Goddess Trash

things like

the desert as a lifeless wasteland where ‘life is crushed underneath the shifting sands and blazing sun’ blah blah blah. deserts are full of life and they are beautiful and people have lived and prospered in them for eons. please read a book

the desert as an ugly or barren terrain where everything is harsh and threatening

the desert as something scary

the inhabitants as backwards religious zealots

the men as overly violent and oppressive

the inhabitants in need of outside instruction/intervention, i.e. “civilizing the savage”

the “harem” and women as exotic, sensual, mysterious

writing tribalism with no knowledge of how tribes actually function

djinn (or for the westerners, genies)

Islam Lite (the aesthetics or spiritual practices appropriated and stripped of meaning)

sprinkling random arabic words for ✨flavor✨instead of expanding your worldbuilding to include language as well

clothing as oppressive or mysterious, instead of serving its actual purpose (protecting you from the elements, which should be obvious but i guess it isn’t. covering your skin keeps you cooler and safer in most deserts)

people who live in deserts as ignorant, superstitious, uneducated

So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.

They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.

And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.

Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.

Hear me out. hear me out. So. When the Sons of Feanor arrive in Beleriand, there is already a battle on. It's hard fought until the Noldor show up with a lot of issues to take out on the forces of Angband and the Dagor-nuin-Giliath quickly goes against Angband.

Orcs HAD been beseiging the Havens at Falas, but pull back to reinforce the northern forces of Angband agains the Noldor. Or attempt to, anyway. They run into a problem in the form of Celegorm son of Feanor and his forces, who ambush the reinforcements near Ethel Sirion and drive them into the Fen of Serach. Being stuck in a swamp with a hunter of Orome hunting YOU is not a good situation, and it shows; Celegorm destroys that force of orcs to a one. No orcs or servants of the enemy survived him.

It is canon that Celegorm knew all the tounges of birds and beasts, at least those in Valinor. This no doubt aids him greatly in hunting the forces of Angband; in the fens the very toads and frogs could give him intel.

HOWEVER. I posit that it is quite probable that the toads and frogs of Beleriand speak a rather different dialect than those in Valinor, much as the elves of Valinor speak Quenya and those in the East Sindarin and Silvan and other tounges.

Yes, you understand.

Modern au…

If you are here, you need to not be.

'hey we've been spying on you and tracking your every move. it's a culmination of state of the art technology and an unprecedented invasion of consumer privacy. a room full of men with made up jobs bent their will toward decades of constructing this system, defending it in court, and tirelessly innovating new ways to aggregate more data about you'

and the end result is

'yeah so uh we saw that you recently bought a car. so here's an ad for that car'