#ask balls

[balrogballs]

The books tells us that Arwen strongly resembles Elrond, that she's basically the female version of Elrond. Which makes me wonder....

Can Arwen do The Eyebrow??

you truly are a maverick and i am most grateful to you. ever since the trilogy came out, we as a fandom have been so busy slashing through the battlefields of hugo weaving elrond discourse that we missed the untapped potential of hugo weaving arwen 😇

tldr: yes she can do the eyebrow

[balrogballs]

Something something Feanor Freudian something

……..AU where the Noldor stay in Valinor because they all misinterpreted Fëanor’s speech in a very specific and yet unified way 😌

sorry abt the delay i just HAD to do a little sketch for this one

[balrogballs]

Can I see Fingolfin from the Mereth Aderthad? Pretty please? 🙏 🥺 You draw him as such a daddy and I know he looks good.

Fingolfin DILF-livery!!!

okay so technically this is a version i scrapped, as you can probably tell by the bits i left uncoloured… essentially i decided against the 1800s style colonisercore military attire for the mereth aderthad painting because it’s too intricate to render in that many people, so the final version will be different but same pose and same eagle because i am not drawing that fucking bird again. context for eagle is that i like the idea that the house of Fingolfin absolutely adopted and gobbled up the eagle motif for political reasons after the Thangorodrim rescue.

👇🏽 as you can see he also has a ear-prosthetic like Maedhros, but his is for post-Helcaraxë frostbite reasons, he has an exceedingly biteable mole on his lip yum yum, and the cunty little nose piercing is inspired by @antlered-vixen’s elves who always have excellent facial piercings.

[balrogballs]

Feanor for the 6 character game please Balls? I love your art style, btw, it’s so lush

if you think my maglor looks like fëanor then wait till you see my fëanor…

this is a study done with 1 (one) oil painting brushset on csp* hence not as lush as usual i’m afraid, but i feel like that works for this guy. technically i’ve drawn fëanor before but they’ve been either for commissions or very stylised, so meet #myfeanor i guess… boobies out but tastefully censored so that you cannot see his silmaril hiding place (nipple piercings) 😊

*except the text obviously

[balrogballs]

COMMISSION DETAILS

As (long 😩) promised, I've put all my prices and commission information on a single post, and here it is, complete with a gallery.

Opening up queue slots to August turnaround now since we've just been hit by The Landlord Surprise (landlord selling his house before the Renter's Rights Bill becomes law because god forbid renters receive rights) and need to find a new place in Hell City at short notice. Available slots/dates are under the cut, I'll strikethrough each one as they're taken.

All commissions via KO-FI (where you can also buy me a house), all reblogs appreciated!

QUEUE SPOTS:

May Turnaround: Slot 1 / Slot 2

June Turnaround: Slot 1 / Slot 2 /Slot 3

July Turnaround: Slot 1 / Slot 2 / Slot 3

August Turnaround: Slot 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

[balrogballs]

Hey Balls, pinterest has revealed to me what I can only call a Teleporno ornament:

Galadriel took this to Aman with her and when Finarfin asked her about the man she married, she says ‘wait, you can see him’. And Finarfin is standing there assuming she has a portrait in a locket or something normal. Or that she’s going to do some magic fuckery with her fancy hair and idk make a hair portrait of him. But no. She pulls this out. She hands it to her father.

“Press his nipples,” she urges. “Just press them.”

He enquires why, and like honestly fair enough.

“Just press them, Atya.”

He presses them gingerly. Teleporno starts rocking back and forth on the bird. Galadriel wipes a tear from her eye.

[balrogballs]

lmaooo where the fuck did i or others like me (?????) say “poc elf drawings are useless”? i already talk too much, please do not put words into my mouth.

anyway, this “o great decoloniser” anti-intellectual schtick really is not going to work on me. if you can read the silmarillion then you can read this. this has in fact only pissed me off enough for

😇 a Balls Essay™️ about why surface level representation is a fundamentally flawed moral litmus test in fandom, how consumption is not action, and how displacing material change with symbolic gesture can infact reinforce the structures ostensibly being “challenged” 😇

now. i love seeing historical non-white cultures adapted into tolkien fanart, i think the ‘islamicate’ period stuff is very nice looking, and half the elves i myself draw aren’t white lmao. it’s great, it’s a lot better than it was for sure! never have i said we should have less of that. what i did say multiple times, continue to say, and will probably die saying, is that the prevalence of brown elves in fanart is not a gauge of whether a fandom or an individual is or isn’t racist/otherwise bigoted.

when we get obsessed with treating “whether someone's fictional elf is brown enough” as the sole marker of their bigotry/lack of bigotry, we risk treating racism like it's primarily a creativity problem rather than a power problem. it’s much easier to police someone's character designs than to examine why you’re willing to overlook someone’s proto-fascistic views in favour of their fandom opinions (more on this below 😇).

a diverse representation = moral purity approach puts this weird pressure on creatives to prove their moral worth through their character designs and what not, but more importantly it creates a problematic dynamic where diverse art becomes a shield against criticism. we end up with a system where people can game representation rather than genuinely engaging with it.

it also feeds into a kind of aesthetic activism that mistakes visual representation for actual progress. absolutely, seeing yourself reflected in art matters, but when we treat fanart like a reliable indicator of someone's values, we're prioritising the appearance of inclusion over substantive change. someone can draw all the brown elves they want and still run around on anti-immigrant marches.

focusing on the appearance of diversity as shorthand for someone’s moral worth also risks a lot of art and writing coming from a place of guilt rather than genuine interest or understanding. artist feel like they "should" draw more brown characters, so they do: but the motivation is obligation, not engagement. this kind of guilt-driven representation often results in tokenistic characters who exist primarily to make the creator feel better about themselves.

such characters can often be either idealised beyond recognition or burdened with representing entire communities. they’re created to absolve the artist's conscience rather than to tell interesting stories or explore complex identities. the brown elf becomes a therapy tool for white guilt rather than a genuinely imagined character.

art and literature do not exist in a vacuum, and nor are they direct peepholes into the creator’s heart. art can absolutely be performative, and artists/writers are perfectly capable of compartmentalising their fantasy preferences from their real-world attitudes.

like i’m sorry but. i have seen multiple “poc elf” consumers and producers happily chatting and regularly interacting with that insane openly white supremacist gunfucker who regularly posts about ‘Moslems’ and ‘jihadis’ and ‘if you don’t like America, then get out’, just because they enjoy his posts about how the kinslayings were great or whatever. and yeah you might say keeping company with fuckers like that doesn’t make someone racist. which is fine. but then i also get to say you reblogging a brown elf does not make you not-a-racist.

when we focus obsessively on aesthetic representation, ie only on who gets depicted and how, we often lose sight of who actually holds power and resources, and who is causing the problem you’re trying to solve. the insidiousness of this displacement is in its ease: recognition politics feels more accessible to the privileged because it is less threatening to existing structures.

also, such a focus on visual representation feeds into what we might call the spectacle of diversity: making inequality visible + consumable rather than actually addressing it. when ethnically diverse elves become the only way we think about inclusion, we're essentially turning justice into entertainment, something to be consumed rather than lived.

this spectacularisation allows institutions and individuals to appear progressive without changing their actual practices. representation becomes a substitute for, rather than a step toward, meaningful change.

there’s also the way representational politics turns identity into a commodity to be bought, sold, and consumed. brown elves become products in a marketplace of diversity, valued not for their narrative potential or cultural significance, but for their ability to signal both creator's and consumer's moral worthiness. this is not anti-establishment radical progressivism, this is neoliberalism working as intended.

such commodification process is imo dehumanising: it reduces complex, lived identities to aesthetic choices to be traded like any other cultural product. the brown elf exists not as a character with agency and depth, but as a token in a game of Moral Monopoly.

in conclusion: brown elves are brilliant. we should have more of them. however, i am not going to assume that everyone who draws or writes about brown elves is the second coming of nelson mandela.

finally please drop the fucking annoying tone. i have been called pretentious way too many times to sit around weeping because someone on the internet implied i am up my own ass. i am absolutely up my own ass. i own it. it is my ass. also sorry for answering as a screenshot, i wanted to block you x

anyway balls unhinged ask counter set back to zero days since last unhinged ask.

[balrogballs]

top 5 sexiest silmarillion deaths

Fëanor: literally i do not care that it happened ten minutes after he got onto middle earth. literally combusting on the spot because your spirit is too whacky is peak sexy death. my guy straight up went poof. i know his sons were probably traumatised watching him die and all that but the level of dramatics involved in making them reswear the oath and then just turning into a fucking catherine wheel is peak silm for me. i just know one of them thought ‘christ on a cupcake! what the fuck?’ at that moment and thus invented swearing and also brought the word of christ to middle earth. like evil little accidental missionaries. i also know that at least one fëanorian brother developed anxiety issues from that moment because honestly if my dad turned into spontaneous sherbet while i was reciting a poem he wanted me to recite, i would go the rest of my life thinking ‘was it something i said? did i mispronounce foe or friend? did i sa-sī? so yes fëanor for sure.

Gil-galad: similar reasons to the above but also the fact that elrond was probably watching truly fucks with me in ways that are sad but also funny. i also know for a fact that elrond also had an intrusive thought at that moment along the lines of this is because of the time maedhros laughed at my 10 year old ass self for burning my omelette and i pointed at the cremated egg and said ‘haha look its ur dad’ isn’t it?

Lúthien: idk man like. the silmaril making you so extremely hot and sexy by augmenting your existing hot and sexy that it literally sucks away your life force, and going ahead and wearing the fucking thing all the time anyway, is so compelling to me and is 1000% something i can see myself doing. in fact it is number 2 in my list of dream deaths (number 1 being dying while taking a shit just because of how awkward it would be for the people who find me. like what do you even tell people man). anyway yes her. instagram filtered her way into an early grave. not to be vain on main but this is 1000% balls coded behaviour.

Elros: listen i know he had a boring ass death and spent at least two centuries as an umarell after outliving all his mortal buddies but that is precisely the point. the first and only peredhel choice of death that wasn’t (stated to be) about love or some great cosmic reason. guy just wanted to be an old man and collect his pension. straight up just chose it for memes aka he just wanted to. i know that when arwen finds him in edainheaven the first thing she’ll do is slap him for being the primary reason her dad developed a johnny english 2 style eye twitch at the thought of mortality and thus turned into a veritable (fatherofthe)bridezilla.

Glorfindel: cliche choice but listen. it isn’t because he went down fighting a balrog. it’s because he went down purely because he didn’t tie back his fucking hair. probably because it looked hotter in magma-light. again, ballscoded.