#it made sense in my mind

[dilf-in-peril]

I ejaculate and immediately do a kip up to impress you with my athleticism thereby completely deflating the emotional impact of our prolonged and exhausting sexual encounter.

[swiftpascal]

🇨🇱🇺🇸

write your url by only using emojis

🍅✨✨

[zytes]

this manatee looks like it’s in a skyrim loading screen

[oifaaa]

It's funny how opinions can change over time for instance I used to want Bruce to be a good parent but then I realised how fucking boring that is to read at the end of the day comics are soap operas and I'm here for the drama

[milchreste]

[juniemunie]

[Abandoned by the Lightners, his heart became cracked with hatred.]

Hitting a lil' too close to home?

[itsmeimcathy]

nosferatu (2024) by robert eggers | nosferatu the vampyre (1979) by werner herzog | the phantom of the opera (2004) by joel schumacher & andrew lloyd webber | the phantom of the opera (1911) by gaston leroux

[randomminty]

Five billion octopath 2 scribbles i feel sick

[wardinespurrit]

redid my hms designs. i go on a ramble in the tags beware

[dkettchen]

she would've told them unlike her canon! version who decided not to be an ally smh

[melestasflight]

Lena, these are all very valid thoughts that, I have no doubt, will continue to grow.

The residues of patriarchy are undoubtedly the #1 factor in why women characters seem "uninteresting," in Tolkien's fandom and beyond. Take, for example, the number of gay romance novels that get published (and awarded) vs. books focusing on sapphic relationships. The ratio is mind-blowing.

But other than that, I feel like the focus on m/m relationships in this fandom has to do with who used to write fanfiction and how the fandom is evolving. Last year, the folks over at the @silmarillionwritersguild ran a couple of surveys on this topic (details here and here), and there were exciting results:

73% of Silm fandom writers were women (still high, but a decrease from the 90% in the surveys done in 2015)

15% were nonbinary and genderqueer-identifying people

a significant increase in interest in writing women from 2015 to 2020, regardless of the gender of the author

folks who joined newer archives and platforms show higher interest in writing women characters than the previous fandom generation

So, the overall trend is: POSITIVE. Tripple hooray!

The fandom is diversifying, and with it, the types of characters we're writing. There's a lot more content available to fit anyone's box.

All this to say that I can see how the earlier fandom days were a lot greyer. There was little to no nonbinary representation (in writers or characters), fandom platforms used to be shut down for explicit content up until the early 2000s (let's not even talk about queer content), and even folks who were exploring their own sexual identities through fanfiction probably felt like they had to do it in a more subtle way.

I'll dare claim that for many people, it's easier to contemplate alternatives if the protagonist doesn't directly mirror you. Say, a woman in a straight marriage contemplating her sexuality might feel more at ease expressing this through a male character involved with another man, at least at first. The journey is long, slow, and sometimes painful.

What we're seeing now are still the residues of that more limited, and I dare say scary, era of creative writing. A lot of folks are still at the beginning of the journey. But the good news is that, when they start, chances are, they will find like-minded souls much quicker, in much more positive spaces.

So yes, Lalwen (being an unmarried, badass Noldo noble) is still not on the priority list, but characters like her are beginning to crawl up the ladder. There is a lot more talk about here than there ever was. So I'm hopeful this will get prettier and prettier.

thinking about a discussion i saw this morning (please accept these very half developed ideas!) and i do think that part of the reason that the silmarillion fandom pays less attention to female characters (outside of misogyny, which is also a huge part of it) is that basically every single woman is a wife, and most of them are mothers?

i can't help but notice that the majority of popular male characters are unmarried and childless (looking at ao3 statistics, with the notable counter-examples of elrond, who is very often a child in fanfic, and feanor, arda's most divorced elf). which is possibly because many of the most influential male characters in the silmarillion are unmarried and childless, but it does feel a little disproportional.

some very disorganized thoughts on this phenomenon, presented with very little confidence because i'm just bouncing ideas around:

queer ships are far more popular in the fandom as it stands now, because it is heavily queer, and there is very little woman-to-woman interaction in the silm. the majority of the most popular m/m ships are based on some meaningful interaction between the characters. many of f/f ships involve characters that have never met (indis/miriel, finduilas/nienor) or have very limited interactions (thuringwethil/luthien). ------------ this does not explain, however, why m/m ships between people who have no interactions at at all (erestor/glorfindel, celebrimbor/maeglin, etc) routinely get more attention than f/f ships.

basically every woman's story is defined in relation to her husband's (and usually children). idril, i think, is the semi-outlier here (and to some extent aredhel). but even then -- the majority of the male characters, even if they are married, have a lot of story outside of their marriage/relationship (so much so that characters like finrod, fingon, and angrod can go from married with children to unmarried in some drafts have very little changed!). can that be said of any married female character in the text? i don't think so. once a woman in the silmarillion marries and has children, the progression of her story is almost always defined very heavily by her relationship to her husband and children. fingon rules the same and dies the same whether or not he has a wife and son -- idril's story would be very different without tuor and earendil. feanor gets to do a lot of things after his marriage to nerdanel -- fingolfin does very much after his marriage to anaire. both of the women disappear from the story once their marriages are no longer relevant. ---- here i will note that some male characters ARE heavily defined by their relationships to their families. turgon, whose motivations are very heavily based around the death of his wife and protecting his daughter, comes to mind. so does thingol, whose wife and daughter are equally central to his story. that said, neither of those characters is popular in fandom.

to expand on the previous point: characters whose main stories are romance stories, including male characters, do not tend to be very popular. earendil has just under 700 works on ao3. beren has just over 500. (elwing and luthien, for reference, have just over 700 and 800 respectively). despite our love for shipping, the fandom seems to be disinterested in parts of the book with a heavy romance focus. is it possible that the fact that nearly every single woman having a prominent romance arc "turns fandom off" them?

only four unmarried women come to mind as counter examples (watch me miss someone obvious). these are finduilas, haleth, findis, and lalwen. findis and lalwen are footnotes that disappear quickly from the story without being given much to do (which doesn't stop us with erestor or caranthir, but still). finduilas, despite being unmarried, is heavily defined by a tragic love triangle. haleth is the notable exception -- i would say she is more popular in fandom than many women, but less than most male characters. the only real explanations i can give for her getting so little fandom attention is misogyny/bias, the general fact that humans in the silmarillion get less love than elves in fandom, and and possibly her having little connection to any of the other popular characters outside of caranthir.

that being said, i do still think misogyny/the general fandom tendency to ignore female characters in favor of male ones is responsible for a good chunk of the difference. i also really welcome feedback on these thoughts because i feel very uncertain of them. the more i think about it, the more i can find counter-examples and outliers to a lot of the trends i'm talking about here -- perhaps i overgeneralized. is there no coherent analysis to be drawn here?

currently leaning in the direction of "this is a vague but not all-encompassing trend in the text, which affects fandom to some extend without explaining the preference for male characters and m/m ships entirely."

[thirtyskeletons]

expeditious retreat!

[coldbycrossfade]

MAN THAT REALLY COLORS THIS RESPONSE IN THIS CONVERSATION SO DIFFERENTLY FOR ME

[elysiae]

do you think operator & drifter treat their warframes wildly differently?

somewhat insufficient TLDR: i think the operator and drifter are emotionally attached but in vastly, strikingly different ways, and it manifested very, very differently too.

in operator's case, it isn't that they dont *care*, but they know how durable a warframe is. they know they can take one hell of a hit, and they'll be okay because that warframe takes the brunt of it (albeit with some phantom pain if the damage is bad enough). theyre less comfortable outside the confines of those large, bulky war machines because they know they're ultimately safe. those warframes can take hits. they cannot. the operator knows they were people, but they never met those people before the tragedy. besides... a lot of them really are just empty shells. they're hardly the people they once were, especially since they recreated those warframes from blueprints. don't get me wrong, they do remember the anguish of the originals - they were there, they lived it, and they still have empathy for them... but the operator knows the limits of every warframe like the back of their hand - they can maneuver however they want, they can take hits, they can run into armies and not be too afraid because they (as in the operator and the warframe this time) be fine. even if the warframe is damaged, they can fix the damage, so no harm done.

but drifter on the other hand? at first i think they never really realised the power they had. in their mind they were still them, just running, rolling on the occasion, it took them ages to maneuver those things *properly*, and probably only ever really learned with the operator's guidance. they would not let a warframe take a hit, not because they felt empathy for it (at least not a lot, last i checked you kind of need at least *some* to have effective transference?) but because they were so used to walking around vulnerable. yknow, not inside a killing machine. but what would've really solidified the difference was after they went to 1999. sure, hearing that these things used to be people is one thing, but at the end of the day, to drifter, they're still just machines. drifter never got to experience what the tenno did, they never had to deal with reaching into their freshly scarred minds to ease their anger, sorrow, fear, rein them in like the terrified animals they were turning into and hush their cries with understanding - they only knew the dead inside remnants... but it's an entirely other thing when you go to the past and see the people who were hurt. you meet them and you get to know them, become their best friends - maybe even date one of them - and it hit drifter like a fuckin' freight train. they have this entirely different view on warframes from that cold perspective they had at first. they weren't just war machines. those are people. every time they go into the head of those machines, they're looking through the eyes of *people.* people who had families and desires and hobbies, things they looked forward to, entire futures ahead of them that were snuffed out. people who were scared, people who didn't know what was happening. people who knew what was happening, who lived in fear knowing they weren't able to stop it... people who lived in fear of losing themselves. and i think it hit drifter a lot harder than they'd ever admit.

but thats not to say one of them is more attached than the other - both of them care deeply about their warframes. it's just that, they have different ways of looking at them. after all their experiences were so vastly different, it'd be impossible to look at them the same way.

(too lazy to type it out all over, but i have an example in the tags i think kinda helps pull it together more)

[mabaki]

Mbk visiting his friends in the (wvw) mists with some hand-made gifts... LOL

Friends yes, he doesn't like to admit it but he's fond of Vorias and Secquor, who belong to @dion-iron

[silliestgirlintheworld]

Detox just to Retox - The Dan and Phil Hiatus

Dan and Phil x Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes - Fall Out Boy

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Why I Quit Youtube - Daniel Howell (1, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21)

Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes - Fall Out Boy (2, 5, 8, 10, 16, 20)

DIL'S FAMILY WINTERFEST - Dan and Phil Play: Sims 4 #63 - DanAndPhilGAMES (3, 11)

Phil is not on fire 10 - AmazingPhil (4)

DAN AND PHIL MASSIVE PIZZA MUKBANG 2 - DanAndPhilGAMES (6)

Daniel Howell, Twitter 04/01/2019 (12)

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WE'RE ALL DOOMED! - Daniel Howell (22)