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He kinda replace my Blade obsession… srry blade

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from jeffzwarren@jeffzwarren

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the tragedians

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me, finally getting a chance to say something I’ve thought about for twelve days straight: oh, hey, that reminds me, funny thing, this just came to mind but

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I’ve been accused of all sorts of crimes– but I was innocent. There were rumors that I was a looter, that I walked around with a revolver killing people. I guess… I had to prove them right

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a meeting of creatures…

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Check out my ongoing comic Crow Time. It has crows, and also neat pantheons of epic beasties.

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Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you an overdramatic bitch

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO FERDINAND VON AEGIR.

Since it falls on the 30th, I present to you 30 Ferdinands. 

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to the hills, to the hills, to the hills we go! bring all of your fog and smoke, bring all of the friends you know!

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Aroace Legolas & Aro Gimli Headcanons

I read this post and was so moved I made some self-indulgent headcanons for these two besties. 

- Legolas is, of course, aromantic and asexual. He has zero capacity for noticing if anyone has a crush on him and in fact did not know what a crush even was until he was like four centuries old or so. He knew what marriage was, sure, but he didn’t understand that special feelings were not also a social construct, but something that came naturally. Somehow. By nature. It never happens for him, and it doesn’t really bother him until adulthood, when people like he cares about start having relationships. Like Gimli.

- Gimli is perpetually annoyed that Legolas considers his casual sexual exploits “relationships.” 

- Sure, sometimes Gimli spends evenings having sex with people, and sure, it’s often more than a one night thing, but they aren’t relationships, and none of it is tender. He finds tender sex a turnoff - an even setting aside the fact that it’s a turnoff, he doesn’t understand how he could possibly feel tenderness with a near stranger anyway. (Does he want his sexual partners to be more than near-strangers? Hell no.) He is mostly romance repulsed. Sex is easy and satisfying. Genuine intimacy is trickier. He has always seen it in a certain light that makes things like kissing and hand holding seem rather silly.  

- Legolas is not romance repulsed and secretly moons over tragic, romantic stories. In theory, he likes the idea of being swept off his feet. But when anyone actually tries, either with suave gestures or bedroom eyes or even pickup lines, he only feels empty and awkward. 

- (Except he has been swept off his feet before, and it happens every time Gimli performs some impressive feat, either to help a stranger or Legolas or himself.)

- In his years of friendship with Gimli, Legolas has become deeply attached to the friendship they have. Gimli is not only his best friend, but the best of the best. No other friend has ever been kinder to him, more contentious of his needs and feelings, more interested in who Legolas is, more interested in putting in the effort of friendship. Of course Legolas is attached. 

- So sometimes he’s insecure about the sexual relationships Gimli has. Legolas knows there aren’t meant to be emotions tied up in them, but what if something strikes a cord? What if Gimli finally decides to settle down and keep a particularly good sexual partner around forever? Legolas knows he doesn’t want to live his life as a third wheel.

- His worries, as often as they come up, fade just as often, because Gimli never fails to return home to him as if all was right in the world, being at Legolas’s side. What Legolas doesn’t understand is that Gimli feels he already has settled down. 

- Legolas is oblivious. He may not notice it, but Gimli’s friends and and friends with benefits do: Gimli has a massive soft spot for one Legolas Greenleaf. Having come to trust him implicitly as a long time friend and companion, he adores Legolas’s quirks and mannerisms and passions and singing. He wants to see Legolas succeed in whatever he does, and he likes to be there to help when Legolas inevitably needs help. He likes being the person Legolas turns to; in fact, being the person Legolas turns to grounds him.

- Gimli feels emotions no less deeply as anyone else, so he sometimes is afflicted with strong feelings of devotion. He enjoys doing practical tasks for Legolas most of all, or spending time with him, but sometimes his desires are more odd - such as wanting to tease Legolas saying that he may enjoy sex most with women twice his size, but it pleases him even more that the stunningly beautiful, blonde man so many covet is his. His. (Gimli keeps his mouth shut when these desires strike him.)

- Legolas doesn’t ever keep his mouth shut. He spews all kinds of accidentally intimate phrases, blurring the lines of sincerity even to himself. Oh, I love you or I would kiss you or Why spend another night in wild pleasure when you could be cold and watch the stars with me? He trusts Gimli does not take him seriously, but more and more often Legolas frets over his own words. Why couldn’t he kiss Gimli? If only he wanted to, he might completely win over Gimli’s heart and never worry about losing him again. But he doesn’t want to, just like he has never wanted to kiss anyone. 

- He doesn’t know that Gimli has never wanted to be kissed. He doesn’t know that Gimli takes comfort in how, while many sexual partners have to be reminded he doesn’t like it, Legolas is in his same boat of feeling queasy at the very thought. He doesn’t know that what makes Gimli feel special and wanted isn’t some attractive person’s effortless, bountiful physical affection, but Legolas’s rare instances of tentative, trusting touch. Resting his tired head on Gimli’s shoulder. Holding his shoulders when he’s excited.

- Years in the future, they grow so emotionally close and so settled in their ways that bringing up these topics no longer makes them wary. In the future, Gimli makes it clear that he has no interest in spending his life with anyone else, and Legolas feels comfortable telling Gimli that he truly does love him, very much. 

tl;dr: gimli takes bros before hoes to a new level as aro-spec and legolas is so aroace that even tho he could have the perfect cinematic romance with some hottie, all he really wants is gimli to be his bestest friend forever Really, Really Badly

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My mom sent me this post made by @introvertdoodles-blog after I more explicitly shared my orientation with her (I’ve shared my feelings on me being aromantic asexual before, but never actually used explicit terms until recently). It felt kind of embarrassing but it was cute at the same time. I love my mom <3

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peak fantasy environment designs:

floaty islands

glowing mushrooms

bigger versions of normal animals

animalistic dragons

deep, sentient forests

sky/space whales

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As we’re coming up to the two year anniversary of the post that made me famous and led to the new favourite characterization of Legolas as a “baby gay dudebro redneck of the elves”, I feel I should write a follow up based on my flippant agreement to this adorable phrase.

So, I have come to answer a question that has sort of floated in tags since then. Is Legolas actually gay?

And the answer, my friends, is “well, he’s not not gay.”

If Tolkien had the words to describe it today, I would bet good money on him dubbing Legolas as an aromantic asexual, which would be fitting as him being an aro-ace…you know, because of the archery? Ha ha? Please clap.

My argument for this is mostly literary analysis, an understanding of Catholic theology at the time, and a question of demographics. Now of course, the minute I say this, I’m going to have a bunch of people jumping in saying that Legolas is a lesser Glorfindel or a recycled version of the Second Age hero with the same name. For those who say this, a very small part of me might slightly concede but the rest of me says HOW DARE YOU SPEAK THAT WAY ABOUT MY BOY.

So, the literary analysis or as I like to call it “There’s Something About Legolas.” For one thing, Legolas’ lineage is surprisingly empty considering Tolkien wrote the family trees of like everyone ever. We get Oropher - Thranduil - Legolas. That’s it. Now many would argue it’s unlikely he’s Thranduil’s only son as he basically spends his time…well, being Legolas. The other thing that is super weird here is that A) No spouses/wives are known and B) Legolas isn’t married. The first can be explained with Tolkien just never filling it in because women do sometimes go missing in his stuff, sure. The second is a bit weirder because the vast majority of elves do get married and get married before 200. And our boy is a baby, but he’s at least 500. Usually when we get a character like this, there are three possible explanations A) they have no interest in being married or B) Their spouse is significantly younger than them (like my homegirl Arwen being her hot cougar self) or C) they’re going to get killed off. But Legolas never gets married, not even when a large majority of the Fellowship spends their Happily Ever After in happy domestic bliss. Besides Gandalf being well exempt from the whole mortal thing, we have exactly three who do not get married.

1) Frodo - like, I could write a whole other thing on his romantic life and I’m not the expert in our good good boy so I’ll let someone else do that

2) Gimli - demographically, my main man had less than a 33% chance of getting married to a nice dwarven girl. This is not a cultural norm for him so it’s really not weird for this to have worked out the way it did.

3) LEGOLAS - what the heck? Heir to kingdom? Race who is so into marriage they can look at someone and know if they’ve been banging? What? How is this man still on the market?

So then the question becomes this: if Tolkien gave Legolas an exemption from the usual Happily Ever After of wife, babies, healthy happy home life, what is his good life after the war? For Frodo, we get mostly him being a happy uncle and just getting to live that sweet Hobbit life. For Gimli, he gets the best dang caves in the world and gets to make his own settlement and has like the best dwarven life ever. And my argument is that for Legolas, that happily ever after is Gimli. Even in an original draft, Galadriel’s message to Legolas was not warning him about hearing the sound of the sea but that he and Gimli were going on a road trip together post war. And of course we get the whole no greater love piece describing Gimli going with him to the undying lands. There are so many lines and references to them either going where the other goes or dying by the other’s side. Like, if you’ve made it this far, I’m preaching to the choir. Tolkien lays it out for us. This is one of the most important friendships and relationships of the Third/Fourth Age. They love each other and even the laws of mortality are not going to keep them apart because everyone gets a happy ending, gosh darn it. JRR doesn’t let his boys down.

Okay, I’m not saying they are canonically gay for each other. Well, I am a little, but not in the hypersexualized M/M smutty way you might be thinking. Tolkien was a huge fan of using romantic friendship in his work, which is a really old literary tradition and honestly a big thing in real life we should be giving more credit to because it’s the best. By that I mean that he did not view romantic love as being vastly superior to the love between friends. And like that makes sense? Tolkien’s life, in many ways, was inundated with this. As a soldier, Tolkien was part of a military culture that encouraged men to view each other as brothers. As a Catholic, same thing and his theology/philosophy even encouraged the study of the four different types of loves. And even his adult life was filled with close friendships between men. Heck, LOTR would not have been written if it weren’t for his bros just yelling at him to get ‘er done.

Now don’t get me wrong, Tolkien was head over heels in love with his wife. Like disgustingly, adorably in love with his wife. It was just that he had different types of loves in his life and he recognized that these relationships were all important. I honestly believe that Legolas’ and Gimli’s relationship was written with this in mind. I think if Tolkien was to have the words we have now, they would be in a queer platonic relationship because they are not in love in the same way as say Arwen and Aragorn. There is no pining, no lust, no need for romantic love and marriage and babies. But they are soulmates. They belong together. And clearly our boy Legolas has been waiting for him before he can sail off into the sunset.

tl;dr Legolas is a weird elf. The traditional elven narrative of a happy ending wouldn’t work for him so it makes complete sense that he would be in a QPR with Gimli. He’s definitely aro-ace. Tolkien didn’t have the words for this and was writing them in the literary tradition of romantic friendship but he would totally have my back. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

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no one writes love stories better than aromantics send 

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