Celebrimbor: 30-Day Character Study by cloudyhymns

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Day 23: Drop Everything and Read, Part Three

Researching Celebrimbor's Ao3 tags and a subset of six fics from them.

Let's take a look at Ao3, shall we? Note that these numbers were current as of 19:00 on February 10, 2025, CST (UTC-6), and might be slightly different now.

 

Character Tags

The most common is Celebrimbor | Telperinquar at 2760 works. This is a synonym of his canon tag, which is fascinating. It also favors the Sindarin version of his Teleri name, as opposed to the Quenya "Tyelperinquar" that I more often see--particularly because everyone enjoys calling him Tyelpë for short c:

Celebrimbor's canon Legendarium character tag is Celebrimbor (Tolkien) at 1006 works. This is as expected and exactly as it says on the tin. This canon character tag is home to all the other ones under it--its synonyms--all 4 pages and 173 of them!

I have to say that I'm surprised Celebrimbor has so many CHARACTER tags on Ao3 alone--I'm really not used to liking such popular (by my standards) characters!

My favorite single-use character tag has to be Celebrimbor [brief bloody cameo] because it's been wrangled so seriously as a synonym. Lol!

 

Relationship Tags

When it comes to Celebrimbor's relationship tags, there are 1,001 Archive-distinguished relationship tags. The most common relationship tag is Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Sauron | Mairon with 589 works, followed by Annatar/Celebrimbor | Telperinquar with 386 works. Neither of those tags are canon tags, either! The two *canon* tags for that relationship are Annatar/Celebrimbor (Tolkien) with 233 works and Celebrimbor/Sauron (Tolkien) with 188 works respectively. As a short aside, I reached out to the Archive recently asking them to make Annatar/Celebrimbor (Tolkien) and Celebrimbor/Sauron (Tolkien) into a canon tag and a synonym tag rather than two separate canon tags, since it's affecting their sorting and searching algorithms, and some fics are missing depending on which name you use for Annatar/Sauron. I haven't heard back from them yet, but they've had much bigger fish to fry, so I'll have to keep y'all posted on that one.... And yes, Celebrimbor/Sauron is another tag, missing the (Tolkien) specification. It has 108 works. For the Rings of Power fans out there, Celebrimbor (Tolkien)/Halbrand (The Rings of Power) is a separate and canon tag, but Celebrimbor (Tolkien)/Annatar (Rings of Power) is not, and neither is Celebrimbor (Rings of Power)/Annatar (Rings of Power), since Celebrimbor (Rings of Power) apparently falls into Celebrimbor (Tolkien), as does Annatar (Rings of Power) with Annatar (Tolkien), but Halbrand is not considered part of the Tolkien-related fandoms. Yes, I'm giggling over this.

The next most common relationship tag is actually Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Narvi, with 148 works, a canon tag--Celebrimbor/Narvi (Tolkien), 36 works--and even a third tag Celebrimbor/Narvi with 34 works! Who knew? Go, Narvi, go!

After those two is Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Maeglin | Lómion (112 works), Celebrimbor/Erenion Gil-galad (66 works), Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Talion (Shadow of Mordor) (65 works), and Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Elrond Peredhel (32 works).

The most common platonic relationship tag is Celebrimbor | Telperinquar & Curufin | Curufinwë at 160 works, but that is once again not the canon version of that tag. The canon version is lower than several other platonic relationships at 52 works for Celebrimbor & Curufin (Tolkien).

Other major platonic tags are Celebrimbor | Telperinquar & Sauron | Mairon (78 works), Celebrimbor | Telperinquar & Elrond Peredhel (75 works), Celebrimbor | Telperinquar & Narvi (63 works), Annatar & Celebrimbor | Telperinquar (56 works), and a variety of variations thereof.

My favorite platonic tag is Celebrimbor | Telperinquar & Sons of Fëanor (25 works), solely because it makes me smile. [A/N: upon actually READING a fic from this tag, I can say it made me cry into my tea and I have no regrets. Yes, I am a known softie, but also, it hurts so good.... new favorite tag on Ao3?]

So we've covered the major Character and Relationship tags; up next are the Freeforms.

 

Freeform Tags

Out of a total of 585, the top 10 most common freeform tags for Celebrimbor are:

  1. Poor Celebrimbor (62) vs. Poor Celebrimbor (Tolkien) (6)
  2. POV Celebrimbor (Tolkien) (38)
  3. Celebrimbor Has Issues (35) vs. Celebrimbor Has Issues (Tolkien) (7)
  4. Celebrimbor Lives (Tolkien) (35)
  5. Celebrimbor Makes Bad Life Choices (27) vs. Celebrimbor Makes Bad Life Choices (Tolkien) (7)
  6. Celebrimbor Lives (26) [A/N: Just realized I counted this one twice as two different tags, like Ao3 does. Sorry about that!!]
  7. Celebrimbor in Gondolin (24)
  8. Celebrimbor Needs A Hug (Tolkien) (21)
  9. Celebrimbor Has Daddy Issues (16)
  10. Female Celebrimbor (14)

Bold and italicized tags are Ao3 canon tags.

[A/N: I also just realized I forgot to search based on Tyelpë/Tyelpe Freeform tags, too. Well, that's for next time, but I have to say I'm curious what sort of chaos is going on there.]

Two honorary mentions that weren't in the top ten are BAMF Celebrimbor (Tolkien) (4) + BAMF Celebrimbor (3) and Autistic Celebrimbor (3).

Well, that was a wild ride, and that was only the Ao3 side! I'm not sure I'm brave enough to explore the SWG Celebrimbor tag, given how the Ao3 ones went--I will get there, eventually, when I'm less daunted by learning a new archive system.

 

What does this mean for fanfic about Celebrimbor?

Most of the Celebrimbor recommendations I've been given--and most of the Celebrimbor fanfics that I've read--have been for Silvergifting. Quite a few have been recommended to me more than once, namely Chtonion's Your shadow rising to meet you series. But it's on the my reading list for right now due to being over 420,000 words long.... I cannot wait to read it, but simply do not have the time to sit down and binge read it yet.

I did finish reading (and partially beta-reading) 0ur_Ouroboros's Love's Secret Domain series, and absolutely adored it as a study into the devolution of Celebrimbor's relationship with Annatar before the forging of the Rings. Deliciously fascinating and painful in the best way.

That said, I'm pretty sure today's post is supposed to center fics I read for it, so I went ahead and read several fics under my personal favorite tags that I listed above. I have never read any fics with these tags before!

The tags I selected are:

I'm not going to go through each fic I read in detail, since I don't have their authors' permissions to, but I highly recommend each of them! I am working through leaving comments on each of them as well.

That's it for today, though there's still more to be done on Tyelpë tags, for one! Legendarium tags are a bit scattered, so it's like digging in an endless sandbox, and I simultaneously love it and want nothing more than to clean it all up. Hey, Ao3, if you're looking for somebody to wrangle your Tolkien tags for you, I volunteer! I love archives and databases!

There's only a week left in my 30-Day Character Study--next Monday should be my post for Day 30. I don't know what I'll do when I'm done! It's hard to believe it's only been 23 days of coming home and spending my evenings learning and writing about this silly little Elf. At this point, I feel like I get through the door, put the kettle on, and go "Tyelpë, I'm home!!" as all the Tyelpë plot bunnies flee in fear, knowing I'm going to snag one of them.

All of this to say--if you're here and reading today's entry, thank you for taking this wild ride into lore rabbit holes with me. Please let me know if there's something you would like to see before the end, or in the future, since I'll have to figure out what to do with my writing nights once I'm no longer terrorizing poor Celebrimbor.

Chapter End Notes

Please tell me if any of the links do not work. I've gone through and checked them, but I've also had to convert from plain text to Markdown and back to html/plain text, so it's possible I've made a mistake somewhere.

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