Of Seelie and Unseelie Courts

May you wake up with pointed ears, curled horns, sharp fangs, pitch black eyes, and whatever other inhuman parts you would like to have.

no no no, this part is from The Hobbit

The idea and scenario of this comic belong to THESPARCLETHATISBLUE, I was merely an artist on this one. I cannot find their blogpage, but if someone knows, I will happily tag them here.

XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS (1995–2001)

Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing by William Blake

Little angel

Fane, @c-cloudyy 's peace cleric and Karpov, my bloodhunter from Curse of Strahd! Love a good doomed romance 👀

image description: graffiti on a concrete wall that says "filthy HoBBiTSeS"

Ok, so, as most know hobbits LOVE mushrooms, but what if they love ALL mushrooms, even the poisonous ones. What if a hobbit’s body is able to handle more of the poison and it doesn’t affect them at all. And they love it!

And then they nearly give Aragorn a heart-attack when they’re heading to Rivendell. 

Pippin, just being pippin: Look, MUSHROoms!!

The other three, running at full speed: MUSHROOMS!

Aragorn, who is a skilled ranger who knows every plant, tree, and flower to survive: No those are poisonous!

Frodo, who’s mouth is stuffed full: No they’re not. We eat these all the time back in the shire.

Merry, speaking with his mouth full, spitting mushroom everywhere: Yeah, they’re definitely not poisonous. Do you want one?

Aragorn, now having an existential crisis: No, n-no. I’m good.

Sam, mumbling under his breath: Well I wasn’t gonna share anyways.

@penny-anna this seems like your kind of hobbit lore

… OKAY NO WAIT THIS IS IMPORTANT

What if that’s the reason Sam and Frodo survived in Mordor? 

What if all those references to noxious fumes and tainted water and everything were completely literal? They avoided eating anything made there, but they had to keep drinking and breathing. 

What if part of Mordor’s defenses was that it’s literally poisonous to any creature not specifically bred to live in those conditions? What if Faramir was so careful about warning them about drinking the water because he knew it was fatal? What if Sauron’s general lack of concern about shit going down inside his own borders (aside from treachery, which apparently happened a lot) was knowing that any Mortal Man or Elf or Whatever that wandered in was gonna be stone dead in a few days, and his desire to catch any infiltrators on the borders was to keep them alive long enough for questioning?

And then these two hobbits who have spent their entire lives merrily ingesting enough poisonous fungi for breakfast to give Shelob a stomach-ache trot into Mordor and drink the poisonous waters and breath the poisonous fumes and scratch themselves on the poisonous thorns and feel mildly unwell.

Years later Sam gets a pained note from Faramir asking him how the hell he and Frodo survived when all the water is tainted with arsenic according to the survivors of the exploratory party and Sam writes back confused ‘What’s arsenic, it tasted bad and a bit metallic, that’s all I know honestly’ and Faramir goes to rant at Aragorn about how bizarre this is and is really confused when Aragorn goes into full-on flashbacks of watching those four tiny dumbasses STUFFING DEATH CAPS INTO THEIR MOUTHS LIKE GODDAMN CANDY. 

Oooooo, I like that!! And it would make sense after Boromir went on and on about how impossible it was to be able to breathe in Mordor.

Death caps are actually really interesting because they kill you (if you don’t receive proper treatment quickly enough) by destroying your cells over the course of a couple days by, basically, blocking your cells’ ability to create proteins. To my understanding the reason death cap mushrooms don’t poison themselves is because their RNA polymerase is structured differently. So it could just be a simple case of “hobbits are inherently immune to some things that will easily kill a human or an elf”—kind of in a similar way to how there are lots of things that humans can safely eat that we have to keep away from our dogs and cats because that food is deadly to them but not us.

So my first interpretation of the original post was that hobbits can eat deeply toxic mushrooms not because they’ve ~built up an immunity~ Princess Bride style, but because they’re so genetically different from humans that it’s like, “no no no, this mushroom isn’t toxic, it’s just toxic to YOU guys,” the same way we don’t consider grapes or chocolate to be toxic even though those foods are very dangerous to dogs.

Maybe like an evolutionary adaptation to their enormous food requirements: Mammals differ in their ability to detoxify poisons in part based on their dietary evolution. Cats for instance, as hypercarnivores, absolutely suck at detoxifying poisons - their all meat diet means they’ve lost a lot of the metabolic pathways in the liver that other mammals like us and dogs use to neutralise toxic compounds. This is why it’s so easy to accidentally poison cats, this is why you can’t use spot on dog flea stuff on cats; the dog version is about 10x stronger as a dog’s liver starts immediately breaking down the compound so the dose must be higher to be effective, while a cat can’t glycosylate the medication and so it just kinda stays in them unchanged till they excrete it. 

Plants are full of poisons to prevent things eating them, yes that includes lots of the ones we consider safe. Humans, as extreme omnivores adapted to way more plants in their diet than dogs, can eat all sorts of things that will kill a dog because we’ve got a load more metabolic pathways that degrade or modify toxic compounds we eat. Many herbivores, especially ruminants that have extra microscopic helpers to detoxify stuff, can eat things that will murder a human stone dead: deer will eat yew trees ffs. Rabbits eat death caps with no ill effect.

With how much hobbits eat (probably need a lot of energy to fuel their enormous, overworked livers), there’s got to be a lot of selection pressure for not being choosy, and even for being able to handle accumulation of other things like heavy metals just due to the sheer quantity of stuff they consume. Mordor was a polluted land, heavy with toxins usually present only in minuscule quantities in the air and soil, but hobbits eat their bodyweight in potatoes alone every week and are used to high doses of environmental pollutants and just kinda shrug it off as their liver slaps a few methyl groups on things and fires them off to the kidneys for removal. 

Consider this though: Their weird biology makes them stupidly susceptible to something other races are fine with. Like how Sydney funnel-web venom is mildly irritating to most mammals like cats and dogs, but, due to some quirk in primate sodium channels, can kill humans. Everyone gets used to the hobbits just munching away on assorted deadly poisons, maybe flavoured with a little lead, casually drinking hemlock tea and seeing Sam and Merry absolutely lose their shit at someone getting a nettle sting or eating broad beans because “those things will kill you!!!!”.

I mean…this seems completely feasible, if you consider lembas bread, a bite is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man, Merry ate FOUR whole breads and barely burped, Sam and Frodo ate about a quarter piece of the bread a day plus whatever food they could get their hands on in the wild.

D.L. Sauron et al. (3000andsomething or other TA), “Genetic polymorphism and extreme metabolic flexibility of CYPs in Homo sapiens hobbitiensis,” Nature Genetics (Probably) 10 (3); pp 89-108.

little dudes!

presented without context

Teresa Milheiro

Hand Piece: Self defense fist, 1989/90