Eowyn/Faramir was one of the first ships I was truly obsessed with, and am still obsessed with. Faramir has lived the past year of his life in the shadow of the Nazgul, burdened by grief, fighting a desperate war that knows he's going to lose, hating that he has to fight at all but still doing it to protect his men (many of whom will die anyway), to obey his father (who doesn't love him), to defend his city (which is probably doomed.) He bears up heroically under his burden, he doesn't have illusions, he tolerates hopelessness so well that he's not even tempted by the ring: if no actions can avert the inevitable destruction, he might as well act righteously. He holds up under the burden, and he holds others upright as well, but it's sickening him, and the sickening dread that he fights every day has a voice and shape, black wings in the sky.
And then Eowyn shows up having killed one of those.
Imagine waking up in a hospital bed. There's a girl in the room next to yours who keeps arguing with the nurses and trying to check herself out of the hospital even though she's got so many broken bones and just generally looks half dead. There's a security guard on her door because she's an obvious flight risk. You ask another patient who's well enough to walk around how she ended up in there and he tells you she killed depression. Not all depression, but the big one, the King Depression, definitely. She stabbed it in the face.
