B - A pairing you initially didn’t consider but someone changed your mind
Oh, gosh. Nearly all of them? I don't really ship when I read, so every pairing that I like I owe to the fandom. The most recent pairings to jump on board were probably Dior/Nimloth thanks to minuiall and Pharazon/Zimrahil thanks to Clara. (That is, to clarify, Pharazon/Zimrahil in the version of the legendarium where she agrees with him politically and they both press for the marriage in violation of Numenorian law. I will never ship forced marriages (Pharazon/Miriel).)
R - A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships
Oh, gosh, I'm running out of these, and ones with OCs feel like cheating. NImloth's parents! Let's talk about Nimloth's parents! I wrote a fic with them being cute together, so that sort of counts as shipping, and I haven't seen much about them otherwise.
Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go
Okay so adenydd mentioned that she's also been thinking about Orodreth's Northern Sindar wife in the last one of these memes I wrote. So...northern Sindar obviously have a very different attitude toward war and toward Morgoth than the Noldor, given that they chose to continue living in the area even when it became surrounded by orcs. They obviously don't buy into the "no marriage during wartime" ethic either, although lately I've been toying with the idea that that's controversial even among the Noldor and that Finrod was attributing all of Aegnor's decisions to his Elvishness instead of to his thickheadedness mostly out of an attempt to make sense of things and find an underlying rationale?
But anyway the northern Sindar certainly didn't share that ethic. And they didn't share the attitudes of the Noldor on anything else, either. And yet everyone gets along amazingly well, especially considering that otherwise the Silmarillion is basically the Story of Why Everyone Is Racist. The Feanorians meet the locals "gladly", and Feanor's first project in Middle-earth is learning their language and mapping the evolution of their dialect and of Quenya from a common ancestor. That's Feanor's way of showing respect, I think. And it's repaid, because most of the Northern Sindar live in the kingdoms of the Noldor post-Mereth Aderthad. The text notes specifically that everyone in Nevrast chooses Turgon as their lord, and while my eyebrows are raised higher than Taniquetil at that, it does seem to imply that choice in the matter was at least regarded as important.
So, Noldor and Northern Sindar getting along pretty splendidly, except the Noldor are always in charge. :( And every recorded marriage in Beleriand is interracial. That's pretty cool. And so I'm mostly interested in Orodreth's relationship with his wife in the context of a vast cultural divide and yet a pretty strong basis for mutual respect. I imagine her (we're calling her Meril because Tolkien used that name for Gil's mommy once back when he was contemplating Finrod!parentage) pretty young, so born after the revelations of Alqualonde and after the adoption of Sindarin; I imagine her family lived in northern Nargothrond for a long time before it was called that, and simultaneously glad that the land is safe and slightly unhappy that it's been appropriated.
My Finduilas heavily influences her (I know, it should be the other way around), so she's willful and strong but not loudly so, a good communicator but not someone who speaks frequently. She's drawn to Orodreth, at first, by his confidence and leadership in Tol Sirion, but she actually likes him more when she realizes it's mostly feigned. Status and class aren't nearly the same among the Sindar, but there's decidedly the concept of a good match, and it is one.
