#since its beta week i'm able to run with my own guild

[m0n0lithical]

Look at my lorge cat. Look at him. I love him.

[maglors-anion-gap]

5,6,10 and 17 for the spread love ask :)

[from this ask game]

5. Recommend three (or more) blogs to follow

you gave me the hard question!! :( someone else asked me the same question so it's not as hard though, I won't have to narrow it down as much. Today's theme is resources! I am recommending @antiracist-tolkien because the blog has such a good collection of meta and general information. I go weeks sometimes not logging on or scrolling much and I miss so many good posts, so I really appreciate the dedication to running an archive blog of that sort! @tolkien-meta-library fills a similar niche; I'm so paranoid about missing The Definitive Treatise on something or other. I'm also recommending @expertsofarda because if you're not plugged into the silmarillion writers guild discord or don't already have beta readers or mutuals with niche knowledge, this is an excellent place to see who might be able to answer a question of yours. You don't even have to message ppl; just knowing who knows what means tag searching their blog might yield results.

6. Ship or platonic relationship that you got into because of the fans

I think this is a tie between hurin/morwen(/aerin) courtesy of outofangband and idril/tuor/maeglin courtesy of jaz-the-bard! polar opposite pairings, to be sure. The former is because I had no knowledge of the narn and had simply failed to appreciate how cool morwen is (I have since learned the error of my ways). The latter .... tfog was really hard for me to engage with personally for a long time so it was actually really nice to see what the rest of the fandom was up to in terms of putting the puzzle pieces together, deciding what to keep, what to modify, etc. It's about the balancing of it, I think? idril/tuor was not so interesting to me on its own, and idril/maeglin was unbalanced and sad. I think a lot of the ships I'm interested in are some variation of having deep interpersonal conflict but also deep love. shrugs. (I've given maeglin the curufin blorbo treatment - it's the being your father's shadow for me).

10. A popular character you actually really like and why

Umm I actually really like Maedhros (No one could guess from my AO3 works /sarcasm). I don't think bad takes are super unique to him as a character; greater popularity and greater emotional attachment are positively correlated with woobification, and greater popularity is positively correlated with more takes and thus more bad takes. *snl reaction image* he has everything: pain, killing instinct, self-destructiveness, appeasement, love, hatred, duplicitousness, self-serving nature, hope beyond hope, trans of gender. He's not the only one to have these characteristics, but I also like fucked up and evil men. I can't list any of the other feanorians bc they don't come close for popularity.

17. Something you love that you don’t often share because you’re worried what others will think

.... you know the answer to this, my friend! ;) That particular thread will bear fruit soon! But to give a second, evasive, answer: I feel like I do talk about this a fair amount, but it always makes me super nervous to write/post trans porn because ... idk I feel like people treat it like it's extra-perverse or extra-explicit, but like. That's just my life. I am simply just vibing yaknow? Or just, generally explicit fic. Because on the one hand I feel like it's very revealing and I feel weird exposing my sex life to people - not because I feel inhibited but rather that people will maybe find it odd. And on the other, I feel like there's a kind of narrow window past which you go from "freak (appreciative)" to "freak (derogatory)" and that window is vanishingly small for unpopular characters, queer freaks (moi), and kink.