mens rea @daytimelullaby - Tumblr Blog

st-just

s/o to whatever Reductress writer is apparently coming for me specifically.

uroko

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

quirktees

prettyboykatsuki-moved

fanfiction is so awesome. some of the most brilliant writers youve ever met are writing the most crazy porn youve ever seen. does that not move you

zegalba

Belladonna of Sadness (1973) Dir. Eiichi Yamamoto

catchymemes

mothermishy

You guys just have to trust me on this one and click here okay?

abracazabka

feralrookie

OH MY GOD I NEEDED THIS

prismatic-bell

For the chronically anxious and/or otherwise mentally ill:

This is not a screamer, jumpscare, or any other kind of horror link I don’t know the name of. It will not cause you to question reality and as far as I’m aware, there is no reason it should cause any kind of hallucinations or psychosis. I don’t want to spoil the surprise because it’s DELIGHTFUL but I am happy to tell you it’s very sweet and gentle and also great lowkey stress relief. This is a cinnamon roll link appropriate for all ages (yes, all the way down to babies) and you will enjoy it if you click it. ❤️

theyoungwaldschrat

Which one will you go through?

catgirlcadaver-deactivated20241

I am looking neither respectfully nor disrespectfully. I gaze without recognition of your form, and without understanding.

theofficialjonbeers

Me without my glasses

ousia-poetica

Artist Anastasia Trusova floods her canvases with vibrant colours and textures. "Textured graphic impressionism".

thoughtkick

“I keep that memory somewhere inside me—where it’s safe. I take it out and look at it when I need to. As if it were a photograph.”

— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

kilbygirrl

these 20’s really aint roaring man

poorquentyn

It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point.

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again.

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil.

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

sophiamcdougall

+1 You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest - the job of bearing witness to what happened - and the duty to finish and protect his writings? Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school - the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916. My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot. And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor. Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.

vulgarweed

Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever - a particularly nasty disease carried by lice - and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor - as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.

TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.

I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.

gayharoldfinch

“I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way”

well thank fuck for that

feynites

People are confused by the fact that the villains are unquestionably villainous.

What’s happened is that they’ve mistaken a specific brand of subversive storytelling for the only way to tell a morally complex story. The fact that subversion is relative to what you’re talking about has gotten muddied, because people have gone and labelled a certain plot type (which is actually a new fantasy staple in and of itself) as the ‘grey’ or ‘morally complex’ storyline.

This type of storyline is, of course, the one where the distinctions between heroes and villains are deliberately blurred. While there is definitely room to do things like ‘question the accuracy of the heroes’ perception of orcs’ in LotR, it’s also very clear that the canon narrative isn’t aiming for that. We know who the heroes are and we know who the villains are, and apart from some stray moments of self-reflection or betrayal, this is never really brought into question.

People have grown accustomed to seeing only one kind of thing as ‘complex’, which has, ironically, over-simplified a lot of narrative approaches in speculative fiction and fantasy. The prevailing attitude right now is that you can’t call your story nuanced if you know who your bad guys are.