My favourite comment ever posted about my fanfic

[bunn]

"bleh! What have you done to the beautiful dialect of the smilarilion? You've trashed it and made it modern! That is a travesty, and no true fan of tolkein would do this. I reject this work."
-- an unregistered user on archiveofourown

I love this comment so much that I am seriously considering getting it printed on a t-shirt.  I keep reading it again and it makes me fall over laughing again.

Comments

[arcanetrivia]

I saw this post on the front page of LJ when I logged in today. This comment rather makes me want to read the fic that prompted it!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

! I always forget LJ does that. Though, what am I saying, a comment of this quality deserves an audience to appreciate it!

It was Nerdanel and Fëanor : Messages: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10491684 about First Age Nerdanel and Fëanor text messaging one another. Not one of the more serious and Silmarilliony things I have written!

[arcanetrivia]

Well, now that I've slurped up about 170k words (Aman + Mandos + most of the standalones) in four days, I want to say how impressed I am with the care and thought you've clearly put into your series. And though I had to follow along with a cheatsheet at first, I think now I have a much better grasp on all the kinships than I did before, so the next time I go to read anyone's Silmarillion smilarilion fanfic I'll be a lot less confused! Nothing like a lot of practical exercises to help get a firm grasp on information :)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Good heavens! That's a lot of words. I'm glad you liked them! (I admit, I have spent a lot of time with Elrond's family tree open in a tab myself, there are such a lot of them! And I still have Idril & Tuor on the to-do list for the last chapter...)

Given my appalling treatment of the beautiful dialect of the Smilarilion, it's good news that it was at least educational :-D

[arcanetrivia]

Wellll, I can see where people who would complain about the style are coming from. Personally, I was thrown for a moment in one of the stories when someone mentioned coffee -- tea, all right, mumble mumble Middle Earth somehow has tobacco mumble, but coffee seemed too exotic somehow! *chuckles* But really, I got used to it. And there are definitely some worthy phrases in the narrative - like in "The House of Feanor", ancient Elves with minds full of stars, walking through memory and singing songs of days long past.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I warred with myself about that coffee! I would not have put it into Middle-earth: it would feel wrong, I agree (though as an old-world plant from Africa, in a way it should be more at home than potatoes or tobacco or Bilbo's very modern matchsticks...)

But Aman is supposed to contain all plants and creatures that ever have been in middle-earth, so in the end I put it in. But it probably does have too much of a modern resonance to it: even though it IS old, it *feels* present-day-ish in a way that tea somehow does not, even though in Britain we've been drinking coffee longer than we have been drinking tea! It's strange how they have such very different associations.

But in Return to Aman I was deliberately being a little lighthearted for much of it. It originally started as a quick idea for '100 words of embarrassment' (ie, Maglor being embarrassed about meeting Elwing) and got entirely out of hand!