Prologue
The author sat on her bed, staring into the screen of her laptop. She opened a new document, not sure whether she was going to start writing that homework she needed to get done or a new fanfic. For a moment, she hesitated... and then she quickly typed:
DISCLAIMER: If these characters belonged to me, Maedhros would currently be naked and tied up in my bed. He is not. Draw your own conclusions.
She realized that the disclaimer was absolutely pointless, having read about this on TV Tropes, but she rather liked the way she had phrased it and decided to keep it for now. She could always delete it later.
It would probably be a good idea to establish what version of the canon she was going with, too. After a moment's thought, she wrote:
Amras was burned with the ships. Gil-galad is the son of Orodreth who was the son of Angrod; Fingon never married. Celeborn is a Sinda. Maglor, Caranthir and Curufin are married; their wives stayed in Valinor. Argon existed, but the daughters of Finwë did not.
She had always thought that if the daughters of Finwë had existed, they would have made some kind of impact on the world. It was hard to imagine that they just floated around, given the way the other female descendants of Finwë had behaved. Then there was the questions of Balrog wings and Celegorm's hair colour... well, she could get around those by simply avoiding mentioning them.
The Fëanorians take advantage of Námo's only known weakness and escape from Mandos.
She stared at the sentence she had written. There were plenty of stories about Fëanor escaping from Mandos (although most of them seemed to be sadly unfinished) but she had not come across one that used what she felt to be Námo's obvious weakness. It had always puzzled her.
The sentence she had written stared back at her. "And then what?" it seemed to ask. She could not write an entire story about their escape. There needed to be some kind of plot arc. She tried to come up with things that could happen and wrote:
They meet Daeron. Fëanor finally gets to kill a Balrog. Curufin and Celegorm argue with Eöl. EPIC FIGHT between the descendants of Indis and Míriel.
She realized that this was what How To Write Badly Well would call a plot ark; all the coolest and most amazing stuff the writer could think of, stuffed into a story without any real reason for it to happen. She decided that she didn't care. With all these awesome scenes, how could her story not be great?
There was a distinct possibility that this would end up like that Bestest Cake Ever her sister and she made when they were younger. She dismissed the thought. Anyway, the cake had been pretty okay once you cut away the bottom where the unboiled rice grains had ended up. She was sure those had been her sister's idea.
She hesitated, her fingers hovering above the keyboard. Perhaps...? She had never written a self-insert, even though she had badly wanted to. She knew that it was generally despised. But this story was a crackfic and already mostly wish fulfillment. Perhaps there was a place for her in it?
In Mandos, they meet Erwen...
She really should have started on that homework instead.