Rereading The Resurgam Trilogy And I Still Can’t Get Over The Fact That My Undead Ot3 Is Actually Canon

Finduilas is in the habit of keeping things in her pockets for her children. There is almost always a biscuit with jam at the center for Faramir, and a new stone she’s found for Boromir, and silly drawings with riddles she’s made for both of them, just like the ones her grandfather made for her and her siblings when they were young.

The riddles are a delight to the pair of them, and it is one time when there is sure to be no quarrel between them, since they love to solve them together, and Finduilas has crafted them to ensure there are parts to suit both of them well.

The most sacred rule of the riddle games is that no one is supposed to help – a rule she has especially impressed upon her notoriously clever spouse.

But one day, the riddle is particularly challenging to the young pair, and Denethor finds their pleading eyes just ever so persuasive, and before he truly realizes what he’s done, he’s told them which of the Citadel’s many wall carvings will hold the answer they seek.

And so Faramir and Boromir eagerly bring the next riddle to him straightaway, and Denethor is torn. He tries to shoo them off, but catches a glimpse of the paper they hold and curiosity gets the better of him.

When Finduilas runs into the three of them attempting to scale the garden wall at the back of the Steward’s House – and quite by her design is the encounter – there are several moments where all three feign innocence before realizing they’ve been caught.

Because of course she’d known that he helped them before, and had designed her next riddle carefully to see if she could entice him into doing so again.

For the answer to this riddle was indeed over the garden wall, but it was not the expected solution (which involved one of her favorite blooms, called seregon in Sindarin, and a rather clever play on words requiring a nuanced understanding of Steward Beregond’s politics that should have instantly made him realize she knew he’d be helping).

Rather, it was quite a splendid little ‘just because’ picnic waiting for the four of them, with all the jam biscuits Faramir could dream of, and at least four and twenty other lovely things one only discovers on warm afternoons in the presence of those one loves best in all the world.

oh, and it's one thing to count the stars in the sky but it's another to count the bells in your laugh (all the music theory in the world cannot describe its resonance in my chest or the warmth it burns in my heart), for what can the stars give me that you have not already given, and given more freely? the stars shine bright but they cannot compare to the brightness of your eyes. I may see the stars inscribed lovingly on black velvet, a love song to the eternity of space and time, an inscription of the galaxies contained within the earth -- chasms filled to the brim with glittering multifaceted wonders -- but your eyes, your laugh, are worth more than any jewel. -- no. no, there can be nothing else but that laugh which contains within it all the joys the world can know. I would do a thousand foolish things to hear that laugh again.

to her: letters, i.

PSA: Stuff You Maybe Didn’t Realize You Can Back Up To AO3, And How To Tag it

Tumblr seems to be in potential death throes or at least, incredibly volatile and unreliable lately, but we’ve done some pretty good and informative work on canon analysis and reference guides so I was looking for ways to back it up without losing it…and the solution became obvious to me: Archive of Our Own, aka AO3.  “What?” you might ask if you are less familiar with their TOS. “Isn’t that just a fanfic archive??” No! It’s a fanWORK archive. It is an archive for fanworks in general! “Fanwork” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of things, but it doesn’t just include fanfic and fanart, vids etc; it also includes “fannish” essays and articles that fall under what’s often called “meta” (from the word for “beyond” or “above”, referencing that it goes beyond the original exact text)! The defining factor of whether Archive of Our Own is the appropriate place to post it is not whether or not it’s a fictional expansion of canon (fanfic), though that is definitely included - no, it’s literally just “is this a work by a ‘fan’ intended for other ‘fannish’ folks/of ‘fannish’ interest?”  The articles we’ve written as a handy reference to the period-appropriate Japanese clothing worn by Inuyasha characters?  The analyses of characters? The delineations of concrete canon (the original work) vs common “fanon” (common misconceptions within the fandom)? Even the discussion of broader cultural, historical, and geographic context that applies to the series and many potential fanworks?  All of those are fannish nonfiction! Which means they absolutely can (and will) have a home on AO3, and I encourage anybody who is wanting to back up similar works of “fannish interest” - ranging from research they’ve done for a fic, to character analyses and headcanons - to use AO3 for it, because it’s a stable, smooth-running platform that is ad-free and unlike tumblr, is run by a nonprofit (The OTW) that itself is run by and for the benefit of, fellow fans.  Of course, that begs the question of how to tag your work if you do cross-post it, eh? So on that note, here’s a quick run-down of tags we’re finding useful and applicable, which I’ve figured out through a combination of trial and error and actually asking a tag wrangler (shoutout to @wrangletangle for their invaluable help!): First, the Very Broad: - “ Nonfiction ”. This helps separate it from fanfic on the archive, so people who aren’t looking for anything but fanfic are less likely to have to skim past it, whereas people looking for exactly that content are more likely to find it. - while “Meta” and “Essay” and even “Information” are all sometimes used for the kinds of nonfiction and analytical works we post, I’ve been told “ Meta Essay ” is the advisable specific tag for such works. This would apply to character analyses, reference guides to canon, and even reference guides to real-world things that are reflected in the canon (such as our articles on Japanese clothing as worn by the characters).  The other three tags are usable, and I’ve been using them as well to cover my bases, but they’ll also tend to bring up content such as “essay format” fanfic or fanfic with titles with those words in them - something that does not happen with “Meta Essay”.

- I’ve also found by poking around in suggested tags, that “ Fanwork Research & Reference Guides ” is consistently used (even by casual users) for: nonfiction fannish works relating to analyses of canon materials; analyses of and meta on fandom-specific or fanwork-specific tropes; information on or guides to writing real-world stuff that applies to or is reflected in specific fandoms’ media (e.g. articles on period-appropriate culture-specific costuming and how to describe it); and expanded background materials for specific fans’ fanworks (such as how a given AU’s worldbuilding is supposed to be set up) that didn’t fit within the narrative proper and is separated out as a reference for interested readers. Basically, if it’s an original fan-made reference for something specific to one or more fanworks, or a research aid for writing certain things applicable to fanworks or fannish interests in general, then it can fall under that latter tag. 

- You should also mark it with any appropriate fandom(s) in the “Fandom” field. Just like you would for a fanfic, because of course, the work is specifically relevant to fans of X canon, right? If it discusses sensitive topics, or particular characters, etc., you should probably tag for those. E.g. “death” or “mental illness”, “Kagome Higurashi”, etc. 

Additionally, if you are backing it up from a Tumblr you may wish to add: - “ Archived From Tumblr “ and/or “ Cross-Posted From Tumblr ” to reference the original place of publication, for works originally posted to tumblr. (I advise this if only because someday, there might not be “tumblr” as we know it, and someone might be specifically looking for content that was originally on it, you never know) - “ Archived From [blog name] Blog ”; this marks it as an archived work from a specific blog. And yes, I recommend adding the word “blog” in there for clarity- Wrangletangle was actually delighted that I bothered to tag our first archived work with “Archived From Inu-Fiction Blog” because being EXTREMLY specific about things like that is super helpful to the tag wranglers on AO3, who have to decide how to categorize/”syn” (synonym) various new tags from alphabetized lists without context of the original posting right in front of them.  In other words, including the name AND the word “blog” in it, helps them categorize the tag on the back end without having to spend extra time googling what the heck “[Insert Name Here]” was originally. 

Overall, you should be as specific and clear as possible, but those tags/tag formats should prove useful in tagging it correctly should you choose to put fannish essays and articles up on AO3 :) Oh, and protip sidebar for those posting, especially works that are more than plain text: you can make archiving things quicker and easier for yourself, but remember to plan ahead for tumblr’s potential demise/disabling/service interruptions. The good news: You can literally copy and paste the ENTIRE text of a tumblr post from say, an “edit” window, on tumblr, straight into AO3′s Rich Text Format editor, and it will preserve pretty much all or almost all of the formatting - such as bold, italics, embedded links, etc! But the bad news: keep in mind that while AO3 allows for embedded images and it WILL transfer those embedded images with a quick copy-paste like that, AO3 itself doesn’t host the images for embedding; those are still external images. This means that whether or not they continue to load/display for users, depends entirely on whether the file is still on the original external server! As I quickly discovered, in the case of posts copied from the Edit window of a tumblr post, the images will still point to the copies of the images ON tumblr’s servers. What this means is that you should back up (save copies elsewhere of) any embedded images that you consider vital to such posts, in case you need to upload them elsewhere and fiddle with where the external image is being pulled from, later.  Personally, I’m doing that AND adding image descriptions underneath them, just to be on the safe side (and in fairness, this makes it more accessible to people who cannot view the images anyway, such as sight-impaired people who use screen readers or people who have images set to not automatically display on their browser, so it’s win-win)

((*SCREECHES*))

There is nothing more funny that the little nod between Joly and Grantaire when Marius sings about Cosette.

New chapter up for Climbing to the Light!

Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

Pollution, the 4th horseman of the apocalypse from Pterry & Gneil’s Good Omens.

So I’m still going through most of this blog, archiving the old rp stuff offline and deleting the posts themselves. If anybody who I used to rp with here (when this blog was still called ask-the-hypochondriac) wants any of those screenshots, you are more than welcome to contact me and I’ll send copies of them to you.

But yeah, if anybody’s been paying attention to the change in url, this is now gonna be my fic and sketch blog. So I’m going to be rebageling drabbles and fics from my other rp blogs here, dumping original stuff here, posting sketches, that kind of thing. Probably mostly going to be centered on LOTR and the Silmarillion since that’s mostly the fandom I’m in right now.

my tablet got stolen a few days ago, but I managed to salvage one of the drawings I’d done that I really liked off Skype.

Mairon and Langon in Ilúvatar’s First Theme.

il était profond bâtonniste.