[ID: Adult Zuko Unsuccessfully Encourages Toddler Kya To Eat A Spoonful Of Veggies By Opening His Mouth

@feanorianweek day ii; maglor the minstrel

And when this new star was seen at evening, Maedhros spoke to Maglor his brother, and he said: ‘Surely that is a Silmaril that shines now in the West?’ And Maglor answered: ‘If it be truly the Silmaril which we saw cast into the sea that rises again by the power of the Valar, then let us be glad for its glory is seen now by many, and is yet secure from all evil.’ Then the Elves looked up, and despaired no longer.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, “Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath”

[ ID: A 12-picture edit for Maglor from the Tolkien legendarium. The prevalent colours are a green-ish gold and purple. Here’s what the images show:

black text on white background, reading “sole survivor”

The model Noh Seoung Hwa, an east asian man, facing front. He’s wearing a blazer and multiple rings

a detail from a baroque painting, showing a bushy sleeve with gold decor

white text on purple background reading “kanafinwe makalaure” and “maglor”

a bay by night with a reddish moon above

a yellow gem

a golden baroque-style harp

cut-open fig fruits

white text on purple background reading “greatest minstrel of the noldor”

golden glitter on the clavicle of a light-skinned person

Noh Seoung Hwa wearing a crown. His face is only visible from the eyes upwards

A crowd of people with swords shrouded in purple mist

End ID ]

ATLA Gen Fic Recs!

this took a while but here it is! this is just going to be the fics that i've been reading recently, because otherwise this list would go on forever. if you want the full atla list of fics i read, check out my ao3 bookmarks.

How to Disappear Completely by aeoleus @ta1k-less : zuko unexpectedly gains custody of both kiyi and azula after his mom dies in a car crash. i love this one... zuko loves both of his sisters so much and he would do anything for them T_T

The [insert title here] and the Fire Lord by azenki: this one is technically gen but literally everyone thinks zuko is dating around. this is just such a silly and hilarious fic, really made my day after reading it.

Kintsugi by @discordiansamba : this is a series where zuko is just dumped in the earth kingdom after his agni kai and somehow becomes toph's bodyguard. i love the bonding between zuko and toph, and i abosolutely adore the oc's in this fic

Dragon Moon by Satirrian: technically so far this is gen but the author did mention there might be shipping later. THIS FIC!! It literally has so many different things going on but it works. Dragon!Zuko. that should already be enough to get you reading. June teaches Zuko how to be a bounty hunter and their bickering is hilarious. Zuko is such a sassy little shit in this one. Katara has a Mulan moment and it’s absolutely badass.

There Is No Fire Lord by OccasionalStorytelling: this one is inspired by Towards the Sun by @muffinlance. So zuko gets caught while escaping during the eclipse, he gets thrown in prison, and then when ozai is defeated zuko technically becomes fire lord but stays in prison. also his leg gets broken like 3 times lol

A Hundred Golden Suns by aeoleus (@ta1k-less): zuko dies at the agni kai but agni says fuck that and he is basically resurrected in the southern water tribe, where hakoda adopts him. this fic will hurt your heart but in a good way

In The Garden Light At Dawn by Rosemary_and_Geraniums: this one is Very Angsty and has a major character death so warning on that. I just had to include it because it's soooo good and i love angst fics, but if that's not your thing then skip this. This is a soulmate au, but not in a good way lol. zuko never got away after confronting his father during the eclipse. again this is Very Sad so skip if you get upset with unhappy endings

Consider Chaos series by @awesomeavocadolove : ChaosAvatar!zuko. How can you say no to that???

Pride Is Not The Word by @sword-and-stars : iroh gets a call from his long-lost nephew asking him to pick him up. then he discovers that his nephew has been homeless for a year after ozai kicked him out. iroh is having none of that and takes zuko in while quietly think of the best way to murder an abusive piece of shit

The Heat That Drives The Light (the fire it ignites) by isamagicdragon and thegracious: im obsessed with this one. azulon asks ozai to kill azula instead of zuko, who both say "fuck that" and run away to the earth kingdom. years later they hear about the avatar, who was captured by admiral zhao and kept prisoner in pohai stronghold. they decide to break him out

The Family You Choose by TunaFishChris: another soulmate one because i am a slut for them. some people are born with soulmarks. zuko's were burned off by azulon when he was born, because they make you weak.

Doe-eyed by anonymous: a gift fic for @muffinlance. azula is the firstborn, and she is eleven when zuko is born. bigsister!azula is everything you didn't know you needed

East and West by @d-naggeluide : zuko, toph, and earth king kuei go on a field trip together. sarcastic toph, resigned zuko, and kuei who had no idea what he had gotten himself into

The hilarious thing about Sauron is that according to most versions of the legendarium, he was originally, like, a god of planning and logistics, and he initially supported Melkor’s plans for world domination because he regarded the world’s present state of affairs as inefficient and poorly organised. He’s literally what happens when you take the kid who’s fed up at everybody else fucking up their part of the group project and give him phenomenal cosmic power.

Top 5 Best Funny Hobbit Lines

1) “This is what it is, Mr Baggins,” said the leader of the Shirriffs, a two-feather hobbit. “You’re arrested for Gate-breaking, and Tearing up of Rules, and Assaulting Gatekeepers, and Trespassing, and Sleeping in Shire-buildings without Leave, and Bribing Guards with Food.”

“And what else?” said Frodo.

“That’ll do to go on with,” said the Shirriff-leader.

“I can add some more, if you’d like it,” said Sam. “Calling your Chief Names, Wishing to punch his Pimply Face, and Thinking you Shirriffs look a lot of Tom-fools.”

I am particularly impressed by Sam’s ability to marshall the power of Verbal Capitalization when called for.

2) “If you turn over a new leaf, and keep it turned, I’ll cook you some taters one of these days. I will: fried fish and chips served by S. Gamgee. You couldn’t say no to that.”

“Yes, yes we could. Spoiling nice fish, scorching it. Give me fish now, and keep nassty chips!”

Poor Gollum, doomed to a world without sashimi.

3) “Mercy!” cried Gandalf. “If the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more do you want to know?”

“The names of all the stars, and of all living things, and the whole history of Middle-earth and Over-heaven and of the Sundering Seas,” laughed Pippin. “Of course! What less? But I am not in a hurry tonight.”

What makes it all the funnier is Pippin’s sheer laziness. He spent two months in Rivendell and, going by Merry’s comments, I doubt he so much as opened a single book. But he’ll quiz Gandalf incessantly.

4) Gaffer Gamgee, on his son’s sartorial choices: I don’t hold with wearing ironmongery, whether it wears well or no.

There has never been a more quintessentially Hobbit line.

5) Merry Brandbuck, after assisting in destroying the Lord of the Nazgûl: I am hungry. What is the time?

Okay, so it’s not inherently funny, but it gets major points for context.

Metaphysical question - what do you suppose Tolkien meant to indicate by making the 'Flame Imperishable' so important in the early Valaquenta? It's supposed to technically be the thing that really drew Melkor off-course, is the stuff of souls, yet it winds up as this very mysterious, undefined force. Do you think it's the same light that filled the trees (and thus the Silmarils)? Tolkien loves his light, but I wonder how much these forces are connected in canon.

Oh my friend, you just ask the best questions. *evil cackle*

So, as for what the Flame Imperishable does, literally, that's pretty straightforward. (It's also sometimes called the Secret Fire, in case you wanted to search for that in an electronic version.) Eru uses it to kindle life in all beings from the Ainur to the Children, and without this force, that's impossible. Melkor goes searching for it and can't find it, and Aulë makes little dwarf puppets until Eru sparks them to life personally. Ye Olde classic subcreation examples, so on and so forth. Probably sounds familiar from our first thread ever!

I think that this theme of subcreation is really what Tolkien meant to hammer home with the Flame Imperishable, especially in the Ainulindalë. It's a force to give to living beings, not for them to control—and we never see it outside of this "life force" application. So, I don't really think that the Trees or the Silmarilli literally contained the Secret Fire, though I admit that would make a neat explanation for why Melkor was so obsessed with destroying the first and keeping the second.

But neither are we supposed to put the Flame Imperishable out of our minds when we think of these things. Remember how I mentioned searching for "secret fire" in an electronic copy? Well, I did! And the only time it's mentioned outside of the capitalized, proper force of Eru is in reference to... Fëanor.

...Fëanor grew swiftly, as if a secret fire were kindled within him. He was tall, and fair of face, and masterful, his eyes piercingly bright and his hair raven-dark; in the pursuit of all his purposes eager and steadfast... He became of all the Noldor, then or after, the most subtle in mind and the most skilled of hand.

And there's just too many connections here to dismiss, because when the man named Spirit of Fire grows to become a creator like there's a secret fire, the force of creation, inside of him? And he when makes three jewels with literal bits of his spirit, like a secret fire, inside? Isn't a coincidence. And notably, Tolkien says "as if," not "with," so this is still a simile—but it's a deliberate and telling one all the same.

we all have a limit to the bad things characters can do until we're not comfortable liking them but tbh some of you are just super fucking boring

a librarian’s hoard

[ID: Digital illustration of a red dragon surrounded by their colorful hoard of books. A worn, blue scarf wraps around their neck, and a pair of gold glasses sits on their snout, held in place by a gold chain. The dragon’s lair resembles a huge, airy library with multiple levels of bookcases, tall mountains of books, and floor-to-ceiling windows revealing open sky. Decorative gold chains drape across the space. The dragon smiles as it holds a small book in its mouth, stretching to offer it to a distant human standing atop a book tower. End ID.]

my life has been comedy hell for the past 48 hours. so this tiktok zoomer used my email address to sign up for a tiktok account. how tiktok allowed them to do this, i have no idea. aren’t real, respectable social media sites supposed to force you to validate the email before it is used? smh. but i noticed this about a week or so ago. i sent tiktok a ticket telling them to take my email off to no avail. okay, so after receiving the 20th tiktok notification in my email i decide to take matters into my own hands. i reset the password on the account and logged in to make it stop.

then, i posted a tiktok telling the user to POST THEIR EMAIL IN THE COMMENTS so I can change the account ownership over to them. sounds simple enough, but it is here that i truly learned the failure of the american education system. the original user and their friend posted hysterically about how they were going to “text tiktok” to get the account back, i’m a hacker, their username only has letters and numbers in it, how did you change the password, etc. i explained, over ten times, simply and nicely, that this person signed up with my email, and i simply need them to read the instructions and post their email so i can change the account ownership.

whoever is raising zoomers have failed. mfers can’t even read anything more complex than a tiktok caption anymore. stop letting these ipads raise your children or i will call copmala harris. this is the living result of politicians defunding public education. anyway. after an hour, i suppose the two and a half braincells they share rubbed together and an email was provided, but the email is already attached to another account!

i realized this absolute child prodigy signs up for tiktok accounts with emails they have no control over and she makes new accounts when she needs to reset the password. she’s in Fr*aking high school and by that age I know yall have to use your email for stuff. wtf. like this is some shit i’d expect my over 70 year old internet savy-less grandmother to do, and not even she does this! Anyway. Maybe I will receive a functional email at some point today. They are probably asleep because they need to wake up early to attend the grade school that is not teaching them how to read. 😎🔫 WAIT NO THEY ARE NOT IT IS THE WEEKEND. 😎🔫

Cartographic Practices in Arda: Hobbits

[overthinking fantasy cartography series: Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Hobbits, and Men]

o   We know Sam isn’t much for geography - “maps conveyed nothing to Sam’s mind” - but Frodo studied Elrond’s maps in Rivendell, as did Merry, and both made sense of them; so if hobbits do use maps, they may use similar techniques or representation practices to the Elves, and their maps would be mutually intelligible

o   Hobbits do not seem to travel much beyond the Shire, nor need to know much outside its borders. Merry and Pippin, however, who do travel quite a lot back to the south in the Fourth Age, could expand hobbit cartography and place the Shire within a broader political and geographic context. Whether this knowledge is spread among the hobbits more generally, hard to say

The sparse and stylized map given in The Hobbit might be a fair in-world depiction of the limits of hobbits’ grasp of geography, gained through rare instances like Bilbo’s travels

If Merry and Pippin do contribute to updated maps (Merry more likely than Pippin, I imagine), they might well incorporate mapping practices, place names, and territorial divisions according to the realms they serve (so, situating the Shire as an autonomous region within the reunited Arnor-Gondor realm, and adopting Men’s cartographic practices)

Such maps would be more useful to outsiders adding the Shire into their spatial conception of Middle-earth; I doubt they would be much used in the Shire itself

o   Hobbit cartography would relate to land use primarily, I think, mostly agriculture; towns and land tenure would also be noted, since their class structure seems based on land ownership (even though the mechanisms of land acquisition or means of wealth accumulation are murky - they aren’t feudal lords; they aren’t collecting tribute from workers, but plainly there *are* workers and landed gentry, so ??? how did that develop??)

Though, if property arrangements are fairly stable and inherited, and everyone knows which hobbits belong where, is it even necessary to make formal maps of this? Might not customary boundaries just be common knowledge and maybe marked on the ground itself, but hobbits wouldn’t need maps for it?

If they did make physical maps, there would probably be notations for social establishments – taverns, inns, etc. Beyond the borders of the shire, Bree might be the last place actually marked. Again, though, these are the kinds of spatial relations I think would be negotiated in real time through spatial practice, but not recorded cartographically

I suppose given the Sackville-Baggins’s coveting of Bag End, property disputes may be a thing, and being able to assert recorded land claims might be useful - so records of property ownership might be cartographically relevant

o   Beyond such record-keeping, though, I think hobbits wouldn’t really need or make maps unless engaging with outsiders – they know their territory, they understand the rules of ~property ownership~ (historically inexplicable as it is to me) and whatever implicit spatial boundaries or sites of importance exist across the Shire. There might be casually-made “maps” for basic wayfinding if one had to travel to a distant village, but I doubt anyone’s making the type of formal or standardized maps for territorial governance that might be used by a more established state and military - which the Shire lacks, of course (and good for them)