one of my favorite lotr facts is that gondorians speak sindarin as a first language and yet when faramir was talking to frodo and sam about cirith ungol he was like “we don’t know what’s in there.” like faramir. cirith ungol is sindarin for “pass of the spider.” do the math
some of my favorite tags on this post
Don’t forget that Frodo also speaks Sindarin, which makes this even worse.
Faramir: Hey, don’t go up the Spider Stairs.
Frodo: Why? What’s up the Spider Stairs?
Faramir: We don’t know, Frodo. We just don’t know.
to be fair, you’d assume the name means “there’s a lot of spiders here,” not, “there is one spider the size of a draft horse here.” so you go up expecting to have to shoo a lot of skeeter eaters out of your tent, and instead you have to figure out how to rope and shoe godzillarantula.
Hmmm…
They do live in a world where godzillarantulas feature prominently in mythology and history (Ungoliant plunged the world into darkness, scared the crap out of Sauron’s old boss, etc) and existed within the last century in Mirkwood. Assuming they ever talk to anyone who’s been to Mirkwood. They… probably know they were giant spiders in Mirkwood pretty recently? It’s hard to figure out how much anyone in Middle-earth has been talking to anyone else when we didn’t actually see it.
On the other hand – what if it’s the giant evil spiders’ prominence in history/mythology that’s causing trouble? What if lots of evil/nasty things/places get called “spider” just to indicate how nasty and evil they are, rather than any association with literal spiders, and it’s just… overloaded? Maybe the bad part of town in Minas Tirith is the Spider District. Maybe every tavern trying to be edgy calls itself the Spiderweb.
Actually spider/Ungoliant references could be really appealing to Gondorians trying to be edgy. They’re dark and evil! Plunged the world into darkness! But they AREN’T involved in the war they’re actually fighting, they aren’t directly associated with Sauron at all, so getting too interested in them would be creepy without being potentially treasonous. Because no one’s ACTUALLY going to worship those dangerous but not epic spiders up in Mirkwood, and no one’s heard anything from any proper spawn of Ungoliant in ages and ages.
In fact, spider/Ungoliant references might be appealing to ORCS trying to express that something is nasty and creepy! Nobody likes Ungoliant.
Maybe Faramir’s been to fourteen different Spider Caves across Ithilien, and half of them he didn’t even see regular spiders in, they’re just dark and damp and may have had orcs at some point, or something, and at some point in history someone got spooked. So you know, it’s POSSIBLE Spider Pass has something to do with spiders? But really it just means people don’t like it.
(The problem with this theory is we never actually SAW anyone overusing spider references. But it’s plausible they would!)
This sounds like something Tolkein would agree with.
that actually makes a lot of sense. there are probably hundreds of river rapids in north america called Devil’s Cauldron. if someone tells you not to canoe on that river, you’ll assume it’s because the rapids will smash your boat, not because the literal devil will boil you for soup.
And then after class I went to Trader Joe’s to get snacks, because, cooking class, and I walked through the produce section and up to the big racks of bananas they have, but all the bananas were super green.
So I was thinking to myself, I don’t want to buy bananas that I have to wait three to four days to eat, and I was kind of disappointed that the only bananas available were really like, bananas of the future.
Which was when I saw someone else who was also looking at the really green bananas, clearly thinking the same thing, and without considering it, without stopping to reinstall my brain to mouth filter, I just turned back to the bananas and said, not for her ears specifically but definitely within earshot, “Patience Bananas.”
The look she gave me.
I mean, I deserved it, but god damn, I don’t think I’ve ever confused someone so thoroughly in my life.
I’m going to bed, and maybe when I wake up I will be only my usual level of broken weirdo, and not this new, ascended level of broken weirdo.
Patience Bananas is Ankh-Morpork’s newest Watch recruit.
Obviously they are an Omnian, so what does the rest of that first name look like?
…Patience Deeper Than A Sea of Bananas. (Since bananas are technically fish)
I love this idea but may I suggest:
Probably it is Patience-Shall-Be-Thy-Watchword-When-Handing-Out-Explanatory-Tracts Banan. Every single person she meets believes it’s Banana, however, because it’s dreadfully hard to say Banan and then stop. So she is constantly correcting people, which does…well, it requires patience.
Patience Banan likes the quiet rustle of paperwork that’s in order, with everything spelled correctly, and has been known in quiet hours to return it with polite correctional marks.
There had been a recruiting motion for people who were Odd in the Mind, as a sign of Forward Times, and the only one so far to ask what kind of Odd in the Mind she was had been Nobby in on a visit.
Now she lurks like a slow-moving, wide-eyed paperwork ghost. Patience Banan’s Omnian family had been some sort of rural, before Executive Assistant[1] Banan had come to haunt a lifestyle with less tracts and more money.
Boromir lives AU where instead of being around for the events of Two Towers and ROTK he just kind of shows up in Minas Tirith after the Ring is destroyed all bloody & bedraggled like ‘you GUYS i had to swim all the way back what the hELL’
Aragorn: *watching Boromir’s funeral boat drift away* you checked for a pulse right Legolas
Legolas, who definitely does not know how human pulses work: sure did!!
*later*
Aragorn: LEGOLAS I TOLD YOU TO CHECK FOR A PULSE
Legolas: I did!
Aragorn: …..
Legolas: ….
Boromir: …..
Gimli: …..
Legolas: oh you meant check that he DIDN’T have one?
This is the only version of LOTR that I accept now
A while ago I made a bunch of new pies. Well, I didn’t *make* them because they were neural network invented titles and although it tried to imitate the list of pies I gave it, the neural net’s imitations are imperfect.
The neural network, after all, is a computer program with about as many neurons as an earthworm. It doesn’t understand what the ingredients are, or why some combinations don’t work. Some of its titles were intriguing, though. They sounded mysterious. Potentially delicious and/or magical?
Or maybe it just helps that they’re vague. I decided I wanted more like these. To help it along, I spiced up the pie dataset with the names of cookies and apple varieties from the 1905 edition of Apples of New York. I filtered the names for those that had possessives: Mcaffee’s Nonesuch, Cornell’s Savewell, Wile Ox’s Winter (all apples), combined with Goldy’s Dungeon Bars, Esther’s Bracelets, and Fido’s Rewards (all cookies). Then, to give it added old-school flavor, I added all the Dungeons and Dragons spells that had possessives as well (for example, Ivy’s Irresistible Scent, Freedom’s Toast, and Leomund’s Tiny Hut).
I arranged the training data so the pies would be last (so they would be freshest in the neural net’s virtual mind). Then I gave it one single look at the data.
It turns out that I didn’t manage to prevent the neural net from coming up with bad ideas. Perhaps what I should have done instead was remove all the meat pies from the training data.
But some of the pies were exactly what I’d hoped for.
And some even went a little past “ancient” and into “legendary”
You know, a big part of purity culture is an inability to cope with your own mistakes, because in your mind, there’s no way to bounce back from serious errors. You can’t just apologize for doing something Problematic™ and then try not to do it again, because then you’re just Bad, so you’ve gotta prove that whatever you did was never bad to begin with. That you’re still Good and therefore did not actually do anything wrong.
So it kind of irks me when I see people acting like ‘purity culture’ is pointing out mistakes or debating about the implications of various actions.
That’s not purity culture, that’s normal culture. Purity culture is getting so overwhelmed at the prospect of ‘being bad’ that you can’t even cope with it and your only recourse is to fight against the implication tooth and nail, as well as the other, more widely understood issue of people refusing to let anyone else grow or change. Because the conceit of purity is that deep down, you’re either virtuous or evil. So there’s no room for forgiveness or for personal growth.
That’s also why you see it cropping up in social circles all over the political spectrum. Because it’s a fallacy that anyone can fall into as long as they have actual morals. It’s based in a belief that morality is a matter of innate nature, not active choices. Regardless of what your values may be.
This literally sums up what it took me a LOT of therapy to figure out, and real fucking well, too.
Sam/Frodo fic: *spends an entire chapter talking about hobbit land and property laws*
Me: 👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌there👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my self 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠOOOOOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shit
I need to know what this fic is, for, like, reasons
I am not of that particular school of thought where “characters” should “end up happy”—I am of the school of thought that characters should realize their narrative purpose, and whether that’s cheerful or not is an independent question, and varies depending on context.
Cassian and Jyn dying is exactly that.
They die as a realization of their purpose, of the ultimate purpose of Rogue One. It is not a cheerful movie—everybody dies except the few characters that can’tfor continuity purposes; it’s implied that the Rebellion, for all its moralistic posturing, is happy to enact murder the way the Empire does. But at the same time….Jyn and Cassian, K-2 and Bodhi and Saw and Chirrut and Baze and—though their dying may not give much light, it sure beats the darkness. Because of them, because of them and Luke Skywalker after them and Leia Organa after him….everything turns out. The Republic is built on that. Namely: someone is listening: you can have faith even in a darkness so profound it is death. But out there, someone—someone is clutching your floppy disk and talking about hope.
I was raised Catholic, we’re always going to be weak for a martyr, but still. Rogue One is sloppy in execution but not in its thesis. It says: there are people willing to die just to pass on the torch of belief. There are people who will stagger to the edge of the sea, and die in a blinding-white burst of light, because they believe in that world beyond the dying. (I really like FILM HULK but I think he missed the mark of his analysis of RO, he somehow skipped over the profundity of telling a story about nameless, faceless freedom fighters who push the line in a conflict against a vast, oppressive force.)
Most people just…die, they just fade out and that’s the end of it.
But how meaningful, how tremendous, to watch someone die for something. To see it realized, in their wake. (I have many more feelings than thoughts about it, tbh).
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