Junko

《Long-promised follow-up of my Andalite Tail Mechanism TM: how I figure Andalite digestive systems work!

Sometimes, in fandom, we just want to write id-tastic fic that rolls around in tropes that might be viewed as problematic. But we don’t want to address the problematic side of things in this particular fanwork; we just want to roll around and wallow.

It is considered courteous to give readers a heads-up via use of AO3 tags. I propose a tag that signals that a given fanwork is for rolling around, not giving a measured evaluation of anything. The MCU has carved out a space for this sort of fic with the “HYDRA Trash Party” tag, for which I commend them. Trash Party is a bit too specific to cover all of the ground I’m thinking of here, though; I propose “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.”

For those of you not familiar with Arrested Development, Michael Bluth finds a paper bag in the freezer labeled “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.” He opens the bag, finds a dead dove, and reacts as follows:

[gif of a white man saying “I don’t know what I expected” in a deadpan manner]

The “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” tag would essentially be a “what it says on the tin” metatag, indicating “you see the tropes and concepts tagged here? they are going to appear in this fic. exactly as said. there will not necessarily be any subversion, authorial commentary condemning problematic aspects, or meditation on potential harm. this fic contains dead dove. if you proceed, you should expect to encounter it.”

As usual though I can’t help but think about this from an in-universe perspective.

You meet the last Dragonborn. You are a bandit who thinks that her head would probably be useful to somebody. Presumably she knows the Shout that will stop her from taking damage.

But instead this fuck yells wuld na kest, yells herself like 100 feet off the mountain, downs a jar of insect juice midair, and then falls like a stone 10000 feet down the side of the mountain.

things might end up better! they might end up worse. you can’t actually count on anything playing out as you remembered, or getting the opportunities to change the things you wanted to alter. the things you wanted to preserve might be lost to you. you can’t know!!! you can guess, absolutely, but you can’t know for sure, and there will undoubtedly be weird surprises of every kind.

you’ll be perceived differently, for sure. you’ll react differently, too. people who originally treated you kindly might pick up on a strangeness they find distasteful or threatening. maybe you’ll notice ugly flaws in the adults you once admired. maybe your mom had struggles you never knew about and reacts to her three year old firstborn having the consciousness of a thirtysomething by falling down a rabbit hole of mysticism or radicalization and one day she runs off with you to join a cult. or maybe some adult in your life decides that your affect is evidence of psychopathy and you are psychiatrized in new and different ways. maybe your adult knowledge of germs gets you labeled with contamination OCD, or maybe it just means you get sick less because you actually wash your hands now, which means your mom doesn’t stay home as much, which means she’s at work the day Barbara is there and they hit it off and they have an affair and your parents divorce and your dad becomes a homophobe and starts hanging out in conservative spaces and then becomes antivax and won’t get your family vaccinated and then your brother dies of measles and your family is on the news and the trajectory of your life is unrecognizable.

or maybe you can’t relate to the kids you were friends with as a child, because you’re 36 years old and they are seven. you crave the company of your peers, but your parents catch you sneaking onto the computer to chat anonymously with other adults, and now they think your friend Evelyn who you write fanfiction with is a pedophile who’s been grooming you for months and they get the police involved…

or maybe your shitty and abusive childhood is still shitty and abusive but now you’re even more aware of it because you know exactly how bad and unfair it is in the moment but you’re still only five years old and your little hands are too small to pull the trigger of your stepdad’s gun and you can’t reach the shelf where the rat poison is kept and now you can’t even escape into books or stories or video games because you finished them all a hundred times twenty years ago…

(╯°Д°)╯ ┻━┻

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

This makes so much sense in the worldbuilding, actually???

Like, consider: Elves don't understand hobbit families, but hobbits are also baffled by elf families. You have exactly one partner ever? And it's considered wildly inappropriate to take another even if that partner straight up dies? And they only raise their own children, usually three maximum? Most hobbits would be convinced that elves were cold, unfeeling and anti-social.

Bilbo is percieved as oddly elf-ish when he comes back from his adventure at least in part because he only takes on one hearth-child, and even then quite late in his life. Like sure dude, you don't have to have romantic or sexual partners but no children????? Very strange. Here. Take a Frodo. Maybe he'll fix whatever is wrong with your brain.

And this also explains why hobbits get on better with Elrond than most other elves. Because Elrond has a weird af family by elf standards and takes in foster children all the time. He seems much warmer by comparison. Basically, when Bilbo comes to stay at the Last Homely House and he's doing his writing Elrond would be thrown by how comfortable Bilbo is with his family.

Elrond: My apologies, I know this must be quite confusing for you.

Bilbo: No no I understand perfectly. You have two blood-parents (Elwing and Earendil), two hearth-parents (Maglor and Maedhros), one blood-brother (Elros), and one pledge-brother (Gil-galad). Certainly a bit unconventional due to the kinslaying and all, and a bit on the small side, but other than that...

Hearth - lives in your home, presently

Pledge - legal documentation on some sort of “vow,” of familial connection, like a legal marriage or adoption or birth certificate, and maybe also something like a fealty/apprenticeship in some cultures?

Love - you love them so they are kin on an emotional level, regardless of biology, where they live, or legal documentation.

In Appendix A of RotK, Tolkien writes:

Dís was the daughter of Thráin II. She is the only dwarf-woman named in these histories. It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole people. They seldom walk abroad except at great need. They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart. This has given rise to the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves ‘grow out of stone’. It is because of the fewness of women among them that the kind of the Dwarves increases slowly, and is in peril when they have no secure dwellings. For Dwarves take only one wife or husband each in their lives, and are jealous, as in all matters of their rights. The number of dwarf-men that marry is actually less than one-third. For not all the women take husbands: some desire none; some desire one that they cannot get, and so will have no other. As for the men, very many also do not desire marriage, being engrossed in their crafts.

This gave rise to the “born from stone” mini-trope in the Bagginshield fandom, in which dwarves given sufficient motivation can simply carve a baby. This (among other things) allows same-gender couples to reproduce conveniently.

Cabbage Patch Hobbits is a more popular AO3 tag kicked off by an author inspired by the “Born from Stone” trope. Hobbits, the reasoning goes, are known for fertility/fecundity and association with the Earth. In this trope they can just plant a token, and it will grow a vine, which will fruit a baby to dig up. I believe the originating fic does this with a lock of both parents’ hair, and allows for posthumous baby-planting, with resulting amusing Baby Reveals when the parent turns out not to be dead.

Reflective Glass Powder

Holo glitter Paint mix in

Clear topcoat sealer

Pigment for paint mixing

This is of course completely unrelated to this fuckery

And is in no way a suggestion that one could quite easily mix up a few or six or 10 batches of EXTREMELY hard to remove reflective holo-glitter BRIGHT colors of grippy epoxy resin paint, maybe even a rainbow of them, with some pink and baby blue and brown and black, etc... (IN NO PARTICULAR SHAPE OR ORDER), and then go out and slap down well planned out slices of such a coating super fast on the WHITE stripes of any particular crosswalk you might happen to personally see on your evening walk with 12 or so friends who own paint brushes.

And it goes without saying, that while I AM using my subscription included monthly blaze on this, reblogging with other ideas, products, or alternate sources (mom and pop style in Florida, for example) of the products listed above is not really the point of this post.

Even if you have good alternate design Ideas, or a source on getting one of those prism light sculpture dealies made, you probably should not add that information to this post.