Sophie Hatter Finally Lives Out Every Customer Service Worker's Dream Of Retaliating To A Mean Customer

little piece from the schengen showdown finale. appreciate your surroundings :)

i love you im glad you exist im so happy you’re alive

Okay, today I used the phrase “we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater” in a meeting, and my coworker (who is older than I) started laughing because he’d never heard it before.

Now I’m confused. I thought it was an admittedly old-fashioned but generally understood figure of speech. Am I wrong?

Feel free to reblog so this reaches people with different linguistic backgrounds from my own!

The Differences Between Hera and Eowyn

Just thinking about these two shieldmaidens, and the stark differences between them.

I think a big one is that Eowyn is a romantic, whereas Hera has no wish to marry.

Meanwhile Eowyn hungers for battle and glory, and Hera, although willing to fight, does not desire it.

Hera seems to have grown up in a time of peace, or at least her childhood seems to have been peaceful. Although she lost her mother, she was too young to remember her, she had a father, two brothers, a cousin and a motherly figure. She had constant love, affection and security. However, Helm seems to have been protective of her, so freedom was her greatest desire.

Eowyn's mother and father died at an age for her to be devastated at their loss. She then lost her uncle, her father figure, as he succumbed to Grima's enchantments, and her brother and cousin regularly left her behind. Her life was marked with violence and loss.

Meduseld was a cage, but the only people close to her leaving Meduseld were soldiers riding to battle. Freedom meant battle, because battle was what went on beyond the walls of Meduseld. Battle also meant a place in the histories, a chance to be remembered. Battle was where her brother and cousin went when they left her behind. Battle was the opposite of the dry nursing role she was ill suited for, yet had thrust upon her.

Eowyn yearned for battle. She yearned for love. To ride to battle, to be loved, to be remembered, would ease her grief over being left behind, abandoned by those around her. Her infatuation for Aragorn was wrapped up in her admiration a soldier has for a captain. Romantic desire and desire for battle were intertwined.

Both of them were royal shieldmaidens who chafed under the expectations of their sex, and showed great courage in times of crisis, but the similarities begin and end there. Hera, we see, was playful, young, naïve, clever but sheltered, until the events of the film forced her to grow up. Hers was a coming of age story.

Eowyn was cold, despairing, bitter and angry. The events of the movie and the books see her regain the capacity for hope that was taken from her.

Driving lessons with the SHIELD family.

The Lay of Leithian

Hamiathes's Gift Exchange 2025: Schedule Announcement!

The schedule is here, and well ahead of time this year! We're kicking off in about three months, and the schedule will be relatively close to last year's. This exchange is open to anyone with an AO3 account who wants to write a fic or make a piece of QT art. For more details on length, size, and logistics of the exchange, check out the FAQ linked at the bottom of this post.

2025 Schedule

Character/relationship/worldbuilding nominations: Thursday, July 17 - Thursday, July 24

Signups: Friday, July 25 - Sunday, August 3

Assignments sent out: Tuesday, August 5

Fanworks due: Friday, September 12

Fanworks revealed: Friday, September 18

Artists/authors revealed: Friday, September 26

All deadlines are at 8pm EDT

Note: If you don't have an AO3 account, you can request an invite here. There is currently a 3 week waiting list to get an invite, so please make sure you request one soon if you're considering participating!

If you have any questions about how the exchange works you can find last year's FAQ here. Check out past HGE works here! If you want a reminder when signups open, dm me!

Your original WIP is getting an adaptation! Spin this wheel to find out what it is!

Feel free to ramble about your results in the tags!

Headcanon: Bilbo eventually evolves into something of a Santa Claus figure to Hobbits.

“It became a fireside-story for young hobbits; and eventually Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold, became a favourite character of legend and lived on long after all the true events were forgotten.”

Mad Baggins was remembered for randomly appearing with money, but Bilbo Baggins was well known for being extremely generous with his, especially to people who weren’t too well off. Frodo, of course, is just as free with his fortune as Bilbo was, as is Sam when he comes into it, and even Lobelia with what she has left after Saruman’s occupation, and as “Baggins” begins to decline as a name, it becomes somewhat synonymous with charity, and this gets mixed up in the legends about Bilbo’s funny adventures and ridiculous stories until everything’s too tied together to separate.

Bilbo would give out lots of gifts in the winter, to ensure everyone had warm clothes and a roof that didn’t leak, which is how he eventually became tied to Yuletide, and the legends start out as, “Mad Baggins will share his fortune with those who truly need it,” and eventually evolves into, “Good little Hobbitlings might get gifts from Mad Baggins,” and there are all sorts of pageantry and games, like someone will dress up as Mad Baggins and use Hobbit stealth magic and sleight of hand to “appear” in various places, set off a firecracker, and then run for it, and anyone who can catch him can have some candy out of his bag.

Long after Hobbits stop having dealings with Dwarves, and perhaps even after they stop believing in them altogether, they become mystical figures attached to the Mad Baggins legend, coming and going as they please and answering to nobody; anybody who catches a Dwarf may get cursed, but they also may win a treasure off of them like nothing else (and the curses, of course, are the sorts of dreadful things Hobbits can think of; thin foot-hair for a season, or never finding something until you’re looking for something else).

You know those creepy ornate woodland Santas, or like, the horrible Victorian illustrations? They have those too: Mad Baggins (a bright red nose and curly golden hair around his ears, bald on the top of his head and wearing boots of all things) accompanied by thirteen dwarves and a troop of ponies, passing out gifts and then disappearing with more than Hobbit skill. But the classic image of Mad Baggins, the one that springs to mind when children think of him, and appears in whatever their version of The Night Before Christmas is, garbs himself in green and silver and carries a sword (quite an outlandish thing among Hobbits!), and laughs often, being a great lover of song and good food and drink and practical jokes.

And if sometimes the perfect gift does appear out of thin air with no reasonable expectation, well. They say he learned from wizards too, and even though all things are diminished in the latter days, nobody ever said they were going to dwindle to nothing, did they? And it sits well with certain entities that at the end of the day, this is what’s left of a certain Dark Lord’s legacy; a legend borrowing the incidental property of his magic talisman to grant invisibility to bring gifts to children.