ohhh my godd i just finished the two chapters of at the end of all things and forget about bagginshield i need freya/fili fix-it fics 😭😭😭
First off, omghi. IloveyouandImsofuckingexcited. ps this is an excuse to ramble at someone other than Meph, the most patient and indulgent man in the world, so guess what I'm gonna do now?
Second, there's a reason I only listed Freli as the primary relationship, the others are still there, but I don't want to mislead folks.
Third, oh buddy I feel that deep in my soul. I have to stop and write lil blips of alternate versions of my own damn story to make my brain chill so I can work on the actual thing. And a couple days ago, I didn't fall asleep until 6am (I guess I didn't write enough to appease them that day?) bc those two kept telling me about alternate versions of fricking SofA, one of which was extremely horrifying. So I just drop little blips and rambles of all those into the tab called "To make the brain stop" Like. One header in there is 'The Tragic Au they Dodged' (...ok that one isn't a blip, its 3400 words, but in my defense, writing that helped me work out some of the stakes and motivations in the background of Ateal.) Oh wait, its not a spoiler to tell you the high level of it! That one is the 'what if Frey didn't get caught after snagging the ring, and just left the letter behind' version. It's Bleak.
Fourth, Consider this an open invitation to fic of fic this thing if you're inclined. You, anon, or anyone. I can even read it bc this is not a professional publishing conflict. It will make me scream and run in a circle. These two have always broken my brain, but them showing up now has been ruinous. I was reading another hobbit fic bc its where I picked up a fanon thing, and I kept going, hey, where's freya? I misread a comment, and my brain fucked off into 6 versions of what if Omegaverse? including me and Meph trying to figure out what the dominant fandom interpretation would be. Brain: Broken.
Fifth. There's a reason I resisted writing the ringquest, and then this. I wrote a first version of this fic. It was about 45k before I realized the plot arc was crap and I scrapped it to rebuild. There is a 15k word outline. There is 20k of current meta, not counting whats in the archive tab. There's almost 7k of bullet notes bc I needed to know and understand the government and politics of Erebor bc I'm not satisfied with handwaving an absolute monarchy where somehow everyone has free time. I have a sindarin to french dictionary bc the english one wasn't cutting it. I have a playlist of Ateal vibes that is probably incomprehensible to anyone else.
AND.
Is2g this would be easier from scratch. If I was writing a wholly separate, original book, it would be easier to outline and worldbuild, bc then I wouldn't be checking dates and facts from the canon books, from the canon movies, from the movies BTS, and from SofA canon which is subdivided into what characters Think they know vs actual facts and events vs the story that was told for 10 years since the reclamation. This is half the reason why writing the full ringquest won't happen. I'm one of Those Writers, which y'all started to notice. Despite my typos and comma issues, there is background logic and explanations for basically everything. Like. Even Galadriel and the porn has an underlayer of why and how I never told y'all about. Once I realized that SofA wasn't quite crack anymore, I went back and checked and rechecked I'd never said anything to contradict it, then changed something under the surface that matters more in Ateal. Then, when I scrapped and built the deeper version of Ateal, I did it again to make sure I didn't contradict myself. I have to have lists of what different people know bc as you already noticed, folk are making wrong assumptions and it'll matter as we go.
Doing that with the actual ringquest and everyone in the South and lands of Men? agony.
Send help.
(or send messages bc knowing people are excited is nearly as motivating as those two fuckers haunting me at night)