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(talking in the cadence of an anime villain) I will destroy you, rival hayato playlist. I will get more followers/likes than you, with your Melanie Martinez and your burning pile. Some of these songs, are decent. Yes, they are. But do they fit? Do they work? Are they truly relevant for his character and his storylines? Who, exactly, is the second bird that justifies two birds being there? His mother? There are moments of insightfulness, yes, but they are the calm spots in a raging sea. You are nothing to me. NOTHING.

transgender but in a problematic way that cant be sanitized by teens who are trying to reinvent the hayes code

New Tumblr Aesthetic Idea Thingy

Progressive Metal Album Covers. They’re weird, often liminal, but so cool looking.

fellas is it gay to stare at each other like that

Ereri Fanfics

Do you sometimes go on Ao3 or Wattpad and find an absolutely beautiful Ereri fan fiction? I do. But when I do, there is always one thing that bothers me. WHY!? WHY DO YOU MAKE THEM SUFFER?! Eren and Levi don’t need to turned into asylum patients and depression sufferers! And although Eren already is a suicidal bastard, he doesn’t need to be trying to commit suicide every goddamn day.

This post is here not to offend LeviHan, Eruri, Rivetra, Eremika, Eren x Jean, Armin x Eren or any other ships that include Eren or Levi.

phantomseptember said:Recommendations? Recommendations?

yES so probably most of these everyone already knows but anyway

tumblr musicians:

Adele McAllister (btw you can buy some of her songs; I think my favourite is I Sit Beside the Fire and Think)

mythalll’s Lament for Boromir

culumacilinte’s Tom Bombadil’s Song

khyeili’s Dis’s lullaby

really-saraleee’s Inudoy kurdulu

asongofparody

youtube musicians:

Eurielle (my favourite is Song of Durin)

Karliene’s Lament for Boromir 

beriahim (really like his The Lay of Nimrodel but has more tolkien-based)

friendryfire (has both original songs, songs based on Tolkien and covers of other songs translated to sindarin; really like their Singer on the Shore I think about Maglor?) 

Yolanda Mott

Forest Elves’s Lullaby From a Distant Land (their original song in Quenya)

Alex Hruban’s Feanor’s Lament loove the chorus of this one

The Piano Guys - Arwen’s Vigil 

Professional ones:

Айрэ и Саруман / Aire & Saruman (basically all of their songs are either Tolkien or Robin Hobb based)

Caprice (their Of Beren and Luthien is lovely, though I think they have more tolkien-based)

Oonagh (songs Orome, Eldamar and Gäa)

Хелависа / Melnitsa has a cover of May it Be in russian and under name  Хелависа / Hellawes has more Tolkien-based (Legolas’s Song to the Sea is really nice)

Bob Catley (his The End of Summer is about Galadriel)

Lind Erebros (the whole album Elven Oratory, it’s mostly instrumental)

Aonis (Fall of Gil-Galad to make yourself sad)

Broceliande (Galadriel’s Lament to make yourself even sadder)

The Hobbitons

The Fellowship (some of their songs are on youtube)

The Tolkien Ensemble (love their Galadriel’s Song of Eldamar)

Blind Guardian is obvious but still great–

Summoning’s In Hollow Halls Beneath The Fells (thanks to noteli for telling me about the band)

Bttlelore has basically all songs based on Tolkien (really love their Fangorn; thanks to duresteintrepide for telling me about them)

LotR musical’s songs are always great

also in BBC’s Dramatization Bill Nighy (Sam’s voice) sung the lovely Song of Gil-Galad

definitely missed out a lot

branded by the sins of another

I've seen pieces from this extra comic before, but never read the full thing until today. And holy shit does it hammer home just how much the story is about class.

Multiple times, when food comes up in this comic, it’s also in context of money:

I've seen this last panel on the right brought up before in context of like, dungeon meshi's relationship with fat and eating, but in the full context of the comic it really hits how much adventuring directly consumes bodies for money.

As much as this has been part of the story the whole time, showcased as early chapters 19 and 20...

It never fully hit me before how often adventuring comes down to having no other way to make money but to throw yourself into death repeatedly. To be used, whether it’s by individual selfish people (like the resurrection group that is happy to try and get Kabru's group to kill each other to get extra gold from them in chapter 32), or by the greater cog of the Dungeon Economy in general.

Which, to be clear, is all too often how things work in the real world, too. So many jobs burn through the health and lives of workers. Dungeon Meshi just makes it literal in a new way: by making the healing and resurrection, a core part to the adventuring loop, directly use fat, muscle, and energy from the body being healed.

Imagine Amazon, but if you got injured at work, they could literally burn up some of your body to get you back to working sooner. And that was seen as an advantage of the job.

And then you have Laios, thinking about eating monsters:

Not just because he likes monsters a lot. But because it would help. He says something similar in the actual manga too, during the chapter discussing his dream with the Winged Lion

Laios wants to be able to make a home for Falin. He wants to give her a place where she never has to eat alone. And when he gets a party, he wants to give them a way to eat well. And when he runs a country, well…

He wants to ensure that everyone has enough to eat.

Food is political. Food ties into class, and money. What is deemed "proper" to eat, what is a luxury, what is crass… so much of it comes down to money.

Being judged for eating what's available, when what is “proper” isn't affordable, is already a thing that happens. People forced into work that consumes their energy is already a thing that happens.

Dungeon Meshi has a lot of fantastical elements, but boy is its examination of food and class very real.

Random things. What happens when you protest in Russia? You are immediately arrested. It’s not a game of chance, it’s a guarantee. All protests are forbidden. We are not allowed to call the war – the war, you’ll be fined at best, arrested at worst if you do. In fact, as of today, if you’re caught at an anti-war protest, you’re considered a member of a radical extremist group and are facing 6 years in jail. People “detained” for protesting are invariably beaten. Concussions, contusions, broken bones. Men more so than women, though women can’t rely on it. You can be asked to strip since they “need” to check your underwear. You’ll be verbally abused and threatened the entire time. And yes, of course, it doesn’t stop there, since they now know you and your family and where you all work and live. In this country, there is nothing truly independent, there never was. If the words “1937” mean nothing to you, you are very, very fortunate. For us, it’s this again, only a thousand times worse because now it’s empowered by technology.

The other day they arrested a bunch of kids. Literally kids, four of them, aged seven to eleven. They, along with their mothers were carrying flowers to the Ukrainian embassy and a small simple poster “No to War”. They were all detained and immediately separated, kept locked up for the night. We don’t know how the kids were treated. Mothers had their possessions confiscated, not allowed to call anyone, stripped, yelled at, threatened. The harshest threat was to be stripped of parental rights on the spot, never see their kids again. The kids were released closer to morning when a lawyer from a group that helps people in these situations arrived. I have no idea how these lawyers are still allowed to function. Small mercies. (Support them here: https://donate.ovdinfo.org/)

But it’s not just the pain of punishment or jail sentence. It’s the utter uselessness of it all. He won’t care if half the population comes out to say “No to War”. He won’t care if it’s all of us.

A few days ago, every school in the country received instructions to hold special classes to explain to kids why “the liberating military operation” was necessary and what happens now. The teachers have been given manuals on what to say and how to answer the kids’ questions. Some of the answers include: “Don’t worry if you hear that some countries don’t want to be friends with us anymore. There are other countries who do, and besides, Russia is a very big country, so we have everything you can possibly need right here.” By “other countries”, my guess is, they mean North Korea. After the class, the kids are supposed to take a test. It’s electronic, entered through a QR code, and the answers are automatically logged in. Questions include: “Explain why the liberating military operation was necessary” and “Expand on what the Russian government is doing to help people of Lugansk and Donetsk.” The results of the test are tallied, and if some kid doesn’t give the right ones, their parents are called in for “a talk”.

We will either end up with a bunch of really smart kids or another generation of completely deluded people. The last time something like this had happened was in 1991, when the Soviet Union was falling, and my classmates and I were asked to make a choice of do we want to pledge allegiance to the communist party or not. I was ten. My class, as I remember, was split roughly in two. The kids who voted “yes” looked at the rest of us with teary eyes and whispered “our parents told us to do it, they are too afraid.” And we got it. We all got it. Nobody hated anybody for the choice, because we all knew that fear and we all knew what it was like, to be hostage of the regime. We who voted “no” knew what we were risking. At ten years old, we were more politically savvy than a lot of full-grown adults across the ocean. It’s not a good thing.

For roughly twenty-something years, we lived in the illusion that we were out of that prison. Sure, our democracy was not perfect, but whose is? It was maybe incredibly naïve of us, but can you blame us that we wanted to believe it? That we still desperately want to, which is why there are a lot of really confused people in the country right now who still can’t grasp that their leadership has betrayed them?They will, in fact, believe anything but this. They will sooner believe him and ignore the facts, because a) they’re not getting the facts, and b) the truth is terrifying.

Nothing has changed. We’re still in the USSR. Yesterday, in Nalchik, students of the local university were ordered to go out and express their support for the president. They had no warning. At some point the university staff members entered their classrooms, handed out banners and t-shirts, and ordered them to go outside “to stand in solidarity” with the president. Refusal was not an option on pain of expulsion. Among other statements, they were made to hold up banners saying #wearenotashamed which should tell you everything you need to know about how the Russian people really feel.

I’m not going to talk about the independent media, because the last survivors of this extremely rare breed are being shut down as we speak. Meduza is still holding up by some miracle, but their turn can be any hour. They have been declared “a foreign agent” some years back, which means that they can no longer be properly financed and have to preface every single post and article with a huge all-caps statement that this information was created by a foreign agent, presumably to turn “loyal citizens” away. They have been subsiding on crowd-funding this whole time, can’t imagine how, since all transactions are now traceable and giving them money is not without consequences. (Support them here: https://support.meduza.io/)

The world has turned away from us, and I get it, but they don’t understand what they’re doing. Or maybe they do but don’t care. I don’t mean this on an emotional level, but purely practical. The more they punish the Russian people, the more, unfortunately but sadly naturally, the Russian people will unite in their support of He Who Must Not Be Named. He will feel even more legitimate in his actions and he won’t stop. Not that I can imagine anything that could make him stop now but… It’s not helping. It might make a lot of people out there feel better about themselves, but it’s not helping.

Worst of all, we can’t help Ukraine. So much as saying that we’re fighting a war or that we are losing that war can earn you up to 15 years in prison for “spreading misinformation.” It’s impossible to send over money, and as for supplies we can only gather those for the refugees that are fleeing to Russia. Our economy is on the brink of collapse, and the people that are running from the war and come here will have to share it with us. We’re doing what we can for them. It’s not enough.

And personally… My mornings these days start like this. I wake up. I don’t want to get up. I do eventually. Splash water on my face etc. Take my heart medication. Wait for it to take effect. Then I open Telegram and see if Meduza is still broadcasting. Read the overnight update. Learn that the horror continues in a multitude of fresh new horrifying ways. Remind myself that I have no right to sympathy or feeling sorry for myself or any of that. I was not the one who spent the night in a bomb shelter. I was not the one whose house was destroyed. I wish I was but I’m not. I’m just a useless spectator who’s too chickenshit to even go get beaten up and who rationalizes her cowardice any way she knows how. I want you to know this about me before you decide to continue knowing me. I am unaccountably grateful having known all of you.

I don’t know what else to say except maybe this. Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.

soggy vine #5