"Chilchuck would hate Frodo" bullshit, Chilchuck would be super fucking intensely protective of Frodo Baggins.
The ring you got for your inheritance turned out to be CURSED? And you VOLUNTEERED to WALK HUNDREDS of MILES to destroy it!? And when you got stabbed by a monster blade, the ELVES TOOK YOU AWAY FOR MONTHS and you THANKED THEM!?
No. No, I'm your father now, kid. You're joining a union, I'm negotiating your back pay for that trip. And your ongoing medical treatment, and I'm getting you EXTRA for mental anguish. Oh, the elves are offering to take you to some mysterious continent off in the West as recompense? Let's find out how many of these obscure cuss words they can decipher.
I agree with this post but also I have just been hit with the startling realisation that Chilchuck is who the dwarves thought they were hiring when they went to pick up Bilbo and now I desperately want to read *that* version of The Hobbit
Thorin, being held up in the air by a troll: Chilchuck, help!
Chilchuck, still sitting around the campfire, drinking from a flask: One, I'm on my fifteen minute break. Two, my contract doesn't include any provisions for fighting, just burglary. Anything else has to be negotiated at a new rate.
in 2026 i am wishing for all of us the energy of bilbo baggins, who was headhunted for an extremely well paid role he had no qualifications or experience for, blagged the interview, and within his first week found a magic ring that does the job for him
Blocking is your best friend on Tumblr.com
Ship you don't like? Block the tag. Can't handle political news? Block the tag. Some hater saying shit about your ship and calling you toxic for shipping it? Block them. Someone vauge posting about this thing you like sucking? Block them.
You will have so much better of a fandom experience on here if you just block things.
Blocking is your best friend and critical to your own mental health on here.
I have been absolutely in love with Pearl for so long, I was HAPPY to see her in the trailer, the queen herself. Anyways, I really love Nihilux' design as well, definitely pulling both
Some things that I hadnât paid much attention to until I saw another post were the other bounties on the IPCâs list:
The âRed-Nosed Old-Timerâ is a History Fictionologist, and while I personally didnât see mention of him anywhere else, he definitely was mentioned in a characterâs description during the Fate collab.
Vita is definitely an HI3rd Easter egg.
Not sure who âArchie Torreyâ is.
BUT WHAT REALLY GOT ME INTERESTED WAS THIS HOE SANDWICHED BETWEEN BLADE AND âSAMâ:
âSTAR EATERâ RUINS OF RAHU.
RAHU?????? THE LIVING PLANET RAHU????????? THAT FUCK-ASS GLUTTON THAT GOBBLED UP THE XIANZHOU CANGCHENG, JINGLIUâS HOMEWORLD WHEN SHE WAS PROBABLY STILL A KID????????
THAT RAHU????????????
AND YOUâRE TELLING ME FIREFLY HAS A BIGGER BOUNTY ON HER HEAD???????????
YOUâRE TELLING ME FIREFLY IS SEEN AS MORE THREATENING THAN A LITERAL LIVING PLANET THAT EATS OTHER PLANETS AND PROBABLY STARS GOING BY THE MONIKER????????????
There's so much hidden lore in the newest trailer that it's absurd. Aha and Nanook's section alone has SEVERAL lore references to things you find only in Swarm Disaster deep lore and I'm so, so, excited.
Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like "I'm not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it." Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.
Iâve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.
It hasnât crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!
Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.
I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky â the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count â wasnât on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvelâs popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.
Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So letâs look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.
Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:
Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), itâs also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Letâs check out the authorâs FAQ to see if thereâs some important factor weâre missing.
The first thing youâll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isnât counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because weâre not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. Weâll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:
Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?
Letâs look at another ship for comparison. This time one thatâs very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But whatâs AO3 say?
Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!
If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, theyâre determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.
At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and itâs certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.
The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so letâs look at an example to see how this works in practice.
Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but itâs close to reality).
Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works
Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works
Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works
Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works
This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.
How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.
With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and itâs count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesnât even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.
And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the authorâs methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):
The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworksâ are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewerâs part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column âNew Worksâ which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled âNet Gain in Worksâ or something similar.
Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. Thereâs no getting around that⊠other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldnât take on a project like this if you canât do it right.
To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesnât mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.
Sigh. Iâm currently arguing with people on tiktok about henry not actually being smart. I made a post about this a while ago, but now itâs actively happening again. Theyâre telling me the stereotypical yOurE fAllInG foR RiCHarDs blah blah blah. Also saying âthat them making henry out so smart is the pointâ.
I honestly have no energy. Someone also said âheâs smart in one thingâ âŠ..,
I'm sorry, I know Henry has some clear difficulties with decision making skills and lacks in the common sense department at times. But are you telling me people on TikTok actually looked at a guy that can speak eight goddamn languages and recite ancient history from memory and can READ in those same languages and they...think he's not smart?
Like fam, YOU start speaking eight languages.
Also it's hard as heck to do research and draft research papers. Something classics majors are required to do. It's not all learning fun rituals. You have to make thesis papers and do serious cross referencing and cite primary sources to justify your twenty page paper on the cultural impact of hair on social dynamics in the Roman Republic or some shit.
