#to me the sheer amount of lore makes up for the wordiness

[rubys-domain]

so uh... my alt's kazuha is lvl 80 now. and i don't feel like fighting the maguu kenki another 10 fucking times. i'm not sure what else i could do though. there's a lot of world quests that still need doing as well as the sumeru archon quest. but i don't feel like doing any of that rn...

honestly i just want to keep playing on main. even if it's just world quests. i'm way more motivated to do world quests on main for some reason

[hoochy-coo]

Ttpd as a whole ! :)

In terms of her entire discography, this is firmly at 4 for me if you put all the songs together.

The pros are:

- This is her most autobiographical and self-referential album to date. I know that makes the music somewhat inaccessible to casual listeners but if you’re a stan that’s taken the time to digest, you can trace the map. This speaks to how parasocial her fanbase is but that’s a different conversation

- Taylor is usually very curated and calculated about what she wants us to know and how that will ultimately impact how we perceive her as well as her brand. However, she let it all hang out this album and I applaud that.

- The highs are career highs. We have great moment of introspections (Clara Bow, BDILH, The Manuscript, HDIE, ILIPW). We also have some of her best song writing since folkevermore (The Prophecy, SLL, The Black Dog, the Albatross, GAS, FOTS, Loml)

- It’s a grower. I think a lot of the songs need to grow on you because of the length of the album and how wordy a lot of the songs are.

- This album potentially marks her first instance of “not giving a fuck” and putting whatever she wants out. Which possibly signals a change in her creative process and we’ll be getting more raw and honest writing from her moving forward

- The music is catchy. Like cringe all you want over Down Bad but it’s catchy as hell

The cons:

- It’s bloated, unfocused, and confused. I totally get that she wrote most of this at a very painful, confusing period of her life. However, I agree with the NYT’s review that she badly needs an editor. For example, BDILH is AMAZING - it’s like grown up Speak Now on crack and in the context of the TS lore, it’s her giving a cheeky wink while flipping the “fairytale” motif that’s been such a staple to her career. However, it is so ridiculously wordy that it’s such a task to listen to. My head was spinning when I first heard the bridge LMAO. Which brings me to my next point…

- TTPD is self indulgent and not in a good way. She is clearly SPEAKING DIRECTLY to her muse on this album. She is doing so much to send a message to Matty Healey here that it gets a little uncomfortable. There are way too many coded messages and secret in-jokes. I’m in no way saying us as an audience should be able to demand comfort from her work, but I can’t lie and say it doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of the music. A lot of the tracks are clearly intended to sound like 1975 as a jab at Matty and it’s not cute.

- It’s trying to be a Lana album. Drag me all you want but she is writing in Lana cursives for half of this album and I don’t get why. Taylor did some of her best writing her when she kept it simple and worked off a relatable point of reference. For example, the Black Dog tells a very simple story of discovering that your ex-lover forgot to turn off his location and now you’re spiraling wondering what he’s doing at that exact location and who he’s with. Same with the Prophecy - it’s literally about trying and failing at love over and over again and wondering if it’s just not in the cards for you.

- Jack and Aaron. They are all stunting each other and she needs to take a break from working with them for a while. I’m in no way saying that Jack and Aaron didn’t do some good work on this album (because they absolutely did) but it’s clear that they’re not pushing her to try something new.

- Repeated exploration of the same topics and not having new or interesting to say. See: thanK you aIMee, Cassandra and WAOLOM. It’s the same thing being written about from the same lens. She could have kept it in the vault.

- It feels rushed. It just does and the sheer amount of songs thrown onto the album with no stream lining or even sonic ties makes it an exhausting listen in one sitting.

- Not leaning into the horror themes and motifs seems like a lost opportunity. There are tons of horror references on this album that she seemingly has done nothing with. Down Bad compares getting dumped with being dropped back to earth after an alien abduction, WAOLOM likens herself to a witch, TSMWEL compares her ex-lover ghosting her as getting betrayed and shot by a double agent, SLL referencing death, funerals and being reviving back to life but barely living, Fortnight literally references murders, ICDIWABH is a circus nightmare etc.

- All that marketing she did around Joever, which sent her stans on a with hunt, only for the album to be some other muse has left a bad taste in my mouth.

Overall, I’d say the pros trump the cons. However, I honestly think had she sat with it a bit more, rearranged some, edited bits and pieces, and trimmed off the excess, she would have had a fantastic album.

[sxmhlaiocht]

Why I love the Lord of the Rings (Part 1 - Books)

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm obsessed with the Lord of the Rings ('Obsessed' is probably putting it mildly - I'd drop everything to live the life of a hobbit), however I don't think I've ever properly gone into detail about why I love it.

I'll get the obvious bits out of the way first:

Elves are super cool.

Nazgûl are super terrifying and cool.

Second breakfast.  

Elvish is mega cool.

Legolas.

Gandalf is an other-wordly sort of cool.

This may consist of 2 blog posts, one for the books and one for the movies - Cause I've an awful lot to say about both of them and it'd be really long if I tried to contain all my feelings to one blog post. So I'll start with the books.

I read the Lord of the Rings when I was about 7/8 - My dad gave it to me as a challenge to read. Possibly the worst decision he ever made because it took me about a year and I spent most of that time asking him what different words meant. It's an extremely wordy book. Tolkien's style of writing is phenomenally indepth and a good portion of the book is dedicated towards world-building. So, whilst I read it and enjoyed the parts of it that I understood it wasn't until I went back later on in life and re-read it that I really came to love Middle-Earth.

I cannot praise Tolkien enough for the dedication and sheer craft that went into the writing of that book and the writing of all the books surrounding it. He didn't just write a fantasy novel, he built a whole world consisting of different languages, races, and histories. Tolkien called it 'secondary creation' or 'sub creation'. It's this idea that the writer is creating a world that has its own internal consistency and a complete life of its own. He believed that the tales should have several dimensions: geography, characters, languages, timeline, and that they all should be interdependent. The scenery set should be capable of sustaining the events/characters that interact with it and thus, as a result, it adds an element of realism to the story that draws the reader in and has them invested whole-heartedly in Middle-Earth.

The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the lore. One thing I love is that he spent his whole life building this universe - He didn't go off and decide to develop a new one and write a whole different story. He was constantly building on to what he'd already written and developing the world all by himself, filling books with lore and history (The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Beren and Luthien - To name a few). He created languages, he wrote songs and poems specific to different races, he developed histories for all the races - The amount of dedication to the world is incredible and it's probably one of the main reasons I love LOTR so much. You can see the imagination and work that went into it and you're never lost for something to read because he wrote so much.

Another thing I love is the language. Tolkien knew the impact that language can have and he used it to his advantage. He was an expert in the history of English and the language of the Rohirrim (Rohirric) is based on old English. He created two separate but related Elvish languages and gave them a history. Fred Hoyt is a linguistics researcher who teaches Elvish (What a hero) and he said that "They are invented languages but they are completely logical and they're linguistically sound," which I think is a great way to put it. These languages are made up but when you hear/read them they seem completely real. They make sense.

I'm starting to lose the run of myself so I'm gonna try be more concise and finish this up. There's so much I could praise such as the characters, the development of the story, the symbolism, the myths - But I won't. I'm trying to just pinpoint the biggest reasons that I get so emotional about a book.

I love stories with an underdog in it. I love stories that don't hold faith in the little guy (Shoutout to my main man Steve Rogers) which then get turned on their head and are proved completely wrong.

Hobbits <3

“And here he was, a little halfling from the Shire, a simple hobbit of the quiet countryside, expected to find a way where the great ones could not go, or dared not go. It was an evil fate.”

Frodo and Sam manage to trek their way across Middle-Earth, without help for the majority of it, and pull off something that no-one really thought they'd manage. Even Gandalf, their biggest fan, was a bit shocked when he realised they were still alive. I just love it. I love that it was the unassuming hobbits that saved Middle-Earth and all they wanted to do after that was go home to live out their days in peace. They didn't want glory, they didn't want fame, they just wanted to help. I feel like Samwise Gamgee needs the biggest shoutout here though because if it was me I probably would've left Frodo somewhere around Weathertop.