#very......very long post

[abigmessofablog]

I'm sure I'm probably not the first person to note this but the reason so many works derivative of The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings fails to capture the magic of those works is the lack of the hobbityness

Tolkien was, obviously, entirely aware of he common fantasy and fairytale tropes he was playing off of and they're present in his work (placing the proper king on the throne, elves and dwarves, main character who's hesitant to start his heros journey, dragons, ext) but if need be, these elements will be sidelined to emphasize the Hobbitish philosophy about the importance of comfort and good food and so on and so forth. (Thorin's death speech, Frodo's "I can't recall the taste of food, nor the touch of grass" ext)

Warning; super long, barely readable meta rant written at 2AM below

I've seen people say in any other story, Aragorn would be the main character of LOTR and I can agree with that but I'd argue you can kinda say the same thing about Thorin. Aragorn has his whole "rightful king" plot not dissimilar to how Thorin has his "reclaim the homeland, fight the dragon" plot. In the movies our emotional involvement in Aragorn and Thorin gets beefed up a little as they get some more brooding to the both of them. Aragorn gets his angst over his ancestry, Thorin is taken more seriously (ie: his updated, much more dramatic introduction giving him an air of mystery vs his book introduction, movie Balin's speech about his loyalty to Thorin, the treatment of the whole "gold sickness" thing, Thorin's speeches being taken seriously rather than being lovingly made fun of by the narration, ext) You can easily see a version of these stories where these two kings are the main characters of the story but they aren't! but neither of these characters are our main characters. Frodo and Bilbo are, respectively. And Frodo and Bilbo are simple hobbits with simple likes and the desire to live their simple shire life before getting dragged into adventure by the narrative.

I do genuinely like that in the Hobbit movies Bilbo gets to decide to go on the adventure by himself instead of getting unceremoniously shoved out of the house by Gandalf. It gives him more agency and we get the fun adventure that is supposed to take Bilbo out of his shell. Thats the message most people took from the story (ie "the world is not in your books..." I love this message/interpretation as much as anyone to be clear. I'm very guilty of loving my "Bilbo stays in Erebor" fanworks) but it is worth noting that Bilbo returns back to the Shire after his adventure and he gets the big speech about how more people should value the simple things in life before Thorin dies. Bilbo positions himself as sort of an unconventional hero by modern standards. Bilbo gets out of his situations more often than not through his wit and cleverly talking his way out of it rather than any displays of strength. He talks his way around Smaug, he cheats at his game of riddles with Gollum, he stalls the trolls. Bilbo wasn't even awake for the big climatic battle that gets turned into a climax for one of the movies. Bilbo, while getting braver more capable and more accepting of the situation, is still a hobbit! He wants his home and hearth and if he is dragged on an adventure, he will very loudly let you know about it. Frodo is similar in the sense that his strength doesn't come from any physical strength but from his ability to shoulder the horrors™ and then accept help from the people around him (mainly Sam) because he shouldn't have to shoulder the horrors™ alone. Again, the entire time Frodo is going on his adventure he's thinking about how much he'd rather be home. Sam sort of acts like this beacon of what the home represents and he’s the only thing keeping him emotionally stable and tries to comfort him through keeping him tethered to those memories of home. There’s the obvious scenes where Sam straight up tells Frodo to imagine home but there’s also just things like Sam cooking and insisting on making sure Frodo is fed (please note that sharing food is basically the universal signal for closeness, domesticity and the idea of a family unit. Think Norman Rockwell) or them turning their traumatic events into stories that they (again mostly Sam) expect to tell to their family and friends in a very domestic setting and then have those stories be passed down in the “Samwise the brave”, “Frodo wouldn’t have made it far without Sam” scene

You can also use this theme to sort of track the change in tone between the two stories. Bilbo's craving for the simple comforts of a warm meal, his bookshelves and a comfortable are played for jokes a few times, it's ultimately validated by the narrative. Frodo's drive to get back home is ultimately very melancholic and downright heartwrenching and when he can finally go home, it's not the same. In Bilbos case this change is sort of implied through the way Bilbo is treated very differently and treated like the neighborhood crazy guy by his peers post-adventure and this is played for laughs mostly but with Frodo it's outright stated and it is played completely straight. He's been so traumatized, so changed by his journey that he's simply not the same person he was when he left and he struggles to enjoy the aspects of the home that were previously used as an attempt to comfort him. Hence, “the Shire has been saved, but not for me." And he ends up leaving the Shire for good. As much as we know Tolkien hated the war allegory, it does bring to mind a soldier coming back home with severe trauma.

I feel like so much of this is lost in works that try to emulate LOTR and The Hobbit because of the simple fact that action sells much better. I mean, that's why the third hobbit movie is called "The Battle of The Five Armies" isn't it? There's also the want for grimmer, darker stories, since so many people view those as more "realistic" Maybe it's just the result of more cynical creators and audiences who want to watch more of the killing the dragon and cool battles with the big armies and less of the writing about trees and the value of home. I dunno I'm tired

[whiteshipnightjar]

Zoozve, my beloved

[velvetcloak]

The Olympics but high fashion by Wisdom Kaye

[bumbleboa]

oh what a joy it is to get to grow old

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[staff]

Tumblr Tuesday: TURN BACK NOW

Hello, Tumblr. This is your warning. Do not interact with this post. Do not reblog this post. Do not, under any circumstances, like this post. You know what will happen if you do. You have been warned. —Stanford Pines

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[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[eggwishing]

I ONCE TRIED TO WASH THAT SCUFFED OLD THING WHILE HE WAS TAKING ONE OF HIS NAPS, BUT WHEN I TOOK IT OFF HE WAS WEARING ANOTHER IDENTICAL ONE UNDERNEATH! AND ANOTHER! I GOT THROUGH TEN MORE LAYERS OF THE SAME THING BEFORE HE WOKE UP. I WAS SO FRUSTRATED! WHERE DID HE EVEN GET THOSE FROM? THEY ALL EVEN HAD THE SAME STAINS!!

[beaulesbian]

Emmrich & Lucanis banter about/with Spite because it's a very fun angle of conversation between them

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[stealingpotatoes]

the illness post is still getting notes (???!! <3) and that means people are still telling me to get better soon, which is really nice but im gonna be too powerful if i get any better

[hotdogmchiggin]

Company Mandated Fancy Fits on the Tulpar 😏

Also had to include the REAL star of the show (and a bonus)

Based off of this and this. Thank you very much joetastic for being inspirational 👍

The REAL reason this is late

[emberglowfox]

Keeper -- a short comic about an angel meeting a robotic lighthouse keeper that doesn't know the world has already ended. Made in about 18 hours for a 24-hour 24-page* black and white comic challenge (that I arrived late to, ha.)

*the actual submission does not include the cover, which was created after the fact for this post.

This was a really great learning experience as someone who's... never really made a completed comic. I ended up really attached to the story by the end of the project (possibly due to all-nighter deliriousness lol) and ultimately am very proud of what I made.There are some things I'd still like to change, particularly text placement, but in keeping with the spirit of the challenge I've elected to leave it as is.

[gongyussy]

the h in nhl stands for homoerotic

bonus intricate rituals:

[lylahammar]

Randomly thinkin about Chilchuck today, and how he tries sooooo hard to self sabotage

like for example, other half foots on the island think that he's a greedy asshole who only cares about money, and he does nothing to try to disprove that

but then there's this omake at the end of book 9 that shows that people treat half foots fucking TERRIBLY and chilchuck started a union to protect them

and then in the bicorn chapter, he doesn't want Marcille to keep digging into his personal business so he tells her he CHEATED ON HIS WIFE

but he just COMPLETELY fuckin lied about that and made himself sound so much worse than he is bc he's afraid of being vulnerable with people and would rather everyone believes he's a shitty person so he can keep them at a distance

and the thing that's memed so often is that he refuses to help with fighting most of the time because it's not part of his contract

but if you take this lore into account (not gonna add those particular images to this post simply bc I've used them in so many posts already LMAO) along with this tidbit from the world guide:

then it's like. yeah he has to keep his weight low so if he gets killed or severely injured and has to be healed, that could be really dangerous for him. and even if he was healed at that point he'd end up being a burden to the party after that point, he would be too dangerously thin/sickly to be able to help.

Like, Chilchuck has so many things about him that APPEAR to be character flaws, but every single one of them has a very reasonable explanation. He just leans into the mischaracterization bc he's emotionally withholding and can handle people thinking he's an asshole more than he can handle opening up to anyone. he's such a well thought out and interesting character

[chloesimaginationthings]

Happy one year anniversary to this FNAF post,,

[staff]

tumblr tuesday: the ineffable husbands return!

...and with them, your ineffably beautiful fanart of Aziraphale and Crowley. It's also worth pointing out that most of this art was posted in the last day or so. The show has been out for a mere weekend. Please never change, Tumblr <3

(This post goes out to everyone who has seen the second season. SPOILERS AHEAD. MILD BUT STILL SPOILERY. PLEASE BE WARNED.)

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