The Void Herself

Nick Barlow, Clusterfuck/Keep It Together, 2022

galadriel's been around since the beginning, like, for pretty much all of middle-earth's history you understand, she has Seen it all and despite what you may have been led to believe is at all times this close to snapping. also the reason lothlorien is so chill is she has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time

i can't emphasize enough how much of a post-apocalyptic horror story thranduil lives in. homeland destroyed and half his people massacred. has fucken sauron in his backyard and the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light puttering about on his lawn. a dragon lives next door. does NOT have a magic ring and is therefore obliged to rule over his murderforest in normal time

just so we're all on the same page here, legolas' day job before joining the fellowship was to hunt the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light and it's not like, a big deal or anything. he just has to do it. he's used to it.

…they’re both so good. But I do actually have a favourite scenario:

I’m such an angry feminist so I do on principle love configurations of “woman keeps her name” for a lot of couples. Beyond that, there is something about Kaz taking “Ghafa” in any way he can—(it’s a historical setting, they’re an international couple, we don’t have good evidence of Suli custom? I do not know how taking her name might go legally or socially in either of their countries). This especially works in a world where they either move to join her family in Ravka for some reason—I do not think this makes sense for either of them—or they have her empty nester parents move to Kerch—which does potentially make a lot of sense: there’s canonically a large Suli diaspora in Ketterdam and I imagine they’d be as clingy as they can manage after their miraculous reunification with Inej. “Ghafa” nominally ties Kaz to other living family members for the first time in…so many years. There’s a new network for him. Inej’s world doesn’t change, it just finally gets to fold him in. So, other than maybe being more impractical for them, I do still like this.

However. There’s something I’m always leaning towards in Inej taking “Rietveld”—(especially if they stick with Kerch as homebase, which is, unfortunately, the only thing that makes sense to me, even independently for Inej)—because that’s kind of like the most sentimental victory lap for her; He’s more than taken down his “armour” for Inej. He trusts her with a part of his identity that he buried forever ago because he couldn’t even handle it himself. And now she gets to assert she wants to take it to celebrate how far he’s come for her and everything he’s done for her and himself. She’s sort of giving him something—full support, her own bit of sacrifice, her own trust—in return for all the trust and gifts he’s given her, like “you made it, it’s safe now. You have a family: you have me.”

Tangent: I do think gift giving is central to Kanej and that that is significant. Gifts stand in opposition to transaction, and I think the literal scarring (Inej) and cultural scarring (Kaz) from the everything-and-everyone-is-transactional view obviously makes that relevant. Gift giving is also what I mean by sacrifice; when you don’t have it all, when you’re stuck in survival-mode, it doesn’t make any sense in a transactional/competitive worldview to give without receiving. It is radical and sacrificial to care to give. And, last, of course, there is the crow of it all. Crows presenting shiny objects as gifts and whatnot. So it’s part of the symbolic identity that ties them together to.

"Her mind refused to accept what it was seeing, because it could not be Kaine Ferron. His hair had been dark, now it was colourless. While the pallor of his skin didn't come from age, he looked as if he'd been bleached in moonlight."