This blog is 18+ only - my content is NSFW, please do not interact with this blog if you are a minor. I will block you if I catch you.
Do not repost / redistribute my work - this includes feeding or scraping my work into AI and / or AI chatbots, unathorised translations, and / or reposting on other platforms.
Please don't leave comments demanding updates - the updates will come when they come.
AO3
Please note that most of my fics are currently locked due to being impacted by the huggingface AI scraping incident 😭 to access them you will need to have an account and can no longer view them as a guest.
🔥HOTD | House of the Dragon
COMPLETED:
Aemond Targaryen x Reader | As You Are - MULTI - AO3 & Tumblr 1 / 2
🔮 IN-UNIVERSE 🔮
Lady Reader is sent to marry Prince Aemond to forge an alliance between their houses 💕 11k words of pining after one another, and a romantic wedding night that’s hard to forget xx
✨原神 | Genshin Impact
ONGOING:
Kaeya x Reader | A Facade of Frost and Flame - MULTI - AO3 & Tumblr
👑 ROYALTY AU 👑
As Grand Duchess of Snezhnaya - daughter of the reigning monarch - you have always known that your fate was never your own to choose, yet found comfort in the sheltered life you had in the Winter Palace. However, your whole world is soon turned upside down when you are promised to a man you have never met, to become the future Queen Consort of a country that you’ve never been to, and be used as a pawn in a game that you have no desire to play.
In your despair, you take comfort in a man who shares the pain of being separated from one’s home
COMPLETED:
Zhongli x Reader | As The Heavens Move - MULTI - AO3
🔮 IN-UNIVERSE 🔮
The Archon war rages across Teyvat, leaving untold chaos and destruction in its wake - as you earn the ire of a Chi that has stolen your home and all you hold dear, you take solace in a contract that the Lord of Geo offers.
Diluc x Reader | Before Dawn, At The Winery - ONESHOT - AO3
🔮 IN-UNIVERSE 🔮
Set in an alternate timeline where Crepus never died and Diluc stayed with the knights, married you a few years later, and is returning home after a few weeks away from the Winery.
Itto x Reader | A Night To Remember - ONESHOT - AO3
🔮 IN-UNIVERSE 🔮
Itto is a Himbo and he fucks like a champ 🤷♀️
Thoma x Reader | In Contrast to Eternity - ONESHOT - AO3
🔮 IN-UNIVERSE 🔮
Set during the Archon quest - Hurt / Comfort - you realise what Thoma truly means to you.
ON HIATUS:
Zhongli x Reader | A Contract of Gold and Stone - MULTI - AO3
💼 MODERN AU - CEO Zhongli 💼
All his life Rex Lapis had taken contracts and obligations with the utmost sincerity, never minding small manoeuvres and loopholes as long as they did not dishonour the spirit of the original agreement but, after a one night stand turns into a series of office hook-ups, you find yourself struggling to stick to terms that you thought were supposed to be set in stone.
The swords kissed and sprang apart and kissed again [...] steel rang, steel sang, steel screamed and sparked and scraped [...] A red flower blossomed [...] "Come on, come on, my sweetling, the music’s still playing. Might I have this dance, my lady?”
I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what you’re saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesn’t, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think it’s important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because he’s a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesn’t make the text less racist but it’s an important thing to consider. That’s all, I agree with your other points.
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so I’m snowed under atm ☠️
So there’s a lot of talk about Tolkien being ‘of his time and class’ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. ‘Of his time’ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isn’t applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ‘norms of his time’ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to ‘what Tolkien said’ rather than ‘what was actually happening then’.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the “the fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his time” line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moody’s League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think what’s more likely than ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didn’t know any such antiracist thought existed’ is that ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existed’.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharky’s minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking people’s cats
Anyway, I’m so tired of how “of his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really don’t think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as ‘unconscious bias’ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job 😭
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ‘normal people not kings of men’ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of Númenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramir’s entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the ‘childless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gates’ bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a ‘birthright citizenship’ as a consequence of a person’s actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day ‘migrant criminality’ discourse, how can you say he didn’t anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration 😭
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the Fëanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls don’t jump up my ass 😭)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Men™️ being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. It’s not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean ‘he did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm’??? 😭The legendarium isn’t a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that “his time” kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didn’t.
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didn’t have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does ☠️
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on “unconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when he’s hit. Which is to say, the insistence on ‘Tolkien was of his time and his time was bad’ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about ‘the time’ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.
On a vaguely related note, I also think ‘this fandom gives grace to the author’ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket you’re in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and it’s doubly baffling considering that he isn’t exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of ‘grateful to the author for this wonderful world’ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going ‘why the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?’
me: does this fantasy setting have no misogyny or does it just have women in the warrior class
they: i dont understand
me: *explains in detail the difference between a fantasy setting w no misogyny n a fantasy setting where the creator just added women to the warrior class n put no further thought into it whatsoever*
they: *laugh* its a good fantasy setting, sir
me: *looks inside* *they just added women to the warrior class*
Just got an email from the RSC saying that they're going to give out phone camera stickers for GOT: Mad King and asking people not to talk about the plot online because they know people are going to try to post spoilers lol
Just got an email from the RSC saying that they're going to give out phone camera stickers for GOT: Mad King and asking people not to talk about the plot online because they know people are going to try to post spoilers lol
To be one thing and yet to be simultaneously its opposite is the paradox underlying Dracula. Thus, when Arthur looks at the Lucy-vampire lying in its coffin, beautiful in un-death, and asks, 'Is this really Lucy's body, or only a demon in her shape?' Van Helsing replies: 'It is her body, and yet not it'. The movement of the book is towards the clear redefinition of categories, but those categories are not only those of life and death. More significantly, they are the categories of a civilized society, for insofar as Dracula is concerned with religion it is concerned with rituals of social rather than of moral purity: Mina, for example, remains morally good even when the vampire's attack has left her ritually unclean. Blood becomes a means either of symbolizing relationships or of perverting them. Rifts or anomalies in normal relationships—familial, social and sexual—are invitations to the vampire, who dwells not in the other-world of death, but in the ambiguous space between contraries. Thus, in his separation from Mina between betrothal and marriage, Jonathan Harker meets Dracula. Thus, the happy wife or submissive daughter may be safe, but the isolated fiancée whose mother is dying (Lucy) finds herself vulnerable. Danger lies not in death, which is at least an achieved state, but in the transition from life to death; not in judgement, but in the distance between death and judgement. Similarly, single and married states are clear categories and so may be equally pure and clean and holy; the gap between them is dangerous. In what anthropologists call the 'liminal zone," where the initiate moves between what is known and what is not known, the vampire is most certain to be encountered. In this sense, Transylvania (where Jonathan Harker's very obviously initiatory adventures take place) contains similar dangers to those Lucy encounters in the space between childhood and adulthood. Jonathan, no adventurer, nobleman or hunter, needs to confront the darkness of violence and danger so that he can be fit to wage war with Dracula. More fortunate than Lucy, Jonathan as a man can learn the role of noble hunter, initiated into the rites of healing violence. The final destruction of the vampire allows the characters to reassert social categories and unambiguous identity, becoming simply husbands or wives or civilized men and women without the confusion that signifies uncleanness.
Anne McWhir, Pollution and Redemption in "Dracula"
The identity of Dunk's father is left a mystery. Some have speculated that he is a high lord's bastard like Umber, due to his size. I think him having noble lineage misses the point of his character. He is a bastard born in Flea Bottom from two parents with possibly a prostitute for a mother, the lowest of the low, and he proved to be the greatest knight of his time.
The only father he needed was Ser Arlan of Pennytree. That is the lineage he descends from, not in blood, but in spirit. Dunk passed or at least tried to pass that down to Egg. Dunk was special not because of his blood or lineage, but because he was Dunk.
Dunk the hedge knight who challenged a prince to defend a smallfolk woman, cut his own cheek in an attempt to stop a fight between Webber and Osgrey, inspired a future king and likely put his life on the line and tested his Kingsguard vows by taking a stand against his own king to save the life of an infant.
His greatness came not from his pedigree, but the choices he made.
Have you seen the snezhnaya preview? Tsaritsa reveal has me so hyped knowing she’s canonically a mother now 🥹
Speaking of, I keep rereading your chapters of A Facade of Frost and Flame now that snezhnaya is right around the corner !! Hope u have the time to continue it soon and maybe have some new profound inspiration/encouragement, I truly do adore your writing <3
I haveeee!!! Very excited for Snezhnaya i can't believe how quickly it's come, nod krai flew by lmao and it feels like launch wasn't that long ago either?? I had just graduated uni, it was lockdown, I had all the time in the world to explore teyvat and now im almost 30 💀
But anyways, thank you that's very sweet ❤️ I do hope to continue it at some point, and am sorry it's not been updated since December...
It's kind of down to a couple reasons - firstly, I've been a bit disillusioned about fic writing since all my fics were scraped last year. I go back and forth between wanting to create in spite of AI, to thinking what is the point in putting in all that effort for someone to just steal it anyway.
I locked my fics for a while afterwards and it killed the engagement on them like crazy, which is frustrating because despite AFOFAF being the strongest fic I've ever written it is by far the least popular because of that.
Secondly, (the biggest reason if I'm being honest) I've had an extremely busy couple of months work-wise where I took on a LOT of additional responsibilities on top of the work I was already doing. I'm sure you can understand that if I spend all day writing copy / content at work, the last thing I wanna do is carry on writing other stuff when I get home or when I have time off.
I'm doing okay though and still love my job!! I'm just tired haha. I'm also mostly off social media atm so haven't really posted any life updates to explain the delay.
ANYWAY sorry for the long reply and thank you again for reaching out ❤️ it makes me really happy that people still enjoy my writing even though I've been slacking on the updates lol xxxx
