sometimes people ask how the cat in this post is doing, almost a decade later! you are very sweet to ask. she is Still At It
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if i look back, i am lost

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trying on a metaphor

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@nvmfairy
sometimes people ask how the cat in this post is doing, almost a decade later! you are very sweet to ask. she is Still At It
@presidentofthehotgirlclub not a kitty video, but i think you'll like this if you haven't seen it already
"There are no monsters in the sea, only the ones we make up in our own heads" Bless you, ma'am.
It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point.
And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again.
And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil.
“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”
So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.
+1 You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest - the job of bearing witness to what happened - and the duty to finish and protect his writings? Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school - the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916. My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot. And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor. Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.
Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever - a particularly nasty disease carried by lice - and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor - as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.
TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.
I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.
“I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way”
well thank fuck for that
People are confused by the fact that the villains are unquestionably villainous.
What’s happened is that they’ve mistaken a specific brand of subversive storytelling for the only way to tell a morally complex story. The fact that subversion is relative to what you’re talking about has gotten muddied, because people have gone and labelled a certain plot type (which is actually a new fantasy staple in and of itself) as the ‘grey’ or ‘morally complex’ storyline.
This type of storyline is, of course, the one where the distinctions between heroes and villains are deliberately blurred. While there is definitely room to do things like ‘question the accuracy of the heroes’ perception of orcs’ in LotR, it’s also very clear that the canon narrative isn’t aiming for that. We know who the heroes are and we know who the villains are, and apart from some stray moments of self-reflection or betrayal, this is never really brought into question.
People have grown accustomed to seeing only one kind of thing as ‘complex’, which has, ironically, over-simplified a lot of narrative approaches in speculative fiction and fantasy. The prevailing attitude right now is that you can’t call your story nuanced if you know who your bad guys are.
@nvmfairy is that how your playthrough is going? :D
Hahaha yes :D
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@todaysbird
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Nick Offerman Answers the Web’s Most Searched Questions –WIRED, 2020
horror people. please reblog this with something that would get your “horror card” revoked. could be a director/film/actor you don’t like, or something you haven’t seen or whatnot
via ErinInTheMorn | Erin Reed Substack | House Bill 0009
sorry this tweet is just Very Good and im glad
POV: your sim can break the fourth wall but still doesn’t understand
POV: your sim
can break the fourth wall but still
doesn’t understand
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Hector Barbossa & Elizabeth Swann | Parallels & Developments
#These two had such an impact on each other–in a weird way it’s Platonic!Hades and Persephone #where she learns to become a better king of the dark sea and dead men than he ever could and he comes to almost admire her for it. #Just… y'all have been sleeping on this relationship. #Elizabeth didn’t retain shit from Jack Sparrow–Will did. She learned from Barbossa. (via @theimpossiblescheme)
THIS. Not only is Barbossa far more of a Proper (Cinematic) Pirate than Jack (with the outgrown Errol Flynn hair to prove it!), but he absolutely plays the role of Hades in Curse of the Black Pearl.
While Elizabeth first boards the Black Pearl (here functioning as both Hades’ chariot and Charon’s ferry) more or less voluntarily, Barbossa/Hades does indeed kidnap her and take her to the “land of the dead”—the Isla de Muerta. The Black Pearl also serves as a kind of limbo, holding men halfway between death and life. Much like Pluto of old, CotBP!Barbossa is strongly associated with both wealth and death, even more so than the other pirates. When they get to the “Underworld”, we see that the cursed crew members require a blood sacrifice to regain (permanent) corporeality, paralleling the shades Odysseus encounters who require blood to regain the ability to speak (Odyssey 11.24-50).
By the time At World’s End rolls around, Elizabeth has begun to catch up to Barbossa in terms of piracy and command. She visits another, more literal Underworld at Barbossa’s side; he knows the way, and she has more than learned from her previous experiences. It was Elizabeth thinking more piratically—thinking like Barbossa—that made the trip to the Locker necessary, after all.
In the end, she eclipses Barbossa in power and is crowned King, with her own beloved ferrying souls between worlds as she sails the seven seas. Like Persephone, Elizabeth straddles worlds and holds power in both, and it was Barbossa/Hades who first helped her get there.
(Anyway, this series owns my entire ass, follow for more irregularly scheduled Pirates content and hmu if you want a longer essay on how the Locker journey in AWE is a classical katabasis narrative with a sweet twist on Orpheus’ in particular. Also Barbossa quotes the Aeneid.)
Some lovely tags submitted to me by OP/@charlesdances:
#and I believe in a way Elizabeth makes Hector realize that it is possible for pirates to be masters of their own fate again #and had no problem in the end after her speech that the ‘maid’ from long ago #is now his king #and now he’s this amalgamation of weird mentor/uncle/man she asked to marry her and the love of her life #and i love how she KNOWS that he’s the only one brave/insane enough to guide them through that maelstrom #and when he responds with gusto she gives this GREAT BIG SMILE #as if to say ‘THERE’S the one and only pirate I know. There’s Captain Hector Barbossa.’
Elizabeth and Barbossa’s relationship is so underrated, I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen any of it put into words. The Hades/Persephone parallel is one I haven’t seen before but hoboy am I here for it.
I’ll blame a lot of factors for why people don’t really seem to understand the dynamics of these four characters. First of all, Jack is not the protagonist (the failing of OST is, in my opinion, that they forgot this little detail). Will and Elizabeth are the protagonists. Jack and Barbossa are secondary supporting characters, whose purpose in the plot is to drive the development of those two. Their influences on Will and Elizabeth are very specific. And when you analyze the relationships, you definitely see a very distinct pairing up. Will and Jack, Elizabeth and Barbossa.
Will needed Jack, because Will needed to learn how to put himself first sometimes, needed to learn to see things from more than one angle and that things aren’t as black and white as they seem. Will needed to see someone strange and confident and dangerous who could inexplicably do good things, who had a good heart (and, originally, Jack absolutely did; the fourth and fifth movies absolutely decimated this aspect of his character, and I will die mad about it) but was still able to be a little selfish. Because Will? Will had no concept of selfishness. Will was perfectly ready to sit and pine over Elizabeth for the rest of his life, to let a lazy, sloppy drunk take credit for all his hard work, to fade into the background and let life happen around him. That was how things were supposed to be. That was how the world worked. Black and white. Right and wrong. At least once more, Miss Swann, as always. I practice three hours a day so that when I meet a pirate, I can kill it. My father was a good man. Will is a good man, but he needs to learn to be a bit of a pirate. A bit selfish. A bit dangerous. And in the end, Will is cursed to captain the Dutchman, a twisted take on the immortality Jack has sought. His companions are dead men, his ship is a ghost. He is a legend. So, in a way, he surpasses Jack.
Elizabeth, though? Elizabeth had no need for lessons on shades of grey. Elizabeth likes pirate stories. Elizabeth loves the blacksmith’s apprentice, and flirts openly with him in front of her own father. Elizabeth is constrained, not by her desires, but by her station, by expectations. By love for her father, because it’s obvious in the film that her desire to please him is out of love, not obligation. What Elizabeth needs is to be shown how to take what you want. How to choose the rules you wish to follow, and hang the rest. She’s a natural leader, born into a world where no one would ever let her lead. Jack is a lot of things, but a leader, he is not. He inspires no loyalty, except in the form of debts to be paid. He keeps secrets from his crew, tells them nothing, trusts no one, and in return no one trusts him. Barbossa, meanwhile, was able to win over all but one member of Jack’s own crew and get them to turn on him. Barbossa had these men follow him for ten years, trusting that in the end, he would save them. Barbossa inspires confidence. He’s honest with his men, and honestly no crueler than is necessary to keep pirates in line. This is why Elizabeth is the King, because she respected Barbossa, watched him, learned from him. And, yes, surpassed him.
There’s something to be said, I think, for the fact that in the end, Will and Elizabeth both matched the two pirates, and then went beyond what they’d both accomplished.
@blackheartedbrigand
@anklesalltheway OMG thanks for the tag! These posts are amazing. And I can’t wait to explore this relationship with you <3 I should have a post for you soon!
one day I woke up and realised all the waiting and yearning was actually me living my life and it’s happening right now and it’s still good even if it’s not perfect and there is no moment when all your dreams get fulfilled and everything makes sense. like… this is it. this is life. you’ll waste away your youth waiting for some imagined future if you don’t love life for what it is now and make the most of it
remember that sasuke figurine that could hold up like literally fricking anythign
And my personal favorite
ARE YOU KIDDING ME
This is one of my favorite posts on this goddamn site.