known tragedy enjoyer

dd. he/him/his. yo. about me. byf/dni. taglist.

[sailatina3]

I wish it were more common to have "bilingual" stories. By that i mean stories where it's important that 2 or more languages are spoken throughout. There isn't any translation, there's just multiple languages spoken by the characters. I understand why this is seldom done considering how heavily limiting it is to the number of people who can actually read or watch it. But idk I think the world would be better off with some stories like that.

[ultimatecryptid]

btw if you're up for it :3c The Sun in Reverse: When does your character’s goal seem just out of reach?

im LATE but i do have an answerrr. you didnt specify so im gonna take the opportunity to talk about my VTM oc Aymoneta.

Aymoneta was turned in the 1200s, and throughout her—maybe—800 year life, there has always been something she couldn't achieve. Because what I want to explore with her is the idea that the goalposts are always moving. Even with 800 uears she couldn't succeed, she couldn't have succeeded with 2000, just like the Antedeluvians havent.

There's lots of things that have been out of reach: the abolishing of blood ties from both of her sires (even through her ill thought out vaulderie attempt), in the 1300s she really wanted to Julian of Norwich herself and have a Christly vision, but didn't despite a VARIETY of methods. Now, however, she's been desperately trying to wake up... but something has been stopping her.

Okay also Emery my beloved Em for fun. She wanted to have a happily ever after with Alistair after DAO, but when she was appointed Warden-Commander, and Ali was called to Weisshapt—and WENT... It didn't matter how much she wanted it to work. He wasn't there when she needed him.

[tainbocuailnge]

forget everything anyone has ever told you on the matter the truest marker of adulthood is starting to hear the siren call of high quality kitchenware

[tainbocuailnge]

to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it you’re literally gonna be using that almost every day

[elveny]

If your business can only be reached and all info about it only be accessed via Facebook or Instagram, know that it isn’t reachable or accessible AT ALL.

The whole metaverse can no longer be properly viewed without an account and I am definitely not making one just to see your contact info or opening hours.

Get a fucking WEBSITE. It can be just a static landing page with the relevant information. But get off the metaverse!

[balrogballs]

I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.

Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:

If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.

I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.

I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.

What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?

Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.

No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.

There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.

Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.

The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.

Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.

Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.

I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.

Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.

I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?

This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.

You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.

So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.

But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.

Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.

We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.

[t4timekeeper]

sometimes people will insist a character is butch/masc and then you look at the character and they’re just fat. or muscular. or black. or indigenous. or some combination of the above.

[design-is-fine]

Elisabeth Treskow, Graduated Fringe Necklace, 1955. Essen, Germany. Source

[rainekittys]

I post a lot about how fat people deserve to feel sexy and are hot, which is true, but I do also want to remind everyone that fat people should also be able to exist and be respected without being sexualised or you being attracted to them. You should respect people and treat them normally regardless of how attracted to them you are. If your activism centres purely around how much you can sexualise a marginalised group, your activism is shit, sorry

[ghostwise]

spooky guy in good spirits 👻 no scar yet so, pre-drezen

[qcharlie]

i wish we were able to talk about women's rights without someone mentioning how much they do or don't want to have sex with them. i don't care if you're a lesbian Stop finding worth in women purely from their perceived attractiveness

[qcharlie]

"I think women should not be expected to shave for societal respect / to avoid discrimination" "yeah🤤 i love bush" ok well that's not what we're talking about is it.

[qcharlie]

i hate how many posts about trans women deserving respect always devolve into "I love girldick" or "trans rights but I don't want to date a trans person" because that's entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. you should not respond to feminism with "YESSS I loveeee you because I see you as nothing but a sex object" you people sound like other men I get stuck talking with that end up saying "free the nipple so I can see boobies in public" and thinking they're feminists. why can't we just respect women regardless of your attraction to them or not. why does it need to be brought up in every conversation regarding their rights

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

You have became this medieval role, how do you feel about it

you are in the medieval era and you have this role!

How do you feel?

great!! I love this

good!

It's okay

So bad. I hate this

This is similar to my real job!

Results/other

Voting ended onJul 18

[boychic-deactivated20230922]

everybody who skipped dragon age origins is missing out b/c at some point you help a tree who speaks only in rhymes steal an acorn from a homeless man in your quest to locate and kill a naked woman and some werewolves for an 800 year old elf

[what-even-is-thiss]

I expected my cpap machine to make a dramatic difference right away but after waking up from my first night on the machine I think the experience can be described as I woke up and thought “well I don’t think I feel dramatically different but it also definitely feels like something in there has been unclogged”

[what-even-is-thiss]

It’s like uh like when you finally remember to clean the hair out of the shower drain after a while. But with my general vibe.

[what-even-is-thiss]

According to my app which no is not called cpapp unfortunately I only stopped breathing 1.7 times per hour. Which might sound weird but during my sleep apnea test I stopped breathing 23.5 times per hour so as you can imagine breathing is generally better than not breathing

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m not talking about my health just to overshare btw. I think there’s probably other young people out there with sleep apnea who might need to hear someone in their 20s discussing this.

Don’t feel ashamed to get tested if you’re tired all the time or someone has told you that you gasp for air in your sleep. Get your shower drain unclogged.

[quakerhobbit]

I'm 35 and I got tested for sleep apnea in the fall and I was having OVER 50 EVENTS PER HOUR.

Got my cpap and holy shit the difference. I am actually rested when I go to bed at a reasonable time. I no longer need daily 2-4 hour naps just to function.

And I also suspect that it might be helping me not get as many colds, because that nightly airflow clears things out.

I'm really glad I have my cpap now and everything is better, but also wish I had got tested earlier, because maybe if I'd caught this sooner I wouldn't have developed some of the other health issues I deal with. But I thought I was so tired all the time because I'm a parent and autistic.

So yeah, even if you think you know why you're always tired, get tested just in case.

[redstonedust]

i understand (on paper) why companies are anti-piracy but its funny when random individuals are also strongly anti-piracy. like how does it negatively affect your life if someone you know downloads a cracked torrent of sims 4. you dont work for EA. EA isnt gonna pay you for this. you lose nothing. its fine. chill out.

[riseofthecommonwoodpile]

you make one fucking post where the point is “women are encouraged to develop disordered eating from a very young age and that impacts how we view the ‘natural’ size and shape of women” and too many reblogs later i am being accused of saying short people wouldn’t exist if they ate better growing up. i’m sorry but if you genuinely think i was saying that you are just a buffoon. i cannot and will not sanction your buffoonery.

[and-orlesian-feathers]

Major Arcana Inspired Character Asks

Leave a card in my inbox! 

The Fool: When has your character been excited to start a new journey? The Magician: How does your character unleash their creativity or resourcefulness? The High Priestess: When has trusting their instincts paid off for your character? The Empress: Who has been a positive female figure in your character’s life? The Emperor: Who has been a positive male figure in your character’s life? The Hierophant: Who has served as a mentor to your character? The Lovers: Which of your character’s relationships has been the most positive? (Romantic or otherwise) The Chariot: What goal is your character determined to reach? Strength: On what issue is your character persistent? The Hermit: Write about a time your character did some soul searching. What did they find? The Wheel of Fortune: What are your character’s proudest successes? Justice: When has your character felt satisfied with the conclusion to a major dispute or concern? The Hanged Man: When has your character needed to step back and look at things from a different perspective? Death: When has your character had to let go of something in their life? Temperance: How does your character balance their life? The Devil: Does your character ever neglect their wild side? The Tower: When has your character lost an ideal or relationship? The Star: When has your character been most hopeful? The Moon: When has your character’s path been unclear? The Sun: When does your character sit back and enjoy themselves? Judgment: Has your character ever been given a second chance? The World: When has one of your character’s dreams come true?

Bonus: Major Arcana in Reverse!

The Fool in Reverse: When has your character acted recklessly? The Magician in Reverse: When was your character manipulated? The High Priestess in Reverse: When has your character felt betrayed emotionally? The Empress in Reverse: When has your character felt dependent on another? The Emperor in Reverse: When is your character inflexible or stubborn? The Hierophant in Reverse: When has your character’s personal beliefs been challenged? The Lovers in Reverse:  When has your character experienced heartbreak? The Chariot in Reverse: When has your character’s pride or arrogance been their downfall? Strength in Reverse: What are your character’s doubts or insecurities? The Hermit in Reverse: When has your character felt the most alone? The Wheel of Fortune in Reverse: When has your character felt their life was no longer under their control? Justice in Reverse: When has your character been treated unfairly or cruelly? The Hanged Man in Reverse: When has your character tried to avoid making a major decision? Death in Reverse: When has your character tried to fight change? Temperance in Reverse: When has your character felt overwhelmed? The Devil in Reverse: When has your character suffered from refusing to break off an unhealthy relationship? The Tower in Reverse: When has your character’s actions led to disaster? The Star in Reverse: When has your character lost faith? The Moon in Reverse: When does your character mistrust their feelings or intuition? The Sun in Reverse: When does your character’s goal seem just out of reach? Judgment in Reverse: When has your character found it difficult to forgive themselves? The World in Reverse: What is your character holding back? 

[ultimatecryptid]

@ghostwise

[pgwodewose]

As you all well know, I am very much into Arthuriana, and I am writing an Arthurian retelling.

I am also a godless socialist anarchist who believes Britain shouldn't have a monarchy.

How could I possibly therefore be into a body of literature which tells the legend of a Good King™? And why on earth would I bother writing a retelling of said legend, if I hate the monarchy so much?

Except...Arthur might be a Good King, but he is never a perfect one, not in the original Welsh literature, not in any medieval literature that I know of. He is never an Unambiguously Good King™. And even if he were, that doesn't necessarily mean that the institution of the monarchy is itself good.

And that's the key word here: Institution.

For instance, when we say All Cops Are Bastards, we're not just talking about individual cops. We're talking about the institution of policing and what it represents: a carceral system, state-sanctioned violence, and in the case of my country, the iron thumb of white supremacy and class hierarchy pressing itself down on ethnic minorities and the working classes, and those are the examples from off the top of my head. Your cousin Pete may be a Good Cop, but he's still acting in the service of a rotten institution that perpetuates violence on behalf of the state.

So when I say the monarchy is bad, I'm not just talking about individual monarchs, good or bad, but about an institution that asserts that an individual has the right to rule over you by virtue of what family they're born in, "by their blood", or by virtue of Because-God-said-so.

And in the context of Arthuriana, there's another thing to consider:

Arthur may be a Good King, Camelot may be a Great Kingdom, but it is one that was founded on violence, and I'm not talking about Arthur's wars with the Saxons: I am talking about Uther Pendragon's rape of Igraine that was brought about so that Arthur could be born, so that this Great Kingdom could come about.

Do the ends justify the means? Is a Kingdom, no matter how good, that was founded on such violence, that saw one woman and her family as expendable in order for it to exist, worth saving?

I believe Arthuriana has plenty of space to explore such ideas. I think there is room for an interpretation that is questioning of the systems of violence that the characters knowingly or unknowingly perpetuate, including the institution of the monarchy.

And no, I don't believe such an interpretation will lead to a work that's inherently cynical or nihilistic. If anything, I think it adds to the tragedy, and I think questions such as these can make for a good story.