planetary go!

“that guy behind us is following you,” she said. “he was watching you leave the train car and followed you up.”

i hadn’t noticed him, or at least not noticed him following me. when we stopped outside a grocery store, he stopped half a block back and loitered. the woman linked her arm with mine and walked me several blocks out of her way to my front door and made sure i got inside safely.

another time, nocigar and i were walking home and at a stoplight a stranger grabbed my arm when i wouldn’t respond to him and tried to physically drag me over to him. she—who is, by the way, not a very physically imposing girl—ripped his hand off my arm and snarled, “don’t fucking touch her.”

“Those guys behind us were talking about following you. We can walk with you.” 

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore

Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude

But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work

This is the version we know and love today

BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore

If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found

To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit

The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior

Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies

So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written

Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah

For example,

“you run like a girl”

calling boys who don’t enjoy sports girly or sissy’s

putting down men who enjoy cooking because “the kitchen is where the woman belongs”

the idea that still exists that men shouldn’t participate in baby showers because they’re too “feminine”

how in every movie and tv show, boys had to defend themselves by saying “they’re action figures” because they felt emasculated over their friends seeing them with something that looked like it could possibly belong to a girl

-public schools

-public libraries

-hospitals/doctor’s offices

-small businesses operating online

-independent sellers on amazon/ebay/etsy/etc

-entertainment venues

-streaming networks like netflix and hulu along with all their original, non-televised content (stranger things, voltron, oitnb, etc)

-at risk/lgbt children, teens, and adults

-the disabled/mentally ill

-companies using apps/wireless payment in stores

-artists and musicians based online

-political movements such as BLM

-low income households

-online college students

-companies and startups kept alive by ad revenue

-video content creators/youtubers

-the live/online gaming industry and their patrons

-the entire network of unbiased news and freedom of information/informal education