#honestly maybe it is because I am a writer who loooooves angst

[the-bi-space-ace]

not to be a downer but I am suuuuuuper worried that because Hunter is going through it and is pissed he's going to say something to Echo blaming him for what happened to Tech.

I am not prepared for that kind of pain.

[saurons-pr-department]

How did you become a Sauron fan?

Honestly, I’m not quite sure... It kind of snowballed quickly XD Maybe a year or so ago, I started to really get back into LotR and The Hobbit and, as happens with these things, I wanted to know more and more about Middle Earth and whatnot. Then I remembered that I had been to a panel at a local convention a few years before this where two lads explained The Silmarillion and I was like, “ah yes, this is what I need!” But I didn’t get a chance to get the book for another while after that, so I spent a lot of time looking up fan art and reading about The Silm and stuff. I found myself particularly drawn to all things Sauron.

When it comes to people’s favourite characters, you’ll often hear people talk about how they either identify with the character in some way, or that the character has some kind of traits that the person wishes they had themselves. And while no, I don’t want to rule the entire world with an iron fist XD there are things about him that I can’t help but think “I kind of wish I was a little like that”. Mostly his organisational skills and his full confidence in himself and the things he does. Like, at no point does this man ever seem to question himself! I once spent about ten minutes practicing how I was going to ask for a stamp at the post office, while this man saunters into Númenor and converts everyone to a religion he’s making up as he goes along and convinces them to go fight the gods and then has a good ole giggle to himself because he thinks he so damned clever! Okay, it backfired on him, but you have to admire the ballsiness of it XD In terms of identifying...it’s more fanon Mairon/Sauron. In a lot of fics, he comes across to me as neurodivergent, even if the writer probably isn’t intending it. I’m neurodivergent (ADHD) so sometimes I’m reading something and the writer is trying to make him seem really ‘other’ because he’s an Ainu and I’m just like “hehe, no, that’s just life with a funky brain”. But yeah, I kind of ‘get’ him in those situations.

And then we have the fact that much of what we know about him lands him right in the middle of the type of story that I love: angsty fall stories. I looooove fall stories and I loooooove angst stories and he just delivers on both. And he has multiple falls! He went from The Admirable to The Abhorrent. He rose to power as Melkor’s second in command but that was whipped out from underneath him in the War of Wrath. He rose to power as a Dark Lord in his own right but was defeated more than once. He’s just rise and fall, rise and fall. It’s the kind of drama that I love! Then there’s the angst. Like, there are multiple points in his story where I feel that he was happy, or could have been happy, but something came along to ruin it (sometimes that ‘something’ was himself *cough*Eregion*cough*). What’s even better, is that much of his story is a mystery. How did he go from serving Aulë to Melkor? Why is he specifically singled out as a shapeshifter even though all the Ainur are technically able to change their form like we’d change clothes? Did he genuinely want to repent after the War of Wrath? What was he doing before he “fell back into evil”? What were those “bonds that Morgoth had laid upon him”? How did he go from ‘Melkor should be in charge of everything’ to ‘I am literally the only person in existence who knows what’s good for the world’? What exactly did he do in Barad-dûr all day?? Not only is the canon information on him really interesting, but there’s so much space to make things up too that just make him such a fun character to play with, especially his motivations.