Lo! I commissioned the amazing @balrogballs to paint Fingolfin, Lalwen and Anaire from my longfic Virtus et Scientia. This is them from the engagement ball in the last chapter. Thank you Ziz for being such a delight to work with and a marvelously talented artist! Truly this is my birthday in May. Everyone look at Lalwen and Anaire!! Are they not the prettiest specialest princesses in the world? Pinching their rosy cheeks. Kissing Lalwen's septum piercing and Anaire's nose. And Golf is so handsome and charming. Petting his bangs. Kissing his [redacted]. Ziz really got all their personalities PERFECT. Will be hanging this on the wall in my office!!!
This was SUCHHHH a delight to work on, and you as well! Thank you for trusting me with this, especially as I loved Virtus 🥹❤️ I especially enjoyed making Lalwen a little devil, also peep @peasant-player pattern making an appearance on Anaire’s dress 🥰
had an excellent time painting this OC commission of Ilsë, daughter of Celebrimbor and Tinwë of the Laiquendë, for @princessbatteringram, who described her as “generational trauma given form” and “curious, maybe a split second away from impish or mischief”, which I feel like everyone knows are my two favourite vibes to capture in a portrait. this is intended as a self-portrait by Ilsë done in oils (though of course the actual piece is digital).
I especially enjoyed rendering the iridescence of her dress and the various incarnations of her face I cycled through to land on this expression, and characteristically, her hair being described as resembling molten silver made my brain go brrr (complimentary brrr). Anyway, here’s a closeup as always because the main reason I spend multiple sessions rendering hair pretty much strand by strand is so that you can look at the closeup and go “damn balls you render hair pretty much strand by strand” 🥰
Sorry to Darkening Post once again but as I’m stuck on the apocalyptic nature of the destruction of the two Trees and the Darkening of Valinor, I’m simultaneously thinking about all the little microcosms of horror that made it up. The perfectly ordinary day that crawls slowly into something irreversible.
The ceasing of bird song that spreads from Tirion until the gulls in Alqualondë at last fall silent, the children running indoors, the slow trickle of venom into the streams and root systems as the wells of Varda are consumed and the very air changes, even before the darkness.
And the ways that these smaller aspects are ingrained in the wider consciousness; bird calls that can never again be heard again without invoking the dread of that hour. The multitude of people who are frozen in that time.
Maedhros’s testimony of the Darkening in the older drafts paints such a vivid picture not only of the moment the lights went out but the agitated, disturbed air of the time before. For all that the Darkening was an abrupt, cataclysmic moment, the sheer wrongness brought on by Ungoliant and Morgoth’s presence and spells was felt in the hours before too.
“We were irked by the idleness and silence of the day”, like the crackling, foreboding air before an encroaching summer storm, one that will end the world as we know it
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
I was talking about this with someone yesterday but I do think it's odd that in the Silm fandom enjoying one character often seems to be viewed as code for necessarily disliking another and/or as apologetics. What if I told you I think they all suck to some degree and I enjoy all of them very much
Audio of me presenting this to my English club linked here.
Transcription of the audio file below! I presented it to a group of people who weren't familiar with the Silmarillion, so I did a little bit of explaining y'all won't need.
I'm presenting on a project I've been doing for the past… two years? It's called “Who’s That Silmarillion Character: A study of the iconography of the fanart of the Silmarillion fandom”.
Welcome to nerd-central!
*scattered giggles*
*Next Slide*
So, the point of this whole thing is, the Silmarillion fandom – which, for those who don't know is the, kind of, history book of the Lord of the Rings – it's full of talented artists. Like, professional-level crazy-talented. And, most of the Silmarillion characters, because there's so many of them, have never had any kind of visual adaptation. However, a lot of the Silmarillion fans will recognize the characters in the art at the drop of a hat.
And I wanted to know – first of all, if that was really true, like, based on hard data – and, if so, how and why. So I made a blog about it, y’know, as you do.
*Next Slide*
For my methodology: that is a list of all of the characters I made polls for – there are 93 of them. That's a very long screenshot.
So, step one: create a list of all of the possibly recognizable characters. I did have to expand it a few times, because the Silmarillion fandom has people who are even nerdier than I am! I love to see it.
And then, step two, track down art pieces of each character that are recognizable to me for whatever reason, and not based off an adaptation, which for some characters, was kinda difficult.
And then, ask the artist for permission to use it – repeat as needed. There was a few artists who didn't want their art posted without their names, which, that's totally fair.
Step four, create a poll with the unlabeled art piece.
Step five, include the correct character, as well as several possible “decoys” who share as many similar traits as possible.
And then publish the results, while tagging the artist, making special note of what caused a character to be guessed correctly and what caused confusion.
And then repeat steps one through six 92 times.
And, in order to randomize it, I separated- I alphabetized the characters, numbered them, and then chose one from each set of ten, and just kinda cycled through that until I was out of characters.
*Next Slide*
So, my findings!
Overall, the Silmarillion fandom has an unnerving uniformity; like, it was kinda creepy. The total average was 70.1 over all 93 characters. Of those 93, only two did not win their poll, which is wild to me.
So, in order to really dive into this, I tried to separate the characters in as many ways as possible. So, in the first little bubble on the left there, I split it into male and female and there's a slight discrepancy, but not much; which is also very impressive, considering Tolkien writes a lot more about his male characters.
And then, I split it up by species. Those are all pretty uniform. The mannish characters did have a higher recognition rate, which was interesting – still don't know why. But the maiarin characters were particularly interesting to me, because I split them up into the Valar – which is like the Greek gods of Middle Earth – and then the lesser maiar, which are everyone else. And I thought, for sure, those'll have totally different numbers. Nope! They are less than three percent off.
The hair color was actually a little more split apart. So, the dark haired and silver haired characters were pretty- pretty normal. The redheaded characters were super high on the list, they did very well, which makes sense because – first of all, there's only five of them as opposed to, like 49 dark haired characters – and one of the redhead characters was voted most recognizable and one of the other redhead characters is one of only two elves with a beard, so, fairly recognizable!
And then, the blond characters… We'll get to those in a minute ‘cause there was some “statistical nonsensery” going on there.
*Next Slide*
However, there were two exceptions that, quote-on-quote, “failed” their polls. But, when it comes to research, things going differently than you expect isn't necessarily “failure”. It can teach you so much, because those two characters failed for the exact same reason; and that reason is that they share a lot of iconography with much more popular characters.
So, the Saruman art I did- since I was going for something that didn't have an adaptation, I didn't go with the easily-recognizable movie version. I went with before he got sent to Middle Earth. Which means he was mistaken for Sauron, because they have a very similar background. They worked under the same master. They're both associated with fire and the forge- so that was interesting.
And Curufin, that character, he shares one of his names with both his father, Fëanor, and his son, Celebrimbor; and both of those characters are much more popular and well-known, and well-loved. Curufin kinda just gets left behind.
And also, both of those don't really have any iconography that's unique to them. It's just- there's a lot of overlap that combine to make them [recognizable]. And, I knew it was shared iconography specifically that threw off the polls because there were a lot of characters that I had barely heard of, or hadn't heard of at all, that absolutely crushed their polls. It was crazy!
*Next Slide*
And then *giggle* now we come back to the blonds. I made a meme about it.
The Arafinwians are five characters, Arafinwë and his children, and pretty much their main recognizable character trait is that they're blond. Galadriel is one of these. She's also the only female one.
The average score for that family was 59.94 – I remind you that the average overall was 70. There's some of them that don't even have any secondary signs, it's just… blond. And, mind you, five characters singlehandedly lowered the blond score by six percent! It was crazy!
So, that's what I've been doing for the past two years. Thank you very much! *applause*
i love celegorm. in any other context the fancy blond third-born who can speak to animals and loves nature would be subject to the worst disney princess-ification known to mankind, but then you have this bitch and it's just the most abhorrent little gremlin bastard you can possibly imagine. godspeed
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