#humans tend to translate it as 'it' but its connotations are more... malevolent

[feanorianethicsdepartment]

I am completely sure that this is directly disproven somewhere in the Tolkien universe, but I also don’t care enough to actually look it up.

But anyway, what if elves in general (but Noldor in particular) have rather strict roles when it comes to titles. So an elven Lord has to do certain things (like collect taxes), but is absolutely not allowed to do other things because those activities belong to an elven Lady (this goes for Prince, Princess, King and Queen as well). It’s just that this system has nothing to do with gender, and barley has anything to do with class. If it’s relevant, elven partners discuss which role they want and use the appropriate title accordingly.

But the distribution of tasks (at least superficially) falls close to what a human would consider to be appropriate for a Lord and Lady, and elves are largely indistinguishable when it comes to gender anyway, which leads to a multitude of hilarious and also politically tense misunderstandings.

fuck yeah i love headcanoning fantasy races who don't do sexual differentiation and gender and all that the way humans do at least humans of the western variety but i don't have the background to get into that. dwarves just don't gender at all, i figured out pretty early, which is why i they/them gimli, but i wasn't too sure what to do wrt elves? they obviously Have Gender, and i like the idea of it looking superficially like the human system but operating very differently underneath, but i wasn't quite sure where to take it

but this made it click! the titles thing - i'm not sure why that wouldn't have much to do with class, you'll always have important people doing the important jobs (and vice versa!) but gender, yesss. elves describing a gender as a role in society they happen to be taking, almost like a facet of their job. and like, these roles aren't inherent or anything, a different person will do different things through the course in their lives, especially when they're immortal. the same elf might go by 'he' or 'she' or 'they' or some fancy-shmancy vanyarin neopronoun at different points in their lives, all more connected to their hypothetical dnd class than whatever their reproductive organs are doing that's a speculative biology rabbit hole i'll leave for another day

i feel like this could explain the apparent preponderance of dudes in the finwean family tree, for one. like, when the first humans come over the blue mountains, most-but-not-all of the local third-generation finweans are doing variations on the warlord archetype, which generally gets coded male. they get put down in the human histories as Always Guys, even though like half of them were going by she/her before the darkening. the exceptions, aredhel and galadriel, are both doing more subordinate female-coded social roles - very different female-coded social roles, if you asked them they would consider themselves different genders, or at most extremely culturally divergent takes on the same gender. orodreth probably also falls into this category, he's just either (a) doing a male-coded support role or (b) going down in human history as male from that time he failed to finrod

i dunno, i just like the image of humans initially assuming elf gender works like theirs, but slowly over the decades coming to the realisation that it’s completely different on every level below the surface

#ask #whotookliterallyallthenames #elves #humans #sorry for getting on my Weird Gender Shit soapbox i just enjoy playing with these ideas #i'm not sure how much of this i buy but it was interesting to think up #there's a specific gender role/pronoun set associated with capital e Evil #humans tend to translate it as 'it' but its connotations are more... malevolent #orcish in the sense of the shadows in the woods around cuivienen #it's an absolutely massive insult to use this set on anything that isn't a slavering monstrosity #'you're not a person you're a threat' #... i feel like this is how maglor thinks of itself after the end of it all #honestly this whole thing exists mostly to justify my genderfluid transfemme mags brain worms #'which one of them's the guy?' 'they're the lords of the gap the fuck do you mean' #weird gender shit