Zee or Balls, 28 | in LOTR/Silm hell | i write, illustrate and shitpost | | timelessutterances on AO3 | 🍜 elrond cummies enthusiast and teleporno connoisseur 🥺
i write and illustrate, but my true commitment is to pure shitposting. if you come across a seemingly well-sourced quote attributed to jrr tolkien, usually of the scatological nature (eg: elves don’t shit but they probably should) but not always, linked to my username, please note the following: jrr tolkien did not say that. i did. it was born from my ass.
about me: i'm 28, mostly based in the UK. i write litfic irl and work in humanitarian advocacy. you can call me z, ziz, balls or whatever combination of the three.
writing: i’m timelessutterances on ao3 — i’m currently posting prayers to broken stone, my silmarillion au set in postcolonial india. i have a meta tag for this fic with art, theory, character notes etc. you can find my other writing on ao3 or on my writing tag.
i don’t use any other social media, but feel free to ask for my Discord.
Sometimes I think about my initial idea for Prayers to Broken Stone, which was going to be a tragic satire of the Nehru-Gandhi family starring the House of Finwë, which I shelved because believe me when I say, despite their relative global fame/infamy compared to the stars of Kozhikode District North municipality politics, contextualising that fucking family and their straight up fucking weirdo dynamics for a non-Indian audience would take at least a few more years off my life than Prayers has, and frankly I didn’t have it in me to turn the line of Thingol into the fucking Bhuttos or something.
However, it would have been so fucking funny. You need to know how funny it would have been. Nehru would have been Finwë, obviously. Miriel would have been Kamala Nehru, ie Nehru’s wife who was pretty much a child bride and also died of tuberculosis pretty fucking soon. Indis would be Edwina Mountbatten, equally obviously.
Fëanor would have been Indira Gandhi, and Curufin would be Sanjay Gandhi. Finrod would have been golden boy raja beta Rahul Gandhi, and Galadriel was born to play Priyanka Gandhi. Obviously there are only a finite number of Nehru-Gandhis so I would have to branch out into the upper echelons of Bollywood and other conglomerates. Caranthir is Vijay Mallya. Maglor could have been Akshay Kumar (Canada is his Valinor) but then after the First Age, he turns into Aamir Khan and starts making social commentary Bollywood films starring his brothers. Melkor is Arnab Goswami. Fingon is Salman Khan in his shooting-deer era.
The only fly in the ointment would have been fucking Elrond. Every time I think about what Elrond could have been in that AU, all I can think of is:
that one 100% Caucasian French lady who plays Indian women in Bollywood films because Bollywood producers literally cannot sleep at night if they don’t spend every single day incrementally making colourism even more of a problem than it already is
The agony was burning, I imagine. His skin aflame in the new dawn of life. He could pin down the sensation’s origin only that it was everywhere and in everything. His voice grew hoarse until I put my hand over his mouth and he was left silent, silent in this aching oblivion, eyes glued shut like a newborn calf, mouth open in a silent wail, waiting for the executioner to realize their mistake.
This did not come, he was soon to realize. My tender hand raked down the sides of his face, his skin wet with sweat and the substance of remaking. The scars I had created caught on my palm. His eyes could not unglue themselves to peer into my face, his recreator, his master–he who had put back together the hungry soul of Nelyafinwë; and watched as the eldest Son of Fëanor pulled himself from the stone work and flopped unceremoniously onto the gravel. Wailing like an infant.
I was disgusted, at first. Violence churned in my gut, and I felt, horrifically and powerfully, the consequences of my wrongdoings. But, in time he quieted and his teeth nipped at his lips until blood, crimson, flowed strong as a river. He opened his eyes to the darkness of this world, with only the forge’s flame to wet his vision; and the fleeting wildness, the cowardly actions, passed from him as he took me in.
Long had I envisioned what I would say, but in the end I only took his cold hand in mine. “You were dearly missed, Nelyafinwë.”
Strangely Constructed Souls — continue reading on AO3
Sauron reconstructs Maedhros after going too far in his tortures–the creature he crafts is a terrible beauty, much to his liking.
Told in a series of journal entries by Sauron’s hand.
written for @silmarillionepistolary day 3: journals <3
POV : You’re visiting Tirion’s palace with lady Celebrìan and there is a portrait of lady Galadriel as a very serious baby on the wall.
I thought about making her albinos like how I imagine her mother but ended up making her like her dad instead. Also the dress print is this cute ivy art nouveau border by Maurice Pillard Verneuil.
Firstly I love your art and you are one of my all time favourite Tolkien artists. Secondly, a crumb of Elros if you’re still doing requests? 🥹🙏🏽
Your Elros is finally finished ✨✨✨ young king Elros was probably a hot mess, he had to be with descendants like his. The design is half though out and pretty much just the first idea I went with. I like royal purples for him using a lot of influence from Byzantine/ancient Egypt and Rome.
…man sometimes i think i went over the top with comrade maedhros but thankfully every time i return to kozhikode i am reminded that the comrade is in fact an understated representation of That Specific Type of Guy. anyway this was the wifi name in a fucking nightie shop.
no the password was not written on the wall for public usage or anything, which i guess is somehow even more comrade ‘the deed to the cliff house is in my name so it is my house’ maedhros coded 😭
Elrond discovers first hand one of the common woes of nursing parents:
Nursing flu
Head over to A03 to read! Or start from the beginning to catch up on:
An introduction by Erestor
A Jewelery-related Traumatic Earlobe Injury
A traumatic penetrating injury to the right buttock
The fun continues for @silmarillionepistolary Silmarillion Epistolatory Week.
A shoutout to @i-am-a-lonely-visitor for their depiction of Elrond breast/chestfeeding in their fic A Moth and A Candle, which game me the idea, and for the concept of Elrondgender which I love very much.
An Incident occurs and the Finwëan brood of Middle Earth are called to defend themselves.
The start of a charming tale of complete silliness told through letters.
@silmarillionepistolary
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Brought to you by the collective brains of Leaf and Lore with a huge shout out to @isilme-among-the-stars @glitterlessgold @a-tehta @beatles4ever65 @infiniteriver @mnimeresponding @stormsbreadth @motherfuckingnazgul @vaciena @gaydhros @dreamychaos
Hiiii question on Nobody’s Son if that’s ok? I just finished Ch 2 and I caught that you mentioned Finarfin and Maedhros would usually get hit by their parents when they were naughty as kids, and I was considering if that may be the reason they can ‘see’ the religious abuse going on inside Fingon’s household? Or am I wrong or making things fit?
Sorry for the delay! Obviously content warning for discussion of corporal punishment et cetera…
Hmm so frankly, the way I saw it as I wrote it, that doesn’t really have much to do with it… or if it does, it’s not because they (Finarfin and Maedhros) viewed discipline in their own households as particularly abusive, quite the contrary. Obvious disclaimer that I am obviously not saying that physically punishing your children is not abusive, and nor am I saying that it had no detrimental impact on them as adults (I mean… look at them ☠️😭), but rather that it would simply not have been considered abusive in their environment, by themselves or any other.
In the setting that those three were growing up in, ie mid 1920s rural India etc, ‘the rod’ as a disciplinary method would be extremely common, not just locally but across the world, hell, the UK only abolished corporal punishment in schools decades later… hence why teen Maedhros and Finarfin practically expect a thrashing every time they pull some kind of shit or the other, to the point they made up a competition where whoever got more of a whaling gets to win that round. And it wouldn’t even just be home where physical punishments are levied: Finnu himself talks about how Baby!Comrade used to take his ‘punishments’ (ie ruler whackings from teachers etc) for him at school because Finnu, who grew up never being smacked, would cry at the very sight of the ruler, while Maedhros would have just seen it just as, obviously not pleasant, but a standard response to his misbehaviour.
And similarly with Fëanor, where obviously you can make any good/bad dad interpretation of him in Prayers!AU because it’s pretty vague on and apathetic to the matter, but the mention of arse-whacking isn’t intended to tar him as an exceptionally cruel abusive person or what not… it would be very weird for a father of seven boys in that time and place to not use the cane to discipline his sons when he deems it necessary (and he isn’t really said to be too handy with it), especially the more stereotypically unruly ones like Maedhros. And teen Maedhros himself pretty much takes a ‘lmao memes’ attitude to it, simply because everyone he knows was also brought up like that.
Same applies to 1940s etc with the El-twins: it’s noted multiple times in the fic that Maedhros made it a point to never physically punish or even verbally discipline the twins as they were growing up, but it’s less because he has a particularly progressive mindset on the matter of spankings (very much the opposite lmao believe me this man would write a thesis about why sparing the rod is the reason Elros has asthma idk) and more that he’s afraid his temper might get the better of him and he would end up actually hurting them in a way he didn’t intend to.
And so Fingolfin absolutely is an anomaly here in never laying a hand on or raising his voice to his children, and it is that anomaly status which makes his mode of ‘coercively kind’ abuse so difficult for most people to parse. As in he’s operating in an environment where ‘not hitting your kids’ isn’t seen as the bare fucking minimum that it is, and to the local public, said choice would instead classify him as ‘better’ or ‘kinder’ than pretty much every other parent in his vicinity.
Which is to say that everyone around him is so convinced that ‘a tight slap’, in the words of Finarfin’s father, is the expected and deserved response/punishment for Finnu’s queer ‘waywardness’, that they just can’t or don’t comprehend things like ‘being cold at the dinner table’ or ‘withdrawing affection’ or ‘giving sodom and gomorrah sermons week after week’ or ‘making a humiliating public spectacle of your son’ as being deliberate modes of punishment and control enacted by Fingolfin… like the ‘not hitting’ isn’t really something he does for nefarious reasons, he’s not a cartoon villain ygm, he just does have a gentler temperament (as do both his sons!), but the coerciveness is how he ‘makes up’ for that.
It’s not a case of a man being kind in public and cruel/violent at home, but a man leveraging his kindness as a form of punishment. And again, that’s why the coercive aspect is paramount: the guy is pretty much using theological doctrine about ‘kindness and care’ as a whip to beat his own son with, as well as a curtain to obscure the whipping from the public eye.
And that would play a role in Finnu himself staying quiet/being unable to express what exactly is going on: you’re a kid, you’re never smacked at home so even the idea of being smacked by a teacher is terrifying to you, you know that everyone else around you gets a smacking for ‘misbehaviour’ no questions asked, and again you’re like 10 so you’re led to think, well, maybe I’m the lucky one because Maedhros and Finarfin get smacked if they’re naughty and I ‘only’ have to deal with the silent treatment from the only parent I have. And it just escalates until you’re sitting in a congregation where literally everyone is perfectly aware your dad’s sermon on the evils of homosexuality et al is about you, but equally everyone is like hey at least he’s not smacking you so he clearly has your best interests at heart xxx
So it’s not Maedhros and Finarfin seeing Finnu’s upbringing and going ‘he’s just like me’ and more that they are, like the public, aware that Fingolfin has never laid a hand on or even shouted at his children, but unlike the public they are also close enough to Finnu to see that he is being punished somehow. Where even as kids, they could see that the ‘normal’ ways of discipline as practiced in their houses, ie getting the switch for misbehaviour, do not exist in Fingon’s house, and yet there is undeniably some kind of mechanism of discipline going on there… hence, putting two and two together. TLDR: the prevalence of physical punishment as ‘the norm’ partially enabled this coercive abuse to hide in plain sight.
i have to say that as someone who is pretty much ubiquitously ambivalent to Russingon, your prayers!AU Russingon posts (and individual posts about the Comrade and Finnu) are proving to be the exception. what i'm trying to say is well done and also i am a huge fan of everything about your Finnu design
HAHAHHA thank you very much and this is truly not the first time I’ve heard that, re: Prayers!Russingon being described as ‘Russingon for the Russingon Ambivalent’ and I always find it very funny… I wonder if it has something to do with how the ship itself isn’t particularly relevant in the main Prayers story, and that most of the Russingon-focused oneshots are first-person narrated by Finnu, who has… an interesting way of putting things, to say the least 😭
And thank you very much for the kind words re: his design! My mother is a professional kathak dancer so I have across my childhood known so many variations of Finnu that it would have been wrong to not put him in a story ☠️
India, 1960s: When they told him to “dress as his heart desires” to his first gay club night, nobody, least of all Fingon (who spent the present-day equivalent of Rs 50,000 on his own outfit for the evening), expected Comrade Maedhros to borrow a doggy harness off Celegorm’s newest Alsatian and turn up dressed as a “small dachshund wearing a little Lenin hat”, inadvertently influencing global gay culture for decades to come.
Thus ended Beleg Strongbow, truest of friends, greatest in skill of all that harboured in the woods of Beleriand in the Elder Days, at the hand of him whom he most loved; and that grief was graven on the face of Túrin and never faded. But courage and strength were renewed in the Elf of Nargothrond, and departing from Taur-nu-Fuin he led Túrin far away. Never once as they wandered together on long and grievous paths did Túrin speak, and he walked as one without wish or purpose, while the year waned and winter drew on over the northern lands.
But Gwindor was ever beside him to guard him and guide him; and thus they passed westward over Sirion and came at length to Eithel Ivrin, the springs whence Narog rose beneath the Mountains of Shadow. There Gwindor spoke to Túrin, saying: ‘Awake, Túrin son of Húrin Thalion! On Ivrin’s lake is endless laughter. She is fed from crystal fountains unfailing, and guarded from defilement by Ulmo, Lord of Waters, who wrought her beauty in ancient days.’
Then Túrin knelt and drank from that water; and suddenly he cast himself down, and his tears were unloosed at last, and he was healed of his madness.
I love this passage. It's written so many years ago in a world with specific standards about what male strength is, about how men should carry themselves and express emotion etc. And yet the 'madness' that Tolkien attributes to Turin does not come down to being emotional/fragile/consumed by feelings and grief. It's about suppressing emotions and about how emotional wounds can fester. The moment in which he breaks down and cries his little heart out feels so cathartic every single time.
Of course His Malevolence demanded that he be a part of this trend as well. I also had a similar idea to someone else on here in making Mel a Pelican Eel for his reverse mer half.
