#pretty much paradise

[milescomics]

found a cute wigglypaint sketch from last year :D

[084392]

ive been calling him richard

[warrioreowynofrohan]

One of the oddest Silmarillion takes that I’ve seen recently is the idea that Beren and Lúthien had it easy.

I mean, let’s take a look at Beren’s life. The Battle of Sudden Flame hits when he’s in his early twenties. He spends five years carrying on a guerilla war against the invasion of his homeland by orcs and other evil creatures; his mother and all his female relatives have to flee, and he has no knowledge of whether they are desd or alive, or captured. There’s a strange darkness speading over the forest and turning it into something out of a horror movie, a place most people won’t even dare to go into. The band of guerillas is slowly whittled down to about a dozen people, who are hunted constantly by Sauron and his wolves. Then, while he is away, his father, his uncles, and everyone else remaining are brutally killed, and he returns to find crows eating their corpses and orcs joking about looting the dead.

He carries on an guerilla alone, against Sauron, for another several years, in the haunted woods od Taur-nu-Fuin. When he absolutely can’t last any longer, he crosses the most horrifying wasteland in all of Beleriand, where the only water present is poisoned and turns you mad, filled with evil spiders and who knows what other creatures. He’s in his early thirties but he’s been through so mich that he looks like an old man. He has lost literally everyone he has ever known; he does not know if any friend or relative of his, anywhere, is still free or living.

Then he meets Lúthien.

When he leaves Doriath on the quest of the Silmaril, which every sane person in Beleriand knows is laughably impossible, he goes to Finrod, the one person he can hope for any assustance from. Finrod has an entire realm; I don’t think Beren is any expectation that Finrod will go with him personally. And what happens? The king of the largest remaining kingdom in Beleriand besides Doriath is overthrown by his own people at the instigation of Celegorm and Curufin and left with only a few loyal people around him. All of whom then die torturously in the dungeons of Sauron, followed by Finrod’s own death saving Beren.

On top of everything else he’s been through, on top of spending several months in despair being tortured in Sauron’s dungeons, the survivor’s guilt that Beren must be feeling is extreme. Even after Lúthien rescues him, it takes him a while to recover. And he still hasn’t made any progress on the quest itself!

Then they’re attacked by Celegorm and Curufin – the people who bear a substantial amount of respinsibility for the death of Finrod and the Ten, the people who very deliberately abandoned them all to due and coerced all Nargothrond to do the same, and the people who kidnapped Lúthien and attempted to force her into marriage – and they try to kidnap Lúthien again, and to murder Beren.

The fact that Beren does not kill Curufin in that moment is a deed of extreme moral fortitude. The difference between Beren and Lúthien compared with many of the Finwëans isn’t that they don’t face temptations, or that their choices are easy, it’s that they overcome those temptations.

So. Beren spares Curufin’s life at Lúthien’s urging and Curufin immediately tries to murder Lúthien; Beren jumps in front of the arrow, is severely wounded again, and for the third time since they met Lúthien gets to work healing him. Virtually all of their time together has been spent with Beren recuperating from physical injury, psychological injury, or both.

And as soon as Beren recovers, he walks away from the one person who loves him who’s still alive, and prepares to rob the gates of Hell, alone. Because Beleriand is dangerous, and as long as Lúthien is with him and therefore unable to go anywhere safe, she will be in danger from both the servants of Morgoth and the sons of Fëanor. And even if there’s a virtual 100% chance that him walking into Angband will lead to him being slowly tortured to death, that’s a better option than the one person he has left getting killed or, worse, captured, because of him.

And then she goes with him anyway. And beyond all hope they actually succeed in getting a Silmaril - and then he immediately loses it, and his hand, to Carcharoth, and it was all for nothing.

And for the fourth time since Lúthien met him, he’s near death and she’s desperately fighting to heal him and kerp him alive, while she’s exhausted to the point of collapse. And this is the moment when she gives up and goes back to Doriath, because that is what has the best chance of keeping Beren alive.

And then, at last, a ray of hope – Thingol looks at all they’ve been through and says, fine, you crazy kids can get married. And they’ve scarcely been married yet when they learn that oh, it’s not over, Carcharoth is rampaging through the land killing people and this needs to be dealt with. And Beren, even after everything, insists on going. (Because, hello, survivor’s guilt! he probably feels that this is his fault for, uh, getting his hand bitten off.)

(The fact that the Silmaril was, for a time, inside a wolf and outside Doriath, and Celegorm, noted hunter, never got near it, is, okay, rather amusing to me.)

And then Beren dies, saving Thingol, because he knows deeply what it feels like to lose his family and he’s not going to let that happen to Lúthien. And she loses him instead.

Now let’s shift to Lúthien’s point of view. Since her first meeting with Beren she has been betrayed by literally everyone she knows and everyone she meets except for Beren and Huan. She has been treated like a child, and a madwoman, and a trophy, and a pawn, and a sex object, and literally everything except an adult person whose choices have worth and meaning. She is not a superhero; she does not know what she is doing; she is terrified for practically every moment of it, for Beren’s sake even more than for her own, and for much of it she is hopeless. She does not know how or if she can achieve anything; she only knows that she has to try, because it is better than sitting in Doriath waiting to find out if Beren is dead. She puts substantial work and thought and effort into figuring out how to get out of Doriath (given in more detail in the poetic version) – and then, just when she thinks she’s found help (note: Celegorm and Curufin do not give her their names when they first meet her; she doesn’t know they’re the sons of Fëanor), she is again taken captive, this time with the goal of forced marriage and the threat of rape hanging over her. And she still knows Beren is in desperate danger, and she still can do nothing about it.

When Huan aids her and she goes to Tol-in-Gaurhoth, it isn’t because she feels she has the power to fight Sauron one-on-one! It’s because she’s desperate and can’t think of any other options. And in fact, it is not she who defeats Sauron, it is Huan; once he is defeated by Huan, she has the intelligence and strength of will to force his surrender by threatening him with something he fears more than defeat, and to demand – not the freeing of Beren alone – but the destruction of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, freeing all its prisoners. The reason she defeats Sauron is not that she’s a half-Maia badass who can wave her hands and do everything easily! The reason she defeats him is that she shows up there completely vulnerable and in effect uses herself as bait. That is an extraordinary degree of courage, not some kind of deus ex machina. And she’s putting all the strength that she has on the line – she’s pretty much passing out by the time she finds Beren. Similarly, all her healing of him is hard, exhausting work that she’s doing despite being, the whole time, terrified that he’s about to die. None of this is easy.

Likewise in Angband – Huan’s advice and Lúthien’s magic of disguise and sleep is invaluble in getting them through the door and past Carcharoth, but the reason she is able to enchant Morgoth and cast all Angband into sleep is not primarily because of extreme power, but because, like every other non-Beren person she meets, he doesn’t take her seriously. Morgoth finds the idea of using Melian’s daughter as a brief entertainment amusing (and, if you read the poetic version, makes some truly creepy sexual threats against her), and that’s how she is able to get him unguarded enough that she’s well into her song and he’s already getting sleepy before it starts to occur to him that maybe this isn’t going quite as he planned. Lúthien’s victories are not because she’s just on a different power level from the rest of Beleriand, they’re because she’s amazingly brave and willing to walk into the most dangerous places virtually defenceless. And she and Beren rely on each other utterly – after her sleep song she’s practically passing out and can only get out of Angband because Beren is holding her up.

So this is who they are, at Beren’s death. A man who has lost everyone he loves and everyone who loves him, every friend or family, often helplessly witnessing their gruesome death – everyone except for Lúthien. And an elf-woman who has been betrayed by everyone she loved or trusted, except for Beren.

When Beren dies, I wonder if he’s even relieved that it’s finally him dying instead of everyone around him. When he sees Lúthien in the Halls of Mandos, I believe his first feeling would be not joy or love, but horror. That the last living person he loved, and the one he wanted above all to save, had now died because of him.

But Lúthien isn’t done. She goes to Mandos, and she sings, and her song says: look at what we have been through, look at what all Beleriand has been through, Eldar and Edain. We don’t want realms or glory or power; we only want a few moments of peace with each other, and we fought so hard for it, and we didn’t even get that. And when she’s offered bliss and immortality for herself, she says No, I don’t want it, not without Beren. She isn’t promised happiness or long life – she only know that for the short time she will get, she will have the chance to be with Beren. And that is enough for her; for that, she gives up everything else.

This is a faerie-story; but it does not sound to me like a trite tale of easy victories handed to the heroes by Fate or by the author! They fought and struggled and sacrificed for those victories, amd they did it without ever letting go of courage, and mercy, and humility. There is a reason why this is the story that Frodo and Sam hearken back to for inspiration.

[sskk-manifesto]

Bungou Stray Dogs: Dead Apple and how “ability users” (opposite to “normal people”) learning to accept themselves through the acceptance of their own abilities is a queer metaphor of acceptance of own's sexual orientation and gender: an essay by me

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance - Prankster's Paradise

[backpackingspace]

Psst want some some angst?

Odysseus with flowers woven into his hair, around his wrist, his ankles/ his neck/. Odysseus with his hair oiled and his skin scrubbed clean.

Calypso forces him into the bath. Forces him into clean clothes makes it so that he cannot move protest or breath while she brushes his hair. The flowers won't come off, even when he claws at his skin making himself bleed, even when he yanks chunks of his hair out trying to dislodge the pretty blossoms. Calypso heals him anyway makes his skin flawless, regrows his hair. She likes him looking pretty, likes him looking like he's loving life. Won't allow anything from the outside world to touch them, even if that's odysseus himself.

After all, she can't have anyone thinking she doesn't look after her beloved mortal. She's heard how the other gods treats their pets, how rough they are. But she's different. See how well odysseus is taken care of? And why would he even want to think about anything else when /shes/ right here. So what if he's a little resistant to the idea right now? Odysseus, the poor thing, is battered and traumatized it's natural that he'd be a little confused. One day he'll snap out of it and thank her. She just knows it.

[mmehrunesraz0r]

WINSLOW LEACH REDRAW!!!

(old version under the cut!)

(drawn in april 2023)

[smexydilflover]

I really enjoy being a dramatic bitch.

[yb-cringe]

*raises hand in "not a qsmp watcher but loves seeing it from the sidelines on social media"* what on earth is qfit's backstory that the present events are nothing to him??

2B2T, which is basically the content fit does outside of streaming (and primarily did youtube videos on). Long story short, if you don't know 2b, it's an 'anarchy' server which basically means there's no rules. You can hack, cheat, say whatever you want, destroy whatever you want.

He's mentioned before that qFit is FROM 2b. We don't know for how long or why, just that he WAS there and then he got a job to retrieve and gather player data on the island. And if he's successful, he gets money *and* his freedom from 2b2t. However, if he fails, he will never be able to escape or leave 2b again. Implying he wasn't really able to before either.

as for exactly what happened there, who knows. the videos he has up on his channel are a good GUESS at to what went on, but with the implication of 'everything ive seen here has been a cakewalk' with the knowledge of him learning about, oh you know, torture and kidnapping and child death etc etc-- Probably not anything good.

[bruabbaism]

aaand finally yukako !!

[egginfroggin]

Happy 1-year anniversary to the start of Emmet's terrible, no-good, very bad day(s).

Which is to say, Pandemonic Paradise turned a year old today!

In honor of this vague occasion, I have attempted backgrounds, of all terrible, no-good, very bad things (help me).

So I did some looking, and apparently it seems that the Distortion World is dark blue in the games and purple in the anime. I never played D/P/P, and only watched one of the animated movies probably close to a decade ago (ough), so my brain just assumed lots of purple.

Anyway, this was fun! RIP planned Ingo companion piece, there is no way you'll be finished by the end of the day, sorry.

Thank you all for sticking with this extremely self-indulgent fic for a year! We're almost at the end as of chapter 7, and hopefully I can finish the fic before the end of summer.

Thank you all so much! I hope you all have a wonderful day! <3

(Program used: Krita; time taken: about 2 hr 30 min)

[milescomics]

another animatic I made last spring

[cloudgremlin]

Fanart Time

I started reading Off Colors: Contrasts by @sibillascribbles08 and HAD to draw this over the top Donnie (he has no thoughts in that head only Splatoon music and the desire for chaos). To the right is the first sketch I blundered out after reading the various descriptions of Donnie’s outfit (it did originally have rings, but I hated that because wearing rings while fighting is a sure fire way to mess your hands up so after some aid from friends I gave him gold belts instead), and then I realized Sibillascribbles has ART so I went to look at reference and realized OH I made this boy too punk XD. To the left is a much more canon rendition.

I do think it’s hilarious that this AU’s Leo saw this dude and was like “wow that’s an unbelievable amount of jewellery” meanwhile canon design has like, a single necklace. OffColors!Leo is a precious soul <3

I also realized I have accidentally been influenced way too much by my own AU’s Don in relation to fashion choice, so here’s a little dumb sketch bit:

The benefits of having a younger sibling: they steal all your clothes smh

[ee3y]

The Wisdom Saga is such an easy album for me to put as my number one, i think there was not a single miss wow

[returntotheground]

hhp cafe

[ink-blot-thoughts]

Okay big brain thought time:

Phantom thief Haikaveh AU.

Kaveh is a phantom thief who loves his dramatics and stealing from rich people. Is still hella in debt cause he gives away everything like the most sopping wet rag version of Robin Hood. Uses mad architecture knowledge to evaluate buildings. His arch nemesis? Detective Alhaitham.

Meanwhile, Dectective Alhaitham is a bored detective who will not be working overtime on this new thief case, thank you very much. Accidentally keeps foiling Kaveh's heists by running into him and Kaveh can't keep himself from arguing with him and getting caught by all the yelling. Hmm? Archnemesis? He has no time for such a ridiculous notion, besides, Kaveh practically catches himself, Alhaitham would much rather spend the time reading a good book.