You Know The Ambiguously Timed Event That Tolkien Describes As "Elrond Sends For Arwen, And She Returns

Maeglin and Idril in Uzbek Gondolin

Thank you to @the-quiet-fire-of-defiance​ for helping me work out how to do this and for writing an image description

Image description: an edit with nine images. 1: a headshot of an Uzbek man. 2: A photo of some stone buildings. 3: a photo of a city from above. A large pale tower, lit up with warm lights from inside, is surrounded by smaller stone buildings including what looks like a mosque. 4: a sketch of Gondolin by FelixSotomayorArt on DeviantArt. 5: a photo of an Uzbek knife next to its beautifully detailed sheath. 6: a photo taken between two blue buildings covered in geometric designs. 7: a sunrise/sunset over a cluster of stone buildings, dotted with archways and domes. 8: an Uzbek woman in brightly coloured clothes holding a pomegranate. 9: a banner reading “Gondolin” in white text, with a moon and star symbol on either side.

You never know how long your words will stay in someone's mind even long after you've forgotten you spoke them.

— Unknown

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

Nine rings were made for men. Seven for the dwarves, three for the elves, and one for the big guy himself. One, three, seven, nine. There is but a set of five missing to complete the sequence of odd numbers. I propose that this missing set of rings of power was gifted to a mysterious someone by their true love, along with a partridge in a pear tree (among other things). In this essay I will-

silm fandom what's your wisdom?

Speaking of linguistics fics, an idea I’ve played with but never put into practice is using maximal Latin-rooted words when characters are speaking Quenya and Germanic-rooted words when they’re speaking Sindarin.

The effect being to make the language shift more meaningful than just a dialogue tag, (maybe even to the point where I don’t always have to say it outright) and it would work by playing on associations of Latinate words as more highbrow and polysyllabic and Germanic words as more common. (Think regal/kingly, dine/eat, or educate/teach.)

It might backfire, it might be impossible (sometimes the connotations run the other way!) but I think it’d be fun to try.

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

You're telling me that I can't eat plain marinara sauce for lunch, even if it's my safe food? Who came up with that rule?

Literally obsessed with @damianwaynerocks ‘s post about Zuko meeting Batman, all dialogue is from that. Anyway, here’s Robin!Zuko feat. his blue spirit mask (kind of):