More Alliteration, Please

Silmarillion & several book series you've never heard of (Tortall | Queen's Thief | Goblin Emperor & Cemeteries of Amalo | Heralds of Valdemar | etc) Alliteration is my favorite poetic device

[nisiedrawsstuff]

Queens of Númenor

[rona-is-reading]

“I really need this break, I’m sure this visit home will be uneventful”

Vanyel I have some bad news for you regarding how we as readers have exited our time skip to this exact moment

[balrogballs]

CELEBRÍAN: FOURTH AGE AMAN

latest finished commission piece, featuring Her™️. my everything™️. my Girl™️. waiting for her sad wet cat on the beach, dripping with diamonds. a woman who has spent 500 years cosying up to all the MILFs in valinor. as she fucking should. also featuring a little ear-tip prosthetic 🥰

commission deets etc

[catilinas]

THIS is shrimpteresting because like. be thingol. you don’t know what an orc is yet. see orcs. think, maybe it’s those other elves? think, probably it’s fine to attack them with weapons. this is followed quite soon by ‘the sindar were well armed, and they drove off all the creatures of evil’ so like. they did do that. me when kin (?) slaying (!) is literally ok i guess

[thetiredprometheus]

Little Stars

[fantasiavii]

One thing I love about Murderbot that I don’t see talked about much is how it literally translates everything it hears. I think it’s easiest to notice with swears. This is most obvious in Fugitive Telemetry with the crew of the Lalow. They say things like “that picker” and “penis move” and “pussing corporates,” some of which confuse even the Preservation humans. But it does it all the time.

In System Collapse, Tarik says “motherless” (as opposed to something like motherfucking) and the BE corporates say things like “lame-skulled” and while you could think those are just futuristic insults as a result of linguistic drift (which they could also be), I think they’re just literal translations. It becomes more noticeable when you see how religious terms are rendered: “oh high one! Oh deity!” Which is like…sure. They could literally be saying that. But imo it makes more sense if MB is translating something they’re saying in another language.*

I think the most notable case of this is when Thiago calls Amena “my daughter.” On first read I literally thought it was just a Preservation thing but then I realized it made a lot more sense to me (a 21st century American) if he was saying something like mija but MB was just literally translating it into its archive bc that’s how it processes language.

This is also the reason for Amena’s use of Second Mom and Third Mom. It sounds kind of clunky in English but Chinese does a similar thing which sounds perfectly natural in that language (e.g. da-ge, er-ge, san-ge for first/oldest brother, second (oldest) brother, and third (oldest) brother).

Anyway! It’s a fun little detail I really enjoy about MB. There are definitely way more examples but I didn’t have time to track them all down.

*Don’t ask me which languages. Linguistic drift ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[prokopetz]

The one that most obviously struck me as signposting this convention is Murderbot's constant use of the set phrase "humans and augmented humans". That's clunky as hell at face value, but it makes a lot of sense if interpreted as a diegetic translation artifact, with "augmented humans" being a literal translation of some word in whatever language Murderbot is "really" speaking which has no snappy English equivalent.

[lukasspookas]

vanyel ashkevron fanart

[hhimring]

Seamstress to the King

@tolkiengenweek

This is for Day Three; it can be both for Gray Spaces and Fealty.

Inzilmith would never have ended up on Elendil's ship except for her entanglement with a relative of Elendil's executed by Sauron. But in the new Kingdom of Arnor, some rules are entirely rewritten.

‘You cannot be serious,’ said Inzilmith. She had never got used to finding herself on the fringes of the court of Arnor, such as it was. She supposed Elendil’s family regarded her as charity case inherited from their deceased relative, which evoked mixed feelings… ‘My lord, you seem to have forgotten that I am a seamstress from the gutters of Armenelos! You cannot ask me to make your coronation robes.’ ‘The gutters of Armenelos no longer exist, no more than Romenna’ said Elendil. ‘You forget I have seen your work. You deserved better then. I would choose nobody else, now.’

Originally written for an Insta-drabbling session on the SWG Discord; previously only posted under lock.

[toomuchlemons-deactivated202007]

Quicky Idril - Tuor - Voronwe Requested by @sharpglance

Okay the last from request ^^

[leonardcohenofficial]

(1852) Frederick Douglass, "What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July" •

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to address the citizens of his hometown, Rochester, New York. Whatever the expectations of h

yearly required reading

[ego-sum-arbor]

Terrible to have a blorbo whose name is a spoiler

[outofangband]

Thinking about elves and color.

Elves being able to see spectrums of color that humans cannot. Shapes in the dark, the colors of movement, of water, of different forms of light.

Elves who can primarily see at night or in the depths of a forest, who experience disorientation in bright or open spaces.

Elven languages canonically have many roots related to green. I imagine some languages with hundreds of words for green, the green of light through trees in the morning, of frail ferns unfurling in the dawn of spring, of the metallic greens of raven’s or starling’s feathers, of a sickly pallor or dusty lichens.

Forms of color blindness that don’t exist among humans or are more common among elves; inability to name or distinguish colors, only seeing shades of grey, temporary color blindness arising from extreme stress or sensory deprivation.

Synesthesia in general is more common among elves and many forms involve color; smells or tastes as color, sound as color, the music of the world, in the water, felt as color. Pain or grief as color. Communicating color through ósanwë.

I just really enjoy playing with elven senses and I think there’s so many possibilities here

[itsthatalice]

Beren saying "even now a silmaril is in my hand", then showing off his empty stump, might be the best play in the whole mythology. Absolute king shit

[rinthecap]

Day in the life of a blacksmith 😎

[muppetebbtide]

csevet gets away with being crazy bc he's so sweetie but his story arc within tge is pure bedlam, he just does it so elegantly and politely it glosses over. courier agreed to be imperial secretary after one vague and polite insinuation from the emperor in that direction, despite possibly not having learned to read until he was a teenager (and the circumstances within which he was sent into maia's service are HIGHLY questionable, it's possible csevet wilfully interpreted chavar's wording to get the outcome he wanted). he got offended when maia insinuated, not that he would covertly read a letter of imperial business entrusted to him, but that he wouldn't immaculately reseal it if he had done such a thing. about fifty pages later he is hustled into admitting he did that exact thing with the first letter he ever gave to maia. and he immaculately resealed it. he is the only person to land a punch on anyone on-page, and he did it in front of like half the government. he insinuated the emperor was insane, to his face, then promptly prostrated himself on the floor outside. in like, the gravel. he loudly guilt tripped priests in a holy building and wasn't sorry about it even a bit. he personally influenced and drove several state matters that rightly should not have really been up to him, including the emperor's marriage and the investigation of the assassination of the previous one. he then proceeded to pick an empress and present the proposal to the corazhas as if that was the emperor's opinion, even though maia had no opinion in the slightest. one can make a textual argument suggesting he might have sliiiightly lied to the emperor about a few things, including his age, or at least obfuscated. his only apparent objection to becoming lord chancellor was said nebulous age. he still somehow has time to read ethuverazhin jane austen. he compared his commitment to his role to celehar's Actual For Real Religious Calling. katherine addison please let me look in his brain just once it HAS to be absolute scenes in there

[crocordile]

young attolia

[nycterisg]

okay but how overwhelming it must be for an ainu to have a body: to have existed, spaceless and timeless, without any cognition of limits or confines, and then suddenly to craft a finite cage of flesh; to act upon matter, through matter. The body is action; the body is dead weight. The body is knowledge, it is to know, to experience the world through touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste. The body is ignorance, perception bound by the senses. The body is horror. The body is pleasure. I bet it's both beguiling and frightening at first, and that it never quite ceases to feel alien.