Comments on Cabbages and the Embarrassment of Being Maedhros

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I enjoyed this story tremendously. You manage to write your characters very sympathetically without turning the story into long introspective emo-fests. I really like your concise writing style and your skill for formulating things so that I find myself going "Yes! Exactly! You nailed it!" Thank you very much for a great (if that can be said, considering the subject matter ;)) read!

 



Excellent!

From poignant to chilling to funny and beautiful writing all way through. Numerous perfect lines stick in my memory: Maeglor's thoughts on orcs; Maedhros' on the lack of appropriate swearwords, on poor perceptive Carnistir's needs, on his own 'general derangement and insanity'...

There are so many gems in this short story that all I can think to do is go look for more from the same hand.

 



Still working my way through your stories. Love this one as well. I see you credit Dawn with influencing your characterization. No wonder I find it so convincing and sympathetic. She also greatly influenced my own Maitimo and Findekano stories--in fact I often joke that I write fanfic of her canon. I do depart as well.

I love that you use humor. I can't explain why the First Age is my choice of subject matter--anguish and high heroism really doesn't suit either my personal taste in either reading or writing. But when I fell in love with these characters (pretty much the whole House of Finwe, although I have my favorites!) I fell hard. You hold my attention and keep me with you by your use of human psychology and like I mentioned before humor. I am enjoying this series so much.



Thank you very much for taking the trouble to engage with the series!

I think Dawn is just the most glaringly obvious of my influences. However, since I spent the months before I wrote the first of these stories voraciously reading Maedhros stories on the internet, I would find it pretty hard to compile a comprehensive list of everyone who influenced me...

I'm sure there is a quotation from the Sage himself about why humour is important - although he is more likely to have written it with the Lord of the Rings in mind than the Silmarillion, I guess: something about the necessity of hobbits. But Third Age elves have a sense of humour, so surely elves of the First Age did, too!