#the themes are so good

[heretherebedork]

Moonlight Chicken is about moving on, about finding community, about learning to love, about learning to let go, about realizing you were never alone, about trusting in love, abut overcoming your internalized prejudices, about the power of relationships (romantic, platonic and familial) and how they are shaped in day and in night and in life and in death and in loss and in gain and in change and in choices, it's about your family and it's about what family means and it's about loving with your whole heart and smashing down your walls and opening up even when you know you might get hurt again.

[lotrmusical]

never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱

[ghosted-jazz]

Soldier, Poet, Kings

Bonus wallpaper version with just Joel:

[devilledminion]

What is the key to enjoying life? (x)

[chloesimaginationthings]

The true meaning behind FNAF princess quest

[lonicera-caprifolium]

this was meant to be them regular, but please also consider a full Hallmark AU--

like a "childhood best friends (both crushing on each other), then one or both leave town to start their lives... now they're both serendipitously home years later, and sparks start kindling as they lean on each other to get through the holidays." sort of thing

[heartorbit]

figure skating set right now please. thanks

[arundolyn]

couldn't resist making a gif of when she whiffs bomb-bombnnière. i love you girlfailure

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Heh...Literally nothing personal, kid.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[otiksimr]

Poorly drawn Voltorb line

[the-phantom-peach]

Meeting the Light Dragon ✨🐉

[tagged as spoilers!]

[sealsdaily]

Today's Seal Is: Beta Spheal

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF Abby and Gregory discover Michael is an artist too

[satsuha]

magician outfits...