LOTR ROTFLMAO
 Almost everybody in the Lord of the Rings fan culture has already read these hilarious pages -- the secret diaries of the characters from Fellowship of the Ring -- but I offer the link to Cassandra Claire's work just in case you're like me, a LOTR-loving boomer who's bemused but pleased that a new generation has been so rabidly infected by the Tolkien bug. Frodo lives!
The pleasure here is not so much the amusing gloss on the story but rather the dry, oh-so-British wit of Claire's diary-ese. Be sure to read the diaries in strict sequence so not to miss the running gags. (The sequence runs from Aragorn to Sauron.)
These diaries are part of the fan genre called "slash," which has nothing to do with Friday-the-13th-style horror. Here's a nice concise page by K.S. Nicholas explaining "What is Slash?" complete with theories about its particular appeal to women. According to fan-culture expert Harry Jenkins, the term "slash":
. . . refers to the convention of employing a stroke or "slash" to signify a same-sex relationship between two characters (Kirk/Spock or K/S) and specifies a genre of fan stories positing homoerotic affairs between series protagonists.
For another indicator of slash's rather boggling popularity, consider that there's a Harry Potter Slash Web ring, including a bulging site called the Potter Slash Archive. Heck, there's even a Harry/Draco Web ring! (You see, those two only pretend to despise each other.)
11:57:19 PM 
|
