I'm Going To Cry Tears Of Joy Over This Masterpiece

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Pros to having the wildemount gays all live together: 

Gardening buddies

Empire sibs collectively dying from queer exposure

wlw mlm solidarity

xhorhass gays get to welcome empire sibs home after a long workday and honestly, i think we all need this

collective couch snuggles probably.

THERE ARE LIKE TEN CATS AND DOGS COMBINED HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THIS CONSEPT I’M-

Cons:

There are none.

Everything is as it should be. UwU<3

“6) Tolkien’s hero was average, and needed help, and failed. This is the place where most fantasy authors, who love to simultaneously call themselves Tolkien’s heirs and blame him for a lot of what’s wrong with modern fantasy, err the worst. It’s hard to look at Frodo and see him as someone extra-special. The hints in the books that a higher power did choose him are so quiet as to be unnoticeable. And he wouldn’t have made it as far as he did without his companions. And he doesn’t keep from falling into temptation. A lot of modern fantasy heroes are completely opposite from this. They start out extraordinary, and they stay that way. Other characters are there to train them, or be shallow antagonists and love interests and worshippers, not actually help them. And they don’t fail. (Damn it, I want to see more corrupted fantasy heroes.) It’s not fair to blame Tolkien for the disease that fantasy writers have inflicted on themselves. […] Fantasy could use more ordinary people who are afraid and don’t know what the hell they’re doing, but volunteer for the Quest anyway. It’s misinterpretation of Tolkien that’s the problem, not Tolkien himself.”

—

“Tolkien Cliches,” Limyaael

(via mithtransdir)

The whole point of The Lord Of The Rings… like, the WHOLE POINT… is that it is ultimately the hobbits who save the world. The small, vulnerable, ordinary people who aren’t great warriors or heroes.

Specifically, Sam. Sam saves the world. All of it. The ultimate success of the great quest is 100% due to a fat little gardener who likes to cook and never wanted to go on an adventure but who did it because he wasn’t going to let his beloved Frodo go off alone. Frodo is the only one truly able to handle the ring long enough to get it into Mordor - and it nearly kills him and permanently emotionally damages him - but Sam is the one who takes care of Frodo that whole time. Who makes him eat. Who finds him water. Who watches over him while he sleeps.

Sam is the one who fights off Shelob.

Sam is the one who takes the Ring when he thinks Frodo is dead.

Sam is the one who strolls into Orc Central and saves Frodo by sheer determination and killing any orc who crosses him. (SAM THE GARDENER GOES AND KILLS AN ACTUAL ORC TO GET FRODO SOME CLOTHES LET’S JUST THINK ABOUT THAT). And then Sam just takes off the Ring and gives it back which is supposed to be freaking impossible and he barely even hesitates.

Sam literally carries Frodo on the last leg of the journey. On his back. He’s half-starved, dying slowly of dehydration, but he carries Frodo up the goddamn mountain and Gollum may get credit for accidentally destroying the ring but Sam was the one who got them all there.

Sam saved the world.

And let’s not forget Pippin and Merry, who get damselled out of the story (the orcs have carried them off! We must make a Heroic Run To Save Them!) and then rescue themselves, recruit the Terrifying Ancient Powers through being genuinely nice and sincere, and overthrow Saruman before the ‘real’ heroes even get there.

Let’s not forget Pippin single-handedly saving what’s left of Gondor - and Faramir - by understanding that there is a time for obeying orders and a time for realizing that the boss is bugfuck nuts and we need to get help right now.

Let’s not forget Merry sticking his sword into the terrifying, profoundly evil horror that has chased him all over his world because his friend is fighting it and he’s gonna help, dammit and that’s how the most powerful Ringwraith goes down to a suicidally depressed woman and a scared little hobbit.

Everything the others do, the kings and princes and great heroes and all? They buy time.  They distract the bad guys. They keep the armies occupied. That is what kings and great leaders are for - they do the big picture stuff.

But it is ultimately the hobbits who bring down every villain. Every one. And I believe that that is 100% on purpose. Tolkien was a soldier in WWI. His son fought in WWII. (And a lot of The Lord Of The Rings was written in letters to him while he did it.)

And hey, look, The Lord Of The Rings is about ordinary people - farmers, scholars, and so on - who get pulled into a war not of their making but who have to fight not only because their own home is in danger but so is everyone’s. And they’re small and scared but they do the best they can for as long as they can and that is what actually saves the world. Not great heroes and pre-destined kings. Ordinary people, doing extraordinary things because they want the world to be safe for ordinary people, the ones they know and the ones they don’t.

Ordinary people matter. They can save the world without being great heroes or kings or whatever. And that is really important and I get so upset when people miss that because Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli and Gandalf and all the others are great characters and all but they are ultimately a hobbit delivery system.

It is ordinary people doing their best who really change the world, and continue doing so after the war is over because they have to go home and rebuild and they do.

If nothing else, I have to reblog this for the phrase “hobbit delivery system.” So accurate it hurts.

(via elenilote)

What I love too is how even the foretold king and the assorted great heroes themselves all come to recognize that their main (and by the end, only) role is to distract Sauron. To the point that by the end they’re all gathered up before the black gates of Mordor in order to keep his attention focused on them, with only the hope - not the certainty - that they can buy Frodo whatever remaining time he needs, if he’s even still alive.

One thing the movies left out but has always been such a key part of the books for me was how when the hobbits returned home, they found that home had been changed too. The war touched everywhere. Even with all they did in far-off lands to protect the Shire, the Shire had still been damaged, both property and lives destroyed, and it wasn’t an easy or simplistically happy homecoming. They had to fight yet another battle (granted a much smaller one) to save their neighbours, and then spent years in rebuilding.

(via garrusscars)

In many ways, the entire POINT is that homecoming. A quest, an adventure, is defined by the return home, and the realization that not only have YOU changed, so has your home.

(via mymyriadmusings)

“My friends, you bow to no one.”

(via sorrelchestnut)

@daisyfornost

(via roselightfairy)

if anyone is need of a long, entertaining adventure with a hero who never set out to be a hero but was just TRYING TO DIG A TUNNEL DAMMIT, Ursula Vernon’s Digger and its delightful wombat heroine might be up your alley. 

(via beatrice-otter)

this is all so good and important i only have to add as i am contractually obligated to do that gollum didn’t “accidentally” destroy the Ring, frodo’s geas took effect and kicked his ass when gollum broke his word, so the credit for that goes back to Frodo again who absolutely anticipated he would do so and set up the geas for just that reason

Rook oversharing while helping Lucanis with cooking (so I can put more backstory details bc I can’t draw out his entire life)

I’m curious if anybody can guess who the mage he’s referring to is :>

Update: The mage reveal

Why Fenris could Never Cameo in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

In the run up to Dragon age: The Veilguard, I was almost certain that Fenris would be our main legacy character from previous games. Not only has he been central in the comics released between DAI and DATV, he is an escaped Tevinter slave who's plot revolved around magisters, magic and the structural prejudices surrounding elves in Thedas. Not only that, but he's canonically in Tevinter killing slavers currently so he's geographically in the right place for us to meet him.

About halfway through the game though, it was clear to me: Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.

How the Veilguard treats Thedas is...odd to me, to say the least. I will be writing another post about how much I adored the expanded big lore in this game (the titans, ancient elves were spirits, where the blight came from etc.) and yet while these large lore expansions worked for me, the actual culture of modern Thedas is entirely softened, its sharp edges filed down until it's a sanitised fantasy world devoid of what made the franchise so vibrant and compelling in the first place.

So let's start with Fenris and slavery. In all three games, the reality of slavery is pushing at the corners of the world. In DAO Loghain allows Tevinter Magisters to enslave elves in order to raise money for his war effort. In DA2 Fenris is fighting to be free from slavers who will not leave him be, let alone the reminders that the city was built by slaves which are everywhere. In DAI one of the two possible mini-bosses is Calpurnia who was a slave, and characters such as Gatt and Dorian both show us how much slavery is tied into Tevinters culture and success.

But DATV the first game actually set in Tevinter where we get to see the famed Minrathous...it's like the game purposefully wants to avoid the issue. I can feel it tilting the camera away to not allow me to see. Slavery is mentioned, but never talked about in depth or as a specifically ELVEN problem in Tevinter. This might have been done to be less problematic, it feels ignored.

We are in DOCK TOWN. We are at the DOCKS. You would think that slaves from all over Thedas who are being smuggled and bought by various groups would be everywhere. You would think that the injustice in dock town would be partly built on the back of ships we've seen in the comics crammed with elves in chains. This is the world Dragon age set up for us. And yet...nothing. zilch. A tiny easily skippable side quest where we free a couple of venatori slaves, but only one of whom is an elf.

None of our Tevinter characters seem to have been influenced by their culture even a little bit when it comes to how they view elves; there is no moment when Neve fucks up and says something prejudiced, no moment when Bellara or Davrin are distrustful of her for being a Tevinter mage.

The same goes for Zevran; a character who epitomised the issues with the crows. The crows have consistently been characterised as very morally dubious assassins who kill for the highest bidder and who buy children on the slave market and torture them as they grow in order to assure that they reach maturity able to withstand torture without giving away a client's name. Zevran is very explicit about the fact that if you fail a contract your life is forefit.

Nobody responds particularly to you if you're an elf. Nobody trusts rook less for it in Tevinter. Nobody treats Rook any differently. Even DAI had better mechanics for this; with nobles in Orlais less likely to trust you as an elf.

Considering one of the main plot points of this game and what makes Solas sympathetic is the fact that he was fighting against the slavery of ancient elves...you'd think the game might want to mirror that in modern Thedas. It might want to show us how characters fighting to end slavery in Tevinter are similar to Solas and how the society Solas fought against was similar to the one that characters we love such as Fenris have fought against in modern Thedas. Maybe we'd want to explore how in a world of slavery like this, how could the answer NOT be to tear it all down? Maybe we should have that option at the end of the game so it really can chose whether we agree with Solas and his plans or not.

Adding Fenris to this game would entirely break the game because Fenris refuses to allow you to look away from this horror. He is a sympathetic character who had to learn to trust mages again because of course he didn't trust them. Of course he didn't. Fenris wouldn't allow the camera to shift focus because he's literally covered in the lyrium scars that show how slaves are used as experiments in Tevinter. Fenris WOULD question Neve on how she feels about elves and slaves. Fenris WOULD have things to say about Lucanis and the crows (let alone the fact Lucanis is an abomonation). So he could never be in this game; he'd drop a bomb on it's carefully constructed blinders to the very society its supposed to be set in.

And yet, in DATV, the crows are presented as...a found family of misfits and orphans? The politician who opposes the crows having absolute power in Antiva is framed as a comically evil idiot who doesn't understand that the crows are ontologically good. Yet...they're NOT. Crows in this game act more like a secret rebel group than an assassin organisation. We see no crow taking contracts with the VERY RICH venatori magisters despite being hired killers. We see crows just refuse to kill people despite having a contract because 'its crueler to leave them alive'. The crows don't feel like the crows here, they feel like a softened version of a cool assassin group who are cool because they wear black and purple.

Our pirate group are also sanitised; the Lords of Fortune are good pirates who only steal treasure that's not culturally significant. Theyve clearly read the modern critiques of the British Museum and have decided to explicitly stop anyone levelling similar critiques at them. There is no faction of the Lords of Fortune who aren't like this, no internal arguments about it. Everyone just. Agrees. And is able to accurately tell what a cultural artifact is vs. what treasure that you can have yourself is. Rather than showing us why a pirate stealing cultural artifacts might be bad (like in da2 where such a situation literally causes a coup and a war) it just tells us it's bad. But also pirates are cool so we still want them in our world.

This issue seaps into Thedas and drains it of any of the interesting complexity and ability to SAY anything that this franchise had before this game. It becomes a game about telling and not showing rather than the other way around. The games have ALWAYS asked questions about oppressive structural systems and their interplay with society, religion and culture and how these things can affect even the most well meaning character. Dragon age at its best IS a game about society and how society functions both for and against it's characters and what happens to societies built on cruelty and indifference. The best bad guys dragon age has given us are those who are bad because they embody these systems or have been shaped by them. Our main characters have had to wrestle with questions surrounding how to exist in these systems, fight against them, learn and grow.

Yet every group you come across in DATV is sanitised and cleaned up to the point of being as non problematic as humanly possible. None of our cast of characters have to wrestle with where they came from or the world that shaped them. None of them have to confront their own biases. They start the game perfectly non-problematic and end it that way too.

And this just...isn't what Dragon Age has been in the past. It isn't why I love the franchise. The whole game just felt, in a way, hollow. And this was a CHOICE and it is why the legacy characters are few and far between. Too many dragon age characters are just too...angry and complex for this game. You can feel them pulling their punches on this one. I have to imagine they did this because they didn't want to be criticised or have too much controversy? But I think it honestly goes far too much in the other direction and just makes it bland.

I can't imagine what I say here will be unique, but it is the basis for a LOT of my other thoughts on this game so I wanted to get it out of the way first. The softened Thedas and characters make this game by far the weakest in the franchise.

guide to singing along to musicals alone

Be More Chill: sing along to ALL the instrumentals.

The Book of Mormon: passionately yell the lines. Then glance out the window awkwardly to make sure no one’s listening. Then resume passionately yelling. Awkwardly go quiet when you hear people passing your door. Repeat.

Dear Evan Hansen: two modes: either humming the songs peacefully to yourself or jumping to your feet, perfectly executing the “Sincerely, Me” dance and also doing all of Ben Platt’s physical tics and waiting for your Tony.

Falsettos: *singing along happily for hundredth time* *abruptly stops* What does that line even mean

Hamilton: there is literally only one way to do it: singing along to all the parts at once and incorporating all the furniture in the room for maximum effect.

The Last Five Years: have a hundred tabs open with the lyrics. It would be one of the easiest musicals to sing along to alone if there weren’t so many goddamn words.

Les Misérables: reconcile yourself to the fact that it’s physically impossible to sing along to all the parts. You gotta just pick a character to sing with. Which is actually fine, because most Les Mis fans have this one character that’s “their” character. And there’s probably only one character who’s in your range, anyway. I mean, you can try to sing along to all the parts, but prepare to get absolutely slaughtered in “One Day More.”

Newsies: whatever you do, just don’t try to dance along. Please.

Next to Normal: *singing along happily for hundredth time* *abruptly stops* Whoa. That line is really clever/weird/sad/beautiful.

The Phantom of the Opera: AHHHHH aaahhhh ahhhh ahhhHHHH SING MY ANGEL OF MUSIC AHHHH ahhhh ahhh hahhhHHHHH sing mY ANGEL ahhh hahhhhhhh ahhhhHHHHH SING FOR MEEEE AHHHHH HHHHHHHH HAHHHHH HHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHH SING MY ANGEL HHHHHHHH Ś̹̗̝̠̫I͓̻̰̲N̢̠͕G̦̬͟ ̲F̳̫̦̜̭̰O͙̹̪͕̞͉͟R̩̭̦ ̛̠͚̰M̫͍̬͇͈̖EE̖̙̬̳̞̞̹È̖E͈EE͏E̗̞̲͍̰̕E̗̙̬̻̭Ḛ̫͉̗̜ aaʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰ

Rent: ALL the air guitar.

Spring Awakening: *forgets lyric* 🎶 lonely grass purple horses hay bale 🎶

Waitress: wait until “I Didn’t Plan It” and “She Used to Be Mine,” and then let out YEARS of pain and sadness

Wicked: *searches on YouTube* how to belt

The Walking Dead Variant Covers

"If you meant what you said Alistair, then swear on the divine. 'Tis not often you get to be in her presence" "I- It's- You never stopped being mean, do you?"

Do you ever think how much of an impact having the major leaders of the post-war era be intimately close friends would affect politics in ATLA. The Gaang traveled together for months, living in close quarters, seeing each other at their bravest and their most vulnerable; it affects how you see and act around each other.

They touch each other so casually, so easily it unnerves most nobles. Master Bei Fong throws her feet into Counselor Sokka’s lap at any given opportunity. Fire Lord Zuko absentmindedly straightens out Avatar Aang’s sacred robes that are entangled from some airbending move. Master Katara throws an arm around the shoulder or waist of her compatriots, keeping them safe and within her reach and none of the others so much as blink. 

Members snap at each other, vicious little barbs said with crooked smiles. The master waterbender taunts the lord of the Fire Nation about his honor. In the past such a person would have been burned to a crisp for such a slight but this Fire Lord merely rolls his eyes and retorts about some waterbending scroll. Lady Bei Fong pops out of nowhere and launches the most powerful bender into a wall and the spirit of the world just laughs and then throws some rocks back at her. 

It scares the hell out of politicians how they communicate so easily with little to no words. Avatar Aang and Counselor Sokka can hold entire, detailed conversations with just their eyebrows and mouth expressions. Master Katara can walk into a room and sense with uncanny accuracy, before anything that happened, that her fellows are up to no good. The group, full of various world leaders and master benders will babble on for minutes, the Fire Lord listening attentively before turning to his stunned and confused audience and translating without a hint of shame. It simply is how it is when the young men and women shaping the world grew up alongside each other in the darkest of days and now can stand together, as one family of four nations, in the light.

there’s going to be a difference sometimes between the stories that you find masterfully crafted and the stories that mean a lot to you personally and those two things don’t have to overlap completely or even at all to make that story worthwhile

and that’s a good thing to remember as a reader/viewer/etc but also as a writer because even if whatever you ultimately write is full of mistakes, someone out there is gonna take it so to heart that it fundamentally changes them as a person. and that is. Huge.

The more I saw the more impressed I was

Dragon Age Ukiyo-e Character Fan Art - Created by Dakkun39

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