At Some Point It's Just Like. Do They Even Fucking Like The Thing They're Asking AI To Make? "oh We'll

not stanning mantis is a sin

the tea is that if mantis was a white, conventially pretty woman without an accent, she’d be adored and stanned far more and thats that

i feel like there are two extremes when it comes to the fëanorians: woobification or demonization, and i think both of them suck the life out of the characters. 

“fëanor/his sons did nothing wrong!” is a weird hill to die on considering how much the text itself disagrees, but i’ve seen people make memes and short posts echoing the sentiment. they usually side with them bc they’ve grown attached to the characters and can’t bear the thought of liking morally gray war criminals, so they rationalize this discrepancy by absolving the characters of any guilt and mentally categorizing them and their actions as always good and just, thereby avoiding having to ask themselves “why do i like these garbage elves?”. it’s a very boring way to go about viewing media - to always have to agree morally with a character to enjoy them.

“fëanor/his sons are absolute monsters who fucked everything up and deserve their fate” is the next extreme i see, and in some ways i actually don’t mind this as much as the other one, despite being a fëanorian fan myself. it’s more rooted in the text imho and understandable if you just look at the result of fëanor’s actions. that said, i feel like it isn’t a fair reading of the text and this viewpoint completely ignores the several times we are told about the good and noble deeds and intentions of fëanor and his sons. i also see this same sentiment in posts bashing on the kidnap dads. that does piss me off tbh, because i see people trying to claim that maglor and/or maedhros were abusive, something we have zero textual basis for. all we are told of their relationship is that “…(maglor) cherished them, and love grew after between them, as little might be thought…”. that’s it, and i take it at face value. as a survivor of familial abuse, i find it bizarre that people want the relationship to be toxic. maybe it’s because they can’t conceptualize terrible people making good guardians, i don’t know. all i know is that viewing maglor and maedhros as inherently evil and bad is glossing over one of the most interesting and compelling dynamics in the whole book to me - that of the brothers and elrond and elros. the idea that these arguably awful dudes find some semblance of family again with these twins who are survivors of the very kinslaying they committed? it’s strange and touching and the one of the last bits of good in the entire rest of the quenta silmarillion. if you write off all the fëanorians as assholes, you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater and losing out on enjoying the best written morally gray characters in all of tolkien’s works.

tl;dr: viewing the fëanorians as either wholly good or wholly evil is incredibly boring! gray morality is fascinating!

finland is fuckin wild, i swear

Using the hobbit age of adulthood (33) and average life expectancy (100), and comparing them to the legal age of adulthood in 1937 England (21) and life expectancy at the time (~late 50s early 60s):

Frodo (51, physically unchanged since 33) is the equivalent of a human 32-33 year old, and looks 21

Sam (39) is the equivalent of a human 24-25 year old

Merry (37) is the equivalent of a human 23-24 year old

And Pippin (29) is the equivalent of a human 18-19 year old, and by both hobbit and 1937 English tradition, still underage.

When we first meet them before the timeskip:

Frodo (33) - the equivalent of a 21 year old (barely, it was the days after his birthday)

Sam (21) - the equivalent of a human 13 year old (Which is adorable, bc his father describes him as constantly being over at the Baggins’ house, listening raptly to Bilbo’s stories)

Merry (19) - the equivalent of a human 12 year old (which is really funny because Merry is chilling at Frodos house and helping him distribute the stuff from Bilbo’s will and kind of affectionately sasses Frodo quité a bit and that’s so much funnier thinking of Merry as a literal child, which didn’t occur to me when I was listening to that scene)

We don’t meet Pippin but he’d be 11. The equivalent of a human 7 year old.

During the timeskip it talks about how Frodo mostly hangs out with the younger hobbits and is closest to Merry and Pippin out of everyone, and when I was listening, I was just like “oh okay his friends just happen to be younger” but no they were both literal kids for most of that timeskip, Frodo’s that guy who hangs out with kids because grownups all exhaust him.

(and meanwhile, the kids are just like LOOK ITS OUR COOL BIG BROTHER FRODO)

Bonus – I don’t remember the exact numbers, but Bilbo is basically a guy in his 80s who looks 33. Which really drives the ring thing home imo

i feel like ‘fostered by elves’ definitely made Tuor and Turin Weird to humans and attractive to elves (as is actualy shown in the Narn to a degree I think)…

imagine how incredibly weird/messed up a child partially fostered by the Ainur/Valar in Valinor would be.

Am I talking about Fëanor again? Yes I am. Sure he was Finwe’s favourite child and he loved him. But Finwë was grieving, and King; which is to say his father was both overwhelmed by his emotions (which he ended up putting before the wellbeing of his child in the end) and busy. Finwë was also at least at some point during Feanor’s youth went to stay at Ingwe’s and was walking around on his own, at which point he fell in love with Indis, so he simply cannot have been around all the time.

There is also a note on Fëanor being the only elf to learn Valarin. And there is that note I quoted about Fëanor giving many jewels to the maiar of Lorien, presumably because or while they cared for his mother’s body. 

…what I’m saying is… distressing/depressing idea of tiny child Fëanor tinkering away in the gardens of Lórien beside his mother’s ‘sleeping’ body while the maiar try to babysit him. 

Not Fëanor learning Valarin as an adult because he’s a special linguistic genius (though that’s true) but simply because his babysitters were occasionally incorporeal beings who whispered a distressingly alive, sharp language into his tiny pointed ears. 

do ya ever bring your pet up to a mirror and ur like “that you”

PLEASEEEE I WANT TO SEE IT

plz tag me if u do

I'm tempted to make a Reddit AITA post from Finwë's perspective — my eldest son pulled a knife on his half brother. Everyone in the family is mad and wants him gone. Am I the asshole for going with him? — and see how Reddit judges the first High King of the Noldor

oh god, it's so beautiful

man this took longer than I wanted, also now you’ll finally see who’s the duke and his bodyguards!

HERE WE GO AGAIN

CRYING MY FACE OFF GOD

Don’t cry. You’re perfect.