Aurmeril of Middle-earth

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore

Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude

But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work

This is the version we know and love today

BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore

If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found

To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit

The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior

Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies

So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written

Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah

‘Dark are the waters of Khaled-zaram and cold are the springs of Kibil-Nala and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dum in elder days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone.’

This is the moment Gimli gets her, or at least he gets that she gets him. In this one sentence, 

She acknowledges that Gandalf (and Gimli) was not wrong to pass through Moria.

She shows empathy for Gimli’s wish to see Moria again, even if it is ruined or unsafe.

She deliberately uses the Dwarven names of places - endonyms instead of exonyms, Khazad-Dum instead of Moria, Dwarrowdelf instead of Black Pit.

She doesn’t only show respect and understanding, she shows knowledge - in addition to knowing dwarven names, she seems to know dwarven culture, since the descriptions she uses are very similar to the ones in Gimli’s song.

Knowing Galadriel’s past, it seems like her understanding of Gimli’s grief for Khazad-Dum stems from her experiences with losing… well, she lost a lot of people and places over the eras. She stood witness to the losses of various paradises, she gets it. But the fall of Gondolin is the most obvious parallel, or maybe Doriath, and the knowledge that Lothlórien can only be a faint echo of its glories.

Knowing Galadriel’s future, it seems like her grief for losing Middle-Earth forever also shines through the sentence. The world is changing and beautiful things fade or die or must be left behind, and she knows this probably best of everyone on Middle-Earth.

So, we know elves fear (souls basically) and hroa (body) are linked. Ex, if the elf is upset as hell their body just…degrades. That part is canon.

So, I think it would make sense that a sad, their body would require more sleeping, food, etc to sustain itself. 

This takes stress-eating and breakup-icecream to the max. We know elves typically aren’t the biggest eaters in the world. But if an elf was very upset, they would just eat and eat and eat, sleep all the time, etc. Which leads to a few things.

1. To a smaller degree, emotion snacking is basically mandatory. “Fuck, I just failed a test. Aaaand I could go for like five hamburgers right now.”

2. This could also go for larger things. Just like human’s depression-nap system, a sad elf will just. Sleep. For weeks. 

3. Perhaps it’s an elvish custom to hold huge feasts after times of sadness. Beloved town member just died? Thier funeral will have a shitload of food. Everyone will need it. Post-battle? Better start a huge potluck, shit, these elves need a lot to eat to keep up their souls now.

4. FOOD GIFT BASKETS ARE A MUST. Flowers? No one needs them. The real thing to do to cheer up your elf friend is send them several crates of protein bars. 

5. Maedhros probably ate an absurdly huge amount, all the time. Even on top of how much he would eat being so tall. Invite this guy over for a buisness dinner? Better have an extra four portions for him. 

So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.” Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.”  YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion. 

Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts. 

Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.

Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.) 

And THIS, this is hopepunk: 

We had one particular artist, tasked with drawing a series of elves, who didn’t quite seem to get what that meant. Their output was basically “white elf”, “another white elf”, “white elf with a tan”, “white elf looking a bit pale”, “yet another white elf”, etc.

When this was pointed out, they were like “oh, yeah, now I get it - I’ll totally fix that with my next piece”. They proceeded to turn in a picture of a blue elf. In the end, we had to provide specific quotas for specific levels of racial representation in order to get the point across. It all worked out in the end, but it’s stuck with me ever since that this artist examined the original spec, looked at our feedback, and came to the conclusion a blue elf was more plausible than a black one.

“How do you ‘accidentally’ become the leader of a creepy ghost army?!”