what TLJ probably meant: poor Kylo Ren look he had a reason to come into the Dark Side his own uncle tried to kill him :’((( it’s also all Luke’s fault, blame him, he gave up on Ben so easy!!
what I, an intellectual, learned form TLJ: if Luke “there is still good in you dad Vader” Skywalker takes one look at Ben Solo’s mind and thinks this one is irredeemable then well, shit, I absolutely believe him
Kylo: luke tried to kill me when I was just a child!
What Rey Should have Said: And if he had then you wouldn’t have DESTROYED MULTIPLE PLANETS
Kylo: …..
Rey: YOU SLAUGHTERED BILLIONS
Kylo: …….
Rey: YOU MURDERED CHILDREN WITH A LASER SWORD
Kylo: okay but Luke…tried to kill me…
Rey: Because he saw your future where you murdered children and blew up planets
Kylo: Okay but if I WAS DEAD that would be BAD for me personally
Rey: But good for the billions of innocent people who you brutally murdered
Kylo: But…bad…for me…
So
TRAGIC
Rey: I don’t think you understand how this “Sad Backstory” thing works
Not just that, but literally IMMEDIATELY after almost getting killed by Luke he goes and kills all of the other jedi-in-training who won’t follow him. His first action after almost being killed, because Luke thought he was going to be evil, was murdering people.
I still can’t find the logical connection here like why would that be your second step
A not-evil person would have like…called their parents or…the space cops. Not murdered everyone else in his school.
man, even a slightly smarter evil person would have called their parents or the space cops or something
like if you’re trying to neutralize a good guy, getting him thrown in space-jail for trying to murder his nephew is a pretty good tactic! causing a rift between Luke and Leia is a great plan! Fuck, you could maybe even set yourself up as the new head of the Jedi Order – or your shadowy puppet master could. Or cause a schism, Jedi love schisms.
But no instead you went off and murdered a bunch of children, and now your mom is not mad, just disappointed and also marshalling an army to defeat you, and your uncle is on a depression bender but crucially is not dead and thus also available to kick your pasty Sith ass. Leia’s got a handsome new son, your dad’s out there somewhere probably having adventures, and all your best ideas are cribbed from the Galactic Empire, which, sure it was in power for about 25 years, but they lost.
The Sith Lords of old are fucking shaking their heads at Kylo “Sith-Lite” Ren and probably also what’s-is-face, the guy in the gold robe. Like, somewhere in the afterlife, Palpatine is absolutely aghast that these are his successors. They couldn’t manipulate their way out of a paper bag!
do you think after Ron and Hermione got out of the trapdoor and raised the alarm and were being patched up in the hospital wing
do you think they were given the most royal proud mama smackdown by McGonagall like “ how DARE you infiltrate a death maze you are ELEVEN and miss granger how on earth did you solve my chessboard i”
and hermione interjected like “oh professor it wasn’t me. i’m useless at chess. it was ron.”
and McGonagall turned to look at Ron Weasley in total amazement at this 11 yr old kid who had been pretty ordinary in all her classes but had apparently beaten her in death chess and he just shrugged like “rookie mistakes, professor. you made some rookie mistakes.”
One of JRR Tolkien’s ideas for Aragorn’s backstory in The Lord of the Rings was that he was actually just three or four generations removed from Isildur himself.
Then how did he survive for the thousands of years between the Second and Third Ages?
The story goes something like this:
Many hundreds of years ago, young Aragorn fell in love with an Elven woman, who exactly resembled Lúthien Tinúviel in shape and outward form.
She called herself Arwen Undómiel, the Evenstar.
He fell for her, and romanced her, and gave himself to her; together they lived in her kingdom, where her magic and her power slowed Time to a crawl for them, while hundreds and hundreds of years passed in the world outside.
At first, the Elven-maid seemed every inch a queen: beautiful, graceful, soft-spoken, meek, and with the manners befitting an upbringing in Valimar long ago.
But over time, Aragorn came to realize that his beloved had a hard, greedy, grasping side, even a cruel streak, which more and more showed itself in unexpected flashes.
Worse, she was not who she seemed to be.
Eventually Aragorn pieced together the secret.
His bride was Sauron, divested of her usual male disguise.
Greatly weakened by the loss of the Ring, Sauron yet maintained strength enough to craft a prison for the heir of Isildur: a false realm of hollow bliss and sterile delights, where the one she thought was the greatest threat to her power could languish in eternity.
A part of herself, wearing a female aspect – the gender she had hidden long ago in the deeps of time, to gain entrance as an apprentice to the smithies of Aule – remained in this pocket world, as Aragorn’s bride: a plaything to keep his attention from the bars of his gilded cage.
But eventually, Aragorn figured it out.
Eventually, Aragorn escaped.
Thousands of years had gone by in the world outside since Aragorn had been ensnared by Sauron.
Now, emerging from long captivity in a magical sub-realm, he studied the world around him, and learned what had changed and what had endured.
He met Gandalf, and learned much from the Grey Pilgrim, and taught him some things of his own; and, in search of information, he pursued and captured Gollum, who had possessed, and been possessed by, the One Ring for so many centuries.
And, shortly before his ascent to the throne of the reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor, he met his future bride: Eowyn Elfsheen, sister-daughter of Théoden, King of Rohan.
(PS: Christopher Tolkien or another amanuensis may have written this story down as part of the Secret Library Archive Project.)
I ship this now.
My reaction:
“Aragorn’s backstory“ Oh, ok, is this gonna be what the whole Amazon thing is going to be about?
“He meets Arwen“ Yeah ok
“She seemed evil” um, ok…that’s new.
“She was Sauron“
so you’re telling me Sauron was getting ploughed by Aragorn for thousands of years “as part of a fiendish plan to waylay the heir of Isildur”, no other reason, Sauron just lying back and thinking of Mordor, hating every second of it, is that what you’re telling me
did everyone just forget about when bill was attacked by greyback and he had a ton of scars and mrs weasley was like “oh better call off the wedding” and fleur was like “why the fuck would we do that” and mrs weasley basically said that fleur only liked bill bc of his looks and fleur totally told her and was like “i love him no matter what he looks like” and she turned out to be really cool
I feel like fleur is underrated
what she said exactly was “i’m beautiful enough for both of us” and honestly when has anything been more iconic
Fleur is constantly shit on bc she’s pretty. Esp by Hermione and even Ginny. Fleur was a Triwizard Champion, deemed the most worthy in her entire school. She’s not stupid, and when Harry reminds the girls that she’s not an idiot, both Hermione and Ginny accuse Harry of only sticking up for her because he thinks she’s hot.
This smacks uncomfortably of the “girls bring catty and hating the pretty girl” bullshit.
Fleur never forgot that Harry saved her sister when he did not have to, and even at the time, she outright stated that she “deserved zero” points for allowong the Grindylows to stop her.
Fleur is part veela… It is literally in her blood. She can’t turn it off. And blaming her for guys being attracted to her is way to similar to “she’s asking for it”.
Mrs. Weasley, who is known in the fandom for taking in strays and loving everyone So Much, actively hated Fleur for over a year… With absolutely no concrete reason to do so. Ginny says that the only reason Bill likes Fleur is that “he’s always gone in for a bit of adventure”. And imho this is one of the cattiest, most insulting things ever said in the entire series.
Fleur is the Elle Woods of the wizarding world. She has had to fight against her looks every step of the way, to prove that she belongs at the table. That she isn’t just a pretty face. That she deserves the attention for her deeds or her words or her heart, not just because of her face. To not be objectified by everyone she meets, to make friends who care about her for who she is, not what she looks like.
I maintain this is why she chose Bill. He treats her like a person. And why she adores Harry. Harry has always treated her like a person too. He blushes when she kisses him, but he’s a 16yo boy, he blushes at everything. And when they first met, he was nervous around her… but he was also nervous around Cedric and Krum. It was because they were older than him, not because of a crush. Harry never once thought about asking her to the Ball.
At the Burrow, Harry doesn’t stare at her or clamor for her to kiss him, or get distracted and drop things because she’s nearby. That’s why she likes him. Nearly everyone else in that house is awful to her. It’s really not a surprise that she’s a bit snotty back.
Yes. Fleur is hella underappreciated, and I have Feelings about it.
Wonder Woman greeting T’Challa with the Wakanda Forever salute, but forgetting what happens when she clashes her gauntlets like that
Accidentally blowing him through three walls, a car, and M’Baku
He is, of course, completely fine, but that was certainly not the greeting he expected from the suddenly VERY apologetic Princess
Bonus: T’Challa runs back to Diana and does the salute again, channeling the power from the improved kinetic absorption and redistribution on his suit, and launches Diana straight into the sky. They laugh about it later.
This is the wholesome content I signed up for
Further bonus: during a later team-up, the villain has T’Challa by the throat and is threatening to snap his neck if Diana comes any closer. She hesitates, at which point the villain laughs and asks if T’Challa has any last words. Of course he does:
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo what’d he say
Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish
i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.
english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max.
frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.
so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.
so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.
to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather
was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a
somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.
so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his
upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his
Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice
from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really
obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!
considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
…it’s
also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though
with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.
which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.
this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!
Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.
Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*
Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now
Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?
Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?
Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.
Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.
Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y’all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.
Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man
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