All my interests in a trench coat

Marchwarden has spotted you.

But now they were in this strange sea, and neither of them looked anything like the Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch the other had known. Adam was a collection of l thoughts barely masquerading as human form. Ronan Lynch was raw dark energy, alien and enormous.

And yet when Adam's consciousness touched his, Ronan recognized him. It was Adam's footstep on the stairs. His surprised whoop as he catapulted into the pond they'd dug. The irritation in his voice; the impatience in his kiss; his ruthless, dry sense of humor; his brittle pride; his ferocious loyalty. It was all caught up in this essential form that had nothing to do with how his physical body looked.

What a STUNNING panel for a cabinet door! Dated late 16th–early 17th century and acquired by Cooper Hewitt @cooperhewitt in 1959, it has been created using a raised embroidery technique and it made from silk, metal wire, metal strips, coral beads, cotton, and linen.

A panel like this one would have been made by a team of professional embroiderers, mostly male, with specialized skills: one for the hand-painted silk backgrounds, one for the raised metallic embroidery, one for the needle-lace leaves, etc.

Also special attention to this thrush that I am very proud of

The other rebels are like you need to subtly let her know you're on her side, so you go bet and turn your charm up to 11. Which would have maybe worked on anyone else but this is Katniss Everdeen we're talking about.

So now you're stuck doing increasingly ridiculous social gymnastics every time she's around and still by the time the night before the Games arrives the only thing she's convinced of about you is that you are going to try to fucking murder her

So you freak out, seek out Haymitch and basically go "hey what the fuck is wrong with your kid". And Haymitch just stares ahead for a second, nods, takes off his bracelet, says "wear this" and leaves. You fucking hate district 12

So you go okay. Breathing exercises. This is fine. Guess I'll have to save her life during the Games or sth maybe that'll do the trick. And when you see the Arena you cheer up for a sec bc you definitely have the advantage here she'll have to trust you right?

Wrong. She can fucking swim. SHE CAN FUCKING SWIM.

So now you're in the Cornucopia with no cards up your sleeve, no time left, and arguably the other deadliest tribute in that Arena pointing at you with a bow, and so you go "you know what, fuck it, I'm going to die anyways" and you show her the bracelet

AND IT FUCKING WORKS

Bear in mind Finnick had no first-hand experience on Katniss and Haymitch's bitch-to-bitch telepathy this was his first contact with it

Maura, Calla, Persephone; strange three headed entity, with a silent language all to their own. They've been in this together since the beginning. They've been together so long, that its hard to see clearly, think clearly, on their own.

Persephone: enigmatic, far-away, unknowable; the sort of psychic different to all the rest, the kind you can't understand but love anyway. Quietly ready to give everything for her friends. The strange one.

Calla: blunt, fierce, loyal; the ability to understand the link between an object and its owner on a fundamental, extra-knowing way. Untempered by kindness, but kind anyway. Solid and reliable, sneering and judgemental. A good friend to have.

Maura: Idealistic, tiebreaker, action-seeker. The one who makes sense of the other two, the axis through which all other women in the house are conncted. The one clinging to the past even as she summons the future, who puts things into motion, the one who makes things okay again. The leader.

Gwenllian: wild, eccentric, free; she came in late, the mirror who sees too clearly. She fits in this place, but she cannot replace the others. Too strange for the outside world, but too mortal for her home. She is passionately herself, leaves in her veins and stars in her eyes. A mirror into the soul.

In order: Adam, Ronan, Gansey, Blue.

And the part that fucks me up:

Blue came into the picture after the once-dead-boy had been foretold to die again. Gwen came into the picture after Maura vanished, when it was uncertain she'd come back home.

Adam had a vision of himself killing Gansey, a prophecy that's haunted him for months, but didn't quite come true. Persephone died (killed herself) scrying (another type of vision) to find Maura (there wasn't a guarantee it would kill her).

Calla endured her best friend vanishing (when she told her not to); she endured her other best friend dying when she knew better. Ronan was the last to know Gansey would die (he knew anyway). Calla was alone in the knowing; Ronan was alone in ignorance.

Maura came back; gansey didn't (until he did).

Persephone is dead, Adam is not (his forest is gone)

...

Saying "Tolkien was unusually decent on race for an English academic born in 1892" is not the same thing as saying "Tolkien was morally flawless." Few serious Tolkien scholars would argue that Tolkien's work is free of racialized assumptions. It is worth talking about how to interpret those assumptions, how central they are to the legendarium, and how modern adaptions should engage with them.

Second, historical context does matter. It doesn't excuse everything, but it's how useful comparisons are made. To decide whether Tolkien was progressive, we need to compare him to other Oxford philologists and European writers of the early-to-mid 20th century.

On that comparison, there is good evidence he was ahead of his time: consider his outright rejection of the Nazi racial ideology in the 1938 letter, his condemnation of apartheid, his mistrust of imperial arrogance, and the recurring theme throughout his work that mercy and humility are preferable to power.

None of those erase the racialized geography of Middle-Earth or the descriptions of Southrons/Haradrim/Orcs but they do tell us something about what Tolkien personally believed, even if his fiction sometimes reproduced assumptions that don't sit easily with those beliefs. His documented opposition to Nazism and apartheid is not trivial. They are evidence that Tolkien's moral outlook on race was more expansive than many of his contemporaries, even if he did remain bounded by assumptions he himself never recognized.

We routinely evaluate historical works relative to their own moment while still recognizing their limitations.

Pride and Prejudice is by modern standards still a deeply gendered novel, but its insistence that women possess intellectual and moral agency pushed feminist thought forward. Maurice is centered on white upper-middle-class English men, but in 1913 simply writing a novel where two men fall in love, have sex and find happiness was radical. Huckleberry Finn was one of the strongest anti-slavery novels in American literature, while still reflecting assumptions and language of 19th century America.

The Lord of the Rings makes the renunciation of power rather than its acquisition the moral center of an epic fantasy. The commoners who reject glory are depicted as the real heroes. To an extent, it also undermines a simplistic view of racial superiority.

Consider Sam wondering about a dead Southron soldier:

He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in pace...

Sam doesn't just pity the Southron. He wonders about what he wanted, and who was waiting for him at home. It's an unusually empathetic for a wartime epic written in the 1940s.

First Boromir, who traveled from Gondor to Rivendell — 400 leagues/1200 miles in 110 days— fearing Gondor could not hold much longer. The opposite journey from Rivendell to Gondor’s borderlands took Frodo and Sam nearly the entire trilogy. Oh and Boromir lost his horse midway through and had to walk.

It’s worth mentioning that Aragorn and Gandalf fairly recently traveled even farther, though over longer periods of time.

Aragorn tracked Gollum through the wilds near Mordor for years before bringing him to Mirkwood and eventually returning to his Ranger duties near Bree.

Gandalf (over 17 years) traveled to Minas Tirith and the Gladden Fields researching Isildur and the records of Gondor. Then helped Aragorn capture Gollum. THEN went to the Shire to start Frodo’s journey.

(Legolas didn’t travel as far but he still came all the way from Mirkwood to report to Elrond that Gollum escaped. Oops. Real awkward that Aragorn and Gandalf happened to be there.)

Glóin and Gimli came from Erebor, essentially retracing the journey of The Hobbit, seeking Elrond’s advice because Mordor is closing in on the Kingdom Under the Mountain. Also to visit Bilbo.