Also started looking through a pile of doujinshi friends left with me when they moved. Supposedly Saiyuki, but mixed in with a bunch of FF7. And oh was that a trip, back to the late 90s and the piles of FF7 I translated for Aestheticism. All those Sid x Vincent stories, though IIRC Fearless Leader was more a Sephiroth x Vincent fangirl. And of course at the time I didn't know that the originals were pixillated Lego people. That would have killed the magic right there.
Also: lord but my Japanese has disintegrated.
One of the things that fantodded me a bit about LOTR was the sense of deep time, of all those ages of History behind it, and unexplained history at that. 'The hidden city of Gondolin', you say? and then don't tell me anything more about it. Don't know how I came to be googling LOTR, but I fell into a wiki-shaped hole for a couple of hours trying to make sense of who and what and when. The deep time thing should fantod me less if I remember that from the pov of the elven protagonists, the First Age was maybe 40 years ago if that. But I'm still fantoddy with all the names I can't keep straight and the places I can't place. I need a family tree, printed on paper, and even more, a set of comprehensive historical maps:
"Celeborn and Galadriel traveled first to Lindon, where they ruled over a group of Elves as a fiefdom under Gil-galad. Sometime later, they had a daughter, Celebrían. They moved eastward and established the realm of Eregion, or Hollin, which they ruled under Gil-galad, the High King of the Ñoldor. Eregion, to the west of the Misty Mountains near Moria, was a prosperous kingdom during this time, and had open trade with the Dwarves. Also, during this time, they made contact with a Nandorin settlement in the valley of the Anduin, later to be known as Lothlórien. Subsequently, while Celebrimbor now ruled over Eregion, they left Eregion by way of the mines of Khazad-dûm. After the death of the current King Amdír, in the War of the Last Alliance, and the departure his son on Amroth, Celeborn and Galadriel became the Lord and Lady of Lothlórien." Clear as mud, that.
I suppose most of the history is in The Silmarillion, but I never got anywhere with that. I looked through Unfinished Tales, but that was even worse. Ms traditions are so not my thing.
