[shitpostingkats]

Palpatine: And in exchange for your sworn fealty, a lifelong service to my empire, and your intel on the Unknown Regions, what must I give you in return?

Thrawn:

[valtsv]

having both anxiety and depression is like that post about washing your meds down with redbull. you’d like to think that the constant fear of failure caused by your anxiety would cancel out the lack of motivation you feel thanks to your depression, but no. they are both working so very much and you cannot stop it.

[valtsv]

[joseshin]

It’s the duck paddling on the water thing.  The mind is going 100 mph, the body is just sitting there.

[haniju]

Why Depth of Customization Equals Quality

Shallow customization gives you a costume. Deep customization gives you a character. SweetDream is firmly in the second camp, you shape appearance, personality, quirks, voice, and backstory until she's genuinely distinct.

That depth is itself a mark of quality, because it carries through into how she talks and behaves. The companion you carefully built is the companion you actually get. On sweetdream.ai, detailed creation pays off in every conversation.

[padmestrilogy]

darth maul and padme amidala: discarded pawns

iain mccraig on doing concept art for the phantom menace / wookieepedia / james dillon / star wars tales volume 6 / paul mcdonald

[redlandscapes]

And they both came around to the same politics in the end, the two people who came closest to understanding what the Clone Wars really were while they were still being fought.

Have you ever considered that we may be on the wrong side?

[dragonnnerdd]

This just made me scream all the screams to be screumpt, the parallels, THE PARALLELS

The fact that they're extremely different, Padme is beloved and she's one of the kindest, most moral and caring people, and she wants peace, and then Maul has never been fully trusted by anyone other than his brother, he is manipulative, will do anything for revenge, and he has known nothing but violence, rage and despair, and yet, in the end, they were both victims of the same man, neither of them were listened to when it was most important, and they ended up both having the same role in the end--a pawn to throw away, it--it makes me ILL OH MY GODDJWJJDNDJWJWJSSJAJJSJSJSJAJ

[clodoveah]

One thing that struck me about Maul episode 8 was how stilted the dialogue Savage & Maul had in Maul’s trauma visions.

A lot of people are treating it as if this happened in objective reality, that Shadow Lord retconned his backstory. But I think this is what Maul wants his backstory to be, and in typical Maul fashion, deluded himself into believing. Honestly, I don’t think he remembers the truth. Anyhoo the dialogue felt oddly canned because it felt so…convenient for Maul.

He wants to believe that he had companionship before Sidious, that he was something before him. He’s a really lonely guy. He wants a benign brother figure that could’ve offered him a different path. All the evidence suggests that he & Savage weren’t even raised together, but since Savage is the closest thing to family Maul’s ever had, it makes sense he would project these desires onto him. Especially the “what have you done with my brother?” line.

Maul (through Savage) is putting all of the agency upon Sidious. Sidious corrupted him, Sidious ruined him, Sidious is responsible for all of the cruelty Maul inflicted upon Savage. Which, in a sense, is partly true, but not in the way Maul thinks it is. Sidious abused and warped him, yes, but Maul makes the choice to emulate him by being similarly cruel. Maul doesn’t want to confront this though. So instead we get Savage (a representation of companionship Maul desperately wants, the perfect life he believes he could’ve had without Sidious) standing up to man. Lets pretend that everything in the visions happened in reality Be honest. If Savage had said that in reality, do you think Palpatine would’ve let him live? He’s not one to take insults lightly. Do you think Savage would’ve had the courage to stick up to a Sith Lord? Or that he would be blaming Sidious for “changing his brother” rather than Maul making the decision to leave?

He didn’t even remember Savage’s last words correctly. In Maul’s vision, he said “Avenge me” but in reality he said “Brother. I'm an unworthy apprentice. I'm not like you. I never was.”

Maul doesn’t want to acknowledge the cruelty he inflicted upon Savage. Savage’s dying words were about how inadequate Maul made him feel. He doesn’t want to remember that. So he doesn’t. Given Maul’s fate, he is doomed to repeat that abuse again. Making a pantomime of the dynamic he had with a brother that never existed, again and again, with Devon, with Ezra, failing to see the truth of it. Which is incredibly sad.

[godlessondheimite]

A YA romantasy writer filed suit against another writer for copyright infringement, and as is always the case with these things, she padded her claims with delusionally spurious examples. The judge issued a 160-page ruling against the plaintiff where you can tell from the start how resentful they (or whatever clerk actually did the work) are to have been forced by duty to have read the works in question.

[headspace-hotel]

"Alaska is a place known to the public, so setting a novel in a Alaska is not copyrightable."

[sparklingspirals]

all the roads lead back to the loneliness ive felt ever since i was a child

[iamnmbr3]

Remember the bit in the book that's like -

Jonathan Harker: The only good vampire is a staked vampire.

Mina: I got bitten. I'm turning into a vampire.

Jonathan: No. We're turning into a vampire. Satan here we come.

[mhevarujta]

According to Tolkien, Sauron (like Morgoth before him) makes a mockery of repentance.

But what I find interesting is their different attitudes. Melkor was a player. He loved the game. He acted his part and he had no issue with groveling. He even took a kind of perverse joy in the process of manipulating Manwe and the rest of the Valar.

Sauron was different.

Even when he fears for his safety, he only forsakes Melkor momentarily and that only after Melkor has been "utterly defeated" .

Manwe called Sauron to face judgement and was leaving room for the latter's rehabilitation, but as someone who was proudful and sought out mastery and quick results, Sauron probably didn't see the point of going through the charade that Melkor had to endure during his first captivity. So he outright refused judgement and then made a run for it, biding his time until he was ready to make a move.

And it's canon that the reason Sauron rejected repentance is because 'he couldn't face the humiliation of recantation'. If he wanted to he could have just stood in front of Manwe. He could have lied through his teeth, proclaimed regret and demonstrated false humility like Melkor did in the past. But this was not who Sauron was. He could not just stand in front of the Gods and reject his own heart, his choices, his actions and his system of beliefs. He was prouder than that and he was a person of conviction which, no matter how twisted his perception of the world was, is absolutely fascinating to me.

[astrotheyge]

"The hearts of men are easily corrupted." Wake Up Dead Man (2025) & Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Bonus for @mykingdomforasong:

[ferithtolkienesque]

The Silmarillion fandom is genuinely insane. Like, you hang out on tumblr, read fic on AO3 and you think, yeah. Lots of people have read the Silmarillion. It’s Tolkien. Everyone’s read Tolkien. Barnes and Noble has a whole bunch of the HoME and also a bunch of books by people writing about the legendarium. This is mainstream, surely.

But then you actually touch grass and talk to normal people. Not even that, you talk to people who self diagnose as hard core Tolkien fans. And. None of them have read the Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is famously a book that nobody reads.

And yet. On AO3 The Silmarillion and Other Histories of Middle Earth has more works than The Lord of the Rings. Think about that. That’s baffling. It’s ridiculous. Like I realize that LotR fandom is split a bit by the movie, but still. The Silmarillion has almost four times as many fics as the LotR movies. Everybody has watched the movies!

I need to know what percentage of people who actually read the Silmarillion went on to write fic or draw fanart about it. Because it must be insane, surely. Like, I’m pretty sure the Silmarillion wins some kind of record in this department.

Thinking about the fanfic bell curve where on one end you have “Perfect, needs no improvement or elaboration” (LotR sits here) and on the other you have “So bad it’s no fun to even think about” with the middle being the fanfic zone. But I think there may be a secret fourth Silmarillion option. Which is a book that is perfect* but simultaneously non existent. It’s not even a real story! The language is super pretty and deeply incomprehensible (especially to people who, unlike me, were not raised from early childhood on both the Bible and classic literature). And it’s more of an outline and an abstract painting of cultural and world building vibes (not cultural and world building facts and information) than an actual narrative. There are story hooks galore. There are vivid and fascinating characters, but their lives are glossed over and you only get one or two paragraphs of prose that will reorder your brain chemistry and haunt you forever. There are countless more characters who only exist as names, the implication of whose existence is fascinating. All of this is deeply frustrating, both to casual readers who just want a Normal Enjoyable Book, and super fans who want All the Lore. But it is catnip to anyone who engages in transformative work.

*I am aware that not anyone who is a fan of the silm thinks it’s perfect

[ithilienns]

What I love about this is that this is arguably exactly the role The Silmarillion is meant to have. Tolkien intended to create a mythology! To quote from the Humphrey Carpenter biography:

Here is how Tolkien expressed it when recollecting [the origins of Middle Earth] many years later: ‘Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story — the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast back-cloths — which I would dedicate simply: to England; to my country... I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Except it’s not absurd and I don’t think anyone is laughing because Tolkien arguably accomplished what he set out to achieve. The Silmarillion and related stories do in fact form a mythology and mythologies have always been collaborative traditions. Of course the ratio between readers and fanfics is disproportionate! You will be hard pressed to find a book better suited to transformative works because that’s what it’s meant to do.

[musicofthe-ainur]

Am I the only person who thought this was really fucking funny

[eleemosynecdoche]

A lot of the really funny moments in Lord of the Rings come from Tolkien playing with language like this, where we have relatively formal, archaic, “high” language responded to with informal, modern, “low” language. 

[modernclaire]

another hilarious example:

[lotrmusical]

my absolute favorite example of tolkien switching registers in this way is

[dukeofbookingham-deactivated202]

[obsidianstrawberrymilk]

funniest shit on the planet is that sunshot campaign is just wwx digging up graves on -10k hours of sleep and evil juice flowing through his veins while lwj is chasing him trying to pry the shovel away and not dirty his white lan robes in the process while jc is staring at the sky and responding to everyone freaked out by wwx by refusing to leash him and going 'thats literally normal what are u talking about'

[archivedsoul]

so many people have inspired me to be nothing like them

[farewell-wanderlust7]

Being a Silmarillion fan is so funny when hanging around regular LoTR/TH fans, because they know you’re the Lore Guy ™️ and so they ask you a question about some random detail and request an explanation and my ass, without fail, will always look them dead in the eye and declare:

IN THE BEGINNING, there was Eru Ilúvatar–

[haniju]

@never-oaky me

[ezrzr]

i do not “chatgpt,” i do not “character ai,” i do not “chatbot,” i IMAGINE scenarios in my HEAD. and if i DON’T LIKE IT, i DO IT MORE.

[papayajuan2019]

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

[derelicthousefootage]

[chilewithcarnage]

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

[wizardnuke]

"Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard." - Brennan Lee Mulligan

[80scifi]

if anyone ever asks why return of the jedi is my favourite star wars film i’ll just send them this gif

[doctorbutler]

[bluebandedagate-reblogs]

[luimnigh]

I think the funnier conclusion is that Luke did mean to physically kick the guy, missed, and then used the force to cover his fuckup.