21 || they/them / 👩❤️💋👩 || Uruk enjoyer || Please talk to me about Hozier and/or Victor Hugo || Here to shitpost and also indoctrinate you into Marxism || Begrudging member of many-a fandom
909 posts
Floustian - Michael Parenti Enthusiast - Tumblr Blog
Shakespearean prophecy my beloved
need a polite way to say "im not engaging in a discussion on this topic with you because the conclusions you have reached are based on so many interwoven layers of misconceptions it would be easier to just like, hard reset your whole brain, just start over as a baby and try again"
Has anyone asked him to clarify what he means by this because this is outright endorsing colonization and I can't believe the democrats were so obvious as to admit to this. Usually they sugarcoat their language but I guess they don't even care anymore???
Marius booby compilation
if I had a nickel for every time Marius gets called a booby in the Hapgood translation, I'd have four nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened four times.
Thénardier in 3.8.12
Javert in 4.2.2
Valjean in 4.3.7
Gillenormand in 4.8.7
Four characters with absolutely fuck-all in common somehow manage to put aside their differences and come together in a beautiful show of solidarity on this matter and this matter alone.
In conclusion...
ngl gender is never beating the "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" allegations
me: i am glad that rings of power is giving the orcs personalities and autonomy, it's much more interesting for them to be individuals who can make choices rather than a faceless horde of evil
glug: uses his free will to kill adar
me: NOT LIKE THAT
Your honor........ He's my blorbo now permanently I can't help it
Sam Hazeldine as Adar - Inside The Rings of Power S2, E8 | The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power
faustian bargains in the legedandarium, played straight, subverted, or rejected
Feanor and Melkor. the first of them, and rejected. Melkor comes to Feanor's door and offers the bargain, helping Feanor to escape Valinor, but Feanor sees through him and rejects him and his offer. this doesn't save him from consequences, and beforehand Melkor is forced to use indirect manipulation against him;
Celebrimbor and Sauron, subverted. even though we see most of the aspects of a bargain in this situation, included the teaching, the search for control over the earth, the ambition, the challenge to divine authority, Celebrimbor is never entirely aware of Sauron's true nature until the end of Sauron's partnership with the elves of Eregion. the deception, and afterwards the staunch resistance to torture, essentially erase the main faustian aspect: intentionally entering in a covenant with the devil at the cost of one's soul;
the Nazgul and Sauron, played mostly straight. I don't think I need to explain this one, but receiving a ring from a powerful entity that guarantees material and temporal power, as well as "immortality", is all very classic. you could argue whether there's enough deception here to not make it such a straight example, but the outcome of the trapped soul is definitely there.
Ar-Pharazon and Sauron, perhaps the single most straightforward bargain out of these. the desire for immortality and fear of death is there, the push to achieve greater things and have greater power through Sauron's strengths and counsel is there, the slow corruption and increased desire for a final sublimation that doesn't come is also there, and all in awareness of Sauron's identity, despite his deceptions.
Galadriel and Sauron, rejected. this is an almost perfect mirror of Feanor and Melkor, except for the fact that Galadriel doesn't receive the offer per se, and is left alone with having to resist her own temptation, instead of facing off the adversary right in front of her. her immediate offer is also not freedom as is Feanor's case, but power, which might make this one a truer faustian bargain than the Feanor&Melkor one.
there's other minor situations that might count (like Melkor offering the sons of Feanor a deal with regard to Maedhros, or Sauron and Gorlim), but I'm choosing to focus on those where the theme of power/of achieving something beyond one's capabilities is more at the forefront than in other types of bargains.
i like how in modern internet greek mythology apollo hits you with a red ball to grant you the gift of prophecy, while in ancient greek greek mythology, eros hits you with a purple ball to make you... fall in love with people who arent attracted to your gender?
σφαίρῃ δηὖτέ με πορφυρῇ βάλλων χρυσοκόμης Ἔρως νήνι ποικιλοσαμβάλῳ συμπαίζειν προκαλεῖται· ἡ δ᾿, ἐστὶν γὰρ ἀπ᾿ εὐκτίτου Λέσβου, τὴν μὲν ἐμὴν κόμην, λευκὴ γάρ, καταμέμφεται, πρὸς δ᾿ ἄλλην τινὰ χάσκει.
Again golden-haired Eros, striking me with his purple ball, calls me to play with the girl who has fancy sandals; but she (for she comes from well-built Lesbos) finds fault with my hair since it is white, and gapes at someone else, a woman.
(Anacreon fragment from Athenaeus 13.599C-D)
“For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.”
— Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging”
Black Sails | XVII.
guy who has only read the epic of gilgamesh reading the second written narrative: getting a lot of epic of gilgamesh vibes from this
In the earliest Christian vision, St. Peter's Apocalypse (2nd c. CE), we find women hung by their hair, hair that they plaited “not for the sake of beauty but to turn men to fornication”, and men “ hung by their loins in that place of fire” (Gardiner, ed. and trans., Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante, p. 6). At the end of the vision tradition is Thurkill's Vision (dated 1206, of English provenance), whose adulterers must fornicate publicly in an infernal amphitheater, and then tear each other to pieces:
An adulterer was now brought into the sight of the furious demons together with an adulteress, united together in foul contact. In the presence of all they repeated their disgraceful love-making and immodest gestures to their own confusion and amid the cursing of the demons. Then, as if smitten with frenzy, they began to tear one another, changing the outward love that they seemed to entertain toward one another before into cruelty and hatred. (Gardiner, ed. and trans., Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante , pp. 230-231)
so the thing about Aragorn and Arwen being thematically incestuous is this.
yes, their bloodlines obviously trace back to two twins, so technically there is that, but there's so many generations between Aragorn and Elros that the level of actual consanguinity is honestly irrelevant. moreover Numenor famously forbade marriage between cousins, so you don't even get royal bloodline fuckery. on the purely practical level, Aragorn and Arwen don't share enough blood for it to even remotely matter.
now, Elrond being Aragorn's foster father comes into play. and here the thing isn't so much what happened but what Tolkien was at such pains to avoid. cause he contrived that Arwen was with her grandmother Galadriel for the entire duration of Aragorn's youth, so that he was unaware of her and, crucially, so that she would only see him when he was older (if not an adult per se) and he would only see her, come to know of her, when he was a young man instead of a child under the roof of his foster father and sister. this contrivance makes it so that they do not, in fact, perceive each other as siblings, which is frankly like saying, I know this could have a vibe and I'm trying my hardest not to deliver that vibe.
but that's not the kicker. the kicker is what elrond says about Aragorn and Arwen marrying which is, extremely explicitly, a matter of reuniting the bloodline of Elrond with that of his twin brother Elros; and also, explicitly, about race, and the blood of "lesser men" mingling with that of the high men of Numenor. not only preoccupations of purity in blood strongly intermingle with themes of incest (as already mentioned, noble bloodlines fuckery marrying into themselves is a symptom of this), but this is also doubly linked to bringing things back in the family, in the literal sense and in the metaphysical sense (gift of men dividing fates etc). the splitting of bloodlines will be once again reunited by my daughter marrying with the descendant of my twin brother.
on all levels except the genetic, Aragorn and Arwen rotate around a cloud of thematical incest.
being a vampire is about penetrating someone but it's also about being filled up with their fluids. in this way vampirism confuses the top/bottom dichotomy
when you arch your back to make sure your ass still looks good while you're crying alone and going through it
I can't even blame Glûg because he did what he thought was best.
Like, the tragedy is that Adar can't put into words how terrible Sauron is. And because of this, the uruks can't understand why he's risking their lives. Uruks aren't as long-lived as elves, so there's a good chance the ones living now only heard stories of Sauron.
From Glûg's pov, he's got a family back in Mordor. They fought so long to get a home. Now they have it, and Adar is bringing them to die. He can't fathom how enslavement under Sauron would be worse or how even Mordor wouldn't be safe from Sauron.
And like, I hate that he killed Adar, but the poor guy paid for it!
I mentioned it in the tags earlier, but I feel this deserves a post.
This may be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I really liked that Adar chose not to reveal his Elf name. Sure it is a bummer that we won't ever know, but I loved it so much that I don't care. Adar's refusal to tell his old name symbolizes his rejection of his old Elvish identity in favor of his new one.
It's not like he doesn't remember being an Elf -he clearly does! He remembers his name and his old language and his old face! And he still rejected them! He could have kept the ring for himself, and tried to buy his way into the Elves again, but he didn't. He put on the ring, saw what it had to offer him, what the Elves (NOT Sauron) had to offer him, and he said "thanks, but no thanks". Why did he reject the power of the Elves, again? To stay an Orc. Sorry, an Uruk.
This is an incredibly powerfuI and brave decision from the show: it would have been easy to tie Adar's healed look into a "redemption" in which he immediately loathed his past as an Orc, especially since the show chose to use the idea that Orcs are descended from corrupted/tortured Elves. But they didn't! I will always love the show for this alone.
In a world where Elves are seen as the Best of the Best and Orcs as the lowest of the low, he chose the latter, not out of self-hatred or a shallow sense of power, but out of pride, honor and yes, even love. He loves being an Uruk, and he loves his children as Uruks. He's not trying to turn them into Elves, like a reverse Morgoth. He just wants a home for them, where they can live in peace. He clearly believes this is possible. And, for a while, they do too.
It is no accident he started to lose them the moment he began acting like Sauron, treating them as pawns and things to be sacrificed for his revenge. That doesn't excuse the Orcs' betrayal (like guys, come on!!!) but it does explain it -if they are going to be treated like shit, they may as well be treated like shit by the most powerful guy around, so they resorted to what they know best: backstabbing.
You know, I was going to make a joke about how the Orcs can't handle Daddy having a bad day, but then I realized it's not a joke at all -they literally can't! They never had a leader like that before! So they panicked and chose the old familiar pain Sauron represents. The curse of abusive cycle strikes again.
This is why Adar's death is so tragic: he was killed like Sauron was, but, unlike him, he sincerely wanted the best for the Orcs, or, at the very least, didn't want them to be slaves. The worst thing is that, as far as canon goes, this is be the last time someone truly stands up for them, and the Orcs will subsequently in enslavement for thousands of years.
RIP again king. You shall be missed.
(Also him and Galadriel should have kissed at some point and the ring scene between the two is clearly a marriage proposal but that's beside the point)
I just watched episode 8, and I honestly feel very bad; I feel sad. I can't accept that Adar died. He just wanted his Uruk to be free and live in peace. I thought we'd see more about his past or at least tell him what his old name was... We weren't even given that.
Galadriel could have helped him at least kill some orcs...
On the other hand I'm surprised that Arondir is as if nothing had happened, not even a scratch.
Something else occurred to me about Annatar's weird behavior with Mirdania: couldn't this whole progression be seen as a retelling of what happened between Mairon and Melkor back in Valinor, when Mairon was a smith under Aulë?
I'm just envisioning Mairon working as a talented and diligent maia under his teacher, and then Melkor coming in and skulking around the forge and being enticing, and Mairon falling for it, hanging around him, adoring him, touching him on the arm, and being seduced away and corrupted.
Sauron's discomfort with and contempt for Mirdania in this scenario would ultimately reflect his unexpressed and unprocessed feelings towards himself. For being naïve, and infatuated, and condemning himself to an eon of torment.
When he finally throws her off that wall, and lets her believe that Celebrimbor did it, he's expressing something about how his own master, Aulë, failed to save him, and how perhaps it would have been better to die than to end how he has.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has run a secretive program for years where ICE agents have trained hundreds of civilian volunteers on how to operate multiple types of firearms, conduct investigations and surveillance of immigrants, and use lethal force on human beings. The program, known as Citizens Academies, includes role-play scenarios for civilians to conduct fictional raids on immigrants and is active in New York and in more than a dozen cities across the country. The program is run by Homeland Security Investigations, the branch of ICE in charge of intelligence, international affairs, and surveillance. According to thousands of internal documents obtained from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request litigation, published on Oct. 1 by a group of civil rights organizations, the program was piloted first in Puerto Rico in 2014 and turned national in 2019. [...]
so is USA building its own Wehrbauern now or what