Nienna Nir

Incapacitated by Misadventure

[niennanir]

I might be a smoking tire fire of post menopausal hormonal imbalance now, but I was hot and buff once and no one can take that away from me because there are pictures to prove it.

[puppygirllaika]

Could you personally navigate a cross-country road trip, door to door, without your electronics (phone/computer/tablet/etc)?

Yes

No

Voting ended onMay 29

[niennanir]

Ya'll, I have seen so much of this country, most of it before some of you were born, and I can remember taking road trips where all I had was a list of highways and their exit numbers. And a folded up map of the US in the glove for emergencies. If it was off the I-75 corridor I wouldn't even bother with that.

[homunculus-argument]

I think it would be funny to write a murder mystery where not only did every single character involved have an obvious motive to kill this mf, they were actually all attempting to murder him first, but the murder attempts all cancelled each other out all except for one. Two people tried to poison him but the poisons just happen to work as antidotes for each other, and instead of killing him only gave him the shits, and due to having the shits he couldn't go hunting that day like he had planned, foiling the plans of the one who had conditioned his favourite hunting horse to panic and bolt at the cue of a whistle, and the other murder attempt of tampering with his gun so that it would have exploded his whole face off.

The whole mystery isn't about who could have done it or how, but who was the one who got lucky and actually succeeded.

[terriwriting]

Sherlock Holmes and The Case of Perhaps We'd Best Leave This One Alone, Watson. There Appears To Be An Excess Of Armed Maniacs In The Vicinity.

[copperbadge]

When I was in high school a friend of mine would host murder mystery dinners once or twice a year. They were the kind you could buy as a kit -- I don't even know if they exist anymore -- and everyone was assigned (or chose) a character, then received a booklet of clues to share. The idea was to spend an evening in a one-shot LARP designed like an Agatha Christie novel.

I was a year above most of them at school so they threw a "goodbye" murder mystery for me just before graduation, and about 2/3 of the way through the game we all realized that everyone had at least attempted to kill the victim. The game then shifted from "whodunnit" to "who succeeded in dunninit" which we all felt was not only super fun but above the usual level of narrative complexity for those games.

After we solved it, we discovered that the game wasn't from a kit -- the host had written it herself and meticulously printed out the booklets in replica style of the kits. It was the best going-away party I think I could possibly have had.

[niennanir]

Clue (1985) Ya'll are describing Clue

[niennanir]

Ladies and Gentlemen; A conversation with my mother

[orions-mistletoe-arrow]

My favorite headcannon I have going for LOTR right now is that the elves that are still around by the time Frodo gets on the scene are the elvish equivalent of doomsday preppers.

I forget where I read it, but I'm pretty sure that at some point there were millions of elves on Middle-earth, and by the end of the third age, it's down to a few thousand, aka a very small portion. These are the elves that got told way back in the first age, "Hey, just so you guys know, you're totally welcome to come back and live in heaven now without any worries" and responded, "No thanks, we're good!" and then proceeded to not only hold to that but survived the next 7.000 years of bullshit including but not limited to:

Multiple continents sinking into the sea

orcs

dragons

balrogs

multiple wars with Sauron, a literal divine being

The rise and fall of several human empires

more orcs

wargs

a bunch of their territory being overtaken and burned to the ground

And all of their loved ones either dying or sailing, even though we know that grief can and will kill an elf

Like, you can't tell me that third age elves start showing up in the undying lands, where everyone has spent the last few thousand years basking in the magical equivilant of free therapy and probably have as many defence measures as a suburban coldesac, and aren't viewed as the most feral, twitchy, paranoid mother fuckers; held together by suspicion, stubornness, and at least 25 contingencies for every situation they've collectively encountered during their time in Middle-earth.

My favorite examples of feral, hyper-vigilant behavior include:

Elrond: Security clearance; sure, Turgon may have threatened to kill anyone who tried to leave his hidden city, but he also took an entire army out of and back to the city at once, and then also didn't realize that his own nephew snitched on where the city was. His security protocols sucked. Meanwhile, Elrond had hundreds of strangers coming in and out of Rivendell for over 3,000 years, at one point completely surrounded by enemies and full of nothing but a bunch of refugees, and Sauron still never found it. You can't tell me that he didn't have at least 25 security checkpoints on the way into his city(sorry, house-that means it's private property, right?), even if you didn't know they were there.

Galadriel: Paranoia; This woman was magically keeping track of everyone she knew and even did it often enought that she knew what to look for of those she couldn't directly track (gandalf) and looking into their minds and testing them. All while having Sauron constantly clawing at the walls of her mind, at least for a few years

Thranduil: Spite; it was basically only his sheer audacity holding his nuclear bunker- cough cough- sorry, I meant vast underground halls together, while his next-door neighbor was some cursed ruins, a dragon-infested dwarf kingdom, and evil, man-eating, car-sized spiders on his front lawn.

Haldir: he blindfolded the fellowship when they tried to enter his city (super secret hideout), need I say more?

Multiple examples of groups of elves jumping out of trees fully armed and ambushing anyone who wanders into their territory. And while the characters seem surprised to be ambushed, they don't seem surprised that elves ambush people in general, leading me to believe this is normal behavior.

In summary, while the elves in the LOTR and the Hobbit seem all chill and fun, I like to imagine them as the crazy raccoons of the elvish family trees that wandered in 5 hours late.

[armenelols]

If I might add, concerning Rivendell, in The Hobbit, Gandalf struggled to find a path there. He would have gotten there soon enough even without the aid of tra la la lally elves, but nonetheless, according to the elves, Gandalf and the company were a bit out of the way of the path.

Gandalf. Who has been to Rivendell a shitton of times, probably. Gandalf struggled to fimd his way in.

And in LotR, Elrond clearly controls Bruinen in a way to deter intruders

The siege of Rivendell by Witch-King's armies during wars with Angmar lasted 50 years. Rivendell is a house, not a fortress, and it lasted half a century.

Elrond has very successfuly barricaded Rivendell against enemies. He, cannonically, had the above mentioned 25 security checkpoints

[batsintheshadows]

#lotr#hobbit#silm#->#when you're singing tra la la lally no one pays attention to the fact that you've id'ed every single member of the group trying to get in#and have them covered by archers who can hit a mouse in the dark (@jaz-the-bard get peer reviewed!)

[niennanir]

There is a huge overlap between acting like a cheerful cut-up and being a paranoid lunatic.

The sorts of people that grin and sing mocking little songs when your GPS (Gandalf Positioning System) has failed to get you to their BBQ are the same mofos who have covertly placed wi-fi enabled trail cams all over their own neighborhood and knew where you were anyway before you texted.

Don't ask me how I know this, you won't like the answer.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Okay, for Star Wars Day I want to talk about what I love about The Thrawn Trilogy. Not sure if I’ve posted about this before or not.

[Spoilers for the plot of the whole trilogy below.]

Timothy Zahn’s written a wide range of sci-fi other that Star Wars; some of it I like (The Quadrail Trilogy), some of it I don’t (the Cobra books; the first one’s a Rambo-esque examination of the human fallout of a supersoldier program, but the others dive headfirst into militarism). He leans towards military sci-fi and cleber people with elaborate multilayered plans, and that does come out in the Thrawn Trilogy, but what really makes him stand out is something too often lacking in multi-author media: he respects the universe he’s in.

The Thrawn Trilogy is noticeably more idealistic than many of Zahn’s other books, because that’s a foundational characteristic of the Star Wars universe. Zahn’s non-Star-Wars books are frequently ones where the heroes win by being clever and adaptable; Star Wars is a media where the heroes win by being good. Luke’s redemption of Vader in Return of the Jedi is, to me, the moment at the absolute heart of Star Wars.

Zahn neither throws away his own literary instincts nor bends Star Wars to serve them; he weaves them together effectively. The thing I love the most about the Thrawn Trilogy is that the heroes win by being good. Thrawn is more nuanced and thoughtful than the Imperials of the original trilogy, and treats his own men better than Vader does; but the crucial difference between him versus the heroes is that he treats neutral characters as enemies or tools while Luke, Han, and Leia listen to them, trust them, take risks for them, even when the neutral characters look awfully like enemies. Kaarde takes Luke captive and is considering handing him over to Thrawn. Mara Jade openly and vociferously proclaims her desire to kill Luke – both to others and to his face. The Noghri carry out numerous very skilled attempts to capture Leia and hand her and her unborn twins over to the mad Jedi Master Joruus C’baoth.

And Han and Luke work with Kaarde. Luke repeatedly trust and saves Mara. Luke rescues Kaarde when he is captured by Thrawn. Leia places herself at extreme risk by travelling to the Noghri homeworld to help free them from the deceptions of the empire. They would have good, pragmatic, sensible reasons to not do any of these things. But the fact that they do them, while the Empire lies and manipulates and coerces, is why they win. Mara helps Luke to destroy C’baoth and the Empire’s cloning facilities [this was written pre-prequels, so it’s operating on different assumptions about the Clone Wars]. Kaarde comes in clinch with an alliance of smugglers in the main space battle. (The climax’s combo of a land battle, a space battle, and a Jedi showdown is also a great nod to ROTJ.) Thrawn’s Noghri bodyguard assassinates him at a pivotal moment. It’s what frustrates me so mich when people call this combination of events a deus ex machina, because it’s anything but – it’s the culmination of every moral choice the heroes have made over the course of the trilogy, including the ones they didn’t recognize as choices because they were so ingrained (Luke!!! ❤️❤️❤️ “this woman hates me and wants me dead. guess I’ll trust her unconditionally and give her whatever she needs.”). Even before the final battles, Mara is present to save Leia from a kidnapping because Luke went out of his way to save her when she was helpless.

Zahn’s own instincts and talents enrich the story without overriding its ability to feel like Star Wars. There are so, so, SO many stupid, arrogant villains in Star Wars Legends (I am looking at YOU Kebin J Anderson!), and next to them Thrawn is a breath of fresh air. He’s calm, collected, smart, creative, adaptable, able to keep a cool head in the face of setbacks and modify his plans as needed, and yet he’s still villainous, and he loses because of villainous actions – actions that he or his adherents could easily regard simply as hard-headed pragmamtism. (In some of his more recent books Zahn has kind of bought into Thrawn’s hype and moved away from this, and in consequence I don’t find those ones as good.) His right hand and the Watson to his Sherlock is Pellaeon, our Imperial viewpoint character and a good insight into a ‘typical’ Imperial – he believes in the Empire, hates the ‘Rebellion’, is bigoted, has few moral compunctions but lots of practical ones, and still feels like a three-dimensional character rather than a caricature. (Twenty years later in the Hand of Thrawn trilogy, he’s improved considerably as a person.)

And the additional asset of Zahn’s penchant for smart characters is that the heroes are also smart, thpugh their plans tend more towards off-the-cuff improvisation than long-term strategy. Zahn brongs in fantastic new characters like Mara and Karrde, but he integrates them effectively with Luke, Leia, and Han rather than using them to upstage the OT characters (a frequent temptation for shared-universe authors).

All of these are things that authors in some of the major events later on in Legends (New Jedi Order and onwards) conspicuously failed to do, and destroyed by enjoyment of the later books in consequence (I was flagging by the late NJO books and dropped off entirely about a chapter into Legacy of the Force). They imposed their own preconceptions, tone, or genre preferences on the series (pro tip: don’t hire someone virulently anti-Jedi to write Jedi.) The played favourites with characters (each of three LOTF authors seems to have had their own key blorbo, and some NJO authors did as well). They wrote at cross purposes with each other and tried to pull the narrative in different directions (really, the attempt at a stronger shared continuity from NJO onwards was what made this a big problem; before that, continuity was fluid enough that you could mostly just ignore the book you didn’t like and focus on the ones you did). And it makes me appreciate even more an author who had not only the talent but the humility to shape the tone of his work to fit the genre and universe it was located in.

[niennanir]

I can tell you exactly why the Thrawn trilogy is what it is: Tim Zahn loves Star Wars.

I'm talking fangirl levels of love here. I frequent a con that Tim has been going to regularly for years and the man is always 100% down to talk Star Wars, not his books, Star Wars. He got his wife an electronic Porg that flapped and waddled around and she carried that thing around the con like a Purse Puppy the year The Last Jedi came out. The day I met him, has to be 15 years ago now, he asked "is this seat taken?" at my table and over snacks we all talked about the state of politics in the Outer Rim. Timothy Zahn Loves Star Wars. And it shows.

[bucketofdeltav]

So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.

[niennanir]

[groovysarity]

[auressea]

... I! yeah. Yeah I do- I LOVE these words. the only ones on this list I have never used are tomfoolery, Nincompoop and Malarkey. I HAVE called someone a "ninny" which is I think, short for nincompoop.

WORDS ARE FUN!

[niennanir]

Some of y'all were not raised in Rural America and I am flabbergasted at how much it shows.

[niennanir]

It's all Early Nineteenth Century Romanticism up in here, my lovelies.

[partywithponies]

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." is one of the greatest character introductions of all time.

[booksinmythorax]

It's also bold fucking words from a man named Clive Staples.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Oh, I 100% think he’s deliberately riffing on that.

[niennanir]

Shout out to 20-year-old-Me whose list of theoretical baby names included 'Eustace', 'Clive', and 'Beren' and did not include any Michaels or Williams whatsoever.

Give a kid a name and they'll rise to overcome it proportionally to the name itself.

[thetrekkiehasthephonebox]

Transplant Your Darlings: That bit is important to the story, it's just in the wrong place.

[niennanir]

Honey, sometimes you're going to move that Darling all around the garden until you finally admit to yourself it's not working and you put it in a pot and take it back in the house.

[niennanir]

Concealed Hand

The Italian American Club serves dinner every Friday night. All the tables seat eight. If you do not bring seven people with you, they will happily find seven perfect strangers for you to eat dinner with. Mum and I frequent the Club because she loves Italian and I love talking to strangers. Tonight our dinner companions were two BFFs and two couples.

BFF1: (to Wife1) I've given up Mahjong, I'm just not any good at it. Wife1: We play One Eyed Jacks on Tuesdays, you should join us! BFF2: I don't even know what that is. Wife2: (to me) Do either of you play Mahjong or One Eyed Jacks? Me: *trying hard to think of a normal people answer* Mum: We play Lord of the Rings Online *Crickets* Husband2: wow Me: It's one of those video games where hundreds of people play on the internet together. Wife1: You... both play? Mum: Enthusiastic nod Me: She's a hobbit Husband2: wow Later Me: Ladies, Gentlemen, it's been lovely to meet you all. Wife2: Oh! leaving already? Husband2: They've probably got a campaign or something! Wife1: Oh! Do you have a campaign you have to go to? Me: Something like that. BFF2: I still don't think I understand what it is they play. Husband1: Go kick ass, girls!

[niennanir]

Why is Lust always portrayed as a woman who embodies the personification of the desired when every other Deadly Sin is portrayed by a character who is the manifestation of the most monstrous aspects of that sin? Lust should be a grossly unattractive male who continuously makes lewd jokes and creeps on people who clearly find him repulsive.

[trekcore]

April 5, 2063

[daisyfairy1]

Ok, so I now want to read fics in all the fandoms based on this.

(Found on twitter https://twitter.com/WholesomeMeme/status/1632788134856474624?s=19)

[deehellcat]

omg, yes please. this would translate so well into so many fandoms :D

[copperbadge]

What impresses me most is the attention to design. There's formatting and layout involved.

Did this bouncer like, bring this person home, put them to bed, start the laundry, and then sit down to make a little Drunk Guest zine? Does he do this regularly so he had a template ready? Is that cool or a little weird? Was he attracted to his guest and hoping to make a great first impression? Was he just super anxious that they weren't waking up before he'd have to leave for presumably his day job, so he poured it all into this little gem the following morning? Is his day job in typesetting?

It manages to inspire even more questions than it answers, which is quite the feat.

[niennanir]

Having once been in a career field that regularly exposed me to people making highly questionable choices without a social safety net and who then ended up with those same people crashed on my sofa I can assure you confidently of the following:

1: This particular Bouncer has seen the results of not intervening in matters like this previously and has determined their personal moral compass will not allow them to do so again.

2: The Bouncer has taken enough fall down dunks home to have one of them panic and start screaming, quite possibly enough to wake the neighbors and/or involve law enforcement.

3: The Bouncer has made at least 1 (possibly 2) good friends by taking fall down drunks home and leaving them in the spare room.

4: The Bouncer totally has a Drunk Guest Zine Template on his laptop which he fills out after he starts the laundry, prints, and then leaves by the bed when he returns with the Tylenol and a glass of water.

This, in all honesty, seems like a really, really normal thing to do to me and I'm actually slightly weirded out by how many people are impressed by this considering the sorts of background checks a potential bouncer has to go through to land a job at a bar that isn't sketch as all hell. That might just be me though.

And I probably should add the WiFi password to the Emergency Guest Zine.

[silvergreyrain]

I've been yearning for something with adult married yuuram and finally had this unbearable itch scratched!

The consort of the King by NiennaNir has kept me glued to my monitor for days! Totally hadn't expected to find a gem like that!

There's angst. Lots and lots of angst which potentially could make you recall some of the most miserable moments of your own life, but omg...

it's LONG and has delicious gradual development.

Both guys have to go through some terrible times but are always together, being fiercely protective and utterly devoted to and caring for each other which is all i ever wanted for them

They are best friends who love each other and they acknowledge it and openly talk about it. a sure way to draw me in.

Greta is really great in this (at later stages in particular)

They get a second child later on, and normally I wouldn't touch a kid-fic with a stick in any fandom EVER, but it's so well-implemented and WORKS so nicely, I almost can't see it being any other way now WHAT THE HELL

And most importantly? It's set in animeverse! The thing that had kept me frustrated and disappointed FOR YEARS gets a fresh perspective! idk but it made me go through so many feels

Just finished it the other day, and went straight ahead to reread it all over to have a fresh look.

This story almost makes me feel at peace about the non-existence of a proper ending for the novels XD

It's so great to get closure for something <3

[niennanir]

I just.... really don't know what to say here. This reblog has been sitting here blank staring at me for hours.

I could talk about the really impressive art quality that I am entirely qualified to expound on because I have done 3D and damn are hands hard to get right.

I could talk about the fact that Wolfram wanted a big family and deserved to have that addressed in some positive way as much as he deserved resolution to the situation of all of the really awful things I put them through.

I could talk about the fact that I would have been really delighted if half a dozen people read it once and really enjoyed it. That was honestly my goal. And once more I prove that I have no real idea what fandom wants to read and I can just write whatever I want and someone will love it, probably a lot more people than I think.

I am just blown away with the response to this fic, (and originally it was one long unwieldy fic, I still think of it that way even though I broke it up into parts to make it more manageable.) So kudos to all of you who read and left comments or a little heart, because there is so much joy in knowing you're giving others something they truly want.

[niennanir]

Chapters: 4/6 Fandom: Kyou Kara Maou! Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Wolfram von Bielefeld/Shibuya Yuuri, Anissina von Karbelnikoff/Gwendal von Voltaire, Gisela von Christ/Adelbert von Grantz, Minor or Background Relationship(s) Characters: Shibuya Yuuri, Wolfram von Bielefeld, Conrart Weller, Gwendal von Voltaire, Gunter von Christ, Gisela von Christ, Yozak Gurrier, Greta (Kyou Kara Maou!), Anissina von Karbelnikoff, Adelbert von Grantz, Lord Gegenhuber "Hube" Griesela, Nicola (Kyou Kara Maou!), Cecilie von Spitzweg, Murata Ken Additional Tags: Violence, Hurt/Comfort, just hurt, None of this will make sense if you didn't read the previous works Series: Part 5 of The Return of the Demon King Summary:

I don’t know what happened here. These didn’t exist when I started editing.

Chapter 4: Prevarication

The quantity of things that were likely to have happened in this anime that never made it to the screen is an irrational number.