The World is Quiet Here

28 | they/them | Canadian | this blog is a collection of digital scraps I wanted to keep

[t00thpasteface]

i was talking about this on my server earlier but i really think "cozy" is one of the worst genre labels out there in the gaming space. like people dunk on the terms "metroidvania" and "first person shooter" a lot for being uncreative or limiting but at least those are like... falsifiable descriptors. you can look at a game and go "yeah this game's mechanics and core gameplay loop generally operate like metroid/castlevania" or "yeah this game primarily uses a first person camera paired with some sort of projectile weapon" so i don't think they're completely useless. but "cozy" is just nonsense. fully subjective. i see a lot of games popularly labeled as "cozy" that share almost zero mechanical features between them and don't even always match in tone or aesthetic. hearing a game described as "cozy" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect as a player beyond maybe giving you a sort of forewarning about the fanbase and their discomfort tolerance. "cozy" is not a quantifiable metric. like imagine if someone offered to buy you takeout and asked you what kind of food you'd like and you told them fully unironically, and with no further elaboration, "i want to get yummy food." that's what hearing "cozy games" sounds like to me

[wish-i-could-read]

me playing expedition 33:

[waytoohigh63]

thing that pisses me off most about adhd advice from neurotypicals... the 'doing something for 30 days forms a habit.' bitch nothing in my life is a habit i would be ripping bong and jacking off all day if it was a matter of choice. never underestimate my ability to be super invested in something for like 2 weeks and then forget to do it one day and never go back to it

[waytoohigh63]

thing that pisses me off most about adhd advice from neurotypicals... the 'doing something for 30 days forms a habit.' bitch nothing in my life is a habit i would be ripping bong and jacking off all day if it was a matter of choice. never underestimate my ability to be super invested in something for like 2 weeks and then forget to do it one day and never go back to it

[punkitt-is-here]

obsessed with this fucking gastronauts clip

[makereadgrow]

RIP Joann, now what?

FIND AN UPDATED LIST HERE

I wanted to make a post I could copy and paste and or link when I see folks asking where to buy fabrics when Joann is gone. I sew a lot, generally between 100-200 items a year and I don't do it on a big budget. Stores are not in a particular order.

Notions:

Wawak.com - start here, mostly stay here. Wawak is a supplier for professional sewing businesses and have the prices that show it. I will not pay for gutermann Mara 100 anywhere else. I buy buttons, tools, thread, and most elastic here.

Stitch Love Studio - this is where I buy lingerie supplies https://www.etsy.com/shop/StitchLoveStudio?ref=yr_purchases

Fabric:

Fabric Mart - this is one where you want to sign up for emails and never buy unless its on sale. They run different sales every day and they rotate. Mostly deadstock fabrics but I buy more from here than anywhere else. Fantastic customer service and if you watch you can get things like $6 wool suiting or $4 cotton jersey. https://fabricmartfabrics.com/

Fabrics-Store - again, buy the sales not the full price. Sign up for the emails but redirect them to a folder because it is TOO MANY. They stock linen or good but not amazing quality. https://www.fabrics-store.com/

Purple Seamstress - This is where I buy my solid cotton lycra jersey. They have other things, but the jersey is what I'm here for. Inexpensive and very good quality. If you ask she will mail you a swatch card for the solids. https://purpleseamstressfabric.com/

LA Finch - deadstock fabrics with a fantastic remnant selection https://lafinchfabrics.myshopify.com/

Califabrics - mix of deadstock and big brands, easy to navigate and always seem to have good denim in stock. https://califabrics.com/

Boho Fabrics - good variety, nice bundles. I have also gotten some really great trims from here. https://www.bohofabrics.com/

Firecracker Fabrics - garment and quilting fabrics, really nice selection and great sale section. I've bought $5 yard quilting cottons here several times. https://www.firecrackerfabrics.com/

Hancock's of Paducah - Quilting fabric and some limited garment fabric. AMAZING sale section. Do not sleep on the sale section. This is my first stop when buying quilting fabrics. Usually the last stop too. Not particularly speedy shipping. https://www.hancocks-paducah.com/

Itokri - This is something a little different. Itokri is an Indian business with incredible traditional fabrics. Shipping to the US is expensive, but the fabric is so inexpensive it evens out. I generally end up paying like $30 for shipping. Beautiful ikat and block prints. https://itokri.com/

Miss Matatabi - this is a little treat. This isn't where you go to save money, but there are so many beautiful things in this shop. Ships from Japan incredibly quickly. https://shop.missmatatabi.com/

Lucky Deluxe - Craft thrift store, always has an incredible selection and fantastic customer service. I need to close the tab fast because I never go to this website without finding something I need. https://www.luckydeluxefabrics.com/

Swanson's - the OG of online craft thrift stores, but I find their website harder to navigate. https://www.swansonsfabrics.com

Honorary Mentions: I haven't shopped at these places yet but I have had them recommended and likely will at some point.

A Thrifty Notion - https://athriftynotion.com/

Creative Closeouts - https://creativecloseoutsfabric.com/ being rebranded to sewsnip.com on March 1 - quilting deadstock

Hawthorne Supply Co. - I just got this rec and I think I need to not look too closely or I'm going to slip with my debit card. https://www.hawthornesupplyco.com/

This is not an exhaustive list of everywhere you can buy fabric, or even a full list of where I shop. There are SO many options out there in the world. You also need to think outside the fabric store box. I thrift men's shirt fabrics for quilts and sheets for backing fabric. I don't do a ton of in person thrifting and my local stores don't get a lot of craft materials but every thrift store is its own universe and reflects the community it is in. Go out and find something cool.

Oh and final note: Don't shop at Hobby Lobby.

[nohoperadio]

just saw a pigeon doing the puffed up courtship dance thing to another pigeon, and as he was strutting around he suddenly stopped for a split second to do a very brief preen-peck at his own side, then returned to the strutting around. and i surprised myself by instantly losing respect for the male pigeon in that moment, like come on man i appreciate you had an itch or whatever but how is she supposed to feel special when you're getting distracted by bullshit like that? which on reflection i don't endorse, i mean those are pretty harsh dating norms i'm imposing on these pigeons, from a total outsider perspective, for no reason. probably not all girl pigeons are as uptight about that sort of thing as i would apparently be if i was a girl pigeon, maybe she even found it endearing who knows, i don't know her. it's none of my business really. sorry pigeons.

[snappingsquids]

um for the locked tomb folks that have their books memorized—do we believe that Jod committed the resurrection?

like, through Nona we get the story leading up to the end of the world. his genocide, anger over the trillionaires, the degree to which he manipulated his friends in order to keep them on his side. but he doesn't talk about the resurrection, all he talks about is what leads up to it: nuclear extinction, the death of the solar system, trillionaires escaping, crafting the body for Alecto, etc.

when he's asked about the resurrection he talks about how "the cost was too great" and even the neo-niners were just kept on ice for the myriad. plus, "John is a lying liar who lies". he doesn't even resurrect his daughter (though the issues of invulnerability serve him more), but instead grasps whatever is left of her soul and shoves it in a corpse, like his creation of Alecto's body. the most he demonstrated was the ability to create a revenant.

there's something that nags at me over this, because John's power isn't his own, it's Alecto's—given and stolen, the ability to wield it for massive solar system level extinction events by consuming the soul of the earth isn't the same as a practiced skill.

this is all for fun, but I do think John is taking credit for the resurrection as part of his myth, his ego. I'm tempted to say Alecto pulled it off and he took the credit.

also, I'm probably wrong and someone's gonna slam down some citations. please do it, hit me with some theological parallel for funsies too.

[katakaluptastrophy]

I don't think John is lying about the Resurrection, but as the end of NTN seems to hint at, I don't think we're getting the whole truth...

In the immediate aftermath of the deaths of 10 billion people and all the planets of the solar system, I do suspect John might have been able to fully restore a very small number of people. Because this is what Harrow narrates at the end of NTN:

You resurrect some of them. You wake up fewer still. You start out with a few thousand, then, later, some hundred thousand, then millions, but never more than millions.

Which suggests that John only ever resurrected a few million people, not the whole 10 billion population he slaughtered. And many of them he stuck in storage - hence the "ancient dead" who supply the new Ninth.

Harrow then says:

I want to understand why she was angry — I want to understand the mathematics, now that I have seen them for myself. I want to know how many of the Resurrection are left, and how many you began with, and what the discrepancies are. I want to know where you put them. They didn't go into the River. I want to know why she was angry...and why you were terrified.

The implication would seem to be that billions were never resurrected and their souls never passed into the River. What happened to those souls? In John 1:20, John describes how he "drank them in" after they were killed by the bombs or directly by him. But then it seems he didn't resurrect them all.

So this is where I start to wonder about the Tower, and about Varun saying "he left them too long - you left them too long, my salt thing". About how Harrow assumes the treasure of Canaan House is a power source in GTN. About how Abigail makes a strangely significant digression about the secret chambers of the Emperor in Canaan House in the middle of HTN, saying that they're more likely to find them than summon the ghost of Nonius...

Is some of John's power independent of Alecto, from the trapped energy of those billions of souls? Are these trapped souls the source of the devils? Just what is going on in the nexus of those questions Harrow asks, and how badly is that going to go wrong for him (and everyone else) in ATN? Why is John terrified?

[ghostsandyoumightdie]

If John is gaining power from those 10 billion souls being somewhere... Else, I wonder if the Eighth's soul siphoning method (using a vacuum) is an extremely diminutive form of that necromancy. That would also mean the whole concept of soul siphoning was foreshadowing.

[katakaluptastrophy]

Oh, ok, this is a fascinating suggestion...

Here's Cytherea explaining how soul siphoning works to Harrow and Gideon:

When Master Octakiseron siphons his cavalier, he sends the soul elsewhere and then exploits the space it leaves behind. The power that rushes in to fill that space will keep refilling, for as long as either of them can survive.

And here's Harrow and Palamedes discussing what the challenges at Canaan House are meant to teach them:

"As we saw in the entropy field challenge, continuous siphoning..." "...These experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They've hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that's the true prize." "Ah. Your secret door theory. Very Ninth." She bristled. "It's a simple understanding of area and space. Including the facility, we've got access to maybe thirty percent of this tower."

The Emperor is apparently on record as saying that "siphoning was the most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up".

In Harrow the Ninth, Abigail, asked to summon Nonius, says:

"I think our chances are very small. I think we've got a similar chance of Magnus tripping over the secret entrance to the lost chambers of the Emperor Undying. Actually, that's significantly less unlikely, as I've come to believe they run sidelong to the facility rather than — never mind..."

Which seems like a lot of detail for an apparently irrelevant digression.

Abigail also tells Harrow that there is "something terribly wrong with the River" and Alecto later describes it as "yet dead". Why does it feel like John in part runs on some metaphysical equivalent of a hydroelectric dam? Generating phenomenal power from something that interrupts the natural flow of a river, preventing things from moving through it as they should, upsetting the natural rhythms of the ecosystem...

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

I can't believe I haven't come across this post before—this is something I've been thinking a lot about, trying to figure out what the Tower is and how it ties to John's power source. I have also come to the conclusion that John might be using the perma-siphoned resurrected in his sunk-boat attempt at gathering enough energy to redo everything. I have a very long, half-written post somewhere in my drafts… This might very well be what upset Alecto so much and led to the tantrum that precipitated the whole chain of events where RBs showed up, lyctorhood was put into practice, John deactivated Alecto, fled to the Mithraeum, etc.

We get a thorough explanation of how siphoning works in the Avulsion chapter in GtN, and the mechanics of Eight siphoning are explained even though the siphoning used by Harrow in that trial is actually a different type, performed without sending Gideon's soul anywhere, and this stands out in a book that isn't in any hurry to explain its magic system and is selective about which puzzles we get to witness.

We are also told by Ianthe in GtN that there's a place “over the river […] where the soul goes when we knock it about… where the things are that eat us”, seemingly referring to Hell and not to the River Beyond. Augustine then says the Eighth house “sucks at [the stoma] like a grotesque teat”, confirming that the Eighth send souls to the stoma, and gets energy from there, not from the River per se? We then get of course a lot of info in HtN about the River, exerting space in non-space, etc. particlarly this interesting interjection by Harrow: “You can't build in the River! […] You might as well try to wall off time with bricks and mortar.” In Canaan resides “The sum of all necromantic transgression”, etc.

(Some of this has already been explored in u/Zealousideal-Sea9006's series of posts on what Cytherea was really doing in Canaan, which I absolutely recommend.)

Re: energy, one thing I'm fixated on—there's been very little information on what “spirit magic” is. For bone magic and flesh magic we understand thanergy and thalergy are used. There isn't a clear indication of what energy is at play when spirit is manipulated, or in what form would energy arrive from the River. There is no mention of “spirit energy” in all three books except once, Abigail speaking of Harrow's “heterogeneous soul situation” as her “spirit energy” being “diverse”. The entire River is, according to Augustine, made somehow of spirit magic, not spirit energy. As if this particular kind of magic was an extant, non-manmade thing, whereas bone and flesh magic are the specific practices. Are magic and energy synonimous in spirit magician lingo? What kind of energy is it that comes pouring from the stoma? I'm not sure how it could be thalergy or thanergy, seeing how nothing in the River is alive or materially dead—perhaps some earlier, primal type of spirit energy that converts to thalergy when materialized in our world? Is there meant to be a cycle, instead of an endless entropy of thalergy -> thanergy? Where does thalergy come from anyway? Energy can't be created, according to the laws of thermodynamics… (*)

The interesting thing is that Ianthe, who's been trying to figure out the Resurrection, isn't thinking about using human souls—she's thinking about using a displaced planet's soul. Tamsyn did say Ianthe was yet to do one massively shitty thing in AtN…

(*) My guess is: according to “Anastasia's tripod principle”, you need soul + body + thalergy for someone to stay alive. If someone's soul is separated from the body, but spirit magic is rushing into it, it might sort of fill the role of the original person's spirit, which allows the body to keep producing lots of thalergy which can be used outright or decayed into thanergy… and as we can see with Alecto, Jod or even Gideon, the amount of power/strength a body can generate and spend is bigger the richer the soul is, so an endless supply of spirit energy could mean a body produces much more thalergy than usual. There might be something weird going on with spirit -> thalergy conversion, considering babies release an immense amount of thalergy despite being small, no matter how much growth their cells are going through… as if their thalergy drew from some kind of lifetime reserve in the Beyond?

[ryan-sometimes]

I love how Zohran Mamdani is wearing a suit everywhere. And if he has anything else he puts it ON TOP of the suit. A basketball jersey. A high-vis vest. All worn over the suit. He’s like the mayor character in a cartoon who’s always dressed as The Mayor. If I didn’t know who he was and he biked past me in NYC I’d be like holy shit was that the mayor

[mankillercalledbunny]

Not to bring the serious to a very fun post, but this reaction is exactly what Mamdani is working for with his image, because in a very real way the most effective way for him to be The Mayor is if he looks like The Mayor.

This is a man who is VIOLENTLY aware that when it comes to conservatives, he is a Muslim first, a Brown Man second, an Immigrant third, a Socialist fourth, and a human a very distant fifth, if considered at all. He was also a young adult during the Obama Years and will have seen Republicans rip Obama to shreds for wearing a tan suit instead of a dark one and use literally ANY excuse they could to try and degrade his image.

Despite the fact that a mayor who wears a T-shirt and jeans might "seem more approachable" in the eyes of the average American, Zohran Mamdani knows that someone with his profile fundamentally cannot get away with that the way his White colleagues can. He has instead put in the effort to look professional and BE approachable, because not only does it make it easier for him to reach and represent his constituents, it forces everyone, including both his opponents and establishment Democrats, to engage with the work he is doing instead of judging his image. The fact that he is always seen in a suit and is recognisably The Mayor is, while also something he has fun with, a deliberate choice to ensure he is as inarguably A Professional Politician To Be Taken Seriously. The added humour of e.g. the hi-vis is a bonus, only achievable because he works so hard to Look Like The Mayor.

[mankillercalledbunny]

Adding these tags from @haunted-stranger-garden bc they illustrate this brilliantly

[dragon-in-a-fez]

never going to be over that time I was trying to explain polyamory to my mum, and she said "I just don't understand how someone could be in love with two people at once" and I gave her my the-cognitive-dissonance-is-causing-me-physical-pain face and she said "what??" and I very quietly said "mother....you had an affair...."

[deadpowol]

[ceruleana]

Eva Stratt's pov of phm is kinda insane really. Because it's basically being told, hey humanity WILL go extinct soon. but we've decided that if one person makes it through all the levels of the Torment Nexus our chances of survival might increase. they might also not. Anyway. We think you're the best person to do this. Your reward is that everyone will hate you forever.

And you're like well. I'd rather trust myself to the fate of the world than anyone else. And I'd rather not let anyone else suffer the Torment Nexus just because of my own feelings. That seems kinda selfish. Alright sure.

So you enter the Torment Nexus. Each level has you pressing buttons like, [abduct innocent scientists to your vat: chances of humanity's survival increases by 0.005%] [everyone disliked that] [congrats! your moral goodness has decreased!].

The later levels get even worse. [blow up Antarctica: chances of humanity's survival increases by, ummm who knows ????] [total humans negatively affected: ????] [congrats! you're an ecoterrorist!].

Then you reach the final level. It reads: [through this door you'll break the news to your friend that he needs to die.] And you're like, wait he has to die??? I have to tell him?? But that's incredibly fucked up. After I went through the Torment Nexus as well. But it's the last level. So oh well. I can do this I suppose. Rather me than anyone else.

You enter the level and you friend is standing next to a cliff. You go over to him and say, hey this really fucking sucks but I've just learnt you need to jump off the cliff. Then we might be able to save humanity for real though. Maybe billions of people can survive if this works.

Then he turns to you and is like, are you fucking insane? And starts sprinting away from the cliff. Suddenly you have a gun in your hand. You're like, no wait. I don't want to do this. For real? I gotta shoot him for real? [Chances of survival if he lives: 0%. Chances of survival if he dies: maybe NOT 0%......????]. You pull the trigger. [congrats! you're a murderer!]

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

harrow's relationship with gideon's name is insane to me. like she hardly ever says it. she almost never actually says gideon's name, and when she does it's usually a big deal. the first time of course being her shouting "gideon! gideon!" after the avulsion trial, a rare display of open attachment and concern. the other that stands out is when her last words in harrow the ninth, for all intents and purposes, are gideon's name, even though she doesn't even know what she's saying. i don't think harrow ever once says it lightly, without really truly meaning something by it. but the rest of the time? the rest of the time she calls her "griddle." which is transparently babytalk. fucking insane that harrow's mean annoying nickname for gideon is just. just her struggle to pronounce it as a toddler. how perplexingly cruel and vulnerable is that. parroting your own babytalk at someone. you have always been stuck with me and you always will. you will never escape our shared childhood. i am as fundamental to you as you are to me. your name was one of the first i ever tried to say. i have been asking for your attention for our entire lives. i have been calling to you since before i could form the syllables. gid-oh! gid-oh! gid-oh!

[redarmyscreaming]

Hertella Auto Kaffeemachine. This Dash-Mounted Coffee Maker Is Likely the Rarest Volkswagen Accessory.

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

Getting into a KarAkciddent and splashing 3 cups of FükkenScälden all over myself

[petewentzisblack1312]

we seriously need to stop conceding to the personhood trap when it comes to abortion rights. is a fetus a person? thats a spiritual question. i dont care about the answer. should another person dictate what someone can do with their body? simple answer: no.

[petewentzisblack1312]

like if a fetus isnt a person it has no right to my body and if a fetus IS a peson it also has no right to my body because there is no other context in which we are required to put ourselves at risk of physical harm to preserve another persons safety or even life.

you dont have to save someone from drowning even if youre a strong swimmer. even in death youre not required to donate organs and that could save several people. you can kill someone if you truly believe your safety is at risk. we dont mandate preservation of life over autonomy in any of these circumstances.

[lovely-v]

Every time Sean Astin makes a statement on whether or not Sam and Frodo were indeed gay for each other in lord of the rings he’s always like “well we have to acknowledge that attitudes around sexuality have changed dramatically over the past several decades and since authorial intent is only up to speculation, the story is open to multiple readings, some of which might have different significances for different groups of people also they kiss on the lips because I said so”

[busket]

at the rose city comic con panel this month a fan asked them (sean and elijah) if sam and frodo were in love and they said

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

Sean: dont tell rosie

[explorerrowan]

Rosie: "This is my husband Sam, and that's his husband, Frodo. Frodo is my husband-in-law. I'm not into him, he's he's a bit too 'elfy' for my taste, but Sam likes him, and that's fine with me. As far as I know, Frodo can't give Sam children, but Frodo looks after ours all the same, so I don't mind sharing Sam if it means another pair of eyes on the wee ones. In all honesty, our family tree is right simple compared to some hobbits. Yes, I'm referrin' to you Lobelia, over there pretendin' you ain't eavesdroppin'. Still bitter you ain't got either of my boys or their house, eh?"

[arcaniumagi2]

[ms-katonic-of-tamriel]

Tbh it's canon that Frodo invited Sam and Rosie to move in to Bag End after their wedding and they all lived there for a couple of years until Frodo went to Valinor, so yeah. Running with it.

And once Rosie dies, Sam says his goodbyes and disappears after him.

[roach-works]

what’s funny is people assuming that rosie would somehow be too dim or naive to KNOW that sam loved frodo, instead of looking at a guy who would loyally follow a beloved friend to hell and then help carry him home again, and not be like ‘oh i can’t not fuck that.’

[elodieunderglass]

Polyamory, specifically polyandry, would be an interesting solution to the oddball population of the Shire.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

No outsider ever parses hobbit genealogy well enough to understand this except for Gandalf, who never explains anything either.

[dancingspirals]

are you kidding? Gandalf would WEAPONIZE his knowledge of Hobbit genealogy against outsiders

[elodieunderglass]

Since “pledge” kinships are multidimensional and can occur in different directions, hobbits can form - and formalise - family bonds simply because they choose to. Gandalf doesn’t tell anyone that the formation of Thorin’s Company, the Fellowship of the Ring, and Belladonna Took’s Accidental Troop of Mercenaries* are legal formations of pledge-siblings, a hobbit family structure usually claimed to increase social class and prestige (as high numbers of pledge-kin confer distinction on a hobbit, being a sort of popularity vote/endorsement that adds greatly to their social power. Incidentally, this is partly why Bilbo was both controversial and successful in his pledge-claim of Frodo; outsiders mistook his “bachelor” status as someone living outside of heteronormativity, while the Shire was bewildered and increasingly annoyed by his rejection of pledge and hearth commitments. By rights Bilbo had too few pledge-kin, and too little parenting experience, to claim rights to an orphan, especially one from Brandybuck hearth; but conversely, his social status was high enough that his belated bid for his very first pledge-son couldn’t reasonably be denied by anybody.)

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

* see the post about the Old Took’s “enchanted diamond cufflinks” that obeyed the wearer’s commands; which were probably, given the general state of things, two lost silmarils recovered by his Remarkable Daughters and gifted to him because things stay small and safe in the shire

[chaosaccountant]

@elodieunderglass wouldn't that make pippin both denethor's pledge-son-in-law, and (as pledge-brother to the king) probably outrank him?

[elodieunderglass]

Only through Boromir while Boromir was alive! Pippin’s familial claim through Boromir technically dissolved on Boromir’s death, as Denethor hadn’t been privy to it, and those bonds rarely stretch to a stranger when the person in the middle has died before introducing them; although Pippin, who was well-brought-up, perfectly and politely rectified the problem at once by simply swearing himself as Denethor’s pledge-son. but through his blood-cousinship to Frodo, who was older than Boromir, his status as the Took double-primarc (don’t ask) and the proximity-enhanced status-doubling effects of having a five-way cousin in Merry, Pippin was demonstrably higher status as a pledge-sibling and was also his own father-in-law and approved of himself. As such, he would have significantly raised Boromir’s social status and marital prospects in the Shire.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

Ironically, the events in which Pippin realized this made Faramir his own hearth-son - so Pippin won in the end and took a great interest in ceremonially approving of Eowyn. Gandalf never explained

[elodieunderglass]

[tkingfisher]

I will buy that for a dollar, yup.

[deafmangoes]

It crossed my dash again! The Hobbit Polyamory Post!

[isa-ah]

it should be illegal to take a nap and still have a headache when you wake up. like no i shut it off and back on again why are you still here