inspired by a thing some people in a discord channel i’m in are doing: make ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT ME/US based on my/our WRITING. bonus points if you read the writing before having talked to us.

(writing can be found here; if you’re familiar with glowfic/amentumblr i assume you know who i am, but if you don’t then you can send an ask and i’ll clarify)

gonna skip to part five of the magnus archives bc ive been told thats when the trolls come in

i don’t even have a personality any more i’m just like good morning THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES

I have lots of thoughts on this but also negative spoons; poke me on discord about it later? (If it’s in a server rather than DMs, please @ me or I won’t see it)

I’m loving all this gender+sexuality Tolkien talk, but now I’m curious - what ARE the ways that you think all these elves and Atani conceive of gender in their cultures? I’ll admit that the idea in the Nolofinwe post that lady elves and ONLY lady elves can make bread, not male elves, as baked into world physics really got me. Like, is that a defining difference? THE defining difference? Or is it all down to that Homosocialization and it’s all about who you hang out with?

Okay so the bread baking thing is half serious half canon. The only serious defining “this is a thing that only níssi can do as opposed to néri” thing in Tolkien’s discussion of sex and gender among the elves is baking bread. And there are a few schools of thought regarding that, from “it’s just a gendered skill that néri don’t get taught how to do” to “yeast literally will not ferment unless a nís is doing the baking”; I tend to go with the latter, because it’s so very alien and because it’s also hilarious.

The big thing for me is that elves don’t have the big things that define gender and gender roles for us in western society. Elvish religion is explicitly not particularly organized - there are some hymns to the Valar, but they don’t treat the Valar as gods whose wills must be obeyed, and it’s stated in-text more than once that there are areas of life that the Valar have no real dominion over. There aren’t millennia of religious doctrine hashing out what gender means on a theological or sacramental level, and there aren’t millennia of societal traditions that all more or less fall into “Man lead woman follow”, either. The one text that we have that discusses gender is pretty clear that aside from the mechanics of biological reproduction and baking bread, there’s no set-in-stone divisions between néri and níssi, which indicates to me that there’s no reason these people would share our modern conceptions of what gender is. Elves don’t have long organically-developed histories involving many different layers of experience where gender plays a role in things. Because they’re immortal with relatively low population growth rates and a lack of the older generations dying out to codify social changes, they are pretty consistent; I don’t think there’s zero change from Cuiviénen to Imladris, at all, but there’s much less change than there would be in the same amount of time for a human population. And Cuiviénen isn’t stratified by gender, either - they didn’t develop a system based on designating particular roles to specific genders, and we know this because it’s never mentioned in the text.

So what I’m left with is the fact that we know that both Imladris and Valinor had cultures with two recognized genders, but no real set-in-stone roles for those genders, because there was no need for gender roles to exist, so they just… never developed. I do think that there was a masculine/feminine divide of sorts, but nothing particularly coded one way or the other. Basically, it doesn’t look anything like what we have today, and therefore mapping out things like our contemporary frustrations or angst regarding the restrictive nature of gender roles just doesn’t work. They don’t see that much difference between néri and níssi, not really, though there are certain signifiers that indicate “masculine” or “feminine”, and there is some expectation that gender will correspond at least a little to one’s anatomy, but there aren’t social consequences for varying from those signifiers or expectations.

I have made a new podfic, for 75hearts/@daywillcomeagain‘s fic ‘in the indigos of darkness’.

A story about found family, three unrepentant king’s men under Pharazôn, disability, religion, and death

Link to the ao3 page

Link to the google drive download

Image credit to the European Southern Observatory. CC BY 4.0

Angst (12) Canonical Character Death (9) Suicide (4) Dubious Consent (4) Character Study (4)

I feel. Hm. Called out.

Top three tags on your AO3 account summarises your brand.

(Fellow writers feel free to reblog with screenshots)

I know the Númenor day for @ataniweek was yesterday, but I wrote a quick Tar- Míriel centric fic (warning: It’s kinda dark) that I’m hoping they can still give a shout?

Chapters: 8/8 Fandom: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con Relationships: Tar-Míriel/Original Female Character(s), Tar-Míriel/Original King’s Man Character, Ar-Pharazon/Tar-Miriel Characters: Tar-Míriel, Ar-Pharazôn, Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s), Sauron | Mairon Additional Tags: Númenor, Romance, Unhappy Ending, Tragedy, ‘Canon Compliant’ as a warning tag, Torture, Disease, Gift Giving, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Religion, Religious Worldbuilding, Infidelity, Loyalty, Spies & Secret Agents, Conflicted Loyalties Summary:

Ten of Swords: a painful and inevitable ending.

Ar-Pharazon has fears about the loyalty of his new wife, Tar-Miriel, and asks a soldier, Zimrazagar, to spy on her, in the guise of guarding her.

Zimrazagar intends to stay as a mere bodyguard, with a sideline in spying, but even with the best of intentions, she does not succeed.

…and it all ends in drowning and death,

You can always tell you've reached A Certain Point(TM) with a specific fandom when you can look at fanworks and immediately pick out the influence of other content creators in the fandom, as well as what headcanon trends (not necessarily related to the fanwork in question) the author likes, what ships they prefer, get a good idea of what discourse posts they would have reblogged and what side they would have taken, and approximately date the thing without needing a time stamp, like an art historian who is a hyper-specialised expert in a particular creative millieu from like, the nineteenth century

turgon doesn’t share his dream (14/?)

To all the Tumblr users who tend to use tags very liberally:

thinking about Finduilas always really gets to me, and I know it’s because I’m Overemotional Finduilas Faelivrin Fan #1 and all but also just!! This girl! The Silmarillion is filled to the brim with characters who are hurt and grieving and who have had their hope crushed time and time again, but who respond to it by fighting back against the dark forces that did that to them. Finduilas… doesn’t have that outlet. She’s sidelined as emotional support in a hopeless war, and I think it says a lot about her character that she immediately fell in love against her own will with the first person in however many years who made her feel like she, or anyone for that matter, could do something.

…And then her choice of allegiance turned out to be wrong, in that final, fatal case. I wonder how that made her feel, bleeding out as a prisoner of orcs, knowing that her beloved and her father were dead in part because of the choice she aligned herself with in a desperate bid not to be helpless anymore?

@princess-faelivrin

Finduilas

Controversial shipping asks

Interest Checks!

Here are the interest checks for two possible separate projects, a general Silmarillion fandom fanzine and a Fin-galad centric one! “Zine” can mean a couple of things, but in this case refers to an organized collection of fanworks by different people.

Silmarillion Zine Interest Check

Fin-galad Zine Interest Check

Signal boosts are appreciated! I will close these checks mid-March, and continue or not continue the projects accordingly.

had a long and tedious week, so here’s some maedhros I sketched to cheer me up. fave conflicted-murder-elf-looking-slightly-to-the-left. I’m always torn about his hair: while I like all the headcanons abt him wearing it short post-thangorodrim I also like to picture him with the most impractically long fuck-you hairdo ever! but why choose whe he’s been around long enough to try everything. also, kintsugi-like customs but for covering scars w gold-leaf or something?? uhm. anyway, click-through for larger + descr.