This Is So Beautiful

Reading fantasy again, I've started thinking about how odd it is how in books like that, the non-human races invariably scoff at human frailty and vulnerability, even those that they'll call friends. Like that's mean?? Why would you be a dick to your friend who you know is not capable of as much as you are, and it's not their fault they were born like that. That's mean.

Like consider the opposite: Characters of non-human races treating their human companions like frail little old dogs. Worrying about small wounds being fatal - humans die of small injuries all the time - or being surprised that humans can actually eat salt, even if they can't stomach other spicy rocks. Being amazed that a human friend they haven't seen in 10 years still looks so young, they've hardly aged at all! And when the human tries to explain that they weren't going to just unexpectedly shrivel into a raisin in 10 years, the longer-lifespan friend dismisses this like no, he's seen it happen, you don't see a human for 10 or 20 years and they've shriveled in a blink.

Elves arguing with each other like "you can't take her out there, she will die!" and when the human gets there to ask what they're talking about, they explain to her that the journey will take them through a passage where it's going to be sunny out there. Humans burn in the sun. And she will have to clarify that no, actually, she'll be fine. They fight her about it, until she manages to convince them that it's not like vampires - humans only burn a little bit in the sun, not all the way through. She'll be fine if she just wears a hat.

Meanwhile dwarves are reluctant to allow humans in their mines and cities, not just out of being secretive, but because they know that you cannot bring humans underground, they will go insane if they go too long without seeing the sun. Nobody is entirely sure how long that is, but the general consensus is three days. One time a human tries to explain their dwarf companion that this is not true, there are humans that endure much longer darkness than that. As a matter of fact, in the furthest habited corners of the lands of the Northmen, the winter sun barely rises at all. Humans can survive three weeks of darkness, and not just once, but every single year.

"Then how do they sane?" Asks the dwarf, and just as he does, the conversation gets interrupted by the northland human, who had been eavesdropping, and turns to look at them with an unnerving glint in her colourless grey eyes, grinning while saying

"That's the neat part, we don't."

there is an opportunity to make a "be gay, do crime" joke here, but i have no idea what joke that would be

its pride month, fellow borrowers. you know what that means.

this is really random but i just wanted to take a moment to share this gem i found on youtube. i love the niche little branch of content creators who both shitpost and also provide some of the most thoughtprovoking, nightmare-inducing stuff on the internet, which is why i love you guys on tumblr! anyway, ive blabbered on enough, here's the link: https://youtu.be/hFF5PLst0mo?si=IcsO1zuJ91dxyjKq

it's amazing to see people who see tolkien's representation of women as a positive. take a reblog and a like my friend

I just want to say to my fellow female Tolkien fans that we should not feel ashamed for loving these books that are admittedly male-centric.

It’s tempting to call Tolkien a sexist for including so few female characters in his legendarium, but we must remember that the women he did include are the epitome of girl power and some of the best role models we could ask for: strong and willful and noble and brave, without sacrificing their femininity to prove themselves.

It’s glorious to me how you can flip through the books and see page after page of men doing everything … and then suddenly:

There’s Varda creating the Stars, Sun, and Moon!!

There’s Yavanna saving her trees by inspiring the creation of the Ents!!

There’s Melian making an Elf king forget his own people and then shielding an entire kingdom!!

There’s Lúthien defeating Sauron himself AND Morgoth himself!!!

There’s Idril preventing the complete annihilation of her people by creating the secret path out of Gondolin!!

There’s Galadriel resisting the One Ring!!

There’s Éowyn killing the lord of the Nazgûl!!

There’s Ioreth saving the victims of the Black Breath through her knowledge that the king will be the healer!!

There’s Arwen bridging the gap between Elves and Men as Queen of Gondor!!

There’s 100-year-old Lobelia beating Ruffians with her umbrella and leaving money in her will to help homeless hobbits!!

There’s Rosie raising 13 kids while simultaneously serving the whole Shire as Mistress of Bag End!!

There’s Elanor guarding and preserving the Red Book so that we can read it now!!!

That’s why I just can’t hold too big of a grudge about this. Yes, Tolkien didn’t write female characters too often, and it would’ve been fantastic if there were more. But when he did write them, they were amazing.

And on top of that, his male characters display literally our dream level of healthy masculinity in a man. Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Faramir, etc. are our wish fulfillment. We have every right to enjoy that.

OMG YOU JUST REKINDLED MY MUSE FOR G/T CONTENT THANK YOU SO MUCH

thinking about Orpheus and Eurydice but g/t and i can’t tell which is worse

giant Orpheus with tiny Eurydice. she’s so small, she’s hard to spot even when one does look for her. he’s always kept a careful eye, making sure she was safe and alright, so the idea of her walking in his footsteps out of sight is terrifying to them. every one of his steps is like twenty of hers, so he has to go so. agonizingly. slow. to make sure she can keep up. he can’t even sing, because he has to concentrate all of his hearing on the softest footsteps behind him.

alternatively, tiny Orpheus and giant Eurydice. he can hear every one of her steps, when she sighs, when a large teardrop splashes onto the ground. he has to be careful to stay in her sight, but far enough ahead that he has a comfortable distance from the booming steps. he stumbles through half of it with his eyes screwed shut, worried she’ll go a step too far and he’ll get a glimpse of her form. she always did consume his entire vision, something so giant and beautiful you can’t help but look, a deeply rooted instinct he has to fight off with his entire body.

ultimately it doesn’t matter which is more tragic.

he’ll look back at her either way.

watching zeke annihilate hundreds of teenaged scouts 😇😇😇😇🥹🥹🥹☺️☺️☺️🥰🥰🥰😍😍😍😘

Watching Annie obliterate the Levi squad 🥰🥰

finally somebody says it. i love all the chill fluffy slice-of-life stuff in g/t but i hunger for violence. let us see the borrowers making war on humanity. let giants enslave humans by the millions and use them for war, labor, and pleasure. let me see the monsters, the freaks, the cruelties of this fandom. you all hide from your darkness and have become blinded by the light.

reminder: g/t is not about trying to Get A Good Grade In Morality. g/t isn’t about making things palatable to others. you can use those fucked up ideas you have. you can draw that NSFW. not all g/t content has to be Ideologically and Morally Pure. you can do whatever you want actually. preferences and likes in fiction do not equal IRL values. fiction =/= reality. write that fucked up g/t shit

The love of knowledge or education is a blessing, but it's rough to live in a world where it's seen as a curse.

Hell, maybe it really is one.

People talk about gifted kid syndrome but people don't talk about just being the kid who liked to learn surrounded by people who don't. It's harmful to tell kids they're special and gifted and instill in them high standards and expectations, but it's also harmful to be someone who just enjoys learning and understanding the world around them yet also be surrounded by people who can't or have no desire to.

Struggling due to impossibly high expectations is one thing, Struggling bc no one around you has the desire or ability to reach the expectations is another.

Maybe it's because society encourages children to hate school and education (maybe because the public education system in the us is awful), but it's such a strange, haunting sort of loneliness to constantly seek to move towards a light while everyone around you is either too foolish or too blind to even see it.

this sounds so stupid and naive but I think a lot of problems wrong with our society could be fixed if we tried to understand each other, regardless of what we feel about the other sides beliefs. Only by recognizing the divides between us can we come to cross them

I haven’t been on tumblr for quite as long as a lot of people but over several years I’ve noticed this interesting gradual sorta,, shift in the general culture? that it went from this mostly depressed, nihilistic outlook where people would regularly joke about hating themselves and being hopeless and depressed, to a wave of vehemence of “STOP hating everything actually the world is Good and you deserve love!!!” type posts, to now, where those aggressive ‘PSAs’ have faded away and instead I regularly see people romanticizing simple things like stars and hot tea and rainy mornings, and waxing poetic about their friends, and just trying to put love out there. and I don’t know exactly what that means (someone who knows more than me could probably say something smart about generational expression and trauma or popular perception of mental health and whatnot), but I do know that it makes my heart very full to see people learn to love the world and themselves by extension, and a whole userbase adopting healthier coping mechanisms, and therefore teaching the younger users to do so as well. I might just be following different people, but I really do think we’ve grown. everyone has grown. five years ago it wasn’t unusual for the next post on my dash to be a scathing commentary on why nothing matters or an anon ripping into someone they barely knew or someone complaining about how pathetic their interests are. now I have mutuals who get excited and spam reblog art of cows and friends I see tagging each other in pictures of frogs and strangers writing paragraphs about how much I matter. it makes me happy. idk. just an observation I wanted to make. I think people are good and everyone’s just trying their best at the end of the day