Ran Into My Seventeen Year Old Brother In The Kitchen At 1am Last Night And When I Asked Him What He

My BIGGEST pet peeve when it comes to Tolkien is how people will sometimes characterize Melkor’s rebellion as being about him wanting to do his own thing and rebelling against Illuvatar’s oppressive sheet music.

THERE WAS NO SHEET MUSIC!  Illuvatar wasn’t forcing anything.  The Ainulindale was improv.  Illuvatar just gave them the theme, the idea, the feeling, the starting point.  The Ainur were drawing inspiration from the thought of Illuvatar, sure, and so long as they were in harmony the music played precisely as Illuvatar intended because Illuvatar had created them and knew how they worked together.  But the music of the Ainur before Melkor’s dissonance was quintessentially creative, as well as corroborative.  It was spontaneous, perfect harmony of free individuals perfectly in tune with each other, whose improvisations were constantly building upon each other.

Melkor’s rebellion was not about asserting his freedom of expression, because his expression was already free.  Instead it was explicitly about making his own voice louder and more important than anyone else’s, and subjugating the creativity of others to instead convince or force them to follow him exactly in repetitive unison.  And so, when Melkor’s goal became drown everyone else out, instead of make beautiful music together, his music became less creative, less innovative, and less his.

So it kind of annoys me when people talk about Melkor like he’s all for freedom of expression when he’s pretty much the opposite of that.

idril is the only person who thinks turgon is funny

"Elrond raised his eyes and looked at him, and Frodo felt his heart pierced by the sudden keenness of the glance." - The Fellowship of the Ring, The Council of Elrond.

So. What do you want to bet that when glorfindel came back to middle earth he had a heart attack because elrond looked like maeglin.

(This means that the list of people glorfindel has considered trying to murder about this exact topic is elrond, bilbo, and aragorn. Plus a bunch of elrond's other human fosters but none of THEM fell for arwen so aragorn was def the most severe)

And since arwen is exactly like elrond in every way, this is yet more proof for my theory of "every character named twilight + son/daughter is a meaningful parallel"

8 year old Dick’s third trip to Bruce’s office and being so helpful that he pressed ALL the elevator buttons so that they could shout good morning to each floor

Maeglin and Idril in Uzbek Gondolin

Thank you to @the-quiet-fire-of-defiance​ for helping me work out how to do this and for writing an image description

Image description: an edit with nine images. 1: a headshot of an Uzbek man. 2: A photo of some stone buildings. 3: a photo of a city from above. A large pale tower, lit up with warm lights from inside, is surrounded by smaller stone buildings including what looks like a mosque. 4: a sketch of Gondolin by FelixSotomayorArt on DeviantArt. 5: a photo of an Uzbek knife next to its beautifully detailed sheath. 6: a photo taken between two blue buildings covered in geometric designs. 7: a sunrise/sunset over a cluster of stone buildings, dotted with archways and domes. 8: an Uzbek woman in brightly coloured clothes holding a pomegranate. 9: a banner reading “Gondolin” in white text, with a moon and star symbol on either side.

The difference between Beren and Luthien and Aragorn and Arwen is that the former follows the conventions of fairy tale and the latter follows the conventions of courtly love. In this essay I will

reading romance as an aroace

*opens book*

"Let's get to the good stuff"

*flips past first meeting, kissing, smut*

*gets to a mature, understanding conversation between the couple in which they each apologize, explain their experience, work out the problem between them, and formulate a specific plan to make sure things will be better in the future*

"Now THIS is what I'm here for!" *happy stimming*

Kids 🤝 autistic people

Blunt honesty

god i hate how aesthetic-obsessed we have become. i'm not talking about cottagecore or dark academia or any of the other -cores, i'm talking about everything being so glossy and pretty and perfect and smooth and one-liner hot takes and feel-good own-the-conservatives progressivism and Top 10 Company Tweets We Laughed At and ring lights and young vloggers with pastel-perfect colour-corrected lives and carefully curated messy title cards and perfect montages being called "photo dumps" and bookstagrams or booktoks or bookblrs who buy every book they read, not a library edition in sight and "that girl" and this is how you age when you're unproblematic and glow ups and "clean" "inclusive" beauty and earth tones and minimalism and filming random people without their consent and definition of the self through consumption of goods and ggrgehwrgehrgehrgehrgehrrerg

Can I please ask for your top five theories on why the Ringwraiths become so much more powerful over the course of the LotR trilogy? By the end of the books a single Ringwraith holds an army of 6000 men in paralysing dread from a height of a mile, they're dismaying hosts of men, etc. And in the beginning, they're easily defeated by "jumping behind a tree," "pretending to be in a different room," "getting on a little boat," "man with a stick on fire," etc.

hmm ok

1) their power depends on how physically close they are to sauron/mordor

2) they consciously weren’t unleashing their full power early in Fellowship bcos it didn’t seem worth it when they were just dealing w hobbits

3) they just woke up from a REALLY long nap and it takes them a while to fully come ‘online’

4) their power just waxes & wanes sometimes

5) hobbits are their One Weakness