Y’ALL @astrolavas has done a beautiful commission for my fan fic!! I’m so hype for how it’s turned out the expressions are perfect, AND THIS SCENE IS IN THE STORY!
The full Catra vs Glimmer battle is out now and there’s a whole tournament arc of these fights, you can read here on ao3!
The second battle of Force Captains is complete! Adora vs Entrapta and the battle is heating up, who will rise on top? Can Adora keep up with the machines? Will Entrapta ever take this seriously? Find out on Ao3!
I remember right after the Superman movie come out everyone was making the “Clark saved Lex’s life by saving Krypto before Kara ever found out” jokes and its absolutely fantastic to me how supergirl 100% confirmed that to be true. Lex doesn’t even KNOW how lucky he is that he got the emotionally stable super
The popularity of ~~problematic~~ kinky erotica is similar to the prevalence of monarchies in speculative fiction.
Sure, it's fair to find it annoying but the people who read those novels generally don't want a monarchy in real life, enjoyment of it doesn't indicate that they're subconsciously anti-democratic and the popularity of that type of fiction isn't an indicator of some growing social ill.
But then occasionally you'll be reading an author with slowly dawning horror as you realise he genuinely believes in the divine right of kings
@hamletthedane’s tags:
#Vincent Van Gogh is crying somewhere in the after and I’m crying just thinking about that#you knew!! you saw the patterns!! there is a whole planet painted in the oils from your brush!!#TIL that the craft Juno went as close as 4000km from Jupiter’s weather surface#for context: the craft was closer to Jupiter than NYC is to LA#which is space terms is like. basically being on the planet#holy shit
☕️ + Rhun in TROP if you watched it because I think you’ll have a interesting take on it
send me ☕️+a topic for my take on it!
Hahaha I have indeed watched it and I’ve actually talked about the Gaudrim from TRoP here before, and yes I do indeed have a Take. Just a general note for the reader, please don’t take this as some sort of anti-show vendetta or wank or whatever, it really isn’t and I don’t even wank about adaptations on here, this is just my thoughts on this specific aspect, I have tagged the appropriate critical tags, and you can absolutely scroll if you’re not keen on reading it.
Anyway, the minute these riders came on screen, literally every single bit of pomp about the show’s progressive casting and representation flew right out of the window for me and turned it into unashamed diversity theatre. It was truly the moment that made me sit back and go “ah, this is an American production funded by the Amazon corporation”. Took me right out of the setting and plunged me into post 9/11 USA. Because I’m sorry just look at these fuckers. Forget Lawrence of Arabia, these are straight up elf-jihadis under the spell of Istari bin Laden… 😭
And one of the most interesting things I learned about these guys — the actors playing were actually a relatively diverse cast and clearly individualised… yet for some reason these anonymising masks were added in post-production.
What really got my goat about all this is the fact that it is SUCH a DEEPLY unnecessary portrayal, so clearly reactionary War on Terror propaganda, that the only way I can read it is as a deliberate decision, without even a shred of allowance for ignorance, because once again, the advertising for the show literally uses its own progressivism as a hook. Because there was literally no need to do this shit. Like you have to go out of your way to do something like this. Tolkien is notoriously not-good with race, and the Easterlings were the perfect example of that. The Jackson films aren’t great with race, and the Easterlings were the perfect example of that. TROP is self-admittedly aware that neither Tolkien nor the films are good with race and that the Easterlings are the perfect examples of that, decided to shoehorn them into the narrative as the ‘Gaudrim’ and… somehow made them worse.
I chat at length under the cut re: US exceptionalism, protestant ethnics, war on terror logic, desert-spaces, and why exactly this plotline was so galling to the point I had to rewatch those scenes like “???” and how it frankly just put a bad taste in my mouth for reasons way beyond Tolkien adaptations or lore… sorry this turned into an essay haha but it’s so you don’t think it’s just me blindly criticising something because I don’t enjoy it or interpret it differently.
So firstly imo what’s crucial here is understanding that the desert riders don't simply represent post-9/11 anxieties… their inclusion in that form outright reproduces the securitisation logic of the War on Terror. And this isn’t me forcing a progressive read of an adaptation that never claimed to be righting racial wrongs, because the entire Adar plotline with the orcs (as much as I am a bit iffy about certain aspects there) was proof that the writers are perfectly aware of how fantasy can think about populations constituted as "life to be protected" versus "life disposable to violence."
The first problem for me here is how the show constructs the riders as a collective rather than as individuals. Again, a clearly deliberate choice in a piece of media where half the characters are straight up OCs, many of them well fleshed out and elaborated upon. You have an entire plotline about Harfoots and Stoors with a full new cast of characters, and yet you never even see the riders’ faces, never hear their individual stories, never witness any internal differentiation or dissent within their ranks, only an instance of collective disagreement with their leader. Sure you can say ‘this might come later’ but looking at the narrative trajectory, I simply do not think so and even so, literally every other in-group has been depicted at length already.
And this depiction of racialised populations as a collectively violent mass, this coding through ‘swarm’ and ‘horde’ aesthetics has a very trackable genealogy in colonial discourse about non-Western peoples lacking individuation. Anonymised people of the global south, etc. The riders answer only to Blue bin Laden, are not positioned as a nation-state enemy to be negotiated with or defeated militarily in conventional terms… Gandalf doesn’t treat with them, he treats with the wizard. The riders are simply a band of terroristic agents in an area very clearly representing ‘the Orient’, who are willing to kill children over a payment dispute with their boss, a kind of illegible viral threat that requires ‘divine’ counterinsurgency in the form of Bombadil and Gandalf. The lack of faces under headscarves worn in a style blatantly similar to representations of Arabs + them literally wearing fucking skull masks (edited on them in post!!!) isn't just dehumanisation fyi… it's the visual articulation of an enemy that cannot be comprehended as human through the liberal USamerican 21st century frameworks of personhood the show deals in. Just look at the very name they’re given! Gaudrim, ostensibly from the Sindarin gaud (machinery, contrivance, according to TG)!!!
Anyway this is where Lawrence of Arabia / Gandalf of Rhûn comes in, the savior figure and an example of a particular technology of power at work… elven and Maiar magic is benevolent even when violent, operates in service of life (healing, protection, nurture). Meanwhile, the desert riders' power (through their connection to the dark Istar) is necropolitical from the jump, oriented towards pure destruction.
This isn't a morally neutral "corruption" narrative or a general black-and-white fantasy portrayal of good and evil… this takes the Oriental horde tendencies of the Easterlings from the source text and gives it a contemporary, worse, face. In a show where everyone from a random orc extra to literal Sauron is presented as redeemable or at least not ontologically ‘bad’, the elf jihadis are given no such humanity. Even their doubts are to do with honour and payment. And the thing is, for a production claiming a racial progressivism that sets it apart from its predecessors… this not a unique portrayal! This is the logic of War on Terror American exceptionalism!
As in, our violence is regrettable but necessary, protective, ultimately life-giving; their violence is pathological and must be eliminated. The show literally cannot imagine the Gaudrim as having legitimate grievances or complex motivations, their only disagreement with their leader being a basic argument over compensation and the loss of ‘honour’ for these former kings. They follow the dark wizard because *checks notes* they're just like that 🤪🤪🤪
Vulnerable to extremism and prone to fanaticism. Like, you know…
Ok moving in to spacial politics, because the desert is doing some heavy lifting lmao… and this isn’t much of a difference from book canon, in which there’s a general lack of information about the Easterlings at large, their general coding and desert setting being enough to fill in the blanks in a, well, Lawrence of Arabia sense. The adaptation takes this and dials it up to 2000, with perfect awareness of how exactly a desert setting functions in post 9/11 visual cultures, ie as an “everywhere war” space (Derek Gregory term iirc), where it’s simultaneously nowhere (outside civilisation, beyond the polis) and everywhere (the frontier or boundary requiring vigilance and intervention).
Contrast this with how Lindon, Númenor, Eregion and Khazad-dûm are shown in the adaptation: spaces of architecture, culture, history, law, hallmarks of sovereignty and civilisation… there was even that bit at the end of the second season where Elrond cries out about the burning of Celebrimbor’s books and centuries of research. Not so with the Gaudrim. These guys emerge from this vacantly violent desert space, existing in a state of exception from the other groups… the only culture and lifestyle seen in the desert belonging to the Stoors, who ostensibly leave the desert at the end. There's no room for understanding Gaudrim culture as legitimate or any proof of their position in a meaning-making system. Meanwhile, the elves' devotion to the Valar, the dwarves' relationship to Aulë, even the Harfoots' folk traditions, are all treated as enriching cultural practices.
And Gandalf’s journey was made fun of by critics as faux Lawrence of Arabia for a reason! Because it is! It’s a narrative of penetration into an ungovernable space, Bombadil’s oasis (don’t get me started oh my fucking god) and Gandalf’s presence the only instances of order/knowledge/‘proper’ magic as opposed to chaotic dark arts. This is textbook civilising mission stuff filtered through counterinsurgency logic!!!
Again, this isn’t Tolkien’s Orientalism reproduced uncritically, this is a deployment of those tropes in a specifically USAmerican sense. I think it was Rey Chow who coined the phrase “the protestant ethnic”, but it basically describes how liberal multiculturalism insists on cultural and ethnic differences being performed in legible, consumable ways. And so it is here! The "good" diversity in the show (Black elves, dwarves of colour etc) operates within palatable Anglo frameworks: they all wear clothes recognisable as ‘typical Western fantasy’ costumes with a Byzantine/Southern European influence, they speak RP English, all except the proto-Hobbits have Sindarin as a common tongue, they all participate in courtly politics (dwarves) or engage in traditional militaristic pursuits (Adar), value individual achievement but act in the interests of a legible cause. And the cause might be ‘evil’, eg with Sauron, but it’s comprehensible: they all are depicted as people who think of themselves as righteous. Their racial difference is epidermal, their cultural logic is functionally Western.
The riders, by contrast, are illegibly Other: their dress, their language, their social organisation all mark them as outside modernity. There’s no ‘fantasy robing’ here, they’re what ChatGPT would spit out if you asked it to make you a fantasy jihadi, and their motivations are ‘compensation’ and ‘put under a curse of the flesh’. And crucially, the show never does the work of making them legible as it does for its other populations, makes no effort to translate their difference into something even approaching complex subjectivity.
And so what this kind of simplistic racialised portrayal of these anonymised people who blindly ‘serve’ every evil that comes around does is naturalise ‘intervention’ as a permanent necessity in places like Rhûn and Harad… a position that the books carry uncritically into the Fourth Age. The Easterlings aren’t a one-time-threat to be defeated, they’re a population perpetually susceptible to radicalisation. Such a region doesn’t call for militaristic defeat but for population management, not the winning of a single war but the maintenance of indefinite security operations. The Westerly men and elves cannot just fix the ‘problem’ of Harad/Rhûn and leave, their presence is permanently necessary… from the First Age to the Fourth, world without end…
Sound familiar? 🤡🇺🇸🇦🇫
And let's be clear about what gets disappeared in this framework: any possibility of understanding the riders as responding to actual material conditions or histories of domination. Even in Tolkien's texts (and this is saying something!!!), there are at least hints that the Easterlings and Haradrim have been conquered, deceived, or coerced by Sauron… that their enmity toward the West might have explanations beyond simple evil. The Rings of Power forecloses this entirely. The Gaudrim riders appear racialised and threatening from the outset, with no backstory that might complicate the good guys/bad guys binary aside from a flesh-curse inflicted by a single character… just like all the other ‘simplistic’ reasons for the Easterlings’ evil across the legendarium, it is weak on its own and clear as day when viewed as a pattern. And I’m sorry but imo this is identical to how War on Terror discourse severed terrorism from any connection to US foreign policy / economic imperialism / support for authoritarian regimes.
The terrorists hate us for our freedom, not because of anything we did to them. The Haradrim serve darkness because they're vulnerable to evil, not because they have historical grievances.
Finally, there's the question of rehabilitation and redemption: who gets offered the possibility of real internal change? Galadriel can be consumed by vengeance and find her way back. Isildur can be an arrogant dickhead and learn humility. Sauron gets a whole seduction-and-corruption arc that grants him psychological depth. Adar and orc-rights are a major plotline. But the Gaudrim are either threats to be eliminated or victims to be saved, with no middle ground where they might be political actors making strategic decisions within constrained circumstances. This is the fundamental violence of how a ‘terrorist’ is constructed in the post 9/11 imagination, ie not as a political subject with agency, but as either monster or dupe, either evil mastermind or brainwashed footsoldier. Either way, not fully human in the way that grants political legitimacy.
What all this, and the muted reaction to it aside from the people who already talk about race in Tolkien, told me was just… how deeply the biopolitics of the War on Terror have been naturalised into our reception of a story, the way tons of people who praise the show for its surface level representation and hold themselves as somehow more antiracist than the rest for such a veneration, only acknowledge the Gaudrim’s depiction as a blip in otherwise progressive narrative… at best.
And this isn’t me saying that people who don’t let this portrayal impact their entire reading of the show’s progressiveness are bad people or aren’t media literate or anything like that. It’s actually more telling of how the binaries of civilisation versus barbarism / savable versus disposable populations / benevolent intervention versus illegitimate unruly resistance have just… become the default settings for how we imagine good versus evil. IMO it isn’t that the Gaudrim are a problematic representation in a single show… it’s that they're purposely symptomatic of an entire apparatus of racialisation that reconfigured how post 2001 USAmerican cultural production imagines difference itself. And slapping some diverse casting on the package doesn't interrupt that apparatus, it just makes it an easier pill to swallow.
miraculous ladybug au where everything is the same but adrien is a girl this time! i started this au back in may 2025
i was gonna dump everything i did about this au in one post but it was getting too long so i decided to divide it into chat noir and adrienne posts. this is the adrienne one
mad scientists who have a specific thing they want to achieve can be very interesting if the goal is interesting and not "lets make supersoldiers by injecting everything with purple goo" but i LOVE when they're just in it for the love of the game. they fuck around and find out until they die or don't. it's about the journey not the destination. especially when they cause immense damage along the way and it was never for any grand purpose, but just to see how far they can take it.
For the made-up fic title meme: "Ghosts and Circuses" please!
Okay, now that the meds are working and I don't feel like death I could think and, like, come up with things, in my MIND again! Beautiful! Admittedly this idea is a bit stunted as I never got to watch Ahsoka's live action so RIP me but it did jump to mind immediately lol
Either at the end of the Empire or just post Empire, some worlds both inside and outside the Empire have begun running hologram arena where anyone can test their mettle against the heroes of old. Including the Jedi killed in Order 66. Ahsoka is passing through one of these areas and wasn't planning to watch but she sees Luminara as the hologram currently up to be beaten. She pays the entry fee and heads inside, and she hates it. She hates everything about it. The commodification of the Jedi who died trying to save the galaxy, the braying for blood of the contestants, most of whom die.
She also can't look away because the Luminara hologram fights just like she would've. Not trying to kill the fighters for as long as possible before being forced to make the final blow. Ahsoka knows, logically, this is to draw each match out as long and bloody as possible. But she wants to know how the hell they could replicate it so well.
So she enters it the next day. Vibroblades and blasters, not her favorite, but kinda necessary as she's posing as not a Jedi. This isn't Empire space, but lightsabers would make it Empire space quickly. She walks in and is matched with Kit Fisto, it's sloppy and closer than she'd like, but Ahsoka eventually beats the hologram and gets the winning pot plus a bacta patch up. She signs up again the next day, this time it's Dooku. She doesn't even know where the hell they'd get the information to mock out Dooku. Again, closer than Ahsoka would like, but not the worst she's done.
She upgrades her gear with her winnings and sings up again the next day. This time she's put as the dead last fighter drawing a large crowd, including the owners. It's Anakin.
It's Anakin, it's Anakin, it's Anakin. It's a slog, it's brutal, she really doesn't want to kill him, even just a hologram. But she at least knows him well enough to know that they must have holocron recordings or other Jedi resources being used to make them. She wins and the owners invite her to a celebratory drink at their private box. They'd like to hire someone like her, all they can promise is that she'll be a shooting star, burning fast and bright.
She doesn't care, as long as she finally gets access to the backrooms areas, she doesn't care.
There's more battles in the arena, some spying and subterfuge as she tries to work out what they have and where it's stored. Eventually Ahsoka does find the source. It's battle droids. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of battle droids. Just the heads or chassis with the memory cores. They're trawling countless hours of battle footage each droid recorded, finding the patterns, and building their holograms from the ground up. All the time and effort she put in doesn't save anything from the Jedi Order. Just more ghosts that make her physically sick to see, like they could spring to life at any moment.
Ahsoka finds a way to sabotage the whole thing. It's not ever arena, even if they share information between them. Billions of battle droids were made and deployed, this is a drop in the bucket. But now she knows. The droids are still reliving the clone wars, and in a way, so is every Jedi projected up top. She pulls the plug and destroys it.
I am tempted to have her then go and kill the owners too, but I think she'd only want to. Instead she'd let their ruined miniature empire collapse under them. They were employing hundreds to run the damn thing, and a good chunk of them are violent and desperate people who want the money they were promised. Money the house can no longer fleece off those coming to bet on the game, buy over priced food and drink, and even walk away with tacky merchandise. It's all gone.
Ahsoka vanishes back into space, she never goes back, but within a week someone's finally made the connection to who she is.
The Ghost of Jedi Commander Ahsoka Tano came for revenge, so the stories go.
Catra Brainrot Central @phosphoruskim - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
