Yeah. They did that. I bet the ‘clarification’ came as a result of some strong legal threats.
So be aware in the coming weeks that if your favorite actor reportedly says something shitty about the strike that makes your blood boil? Check the sources. There’s going to be a lot of uh, spin in the news.
It’s a shame that the fuckton of people I followed on Twitter don’t all end up in the same place, and I more or less have to spread myself out to find them all.
Hell, I’m tempted to just make a Hobbit side account, so I can have any of that stuff be regulated over there, and not all over my main feed. As is, I’d like to gather up any of my mutuals who came to Tumblr.
If we followed each other elsewhere, please let me know!
“biblical angels” you do realise there are angels in the old testament that are literally just regular looking guys, right? you do know that the hallucinogenic incoherent descriptions are in like. two books. and the rest of the time angels are just guys. you know that, right?
and I’m not saying don’t have fun with weird angels. I’m saying, either the eldritch forms are for special occasions, or the society of the angels is Many-Eyed-Many-Winged-Interlocking-Circles, Four-Faces-Six-Wings, and Mike.
Literally Raphael is just a normal person!
this is what the heavenly breakroom is like
Oh no now I love the water cooler angel
I have an old fanfic that I never posted anywhere, maybe never will, but I used to really enjoy re-reading it I’m the past. I read it again recently (last time was just earlier this year) and I suddenly felt like it wasn’t very good. Maybe that means that my writing has gotten better in that time, or something, but jeez I just really want to do some editing now.
I swear, I need to draw Thorin again, I really want to settle on a design for him, cuz I never could back in the day. I have a Rankin/Bass-ish style in mind for hobbies but I think I’ve finally resolved to mostly leave that aside with the dwarves, just keep them from looking too realistic next to the hobbits.
Also, I can’t wait for my Twitter mutuals that migrated over here to be subjected to my love of the Hobbit movies. I used to be able to keep it a relative secret, but Elon had to fuck that up.
Not posting this as a reblog because I don’t want to screw with somebody else’s notes, but the whole “theological implications of Tolkien’s orcs” business has some interesting history behind it.
In brief, a big part of why the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe™ is so cagey about what orcs are and where they come from is that later in his life, Tolkien came to believe that orcs as he’d depicted them were problematic – albeit not because of, you know, all the grotesque racial caricature.
Rather, he’d come to the conclusion that the idea of an inherently evil sapient species – a species that’s incapable of seeking salvation – was incompatible with Christian ethics. Basically, it’s one of those “used the wrong formula and got the right answer” situations.
In his notes and letters, Tolkien played around with several potential solutions to this problem. (Though contrary to the assertions of certain self-proclaimed Tolkien scholars, there’s no evidence that he ever seriously planned to re-write his previous works to incorporate these ideas.) In one proposal, orcs are incarnated demons, and “killing” them simply returns them to their naturally immaterial state; in another, orcs are a sort of fleshy automaton remotely operated by the will of Sauron, essentially anticipating the idea of drone warfare.
Of course, this is all just historical trivia; any criticism of The Lord of the Rings must be directed at the books that were actually published, not the books we imagine might have been published if Tolkien had spent a few more years thinking through the implications of what he was writing. However, the direction of his thoughts on the matter is striking for two reasons:
Tolkien’s orc conundrum is very nearly word for the word the problem that many contemporary fantasy authors are grappling with fifty years later. They want epic battles with morally clean heroes, and they’re running up against exactly the same difficulty that Tolkien himself did – i.e., that describing a human-like species who are ontologically okay to kill is an impossible task.
After all the work he put into solving this impossible problem, one of Tolkien’s proposals was literally just “what if they’re not really killing the orcs, they’re just sending them to the Shadow Realm?”
