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@thearrogantemu
General Index Posts
Tolkien Meta
The Untamed
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Maedhros and/or Fingon
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These Gifts That You Have Given Me
In Full Measure I Return to You
Mutilation of the arm or hand in Tolkien. turin and eowyn are both mutilated in the process of killing a thing that cant be touched. beren and frodo are both mutilated because their hand contains a valued object, and the object is bitten off of them. sauron and frodo both lose a ring finger. maedhros and beren both lose a hand at or nearabouts the gates of thangorodrim. maedhros and frodo are both saved in the mutilation.
One upon a time, a long long time ago, I went to a university professor I respected a great deal during office hours excited to hear his thoughts on my critical theory approach to analyzing the text we were reading at the time, and he said, that as writers our primary role & objective should be to write good stories. He quoted some intellectual I donât remember to emphasize his point â that we should seek first & foremost to write *good stories*, instead of lecture at the audience about Leftist principles, or plan for the moral of the story to be X then try to reverse engineer a coherent narrative from that end. We had a longer conversation about it that I canât quite recall, but his gist was â the stories that last & influence people are *good stories*, not stories borne out of good intentions or correct ideology. Good Nazi stories will outlive weak Marxist stories every time.
I find your work hits too many leftist beats for it to be coincidental. And Iâd like to ask how you approach ideology in your creative process, bc I recall you said once that as creatives we should think about the sort of story we create in todayâs broadly awful, fascist, imperialist, late stage capitalist world.
Do you ever think like, oh thereâs another oil spill in the Gulf, I should want to touch on ecological harms in my upcoming episodes & the tension between environmental preservation vs economic industrialization? Do you go about it deliberately thinking about the message you ultimately want to convey; do you sometimes end up changing details or editing elements bc you are cognizant they may dilute or harm the ideological message, so to speak?
Or do you just focus on writing a *good story*, and the ideology surfaces organically simply bc of the principles you hold as an individual?
(On further reflection Iâm not so sure what my professor was trying to communicate â perhaps he felt I was a hairâs breadth away from writing straight propagandistic fables, and wanted to set me back towards more humanistic writingâŠ)
(Bonus question: of all the characters youâve written which was most ideologically opposed to yourself? Did you struggle with humanizing them? Do you feel hate for any of the characters youâve birthed, basically?)
Hi! What an interesting question, thank you for asking it.
Your college professor sounds cool and as you say, it seems as if he was trying to give you writing advice in the context of a specific conversation.
I think my approach towards ideology in fiction is quite strongly opposed to the advice he gave you, though:
Seek first and foremost to write good stories.
Definitely, but this doesn't mean that good stories are necessarily "apolitical", non-explicitly political, or political as a tertiary concern, which I think is the subtext lurking in the margins of that statement.
The Dispossessed is a damn good story and also firmly, explicitly and fundamentally about its author's politics.
We should always be aware of the very real risk of lecturing or hectoring the audience until they lose all patience, or letting our ideology flatten the reality of the narrative and characters, or being so caught up in communicating our beliefs that we fail to apply craft. But we can also remember that these are subjective judgement calls and they're affected by personal preference, prejudice, and political environment.
There are audience members who might see any trans character as an act of jarring political intrusion and the author's hand forcing an ideology down upon their story, but would view a positive portrayal of the US Air Force funded by the US Air Force as pure rip-roaring apolitical entertainment. There can be no winning by dialling back your ideology sufficiently to satisfy theirs.
There are listeners who by the first or second episode of The Silt Verses were confidently stating that we were just repeating ourselves tediously now, we'd already fully covered the topic of 'capitalism bad' from I Am In Eskew at the level that they wanted to experience it (and fair play to them). There are people who got to the end of both shows and still weren't sure what our politics were!
Trying to edit our politics out of a story to ensure the most broadly favourable audience response can only benefit the politics that is insidious and entrenched enough to walk unseen.
Don't plan for the moral to be X and then work to that conclusion.
Up to a point, sure. But let's distinguish between morals, premises and themes, because again I think the subtext is 'don't begin a story already in possession of a confident political opinion or intent', which to me is very wrong.
Again, take The Dispossessed, one of the great works of science fiction. If we reduce that story to its end statements - capitalism will inevitably steal, exploit and corrupt the most utopian scientific ideals, for example - it could easily be characterised as clunking didacticism given its author's politics.
Put it this way, I do not think LeGuin surprised herself mid-edit by coming to that conclusion.
But the story is much more than its outcome. It's a dissection of the thinker's role and treatment in two very different kinds of societies, it's an exploration of Shevek's character and essential loneliness, how he chafes against the unyielding rules of the anarchist society he believes in and how he's tempted by the comforting aspects of the capitalist society he rejects.
I agree that you should keep yourself open as a writer to anything, and that you should take care to ensure a character is never solely a mouthpiece for the 'right' answer you've already figured out in your head. But that's about good characters more than an excess of politics. Characters should never have all the right answers, because neither do people. People struggle with things.
Me, I firmly believe that we're inhabiting an unsustainable nightmare that insists upon itself as normality and which must somehow be confronted. That's an explicit political throughline in all our works so far, it's a message I set out from the very beginning to convey, and I'm happy not to spend time considering the alternative view that actually, everything is fine and should remain how it is.
But that's the premise rather than the moral, it's the story's first thought and not the last thought. We want to take that premise onwards and explore the human beings who have to live with it.
"Good Nazi stories will outlive weak Marxist stories every time."
OK, but what constitutes a good Nazi story, and what storytelling lessons should we earnestly hope to learn from it?
Far-right fiction doesn't find popular success by focusing on good, hearty, nutritious narrative elements that are foolishly eschewed by shrill leftists. It finds success because it works to stimulate the very worst parts of humanity.
The Nazis' Jew Suss adaptation was very much a case of ideology taking precedence over storytelling, to the extent of editing out reaction shots that weren't sufficiently anti-semitic. Why, other than institutional stage-managing and the historical moment itself, did it find such a wide and receptive audience in Germany? Its central narrative elements (fear that outsiders have infiltrated our society for their own malignant purposes while also lusting after our helpless women; the righteous thrill of violent justice being exacted upon evildoers) are the exact same ones you'll find in other far-right popular successes like Birth of A Nation and, uh, Luc Besson's Taken.
For me the work is not about aiming to compete with these stories on their own terms, but dissecting and challenging the aspects of humanity that make it possible for these stories to succeed. If that approach risks a smaller audience share or longevity, it's necessary work nonetheless.
Do you ever think like, oh thereâs another oil spill in the Gulf, I should want to touch on ecological harms in my upcoming episodes & the tension between environmental preservation vs economic industrialization?
I don't think it's about trying to provide a complete ideological statement or cover every pressing political issue with a single work; I don't think that's possible or something to strive towards. Let every fiction come with missing pieces and flaws and authorial blind spots; let us seek out other fictions by other human beings that can bring their own perspective to bear. It's infinitely better to have a library than a single holy text.
So no is the short answer, unless the oil spill sparks a good idea that contributes to the story!
Do you sometimes end up changing details or editing elements bc you are cognizant they may dilute or harm the ideological message, so to speak?
No and yes. I think that wayward or challenging elements are a crucial part of delivering something that's not just an ideological diatribe, and it's always fun and rewarding to explore them, so long as you have courage.
It's sometimes hard to have courage, particularly when you're writing for a very reactive and accessible online audience and you don't really have an expectation of continued livelihood beyond their collective support.
I've definitely sometimes strayed away from material because I wasn't confident in how it would be received, but usually I end up quietly regretting that cowardice. An element which you might think is unhelpful or harmful is often something very important which is just in need of thoughtful handling.
I think I've mentioned this before, because it still weighs on me somewhat; during the S1 Silt Verses Q&A, we had one question sent in by a listener who asked us very forcefully why our only queer characters had all died, and wanted us to commit publicly to not killing any more of them.
Was I beset by the fear that we'd accidentally written a manifesto of murderous prejudice? Was I tempted to react in a panic by introducing Derek, The Fulfilled And Contented Queer Dude Who Is Functionally Immune To The Story He Inhabits And Will Never Die Or Suffer? Definitely. Cowardice.
We didn't do that, obviously, but I tried to stop and consider where the question was coming from in good faith, which in turn made me reflect on the genuine consequence and potential harm that had come with keeping our protagonists' identities implicit up to that point while being more explicit about minor characters, and so we worked to move past that (while continuing to kill, basically, everyone).
Which character are you most ideologically opposed to / do you feel hate for any of the characters you've birthed?
Only in the sense of hate for myself. I think it's genuinely hard to write even a one-dimensional character which isn't in some way expressing an unwanted part of yourself or a longed-for aspect that's missing from yourself. And so it's not really about ideological opposition so much as staring at your own worst reflection and trying to make sense of it.
I hate David Ward's neuroticism and self-absorption, because it's my own. I hate Faulkner's obsessive desire to frame himself as the hero of the story, because that's an impulse I've struggled with. Even Carson, to an extent, is an expression of my time as a middle-manager during the Covid lockdown, jollying employees along with a rictus grin so that the everyday work can continue as the world burns.
The yearning for an ideology that's simple and reassuring and gives us a clear-cut identity in an otherwise shapeless existence. Terror of the other. Terror of change. The desire to mould our children into continuations of ourselves. Endless adaptability and selective ignorance in the face of unacceptable horrors. All the worst stuff is in me, not outside of me, and that's where I'm trying to explore it from.
If anyone somehow gets to the end of this, I am experiencing feelings of deep regret because I should have spent this time working on the show but the question was too interesting. Fuck.
...so I just went on Ao3 and to my ASTONISHMENT no one has written the ten-years-later fic of E. Nesbit's The Railway Children in which our three protagonists encounter World War I.
My Shakespeare students (they are 12) wanted to summarize the lessons they learned this semester. If. Um. Anybody would like to see.
I cannot emphasize enough that they made these with very little input from me.
Henry the Fifth
- ALWAYS encourage others to do their best.
- NEVER talk about people behind their back.
Antony and Cleopatra
- ALWAYS check your produce for pests. [They liked this one so much made a rap about it.]
- NEVER count your chickens before they hatch.
Hamlet
- ALWAYS act decisively
- NEVER tell your girlfriend to go to a convent and become a nun [Oh boy they REALLY liked this one]
Romeo and Juliet
- ALWAYS collect all the important information before making an important decision
- NEVER bite your thumb at us, sir. [They enacted this scene in the original language a lot, except they swapped every âsirâ for âbro.â]
The Merchant of Venice
- ALWAYS pay your debts.
- NEVER judge based on appearances, because âall that glisters is not gold.â
The Tempest
- ALWAYS try to forgive others.
- NEVER be a colonizer. [Yes, a middle schooler said this]
Midsummer Nightâs Dream
- ALWAYS stay on forest trails
- NEVER fall in love with an ass. [They were excited about this one for obvious reasons.]
Twelfth Night
- ALWAYS stay in touch with those important to us
- NEVER read other peopleâs mail
Macbeth
- ALWAYS wash your hands. [One of the girls performed Lady Macbethâs entire Out Damn Spot monologue at the end of the semester]
- NEVER succumb to peer pressure.
Yeah, I was re-reading the Tempest like âhmmm will they even understand the subtle themes here⊠this might be a cut-and-dry magic story to them.â
Kid 1 (known intellectual): Wait, Prospero is like⊠a colonizer to the magical creatures. He showed up on their island and enslaved them.
Kid 2: Enslaving people is bad! Is Prospero a bad guy?
Kid 3: But Caliban is bad! He wanted to kidnap Miranda.
Me: Yeah, itâs kind of hard, isnât it? Just like how in real life most people are a mix of good and bad.
Kid 4: âŠis this why Shakespeare is supposed to be, like, really good?
An Overly In-depth Analysis of Spinning Silver Many Years Late
`When I first started writing this in 2022, I had recently finished reading Naomi Novikâs Spinning Silver for the first time. I wanted to remember a particular quote in the book, and stumbled upon some reviews from 2019, when the paperback was released.
The quote I was looking for: You will never be a Staryk Queen until you make a hundred winters in one day, seal the crack in the mountain, and make the white tree bloom.
The reviews:Â
âŠread Temeraire and Uprooted at least ten times, but couldnât reread this. The relationships between the two main men and two main women are abusive. Certainly, thereâs trauma involved, but itâs not a womanâs job to heal menâs trauma through sacrificing themselvesâŠ
âŠI adored Uprooted (had some issues, but still loved it completely), however Spinning Silver just felt off â not as magical, terrible âromancesâ, too many POVs, etc. All in all, it just wasnât as gripping. I liked Miryemâs character, but the other two protagonists were very bland âstrong female charactersâŠâ
I hate this. I hate this so much. I hate this enough that Iâm going to write an excessively long post defending Spinning Silver for three years. For everyone that doesnât want to read a masters-student dissertation of an essay or who hasnât read the book yet and wants to go into this spoiler free, hereâs the TL:DR version. There are no romances in this book. The two reviewers above are trying to apply the enemies to lovers tropes they loved so much in Uprooted to a grimm fairy tale about politics, feminism, and Jewish persecution. There are no romances in this book. This is hard to grasp, because two of the main characters are married, and that marriage is a major part of the plot, but no one in those marriages including the men wanted the marriage in the first place. To call it âabusiveâ is to read modern expectations onto a historical political marriage that, while not inaccurate, fundamentally misunderstands the point and the context in which the story takes place.Â
Also, I would recommend the audio book, if you have trouble with multiple points of view. They are all in first person, and although it starts out with just two, we add more and more POV until thereâs 5 or 6 total. The reader Lisa Flanagan does an excellent job distinguishing POVs which will make this aspect of it easier. Read the book, particularly the audiobook. But if you are reading this book looking for romance, youâre going to be disappointed. Itâs still one of the best if not the best re-imagined fairy tale Iâve ever read. Hereâs an excessively long post about why.
midsummer: if the feudal strictness of your home kingdom canât give you what you want, try going on an adventure guided by magical supernatural beings
macbeth: but not like that
hamlet: if youâre in a duplicitous violent world, your king and your peers and your girlfriend may lie to you, so only follow the advice of your steadfast best friend
othello: but not like that
as you like it: if you undergo a misfortune that causes you to hate your life in your city, give yourself a makeover and run away to the woods
timon of athens: but not like that
two gents: if youâre in love in italy, you can quickly and easily communicate important information via the verona postal service
romeo and juliet: but not like that
Russian translation of "And What Happened After"!
There's a new Russian translation of And What Happened After, thanks to the skills of @adelacatcher! I'm deeply honored (and to anyone out there reading this fic in Russian, hello and best wishes from the author!)
Most recent bookbinding project - the devastating These Gifts That You Have Given Me, written by @thearrogantemu .
Front endpaper artwork is 'Ost-in-Edhil' by Felix Sotomayor, back endpaper by the splendid @fickleartdump .
(the embossing was an experiment, turned out a little messy, but I hope to think that Celebrimbor would approve)
EVERYTHING'S FINE :) By W.B. Yeats
Tracing a neat straight line, adept and sure, The falcon heeds the calling falconer; Things hang together, and the center holds; Mere symmetry is ordering the world, The sea-bright tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence proceeds; The best have strong convictions, while the worst Are full of resignation and are sad.
Surely no revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming's far away. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When an indifference borne of stable comfort Leaves my sight clear: somewhere in sands of the desert A lion with lion body and the head of a lion, A gaze calm and leonine, as is usual, Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it Reel shadows of the normal desert birds. What a nice lion, right? And now I know That twenty centuries have gone along And things were bad sometimes, and things were good, And if a lion slouches toward Bethlehem, That's 'cause it's native to the Levant.
Ever heard "Losing My Religion" transposed into major? That's sort of the auditory equivalent of this.
Hello! I'd like to express my admiration for your amazing story "And What Happened After." You've done an enormous amount of work, and the story gives a feeling of healing and hope. It's really heartwarming! I've heard that for many fans in the English fandom, it's become a tradition to read it after watching the movies or reading the books. Maybe it would become a tradition in a Russian fandom too, I hope so!
Would you please give me your permission to translate this wonderful work into Russian and publish it (with you clearly credited as the author and with a link to the original) on the Russian fanfiction platform? I would be delighted to take on this translation, if no one has done it before.
Thank you for this beautiful work, and I hope to hear back from you!
Hi @adelacatcher! Thanks so much for your kind words. I'd be honored if you wanted to translate "And What Happened After" - you have my full permission and my best wishes for the endeavor! (I'd love to see a link if/when it gets posted, not that I can read Russian, but I can still express my appreciation!)
Reddit user has cracked the code on how to read fanfic and study at the same time
(image via twitter)
original reddit post
Galileo Galilei is that you?!
guilt by complicity
Dad just mentioned âRacineâs Sarumanâ and oh my god I want it
GrĂma Wormtongue as the Obligatory Confidant Gandalf as the Conflict Aragorn as the Noble Monarch Who Is Totally Not Louis XIV Sauron as the Deus Ex Machina
Act I, Scene i: the ruins of OrthancÂ
Saruman:Â
Stop, GrĂma, and speak with me a while. My eyes have ne'er seen a disaster so great: My armies are scatterâd, my men are all slain And Elessar the King is returnâd to my door. Shall I speak with the proud Maia who rides in his train and what of the small folk who brought my tower low? Alas, what ruin has come to Isengard! O glories past, O hate, O my fallen pride!Â
@sigaloenta
SARUMAN Restez, Grima. Bien que Fortune me ruine je trouve encore besoin de vos conseils si dignes. De mes armĂ©es Ă©normes, nul homme reste vivant et sur les plaines dâOrthanque triomphe lâarbre argent. Or, dois je voir le roi, le puissant Elissar? Et lâarrogant Maia, qui suit partout son char? Ces qui mâont renversĂ©, les crĂ©atures petites? (Cette tour de telle hauteur, ont ils aux sol rĂ©duite.) Verront-ils Saruman en guise de suppliance? Entendront-ils mes mots serviles dâobĂ©issance? HĂ©las, mon Isengard â quelle chute as tu passĂ©e! O gloires toutes tombĂ©es! TombĂ©e ma fiertĂ©!
*gathers all of the people in the world who write the number 7 with a little dash in the center of it so I can study them like little critters and find out what makes them do that*
Thereâs actually a lot of history regarding the development writing systems and why there are different visual representations of numerals, but the short answer is: itâs regional, and you probably picked up how to make your numbers look based on your parents or your primary school teachers
I do it out of spite because in grade school a kids detective story identified the culprit by saying NO American wrote their sevens with a line and I thought that was super flimsy evidence and it made me so mad I started putting a line through my sevens so the fictional detective would be wrong and then kept doing it for several decades since.
I do feel one canât underestimate the âelementary school child taught themselves how to do this Out Of Spiteâ crowd
What reconciliation Of two proud men? what peace can be found To grow between the hammer and the anvil? Tell us, Are the old disputes at an end, is the wall of pride cast down That divided them? Is it peace or war?
It's the ten year anniversary of finishing These Gifts That You Have Given Me, still one of the things I'm proudest of having created. In many ways it really does feel like ten years - I've gone through at least a decade's worth of transformation in my life - but my terrible OTP is just as terrible, and just as compelling to me, as the day I texted @sumeriasmith "I'd forgotten just what a nasty end Celebrimbor came to"
One of the most gratifying things about having offered this to the world has been seeing subsequent epic works that mention it as an influence - Prackspoor's Equinox, Chthonion's Anastasis, Cherepashka's For Nothing Less Than Thee. The wells of imagination, knowledge, talent, and passion are very deep in Silmarillion fandom, and it's been an honor to be - I feel I've lost hold of the metaphor here. Am I another drop of water in those wells or am I helping dig them deeper or am I just drinking from them? Or, as Bilbo said, all of them at once?
Chapters: 4/6 Fandom: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien, TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Sauron | Mairon, Annatar/Celebrimbor | Telperinquar Characters: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar, Annatar (Tolkien), Ereinion Gil-galad, Galadriel | Artanis, Elrond Peredhel, Narvi (Tolkien), Original Characters Additional Tags: Second Age (Tolkien), Eregion, Ost-in-Edhil, Gwaith-i-MĂrdain, Time Travel Fix-It, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, References to Torture, How many math and science concepts can be co-opted into relationship metaphors? An experiment, Ever so many footnotes Summary:
At the end of the Third Age, Sauron falls. Partway through the Second Age, Annatar and Celebrimbor awake, with memories of a future that hasnât happened yet. Each believing himself to be the only one to have traveled in time, they set out to change one anotherâs choices. Much else changes before they are done.
New chapter up. @solmarillion, your gift has not been abandoned! Thank you for your patience.