Literary Fangirl

Ravenclaw: Rain pounding on the windows. Book pages being turned. The world underwater. A heart beating. The flutter as cards are shuffled. Piano music. The whisper of the wind.

Gryffindor: Fire crackling. A cat purring. The pop as a cork is removed from a bottle. Thunder. High heels tapping against tile floors. Birdsong. The roaring crescendo of applause.

Slytherin: Waves crashing against the sand. Fresh snow crunching underfoot. Whale song. Coins clinking against each other. Ice cubes in a glass. Old music. The silence right after a storm.

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore

Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude

But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work

This is the version we know and love today

BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore

If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found

To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit

The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior

Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies

So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written

Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah

And then all of a sudden the next summer rolls around and the Weasleys were all like, “Lol nope we’re going on a vacation have fun with that convicted murderer who’s looking for you, here’s a photo of us having a good time without you.”

And of course Harry, my darling cinnamon roll of a child, is just sitting there half-starved with Dudley’s hand-me-downs hanging of of him, smiling like, “Oh wow, they had a lot of fun, I bet!”

And it’s like even when they came back, they still didn’t do a single thing to help Harry. Hang on, isn’t this also the summer of the telephone incident? Why would Ron even bother casually calling up Harry like he had to rescue him from his barred up bedroom! He should know that he can’t just call up Vernon and be like, “Hey, how’s it going, is Harry there?” No, Ron! He’s in his barred bedroom! ‘Sorry about that,’ he casually says in his note. His note! Why was his note, ‘Hey, look at how much fun we had’ and not ‘Hey, are you still alive?’

Why didn’t Arthur and Molly make an attempt to get him? Why didn’t Fred, George, and Ron show up to Privet Drive again?

Why were the Weasleys an amazing surrogate family to Harry except for this one time when they severely dropped the ball and nearly got the poor child expelled because he had to use magic to stand up to his abusive relatives?

Did Jo just think we would get tired of two similar summers? Because we wouldn’t have! If it meant that Harry was in a loving, household, I’d be fine if she had just copied and pasted the entire The Burrow chapter. Or hell, if you need something original, send Harry to Egypt with them. Don’t just have the entire Weasley family randomly forget about this boy! It’s so out-of-character!

They would never…

Egwene’s like “these Aiel are definitely gonna kill us so I have to hold saidar the whole time and WATCH THEM”

Aviendha is all “No, Aes Sedai we would never harm you. I would literally let you kill me if you wanted.”

Elayne “Slut for Aviendha” Trakand is all “I know you would! Look how much I know about Aiel! I love Aiel!”

Bain and Chiad are side eyeing Elayne and Egwene the whole time, trying to figure out if they’re fucking or not.

Me:

SPOILERS

For some time now, I wanted to launch a series of mini-articles, discussions and theories about the Wheel of Time. Being currently not busy, let’s start!

As I was falling asleep yesterday, a detail of a Memory of Light kept popping up in my head. As Rand rides away after the Last Battle, he takes out his pipe, cannot channel (not the One Power nor the True Power) but by wishing it lit, the pipe is lit. Now, we know that the ending was written by Robert Jordan and that Sanderson, though knowing why and how, will not tell us.

BUT, if you read carrefully, one can find some clues. I’ll summarize the bits of information I thought useful for this theory :

The Wheel of Time is a cyclical time

The Dark One is sealed at the beginning of time

The Bore happens at the end of the Age of Legends when mankind opens the Dark One’s prison

During the fight with the Dark One, Rand “creates” realities, not by channeling but by using threads of the Pattern

All these infos, swimming in my head as I was falling asleep suddenly all clicked. Rand, during the fight, created the world again, after rejecting several possibilities. Hence the world, which could have stopped, is born again. As such, while it’s a bit of a stretch, a can theorize that Rand is the Creator (or at least an avatar of him) creating the world and sealing the Dark One.

If we take this theory as true, Rand’s pipe becomes much clearer. During the fight with the Dark One, he uses the threads of the Pattern and DOESN’T channel. And, for me at least, at the very end, he kept this ability to bend the Pattern’s threads and light his pipe with it.

So… that’s it, not much of a theory, but the epiphany seemed so important I had to share it.

Rand, to us, fits a lot of what we say about Jesus. Jesus, in Christianity, is the son of God. How far is it from avatar of the Creator to son of God to God himself to the Creator?

Four years after Harry’s left Hogwarts he visits McGonagall’s home to talk her out of retirement, and the door is opened by a woman he doesn’t recognise. Confused, he introduces himself and asks to see McGonagall. The woman recognises the name and invites him in, saying Minerva will be home soon. She then talks a mile a minute, but not about the war - about the stories she’s heard about the golden trio from their head of house. About how Harry stood up to Umbridge, and how clever Hermione was, and how Ron had been able to beat her chess game, and how PROUD Minerva was of them all.

By the time McGonagall does arrive, Harry and her wife are chatting like old friends. Minvera’s wife calls her things like “Darling” and “Pumpkin.” Harry cannot believe his ears.

you gotta digest it.

“oh man im so sorry i sucked some fairy dick once and now i have to keep coming back to do it again– its a long story”

Like, this analysis treats it as a substance problem, i.e. “edible matter from fairyland has properties that, if ingested, physically prevent you from being able to return to the real world.”

But OTOH, a recurring theme throughout fairy stories is that they’re all about…rules and exchanges and agreements with really steep interest rates:

“I’ll do you this favor, but if you don’t guess my name you’ll have to give me your first-born child.”

“You’re gonna be real good at everything but when you’re 16 you’re gonna prick your finger and die.”

“You loaned me $2 for the bus when I looked like a beggar, so now here’s a literal pile of gold and shit.”

Not to mention that in Childe Rowland, one of the central “if you eat food from fairyland you’re stuck there” stories, Rowland manages to retrieve his siblings despite them all presumably having chowed down on fairy food – all it took was beating the Fairy King in a swordfight and threatening to chop his head off.

The takeaway, I think, is that the food thing a matter of implicit exchange: if you get your grub on in fairyland, you’re accepting their hospitality and eating food that they own. This means you owe them, which the fairies can magically leverage to prevent you from leaving.

(You can probably get around this by explicitly agreeing to pay for your meal before you sit down to eat. From what I remember, fairies don’t seem capable of pulling a “Haha, we had an agreement but you’re fucked anyways!” maneuver, so if they agree to let you leave they might even be forced to help you leave.)

Which brings us to the matter at hand: if you blow a fairy you’re doing them a favor! They owe you.

And…they’re a fairy, so if you didn’t agree to terms beforehand they might not repay you in a way that’s ultimately helpful or safe, but it certainly doesn’t seem like they’d be able to, like, pat you on the head and be like “Thanks, you’re really good at this buuuuuuut also you’re stuck here forever now.”

“you wanna come over for the weekend?”

“oh man I’m so sorry i sucked some fairy dick once and now he always comes by over memorial day weekend and helps me out with minor home repairs.”