Just remember 60 people signed on to stab Caesar and he only had 23 stab wounds, the real moral of the story is group projects have always just been like that
It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point.
And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again.
And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil.
“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”
So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.
+1 You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest - the job of bearing witness to what happened - and the duty to finish and protect his writings? Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school - the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916. My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot. And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor. Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.
Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever - a particularly nasty disease carried by lice - and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor - as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.
TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.
I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.
happy ides of march eve remember to completely disregard any weird happenings or foreboding omens and look forward to tomorrows beautiful day
the way aragorn runs is so chaotic
@tathrin's tags have been vetted and approved
#that is a man who A: has tripped over his sword before and been laughed at by EVERY ELF IN RIVENDELL and is NOT going to do it again#and B: knows that he has more leg than anyone else in the room and is GOING TO USE IT BY GODS#he is COVERING GROUND with every step#he got that moniker of strider through HARD HONEST WORK (and very very big steps)#aragorn#lotr movies#viggo mortensen
I don’t think I’ve seen these posted here yet, so I feel obligated to share my favorite interaction in the whole game
my pedantic catboy timeloop administrator who dispenses missions and places cooldown restrictions on my time travel has taken a moment to clarify that we are in a closed loop, NOT a multiple timeline/branching path situation, and he would prefer that i stop using phrases like 'alternate timelines' as it they are inaccurate and misleading terms. but to be fair to him. he's right.
Big news from Tartarus I'm just so proud of him
guys ive j gotten some horrible news
posting textposts about an otome game nobody cares about in 2023. hi to the 3 code realize fans out there i’m normal about this game currently
“Why did you follow this person ? uwu”
I’ve been here for fourteen years, do you think I remember? I don’t know who any of these people are anymore. I don’t know why they’re on my dash. I allow them to stay because they haven’t pissed me off enough to unfollow them yet. “Why did you follow this person?” I’m not sure I ever did. They’re just part of my ecosystem now.
cant get that gorgeous tumblr poll out of my head
― Ovid, Metamorphoses
"if i was orpheus i would simply not turn around" yes you would. if you were orpheus and you loved eurydice, you would. to love someone is to turn around. to love someone is to look at them. whichever version of the myth — he hears her stumble, he can't hear her at all, he thinks he's been tricked — he turns around because he loves her. that's why it's a tragedy. because he loves her enough to save her. because he loves her so much he can't save her. because he will always, always turn around. "if i was orpheus i would simply —" you wouldn't be orpheus. you wouldn't be brave enough to walk into the underworld and save the person you love. be serious
Do you ever lie awake wondering how the heck Gimli knows what a nervous system is
Clearly dwarves have medical knowledge far more advanced than that of the other races.
His Majesty Dr. Gimli, son of Gloin, Neurosurgeon, M.D.
gimli trying to explain his studies to legolas, a flat-earther
#*scroll down* #*remember that middle earth is canonically flat for elves and round for everyone else* #*scroll back up & smash that reblog button"
tired: legolas took gimli to valinor with him because they were bffs/in love/etc.
wired: legolas took gimli to valinor to prove the world was flat after arguing with him about it for decades
Sorry it’s what to elves
So, in Tolkein lore, the world was originally flat, with most of the land in the middle (hence Middle Earth). But the Numenorians (men who were rewarded with their own Atlantis-equivalent island for service in the first big war against Melkor, but eventually Power Corrupts etc) tried to invade the uttermost west which was basically Elf Heaven. To put an end to that sort of thing, the creator of the world Bent The World and made it a sphere…but left elves able to treat it like a flat disk. So elves can sail west and reach Elf Heaven, but a man or dwarf or hobbit who sails west will eventually wrap around to the east coast of Middle Earth.
This is why Legolas can see for such great, almost impossible distances. The Earth does not curve for him.
Legolas said fuck the horizon
God I fucking love high fantasy
i have a friend whomst I will not name in case they don’t want to be asked about this but they have a Very Specific and Terrible power which is, if you take the online BDSM quiz and then just simply mention you have, they can look at you for under ten seconds and just state your top result.
I can’t tell you anything more soul-shattering, any death more instant and devastating, any moment more harrowing to witness than someone saying “yeah i took the BDSM quiz once” only for my friend to no more than glance at them and then announce “brat” and the look in the person’s eyes is that of one who just tipped too far back in their chair
and they say xmen aren’t real
I think your friend might be an actual regular telepath who just figured out the funniest way to use their powers
me and my wife
I opened my copy of The Tale of the Body Thief & immediately had to close it again because of this silly little annotation
the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck
this is what ancient greek philosophy is like
False! “Sightly” is a positive word, so the default way for things to work is good as well.
The true most ordinary object is beautiful, horrible sounding, very smelly, intangible, and delicious.
I still don’t think it matches anything in existence but to truly understand a thing one must know its true nature.
"touchy" is also a word! however it's mostly used for things that aren't objects, like subjects of conversation. it either means "oversensitive and irritable" or "requires careful handling/wording, delicate"
i think the second one works well for our hypothetical object. so we can use that.
therefore, the Default Object is:
- beautiful
- makes a horrendous sound
- smells absolutely awful
- is very fragile
- tastes delicious
and i still cannot think of anything that matches this
behold, the default object!