#the writing y’all! the way it all dovetails

[missriyochuchi]

If ever there was a spark of a clone rebellion, it’s the regs finding out that the Empire is kidnapping potentially Force sensitive children. Their paternal Fett genes and service history with the Jedi have culminated to face their ultimate enemy 🫡

[eris-abomination]

Not to be patronizing, but I’m convinced some of y’all don’t know what radfems actually are. Every time I try to speak about how dangerous and reductive radical feminism is as an ideology, I get paragraphs upon paragraphs written trying to “errm actually” me and defending them, so let me clear things up.

Radical feminism’s core belief centers around a form of gender essentialism: that men are inherently violent oppressors and that the patriarchy is to blame for every problem that befalls women and fems. This is not to say that the patriarchy isn’t a major contributor to misogyny, but it completely excludes intersectionality from the equation and dovetails into TERFy rhetoric very easily.

In blaming every issue on the patriarchy alone, radical feminism erases the very real contributions of racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc from our struggles in society. Oppression and privilege are extremely complex and fed into by many biases and phobias upheld by our societal systems, not just the “boys vs girls” mentality that radfems emphasize. The main pitfall of this ideology is the way it places all men and all women on an equivalent level of privilege or oppression respectively, rather than the unfortunate reality: for example, a cishet man having inherent privilege and hypothetical oppressing power over a queer or trans man, or an abled woman having privilege over a disabled woman.

Radical feminism also tends to veer into a defeatist mindset: men are inherently oppressive and women are inherently at the bottom of the societal totem pole, so what’s the point of trying to dismantle these systems? The radfem “solution” is to ignore the nuances of intersectionality and create divisions between men and women as a “safety measure” which, as mentioned earlier, opens the door for TERF-like and tribalist ideologies to take root (bathroom bans, label politics, “gender traitor” rhetoric, and categorization of trans and nonbinary people into their AGABs). The “solution” of creating purely woman-only spaces fails to acknowledge that women can also be oppressive toward other women, but it’s still viewed through the lens of “the patriarchy can’t affect things here because we’re all on the same level of disadvantage”.

I don’t write all this to accuse all self-proclaimed radfems of being knowingly malicious or bigoted, but it seems that not many people fully understand the true implications and reductiveness of what radical feminism really is. If you managed to get through this whole post (congratulations!), I invite you to examine your own ideologies and the biases and faults behind them, and hopefully grow, change, and become a more nuanced and open-minded person from there.

Edit: I can and will delete your comments if you’re incapable of being civil (or scrolling away or blocking me like a normal goddamn person) 💕💕💕

[notalostcausejustyet]

A pull from my deck, because visual interest.

This one is for both @adverbian and @voluptatiscausa because good lord do y’all really get me to put what I learned in therapy through its paces lol. In the best ways possible of course! Saturday morning coffee thoughts.

Let’s talk about online spaces, finding community, and productive ways of working through things.

The internet is vast. The cosmos, but in digital form. It is also, so very, very small. We somehow took the inimitable and unquantifiable collection of humanity’s existence, stirred in some programming, and created community. Through art and storytelling and the sharing of self, we find people from all over the world and can say “oh, there you are”. We find shared experiences and new perspectives. Dovetailing interests and wonderful new knowledge. There’s so much talent out there. So much brilliance. We gather around our digital cafe table and share peices of ourselves. Commiseration, absolution, acceptance. We get to look at another human being and tell them “I see you”. We get to be seen in return. The load is lighter, and healing is easier when the work is shared. The act of extending grace and acceptance towards others makes it easier to do so for yourself in the end.

For me that looks like writing, spending time in that online space with other writers, finding inspiration their work, or them finding inspiration in mine. It’s an intimate and vulnerable thing. You take a piece of yourself and reframe it around a story, a piece of poetry, some meta-analysis of another work. You hold it out and hope that someone sees an echo of their own experience. It’s cathartic and healthy and you’re constantly learning new things about yourself and other people. Sometimes it hurts, because it’s a wound that hasn’t healed yet and admitting it to yourself, showing that to others is frightening. But you can’t heal in the dark. So you write about it, and turn on the light.

This is a lot of deep thought for Saturday morning coffee, but I’m incredibly grateful for the online community I’ve found in the past few months. I’m thankful that I can still write, that I am writing again. I’m still astounded that writers that I admire tremendously think so highly of it. More than that though, in offering of myself to others, I’m finding healing for myself. It’s one day at a time and the work of growth and knowing and finding healing will never be done. And that’s ok, it’s as it should be. One step at a time, into the sunlight.

[firelxdykatara]

so i saw a kata*ng post saying the fact that there are barely any male zutara fans proves the shippers are just thirsty for zuko and project themselves onto katara which is funny cuz nobody argues male katan*ng fans are projecting onto Aang. Although I suppose their point was that both men and women ship kataa*g but zutara is mostly shipped by women, which might have some truth to it. personally i think the reason for that is cuz men usually tend to stick to canon material regardless of the

(continued) quality of canon's content, including ships whereas women are more likely to be into fanon transformative work that changes canon if it doesnt satisfy them or they find it lacking. Theres a reason most fanfiction writers are women for example. what do you think?

First of all, ‘men don’t like the relationship where the girl actually has agency in how it develops and where her feelings are considered relevant, but prefer the relationship where the girl has no agency and is handed like a trophy to the hero for saving the world, despite the fact that the only thing she ever actually said about her potential feelings for him were that she was ‘confused’‘ really isn’t the ‘gotcha’ those people seem to think it is.

Like, no shit, straight men (including bryke, incidentally, and I’m sure that the fact that adult Aang was literally modeled after Michael Dante DiMartino is totally a coincidence) seem more inclined to like the relationship where the boy had clear feelings for the girl, who gave no sign of returning them, and all he had to do was wait for her to See The Light and realize she wanted him, the Nice Guy, and not the Bad Boy over there with the wicked cool scar on his face--and before anyone accuses me of pulling this out of my ass, why don’t y’all go and check out the Book 4: Air video that was released at SDCC and see what they thought of Zutara and also how they treated their own fanbase. That is literally one of the oldest Straight Romance tropes in the book--boy likes girl, girl is oblivious, boy finally Wins Girls Affections by saving the day or whatever at the end and she’s suddenly all over him despite having shown next to no interest in him over the course of the series.

So yeah, no wonder men like that relationship, and women tend not to.

Of course, the other side of that coin is the misogyny inherent in insisting that women are so ruled by their attraction to men, specifically, (nevermind that many of us are queer and not all of us are even attracted to men--interestingly, I know more than one lesbian who is a zutara shipper!) that it’s completely impossible that they watched a show where two characters had a series-long relationship arc from enemies to friends and believed there was potential for it to progress even further, from friends to lovers--no, they must only think zuko is hot and want to project onto Katara so they could be with him. (Nevermind the fact that this makes no sense--there’s a character who, in canon, actually gets to kiss Zuko. If projecting ourselves into relationships with Zuko was the point, why aren’t we all Maiko shippers instead?)

And on the... third hand??? What does it even matter? Even if Zutara shippers were mostly women because we all just wanna make out with Zuko (rather than most zutara shippers being women because zuko and katara lends itself best out of any of the available ships to transformative works, particularly because of how much legwork the show did with their relationship that it didn’t even do with their canon romances, and that dovetailing nicely with the fact that most transformative works are written by women, who have always dominated in transformative fandom spaces in particular), who cares? That still doesn’t change the fact that Zuko and Katara had a series long relationship arc. It doesn’t change the fact that they went from enemies to friends and it took more work for Zuko to gain Katara’s trust than anyone else, and he was willing to put in that work because he cared what she thought of him. It doesn’t change the fact that he took a bullet lightning bolt for her in the most romantically coded, storyboarded, and written scene in the show (and yes, that’s including the scene where sokka was literally preparing to have sex with suki). It doesn’t change the fact that the story of Oma and Shu parallels Zuko and Katara, right down to the two original earthbenders being red and blue coded. and finally managing to save each other and be together

At any rate, circling back to the point you were actually making--you’re absolutely right, as I mentioned, that women make up the majority of fandom, in particular transformative fandom, for a reason. And so no, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the relationship that best lends itself to fanon development--because canon came so close but didn’t actually follow through, leaving us with an incredible foundation which can be taken in so many different ways--is also the one that has a primarily female fanbase.

And I think writing that off as ‘lol they’re all just horny for zuko’ is incredibly misogynistic, but given the way the atla fandom has been showing its ass lately, I’m not remotely surprised.

[shadowofthelamp]

What would you think of a tak zim and dib ship? I actually considered writing a fic about it cause I had a point where it sounded like a good ship, still does, but I find it really difficult to understand, but I wouldn't really be sure how to write them, actually how do you write the zim dib and keef ship?

So, fun fact: When I first got on tumblr at 12-going-on-13, I actually liked DaTr more than ZaDr! However, I was never really much a fan of ZaTr- I guess I just couldn’t find the appeal yet. More under the cut because this got weirdly long and I talked myself into liking it, OOPS. Mostly about Tak bc y’all already know how I like ZaDr. For my analysis for kazadr, you can just go into my kazadr tag, it’s pretty short atm and I don’t have a ton to add to the analysis posts in there yet. (The ‘aip dad keef au’ one is longer and has more, but has aip stuff like mpreg, depends on if that floats your boat or not.)

I think she’s only fun if you play into the fact that she’s objectively defective too- she spent SIX MONTHS traveling to some backwater hellhole just to ruin the life of a guy who didn’t know she existed and who the Tallests themselves sent her, no matter how much she insists it isn’t ‘about revenge’. She had to know Zim’s mission was fake if she even knew where he was, especially considering her comment about how the Tallests don’t consider Earth valuable. She’s desperate and clings to her own ideals and is in denial about her own defects because she’s actually competent- she’s sort of like Zim in that way, in that she’s sure what she wants is what’s better for the Empire, no matter what everyone else says she should do. In her case, she’s probably right, but she’s still clearly more ruled by emotion than she’s willing to admit considering she didn’t just take her job on Dirt.

The Empire works against both of them, but in Zim’s case, it’s all his own fault because when he IS trusted it never works out, but in hers, it’s frustratingly out of her hands. Zim just brushes aside when he isn’t supposed to do things because surely whatever he does will work out because he’s Zim, she knows full well that she’s going against orders but overprepares so it will be considered impressive enough to forgive the transgression. They’re kind of on the same scale, Zim’s just unaware of the possibility of failure while she knows it all too well.

She relates to him more than she’d like to admit- or more than he’d realize. It’d infuriate her to know that, though- she’s Tak, she’s not a defect like him! But his distaste of her comes mostly from her trying to steal his mission- if they were able to find a way to meet without aggression and she actually had to sit down and listen to him, really listen and strip past all the pomp and idiocy, there’s sparks of genius down there that she unwittingly would admire a bit. Likewise, he could admit that there’s something to be said for her plan and her skills, skills that the Empire was basically wasting. Like his! They might be a good team, if she apologizes for trying to take his mission!

Huh. I think I just talked myself into not minding it.

Anyway, as for all three of them: I liked DaTr both because they disliked Zim and because by the end of the series, Dib’s attitude of ‘well, no one is going to respect me, but at least I can do this to feel half-decent about myself and because no one else is competent enough to’ would dovetail nicely with the resignation she’d probably have if she was stranded on Earth or otherwise kept from rejoining the empire. The Membrane family are the only humans she half-respects because they proved themselves capable of standing up to her tech and figuring out her plan, so she ends up sort of studying him as a potential tool. Most likely she pretends to have a truce and uses it to study his weaknesses for future betrayal but finds a kindred spirit in the process. 

Whichever one she ends up with first, they basically come as a package deal, so she’s got to get used to both of them. Maybe they all end up bonding over working on machinery together? She cobbled her own SIR together, after all, probably out of literal trash- she’s likely quite a good mechanic, so having partners prove they’re good at something is a good step. 

Even more than Zim, she’d resist and resist HARD the thought that love and affection is something that she can experience. She’s not like Zim, she’s a normal irken, and those things simply don’t exist for someone like her... right? Nevermind how she treats MiMi, nevermind how she abandoned her post to seek out someone who’d already been considered adequately dealt-with by the Tallest themselves. She’s never been quite comfortable just being an interchangeable piece in the machine. A piece, sure- she was eager to become a soldier, and one of the most important soldiers- but not an interchangeable one. She was going to help propel the Empire to greatness even if she had to bend a few rules to do it, and hearing her own thoughts echoed out of Zim’s mouth just drives her hackles up, because how dare he try and pretend they’re the same? 

She doesn’t know how to process that affection when she’s given it, and it probably has to start with them gaining her respect before she even considers letting them close enough to have the crisis over affection. It’s an awkward, fumbly thing- Dib’s no good at this, Zim’s even worse, and she just freaks out at the realization that she actually kind of does want this??? Maybe??? DID THEY SOMEHOW GET INTO HER PAK AND INFECT IT WITH GOOPY WARM THINGS, WHAT IS THIS.

They’d have to start with mutual understanding and truce first- it’s very much an enemies to friends to lovers over the enemies to lovers speedrun I kinda like with ZaDr. It’s only when they spend so much together because none of them are particular fans of humanity and only feel like the others understand them that they begin to bond, and then as Dib ages, his feelings get mixed up, and it ends up dragging the other two into that with him as they’re the only two that he really spends much time with and enjoys the company enough to like and begin fumbling through the first stages of an actual romantic relationship with. 

[fantroll-purgatory]

@silenteko

So up top it looks like you’re doing this for an AU in which:

there are trolls that have not yet fully matured who live on a sister planet called Tronia

sister planets have “princesses” who presumably retain local authority to govern, though the Heiress’s and the Condesce’s authority would presumably supercede it

the canon trolls still exist and interact with your trolls (indicating interplanetary communication) but presumably haven’t played SBURB yet

mutantbloods are automatically assigned the Cancer sign

That’s all I can glean so far? So apart from those rules, I’m going to review your character as though she’s Alternian, since it takes place in the same universe.

Name: Sallva Spiral

You don’t really mention why you gave her this name, but since she’s a self-insert I am going to assume that the first name is at least somewhat related to your first name. The last name could do with some obfuscation though; ow about Xilleh, which is just “helix” backwards and with an extra ‘l.’ It’ll also help hammer home the “mutated DNA” theme I’m hoping to include. I also like it because now both her first and last name have two l’s side by side, which kind of looks like a strand of DNA that has unwound before replication!

Strife Specibus: woo! I am unsure if it’s an actual weapon or not, but before the game she doesn’t have one. Her Strife Specibus consist of two mini scythes (she got the code from a friend of hers), connected to chains that cuff to her wrist. That way, if one gets knocked out of her hand, she doesn’t have to jump all over the place to retrieve it in battle

I think that’s still a specibus; it’s just scythekind. In the meantime, I’ve had a look at you and your co-author’s profiles on deviantArt, and I think y’all may be interested in the mechanics of the Spiral Knights MMO since it links your names together! In light of that, maybe you wanna try swordkind, given that it’s the iconic Spiral Knight weapon? You can still keep the concept of a weapon that’s cuffed to her wrists.

Fetch Modus: I am unsure of what to give her. As if I’m going to be honest, she’s more likely to use a bag than a Fetch Modus

How about we split the difference with a BACKPACK MODUS, with 4 compartments that have limited space?

Blood Color: Gold! Haha

So here is where I’m trying to hammer home the mutantblood concept bc you’ve made a goldblood with very very obvious seadweller ears, and those two generally don’t…mesh…

I may lose the ears, but I’m gonna take a page out of CD’s book for an “aquablood” mutant we got a while ago and make her a polyblood to preserve some of the interesting aspects of this character. I’m thinking cerulean, since there’s overlap there both in the symbol visual and in eye-weirdness. Also lets me keep one of the colors in her initial color scheme with easy design justification.

She could be a polyblood who was basically assumed to be a “pure” goldblood because of her eyes, but whose true abilities lie in being a latent ceruleanblood.

As for why she wasn’t culled as a baby: this yellowblood doesn’t really look like a mutant, and even if her weird cerulean eye is an indication that she is, look at the other one. She’s got partial voidrot! She’ll be dead soon anyway. So the reason Sallva is still kickin’ is because, as a gold/ceruleanblood, her cerulean side generates enough energy to temper her voidrot, while her gold side dampens her psychic abilities by feeding off the energy. No telekinesis.

Symbol and Meaning: Her Symbol is actually from the Extended Zodiac, so I am unsure of it’s meaning.

It’s Gemsces, sign of the Prudent! A quick rundown: overbearingly smart, restless and skeptical, and always looking to take care of others. Also, prudence means showing careful thought and planning for the future.

Troll Tag: spiralLights! It’s a reference to her original last name that I had given her before I found out about the 6 letter thing.

Quirk: she replaces her ‘s’ with ‘5’, her ‘a’ with ‘@’, and her ‘o’ with ‘0’

While this dovetails with canon, we’ve also found with Hiveswap Friendsim that quirks needn’t necessarily be all that complex! We’ve been operating off the quirks of a bunch of real dramatic trolls for a while now. But maybe that’s who your troll is! If we go specifically with the polyblood redesign, the “too many quirks” could also just be a reflection of her inner self, which is a soup of contradictions.

I think I can make up sufficient reason to keep these quirks; Sallva can swap her s’s out for 5′s because of the 5 nucelotides we commonly see in DNA and RNA. She can swap a for @ because it’s a spiral. As for swapping o with 0, I have I think a sufficiently interesting backstory for her that’ll make that work.

Actually let me just add another one, for fun, if you’re keeping the new last name: Sallllva doublles allll her ‘l’s. The quick br0wn f0x jump5 0ver the ll@zy d0g. Give5 her @ nice llittlle dr@wll, and overdramatic to boot.

Special Abilities: She’s a Gold blood, so it’s obvious she has some sort Psychic ability. Hers is Strong Empathic abilities. Sometimes they can be so strong she gets confused as to which emotions are hers, she can also guess a person’s thoughts sometimes.

Goldblood abilities are typically telekinetic in nature, not psychic! But I really really like this concept, so I think this gets folded into the polyblood mythos; she’s heavily empathetic because of the psychic abilities that ceruleanbloods sometimes get!

To make things interesting, let’s make it so she has stuttering resistance to psychic attacks; sometimes active resistance, and sometimes an even lower resistance than usual depending on her mental state.

Lusus: Her Lusus is a mix between a Snake and an Eevee. Why? Because I like Snakes and am a Proud Slytherin and my favorite Stuffed animal is an Eevee. Her Lusus is Deceased

Also works for the polyblood theory, since polyjuice potion uses snakeskin and Eevee is like, the Pokemon for taking a generic base and turning it into whatever you want.

Personality: She’s paranoid. It doesn’t really affect her often, but she was one of the few in her session who was Skeptical about SGRUB. She’s loyal though, as well as possessive. She’s actually killed trolls who picked on her friend, who’s a mutant blood. She gets most of her traits from me. She’s my ‘True Sign Troll.’

Interest: She loves Art, her cat Frisk, Writing, Snakes, Plants

Iiiiiii don’t know that trolls can have cats as like…pets? But let me sell you on a different idea: when Sallva’s yellowblood lusus was killed, she despaired. Her mental health went downhill. She was unusually prone to psychic manipulation. Until…she was found by a ceruleanblooded lusus who had lost its charge. It is highly unusual for a lusus to bond with an adult troll, but it had just lost its troll at a very young age, and was mostly acting on instinct to find the nearest unbonded ceruleanblood. Most ceruleanblood lusii seem to be bug-like, but we could argue for something like the Catbus from My Neighbor Totoro:

Picture that version of Frisk in a kernelsprite!

Title: Mage of Life - She actually uses her ability over Life to control plants to help her fight, or to talk to animals to get help. I am unsure all of what a Mage of Life can do, but I do know they make brilliant doctors, especially if they reach God Tier, which Sallva does. After ascending to God Tier, she refused to kill another Soul, mostly because she can feel their pain. The only exception being her Ex-Matesprite, Adrium.

Hmmm. Once again, since this is a self-insert I’m loath to change stuff like names or signs or titles since people usually come to it after a great deal of introspection. Makes more sense to retrofit the character abilities so…

Let’s consult my co-mod’s write-up on what a Mage of Life is!

I don’t know that she’d be able to control plants or ask animals to get help, but it makes a lot of sense to me that she’d be able to encourage nearby creatures to help just by broadcasting her distress. Also I really like the touch that she’s essentially railroaded into the Hippocratic oath after god-tiering because of overblown empathy. I would be most interested in seeing how Adrium’s death would affect her, since her anger wouldn’t supercede his pain.

D/Ancestor: I am unsure, I haven’t actually come up with them quite yet.

How about the Inklling? Unlike her descendant, this troll was mistakenly assigned as a ceruleanblood. She was most famous for having devastatingly accurate hunches when solving mysteries, much to the chagrin of the tealbloods below her. In reality, this was her empathetic abilities manifesting themselves, though they were deeply tempered by her partial voidrot, and therefore not detected by her fellow caste.

Land: Land of Jungles and Deserts - *Snickers* I most put her here because I wanted to be able to make her complain about being a Sea-Dweller in a Desert and stuff.

So since we’ve made it so she’s no longer a seadweller, how about we subvert this here by submerging her in water? Maybe Land of Corals and Chorals to really hammer home an almost mermaidy theme?

Dream Planet: Derse - My baby’s a proud Derse Dreamer. Anyway this is relevant in the way the Derse Dreamers are Blue Team, and Prospit Dreamers are Red Team.

History: Sallva actually blames herself for her Lusus’ death, why? Because her Ex-Matesprite killed her. Adrium (Ex-Matesprite) is a violent troll, but Sallva overlooked his faults until it was too late. She gets revenge during the game and kills Adrium, though she looses her eyes and a piece of her horn to the fight, she reataches her horn with a vine though. She currently only has a Moirail (which I might upload later.) Her Sprite is Frisksprite, who jumped in the orb thingy (I forgot what it’s called.) They live on a sister planet to Alternia called Tronia, and have in fact met the Cannon Trolls a few times when Tronia’s Princess went to visit her fellow Princess, Feferi. They haven’t been there since Alnaya (Princess) got in a fight with Feferi. Though a few of them remain friends with the Cannon trolls, for example; Sallva and her Moirail Nellie still being friends with Nepeta and Equius(did I spell his name right?)

(And did I do this submitting thing right?)

Yep, you spelled his name right and submitted the character correctly! Let’s move to the redesign!

As always I try to keep self-inserts in particular as close to their original design as possible. Credit for the outfit goes to naphal.

Hair - just added stuff here and there to give it volume!

Horns - I gave her a second set to match with goldblood norms!

Visor - changed to match new eye colors

Mouth - added teeth since both ceruleans and yellows are a toothy bunch

Shirt - so USUALLY you’re not really allowed to display your symbol in anything other than your blood color, but I thought keeping it black was a nice nod both to the voidrot and to her polybloodedness.

And that’s it! Hope my feedback is useful.

[deehollowaywrites]

Turf writing is one of the great formats. In the narrowest definition, it’s given us Maryjean Wall, Joe Hirsch, and of course the inimitable Joe Palmer; in the modern era, race fans enjoy journalism and color from Natalie Voss, David Hill, Teresa Genaro, and John Cherwa. More broadly, racing’s corner of sports nonfiction is home to the likes of Joe Drape, Jim Squires, Lawrence Scanlan, and Linda Carroll.

Why then is there such a dearth of diverse racing fiction?

Dick Francis cornered the crime-novel market in 1962 and rightfully so--his thrillers remain tight, humorous, often moving, and rich with detail. But let’s be real: homeboy was writing about British horse racing, an entirely different animal from the US sport, and even where the two dovetail, they generally differ in the particulars. Any new US fan would do well to read a few Francis titles and murmur in wonder that amateur steeplechasing is, apparently, a thing people do. When Francis died, his son took over the family business and (as is the norm with children trying to magnify or at least capitalize on their parents’ callings; see also Todd McCaffrey, Brian Herbert, and Christopher Tolkien) turned out some weak tea. Notably, he tried to do what his father never had: he wrote about US racing from the perspective of the Francis hero-detective Jeff Hinkley.

Triple Crown is not a good novel, y’all, and least of all a good racing thriller. I read and livetweeted it in unflattering terms last year.

Now I hear you saying, But Diana! You were a Weird Horse Girl and we know you read all the horse books! Don’t play like it’s some vast unending desert! Friends, the great horses of literature are, with one obvious exception, British if they’re Thoroughbreds (National Velvet, King of the Wind) or belonging to some other wonderful breed if they’re American (the rest of the Henry ouvre). The great outlier of US Thoroughbred literature is the eponymous middle-grade series created by Joanna Campbell. There was an interesting novel released five or so years ago, Lord of Misrule, that captured the wonders and vagaries of the racetrack. There are the continued successes of Felix-As-Dick Francis and Sasscer Hill, both of whom write thrillers; there’s Bev Pettersen, a Fern Michaels series or two, and a very few other options in romance, where cowboys still reign supreme. One of my favorite young adult novels, The Scorpio Races, is a gorgeous blend of fantasy and hot-blooded racing. The Sport of Kings, released last year, attempted a Great American Novel through the lens of Thoroughbred breeding. Whether it succeeded is a post for another time. Of fiction titles across genre released in recent years, racing personality Jason Beem’s Southbound comes closest to the sugarplum vision dancing in my head. It’s got larger-than-life track characters, plenty of deep-dive industry details, and a gambling addict protagonist, but at core it’s a story of personal crisis and growth.

Overall, though, horse literature and Thoroughbred stories specifically seem aimed at one of two audiences: Weird Horse Girls aged around 12 and gambling men of A Certain Age. Like horses and racing themselves, if you think about it. Publishing seems to have internalized the idea that horses are a thing you love when you’re a kid--most of the long-lasting horse stories are considered to be for children--and then grow out of, and racing belongs to a graying fanbase.

I could wish for a full-throated upswell of racing stories, a Lexington Renaissance if you will, but at the least I wish for the dynamics, peculiarities, and beautiful, strange details of turf writing to cross the divide to fiction. Duel for the Crown, for instance, elucidates the story of Affirmed and Alydar as a metaphor for the state of racing at that time: the tensions between old blood and young upstarts, the war being fought between limestone and bluegrass. Joe Drape’s books are always historical, political, cultural--whether obvious, as with Black Maestro, or subtler, in how American Pharoah is less the story of the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed and more a roadmap of modern racing. Headless Horsemen reads like a thriller, and I’m likelier to give it a reread than reach for any of the current racetrack thrillers on the strength of Squires’ writing alone. Ride To Win, nominally a highlights reel of great jockeys, acts as style manual, poignant memoir, and understated exposé all in one.

There is no reason for genre fiction, the arenas of crime and romance where it’s easiest to find Thoroughbreds, to be badly written, lazily characterized, poorly conceived, or skimpy on reality. The realities of racing are far more exciting than anything an author could come up with on their own (I say this as someone invested in translating bonkers headlines into fiction). Racing, like every other sport, is an industry that should make for colorful, multicultural, tense drama in fiction--yet the offerings for fans seeking portrayal on the page remain milquetoast and outdated at best.

The reading public often looks askance at genre fans. Romance, crime, sci-fi, and anything else that can committed to mass-market paperback is rarely considered Real Literature. Similarly, in the grand scheme of American sports, horse racing is the spinster aunt you rarely see at family functions. It makes a certain amount of sense that literature about the sport would be corralled off, the way that--in the mode of St. Patrick’s Day, when suddenly everyone is Irish--only on the first weekend in May does the rest of the country pretend like they’ve always been interested. But horse racing is vivid, overtly political, composed not just of hockey-playing owners and celeb chefs but of immigrants with dreams, outsized personalities, hard-ass women, truly ugly history. Two minutes of racing can be run a thousand times over with a different story each time. The sport contains multitudes, the utmost heights and depths of American culture. Its conservatism, real and perceived, is at odds with its reality: the horse wins or it doesn’t, and there is nothing any of us can do about it.

[gaolcrowofmandos]

Elfstone discourse? (Is this a thing?)

So I was re-reading The War of the Jewels the other day, when I came across two life-changing scribbles of Tolkien's, right in the thick of the commentary on ‘The Later Quenta Silmarillion’ (p. 176-7 of my paperback):

“He [Fëanor] gives the Green Stone to Maidros.”

This line was admittedly, “not in fact to be inserted,” but then this proceeds it:

“‘At the top of this page [in the QS manuscript] my father penciled: ‘The Green Stone of Fëanor given by Maidros to Fingon.’”

Wait, what Green Stone?

Thanks, Christopher, for the confirmation:

“This can hardly be other than a reference to the Elessar that came in the end to Aragorn…”

Folks.

In this older draft, Fëanor makes the Elessar. It comes to Maedhros (whether by deathbed gift or simple inheritance). After Thangorodrim Maedhros gives it to Fingon. and Fingon later gives it away like he does a certain Helm

CT suggests that this idea was replaced by the essays found in 'The History of Galadriel and Celeborn,' but y’all: no one will take this away from me.

Here’s why:

(Buckle up and get ready for Draft Hell under this cut.)

So we’ve got three different origins stories for the Elessar in UT, and no clear indicator that Tolkien ultimately chose one or the other. To me, that makes the slightly older ‘Maidros gives the Green Stone to Fingon’ version, which is never explicitly overwritten, an equal contender.

Those three alternate versions run pretty simply as follows:

V1: Enerdhil (more on him shortly) makes the Elessar in Gondolin. Eärendil of course sails with it. Olórin brings it back to Middle-earth and gives it to Galadriel.

V2: Enerdhil makes the Elessar in Gondolin. Eärendil of course sails with it. In Eregion, Celebrimbor, a random smith of Gondolin, makes a second, lesser Stone for Galadriel.

V3: Random Guy Celebrimbor makes the first Elessar in Gondolin. Eärendil of course sails with it. In Eregion, Celebrimbor makes a second, lesser Stone for Galadriel.

The ‘Green Stone of Fëanor’ scribbles form a much more satisfactory explanation of the Elessar’s origin than any of these (incomplete and textually isolated) stories. Aside from the obvious implications for Mae and Fingon, it makes so much sense from a narrative perspective. I shall explain.

Let’s start off by tackling the first UT version head on, alias Exhibit A: What is an Enerdhil?

No, seriously:

“There was in Gondolin a jewel-smith named Enerdhil, the greatest of that craft among the Noldor after the death of Fëanor.” (p. 248 of my Houghton Mifflin paperback)

Yet somehow he’s literally nobody? Christopher Tolkien makes it clear:

“Enerdhil appears in no other writing...” (p. 251)  

There are next to no Tolkien ‘artifacts’ made by named individuals with no other narrative significance. Let’s take Telchar, who ostensibly exists only to make stuff. But the fact that the same smith made Angrist, the Dragon-helm, and Narsil is narratively significant. Enerdhil the One-Hit Wonder doesn’t jive.

So, it seems this is why Tolkien writes off his existence in favor of Celebrimbor making the Stone:

“...[T]he concluding words of the text show that Celebrimbor was to displace him as the maker of the Elessar in Gondolin.” (p. 251)

Okay, so Enerdhil is out of the picture, but let’s take a look at the latter two versions (the second with both him and Celebrimbor, the third with only Celebrimbor).

In both texts, Celebrimbor is not a Fëanorian:

V2: “[Celebrimbor] was of Gondolin long ago, and a friend of Enerdhil…” (p. 251)

V3: “The Elessar was made in Gondolin by Celebrimbor, and so came to Idril and so to Eärendil.” (p. 251)

Not only do we know Tolkien later overwrote Celebrimbor’s origins (making these drafts less than authoritative), but in these versions, the Stone is strongly attached to Celebrimbor, still maker of the Three Rings, as well as to Gondolin. If we assume that this Rings/Elessar association should be maintained, Celebrimbor's LotR-compliant transposition to the line of Fëanor should imply that the Elfstone goes with him.

Tolkien seems to be getting down with the powers of healing and preservation the Elessar shares with the Three. That metaphorical significance works brilliantly with ‘Green Stone of Fëanor’: The symbolism of the Stone’s transfer from Maedhros to Fingon (and potentially from Fëanor to Maedhros priorly) strongly enhances its meaning later in the legendarium.

So let’s talk healing, which is exactly what we see post-Thangorodrim, albeit of a different kind than we tend to link to the Elessar:

“By this deed [i.e. rescuing Maedhros] Fingon won great renown, and all the Noldor praised him; and the hatred between the houses of Fingolfin and Feanor was assuaged.” (‘Of the Return of the Noldor’)

And Our Favorite from ‘The Grey Annals’:

“Thus he rescued his friend of old from torment, and their love was renewed…” (p. 32)

What gift could dovetail with this moment better than the Elessar:

“For it is said that those who looked through this stone saw things that were withered or burned healed again or as they were in the grace of their youth, and that the hands of one who held it brought to all that they touched healing from hurt.” (UT, 249)

Withered and burned stuff in need of healing? Looking back to youth? I’d say the Elessar is the sparkly symbol for the job. Also, do they use the Elessar to heal Maedhros after his rescue? Hell yeah, they do.

Additionally, if we emphasize the --admittedly discarded -- first note, with Fëanor bequeathing the Stone to Maedhros in his dying moments, as the note’s placement suggests, we catch an enigmatic insight into Fëanor’s view of his eldest. If he’s assigning the task of healing something (the world? the family? his own legacy?) to Maedhros as the flesh is falling burnt off his body, that’s monumentally important... But it’s also a topic for a different post.

Anyway, it certainly fits to see Maedhros give the Elessar to Fingon in direct conjunction with the healing of the feud. After all, the Stone represents both preservation and restoration

Those same attributes also have a tremendous significance for the Exiles who linger in Middle-earth in the Second Age, and the Elessar’s return (whether as the same stone or a replica) serves as a forerunner of the Three Rings’ powers of preservation.

In V2, Galadriel sees Nenya as having the same function as the Elessar, if in a stronger capacity:

“Wielding the Elessar all things grew fair about Galadriel, until the coming of the Shadow to the Forest, but afterwards when Nenya, chief of the Three, was sent to her by Celebrimbor, she needed it (as she thought) no more, and she gave it to Celebrían her daughter, and so it came to Arwen and to Aragorn who was called the Elessar.” (P. 251)

Suffice to say, the Elessar’s healing properties take on a new connotation when it’s introduced early in the First Age. It becomes a token both political and spiritual - just as it becomes for Aragorn.

In the UT theories, the Stone certainly has a spiritual meaning, but on the brow of Envinyatar the Renewer, it represents a very Silm-esque union of realpolitik and in-universe theology: the reunification of Gondor and Arnor, and more importantly the passing of dominance in Middle-earth from the Eldar to the Atani.

Galadriel’s gift of the Elessar marks (in addition to a wedding gift, per LACE)  both a willing surrender of power as the Three fade and a resignation to fate. Hmm, sounds a bit like the self-Dispossession we see in Maedhros’ abdication - which should also be marked by the transfer of the Stone. While the dooms which Galadriel and Maedhros accept are strikingly different (the forgiveness of the Valar, as opposed to their curse), the same spirit of surrender aligns the two transfers of the Elessar.

So to summarize the theory: Fëanor makes the Elessar, and Maedhros gives it to Fingon because:

1. Enerdhil is a fake. 2. Celebrimbor is a Fëanorian. 3. The Elessar is a symbol.

However, this theory does raise one giant problem: how does it get from Fingon to Eärendil, and then, potentially, from Eärendil to Galadriel?

In V1 above, we see some level of in-universe debate about whether Galadriel's Elessar is even the same as Eärendil's, or if a second one is made in Eregion:

“Some say that the second was indeed only the first returned, by the grace of the Valar; and that Olórin...brought it with him out of the West.” (p. 249)

While I'm all in favor of a return to the Hither Lands á la Glorfindel, the two Elessari-conception also works in a universe where the original is Fëanor's work.

It's no stretch to imagine that the grandson who carves  the Star of Fëanor on the Doors of Durin, and has a damning *ahem* demonstrated passion for healing Arda's hurts and preserving its beauty, might emulate one of Fëanor's early projects as a precursor to the Three. He could then still give it to Galadriel, just like his Gondolin Doppelganger does.

Still, how does the Elessar get from Fingon to the refugees at Sirion? We know it’s canon that it comes to Eärendil. After all, Aragorn has Bilbo include this in his oh-so-cheeky verses about Eärendil:

“In panoply of ancient kings, In chained rings he armored him…. An eagle-plume upon his crest, Upon his breast an emerald.” (‘Many Meetings’)

The chain of transmission isn’t an insurmountable problem. Fingon just has to send or give it (most likely) to a relative in Gondolin, or (less likely) to Círdan (who we know becomes Eärendil’s friend). I have a couple wonky theories, but this post is already way too long. (Any thoughts?)

Okay, wow. This has been a mile-long ramble about why two penciled scribbles are a better headcanon than fully-formed essays.

Moral of the Story: Nobody scribbles marginal notes like Tolkien scribbles marginal notes.

(Quickie Disclaimer: Apologies if someone has already written about this. I haven't found anything in fandom about it, but if something exists, please link me to it - I'd love to see!)

[titleknown]

what are the glaring problems in Steven Universe you speak of? which political themes took a bad turn? I'm honestly curious

Well, y’all can correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I can see the major factors are twofold.

A) The fact that people are more seeing the show’s politics as ending up as “H8 Is H8 uwu,” given that Bismuth is pretty much a radical-activist-type character who’s a lot of folks feel was in the right and yet was portrayed as a villain; and the fact that subsequent eps like “Gem Harvest” which was pretty much (According to a lot o fold “Be nice to your racist uncle” message-wise and the feeling that there’s an over-sympathetic lens to the violently oppresive dictators that are the Diamonds.

I’ve heard some people say in response to the way Bismuth hasn’t appeared since “Well, the actress is a guest star and she’s busy,“ which fails to understand why in the screaming dicksauce would you make a character that mythos/thematically-important a fucking guest role?! Not to mention the fact that some people have interpreted it as an insult from the Crewniverse to their fanbase after the Zari incident, which if so is disgusting.

Which, really, dovetails nastily with B) The fact that a dickton of characters considered black-coded; like the Rubies; Amethyst and Garnet, have been sidelined storyline-wise for the pain of the white/white-coded characters. The fact that the writing quality for some white-coded character (HI LAPIS) has been said to be slipping while Bismuth (Again the lynchpin of all this) was coded as a butch black lady is the snow-encrusted pinnacle of this shit-mountain.

Of course, given the role Bismuth was implied to have played in Lapis’ poof-ing, I can see trouble brewing from a mile away with the most likely storyline route possible Bismuth reappearance, when you remember point B and the sorts of stereotypical coding that could play into.

At the very least I hope they take enough criticism to show some actual empathy/sympathy about Bismuth’s perspective. But, hope is a quantum quality, and thusly, we wait...