#i've only read the second one but i think in the first fic fingolfin also saves him? more similarities? though i've only skimmed through it

[eight-pointed-star]

fics where someone goes to angband instead of/with maedhros

[in the brackets are the characters who are captured]

For Want of a Crown by theScrap_Witch [maglor]

The Price We Pay by theScrap_Witch [maglor]

A Different Kind of Doom by Aemileth [all sons of fëanor]

A Perfect Pair by SunflowerSupreme [finrod and maglor]

A Songbird in Angband by AdmirableMonster (Mertiya) [maglor]

Mountains Don't Sing by MathConcepts [maedhros and fingon]

Animal Skins by Ilye [celegorm]

In Gold gefasst and Prized Jewel by Siana [maedhros and maglor]

A Fair Evil by Siana [maedhros and maglor]

A Broken Voice by Silentx13 [maglor]

Wisdom Prevails by Ardruna [nerdanel]

What If It Hadn't Been Maedhros? by ArvenaPeredhel [maglor, celegorm, caranthir, curufin, amras] (it's five different stories, not "all of them get captured together")

Aphonia and Mother Who Bore Me by ArvenaPeredhel [maglor]

Hard Choices and Silenced by waitingfover [maglor]

The Expendable One by The_Cinderninja [celegorm; he isn't exactly captured but it fits]

+ three in russian

Услышь меня, брат... by Nolofinve [feanor]

Кроме пыли и пепла by vinyawende [feanor]

За перевал by М. Кимури [it doesn't quite fit the description but still has a similar plot]

this list probably isn't comprehensive, if you know more fics with a similar plot, please tell me!

if you are the author of one of the fics here and would like to be @'ed or to have your fic removed from here, please tell me! if i made a mistake in the descriptions tell me also

[zealouswerewolfcollector]

i hope it isn't offending, but it makes me laugh and cringe a bit whenever the sons of feanor and feanor himself are written as this righteous, i-am-better-than-you and i-have-the-right-to-be-a-dipshit-to-you kind of dudes while other characters such as fingon, finrod, fingolfin and glorfindel are written as assholes or are villainize. Like, to me it seems out of character? Maybe its because im new and has just finished reading silmaril. The amount of fics I've stumbled, they are so good and beautifully written, but the way they portray the sons of feanor as suddenly the good guys just because they apologize and took care of elros and elrond?

First of all, welcome to the fandom, anon. I hope you'll like it here. Sorry for answering late. I've been away from the fandom lately and have only now seen this ask.

To be honest, I’m not sure if this ask concerns my writing or the fandom in general. I am not a Feanorian apologist, though I am a Feanorian fan, and I like to think that I don't write the Feanorians that way. But I don't know how my fics look from the outside.

I do agree that there is a trend to whitewash the Feanorians sometimes at the expense of other characters, but I understand where that's coming from.

A substantial part of the fandom, myself included, loves conflicted, morally grey characters. Personally, I am always drawn to characters who do terrible things but have the potential to do better. I love the themes of guilt, redemption, wasted potential, what could have been and fall of the hero.

When you love a character and write about them a lot, you tend to sympathize with them and look for motivations for their actions. A lot of people are fans of redemption arcs, so they give them to their favorite characters. Now as I've said, sometimes it's at the expense of other characters, but I don't think that's prevalent in the fandom. Writing fics sympathetic to Feanorians doesn't always mean that the other characters were in the wrong.

We have to also differentiate between the types of fics that cast canonically 'good' characters in a bad light. Is it because

The author really doesn't like the character and villainizes them to make their fave look better. This is often the case with Elwing, sometimes with Fingolfin.

The author wants to write a dark fic and has a 'good' character do a terrible thing. This doesn't mean though that the author hates the character or believes they are canonically evil. I have seen a few dark fics with Glorfindel. I'm assuming that's what you're referring to when you say that he's written as an asshole because from what I've seen he's usually written as a great person. Though I have to admit that I'm not very interested in Glorfindel and might have missed something.

The author wants to write a believable character and gives them flaws to make the fic more interesting. This often happens to Finrod, who on the surface level reading is a perfect angel who never did anything wrong. (Arguable, of course, but that's how he seems at first glance.) Tolkien was writing a mythology and could get away with it, but fics are almost always on a smaller scale and more personal, and authors love to write flawed characters.

Now, I will read the second fic if I'm in that kind of mood and I will most likely read the third fic. I might not read the first fic, but even then it all comes to personal preference. For example, I don't believe Feanor was a terrible father, at least in the beginning, but I absolutely don't mind that others do and will read fics where he's written that way. But if Elwing is written as a bad mother or if she or Dior are blamed for what the Feanorians did, I will press the back button.

(As a side note, I'm very curious about the fics where Fingon is villiainized. I've seen it only in a few explicitly dark fics, which I can count on the fingers of one hand. In my experience, he's often written as almost flawless, even more perfect than Finrod. I'm in the process of writing a Russingon fic where Fingon is... less than perfect (though so is Maedhros) and I wonder if that would also count as villainizing him.)

My advice to you, anon, is to curate your fandom experience. I understand where you're coming from. There are many perfectly well-written, amazing fics from talented writers that make me unreasonably mad or upset. But, ultimately, everyone is allowed to write whatever they like and it's up to us to find out when to stop reading. The Silm doesn’t give us much in terms of characterization, so authors have a lot of leeway there and ‘out-of-characterness’ is very subjective.

Find like-minded people here or on Ao3, find authors that you like, subscribe to them, follow their tumblrs. Get Ao3 Savior or Greasemonkey extensions to block works you don't like. You can also create a custom skin to block works or users you don't want to see. Follow the instructions in this post. It will take at most ten minutes. It's especially useful for multi-chaptered fics you never want to see again. I use it and it's a huge relief.

Sorry the reply to this ask got so long. Sometimes I do tend to go off on a tangent. Hopefully, this was somewhat helpful. Good luck to you.

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

for the fandom ask, the silmarillion

the first character i ever fell in love with:

Oh gosh, it's been so long! I remember writing a very, um, untutored poem about Fingolfin for a now-defunct Tolkien fan forum that I got banned from for being too young in 2004 or thereabouts, though. So maybe him?

a character that i used to love/like, but now do not:

I've gone back and forth on Maedhros and some other of the sons of Fëanor a lot over the years, but the one I consistently really don't care about now even though I once liked him a lot is Curufin, and it's entirely because of the ~2012-2015 era of the fandom's agonizing habit of insisting against all reason that he, like all of his brothers, Did Nothing Wrong.

a ship that i used to love/like, but now do not:

I don't dislike Caranthir/Haleth now, but it's no longer my preferred answer to what's "up with" either character involved, relationally speaking.

my ultimate favorite character™:

Galadriel, or maybe Lúthien given that Galadriel is only incindentally involved in most of what goes on in the Silmarillion itself and most of her importance only kicks in later. In general this is a fandom in which I prefer to actively prioritize the female characters beyond their in-text importance, which has led to some friction with my best Tolkien-fandom friend since she tends to be more content with the canon narrative and character focuses.

prettiest character:

Lúthien, obviously, but I also tend to feel like Nellas--who's technically only in Unfinished Tales, not the Silm as such--is probably lovely.

my most hated character:

Tar-Aldarion, who's technically also an Unfinished Tales character but is Silmarillion-relevant because he's from the Second Age, is someone for whom I have next to no patience at all. He's an absentee husband and father obsessed with Navigating and Exploring as a form of personal self-aggrandizement; we're supposed to see the good in him because he provides aid to the elves in Middle-earth, but Númenor under his rule also begins a colonization and conquest process that later turns it into a polity that's in some ways even worse than Mordor. Not a great guy!

my OTP:

Beren/Lúthien feels "too easy" somehow so instead I'll say Míriel/Indis; there's not a ton of canon evidence for this obviously, but in my head Indis pursued Finwë mostly due to their mutual love for and sense of having lost Míriel, and there's nothing in canon that contradicts this either.

my NOTP:

First Age: While obviously this doesn't justify Fëanor's treatment of his stepmother and half-siblings, Finwë and Indis's marriage itself pisses me off big time due to lurking suggestions within the canon that Finwë was thinking solely of his own perceived needs in his decision to remarry, in particular his desire to be sexually active again and his desire for a larger family size; neither of these would be a huge red flag in a widower contemplating remarriage IRL, but considering that this is someone who has to have the gods bend the rules of the world to accommodate his desires, I don't think it's a good look.

Second Age: I hate, hate, hate "the Zimraphel draft," although I've written a fic that tries to receive it charitably and harmonize it with my own reads on the characters.

favorite episode:

N/a

saddest death:

Maedhros's death is really gut-wrenching considering the sheer futility of it, especially since it comes after the victory has been won. There's obviously a ton of very strong competition, though! A more interesting question is least sad death, to which Beren, Lúthien, and Fëanor (since it's extremely difficult to argue he didn't bring it on himself) are imo the strongest answers.

favorite season:

N/a

least favorite season:

N/a

character that everyone else in the fandom loves, but i hate:

something something early 2010s something something Fëanorian/whiteNoldocock stanning something something. I do like most of those characters, but I'm apprehensive about devoting too much fannish attention to them due to the awful history there.

I'm also fairly anti-Melian, but I think that's a more common opinion than it used to be.

my ‘you’re piece of trash, but you’re still a fave’ fave:

I mean, it's the fucking Silmarillion. Anyone from Thingol to Caranthir to Finrod to the cast and crew of The Túrin Turambar Experience Featuring Beleg could fit.

my ‘beautiful cinnamon roll who deserves better than this’ fave:

Andreth is the only character in the Silm who comes even remotely close to this, unless you include "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age" and parachute in the LotR cast, which feels like cheating to me. Since Andreth is a History of Middle-earth character, in the published Silm itself there might literally not be any. Maybe Barahir or someone like that?

my ‘this ship is wrong, nasty, and makes me want to cleanse my soul, but i still love it’ ship:

I used to feel this way about Angbang (Morgoth/Sauron) until I realized that people were taking it seriously and engaging in genuinely dangerous far-right-adjacent/Objectivist-adjacent moral and political revisionism of the canon over it.

my ‘they’re kind of cute, and i lowkey ship them, but i’m not too invested’ ship:

Most of the canon ships that I haven't already discussed in this post, tbh. It's also my opinion of Maedhros/Fingon, the biggest fanon ship and one with surprisingly strong textual support if you're willing to invoke the right Classical and medieval models. Tolkien doesn't generally write bad relationships unless they're supposed to be bad, mostly because his characterization is too lapidary to accommodate huge amounts of everyday interpersonal drama.

send me a fandom and i’ll tell you…