Anonymous asked: legolas & gimli!!! bc i saw you mention them in your faramir & eowyn answer and got v excited but then you didn't get TOO sidetracked lmao
1. I love the dynamic, of like, light-hearted kinda scatterbrained eccentric and slightly goofy elf ranger who verbally shitposts and sounds like a loon whenever he opens his mouth but occasionally says deep and genuine things too, plus the super-serious well-spoken soulful proud dwarf lord who also talks weird but in like, the opposite way, with these heartfelt open feelings couched in kind of solemnity and manners, but more and more frequently over the book babbles and says spontaneous stuff, and how they fit together so well in a dynamic that is really un-cliched on the personal level – this weird melding of senses of humor and viewpoints on the other characters and events around them, which are pretty different but don’t oppose one another as much as overlap and join together to create a single bigger, even more fun outside viewpoint, they’re such a good pseudo greek chorus-y thing
2. I think this pairing is the main reason I kinda like the LACE ‘elves have no desire to have sex with anyone unless they fall in love and sex equals getting married for them’ thing tbh. I love the symmetry with the ‘dwarves only ever fall in love once and never marry otherwise but nothing is said about extramarital sex for them’ thing, Meaning it’s like, some weird special experience on both sides but in different ways. I usually don’t care for this trope in most shippy fic, but I like it in interspecies and I really like it for them.
3. Aaggghhhh the getting-together process! Most of all, I think about the fact that by all accounts, and as implied by certain lines in Fellowship, the dwarves of Erebor don’t really get elves and the elves of Mirkwood don’t really get dwarves, and there’s probably a lot of just, natural assumptions that are totally wrong and which they never thought to examine. It could even be that the fire-forged-ness of their bond might actually interfere with some of this understanding of each other, if they moved into this state of complete attachment and acceptance of each other while in this upside-down fugue state of pre-apocalypse where they didn’t really have…that much time to talk, after their period of downtime in Lothlorien where I assume the first stage of their friendship was formed. Like, when they emerge from emergency-mode after the destruction of the Ring, they’ve already plummeted straight into “oh I know he’s a weird alien and I love him, oh no wait it’s that kind of love, okay lol this definitely won’t work welp I’m screwed I guess???” without considering that no maybe he’s not that much of an alien, and yes you can fuck him without it being a disaster.
4. OBVIOUSLY the whole immortal/mortal thing, especially highlighted since they live in pretty close contact and temporally in parallel with Aragorn and Arwen, whose mortal/immortal problem is totally different. Also the sea-longing! How, and when, was it decided that Legolas would stay in ME that long, or that he would take Gimli with him to Valinor? So many opportunities! In some ways, their time in ME after the war is a grace period, a finite stage of overlap, a kind of once-in-an-age, improbable, forgotten, enchanted sort of time, where the dwarves are building for the future but the elves are just pretty much just lingering and housekeeping for the humans on their way out, and it would feel like there is a sort of pressure to make something of this time, both their own separate lives and whatever their relationship is like.
5. lmao I think the main reason I imagined Legolas as blond was either because Thranduil had golden hair in the Hobbit book or because something something weird associations with personality types something (because I had no idea about any of the movie castings at the time I read the books). BUT ALSO: “I say to you, Gimli son of Glóin, that your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion” :)
6. I am TRASH. I will read SO MUCH SILLINESS with them. But here are just three HQ recs:
On the Cold Hillside by marycrawford
