#but variety is the spice of life

[emcee334]

I appreciate that the Cohoot head matches well with the Kulu-Ya-Ku armor set 😁

[sillylotrpolls]

I'm kind of surprised that "Hobbits are short men" won with 28.3% of the vote. I expected that option to do either very poorly, because I usually assume the "actually..." answers will do poorly, or else to do extremely well because it's the closest to canon. 28% is not either of those extremes. Huh.

I'm also quite surprised "New Zealand" took second with 20.6%. The "crack" answers usually don't do that well when multiple serious(-ish) choices are present. And it handily beat "Narnia," which garnered 7.2% and 6th place, even though there is an entire book devoted to how great the Narnia afterlife is.

Actually, you know what, this whole poll surprised me. I really don't know what I was expecting. And really, do I need to have expectations for every poll I put out there? Surely not. Will this keep me from trying to guess which options will "sweep" in the future? Also not.

I did really like the suggestion by @fromthemouthofkings, @notagiraffe, and a few others that hobbits are Yavanna's "children" and thus go to her halls/gardens, with a convenient path leading next-door to her husband Aule's halls and the dwarves. I've read quite a bit of post-death fanfic that focuses on the whole "woe, we are doomed to separate afterlives, how can we possibly overcome the capricious will of the gods?" thing (which is a super-canon type of plot, btw, see: Lúthien and Beren) and I'm frankly kind of over it.

I think my big takeaway here is that afterlife!fanfic could use a bit of a shakeup, and there are a lot of fun and intriguing ways to go about that. I hope I see some when next I'm browsing Ao3 to get my dopamine fix at 2 am.

After all, wouldn't it be fun to see Yavanna be all "So.... if Ilu and Manwe aren't going to bother to properly manage Middle-earth, and my hubby won't stop bragging about how great his dwarves are, what's to stop me from making my own species of little short guys?" So fun, right? Please do drop a link if someone's already written it. :D

(Context below poll)

Tolkien is very specific about what happens to some of his fantastical species after they die, but not all.

Naturally, he goes into the most detail about the elves, and elven post-death circumstances are a pretty big plot point in the Silmarillion.

Paraphrasing from Tolkein Gateway:

Death was unnatural for Elves; Ilúvatar [omnipotent god] intended for an Elf's spirit and body to remain united forever, but this design was disrupted by evils of Melkor [Sauron's boss]. Should an Elf die, its spirit would be summoned to the Halls of Mandos [god of dead]. Elves could refuse the summons, but this would suggest that they were tainted. Elves who went to the Halls were typically given the opportunity to be reincarnated after a while into a body identical to the one that died (unless the elf was very bad). An elven spirit could also choose to remain disembodied.

By the time of the Third Age (when Lord of the Rings takes place), elves could only reincarnate in Valinor (where Frodo sails off to at the end of RotK) and could not return to Middle-earth after doing so.

Dwarves also have a cool afterlife, as expanded on in the famous fanwork Sansûkh. Paraphrased from Tolkien Gateway:

The Dwarves held to a promise that Ilúvatar [omnipotent god] would hallow them and adopt them as his Children. After death Aulë [smithing god who made the dwarves] cared for them, gathering them to the Halls of Mandos with the other Children of Ilúvatar, though in halls set apart. After the Last Battle they will work alongside Aulë in the remaking of the world.

Men, on the other hand, were given the "Gift of Men." Again paraphrasing Tolkien Gateway:

After Men died, their spirits were gathered in the Halls of Mandos, and then departed for a destination unknown even to the gods. Whereas all other beings, including the gods themselves, were bound to the world and its fate, the Gift freed Men from this destiny, allowing them to shape their own lives as they wished.

Most Men, for some reason (the elves blamed Morgoth), did not see this as a very good gift.

So where does this leave hobbits? Tolkien's books don't say, though he did write a letter one time saying that hobbits are basically just short Men. However, it is also the case that he shoehorned in The Hobbit to fit with his Silmarillion world (thus giving us the Lord of the Rings trilogy), so if you want to disregard this bit of ephemera you are completely within your rights to do so.

[fictionz]

Happy to see Kristin Lehman out here getting a role on The Outer Limits as a normal person, not carrying on ill-fated romances from behind a screen or via hologram.

From “Time to Time,” season 7.

[god-of-this-new-blog]

One must imagine Lawlight happy

[gingersnapwolves]

Over 60 here. I didn't count all the individual sample bags on the fifth shelf...

Why are there so many boxes of tea?! There's loose leaf tea in the cabinet too!

[the-magpie-collective]

"Make Wyll worse. Make him turn evil. Make him want revenge or to hurt other people, just like the other characters. That would fix him. That would make him interesting."

Wrong. Wrong. Very wrong.

Make Wyll worse. Make him continually sacrifice his comfort for the safety of others. Let him constantly put himself last in his goal to make the world a better place. Watch him erase his sense of self for a heroic mask that exists to make others feel comfortable and at ease around him. Have Wyll grind away at himself day after day after day until there is nothing left for him to give. The only worse Wyll I want to see is one who continually sets himself on fire to keep others warm.

I cannot fucking wait until this idea that just because someone is good/kind/helpful then they must be infantile/naive/boring dies. No, being a nihilistic pessimist is not more interesting or whatever, especially when there are already characters in BG3 that fulfill that role.

[minniiaa]

Law and Luffy are unquestionably my favorite ship for many reasons, one of them being that they both fit perfectly in either a top/bottom role.

Bratty Bottom Luffy and Dom Law? Yes. Hungry Top Luffy and Pathetic Bottom Law? Perfect. I have never read a Lawlu fic I didn’t like.

[eppysboys]

I will say, this shot is great, perfectly captures Brian's mix of amusement, admiration and nervousness at press conferences:

This shot.......perfectly shows that the wig budget was below the floor

[pocketramblr]

Sometimes I think "well there doesn't need to be any more reporters in that family" but then I (teacher) look at my parents (3/5 are teachers) and other relatives (more than one sibling, grandparent, cousin, etc) who are teachers and go. Hm. Well. Ok maybe it's not that weird to have multiple reporters then

[strawlessandbraless]

Reblog for science 🧫🧬🔬🧪🥼🔭⚗️🧑‍🔬

[gender-premium-tm]

started reading dc (well. mostly batfam. i know what i like) fics and now this guy won’t stop following me everywhere. he’s in my emails. i have a headcanon design for him (he’s in the meme!! yippee!!). i made a playlist. i don’t even GO HERE. it’s so over 😔

[magistralucis]

pronouncing the necron 'sz': personal rating list*

broke: /s/ only ('seras')

woke: /z/ only ('zeras')

provoke: /s/ and /z/ pronounced separately ('s-ze-ras')

bespoke: /ʂ/ or /ʃ/ ('scheras')

invoke: tensed fricative /s͈/ ('sseras')

misspoke: /s/ but evil ('ßeras')

(* Further notes in tags.)

[an-experienced-gentleman]

Variety is the spice of life.

Six Sexy Words

[sanitysims]

yowzers!!!!

[purgefluidz]

I can pretend any male celebrity has a vagina

[sotiredmostnights]

i think one thing FE3H did that's kind of disappointing is it made a lot of the fandom expect every single character to have a tragic backstory and every single support chain to hold some deep level of emotional weight. these aren't *bad* things to want in a game by any means, but personally i think it's important to appreciate supports or characters that are silly or whimsical or just plain endearing without being so serious all the time