Fandom meme

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Another meme, snagged from randi2204:

Comment to this entry with any fandom. If I'm knowledgeable enough in the fandom, I'll tell you one non-canon ship I like, one canon ship I like, and one ship I really don't like (either canon OR fanon). Then post this in your own journal to offer up the same responses.

Sidebar: I'm getting bored. I really wish I were writing fic. *sigh*

Comments

[randi2204]

I agree - if you're not into all the 'shipping post-movie, LotR is not a very pairing-centric fandom, and I must apologize for limiting you in that way. I wish I'd thought of this before, but if you wanted, you could include the non "'ship" relationships, such as the friendship between Merry and Pippin. I'd consider it perfectly acceptable if you want to revise your answers. ^^

In the books, Arwen simply did not have that great a role, and that made it difficult to consider whether she was "worthy" of Aragorn or not. Her non-presence made her rather a cipher. (JRRT was much more intent on telling the story of the adventure and creating the mythology, and gave short shrift to some of his female characters.) So, because there needs to be a strong female lead - or at least, she's got to have screentime, which she did not in the books - in a movie to bring appropriate focus to the Hero's Love Story, they had to increase Arwen's role (cutting out Glorfindel in FotR, the "dying" scenes in TTT, etc.) in order to make her more present and thus more worthy. Or so it would appear to me. It's been a couple of years since my last reading, and inevitably, the characterizations from the movies are getting tangled up with those from the books in my head.

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Oh, no worries, I don't need to revise. :) To be honest, it wasn't until I tried to think of pairings that I realized how little I consider them.

Tolkien did give short shrift to many female characters, which is what made Eowyn stand out to me. She's the only one who really has what you'd call a character arc, and it's a damn good one, too. She really overshadows Arwen, which is why it always seemed strange to me that Arwen the non-entity ends up with the big hero. I can understand why they had to beef up Arwen's role for the movie, but I don't have to like it. :)

Now that I'm thinking about it, it says a lot about our story-telling conventions, that it's imperative for the movie hero to have a worthy love interest, to the point of departing from the source material to create a worthy love interest when there is none. It's an integral part of the modern adventure story - or almost any story, come to think of it. LOTR is so very striking in that most of its heroes (and it's unusual that there are so many to begin with) don't get a romance at all.