People Can Be So Quiet About Their Pain, That You Forget They Are Hurting. That Is Why It Is So Important

“Zuko adopts” bingo

I was describing all of the “x adopts Zuko” AUs that I used to follow on @muffinlance​​‘s blog to a friend, and I referred to them as “Zuko Adopts Bingo”, so same friend  asked “wait, LITERAL bingo?? Did you guys makes cards?”

and I couldn’t remember any, but I had the time tonight so I was like, why not?

[Image Description: a bingo card titled “Zuko adopts bingo”. The the squares are labeled as such:

First row: Hama, Fire Sages, Jun, Hakoda, the Gaang

Second row: the Herbalist, Vattu, The Painted Lady, Other Spirits, Jet

Third row: Zuko, the Beifongs, Iroh/FREE SPACE, Zuko’s crew, Jee specifically

Fourth row: Yuyan Archers, Batman, Dragons, Kyoshi Warriors, the Dai Li

Fifth row: Azula, Jeong Jeong, Team Leverage, Piandao, Wild Animals /end ID] 

—-

I did have specific fics and/or tumblr discussions in mind for every one of these. I might try to link them all in a reblog, but I didn’t take notes while I made this so it might be a hassle to find them again ^^;;

also please tell me if there’s any more AUs I forgot about or that are your particular favorites – or better yet, make your own bingo card and send it to me! Let’s make this a Thing, I’m having fun here :P

The case against Finrod revisionism 

I’ve always been frustrated by what I see as bad-faith interpretations of Finrod’s character. You don’t have to like him or find him interesting, but it bothers me when people make claims about him that don’t make sense. When it comes to Finrod, they usually follow a similar pattern, something like: ‘I thought Finrod was good the first time I read the Silmarillion, but now I think he’s bad.’ ‘I thought Finrod was a friend of Men at first, but now I think he actually looked down on the Edain and treated them poorly.’ ‘Finrod comes across as a perfect good guy in the Silmarillion, but what if he’s secretly manipulative and evil?’ That’s what I’m calling Finrod revisionism. This is not a callout post; I’m just giving my reasons why ‘Finrod is actually evil and the Silmarillion is lying to you’ is not a take that does it for me. I think it’s entirely fair to criticize Finrod. He’s not perfect and if he were I think he would be less interesting (more on that later). I just do not vibe with interpretations of his character that paint him as someone who intentionally sacrificed the Edain in battle, someone who committed genocide against the Petty-dwarves, or someone who held prejudiced views, and I think those interpretations are unsupported by canon. This is a long post, so I’ll put it under the cut.

Continua a leggere

If anyone wants a fic with this, I liked Drag0nst0rm’s Scion of Somebody, Probably on ffn

best Gil-Galad lineage headcanon is that he’s not descended from any of them, he’s a pretender to the throne and that’s why his story keeps changing

It sure is convenient that all these songs that ostensibly weren’t written in English all rhyme when translated into English, isn’t it, Mr. Tolkien?

Damn I just realized that since the Rohirrim didn’t read or write (wise but unlearned, writing no books but singing many songs) that means Eowyn couldn’t read or write and since she marries Nerdboy McGee who loves reading and writing more than anything you can your bottom dollar one of the first thing that happens in their courtship/marriage is Faramir and Eowyn wholesome tutoring sessions in the Minas Tirith library (!) 

I've always followed this saying: hope for the best, but expect the worst.

So many people hear that, and they immediately assume I'm an extreme pessimist. Or they'll think that that saying is what makes me so depressed. It makes me extremely frustrated because I don't expect the worst in a "life sucks and the world hates me" kind of way.

I struggle when things go wrong, especially when it catches me off guard. Unexpected bad things can trigger big, out of control emotions, and for my autism (and cptsd) that's hard to deal with. It can lead to things being more traumatic than they need to be if I'm not prepared for the bad outcome. The whole situation feels out of control, and I don't always have a good sense of clarity when I'm having intense emotions or a meltdown, which makes my own response feel out of my control.

So, I try and expect and prepare for the worst. I talk myself through what I will do if something doesn't go the way I want. I make guesses on how I will feel, and talk myself through those emotions before they've ever even come up. I make plans on what my next steps will be, even if those next steps are simply time to recover from disappointment. All the while, I still am hoping for the best. I want things to go well, I want to succeed. I hold my breath, cross my fingers, and wish for things to turn out well.

Nobody ever understands this. I'm not trying to be a pessimist, I'm trying to accommodate for myself and make my life easier, to make my life happier. Life, by chance, is going to disappoint sometimes. I don't want to be blindsided and thrown into a tailspin. I want to be able to sit with myself and process, and move on. And I don't know why people can't understand that.

Do you ever think about how staggeringly in bad taste it is that Gandalf brought a firework that turns into Smaug to Bilbo’s birthday party

Like how were you hoping that would go

Thoughts on Yavanna and the portrayal of nature in Arda

And in that time of dark Yavanna also was unwilling utterly to forsake the Outer Lands; for all things that grow are dear to her, and she mourned for the works that she had begun in Middle-earth but Melkor had marred. Therefore leaving the house of Aulë and the flowering meads of Valinor she would come at times and heal the hurts of Melkor; and returning she would ever urge the Valar to that war with his evil dominion that they must surely wage ere the coming of the Firstborn.

And:

It came to pass that the Valar held council, for they became troubled by the tidings that Yavanna and Oromë brought from the Outer Lands; and Yavanna spoke before the Valar, saying: ‘Ye mighty of Arda, the Vision of Ilúvatar was brief and soon taken away, so that maybe we cannot guess within a narrow count of days the hour appointed. Yet be sure of this: the hour approaches, and within this age our hope shall be revealed, and the Children shall awake. Shall we then leave the lands of their dwelling desolate and full of evil? Shall they walk in darkness while we have light? Shall they call Melkor lord while Manwë sits upon Taniquetil?’

Yavanna is differentiated from most of the other Valar in her desire to go to the Outer Lands, and she is alike to Oromë and Ulmo in this, but they are clearly in the minority. She is also in favor of directly opposing Melkor through war, and in that scene where she advocates for it, she and Tulkas are the only ones. Of course, some among the Valar find ways to help other than fighting—after the council, Varda goes out to hang more stars in the sky so that the Children of Ilúvatar do not awaken in darkness—and later the Valar do wage war against Melkor and imprison him. But Yavanna was in favor of fighting and getting involved much sooner. 

It seems a defining characteristic of Yavanna is that she not only loves Middle-earth and its inhabitants, as all the Valar do—she also feels compelled to be involved, to act, to fight. Of course, during the First Age she remained in Valinor with the other Valar. But she is far more in favor of being involved in the world: she went to Middle-earth when most of them did not, and she advocated for intervention in Middle-earth before most of them were ready to do so. Tolkien characterizes her this way consistently. 

I love this, because nature is often thought of as passive, and Yavanna is anything but. As the Valië who created green and growing things, she is probably the closest thing in Tolkien’s writing to a personification of the natural world, and so her desire to play an active role in Middle-earth—and to fight to protect it—says something about how Tolkien viewed nature.

Many people think of nature as a passive thing, separate from humans, which we can own and use however we want. In this understanding of the world, nature does not feel; nature does not act. While some people acknowledge that animals have thoughts and feelings, few people think plants have them. But in Tolkien’s world, trees do think, and feel, and remember—and they also literally fight back against those who hurt them. And the Ents and all of the trees of course come from Yavanna’s thought. Yavanna first thinks of Ents because of her desire to protect trees:

‘Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon bough little mourned in their passing. So I see in my thought. Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!’

And Yavanna says to Manwë that this thought was in the Ainulindalë itself: 

‘For while thou wert in the heavens and with Ulmo built the clouds and poured out the rains, I lifted up the branches of great trees to receive them, and some sang to Ilúvatar amid the wind and the rain.’ 

The trees sang to Ilúvatar!!! The trees sang to Ilúvatar!!! I love that so much. Does this mean that some trees participated in the Ainulindalë as it was unfolding? Or was this merely a vision of Arda in the future? Either way, through this passage and others, Tolkien completely rejects the idea that nature is passive or inanimate, and I love that.

The other thing that stands out to me about Yavanna is her anger. She wishes that trees might ‘punish’ those that wrong them, and says of the Ents, ‘there shall walk a power in the forests whose wrath they [anyone who cuts down trees] will arouse at their peril.’ I love this, and it rings true to me that nature is something whose wrath we arouse at our peril… It’s not that you’re going to be attacked by Ents if you cut down a forest unsustainably (although maybe you should be), but destroying nature arouses its ‘wrath’ in the sense that it throws things out of balance, and creates more problems that end up hurting us, too, because we’re also part of nature.

It also occurred to me that Yavanna is quite different from the concept of mother nature found in a lot of myths, even though mother nature or mother earth would seem like logical archetypes to compare her to. There are some similarities, of course: she is associated with growing things and with plenty. But I feel like mother nature is usually associated with nurturing, gentleness and pacifism, and Yavanna is not a pacifist. And it isn’t that she can never be nurturing—it does say she would ‘heal the hurts of Melkor’ in Middle-earth—but she also wants trees to ‘punish’ those that harm them, and warns of the ‘wrath’ of the forests, and urges the Valar to go to war themselves. And I love that. I hear the echo of her fierce protectiveness in the Ents’ marching song:

We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door; For bole and bough are burning now, the furnace roars—we go to war! To land of gloom with tramp of doom, with roll of drum, we come, we come; To Isengard with doom we come! With doom we come, with doom we come!

No offense to people who function properly but I’m different

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