ninethousandbees

ninethousandbees:

so I am extremely behind on my silm rereading, but I want to rec some things before we all get too far away from the Valar-centric chapters:

cosmic horror ainur are possibly one of my favourite silm things, and @napoldeinlove has done some fantastic art of Manwe and Varda here and here

I also really like things exploring underappreciated Valar (and particularly the Valier) and @misbehavingmaiar has written a really fantastic little fic about Vana here which made me think about her in a whole new way.

while I’m at it, I also want to just recommend misbehavingmaiar’s entire blog; Wesley’s interpretations of Sauron and Melkor are fresh and original and depict them as complex, well-rounded characters with understandable motivations while also not shying away from the fact that both of them are kind of terrible people. He is also a fantastic writer and artist and has some awesome headcanons which have given me a completely new perspective on some aspects of Tolkien’s world and made me think about others that I had never really considered before. As a warning to first time readers, misbehavingmaiar is an RP blog and therefore contains spoilers through the end of the Silm; you may want to save reading it till you finish the book

I haven’t been much of a dwarf person in the past, but @determamfidd’s wonderful fanfic Sansukh has just about converted me. It’s a long fic (it has just hit 40 chapters and about 400, 000 words) covering the time between the Battle of Five Armies through to the end of the War of the Ring from the perspective (mainly) of the Dwarves of Erebor. Dets does a fantastic job of integrating the bits of Dwarvish culture we know about into something interesting and believable, and is spot-on in her interpretations of the characters of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and their relationships with each other. She also has some of the best OCs that I have seen for a long time, and I would gladly read reams of fanfiction about any of them, because they are anything but two dimensional and each of them could easily hold up a story on their own

oh my GOD – thank you so much!!