adding a read more to this because it’s getting long
STAR WARS
A Garden We’ll Never See: (Sabé/OC) Complete, oneshot
The Definition of Insanity: Last updated 04/11/2022, next chapter 25% written
I have loved the stars too fondly: (Jangobi) Last updated 28/08/2021, next chapter is 30% written
Identity Unknown: (Codywan) Complete, no intent to continue this AU currently
Out of Chaos|Exiled Order AU: (Jangobi, eventually) Last updated 13/08/2021, next chapter is 50% written
Muscular Hydrostats and Their Intimate Applications: (Obiclones) Last updated 14/12/2022, next chapter 0% written (rated E)
Pain Train AU: (Fox/Thorn) Last updated 11/11/2022, there are a few fragments written but nothing set to become the next work
The Only Thing That Never Fails|Jangobi Week 2021 fic: (Jangobi) Last updated 23/06/2021, next chapter 0% written (rip)
Troanyc te Manda’lor: (Jangobi) Last updated 12/08/2021, next chapter 100% written but I have been putting off publishing it for eight months because I don’t want to do the hovertext
vox brain goblin: (Vox) will anything come of this au or will it just be smut in my documents folder forever who knows
we mortals dream|wingfic: (Obiclones) Last updated 30/07/2021, next chapter 20% written (side story is rated E)
woerm: (Quinobi) Complete, oneshot (rated E)
Year of the Mythosaur|Mandomart AU: (Jangobi) Complete, possible continuation
BATMAN
all things for us are ultimate: Last updated 28/04/2022, next chapter being rewritten
SANDMAN
A Candle in the Yearning Heart: Last updated 05/12/2022, next chapter is 5% written
A God of Modern Dreams: (Dreamling) Last updated 24/11/2022, next chapter 20% written
all our worst efforts: (Immortal Throuple Dream/Hob/Calliope) Last updated 11/12/2022, next chapter 40% written
The Death of Dreams (the Forging of Hope): officially a fixit now, but still under construction
phenomenal cosmic power, itty bitty living space: (Dreamling) being written on discord, first chapter is probably around 40%???? needs an actual title
ASSASSINS CREED
Time Smush AU: percolating, pending a rewrite of the first chapter
Tulip Time AU: 5% written, oneshot
CONTROL
poetry itself to write: (Jesse Faden/Emily Pope) Complete, oneshot
FINAL FANTASY XV
Fool Me Twice: (Cor Leonis/Titus Drautos) Complete, no current plans for a continuation
CROSSOVERS
Alfred the Cats: On tumblr, Batman/Control
From the Ashes: Last updated 13/08/2021, Naruto/Harry Potter crossover that is on hold because I have no motivation for anything HP anymore. Have been considering a rewrite without HP, possibly with Merlin instead or just Arthurian legend
Notes
1. If there isn’t a link it doesn’t exist on AO3 yet. Feel free to ask about the aus that aren’t published
2. I have drifted out of Star Wars, hence the time since most of those have been updated. I am trying to work on them anyway.
i noticed a pattern, so here's a moment of appreciation for the very very many female youngest children in tolkien's works:
we have aredhel, in some versions, galadriel, idril and celebrían (since only children are still youngest children), lúthien, elwing, arwen, the unnamed daughters of aragorn, morwen, rian, emeldir, nienor, haleth, ancalimë, eowyn, lothiriel - i could keep going across families, time periods, species.
this struck me really hard because in my cultural background, and sadly many others, parents often keep having children until they get a boy. especially in older generations it's more common to see a youngest/only child who is male because they are the goal, while girls are seen as less useful, not expected to work and inherit businesses or even move out, unless it is to live with her husband.
so yeah, probably just a cultural difference, and definitely not what jrrt was thinking about. but really unexpectedly heartwarming to see so many families ending with a girl.
Literary criticism terms I use on this blog despite making them up myself, much to the chagrin of anyone who does not have my back catalog memorized:
are we the baddies: SFF subgenre focused on agents of an imperial power realizing that and grappling with what to do next, in contrast to stories focusing on the scrappy rebels resisting said imperial power
I could fix him (the empire): SFF subgenre where the colonized subject being nice and/or sexy enough Ends Colonialism, frequently tied to the John President of Racism problem
librarian bait: books centered on the transformative life-changing power of books and libraries, cousin to books focused on the transformative life-changing power of storytelling and narrative in general
college brochure fiction: stories where the protagonist has an artfully arranged group of diverse friends who are as flat as paper and whose cultural backgrounds never come up meaningfully
the Dave Strider: character the fandom fixates on to the detriment of everything else, until the weight of that attention warps fanon and sometimes even canon around them. almost always male. it's happening to Gurathin from Murderbot right now
#OP tell us more about the John President of Racism problem!
It hails from an immortal tumblr post by penultimate-step, except not immortal apparently because I get 'not found' when I try to go back to the original. (Edit: Link found) So here's the text:
It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.
Tolkien only has two kind of elves: Enderenwen the fair, who's eyes hold centuries of pain and yet his gaze is as kind as the first sun in spring, his mother was a nightingale and his father a seabreeze, flowers grow wherever he walks;
And Finwendulenfinfedë, who has killed half of his entire family and is here to fuck shit up and/or die trying
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
the number 1 rule of fanfic is have fun and be yourself. the number 2 rule is the average healthy adult male can lose roughly 2 liters of blood before dying.
The core conceit of Lord of the Rings is pretty funny. You are a twenty three year old in a suburb of Maine. The little bracelet in your grandpa’s attic has an inscription on it that is the password to the world’s entire nuclear arsenal. It is up to you to walk to the only hydraulic press in the world, located in Arizona, before the FBI finds the bracelet, kills you, and enslaves the suburb of Maine you currently live in
Also the 90-year old hobo that your grandpa beat in a rap battle for possession of the bracelet while hiding from the Romanian secret police really loved the bracelet because it was coated in small amounts of LSD and tried to hunt and kill your grandpa to get it back. He was then apprehended by the FBI and instantly gave them your grandpa’s address. Seal Team Six is about to break down your door and shoot you, says your local congressman who can also do cool magic tricks
There's a guy in NY who MIGHT be capable of destroying the codes but won't coz he simply wants to spend time with his wife. So it's up to your grandpa's old friend in rural Ohio to get you the friends capable of finishing the task.
a lot of people are very angry with me over this, but I'd just like you to sit down and imagine a banana. maybe a green one so it's extra firm. if you need it to be harder, you can toss it in the freezer.
and that brown end? the hard bit? pencil sharpener. or sharpened with a blade. are you following me? now, attach six of those to a harpy.
yeah. I think you're seeing the vision. you can apologize to me any time you're ready
I hope this comes across as positive/complimentary: I'm reminded of the art teacher who is quoted somewhere on tumblr as saying approximately
I do not like this style. I will never like this style. ... My biggest criticism is that I merely dislike this [art project]. Make me hate it. Make me furious over how much fun you're having with this thing I hate.
You don't need that teacher's advice, though. You're already having so much fun that tumblr is furious.
i find it v cute when rpgs offer me, someone whose sole strategy is “attacking enemies,” status changing effects. “this lowers your enemy’s speed” you know what else would lower their speed? being dead, from my fists
One year ago today I posted this practically shot Iron Giant photo I created using real figures, lighting, miniature sets & my trusty old tin foil for water technique & cotton wool for the splashes.
