#i am not recon and never will be bc it doesn’t vibe with my personality or lifestyle

[bog-horse]

anyway my issue with a lot of other helpols (which just makes me avoid the larger community and do my own thing in my corner) is that a lot of them are recon (which is fine!!!) but i am inherently informal and weird as shit in my practice. i call hades and hestia my spiritual dad/mom, hermes gets donuts as offerings when i’m trying to get to class on time and avoid traffic, i once asked artemis to keep deer from jumping out in front of my car on a road trip home with an offering of granola/sports bars. when people get too formal with the gods and pull out the titles, i usually bail bc it makes me uncomfortable. my relationship with my deities is extremely deep and connected, and it’s not that people who have more formal relationships with them can’t also have those, but it’s that if i called hades “lord hades” with any seriousness, he’d hit me with a rock, basically.

i don’t judge other people for their practices or more formal relationships bc honestly, it’s between you and your gods, but like… my go-to offering is the pomegranate brookside dark chocolates, and yes. sometimes i eat them out of my offering dishes the next day.

[silvantransthranduiltrash]

Okay listen, absolutely joining the Legolas is old af boat, love the vibe, but what if he is genuinely that old AND still considered ‘young’ by his people? I recon that the silvan concept of age is vastly different to the noldorians simply because they didn’t start shit and typically minded their damn business meaning more of them survived. So he’s essentially super old by noldorian standards but considered pretty young by silvan standards. Pretty much ever other elf he’s met just assumed he’s ‘young’ by their typical standard (joyful personality only exacerbates this) and vastly misjudged his actual age

Also hello I love your blog!! Hope you don’t mind me adding this!

OH MY GOD YES, WELCOME ABORD!! AND OMFG THAT’S HILARIPUS I CAN JUST IMAGINE IT:

Legolas: casually comenting on how he’s one of the younger silvans on occasion

The noldo/sonda: ph, so he was probably born in the third age then, and this is his first tussle woth sauron, and he’s never even witnessed morgoth’s bs woth his own eyes

The twins (yes, i will alwys use the peredhel s a medium for these bizarre reveals bc i feel like they’re more open to asking questions about the silvans: *trying to figure out if they’re older or younger than legolas* so when were you born then?

Legolas, after thinking for second: well i was born about 1000 years before the feanorians landed on these coasts, so about *counts fingers* only 8 thousand years.

Elrond, who’s walking past: HOLD ON, WHAT-!?!

Legolas, continuing: None of my peers ever let me forget it, when we’re off duty i’m always refered to as the “baby captain”. With my siblings i can put up woth it, but oh my god, assholes, get over it! If they can bitch about it, they can work on their skills. Then they won’t have to take such a youngen’s orders!

Elrond, slightly histarical: hold on hold on hold on- you’re how old?!? That’s older than me! That’s older than my parents! Or my grandparents! You could’ve known luthien-

Legolas: -i did know luthien-

Elrond: AND YOU SAY YOU’RE YOUNG!?!-

Legolas: i am young:

Elrond: what am i a baby in your eyes??? A fetus?? Or my kids just eggs??? Oh my god, does that mean that all the times thranduil refered to himself as one of the youngest of the avari/silvan rulers, that doesn’t actually mean he’s that young either? Wll, he’s your dad, so he’s at least older than you- *horrified gasp* *horrified whisper* does that mean all this time we commented on his “young age” he was looking at us like we were fucking morons???

Legolas: i mean, tbf, 95% of the avari/silvan rulers are all elves that awoke at the lake way back when, while my father was born the old fashioned way, so when sm1 says they’re younger than the avari/silvan rulers, it don’t mean much…

Elrond: wait, but how are you still considered young by your elves’ standard?? Aren’t there a lot of older elves that have died?

Legolas: well, for one we haven’t killed each other for jewelry.

—————-—————————————————————————

No, but it probably helps that legolas is the younger/youngest sibling, and all the elves just automatically assume that, bc he’s the youngest of his siblings, he’s young. For some reason, a lot of people have a bad habit of considering the “-er” and “-est” to mean essentially the same.

[betelgeusing]

I’m caught up on the Stand here r some opinions (OBVIOUSLY spoilers thru episode 6)

good:

Glen Bateman, Tom Cullen, Nick Andros, Larry Underwood casting/rewrites/adjustments

(Jovan Adepo deserves full credit for me not only tolerating Larry but actually liking him most of the time cause hoo boy I hated his guts in the book)(also!!! he played Teenager Michael Murphy in The Leftovers and it’s TRIPPING me out because he is OLDER than me and I never would have guessed it watching that show!!!)

(also it’s SO nice to see Brad Henke playing a teddy bear of a guy bc he is shaped like a friend but I’ve literally only ever seen him play absolute monsters)(I luv Tom Cullen)

dayna jurgens best character in the book best character in the series

I wasn’t sure about Owen Teague as Harold bc book Harold is overweight and pimply and kind of greasy and off-putting and Owen is skin and bones and good-looking but he projects creepy and sus very well. he is doing my boy Justice

speaking of, odessa young REALLY sells "girl stuck with a creepy guy who has an unrequited crush on her" like you can feel the discomfort and borderline contempt streaming from her pores

appreciated the rewrites of Rita to make her whole deal not horribly sexist and weird (same goes for most of the women tbh). Heather Graham did great

updating it to 2020ish works well. Glen vaping all the time = legendary

they did a good job of trimming and conflating some of the stuff so the story stays focused. things they cut MOSTLY weren't super important

alex skarsgård scissors stab neck smeared in blood sexy

J! K! Simmons! CAMEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

meh:

james marsden is fine (actually better than I expected in this) but he always fails to excite me. gary sinise in the OG miniseries was a better vibe for Stu and they should've gone for someone with more of the everyman energy. Marsden looks like a catalog model and doesn't seem to be able to bring an observable personality to his roles (sorry man)(on a more positive note this is why he was a perfect Scott Summers)

Whoopi Goldberg is a fine actress and apparently in contrast to a lot of critics I’m actually fine with her casting but mother abigail is SUPER under-used and way less developed than she should be-- we know literally nothing about her outside of her occasional appearance to scold and/or guide and that lack of personhood plays heavily into into the “magical negro” trope which. ugh. at least in the book she had a ton of backstory and family and stuff to do outside of “be the magical prophet for everybody else”

I love the whole Skarsgard family and am always happy to see one of them. that said, Alex lacks Randall's bouncy gleeful chaos energy and sheer malevolence. also he whispers all the time and I'm not sure what that choice is all about (no lbr that’s just an askars acting habit and outside of Eric from True Blood it’s not a great one)

bad:

not enough dayna screen time

pacing is weird and makes it really hard to get invested. starting at the free zone in Boulder and only jumping back to how they actually started/how they GOT to Boulder in pieces every episode feels really disruptive. not that it’s hard to keep track of, but it’s hard to really feel anything for anyone with such a disjointed narrative. the trip to Boulder is half the novel and it’s super important for establishing character dynamics, rivalries, motivations and personalities and if you meet these people mid-story after their arc is half finished and only get fragments of the VERY IMPORTANT ESTABLISHING STORY every now and again it feels like being robbed of setup and then payoff? idk. I hate it. I think they should have started at the beginning and gone thru chronologically, the story works way better that way

for that matter, playing all coy and mysterious with Randall and only showing Vegas for the first time in episode 5?? when the book has us there every step of the way? I don’t need a 1:1 adaptation but I do think following Vegas developments is super helpful re: understanding stakes and how much of a threat your enemy is, and with so little focus ON the enemy, it’s just not scary?

SPEAKING of Vegas what the actual hell. apologies for going “but in the book!!!” so many times but literally in the book Vegas would be a very appealing prospect for just about anyone. there’s electricity, there are supplies, there’s peace, there’s structure and organization. iirc Dayna is even tripped out on her recon mission because she makes friends with people and is struck by how normal and decent everyone seems? WELL this adaptation just threw that out the window and just went full fledged hedonistic sin bin full of just deeply unpleasant people that are more caricatures than characters. everyone there sucks turds. lacks any kind of depth. HUGE swing and a miss bc it hits so much better if you’re like “these are largely decent people lured in by the promise of stability, making moral compromises because they’re scared and trying to survive and Randall’s leadership is a huge temptation” vs “every single person here would roofie my drink and not feel a twinge of conscience about it”

every single choice made with regards to Nadine. badly miscast, robbed of the kickass witch’s streak aesthetic, set up as a consummate villain from the beginning (her constant struggles with her fate are totally omitted till it’s way too late for them to be in any way believable), relationship with Larry is basically nonexistent, and the planchette incident from her childhood is revealed much too early so it’s devoid of any real sense of horror (portrayed as a catalyst for lifelong villainy rather than a late-in-story revelation that she was set on a path against her will). done right she’s complicated and sympathetic at least until her complete heel-turn, in this series she’s just 2d and dull

randall beating bobby terry to death instead of ripping him apart with TEETH was a stupid change made to spite me personally. I mean can you IMAGINE how good that scene could have been