Spooky Elf Jail

i’m just saying aragorn son of arathorn oh im sorry STRIDER (one of them rangers what his right name is i never heard etc etc) didn’t need to be that sexy at the prancing pony. like ostensibly he’s trying to lay low but even dipshit little [relatively] eighteen y/o frodo is like hey what’s the deal with that extremely ostentatiously sexy man in the corner

“you draw far too much attention to yourself ‘mister underhill’” if i were frodo i wouldve snapped. jesus christ. i can’t help that i’m two feet shorter than everyone else in this definitely definitely 100% a gay bar but at least i didn’t lurk in a sexy corner making eyes at everybody from under my cloak at least im TRYING to pretend i’m not a protagonist you fine ass idiot. i KNOW i’m being pursued by the black riders which is why i didn’t SERVE CUNT from the SHADOWS. the fellowship of the nerve of this bitch

@hacash

this is another discussion tangential to the one about LotR/Tolkien, but I do also think that the cartoon-fascist cosplay that is in vogue on the US far right has hindered a lot of people's (especially Americans') ability to recognize or push back against strains of conservatism/fascism that rhetorically focus more on things like stability, tradition, family, and community rather than the worship of power and cruelty for the sake of power and cruelty. the deep Catholic conservatism that underpins LotR might seem opposed to the far-right politics that is in vogue right now in the US (see also the whole Pope Leo vs. Trump and Vance thing) but obviously there's a reason that fascists and conservatives have loved Tolkien's work for a long time, and there are more sophisticated and arguably more dangerous strains of fascism that are extremely skilled at weaponizing the same "universal" values that LotR's heroes are fighting for. and obviously I'm not immune to this, or the tendency to project my own politics onto LotR -- I watched the theatrical rerelease of The Two Towers the same day that Alex Pretti was murdered, and when Théoden says "so much death. what can men do against such reckless hate?" I felt myself moved almost to tears because it seemed to speak with such clarity to the precise moment. but there is a difference between "this is what the text seems to be saying to me in this moment" and "this is the value system underpinning the text itself."