Auror Fannypants

"Looks like they could kill you" "is a cinnamon roll"

"Looks like a cinnamon roll" "is a cinnamon roll"

"Looks like they could kill you" "would kill you"

THE GLANCE... i.e. the look they give each other when there's stupidity in the air

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.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

And so much love to that poster, because it stuck with me, and really made me think about why I find Kel so compelling. And, in thinking about it, I've come to understand that the truth is that Kel doesn't get chosen. She chooses herself.

When Kel touches the door at the beginning of Squire, Neal tells her never to do it again, because the Chamber might kill her. And Kel proceeds to touch that fucking door every fucking year, to the point that the Chamber knows her, and remembers her, and is like, "Girl, you again??" And she's like, "Yep, it's me! Please torture me some more." She keeps coming back because she is afraid that she won't pass the Ordeal, and she keeps touching the door because when Kel can't do something, she works at it until she can. And so, she builds a relationship with the Chamber the way she does with everyone else in her story: by showing up, by being reliable, by having integrity, and by being the best version of herself she can be, every day.

I tend to believe that the purpose of the Ordeal is that the Chamber forces you to change--to realize something about yourself that needs to be faced so that you can become a better person--and that the Ordeal only ends once you've internalized that change. (This is why Joren dies).

Kel's Ordeal ends when she changes the way she thinks about the Chamber: "I thought you would be grand and terrible" she says "I thought you would make us grow up... This is just mean." She had put her faith in the Chamber to show her that she was worthy, but she was worthy from the start. This is what changes about her: she no longer seeks external validation from the Chamber; she no longer has anything to prove. She realizes was always worthy.

And the Chamber doesn't go on and on about how she's special, or the chosen one, or whatever. It just says: "You'll do."

When Blayce starts defying the laws of life and death, there is only one class of knights that the Chamber has access to, and Kel is the last candidate to enter the Chamber that year. She is the Chamber's last chance to enact any sort of will on the world outside its little room. And Kel walks in, and it knows her. She is the one who has been testing herself against it for years, and she comes back and gives it the metaphorical finger and tells it to fuck off. The entity in the Chamber is already searching for someone to do this important thing, but Kel doesn't need some elemental demi-god who exists outside of time to approve of her. She does that for herself. She chooses herself.

The Chamber didn't pick her in advance; it wasn't some mystical prophecy. It was holding a job interview, and Kel showed up and said, "It's me. I'll do it. (Also, go fuck yourself.)"

And the Chamber says: "Yeah, all right. (Thank fuck you showed up)."

What I love about Kel is that she embodies the kind of heroism that is possible for all of us. She is dedicated. She is kind. She is hard-working. She commits herself to the service of others. None of those things are superhuman. They are possible for each of us to achieve.

At the end of the day, being a hero isn't about being blessed or prophesized or having super-powers. It's about showing up every day and saying: