lord of the rings is a fun place to fandom because there's so many options to obsess over no matter what your interests are, but because of that it's also a humbling reminder that different people like different things and that's ok.
like, for me the heart and soul of lotr is the hobbits, and it always bemuses me to see how underrated they can be in fics or fandom like?? you have these funky little fuckers who are really brave and kind and loyal but also have oddball forms of government and eat and party a lot and get into scrapes and have all these hobbit pals and there's all sorts of shipping options and they have interesting nuanced social politics and second breakfast and pipeweed and they give presents on their birthday instead of the other way around so they're always getting presents and they're hilariously weird about their family trees and they led full-scale guerrilla warfare against these bastards who invaded their homeland but also all they want to do is chill and have nice gardens and probably judge vegetable growing competitions and have pretty dances
and instead people are getting super invested in basic-bad-boy-bitch sauron? huh. fair enough. the world is indeed a rich tapestry.
yknow in some fandoms they'd fight over this
good job
in the interests about being open and honest about my own flaws the early iteration of this post was way snider about this particular fandom quirk*. but you know what? if people want to go nuts over a particular character who is (in order) middle earth's top model/a sentient heap of metal work/a disembodied eyeball, then who am I to heap scorn on that in the main tag?
(I do think more people should have fun with the sentient scrap metal/disembodied eye element of the character just for shits and giggles. if you're going to go mad over a villain at least have fun with it, you know?)
