The Silmarillion fandom is genuinely insane. Like, you hang out on tumblr, read fic on AO3 and you think, yeah. Lots of people have read the Silmarillion. It’s Tolkien. Everyone’s read Tolkien. Barnes and Noble has a whole bunch of the HoME and also a bunch of books by people writing about the legendarium. This is mainstream, surely.
But then you actually touch grass and talk to normal people. Not even that, you talk to people who self diagnose as hard core Tolkien fans. And. None of them have read the Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is famously a book that nobody reads.
And yet. On AO3 The Silmarillion and Other Histories of Middle Earth has more works than The Lord of the Rings. Think about that. That’s baffling. It’s ridiculous. Like I realize that LotR fandom is split a bit by the movie, but still. The Silmarillion has almost four times as many fics as the LotR movies. Everybody has watched the movies!
I need to know what percentage of people who actually read the Silmarillion went on to write fic or draw fanart about it. Because it must be insane, surely. Like, I’m pretty sure the Silmarillion wins some kind of record in this department.
Thinking about the fanfic bell curve where on one end you have “Perfect, needs no improvement or elaboration” (LotR sits here) and on the other you have “So bad it’s no fun to even think about” with the middle being the fanfic zone. But I think there may be a secret fourth Silmarillion option. Which is a book that is perfect* but simultaneously non existent. It’s not even a real story! The language is super pretty and deeply incomprehensible (especially to people who, unlike me, were not raised from early childhood on both the Bible and classic literature). And it’s more of an outline and an abstract painting of cultural and world building vibes (not cultural and world building facts and information) than an actual narrative. There are story hooks galore. There are vivid and fascinating characters, but their lives are glossed over and you only get one or two paragraphs of prose that will reorder your brain chemistry and haunt you forever. There are countless more characters who only exist as names, the implication of whose existence is fascinating. All of this is deeply frustrating, both to casual readers who just want a Normal Enjoyable Book, and super fans who want All the Lore. But it is catnip to anyone who engages in transformative work.
*I am aware that not anyone who is a fan of the silm thinks it’s perfect
I’ll go into more detail on this later, but every artist (not just visual artists, any creative) will have a voice in their head telling them to keep their art as a hobby and spend their life doing a boring but profitable job, and that voice is backed up by most of society and probably your family and some weird people on tumblr who’ve convinced themselves parroting narratives 99% of republicans support is progressive.
I have to tell you that that voice is dead wrong. You will be miserable forever if you go down that route. Capitalism will suck, but a slightly better place on a totem poll of horrors is not worth spending your life doing something that makes you miserable. People make livings doing art, they’re happy doing art, it’s not tainted or destroyed by being something you make money off of. I can assure you there are tons of people living happily and comfortably as artists.
When you decide to make art your hobby when you wanted it to be your life, it isn’t a hobby, it is fantasizing about the life you wanted to have, and your art will becomes ways to try and pretend to make things you would have actually made. And you will not stop seeing your life’s work everywhere you go once it is doomed to not exist, that feeling just suddenly becomes painful. To see your art in the world is the gift of all artists, but it is the curse of all who have abandoned art.
Someone who gave up on their dreams is mad at me in DMs, feeling vindicated. Reblog to make capitalism fans mad.
Some people really do see “follow your dreams” and go on a novela length rant about why they don’t think they have the right to. Some people take so much comfort in the idea that their oppression is the best they can get.
Make sellout an insult again.
You’re not a sellout for having to work two jobs right now for whatever reason. You’re a sellout for completely resigning yourself to that fate, believing it’s impossible to ever amount to more, and hating the idea that you ever could. It’s when you’re violently opposed to the idea that you could ever become anything but a pawn for capitalism and convince yourself that this is the best option for upu. And you’re a dangerous sellout when you tell young people to follow in your path.
I know Annabel Lee is mentioned explicitly in text and is even the name Jod gives Alecto but I can’t help but also think of “Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning wherein the narrator confesses to strangling his lover with her own long blonde hair to preserve her love for him. At one point he even tells himself “no pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain.” Then he props her body up and sits with her all night, ending the poem with the line is “And yet God has not said a word!”
Ableism in leftist spaces is really foul because you will see the most self-proclaimed progressive punk with badges that say shit like “fight the fascists” “it’s okay to punch nazis” and then they’ll turn around and say “actually I don’t think disabled people should have children”
Twelve essential dungeon-crawling fantasy monsters:
Big and dumb
Small but there’s lots of them
Tentacles don’t go there
Evil horse
The author’s been reading Wikipedia articles about mushrooms
Eye
Child you’re allowed to punch
Dude that looks like another dude
Hostile architecture
Allegory for capitalism
Uncomfortable implications
Steve
Number 5 could just be “author’s been reading Wikipedia article”
No, the monster writeup where the author has clearly been Wiki diving specifically about mushrooms is genuinely a recurring pattern in fantasy tabletop RPGs. In fact, it even pre-dates Wikipedia; to pose a relatively early example, consider this entry from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual (1993) for “Fungus”:
ALT
(Comprehensive online encyclopedias weren’t really a thing yet in 1993 – they probably transcribed this shit by hand from an actual, printed encyclopedia!)
did we think mushrooms were plants in 1993 or did the authors of the ad&d 2e monstrous manual just only have access to a particularly old encyclopedia?
Neither; fungi are classified as plants in D&D and its children because making them their own category is mechanically inefficient.
That’s not applicable here – this is an excerpt from a 2nd Edition resource, and D&D didn’t have formal creature types until 3rd Edition.
It looks like the research that revealed fungi were Not Plants, Actually happened in 1993:
Signal yapping while Octavia has a full episode. Not sure what it’s an episode of, but it’s definitely not a sitcom.
Octavia’s definitely being paranoid here. Whether it’s warranted or not is unclear.
Zoogs are once again cementing their place as the best. Best what? Doesn’t matter.
I absolutely love the fact that Octavia wants to GTFO ASAP. Very relatable.
YES, YES KILL THEM! MAKE BAD DECISIONS! PAINT THE FLOOR WITH THEIR SKIN AND THE WALLS WITH THEIR BLOOD! TEAR OFF HER JAW AND USE IT TO MULCH HER FLESH AND SMASH HER SKULL!
Sorry, had a bit of a moment there. Moving on; Octavia’s inability to believe that anyone could ever see her as beautiful is very powerful.
Bright, huh. She isn’t what I expected, that’s for sure. She also seems to be the least stable, which is a feat considering the rest of the group.
ALT
