olliecowz

[olliecowz]

Azog the Defiler and ceremonial orc wear

At least my take on it lol

[olliecowz]

My idea for worldbuilding cuisine...Elves are generally masters of "recovery cuisine", initially as a reproductive necessity (giving a new mother the best food possible, and they are obligate queuers with two seperate hierchies for males and females, and they are semi-eusocial, but with a human body plan, yikes !) It's a nearly universal practice amongst elves (like all human cultures have music, for example). However, amongst persecuted human minorities living near elves, the custom did also caught on.

Usually, it would consist of fruit and fermented mushrooms (elves are obligate fungivores), with meat-eating cultures incorporating it due to it's caloric density, usually pretty lean animals such as rabbits, older adult pigeon, lemmings, oysters, mussles, crabs or prawns. Fermented greens or lichens if available might be added to increase iron (after all, plenty of minerals are lost to pregnancy). Seasonnings that increase absorbtion would be added. Infusions and bonebroths might be added as a drink for hydration and nutrition.

The Elven Hunts further exaccerbated the cultural phenomenon, because it made wives nigh-irreplaceable, economically-wise. They also extended it to injured workers and torture victims, to the point in surviving Drow cultures, "soup aunt" is a common stereotype (ienerous with corporal punishment, and encourages others to do so with her nieces and nephews, but always cuddles them afterwards and feeds them soup). The traveler mage culture, being all human, also have a similar stereotype of "vinigar mom".

Usually, the prefered foods would be steamed bread with a topping lactic-acid fermented leafy greens or fruit, and some pine infusion to wash it down.

WAAAAIT THATS COOL ASF

I wanna eat the food in your worldbuilding like idk where I’m gonna get lemming meat but lemme eat it

[olliecowz]

I wonder sometimes why Soubise is so messed up in Innocent. Like...He is messed up, even by Innocent standards, which says a lot.

He probably came from a family like that which is even scarier to think about like. Imagine dealing with a whole clan of that

[olliecowz]

Azog the Defiler in Orc Ceremonial wear

[olliecowz]

Okay, so in my fantasy world, the humans that inhabit Sulifer (a country covered in cold taiga and prairies) would never think of eating protein that isn't vinigaired. The reasons for this are hystorical and hygienic : they had to face a few epidemics in the past that killed a large percentage of their population. Secondly, because of the cold climate, each year, they loose a good number of calves, piglets and lambs to hypothermia, and they can't afford to waste meat. But they are often unable to distinguish those from animals that died/are stillborn due to infection or malnutrition. Also, this is renaissance, so...The chances of prion would be lowered because they don't turn their cows into unwilling cannibals. So yeah, the meat is generally safe to eat, but only after vinigering long cooking and generous to make sure worms or diseases are dead. When meat is not available, they replace it by eating raw or steamed sourdough with lentils, all vinigared to prevent infections. So, they don't even consider unvinigared proteine food to be food.

Your worldbuilding for food has me gagged like- Omfg I need your sources bc its so immersive I NEED you to write a book or a world encyclopedia or smth I would devour it

[olliecowz]

How do you like my version of 12 year old Charles-Henri Sanson ? Is he cute ? Glazed it !

I COULD HAVE PARENTED HIM!! I COULD HAVE MADE SURE HE WAS OK 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

[olliecowz]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[olliecowz]

Lowkey getting my ears pierced just so I can wear these

[olliecowz]

I’m getting into the Three Musketeers and let me tell you the way I SWITCHED SIDES SO HARD after finding out what Athos did to Milady. Like girl I hope you kill his crusty ass I’m on your side

[olliecowz]

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[olliecowz]

i can't fucking shut up about the man that people are starting to call "The Claims Adjuster" because he not only shot that evil fucker but:

wrote deny defend depose on the bullets in sharpie

deliberately left behind a backpack in central park full of fucking monopoly money

and the cherry on top (so far) is that he potentially used a gun that was designed for veterinarians to put down sick animals

its art, its amazing, this is the best thing thats happened in like 10 years and he is my hero. Everything has felt so bleak and this is like a ray of light shining through the dark clouds into my soul

may they never catch him, and may we never find out who he was

[olliecowz]

My main idea is having Johnny and Dally get revived with shimmer by Singed, maybe Dally becomes a sort of Jinx like character while Johnny is more of a post-explosion Viktor

Then they kiss

Hear me out on an Outsider / Arcane au

[olliecowz]

if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do... research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?

[olliecowz]

Hear me out on an Outsider / Arcane au

[olliecowz]

Every few months I get reminded I used to be OBSESSED with The Outsiders

[olliecowz]

WHAT KINDA CAT ARE YOUR MUTUALS

I REALLY WANNA SIT HERE AMD GO THROUGH TAGGING EVERYONE BUT I HAVE TO GO TO BED NOW SO I’LL DO SO TOMORROW!!!