#it's because Thorin be always gatekeeping

[bagginshield-anthology]

***It's cause he's always gatekeeping***

Thank you @ilovemosss for this inclusion! Absolutely legendary of you.

Thorin, in the throes of dragonsickness: "why am I always gaslit and never girl bossed?"

Bilbo: *eyerolls in boyfriend with lost patience*

I said this to my friend and thought it was a perfect Bagginshield dynamic

[shirefantasies]

can i request thorins company with a reader with really long hair?and maybe they have a really long hair care routine or something

also i luv your work!!Hope ur doing well💓

Doin’ better these days 🤞🏻 we love hair imagines for the company hehe

Thorin’s Company When You Have Really Long Hair

Absolutely worships it: Thorin, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bombur, Dori

Teases you a little: Dwalin, Nori, Fili

Just happy to have you: Balin, Bofur, Ori, Kili, Bilbo

Whether you wear it down, up, braids, locs, one big braid, your hair one of your favorite features of theirs and they all have a different way of showing it. Thorin, for example, loves to gently comb his fingers through your tresses if he can and is always holding it out of the way for you. Especially if you are not a dwarf, he deconstructs a lot of gatekeeping he would have done in the past and devotes himself to performing dwarven hair care practices and styles on you. Oin cares not for how long your routine is, he will learn it. Add to it or alter it a bit, even, with some of his own products, and you can’t really be too frustrated because dwarves do have the best hair products in Middle Earth. He has the gentlest hands as he caresses, treats, and styles your hair, never causing you a moment’s pain. Gloin glows with pride, practically insisting on handling your hair so long as you trust him. He’ll brag to anyone that you have the most gorgeous hair he’s ever seen even if you aren’t a dwarf. Let him do it up in braids, it’ll make him happier than anything! It can be hard to connect sometimes if you don’t speak Khuzdul, at least for Bifur, so he throws himself into acts of service. One of these is taking up the trouble of your long care routine. Silently he beckons you to sit between his legs, his hands working through your flowing hair. Gives you braids that match his and kisses them when he finishes. Bombur’s beard is very long, so he understands elaborate care routines. You two take up a trade of sorts where you re-braid his beard and he treats your hair, perhaps even trying a new style if you like! It may take a long time, but Bombur is in no hurry. Especially if your special routine gives him time to have his hands on you and in the hair he can't stop complimenting. Ever the aficionado of beauty, Dori adores the great flow of your locks and all their potential. If he has his way, he'll try many a different style and even decoration, weaving the prettiest beads and baubles and flowers in your hair. Always reminding you to take care of yours, he'll half-jokingly sigh and concede that alright, he'll simply do it himself. But of course that is simply his excuse to touch your beautiful hair, of course!

Dwalin loves your hair, adores the way you've let your tresses grow in a fashion any dwarf would be proud of, but he can't deny the irony. Your hair is long, flowing, tumbling far past your shoulders, and yet he has none. By a choice as proud as yours, but still. How could he help teasingly asking you, "Ya sure you don't wanna look like me? Lotta weight off those pretty shoulders." Similarly, Nori teases you, dramatically sweeping it off of your shoulder, that it gets in the way when he’s trying to enjoy you. He loves being able to move it off your face or off your shoulder for a kiss, though, he just can’t help joking around at all the time you take with it and simply how much there is. Of course Fili is going to tease you, it’s part of how he shows he cares. Jokes about if you’ll trip on your hair someday or playfully taking it in his hands to use as a blanket are interspersed with compliments about your beauty and Fili jumping constantly between you and danger. He’s always offering to braid it away from your eyes or tie it up to shorten it if it swings near your feet.

Balin cares about the heart more than the body, so while he cannot deny that your hair is beautiful he would not mind one bit if you lost it all. He brushes or detangles it so gently, but his eyes are on you the whole time and his favorite part of your elaborate care is simply the conversations you share, idle or deep. As someone who doesn’t exactly align with the beauty standards of his people, Bofur acknowledges he’d be quite the hypocrite if he imposed them on you, especially if you aren’t even a dwarf! What he wants most is someone who can make him smile, and as he’s told you you could do that even if you were bald as Dwalin! He lives to reassure you and also enjoys hearing that you’d love him no matter what, too, as you do each other’s braids. Ori is not focused on appearances, either, practically not noticing your hair until he makes to sketch it out and realizes how impressively long it really is. Then he’ll talk to you about it, curiosity overtaking him as he asks questions like how long it took to get it like that, if it gets in the way, what you do for it… Flushes the first time you invite him to touch it, but from then on he’s addicted! Plays with it idly a lot of the time. Kili finds a little bit of beauty in everyone, so long hair or short you can catch his heart. He can’t help swooning over the way your long tresses, braids, however you keep it glisten in the sun. Teasingly reaches out to touch it, but never actually does until he has permission. When he does, though, expect a few playful tugs! Bilbo has even less expectations about your hair as hobbits don’t typically keep theirs so long. It comes as a bit if a surprise to him to see yours, but it reminds him of the beauty of the elves. It’s unfamiliar and he loves the unfamiliar if he lets himself admit it. He does, and from there he insists upon relieving you of that long routine of yours “now that I’m here”.

Taglist: @lokilover476 @fuckyoumakeart @kilibaggins @mossthebogwitch @ibabblealot @stormchaser819 @pirate-lord-of-narnia @datglutengoblin @letmelickyoureyeballs @mossyskinn | Reply/Message/Ask to join 🥰

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

Thank you so much for answering my asks (a few about Theodred, as well as Éomer and Eowyn, and Rohan in general)! I’m rather shy, so I prefer to be anonymous. Plus, I often think my questions can be seen as stupid, lol. I don’t have in-depth knowledge of the LOTR fandom, so for someone like you, the answers to my asks might seem simple and rather obvious ... But I rather enjoy reading your answers and learning more about the characters and the world Tolkien created, as well as your headcanons and interpretations of certain things. So, thank you again! You’re a gift to this fandom! 💕

🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

Thank YOU, lovely anonymous person!! Both for being SO sweet and also for sending me fun questions because there’s nothing I like more than to think and talk about this stuff! So your questions are a gift to me!

I totally get feeling worried that questions might seem silly or simplistic — I definitely feel that myself when I ask questions to other people here in the Tolkien community because it is so full of folks who are really smart and deep into the lore. It can be intimidating for sure!!! So definitely keep asking those Q’s anonymously if that makes you feel more comfortable — that’s what the option is there for!

Also, FWIW, I don’t think any of the questions I’ve gotten are stupid! And as for things that might be new to you but are more familiar to me, let me assure you that this fandom and its source material are SO intensely deep that literally EVERYONE has areas where they know very little or nothing. I definitely do!!! (E.g.: I cannot even tell any of the members of Thorin’s company apart and know basically nothing about any of them! And that’s just one example!) So that’s nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed of, because it’s ALL of us on some level! Anyone who would make you feel badly for not knowing the answer to something already is being very gatekeep-y and rude and not helpful to the overall health of the fandom.

I try to make it a guiding principle to always be nice to everyone who takes the time to bother to ask me anything. And hopefully my answers make people feel like I was genuinely happy to answer the question, because I am! PLEASE, people, definitely tell me if you ever get a whiff in my responses of anything other than this. I am nothing but grateful that anyone thinks my opinion is ever worth seeking or would trust me for a fact or piece of lore!

Anywho. The kindness in your message really made my day. I’ll be thinking of you, Anonymous, and hope you’ll stay in touch as often as you’d like! ♥️♥️♥️

[eveninglottie]

write what you want regardless of the genders. it's better to spit the story out and then go back and revise then get hung up on whether or not every interaction or plot point could be part of an 800 word call-out tweet-longer that briefly trends on fanfic twitter. everyone comes at fiction from their own distinct background. you could write the most 'pure' romance ever, regardless of the genders, and it could still inadvertently trigger someone or raise concerns. comfort can be misleading.

so I don’t want you to think I’m disagreeing with you here, because you’re right. people spend way too much time thinking out the possible doomsday scenarios of what they might do instead of just doing it to see what happens. I am one of those people, for sure, it’s stopped me from doing pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted to do my whole life, so we’re on the same page here with both the concept of not worrying about what other people will think and also how no one holds the magic gatekeeping key which dictates what is problematic or not. every person is different and some things will upset people in a way that doesn’t upset you. that’s just a given. 

but I think that’s not really helpful when you’re trying to figure out your own motivations for doing something. 

like, yes, is a lot of this affected by how I think other people will react to things I create? of course. everything i do will be affected by how I think other people will react. that’s just how my brain works, and it’s my job to keep growing more confident in myself to counteract that (because the older you get you really do give less of a fuck and boy it’s so nice!!) what I was trying to bring up in that post was my own reasons for feeling more comfortable writing one thing than another. 

because I just think it’s fascinating and complicated and I’ve mentioned more than once to friends that it really just surprised me how freeing writing m/m has been vs m/f. it’s like my descent into sk was this moment of enlightenment when I realized “hey this is a hell of a lot easier to talk about when there are two boys involved!” like I realize that the majority of my writing the past two years has been on my own, and even though I can tell you’ve I’ve written well over 500k words and only posted maybe a fifth of that I can’t prove what I’m about to say so you’re just going to have to take my word for it, BUT I’ve included so much more discussion about sexuality and how characters express it and grow with it and figure out for themselves what they are. like it was never a thing I thought about a lot when I was writing my m/f fics (even tho all the women were still bi but that’s a whole other barrel of monkeys). it was never me sitting down and interrogating my choice for writing that pairing the way I did. I just did it. (I didn’t stop to consider the gender is what I mean, I thought about literally all the other things but gender and sexuality were not included in that) but now there’s a whole other sphere of characterization that I keep finding myself drawn to, and even without realizing it, it becomes a big part of how I write certain characters. (like deciding to write keith as demi while still being sexually and physically attracted to shiro has been really eye opening for me as someone on the asexual spectrum.)

because like, for example, I wrote a fem!bilbo fic, right? so clearly I was thinking about gender a bit, but most of that had to do with me having always reimagined that story (and lotr) with female protagonists. that’s what I did with a lot of childhood faves, actually, eragon, harry potter being two of the most prominent, and thinking about fem!bilbo and how that would change the story especially if she was in a relationship with thorin and the shire was maybe a bit more stifling for a woman, etc. - BUT that was one of those pairings that I’d never been drawn to when it was m/m. I couldn’t really get into it, and I was not a fan of the hobbit movies at all, honestly, and I tried, and it was only when I switched things around did that fic click for me, but I wonder a lot if I were to have come to hobbit fic later, after I’d gotten over my aversion to m/m (not in general, just me writing it, because reasons), would I have written it with bilbo as a boy? would I have been less likely to imagine bilbo as a woman? or was it a number of factors that led me to write that fic which really couldn’t have existed in any other incarnation, and would it have been a different fic entirely?

(the hp thing in particular is SO WEIRD to think about now because a lot of what I’ve been grappling with in my drarry fic is very male-centric? not like in a bad way, just thinking about the rivalry and bonds between boys and how boys look up to their male mentors and authority figures in very different ways than they do their female counterparts and also what does being interested in other boys do to one’s internalized and very misogynistic/homophobic ideas of Legacy and Family and Proper Gender Expression specifically when it comes to sex with other men like it’s Very Gendered in my head and it’s hard to separate that from what I used to be interested in which has expressed itself in other ways, specifically roslyn as chosen one in ascendant which I’ve said before was the result of a decade of rewriting those boy heroes as girls because I felt so connected to them and wanted girls to be every bit as important as boys, like I could draw a straight line from me writing bits and bobs of girl!harry as a fourteen year old and me writing roslyn in ascendant and wow I kind of want to punch myself in the face for how long I’ve rambled on about my own stuff but you know what no this is my tumblr and I get to obsessively and exhaustively talk about my own fictional worlds if I want to)

so it’s been a bit of a mindfuck trying to reconcile this shift in my own interests with the fact that I am a woman who identifies as largely asexual. and I think it’s important to sit down with yourself every once in a while and really look at the things you produce and do some self-examination. because I do wonder a lot if my comfort writing m/m now is because of this lack of pressure I normally feel when writing female characters or if it’s because I don’t have to interact with Me As Author so much when I write about boys because I am not a boy or if it’s because I feel a lot more comfortable identifying as queer when for the majority of my life I’d forced myself to be straight even though it didn’t feel right. 

then there’s the whole conversation about women writing m/m and how a lot of queer men feel they’re being fetishized or that their stories are being appropriated by women, in the same way that white people writing stories about people of color can be appropriative, men writing about women, straights writing about lgbtq+, cis people writing about trans or genderqueer people, et cetera with literally any minority being written by someone not from that minority, right? 

and I think it’s a bit reductive to say that it doesn’t matter. because it does matter. you’re right in saying that it matters to someone and I think the job of anyone who creates any kind of content is to think about that and be mindful that you don’t create in a vacuum. your art has power even if you don’t think it does, if you don’t want it to, and that’s something no one should take for granted.

now, I am not saying that certain people do not have the right to write certain stories. no one has the right to write anything, just as no one is forbidden from writing anything. and no one writing anything should be harassed for writing something that people perceive is out of their wheelhouse (because a lot of marginalizations are not visible! abuse, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, whether you’re neurotypical or not! and there’s no requirement that you make public your trauma/identity to provide cred! in fact it’s kind of horrific that anyone thinks this!) it’s a complicated dynamic but the more we talk about these things the easier it is when a marginalized person says, “hey this thing you wrote is kind of bad,” the writer can go “oh man I’m sorry, let me think about it and see what I did wrong so I can do better in the future” OR “oh wow I see what you mean, but this is important to me” and the reader can go “I respect your right to write what you want and in the future I’ll do more to shield myself from this kind of content” instead of Cancelling someone because they didn’t effectively prostrate themselves before the ultimate judges of problematic content, a bunch of randos on the internet.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, yes, I agree with you that it’s not necessary to worry about this stuff, and that a lot of it is energy wasted especially when you’re worrying about theoretical responses from people who read your stuff, but that’s not helpful to me, because I think that’s disregarding the fact that we live in a society with weird power dynamics that are constantly shifting. I think it’s my job as someone who is mentally capable of dealing with this kind of self-examination to push back on some of these things when I can. because if I didn’t challenge myself every once in a while, I wouldn’t grow as a person or a writer and if there was one mantra I would live my life by besides the assertion that I would be blissfully happy if I downloaded my consciousness into a robot body, it would be that You Have To Be Okay With Critique and It’s Good When People Call You Out In A Safe Setting, like everyone is a dick and an asshole and a Bad Person and pretending you’re not is the most useless battle you could ever fight. we contain multitudes and some of those tudes are downright ugly.

quick sidebar: I would not have been able to have this kind of conversation with myself four years ago, and something I have not even talked about is how my shift toward more m/m content began at the same time as I was getting used to getting medical treatment for my grab bag of mental illnesses, like it’s pretty obvious that I got into sk right about the time I settled into my meds so what does That even mean?? so many THINGS to consider!!

idk. I know when I write stuff like this people think I’m beating myself up over it, but I’m really not. I just like talking about it sometimes and this tumblr is where all my neuroses go to live forever more in the annals of this blue hell until I chicken out and delete them the next day. I guess I know that when I read other people talking about things I’ve also been thinking about, it’s nice to hear. and as this is something that is still new to me, fandom in general is still bonkers to a part of my brain because I came into it as an adult, the whole conversation (if there even is a conversation because there might not be but there’s one going on in my brain) about women writing m/m is interesting complicated and something I think about a lot. clearly without any real focus or conclusions to be drawn, because I dropped out of college and never learned how to make my point in a concise and understandable manner. 

anyway I hope you don’t read this as me arguing with you nonny, I just wanted to clarify what I mean in the original post

[ofbooksandofbeards]

god, finding the Hobbit fandom has saved my sanity when it comes to seeing all these supposed fans of the book shrieking the most wild shit about the Hobbit trilogy being bad. whenever they say that too much was changed I would ask “what exactly that was crucial to the story or (as you said) the extremely sparse book characterization was changed?” and they got nothin. when they say Tauriel ruined it for them because she’s just there to look pretty and have a cross-species love interest I ask “what exactly was Legolas in LoTR? in what way was him being pretty and ass-over-tits for Aragorn feeding the story more than Tauriel’s role did? they’re both shown as being primarily skilled fighters and hunters with supernatural gifts so what’s the difference?” and they got nothin. when they say that the Hobbit trilogy was rushed and then over-stretched to make more money I ask them “wait... you mean the same filmmakers who have kept most of their original facilities and staff despite making millions on the previous trilogy? the same writers who said themselves they started working on a series of Hobbit films at the same time as the LoTR films? the same folks who have not moved to LA to live in mansions and party every day?” nothin. then they pull out the BS about how the Hobbit shouldn’t have all of this LoTR stuff in it and I ask them “so you never read that Tolkien himself longed to go back and connect the two books better? and that he preferred editing over exact recreation when it came to future film adaptations? and that actually the Hobbit films could have added even more connecting material like Aragorn in Rivendell or flash-forwards and flash-backs?” they’ve got nada. when they... oh my god... complain about special effects and CGI... like holy shit, I love the LoTR like family but ??? there’s a reason we all made memes about some of the SE and CGI back in the day.

also, I and other female-identifying fans have often said we feel a deep kinship with how Fran and Philippa in particular developed the many kinds of love and bonds of trust between characters in Tolkien - not least the cultivation of a central love story between Bilbo and Thorin for the Hobbit. and let’s just say the fantasy-bro gatekeepers who always cry “why everything have to be gay??” whenever a single queer-nuanced anything happens in their monotonously heterosexual media are neck-and-neck with those types of girls and women who don’t want to like what is popular and who violently hate any female characters apart from the very few they’ve decided aren’t somehow a threat to their self-insert fantasies. so the fact that it was two women making changes to Tolkien to update the text for modern audiences and provide a more grown-up connection to the previous trilogy - instead of making a 50 minute kid’s movie that’s just as absent of connection to LoTR as the text - was only ever going to piss off certain people, who weren’t worth pleasing in the first place. and if someone hates the Hobbit trilogy then considering how the action and journey and most of the crucial interactions were kept to canon, I guess they hate the Hobbit as a book too.

and lastly, there’s just the folks who view their experiences with media (LoTR) to be only valuable if they are considered to be “unique”. so their hatred of the Hobbit trilogy was decided as soon as a younger or new set of fans got to have their own LoTR experience with the movies, premieres, cast interactions, etc. sorry to those fans but LoTR and TH are brilliant films to love equally because the casts are equally idiots and wonderful, the craft of each trilogy is exquisite, and the adaptation of the original text to movie was so kindly and tenderly done. even major sacrifices like Faramir’s introduction or the major de-aging of Frodo were still amended beautifully. and sorry but dropping the Fraggle Rock talking animals of the Hobbit and Bilbo talking like Winnie the Pooh even when he’s facing death while adding in deeper emotional bonds to the company? superb writing choices. why not love both experiences? why not love that a whole set of target-audience young people came out in droves and discovered a love for Tolkien as a result, just like people my age did for LoTR?

anyway I’m really sorry for spamming all over your meme post because you basically said it all xx

someone: oh my god i cannot believe they made 3 separate hobbit movies, that's so unnecessary-

me: