fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2987 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2987 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If LOTR had a shipping war pre-movies, it was Eowyn/Aragorn vs Arwen/Aragorn (but it wasn't really a shipping war like you get now).

I think Eowyn/Faramir is a popular ship, though Eowyn/Aragorn may be more popular (it's hard to say as they've all been overshadowed by other stuff since the movies came out and the old book!fandom is harder to find online). I think there was a lot of stuff regarding Eowyn/Faramir in the light of Eowyn/Aragorn (and how well developed or not that particular relationship was).

I know when I first read the book, I thought Aragorn/Arwen came out of nowhere (as did Eowyn/Faramir) but I now love Eowyn/Faramir too. But I think this was the basic crux of the debate for many of the Eowyn/Aragorn vs Arwen/Aragorn stuff.

You definitely wouldn't be run out of fandom for liking your ship! And I'm sure you'd find a good number of fics and art for them too.

I'm glad to hear that Eowyn/Faramir is somewhat of a popular ship! That makes me happy.

I wish I could read the old meta/'ship war' stuff about these pairings. I'm personally surprised about the popularity of Eowyn/Aragorn; it never seemed to me that Aragorn really cared about Eowyn (because he was so set on Arwen), and Eowyn's crush on him seemed almost naive? But they would make a sexy couple.

But thank you! I'm going to try to find some fic and art for them.

I think it's somewhat a difference between a close reading and a superficial one. Once you know about Arwen and Aragorn, Tolkien drops a ton of hints about him thinking about her and liking her and such.

BUT, Eowyn gets more screentime with Aragorn than Arwen does, and her time with Faramir is pretty short. Arwen isn't overtly mentioned much. While reading the book, I was introduced to Eowyn and had no idea where her story was going. She was in love with Aragorn (who was a cool character -- why shouldn't she end up with him?). She SAID she was in love, and I took characters at face value, so I didn't see her deeper issues. I spent a great deal of time thinking about the two of them together before I got to the House of Healing. Then she and Faramir seem thrown together as a sort of pair-the-spares sort of thing (note: I don't believe this anymore but that was my initial impression).

But that's pretty much the debate -- how much of her feelings for Aragorn are genuine? How much of the narrative supports them? Is the Arwen thing a cop-out? What about the political ramifications of marrying Arwen? And so on and so on.

Yes, I think when I was younger I just thought two people who are similar, and that the badass woman should go with the badass man. Arwen seemed like such a non-entity and coming out of nowhere until I read the appendices, and I was going through a phase at the time where I thought that badass was automatically superior to damsel and therefore didn't like Arwen (it didn't help that when the movies came out later she was played by Liv Tyler, who I used to not like very much).

But on rereading the books and expanding out further into the various Middle Earth writings, I've come to appreciate Aragorn/Arwen (although I will say that I'm still slightly skeeved by the fact that he was basically raised by Elrond).

Although, interestingly, some of Tolkien's earlier drafts of LOTR did pair Aragorn and Eowyn until he decided to create Arwen instead.

DA

I'm curious, why were you skeeved out by Elrond raising Aragorn?

Because that means Aragorn and Arwen were basically raised as siblings. So it kind of skeeves me a bit. But only a little because it is clear they never considered themselves siblings.

And yes, I realize that Arwen was an adult by the time Aragorn was born. But Elrond is still her father and he raised Aragorn. So that still screams sibling to me even if they never saw it that way. I get turned off at least a bit by anything that has the hint of incest. I feel the same way about Clueless.

Edited 2015-03-10 02:59 (UTC)

Um, it says in the appendix that she's in Lorien the entire time Aragorn is being raised. They never meet until Elrond reveals to Aragorn who he is (when Aragorn turns 20), and right after that Aragorn meets Arwen for the first time. They're both adults when they meet.

Right, which is why I still ship and why it only skeeves me a little. Elrond still raised Aragorn, though. It still strikes me as at least hinting at incestuous. If in real life someone adopted a child after their biological child was grown, I'd be really bothered if those two children later hooked up. Fiction is different, especially when you're talking about one half of the pair belonging to an immortal race, but it still bothers me a little.

This seems really weird to me. The only one it would be at all incestuous to would be Elrond, and even then I'd have to stretch my imagination a lot to make that work.

Even in the real world (which doesn't remotely apply in this case), if someone adopted a child and raised it to adulthood without ever once meeting (or even hearing mention of -- Elrond never mentioned Arwen to Aragorn) the biological child, and then the biological child met the other child when they were both consenting adults (40 and 20 years old maybe?), I don't see a problem. They don't know each other. They're not siblings to each other. (Indeed, it would be less problematic in modern day because for this situation, the older child likely has no relationship with his or her father because how else could the adopted child never see or hear about this person beforehand?).

But if you want to be bothered by it, then whatever I guess.

[ SECRET POST #2987 ]

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