#orc culture is some of my favorite worldbuilding in this show

[timetot]

Friends at the Table: Winter in Hieron Ep. 19

In which Fero loses his goddamn mind thanks to Orcish culture shock.

Welcome to the New Archives, halfling.

JACK (as Lem): You need bedding or beds?

AUSTIN (as Porter): Both. Also bets, also. If you have any bets to make, I would love to take a bet. KEITH (as Fero): What're you taking bets on? AUSTIN (as Porter): What are you--what are you putting a bet on? KEITH (as Fero): What is there to put a bet on? AUSTIN (as Porter): Literally everything. Welcome to the Archives, halfling. KEITH (as Fero): Um... So what's the odds on sun going down? AUSTIN (as Porter): They're split right now, funny story. KEITH (as Fero): Okay? AUSTIN (as Porter): It's two to one, the uh, no two to--three to two. Three to two.

AUSTIN: He's doing this correction himself.

AUSTIN (as Porter): Three to two, that it will not go down. KEITH (as Fero): All right. Fifty on not going down. AUSTIN (as Porter): Fifty? KEITH (as Fero): Fifty. AUSTIN (as Porter): All right, I'll take the bet.

KEITH (as Fero): All right.

AUSTIN (as Porter): Who are you betting with?

KEITH (as Fero): What d'you mean? I've never--I don't like this. I don't go here. I don't--

AUSTIN (as Porter): Okay. I need a bet. I don't need you to bet me.

KEITH (as Fero): (laughing) Wait, so you need a, you need the other party?

AUSTIN (as Porter): No, I need the bet. I need you to make a bet, and then I'll take the bet.

KEITH (as Fero): Wait! You need me to invent a thing to bet on? AUSTIN (as Porter): No, you can bet with him, you can bet with whoever you want, I just need there to be a bet, and then I'll take the bet and add it to the Archive. KEITH (as Fero): The bet is the--the bet is that I don't think the sun will go down, with the money I have! AUSTIN (as Porter): That's not how it works. JACK (as Lem): Who are you betting! Bet me. Or bet him. KEITH (as Fero): I'm betting all the people that also bet on this! That's how a bet works! AUSTIN (as Porter): That's not how--no, that's now how it works. JACK (as Lem): That's not how it works. ANDI (as Ephrim): Two coins. KEITH (as Fero): What are you talk-- JACK (as Lem): Ephrim. All right. Ephrim, Silver Hand. ANDI (as Ephrim): Yep. Two coins on the sun going down-- KEITH (as Fero): Two coins? ANDI (as Ephrim): Which one were you betting on? Fero? The one that Fero's not betting on, two coins on the other one. KEITH (as Fero): I'm betting--but I'm betting fifty! I'm not gonna give--I'm not--you have to-- ANDI (as Ephrim): I gave away all my money like, a few hours ago! I've got not as much as that! KEITH (as Fero): But that's not how--that's not how three to two works! ANDI (as Ephrim): Well... make it less! JACK (as Lem): I think you might have to leave without the bet, but I can give you the bed. AUSTIN (as Porter): I'll take the bed. JACK (as Lem): All right.

AUSTIN: And he like takes out a wrench and starts like wrenching the sockets and removing things, and…

JACK (as Lem): It's a good bed. AUSTIN (as Porter): It's a good one! KEITH (as Fero): Can I--are you--can I just give you some advice? About the bet thing? If everybody that bets all bets together, then you don't have to have a second person to bet with. AUSTIN (as Porter): It's not--you don't-- JACK (as Lem): He's new--he doesn't--it's okay. AUSTIN (as Porter): I know, this happens every time we get guests. ANDI (as Ephrim): So... we wanted two new beds... and now we have no beds. AUSTIN (as Porter): Have a great night!

AUSTIN: Door. Lights.

KEITH: Hey, I'm leaving. I'm--bye. I'm also gone.

[thanks to rhys for the transcript!]

[gilded-green]

In celebration of the 10th anniversary, I’ll probably reread GG and send updates/highlight areas and as for commentary. Probably XD

But first. What aspect of Gilded Green was your favorite? What was something you put in a lot of world building for but never got to show either in fic or on tumblr. Who is your favorite character and why, what makes them special in your eyes? Which character has turned into a completely different one as soon as you started writing them? Which part of the fic did you like most when you finished it, do you still like it? Similarly, which part do you dislike most?

Lasty, anything about gg2’s story you want to share/talk about/rant?

-love, the dai li fangirl

Haha, no pressure! But at the same time yes if you do feel free to send me passages for commentary here! <3

What aspect was my favorite? Hmmm. *thinking face* I think, when I first came up with it, I was just thrilled to have these two small things - minor character Lu Ten, overlooked villain organization Dai Li - that I was able to combine into something so big. That was pretty nifty!

As I started developing the story, I think what really caught my attention was the fact that “Wow, all these characters are awful people!” Like. The Dai Li aren’t good.The Fire Nation aren’t good. Lu Ten is a victim but also an oppressor. All off these people have extremely different beliefs and worldviews - Fire supremacist, police state enforcers, classist academic gatekeepers - and all of them think THEY’RE in the right here and none of them are. I think Tien and Hoang might be the only people with a decent, non-oppressive worldview in the story so far. XD I was growing out of the storytelling trope of black-and-white morality at the time, so it was really fun to start experimenting with writing awful people as enjoyable, sympathetic characters.

World building? Hmm. I was just learning how to use my worldbuilding muscles back then. I seem to remember reading up a lot on how brainwashing actually works in the real world and going “I don’t think this is compatible with what we have in ATLA” and just kinda tossing that whole thing out. XD I also recall looking up a lot of stuff for the bits about Jouin, some of which - kalua pig! - has since shown up again in WFFD. I also recall someone on FFdotnet at the time saying “All this chapter did was tell us more about a dead character than the living one” and I was just kinda like -_- yes because he is DEAD and this is your chance to feel sorry about that, we’ll get plenty more of the living one later on account of him still being, y’know, alive. XD

Oh, and Shirong’s personal side projects. I finally got into that a bit in A Meeting of Minds, but the dude DOES have his own stuff going on, which Delun so rudely interrupted to drag him off to see Long Feng about brainwashing a Firebender.

I also did a bunch of research for the birthday party interlude, I think. Mostly appropriate alcohol for such an occasion? And....okay, this’ll sound funny, but.....food containers. I wanted Fen to pack up leftovers for Suyin and Shirong. That’s what my Italian family does after get-togethers, and I assumed that a Chinese family/friend group would do the same! But I also had, like, zero exposure to everyday Chinese life, let alone everyday Chinese life in the 1800s, and I just didn’t have the...idk, cultural osmosis? to figure it out. Like, if you asked me how Victorians would transfer food I’d probably come up with “Idk, wrap it in cloth and stuff it in a basket?” and I assumed people living in modern China would also be able to explain what their people did for food storage/transport 150 years ago but I didn’t have that cultural background, now, did I??? Also this was 10-12 years ago I was looking this up, mind you, the internet was still very different, there was plenty of information on Chinese historical events but not on everyday life objects, CDramas weren’t easy to find if they were translated at all and I certainly didn’t know they existed, and no one was posting beautiful aesthetic videos of life in a rural Chinese mountain village to youtube yet. Eventually I learned that bamboo baskets were a thing, but there wasn’t much info on THOSE either and I wasn’t sure how to describe them, so I just tentatively typed “basket” and called it a day. XD

YOU CANNOT ASK ME TO CHOOSE MY FAVORITE CHARACTER THAT’S LIKE ASKING ME TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MY CHILDREN!!! *shoves Yong off a cliff*

I’m very fond of the Dai family, along with the Trungs and Sais. I’m very proud of how Tuan turned out. I adore Yuan, who you’ve barely met, and Xun, who you haven’t. Huang and Wu Sheng are also definite faves and I can’t wait for y’all to get to know them better.

Characters do usually behave for me in terms of personality development. They surprise me, but they never really turn out to be the complete OPPOSITE of what I was expecting? They just kinda develop organically. Huang and Wu Sheng surprised me, tho, those boys got deep. I knew they had the potential, but developing their backstory actually caused Stingrae and I to develop Ba Sing Se’s socio-political backstory and Long Feng’s rise to power, all because of an inkling I had. That was a very satisfying few years of worldbuilding and story development.

Um, favorite part of the fic....idk, I’m very fond of the final scene, with Azula and her wall chunk from Lu Ten. I’m doubly fond of it because of how it always resonates with readers. Heck, during Azula week last year, I used that chunk of rock as an ongoing theme in Sandstone, and someone commented like “I DIDN’T REALIZE YOU’RE THE ONE WHO WROTE GILDED GREEN” and that made me really happy!

Lu Ten’s time stuck underground - I used the seven stages of grief to get through that one and it was very helpful in structuring that part of the story, and I figured it was deep or something because PSYCHOLOGY.

I’m also proud of myself for getting through the dark brainwashing scenes. So, like, FYI, fanfiction could get...very dark, back in the 00s. People love to play purity police these days and complain about how nasty people get can, but listen. Listen. Do you have any idea how dark FFdotnet got back in the day? Legolas And Aragorn Get Captured By Orcs And Brutally Tortured was an entire genre. I feel like torture fic was actually a lot more common back then, and darkfic in general - I’m sure someone could write a whole thesis on why it’s not so prevalent anymore, I’m gonna guess the fact that fandom is less-insulated and more public now could be part of it, maybe also the fact that the internet is more social media/influencer culture based so people care about their image, and also the purity police which is its own kettle of worms, but I also think that the Bush Administration had something to do with it? You have all these kids who were pre-teens when 9/11 happened, growing up during the Iraq War with an awful presidential administration while everyone was scared and conservative Christianity started to realize that their control over the nation’s “morality” might be slipping and reacted accordingly......yeah there was a lot of darkfic back then.

And I read a lot of darkfic too, but, uh....well, statistically speaking, a lot of writing is bad, okay? A lot of those fics were just weird; you could see where the writer had this idea, and also where they failed to execute it in a way that resonated or made sense. And whatever, writers were young and just wanted to pound out some catharsis, it’s cool, but it still just felt narratively awkward when you could tell how the writer was more focused on LET’S MAKE THIS AS DARK AS POSSIBLE instead of “Let’s tell this as well as possible.”

So the first several attempts at writing the brainwashing scenes, I was nervous because I didn’t want to get TOO dark, and when I finally decided “eff it” and said to Stingrae “I think I need to let this be as dark as it needs to be” I was still nervous because I didn’t want it to end up WEIRD. Idk if that makes sense, but anyway I seem to have done a decent job at it!

As for parts I dislike the most, uhhhhh Iroh’s retreat (I didn’t care, I just wanted to get it over with), Enlai might’ve been promoted too fast? idk, the fact that I came up with Nanyue AFTER I finished publishing GG so I couldn’t work that into the Quy bits, the fact that I was young and innocent and didn’t understand sexual slang or innuendo and randomly chose Dong as the name of the court physician which could lead to some awful puns except no one ever seemed to pick up on that and maybe I’ll regret pointing it out but the man IS going to appear again so I might as well get the first shot in myself. XD

I might have GG2 stuff to talk about but not sure, if I do I’ll make another post on that!

<3

[weepylucifer]

The people in the notes are so boring. Op is correct and here’s why.

Tolkien wasn’t, you know, writing fantasy novels. Tolkien wasn’t technically even writing a fictional culture’s history book. Tolkien was mythmaking. Even as he veered further away from the concept of “this has to connect to England somehow”, he was working within the genre constraints of a collection of mythology. You know, like when someone publishes a book that’s like “Here’s me retelling my favorite Norse myths” or “I re-translated the story of Hades and Persephone and now it’s feminist” but for this made-up culture of elves.

What is an obvious staple of the epic myth as a quote-unquote “genre”? It is subject to constant cultural shifts as it gets re-told again and again. A retelling of an actual historical event can change with time in order to: explain the state of the world in some way, push a political agenda, make someone or some group look good or bad. Take Arthuriana as the obvious example. While King Arthur may (or may not) have existed, there certainly wasn’t a magical wizard helping him, or a Lady of the Lake, or any dragons. These elements got added over time for a myriad of reasons. The English, the French, the Welsh, the BBC Merlin show: everyone has added to the King Arthur myth so much that my prof called it “the myth that works for everyone” because by now it can be used to push just about any agenda on the British isles.

When we read the Silmarillion through that same lens, it should become clear that we can take absolutely no part of it as absolute, in-universe truth. The fact that multiple fragmented versions exist honestly just adds to this. Gil-Galad’s 15 dads are a feature, not a bug. ANY part of the Silmarillion, especially the parts that would, in a modern fantasy novel, look out of place or make no sense for how we think of fantasy worldbuilding, can be read as simply perks of the genre. (Random shit like Feanor’s body spontaneously combusting or Turin’s sword talking to him: probably not meant as an accurate account of a historical event, but as an element of storytelling that is appropriate for an epic ballad in the way of the Edda or the Nibelungenlied.)

All this to say: any part of the Silmarillion can be said to, in-universe, serve the agenda of whatever elf a given story happens to be about. “There is no true version of Melkor except the one Tolkien made up” is not playing Tolkien’s game correctly. The people who first said “I did a re-tread of Hades and Persephone so now it’s consensual” are legitimate scholars. So yes, it is also completely legitimate to play in Tolkien’s sandpit in the same way; there is absolutely room for an interpretation of the text that posits that the Silmarillion was written by the winners and Melkor and the orcs were unfairly maligned

Why isn’t there more interpretations where Melkor has been horribly slandered by the Silm??? He wasn’t a WahAhaha evil guy. If you actually got to know him, he was just some dude. A chaotically chill and unorthodox nerd who’s a walking encyclopedia and gets his ass beat in physical fights. I mean, sometimes he flies off the handle a bit when his enemies piss him off, but it takes a lot to get him angry.