The Tale Of Aragorn And Arwen Is A Horror Story, Or A Cautionary Tale At Least.

I just wanted to talk about this scene because I noticed something: Levi is picking Hanji up, but the way he is leaning at the door and looking, I think he was waiting there for a longer time and didn’t just came at the very moment . And when he called Hanji to get moving(because she didn’t listen to poor Moblit), she looked surprised, as if she didn’t knew he was there the whole time(when he just came she would have heard his footsteps and we , the watchers ,would see him coming at this moment)

So I call it a levihan scene because it seems as if Levi watched her working and was waiting in patient for her while the others left them

REBLOG IF YOU’RE STILL IN THE HETALIA FANDOM

WE WILL NOT LET IT DIE. NEVER.

Hanji child and Hanji adult

It’s the end of the year, so it’s time for a decade redraw! I chose my piece of Legolas after the battle at the gates of Mordor, which I first drew while in New Zealand in 2009. I liked the idea of him having lost/given away/destroyed his arm guard in the chaos of the previous few weeks. My redraw is sort of the next breath, when he looks up and realizes that the gates are down, the mountain is crumbling, and the tower of Barad-Dur with its fiery eye is no longer standing.

I know I haven’t posted as much LotR content since my own books started being published, but I have a lot of feelings about this character and this scene in particular. Legolas is practically the last Elf anybody would choose to go on a quest to save Middle Earth. He’s the least noble of any Elvish heroes, with absolutely no deeds to his name besides losing Gollum (oops), he’s from the least of the Elf-realms, and he has unremarkable lineage at best and bleak family history at worst. His grandfather led a disastrous charge at the Battle of Dagorlad that got his whole company killed (Book of Unfinished Tales), which Thranduil witnessed first hand. The passage that comes after is one of my favorites:

“[Thranduil] had seen the horror of Mordor and could not forget it. If ever he looked south, its memory dimmed the light of the sun, and though he knew that it was now broken and deserted and under the vigilance of the Kings of Men, fear spoke in his heart that it was not conquered forever: it would arise again.”

And now here’s his son, who almost certainly expected to die that day for a world he has no moral obligation to, surrounded by absolutely none of his kin, sitting on the threshold of Mordor, instrument of Sauron’s final destruction and LIKE? Come on, that’s a great arc.

Healthy, wholesome ships are the best ships

I think I overdid this

Oh my god what I have done

BONUS

SPOILER FOR CHAPTER 15 OF THE MANDALORIAN

H E T O O K H I S H E L M E T O F F AAAAA DIN DOES SO MUCH FOR THE BABY I AM CRYING OMFG IT'S SO BITTERSWEET

DADA IS MAD

U BETTER WATCH OUT, GIDEON

off top mayfeld having sexual tension with everyone, even the fucking droid, is the best thing on the planet

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistant. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowing. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

Was reading a little thing about Maglor settling in the Shire, and I was thinking about how they have all this genealogy and it’s just.

Hobbit: I can trace my parentage way back to [don’t want to think of an old hobbit nam]

Maglor: I don’t have a great-grandfather