kill optimus prime for real

"ah, but if the love is not there in your heart...then, you sure ain't no superhero!" dramatic banjo, your friend, doing the worm on the floor and in your heart. fan of robots.

[dramaticbanjo]

your friend banjo, doing the worm on the floor and in your heart.

any pronouns. over 20.

my back hurts.

not usually nsfw posts but like. im an adult here.

bioware (mostly dragon age) sideblog: HERE

i'm not sure why i made it separate either but it's been here for a long while so i guess its just that way

here's my tag for when i remember i can put art n stuff here: ART TAG

when im doing stuff here: DOIN' STUFF TAG

[balrogballs]

I really don’t 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 Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ 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 isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.

Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s 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 isn’t 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 ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ 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 ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s 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 it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ 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 ‘I don’t see colour’ 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 don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t 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 ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ 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 doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. 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. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t 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, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t 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 ‘get thee gone from my gate’ 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, Tolkien’s 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 Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ 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 “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s 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 "incidental”, 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 ‘scandal’ 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 Politics™️, 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 didn’t 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 doesn’t 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 Tolkien’s 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 it’s 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 don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ 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 ‘love’? 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 Númenor 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 we’ll 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 Tolkien’s 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 don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” 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.

[balrogballs]

also re: ‘serkis is factually incorrect bc there canonically were hobbits with brown skin so tolkien is antiracist’. hobbits with brown skin, in the period tolkien was writing in, did not deliberately signify racialisation. half the famous five kids were referred to as being nut brown. the stars of malory towers were described as brown skinned and were all fully white english. in enid blyton. ie a notoriously racist writer. the kid in the secret garden is described as brown. midcentury writers used brown as a standin for tanned! this is incredibly common! how are we doing ‘oh he’s just of his time’ but not bothering to look at the ‘conventions’ of his time! it’s fine if you want to interpret it as that in fanworks and adaptations but i’m going insane when people are acting like tolkien referring to characters as brown skinned makes them not-white and apparently makes him some sort of antiracist.

[hoaxghost]

holding on by a god damn thread

[galacticsabc]

Go! Rocky, Go!

[dramaticbanjo]

while the abyss zone was a good intro What The Deal Is for the rest of the game, gear forest i think hits it home with the feeling. at least thats what i felt.

[galactoon]

MTTVember: Happily Ever After

[shovelwareyaoi]

a woman in a popular piece of media could rightfully call someone a friendless loser for being a friendless loser or be vaguely upset about her romantic feelings not being reciprocated and people would find a way inevitably to paint her as a homophobic arophobic transphobic ableist for saying this but a tumblr popularboy could turn to the screen and go i hate women and minorities and people would go well he didnt mean it it was just due to his smol bean nature

[shovelwareyaoi]

woman characters: i can't believe you never spend time with me! all you care about.. all you care about is your work!

fandom: ugh she's such an ableist dick :/ doesn't she know that work is his special interest :/

man character: ugh i can't believe women are starting to get promoted around here don't they know this is a man's job

fandom: omg my gay baby bean 🥺

[ndnbutch]

I get in theory why people complain about het ships or whatever, I get wanting to watch queer media I really do, but I guess where y’all lose me is like. I saw some asshole on a post about Sinners complaining it was “hetslop”—this person was specifically doing so while also claiming Remmick was a queer character and thus they were justified in caring more about him than the Black protagonists. which is a whole other disgusting can of worms that has been well addressed by others at this point. but even in the absence of that part of the argument, like, no, i actually don’t think that a hunger for queer stories is an especially good excuse to deride and dismiss a piece of landmark Black filmmaking, especially as a non-Black person. I have a post that’s been going around encouraging folks to engage with more Native stories and characters, and I had someone come onto that post saying in the tags that they’d need these stories to be queer in order to care. and I just think that, you know, sucks! like obviously as a queer Native I also want to see more of those stories too. but idk how else to put it other than to say that Black people and people of color shouldn’t have to be like you in order for you to care about our narratives and experiences. and I think some of y’all are using this disdain for heterosexuality as a cover for your unexamined racial biases. it’s not okay to be racist to people just because those people happen to be straight, and you continue to be white before you are queer.

[ndnbutch]

on an even more basic level than that, also, I simply just think some of y’all NEED to learn how to interact with media and storytelling without ships and fandom in mind. like if not being able to write fic about two men kissing is genuinely going to be a dealbreaker for you I think that’s actually something you need to work on within yourself because at that point I think you’re no longer really interacting with art and themes and narrative so much as just kind of playing with toys. which is, like, fine I guess. have fun. but it wouldn’t kill you to disengage from that from time to time. especially if would allow you to actually appreciate rich and deeply moving cultural stories from communities of color that you desperately need to learn how to see as human

[shovelwareyaoi]

yaoi fandom is just threatened by the idea of a woman existing in general so to mask that they go for the mother/sister/daughter angle when handling any woman in the vicinity of their yaoi guys instead of framing her as like some kind of evil yaoi homewrecker but it's equally misogynistic if not moreso imo

[shovelwareyaoi]

good prev

[itsoverfeeling]

that woman is not his little sister, shes his grown ass adult coworker

[itsoverfeeling]

also not his daughter

[recurring-polynya]

I think one of Kubo's truly underrated design decisions is when he decided that the captain's haori came in SLEEVES or NO SLEEVES options, and that each captain just gets to pick. Like, you can just mentally run through the captains and their choices are all very obvious and correct. There's no easy axis to explain this one, aside from "would like sleeves yes/no?" and it's such a delightfully subtle bit of character-building. This is to say nothing of the fact that Zaraki chose sleeves and then ripped them off.

[recurring-polynya]

it occurred to me that the reason Zaraki's sleeves are ripped off is probably because he's wearing the haori he took off the corpse of his predecessor and didn't like that it had sleeves, which honestly only adds to the character-building aspects.

Now, the only official pictures I could find of Kenpachi Kiganjō are cropped in such a way that you can't tell if he's got sleeves or not. He definitely seems like a no sleeves guy. There are a few fanarts of him that also have torn-off sleeves. Fanartists can do what they want, I kind of assume they didn't have any source for that, aside from Zaraki's haori. The guy two-Kenpachis before him, Azashiro, had sleeves, so I suppose they could all be wearing his. The problem is that Kiganjō was enormous. Like, Zaraki is big, I know, but Kiganjō was 7'3" and 700 lb. I think it's kind of unlikely he's sharing clothes with any of them.

Anyway, I think the actual explanation is that Zaraki did not actually read his captain-onboarding packet and fill out the required forms, so they gave him the default haori (sleeves) and then he had to deal with it. He probably also can't check his gotei dot death email because he didn't sign the Responsible Computer and Hell Butterfly Use Agreement, either.

[vampiricrodeo]

i think we'll get along 𝒻𝒶𝓂𝑜𝓊𝓈𝓁𝓎 💋

k. mettaton design is by @/paintedhen!!!

[clacy2812]

Doodles i made that i will make illustrations or cleaned up later :3

[nitewrighter]

Parent: I just don't know how to get my child excited about reading!

*child grabs book off the shelf*

Parent: No, you're not reading that.

*child grabs another book*

Parent: Or that.

*child grabs another book*

Parent: Or that. *sigh* It's just such a shame that my kid isn't interested in reading!

[nitewrighter]

I need parents to understand that reading the same Lankybox graphic novel over and over is actually a gateway drug to Reading Stuff Other Than That. And shutting down books kids get excited about is a gateway drug to kids Not Reading Period.

[nitewrighter]

When I was a kid I would read Simpsons episode guides. Simpsons episode guides! I was reading literal summaries of a tv show in a book that was designed to be leafed around in rather than read cover-to-cover! And guess what! It built up positive associations with reading for me and established reading as a habit! Hell, because the Simpsons isn't necessarily a kids show, I could actually return to it and get more out of the jokes as I got older! Let kids read garbage! To quote Mac Barnett, kids have just as much of a right to read garbage as adults!

[valtsv]

"here's my original character, Man Who Sucks But Loves His Daughter Very Much" and it's a guy who worships at the altar of patriarchal violence and the woman he uses as an excuse and an effigy to absolve him

[valtsv]

well i think his daughter should tell him to kill himself

[skopostheorie]

[owlyjules]

Added some prints to the shop!:D A lot were previously work I did for zines and other projects but now I can add them to the store! Hope you find something you like!;) Link here!