I’m in a ranting mood, so here it goes.
If you go to the site fan-fiction.net and look up the “lord of the rings” stories, you’ll find horrible things, just like on here. There’s slasher torture fics, most of them involving Legolas for all you fans of 50 Shades of Gray, and then there’s these…
Pretty much the premise of the “Mary Sue in Middle Earth” fan-fic is that a girl from Earth gets zapped back into Middle Earth and either A) falls in love with a member of the Fellowship or other significant member of the Free Peoples or B) becomes the tenth member of the Fellowship or even worse, C) the author thinks they know better than JRR Tolkien and tries to rewrite how the Ring is destroyed.
Seriously (I think I say seriously too much, so there’s that one time, I’ll try not to use it again in this rant), it makes one want to just give up on Lord of the Rings all-together! However, I persevere. I would have written a satirical work parodying all these ridiculous MS in ME fan-fics, but I just can’t bring myself to do that. So instead, I’ll discuss it here and now in this rant.
First off, the pairings. Now the book doesn’t mention how old Legolas is, but we can rest assured that he’s not going to be fifteen…unless that’s 1,500! Seriously, that kind of pedophilia is as bad as Twilight, if not worse because Legolas is older than Edward! Now here are the other characters…Kili and Fili are both 82 at the time of The Hobbit, Aragorn is 87 during the War of the Ring, Frodo is 51, Boromir is 41, Merry is 37, Faramir is 36, Pippin is 29 and Eomer is 28. Most of the Sues are under the age of 20, therefore, fangirls, imagine falling in love with someone the age of your parents, or your grandparents! Weird, isn’t it?
Now to the Ring. Aside from those stories where the MS suddenly learns that she’s a long-lost elleth and has Mary Sue Arwen powers, most of the MS’s who end up in Middle Earth are human. How the fuck do you think you’re capable of resisting the power of the Ring? This bugs me to no end. Especially since the authors of these Mary Sue in Middle Earth stories have probably never read the books, only seen the movies, and they’re forgetting Elrond the racist dick from Peter Jackson’s movies, not to mention Galadriel who says, in the prologue, that “the hearts of Men are easily corrupted.” Even if you want to split hairs and say ‘but I’m a girl!’, that doesn’t change anything: you are of the race of Men, or if you want, you are human. Therefore, by the rules of the movie (which they do abide, because the dialogue, depictions and situations are ALL based off those from Peter Jackson’s movies rather than the books), your MS should be susceptible to the power of the Ring. Even more so if, as usual, they’re an emotional basket-case back home, stuck up in their rooms in their pajamas, eating popcorn all by themselves, watching the movies, with zero lives and all. The Ring should be tempting the hell out of them, telling them that if they only took it up, they could make all their problems cease.
Okay, here’s a question: why would the Council of Elrond let a teenage girl to sit in on their proceedings? What lore does this MS have that would be beneficial to the decision of the Council? What nation of Middle Earth does she represent? Not to sound sexist, but come on, who lets a teenager sit in on VERY important, world-altering decisions? Furthermore, why would they even listen to her suggestion to “bury the Ring”, “have Legolas shoot it over the mountains of Mordor into Mount Doom” or, possibly the worst and most unoriginal idea ever (making How It Should Have Ended a stupid, brainless rip-off), “use the Eagles?”
I won’t get into the Eagles here, that’s for another time. But I will say this much more: how does a teenaged girl with no training or skill suddenly become skilled with whatever weapon she has to carry in the War of the Ring? Oh, and here’s one, how is she even brave enough to even consider going with the Fellowship into Mordor? I learned stage fencing in my theater class and know that it is VERY difficult to use a sword, much less properly, if you’ve had no training. And look at teenage girls today: which one of them would volunteer to pick up a gun and go to the Middle East to fight the war? Or even if one was swept up by some strange twist of fate, what would they be doing besides curling up in a ball in a corner, sobbing and cowering because they’ve just realized they entered hell on earth and are a step away from death? That’s what it would be like going into, say, Helm’s Deep, to say nothing of Minas Tirith.
You might call me a hater, that I search fan-fiction.net for the sole purpose of rooting out these awful fan-fics. But here’s the plain and simple truth: you’d have to search the “Lord of the Rings” fics for days and nights upon end to find the good stories, if any exist. The first ones you see are the ones I’ve described to you already: slasher/torture fics or MS in ME. I’m raging because my beloved Lord of the Rings is being turned into something as debased as Twilight!
