To Mordor and Beyond

News Media Commentary
Title:	To Mordor and Beyond
Commentator:	Anne Ford
Date(s):	October 7, 2005
Venue:	online
Fandom:	Lord of the Rings
External Links:	online as a PDF
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To Mordor and Beyond is a 2005 article by Anne Ford for the "Chicago Reader."

The topic is a fan who discovered slash through the Lord of the Rings movies, and how it changed (and saved) her life.

The article contains art by The Theban Band.

From the Essay

Though better than she had anticipated, the movie was just entertainment for Maxwell until about three-quarters of the way through, when the wizard Gandalf falls into a fiery abyss while trying to defend Frodo and his companions from the demonic Balrog. Frodo howls—a long, horrified, wounded sound. “That scream tore open something in me,” Maxwell says. She huddled in her seat, “crying and screaming and full of joy.”

The next day she went back and saw the movie again. She did the same the day after that, and then the day after that, and then the day after that. Maxwell saw The Fellowship of the Ring five times a week for two months, usually by herself.

At first she had a hard time finding anyone who under- stood her new fixation. “I’d say to people, ‘Did you see Lord of the Rings’ and they’d say, ‘Yeah, good movie.’ And I’d go, ‘But what does it mean that Frodo was an orphan, and then Gandalf falls at Khazad-dum? How did he feel?’ And everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, good movie.’” In frustration she turned to the Internet, where she found fan discussion boards full of peo- ple as desperate to analyze every facet of the movie as she was. She also discovered that quite a few fans were writing and posting their own stories about Tolkien’s characters. Even more intriguing: some of those fan stories—the ones called “slash”— were homoerotic. A friend she’d met through a Reader personal ad (“Tolkien addict seeks same for obsessive conversation”) showed her a story in which Frodo and his hunky male companion Aragorn get it on. “I was like, wow, this is really fucking sexy,” she says, grinning. “It was a lightening that I needed. It wasn’t all trauma; it was fun too. ‘Look at that glance between Frodo and Sam.’ You just feel friendlier to someone when you know they’re sucking each other’s cocks.”

On July 15, 2002—the tenth anniversary of her sobriety—she finished her first major work, a 24,000-word, 12-part series called “Remembrance.” Since then she’s written several more sagas, met dozens of friends, found love, and come to think of herself as a writer. Without slash, she says, none of that would have happened. “My life—it’s unrecognizable.”

As a recovering alcoholic, Maxwell says, she understood Frodo’s obsession with the Ring. He knows it’s destroying him, but he finds himself drawn to it against his will. And every time he gives in to the temptation to put the Ring on his finger, the lust for it becomes stronger.

Now slash gave Maxwell a way to construct a backstory for Frodo that would bring his experience even closer to her own.

[...]

It was as if she could channel all her own pain into Frodo, and all the healing and gentleness she needed into Sam. The relationship she created for the two of them was sexual, but it was playful and loving instead of abusive and exploitative. “That’s why the whole slash thing was so incredibly liberating,” she says. “I guess if there’s safe sex, there’s safe voyeurism. I was borrowing other people’s bodies to explore my own head.”

After finishing “Remembrance” Maxwell was hit with an unexpected emotion: grief. At the end of her story, as at the end of Tolkien’s saga, Frodo departs alone for the land of the Elves. “It was just unbearable to me that Frodo had to leave Sam,” she says. “I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t look at the cover of The Return of the King without break- ing into tears. I was, like, disabled.” That’s when she discovered the appeal of a slash variant: RPS, or real-person slash. Instead of creating stories about fictional characters, RPS slashers create stories about the actors who portray them. “Real person slash — I began to understand it then,” Maxwell says. “Because Frodo left. That’s canon. There’s nothing I can do about it. Elijah Wood is in Los Angeles.”

RPS is a contentious issue in the slash world. Some think writing highly personal, sometimes highly explicit stories about real people crosses an ethical line. Others worry that the actors will be offended and sue either the writer of the story or the Web site where it appears. So far that hasn’t been a problem. “If any of those men said, ‘We think it’s disgusting and we want it stopped,’ we would put down our pens,” Maxwell says. “Or at least, we wouldn’t post it on the Net.” She sees RPS as a way to pay homage to the actors she loves. “I was talking to a friend of mine and I said, ‘Whenever I write one of them, I’m sending good energy their way.’ She said, ‘Now I understand. It’s prayer, isn’t it?’ Yeah. And it really is.”

Maxwell realizes that despite everything slash has done for her, many people find her relationship to it puzzling. “We all have our enthusiasms,” she explains. “Working out. Your children. Whatever. This is a concept in addiction that is really misunderstood. See, people think that what’s wrong with addicts is doing drugs. The only way to really tell if someone has a disease is to look not at what the person does to the drug, but what the drug does to the per- son. What this drug has done to me has opened up my life. I’ve made a couple of dozen friends. I’ve met someone that I want to spend the rest of my life with. What else could I be doing, needlepoint?”

Fan Comments

When I started at the Chicago Reader, I recall people making fun of Anne Ford’s 2005 piece "To Mordor and Beyond: Drugs and alcohol nearly ruined Sarz Maxwell’s life. Writing dirty stories about hobbits made it worth living again." It sounds like a risible premise, but it’s a moving account of how a woman worked her way through a difficult past in the virtual world of slash fiction—a virtual world that started in print and moved online...