#ring of evil

[qweaenr]

THE EVIL RING - Leo Chuan

[yaoioioay]

[jasontoddsguns]

“Boromir apologist” he doesn’t have anything to apologize for????? He fell victim to evil ringTM like once. and then immediately redeemed himself. Guys come on.

[sugurugetos]

DURIN IV & ANNATAR THE LORD OF THE RINGS: Rings of Power — 2.03

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

People playing Elden Ring and looking for the "good" demigod to root for are missing the point. Pick your favorite mass murdering war criminal megalomaniac with mommy issues and endlessly simp for them like the rest of us, cowards.

[etruski]

Shieldmaiden of Rohan

[faramirsonofgondor]

AU where Boromir survives but literally nothing changes because they all think he’s dead and he’s still recovering and by the time he’s actually okay again everything important is already over. Like lowkey imagine how fucking funny it would be if during the one scene where Frodo wakes up after destroying the ring and everyone is coming in, Boromir just walks in nervously and Frodo, who is trying to distract from the fact that he very clearly does not know Legolas’ name, pretends to pass out. Everyone is just like “oh dear!”, Sam goes into overprotective mode (“I told you it was a bad idea Mr. Gandalf!”) Aragorn is trying to reassure Boromir that it’s not his fault and that everything will be fine, Merry and Pippin are trying to comfort each other, Gimli and Legolas are just standing awkwardly in the corner because they know nothing about hobbit biology and what normal reactions are for this sort of thing. Gandalf is the only one who knows Frodo is faking it but he says nothing because Gandalf loves drama and being a bitch. Eventually they’re all ushered out to give Frodo more rest, except for Gandalf, who insists on staying to watch over him. After everyone is gone Gandalf tells him he can open eyes, and the first question out of Frodo’s mouth is very much not about Boromir’s miraculous return, or the state of the world, or about what happens to him now, but rather ��Gandalf, what the fuck is the elf’s name?”

[artscheese]

Overtime 💡🌙

[alina-is-hollowing]

I love games that, upon completion, shatters my sense of reality, leaves me full of emotions for days or weeks at end, and changes me as a person, for better or worse

[headcanonsandmore]

Sauron: Aha, who is now in possession of the One Ring? A common soldier? Perfect; they will be tempted by dreams of conquest, wealth and power! But... wait, what is happening? Why is the tempation not affecting them? What sort of lowly human could possibly resist my power?

Sam Vimes, chucking the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom before striding off to get home before 6pm: Bloody stupid piece of jewelery-

[toyastales]

SCHIAPARELLI READY-TO-WEAR JEWELRY

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[cyrankaa]

[stevienick]

some of my favorite horror movies + the cramps

[wakebymoonsleepbysun]

Someday he'll understand just how Mr. Pye felt...

[pilkypills]