Feminist Ally Forumgamer

The Fall of Gondolin is weird, because all these big fantasy novels and stories and animes have the Big Epic Fight climax where all the heroes fight so hard and barely pull through and it’s so badass and the audience loves it. Then we have Gondolin….and it’s….not. You read and they’re doing badass things and shouting about hopes and valor and dreams and youre like!! fuck yeah!! and they kill SO many balrogs and orcs and its going EXACTLY like one of those big climax battles. Then….it doesn’t. It just, goes downhill. Your favorite characters start dying, losing their little feats of valor. It gets less badass and more unsettling horror. The descriptions shift from awesome swords to wow, there’s a body in the street, wow this dude is dying next to his friend. Hey, someone’s daughter is out there sobbing and screaming and she watches her dad die. Another one of your favs dies. The room full of civilians gets attacked. You’ve lost the fuck-yeah mood and now you’re sitting there with a concerned expression because this is not the emotion you intended and it’s not sexy, badass action flick it’s just a cold nameless corpse in the streets and families committing mass suicide to avoid being taken into slavery, someone’s cousin trying to murder her family and rape her, there’s dragons in the street but they’re not cool and fuck-yeah, they’re burning people to death as they cower against walls they can’t escape from, and the battle is lost, and everyone dies, except for a tiny handful of people who run out a tunnel, way less than there should of been, and you’re like. Oh. That wasn’t the “cool fantasy battle” I was thinking it would be. That was a lot. I need to sit down. I just got destroyed by thirty pages of prose. 

This is why I don’t believe people when they say that George R.R. Martin is the “edgy” fantasy author and all J.R.R. Tolkien ever wrote were kiddie books.

George R. R. Martin books are about 100% more uplifting and hopeful than anything Tolkien ever wrote :\

I really like this style of ending books, it feels very real and sticks with me longer. It makes the happiness mean more while it lasts, and it makes the fight for it more potent to read about.

It’s not a fight to save the world forever, it’s a fight to keep the world a little better

I think this is why we are still analyzing and obsessing over Tolkien’s works decades later. This is where the Fanfiction and the art and the headcanons and the endless analysis stem from. I think to some extent we don’t WANT it to end that way. We want a happy ending because Tolkien did such a good job of making us love his world and his characters, and in a world where we’re so used to reading about fantasies where everything turns out alright and everyone is satisfied, it almost feels wrong for the story of Middle Earth to end so woefully. It’s like sure, this story takes place with gods and dragons and elves and magic, but it’s real. It doesn’t work out perfectly, it doesn’t really have a happy ending, not everything that we wanted to happen does happen. It’s almost TOO real, but that’s also why I love it so much. Because it feels like it could actually be our history, like these events could actually have happened.

It’s also why A Song Of Ice And Fire has had the cultural impact of a moist towlette to the face

it must be so freeing to be as stupid as a ceo. not a single thought echoing through that hollowed out skull. you get paid more money in 20 minutes than a handful of small countries make in a year combined to say the biggest number you can think of and if your company doesn’t hit that number you get to fire all of them

To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.

Final note: while they were dating, a favorite activity was to go to a local cafe with a balcony and throw sugar cubes into people's hats.

it's been said a thousand times but "male loneliness epidemic" is just our entire generation's loneliness PANdemic. it's just the crisis of capitalism. almost all young people these days are lonely and depressed because of the crisis and decay of the system we live under and tbh the centering of "male loneliness" in this discussion is embarrassing but also a really understandable consequence of sexism & this current stage of culture war . "Oh won't someone think of the young men" oh won't someone think about class consciousness lol

Stealing this from twitter but I liked the concept: put in the tags where were your 8 great-grandparents from (given modern borders) ?

Should SNAP dollars be spent on sodas? I don't know, are sodas a food or beverage? If yes, then yes. (: