The Silmarillion According To Someone Who Has Never Read It But Only Picked Up Bits And Pieces From The

Something I need the fix it AU writers who use Frodo as Bagginsgields child to focus more on:

Gimli meeting a hobbit that looks strangely like Thorin Oakenshield but has the last name Baggins before connecting the dots:

Talking about Sam Gamgee just reminded me that if we’re going to look at LotR/Hobbit parallels that Bilbo is actually Sam, with Thorin as Frodo. 

Bilbo/Sam parallels:

- Both were brought along as an afterthought because Gandalf had a nagging feeling that the Quest would fail without him.

- It’s not “their” quest, they’re mostly observers of someone else’s nobility and drive, but when disaster strikes they take charge and are ultimately responsible for the quest succeeding at all. 

- Both see themselves as “just” hobbits, somewhat pastoral and “average” compared to the epic heroism they’re witnessing. 

- Both bear a great deal of affection for a certain dark haired, blue-eyed person who is the focus of the quest, sob at the thought of losing them, and are generally in awe of their nobility (yeah of course I included Bagginshield and we are absoLUTELY treading into movie canon now because book Bilbo has no awe for Thorin at all, lol, not to mention the Thorin/Frodo parallels are visually striking only in the movie)

- Both are incredibly resilient against the Ring, able to take bear it and cast it off with barely any resistance (Frodo couldn’t even throw the ring into his own fireplace before the quest even began). 

- Both followed their companion across the world, with only mild complaining ;)

Bilbo at the start of The Hobbit: I am a Respectable Gentlehobbit.

Bilbo at the start of LotR: I am a Menace To Society. >:3

My contribution to the @bbcmerlin-reversebang this year! I had the pleasure of working alongside the lovely @remaymberme and their story a single thread of fate(tied me to you) <3

Also a shoutout to the ever amazing @feuxx for betaing and helping me through the fest ^_^

Warner Bros isn't trying to promote this movie anymore, apparently, so I guess I'll have to do it. They just dropped this incredible song less than a day ago and I am feral. I will not apologize for the person I will become after December 13th. This looks incredible.

whenever I’m in a creative lull I go back to the classics 🌸🍂

“I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn. Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.” He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser. Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.) I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say. I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)”

— “As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?” (via meiringens)

hot take: Pippin is the only one of the hobbits who is ‘team Arwen’ in the ‘who is the most beautiful woman in the world’ argument