Anghraine

Normally I just vaguely describe text posts I reblogged on a certain date, but this one really cannot be paraphrased:



[Text: Tumblr user problempippin posted on 15 Jan 2019 that "pippin is buff and the reason why boromir and other men of gondor describe him as childlike is bc in gondor all children are fucking shredded"]

I added:

#finally quality gondor content

[ETA 5/24/2024: this was mostly but not entirely tongue-in-cheek on my part! Tolkien is pretty clear that even Third Age Dúnedain are bigger and stronger than other people, including Elves, and their standards of physical strength are pretty distinct. I could believe that kids in Minas Tirith are shredded :P]

I’m not a proactive person at all, so getting all my class’s materials for the week posted before 7:30 AM on Monday feels like a major accomplishment.

I’ve barely started “The Perils of Peekablue,” but Mermista looks great.

Tagged: #i mean they all do (scorpia!!!) #but mermista is next level fabulous

I know it’s a 15-y-o game that most people don’t care about any more, but I am so close to getting Legendary Defender of Ascalon in Prophecies for the first time ever. !!!!!

Tagged: #and i almost clicked the wrong person and left after ALL THIS #but anyway #i decided to start going for it in ... may i think #and it takes so much! esp when you don't have the time for serious grinding! but i've never done it and i have so many ascalon feelings ... #and now i only have one level to go if i can just manage one more

My birthday is next month and this year, I’m struggling to wrap my brain around it. Like … it’s just marking another year of life (though after the last year, that isn’t nothing) but it’s also WOW. EVERY YEAR I GET OLDER. WHAT A CONCEPT.

Tagged: #also i saw the post about how the ides of march is a sort of tumblr holiday that no one else cares about and was like #excuse YOU i've been on the receiving end of ides of march jokes for my whole life #and rightly so! #personally i like to imagine that the doctor handed baby!me to my mother and was like... BEWARE

My actual, serious opinion on why Darcy thinks living 50 miles from your family is relatively close while Elizabeth thinks it's far:

Darcy is so profoundly out-of-touch due to wealth, property, influence, his families' status, etc that he truly does not comprehend the complications and expenses of travel for normal people even among the landowning classes. Like, there's all this ink spilled on his status as a gentleman/landowning commoner and what really differentiates a gentleman like Mr Bennet from one like Darcy if anything, and what that would mean in their social context, blah blah. But in pragmatic terms, Darcy's lifestyle and his interests as a landowner have far more in common with the nobility to which he is connected than the typical lifestyles of the gentry.

Darcy talking about 50 miles of good road being nothing in terms of inconvenience and blithely ignoring the costs of either owning or hiring horses, the complications of maintaining a horse if you do own it, the complications around hiring or owning the vehicle drawn by the horse(s), how much more you'd need to pay in services if you don't own the vehicle/horses, what using that vehicle for travel would entail for the workings of the estate or your trade if your family does own it, the cost of stopping along the way, what's lost by the duration of the journey, etc etc. These are things that even fairly well-off landowners like the Bennets would have to deal with in terms of the convenience of travel on "good road" (and also clues us into the prosperity of the Gardiners). These concerns do not even occur to Darcy as problems to consider. This doesn't represent a malicious, personal callousness so much as the genuine obliviousness that arises from extreme socioeconomic inequality. These kinds of problems simply melt away in Darcy's life (read: there are people who make them melt away) and as a result, he truly does not comprehend the impact of prosaic difficulties on the feasibility of something like travel for people like the Lucases or Bennets. The only calculation of convenience that seems to be happening in his head is the effect of distance and road quality on the timing of the journey.

(I think his confusion at people who have family libraries but aren't buying books at this super important literary moment reflects this as well. Books were still quite expensive at the time. He does not appear to grasp that "always buying books" like he does is literally not an option for most people, even in the gentry. He's right about the important literary moment, but "buying things costs money" is a concept that seems not to even enter his calculus.)

My much less serious opinion on why Darcy thinks living 50 miles from your family is "a very easy distance" while Elizabeth thinks it's far:

His landowning family members don't have to think about these problems any more than he does, and if I were Lady Catherine de Bourgh's nephew, I would also consider living 50 mi away from my relatives pretty damn close.

I appreciate people going on about how a story isn’t for the squeamish (derogatory), as someone who is very definitely squeamish.

Tagged: #i get anxious about episodes of cartoons for seven-year-olds #i definitely am not equipped for ... that

Silliness over AO3 stats:

The first part of my Lucy Skywalker series (a linked series of genderbent f!Luke fics) has always been the most popular of the main series. It's less so in kudos, but definitely leads in bookmarks (the first, The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker, has 48 bookmarks [ETA 3/24/2024: now 53], while the second, The Imperial Menace, has 20 [ETA: now 24]), and The Imperial Menace has way fewer hits, too.

I guess it’s a positive that The Imperial Menace has nearly as many kudos as Adventures does: 242 for The Imperial Menace [ETA: now 288] to Adventures’s 260 [ETA: now 323]) despite significantly fewer people reading it at all. But still. And I do think Adventures is much more flawed in some ways (The Imperial Menace has its problems, but different ones that bother me less). So I’ve been low-grade HMPH even though I hated writing 85% of The Imperial Menace.

BUUUUT

After years and years, I got a burst of inspiration to go back to working on the third fic in the main series, The Jedi and the Sith Lord, in early 2020 (which feels like a lifetime ago and, also, yesterday). And I’m a lot happier with it than with any of the other Lucy fics, and wrote a ton of it all at once (I think it had two chapters when I went back and it now has 20).

AND!!!! It has way more hits than The Imperial Menace even though it’s also a sequel (maybe because it has a clearer if very short summary—“Lucy emerges from carbon-freeze as the captive of Darth Vader”—and also splits off from canon in a much more significant way). But it has a bunch more kudos than Adventures (325 [ETA: now 405]), more bookmarks, probably three times as many comments [ETA: now 289 to 51, though both are affected by my responses], and it’s like … FOR ONCE the thing that I personally like best and worked hardest on is also the one that readers like the most! Yay! :D

…like I said, silliness, but it is nice to get that alignment happening on a fic that I care a lot about.

Tagged: #also the collective lucyverse fics are now over 100k thanks to 'the jedi and the sith lord's 67k(!) #which i'm ridiculously happy about