ROP really gave rights to mean women, angry women, ambitious women, chaotic women, silly women, vulnerable women, hurting women, flawed women, AND himbos. !!!!!!

Actually original Mairon and Arien being so otherworldly pretty the elves cannot look at them for too long

I get that amazon wanted to make a silmarillion series, what I don't get is why they never thought to come up with another idea after not having the rights to the silmarillion and instead went "surely we can make a silmarillion show from the appendices alone" thus making their own lives harder and the show probably worse

sorry just realized that i'm chaotically posting about Tolkien opinions from a blog titled 'girlboss Sauron'

full offense but if you say that you are a "super" Tolkien fan who has read LOTR and the Silmarillion multiple times and that you watched Rings of Power and it was "very true to Tolkien and honored him and really felt like Tolkien and that he would have approved" I'm going to assume that either a) you are lying about ever read Tolkien, or b) you have terrible reading comprehension bc I have no idea how you could read any Tolkien anything and then say that Rings of Power bears any resemblance to anything that man would have given his approval to, but okay. (And I'm not even talking about people who liked it, this is specifically talking about people who are like "~it's very true to Tolkien" bc lol no)

I do think modern audiences’ obsession with criticising movies for being ‘derivative’ (mostly from 20th century media) is. Misguided. As if most of those works weren’t heavily derivative too. I once sat through an entire rant from a friend who was ragging on jk Rowling (as one should), but her criticisms revolved entirely around how derivative her work was - especially in regard to lord of the rings. And I was really biting my tongue to not tell her that lord of the rings itself as a work is almost entirely derivative itself. Both from works of folklore and fairytales and from Wagner’s ring cycle which is itself an adaptation of die Nibelungen. Very little in this world is ‘original’, and chances are if you watch a film and think it’s original you’re just unfamiliar with whatever source material it’s been inspired by. Homage to old stories and reinterpreting them or rejuvenating them for the modern audience and context.. is pretty much how the entire history of storytelling as a medium has played out. Yet audiences today are so obsessed with no spoilers and having the rug pulled out from under them that somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten that it’s ok for stories to be … predictable in a way and for audiences to be able work out the plot twists themselves before they arrive. Few audiences today watch the original Star Wars trilogy without knowing Darth Vader is Luke’s father. That doesn’t take away from the quality of those films or that story. If a story can be ruined by a spoiler or by being derivative or whatever then it’s not a good story in the first place. But being derivative in and of itself should not be seen as condemnatory.

humans are not the default race

In every scifi and fantasy setting with """races""", humans are the default.

If you're lucky, we're the short-lived, fast-reproducing pests that are all white Europeans for some mysterious reason, and also have disproportionate rates of being raised as undead because we can't be bothered to make zombie dwarf minis or animate a vampire gnome that has to jump up to bite a tall person's neck.

(We've got BOTH human AND elf skeleton warriors! Oh, hey, I just changed the scale, now it's a hobbit skeleton OR a giant skeleton! Such skeleton diversity! No, Khajiits can't be bone boys, a skeleton with a tail and a cat skull is just TOO SPOOKY)

I feel like a lot of people don't realize that we (Homo sapiens) have the longest running endurance of any land animal. Being able to run a marathon is not normal.

(It's because we evolved the very unusual hunting strategy of Slowly Chasing Gazelles Or Whatever While Throwing Sticks At Them Until The Gazelle Or Whatever Collapses From Exhaustion Then Casually Walking Up And Bashing Their Head In With A Rock™).

Even Neanderthals probably couldn't match our tenacity (they were considerably stronger and tougher though, but by no means dumber judging from the size of their brain cavities{which was bigger than ours actually})

(the evolutionary Neanderthal hunting strategy was probably something like Jumping Out And Stabbing An Ice Age Megafauna With A Stick Then Getting Punted 12 Feet Into a Tree Then Getting Up And Doing It Again Until It Dies Because You Have Superhuman Bone And Muscle Density And If You Do Break One Of Your Unbreakable Bones Your Homies Will Take Care Of You Until It Heals™ [Neanderthal skeletons are found with healed fractures surprisingly often despite said bones being much stronger and denser than ours, they just kept evolving denser bones until they couldn't even swim without sinking like a rock and they still got broken all the time])

So given that we, Homo sapiens, actually literally used to be the "species that specializes in sheer endurance, determination, and unbreakable fucking will", I want more fantasy and scifi settings where we are that way! I think the only setting where that's even remotely the case is Undertale. We're not just the "default" intelligent species!

The only reason we're good at everything is because we can make complex tools and can learn and aren't bound by instinct. Which, by definition, all fantasy races would also be able to do. Otherwise, they'd just be considered animals. Like trolls and Redditers.

The "default" species should just be really good at making tools and quickly adapting, but kinda suck in every other category. So I guess gnomes or goblins are the default d&d race.

And Humans are certainly not the Tolkien "that one race that lives short lives and reproduces faster than everyone else and is good at farming" because:

A) we actually do already live relatively long lives for mammals of our size and also GIVING BIRTH CAN KILL US, AND IF OUR PARENTS DON'T RAISE US JUST RIGHT THAT CAN ALSO KILL US, WE ARE SPECIFICALLY VERY BAD AT REPRODUCING

B) we are in no way adapted to farming, and most of our modern health and societal issues stem from the fact that we aren't meant to farm or be civilized, but do it anyways.

We only farm because it helped us survive the ecological collapse at the end of the ice age, now we're in too deep to go back.

When the ice age ended (quite abruptly) the ecosystem couldn't provide for hunters and gathers anymore, a bunch of stuff were getting heat stroke, sea levels rose, hibernation and bloom cycles and reptile gender ratios were out of wack, predators died out because herbivores died out because plants weren't doing well so weren't making as many fruits or seeds. Decomposers like vultures and worms had a field day. Until they didn't (rip condor population). It would take a while for a new equilibrium to emerge and for evolution to fix things.

But farming doesn't need any outside ecosystems except for soil and pollinators, mostly, so that still works. And farming makes more food meaning you can have more people.

But it also means you can't go back to foraging without all the extra people dying of starvation. So anarcho-primitivism would technically be the most deadly ideology if implemented and therefore is not based, unfortunately. Here's hoping for an apocalypse to do that for us! (I would not survive it)

Fun Fact: those isolated tribal societies like the Sentinelese that still do hunting and gathering only spend 15-20 hours a week doing that and another 20 doing camp chores, and the rest of their time forming meaningful relationships and not being depressed.

Notice how most of what they do as "work" (hunting, fighting, hiking, berry/mushroom/etc picking, cooking, camping, arts and crafts, oral history/story telling) are things that we need to do during our limited free time just so that our "work" doesn't drive us insane. If we were good at farming or industry or civilization, then things like math and repetitive manual labor wouldn't be work.

Sure, these foragers die young, but so did medieval peasant farmers who were even less healthy since they had much less diverse diets (a lot of carbs) and got plague more often thanks to cities and their close proximity to livestock. And our modern sedentary lifestyle is bad too.

Hobbits are suited to farming (also Entwives I guess). Hobbits are quite good at it, at the cost of not being as good at much else, they inherently enjoy it quite a bit and most* aren't haunted by the sense they should be anything else, like we are. *(The Took family got that call to adventure 'tism)

We only think that we're not special or can't be anything other than what we currently are because we no longer have anything else to compare ourselves to. The Neanderthals, Denisovans, and irl hobbits died out tens of thousands of years ago and the fucking aliens are somewhere, presumably

We are special, only we survived.

But at the cost of becoming the species equivalent of an abandoned child raised by wolves. We fantasize about these things because we all know that we shouldn't be alone. But our perceptions of ourselves are twisted by our trauma and lack of socialization.

Personally, the realization that having lost our family was probably our fault makes that hurt so much worse.

Regarding "The Hobbit" film trilogy, even if I ended up personally disliking and resenting how much time and focus the elf characters (and others) ended up taking away from the dwarves whom I think deserved more focus as rich internal characters (I know that studio pressures are a factor in that terrible love triangle and so on), I still... vaguely appreciate the effort to create and include named female characters like Tauriel, when the book is sadly lacking in them. I think she's fine, actually. Comparatively, there are many other elements in these adaptations that I think are much, MUCH worse.

But still, if you want to add female characters to this story, the obvious answer to me seems to be to just make half the Company into dwarf women? (With similarly fancy beards and other facial hair! Because I think that's fun.) It's just... so much easier?

Do NOT come at me with that "dwarf women are rare" bullshit. Unreliable narration. Logistically unlikely. Also, if you believe that "men are the warriors and craftsmen, the women stay at home" is how dwarf society strictly functions (boring, honestly, on top of being incredibly sexist), I could argue that the Battle of Azanulbizar and other struggles probably left a significant dent in this dwarf group's male population, leaving behind many widows and mothers without children to pick up the work. The battlefields have come to and TAKEN both Erebor and Moria from the dwarves. I see no good reason why dwarf women would not have equal investment in reclaiming their home and the gold. Many of the Company are not presented to be formally trained warriors, anyway.

Now, ideally, we could do way queerer stuff in terms of both romance and gender here, but we know cowards with veto powers would not let this happen. Still, I feel like basic genderbending would have been a very doable move and is, actually, a very reasonable ask of an adaptation that would have added some depth to the story even if you didn't acknowledge the change at all.

Like, preferably, this would be an adaptational change that would be directly addressed. Maybe all of the Company appear male at first due to traveling that way (and assumptions made by humans and hobbits), then Bilbo might learn that some of the Company are dwarf women when he becomes closer to all of them. We could have a brief scene acknowledging that dwarf women are fighting these battles for their pasts and their futures too. It doesn't have to be a big thing! They can just be there. Existing. Participating.

I even think it would be fun if two of the dwarves were actually an older married couple traveling together, instead of brothers or cousins, because loving married bickering and battle couples are fun. You can have running jokes in the background about how Smaug's invasion ruined their wedding day, and going back and forth with "you never take me anywhere nice" @ each other whenever they're stuck in Goblintown or the Mirkwood dungeons. (I like seeing good marriages & partnerships in fiction and established couples going on fantasy quests together. I just think it's neat.)

But another (sillier) direction is that you could just cast some actresses in beards to play some of the dwarves, then leave the fact that some of these characters are probably dwarf women (traveling as men) as a fun detail for the audience. Bilbo is either too oblivious to notice or much too polite to bring it up at all. It's canonically compliant to the text this way!

Now, obviously some few people would have complained that Tolkien's work was being ruined by "political correctness", but they complained anyway about Tauriel (when there are MANY other bad choices in these movies), and what worthwhile arguments could they have possibly made against genderbending some of the THIRTEEN dwarves? Like, most casual fans I know cannot NAME the entire Company, who get so little character development in the book that the films had to come up with unique designs and backgrounds for most of them anyway. Bro (directed towards someone objecting to the idea of including female dwarves), be real, there's no way that you honestly cared this much about "Nori the Dwarf" before right now.

No, Amazon’s Rings of Power is not “woke”

It annoys me so much when people complain about Rings of Power being “woke.” First of all, because of the way they overuse the word, woke has become a next-to-meaningless term that can be applied to anything conservatives don’t like. Second, Rings of Power is only progressive in the most surface-level way; underneath that it is in fact extremely regressive. People who whine about Rings of Power being woke are not only annoying, they’re also just plain wrong.

Ever since the casting was announced, right-wing idiots have been shrieking about Black actors being cast in Rings of Power. These trolls have made all kinds of dumb statements about how Middle-earth = Europe, but they seem willfully ignorant of the fact that Europe has never been exclusively white, and there is no reason to exclude people of color from the cast of any Tolkien adaptation. Still, this didn’t make the show progressive in its casting (which was tokenistic) or its writing (which ranges from bad to horrible).

For instance, the only storyline Amazon writers could apparently think of to introduce Arondir was literally him being enslaved. I mean, really? Is that really the best plotline to go with? To be clear, I’m not criticizing the actor, I’m criticizing the writing. In addition, Amazon cast actors of color overwhelmingly in parts invented for the show—rather than as actual Tolkien characters—which more easily allows them to be sidelined by the narrative, and the casting overall was in no way diverse enough. So I find it bizarre that people criticize the show for its so-called wokeness, when very little effort was made from a diversity and inclusion standpoint.

Right-wing nutjobs also threw a fit about Amazon portraying Galadriel as a warrior, to the point where they started calling her “Guyladriel.” They whined about Galadriel being too feminist and too masculine in the show, but that’s the opposite of what happened and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Galadriel as a character. First of all, she fought at Alqualondë in one version of the story, so no one should have a problem with her wielding a sword. What IS a problem is everything else about her portrayal.

Amazon’s writers took one of Tolkien’s most interesting characters and stripped her of her power, her authority, her gravitas, her wisdom, and her ambition. They had Gil-galad, her younger cousin, order her around. They had Elendil compare her to his children, even though she’s older than the sun and moon. And they made her a petty, naïve, incompetent brat whose entire first season involves being manipulated by Sauron, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, having a bizarre will-they-won’t-they relationship with him. In addition, Galadriel is canonically tall and strong, and one of her names means “man-maiden,” but they made her short and waif-like instead.

Galadriel in Amazon’s show doesn’t even resemble the character Tolkien wrote—the character named Nerwen, who never trusted Annatar, who certainly never had some creepy Reylo thing with him, who was powerful and wise and authoritative, who had a marvelous gift of insight into the minds of others—not a quippy, rude, annoying idiot who is constantly being controlled by the men around her. I don’t know why anyone would look at Rings of Power and think this portrayal is progressive. It’s actually a failure of imagination: Amazon’s writers literally cannot conceive of a powerful woman even when all of the work of imagining her has been done for them.

In addition to the faux-feminist-and-actually-sexist portrayal of Galadriel, Rings of Power is also on the whole weirdly regressive from the standpoint of gender roles and gender expression. Tolkien’s Elves are canonically tall, beautiful, and long-haired, regardless of gender. Tolkien’s Dwarves all have beards. So what did Amazon do? They gave most of their male Elves short hair, while the female Elves still have long hair, and they did away with female Dwarves’ beards. They patted themselves on the back for “letting” Galadriel fight, but don’t show other female warriors—in battle scenes, for instance, why are all the soldiers male? In general, they made their characters adhere to conservative gender roles and gender expression, which is especially glaring because it contradicts what Tolkien actually wrote.

On top of all this, they decided to throw in some anti-Irish stereotypes with a side of classism, just for fun. They had the ragged, dirty, primitive Harfoots speaking in Irish accents, while the regal, ethereal, advanced Elves speak with English accents. None of the actors playing the Harfoots are Irish themselves, to my knowledge, which makes the choice to have them speak this way especially questionable. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?

All in all, it makes absolutely no fucking sense to criticize Rings of Power for being woke. It may look progressive on the surface because there’s a Black Elf and a woman with a sword, but that’s as far as it goes. The show isn’t particularly diverse to begin with, and it treats its characters of color poorly. Galadriel’s portrayal is disgustingly regressive, as is the show’s overarching take on gender. This is to say nothing of the caliber of the writing in general, which is unsurprisingly low. There is so much to criticize—like the nonsense about mithril, or the fact that Celebrimbor of all people doesn’t understand alloys, or the fact that you can apparently swim across the Sundering Seas now—which makes complaining about the show’s supposed wokeness especially irrational.

I also have to wonder if the people still whining about wokeness know anything about Tolkien’s works. Do they know that the crown of Gondor was based on the crown of the Pharaohs of Egypt? Do they know that Tolkien considered Byzantium the basis for Minas Tirith? Do they know that female warriors already exist in Tolkien’s books? Do they know when they rant about how much they hate “Guyladriel” that Amazon’s portrayal is actually too feminine? Ultimately, people who complain about wokeness in Rings of Power—or any Tolkien adaptation—are just betraying their own idiocy. I honestly think if Tolkien’s books were published now conservatives would scream that they’re woke too.

People keep insulting the Amazon Lord of the Rings show by comparing it to fanfiction when really it's the EXACT opposite of fanfiction! It's so interesting/awful because it's like the ultimate ANTI-fanfiction! I was talking to someone the other day and wasn't aware that lots of people don't know about the insane complicated rights issues happening behind the scenes of the Amazon Show but it's wild. To give a quick summary of the Battle of the Five Rights Issues, as I currently understand it: 1. Amazon only has the rights to make a show about the pre-LOTR era as described in the Lord of the Rings books-- primarily in the appendices of Return the King, where a handful of pages give a brief timeline of some events that happened before the stories. In practice this means they are unable to use nearly all of the characters, places, and events people are familiar with when they think about Middle Earth. They have to make up everything out of whole cloth-- from characters to events to settings. This is either because of timeline reasons or for legal reasons or for both. Whenever they do manage to scrounge up the rights to something you might even vaguely remember (like Mithril) they announce it with enormous fanfare like they're a marvel movie introducing an avenger.

(Parenthetical: Another weird thing I noticed is that the series features practically zero quotes from Tolkien. I only counted about like 4 lines that were edited versions of lines from the books? While this is just a wild tinfoil hat theory, It does feel to me like there might've been some kind of limitation on the amount of Tolkien's words they were allowed to use, as well as the obvious limitations on characters and plot points and etc. The show has the rights to so few things and always REALLY wants you to know when it has the rights to something. It's desperate to remind you of the original books. You would think that, when it's unable to rely on familiar characters or places or events or plot points or music or etc, they would rely instead on Tolkien's really recognizable prose/poetry/language to form an emotional connection to the original stories. After all, language is the heart of Middle Earth, the author's love of language is the reason the world was created, and the unique prose of the story is kinda the soul of why it's memorable. And again, they theoretically have the rights to everything mentioned in the original trilogy right? Theoretically? So it's really odd that they don't use almost any of the language, unlike basically every other adaptation. It might just be a weird writing decision, but it's so strange that it really makes me feel like they were limited or at least dissuaded from including lines from the books.)

2. Amazon is legally Not Allowed to feature things that were mentioned in the Unfinished Tales or the Silmarillion, despite the fact that those are the books that contain most of the stuff about the era they're theoretically adapting. This leads to a bunch of really weird stuff where they introduce things you'd only care about if you read the Silmarillion, but can't include any of the things that would actually make you care about it. Like people who Aren't deep into the lore have literally zero emotional investment in Celebrimbor, but people who ARE deep into the lore know that you can't reference any of the reasons they care about it. 3. Amazon's series is NOT part of the same canon as the Peter Jackson/New Line Cinema films. They're not. However they obviously want to trick people into thinking they are because those movies are popular and a prequel to them would make money even if it sucked (see the Hobbit films.) But again, New Line Cinema still wants to make its own LOTR content based on the slivers of rights they've managed to grab onto, and don't want Amazon to step on their toes. So IIRC Amazon actually made a deal with New Line Cinema that they were allowed to imitate their movie franchise's aesthetic (to keep the brand popular and in the public eye)........ BUT if New Line Cinema ever felt like Amazon was infringing too much on their territory, they could step in and stop it. So the show just sorta looks and sounds like a bland knockoff of the New Line films, because that's all they're legally allowed to be XD. Like they're supposed to look/sound just enough like them to trick you, but they're not legally allowed to include the specific things from the PJ films that would actually make you feel nostalgic for them (like the famous musical leitmotifs.) 4. Part of the deal was that the Tolkien Estate could step in and change anything in the show if they felt it wasn't true to the lore-- which is ridiculous because again, Amazon basically doesn't own the rights to any of the lore so they're just making stuff up anyway. From what I can tell it seems like this basically means the Tolkien Estate can arbitrarily veto any creative decisions based on whatever they've decided “Tolkien would've wanted,” which obviously limits what Amazon is able to do (and likely prevents them from actually criticizing the awful problematic elements of Tolkien's worldbuilding)

5. Ok I don't have a fifth one. SO BASICALLY: Yes, the Amazon series is about a bunch of original characters in almost completely original settings featuring original events and original plot points that (for the most part) doesn't even include any of Tolkien's actual words, and also isn't affiliated with and doesn't include the recognizable things like musical motifs from the New Line Cinema films. But that doesn't make it fanfic. Because fanfiction is when you take another's person's characters and stories and write your own weird personal take on them, even if you don't legally own it. Who legally owns the copyright is irrelevant in fanfiction. Fanfic it's about writing a story with the characters and world you love, about transforming a story you're passionate about even if you don't legally own the rights. Amazon Rings of Power is what happens when an entire show is completely written around what you legally own the rights to. Every aspect of it only exists as an elaborate tap dance around copyright infringement. Again, I think the Amazon series is more interesting as "a study of how corporations/megafranchises can do massive harm and also weaken our ability to create good art" than it is as a tv show, alskdjfsdlf.

If fanfiction is "writing something you love regardless of whether you own the rights" then Rings of Power is "writing whatever fits within the extremely narrow box of the rights you happen to own." And that makes it....a very strange thing to exist! It’s kinda a shining example of how giant media monopolies and copyright laws designed to benefit them end up hamstringing everyone’s ability to create meaningful art, even the corporations themselves.

Your retelling, will it be implying a Thorin/Bilbo attraction?

I ask because I just discovered that ship and when I looked it up on tumblr, it led me to your work lolol

Every time someone asks me this I feel more like I'm making a Real Adaptation! I love the idea of people following this webcomic for years while analyzing the gay subtext as if they're waiting to see if Supernatural will make Destiel canon. a powerful feeling. The short answer is yes! The long answer is that it's complicated, and that if you're not a Bilbo/Thorin Person you should still stick around because I'm going to handle it in a very funky way that is not what you're expecting (also at the rate I draw, it won't be "canon" in the comic for approximately 2039482289798334534534534534 years.) Generally Thorin's role in my version of the story is that he's a living embodiment of The Quest, and Bilbo's feelings for Thorin mirror his feelings for the Adventure. When Thorin first arrives at Bag End, Bilbo is overwhelmed and annoyed and confused-- he finds him both fascinating and horribly frustrating at turns, and has no idea how to feel about Thorin in the same way he has no idea whether he'll join the adventure. As the story continues, Bilbo's feelings on the Quest will shift, and his feelings about Thorin will shift as well. I just really love the general idea of a new take on Thorin where he has a bit more pathos and a deeper relationship with Bilbo. I also think the way LOTR retroactively reframes The Hobbit as a story written by 'unreliable narrator Bilbo Baggins' adds to the possibilities a lot! there's a lot of queer subtext in Lord of the Rings, and it's fun to bring more of that subtext into the Hobbit. Tolkien often refers to hobbit adventures as "queerness,' and makes "queerness" the name for the thing that bigoted hobbits are afraid of; the fact that Bilbo has been repressing the "queer" part of himself that he inherited from his mother is, canonically, the thing he's struggling with in the beginning of the story.

I really enjoy the bit in the Unfinished Tales where Gandalf describes Bilbo like this:

And now I found that he was 'unattached' - to jump on again for of course I did not know all this until I went back to the Shire. I learned that he had never married. I thought that odd though I guessed why it was; and the reason that I guessed was not that most of the Hobbits gave me: that he had early been left very well off and his own master. No, I guessed that he wanted to remain 'unattached' for some reason deep down which he did not understand himself - or would not acknowledge, for it alarmed him.

That feeling of not being "out to yourself" and not knowing what it is that you want out of life is just!!! It's just very compelling to me.

Thorin's still gonna die though. Don't you hate it when you have this whole elaborate coming-out-to-yourself story but then your first gay crush is so Problematic he kiiiinda nearly starts a war so you betray him by stealing the Heart of his Mountain in order to prevent that war, but then the war happens anyway and he dies horribly :/. A universal gay experience.

Thorin is also an interesting character to play with, especially because I'm diverging more from the book (compared to Bilbo or Gandalf.) The way I'm planning to handle him is that he's a character we see only "from the outside," from the perspective of other characters, and no character sees every side of him. The dwarves portray him as a noble king; the elves portray him as a haughty arrogant joke, to the point where it affects Tolkien's own "translation" of the story; Bilbo has his own complicated feelings about Thorin, but even his portrayal of Thorin is heavily biased and he never gets to see the full picture.

But yeah-- the Hobbit is originally a very lighthearted story, but I do think there are lot of darker and deeper emotions you could explore in it if you wanted to, particularly if you bring in the metatext of how it's reframed in Lord of the Rings. And I do want to explore those darker emotions! So I am XD. There already was an extremely book-accurate comic adaptation of the Hobbit that came out in the late nineties (though it's super short and the pages are cramped to fit in all the prose)-- so I don't really see the point of being obsessively close to the original novel, since an obsessively close comic adaptation already exists. This comic is for the Weird Queer Overly Emotional Metatextual Reframing of The Hobbit!! Anyway, it's fun.

Tolkien's crowns.

You know something that really annoys me about the Tolkien movie adaptions?

Crowns.

Like a lot of things Jackson did, he basically crafted something completely new out of the bare bones we get from some descriptions, for better or worse, but the Crowns are another matter, because not only did Tolkien give very clear descriptions, and even drew the two most notable ones(the crowns of the dwarves and gondor)that appeared over the course of Lotr and the Hobbit, both had very, very clear cut meanings and symbolism behind them, that tied them to their real life origins.

The crowns of the dwarves of Erebor and Moria look like someone took their helmets and filed down the sides so only the skeleton remained, to varying degrees of success.

But you know what tolkien used?

In the books, Tolkien's dwarves uses crowns speciffically modeled after the crown of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

Why?

Well if you know anything about said empire, and the actual inspiration for Tolkien's dwarves, the picture is a bit clearer.

See Tolkien specifically modeled his dwarfs, their history of losing a homeland, desire for a new one, and their proud, industrious culture of craftsmen and skills of making money on a mixture between the Norse mythical dwarves, and the Jews in the long centuries after the Romans kicked them out of their original homeland.

Now with this in mind, Tolkien choosing to model the Dwarves crown on the Austrian one is him specifficaly choosing a real, Germanic crown as the inspiration... As well as a nod to the fact that the Austria-Hungarian empire was legendary for his time(The time Tolkien grew up in) as a progressive haven for jews, probably the best in Europe.

An empire, that was also destroyed by fires of war, just Moria and Erebor.

In other words, there is so much symbolism here that is completely and totally stripped away by the helmet crowns the movies gave them.

Hell, even the original hobbit animated movie got this right, while Jackson did not, as they basically just made the crown the austrian one, just a bit more exagerated.

Meanwhile, there is the crown of gondor, which completely missed absolutely everything tolkien tried to do with the Gondor crown.

It's a crown that fits perfectly with the rest of the city, this is truly a crown of the Gondor that the movies portrayed.

Meanwhile, Tolkiens Winged silver crown... Does not.

Even within the context of the fact that the books gondor is an early medieval(as it does not have plate armor at all) styled kingdom in terms of armor and clothing design, the crown does NOT fit in the slightest.

And that's the point.

The original crown of Gondor was a simple war Helm of the day that Elendil wore, and the later one that Aragorn wore was a more fancy replica of that helmet.

It is outdated by thousands of years, a relic of an elder time that was long lost even when Gondor's lost it's Kings in the first place. It's not supposed to fit in.

Also the fact that Elendil wore this, and it was considered just fine, tells us a lot about Gondor's fashion and style of arms during the closing days of the second age.

However, then we get into the deeper meaning behind the crown and where it was inspired from.

Gondor's winged crown was very deliberately inspired and based on the crowns of ancienct egypt, which was one of the main inspirations for Gondor and(to a lesser extent) arnor.

Just like Egyot there were two kingdom, an upper and a lower one, though in middle earth it was instead called the northern and southern ones.

Just like egypt, Gondor's entire socity and political and economic strength was based around their massive river that ran through the realm.

Just like Egypt, one of the biggest problems the gondorian elites had was their obsession with grand mousoleums and graves for their elites, focusing far more on the dead rather than their living children, and wasting who knows how much coin, manpower, energy and resources on such rather than just burying them in thr ground.

Basically the same problem egypt had building stupidly expensive superstructures for their dead in the form of pyramids, rather than something actually useful.

Then there is the fact that just like how lower and upper egypt combined their regalia together(as in they fused the two crowns into one, bigger one), Aragorn very deliberately made the royal regalia of the reunited Kingship BOTH his ancient and out of place winged crown, and the Silver scepter of Annuminas, the royal symbol of Arnor, combining the two of them together into one office.

re: the text's sort of feints towards darkness, i was thinking about this in the context of the burning question, Why Do No Dracula Adaptations Bear Any Meaningful Resemblance To The 1897 Novel Dracula By Bram Stoker, actually - how part of why it feels so incredibly like a time capsule of an extremely specific historical moment is that it kind of straddles two literary landscapes, both of which were in the air at the time of its publication, but one of which was sort of on its way out. the horror of dracula feels very modern (and the gore of it seems to have been particularly so at the time - in this selection of contemporary reviews, both admirers and detractors note that the book is maybe the grossest thing they've ever read), and of course the text is itself enamored of modernity, but the characters are, like, incredibly old-fashioned: if the plot is the nineteenth century up-to-date, the cast is the nineteenth century with a vengeance. i don't just mean their beliefs or behaviors, although, like, yeah - i mean that there's a kind of thoroughly sweet wholesomeness to them at their core that i don't think ever really stopped being written but that does nearly completely drop out of, like, The Anglophone Literary Canon not long after dracula was published (and that "nearly" is covering both for the fact that i would not consider myself particularly well read, and for the fact that some might consider tolkien canonical).

which, i mean, some (a lot) of this is just about the development of mass market paperbacks and the emergence over time of genre writing as Genre Writing, etc. and some of the dracula adaptation thing is definitely just that one guy made a movie a particular way that people thought slapped and subsequent adaptations have to a large degree been adaptations of that more than of the novel itself. but i do keep thinking about nathaniel hawthorne's midcentury complaint that america was given over to "a damned mob of scribbling women," about what a college professor of mine called the "masculinization" of the novel in the early twentieth century, which the short ta-nehisi coates post i found to remind of me the exact hawthorne phrase also reminds me is about the novel as a form moving out of the realm of trash and into respectability, and thinking, you know - through a certain lens, the lens of What Is Gender, Like, Culturally... for a book about 700 guys doing science and adventures, dracula is kind of a girly novel! it's florid, it's sentimental, it's a story about a battle with evil but somehow curiously a very domestic novel, too - so much of it is just people in houses talking! it is quite literally a tale of women's work, in that the in-text explanation for the existence of the text itself is the work done by a scribbling woman. and so i do kind of wonder if that's a factor in why, despite the book's ongoing popularity and the character's incredible fame, people seem not inclined to pick up what stoker was putting down when creating their own dracula tales: they want to make something that is kind of dudelier than dracula, despite being so much a book about so many dudes doing dude stuff, actually is.

Fallen in Middle... Sea?

Okay, I just had a dream (that someone would please come and steal and write). Case in point 1. Persona falls into Middle Earth is one of my favorite tropes when people get all technical and discuss differences and such. 2. I just saw the Rings of Power. So, here we go with a bad written prompts of mine (fell free to use it) It's female coded because it's actually all a dream I had.

Reader may or may not be more or less a Tolkien fan, but between one thing and another she knows more or less what Sillmarion, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are about (a lot of Wikipedia may or may not have helped).

But what does Reader know about the TV series "The Rings of Power"? Which is a series PENDING TO BE RELEASED in a few days. Galadriel comes out, Sauron comes out and a lot of OCs come out. Is written in the 2nd Age, about which hardly a thing is known. And people is already complaining because that and people of color or something like that. Reader gives two shits about it.

Soooooo The curtain opens.

Reader wakes up (not to mention almost drowns) in the open sea, nothing in sight. She is rescued by a bunch of people and all wears medieval clothes and speaks an unknown language. And they itch her clothes. What's so strange about her clothes!!? (they should be grateful that you're wearing long pants!!)

In any case, after a time at sea where only a couple of people try to communicate with her (Not to be ill-considered, but Reader believes that she already knows the word prostitute, whore or equivalent in the language of these people although what she has been taught does not include that word) something hits the ship and smashes it to pieces. Which leads them to wander aimlessly for two days or so. They will all be wet and hungry but the atmosphere is all hot and smoky!

In the wreckage of the ship you rescue someone who introduces herself as Galadriel. Cue your world going crazy because WAIT, this IS Middle Earth? (I mean, you had had clues because of how people blasphemes and blesses, but denial is a powerful weapon) What is Galadriel doing in the middle of the sea, with such a hidden bad character btw? (THAT IS NOT IN ANY BOOK!!!) And well, from here the story begins. Only you Halbrand (appropriately one of the few interested parties who was nice to you) and Galadriel survive the next attack at sea. You are rescued by hotty Elendil, etc.

Thus Reader becomes friends with these two sharing the "culture" of their "country" (world) and their eclectic knowledge. It may or may not be that Reader supports that Halbrand wants to spend the hell out of his "inheritance" (because long live democracy and things should be voluntary for people prepared for it and feeling it, although Reader admits that Halbrand is super smart -suspiciously even for a HUMAN commoner).

Also both (Halbrand and you) of you are considering making a place for yourself in Numenor (well, more him than you, Reader is thinking that if Galadriel is not an option, she doesn't know who to ask about her situation, since you never know where Gandalf is. Some other Istar, maybe?) but in the meantime you learn from their healers and try to adapt to the somewhat misogynistic culture (Why is everyone surprised that she is NOT married with children back her home, goddammit!) and wears long dresses everywhere -also PADS send help!!!- and you may be developing a crush (reciprocate, is he courting you?? Wow, how strange this world is!!) on Halbrand but rather die than hook up with a future king (first is to try to return home, if that is not possible, try to live a peaceful -no obligations- life, perhaps among the hobbits)

[Reader is a fan, but not a hardcore fan, she's not aware of certain things, in fact, she's still wondering when Gandalf and Mordor is going to appear, like, isn't it supposed to be IN the Southlands? Shouldn't she stop Halbrand or more like Galadriel to push Halbrand from going?)]

In my dream Reader calls herself a healer because is the closest thing in Middle-earth to her job (you can think whatever you want) and because of her knowledge she accompanies and helps Halbrand and Galadriel to the Southern Lands and later to the Elf Kingdom (making the trip not have to be so drastic and hasty).

Galadriel also mentions that "the three of us have met for some purpose" Because anyone can see that Reader is almost as out of place in Middle Earth as "The Istar" was upon his arrival (It doesn't help that Reader doesn't take off her sneakers/sport shoes/boots even by begging... I suspect she sudenly cares lot about her bra now). Some people call her behind her back "The Naive Wise One" because she knows and teach so much but at the same time she doesn't know.

My top 7 Faerie stories/worlds atm 🦋

**Note, I am super dupes aware that I haven't read/watched everything, so please feel free to reblog/comment with recommendations!**

Faerie is the pulse of my heart, and my mind/spirit/etc. spends a LOT of time thinking about it, SO here's the most resonant of depictions of the realm/faeries themselves in my current opinion (and why).

(And not in any particular order:)

Elfhame, @hollyblack 's "Folk of the Air" series and all related books

Arda, Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and all related adaptations

"Suitor Armor" by @thepurpah

Studio Ghibli's take on spirits in Japanese folklore

Brian and Wendy Froud's take on Faerie

"Fraggle Rock"

"Tock the Gnome," by myself!

Thoughts:

(Art by Rovina Cai, from "How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories")

I feel very much that Holly Black gets the lushness and richness of Faerie, plus the trickery of it, and that level of dangerous beauty - what attracts humanity to it, etc. How everything is in extremes, too, but also how parts of it echo the human experience - both in terms of courts, but also in terms of the heart, and the emotional impact of intense circumstances and intense feelings.

I am, admittedly, not all caught up yet since I haven't read her earlier works, but of course I recommend starting with "The Cruel Prince" and reading forward from there (the more recent "Stolen Heir Duology" having an extra special place in my esteem)!

(Also special shoutout to the fact that there are Nisse - Gnomes! - in the recent books, AND that her take on Redcaps is absolutely Orcish 💚)

(Also also, cw: Changelings. They can be a triggering/upsetting subject, considering how our concept of them as humans seems to have come about. She does make pretty heavy use of them, but not in the ways that one might expect, and always from a very emotionally-centered space - not a humans-abusing-potential-fae space.)

So, Tolkien - yes, I am including the world of his works in this because even though he considered them religious and specifically-denominational, he took SO MUCH inspiration from folklore and faerie tales (do not even get me started on what got edited out of "The Silmarillion" istg) that Arda is not wholly Christian, from my Faerie-worshiping queer-ass faerie perspective thankyouverymuch. Not to mention what is being done in fandom with the faerie-races, especially the Dwarves and the Hobbits, AND what recent adaptations are opening up with the Orcs!! Obviously, his take on Faerie is a much more literally-grounded reality - they exist in the Earth-based world (as if Faerie has bled into what we expect Earth to be), they have magic (at least the Elves and Dwarves do) but it's both somehow super ethereal and super physical at once. And divinely connected, since the biggest magic in Middle-earth (or any part of Arda) comes from the lesser Gods - the Valar, and the Maiar who serve under them as well as from Big Sky Daddy Eru, but we're not talking about him right now. So that, to me, really speaks to the spiritual nature of Faerie too - which is always always always personally interesting to me, and Jrrt's take on the fae was absolutely foundational in my budding concept of them, before I even really thought about who they are in a conscious way.

I don't know where to recommend starting, since I got into the world through the Jackson films, first, and I wouldn't change my experience for anything because it's given me SO much. But in fandom, shoutout to the works of @conkers-thecosy (read her fics here!) as well as "A Long List of Happy Endings" by vicious_summer and "The Mushroom Mine" series by @chrononautintraining for Dwarf Stuff - and "Splint" by HelenaMarkos for Orc Stuff. Plus, as much as I know it's divisive, "Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" is - again - doing wonders about the Orcs AND doing very well by the Dwarves too, in my opinion, showing them as a fully realized and thriving people (though Dwarf women should still have beards, Amazon!! And there seems to be some confusion around how the name of Durin functions...)!! Available to stream on Prime, here.

"Suitor Armor" takes place in a world that appears very similar to medieval Earth, and as such the worldbuilding itself doesn't feel very specifically Faerie - yet. However, with the main character having significant ties to the fae, and with the story still having space to explore their culture once the tale takes the characters there, I have faith that we are gonna see more of this take on Faerie specifically soon. In the meantime, what we have seen so far - how faerie magic works, how they relate to each other, etc. - rings true for me, and is lovely to behold, especially in the face of the tragedy around their circumstances in the Big Plot.

Free to read here (and coming to bookshelves in 2025!!).

As for Studio Ghibli - Miyazaki's take on the spirits of Japanese folklore - which are absolutely Faerie - was SO formative for me growing up. I don't have anything else to say about that except that he's right!!

I recommend "Princess Mononoke," "Spirited Away" and "My Neighbor Totoro," particularly. All available to stream on Max right now (but buying physical media is better, and they're very likely available to rent other places, too).

Brian and Wendy Froud's work has, of course, also been absolutely formative for me - especially when I started getting into Faerie properly. Their work doesn't require much commentary either - they're just correct 💗 Nothing I've experienced has ever contradicted what I've read in their books, and I feel like their work really, really gets the energy of the fae and the liminality of their existence. And that there is kindness, and light, as well as danger.

I recommend "Trolls" and "Faeries' Tales," to start with, and of course the quintessential "Faeries" by Brian Froud and Alan Lee, which started it all.

(Also, considering what's below, special honorary shoutout to their work on "The Dark Crystal." Definite overlap there and absolutely counts.)

Obviously there's some crossover with The Muppets here, considering they come from the same studio, BUT if we're looking at just "Fraggle Rock" on its own - absolutely. Though a very different take than those mentioned above, if you're looking for the whimsy and delight at the heart of the fae, the Fraggles have it.

Both the original series and the reboot are currently available to stream on AppleTV.

Okay, and my own! What I'm doing with the world of "Tock the Gnome" is a little bit different - again, we're looking at a realm that isn't free from some of the physical bounds we find on Earth - but in its vast history there is Faerie at its purest, and the characters are on a Big Quest that will be instrumental in restoring the realm to what one would expect of Faerieland (all wrapped up in a body-positive, sapphic-presenting queer romance, btw). My focus is on Gnomes and Orcs, in particular, since the fact that they're also fae is a big part of my message. Recognizing that, as well as recognizing the importance of connectedness between people and the balance of that and personal sovereignty, and how damage to those things might impact the whole of a magical realm.

All pages available to read for free here, across several platforms (with print issues available here).

🦋💗🦋👏👏

I don't even have the right words to express this but it's so special to me that tolkien's appreciation and love for poetry and music is reflected in the fact that some of the best adaptations of his works are songs

characters in tolkien's works sing to each other about history, legends and long-gone heroes! and we sing to each other about them! GOD