“Abbey Road”.

The dysfunctional House of Finwë at one of its finest moments, work in progress.

This will surely take me ten thousands years but it's fine. That's what the lockdown is for. And I do love my doomed Noldor.

(Sketching this was so HARD. It took me 20 perfectly happy minutes to sketch Nolofinwë, but Feanaro... I redrew him at least ten times before landing on this pose...and I am sure I will tweak it a thousand times in the greyscale rendering)

It makes me so, so angry when I see those posts that are like "HORRIFYING EARLY PLASTIC SURGERY RESULTS FROM WW2," because all of those lists are full of images that aren't the final result and are used for pure shock value. Harold Gillies, who performed most of those surgeries, was an incredibly talented surgeon. Here are some images of the full results of his surgeries.

I need to emphasize that I can't post the "before" pictures that go with these because the men did not have faces. The injuries were so extensive that these men were missing nearly all of their facial features, and through cutting-edge techniques that "looked scary" at the time (e.g. extensive skin grafts), Gillies saved these men from a medical nightmare.

Gillies performed the world's first ftm bottom surgery for trans man Michael Dillon and pioneered mtf bottom surgery! Respect his legacy.

antarctic exploration is so funny because you read about the endurance expedition and it’s a zany adventure with a lovable stowaway and trials and tribulations that show the indomitable nature of the human spirit without a single man lost and it ends in a thematically resonant and meaningful way with a fitting and beautiful conclusion and then you get to the belgica and the crew are running away constantly, they frame the cook for his own beatdown and get him fired, the beloved moral-boosting chipper ships boy literally falls off of the boat and drowns before they even GET to antarctica, the commandant and the captain are deliberately freezing the ship in ice to protect their beautiful belgian honor, they’re constantly falling into crevasses, and the ships pet penguin dies in what i cannot stress enough is the most narratively ominous and portentous circumstance on the morning of their imprisonment in the ice. the doctor was literally imprisoned for fraud.

House Martell. New ASOAIF fanart for Great Houses.

“ I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.”

Bram Stoker, Dracula

I so badly wanted someone to write the story of these two sailing at least for a while! Rhaenys both on board and flying Meleys who will obviously accompany them! An adventure where they met with pirates, where she can visit other ports with him... something so she can feed her adventurous side before her children are born, before she is stuck on the Driftnark like a bird with a broken wing!

Random landscape sketch (a stock photo study done in about 40 min). Keen eyed people may spot my lovely OC strolling around as a dark silhouette.

Luthien Tinuviel in the halls of Menegroth

"As Beren looked into her eyes

Within the shadows of her hair

The trembling starlight of the skies

He saw there mirrored shimmering.

Tinuviel the elven-fair,

Immortal maiden elven-wise,

About him cast her shadowy hair

And arms like silver glimmering"

Portrait study of Olenna Tyrell one of my favorite characters from A Song of Ice and Fire, as portrayed by Diana Rigg in the HBO series

Fëanor Lives AU

Inspired by comment-tags on my poll about whether Fëanor or his sons were worse, I’m going to try to theorize what would have happened if Fëanor hadn’t died within a few weeks[1] of landing in Beleriand.

First, there’s the question of whether, even if he had survived Dagor-nuin-Giliath, he would have survived until Fingolfin arrived. There’s a decent case to be made for no. His sons are fairly rudderless and inactive after he dies and Maedhros is captured, and don’t do a lot between that point and Fingolfin’s arrival; that would not have been the case if Fëanor had lived. (Setting aside the possibility of “he lives but is too severely injured to do anything,” just because it’s not what I’m interested in here.)

I don’t see him just sitting in Hithlum (even if Maedhros was captured, and I don’t see that happening either if Fëanor had lived; it feels like another product ofhis sons’ disorientation in the wake of his death). And considering his mindset from his speech in Tirion and Oath through to the point where he dies in canon, I can see him throwing his army against Angband until a large part of them are dead, and potentially until he himself is dead. Given that they successfully take out pretty well the entire orc-army in Dagor-nuin-Giliath (“Ten days that battle lasted, and from it returned of all the hosts that [Morgoth] had prepared for the conquest of Beleriand no more than a handful of leaves.”), they might have even made it into Angband. This isn’t Morgoth as of the Dagor Bragollach or Nirnaeth Arnoediad, when he’s got dragons and the accumulated armies of 400 years; at this point he’s got balrogs and Sauron and some other Maiar and a fortress and some kind of reserve forces. Morgoth may be best off retreating enough to lure them into into Angband, and then capturing or killing them when they’re in the dark, disoriented, separated, in mazelike tunnels.

So that’s one possibility: that by the time Fingolfin arrives, Fëanor and much of his forces are dead or captured. The ‘captured’ possibility lends itself to interesting AUs by itself.

In any possibility where Fëanor does survive until Fingolfin arrives, but has realized he can’t defeat Angband on his own, I feel like there’s an extremely high likelihood of another Kinslaying then and there. Not primarily because the elves who crossed the Helcaraxë are angry with him, though they certainly are, but because we’ve seen Fëanor in this position before: with a determined sense of what he wants to do, without the resources to do it, and with someone else denying him those resources. That was Alqualondë. Given the mindset Fëanor has displayed all through the Return, he would see it as Fingolfin’s usurpation standing between Fëanor and the forces he needs to conquer Angband (and would not recognize that the other elves’ total unwillingness to accept him as king is associated with him stranding them at the far end of an icy wasteland, more than with Fingolfin specifically, and that killing Fingolfin is not going to get them on-side). This battle would be fairly brutal, with a lot of bad blood on both sides; it would be very amusing to Morgoth, and pretty well put an end to any chance of an equivalent to the Siege of Angband ever coming to pass.

(I know there are plenty of fanfics where Fëanor survives and Fingolfin recognizes him as king. I just can’t see this happening; not only because of the very justified resentment, but because Fëanor’s decisions have been uniformly terrible, and not abandoning his people to that kind of terrible leadership was the main thing motivating Fingolfin to join in the Return at the start. In the extremely unlikely event that Fingolfin did, I don’t see most of the Noldor who crossed the Helcaraxë following him rather than breaking off under Turgon or someone. The reason why Maedhros’ abdication is so crucial in canon is because it’s the only thing that’s ever going to enable the Noldor to form a united front.)

So yeah, I have to agree with the people on the poll who said it’s probably for the best that Fëanor didn’t survive longer. What he would have done if he had been alive during the later parts of the Silm feels like a moot point because I can’t imagine a scenario where he survived but events were otherwise similar to canon. He’s a force of nature; he makes the narrative different, it’s what he does. It’s why him setting everything off and then suddenly dying makes for such a great story.

[1]: I’m making an educated guess.The Fëanoreans travel up the Firth of Drengist and into Hithlum, start setting up camp by Lake Mithrim, and are attacked by orcs before they can finish making camp; the battle against the orcs, Dagor-nuin-Giliath, lasts 10 days, and Fëanor diesat the end of it.