a thing got me thinking about bilbo and thorin the other day. you know there are people who act sweet and lovely when they are concerned about you and then there are people who don’t handle emotions well who get all annoyed despite themselves (you’re ill? why the fuck didn’t you say? you should’ve said earlier! do you want tea? what do you mean you don’t, you need something hot, shut up and drink your tea. do you need anything else? here take this fucking blanket, and another one, and if you aren’t feeling better tomorrow i swear to god…)
and i thought obviously, obviously, bilbo is the second type. the whole of botfa he spends making concerned noises and looking like he’s on the verge of a (you cannot go to war) tantrum. so that then lead me to the thought - is thorin the 1st type then (since they are so - not different but - complementary in a lot of ways)? then i remembered the way thorin snapped at bilbo after saving him in the misty mountains. nah, classic case of ‘you made me worry about you and i can’t admit it so you’ll pay for that’. clearly he’s also type 2…
still that didn’t make sense. they have to be unlike each other in this, it’s one of those fields where their experiences have been so vastly different (bilbo being a loner and thorin having a whole nation under his wing), no way they’ve developed the same emotional reaction. plus thorin actually seems to handle his feelings quite well compared to bilbo (by at least acknowledging them). it really shows how much of a repressed mess bilbo’s emotions are.
so i started sifting through their moments of emotional distress - bilbo being polite af to dwarves in bag end, apologizing to bofur in the caves, then mirkwood and the not so polite “stay where you are”, and later the even more exasperated “you MUST trust me”, “he doesn’t sleep, he barely eats”, crescendo-ing in “you CANNOT go to war!” and thorin - from “he’s been lost ever since he left home” and “what were you doing? you nearly got yourself killed!” to “bilbo! where is the hobbit?!” and then the times he’s worried about others or with others around - balin in bag end, kili in laketown, dwalin pretty much constantly
and i saw that, like many things in life, the two types are not a binary but a scale, and bilbo and thorin start from different ends and go through it in opposite directions. i.e. the more thorin knows you the more he is concerned with not hurting your feelings, the more bilbo knows you the more your feelings can go fuck themselves. in other words, thorin gets more and more at ease with emotions as he grows to know a person, and bilbo - oh, bilbo… all his ingrained politeness starts flaking off the moment he actually grows to care
in short, this proves yet again: thorin is uncomfortable with strangers, but very comfortable in love. bilbo is comfortable with strangers because strangers are much safer, but once someone gets a big enough place in his heart he just loses it. it’s not so much that he’s comfortable enough to take off the polite mask but that he is scared and angry because he feels he is powerless where it really matters. he cares about everything and everyone, and yet, when it’s too deep he can barely hold himself together, he starts feeling ridiculous and wrung out, because caring is hard. caring hurts a lot.
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