Anonymous asked: About your Thranduil cartoon commentary, couldn't find if anyone had said so already, so if redundant pls ignore: But Dain II Ironfoot is of the line of Durin, and precedes Gimli in succession. Thorin and Dain share a great-grandfather, Dain I, while Balin, Dwalin, Oin, and Gloin are Dain I's brother's descendants.
and I am OFFENDED of course I know that I love dain, but like on the list of dain’s top five wishes all of them are ‘go home to the iron hills out of this drafty old mountain’, (six is ‘punch thorin oakenshield right in the nose for stranding him here in the first place’), (but then again not even the force of dain’s exasperation can bust through to the halls of Mahal so), so dain IS king of erebor…against his will is the point I’m making up there, he’s too noble and honorable to tell erebor to figure it out their own damn selves
Basically: yes, Dain Ironfoot is an Erebor king of the line of Erebor kings, descendant of Durin, this is not questioned by anyone ever. But Dain wants to go back to His Damn Hills out of Thorin’s ex-dragon-infested mountain, but his cousin went and got his entire line killed before Dain could get out of range.
You can bet your ass that the Erebor dwarves are very aware that their king is an Iron Hills dwarf to the core–they love Dain! They do! (So do I!) And he does a great job as king! He leads them successfully for many years!
But they want him to be happy, because they care about him. And they know that he looks up at the inside of his great arching throne room and goes out to the battlements to look down the rock face of the mountain, and he misses his home. There’s a certain tragedy to a homesick king.
The point is that Dain is an Erebor king who longs for a home that isn’t his kingdom, and whose people know it. And that’s not a reflection on his skills or his lineage, merely on the fact that he’s not an EREBOR KING in the way that, say, Thorin (who fought his way back to the Mountain for his entire life) was.
So now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’d like to point out that there are two ways for Dain’s death in battle to pan out:
- He is interred in the stone halls of Erebor, a home not his own, and his son the Stonehelm is reminded, every time he pays homage to his father, that Dain is still not home.
- His people, who love the king who fought for them in the throne room all these years and died fighting for them still, make the pilgrimage to bury their king at home.
I do not know which of these I like better.
