Fandom Voices: Women in Fanworks by Dawn Walls-Thumma

Fandom Voices: Women in Fanworks

The role of women in Tolkien's legendarium has been the subject of decades of scholarly and fannish debate. The Tolkien fandom has been no less fraught where women are concerned. The treatment of women fans, the reception of women characters (including and maybe especially those embellished or added into media adaptations), interpretation of how women are presented in the legendarium, and how fans create fanworks (or don't) using women have all been areas of controversy.

It is the latter that concerns us here. Last month, we looked at Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data on how fanfiction writers create fanworks using women characters. This month, we consider the perspectives of those writers and creators: What their experiences are with creating and reading/viewing fanworks that involve women, and if these experiences have changed over time.

We asked two questions of participants:

• If you create fanworks, what have been your experiences creating Tolkien fanworks that include women characters? If you've created fanworks for several years or more, have your experiences changed over time?
• If you read and/or view fanworks, how do you see women depicted in the Tolkien fanworks you read or view? If you've read/viewed fanworks for several years or more, has the depiction of women characters changed over time?

Twenty-two participants' replies are used in this article. However, as with all of our Fandom Voices articles, we never close our surveys, and if you wish to reply to this one, you can respond to the survey here. We will continue to update the response collection here as new responses come in.

The Canon

Participants observed on many occasions that Tolkien's canon itself presented challenges when writing about women. Ziggy notes that, "Although there are few women characters in Tolkien, those that are given a role in the narratives, are strong and independent," but goes on to write that, despite the presence of strong women, characters like Arwen are "a shadow with no part to play that has any significance." Other participants noted that the available details about canonical women were so scant that they became original characters or OCs. Hennethgalad writes that "​​it’s always OC time, except maybe, maybe Galadriel" because "there’s so little text to work with."

Another respondent makes a similar observation, adding that being classified as an OC carries its own burdens: "There is, perhaps, the tendency to view underdeveloped female characters as being more in the realm of OCs, which again seem to get far less engagement in general than canon characters. But when given so little information on them from the text, it is almost necessary to imbue them with originality due to the lack of anything else to go on (sometimes not even a name!)"

How to leverage the canon in fanworks about women also opens questions for creators. Returning to hennethgalad: "The question, for those remaining 'true' to canon remains whether to perpetuate Tolkien's period attitudes or to allow each character full agency and recognise their independent existence." Another participant used Tolkien's own canonical tendency to write his works as in-universe histories as a way to circumvent the sexism and misogyny present in the legendarium:

Early on, I focused on Tolkien's female characters largely as he depicted them—just expanding on what was given. Over time, I've done more that deals with finding the ways in which female characters, whether canon or original, can provide plausible rereadings of Tolkien's texts, where women are more active politically, on a parity in some cases with male characters, and then within the story also suggest why this version of the character might not have been "recorded" properly within the conceit of "found texts."

(It's worth noting that Tolkien used this same strategy in his own works, namely in the two versions of how Bilbo obtained the One Ring—the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (LotR) versions—when he found that his earlier writings didn't align with his later direction for the story.)

Elwingd made the observation that, despite a dearth of canonical information about women, fanworks communities often use each others' works and interpretations to provide a shared foundation for how characters are viewed: "It's very easy for the writer to go 'OOC' [out of character] as there is little-to-no 'canon' information on Tolkien's female characters; however, I've found that most fanworks focused on a particular female character tend to have authors that run in the same circles/read each others' works and are thus influenced by each other, limiting the number of widely different portrayals." Given that most fanworks creators are women, it is interesting to consider how, in this regard, the shared authority of women fans supplants the authority of the original male creator.

Participants varied as to whether they saw the canonical challenges of writing women as frustrations or opportunities. "I have at times struggled with certain female characters due to the lack of basic information in the text while trying to map my story as close as possible to canon," writes one respondent. "The lack of a name is one that constantly makes me struggle, for Tolkien can 'hide' details and information about a character through their name, so the lack of one seems to be an even greater character hole than most." This writer goes on to say that, "in a male-character-heavy fandom, I can almost enjoy a greater level of freedom to explore these characters that have very little settled in canon or in fanon about them. I won't call this a good thing, rather it is making the best out of a negative."

Other participants did see the lack of canonical characterization as a positive and an opportunity. "I enjoy building on characters for which there are few textual references to go by, or exploring women characters that would be deemed 'background characters,'" writes one participant. A different respondent notes similarly: "I see a great deal of variety, but there's always opportunity for more. I really enjoy it when minor characters are fleshed out, and there's so much opportunity to do that in Tolkien's works."

Motives and Craft

There are many reasons creators want to make fanworks about women. Our recent article on the analysis of Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data broadly identified representational and reparative motives: the need to show the perspectives of women in the legendarium, and the need to repair sexist and misogynistic elements of the legendarium through fanworks. Responses to our questionnaire showed tendencies in both directions.

"For me, writing about women in fic, is often linked to exploring womanhood," Shadow wrote:

Not in a narrative sense, it rarely has any importance to the story I tell, but in a personal sense. I'm agender in a "my gender is very low on the priority list" sense, and pretty much the only thing I am certain about is that I'm definitely not male, so I like looking into the what-ifs of being a woman in writing.

Maggie Honeybite, who started writing in the early 2000s and recently returned to fandom after a long hiatus, likewise identifies the experience of womanhood as a motive to focusing more on female characters after her return to fandom: "Since coming back to fandom I've written more female characters. I think that it's a question of where I was/am in life. After having kids and experiencing some life struggles, I find I can relate to Tolkien's female characters more, which means that I enjoy exploring their experiences more than I used to."

Representations of the spectrum of relationships between women are also a subject and motive of fanworks. One participant states: "Generally I have seen compassionate takes and various explorations of a transformative nature, which I liked. In fanart, I've seen more wlw [women loving women] depictions than in the past which I like. But also platonic friendships between women characters are represented more often, I've noticed, which is also great."

Zhie has seen a shift in motive, from wanting to see self-insert characters to working with characters in the legendarium:

I've seen less Mirkwood Princess self-inserts than I once did, but my reading/viewing is spotty at best, and I am not a reliable individual when it comes to the overall fandom. However, in the years earlier when I was running het swaps, there were a lot of requests for OFCs [original female characters] or reader-as-character stories. When I poke around now, there seems to be more attempts to find characters already in Tolkien's works to work with.

Several participants noted that they were motivated to write about women because of fandom institutions such as groups, events, and challenges that specifically encouraged it. Legendarium Ladies April, Femslash February, the Textual Ghosts Project, and the SWG were all mentioned as Tolkien-focused projects encouraging the creation of woman-centric fanworks, and An Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Tumblr as places friendly to women-centric fanworks. In some cases, these projects didn't need to focus on women per se but on adapting Tolkien to a more diverse and modern audience. Marie Prosser mentioned the Mythgard Institute's Silmarillion Film Project as pushing her to write more about women: "For The Silmarillion, most of my female characters remained supporting roles until I became involved in the Silmarillion Film Project. The challenge of adapting Tolkien's story to television invited more exploration of the female characters, and had space for whole episodes with female protagonists."

"[F]or me, writing women is simply a product of women existing in reality and being fundamentally a part of everything that happens," responded one participant. In other words, whether writing about friendship or love or motherhood and no matter how women apply their various skills, these experiences define life for over half of the world's population and should not be radical to create art about. The same respondent goes on to say:

As a friend of mine who teaches in the video game industry is fond of telling his students "female is not a personality trait." Women are just as diverse in all their aspects as men, and to deny them this in fanfiction is to deny true personhood to women in favor of either falling into or vehemently rejecting stereotypes, rather than embracing all the many nuanced possibilities that female characters can have.

These closing remarks begin to shade toward reparative motives for writing: using fanworks to repair the sexist and misogynist aspects of the legendarium, as well as addressing the limited depictions women typically receive in mainstream media. Several participants noted not just Tolkien but the broader popular culture made writing about women difficult, as creators have fewer models of diverse and fully realized women characters than they do men. Shadow observes that, in fanworks, this has begun to shift: "Over the last few years I've also seen more and more fic dealing with women outside of their purpose in romantic relationships, a fact that pleases me greatly. There is so much more room for women characters and exploring it is great fun."

Ziggy likewise identifies social justice motives not as the raison d'être for writing about women but nonetheless an influence on creators: "I don't think women characters have increased or changed in my reading as I tend to read strong writers who are very aware of feminism and although this is not the intent, they recognise the issues and write strong female characters."

Both Shadow and Ziggy introduce the issue of how women are written and how this has changed. Numerous participants observed a shift in how women are depicted in fanworks, which sometimes seem to respond to sexism-driven limitations reflected not just in the legendarium but the broader popular culture. Elwingd makes the observation that fanworks about women have settled between two extremes they occupied at different points in the fandom's (and popular culture's) history:

Over time, focus seems to have shifted from "women do not fight because they are better suited to healing" etc. etc. (a statement that I believe originated from Tolkien himself) to "women are badass and fight well and are often the most powerful characters ever" (aka the Joss Whedon idea of feminism) before finally settling back to "women can fight and heal and do girly things and do powerful things and the two are not mutually exclusive."

More options for women—and more openmindedness toward women characters (which will be discussed more below) also expands options for characterization. One participant observes:

I noticed the shift in mostly making fem characters almost "perfect" and always unapologetically good to make them a little more "flawed," which is probably due to the fact that the fem characters weren't well received at first, so people writing them as good people was revolutionary enough for the time, and now that the fandom is getting a little more openminded, fem characters are finally allowed to be flawed without being demonized for it.

Another writes: "[T]hings have been steadily (if slowly) improving with regard to diversity of depiction [of women] (less flawless saints & distressed damsels)."

Ultimately, motives for writing about women in a canon that often seems to actively thwart the endeavor are manifold. One participant summed this up succinctly: "I think I've seen everything, from people who hew quite tightly to what is presented by Tolkien himself, to people who prioritize OFCs to tell their story, to 'revisionist' readings of the female characters, etc."

Reader Reaction

The predominant response from participants observed a major shift in how women characters are regarded by readers. Many respondents detailed antagonistic reader reactions early in the fandom's online history, generally the first decade of the 2000s. Independence1776 describes this era as hostile enough to dissuade her from writing women¹:

When I started writing in Tolkien fandom in 2004, it was Not Done to write female-centric stories. They were generally a gateway to flames. Even background original female characters were a risk, safe only if they were unnamed and clearly around for just the length of the scene (someone in a market stall or a barmaid or the like). So that influenced how many women appeared in my fic in foregrounded roles.

Lyra describes the impact of the hostility towards women characters as influencing not just the stories she wrote but her own attitudes toward women in fanfiction:

Due to fandom being hostile towards original female characters (and even some canon female characters) and canon featuring way more (named) male characters, fanfiction was very male-centric. Writing fanfic that featured OFCs, or even just fleshed-out female canon characters, took quite some courage. It didn't initially have that courage. To be honest, I wasn't even aware at the start that something was wrong with that widespread attitude in fandom—canon was male-centric, so naturally fanfic was also male-centric. It took a general shift in fannish attitudes before I began to question that logic. Even then, it took a conscious effort to include more female (or other non-male) characters in my fanfic.

Not all experiences with writing women were negative, however. Zhie describes writing about minor, unnamed, and original female characters as a generally positive experience:

Generally, my experiences have been positive, whether writing about canon characters, unnamed canon "textual ghosts," or original characters. I did not spend a lot of time early in my participation in this fandom concentrating on "main" characters (avoidance of Arwen as an adult, not much writing about Éowyn, etc.), focusing rather on characters others were not writing about or might not have been aware of, or creating additional characters. There is a lot of potential for gap-filling.

One respondent describes the experience of writing in the early fandom versus more recently as a shifting in anxieties, as creators moved from the conviction that women-centric fanworks would invite criticism to worrying whether they were doing adequate justice to the task of depicting women—a group of characters neglected and sometimes damaged by the legendarium and popular culture:

To begin with, I was nervous about writing women characters, especially original female characters with sizable roles. Although people in fandom were already starting to be be less critical of Mary Sues than they had been in the past, apparently, there seemed to be a lot of internalized anxiety around, still, and it was catching. I don't think this has entirely gone, but I am seeing less of it. Nowadays, I guess there are competing anxieties: whether one has done sufficient justice to one's female characters, and so on. That said, the actual response I experienced from readers has always been more positive than my anxieties might have led me to expect.

As this respondent noted, positive reactions to women in fanworks have soothed anxieties about writing women. Other participants noted the same. Independence1776 identifies this as an intentional shift based on the work of fans like Elleth, whose fandom projects encouraged the creation of and positive reaction to fanworks about women:

That started to change around 2010. It was part of a larger general fandom trend that started examining the inherent sexism within fandom. There started being pushback against the vitriol and people started writing female characters in more roles and more frequently. Specifically in Tolkien fandom, Elleth’s push for Tolkien femslash and the creation of both Legendarium Ladies April and the Textual Ghost Project were, I think, some of the results of this movement.

Another participant observes a shift in the roles women are permitted to play in fanworks today versus in the early-mid 2000s: "I think these days there's definitely more willingness to write female characters in their own right, from their own perspectives, rather than just being part of a man's story as a mother or wife. (Obviously this still exists, and to some extent always will, but the point is to have such a variety that it doesn't make up the majority of the stories told about women.)"

Lyra likewise notes that this era produced a change in how she regarded women in her own fanworks:

When I made Maedhros's first and most knowledgeable healer a woman in a fanfic about his rescue from Thangorodrim, it felt like a very brave move, and I was surprised when nearly nobody batted an eye (or at least, nobody bothered to comment to tell me about their disapproval). By now, I no longer care about the judgement of those segments of fandom that are anti-feminist, so including and fleshing out female characters (whether or not they're the main character of a story) is actually quite fun. But it took a while to build up the confidence!

As the reaction to women in the past was not universal, nor is today an unequivocal utopia. One person noted positive change while also observing that there is still work to be done: "Most of my female OCs have been received better in recent years than they were when I first started writing about female characters, but my Fingon's wife OC is still poorly received by fans heavily invested in the Maedhros/Fingon ship. And femslash is still marginalized."

This participant's experience was echoed by other creators, who noticed a disparity in how readers reacted to stories about women versus those about men, especially in the realm of read counts and feedback. One participant observes: "I've found on the whole, the stories featuring female characters receive far less overall attention, but this does not discourage me from writing them, because the attention they do receive is wonderful to see and very motivating."

Another participant notices the same tendency but struggles to disentangle decreased reader engagement from women's lessened roles in the canon:

While it is difficult to draw a broad conclusion without hard numbers, I do have the perception that female-centric character works receive less attention than male-centric character works.

But it is also difficult without hard numbers to ascribe the disparity to gender as there are many male characters who seem largely ignored by fandom while certain characters (or more accurately, certain pairings) seem to dominate—but those dominating are still overwhelmingly male characters.

It does make one question if the female characters are overlooked because they're female, if they're overlooked because they're simply not 'the popular character' of the moment, or if they’re overlooked in fanworks because they were largely overlooked in the original work to begin with.

Even with my own writing, however, I find my female character stories seem to gather less interest or engagement from readers, and female-centric explicit works get even less attention both from readers or from other authors but again is that because they’re female or because they aren’t the fandom big-name populars?

This reduced audience engagement discourages some creators, as Gabriel describes: "My experiences have included feeling isolated from the rest of the fandom. People don't seem overly interested in discussing or reading about female characters. Especially OCs. As a result I have delayed for years posting works with these characters."

But if the climate surrounding writing about women has improved, why hasn't reader engagement increased to match? Another respondent writes: "Also, sometimes I feel that there can be a bit of discrepancy between what people say they want to see, with regard to women characters, and what they end up reading and writing."

Some of this discrepancy also seems rooted in pairings. While one respondent observes that "there are far, far less fics where the woman is depicted as actually evil so the m/m [male/male] ship can exist," another participant states that, "When looking just at singular-authored fanfiction, however, the apparent preference to write canon characters also tends to then skew toward male characters both because of their weight in the original writings but also because of the tendency of non-gen fiction to be m/m pairings or m/f [male/female] pairings rather than f/f [female/female] pairings."

Another participant also noticed that the most popular pairings are almost unequivocally male/male, with some slight attachment to certain male/female pairings:

I cannot think of a single top female pairing that comes anywhere close to the level of fandom popularity that pairs such as Fingon/Maedhros, Celebrimbor/Sauron, or Melkor/Sauron enjoy. There are no solid "these two are a couple, full-stop" female pairs whose hills people will die on. There are some that are more common but they are not ragingly popular. There are a few m/f pairs, such as Caranthir/Haleth, that enjoy broad popularity, but again, there is not a single f/f pair that comes close.

This participant goes on to describe how this extends to fanworks that increase LGBTQIA+ representation at the expense of women characters:

There is the tendency I've seen to further erase female characters either by ignoring them entirely or removing their female-ness. While this is often in pursuit of the undeniable need need for diversity in queer representation, it seems to me that it is often done at the expense of a canonical cis female character rather than a cis male character.

Nor is the tendency to denigrate women as a way to prioritize male pairings or characters completely gone. "[T]here are still problems with female characters being harshly judged in comparison to male characters," writes one participant, "or being deemed 'useless' if she's a non-combatant or hated for 'getting in the way' of a certain ship or ignored entirely in favor of even less fleshed out male characters (ex: Erestor)."

Finally, the discrepancy in how women are written in Tolkien-based fanworks compared to men also circle back to the issues of how women have been represented in popular culture and the challenges that poses to creators eager to repair that damage. "I still find that I do not write female characters as often or, occasionally, as nuanced as I would sometimes like," writes one participant. "I can still find it difficult at times to break out of the culturally imposed tropes and expectations of what a female character can, must, or shouldn't be."

Mary Sue

The term Mary Sue originated in 1973 in a Star Trek fanfiction written by Paula Smith, mocking the tendency of writers to include perfect female characters in their stories. The term swiftly spread to other pre-Internet and early Internet fandoms, of which Tolkien was of course a prominent one.

Reader reaction to Tolkien fanworks about women cannot be discussed without mentioning Mary Sue. Nearly a quarter of respondents in the original call for participants specifically mentioned Mary Sue in their responses and quite a few others referred to this era (some of these responses are found above) without specifically naming Mary Sue: a time when the term "Mary Sue" became a pretense and shorthand for hostility toward women characters.

Some respondents noted the paralyzing effect that the hostility toward so-called Mary-Sue stories had on their work. "I hit some bumps with my female OCs, especially the first one," writes Shadow. "I guess it happens when you start writing during the Mary Sue hate phase."

StarSpray makes a similar observation: "I started writing LotR fic in the mid-2000s, when I was a teenager, and back when to write a Mary Sue was to commit a cardinal sin, and it was several years before I felt confident enough in my writing and comfortable enough in my own skin to decide that that was stupid and I was going to write what I wanted anyway …."

Part of this anxiety seems rooted in the ballooning definition of what constitutes a Mary Sue story. Lyra explains this as follows:

When I started creating fanworks, there was a much more hostile attitude towards so-called Mary Sues (a label generously bestowed on pretty much every OFC, and even some canon characters such as Lúthien). In theory, there were certain criteria for "identifying" Mary Sues, but in practice, pretty much every OFC could be construed to fit these criteria in some way. There even was a flowchart on how to create a "good female character" that outline that pretty much every way you wrote a female character would end up at "Mary Sue", and to this day I'm not certain whether it was satire or serious.

Another participant's experiences, however, find the hostility toward women characters to be somewhat exaggerated, driven by a reaction to Mary Sue stories, which this participant is able to separate from other women-centric fanworks:

It's also probably the case that people overstate the notion that female-centered stories are a "problem" or somehow notably more likely to draw a reaction than male-centered ones. The reaction is probably to the Mary Sue phenomena, which I'll just define for convenience as the OFC or coopted canon character who draws attention to herself as not well-integrated into the world Tolkien wrote, usually the product of a much less developed and skilled writer. Excluding that particular example of female character, I really can't say I've ever seen or experienced a reaction to women-centered fic per se. There's not as much of it—it may be harder for modern writers to convincingly and compellingly find ways to put their female characters into contact with the main action of the stories Tolkien gave us, which doesn't help, but I wouldn't say that I've noticed any tendency to poo-poo stories because they are centered on women.

Regardless, several participants identified an ongoing chilling effect on their fanworks, originating in the hostility toward Mary Sue fanworks. Gabriel puts it succinctly: "When I first ventured into this fandom there was a lot of misogyny directed squarely at female characters. I won't say it's completely changed since those early days, but it has softened a little. And I still to this day find it particularly difficult to post about women, because of the prejudice."

Another participant sees deep-seated prejudice against women characters (or women more generally) as obstructing meaningful progress, even today, toward writing realistic women in an equitable way:

The big Mary Sue witch hunts have gone away for the most part, but there's still the feeling that you can't have a woman OC in Tolkien's settings without stripping out anything controversial (or interesting). She has to be as bland a character as possible or people will still treat her like a Mary Sue no matter how canon accurate she's depicted/named. She can't be an Arnorian Ranger/Shieldmaiden/some kind of fighter; she can't have any connection at all to any canon character; she can't be too smart; she can't have an "unusual" career or hobby; she can't have traveled; she can't have strong opinions that go against "the morals/ideals of Tolkien himself," etc ... It feels like so many older Tolkien fans writing women, especially fans who are themselves women, NB [nonbinary], or non-cisgender had it beaten into their heads that the only way to write a woman in fanworks is to basically make her the evangelical Protestant ideal woman: does nothing, has no opinions, and is stuck essentially—as it were—barefoot and pregnant.

Another respondent noted changes in how women characters are regarded in the fandom but also felt that the sexism and misogyny that produced the attacks on Mary Sue stories run too deep to fully extricate:

I just ... don't really publish my stuff that centers around female characters, esp. controversial ones or OCs. Some of those works were shared in private, especially when Google Docs took off, but I just didn't want to deal with the Mary Sue witchhunting of the 2000s and 2010s Tolkien fandom and/or the lowkey misogyny of the fandom, especially in spaces like Fanfiction.net. I sometimes feel like the tides are changing in a positive direction, but sometimes that tide only feels surface level—like it's waiting for the more progressive side of the fandom to move on from Tolkien before bringing the nasty back out again. I don't trust the acceptance and even elevation of works with female characters to last.

Other participants, however, notice that the concept and character of Mary Sue has been questioned and reclaimed in recent years. Lyra writes: "The term Mary Sue has, to some extent, been reclaimed and put in relation to male characters who fit the same criteria but somehow never were criticized to the same extent (although the term Gary Su existed, it was never applied as broadly as Mary Sue), and people who still mock writers of perceived Mary Sues are generally quickly called out on their nonsense, or ignored." Ziggy notices that young and self-insert female characters have enjoyed something of a renaissance, without the criticism once lobbed at them: "What I notice though is that a lot of new/emerging/less experienced writers or in a lot of fanfic recently is the prevalence of transgender female characters or female leads. On reflection, I'm not sure this is a change as we used to call them Mary Sues but I think that may well be a bit pejorative? Interesting to consider this point."

Conclusion

The biggest takeaways are how the fandom has changed over time and how, simultaneously, its history continues to impact how women characters are written, created, and perceived in fanworks.

This is not entirely the fandom's fault. Multiple participants noted the baggage carried by women in fanworks that comes from the canon itself or the broader popular culture in which it is situated. However, participants overwhelmingly described an early online fandom that was overtly hostile to women characters, discouraging not just original female characters (OFCs) but even the centering of canon women in fanworks.

Many (though not all) of these participants believe things have changed today. However, the impact of these years of fandom history linger. Participants continue to describe a chilling effect on their creation of women-centric fanworks: feeling anxious that they are either breaking the (largely unspoken) rules about acceptable roles for women in Tolkien-based fanworks or not adequately meeting the challenge of representing those women (and often repairing the extensive damage done by decades of sexism and marginalization in popular culture). They also describe discrepancies between fanworks featuring men and women: the number of fanworks, the popularity of pairings, the comments and clicks received.

Many participants remain optimistic, however. They see the dearth of women in the legendarium (and the few details available about those who do exist) and even the fandom's damaging history as opportunities to expand the legendarium not just in new directions but in directions that elevate women characters and prioritize the experiences of women fans.

Works Cited

1. Indy also has a recent post on Tumblr that elaborates on her experience with writing women in the Tolkien fandom.

Responses

All responses we've received to the above question are collected here without curation or commentary. Responses have been lightly edited.

Were you a part of the fandom before one or both films? We're still collecting responses and will update this page as new responses come in.

If you create fanworks, what have been your experiences creating Tolkien fanworks that include women characters? If you've created fanworks for several years or more, have your experiences changed over time?

Women have always featured strongly in my fics, especially as POV characters because I (as a more fem-aligned person) find it easier to get into their mindsets. In the beginning, I largely wrote about OCs, not quite daring to touch canon characters yet, but that changed over the years as I grew more confident in both my knowledge of Tolkien and my own writing. The first canon woman I wrote about was Belladonna Took, shortly followed by Nerdanel, Celebrían, and Arwen, and they, together with Aredhel, are the canon women featured most often in my fics.

I hit some bumps with my female OCs, especially the first one. I guess it happens when you start writing during the Mary Sue hate phase. Nowadays most of them seem to be accepted just fine.

I never encountered the same issue when starting to write about canon women. Maybe because my corner of the fandom back then was strongly dominated by women who more often than not supported seeing canon women portrayed in fanfic.

For me, writing about women in fic, is often linked to exploring womanhood. Not in a narrative sense, it rarely has any importance to the story I tell, but in a personal sense. I'm agender in a "my gender is very low on the priority list" sense, and pretty much the only thing I am certain about is that I'm definitely not male, so I like looking into the what-ifs of being a woman in writing.

~ Shadow, response collected on 3 September 2022

---

Tolkien only. Although there are few women characters in Tolkien, those that are given a role in the narratives are strong and independent. Although we meet Arwen first in LotR, she is a shadow with no part to play that has any significance. She is simply the romantic interest and the added motivation for Aragorn's quest. That changes with Galadriel—and although she is also portrayed as a great force for Good, she is far more complex, and when I started writing her, I didn't like her as I was coming from the Silvan/Mirkwood perspective, hadn't delved into the Silm and fallen in love with Maedhros, and writing Legolas and Thranduil, was coloured by what I had read of Oropher, etc. moving to escape Galadriel's influence. However, she is a rich and complex character. She has defied Fëanor, crossed the Helcaraxë, survived Beleriand and not returned—love that. Lost a child. (I'm not sure if this is what you want—I feel I am rambling.)

I wrote Éowyn first—easy to love. Feisty, a bit irresponsible, dashing and wonderfully heroic. But when I started writing Arwen, I wanted to make her more like the other female characters in Tolkien and so she has also become more 'real' to me. I've made her the force behind Aragorn as King, for example. Galadriel though, has taken over a whole arc connecting to the Second Age, the Rings and Mirror—I find that as I wrote her, she has won me over completely. I am giving her the lead role in the Beyond Middle-earth narrative that is emerging.

In answer to the question, have I changed—I don't think I have. Éowyn is a strong lead in my first ever fanfic, "Songs of Rohan/Deeper than Breathing." Galadriel is a strong lead in the third section of "Where the Shadows Lie"—and she changes from villain to hero in that, I think. (Not all my readers agree.) Arwen is left happily in charge of Gondor while Aragorn plays at being a Ranger in "Seven Stars." To be fair, my leads are always the Fellowship characters or, in the Silm, I only write Maedhros.

—

My own writing has not changed over time. My fics are Legolas-centric with the Fellowship, but I've written Éowyn from the first fic, then Galadriel has figured more strongly in the last three fics, and Arwen. But although they have been important dynamic characters, they are not central like Fellowship characters.

~ Ziggy, responses collected 4 September and 6 November 2022

---

When I started writing in Tolkien fandom in 2004, it was Not Done to write female-centric stories. They were generally a gateway to flames. Even background original female characters were a risk, safe only if they were unnamed and clearly around for just the length of the scene (someone in a market stall or a barmaid or the like). So that influenced how many women appeared in my fic in foregrounded roles.

After the shift in fandom that I describe in the other answer, I started writing more women-centric stories. To this day, if I need a background OC, I will most likely make them female. If I’m writing an OC who is more foregrounded, I like making them female … but I also still have a little bit of fear about backlash.

~ Independence1776, response collected 4 September 2022

---

To begin with, I was nervous about writing women characters, especially original female characters with sizable roles. Although people in fandom were already starting to be be less critical of Mary Sues than they had been in the past, apparently, there seemed to be a lot of internalized anxiety around, still, and it was catching. I don't think this has entirely gone, but I am seeing less of it. Nowadays, I guess there are competing anxieties: whether one has done sufficient justice to one's female characters, and so on. That said, the actual response I experienced from readers has always been more positive than my anxieties might have led me to expect.

~ Anonymous, response collected 4 September 2002

---

I just ... don't really publish my stuff that centers around female characters, especially controversial ones or OCs. Some of those works were shared in private, especially when Google Docs took off, but I just didn't want to deal with the Mary Sue witchhunting of the 2000s and 2010s Tolkien fandom and/or the lowkey misogyny of the fandom, especially in spaces like Fanfiction.net. I sometimes feel like the tides are changing in a positive direction, but sometimes that tide only feels surface level—like it's waiting for the more progressive side of the fandom to move on from Tolkien before bringing the nasty back out again. I don't trust the acceptance and even elevation of works with female characters to last.

~ Anonymous, response collected 9 September 2022

---

Proportionally to Tolkien's works, my fanworks include more men. However, I can't imagine writing a fic with no mention of a female character at all, simply because it makes no sense (unless I write some sort of segregated AU) in my stories (even the short ones operate on a longer timeline. It'd be ludicrous that males characters never meet any female ones).

~ Anonymous, response collected 13 September 2022

---

Never had a problem from anyone when I did focus on women characters. Early on, I focused on Tolkien's female characters largely as he depicted them—just expanding on what was given. Over time, I've done more that deals with finding the ways in which female characters, whether canon or original, can provide plausible rereadings of Tolkien's texts, where women are more active politically, on a parity in some cases with male characters, and then within the story also suggest why this version of the character might not have been 'recorded' properly within the conceit of 'found texts'. The responses I've gotten have all been positive. I think this is partly a function of who is still reading in the fandom—I started reading when movie fandom was coming on the scene in 2001, wrote throughout the first decade, and still write occasionally. That's a lot of time for the high reaction to unconventional interpretations or just not very good interpretations to wear itself out. It's also a lot of time for a writer to learn how to write more difficult or complicated material better (or material that has a more complex relation to the text(s) that inspired it). So those two things—readership change over time and skill level increasing over time—may also play into my experience of writing stories centered on female characters.

It's also probably the case that people overstate the notion that female-centered stories are a 'problem' or somehow notably more likely to draw a reaction than male-centered ones. The reaction is probably to the Mary Sue phenomena, which I'll just define for convenience as the OFC or coopted canon character who draws attention to herself as not well-integrated into the world Tolkien wrote, usually the product of a much less developed and skilled writer. Excluding that particular example of female character, I really can't say I've ever seen or experienced a reaction to women-centered fic per se. There's not as much of it—it may be harder for modern writers to convincingly and compellingly find ways to put their female characters into contact with the main action of the stories Tolkien gave us, which doesn't help, but I wouldn't say that I've noticed any tendency to poo-poo stories because they are centered on women.

~ Anonymous, response collected 18 September 2022

---

I wrote fanfiction in the early 2000s, then took a long break, and I'm back writing now. In the beginning I definitely wrote more male characters, primarily in m/m stories. Since coming back to fandom I've written more female characters. I think that it's a question of where I was/am in life. After having kids and experiencing some life struggles, I find I can relate to Tolkien's female characters more, which means that I enjoy exploring their experiences more than I used to.

~ Maggie Honeybite, response collected 24 September 2022

---

Most of my female OCs have been received better in recent years than they were when I first started writing about female characters, but my Fingon's wife OC is still poorly received by fans heavily invested in the Maedhros/Fingon ship. And femslash is still marginalized.

~ Anonymous, response collected 3 October 2022

---

I started writing LotR fic in the mid-2000s, when I was a teenager, and back when to write a Mary Sue was to commit a cardinal sin, and it was several years before I felt confident enough in my writing and comfortable enough in my own skin to decide that that was stupid and I was going to write what I wanted anyway—and by then I had started getting into the Silm fandom, and particularly when I dropped into the fandom circles centered around the SWG I found a lot more encouragement and interest in fleshing out the women in Tolkien—named and unnamed—and events like Legendarium Ladies April, or Femslash February. These days I never even see the phrase "Mary Sue", let alone indictments against OFCs, and it's a really nice change.

~ StarSpray, response collected 4 October 2022

---

I've created a fair number of fanworks that feature female characters in a main role, including some femslash fic and some fic where there are only female characters in the story. This has remained pretty consistent over the twenty years or so I've been in Tolkien fandom. I would say approximately 25% of my stories fall into this category. I've found on the whole, the stories featuring female characters receive far less overall attention, but this does not discourage me from writing them, because the attention they do receive is wonderful to see and very motivating.

~ Anonymous, response collected 4 October 2022

---

It’s always OC time, except maybe, maybe Galadriel. There's so little text to work with.

The question, for those remaining 'true' to canon, remains whether to perpetuate Tolkien's period attitudes or to allow each character full agency and recognise their independent existence. 

Fëanor, for instance, if he were alive now, would commit suicide by first massacring his whole family, because he can’t bear to think of them having existence separate from his own ego.

The identity part of identity politics. 

Hopefully the answer to the question is a no-brainer. We are all individuals …

~ hennethgalad, response collected 5 October 2022

---

Due to fandom being hostile towards original female characters (and even some canon female characters) and canon featuring way more (named) male characters, fanfiction was very male-centric. Writing fanfic that featured OFCs, or even just fleshed out female canon characters, took quite some courage. It didn't initially have that courage. To be honest, I wasn't even aware at the start that something was wrong with that wide-spread attitude in fandom—canon was male-centric, so naturally fanfic was also male-centric. It took a general shift in fannish attitudes before I began to question that logic. Even then, it took a conscious effort to include more female (or other non-male) characters in my fanfic. When I made Maedhros's first and most knowledgeable healer a woman in a fanfic about his rescue from Thangorodrim, it felt like a very brave move, and I was surprised when nearly nobody batted an eye (or at least, nobody bothered to comment to tell me about their disapproval). By now, I no longer care about the judgement of those segments of fandom that are anti-feminist, so including and fleshing out female characters (whether or not they're the main character of a story) is actually quite fun. But it took a while to build up the confidence!

~ Lyra, response collected 13 October 2022

---

It's very easy for the writer to go 'OOC' as there is little-to-no 'canon' information on Tolkien's female characters; however, I've found that most fanworks focused on a particular female character tend to have authors that run in the same circles/read each others' works and are thus influenced by each other, limiting the number of widely different portrayals.

~ elwingd, 23 October 2022

---

While it is difficult to draw a broad conclusion without hard numbers, I do have the perception that female-centric character works receive less attention than male-centric character works.

But it is also difficult without hard numbers to ascribe the disparity to gender as there are many male characters who seem largely ignored by fandom while certain characters (or more accurately, certain pairings) seem to dominate—but those dominating are still overwhelmingly male characters.

It does make one question if the female characters are overlooked because they're female, if they're overlooked because they're simply not 'the popular character' of the moment, or if they’re overlooked in fanworks because they were largely overlooked in the original work to begin with.

Even with my own writing, however, I find my female character stories seem to gather less interest or engagement from readers, and female-centric explicit works get even less attention both from readers or from other authors, but again, is that because they’re female or because they aren’t the fandom big-name populars?

There is, perhaps, the tendency to view under-developed female characters as being more in the realm of OCs, which again seem to get far less engagement in general than canon characters. But when given so little information on them from the text, it is almost necessary to imbue them with originality due to the lack of anything else to go on (sometimes not even a name!)

I am not sure if this is a new phenomenon in fanfiction. My earliest interactions in Tolkien fandom spaces was utilizing roleplay and collaborative writing rather than singular authored pieces, and the gender of the characters seemed to reflect more evenly the gender of the writers who created original characters to engage in the collaborations. This meant that the greater prevalence of women authors resulted in a far more balanced writing world of male and female characters (though still lacking in diversity in almost every other respect, especially color!).

When looking just at singular-authored fanfiction, however, the apparent preference to write canon characters also tends to then skew toward male characters both because of their weight in the original writings but also because of the tendency of non-gen fiction to be m/m pairings or m/f pairings rather than f/f pairings.

Leaving behind the perception of how my works are consumed by fandom, for me, writing women is simply a product of women existing in reality and being fundamentally a part of everything that happens.

I greatly enjoy writing the spectrum of personalities, from shy and quiet to loud and brazen. From meek and insecure to confident or commanding, even to ignorant and mean. Like male characters, female characters come in all types. As a friend of mine who teaches in the video game industry is fond of telling his students, "female is not a personality trait". 

Women are just as diverse in all their aspects as men, and to deny them this in fanfiction is to deny true personhood to women in favor of either falling into or vehemently rejecting stereotypes, rather than embracing all the many nuanced possibilities that female characters can have.

I still find that I do not write female characters as often or, occasionally, as nuanced as I would sometimes like. I can still find it difficult at times to break out of the culturally imposed tropes and expectations of what a female character can, must, or shouldn't be. In my earliest years of writing, I found writing female characters to be very difficult for me, possibly an effect of being also neurodivergent. It was easy for me to imagine all manner of male character personalities due to being surrounded by ample examples in all forms of media. It was far more difficult for me to try to imagine female characters with that same diversity of personalities, and for a long time I struggled. I will not say that I have escaped entirely this difficulty, but I find that female characters do come far more naturally to me these days, in a beautiful array of types, than in the past.

I have at times struggled with certain female characters due to the lack of basic information in the text while trying to map my story as close as possible to canon. The lack of a name is one that constantly makes me struggle, for Tolkien can 'hide' details and information about a character through their name, so the lack of one seems to be an even greater character hole than most.

Still, in a male-character-heavy fandom, I can almost enjoy a greater level of freedom to explore these characters that have very little settled in canon or in fanon about them. I won't call this a good thing, rather it is making the best out of a negative. 

~ Anonymous, response collected 30 October 2022

---

Yes, in terms of female representation, my experience changed a lot. I lowkey started from a beginning in which I wrote really little about women because there wasn't much attention to them, fandom speaking, to writing mostly female characters' POVs, or at least to write something that heavily focuses on female characters.

~ Anonymous, response collected 1 November 2022

---

Most of the early fanfics I wrote centered on male characters. This was true not only of Tolkien's world, but other fandoms I wrote for. I started writing stories centered on female characters in some of my anime fandoms. For The Silmarillion, most of my female characters remained in supporting roles until I became involved in the Silmarillion Film Project. The challenge of adapting Tolkien's story to television invited more exploration of the female characters, and had space for whole episodes with female protagonists. And so I found myself writing the Haleth-centric attack on the stockade, exploring her backstory, family, and friendships. And I was able to return to Haleth later when a young Andreth visited her in Brethil. Letting these two women from different cultures meet and learn from one another was a fun challenge, and not a story I would have explored on my own outside this adaptation challenge.

~ Marie Prosser, response collected 20 November 2022

---

My experiences have included feeling isolated from the rest of the fandom. People don't seem overly interested in discussing or reading about female characters. Especially OCs. As a result, I have delayed for years posting works with these characters. The situation appears to worsen if one or more of your characters are a Mary Sue.

~ Gabriel, response collected 20 November 2022

---

I enjoy building on characters for which there are few textual references to go by, or exploring women characters that would be deemed 'background characters.'

~ Anonymous, response collected 20 November 2022

---

Generally, my experiences have been positive, whether writing about canon characters, unnamed canon 'textual ghosts', or original characters. I did not spend a lot of time early in my participation in this fandom concentrating on 'main' characters (avoidance of Arwen as an adult, not much writing about Eowyn, etc.), focusing rather on characters others were not writing about or might not have been aware of, or creating additional characters. There is a lot of potential for gap-filling.

~ Zhie, response collected 21 November 2022

---

Almost all my Tolkien fanworks are or were centered around female characters, especially when I started writing. At first, it was really a matter of process-of-elimination: as a younger writer I didn't feel I was capable of writing adult men realistically, so if I wanted to write fanworks I was happy with, they had to focus on women. In that time I wrote about a lot of OCs, and generally relegated male characters to very brief scenes. Now I'm much more comfortable writing male characters in general, and do have a couple of short fanworks that only contain male characters. However, I still gravitate toward writing about women, and have (pure guesswork warning) about a 70-30 female-to-male ratio when making any random OCs a story calls for. I have also begun to really enjoy creating semi-OCs to flesh out the random names on family trees, or to fill roles that aren't even given a name in canon.

I can only remember receiving a couple of disparaging comments over writing female characters; all were from the same anonymous reviewer on Fanfiction.net, and fortunately didn't affect me very deeply.

~ Anonymous, response collected 23 November 2022

If you read and/or view fanworks, how do you see women depicted in the Tolkien fanworks you read or view? If you've read/viewed fanworks for several years or more, has the depiction of women characters changed over time?

When I read about women in Tolkien fanworks, they are usually portrayed as strong and willful. There are few meek women amongst his named cast and most OCs I've seen follow suit.

Over the last few years I've also seen more and more fic dealing with women outside of their purpose in romantic relationships, a fact that pleases me greatly. There is so much more room for women characters and exploring it is great fun.

~ Starspray, response collected 3 September 2022

---

I only read fanfic that is really well written and well constructed, where the characters are engaging—that's my expectation of spending any time reading so I do regularly experience strong, well developed female characters, although to be fair, rarely the leads are female. I select works that feature my favourite characters—who tend to be Fingon, Maedhros in The Silmarillion, and Legolas or Fellowship in LotR so I encounter female characters, but don't choose to read them except there are some great writers whose work I read regardless of characters. Dawn Felagund for example, Himring. Tolkiengirl. I think the changes in the fandom are more evident in trans characters, and ethnic diversity within races, especially Elves. I love the colour-blind casting in RoP although I HATE what they have done with the Lindon characters. But look how they are using Galadriel as the lead! As a work of fanfic, which it is, you gotta love that! Hope this is helpful and what you are looking for. Ziggy.

—

I don't think women characters have increased or changed in my reading as I tend to read strong writers who are very aware of feminism and although this is not the intent, they recognise the issues and write strong female characters. What I notice though is that a lot of new/emerging/less experienced writers or in a lot of fanfic recently is the prevalence of transgender female characters, or female leads. On reflection, I'm not sure this is a change as we used to call them Mary Sues but I think that may well be a bit pejorative? Interesting to consider this point.

~ Ziggy, response collected 4 September and 6 November 2022

---

I entered Tolkien fandom in 2004; I quickly learned that there was a wide range of unacceptable story roles for women and pretty much all of them can be summed up as “not allowed to be the main character.” Pretty much any woman—canon or not—was assumed to be taking time and focus away from the characters who *really* mattered: the canon men. Canon het romances tended to be the exception, but they were (I recall) more likely to be written from the male character’s perspective than the woman’s. Fics that deviated tended to be flamed unless they were extremely well-written and those few fics were held up as the gold standard. I know of one well-known author who was afraid to reveal certain aspects of her OFC’s parentage due to fear of being accused of being a Sue-writer.

That started to change around 2010. It was part of a larger general fandom trend that started examining the inherent sexism within fandom. There started being pushback against the vitriol and people started writing female characters in more roles and more frequently. Specifically in Tolkien fandom, Elleth’s push for Tolkien femslash and the creation of both Legendarium Ladies April and the Textual Ghost Project were, I think, some of the results of this movement.

I haven’t read deeply in Tolkien fic in a few years, but in what I’ve read and seen on Tumblr, I have seen a much wider percentage of women portrayed in largely positive ways and taking active roles in the plots. It’s a vast and pleasant change from my early years in the fandom.

~ Independence1776, response collected 4 September 2022

---

In general, writers are less likely to be apologetic about the women characters they write. Writers and other creators are also more likely to create different kinds of women. But there are other changes here that are part of more complex developments that I find it difficult to summarize. Also, sometimes I feel that there can be a bit of discrepancy between what people say they want to see, with regard to women characters, and what they end up reading and writing.

~ Anonymous, response collected 4 September 2022

---

There's a tendency, despite the glut of good fanworks depicting women as fully realized humans, for women to be sort of ... excluded from the main narratives of fanworks unless they're super, major lore important or in a super, major lore important canon het ship that people like (i.e. Beren and Lúthien). Most of the time still the women are ignored, sidelined, or turned into nothing but cheerleaders for the m/m slash ship. Also the fandom doesn't seem to like or care about female characters who don't fit the masculine mold of badass. If they're a woman who wasn't a sword-swinger at some point, they're mostly ignored. The depiction of women characters overall and overtime has improved a lot. For instance there's far, far less fics where the woman is depicted as actually evil so the m/m ship can exist (i.e., all the evil Arwen fics from the '00s).

The big Mary Sue witch hunts have gone away for the most part, but there's still the feeling that you can't have a woman OC in Tolkien's settings without stripping out anything controversial (or interesting). She has to be as bland a character as possible or people will still treat her like a Mary Sue no matter how canon accurate she's depicted/named. She can't be an Arnorian Ranger/Shieldmaiden/some kind of fighter, she can't have any connection at all to any canon character, she can't be too smart, she can't have an "unusual" career or hobby, she can't have traveled, she can't have strong opinions that go against "the morals/ideals of Tolkien himself", etc ... It feels like so many older Tolkien fans writing women, especially fans who are themselves women, NB, or non-cisgender had it beaten into their heads that the only way to write a woman in fanworks is to basically make her the evangelical Protestant ideal woman: does nothing, has no opinions, and is stuck essentially—as it were—barefoot and pregnant.

~ Anonymous, 9 September 2022

---

Hard to tell. I don't read stories because of the gender of the characters. I can read a story on Lúthien because it's Lúthien herself who interests me, and she happens to be a woman. What matters to me is characterisation itself. I like flawed characters who are despicable at first, but later grow on you, or characters so well depicted it's as if they could be real. The authors I like usually write compelling characters, and I tend to read fics written today from all the way back to the early '00s, but it's not chronological (publication date). I wouldn't be able to judge the greater picture because I'm picky/I have specific tastes and read what suits said tastes.

~ Anonymous, response collected 13 September 2022

---

I think I've seen everything, from people who hew quite tightly to what is presented by Tolkien himself, to people who prioritize OFCs to tell their story, to 'revisionist' readings of the female characters, etc.

~ Anonymous, response collected 18 September 2022

---

I get the feeling that the younger generation of fans write more women and write them in more diverse ways.

~ Maggie Honeybite, response collected 24 September 2022

---

It's gotten a lot better. You used to have to really dig to find female-centered stories, but now it seems like more people are writing them.

~ Anonymous, response collected 3 October 2022

---

When I started reading Tolkien fic it was, again, back in the 2000s, and by far the most popular fics I was finding were about Aragorn and Legolas having adventures, or whatever, nary a woman in sight. There were also a lot of stories that focused on Aragorn as Estel growing up in Rivendell, but those were focused on his relationships with Elladan and Elrohir and Elrond, and it was some time before I dove into the Appendices and realized that those fic writers had just fridged Gilraen for no reason. It was really frustrating. But on the flip side there were some really lovely Éomer/Lóthiriel fics that focused on Lothíriel and fleshed her out in various and interesting ways, which showed me what could be done with these women who were just names in canon. By the time I entered the Silmarillion fandom I was seeking out women-centric fic, so that's what I found. These days the numbers of fics about women are a lot larger so there's a wide variety of depictions and interpretations, and it's really great. I haven't gone looking in a while but I'd be willing to bet there are fewer fics these days that just cut Gilraen entirely out of Aragorn's early life.

~ StarSpray, response collected 4 September 2022

---

I see a great deal of variety, but there's always opportunity for more. I really enjoy it when minor characters are fleshed out and there's so much opportunity to do that in Tolkien's works. I think these days there's definitely more willingness to write female characters in their own right, from their own perspectives, rather than just being part of a man's story as a mother or wife. (Obviously this still exists, and to some extent always will, but the point is to have such a variety that it doesn't make up the majority of the stories told about women.)

~ Anonymous, response collected 4 October 2022

---

I see more perpetuation of patriarchal stereotypes than is good for the culture.

~ hennethgalad, response collected 5 October 2022

---

It definitely has changed. When I started creating fanworks, there was a much more hostile attitude towards so-called Mary Sues (a label generously bestowed on pretty much every OFC, and even some canon characters such as Lúthien). In theory, there were certain criteria for "identifying" Mary Sues, but in practice, pretty much every OFC could be construed to fit these criteria in some way. There even was a flowchart on how to create a "good female character" that outline that pretty much every way you wrote a female character would end up at "Mary Sue", and to this day I'm not certain whether it was satire or serious. In the late Noughts/early Tens, there was a shift in my fannish circles—an active pushback that emphasized naming the unnamed women and giving them backstories, as well as creating femslash as opposed to the ubiquitous mlm slash—and as a result, there is now a lot more unashamedly female-centric fanfic. The term Mary Sue has, to some extent, been reclaimed and put in relation to male characters who fit the same criteria but somehow never were criticized to the same extent (although the term Gary Su existed, it was never applied as broadly as Mary Sue), and people who still mock writers of perceived Mary Sues are generally quickly called out on their nonsense, or ignored. So while there are still corners of fandom that are conservative and reactionary, the general hostility towards female characters no longer feels like the mainstream attitude.

~ Lyra, response collected 13 October 2022

---

Over time, focus seems to have shifted from "women do not fight because they are better suited to healing," etc. etc. (a statement that I believe originated from Tolkien himself) to "women are badass and fight well and are often the most powerful characters ever" (aka the Joss Whedon idea of feminism), before finally settling back to, "women can fight and heal and do girly things and do powerful things and the two are not mutually exclusive".

~ elwingd, response collected 23 October 2022

---

I cannot think of a single top female pairing that comes anywhere close to the level of fandom popularity that pairs such as Fingon/Maedhros, Celebrimbor/Sauron, or Melkor/Sauron enjoy. There are no solid "these two are a couple, full-stop" female pairs whose hills people will die on. There are some that are more common but they are not ragingly popular. There are a few m/f pairs, such as Caranthir/Haleth, that enjoy broad popularity, but again, there is not a single f/f pair that comes close.

There is the tendency I've seen to further erase female characters either by ignoring them entirely or removing their female-ness. While this is often in pursuit of the undeniable need need for diversity in queer representation, it seems to me that it is often done at the expense of a canonical cis female character rather than a cis male character.

I think it would be a worthwhile effort to collect data on the frequency with which canon female characters (often very underdeveloped in the source text) are rewritten as a former identity of a canon character who is written as transmale, vs the frequency of canon cis male characters written as either non-binary or transfemale characters. While turning a nameless spouse into a previous husband rather than a wife is great for queer representation, it is still doing so at the expense of a cis or transfemale character. It sadly seems far too common to follow the inertia of the text and ignore female characters entirely.

Among those who follow the Silm origins of Gil-galad being Fingon's son, I have noticed very little attention given to Gil-galad's mother, who seems to be as absent from fanfiction as from the canon text. Even the ongoing joke of who his father was usually ignores any potential mother.

None of this is to say that female characters are rare in fanfiction, or not well done. I have read stunning, beautiful, painful, and moving depictions of female characters, or seen amazing art that truly captures that magic and spirit of Tolkien that are very much deserving of praise and attention. Just that their inclusion in fanfiction is still influenced by modern culture, media, and their insignificance or absence in the original text.

One change I have noticed over time, though I cannot attempt to pinpoint when, is the far greater body diversity in works of fanart. Skin color, body type, height, disability, even little things like freckles seem to have grown far more representative than what I remember from twenty years ago. It is gratifying to see both the artists being freer to produce these and the fandom being largely positive in their interactions with them (though not 100%, sadly). But it does give me hope that the movement is in the net positive direction.

~ Anonymous, 30 October 2022

---

I think it's positive that there's some attention for the women in the legendarium, that's a very male-centric place, even the ones who're just a name thrown here, like Amarië or Anairë. i noticed the shift in mostly making fem characters almost 'perfect' and always unapologetically good to make them a little more 'flawed', which is probably due to the fact that the fem characters weren't well received at first so people writing them as good people was revolutionary enough for the time, and now that the fandom is getting a little more open-minded, fem characters are finally allowed to be flawed without being demonized for it.

~ Anonymous, 1 November 2022

---

Tolkien has some great female characters … but it's hard not to notice how few there are. Fanfic lets people turn a name on a family tree into a story. I like that! I don't always seek out stories that are about female protagonists, so I can't speak to trends, but I don't feel there's any dearth of stories from (say) Nerdanel's point of view.

~ Marie Prosser, response collected 20 November 2022

---

From the fanworks I've read, over eight years or so, women are usually depicted as being stalwart, yet still managing to not lose their femininity. When I first ventured into this fandom there was a lot of misogyny directed squarely at female characters. I won't say it's completely changed since those early days, but it has softened a little. And I still to this day find it particularly difficult to post about women, because of the prejudice.

~ Gabriel, response collected 20 November 2022

---

I cannot say for the second question. For the first question, most of my exposure to this is via AO3 and Tumblr. Generally I have seen compassionate takes and various explorations of a transformative nature, which I liked. In fanart, I've seen more wlw depiction than in the past which I like. But also platonic friendships between women characters are represented more often, I've noticed, which is also great.

~ Anonymous, response collected 20 November 2022

---

It varied then and it varies now but things have been steadily (if slowly) improving with regard to diversity of depiction (less flawless saints & distressed damsels). However there are still problems with female characters being harshly judged in comparison to male characters or being deemed "useless" if she's a non-combatant or hated for "getting in the way" of a certain ship or ignored entirely in favor of even less fleshed out male characters (ex: Erestor).

~ Anonymous, response collected 20 November 2022

---

I've seen less Mirkwood Princess self-inserts than I once did, but my reading/viewing is spotty at best, and I am not a reliable individual when it comes to the overall fandom. However, in the years earlier when I was running het swaps, there were a lot of requests for OFCs or reader-as-character stories. When I poke around now, there seems to be more attempts to find characters already in Tolkien's works to work with.

~ Zhie, response collected 21 November 2022

---

I feel like writing about female OCs has become a lot more (bad word choice warning, but can't think of a better one) "respectable" in fandom circles; when I started reading fanfiction it seemed like most of the "well-regarded" fic that I encountered focused almost exclusively on canon male characters, with any female OCs being defined by their familial or romantic relationships to those characters. Now I feel like I see a lot more fanworks focusing on women in their own right, such as (for example) fanworks about Nerdanel or Arwen that don't have anything to do with Fëanor or Aragorn, or OCs that aren't in a relationship with a canon male character. I also feel like I see several more fanworks focusing on very obscure characters.

Some of that may correlate to a change in which communities I was aware of; at first, I was only really aware of Fanfiction.net, and didn't spend much time in other archives for several years. Now I mostly read on AO3 and the SWG.

~ Anonymous, response collected 23 November 2022