O K A Y
SO
Let me take you back, my dear, to approximately one year ago, shortly after my ass finally sat down for a plane ride and read all three Lord of the RIngs books in twelve hours. Naturally, having finished them and being in need of more, I went out to AO3 within days and started sifting through the Legolas/Gimli fic, because that ship sails itself to Valinor and I’m not a moron. And the VERY FIRST FIC when you sort by kudos (one does not simply enter a new fandom sorting by Date Updated, after all, sorting by kudos is the wise soul’s path) is Sansukh, with some rather peculiar tags (’dead dwarf peanut gallery’ among them) and 400K words and the ships Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield and Gimli/Legolas Greenleaf in pride of place.
“Well,” I said to myself, “I’ve never even READ the Hobbit and from what I know, I don’t ship Thorin and Bilbo at all, doesn’t Thorin try to kill him?” (Not that that’s ever stopped me before, but forgive me my naivete.)
“I’m sure there are more Legolas/Gimli fics that include ships I ship,” I decided, and kept right on scrolling.
So I skipped it. And methodically worked my way through the nine hundred odd Gimli/Legolas fics available on AO3. The quality of these fics declined, both in terms of characterization and of grammar, as these things do, until I broke down and admitted to myself that I couldn’t stand to drag myself through an unbroken block of text, and went to glance over FF.Net because that’s my usual move. Now, self-insert fics are some people’s cup of tea, and that’s great, but I was on a mission, I had a quest, and Girl-Of-The-Week/Legolas was getting in the way of my need for Gimli/Legolas, so I didn’t last long in the FF.Net archive, needless to say.
“Come on,” I groaned, “there’s got to be more good shit, where is the rest of it? Where’s my novel-length mess of mutual pining and tragic adoration and banter, with Eternal Third-Wheel Aragorn and beautiful world-building and rampant use and abuse of Sindarin and Khuzdul?”
And then I recalled something that had almost slipped my mind.
There was that one fic. The one I’d taken to skimming past because why do people ship Thorin/Bilbo, anyway? It was long, it was popular, and hey, I could always just…stop, if I didn’t like it, right?
I was desperate. It was worth a try.
And, oh, darlings, was it ever worth a try.
I was a chapter in.
I had been dropped headfirst into a pool of characters I didn’t know–Thorin? He was a king of something, I thought. Thorin’s nephews, Fili and Kili? Never met them. I was pretty sure one of them was blond. Mahal? Had to Google him. Dead members of the Company? Had to look up a list. Thorin’s father and mother and brother and grandparents? Spent a few VERY confused minutes doing research before I realized half of them had been created wholecloth by @determamfidd. It didn’t matter. By the end of the first full chapter I was ready to take a throwing axe to the chest for these dwarrows (and Mahal).
Watching Thorin come to terms with his death was agonizingly wonderful.
By the time Thorin’s spirit visited a sixty-something red-haired dwarf with a temper and an axe, I was addicted.
By the time Thorin had a sudden and terrible revelation about Bilbo Baggins, I was beyond sold, I was in love.
The culture of the dwarves of Erebor, the return after the diaspora in the Iron Hills and their stony determination to survive, Dain Ironfoot’s abrupt promotion to king over the bodies of Thorin and Fili and Kili, Lady Dis’ grief, the anguish of the Moria colonists, the dwarves in the Halls of Mahal grieving their living and dead loved ones, Gimli’s reckless love for his family and his people–it was like falling, or flying, or drowning. It was perfect, I thought to myself, feeling a great tremendous weight in my chest like the breathless moment after getting the wind knocked out of you, right before it hurts, when you just think oh, wow. It couldn’t get better, never mind that this person had apparently written however many thousands of words of just…dwarves being dwarves.
And then.
Bilbo left. The Ring was on the field of play.
“There is no way this woman is crazy enough to rewrite the entire trilogy,” I said to myself. “And if she maintains this level of talent all the way through, I may have to scream.”
Well.
The fic is almost done. Dets is that crazy. I have had to scream.
This is the epic-length Tolkien fic of your dreams. It has women (and dwarrowdams, and lady elves) being badass. It has nonbinary and trans characters. It has world-building beyond the dreams of mortal man. It has desperate pining and steady love and families torn apart and reunited and heroes to save Middle Earth.
It has songs that will break your heart and make you smile and wriggle their way into your mind (The Iron Hills For Me fucking BROKE ME, I read that section in bed and I had to put my phone down so I didn’t get tears on it, I love it so much). It has moments of brilliant, shining joy where all you can do is laugh and heartwrenching world-weary tragedy where crying just doesn’t seem like enough, somehow. It has Aragorn, the perpetual third wheel, who just wants his friends to be happy and would consider saving Middle Earth a definite bonus to that. It has all the mid-battle and post-battle and just-because banter you could want, between dead dwarves and living dwarves and elves and Men and even the occasional Vala. It has Legolas and Gimli cobbling together a friendship from shared experiences and shared grief and falling in love and miring themselves down in misunderstandings and pining and coming together in the most perfect ways. It has Khuzdul and Sindarin and writing that honestly could put Tolkien to absolute shame in places.
It’s beautiful.
It’s elegant.
It’s sprawling.
It’s everything I could have hoped for in a Tolkien fic, and so much more.
It’s fanfiction of Lord of the Rings, but only in the way that Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost are fanfiction of the Bible.
It’s Sansukh.
And THAT is pretty much what I have to say about that.
Aw Yiss 