FANDOM CENTRAL.

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

I was inspired by lots of cute Polly Pockets from the 80s and 90s for this piece! 💕 I love how each Polly Pocket has a unique world inside it so I drew some dolls exploring other toys and making friends! 😊

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

it must have been equally terrifying for her as it was for the real nikki to have someone else fight for control over what she perceived as her body. the scene where she's sobbing in the corner, terrified of her dreams is now more sad than terrifying to me. real nikki, who has just been raped by her once best friend hurting so badly that it seeps into entity!nikki's nightmares. entity!nikki who doesn't understand why the thing she wanted so badly is causing her so much pain. why she can't bring herself to lie in bed next to the man who is the center of her world.

and the worst part is bear doesn't even seem to like her. she's trying so so hard; she made a lovely memorial for his dead cat, she waited for him to come home all day without moving an inch, she made sure to be the most doting girlfriend at the party, and he's not pleased by any of it. he seems disturbed and angry and scared and she has no idea what to do to make it better. to make it worse, he keeps asking her to behave like the original nikki but he was the one who wished for her!! she can't be like nikki because nikki was simply not capable of loving bear even a fraction of how much she does!

she can't seem to reconcile it; he wanted her so badly he conjured her into reality and now he doesn't want her anymore. she doesn't know what to do. she tries everything. she obsesses over him, she threatens to hurt herself, she gets rid of that bitch sarah who keeps distracting him and trying to steal him away, and then dresses in her clothes for good measure and he still doesn't want her.

and then finally in a fit of desperation, she makes the wish and for one beautiful moment its all perfect. he's finally looking at her the way she looks at him. and then he's dead and she's lost everything.

(And lemme sneak back here and add this to provide some context for the rest of this post. Marta’s situation is affected by class, money, power, immigration, concern for loved ones, character dynamics, the concerns of the plot, Benoit Blanc’s whole deal—but this post isn’t about any of that. This post is just about the theoretical Best Nursing Action. This post is a case study in your third semester Patient Safety class. This post exists in the same perfect world that NCLEX questions exist in.)

By the professional standards of nursing, when she gives the medication without checking the label, she fails at doing a universal safety check that can have catastrophic consequences. Let’s ignore the fact that the meds were maliciously switched (we’ll get to that, it’s a real fuckin wrench in everything). The fact is that she should have verified that she had the right medication rather than go by routine. Med error is so so easy in part because passing meds can become so routine. Especially in home health. You lose the fear of fucking up, you don’t check something bc you’ve done it a hundred times before, oops something goes wrong.

Additionally, she fails to assess her patient. Harlan is not showing any signs of morphine overdose. (I also want to be clear as I’m saying all this: if I thought I had given someone 100x their morphine dose and then lost the narcan, my asshole would have fallen out so hard you would have heard a clunk when it hit the floor. I like to think I wouldn’t let the dramatic old man rope me into an elaborate coverup, but like. He was very convincing. Anyway—)

Most importantly, she does not admit her error. Every single person in healthcare will make a mistake. If you are lucky, it doesn’t cause any harm. If you aren’t lucky, you think about what you did for the rest of your life. Sometimes you’re lucky and you still think of what you did for the rest of your life. What’s important is not keeping mistakes secret. It doesn’t help the patient harmed by the mistake to pretend there isn’t a problem or that you don’t know what the problem is. And on a larger scale, it doesn’t let the system know what happened, how the mistake happened, and what we can do to stop it. Marta doesn’t tell anyone what happened, largely in part bc Harlan is fucking wild and so hyped to die dramatically, but still for the point of nursing argument: she conceals her mistake.

And that causes about every problem in the film. Because if she’d been like “Harlan, this is insane, I am calling an ambulance” (and to her credit—she did try to call an ambulance. That crazy bitch Harlan ruined that plan) then the med switch up would have been caught because he would have been fine. So much of the situation was out of Marta’s control—literally, malicious interference with the medication and hiding the reversal agent, like what’s she supposed to do about that—but after the error happened, she engaged in a cover up.

And the moment in which Marta is a by the books Good Nurse is when she performs CPR and calls 911 to save someone she believes is blackmailing her and is the only person who knows Harlan’s death is her fault. She is providing care to someone in need regardless of her personal situation. She is owning up to what she did to prevent further harm. In a world in which Harlan was dying from a med error, she provides the family closure regarding his traumatic suicide. Being a Good Nurse means owning up to your mistakes, even if it is too late to save the patient, because we can’t find ways to address problems we don’t know exist.

But like to get back to the murder of it all, her failure to check the medication DID prevent a catastrophic med error. Like yeah she fuckin t gave the right med! She did know it by touch! And on one hand, that’s kinda bullshit, but on the other hand, I know what dilaudid feels like when I draw it up. I know what Ativan looks like in a syringe. And to be clear I would not give anything on a purely vibes based premise, but with experience you do get a nursing sense that’s difficult to articulate. It’s knowing someone has a fever from the doorway of their room, or that someone has a GI bleed from the faint smell of their poop, or that someone is in the early stages of sepsis from a glance at their respirations, or that someone’s getting delirious from just a passing comment they make. Intuition is not a consistent safety system, and also it is an invaluable asset. Sometimes you just know something isn’t right. That cannot be the entire basis of your practice. But it helps!

Marta knew the med was right because she’d drawn it up a hundred times before. That’s horrible safety practices, but also she was right. If she’d done the med check correctly by verifying the label on the vial, then she would have killed Harlan. So in this sense, ignoring protocol and going by pure intuition resulted in the correct decision in the context of unknown but extraordinary circumstances (Chris Evans). So like. Not sure exactly what the takeaway there is. I think mainly just murder is wrong.

And also just generally speaking—stepping back from the murder of it all once again—Harlan clearly liked her. Marta and Harlan had good therapeutic rapport, by which I mean they enjoyed each other’s company which was probably Harlan’s chief need. Like medications, treatments, those are all good, but so is talking to patients like they’re people and making them feel comfortable. I mean, she did that so good she got millions of dollars and a mansion. Girl knocked it out of the park.

So is she a Good Nurse? I’d say overall yeah. While at times throughout the movie, she is more concerned with being a Good Daughter or a Person Who Isn’t In Jail, the overall impression is a compassionate person who is normally competent at her job, tries to save others despite her personal situation, and takes responsibility for her mistakes. I think that’s why she rings true as a character who is a nurse, even if you could quibble with the exact medical details.

yeah it’s interesting, because there’s a real split between people going “this is the most annoying self absorbed idiot on the planet” and people going “oh…..that’s me 🥺”

And she also arrived with a little surprise!

When she was spayed, my old coworkers noted a weird scarred area on her uterus. A little while later she was getting an xray for a cough and they noticed a calcified area in her abdomen. So they went in to see what that was... and they found a lithopedion, a "stone baby". It's basically a fetus that ruptured through the uterus and her body encased it in calcium to protect itself!

Image under the cut