#AND the original star wars EU which fyi was an absolute clusterfuck

[tathrin]

If Finrod is Legolas's other dad, explain Lorien.

Reference is to this post, and also I'm tagging @z-h-i-e because this is their ship-baby, I just popped in to sprinkle some additional inspiration because my brain went "ooh hey!" when their post crossed my dash because that's the kind of supportive community fandom is supposed to be made of fyi.

Right, so. There's no sense of tone in straight-text communication on the internet, so I know that it's entirely possible that this ask was sent in the spirit of giggling-with-popcorn delight while you eagerly await the resulting explanation. It's equally possible that you're playing at being The Ship Police and challenging me in the expectation that I won't be able to make this Just For Funsies ship sail without floundering on the rocks of canon.

Either way: buckle up. Because the boats of Lórien don't sink.

Because when Legolas gets to the woods of Lothlórien with the rest of the Fellowship, he's delighted. He's never actually been here before! He's heard all the stories, and listened avidly, but. well. Thranduil and Galadriel both blame the other a little bit for the nasty way Finrod died (they know it's not the other's fault so they don't say anything, either to each other or anyone else but, well. it feels like it ought to be the other one's fault, somehow).

And there's all that tension re: Doriath still, and why Galadriel couldn't just pick-up where Melian her teacher left off and maintain the Girdle afterwards—because I'm not a maia, Thranduil, you ass! Oh, so you couldn't even TRY?—especially because she then proceeds to do basically that for Lórien just a few thousand years later...and of course Galadriel thinks it's Oropher's fault that so many of Lothlórien's elves died in the Last Alliance, because if only he hadn't been so reckless and pig-headed then surely Amdír would never have thought up that idiotic suicidal charge on his own...and if she'd maybe tried a little harder to rein-in the son/nephew of the Kinslayers, maybe Sauron would never have even made the Rings, and Mirkwood would still be Greenwood, which you'll note she can't be arsed to extend her convenient semi-girdle to either...and if he wasn't so damn prideful maybe somebody could help his precious stupid spider-forest...etc etc.

They aren't like. enemies. but they don't really get along anymore, either. They don't talk. (There's a reason the elves of Green/Mirkwood were moving north even before Sauron took up housekeeping in Dol Guldur.) So even though Lothlórien is like maybe a week's walk away, Legolas hasn't actually been here before. And he is stoked! Because he's always wanted to visit, but he didn't want to hurt his remaining dad's feelings by being like "bye, gonna go visit my aunt whom you haven't spoken to in like three thousand years, nbd!" so he never did — but here they are now, and it's part of the Quest, so it's not like Legolas just popped in for a visit, is it? He's doing something that just happened to bring him here, so Thranduil can't take it personally, and...well, here he is! At last! This is awesome! He's so excited to see his aunt's fabled forest!

And then they want to blindfold him!? He's FINALLY in Lórien, and he's not even allowed to look at the place!? This is his aunt's forest, for fuck's sake — he is an elf and a kinsman here, dammit! No wonder he goes from zero-to-sixty re: "golly Gimli don't be so stubborn" => "hOw dARe yOu!?!?!?" when the blindfold is suggested. He's not just pissed, he's taking it personally. Because he's family.

Okay so far so good, but when the Fellowship comes before Celeborn and Galadriel why doesn't anyone say anything about Legolas literally being their nephew, one might ask? Ah! Well, that's because we have Hobbits for our narrators, and they simply don't know elvish family trees well enough to catch that detail. Which is why when Celeborn says "Welcome son of Thranduil! Too seldom do my kindred journey hither from the North," it's perhaps a little more pointed of a statement than the Hobbits know. Celeborn is saying long time no see nephew, how nice of you to visit FINALLY. But Legolas and Thranduil have called themselves "Wood-elves" since moving to Greenwood, so the fact that he's actually half-Noldor just never gets mentioned, because it's not like it's relevant, is it? He doesn't mention being half-Sindar either. He calls himself a Wood-elf because he is a Wood-elf...by adoption. So why would the Hobbits even think to ask?

And we know that Galadriel uses ósanwë on everybody, so why wouldn't she be using it with her own nephew? What better way to have a private family chat, after all? And she doesn't say anything aloud to anyone while Celeborn is greeting everybody else, and it's not like Galadriel really needs to listen to the "hellos" either; perhaps she and Legolas have a little mental confab just the two of them while everybody else is settling in. You could easily write that in, if you wanted to, without breaking any of the existing canon.

After that, we actually have a perfect textural opening for Legolas to go hang with his aunt and uncle some more: while the rest of the Fellowship doesn't see Galadriel and Celeborn again until the Mirror and then their departure, the book says "Legolas was away much among the Galadhrim, and after the first night he did not sleep with the other companions, though he returned to eat and talk with them." So we know that Legolas is going off to hang-out with the Lórien elves...a.k.a. Aunt Galadriel. Probably sleeping in the guest bedroom and pestering her for embarrassing stories about his dads. And maybe asking her for tips on how to talk to dwarves without putting your foot in your mouth since she's clearly got experience.

And no, none of them went in for stuff like gushing hugs when they meet...but if they haven't spoken to one another in a few thousand years, and probably didn't spend all that much time together even before that (Galadriel and Thranduil weren't much in any of the same places after Doriath fell) then they wouldn't likely be all that cuddly with one another anyway, would they? Distant-but-fond seems like the order of the day to me, and you can definitely read their fleeting interactions in the book that way. (A kickass bow potentially strung with your own hair is a great gift for a nephew you don't know well who's about to go off into danger! I bet he could even shoot-down a Ringwraith with a bow like that!) Tense-and-awkward-but-trying-to-be-polite would work too, of course; depends on what kind of drama you want.

So yeah, actually I think it's perfectly reasonable to posit that Galadriel could potentially be Legolas's aunt; I've seen several fics that present Celeborn and Thranduil as cousins or some other close relative, and nobody gets shirty about the canocity of that kinship re: the Lórien scenes, so why wouldn't the connection be just as acceptable to come via Finrod and Galadriel instead? There's nothing in the text that I know of that says it can't be canon.

Anyway, Finrod-as-Legolas's-other-dad wasn't actually meant to be a serious "look how well canon supports this idea, it's definitely a very plausible thing that people should embrace in a wholly serious and canonical manner" theory to begin with. I was just having fun. Somebody said, "hey check out their weird rare ship, it's a lot of fun!" and my brain had a lightbulb moment and went "ooh what if you took that silly fun ship and leaned-in even harder with it, though?" and here we are.

Does a marriage between Thranduil and Finrod actually fit with all the canon of the Silm? I don't know, probably not; then again it might, simply because so much of the Silm is vague, especially when it comes to the elves of Mirkwood who barely even get mentioned once or twice. Personally I prefer having Legolas be born in Mirkwood and to be relatively young for an elf when Fellowship starts (there's no canon about that either way, I just like the vibes of it). However, this ship is a lot of fun too. In fact, I think it's already my favorite idea for an older-Legolas-with-ties-to-important-people take on the character, if that's how you want to take the character, simply because it is so much fun.

Do I think it's canon? No, of course not. But who cares? We're not writing Academic Articles on Accurate Tolkien Scholarship, we're writing fanfiction. We're having fun. So if you're a giggling-with-popcorn anon: good, awesome, glad to have you here enjoying the fun too. If you're a Ship Police Anon...well, acab and farewell because I frankly just do not have the time to give a shit about what somebody else ships or doesn't. Block the tag and move on.