Fellowship of the King: Final Thoughts

[masterghandalf]

This is a repost from Das_sporking2. Previous installments of this sporking may be found here.

Warning: This post contains general discussion of all the various gross elements in the fic as a whole.



Final Thoughts

MG: And so, everyone, we come at last to the end of Demetrious Polychron’s Fellowship of the King! Just… just what is there even to say about this absolute mess? Not only does it utterly fail to capture the tone, spirit or worldbuilding of Tolkien – despite the sometimes genuinely impressive amounts of obscure lore and backstory Polychron is clearly familiar with – not only is it full of weird and gross content related to sex and gender and fetishizing of wealth, power and the ability to do violence than run entirely counter to the source material, even taken on its own merits as a story, it still sucks. It’s rambling and incoherent, full of weird diversions, including multiple flashback arcs and a jaunt through the underworld, it’s overstuffed with characters and plotlines that it ultimately can’t help but leave underbaked and underdeveloped, tosses in new lore and worldbuilding willy-nilly and without proper buildup or considering whether it matches with the rest of the story or the source material, and then it just sort of ends suddenly with no resolution, clearly in hilariously premature anticipation of a series of sequels that will ultimately never materialize because of the author’s own hubris.

In some ways, out of everything I’ve sporked, it puts me in mind most of Partially Kissed Hero. Oh, it’s not nearly as bad, mind you. Nothing I’ve sporked has ever quite matched PKH’s feeling that you’re watching the author’s mind unravel in real-time, which I think can only really happen in the realm of online fanfic or something very similar, as it requires both a serialized narrative unfolding in episodic installments over the course of years and little to no actual oversight from anyone who can say “maybe this is a bad idea.” FotK, whatever its other vices, was at least completed and organized into a single, (mostly) coherent piece before being put out in the world. As such, while a lot of it still doesn’t make much sense, it flows better than PKH and goes to less… obvious extremes over the course of the writing; it’s also not nearly as long, which helps a lot. Nonetheless, the bizarre tangents, gratuitous edginess, obsession with stuff and extended digressions spent on glorified shopping trips, protagonist-centered morality and general over-the-top nature of the characters, magic, events etc, and derailing of canon characters into villainous masterminds who have supposedly puppeteered events behind the scenes for ages while being completely incompetent when they actually appear, can’t help but put one in mind of that truly abominable fic, and the writing style is even somewhat similar as well (albeit I think most of the similarities are down to both of them being written by authors who are trying to be clever, and want to show us their cleverness at length, while not being nearly as actually clever as they think they are – I’ve seen similar blends of “bland but pretentious, edgy but immature, and interspersing allegedly comedic asides with the author patting themselves on the back and long, rambling sidetracks” from authors with similar problems. Still, I noted the parallels, so it felt worth pointing out.

In any case, moving on to the meat of my final thoughts, I’d like to organize this a bit differently than I have before; since there’s just so much wrong with FotK, to start off with I’d like to run back through my counters, showing the final scores they all arrived at, explaining in more detail why I picked them all, and what I think the final numbers show about the fic as a whole:

The Counts

Happy Ending Override: 38
Going from lowest to highest, we’re starting with this one. Now, LotR’s ending is generally more properly classified as bittersweet than happy per se – including both Frodo’s personal tragedy and the fact that, on a larger scale, while Sauron was defeated the time of the elves and many of the other old powers of Middle-earth had come to an end, many fair and wondrous things were lost or destroyed, and the fading of magic from the world was greatly accelerated. Still, I thought the title for this counter was appropriate, considering its subject matter. Basically, this one reflects one of the fundamental problems with the fic – it really makes it feel like LotR didn’t matter. There’s a new dark lord – technically, a pair of dark lords – ruling in Mordor from what amounts to a rebuilt Barad-dur, plus a number of other potential successors to Sauron’s throne in play. Gondor is at war and barely holding the forces of evil back, while the Free Peoples are threatened on all sides. The Rings of Power are not only still in play, having not actually been depowered by the destruction of the One, but there are a whole bunch of other rings still out there we’d never even heard of before! To add insult to injury, even the One Ring itself has returned, in a sense (as the Master-stone). Yes, yes, “always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and begins to grow again,” but we barely have a respite here; it honestly leaves us feeling like the only parts of the War of the Ring that actually mattered were Sauron personally being overthrown (though someone else succeeded him immediately as ruler of Mordor) and Aragorn replacing Denethor on the throne of Gondor. Not only do I think all of this is a catastrophic mistake narratively, for reasons I’ll get into later, it also can’t help but feel like a slap in the face to everyone who read and enjoyed the original LotR, like that story was in the end little more than a minor hiccup in Arda’s history.

Linguistic Confusions: 62
Don’t see much point in dwelling on this one; I borrowed it from my Last Ringbearer sporking because Polychron, like Yeskov, frequently butchers Tolkien’s languages (though unlike Yeskov, he puts at least some effort into it and gets it right more often than I’d initially thought he did, so he gets some credit at least). Normally not something I’d much dwell on, but considering how much effort Tolkien put into developing Arda’s languages and how much it meant to him – it’s an oft-repeated fact that one of his major reasons for developing Middle-earth as a setting was to create a world where his conlangs could live and be spoken – and Polychron is ostensibly trying to write a serious sequel to LotR, I think in this context it matters a lot when he screws it up.

Take That, Tolkien!: 62
Another count I borrowed from my TLR sporking. Like I said at the beginning, I used it a bit differently here. Polychron doesn’t have the same sort of axe to grind with Tolkien as Yeskov clearly did, and they’re writing very different works with different relationships to the source material – TLR was a deconstruction, FotK a sincere attempt at a sequel – and so he doesn’t really go on the attack vis a vis Tolkien in the same way. What he does do, in my opinion, is try to outdo Tolkien, like in trying to make a worthy follow-up to LotR, he feels like he has to make a better LotR. And his vision of “better” makes it abundantly clear, IMO, that he has no freaking clue what made the original story so beloved in the first place. And he does clearly have some areas where he thinks something is stupid in the original LotR that he makes fun of in FotK – “ribbles,” anyone? But overall, this count is less for him attacking Tolkien, and more for him trying to be a better Tolkien and failing miserably at it.

Expansion-Pack World: 73
Middle-earth is one of the most famously detailed worlds in fiction, and it was a project Tolkien worked on – and revised heavily multiple times – across the course of his entire life. And yet it still had lots of blank spots in it, particularly outside of the lands of northwest Middle-earth where most of the Legendarium takes place, or on those continents other than Middle-earth, Aman or Numenor, which are mostly left as little more than vague names and landmasses. So, there is legitimately plenty of room to explore! And Polychron’s first attempt – establishing Guan Qubing’s empire of “Hildoria” – is decent enough as an attempt to put a loosely-Chinese counterweight to the loosely-Byzantine Gondor in one of the major blank spaces on Tolkien’s map; it’s clumsy, but it’s not terrible. Unfortunately, we then end up getting extended digressions into his version of Harad and “Under-earth,” which feel like absolutely nothing that exist in Tolkien’s creation, throwing whole races, civilizations, realms and metaphysical concepts at us that not only make no sense when placed alongside the Sil or HoME and the worldbuilding established there, but that also don’t really seem to affect the story that Polychron himself is telling outside of the sections where they’re directly relevant. And on top of that both Celendrian’s “Princes’ Brigades” and Glorfindel and Ulbandi’s “Pact of Middle-earth Powers” (I still prefer “Legion of Doom”) which create random monarchies all over the map, with no real concern for how this fits into the political or cultural landscape of Middle-earth, for the sole seeming reason of having lots of people both heroes and villains can recruit from as needed. If you care about the lore at all, it’s maddening, and even if you’re not bothered by that, it’s just sloppy. And taken as a whole a lot of it can’t help but feel like someone’s homebrew DND setting just vomited all over Tolkien’s carefully constructed world… which isn’t really beating the “failed DM” allegations some of you in the comments came up with. In other words, Polychron’s worldbuilding is bad, and he should feel bad.

Traveling at the Speed of Plot: 73
Tolkien is very careful in LotR, and to a somewhat lesser extent the Sil (which covers a much larger span of time, admittedly) to keep very precise track of things like distances, characters’ locations, and travel times. Going by the appendices, you can actually use the detailed timeline in the later part of “The Tale of Years” to track exactly where every character is at any given point in the story, how their storylines line up, and how quickly they travel from one place to another. Polychron… does not do that. His characters mostly seem to show up whenever and wherever he needs them, with at best a token nod given to things like travel times and logistics, and the longer the story goes on the more maddening it gets. This is especially obvious at the battle at Weathertop, where both sides just sort of… spontaneously manifest armies to have a big battle, which then disappear into the ether when their work is done. An important part of Tolkien’s attention to these details is that it gives his battle and travel scenes actual weight, feeling like they really matter in the context of the world and exist within the bonds of some level of realism, despite the fantastical setting. Since Polychron fails to do the same thing, his battles and journeys lack that same weight – they don’t really matter and feel like no effort goes into setting them up in or out of universe, and so we’re left having a very hard time caring about any part of it. Not helping is the way that settlements themselves seem to be built, destroyed and rebuilt very suddenly, with people manifesting from thin air to populate them, making the world feel more like an RTS map than a place real people actually inhabit.

Pervy Hobbit Fanciers: 89
This one… ugh. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is not as entirely sexless as is sometimes claimed, but it’s still very much the case that explicit sexual content was something he had no interest writing, and sex by itself is rarely foregrounded as a motivation for characters. And I think that’s perfectly fine, honestly – as an ace person, I do kind of have to side-eye criticisms of Tolkien I’ve seen that imply his work is immature or lesser for not focusing on sex, or that other writers (I’ve seen the comparison made for Howard, Tanith Lee, and Martin, among others) are automatically superior for being more explicitly sexual or sexually charged. And, well, I think Polychron is a good counterexample, because his work is much more sexualized than Tolkien’s, and infinitely less mature. The most immediately obvious example is every male hobbit in the Shire and beyond seeming to hit on underaged Elanor (hobbits come of age at thirty-three, Polychron! She’s more than ten years off from that!), which is yucky but also kind of tame because nothing actually happens with it. But then we get Estel and his single-minded obsession with raping every woman he meets (Tolkien certainly includes male villains who are stalker-ish, domestic abusers, or who are implied or outright stated to be rapists – Melkor, Eol, Maeglin, Grima, Pharazon, etc. – but nothing like this)… Galadriel’s entire backstory seeming to be driven by her string of affairs as both she and all the men around her seem to be basically slaves to their hormones… Glorfindel and Thuringel’s Lust-with-a-capital-L being their defining emotion (and yes it’s clear this means sexual lust at least some of the time)… and of course the inexplicable scene where the villains all get together and compare the size of their naughty bits late in the fic. While all the actual sex scenes are fade to black at most, it’s still a lot more overtly sexual than anything in Tolkien… and also extremely unserious and immature. Polychron clearly has no interest in exploring sexuality as an actual motivation for his characters, and if you’re sincerely turned on by any of this, well… not to judge, but I have questions. Ultimately, the vibe I get from this is a mix of the author giggling to himself about how very naughty he’s being, mixed with difficulty understanding that men and women can have relationships that aren’t based around sex if the Galadriel backstory is anything to go by (and iirc the only on-page reference to homosexuality is Glorfindel making a joke about raping both male and female slaves, which… yikes). In other words, it’s gross, it’s gratuitous, it’s the exact opposite of mature, and it makes me think Polychron has some serious issues he should probably consider talking out with his therapist.

Bigger, Louder, More!: 116
This one, honestly, ties into what I see as some of the same issues as the “Take That, Tolkien!” counter. The only way Polychron seems to be able to conceive of to write an LotR sequel is to do “LotR, but more.” Bigger fortresses and bigger populations, no matter how little sense it makes. More factions, more rings. More worldbuilding, regardless of whether or not it fits in with the rest of the setting, and higher stakes. The One Ring could make whoever possessed it potentially strong enough to conquer Middle-earth (albeit explicitly not invincible?) Meet the Master-Ring, which can and will make whoever possesses it have absolute power over all of reality! LotR has one major Dark Lord, plus a couple of wannabe or subordinate mini-Dark Lords? Polychron gives us so many potential Dark Lords you can’t even count all of them on both hands! Tolkien gave us an epic quest? We’re having multiple simultaneous epic quests for different McGuffins! Tolkien’s heroes receive powerful items at different points in the story? Polychron’s heroes get to root around in Elendil’s treasury and take their pick of basically ever legendary item that ever existed! Tolkien gives us one dragon being a big deal? Polychron gives us an invasion of dragons! Tolkien has his villains cross orcs with Men? Polychron introduces orc-elf hybrids! And so on and so forth. Ultimately it just points to a very shallow and superficial reading of LotR, going wide-eyed over the surface-level aspects of the story and trying to inflate them to be as big and dramatic as possible, while unfortunately missing out on the subtler, human-level moments that make the story actually work.

Feel My Edge: 144
This one is really a pair with “Pervy Hobbit Fanciers,” I think, because they both speak to the same underlying problem – Polychron’s lack of maturity that tries to masquerade as actual maturity. To be blunt, Polychron likes writing about rape. And violence. And hard characters making hard choices for the supposed greater good. And lots of collateral damage to the world at large. And lots of villains being gratuitously evil for no real reason other than to show to us that they’re evil. And sometimes all of the above happening at once. But what he’s not interested in is actually exploring any of these topics in any level of detail. Like Newcomb, he just throws this stuff in to be shocking and lurid – look, one of my villains is obsessed with rape! Another breeds literal monsters from her own body. Two others love engaging in lurid, bloody sex rituals. Why do they do these things? Dunno, because that’s what bad guys do. Why are the twins so single-mindedly obsessed with killing literally every orc ever, even those who pose no threat or had nothing to do with their mother’s abduction? Because it makes them hard and badass and cool, man. Why does Thuringel look like a gross, maggoty zombie in her true form, and why are the new Nazgul visibly reanimated corpses? Because it’s grotesque and shocking. Why do we get an extended digression about how Glorfindel was tortured and mind-raped and it turned him evil? Because it’s shocking and horrifying. Why is one of the main villains Celebrian’s child by rape, why does he have incestuous desires towards his own sister, and why is he evil because apparently orc puberty just does that to a guy? You get the idea. But there’s no gravity to it, we don’t see any real exploration of what any of this means or how it has any lasting effect on the characters going forward the way we do from Tolkien’s own works, it’s just there for us to stare at it and marvel at how shocking and horrid it is, and then move on to the next thing for us to be shocked and horrified by, and it quickly loses whatever luster it had and becomes gross, tiresome and off-putting. There are mature ways to handle any of these sorts of topics… and then there’s gross schlock, and this, sadly, is clearly the latter.

The Unfair Sex: 171
Demetrious Polychron has issues with women. There, I said it. But frankly, it’s kind of hard to ignore and it pervades the whole fic. We’ve already gone over the fic’s shallow and gross use of sexuality and sexual violence, almost all of which either victimizes or objectifies the women involved in very gratuitous ways. Looking at the fic’s two main female villains, both Ulbandi and Thuringel are defined by their sexuality, how they use it to seduce and manipulate men or to give birth to monsters or other villains, and Thuringel in particular is described in very overtly sexual terms that combine with her physical grotesqueness in ways that become intensely off-putting and seem to make her sexuality itself into something grotesque and monstrous. Both Ulbandi and Thuringel are defined by their past relationships with powerful men (Melkor and Sauron, respectively) and with different evil men in the present of the story (Estel and Glorfindel, with Ulbandi’s attraction to Estel being the most inexplicable – seriously, what does she see in him?). Ulbandi’s backstory also includes the weird straw-feminist tangent about turning evil because Eru wouldn’t put women in positions of power… which is both untrue per the Sil (some of the most powerful and revered of the Valar are women! There are absolutely issues you can take with Tolkien’s handling of gender as a topic, but “Eru only appointed male Valar to shape Arda” is simply false!) and also indirectly positions feminism as the root of all evil, which is just… yikes (and which, of course, goes entirely undeveloped after it’s first mentioned). And that’s just the villains. On the heroic side, Elanor, Celendrian and Celendrian’s sisters mostly come off well, though Elanor gets rather overshadowed by the men around her despite being the supposed main character, while Celendrian has the horrible plotline with her mother and their Ring of Power. Moving on to adult women, though… Arwen isn’t an outright villain, but she’s arrogant, ruthless, judgmental, self-righteous, ill-tempered and causes many of the story’s problems by her own poor decision making. Seriously, Polychron, what did this character do to you? Galadriel, in her backstory, basically caused half the story’s conflicts by sleeping around, and her ultimate moment of redemption… involves swearing fealty to a man (who was uninvolved in any of this business) because of course it does. Rosie, despite making a big deal of accompanying Sam on his journey, contributes essentially nothing to the story other than summoning Tom Bombadil and being threatened with rape by Estel. The only adult woman who gets an unequivocally positive portrayal is Eowyn, and I have a sneaking suspicion that Polychron lets her be “cool Mom” because he thinks she’s “not like other girls” (which, in addition to being extremely sexist in its own right, is just a shockingly shallow reading of Eowyn’s character and arc). Taken as a whole, the pattern is just really hard to deny… Polychron has issues, and they make large chunks of this fic intensely unpleasant to read.


Plot-Induced Stupidity: 196
Pretty straightforward here – Polychron’s characters tend to make really dumb or short-sighted decisions for no readily apparent reason other than to grease the wheels of the plot. It’s all the more blatant because Tolkien’s characters generally don’t do that, so it’s very obvious when Polychron is just lining up his dominos so we can have the “cool” scenes he envisioned in his head play our or the plot progress like he wants it to, regardless of whether it makes sense for his characters to do the things he has them doing in order to make it happen. Not a lot more to say here; it’s a sadly common problem in bad fiction, it’s just especially galling here.


Rings-a-Palooza: 240
Ugh; this isn’t the fic’s biggest problem, but it may be its most obvious because it’s so central to the plot. Polychron loves his Rings of Power. Now, including the lesser rings, which are only alluded to briefly in LotR and which we know very little about, as McGuffins for your Fourth Age fic is by itself a perfectly fine idea. The problem is that Polychron turns around and says whoops, they weren’t actually “lesser” at all but the very best and specialest of all the Rings, including the one that makes the wearer into God, big-G totally intended. And then he goes ahead and establishes that the Seven and the Nine still retain their power, despite the One being destroyed… and then he brings the One itself back, in a different form. And then it turns out that most of these rings are actually not only still out there, but a significant chunk of the cast still has them, and had them all along! And the goal of the story is to collect these rings, and though we make some lip-service to the idea that they need to be destroyed, the short-term goal is clearly to have them in order to use them. And, well, I think it profoundly illustrates Polychron’s sheer level of Missing The Point better than anything. Sure, people may joke that the entire Legendarium is just thousands of years of people fighting over jewelry, from the Silmarils to the Rings, but the fact is that the not-so-subtle theme here is that spending thousands of years fighting over jewelry is bad. Look at the Feanorians, whose pursuit of the Silmarils not only led them to ruin, but called down a curse on the Silmarils themselves that bit anyone who pursued them for selfish ends. Or how the Rings are a power born of hubris, that should never have existed, and how even the Three – the most benevolent of the Rings – ultimately had to pass away as a necessary consequence of victory over Sauron. Polychron doesn’t see any of that. He just sees the shiny, and that possessing the rings and using their power to achieve one’s ends – the temptation that the heroes of LotR must confront and reject – is perfectly fine and dandy, actually. And it’s a reflection of his deeper issues where he fixates on acquiring stuff and powers and glory and the actual themes of the work he’s seeking to adapt – which are at best deeply skeptical of these things, and at most reject them outright – get buried beneath the avalanche of shiny magic objects.

Loremaster’s Headache: 552
And finally we come to the end. Polychron’s relationship with Tolkien’s lore is… really weird and confusing, honestly. He clearly knows a lot, pulling out obscure details from the Lost Tales and the HoME – including the entire character of Ulbandi! – and using them more-or-less correctly and building his story on their foundation. But he also just regularly screws up less important events or details, haphazardly tosses his own worldbuilding in without caring whether or not it meshes with anything else Tolkien has established, explaining things that didn’t need to be explained, offering contradictory explanations for things that didn’t need to be explained, trying to mix different versions of the Legendarium poorly (the Lost Tales really shouldn’t be mixed in with later material like this, honestly – I’ve seen arguments I find persuasive that even calling them an earlier version of the Sil is misleading, because so much was changed between the two versions. Or trying to iron out whether Galadriel or Celebrimbor was lord of Eregion by having them sort of trade the title back and forth like a hot potato!). The end result is a mess, a mix of fairly deep knowledge and amateurish mistakes that just ends up being frustrating and confusing. I tend to agree with some of the observations in the comments that part of the problem is that Polychron is the sort of fan who associates fandom chiefly with finding and memorizing long lists of trivia, without concern for deeper issues of how these things fit together or what they actually mean in an overall sense. I think that probably explains a lot about both his handling of Tolkien’s worldbuilding and his own, not that it makes it any better. Maybe from another fic in a different fandom I might be more inclined to let this slide, but the Legendarium is one of the most detailed and beloved fictional settings of the last century for a reason, and Polychron is the one who tried to present his work as a true and legitimate follow-up to Tolkien’s. By that standard he fails utterly, and because he brought it on himself, I think it’s more than fair to hold him to it in ways that might not be for other authors of other fics.

Well, at the end of the day, what are my conclusions from this? I think where the counts ended up mostly don’t surprise me. “Happy Ending Override” being the smallest is fairly predictable, because there are only so many plot points from LotR to overturn, and so much of the fic is given over to flashbacks that can’t really do that in the first place. “Loremaster’s Headache” being by far the largest is also predictable, because so many of the worldbuilding fails are so pervasive and so jarring, and again because Polychron was the one who put his own work in conversation with Tolkien’s so explicitly in the first place. “Rings-a-Palooza” being second place also isn’t surprising, because damn, does Polychron love those things as much as he misses the point of what Tolkien was doing with them. Otherwise, I find the way the other counts mostly cluster in the middle between those extremes to be pretty straightforward – they may not be as ridiculous as “Lore” or “Rings” but still highlight just how repetitive this fic can be, and how much it leans into its obvious issues and problematic tropes.

And so, with that breakdown out of the way, let’s move on to looking more at the fic as a whole, shall we? I’m going to shake up my usual formula for final thoughts posts a bit here, first looking at characters, then the plot as a whole, and then mix theme and writing style together as I ask the big question… why does this fic fail so bad at being an LotR sequel? Onward!

Characters

Ooof. This one is going to be a lot, people. Because the cast in this thing is freaking huge. In addition to Tolkien’s characters – from multiple time periods! – only some of whom are particularly recognizable as being the people they are supposedly based on, we also have Polychron’s own oodles and gobs of OCs. And, frankly, they all tend to blur into each other, and to appear and disappear from the story seemingly at random, and it can get very difficult to isolate the specific traits and arcs of individual characters as a result (especially since we can’t see how the story actually ends). So, instead of looking at the characters one at a time and giving each their own little section as is my usual style, I think we’re going to instead try and isolate them based on the overall groups in which we’re first introduced to them.

To start with, the hobbits. Elanor is our ostensible main character, and the first hobbit we’re properly introduced to, but honestly, she doesn’t really stand out that much. As a young hobbit from a family known for having produced adventurers but having no real desire to adventure herself until she gets pulled into things by a wizard, she really doesn’t do enough to distinguish herself from Bilbo and Frodo, her predecessors in a similar role. Even her actual reason for joining Alatar – that her knowledge of the Red Book is just so unique and valuable – feels rather tenuous, and never really comes into play in a significant manner (and her previous history with the royal family – she’s already been named an honorary lady in waiting by the time we meet her – and especially her friendship with the princesses goes underdeveloped). And, as the story goes on, she feels increasingly overshadowed by Eldarion, Fastred, Celendrian, even the twins in terms of who is doing actual protagonist-y things (which also feels like a betrayal of the spirit of Tolkien; while Thorin in The Hobbit and Aragorn in LotR were more archetypal heroes compared to Bilbo and Frodo, Tolkien never lost sight of the fact that it was the hobbits who carry the emotional and narrative core of the story). And, considering that most of said characters who overshadow her (and all of the ones who are regularly with her) are men and she’s a woman makes the gendered elements of the story even harder to ignore.

As for the other hobbits, Fastred is easily the most prominent, and it’s clear he’s Polychron’s fave and very likely a wish-fulfilment character and even a self-insert. Tolkien’s Fastred, for reference, is mentioned only briefly in the appendices as Elanor’s eventual husband and the father of her children, and he’s from Greenholm (which Polychron inexplicably decides to make his surname, rather than his hometown) and… that’s about it. Polychron, though, gives him one of the major McGuffins of the story (the Turin-stone), has him hatch and bond with a dragon (against all logic), has him receive titles from the Reunited Kingdom and seemingly from the dragons themselves (that’s the only explanation for “lord of dragons,” at least that I can think of…) and seems like he’s on the way to eventually become the vessel for Turin’s spirit. It’s… quite a lot, and even though he’s not done much with all of this yet, it’s certainly something Polychron seems to want us to think is very cool. Theo, on the other hand, is… sort of there. His job is basically to be that other hobbit who isn’t Elanor or Fastred, and he seems like he’s supposed to be a bit more serious and mature but also kind of self-important and pompous, and he gets the sunstone… and then dies failing to use it against Glorfindel. His death isn’t bad, and everyone mourning him is some of the more effective emotional beats in the fic… but I really wish he’d been more developed beforehand. Sam suffers because, while I think Polychron likes him, he doesn’t seem have a good handle on how to write him; we have a few good moments of the loyal and protective Samwise and how I’d imagine him as a father, but more often he feels argumentative, ill-tempered and stubborn, falling into the “overprotective dad” stereotype and being more of an obstacle than a help to Elanor, and ultimately bows out of the quest too early and too easily, generally feeling underutilized and contributes very little to the story. Rosie has it even worse than Sam; as I mentioned earlier, despite making a big deal of accompanying her husband on his journey, it feels like the only major contributions she makes are summoning Tom Bombadil (when it would make more sense for Sam to do, since he actually knows Bombadil), getting threatened with rape by Estel, and mourning for Gwaihir (which any character could have done as easily).

Moving on to other characters who join the hobbits on their journey. Alatar clearly suffers from the fact that he’s supposed to be Gandalf but better, but the emphasis on his fancy outfit and weapons and the secret knowledge and harsh wisdom he brings with him out of the East just feels like it’s being laid on way too thick, especially since his actual actions tend to show him as ill-tempered, quick to judgment, and not nearly as powerful or knowledgeable as he makes himself out to be (his partner Pallando, by contrast, barely appears in the story at all until near the end). Eldarion’s introduction, as the mysterious stranger met at the Prancing Pony who proves to be more than he seems, very closely mirrors his father, but he ends up cutting a decidedly less impressive figure. Despite how Polychron insists he’s such an amazing badass, with a talent for combat and magic and who even manages to hold his own against a freaking Vala, personally he’s arrogant, self-absorbed, judgmental and elitist, best illustrated by his clearly shocked and disgusted reaction to learning that Sam, his childhood hero, was born a commoner and worked most of his life as a domestic servant (Eldarion does eventually come around and regain his high esteem for Sam, which feels like it’s supposed to be an arc, but it’s barely touched on and never really developed, so much as vaguely implied to happen off-page). It seems that, like his father, Eldarion is supposed to be an archetypally heroic figure we should admire, but Aragorn had spent decades traveling and adventuring around the world honing his skills, and we get to see how he gradually builds the hobbits trust in him and earns their respect; Eldarion is barely an adult and swaggers on-page clearly expecting that he should be treated as awesome just for existing, and it really doesn’t have the same effect (I’m reminded of a comment I once saw about the first Brimstone Angels novel, comparing Lorcan’s interactions with Farideh and Havilar as feeling like a college frat boy trying to impress a couple of high school girls with how worldly he is. I think Eldarion has some of that same vibe; if you’re at all familiar with the Brimstone Angels books, you can gather this is not a flattering comparison).

Manus Tarqus is also clearly supposed to be a somewhat Aragorn-like character; also met in Bree, in some ways he fits it better, being a seasoned traveler and adventurer who’s journeyed all around the world. And it’s good to see a major, positive Haradrim character, especially after the disaster that was Last Ringbearer’s handling of Harad. Unfortunately, Manus comes off as a much worse person than I think Polychron intends; his repeated and seemingly sincere desire for a Ring of Power seems like it’s supposed to be endearing, but considering what those Rings are and what they represent, is extremely worrying instead. Making it worse is his proven willingness to sell weapons to evil tyrants like Glorfindel and Swahilloguz, which the story just sort of casually handwaves away as unimportant, when it actually really is quite important (Incanus, inexplicably a separate wizard form Gandalf, has a similar issue, serving Swahilloguz and then joining our heroes without any real explanation or excuse for his actions, on top of being disturbingly eager to strip-search Arwen). Malvia, despite being Manus’s princess and liege lady, is mostly just reduced to being his sidekick and is almost purely a satellite character to him (noticing a pattern?). Elladan and Elrohir I ended up nicknaming the Murder Twins, because that’s what they are. Polychron seems to really like the twins and consider them “badass,” because while they’re late arrivals to the story once they do show up the come to increasingly dominate it. Alas that the only thing Polychron really seems to like about them is their capacity for violence, as he explodes their canonical desire to avenge their mother’s torment at the hands of the orcs of the Misty Mountains into a full-blown genocidal crusade against all orcs everywhere, up to and including murdering a cave full of sleeping orcs who had never shown any indication of being a threat to them. And Polychron, sadly, seems to think all of this is cool and hard and not at all a crossing of the moral event horizon (and based on the end of the fic, it looks like the rest of the series would have rather heavily involved their love life, too). Calcarin and Stygobromus… are basically there to fly the collocoll flag; they seem like more-or-less decent sorts, but we barely get a chance to get to know Stygobromus before his heroic sacrifice, while Calcarin mostly ends up just sort of following our heroes around, marveling at the wonders of the surface while his unique physiology occasionally offers benefits.

Moving on to the royal courts of Gondor and Rohan, Celendrian might actually be the most interesting and compelling of our major leads, not that this is saying very much. I probably like her the most, at least. Unfortunately, most of her arc is dedicated to her mother giving her a Ring of Power that mind-rapes her by forcing her to relive the memories of its past bearers and nearly overwhelms her own personality, which mostly serves as a vehicle for the fic’s quite exhaustive series of Second Age flashbacks more than development for Celendrian herself, and her actual assembly of the Princes’ Brigades and subsequent big damn heroes moment and Weathertop ends up feeling badly rushed, incoherent and consequently unearned as a result. Her younger sisters are mostly just her mini-mes who exist solely to back her up and get very little development of their own. Elfwine (not “Aelfwine,” Polychron, that’s a totally different character!) is presented as so badass it comes off as more comical than impressive (seriously, the guy hunts dragons for sport in Middle-earth… yeah, right) and the Daughters of Rohan, despite existing to honor Eowyn’s legacy and continue it, mostly just exist as their brother’s backups. Elboron seems decent enough, I guess, but is mostly there as Eowyn’s son and Celendrian’s love-interest more than as a character in his own right. For the older generation, Aragorn is mostly presented as the big good, but in a fairly generic way and often comes off as rather hapless, unable to deal with the rising plans of the various villains or even counteract the irrational, paranoid and cruel behavior of his own wife; hardly the great King Elessar LotR indicated we were getting! Arwen herself may be one of the characters who has been derailed in the most shocking ways (along with Glorfindel), being presented as cold, manipulative, imperious, cruel, shortsighted, banishing Legolas and Gimli on a whim, forcing a particularly unpleasant Ring of Power on her daughter just because, ultimately getting herself captured by Thuringel and becoming corrupted and a tool of Glorfindel, and that probably only just scratches the surface of the extremely unpleasant way Polychron portrays this character. All I can figure is that he has some sort of intense enmity for her for reasons I’m not quite able to fathom; it certainly doesn’t seem to be based in anything we see in Tolkien. Eowyn, by contrast, gets a minor role but basically gets to be the “cool Mom” and is probably the only adult woman in the fic who gets a straightforwardly positive portrayal (though again, I can’t shake the feeling it’s because Polychron thinks she’s Not Like Other Girls). Faramir, on the other hand, only appears very briefly but also suffers quite badly, not only objecting to his daughter’s marriage to Elrohir (entirely reasonable, considering the awful person fic!Elrohir is) but actively demanding two Silmarils in a nonsensical repeat of the story of Beren and Luthien with himself in Thingol’s role, something you’d think Faramir would be wise enough to avoid.

Moving onto the villains… hoo boy, there are a lot of them. I can’t shake the feeling that Polychron had various ideas for what sort of character he wanted to be Sauron’s successor (itself I think the wrong approach to this story, but… more on that later) and ultimately went with “all of them.” As I noted, we have at least six villains established who are powerful enough and prominent enough in the narrative that I’d consider them real contenders for the big bad role. Glorfindel is the most obvious, being both the clearest successor to Sauron and the most prominent in the narrative. Polychron’s choice for this character’s direction is… unique (I really don’t know what possessed him to derail a minor but entirely heroic character into his main villain, unless it was purely for the factor of it being an unexpected subversion) and the backstory he gives him (he’s evil because he was captured and tortured into madness) is riddled with unfortunate implications. As for Glorfindel himself, he probably accomplishes the most of any of the villains – rebuilding Mordor off-page, creating a new generation of Nazgul, gathering the Legion of Doom – but that’s not saying much. On-page, the best that can be said for him is that he’s entertainingly over-the-top, and his laundry list of absurd superpowers, including transforming himself into a literal fiery, horny demon and shooting literal lasers from his eyes never fail to amaze. Unfortunately, he – and Thuringel – kind of falls out of the story in the last couple of chapters, though he’s still out there, and Polychron’s obsession with talking about his capital-L Lust gets really silly, really fast. Thuringel herself, as Glorfindel’s partner and Sauron’s former consort, is probably the next most prominent villain. She, unfortunately, ends up being the incarnation of a great many of Polychron’s myriad issues with women; she’s physically hideous (in her true form) but grossly sexualized, defined mostly by her relationship with men (Sauron and Glorfindel) and takes a subordinate role to Glorfindel despite being older and stronger than he is, she’s into gratuitous depravity for its own sake (remind anyone of Newcomb?) and generally comes across as petulant, shrieky and emotional, which isn’t stereotypical at all. Oh, and she also bore Sauron a son in the Second Age, which amazingly fails to have much impact on anything. And I’m still not sure just what she is, though “undead elf” seems most likely.

Estel is also a prominent villain; I called him “the Edgelord” and the comments named him “the Prince of Rape” and there’s a reason for both of those. On the one hand, this entire character revolves around rape, let’s be blunt here. He was born of rape (because of course Celebrian was raped by those orcs, guys), his first evil act was to desire incest with his sister, he uses rape to build his army and “breed” more beings like him (the logistics of this are as nonsensical as they are horrifying) and he threatens to rape every woman he interacts with. And yet he’s also impossible to take seriously. The names of his offspring are silly; “orcelven” is stupid, and “horks” is even worse. His demeanor is that of a goofy cliché villain, and his weird habit of just roaring out of nowhere (when neither elves nor orcs do anything like that) doesn’t help. And he fails at literally everything he attempts; his initial attack on Sam and Rosie is foiled by Bombadil, his attempt to assassinate Aragorn and Arwen in the flashbacks is a wash, Eldarion drives him off during his attack on Manus’s caravan (and he’s a decidedly lesser threat than Glorfindel for the whole sequence), and he ends up getting ensorcelled into loving Ulbandi and wanders off passively with her, the last we see of him in the fic. Basically, he’s what happens if you take a goofy, ineffective eighties-cartoon-style supervillain like Cobra Commander or Skeletor, made him a serial rapist, but changed nothing else about his characterization, effectiveness, or how the narrative treats him. The result is laughable far more than it is scary (and I hate that Polychron gave him Aragorn’s childhood name, which Arwen seems to still use as an endearment between them later in life despite the fact that we’re supposed to believe it was her evil rapist half-brother’s name first). Swahilloguz and Lungorthin are obviously characters being introduced to be explored more fully in sequels. Swahilloguz… actually feels like he could be a character who could exist in Tolkien’s Middle-earth in many ways, probably the most of any of the villains (more on this later) though he suffers from the fact that he serves the Silence That Devours, which simply doesn’t fit into Arda’s cosmology at all no matter how Polychron tries to smash it in there (replace the Silence with, say, Ungoliant, though…) and everyone seems weirdly cool with the fact that there’s an eldritch abomination in Harad that’s trying to eat the planet and don’t seem to think it’s worth prioritizing. Lungorthin, though, can never shake the sheer random factor of Sauron having had a freaking Balrog for a vassal during the War of the Ring and yet never got around to using him for anything, and the fact that he set up shop in Moria – recently vacated by another Balrog – is just trite and uninspired on Polychron’s end.

While Glorfindel is the most prominent in this story, Ulbandi has the best chance of being the actual big bad of the overall saga. Unfortunately, she’s a real letdown. Polychron takes the concept of Melkor’s consort, discarded very early in the process of creating the Legendarium, dusts it off, and promotes her to a full Vala, and even talks her up so that she, rather than Melkor, comes off as the true source of evil in his version of Arda. Aside from the problem of hyping up a character who, while not actually Polychron’s OC, might as well be over Tolkien’s canonical supreme evil, we then run full-tilt into the problem of Ulbandi’s origin story involving her being presented as a straw feminist who introduced evil into Ea by standing up for women’s rights (really…) and weird tangents like her giving birth literally to armies of monsters, or inventing concepts like “boobs” or “the female sex drive” (but Polychron doesn’t have problems with women, honest!). And when we actually see her (after we’ve mostly just had her referenced as a backstory element with little indication she’s still an active threat in the present) she’s fairly underwhelming, losing a duel with Eldarion, fleeing behind her own giants, letting our heroes escape her domain, showing up to derail Glorfindel’s plans by taking over the Legion of Doom only to fall for Estel for utterly inexplicable reasons, and of course comparing bust sizes with Thuringel before vanishing from the story. Reviving the concept of Ulbandi for the later Legendarium isn’t necessarily a bad one, if you put more thought into it, but really, Polychron shows the exact wrong way to do it, and it’s a very poor setup for his seeming big bad overall.

As for the minor villains (yes, Polychron named them the Pact of Middle-earth Powers and yes, I’m still calling them the Legion of Doom) they’re mostly minor monarchs of nations that, at best, are Polychron’s invention and at worst don’t fit on the map at all, and they mostly blur together. There are a few standouts, who I suspect might have been intended for bigger roles down the line. Gothmog, the orc king and Estel’s biological father (presumably unrelated to either of Tolkien’s Gothmogs) is an obvious one. Tevildo and Thu are also given a great deal of hype despite not really doing anything much in the actual story, and I have a feeling we’d have seen more of them (and they’re both named after earlier versions of Sauron, which is never explained) as might have been the subterranean rulers like Lucifugus and Inaequalis, who get much the same treatment. Lemminkainen might be the most developed of the side villains, but she also falls into the problem of the only female wizard (who Polychron specifically added to the Istari) turned evil for petty reasons (she doesn’t like the cold!) implied to be centuries before Saruman did (and I still think Polychron probably meant to name her after Louhi and screwed up). But really, these guys just sort of blur together, which is another sign there are too many of them for the story Polychron is writing. Of non-Legion affiliated villains, we also have the Autono-man King, who seems like he might be set up as a bigger threat down the line despite his absurd and cartoony introduction; Ohtaron Moringotho gets set up in a big way in the final chapter despite his existence not even being hinted at before that (he comes across as reasonably competent, but I’m not taking bets on how long it would’ve taken for Polychron to ruin him) and of course there’s whatever is going on with the dragons and whoever is leading them. But really, all of these obvious sequel hooks just speak to Polychron’s hubris in thinking there would be a sequel in the first place, which… LOL, no. Among villainous minions, we don’t see much to write home about. Warlock of Khand is never even named and dies shortly after being introduced, and we never get any real understanding of what his deal is or even what he is, aside from the fact that he apparently works for Lungorthin. Erestor’s demonization is just as random as Glorfindel’s (though since canon!Erestor is just a background figure at the Council of Elrond, one could make the argument he doesn’t actually have enough character to derail…) and he plainly exists just so we can have a villain for one major battle scene and dies at the end of it; the new Nazgul he commands, despite Polychron’s attempts to hype them up, just can’t compare in terms of menace to Tolkien’s originals.

Our final set of characters are the flashback characters from the Second Age arc, three in particular. Galadriel herself, our primary POV character for the arc (until she’s not…) is derailed into a hormone-addled fool who drives almost all the conflict of the Second Age with her series of affairs; we’re given no particular insight into what drives her to fall for either Celebrimbor or Aldarion, beyond that the former is smart and charismatic, and the latter is “rugged” and “manly” in a way male elves aren’t (no unfortunate implications there…); the end result not only cheapens Galadriel’s character, it makes the whole saga feel significantly more silly and trite. Celebrimbor is someone we’re clearly supposed to admire, but Polychron’s determination to hype him up – including having him make dozens of Rings of Power before Sauron even shows up on the scene – quickly reach a point where they come across as ridiculous instead of impressive. Celebrimbor’s constant flip-flopping on whether he wants to even be lord of Eregion or not make him feel weak and inconsistent, his determination to make an all-powerful ring to win back his girlfriend and get revenge on everyone who ever doubted him make him look like a maniac (even if he doesn’t end up using it) and his one-elf-army last stand in Eregion is just absolutely absurd. If Celebrimbor is hyped up, Sauron is the reverse, presented as a big dummy who never really fooled anyone and whose knowledge was always exceeded by Celebrimbor’s, whose rings his were never more than a pale copy of… and yet Sauron still ends up having to win in both Eregion and Numenor because canon says he does, and so everyone involved, despite having been previously established as seeing through him, ends up making very obvious and avoidable mistakes to let it happen. And he has a son, which feels like it really ought to be a much bigger deal than it is.

Looking at the characters as a whole, some general trends emerge. First, there are far too many major characters for the size of the narrative, so it becomes basically impossible to keep track of them all (and there are some I missed here because their roles are so minor, like Bombadil or the Stone-men). For another, Polychron is often very bad at conveying what he clearly intends to – his villains aren’t scary, his heroes aren’t heroic, his smart characters aren’t smart. Third, he’s ridiculously edgy, with his villains regularly engaging in acts of depravity or pure cackling supervillainy to prove how eeeevil they all are, in a way Tolkien generally had the maturity as a writer and a person to avoid, and it doesn’t make taking them seriously any easier. Finally, the women tend to be portrayed in gross ways, demonized or damsellized, made to suffer gratuitously, or just generally overshadowed by their male counterparts, with very few exceptions. In other words, Polychron’s character work is overstuffed, inconsistent, gratuitously edgy, and sexist. And, as we’ll see, that continues beyond his characterization and into the fic’s plot as well.

Plot

How do we even give an overview here? The plot of this thing is all over the damned place, in ways that make it surprisingly hard to identify a real through-line. Let’s take a look back at it, shall we? We start off fairly straightforward, first introducing Elanor, then having Alatar arriving at the Shire and recruiting Elanor for a quest, which is basically a straight up pastiche of the starts of both The Hobbit and LotR, with the additional wrinkle of Sam and Rosie heading off in pursuit. The biggest problem here is that, after Bree, it’s not quite clear at this point where these people are going or what they’re trying to accomplish, beyond something something Rings. Then we have the party at the Prancing Pony and meet Eldarion, get the flashback to his meeting Este at Minas Tirithl, get the attack on Bree, get Alatar’s duel with Glorfindel and the big flashback to Glorfindel’s backstory, then we get the flight from Bree and then out of nowhere we get the attack from the Rikedons and the whole backstory with Harad and the Silence that Devours and Swahilloguz, and it all has absolutely nothing to do with anything the story has been about so far. That ends Book I.

Book II opens with Celendrian, and her companions traveling, then Arwen giving Celendrian the mind-rape ring, then Celendrian having the multi-chapter Second Age flashback (that’s mostly about Galadriel’s sex life), and then in the present Arwen gets captured and Celendrian forms the “Princes’ Brigades.” Then we have the twins’ backstory, and then the battle at Weathertop with the randomly spawning and disappearing armies, everyone getting lots of stuff from Elendil’s treasury, the underground adventure (with its own side-quest about destroying an enemy superweapon that turns out to be, of course, a Ring of Power) and the meeting with Ulbandi, Glorfindel’s council, Ulbandi crashing it, the battle at “Glorfindell” and then two chapters of falling action as everyone prepares to separate for their various quests (and get lots of stuff and titles) until we finally end the book with a completely out of left field dragon attack and the introduction of a random new villain. Whew.

As you can probably see when it’s all laid out like this, the biggest problem is that it’s very hard to say what this story is actually about. The closest thing to a through-line is probably Elanor, Alatar, Fastred and Theo moving vaguely east for somewhat unclear reasons, stopping at Bree to pick up Eldarion and fight off the warlock, Glorfindel and Estel, then moving to Weathertop to have a big battle and rescue the twins, then moving on to “Glorfindell” to rescue Arwen and confront Glorfindel again. And, as main plot threads go, that really isn’t much of one; “travel in the general direction of your vague goal and fight bad guys you meet along the way” really isn’t much of a story. Indeed, by the end of the fic it becomes clear that this was only a prelude to the “real” story, which seems to be set up to be going in at least three major directions next – the quest for the Master-ring, the quest for the Silmarili, and reclaiming Moria from Lungorthin. As you might notice, only the first of these has much to do with, well, anything that FotK has actually been about. Lungorthin has been probably the least active of the major villains thus far (he sent the warlock after Eldarion and fought Glorfindel in a flashback, and that’s really about it) and reclaiming Moria is not a goal that’s been given much foreshadowing until suddenly it’s about to happen in the last two chapters. Meanwhile, the quest for the Silmarili comes completely out of left field, as nothing in the fic – not even the flashbacks, really – has much set it up, or dealt with the Silmarili at all.

Speaking of the flashbacks, the structure of the fic makes it very hard to stay focused on the main plotline in the first place. First we have Eldarion’s flashback to Estel’s attack on the council at Minas Tirith, which isn’t that bad. But then the better part of two chapters get dedicated to Glorfindel’s backstory. Then a significant chunk of the last chapter of Book I is all about introducing Swahilloguz and the Silence and Manus’s backstory, which actually interrupts the equally random attack from the rikedons (which, like so much else in the fic, comes from freaking nowhere). Then we switch entirely over to Celendrian, and then she mostly serves to enable a three-chapter flashback to the Second Age, and it’s not until Book II, Chapter 5 that we rejoin our main characters at all. Though we don’t get much in the way of massive flashbacks after this, the plot still gets derailed periodically by infodumping on Ulbandi, everything about Under-earth, and at the very end of the fic Ohtaron Moringotho’s backstory. And speaking of Moringotho, the final chapter mostly serves to set up two more plot threads, him and the dragons, that have essentially nothing to do with the fic thus far and have little to no actual foreshadowing. It’s just kind of maddening.

The ultimate result is that FotK’s plot, while straightforward on the surface, ends up feeling like something of a random events plot when you dig into it, with Elanor’s journey to Rivendell – the seeming A plot of all of this – being constantly interrupted with infodumps and digressions, most of which are never particularly relevant again, while major events happen suddenly without much in the way of foreshadowing. Ultimately, one is left feeling that FotK is less a coherent story and more Polychron haphazardly introducing a bunch of elements he intended to develop further in later installments of this saga (in which case… oops). It’s all the more frustrating because Tolkien, despite the reputation of the epic fantasy genre he inspired, is actually a fairly tightly focused writer, especially in The Hobbit and LotR. The Hobbit is very tightly focused on Bilbo’s pov of his journey with Thorin and Company; we occasionally get asides, but they’re mostly things Bilbo either already knew or learned later (before writing his memoirs) and never take up much time or space. LotR has five major POV characters – the four main hobbits and Aragorn – and at least one of them is present for basically every major event in the novel, while those they weren’t involved in get relegated to the appendices as interesting but not vital information. Exposition, when it happens, is usually delivered by particular characters in specific scenes where that knowledge either is or is about to become important (even “The Council of Elrond,” which is notorious for being a lengthy infodump, is basically just everyone laying out the key components of where Middle-earth’s situation stands at the moment so they can plan what to do next) and flashbacks mostly happen when characters who have dropped out of the narrative for a while (ie, Gandalf after his imprisonment in Isengard and later his fight with Durin’s Bane, Merry and Pippin after the Three Hunters meet up with them in the ruins of Isengard, Legolas and Gimli recounting their journey with Aragorn from the Paths of the Dead to the Pelennor Fields) have met back up with everybody else and need to fill them in (and telling what was happening in real time would’ve messed up the pacing and suspense). Polychron follows none of these guidelines, and his story is much weaker for it.

But comparing Polychron’s writing to Tolkien’s in this way brings us to our final point, and the real meat of why I think FotK fails, both as a sequel to LotR, and as a fantasy epic in its own merits.

Theme, Style, Tone and Setting: Or, How Demetrious Polychron Fails At Writing A Sequel to LotR

Demetrious Polychron advertised Fellowship of the King as a “perfect” sequel to The Lord of the Rings. Quite aside from him not having the legal right to do this, antagonizing the actual copyright holders and getting rightfully slapped down by them, I think he failed miserably at this endeavor even taking the story on its own merits. So let’s round out our review by exploring just how badly FotK misunderstands and misrepresents both Middle-earth in general and LotR in particular.

Let’s get the easy ones out of the way first. Polychron’s writing is amateurish, blunt and melodramatic to the point of being silly when it’s not dry and lifeless lists of stuff and expository ramblings, with odd asides (sometimes in perens!) that break immersion and just feel inappropriate and goofy. It reminds me of certain other bad writers we’ve seen here, in some ways (Lionheart) and certainly bears no resemblance to Tolkien’s steeped-in-classic-literature prose. Honestly, the fact that Polychron misspelled Tolkien’s own name in the dedication to FotK should tell you something about how sloppy the writing here is. But the ranges-from-dull-to-eye-wateringly-bad prose is only the tip of the iceberg here.

Setting wise… Polychron does a lot of worldbuilding. Some of it, like the Hildoria stuff, feels somewhat underbaked but still like something that could plausibly exist in Middle-earth. Other parts… do not. The Harad and Under-earth material isn’t uninteresting, exactly – in the hands of a better writer I might be interested in reading more about it! Unfortunately, it doesn’t really have anything to do with Tolkien’s Middle-earth, nor can it be made to fit there easily. Polychron freely adds new realms, new races, new metaphysical concepts, etc. to Arda while subtly or not-so-subtly denigrating Tolkien’s characters for their ignorance. The problem is that, of course, Arda’s history and metaphysics are very, very thoroughly detailed in LotR’s appendices, the Sil, and various notes scattered across the Unfinished Tales, History of Middle-earth, Nature of Middle-earth, etc. That makes the sort of additions Polychron makes very blatantly obvious. Where to the Collocoll fit into Arda’s tree of life? Were they made by one of the Valar, were they creations of Eru Iluvatar that were kept apart from the surface world for the creator’s ineffable reasons, or are they deliberate mysteries? We really don’t know. We do learn more about the Stone-men, but it unfortunately doesn’t fit with the rest of what we know about Ea’s history. What about the Silence? Where did it come from, and how does it fit into things? Polychron gives us a couple of different answers, including, inexplicably, Eru’s random misogyny, but it’s still a puzzle-piece that doesn’t quite fit. And we’re never given the slightest explanation for what a damned multiversal nexus is doing in the middle of Mordor, nor does it ever actually matter to the story in the slightest. The contrast to Tolkien’s own worldbuilding, where every species is given a plausible origin and every major nation has its history traced and we explore in a lot of detail what the major divine and demonic powers are and how they related to each other is striking, and makes Polychron look much worse in comparison. Sometimes Polychron even tries to resolve Tolkien’s own mysteries (it should be noted Tolkien himself left some questions open deliberately, Tom Bombadil’s origins most obviously, because he believed there should be some genuine enigmas in a legendary age) and does so very clumsily. Take the Nameless Things (which, ironically, he treats as their proper name, when the fandom mostly adopted it for a lack of anything else to call them), which he goes out of his way to establish an origin for (as Ulbandi’s spawn) but in so doing makes them significantly more mundane and less frightening (not helped by their pathetic performance against Our Heroes, which mostly consists of them killing each other). In general, as some of the commenters noted, Polychron’s worldbuilding feels less like Tolkien’s and more like that of a DM with a rather bad homebrew DND setting; some of the ideas are interesting, but they’re just thrown at us so randomly and clumsily, and set in comparison to better ideas from a better writer, that it all falls flat.

But where Polychron really fails is in matching Tolkien’s themes and tone; you can argue that as a different writer with a different background he’s not really under any obligation to do so (it’s not like all fanfic has to slavishly ape the source material; some of the best fic does nothing of the sort) but I think that not only did he bring the comparison on himself by advertising the fic as a legitimate continuation of LotR, but in the specific case of Middle-earth the theme and tone are inextricable parts of what makes the setting as a whole come together. And I think they’re very inexorably linked, so let’s look at why.

The most important aspect of Tolkien’s themes, IMO, and the most consistent across the entire Legendarium, is how very bittersweet it all is. There is no triumph without attendant tragedy, and no victory without loss. Yes, the villains are defeated and the day is saved, but heroes die or fall along the way, and many fair things are destroyed or doomed to fade away and cannot be recovered. Even The Hobbit, most lighthearted of the Middle-earth works, still ends with a terrible and destructive battle Bilbo cannot prevent, and though Thorin finds atonement for having fallen into pride and greed in the earlier chapters, it costs him his life. LotR is more bittersweet still; the Sil and its attendant materials are an outright tragedy. This undercurrent of sorrow and grief is inescapable in Tolkien; it is nowhere in Polychron. Related to this idea is something we’ll be coming back to presently, that of the decline across the Ages, as Arda transforms from a mythic world into an earlier epoch of our own Earth. The First Age is a time of myth, an age of heroes, gods and monsters; the Second is the age of great empires, Numenor and Mordor at their height, and the last great flowering of the elves in Eregion and Lindon; the Third is the age of fading, as the old powers and peoples dwindle but the new world has not yet been born; finally the Fourth will be the Dominion of Men, seeing humanity firmly established as the dominant power in Middle-earth. Polychron, considering the direction in which he chooses to take his sequel, seems to have missed this entirely.

Another vitally important theme in the Legendarium is its rejection, or at least complication, of many traditional ideals of power, wealth and even conventional heroism. The moral of The Hobbit is in part that the wealth of dragons really isn’t that great a thing to possess and is more trouble than it’s worth; Smaug’s villainy is motivated above all by his desire to have, and Thorin’s unwillingness to share his newly-acquired wealth with those in need or who also have a legitimate claim is nearly his undoing, while Bilbo, who goes home with just a pittance, is content (and Thorin spells out this moral very explicitly as he’s dying, just in case we haven’t gotten it yet – “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world”). And of course the central conflict of LotR is that the One Ring is a weapon too dangerous to be permitted to exist and which no one can be reasonably trusted with, and that any victory built on its power will be rotten at its foundations – even the Three Rings, which are not evil, will have to pass from the world to destroy the One, and this is presented as a sorrowful but necessary loss. Similarly, Sauron cannot be defeated by force of arms, not even by a great warrior like Boromir, a powerful wizard like Gandalf, or even a bona fide epic hero like Aragorn. It is the simple kindness and courage of ordinary people – Frodo, Sam, even poor Gollum – that ultimately defeats evil. Even in the Sil, everyone who lusts after the Silmarils for selfish reasons comes to a bad end, including their creator and his sons, and its made painfully, brutally clear that the martial heroism of the Noldor is ultimately vain against the power of Morgoth.

Polychron appears to understand exactly none of this. Polychron loves stuff. The treasury scene – where seemingly every famous relic in the history of Arda is gathered together in one place for no particular reason save for our heroes to have their pick from it – is the most obvious example of this, but far from the only. We have plenty of scenes throughout the story where everyone gets to dress up fancy, wear lots of jewelry, get lots of weapons or titles (or a freaking dragon, Fastred…) and everyone else just sort of stands around oohing and aahing at them. The bigger sin, of course, is all the damned rings. Everyone seems to have at least one (including canon LotR characters such as Faramir, which undermines their own awesome moments by handwaving them as “the rings did it”); instead of being rare and precious (if you’ll pardon the phrase…) it instead seems like we can barely go a few chapters without characters tripping over new ones. And, rather than the Rings representing at worst a dangerous power that must be rejected for both one’s own good and the good or the world, or at best a temporary protection against the inevitable decay of time, all of our heroes are quick to want to learn how to use their rings, and many of them do so learn, and the ultimate goal of the mission seems to be to gather all the rings (including the all-powerful “Master-ring”) and use them to defeat all the bad guys in one final, apocalyptic battle (as if Polychron seems to think that rejecting the rings the first time around was a mistake, and we need a do-over). It’s vaguely mouthed that these rings will eventually need to be destroyed, but that’s a decidedly secondary concern to everyone squeeing over their new magic shinies and all the cool new superpowers they offer. Gollum and Saruman would be proud.

Deeper than that, Polychron’s take on Middle-earth in general is very shallow and superficial. He may not be interested in deeper themes, but he sure does love making things massive, over-the-top and epic. Why have one Dark Lord when you can have six and counting. Every city in Middle-earth seems to have ballooned massively and inexplicably in the twenty-years since the War of the Ring, or been rebuilt if it was in ruins (seriously, where are all these people coming from? Clearly not from other countries and cities, because the same thing is happening there, too!) because clearly if there’s one thing Tolkien would’ve wanted, it would be massive urbanization and the attendant paving over of nature./s Like Yeskov, Polychron litters Middle-earth with royalty, inventing new characters to be kings and queens and princes and sometimes promoting characters who held no such title in canon. Magic has hardly diminished – if anything it’s increased, since not only to the Rings retain their power, and not only are there even more Rings revealed than we thought existed, but we see a number of characters using very un-Middle-earthian flashy magic, Glorfindel’s demon transformation and laser eyes being obvious examples. And aside from magic, Polychron clearly loves action and muscular, violent types of “heroism.” We’ve got massive armies emerging from thin air to have massive battles in the middle of nowhere, for starters. Eldarion’s major moment of awesome is fighting off Ulbandi, a literal deity (because he has a magic sword, which also strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of heroism in Middle-earth). Alatar dramatically declares how hard he is (not that way, stop sniggering!) and we’re clearly supposed to think it’s very cool. Polychron adores the twins and their single minded determination to murder literally every orc they come across, but never questions whether they should be doing that or not (I recently saw some analysis pointing out that Tolkien’s heroes, in fact, don’t go out of their way to kill orcs in situations where they wouldn’t also be willing to kill humans – the Huorns massacre Saruman’s Uruk-hai, but the degree to which the Huorns can actually be considered “heroic” is questionable, they’re closer to an amoral force of nature the ents have on a leash - and indeed try to avoid confrontations with orcs at various points). Even Goldberry, of all characters, gets made a queen of the nymphs and veteran of the Wars of Beleriand, when canonically there’s no indication she had any such backstory. Even among the hobbits, Fastred gets loaded down with artifacts, powers, titles (and, again a freaking dragon) and he’s pretty clearly Polychron’s favorite (even Elanor increasingly gets left in the lurch in comparison). It all goes to show, IMO, that Polychron is heavily fixated on the outer trappings of Middle-earth – action! Magic! Artifacts! Epic scope! – and misses the deeper meanings entirely.

I also think some of the ways in which Polychron’s writing differs from Tolkien’s are illustrative. Notably, a number of Tolkien’s characters carry over to FotK, and the difference in how Polychron writes them versus how Tolkien writes them is stark. Some are still recognizable as themselves, but have clearly been shoved into specific boxes that flatten their characters. Sam is The Overprotective Dad (and also The Skeptic when it comes to Alatar) and Rosie, by extension is The Mom; Aragorn is The Good King who mostly exists as a distant, mostly benevolent figure. Elanor, Alatar, Eldarion and Fastred are all characters who we know basically by their names and relationships to other characters from the Appendices and elsewhere, and we’ve already discussed how Polychron handles them – though Alatar in general feels like he’s meant to be The Cooler Gandalf. He at least makes a gam effort at writing Bombadil’s eccentric demeanr and blue-and-orange morality, but the character still comes off as a pale shadow of Tolkien’s take, and disturbingly blasé about Estel’s villainy until he threatens Goldberry. The twins are The Badass Warriors we should all admire. Eowyn is The Cool Mom. Unfortunately, that brings us to characters like Arwen, Faramir, and Glorfindel, who are utterly unrecognizable compared to their canon selves. Arwen seems to have become The Evil Queen (with shades of The Evil Stepmother, oddly, despite not being anyone’s stepmother) for no really explained reason other than that Polychron wants to make her as unpleasant as possible, where Faramir has inexplicably lost all his wisdom and nobility and become a new Thingol, to the point of wanting Silmarils. Glorfindel… we’ll talk a bit more about in a minute. In any case, it’s clear that Tolkien’s characters get flattened, badly, in the transition to Polychron-verse, and it highlights his comparative weakness as a writer.

I also think it’s instructive to compare how the two writers handle their villains. LotR is actually pretty economical with its villain cast. We have Sauron as the ultimate overarching villain of the saga, while the Nazgul collectively act as his enforcers and proxies, with the Witch King as their leader and Sauron’s effective number two. Saruman is a secondary threat for the first half of the story, returning at the very end (and his existence underscores some of the story’s thematic points, particularly the corruption of power and the dangers of trying to use evil’s methods against it). Gollum is a specific foil for the hobbits, and probably the most developed character of the villain cast, since the story spends so much time with him in TTT and RotK. Denethor is nominally a “good guy” but someone our heroes clash with over methods and ultimately becomes a direct threat when he succumbs to suicidal despair and is a deeply tragic figure with a lot of pathos. The rest of the villains are mostly minor recurring characters (Grima being probably the most important) or else monsters or other antagonists who are only met briefly. But the major antagonists all have very clear niches to fill in the story, suited to their personalities and circumstances.

Polychron, OTOH – not only does he have far too many villains, they all sort of blur together after a while. As I’ve already mentioned, it really does feel like he decided to ask “what sort of character do I want as the successor to Sauron?” came up with a bunch of ideas and decided to go with “all of the above.” The story is bursting with dark lords and dark lord wannabes, who mostly fail to corner a particular thematic niche and all act like the same melodramatic goofball in person (Ulbandi and Thuringel, being women, get an additional personality trait of being “sexy, but in a gross way”). Furthermore, it’s interesting to look at the story’s structure and how the villains are used. In LotR, as mentioned before, Sauron is the villain who spans the whole story. In the first Book of Two Towers (and the third Book of the overall story) we shift our focus to dealing with Saruman, both for logistical reasons (the story has ended up in Rohan, and he’s literally next door in Isengard) but also because the course of the war dictates removing the Free Peoples’ weaker enemy first so we can turn around and focus on all our attentions on the much greater threat of Sauron (and then Saruman does eventually come back at the very end of the story, shorn of most of his power, as a final opponent for the hobbits to show how much they’ve grown, and even this is carefully built up looking back). The Witch King also becomes the heavy for the Siege of Gondor arc, because he’s previously been established as Sauron’s most powerful minion and we know the story will have to deal with him. Polychron also shifts around the focus on his villains but does so very haphazardly. The first few chapters set up Estel as the obvious villain, then we suddenly shift and Glorfindel becomes the main villain while Estel slips into the background, then in the final quarter or so of the fic Glorfindel also gets sidelined as Ulbandi becomes the biggest villain, and then in the very last chapter we’re randomly introduced to yet another new baddie in the form of Ohtaron Moringotho. It all feels less like the story is shifting through these villains in a way that makes sense, and more that Polychron keeps losing interest and deciding to deal with someone else for a while.

Ultimately, though, looking back over FotK… I think this was, fundamentally, just the wrong idea for an LotR sequel in the first place. Looking over the Middle-earth canon as a whole, Tolkien rarely repeats himself directly. The Hobbit is a relatively lighthearted adventure; LotR, a sweeping war epic, is quite a different beast in both style and tone, much darker, much more serious, and much larger in scale. The Sil is a historical chronicle and quite different still, and the three “Great Tales” that form its core – “Beren and Luthien,” “The Children of Hurin” and “The Fall of Gondolin” – are also quite different from one another. Tolkien’s own writings suggest that had his own sequel idea for LotR, “The New Shadow,” been completed, it would have been more of a gritty political thriller fantasy dealing with the discovery and defeat of the evil cult seeking to seize control of Gondor (and part of the reason why the story never got off the ground is that Tolkien self-admittedly didn’t actually want to write a gritty thriller). Still, despite his obvious dissatisfaction with “New Shadow,” it seems worth noting that Tolkien tried to begin it at least three times over a period of several years, and all three versions retained the same general premise, even if details such as character names changed. And I think his letters support this – it was clear that, whatever his other issues, he thought the next great evil would come from within the Free Peoples, and Gondor specifically, not from without, and that there was only one way for the story to plausibly develop (and it wasn’t just a retread of what LotR already did), even if he didn’t feel like actually telling that story.

FotK, on the other hand… well, I have my “Happy Ending Override” and “Bigger, Louder, More!” counts for a reason. It’s just LotR Plus in a lot of ways. Evil is rising in Mordor, again. The Rings of Power are in play, again. A wizard has recruited hobbits for a quest, again. But this time there’s more rings, more dark lords, bigger armies, bigger magic. This Middle-earth hasn’t “faded” since the War of the Ring – if anything it’s the opposite, a higher magic setting with unknown magical races and beings appearing rather than vanishing. The cities are bigger, the battles are bigger, the monsters are bigger, but it’s just more of the same – but blown up to massive size while simultaneously shorn of deeper meaning, so it all blurs together into a giant blob, losing sight of everything that makes Middle-earth special in the process. We get hints that with apocalyptic forces like the Silence or Ulbandi and possibly even Melkor himself in play that this may be it, the end, the final battle against the forces of evil once and for all. But Tolkien is clear that such a battle won’t happen until the end of time – it can’t happen. The War of Wrath was basically Armageddon and saw Morgoth, the incarnation of evil, overthrown… but evil endured. Gandalf is clear in LotR that evil will still exist with or without Sauron – their goal in the War of the Ring is to defeat one tyrant and save Middle-earth from his oppression, not to defeat evil forever. But Polychron really does seem to be angling for The Big One, and it feels both like a massive escalation, but also massively immature. Middle-earth is meant to be our Earth’s mythic past; the removal of supernatural evils from the world is just that, no more and no less, and the Big Battle To Decide Everything will also be the end of everything. But I don’t think Polychron realizes that.

In short, Fellowship of the King is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It misses the tone of Tolkien, the themes of Tolkien, and the style of Tolkien in favor of aping the surface-level aspects of Tolkien and blowing them up to monstrous size until all distinctiveness and subtlety is lost. You can make an argument that a lot of modern fantasy makes that mistake, honestly, but FotK is especially egregious, for the obvious reason that it’s actually trying to be a legitimate follow-up. It certainly isn’t a “pitch-perfect sequel” to anything. But for now, we’re almost done. Just a few final observations to go.

Conclusion

Is there anything worth salvaging here? Eh, not really. Some of the worldbuilding is interesting but really needed to be spun off into its own setting and not tied down to Middle-earth. Most of everything else Polychron does is just pure excess, burying everything that made Middle-earth special under an avalanche of more with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. As a sequel to LotR, it misunderstands the work it’s following up on so badly that there’s not really anything of value in its interpretation. Honestly, the fic would probably have been rightly forgotten if Polychron hadn’t first tried to sell it as an actual book and then sued Amazon and the Tolkien Estate for ripping him off, for which he got what he deserved.

Is there a better way to do a sequel to LotR? Well, there’s “The New Shadow,” of course, the problem being that Tolkien himself quickly got sick of it and abandoned it on at least three separate occasions – for whatever reason, that story clearly wasn’t clicking for him. I tried to write my own “New Shadow”-esque story in an original setting a few years ago for NaNo, and it… did not come out as what I wanted from the premise, so I shelved it. Probably the closest thing to an actual version of “The New Shadow” we’re ever likely to get is Tad Williams Last King of Osten Ard series, a sequel to his classic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, which wrapped up just last fall. Looking for other stories to tell within Middle-earth – well, as Dennis McKiernan discovered “the dwarves reclaiming Moria” is a pretty obvious one, and honestly fairly easy to work a hobbit into, if you want to maintain their presence. The bad news is that then, it stops feeling like a redux of LotR and starts feeling more like a redux of, well, The Hobbit, unless you can put a new spin on it somehow (which McKiernan didn’t really manage). On the other hand, you could also explore some of Aragorn’s wars, which might be a place to work in one of Polychron’s concepts – Swahilloguz! Regardless of what I think of the Silence, Swahilloguz himself is probably the easiest of Polychron’s major baddies to make fit in Middle-earth. An Avari warlord ruling much of Harad is easy enough to justify; he was an ally of Sauron but not tied to the One Ring, so he wasn’t destroyed like the Nazgul were; he was far south enough that Gondor didn’t really have knowledge of him, especially with Mordor in the way; and he can be a “dark lord” type villain who is nonetheless much weaker than Sauron, so while he’s still dangerous doesn’t feel like he’s overshadowing LotR. You could even sub an encounter with Ungoliant, who fled to the far South per the Sil, instead of the Silence in his youth, so you don’t have to lose the “herald of an eldritch abomination” angle. It’s not much, but if you have to use one of Polychron’s concepts, I think he’s the one I’d go with.

But ultimately… I just don’t think LotR actually needs a sequel. Largely because LotR is a sequel, multiple times over. It’s a sequel to The Hobbit, of course, but at least as much a sequel to The Silmarillion even if that hadn’t been published yet when it came out. LotR is, fundamentally, the culmination of the entire Legendarium, the point where the Sil, the Numenorean cycle, and The Hobbit all meet and mingle. It’s the last hurrah, the culmination of “the long saga of the Jewels and the Rings,” the final struggle between the Free Peoples and the Dark Lords, the end of the age of myth that will determine whether the age to come is the Dominion of Man or the Second Darkness. And it ends with many of the last remnants of those earlier Ages being destroyed or withdrawing from the world. Their time is over. Their story is done. Any sequel to LotR has to grapple with the fact that LotR already marks the end not only of the Third Age but of a saga that stretches all the way back to the First Age – hells, Sam himself lampshades how he and Frodo are carrying on then same story as Beren and Luthien, and Earendil and Elwing, and Gil-Galad and Elendil, and so many others. I think, aside from his dislike of where the story was going, one of the reasons Tolkien scrapped “New Shadow” was because it didn’t really do enough to justify its existence as the next chapter of that saga, or that the saga needed another chapter at all. Polychron mostly justifies it by trampling all over LotR and ignoring all the implications of the ending he didn’t like, which was worse. But the fact remains that, if you want to tell the story of the Fourth Age and present it as a worthy follow-up to LotR, you have to first justify why continuing the story of Middle-earth into the Fourth Age and writing a follow-up to LotR was necessary in the first place. Tolkien himself couldn’t do it and was ultimately content to let the story stand where he left it. Polychron clearly wasn’t content, but FotK couldn’t justify its own existence, either. It just retreats the same old ground, with more bells and whistles, and more edge.

Anyway, we now come to the end. It’s been a very long, very weird journey, and I’d like to thank you all for sticking with me during it! Those of you who’ve checked out my personal journal have some idea of my next steps, but for those who don’t, my plan is to continue my exploration of weird Tolkien fanfics, spinoffs, adaptations and sequels by taking a look at someone who was a bit more successful at getting both his own sequel to LotR – and his own retelling of LotR – published by thinly rebranding them as an original setting. That’s right, we’re leaving Middle-earth and heading over to Mithgar (see, it’s a totally original setting for copyright purposes!) to take a look at the Iron Tower Trilogy and seeing how one of the most notorious Tolkien ripoffs in modern fantasy holds up, before moving on to McKiernan’s own attempt at an LotR sequel, the Silver Call duology. Oh, and we’re going to be working in a look at Amazon’s Rings of Power in there somewhere, too😉. I’m also planning to replace Newcomb with a sporking of another bad original fantasy series… but for details there, check out my final thoughts post for the Chronicles of Blood and Stone, coming next week!. Anyway, thank you all again, and I hope at least some of you will be interested in following me on my next journey! Until then, Namárië!

Comments

[ltzip]

You have wonderfully resumed the whole thing and others have done the same on the Das Spoorking's comments, so I will simply say that this is a very bad fan fic written by a narcissistic edgelord with zero self-awarness and so much issues with women that it turned his work into a secret necromantic ritual to summon Freud's ghost.

Also, it seel, to me, that his knowledge of the source material steem more from nerd's forum discussion, wiki and other fanfictions than the books themselves... If he actually read them before at all, who knew.

[masterghandalf]

You have wonderfully resumed the whole thing and others have done the same on the Das Spoorking's comments

Thank you!

so I will simply say that this is a very bad fan fic written by a narcissistic edgelord with zero self-awarness and so much issues with women that it turned his work into a secret necromantic ritual to summon Freud's ghost.

No arguments there;).

Also, it seel, to me, that his knowledge of the source material steem more from nerd's forum discussion, wiki and other fanfictions than the books themselves... If he actually read them before at all, who knew.


My gut says he's at least read LotR, but that he's the sort of shallow reader who is very good at remembering trivia, but very bad at synthesizing it and seeing the deeper meaning in the text. Which I think explains a lot about both his seeming level of knowledge about the Legendarium and his own writing style.