Fandom Voices: Impact of the Films by Dawn Felagund

Posted on 13 May 2022; updated on 25 November 2022

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Responses: The Hobbit Films

If you were part of the Tolkien fandom before the Hobbit films were released in December 2012, how do you think the films impacted the fandom? What other experiences/memories do you have related to the films and the fandom at this time?

All responses we've received to the above question are collected here without curation or commentary. Responses have been lightly edited.

Were you a part of the fandom before one or both films? We're still collecting responses and will update this page as new responses come in.

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It didn’t seem to impact the fandom as much as LotR did, or that was my impression. At that time my fandom home was the fandom-specific Faerie Archive and not so much AO3 (where there might have been more reaction fic-wise).

~ Spiced Wine, response collected on 24 March 2022

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I was actually out of the fandom from 2006 to 2021, though still enjoying and consuming Tolkien's works on my own. With such a long absence, I obviously noticed a lot of changes and I am sure many are related to the Hobbit movies. In particular, the way the fandom seems to have folded in some non-canon aspects of the Hobbit movies (like Tauriel as a character). Personally, I tried to enjoy the Hobbit movies and hoped they would reinvigorate my love of Tolkien fandom, but they were disappointing enough that I still haven't watched the third one.

~ polutropos, response collected on 24 March 2022

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Legolas was blond; Tauriel was canon; Elves are vegetarian.

~ Anonymous, response collected on 25 March 2022

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Many people I know that were/are fans of Tolkien's works were very disappointed with the Hobbit trilogy. While I think that both the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogies have helped to make the books more accessible and more widely known, I think the biggest impact the most recent trilogy has had is the wariness most people I talk to feel as the new series approaches.

~ Salyene, response collected on 27 March 2022

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The Hobbit is a turning point in my opinion. I think the community split somewhat and defenders of The Hobbit started to become aggressive in their defence of the movies. 

~ OnTheTrail, response collected 27 March 2022

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The fandom was divided. Many were enthusiastic about the cast (particularly Freeman, Armitage, and Pace) and returning to Middle-earth. However, others were frustrated by deviations from the source material, the choice to do a trilogy of films, the reliance on CGI, and the cartoonishness of the action compared to Jackson’s LotR films. I remember personally enjoying each film (while acknowledging flaws) but seeing many fans vocally disappointed on forums such as TheOneRing.net.

~ Jacob J., response collected on 27 March 2022

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Whereas the earlier trilogy had split the community along Purist/Revisionist lines—essentially the question being whether the priority was to create stand-alone art or remain faithful to Tolkien's text—The Hobbit movies saw far less emphasis on fandom Purism (except possibly over Tauriel), and much more criticism over perceived narrative bloat. People reacted poorly to them because they were seen as bad movies, rather than as poor adaptations of Tolkien. I also suspect that casual fans were disappointed in that The Hobbit did not measure up to the original trilogy, whereas the veterans who had been around before 2001 arguably felt a bit "over" Jackson. I suspect the Del Toro Hobbit would have been received rather differently.

(Again, as a New Zealander, there are also certain things about law changes from the era I could talk about, but that is a bit out of the scope of the question).

In terms of fanfiction, I think Hobbit fic was rarer prior to the movies than what would come later. Certainly the rash of Kili fanfiction (a throwback to the Legomances of an earlier era) was entirely a product of these movies.

~ Daniel Stride, response collected on 27 March 2022

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Well, honestly I had no confidence in the Hobbit trilogy once I heard it was going to be a trilogy and Del Toro was out as director. At that point, I kind of felt it was going to be a "studio" movie, meaning a LOT of interference from people who shouldn't. So seeing it at last was not so much a letdown as it was a confirmation of what I thought was going to happen. It was a tragedy because the casting was spot on, everyone obviously put their everything into it, but it was hobbled by what editing made of it. 

I don't think it put anyone off at all from the fandom, and there are some fan-made edits of The Hobbit which makes the series FAR better than what Jackson was forced to release. And on a positive side, I think it engaged a lot of fan creativity on what they would have done to make the films better.

~ John, response collected 27 March 2022

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I don't think the Hobbit films impacted the fandom as much as the LotR films did. Most of the people I knew who watched the films had already read the book.

~ Anonymous, response collected 27 March 2022

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I'd argue that the movies shaped the way the fandom (especially the fanfiction fandom, and to a certain point the fanart community as well) looked at The Hobbit characters. Prior fanfics included characters that appeared in both books (Bilbo, Gloin, etc.) in very minor ways. Other characters were included in terms of their relationships to the main LotR characters (the Elvenking as Legolas's father, the line of Durin in their relationship to Gimli, etc.). Only Gandalf escaped this treatment due to his major roles in both books.

The movies completely changed the way the events of The Hobbit and the characters were seen by the fandom. The biggest impact was undoubtedly on the characters of Bilbo and Thorin, who were immediately shipped together in a relationship. When sorted by kudos, for example, the top Tolkien-related fics on Archive of Our Own are generally related to the events of The Hobbit (or a fictionalised version of the time right after the events of the book/movies) and either feature Bilbo/Thorin as the main pairing or as a background pairing. Additionally, nearly all were written after the release of the first movie, and most after the release of the entire trilogy, which is why I'd argue the online fanfic fandom as it exists today can trace its existence to the Hobbit movies. 

Additionally, there's the curious case of Tauriel. While there have been numerous debates regarding the creation and inclusion of the character into the Tolkien canon, it's undoubtedly true that she caught the interest of a major chunk of the fandom. The Lord of the Rings books had a canonical female presence (Éowyn, Galadriel, Arwen) that The Hobbit did not. By adding the character of Tauriel and making her more than a passive romantic interest, I'd argue that Jackson caught the interest of a section of fans that would otherwise have paid little attention to the Hobbit film series. Indeed, she remains a popular supporting character to add to Hobbit and LotR-adjacent fanfics, and rarely in a way that is critical of the development of her character. 

Similarly, while Legolas is not part of the original book, giving him a greater depth of character through his inclusion in the Hobbit movies has been largely appreciated by the fanfic fandom. While the Legolas/Gimli ship has existed long before the movies were released, the release of the movies resulted in a greater interest in the ship—some of it being a natural progression of the popularity of the Bilbo/Thorin ship, while another portion being due to the interaction with the Dwarven race pre-LotR that Legolas has in the movies but lacks in the books. 

The main critique of the films among the fandom in terms of characters and character development, I'd argue, was the hinted romance between Galadriel and Gandalf. It is one that much of fandom finds hard to swallow, given that it comes out of nowhere and Galadriel is canonically married to Celeborn (which, it should be noted, was shown in the LotR movies). Similarly, Gandalf's status as a Maia and the all-knowing teacher/mentor that he has in both film series seems to limit the ability of fans to see him as a romantic prospect, again making the hinted relationship seem wildly out of left field and often a space for mocking.

~ Rishika Aggarwal, response collected on 27 March 2022

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I don't think the impact of the Hobbit films was as huge as before. Maybe they didn't attract as much attention as the Lord of the Rings ones, or maybe because I had already moved a little away from fandom and fanfiction.

~ Anonymous, response collected on 28 March 2022

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The poor quality of the Hobbit movies seem to have left a sour taste. It made people appreciate the Lord of the Rings trilogy even more, even if they aren't great adaptations. I remember really disliking these movies and delayed seeing the third part as long as I could. They showed that all the money in the world can't make a good adaptation if you stray so far from the source material.

~ The Red Book (Steven), response collected on 28 March 2022

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I was a Tolkien fan well before the Jackson LotR films, but I was not at that time part of fandom, which I discovered more recently (albeit before the Hobbit films). The fandom I see (both fanfic and articles) is definitely book-focused, and as far as I can tell the Hobbit films sank with barely a trace. I presume that Tauriel fanfic exists, but I have not yet come across it. There were some articles written at the time of the films' release, but not really many retrospectives. We all kept happily chugging along and pretended they didn't happen.

Interestingly, the Jackson LotR films are acknowledged, even in book-focused spaces—ACOUP's blog posts on war tactics, for example, or /r/tolkienfans on Reddit—but the Hobbit films are mostly ignored.

~ TRiG, response collected on 28 March 2022

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I'm sure the Hobbit films brought even more people into Tolkien fandom, considering the first one was released nine years after The Return of the King. A lot of friends and fellow fans of my acquaintance were very eager to see the films, but I was indifferent. PJ and Company managed to screw the pooch in a few unforgivable ways in their Lord of the Rings films (for me, at least) and I just never bothered to see the Hobbit films.

~ Anonymous, response collected on 29 March 2022

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A huge chunk of younger people joined the fandom, I think. There was a surge of interest for Thranduil, and the Bagginshield ship gained enormous popularity. Again, fanart became very standardized, but then there were more representations of Dwarves, especially Dwarven ladies.

~ Anonymous, response collected on 29 March 2022

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Thobbit shipping. Everybody was cool with teh gays all of a sudden. Tauriel was treated almost as criminally badly as Arwen, but at least she didn't have most of her scenes cut, so ... yay.

~ Anonymous, response collected on 29 March 2022

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I wrote a slightly tongue-in-cheek review of the first Hobbit movie on LJ, which was co-opted by friends into publication in the Amon Hen fanzine. So, I guess I was part of Tolkien fandom at that point, though rather peripherally so. 

I remember a disapproving feeling of 'how very uncanonical and awful these movies are' floating around, particularly in the terrible reviews for the last movie—but checking back on my LJ comments at the time, many of my very-long-term Tolkien-enthusiast friends seemed to have loved them, as I did myself. 

The last Hobbit movie pretty much coincides with me starting to slide back into active Tolkien fandom, though the part I slid into was First/Second Age rather than Hobbit. My impression is that Hobbit movie fandom mostly does its own thing in slightly separate space, so it felt less overwhelming than the arrival of LotR movie fandom did. Or perhaps we were just more used to blockbuster movies coming down crashing in the general area by then.

~ bunn, response collected 29 on March 2022

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In my corner of the fandom, the Hobbit films didn't have a significant impact. However, as my preferred fannish haunt is the Silmarillion fandom, that may simply be because there's next to no overlap between my bubble and The Hobbit (either book or movies). There were a few fannish discussions that were brought on by the movies—one being the potential antisemitism in the depiction of the Dwarves in the book, and whether or not the movies counteracted that; another one being the introduction of Tauriel as a character, and as a love interest—and I'm fairly sure that few people were "seriously" (i.e., out of crackfic or PWPs) shipping any members of Thorin's company, but particularly Thorin and Bilbo, before the movies. The costume design was once more influential, with the notable exception of the Dwarf women—who in the movies are barely bearded and clothed in Renaissance-like gowns, whereas most of the fanart I've seen prefers to depict the Dwarf women as sporting long, elaborate beards and armour just like the male Dwarves. 

I had the impression that the Hobbit (movies)-only fandom quieted down a lot quicker than the LotR movies fandom. People were either sucked into the larger Tolkien fandom, or moved on to different pastures.

~ Lyra, response collected 29 on March 2022

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Bagginshield was I think the only good thing to come out of the Hobbit films and even that's just so-so. Actually I didn't even see the whole trilogy. I don't think the fandom as it was was impacted that much by the Hobbit trilogy.

~ Megan Abrahamson, response collected 29 on March 2022

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Dwarves became sexy. For fans of the LotR movies, Gimli was too old to be interesting. The only member of the Fellowship with fewer ships with his fellows was Gandalf. Then Thorin/Bilbo happened. I knew as soon as I saw that hug on the Carrock that was going to be a huge ship.

~ Rebecca, response collected on 29 March 2022

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Most fans who were already in the fandom seemed to be interested, but not wholeheartedly enthusiastic or even outright sceptical, especially once it was revealed this would be a trilogy. There was some controversy about Tauriel as an original female character from the outset (welcomed by some, but rejected by others), which intensified when the love triangle was revealed. I seem to remember some early fanworks of Tauriel. There was widespread criticism of some features of the trilogy from the canon point of view, especially the portrayal of some canon characters (Radagast, for instance). Film jokes and memes spread very quickly and became beloved, even if the memes were about elements that had been criticized in the films (like Thranduil's elk). The burgeoning of Bagginshield fics was predictable, but the numbers, quickly growing on AO3, nevertheless took previous fans by surprise. There sometimes seemed to be a bit of disagreement about how many references to any book source a Hobbit movieverse fic needed to contain, proportionally, before some non-movie fans were happy to see it tagged for that source on AO3 (and have it appearing in the tag), although I think there is some uncertainty about tagging for sources more generally, of which this was part. I think established fans were often not aware of the development of some fannish Dwarven lore (starting with the movies but taken further by fans) until relatively late, until they began encountering these in a more fully developed form in fanworks: neo-Khuzdul, for example, dwarrowdams, and other such elements. Eventually the older strands and the newer movie-related began to mingle more often, though, and some of these elements grew more familiar, even though they were not necessarily adopted.

~ Anonymous, response collected on 29 March 2022

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My short answer is: they had a lasting impact because they (along with the general fandom shift to Tumblr) brought Tolkien fandom closer in culture/contact with general Western media fandom and that changed how many people interacted with fandom and the canon, both movie and book. There started becoming more of an assumption that everyone was multifandom and conversant with the norms of non-Tolkien fandom without realizing that Tolkien fandom has long had its own subculture, especially because a lot of the newer fans seemed to be or outright were dismissive of long-time fans and our experiences. This also marked the shift away from Tolkien-specific fic archives to AO3 dominating. (The longer answer would probably be an unsourced essay based on my opinions and observations.)

As far as memories: my predominant one of larger fandom (as opposed to my group of fandom friends reacting to the movies) is of going into the #Hobbit tag on Tumblr the day the first movie was released and reading back twenty pages to find the first post that *wasn’t* negative toward new fans. It was literally twenty pages of “new/movie fans suck.” I ended up making a little “Be like Elrond, kind as summer” banner to push against that mindset, though it didn’t get all that much traction.

~ Independence1776, response collected on 1 April 2022

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They have huge influence on the fandom since I knew how Two Towers and Return of the King had made me devour all the books and pertinent info about Tolkien afterwards, so I definitely think of Peter Jackson's movies fondly and really my gateway to whet my appetite about Middle-earth in the highest form possible.

~ periantari, response collected on 2 April 2022

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Caveat that the majority of my fandom experiences have been online. 

I think that the Hobbit films brought a new wave of fans and a younger generation of fans in particular into the fandom. The generational difference meant that fandom activities also took place on new spaces like Twitter, and took on the cultural norms of these spaces too. "Stan Twitter" just has a different energy from LiveJournal or Tumblr or the various old forums.

It may have been the spaces I frequented, but I also noticed a greater desire to openly discuss and create transformative works that were challenging or subversive of cishet or amatonormative readings of the texts, and Eurocentric readings of the texts too. It's not so much that these fans originated those ideas (they definitely didn't) but I started to see them normalised as part of fandom discussion across spaces (not confined to one community). It didn't feel like the LotR online fandom where there seemed to be a clear divide between people who loved diverse readings and discussions versus people who were gatekeepers and/or prejudiced. The Hobbit fandom almost had a homogeneity of sorts that allowed a crosspollination of fandom culture between spaces that I hadn't really seen in other corners of online Tolkien fandom.

~ Anonymous, response collected on 3 April 2022

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Before the Hobbit movies, fanfic based on The Hobbit was relatively thin on the ground. I recall pulling a little trick with one of my fanfics, written years earlier, which had a little Hobbit-based content in it. I simply listed it in The Hobbit category on AO3 shortly before the first movie came out and then watched the kudos roll in!

On a more serious note, prior to the Hobbit movies, Dwarves got short shrift in fandom. Gimli was seen as "unsexy," and Legolas/Gimli, despite arguably having incredibly shippy content in the book, wasn't written very much. The Hobbit movies changed that, and changed the way that fandom perceived Dwarves. 

Bilbo had previously been seen as the uncle or as someone older and thus less sexy prior to the Hobbit movies. They changed how he was perceived too, and he began to get a lot more explicit content, especially with the rise of Bilbo/Thorin, which is a Hobbit movie ship from whole cloth, specifically sparked by the hug they share at the end of the first Hobbit movie. 

By 2012, fandom was a lot more shameless about kink than it had been in 2001, so a lot more kinky fanfic was written early on for the Hobbit movies than there had been for the LotR movies. As well, much more was written about gender, including changes to stated gender or writing specifically transgender fic, and also a lot more emphasis on queerness and queer community in Middle-earth. 

~ Elwin Fortuna, response collected on 4 April 2022

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I'm not sure if more people read The Hobbit after the films than after seeing LotR, but I think the fanfiction really exploded, partly to fix some of the problems in the film but mostly of course because Bagginshield was a very writable ship. :)

~ neverwhere, response collected 29 April 2022

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My participation in online fandom fell off in 2004 and didn’t pick back up until 2015, but the online fandom landscape had changed *immensely* in that time. Social media sites had overtaken message boards as the primary way of interacting with fans. AO3 existed. Many of the smaller fanwork archives from the late '90s and early '00s were gone. The sheer diversity of fan representations of Tolkien’s world had *greatly* increased. Unsurprisingly, there were far more depictions of Dwarves than I had ever seen. Bagginshield was a pairing I had never encountered before the Hobbit films. Radagast was a character I had rarely seen depictions of in fandom until The Hobbit films. 

I also got the sense that there was a contingent of fans who very much loved The Hobbit films who were energized by the fact that the films veered as much from the source material as they did in terms of adding scenes and expanding characters etc. I also got the sense that some of this love for the films was framed or perhaps engendered partly as a reaction to those who felt the opposite about the films, be those fans who loved the books but didn’t like any of the films or fans who liked both the books and the LotR films but hated The Hobbit films.

~ PhoenixRisesOnceMore, response collected 1 May 2022

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I had a certain sense of déja vu concerning a new wave of complaints about the changes in the adaptation, polemics about faithfulness, or whether the films are running too long, and such ... Similar debates were occurring in the very early 2000s, with the gradual premieres of the first film trilogy. Overall, in the early 2010s, I had an impression the fandom was largely positive about the second film trilogy. (Speaking for myself, I felt "glad to be back in Middle-earth".) I think everyone reasonable acknowledged the second trilogy has to stand on its own, partly by necessity, as the stakes and tone of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are often vastly different. Reconciling the two (tone and stakes) in adaptations that are part of the same continuity is always going to be difficult. I think the creators handled it far better than I expected with both trilogies as first-time live-action adaptations. Personally, while I can write down a long list of minor objections I have to changes or portrayals in all six films, I think neither of the trilogies fail as adaptations. My biggest "issue" with both film trilogies, ironically enough, is that I need to be in the right mood to watch them from start to finish. All six extended editions are fairly long films, and as much as I enjoy them, they're not something I'd rewatch every week or month, or maybe even year. However, certainly something I would gladly rewatch every now and then.

~ Anonymous, response collected 25 May 2022

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I don't remember there being very many stories about the Dwarves prior to the Hobbit movies. Also, it seemed like genderbending characters became more common after the Hobbit movies came out (i.e., stories featuring a female Bilbo, female Thorin, etc).

~ Elfhild, response collected 19 June 2022

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So much stupid. "Dwarrrows" = DUMB. So many eager stupid children coming in and then whining about getting crit. I block all dwarrows because is so wrong and I hate the SJW fandom.

~ Anonymous, response collected 18 September 2022