#zerfindung

And I would love to share lol

Alright so here’s some of my headcanons on trans Elves in the three Valinorean Elves group and the way they are seen in their culture:

Trans Vanyar: for the Vanyar, trans Elves are seen as being particularly in tune with their own fea, being able to recognize their own identity despite having been assumed to be of another gender. Within Vanyar society trans Elves tend to be connected with the Feanturi. Culturally, the Vanyar tend to recognize five genders: cis male, cis female, trans male, trans female, and nonbinary people. Being considered close to the Feanturi, many trans male Elves tend to be close to Namo, while many trans female Elves are close to Nienna, while nonbinary Elves are more close to Irmo and his wife Este - who in my headcanon, both have a “dreamlike” appearance and are not particularly tied to gender

Trans Noldor: Noldor don’t have a cultural concept of gender or specific roles for trans people. That being said, they are the kings of microlabeling. These are people who are famous for their love of languages and making words up, you bet they found specific words for all sorts of specific genders and experiences. They see new things to give labels to, they get down to making words, that’s just how they roll. It’s also popular among the Noldor for trans feminine people to incorporate something gold in their jewelry or clothing, as the golden tree Laurelin was considered female, while trans masculine Noldor like to put on something silver to represent Telperion. It was a system that became popular thanks to Fingon, who is genderfluid, and had the habit of wearing a gold clasp on their chest on female days and a silver one on male days, and because of their fame as Prince and general popularity other people imitated them

oh okay so this was for a class where we had to read some of hesiod’s theogony and then some of apollodorus’s library and in theogony like. there’s this huge description of zeus like. with his lightning bolts getting ready to fight the giants and then in library like. he was literally fighting earth? which gave me a lot of thoughts about like. western culture’s relationship with earth and global warming etc etc but like. there are so many demigods/gods who exist because zeus raped their mothers, like if you’re a woman you’re probably terrified of zeus to be honest especially because then hera gets jealous and angry too... this isn’t super coherent, so here are a couple of bits from the essay also:

Zeus grows into a god who can overpower his father. One thing interests me here is that the narrative then focuses almost entirely on Zeus’s strength and power and barely touches on Rhea’s cunning and the strength it must have taken to defy Cronus. There’s a whole paragraph describing Zeus’s powerful actions, describing how he “no longer held back his strength, but… he manifested his full force.” (Hesiod 687) Rhea, on the other hand, is not mentioned once after she steals Zeus from Cronus. After a full page describing Zeus, here a god of destruction, hurling his lightning and setting fire to Chaos itself, this same passage ends with, “An immense din of terrifying strife rose up, and the deed of supremacy was made manifest.” (Hesiod 687) An interesting note here that “supremacy” is also an extreme translation of the word κάρτευς, which is from κάρτος and means “strength” or “vigor.” Not only does Hesiod glorify Zeus’s masculine power, but the translator, who was presumably working thousands of years later, also glorifies it, which gives us a look into their values. 

and

Finally, we come to what is to me the most interesting segment to examine in a modern context: Apollodorus writing about Zeus and the gods fighting against Earth and the titans. What interests me about this is not so much the details of the fight, but the fact that, at the very beginning of Western civilization, we have a narrative of the gods, who in this case are the heroes and the figures that readers are meant to empathize with, fighting against the Earth and other natural processes: “But Zeus forbade the Dawn and the Moon and the Sun to shine,” Apollodorus writes before going on to document Zeus’s battle against the Earth and her creations. This is innocuous enough in a vaccuum-- it’s only a mythical story, of course, and such an old one at that. But the gods are fighting their own grandmother. She is what sustains them, the reason they exist, and they want to destroy her. In the eyes of someone who has grown up in the shadow of this destruction, and taking into consideration the violence that humans have done and been doing to the Earth for years, this battle between the gods and Earth seems much more sinister. This feeling grows when you remember that many indigenous cultures in North America had a much more loving and nurturing relationship with the Earth before Western colonization and farming practices came here and destroyed their years of work.

I thought this was actually a pretty popular take?

small aspects of it definitely crop up wrt specific issues or individual characters’ relationships, which makes it all the more sadness-emoji when the vast majority of ppl don’t actually contemplate the full take and instead slide into yet more ‘hmm yea 3rd age elf ethnic identities are exactly the same as in the 1st age’ and ‘the tra-la-la-lally elves MUST have been silvan elves or smth bc The Noldor(TM) would never do that and definitely would not have changed over the course of 7,000 years in middle earth’, missing the potential of reconciling this sort of exciting evidence of progression

@zerfindung replied to your post “�� Probably my least favorite thing about Silm Discourse is the fact...”

isn't that kind of galadriel's arc? though she didn't do much murder in the first age but I like the headcanon

Not a written thing, but we did do a UBS devoted to him and Brienne, following us rereading both of their chapters. They parallel each other like woah.