Tis true. It did occur to me, somewhere along when reading the Hobbit, why the main characters (okay, the main dwarf characters obviously) all die. I remember getting to the end the second or third time (the first time I read it was a write-off, as I only read it to get to Fellowship of the Ring) and going 'wait, what? Why did you write an entire book about people who die?' And why do they 'die in a footnote?' basically, because the Battle of the Five Armies is like this huge thing that happens but isn't described really. And I was very confused. And then I read like everything else Tolkien wrote and went, huh, Dain, you totally got the short end of the stick in literature, but I like you.

And it's funny that you make that point about Dain not having contact with the ring, because yeah, he was away in the Iron Hills so probably didn't, and therefore couldn't be corrupted, and I always got the sense that the dwarves of the Iron Hills were more…dwarvish? Like that the Iron Hills wasn't this massive, massive enormous building project, but more…normal? If that makes sense? Like more Ered Luin was, for the dwarves that lived there before the Erebor survivors arrived.

So, in other words, we're thinking alike, as always.

And it totally pissed Sauron off. After all, the dwarves were Aule's creation, and that alone, the fact that they existed, must have angered Sauron, knowing he could never achieve something like that great, so he had to settled for Rings That Could Be Destroyed. And didn't work as well as he wanted them to.