Galadriel took part in the kinslaying at Alqualondë, she is totally a dick. The LOTR movies portrayed her in a much more positive light than the books.
True heroes as you describe them exist only in your imagination and in fairy tales.
True heroes as you describe them exist only in your imagination and in fairy tales.
> Galadriel, the only woman of the Noldor to stand that day tall and valiant among the contending princes, was eager to be gone. No oaths she swore, but the words of Fëanor concerning Middle-earth had kindled in her heart, for she yearned to see the wide unguarded lands and to rule there a realm at her own will.
Which doesn't say she was part in the kinslaying (though it doesn't say she wasn't, but its hard to interpret "Standing tall" as "participated in slaying her mother's kin").
In another version
> Even after the merciless assault upon the Teleri and the rape of their ships, though she fought fiercely against Fëanor in defence of her mother’s kin, she did not turn back. Her pride was unwilling to return, a defeated suppliant for pardon; but now she burned with desire to follow Fëanor with her anger to whatever lands he might come, and to thwart him in all ways that she could.
Which sounds like she participated _against Fëanor_, as in: she defended those being attacked.
In another unfinished version she left Valinor on her own separate from the rest of the Noldor.
In any case, she seems to be motivated by a desire to rule her own realm and a strong dislike of Fëanor.
Also, I am fairly certain that Tolkien was writing a fairy tale when we wrote about Galadriel and co. :)
It's not at all unreasonable for her portrayal in the movies based on the LotR books to be...based on her portrayal in the LotR books, and not attempting to incorporate largely irrelevant details of her backstory from Tolkien's other writings.
Basically, anyone with a personality built for command, taking up the Ring, would become a tyrant of some sort. That's part of why it was so important that it came not just to hobbits, but to these hobbits, whose strongest desires were about protecting, and gardening, and living their hobbity lives. (I imagine if Lobelia Sackville-Baggins had gotten her hands on it, she wouldn't have fared so well. Not a Dark Queen by any means, but still something much more dark and dangerous than what became of Bilbo, Frodo and Sam.)
The Silmarillion was his unfinished writings. I don't recall whether he had any intention to ever publish it, but certainly, he did not make strong efforts to do so. His son Christopher had to make a monumental effort to take the various disparate scraps and versions of stories to put them together into what appears to be a coherent whole.
To say that Tolkien "intended" for Galadriel to present, in Lord of the Rings, any of the traits one would associate with a kinslaying ruthless warleader is to completely ignore the context and the manner in which he wrote those two different aspects of her.
For the record, I'm not in this camp. I think it's fair to debate whether Galadriel participated and/or was culpable in that (as other threads have).
I'm just arguing (perhaps specifically in Tolkien's case) that LotR sits inside the "legendarium" and can't be properly interpreted in a void. I don't feel that the Silmarillion stories were so unfinished that they don't reveal truths about the characters, that Tolkien must have already held when writing LotR.
But now in retrospect, I'm probably glorifying Tolkien a bit too much. It's normal for authors to change their minds about their characters, and it's normal for people reinterpreting those works to sometimes ignore those changes of mind. (It's also normal for fans to dislike those reinterpretations when it clashes with their understanding of the characters).
I'm afraid, this argument is both wrong (maybe you just haven't been lucky with people around you), and inapplicable (the talk is imaginarium).