elves behaving badly :)

[edenfalling]

So, over the past couple-three weeks I accidentally fell down a hole into Silmarillion fandom.

The surprise is that it's taken me this long, really, since The Silmarillion was always my favorite part of Tolkien's Middle-Earth stories, ever since I read it when I was 10 years old. I think this is for precisely the reason a lot of people find it weird: namely, that it reads like an old-fashioned, formally-phrased collection of myths/legends/fairy-tales from some not-quite-European culture, and I lived for that kind of book when I was eight to twelve years old.

I have also started rereading The Silmarillion itself, which is a fun rediscovery since after rereading it dozens of times from age 10 to roughly 18, I hadn't opened it for nearly twenty years. I think I really must get my hands on the rest of the "apocryphal" works both because writing process is fascinating, and because conlangs are fascinating. That may take a while, though, since I do have a bunch of other stuff going on in my life.

Anyway, this is probably not going to be a writing fandom for me, but I am having loads of fun reading through decades of other people's work. And that's one reason I've been a little distracted for a while. :)

Comments

[krait]

Awww, I have a weird fondness for the Silm - mostly because an old-fashioned, formally-phrased collection of myths/legends/fairy-tales from some not-quite-European culture is the kind of thing I really love, but I bounced hard off Tolkien's version. It took me two tries to get through the thing and I retained basically none of it, even though the individual bits were enjoyable when I was reading them.

So instead I am just nebulously fond of the pleasant moments I remember having, without really remembering what they were.

(Probably the conlangs and the poetry.)

[edenfalling]

I'm kind of "eh, whatever" about most of Tolkien's poetry -- like, it's not bad, but most of it just slides out of my memory -- but there are a few lines here and there that stick with me. And his conlangs are a joy. :)

[branchandroot]

That is absolutely one that I would have fingered as a natural, for you. Have fun down the rabbit hole!

[edenfalling]

*waves cheerfully and continues spelunking*

[pilfered_words]

Have you found thearrogantemu's fic yet? It's possibly the best fanfic I have ever read.

The fandom itself has some... politics, let's call it that, that I was unpleasantly surprised by a few months ago, but the fic is great.

[edenfalling]

Yes, I have found that! It's wonderful.

...Dare I ask about the fandom politics? I don't expect I'll get involved, but it would be nice to know about potential pit-traps before accidentally stumbling into them.

[pilfered_words]

I don't know many details, since I've never been particularly involved in the fandom, but from what I've pieced together:

There was Discourse on a number of topics, including Feanor, the Valar, Elwing, and Numenor. As happens so often with Discourse, it got very personal for some people, and they did some regrettable things (I believe involving secret sideblogs??? it's all been wiped from the face of the internet.). Then the two sides stopped interacting with each other, but continue to hate each others' guts.

I didn't start paying attention until after this point, so from my perspective, a couple reasonable people that I'd been lowkey following for a couple years, because they had interesting metas even if I didn't agree with everything they said, suddenly attacked someone I had just become friendly with in a completely different context, just because my friend had posted a character opinion that was associated with the other side.

[edenfalling]

Oh dear. Why are people always like this?

I mean, I suppose to some degree it's an inevitable consequence of a fandom growing to a certain size -- you're going to run into personality conflicts, which will compound any other points of disagreement -- and being a more "academic" fandom is no help in that regard considering how nasty academic arguments can get. But still, it's always kind of depressing when otherwise reasonable people get sucked into one of these Capulet-Montague style feuds. :(

[pilfered_words]

Yep. It's kind of poisoned the fandom for me - every time I see something, I wonder about the author: 'and which side are you on? and how far would you go to promote it?" Fic is fine, but meta gets kind of... eeehhhh.