normal about elves

soleil/anárien ✵ they/she ✵ 28 ✵ autistic lesbian ✵ artist ✵ writer ✵ cosplayer ✵ ludomusicologist ✵ pokémon ✵ zelda ✵ fire emblem ✵ tolkien ✵ final fantasy ✵ bg3 mature content will be present and tagged art blog | ao3 | ig | bsky

[solmarillion]

💎HOUSE OF THE MÍRDAIN💎

✵ A Silmarillion Discord server ✵

❝For the gates of Ost-in-Edhil will always be open.❞

Mae govannen, mellyn nîn! This is an LGBTQ+ friendly server for fans of the Silmarillion. Share your love for Tolkien in a comforting community of creatives & friends.

Invite is in the replies. This is a ship-and-let-ship space. Please read the rules before joining.

[mousidy]

the state does not need to assign you a sex, nor does it need to keep inalterable record of it btw

[mousidy]

a very interesting terf objection to this one boils down to "but how would the state know who to protect?" because it speaks to the incredible privilege of being in a class the state actually ever remotely wants to protect. most oppressed groups do not want the state to have a registry of them, lol

[mousidy]

the patriarchy has done a great job convincing white cisgender women that it's in their best interests to maintain it

[vacuously-true]

Researchers can do studies that track disparate impacts across genders just fine without the government storing your assigned sex as part of your legal identity. They do this with race and orientation and disability and so on just fine.

A census can understand population level trends just fine without storing your assigned sex as part of your legal identity. They can ask for this information in the census. The census tracking population level data is not the same as your assigned sex being permanently part of your legal identity. (At least, the way my country does a census.)

Your doctor can know your anatomy by you communicating it to them if/when it is relevant. There is never a time when they might need to know something that could only be conveyed by your assigned sex being officially relayed to them via government documentation. You can just use your words. The same way you tell your doctor any other part of your medical history.

People respond to "the government doesn't need to store your assigned sex as part of your legal identity" as if they are hearing "no one should ever acknowledge gender or sex at all" but that's not what's being said.

Your birth certificate conveys important legal information about you. Your name, as a designation. Your parents, as they have a legal obligation to you. Your place of birth, as that place has a legal obligation to you. Date and time of birth, since age is important for application of some laws.

And sex. That's on there too. But what is the legal relevance? What laws is the government going to apply to you differently based on what sex is on your birth certificate? I can only think of one thing my government really uses that for, and that is to determine who has to sign up for the draft. And guess what, fuck that shit anyway. The government also used to use this to decide who is allowed to marry who. They don't do that anymore. For now.

There is literally no reason my assigned sex needs to be part of my legal identity. My government is not using that for anything (important). It doesn't matter. If the gender markers on everyone's IDs vanished tomorrow nothing (except maybe the draft) would be significantly negatively affected. Data collection for research could continue as usual since researchers usually have people self report these characteristics rather than checking their government IDs. My doctors would still know which organs I have and if they forgot, I could tell them. I don't want anything to be part of my legal identity that doesn't have to be.

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[depsidase]

[barkingbarghest]

Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.  Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.  Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.   Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”  “It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.  

[ambarto]

So a while ago I made up an hypothetical Quenya word for genderfluid, making “sirëanassë”, and I thought mm, why not try making up a few more Quenya gender words? So here’s some attempts.

Gender - I used “nassë” for this since that’s the closest word I could find. It roughly means “true nature” which is close enough to the concept of identity, but if anyone else has better guesses I’d love to hear them. I’ll be using it for this post

Nonbinary / Genderqueer - one possibility is using “exa”, “other”, and build “exanassë”, or “different nature”. Or, other idea, we could draw a parallel to the Valar and Maiar, who appear male or female but are pretty much stated to be “other”. “Aina” is a word relating to “Ainur” which means “holy” or “divine”, it could be possible to make “ainanassë”, to describe that someone’s nature is similar to that of the Ainur.

These two words both have interesting possibilities. First of all, while for us nonbinary refers to any gender that is not always and entirely male or female, what could count as an Ainur’s gender? Ainanassë could refer only to people who are not at all male or female, in which case, it excludes for example male/female bigender or genderfluid. Or ainanassë could be anyone who isn’t just male or female all the time, becoming close to the umbrella term nonbinary or genderqueer. Or it could also refer to anyone whose gender identity isn’t “tied” by their physical body, in which case it becomes an umbrella for all trans people, and maybe exanassë could be considered a subsection of ainanassë.

The use of ainanassë, that connects nonbinary people to the Ainur, would imply a society where nonbinary people are seen as religious figures and possibly revered. On the other hand, exanassë seems more apt for a society where nonbinary people have no particular role, as well as a word that could be used in a more binarist society.

There are also other implications. Say ainanassë was the preferred term in Valinor, what of the Noldor Exiles? If their whole thing is rebelling against the Valar, then exanassë could be a word coined by Noldor who wanted to cut off their connection to the Valar at all, detaching their gender from the concept of divine. In this case, the role of nonbinary people within society may be vastly different between Valinorean Elves and Exilic Noldor.

Nonbinary person - “nassë” can also mean “person” and could be used as a gender neutral option. An alternative can be shortening the word to “nas”, which sounds more similar to nér and nís. Maybe “nás”, to keep in line with how the other two words have long vowels.

Transgender - we said before ainanassë could work as an umbrella term for all trans people. Another option might be “lethanassë”, or “free nature”, which may refer to a trans person’s identity being unbound by the expectation posed by their body.

Using the first term, a trans man could be called “ainanér” and a trans woman “ainanís”. With the second, we have instead “lethanér” and “lethanís”

By using ainanassë as umbrella term for transgender, we may have then that all transgender people could be considered tied to the divine. Looking again at the Exilic Noldor, lethanassë may become the preferred word used in Beleriand, with the added bonus that in this case “free” would refer to freedom from the expectation of being tied to the Valar as well.

Bigender - combining “nassë” and “atta”, meaning “two”, we can get “attanassë”

Polygender - the prefix “li-” or “lin-” can stand for “many” in compound words. This can become “linnassë”

Agender - the prefix “ú-” can stand for no or without, so agender becomes “únassë”

Demigender - we could use “per-” for “demi”, and demigender can become “pernassë”

A demiman can be “pernér”, a demiwoman can be “pernís”, and a deminonbinary person “pernás”

That’s what I have for now and also feel free to give your opinions on which words you like better for nonbinary and trans because I honestly can’t decide

[natnormalatall]

roald dahl was antisemitic and misogynistic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife (and was racist as well as antisemitic!). hp lovecraft was racist as fuck. anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think they bleed into the books so uh keep an eye out for that

the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people

[agnes-nielsens]

you're telling me this hole is significant to the plot?

[solmarillion]

"Just why Mr. Frodo was selling his beautiful hole was even more debatable than the price."

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

[weevilwizard]

so we all agree that lord of the rings is a musical

[weevilwizard]

you. you get it

[balrogballs]

"and friendship/love/whatever can certainly be a driver, but i don’t think it’s the driver." but the only reason we are canonically given is that their ancient friendship stung his heart. saying "it's not the main driver" is directly going against canon, when it's all we know. also fingon's actions/reactions during the rescue seem mostly personal/emotional rather than political. eg being willing to kill maedhros to end his suffering is understable from a personal, love-inspired POV, but it wouldn't be politically advantagous for fingon to kill feanor's oldest son. once that got out (even if fingon managed to keep that a secret, sauron or morgoth would certainly know and spread that information around to sow division), the divide between noldor factions would only grow worse or erupt into outright hostility/fighting.

ok listen i am not going to sit here and argue whether or not ‘russingon’ is canon because i feel like there are much better uses of everyone’s time and secondly any time someone says anything about this pairing they get an inbox essay, which i find particularly irritating because i don’t even not-ship them, i enjoy the pair, pls stop being annoying.

in my post i literally said that the ancient friendship is a driver. i just said it’s overemphasised into being the only driver because the majority of interpretations of the thangorodrim rescue is done through shipper goggles. i didn’t say fingon is a psychopath who hates maedhros and is doing everything for callous political reasons. of course he’d have a reaction to seeing his friend/lover/what not strung up like that in torment. of course in that moment he would feel inclined to shoot him like he was begging, because that was an act of mercy and fingon is, while mired in a wider political project, not a particularly cruel person at any point! there being political reasonings for a personal act does not mean that personal feelings are kept out of it. that is what makes the pairing interesting! they’re not romeo and juliet, they’re two high ranking royals at the tip of the great noldor feudalism cock, in a text that is written as a history, and that means almost every action these characters take are political actions, regardless of personal motivations. stories are not split into ‘political’ and ‘apolitical’ — the rescue having political aspects to it doesn’t mean that there are no personal feelings involved.

as for your point about ancient friendship being the only canonical reasoning you get, the silmarillion is a text pretty sparse in its character motivations, and interpreting a text doesn’t mean just looking at what is directly said but what is implied by both the narrative and the environment it operates in. an ancient friendship with the reigning monarch is a political advantage to the newly arrived noldor. i am not saying that the friendship did not exist or that it played no role in the rescue, it clearly did. i am saying that the rescue can pretty easily be seen to have a myriad of favourable political outcomes, and that those are ignored in favour of focusing only on some great romantic scene starring two individuals that has no other motivations or repercussions for the wider political stage.

and i think viewing fingon as a pining loverboy and nothing but a pining loverboy is a reductionist diminishment of his character for the purposes of shoving both him and maedhros into a pining-and-pined-for trope. finally, please remember the question i was answering is one about my opinions on something. this is how i interpret it and why. i am not saying that people viewing russingon as a great romantic saga between individuals are reprehensible, i am saying it’s not my jam and that i think both characters are too flattened in that lens to appeal to me.

[melestasflight]

Besties, I'm a die-hard Russingon shipper and love a good 'ol romance like the next girlie, but let it be clear: Maedhros' rescue from Thangorodrim is not some princess saved from a dragon castle but an extremely layered decision that is motivated politically first and foremost, while certainly not free of personal complexities.

Fingon’s heroic act and why later he gets proclaimed "of all the children of Finwë he is justly most renowned", is due to his contribution to preventing civil war among the Noldor.

The Silmarillion is explicit about the tensions at Mithrim:

No love was there in the hearts of those that followed Fingolfin for the House of Fëanor, for the agony of those that endured the crossing of the Ice had been great, and Fingolfin held the sons the accomplices of their father. Then there was peril of strife between the hosts

Years later, when Fingon decides to look for Maedhros, the conflict between the hosts comes back as a primary reason behind his decision:

Then Fingon the valiant, son of Fingolfin, resolved to heal the feud that divided the Noldor, before their Enemy should be ready for war

Fingon is not some love-stricken fool who runs after his boyfriend the moment he steps foot in Beleriand, but a leader and a lord who has already lost people across an icy wasteland and is tasked with ensuring the remainder is not sacrificed to civil war.

Three entire years pass between the arrival of Fingolfin’s host at Mitrhim (FA 2) to Fingon’s rescue mission (FA 5). In some versions, this timeline gets stretched to five years.

Yes, "their ancient friendship stung his heart", certainly, but divorcing that element from the rest of the factors driving Fingon to Thangorodrim is frankly a disservice to his character, and ignorance of the long history of division among the Noldor that shapes the politics of Beleriand throughout the first age.

You are of course free to construct an AU that suits your tastes.

[videntefernandez]

never kill yourself, the fanfic might post a new chapter any time

[cinemairon]

Fingon and Maedhros Dawn

Motivated by @lotrart 's support to my older works of them, I just made something new.

The pose is partly inspired by some CD (idk which is it, I just liked the pose but I altered it a bit).

[tobermoriansass]

are there any mothers in the silm you hc as bad mothers?

🥲🥲ok so not to be deeply insufferable, but i want to problematise the concept of a "bad mother" first before i answer this -

firstly i believe that the concept of a "bad" parent - where bad holds the emotional/moral valence of ethically bad - is one that really should be restricted to parents who outright fail their children in ways that they absolutely have agency over. textually, there are exactly four silm characters this holds true for & they are all fathers - finwe (who consistently shows favouritism to feanor), feanor (who YES FINE he just "requests" his sons to hold true to their oath, even knowing that morgoth can never be defeated), thingol (who straight up locks up his daughter to forbid her from marrying) and eol (who exerts undue if not abusive control over what his son is and is not allowed to do, to the point of attempting to kill him in a last ditch attempt at control). we simply do not have this kind of information about the women to make any inferences about who they were as mothers. (turgon and curufin are edge cases to me in that you could headcanon them as either good or bad dads depending on how you choose to read the textual evidence that exists)

secondly, i think that "bad" as in, "not very good at" exists on a separate axis that does not have any ethical/moral valence - parenthood is an imperfect art, it exists in fraught social contexts with fraught social norms that most people are failing at, people are people and are going to fit imperfectly together in ways that generate friction, or result in people going unseen, which results in failures, including parents failing their children. this is personally what i am super interested in, in terms of mothers in the silm text, because i think there are a lot of possible readings here.

thirdly, there is also "bad" as in "character believes they have failed at this", while they have outwardly done their best - this again bears no moral/ethical valence, but is an attempt to engage with the inner landscape/feelings a mother might have in relation to her child. it may not even be related to what really happened, but like, that is also people - and women, especially, end up with distorted agency where they carry the blame for things that were not their responsibility while at the same time being in low agency situations (and sometimes feeling powerless)

fourthly, there is also "bad" as in "society thinks this is bad", which again i believe has zero moral/ethical valence and has everything to do with the demands and ideas that society holds about how mothers should behave i.e. as endless, selfless vessels of submissive devotion to their children.

fifthly, with this definition in mind, i actually enjoy imagining nearly all the silm characters who are parents as "bad" as in falling into the last three categories, and a lot of the mothers, specifically, as failing at "motherhood" as in the social construct of what motherhood is (especially in a deeply cisheterosexual patriarchal society with a strong streak of conservative gender complementarianism viz. LaCE & details in NoME), rather than failing in objective terms, and therefore trying to reckon with their own relationship with motherhood and their children as a result

TL;DR: I BELIEVE YOU CAN MAKE A CASE FOR NEARLY ALL THE WOMEN IN THE SILM BEING ''''''''''''''''''''''''''BAD'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' MOTHERS

bearing that in mind, some thoughts under the cut -

Miriel - bad as in both "not very good at" but also bad as in "society thinks this is bad", because I genuinely believe that she didn't want to have kids, that she was devoted to her art, but that in Valinor as a queen, she increasingly came under pressure from both Finwe and her social world, to have children (which seems to have symbolised bliss and happiness and prosperity). In a land where there is no divorce and her husband was king of the Noldor, so separating from him would have Not Looked Great (to say the least), and where Finwe clearly wanted more kids, and where Miriel was struggling to be a mom to Feanor, death seems to have been the best way out for all involved. I think its interesting that when she returns to life its for her craft. She doesn't seem to have any interest in reconnecting with family. So, I believe if she had lived, she would have been an ambivalent parent, probably vacillating between loving Feanor and being distant in a way that suggested tiredness.

Melian - bad as in "thinks she failed at it" and also "not very good at", because I think its fascinating that for all that she intervenes on Luthien's behalf in telling Thingol that he can't actually change any of the unfolding of this story with Beren, she really doesn't do much to stop her husband from locking Luthien up, or even to intervene on her daughter's behalf and help her in any of the texts. She seems textually to be a wife first and mother second in ways that ultimately leaves Luthien pretty isolated.

Nerdanel - bad as in "thinks she failed at it" and "society thinks she's bad" because she walked away from her husband and sons when they chose to go into exile in Formenos, and in a way that would very much have been perceived as a snub (i.e. going to live with Indis). But also failed at in that if her sons were involved in the Kinslaying at Alqualonde, something must have grown in them that would have made them okay with drawing swords on other Elves, or thinking that they had a right/entitlement to those ships - and I think she spends a long time thinking about the ways in which she actually failed to spot that growing and nip it in the bud, or else might have seen growing and thought nothing truly bad could come of it. Its not her fault, bc agency ultimately lies with her son, but its also the sort of human thing I think mothers worry about.

I think Earwen and Anaire both have/carry similar feelings/burdens about their children - especially Earwen, who has to consider why her kids would betray her own kin and decide to join with Kinslayers, instead of returning back to her. I think when Finrod returns, she goes back and forth between loving him and being furious/cold at him for that particular betrayal and so their relationship as it is grows pretty uncertain and fraught. Earwen also named her daughter Nerwen i.e. man-maiden, which is an interesting sort of name to give your kid in Gender Essentialist Paradise (and which I think is interesting that Galadriel rejects both her parents' names in favour of one that grants her more personhood / individuality)*

I don't think Aredhel was a great mom as in "not very good at" for reasons I outlined in this much longer meta, but which amount to "Maeglin got his complex about Noldor superiority from somewhere and that ugliness almost certainly came from his Noldo parent". I don't actually think she was ambivalent about Maeglin as a child as some people do think. I think she loved him a lot (I mean, she threw herself in front of a javelin to save him), but I do think she did have a self-absorbed streak evinced much earlier in the text that the abusive nature of her marriage turned from flaw into means of self-preservation - but which also became a flaw in the way she associates the Noldor with greatness, freedom and these high ideals (which we know is not true!) and which also does affect/shape the way that Maeglin thinks of himself and rejects his Sindar background.

Luthien is an interesting mom to me on a lot of levels (and hear me out on this) because like, on the one hand the text seems to imply that she is actively estranged from Doriath & her parents (VERY understandable considering everyone thought it was fine and okay to lock her up in a tree for the crime of being in love with a Man - that too a Man of royal lineage, so not just a nobody). on the other hand, Dior is raised as / or at least treated as Thingol's heir. on the one hand, it could reflect that she let Dior be his own person in ways that her parents refused her, including letting Dior make decisions that she might have disagreed with. on the other hand, Dior was in his thirties at the time of his death & married Nimloth at 27, so he must have been at Doriath before, including in his youth - did Luthien have any say in this? Did she defer to Beren (who seems to be the one retains ties to Doriath)? I think there's interesting scope to explore "bad" as in "ambivalent" or as in, allows some level of the social pressures & compulsions of Doriath land on her otherwise young son (in Elvish terms, tho maybe not Mannish). I personally headcanon her as being on the more ambivalent end - both wanting to let Dior be his own person, but in doing so letting Dior fall to the institution & court that ultimately would have crushed her into acceptable Elven femininity if she hadn't escaped. I think its possible she also felt some level of guilt about it and some level of guilt that she's bequeathing the Silmaril to him, when she knows or guesses the violence it will bring - but which also symbolises the intense sacrifices both Beren and she made in order for them both to be together, in the face of societal persecution, but which also symbolises the moment where her own father treats her like an object. I also think about whether or not Dior resents the fact that they live away from Doriath and its greatness, or has fraught feelings about it and whether that emerges in relation to Luthien. IDK how to explain it exactly, but it has that whiff of liberal parents whose kids turn edgelord conservative because that's their form of rebellion, with all the complex feelings that brings for the parents (especially the mother, who might feel herself to have failed at imparting some crucial value to prevent this).

Elwing is basically a lightning rod flash point for this in this fandom, so please try and read this with grace and also hear me out. Elwing was a child, thrust into a position of leadership under extremely devastating circumstances. She has lived her whole life under the peril of twofold death - knowing that either Morgoth, or the SoF are going to strike her down at any point to take the Silmaril from her - in addition to being a refugee. I do believe that given those circumstances, that while there were adults around her who did their best to give her a stable upbringing (ranging from whatever remnants of the Sindar royal family were there to people like Idril & other Gondolindrim), that she grew up with a fraught & fractured sense of self (three is old enough to form some memories, even if very fragmented and incoherent). She is essentially little more than a child in Elvish terms when she marries and has kids. I think she did the best she could under those circumstances, but the best she could was also, unfortunately, hampered by the position she was thrust into. By that point the Silmaril clearly has totemic and cultural value to the Iathrim as well, in representing the death of their realm & the struggle of Luthien. Elwing is put in the impossible position of having to choose between the survival of her children & people, their symbolic collective identity in relation to the jewel & also her own relationship with her parents & grandparents symbolised in the Silmaril. I think that burden weighed on her in ways that probably manifested in a kind of exhaustion that kids pick up on, but which nevertheless also means that some of their childish emotional needs aren't going fully fulfilled. A lot has been said about her jumping off the cliff, but I think that it occurs at the point of collapse of all these fraught burdens she has to bear when she sees that Sirion is lost (and by definition, almost certainly her children) and that she has failed, in some way, to bear all these contradictory burdens successfully. I think that both her kids recognise this in their adulthood & have a great deal of compassion for her and that's also why Elrond firmly names his lineage through Elwing & Earendil. But I also think it doesn't stop Elwing from carrying some sense of inadequacy and guilt, some sense that might have done something differently to not "fail" her children, or to have spent more time for them (back when it felt simultaneously like each moment was the last and that they had all of eternity).

This is pure headcanon and has zero attachments to anything that appears in canon lol but I think Thingol's Mom was a "bad" mom in that while she wanted the best for her kids, she believed in doing this by Gaming The System and this meant failing her daughter (and granddaughter) at various points because they refused to be "good women" while she did her best to police them back into good, demure cisfemininity, in addition to resenting Melian's influence over Thingol and that at least, therefore, some of Thingol's disastrous decisions were down to him listening to the voice of his mother (either in his head or outwardly) instead of Melian or his daughter. I mean, some of it was also clearly down to him valuing and privileging male influence - e.g. in the Leithian text, turning to Daeron to understand why birds no longer sing in Doriath and what it means, instead of Melian who presumably would actually know????? - but at least some of it was because his mother was whispering sexist nonsense in his ear as well.

I actually think Indis was the best mom she could be given the circumstances, but everyone calls her a "bad mom" because she chose to walk away from the familial clusterfuck that her husband's favouritism plus indecisiveness in naming an heir had created, which like, she's a woman walking away from her adult children who are largely making bad decisions. We may hate that because of the way we see moms as mops for our emotions, but that's actually so deeply valid of her. That said I rly like valacirya's interpretations / thoughts on Indis as an "ambitious" mother which is also treated as societally "bad".

*both Earwen & Nerdanel get a lot more fleshing out perspective-wise in my fic sisyphus, unhappy specifically in chapters 21, 32 & 41

[fantasychica37]

Where were you ten years ago op this is great! (I do think, though, that at least as far as I’ve seen not many people realize Elwing didn’t know she was going to get turned into a bird and she was trying to die, and so to everyone else who sees this (not you, you thought it through perfectly), that motive - trying to die vs. trying to go to Valinor - changes the calculus of making a moral judgment on the situation significantly!)

[tobermoriansass]

I definitely agree that's what's going on with Elwing and her reception within the fandom. It can be very hard to disentangle what we as readers know from what the characters know. But that said, mmm, I don't know. I don't think people are very kind, either, about Elwing jumping a suicide or Elwing jumping as going to Valinor! In both cases, the general line of argument seems to be whether or not, as a mother, she could have made the right "sacrifice" to be a "mother" to her two sons, instead of "abandoning" them in a warzone. If she's going to Valinor, she's putting politics and the Silmaril over her children. If she's trying to kill herself, she's putting her own emotional pain and interiority over her children, instead of appropriately suppressing them and reorienting herself around them instead. It's sort of a no-win situation as far as Elwing is concerned - but sadly it does mean that merely understanding Elwing is choosing death is not really enough for people to sympathize with her, because it still means she's failing at being a *mother*.

Like, I remember a couple of conversations from a couple of months ago about Elwing's suicide specifically depriving her kids of care, that was pretty astounding in the total lack of sympathy for Elwing as an independent *character* in her own right. Which is also sort of the problem with all the women I've discussed above, bc they're all framed in fandom in terms of their motherhood and therefore are only allowed as much personhood as motherhood will grant them. But in the case of Elwing, it produces some really horrifyingly upsetting takes because even when confronted with her death-as-suicide, people are just unwilling to grapple with what exactly it takes to drive someone to not just contemplate but act to kill one's self. Like, we just shy away from contemplating the emotional duress of that, you know? And then to insist that those feelings are suppressed so she can take care of her children... IDK man, its the 21st century, we're all ostensibly feminists here: how is this in any form or substance a feminist line of argument?

Anyway, IDK that I have a point in this lol, except that I wish people were less determined to reduce women down to their motherhood, or if they want to explore motherhood, that they become less intent on sorting women into the madonna-whore binary of motherhood (mother mary-evil stepmother binary? perhaps?) which was also the reasoning behind this response which is also the result of ten years of being annoyed by various takes as a part-time long-time lurker in this fandom lmao

[xenasaur]

nods thoughtfully. I hadn't even considered it. am I a bad person?

[deepdwellingsteamboat]

OUR PLANET 2019 – 2023・1x02 Frozen Worlds

[jadeblueafterglow]

more leftists should be vegan. veganism and leftism operate on the same beliefs. social justice, no exploitation of labor, autonomy, environmental concern, intersectionality, an equal and just living etc. leftist praxis should include veganism

[moniquill]

Indigenously: no.

Animal welfare and animal rights are different things; it is good and normal for humans to be slightly anthropocentric while acknowledging our role within the greater ecosystem. Factory farming should indeed be dismantled- I want all animals harvested for food/leather/fur/bones/organs to have full and rich lives with as little suffering as possible before they're harvested. But it is not anti-leftist to live as a predator within the ecosystem. It is not more wrong for humans to eat salmon than it is for bears and eagles to do so.

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

i used to work in a vegan restaurant and it had basically all the same labor and management problems as the other restaurants i worked at that served meat. obviously. because it was a business in a capitalist system so obviously theres an economic incentive to pay workers the bare minimum and charge customers the maximum you can get away with.

in fact, the restaurant used the vegan identity and environmentalism as fuel for their marketing in quite cynical ways. at the same time they had a deal with Whole Foods (implicated in prison labor allegations btw) to source ingredients, meaning that there were transcontinentally shipped produce lol. for example we used frozen blueberries that were product of Chile. for a restaurant in the pacific northwest region in the united states of america. there are blueberry farms in oregon, washington, etc. But it’s cheaper to exploit south american farms than get local blueberries i guess. (which still by and large exploit the labor of migrant farmworkers from mexico and south and central america, but i digress)

i was vegetarian at the time and i had a lot of deep conversations with my coworkers and manager and the conclusion i came away with is that veganism is merely a cultural practice and is not inherently “leftist” in any way. if you consider human lives equal to animal lives i think that is not compatible with a clear-sighted materialist analysis of the world we live in. its practically a religious belief. which, like, okay, you can be religious, you can have irrational beliefs, but that’s not what “”””leftism”””” is about. that’s not really what any socialist or communist theory is about. it could be syncretized with socialist theory, but it would always merely be an ill-fitting addendum.

[fanfckery]

I was going to put this in tags but no.

Cashews that make vegan cheese are extremely dangerous to harvest due to the fact they mist be harvested by hand and the fruit has corrosive enzymes. Most workers end up with scars from chemical burns.

Almond farms were linked to the declining bee population due to the number of bees needed to pollinate the plants. Most bee keepers were lucky to get half their hives back after farms rented them.

We all know about how much of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed to make way for soy farms.

Agave is a main food source for many bats, but no, harvesting excess honey from bees that over produce it is the problem. If bees regularly have a large surplus of honey they swarm, the hive splits and some leave to start a new hive. Problem is that most bees don't survive this process because it makes them vulnerable to other environmental factors. So encouraging farming and over consumption of agave and stopping the consumption of honey, you're actually harming two different populations of pollinators.

"Vegan leather" is mostly plastic, which breaks down and sheds microplasics. Contributing to the ever growing landfill and contaminated water supply issues we have. Meanwhile cow hide is a natural byproduct from the meat industry, and real leather can last decades if taken care of. A single cow can feed 2 families of 4 for a year, and that leather can go towards making belts, boots, gloves and jackets that last decades.

If you want to actually support ethical food production and animal welfare do your research on where your food comes from. Look into local farms and their practices.

[avantegarda]

video game and film fandoms will come and go for me but the Silmarillion fandom will never die. because that book came out like 50 years ago and we're all still trying to figure out what the hell is going on there.

[picsthatmakeyougohmm]