Antares0606 @antares0606 - Tumblr Blog

eldalier

Irmo, master of dreams

#irmo

lesbienj

i’m gonna be so real idk how many more aurë entuluvas i got left in me

dawnfelagund

Communities Do Comment: Expanding the 3C's of Commenting with SWG Data

Fanfiction authors almost universally enjoy receiving comments on their work, and in my twenty-two years in the Tolkien fanfiction fandom, I have never known a time where there is not some angst over comments among writers. As an author, I too care about comments because they make posting (which I honestly despise, despite the fact that it is what I am doing right now) worth it. As an archive owner, I care even more because I want the creators who share their work on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild (SWG) to feel wanted and welcomed there—and that sentiment tends to come from receiving comments.

In 2018, I wrote an article called Why People Don't Comment: Data and History From the Tolkienfic Fandom at the behest of a project called Long Live Feedback. Comments (at least on AO3) were tailing off, to the despair of authors who already felt their work went largely unnoticed. As I looked at various data from the @tolkien-fanfiction-survey and collected from different archives, I developed a theory of commenting that I call the 3C’s: commenting depends on confidence, community, and commenting as a skill.

Last year, I revisited this article for the SWG’s fan history column Cultus Dispatches and updated it with some new data. Good news: AO3 is no longer sliding into a commentless abyss! I intended to follow up the next month with more data from the SWG, but planning Mereth Aderthad 2025 took over my life at that time, and once that was past, I put Cultus Dispatches on hiatus until I had the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data in hand. More than a year later, I have the SWG data at last, and it lends further support to the 3C’s theory of commenting, especially the importance of community.

I hope you’ll read the full article Communities Do Comment: Expanding the 3C’s of Commenting with SWG Data but here are two key takeaways:

Looking at comment data in the context of fan history shows that commenting dropped off when community platforms were not widely available, i.e., the years between the heyday of Yahoo! Groups and the rise of Discord.

On the SWG, challenge fanworks receive about twice the comments as those that weren’t created for challenges. I suggest that participation in challenges signals community involvement, driving up comment counts.

Confidence and commenting as a skill remain important—my 101 Comment Starters have more notes by far than anything I’ve ever posted on Tumblr—but their force is diminished when an author and reader share a community. And this makes sense, the equivalent of complimenting a friend’s outfit versus a stranger on the street.

For more analysis and discussion of the data, see my article Communities Do Comment: Expanding the 3C’s of Commenting with SWG Data.

And if you enjoy the unholy three-way Venn diagram that is my work on Tolkien studies, fan studies, and quantitative humanities, check out Tolkien by the Numbers on Substack.

#fanfiction comments

asinoeiv

Firstly I love your art and you are one of my all time favourite Tolkien artists. Secondly, a crumb of Elros if you’re still doing requests? 🥹🙏🏽

Your Elros is finally finished ✨✨✨ young king Elros was probably a hot mess, he had to be with descendants like his. The design is half though out and pretty much just the first idea I went with. I like royal purples for him using a lot of influence from Byzantine/ancient Egypt and Rome.

AHHHHGGGGGGG

The Choctaw-Irish Brotherhood(via)

paula-of-christ

im-the-princess-now

I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help

dresshistorynerd

It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yeald failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by Brittish landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatos, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

trickstertime

Then in 2020:

Navajo Nation say Irish generosity is the ‘good in all of the bad that is going on’

jennybobenny73

Choctaw Nation has now added a monument of their own:

A sculpture honoring the relationship between the Choctaw Nation and the people of Ireland will soon be erected on the Choctaw Capitol groun

general-illyrin

I don’t know enough about the situation to be able to say if I agree with the economic analysis, but the willingness to help each other and the memory of that continuing to cause goodwill is beautiful

starlight-pirate

King Thranduil

asinoeiv

Gil Galad's chief councilors and source of headaches.

Two half-elves: one the Eldritch scion of pretty much every royal line—human and elven—and the other, the Fëanorian hardliner that may or may not be an actual Fëanorian. Both are having a dubious claim to your throne and a total disinterest in it at the same time.

endortbc

This is based on the idea that for both Dwarves and Elves, braiding has a special meaning, and it is something shared between those who love and trust each other.

I imagine they got married soon after the war. Later, Legolas moved to Ithilien and Gimli to Aglarond, but they found ways to get together. This is when they got a chance to reunite and braided each other’s hair.

Kindred.

#gimli son of gloin #legolas son of thranduil