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rhapsodyinviridescentgold · 2 years ago

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Ooh, I want to know more about the ofermod essay!

Oh!!! Welcome!!! Yes, yes let me tell you about the Ofermod essay!!! Sorry it took me so long to respond! I didn't even realize I had a message until I clicked the tab open by accident. Also I loved your post so much, I want to print it out and eat it or paste it on my wall or both. So in case you haven't read it/for those reading THIS post who haven't read it: the Ofermod essay is typically included in "The Tolkien Reader", which is a bunch of stories and essays and commentaries that JRRT wrote, some of which accompany the legendarium, some of which don't. The Ofermod essay is an expansion on JRRT's short play "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (be-york-noth), Berohthelm's Son" which in turn was inspired by a fragment of Old English poetry commonly called "The Battle of Maldon" and depicts a battle between the people who would become the English and what were essentially Vikings. "The Battle of Maldon" is about an Old English king/earl/noble of some sort, Beorhtnoth, in the perfect position to have the Vikings forced into a bottle neck where it would be very easy to kill them. The Vikings, not liking the idea of being killed, sent a message to Beorhthnoth being like "hey dude, just killing us in a bottleneck is not Heroic. how about you let us get super close and then we can brawl like Real Men, From The Legends of Old" and despite everyone around him saying that was a bad idea, Beorhthnoth is like "oh hell yeah, I love the old hero stories! Let's totally do that!" And long story short the Vikings obliterate the English and it's all Beohthnoth's fault.

The play that Tolkien wrote features two servants who are sent to the bloodied and death-ruled battlefield to find the body of the king and bring it back to the Ely Cathedral for burial. The play is seven pages long, but the general gist is that one is super hyped to be here for the opportunity to even be in the wings of such a grand and heroic battle and the other is...fucking exhausted, because he knows war is nothing but misery and pain and death and that there's nothing heroic about a king who's pride and desire to match up with the legends of old only results in more misery and more pain and more death. Then comes the Ofermod essay! In Old English, the original line describing Beorhtnoth's folly appears "ða se eorl ongan for his ofermode alyfan landes to fela laƿere ðeode" which is translated to "then the earl in his overmastering pride actually yielded ground to the enemy, as he should not have done". As you can see from the English translation, the incredulousness of "actually" and the condemnation of the words "as he should not have done" indicate quite clearly that, even in the era of the writing of the text, Beorhthnoth displayed a completely atrocious amount of overzealous pride and that resulted in the death of everyone in his household, all of his soldiers, and likely a good number of his common people too.

In the essay, Tolkien expands a bit on the myth of the heroic poem and the "northern heroic spirit" and touches on how it influences perceptions of people, and how they become willing to buy into the myth because they want to believe in it. In the case of Beorhthnoth, it's because of "a character, we may surmise, not only formed by nature, but moulded also by 'aristocratic tradition', enshrined in tales and verse of poets". This idea that you must give more than what you are able to give and die upon the idea of heroism because it's part of the messaging you've internalized. Basically, being heroic is so romanticized, that logic flies out the window. Tolkien also states: "Yet this element of pride, in the form of the desire for honor and glory, in life and after death, tends to grow, to become a chief motive, driving man beyond the bleak heroic necessity to excess." Then Tolkien totally rips into him with such phrases like: "he was responsible for all the men under him, not to throw away their lives except (my emphasis) with one object, the defense of the realm" and "It was wholly unfitting that he should treat a desperate battle with this sol real object as a sporting match" and "Why did Beorhthnoth do this? Owing to a defect of character, no doubt" Which is....so incredibly harsh. Totally true! I agree 100%! But my god JRRT the "Owing to a defect of character, no doubt" absolutely kills me. Anyways, I belive it's clear how heartily Tolkien disapproves of this irresponsible "excess" as he calls it.

So if you'll allow me to throw my hat into the ring on LOTR analysis, I also want to support your side in agreeing that the idea of "self appointed hero" vs "doing what you can" is an important detail to bring up! I think in Middle Earth, which is so haunted by the past, but specifically haunted by songs of the past and old heroic endeavors of those of Túrin Turambar, Lúthien and Beren, Tuor, Eärendil, etc., then it only follows that the races of that world are constantly inundated with what has come before, of when times were greater and acts of heroism grander and this likely shapes the heroic aspirations many of the incredibly compelling characters in Middle Earth. The myth of heroics builds on itself, becomes more powerful as the stories grow and are handed down (which, I believe, may be influenced by the Power of the Word in Arda, but we don't have time for that right now) and ends up affecting the tragic heroes all across the timeline. If we use Boromir as an example, most of us already know and accept that there was lots of pressure on him to be of service to Gondor and to help his city, but I believe this was compounded by the influence of the heroes who came before. He was constantly being pushed and prodded by Denethor to be stronger, greater, more. Gondor itself is also defined by What It Was and the Good Old Days, which definitely doesn't help. And I believe it's basically impossible for a young man to not internalize some of those messages. And now, on the quest, he's in the company with elves and dwarves, doing things that you hear of in legends like fighting Balrogs. He's literally with Aragorn! A prophesied king! Is it any wonder he felt the weight of legend like a noose around his throat? Is it any wonder why he wouldn't have tried to do what songs had told him to do, and make a place for himself in the annals of heroic legend? Which is, of course, an ambition and a weakness the Ring leveraged.

I hope that isn't too much speculation at the end there. I just think this concept of Ofermod that Tolkien explores ties in really well with your extremely well verbalized analysis! In addition, I think the Ofermod essay can also allow some insight into character motivations and how they're influenced by the culture surrounding them, and also in investigating the importance of song and history in the context of it's influence over Arda, and how the reverberations can shape even distant events. But that's an essay for another time, haha. This got super long but I just got so excited!!

#richard talks #should be richard rambles at this point lmfao #warrioreowynofrohan

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your-brilliant-lady-m · 3 years ago

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Part 2 - Basic Concepts of Miraculous Ladybug: Kwami

Kwamis are a fun concept and one of the main draws of the series. They make sense story-wise because, firstly, our characters need some support system. And since a lot of conflicts are centred around secret identities, characters should be able to discuss their double life with someone. As magical beings they could also be used to expand the lore, introduce new concepts and drive forward both the plot and character development. It doesn't always happen but Kwamis are a good idea. Some people who write AU's think that Kwamis are redundant, but I have to disagree.

Origins and nature

Where do Kwamis come from? What are they? It's never explained. Oh wait, it was explained in a comic people can accidentally find. You decide to explain the origins and nature of magical beings who are one of the key elements in your magic system and worldbuilding IN A SIDE COMIC, which has zero effect on your main story. Sounds legit.

Here it is.

So, Kwamis are abstract creatures. They can become tangible and interact with the world because of the miraculous jewels. Essentially, each Miraculous acts as an anchor to the material world for Kwami. They existed since the beginning of time and were invisible observers of the universe. Until they settled on Earth and observed how humanity came to be. This is where things get interesting.

Kwamis are the embodiment of abstract concepts. But, some abstract concepts were created by people (like everything mentioned in the comic: beauty, math, love, etc).

Kwamis wanted to help humans. And then, a human, who couldn't see, hear or touch a Kwami creates miraculous jewels. And now these beings can interact with the world, use their powers and grant them to humans. Yet, they are completely under control of their holder. I'll discuss it later, but why did Kwamis accept this deal? They are practically enslaved. At the same time they care about people and generally love humanity.

According to the wiki Kwamis grant powers because of "the privilege of having the ability to be perceived by mortals". What? Did I read that right? Kwamis agreed to be enslaved and used as a power source, because they wanted to interact with material world. That's it, guys, end of the story.

We also know these things about nature and abilities of Kwamis from the show:

1) need food, but only to provide the power for the holder;

2) can't phase through precious metals (Chloe's bracelet in "Rogercop"), their own miraculous and humans;

3) they can control if they phase through things or not – meaning that if they want to, they can (this way Tikki can stay in Marinette’s purse without much trouble and Plagg sleeps on Adrien’s pillow);

4) they can perform magic without a holder but they don’t control it very well, there are certain types of things that they can’t do without a holder;

5) they are immortal but can get sick for some reason, a non-magical reason mind you;

6) technology can't detect them in any way, you can't film, photograph or record their voices (writers establish this many times, but promptly forget all about their own rules in "Optigami", where Marinette talks with Kwamis over the phone without any problems).

If I missed something important, then let me know.

Look, the questions related to origins and motivations of Kwamis might not be very prominent in your story right now, but you must answer them in case you might need to involve these facts in the plot down the line. It's important to avoid contradictions in the serialised story with liquid plot, that can't be set in stone. It's a made up world for the sake of everything sacred! You can make up explanations and rules, of course as long as they don't contradict common sense.

Plausible ideas for origins and nature of Kwamis:

1) Kwamis are immortal spirits, whom humans accidentally summoned and bound with spells to Miraculous stones. They remember their existence before this. This version doesn't really explain their desire to serve people and love for humanity, however. It would be more logical for Kwamis to resent people for enslaving them. It doesn't explain how humans could create those spells and Miraculous stones either.

2) Kwamis are physical manifestations of abstract concepts who existed simply as fragments of matter for a very long time without sentience, until they were accidentally summoned through the Miraculous stones and bound by humans to serve them. Kwamis do not remember their existence before Miraculous. In this version Kwamis serve humans and love them because they have never known a different kind of existence. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide any explanation on the creation of Miraculous and spells.

3) Kwamis are gods, who created the universe with all its elements and concepts including humanity (similar to Valar and Maiar in Tolkien's Legendarium). They wanted to help their creations but discovered that their power was too wild and unpredictable for that. So, Kwamis decided to give up their free will and magical independence to help humanity. Together they created Miraculous stones for humans to use and sealed themselves inside. Kwamis as gods were abstract concepts, who didn't have a body. The act of sealing their power in the Miraculous gave them an opportunity to interact with outside world (an anchor) and each Kwami chose an small animal form (because humans easily formed bonds with animals, had animal companions (pets), small animals look non-threatening and familiar). Kwamis intentionally choose certain animal forms to suit the human symbolism. Humans later used magic that Kwamis discovered for them to place spells upon small gods (spells related to identity protection and so on). This version answers most questions, but if Kwamis are gods then powers they grant to people seem to be rather small.

Feel free to add more. I would be interested to hear your ideas.

Identity Protection

In "Origins" we learn that Wayzz can sense the aura of Butterfly Miraculous, a negative aura of activated Butterfly Miraculous, to be more precise. And yet, Tikki and Plagg are genuinely surprised to discover the identities of their holders in "Dark Owl". There are several things wrong with that.

Can Kwamis sense each other's presence? They shouldn't be able to do this to protect the identities of their holders. On the other hand, they are ancient spirits. So, their inability to sense each other seems weird. Unless it's the same situation as with the spell that does not allow them to speak the name of their holder aloud.

But if they can sense each other like Wayzz did, then it means that Plagg and Nooroo were living in the same house for over a year and nothing happened. I mean, Plagg could have just come upstairs, take off the brooch from Gabriel, while he is asleep and return it back to Fu.

This question lies right here, on the surface. And that's only one massive and very obvious plothole. How to fix it? Establish that Kwami can't sense each other for identity protection. In "Origins" Fu meditates on his balcony and Wayzz sees a charged Akuma flying by. That's how they discover that Butterfly is in Paris and the Miraculous is in the wrong hands. Perhaps, Gabriel akumatizes someone for the first time to survey the surroundings and general public is not aware of this. This works better in the narrative, giving Fu time to select holders for Ladybug and Black Cat. It also establishes whether Hawkmoth can remove the Akuma from someone without Ladybug and discharge it. Maybe it depends on the circumstances (sometimes he can, but if this person was akumatized many times or their emotions are too strong and their mind doesn't want to let Akuma go then Hawkmoth can't pull the butterfly out with his magic). This scenario allows for Volpina to happen on "Heroes' Day". Silly recurring Akumas like Gigantitan and Mr. Pigeon could still happen. In this case Gabriel didn't want to akumatize the guy more than 70 times on purpose. It just keeps happening against his better judgement because evil butterflies are automatically attracted to Mr. Ramier. This way repeated attacks of Mr. Pigeon annoy Hawkmoth just as much as they do the heroic duo of Paris (I did not sign up for this Nathalie!).

Let's come back to the spell mentioned earlier for a moment. Kwamis can't say the name of their current holder out loud, but apparently, they can exploit a loophole in the spell by confirming the identity of their holder in another way. The spell doesn't work with other holders. Kwami can say the names of other holders if they know their identity. That being said, can the holder order the Kwami to tell them the identities of other heroes if they know them?

Kwamis know how each Miraculous looks with or without camouflage. Can the holder order the Kwami to tell them how each Miraculous looks in disguise (I liked that Grimoire doesn't have pictures of camouflage for identity protection)? Guardians can recognise Miraculous in any mode (Su Han). Did Fu teach Marinette this? Does she know how each Miraculous looks like unactivated?

Oh! Since we are discussing camouflage, let's take a moment to appreciate the Mother Of All Plotholes. Plagg didn't recognise Peacock because of the plot.

Relationship with Holder

I absolutely loved the idea that Kwamis must obey their holder introduced in "Sandboy". This concept opens tons of plot opportunities. It's such a great idea that makes sense, has potential, can create conflict. Why, oh, why didn't writers develop it more?

Like, it was so good. It can be a great push for character development. This concept resolves so many existing inconsistencies within the plot. It's mind-blowing.

Why can't Nooroo simply leave Gabriel, so that he wouldn't be able to transform? Because Gabriel bound him with Miraculous to always stay near.

In "Sandboy" Tikki asks Marinette's permission before going to the meeting. Plagg lies to Adrien instead. This implies that usually Plagg's holders weren't kind to him or feared his power (Su Han's remark in "Furious Fu"). Perhaps, his holders were taught to keep the Kwami of destruction under constant control. So, Plagg in turn has learned not to ask, because if he doesn't ask permission then his holder can't deny him freedom with magic.

Can Kwami lie to their holder? Maybe they can't lie to their holder about their nature, origins and powers and other Miraculous (but Kwamis can't reveal the location of Miracle Box, Guardian's identity and can't confirm identities of other holders known to them in any way). Kwami would be forced to speak even if they don't want to. That's why Nooroo told Gabriel everything about the abilities of the Butterfly Miraculous and the wish secret of Ladybug and Black Cat.

But Kwamis can lie to their holder according to Plagg in "Sandboy". If Kwamis can lie about everything (including powers) then Nooroo didn't have any reason to be honest with Gabriel way back in "Origins".

Speaking of Gabriel and Nooroo. Can Kwamis harm their holder? Maybe doing so would harm the Kwami as well. Can they do it only when the holder is not wearing the Miraculous? Can Kwami take their Miraculous from their holder? Will they disappear if they try to do so? It seems like Kwami disappears only when the holder takes off the Miraculous with the intention of renouncing power, the words "I renounce you" are not necessary.

Other Kwamis can take the Miraculous from people if it's not their own (Wayzz in "Feast"). But what if it wasn't possible. Imagine what could happen if it's not possible to take the Miraculous by force from the transformed or untransformed hero. Just like Lady WiFi couldn't remove Ladybug's mask. A person has to willingly give up the Miraculous. Only in this case, it's possible to take it. For example, somewhere around the middle of season 3 Hawkmoth could have trapped Ladybug and Chat Noir and cut off any escape routes. His Akuma tries to take both Miraculous, but they don't budge. Then afterwards, every Akuma tries to manipulate the heroes using hostages, illusions or mind control. It's hard to say whether this version will be better than canon, but it's a fascinating theory.

You can use the idea of obedience to create more situations contrasting the relationship of Plagg and Adrien, Gabriel and Nooroo. I liked how canon created a storyline about Plagg learning to control his powers without a holder and Adrien helping him. However, why would you stop here? Give us some flashbacks about Plagg's previous holders, tell us what kind of people they were. Expand the lore and add some character development for Plagg and Adrien. The same thing goes for Marinette. What kind of battles did they have in the past? What kind of people past holders were? Did Ladybug and Black Cat heroes always get along well? Were they allies or enemies? Were they always lovers?

Give us more information about Butterfly and Peacock holders. Perhaps Nooroo has dreams about his past holders who were good people. Show us what kind of things a Butterfly holder with good intentions can do. Tell us more about Duusu and her past holders, sprinkle in a few bits of info about Emilie and Duusu's relationship, just a few vague hints to preserve the mystery. You have a lot of screentime each season and instead of doing filler episodes dedicated to love drama, you can use them for developing minor characters, relationships between them and lore.

#miraculous ladybug #ml #miraculous analysis #miraculous meta #ml meta #ml analysis #miraculous transformations #miraculous critical #miraculous ladybug critical #miraculoustalesofladybugandcatnoir #kwami #miraculous kwamis #miraculous holders

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tolkien-feels · 3 years ago

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So @theleakypen said this a while ago

And I, being both a simple person who will take any excuse to talk about Rosie Cotton, and a busy person who really shouldn't be writing essays about anything, decided to compromise by giving the tldr version of a hypothetical essay

I’ll be the first to admit there's very little Rosie canon, so anything said about her is up for discussion. But then again, the same goes for a lot of Tolkien characters and that’s never stopped anyone from conjecturing, so I won’t let it stop me either.

I actually want to begin this with something that’s not clear-cut canon: the unpublished epilogue. More precisely, a part of it that is referenced in RotK:

Master Samwise stood at the door and looked away eastward. He drew Mistress Rose to him, and set his arm about her.

‘March the twenty-fifth!’ he said. ‘This day seventeen years ago, Rose wife, I didn’t think I should ever see thee again. But I kept on hoping.’

‘I never hoped at all, Sam,’ she said, ‘not until that very day and then suddenly I did. About noon it was, and I felt so glad that I began singing. And mother said: ‘Quiet, lass! There’s ruffians about.’ And I said: ‘Let them come! Their time will soon be over. Sam’s coming back.’ And you came.’

‘I did,’ said Sam. ‘To the most belovedest place in all the world. To my Rose and my garden.’

I’ll skip over Rosie’s inexplicable intuition (though of course that’s an important Tolkien trope, and usually reserved for particularly special characters), and just focus on the actual events of the day. According to Rosie, she thought Sam was dead, but suddenly (though it made no logical sense), she began to sing in defiance of evil, with bold, sudden hope. Now, is it me or have we heard this story before? Anyone remember Sam refusing to bid the stars farewell and singing in the tower of Cirith Ungol? What about Fingon harping a song of Valinor in Morgoth’s own realm? And of course, Luthien singing in Tol-in-Gaurhoth is legendary. Songs of hope in defiance of evil after the loss of a loved one are. A pattern. But Rosie bends this pattern in two very significant ways.

The first is that the lost one is supposed to answer the song. That’s the whole point of it! That’s how they’re found! But Rosie’s song goes unanswered. For me, that really changes my reading of her half-serious impatience when Sam finally returns to the Shire (”You haven’t hurried, have you?”) - at first I had just assumed this showed just how little hobbits of the Shire understand the Quest, and while I still think that plays a large part, there’s more to it. Tolkien’s very worldbuilding rules dictate that Sam should come back to her when she sings, but he takes forever to do that, and all the while Rosie isn’t sure if her hope will pay off. I can see where she’s coming from with her impatience!

The other way Rosie breaks the pattern is that she doesn’t play the role of rescuer. Or at least it’s not immediately obvious that she does. But I think Rosie does rescue Sam in a way, from the darkness of the Quest and the horror of finding the Shire so changed by the Scouring. Thinking along these lines, I can’t help but think of Luthien healing the winter of Thingol with the touch of her hand. Perhaps Rosie does something similar. Unlike Luthien, Rosie belongs to the aftermath of a great quest. She belongs to the part of the story where the land is turned green by the happy couple -- which, in a way, Sam does, and I see no reason why Rosie doesn’t help in her own way, though the book never openly mentions it.

I’d even risk saying that besides the Silmarillion, LotR itself presents a parallel: Rosie and Sam are a smaller scale of Arwen and Aragorn (who are a small scale of Luthien and Beren, who are a small scale of Melian and Thingol...) Not only do both of these LotR relationships go way back to events that happen before the story, but they also seem to both represent the same hard work of building up what was torn down by the war.

In a letter, Tolkien once mentioned that "I think the simple ‘rustic’ love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his (the chief hero’s) character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests, sacrifice, causes, and the ‘longing for Elves’, and sheer beauty."

Rosie, in her very ordinary, humble way, is no less important than Melian and Luthien and Arwen - she's both a symbol of hope and a bringer of life. Far from just being an afterthought to give Sam a happy ending, she is herself part of the Quest. Frodo set out to save the Shire - she stays behind and eventually saves it too by making it the green, sweet place it is meant to be.

In all of this, I don’t mean to make Rosie some kind of... extraordinary, queenly, fated person. Much like Sam, I think the entire point of her character is the heroism of ordinary people. She doesn’t have to be outstanding in every way to be important.

I could probably keep going and talk about how whatever little we know of her personality points to her being rather similar to Sam (listens to stories with shining eyes, thinks highly of Frodo, treats courage and loyalty as a matter of common-sense, very practical, close to her family), but this is already longer than I meant it to be so I’ll leave it at that.

#i'm eyeballing it but i think this must be like a thousand words #i can't believe i accidentally wrote an essay anyway

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undercat-overdog · 3 years ago

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You mentioned that you don't think Sauron ended up in the void? But doesn't the line 'followed him down the same ruinous path to the void' imply that he did,?

Thanks for the ask! My reasons below:

Return of the King has him become a shadow blown away, in the The Field of Cormallen:

And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.

Tolkien's deuterocanonical writings (Morgoth's Ring esp, I think in the Letters too but that’s still in a moving box) talks about how he's an weak spirit incapable of pulling himself out of a state of impotent rage and longing, and logically thus still in Ea:

Thus Sauron was said to have fallen below the point of ever recovering [after the loss of the Ring], though he had previously recovered. What is probably meant is that a ‘wicked’ spirit becomes fixed in a certain desire or ambition [...] - Morgoth’s Ring, Notes on motives in the Silmarillion, footnote 11

Morgoth didn't end up in the Void because of his metaphysical state or because he had diminished himself but because the Valar sent him there:

But Morgoth himself the Valar thrust through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void - The Silmarillion, Of the Voyage of Earendil

Morgoth’s Ring is actually a bit more complex than that and somewhat contradictory - saying that if he were truly thrust out of Ea it would have required the intervention of Eru, though whatever the Valar did had functionally the same effect. There’s actually a super interesting bit about him brooding on the edges of the solar system (Arda) wanting to come back into Ambar the planet - notes on motives is part of Myths Transformed, with all its weird cosmology and in which the Void is apparently outer space, not unbeing. But basically the Valar either thrust him into the Void, whatever it is, or did the equivalent.

Anyways, whatever happened to Morgoth was the doing of the Valar, who then held Morgoth, who was still in physical form at the time, in captivity. Since Sauron is not in their custody, they can’t do anything to him,* and that custody absolutely matters (they can’t do anything to Sauron from Valinor and would need to go to Middle-earth and, wanting to avoid more drowned continents, sent the Istari). Moreover, Morgoth’s Ring also talks about how the Ainur who entered Ea are bound to it and can’t depart without the intervention of Eru (I don’t think Tolkien ever talked about what happened to Gandalf when he died, but I am very curious about that.)

*the Void may come up in Bones, since Sauron is very much in the land of the Valar in that fic.

The same thing happened to Sauron as happened to Saruman, save that Sauron immediately post-destruction was far larger and more threatening and he seems to retain more... idk, size, than Saruman, since Sauron was far more powerful to begin with. (The “chief of Aule’s people” originally; Sauron’s in the top tier of Maiar.) I could swear Tolkien says that explicitly in one of the letters, but I can’t check rn so don’t quote me.

But anyways, weak spirit is the natural metaphysical outcome, need the Valar/Eru to be Voided? I’ve read the sentence you quoted as metaphorical? Or describing what he did wrt making himself a dark lord.

As a general rule, I give a lot of weight to Morgoth’s Ring when it comes to the nature of the Ainur and I think things like “followed to the Void” can be metaphorical - see Gandalf telling the Witch-king to go to the nothingness that awaits him, which I am not sure is metaphysically possible in Arda, given the Gift of Men; I don’t think anything can take away that particular gift of Eru’s. Others may disagree.

I hope that answers the question? I am, as is probably apparent, always happy to talk about Sauron, so thank you :)

#meta #sauron #myths transformed is fantastic for its information on sauron #and morgoth and the other valar if you're interested in them #ask #anonymous #update from nov 2023 undercat: i definitely think that 'followed him into the void' line is metaphorical #yes i don't think it fits the metaphysics of arda (as they exist in the later writings; which are what i use)#but also i don't think we should take everything literally #there's lots of things that really aren't literal

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bitletsanddrabbles · 4 years ago

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Theater vs. Books

One thing that has routinely shocked me in the Downton Abbey fandom is how little people seem to know about how TV works, particularly when compared to written fiction.

Examined logically, this should probably not be surprising. I’ve been involved off and on in school plays, church plays, acting camps, etc. for as long as I can remember. I actually went into university on an acting ticket, only to switch when I realized I’d get ulcers if I tried to make a living at it. Between writing classes and Dad going “Honey! The Vacation Bible School skit scripts are terrible again this year! Can you fix them?” I have way more scripting know how than I realize, not to mention directing since I then directed all the skits. I took a few combined study classes in college that involved film and, of course, my BA is creative writing, which does not make me the be all and end all of writing knowledge (there are people who haven’t taken a writing class in their lives who can out write me), but does mean that I have more idea what the different parts of a story are and how they fit together than someone who just took high school English.

However, one of my personal neurosis is that I know the education system I went through is substandard and that I am bad at research, therefore I expect the entire world to know more than I do. From a logical stand point this is rubbish, but try telling my psyche that when someone talks about how bad an actor is and then holds up a badly directed piece with a lousy script. (Guy in high school who insisted Nicole Kidman couldn’t act because Batman Forever, I am so looking at you.)

I mean, really. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve done or how much I know. If I am the only person on the planet who did not, at age five, win an academy award for my first screen play, which I also produced, directed, and starred it, everyone else should know more than me.

Don’t think I can’t see that trophy you’re hiding behind your back.

So for the sake of spreading awareness of what education I do have and helping my neurotic little mind cope with the reality that I’m not the least education person on earth, I’d like to make a few points on theater - both stage and film - versus the written word.

- Theater is an incredibly limited art form. Unlike prose where your narrator can spend pages taking you deep into a character’s psyche, most theater is restricted to communicating entirely thorough what can be seen and said in dialogue or monologue. Some theatrical pieces do use a narrator, but a lot of disadvantages to this in an acted piece (it creates pacing issues, people find it off putting, etc.), so it’s not common. Now, since people perceive emotions differently based on their personal experience, getting an entire audience on board with a nuanced performance is basically impossible. Take sarcastic characters, for example. In a book, you can say that a character made a sarcastic joke that wasn’t meant to be malicious, but that people got offended anyway. Different people will read it different ways - some people will insist it was malicious despite the explicit statement it wasn’t, etc. - but the story has told you the impression you’re intended to get. In theater, your actor has to be sarcastic, the other actors react poorly, and even if you write in, “I was only joking, geeze”, it’s up to the audience to decide whether that was true or not.

So no matter how good your actors, directors, and writers are, it will always be tricky to nail down the intended authorial intent of any one scene or character.

- Theater requires a large budget. Writing does not. Seriously, these days technology is all about multitasking. It’s pretty much gotten to the point that you can buy a toaster and write a story on it. The most expensive books to write I know of are the early Harry Potter novels because JKR wrote in notebooks with pens. Oh yeah, and she bought coffee to drink while she did it. Now, you can argue that computers still cost a fair amount of money, but they’re pretty much a one time expenditure (unless you insist on upgrading or you break it or something basically not-inherent to computer owning).

Every time an actor walks on a stage or screen, they earn money. Every time a character changes clothes, that costs money. Every time there’s a scene (mostly stage) or location (mostly film) change, that costs money. Every time something catches fire, that costs money. Every rehearsal costs money. Theater is one, big shopping list.

- Theater has time limits. Books do not. One of the things in the budget for a theatrical production is space for that production to be seen. It’s a stage or a park or a movie theater or TV air time. All of that costs money and how much you can buy depends not only on how much money you have, but how much time the owners of the theater, park, TV station, etc. are willing to give you.

This means unlike book editors and publishers who can look at a work so stinking long no one would pay for it or want to hold it up long enough to read and go “Sorry, Mr. Tolkien, but we’re going to have to break this into three parts,” the people writing scripts need to try and meet a strict time limit - not shorter, not longer - and if they go over, the editors have to actually take stuff out.

The closest thing writing really has to this is things like drabble challenges where you have to tell a story in an exact number of words. When these first hit Live Journal they were popular because they were a challenge. When they started losing favor, it was because 90% of the time you wound up sacrificing good writing for word count.

Theater, thankfully, is generally a bit more forgiving, but still. Telling a segment of story in a one hour time slot - or a full story in two hours - is not a walk in the park.

- Theater is not a one pony show. There are so many times I have seen people criticize an actor or director or script writer for something that is blatantly not their fault (see above), that I can’t even begin to count them. Theater is a group effort. If someone blows their lines, it’s not the script writer’s fault. If a director insists that an actor ham it up, that is not a reflection of the actor’s skills. There are times when directors actively screw up the action and the script writer doesn’t get a chance to fix it. An example of this is Downton Abbey, season two, where Anna and Ethel were supposed to be fluffing the couch cushions - the part you sit on - by dropping them. This was filmed as them dropping the throw pillows, which made no sense, and by the time Julian Fellows got to see the rushes, there wasn’t time (or money) to redo the scene. So we’re stuck with two maids who apparently don’t know how to fluff pillows and, if you do know how to fluff pillows and have not read the scripts with authors commentary, an audience who assumes that the writer was the person who got it wrong.

- In theater, especially film, mistakes are forever. This is more or less true in traditionally published writing as well, but it’s amendable. If an author makes a typo or gets off in their timeline or forgets where Dr. Watson’s war wound was in the last story, it’s set in stone for the already printed edition, but can, if the author so chooses, be corrected in later printings. Similarly, in stage theater a gaffed line is gaffed and there’s no un-gaffing it, but you can get it right in the next show.

An error in film is set in stone until someone decides to do a remake.

- In no institutionalized story telling medium is the audience comprised of one person. Unless someone is telling you a bedtime story, the story is not meant to cater solely to you. In fanfiction, which is amateur by definition, you can appeal to as niche a group as you like. In professional story telling, you need to appeal to as broad an audience as possible if you want to be successful. In theater, with it’s time constraints, this means every time spent on one plot line is time that can’t be spent on another plot line. In order to please the fans of character A, you have to take story time away from the fans of character B and vice versa. It’s a balancing act where you try to please everyone, and pleasing everyone is impossible. And everyone I’ve seen say “We really didn’t see enough of (x) in this show! We were robbed!” has a plot (y) that “served no purpose” that could have been sacrificed for their satisfaction, but guess what? Someone loved plot (y), wanted to see more of it, and thinks (x) could have been cut out to make that happen. The reason the creator gave us a little bit of both instead of a lot of one and nothing of the other is not because the don’t care about the fans of (x) or (y), but because they care equally about both of them.

They have to.

It’s their job.

#theater #film #writing #books #how things work

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phoenixrisesoncemore · 5 years ago

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It’s true, I personally think the universe is really amazing yet also really stupid, but maybe it’s because I think of it as another rough in-process draft of an indefinite number, to use your metaphor. But anyway if going by the premise + logic of what you say at the end of your post, how would one theoretically know that this universe isn’t the result of someone else remaking a former, even shittier/less amazing universe into something less shitty/even more amazing.

Hi, Anon. Sorry this took me a bit. I think that’s a great question (like, I can’t quite express how great because it gets too close to some other writing I am doing for me to talk about it too much right now, but it’s a *really* great question)!

[Note this is in response to this post.]

In the real world, I’m not sure there’s anyway we *could* know if we are living in one of a series of universes and most especially whether the cause of the “Genesis” of any of said universes was the result of the action of a conscious being working to “improve” on its predecessor, but it’s fascinating to consider! It’s really a *series* of great questions:

Are we in one of a linear series of universes?

Can we know if and how the previous universe in the series differed from ours?

Can we know if our current universe was engineered by a consciousness in the previous universe in response to fundamental conditions in the previous universe?

Is the current universe in some way ethically superior to the previous one and how would we measure that?

According to Cosmology

If we take out the metaphysical/theological/moral aspect as well as the “intention of a conscious instigator” aspect (that is, stick to question 1) it’s basically cosmology’s “Big Bounce” hypothesis (Einstein’s cyclic model, for example) where the universe doesn’t begin or end, but simply collapses and then re-expands in a cycle forever—Crunch, Bang, Crunch, Bang, etc. Something I’ve wondered for a while: if this is true, could there be any evidence available to us that past cycles existed and, if so, what they were like? I don’t know what such evidence would be (not that I’m, like, an expert :D), but that’s just a small part of the question you’re asking.

I don’t remember if the underlying “laws” of the universe were conceived as capable of changing between cycles in this conception—is gravity still the same, is there still electromagnetism, is there still entropy?(1) If we want to do more than limit this question to the material/mechanical “is it possible?” by looking at the moral implications(2) then we’d need for some of the underlying laws to be able to change.

There is an alternative to the Big Bounce: each universe (a) may create new universes (b, c, d, ...) through some action(s) either within the universe (a) or outside of all universes. White holes are an example of the former: new, separate universes beginning from singularities inside white holes in our universe. Brane Theory postulates that this happens when meta structures outside the universe called “branes” bump into each other; this would be an example of the latter. And I’ve seen versions of hypotheses for both that suggest the fundamental laws of nature need not be the same among the universe (a) and the universes (b, c, d, ... ). But as far as I know (and that’s not necessarily saying a lot :) ), no one has found a way to make these hypotheses falsifiable.

Still none of that addresses the conscious intent question, to say nothing of the last question; the last is, of course, quite subjective.

According to Religion

I’m not very familiar with religious/philosophical(3) conceptions of Creation as cyclical, though I know they exist in Buddhist and Hindu models as well as in the ancient Mayan religion. I’m afraid I don’t know which, if any, view this process as one with a goal or direction. Is growth and improvement of the universe and its mechanisms from cycle to cycle important in the same way as it can be said to be important for living creatures within it in these models? Furthermore, do any suggest that any such improvement is, was, should be, or will be the result of conscious, intentional actions? Can anyone help me out on this one?

It’s a fascinating prospect though. I’d even say it’s a hopeful prospect (and maybe, just maybe, not entirely out of line within the context of Tolkien—see below)!

[Forgive me if I get a bit over-explicatory and didactic here—it helps me to write all this out, even if it might be common knowledge to readers, particularly in the Silm fandom.]

For the purpose of my previous post, I’m speaking (somewhat obtusely) about Tolkien’s cosmological/metaphysical belief system which, at least by the time of the writing of the contents of the published Silmarillion, is somewhat in line with his underlying Catholic faith. The issue at hand, of course—and the issue that Tolkien was trying to “solve” (or at least consider)—was The Problem of Evil.

How does someone working from a Christian perspective square the fact that the world is filled with horrific pain and suffering with belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God? David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion expressed the problem thusly: "Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?"(4)

One such answer to this question includes an appeal to Free Will—after all, if people are to be allowed Free Will, then they must be allowed to use that will to commit evil, even if an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God would prefer they did not, since that is the definition of Free Will. And this may be convincing for some—or even for me on good days so far as it goes—but it does not address the fact that the natural world, up to and including processes that are several steps removed from consciousness/will (or even life!), generates the conditions for suffering. Free Will may explain why God tolerates things as unconscionable as genocide, but it does not explain why most of Nature consists of suffering as an integral part of its mechanism: we can see the fear in the prey animal’s eyes when it hears the twig snap, but the predator has to eat, too. Suffering is required for the system to run. The story of The Fall as told in Genesis may explain why such suffering happens to human beings, but it does not explain why it happens to everything else, why The Whole Damn Thing Is Fallen.

Enter Melkor stage left.

Tolkien’s Felix Culpa

There’s a quote in one of Tolkien’s letters where he addresses The Problem of Evil almost directly. Tolkien is writing to his son, Christopher, during his RAF training during WWII. Christopher was the child closest in mind to Tolkien, himself, and I am sure his proximity to danger at this time was especially hard for Tolkien on a number of levels. In Letter #66 Tolkien writes the following:

“I think also that you are suffering from suppressed ‘writing’. That may be my fault. You have had rather too much of me and my peculiar mode of thought and reaction. And as we are so akin it has proved rather powerful. Possibly inhibited you. I think if you could begin to write, and find your own mode, or even (for a start) imitate mine, you would find it a great relief. I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes(5).” —Letter #66, to Christopher Tolkien, 6 May, 1944

The cosmology and theodicy of Tolkien’s Secondary World (Middle-earth, Arda, Ea) is laid out in the first chapter of The Silmarillion (Ainulindale, aka “The Music of the Ainur”) and represents an attempt to “make sense” of a world that could generate the kind of evil he had experienced in his life. If I may postulate: the death, during his childhood, of first his father and then mother; what he perceived as his mother’s martyrdom for her Catholic faith; and the endless mechanized, brutal, and senseless horror of WWI.

The answer to this for Tolkien was Melkor/Morgoth, his own resident Satan. But unlike Christianity’s Satan, Morgoth/Melkor had both sub-creative capabilities(6) and was responsible for some aspect of the “Design” of the universe through his Marring of the Music.

In my post the “drafts” are the Two Themes that were sung before the Third Theme (most importantly The First Theme—the Perfect World). The Third Theme is the Theme that finalized the means by which Melkor’s Marring would be integrated into Eru’s greater purpose in such a way as to generate Good that is far greater than what could exist in The Perfect World. It is the Theme that describes our Fallen World.

As The Fall of Man is envisioned as a “Happy Fault” (Felix Culpa), a sinful act that nevertheless allowed the far better redemption of Man through Christ to happen, so too is Melkor’s Marring of the Music envisioned as the means by which greater things than could have been otherwise will arise in the world.

The Problem of Evil as it extends to suffering “baked in” to the system is thus “solved” by placing a conscious agent, allowed Free Will, between God and material reality, with sufficient privileges to affect the design of the universe (Laws of Nature) and sufficient power to enact those designs, however evil, in matter, itself. While that latter part is not unique to Tolkien (hello demonology), the former is not something I have really encountered in quite that form anywhere else.

Now, getting back to your question and tying it to Tolkien :).

At first glance it might appear that any kind of cyclic model of the universe, with the actions of finite, fallen, non-divine beings working to “improve” on the designs of their divine predecessors, would be antithetical to Tolkien’s increasingly Catholic metaphysic. And yet...

Pair up some statements he made regarding both the Primary and Secondary Worlds with the events of the short story Leaf by Niggle and things look rather different. Tolkien said in a few places that he hoped that the ultimate fate of humans, as fundamentally sub-creative beings, would be to have God grant reality to their ideas, in the same way Eru grants material being (reality) to the vision created by the Music of the Ainur. This is essentially what Niggle receives when he reaches the upper layers of “purgatory”: his Tree made REAL (“Ea! Let these things Be!”). Not only that, his experience of it and its reality is intimately tied to his neighbor, Parish, the man who in life was always getting in the way of Niggle finishing his Tree painting. And this is a supremely important point for Tolkien and its the point that Melkor rebels against: sharing in the work of creation. Melkor cannot abide it, to the point that he would rather make all of creation not exist if it can’t consist only of his own mind.

Indeed, even in the context of his Secondary World there are hints that after the end of the Universe, Men will Sing a new Music, supplying their own ideas for the Design of new Eas. What would these human ideas be, and might they include universes even better than Ea, Men having lived in it and having not originated outside it and having been granted a capacity for working outside The Music unlike any other beings in Ea?

Well...one does wonder....

Notes

I seem to remember that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is one of the reasons this hypothesis fell out of favor back in the late 20th century

And unless I can lay my ethical issues with Nature purely at the feet of the happenstance of evolution on our particular planet (maybe on other planets life evolves in such a way that suffering does not exist but all the good stuff does?).

There’s also Nietzsche’s question of Eternal Return (among other philosophical equivalents). However, I don’t think that required distinct universes, but rather merely infinite time in which matter might, by sheer probability, return to a copy of its previous arrangement.

I posted a quote from Candide not long ago. In Candide, Voltaire was directly mocking Gottfried Leibniz’s take on this issue—that our reality must represent The Best of all Possible Worlds because it is the reality that God chose to create. OK, sure, Gottfried.

“History of the Gnomes” refers to the tales of the Noldor (then called “Gnomes”) and the Silmarils that make up the bulk of The Silmarillion.

It wouldn’t, I think, be out of the question to view much of Tolkien’s divine cosmology as rather Gnostic in flavor: a supreme One delegates creative powers to subordinate divinities who enter into the world, much as some Gnostic thought perceived the demiurgic Yahweh as doing, against the will of the higher God. The (very important) differences being that the Ainur’s powers (at least by the time of the writing of the contents of the published Silmarillion) were only *sub-creative* (they could not create matter or material existence ex nihilo), that material existence is conceived of as fundamentally good (divine sparks/souls are not “trapped” in matter), and that the demiurgic entities are not themselves responsible for creating humans (who are positioned as their peers).

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searchingwardrobes · 5 years ago

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Review 2 of 2

I know it’s been a month since part one of this review (which you can read HERE), but I had to collect my thoughts on this book! Not because I had mixed feelings about it - it’s honestly one of the best books I’ve ever read - but because it made me so emotional. I did write a review on Goodreads, which I’m posting below, and after that I’ve included several passages that moved me as I read. I marked a LOT of them (sorry, library), so I hope I can narrow them down. Having said that, this will get long, so more under the cut!

Tagging: @snowbellewells @reynoldsreads @whimsicallyenchantedrose @ekr032-blog-blog @superchocovian @lfh1226-linda @nikkiemms @thislassishooked @branlovestowrite @tiganasummertree and I thought of you @distant-rose for the way Joy fell in love with England just as much as with Jack :)

****I guess you can say there are technically spoilers beyond this point, but since this is all historical information, many may already know these details. ***

Before I get into that though, I want to clarify a few questions I brought up when I was only half way through the book. I wondered about their letter writing and why those letters were destroyed. Turns out CS Lewis burned all of the letters he received because people wrote to him about very personal things, and he didn’t want those being published after his death. So, that makes sense, I guess, though it still doesn’t explain what happened to the letters he wrote to her, unless he burned those too after her death for the same reason. Jack (what his close friends called Lewis) had a civil marriage with Joy first because of immigration issues, and she and the boys lived in a separate house. However, they still spent a lot of time at the Kilns (Lewis’s home) and lived there briefly at different times. Their relationship, according to most sources, wasn’t physical at that time (however, does anyone really know for sure except for the two of them?), and the book depicts it that way. The church refused to marry them because Joy was divorced, and this was a major issue for Jack due to his faith. Only after a sympathetic priest married them in a hospital did they consummate the marriage.

The major source material for this book was an unpublished manuscript called Courage containing forty-five love sonnets Joy Davidman wrote to CS Lewis. David Gresham, Joy’s son, found them in the back of a closet in 2013. Most of the chapters in the book start with lines from these sonnets. And these sonnets are definitely intimate and passionate. I’ll confess, it’s a little weird when you imagine that famous picture of CS Lewis we’ve all seen a million times, bald headed with his pipe. Like reading sexy poems someone wrote to your grandpa. Nevertheless, the love story crafted in this book was breathtaking.

Here’s the review I wrote on Goodreads:

I almost don't know where to start with this book, it was so good! The writing style, the phrasing, the characterization, it was all stellar. I felt like I knew Joy personally reading this. I also loved how the author didn't romanticize Joy or Jack (C.S. Lewis). She wrote them flaws and all, including their physical traits. This isn't Hollywood, air brushing the protagonists so they fit society's definition of "sexy." This book proves you don't need attractive people to tell a passionate, romantic love story. Love is so much deeper than that. I think that can sum up this entire book: love sees past our flaws; love is attracted to our minds and our souls, not just our faces and bodies; and love blooms best when it's rooted in a strong friendship.

This book also tackled the sexism rampant in the 1950s and how that impacted Joy, who broke the mold on what a woman should be. It makes you realize how the social norms of the day influenced Lewis's friends and their opinions of Joy. (Tolkien despised her.) You also feel Joy's oppression under these expectations and understand why Jack's friendship meant so much to her. He viewed her as an intellectual equal, something she was desperate for. I also was heartbroken over the poor medical care she received simply because she was a woman, with the doctors often completely ignoring her to address the men in her life and making light of her symptoms. Today, she might have lived.

I refuse to read other reviews because I have a feeling many Christians won't like this book. Joy is not a sanitized Christian heroine. She would definitely fit in more with the "bad girls" of the Bible like Rahab and the woman at the well than she would with Sarah or Hannah. She was a real person who came to faith late in life. She made mistakes even after her conversion, and some of them will make the reader uncomfortable. There were a lot of gray areas in her life and in her relationship with Jack that aren't easy to grapple with. So if you're looking for a black and white, squeaky clean, shining beacon of virtue you'll be disappointed. But if you're willing to take the journey with Joy, it's a fantastic tale!

Now for some of my favorite passages! (The book is in first person from Joy’s point of view):

“What could I have done differently? I begged the tortured Christ in stained glass.

My parents had warned me - Why can’t you be softer, nicer, and kinder? Prettier? More like Renee? {Renee was a cousin and one of her husband’s many affairs.} Why couldn’t I? Was this my punishment for such self-will?”

“I stayed and felt the enormous noise vibrate through my body. Chills ran through me, and I shivered with the unceasing sounds, which were cleansing me, coursing through my veins, through my mind and my spirit. The tenor and fifth ringing together, not synchronized or in harmony but in perfect sublime sound. My boundaries dissolved; transcendence enveloped me. God was with me, and always had been. He was in the earth and the wind, in the ringing and the silence, in the pain and in the glory of my life.”

“In his office Jack didn’t just read; he went deep inside the work his eyes fell upon, taking apart the sentences and themes. And while I was nearby, he would often call my name.

‘Joy,’ he’d say, ‘what do you think . . . ‘

Off we’d go into a theological or thematic discussion. Sometimes I feared I would wake and be back in the rambling, falling-apart house in Staatsburg, Bill stumbling drunk down the hallway smelling of sex and whiskey, and find my time with Jack had only been a dream. But instead I sat in the armchair of his office at the top of the staircase discussing the meaning hidden in stories.”

“It’s not an apology, Jack. Can’t you see? It’s grace, the kind that hunts us down and doesn’t let us go. It brought us together. The grace that keeps the planets in their orbits and causes lilies to open their faces to the sun.” I dared to meet his eyes with mine. “It’s love.”

“No.” I took another sip of sherry. “I’m confused . . . . About Jack, I don’t know. This time it’s not just about some physical need. For goodness’ sake, the man smokes sixty cigarettes a day and then his pipe in between. He’s seventeen years older than I am. But he still has this great gusto for life - for beer and debate and walking and deep friendship. Christianity most definitely has not turned him into a dud. This isn’t some lust-fueled fantasy. It’s the connection between us. The discourse. The empathy. The similar paths. This isn’t some obsession with getting something, Belle. It’s the feeling of finally coming home. It’s confusing at best.”

“Red heat filled my chest. He turned to place the sword on the mantle, and the structure of his chin, the lines of his smile, caught the firelight. A line of poetry surged forward in my mind: the accidental beauty of his face.”

“He was instantly next to me, his hands on my shoulders to spin me around to face him. ‘Don’t turn from me,’ he said. ‘I cannot bear that. If we can’t indulge in eros, surely we have all the beauty that remains in philia.’ He pulled me close to wrap his arms around me. Twilight turned to night and my head rested on his shoulder and the palm of his hand was on my neck, stroking my skin with gentleness as if consoling a small child after a frightful storm.

But this wasn’t fright he was trying to subdue; this was desire. His mind might twist firm around logic, but his body divulged the truth.

It was he who let me go, and gently touched my cheek before leaving me quaking without another word.”

“Jack was alongside me every day he came to Oxford from Cambridge, and many whispered that he’d moved in. What vivid imaginations they had.

There had been a night I thought we were on a “date” - when he took me to see Bacchae, the great Greek tragedy. In the dark of the theater he had taken my hand. With our fingers wound together and the great tragic ending of the play approaching, I believed in more for us. But, alas, after leaving that darkened theater our natural rhythms returned - philia, banter, beer, and laughter.”

“At your worst?” He shook his head and his spectacles fell from his face, landed on the worn cream blanket covering my diseased body. “You are beautiful to me, Joy. You are all that is beautiful.” He tucked a stray hair back from my face. “All my life I have thought of love in a literary sense, part of a story or a fairy tale. But love is really true; I know that now. Eros - I haven’t loved completely until now. I know that.” His voice held the truth of every word spoken, a man broken by death’s threat.”

“He kissed me again. ‘Everything I’ve written since the day you walked into Eastgate has been tangled with you. How could I have not seen it at all?’”

“Will you go to them?” I took his hand in mine. “They need you, and they love you, Jack. You know that, don’t you?’

‘As I love them.’ He kissed me and left as a father to my sons.

“All the years wasted believing that love meant owning or possessing, and now the greatest love had arrived in my greatest weakness. In my supreme defeat came my grandest victory. God’s paradoxes had no end.”

“I didn’t know if others understood his deep love for me. I’d wondered and then let it go - it didn’t matter what Tollers {Jack’s nickname for Tolkien} or the Inklings or the Sayers believed. Maybe Jack had admitted his love or maybe he hadn’t, but all that mattered was that I grasped the truth. He loved me when I was brash. He loved me in my weakest state. He loved me after I stopped trying so hard to make him love me. He loved me when I was outwardly unworthy. I thought of Aslan and his words in Prince Caspian, ‘You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.’”

“His brown eyes seemed fathomless, their depths holding the answers. ‘Although it was your mind I loved at first, it is not what I’ve loved best. The heart of you is the heart of me now, and I want to know it fully.’”

#melanie reads #book review #becoming mrs lewis #patti callahan #review 2 of 2

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aegon · 5 years ago

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You seem like someone who has read a lot of books, sorry just making a general assumption with no basis whatsoever. I am looking to get into a new fandom after GOT (ugh) and I have heard great things about Dune, at the same time I am afraid of authors subverting expectations lmao. I absolutely hate little women because of Jo-Laurie (hopefully that's not a spoiler for anyone! sorry if it is). Anyway, thoughts on Dune? Can you tell me a little bit more w/o spoiling too much? oh, happy ending?

omg no don’t apologise, that’s a huge compliment! I actually just finished reading dune so I can help there :)

pros

it’s on par with tolkien in the sheer enormity of the universe, like it’s intense af but so immersive too. the world-building really is something to be admired and you can see where star wars and other sci-fi tropes were inspired. don’t listen to anyone that says it’s too much of a drag, it’s heavy but as you get deeper into the story, the richness of the universe really pays off.

the story is super engaging and often, what you perceive is far from the reality and it encourages you to try and read between the lines to see what characters are actually up to. like asoiaf, the narrative uses subversion in a way that serves to criticise the very themes it addresses than for the sake of “subverting expectations.”

the characters are flawed and complex, and you won’t always agree with their decisions, but you’ll see the logic behind them.

a bittersweet ending, more on the sweet side. I use bitter loosely because it’s more complex than anything. like, it’s happy for the protagonists but complex in that it isn’t quite the happy ending the characters necessarily want for themselves (not in a ‘little women’ sense tho) and there are definitely going to be consequences that are going to hurt like a bitch, but I haven’t read the next part so....right now, it’s all good lol

mixed

herbert was clearly very well-versed in religious history. this might not be something you really care about, but I was totally taken off-guard by how much islamic references he used, as well as how much his “new” language is mostly made up of arabic. clearly, he assumed most of his readers hadn’t read the quran so passes off so much of our religion as part of his world-building. I appreciate him using the correct definition for terms like jihad as well as avoiding going down the route most sci-fi stories go with religion being this monsterous doctrine that deserves to die out, instead of something that inspires both good and bad. I just felt pretty iffy with the appropriation of my religion and the not-so-subtle allusions to our prophet, which is very sensitive, to say the least.

it won’t escape you that dune was very clearly written at the height of the cold war from a very american perspective. the people, the names, the cultures, it’s blatantly obvious who is referring to what and the way they’re painted is sometimes a little too on the nose that I rolled my eyes a few times. saying that, there are still some clear anti-imperialist themes so it’s not cringe so long as you recognise the era this book was written in.

cons

so while I haven’t read the rest of the series, I’m also well aware of the some of the issues, namely herbert’s homophobia. it’s played down enough in dune where I imagine the film adaptation coming out can ignore it without affecting the story, but herbert was very homophobic and you can see it coming through in his writing of one specific character. it’s not enough to really pollute the story, but just a heads up. it’s a rowling situation tbh.

it’s pretty obviously written by a man and one should keep that in mind when reading it. that isn’t a con in itself, but it’s something to remember when looking at how female characters are represented. it’s far from the grossness of game of thrones/asoiaf, and while the women of dune are powerful, they rarely have the agency to really use that power for themselves in lieu of serving the agenda of another male character. saying that, this is entirely my own opinion and women have written articles arguing for and against my point so it’s pretty subjective. either way, they’re still very well-written.

okay so I guess that’s my honest review while trying not to spoil anything oof. overall, I think it’s definitely worth a read. dune is an epic in every sense of the word, and it’s the godfather that inspired so many stories today. it really develops your own literary palette and you start seeing its influences pretty much everywhere then.

hope that helps!

#anonymous #answered #long post

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sol1056 · 6 years ago

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How do I define a magic system, so it doesn’t seem like a god in a machine type of thing?

Rules, limits, consequences – and don’t make the story’s resolution pivot on magic. (That last one is probably the most crucial, really.)

You don’t have to explain the rules in the story, but they must be somewhat intuitive by virtue of consistency. If a character can only do X magic when it’s night, make very clear it’s night, the stars are visible, and never, ever break that rule. Some readers will miss it, some will put the clues together, but you’ll write with an assurance that will make pretty much all of them roll with the system as internally logical, just on gut instinct.

Limits are something that tends to get explained, because it’s useful for adding tension. Although you might not want to do a hard system (hard as in outlined and nailed down with very specific rules and limits; Sanderson’s novels are entirely hard magic vs Tolkien’s novels are soft magic), it’s still good to elucidate the limits so readers can get worried.

A limit doesn’t always have to be explained, but like rules, it should be implied by context. It’s like… we know from the real world about how fast a given kind of horse can go, so if a horse is written going twice that fast, some readers will call foul. And even people who don’t know horses will give you the side-eye if you have the horse running for days on end without rest (unless you have some kind of worldbuilding detail to handwave that).

So, a rule is what you can do, and a limit is how much you can do — and consequences are what happens if you do everything right, everything wrong, or something you shouldn’t, or do more than the limits say you’re allowed to do. Consequences will vary based on the situation and context, but they should always be present.

Consequences are simply the cost of doing a thing (anything, regardless of value or intent), and the cost depends on the metaphor you’re using to conceptualize the magic. If you think of magic like technology, well, there’s a cost in the time to learn it, and a cost in terms of what it, well, actually costs to purchase. But you don’t feel physically exhausted after using your phone, I mean, you might, but that’s not inherent to the phone.

If your metaphor is that magic is like running, then you’d have a physical cost like feeling drained or getting shin-splints, but you probably wouldn’t have a cost in terms of learning to put one foot in front of the other really fast.

My favorite metaphor for magic is treating it like a complex area of study. It takes concentration, checking your work, and the ability to think logically and clearly. You might have eye strain, a headache, or just feel dull-minded after an hour or more hammering at an equation. You won’t necessarily have a cost in outright physical exhaustion, and the monetary cost might be little more than the effort of getting a library card.

There are two reasons for consequences. One is that we’re dealing with a gaming-influenced genre, and a game gets boring if someone can power up to the point they can destroy worlds without breaking a sweat. Just like you’d expect a character to get exhausted if they push past their physical limit, consequences penalize them for pushing past a magical limit.

The other reason is that consequences are the best way to introduce (or raise) stakes. Take the rules (ie, only magic at night) and the limits (ie, cannot do it for more than ten minutes): what happens if someone tries to do magic for twenty minutes? Lose their voice, or hallucinate? What if they do magic during the day? Maybe they have nightmares? What if they do magic for longer than ten minutes and it’s during the day? They get all of the above plus go bald?

And then you put the character in situations where magic — during the day, for ten-plus minutes — is their only option for getting themselves or someone else out alive. If you’ve done your groundwork, the reader will be on pins and needles, knowing the character is choosing a path that’s going to have severe consequences.

Of course, then you do need to impose those consequences — or find some clever loophole in the rules and limits. Frex, a solar eclipse is one of the oldest ways around ‘only happens at night,’ but hey, it works, and it’s observing the letter of the law: the sun is gone, ergo, it’s not-day.

The last one is the biggest, and it’s one of the reasons authors like Sanderson rely on hard magic. It’s a lot easier for the reader to visualize (and recognize) the validity of those loopholes if they have a fairly solid idea of how the magic system works.

If, say, magic is like water, and the story consistently shows magic acting like water, the reader won’t see it as a deus ex machina but as a clever loophole to have the protagonist use magic that has the properties of ice. We know ice = water, so the final resolution to defeating the bad guy doesn’t violate our understanding of the metaphor.

If you look at older fantasy works (Tolkien being the biggest name, of course), the magic is usually soft. From start to finish, exactly what Gandalf can and can’t do, or how much he can do, isn’t explained (and I should note that he doesn’t do a great deal of it, either, which makes it harder because there’s no laundry list to derive rules or limits).

However, the pinnacle of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings isn’t magic at all. In one, it’s a man shooting an arrow at a dragon; the other, it’s three hobbits in a volcano, and one falls in. (Note: there is an extremely subtle magic going on there, that’s foreshadowed quietly and explained very clearly, and that final showdown is internally consistent with the explanation given.) For the most part, though, the resolution comes from reasonable actors and their believable actions, so it doesn’t require we know more about the magic than we’ve previously been told.

If you feel the impulse when writing the resolution to have another character exclaim, “I didn’t know you could do that!” and the protagonist say in awe, “gee, I didn’t know, either,” you’ve just instinctively lampshaded your own deus ex machina. What you want is a surprise not for the unexpected but for the obvious, once the characters (and reader) have hindsight. Of course water has more than just its fluid state! The magic’s not been bent out of shape; we just hadn’t considered all the possible implications; now that we realize that, it’s obvious that was the best way to defeat the Big Bad.

That said, one of the most satisfying resolutions (admittedly also harder, but that’s what makes it satisfying) is when you have magic throughout a story… and the resolution is entirely independent of magic. In other words, if the reader hadn’t been so focused on the world’s rules and limits around magic, they could’ve realized every ingredient was right there for an incendiary flash-device that would blind everyone and allow the good guys to get away.

Granted, that’s a lot harder, because that means you have to come up with a way to get out of a (hopefully) really sticky and intense set of dire straits without being able to use Stuff You Made Up. Basically, you went through all the work of setting up this convenient system… and then setting it aside for the harder work of characters rolling up their sleeves and wading into the fight.

As a good example of that kind of magic-is-everywhere except the resolution, get a copy of Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers. There’s an anime version of the first light novel, from a few years ago, but the novels have been translated up through volume 6. Yamagata is an author who writes phenomenally tight stories; every single word and detail is a clue.

It starts off with a very D&D-like premise: six heroes are mystically chosen via a tattoo that appears on them, and they must journey across the land to fight the oncoming evil. The six meet up at a temple, and from there they’ll set out to battle. Except there’s two problems: one, a barrier’s suddenly appeared, locking them all in, and two, there’s seven of them, not six.

It’s basically a locked-room mystery, filled with magic and the usual tropes and a few totally unexpected twists that in hindsight were laid out perfectly. At least for the anime, rewatching meant catching a dozen or more clues in every episode, even in throwaway lines, and I’m told the light novels are all that times ten — and the resolution never lies in magic. It lies in something in the real world, some facet of geography or climate or physics.

That takes a lot of work, and it’s really a story where you have to work backwards from the end, to make sure every clue is laid down but just enough obscured by various red herrings. When the story makes sense backwards – each clue leads to another – then you’re ready to tell it forward. Hard, but boy is it satisfying to get to that conclusion.

#writing #fantasy #worldbuilding #sff #magic #sol explains things

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spontaneouselfcombustion · 2 years ago

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i keep trying to find reviewers/tolkien fans talking about rop in a sensible way bc i’m not interested in people being upset over minor lore changes and shit like that but it’s very hard because many of them go insane over the lore breaks with the silmarillion.

amazon doesn’t have the rights to the silmarillion and i don’t know if these guys who black out with lore hate know this???

like, the show is Bad but it’s from a “the showrunners are jj abram’s henchment who have no idea how to run or write a show” place. if it was over all a good, solid well done show i think like 50% of the lore pedants would die away bc like “it’s not 100% lore accurate but it’s very good for what they have”

i’m not interested in hearing ANYONE, ANYWHERE rant at me about why it’s bad because of x,y, z in the silmarillion. i want to hear it on the basis of it’s actual construction as a piece of media and for what lore it has access to and what lore it could maintain between the silmarillion and lotr without butting up against the lack of lore rights (ex. incorporating more of galaderial’s lotr characterization with the “traumatized and badly coping” angle so 2nd age galadriel feels like the logical middle step, celeborn if not actually around has more importance than just “i had a husband once, he died(?)” like no weird romantic vibes between her and halbrand bc you know.... she’s.... married....)

martin’s and tolkien’s works really shouldn’t be compared much bc the Vibes are so different but it can’t be helped to some extend because house of the dragon and rings of power are both historical prologues based in in-world history books/notes and the source materials for the shows are basically just timelines and vibes. the general consensus i see is the whole hotd is not a perfect show (especially bc s1 is forced into timeskip hell bc if we don’t SHOW the ORIGINS of the GENERATIONAL CONFLICTING COMING TO A HEAD then that GENERATIONAL CONFLICTING COMING TO A HEAD doesn’t LAND so RIP!!!!) it’s also not Bad. it’s fairly solid, many of the issues (timeskip hell) in s1 will be gone for s2 and the writing as a whole is a return to the levels seen in the Actually Good Seasons 1-4. like it’s generally seen as mid to great which given the end of got is uh...... STAGGERINGLY GOOD FEEDBACK. and they didn’t have much more to work with and also have the “technically this story should be happening over a VERY long time” issue that rings of power has. hotd not being absolute dogshit is proof basically that the task is not impossible.

i GENUINELY think that rop could’ve worked using just the appendices, main lotr books and whatever loopholes around not having the silm rights they could sneak past the estate the issue here is just bad handling of the project. if you put a good writer/showrunner at the helm you’d find a LOT of the problems the show has and that people complain about would be gone.

like let’s be clear, i like things like buffy the vampire slayer and the genuinely kinda bad vampire diaries. buffy is well known for looking at things like internal lore or common sense and going “no 💖” bc it has a Neat Thing it wants to do and even if i gripe a little i still am 100% here for the Neat Thing but it’s!!! actually neat!!!! tvd is just..... hot trash. totally incomprehensible. media you do not watch for it’s award winning and genre shaping writing. it is not vampire sapranos. but there’s enough heart and the right kind of cheesy bullshit that i can gleefully watch and ignore all the comical amounts of issues it has.

the issue for rings of power is that it doesn’t sacrifice consistency for metaphor or important character moments (btvs) nor is it the kinda bad that’s fun (tvd). it’s the kinda bad that just makes you annoyed. if this show was as epic as it likes to think it is then i could not at ALL care that everyone in the southlands arc should be DEAD because that’s how PYROCLASTIC FLOW WORKS. if it would good, then people would be dead/not so immediately in the line of fire that i gotta worry about that or if it was So Bad It’s Fun i wouldn’t care because i like seeing my funny little guys get thrown around the silly little story and it looked neat.

and like, while i would love to engage in convos dissecting it as like, a study in writing and adaptation and all that i also don’t have time for anyone who bangs on about the LoRe and the silmarillion bc they just don’t have it to work with. I’d be much more interested in seeing a discussion about what COULD be done with what they DO have access to but very few seem to be capable of managing that concept atm

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gurguliare · 7 years ago

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hey i’m putting this whole dumb mariner’s wife maunder under the cut because tumblr’s glitchy apostrophes really bother me, thanks

One thing I love about "The Mariner's Wife" is that it's as close as Tolkien gets to like, utopian drama, in that no one in the story is making decisions based off immediate need---poverty, war, et al obviously still exist, but they aren't the kind of threats they are in any other part of the legendarium. Even Valinor! once Morgoth is released. to quote Andie’s meta that I personally slid her $20 under the table for, "very few choices made in Numenor would lead to evil. Probably the worst thing that would happen due to bad human choices in Numenor were mass accidents." All external pressure, positive and negative, (let's say Middle earth’s tempting resources vs Sauron) is at a huge remove, enough so that the characters have almost perfect freedom in how they want to deal with it---except that that their actual reach is limited, and the combination is paralyzing, of course.

I really enjoy the fatalism of Tolkien’s base worldview as applied to the problem of maintaining rather than restoring peace: it’s one of his bleaker stories exactly because it’s ~pre-Fall, post-another-Fall, and tearing itself to pieces while worrying about, essentially, the wrong problem---“what weapons do we need to face the crisis that’s surely coming” rather than “what tools can we give our heirs?” Say that the usual conflict in utopian narrative is “how does the utopia survive,” with the added caveat that the utopia needs to preserve its identity plastically, and not become super-resistant to change---or, put another way, the utopia has to avoid being compromised by “realism” without sealing itself off from reality. Which can be the outside world, but which can also be the strains of rupture and change already present within the utopia, part of its heritage, and naturally produced within it as a society of actual people.

And it seems revealing to me that this bubble is the precondition for Tolkien writing, also, a domestic drama, knowing as we do his mixed opinion of character-driven literature (“stage-plays”). Obviously Aldarion and Erendis are each deeply concerned with How To Save Numenor: and although they're sort of obvious mouthpieces for transformation and conservation respectively, it’s not black-and-white---Aldarion recognizes the need to offer aid and tend old alliances in Middle-earth, but Erendis is the one aware of fissures within Numenor and the ripeness for conflict between unequal groups: men and women, shorter- and longer-lived Numenoreans, and, yes, elves and humans. These are problems that demand serious intervention, even with a status quo in all other ways worthy. So like... there’s enormous scope in which to work, despite the appearance of equilibrium there’s tons to do to keep alive the body paradisiac, and yet it’s exactly this relative innocence and freedom that makes it easy for the characters to suspect one another of perversity, and insincerity, in their respective choice of causes. Everything is equally urgent, and everything is also equally, secretly unreal. Erendis hates the sea and loves trees to spite me, thinks Aldarion; Erendis assumes that Aldarion’s voyaging is born of discontent with Numenor (but really boredom with her). Because Numenor is, in the moment, perfect---because the stakes are semi-abstract and it’s incredibly easy to dissociate intellectual possibilities from present risk if you don’t already feel the threat on an emotional level---it’s the most natural thing in the world to accuse the person with different priorities of playing games with facts, out of pure self-interest.

Hence Erendis’s speech about men; hence also why Ancalime thinks her parents fight for the “promise of sport,” not for considerations ideological or personal. In part because Aldarion and Erendis both consider themselves objective and think that objectivity alone will serve to carry the day eventually, they’re totally unable to communicate their respective visions to their heir, and they only ever get a partial glimpse at one another’s. Which sucks! Like, part of the tragedy of the Tree Subtweets is that Erendis herself represents something as irreplaceable as the trees: a loving devotion to the land and its people that needs no rational basis, precious exactly because rationality is in some sense inadequate to the momentous task at hand. Aldarion is a good steward of resources because he’s personally farsighted and has a basic grasp of logic---but he can’t make his descendants into equally sensible stewards, or rather, he can’t do so simply by being perceptive and expecting the same from others. Insert joke about cult of priests devoted to scaring people away from nuclear waste zones in the far future... but that’s the thing, right: some information is safer culturally embedded than it is passed down literally. Aldarion is born in the wrong time for even his longest-term preparations to be relevant, meaning that if he wanted any control whatsoever over the future, he needed to be forming close, trusting relationships within his own family, for even a hope in hell of continuity.

Which... it’s interesting, right? Tar-Meneldur does it; he abdicates because he lacks Aldarion’s perspective on the situation in Modern Middle-earth and because he (Meneldur) recognizes that action or inaction on his part are both choices he simply doesn’t have the moral license to make. But the thing is, that generosity doesn’t teach Aldarion, in turn, to be generous. I think we’re supposed to understand the abdication comes too late. The feeling I get from both Erendis and Aldarion is that part of the reason they’re so convinced of their own superb rationality is because, for their whole lives, their parents have been telling them how proud and willful they are, without regard for actual progress these stiffnecked children have made toward thinking adulthood. (Note: we see less of Erendis’s side but what we do get is the wayyyyyyy more concentrated version of this, unsurprisingly. One other big problem here is that Aldarion identifies Erendis as an equal opponent with all the same weapons he has, and she isn’t. But this post is already so long) ...The fact that Erendis and Aldarion are proud doesn’t make them deluded, and they know that; they have evidence no one else has, they see things no one else sees. They’re so smart! But then they take pride in pride, moreso as they’re scolded for it; they both develop this protectiveness toward the “right” to pride itself, because despite all the warnings, despite the condescension and doubt from outsiders, this burning self-reliance led them to the most important things in their respective lives (until, coincidentally, it became the most important thing in their respective lives). Ouch.

And pride without purpose (except self-protection) is the one thing that descends to Ancalime, and that sense of alienation persists in the Line of Elros without any final antidote. The one institutional takeaway is the wrong one: “don’t marry outside the Line” wedges open the split between Numenor’s “levels” of reality, again, if we say there’s a utopia-within-the-utopia---the changing present inhabited by its people and the dream of eternity, political and later personal, that haunts the kings.

...I would speculate here about the parallel to the Valar’s handsoff approach to “advising” Numenor but that would get boring fast! And isn’t really fair, or indeed, interesting---the thing that gets me is this entirely human plane of action, even the wasted potential of which is going to change the world. The point is, Tolkien does a really good job setting up personality cascades, and it’s funny. I could ... man I want to talk a bit more about the parenting thing because it’s obviously also connected to, uh, Meneldur and Almarien and Nuneth’s relationships to Numenor! and Numenor’s hypothetical future. But this post is so long and meandering and unedited already and I’m sick of it. GOD. SORRY. GOODNIGHT.

#somehow the shorter of two non-essays i started yesterday at walgreen's #silmarillion #aldarion #erendis

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melissafoxmedia · 6 years ago

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Gender roles, witches, demons and Hereditary. A film essay and review.

An opinionated and biased essay ahead, perfectly imperfect. This writer is aware of said bias's and welcomes your ideas respectuflly. Proceed.

Halfway through his movie, I turned to my husband and said, “I think we might need therapy when this is all over.” I’d like to start with a caveat that we are a household that loves horror movies. In my opinion, horror is an under-appreciated genre. I'm not talking about franchise horror films, of which we are not a fan, with the exception of Insidious. I'm talking, The Shining, Blair Witch Project, Suspiria, Mommy, Let The Right One In, Babbadook. Classic horror tales and the like. Greek tragedies, even Shakespear. I have a lot to say about this one. So fair warning, this essay is long.

A QUICK BACKGROUND

I grew up reading Steven King, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelly, Edgar Allen Poe, Anne Rice and Mark Danielewski. I would argue that even my favorite fantasy and science fiction writers like Tolkien and George R.R. Martin borrow from the horror genre.

What solidified my interest in horror was actually a class in Chinese and Japanese cinema and art history. I enjoyed studying the nuances of the culture through the stories they told. Most of which were ghost stories. Ancestral worship is part of their culture. When visiting someones home, you might find a shrine to their passed loved ones. Ghosts are a normal, everyday part of their spiritual life. So too are their ghost stories.

This connection to the dead is apparent in many cultures. The Celtic festival of Samhain, The Buddhist Obon, Dia De Los Muertos, Chuseok in Korea and Gai Jatra in Nepal. All have ceremonies and celebrations that honor ancestral spirits. Essentially, the ghosts of your family. I joke that even the Bible is one long ghost story. Full of death, rebirth, angels, demons, spirits, voices and apocalyptic visions. But where eastern religions and ancient cultures differ is around the premise of fear. Specifically spirits.

Take, for instance, the Buddhist Obon and Del Dia De Los Muertos. Celebrations designed to honor the people who came before you. Essentially, one envokes the spirits of your ancestors come back to visit the living. One would light lanterns or lay a path of flowers to guide those spirits back to earth for the celebration. You are literally inviting ghosts to come and have dinner with you. These rituals are not fear based spiritual practices. You will find no children running away in horror from the ghosts of great granddad. They are beautiful rituals full of dancing, prayer, and community.

I grew up going to Church for a large part of my life, so my religious experiences of adolescence are based on my experiences with the Chrisitan church. Here notes my personal bias. I have no such memories of honoring my ancestors in a such a way from the Church. In fact, anything involving something seance-like would have been viewed as the devil. The dead are mourned in quiet reverence but one must be careful in creating any false idols. The only ghost that is ok to envoke, is the holy ghost. It's still very old testement thinking when it comes to this one.

I have a vivid memory of sitting on a picnic bench at Jesus camp, 13 years old, sobbing uncontrollably. I just listened to a fiery sermon about hell and I was truly conflicted. I was already "saved," having said the prayer and done the ritual at 8 years old. But my father was not. He was an atheist. I didn't want him to go to hell. I was terrified and felt guilty. My counselor at the time kept pressing me to call him. She wanted me to "get him saved," right now.

As an adult, I see how flawed that moment was. I did not call my father that night. I couldn't understand how my Christian peers thought less of me for doing so. I thought for sure that God would understand my compassion. My father and I had already discussed his feelings. He always respected my right to choose a religion, and I liked that, so I respected his. But that is not how I was treated by members of the Church. Needless to say, my relationship with the Church ended shortly thereafter and became an agnostic in my adult life.

I could give many instances of examples of why I feel that Christianity is a fear based religion, but I am not defending that point for this essay. Let's assume that it is.

I think it's interesting that our writer for Hereditary uses Goetia as it's religious influence. Goetia, an ancient Greek word that literally means sorcerer, get's its roots from the 16th century. Later, during the Renaissance, it became dubbed "black magic." The backdrop for the ending of the film and it's 17th-century Greek influence, we will explore later. But culturally, I think it's worth looking at this film through an American lens, of which, most of the population is Christian, making the comparisons I make relevant. Hereditary is an American film, written by an American writer. So I don't think he is trying to say anything specific about religion, other than to use it as a horror construct. This writer is obviously aware of his audience and is using that within his film.

We like horror films about evil, possession and ghosts almost as much as we like superhero movies. That classic good versus evil fight. We love it when the lines are drawn in the sand and the tension is clear. We don't get that kind of clarity in life. In fact, life is made up of many unknowns and gray areas. Those two, a cause of our fear and anxiety.

Hereditary doesn't put this idea front and center. Which is why I love it. The supernatural takes a back seat up until the second act. It dives headfirst into the gray areas to establish our characters and keeps us in the deepend with our worst fears.

ABOUT HEREDITARY - NON-SPOILER REVIEW

Hereditary is brilliantly written and performed. If I were awarding Oscars, I would give one to the writer and one to the lead actress. The writing and specifically her performance is award worthy. It is visually stunning and draws from some of the best ancient storytelling techniques of the ages. Its greek tragedy influence is what makes the whole story so strong. The best moments are the long takes, the timing of the edit, the absence of music and truly breathless performances.

But I would argue that the best thing about Hereditary is what it doesn’t explicitly say. Like a Greek Tragedy, it’s about the things that take place in-between the lines that make it so terrifying. It’s a spiritual horror film that speaks to our fears of inheriting the tragedies and traits of our ancestors. It’s about secrets between parents and children. Grief and it’s emotional manifestations. How tragedy can transform a person. It’s about the unspeakable terror that leads to more questions than answers. If you are looking for a nice bow-tie ending, you won’t get it. You are more likely to walk away going, “huh?” I loved the ending, but I think it will turn a lot of people off. It’s not what you are used to these days.

The best thing about the movie, in my opinion, is about women, spirituality, possession, and emotion. Which leads us to the essay below. I won’t be diving into Greek Tragedy or deconstruction of its uses in horror films. That’s for another day. I think it’s been widely documented in reviews thus far. I’d like to take a look at Gender, Christianity, Religion and how this film plays with those larger social constructs.

GENDER ROLES IN HORROR FILMS

Gender roles in horror films are one of my favorite things to pick apart culturally. If you want to dive in more, this is an excellent place to start. Women in horror films have a long history of being gas-lighted by the male characters they interact within the plot. They are scorned with male “logic,” that the things they are experiencing aren’t real. Usually, they are tortured, shallow characters that look pretty and scream on cue. Often viewed as “crazy,” and spend most of the plot running from danger. This isn't always the case, there are a few standouts. But for the most part, I think the above is true. Women are either victims or "witches," in the majority of horror films. I also think it's interesting how we treat women who are having spiritual experiences. In our stories, we are uncomfortable with female emotion. Therefore, if someone is having an extremely emotional experience, we are likely to view them as scary.

We are at our roots a Puritan nation. One whose fear of “the devil,” allowed us to pillage “savage Indians,” in the name of that fear. Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries persecuted thousands of witches. Whole villages of Swiss women were wiped out in the hysteria.

In America, we have the Salem witch trials.

I recently got to visit Salem Massachusetts. I read this fantastic book before I went called, “A Delusion Of Satan, The full story of the Salem witch trials.” Which outlines in more context the conditions and beliefs that lead to the "witch hysteria.” Today, those Puritans have received their Karma. Salem is a joke. It’s become a tourist Halloween town. Complete with haunted houses, tarot readers, and hippie spiritualists. The “devil,” they so fought to destroy has won. I laughed thinking about the righteous judges jumping through time to see children running around in witch costumes pretending to put spells on each other in their beloved village.

The story of Salem became a cautionary tale of the dangers of religious belief. But the book attempts to take it one step further in outlining the gender roles of women, power dynamics between men and women and femininity, creativity and inspiration. Unlike the modern telling of the story like “The Crucible,” the book deliciously researches connections from historical records. The trials were meticulously documented. Which may be why the story has been passed down to new generations and became taught in schools. But the book makes some connections for me that my 5th-grade classroom reading of The Crucible didn’t.

Life was hard as a puritan and men made all the rules. Imagination was stifled among children. Art was functional. Creativity was not encouraged, survival was. Sexuality was almost exclusively prohibited as a sin of the flesh with the exception of procreation. Pleasure was not allowed. Expression among women was silenced. These are all feminine values. Women who express extreme emotion are “crazy,” while men who express themselves in extreme ways are “passionate.” Soon “crazy,” became “a witch.” Any outburst of extreme emotion and a woman could be accused of being possessed by the devil. Witch hunting thus became inherently female and while anyone a could be accused of being a witch, most of the persecution was of women.

As a little girl, I played a lot in an imaginative space. I experimented with all kinds of storytelling and play acting. As a teenager, I was emotional and dramatic. I guarantee if I had been observed by a Puritan priest, they would have convinced the town that I was possessed. I think most artists would have been accused of witchcraft in that era.

These tropes still exist today. We still silence women. We write stories where they are silenced by others. In a large majority of our horror films, women are either the victims or for lack of a better term, "witches." As time moved on, we stopped persecuting witches and started locking women up in asylums for misbehaving. Thus replacing "witch," with "crazy."

I’m sure at some point, we have all thought our mothers to be “crazy,” through this lens too. Extreme imaginative outbursts or expressions of emotion are squashed in our society. We can barely handle a crying baby on an airplane let alone a woman who cries in public.

And here marks the line of spoilers people. If you wish to continue, do so at your own risk. I am about to talk about the details of the story.

GENDER, DEMONS AND WITCHES IN HEREDITARY

Hereditary begins with our main character, Annie, in the midst of working on her art. She creates model dioramas. It is implied as the story chugs along that these dioramas are her emotional outlet. This is how she processes grief, anger, and fear. The tension between imagination, memory, and reality play nicely here. Why in the world would someone make a miniaturized model of the death of her mother?

I enjoyed the duality of the models with life. The idea that I could take memories and tragedies out of my head and examine them as real-life objects. To see if I could make sense of them, process them differently. This process apears painstaking in the film. The details are fussed over, out main character possessed with the idea of recreation. A rebirth of her pain. Nicely done.

Next, we meet Charlie. Charlie is different. She makes you uncomfortable but we trust her slightly more because we assume it’s a mental disorder. The play on gender here is masterfully done. Our young actress is phenomenal but I question the casting choice. We love to put our humanly different in horror films and this borders exploitation for me. It's akin to pointing at her and calling her "freak." I get that we are establishing a long line of mental health issues for our characters, so I'll leave this one be. But do better next time.

Next, the shocking tragedy that propels our characters into some of the best moments of the film. Personally, I did not see that one coming. The car accident begins our true emotional terror.

Annie experiences real grief for the first time in the loss of her daughter. She was relieved when her own mother died, having been released from the burden of that relationship only to be thrust forward into the guilt of playing a part in her own daughter's death. Grief is not handled lightly here. Our main character moves through hysteric fits. She retreats. She creates twisted dioramas of the accident. All the while her husband grows more and more suspicious of her behavior. Her husband literally acts as men have throughout history. Questioning the intensity of her emotions and wondering if he should send her away. If we are sticking with our horror metaphors, Annie is possessed by grief.

My favorite scene to illustrate this concept is at the dinner table. Tensions mount in the household to an emotional breaking point. Our male characters confront our female lead and claim that she isn’t being truthful about her feelings. They invite her to express herself.

She does. This eruption is the best scene in the film. Rarely do we get to experience female emotional flow on the screen. The sight of a woman in full emotional and visual expression makes our male characters physically retreat from the scene. The very thing they invited her to express is the very thing they can not handle and rather than applaud her completion of this expression, they squash it. The men refuse to join her and instead they persecute her almost as if saying, "burn the witch.’ The refreshing length of the shot and the stellar performance by the actress is noteworthy. They do not shy away from the complexities of extreme emotions.

I think all of us are afraid that if we let go on some level, what comes forth would be bad. Tapping into our emotional flow is scary. So scary that as a society we can’t handle people doing it in front of us. We tell each other, “don’t cry,” when comforting one another. We tell our men, “crying isn’t manly.” And when we see our lead actress express herself on screen, we too as an audience are scared. We question her sanity, if only for a moment. Can we pause for a moment to admire the cinematography choice here? It's like an 18th century painting.

I mean, look at that still shot above. Gorgeous terrifying women in full power feeling herself fully. Just hand Tonni Collect the Oscar, please. This scene is fucking amazing. I applauded Annie's capacity to let go and laughed when the men wouldn't join her. Granted, it has taken me a long time to be ok with my own extremities of emotions but now that I am, I was praising this goddess on screen. I honestly can't think of another on screen performance that accomplishes this as well as Hereditary does.

Emotoins escalate as the film begins introducing the supernatural to the plot. Annie, meets with a new friend in her grief group, this friend conducts a saence to bring back the spirit of her grandchild. It seems to work and despite her reservations, she tries it. This triggers the climax of our film and leads to its ultimate resolution after discovering that her mother had a secret spiritual life. Spirituality “literally," kept in a box and hidden away until the very end of the film. I think spirituality is what our writer wants you to infer as the "hereditary trait." It’s the thing that our lead character doesn’t want to inherit from her mother. Her secret life. Her mental illness. Her spirituality. One might even say, she demonizes her mother. 😉

CHARLIE

The gender play with Charlie is also worth noting. At the conclusion of the film, we learn that Charlie is a male demon reincarnated into a female body. His name is Paimon. His rencarnation into Charlie was a mistake, as we learn at the conclusion of the film. The whole film is a plot to correct this mistake. Charlie referenced as she presents more like a tomboy with an androgynous name. While women are often “Witches,” in our scary stories so to men are painted as “Demons.”

I always wondered why this trope existed in our storytelling. Sometimes I think it's about dominance and submission, Witches serve Demons. Men subservient to women. Demons are usually powerful creatures in our stories. Females are usually the victims of demon possession, either used for literal possession or for impregnation. But it wasn’t always that way.

In the pre-Christian era, demons were both male and female. Much like the ancient polytheistic religions that had many gods and goddesses, so too was the gender spectrum of demons. It’s Christianity that spun the gender roles and made them sexless. Technically, Christian demons are fallen angels, as referenced in the Bible. They are sexless beings whose purpose is to test human beings on their faith in God and lead them to sin.

"For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ. 14. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. 15. It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.” —2 Corinthians 11:13–15

I always wondered, why then do we paint demons as masculine throughout history? See that winged creature demon up there - - - what sex do you infer when observing it? For context, the above painting is Dante and Virgil in Hell - William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1850. It’s a scene from Dante’s inferno, in which there are several biblical references used to describe the journey into hell. This painting is terrifying in person btw. It’s the size of a billboard and you can see the demons eyes staring at you from all angles. Notice the color palet and the lighting on the main figures in the foregroud. Remind you of any shot from before?

Back to Hereditary …

Why does Paimon need a male body? Why is he unhappy in a female body? Paimon is supposed to be a Prince not a Princess. If you don’t know who Paimon is … you aren’t alone. I had to look it up too. He’s one of the kings of hell with Goetic orgins, also referenced in Persian and Iranian stories. The “King," denotes man right?

Paimon is referenced in a demonology spell book called Lesser Key Of Solomon. Therein lists 72 demons of which, one is Paimon. Each demon has a symbol, which was a clue in the film. Annie wears one around her neck. Guess she should have googled the symbol before wearing it.

So essencially our demon "man-king," is pissed because he was born a woman and his followers work to correct the issue. Wow. Talk about some gender issues right? The wiki page for Paimon also gives us a hint at a sequel btw… go read it if you like.

SO have you made it this far?

If you have, cheers to you. Welcome to my geekery. I spent a lot of money on my education in art history, English and film critique. Literally wrote a paper a day for 4 years. I’m still paying off the bill. Blogs are more refreshing though, I don’t have to worry about being perfect or getting graded. I can just share my passion for picking apart social and cultural references in storytelling.

That said, if Hereditary made me spawn a long essay like this, imagine what it might do for you. I will warn you, my husband is still having nightmares from the visuals. Which I didn’t even get a chance to geek out about here. That said, I do think that our tales of horror are the most interesting things to look at in society. Our relationship to fear or lack thereof is still taboo. Last year marked the first time a horror film was nominated for an Oscar, and I think to Get Out was nominated more for its cultural relevance and discussion of race in our time. I’d love to see more from this writer. I was seriously impressed. It’s well researched and smart with an excellent understanding of pace and emotional landscapes.

So just like our movie, here ends my essay. I’m not going to neatly tie this up.

What did you think of the film?

#Hereditary #movie review #film review #film essay #gender roles in horror films #Salem witch trials #Charlie Hereditary #Demons #Christianity

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nefertiti22002blog · 6 years ago

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Fanfiction writer asks

@criminal-minds-fanfiction sent out an epic set of 50 questions under this title. (Thank you!) It took awhile, but these were excellent questions, and I enjoyed answering them. (I just reblogged them without answers, in case any of you want to have a go.)

I don’t expect many will want to read all 50 answers, but people who have recently started following me might be interested in the fics I write in the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fandom (and even those I used to write in the Lord of the Rings fandom).

Fanfiction Writer Asks

Most of the writer ask posts I come across are only like ten or so questions long so I thought I’d try to make a longer one because we like talking about our writing! Feel free to reblog!

1) How old were you when you first starting writing fanfiction?

52, still going at 68

2) What fandoms do you write for and do you have a particular favourite if you write for more than one?

Started out in The Lord of the Rings, writing Gandalf slash. (My fics are available on my old website, “Meddling in the Affairs of Wizards.” Haven’t had time to add them to AO3 yet.) After a seven-year pause, got started again by the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell tv series, after having been a fan of the book for seven years. (Those fics are all on AO3.)

3) Do you prefer writing OC’s or reader inserts? Explain your answer.

I have written OCs, but only if they fit into canon, which I try to stick to as much as possible in most cases. (I had to look up “reader inserts.” Never done one.)

4) What is your favourite genre to write for?

Given my two fandoms, it must be fantasy.

5) If you had to choose a favourite out of all of your multi chaptered stories, which would it be and why?

I suppose it would be “From the Ashes a Fire,” a Gandalf/Aragorn romance. I tried to pair Gandalf with as many different guys from the novel as possible, but Aragorn always seemed to most logical lover for the wizard. I think most of my fics up to that point had been practice for that one.

6) If you had to delete one of your stories and never speak of it again, which would it be and why?

“Service at the Prancing Pony,” which pairs Gandalf and Bob. (Yes, there is a Bob in LOTR.) It was only my second fic, and it’s pretty trivial.

7) When is your preferred time to write?

Evening.

8) Where do you take your inspiration from?

The challenge of figuring out a fic with explicit content (usually) and keep it true to the original source novel.

9) In your xxx fic, what’s your favourite scene that you wrote?

“Thrice Returned” is a multi-chapter novel pairing Gandalf and Frodo. My favorite scene is when Frodo wakes up in Ithilien after the Ring is destroyed and discovers that Gandalf is alive. I always felt that Tolkien should have shown that scene, but he skips over it. Of course, my version is more romantic, which is partly why I like it.

10) In your xxx fic, why did you decide to end it like that? Did you have an alternative ending in mind?

I don’t recall ever having an alternative ending for a fic in mind. My funniest ending, I think, is in “Mr Norrell’s Breeches.” I had no idea how I was going to end it, and inspiration struck just as I got to the ending. (Usually I know how the story will end, sometimes down to the last exchange of dialogue.)

11) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it?

Yes. In Chapter 8 of “Two Masters in the Darkness” Norrell and Strange summon the new King of Lost-hope (to call it by its old name). I referred to the King as King Stephen, but as one reader pointed out, he wasn’t using that name after the death of the gentleman with the thistle-down hair. I amended the story to be more consistent with that premise.

12) Who is your favourite character to write for? Why?

It was Gandalf for six years, until I ran out of inspiration. (I just COULD NOT find a way to pair him with Sam.) Since I started writing JS&MN, it has been Mr Norrell. Although I write book-canon, I imagine my Mr Norrell as he is played by Eddie Marsan, who brings such warmth and empathy (and cuteness!) to the role, despite the fact that the screenwriter made him such an inconsistent character. (If he can do the fantastic York Minster magic, why can he not do sea beacons? And so on and on.)

13) Who is your least favourite character to write for? Why?

Generally I don’t write for characters I don’t enjoy. Lady Pole was the hardest; I only did her once.

14) How did you come up with the title for the xxx? - You can ask about multiple stories.

Often I do variations on quotations from the book. My favorite title of my own is “One Spell not to discover what My Friend Is doing Presently,” where Mr Strange speaks harshly to Mr Norrell, who casts a spell to make them invisible to each other. I loved writing the farce that resulted.

15) If you write OC’s, how do you decide on their names?

I generally do a search for Regency-era names, as with the Misses Whitworth and Bastable in “Mr Norrell, ladies’ man.”

16) How did you come up with the idea for xxx?

Often I rely on prompts, but I came up with the idea for “Stark Staring” on my own. It started with a simple premise, that Mr Norrell would get a little tipsy and cast a spell that would allow him (but no one else) to see Mr Strange unclothed. I thought it a pretty feeble idea, but it worked out very well.

17) Post a line from a WIP that you’re working on.

From a fic with the premise that Mr Norrell is (of course) secretly in love with Mr Strange and highly distracted by his pupil’s habit of pursing his lips when he is concentrating on his work. He inadvertently lets slip some indications of his desire when the two are close together looking for a book in the library: “Mr Strange had not failed to notice the man’s gaze directed at his mouth and the faint whimper and the subsequent slight confusion and the heavy breathing and the mere pretense of examining the books when instead Mr Norrell was staring into space and blushing furiously.”

18) Do you have any abandoned WIP’s? What made you abandon them?

Nothing that I carried on beyond a few paragraphs. Just couldn’t find the inspiration to go on.

19) Are there any stories that you’ve written that you’d really love to do a sequel to?

I would love to continue my “Jonathan Strange ♥ Mr Norrell” series by taking the two magicians on one of the adventures that are only hinted at at the very end of the novel. I’ve gone so far as to set them up as planning to go to Egypt, but I have not had the time to do the necessary research to figure out a plausible evil spell for them to save someone from. Maybe someday, but I doubt it.

20) Are there any stories that you wished you’d ended differently?

No.

21) Tell me about another writer(s) who you admire? What is it about them that you admire?

I am very fond of the JS&MN fics by Predatrix. She also writes Norrell, pairing him with Childermass most often but also with Strange. She sticks less to book-canon than I do, but she has a great imagination when it comes to thinking up magic for the characters to do. I have not got that talent and usually derive the magic, when necessary, from Clarke’s book.

22) Do you have a story that you look back on and cringe when you reread it?

Not really.

23) Do you prefer listening to music when you’re writing or do you need silence?

Either way. As long as I’m not listening to vocal music with English lyrics, I don’t get distracted.

24) How do you feel about writing smutty scenes?

Love ‘em, though I have written so many by now, and for the same characters, that I kind of dread them.

25) Have you ever cried whilst writing a story?

Yes. At the parting (inevitable) of Gandalf and Aragorn at the end of “From the Ashes a Fire” and at the letter Childermass writes to Norrell in Chapter 9, the end of “Two Masters in the Darkness,” after he has been separated from Norrel by the Darkness. Even though my main pairing if Norrell/Strange, I loved writing the relationship between Childermass and Norrell in “Master and Man” and its consequences in “Two Master in the Darkness.”

26) Which part of your xxx fic was the hardest to write?

I did an AU version of “Thrice Returned” (the Gandalf/Frodo epic) where instead of being killed by the Balrog, Gandalf survived and went with Frodo and Sam (and Gollum) to Mordor. Figuring out what effects that would have on the rest of the book’s plot was a killer, but I struggled through it and came up with something that someone manages to be sort of book-canon and yet AU at the same time.

27) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow?

Sometimes I do an outline for the multi-chapter fics. Not for the one-offs. In doing “Jonathan Strange ♥ Mr Norrell,” I had to do an elaborate chart with a chronology of all the things that happened to the two in the Darkness, since I wanted it to be absolute book-canon despite involving events in the final chapter that Clarke barely hints at. The chronology (when was Norrell born? 1765 in my head-canon) is the hardest part, since Clarke is so clear about hers.

28) What is something you wished you’d known before you started posting fanfiction?

More of the conventions. I just saw a prompt on Library of Moria requesting a Gandalf/Pippin fic, as if it would be something hard! I saw how to do it right away and just launched in.

29) Do you have a story that you feel doesn’t get as much love as you’d like?

I think “The Toasts of Venice,” a sequel to “Jonathan Strange ♥ Mr Norrell” that takes the two magicians to Venice immediately after the last scene in the book, is pretty darn good, but for some reason it got far fewer hits (averaging by chapter) than the original. It has an amusing scene of Strange trying to get Norrell to be a bit less shy about going out of Hurtfew by taking him to a sweets shop.

30) In contrast to 29 is there a story which gets lots of love which you kinda eye roll at?

I’m rather surprised that “A Book with a Strange Spell upon It” gets more hits than most of my other one-offs, some of which I think are better. But it’s a good story, so the disparity if not odd enough to make me roll my eyes, even a little.

31) Send me a fic recommendation and I’ll post it for my followers to see! (The asker is to send the rec not the answerer)

Having plugged Predatrix’s work already, I’ll say “The Perils of Being a Virgin in Faerie (Together with a Solution Thereto)” by Nothingshire. An excellent premise—that Mr Norrell’s virginity makes him an attractive kidnapping target for Fairies—with delightful humor and genuine affection between the two magicians.

32) Are any of your characters based on real people?

Not apart from the ones in JS&MN that Clarke based on real people.

33) What’s the biggest compliment you’ve gotten?

So hard to pick, but I really appreciated one I got for my series “Jonathan Stolen & Mr Norrell.” The premise is that after a few years in the Darkness, Jonathan attracts the attention of a beautiful lady fairy who kidnaps him, and Mr Norrell has to get up the courage to rescue him. I was a bit trepidatious about writing a Fairy character, especially given my lack of imagination when it comes to writing magic. But I gave it a try, and one reader made me confident that I had succeeded: “I love Lady Turn-of-Tide! You've pinned down the character of Clarke's fairies exactly: capricious, self-centred, vain, generous and cruel all at once, and utterly incapable of seeing humans as anything but cute playthings. As Strange says, she's a good sort (for a fairy), but I know I wouldn't want to meet her! She was a lot of fun to read about, though.” Yay!

34) What’s the harshest criticism you’ve gotten?

There was a troll on tumblr who was lambasting those of us who write really explicit stuff about JS&MN characters. She or he was denouncing a group of us (specifically by our pseudonyms) for ruining Mr Norrell and the others. As if anyone was forcing her/him to read the stuff! Fortunately the fandom sprang to our defense, and I actually got more hits than usual on my latest Norrell fic, “Stark Staring.”

35) Do you share your story ideas with anyone else or do you keep them close to your chest?

I’ve run some stories past Predatrix and even collaborated with her, and I’ve done that with past betas.

36) Can you give us a spoiler for one of your WIP’s?

I only have one, which I quoted above. It is based on a prompt that requests that Norrell be the top in the sex scene, for a change. That goes against my head-canon, but I shall do my best.

37) What’s the funniest story you’ve written?

Hard to choose, but I guess I would say “The Epic Battle over Mr Norrell,” where Childermass and Lascelles both want Norrell sexually, for different reasons, and they decide to have a contest demonstrating their various skills for a delighted but increasingly frustrated Mr Norrell (since of course they have to start over at each stage of the contest without him coming). Guess who wins!

38) If you could collab with any other writer on here, who would it be? (Perhaps this question will inspire some collabs!) If you’re shy, don’t tag the blog, just name it.

I’ve collaborated with Predatrix, but the sort of stuff we write requires very similar tastes, and I doubt I would find anyone else.

39) Do you prefer first, second or third person?

Definitely third, though I have done some first person in letters within the fics.

40) Do people know you write fanfiction?

Only people online.

41) What’s your favourite minor character you’ve written?

I don’t know whether he counts as minor, but I have built up Mr Norrell’s servant Lucas into a fairly major figure in my “Jonathan Strange ♥ Mr Norrell” fics. He agrees to return to Hurtfew, even in the Darkness (as do some other servants), and he works his way up to essentially replacing Childermass as Norrell and Strange’s Man of Business. I quite like him as a character.

42) Song fic - What made you decide to use the song xxx for xxx.

I’ve never done one.

43) Has anyone ever guessed the plot twist of one of your fics before you posted it?

Not that I know of.

44) What is the last line you wrote?

I added this to the WIP quoted above, in 17: “The exchange of Jeremy’s Tott’s little monograph, ENGLISH MAGIC, for its mirror had been a thrilling revelation that there was a second genuine practical magician in England.”

45) What spurs you on during the writing process?

Like Tolkien, I write what I would like to read. I am a professional writer and love dealing with the English language. It’s fun, and I love reading the results.

46) I really loved your xxx fic. If you were ever to do a sequel, what do you think might happen in it?

See number 19.

47) Here’s a fic title - insert a made up title. What would this story be about?

I fear I cannot come up with a title before starting to write the fic.

48) What’s your favourite trope to write?

Basically my Norrell/Strange fics are based around the idea that Norrell, who in the book is so boring and dry and selfish, becomes a different person when he’s with Strange. More lively, talkative, and even passionate. That makes writing about these two when they’re finally reunited in the Darkness is such fun. Norrell is transformed into a fascinating character.

49) Can you remember the first fic you read? What was it about?

It was called “No Windows,” and it was a LOTR AU in which Gandalf seizes the Ring because he loves Frodo and wants to spare him the agony of carrying the Ring—and naturally he’s corrupted by it. It was a terrific story, but unfortunately the author apparently withdrew from the fandom and deleted the fic. I was lucky to have started with such an excellent fic, since it made me go on and read more and then start writing.

50) If you could write only angst, fluff or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why?

I would say smut, since virtually all of what I’ve written has included very explicit scenes. But I’ve also enjoyed working out the other scenes and making them book-canon. I think I would choose fluff if I could only do one, since I enjoy writing comedy and farce.

#Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell The Lord of the Rings fanfiction asks

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unknown-de-mordor-blog · 7 years ago

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Five ships I’m still not over

Beleg Cúthalion/Túrin Turambar

Universe: Middle-earth, first age

Ship name: Nothing that’s widely used in the fandom, I don’t think. But I like to think of them as ‘Black Sword (referring to Turin’s cursed weapon) and Strongbow (direct translation of Cúthalion)’

To me, there's no character more tragic than Turin son of Hurin, and no pairing more tragic than him and Beleg. And no clearer love, too. I don't know if J. R. R. Tolkien intended for them to go that far, but their emotional connection is so deep and powerful that whether you ship them or not it's undisputedly one of the most beautiful relationships in Tolkien's lore. Alas! It's not powerful enough to undo the curse placed on Turin and his clan, which ends both his and Beleg's life all too soon and all too tragically. So, yes, I count Beleg as one of the elves who die for love.

Favourite quote: 'I would lead my own men, and make war in my own way,' Turin answered. 'But in this at least my heart is changed: I repent every stroke save those dealt against the Enemy of Men and Elves. And above all else I would have you beside me. Stay with me!' 'If I stayed beside you, love would lead me not wisdom,' said Beleg.

Uh, I love this so much because it shows the difference in their temperament and maturity. Beleg's an elf who has lived through and fought in so many wars. He's an (elf)man of duty, honour and intellect, and Turin is still a young man whose pride and stubbornness can seriously get in the way of a grown-up conversation. And Beleg is so not having any of that in this scene. He’d do anything for Turin, including ditching his command to find him, but he can pull some tough-love moves, too, when Turin’s unreasonable.

Uzumaki Naruto/Uchiha Sasuke

Universe: Naruto

Ship name: sns, narusasu, sasunaru

I think Naruto and Sasuke canonically love each other, I really do, but I don’t think they are together romantically at any point in the series. And that’s by design, really. Sasuke -- the last of the Uchiha, the tragic figure of the Naruto series (still not as tragic as Turin, but let’s not do this morbid comparison) -- has too many issues to work through, and Naruto isn’t in the position to really help him through them. So as soul-deep as their bond is, they couldn’t have been together and survive each other. Although, I really want that to happen. That’s what fanfictions are for, I guess.

Favourite quote: ‘If you attack Konoha, I will have to fight you... So save up your hatred and take it all on me, I'm the only one who can take it. It's the only thing I can do. I will shoulder your hatred and die with you.’

Honestly, Naruto might just as well propose to Sasuke with that because he’s essentially saying ‘give me your worst, I’m not leaving and never will’. I know friends could be like that, too, but normally not to this degree and not with this kind of commitment. I’m not surprised at all when Sasuke has to ask Naruto why the hell he is doing all this for him. It just goes beyond reason, really.

S'chn T'gai Spock /James T. Kirk

Universe: Star Trek

Ship name: K/S, Spirk

The Daddy of all ships! Pun intended! Spock and Kirk's friendship really walks that fine line of are they/aren’t they. I personally think they aren’t (another controversial statement coming from a shipper), but they’re so cute together you just can’t help think: what if they are? They have this deep trust and affection for one another anyway; why not push it a notch further? ‘This simple feeling,’ as Spock calls it, might as well be love.

Favourite quote:

Kirk: How's our ship? Spock: Out of danger. Kirk: Good... Spock: You saved the crew. Kirk: You used what he wanted against him. That's a nice move. Spock: It is what you would have done. Kirk: And this... this is what you would have done. It was only logical. I'm scared, Spock. Help me not be. How do you choose not to feel? Spock: I do not know. [tears fall] Right now, I am failing. Kirk: I want you to know why I couldn't let you die... why I went back for you... Spock: Because you are my friend. [Kirk places his hand against the glass and gives the Vulcan Salute as he dies]

It’s actually really hard for me to pick a quote for these two because I think every ‘Jim’ from Spock does the job except nobody else would understand it but me. (Second to that is, ‘Captian, not in front of the Klingons.’) While I love them teasing each other a lot, I think Kirk’s death scene from Star Trek Into Darkness has all the right punches to it. Spock has been unable to accept the feeling of friendship towards Kirk (actually just feelings in general) until the moment he watches Kirk dies behind the glass door. And all just comes out like BOOM! Not to mention how close Spock comes to killing Khan for revenge before Uhura tells him that Kirk can be saved but they need Khan alive. Honestly, that’s the only reason Khan’s head doesn’t go plop in Spock’s hands.

Morgoth/Sauron

Universe: Middle-earth, first age

Ship name: it just came to my attention that the fandom is calling this ship Angbang (a wordplay on the name of their home/fortress Angband). Nicely done, you naughty people. Also Melkor/Mairon if you’re going by their proper first-age names.

I think a lot of people seeing this ship would go ‘what?!’ Like, how is that even possible when Tolkien didn’t write a single scene with the two of them in it. I’d say in this case the absence is more powerful. Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales as lore, so they necessarily come from the perspective of the tellers; i.e., humans and elves. That doesn’t mean Tolkien didn’t drop hints about the complex characters that the dark lords of Middle-earth are. He even has Elrond says that people don’t start out evil, not even Sauron. So the question becomes, what the heck happened? And the heck that starts it all out is pretty much in the first few chapters of the Silmarillion where Morgoth is clearly a powerful and inventive figure but in many ways an outcast and shunned by everyone including the very power that made him. (*cough* daddy issue *cough*) And then we are made aware of the fact Sauron, who is also powerful and creative, isn’t on Morgoth’s side from the get go but decides to join him later. The power-hungry dark lords we are later told about aren’t that at all, so it raises the question of their true characters and motives. If anything, I think the length in which Sauron would go for Morgoth thousands of years after his master is defeated and shut away says something about their bond with each other. And if I know one thing, it can’t be fear or respect. If I have to make a guess, I think it is akin to love.

Favourite quote: There isn’t anything I can quote from the source material since there hasn’t been a dialogue or anything they say to an audience that could be trusted as genuinely representing who they are. One thing I do scream about is the scene in the Return of the King movie when the black gate opened and behind there isn’t just the tower with the eye of Sauron but Mount Doom next to it in the same frame. I was like ‘I know Morgoth’s not here but isn’t that him in spirit.’ Yes, I’m a proper trash for these two.

Also, there’s this awesome comic series (unfortunately discontinued) by Suz. It’s legitimately hotter than the fire of Aule’s forge, honestly.

Beren/Lúthien

Universe: Middle-earth, first age

Ship name: I’m not aware of any ship name for these two but ‘Beren and Luthien’ is catchy enough as it is.

How else to finish this list but to dedicate the last entry to the greatest love story of Middle-earth, and, yes, I'm saying that with a straight face because, holy hell, this couple defies expectations left, right, and centre. Luthien, our elven princess, is an active participant in her own fate. She falls in love with a human who, in an act of valour, accepts her father's stupid, impossible task to steal the most treasured jewel from Morgoth the Dark Lord himself. Luthien basically runs away from home, finds her man captured and tortured, and tears the goddamn fortress down in a showdown with the-dark-lord-to-be Sauron himself (which makes you question the competency of everyone else in Middle-earth). They then proceed to steal the jewel together. They don't quite succeed in bringing it back and Beren loses his hand in the process, but hey, they could say it's in his hand, somewhere, and now could they please marry because otherwise I have a feeling that Luthien is going to elope with her boyfriend and her mom and dad won't be seeing her again ever.

And this is really just scratching the surface of Luthien’s feisty personality quite unbefitting of most princesses until the recent overhaul of attitude by Disney. And all this came from a man who was born in the Victorian era when women's autonomy wasn't given or respected. But I think Luthien's depth of character comes from the fact that she has a real-life counterpart, and so she feels more like a real woman. And the love between Beren and Luthien feels compelling because its the love the professor himself had for his wife and life-long partner, Edith. You can check out their gravestone. I'm so not making this up.

Favourite quote: The song of Lúthien before Mandos was the song most fair that ever in words was woven, and the song most sorrowful that ever the world shall ever hear. Unchanged, imperishable, it is sung still in Valinor beyond the hearing of the world, and the listening the Valar grieved. For Lúthien wove two themes of words, of the sorrow of the Eldar and the grief of Men, of the Two Kindreds that were made by Ilúvatar to dwell in Arda, the Kingdom of Earth amid the innumerable stars. And as she knelt before him her tears fell upon his feet like rain upon stones; and Mandos was moved to pity, who never before was so moved, nor has been since.

It’s not a scene between them, but this is how far Luthien’s love and badassery goes. She loses Beren in a battle to protect her father’s kingdom, and she dies grieving him. In the afterlife, she gets to meet the god of death Mandos and sings him a song of their love and her grief. Apparently, she’s so good with words and music that Mandos is like, ‘I can’t handle the feels. You can have your husband back and have a mortal life with him.’ And Luthien takes the deal, of course.

#my post #tolkien verse #naruto #star trek #beren and luthien #spirk #angbang #sns #narusasu #sasunaru #turin and beleg #shipping supreme #I'm enterprising these shit

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