#my tragic blorbo

[adrift-in-thyme]

Thinking about First again

[fma03envy]

You should watch fma03; it's really good I promise

[dawning-skye]

some older KH zine pieces

[kindred-spirit-93]

the peoples princess!

@notsolonedesert ur lovely ctimene has graced my lecture notes <3!! no references we die like my final braincells lol

her sarcasm knows no bounds and odysseus' famous wits have ocassionally paled in comparison to his sisters many a time ;)

sassy lil sister ctimene please and thank you. also stubborn af. idk i need more of them being siblings and and how they grew alongside one another and now tease eachother over meals and reminisce during cold winter evenings childhood shenanigans and laugh boisterously together (they have the same laugh. and a dad sneeze TM) and how they reacted to each others firstborns and and and

[porrigens]

acht

[jonathanbyersphd]

dinkleberg

[fallowtail]

controversial take here but i really hope hetty is on her absolute worst nastygirl/comedic clown behavior in s4 to push back against the poor little meow meow woobification curse shes been experiencing since holes because i am tired

[77ngiez]

hey guys do we realize that the main difference betwen how kai and midori developed is that kai was given the chance to learn what normal life and love and family was like by working with chidouins while midori was kept under asunaros thumb all his life. do we realize that just a few changes could have kai acting just as cruel and merciless as midori. do we realize that midori is a victim of asunaro too, and though that doesn't excuse his actions it does make them more tragic. do we realize this or are we all being serious when we say midori is the only character who isn't worth redemption.

[sforzesco]

It’s a little bit ‘I was the match and you were the rock, maybe we started this fire/We sat apart and watched all we had burn on the pyre,’ and ‘Do you understand that we will never be the same again?’ from Bastille’s The Things We Lost In The Fire

and a little bit:

‘A l’instar de son aîné, Caius Antonius sait se montrer délicieux. Il est cultivé, intelligent, plein d’esprit, gracieux, amiable. Surtout, il appartient à la même génération que Brutus, au même milieu. Depuis le départ de Cassius pour l’Orient, il y à quatre mois, Marcus a vécu avec des hommes dont il pourrait être le père, ou avec les soldats, des bas officiers plus âgés mais qui ne sont pas de son monde.’

and also

‘En juin, Cassius a enlevé Laodicée et définitivement défait les forces de Dolabella. Jugeant les autres à sq propre mesur, le beau Publius Cornelius s'est souvenu de ce qu'il avait fait subir à Trebonius…Cassius passant pour un homme violent et rancunier, pour un ami fidèle aussi, Dolabella s'est dit qu'il allait payer la mort horrible de l'ancien gouverneur.’

Brutus: Assassin par idéal, Anne Berner

actually it’s mostly about how my entire playlist for the road leading up to Philippi (after both Brutus and Cassius leave Rome after the assassination of Caesar) is Bastille’s Bad Blood album on repeat. I want their relationship to get messy. There’s another version of this scene that gets a lot more teeth to the subtext of the conversation, but I wanted to play around with it first before committing to like. room layouts. there was originally a couple of transitional panels before the last 2 because I wanted Brutus to really chew on this thought he has, but augh. stairs. didn’t feel like drawing those.

ko-fi⭐ bsky ⭐ pixiv ⭐ pillowfort ⭐ cohost ⭐ cara.app

[strangerinthelight]

[sunsetzer]

[canisalbus]

idk whats going on with the lore and all (excited to find out) but i gotta say god damn you got some hot dogboys

hot dog (boys)

[altocat]

I know we're definitely not going to get it but I hope Sephiroth is a screaming frothing mess when he loses it in Nibelheim. I want tears and snapping teeth, smashing and clawing at everything he comes across. I want him completely unhinged and destructive, so full of hate and bitterness that he just wants to tear everything apart. I want batshit crazy expressions that are pure nightmare fuel. I want a complete and total transformation that scares the shit out of the player, a horrifying metamorphosis.

I want to see a man become a monster.

[rooksunday]

maul is instead sent to be one of the trainers on kamino. ostensibly to ensure the hand of his master over the clones, and so maul is there to gently warp minds, while also offering a class in hand to hand combat.

but.

the clone children cadets are so small.

so what! maul had been small and weak once, hadn’t he? they should be ashamed about their weakness!

but… but they’re so small. and the alphas look at the younger clones the way that savage had once looked at maul.

and the alphas look at maul the way that he had never dared to look at his master.

[goodobservationshirley]

Say hi to Sam for me.

[urwendii]

And i'll add that line of the Lay of Leithian,

Nigh the foul spirit Morgoth made and bred of evil shuddering strayed from its dark house, when Lúthien rose and shivering looked upon his throes.

which clearly hinted at Melkor's corruption of Mairon being more than just seduction - regardless on how you interpret it.

I’d like your opinion if not too much of a bother: Do you think that in actual canon Sauron was somewhat initially sincere in his offer to help the elves improve middle earth? It reads to me like he was only interested in lying to the elves of Eregion for his own personal use, but I can’t get past the idea that it seemed so easy for him to fool them. Fooling men is one thing, but the elves seem to take stock of others much more accurately. The easiest way to deceive is to have some truth mixed in with the lies. There is somewhere that says something to the effect of his repentance might have been sincere initially at one time (though I think it was more because he was scared for himself).

Questions about Sauron are never a bother!!!

Short answer: Yes, I think Sauron was somewhat sincere in his offer to help the elves improve Middle-earth.

Longer answer: Yes, I think Sauron was somewhat sincere in his offer to help the elves improve Middle-earth and I have textual support!

The well known line that you referred to is from Of The Rings of Power and the Third Age in the Silmarillion, and is regarding Sauron abjuring his past deeds to Eönwë:

And some hold that this was not at first falsely done, but that Sauron in truth repented, if only out of fear, being dismayed by the fall of Morgoth and the great wrath of the Lords of the West.

Now, you can (fairly) make the argument that this is no true repentance if he's just doing so because he's scared, and that by the time he approaches the elves circa S.A. 1000, he was back to being 100% bad vibes, evil all day e'er day, bad news bears, etc. but I think his desire to work with the elves to improve the world was genuine.

This is slightly undercut by what comes next:

Seeing the desolation of the world, Sauron said in his heart that the Valar, having overthrown Morgoth, had again forgotten Middle-earth; and his pride grew apace. He looked with hatred on the Eldar, and he feared the Men of Númenor who came back at whiles in their ships to the shores of Middle-earth; but for long he dissembled his mind and concealed the dark designs that he shaped in his heart.

You might say, well there you have it, he has dark designs and hates the elves, case closed pack it up, but WAIT. Now, if you know me, you know I don't hold much truck with most 'biased narrator' bs, but I do think it's worthwhile whenever we are being told about a character's thoughts to consider the framing of the story and how those thoughts could possibly have been known. I think in this case and in others (for instance, Maedhros' thoughts right before he dies) we can assume that whoever is recording the story, whatever their motives, did not actually know what characters like Sauron are thinking.

'But Aipi, you filthy hypocrite,' you say. 'You've argued yourself that the 'single narrator' lens of the Silm that many fans take misconstrues what's going on, since the sources it pulls from have multiple in-text historians and bards or sometimes none at all, and because of that, you can't just chuck out the lines you don't like with no evidence.'

Fair, totally fair, but I have evidence!

The reason I think the "dark designs" bit is color added by a historian who did not actually know Sauron's thoughts at the time he came to the elves is because of On Motives.

If you are a Sauron fan, I highly recommend tracking down a copy of Morgoth's Ring and reading the chapter 'Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion'. I am resisting quoting the whole thing, but importantly we are told:

[Sauron] did not object to the existence of the world, so long as he could do what he liked with it. He still had the relics of positive purposes, that descended from the good of the nature in which he began: it had been his virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall, and of his relapse) that he loved order and co-ordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.

On Motives gives us several important facts: Sauron has the relics of positive purpose, he has the virtue of loving order and coordination, he fell and then again relapsed (which means he must have achieved some sort of not-evil state inbetween the fall and the relapse!).

We also get this wonderful line comparing Sauron and Saruman:

Sauron's love (originally) or (later) mere understanding of other individual intelligences was correspondingly weaker.

And there are other references to Sauron being capable of admiring minds outside of his own in On Motives. To me, all this points to Sauron not only coming to the elves with genuine aspirations to help, but also that at this point perhaps 'hatred of the Eldar' is a wee bit overblown.

The idea that Sauron falls, starts to walk a better path, and falls again is a key motif in the history of Middle-earth. It echoes Morgoth's arc, and then is replicated in miniature in a way in Gollum. He has some genuinely good intentions, but these are warped by his desire for control and the corrupting nature of power.

There's even more bits on Sauron and his fair motives in Tolkien's letters, but I think I'll wrap with this quote (another fave):

But at the beginning of the Second Age he was still beautiful to look at, or could still assume a beautiful visible shape – and was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all 'reformers' who want to hurry up with 'reconstruction' and 'reorganization' are wholly evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up.

Perhaps Sauron was always doomed to fall again because of his need to control, but I think the elves of Eregion recognized a genuine kindred motive in him.