What If Gimli Found The Paths Of The Dead More Terrifying Than Any Of The Others Because As A Dwarf Underground

What if Gimli found the paths of the dead more terrifying than any of the others because as a dwarf underground spaces are usually comforting to him.

It is utterly horrifying to him for the same reason horror movies use lullabies to freak us out- the perversion of the familiar strikes a particularly deep note of horror.

The danger was action movie danger until the paths of the dead, when suddenly Gimli is in the literal uncanny valley- his every sense is full of how wrong this feels, except his eyes which perceive a tunnel, something that should feel like home.

Tl.dr The paths of the dead give dwarves cursed doll vibes.

#he's like a hysterical cactus and she's like a gardener who keeps touching the cactus without any gloves and wonders why it stings#they're clowns your honour

-Had to reblog and highlight these excellent tags from @beautyofloneliness

Every time I reread a bit of Spinning Silver, I notice new ways the Staryk king is 100% a panicking, highly reactive dufus who does not know what he's doing at any point in the book any more than Miryem ever quite does.

Miryem and the Staryk king are peak clown-to-clown communication; to the point that they come to understand each other on a deeply personal, cross-cultural level - enough to realize that they are actually well-matched in terms of their values and long-term goals enough to actually fall in love with each other - all while still completely missing like 90% of everything the other one is trying to say at any given moment.

I love them and I love this book so much.

Never recovering from this actually…

zuko is all too happy to listen as sokka rants about a problem he’s having with his latest invention

to me, the funniest thing about “that’s rough buddy” isn’t the fact that sokka says something patently insane with zero context seemingly out of nowhere, or the fact that zuko clearly doesn’t know how to respond. it’s the completely incorrect use of the word “buddy.” zuko would obviously like to be friends with sokka, but sokka is not, in fact, his friend. this is the most time they’ve ever spent together, and it’s because zuko invited himself to tag along on sokka’s suicide mission. at this point in the episode, sokka still hates this guy, perhaps less than he did a week ago, but he still hates him enough that he didn’t bother forcing zuko to stay home, which means he still didn’t really care whether or not zuko lives or dies. which, considering that he had tried to kill zuko multiple times in the past, is not all that surprising. this entire episode is essentially just zuko forcing his friendship onto sokka while sokka is legitimately too depressed to care. so when zuko calls sokka “buddy,” there’s a spirit of dogged optimism characterizing that epithet, because in no possible realm would sokka consider zuko his buddy at this point in the episode. and that’s something we miss when noting the iconicness of this exchange, simply because, by the end of this episode, they are buddies, so in our minds looking back on these lines, the implication of friendship doesn’t feel out of place at all. and really, it isn’t out of place, but only because zuko’s tenacity and determination (in this instance, his determination to befriend sokka) has always hugely outweighed his ability to read the room.

are we still doing this because i have a late submission