Okay, confession time: so I grew up with the Lord if the Rings. My mother read the series when she was younger, enjoyed it, and my brother and I were subjected to the cartoons and later, the live action trilogy. I saw Frodo lose his finger so much as a young child that I still have war flashbacks, okay? I wasn't even ten. At most, I was in the first grade of elementary school. I still can't watch the Return of the King all the way through, and frankly I fast forward through every Gollum scene and many of the Frodo and Sam scenes.

Anyway, I routinely saw these books lying around the house, but I never read them. I did try a few times, but I never lasted more than a page or two.

However. This didn't diminish my interest in the series. Sansûkh remains a part of my heart, along with several other LOTR fanfics, and I do read essays about the story as a whole. And these essays, particularly about the Hobbits, Merry and Pippin, as well as Gimli and Legolas, made me think that I wanted to actually experience the series without the filter of fanfiction.

So basically what this means is, I'm using the whole self-isolation thing as an excuse to listen to the Lord of the Rings on audiobook, so that I can't be offended by Certain Stylistic Choices, which are now made invisible. (We're just meeting Treebeard now, and I am Still Offended that Gimli has thus far been a cardboard cutout who has contributed little to the quest, never mind the story at large; Fredegar Bolger has had more screentime than Gimli so far.)

Anyway, the further I get into the series, the more I think that if I ever decide to write LOTR fanfic, it will be about Boromir saying No to the One Ring.

Because here's the thing. I hear a lot about Faramir, and how he turned the Ring aside. And there's speculation about how he would've been a better choice for the Company, and Boromir messed that up and so died because he was apparently flawed like that. But see, Faramir didn't know that Frodo had the Ring at first; he was yanked around a little, a bit like it was speculated Thorin was, and when Faramir finally saw the Ring that drove his brother mad, he said, "No thank you" and put as much distance between himself and Frodo as possible. He was tempted, and he refused. Good for Faramir.

But no one talks about how Boromir was tempted for weeks, if not months. He was as tempted as Faramir and Galadriel the first time he saw the Ring, and he pulled himself back. And then he joined a Company to destroy the Ring, and every single day that Ring called for him, and the closer the Company came to Gondor, to the people who needed him, the stronger the Ring tempted him. Every day Boromir knew that Frodo carried the Ring on a chain around his neck. Frodo, a Hobbit, no bigger than a child, with next to no fighting experience whatsoever; someone Boromir could easily overpower. Someone he saw every day, almost always within arm's reach.

The Ring haunted his dreams to the point that Boromir equated possessing the Ring with saving his people.

Every day, Boromir said No. Until one day he didn't. And I think that would be a story worth telling.