yupyup

I think probably I should stop for now but I might come back and pester you with more ideas later, if that's okay with you

Thank you so much for the excellent prompts! I really, really want to write the Maedhros-in-Troy one, but as MegMarch has been firmly resistant to listening to Epic, I am not sure if it would be a good gift for her. I may have to write it anyway, though . . .

Several of the other prompts are also tugging at me - I will definitely add them to the list!

(Zeus's dialogue taken from Epic: The Musical. Warnings for references to fall-of-Troy typical violence.)

. . .

Between the thunder and the way the looming clouds kept forming in the shape of eagles, Maedhros was pretty sure this ‘Zeus’ was a maia of Manwe. It was one of the only things he was sure of at the moment; he had gone from the dark, tangled woods of Doriath to a room overlooking a burning city in the blink of an eye. For a single moment, the Music of the world had held steady at least, felt almost as it should be - and then it had crashed on into wholly unfamiliar strains.

It could just be some glamour called up by the Enemy, of course. An illusion, meant to trick him into killing his own men. When the maia had appeared and urged him to turn from the window and face his foe, telling him he must not hesitate to kill an enemy unlike any he had faced before, he had been almost sure of it. He would be led to something that looked foul, and in truth it would be one of his few remaining brothers, and the maia would try to force them to fight. He had been convinced of it.

Looking down at the infant in the crib, he was far less sure of it now. If this was an illusion hiding one of his brothers, meant to provoke him into attacking, it seemed an . . . odd choice. To say the least.

The thunder crackled pointedly.

“This is a baby,” he said flatly.

“This is the son of Troy’s very own Prince Hector,” Zeus countered.

This meant nothing to him. Less than nothing.

Even if it hadn’t, he struggled to think of anyone the maia could have said the child was the son of that would have made the prospect of more blood on his hands even vaguely tempting.

. . . This is the son of Angband’s very own king Morgoth? Maybe? Possibly?

Even that would not change the fact that this looked very much like a normal baby. Small. Vulnerable. Face twitching with displeasure as he started to wake from the screams pouring in from the city.

He looked a little like Caranthir had as a child. Caranthir, who -

“A baby,” he repeated sharply.

“Know that he will grow from a boy to an avenger.”

Maedhros was not aware of anything he had done to anyone related to a Troy or a Prince Hector. If he had, however - well, he had been chasing after Dior’s sons to try and save them. He hadn’t been under any illusions about what their thoughts would be on him once they were old enough to draw swords.

(How far away were they now? How cold? Was this all just a trap to slow him down?)

“One fueled by rage as you’re consumed by age. If you don’t end him now, you’ll have no one left to save.”

He had pitifully little left to save already. However:

“I’m an elf,” he reminded the maia. “My age is the last thing I’m concerned with.”

For just a moment, the maia, bewilderingly, looked confused. This didn’t stop him from pressing onward. “He will burn your house and throne,” the maia insisted.

“I don’t have those anymore - “

“This is the will of the gods,” the maia intoned.

That hadn’t worked on him even when the advice he was being given was a lot more sensible than this.

“The blood on your hands is something you won’t lose.”

True, but -

“All you can choose is whose.”

Maedhros looked what he was now very sure was a fallen maia of Manwe. He looked at the baby. 

He unsheathed his sword.

“Truth,” he agreed, and promptly stabbed Zeus in the eye.

The maia howled.

Maedhros used his false hand to scoop up the baby as best he could and made a run for it.

. . .

Outside the windows in the corridor he had run into, the city was burning. The fires might not last long; a storm was brewing fast and fierce above.

Maedhros just wanted to get out. He didn’t know who was fighting or why; he couldn’t be sure what was real and what was illusion. If any of these men were his, they were almost certainly the invaders, but he couldn’t be sure. Best to just make a sling out of the baby’s blanket to secure him and get out. Best to keep moving. Best to stay out of things. Best -

Best to examine what, exactly, that soldier thought he was doing, chasing a toddler with a drawn sword.

And what that soldier thought he was doing, ripping an infant out of what must be the child’s sister’s arms and trying to throw the child out a window.

And, for that matter, why that soldier had decided the most critical opponent in reach was an unarmed woman and why he had decided to begin this attack by grabbing at her belt. Or why that one was dragging a sobbing girl down the street by her hair -

Most of these investigations were carried out via his sword. One long range examination required the assistance of a spear borrowed from a previous investigation.

(All of these soldiers were the ones attacking the city. He knew all too well what it was to be on both sides of these battles, but if this truly was an illusion - if his people were anywhere here - )

(Then they weren’t the ones defending the city.)

(But if there was any truth to this illusion - if this was not an illusion -)

(This was orc work. And however monstrous he had become, he would not stand for it.)

(He would not let himself live to become a man monstrous enough to stand for it.)

. . .

(He understood this.)

(He did not quite understand how this led to him standing once more on a stormy shore, staring at a ship he intended to steal, with a crowd of mostly women and children behind him.)

My girl Cassandra deserved a better fate. Let her be one of the Ithacan sisters.

SIR YESSIRRRRRR!!!!

He would have a rivalery with lawyer Jin Guangyao, who he sees as a manipulative piece of shit that gets horrible people out of jail.

He would have a rivalery with lawyer Jin Guangyao, who he sees as a manipulative piece of shit that gets horrible people out of jail.

Jason, on a medical table for the twelfth experiment that day: how do we even know it was me, though?

Ra's: what do you mean?

Jason, shrugging: like- maybe i was just in a magic coffin. maybe it had nothing to do with me, maybe it was my environment. have you ever read the book 'pet cemetery'?

Ra's:

Ra's: *squints deeply*

Ra's: no. if it was the graveyard then you wouldn't be the only person that came back to life. you're being ridiculous.

Jason: i dunno. maybe it was just that one specific patch of grass.

Ra's:

Ra's: hm.

Bruce finds out Jason came back to life way earlier than planned because halfway through patrol he gets an alert of a disturbance at Gotham Cemetery and when he and Tim get there it's to see Jason and Ra's in the dark with headlamps on next to Jason's now dug-up grave, dirt everywhere as Jason holds a shovel and Ra's holds the corpse of a dead chicken over the hole, ready to lower it, surrounded by league assassins either standing guard or holding notebooks and pens for if something actually happens and Ra's wants to take notes.

Also the further you move toward the poles the more pronounced the difference between the length of day and night is. Worst part of a far-north (or south) heatwave is it doesn’t get dark long enough for meaningful cooling.

oh my goddddd why do we have to do this every yearrrrr. this stupid country is not meant to get this hot and people are dying.

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

Sewists are usually say it's not, and they partially right, because it definitely more expensive then buying stuff from Shien. But here is the thing. A lot of people who sew (at least here in Russia) are not choosing between Shien (we don't have it anyway) and sewing. We sew because a lot of things we want to buy are either unavailable or very expensive.

Like. My grandma sewed because of Soviet economics and Iron Curtain we barely had any decent clothes. My mom sewed because in 90s in provincial Russian town you can't even buy fucking chicken in the store, I don't even talk about clothes. I sew because of Russian economics and sanctions we barely have any decent clothes. And also I have big boobs and I just can't buy some stuff in the stores.

So. Actually, you can sew for cheap. If your relative has a sewing machine (it's pretty common here in Russia) and you can borrow it, you don't need to spend money on your equipment. You can buy cheaper fabric in online stores that are targeted at small sewing businesses. I know places when you can buy rayon fabric for 2-3€/m.

On the other hand, when you sew, you usually don't want to do it from the cheap rayon. You want better materials and sewing techniques. You want more complicated sewing pattern. In the same time it's pretty disingenuous to compare these clothing pieces with Shien clothes, because you can't get decent linen or wool pants from Shien. If you are good at sewing and you want to compare your clothes with something readymade, it can be less expensive to sew your own clothes even if you count working hours.

So, the honest answer to this question, imo.