Untitled

My brain wouldn't shut up until I made this.

red classic tabby with low white spotting

Necromancer that doesn’t know they’re a necromancer and thinks they’re just a really good emt

That is the funniest thing i have ever read

the thing was, she wasn’t going to be able to pass the recertification exam, and she couldn’t figure out why. annabelle studied. she practiced. she pulled out every trick and shortcut she’d learned during her two years as an EMT and none of it worked. she just – she didn’t get it. it made no sense.

“wake up,” she urged the dummy, pressing her hands to the pulse points on its wrists. “come on. what the fuck.”

“yeah, i don’t think that asking nicely is going to do the trick,” hank said, his eyebrows raised. his helmet, the special one they’d decorated for him with craft supplies from michael’s when he’d gotten promoted to firestation chief, sat askew on his head. “i can see now why they didn’t pass you.”

annabelle rolled her eyes. “it’s a psychological thing,” she said. “it’s like, you give the brain an instruction and it follows naturally. and the pulse-point thing always works. i don’t know why it’s not, like, in any of the books, but i swear to god it’s worked for me every time.”

it was true that annabelle had the best record on low body counts, which was good because she was the smallest person on the team not counting Georgie, who was a corgi. jake and lillian were always making fun of her for having been the shortest of their whole rookie class. but it hadn’t ever been a problem before; annabelle rarely had to carry anybody out, because she was good enough at getting them on their feet.

but none of that would matter if she couldn’t pass her stupid recertification exam, because they’d take her badge and she’d have to go be, like, a doctor or something.

hank blew out a long breath and sunk down to where she was kneeling on the station floor in full fire gear, giving CPR to the practice dummy, whom they called dierdre. there was a little light that went on when you’d saved its life. it had been a dull gray for an hour now.

“look, AB. i know you’re a good firefighter, and i know you know how to deliver CPR. just do it like you do it during an emergency. you’re overthinking it.”

“but this is what i do during an emergency!” annabelle cried, throwing her hands up. “i put my hands on their pulse points and i use psychological mumbo-jumbo and they just get up and walk!” 

hank blinked. “…really,” he said, voice flat. “people who’ve been inhaling smoke for half an hour just … get up and walk.”

“the brain is an incredibly powerful organ,” said annabelle, shrugging. “look man, i don’t know, okay? but it works. i haven’t had to actually do CPR in like a year and a half.”

he gave her a long, quiet look and said, “well….huh,” before pushing himself back up onto his feet and frowning off into the distance. “keep practicing,” he said after a minute, and left her there.

-

hank switched her team.

“what the fuck, man,” she said, sliding into the truck next to him as the sirens went on. “i can’t get CPR on one fucking dummy and suddenly you don’t trust me to do my job without supervision?”

carl and bethany very carefully did not meet her eyes in the rearview from the backseat. bethany pulled a magazine from beneath the seat and said loudly, “look, carl, jennifer aniston and brad pitt are getting back together.”

“thank christ,” said carl. “i’ve been really worried about jen.”

hank gave annabelle the flat look that had gotten him promoted to firestation chief in the first place, the one that said i’m your dad and you don’t want to disappoint me. as always, annabelle wilted underneath it, sliding down in her seat and crossing her arms over her chest. it was a difficult feat in full gear but she wanted him to know she was feeling sullen.

“i trust you completely,” hank told her, his voice a light scold. “i want to see you in action so i can help you figure out what’s going wrong with the dummies. sometimes it’s hard for the brain to accurately remember everything that happens during a crisis.”

annabelle rolled her eyes. “i told you,” she said. “it’s just – it’s the same thing every time, I’m not like, blacking out.”

“great, then i’m about to learn a cool new trick,” hank said serenely, and pulled the truck out of the lot. annabelle kept her gaze focused out of the window, watching the city pass as carl and bethany talked loudly about which celebrities were dating which other celebrities and who wore what better. she tried to swallow down the nerves that tightened her throat. maybe the dummy was right. maybe she was doing something else and didn’t remember it. maybe the last two years had been a fluke and she had no business being a firefighter. maybe she was about to get fired.

there wasn’t a fire, though the alarm was going off. instead they found a bag of smoking popcorn and the collapsed heap of a forty-five year old bachelor type, down to just his boxers and a pair of slippers with llamas on them. he had no pulse. 

hank held carl and bethany back, directing them to deal with the smoke from the popcorn; annabelle he pointed toward the resident with a jerk of his chin. 

she sighed, kneeling by his side. she pressed her hands flat to his heart and then dragged them across his chest and down each arm, to his wrists. with her thumbs on his pulse point, she hissed, “let’s go, man. up and at ’em. you’re not meant to die in your underwear while cooking popcorn, come on.”

she held her breath for a few moments, conscious of hank’s eyes on her, and let out a long sigh of relief when she felt his pulse jump beneath her, watched his eyes flicker. “what the fuck?” he asked, voice a croak. “what happened?”

“you gotta eat more vegetables, bud,” annabelle told him, and looped his arm over her shoulders to help him get to his feet. she was so relieved she could have wept, but instead met hank’s eyes with a challenging glare. see? she thought. i told you. “let’s get you to the ambulance.”

-

“the bad news is that you have a lot of practicing to do if you want to pass your recert,” hank said without preamble, showing up at her apartment. she didn’t think she’d ever seen him in jeans before. it was weird. “the good news is i understand your problem now.”

annabelle stepped aside, beckoning him in. “what problem?” she demanded. “it worked! you saw it work. that’s the opposite of a problem.”

hank shrugged. he handed her a trifold that he’d clearly printed off at home. it said so you think you’re a necromancer. annabelle blinked down at it, and then up at hank, and then down at the trifold again. “i … don’t understand what’s happening here,” she told him honestly. 

“i’m not in the community and they’re kind of cagey, so i can’t really tell you a lot,” hank told her, stilted and visibly uncomfortable. “but i have a cousin who is, and um, i just want you to know that this doesn’t change anything. you’re still who you’ve always been and you have my complete support. we’ll figure out how to get around the recert. maybe i’ll – i can put you on admin duty to give you time to study. we’ll say it’s because of an injury.”

“hank,” annabelle said, with some urgency. “hank, this flier says the word necromancer.”

“yes,” agreed hank, looking relieved. “oh, good, you’ve heard of it already. i thought i was going to have to have the whole your body is changing talk.”

annabelle shook her head. “no, i – hank. you know that … um, you know that necromancy isn’t real, right? people can’t bring other people back from the dead. that’s crazy.”

“annabelle, not four hours ago you instructed a dead man to stand up and he did.”

“okay, he wasn’t dead, obviously. he was almost dead, at best.”

“no. he was dead.”

“i felt his pulse! it was very faint!”

“you called his pulse. no one else would have felt it, because it wasn’t there except in response to you.”

“hank, what the fuck.”

he shrugged. “read the flier,” he instructed. “and bring dierdre home with you. you’re going to have to practice a lot if you want to get recertified, considering you haven’t one time had to use any of the skills you learned the first go around.”

he bussed her temple as he went by, letting himself out of her apartment with a friendly wave. annabelle looked down at the flier in her hand with a frown. when she unfolded it, the first page said, everyone’s necromancy journey is different, but most people discover their gift by accident. have you ever brought a pet back to life? touched an elderly relatives hand and seen some of the color flood back into their face? or perhaps, more subtly, been able to keep cut flowers alive long past their purchase date?

annabelle looked at her kitchen table. she’d had the same vase of tulips on it since she moved in, three years ago. it was true they periodically started to wilt, but she usually just changed their water and they were fine, popping back up one after the other as she slid them into the fresh vase. 

“well shit,” annabelle said, letting the flier fall from her hands.

Tumblerians tumblrites and tumblers, all and alike make writing and art prompts out of things that weren’t meant to be and that is a beauty beyond compare. Thank you members of tumblr for the amazing stories and art and for sharing it with the small world that is this website.

Li’s Friends: Horrible Pets to Protect You From the Horrible World

An original coloring book bestiary, brought to you by the Avatar: The Last Airbender fan community.

45 artists, 113 illustrations, 100% of profits donated. Featuring such timeless terrors as the giant isopuppy, mimic catopus, polar bear goose, and more, with nerdy world building descriptions by MuffinLance, author of Salvage.

Appropriate for all ages, from the fantasy-loving kids in your life to the adults who could use some terrible-animal-themed stress relief. Make the world a better place, one coloring book at a time.

PDF Book: Free With Donation

Paperback Book + PDF: $14.99 USD

[id: Various pictures of the physical book showing the cover, dedication page, and example two-page spreads with animal descriptions and illustrations.

Animal hybrids shown: swan anglerfish, hawkmoth weasel caterpillar, poison dart frog widow bird, polar bear goose, jellyfish whale, mantis shrimp badger, llama lion, and artic lobster wolf.

End id.]

Pre-Holiday-Season reblog, for those looking for fun and inexpensive gifts. We've raised over $3000 for wildlife charity since the book launched! Color your way to a better world!

today I had a dream that there was a species of deer called “ice deer” and every winter they’d travel up North and have their babies in a frozen cavern and the babies would be sort of comatose in the cold, and then the deer would leave the babies there and migrate South until spring, and just before the first thaw, they’d go back up North and find their babies and wait for them to thaw out and wake up and they’d nurse them.

But with the Earth getting warmer and spring coming sooner and winters being less harsh up North, the babies were starting to thaw out too early, so when the Ice Deer got to them, they’d been awake already and starved to death.

So there were only like, 300 Ice Deer left. They were bigger than elks, all white with blue antlers that even the females grew, and I realized the only solution would be to somehow lead them North every year when it started thawing. As a human I could check the weather and the ice in the North Pole and when it was time to go to the babies, even if the deer thought it was still winter.

So I had to devise a plan to get the Ice Deer to follow me North to their babies on time every spring, and it just became part of my life. I did other stuff and lived life as usual while keeping track of the weather near the end of winter and I’d be like, welp it’s time to lead the deer North, and I’d set out to find their winter home.

And a lot of people were like “this isn’t a permanent solution. We need to focus on climate change so it’s fixed for good.”

and I was like dang I know but the Ice Deer need us right now so, someone’s gotta do it? And it just became a thing I did.

ppl messaging me like “I thought this was real for a minute”:

: O !!!!!!!!

Everyone asking is absolutely allowed to use the Ice Deer in their fantasy world building and in fact I encourage it bc I love the idea of this one made up animal quietly linking all of your universes.

i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word

if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.

specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)

Crawling out of my hole to remind people that with this current update to Firefox (version 144) they've gone and dumped in their lot with a buncha lil AI tools, namely Perplexity as a new search engine.

So if the sound of that leaves your mouth tasting of tar, here's what you want to do:

In the url bar, type in about:config

It'll give you a big scary warning page that you might poke holes in your browser. Good. You want to do that. Click continue.

One by one, you're going to need to put each of these into the search bar in the page, not up top:

Each of these are gonna have a lil toggle icon on the right hand side that looks like a funky double-ended arrow. Click that and the value next to it should change to false. It all auto saves as you go. Some of these might already be set to false by default and that's peachy.

The next best thing you can do for yourself is to set your default search engine to udm14 or Qwant, but for now, we're just tidying the garden a lil bit.

Edit: This wildly broke containment for a post that was supposed to be me basically ranting and grumbling like an old man on my porch to my homies. If I’ve inspired you to follow through with this, peachy. That was mildly intended. Better yet, I hope I’ve spurred a buncha you on to do your own bit of digging and research.

If you were one of today’s lucky ten thousand to learn something new, I hope you keep doing it. I won’t be here to hold your hand through it, as I simply don’t have the time nor spoons for it, so I implore you to go down your own rabbit hole and chase knowledge wild wild abandon.

Monster Research Funding

Hang in there, Eclair.

my potion #MyPotion

per The Chart, this is a "Hell at the Bell":

This is easily the most enduring thing I've ever made. Godspeed funny little jpeg. See you again soon

This was on @whatareyoureallyafraidof's post where they put up this:

And I responded with this image:

and promised in the tags to elaborate if asked. And, @frodo-the-weeb, I will. But it's going to get long and I'm going to have to split it up into several reblogs.

First of all, since not everybody in the world is a Silmarillion enthusiast, let me explain what we're referring to.

One of the stories in the Silmarillion, and possibly the one Tolkien cared about the most, is the tale of Lúthien and Beren; a highly condensed version of a narrative poem called the Lay of Leithian, which Tolkien began writing in the 1930s and tried to get his publisher interested in after the success of The Hobbit.

(Their readers said no, and they tactfully asked him to focus on his Hobbit sequel instead. "The result," in Tolkien's own words, "was The Lord of the Rings.")

The skeleton of The Lay of Leithian is as follows; I'm intentionally leaving out a bunch of information that weaves it into the overarching story of the Silmarillion but isn't relevant to the thesis I'm advancing here.

Lúthien, an Elven princess and enchantress, falls in love with a mortal man, a ranger called Beren. Her father, the Elven King Thingol, disapproves and sends him Beren off to fetch one of the jewels from the crown of the Dark Lord Morgoth. Lúthien tries to join Beren but her father imprisons her in a tower to stop her, only it's actually a treehouse because they're forest elves. Lúthien magically grows her hair long and uses it to escape. By the time she catches up with Beren he is chained in the dungeons of Morgoth's second-in-command, Thû (whom Tolkien later renamed Sauron). She rescues him with the help only of a dog, who defeats Thû himself in single combat. They then live in the forest together for quite some time, but Beren feels bad about being the reason she can't go home to her family, and still intends to finish his mission and get the jewel. He leaves one morning while she's still asleep, so as not to put her in danger, and then when he's on the threshold of Morgoth's underground fortress in the far North of Middle-Earth she catches up with him again and he accepts that she's not going to be put off. Together they enter Morgoth's fortress and make their way to his throne room. They are in disguise but Morgoth is not fooled and uncovers Lúthien in front of everyone, declaring his intention to make her one of his many slaves. Lúthien offers to sing and dance for him, which is the way she works her magic. She puts everyone in the throne room to sleep, including both Beren and eventually Morgoth. She wakes Beren and he takes the jewel and they flee, but as they get to the outer door they are stopped by Morgoth's guard-wolf, who bites off Beren's hand holding the jewel.

That's as far as Tolkien ever got with the poem, but we have the synopsis in the prose Silmarillion to tell us the rest of the story; again cutting it down to the quick, Thingol accepts Beren as his son-in-law, Morgoth's guard-wolf attacks Doriath, Beren goes and hunts it but is mortally wounded, his spirit goes to the Halls of Waiting in the Undying Lands where the dead in Middle-Earth go, Lúthien also goes there and, again through her magical song, persuades Mandos the god of the dead to let him come back. Mandos offers her a choice: live on immortally as an Elf without Beren, or return to Middle-Earth with Beren but both of them will grow old and die. She chooses the latter.

Tolkien created Lúthien as a portrait of his wife Edith, which makes Beren a picture of himself. We know this for a fact because he had LUTHIEN written on her grave when she died, and when he joined her in it two years later the name BEREN was written for him:

Now on the lower right side of my response image you'll see Pauline Baynes' illustration of the Lady in the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair, one of C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories. A quick synopsis of the Lady of the Green Kirtle's part in the story:

The Lady is a witch who rules a gloomy kingdom underneath Narnia, accessible through a fissure in the earth in an old ruined city far to the North. Before the story opens she has enspelled and kidnapped King Caspian's son Prince Rilian, whom she intends to send leading an army to conquer Narnia in her name. For twenty-three hours a day he is her willing slave and lap-dog; to maintain the spell, he must be bound to the titular silver chair for the remaining hour, during which he is sane and aware of his imprisonment. The protagonists, Eustace and Jill and their guide Puddleglum, meet her and Rilian unawares on their journey to the North; she sends them astray and almost succeeds in getting them eaten by giants. Eventually they rescue Rilian from the chair, but she sings a magical song which very nearly puts them all to sleep but for Puddleglum's intervention. Foiled, she transforms into a serpent, attacks them, and they kill her.

It is my contention that the Lady in the Green Kirtle is Lewis's caricature of Lúthien, with the enslaved and befuddled Prince Rilian representing Beren; and further, that Lewis knew or recognised that Lúthien and Beren were a literary portrait of the Tolkiens, so that The Silver Chair is ultimately a nasty commentary on their marriage.

In forthcoming reblogs I will lay out my evidence for this thesis.

First, let's talk about C. S. Lewis and his attitudes to women.

C. S. Lewis's religion, philosophy, aesthetic, and politics, were all built around two core beliefs: Platonic essentialism, and a hierarchical universe. Either one could be a whole essay in itself, but let's focus on how he applied them to gender.

Platonic essentialism: Lewis believed that masculinity and femininity were pre-existing spiritual realities of which biological maleness and femaleness were merely physical manifestations. Hierarchy: Lewis believed that masculinity was spiritually superior to femininity.

---A Preface to Paradise Lost p. 113

Accordingly Lewis believed, and openly taught (in Mere Christianity for example) that women ought to be subservient to their husbands. Husbands ought meanwhile to take charge as head of the household.

The following passage is also from A Preface to Paradise Lost and is strictly speaking about Milton's philosophy, not Lewis's, but Lewis does not attempt to disguise his agreement with it. I'm quoting it mainly for the sake of one revealing phrase:

"Uxorious" means "very devoted and possibly submissive to one's wife". Wiktionary gives "doting" and "whipped" as synonyms. Lewis will use the word once more in A Preface to Paradise Lost, to name the fault in Adam that leads him to sin (Eve's fault being pride).

For much of his life Lewis held that women were intellectually inferior to men. You can find again and again in his writings little barbed complaints about women infiltrating male spaces and bringing the conversation down.

In 1952 Lewis met Joy Davidman, who proved to be his equal in both humour and intellect. He would go on to marry her twice; first in a civil marriage in 1956 so that she could gain UK residency, and then in a Christian marriage in 1957 at her hospital bedside. Thereafter his views on women became more moderate. In 1960, in The Four Loves, he wrote a lengthy complaint about specifically uneducated women infiltrating (educated) male spaces and bringing the conversation down.

Lewis's views, and the shift as he got to know Davidman, are very evident in his fiction. In Perelandra (1943) a Satanic being tries to tempt a new Eve, the queen of Venus, into rebellion by teaching her feminism. But never fear, folks, she is properly subservient when her Adam arrives at the end of the book. That Hideous Strength (1945) is, underneath the fantasy, the story of a regrettably modernized woman learning to accept her proper place beneath her husband. The narrator character of Till We Have Faces (1956) survives abuse at the hands of her father to become a warrior queen.

The Silver Chair will get its own post later in this thread, but it belongs emphatically to the pre-Davidman period of Lewis's career.

We have less direct evidence about Tolkien's attitudes to women, or to gender issues; unlike Lewis his non-fiction writings don't delve into theology or philosophy or relationship dynamics, but stick strictly to matters of language and literature.

And let's face it, if you're coming to a conservative Catholic 1950s Oxford professor looking for 21st-century intersectional feminist theory, you're going to be disappointed.

When Treebeard describes how the Entwives were more practical but less imaginative than the Ents, and how they went about civilizing and domesticating the world while the Ents would have been content to exist in the wilderness, I think we're seeing some of Tolkien's real gender philosophy; possibly making the common mistake of universalizing his own experiences in his marriage, in which he was certainly the more imaginative and less practical partner.

There are no female characters at all in The Hobbit. In The Lord of the Rings you can count them all on your fingers and have some left over, and only two, Galadriel and Éowyn, get more than about half a page each. (Well, OK, three if you count Arwen in the Appendices. Four if you count Shelob.) Even in the Silmarillion, which is a bit closer to balanced in this respect, Tolkien has a habit of pedestalizing his women.

Both Galadriel and Éowyn are worth taking a closer look at. Galadriel, rather than her consort Celeborn, is evidently the one who makes the decisions in Lothlórien; she overrules his misgivings about Gimli, for instance. She is feared in Gondor and Rohan, where men like Boromir and Éomer believe her to be a wicked witch. And the fascinating thing is they're right. She fits nearly every aspect of the fairy-tale Wicked Witch trope. She has magical powers, she's ambitious, she lives deep in the forest, she draws travellers in and determines their destiny. Yet Tolkien chides her detractors' fears as ignorance, holding her up for us to admire.

Then there’s Éowyn. When Tolkien first introduced her into the drafts of The Lord of the Rings, she was to have been Aragorn’s love interest. In the finished work, her love for him is unrequited, and she falls into despair. But here again Tolkien subverts a trope from the heritage he drew on. In mediaeval romances, in folk-tales and ballads, ladies who despair of love pine away and die picturesquely; Éowyn makes a rather different choice, to put it mildly. And it's not so clear that her trouble is lovesickness as such. Gandalf diagnoses her as follows:

That is, Éowyn chafes at the limits imposed on her life by the gender structure of the Rohirric court, and sees marriage to the King of the West as her ticket out of there.

All of this is quite beyond C. S. Lewis, even in Till We Have Faces. But the fact that I have to argue for it, winkling out convenient passages like potatoes from mud, tells you that it's hardly clear or obvious. At the conclusion of their respective arcs, Galadriel submits to "diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel"; and Éowyn realizes that "No longer do I desire to be a queen," and puts aside her weapons to become a healer.

I'm not finished arguing, of course. Galadriel's submission is an act of strength, of withstanding the temptation of the Ring, to which more than one male character will later succumb; it turns on their heads the myths both of Pandora and of Eve. And we know Éowyn never wanted to be a queen, because the male-imposed duty that she ran away from to go to war was the duty of being queen regent of Rohan. She wanted to save people, not rule people. But I can't claim that my case is obvious; not in The Lord of the Rings.

It is only in Lúthien's story in the Silmarillion and, still more, the Lay of Leithian, that Tolkien draws out this subtle theme and proclaims it to the skies. Lúthien begins by subverting the story of Rapunzel, becomes a knight-errant rescuing a male damsel-in-distress from a dungeon, and proceeds to gender-flip the myth of Orpheus. Undergraduate courses on English literature will tell you that feminist subversions of fairy-tale tropes began with Angela Carter in the 1970s; well, Tolkien was doing it in the 1930s, if only he could have found a publisher willing to chance it.

I'd like to quickly note that, in all of Middle-Earth, we never meet a married couple where the wife is of a lower social rank than her husband, and in nearly all cases she's his superior. Galadriel is senior to Celeborn. Éowyn is a daughter of kings where Faramir is merely a steward; at the earlier stage of composition when she was to be paired up with Aragorn, Aragorn was just a ranger. When Aragorn became the lost King of Gondor, he had to be given an Elven princess for a bride, in a repetition of the situation between Lúthien and Beren.

Now read the post above about C. S. Lewis's gender philosophy again, and imagine how he would have felt about all this.

I could go on -- in other places I have gone on, and on, and on -- about how Tolkien reverses the typical fantasy clichés to code evil as masculine and good as feminine. But I'm here to make a case about the relationship between the Lay of Leithian and The Silver Chair, and I think I have said sufficient about their respective authors' attitudes to women to move on to another point in the next reblog.

Tolkien and Lewis's friendship is exaggerated on social media these days. No, they were not "besties". No, Tolkien did not call Lewis "Jack" despite that being the name Lewis used among people with whom he was on first-name terms, because Lewis and Tolkien were never on first-name terms, that having been a much more exclusive degree of intimacy in their world than it is in any present-day English-speaking community. (Lewis, who came up with nicknames for everybody, did call Tolkien "Tollers".)

But they did know each other about as closely as people can whose main social connection is work. Lewis wrote extensively on the kind of affection one can have for someone on the basis of a shared interest, hobby, or purpose, and it's not hard to see Tolkien in those passages.

He also wrote, repeatedly, about how awfully annoying it is when you meet up with a friend like this and they bring someone else along without telling you and you can't have a conversation about your shared interest because that would be leaving the other person out and instead you have to spend the whole time making small talk.

Which is where Edith Tolkien comes in. It's been some years since I last had a copy of Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien in my hands, and there isn't one readily available online, so I'm telling you this next bit from memory. Edith was not one for philosophy or theology or technical discussions, her conversation being more at the level of what their children were up to and the price of groceries; when she was present, Tolkien accommodated her interests. Separately, Carpenter also mentions her mysterious dislike for Lewis, speculating that she considered him an intruder into their family life.

Carpenter doesn't connect the dots here, but I'm not the first person to have done so.

How well acquainted was C. S. Lewis with the Lay of Leithian? Possibly better acquainted than anyone but Tolkien himself.

At some point during the composition of the Lay, Tolkien typed out what he had done so far and gave it to Lewis to read and critique. Lewis's critique, so much as was left of it when Christopher Tolkien came behind to document his father's writing process, got as far as the part where King Thingol demands Beren bring him the Silmaril as the price of Lúthien's hand in marriage. But from their correspondence we know he had read at least as far as the part where Beren and Felagund and his warriors disguise themselves as Orcs in a failed attempt to sneak through Thû's lands without getting caught.

So Lewis on this occasion seems to have got just about as far as the point where it becomes clear that Lúthien is the rescuing hero and Beren the damsel-in-distress rather than the other way about, is what I'm saying.

Now Lewis's commentary is detailed, down to the individual word choices in some lines of the poem. Tolkien implemented many of his suggested changes, and with many of the others he changed what he had written even if it wasn't to make it the way Lewis suggested.

Some of Lewis's wording carries forward into Tolkien's later work. Christopher Tolkien picks out the many-pillared halls of stone in Gimli's poem about Moria in The Lord of the Rings: this phrase was originally used in the Lay for King Thingol's hall in Doriath, and the word many-pillared came from a suggestion of Lewis's.

Fans of The Lord of the Rings who like the framing device of it being an ancient manuscript of which Tolkien was merely the translator? You have Lewis to thank for that conceit. Lewis framed his critique of the poem as an academic paper, pretending the manuscript Tolkien had given him was an ancient, fragmentary document, of unknown authorship, with multiple scriptual variants (in which he professed to find his alternative suggestions), much debated by the fictional scholars Peabody, Pumpernickel, Schuffer and Schick. He even had Felagund's fortress Nargothrond survive into the present as an English town, complete with public library, called "Narrowthrode".

Tolkien and Lewis had some idea, or at least Lewis had some idea and tried to get Tolkien into it, of joining up their fictional universes so that Middle-Earth and the Ransom Trilogy would form a single continuous history, which is why Númenor is the true name of Atlantis known to Ransom and Merlin in That Hideous Strength -- spelt Numinor because Lewis had heard Tolkien read the name aloud but not seen it written down.

(For those who came in late: Lewis and Tolkien were members of an informal Christian literary circle in Oxford through the 1920s and 30s, called the Inklings, who would meet in the pub to read aloud what they had been writing for the group to comment and discuss. Other members included Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Roger Lancelyn Green, and the physicist Hugo Dyson, who on one occasion interrupted Tolkien's reading of a Silmarillion passage with the cry "Not another fucking elf!")

So Lewis was closely familiar with the Lay of Leithian. Even if he didn't finish reading the manuscript Tolkien gave him, he knew the story from Tolkien's readings to the Inklings. He knew that Lúthien rescued Beren from the dungeons of Thû / Sauron; he knew they travelled to the far North of Middle-Earth, and then descended deep into an underground fortress, to confront Morgoth; he knew that, at the story's climax, Lúthien put Morgoth to sleep through the enchantment of music.

Next time I'll look at The Silver Chair in detail.

Confession time: I am an adherent, albeit a cautious one, of the theory that C. S. Lewis structured the seven Chronicles of Narnia around the Seven Planets of classical astrology. This theory is the brain-child of a guy called Michael Ward, who constructs all kinds of theological and philosophical ornamentation out of it, not all of it particularly convincing.

What inclines me to the theory is primarily Lewis's demonstrable obsession with astrology throughout his other works -- fictional, religious, and scholarly. If he didn't put the planets into the structure of the Narnia series, that was a piece of unusual forbearance on his part. But you don't have to agree with me about that, to follow this. I'm going to talk about the themes of The Silver Chair; the hypothesis that these themes were connected in Lewis's mind by a shared association with the Moon and its place in the Ptolemaic view of the universe informs my discussion but is not a necessary premise for it.

I'll be referring again more than once to the chapter on hierarchical thinking in Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost, because many ideas that Lewis worked into the story of The Silver Chair as themes or motifs he first discussed explicitly in that chapter. Compare

with

The Silver Chair opens with Jill Pole crying behind the gym because she is being bullied. The administrators of the school "had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they liked. And unfortunately what ten or fifteen of the biggest boys and girls liked best was bullying the others." The situation reflects the passage in A Preface to Paradise Lost where Lewis refers to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: "If you take 'Degree' away 'each thing meets in mere oppugnancy', 'strength' will be lord, everything will 'include itself in power'. In other words, the modern idea that we can choose between hierarchy and equality is... mere 'moonshine'. The real alternative is tyranny; if you will not have authority you will find yourself obeying brute force."

This theme echoes throughout The Silver Chair. Aslan is the supreme authority throughout the Narnia Chronicles, obviously; but only here does he introduce himself by issuing a set of arbitrary commands and then sending the protagonist away.

(Arbitrary, I would say, and obscure to the point of being clearly designed to set Jill and Eustace up to fail and repent. So perhaps a more apt parallel for Christianity than Lewis intended.)

Physically speaking, the journey Jill and Eustace must undertake has more vertical layers than any other Narnian quest. They go up through the door in the school wall to find themselves in Aslan's Country, which is at the top of a high cliff above the clouds. They descend from Aslan's Country to Narnia, from Narnia via the Northern Waste to Underland, and glimpse the layer below Underland which is Bism; then up again to Narnia, up again to Aslan's Country, and down through the wall again to their school, where Aslan and the regenerated King Caspian re-establish godly authority and punish the bullies.

Whether or not the Narnia Chronicles as a whole are structured according to the Ptolemaic cosmos, this particular element of this particular book is a strong piece of the case for it: worlds above worlds above worlds, just like the heavenly spheres. For Lewis it's another symbol of cosmic hierarchy.

Whereas height symbolizes genuine God-ordained authority, the symbol for the alternative -- tyranny, rule by strength -- is size; as the bullies are bigger and stronger than the other children, so the giants of Harfang are bigger and stronger than the protagonists. In Perelandra, I think it is, Lewis has his protagonist decry modern astrophysics for emphasizing the size, distance, and number of celestial objects and thereby demanding that he "bow down before bigness".

The atheistic, scientific worldview is undisguisedly the target in the climactic temptation scene, where the Lady attempts to enchant the protagonists into believing that Underland is the only real world and the higher levels don't exist. More subtly, Lewis is saying that what's wrong with the scientific worldview is that it purports to flatten the Ptolemaic hierarchy.

Next time I will focus on how The Silver Chair treats gender, with especial reference to the relationship between the Lady and the Prince.

When I was a kid, the bit at the end of The Silver Chair where C. S. Lewis invites us to laugh at the Head of the school panicking when Eustace and Jill and Caspian come back through the wall and start beating up the bullies, and takes care to inform us first that the Head "was, by the way, a woman"... well, that seemed jarringly sexist and out of tone with the rest of the story.

(Oh, don't you worry, at the time I was absolutely fine with the idea of beating school bullies with riding-crops and the flats of swords; just like many people today seem to be perfectly fine with the idea of murdering health insurance executives. It wasn't until a lot later that I realized that, of the three schools I went to, the one with the strictest discipline was the one with the worst bullying problem.)

Only about ten years ago, when I was re-reading the series much more carefully, did I recognise that the misogyny of the scene is in fact in perfect keeping with the rest of the story.

Yes, The Silver Chair has a female protagonist. Yes, uniquely among the Narnia Chronicles, that female protagonist remains the viewpoint character from the beginning of the book to the end. And no, it's not unique among the Narnia Chronicles in teaching the message "do as you're told" rather than "think for yourself".

But let's look at Jill's character arc, shall we? Her first mistake, the wrong choice that shows her character flaw, is to ignore Eustace's (male) voice of reason and stand too close to the edge of the high cliff, thus causing Eustace to fall off. She is rebuked by Aslan and submits to obey him, but later endangers the mission by trusting the Lady instead of listening to their (male) guide, Puddleglum.

When they get to the ruined city but only Puddleglum sees that it is the ruined city, Jill is the one who urges them to keep going and reach the comforts of Harfang. This apparently counts as disobeying Aslan despite the fact that he said nothing about it, and he rebukes her again. She then has to perform childish femininity to distract the giants so they can escape the castle, and Lewis remarks that "girls do that kind of thing better than boys".

In Underland they meet the man who will turn out to be the Prince they are there to rescue, but he's under the Lady's spell. He reveals that she plans to make him lead a war of conquest over a surface country, and then we get this exchange:

Later I'll come back to what this says about Rilian and the Lady; for now let's focus on what it tells us about Jill. She doesn't tell him not to patronize her or call her "sweetheart" (in fairness I suppose he is an adult talking to a child, not just a man talking to a woman). She does tell him that he's doing masculinity wrong by letting his romantic partner tell him what to do.

During the enchantment scene it's Jill who invokes a higher power -- the male, hypermasculine Aslan -- to try and counter the Lady's statement that nothing exists outside of Underland. When Puddleglum breaks the spell and the Lady turns into a snake and they have to fight, Jill sits down on the floor and tries not to faint. For the remaining four chapters, she does nothing that she is not instructed to do except ask for help. She transforms from an active protagonist to a passive one.

I thought I was going to be able to cover everything The Silver Chair says about gender in one post, but this is getting long enough. Next time we'll look at the other female characters, and especially the Lady and her relationship with Rilian.

First let's quickly deal with what other female characters there are in The Silver Chair; this won't take long. The only ones that have any real impact on the story are the giantesses of Harfang and the Head of the school.

Not that it makes up for his misogyny, but Lewis was a lifelong advocate for treating younger people, including children, with the respect due to fellow human beings. The giantess Queen is of the opposite inclination, ordering her servants to "Comfort the little girl. Give her lollipops, give her dolls, give her physics [=medicine], give her all you can think of -- possets and comfits and caraways and lullabies and toys." The old nurse giantess assigned to the task is even more patronizing, calling Jill "precious poppet". In fact all the giants infantilize the protagonists until we learn that they intend to eat them; but the giantesses in particular feed into stereotypes about gushing feminine sentiment.

The Head is mentioned on the very first page of the book, but we are not told that she is a woman until almost the very last page. What we are told right at the beginning is that she talks to bullies instead of punishing them, and that this doesn't work. At the end, when Aslan and Caspian and Jill and Eustace invade the school and start assaulting the other children, she has "hysterics" (Lewis's word) and is found "behaving like a lunatic" (Lewis's phrase).

Which I have to admit is funny, but the joke is soured by the misogyny (and also by what I know about Lewis's attitude to democracy, which is too big of a sidetrack to get into here).

We are not given the name of any female character from the Narnian world in this book, not even the main villain, who remains "the Lady of the Green Kirtle" or else "the Queen of Underland" or "the Witch", throughout. (On the other hand we are given the names of all the English bullies, and two of them are called Edith.)

The first we hear of the Lady is in the story told by the Owls, how she first killed Rilian's mother in front of him (in serpent form) and then seduced him away from Narnia (in human form), having met him in a forest glade by a fountain. The cadences of language used in this story somehow feel like Tolkien's writing; I can't explain what I mean except by pointing you to read it and going "See?" Lewis does use archaic language elsewhere in the Narnia Chronicles, but this is the only place where he sounds like Tolkien. Maybe I'm overthinking that.

The protagonists first meet the Lady in the northern wastes, riding alongside a knight in black armour who never speaks (later revealed to be Rilian). Lewis emphasizes her beauty and the loveliness of her laugh. She laughs off Puddleglum's suspicions and directs them to Harfang for the Autumn Feast without revealing that they are to be the main dish. As a result, now that they have hopes of worldly comfort, Jill and Eustace lose their focus on their Aslan-given mission and become more short-tempered with each other. Again there's a whole wealth of insight into the conservative worldview there that I don't have time to explore.

What isn't clear is why she does this. At Puddleglum's insistence, the protagonists don't tell her anything about their quest. She has an army of gnomes at home in Underland if three people were to find their way down into her domain. What threat are they to her? What does she gain by feeding them to giants? We're never told.

After Harfang the protagonists sink down to Underland and are taken to the Lady's castle, but she is not there; instead they meet the bewitched Prince Rilian. He remembers nothing of his former life and talks constantly, monotonously, about how good and kind and wise the Lady is and how deeply he owes her all his obedience. Lewis both tells and shows us that there is something wrong with him mentally. This is where we get the lines quoted above about how men shouldn't be bossed about by their wives.

Then comes the one hour of the day when the enchantment does not hold, and he has to be bound into the silver chair. He still remembers only fragments of his past life until they free him, but he is sane and aware of his condition, and he calls the Lady "the most devilish sorceress that ever planned the woe of men".

The Lady returns, to find her spell broken and the Prince declaring his intention to leave her service and go home. She responds immediately by casting another spell on all of them, using music (but "monotonous, thrumming" music) to make them forget the existence of the above-ground worlds. Again Lewis notes her lovely laugh. When they remember things like the Sun and Aslan, but can only describe them with reference to Underland things like lamps and cats, the Lady responds that this proves they are just inventing the above-ground objects by mythologizing the underground ones.

Puddleglum defeats the enchantment by invoking the Ontological Argument -- we have Lewis's word for it, in a letter to a reader -- and yet again I find myself forced to pass by what could have been a fascinating sidetrack. The Lady transforms into a serpent and the male characters kill her. Rilian remarks that he's glad she transformed because "It would not have suited well either with my heart or with my honour to have slain a woman."

Thematically, then, the Lady denies the existence of any cosmic hierarchy above herself; she ensnares the man who should have ruled the level above her so that she may instead rule over him. Weaving this theme together with Jill's progression from quarrelsome to compliant, The Silver Chair is a symphony of patriarchal misogyny.

In the next reblog -- which should be the final one, but I make no promises -- I shall make plain the comparison between the Lady and Prince Rilian, Lúthien and Beren, and Edith and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Let me start with a minor correction. I've been saying Tolkien wrote the Lay of Leithian in the 1930s; in fact he did a lot of the work in the 1920s, and Lewis saw it in 1930.

And I should have told you one more detail about it -- though I imagine most people who've got this far into the thread are already familiar enough with the story to know this: Lúthien and Beren first meet by a stream in the forest, where she is dancing in the starlight and Beren happens upon her, a weary traveller escaping the destruction of the band of rangers who were his family.

What most of you probably don't know, what I certainly didn't know until I was looking things up for this thread, was that this story element was inspired by a specific moment in Tolkien and Edith's life. It was 1917, he had come back from France and was stationed in Kingston-upon-Hull. They went on a walk in the woods in the country not far from the sea, and Edith danced for him in a clearing full of white flowers, of a sort that Tolkien called "hemlocks" (not the poisonous kind), growing in an arrangement that botanists call umbels.

Even Aragorn's song in The Lord of the Rings retains the detail of the hemlocks and their umbels:

The horrors that Beren has already passed through at this point may be a reference to Tolkien's wartime experience.

Their marriage was not perfect. All Tolkien's friends were scholars and Edith had little interest in intellectual subjects, so she had difficulty joining in their conversation, which often left her lonely. Additionally, there was the matter of religion. Edith converted to the Catholic Church when they got engaged, at the cost of being turned out of her home of the time; but she did it for Tolkien, not for any actual change of belief, and after several angry quarrels with him she stopped going to confession in the 1940s.

But they loved each other enough to work through these difficulties. Tolkien was still telling people decades later how grateful he was that she would leave everything behind for a man whose only realistic prospect, at that point, was to get killed in the war.

(Oh, yeah, another detail. When they were first going out together, Tolkien's Catholic guardian disapproved of the relationship and forbade him to contact Edith until he was twenty-one; an injunction which he obeyed to the letter, writing to her on the evening of his 21st birthday. She by that time was engaged to another man, but she immediately broke it off to marry Tolkien instead. And changed her religion and got kicked out of her house. Lúthien's instant, rebellious devotion to Beren didn't come out of nowhere.)

...I promised this would be the reblog that drew it all together. It's getting a bit long to launch a new topic now. I should have talked about the Tolkiens' marriage a lot earlier. But now I think we have all the background we need. Next time.

Let's lay out the similarities between the Lay of Leithian and The Silver Chair. I wish tumblr would give you an option for putting text in columns. Never mind.

Now if that were all, if there were no real-world connection between Lewis and Tolkien, I would file this under "intriguing coincidence". But...

On the preponderance of the evidence, therefore, I conclude that The Silver Chair is (at the least) very likely to be a response to the Lay of Leithian and, through it, a caricature of the Tolkiens' marriage.

Basically he's saying I wish Tolkien would put that woman in her place.

I confess, I can still find much to admire in C. S. Lewis. I've already mentioned his respect for children. His work is admirably body-positive for a traditional Christian; though not quite a naturist he was a lifelong skinny-dipper, and nudity is generally (though not invariably) a positive symbol in his fiction. He was about as pro-gay as you could reasonably expect of a 1950s conservative; he thought sexuality was none of the police's business. And he did, late in life, moderate his misogyny; when I get sick of it in Narnia I do have Till We Have Faces to turn to for reassurance.

But I'm glad he's not still around and I don't have to distance myself from his entire opus just so as to avoid enabling him to promulgate his bigotry.

(As I do with certain other authors of seven-part British children's fantasy series.)

This is a really, really, really solid (to the point of damning) interpretation/analysis. The only thing I'd add is that I do think the hemlocks are a clever double meaning, where Tolkien is alluding to the poison hemlock even though he's depicting the innocuous flower. (The Legendarium's treatment of suicide and otherwise "voluntary" death, both in stories like Lúthien's and in other contexts like the Númenor narratives, is the one conscious departure from orthodox Catholic moral and philosophical framings that Tolkien freely acknowledged during his lifetime.)

An interesting sci-fi short story from 4chan.

[Imgur]

That is some fine writing.

The Imgur link is broken so:

[Series of posts on 09/16/11]

About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.

His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.

One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.

People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.

Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)

It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.

The galaxy moved on.

Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.

Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.

Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.

Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.

“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”

After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.

“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”

The Admiral said “Who?”

What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.

Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.

We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.

That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts - acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets - was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.

Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.

This makes me cry

It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.

Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five, 

A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field. 

Waiting.

When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”.  The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace. 

Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.

We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice.  In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off.  It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.

Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.  

Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.

We find it terrifying.

I love this one. Reblogging for something new. 

Humans had been part of the intergalactic alliance now for longer than most could remember. New member systems were typically bemused by the Dracs semi-reverence of these fragile, hairless beings, and the Hives’ blend of respect and fear. 

Until the moment when their ambassadors were shown The Film. 

That’s all it was called, because the contents weren’t comprehensible.

Over time, the Vandals had reorganized and rebuilt; they’d formed alliances, created new weapons technologies, and were completely ready to take on the Drac galactic navy.

They were utterly unprepared for the humans. 

The command ship of the Vandal fleet was unassailable. Ion weapons were turned aside, the most powerful laser arrays were useless. Physical projectiles did work, but the mass of even a missile next to the ship was insignificant.

When the human destroyer Athena began to accelerate towards it, all shields to front, full power to thrusters, the Dracs made contact immediately, demanding to know what they intended to do.

The comm channel came back with a medley of humans singing, chanting, praying, and the captain simply said, “Ending this damn war.”

And disconnected.

The Drac central command watched the remote readouts of the human ship as it soared past the Vandal fighter vanguard. The Athena wasn’t firing, and the Vandal command didn’t have a protocol to deal with this, so they directed no resources towards the destroyer.

The reactor on board the destroyer began to systematically overload. Command patched through directly to the engineering room, and were met with the chief engineer saying with a smile, “No time to explain, I’ve got to say my last words to my creator.”

And he disconnected.

The Athena was traveling at an unsafe speed when it collided with the Vandal command ship, tearing through the armor.

When the Athena’s reactors then went critical and destroyed the entire Vandal command, the human admiral aboard the Drac command vessel bowed his head and said, “May their memories be a blessing,” and proceeded to help plan the final assault on the remaining, disorganized Vandal fleet. The remaining human ships were heard chanting “For the Athena!” as they went into battle with little regard for their own safety, and less for the Vandals.

Ambassadors were always pale by the end of The Film, but none of them questioned humanity’s place in the alliance again.

An interesting sci-fi short story from 4chan.

[Imgur]

That is some fine writing.

The Imgur link is broken so:

[Series of posts on 09/16/11]

About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.

His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.

One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.

People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.

Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)

It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.

The galaxy moved on.

Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.

Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.

Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.

Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.

“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”

After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.

“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”

The Admiral said “Who?”

What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.

Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.

We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.

That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts - acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets - was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.

Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.

This makes me cry

It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.

Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five, 

A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field. 

Waiting.

When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”.  The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace. 

Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.

We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice.  In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off.  It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.

Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.  

Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.

We find it terrifying.

I love this one. Reblogging for something new. 

Humans had been part of the intergalactic alliance now for longer than most could remember. New member systems were typically bemused by the Dracs semi-reverence of these fragile, hairless beings, and the Hives’ blend of respect and fear. 

Until the moment when their ambassadors were shown The Film. 

That’s all it was called, because the contents weren’t comprehensible.

Over time, the Vandals had reorganized and rebuilt; they’d formed alliances, created new weapons technologies, and were completely ready to take on the Drac galactic navy.

They were utterly unprepared for the humans. 

The command ship of the Vandal fleet was unassailable. Ion weapons were turned aside, the most powerful laser arrays were useless. Physical projectiles did work, but the mass of even a missile next to the ship was insignificant.

When the human destroyer Athena began to accelerate towards it, all shields to front, full power to thrusters, the Dracs made contact immediately, demanding to know what they intended to do.

The comm channel came back with a medley of humans singing, chanting, praying, and the captain simply said, “Ending this damn war.”

And disconnected.

The Drac central command watched the remote readouts of the human ship as it soared past the Vandal fighter vanguard. The Athena wasn’t firing, and the Vandal command didn’t have a protocol to deal with this, so they directed no resources towards the destroyer.

The reactor on board the destroyer began to systematically overload. Command patched through directly to the engineering room, and were met with the chief engineer saying with a smile, “No time to explain, I’ve got to say my last words to my creator.”

And he disconnected.

The Athena was traveling at an unsafe speed when it collided with the Vandal command ship, tearing through the armor.

When the Athena’s reactors then went critical and destroyed the entire Vandal command, the human admiral aboard the Drac command vessel bowed his head and said, “May their memories be a blessing,” and proceeded to help plan the final assault on the remaining, disorganized Vandal fleet. The remaining human ships were heard chanting “For the Athena!” as they went into battle with little regard for their own safety, and less for the Vandals.

Ambassadors were always pale by the end of The Film, but none of them questioned humanity’s place in the alliance again.

chaoticly-shy-dragon replied to your ask post

Azula would be so proud of her dragon. He bit a bigger dragon and lived.

"My dragon beat your dragon," says the toddler, "This island is mine now."

"That's not how it works," they say.

They are wrong.

No wait, random worldbuilding idea:

A people who have an age-old tradition, that when warriors left home to go to war, their family that remains home prepare funeral goods for them while they wait, sewing them the clothes and preparing the tools and all that they will be buried with - to emotionally prepare them to the hard possibility that the one who left will not return home alive. If the warrior returns, their burial goods are all burned in a bonfire that is lit for the celebration of their return.

And to this modern day, mothers of the culture will tell their children "fine, but let me take your measures for burial clothes before you go" as a way of telling them that something they're about to do is lethally stupid. Sharing stories about just how dramatic their mothers are, someone tells their group of friends that his mother once actually took out a measuring tape to start taking his measures when he said he's leaving home for a work trip.

And another one goes "pfft, yeah. This one time I went to a rock concert and came back home to mom sitting on her sewing machine, fucking making me a funeral coat."

HE DID IT FOLKS, HE DID THE THING

I genuinely love how this man wrote the most effortlessly, breathtakingly universal truths I've ever read and then will just...dad joke all over the place.

and

But also...

and also...

and also...

and also...

and fucking..

But then...

...and also!

...and don't forget!

...and furthermore!

The one-two punch of something like...

...and then the utter, truthful, poetic simplicity of...

Not many writers ever manage to swing so fully between the poles of absurdity and veracity with such success on both ends of the spectrum. What a gift he was and is to all of us.

villain going to the goon shelter to pick out a new henchman

this energetic and diabolical boy was rescued from a goon hoarding situation… he loves pulling levers, gloating, and turning cranks with great abandon. prefers to be the only goon. needs an active lair with plenty of enrichment.

now this fella comes with some baggage. his previous villain was going to have put down when he refused to perform unsedated human vivisection as a form of torture. one of our agents intercepted the execution and brought him to the goon shelter. would thrive in an environment of G or PG-rated villainry.

on the other hand, if you’re looking for something a little more… advanced… then this fine lady over here would make a great challenge for an experienced villain able to set firm boundaries. she will NOT be released to first-time villains; proof of prior henchpeople must be demonstrated before adoption approval. high prey drive. under no circumstances should she be left alone with children or small animals. must sign waiver releasing the goon shelter from responsibility if her behavior is deemed excessively depraved.

These two are pair-bonded and may only be adopted together. Up for anything, they are fiercely loyal to their employer provided their needs are met and they are permitted to hold hands. They look alarmingly similar to one another but it is undeterminable whether they are close blood relatives or lovers who choose to dress and style themselves in identical ways. Habit of finishing each other’s sentences with rhyming couplets; we have not attempted to train this out of them. Will answer to whatever names or titles you give them so long as they are complimentary and/or rhyme.

Will you help this goon find his forevil lair? He’s been returned to the goon shelter six times now but we refuse to give up on him. A vile little rat of a man, he’d be the perfect accomplice to someone willing to overlook his unfortunate heterosexuality. If gay-coding is not your style and you don’t expect it from a henchman, please consider giving this little guy a good home in your dastardly schemes.

This guy is not your typical goon. He was rescued from a high-kill shelter after being deemed unfit for henching. His deep baritone voice, his darkly handsome good looks, and his flair for the dramatic have made prospective employers pass over him time and time again, making him the longest resident of the goon shelter. But don’t judge a book by its cover—while his appearance and demeanor suggest “villain”, his real passion is taking orders and faithfully serving a master. If you’re secure in your villainry and not prone to jealousy, he may just be what it takes to turn your base into a lair.

btw if you're on this site it is your duty to reblog any post that has been prophecied to reach 10k notes. let's all annoy op

#this post deserves #10k notes #perchance.

ehh no actuallly it does not

Unfortunately for you, Tumblr is a site where the opinion least regarded on deserves notes is the original poster, sooo

@walmart-the-official

well. it's been over a month and we're not even at 1k yet, so I think I'm safe. perhaps 😌

....nate I'm really sorry I laughed at you for having posts with thousands of notes. don't do this to me