Sun without Shadow

Mary Wollstonecraft, I am so sorry. that someone looked at your life in the 19th century, and decided that you didn't "value love". These Bridgerton show-runners didn't do any research about your life, and its clear your name only came up bc they did a cursory search on google about. "most well known feminist in regency England"

Even though Wollstonecraft existed in the most stringent gender norms, she had multiple passionate & public love affairs, one when it ended, she were so heartbroken she attempted suicide.

Wollstonecraft had sexual relations outside of marriage (when lead to MULTIPLE babies conceived out of wedlock) in an era that shunned that heavily. Both she and the philosopher Goodwin weren't fond of marriage as an institution but wed to make their child legitimate.

You wrote publicly about the heart's desires, of the pains of heartbreak, of passion and love. Your marriage to Goodwin was seen as extraordinary by your contemporaries, enviable in that you espoused and LIVED through a true marriage of equals, of a husband who saw your feminist ideals and progressiveness as one to uplift.

He wrote a memoir entailing her intellectualism and defending her unconventional lifestyle : “There are no circumstances of her life, that, in the judgment of honour and reason, could brand her with disgrace.” he writes. “Never did there exist a human being, that needed, with less fear, expose all their actions, and call upon the universe to judge them.”

Because Bridgerton show-runners are so misogynistic, are so violently antifeminist and conservative, they only viewed Wollstonecraft as a warning for others. It's clear Eloise is meant to be the taming of the shrew archetype. They have stripped her of her spirited desire to make the world a better place. Her fiery cries about the injustices women face.

at the time of writing, this post has been reblogged 3,133 times!

of those reblogs, approximately 596 of them were tagged!

of those reblogs with tags, 123 of them pertained to helly r. in severance!

you'd think that klingon horror movies are gorefests, but it's actually quite the opposite: gore is honorable, and nothing is scarier than dishonor. they often show a person whose life falls apart despite their own valiance and virtues: like an earth tragedy but with someone who clearly doesn't deserve it. at the end, there's often an operatic number where the protagonist exclaims that there's nothing they could have done to prevent their abysmal fate.

poem by Mikko Harvey

If I tell you this is a horror dance number it still won't prepare you. That last move was so terrifying even the judge was like "Let go! Let go!" If you told me they're actually possessed I'd believe you.

The music is a remix of the song Mere Dholna from the Bollywood movie Bhool Bhulaiyya, a remake of the classic Malayalam horror-comedy Manichitrathazhu. It's about a young bride that seemingly becomes possessed of Manjulika, a dancer of the ancient royal court whose tragic death has turned her into a vengeful spirit, one who evokes the wrath of the goddess Durga Kali. In the iconic scene that is repeated across remakes, the groom and his family discover his bride dancing in the dead of night in a manic, disassociative fugue, wearing a moth-eaten dancer's costume and a face smeared in kohl, ash and vermilion. She's hallucinating that she's Manjulika dancing carefree for the court with her lover. The upbeat music is deliberately incongruous with the pathos and creepiness of the scene in reality, especially as it crescendos in the bride's head to the moment when the king decapitates Manjulika's beloved in a fit of jealous rage.

This specific number is by the all-male troupe B Unique, performed for the Indian reality talent contest Hunabaarz. It's a modern fusion based on Bharatnatyam that turns up the creep factor by 200% and is basically a showcase of contortionism and synchronicity. One of the most perfectly choreographed and executed dances I have ever seen. Truly incredible!

And you know what?  The Unicorn doesn’t give two fucks about her virginity, about her supposed loss of innocence and purity.  She’s not repelled by Molly being older, being experienced, being a full human person.  None of that has ever mattered to unicorns, only to the people telling stories about them.  Not only does she step in to physically comfort her here, but before long this bandit’s wife becomes her friend, closer to her in most ways than Schmendrick.

[Lír said,]  "I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and likethem it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts […] the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. […] Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”

The Lady Amalthea did not answer him. Schmendrick asked, “Why not? Who says so?”

“Heroes,“ Prince Lír replied sadly. “Heroes know about order, about happy endings – heroes know that some things are better than others. Carpenters know grains and shingles, and straight lines.”

Molly spent a long time thinking her role in life was the Hero’s Lady. She shacked up with Captain Cully because she thought he was a hero and that was her role, but over time as she came to understand how un-heroic he was, she became bitter and derisive, pointing out what the true order of things was. Like, let’s go back to her first scene where Cully is explaining to Schmendrick how he and his men all hate King Haggard, and one day Haggard will have to pay “such a reckoning”:

A score of shaggy shadows hissed assent, but Molly Grue’s laughter fell like hail, rattling and stinging. “Mayhap he will,” she mocked, “but it won’t be to such chattering cravens he’ll pay it. His castle rots and totters more each day, and his men are too old to stand up in armor, but he’ll rule forever, for all Captain Cully dares.” Schmendrick raised an eyebrow, and Cully flushed radish-red. “You must understand,” he mumbled. “King Haggard has this Bull –” “Ah, the Red Bull, the Red Bull!” Molly hooted. “I tell you what, Cully, after all these years in the wood with you I’ve come to think the Bull’s nought but the pet name you give your cowardice.If I hear that fable once more, I’ll go and down old Haggard myself, and know you for a –” “Enough!” Cully roared. “Not before strangers!” He tugged at his sword and Molly opened her arms to it, still laughing. 

And within a day Molly Grue has met the Unicorn, set out on a quest with her (and doesn’t bat an eyelash when she learns they’re going directly to Haggard’s castle), and becomes a pivotal player in destroying King Haggard and the Red Bull.

Molly understands “the order of things” when Schmendrick doesn’t. When the Red Bull is about to beat the Unicorn, Schmendrick’s all, “Welp, shit happens, so long,” and it’s Molly who yells and screams at him that this must not happen, how he might have been an inadequate charlatan all his life before this, but this is the moment when he HAS to draw deep on his true power and save her. So he does. And when he does, Molly understands how absolutely terrible becoming human is for the Unicorn, which Schmendrick doesn’t–even though he heard the Unicorn say that Nikos would have done better to let a unicorn die than make it into a man, and she didn’t.

Molly’s work in Haggard’s castle is fairy-tale like in nature, somewhere between Cinderella (”My father sets you to the weariest work there is to do, and still you sing”) and the labours of Hercules or the Biblical Israelites. According to the novel, “Molly Grue cooked and laundered, scrubbed stone, mended armor and sharpened swords; she chopped wood, milled flour, groomed horses and cleaned their stalls, melted down stolen gold and silver for the king’s coffers, and made bricks without straw.”

In reward for her work, several unprecedented things happen. Lír comments that “There has never been singing in this castle, or cats, or the smell of good cooking,” but now that Molly Grue has come, all these things have come to pass. And in the end, this work is pivotal–if Molly weren’t there, the cat wouldn’t have come; and without the cat, they never would have known how to find the Red Bull.

The point of fact is, Molly is able to do what she does for the Unicorn because she’s older, she’s more experienced, she’s weathered hardship and seen dreams broken, and knows what to hold on to and what to give up on. She knows that love is a very fine thing, but unicorns are something else.

the ones that life crushed out of her until she had to give up on them and accept that they weren’t real and had never been.

Having to give up your bright dreams because life will never let you have them is hard to do - and its a bitter feeling once you finally have.  It’s not a feeling I’d wish on anyone.

Molly’s given up on her dreams -

and then one day, out of nowhere, her dreams show up.

And its too late.  She’s already given them up.  It’s not fair for them to show up now, when its far too late, when she’s already lived with what giving them up has made her, what she’s made herself to survive having to give them up.  She’s furious at her dreams for being too late to matter.

and it breaks her heart into tears.

and then, after, its ‘you came….’

and the dreams lead her out of the woods, or she leads her dreams out of the woods, but its alright.  Because -

you came.

The movies emphasize the magical control that the evil powers exercise over Theoden, but in the books, it's more obviously a depiction of bad kingship, in the British medieval sense. Theoden takes bad advice; he neglects his family; he fails to reward his knights; and he leaves his people vulnerable to attack. He also does not honor his kingdom's promises to help nearby kingdoms, as we can tell from Boromir's account of what Gondor has been going through.

Gandalf doesn't just cast out the curse and magically fix everything. He encourages Theoden to free himself from his bad advisor, but Theoden has to take all the subsequent steps. And those choices are not easy; after so much neglect, his knights are scattered, and his only option for defending his people is to gather them at Helm's Deep. The siege does not go well. His people are afraid and despairing. But nevertheless, he holds firm and charges out to meet the enemy -- and Gandalf literally meets him halfway, bringing with him the lost knights, whom Theoden welcomes and rewards after the battle.

Theoden could have just gone home after that. But when Gondor calls for aid, Theoden proves his worth by honoring his promises. He keeps his oaths not only to his people but to his allies.

And the climax of his redemption in the book is not his death, but his leadership. The ride of the Rohirrim against Sauron's armies is described in lavish detail, with an uncharacteristically heated pace: Theoden leads the entire line of Rohan, his banner streaming behind him in the wind as they race toward their foe. And that's the end of the chapter.

I love Theoden's arc so much, and especially that moment so much, because the message is not that he has to win battles or seek power. He just has to keep fighting. Theoden's greatest enemy isn't really Sauron: it's despair. And over the course of the book, he keeps choosing hope and action over despair and hesitation, until finally he can lead his people with courage.

Yes, Theoden’s greatest enemy is despair! Everyone’s greatest enemy is despair. It’s the biggest fucking theme of the series IMO and it makes me crazy how often it gets overlooked.

lord of the rings is a story written by a man whose experience of war was crouching in the bottom of a trench. People like to make a lot of hay about the charge of the light brigade and it’s similarity to the ride of the rohirrim, but no. Tolkien’s experience of war was getting fucking trench fever, not watching cavalry charges. Tolkien’s experience of war was listening to the shells fall around him, knowing that death could come at any moment. He experienced war in a way where the soldiers on the other side of the line were a faceless threat, and the closest and most present enemy was his own fear.

this is the hill I will die on. This is why I hate it when people talk about LotR as a morally cowardly story about fighting mindless orcs that exist to be cannon fodder. No. Lord of the Rings is about seeing the dark coming on the horizon, and fighting yourself. Fighting the fear and despair that rise up inside you. Struggling with your own terror and powerlessness, knowing that you are small, and nothing you do will matter in the face of this massive conflict—  you’re just here, one more meaningless soul to feed into the machine guns. Lord of the Rings is about taking a deep breath, and bracing yourself, and deciding that if nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it. The ring can’t possibly be destroyed— we choose to form a fellowship anyway. Helms deep will surely fall by morning— we still choose to fight. The quest can’t possibly succeed— and yet we choose to march into the teeth of mordor to distract the enemy. It’s not hope, exactly? But’s it’s not not hope.

I did at one point have twenty pages written about this. Tolkien was a deeply christian man— he believed in eucatastrophe. Salvation. A better world to come, after suffering, if you bore your suffering well. But he was also a world-class Beowulf scholar with a kinda viking-warrior-type view of the world. And do you know what the vikings believed? (Pls don’t anybody @ me for saying viking, I know it’s a verb and not a culture). The vikings believed that the time of your death was preordained, and that all you had control over was how you met it.

And that is some seriously Rohirric shit!! Like, we’re all mortals doomed to die, Ragnarok is coming, and this whole world is an inevitable grind down into oblivion… but if we’re fighting a long defeat, all the more reason to fight it gloriously!! That’s epic. Eomer approves the hell out of that message.

I’m gonna be a real nerd now, and quote from a poem called the Battle of Maldon.

“Courage shall grow keener, clearer our will,

More valiant our spirits, as our strength grows less.

Here lies our good lord, all leveled in dust

The man all marred. True kinsman will mourn

Who thinks to wend off from battle play now?

Though whitened by winters I will not away,

But lodge by my liege lord that favorite of men;

By my dear one and ring giver intend I to lie.”

That’s a translation from an Old English poem that’s literally a thousand years old, but it always gets me how much it sounds like something Tolkien would write. Theoden and Eowyn are practically leaping out of that poem: We’re all going to die, I choose to meet my end fiercely. We’re all going to die, so I want to die beside my king.

It’s an acceptance of death, and even of failure, but not of defeat. Because— to get back to what I was talking about earlier— Lord of the Rings isn’t actually a story about battlefields. It’s a story about being at war with your own heart. Despair or faith? Hope or defeat? Tolkien wants you to know that even if your city is overrun by orcs, or you’re killed in a meaningless push for another 50 feet of french mud, you can still hold on to your courage with both hands and not cede up your soul to despair-- and that’s the battle Tolkien thinks is really worth writing about.

It’s a battle that every major character in the story fights. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Theoden, Denethor, Merry, Pippin, Boromir, Galadriel, Eowyn, Faramir, Eomer, Saruman, Gollum, Aragorn. Some of them hold onto hope through everything. Some of them break utterly. Some of them are defeated, and then with help find their footing again, and make a redeeming last stand.  

But the point that Tolkien hammers home again and again is: Death and failure are natural parts of life, and should be accepted. Despair shouldn’t be.

Tolkien says: hope is hard, actually. Fuck that Game of Thrones grimdark bullshit. Hope is hard fucking work. And even if you don’t have hope? Fight like you do. Because the world needs people working to make it better. Do the best you can with what you have, and whether you can see the mark you’re making on the world or not, the simple fact that you’re trying means the world is a better place.

Theoden was a king and a knight. But he battled his despair and won. I’m a civilian and a teacher. I can do the same. I believe with all my heart therefore, that teaching literature and history are crucial for the health of humanity. Courage can be found in fiction and in reality. And I like writing about it as well as reading it.

The crisis facing us all right now is, at bottom, meaningless lives. Tumblr is full of laments over the ways industrialization and globalization have made people nothing but interchangeable cogs. That corporations treat employees as expendable resources. That community has broken down, leaving everyone isolated and relationships fractured. And these points are all valid.

Outraged, angry people of all stripes want to fix everything that is wrong in society and rage at those they believe are standing in the way of their efforts. And I completely understand that desire to build utopia. The world is deeply broken and it hurts to see that brokenness. Worse, to have to live in it.

So this is another way that reading literature is so valuable. Because Tolkien reminds us that the world has always been broken. That when one evil is defeated, another will rise in its place (implied in the way Tolkien takes such care (in the chronology in the LOTR appendix) to weave his story into the flow of later history, a history that leads directly to the evils of early and mid-twentieth century). We cannot build a perfect world. And if we focus on that fact, we will despair.

But Tolkien comes alongside us and says, "If nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it."

To see intractable problems and imperfect solutions and say, "I know that even if everyone worked together in exactly the same way, we could not create a truly just and whole society, but I will do my small part to stand against the tide of darkness, even within myself, and to build, even a little bit," is to seize meaning for our lives, even when all that surrounds us presses us toward nihilism and despair.

After all, if you want to buy absolutely nothing - if you want to create a way to live separate from society - you cannot do it like Thoreau; even Thoreau wasn’t doing it like Thoreau; you have to create an separate society, a self-sufficient community, and live in that.

And interestingly Seymour put his finger on “why communes fail.”

In his experience, which was deep and broad, experiments in self-sufficient communities/communes virtually always failed. And not because the idealistic fools weren’t capable of growing crops, or chopping wood, or whatever. It isn’t even the founders were stupid or ignorant or inexperienced, or because self-sufficiency only attracts dramatic personalities. No, the communities he observed consistently failed because they had no ability to resolve conflict. Every group of people will have to come to a tricky decision, resolve a sticky situation, have an awkward conversation or even just get along with unideal situations. They didn’t fall apart because a sheep fell in a ditch; anyone can get a sheep out of a ditch; they fell apart over the arguments about ideology, ditches, sheep and blame. It was always some issue of conflict or communication that broke these well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-educated people apart.

Step back from that and think: people frequently try to live outside capitalism even in this modern world, people frequently try to live in the most environmentally-friendly way, people frequently try to envision an alternative to a hostile state, even in this world where it is difficult or impossible to do so. For every utopia you might picture, people (being people) will have already made a decent attempt at building and living it, in the hope of showing it or even giving it to you. And those utopias aren’t here at the moment for you to have, because it’s terrifically difficult to make communities out of nothing. And that’s largely because it’s very hard to have communication skills about anything at all, let alone something that gets you mad.

All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.

They will not wake up, the morning of the revolution, and suddenly become different people. Your choices will be to line them all up against a wall and shoot them . . . .or figure out how to live with them in your community. (And multiple revolutions in the past hundred years have tried that whole "line them up and shoot them" thing, tried it REAL HARD, and it didn't work out great for them either.)

The more de-industrial, de-urbanized, de-impersonal, whatever, your ideal society is? The more it will involve having to work, and work well, and work effectively and without interpersonal violence (physical or social) against people who irritate the fuck out of you.

And no, we never really had any Neat Trick to make that easier in the past. What we most often had was survival pressure so intense that the threat of being ostracized (or having the group turn on you) was enough to force resolutions that nobody was really happy with, or that left an unspoken wound to fester for generations, or to offer up a scapegoat to vent the community's violence on and then pretend to move on, or . . . .

Etc.

 give him two sands

like sandses and handses