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Entry tags:
- autism,
- book: lord of the rings,
- book: pride and prejudice,
- book: the hobbit,
- ch: aragorn,
- ch: denethor,
- ch: faramir,
- ch: éowyn,
- complaining,
- disability,
- era: 1990s,
- era: aughts,
- family,
- fandom: austen,
- fandom: fandom,
- fandom: middle-earth,
- fandom: narnia,
- film: lord of the rings 2001,
- game: heroes of might and magic,
- game: secret of mana,
- gaming,
- genre: meta,
- genre: retrospective,
- gondor,
- húrinionath,
- nice things people say to me,
- person: jrr tolkien,
- rants,
- rare breed of attack unicorn,
- rl,
- sf/f,
- ship: faramir/éowyn,
- site: emyn arnen,
- site: livejournal,
- site: men of gondor,
- uni and academia,
- wank,
- writing
A fandom retrospective (1/3)
I talked a few days ago, under f-lock, about some painful RL experiences around being perceived as deeply boring and incapable of feeling pain (or feeling most emotions, really). And I wanted to make an addendum to that, one that I don’t think really needs the f-lock.
I’ve made many complaints about various fandoms + multifandom spaces and trends over the years, and I still consider most of those complaints valid. Nevertheless, fandom has typically been a much less bleak environment for me.
If someone in fandom finds me boring, they usually do not tell me so, or treat me in a way that makes this apparent. They simply don’t interact with me. And people who do follow me or interact with me don’t do it because of my family’s involvement, or because I’m a package deal with more interesting/attractive/charismatic friends, or because of some other figure in my meatspace life at all. In fandom, none of that matters. At least, it hasn't for me.
Even the followers who don’t particularly care about me as a person are following me for my own sake in some capacity, rather than for the sake of someone else. Sure, some of these will leave if I get super into something they find dull, or stop posting or whatnot, but their interest in my opinions about the thing they’re into is still about my opinions of that thing, or how I express my opinions, or something about my online persona.
And there are also people who don’t share my preoccupation with a current fixation, or don’t find my take on it interesting, and are thus kind of bored, but they like me personally enough to stick around, anyway. This doesn’t usually trigger my “oh no I’m being boring” issues, because if they’re invested enough to stay, despite disinterest in my current thing, they’re evidently still engaged at some level with me.
Beyond that, people in fandom don’t typically lecture me on my general demeanor. It’s happened, but not often. In fact, while fellow fans sometimes express respect for my—let’s say, often rather severe manner of presenting myself and my opinions, they don’t generally act like it is required of me to be that way or that it somehow precludes a capacity to feel. We’re all in fandom because we feel things!
And that’s been very powerful for me. I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until I was well into my 20s, while I’ve been directly or indirectly excluded or distanced from many RL social circles ever since I was a child. I’ve certainly been treated as if I and the things I care about are objectively dull and emotionally unengaging.
But throughout my entire adult life, there has always been one glaring exception to this. There really was a social sphere in which my experience of others and of myself could be different. There was fandom.
For all of online fandom’s many, many flaws, this has been part of my experience of it from even before I was an adult—in fact, from the time that I made my first post. At the time, I was extremely shy and anxious, so I lurked a lot, and was very worried about breaking some rule somewhere if I actually said anything on the big scary Internet. But I had feelings. I was in high school and I had such feelings.
Many of these were Pride and Prejudice feelings. In high school, I started collecting copies of P&P just so I could read the introductions/editorial content and see what other people thought about it, since nobody I knew IRL cared about it the way I did. This was both my first step into academia proper and a sort of proto-fannish activity. But my Austen feelings were not actually the ones that propelled me into breaking my self-imposed Internet silence and detachment from online communities. A lot of Austen fandom didn’t really seem like my people. I was also into Harry Potter, but HP fandom similarly did not seem like my people.
Actually, speaking of boring other people, I’m going to be really self-indulgent and rewind even further for THE FULL SAGA of what brought me into fandom.
It was 1997. I was in sixth grade and inhaling just about every remotely age-appropriate book I could get my hands on. I loved reading more than anything. And I was sick a lot, and didn’t have close friends, so I had plenty of time for it.
I already loved SF/F stories in particular. My parents were big fans of the genre. I read all their Narnia books when I was about 8 (and had strong opinions on Narnia even then). We’d played fantasy-themed games as a family for almost as long as I could remember. My dad was a computer programmer and had access to some pretty good computer stuff for the time, even when we were struggling for money otherwise, so we were able to play Secret of Mana, Heroes of Might and Magic II, all that kind of thing. It was those that got me interested in writing my first stories, and I was already coming up with my own spins on various high fantasy tropes as a hobby.
I used the MS Paint text box on the family computer to write different stories in, and when my dad saw what I was doing, he went, “oh, no, you are not going to do that.” Instead, he dredged up an old laptop that ran on DOS and could only really handle WordPerfect, but having my very own laptop with the incredible magic of *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ ✿ word processing ✿* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ was incredible. I wrote and wrote and wrote on that thing.
Of course, I still had to go to school. I got on really well with my teacher that year, an elderly man who was kind and supportive despite my frequent illnesses taking me out of class, and who valued reading/writing more than most of my teachers. We had assigned lists of books that I dutifully read according to the schedule, until we got to a different kind of book:
The Hobbit.
I read the assigned section, and knew I was supposed to stop until the next week, but I just couldn’t. I breezed through the whole book and was enthralled. It was the greatest!! thing!!!! that I’d ever encountered. I also read P&P that year for the first time, independently of class, and did like it (especially Darcy!), but I didn’t get it in the same way, presumably because I was eleven. I was so enthusiastic about The Hobbit in particular that my dad gave me Lord of the Rings to read.
LOTR was a lot harder. I struggled with the early chapters of Fellowship for awhile—there were bits I found interesting or entertaining, but overall, it was really slow going and I eventually gave up on LOTR for the moment. After that, I mostly read SF/F that was geared towards a younger and more contemporary audience (Jane Yolen, Tamora Pierce, Diane Duane, Mercedes Lackey, etc).
So I carried on with my life and general interests through middle school and into high school, and didn’t return to LOTR since I had so many other things going on and no lack of things to read. But, of course, the Tolkien landscape was forever drastically changed in 2001, when Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Fellowship of the Ring was released. Although I had only ever read maybe a quarter of Tolkien’s version, I agreed to go see the movie in the theatres.
At the time, I largely liked it. It was definitely a very good film (I still think it’s the best of the LOTR movies, actually), though I felt the characterization was a bit weak in ways I couldn’t quite pin down, and I didn’t care for the Lothlórien section. My dad hated it because of the handling of Aragorn and excision of so many of his favorite details from the book, but I couldn’t remember the book clearly enough to judge for myself. So I figured I’d try to read it again, now that I was older and the world was having a Tolkien moment.
I plowed through the slower early parts of Fellowship over a few days, and then once it hit its stride, I had The Hobbit experience all over again. I was completely enraptured and ignored my homework, my hobbies, and everything else to finish the entirety of Lord of the Rings that day. Well, technically it was the middle of the night by the time I got to the end, and I had to get up at 6 AM the following morning, but I regretted nothing.
I realized I had been mistaken about The Hobbit. It was cool, for sure, but only a pale shadow of Lord of the Rings, the actual Greatest Thing Ever. There were many reasons I thought this, but undoubtedly one of them was the intensity of my love for Tolkien’s Gondor in general and Faramir in particular. I did not think Faramir or Gondor was perfect, but they were certainly perfect for me.
At this point, I could more clearly see what my father was peeved about in the film version of FOTR. Unlike him, I thought the filmmakers were correct to take out Tom Bombadil and Glorfindel, but like him, I thought the handling of Isildur’s legacy and Aragorn’s hang-ups was shaky (not absolutely bad, but among the weaker elements despite Viggo Mortensen's very good performance). Still, when FOTR was great, it was fantastic. Maybe not on Tolkien’s level, but what was? Considering what they had done in FOTR, I was curious and excited to see TTT, and especially to see what they’d do with my fave, Faramir, and other faves like Éowyn and Frodo.
If you know me, it's obvious that I was extremely disappointed (understatement). I didn’t even particularly like the handling of Éowyn, which gets much less criticism these days. Miranda Otto’s Éowyn was sympathetic and compelling, but I felt she was already far too warm and approachable for the ultimate payoff of her arc, and that it was amping up Aragorn/Éowyn vs Aragorn/Arwen in a kind of cheap way that did little service to any of the characters involved (particularly Arwen). I felt like the filmmakers didn’t quite know what to do with the hobbits (especially hobbits other than Sam) and that they would have honestly preferred an Aragorn-centric narrative. And I felt like there was an underlying cynicism about people other than the special chosen protagonists that seemed an extremely poor fit for Tolkien.
Yet the handling of Faramir and the Dúnedain of Ithilien was certainly my biggest issue with it. There were a lot of criticisms at the time of how TTT handled Faramir, and a lot of defenses against those criticisms, from people involved in the films (even David Wenham himself had to do kind of defensive PR for the scriptwriters) as well as from the movie's fans. I was familiar with the Internet by then, so I read the various defenses and found them unconvincing and poorly reasoned.
But the thing was—obviously a lot of other people also weren’t convinced. It wasn’t just me. The response to the films at the time seemed much less uncritically adulatory than it would become later, at least in the places I was looking at. And I definitely got the feeling that even a lot of the people who liked TTT thought the whole Osgiliath detour was a weak point.
I still didn’t say anything online or have any direct involvement in fandom.
The next year, Return of the King came out. The tide of Jackson film discourse seemed to shift after that, including when it came to Faramir. Most people seemed to think that, while TTT!Faramir was awkwardly handled and bore little resemblance to Tolkien’s character, all that was fixed by making him a soft tragic woobie in ROTK (not the phrasing of the time, but the sentiment). In addition, Éowyn gets an awesome moment vs the Witch-king (the "I am no man" film version soon eclipsing her laughing defiance in the book). We get to see an imposing Minas Tirith, various big emotions and iconic set pieces, etc, and apart from the dragging pace of the multiple endings, a lot of people seemed to think it was basically the perfect final note for the series.
I did not agree. I very intensely did not agree. I was much less attached to Denethor then, but I still thought the handling of his character was awful, stripping away all the pathos of his characterization and downfall, his parallels with Aragorn, etc. I thought Gondor was bland, shrunken, and borderline whitewashed. I thought the depiction of Faramir was nearly as far off as in TTT, just in a different direction that was easier for audiences to sympathize with (and substantially worsened by the choices made with Denethor).
I thought the softening of Éowyn’s character and motivations was still very much in evidence, and that the film didn’t really resolve her arc at all. I thought Gimli was a travesty of Tolkien’s character and Legolas only somewhat less so. I thought Frodo and even to an extent Sam and Gollum were horribly mishandled by the script. I did not like supercharging Aragorn’s chosen king stuff or basically anything to do with the armies of the dead. The bulk of the choices made with Elrond and Arwen were baffling. I thought the film in general was more racist and misogynistic than the book itself. I hated prioritizing Aragorn’s coronation over the Scouring of the Shire.
Bear in mind, I did think there was a lot that was good about it (and TTT) in terms of cinema more broadly. I own the extended editions for a reason and have watched them all multiple times; I have fond memories of our beloved fluffy cat sitting on my shoulder and watching the EE with me. But I felt with all my 17-y-o intensity that it was not a good adaptation of Tolkien’s work and that “ROTK fixed everything” was WRONG. And I felt it was especially wrong with regard to Faramir. I was curious if I was the only one who still felt that way.
I wasn’t.
LOTR fandom did not mainly focus on Faramir or on Gondor. But it was a massive fandom, especially right after ROTK came out, and any significant character had some kind of fanbase somewhere. Fandom was still highly decentralized and sometimes you kind of had to dig around to find the people who were into the same things as you, but you could find them, and I did.
Specifically, I found Emyn Arnen, a website dedicated to Faramir/Éowyn fanfiction and forum discussions. I liked Faramir/Éowyn a lot, as I still do, and I kept my Faramir/Aragorn (and Faramir/Arwen!) shipping on the down low back then. But although Emyn Arnen was ostensibly a shipping site, the forums were divided between boards for discussions of the individual characters in the ship, a board for talking about Faramir/Éowyn itself, and boards for talking about other matters from the books or movies. I think there might have been some other boards, too.
In any case, the point is that there was discussion of Éowyn and Faramir separately on Emyn Arnen, as well as in terms of the ship. And in the wake of the films, the Faramir discussions were on fire.
Many of the vocal fans there were pissed about TTT and not especially placated by ROTK. Some people would try to defend movie Faramir, but a lot of the book Faramir fans there were just not having it. I had very definitely found my people. So I read the rules and silently watched a few of the discussions, especially the Faramir-centric ones. One of these ended up drifting from the failings of movie Faramir to wondering if book Faramir was too perfect to be recognizably adapted at all. At that point, I screwed up my nerve and made my first online post ever.
It was obvious that these people were older than me, perhaps much older. I was self-conscious about intruding on their community (though, at 17, you couldn’t have paid me to proclaim my status as a minor to them). But I felt very strongly that Tolkien’s Faramir is not perfect, and that in fact, the film version of ROTK softened his flaws to make him more pitiable while trying to pin movie Faramir’s weak, dumbass decisions on their villainized Denethor. Moreover, even if we were to accept that he was unadaptably perfect in the book and had to be changed, this would not automatically mean that the specific changes made in the films were good ideas or well-executed, and I didn’t think they were either of those things. That was the gist of my first post.
Not everyone agreed, or agreed completely, but they appeared to find my perspective intriguing. And some of them definitely did feel the same way. Regardless, my arguments became part of the ongoing conversation they—or rather, we—were having. Nobody seemed to realize that I was a high schooler, nobody seemed to think I was boring, and the other book Faramir fans quickly befriended me.
Eventually, the movies vs book discussions were so wide-ranging, and permeating so many different conversations on the site, that I took the initiative of creating a single thread to quarantine rants about the movies as adaptations of Tolkien. Since it was my thread, I got to make the rules within the parameters of the site, and I decreed that posts in the thread did not have to specifically be about the movies' depictions of Faramir and Éowyn, but could touch any and all gripes with the films in terms of the book. My hope was that this would keep our book-based rants from overflowing into so many of the site’s discussions, while still giving the book fans a space to air our grievances.
Some of the more defensive movie fans would actually go into this thread to complain about us criticizing the films—in a thread that existed solely for that purpose and which was clearly signposted and permitted by the mods. But by and large, the thread seemed to work as intended. We had so much to say that we maxed out the first purist ranting thread fairly quickly, so I started a new one. And then we maxed that one out and I made a third one. Eventually, the Emyn Arnen mods themselves took over maintaining the purist ranting threads in an organized way and would start a new one as soon as the previous one filled up.
It’s kind of wild in retrospect. Now and then I still encounter people who remember the purist ranting threads of Emyn Arnen, and will be like “wait, I used to read those! You were the one who started them?”
YES, ’TWAS I ALL ALONG.
But like I said, the tactic seemed reasonably effective. The purist ranting threads kept our screeds from overrunning other discussions, while still allowing us to vent without having to make constant disclaimers about how good the movies were, how they’re in a different medium, how some of the omissions were the right choice, blahblahblah.
On my end, it was exciting to interact with people who cared not just in the same type of way as me, but about the same things and with largely the same feelings about those things, so we could really focus on the nuances and particulars that different people had noticed or thought of. Most of us in the ranting thread were fans of the Stewards and Stewardist Gondor, and tended to be a bit skeptical of Aragorn’s ascension (especially as represented in the films, but not only).
Still, at the end of the day, all this was kind of a hack around the absence of a fannish space for book Gondor fans. Emyn Arnen was not really meant to be that, and LiveJournal communities were cool, but didn’t give us quite what we were after, either.
Eventually, some of the Gondor fans came up with the idea of creating a new site. A site of our own, as you will. Instead of adapting Emyn Arnen or even lj to our purposes, this site would be specifically designed for discussion and fanworks focused on Gondor, especially late Third Age Gondor.
This wasn’t my idea, but I was very definitely onboard with it. Emyn Arnen was a shipping website, and a bunch of us were people who did like Faramir/Éowyn, but were more focused on Gondor in slightly varying ways.
There was no break or drama with Emyn Arnen that I knew about. It was pretty normal at the time for people to build separate but loosely affiliated sites with different emphases, and we remained active at Emyn Arnen. But since a bunch of us were in it for fundamentally gen rather than shippy reasons, it seemed appropriate to divert our more Gondor-focused activity into a Gondor-centric space where we would focus on characters like Denethor, Finduilas, Imrahil, and Boromir in addition to Faramir.
I’ve seen it said that the Gondor fans of that era mostly just cared about Faramir, but never by people who were actually active in the community at the time. I was up to my ears in early 2000s Gondor fandom, and while that might have been true of me, it was not true of the community in general.
Sure, Faramir was probably the biggest fave of that crowd for multiple reasons, including him being the most prominent Gondorian character still alive by the end of LOTR and closely associated with Tolkien himself. But the Gondor fandom of this era also went out of their way to create spaces where you could reliably find defenses of Denethor and Boromir, speculation about Finduilas and Lothíriel, commiserations about Imrahil’s absence from the films (“wait, is that random blond guy supposed to be Imrahil…?”), debates about Gondorian culture and history, etc.
Early on, I was especially baffled by how invested a lot of the Gondor circle was in Denethor. I know, I know, but at first, I didn’t get it, beyond thinking he was a well-written character who had been grossly mishandled in the films. Gondor fandom included a bunch of Denethor fans, though, probably all the more concentrated there because the film depiction of him had comprehensively ruined his reputation in more mainstream LOTR fandom. I didn't always agree with the other Gondor fans about Denethor, but I disagreed far more with the people they were reacting against, and gradually came around to liking him, too.
Outside of the Gondor-centric fan circles, Denethor was often treated as a simple villain or unambiguous abuser in discussion and in popular fics (most notably in the much-recced “A Game of Chess”). So a number of the Gondor fans would make a point of writing fics or arguments that pushed back against tropes like abusive Denethor, Finduilas being unfaithful, Denethor being definitionally bad because he doesn’t like Aragorn, etc.
In any case, early 2000s Gondor fandom was definitely not all about Faramir. It especially wasn't in our own spaces, which existed in part because our interests extended beyond Faramir and Faramir/Éowyn.
And I was part of this! I had been a total nonentity in my high school and eventually just left and went to community college through Running Start to get away from how shitty it felt. Even then, I felt fairly invisible and off-putting. But among the Gondor fans, I didn’t feel like an afterthought at all. I wasn’t disregarded, and nobody treated me as tedious or particularly difficult, although I was even rantier then than I am now. We all cared passionately about the same relatively niche element of LOTR, we had a lot of common pet peeves (see above), we thought LOTR was genuinely a great novel and not just a trailblazing one or appealing for world building rather than prose or improved upon by the films. We followed each other on lj, and though the Tolkien fever of the time faded, we remained friendly in the world of lj fandom and paid attention to what was going on with each other in later years.
I’ve made many complaints about various fandoms + multifandom spaces and trends over the years, and I still consider most of those complaints valid. Nevertheless, fandom has typically been a much less bleak environment for me.
If someone in fandom finds me boring, they usually do not tell me so, or treat me in a way that makes this apparent. They simply don’t interact with me. And people who do follow me or interact with me don’t do it because of my family’s involvement, or because I’m a package deal with more interesting/attractive/charismatic friends, or because of some other figure in my meatspace life at all. In fandom, none of that matters. At least, it hasn't for me.
Even the followers who don’t particularly care about me as a person are following me for my own sake in some capacity, rather than for the sake of someone else. Sure, some of these will leave if I get super into something they find dull, or stop posting or whatnot, but their interest in my opinions about the thing they’re into is still about my opinions of that thing, or how I express my opinions, or something about my online persona.
And there are also people who don’t share my preoccupation with a current fixation, or don’t find my take on it interesting, and are thus kind of bored, but they like me personally enough to stick around, anyway. This doesn’t usually trigger my “oh no I’m being boring” issues, because if they’re invested enough to stay, despite disinterest in my current thing, they’re evidently still engaged at some level with me.
Beyond that, people in fandom don’t typically lecture me on my general demeanor. It’s happened, but not often. In fact, while fellow fans sometimes express respect for my—let’s say, often rather severe manner of presenting myself and my opinions, they don’t generally act like it is required of me to be that way or that it somehow precludes a capacity to feel. We’re all in fandom because we feel things!
And that’s been very powerful for me. I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until I was well into my 20s, while I’ve been directly or indirectly excluded or distanced from many RL social circles ever since I was a child. I’ve certainly been treated as if I and the things I care about are objectively dull and emotionally unengaging.
But throughout my entire adult life, there has always been one glaring exception to this. There really was a social sphere in which my experience of others and of myself could be different. There was fandom.
For all of online fandom’s many, many flaws, this has been part of my experience of it from even before I was an adult—in fact, from the time that I made my first post. At the time, I was extremely shy and anxious, so I lurked a lot, and was very worried about breaking some rule somewhere if I actually said anything on the big scary Internet. But I had feelings. I was in high school and I had such feelings.
Many of these were Pride and Prejudice feelings. In high school, I started collecting copies of P&P just so I could read the introductions/editorial content and see what other people thought about it, since nobody I knew IRL cared about it the way I did. This was both my first step into academia proper and a sort of proto-fannish activity. But my Austen feelings were not actually the ones that propelled me into breaking my self-imposed Internet silence and detachment from online communities. A lot of Austen fandom didn’t really seem like my people. I was also into Harry Potter, but HP fandom similarly did not seem like my people.
Actually, speaking of boring other people, I’m going to be really self-indulgent and rewind even further for THE FULL SAGA of what brought me into fandom.
It was 1997. I was in sixth grade and inhaling just about every remotely age-appropriate book I could get my hands on. I loved reading more than anything. And I was sick a lot, and didn’t have close friends, so I had plenty of time for it.
I already loved SF/F stories in particular. My parents were big fans of the genre. I read all their Narnia books when I was about 8 (and had strong opinions on Narnia even then). We’d played fantasy-themed games as a family for almost as long as I could remember. My dad was a computer programmer and had access to some pretty good computer stuff for the time, even when we were struggling for money otherwise, so we were able to play Secret of Mana, Heroes of Might and Magic II, all that kind of thing. It was those that got me interested in writing my first stories, and I was already coming up with my own spins on various high fantasy tropes as a hobby.
I used the MS Paint text box on the family computer to write different stories in, and when my dad saw what I was doing, he went, “oh, no, you are not going to do that.” Instead, he dredged up an old laptop that ran on DOS and could only really handle WordPerfect, but having my very own laptop with the incredible magic of *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ ✿ word processing ✿* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ was incredible. I wrote and wrote and wrote on that thing.
Of course, I still had to go to school. I got on really well with my teacher that year, an elderly man who was kind and supportive despite my frequent illnesses taking me out of class, and who valued reading/writing more than most of my teachers. We had assigned lists of books that I dutifully read according to the schedule, until we got to a different kind of book:
The Hobbit.
I read the assigned section, and knew I was supposed to stop until the next week, but I just couldn’t. I breezed through the whole book and was enthralled. It was the greatest!! thing!!!! that I’d ever encountered. I also read P&P that year for the first time, independently of class, and did like it (especially Darcy!), but I didn’t get it in the same way, presumably because I was eleven. I was so enthusiastic about The Hobbit in particular that my dad gave me Lord of the Rings to read.
LOTR was a lot harder. I struggled with the early chapters of Fellowship for awhile—there were bits I found interesting or entertaining, but overall, it was really slow going and I eventually gave up on LOTR for the moment. After that, I mostly read SF/F that was geared towards a younger and more contemporary audience (Jane Yolen, Tamora Pierce, Diane Duane, Mercedes Lackey, etc).
So I carried on with my life and general interests through middle school and into high school, and didn’t return to LOTR since I had so many other things going on and no lack of things to read. But, of course, the Tolkien landscape was forever drastically changed in 2001, when Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Fellowship of the Ring was released. Although I had only ever read maybe a quarter of Tolkien’s version, I agreed to go see the movie in the theatres.
At the time, I largely liked it. It was definitely a very good film (I still think it’s the best of the LOTR movies, actually), though I felt the characterization was a bit weak in ways I couldn’t quite pin down, and I didn’t care for the Lothlórien section. My dad hated it because of the handling of Aragorn and excision of so many of his favorite details from the book, but I couldn’t remember the book clearly enough to judge for myself. So I figured I’d try to read it again, now that I was older and the world was having a Tolkien moment.
I plowed through the slower early parts of Fellowship over a few days, and then once it hit its stride, I had The Hobbit experience all over again. I was completely enraptured and ignored my homework, my hobbies, and everything else to finish the entirety of Lord of the Rings that day. Well, technically it was the middle of the night by the time I got to the end, and I had to get up at 6 AM the following morning, but I regretted nothing.
I realized I had been mistaken about The Hobbit. It was cool, for sure, but only a pale shadow of Lord of the Rings, the actual Greatest Thing Ever. There were many reasons I thought this, but undoubtedly one of them was the intensity of my love for Tolkien’s Gondor in general and Faramir in particular. I did not think Faramir or Gondor was perfect, but they were certainly perfect for me.
At this point, I could more clearly see what my father was peeved about in the film version of FOTR. Unlike him, I thought the filmmakers were correct to take out Tom Bombadil and Glorfindel, but like him, I thought the handling of Isildur’s legacy and Aragorn’s hang-ups was shaky (not absolutely bad, but among the weaker elements despite Viggo Mortensen's very good performance). Still, when FOTR was great, it was fantastic. Maybe not on Tolkien’s level, but what was? Considering what they had done in FOTR, I was curious and excited to see TTT, and especially to see what they’d do with my fave, Faramir, and other faves like Éowyn and Frodo.
If you know me, it's obvious that I was extremely disappointed (understatement). I didn’t even particularly like the handling of Éowyn, which gets much less criticism these days. Miranda Otto’s Éowyn was sympathetic and compelling, but I felt she was already far too warm and approachable for the ultimate payoff of her arc, and that it was amping up Aragorn/Éowyn vs Aragorn/Arwen in a kind of cheap way that did little service to any of the characters involved (particularly Arwen). I felt like the filmmakers didn’t quite know what to do with the hobbits (especially hobbits other than Sam) and that they would have honestly preferred an Aragorn-centric narrative. And I felt like there was an underlying cynicism about people other than the special chosen protagonists that seemed an extremely poor fit for Tolkien.
Yet the handling of Faramir and the Dúnedain of Ithilien was certainly my biggest issue with it. There were a lot of criticisms at the time of how TTT handled Faramir, and a lot of defenses against those criticisms, from people involved in the films (even David Wenham himself had to do kind of defensive PR for the scriptwriters) as well as from the movie's fans. I was familiar with the Internet by then, so I read the various defenses and found them unconvincing and poorly reasoned.
But the thing was—obviously a lot of other people also weren’t convinced. It wasn’t just me. The response to the films at the time seemed much less uncritically adulatory than it would become later, at least in the places I was looking at. And I definitely got the feeling that even a lot of the people who liked TTT thought the whole Osgiliath detour was a weak point.
I still didn’t say anything online or have any direct involvement in fandom.
The next year, Return of the King came out. The tide of Jackson film discourse seemed to shift after that, including when it came to Faramir. Most people seemed to think that, while TTT!Faramir was awkwardly handled and bore little resemblance to Tolkien’s character, all that was fixed by making him a soft tragic woobie in ROTK (not the phrasing of the time, but the sentiment). In addition, Éowyn gets an awesome moment vs the Witch-king (the "I am no man" film version soon eclipsing her laughing defiance in the book). We get to see an imposing Minas Tirith, various big emotions and iconic set pieces, etc, and apart from the dragging pace of the multiple endings, a lot of people seemed to think it was basically the perfect final note for the series.
I did not agree. I very intensely did not agree. I was much less attached to Denethor then, but I still thought the handling of his character was awful, stripping away all the pathos of his characterization and downfall, his parallels with Aragorn, etc. I thought Gondor was bland, shrunken, and borderline whitewashed. I thought the depiction of Faramir was nearly as far off as in TTT, just in a different direction that was easier for audiences to sympathize with (and substantially worsened by the choices made with Denethor).
I thought the softening of Éowyn’s character and motivations was still very much in evidence, and that the film didn’t really resolve her arc at all. I thought Gimli was a travesty of Tolkien’s character and Legolas only somewhat less so. I thought Frodo and even to an extent Sam and Gollum were horribly mishandled by the script. I did not like supercharging Aragorn’s chosen king stuff or basically anything to do with the armies of the dead. The bulk of the choices made with Elrond and Arwen were baffling. I thought the film in general was more racist and misogynistic than the book itself. I hated prioritizing Aragorn’s coronation over the Scouring of the Shire.
Bear in mind, I did think there was a lot that was good about it (and TTT) in terms of cinema more broadly. I own the extended editions for a reason and have watched them all multiple times; I have fond memories of our beloved fluffy cat sitting on my shoulder and watching the EE with me. But I felt with all my 17-y-o intensity that it was not a good adaptation of Tolkien’s work and that “ROTK fixed everything” was WRONG. And I felt it was especially wrong with regard to Faramir. I was curious if I was the only one who still felt that way.
I wasn’t.
LOTR fandom did not mainly focus on Faramir or on Gondor. But it was a massive fandom, especially right after ROTK came out, and any significant character had some kind of fanbase somewhere. Fandom was still highly decentralized and sometimes you kind of had to dig around to find the people who were into the same things as you, but you could find them, and I did.
Specifically, I found Emyn Arnen, a website dedicated to Faramir/Éowyn fanfiction and forum discussions. I liked Faramir/Éowyn a lot, as I still do, and I kept my Faramir/Aragorn (and Faramir/Arwen!) shipping on the down low back then. But although Emyn Arnen was ostensibly a shipping site, the forums were divided between boards for discussions of the individual characters in the ship, a board for talking about Faramir/Éowyn itself, and boards for talking about other matters from the books or movies. I think there might have been some other boards, too.
In any case, the point is that there was discussion of Éowyn and Faramir separately on Emyn Arnen, as well as in terms of the ship. And in the wake of the films, the Faramir discussions were on fire.
Many of the vocal fans there were pissed about TTT and not especially placated by ROTK. Some people would try to defend movie Faramir, but a lot of the book Faramir fans there were just not having it. I had very definitely found my people. So I read the rules and silently watched a few of the discussions, especially the Faramir-centric ones. One of these ended up drifting from the failings of movie Faramir to wondering if book Faramir was too perfect to be recognizably adapted at all. At that point, I screwed up my nerve and made my first online post ever.
It was obvious that these people were older than me, perhaps much older. I was self-conscious about intruding on their community (though, at 17, you couldn’t have paid me to proclaim my status as a minor to them). But I felt very strongly that Tolkien’s Faramir is not perfect, and that in fact, the film version of ROTK softened his flaws to make him more pitiable while trying to pin movie Faramir’s weak, dumbass decisions on their villainized Denethor. Moreover, even if we were to accept that he was unadaptably perfect in the book and had to be changed, this would not automatically mean that the specific changes made in the films were good ideas or well-executed, and I didn’t think they were either of those things. That was the gist of my first post.
Not everyone agreed, or agreed completely, but they appeared to find my perspective intriguing. And some of them definitely did feel the same way. Regardless, my arguments became part of the ongoing conversation they—or rather, we—were having. Nobody seemed to realize that I was a high schooler, nobody seemed to think I was boring, and the other book Faramir fans quickly befriended me.
Eventually, the movies vs book discussions were so wide-ranging, and permeating so many different conversations on the site, that I took the initiative of creating a single thread to quarantine rants about the movies as adaptations of Tolkien. Since it was my thread, I got to make the rules within the parameters of the site, and I decreed that posts in the thread did not have to specifically be about the movies' depictions of Faramir and Éowyn, but could touch any and all gripes with the films in terms of the book. My hope was that this would keep our book-based rants from overflowing into so many of the site’s discussions, while still giving the book fans a space to air our grievances.
Some of the more defensive movie fans would actually go into this thread to complain about us criticizing the films—in a thread that existed solely for that purpose and which was clearly signposted and permitted by the mods. But by and large, the thread seemed to work as intended. We had so much to say that we maxed out the first purist ranting thread fairly quickly, so I started a new one. And then we maxed that one out and I made a third one. Eventually, the Emyn Arnen mods themselves took over maintaining the purist ranting threads in an organized way and would start a new one as soon as the previous one filled up.
It’s kind of wild in retrospect. Now and then I still encounter people who remember the purist ranting threads of Emyn Arnen, and will be like “wait, I used to read those! You were the one who started them?”
YES, ’TWAS I ALL ALONG.
But like I said, the tactic seemed reasonably effective. The purist ranting threads kept our screeds from overrunning other discussions, while still allowing us to vent without having to make constant disclaimers about how good the movies were, how they’re in a different medium, how some of the omissions were the right choice, blahblahblah.
On my end, it was exciting to interact with people who cared not just in the same type of way as me, but about the same things and with largely the same feelings about those things, so we could really focus on the nuances and particulars that different people had noticed or thought of. Most of us in the ranting thread were fans of the Stewards and Stewardist Gondor, and tended to be a bit skeptical of Aragorn’s ascension (especially as represented in the films, but not only).
Still, at the end of the day, all this was kind of a hack around the absence of a fannish space for book Gondor fans. Emyn Arnen was not really meant to be that, and LiveJournal communities were cool, but didn’t give us quite what we were after, either.
Eventually, some of the Gondor fans came up with the idea of creating a new site. A site of our own, as you will. Instead of adapting Emyn Arnen or even lj to our purposes, this site would be specifically designed for discussion and fanworks focused on Gondor, especially late Third Age Gondor.
This wasn’t my idea, but I was very definitely onboard with it. Emyn Arnen was a shipping website, and a bunch of us were people who did like Faramir/Éowyn, but were more focused on Gondor in slightly varying ways.
There was no break or drama with Emyn Arnen that I knew about. It was pretty normal at the time for people to build separate but loosely affiliated sites with different emphases, and we remained active at Emyn Arnen. But since a bunch of us were in it for fundamentally gen rather than shippy reasons, it seemed appropriate to divert our more Gondor-focused activity into a Gondor-centric space where we would focus on characters like Denethor, Finduilas, Imrahil, and Boromir in addition to Faramir.
I’ve seen it said that the Gondor fans of that era mostly just cared about Faramir, but never by people who were actually active in the community at the time. I was up to my ears in early 2000s Gondor fandom, and while that might have been true of me, it was not true of the community in general.
Sure, Faramir was probably the biggest fave of that crowd for multiple reasons, including him being the most prominent Gondorian character still alive by the end of LOTR and closely associated with Tolkien himself. But the Gondor fandom of this era also went out of their way to create spaces where you could reliably find defenses of Denethor and Boromir, speculation about Finduilas and Lothíriel, commiserations about Imrahil’s absence from the films (“wait, is that random blond guy supposed to be Imrahil…?”), debates about Gondorian culture and history, etc.
Early on, I was especially baffled by how invested a lot of the Gondor circle was in Denethor. I know, I know, but at first, I didn’t get it, beyond thinking he was a well-written character who had been grossly mishandled in the films. Gondor fandom included a bunch of Denethor fans, though, probably all the more concentrated there because the film depiction of him had comprehensively ruined his reputation in more mainstream LOTR fandom. I didn't always agree with the other Gondor fans about Denethor, but I disagreed far more with the people they were reacting against, and gradually came around to liking him, too.
Outside of the Gondor-centric fan circles, Denethor was often treated as a simple villain or unambiguous abuser in discussion and in popular fics (most notably in the much-recced “A Game of Chess”). So a number of the Gondor fans would make a point of writing fics or arguments that pushed back against tropes like abusive Denethor, Finduilas being unfaithful, Denethor being definitionally bad because he doesn’t like Aragorn, etc.
In any case, early 2000s Gondor fandom was definitely not all about Faramir. It especially wasn't in our own spaces, which existed in part because our interests extended beyond Faramir and Faramir/Éowyn.
And I was part of this! I had been a total nonentity in my high school and eventually just left and went to community college through Running Start to get away from how shitty it felt. Even then, I felt fairly invisible and off-putting. But among the Gondor fans, I didn’t feel like an afterthought at all. I wasn’t disregarded, and nobody treated me as tedious or particularly difficult, although I was even rantier then than I am now. We all cared passionately about the same relatively niche element of LOTR, we had a lot of common pet peeves (see above), we thought LOTR was genuinely a great novel and not just a trailblazing one or appealing for world building rather than prose or improved upon by the films. We followed each other on lj, and though the Tolkien fever of the time faded, we remained friendly in the world of lj fandom and paid attention to what was going on with each other in later years.
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Also, I love that wrt Quenya. It reminded me that in high school after I read LOTR, my dad and I (my cool adoptive dad mentioned in this post, not the shitty bio father from my reply in the f-locked one) bonded over loving Tolkien's LOTR and our mutual indignation over the films and language in general and he found a Quenya course that we worked on together. I was never on the level of the people writing documents in Quenya, but I did really enjoy learning about it and some of its linguistic elements in a more general way and found Ardalambion etc. /fistbump
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IRL vs online is a weird divide; it's hard to believe that online/fandom accomplishments really "matter." Perhaps because of the lack of physical matter! But they really do, imo.
Right! They're continually delegitimized even as online fandom increasingly internalizes mainstream norms of respectability. And thanks again! <3
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This is downright so cute! Like, in a nerdy way, obviously, but it is just so delightful!
It was definitely a very good film (I still think it’s the best of the LOTR movies, actually)
I do agree with this, although once I got my VHS copy (ye olden times) I actually spent an afternoon logging how many times Frodo falls down in FOTR (it's 34 times, iirc all these years later, but close to that number +/-2) and ranted at anybody unlucky enough to be in my radius about how this was a travesty of filmmaking and was sending cues to the audience about how Frodo was incompetent and unable to handle the burden of the Ring and completely ignored his bravery and fortitude and - you see how this is coming out again like it's a practiced speech? It's because I haven't let it go 2 decades on. FOTR is still the best of the 3, but damn if he didn't do my Frodo dirty from the start. /sidetrack>
I didn’t even particularly like the handling of Éowyn, which gets much less criticism these days. Miranda Otto’s Éowyn was sympathetic and compelling, but I felt she was already far too warm and approachable for the ultimate payoff of her arc, and that it was amping up Aragorn/Éowyn vs Aragorn/Arwen in a kind of cheap way that did little service to any of the characters involved (particularly Arwen)
Cue similar rant about Éowyn cooking a meal for Aragorn on the road ffs -
thought Frodo and even to an extent Sam and Gollum were horribly mishandled by the script
+1 to all the Faramir commentary on TTT/ROTK, but I had to pull this section out because OH MY GOSH YES. And the last 20 years of discourse over how Sam is the real hero has only been worsened by the PJ adaptation. Where's the gifs, where's the GIF -
Anyway, very cool history <333
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Aww, thank you! I was basically looking for a fan community and using academia as a substitute in the only way I could. It was actually really fun when you were asking for recommendations about a good edition of P&P, because I still own about 20 different editions and I was like AT LAST, MY TIME HAS COME!!
(There were ways in which academia made a very poor substitute for the fannish community I actually wanted, as I'm sure you can imagine—Austen criticism is very hit and miss in terms of attention to detail, trading on her reputation to talk about some sketchy pet theory, forced detachment, etc. When I did eventually end up in Austen fandom, partly it was because although Austen fans could be bigoted and short-sighted, they honestly seemed to know the actual novels much better than the academics and weren't nearly as invested in propping up theories from the rejects of other fields.)
I do agree with this, although once I got my VHS copy (ye olden times) I actually spent an afternoon logging how many times Frodo falls down in FOTR (it's 34 times, iirc all these years later, but close to that number +/-2) and ranted at anybody unlucky enough to be in my radius about how this was a travesty of filmmaking and was sending cues to the audience about how Frodo was incompetent and unable to handle the burden of the Ring and completely ignored his bravery and fortitude and
You're not wrong! My Frodo feelings are not as intense as my Gondor feelings obviously, but he is actually one of my favorite characters in LOTR and I think the most thematically central in ways that the movies seem to either not understand or were actively trying to undercut. Although FOTR (the film) is the strongest and also the most engaged w/ Tolkien IMO, a lot of the seeds for things that would hit particularly hard in TTT or ROTK were actually set up in FOTR. You can see this w/ characters like Elrond and Boromir, but it's most noticeable w/ Frodo. Part of the power of Frodo's story in the book, I think, is that he's so clearly not tripping over his feet from day 1 and not a wide-eyed child coming of age, and the effect of the Ring on him is subtle and gradual even as it becomes increasingly powerful, and so his ultimate claiming of the Ring at the end of the quest is all the more powerful because it doesn't feel inevitable. There have been so many "Sam is the true hero and wouldn't have claimed the Ring" "Bilbo wouldn't have claimed the Ring" "Aragorn wouldn't have claimed the Ring" NO YOU ARE ALL WRONG!!! Frodo did the most that anyone could have done, sacrificed virtually everything he was to get as far as he did, and was incredibly durable in the face of an incalculable force in a way that, in all probability, no other person would have been. He was "meant" to carry the Ring for a reason!
I also think things like the flattening of Merry's ingenuity and resourcefulness also has its roots in FOTR. :\
Cue similar rant about Éowyn cooking a meal for Aragorn on the road ffs -
An emotionally open doe-eyed Éowyn making terrible food for Aragorn (LMAO WOMEN WHO CAN'T COOK, AM I RIGHT?) is such a weird choice for her character. I don't blame Miranda Otto; she doesn't look or act anything like how I see Éowyn but she didn't write that script or direct herself, so it's not on her. But I don't think they ultimately knew what to do w/ her even while pretty obviously preferring Aragorn/Éowyn and leaning into it, so she's pretty consistently made more personable, more approachable, more open, more ... cute, I think. And of course that also has ramifications down the line.
+1 to all the Faramir commentary on TTT/ROTK, but I had to pull this section out because OH MY GOSH YES. And the last 20 years of discourse over how Sam is the real hero has only been worsened by the PJ adaptation.
YES. It is so hard to have any conversation about LOTR, the book, that is not shaped by the films at every turn and a lot of the more annoying tendencies are directly rooted in the films or vastly amplified by them, definitely including Sam Is The Real Hero discourse.
lol the screenshot is just ... me for the last 20 years, pictured.
Anyway, very cool history <333
Thank you! I'm glad you were interested enough to read the whole thing :D