Tag: goldsickness

OK so I don’t actually use Tumblr, but I needed to comment here so I made an account…. I was lying in bed flipping through your post history looking for awesome L/G arts when suddenly one of the Bagginshield posts hit me hard in the feels.  I want to thank you because thanks to all the stuff I saw there today, I just realized this incredible parallel between Bilbo and Thorin: the Ring’s effects are so similar to dragon sickness, maybe that is how Bilbo became one of only two people who were ever able to give up the Ring.  He knew first-hand what mindless obsession with an accursed treasure can do to you and those you love.  I swore I wasn’t going to turn to the Bagginshield side of the Force and here I go anyway… you are very persuasive!  😉

I have to post this in order to answer, I’m afraid, bc your askbox is closed and you have submitted this rather than sending an ask! So I hope you do not mind, @lotrtafkab but I didn’t want you to feel like I was ignoring you!

Yeah! The creeping, insidious nature of obsession and how twisted and cruel and malignant it can be – that’s been commented on quite a bit in Hobbit fic when it comes to the dragon-sickness and/or the Ring… and not just by me, but by LOTS of people! I’m very happy you like the way I approached it 🙂 Thank you!

Dear other anon, there is a difference between bod boys and people who have a gruff personality. A bad boy does shitty things and is a generally shitty person but is also hot. A gruff person is just someone who has more difficulty expressing emotion. Thorin is gruff. Dwarves in general have gruff personalities. His is just accompanied by quiet and less whimsy than say Bofur. The things he does in the last movie are literally bc he has a mental illness triggered by substantial amounts of gold.

aviva0017:

muchymozzarella:

[passing this along. 

Thorin was irritable for many good reasons I don’t need to list if you have any observational skills]

BTW guys on that note the “mental illness” portion, whether equatable or not to our world’s mental illness, is quite literal in the sense that the greed experienced by dwarves is not of their own wills but is induced by Sauron himself, who could not bend the dwarves to his evil but instead poisoned the dwarves’ natural industriousness.

This is why in LOTR it’s a big deal when Galadriel says “your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion” to Gimli

Because dwarves aren’t naturally greedy, and Elves have no place to talk about the greed one of their own (Celebrimbor) caused (even if inadvertently, by creating the rings which Sauron poisoned) in the dwarvish race in the first place. 

I was 100% on board with this until that last paragraph, I’m not even sure what that’s trying to say, but if it’s somehow blaming Celebrimbor of all people for that dwarven greed, when he was just as deceived by Sauron as everybody else, then that’s kind of ridiculous.

The rest of it is pretty spot-on though.

Oh hey, yeah – I would have to agree that Celebrimbor was a total victim in this scenario.