(yes, that @gallusrostromegalus )

The timestamp really adds to this tbh

Which Tolkien character is your roommate?

Spin the wheel to see whether you'll enjoy your time as a roommate. 🤣

Yaaaaaaas! We will braid each other’s hair every day and gossip about other Tolkien characters. The best roomie. 😆

wyll is probably canonically the hottest baldur’s gate character. high charisma prince??? fairytale hero???

karlach calls him the best of all of them. shadowheart says she has a soft spot for the confident ones (while referring to him). astarion says he’s the sort of prince he would have dreamed about.

he’s a romantic. he can dance really well. he likes bad puns. he reads fantasy smut (and easily admits it). im saying all this as a lesbian

A tip for excellent writing I just learned: Don't introduce a character with their Dramatic Backstory. It makes readers go "oh alright this is the Dramatic Background Story Character" and establishes a baseline of Tragic, either for the story as a whole or this character in particular. With no contrast of light and dark, pure darkness isn't impactful, it just looks like the absence of anything to look at.

If you really want someone's dramatic backstory to hit the audience like a gut punch, let them get to know the character first. That way the dark backstory doesn't come off as a description of who they are, but an explanation to why they are the way they are. Bonus points for connecting it to something that's already been established as a part of the character - what a devastating blow to suddenly put together that hold on, that funny quirky thing that they always do is a fucking trauma response.

as someone with parents who have enforced their merciless beliefs self-righteously against my personhood, parents who perceive my mere existence to be so incompatible with their worldview that they have done immeasurable damage to my sense of self even well into my adult years, I find Ulder Ravengard to be a deeply, inexorably painful character to reckon with. but. I absolutely cannot see him as pure evil and. it baffles me that people do?

doesn’t he do the one thing that we all wish so badly for our intolerant, dogmatic parents to do? doesn’t he admit he was wrong? doesn’t he commit to make amends? doesn’t he recognize that in the end, Wyll was the better person with the kinder heart all along?

I have a lot of feelings about how I want to write a healing path for Wyll to both come to acknowledge that his father’s rejection of him was a reactionary, unjust thing and can’t be completely excused by the framework of “doing what was best for the city,” while at the same time, not somehow twisting it up to mean that Ulder is somehow beyond redemption, because Wyll wants and deserves Ulder’s redemption just as much as Ulder does.

Wyll should get to accept that he is worth saving and his father did wrong in casting him out “for the greater good,” (whether or not Wyll’s perceived wrongdoing was legitimate), and Wyll should also get to have his repentant father back (maybe with a smidge of healthy distance ofc because Wyll is his own man). idk this is so important, and I’m bad at words but please. listen.

Grammar PSA

the expression you're looking for is reining in. it is NOT reigning in. it comes from horseback riding.

you REIN IN your horse when you pull on the rein to tell him to slow down.

similarly, you GIVE HIM FREE REIN when you loosen your grip on the reins and let him run as fast as he likes.

that's where the metaphor comes from. you can rein in your evil vizier when he proposes a little too much child murder, or you can give him free rein when you need your enemies obliterated and only underhanded treachery will do. but unless he actually pulls off that nefarious coup he's plotting, the only one reigning here is you.

The world is in great peril, and you are the unlucky protagonist who must save it! Spin this wheel three times and get your Dragon Age party that you're stuck trying to save it with.

Feel free to reroll repeats. Most are companions, but there are also a few companion-adjacent possibilities. You can assume that you as the protagonist have a basic level of combat competency even if you don't in real life, so don't worry about yourself

i'm yoinking this bc i love it as an obimaul concept

so imagine through some handwavey force stuff, maul loses all his memories. he remembers only one thing: he has to get to someone named kenobi. this is immeasurably important, perhaps the most important thing in his life. he has a vague sense that in the past, he cared about this very intensely. and when he finds kenobi, he has to do... something (he does not recall what)

he somehow finds obi-wan and explains to him "i have recently lost all memory of my life up to this point. i don't remember who i am or what i am supposed to do. all i know is your name and that it seemed very important for me to go to you. that is probably because we're best friends, right? :)" and obi-wan is like uuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh 😬

People often say LOTR is a story about hope. (I'm reminded of it because someone said it in the notes of my Faramir post.) And that's true, but it's not the whole picture: LOTR is in large part a story about having to go on in the absence of hope.

Frodo has lost hope, as well as the ability to access any positive emotion, by Return. He is already losing it in Towers: he keeps going through duty and determination and of course Sam's constant help.

For most of the story, Sam is fueled by hope, which is why it's such a huge moment when he finally lets go of the hope of surviving and returning home, and focuses on making it to the Mountain. To speed their way and lighten the load, he throws his beloved pots and pans into a pit, accepting that he will never cook, or eat, again.

When Eowyn kills the Witch King, she's beyond hope and seeking for a glorious death in battle. It's possible that in addition to her love and loyalty for Théoden, she's strengthened by her hopelessness, the fear of the Nazgúl cannot touch someone who's already past despair.

Faramir is his father's son, he doesn't have any more hope of Gondor's victory or survival than Denethor does, he says as much to Frodo. What hope have we? It is long since we had any hope. ... We are a failing people, a springless autumn. He knows he's fighting a losing war and it's killing him. When he rejects the ring, he doesn't do it in the hope that his people can survive without it, he has good reason to believe they cannot. He acts correctly in the absence of hope.

Of course LOTR has a (mostly) happy ending, all the unlikely hopes come true, the characters who have lost hope gain what they didn't even hope for, and everyone is rewarded for their bravery and goodness, so on some level the message is that hope was justified. But the book never chastises characters who lost hope, it was completely reasonable of them to do so. Despair pushed Théoden and Denethor into inaction, pushed Saruman into collaboration, but the characters who despaired and held up under the weight of despair are Tolkien's real heroes.

(In an early draft of Return, Frodo and Sam receive honorary titles in Noldorin: Endurance beyond Hope and Hope Unquenchable, respectively. Then he cut it, probably because it was stating the themes of the entire book way too obviously, because this is what Tolkien cared about, really: enduring beyond hope. Without hope.)

Also, people who know more than me about the concept of estel, feel free to @ me.

adhd will get you thinking "i should make this doctors appointment" every day for 7 months and counting

none of us are making those appointments huh

Life's more painless

For the brainless

Why think too hard?

When it's so soothing

Dancing through life

i love characters who do the “i worship the myth i make of you” and in turn dehumanize and get wrong the object of their devotion and love. yes project a thing that does not exist onto a pedestal and kneel at it like it is your altar. this will surely not blow up in both of your faces eventually

Holmes was about to answer the client’s question, but Watson beat him to it with a classic detective line:

just look at Holmes’ face in the background! he’s so proud of his dear doctor you can almost hear his brain yelling out the affection

who is the first david you think of when you hear the name david

Here we see Big Barda demonstrating her proprietary Nazi-pummeling technique. This Nazi Punch of the Day is from Harley's Little Black Book #4, published in late 2016.