fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3129 ]

[ SECRET POST #3129 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3129 ⌋

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

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Notes:

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Evil!Thranduil and Evil!Denethor are up there for their pervasiveness. But when they make Evil!Elrond, that's the absolute worst.

Yeah, the problem is you expect Thranduil and Denethor to be bad because they were, to a degree, in canon. Elrond? He was good. Maybe the first Hobbit movie made him a bit of an ass for not catering to the dwarves well, but that doesn't make him bad, just makes a supposedly wise Elf not so wise.

Can you tell that I mostly like Elrond?

I would think Evil!Elrond comes out more from the LOTR movies where he lies to Arwen and gets in the way of Arwen/Aragorn.

I actually thought Elrond in the Hobbit movies was perfectly reasonable and patient. Thorin insults him; he can tell Gandalf is up to something; the dwarves break his furniture and set in on fire. In the EE, they bathe naked in his fountain and start a food fight.

Yet he still helps them. (He even lets Thorin keep a sword that may have been his grandfather's.) I don't think expressing a reasonable concern about Thorin's mental state made him bad either. And, of course, in the book he just straight-out helps them with advice, ponies, and even Bilbo's handkerchief.

(Totally agree on liking Elrond best!)

Ahh yeah, when you point out Arwen, I see where it might come from. I suppose the reason why that side doesn't occur to me is because I was off in the slash section of fandom in my LotR days, so Arwen/Aragorn was, at best, a background pairing. Even now it remains a background pairing but is even more a part of the canon furniture as Aragorn is no longer on my shipping list at all (back in my first still in the fandom Aragorn was half the first pairing I shipped).

These days I may play with the subject of Elrond's demands about Aragorn marrying his daughter, but I veer more towards book canon, in that he will only allow it if Aragorn becomes king of Gondor (and because one of my main characters is Boromir, that is not exactly a favourable result in his eyes).

Uh Thranduil and Denethor seemed pretty evil to me.

They're really not, especially in book!canon. I mean, I can understand where the idea came from; the movies did a terrible job with both of them. But, even if you agree with movie!canon, in fic it's taken to an extreme that just isn't either character.

In fic, Thranduil is a rapist and terribly abusive and actually evil so that Legolas can be appropriately woobified and Aragorn (or whoever) can swoop in and rescue him. Ditto Denethor's portrayal.

These two are complicated characters but they are not evil. Indeed, with everything we know about elves and about Thranduil's history, he is likely a very warm and loving father who cares very much about his people.

And I could write pages about Denethor. There's an argument that Thranduil is a straight-up good guy, but Denethor has layers of gray to him that make it easy to ignore the good of him. He is more of a tragic figure. But neither is evil.

Wait, do you know they aren't assholes, or is that just your head!canon? I mean, I grant books can give more nuanced interpretations, but to some extent, book canon is different from movie canon, and in movie canon, there was next to nothing redeemable about either character. Does that make them violent rapists? Well no, not in canon. But if you want to write a rape!fic, you might as well make the asshole characters do the deed.

No, it's not my headcanon. I can quote you all the relevant passages from the books. And, to be clear, I am talking from the book perspective. I have been from the start (I only quoted movie to respond to the comment I received). Especially when you consider Thranduil, the evil!Thranduil and evil!Denethor that I encountered was back when LOTR came out, which was before the Hobbit movies completely bastardized Thranduil's character. Impressions from the movies for him weren't around so there was only the book, and in the book he is a good person (Bilbo decides if he's going to die, he'd rather die defending Thranduil than anybody else).

(Seriously, I started going over the book characterization for these two to support my claim but it was turning into an essay, so if you really want me to prove that this isn't a headcanon, I can. Suffice to say, it's more than a more nuanced reading of the books: the movies fucked up their characterization and they're not like that in the books.)

It's not as if I don't understand where these bad characterizations came from but that doesn't make them any less wrong. And it wasn't just the one-off fic where someone wanted to make them evil for the sake of the fic; there was a vocal part of fandom back in the early 2000s (and to some extent still today) that insisted these two are actually evil - that it was completely consistent with their characters to be physically abusive to their children. So, that made them the worst characterizations in my fandom.

Then I think you're failing to grasp the nuances of their characters. If you've only seen the movie versions, then that's sort of understandable because they were definitely more villainous and less subtle. But that's not book canon. Even in the films, you can pick up on the concept that while they both did despicable things, it's simplifying who they are to label them as "evil". I think that's the point Tolkien was trying to make, that people are capable of evil acts for reasons other than just reveling in evil.

So what would be wrong with writing them as irredeemable assholes, since that's what they are in the movies? They are two separate canons, and at very least, in the movies, they are pretty much villains.

DA

Well, that's up for debate if they're irredeemable assholes in the movie; I didn't see it that way and I know many others who feel the same way. And there's nothing wrong with writing them that way but it's still bad characterization. They're not villains. They're antagonists.

You seem weirdly defensive about this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #3129 ]

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?

Re: Worst character interpretation you've ever seen?