Things I Do While Conversing With My ND Friends

Too much praying directly to the Valar and not enough praying to their Maiar for their intercession

I like how some of Finwë’s kids possess a gram or two of chill (Finarfin got his as a wedding present) but his grandchildren are all 0 chill nightmare children, all 14+ of them. One or two are chill-passing, The Arafinweans, Turgon, and Maedhros can appear to be grownups in the right light, but then you back them into a corner and it’s Kinslaying, Werewolf Biting, Standing At The Top Of Your Tower As The City Falls time. Even Galadriel mostly manages to be self-aware about her tragic case of congenital Shakespeare villianitis. Her greatest achievement is pulling back from the brink of bad choice central.

The Sindar in particular seem to fall into the narrative trap of, “well Fëanor’s boys are horrible demons but their cousins are surely fine,” and then, whoops, the crazy was right next to them the whole time! Just waiting for a dumb stunt to pull! You can’t escape the belated curse that Finwë’s insatiable lust called down. It just took a generation or so to really kick in.

One thing in Lord of the Rings I’ve found extremely relatable lately is how the hobbits react to apocalyptic horrors by focusing on the mundane details of their day.

“Looks like we’re on a hopeless journey into Hell in the middle of a world-ending event where everything we know and love will be destroyed. What are we going to have for breakfast today, Mr Frodo? :D”

Sauron’s First age elf ratings:

Feanor: husband stealer -5/10

Maedhros: squishy, screams loudly 7/10

Fingon: stole favourite prisoner 2/10

Celegorm/Curufin: commited grave sin of letting Lúthien leave to fuck shit up 0/10

Lúthien: FUCK NO. SCARY AS HELL -1000/10

Thingol: has scary wife 1/10

Finrod: tasty 9/10

Fingolfin: hurt husband -2/10

Turgon: unreasonably paranoid 3/10

Maeglin: whiny 6/10

Gil-Galad : who is he?? 1/10

Galadriel: too close to Melian -1/10

Elrond/Elros: mini Lúthien x2 -20/10

Eärendil: killed favourite dragon -30/10

spending $10 of my hard earned money so i can shove my favorite pic of my cat onto ur dash

90% of arguments about media could just be solved by saying “different people like different things in their stories” and leaving it at that

Speaking of linguistics fics, an idea I’ve played with but never put into practice is using maximal Latin-rooted words when characters are speaking Quenya and Germanic-rooted words when they’re speaking Sindarin.

The effect being to make the language shift more meaningful than just a dialogue tag, (maybe even to the point where I don’t always have to say it outright) and it would work by playing on associations of Latinate words as more highbrow and polysyllabic and Germanic words as more common. (Think regal/kingly, dine/eat, or educate/teach.)

It might backfire, it might be impossible (sometimes the connotations run the other way!) but I think it’d be fun to try.

i just saw the tag “canon complicit” instead of “canon compliant” and im laughing its like “canon is a criminal act that i unfortunately support with this fic”

theory: Aredhel was the most skilled among the Noldor at spells of concealment

support:

she was particularly friends with Celegorm, so it's reasonable to conclude that she, too, was a hunter. stealth is a valuable skill for a hunter.

why did a woman who grew so impatient with Gondolin that she badgered her brother for years into letting her leave, and then slipped away from the escort he insisted upon, even move to such a secret city in the first place? Because she's the one who helped hide it in the first place

seriously, someone in the building of Gondolin must've been an expert at concealment spells. Even with Ulmo's blessing, you simply can't build and move en masse to an entire city without anyone finding out where it is without serious juju. why not Aredhel?

Turgon let his sister leave Gondolin on vacation when he never let anyone else go not out of weakness to the pleas of family, but because he knew that if Aredhel didn't want Morgoth or his spies to see or track her, they fucking wouldn't see or track her - and if they could, Gondolin's hope of secrecy was lost anyway.

alas that Eol was even better at it than she was (maybe this intrigued her at first. maybe there was delighted hide-and-seek beneath the dark trees before there was only hiding)

alas that she didn't have time to teach Maeglin all she knew