Literary Superheros

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

In the first movie alone, some of his greatest hits:

Successfully pickpocketed Rick on their first meeting, without Rick so much as joining the dots until later.

Survives a pitched battle on a burning ship without a scratch, and somehow gets the key from a burning hook-handed enemy mook in the process. (“And did I panic? I think not!”)

Survives a pitched battle in the Hamunaptra ruins while drunk, through liberal use of cover and picking off targets at range.

Rolls a Nat 20 on his deception check to avoid being massacred by a large group of hynotised enemies in the museum.

Survives the final pitched battle with the undead (again, through liberal use of cover, hiding and running).

Successfully makes his intelligence roll to translate the Book of Amun Ra (with the Help action from Evie).

Successfully uses the resulting control over the undead mooks to even out the battlefield, including the genius brain move of sending them after Ankh-Su-Namun to both save Evie and distract Imhotep.

Successfully pickpockets a lich while being strangled by him to regain the key and enable Evie to use the book to banish Imhotep altogether.

Yes, he’s fairly flimsy in direct battle, and if at all possible refuses to get to melee range with anybody. So he’s a ranged rogue, and has a tendency to use the environment to his advantage. But he’s clearly designed around Sleight of Hand, Charisma, and a decent sprinkling of Intelligence, and prefers to use object interactions and battlefield control to even out his odds. For all that, though, he fully will stay in melee range if he has no other choice, and take the opportunity to pickpocket the BBEG while he’s at it.

I didn't realise before, but this whole battle starts with Evie telling Jonathan that the only way to kill Imhotep is to open the book and read the spell to banish him. Jonathan says it's locked, they need the key, and Evie then tells him it's in Imhotep's robes.

When Jonathan sends the priest mummies after Ankh-Su-Namun with the spell on the cover (saving both Rick and Evie in the process), Imhotep is coming right for him. However, Imhotep is then briefly disabled by watching the brutal murder of his lover all over again, and Jonathan ... could have run. There's a beat there where Imhotep is completely focused on something else, and Jonathan absolutely has the presence of mind to use that, but he doesn't. Imhotep, now incensed that Jonathan has murdered his lover, promptly spins back around and goes to murder him back, and is only stopped because Rick returns the favour from earlier and saves him.

At which point a lightly-strangled Jonathan stands back up and tells Evie he got the key.

He fucking stayed put on purpose because he knew they needed the key, that Imhotep had the key, and that he was the only person who could fucking pickpocket the BBEG mid-strangulation and get away with it, so long as someone could swoop in before the undead wizard actually killed him. Imhotep is immortal and immune to damage if they don't do something about that. This is a fight of attrition they cannot win. And his sister told him what they needed to stop it, so Jonathan went and got it.

He cheerfully calls himself a coward, and then he goes and fatally pisses off a lich as a distraction, and then stands still to be murdered for it in order to get close enough to pickpocket the immortal pissed off undead. It wasn't that he took the opportunity while being strangled, he set up being strangled in order to have the opportunity.

The Great Lace, Chicago, 2026

lovely birds & i, at palais galliera ݁ ˖Ი𐑼⋆