Well, that earned a confused look from Marceline raising a brow at the other for a moment, as crimson eyes looked Sunset over for an explanation.
Sunset started intently at the vampire queen for a second before slowly rasing her hand, finger pointed out and slowly poked the vampires nose, little out a small “Boop!” as her finger connected to her nose.
Please remember that just because someone is playing a villainous character doesn’t mean that they don’t love their character, or don’t have a version of it that is perhaps new to you. Respect the muns of villains as much as you would respect any other mun, and remember to work with them.
It is very hard to play a villainous character in a world full of heroes and cinnamon rolls, and the muns who pick them up and are willing to give them a try deserve some extra support and love, because they’re going to need it. Love the villain muns, respect their autonomy as players, and don’t try to force their character to submit to your plot desires just because you’re playing a hero. Heroes might not always win, and heroes are not always more interesting, not always better characters – they’re just typically more popular because most of us want to be good, and it’s a lot easier to self-insert with a morally good character for many people.
Respect your villains. If they’re canon characters, don’t assume that they’re all the same as every other one you’ve seen. If they’re original, respect that their mun is giving you a neat new antagonist to deal with.
Conflict is necessary, and villain muns deserve to enjoy their RP experience, too!
I have realized that Steve Rogers would have gone into the ice after The Hobbit was printed but before The Lord of the Rings was released and now all I want is him finding out about The Lord of the Rings and being so excited because “Wait, you mean there’s a sequel?!”
please please please just imagine the following:
Steve reads The Hobbit in the 30s/40s. Maybe Bucky saves up and buys it for him one year for his birthday. Maybe he picks up a copy while on the USO tour. Maybe Peggy lends it to him.
He reads it. He loves it. He goes into the ice.
He wakes up and rereading it crosses his mind but “It’s an old book now, no one’s probably heard of it.” and there are so many new things to read that it gets pushed aside.
(Or maybe he knows that they’re making The Hobbit into a movie and he’s so happy about that but he doesn’t really read into it, you know? It’s going to be a movie, that’s good enough for him. He doesn’t watch interviews, he doesn’t read articles- he hears about The Lord of the Rings, of course, but no one ever makes the connection for him.)
(“I’ll reread The Hobbit before the movies come out,” but there’s still so many new things that it still gets pushed aside.)
Someone (Nat or Sam, in a hotel somewhere while they’re looking for Bucky, or Bruce in the Tower, or whoever) flips through channels and puts on The Lord of the Rings movies and Steve is only half paying attention. Maybe he’s sketching. Maybe he’s reading reports. Who knows.
Then he hears “hobbits” and it catches his attention because wait, is that…? But this isn’t The Hobbit, he doesn’t know this story, but he’s invested now and he’s watching a little bit more.
Gandalf appears, and Bilbo, and wait he definitely knows these characters what’s going on, what’s happening here, what story is this?
“Well, yeah, it’s The Lord of the Rings, it’s the sequel to The Hobbit-”
“He wrote a sequel? There’s a sequel!?”
“…there’s technically a prequel too, mostly put together by his son, but-”
“HOW MANY MORE BOOKS ARE THERE?”
“…three in The Lord of the Rings, plus the Silmarillion, and a lot of history/meta stuff too…”
“I WANT TO READ THEM ALL.”
Steve does read them all.
(There’s a moment of loud indignation when he reads about the riddle game because “It didn’t happen like that!” He has to have the changes explained, and then it’s the funniest thing in the world to him.)
Please just imagine Steve Rogers in his office at the compound with a tiny book shelf that’s just full of copies of all of Tolkien’s works. And tucked in a corner is a first-edition copy of The Hobbit that Tony bought for him, and Steve knows that it has to be ridiculously expensive but he dosen’t care, because it’s almost exactly like the copy he used to have. And even though he knows he probably shouldn’t handle it too much, sometimes he picks it up and rereads the riddle game scene. (The original is still better, in his opinion.)
But please also imagine Steve reading, specifically, The Return of the King.
Steve reading about Frodo and Sam nearly dying on the slopes of Mount Doom, saving the world by the skin of their teeth, and it’s exactly the epic fantasy ending he was expecting. Aragorn marries Arwen, and the hobbits are heroes, and everything is right in the world.
And then they go back to the Shire.
They go through literal war, and they try to go home… but it’s not home. It’s been ravaged by the war, by technology, and “in your heart you begin to understand: there is no going back.”
And Frodo sails. Frodo sails, and even though you know that Sam still has Merry and Pippin, look at what he’s lost. He lost Frodo, he lost Gandalf, he lost the innocence of the Shire. And Sam is left behind, left to return home to his wife and family alone, and its an awful, terrible moment, that moment when you’re confronted with the reality that “We set out to save the Shire, Sam. And it has been saved, but not for me,” that winning the war can mean losing in other ways, that sometimes you don’t get your happy ending-
But that’s not the ending you’re left with. Because the last line of the book is “Well, I’m back.” and Steve, sitting in his apartment, surrounding by a future that never expected to see, that he understands and embraces but still sometimes doesn’t feel like his own world- Steve sits back, and sets the book down, and innately understands Sam’s feeling of pushing forward and finding happiness even in the light of a great personal loss. Steve has literally lived through his own Scouring of the Shire, has tried to go home only to realize that there is no going back, Steve would have every reason in the world to be Frodo and to decide to step back and find his own peace because damnit, he deserves that.
But Steve isn’t Frodo, Steve is Sam, Steve is the stouthearted and steadfast and he keeps moving forward, because he gets home and doesn’t just see the broken edges of the world- he also sees the pieces that got put back together. He sees everything he survived, and everything that the people around him survived, and when he finishes reading that book and sets it down he looks around his apartment and realizes for the first time that he’s finally managed to come home again.
Headcanon accepted
Guys, this is pretty much canon!! There’s an old comics panel (I’m pretty sure @jayleeg has posted it) that shows Steve reading Lord of the Rings!!! And saying he loves Tolkien.
Yup, that was Avengers #46 by
Roy Thomas…
And to add more food to the fodder, from Cap #255 by Roger Stern…
Steve Rogers is a big ol’ geek, just like the rest of us. 😉
Steve and the Silmarillion tho
Someone please draw a flashback of Steve seeing Asgard for the first time and being like “I AM NEVER LEAVING HERE EVER”
I’m actually picturing Steve being super disappointed in The Lord of the Rings because “This isn’t the fun adventure tale I was hoping for.” But then warming to it over time.
@chiribomb@thefingerfuckingfemalefury guys, just imagine Steve reading the Silmarillion and then all the craziness of the History of Middle Earth books and the Three Great Tales books. And his reaction to all that Elf Nonsense™.
And I wonder what his reaction would be to the movies adapting them?
I feel like he would have Opinions on the Hobbit trilogy
TheWanderingSunset2 