General You

For example... The fact that you talk about positive masculinity as being about guys wanting a version of being a good person that's not for girls.

"Why do men specifically care so much about gender roles?"

I mean... the first half of that sentence is answering the second half.

"what's a way of being a good person that's Not For Girls™"

There's no way to win!

Comparing yourself to people who make it is depressing and comparing yourself to people who don't is depressing and thinking about yourself on your own terms is depressing and I won't even get pat on the head by a robot lady and get my shit together 10 years younger than I am right now like this fictional character does.

With people who make it, comparison can tell you what they had that you're lacking, and thereby help you fix things or at least give you more information.

With people worse off than yourself, the same comparison can tell you what assets you have that they need, and you can consciously make use of those things. It's not about gratitude or sneering. It's simple inventory. You can't possibly think of everything in the world yourself, and you can't possibly expect yourself to reinvent the wheel with every new problem. Comparison is silently asking nosy questions about what differences exist, why they exist, etc the whole who-what-when-where-why-how. It helps you learn.

Rather than thinking about yourself on your own terms in a hostilely-critical manner a la looking for weaknesses to excise, an objective assessment can help you let go of self blame for not having things you need, for not solving things earlier or faster, and help you see things you did try regardless of whether they turned out well. You wouldn't sneer at people in a worse position than yourself; there's equally no reason to sneer at your own disadvantages compared to where you want to be. Which of course does not instantaneously alter how you feel about yourself.

I think ultimately it really feels like there is a shocking lack of actual agency involved. I can swap notes with people and consider my options and work hard and all that but it doesn't actually matter. (And on top of that, as an ADHDisaster, it hardly feels like I have any influence on which interventions I do or how or how much anyway.)

There's no way to win!

Comparing yourself to people who make it is depressing and comparing yourself to people who don't is depressing and thinking about yourself on your own terms is depressing and I won't even get pat on the head by a robot lady and get my shit together 10 years younger than I am right now like this fictional character does.

With people who make it, comparison can tell you what they had that you're lacking, and thereby help you fix things or at least give you more information.

With people worse off than yourself, the same comparison can tell you what assets you have that they need, and you can consciously make use of those things. It's not about gratitude or sneering. It's simple inventory. You can't possibly think of everything in the world yourself, and you can't possibly expect yourself to reinvent the wheel with every new problem. Comparison is silently asking nosy questions about what differences exist, why they exist, etc the whole who-what-when-where-why-how. It helps you learn.

Rather than thinking about yourself on your own terms in a hostilely-critical manner a la looking for weaknesses to excise, an objective assessment can help you let go of self blame for not having things you need, for not solving things earlier or faster, and help you see things you did try regardless of whether they turned out well. You wouldn't sneer at people in a worse position than yourself; there's equally no reason to sneer at your own disadvantages compared to where you want to be. Which of course does not instantaneously alter how you feel about yourself.

There are lots of adults who are of the "here I stand" mindset about other people being inherently evil. Like modern fringe homophobes do, like historically people assaulting children for being left handed did. Attempting to argue with them is pointless, because even if you succeed at it, they will still treat you like shit. You will never have worth to them or respect from them. "I'm evil suck it" is a way to get them to piss off and leave you alone, to make them stop attempting to "save" you. Even the most fervent of Mormon proselytizers have a list of houses they do not go to; the point of "suck it" is to get yourself on that list.

Dunno what Andreesson did, but in no way is forcing yourself onto an asshole's Do Not Call list a slippery slope towards other "evil".

Adults can normally basically ignore this category of people. If a mormon pair knocks on your door, an adult can tell them they are not interested and close the door and go back to what they were doing. Adults also more often have the option of just directly telling people to "piss off and leave you alone", and if they refuse, you can get a restraining order.

If, to take a real example, someone is making posts about how I am as bad as Leopold II because I am in the worm fandom (or, to take a slightly more serious subject, where it is quite common for people to call others inherently evil, because I believe ao3 should continue to host explicit snarry fic), I don't have to agree with them and go over the top and declare myself evil.

I don't think there's a problem with considering "I'm eeevil" to be childish, especially in the context of christian belief. Temptation is a real problem in religion, in the give an inch/take a mile way. That'd be an unhealthy thought pattern, because that devil is real. Even if it's obviously sarcastic, people would be concerned about why someone would say something that drastic.

There are lots of adults who are of the "here I stand" mindset about other people being inherently evil. Like modern fringe homophobes do, like historically people assaulting children for being left handed did. Attempting to argue with them is pointless, because even if you succeed at it, they will still treat you like shit. You will never have worth to them or respect from them. "I'm evil suck it" is a way to get them to piss off and leave you alone, to make them stop attempting to "save" you. Even the most fervent of Mormon proselytizers have a list of houses they do not go to; the point of "suck it" is to get yourself on that list.

Dunno what Andreesson did, but in no way is forcing yourself onto an asshole's Do Not Call list a slippery slope towards other "evil".

There are lots of adults who are of the "here I stand" mindset about other people being inherently evil. Like modern fringe homophobes do, like historically people assaulting children for being left handed did. Attempting to argue with them is pointless, because even if you succeed at it, they will still treat you like shit. You will never have worth to them or respect from them. "I'm evil suck it" is a way to get them to piss off and leave you alone, to make them stop attempting to "save" you. Even the most fervent of Mormon proselytizers have a list of houses they do not go to; the point of "suck it" is to get yourself on that list.

Dunno what Andreesson did, but in no way is forcing yourself onto an asshole's Do Not Call list a slippery slope towards other "evil".

in such a discussion, changing Thing means changing who's good and who's bad. nobody wants to be a bad person, and nobody wants other people to think they're bad people.

people who agree that Thing causes harm will wonder if continuing to do Thing causes harm:

am i hurting people by participating in Thing

am i supporting harm to people if i do this

will everyone think i want to hurt people who don't do Thing

Reading it these days is different from reading it 30 or 60 years ago; I have a computer and internet access and I can immediately just look up whatever the hell the Elves are talking about when they thank some mythic figure; I don't recall how much of this was in the Hobbit, and of course if you read really far back you certainly didn't have the Silmarillion.

One thing I'm noticing this time, because of the preocupations of the time in which I'm reading it, is the immediate focus on Bilbo's pity for Gollum, and for that matter the pity felt by the elves and Gandalf for him as well.

Somewhere buried deep beneath it is one of the central tensions of modern Christian theology, which is that God provided us with wills of our own, and the capacity to act, in some small way, against him, and then immediately became infuriated and filled with rage when we used such things.

I'm not well familiar with the textual history of the Silmarillion, but if you read it it's hard to explain how Illuvitar and Morgoth are different; Morgoth seems merely to want Illuvitar's position.

One wonders why Illuvitar gave the Ainur the capacity to create disharmonious music in the first place.

I feel like there is something in this impulse that perhaps might be somewhat embedded in British culture, but I kind of felt it as a kid and never much liked it, which equates disharmony with wickedness. I think there's a lot of this in Chronicles of Narnia as well.

Actually, as a child I often thought the description of heaven in the Book of Revelation sounded profoundly unpleasant. Constant chanting, constant light, all aimed at satisfying the ego of a being which, quite frankly, should not need such things, no time to be alone and think your own thoughts, it just sounds unpleasant.

I guess Tolkien was a bit divided on the nature of Orcs and Trolls in his private writings? He would sort of have to be, because there is this kind of fundamental tension between the Christian belief in a universal pity and forgiveness, and the Christian belief that disharmony with God is inherently a form of wickedness.

I guess really what I kind of chafe at, and I think this is a constant tension in Lord of The Rings even in the first few chapters, is the sense that one should listen to and admire one's betters, and that to disagree with them, or resent them, or rebel against them is a sign of wickedness rather than, frankly, a fairly natural set of impulses (Particularly in the Children at whom these books are aimed!)

>which equates disharmony with wickedness >and that to disagree with them, or resent them, or rebel against them is a sign of wickedness

orcs and trolls are created "damned", inherently evil and unable to change that. i've heard tolkein said he regretted that bit of lore exactly because it's against the concept of grace.

frodo and gollum are paralleled. gollum kills someone to acquire the ring; frodo volunteers to carry it because no one else will, and attempts to resist it. bilbo carried it and used it for a long time, according to the Hobbit; i've heard tolkein said the discrepancies between Hobbit and LOTR are because bilbo lied. perhaps then, bilbo was not as nice and unaffected by the ring as the Hobbit claimed.

bilbo left the shire in the middle of his joint bday party with frodo. frodo left shortly after, and frodo eventually left for the Undying Lands. maybe the real function of the ring is death. accepting it like gollum did, like bilbo took it, like the other people accepting the sibling rings linked to it, requires that you either leave your world behind or that "who you are" dies and what's left becomes corrupt. like a body without a soul, an empty shell. to return to the place you left makes you a sort of zombie, that "disharmony with god" type of thing, a wraith among the living seeking to bring down everyone else for company in their misery. perhaps bilbo was not affected like frodo because he did not know what the ring was.

if the ring's function is death, maybe it turns hobbits invisible because hobbits can move between spirit forms like wraiths are and the physical world without becoming corrupt. i've heard the undying lands used to be freely accessible, not a one way trip; if so, that would parallel the hobbits' ability to move between worlds. if the ring is death, perhaps morgoth putting all his soul into it was sort of him becoming the lord of death, like a satan figure. it feels like there's a relationship between frodo volunteering to carry it and morgoth creating the ring of his own will; they both freely chose. if morgoth and illuvitar aren't terribly different, perhaps they are different types of life and death: illuvitar and the undying lands as a spiritual form of heaven, wherein you physically no longer exist in the mundane world, vs morgoth's immortality of the body on earth and death of the soul.

maybe the world is called "middle" earth because it's between the lower world of soul death and the higher world of bodily death. the parallel between frodo and gollum has the sense of "there but for the grace of god go i"; maybe the orcs and trolls and gollum all chose to spurn grace, spurn light and eternal spiritual life to instead choose indulgence in physical life. if so, the "indulgence" is likely a play on the christian idea of "the flesh is weak", and that flesh itself is damned and unclean due to original sin. it could also be a form of the christian "three enemies of the soul"/"three categories of sin", which are the world, the flesh, and the devil.

if that's true, then perhaps orcs and trolls are inherently damned because they are created as a body without a soul, like a zombie. maybe orcs, which i've heard are twisted forms of elves, actually are elf bodies raised from the dead via some kind of necromancy. in the movie they're born from the dirt, which kind of feels like a play on the christian idea of "from dust to dust" wherein humans are created from dirt and will return to it in death.

light and dark, illuvitar and morgoth, the undying lands and the depths of greed where the balrog lives, could all be different forms of eternal life. hobbits going invisible could be them giving up their bodies willingly, taking a sort of true/eternal form like the invisible hand of god working in the world. maybe tom bombadil could not be tempted by the ring, by eternal life, because he never existed in bodily form--maybe he's a sort of solid spirit, master of nature. goldberry, his spouse, is called the river-daughter. water is cleansing and life giving, like the religious concept of baptism cleansing sin. cleansing death, i think, since they're called "life giving" and one gets to the undying lands by *sailing*. if that's true, then going to the undying lands is a "clean death" that gives the peace not found in life and allows the body to literally "rest" in peace, never to rise again.

goldberry as the daughter of the *life-giving* river--not the river itself--could be the spirit of life itself. bombadil is thought to be a type of genius loci, which IRL is the spirit of a place; he could be the spirit of the middle earth lands itself.

maybe singing, playing, food, happiness, and taking pleasure in the world (hence all the long nature walks in the books) are the elements of *satisfaction* in life. satisfaction and fulfillment could be the factors of immunity to the "temptation" of becoming a soulless body, seeking in death what was missing in life.

since the ring does not affect bombadil and he plays with it like a toy, the metatextual idea could be that he's telling the hobbits there is still pleasure and life after their task, that the ring ultimately does not affect what truly matters in the world. maybe the ring isn't standard death, but a loss of pleasure in life. that fits with gollum and frodo both forgetting bodily sensations like the taste of strawberries and soft wind.

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6

There was some variation in some forms in different dialects and sometimes even within a single dialect, but this table captures the basic forms. (Note that the vowels here basically have classical values, so hē would be pronounced somewhat like hey, hire would be something like hee-reh, and so on. A macron or acute accent just indicates that a vowel is longer.)

he/hine/him are archeopronouns. grab "him" by the hiney.

the third person for "she" is "hīe", which was also the plurals for every gender.

the current they/them/their evolved from old norse.