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You know the ambiguously timed event that Tolkien describes as "Elrond sends for Arwen, and she returns to Imladris; the Mountains and all lands eastward are becoming dangerous"? I was thinking about it, and here's a half-baked Arwen headcanon:

Arwen immediately correctly assumes if her father, who never became controlling even after what happened to Celebrian, is telling her what to do, he's got a legitimate reason to be afraid and it would be wise to listen.

(Bonus points if he sends the twins to fetch her and the three of them spend the trip back home discussing the situation because "Get your sister away from incoming danger" is not something Elladan and Elrohir have ever heard before)

Arwen hasn't spent all these long visits to her grandmother doing nothing. She's been learning to be an elf queen, thank you very much. Who did Galadriel learn to be a queen from? Melian. Arwen's education is probably the best a queen can get by the Third Age tbh

Arwen doesn't make any dramatic announcements or anything, but she quietly decides she is the Lady of Imladris now that Celebrian is West, and she is going to make sure Rivendell remains the last refuge in the world if the worst comes to pass, like Galadriel does and like Melian once did

Elrond can proceed to spend the rest of the war focusing on ensuring Rivendell is protected and doing the thing canon seems to imply he does, which is to try and guess ahead of time what will be needed and provide that - the day to day matters which were his responsibility during peacetime are all seamlessly claimed by Arwen

By the time she marries, Arwen has effectively been running Rivendell for like 3 years (or 10 depending on which timeline you favor), so she technically has more experience with ruling than Aragorn does? She's just objectively a skilled queen, what can I tell you

"Elrond raised his eyes and looked at him, and Frodo felt his heart pierced by the sudden keenness of the glance." - The Fellowship of the Ring, The Council of Elrond.

So. What do you want to bet that when glorfindel came back to middle earth he had a heart attack because elrond looked like maeglin.

(This means that the list of people glorfindel has considered trying to murder about this exact topic is elrond, bilbo, and aragorn. Plus a bunch of elrond's other human fosters but none of THEM fell for arwen so aragorn was def the most severe)

And since arwen is exactly like elrond in every way, this is yet more proof for my theory of "every character named twilight + son/daughter is a meaningful parallel"

Hi! I like your collages :) I wonder how long does it take to make them?

Hello! Many thanks for your kind words and your thoughtful question! I am so happy that you like my collages, and I am so delighted to reply! :)

In general, it takes me several days to make a collage. It took me a total of eleven days to make both collages of Zuko (Fire Is Life and Zuko in Water Tribe war paint), so I think that these specific collages took about five or six days each.

I had a lot of fun making these collages! When I completed them and cleared my collage-making stuff off my desk, I felt a bit sad to be putting that stuff away. Then I received your ask, and it motivated me to put that stuff back on my desk, together with the completed collages, and to take the following photo to accompany this reply.

[Image description: A photo of the surface of a desk.

On the desk are two completed collages. Both collages are portraits of Zuko. In one, he is wearing Water Tribe war paint.

Also on the desk are some items that were involved in making the collages. These items include an X-Acto knife and cutting mat, two adhesive applicators, a ruler, a pen, a mechanical pencil, and various kinds of paper.

One piece of paper has a pen sketch on it. Other pieces of paper have shapes cut out of them. Some pieces of paper have smaller pieces of paper pasted onto them, and one also has pencil notations on it. End image description.]

For these collages, I made a pen sketch and chose color palettes based upon character design elements from the Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series and comics.

For the Water Tribe war paint collage, I also consulted descriptions from the fanworks that inspired it, which are Salvage by @muffinlance​ and war paint by @agentcalliope​ — two beautiful fanfics in which Zuko is essentially adopted as an honorary member of the Southern Water Tribe.

I selected paper for Zuko’s skin and scar, and for the war paint, by pasting various pieces of paper onto other pieces and testing the effects of layering them.

When I had selected all the paper for both collages, I made a chart containing a column of paper swatches and a corresponding list of planned locations, such as “hair highlights” (russet origami paper), “irises, border” (metallic gold origami paper), and “background” (colorful and sparkly momi paper).

To assemble the collages, I cut the paper into shapes with an X-Acto blade, sometimes with the help of a ruler, and then pasted the shapes into place with one adhesive or another, depending upon the weight of the paper, which ranged from art tissue to card stock.

After completing the collages, I tried scanning them, but the scans didn’t show the reflective quality of the metallic gold origami paper.

I wanted Zuko’s gold eyes to shine, as though from his inner fire. So I brought the collages to a window, angled them so that Zuko’s eyes reflected the sunshine, and took photos to post on Tumblr.

Just as I enjoyed making these collages, I am enjoying reading and replying to people’s comments and questions, such as this lovely ask! Thank you again! :)

The difference between Beren and Luthien and Aragorn and Arwen is that the former follows the conventions of fairy tale and the latter follows the conventions of courtly love. In this essay I will

Thoughts on Yavanna and the portrayal of nature in Arda

And in that time of dark Yavanna also was unwilling utterly to forsake the Outer Lands; for all things that grow are dear to her, and she mourned for the works that she had begun in Middle-earth but Melkor had marred. Therefore leaving the house of Aulë and the flowering meads of Valinor she would come at times and heal the hurts of Melkor; and returning she would ever urge the Valar to that war with his evil dominion that they must surely wage ere the coming of the Firstborn.

And:

It came to pass that the Valar held council, for they became troubled by the tidings that Yavanna and Oromë brought from the Outer Lands; and Yavanna spoke before the Valar, saying: ‘Ye mighty of Arda, the Vision of Ilúvatar was brief and soon taken away, so that maybe we cannot guess within a narrow count of days the hour appointed. Yet be sure of this: the hour approaches, and within this age our hope shall be revealed, and the Children shall awake. Shall we then leave the lands of their dwelling desolate and full of evil? Shall they walk in darkness while we have light? Shall they call Melkor lord while Manwë sits upon Taniquetil?’

Yavanna is differentiated from most of the other Valar in her desire to go to the Outer Lands, and she is alike to Oromë and Ulmo in this, but they are clearly in the minority. She is also in favor of directly opposing Melkor through war, and in that scene where she advocates for it, she and Tulkas are the only ones. Of course, some among the Valar find ways to help other than fighting—after the council, Varda goes out to hang more stars in the sky so that the Children of Ilúvatar do not awaken in darkness—and later the Valar do wage war against Melkor and imprison him. But Yavanna was in favor of fighting and getting involved much sooner. 

It seems a defining characteristic of Yavanna is that she not only loves Middle-earth and its inhabitants, as all the Valar do—she also feels compelled to be involved, to act, to fight. Of course, during the First Age she remained in Valinor with the other Valar. But she is far more in favor of being involved in the world: she went to Middle-earth when most of them did not, and she advocated for intervention in Middle-earth before most of them were ready to do so. Tolkien characterizes her this way consistently. 

I love this, because nature is often thought of as passive, and Yavanna is anything but. As the Valië who created green and growing things, she is probably the closest thing in Tolkien’s writing to a personification of the natural world, and so her desire to play an active role in Middle-earth—and to fight to protect it—says something about how Tolkien viewed nature.

Many people think of nature as a passive thing, separate from humans, which we can own and use however we want. In this understanding of the world, nature does not feel; nature does not act. While some people acknowledge that animals have thoughts and feelings, few people think plants have them. But in Tolkien’s world, trees do think, and feel, and remember—and they also literally fight back against those who hurt them. And the Ents and all of the trees of course come from Yavanna’s thought. Yavanna first thinks of Ents because of her desire to protect trees:

‘Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon bough little mourned in their passing. So I see in my thought. Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!’

And Yavanna says to Manwë that this thought was in the Ainulindalë itself: 

‘For while thou wert in the heavens and with Ulmo built the clouds and poured out the rains, I lifted up the branches of great trees to receive them, and some sang to Ilúvatar amid the wind and the rain.’ 

The trees sang to Ilúvatar!!! The trees sang to Ilúvatar!!! I love that so much. Does this mean that some trees participated in the Ainulindalë as it was unfolding? Or was this merely a vision of Arda in the future? Either way, through this passage and others, Tolkien completely rejects the idea that nature is passive or inanimate, and I love that.

The other thing that stands out to me about Yavanna is her anger. She wishes that trees might ‘punish’ those that wrong them, and says of the Ents, ‘there shall walk a power in the forests whose wrath they [anyone who cuts down trees] will arouse at their peril.’ I love this, and it rings true to me that nature is something whose wrath we arouse at our peril… It’s not that you’re going to be attacked by Ents if you cut down a forest unsustainably (although maybe you should be), but destroying nature arouses its ‘wrath’ in the sense that it throws things out of balance, and creates more problems that end up hurting us, too, because we’re also part of nature.

It also occurred to me that Yavanna is quite different from the concept of mother nature found in a lot of myths, even though mother nature or mother earth would seem like logical archetypes to compare her to. There are some similarities, of course: she is associated with growing things and with plenty. But I feel like mother nature is usually associated with nurturing, gentleness and pacifism, and Yavanna is not a pacifist. And it isn’t that she can never be nurturing—it does say she would ‘heal the hurts of Melkor’ in Middle-earth—but she also wants trees to ‘punish’ those that harm them, and warns of the ‘wrath’ of the forests, and urges the Valar to go to war themselves. And I love that. I hear the echo of her fierce protectiveness in the Ents’ marching song:

We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door; For bole and bough are burning now, the furnace roars—we go to war! To land of gloom with tramp of doom, with roll of drum, we come, we come; To Isengard with doom we come! With doom we come, with doom we come!

tragedy enjoyers when their favourite characters are brutally killed in a completely avoidable scenario of their own creation

[Image description: A gif of a crowd cheering wildly. They throw their hands up and high five each other. /End ID]

microdosing on being goth by wearing black jeans

If you’re ever feeling down, read this paradigm for “banana” in Icelandic. read it aloud. you will feel better

You know what the Fire Nation is missing? Lizards. Have you ever gone to a tropical place? There are just: Lizards. You see a wall, there is a lizard. You go walking, you find lizards. Azula is talking? There is a lizard trying to figure out how to get to the other side. Zuko is being dramatic? There is a lizard in the background as public. The escape from the boiling rock? A lizard also tags along. Just lizards, they really know how to set the ambient