Reviews Fanfic / Sansukh

Fanfic An excellent, well-written, absolute doorstopper of a fic

Sansukh is a really, really well-written monster of a fanfic (seriously, it's longer than the actual Lord of the Rings trilogy!) that does a great job expanding on dwarven culture in a way that mostly feels like an extension of cannon. The Fellowship characters all felt perfectly in-character for their book versions, even when the fic veered into decidedly non-cannon territory with the Gimli/Legolas romance. Thorin's Company, being mostly interchangeable in the book, take far more influence from The Hobbit movies than the book, and despite not being particularly fond of The Hobbit trilogy I found all of their characters to be enjoyable.

What makes Sansukh more than just a Perspective Flip of LOTR is how well it interweaves scenes of Erebor after the Battle of the Five Armies (Dain's kinghood, the decision to try and retake Moria, the eventual alliance with the Murkwood elves against the armies of Mordor) with cannon events. The writing was so consistent that it became genuinely difficult to tell what was the fic's invention and what was a retelling of canon events mentioned in the appendices.

And despite not really being a fan of either main ship (Gimli/Legolas + Thorin/Bilbo), both were written well enough that I completely bought these characters falling in love and it didn't harm my enjoyment of the fic's story.

All that being said, I do have a few nitpicks:

• Much like the films, the ending drags on much longer than it needed to. For instance, the Scouring of the Shire plays out completely identically to cannon since there's no one present who can hear the ghosts' input; that whole chapter could have been cut without affecting anything else.

• The choice to have soulmates be an established thing and big deal in dwarven culture feels... well, like a fanfic contrivance, which sticks out all the more because of how the rest of the fic sticks so close to cannon.

• There is a LOT of Khuzdul in the work, and while it's cool and well-done worldbuilding, it gets tedious to scroll back and forth to the bottom of the chapter and back again to see the translations, especially since the chapters are so long that its easy to lose your place.

• This is personal preference, but I really disliked the Kili/Tauriel romance in The Hobbit trilogy, and wasn't a fan of it in this fic either. They knew each other for like 3 days. Tauriel spending the rest of her life pinning after him and him spending his whole afterlife pinning after her... no. I just don't buy it.

Fanfic Magnificent

Okay, first things first: it took me a long, long time to get around to reading this fic. The plot, the ships, the very idea of the Soulmate AU? Engh. Really not my thing. Especially as I am very picky about canon. I thought that the fic would, at the very least, not be my cup of tea.

Dear reader, I have never been so completely and utterly wrong in my entire life. If I ever have, then I struggle to think of an example.

While I am not sure what Tolkien would make of some of the changes and expansions of canon that the author of this extraordinary fic has come up with, I am certain that he would approve of the essence of it. He'd definitely approve of the music. The breadth of knowledge is incredible, the worldbuilding is remarkable, and good god, the ability to balance it all, making a coherent plot and neatly evading what could so easily have been a glorified commentary fic... This is a work of art, a work of craft, and a true masterpiece in the oldest sense of the word. It is a labour of love, and that, at least, Tolkien would most certainly have approved of.

And, as it happens, I do too. It is rare for a story of any kind to make me tear up, and even rarer for it to make my heart sing. This one did both, and so much more. It deserves all the credit that it gets and far, far more.