I Did Some More Fantasy Archery Trope Testing. This Time The Arrow Stabby Thing!

This is a bathrooms during social events appreciation post

Working on (yet another) ATLA wip in which during the invasion Azula helps Zuko escape and goes with him (because her beloved dumbass of a brother clearly has not been paying attention to all her subtle warnings on how not to get dead and clearly needs a more direct approach at keeping him alive and mostly in one piece). And in the process of getting the fuck out of dodge, Bato who's been separated from everyone else ends up accidentally crashing their escape party along with Toph and the four of them end up on the run together.

Toph gets along with the two runaway royals who are as suspicious and untrusting if Bato as he is them...at least until the fire siblings unintentionally trauma dump about their fucked up childhood and Bato decides "I'm dad now" and adopts them against their will.

Eventually Azula and Zuko just give up on fighting it and are like "okay cool, you're gonna be Firelord after we kill Ozai and then we can just chill for like, five god damn seconds"

And anyway eventually they all meet up with the Gaang and Hakoda and co and it's just like...

Hakoda:

This is my daughter Katara: Master Water Bender, Teacher of the Avatar, brave and true of heart.

And my son Sokka: genius inventor, master strategist, unmatched in his fierceness and loyalty.

Bato:

This is my new daughter Azula. She'll sell your soul to satan for a fire flake and then use that fire flake to take over hell.

And this is my new son Zuko. He's faral and will probably bite you. Don't leave him alone too long or he'll probably end up trying to fight god again.

And this is Toph... I don't know if I've adopted her or if I'm being held hostage but either way I've started saving up for the next time I have to bail her out of jail.

Fic idea:

There is a hall of waiting for men in Mandos too, right? For them to wait for their loved ones before they go on together? (If I made that up it’s just the fic premise now, but isn’t this where Beren was chilling when Luthien came for him?)

Anyways Elros figures out while he’s waiting for his kids that he can use his Descendant of Luthien powers to pop over to the Elvish side and meet all the dead elvish relatives he wouldn’t get a chance to know until the breaking of the world otherwise.

He realizes most of them are either gonna be there forever cause they demonstrably Can’t Get Over Their Shit, or Valinor will end up a burning pile of rubble as they are released and forced to face their shit whilst alive.

This is a problem because Elros knows his brother craves family, and while they both accept he and his twin cannot be together forever in life or death, he expects these layabout relatives to get off their dead asses and start making up with each other, so when his brother ends up in Valinor, whenever that may be, he has a loving supportive family that isn’t dragging him in a hundred different directions.

Cue dead Elros playing life (death?) coach to a bunch of dead elves. Some of them are conscious enough it’s like having a normal conversation. Some of them are in soothing or disturbing dreamscapes, with various degrees of awareness of where they are, what they’ve done, and what has happened since they died.

Helpful sidekicks include:

- Soon to be released Glorfindel!

- Finwe, cause he’s sick of his family being idiots and sad his BFF Elwe isn’t talking to him.

- Elros’s extremely argumentative wife, who’s a little confused, but she got the spirit.

- Namo very deliberately Not Helping, because they are Breaking Rules, but who keeps giving them hints like “It would be a shame if you dragged this person’s soul by it’s metaphorical ear to talk to that person’s soul, which of course is interfering which is Bad, I hear.”

- A maia representative sent by Nienna (who thinks this is brilliant). It’s a Maia who really loves elves, and is really interested in how to get them to stop self sabotaging with their own stupidity, and yeah. It’s Gandalf.

Pervading questions:

What happened to Dior and the first set of Peredhel twins?

Where are the Feanorians? Did they really get sent to the void?

Why would anyone want to live forever dealing with this nonsense, is Elrond a martyr or just an idiot. It’s just Finwean family drama? forever?!?!Elros is very confident he made the right choice.

I’ll definitely write this outside my head >>

the mortal LaCE loophole

Anyway fun little factoids for fanfiction writers who want to be maliciously canon compliant with LaCE are that: 1. an elf without descent from Earendil and Elwing does not have the Choice, and does not necessarily die when their mortal partner does out of grief; case to point; Mithrellas, who just left one day 2. the rule post-statute is that no elf may have more than one spouse in this world at the same time 3. even if you go by the very strictest of LaCE interpretations (it’s not a cultural document but literally biologically true, sex = marriage even if no vows to Eru/Valar are made) … this still allows for what I refer to as the Mortal Loophole 4. because mortals do not stay within the circles of the world after death 5. congratulations! your elves can practice serial monogamy with mortals and be entirely canon compliant 6. literally, this is not against any of the laws. infinite mortal spouses. 7. this can either be a horror scenario (pre-existing inequalities in the first age between elves and humans + disposable spouses? hm…) OR just an excuse for 100% canon compliant slutty elves I guess. Just with mortals. 8. No, elves don’t only marry for true love guaranteed to kill them in the event of death – as noted, again, both by LaCE and demonstrated by Mithrellas’ actual behaviour. Luthien was an exception adn should not have been counted. 9. Then why did Aegnor leave? As stated in Athrabeth; he’s Noldorin royalty and has some wacky idea about No Romance During War* (*in part because to Tolkien as a Catholic marriage = children, and children during war = big no no to Noldor for reasons that do make sense) and also he was afraid of seeing Andreth age, elves are capable of living more in memory etc. 10. Anyway not every elf is highly principled Noldorin royalty. 11. Unfortunately the outcome of elf/mortal pairings = default mortal child unless you’re a descendant of Earendil. Somewhat traumatic for an elvish parent 12. But as Eol demonstrates shitty elvish parents exist, and also having a child is a conscious act for them anyway. So they could just. Not.

reblog and describe your favorite tolkien character in the tags

The Silmarillion but it’s narrated like a football game with play by play commentary done by Rúmil and Pengolodh.

Word Count: 1781 words

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Fandoms: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth

Characters: Elrond Peredhel, Elros Tar-Minyatur, Maglor | Makalaure, Maedhros | Maitimo

Additional Tags: One-Shot Collection, Non-Linear Narrative, Elrond-centric, Maglor-centric, Character Study, Family Feels, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Everyone Needs a Hug, let Elrond not lose anyone 2k20

Summary: Scenes of the kidnap family through Elrond and Elros’ childhood, featuring difficult questions, buried feelings, and the fragile hope of a happy ending.

Can also be read below the cut

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Hi, hello, your herbalist!zuko art is the greatest thing ever

herbalist!zuko / spirit and me says thank you! 

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also please consider these, possible hair development through the three seasons. 

just to be sure, credit to @muffinlance​, the dear anon and everyone in the atla fandom who looked at zuko with long hair and runs with the fun!

It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point. 

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

@prekliata-bryndza I realize what gets to me about Elrond as specifically the minstrel of Gil-galad. Obviously I have thought about Maglor teaching him, but many people have already created works on this topic better than I can. Actually this makes me think of a scene I have had in my mind for quite a while but haven’t written yet. I imagine near the end of the War of Wrath, a ship full of refugees fleeing a sinking Beleriand lead by Elros at the front steering, and I imagine Elrond at the back singing to comfort the children and the hurt and the weary, and this is how I came up with a concept of this role that Elrond fulfills first beside Elros in practice and then beside Gil-galad officially that is more than knowledge and wisdom — the close companion of a king whose role is less decisive but less constrained than a king’s, therefore providing a balance to kingliness that Elros and Gil-galad and their peoples value and need.