Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
We’re watching the Return of the King right now, and got to the part where Denethor is introduced. My husband asks me for the context of why Denethor is Like That, since I just finished reading the book. So I explained how Denethor has been using a Palantir for years to get information, and how Sauron has been manipulating him by only letting him see events that give him a worst possible impression of reality.
So my husband replies “Oh! So Denethor is basically just like your grandpa after he starts getting all his news from Fox.” And honestly, yeah pretty much.
Warn people before you make statements like that. I was not ready.
I just love so much that one of the first things we see Aragorn do is have a ptsd flashback, with a panic attack during their initial meeting in Bree
‘You can do as you like about my reward: take me as a guide or not. But I may say that I know all the lands between the Shire and Misty Mountains, for I have wandered the over them for many years. I am older than I look. I might prove useful. You will have to leave the open road after tonight; for the horsemen will watch it night and day. You may escape from Bree, and be allowed to go forward while the Sun is up; but you won’t go far. They will come on you in the wild, in some dark place where there is no help. Do you wish them to find you? They are terrible!’
The hobbits looked at him, and saw with surprise that his face was drawn as if in pain, and his hands clenched the arms of his chair. The room was very quiet and still, and the light seemed to have grown dim. For a while he sat with unseeing eyes as if walking in distant memory or listening to sounds in the Night far away.
‘There!’ he he cried after a moment, drawing his hand across his brow. ‘Perhaps I know more about these pursuers than you do. You fear them, but you do not fear them enough, yet.’
which is like, he is having a flashback so bad that he is feeling the pain again, he grips the chair tightly to ground himself/it’s a reaction to the adrenaline, and then disassociates hard enough that the hobbits/onlookers can see that he’s not seeing them/isn’t mentally there. he breaks himself out of it, but at that point has panicked hard enough that he has to wipe (presumably sweat off of) his brow.
and, like, yes this is what a panic attack can look like to onlookers because it is often very tight/restrained/drawn inward and while you feel like your heart is racing so fast you might die you might look like you’re just gripping your chair/yourself/the wall/your bag and your eyes are distant
and for that to happen in the second chapter of meeting Aragorn means so much to me because here is a tall, strong man with years of experience, one of the best fighters in Middle-earth, and he’s having a panic attack as one of his introductory actions
and it’s like so nice to read that after today when I had a panic attack bad enough that I had to take medication so strong that my friends go oh hmm be careful with that because no one seems to understand what is happening inside of me because it looks like that outside. I’m clinging to my own arms and staring at the wall but it feels like I’m dying again
it just means so much to me. like look at Aragorn he’s so brave and strong, right? he has ptsd flashbacks and panic attacks, and he’s still brave and strong. because breaking down doesn’t make you weak
Okay, so this would be the kind of opportunity in which me pulling on my “trauma researcher” hat and going on and on about how amazing this is using scientific texts would actually be really interesting to other fans and not just me BUT instead… I’m exhausted and my brain is dead-tired, and so all I can do is add a screenshot of what I already screamed in the comments because @starwrought blew my damn mind and, especially after a recent comment on one of my fics, I just feel SO VALIDATED that this is in the source material
There is some trauma in Moria as well: ‘I too once passed the Dimrill Gate,’ said Aragorn quietly; ‘but though I also came out again, the memory is very evil. I do not wish to enter Moria a second time.’
Tolkien was in the trenches in WW1, he knows full well that the brave experienced soldiers would have more than their share of evil memories to contend with on dark nights, I think this goes hand in hand with the central point of the book, that heroism comes not from battle or some grand victory but from quietly determined compassion and just doing what must be done because someone has to.
this is really well put and exactly why ‘well Aragorn (or any of the other heroes/soldiers) were brave and strong and therefore never had any weakness, never were deeply hurt by the sacrifices they made to protect others,’ and ‘Frodo was weak and failed because he was too deeply hurt to destroy the Ring and continue life in Middle-earth’ are such hurtful sentiments.
Because the strength of the world does come from continuing to do what is right, even if it feels like that will lead nowhere or is hopeless.
Frodo does all that he was able to, physically as well as mentally, and he couldn’t save the world alone because no one can
Every story of every hero comes back to love and that love being enough to keep going, even if it seems hopeless
No one makes it out of any of the battles completely unscarred, either physically or mentally, and it is realistic in a way that hurts because of how human it is. How the heroes aren’t brave because they never cry, never weep openly, never despair, never curse their fate, never say I wish this hadn’t happened to me, never break down, never face fears, never are defeated, but because they keep going for the love of the world, for the love of their friends. All of it is for love
And yes I think Tolkien’s experience in World War I really shaped that perspective because he saw people break down, because he lost all h is friends, because he didn’t write that bravery is never screaming out in pain because bravery can be breaking down and then needing someone else to help put you back together
Bravery can be continuing to live even if you know you’ll never be fully healed
And I don’t see that enough in literature, in movies, in shows. The definition of bravery keeps circling back to ‘and they were beaten and tortured but they never broke, never cried out, never sobbed’ and ‘then his wife died and he shed a single tear before he went to inflict violence in a Strong Manly Brave Way’
So when you read something else where the pain is too much to bear sometimes for even the bravest of the heroes and where you don’t have to do everything alone because there are people around the world doing what good must be done no matter how small it might be, it stays with you forever
[ID: tweet by Labour Accelerationists reading, “Watching LOTR on a dodgy website and they’ve replaced Gondor with Gender in the subtitles lol”. Attached are four screenshots from the movie featuring their classic lines subtitled as, “The rule of Gender is mine and no others’,” “None but the king of Gender may command me,” “Gender calls for aid,” and “This will be the end of Gender as we know it”.]
nothing but facts. his anger is absolutely justified
For the people who aren’t quite getting it, here’s a map (I have one framed up)
[image ID: 2 close ups of drawn map of Middle Earth, the second one with Grey Havens, the Shire, Old Forest and Bree marked out in yellow. They lie in a straight line from west to east]
[image ID: 2 close ups of drawn map of Middle Earth, the second one with Rohan, mountains, and Gondor marked out in yellow. The mountains (really the White Mountains) separate almost all of Rohan from Gondor and thus will need at least 3 days to cross]
I mentioned this in a comment, but it occurred to me that I should tell the whole story about how the tall blond elves were discovered.
About 15-20 years ago our local science fiction club had a dinner meeting with some guests – makeup artists and special effects artists who had worked on the Lord of the Rings movies. One man, I remember, made a huge number of furry hobbit feet (almost like slippers) because the actors generally wore them out in a day or two of hiking on rocks or through the woods. Another specialized in elven pointed ears, and talked about how they had to make sure they didn’t pinch the actors.
I don’t remember which of the visitors told this story:
Viggo Mortenson was serious about wanting to really embody Strider, who had lived out in the borderlands and in the wild for decades. And he wanted to look *authentic*. So he wore his costume, including cloak and leather garb, all the time, not just on the set. He wanted it to have that ‘lived-in’ feeling. There were some great pubs in Queenstown, where much of the movie was being shot, and he and Sala Baker, who played the very largest of the Uruk-Hai (the one that killed Boromir and that Aragorn killed) used to hang out together in the pubs.
You have to remember, this was before many of the computer special effects were being used. When there were crowd scenes, they weren’t doing the now-familiar bit of having ten real people and multiplying them on computer with tweaks. They had crowds.
It’s been a custom for a long time in New Zealand to ask local people to be in movies and TV shows as extras. One of my cousins was in an episode of Xena, back when; all you had to do was go to where they were filming and see if they needed someone, and they’d take you in, put you in costume, and there you’d be on film. They were doing that in Queenstown too.
So there’s Viggo and Sala in their favorite pub, hanging out, when a crowd of tall blond guys show up to get a drink. Apparently the two of them took one look at the newcomers, said “Elves!” to each other, and went up to the guys to say, “Hey, would you like to be in a movie? You’re perfect for this one or two scenes.”
And they said yes.
So that is how the Swedish soccer team marched into Helms Deep as Elven archers, immortalized in The Two Towers.
[I was in Christchurch during part of the filming, and I’d made plans to go to Queenstown, but for the only time in the entire several years of filming there was a mudslide across the train tracks between Christchurch and Queenstown that took a couple of days to clear, so I had to cancel and went elsewhere for the rest of my time in New Zealand..]
Bilbo was declared dead while he was away in the Hobbit (and had to do a bunch of paperwork to get declared alive again) but there’s no indication he was formally declared dead after leaving the Shire, even though most people assumed he had died.
Therefore I posit: having a missing person declared dead in the Shire requires the consent of their next of kin. Whoever Bilbo’s next of kin was at the time of the Hobbit (possibly Otho? I’m not sure) had him declared dead at the first opportunity but Frodo refused to ever do it.
Frodo had anxious hobbit bureaucrats knocking on his door every couple of years like ‘Mr Baggins… blease… it’s been 10 years… he was eleventy-one… can we fill out his death certificate yet’ and Frodo was like ‘absolutely not’.
Early on he genuinely couldn’t bring himself too but after a while it was more that he enjoyed irritating the local magistrate’s office than anything else.
I raise you: the hobbitish bureaucracy has no means to re-declare someone dead. They had no precedent to declare someone who was once-dead dead again. They would need the Thain, the Mayor, and the Master of Buckland to agree to changing the statute, and since the Thain and the Master are too amused by the whole henclucking that they haven’t gotten round to it just yet.
I’m upping the stakes with: last time Bilbo was declared dead when he was, in fact, not dead, they removed the law stating that you can have someone declared dead without a body, so when Bilbo left (happily aware of this legal loophole and snickering) he could never become legally dead again.
I am loving the implication here that Bilbo can literally never die in the eyes of the law. He’d love that.
a hobbit parent telling their kids the story of Mad Baggins and being like “thanks to a loophole in hobbit law he’s technically still alive today”
a hobbit child misinterprets this and lies awake at night worrying that Mad Baggins is still out there and will appear in their room without warning
Alternatively: the laws for declaring somebody dead if they’re missing for long enough are still in place, but the magistrates are just refusing to enforce them in this particular case.
After all, last time they declared Bilbo Baggins dead— which involved filling out all the paperwork necessary to declare somebody dead without a body— he had the rudeness to show up again, forcing them to do a lot more paperwork, and this time with an indignant Bilbo having a go at them while they did it.
As a result, the magistrates have decided that they’re not going to declare Bilbo Baggins dead a second time unless they have a body, a coroners reprt explaining the cause of death, and a three day wake to make sure that he doesn’t get up and walk away again.
Centuries later, hobbit parents tell their children that Mad Baggins is forever gone from the shire— at least until the day when somebody is stupid enough to declare him legally dead, at which point legend states that he will immediately come marching back, demanding an explanation.
i love the implication that its considered rude in hobbit society to show up alive after being declared dead
Two hundred years later the inheritance drama over Bag End is still going strong. The Sackville-Bagginses insist that even if Bilbo isn’t legally dead, he’s clearly abandoned the property; those responsible for overseeing the affair respond by pointing out that, as it’s well known that Bilbo Baggins could turn invisible, they can’t be sure he’s not still in the building.
Of everything Aragorn does in these books, nothing proves he was raised in Rivendell like accepting Merry’s apology, kissing him and going out without ever saying “I was kidding”
I just know in my heart Rivendell elves are just constantly leaving it up to bystanders to tell guests that they’ve just been pranked in a melodramatic and Cool™️ way
