marvelousavenger - Tumblr blog

[marvelousavenger]

yeah as soon as I wake up no longer fatigued for the first time in my life I'll be set

[marvelousavenger]

“This too shall pass” well can it pass a little faster jeez

[marvelousavenger]

I hate when people say ohhhh your pets only love you because you feed them. as if that wasn't the first form of love any of us felt. get real.

[marvelousavenger]

i do genuinely need to go on some sort of quest this year or i’m going to become evil for real

[marvelousavenger]

“you should be at the club” i should be by the sea. i should be in the mountains. i should be awestruck and rendered speechless by the majesty of the natural world. if you even care

[marvelousavenger]

i have time to ask God a whole lot of questions about a whole lot of things in the time it takes me to walk down to the beach but when i find an empty bench and sit and stare out at the harbor islands and the sailboats glowing in the setting sunlight and the blue expanse of shivering waves it takes hardly any time at all for God to remind me that He is very aware of all the things i am asking Him about, that He is more than capable of taking care of every single thing that worries me. the waves come in like persistent reminders of His faithfulness, of His sovereignty, of all the beautiful mercy He has worked in my life before: reminders, in wave after wave after wave, of His love.

[marvelousavenger]

“I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay - cold, expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike construed by the world into the attempt to hook a husband. Never mind! well-meaning women have their own consciences to comfort them after all. Do not, therefore, be too much afraid of showing yourself as you are, affectionate and good-heartened; do not too harshly repress sentiments and feelings excellent in themselves, because you fear that some puppy may fancy that you are letting them come out to fascinate him; do not condemn yourself to live only by halves, because if you showed too much animation some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you designed to dedicate your life to his inanity.”

— Charlotte Brontë writing to a friend who had been kind to a man she thought was married, only to have him fall in love with her because he thought she was flirting (letter dated April 2, 1845). (via groot)

[marvelousavenger]

Sean Kendrick’s brain: the sky the sand the sea and corr and you’re handling that horse wrong you fool

[marvelousavenger]

sweater season is upon us.

[marvelousavenger]

i fucking love spoilers for media i don’t consume and have zero context for. i love seeing a photo of a slightly surprised normal looking dude and seeing people freak the fuck out because of the significance, for which i know nothing of. he’s just some guy to me. it’s exhilarating. blorbo from my mutuals insanity

[marvelousavenger]

One of the things that’s really struck me while rereading the Lord of the Rings–knowing much more about Tolkien than I did the last time I read it–is how individual a story it is.

We tend to think of it as a genre story now, I think–because it’s so good, and so unprecedented, that Tolkien accidentally inspired a whole new fantasy culture, which is kind of hilarious. Wanting to “write like Tolkien,” I think, is generally seen as “writing an Epic Fantasy Universe with invented races and geography and history and languages, world-saving quests and dragons and kings.” But… But…

Here’s the thing. I don’t think those elements are at all what make The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so good. Because I’m realizing, as I did not realize when I was a kid, that Tolkien didn’t use those elements because they’re somehow inherently better than other things. He used them purely because they were what he liked and what he knew.

The Shire exists because he was an Englishman who partially grew up in, and loved, the British countryside, and Hobbits are born out of his very English, very traditionalist values. Tom Bombadil was one of his kids’ toys that he had already invented stories about and then incorporated into Middle-Earth. He wrote about elves and dwarves because he knew elves and dwarves from the old literature/mythology that he’d made his career. The Rohirrim are an expression of the ancient cultures he studied. There are a half-dozen invented languages in Middle-Earth because he was a linguist. The themes of war and loss and corruption were important to him, and were things he knew intimately, because of the point in history during which he lived; and all the morality of the stories, the grace and humility and hope-in-despair, was an expression of his Catholic faith. 

J. R. R. Tolkien created an incredible, beautiful, unparalleled world not specifically by writing about elves and dwarves and linguistics, but by embracing all of his strengths and loves and all the things he best understood, and writing about them with all of his skill and talent. The fact that those things happened to be elves and dwarves and linguistics is what makes Middle-Earth Middle-Earth; but it is not what makes Middle-Earth good.

What makes it good is that every element that went into it was an element J. R. R. Tolkien knew and loved and understood. He brought it out of his scholarship and hobbies and life experience and ideals, and he wrote the story no one else could have written… And did it so well that other people have been trying to write it ever since.

So… I think, if we really want to write like Tolkien (as I do), we shouldn’t specifically be trying to write like linguists, or historical experts, or veterans, or or or… We should try to write like people who’ve gathered all their favorite and most important things together, and are playing with the stuff those things are made of just for the joy of it. We need to write like ourselves.

[marvelousavenger]

"are u ok?" no mf all my comfort characters are dead

[marvelousavenger]

How can a person be normal about the lord of the rings how can you experience that whole story with that ending and then just go on with your life

[marvelousavenger]

I don't think we appreciate just how much Sam refuses to accept Frodo's self-sacrificing hero bullshit. Frodo's just like, "I must travel the road to Mordor alone in order to protect the ones I love" and Sam's just like, "You emo bitch not without me."

[marvelousavenger]

Portrait Of An Enemy.

Lucia Heffernan

[marvelousavenger]

- Boromir… Boromir! Give the Ring to Frodo. - As you wish… I care not.

[marvelousavenger]

Despite my best efforts, it is once again 10pm