I mean, now the English-speaking people have caught up.
So there was this very popular fic from the time of Soviet Union called "Black book of Arda" (except in Russian of course), about the Silmarillion from the PoV of the villains, and... I never read it, automatic translations were not that good at the time, and I'm bad at Russian, but it has the reputation to 1) use the change of PoV to explore themes like "history is written by the victors" and propaganda, in a way that talked to the Russian readers, and have cold war references too, and also being quite good? And it led to a fashion of fic presenting them as sympathetic, which led to shipping? I don't know, most of this happened, obviously, in Russian :D