Ael's pastimes @aelwing - Tumblr Blog

everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her

solowinged

let’s travel through the vast unknown with mama

omnybus

Space chickens

booksbabybooks

Posts like this are why I'll never leave Tumblr

gayharborbutcher666

This whole fuckin scene lmao

manicpixiedckgirl

theaudientvoid

There are multiple chapters that are set in hospitals where the characters are attempting to recover from injuries that never fully heal. I must once again stress that my experience in WWI was perfectly normal.

aro-ace-from-outer-space22

There is a giant horrible mudplain full of unrecoverable and perfectly preserved dead bodies that the characters have to walk through in a land where the air is poisoned gas, and on a compLETELY UNRELATED NOTE: WWI WAS TOTALLY FINE AND NORMAL!!

kingercainedaddyissues

Uh??? Tolkien did not claim that???

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead."

He talked about how WWI affected his writing all the time, he was not in denial for how it affected??? Am I missing something????

alexseanchai

https://www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2017/09/tolkien-as-war-novelist-another-way-of-dealing-with-trauma-through-writing/

what Tolkien was adamant about, which has been confusing people for several decades now, is that he wasn't writing about World War Two

beatrice-otter

He was also very clear that he was not writing allegory. Now, some people are not very clear on what allegory means. "Allegory" and "symbols" are not the same thing. Allegory is a type of symbolism, but there are a lot of ways of doing symbolism that aren't allegory ... and a lot of people are kind of fuzzy on that. The way allegory is most commonly used in literary and religious analysis is that there is a direct, almost 1:1 correspondence between the literary figure and what it is standing in for.

So, for example, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of Christian salvation. It's sort of a novel? There are characters who do stuff? but also they are very one-dimensional. The main character is a guy named Christian--yes, really!--who is journeying from his hometown ("the city of destruction") to the Celestial City (heaven). There is not much subtlety to it. It is pretty much what it is. There is no slippage, no playing around with the theme, no places where the symbolism is ambiguous. John Bunyan, the author, is hitting you over the head every step of the way with the Meaning That You Are Supposed To Be Getting From The Story.

Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.

Tolkien is not doing allegory. Tolkien is taking the material of his life--his faith, his experiences in WWI, his linguistic and historical knowledge, his favorite books--and using them as the building blocks of his story. The themes and imagery and symbols draw heavily from all of that, the characters and settings draw heavily from all of that, but they are too complex to be allegorical. There's a lot of symbolism! It's not allegory.

So, for example, let's take the Dead Marshes referenced above. Does the experience of walking through this muddy wasteland with corpses all around that are rotting but still look like people draw from Tolkien's WWI battlefield experience of dead bodies in the trenches? Of course it does! but there are also a lot of differences. These dead are not from the current war, they are from a previous one--they are a reminder of old conflicts, of the ways the systems and powers of the current war have not come out of nowhere, there is history here. There is meaning that is not drawn from the Somme. And they are also drawing from literary references Tolkien was familiar with--primarily William Morris. Modern readers don't get the references because we have generally not read The House of the Wolflings, but that doesn't mean that the references aren't there.

So people read Tolkien's insistence that he didn't write allegory, and take that to mean that he's saying there isn't symbolic and thematic references. And that isn't what he meant! And also, we focus so much on the thematic references to WWI and Christianity, and we miss most of the other references, which makes it seem like Tolkien's only drawing on WWI, when he's actually doing something more complex.

sunderwight

Not to post about The Mummy (1999) in 2026, but I mean if I am gonna then it's going to be on tumblr now isn't it?

Anyway do you think the writers realized that their sequel retcon of making Evie the reincarnation of the skeevy pharaoh's daughter in an effort to up the villainy factor of Imhotep and Ankh Su Namun also implies that it's, uh, pretty likely that Evie's past incarnation is the reason Imhotep became an apocalyptic undead horror in the first place?

I don't even mean that she's the reason the medjai probably knew that more people than just Ankh Su Namun murdered the pharaoh, though there is that, but like... the reason Imhotep become the titular Mummy and not just a very dead high priest, is because the ancient medjai executed him by sealing him alive inside a sarcophagus with flesh-eating scarabs and doing (presumably) a bunch of other stuff to ensure that he would be locked in eternal agony, which as a side-effect also guaranteed that if he ever got out he'd be... y'know. Still occupying his corpse and able to muster up high level dark magic and create sand storms and shit?

The first movie keeps it fairly ambiguous as to who gave the order for Imhotep to get the Curséd Revenant spa special, but like, it probably wasn't actually the medjai themselves who just up and chose it. They knew what it entailed and that it would mean that countless generations of them would have to guard this one tomb to make sure no one ever let Imhotep out, which just sounds impractical, to be honest. Especially when there are many other ways to fuck Imhotep's afterlife over and just be rid of him, even with torturing him a lot before he actually dies. This is Egyptian mythology (loosely), just deleting the sonofabitch would be an option. They could even still bury him alive if they want!

However, 'torture him for all eternity' does sound like the kind of shortsighted sentence that someone who really cared about the murdered pharaoh might ask for. Especially someone who might, additionally, feel some degree of guilt (perhaps for losing the deciding match on who would bodyguard their dad to one of his future murderers?) and be lashing out without much foresight to the whole "btw if we can't successfully guard this one tomb forever then we're all fucked" loophole. Like a rich person with a very skewed concept of scale and the practical requirements of tomb-guarding, for instance.

So yeah I think Nefertiri is the one who had the medjai curse Imhotep, which is the reason Imhotep becomes a Problem later, and also the reason why Evie is the one who has to release him (accidentally) and then resolve the issue (on purpose) and why Nefertiri got locked into a reincarnation cycle instead of just moving on to her own afterlife too. The ancient Egyptian gods were like, yeah nah, and yeeted her back to the world to live out countless lives until Imhotep's soul was either pacified or destroyed.

But also I'm pretty sure that layer of storytelling wasn't intentional. Whoops.

notjusthespongenextdoor

For a city to be walkable. It must also be sittable.

notjusthespongenextdoor

#every time I read this phrase the same thing happens#I read it as shittable and go wait that can't be right#oh right they were talking about public benches that makes more sense#but public bathrooms available without fees should also be a thing tho#cities should definitely be shittable#it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME

it must also be shittable

whereserpentswalk

Fuck hostile architecture, I want unhostile architecture. I want benches to be designed to be as easy as possible to sleep on. I want little places for pigeons to nest to be purposefully put on buildings. I want people designing public spaces to think about what they'd be like to skateboard on. I want "Please loiter" signs. I want people to be kind. I want...

awritersbro

We need cities that do not resent the fact that people live in them

the-haiku-bot

We need cities that

do not resent the fact that

people live in them

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

uhanekahiko

Polynesians did also rely on a form of a physical map called a stick chart, illustrating the specific wave and swell patterns surrounding different island chains. These were particularly helpful during cloudy conditions when the sun and stars were less useful. To navigate the Marshall Islands, the Marshallese represented ocean swell patterns using parts of coconut fronds and shells as islands. Like a subway map, they don’t so much represent distances as they do relationships. The complex and decorative stick charts were often only understood by the person who made them. They were memorised before a voyage by the pilot who would lie on the floor of a canoe to get a sense of swell movement and often lead a squadron of 15 or more boats.

baddestvenus-in-virgo

sometimes I am just amazed at how my ancestors managed to navigate the entire Pacific Ocean with these. knowledge that was nearly lost and is being re-learned.

gamebird

AH! I'd heard of these, but this is the first time I've come across pictures.

drawballa

Sleepy boys 💤

queenangst

idk if this is a young fan thing or new fandom culture but some of yall think fics are abandoned way too quickly. a few months or a year or two is not unusual to go without a fic update. sometimes fics take longer to write, other times writers have rl events, or maybe there's multiple fics and one gets more priority. there are tons of reasons for fics not to be updated every week or every month. it also isn't uncommon for people to come back and update fics after a number of years—ive read updates that took five, or ten years. people's lives change, but they still want to tell their stories. personally, i never consider a fic abandoned unless the author has said so; though if it's been a few years i manage my expectations. but a last update being a year ago is... generally not a sign that a writer has abandoned their fic

liladiurne

That! Exactly that!!! Writers have lives and writing is hard! It takes time. Stop assuming fics are abandoned!

heywriters

Original fic usually goes through this same process before being commercially published. Readers just don't know that bc they aren't receiving it in bite-size chunks online. Large periods of stagnant writing are historically just another Monday for most writers.

holylulusworld

This☝️.

crustystherat

Random thing for people to consider is that since Laika is the saint of one way trips should Felicette be known as the saint of safe landings since she did make it back to the ground safely