#toafk

Fingon and Maedhros on the way to Doriath from The Once and Future King by @batsintheshadows

Here in this world he changed his life. Arthur’s promised resurrection pales in the face of his existence. The king may not come again, but his dream will never die, not while there are those who keep the candle burning. As White turned to Malory in the wake of World War II, as Mirrlees imagined a mirror of London in the aftermath of World War I, I've turned to their work, and to the work of Le Guin and Clarke as the United States continues its descent into right-wing authoritarianism. Each novel reckons in a different way with what a “love of country” unbounded by borders and grounded in a recognition of nonhuman agency could look like.

[…]

It would be easy to read each novel as fatalistic and the defeats and tragedies the characters suffer throughout as confirmation of the futility of their cause. Instead, that perpetual incompleteness functions as evidence of a long and living tradition, as a call to action that makes the reader an active participant in the story, an inheritor of its life past the end of the page. Arthur’s call to keep the candle burning, Stephen’s promise that Lost-Hope will be “in time set right,” even Estraven’s heir’s request to Genly to hear “…about the other worlds out among the stars— the other kinds of men, the other lives?" all gesture toward the fact that the work is never finished, the grail never reached. The story goes on, and therein lies the hope. In Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which Ackroyd also quotes in his Albion (another link in that ever-growing chain) a different version of Merlin tells Arthur:

For an ye heard a music, like enow

They are building still, seeing the city is built

To music, therefore never built at all,

And therefore built for ever

A better world is not fated or promised. Although I love the places that have made me, I often fear that Le Guin’s skepticism of even this more localized love of place is correct, as it too can be weaponized and subverted into serving the project of nation-making. But in the intuitional, border-dissolving language of fantasy, in work spanning centuries and oceans, I’ve found again and again as counterpoint to and shield against that nationalist threat a turn towards a living natural world and a collective tradition that stretches forward into the future.

Almost daily now, I read in the news that the U.S. government has bombed another country or provided the weapons to do so; that they’ve gassed people in the streets, at home and abroad, that they’ve kidnapped, beaten, and shot those who would oppose them. And still, professors link arms and form a wall around student protestors as riot cops advance; faith leaders and public servants walk side by side with immigrants into court, placing their bodies in the line of fire; neighbors blow whistles and block streets as hooded ICE agents kidnap children to fill their camps. Although many individuals still languish in ICE detention, others have been freed through the tireless efforts of lawyers, activists, and local officials. In 2025, Australia’s humpback whales, which were hunted to a near extinction population of 150, returned in numbers higher than the pre-whaling population, thanks to a decision to ban commercial whaling of the species in 1963. And this past July, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognized that “ecosystems—such as forests and rivers—have the right to exist, regenerate, and maintain their life cycles.” This landmark decision would not have been possible without the earlier work of Māori rights of nature activists and Indigenous water protectors in Ecuador, among many others. These gains were not given but fought for.

Tennyson’s Merlin, naturally, saw it coming: We have not built the city; we probably never will. And we are building still.”

you might know me as the author of a time travel fic The Once and Future King.

this one lol

if you've read it, tysm! im proud of that work.

it's forever on a wip status because i might have blown my head on writing and plotting for that fic. but i still have the outline for it. if anyone's interested, here it is: