Sci-fi and fantasy, currently obsessed with The Silmarillion (Maedhros, Maglor, Elrond, Glorfindel, my loves). Tabletop RPGs, especially The One Ring 2e. Trekkie, Transformers, Stargate SG-1. Ao3 is dragonbornsandwaffles. Love a good fix-it fic. Fëanorian at heart. Header by erekuri, icon by veluv_art.
Hello! If you've found this blog, you're probably into sci-fi like Transformers or Star Trek, tabletop RPGs, or the Silmarillion (or shitposting in general). I've been writing fanfiction for over 20 years, though I've only just started posting on Ao3 under the name dragonbornsandwaffles.
I adore a good fix-it fic, and fics that have sci-fi elements like time-loops or eldritch entities have my whole heart. I also love to explore characters and elements like grief, love, strength, and healing. My works tend to give more nuance to female characters and explore who they are outside of their roles in relation to male characters. I do write E works on Ao3 and might link to them from time to time.
Though I am more Fëanorian- and Kidnap Fam-based, I also believe the situation in the Silmarillion is too complex to choose "sides," and I also have great empathy for the Sindar. Everyone was just trying their best in an impossible situation. I don't engage in discourse about who was better, etc. We all love our blorbos and I just don't see the point.
Main blorbos: Maedhros, Maglor, Elrond, and Glorfindel, but I also adore Nerdanel, Míriel, and Haleth. Fëanor as well - he needs a ton of grief counseling. I have a huge soft spot for Elwing, Eluréd, and Elurín. Out of the Valar, Irmo and Estë.
Main ships: Russingon, Maglorfindel, and Fëanel. On the side, Halenthir and Celrond. Erestor Caranthirion truther.
Fic navigation under the divider.
Fanfic Navigation
To Begin Again: M, Eldritch and High Kings Maedhros and Elrond AU, 150k+ words. My main longfic series. After being reforged and sent directly to Valinor days before the Darkening, Maedhros discovers that the House of Fëanor can reverse the Doom of the Noldor. Meanwhile, Maglor simultaneously finds himself in Third Age Eriador. The two brothers must learn to control their new powers while simultaneously saving their people from the Doom across the span of three ages. The bulleted fics below are part of this AU.
Every Ending is a Chance: T, 17k words. "As the lava burns his fëa away, Maedhros is reforged and returns to Valinor before the Darkening. But the Valar have something more in store for him, and Maedhros isn't sure he wants to know what..." A prequel of sorts to this universe, covering how Maedhros came to be High King and the specifics of the Doom.
A Place by the Fire: T, 16k words. "A year after Maedhros falls into the fires that are his Doom, Maglor finds himself falling into Third Age Imladris. At one point, he would have welcomed a new home with new friends and family. Now, the thought terrifies him - particularly when the silmaril melded to his hand starts to take on a life of its own. At least Rivendell is a place of love and healing." Part two of the prequels, covering how Maglor reunited with Elrond and started to experience his eldritch powers.
Courage of Stars: M, 116k words and counting (WIP). "An eldritch Maedhros gets more than he bargained for when he attempts a daring rescue in Angband. Meanwhile, in the Third Age, Elrond faces the Valar and Fingolfin, Fingon, and a flamboyance of Fëanorians arrive in Rivendell. Rediscovering family ties and what it means to be at peace whilst finding romance and learning to deal with emerging eldritch powers is a lot harder than it sounds." The main work for To Begin Again. It has time travel, domestic fluff, grieving rituals, accidental child acquisition, terrible puns, actual family bonding between Fëanor and Fingolfin, Fëanorian-Hobbit shenanigans, and more.
Hole in the Wall: G, 2.8k. "Elrond and his children cook up the perfect meal for Celebrían with some less-than-ideal results: Namely, renovating Rivendell one shepherd's pie at a time." A giftfic for the lovely BalrogBalls in the 2024 White Oliphaunt Gift Exchange.
not doomed by the narrative but saved by the narrative. yeah i know you'd rather die than keep suffering but the story doesn't actually care what you want. you have to keep going, even when it hurts. even being erased from existence won't stop you from being salvaged from the wreckage of un-being. get up. keep pushing. keep bleeding. keep living.
An Incident occurs and the Finwëan brood of Middle Earth are called to defend themselves.
The start of a charming tale of complete silliness told through letters.
@silmarillionepistolary
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
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video game and film fandoms will come and go for me but the Silmarillion fandom will never die. because that book came out like 50 years ago and we're all still trying to figure out what the hell is going on there.
sex is a distraction from your true purpose in life which is to go to the aquarium and look at the fish and go "wooooooaaah.... fishies". cmon guys we all need to lock in.
bestie boo, let me fill you in on something: if you're going to take any part of 'good grammar' and randomly assign it to She's A Witch! AI, you might as well give up. It's over. You're cooked. Anyone who has spent the last decade or more learning to type properly, anyone who has spent any time writing articles/papers/essays that require you to use 'good grammar' is going to fall into that 'oh no it might be AI' trap.
Stop hunting like it's 1692. You're not going to find Goody Proctor at the ChatGPT sacrament. What you're going to do is exactly what happened back then: harming people who've done nothing wrong.
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain
lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons
because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death
Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune
and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it
Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and
Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and
Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.
(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)
There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)
There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.
Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."
Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.
Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:
And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.
And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.
This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book
Okay but you forgot the best part! During the scene where Aragorn, Gandalf and the other Main CharaktersTM ride ahead to go shout at the gate (and talk to the mouth of sauron in the extended edition) they were very firmly told only to ride up ahead “this far” because that area was cleared and beyond that it wasn’t.
But. Viggo Mortensen is absolutely mad and lead them just…. a bit farther than that. Everyone else was very scared they might blow up any second. Viggo said it “added a little extra tension”.
Viggo was just Like That™ for the whole trilogy, taking method acting to extreme levels:
he would spend multiple days walking overland to locations in full pack, sword, & armour when everyone else was travelling in trucks
refused to use any prop swords that weren’t actual steel
basically lived in the forest in-costume, sleeping rough under the sky, even fishing & foraging for his food when possible
often spent hours in the barn just bonding with the horses. He adopted the horse he rode, Uranus, after filming ended
repaired all his own gear by hand, which was often since he never took it off
had a tooth knocked out during filming but had the crew simply glue it back in place so they could keep filming
the instructor who taught everyone swordplay said Viggo was the best swordsman he had ever trained
carried his sword literally everywhere & practiced non-stop, resulting in the cops being called when locals reported “a wild man swinging a sword around his head" outside a gym in Wellington
an orc actor fucked up & accidentally threw a dagger directly into Viggo’s face, but Viggo just deflected it with his sword. They kept that shot
infamously broke 3 toes kicking that helmet but stayed in-character & sold his very real scream as part of the scene. They also kept that shot
Viggo insists on doing his own stunts; in The Two Towers where Aragorn is unconscious & floating down the river, the strong current pulled him underwater for so long that a rescue team had to go in to save him. Viggo survived by grabbing a boulder on the riverbed and pulling himself to the surface
It’s probably more accurate to say that Aragorn played Viggo Mortensen in the off season, so I’m 100% unsurprised to hear he put a whole crowd of fellow actors in genuine mortal peril for a 12% increase in authenticity
Hi! For the pride requests could I ask for aromantic aredhel? No worries if you don't have time/have done it before. And regardless I love your art it's always so good!!💖💖💖
+ aroace for annon
Thank you <3 - there´s always time for Aredhel
🏳️🌈CELEBRATE PRIDE WITH ME🏳️🌈 - send in a character or a ship with a pride flag and I´ll draw it
Wait I’m sorry parent/child incest fic?????? Why does that exist? Why do you KNOW that exists?????? What the fuck 🤢
I feel like you can sort of tell how long (or not) someone has existed in fannish spaces by how outraged they get about things like this. Like rings in a tree trunk lol. I've been in so many fandoms. At least one, but often multiple at the same time, since I was a teenager. I've seen just. Everything.
Sex pollen. Mpreg. Incest. Monster fucking. Tentacles. Pairings like Snape/Hermione that would be crazy abusive and illegal if they were real. Wild kinks. The babygirlification of all kinds of villains. So much RPF (the 'I sincerely believe they are secretly a couple' kind and the 'this is fictional but it's fun to imagine they're in love' kind.)
You learn to just scroll past shit you don't like or unfollow people or filter tags. The tldr of fandom is that humans are weird as fuck. And creative, and unhinged, and traumatized, and talented. And amazing. And every single thing that you clutch your pearls about 'well surely someone doesn't want to read/write THAT!' - someone does. Probably lots of people do. And those people are perfectly normal. In their offline lives, they're parents and siblings and they have jobs and friends and they go about their lives and they don't cause any harm. And that's the sticking point. There's this really concerning, frankly highly Evangelical idea that if someone enjoys the wrong kind of fiction, they are obviously a Bad Person. But nothing is that simple, and thought crimes aren't real, and you definitely have some thoughts or ideas that someone else would find fucked up. You don't have to like every kind of fic that exists. I certainly don't. But shaming people for their harmless fantasies about fictional characters is so boring. I saw Goody Proctor enjoying a Toxic Ship! Good for you, I'll alert the pope.
