"Nine hours of cinema entertainment without one female character is essentially, subconsciously, telling the female audience: ‘You are irrelevant. You’re not important to storytelling. You don’t have a place in heroic moments […].’ You know, it has a very damaging effect on the female psyche and we deal with that all the time in media. Women are always overlooked and there are all of these very, very powerful statistics around the fact that if there’s a woman in a film, she will only speak to men or about men, if she’s talking to another woman. There’s all these strange things that have become mainstays of our storytelling only because we’re still entrenched in the old patriarchy we were raised in and have come from. I mean Tolkien was writing this book in the 1930s, it’s understandable that he didn’t include women. It’s not understandable today to exclude women from a story you’re telling and I think I’m willing to take the heat if that means little girls are going to come away thinking they can have an impact and that they’re an important person."
— Evangeline Lilly on the necessity of Tauriel in The Hobbit (x)
And yet she was stuck in there for a love triangle that was totally unnecessary. That was literally her only purpose in those movies. Totally abandon duty and honor to go chasing a dude she talked to for five minutes, directly disobeying an order and dragging her charge into danger, because *starry eyes* he’s different and special.
mmmm yeah but have you also considered that maybe there’s more to her than that? I know she’s not canon but if young girls go to see this movie and see no female representation, like Evangeline said, it’s basically telling them they don’t matter. I can pretty much count on one hand the number of females in all six movies that get more than two minutes of screen time.
Although she is part of a love triangle, Legolas’ pining is one-sided, and from my perspective, Tauriel and Kili’s relationship isn’t completely unnecessary, at least in the way the film is adapted. And it’s more of a profound bond than a “relationship”, I mean they’ve know each other for like a week at most. The way I see it, it’s just two beings bonding over fire moons and starlight, and going after something that could be, that will probably never happen but “fuck, we’re probably gonna die anyways so why not make it count?”
Tauriel’s storyline also plays with morals vs duty, she disobeys Thranduil and goes to help the dwarves because it’s what she sees as right while in the whole of DOS he sits on his pretty ass in his elf kingdom lusting after jewels and partying hard by getting shit faced on dorwinion wine.
On top of all that, she’s a badass warrior who fights for the greater good of Middle Earth and looks super fine while doing it. And so-fucking-what if she does all that for Kili? Aragorn pretty much does all of those things - struggles for what is right, has mad fighting skills, is incredibly gorgeous, and does most of that so he can save Arwen. But I don’t hear anyone complaining about that.