Lord of Lasgalen

Something about how the wood-elves weren't part of the war against Sauron until the last alliance. Something about how two-thirds of their army died.

Something about how their forest was inexorably corrupted over a thousand years, and something about how the other elven realms, the ones who were involved—it's their fight and it's their family history—somehow, somehow, stayed safe.

Something about losing everything to someone else's war.

This is something I've thought a lot about. Especially in the context of them being so untrusting of strangers. And the spit-in-the-face insult the "more dangerous, less wise" saying truly seems to me. The fact that Thranduil is the last elven monarch is truly such a huge testimony to his skill and power, and that's before you remember that the other two main elven settlements left have rings to protect them.

I love elrond and galadriel, but I hate the trend in fanon to portray them as wise and correct while also making Thranduil into either a joke, a drunkard, or a villain.

I don't know. It haunts me. Two thirds of your army...in a species so slow to reproduce...that's devastating. To come out of that and continue to hold your own and fight and pose a threat to Sauron right up until he was defeated? That's extraordinary. Thranduil is possibly the best elvenking we ever see. And he and his people get dismissed as jokes.

This^^

In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost. They dwelt most often by the edges of the woods, from which they could escape at times to hunt, or to ride and run over the open lands by moonlight or starlight; and after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk. Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People.