Here’s The Thing.

rewatching lotr, and rewatched the hobbit trilogy like 2 weeks ago, and i must say. i love this franchise for all its “i knew a guy who knew a guy” relations. like to give just one example, gimli presumes for a second, like the whole fellowship, that frodo got injured by the cave troll in moria. but he’s actually just fine! because frodo just happens to be gimli’s dad’s boss’s situationship’s nephew, and therefore has the mithril shirt that gimli’s dad’s boss gave to his situationship right before gimli’s dad’s boss led the company to battle against, among others, legolas’s dad. legolas’s old situationship from like last year (60 years ago) was also there and chose, get this, gimli’s dad’s boss’s nephew over him. i love yall

“I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn. Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.” He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser. Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.) I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say. I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)”

— “As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?” (via meiringens)

Thinking about these two. A LOT

I like to imagine for Gimli “elf traits” slowly become “Legolas traits” until he’s in too deep.

Mini comic style thingy fueled by 2am hype only. Dont mind me not deciding on the faces i r u s h ed

Here are some interesting facts about the raven:

• They are one of the most intelligent birds on the planet - they can solve tasks, play tricks on other animals and can count

• Ravens can imitate human speech just like parrots

• They can reach 2 feet in size from head to tail - bigger than some cats

• Ravens do things just for fun, such as sliding down snowy hills, swooping when flying, and they even build their own toys out of sticks and rocks

• People who have owned ravens have said they are cat-like in nature and can be very cuddly and affectionate, but can throw a strop when they don't get their way

• Science has found that ravens can communicate by "gesturing", and point their beak in certain directions to tell other ravens where to go

• When they reach adolescence, ravens leave their parents to find other teenage ravens and join "teenage gangs"

• Ravens are monogamous and mate for life

• Although they have been seen for centuries to represent death and sadness, ravens are compassionate, loving animals and will console their raven friends if they have been injured

All in all, ravens are amazing and beautiful animals!

me mentally: these characters have a relationship that cannot be defined by any one thing and reaches throughout the narrative and is so woven into their characters that trying to force it under one label would be inaccurate and doing it a disservice.

me out loud: idk man they're fuckin gay

me: writes one sentence

brain: *golf clap* congrats, you're basically Shakespeare.

the fellowship of the ring as jellycats

Frodo

Sam

Merry

Pippin

Gandalf

Aragorn

Boromir

Gimli

Legolas

Do you ever think about how staggeringly in bad taste it is that Gandalf brought a firework that turns into Smaug to Bilbo’s birthday party

Like how were you hoping that would go