Interview with chrissystriped by Dawn by chrissystriped, Dawn Felagund

Chrissystriped is a prolific author on the SWG whose work spans characters and ages and topics. For Mereth Aderthad 2025, chrissystriped is writing for Shadow's presentation, "The Aromantic in Tolkien," and will be sharing a Third Age story that features Bilbo and Boromir as aromantic characters. Dawn spoke with chrissystriped about her story, her process as a writer, and the importance of representing aro-ace characters in fanfiction.

Dawn: To begin, we hope that attendees to Mereth Aderthad will want to check out the creators whose work will be featured at the event. So where can we find your fanworks?

chrissystriped: I post on the SWG as chrissystriped and on AO3 as ChrissyStriped (on AO3 my fics are only visible for registered users). I sometimes forget to cross-post (or in the case of my longest fic, I simply haven't taken on the task yet to move it to SWG), so there are some fics that are only on one or the other, but I do my best to have everything on both sites.

Dawn: You write such an incredible range. I've just looked at your first page of fanworks on the SWG—first page of several, I'd add!--and you have stories ranging from sweet moments between parents and children to the Last Battle at the end of the world. You span characters, groups, and ages. What draws you to Tolkien and do you have a favorite part of the legendarium?

chrissystriped: I distinctly remember reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time and wishing Sam had memorised more of the poem about Gil-galad. I loved getting to the Council of Elrond chapter for all the history in it. Middle-earth has such an incredible depth and each time I open a book by Tolkien I find something I didn't notice before. I love both The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, but The Silmarillion tickles my creativity more because of how condensed it is in many parts. We see so many characters only in passing or hear about events in one paragraph. As a writer I feel like I can always find something to expand on.

My favourite single piece of the legendarium is a bit out of the way: It's two passages in the Lay of Leithian (in the History of Middle-earth, Volume 3), one where Tolkien recounts the duel between Fingolfin and Morgoth and the other the song-fight between Finrod and Sauron. There's something about having those events in verse that makes them so much more emotional.

Dawn: I notice you write for a lot of our challenges too. What inspires you as a writer to choose what you write about? What does your creative process look like?

chrissystriped: I'm very much not a planner. I start with a vague idea—sometimes it's the beginning of a fic, sometimes it's the place I want the characters to be at the end, sometimes it's just a few lines of dialogue—and then hope the characters will come to life and fill in the rest. The best part of writing is when the characters tell me their story.

That's why I like to write for challenges or exchanges, it's a similar process, only the prompt is something someone else came up with. Usually one character or other will then step forward and say "This one is mine". Right now I also enjoy to consciously pick characters I haven't written before, so I'm all over the place with my fics.

I've only started to write such a wide range of characters and settings in the last five years or so. The fifteen-plus years before that I've spent almost exclusively writing my alternate universe (AU) that started at its core as a canon-divergence fic where Melkor repents and eventually gets a happy end. But it sprawled outwards and now includes fics about good Orcs and the former slaves of Angband as well as a series of Maedhros/Fingolfin fics.

Dawn: I noticed you had several recent works about Orcs, who are experiencing something of a well-deserved moment in the fandom, with Cuarthol's Orcs Are People collection, our Orctober challenge last year, and a forthcoming book by Rob Tally that considers the humanity of Orcs. What about this topic appeals to you as a writer and Tolkien fan?

chrissystriped: Tolkien gives us a few glimpses of Orcs talking among themselves and while it's from our heroes' points of view, they are clearly people (not very nice people, but still people), and at the same time no one in his works ever gives quarter to Orcs, it's okay to kill them all. I think that's something one can be critical about and that I want to do differently in my fics.

I love redemption arcs and I have a very soft spot for Orcs as people who have their own thoughts and dreams and who are not inherently evil, but the circumstances make it hard for them to be good. I like to write about them making their own way and finding something better beyond Angband or Mordor.

Dawn: Why did you choose Shadow's presentation to write a story for?

chrissystriped: Despite many of my fics being smutty and concerned with romantic love, I've come to realise a few years ago that I'm aro-ace myself, so Shadow's presentation caught my eye immediately and I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to write a fic with aromantic characters as main characters.

Dawn: I love that all of the presenters and creators for Shadow's paper are aro-ace themselves, especially since Shadow's exploration of aromanticism in Tolkien is striking into new scholarly territory. It is exciting to see this area of the legendarium receiving attention! Do you have any thoughts on the importance of representing aro-ace characters in fanworks?

chrissystriped: I first encountered the term "aromantic" in a fandom context and I'm sure many people can relate when I say it felt really good to have a label to stick to how I experience myself. I think it is important for people to be able to find themselves in stories and get a feeling of "this is not just me, there are others with similar experiences". We are so much freer in fanworks than mainstream media because we do not have to cater to what big publishers or studios think is their reader-/viewership and we should use that freedom.

Dawn: I don't want to give away too much of the story that you've written for Mereth Aderthad (which I have gotten to read! definitely the most awesome part of being the event organizer!), but given that we know Shadow's presentation will be about Bilbo and Boromir as aromantic characters, had you considered either of these characters as aro before, or was this a new approach?

chrissystriped: There's a line about Boromir in Appendix A that says he's "a man after the sort of King Eärnur" which sounds like an euphemism to me, considering they both have no wife and children. So I've thought of him as aromantic for a while.

With Bilbo I just accepted that he's not married (maybe because for me that never felt odd) and didn't think about it too much. But reading him as aromantic makes so much sense.

Correction

This interview originally and incorrectly attributed the Orcs Are People collection to Shadow. Cuarthol was the compiler of Orcs Are People.