montanawitch

[montanawitch]

men will really just make fun of you for anything. you can just breathe and they will find a problem with that

[montanawitch]

i can never face my family again

[montanawitch]

I get so heated when people argue that everyone in Middle Earth is white because "it's an english novel".

JRR Tolkien's father was a bank manager outside of England, so Tolkien was born in South Africa. Here's sources from tolkienlibrary.com and birmingham.gov.uk to prove it, you can look it up for yourself:

Is JRR Tolkien an English author? Yes, undoubtedly. But it's not like this man hasn't seen anything outside of England. It's not like JRR Tolkien never saw a black person. He grew up freaking in South Africa and part of his fascination with linguistics began with native African languages.

So, if anything it actually makes MORE sense for Tolkien to base some of his fictional species off of non-white cultures. Because if you're as into worldbuilding and fictional lanuages as Tolkien is, you're almost certainly going to draw from the cultures you known and some beyond that, and once again, this man was born in Africa.

In the Lord of the Rings novels, also attested to in the LOTR Wiki, the Uruk-hai refer to the Rohirrim as "white skins" as a sort of slur against the people of Rohan.

(Image from Tolkien gateway)

This implies that, at least among the races of men, the Rohirrim are the only ones with notably white skin. So, the men of Gondor for example, like Aragorn, Boromir and Faramir are likely all people of color. Especially because Boromir and Faramir specifically are constantly described as having long, black hair. And let us not forget that Tolkien himself described Aragorn as "lean, dark and tall with shaggy dark hair freckled with grey".

I could believe the Hobbits being white because they're the race that's most clearly inspired by English culture and are generally confined to one area, but the Elves and the race of Men spread out over vast spaces in Middle Earth. If you know anything about evolution you'll know that the more land a species covers, the more variation it'll have - that's kinda what happened with us humans. So yeah, Elves and Men (excluding maybe the Rohirrim) and Dwarves are probably a mix of different skin tones. Get over it.

And lastly, it's just more creative to imagine them as not strictly white. Think of how many fascinating cultures you could draw inspiration from by allowing some Tolkien characters to be black. Maybe the men of Gondor are inspired by Indian culture? Perhaps the Dwarves could take inspiration from indigenous mountain-dwelling cultures like those in Latin America? These things are fun to explore!

Keep racism out of Middle Earth. JRR Tolkien grew up in South Africa. Die mad about it.

[montanawitch]

‘relationships are work’ means ‘you have to put effort into loving each other intentionally & learning how to love each other and communicating properly’ not ‘your relationship makes you feel stressed and sad most of the time & the other person disrespects you and treats you bad but you stay anyway’

[montanawitch]

You're in her dms well i'm in my jammies. goodnight

[montanawitch]

Source

Source

[montanawitch]

The stigma of self-inserts is so harmful to the creative process. Relax. Admit it. Everything you make is derivative of yourself, always, no exceptions. You can turn the mirror into tinier and tinier shards or you can make it as big as you want to reflect as much as you want. At the end of the day it's always going to show you inside of it. Pretending otherwise is stupid.

[montanawitch]

[montanawitch]

Elon Musk is a lil bitch

Wowwww

[montanawitch]

Conservatives: Gender roles are biological and made by god. It is useless to fight against your predefined inner nature.

Also conservatives: We need 24/7 propaganda, isolation, and censorship to reaffirm gender roles because if people get the idea that they can just not conform (or, god forbid, transition) then we will lose our children and Western Values will be destroyed.

[montanawitch]

the new normal that should have arised from the current covid pandemic was a fully vaccinated populus, masks as common usage, huge amounts of industry restructured for remote work, single payer healthcare, elimination of the landlord class and massive public health awareness

but the minute we approached any of that capitalism screeched on the brakes. this state will never be out for your interests.

[montanawitch]

I absolutely will die on this hill, access to fiction that makes your skin crawl and open discussion about it is the best way to keep that skin crawling fiction from happening in reality.

It doesn't matter if it is ~positively~ or negatively portrayed. If you censor it, we don't talk about it, then we can't protect against it.

[montanawitch]

me looking at john singer sargents watercolours: Just Fuck Of…

[montanawitch]

POV you're a scientist at One Direction Inc. breeding brain fungus that makes white women hallucinate gay relationships

[montanawitch]

[montanawitch]

The whole notion that women didn’t work is pretty much about upper class white women’s experience because historically poor women of color have always worked and get exploited and literally so many aspects of feminism is like claiming that it has paced ways and given rights to women but its actually only beneficial to upper class white women. Women from third world countries have always worked and fought in war. We just never got the proper credits for it or anything.

[montanawitch]

Reblog to make it die faster