Let's see if we can do better

Back from the dead but still on Semi-hiatus  

[r0cketeer]

CASSIAN ANDOR IS BACK 😭😭😭😭😭

[cairnsteward]

people who draw found-family-type groups of characters all sleeping in a big sort of loose pile together….. how does it feel to hold my life in your hands

[jhoca]

someone called sokka “prince of the southern water tribe” and so naturally, I wanted to draw him in fancy water tribe prince clothes…the takeaway: beads and braids in his hair, floof cape, pierCINGS (also on twitter)

[zukosturtleducks]

@muffinlance Prince Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe, Wearer of Fancy Fur Capes

[serenaci]

[fishmotif]

imo the most iconic gayle moment is that one where she electrocutes herself using a dog collar to bake an apple pie with the edge of seventeen by fleetwood mac playing in the background 

[maxandthespidersfrommars-deacti]

WHAT IS THIS

[toddreu-deactivated20191220]

Fuck you, Bonnie

[alrightginger-deactivated202206]

GAYLE DESERVES A NETFLIX SERIES

[deep-dish-luigi]

one person is enjoying the failure of cats (2019) more than the rest of us ever will and its this man

[penny-anna]

Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

[penny-anna]

~*~earlier~*~

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Frodo: Merry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll wait.

[penny-anna]

#legolas’ hick accent vs #frodo’s ‘i learned it out of a book’ accent #FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Frodo: :)

[storywonker]

Frodo: Hello. My name is Frodo. I am a Hobbit. How are you?

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo, crying: please I can’t understand what you’r saying

[ramshacklefey]

Ok, but Frodo didn’t just learn out of a book. He learned like… Chaucerian Elvish. So actually:

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

Aragorn: *laughing too hard to walk*

[reformedkingsmanagent]

@ghostriderofthearagon

[cryptidscrypticcrosswordclub]

dYinGggGggg…

[whetstonefires]

i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.

[whetstonefires]

to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!

[bowditch]

Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.

Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*

[linguisticparadox]

Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.

[sainamoonshine]

Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man

Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s

[esser-z]

Tolkien would be SO PROUD of this post

[sunny-dayze]

@words-writ-in-starlight

[wodneswynn-deactivated-deactiva]

If I remember correctly, in the “tree of tongues” material from The Lost Road, Tolkien goes into some detail about how the reason elves have so many dialects is that elves view language as a form of collaborative art, which they delight in, so a newly-coined word or grammatical construct gets spread around just like a new song would.

Elves may be immortal, but they’re also immortal nerd OCs and we must never forget this

[kittyknowsthings]

Thank you for this addition which is both lovely and educational

[kyraneko]

So what you’re saying is, they’re us. They’re the internet. Sending “yeet” and “smol” and “I lik the bred” all over creation until two elves who’ve never met in their lives and be like “beans, amirite?” and “yeah I love kitter feets too.”

[ekjohnston]

EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS BEAUTIFUL

[prismatic-bell]

Somewhere in the Grey Havens, Tolkien is reading this post.

He is simultaneously laughing with delight, and utterly PISSED that he can’t reblog with a whole nerdy essay to build on what you’ve all said.

[na-yserin]

@deadcatwithaflamethrower you have probably seen this but it made my morning :D and I hope you enjoy it!

[deadcatwithaflamethrower]

Laughed so hard I was sitting here wheezing when I hit Boromir being embarrassed from the grave.

[moon-covey]

Was somebody here or were you talking to the cows again? — That was Lex Luthor from another Earth.

[writing-prompt-s]

The person who grew up expecting to be the “chosen one” learns that they are meant to destroy the world, not save it.

[helz-belz]

[idiopathicsmile]

the trouble with writing is that it’s literally always easier to just lie facedown on your floor and make inarticulate noises

[wintersongstress]

[fuelledbyfanfiction-deactivated]

to everyone that follows me for fanfiction, i’m sorry 😂

[gaynfl-moved]

depression and being in the closet stole my teenage years from me so if you catch me doing some juvenile shit in my late twenties mine your own damn business

[tommyswiseau]

me talking to myself trying to justify spending $12 on dice that glow in the dark 

[marvelladiesdaily]

PEGGY CARTER/CAPTAIN CARTER in Marvel Studios’ WHAT IF…?

[comicsodissey]

Jedi Cat Meme ;  Art by JB Casacop

[chickensaredoodling]

Started and finished last year, but only have time to post it now. It’s part of my atla bender series. I always thought a big part of Zuko’s character was about balance.

[prokopetz]

The real unspoken hilarity of games like Dishonored is when they give you missions in areas that logically ought to have dense civilian populations, but the only lines of sight you’re actually required to avoid are those of a handful of strategically placed guards. The necessary implication is that there are dozens of everyday people who can see this blade-festooned gargoyle of a human being creeping about falling off of roofs plain as day and just don’t say anything about it to anyone because it’s Not Their Business™.

[prokopetz]

People in the notes are talking about how obviously folks aren’t going to snitch to the authorities, and sure, I’ll buy that, but here’s the thing: in order for the events of play to go down as depicted, it’s not sufficient that random civilians don’t talk to the authorities about Mr. Stabby over there – we’d also have to believe that they don’t even talk to each other. Like, everybody knows there’s a knife wizard living on the roof, they all saw that one time he accidentally clotheslined himself on a lamp-post while trying to sneak up on an evil robot, and they just… deliberately don’t acknowledge it?

[hatepig]

To be fair to the poor bastards living in Dunwall, there’s also, in order of horribleness:

A horrible witch woman living down the street who is also magical as shit and probably ate plenty of people who snitched.

Huge death clams what spit acid.

A group of super militant church assholes who ruthlessly abuse their authority and will burn the fuck out of anyone who isn’t praising the Abbey of the Everyman with each breath.

A bunch of corrupt as fuck guardsmen who you can catch harassing random people a LOT and who make the Fingermen from V for Vendetta look polite.

A group of cultists who are also doing bullshit magic.

A group of assassins (also doing bullshit magic).

Swarms of plague carrying rats who will strip you to the bones.

Actual goddamn zombies.

It’s a miracle anyone in Dunwall lives long enough to say hello, much less start running their mouths. I know I for one would be avoiding my neighbors for fear that some rose-growing jerkwitch would think I was talking shit and put me in a stew.

[kylos]

THANK GOD 🎉