#Letters from Santa

[bits-of-wit]

[starsofarda]

The first time I got know Tolkien's works was not the Silm or LOTR.

My English teacher in middle school brought in photocopies of his "Letters from Santa".

She talked about Tolkien and she told us that these were the letters he used to write to his children up until way into their adulthood.

The base line of these letters was that Santa was just trying to do his job, but a clumsy polar bear was always messing up things.

And that was my introduction to Tolkien.

The lotr movies came out more or less at the same time as Harry Potter, so whilst I was a "yeah yeah the hp movies and books", LotR was, and still is, my introduction to fantasy and my hype was and still is huge. It basically was love at first sight.

Anyway, I hope y'all can read Tolkien's letters from Santa.

[yeoldenews]

We

we

we

and

[corviiids]

sparknotes for chapter 9 of as you like it because a very kind commenter asked for a breakdown and if theres one thing im good at it's breaking down

(spoilers for the fic obviously)

tihs chapter gave me so much trouble. i sat on it for so long i literally hated it by the time i posted it but im starting to forgive it now. it was, as ive said, originally way longer, and the next part of the fic was supposed to be the second half of this one... but it was starting to get absurd and i realised that neither part would have the weight i needed them to have if they were lumped in together. (with some relief, honestly, because i kind of had wanted them to be separate initially but didn't think they'd be long enough. i dont know myself very well.) anyway, the next chapter should be a bit of a doozy now although hopefully not SO absurdly long.

this chapter picks up where the previous cliff hung off, which is to say, after the 'shadow' akechi reveals that he's actually just the real ass guy. akechi in the palace what will he do. the chapter doesn't immediately kick off with ren's reaction though and that is because ren is the most repressed man alive and does not know how he feels about it.

so, akechi disguised himself to enter his palace, which is significant for a few reasons:

1. he's disguised as himself

which i think is ironic in a fun way, but it's also just a very basic nod to the fact that akechi pivots between which of his personae is his default. this isn't necessarily super meaningful, but he does later refer to the black mask suit as

a costume, instead of an outfit. i mean, don't read into it too much, he's just talking, but i did think that probably points to how he feels about his appearance generally.

2. more importantly, his disguise involves taking off his mask.

so he's disguised, yes, and he's disguised as himself, yes, but that disguise is a literal unmasking, which is also kind of ironic. in presenting himself this way he has literally and figuratively made himself vulnerable. they're inside his heart, and the entire time he's in the palace, he is exposed... again both literally and figuratively because he also starts sharing more with ren than he ever has. look, i just think it's fun to have a character who has so many layers that he has to lie so hard that he becomes himself again.

i only want to point this out because (this is also part of larger meta about mona lol) akechi knew about the metaverse, but there is no way to intuit the method of stealing hearts without guidance. it's such a specific and involved process. thje most akechi could work out on his own was that if you killed a shadow, that person would have a mental breakdown. no way to guess that if you send a calling card and then go in within the next 24 hours and take a physical manifestation of a thing that you didn't know existed (process) would lead to that person ahving a change of heart (result). so even if akechi had a palace and knew about it, even if he wanted to do something about it, he would have assumed there was nothing he could do about it - i also have no idea what the process would be for sending yourself a calling card, even if he DID know about the process. so basically in this fic akechi found his palace and just assumed that was it. he was like, fucked up lol. anyway

this just straight up isn't true HAHA so i put in the silly little dichotomy of akechi gently taking ren's arm to protect him from slipping on the ice while telling him that he lied about caring about him. i think in this chapter as akechi begins to openly explain more and more of his thought process, this is probably the first truly clear glimpse you get of exactly what akechi's distortion is and how deep it runs.

the things akechi says with total conviction in this chapter are just... not true, not a fair or founded way to view the world (or the art of performance haha), but he says them with total conviction, and hopefully it should show off how unreliable he is as a source of exposition. one commenter asked about this moment of akc's eyes going yellow and if it was somehting that happened in canon - not really, i was just thinking about those little moments in the game after you send a calling card where the game cuts from the person to their shadow to do a little oneliner about their distortion.

akechi's IN his own palace, so i thought it would be fun to kind of make it a physical thing that can happen to him where he sort of merges with his shadow for a brief second in the moments when the distortion is strongest.

OKAY this is one of my favourite bits of the chapter HAHA the deep soda lore. i dont expect anyone to remember all the way back to chapter 3 but:

literally nobody asked about this but i love the phantom thieves!!! i dream of all the little silly moments of being a team that they must have that we don't get to see in gameplay, for obvious reasons of it wouldn't really work in a game, but i can imagine them in my brain. i can imagine their trickshot contests that get their asses kicked. i can imagine them chanting at each other to chug while joker and oracle compete to down an entire bottle of brand neutral mountain dew baja blast. i can dream.

soda lore is gay.

i dont honestly think it's inherently a bad thing necessarily but this part does kind of set up like... you can see akechi very early on in life forming this worldview that the truth isn't always what you want, you know? this was a 'lie' he and his mother both bought into, they both knew what the truth actually was, so it wasn't real dishonesty, but they just had this little fantasy. i just thought it would be fun for akechi to have a way to bond with his mother and feel closer to her, and that way is by buying into this white lie. idk

akechi's mother isn't really a character and i don't want to form her into too much of one because i think it's very much the point that, like... he made this point in an earlier chapter but having lost her at a pretty young age i think it's quite crucial that akechi doesn't really have a fully formed image of who his mother is outside of what she was to him as a child. so i actively don't want her to feel too real or defined. im not interested in making an oc out of her because i think it defeats the purpose. that said, this line exists to maybe gesture very vaguely at the notion that akechi's mother was a very bright person who similarly was stuck in circumstances that didn't serve to foster her real potential. just the image in my mind of a person who's clever enough to get across algebraic notation in chess by flipping through a book in a few minutes, but was never exposed to the opportunity to learn chess until this moment in someone else's house, and also the particular situation of learning this skill WHILE at someone's place as a call girl, i dunno . i hope im treating this with the grace it deserves but i wanted to build just this particular image in vivid colour while also keeping the reality quite blurry and vague, just to give the reader a sense of where akechi came from while still preserving his limited pov.

my thoughts on the phantom thieves' methods (and how they compare to maruki) are definitely too long and involved to put into a post about this fic chapter specifically, but maybe one day. i also wanna stress im not like... strictly anti-phantom thief or anti-heartstealing lol but i do have thoughts about the philsophy of it and the thieves' hypocrisy WHATEVER that's not for this post. i bring this up only to crow about finding a way to bring up the experience machine (ie maruki's reality) in this fic without it being royal compliant and have it be... hoepfully... sufficiently relevant to the plot. wa hoo! the experience machine came up for the first time back in chapter 4 and im just delighted that i finally got to close that loop. by the way, that experiment is also called the lotus eater machine after the lotus eaters in the odyssey! i dunno that it's actively my favourite thought experiment but it's definitely up there and i think about it a lot.

TITLE DROP

i think i spoke once about what 'as you like it' means. it's obviously the name of the shakespeare play from where 'all the world's a stage' comes, but it has a couple more layers to it as well - akechi's palace is a place where he performs to what he believes other people want or need to see from him - so his appearance is as you like it. and his accusation of the thieves' heartstealing methods is that they twist a person's internal reality to suit their vision - that's the meaning he's taking here, claiming that joker is turning akechi into an unfamiliar new thing, as [joker] like[s] it. you get it.

this running joke of ren really hating vents wasn't something i planned but im attached to it now. prayer circle for his knees

ive basically given up on making sense of samerecarm, which is par for the course for any rpg or video game really where reduction to 0hp/revival are mechanics. like, im inclined to think 0hp is more equivalent to unconsciousness, because... well... otherwise it's pretty cold that they left akechi dead in the engine room without even looking for a way around the wall. lol. but one of mona's revival lines is 'being dead isnt easy!' or something like that, so i kind of just give up and assume it's video game logic you'r enot meant to look at too hard lol. the way i reconcile it for my purposes is to say it's a sort of metaverse-exclusive state of being which is not quite dead but sort of in a limbo state wher eyou can be brought back with specific revival magic, which i refer to as being down. that's uhhh, that's different from the battle status of down... which you get after being hit with a crit/technical/weak skill... look, don't think about it. joker in crow's arms.

this is literally meaningless i just wanted to include a cameo of my very favourite persona q2 battle theme.

[st4rstudent]

so you guys ever think Santa Paws talked to Rose?

[caffichai]

It's a little while till Lunar New Year, so in the meantime...

If you think "something else" and comment/send an ask, I'll definitely put a lot of consideration into that! At the very least I'll probably add it to a future poll!

[anaalnathrakhs]

i feel it's so fucking stupid and ungrateful but it still hurts a little when someone gifts me something i just don't like. i don't know. i know it's dumb and inaccurate to astrain that much meaning to a simple gift, but it feels kinda like they don't know me. i guess it feels like people don't see me, like a reminder that the person i reflect and the person i feel like are incredibly different.

[wosemi-sama]

nenekasa o'clock bc i love them and its valentines day also 🔥🔥🔥🔥

these chocolates made just for you

Tsukasa walked up to the front porch, slightly trembling. The box of chocolates he was holding became slightly sweaty from keeping it in his grasp so tightly. The bouquet of flowers was barely holding on for the same reason. He took a deep breath in before knocking on the door.

He stood there for a moment. Silence. Finally, a click was heard and Nene opened the door.

"Hello..?" Nene seemed confused.

"Aha! Nene!" Tsukasa shouted, yet he seemed less confident than usual. "Happy Valentine's Day!" He said with a slightly shaky voice. Tsukasa gave Nene the box of chocolates and bouquet he was holding.

The box was heart shaped. It was red and had a brown bow neatly wrapped around it. The bouquet of flowers was wrapped in brown paper and a pink bow.

"I actually made them myself!"

Tsukasa had been looking into a gift for Nene since early January. Yesterday, he and Saki got together bright and early in the Tenma kitchen to make the chocolates. Saki was glad to help in any way she could.

"O-oh. Thank you... Happy Valentine's Day to you too, Tsukasa." Nene examined the bouquet of daffodils and white roses, unsure of what to say.

In all honesty, Nene had completely forgotten about the holiday. She was going to get a gift for Tsukasa, but it seemed it had completely slipped her mind. She also wasn't too sure what to get him, and thought that the actual act of giving him the gift would be really awkward and-

"Uhm, I got you a gift too. I'll be right back." Nene slammed the door and ran to her room.

She threw the boquet and box of chocolates on her bed before frantically looking around for anything that she could give Tsukasa.

Finally, she spotted something on the floor. It was an unfinished charm bracelet when she was making them with Emu yesterday. All she had to do was tie it together.

Within moments, the door slammed open. Tsukasa jumped a bit as Nene was struggling to hide the fact that she was out of breath.

"H-here it is...." Tripping over her words, Nene gave Tsukasa the bracelet.

"Ah, thank you, dearest Nene! I'll be sure to cherish it." Tsukasa finished his sentence before realizing what he said. He immediately covered his mouth with his arm and silently screamed into the sleeve of his cream colored sweater, face as red as the box of chocolates he gave her.

Dearest.... huh? Nene thought. She wasn't any less surprised and flustered as Tsukasa.

"U-uhm! I should get going. HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY." Tsukasa shouted nervously. He immediately slammed Nene's front door shut.

Nene slightly jumped at the loud slam. She inhaled and exhaled to calm down before going back to her room.

Nene took a good look at the flowers chocolates. She was grinning from ear to ear. She put the gifts on her desk and flopped on her bed, sighing the most dramatic sigh ever.

Oh, to be idiots in love.

[realboutfatalfury]

finally finished zero escape 999

[lewanarta]

Anže and Santa 🎅

[joemerl]

Tolkien household, late 1932

Edith: (shifting through many pages of manuscript) Gnomes fighting goblins...made-up languages...cave paintings? Is this part of your epic elf mythology project?

J.R.R.: (writing feverishly) No. It's my Father Christmas letter to the children.

Edith:

Edith: As always, Ronald, you are taking things too far.

[the-travelling-witch]

Surprise i might not be willing to buy it for myself but I will absolutely buy it for a friend. Enjoy, moon child

christmas, halloween edition

[twentytanya]

Some Applause For The Postal Service! | Tansica

Tanya was getting a discount for helping Boba out, but that still left her to come up with approximately £30 when she did not have a single shilling to her name. Hence, TaskRabbit.

Her first job was for someone named Jessica Rabbit (fitting!) who lived in Southern Isles. Sealing, addressing, and delivering holiday cards. How sweet. Barf.

(Okay, sorry, Tanya was trying to be less of a Grinch this year).

“Helloooo,” Tanya said, knocking on the door of the address she had been given. “I’m your TaskRabbit!”

[outfit]

@notbad-justsungthatway​

[neonsbian]

guess who found another yuta and yangyang interaction 😁

[twinknote]

has anyone else seen that really horrible ad on hulu funded by literally israel. it makes me want to fucking punch the tv and i fucking Hate knowing that so many people are going to fall for the straight up propaganda they’re spewing

[fairyprince7]

HAPPY DAY OF BIRTH HERE IS A LING YAO FOR YOU <333 (this is just some random picture of him that I found but I hope you like it nonetheless)

I LOVE THAT PICTURE OF HIM SM IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY WHENEVER I SEE IT