#murder orcs

[erose-this-name]

humans are not the default race

In every scifi and fantasy setting with """races""", humans are the default.

If you're lucky, we're the short-lived, fast-reproducing pests that are all white Europeans for some mysterious reason, and also have disproportionate rates of being raised as undead because we can't be bothered to make zombie dwarf minis or animate a vampire gnome that has to jump up to bite a tall person's neck.

(We've got BOTH human AND elf skeleton warriors! Oh, hey, I just changed the scale, now it's a hobbit skeleton OR a giant skeleton! Such skeleton diversity! No, Khajiits can't be bone boys, a skeleton with a tail and a cat skull is just TOO SPOOKY)

I feel like a lot of people don't realize that we (Homo sapiens) have the longest running endurance of any land animal. Being able to run a marathon is not normal.

(It's because we evolved the very unusual hunting strategy of Slowly Chasing Gazelles While Throwing Sticks At Them Until The Gazelle Collapses From Exhaustion Then Casually Walking Up And Bashing Their Head In With A Rock™).

Even Neanderthals probably couldn't match our tenacity (they were considerably stronger and tougher though, but by no means dumber judging from the size of their brain cavities{which was bigger than ours actually})

(the evolutionary Neanderthal hunting strategy was probably something like Jumping Out And Stabbing A Wooly Rhinoceros With A Pointed Stick, Then Getting Punted 12 Feet Into a Tree But Getting Right Back Up And Doing It Again Until It Dies Because You Have Superhuman Bone And Muscle Density. And If You Do Break One Of Your Unbreakable Bones Your Homies Will Take Care Of You Until It Heals™

[Neanderthal skeletons are found with healed fractures surprisingly often despite said bones being much stronger and denser than ours, they just kept evolving denser bones until they couldn't even swim without sinking like a rock, but they still got broken all the time])

So given that we, Homo sapiens, actually literally used to be the "species that specializes in sheer endurance, determination, and unbreakable fucking will", I want more fantasy and scifi settings where we are that way! I think the only setting where that's even remotely the case is Undertale. We're not just the "default" intelligent species!

The only reason we're good at everything is because we can make complex tools and can learn and aren't bound by instinct. Which, by definition, all fantasy races would also be able to do. Otherwise, they'd just be considered animals. Like trolls or Redditers.

The "default" species should just be really good at making tools and quickly adapting, but kinda suck in every other category. So I guess gnomes or goblins are the default d&d race.

And Humans are certainly not the Tolkien "that one race that lives short lives and reproduces faster than everyone else and is good at farming" because:

A) we actually do already live relatively long lives for mammals of our size and also GIVING BIRTH CAN KILL US, AND IF OUR PARENTS DON'T RAISE US JUST RIGHT THAT CAN ALSO KILL US, WE ARE SPECIFICALLY VERY BAD AT REPRODUCING

B) we are in no way adapted to farming, and most of our modern health and societal issues stem from the fact that we aren't meant to farm or be civilized, but do it anyways.

We only farm because it helped us survive the ecological collapse at the end of the ice age, now we're in too deep to go back.

When the ice age ended (quite abruptly) the ecosystem couldn't provide for hunters and gathers anymore, a bunch of things were getting heat stroke, sea levels rose, hibernation and bloom cycles and reptile gender ratios were out of wack, predators died out because herbivores died out because plants weren't doing well. Decomposers like vultures and worms had a field day (Until they didn't [RIP condor population]). It would take a while for a new ecological equilibrium to emerge and for evolution to fix things.

But farming doesn't need any healthy ecosystems except for the soil and pollinators, mostly, so that still works. And farming makes more food meaning you can have more people. So now there's more people.

But that also means you can't ever go back to foraging without all those extra people dying of starvation. So, anarcho-primitivism would technically be the most deadly ideology if implemented, and therefore is not based, unfortunately. Here's hoping for an apocalypse to do that for us! (I would not survive it)

Fun Fact: those isolated tribal societies like the Sentinelese that still do hunting and gathering only spend 15-20 hours a week doing that and another 20 doing camp chores, and the rest of their time forming meaningful relationships and not being depressed.

Notice how most of what they do as "work" (hunting, fighting, hiking, berry/mushroom/etc picking, cooking, camping, arts and crafts, oral history/story telling) are things that we need to do during our limited free time as "hobbies" just so that our "work" doesn't drive us insane. Thus leaving less time for relationships, etc.

If we were actually good at farming or industry or civilization, then things like math and repetitive manual labor wouldn't be work. They'd be the most fun activities.

Sure, these foragers die young, but so did medieval peasant farmers who were even less healthy since they had much less diverse diets (a lot of carbs) and got plague more often thanks to cities and their close proximity to livestock. Our modern sedentary lifestyle is bad too.

Hobbits are suited to farming (also Entwives I guess). Hobbits are quite good at it, at the cost of not being as good at much else (besides going unnoticed and throwing for some reason), they inherently enjoy farming life quite a bit and most* aren't haunted by the sense they should be anything else, like we are. *(The Took family got that Call To Adventure 'tism)

We only think that we're not special or can't be anything other than what we currently are because we no longer have anything else to compare ourselves to. The Neanderthals and Denisovans died out tens of thousands of years ago and the fucking aliens are somewhere, presumably

We are special, only we survived.

But at the cost of becoming the species equivalent of an abandoned child raised by wolves. We fantasize about these things because we all know that we shouldn't be alone. But our perceptions of ourselves are twisted by our trauma and lack of socialization.

Personally, the realization that having lost our family was probably our fault makes that hurt so much worse.

[xnotmelodyx]

Are they ok? 😭

#MD humans

[carionto]

Just. One. More. Episode.

Alien: Hmm, I haven't seen Human in a while.

Alien 2: That is worrying, you know to never leave your Human out of sight for too long. That's how you get the Ant World they tried to hide.

A: Hmm, but it's also not a good idea to pry into their privacy too much.

A2: True. What were they last doing?

A: Carrying several boxes of flavored nutrient packs into their apartment.

A2: Did they mention anything about a specific subject that had not come up much at all before?

A: Hmm, they did recommend I check out a documentary series about true crime. I did, but couldn't finish. It went into disturbing details.

A2: Oh no. Now, this is important - did they say the word marathon before you last saw them?

A: Hmm, I think so, yes.

A2: How many boxes? And how long ago since they brought them in?

A: Hmm, eight and three days ago.

A2: Your Human will appear in about thirteen days.

A: Ah, I think I understand now, but they're alone, shouldn't a standard nutrient box last about 5 days per Human?

A2: When on a regular schedule, yes, roughly. Your Human is intently watching countless hours of these documentaries and are likely unaware of their rate of consumption due to being emotionally engaged with the subject matter.

A: That is... disturbing. Should we intervene?

A2: No, it's a phase. If we take them away from their current subject of passion, it will become more entrenched, potentially. Best to let them run out of nutrients and force themselves to leave that environment. Then we can persuade them to return to normalcy, given they will be more accepting of the idea due to leaving that situation of their own will.

A: And if they are not persuadable?

A2: Then we get another Human to metaphorically "bonk" them back to their senses. Although on some Humans a literal bonking works too. It's very circumstantial.

A: Hmm...

A2: Although there is also the risk of the other Human becoming convinced to join them instead on further diving into the subject matter. There does appear to be an endless supply of these true crime shows on the Human extranet.

A: That is... not reassuring in any way.

A2: Well, that's Humans for you.

[ruinatlantis]

Honestly, thank god for the tumblr version of humans are weird/space orcs/whatever. I love the stories I read on here about discovery and interaction between different species and how cool space is. Every time I try to go to reddit (into the r/HFY one, which is supposed to be the same thing), all I get usually is stories of human's deadly military in space.

[pengtheplush]

| Ar-Kaius the Architect ⚒️ |

Finally, this little series of mine is complete! I'll be using the models I've collected for some of my posts going forward, but I'm sure this isn't the end of my Hero Forge adventures. I think a certain unkillable ranger is calling my name. With that being said, here's a look at the last but not least addition to my now 11-part series!

Side tangent, I know how human he must look, but you've got to believe me when I say that this was what I was working with underneath all the paint and polish:

Olog faces are impossible to reconstruct in Hero Forge. At least I now know I'm not cut out to be a plastic surgeon 😅

[blackjackkent]

OK, Minsc is in hand, Rakha and co. have located Candulhallow's Tombstones, and Operation Save Lae'zel is a go!

Candulhallow's is near Basilisk Gate, north of the Elfsong, and it occurs to me that one of the Dribbles locations is en route towards it. However, unlike most of the other murder tableaux, this one doesn't have a nameplate on the door for Rakha to correlate to the Bhaalist list, so instead I'm inclined to say that she picks up on it by smell.

Because let's be honest - there's no way Rakha doesn't smell this. XD

As usual, another scribbled note from Orin is on the body along with a piece of Dribbles' corpse:

"Balthazar..." Rakha says slowly.

"Not the necromancer," Jaheira says, squinting at the dead body. "Another Bhaalspawn, a member of the Five. He sought to slay Caden as well - not for power, but to remove the taint of Bhaal's blood from the world, for his knife would have found his own throat after."

Rakha thinks this over. "It seems he did not succeed, then," she says cautiously.

"So it would seem," Jaheira says, looking at her sidelong.

"What other Bhaalspawn lived beside your friend?" It's something Rakha has not considered before. Are there perhaps others besides Orin still living who might seek to come after her?

"To my knowledge, none," Jaheira says slowly. "Even Caden and Imoen shed their divine lineage in the end. And in truth we had thought that to be the end of it. Your very existence, and Orin's, is... puzzling."

Rakha's lips twitch in a dry almost-smile. "That's one word for it."

[saurongorthaur9]

I think maybe part of what I hated about the kiss was that if my best friend did that to me, I would murder them on the spot.

[iridescentoracle]

Hello! I am here to ask about your Dior headcanons re: the political cohesion of Doriath. 👀

Oh man, I didn't expect anyone to actually take me up on that!

(Okay so I got partway into writing this and then realized I should probably note up front that I tend to stick to the Silm (& LOTR/the Hobbit where applicable, but they... aren't, here) as the most authoritative version of canon, and I can get into why and where the nuances/exceptions are there (I do say tend to stick, it's not hard and fast!), but that's mostly a side note here: the point is simply that I don't really factor other drafts or the poetic Leithian into my take on Doriath, Thingol, Dior, etc, just what we're told in the actual Silm. I also read the Silm as an in-universe history text compiled by in-universe scholars, who, being people, are going to have their own biases and blind spots, even when they're doing their best to be accurate!)

So, this is a two-part thing: #1, there's the political cohesion of Doriath before & at the time of Thingol's death, which i talked about in the tags of the post that prompted this ask but is kind of necessary as context for the Dior part to make sense, and #2, there's the actual Dior headcanons. Both of these parts are very long because I've never really seen anyone else suggest any of this stuff and I want to explain where I'm coming from thoroughly enough that it actually makes sense to people who aren't me, but the TL;DRs:

TL;DR 1: I think Doriath was probably a hot mess politically after Thingol died, with tensions between various groups of Sindar and Laiquendi in the leadup to Thingol's death & Melian's departure, and more political tensions afterwards between those who wanted Beren & Lúthien to come be the new rulers, and those who thought they should stay gone, with someone still in Doriath taking over.

TL;DR 2: I think Dior became Eluchil, potentially at the request of some portion of the Iathrim, hoping to help prevent Doriath from devolving into civil war, and saw dealing with the Silmaril-Fëanorioni situation as a lower priority than stabilizing Doriath's internal political situation until it was too late.

1. The political cohesion (or rather, lack thereof) in Doriath prior to Thingol's death

So, okay, the thing about Doriath is that we don't actually have any real idea of like... how much the Iathrim liked being the Iathrim? We're never told about any intra-Iathrim conflict, but a) the Silm was probably compiled mostly by surviving Gondolindrim or their descendants, so they wouldn't know about anything liike that unless surviving Iathrim told them, and after the Second Kinslaying I don't imagine many Iathrim would've been eager to talk about how things had actually been tense/messy/etc when they could remember everything as having been perfect until it was ruined by the Fëanorionrim, and doubly so after the Third Kinslaying, so why would anything like that make it into the Silm?

and b) what we do know about Doriath is that it wasn't really Doriath as we know it until Morgoth came back to Middle-earth, and everything went to hell.

At the start of the first age, you suddenly get Doriath (the fenced land!) being the one protected area of a continent that used to be totally free and open. How many Sindar actually didn't particularly care for Thingol's style of leadership, or simply preferred to live nomadic lives, going basically wherever they pleased, until suddenly that wasn't safe anymore, and you were only guaranteed survival if you were close enough to Menegroth to be within the Girdle when it went up? ditto how many Laiquendi had no interest in swearing loyalty to Thingol right after their own king had just been killed, but again, made it to safety and stayed there over taking their chances on their own in the outside world? (None of this is meant as any insult to Thingol himself, by the way; he can have been a good king who did his best for his people and still rubbed some of his new subjects-by-necessity the wrong way, through no fault of his own or theirs.)

I think it's entirely possible that there were always potential political tensions under the surface in Doriath that just... never got written about, because they never boiled over into actual political conflict, and so it was never the sort of tension that had any bearing on the historical record.

Except then Beren & Lúthien happen to the world, and a few years later the Narn, and in the blink of an eye suddenly the only king Doriath has ever had is dead, and the only queen Doriath has ever had is gone and the Girdle with her—and more than that, the only rulers the Sindar had ever had for three thousand years before Doriath existed.

And where a few years earlier I think the Iathrim would probably have turned pretty universally to Lúthien, now she's abandoned them for her human husband—and while she's my favorite character in the entire legendarium hands-down and I don't blame her, I think that's another place there might have actually been some very mixed feelings among the Iathrim that nobody wanted to admit to later because how could anyone have been upset with Lúthien—and on top of her abandoning them for him, I think it's extremely probable most of Doriath did not actually get over their xenophobia about humans in general or Beren in specific when Thingol did (we know for sure at least some of Doriath didn't, cf. Saeros insulting Túrin's mother & sister to his face), but again, who's going to admit to having had a grudge against the holy couple of Middle-earth after the fact, you know?

Conversely, there could've been a sizeable faction of Sindar who had been totally loyal to Thingol until everything happened with Beren & Lúthien, but who found his actions towards them and/or Finrod to be where they drew the line, and while (unlike B&L themselves) that faction stayed in Doriath, there could've been a new, additional tension on that front.

Finally, for all we know there were multiple factions within the Laiquendi of Doriath, with political tensions stretching back to before their king died, rooted in who-even-knows!

2. Dior

All of that, of course, sets up a very, very messy political situation for Dior to walk into.

The Doriath stuff is arguably more speculation than actual headcanon, but here's where the unambiguous headcanons come in: I don't think "Dior Eluchil set himself to raise anew the glory of the kingdom of Doriath." Obviously that's how it got written down, but bluntly, I can't see Beren and Lúthien having a kid that stupid or, like, power-hungry and arrogant?

What I can see is a situation where the messenger that brought word of Thingol's death and Melian's departure asked Beren & Lúthien to come take over as the new king and queen, we promise we're not mad about you leaving and we won't be xenophobic to your husband anymore we swear it's fine now pretty please, Beren & Lúthien said no, and the messenger either asked Dior as a second choice, or said "okay fine none of that was actually true but Doriath is falling apart and we need a leader ASAP and there's about eight different contenders* (mostly kinsmen of Thingol or Laiquendi) being backed by various factions and it's going to devolve into civil war any minute so if you care at all—" and Dior said "would I do?"

(* Ask me about my Galadriel headcanon)

I don't think Dior necessarily wanted to be king of Doriath, and I don't think he saw the throne as his birthright or anything like that; I don't think anyone involved, from Thingol to Lúthien to Dior himself, ever considered the possibility of Thingol dying and needing an heir! I think it's possible he was asked, or at most that he offered, and either way, I think he saw becoming king as taking on a responsibility for the sake of others.

(Which, like, "well here's a potentially impossible task that I'm going to take up even though probably no one thinks I'm actually capable of it, but it's my duty to help others as best I can" sure does sound to me like an attitude one might develop when raised by Lúthien "I kicked Sauron's ass cast a sleep spell on Morgoth and persuaded the Valar to find a loophole in the fabric of reality" Tinuviel and Beren "I stayed by my father's side as an outlaw to give my mother time to lead the rest of our people away hopefully to safety knowing I would never see her or any of them again (and then spent several years being a giant thorn in Morgoth's side for good measure)" Barahirion, where "apparently my grandpa I may or may not have ever met died, guess that makes me the king of a place i may or may not have ever been" does... not.)

I also think he either took on the epithet Eluchil, or was given it by whichever factions of the Iathrim accepted him as king, when he actually became king. Obviously he's going to be referred to as Dior Eluchil even before that in retrospect because that's how he's thought of later, but that doesn't mean it was actually a name he always had, you know?

The final thing is, I think if Dior essentially walked into a political situation five seconds from devolving into civil war, it makes his inaction regarding the Silmaril prior to the Second Kinslaying make more sense: the Fëanorioni have been sitting around doing nothing about the Silmaril in Doriath / with Beren & Lúthien this whole time, the letter saying "hey that's our Silmaril give it back now" is probably just a formality, and Dior's only been ruling for a couple years, there's still plenty of people dubious about whether he should be king at all, he might well be subject to at least some of whatever xenophobia remains about humans in Doriath, and in general all the work he's done on stabilizing the kingdom will absolutely come undone again if he screws up; he's trying to keep a kingdom from falling apart, the Silmaril thing can wait.

Of course, it wasn't a formality, and it couldn't wait, but why would Dior have known that?

[bellamontwasright]

Most Serena mods weird as hell 💀💀💀💀 I'm sorry but people are not in the wrong for clowning on them.

[crearuru]

Another year of frieren discourse ahead lads

[chloecorvid]

Illustration I made of my DnD character Norphanus (orc-elf) since his main motivations have now been revealed to the party! He wants to bring his dead fiancé Tide (water genasi) back from the dead to atone for the accident he was involved in, and to become a Lich King to create a kingdom of undead for those who are denied an afterlife like he was... because poor Norph was drowned as a child for messing with Necromancy in his Sun-Elf city...

The running joke in our server is that it's always Bully-Norph-O'clock

[bobauthorman]

[wufflesvetinari]

Fandom: Baldur’s Gate 3 Relationships: Astarion/F!Cleric Tav Wordcount: 2k now, might be around 7k total Setting: that "Free the Artist" ghosty sidequest in Act 3

Additional Info: astarion whump. put that man in a Situation. plus a bunch of self-indulgent ilmater/cleric stuff. based on a moment in my game where astarion got possessed in combat, but written with several times more drama lmao

AO3 Summary:

She skids to her knees beside him. “Astarion, stay down. Look at me, we’re going to help you—”

Astarion makes a horrible noise—distress, his or the ghost's, impossible to know. He convulses once, twisting at the waist to look up at her. He reaches for her face.

He claws a line down her cheek, bloody.

(Astarion gets possessed. Good thing Tav is a cleric.)

[howhow326]

Yooo, what if I make a Dark Urge half Orc that's a cleric of Gruumsh and like I headcanon Gruumsh as his dad.

I just did something!

[ghostlythinglady]

A lot of fantasy goes with Tolkien explanation of fantasy racism being the result of ancestral grudge.

Then you got Dungeon Meshi which is like:

"Elves and Dwarves hate each other because their respective empires make up 2/3 of the imperial core and are stuck in a cold war as the planet runs out of uncolonized land to grab. Elves are able to live in pastoral paradise because they've horded most of the settings farm-able land and natural capital, displacing and mass murdering any natives in the process. Orcs and goblins are hostile to other races because there the primary targets of an ongoing slavery and genocide campaign. The dividing line between human and inhuman is arbitrarily assigned via a phrenological pseudo-science that quickly falls apart when questioned by anyone who wasn't indoctrinated into it since birth."