noveeleven

[noveeleven]

maeglin and idril 🗡️👑

[noveeleven]

i'm obsessed with hamlet. serial procrastinator, famous yapper, who monologues any time anything goes even mildly wrong. he gets POISON STABBED, and instead of dropping dead like his mother, his uncle, and his opponent, he MONOLOGUES ABOUT IT. HE PROCRASTINATES DYING TO MONOLOGUE ABOUT IT. there's just something so beautiful about him clinging to life to deliver one last baller speech

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a while ago I read this sci-fi short story from the 50s where a guy is kidnapped and interrogated by aliens using a very sophisticated lie detector, but he realizes that the lie detector works off technical truth, and with some careful phrasing and misdirection, he manages to make them believe that humans are a race of immortal, overpowered, omniscient telepathic beings. and it works.

my favorite part is when he tells them that humans are "capable of transportation without the aid of spaceships or any vehicles, just by using mental power to control physical matter". it's true, we can. it's called walking.

[noveeleven]

After reading it wholly, The Jewel of the Seven star is "Dracula but everything is solved by the power of friendship between the Victorian Lady and the Ancient Egyptian Queen whose she's maybe or maybe not the reincarnation". Lady Margaret Trelawney took a look to Queen Tera and she's like:"We have to try to reanimate her in the moder world, I'm telling you as I were her. Also, I just want a best friend". Bonus point: the whole main cast is elated to reanimate the Queen because she was the smartest lady of her time. They want to speak science with her. The Queen returns in the end? No (maybe maybe because in a quasi - horcrux style, she chose to die because her reanimation would kill Lady Margaret), but they all whish she returned to life very much and that awesome. 8/10 just because the characters aren't fleshed out as much as in Dracula

[noveeleven]

elf yuri except one of them is high fantasy and the other is one of santa's

[noveeleven]

Nienna can also be Vesta: the quiet goodness of household who alway make sure there is a kind fire to everyone as Nienna comfort the creation

The silly post about Elrond’s healing just being very strong Dad Energy™️ made me want to put forth a theory I’ve had for a while about what Melian is the Maia of, and how that affects the powers of her descendants.

So it’s no secret that the Valar are a pantheon in the style of the Pre-Christian Europe, like the Greek and Norse pantheons; head-honcho god has bird/sky themes, and all the big archetypes are filled: war, nature, forge, spring, death/doom, chaos, sea, weaving/history, hunting, dancing, dreams, healing/medicine, stars, and pity, the last one being Nienna and a bit of an outlier who makes a lot of sense filling the role that Mary fills in Catholicism, which makes the whole group align better with Tolkien’s Catholic worldview of compassionate deities, a concept that was NOT prevalent in those pre-Christian gods.

A few main members of the archetypal pantheon are missing, One is a god of music, which makes sense because ALL the Ainur are gods of music due to the nature of the universe. Others are taken up by maiar, such as Arien and Tillion being the sun and the moon, Tillion being a Maia of Orome the hunter, which draws Artemis connections, and Arien being a Maia of Vana the ever young. Eonwe is the messenger and

Melian’s role is never expressly defined unlike Arien and Tillion and others. She’s associated with both spring and healing through Vana and Este, and her contribution to the song pre-children seems to be songbirds-more specifically teaching the nightingales to sing songs, since birds should fall under Manwe or Yavanna’s purview (she is said to be akin to Yavanna, but that’s vague and not fleshed out).

But she’s also seen as one of the more powerful Maia, and I don’t see that justified by being the Maia of songbirds. Again, music is ALL of the Ainur’s thing, and what do songbirds have to do with healing, the main power her descendants inherit?

Well, what do songbirds have to do with spring? What is the point of their songs?

It’s attracting a mate. Birds in spring is euphemistically associated with love and sex.

Melian is the only Maia we know of to marry one of the children, and this pantheon is MISSING a goddess of love and marriage and motherhood. Her daughter then goes on to have THE romance of legend, and while Luthien is acting out of love for Beren she is basically unstoppable.

We never see Luthien use her power any other way, outside of her love story, and the idea that she would NOT be as powerful when her songs were not in service of saving her love is actually pretty compelling to me. And also solves the problem of “Why did Luthien, who can put a spell on MORGOTH, let Celegorm and Curufin keep her hostage for a bit.”

The idea of Melian being the Maia of Love and Motherhood also makes sense in context of her abandoning Doriath. If her power comes from love of her husband and daughter, then the girdle was doomed once Thingol died whether she stuck around or not, so her leaving is more forgivable.

Love being such a huge theme in Tolkien’s work, it makes sense why Melian and her descendants are SO powerful. And why they are canonically the most beautiful creatures to walk the earth, as beauty and love are usually intertwined in these figures of mythology.

And Tolkien connects love and healing many times in his work. Aragorn working in the halls of Healing specifically orders Eomer to be the first person Eowyn sees, because her love for her brother is more true than her toxic obsession with him. Also as noted in the other post, his magic healing includes giving them a kiss on the forehead.

Faramir and Eowyn’s whole relationship plays out in the halls of healing, and Eowyn’s arc in this time is seeing no value in healing, either herself or others, until she finds love and hope in Faramir and basically in the same breath vows to become a healer.

Elrond’s compassion and Big Dad Energy and love for everyone is indeed what makes him the best healer in middle earth. And I’m going to argue there is a legit reason for that, with the source of his family’s healing talent being this world’s goddess of love. And of motherhood, which I think translates well to Elrond being everyone’s dad. Perhaps I should say “parenthood” since that is so obviously passed down.

Tl.Dr. Melian is the Maia of love, romantic and familial, which is the source of the Peredhil’s healing powers (and extreme attractiveness).

[noveeleven]

Thinking about Romeo killing himself through poison (more passive, "woman's weapon) Vs Juliet having to kill herself with a knife (more active, images of falling on your sword, typically masculine concepts)

[noveeleven]

hate coming to terms with things. i should be able to cast a fireball instead

[noveeleven]

Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.

[noveeleven]

Arthur: my servant touched me

Geoffrey: Sire, there is no need for you to worry. There are several law books on how to sack a servant, even if he was promoted for saving your life

Arthur: no

Arthur: you don't understand

Arthur: I need more

Geoffrey: ... Sire, there is no need for you to worry. There are several books on master servant erotica available, requested by several of your ancestors.

Arthur: that's my man

[noveeleven]

i think the next arthurian adaptation we need is a nature documentary abt the questing beast, narrated by palamedes

[noveeleven]

Brothers

[noveeleven]

In case y'all don't know, Scrooge McDuck is a Disney princess:

[noveeleven]

no results button this time, if you can't decide either then i guess we can all find out in a week

PLEASE reblog this poll, i really want to get a fandom consensus

[noveeleven]

Dracula season may be over now but I am still very much obsessed with these two

[noveeleven]

I'm trying to figure out who I'd put in an elf fight club to determine the mightiest elf

So far I have:

Glorfindel

Ecthelion

Gil-Galad

Galadriel

Maedhros

Finrod

[noveeleven]

*sigh fondly* Now I've got to watch Fangs of Fortune, whatever it's, right?

Anybody from the Tolkien to C-drama pipeline: are you watching "Fangs of Fortune" and realise that this director could totally and elegantly adapt "The Silmarillion"? Which none of us would ultimately trust PJ with? Would we not love to see this guy's take on Morgoth, on Feanor, on Luthien? Do we not admire how much Edward Guo's aesthetics are truly universally human, beyond the scope of culturally defined roots?