Transcript
Speaker: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer -led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Alicia, and I'm here with my usual co -hosts, Grace. Hello. And Aliyah. Hi. And today we're joined by Cameron and Mercury, who you have heard of already if you've been listening to us for any length of time. We've not been able to shut up about their Sauron -related research this year. Yep, for good reason.
Speaker: And that's why they're here at the spookiest time of year to talk about the darkest Middle Earth ship, Angbang, or Melkor slash Morgoth in Sauron. Yes, we're doing another Sauron ship themed holiday episode. It's spooky themed. We're so glad to have both of you here. Thank you so much for coming on. Hey everyone. Thank you for having us.
Speaker: All right, gather around everyone, warm yourselves by the fire, maybe take a little nip from the bubbling cauldron. We're delving deep today and we might need some of the strong stuff to fortify this. And may I just say, in the wise words of Darkwing Duck, let's get dangerous. Yeah.
Speaker: All right, Lodgers, before we embark on this journey together, we want to give everyone a big heads up and content warnings about today's episode. This episode includes discussions of sex, sexual relationships, kink, BDSM, intimate partner violence at various levels of consent, sexual assault and sexual abuse, abusive relationships, and abusive power dynamics.
Speaker: We want you all to listen to yourselves and your needs. So if you need to disengage from the conversation and these topics, please take good care and we'll see you in the next episode. Otherwise, we hope you consider this episode an invitation to listen and better understand some experiences of fandom and culture that you may not otherwise seek out. We invite you to keep an open mind, a curious heart, and join us for some no holds barred freaky shipping shit. All right, before we begin, Cameron and Mercury, could you please tell us a little bit about yourselves?
Speaker: Okay, hello. I am Cameron Bourque -Queen. My pronouns are she, her, and I'm an independent scholar. I first read Tolkien as a teenager in the long ago days of the mid -90s. I fell absolutely totally in love with
Speaker: the legendarium and everything Tolkien wrote, but I was focused most specifically on Sauron. Sauron was the center of that obsession and that love because of all the questions that he posed for me and my understanding of the legendarium about all kinds of things. Evil, theodicy, questions of like order and control and power.
Speaker: I, over the last eight years, I've kind of gotten re -involved in Tolkien fandom after taking about a decade -long break. And over the past couple years, I've started getting involved in Tolkien scholarship. This year, I presented five conference papers focused on Sauron, his development over Tolkien's lifetime, and his intersections with the metaphysics of Middle Earth. And again, thank you guys for having me today. And hey, everyone. I'm Mercury Netis. I'm a he -they -queer. I'm in between universities at the moment.
Speaker: but I'm currently and primarily a queer theory and Tolkien studies early career scholar who is associated with Sycam University at the moment. And I'm working on my PhD applications as we speak. I came to Tolkien through Jackson films, but have since gone happily down the rabbit hole to mix my fiction metaphors. While Sauron isn't my primary focus, he, like he is Cameron's, he plays a major part in the work that I'm doing towards my PhD, which is really looking in depth at the queer mechanisms within the texts that are intimately linked with the period in which Tolkien was writing.
Speaker: and my paper for the Tolkien Society Summer Seminar this year on how Sauron fills the femme fatale archetypical role on Numenor. It's just one small slice of a much bigger project. I'm constantly percolating in my brain these days. I'm super happy to be here. I love you guys. Aww, we love you too.
Speaker: We are so excited that you guys are here. Yeah. It's definitely been a conversation that we've had a lot of time. It's like, we really want to talk about Sauron with like these two. Yeah. Scholars were very excited about this. If you've listened to previous episodes, y 'all know we've mentioned the y 'all so many times so that it's like, yeah, you're finally here. Yay. Hey, time to be degenerates together. Yay.
Speaker: I'm here for the bang. I have my tickets for the bang, I believe. Excuse me, Madam, are you here for the bang? Yes, my name is on the list, I believe. No, don't make me say it. I'm gonna say it now. I'm, like, baiting you now. Sorry. You're here for the ang bang. We know. We're aware. We're aware.
Speaker: Let me just give some, like, very general background information. If someone's somehow listening to this and doesn't know what Ang Bang is, we mentioned before, it's Melkor slash Sauron, or Morgoth if you know him that way.
Speaker: It's named Aang Bang because it happens in Aang Band. And banging is what is fucking happening in Aang Band. And if, for whatever reason, you don't know who, surely you know who Sauron is if you're listening to this. He's the big bad of Lord of the Rings. He made the ring. Melkor is kind of his boss in the first stage, sort of.
Speaker: Awesome. Yeah. Melkor, who's also known as Morgoth, he ends up falling at the end of the first age and being sent off into the void to do whatever he does in the void. I'm assuming just be real bored. You don't really hear that much about him in The Lord of the Rings, so if you haven't read the Silmarillion, I can understand why you wouldn't know that. But this is very much a first age and previous kind of ship.
Speaker: And it's a ship that, even though we're just talking about it now, it's been around for a while, and we're gonna go into some of the fandom history of it. But you just get a peek at that by the fact that this ship, Ang Gang, and then also Silver Gifting, are ships that are referred to by a name that is associated with elements of the characters rather than the more modern Portmanteau sort of ship names.
Speaker: It's just worth noting that we're going into some deep fandom history here. I think that's your cue, Cameron. Oh, that's my cue. OK. We're going into some deep fandom history. Yeah. OK. So to talk about this, I should first put up this disclaimer that my interest in Aang Bang, although I'm familiar with the ship and have enjoyed some iterations of the ship, I'm familiar with the ship mostly through the side of Sauron, because Sauron is my fixation, apparently.
Speaker: So I'm going to be a little bit biased towards him in this and this fandom history I'm going to talk about is it's partly comes from my own experience and recollection of being involved in fandom from the late 90s until today with that as I mentioned that decade -long gap in there and has also been informed through some just research online research through talking to other fans, etc, etc. So to give you a bit of that background I
Speaker: I discovered Tolkien online in 1998 when I first discovered the internet because Tolkien was the first thing I searched for. And then the second thing I searched for, I'm pretty sure was Sauron. Of course, this being during the period where the Peter Jackson films were in production, I think maybe was it pre -production a little bit in 98 and then they started moving into production soon after that. Right.
Speaker: So a lot of the content out there was very Lord of the Rings heavy. A lot of it was confined to things like message boards, dedicated fan sites that had comment sections, but were more based around one particular individual or group of individuals posting content and work. LiveJournal got in there at some point. You had your Yahoo groups, you had fanfiction .net.
Speaker: And in about 2005, you ended up getting the Silmarillion Rider's Guild. The majority of that content, like I said, was focused around Lord of the Rings. It wasn't really focused around Silmarillion content, except when you started to kind of get into the more nerdy fandom spaces or somewhere like the Silmarillion Rider's Guild. Silmarillion content also
Speaker: tended to be a little bit more gate kept than Lord of the Rings content again, just because of that dynamic of who had read, watched, and when. Queer content, dark content, was much more cordoned off than it is now, but not always. There was some of it out there.
Speaker: A lot of the Sauron ships you ran into at the time tended to be very third -aid centric. Again, naturally this is the Lord of the Rings period. I can distinctly remember a few Sauron Aragorn fics that I found on fanfishing .net and then there was a... Oh yeah, definitely. I mean Sauron Isildur is one of my ships that I'm really looking forward to with Rings of Sauron.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. Maybe more of that. Completely makes sense. And you'd see a lot of like Sauron with an OC or a self -insert character happening at the time. There weren't nearly as many art depictions of Sauron as you can find now. And the ones that you did find, they tended to either obscure him physically. So you have like a figure in a dark cloak. You can't see the face. Or they presented them in very demonic or bestial ways. And like to this point,
Speaker: What I always find this really interesting, sorry, this is slightly a digression, but I find this really, really interesting that even though the Silmarillion has been out for a while at this point, people are still depicting him as Lord of the Rings, Sauron. They're not depicting him as Silmarillion, Sauron. Because if you read the Silmarillion, that's not how he looks. But it's interesting that it takes the internet fandom of the 2000s to change that and to actually go back and go, actually, why are we still depicting him this way? That's specifically over the Rings.
Speaker: That's true. That's true of scholarship, too. There's far more scholarship about Lord of the Rings -era Sauron than there is about Silmarillion -era Sauron or any Sauron, second aid, first aid, whatever. Working on it. Yes, this is our mission. Okay, so generally he's depicted as obscured or monstrous. You've got a few professional illustrations by professional illustrators, the big names that probably everyone knows of, stuff that like Alan Lee, John Howe, I think
Speaker: Did Alan Lee do one? I know John Howe did. I'm not sure if Alan Lee did. Alan Lee did a eye of Sauron, but I don't know that he did a Australian Sauron. Okay, I think he's done one recently. He did a few for the fall of Numenor book that he hadn't back then. Oh my god, the new ones, yes.
Speaker: So I ended up leaving fandom at like 2005 because I don't know. I had a life or something weird. I don't know. What kind of life it was, I don't know.
Speaker: I came back to fandom in 2015 after I'd seen the last Peter Jackson Hobbit film. I was just randomly looking at something online, something about Sauron. And I was on Wikipedia and I discovered that somewhere in that break in time, there had been published a reference to his original name, Myron. And that kind of pushed me back into fandom and I realized, wow, everything had changed.
Speaker: in that decade I had been gone. There were suddenly a whole plethora of different interpretations of Sauron. Aesthetically, physically, you had tons of illustrations of Sauron in his, quote unquote, fair form. A lot of them were much more feminine than you had seen previously in previous years. You know what's interesting? In that gap when you were gone is when I showed up.
Speaker: So while I do not have the memory that you have and I cannot remember what the hell was going on, the only, the first Sauron's I saw were fiery eye on the tower in the Jackson films and pretty boy Sauron. Those were the only ones I knew. And Hengbang was actually one of my first really big chips. And it was all based on this, this beautiful Sauron image. I hadn't had that previous experience.
Speaker: That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, I think it's interesting as somebody who's kind of one been really focused on art. I'm sure this has gotten brought up on the podcast before I am a graphic designer by trade. I watched fan art kind of shift from really European centric models based on things like Alan Lee, John Howe and the
Speaker: the movie depictions towards a more anime influenced model. And I think that kind of the pretty boy Sauron came about like during that shift. Definitely. But we're also definitely going to get to it because I know that we're going to talk about Fobs quite a bit. But Fobs wasn't the only artist who was working at the time as well. I don't remember the artist's name, unfortunately, at the moment, who was working at around the same time as Fobs and they kind of drew each other's styles at one point.
Speaker: who was drawing very Eastern inspired Sauron, but it wasn't like Bichonnen style, if that makes sense. I don't know how to really explain that, but for anyone who doesn't know what that is, Bichonnen is this anime term that is like, you're pretty boy. You're anime style pretty boy. But he wasn't that. He was broad shoulder. He was square jawed, but he was like,
Speaker: had long hair and it elaborately put up ways with pins. Unfortunately, I don't know the name of the clothing type, but the sort of Chinese style collars. It was like Ganondorf?
Speaker: No, it wasn't it wasn't rehydrated Ganondorf. I'm the bad person who was going to say like the Finnish Boromir. OK, so obviously there's we're in 2015, there's much more queer content and suddenly there are these fan works that when I left in 2005, ships with Sauron that I had had not seen before. Now, that doesn't mean that they weren't out there, but they weren't prevalent. Those being things like silver gifting and aang bang.
Speaker: There's something that I want to, another disclaimer I want to make here, when we're talking about any kind of fan work from a historical context, fan work is incredibly ephemeral quite often. That's true of whether you're talking about zines and physical fan work because it can very easily be lost or destroyed. That's also true of digital fan works because fans take things offline, archives close down,
Speaker: Fan content gets purged. We saw that happen with live journal and fanfiction .net and with Tumblr as well to an extent and in a way when it comes to quote unquote adult content.
Speaker: Yeah. And there's a little bit of work to preserve it as well because some of those archives that were siloed off and cordoned off are now being loaded into archive sites like Archive of Our Own and all of that and trying to preserve what is left of the ephemera from that time. But it's not necessarily all still there to preserve.
Speaker: Yeah, and there's some things that I was able to find that represent some of the earliest examples of a bang -bang that I could find, which did come from individual small kind of niche archives, which have since been loaded onto A03. But yeah, I'm sure there's stuff out there that is just gone, if it's gone forever. So anything I'm going to talk about in terms of history, there's probably stuff in here that I am going to miss, that I'm going to misrepresent because I wasn't there and because
Speaker: either the record no longer exists or because I haven't found it yet. So I'll plug at the end how you can get in touch with me. This is something that I'm currently working on researching. So if you have information, go to the end of this podcast or listen to the end and get in touch because I would love for you to correct me on where I may be missing things.
Speaker: I'm so sad that I wasn't in this fandom like in this particular ship back then because it would have been printed out like the fan art would have been printed out on my math finder so I would still have it. I still have printouts of like Final Fantasy 7 art that's nowhere here now but speaking of Bishona and Sephiroth I just want to I just want to throw him in here.
Speaker: I want to touch on something before we get really into the history. You mentioned that while you were gone, Myron became one of Sauron's names. I think it's interesting to note that
Speaker: In fandom, a lot of the times Sauron, Annatar, and Myron are essentially three different characters, even though they're the same person. Yeah, I always had that really weird, unfortunately. They may be tagged together, but they may not be treated as a singular entity. As one person, right? That's really fascinating, yeah. Some of that comes down to stuff that I talked about this year at Oxenmoot in a paper I gave there, which I think because
Speaker: Part of that is because in those three different ages, you have Tolkien writing about him in three different periods, and he never entirely, for whatever reason, he never entirely synthesizes those three different periods. Probably because these are three different texts. The Lord of the Rings is a very different type of text than the Silmarillion. It's written in universe by different people. It has a different function. So I think there's a lot of, I don't like the word canonical, but canonical, blah, blah, textual reasons.
Speaker: why that may be happening along with a slew of fandom reasons. That always really drives me a little bit crazy because like don't you want a multi -dimensional character? Oh yeah. Don't you want a character who is different at different times in their life? Like I think it makes him incredibly interesting that he's different at different times in his life. He's not like to use a poor psychiatric term he's not having multiple personality disorder or something like that you know like he's
Speaker: He's one person with different elements and aspects to him. That's him fundamentally. He's a shape shifter. He's a shape shifter, textually, metatextually, literally, figuratively. That's who he is. Much like all of the I knew. Every single one of them. Pretty much. Pretty much. The thing about Sauron is I think he's the only one that we actually see shift shape in a story, in a narrative, an actual narrative. Such a good story.
Speaker: Yeah, in text. As much as I want to count Tolkien's letter talking about how Yavanna is sometimes just a tree for shits and gigs, you can't really count that. And Olmo is the sea. Do you know where the sea ocean is? Yeah, that's true. And it's also something that we in the modern age, especially those of us who grew up with any sort of social media like Tumblr or what have you,
Speaker: should understand the malleability of identity because we've been able to change usernames or blog focuses or academic focuses or whatever throughout our lives and our lives are much shorter than that of a being who is like in Arda for all of Arda's existence sort of thing. Definitely.
Speaker: I think all of this ambiguity surrounding Sauron and how he has lived through all of these texts and the contradictions that are rolled up in him is what makes him such a compelling character and what makes him so fun to ship. And what makes him such a queer icon. Yeah, in this ship he is way more compelling than Melkor. Oh definitely. Definitely he is. I definitely agree with that.
Speaker: Anyway, so back to the history. The history of Aang Bang kind of runs alongside the history of these changing depictions in Sauron. One thing that I actually discovered just in the last year that I didn't realize the very first extant work of transformative fiction in
Speaker: Tolkien fandom was a short work of fiction that was published in the 1960 fanzine I Palantir written by George Heap about Sauron. It was the events of the Lord of the Rings kind of recontextualized from Sauron's point of view. It's currently, you can actually go look at it right now, it's housed and digitized in the Marquette Archives. It follows this trope of the bad guys are really the good guys and they were slandered by the victors and here's what really happens.
Speaker: kind of track, with the idea being that it was Sauron's intention from the beginning for the one ring to be destroyed, such that the three rings would be destroyed with it, lessening the power of the elves, which the document calls the Immortals, and freeing men from the tyranny of the elves and letting them live
Speaker: in freedom, which is a theme that's going to come back up with Sauron and Melchor and ultimately the ships that surround them. This is something, you know, this is 1960, this is written pre -Silmarillion, so it's part of a time in fandom where you had fans who were
Speaker: kind of debating and questioning and very curious about what the Silmarillion might contain. And so in a sense it interacts with that question as well with fans trying to, I don't want to say create their own Silmarillion, but to try and understand without having any of these primary texts.
Speaker: what that history that they're getting a glimpse of in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings might have really been. Something that I want to plug, Donal Stuma, Kate Coker, and Maria Alberto have all done some really interesting work on fandom studies and the history of fandom, including around Tolkien. And there is a piece called Affirmational Fandom, Transformational Fandom, and two old Tolkien fanfics on the Silmarillion Writers Guild website, which Donal Stuma wrote.
Speaker: which talks about this piece. It's called Departure in Peace. So you might want to check that out if you want to learn more about it. That same reversal I was talking about, it's really reminiscent of what happens in a piece that's probably more well known to anyone who is familiar with transformational works of Tolkien. It's the Russian fic that's actually been published in physical form the last ring bearer. I hope I'm saying this. Kiril Yeshkal? I so want to read that. Like, I so, so, so want to read that.
Speaker: There is apparently an English translation online. Let's just say I have encountered the English translation online. So yeah, the Last Ringbearer is definitely one of those. I kind of feel like if you've been online in Tolkien fandom for kind of any length of time, I think you kind of eventually sort of run into it or at least hear about it.
Speaker: That might be just my perception, but I kind of feel like this is sort of like, once you've reached the last ring bearer, you've kind of like, I don't know, you pass through a gateway into real Tolkien fandom nerdery or something like that, where you're like, Oh yeah, here's this, here's like the final gate into, I don't know, nerdvana of Tolkien fandom. Yes. How, what was the distance in time between the last ring bearer and the Black Book of Art?
Speaker: Black Book of Arda actually predates Last Ringbearer by... Oh, that's interesting. I've seen anywhere from six to seven years. Okay. This might be a good place then. You want to start in? I was going to say, I have never heard of the Black Book of Arda. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Speaker: So the Black Book of Arda was written initially, I believe in either 92 or 93. I've seen a few conflicting dates on that, although there were rewritings and rereleases of it in physical print up through, I think, 2002. I may be wrong about that, but there have been a few.
Speaker: It's a piece written by Natalia Vasileva and Natalia Necrosova, and I'm so sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. I've only read the first three chapters and I read them last night. Thank you, Alicia, for sending me. I'm also very excited to read that. Alicia coming in clutch. Yeah. They can be found on the Wayback Machine. That's the only way you can find them. The website has been purged. I will put a link in our resources.
Speaker: Yes. And it's, it's, it's only the first three chapters that have been translated into English. So that is all I am familiar with other than through just fandom osmosis hearing about from other people. This is also me calling to arms, uh, any Russian fans who want to translate the black book of art for us. We'd be super happy about it. Well, or any Portuguese speakers, because there is a Portuguese translation of it as well.
Speaker: Yes, exactly that. So basically it takes a similar talk to The Last Ringbearer in that it does a, what if all of this is biased and it's actually the bad guys who were the good guys and history as we know it in The Silmarillion was written by the victors. It's one of those pieces that takes Tolkien's assertion that these are texts that he is translating that were written by in -universe characters very seriously and says, well, they didn't know what they were talking about or they have a biased perspective, et cetera.
Speaker: No, it's older propaganda is what it is. It's an older propaganda except it's it's Happening in the case of Lord of the Rings. It was happening with the Lord of the Rings text This case is happening with some really in text. It's very much centered on Melkor as At least based on the first three chapters. It very much feels like paradise lost if paradise lost truly took Satan seriously and wasn't looking at him as
Speaker: deceiving himself. Now that may change in later chapters, I can't read them, but the first three chapters are very, very solidly in that vein of interrogating these theological questions that the legendarium raises, including some really tried and true real world questions about free will and the nature, knowledge, and goodness of God. And the thing is like, and we're going to see this as we continue on with the history, that the Russian fandom has a huge influence on this ship. This ship.
Speaker: was pretty much created, in my opinion, by the Russian fandom, in a lot of ways, like from the Black Book of Arta to Phobs, who we'll talk about, and onwards and upwards, I guess. And I always wonder how much of this Russian fascination with the bad guys of the story stems from Cold War politics. Like, putting aside the Tolkien wholeheartedly rejected the allegorization of the story, there is such a strong pop culture through line during the Cold War,
Speaker: where Western media makes those from the East the villains and instead of the normal flavor of Orientalism that's been going on for ages and ages and ages and ages, specifically coded it as Russian as opposed to Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern. The Cold War, it became Russian. And so I always wonder how much of the Russian fascination with treating the text this way is in some ways a pushback response and how much of it is the pushback response and how much of it is
Speaker: actually a very dangerous threat of Russian nationalism that dances with fascism. And where do we sort of find that gray area of, is it an innate sort of feeling that if it's a western piece of media that is depicting the East as bad, clearly they're depicting us. So we should be identifying with them saying actually they're not terrible. Or is it, we agree with these bad guys because we are part of this very dangerous threat of Russian nationalism that dances with fascism.
Speaker: And it's really hard to tell the difference of where that is. And then I would also argue, threading in the fact that this is an inherently queer ship. And there's been a very complicated history of how the Russian government regime has treated its queer citizens. Yeah, for sure, for sure. But that also doesn't mean the queer fascists don't exist.
Speaker: No, they definitely do. Sorry guys, they do. Yeah. And actually like in her paper, when philology becomes ideology, the Russian perspective on Jarrah Tolkien, Olga Markova notes that one of the major reasons, if not the major reason, Tolkien wasn't published in Russia until 1992 was because it was assumed by the Soviet government to be Western propaganda, hitting the freedom of the West against the tyranny of the East.
Speaker: And while we know that's not true now and Tolkien hated that reading, it totally tracks that people used to this kind of dichotomy coming out of the West would sympathize with the baddies because they're so used to sympathizing with the baddies who are so often an allegory for them.
Speaker: Yeah, so it absolutely tracks just like queer people. Mm hmm. Yeah. One of the interesting things that I've learned through this in regards to Russians and literary criticism in general is there is a myth or article called How Russian Sea Tolkien is by Vladimir Ruschnitzky. And he's talked very specifically about how Russians at this point in time in the 70s were taught
Speaker: to read everything allegorically. And the only way to actually justify something as a piece of literature is if it had an allegorical meaning. Which I mean, yeah. My parents are both Soviets and that is completely true. I think we also can't ignore that
Speaker: during the Cold War, though this was not Tolkien's intent for allegory, there are certainly people in the West who read it as that type of allegory to make Western culture the good guys and to justify Western culture as the good guys in opposition to Soviets and Communists in the Cold War and queer people being accused of being Communist here in the United States and all of this. These are all very complicated threads that
Speaker: lean into some of the ways that Tolkien may have been viewed in Russia because of the context that were going on in the rest of the world. And 1984 and Lord of the Rings came out really, really close together. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There's something interesting in what that paper that Alicia mentioned, how Russians see Tolkien, the Grushnetsky paper, he contrasts in talking about how the effect that the Lord of the Rings, specifically, because this was written in the 90s. And at that time, the Silmarillion hadn't been officially translated into Russian yet. But he contrasts what he sees as this ethical and moral framework that's apparent in Tolkien.
Speaker: with the communism that he sees Russia coming out of and claims that, quote, because Russia has existed until recently as a totalitarian state, Tolkien's words about a prisoner escaping from the walls of a prison have a special relevance here. And for anyone who doesn't know, that's a quote from Unfairy Stories. And I think that's an interesting take, considering the Black Book of Arda is very much about escaping from totalitarianism and escaping from a prison and gaining
Speaker: freedom and independence and free will, except in the case of the Black Book of Arda, the person who is preventing that freedom is Eru. And the Valar, but specifically Eru, who Melkor is
Speaker: rebelling against not out of a desire that he wants to be bad for the sake of bad but for the fact that he wants to and apparently this is only based on my reading of the first three chapters because he wants to grant freedom and beauty and and Life and even mortality in the story. It appears if he's the one who created men hmm to other sentient beings so it's an interesting twist if what rushnet ski is saying is is accurate about
Speaker: Tolkien fandom at that time. Yeah, comrade Melkor. But that's also like so dangerous. Yeah. Like, I do want to make a good point. Like, while I do think there is tremendous value in considering the idea that we are being given a biased depiction of our enemies, it's super, super valuable, especially in regards to say, the orcs who are caricatures and racist caricatures in a lot of ways. It's such a slippery slope from maybe we haven't been told the whole story to, well, maybe the enemies are the good guys. And
Speaker: Tolkien's morality is not that gray. It's gray when it comes to humans and humanoid analogories, or analogs rather, but it's less gray with the theological characters. The theological characters are a lot more black and white than what the morality is. And so if you're saying that this character who Tolkien has specifically written to be a tyrant might actually be the good guy, what are you doing?
Speaker: Is this how we end up in the bad place? That's a really good point. And I guess it kind of like speaks to some of the power, I guess, that can be behind some of these transformational fan works and kind of considering where you can go with with some of these things. And yeah.
Speaker: That's really fascinating. I actually hadn't heard of the Black Book of Arda before you guys had mentioned it. The only real kind of major, I guess, text that kind of dealt with this sort of perspective was the last Springbearer. So yeah, I super appreciate you guys bringing this up and talking about this.
Speaker: I think this is also really interesting to consider in the context of some of Tolkien's letters, particularly letter 246, where he's reflecting on who would have, as a ring bearer, been a poor choice, or been worse as a ring lord than Sauron, and he comes away
Speaker: with the assertion that Gandalf's ringlord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained righteous but self -righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for good, and the benefit of his subjects according to his wisdom, which was and would have remained great. And there's a marginal note where he says thus, while Sauron multiplied
Speaker: some sort of evil. He left good clearly distinguishable from it. Gandalf would have made good detestable and seem evil. And I think this is all really interesting to contemplate, both in the context of questioning who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, is this biased, and then also how this would have been received at various points since publication by various audiences.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely. Who's the bad guy? What's the bias? But also what is the ethical core of the conversation? Like it's so easy to get distracted by the good intentions. Yeah. And a question too of even if it is propaganda, even if we've been sold a false bill of goods, does that automatically justify the actions of the quote unquote bad guys who we're now considering?
Speaker: Now we're getting a little too close to politics. A little poignant, timely discussion. Mercury, your point about how Tolkien is more morally elastic with humanoid characters versus the more god -like characters is really interesting because I was reading the first
Speaker: I read the first one chapter of Black Book of Art. It was too flowery for me. I couldn't get very far in it. It was giving me big Feanor and Manway vibes. Melkor is chafing against what he sees as
Speaker: a stifling kind of overlord and just wants to kind of do his own thing, right? In the same way that I personally read Feanor as someone who's just trying to do what they like. Now, I'm not saying Feanor is not a fucking dick because he is, but he just wants to like do what he wants to do, right? And he wants man way to get off his dick and just let him do what he wants.
Speaker: And I get that same kind of vibe with Melkor. So I think it's an interesting treatment because it is something that I personally read as paralleling something that Tolkien wrote. And I think the difference between the levels of power of the beings is an interesting difference that I hadn't really thought about while I was reading it. And it's giving me something to chew on. Yeah.
Speaker: And I wonder if again, we are getting off topic, but I wonder if again, I wonder if so much of that is Tolkien the man versus Tolkien the Catholic. And like, when he is talking about people, he is a lot more forgiving. He has a lot more forgiving. He's a lot more compassionate. He's a lot more sympathetic. But when he's talking about God, he's like, well, this is what doctrine is.
Speaker: you're technically getting into the crux of my PhD question is how is Tolkien marrying his real life with his Catholic life and how that kind of comes through with queer characters very, very strongly. But that's another topic for another time.
Speaker: This actually I'm probably gonna jump back on this myself a little bit later When it comes to like Tolkien in the Odyssey because I've read Tolkien's work in the legendary was very very much him battling with his ideas of the Odyssey against his his own understanding of Catholic doctrine say no Yeah, we could talk about that for hours
Speaker: That's the next episode that we're going to invite y 'all back on for. I know. We planned a follow up episode. Yes. So I was just going to say, I've been reading through the lens of some research about generations over the last hundred years, too. And I think it's really interesting to consider how
Speaker: Tolkien's path through all of this shifts with changing times because he's writing it over such a long period. Also, how it is received by different generations of people, social generations of people in different places because of how generational shifts tend to shift between what values of collectivism and what values of individualism are prioritized in each generation, broadly speaking.
Speaker: We need a whole separate episode where she can sit and talk about the metaphysical. Interesting.
Speaker: ontological metaphysical theological that's that's my shit i'm like that's this is like the sexy shit it's like it's cool man it's cool but have you ever thought about theodicy we haven't even gotten to the sexy shit yet i do want to mention how sexy the theodicy part is but i'll make that very brief
Speaker: You're either going to convert Melia or it's going to be like your kink is not my kink and that's okay moment and that's fine too. That's how it rolls man. I just want to model this for everyone.
Speaker: So anyway, back to the history. Okay, ship, Aang Bang. We're actually truly getting into Aang Bang because I, now this is to my understanding again, I don't think the Black Book of Arda necessarily is Aang Bang, but again, I can only read the first three chapters in English, so I'm not sure. However, if we want to actually talk about specifically a Melkor Sauron ship, the Aang Bang ship, we should first distinguish a little bit between a Melkor Sauron ship and Aang Bang itself, because it actually didn't get
Speaker: I didn't point the name Aang Bang until about 2012 -2013. Really that late? Wow, that's interesting. The ship itself, as far as I can tell, the earliest examples I found date back to about 2002. If there's a piece that was on the archive least expected, it's now on AO3.
Speaker: written by Maburishi Noeume, and I don't know if I can pronounce the name of this this thick. It's Melte Tehi, I think perhaps? I think it's Techie or something like that. Techie, okay. It is one that actually specifically cites the Black Book of Arda as inspiring it. There was another thick in 2003 by Makamu on the Hennethanun archive called Dark Light. It is also now
Speaker: I believe on AO3. There was an archive, and it's still up, it still exists, and Soreg, in which the fan Taelis has gathered her work. In 2004, she published a piece called Terrible Alchemy, which is early Ang Bang, but not yet called Ang Bang. Incidentally, she actually wrote one of the earliest examples of silver gifting I know of, which is
Speaker: the 2003 One Ring to bind them. You may also be familiar with her in fandom because she was one of the earliest fan work creators to write ELF BDSM and to like, yes. She like created a whole set of rules around it, which I think is what Ansereg refers to. Again, I'm probably mispronouncing that, but she is also pretty famous for having written a 2003 essay on what Tolkien really said about ELF sex or what Tolkien really said about sex. I don't remember the title exactly.
Speaker: I wonder how that compares to what we have now. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: Let's see, published a piece in Malorn called Warm Beds Are Good about - We have cited that before. We have. We have. We have cited that. Awesome. Yeah. And then Tolkien Fandom History, which is a Tumblr blog, actually interviewed her in 2018. And one of her answers was about back when she was writing her answer, what would she not have expected to be going on in 2018 in Tolkien Fandom? And her answer was both,
Speaker: If you had asked me which pairings people would be discussing with me 12 years later, I would never have said the Sauron pairings. So in this period around 2002 to 2007, you also see a bit of a surge in Sauron content in the Silmarling Riders Guild, where you see a Milkwar Sauron ship as kind of a background ship. I think there was a thick written by
Speaker: Pandemonium 213, who's best known for The Apprentice, which was published on the Silmarion Riders Guild in 2007. I recognize this name. That for me is a big deal because I don't remember shit. She is pretty cool, I must say. She writes a very scientist Sauron depiction that I quite like.
Speaker: Elegy for Numenor is another piece that appeared in 2009 by ElfScribe. It actually is one that was recommended in USA Today in a May 20th piece from 2015. Yes, they rekt a explicit Tolkien fic. Oh my God. Wow. I'm so happy. Amazing. That is so weird. And it's another example of a fic that it's specifically Sauron Arfareson.
Speaker: But I believe there is a, if not specifically a flashback, there is a sense that there was a, a Melkor Sauron ship in the past. Hmm. There's another example by Rosandal chasing mirages, which I don't have a date on here, but I believe if I'm remembering correctly, that was 2008 or 2009. I think I know that person.
Speaker: Yeah, I think they still post, I believe, on Tumblr. To be fair, this is also a ship name. Yeah, I've met someone who uses that as their pen name. I wonder if it's the same person. I assume it's the same person. Interesting.
Speaker: I would also just add that in the archive library of Moria, the earliest Sauron Melchor effect that I could find was also 2009. So you can sort of see it gaining momentum around that time. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And then we hit 2012 and 2013, late 2012, early 2013, which is apparently when something cosmic happened.
Speaker: And the planets aligned and something astrological was going on because there was an explosion of content about Sauron and specifically content about Melkor Sauron and you get the coining of the name Angdang. I mean we can take a guess as to the reason why and that person's name is Phobz.
Speaker: Yes. One of the reasons why, I think there were a lot of reasons why, but I think Fobs is the reason it became as popular as it did in the iteration we probably most associate with it. Yeah, because it's like, and this is why we wanted to talk about the Russian fandom having such a huge influence on this ship. It's because you have Black Book of Arda, you have Last Ringbearer, and you have Fobs. And Fobs comes from this environment where out of this sort of
Speaker: bubbling melting pot of Lord of the Rings fandom and Silmarillion fandom that's coming out of Russia. And I cannot believe these are not connected. They have to be. They surely have. So it's all, we are coming at Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion from a very Western perspective. We cannot relate without someone having told us what's going on elsewhere. And I think this is a really, really good
Speaker: picture of it that we are getting from this ship specifically. Tell us a little bit more about FOBs and their contribution in this context. Well a lot of the FOBs content, let's see, there's a lot of stuff that kind of converged in 2012 -2013. The FOBs was one element of that starting
Speaker: Right around the end, I believe in November or December of 2012, Bob started posting illustrations of Aang Bang content. This included an image of Sauron that was quite a bit different than the obscured or bestial or demonic. He was very fair. He was even rather feminine.
Speaker: One of her early depictions actually is a version of an unused BTS image from the Return of the King DVD, which is probably one of the, you know, the Anatar image that I'm talking about. I'm thinking of it right now. Yeah. It's that but done in Bob's style. Oh yeah, it's such an interesting. Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know if I would have liked it there, just because in that story. I'm glad it exists, but I'm glad that Phobs took it somewhere else, maybe. And took it for their own. It's also worth noting, Phobs is a professional illustrator. So we are having really, really high quality comic style illustration coming out of one artist, and prolifically. A lot of it is happening because this is what she does for a living.
Speaker: prolifically, and people are picking up on it who are involved in Tumblr, DeviantArt, and they're copying the style. There are cosplayers who are copying the style, specifically fem cosplayers who are doing. Yeah, really? Yeah, I was relatively recently went to a convention with them and they were Phob's Sauron. Yeah.
Speaker: There's been a lot, like starting not long after she posted those first illustrations, you started to see cosplayers doing specifically that Bob's Sauron. And Bob wasn't the only person illustrating Sauron Melkor at the time. This is a good time to say the artist, I found the name of the artist that I was talking about before who was working at the same time as Bob. This is Gerwell, G -E -R -W -E -L -L. Oh yeah, I know Gerwell, yeah. Who is a slightly different, beautiful Sauron.
Speaker: that's coming around at the same time. Yeah. So there's Bob's, there's Gerwell. Another account that's putting out a lot of work is Zlu and Luft. I believe on Tumblr they're known as Angban style. It seems like there's a little bit of a, or there was historically a division based around how Sauron specifically was depicted. There's an account misbehaving Myar.
Speaker: Their depiction of Sauron and the Aang band style, the depiction of Sauron tended to be buffer, more muscular. This person looks like he's a smith and he works in the forge. Whereas you have the Fobs depiction, which is very, very feminine. Often it got a little less feminine. The more Fobs worked on it over the years, but the early depictions are especially feminine.
Speaker: And there was a lot of like I remember a little bit of this still going on when I came back in the Phantom in 2015 But there was there was some contention in some quarters over which is the preferred look for Sauron generally speaking I Do want to jump in and just point out that one of the notes for this section is who was the sparkly twink?
Speaker: It's like because they're the like the Ang ban style and the misbehaving my our images Melkor is the sparkly twink. He's the one with the flaming. Oh, yeah. Mm -hmm. And Sauron is much less fair. He tends to be depicted with a darker skin tone. Um, whereas Melchor's not again with
Speaker: in a lot of ways, but the whole issue of how Sauron and Melkar depicted and racial coding in all of them is so fraught. Yeah.
Speaker: So that's essentially who is the sparkly twink. That's that's how you can tell the two styles apart. Yes, yes, exactly. That's amazing. This is fascinating because in a recent fandom podcast, I heard people talking about the history of the Star Trek fandom. And it was in the context of there's always a lot of discourse about, you know, what sexual positions different characters take and whatever.
Speaker: But the way that this was framed was a fascination from people who had been in fandom a long time and the shift in perception about, to quote them, which of these characters gets bred. Which was a hilarious way for me to come into this discussion on this. One of the things that they were pointing out was that the Spanish perceptions of
Speaker: the sexual dynamics between Kirk and Spock have dramatically shifted as time goes on in a fandom that's been around for significantly more than half a decade. And it's interesting to see that happening here with another long -running fandom with the shift in depictions.
Speaker: Who is the sparkly doing? Yeah, who is the sparkly doing? This is also the time and I and I have to credit SkyEvanTied on Twitter for pointing me to this. This is the time period when Aang Bang is coined as the ship name. Before that they were often called Melron. Yeah, that's no good. Aang Bang better ship name. Definitely, definitely better. Poor Minto ship names. Man, they just...
Speaker: I mean, there's also, the other option is moron. So it's kind of like - I think I have heard that. I think I did see that somewhere at some point. I like that. It's probably more. And then there's worse. This reminds me about how we were deciding Star Trek portmanteau ship names back in 2009 because they hadn't existed yet, even though the Star Trek fandom had been around forever. Right. And Chekov and Sulu, you either had Chulu, which is what we went with, or Sukhov. So we were like, we can't go with Sukhov.
Speaker: Why not? I mean, let's just say the very, the very earliest name for Kirk and Spock was Spirk when, when the portmanteau of cock is right there. And I'm kind of like,
Speaker: You guys are cowards. Either that or we're just not privy to those fandom conversations where that was the way things were. Very good point. Very good point, Grace. We also had a lot of debates in Roswell New Mexico fandom. There's a character whose name is Alex. And when you try to portmanteau the name Alex literally everything that you portmanteau it with just ends up sounding like a condom brand.
Speaker: So, you know, lean into it. I will say, you know, who aren't cowards, hang hangers. Definitely not. Sally four. Yeah. Oh yeah. I think what's interesting about this time period is you've got fobs and fobs becomes very popular, but you've also had this run up of through the nineties. You've got the whole history of middle earth that's been published. You've got.
Speaker: Morgoth's Ring, which has a whole bunch of juicy stuff in it as far as Sauron and Melkor. You've got Blind Guardians Nightfall in Middle Earth from 1998, which has one particular dialogue scene between Melkor and Sauron that I think you could easily ship if you wanted to. It doesn't have to be. But it's one of the few examples of that that existed that I was familiar with that early.
Speaker: You've got what I mentioned, the 2004 depiction of Annatar on the Return of the King DVD, where you see him looking much more fair. It's probably one of the first fair depictions of Sauron some fans had seen. In 2007, you've got the publication of Karma, Elder Lamboron 17, which includes the name Myron, which one of the meanings is precious and what self -respecting fan is not going to take that and run with it. You're obligated. Yeah, you're obligated.
Speaker: You've got Bob's becoming popular. We're assuming that she was probably familiar with Black Book of Arda. And you've got the English translation of Black Book of Arda coming out online in 2012. And this is all in the context of a world where we've seen a greater interest in stories like Wicked and Maleficent. These stories where one of the villains, you know, were the heroes or at least the protagonists of our stories. You have it in the context of what we talked about with the Shounen culture and the surgeon.
Speaker: anime that's suddenly available in the West. I just want to interrupt there and say one of the things that I was thinking about as you were talking about this and you've noted in our notes document like Wicked
Speaker: 1985 is the book, 2003 is the musical, Olivia sent 2014. But one of the first times that I encountered this was actually in a children's book. And it was the true story of the three little pigs as told by a wolf, Alexander Wolf or 1989. So great generationally, I was primed to ask these questions in this context. And then, you know, by 2014, as we're getting movies doing this and all that,
Speaker: my generation is growing up with that. And people wonder why we're not generation of kinksters. Come on. We're raised on the big bad wolf might be the good guy, you know? Maybe that wolf is sexy. Maybe that's okay. There, in fact, you have come to Stephen Sondheim and into the woods. And that's a question that he certainly has.
Speaker: Oh no. It all comes back down to musical theater. God damn it. Sorry, that was my degree. I want to have a conversation about musical theater. There needs to be more middle -earth musicals so we can have a whole conversation about middle -earth musicals. It's aang, bang. It's aang, bang. It's aang, bang. It's aang, bang. It's aang, bang.
Speaker: So talk about Morgoth at all. Really get to in this musical, try to get the rights to the the whip song from where there's a way. I mean, I really think it needs a surprise. Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh. Can I just tell you how disappointed I am that not a single person on AO3 has written an gang bang fit called Morgoth's ring? Not one.
Speaker: Wow. To be fair though, I literally, so I have six Aang Bang Fix bookmarked on AO3. One of them is all about cock rings. So, you know, we're getting there. We're getting there. I think it does lend itself a little bit more to a Sauron second age, third age sort of scenario there rather than Morgan. I think that's just the lower hanging fruit, if you will. It depends.
Speaker: to bring your disgusting. Yeah, it does. All right. Yeah. Where were we? Back to you, Cameron. I think Alicia's got me like plotting out fanfic here. Man. That is awesome. And I want to see it when you are done with it.
Speaker: I'm never writing it. I'm just going to stay in the drafts folder for forever. Somewhere listening to this, there is a Morgoth fangirl who is so mad at us right now. I am so sorry that I am obsessed with Sauron. I mean, true. That's why I'm not interrupting with anything Morgoth. I'm also obsessed with this. I'm sorry, fan. One fan who's really pissed at us. I'm so sorry. The one Morgoth fan that's out there.
Speaker: I don't know this this show and I wish I could find the tumblr post that pointed this out
Speaker: There was an anime that was produced in 82 -83. I'm going to try to say this name. Voku Patilero? Patilero? I'm not sure. There is an article on Tuxedo Unmasked that talks about similarities in the relationship between these two characters, this queer relationship.
Speaker: in this anime between these two characters and how similar that is to Zoe Sait and Kun Sait in Sailor Moon. Of course, yeah. But something that I did not make this connection, someone else on Tumblr did, and I'm so sorry I've not been able to find the post that did this, pointed out how similar these two characters in the show look to
Speaker: the FOB's depiction of Melfor and Sauron. It is very similar. That's fascinating. There is one member of the pairing has this long flowing golden red hair, much more feminine looking. The other member has the long straight black hair, more masculine looking. It's a little bit uncanny when you see it. I don't know that that's evidence that that connection actually happened, but it's interesting to think about.
Speaker: We're just in the context of mapping on to archetypes. Yeah, definitely. So after 2014, there have been a couple other surges in Aang Bang content. It tends to kind of become popular for a while and then die down a bit, become popular again as new individuals enter fandom.
Speaker: Oh, and I should also note that in that 2012 -2013 period, that's also when the Hobbit films were coming out and when the purges from LiveJournal and Fanfiction .net were happening. So you had all these new members of fandom entering spaces where Aang Bang was starting to happen. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's part of what caused it to proliferate. Everything's connected. It truly is.
Speaker: So now you see Sauron everywhere, which I'm very happy about. This is a piece of fandom that I am just not in.
Speaker: But I know that there have been at least one, if not a few, depictions of Sauron and Atar, etc., in video games. And I'm curious when those video games, I don't have a good context for when the video games came out. I know they were largely in the time when I was on a little bit of a fandom break. So I'm curious if there's any sense that these
Speaker: shifting depictions of Sauron were then reflected in the video game images and popularized even more than there. I definitely think they were. Shadow of War and Shadow of Mordor or 2014 -2017. There you go.
Speaker: That's definitely, that's a distinct depiction of Annatar from, say, the FOB's depiction, but there's also a sense where when people are writing the Annatar, they tend to, or depicting Annatar, they tend to depict him, not just name him differently, they tend to depict him as very distinct from how they depict the Lieutenant of Angband, Myron, or how they depict Numenor, Sauron,
Speaker: And there are some other Annatar or second -aid Sauron depictions that are quite similar to how he appears in the Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War games. Which came first, I don't know, off the top of my head. I would not know. I have to imagine there's been some cross -contamination, so to speak, going on there.
Speaker: Totally. I would be shocked if there wasn't quite honestly, but so currently, we said everything is all connected. Everything is connected. So currently, Aang Bang is, it's the most popular. Let me put it this way. There are the largest number of fix in the Aang Bang pairing on AO3 if you search for Sauron and look at relationships. It beats out Celebrimbor Sauron. The third runner up is actually Galadriel Sauron and then
Speaker: running about neck and neck with that right now is actually Galadriel Halibrand, which is... You should be ashamed. Let's not kink shame anyone. He is the one person who's just like, yeah.
Speaker: If people want to ship that, I am totally cool with it. It'll also be interesting to see, like that's clearly the impact of a new media piece, which is Rings of Power, and the way they've chosen thus far to depict the character of Sauron. It'll be really interesting to see if that
Speaker: continues in that vein or gets complicated as new seasons here. I'm not looking forward to the fandom wars in any way, but I'm curious if as a depiction of Sauron maybe gets more complicated.
Speaker: We might see a shift in what fan fiction and fan works start to appear or if this is going to lock us in it to a new direction and I hope it doesn't lock us into it I mean I find seeing new depictions, but I hope it doesn't round out other depictions, you know
Speaker: I mean, like, that's my big concern. Let's not get too far down this rabbit hole, because it's not what this episode is about. And we move a few years before we see where that impact goes. It's just a one thing. And then I will let this drop. I want to defend my kink shaming. It's not shaming these people. It's that I am upset about the erasure that is happening in the frames of power. I agree. That's where I'm standing at.
Speaker: Yes. We could talk about that for another hour. Yeah. Follow up episode number two. I would love to see if there were a resurgence of other Sauron related pairings or queer depictions of Sauron even in the context of that current piece. They're not gonna do it. No, I don't I don't expect that'll happen in any sort of canonical sense.
Speaker: But I would love to see a fandom response that keeps things queer.
Speaker: yeah highlights the queerness that has always been I agree agree central to this character whether canonical or whatever pieces want to go there or not or adaptational pieces want to go there or not fandom get on it grace amen yeah yeah all you beautiful monster fuckers yes yes absolutely
Speaker: So we've hit modern day at this point. There's currently like 1 ,400 fix on AO3 that are Aang Bang. Surprisingly, half of them are M and up and half of them are rated below that. I don't know if those are accurate. That sounds surprising. Yeah. Is there also a no archive warnings apply? Yes. Rating in there is significant. No archive warnings apply is actually the highest. It's 750. What? Yeah. I know. I was surprised.
Speaker: Everything I'm going to say is pointless. No one's actually going to ski in the ship anymore. What's happening? In interviewing people, one of the things I've heard is a lot of people are saying, where did all my dark fics go? Yeah. So I don't know. It's interesting. There's also the creator chose not to use archive warnings, which is proceed at your own risk. Those are like 438 fics is what I'm getting on that. So it's a little more than they are. OK. Yeah.
Speaker: This is a good time to sort of talk about the state of the fandom at the moment, though apparently my information is all out of date. So take that out of the world. Because it's been a while since I've played in this sandbox. I do apologize. But so generally, I would break up the types of Ang Bang. This is important because we need to discuss sort of this ship, Ang Bang, is dark. It is messy.
Speaker: It is, you get into dub con territory, you get into these characters are the villains and they're doing horrible things. And how, how do we engage with romanticizing these characters? Okay. So in my mind, there are three kinds of Aang Bang fans, Aang Bang fans. I'm never going to say Aang Bang correctly anymore. There are three kinds of Aang Bang fans. And mind, this is an overgeneralization, but there, there is a lot of crossover between these three groups.
Speaker: And I think this, but I do think this generally applies to all problematic ships in one way or another. This is just from my personal experience of being a kinkster in fandom for two decades now. So this is just what I've seen in the time that I've been doing this. So the first two of the three types of bang bang or problematic fic fans are the ones that I would call the Apologia people, the people who are engaging in Apologia, who are apologizing for something.
Speaker: The more common Apologia fan is the I can fix him types. These are your serial killer groupies in real life. They are your poor little meow meows, your Wubifications, your Kylo Ren apologists, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These tend to be younger fans, not always. And they really just create versions of really nasty fictional characters that are romantic heroes or overly sympathetic and tend not to interrogate why they're attracted to these characters, but rather seek to make excuses for them.
Speaker: And it can get, it can get really grating. Again, I'm not going to tell anyone, don't write the thing that you want to write. That's not how I play. You have fun in your sandbox, have a good time. But there is that segment of people who are just apologizing and trying to create a romantic hero out of a baddie. And you get that with this fandom as well. The second type of Apologia fan, which is a lot less common, but it's definitely still there and we cannot ignore them. And Fobs is unfortunately one of these.
Speaker: Or at least was, we don't know if she's changed her mind about it, so I don't want to entirely slander her, but if she has in fact changed her mind about it. And those people are the ones who genuinely agree with these problematic characters and their behavior. These are your Nazi fetishists, generally. These are your stealth fascists who will turn a blind eye because they secretly agree, but they know better than to say anything.
Speaker: Yeah. These are the people who think Hitler had some good points or that we should sympathize with real villains of history beyond just surface level understanding of why they did what they did. Right. From what I understand, this was a big problem like Hetalia fandom. Both of these kinds of Apologia were. It's a big problem with Attack on Titan fandom because the show is built on an anti -Semitic framework. We can, based on the information that we have, assume that Fobs is or was one of these people.
Speaker: I don't know if you can still find this art on her Tumblr, I did not go looking for it, but I distinctly remember that she drew fanart of key figures of the Axis powers. I distinctly remember Hitler, Goebbels, and Hirohito. And if I remember correctly, though please on this do not quote me because it has literally been over a decade, she dug her heels in about it when confronted.
Speaker: saying something along the lines of just because I find them to be interesting people doesn't mean I agree with what they did. Oh, boy. Well, it's like what's his face with the garden of dictators in his. Oh, shit. Yeah, I forgot about that. And his Nazi napkins where he's like, oh, I just keep this memorabilia to remind me of how bad they are. And like, and to be fair, like this is not a bad thing on its own. Like we're historians. We sometimes find shitty people super interesting.
Speaker: But I'm not going to go around writing fanfic or drawing comics of Jeffrey Dahmer, who I personally find really interesting. This whole thing is a big red flag in my book. Now, again, I don't know if she ever apologized for this. I don't know if she ever took any of it back or if she ever changed her mind. I know nothing about it further. And I don't necessarily care. What's important is that we can't ignore that the major contributor to the popularity of this ship is one of these types of fans. And I think that is significant. We can't really ignore that. Yeah.
Speaker: But then we get to the third type of fan of problematic contact, which I find to be the best people. You can pretty much know in any fandom, but I'm biased. For this purpose, I'm going to call this group the Kingsters. These are people who have approached really complex topics with nuance and thought and who are, whether they realize it or not, engaging in kink behavior in a fandom setting, which requires me to explain what that is. So yeah, if you're not a Kingster already,
Speaker: Here's some education if you are, have a cup of tea. He comfy everybody. Yeah. Basically, kink and BDSM communities are founded in an understanding that the thing you are really super hot for or super into may not be socially acceptable and may not even be ethically or morally acceptable. And you know that. But there is a place to play with these desires that is safe both for you and for other people.
Speaker: The space is a sort of fictional bubble that is negotiated between yourself and your partners with explicit consent and communication. And with these caveats, with knowing that no one is actually in danger that they haven't consented to, because you can consent to be in danger, that is a big thing, but you are consenting to it. And that no one is actually acting on these desires in the quote unquote real world with real world consequences.
Speaker: This allows, for example, people with rape fantasies, and this is a huge percentage of people, by the way, that is statistically known, a huge amount of people have rape fantasies. It allows people with these fantasies to play with that fantasy without actually being sexually assaulted and without actually sexually assaulting anyone. But there are systems in place to play act that with safe words and having discussed it beforehand. And this is often restorative, freeing, sensual, and deeply intimate because you have to trust another person
Speaker: And trust is everything. All of this to say that kinksters are really good at understanding the difference between fiction and reality. And through fiction, through this bubble of unreality, we can explore the worst parts of humanity from a safe distance. And that's fun. That's why the horror genre exists. We as humans enjoy that thrill, but have the morals and ethics to know what isn't okay usually. And I believe that a lot of what fanfic writers are doing
Speaker: especially with things like gangbang, is engaging in the same behavior, whether they realize they're doing it or not. Fanfic is a safe space to explore the really nasty things humans get up to. And as long as you tag your content appropriately, your readers are consenting to engage with that content. And these, I think, are the best gangbangshippers. We have a lot of fun getting really nasty and weird and violent and questioning lines of consent. But everyone who's reading it has consented to read the fic.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you so much for kind of taking us through that because I think that's such an important element of kink that a lot of people may not sort of understand on the surface level when like they first think about it. And I think that that's such an important
Speaker: conversation for people to have amongst themselves, like not just in fandom, but particularly in fandom, because there tends to be cultures that emerge out of kind of a performance of morality that - Or a pressure for it. Yeah, exactly. That sees these bubbles of unreality and mistake them for reality and make judgment calls based on those.
Speaker: that are really, really dangerous and really, really nasty. And I also think that a lot of people, like in general, should be educated more about kink and about what the ethics are kind of behind it, what the appeal is behind it, because I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding before a lot of people because they just see like, oh, it's violent, therefore bad.
Speaker: Or it's like dubious consent, which is what dubcon stands for. That's bad. Rape is bad. So I feel like more people should have this as part of their sex education. I agree. Because I think that there's a place for it in the wider popular culture, not just in fandom. And that will kind of like, you know, from the outside will inform fandom in a much better way, in a much healthier way.
Speaker: So yeah, thank you for taking us down some of this Mercury. I really appreciate it. And there are some complicated pieces of as you learn more about this topic, there's not just one way to do this safely and ethically, right? There's different frameworks. There's as a shorthand safe, sane, and consensual. There's also RAC, which is risk -aware, consensual kink, where like, as Mercury noted, like there
Speaker: you can agree to be in some level of danger and have the means to get out of that and to say for it out of that. And in the context of fanfic reading, you have that as well. It's the back button. It's closing out of something and stepping away and saying, nope, that was past my boundary. It was at my boundary. This is not for me. And it's OK to hit that and step aside.
Speaker: That is absolutely okay. And I think as we talk about the ethics of kink and fandom, I said I was going to bring this up, but we also, it's worth looking at the most famous example of where fandom and understanding of
Speaker: kink sort of like came together in the general social consciousness. And so really briefly, that is the publication of the Fifty Shades of Grey novels and then the films that came from them. Those novels started as Twilight fan fiction. They depicted a lot of kinky acts, but they didn't always do so. They often did not do so in ways that were in alignment with the ethics of the BDSM
Speaker: some community. And so they came to the attention of a very large, very hegemonic piece of the population. And some of that was great. It raised awareness that these very interesting things are out there that people may have wanted to get into.
Speaker: But the framework that they provided was used as a little bit of a manual for how to get into this in a way that didn't set people up well. And that was a lot. There was a lot of discussion within fandom and the community and the publishing community and all of this about the ethics of that particular depiction. Yeah. And like just very quickly to add to that, like.
Speaker: Dubious consent and bad kink rules are perfectly acceptable in fan fiction if you have warned for that. If you are not saying, this is a good example, like we'll get to that with Angbang. Angbang is not a healthy ship. It's not a healthy ship. It's not a healthy communicative ethical relationship, but it absolutely is a DS relationship in a lot of ways. But we as readers can ethically engage with it by saying,
Speaker: tagging it appropriately and hitting the back button if we don't want it. Yeah, I do want to go on record. Fifty Shades is a particular sore point for me. Why Fifty Shades is so dangerous is because it did open up BDSM and Kink to a large audience.
Speaker: while depicting what is romanticized relationship, like sexual abuse as kink, and that's not what's depicted in those books at all. Yeah, emotional and like intimate partner abuse. Essentially, you can play act that kind of thing as part of kink, but you have to consent to it, and there's no consent there. And essentially, the way that book was tagged, marketed,
Speaker: read and picked up was not accurate. Yes. It was perceived as a romanticized relationship rather than devious consent under negotiated consent views, like all of these things that if you knew that's what you were reading and the author knew that that's what they were writing, the tags would have told us something very different than what ended up being the cultural trend.
Speaker: They actually in a really good podcast that I would recommend for anyone who wants to like, just listen to Kinky people talk about Kinky stuff called the field dorks. And they have a whole episode, multiple episodes where they trash 50 shades. And one of the things that they repeatedly talk about is if this was marketed as a horror, I'd be super into this.
Speaker: Yeah, but it's not. It's marketed as something positive, and that's not what it is. It's romance. Yeah, it's marketed as romance. It's like, this isn't romance. Yeah, just also a quick plug for romance author Jenny Trout, who did a chapter by chapter takedown of Fifty Shades, where she went in detail about how problematic everything is.
Speaker: It's still up on her website and it is a fantastic read if you really just want to hate read something without actually hate yourself. I would also recommend Roxanne Gay's essay on the topic in her collection Bad Feminist is also fantastic. There's a lot of good work that was done in response to this cultural event. So let's get back to Aang Bang. One more thing that I want to say.
Speaker: When we are reading fanfic, we can get a lot of important context and empathy building and a lot of things out of fanfic. But unless something is written as a manual or how to do something, how to get into a particular event or subculture or anything like that, we should not take a piece of fanfiction and use it as an instruction manual. That's really important.
Speaker: it needs to be peer reviewed by the people who are part of that subculture. It needs to be a good resource instead of just an available one. So as long as we're not reading our delightful dark fic as the manual for how we should operate anything and romanticize anything and find that normalized in our own lives, we are okay. And bringing it back to Ang Bang.
Speaker: I think we could, one sort of starting point of a conversation we could be having is the relationship of power in this ship. So I think personally, now that we're entering it with the framework of we're in our little bubble, we have all consented, we are all consenting adults who have consented to read dubious consent and potential sexual assault and violence and all of that. We've all consented to read this.
Speaker: I think a really big reason why the ship is so popular is because it taps into something fundamental about kink and that is that kink is in many ways a reclaiming of power. So there's a really interesting article on Vice by Rebecca Liu called the subversive sexual power found in erotic fan forums, which is it's a very, very short
Speaker: but it's all about sort of how sex is often about power and fans. In her argument, it's about female fans, but I think we can include queer fans. And that's because the statistic that most shippers are women is outdated, to say the least. But so her argument is basically that fans are able to feel powerful in a powerless world through kink in fandom. She quotes a Janelle Monae lyric, everything is sex except sex, which is power. And then says about weird kinky fanfic that it's, and this is a quote,
Speaker: It's a big fuck you to the way in which mainstream culture drip feeds us one singular meaning of sexual attraction, dictating not only who to desire, but how. And what's left is a, yeah, what's left is a sanitized understanding of wanting and loving that excludes so many types of bodies and so many ways of loving them. The form of attraction seen on Tumblr's kink communities allows for disgust, pain, and absurdity to be sources of arousal.
Speaker: in ways that dominant, heteronormative mindsense about sexuality do not. Now, she's talking about people who want to fuck Venom or Pennywise, but I definitely think this applies to Aang Bang as well, because power and the evils of power are such a heavy through -line in Tolkien's work. He wrote these two villains in particular to be all about trying to be powerful. So of course, if we're looking for subversion of power, hello, perfect. They're hot because they're powerful.
Speaker: Even if they achieve their power in a horrible way, they're hot because they're powerful. Right. And like, there's another thing there's from an article by Justin Lee Miller called the psychology of sadism, why some people are turned on by others pain. And this article lists a whole lot of reasons of why people might be into sadism as a kink, but one really stands out in terms of bang bang. And that is quote, this pattern of findings suggests that for some men.
Speaker: sadistic fantasies may be a way of exerting control that they don't otherwise feel they have, or perhaps compensating for a perceived deficiency or something that they feel is lacking in their own life.
Speaker: Like, that just screams Sauron to me. Sauron. Sauron. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think also Fanfic allows us to interrogate all of this at a remove, like a very personal view, but a safe and removed view as well. It's, it is that safe space between us and the screen as well. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the discussion about power
Speaker: is really useful here as well. And I also want to say that, like, I was talking about Fobs and the Russian influence, and I really don't want to paint all Russian Ang Vang fans as like Fobs. I'm 100 % sure that there are a great many of them who are engaging in King Fiscor's behavior the way that everyone else is. It is notable also that the translator of the 1992 edition of Lord of the Rings and the Russian, Vladimir Muravyov, specifically noted that The Lord of the Rings is a book about the nature of power. Right.
Speaker: I said this is all about power, and it is. The Moraviyev quote is, quote, this is a book about the nature of power, which seeks after power over mankind, power without morals and enslaving power based on lies and violence. And Markova, who quotes Moraviyev, notes after that quote that the first Russian Tolkienists saw it as a way out of the dead end ideology, the structured totalitarian world of evil, lies and slavery.
Speaker: So like not all Russian Tolkienists are like mobs. I really want to make that very clear. But it is very much this like this conversation coming out of Russia about the nature of power in the Lord of the Rings if the translation of the Lord of the Rings is super heavy on the point of it being about power. Here we come to sort of this like conflagration of it and power manifests in really kinky ways is what I'm saying.
Speaker: I think that seems like a place where I'd like to maybe transition into talking a bit about what I think is my own personal favorite interpretation of this ship, which mixes power with religion, with theology, with the Odyssey. And the best way I can describe that, and I have seen this done in this ship. And I think it's, for one thing, I think this ship can be a really great way of interrogating
Speaker: Tolkien's theology, for one, I think it can be an interesting way of interrogating some of the contradictions that are inherent, say, in Sauron's character, particularly in the way Tolkien changes his description of Sauron over time. And in things like Tolkien stating that Sauron adored Mordegoth,
Speaker: But Sauron also loved order, and yet Morgoth Melkor represents really this kind of chaos god. His mission is so much at odds with Sauron that there's a lot of times you'll run into fandom people asking the question, well, what happened there? How did this end up happening? How did this character who is being described as obsessed with order or loving order or wanting to order the world
Speaker: end up thinking his best direction in life was to throw his hat in with this chaos destructor god. Yeah, with this god who he wants to see the annihilation of the world. Chaos is a ladder. I definitely want to hear all of your stuff about the Odyssey and Saints and all of that Cameron. I'm super into it. I think it's great.
Speaker: But this is also exactly why I read this relationship as so much fundamentally based on power and the hunger for power. Because Sauron has shown time and time again that he's able to play submissive to get what he wants. So at some point, submitting to Melkor becomes simply the latter to climbing rather than genuine belief. And the way that I read it, and that's just what I love about fandom, is we can have these completely different interpretations of this ship, and they're both completely correct. For me,
Speaker: I almost don't think he actually adored Melkor all that much because Melkor is an object towards his achievement of things. And once Melkor's in the void, I do not think if Melkor came out of the void, Sauron would just go back to groveling. There is one Lord of the Rings and he does not share power. Hell yeah. And that's definitely an interpretation that I've seen and it's one that I can enjoy in some forms. It's not the headcanon I have, but like you say,
Speaker: The great thing about fandom and fic in general, and Sauron in particular, because he's a shapeshifter in more ways than one, is that both of those can exist simultaneously and make complete sense in the context of Tolkien's greater canon. Because for me, this is when Tolkien says the door.
Speaker: That's something that, to me, brings to mind those examples of Baroque art that mix the very erotic with the religious symbolism like ecstasy of St. Teresa, those kinds of things where this religious adoration obtains this physical, sensual, erotic dimension.
Speaker: For me, that's, I think, what hits the spot most when it comes to depicting Sauron and Milford. Now, personally, my head canon is I see Sauron becoming quite disillusioned. But that is the way that I try to make that contradiction that I see between this odd couple of the order lover and the chaos god work. It has to do with this idea of religious adoration.
Speaker: Whereas for me, what works for me, what's very sexy for me, is the seducer power climbing and being the docile submissive to get what he wants.
Speaker: if Melkor comes back from the void, Melkor putting the groveling scheming up, start back in this fucking place. That's delicious. But that's what's so great about all of this. All of this is true. All of it works. Because I think the place where I really enjoy is the place almost between those interpretations of
Speaker: the uncertainty as the character is the reader as to whether the adoration is genuinely felt or performative and at what point it changes over between those two when it is opportunistic and when it is genuine and how those different interpretations change how events work. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm falling under. I think... My headcanon is Sauron always followed Melkor from a Littlefinger chaos is a ladder kind of thing. But I don't think that Sauron is as much like Littlefinger because I feel like Sauron has teeth in a way that Littlefinger didn't.
Speaker: I think by the time Morgoth is thrown down at that point, all Sauron has left is contempt and he knows he can do better. And if I'm going to read a book, that's what I want. I want him to be like, fuck Morgoth. He had everything and threw it away. I can do it better than he can. I'm going to be what Morgoth couldn't be.
Speaker: Yeah, he never followed the schedules I made for him. I did so much work in his planner. I can't he didn't follow any of my suggestions. And no, y 'all just introduced a new headcanon of Sauron for me, which is the like evil villains assistant. That's the first place I saw that with Bob. And honestly, the funny.
Speaker: The crack idea in my head for why Sauron fell is because he had to do one too many group projects in Al Maron. He just had had enough of this shit and he thought it would be better with Morgoth. No, it was just as fucking bad. Yeah. And also you couldn't see it because of the podcast and so people can't see my face. When Alicia mentioned Littlefinger, I was just like gasping because literally in my notes,
Speaker: And I'm going to read this to you what it says in my notes, OK? It just got there. So I was talking about how this idea of Melkor putting the groveling scheming upstart back in this place is very hot to me. So even though I do believe I agree with you, Sauron has a lot more teeth than Littlefinger does. Way more teeth, and they're all very sharp. Where Sauron's power is manipulative, Melkor gives me big power is power vibes.
Speaker: You know, in that scene in Game of Thrones where Littlefinger is like, power is manipulation. And then Cersei goes, no, power is power. And basically almost threatens to kill him because she has so much power that he has right now. Right. Right. Melkor, like Sauron thinks he's really fucking powerful. He thinks that he's the strongest, most powerful, smartest being on on Arda. But Melkor is fundamentally stronger than him. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm. Super into that. Yeah. And Sauron's just gotten too big for his britches. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: I love all of these different interpretations and these different readings. And this is what I love about both fandom and fan reception theory. Yes, yes, definitely. Yeah, same, same, same. Like I'm I'm not an ang bing shipper at all, really. And so I'm just I love hearing everybody's things like kind of coming together and like existing in
Speaker: I don't know if harmony is the right word for a chaos god. I feel like harmony is the exact wrong word.
Speaker: all exists simultaneously and is all sort of true at the same time and yeah I just really love because yeah again and kind of getting back into the discussion about like BDSM and like the discussion about negotiating power and exploring what power means to us as individuals it gives us a safe space to explore feeling empowered especially in places where
Speaker: we may not feel empowered at all. And I feel like in fiction and in art and in, you know, in fandom sort of teasing out a lot of those pieces, I feel like that's where we can find a sense of liberation and a sense of real engagement with the real world and sort of the real power dynamics, I guess, in a way that's safe and consensual for you. Exactly. And you can get as nasty and weird as you want.
Speaker: and then walk away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I don't know if anyone but me remembers this fucking fever dream. There was maybe two years ago, a fan poll that went around Twitter and Sauron won the comfort character fandom poll. Isn't that incredible? That's wild. I can't find it anywhere. It's disappeared into the memory hole that is the internet. It was Twitter, right? It was only two years ago. It was Twitter two years ago so it doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker: And it's just, it was so funny. It was so funny to me because I looked at this and I went, you see, this is evidence of how many Kingsters there are in this fucking community. The Dark Lord of Mordor? Why, yes.
Speaker: is your comfort character. I think Elrond got spot number two. Really? My emotional support Dark Lord. It's so wild. And I love it. It's so weird. I think it's also before I go too far off topic, I'm gonna say one thing and we're going back to the topic. But I think it's also a way that a lot of us use of
Speaker: hoping with the hard things that are going on in our actual real lives and the primary world and all of the very real hard things that are going on is to explore the hard things through fiction. And so being able to come back to something that is a familiar and predictable
Speaker: trope of a dark lord and the relationship dynamics and interrogating that and all of that. It makes a lot of sense why there is so much of that in our fandom, but then also in so many other fandoms as well. And this is the crux of horror theory. This is what horror works because this is just what horror functions to do. It functions to give you, one, a safe space to be weird, and two,
Speaker: this way of coping with really difficult things in a way that's detached from reality. It's an endorphin release in a safe context or environment. It's a way to play act the very real fear and danger and all of that. Yeah, you said it much better than I did, but yeah.
Speaker: And I think that that's appropriate for a spooky season because I feel like we all kind of engage in this as a collective kind of at the same time. And it's important to do so because I feel like in a lot of ways people sort of see this time of year and autumn and spooky season as kind of like a pressure valve and kind of like a little bit of a release where we can kind of really let our weirdness shine and really let some of those dark things
Speaker: really come to the surface where we can play with them and feel safe with them in a way that is again liberating and healing in a lot of ways when so much of the world is actually extremely scary and very confining and depressing.
Speaker: Yeah, there is a very reasonable, logical and appropriate reason why we seek out Darkfic, why we write that, why we seek out Friday the 13th movies and you know, Freddie and Jason and you know, Nightmare on Elm Street and all of these classic horror pieces.
Speaker: because they are a way of processing that is safe and healthy. And my husband, he asked me like, you have an anxiety disorder, why do you enjoy playing Silent Hill? Why do you enjoy doing these things? Because I'm in control of Silent Hill. I can turn it off. I can't turn off the real world. I can turn off the game. Yeah. So there's a really interesting phenomenon that's been observed that
Speaker: the people who most enjoy kidnap stories. So plots about kidnapping, anywhere from bodice ripping to, like, you're, you know, being kidnapped by the pirate and now you're in a romance novel, to genuine horrifying kidnap, like, rape scenario fan fiction and stories. The people who enjoy those the most are generally, not always, but generally people who experience a whole lot of shame or limitation in their life.
Speaker: like people who are extremely religious, teenage girls, queer people who are still in the closet, like people who experience a lot of shame, they cannot do these things themselves. So they cannot experience sexual pleasure on their own. So if you have the mechanism of you've been kidnapped, so you now have no choice in the matter, you can now enjoy that experience. You can enjoy the sexual experience because the power is out of your control. You are not blamed in your shame space. And I think
Speaker: What's really interesting about Aang Bang, and especially because Fobs really created a big massive chunk of the ship and Fobs also created this like office worker dynamic between them, is that you kind of get with Aang Bang, you get this like experience of
Speaker: to be crass sucking your boss's dick because he has power over you and then being stronger than him at the end of the day. And like having more power than him at the end of the day. And so like, I think I, again, there's this two Melkor fans who are angry at me for saying this and listening to this entire podcast and having a fucking thing about Melkor. Sorry guys. Sorry. But I do feel like Melkor is secondary in this shit. I think he is
Speaker: the catalyst for which Sauron grows.
Speaker: Hmm. Yeah, I mean that kind of ties into my personal pet theory about like how I think Sauron is a much more interesting character and villain than Morgoth ever was or ever will be. Again, sorry to the Melkor friends. But I sort of feel like Satan's lieutenant, I feel like, is always going to be kind of more interesting than the popular depiction of Satan. You know, Paradise Lost accepted.
Speaker: that list is way more interesting but it's like yeah it's like i feel like paradise losses being elusive for my feet sort of the exception but i feel like the person who's not the embodiment of the evil is always going to be a little more interesting because we can't kind of conceive of
Speaker: the literal embodiment of evil as like a person, you know what I mean? And so it's sort of like that person who is not like this archetypal sort of nebulous sort of being that's supposed to just be pure evil is always going to be more interesting. And that's why I think Sauron is a lot more of a compelling and a lot more powerful villain than Morgoth kind of ever was or will be. Yeah, I agree with that totally. And I think
Speaker: One of the things that kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the road to hell being paid with good intentions and, you know, who would be worse with the ring? It would be Gandalf. Sauron has the distinction of, despite what Tolkien says in his letter to Christopher about when he was dealing with good and evil and trying to work that out for himself, recovering from his time at the Psalm,
Speaker: that's what generated Morgoth for him was working through that. Despite him saying that, it's Sauron who's the character that Tolkien in the 50s starts to refer to as someone who at one time actually did have good intentions and did actually start out to some degree in some way with benevolent intentions. That's an incredible, incredible character arc to take someone on.
Speaker: Yeah. Totally. Totally. I mean, that's why he's so interesting. Yeah. And like, it's how do you get from this really good intention to just wanting to make things a little bit more orderly. And like me and Cameron are both control freaks. Okay. We're control freaks and perfectionists and I have really horrible ADHD and desperately need to get my life into control at all times. So like totally relate, totally relate to someone wanting to
Speaker: help people be their best version of their self. But I also, through Sauron actually, I can use him as an example of what not to do. Because I can see myself going, I'm controlling other people with my version of what's correct. And that's not okay.
Speaker: I know what's best for you. And Cameron and I joke all the time about how Sauron is a Capricorn. And I'm like, I'm a Capricorn. And I'm like, yes, I relate to these feelings of wanting that degree to control and kind of saying to myself, man, if I had the power, if I ran the world, things would be a lot better because I would force people to be kind to each other. I would force people to not be dips. Right. And it's sort of like.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like... That's a Virgo. Yeah. It's like, I'm a Virgo moon. So it's... There you go. But it's like that sense of, again, thinking that you kind of know best and that you can direct people to be their best. That's such a really powerful intention and such a dangerous intention too. That's how cults start, man. Yes.
Speaker: Yes, exactly. I mean, that's how fascism happens. Yeah, that's how fucking fascism happens. And that's all that's contained in that line in the Lord of the Rings at the Council of Elrond when Elrond says, nothing is evil in the beginning, even Sauron was not so. That's in the context of what could happen to anyone if they took up and used the ring with good intentions. You can become Sauron. Exactly.
Speaker: Even Sam, when his whole imagination of what's going to happen, if he takes the ring and becomes a gardener, and just gardens the whole fucking world today. Eventually, it will be a totalitarian garden. It will happen. Eventually, it's going to be the most regimented garden with nothing growing out of place and nothing on its needs. We're going to get monoculture. We're going to get...
Speaker: plant like Bradley pairs all over the place. Sam, getting the rain is Monsanto.
Speaker: Oh, that's a fucking hot take. We need a whole other podcast episode just about the ring. And then I can rant for two hours about a major follow up number three. For what I want to talk about at Miskon this year. Follow up number three, I guess. I do want to mention really quickly something that occurred to me when we were talking about Sauron and how he's so compelling versus Melkor. It's really the R1 versus AO1 problem.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. Because Tolkien spent a lot more time developing Sauron than he did Morgoth Melkor. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great parallel. Very, very parallel. I was thinking about it, too, in terms of we get to see Sauron in three ages. We get to see Morgoth Melkor in one. Although I wonder if we actually get more direct screen time in the narrative from Melkor, especially if you add in the Book of Lost Tales.
Speaker: and the early depictions where it's not quite to the Silmarillion where everything's summarized and you have more, more full narrative of everything. You might get more of Melchor then, but he's not as varied as Sauron is. This also brings into the point of do we consider the ring to be Sauron, which I know me and you both do. Yes, yes. So if we consider the ring to be Sauron, then Sauron is there the entire time. So then we get more Sauron.
Speaker: Exactly. But that's like it. We'll look at it. Say, well, another follow up episode with you guys just talking about Sauron instead of this freaky ship, man. Sorry folks, we're just becoming a Sauron fan podcast for like the next 82 episodes. We'll be back to everyone else eventually. This is how we end up in the bad place. We don't want to do that. We don't want to become the poor little miyami house. But to bring Morkoth back into it a little bit.
Speaker: One of the things I find really fun, this is not even just sexy or evil or nasty or cute or whatever. I find it really fun that we have someone who's just throwing fucking temper tantrums every five fucking seconds and his nanny. Because Melkor is a bazillion times more powerful than Sauron. What does he do with it? Breck stuff. Whereas Sauron is like, oh, order, I must make things.
Speaker: fix things and make things organized and you're just.
Speaker: Knocking down the towers, okay. Fuck these lamps. Yeah, fuck these lamps, man. Fuck these trees. Just like, hair forming some shit, you know. I absolutely adore, like, Lieutenant Arasaran and that depiction of him as the long -suffering Lieutenant of Engden, trying to take Morgoth, Mr. Idea Man, take his ideas and make them work functionally. Yes, yes.
Speaker: Oh my God. I just had the most horrible thought of, oh no, Morgoth as like Elon Musk. And I don't read a lot of thick because I'm very, very picky and I don't have a lot of time, but I, one of the things I really love is modern use and the really common Morgoth and Sauron modern use.
Speaker: are office -based always. And they are very, not always, but mostly office -based. And I have read a fic where Melkor is this like big CEO and he hires this like weird goth punk, very well buttoned, like, you know, like fashionable goths, the ones who have like really perfectly done everything perfectly, but everything's in black, hires him. And then it's just like, oh,
Speaker: You're a kinky bitch. I am also a kinky bitch. We're going to have some fun with this. Oh, my God. I love it. Yeah. Producer Tim gets to cut this later if he wants, but I do also want to point out that Tim, who is always, you know, along for the journey here, but never taken the spotlight, did just suggest a Blackadder and bang mashup. And I need this in my life. I need this in my life, too.
Speaker: Definitely. It's a good idea. It's a good idea. Oh my god. It's such a terrible idea of like, especially like, of Elon Musk being just literally destroying everything he touches and poor Sauron being, I guess, whoever's left at Twitter.
Speaker: The one loyal employee holding the entire network together. Just having a weird obsession with the letter X. Yeah, we'll keep on chopping it, I guess. I don't know. The parallels don't quite match up, but... I will see if I can find, because that's not one of the ones I have bookmarked, which I'm very surprised. I will see if I can find that thing, because it was fun. Terrible. It makes me nauseous just thinking about it. Oh, man.
Speaker: Do you guys want to talk more about some of the really freaky gross shit that needs to be in the content warning? I mean, we did talk about, you know, actively talking about rape fantasies. So I think we have that all down in the content warning. I mean, I can read to you tags on the six Ang Bang Fix that I have bookmarked. Oh boy. They're actually not that nasty. Oh, okay. So one of them is called Melkor's Golden Dragon.
Speaker: And that's the cock rings one. Okay. That includes tags anal sex, anal fingering, rimming, cock rings, forge sex, light bondage, light thumbs up, fluff and fluff smut. Fluff smut. Oh. I know. I mean, that's just fluffier than I was expecting. Yeah.
Speaker: Another one called Golden Notes, which says rough sex. More tags to be added later. More tags to be added later. Mild footplay. Myron is the best role player. Dom sub play in submission. Footplay. Mild footplay. I think the mild tag is what's getting me. Just a little footsy under the table there. Is it like socks? Or fully? Is that what mild means?
Speaker: I mean, most of these aren't even, I'm sort of shocked at myself that the ones that have bookmarked are not the nasty ones. It's like you have to kiss the boot, but you don't have to lick the boot. Is that what mild means? That must be what mild means. I will say there is the one that's number at the top of it, which means most recent, it's called a lesson in dominance. Now, mind you, I can't tell you if I can recommend any of these because I have, the last one was read
Speaker: in 2013, and I don't know if they're any good anymore, but I'm going to read you the summary. And this is a modern AU. It says, a shadow fell over the table and a big hand slammed down next to Myron's notes, upsetting his neatly sorted markers, which he wanted to protest, but when he glanced up, he fell silent. An upperclassman had approached their table. A senior Myron thought he hadn't seen the guy around much, but he always sported a sour expression and messy dark hair that hugged his ribcage.
Speaker: his leather jacket was torn in places but in a way that seemed deliberate and his skin had a sickly pallor as though he hadn't seen the sun in several weeks. Myron didn't know what he studied or where he had suddenly come from, didn't even know his name, only that the smile he wore now was mesmerizing. Can I help you? Myron asked, throat suddenly dry. On the contrary, I'm here to help you.
Speaker: I know a thing or two about dominance. Want me to teach you? Of course, of course there is a high schooler college AU. College AU? It's probably better, but of course there is. There's also a really good rock band AU, but I have to find out where that is.
Speaker: Like Melkor's in a metal band. Oh, I think I've seen at least art for that. I've not read it. I've definitely seen that art. Amazing. I do love an AU just for the way that you can take it and interrogate a lot of the standard pieces of understanding of a dynamic and just take it in a different context and re -examine it. I love them so much.
Speaker: They're my happy place. So thank you guys so much for such a fun and informative and really engaging conversation. I feel like I'm going to be thinking about this conversation for a while. So thank you guys so much again for coming. Is there anything that you guys would like to plug? Like your socials, some upcoming projects where we can find you, anything like that?
Speaker: Oh, let's see. Well, you can find a recording of a paper I gave at the Mythopoic Society, OMS, this year online. If you go to dc .swosu .edu and search for either my name or the title through Sauron's Eye, you should be able to find that. Very much about the Sauron Theodicy Order, Problem of Evil, Art of Hard stuff. I'm currently working on preparing a couple of my recent conference papers for hopeful publication.
Speaker: One is a look at Sauron's original name Myron through the lens of the literary automastics. The other is about the stages of Sauron's development over Tolkien's lifetime and how those stages map onto three proto Sauron characters from the Book of Lost Tales. Next year I'll be presenting at the International Congress on medieval studies at Kalamazoo with a paper looking at questions surrounding Sauron's corporeality and bodily wounds. All of these papers are the first stepping stones towards a larger project focused on Sauron, another part of which involves
Speaker: reception and fandom studies. And for that I'll be producing one or more surveys, which I'm hoping I can get some good responses to within fandom. So if you have ever engaged with Tolkien at all, even if the ship is not your thing, even if Sauron isn't your favorite character, and this is something that you would like to participate in, you can sign up for a mailing list to be notified when that project goes live by going to SauronProject .com
Speaker: and then train your email. That site will also direct you to my other locations on the web. Just go down to the bottom bar and you can find my blog and my scholarship page and whatnot. And once again, thank you for having me. Yeah. So I gave a paper on Sauron's role as femme fatale on Numenor for the Tolkien society summer seminar that can be found on their YouTube. I can be found on my blog, which is, and its folks are queer at sub stack. Uh, I also have a card, which is lush magic dragon, that card, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, with all of my information.
Speaker: I'm on Twitter and blue sky as mercury reads, and I'm going to stick it out on Twitter until they force me to leave. And I'm probably going to be submitting something for myth on, on the ring as querying mechanism and how it reflects Sauron's behavior in the second age, as well as in the mechanism for querying the seemingly respectable in the third. So keep your eyes out for that as well. It's all kind of part of this ongoing.
Speaker: thing that will eventually be my PhD. So it's just going to be endless. Amazing. Well, yes, speaking of MythCon, we do want to announce on here on the podcast that we are going to be co -chairing and putting together a online midwinter seminar.
Speaker: called Something Mighty Queer. Queerness in fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, and other mythopoic work. This is a
Speaker: event put on by the mythopoic society which we are all members of and we would love to see material from you guys and we would love to see you guys come to and attend our lovely event so the call for papers deadline is november 30th 2023
Speaker: We are accepting all sorts of papers and presentations on topics about queer readings, queer coding, a whole bunch of things about not just queerness and Tolkien, but across the speculative fiction and science fiction and fantasy sphere.
Speaker: If you would like to submit your proposal, please send them to the email address, oms -chairatmythcon .org. And that is again, oms -chairatmythcon .org. We look forward to seeing all of you there. The date of the seminar is February 17th and the 18th, 2024. Again, it's going to be held completely online via Zoom and Discord.
Speaker: So we hope to see you guys there. We are very excited to see what proposals you put forward to us as well. We're just so excited about what could come from this midwinter seminar. Yeah. Thank you both, Cameron and Mercury, for coming out. This has been such a good discussion. And I can't wait to have you guys back. Thank you for inviting me. This is so much fun. Yeah. You guys are great. We love you.
Speaker: We love you both. Speaking for Cameron, I see. Cameron is definitely in agreement because I got caught up with the one you did recently with Robin and Chris and Steve, which was really good. I really enjoyed that one. Oh, thanks. I'm very excited about that work. Me too. That episode.
Speaker: made me realize I should probably ask Steve if he wants to help me with the PhD. Just like everything Steve said I was just like yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I know you already did the silver gifting episode but if you ever want someone to just come on and read all of these gifts that you have given me like out loud, I'll do it. I always talk about silver gifting because silver gifting and
Speaker: Sauron on our Farzan doesn't have a name. Isn't that awful? Makes me sad. Got to come up with something. They're the two that I know the most about. So. Should we just call it the sodded? Like that could just do something that is the sodded. Nice. Do you love it? I like it. Sauron. I agree with that though. Sauron. Sauron. That sounds like a medication. That's an anti -depressant. Oh. So let's just say an elf name? It has to be. It's Sauron.
Speaker: It's what you take in addition to your antidepressant. It helps enhance it, you know, well be trained or whatever. It's like a vilify or whatever. Yeah, a vilify. That's it. You know, really just like, just like there's always, you know, a generic name and then a brand name. We do get that out of all of the Numenoreans, especially the later Numenorean things. Is our Farazon the generic of silver gifting?
Speaker: Thank you Merkurian Cameron. Thank you listeners for coming out and giving us a listen today. If you want to find us, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify. You can also stream episodes directly on Zendcaster. That's zendcaster .com slash queer lodgings, the Tolkien podcast, hyphens in between all those words.
Speaker: Please leave us a rating, like, share, and subscribe where you can do so. Also visit us on QueerLodgings .com. We have all of our episodes up there, including resources, and we may or may not have a merch stored now.
Speaker: You can also find us on all your favorite social medias, almost. You can find us on Facebook at queer lodgings, Twitter for right now at queer underscore lodgings. And we are now also on blue sky at queer lodgings. You can send us an email at queer lodgings podcast at gmail .com with suggestions, thoughts that you have. We love hearing from you guys. Every single email that comes through, we all get all very excited about it. We do. Yeah, we really do.
Speaker: Cool. Thank you guys. Thank you so much for bringing us out.
Speaker: But from what I've noticed, the silver gifting fics tend to be a lot longer. They tend to be very long. They take a lot of plot development. The Angbang fics are usually just fucking. Just here for the smut.
