'Lo! I'm gremble, and once every seven years I emerge with fanfic. This used to be a blog for my ddads fic, but these days it's been taken over with a lot of witcher shit.
I'm on AO3.
Click here for my introduction and for info on trigger warnings. Send me ASKS!!! i craves them.
Hello, I am gremble. I am a fandom cryptid who comes out with new content once in a blue moon.
DREAM DADDY (MY TRUEST LOVE)
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - Robert/Dadsona, 112k words, the slowest of slow burns, because "men having emotions that they don't know how to deal with" is my JAM.
ddads primer, which will equip you with everything you need to know in order to read my fic.
gremble's favorite meta on ddads (and I wrote a lot of it)
WITCHER SHIT
And then when ddads fandom was dead, I somehow stumbled into the Witcher, and apparently Geralt/Jaskier is where I live now.
FICS
For the Asking -- Warlord AU that began as a thought-exercise into what Geralt's side of the story looked like in @inexplicifics' “With a Conquering Air," and then turned into 55k words of pining and fantasy politicking.
“That Uncertain Season” -- A short 9k spinoff of "For the Asking," looking at that power imbalance from Jaskier’s angle, and exploring a different way that their relationship could have developed.
A Song of Selfish Hearts -- aka "the tropey amnesia fic" -- in which Geralt loses a chunk of his memories, meets a handsy bard, and comes to the obvious conclusion: that somewhere along the way, he apparently lost his godsdamned mind and decided to take a human lover on the Path with him.
META
I enjoy discussing the ways in which The Witcher Netflix disappointed me. 😊
In my capacity as a leather armor-maker, I’ve discussed the costuming. (And here, have some pictures of gremble in Geralt's armor)
AND ALSO I DID THAT ONE DRESDEN FIC LIKE TEN YEARS AGO
Enemy Mine -- Dresden Files, 120k, Harry Dresden/John Marcone -- Reads like a Dresden Files novel, with ensemble cast & complicated plot, but more gay shit.
PODFICS
My podfics are on AO3 under the gremble-pods pseud.
sometimes a fic can just be about the age old question 'how emotionally bad for everyone involved can a threesome be when they all did in fact agree to be there'
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.
brooding men who cannot communicate their feelings if their life depended on it are only hot when they're fictional. if i have to deal with one in real life i will curse him and pray for his downfall every night before i go to bed
It's because the writer communicates their feelings for them. If people wanna pull that off in real life they need to hire a guy to walk around behind them narrating.
i'm rereading the murderbot diaries and murderbot's utter conviction that it and gurathin are bitter enemies is still so funny. buddy. gurathin got over this months ago. he's just a quiet guy.
one-sided antagonism is so delicious. murderbot diaries i also very much enjoy how surreal it must be for gurathin / to know that the heavily armed rogue secunit holds a grudge against him / and also know that all it will ever choose to do about this is make frowny faces and flip him the bird. / (tags via space-mouse)
Today, July 11th marks the anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide where Serbian forces rounded up over 8,000 Bosniak Muslims in the UN-declared "safe area" of Srebrenica, and murdered them—for no other reason than being Muslim.
gotta say I’m a fan of Wells choosing to not only have canonically non-white central human characters in her Far-Future Space Sci-Fi, but also choosing to give them ethnically specific names
Dr. Mensah, Dr. Bharadwaj, Dr. Ratthi, Pin-Lee, etc.
there’s often a bit of a tendency in speculative sci-fi for humans to be “ambiguously brown” cuz of “idyllic cultural melting pot” and that’s ~fine~, and that’s often what makes sense for certain types of setting/story but... i like this better. makes it more real. feels a bit more respectful. and it suits her worldbuilding better.
my vision of Preservation’s past is that the planet the original colonists were set up on looked fine at first—human-habitable atmosphere and temperature and gravity and all that good stuff (TMBD appears to operate on Star Trek rules of habitable planet distribution)—but the heavy metals in the soil proved unsalvageable. The plan was intensive terraforming to remove metals and toxins and corrosives from the soil, but the job was too big and required too much consistent investment and had too little return, so the company that owned the colony just… wrote it off. Pulled support. Stopped sending new seeds and new bots and new medicines and any new supplies because they considered it a money sink not paying off the investment. And they just left the people there.
So the original colonists were stuck on a toxic planet where not much food could grow and the stuff that did was very often contaminated with toxins! So the question left to them was mostly “will heavy metal poisoning or starvation get us first.”
So modern Preservation is kind of culturally neurotic about food scarcity and has a lot of social/political structures built around prepping against famines, and a lot of social mores about food production, food access, and food sharing. They are only three generations out from being abandoned to die on a toxic planet, after all; they are never ever gonna let anything like that happen again!
I like this a lot! I agree 100% that it's a cultural preoccupation for Preservationers to be certain there's more than enough food for everybody. It vibes with some other headcanons I'd been kicking around too, re: Preservation's food supply networks, which is that I think they're a lot more distributed and less centralized than our modern factory farming, with a greater percentage of the general population involved in food production.
One, because it increases famine resilience for all communities to be contributing to the food supply to some degree. A natural disaster in one area isn't going to cause catastrophic global shortages. Communities can survive potential disruptions to the supply chain because they're not relying solely on imported food. If everyone knows "some" gardening, a community is a lot more food-secure.
Two, I feel like it's in line with Preservation values to want its citizens to keep in touch with how their food is made. A lot of the horrors in our modern food production industry -- the horrific abuse and exploitation of farm and factory workers, vile living conditions for animals, unsustainable agricultural practices that are devastating to the environment -- are allowed to happen because the average person is so completely disconnected from the systems that produce our food. It's out of sight/out of mind. It's a job for an exploited underclass, not one that gets respect and worker protections, a profession that schoolkids would be encouraged to pursue.
By contrast, I think that Preservation would have strong cultural convictions regarding the dignity of all labor, especially jobs as vital for society as food production. And while agricultural work is always going to be a physically-demanding job, it doesn't have to be slavery conditions.
I'm reminded of when I was in teacher in semi-rural Japan -- one of the standard elementary-school field trips is taking the kids out to a rice farm at planting time so they could "help." We were issued boots for wading around the knee-high water in the paddies and given a pallet of little seedlings to embed in the mud (and also there was a frog that caused a great deal of consternation):
(lol you can tell the seedlings in the foreground, planted by the kids, are a bit more haphazardly placed than the ones done by professionals. 🤣)
I like to imagine Preservation having a lot of events like that -- field trips for schoolkids, but also seasonal events where urban workers are given time off work with the expectation that they're going to go help out/celebrate on a family/friends' farm. (Because agricultural work is so ubiquitous that everybody knows somebody they could spend that holiday with.)
........mainly because I want Ratthi to be really bad at this, city slicker academic than he is. 🤣 He is cheerfully going to help on Mensah's farm, Happy To Be Included 🥰, while Murderbot is there clutching its face like OMIGODDD THIS IS JUST "INNOVATIVE NEW WAYS FOR RATTHI TO FALL DOWN A HOLE / FALL IN FRONT OF A COMBINE HARVESTER." 😱 WHO AUTHORIZED THIS. 😱😱 NOT MURDERBOT, THAT'S WHO.
