Peter Jackson, being a man of common sense, knew that he was dealing with a demographic that needed more women to counter the all-male cast of dwarves, hobbits, wizards and other characters. This is why he created the character Tauriel, a female elf, played by actress Evangeline Lilly. Tauriel played the role of female badass who fought off vast swaths of enemies alongside her male counterparts. However, as the dwarves were being imprisoned, she slowly began to fall for Kili, one of the male dwarves. This led to a budding romance storyline that adds considerable length to the film and took away from the main story. Perhaps it was Jacksons way of shoe-horning a subliminal message on putting racial differences aside for the common good into the film. After all, it has been suggested that race-mixing in Middle-Earth is taboo, with one of the few exceptions being Aragorn and Arwen from the LotR series. As with other additions, Tauriels presence took away from the core story, and added some unnecessary details to the film. Though it mightve been possible that the writers felt that adding a woman to the story would increase the amount of female viewers, this assumption ignores the fact that women enjoyed Tolkiens original, unaltered story just as much as men.
Alexander Podgorski is a writer for WhatCulture that has been a fan of professional wrestling since he was 8 years old. He loves all kinds of wrestling, from WWE and sports entertainment, to puroresu in Japan.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Queen's University in Political Studies and French, and a Master's Degree in Public Administration. He speaks English, French, Polish, a bit of German, and knows some odd words and phrases in half a dozen other languages.
