Chapter Text
About timeline and characterization:
In this AU (obviously, if you have begun to read the story), Thorin and Fíli and Kíli live, and elements of the films are mixed with those of the books.
Some variation of the expedition to Moria happens, but with a different cast and totally different backdrop of events. The Ring plot and Bilbo and Aragorn and others are SOMEWHERE in this world, but don’t enter into this part of the tale. The big war with Sauron is still coming….
I am fudging many timelines, of course, trying to stay true to character more than calendars. In canon, for example, Kíli is young and brash and romantic in personality (Jackson films), while Gimli is confident and well-travelled, and a sturdier, more mature, rather knightly figure (bookverse). So they still are like that here. In the novels, you might recall that Gimli was only a few years younger than Kíli, and was away on a journey at the time of the quest for Erebor (not a child — despite the amusing locket scene with Glóin in the movie).
Since Kíli ought to be a little older than Gimli, you can take it either that they were born in slightly different years in this AU than in the original, or that Gimli is simply more mature by nature!
Also, in this story Gimli is the expedition leader because he’s good at such pragmatic work (see founding Aglarond in the books), while Kíli came along as a sort of royal observer.
On a more serious note: about noncon, elves, and Tolkien:
So this story had somewhat of a strange origin in my meta-thinking about the Tolkienverse (as well as, ok, my love for the power of hurt/comfort).
If you have focused your reading on Tolkien's published works, which do not depict explicit sexual experience, you will search in vain for reference to rape/sexual assault. But in a posthumous fragment (Laws and Customs of the Eldar, part of The History of Middle-earth), it is declared that Elves cannot be raped, because in the case of such an assault, they would release their souls from their bodies to flee to Mandos (eg, die).
I've always been interested in Tolkien's own device of presenting his works not as "what happened" but as an *account,* a story written by authors who live within the fictional history, in which stories are shaped by what the narrator knows, and change still more as they get retold, re-copied and edited by later people. One of his fascinating tools is to cast many passages in the form of “as x people tell it,” or “this people have a story about y, but that’s because they don’t know the real history, and truth has passed into legend,” hinting at the power of memory, rumor, superstition, and belief in shaping what people think is true.
Specific to sexuality, and to assault: the idea that "our people can't be raped" doesn't sound very plausible for any beings that have bodies. And again and again in the canon, we have passages that speak of captivity and “torment”: like those of Celebrian, Maedhros, Celebrimbor and the thousand nameless thralls of Morgoth and Sauron. What that torment consists of is not enumerated: but it’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t include one of the most basic and profound forms of violation.
But such a belief ("this can't happen to us") does sound very much like the sort of thing a people tells itself to soften or disguise the unbearable. In this telling, the denial that such a thing could befall the Eldar is a sort of superstition: something that people say of the Elves, which is sometimes repeated as wishful thinking by their own kind: but not the truth.
And in a different way, outside of the story, I think I’m uncomfortable with a— perhaps subconscious—implication in the original essay that death would be preferable to surviving sexual assault. It would be a mistake to apply too literally the mythos of a fictional world in which elves live for millenia, wield powerful magic, fight near-omnipotent Dark Lords, are reincarnated, and etc. Yet seeing that fic allows us to explore concepts that lie well outside the margins of canon, I prefer to imagine a version of events where this fom of suffering exists—AND its victims can survive, and recover, and choose what they wish to experience in its wake.