#not with the gatekeeping please
Of all the reactions to a certain upcoming series, I am finding the most troubling is people who have not even read a syllable of Tolkien’s writings coming out of the woodwork and pretending to be serious fans.
You probably all know the type. The blogs suddenly sharing and creating posts on characters from The SilmarillionandBeren and Luthien. Characters they hadn’t even heard of and never mentioned 6 or even 3 months ago. You’re not going to tell me they’ve read all of the above in 6 weeks and are suddenly discussing these stories like old timers.
Some might say “you should be glad these people are engaging with Tolkien fandom!” but I am not. I am not because Tolkien’s works are not like Marvel or Star Wars. This is not some television franchise which anyone can step into, and which Disney can make endless cash grab spin- offs for.
This was the life’s work of J.R.R Tolkien and his son. A labour of love into which which he invested years and millions of words. For which he created several langauges and an entire history.
He deserves at least enough respect for people to actually readone of his works. At very, very least The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings. It doesn’t take much time or effort, and will probably be well worth it.
Furthermore, reading them helps avoid icky and creepy ships such as Legolas with Aragorn post-Hobbit. A time when Aragorn was approximately 10 years old, or Celebrimbor with the guy who tortured him to death.
Or people trying to sound clever and funny by remarking on the age gap between Eowyn and Aragorn in TTT being “weird” whilst being unaware that Arwen is 2700 years old.
So please, for the love of The One, Illuvatar himself, please stop engaging with these stories and characters because you think they’re cool on the basis of some post you saw on social media, or because you are pumped for a future TV show.
Engage with them as the creator intended. As Tolkien intended.
The actual characters, cultures and peoples. Not fandom’s version of them, and certainly not Amazon’s.
What do you think @silmarillionno@outofangbandand@friendoftheelves
I’ m afraid I believe in transmedia storytelling, but I agree with you in this: a work of years and years deserves respect. Thank you for the tag, mellon.
Historically speaking, the primary function of the two Jackson film trilogies in the Tolkien fanworks fandom was to drive fans to the books. In 2015 and 2020, I ran the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey; in both data sets, less than 1% of participants used only the films as sources for their fic. (In 2015, this was directly after the third Hobbitfilm, when one would expect fandom engagement around the films to be at a high.) Yet there is ample evidence that many of those same writers entered the fandom because of the film. Almost half of authors in the 2020 survey responded that they started writing Tolkien-based fic because of the films, and over half felt “encouraged” to write fic because of the films. Yet if you graph out the sources people use by the years they have been in the fandom, you see that, the longer people remain in the fandom, the more books they read and use in their fic.
The tl;dr: media adaptations bring fans to Tolkien and Tolkien fanfic specifically. The books are why they stay.
