#they're all having a terrible time (except Sauron)

[thesummerestsolstice]

Faustian Bargain 👀

I don’t think I’ve seen many fics that fix things in a way that keeps both Gil Galad and Celebrimbor alive before and now I’m very curious.

Alright, this is a prompt from my Unwritten Fic ask game! If you'd like more details on this story, or any of the others there, my inbox is open. This also got pretty long, so I'll post this today and put up a part two for this ask in a couple days.

So the Faustian Bargain AU starts with slight canon divergence– Gil-Galad is in Eregion when it falls, and gets captured along with Celebrimbor. Elrond, who is in Lindon, is suddenly the de-facto High King of the Noldor, while dealing with the fact that two of the people he cares about most in the world are currently in Sauron's clutches.

(And Elrond grew up with Maedhros and the former thralls who followed him. He knows what Sauron is capable of.)

Now, Elrond knows it would be a fool's errand to try and rescue them. No one even knows where Sauron is keeping them. So, instead, he uses a captured orc general to send a message to Sauron. Elrond Peredhel wishes to make a deal.

The terms are simple: Sauron will let Gil-Galad and Celebrimbor free without further harm, and in return, Elrond will become his prisoner. Sauron is not allowed to torture Elrond. Any attempt to rescue Elrond or escape attempts will result in his execution– to prevent Elrond from backing down from his end of the deal. And– and this is the reason Sauron agrees to hand two high-ranking prisoners over for someone he can't even torture– Elrond will help Sauron with his real goal, breaking into the void to free Morgoth. Elrond, who's well acquainted with the scholarship of magic and (in this AU) has been to the void with Earendil before, is maybe the only person in Middle-Earth who can help Sauron do this. And Sauron is desperate enough to take that deal.

So, Elrond and Sauron forge their contract– it's not quite an oath, but an agreement between Maia is still very serious business– Gil and Brim are let go, and Elrond begins his stay as Sauron's prisoner/research partner. Gil-Galad and Celebrimbor, notably, are not told about the "no-torturing" clause of the deal. It is not a great time for them.

Sauron is delighted, but of course, Elrond has his own plans. He knows that Morgoth rising again will be the end of Middle-Earth, and he doesn't intend to let that happen.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Trolley Problems and Deconstructing Trolley Problems in Fiction

Saw some more trolley problem discourse yesterday, arguing that it's lazy/unrealistic/whatever the ethical equivalent of a spiritual bypass is to not engage with the concept on its stated terms. So, it's been bouncing around my head.

1. Kobayashi Maru (Star Trek)

Not a trolley problem as such, but does the same thing that taking a trolley problem at face value does: accepting that sometimes things are going to suck no matter what you do, and also you gotta still make decisions anyways. Kirk's "solution" to the Kobayashi Maru was to hack the program so that the unwinnable scenario became winnable.

Does this work for him in the real world (ie other parts of the Star Trek story that aren't a simulation?) The theme comes up again in The Cobromite Manuever: Spock thinks that logically there is no way out. Kirk decides to just make something up. It works.

In The City on the Edge of Forever, the trolley problem played straight. If one social worker gets saved, a chain of events gets triggered that results in the end of the world as Star Fleet knows it. For history to reassert itself, she has to die. (Although, something interesting here is Kirk does not see the trolley problem and is not the one making the call, which begs the question of whether he could have found a way to wriggle out of the trolley problem if he'd been the one making the decisions there.)

2. Animorphs

So, I'm going to contrast this with Lord of the Rings for convenience: every time a character has a moral dilemma in LoTR, doing the most ethically pure thing is the right thing to do, and doing the more "realistic" thing ("we should use the ring, obviously?" "Sauron can't be beat, we should side with him") is always wrong. The tension in the story mostly comes from whether the characters will be able to stick to the rules or not, not what they should do. I think this is also probably the default stance in children's media: the morally correct choice is also the one that lets the good guys win.

Not so in Animorphs. The kids get ethical dilemmas all over the place, and make all sorts of different, often wildly inconsistent decisions when faced with them, and whether their decisions work out or not does not cleanly line up with whether they're having ethical scruples. And other characters -- one of the really big examples of this is Seerow's Kindness, an Andalite's decision to give Yeerks space travel out of sympathy for them, with disastrous results. Another relatively big example is a younger Elfangor refusing an order to kill Yeerks in a defenseless state, starting a chain of events that involves his friend getting permanently stuck in a Taxxon body and another Andalite getting infested by a Yeerk, who will become the main villain of the series.

(The ethical calls work out sometimes, like when Cassie takes a leap of faith and lets one Yeerk go free after learning the Animorphs' identities.)

Circling back to The Lord of the Rings, that's kind of an outlier even among Tolkien's works. The Hobbit is more morally gray (the dwarves are not really motivated by altruistic concerns, and neither is Bilbo) and the Silmarillion has an awful lot of characters who behave terribly (but often do some good in the process.) (Or who behave purely and get crushed.)

3. Those Who Walk Away From Omelas

It's a trolley problem. Is actively causing suffering for one worth it if it results in greater happiness for the many? And what would you do?

Except, in general trolley problems are explicit about the parameters. There's no uncertainty (unlike in every conceivable real life scenario.) In Omelas, uncertainty about whether it might be possible to have a different foundation for a happy society is baked in. Also, if you read it, Le Guin basically says out loud "I wanted to write a nice happy utopian story, but I figured no one would find it credible unless I included something horrifying, so here, have a neglected child. You weirdos."

As you might guess, I'm going straight from here to The Scholomance Trilogy, where El Takes A Third Way or whatever the TV tropes article is...and also, she's not always able to avoid people dying, not by a long shot.

[catofadifferentcolor]

Terrible Fic Ideas #20: LotR, but make it First Age!Legolas

I've been slowly falling back into the LotR fandom and I have to say that, although there is a lot to recommend the idea of Legolas being one of the youngest elves we come across in the series, I personally love the idea of him being one of the oldest - older, in fact, that Elrond himself.

Hear me out:

We have absolutely no idea how old Legolas is in canon. All we know for certain is that his father, Thranduil, was born and lived for at least a few years in Doriath before the Second Kinslaying in the winter of 506 FA.

This could mean that Thranduil was just a child at the time, but I love the idea that he was a young adult of no more than 500, because that would make him old enough to have 1) a child fight and die in the Sack as a young recruit in the city guard, and 2) for his wife to give birth to Legolas literally as they're fleeing the destruction. (After all, Legolas, green leaf, sounds like something you'd name an elf child in the immediate aftermath of tragedy - the elven version of hope.)

So this gives a Legolas born in the ashes of Doriath, whose day of birth was the day his older sibling (and possibly a great deal of extended family) died, 26 years before Elrond and Elros are born.

This Legolas would also, perhaps, have been old enough to fight in the War of Wrath. He would have lived through the rise of Sauron and the forging of the rings of power, fought at the Battle of Dagorlad and seen his grandfather Oropher (and who knows how many other kin) die, seen the Wizards come to Middle Earth in 1000 TA, and Sauron take up residence in what had once been his grandfather's capital.

The upshot of all of this is, at the Council of Elrond, Legolas would be roughly 6544 and been part and party to all of the same major events as his host, albeit in a somewhat more minor role.

This changes very little, except the entire Fellowship is peppered with these comments that make everyone wonder. The slight digs he makes about famous Nodor elves? Just the traditional animosity of the Wood Elves towards them and absolutely not the result of Legolas having known them in life. Celeborn says something about greeting his young kinsman? The rest of the Fellowship never hears the I'm only twenty years younger than you and that stopped being funny after our third millennia that follows. Legolas occasionally talks about famous historical places and events like he was actually there? That's just the way of elves.

I'm an inveterate Legolas/Gimli stan, so I imagine that as their relationship develops Gimli comes to understand just how much this seemingly young elf has actually lived through, but nobody else does. Not until the conclusion of Battle of Morannon does anyone know the truth - and even then his comment of "it makes a nice change to leave this battlefield without leaving so many kin upon it" is misinterpreted until he goes on to mention something only someone who had been there would know.

The revelation is a bit of a shock, because how is the knowledge that the elf you thought was a couple hundred years old at most is older than Elrond not be a shock? But, again, it doesn't change much.

Except the dynamics of Legolas and Gimli's relationship, because how can it not when Legolas was born in the ashes of a city sacked by dwarves? When Legolas himself has seen the rise and fall of Moria? Rather than overcoming inherited racism their relationship becomes one of I have seen the best and worst Middle Earth has to offer and choose to love you.

Bonuses include 1) Legolas saying some things that really only make sense if he was an older elf, but the rest of the Fellowship running rings to explain them away because there's no way in their minds this particular elf is even 500, 2) Gandalf knowing of the misunderstanding and encouraging it because it's harmless mischief, 3) Legolas being really unimpressed by most of the major figures in Middle Earth history as only someone who knew them as a moody teenager can be.

And that's really all I have. Feel free to use the idea, just let me know if you ever do.

NB: I've expanded upon this idea somewhat here.

Other Legolas Headcanons: First Age | Second Age | Third Age | Half-Maia | Half-Elven

More Terrible Fic Ideas

[doberbutts]

God this. Sauron as Annatar and as Tar-Mairon was not given a lot of characterization. The bulk of characterization we have for him in these forms is popular FANON, not canon. We know that in both of those forms he was a smooth talker, subservient as an act, manipulative, and bided his time until he was trusted before revealing his plans and by then it was way too late to stop him. We know a handful of elves rejected him immediately because they caught on that something was up. We know that Celebrimbor was a bit naive and actively wanted to trust him. We know that he was able to pursuade a cult to follow him in Numenor. But we have very little of his actual interactions with these people because they aren't written like a story, they're written like a history book, more like a list of events than "and then Sauron said x, and then Tylepe said y, and then Sauron said abc to him" etc.

This means there's a LOT of room for interpretation for how these events actually played out. "Annatar" was never given a description outside of "fair, like an elf" and Tar-Mairon was "like a man, but taller/bigger, with a terrible light in his eyes"- meaning popular fan-created depiction of him as a red-haired or blonde twink with long hair is exactly that. Fanon. Not canon. Canon does not give us a physical description for any of Sauron's forms except his armor which is why the armor is the only this consistent about him across all adaptions. "Seduce" meant something very different in Tolkien's time. We never actually SEE the interactions between Annatar and Celebrimbor, we're just told that by the end of things Annatar had Brimby wrapped around his little finger.

[also, Aragorn is eventually described as 'fair, like an elf' as well- so if we're accepting Viggo in that description, we also should accept Charlie as well. Neither are my cup of tea but there's no denying both have an army of fangirls drooling over them.]

Similarly, Galadriel does not have much characterization (no one in the Silm does unless it is a story actually written as a story, such as Beren and Luthien or Turin or the theft of the Silmarils etc, rather than a historical list of events) and what she does have paints a very different picture to what LOTR gives us later. She lies about her involvement with the kin-slayings. She goes to Middle Earth because she wants to rule a land of her own. She rejects convention and shacks up with Celeborn pretty much the second she meets him. She leads an army to throw down with Sauron. She's renowned as such a powerful elf sorcereress that the men of Gondor are STILL scared of her 3000 years later when she hasn't been spotted outside of elven realms unless she's kicking Sauron's ass. She's not even particularly nice to the Fellowship as a whole until after she talks to Frodo about the Ring, and even then most of her positive interactions are with Frodo (because he Gets It), Aragorn (because he's marrying her granddaughter), and Gimli (because he flattered her). The kindly and matronly figure we associate her with is a PJ thing, not a books thing.

Actually, I was just talking to a fellow Books Lover about this, and one of the things he complained about in the OG PJ trilogy was that change to Galadriel to downplay just how terrifying she was. Like a goddess. Beautiful, powerful, could squash you like a bug without even trying, made sure you knew it.

[general] You don't have to like the Rings of Power. My aforementioned friend hasn't seen it yet and hesitates to do so because he's been repeatedly let down by PJ's adaptions- adaptions *I* like. It's not to say that it doesn't have flaws, or that I'm totally happy with the liberties that were taken. But... some of these characters and some of these events do not exist in adaptable form, and so shit has to be made up, which means things will differ from popular headcanons of those who've been making it up themselves the whole time. And that's okay! The beauty of fanfiction and fanart and adaptive/transformative works is that you don't have to care how other people chose to interpret the source material.

You don’t hate Amazon you hate the Silmarillion: a genuine review of Rings of Power

It’s no secret that overall I liked RoP. I watched it with my roommate who gets very hyped about stuff like that and it made for a really exciting viewing experience, instead of the more bitter perspective I might have taken if I watched it alone. But, I also know there are some real faults with the show, I never thought it was perfect and know it’s not on par with the the LOTR movies and I never expected it to be. But, the reason it falls short is not Amazons.

I want to note that I am not defending Amazon. I hate Amazon. Jeff Bezos can catch this guillotine. I am, however, defending the creative team behind the show, which is how I will refer to them from here on out, I only called it Amazon to grab your attention.

Here’s my point though, almost every (valid) critique I see of this show isn’t a problem with decisions the creative team made, it’s an inherent problem in any adaptation of the Silmarillion (and associated works but I’m just going to refer to the Silmarillion for brevity’s sake).

The Silmarillion, as full and detailed as it is, is a shit story. The events of the second age do not fit neatly into a clean story the way LOTR does because it’s not supposed to. The Silmarillion isn’t a story, it’s a history, and history is never narratively satisfying. Tolkien (Jirt, not talking about Christopher here) didn’t publish the Silmarillion in his lifetime, he only even published LOTR and the hobbit, everything else attributed to him was published after his death. He had no intent of making the other works anything other than a comprehensive history of the world he made for documentation’s sake, never with intent to publish.

Because if this, the Silmarillion is really hard to adapt for a number of reasons:

1. Elves aren’t good main characters.

Elves aren’t supposed to be relatable characters, they’re aloof and static and inherently non-relatable (There are exceptions but they’re usually not regular elves. Elrond is half elven, Legolas is very young). Humans and hobbits are the relatable characters through which we view the world, because they can have human flaws and conflicts, which makes for a very human story. To make elves the main characters you need to make them interesting characters, and elves aren’t supposed to have human flaws, and so they either don’t feel relatable human, or feel disingenuous to what we know elves to be like. It’s a lose lose.

2. Middle earth is not supposed to be pretty.

A huge part of LOTR is realizing every place they visit is either the ruins of a past, much larger civilization, or a city that is a fraction of what it used to be (Gondor in lotr is NOTHING compared to what it was in the early 3rd age, or Arnor and definitely not Númenor, Rivendell is a pebble compared to Lindon and Eregion, we only ever Khazad-dûm as a decrepit tomb instead of the most prosperous mine in all of middle earth is once was). This juxtaposition is integral to the main themes of lotr and is imperative to the story jirt was trying to tell. A story set in the 2nd age cannot have these ruins because IT IS THE RUINS. It cannot “feel like lotr” because it is what will make lotr lotr.

3. Characters(individuals) are of little importance in the Silmarillion.

As important as Elendil and Isildur (and even Anárion) are to the plot of literally the entire 3rd age, we know little about their own narratives. They are names for the people that did these important actions and that’s it. Again, the Silmarillion is a history, it’s not going to say what Elendil and Isildur’s relationship was like in excruciating detail or what Isildur wanted to do with his life before sailing to middle-earth and becoming a king. You have to write these characters a good story if you’re adapting the Silmarillion and sometimes there isn’t space to write a compelling journey in the space Tolkien left. Because they don’t have a character, any character you give them will seem “out of character” to many people.

Basically my point is that before you go and say “well this is weird or I didn’t like this choice” think about what the creative team had to create to make an interesting show out of a story not designed to be told. Sometimes they didn’t make the perfect decision, but if you were tasked with adapting something unadaptable do you think you would do it perfectly?

[simaethae]

yeah but when people call him mairon they're referring to him by name not the title people gave him. even working under aule i don't think he was naive or innocent. also didn't it say it some texts that he didn't acknowledge the name sauron until after numenor was drowned and in the third age?

yeah, I don’t pretend my flinch reaction is rational or anything?

I mean, I’ve got that one AU where I consistently refer to Sauron as Mairon myself, and certainly I agree Sauron would never refer to himself as Sauron except maybe in the Third Age. but I do think calling Sauron “Mairon” by default does very broadly tend to be associated with characterisation I dislike (tho obv I try not to jump to conclusions if someone I’m talking to happens to use it). realistically, no one gets that term from canon, it’s a signifier that you are both familiar with fandom discourse on the character and relatively sympathetic to him, and the place people often pick that up seems to be shipping angbang. which, characterisation issues, already mentioned. (I have strong opinions on Sauron characterisation, okay.)

(also it seems a bit unnecessarily inaccessible. I like the sound of Tyelperinquar a lot more than Celebrimbor, but it’s not onerous to stick to Celebrimbor and Sauron and it means new people have slightly more chance of knowing who I’m talking about.)

[presumably a different anon]

ohhh what characterization don’t you agree with? is it that that melkor’s all lovey dovey with him? cus if so same melkor’s an ass -.-            

well I mean, they’re both asses lol. it’s more like, I have real trouble imagining Melkor as like, a person in a normal relationship? I mean, asa mountain that wades in the sea, and has its head above the clouds, and is clad with ice and crowned with smoke and fire - and yeah, he makes himself smaller and pettier and more human, but he didn’t start out that way.

saying I don’t think he cared much about Sauron, or about anyone except himself, is probably giving the wrong impression. I don’t think he really noticed other people. he looks at the world and he wants it to be his, like a kid with a shiny toy. think about the scale of someone who can look at the entire world and think, mine, like it’s something so small to him that he could think of owning it.

…this was an unexpected Melkor digression. anyway I also object to portraying Sauron either as his relatively-innocent victim or as his nagging spouse, but whatever, it’s entirely possible there’s really great angbang out there which does none of this and I’ve ignored it because Not My Ship, tbh. *shrug*

@thelioninmybed

c) ‘Puissance’

look, we’ve all produced some terrible content in our time :’)