Just Thinking About The Absolute Gut-punch That Elrond And Elros Must Represent To Maedhros.

Thingol had the Silmaril the whole time he fostered Turin, right? Like, it was probably sitting down in his vaults somewhere and maybe sometimes he or Mablung would go have a peep to make sure it was still there.

But like. Turin. Smol baby. Bad luck charm. Walking doom magnet. Imagine if he’d gotten his hands on the shiny shiny jewel. How much chaos he could have started. The Tale of Turin Turambar and the Seven Sons of Feanor.

Okay I think I know what it is. Jee is like an eagle. Totally stunning from side view. Derpy from front. It's the shape of his hair and nose, I think????

well… you are right! but… this is not a nice thing to say to our lieutenant and poor hawky!

Anyway, post-canon/resurrected/reborn/survival AU/Halls of Mandos Fëanor is much more interesting to write because that's the cooldown time, that's the time for character development, for consequences, for despair, for moving onwards. Some people are so caught up in their own burning sense of single-minded purpose that they need to burn out before they can even begin to change.

why do the sons of Fëanor gotta...be like that

a librarian’s hoard

[ID: Digital illustration of a red dragon surrounded by their colorful hoard of books. A worn, blue scarf wraps around their neck, and a pair of gold glasses sits on their snout, held in place by a gold chain. The dragon’s lair resembles a huge, airy library with multiple levels of bookcases, tall mountains of books, and floor-to-ceiling windows revealing open sky. Decorative gold chains drape across the space. The dragon smiles as it holds a small book in its mouth, stretching to offer it to a distant human standing atop a book tower. End ID.]

Fuck it, posting the glass eye fic I’ve been sitting on for a few months

•••

Katara didn’t trust Zuko as far as she could throw him, and based on past experiences, she couldn’t throw him very far without waterbending. Not that she’d hesitate to waterbend at him if he tried anything- and at this point, she was just waiting for him to slip up.

Which was why she was immediately ready to water whip him off the side of the temple when she heard Sokka’s terrified shriek. Okay, so maybe she didn’t exactly have proof he’d done anything, or even that he was anywhere near Sokka, but she ran towards the noise, water pouch at the ready, planning the best way to toss him out a window anyway-

And it was Zuko! She let herself have the vindication for a moment. Just a moment. Then asked “Sokka, what did you do?”

Look, she hated Zuko’s guts, but he didn’t look like he was actively hurting anyone right now, staring at Sokka in shock and clutching his face (the scarred side, she noted).

For good measure, she repeated the question at Zuko, because Sokka had screamed and he didn’t usually do that for no reason.

“I was just getting dressed!” Zuko protested, halfway between confused and afraid. “And he just came in and started screaming!”

Sokka made a strangled noise and gestured emphatically at Zuko, which cleared up absolutely nothing. “He- he- his- I-“

“Sokka!” She snapped. “What happened?”

Zuko lowered his hand a little and Sokka let out another half yelp. The firebender glared, then winced a little, still not uncovering his face.

“Wait, Sokka, did you hit him?”

Katara was a responsible person, who disapproved of hitting people on principle. She was not frowning at Sokka because she was jealous.

“No!” Sokka managed to get out. “Zuko- he- his eye fell out!”

Oh.

“Sokka...” she sighed. “Are you high again?”

“Wait-“ Zuko cut in, looking a little less confused (Katara would be angry with him for interrupting later, when she was less desperately perplexed). “You were freaking out because I took my eye out?”

“You... you what?” Katara was now matching Sokka’s confused horror. “You took your what out?”

Zuko lowered his hands, and yep, one eye. One eye and one not-eye, because Zuko only had one eye, and an empty eye socket, because what in Tui’s name was-

“What the fuck-“ She wasn’t sure if that was her or Sokka.

One - one - creepy gold eye blinked at them. “It’s a glass eye,” Zuko said slowly. “I kinda have to take it out sometimes.”

That explained everything and nothing at all. “It’s a what?” Sokka demanded.

“Glass eye,” Zuko said, then waved something small and eye-shaped in their general direction. He looked slightly more annoyed than usual, and then it struck Katara that someone screaming when they saw your face probably didn’t do wonders for self-esteem. “An eye. Made of glass.”

Sokka looked outright terrified. “But... how did your eye turn into glass? That happens? Do I have to worry about that?”

Katara did not slam her head into the wall, showing incredible self restraint. “Sokka, you idiot!” she groaned.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, eyes wide. “Katara, why didn’t you tell me this could happen?!”

As a healer, she had a duty to tell him he was being an absolute idiot and that it was clearly a prosthetic.

As a little sister, she had a duty to fuck with him, and that was a far more sacred duty.

“I’m sorry, Sokka,” she managed to sigh. “I didn’t want you to worry, with all the stuff you do that- no, don’t worry. It’s not so bad.”

“What?” His voice was strangled in fear. “Katara, what? Katara what am I doing?! How do I stop it?! Katara?!”

She’d almost forgotten about Zuko until he very sadly said “why do you think Aang doesn’t eat meat? The Avatar needs two eyes, and if one falls out, it could cause problems.”

She did not like Zuko at all, but right then, she loved him.

Ten minutes later, Sokka had sworn off meat, and then the other contributing factors to eyes spontaneously turning into glass and falling out: sarcasm, boomerangs and being an annoying big brother.

“He knows we’re joking, right?” Zuko asked cautiously after Sokka sprinted out to apologise to the spirits for making fun of waterbending.

“Eh, he’ll figure it out.”

———

“So,” Toph said as they settled down for dinner - with Sokka being late for a meal for the first time in his life, “why is Snoozles throwing seal jerky into the canyon?”

“I have a glass eye,” Zuko explained.

The earthbender nodded sagely. “Yeah, makes sense.”

Aang was slowly looking between the three of them like it would make any of this any more sensical. “Uh... what?”

“Long story,” Katara sighed.

Her brother strode up to the campfire with his usual level of theatre, then remembered that being dramatic was also a risk factor and very calmly and slowly sat down. “I think I’m safe.”

“What about your hair?” Zuko asked, completely blank faced.

“... please tell me this isn’t why you had the bald ponytail.”

“You think I did that willingly? No, I needed at least one eye working.”

Sokka sprinted into the temple.

“You’re not actually going to let him shave his hair, are you?” Zuko asked, looking mildly concerned.

Okay, this was perfect and Katara would remember it lovingly for the rest of her life, but even her natural little sister sadism wouldn’t stretch that far. “Toph, please bring him back here.”

———

“Toph, let me out of the rock! I need my eyes!”

———

“Wait... what?”

———

“What do you mean it’s not a medical condition?!”

———

“What do you mean it’s a prosthetic!?!”

———

“YOU LET ME THROW THE SEAL JERKY AWAY!”

———

“Okay,” Sokka said calmly, two hours and a lot of yelling later. “That was a very cruel prank and I’m never forgiving any of you.”

“Shut up, Snoozles,” Toph scoffed.“There are more important things than your dignity. For example,” she turned to Zuko with a huge grin, “can I touch it?”

“It’s been in his head!” Sokka screeched. Apparently the dramatics were back on. “It has head goo on it!”

Katara frowned. “Sokka, how do you think bodies work?”

“Please?” Toph begged, giving very impressive polar-puppy-dog eyes for someone who couldn’t see. “No one ever lets me touch their real eyes.”

“Because you’re a menace,” Katara scoffed.

“Please, Sparky?”

“Ugh, fine,” Zuko sighed. “Give me a second.”

It occurred to everyone a moment too late that, oh yeah, if anyone was going to spontaneously invent glassbending, it would be Toph.

Bilbo was declared dead while he was away in the Hobbit (and had to do a bunch of paperwork to get declared alive again) but there’s no indication he was formally declared dead after leaving the Shire, even though most people assumed he had died.

Therefore I posit: having a missing person declared dead in the Shire requires the consent of their next of kin. Whoever Bilbo’s next of kin was at the time of the Hobbit (possibly Otho? I’m not sure) had him declared dead at the first opportunity but Frodo refused to ever do it.

Frodo had anxious hobbit bureaucrats knocking on his door every couple of years like ‘Mr Baggins… blease… it’s been 10 years… he was eleventy-one… can we fill out his death certificate yet’ and Frodo was like ‘absolutely not’.

Early on he genuinely couldn’t bring himself too but after a while it was more that he enjoyed irritating the local magistrate’s office than anything else.

thinking about Jet, as I often do, and thinking about how bryke really thought not only that vilifying the only organized resistance to the Fire Nation was a good idea, but also that making that resistance a group of mostly kids and teenagers and still painting them as horrible monsters was a good idea. We really don’t talk enough about how Jet is treated like an adult in the show. And to an extent, all of the kids in ATLA are doing things that they’re too young to do, but pretty much all of them except for Jet have their emotions and backstory explored. Jet gets one line about the Fire Nation killing his family. One line. He’s shown to be this mature, autonomous figure, a leader, taking care of a bunch of other people, and the show goes out of its way to make him both unlikeable and totally responsible for his actions in a way that a character like Azula (who is exactly as old as Jet) isn’t. I was thinking about this post, which talks about the little girl and how that draws on an old racist trope that depicts people of color violently resisting oppression as child-killers and makes real the “what about the women and children?” hypothetical, and it honestly just turns my stomach that bryke used another child to paint this group of mostly children as evil. The little girl gets to be a little girl and is protected, and her protection is used as justification for vilifying Jet. Jet and the rest of the Freedom Fighters don’t get to be kids. They don’t get to be good or morally ambiguous or even just naive. They already had their innocence robbed from them when the Fire Nation took their families from them, and bryke, instead of exploring them as the children they are, makes them out to be just as bad and just as culpable, if not more culpable, than adults who actively participated in imperialism (like Jeong Jeong and Iroh.) And then Jet’s “redemption arc” is him, the only Brown Freedom Fighter, dying violently for the cause. I don’t know, man, writing this post is making me cry, but Jet deserved so much better than that. Jet deserved to be a kid, and he had that taken from him both within the narrative when the Fire Nation burned down his village, and outside the narrative by Bryan and Michael. 

Realizing that a lot of my "emotional oversensitivity" as a child was actually me not being able to distinguish between joking/sarcastic and serious tones

anyway I do think Smeagol could have been redeemed/rehabilitated if the story had played out differently