I liked The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey a lot more than most people, but I can still acknowledge its flaws, especially since this trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug shows that they’re still engaging in one of them. It’s an accepted fact that the Lord of the Rings stories are sausage fests. They’re full of male soldiers of many races, and the female characters are few and far between. The Lord of the Rings movies injected a bit more female presence into the stories with the expansion of Arwen’s character arc, but other than that the cast of characters was more or less the same. It seems like the Hobbit movies, however, are really interested in convincing us that those characters from LOTR who didn’t have love interests were still totally not gay, you guys. Gandalf? He has a thing with Galadriel in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and now in the sequel you can see that even though Legolas is a pretty boy whose best friend was the hairiest dwarf in all of Middle Earth, he’s, like, so into Evangeline Lilly, bro.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug comes out December 13, 2013.