There is a malady inside my soul...

(Art by @linkeduniverse) Not a roleplay blog, just a fictive! | Wind, she/it/sail | | Headmate blog, main @our-happy-end1ng! |

[thewindswaker]

It's an intro, woah!

[Plain text: It's an intro, woah! /end plain text]

Uh, hi! I'm Wind, she/it/sail, although, other pronouns related to the wind or sea are always fine by me! I'm a fictive of Wind from Linked Universe, and I decided that I wanted my own blog, so here we are?

I'd like to establish this, first and foremost: while I'm fine talking about my source and all, I'd like to ask that you don't (pt: don't /end pt) treat me like the character! Thanks!

Uuuuhhhh, other things... well, my favorite Zelda game is Wind Waker (obviously), and I write a LOT. I particularly enjoy plural Wind, actually! Other headmates may steal this blog from time to time, but they'll usually indicate who they are in the tags, no worries!

Also, if you're a fakeclaimer, kindly fuck off, please? I'm just here to enjoy myself, and I don't need you here. I'm also pro-endo, FYI!

(Note: as of 10/16/25, this user has been consumed by Epic the Musical. Send help.)

[thewindswaker]

Bonus points to anyone who recognizes my blog’s titlw.

[write-with-will]

i wish you could turn your eyes off

[liamket]

anything can be platonic if you're not a coward

[xclowniex2]

At a time where jewish groups are being banned from pride events, you do not get to use Anne Franke, a dead jew murdered for being jewish before she could ever come out, as a puppet for whatever queer rights message you want to share.

You do not get to profit, financially or attention wise or another way, off of a *potentially* queer jew whilst we are banned from pride events.

We do not know if she was questioning her sexuality but ultimately straight or if she was actually queer because she was killed for the crime of existing as a jew before she could come out. Queer rights obviously matter. Anne Franke is not the person you should be using.

You need to protect alive queer jews. You need to love all jews, not just the dead ones.

[just--a--random--human--being]

I love the ravioli tag on this hellsite bc half of it is actual food and half of it is boys kissing

[the-quasar-hero]

It’s extremely fucked up that some ppl try to make you feel stupid and immature for hoping for a better world. You say you want world peace and mfs think you need a pacifier; dawg, I just don’t want ppl dying from violence. This idea that ppl simply must die as casualties of war is misanthropic to say the least.

[nonbinaryjudean]

(Jewish) pride month day 1: Dana International

Dana International is an Israeli pop singer and LGBTQ+ rights advocate. In 1998, she became the first transgender artist to win the Eurovision song contest. She has performed at many pride events and has advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in Israel and abroad.

every day this month I will be posting about queer Jews you should know!

[femboy-nation-rise]

I am so glad that I live in a world with trans women and trans men and nonbinary people and intersex people. Things are hard for all of us right now, but I love you all and I am wishing that things get better and easier for all of us! ❤️

[raycatzdraws]

💥ANTAGONISM💥

[hacvek]

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

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

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!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

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.

[roach-works]

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.

[beatrice-otter]

#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."

[whetstonefires]

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.

[beatrice-otter]

#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

[maryellencarter]

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.)

[sunflowergardens-world]

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

[mysteryteacup]

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.

[cacodaemonia]

Wow, a lot has been added since I last reblogged this 😂

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Sauron did NOT raise the mountains of Mordor, because Maiar weren't powerful enough for such drastic remodeling? At least, I can't think of any examples of Maiar undertaking such massive projects.

Beyond that, I think it's stated somewhere that Melkor himself crated Orodruin, or Mount Doom. He could very well have built the mountains at the same time, but since they seem to have been in existence since at least the beginning of the Second Age, there are three other options:

They were there from the beginning, in the Music of the Ainur, and were created when the Valar descended to Arda. One could argue that the ugly shape was created by the discord Melkor sowed in the song.

Melkor created them at another point before the First Age, after most of the other Valar retreated to Aman and he had the run of Middle Earth.

They were created at the end of the First Age, when the Valar returned to Middle Earth and yeeted Melkor/Morgoth into the Void. Most of Beleriand was destroyed at the time, and it's very likely that many other parts of Middle Earth were altered in such a violent upheaval, so it's entirely plausible that was their origin.

Also, the Carpathian Mountains, as well as some other ranges that I can't recall, have weird shapes. Maybe Tolkien was looking at these and just flipped them around:

[redstonedust]

i admit i am getting wary whenever people vaguepost about a fandom being 'full of drama' because a lot of people seem to use 'drama' as a synonym for like. discussions of bigotry and bias in media. which is so very much not the same thing and it hurts my head to see it conflated with shipping wars and headcanon discourse.

[creatingblackcharacters]

Every time someone says "I don't pay attention to fandom drama" and the "drama" is a Black or brown person getting dogpiled for wanted to be treated with respect. But then turn around and go "I didn't know that this sort of thing was happening!" Well you didn't care to look, either 😬

[byelacey]

there is no such thing as a heterosexual vampire

NOW AVAILABLE on lots of different shirt designs and sizes up to 5xl on my threadless shop

[interestingmistakes]

Reblogging this manually. Op doesn't want credit for fear of being terminated.

[wcdonaldo]

your daily reminder that this is a microblogging website and not every post you see is a sweeping well thought-out hot take for you to consider and many posts are in fact vent posts that blew up on accident

[longseasons]

[gwydionmisha]

Bonus: If I buy a book I get to keep it! The publisher can't turn up at my house at random and confiscate all the books I bought.

[bucatinibucatini]

i love cis people cause when i say “when i used to be a girl…” they go “mhmm…. but also….. you’ve ALWAYS been a man” okay ur very sweet but actually i was a weird girl in middle school and you need to know that to understand my personality today