Sweetheartsoldier - Ranger's Dislodgment

“The Devil works hard, but AO3 authors work harder,” I mutter to myself like a mantra as encouragement while I trudge my way through my 10 year old WIP, which is not published on AO3.

Countless children’s media misled me with their emphasis on the dangers of quicksand, but VeggieTales was spot-on with their emphasis on the danger of the public veneration of material goods.

*slaps roof of uncanny valley*

This bad boy can fit so many of my drawings in it!

Rings of Power and orcs. I get wanting to show that villains can be redeemable, but that’s possible if and only if said villain wants and pursues redemption and recognizes where they’ve been wrong. LOTR and every related work prior to RoP consistently showed us orcs who firmly believed it was their right to torture and eat people. Saruman’s main obstacle in using them was that they couldn’t get along; they were killing each other for the opportunity to dismember and eat Merry and Pippin. There’s a lot of work to do before you can make people sympathize with orcs and RoP was not equipped to do even a fraction of that work.

Not to mention it didn’t need to be done. LOTR was already full of nuanced race relations, redeemable villains, and characters making themselves better or worse via their own free will. I would venture a guess that this is why Tolkien made the orcs so intensely reprehensible in the first place—in a world where Gollum, who attempts murder onscreen multiple times and explicitly states his desire to eat more than one of our beloved protagonists, is a sympathetic and redeemable character, you need a very concrete reason to see orcs as consistent, clear-cut villains. I would say we definitely have that. The orcs engage is gruesome violence and they like it that way; we never see an orc who wants to do things differently, therefore by their own choice, none of them have been redeemable.

Gollum is very nearly the same, except for a few moments where he shows disgust for what he’s become and a desire for something good and lovely, like sharing a meal with friends. It only takes a little bit to make him redeemable and it’s a clear picture of how real-life redemption can be accomplished from the measliest of starting points.

But you have to have that starting point, and I don’t think it’s unrealistic or in any way bad to have characters who don’t embrace that starting point, especially when there’s another character right next to them showing that their actions could have been forgiven if only they had any remorse.

the reason "robot racism" is often a really stupid metaphor is the same reason that like. discrimination against demons or vampires or whatever doesn't work, is because there's often a pretty justified reasons humans are scared of vampires or robots or whatever, in a way that doesn't apply to real life minorities, like a fantasy author will be like "the reason vampires are discriminated against is because most of them and kill and eat people for fun and pleasure, and so humans respond by trying to kill them, isn't that so sad" and like no that's a perfectly fine reason to not trust vampires i think.

I know it’s been said a million times, a million different ways, but Dumbledore was crazy right out of the gate with the whole Philosopher’s Stone ordeal. Imagine approaching your longtime acquaintance and saying, “Hey, pal, can I borrow your life support? I want to lure a genocidal maniac in so I can test an 11 year old against him in combat. I’d like to do this on school property, while in session.”

what I assume y’all are seeing on benadryl

Tired of stories where the author worldbuilds a whole religion only to chicken out at the last moment by making the main character a skeptic. You mean to tell me that there’s all this richness in lore and culture, but you’ve trapped me with the one person in this society who doesn’t care about it? So bland. I could meet an agnostic easily enough by walking down the street, but your story is my one chance to hear the perspective of someone who follows whatever religion you’ve contrived. You made this whole world; convince me that your character really is from there.

When someone’s accent changes according to their mood

Forget pet peeves, what is one of your little loves?

I love in the summer when people drive with the windows down, and the music up, and they sing along really enthusiastically.

You, a fanfiction author: “I don’t know if this fic is any good. Maybe I just won’t post it. Probably nobody would like it.”

Your top commenter, eyes enormous: “You hide the fic? You hide the fic in WIPs? Oh! Oh! Jail for author! Jail for author for one thousand years!”

The only fear death holds for me is that, even if I find myself in Heaven, I’ll have to explain to jirt that I posted LOTR fanfiction and edited his poetry to suit the plotline I had in mind. It could be worse, though: I could be Peter Jackson having to look Tolkien in his eyes and explain why Christopher Lee played Saruman.