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@springuswindus
awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges
white ppl will steal every aesthetic from black culture and then call it something so stupid like bo derek braids instead of box braids or hasbin hotel core instead of black southern dandism. yall will bend over backwards to call my culture barbaric/scary just to drool over the aesthetic the moment no actual black people are involved (21 pilots vs actual reggae). And if ur white/nonblack reading this just reblog. I dont need any comments talking about how not racist you are + speaking up over actual black people.
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.
my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.
so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.
the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.
also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:
it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.
#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass
On a Watsonian level, sure.
On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.
I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."
I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.
LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)
Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.
#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains
I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:
Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?
I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.
There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.
Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.
(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)
Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.
This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.
happy glorious 25th of may
I genuinely miss having pet rats 🐁🐀🫶🗿
✩✧🐇✧ ⋆ 🐇✧✶🐇✧ ⋆ ✩
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Got that?
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
Playing music so loud that it vibrates the car is abelist. It directly fucks with my sensory issues in such a way that it causes me headaches and severe anxiety. Like I am non-functional. This has happened to me three fucking times today and I am not doing well at all. It's awful and I want to have a normal day.
Excuse me a moment while I
(No I am not happy about people causing problems for my girlfriend why do you ask?)
Two velociraptors plan an attack.
“And then you show up from the side, and stare at that guy for a couple seconds before attacking.”
“Shouldn’t I surprise attack right away?”
“No no no, you have to give him time to call you a clever girl.”
“Ooh, I do want that.”
“Right?”
Some Cinderella’s Castle race analysis
While Cinderella’s castle isn’t explicitly about race because it’s in a colorblind fantasy world, I do still think the implications of Ella being a black woman are still there.
I think the fact that she isn’t take seriously and called crazy and over the top parallels the experience of black women really well. Black women’s pain and struggles aren’t taken seriously, and they’re called hysterical or over the top for asserting their boundaries or asking for help.
This also makes me think of how black people’s mental health is treated. They are more likely to get diagnosed with highly stigmatized behavioral disorders in order to dismiss their emotions as just the byproduct of a disorder that makes them more “obstinant.”
I think this is especially poignant because it’s in contrast to her white step mother. Yes they’re both women and exist under patriarchy, but ultimately when it comes to believing the white woman or the black woman, who do the people choose?
Also her story is centered around *validating her anger and revenge.* Black people are expected to sit back and be fine with racism, and forget slavery ever happened and ignore the micro agression. We are expected to be “civil and respectable” in the face of our own dehumanization and oppression.
Cinderellas castle says no, fuck that, let her have her revenge and be angry and kill the people who took her family away from her. Let her have resentment and anger because she deserves to because what was done to her was horrible.
While we’re here the trolls really feel like a metaphor for cultural appropriation. They marry into the house of ashmore, and then they kill the head of the house immediately after, taking their land, their home, their resources.
ON TOP OF THAT, they literally steal other people’s skin. They kill people, and use their bodies to parade around as though they are human too.
Yes all three of the trolls are in white bodies, but I still think there’s something to be said about how this parallels the appropriation of black culture.
They pretend to be human, to be of the house of ashmore externally, but internally they are still trolls. This is not who they are and it is not their culture, nor are these even their bodies.
Then they turn around to the person WHOS LIFE THEY STOLE, and force her to do unpaid labor for them. Like it’s literally slavery.
This also makes me think of how interracial family dynamics can lead to racism within families, and how neither blood nor marriage stop people from perpetuating racism against those meant to be their kin.
I really hate to side with Gollum on this, but “what’s in my pocket” is not a riddle and should not have counted.
People think the moral of Disney's Beauty and the Beast is supposed to be something like "don't judge people by appearances" but that's really not it. That is a possible moral of some other versions of the story but the Disney version has a different lesson actually and it's "people can change." And I think this becomes obvious when we look at the Beast and Gaston as foils to each other. Because they both start out arrogant, selfish, and petty. Perhaps most importantly, at the outset neither of them really cares about Belle's feelings. Gaston wants to marry her because she's beautiful, and the Beast hopes she might break the spell, but neither is really considering her needs or desires at all, at the start. But the Beast changes. He tries to make Belle happy. He learns to put her first, to love her unselfishly, which culminates in him letting her go. Meanwhile Gaston responds to Belle's rejection by plotting to coerce her into doing what he wants anyway. He never spares a thought for what she wants. He never changes.
But where it gets really interesting is when you compare their supporting characters. Because all Gaston has around him are sycophants who will tell him how wonderful he is. So he never sees any need to change. Whereas the Beast's servants - even though they are his servants - don't hesitate to tell him when he needs to clean up his act. They are constantly reminding him to mind his manners, control his temper, and consider things from Belle's point of view.
So people can change - but they need help to do it.
who’s gonna tell tumblr that executive dysfunction is more than Not Doing Things?
okay
these are the executive functions. impairment of these functions is executive dysfunction
Oh.
OH
Girl, help. None of my executives are functioning
you have this superpower! BUT you have this side-effect
is it worth it?
yes!!
the side effect is bad but ITS WORTH IT
meh it's okay
the side effect makes it unusable/not worth it
Results/option I didn't think of
Telekinesis but you can't control it. That is... An absolute fucking nightmare. Random movement of objects around me, possibly reacting to fleeting Call of the Void style thoughts. That's worse than not having it in every way I can think of and is frankly a curse rather than a superpower.
It's everywhere
There's also it's more 'diverse' fandom twin
[ID 1: drawing of four non-descript characters smiling lined up, three of them have pale skin while one has brown skin and a more mischievous expression, the characters has text pointed to them reading “that one character that gets the melanin because they’re angry/agressive” End ID]
[ID 2: drawing of four non-descript characters lined up, three of them have varied brown skin and expressions while one has pale skin and a more calm smile, the characters has text pointed to them reading “that one character that gets less of the melanin because they’re passive/calm/fancier” End ID]
This and "that one character that gets darker skin because they are masculine"
Just because I don't want to be solely negative here's a long stream of advice from Twitter about drawing Darker skin and stuff
