Learning to Skate

She/her, 28 year old lawyer in poverty law, lesbian. Likes books, canoeing, being outside, pretty pictures, hockey, other stuff.

[vexwerewolf]

So in the movies they give this duty to Arwen, but in the original Fellowship of the Ring, the elf who bears a wounded Frodo to Rivendell is Glorfindel, and I cannot stress how absolutely batshit this is

Like this is like if a Nazi broke your leg and your ambulance driver was Zhuge Liang

[alagaisia]

Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

[alagaisia]

It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!

[alagaisia]

It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.

[watermelon-converse]

Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this

[emi--rose]

Hell yeah moon holiday

[hello-delicious-tea]

Ooh coming up we should celebrate

[ariaste]

PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)

[wellsbering]

imagine your ex who you haven't seen in a decade (since he stole your car) shows up at your house. in the car. the one he stole from you. it looks like shit. your ex asks you to fix the broken car. then he tells you that the hot girl with him and his buddy (the one that helped him steal the car) is his new girlfriend. she is a member of the royal family and she looks capable of murdering you AND your ex with rage alone. you try to say hi. she does not say hi. no one admits it out loud, but you get the feeling that they're all running from the cops and they all want to hide out in YOUR house.

this is what happened to lando calrissian in the empire strikes back

[zishiyao]

After the War of Wrath, Maglor cast the Silmaril into the sea and left his people behind. He wandered alone along the shores of the world, accompanied only by the tides, the birds, and his unending songs of regret.

[carys-the-ninth]

The problem with commercial F/M romance is that it's written by the most heterosexual women alive and reading it you feel yourself slowly suffocating from the Gender of it all like a fish in a eutrophying lake. And what we actually need as a culture is F/M written by insane bisexuals violently allergic to heteronormativity

[moniquill]

The problem is the insane bisexuals are not interested in commercializing. They write for free and publish their works on AO3.

[morethanslightly]

#hello yes#as one of the individuals in question#WATCH THIS SPACE#but it's true that publishing#understands marketing ff and mm to queer folks#it is LESS savvy#when it comes to wildly queer fm romance#they cannot conceive of a market for it#but if you enjoy such a concept#read Untamed by Anna Cowan#the most bonkers queer historical romance#years ahead of its time#tragically#but so so so so good (tags by @fahye)

[mixtapestar]

any tips on finding a copy/ebook version of Untamed? I can't seem to find any active links

[morethanslightly]

oh that's a bummer, I didn't realize it was no longer available! Anna Cowan's website says she just had the rights reverted to her and that she does intend to make it available again, but there's no date given

I own it, but as a Kindle ebook, which is a maddeningly difficult thing to share, sigh

sorry to have recommended something out of print! as penance, here are some other books I like with m/f romances where there is some good gender stuff happening

Fan Service by Rosie Danan (contemporary paranormal, the star of a CW-type show actually starts turning into a werewolf and goes to the moderator of the show's fan forum for help, she's a bisexual fandom weirdo, he might be too)

Isn't It Obvious? by Rachel Runya Katz (contemporary, bi4bi, they love each other online and hate each other irl, this is funny and delightful)

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (fantasy, she's a huge butch bisexual medieval lady knight and he's a scrawny little modern scholar who studies her, they get stuck in a timeloop, it will make you cry)

like almost every Talia Hibbert book!! they are all great but I've got a soft spot for The Roommate Risk (contemporary, the title gets the premise across, the FMC is a wreck and there's a lot of angst)

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi (contemporary, absolutely gorgeous prose, two people come together after grief, bi4bi)

Tell Me Anything by Skye Kilaen (contemporary, bi4bi, he's been out for a long time and has a loving queer community, she's struggling with coming out because her family is awful, and also her life is just really tough, this is so real and grounded and full of angst)

The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian (historical, I don't know if this one will make any sense if you haven't read The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, which is m/m, but both are good and they're about robbing rich people for justice and fun)

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall (historical, trans woman fakes her own death at Waterloo in order to be herself, in doing so she cuts ties with her best friend, he's so destroyed by grief when they see each other again years later that he doesn't recognize her)

I could make a whole other list for polyamorous romances but I'm gonna stop here for now because it's bedtime

[subsequentibis]

not an apologizer but a contextualizer. yes the character did that but please understand the Circumstance. yes they had other options but they had to make this choice in a sea of available bad choices. and also it made the narrative more interesting. won't anybody think about the narrative!!!!!

[catchymemes]

[plecotusauritus]

There is always a fandom discourse about how fandom is too much about shipping and romantic love, but my beef is actually with people being too fond of the idea of a family as the purest form of love and the strongest unit.

Starting from pople tending to turn every story about siblings who are not besties into this huge tragedy instead of awknowledging that maybe, sometimes, people are not close with their siblings. Or that people are so weird about mothers.

But what irks me even more is the tendency to decide that two people who are close in canon have a "sibling coded relationship" which suddenly also means that shipping them together is wrong. Or if a character has an older person in their life whom they look up to - well that is their parent now!!!! They can't fuck their parent!!!!

There is this underlying idea that elevating characters into a familial bond is above such concepts as romantic love or sex. Which sucks because that is not what the concept found family means - it was meant to describe the queer experience of finding your people and community from outside of your blood relatives, and it was never meant to say that there can't also be romantic relationships within that community.

And it is not even always about the fact that I want to ship my blorbo with everyone who comes near him (although I absolutely do), but I think that sometimes there can be meaningful dynamics that are not about family. I want my blorbo to have friends, lovers, partners, mentors, neighbours, a trusted older person who they can call to but is not their parent.

Maybe some of this rises from the fact that family for me is something complicated and sore and not as important as my friends and community. But also the idea of a nuclear family as the pillar of society is such a conservative talking point and it is weird that people keep throwing a fit about romance and dating as societal standard but don't seem to notice this one.

[illucescere]

Arha in her Labyrinth

[strange-aeons]

during pride month??????

[strange-aeons]

Great news: after being banned from Night Power Tools, my wife has taken up whittling and is making me a spoon

[helenvaughans]

[jasper-dixon]

[xximmortalkissxx]

"Where does one even begin when describing Celebrimbor Curufinwëion? His genius is often mentioned first and foremost—much to his delight I'm sure—but what has consistently impressed me most is his penchant for causing debilitating vexation… A very Fëanorian trait to be sure." - The Mad Ramblings of Annatar, Lord of Gifts.

[elwingedd]

“Maglor’s canonical wife” this “Maglor’s canonical wife” that. I raise you this: Maglor’s many awkward situationships with people he ended up on the opposite side of kinslayings. This all culminates in him marrying Daeron, getting divorced, and then remarrying after 3 ages.

[wtf-scientific-papers]

Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites

[dragongirl-casca]

[wizard-of-interesting-failure]

I do not dream of labor unless that labor is getting bitten by snakes repeatedly.

[elodieunderglass]

Must've been hard as hell in the day-to-day

[elodieunderglass]

Frodo: I just felt like I was really locked in … idk

Sam:

[elodieunderglass]

Getting notes on this post is like …. Girls you might be in burnout. Sorry I can’t help. 😘 though

[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.

[headspace-hotel]

quote i wanted to emphasize

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.

[cvrc11]

A+ analysis, I'll just add that if you want a really, really good breakdown of the pernicious racial ideology inherent in Tolkien's work, everyone should read Charles W. Mills's "The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto". It's a bit hard to find if you don't have access to a university library, but it's a fascinating bit of analysis because it was written before the vast majority of scholarship on race in Tolkien and yet manages to be more profound and scathing in its analysis than anything that would come after.

[balrogballs]

☝🏻 this! reading this essay last year was truly eye opening in so many ways (and it’s the one i mention on this post but got the initial wrong, sorry charles w mill for calling you charles e mill 😭) and honestly if i could ever set people required reading it would be that essay!!!