pawthorn

[pawthorn]

It's a cliché to say that Tolkien's experiences in WWI affected all aspects of his writing, how he wrote about friendship and grief, how he wrote about desolate blasted landscapes. But I wish someone who knows more about Tolkien's military career could help me understand how Tolkien related to retreats. His description of Faramir keeping his people together on the retreat from Osgiliath is one of the best-written sequences in the trilogy, and hardly anyone remembers it. It's about a desperate retreat, and a leader whose presence, whose strength manages to keep it from turning into a rout. There's something very vivid in the descriptions: don't break formation, don't start running or they'll pick you off one by one, keep together, keep moving, hold all of that fear at bay. Tolkien describes that retreat as genuinely heroic, a superhuman act of will, one that exhausts Faramir almost to death, and Denethor still does not accept it as heroic because it's a retreat. It saved men but it lost territory, therefore in his eyes it's a failure.

Tolkien has strong opinions about heroic retreats, in the Silmarillion he sometimes gives the retreat-through-the-dangerous-wilderness plotline to female characters (Emeldir, Idril), he always writes them with respect. Sometimes, getting out of there and keeping most of your people alive is a great act of valour. I feel like he must have had a personal experience about what it means to retreat, and what it means to hold a retreat together, and what it means to get no thanks for it.

[pawthorn]

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.

[pawthorn]

"But calling rightwingers weird inbred small dick manchildren allows me to shame them within their system of values"

That's the problem, and you don't see it.

[pawthorn]

I know I’m not the first person to say this but fandom’s seeming need to shove any character dynamic into some kind of familial role (siblings, father-son, mother-daughter etc) increasingly feels just as stifling and dismissive of platonic love as making every relationship romantic does.

I dunno man do you view all of your close friends as siblings cause I sure don’t. and I definitely don’t think of them as parents

[pawthorn]

idk it really bothers me when people make fun of women and try to justify it by saying White Women or Straight Women or Cis Women or whatever because 85% of the time theyre not criticizing white supremacy or heterosexuality or anything to do with harmful gender stereotypes, they're just making fun of women who Happen to belong to a specific group & are trying to justify their misogyny (intentionally or not) by slapping CISHET onto it

[pawthorn]

Reading articles about MrBeast's dominance of YouTube is fucking bizarre because, from my perspective, the dude isn't even on YouTube. I've never watched one of his videos. YouTube has, to the best of my knowledge, never recommended one of his videos to me. Every thumbnail screenshot of his looks like something you could tell me was a photoshopped parody of YouTube culture, and I'd believe you. No one I follow on YouTube ever mentions him, even negatively or in passing. The first time I ever heard his name was in regards to the quality of his ghost kitchens. The only way I know he isn't a mass, shared hallucination is that I've witnessed the thoroughly mid-looking chocolate bars he sells at Walmart for some reason

[pawthorn]

Honestly I think there's something really fucked up about how people still conflate unkind or unpleasant behavior with mental illness and neurodivergence. It's actually not helpful to say that creepy guys might be autistic. It's actually pretty demeaning to assume intelligent people with mental illness or neurodivergence can't learn to at least go through the motions of small talk or develop their cognitive empathy in the absence of strong compassion or develop supporting systems to be punctual and reliable. And also, as someone who is in fact sometimes mean on purpose it's pretty telling how many people respond to deliberate unkindness with "oh there must be something Wrong(TM) with you, for how could a Normal Person ever take issue with my perfect self and flawless behavior? I'm literally nice."

[pawthorn]

sometimes you just wanna respond with shit like "that must be a very comforting fiction to you"

[pawthorn]

some of you think ‘nuanced’ only means ‘morally grey’ and I’m here to tell you that actually straight up good characters can still be nuanced and unapologetically evil characters can still be nuanced. the character doesn’t have to be an anti hero or morally dubious to have depth. they don’t even have to feel sorry about their crimes to have depth.

[pawthorn]

Honestly this gets at my chiefest complaint/frustration/discomfort with fandom as a whole. Which is: in their rush to defend the artistic merit of fanworks I think a ton of people have really valorized transformation and remixing and reinterpretation in and of themselves, when imo those are all quite neutral actions. When done well, they can expand and build upon and subvert meaning in really powerful and thought-provoking (and fun!) ways. When done poorly, they are just as likely to flatten and oversimplify and decontextualize and completely erase meaning. The simple act of changing something does not imbue the choice to do so with creative validity. It is entirely possible for a cover song to be bad (or just boring!). To exactly the same degree that it is possible to transform a pretty shallow and straightforward work into something deeper and more nuanced and subversive, is possible to transform a work into a vastly shallower and less interesting shadow of itself. As with nearly everything in art, it's all about the execution!

But the second you voice this position (which should honestly be a pretty uncontroversial one imo), you get people shrieking at you about being gatekeep-y and pretentious and betraying the sacred fandom etiquette of Don't-Like-Don't-Read.

And like...listen. I was not raised in a barn. I am 150% capable of quietly back-buttoning out of a fanfic I think is bad or boring - which is exactly what I do when I encounter them - and I am obviously not advocating for stupid ships wars or any kind of harassment or leaving hatemail in people's AO3 inboxes. (Which some people will also accuse you of the second you say anything less than lavishly positive about fandom, in true piss-on-the-poor fashion.) Literally all I am saying is that you can't have your cake and eat it too - that if fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) have artistic merit then fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) are fair game for artistic critique. Which means, in practice, that I can go on my own blog and make a post exactly like this one - critiquing broad trends, or stating that some interpretations are bad actually, or pointing out that subverting or talking back to or reading against the grain of canon is very different from simply ignoring it, or saying "fandom's culture of collage/remix/fuck-canon-I-do-what-I-want can lend itself to to really creative and interesting art but also to a lot of really bland homogenized cut-n-paste art, not to mention some pretty troubling decontextualization." And that if you feel this rains on your personal parade, you are then free to DLDR by back-buttoning out of my blog and/or blocking me so you never have to see my hot takes again, rather than clamoring in my notes about how I should let people enjoy things.

[pawthorn]

You're not immune to being the bully btw. You're not immune to being in the wrong

[pawthorn]

This might be a case of “OP thinks it’s common but it’s rare” or “OP just met one weirdo who did not know a common thing.”

Let’s find out!

I’m not gonna elaborate as to what the sandwich technique is because I think that loses the point of my question. Sandwich technique! Reblog for bigger sample size please!

[pawthorn]

💯 but its 000 for when something's fuckall

[pawthorn]

I think maybe the most ironic part of the white supremacist “Muslims are taking over Europe, save European culture and its people!” rhetoric is that they’ve been saying it for the past 1,300 years. No exaggeration. This is something they’ve been fearmongering about since the 8th century.

[pawthorn]

Reverse Air Bud movie about a human basketball player who, on a technicality, enters and wins the westminster dog show

[pawthorn]

ao3 is an awesome website for people who love "open in new tab"

[pawthorn]

the most annoying people are people who don't understand storytelling. they be like "oooo how convenient that this thing happened to the main character in the very beginning". yeah no shit. that's why the story begins here