All thoughts and opinions are welcome. The only rule I have for this place is that I ask that people remain civil to each other. It is one thing to disagree with a point or idea and quite another to attack a the person expressing it. The first is okay; the second is not.

Finally, although this is a continuation of the LotR Genfic discussion, and although I am the webmaster of the Many Paths to Tread archive, my website is affiliated with neither, and this discussion is occurring independently of the list on which it originated. So, if you find yourself annoyed or angered by the conversation here, please don’t take it out on either of those groups.

My door, however, is always open to questions or concerns at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

For those of you on the LotR Genfic list, you can find the original discussion thread here.

“Like the rest of America and its genius writers,” writes one commenter,

you’re just another ‘trend-spotter’. Like chick-lit hasn’t been suffering since the START of the recession in 2007. You’re 2 years late! But congrats on being another academic whose ’study’ concludes with “we need more work here” or “______ field needs to re-invent itself”. But then again, your party scene tells that perfectly – getting a glimmer of an idea does not count as executing that idea in itself.

Another chimes in, with respect to Ms. Bilston describing a particular revision that she felt compelled to undertake: “Don’t waste your time cutting up the party scene in your book, it won’t sell any better b/c it sounds like a waste of time to read.” As I read these remarks, I was flummoxed by the fact that commenters feel the need to proclaim the utter lack of worth of a novel that they haven’t even read and to dismiss the writer’s efforts as useless. And I’m having a hard time imagining a similar type of meta article written by a male horror or sci-fi author meeting with the same scathing dismissal of his very craft.

Another commenter broadens the ad hominem attack to point out,

This sort of whiny article is precisely why the writers of chick lit are so embarassed. They should be. They write frivolous books that are basically identical to each other in content and then want to be taken seriously.

I’m not a particular fan of so-called “chicklit” or women’s fiction, and my reasons for that are a lot of the same reasons that some of the commenters give: characters whose lives and conflicts seem so unreal and, yes, frivolous that my interest just isn’t sustained. Yet, reading these comments, no matter my own personal agreeance with them as far as choosing novels to read, I find my hackles raised nonetheless and have to come to the defense of my sister-wordsmiths. Because–as escapist as their novels may be–they aren’t getting a fair shake.

Commenter LaniDianeRich–who identifies herself as an author in the chicklit genre–put it best when she wrote,

Why is it okay for Stephen King to write about grisly evil, for Tom Clancy to write about spies, for Augusten Burroughs to write about his tragic childhood, but it’s not okay for Sarah (or me, or hundreds of other writers) to write about women?

Because the arguments against writing that doesn’t fall into the “literary” genre are familiar; I heard the same spiel about a lack of realism and cookie-cutter characters during a rather uncomfortable writers’ workshop in university where a short story of mine was shredded not on its own merits but by the professor’s assessment that, because it was set in a dystopian future, then it was sci-fi and therefore of inherently less worth than my classmates’ work set in present-day reality. In Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories,” he addresses many of these arguments, suggesting that they have had a long and vigorous shelf-life despite the sheer bone-headedness of such assertions. So it’s not the arguments, per se, against “chicklit” that I find so disturbing as the vitriol that this particular genre seems always to earn. Why?

I’m just as guilty. I’m quicker to distance myself, as a writer, from chicklit than I am from the gaudily covered hardcore “science fiction” novels that sound like a thinner, dumbed-down Star Trek, even though I am a writer of neither and, in fact, as a reader, would probably prefer Confessions of a Shopaholic to a book from the Warhammer series. And, certainly, the Warhammer books aren’t regarded as fine writing or profound, yet they also aren’t subject to the same vitriol as chicklit. Rather, they’re waved off as harmless–if at times inadvertantly humorous (at least to those of us who don’t “get” the genre)–escapism. I remember once having to sit through a movie based on a Tom Clancy novel that my husband wanted to see and being driven to distraction by the sheer improbability and inanity of the whole thing, coupled with a constant hyper-masculine need to show the size of one’s dick and the heft of one’s balls by packing as many explosions, bombs, guns, guys in camo, dark-sunglassed operatives shouting in code into walkie-talkies, careening helicopter flights, and urban car chases into an hour-and-a-half sustained roar. Replace the bombs and guns with diamonds and yachts and the guys in camo with slim thirty-somethings in designer Italian couture and the car chases with posh parties and–from the description that Ms. Bilston provides of her own novel–you have chicklit. It’s no more improbable than Tom Clancy, certainly. (Perhaps significantly less so since people, presumably, do live such padded lives somewhere yet, as of passing it on I-95 this morning, Baltimore had not yet been nuked by terrorists.)

Yet I don’t see Tom Clancy or Stephen King or Dean Koontz being berated by literati who wish these authors would just get their darned heads out of the clouds and focus on reality and people (as they are in reality, of course) and “things bigger than your everyday troubles,” to quote on of the commenters on Ms. Bilston’s article.

And now this begins to remind me of a discussion that generated on my last post where I mentioned that one of the more interesting comments that I received on Another Man’s Cage accused me of writing the novel for my own pleasure (as a woman) and that of my largely female audience because I dwelled on the emotional and psychological lives of the characters. That comment–”written for a woman’s pleasure!”–was meant to be withering to the entire premise of my novel, I’m sure. It was instant damnation. It marked me, immediately, as a most unserious writer for choosing to aim my content at people with two X chromosomes. I have trouble imagining the opposite accusation–of a story being written for the pleasure and entertainment of males–as carrying the same sort of clout. Even fandom’s obsession with “Mary Sue,” that icon of female escapism, I think, marks how little we value typical feminine fantasy as compared to typical masculine fantasy. Fantasy in general is always regarded with distaste by some. But male-oriented fantasy–Warhammer and Tom Clancy and epic CGI-enhanced battle scenes–are laughed off at worst but generally consumed as the guilty pleasure that most people feel when indulging in obvious escapism. But chicklit? We need to be puttin a stop to that! But why?

(I should add that this list is relevant to the Silmarillion fandom, perhaps the broader Tolkien fandom in places, but they are hardly representative of Fandom as a Whole, if there is any such thing, and they are not meant to be.)

5. AU. Short for alternate universe, this term isn’t bad if it’s used for what it is meant to represent: stories that are set in an actual alternate universe. This term’s shortcoming comes from the way that its definition has been distorted unto meaninglessness by confusing unpopular interpretation with distortion of the canon. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, so I won’t say much more here except to note that it is unfortunate that a term intended to delineate a distinct, legitimate genre has instead become an aspersion and used to attempt to shame authors into a mainstream, fanonical, and crowd-approved interpretation of JRRT’s texts.

4. OOC. Short for “out of character,” I’ve seen this used as a warning, as a form of AU (i.e., “Warning: I’ve made Maedhros really mean and OOC!”), but most often as a criticism of stories where the reader feels the author strays too far outside the bounds of believability.

But, in Silmfic, “OOC” is almost meaningless.

We recently had this discussion on the SWG list. As I pointed out in my post, even the most written-about characters are barely mentioned in the text; for example, Maedhros–who commands an impressive 22% of stories on the SWG archive–is mentioned only eighty-eight times in The Silmarillion. This isn’t a whole lot to go on.

Silmarillion characters, by and large, are not characters at all. They are archetypes; they are familiar faces throughout literature, here, being used to illustrate broad points about an imagined history. While a perceptive reader can and will detect complexity in these characters, this is more often derived from implication than anything explicit that JRRT has done in terms of characterization. For example, Fëanor is widely regarded as a complex character. What The Silmarillion actually says about Fëanor, though, is anything but shades of gray: He is depicted negatively, representing the worst qualities of pride and arrogance; he is the quintessential fallen character who serves a broader purpose as a vehicle for expressing ideas about possessiveness, pride, and obedience to authority.

These are Fëanor’s canonical traits: He’s a proud jerk. Readers, though, see complexity in his relationships with his family, people, and the Valar. They read between the lines to determine that he was not always such a negative character; that his negative traits evolved from what was done to him rather than from core character flaws.

Most of Tolkien’s Silmarillion characters are this way. They have a handful of defining traits and not much else. It is possible to see much more implied in the story, but this is largely conjecture and interpretation and can hardly be called “canon.” So what of OOC?

OOC, I think, is a completely irrelevant label in Silmfic 99% of the time that it is slung against a story or author. “Keeping to canon” in terms of characterization is limited to understanding the roles that a character plays in the broader framework of the story and not much else. In other words, understanding Fëanor the symbol/archetype requires that he maintain certain traits in order to function in the same way in fan-authored stories as he does in the texts. Making him a meek and pie-eyed boot-licker of the Valar is likely to irrevocably change his character’s function in the story*. Making him chronically anxious or empathetic or a great teacher or a loving father … not OOC. Those things can all coexist alongside his necessary role as the proud jerk to create a portrait of Fëanor the man (not Fëanor the symbol/archetype). As authors, moving characters beyond their roles as symbols or archetypes is usually a good idea.

In Silmfic, OOC is rarely a legitimate critique. More often than not, it is wielded against those stories that do not conform to the reader’s personal interpretation of a character. For example, Another Man’s Cage was once deemed “OOC” by a reader because Fëanor hugged his kids. This particular reader–who clearly wasn’t inclined to see characters rounded beyond those few key traits JRRT gives us–couldn’t see how one as “evil” as Fëanor could ever do something so sweet and cutesy as hugging his kids.

There is absolutely nothing in the texts to support this idea. There isn’t, of course, anything in the texts that definitively states that Fëanor did hug his kids either. Which left that reader and me at an impasse, neither of us wrong but neither of us right either, hurling textual facts at each other that proved nothing definitive.

Slathering “OOC” onto any interpretation which one does not agree is not the solution.

* I would not be me if I did not mention that one can actually justify some of these “OOC” 180-from-the-texts depictions by remembering that The Silmarillion was written as fictional myth or history, with all the thorny issues of finding “truth” in myth or history present here as well. This takes more convincing in a story, I think, but is not outside the realm of possibility.

3. Mary Sue. “Mary Sue” is another one of those terms that has lost its meaning. When I first joined the Tolkien fandom, Mary Sue was usually defined as “ya know her when ya see her.” As I did more and more reading, Mary Sue came to be a character with flawed characterization: Instead of being possessed of all the round, complex traits that we know we should invest our characters with, she was flat and unequivocally Good. Because she represented the author, of course, and the author was simply acting out a fantasy.

Later, Mary Sue was redefined for me as an actor that warped the plot or the other characters. The problem with her wasn’t her flat characterization but the way that she had of hijacking canonical plotlines or skewing canon characters into “OOCness” (see the gripe above this one), i.e. making Frodo’s choice to take the Ring to Mordor not an act of self-sacrifice but because he was enamored of her, and she was going along with the Fellowship because she and Legolas could not be parted from each other. She could be the most believable female character in the world, but her exertion on the storyline and her fellow characters (as understood in the canon) was too strong.

Naturally, “Mary Sue” is not the only fannish term to have different definitions depending on who you ask. (Just ask a few people what “PWP” stands for …) That’s not my problem with the term.

The concept of “Mary Sue” is often itself misogynist. Like “AU” and “OOC,” it often becomes a criticism broadened to include any story with an original female character. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it suggests that there is something wrong with giving the spotlight–or even part of it–to a woman. One of my major critiques against JRRT’s writings is that they are an old boys’ club. Yes, he did better than many–even most–male fantasists, but his stories are still about males shaping their world to suit their vision. It’s called the Fellowship of the Ring for a reason. There is also a reason why even gender-conscious fans do not blink at the term “Men” being used to refer to mortal human beings of both genders: Because mortal women in JRRT’s writings so rarely give us reason to apply it to them that we don’t usually get the chance to notice the sheer wrongness of a sentence like, “Haleth was a Man who led her people to victory.”

One of the major positive functions of Tolkien-based fiction (aside from its value as entertainment or personal fulfillment or as a fun community-building hobby) is that authors can give voices to the unnamed, unvoiced women in the stories and begin to correct the gender imbalance in JRRT’s works. Pinning a derogatory label on the front of every female character who does not appear on the short list with which we have to work in “canon” is one way of further stifling creativity in this regard.

Secondly, the oft-mouthed definition of Mary Sue as a (female) character who is “too perfect” is problematic. What does that mean? That a woman can’t be beautiful, smart, and charming? (I do not believe that. I know some.) Characters that are “too perfect” appear throughout JRRT’s writings. They are both male and female. Critiquing a character as not relatable because of his/her unreal perfection is fair game. Claiming that, as a whole, female characters that are “too perfect” can’t function in a story is sexist. Despite the existence of terms like “Gary Stu” and “Marty Stu,” I’ve never actually seen these terms applied to a story. The message I come away with is that “perfect” women (read: strong, beautiful, assertive, charismatic) are problematic. The same traits in a guy are Finrod.

Thirdly, the accusation of “Mary Sue” is most often made against those characters appearing in stories authored by young women. They are problematic (it is said) because they are shameless self-inserts and represent a female fantasy and nothing else.

And what, pray tell, is wrong with that?

It seems to me that male-authored literature and media is full of self-inserts that represent male fantasies. How many skinny nerds become superheroes or martial arts masters or secret agents charged with saving the world? How many of them get ripped and get the girl? How many adolescent males authoring fan fiction do you think make their male self-inserts well-rounded characters? And how much critique do you think these young men get when they fail to do so?

We not only critique young women; we made up a whole term to point out their literary sins!

No, “Mary Sue” has to go. Not only is it being applied too broadly to exclude female characters in general, but it is being used to devalue the writings and fantasies of young women. It asks, why should they be writing about themselves as an equal, as a Tenth Walker, when they could just pick one of the boys that JRRT gave them to write about?

2. Slash. As I’m writing this, I’m sensing a trend in my loathing of most of these terms: once-accurate (and largely neutral) terms become pejorative and are broadly applied to anything that even vaguely resembles what the term was invented to actually define. Or: if it quacks like a duck, that means it must be a duck, even if it’s really a goose, my dogs’ honking stuffed duck toy, or my crazy uncle dressed like a duck on Halloween.

Slash, as I understand it, was a term originally coined for stories with a prominent same-sex non-canonical consummated pairing. Despite the awful-sounding name, it really was meant to be neutral: “Slash” referred to the literal slash between the characters’ names when indicating the pairing, i.e. Maedhros/Fingon, Aragorn/Legolas, Kirk/Spock. It was a distinct subgenre of fiction that represented the author’s purpose in writing the story–to present sexually a non-canonical homosexual (usually male) couple–and not to act as an indication of non-sexual content.

These days, though, I get the impression that “slash” has come to mean “anything gay.” If your characters just happen to be gay and just happen to have an off-screen and completely non-sexual same-sex pairing, then that is slash. If I want to look at the social issues that might have been present in Gondolin if Ecthelion and Glorfindel really were a couple, even if I never venture beyond the council rooms and parlors of the city to look at their personal/romantic lives, even if they never kiss, then a certain subset of readers will expect me to label that story as slash. It’s not remotely incestuous; it doesn’t “violate canon” in any way, but it depicts gay characters, so people need and deserve a warning.

Among my friends who write mostly same-sex pairings, there is lately a revolt against the term. They don’t like it, and I don’t blame them. Broadly defined as it is, it becomes a way of enforcing homophobia. Readers who don’t like slash often use sexual explicitness as the reason for that. They’ll often affirm, in the same breath, to dislike graphic het stories too. The difference is that a lot of these readers won’t blink at a story that mentions Maglor’s extra-canonical marriage but will pitch a fit if Glorfindel and Ecthelion have an extra-canonical off-screen romance. That’s homophobia, folks. Allowing homophobic people to avoid that truth by aiding them in sweeping anything “gay” under the same label as “gay sex” is wrong.

1. Canon. Tolkien’s stories are full of mythical entities. A coherent canon is one of them.

If one defines “canon” as basically the same as “inarguable facts” (implying that the writer cannot deviate from them without making a mistake or writing an AU), then there are precious few of those in JRRT’s writings.

That is not the problem. That is, in my heretic’s estimation, what makes JRRT’s writings such a fruitful playground for my own creative endeavors and why, I suspect, unlike many other fandoms, one doesn’t see too much migration of Tolkien fans.

The problem is that discussions of canon often begin with the belief that it is possible–with enough study of the texts–to find out answers, “what really happened” in the stories. That it is possible to grade most scenarios, tidily, as right or wrong in terms of canon. That “canon-compliant” and “AU” do not occur on a continuum.

I’ve already made the argument elsewhere that precious little truly counts as canon. Few of the “facts” presented in the stories can’t be challenged in some way. I’ve argued yet elsewhere that where people are hung up on questions of canon, they need to be asking questions about stories and writing. I stick by those beliefs and, in my perfect fannish world, would no longer see discussions of canon framed as finding right or wrong answers but as looking at myriad possibilities with the goal of creating a thoughtful or entertaining story.

So … what terms would you strike from the fannish lexicon?

Point the First. To what degree are Lúthien/Beren and Arwen/Aragorn a male version of the Mary Sue fantasy? I’m not talking about character traits–the idea of both characters but especially Lúthien as a “canonical Mary Sue” is nothing new–but rather the influence the male characters have on these ethereal female protagonists as compared to the influence that female characters in fan-authored Mary-Sue stories have on the male canon characters.

I’ve often seen Mary Sue defined in this way: not as having purple eyes or a six-syllable “Elvish” name or possessing a unicorn but as the force she exerts on the personalities and motivations of the canon males. For example, Leilamelaniewë joins the Fellowship and, suddenly, Legolas is lovesick and emasculated; Aragorn is driven into a homicidal, envy-induced rage; and Boromir forgets the Ring and Gondor to pen love sonnets while his sword grows rust.

By the same token, are not Aragorn and Beren similar to Mary Sue as fantasies of male influence upon women? Think about it: part of the outrage against Mary Sue is the exaggerated influence she has on men who should be well above such frivolities; they are warriors and princes with kingdoms to defend, not carefree playboys with nothing to lose if they dash off to marry Leilamelaniewë while Sauron achieves world domination. Likewise, both Arwen and Lúthien should be above the influence of their respective mortal suitors. They, too, have a lot to lose. Both Beren and Aragorn are presented as somewhat bedraggled and beneath the ethereal and impossibly beautiful women they woo. Not only do Arwen and Lúthien “fall” for Aragorn and Beren, but they go so far as to forsake their immortality. Just like Legolas forsaking his father’s kingdom or Aragorn his crown, these women relinquish a birthright, a defining point of their identity for love of a man.

It’s no secret that JRRT liked to imagine himself as Beren and Edith as Lúthien. What a fantasy! To believe that you are loved enough by a woman that she would give up everything in the name of that love! … her family, her heritage, even her claim to life everlasting.

Yes, it sounds to me more like something out of the pen of a moon-eyed teenager than a curmudgeonly linguistics professor!

To make matters even more interesting is the opposite scenario of an Elven man smitten with a mortal woman. As part of Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, Andreth recounts her failed love affair with Finrod’s brother Aegnor, and Finrod says that he rejected her because,

This is time of war, Andreth, and in such days the Elves do not wed or bear child; but prepare for death – or for flight. Aegnor has no trust (nor have I) in this siege of Angband that it will last long; and then what will become of this land? If his heart ruled, he would have wished to take thee and flee far away, east or south, forsaking his kin, and thine. Love and loyalty hold him to his.

Which makes me ask, what of the kin of Lúthien and Arwen? These are very different standards, and the choice of Aegnor seems relatively easy compared to the choices and fates of Lúthien and Arwen, both of whom suffered immensely to outlive their beloveds. That an immortal prince would fall for a woman “beneath” him is very much a typical fairy-tale fantasy a la Cinderella. But Tolkien didn’t write it that way … for Andreth.

So, is this a male fantasy, to have beautiful and powerful women forsake it all for love of a man? Is it similar to the Mary Sue fantasy in this regard?

Point the Second. Is Mary Sue herself something of a feminist figure? I know that some will immediately leap up to point out that there is much about Mary Sue that defies feminism, but, again, I’m not looking at individual traits or behaviors but rather the force she has over the male characters and, in a sense, how her embellishment places her as an equal to them.

It seems to me that, if young women wanted to insert themselves as love interests into a story, imprisoning themselves in Barad-dûr to await rescue by their chosen hero would be one way to go about it. That they’re taking the journey with the male heroes, granting themselves powers that put themselves as equals or betters to already souped-up canon characters, suggests something different.

So, am I completely crazy in all this?