Peregrinations

Thank you for the prompt! <33 This turned into a bit from the meanwhile the world goes on 'verse, not long after Go On Aching Still. Also it got a bit longer than the other ficlets so it's going under a cut.

30. What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be.

similarly: this woman rejects all the men who express interest in her and seems exhausted by the whole affair: is she a lesbian? aro and/or ace? trans? bi or straight but with standards that no one has canonically met? someone who values her autonomy and knows how much that will be curtailed if she gets married? unless the text is very explicit about her reasoning, we don't know, and it could again be any of the above or a combination.

now, sometimes the text *is* very explicit and people still ignore it. I see this very commonly with ace and/or aro characters where fandom loves to ignore the character's own stated feelings and preferences to make them more shippable. this sucks. or there's instances where a character has an opposite-sex love interest and people really let their misogyny show by claiming that she never really mattered and you can/should completely ignore that relationship and not make it a part of your character analysis. this also sucks.

(Source)

"Return to the Moon" Artemis Ⅱ 2026

A New Year in the western woodlands.

snow snail ❄🐌❄

But then you actually touch grass and talk to normal people. Not even that, you talk to people who self diagnose as hard core Tolkien fans. And. None of them have read the Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is famously a book that nobody reads.

And yet. On AO3 The Silmarillion and Other Histories of Middle Earth has more works than The Lord of the Rings. Think about that. That’s baffling. It’s ridiculous. Like I realize that LotR fandom is split a bit by the movie, but still. The Silmarillion has almost four times as many fics as the LotR movies. Everybody has watched the movies!

I need to know what percentage of people who actually read the Silmarillion went on to write fic or draw fanart about it. Because it must be insane, surely. Like, I’m pretty sure the Silmarillion wins some kind of record in this department.

Thinking about the fanfic bell curve where on one end you have “Perfect, needs no improvement or elaboration” (LotR sits here) and on the other you have “So bad it’s no fun to even think about” with the middle being the fanfic zone. But I think there may be a secret fourth Silmarillion option. Which is a book that is perfect* but simultaneously non existent. It’s not even a real story! The language is super pretty and deeply incomprehensible (especially to people who, unlike me, were not raised from early childhood on both the Bible and classic literature). And it’s more of an outline and an abstract painting of cultural and world building vibes (not cultural and world building facts and information) than an actual narrative. There are story hooks galore. There are vivid and fascinating characters, but their lives are glossed over and you only get one or two paragraphs of prose that will reorder your brain chemistry and haunt you forever. There are countless more characters who only exist as names, the implication of whose existence is fascinating. All of this is deeply frustrating, both to casual readers who just want a Normal Enjoyable Book, and super fans who want All the Lore. But it is catnip to anyone who engages in transformative work.