Other World That Aren't Ours

[sistermagpie]

mirabellawotr wrote this post on her lj about disturbing trends in LOTR fic and clearly it needed to be said! What's better is that it's sparked a lot of good discussion on what Tolkien's world and characters are, as opposed to what they are not, and what prompts people to write fanfic that way. I'm somebody who basically thinks everyone has the right to write whatever they want even if I wish they had never ever put pen to paper. Iow, I can't stop them. Fanfic is always going to draw people who want to deal with their own issues through the characters and since you're dealing with many amateur and bad writers, it may not even occur to them that they're supposed to be sticking to canon beyond the most basic stuff.



But why is it so much of LOTR stuff, at least with hobbits, seems to swing between the extremes of baby-cuteness and wild physical abuse? When I think of some of the most well-known H/D fics I know the characters in them are usually complex and witty. Here's a fandom where people freak out about people writing about children, yet often the characterizations are more sophisticated than those of the four adult hobbits. I know that there too there are people who write non-stop abuse of the characters with Lucius having entire dungeon rooms of the Manor devoted to S&M stuff etc. but it doesn't dominate the fandom. The biggies of H/D, the novel-lengths like LUW, UL, Res--these stories are all about respect of the characters. Sometimes they're hurt in the story, of course, but I'd say they always keep their dignity, even when handcuffed. There's often a good reason for abuse, like in Cassie's unfinished post-OotP piece, "Cigarrettes Will Kill You." (And the abuse there is negligent compared to your average Frodo-rape story.) It's like the characters get bigger in fanon because people are looking at them seriously and closely. People complain about fics that don't do that, the ones who turn Ron into a homophobic jerk to highlight their new perfect Draco (and no, I wouldn't consider Res!Ron to be one of those) or make Pansy a grotesque because she dares to touch Draco in canon. They can tell the difference. The real characterization of the main characters comes out of questions like who they are with respect to their fathers and in contrast to each other. How far are they willing to go for their beliefs? How much do they owe to the people they love? How much can they really trust the other person?

So what is it about hobbits that often leads people to simplify them, make them children when they're adults in canon, make them victims when they are heroes in canon? Is it something in canon? Sometimes I wonder. I mean, the point of Tolkien's story is that we are seeing these characters when there is something far bigger than they are that needs to be taken care of, period. We don't really know about their personal problems because they all dismiss them to go on the Quest. (That would be a sign of good character and maturity in all of them.) This is one of the things I like about pre-quest fic, that we get to see them at a time when they have the freedom to act on their own self-interest and we can think about what they want for themselves. But maybe a lot of people find it hard to come up with anything like that that can compare to the drama of the quest, so instead they either make Frodo's life a never-ending climb up Mt. Doom, with relatives that manage to make the Orcs in Cirith Ungol look restrained and emotional disturbances so bad you'd think ring-lust would be relief or they make them kids with no sophistication or snark.

Take Brandy Hall, for instance. Mira creates a fun version in "Code of the Brandybucks." It's funny but the style doesn't make it less adult, and not just because of the sex. It's got meddling aunts and social conventions but it's also clearly got a Frodo who could organize his household accounts, a Merry who could choose a good wine with dinner and a Pippin who could make change. Willow's RoP has Frodo, Merry and Pippin as children and adolescents, who have their own place in a world full of adults who were obviously once kids in themselves. It makes an interesting world out of ordinary country gentry. You feel for them because they've gotten older and lost touch with friends and made mistakes and missed opportunities and love their children. Frodo's troubles, to me, are more poignant when they're the result of the adults around him being careless or insensitive or just not understanding him than they are in stories where he's being systematically abused because he lives with abusers.

p.s. I just lost a filling from a tooth that was nearly all filling to begin with. This is so not cool.