more meme replies

anghraine replied to your post: a bunch of replies

Yeah, I was definitely thinking that it’s Éowyn as the lone major
female character that would make a fighting institutional
misogyny+renunciation narrative uncomfortable no matter how it was done.
But it could certainly be /less/ so on the writing level, and
alternately ‘more women’ would go much much further than any individual
character really can.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense. And def with you on ‘more women’ being a much stronger and more effective fix than any single brilliantly-written woman. Low numbers of women + expected expanded coverage of roles is really just…the goddamn scourge of writing female characters in large casts.

simaethae replied to your post: a bunch of replies

right, like, i’m super inarticulate rn but the problem with viewing
evil as an inherent character trait rather than specific actions taken
at specific times… and then if you know someone’s not Evil you can’t
reconcile that with their behaviour so have to impute an external
explanation, or something.

i was going to be like, obviously viewing people as objects that are
acted upon rather than making their own decisions is kind of insulting,
but maybe the Valar don’t even think of themselves entirely as people
all the time?

idk let’s pretend i’m making sense. *crawls off to bed*

No it makes total sense! And I agree with you re: evil being defined as people’s actions, for sure, I mean…I was thinking about it more as in…how like, the Valar, and a lot of other characters in Tolkien’s universe, seem to conceive of Evil, as being more of a tangible corruption or defect in reality, with evil actions being the result of, the interaction of Melkor’s influence on the Music of Arda + individual people’s free will determining whether or not they succumb to their inborn temptations or tendencies to Do Evil or whatever. And like, it doesn’t actually jibe with how I interpret the concept of evil IRL so sldufhsudfbj when I talk about this kind of stuff it all like…has a tendency to get wayyyy too hypothetical and caught up in the philosophy/theology Tolkien laid out. But YES I was definitely thinking of Aulë being sort of, unwarrantedly proprietary, well-intentionedly patronizing, whatever, in this…it’s more of a headcanon than an opinion haha. And amusing myself at the idea of Sauron being like “ughghghgghhhh.” But maybe for kind of understandable reasons given that Aule presumably remembers how the music was marred and blames everything wrong with the world on Melkor or like…WHATEVER. How do you psychoanalyze a demigod character ANYWAY I’m just kinda torturing myself here lol.

gurguliare replied to your post: 🔥 like, elrond? Tell me about elrond

i do think the healing focus is kind of implied in staying, in the
same way ‘building’/visionary creativity is implied by elros leaving?
but also i loooove that image of elrond’s adventuresome young adulthood,
alone for the first time

Yeah I did agree with
this on, like, SECOND brush (er, my first read of the Silm was like 3
years ago, whereas I only got into any sort of tolkien fandom about 1 year ago) but
just, it was amusing to come into the fandom going like… “oh. yeah. he did
do healing stuff didn’t he oops it completely slipped my mind because I
was so busy fangasming about the idea of Elros’s powers lasting all the
way to Aragorn!!!”

gurguliare replied to your post: 🔥 like, elrond? Tell me about elrond

post-apocalyptic loremastery defs an indiana jones thing

Do
Not Photoshop This. You know how much I can’t stand Weavingrond.
Photoshop sparkly haloed bearded dude from that animated movie I have never
seen.

imindhowwelayinjune replied to your post: 🔥 like, elrond? Tell me about elrond

this is beautiful meta but also ‘unlimited diems to carp’ better be plastered on every wagon bumper from here to numenor

…..WOW I wonder what the hypothetical second age elf renaissance was like. Was it like a mid-life crisis or not.

a bunch of replies

anghraine replied to your post: replies

I’ve been lowkey pissed off at the whole IF YOU HAVE DISCOMFORT WITH
HOW ÉOWYN’S ARC IS RESOLVED YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND TOLKIEN’S THEMES
ABOUT WAR thing for yeaaaars. yes yes peace > war but somehow Aragorn
and Éomer can go a-conquering for decades and Faramir, who actively
dislikes war, doesn’t give up /his/ sword. Hell, even Merry and Pippin
don’t get marched through a renunciation narrative.

ALSO I am in complete agreement that a large part of the flaw
there—and I do think it’s essentially a flaw of /craft/—is that 1) the
swerve to healing is not set up at all (if anything, almost anti-set up
by her clash with the warden) and 2) Éowyn is the only remotely
prominent female character, and her resistance to gender roles has been
persistently tied up in the warrior arc, so slicing that away would
leave a bad taste even if it’d been handled better.

Yeah, tbh I think like….from a purely in-universe, individual perspective, the reason Eowyn gets that renunciation narrative and the others don’t should be because her personal issues and approach to war are so different from theirs, that’s the reason it’s so different for her-as-a-real-person. But as a character in a story with conservation-of-detail it’s just…when she also happens to be the only female warrior yeah, you can’t say it doesn’t send a message, or that the two roles don’t screw with each other. Like, there is definitely a gender thing there. If the gender thing was actually pointed out in-universe it would probably help a lot.

I…don’t necessarily agree that her gender-role-resistance thing being tied up in her warrior thing would leave a bad taste in the mouth no matter what, if Tolkien had dedicated sufficient pagetime to transmuting or migrating this gender-role-resistance of hers into a different and more meaningful channel, and/or more thoroughly undermining the impression that the men’s continued warfare is something they “get to” do instead of, like, a major kick in the teeth of the victory….but otoh then again, the fact that she’s the only woman around still sticks out no matter how well her arc is done internally so idk maybe yeah.

thelioninmybed replied to your post: gurguliare replied to your post: 🔥 eowyn? …”

this is a v. v. good summary of what always annoyed
me about what is an excellent character with one off the most important
arcs in the books. It’s the pulling double duty and yeah. god. more
female characters, it’s such a simple fix.

simaethae replied to your post: gurguliare replied to your post: 🔥…

“90% of all unfortunate implications regarding female characters.
Would be totally solved if they didn’t usually make up <20% of the
cast.” god yes so very much so!!!

IT’S SERIOUSLY SO EASY. Once you do that everything else starts to quickly fall into place because the female characters are no longer juggling utterly diametrically opposed jobs like being representations of their entire gender while also being a single realistic individual, yet somehow it’s the one thing writers and producers cannot seem to do!

simaethae replied to your post: 🔥Aule”

omg YES and also Sauron would find this SO ANNOYING

Hahahahaha omg yes. I was…sort of thinking about how the Valar don’t seem to really understand, or at least, don’t really understand how to deal with, like, internal evilness or darkness in a person, without seeing it as an external influence from Melkor. And I guess purely metaphysically speaking they’re sort of right-ish in that Melkor is the one who fucked everything up from the start, but psychologically speaking that’s not how it feels or works, even for eg, the Numenoreans. And for maiar who existed from the beginning before the world existed, even more so. Agreeing with an idea that someone else voiced first is very different from someone planting an idea in your mind by force, but I guess in story/song form these things might be harder for the Valar to differentiate, because of their perspective on how the-world-as-it-is came about?

crocordile replied to your post“🔥tell me your unpopular views on what elves look like and other visual…”

Oh my god, so much the last point!

All
that stuff about ppl being “young, but not young” etc really got me
wondering exactly what non-aging would actually look like and I sort of
came up with Keanu Reeves

thelioninmybed replied to your post: gurguliare replied to your post: gurguliare…”

nah guys, it’d give him a radiant inner glow

shit I gotta do something even weirder now so people forget this

INCONCEIVABLE.

thelioninmybed
replied to your post“gurguliare replied to your post: replies …”

just casually get a horrendous facial tattoo of your
gf/bf as of six moths’ name, it’ll come off eventually

This….this
is somehow reminding of like, the El Aurians from Star Trek and their
very non-tolkien-elf-like approach to longevity. Guinan: I was married 23 times and I loved all my husbands.

gurguliare replied to your post“ gurguliare replied to your post: gurguliare…”

but yes 2 healing things too of course, i mean i say
the end of her arc isn’t DISCRETE from the rest of it but it is
especially clunky craft-wise. same for her and faramir falling in love
tbh though i love MOST of that chapter’s achieved effects, intentional
and unintentional

YEAH it’s…not the best-written section of the books haha, and I guess everyone else’s arcs get squashed or glossed pretty similarly, but less is riding on their arcs than Eowyn’s

simaethae replied to your post: replies

i have only very limited interest in tolkien-as-writer as opposed to
middle-earth-as-story, but i got really annoyed, mostly with myself, to
realise the Problematic ™ aspects of the Valar and Eru are presumably
deliberate bc “oversimplifying” is… not a description that has ever
applied to tolkien, ever. anyway, i think i was agreeing, albeit i try
not to discuss rl religion bc my own blank incomprehension gets in the
way

skjdhfbskdjbfdjkg YES tolkien’s allergy to simplification is the gift that keeps on giving

tbh I…try? Ish? not to discuss rl religion in fandom either, I like to take all the catholicism-paralleling metaphysics-of-arda as built-in elements of the fictional universe bc I find it most enjoyable to explore them as they’re posited, but somehow…the conversation gogolified and wound up in a place with vanishing enlightened zombie elves so idk. MY hypothetical offering about tolkien and religious stuff would’ve been that I mostly just really like mythology aesthetics and there-is-no-bright-line-between-what-really-happened-and-in-universe-epistolary-material aesthetics BUT NO.

simaethae replied to your post: replies

retrospectively tho, i’m just amused by my own reactions, in that
like, that totally was what lewis was going for, trust me to get it and
still draw completely the wrong conclusion anyway 🙂

I don’t want to say I laughed but I kind of laughed. Um. Am I talking out of my ass to say I don’t think Narnia is very fertile material anyway – of the meta/fanfic/character-analysis-based fandom kind especially? I don’t think it rewards overthinking the way some books (cough cough ahem) do.

replies

simaethae replied to your post:
So, what is your overall opinion on the Narnia…

Very Tiny Christian Me picked up the allegory right away and
eventually, worriedly, asked her parents if it wasn’t blasphemy to
compare a lion to jesus, which is probably not what CS Lewis was going
for >_> I loved the books but feel they are probably best left for
me in the warm glow of childhood (as with The Hobbit, which, alas, is
not something i can reread with much enjoyment as an adult)

Oh dear poor you 😦 I do remember picking up on the allegory too even though (because?) I was never raised christian, but I actually forget what my initial reaction to it was. I know I was not bothered by christian allegories per se but otoh uhhhh…being nonwhite, nonchristian…as with the racism and stuff there were a whole lot of kids’ fantasy and adventure books that would have been impossible for me to enjoy if I didn’t take them with a lot of salt. But for Aslan etc I think I was actually pretty serious about it in a ‘oooh where is he going with this’ sort of way until ‘where he was going with this’ turned out to be the Last Battle lmao and I was super unimpressed and felt cheated or whatever

simaethae replied to your post: So, what is your overall opinion on the Narnia…

(that proably came out wrong, it’s more that i remember being super
immersed and caught up in what was happening to the characters as a kid,
and it’s not really the same experience when you have everything that
happens next memorised)

Haha I have heard hearsay that this is, apparently, a phenomenon that happens to other people but unfortunately I can’t relate because having every single thing memorized IS the entire appeal of childhood books for me 😀 Probably because I re-read everything I liked so much when I was a kid that I had them totally memorized even back then or something idk.

kareenvorbarra replied to your post: elesianne replied to your post: …

okay! i figured it might be that but i don’t remember the last
battle very well, i think it’s the only one of the narnia books i’ve
never reread because i hated it. so much. by the time i read it i was
old enough that the religious allegory didn’t just go over my head
anymore, and the ending of that book is SO heavy-handed i couldn’t take
it.

A GOOD DECISION. I think I DID read parts of the Last Battle a LOT trying to figure out if I missed something that would make it better! But no. 🙂 I think like, detached from the book series’ narrative, I actually did like some of the imagery near the end in terms of like…how he wrote and conveyed it. I was (still am) very into religious/spiritual/mythological imagery. But the actual story ruined it >_<

maedhrosrussandol replied to your post: So, what is your overall opinion on the Narnia…

I’ve loved those books since I first read them as a 10 year old.
Like LOTR and the Hobbit, I used to reread them over and over. I think
LOTR and the Hobbit hold up better in the long run but I still
appreciate them. Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was always my
favorite–sentimental likely as it was the first one I read and I was
mesmerised by the idea of Narnia.

Heh yeah me too ❤ I feel a little bad about how negative that post got but I just assumed the anon was probably referring to the religious stuff since it was in response to me talking about tolkien’s religious stuff…and IMO Lewis’ religious stuff is genuinely just nowhere near as good, though I don’t exactly have the formal education to be able to write a whole clear post about it.

reply rambling stuff

gurguliare replied to your post:
gurguliare replied to your post:
…

also i have never helped anyone with facts in my life but my
IMPRESSION is–well, one, yes, definitely enormous porousness in
practice. two, i guess, that most people most places had a firm grasp on
‘fiction’ and ‘truth’ as distinct concepts, but like, often in the
sense that truth is IMPORTANT, and lying is bad! so even if everyone
knows entertainment is entertainment, the artist should still make a
show of claimed legitimacy/historical antecedents.

Yeah, it’s funny to think about what “legitimate historical antecedents” would qualify as if, like, there are people who can say “um, I was ACTUALLY THERE BRUH this is totally wrong”….like we were discussing in that other convo a few weeks ago. It would be like being able to time-travel back to the proper time period, except if the time-travel wouldn’t even necessarily be mind-blowing or anything because it was something people were always able to do?

ANYHOW I AM REALLY NUTS about that meta which @kareenvorbarra wrote about Sirion perhaps being a big cultural center and the period between the second and third kinslayings being this cultural explosion due to everyone being mashed together and in the same boat and…being able to actually ask each other what happened! except lol.

but like, it’s that… performative paranoia… about all the liars and
storyfrauds out there that informs so MUCH of the way bullshit eclectic
histories and legends and so on are framed, and that almost compels the
weird admixture of accepted history and real history and total nonsense,
for sales…… anyway uhhhh i’m trying to think how to connect this back
to elves

Heh yeah well for elves I’d think that like…I’m thinking again about the BOLT version of the Fall of Gondolin, where it’s like, one guy’s attempts to piece together what he saw with what someone told him that his sister told him about what her friend told her about what her dad saw on the other side of the city, probably, maybe. And like, it’s actually just “well this is about 40% made-up but all the other accounts are like 70% made-up so idk?” and it wouldn’t calcify in quite the same way intergenerational human incomplete stories calcify, but it might still calcify in terms of…idk themes? aesops? I feel like we already had this discussion…

slice of life elf koans is REALLY DELIGHTFUL. or not
koans, i guess, enlightenment still being resolution of a kind. elf
koans are the saddest koans because they end with “then the master smith
cut off his finger!”

I feel like, the idea of enlightenment could be a Thing for elves but more like, something they made up and they fake it hoping that it they fake it hard enough it will come true or something. IDK I really like the idea of….non-monolithic elves. Whose experiences are so extremely different early on in history but slowly become more and more similar to each other as the common denominators between their experiences become more and more frequent and obvious. Or the opposite, where some who share the same history decide to adapt and develop and interpret the world/the meaning of life one way and others do it a different way…anyway that’s one of the fun things that stand out to me about the Rivendell elves featured in the Hobbit, how they seem to be trying to commit themselves to this philosophy where they accept the transience and changeability of the world joyfully because the moon and stars and the water is still there! though that’s not 100% workable in the long term either because…nature is even less permanent than they are. Plus like, they’re obviously not at all actually unattached to the past. I know Tolkien hadn’t come up with the idea of the three rings yet, but it still works without them given how long the timelines involved are…

simaethae replied to your post: gurguliare replied to your post:
When the tale of…

digression, but my theory tends to be elves’ own
memories of cuivienen are often vague and confusing – like, the
equivalent of childhood amnesia, preverbal memories are difficult to
translate across? so there’s a lot of… did that happen, we don’t know
either

elwe and olwe THINK they PROBABLY had parents?? at
some point? …they don’t *think* they made that up?

OMG yes!!! I love that! That would…explain a lot about how even early on elves seem to have had some ingrained ideas about how the world works and how culture works, some of which make no sense and have this irrational detached quality that is not entirely dissimilar to humans’ irrational ingrained subconscious impressions of how the world works. For humans it’s kind of imprinted on us due to absorbing the legacies and leftovers of tens of thousands of years worth of societal history, but the Cuivienen elves of course have none of that so those concepts would have to come from a different phenomenon…

I really like theories that can sort of, thematically approximate reality when in-universe it obviously can’t factually be like reality? Like idk this is why I love pseudo-Lamarckian conceptions of ’’’’’’evolution’’’’’’ in Tolkien, re: Orcs etc – Darwinian ones obviously do not fit into Arda at all, but like, I would like to be able to fit in the idea of adaptation to the world over time?

some replies

thelioninmybed replied to your post: I knew it was a bad idea to try to compile pics for an aesthetic…

okay but is this a Muderdads aesthetic board because if it isn’t I know what I’m doing tonight

omfg no. like, so much definitely not. pls do it yourself, I could never do a proper aesthetic board for this topic, the symbolism eludes me.

thelioninmybed replied to your post: Ah, you wouldn’t by chance be alluding to the the TOMES of fanfiction…

Sooo did Telvido Durden impale HIMSELF on a flagpole to make a point or…?

this is a bad analogy, Durden’s goals were kinda antithetical to Sauron’s, wow what a horrible thing to have written

I’m getting more and more interested in this premise the more I think about it. But, yes, he would???? Though I guess he could probably just illusion it like with Gorlim, but I feel like the only practical point in doing this charade in the first place would be shits and giggles so errr…then again, he did decide he’d rather show off fighting Huan than protect his dungeons competently so…look, while I like to think Sauron is serious about most things he did I’m not actually 100% convinced about how much gravitas Sauron’s priorities really had at any given time.

thelioninmybed replied to your post: What an idea! Sauron actually backsliding over the course of the SA…

There are a lot of drugs happening here AND a lot of people on fire, I would prefer not to speculate as to what exactly I am inhaling.

or who

Maybe Fëanor’s ashes just sort of drift around Arda infecting people who inhale them with terrible judgement or smth.

simaethae replied to your post: I knew it was a bad idea to try to compile pics for an aesthetic…

spite is the best motivation tho lbr

I would like to say that the enjoyment of developing my own ideas is all I need to get me to finish a thing but no, no, it’s really not. Even if I actually really like a popular headcanon or characterization I will probably at some point become opposed to it just on the principle of “what about this other idea though”