"Promote What You Love": An Interview with Elleth by Elleth, Dawn Felagund

"Promote What You Love": An Interview with Elleth

As we continue our series on creating fanworks about women in the Tolkien fandom, one pattern emerges: A fandom that began as openly hostile toward women-centric fanworks eventually came around to where such fanworks are not just accepted but welcomed. While there is still progress to be made, the shift in attitudes has been both dramatic and relatively swift. What made it happen?

While that is a complicated question with an even more complicated answer, part of the shift was brought on by fans themselves who decided that they would not only create and post fanworks about women but actively work to create fandom spaces for such works to be shared and celebrated. Elleth was one of the leaders of this charge, and she agreed to talk with me about not just her work in organizing women-centric fandom spaces but her own personal journey, as a creator, from disinterest in women characters to centering them in her work.

Dawn Felagund: You've worked on so many different projects promoting fanworks about Tolkien's women and femslash in particular. Can you tell me about them?

Elleth: First of all, thank you so much for having me for this interview, Dawn! This definitely came unexpected. I never considered my fannish activities to be this important, but your request was definitely something that tickled my ego just a little bit.

For the most part, I think it really just was me writing, posting, reviewing, and trying to promote what I enjoyed doing. I've been told, both in fandom and in real life, that my enthusiasm can be infectious, and I had friends to keep nattering about the topics we enjoyed, so that part was easy. It also felt that, since there really wasn't a lot of focus on female characters (and goodness forbid, on femslash!), I needed to work to create the fannish environment I wanted to be in, so eventually it became a given to create community spaces to get like-minded people together. Most of those projects didn't start with me alone, though, and they would have been bound to fail if no one else had been interested. I owe a lot to both Elvie and Frilly, my partners in crime who helped me modding silmladylove, fyeahtolkienladies and Legendarium Ladies' April on Tumblr, and of course to you, Dawn, for the collaborations that you offered with the SWG. Not to mention all the fans who contributed their enthusiasm and love!

Silmladylove, like the name says, was/is a femslash-centric tumblr, specifically for promoting and encouraging Silmarillion femslash fic and art, and we also ran our own takes on panfandom celebrations like Femslash February, the International Day of Femslash, and Femslash Yuletide, usually with little events, prompt lists, or challenges of our own. Those were fun; if life and work weren't keeping me so busy, I would love to pick that up again. Female characters got their due at fyeahtolkienladies, which I eventually also started running alone after life caught up with Elvie; it mostly just consisted of a daily trawl through the fandom tags for fanworks of female characters. I wanted to uplift what was already there, and it turns out that the more it got promoted, the more it got created. I'm not sure if that qualifies as a positive feedback loop, but it definitely was heartening to see.

And then there was Legendarium Ladies' April, a whole month of 3x3 prompts per week to create fanworks for female characters. That one was something Frilly and I came up with in response to a promotion week that was hosted on Tumblr for a group of male characters who were and still are fandom favourites and didn't strictly need promoting as far as we were concerned. I still remember our reactions being "???" and "we should do something to promote characters who really need promoting" and while that may not have been fine fannish manners, we also agreed not to be party poopers and let those people have their fun while we had ours ... and not just a week, for an entire month. [insert slightly manic emoji here.] So in that case, spite was very much a motivator in coming up with the event, but what can I say, that definitely also was fun while it lasted. Sometimes it felt like other members of fandom really just needed permission that it was okay to create fanworks about female characters or femslash, or the reassurance that there was a likeminded community that made it worth it. I received a couple of lovely comments in the course of those events that described exactly that phenomenon, along the lines of "I wrote femslash for myself, I had no idea there were other people out there doing it publicly!"

DF: What about the Textual Ghosts Project? That term originated, if I recall correctly, with a comment on a MEFA story by Dwimmordene.

Elleth: That's correct, and it was Pandë who mentioned the term to me in this post. I had started compiling a list of unnamed female characters and those who are only implied to have existed by the existence of a husband or offspring before she brought up the term. I no longer remember why I created that list to begin with, but originally the Textual Ghosts Project was supposed to be a series of drabbles, one for each of the unnamed women, to give them a name and a little of the history or character that they lacked in canon. That never happened, but I was just yammering a couple of days ago about how I wanted to create something Tolkien-y and could not come up with an idea. Maybe that could be a project to tackle, and invite others along.

DF: You're an accomplished writer and artist in your own right. Were you always interested in creating fanworks about women?

Elleth: Thank you, Dawn! As female characters go, it probably sounds strange, but … no, I wasn't always interested in them. My gateway fandom were The X-Files back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and while the show featured both a male and a female main character, I was more interested in shipping MSR (Mulder-Scully-Romance, the pairing that launched the term "shipping" in the first place) than exploring the characters as characters.

I loved both of them, but my reluctance may have been due to the story arcs the characters underwent: Mulder was the driving force in the show, trying to solve the trauma of his sister's disappearance when they were both teenagers. Scully's storyline, on the other hand, when she wasn't being yanked around to cases by Mulder, involved plenty of questions of bodily autonomy including an alien abduction, her resulting infertility and cancer, as well as her vulnerability in general as a result of the supernaturally-tinged FBI work she was doing. Those issues were far too heavy for me to articulate as a teenager, let alone to want to write fic about them, so I defaulted to romance to extend the already textually deep bond between them into something more tangible. It was, I suppose, something of a fix-it reaction to the different types of trauma the show put them through, but it was never specifically about Scully or exploring her as a character and more about them kissing each other better.

Even in the Tolkien fandom, which I slipped into with the Jackson movies (Legolas was my favorite; I did not enjoy the prospect of Arwen at Helm's Deep, which had been a change that Peter Jackson had intended to introduce until the fannish backlash against it) and then rapidly blew past into The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and History of Middle-earth (HoMe), I wasn't initially a fan of the female characters. Fingolfin and his stand against Morgoth are what I remember most vividly from my first read of The Silmarillion, and I recall actively disliking Finduilas of Nargothrond. At this point in time I can only guess that it was because of the doomed love triangle she was in with Gwindor and Túrin. Unfortunately, back then it was much more permissible to openly bash female characters in fannish spaces, and while I don't think I ever did that, it also didn't help me find a more nuanced approach.

It wasn't until I stumbled over the slightly more expansive description of Nerdanel in the HoMe that I actually found an inroads to empathizing with female characters in particular and, from that, took away the lesson to negotiate their stories on their own terms and explore and flesh them out as characters. It was surprisingly intuitive for me, especially in a fandom where female characters barely exist as characters per se, probably because I found more and more identification points between myself and Tolkien's women the longer I looked. Not least the textual marginalization and erasure I was seeing and feeling similar in real life at that point (I'm queer, female/nb, an abuse survivor, chronically and mentally ill, not quite the person you often find at the center of a text—in my case it may partially be fanfiction as identity reclamation). However, I was also powered by a lot of spite against all the vitriol I was seeing. The internet had always been a safe place for me, not just in the Tolkien fandom, and it actually became a joy to fight back to carve out a place for myself and others who enjoyed the same things I did. My friend Independence1776 summed it up well, saying, "Promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate", and that one definitely stuck with me as a guiding principle ever since.

DF: You mentioned that the "slightly more expansive description of Nerdanel in the HoMe" was what led you to start writing more about women. In your experience, is this typical? Do more developed women characters encourage writing about them?

Elleth: Yes and no. Personally, I think it can both be fun to have the creative freedom that Tolkien's female textual ghosts offer, but I also like the canon as it stands, so I'm thankful for more developed female characters, or for knowing some key life events of character traits, like Nerdanel's wisdom and her talent as a crafter in her own right. In terms of fandom, I've often made the point that female characters just can't win. Having too little information makes them uninteresting to create about, having a few things that aren't exactly right makes them [insert negative descriptor here], having enough/too much makes them one of those dreaded Mary Sues ... but after a while I also realized that people with that attitude are generally looking for excuses to not engage with female characters to begin with. Everything is ammunition against them, regardless of how much or how little there is.

In terms of those who want to create fanworks for female characters, I think it varies in preference from creator to creator, but in general having information for a female character lowers the entry barrier, so to speak. It makes creating for them easier than inventing things from whole cloth, and it will allow more textually-based emotional investment.

DF: You started writing fanfiction in 1999. What do you remember from that time about what it was like to write about female characters?

Elleth: Back in 1999, well. Like I mentioned above, I was in the X-Files fandom and more focused on shipping than female-centric fanworks per se. There were a couple of wonderful, great, amazing Scully POV fics that I still remember, but it also feels that fandom suffered from pretty much the same disease that most fandoms did. Scully, since she was the canonically designated main female character (and eventual love interest) of the main male character, was fine to write about and go into depth about, especially since canon depicted and passed by so many traumatic events without a focus on Scully's recovery or coping mechanisms beyond having a good cry in Mulder's arms. (I may be slightly uncharitable here). Other female characters, though? Canon pretty much modeled rejection of them in the source material. Mulder's ex? Untrustworthy, in cahoots with the conspiracy at the heart of the show. The shady diplomat woman? Well-minded but very shady, also potentially in cahoots with the enemy. The plucky female agent who, in the late seasons, joined the X-Files? Mulder 2.0. and not nearly as good as the original (while the skeptic agent man, after Scully had adopted the more open-minded believer role that Mulder had previously filled, received very few criticisms of being Scully 2.0. from what I remember).

Coming into the Tolkien fandom, specifically the Jackson movie fandom after seeing the first movie and subsequently rereading and completely falling into the books? Lonely, especially once I discovered my interest in female characters. A couple of years ago when I was moving, I found an old notebook, and lo and behold, it contained the beginning of a handwritten Arwen/Gilraen fic, with the note of (once again paraphrased), "I will die if anyone ever reads this", even though quality-wise it wasn't any worse than any of the other fics I'd written and published at that point.

I don't even think it was internalized homophobia at that point because I was aware at that age that I was queer and fine with it, but more of a response to the environment fandom offered.

DF: What was it like to run women-centric events in a fandom that could be unfriendly to stories about women? Did you see people's reactions to and interest in your events change over time?

Elleth: Oh, when we started I was worried. I am something of a worrywart with tendencies to catastrophize anyway, so I was afraid of being flamed or trolled to hell and back, but surprisingly, none of that happened. There were a few voices who tried to discourage us in the sense of "who even is interested in that sort of thing", but not being alone running those events also meant I had friends to fall back on and we'd encourage each other to keep going. In terms of participation, that definitely increased over time as word (and hopefully, acceptance) spread through the fandom.

DF: What is it like to make fanworks about women in the Tolkien fandom today? How have things changed?

Elleth: That is a good question. I started a new job almost a year ago, and since then, I've had very little time to engage with the fandom, write fic, or create art; most of my social and creative energy has gone into my work. I miss fandom dearly, but at least when I left off, fandom definitely felt different, at least in the spaces I frequent. The SWG has always been championing female characters; if I remember correctly, the very first challenge was Strong Women and you have run numerous events on female characters yourself, so maybe I should return that question to you, Dawn. 😉 But all the same, the little corner of Tumblr that I hang out in most at the moment feels more open and accepting, especially with new material (Rings of Power, but also The Nature of Middle-earth and The Fall of Númenor) becoming available. It may have been from lack of exposure since I didn't necessarily go looking for material, but I also did not come across widespread, accepted bashing of female characters as still was the case the last time we had new Tolkien media with Jackson's Hobbit movies and the hate for Tauriel marching at the forefront of fannish discourse. Fandom feels more joyful and less afraid today, and the same seems true in terms of diversity in the Tolkien fandom more generally—casting characters as people of colour and reclaiming and rewriting the Dwarves by Jewish fans are just two examples I can come up with from the top of my head. There also is tolkien-heroines on Tumblr that pretty much picks up where fyeahtolkienladies left off, reblogging female-centric fanworks. Finwëan Ladies Week, plus several cultural events like Tolkien South Asian  Week and a recent one for Latin America are very much expanding the scope of the fandom and, I think, beautifully showcasing the growing acceptance of more diverse takes on the canon. As for me, what little I posted recently was well-received, even if there still is a difference in interest in and numbers of male-centric and female-centric fanworks.

Which, I think now (as opposed to several years ago), is fine. Let's face it, The Silmarillion is a big sausagefest for the most part, and they are genuinely engaging and interesting characters. I'm a Maglor stan myself, so hey, I understand! They are the main movers and shakers of canon and will probably always take the spotlight. Just knowing that there is interest and hopefully no more reluctance or fear to create fanworks about female characters and femslash is good enough for me. I'm happy, even if the numbers aren't necessarily in our favour—it's not a contest. Keep creating and keep having fun while doing it, that's the most important part, whether the character at the center is male, female, NB or another gender entirely.