I totally get wanting to keep to what already works, and I'm definitely not looking to change things for the sake of it if absolutely nobody wants to. We stuck with precedent last year for a reason. But I just want to be transparent about how we assess most of the combined fandoms if we unearth divided opinions. I also don't want to assume that no new fans might be joining us this round who lack prior history requesting Tolkien and may have their own ideas about what works best for them. Or a Hobbit movie fan may chime in who finds some book characters in their tagset really confusing or wants to request Hobbit/LotR crossovers without using the crossovers section, or something like that.

If there's no eligible characters and nobody wants to nominate inferred characters (like a Hobbit character's mother or something), would 'Silm, LotR book, Jackson movies' be a different split that also works? And say Dis and Belladonna should be nominated under LotR for the books.

A unwieldy tagset could definitely be an issue, the crossovers section gets big enough that it's one of the reasons we combine fandoms to cut down on it. But lack of knowledge/interest in all characters wasn't sufficient to separate some fandoms last year, so it would need to be particularly unwieldy. Is there a reason (other than scannability of the tagset) that people can't just pass by any character they don't recognise - assumedly if they don't know them, they're not going to request/offer them? It makes it harder to use Any Relationship in requests/offers, but with requests visible now I suspect Any is less necessary for ensuring matchability anyway.

Sure. :) If people have other opinions, whether they're new or long-time exchange participants, their thoughts are as valid as mine.

My belief is that any female characters who appear in or can be inferred from The Hobbit book also appear in or can be inferred from The Lord of the Rings. (One of the first scenes in the LOTR book is a huge party which all Bilbo's hobbit friends and relatives are invited to, Lobelia also appears in LOTR, and Legolas's mother/Thranduil's wife, who is never mentioned in the books, can be inferred from Legolas existing in LOTR). Dis (the mother of two characters in the Hobbit book) never appears on page; she's only mentioned and named in the LOTR appendices, so seeing her nominated under LOTR wouldn't throw me. If you decide to combine the Silm and LOTR book, I don't see any reason not to throw in the Hobbit book as well, but I don't think it makes a practical difference either way. Other people can say if they disagree.

'Silm, LotR book, Jackson movies': That works for me, but I can't speak for the movies fans on how they feel about combining LOTR movies and Hobbit movies.

Is there a reason (other than scannability of the tagset) that people can't just pass by any character they don't recognise

I think I was hesitant about the idea at first because it's different from what I'm used to, but thinking about it more, I could see it working. On the good side: it's easier to request Silm/LOTR crossover pairings. On the bad side: it might be off-putting for any LOTR-only fans; another issue that I just thought of is that some Tolkien fans might have trouble finding enough fandoms to request and offer if The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion (and possibly The Hobbit) are combined into one fandom.

But I'm mostly guessing about how other people might react; I am definitely not qualified to speak for the whole fandom, so I'll be quiet now and let anyone else give their thoughts. :)

I've been thinking about this some more over the past few days, and I do still prefer a split with Silmarillion and LOTR book separate from each other, as well as books separate from movies. (I don't have strong feelings on how the movies are split/combined or how The Hobbit is handled.) The Silmarillion and LOTR are set far apart in time (up to thousands of years) and in a different physical setting, and not all fans of one are familiar with the other. On the whole, it makes more sense to me to keep them separate. But I can deal if you combine Silm and the LOTR book.

Thank you for popping back! It's definitely helpful to gauge the people's full opinions. Based on the comments so far I'm definitely going to split books/movies and it seems combining the movies will work best. So the options we're then whittled down to now are (though I welcome feedback on better umbrella fandom tag names if people have preferences, I haven't combed through the AO3 tag tree to see if there's an existing option we could utilise yet):

Tolkien - All Books
Jackson Movies

OR

Silmarillion
Tolkien - LotR and Hobbit
Jackson Movies

At this point it does still sound like the books meet the shared universe requirements which other fandoms do, but I'm hoping a few more people might weigh in before we make a decision as I'm aware there are strong opinions involved.

Can you clarify the time issue for me? Someone else said they want to request characters who technically appear in both LotR and Silm but they only want one backstory. A brief Silmarillion for Idiots 101 is welcome if you think it'll support keeping them separate, I'm happy to be over-explained to if it means I don't miss nuances that might be important and aren't obvious to me - is it just that the Silm covers such a long period of time that some characters are Silm only and some characters later in that time period thus will be/are still alive in LotR?

And for characters that do appear in both: is it the same character (just with omissions of backstory if you don't want to read them all), or are there other differences in backstory between books that I'm missing?

Okay. This is kind of complicated. If you ask "Are The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings one continuity?" the answer is that they are and they aren't. It wasn't as simple as him writing one book and then the other.

The Lord of the Rings was published during Tolkien's lifetime, in the form that he wanted. The Silmarillion was compiled after Tolkien's death by his son, Christopher Tolkien, from Tolkien's notes, decades later. The thing is that Tolkien never stopped rewriting and changing his mind about things. The Silmarillion is Christopher Tolkien's best guess at what his father intended, plus whatever was complete enough to be made into a coherent story. Christopher was not entirely satisfied with the published Silmarillion as a complete snapshot of his father's work, so he started publishing more volumes of JRR Tolkien's notes and fragments about Middle-earth. This became the 12-volume History of Middle-earth series plus things like The Children of Hurin, Unfinished Tales, etc. And the Silmarillion tag on AO3 intentionally covers all of that mess, because it's "The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-earth." If you look at all the material, you're going to get multiple contradictory versions of various characters' motivations, backstories, parentage, details of characterization . . . To take one infamous example, if you ask a Tolkien fan who Gil-galad's father is, they'll laugh ruefully, because Tolkien changed his mind about that like six different times. Or they'll tell you which version they personally prefer.

And fans have different ways of approaching this complex and contradictory morass of material. Some people have only read The Lord of the Rings. Some have read The Lord of the Rings and the published Silmarillion. And some have read LOTR, the published Silm, and some or all of the other volumes of notes.

(My internet is being buggy, so I'm going to post this much and continue in further comment(s).)

(And of course even among people who have read some or all of the Histories of Middle-earth stuff, there's a range of decisions about how much they choose to incorporate it in their fanfic and meta, from "lots" to "not at all.")

Every other exchange I can think of separates LOTR and the Silmarillion. I would say that combining them is not the most intuitive thing to do. It might seem from an outside perspective that they're the same thing, because they're set in the same world with some of the same characters, but there are also some significant differences. The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings are written in very different styles. The Silm is written in a detached chronicle-style, with relatively little dialogue, covering thousands of years, including creation myths and accounts of the gods; LOTR is a novel (or series of novels, depending how you look at it) with normal dialogue and getting into the characters' heads in the way you'd expect from a modern work. Not everyone who is interested in one is interested in the other. Combining them might be logical from a shared-world perspective, but I'm not sure that it serves the fans.

As far as time periods go, The Silmarillion takes place over thousands of years, and then LOTR takes place ~3000 years after that (that's over-simplifying slightly, but close enough). Some of the characters from the Silmarillion are still alive in the later time period of LOTR, because they're immortals of various kinds (they can be killed but they don't die of old age). Most of the places mentioned in the Silm are destroyed by the end (a large part of the continent becomes covered by the ocean), so LOTR takes place almost entirely in different geographical locations and set in the cultures that have sprung up in the intervening time. So writing LOTR fic and writing Silmfic is, in most cases, in a different geographical/cultural context (and again, not everyone who is interested in one is interested in the other).

So, is Galadriel in LOTR and Galadriel in the Silmarillion the same character? Well, she's the same person, because Tolkien says she is. But you'd get a different characterization from someone who is taking her Silmarillion backstory into account and someone who isn't. For example, just from reading LOTR, you wouldn't know that Galadriel had four ( . . . or three, Tolkien changed his mind) brothers, one of whom was killed by Sauron -- which makes her fighting Sauron throughout LOTR a bit more personal. Galadriel's decision to reject power, return into the West and reconcile with the gods in LOTR means a lot more if you know from the Silmarillion that she originally came to Middle-earth as the result of defying the gods and wanting to have a kingdom of her own. So it isn't only a matter of facts and events; there's hundreds or thousands of years' worth of stuff that add resonance and motivation to what she does in LOTR. If you request or offer the Silmarillion in an exchange, you can assume that everyone's working with the same background. If Silm and LOTR are combined, that's no longer a safe assumption. So yes, they're the same characters, but "same" becomes not really the same when someone who has only read LOTR is (from the perspective of a Silmarillion fan) missing a lot of context for those specific characters. I think that's what people mean when they talk about wanting a LOTR/Silm character with her Silmarillion backstory. Also, Galadriel as portrayed in the Silmarillion is more, I don't know, feisty? She's mellowed a bit by the time of LOTR. And both sides of her are part of her character, but it you only read LOTR, you only get one side. Basically, I would expect different things from requesting/offering Galadriel in the Silmarillion vs. requesting/offering her in LOTR.

I'm talking about this from the perspective of a Silmarillion fan, who does want to play around with the additional material. There are a lot of Tolkien fans who haven't read the Silmarillion, and that's totally fine! And from their perspective, I suspect combining LOTR and the Silm would be off-putting because it implies that you do have to take the thousands of years of backstory into account for characters who appear in both, when that's not something they're interested in digging into. I just feel that separating LOTR and the Silm gives everyone the most room to work in the particular context(s) they enjoy and avoid mismatch of expectations.

/my two cents

I'm just quickly flying through so this is brief, but I wanted to say thank you for taking the time to write me an idiots guide. From outside it does look more simple, and the changing canon continuities thing is I think particularly relevant to our combining/splitting criteria and it's not something I'd encountered browsing wikis in the past.

I'm guessing if you've got issues about eg. Gil-galad's father even just within Silm, then chances are some parts of Silm agree with LotR/Hobbit and some disagree?

I'll leave it open for discussion in case there's other (for me) unknowns and nuances that may come to light. But it sounds like Silm/LotR and Hobbit books/Jackson movies would be a better split, than combining all the books. Thank you again!

Hi, other Tolkien fan with Thoughts!

Personally, I find the differences between the Hobbit book and the Hobbit movies much more of a dealbreaker than those between the LoTR books/movies. I have a lot of Tauriel femslash ships, but I'm not comfortable requesting them under 'Hobbit (movies)' because Tauriel's presence is really the only part of movie canon that I enjoy and I don't wanna be the person going 'DNW: Hobbit movie canon' when that's the fandom I would be requesting under. With LoTR I'm happy to leave book vs movie questions/preferences in optional details.

would 'Silm, LotR book, Jackson movies' be a different split that also works? And say Dis and Belladonna should be nominated under LotR for the books.

I would be happy with this. I would also be happy with an all the books/all the movies split as you and Zdenka discussed above (and would nominate/request Tauriel ships in crossover), but recognise that that might not be the best for people who are mostly-movie fans.

Basically, anything that keeps Hobbit books/movies separate is fine with me :D

ETA: Actually, re-reading this, I think I ended up talking myself into favouring the Silm/LoTR books/Hobbit book vs Jackson movies split. I have a lot of Silm/LoTR ships where I'd be totally happy just requesting book canon (especially Silm character/Goldberry ships and Galadriel/anyone ships where I don't have to think too hard about whether they're Silm or LoTR) and I can also happily do Tauriel/book character ships in crossovers.

Edited (welp i guess i actually do have a preference) 2018-07-28 04:38 am (UTC)

Thanks for dropping by! It sounds like applying the same criteria we use elsewhere for combining definitely benefits some participants. It also benefits us as mods, there was a lot of confused combing through a Tolkien wiki last year because of minor characters that seemed to appear in multiple books and were nominated under unclear fandom tags or had wandered.

Based on comments so far I'm going to say we definitely need a book/movie split. Nobody has said they don't want the movies combined and from what I remember of them they're a shared universe, so unless someone new weighs in specifically about that we'll go ahead and say combined there. (And I didn't realise Tauriel wasn't in the book! That definitely sounds like a logical case for making them crossovers then, if you're wanting her shipped specifically with the book versions of characters.)

Currently I think our best options under the current policies are (though I welcome feedback on better umbrella fandom tag names if people have preferences, I haven't combed through the AO3 tag tree to see if there's an existing option we could utilise yet):

Tolkien - All Books
Jackson Movies

OR

Silmarillion
Tolkien - LotR and Hobbit
Jackson Movies

Currently there's disagreement about Silm, and I don't know it well enough to make a call myself. Could you help confirm similarities/differences? From what I understand, Silm is a prequel. Thus, while you will have gaps and omissions in backstory if you only read one or the other sets of books, any character who appears across two or more book/book series is the same character. However the degree of time difference between Silm and LotR books has been brought up - but also that some characters technically appear in both, so I'm not sure how or if the time issue is relevant (is it just that Silm covers a specifically long period of time that ends closer to LotR? Thus, some characters are Silm only and some characters justify the combination?) I'd welcome a brief Idiots 101 on the Silm if I've missed any nuances or got the wrong end of the stick.

Someone has popped back in further up this thread about canon continuity differences within Silm, and has probably answered those questions I had about Silm - but if you have additional info you'd like considered, please jump on in!

Oops, I was AFK most of yesterday. I agree with the explanation given above, characters who are in both are technically the same but at wildly different points in their lives with possibly contradictory stories. I was coming at it from the perspective of someone fannish about both the Silm/Histories and LoTR, but I can see where the differentiation might be a dealbreaker for others.

I'm happy with the proposed The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien, and Middle Earth - Peter Jackson Movies split! My biggest concern was book/movie separation anyway :D

That's great to hear, I'm glad it works for you even if it pushes some of those book pairings into crossover. If you have Tolkien requests in the queue that should be crossovers now, you're welcome to either edit accordingly (feel free to just add clear fandom indicators for book or movie versions of characters even if you don't have the slots to also nominate under crossovers) or drop me a list and I can check they go in the right place for you.

I nominated some Tolkien ships before seeing this post, and I definitely think that the Silm/LotR books/LotR movie split is a good idea, and prefer that to any other option. One of the reasons is that I'm going to be requesting ships where characters technically appear, of sorts, in both Silm and LotR (I'm thinking of Galadriel/Varda, which I nominated, right now), but my prompts will most likely be Silm-focused. I'd be reluctant to request ships like that if there was a Silm & LotR books umbrella tag, because I want the Silm backstories for the characters and I wouldn't want to put someone who offered the pairing because both characters are technically LotR characters without reading the Silm. (And honestly, the Silm and LotR are discrete enough works that reading one doesn't necessarily mean you've read the other, and there are lots of fans who haven't read the Silm especially at all, so there might be issues on that front.) And for the book/movie split, I'm thinking that pairings like Arwen/Éowyn might cause issues if they're nominated, because the bookverse and movieverse characters have such different characterization and storylines.

I'm not planning on requesting Hobbit stuff for this exchange, so my opinion is probably not relevant, but I'd prefer a books/movies split for the Hobbit for the simple reason that the storylines diverge so widely from each other that they're barely both set in Middle-earth, and they tell different stories involving different characters from each other.

Thanks for dropping by! Are there any differences in canon/backstories for the Silm vs the LotR book version of pairings like you mention? Other than by omission, that is, or am I correct in assuming each book(s) just cover different parts of the same character(s) life and Silm functions like a prequel?

Also, you say technically they're LotR characters. Does that mean that while they are present in both they don't appear as much in LotR (book) as they do in Silm? Or are there other differences between books I'm not aware of, like comparing reboot or movie adaption versions of the same character.

You're welcome (or anyone passing by) to give me the Tolkien 101 summary of backstory differences if that may help illustrate your argument, given I'm only passingly familiar with the LotR/Hobbit books and not at all with Silm. At this point it does still sound like the books meet the shared universe requirements which other fandoms do, but I'm hoping a few more people might weigh in before we make a decision as I'm aware there are strong opinions involved.

While I realise this may not entirely set your mind at ease, remember that requests will be visible. If you're particularly concerned about being able to prompt for one version or the other (assuming we do combine, which isn't decided yet), I'd recommend getting your optional details and/or letter written and posted early in the sign up. Then if LotR only people really want to avoid needing to familiarise themselves with Silmarillion if they match with you, they have the option to watch the requests come in and decide their offers accordingly.

Someone has popped back in further up this thread about canon continuity differences within Silm, and has probably answered some of those questions I had about Silm - but if you have additional info you'd like considered, please jump on in!