#allalpha

[audible-smiles]

I don’t have the musical education to explain why it sucks, it just does...half of its unsingable! It’s melodies are meandering and pointless and challenging to the layperson...everything’s wordy and ponderous! The lyrics are just- here’s a random song:

Now while the day in trailing splendor gives way to glories of the night,

thanksgiving to thy name we render, O God of darkness and of light.

Each day from thee we have our being, in all this wondrous order set;

thine omnipresence blinds our seeing, and in thy gifts we thee forget.

By the time you reach the end of a phrase you’ve forgotten the beginning of it! It means nothing! Every time I go in and people act like they sincerely want to sing 3 or 4 songs out of this wretched book over the course of a single hour I feel like I’m being gaslighted!

I will give a pass to anything simple, sweet, and clear of purpose- think Enter Rejoice and Come In, My Life Flows On, ‘Tis the Gift to be Simple, This Little Light of Mine, Spirit of Life, Come Sing a Song With Me...anything where the congregation gets to think to themselves “oh good, I know this” rather than “time to struggle through whatever the hell this is”. You can HEAR the energy change when they pick something people genuinely like, and it’s so rare! It should not be rare! Why are we sitting through interminable nonsense every week!!!

If it’s long and complex enough that you need a hymnal because people can’t memorize it after seeing the lyrics a few times, I honestly wouldn’t bother.

[veliseraptor]

fatalism-and-villainy replied to your post: What would Loki be more into during sex? Praise...

idk about loki specifically but i love dirty talk that’s like backhanded compliments/simultaneously both praise and insults at the same time? or phrased as compliments but in a way that the other person would take issue with

oh man this would be...yeah, I feel like loki would definitely be into this, it feels very Him

[paradife-loft]

@allalpha​  - I found the HoME passage I was looking for on King’s Men and Earendil; it’s from The Lost Road, and it’s part of the time travel self insert fic section, with Elendil and his son Herendil speaking.

“Of whom dost thou say that our king, Tarkalion, is descended?”

“From Earendel the mariner, son of Tuor the mighty who was lost in these seas.”

“Why then may not the king do as Earendel from whom he is come? They say that he should follow him, and complete his work.”

“What dost thou think that they mean? Whither should he go, and fulfil what work?”

“Thou knowest. Did not Earendel voyage to the uttermost West, and set foot in that land that is forbidden to us? He doth not die, or so songs say.”

“What callest thou Death? He did not return. He forsook all whom he loved, ere he stepped on that shore. He saved his kindred by losing them.”

“Were the Gods wroth with him?”

“Who knoweth? For he came not back. But he did not dare that deed to serve Melko, but to defeat him; to free men from Melko, not from the Lords; to win us the earth, not the land of the Lords. And the Lords heard his prayer and arose against Melko. And the earth is ours.”

“They say now that the tale was altered by the Eresseans, who are slaves of the Lords: that in truth Earendel was an adventurer, and showed us the way, and that the Lords took him captive for that reason; and his work is perforce unfinished. Therefore the son of Earendel, our king, should complete it. They wish to do what has been long left undone.”

“What is that?”

“Thou knowest: to set foot in the far West, and not withdraw it. To conquer new realms for our race, and ease the pressure of this peopled island, where every road is trodden hard, and every tree and grass-blade counted. To be free, and masters of the world. To escape the shadow of sameness, and of ending. We would make our king Lord of the West: Nuaran Numenoren. Death comes here slow and seldom; yet it cometh. The land is only a cage gilded to look like Paradise.”

“Yea, so I have heard others say.”

…and then it continues on about their personal relationship and desires wrt the politics of the time and such.

if it wasn’t obvious, I love this passage so much for the huge wealth of detail and implication on late Numenorean myth and politics, holy shit. (also interesting little tidbit there on the Faithful and/or Numenoreans’ and/or Tolkien’s perspective on what death means, in the bit about whether Earendil “died” going to Valinor? that could be some nice thematic material for a whole bunch of fic right there. I’m into it.)

[ultraviolet-eucatastrophe]

allalpha replied to your post “Fingon?”

oooh, i'd be interested to hear more about fingon/finrod

Okay BASICALLY the dynamic I like is that they are leaving Valinor, (both of them argued for making this journey, originally) Fingon is under a cloud with their people because of Alqualondë. This is partially a premeditated political move by Fingolfin to publicly distance himself from his first son, and both Fingon and Finrod are complicit in it but still Fingon feels conflicted. He feels conflicted about everything, and everyone, and what is he if not the brave and valiant and beloved prince he always was before? He also misses Maedhros. He thinks he hates Maedhros, but he also misses him. Finrod, meanwhile, has been thrown for a loop by everything that has happened, feels conflicted and vaguely disgusted about travelling with Fingon after he participated in the kinslaying (he’s half-Telerin too) even more so about himself for not having changed his feelings about his cousin enough. Finrod doesn’t hate Fingon for it, can’t make himself, is finding it difficult to reconcile the person and that horrific action, and that frightens him almost as much as the kinslaying itself. He also misses Amarië, feels lost without her (I headcanon them as something of a publicly-known power couple in Valinor). He starts obsessing over Fingon, and Fingon wants someone to take out his frustration on. They share tents and warmth on the Helcaraxë (Finrod uses this to portray himself as a ~good and self-sacrificing person~, Fingon knows this but is touch-starved so doesn’t mind) and not-quite-hatesex, not-remotely-romantic, trying-but-not-quite-succeeding-in-being-devoid-of-tenderness, release of frustration sex happens, as they both try to feel like they’re still warm and alive out there in this frozen hell, where their previously tightly controlled world seems to be breaking down around them anyway.        

[psychopompious-blog1]

maeglin for the meme?

general opinion: fall in a hole and die | don’t like them | eh | they’re fine I guess | like them! | love them | actual love of my life hotness level: get away from me | meh | neutral | theoretically hot but not my type | pretty hot | gorgeous! | 10/10 would banghogwarts house: gryffindor | slytherin | ravenclaw | hufflepuffbest quality: Moles. Dwarves. Being a shit to passing Men. His Unfinished Tales counterpart’s mad skills with siege weaponry and automata.worst quality: Oh you know, jealousy, betrayal, boundary issues, etc. But like, are those really bad qualities, you feel?ship them with: Turgon, or Celebrimbor in AU landbrotp them with: Salgant, sometimes Rog in a “we don’t actually like each other that much but here we are anyway” kinda wayneeds to stay away from: Close relatives Idril, his dad’s javelin, Dark Lords, cliffs.misc. thoughts: Hands-down the character I talk and write about most. I’ve been most drawn to this character ever since I first started reading the Silm, and have spent more of my time researching because of him than any other. At this point I have two mutually exclusive headcanons about his thoughts and motivations during the Fall of Gondolin, one considerably more sympathetic than the other, but I’m equally happy with them. 

[coldwind-shiningstars]

allalpha replied to your post: paradife-loft replied to your post: ...

yeah like that person didn’t seem to realize that desexualization affects AUTISTIC ASEXUAL PEOPLE too? like… stereotypes hurt people who come the closest to conforming to them

yep yep yep

[gloriousmonsters]

allalpha replied to your post: woke up after 1 hour of sleep b/c of horrific...

:(( i’m sorry

well at least the ‘pissed’ helped outbalance some of the ‘deeply disturbed at the level of body horror my mind is capable of coming up with when stressed at night’ and now I’m trying to distance myself from both things by reading surreal humor twitters and it’s working somewhat

[suspected-spinozist]

Unpopular opinion - Silm. Or, alternatively, Star Trek

I think everyone probably knows all my unpopular Silm opinions (and, because of the way fandom social dynamics work, none of my unpopular opinions are particularly  unpopular within my circle of friends). My pro-King’s Men, pro-Feanorian, somewhat irrationally anti-Finrod biases are the obvious cases. My most genuinely unpopular opinions might be that I genuinely like Ar-Pharazôn as a character, and that Celebrimbor in the second age isn’t a naif - he’s older than Feanor was when he died, and should be written like it. 

Star Trek is much easier. I prefer Dr. Pulaski to Dr. Crusher.