Honestly the Hobbit fandom needs more lesbians. Arwen/Tauriel sounds awesome...but what about Tauriel/Sigrid? Like, just Sigrid in general, I love her and she doesn't get mentioned except for in relation to Bard.
I love sigrid but I guess her character doesn’t get enough screen time for me to be able to see how it would work with shipping her with anyone??
But everything always needs more femships. So i am listening….
I HAVE BEEN LOUDLY YELLING ABOUT TAURIEL/SIGRID SINCE BEFORE DOS CAME OUT.
OKAY Y'ALL LISTEN UP THE WAY I FIGURE IT.
Sigrid had to grow up very fast, very young due to her mother’s death and her having to step into mum’s shoes as the woman of the house. Bard is poor and things would be iffy and unstable even in the best of circumstances, but this sure as hell ain’t it - not only is Sigrid having to tackle the domestic responsibilities of an adult woman at like, 8-12, Bard’s always in trouble with the law. Because the law in Laketown is well-established to be skeevy as fuck. So not only is Da a very poor single parent with a job that requires him to be absent for long stretches at a time (fishing voyages, yo) he’s always one scrape away from a stay in the Esgaroth brig. This is obviously not a recipe for a stable or stress-free childhood and adolescence. All the Bardlings grow up with some decent-sized emotional problems that come from growing up in an unstable house. Tilda deals by wanting to fight everything, Bain deals by being a petulant brat, and Sigrid deals by worrying herself to death. She’s got intense anxiety, which is only made worse by her actually being right about being under threat from multiple sides all the time. What’s there to stress about? Well, rent, food, firewood for the winter, house repairs, clothes for the growing kids, Alfrid prowling around with Notices they can’t read that he can make mean anything he wants, the constant looming threat of the house being reposessed or Da never coming back again. Orcs or robbers or rapists or the lake flooding. The list goes on.
Judging by what Bard and some of the other Laketowners say during the BoFA and during some crowd scenes in town, Esgaroth is patriarchal with firmly divided gender roles. So Sigrid is very used to being told what she can’t do, which makes sense because she is young and structurally powerless. She’s also used to being told it’s because she’s a girl, and that makes sense if only because she’s never been exposed to anything different.
Enter Tauriel, dashing elf captain and stone-cold badass who flawlessly takes control of the situation when Bard’s house is attacked by orcs. She’s steely, confident and absolutely efficient under pressure; both the heroic rescuer you dream of when you’re a child in a bad situation and the able role model you thirst for when you’re an adolescent looking for what you want to grow up to be. And, of course, she shatters gender role limitations into smithereens (either immediately, or when Sigrid realizes she’s a woman - I favor the ‘elves are pretty damn impossible to sex by looking and making assumptions’ headcanon). She’s magnetic, capable, suave and-
Excuse me, did I say suave? Oh no. That won’t do. Next morning, when Sigrid is up early making breakfast, she timidly approaches this absolutely unapproachable warrior and uncovers a /socially incompetent derp./ Maybe Tauriel drowsed off with her back against a post and her mouth fell open while she slept, and Sigrid startled her awake. Maybe Tauriel has no everliving idea how to go about making smallchat. Maybe Tauriel has /never seen a human this close before/ and is as scared of Sigrid as Sigrid is of her. Maybe all of the above. But suddenly Tauriel is bug-eyed nervous and spluttering through conversations in very bad Westron, looking like she wants to sink through the floor and never be looked at again, and by the horn of Béma you look just like I feel. By the time everyone else wakes up the soup is on and Sigrid and Tauriel are hunched over the kitchen table, hulling walnuts for something to do with their hands and laughing a bit too brightly at each others’ jokes.
