#literary analysis

However, while capturing the personhood of queer people; Danmei also captures the queerness of people because none of these stories would work if the characters weren’t gay/queer

Wei Wuxian’s absolute buffoonery of misunderstanding Lan Zhan’s feelings in a decade long telephone game in which neither of them open their damn mouth would never work in a non-queer story because between a man and a woman romance would be the natural assumption of everyone around them and therefore wouldn’t leave space for confusion. The misunderstanding of their romance is so closely tied to the plot succession that the plot would be… non existent without it

In TGCF Xie Lian and Hua Cheng’s absolute aspirational love is literally in the backseat and front seat of the story. Not too different from a classic hero’s journey but instead of the hero being one person, it’s two people. They are so intertwined with eo that they become one character and witness a lot of the story together. Witness being a very interesting word choice. Their queerness doesn’t drive the story but replacing one of them with a woman would dampen the effect— it’d remove the uncertainty, the confusion from everyone around them, the genuine slow burn of the romance. There’s also this idea of Hua Cheng falling in love with Xie Lian so far separated from concepts such as gender or whatever which wouldn’t have been hammered home in a straight romance where those conversations aren’t always had between the audience and the story

And Erha.. well obviously. Half of Chu Wanning’s “this is so inappropriate” spiral wouldn’t exist if he was a woman. And, the idea of Mo Ran being a “cut sleeve” builds up the under current of his character being so far dismissed by society because he’s seen as immoral. Which just wouldn’t serve to the same effect if he was into exclusively women because so was every other character.

had to share this brilliant discussion - source: X

At the most important moment in modern fantasy, the hero fails. Not quietly. Not ambiguously. He stands at the edge of the world, feels the full weight of evil loosen its grip, and chooses it anyway.

At the edge of Mount Doom, with the fate of the world balanced on a single will, Frodo Baggins does not throw the Ring into the fire. He claims it. The moment every heroic narrative has trained us to expect as triumph becomes instead a confession of failure. Tolkien does not flinch. He lets the hero break.

And yet the world is saved.

This is not a plot twist. It is a moral thesis. The destruction of the Ring happens not because Frodo earns victory, but because mercy extended long before the ending finally comes due. The quest resolves because of a chain reaction of restraint. The decisive force is not discipline, not optimization, not grit. It is pity.

This is where Tolkien quietly dismantles the moral machinery of hustle culture decades before we had language for it. We live inside a story that teaches us effort converts cleanly into outcome. That endurance guarantees reward. That suffering is a down payment on success. Tolkien offers a colder and far more honest truth. Sometimes you do everything right and still cannot finish the job.

Scholars have long noted that Frodo’s failure is not a betrayal of his character but the completion of it. The Ring is not a fair test of willpower. As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote plainly in his letters, the will is not infinite. Power erodes agency. The closer one comes to absolute domination, the less freedom remains. Frodo is not weak at the Crack of Doom. He is human at the end of an inhuman burden.

By the time he reaches the Fire, Frodo has endured starvation, sleep deprivation, repeated physical injury, and sustained psychological terror. Modern neuroscience would describe this as cumulative trauma. Tolkien simply wrote it as reality. Expecting one last burst of perfect moral clarity from a nervous system already wrecked by suffering is not heroism. It is wishful thinking disguised as virtue.

The quest only succeeds because of Gollum. And even that rescue is not redemption in the sentimental sense. Gollum does not transform into goodness. He falls into the fire because of what he already is. The deeper truth is that Gollum is alive at all only because he was spared when mercy looked foolish. First by Bilbo. Then by Gandalf. Then most dangerously by Frodo himself.

The Ring is destroyed not because Frodo conquers it, but because Frodo once chose not to destroy someone else.

This is a devastating inversion of the moral economy most of us were raised to believe in. We are taught to look for visible proof that goodness works. Tolkien gives us an older logic. Moral victories are often retroactive. The most transformative decisions rarely announce themselves as such. They look inefficient. They look naive. They often look like failure.

In the medieval moral tradition that shaped Tolkien, mercy was not sentimental. It was strategic in a way power could never be. Mercy refused to close the future. It kept outcomes unresolved. It preserved the possibility that evil might one day undo itself. Tolkien does not sanctify Gollum. He allows evil to collapse under its own gravity because mercy refuses to force a premature ending.

This alone would be enough to unsettle the reader. But Tolkien goes further. He denies us the fantasy that salvation heals everything.

After the Ring is destroyed, Tolkien insists on the Scouring of the Shire. Home is violated. The saved world is not the same world. The victory does not restore innocence. Frodo returns permanently wounded. He cannot sleep without pain. He cannot fully enter the peace he helped secure.

The modern myth is that collapse will be redeemed by recognition. Tolkien refuses that lie.

We want the hero to stand at the end and receive the moral reward. Tolkien lets his hero sit down and admit he is finished. Frodo does not recover because recovery would falsify the cost.

This is why The Lord of the Rings remains psychologically modern beneath its ancient scaffolding. The story already understands what burnout culture would take another century to articulate. Some burdens cannot be survived without damage. Some systems demand more than one conscience can sustain. Sometimes the bravest outcome is not conquest but survival long enough to make mercy matter.

We live in an age that worships visible dominance. We measure virtue through performance. We reward leaders who claim they can bend chaos through sheer will. Tolkien issues a quiet warning instead. When power becomes the proof of goodness, goodness collapses.

Frodo fails because no one was ever meant to pass that final test.

The world is not saved by the flawless execution of the righteous. It is saved by the accumulated weight of restraint. By choices made without assurance of payoff. By mercy that looked wasted at the time. By patience that looked irrational. By hands that refused the easy kill and kept the future open instead.

The modern fantasy is not Middle-earth. The modern fantasy is that effort always guarantees justice.

Tolkien tells a harder truth. Sometimes the most important moral decisions you will ever make will feel powerless when you make them. Sometimes the victory will not belong to your endurance at all. It will belong to mercy that looked like weakness years earlier.

Frodo does not win.

Mercy does.

For BOTW, the main question you ask from the start is "Who am I?" and also "What happened to Hyrule?" You learn the answers to these questions over time as you journey across the land and remember things about your past. The answer to "who am I" is "I am the chosen hero," and the answer to "what happened" is "We failed to save everyone." When you learn that, the goal changes from "go and do the quests because the old lady said to" to "Do what you couldn't do back then and save everyone."

In TOTK, the question is "Where the heck is Zelda?" and it's not your question, it's everyone else's. All the NPCs want to know where she is and you're just kind of standing there while everyone discusses it. And then the game throws you an early game side quest where they tell you exactly what happened to Zelda, and then you just have to putter around for 99 years and watch everyone run blindly towards Fake Zelda while you just follow them without saying anything until the final hour.

And then they force you to listen to the exact same spiel about the Imprisoning War, 4 separate times, without changing a single word. Whereas in BOTW, you get to learn about the Champions and who they were and their relationship to you, and explain the Calamity to you in one cutscene.

Plus, they don't expand on anything from BOTW in TOTK. Link and Zelda are just living perfectly fine in society despite having basically been dead for a century. And instead of expanding on the Sheika mythos, they just try and pretend they never existed and put the Zonai in their place as the Ancient Precursor Race with all the Ancient Technology That's Been Lost To Time.

Before his son died, Iroh was a pretty bad dude. He had redeeming qualities, like sparing the last dragons and loving his family. But he was still a general leading a campaign of conquest.

His redemption started after his son died. He clearly had a lot of self reflection as well as a spiritual awakening in the following years.

But he was still conflicted, trying to remain loyal to his nation and family while also practicing the principles he learned from his travels. But those things were incompatible.

Even after he had to actively fight against the Fire Nation when Zhao threatened the moon spirit, he still thought he could return to living in the Fire Nation.

It's only after Azula tried to imprison him and Zuko and forced them on the run that he gave up on the idea.

I think it's sometime around their time staying in Ba Sing Se that he finally decided to oppose the Fire Nation. At the price of his own freedom, eventually.

Like, the power-fantasy is the temptation the Ring uses against people It tempts Boromir with becoming the "one true king" that could save his people with fantastic power. It tempts Sam with being the savior of Middle Earth and turning the ruin that is Mordor into a great garden. It tempts Gandalf and Galadriel with being the messianic figure of legend who brings salvation to Middle Earth and great glory to herself.

The things the Ring tempts people with are becoming the typical protagonists of fantasy stories that we expect to see. and over and over we see that accepting that role, that fantasy of being the benevolent all-powerful hero, is a bad thing. LotR is about how power, even power wielded with benevolent intent, is corrupting.

And its so fascinating how so much of modern fantasy buys into the very fantasy LotR denies. Most modern fantasy is about being that Heroic power-fantasy. About good amassing power to rival evil. But LotR dares not to. It dares to be honest that there is no world where anyone amasses that power and remains good.

Like, if you think about it, the idea of "this marriage is a bonkers idea that will make everyone I know upset but I don't care at all because I love you so much and cannot live without you and fuck everything else" is incredibly romantic and flattering. Who doesn't want to be wanted that badly? You can actually understand why Darcy thinks it's a good idea to say this out loud.

But the great thing about this sentiment is that it's simultaneously incredibly insulting. Who wants to hear that getting married to them would be bonkers? It makes you feel less-than, a feeling which the high and mighty Darcy has zero experience with and doubtless no conception of. It would be impossible to put himself into Elizabeth's shoes in this situation. Which again, makes it believable that he would say such stupid stuff to her in this proposal, even though he's an intelligent guy.

I'm just in awe of Jane Austen at creating a proposal that is simultaneously deliciously romantic and monumentally idiotic and horrible at the same time. It's pretty much the worst possible way to propose, a total train wreck, and yet you can buy Darcy believing it to be a smart way to propose. I love it.