Mx. IsWrath and the Incredible Time Sinks

This is a link to Rick Asterley’s pop hit Never Gonna Give You Up. If you click this link, the song Never Gonna Give You Up will play. There you have it.

he put all his stats in intelligence to amp up his casting but wisdom is his dump stat so it’s like

*clonk*

“two hops this time”

Sam has a Driver’s License but they drive on the other side of the road in Hobbiton so his isn’t valid in the rest of Middle Earth.

Frodo and Merry are Gays That Can Do Math, and therefore can’t Drive.

Pippin HAD a license but got it revoked due to Aggravated Shenanigans.

Gandalf CAN drive but is an insane paranoid hippie that hates both petrolum-based transportation and government paperwork.  He does have a pilot’s license though.  Don’t ask him to justify it unless you want a four-hour lecture on civil rights that sounds like it’s quoting law from another dimension.

Aragon can drive, quite well, but it never occured to him that he might need a license to do so on public roads.  He doesn’t know about taxes either.

Gimli travels frequently but as a diplomet and royal, never was the one in the driver’s seat.

And THE THING IS, I’m not certain it doesn’t also work canonically. Because like we can infer that Aragorn got most of his How To Be A King For Dummies lessons from the elves, and, well, do elves… have… taxes? It seems unlikely. (Do elves even have currency? There’s probably an answer to that one and I just don’t know it.) Somehow I can’t quite picture Galadriel going around Lothlorien like okay suckers pay up you’ve gotta pay a property tax on that tree you know.

So then he gets to Gondor and gets crowned and a few months later someone comes by and is like “how much are we taxing the peasants this year” and Aragorn panics and is just like “f…five? ……. too high? Too low?”

And I mean, who can blame the guy, he’s basically been wandering the wilderness for the majority of his life, it’s not like he’s ever really had personal property besides an improbable number of weapons, so he’s probably never, you know, paid taxes

Like this is a Modern AU where Aragon becomes Mayor of a medium-sized mountain town*, but tbh this still holds in canonverse too imho.  the first like.  3 years of Aragon Having A Real Job For The First Time That Happens To Coincidentally Be A Political Position, is him listening to people making suggestions about “So what are we taxing the pesants?” and “What’s this years Budget?” and him Turning to Arwen, one of like 4 people in all of Middle-earth with any damn sense, and saying

“Hey Babe?  What’s a Budget?”

*In this AU The Riders of Rohan are a Biker Gang and Edoras is a really nice mom-and-pop convience store/bar/mechanic/tourist trap that’s been run by “King” Teddy’s family for as long as anyone can remember.

**I think i might have come up with a “Great Westen American Roadtrip LotR AU” 

Help.

***The Hobbits are Canadians.  I know canadians drive on the same side of the road but the Idea of Sam having an invalid lisence is hysterical.

****They found the ring in the idyllic Waterton-Galcier International peace Park/The Shire, over the border where nobody thought to look for it, and end up on a quest to take it to the hellish land of raging Monsters and unlivable condiiotns known as Mount Doom/ Phoenix Arizona.

The Prancing Pony is the Pie Place in St. Mary, Montan- IT’STWO IN THE GODDMAN MORING I KNOW AO3 GOT NOMINATED FOR A HUGO BUT I DO NOT NEED TO BE WRITING THIS RIGHT NOW.

And even if they do, I bet Galadriel had to go through the exact same process Aragorn did in the post above, because SHE was born in the Undying Lands where life is beautiful all the time and the trees are somehow constantly both in flower AND bearing fruit at the same time, and nobody does any labor unless they like it.

And then just to make things even worse Galadriel learned rulership from Melian, who is a Literal Angel like Gandalf and ALSO pulled all kinds of magical bullshit on her elven husband’s kingdom. What I’m saying here is the first hundred years or so of Galadriel trying to rule on her own were A Very Rocky Time for Everybody.

well it’s 3 AM and I made coffee, and i think this Great Western Road trip AU has legs , so I did a bad overlay and discovered the Hobbits are NOT Canadians:

THEY’RE CALIFORNIANS.  I like this map becuase it puts the trip in some really fun places if you fudge the route a bit:

The Shire is near Mendicino, CA

Tom Bombadil probably lives in Jackson State Forest which is a old-growth redwoods kind of place. 

Bree is now Yuba City, CA

Weathertop is Smartsville, a “Historic” ghost town that seems like a place that would harbour Nazgul

Rivendell is about in Lake Tahoe, maybe Trukee.

I CAN HEAR YOU, PERSNICKETY TOLKIEN CARTOGRAPHY PEOPLE.  WE’RE FUDgING THE ROUTE.  WHAT? YOU WANT RIVENDELL IN FUCKING *squints at map* FALLON, NV??  IT’S WAY TO PICTURESQUE TO BE THAT FAR OUT OF THE SIERRA NEVADAS.

moving right along

Moria can literally be an abandoned uranium mine.  it’s terrific.

Lothlorien is probably the  Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, on account of that’s the one place in Nevada that I can verify has trees.

…I think othornac is in Bakersfield, CA, which puts Fangorn in Sequoia National Park.  Appropriate.

Also Rohan is mostly in the Death Valley Area.  Kickass. Helms deep can be an abandonded nuclear missle silo, it’s awesome.

This does make most of Gondor the Los Angeles Basin tho.  Minas Tirith is now the bustling metropolis of… Palm Springs. Hm. eh,  Gondor’s kind of a shit country as is. DOES put the cave fulla ghosts in the middle of LA tho, so that’s fun.

Shelob lives in the Kofa Nat’l Wildlife refuge, which is IRL famous for it’s tarantulas.

Mt. Doom is still, of course.  Phoenix, AZ.

2. @gaslightgallows uhhhhh… Well, I have pre-orders for the Family Lore Nonfiction Book out right now, but I was wondering what I was gonna do after those ship so I think I’m gonna do this.  So expect Pre-orders to open Late 2019/early 2020?

Other things from the Notes:

I want to thank the Arizonians for coming out and telling me about Sunset Crater, an actual active volcano in the right part of AZ to be Mount Doom.  This means that Phoenix is actually Barad-dûr.  

God bless the people in the notes trying to figure out if Canon!Aragorn would actually know anything about taxes, how or even IF taxes happen in Middle-earth, and what schooling Elrond could have foisted upon Estel during intermittent and extremely distracted visits to Arwen.

Apparently drivers lisences are intenrationally Valid no matter what side of the road you learned to drive on which given my family’s expirience driving in Ireland, seems like a terrible Idea.

Bless @rain-sleet-snow for the following tags: eowyn meanwhile has a license for everything she might conceivably want to drive and knows how to hotwire a quad bikethe real moment where she falls out of love with aragorn is when she realises that he would never get a licenseeowyn appreciates the grim and faintly above the law aestheticjust not the fact that he does things like not signal. or wear his seatbelt.and the less said about the state of the motorbike they lent him the better.boromir probably spent rivendell > moria saying things like ‘this car DOES NOT START until you ALL have your seatbelts on.’‘THAT INCLUDES YOU GANDALF.’he taught faramir to drive and taught himself good habits as a consequence because god forbid his little brother get hurtbecause boromir did not teach him to check the mirrors constantly or somethinghe also taught him basic car maintenancebecause it comes with the package!really eowyn has no idea how much she has to thank her deceased brother-in-law for.

Thoughts for this AU:

I’m playing it extremely fast and lose with travel times, distances, what governments may or may not exist, what year it even is and when the apocalypse occured.

JRRT built so much world he built fantasy for the next fucking century and a half so I don’t have to.  Thank you, Jonald.

There was at least one Apocalypse in this AU becuase the original Series is post-apocalyptic: fallen kingdoms, fading magic, long-forgotten statuary etc.  but the details of which apocalypse and how it went down have been lost to time and the collapse of widespread governance. Maybe it was a nuclear event, maybe the Wyoming Supervolcano, Maybe the Second American Civil War, maybe all 3 at the same time.  Who knows?  Not the Fellowship, which can barely collectively remember to not leave Frodo at the gas station.

Aragorn is a Transguy and tried out like, a zillion names before settling on Aragorn, which is why everyone he meets calls him something different

Barkeep, gesturing to the mysterious dude in the corner wearing sunglasses at night and indoors: Nobody really knows who he is, but I’ve heard him called… Strider. Pippin: what, like Homestuck?

Boromir has a VW bus that’s older than his crap father and has what he thinks are cool modifications to make it intoa camper van, but in reality he ripped out the seats and adhered coleman products to the walls with duct tape

Aragorn: “You fell!“  Gandalf: “Through fire. And water.” Gandalf: “From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak, I fought him, the Balrog of Morgoth.” Gimil: “For the LAST TIME-” Legolas: “Dude, don’t interrupt!” Gandalf: “Until at last, I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountainside.  Darkness took me. And I strayed out of thought and time.  Stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as the life age of the earth.” Everyone: “Oooooh!” Gandalf: “But it was not the end. I felt light in me again.  I’ve been sent back until my task is done.” Aragorn:  “Not to be a buzzkill, but I think you got high and went to a laundromat.” Gandalf:  “Well. I did that too.  Wonderous things they do with Bleach these days, took 30 years of grime right out!”

Aries: You love like a 3rd degree burn. Intense, occasionally painful, constantly covering yourself in aloe.

Taurus: You love like a Gregorian choir. Loudly, all at once, and only at the specific behest of the catholic church. 

Gemini: You love like the battle of kursk, slowly, unshakably, wading knee deep through dead nazis.

Cancer: You love like the centurion in line at Starbucks. Furtively, simply wishing not to be bothered, and carrying a massive goddamn spear if anyone decides to piss you off.

Leo: You love like the large boulder perched atop a nearby hill. Ready, at any moment, to crush some unsuspecting human.

Virgo: You love like a sick elbow-drop. Inefficient, with great risk of injury, but terribly stylish.

Libra: You love like an antique store, slowly, fostering the orphaned and unwanted, home to at least two cats.

Scorpio: You love like gambling debts, growing constantly, with an even more constant threat of shattered knees, you know, from love.

Ophiuchus: You love like a Sasquatch, furtively, out of focus, but intentionally so.

Sagittarius: You love like the moth-eaten wedding dress locked away in the attic of an old house. Definitely haunted, like seriously goddamn haunted.

Capricorn: You love like a brick hurled through the window of a print shop in the early morning, either as a warning, or a random act of chaos.

Aquarius: You love the lullaby from inside the walls. You have no business being this comforting. 

FISTS YOU