#is they get horrifically tortured for being associated with kili and/or killed. man come on.

[thatrandombystander]

I finished rereading the fic, by which I mean I mostly read the first third until a certain point in the fic and went "ugh." at the writing/plot decision (which I actually do remember being exactly where I stopped reading the first time around years ago) and then heavily skimmed the latter two thirds of it

Unfortunately it's the sort of thing that like. Bruh I think there were some good ideas in there, but then it really started dragging out. Every character became the worst version of themselves and was constantly assuming the worst of everyone else, it was increasingly melodramatic, there were plot lines and characters that I don't really think added anything other than artificially extending the story by causing more problems and distracting from the core of the narrative.

Characters kept devolving into yelling matches, never really learned anything from the consequences of their actions and kept repeating miscommunication issues, and you can bet that if a character learned a secret they would blurt it out a chapter or two later in the middle of a heated argument which would ultimately make things worse. Also, homophobia???????? Bruh????

If you're doing a dark story of this length you have got to pepper in some proper positive payoffs and wins. Break up the dark tonal monotony and make those lows even better because we've got the highs to contrast them with.

Overall narratively unsatisfying but with a good dose of trim the fat editing and a little bit of reworking it could have been the sort of fic to tempt me to pick up bookbinding. Meaning it's that worst kind of story that leaves me repeatedly thinking about it because what if it was better!!!???

If you've been reading the tags in the prior chains of this post you would know that this was, of all things, a The Hobbit (movies) fanfic. Yeah yeah horrible things happened to multiple characters but the character I felt most sorry for was Bilbo, especially since the fic didn't seem too interested in him. My guy signed up for an adventure not all this nonsense. He (and several other characters) should have just gone "man fuck you guys, I'm out"

Sometimes you remember a truly dark longfic you were reading 10 years ago around 2014 and go on a quest to hunt it down. Good lord that thing kept going until 2018 and ended up over 700k words long. The amount of ongoing whump and psychological trauma in that fic was truly astonishing asdfghjkl