#silmariien

By inner libertarian, I mean that I am not a libertarian at all, and that when I try to make ‘the state is evil!!!!’ arguments they come out sounding wooden or stupid. When I need a character who believes that, though (and I have a lot of characters who hate the current authorities), I let him out in small doses.Inner nationalist I hesitate to even mention, because I don’t have any instincts in that direction myself and I think it’s a mindset that straight-up does harm. But it is present in a lot of Silmarillion characters, to the point where pretending they weren’t like that might do even more damage. So I work with what I have, which is a vague intuition that when I hate the mindset my beloved character is working with, they’re usually working with this one. The inner hopeless romantic, on the other hand, is thoroughly wedded to my actual personality. I spend a lot of time wanting to convert this blog to paeans to first loves and cuddling and walks by moonlight, and I know that that’s obnoxious and childish, and so I try to pour it out in small doses in contexts where it makes sense. Sometimes I add a little too much of this element and the resulting fic is unpublishable. There is a lot of really dreadful pillow-talk-fic lurking in my drafts because I forgot fic needed any elements other than ‘hopeless romantic’. I am terribly sorry to all my followers who find romance gross and societally constructed and stifling.

23. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?

28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

Maril’s greatest works was lost in the Blog Deletion of 2013, a tragedy on par with - okay, I’ll stop being flippant, but seriously, I was devastated when we lost everything they have done. They’re one of those people with intensely detailed headcanons about characters I’d honestly forgotten exist, and they do an amazing job bringing those characters (and others) to life. They’re also one of those awesome people who bring a fandom together - writing based on other peoples’ prompts and offhand mentions, spinning out an awesome AU (like Space Numenor) to encompass other peoples’ headcanons. Today they wrote me Sudden Flame and it’s delightful.Syrisa is one of the most delightfully subversive fic writers I’ve encountered in any fandom. Her headcanons may shock, anger, and frighten you, but they will never ever fail to make you think about how little we really know about what the world we’re writing in could have looked like. What’s most amazing is that each of her ‘verses are as distinct from each other as they are from the rest of the fandom. She’s also amazingly good at writing characters I think of as Umbridges - people you love to hate until you’re on the edge of your seat begging the writer to make them suffer. Her recent Édebar is deliciously representative.