I do still feel brain blasted by the 'Frodo laid a geas on Gollum' post years later... and I remain mystified by how I didn't see it before. Like this is not a hidden aspect of the story, it is often foreshadowed explicitely in text and happens without obfuscation or metaphor, I swear LotR it one of the most loved yet least properly read books, people read it with a veneer between them and the text of what they believe is happening and what it all should mean, allowing them to miss or rewrite whole character traits, metalogics and the true literal climax of the story in their heads. It UGH it !!! makes the story so much more fucking fascinating to me ONCE aGaIN! John... blink twice if you want to get excommunicated I PROMISE!!! your mummy won't be mad at you
To paraphrase the post and lay it out chronologically, since the post itself is long and the additions jump about a bit;
Frodo when speaking with Galadriel has this interaction;
âI would ask one thing before we go,â said Frodo, âa thing which I often meant to ask Gandalf in Rivendell. I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?â
âYou have not tried,â [Galadriel] said. âOnly thrice have you set the Ring upon your finger since you knew what you possessed. Do not try! It would destroy you. Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor? Before you could use that power you would need to become stronger, and to train your will to the domination of others.â
Frodo here is given the information he needs to figure out how to wield the ring.
Very soon after this Boromir, a man who had been nothing but kind and enduring and who had saved Frodo's life once already, is ensnared by the ring and attacks him. To me, this marks the moment Frodo realises he will likely come to the same end, no one has the will to resist the ring.
Soon after that, Gollum joins him and Frodo acquires the means to essentially practice dominating someone's will. By the time this becomes relevant again it is clear that Frodo knows a great deal more about his charge than he used too and has already made his plan. In sight of the Black Gate, he tells Gollum this;
[In reference to the danger Gollum is in] You swore a promise by what you call the Precious. Remember that! It will hold you to it; but it will seek a way to twist it to your own undoing. Already you are being twisted. You revealed yourself to me just now, foolishly. Give it back to Smeagol you said. Do not say that again! Do not let that thought grow in you! You will never get it back. But the desire of it may betray you to a bitter end. You will never get it back. In the last need, Smeagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command. So have a care, Smeagol!â
He quite literally describes what happens in the final confrontation, like some books foreshadow their endings and some of them just have the main character tell you what will happen. It makes me so insane.
In my mind this is also Frodo trying to soothe his own conscience here. His words will not reach Gollum deeply enough, Gollum will always choose the ring in the end, but Frodo is still using that compulsion as a means to succeed in his divine martyr's quest, putting the burden on Gollum's body whilst he takes it upon his soul.
Of course, this was all preordained by divine decree, there is no other way for this story to end, which I feel like Frodo is more consciously aware of than many other characters, casting his growing despair and melancholy in a new light. Then, well, it all happens just as foretold;
âDown, down!â [Frodo] gasped, clutching his hand to his breast, so that beneath the cover of his leather shirt he clasped the Ring. âDown, you creeping thing, and out of my path! Your time is at an end. You cannot slay me or betray me now.â
Then suddenly, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice.
âBegone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.â
Then the vision passed and Sam saw Frodo standing, hand on breast, his breath coming in great gasps, and Gollum at his feet, resting on his knees with his wide-splayed hands upon the ground.
The curse is set, Gollum attacks Frodo within the crucible of the volcano, biting the ring off of his finger and thereby sealing his own fate. His celebration at being reunited with his precious sees him slip and tumble into the chasm below.
So, Frodo takes the power of the ring, the very thing that has been drilled into the reader as The Final Failure, an action from which no one can recover, sure to spell the end of the world as every one of the so called 'Wise' will tell it, yet he saved the world in doing so. His soul is sickened for it though, leaving him unable to live in the world as it is any longer, which is the price he pays to do this great heroic deed, the deed he was divinely ordained to do. It makes me sick I tell you, sick!!
I really donât 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 Serkisâ âkeep Tolkien whiteâ 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 isnât seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkienâs âI hate apartheidâ valedictorian address being used as a âcounterâ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except itâs only ever the âI hate apartheidâ line thatâs 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 isnât 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 âomg we relateâ and expressing what is a very, very mild âsegregation is not greatâ 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 âwhat do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?â in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose oneâs 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 itâs anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck⊠and then getting really Pikachu-meme âbut theyâre misreading itâ 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 âI donât see colourâ 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 donât have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. Iâm not surprised by Serkisâ comment. I donât 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 âI felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther setâ âI somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possibleâ Serkisâ 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 doesnât exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response âfuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, letâs see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptationâ. 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. Theyâre interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we donât 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, itâs always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had âa few racist elementsâ but ânothing like the racism of todayâ. Of course itâs nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isnât 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 âget thee gone from my gateâ 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, Tolkienâs 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 Tolkienâs âproblematic elementsâ 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 âBlack men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron⊠itâs 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 "incidentalâ, 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 âscandalâ 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 Politicsâąïž, 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 didnât 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 doesnât 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 Tolkienâs 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 itâs 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 donât realy say about most other âcanonicalâ 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 âloveâ? 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 NĂșmenor 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 weâll 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 Tolkienâs 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 donât need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting âkeep the Shire whiteâ Serkis soundbites and âhooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!â 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.
Bilbo was declared dead while he was away in the Hobbit (and had to do a bunch of paperwork to get declared alive again) but thereâs no indication he was formally declared dead after leaving the Shire, even though most people assumed he had died.
Therefore I posit: having a missing person declared dead in the Shire requires the consent of their next of kin. Whoever Bilboâs next of kin was at the time of the Hobbit (possibly Otho? Iâm not sure) had him declared dead at the first opportunity but Frodo refused to ever do it.
Frodo had anxious hobbit bureaucrats knocking on his door every couple of years like âMr Baggins⊠blease⊠itâs been 10 years⊠he was eleventy-one⊠can we fill out his death certificate yetâ and Frodo was like âabsolutely notâ.
Early on he genuinely couldnât bring himself too but after a while it was more that he enjoyed irritating the local magistrateâs office than anything else.
I raise you: the hobbitish bureaucracy has no means to re-declare someone dead. They had no precedent to declare someone who was once-dead dead again. They would need the Thain, the Mayor, and the Master of Buckland to agree to changing the statute, and since the Thain and the Master are too amused by the whole henclucking that they havenât gotten round to it just yet.
Iâm upping the stakes with: last time Bilbo was declared dead when he was, in fact, not dead, they removed the law stating that you can have someone declared dead without a body, so when Bilbo left (happily aware of this legal loophole and snickering) he could never become legally dead again.
A bit of a theory that Iâve struck on while rereading the start of FOTR. I think thereâs something guarding Rivendell besides the Bruinen. I think Elrond has taken a leaf out of Melianâs book.
There are some hints that the distance to Rivendell varies depending on who you are. Frodo starts approaching the Ford in late afternoon; he is in desperate need of healing, and is brought to Rivendell midway into that same night.
In The Hobbit, in contrast, the dwarves and Bilbo cross the Ford of Bruinen in the morning, and the sun is down by the time they reach Rivendell. Thereâs lot of references to the journey being longer than Bilbo would expect:
They came on unexpected valleys, narrow with steep sides, that opened suddenly at their feet, and then looked down surprised to see trees below them and running water at the bottom. There were gullies that they could almost leap over, but very deep with waterfalls in them. There were dark ravines that one could neither jump over or climb into. There were bogs, some of them green pleasant places to look at, with flowers growing bright and tall; but a pony that walked there with a pack on its back would never have come out again. It was indeed a mich wider land from the ford to the mountains than you would ever have guessed. Bilbo was astonished.
Then thereâs Aragornâs line when Merry asks him how far it is to Rivendell:
âI donât know if the Road has ever been measured in miles beyond The Forsaken Inn, a dayâs journey east of Bree. Some say it is far, and others say otherwise. It is a strange road, and folk are glad to meet their journeyâs end, whether the time is long or short. But I know how long it would take me on my own feet, with fair weather and no ill fortune: twelve days from here to the Ford of Bruinen.â
(By the way, it always amazes me, now Iâve noticed it, that the hobbits manage this journey - which Aragorn says would take him 12 days on the Road, with âfair weather and no ill fortune,â in only 14 days with Frodo severely injured, travelling mainly off the Road, and with some bad weather and wrong directions. Some of thatâs due to the extremely fast pace Glorfindel sets for the last twoand a half days, but itâs incredibly impressive.)
If anyone should know the distance from Bree to Rivendell, it should be Aragorn, a Ranger of the North fostered in Rivendell, who has probably covered that journey dozens to hundreds of times. And the Road is fairly straight; it shouldnât be hard for travellers to keep track of the general distance. And also, Aragorn only gives the distance to the Ford, not to Rivendell itself. What if the distance and difficulty of the Road from the Ford to Rivendell varies, based on how well a guest is known. Frodo is the Ring-bearer, in desperate need; he makes it there fast. Thorin & Company are vouched for by Gandalf, but are largely an unknown quantity; it takes them the better part of a day. Someone with hostile intentions might never find Rivendell at all, even after days of wanderings.
One thing it makes me wonder about though is Boromir, and particularly that the book mentions he arrived in Rivendell "in the grey morning", which personally I've always taken to mean in the very early morning, when there's some light but the sun may not yet be properly up and the dim light has that kind of greyish quality (granted that it's late November, so even with Rivendell being further south in Middle-Earth than my home in the real world, at that point the sun probably rises quite late so it may not mean as much as otherwise). Idk maybe that's just my reading of the text, but given that earlier in the chapter the morning is described as sunny, so the "grey" can't refer to cloudy weather, that's how the phrasing would seem to me, anyway.
And it's always struck me as a little bit odd in the sense that, for that to be the case, he would've had to either both start his journey very early that day (which, granted, in itself is plausible) and have been very close to Rivendell already when he started, or he would have had to push through the night without stopping to rest at all. And to me it's kind of, on one hand if he knew he was close enough to Rivendell to reach it that early, wouldn't he have known he was close, and rather pushed through in hopes of getting somewhere inside before the night was over, instead of spending it camped by the roadside in cold damp late November weather? But if he was so far from Rivendell as to have to travel the whole night through without stopping to reach it in early morning, then how would he have known he was close enough for continuing through the night, instead of stopping to make camp and sleep, to be worth it for reaching Rivendell faster?
But your point about the distance to Rivendell being different to different people in different times would make either of those more plausible, either being shorter than he thought to allow him to reach Rivendell in time to attend the Council (since Elrond implies that those who were in the Council had been called there by fate or some such power and were meant to all be there on that day to play their part in the events at hand), or being longer than he thought it would and forcing him to travel all night to reach it (since he was a stranger, unknown to Elrond and coming unexpectedly).
Or, idk, maybe none of this makes any sense to anyone but me, but, yeah.
This makes sense to me! After thinking about it, I figure that Boromir crossed the Ford of Bruinen late in the day on the day before the Council, continued on for a little ways and then camped. And then set out early in the morning any found he was practically on the doorstep of Rivendell, despite having seen no sign of it the previous night. Which adds to his general sense of disorientation.
Honestly no wonder he was a bit in a grumpy mood in the Council, I'd be too if I'd spent the night camped in the wild in late autumn, woken up sometime in very early morning to continue my journey, and somehow found the destination right there almost no distance away at all when i could've sworn it wasn't so close yet the night before, lol
Has someone written the story where Sauron doesnât do all that swords in the dark art nonsense and just sends the Witch King to Hobbiton to file a lawsuit instead?
Itâs not a strategy that would work in any other jurisdiction in Middle-Earth but hobbit law does not recognize wergild and does have the right of first finder, with the time limit being the death of the original owner, which works out great for Sauron who never died (?)
The litigation comes down to âIs this Dark Lord fellow actually alive and if so can he prove itâ âhas he consistently been aliveâ âwhat is being alive, actually, when you think about itâ and â he been making a good faith effort to recover his lost property for the last few thousand yearsâ. Both very tricky to adjudicate, especially with the entire Shire peeking into the court room. The whole case eventually gets thrown out when a strange tall man abducts Frodo in the night but itâs quite the philosophical crisis in the meantime.
This is the closest I could come to what I imagine Imladris looks like, as I never seem to quite settle on a design, but I am delighted with how this turned out! Especially the stairs!
Inspired by; "The Secret Rendezvous" by Pierre Charles Comte
Support me on Ko-Fi; early access drawings + WIP + commission discounts
This event celebrates asexual and aromantic spectrum interpretations and headcanons of Tolkien's Legendarium.
Any creations about the aromantic and asexual spectrums are welcome! You can create edits, gifs, fanart, fanfic, fanmixes, and more! All versions of canon/fanon and characters are included, be it from the books, movies, TV, OCs, etc. Please tag your posts with #aspecardaweek AND @ mention this blog @aspecardaweek so that your work can be easily found. If you are posting your submission to AO3, we will have an event collection! This is not an event for generative AI works.
The prompts below are a guideline for the weekâs events, though you are not obligated to stick to them when participating. Theyâre completely optional, and more of a source of inspiration than a mandatory guideline. Feel free to explore them however youâd like; an explanation for each is given, but you can interpret them differently if you want to.
Day 1 / May 10th: Asexuality || Hope
Day 2 / May 11th: Aromanticism || Community
Day 3 / May 12th: Across the A-Spectrum || Loneliness
Day 4 / May 13th: Worldbuilding || Dragons
Day 5 / May 14th: Relationships || Linguistics
Day 6 / May 15th: Intersectionality || Found Family
Day 7 / May 16th: Freeform
This event was originally created by @arofili is being run by @astriiformes and @physicsandfandoms. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to send this blog an ask!
For further clarification, check out our FAQ, code of conduct, and prompts pages! Happy creating!!
More explanation of the prompts under the cut
DAY ONE: Asexuality
What characters do you see as asexual? Why? How does that impact their lives?
Alternative prompt: Hope
DAY TWO: Aromanticism
What characters do you see as aromantic? Why? How does that impact their lives?
Alternative prompt: Community
DAY THREE: Across the A-Spectrum
âAsexualâ and âaromanticâ are umbrella terms encapsulating a wide spectrum of identities. From grayromantic to demisexual, and aroace to lithromantic âthere are many other labels on the a-spectrum. This is a day for exploring those identities and the characters you associate them with.
Alternative prompt: Loneliness
DAY FOUR: World Building
How does acceptance and prevalence of aspec identity vary over both cultures and species?
Are all elves really baseline demisexual? Whatâs up with one third of dwarven populations focusing on their craft instead of taking a spouse? How do soul bonds work between elven couples who donât want to have sex? Did NĂșmenor get aphobic when they started distancing themselves from the Elves? Do aspec hobbits feel pressure to settle down and have large families?
Alternative prompt: Dragons
DAY FIVE: Relationships
Aspec people can have many different kinds of relationships, including romantic and sexual onesâ but some kinds of relationships are more unique and common to the aspec communities, such as queerplatonic ones. Today is a day for exploring all these different kinds of relationships!
There are several relationships in Tolkien's works that could easily be read as queerplatonic, including Frodo & Sam, and Legolas & Gimli. There is also an interesting footnote in The Nature of Middle Earth which describes something like a queerplatonic relationship and provides some Quenya words for it.
Alternative prompt: Linguistics - Many of the terms for aspec identity come from root words of Latin, can you postulate translations for aspec terminology in any of Tolkien's languages?
DAY SIX: Intersectionality
There is more to a personâs life than just their orientation. Outside of fantasy species, how does being aspec interact with a characterâs other identities and experiences, such as race or disability or religion? Whatâs the impact of a characterâs aspec identity on their gender or other orientation labels? Today is a day for exploring the intersections of the aspec experience with other aspects of identity.
Alternative Prompt: Found Family
DAY SEVEN: Freeform
Post about something aspec related not yet covered in the topics this week, or return to a prompt you have more thoughts about! Alternatively, we have some additional prompts for inspiration that did not quite fit into the other days.
Recommend a fic, meta post, etc. that includes aspec identity.
How would a particular character respond to allonormativity / amatanormativity? What kind of amatanormativity / allonormativity have they faced?
What is a particular characterâs relationship with their aspec identity Is it a big part of their life?
Post about an aspec characterâs family, either found family, or blood relations. Does their family support them? Does their family (or society) have expectations of marriage and children of them?
Post about aspec community (symbols, cultural practices, mentorship and friendship with other aspec characters) within the context a culture within Tolkien's Legendarium, or take a character and post about what parts an aspec community they would resonate with in a modern Earth AU.
iNaturalist user SamGardener is an MVP of identifying flowers, grasses, and herbs, and adding little notes suggesting how to use them in cooking. His accuracy record for Shire-local plants is matched only by Strider2931, whose record is perfect in nearly every category and biome and the popular is that heâs an AI.
