i don’t trust any commentary on the gothic that can’t admit that ann radcliffe is not very good. i think sometimes people wheel her out just to sound knowledgeable and i think hm….and are we going to acknowledge that….to put it charitably….mysteries of udolpho is surely one of the books ever written

one of my deeply held beliefs is that all cats are somewhere between a rat and a bunny but just how rat or how bunny varies from cat to cat

the linchpin of forbidden love with a feudal royal character is that it’s not about them. it’s not about whether they would die for love, it’s about whether they’ll let other people die for it. it’s about whether they would choose the ensuing civil war with their barons and all its carnage for love

disabled people aren’t children but often when someone really hates kids their rage is specifically about having to be inconvenienced or annoyed by someone who is vulnerable in such a way that they can’t help it and require our collective care and that almost inherently implicates disabled people

once someone points out to you that the reason a number of the wigs from the rings of power look really strange is because the actors have their sideburns shaved off unnaturally high like at times well above their ears you cannot unsee it

i’m not saying yiddish speaking or accented dwarves would be bad it’s just when people suggest that for an adaptation i want to know if they are prepared for yiddish speaking dwarves to just read as german to 99% of audiences. i want to know if you’ve heard yiddish spoken

covid shows up in the weirdest ways sometimes like you’ll be watching sports highlight reels and they’ll pull off an absolutely insane play and it’s dead silent in there and you’re like ??????? until it clicks that this was in 2020 and no one could be there. like aw fuck forgot about the plague

huge fan of the email i received from the local animal hospital vaguely implying that my cat was in the armed forces at some point by saying they were honoring our heroes this veterans day with a 5% off sale for hawthorn the cat

love when tolkien says things like “wolves there were, or creatures that walked in wolf-shapes”. love to be told there are wolves or at least Something that is choosing to look like a wolf

me: oh i just don’t really like modern aus personally the setting is just too important to me and too critical to the characters also me: on all levels except physical fëanor is a very old jewish man who scandalized everybody when he was young by marrying a catholic girl

we can talk about attitudes to genre romance all day but the greater weirdness is always the desperation with which people don’t want classic literary love stories to be love stories. they will reach as far as possible into total absurdity to read a romance as secretly being about something else

it has been said and joked about to death but truly any time you watch someone do interior redecorating online it’s always a millenial who will take spaces and furniture with unique and interesting finishes and make it all the ugliest most sterile gray and white situation you can possibly imagine

feanor and son conversation

bilbo baggins is a man who kind of has a woman’s narrative. like the whole thing about the tension between domestic life and adventure and the social consequences of leaving your place in society, having in wit what you lack in strength, and so on. he’s a man with a plucky heroine’s story

sometimes the most fascinating tolkien opinions come from people who don’t know that much tolkien. recently i was staying with an aunt and she smelled a middle earth candle she had lit and said “it’s nice but a little too sweet…middle earth should smell like turned soil and ash”

Sons of Fëanor

you don’t need to see yoshinobu yamamoto’s stats to know how good he is you can just infer it from the way people pulling for the blue jays started going NOOOO NO NO NO PLEASE G-D NO in every chat last night when the broadcast showed him warming up to come in like someone had called in a bomb threat

at the time it was upsetting but in hindsight it’s a hilarious part of my personal lore that i was once suspended from twitter for 6 months for saying that, as possibly the most famous jewish actor, mel brooks should be allowed to hunt the most famously antisemitic actor, mel gibson, for sport

i’m all for art of very muscular women and everything but it is funny when people do that and say its to show Realistic Women’s Bodies because i know what you actually mean here but like this is the body of a pro athlete. this is .01% of people. this is equally as unattainable as any rail thin model

sometimes there’s philosemitism in fantasy that has nothing to do with jews by which i mean having a voyeuristic romance with the tragedy of oppression for a fictional race of othered white people, especially when the oppressors are diverse, is the same process as philosemitism

it’s not that i think women authors should get a pass for writing bad books because they’re women it just does not escape my notice that the various women purveyors of mass market novels on sale in the airport are hunted for sport daily whilst james patterson and his ilk remain at large

just remembered my theory that nessa, being oromë’s sister described as running swift as an arrow, outrunning the deer, is a prey animal god……delicious

caranthir as the harshest of his brothers is so funny just because it’s like, true or not, do you know how huge of a bitch you have to be interpersonally for people to remember you for your shittiness when you’re up against the guys responsible for nargothrond in the contest?

people seeing themselves in characters is a fine line because in moderation that can provide insight but often it produces terrible character analysis because once this is literally you or literally someone who hurt you in your mind you cannot see these people clearly and other views are an attack

sometimes i think about the time i was doing trivia with three other gays and there was a musical theatre question and we could not between the four of us name west side story. truly out here breaking the stereotypes

i love this image but people always use it in a purely negative way whereas to me it feels like when you’re absolutely loving a movie that’s kind of bad. this is me watching the hobbit movies

melian the maia —— for @meladriel.bsky.social ✧

i don’t believe in lore dick measuring contests or excluding people who are getting into tolkien and learning but you do run into some amount of “i haven’t read the book but you have to take what i think about it seriously otherwise you’re mean” around adaptation fan spaces which is like. well, no!

the nfl does a few games in london every year and every time i watch one it’s hilarious because there are always plenty of people in the stadium but they’re so sedate watching it i swear to g-d they have no idea what’s happening. it charms me

[john tolkien in the shibboleth voice] morifinwë, so named for his black hair, which was brown,

something i turn over in my mind all the time is how in a specifically tolkienian sense about being bound to the world versus free to leave it, dwarves are both immortal and mortal. they age and die like men but they remain in the world in death like an elf

there are certainly tolkien characters i have no interest in but it would be a little disingenuous of me to be like “[character] is just boring, i can’t imagine why other people care about them” given that i build cathedrals out of like two lines about nothing characters i happen to be interested in

curufinwë atarinkë………………….i need to crush him within my jaws

size difference elf art is kind of like watching pro sports in the sense that you see this man on your screen and he looks so petite and so little but you know full well that little man is like 6’3” and jacked, he’s just standing next to a seven footer

the art nouveau elves vs. art deco dwarves thing absolutely has hierarchical signalling going on with it but there’s some irony in art nouveau being the aesthetic of the better because of the way that in its time it was, well. the new art, and not the establishment of academicism

must’ve felt so good in the 18th century to scowl severely at another man and say “you forget yourself” and know he wants to suck you off so bad

baseball games when it rains: we need to delay the game for a few hours just to keep everyone safe :) football games when it’s an absolutely biblical torrential downpour with 40mph winds or snowing sideways so hard the cameraman cannot find the ball: fuck it, send them out there

one trouble with real world aus of fantasy is that it’s both funny for the names to stay and funny for them to change. it’s funny to imagine there being a curufinwë fëanáro walking around boston as if that’s normal but it’s also hilarious to anglicize him as like curmudgeon frederick or something

for some reason when i’m telling a friend something in public and i realize midway through this is going to be a bit more graphic than i should really get here i am suddenly possessed by a historical gentleman. why did i refer to a boner as “the personal state of affairs that he was in”

this may strike some viewers as snobbish but i have had to accept that the silmarillion fandom has given me unrealistic expectations for how widely read i can anticipate people in fandoms being because like i venture into other corners and immediately it’s like no one has read any book ever

any time a story involves an adult woman being awful to a little boy i turn evil reading discussion of it because 100% of the time the takes are either hating her in a deeply misogynist way or doing full scale abuse apologia to defend her on the grounds that the victim is a boy with no in between

at some point years ago i started jokingly referring to plural elf babies as the babyar but it’s been so long now that at this point i occasionally have to remind myself that thats not like a fandom bit that people know, that’s just some shit i say. i cannot just be talking about elrond’s babyar

something that’s always vaguely funny to me when writing fantasy is that it often makes sense for women in these settings to be addressed as “lady” as a respectful and deferent term but in present colloquial use calling a woman “lady” is neutral at best but usually disrespectful

i don’t have kids so i brag about my friends instead. i talk about my besties recent accomplishments with fond pride as if i had literally anything to do with it

A crop of a lovely Haldir I drew recently 🌼🌳🌼🌳🌼 #haldir #lordoftherings #tolkien

maeglin and idril 🗡️👑

it’s good to be critical of what’s popular in fandom but it’s also good to be real. don’t be the people who pretended there was no discernible reason shirtless dripping wet evil manny jacinto was more popularly shipped than the teen girl in alien makeup when that one star wars show came out

i saw what was presumably a german police car in rural america the other day like it was clearly a european make no american cop would have with a government car type of paint job and it said POLIZEI on the side and i keep thinking about it because what. did someone import a german police car. why

one of the unorthodox gil-galad origins i indulge in is the idea of him being andreth and aegnor’s son which is for the most part terribly sad but it’s funny of andreth in the sense that like. have the lords of the noldor ever pissed you off so bad you released your own, improved lord of the noldor

the nature of online leftism is that people are like “i would DIE for regular working class people” and you’re like “would you talk to them? would you meet them where they are and explain your views in an accessible way so you can work together?” and they’re like absolutely fucking not. idiot