Inspired by starspray's Tumblr post on the subject. (Still reluctant to post meta on Tumblr. I do not think Starspray will be an ass about it, but others have been, occasionally long after it was originally posted.)

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And still have it be understandable how it got here. (Let me know how I'm doing. I know the formatting didn't carry over - I realized too late I should have gone with the Rich Text editor for this.)

It's mostly behind a cut, because by the time I thought to ask mainecoon76 if we could bring it over here for the wonders of (threaded) comments without character limits and not having to keep blogging or post multiple comments to keep discussing, the reblog chain had already gotten fairly long.

( This way to the discussion of Thorin in the time period before the Battle of Five Armies )

And that is when I asked if we could bring it here, because it was getting hard for me to follow, but the discussion was interesting. Unfortunately, since Tumblr is apparently trying to fail as hard as it possibly can, I didn't see mainecoon76's response that moving over here was fine until very late last night (no notifications) and by then I'd written this entry as further Thorin thoughts/explanation of my perspective on Thorin.

Anyway, if you've gotten through all that, my point is not that Thorin should have been nicer, much less leading an anti-Thorin crusade*. And if your theory is that Thorin's behavior was informed more by his distrust of outsiders than affected by the dragon-gold, I'd say that makes shooting at a messenger even less understandable/reasonable - he had no way to know that the reactions from Bard and Thranduil would be as measured as a non-violent siege. Wars of the non-cold variety have started over such incidents, so pulling that on armed opponents you believe to be outright enemies prepared to wrong you to achieve their ends is courting disaster when your assets consist of 'me, my twelve kinsmen, one hobbit who is not big on violence, and this hopefully well fortified mountain which has tons of treasure but very little edible in it', and that's even before considering that one of your opponents was around to see Sauron get beaten and so can be safely assumed to know a thing or two about sieges and battle tactics.

*If you want the pro-Thorin essay, ask me my thoughts about the treatment he got from a certain director. I have Opinions and am prepared to back them with quotes.

Also, I'm kind of terrified to hit 'post' on this behemoth of an entry. Here goes...

edit Turns out I was right to be terrified. There were only three spots where I screwed up the markup.