Sumiresiel - Violet Sky

Why is this me

People often say LOTR is a story about hope. (I'm reminded of it because someone said it in the notes of my Faramir post.) And that's true, but it's not the whole picture: LOTR is in large part a story about having to go on in the absence of hope.

Frodo has lost hope, as well as the ability to access any positive emotion, by Return. He is already losing it in Towers: he keeps going through duty and determination and of course Sam's constant help.

For most of the story, Sam is fueled by hope, which is why it's such a huge moment when he finally lets go of the hope of surviving and returning home, and focuses on making it to the Mountain. To speed their way and lighten the load, he throws his beloved pots and pans into a pit, accepting that he will never cook, or eat, again.

When Eowyn kills the Witch King, she's beyond hope and seeking for a glorious death in battle. It's possible that in addition to her love and loyalty for Théoden, she's strengthened by her hopelessness, the fear of the Nazgúl cannot touch someone who's already past despair.

Faramir is his father's son, he doesn't have any more hope of Gondor's victory or survival than Denethor does, he says as much to Frodo. What hope have we? It is long since we had any hope. ... We are a failing people, a springless autumn. He knows he's fighting a losing war and it's killing him. When he rejects the ring, he doesn't do it in the hope that his people can survive without it, he has good reason to believe they cannot. He acts correctly in the absence of hope.

Of course LOTR has a (mostly) happy ending, all the unlikely hopes come true, the characters who have lost hope gain what they didn't even hope for, and everyone is rewarded for their bravery and goodness, so on some level the message is that hope was justified. But the book never chastises characters who lost hope, it was completely reasonable of them to do so. Despair pushed Théoden and Denethor into inaction, pushed Saruman into collaboration, but the characters who despaired and held up under the weight of despair are Tolkien's real heroes.

(In an early draft of Return, Frodo and Sam receive honorary titles in Noldorin: Endurance beyond Hope and Hope Unquenchable, respectively. Then he cut it, probably because it was stating the themes of the entire book way too obviously, because this is what Tolkien cared about, really: enduring beyond hope. Without hope.)

Also, people who know more than me about the concept of estel, feel free to @ me.

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Isn't this just being autistic, except people are more understanding cuz they're aliens and not human.

Consider: Aliens land on Earth, they are vaguely humanoid in shape and size, but there is no real way to communicate with them. They're social, curious and friendly, though, and try to get to know humans and interact with us the same way as cats do. By mirroring.

They follow humans around - not necessarily any specific ones, but just wandering wherever people go - and do human things with them. Or at least do their best to try. In gravely serious, intensely focused, but deeply confused silence, they join human activities with this air of "I don't understand what we're doing, or what this achieves, but we're doing it together now."

When there are people waiting at bus stops, one or two of the creatures will join the group, standing in wait. When the bus comes, they'll join the queue lining up inside, and once inside, turn their open palm into a light source and show it to the bus driver in the exact same way as the people showing their bus passes from their phones (the aliens' ability to shapeshift this way has raised theories that they may not be naturally as humanoid as they seem, they've just adopted the human shape to better interact with us), and then go find seats wherever, just like humans do.

They're not going anywhere in particular, nor are they capable of actually paying for their ride, but since there doesn't seem to be any force to stop them from this, people just have to accept their presence. If the bus is crowded, they'll stand just like people do - and sometimes when seated aliens see a human offer their seat to someone who is pregnant, disabled or elderly, they will unpromptedly get up and offer their own to the nearest standing human.

They go to churches, temples, grocery stores, libraries, wherever people go, and clearly try their best to do whatever people are doing. In temples and holy places, they will sometimes join hymns in their eerie, wordless howls, which follow no melody but stop when humans stop singing. They sit and stand where the people do, and copy the positions in which humans pray, and many places of worship don't just tolerate, but downright welcome them - no matter what these creatures are, do they not have the right to pray?

In the libraries they are silent, eerily wandering the hallways, picking up books at random and staring at the pages, turning the page this way or that every few minutes. They don't bother anyone much, once the librarians figured out how to make them put the books they pick up into the returns cart, instead of some random place in the shelves. Some of them seem to enjoy simply grabbing random books, and carrying the whole piles to the returns cart.

They don't understand why we do what we do. We don't understand why they do what they do. But we're now doing it together.

Writing, Neil Gaiman, and Kon Satoshi

I almost gave up writing altogether after reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

I didn’t read it as it was coming out in comics, but later, when it was published in collected volumes.

It was too perfect. Too complete. It seemed like it had sprung fully-formed from Gaiman’s head, and he had to spend years waiting for artists to catch up.

It was overwhelming. Unattainable.

I wasn’t reading the book’s post-scripts, though, because I wanted to avoid potential spoilers. I wanted to experience the material, not the author dissecting it.

I did read them on a second pass. There’s a story on Dream Country, the third volume, about a writer keeping a muse captive so she can give him ideas. It’s a piece with characters that tie into Morpheus’ past and who will come up again, woven into the larger narrative. The book also contains a post-script on how the story came about, where Gaiman states it was at first about a succubus, before moving on to talk about his process for working with the artist.

My eyes kept moving forward, brain storing words from the original script, but my consciousness had taken a step back.

Wait, back up, what was that character again?  Who? Calliope. Originally a succubus, replies brain, let me keep going here.

Yes, stupid me. I had assumed Sandman had been gestating inside Gaiman from the start, waiting for an opportunity for the entire story to burst out. He didn’t transcribe a long epic he had already come up with. He wasn’t born with the tale. He worked at it for years, sometimes throwing away material and replacing it with things that fit better. Like a normal human being.

I keep making the same mistake. I wrote about a similar mental bug when talking about Kon Satoshi and Dream Fossil.

We only see the finished product. We don’t see the author sitting down at the typewriting and bleeding.

It’s all work. Some people have more potential and have it easier, others have to work harder at it, but in the end it’s only work. If you want a chance to get better at it, you should treat it as such.

Well, the ants decided to have a colony inside my mech keyboard.

I'm sorry Sony but you gotta drink some liquid uranium

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