Tag: simaethae

simaethae replied to your post “Okay so I know you’ve done mushrooms/Yavanna connections in the past…”

                           
                   

vv how much time have you spent thinking about killing mushrooms    

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING….ABOUT….tolkien came up with all of those. i acknowledge that i have mixed my metaphors tho because i usually assume hobbits as mushroom-stand-ins whenever i tag my mushroom posts with characters though

garden-ghoul replied to your post “Question! What do you do if you really admire and like the people you…”

 
ONE FIC IS WORTH 20 METAA POSTS           

I MEAN IT IS.

ghoul i know you’re not really in tolkien fandom anymore but i loved ur fic 😉

 simaethae replied to your post “For lines in the legendarium that confuse or stump me: “Of the march…”

                           
                   

   i feel like maybe there’s an implication that
the Silm etc are histories of the Elves who came to M-e, like, the
stories they tell about themselves, and it’s less "no clue what happened
in the War or Wrath” and more “everyone’s exhausted and bitter and has
kind of limited appetite for writing about how the Vanyar turned up and
saved them in the kind of glorious battle they never managed to achieve”
                                        
                  

  you know. less “no tales” and more “Ingwion’s memoirs never got translated”

OMFG yes!! I was vaguely thinking (and totally didn’t even address oops sorry) like, “maybe the vanyar and the exiles in beleriand who stayed didn’t interact all that much because the army left immediately after the last kinslaying bullshit” but THAT doesn’t make much sense either…how about the time before that. and finarfin and the noldor family members. this makes way more sense!!! thank you for fixing this for me ❤

uh….i was going to gripe that in ‘silm as document’ i dimly catch this vague feeling of pengolodh being super…idk…. boring….‘no idiosyncratic individual accounts’ ‘only the most impersonal bland corroborated summarizing possible pls, except in those incidents that have only 1 witness or get retold 500000 times (like fingolfin v sauron)’ or something…because it seems like SOME individual elves ought to have had varying views or interests on this. but then again there was that thing where elves don’t write stuff down a whole lot in the first place so idk maybe i’m being super unfair about that lol!

radiantanor replied to your post “Then the Edain gathered all the ships, great and small, that they had…”

❤ your tags                    

Thanks!!!! I’m very lazy and can’t write unprompted meta!!!

more replies i missed scraping up the last time:

garden-ghoul replied to your post “gurguliare replied to your post:              gurguliare replied to…”

   

  right right… stop explaining things, stop
categorizing things, this is the whole reason why lotr is better than
silm and this has been analyzed 6 ways from sunday so everyone knows it
                 

DOES ANYONE ELSE ANALYZE IT THAT WAY…i thought i was the only one. tho i think “better” isn’t what i was thinking of really. more like. bigger. in spite of being narrower story-wise. lotr is bigger on the INSIDE! 😀

garden-ghoul replied to your post “gurguliare replied to your post:              gurguliare replied to…”

                           
                   

“I get off on meta-characterization”–andie vardasvapors    

  “I get off on humiliation bestilality kink, but
only in service to meta-characterization”–andie vardasvapors          
       

hey ghoul!!!!!!! ………….shut up!!!!!!!!!

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

this is my favourite answer so far                    

why do i make posts at 2am ANYWAY

simaethae replied to your post crocordile replied to your post:                   hey guys, ask me…

                           
                  

    i hadn’t previously considered historical
reenactment as a numenorean hobby and this now seems like a massive
oversight                    

omg I hadn’t either!!!! but yes!!! ahhh did you see that post @crocordile made about numenoreans developing a color-coded system of dance that slowly turned into a big political signalling kerfuffle….?

erotetica replied to your post:                  thelioninmybed replied to your post:           …                

  I forgot about the mindfuck-brick-roads saeros is. less of a ditz than I thought    

OMG lol i didn’t even think of that!

yavieriel replied to your post “yavieriel replied to your post “actualmermaid replied to your post: …”

                           
                   

    yes definitely re: Elves being content to stick
with one thing for a very long time, and not feeling any pressure about,
like, being a generic member of a household who does whatever seasonal
work is necessary, there’s not necessarily that drive to Accomplish
Something.  I mean Voronwe talks about wanting to just spend the rest of
his life laying in a meadow naming flowers, and while given the context
I think his mental state was making his feelings a bit extreme,        
                       
                   

     there still being that underlying sense that
just enjoying the world is all that is necessary, not having that human
drive to make their mark on it.  And just a generous heaping of idyllic,
idealized medieval/pastoral common life, lots of seasonal festivals and
everyone working together.  Give me all that sweet, sweet idealized
feudalism where it’s all close-knit community and deep personal bonds of
mutual loyalty and affection.                          

   (I care about fantasy economics a LOT and also
you can see why I don’t get along with large swathes of the fandom,
because like.  Feudalism and heirarchies and nobility: totally
problematic and IRL not very fun, but the idealized fantasy version is
just.  So emotionally satisfying to me in ways that more egalitarian
approaches are not.  I just want someone who I can unreservedly swear my
undying loyalty to, and have their respect and gratitude in return.)  
               

oh yeah i can see that. it’s true for well…a ton of fictional settings, where “technically”
in “reality” it would suck but like, yk, that’s why it’s a fictional book! more commonly it’s “this dangerous/violent
situation would suck irl but i love it in a book bc it’s so emotionally
satisfying”, but one can definitely apply that to, yeah, i guess idealized views of certain types of society too. i suppose technically speaking, there’s nothing about it that’s substantially different there from say, knowing being superhero would not be fun “irl” but loving the un-deconstructed superhero vicarious life anyway.

gurguliare replied to your post:              Right. Any headcanons on the edain in the war of…                

   i always think about the fact that the generation that founded
numenor would have been people born like, simultaneously in the middle
of the Worst War and also ‘under the protection’ of the valar’s
host—this is the closest humans GET to having elf-like contact with the
valar, even though presumably we’re to assume there was a minimum of
actual interaction, just… proximity……. no wonder the shadow of THAT is
what hangs over numenor, it’s not just automatically   

   following the peremptory chasing-after-the-gods pattern for Mythical reasons    

YEAH definitely!!! the whole thing with the numenoreans’ huge thing for the elves and valar and god and the gift of men etc doesn’t seem to have its root in any of the events of the silmarillion before earendil & the war of wrath imo…it’s the topsy-turvyness of this period plus its generation-long length…and one could see how it would become divorced from context and turn into traditions that they no longer relate to very well after many generations of a totally different life

although….I think since the edain stuck around in ME for 32 years after the war before elros sailed with the first wave of ships (i presume there was a balancing-act going on there, between ‘want to gather and ship over as many ppl as possible right off the bat’…or maybe they weren’t sure yet if any more could come afterwards at all…and ‘want to male sure the veterans of the war themselves get their peace and healing before they die of old age’) it would mostly be the people who were youngish right during the huge massive battle at the end, with ancalagon etc…? or is that what you meant!

simaethae replied to your post “Right. Any headcanons on the edain in the war of wrath?”

    

 
aaaaaa, yeah, these people who’ve spent their
entire lives trapped in someone else’s war… i was going to say you
don’t get any edain heroes in the war of wrath, but no wonder they
imprint on earendil and his kids so hard?                    

Eeeeeee!!! 🙂 I agree totally (no surprise lmao!) Yeah, though I feel like by that time, it had kind of become their war as well. But then otoh i think…yeah, some distinct strains of a ‘we weren’t even supposed to BE HERE’ sort of mentality as well. And the way numenor is framed – in the Appendices it’s like “as a reward for their sufferings in the cause against morgoth, the valar gave the edain a land away from the dangers of ME.” And the whole Land of Gift thing. It seems very ‘we’re sorry. you didn’t deserve this. you deserve better. here’s restitution and and a do-over and second chances’ sort of a thing. anyway yeah god the passage about earendil fighting ancalagon is amaze and has such a edain-pov feel imo ❤

gurguliare replied to your post:                   Right. Any headcanons on the edain in the war of…                

   also the relationship with the tol eressea elves initially being the
friends and allies they were JUST FIGHTING ALONGSIDE in the war,
however ineffectually, and who they may also have grown up among    

   aww… fuck… veteran reunions in early numenor this is upsetting me now  

IKR??? 🙂 🙂 🙂

though ALSO…a lot of the tol eressea elves would be newly-returned exiles who didn’t fight, and would be strangers to the numenoreans, but like, a little the elf-equivalent of the numenoreans in terms of leaving ME, but with a completely different sort of status, like they were pardoned and allowed back onto a proto-aman halfway-house island in spite of all the stuff they did, and being in the doghouse. whereas the numenoreans are rewarded and esteemed and stuff. idk the tol eressea elves helping the numenoreans out and gardening for them and giving them stuff always felt a little like a mass-apology on the part of the ex-exiles as well, for sucking their ancestors into the aforementioned doom and war, like simaethae saidbut anyway yeah…veteran reunions <333 and bridging the gaps in lifespans or communicating “what happened over there?” back and forth with storytelling first-hand accounts <333333

shiniest-knight replied to your post:    I still can’t draw, but I DID buy a set of… 

   yes do it!!! art is good for you    

“YEAH IT’S GREAT!” – teenage me, echoing through the space-time continuum

simaethae replied to your post:  I still can’t draw, but I DID buy a set of…    

   i’ve been trying embroidery bc same tbh    

god i know nothing about embroidery but that sounds even more effective given the, physical stitching stuff instead of ‘more paper’

actualmermaid replied to your post:  I still can’t draw, but I DID buy a set of… 

   I’ll art if you art. Art persistence buddies.    

a good system i will not adhere to

meme: 14! maglor, indis, earendil, peregrine took, treebeard

to Leave in charge of my home while I’m away:

1. indis. prob took extensive care of valinor after the darkening so A+ good references there for house-sitting

2. maglor, probably is pretty good at housekeeping after the 5 younger siblings + two wards, and might also leave behind some great recordings of all the music he composed/practiced while being bored

3. earendil, a little on the fence about this because i’m sure that living in a ship a lot of the time means being super good at keeping an eye on things and keeping stuff clean, but on the other hand, a house is not a ship. uh. does anyone remember Admiral Boom from Mary Poppins? Like that.

4. pippin. is a hobbit on one hand, but is a spoiled rich kid who grew up with servants on the other. i figure he could have an A+ mushroom stir fry ready for me when i get back but idk what shape the house itself would be in

5. treebeard. i have a suspicion my houseplants would rise up to rebel against me when i got the house back after he was done with it.

more replies

actualmermaid replied to your post:
                   thelioninmybed replied to your post:             …               

   YEAH DUDE    

   Not to be like “my fic my fic my fic” all the time but the complex
web of reasons that would go into this decision is a big part of it, obv
the mortality thing is huge but men and elves are different in so many
other ways   

!!!! omg I’m glad you liked that. of course i haven’t seen your fic yet, so i’m very interested in seeing how you handle these things! especially because most of the tantalizing bits i’ve seen you post about it are like, the opposite of what i think about the twins! (IN A VERY GOOD WAY OF COURSE, because there’s so little info and ppl can run in such totally different directions in speculating about it). i actually don’t think about them being different at all in most men vs elves ways (especially not before their choice!), i figure any of those differences, to the extent that they do develop, only come later through different experiences. The only Characteristically Elf/Human differences I generally headcanon them having pre-choice are the Athrabeth ‘predilection for being suited to experiencing immortality/mortality’ sort of thing:

‘Nay, tell me!’ said Finrod. ‘For if you do not know, how can we? But
do you know that the Eldar say of Men that they look at no thing for
itself; that if they study it, it is to discover something else; that if
they love it, it is only (so it seems) because it reminds them of some
other clearer thing? Yet with what is this comparison? Where are these
other things?

…

And those among us who have known the Eldar, and maybe have loved them,
say on our side: “There is no weariness in the eyes of the Elves.” And
we find that they do not understand the saying that goes among Men: too
often seen is seen no longer. And they wonder much that in the tongues
of Men the same word may mean both “long-known” and “stale”. ‘We have
thought that this was so only because the Elves have lasting life and
undiminished vigor. “Grown-up children” we, the guests, sometimes call
you, my lord. 

I do think it’s mostly mortality vs immortality – or like, that’s the make-it-or-break-it issue. But I think mortality and immortality can’t really be isolated as neutral things, because they are not neutral people and def not in neutral situations. (in fact, I think in a weird way, if it was neutral, it could possibly be almost the exact opposite
of ‘being like a human’ and ‘being like an elf’ – because elves want
mortality, and humans want immortality.)

(Anyway, in my headcanon, it would be mostly ‘immortality’ since i’ve come to view the pre-choice peredhil as mostly being like humans – it would be Elrond who made more of a divergent choice (both in terms of fate and in terms of heirship) than Elros, but it wouldn’t feel like that, because you know, going off to Numenor and stuff, which is where Edain society/kingship comes in.)

simaethae replied to your post:                   thelioninmybed replied to your post:             …                

   i keep likespamming these discussions on your tumblr where i have nothing to contribute but they’re so GOOD    

simaethae i SUPER appreciate all your likespamming the reassurance that other people like reading these things is very very encouraging and makes me really happy so PLS  never stop!!