The reason I despise crossovers and most of the Tumblr fanfic community (and literally despise anyone crossing The Hobbit with ANYTHING ELSE) is because everyone on Tumblr seems to be worried about one thing, and one thing only: Shipping.
It doesn’t matter if, you know, Elves barely have any sex at all and keep their sexuality buried. SHIP IT FOR REASONS. Bonus points if it’s two hot male elves macking on each other. Double bonus points if it’s twincest with Elladan and Elrohir.
It doesn’t matter if dwarves are the same way (Why do you think most dwarves only have one (maybe TWO) children at most?). SHIP IT FOR REASONS. Bonus points if it’s Thorin and Kili making. Despite the fact that they’re cousins. Double bonus points if it’s an Elf and Thorin macking, though it would never happen ever in canon and by FORCING it you are removing a part of Thorin’s personality.
SHIPPING SHIPPING SHIPPING
Are these two characters hot? Tee hee let’s ship them
“But the feels!”
I can’t take you guys seriously
Whatever happened to plot coming first? Or has it become that shipping IS the plot? If so, there’s something terribly, terribly wrong.
Thorin and Kili are uncle and nephew, not cousins.
Your argument is invalid.
TL;DR: OH NO. Someone else enjoys fandom in a DIFFERENT WAY FROM ME. THEY ARE DOING IT WRONG.
Seriously. Build a fucking bridge and get over it already. I don’t care if someone loves LOTR/The Hobbit only because they think Thorin’s eyebrows are the HOTTEST THING EVAR and they ship them with Legolas’s bowstring BECAUSE HAWT. I don’t care if they ignore every bit of plot and dialogue in the movies, the books, whatever, because all they care about is Orlando Bloom’s wig.
I don’t care if they think that Sherlock is the result of Bilbo and Smaug’s forbidden love with the help of the TARDIS and some of Sam Wincester’s demon blood.
I don’t care if they think that Sherlock went bad after Reichenbach and that’s how he wound up fighting the Federation.
I don’t CARE.
That person has every bit as much right for their enthusiasm and enjoyment as the person who’s memorized the Silmarillion and can quote it in Quenya. And frankly, deserves to be taken just as seriously, because come on, let’s face it, we’re all geeking out over a work of fiction in some way or another.
(Although for the record, if you paid attention to anything beyond the jokes and the artwork and the “FEELS!”, you’d discover that those awful ‘shippers’ and creators of crossovers are every bit as informed as you are about canon. They just like to play with it differently from you, oh noes, see my first paragraph.)
Okay, three things.
1: I respect everyone’s right to vent about things that frustrate and annoy them on their Tumblrs. This is, in fairly large part, what Tumblr is for.
2: HOWEVER, I don’t mean to be rude, but to be quite blunt, your opinion doesn’t actually matter. People have the right to enjoy stories however they like.
3: The cold truth is that what the OP is complaining about is literally how THE ENTIRETY OF WESTERN LITERATURE AND LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP has always worked.
People have spent literally millennia debating whether Achilles and Petroclus were just friends or were having a sexual relationship. The number of YEARS in which these two have been shipped most likely exceeds the number of Tumblr posts about shipping that you will ever read.
People have spent centuries arguing over whether Milton’s Lucifer is a bad guy or a good guy, and rewriting him in about 100 different ways, often mangling or, as professional literary scholars like to call it, “reinterpreting” him to suit themselves.
People have been writing crazy-ass crossovers since at least the time of Edmund Spenser. He got lauded by Queen Elizabeth for it, and was given a tidy little lifetime pension.
In 1748, Samuel Richardson wrote a novel called Clarissa, in which he told a cautionary tale about a stank-ass young gentleman who seduced, kidnapped, and raped a woman he’d ostensibly fallen in love with. He then proceeded to rewrite his novel three times, because everybody kept telling him how “romantic” it was and he couldn’t stand it. People are still shipping them—along with their respective best friends.
In short, if random shipping, creatively ‘reinterpreted’ characters, and crossovers bother you, well…that’s terribly unfortunate for you.