#I just flip it from vassal devotion to love bc I want my golden boy to love a human

[alsethwisson]

Unpopular opinion: I HATE Haleth/Caranthir discourse with a passion.

Not because it operates on the frankly crazy heterosexist assumption that if a man and a woman met once and didn't hate each other they are contractually obligated to fuck.

That's its own can of shipping worms, I won't go there.

But. (Warning: very long read.)

Tolkien - that crusty old white extremely catholic man - has written us a female character whose most defining trait was refusing to be seen as anything but her own independent person.

She was no vassal of elves, she was no wife of any man. She was Haleth.

It was a conscious choice on Tolkien's part, rewriting his early male "Haleth the Hunter" into Lady Haleth and giving her exactly this defining traits. She was a part of a wider revision of Arda's female characters and their roles he undertook as his understanding of real-life roles women could and would take widened.

(Which is a fascinating story in its own right, by the way, and people who indiscriminately cite some earlier letters as if they were end-all be-all of Tolkien's inner thought are extremely wrong. While conservative to a fault, Tolkien was not unable to correct his beliefs. Cf: Nerdanel and generally the explicit denial of earlier "elven women channel creativity into childbearing" idea in Shibboleth.)

It's very deliberate - and very important - that Caranthir is barely a footnote in Haleth's story. He was interchangeable. It could have been any elven lord. It could have been an Edain lord, as well.

Haleth was not going to let herself or her people be dependent, it's important.

And then fandom came and turned it upside down, and Haleth became a footnote in Caranthir's story. One of a few characters (of both genders to be fair) to have neither marriage nor romance subplot and to be solely defined by her political actions becomes defined by fandom-invented romance with a dashing man.

Yikes.