I can't imagine what would make you think that the Tridentarius twins are creepy...

So not only did I do the normal pre-event photoshoot at Secret Con Prison, I also went out with @ghostcat_cosplays (they/them) and @magpieclaws.cosplay (they/them) after the event too to do this shoot as Ianthe and Coronabeth Tridentarius in the hotel and out at the ruins of Greyfriars in Gloucester itself!

Inspired by my coworkers being baffled at me getting up 2 and a half hours before I come in despite living 20 mins away

(Add reasons why you do or don't get up early in the tags if ya want)

☠️Oh I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies/This is the dawning of the rest of our lives/On holiday!☠️

(Holiday - Green Day)

Here’s Ivan as a diamond stingray, I think him and Fang are neat and I wanna see more of them next season

Throwing this OFMD wip into the void cuz it's a year old but I do still like how it was looking

Sketching through the stress. We're all poison-trained in this house, aren't we? In Spanish Jackie we trust

commander--wake/beyonces_fiancee's top ten TLT fic rec list!

these are my top ten bestest fics thus far in no particular order. criteria to get on this list: I think about them all the time. my mouth was hanging open when I finished them for the first time. I recommend anyone read them, especially you, YES YOU. some of these are deservedly popular/widely read and some are criminally neglected.

I have a taste for dark fic, perverted kinky shit, intimate character studies, slow-burn tragedies, beautiful prose, and good sex writing. assume all of these are bittersweetly tragic at a minimum, fucked-up at a maximum.

the soul that seeketh him by bittybelle

the 86 escapes of gideon nav by gimmeshellder (@jeejyboard on tumblr)

pretty when you cry by Elldritch (@elldritch-horror on tumblr)

and my burdens are light by elijah_was_a_prophet

there is a light that never goes out by reconquer (@sophelstien on tumblr)

feeling good was easy when he sang the blues by forjodssake

more than the mountain by Raxheim (@theriverbeyond on tumblr)

so I open the window to hear sounds of people by oriflamme (@sunderedstar on tumblr)

lux perpetua luceat eis by skvadern

all that singing at the fingers by dire_quail (@direquail on tumblr)

(honorable mention: three fics on my "marked for later" list that I'm hyped to read!)

at the last trumpet by liesmyth (@liesmyth on tumblr)

and rising in the dead time of night by a_big_apple (@a-big-apple on tumblr)

beauty, blossom, die by rnanqo (@rnanqo on tumblr)

happy reading!

sometimes a family is you and your nineteen husbands

11/05/2024 Samba Schutte BTS

Source: Samba's Twitter

Transcription:

Jackie: What are your credentials?

Swede: Well I'm pretty strong

Jackie: Mmm, strong yeah, you would have to be strong.

Swede: I like to work with my hands, I like to work with wood.

Jackie: Ooooooo Wood! Well you know, that's what my hands made out of. Yeah.

Swede: That also looks strong.

Jackie: Yeah, you like that do ya?

Swede: Yeah looks very fierce.

Jackie: Fierce, yeah that's what they call my hand, that's what I call it, that's the big name, Fierce - You wanna touch it?

Swede: Okay

Jackie: Hahahaha, Oooo that feels good there baby

Swede: That feels good for me too

Jackie: Wooo we gonna get along goddamn it.

Stede: Ha!

---

David Jenkins: CUT that was great!

hello hello i just had an absolute BRAINWAVE abt stizzy/steddyhands

basically, izzy was stedes proper gay awakening, not ed

so we're all agreed that pirating is an allegory for homosexuaity, right? stede is unconfortable in a married state as he says, he's uncomfortable being married to a woman and having to portray a proper heterosexual marriage. hes distinctly uncomfortable, and so he runs off to sea to persue a life of piracy, a life of freedom where he can do what he wants and be with whoever he pleases. as jack says, "anything goes at sea."

and finally, at sea, he does seem better. he looks happier, and his demeanour is insanely positive and optemistic. hes clearly a tea cup half full kind of guy. but as genuinely glad as he away from his family and out on the sea, doing what he wants, a lot of his happy attitude is... not quite fake, but definateky forced to be more than he really feels, because its not turning out quite like he'd hoped and trying remain positive.

up until the end of episode 2, stede is not having a very good time pirating. his crew dont respect him or share his values and have almost mutinied, he's terrible at fighting, he's run aground his own ship, lost hostages, and hes accidentally killed a man.

episode 2 is the first time that not only do we stede truly, genuinely enjoy pirating and being good at it, his ruse when negotiating hostages goes off without a hitch even against one of the most notirious pirates out there - which is of course, izzy. izzy brings that out. fucking with izzy is his first true and proper introduction to piracy. hes not fighting the english, hes not dealing with random people on an island, or poor fisherman on a tiny schooner, he's going up against - and winning against! - an actual pirate.

and he kind of enjoys it.

until then, piracy just hasnt been clicking, but it isnt meeting ed that turns it all around for him. izzy was stedes first taste of true pirating. sure ed teaches him the ins and outs, and ed is the one that stede falls for, but something clicks with stede when he meets and confronts izzy. izzy casts that first spark, that lets stede know he's on the right track and that this is the life for him, a pirates life, a life at sea - where anything goes.

Presenting, the Complete Locked Tomb Timeline

Because I am a horrible nerd, I’ve compiled a complete timeline of every known event in the locked tomb trilogy so far. This is roughly divided into three parts:

Please note that this contains SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING including bonus content like The Mysterious Study of Dr. Sex.

The timeline itself is below the cut because otherwise this post would eat people’s dashes for breakfast.

Keep reading

Frodo Laid a Geas (and other invisible magic)

This was so obvious when I realized it, but I think most people miss it, because we’re so desensitized by D&D-style magic with immediate, visibly, flashy effects, rather than more subtle and invisible forces of magic. When Gollum attacks Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom, Frodo has the chance to kill him, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says:

Frodo: Go! And if you ever lay hands on me again, you yourself shall be cast into the Fire!

Frodo’s not just talking shit here. He is literally, magically laying a curse. He’s holding the One Ring in his hands as he says it; even Sam, with no magic powers of his own, can sense that some powerful mojo is being laid down. Frodo put a curse on Gollum: if you try to take the Ring again, you’ll be cast into the Fire.

Five pages later, Gollum tries to take the Ring again. And that’s exactly what happens. Frodo’s geas takes effect and Gollum eats lava.

On further reflection:

All the other people in the franchise who were offered the Ring declined to take it because they were wise enough to know that if they used its power – and the pressure to do so would be too great – they would be subject to its corruption.

Frodo uses the power of the Ring to lay a geas, and then five minutes later at the volcano’s edge, succumbs to its corruption. The Ring has gotten to him and he can no longer give it up. Because he used its power.

On further further reflection: I’d have to read the section again, but I recall that after throwing Gollum off and laying the geas, Sam observes that Frodo seems suddenly filled with energy again when previously he had been close to dead of fatigue. He hikes up the mountain so fast he leaves Sam behind – and doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s left him behind. 

Could he have been drawing on the Ring’s power at this point in the story? At this point in the story we’re relying on Sam’s narration, and Sam doesn’t know what’s going on in Frodo’s head, so it’s hard to say for sure. Having used it once, after spending so long holding out against it, was that the breach in the dam?

Which means that the moment that Frodo succumbs to temptation is not the moment at the volcano – it was already too late by then. The moment he is taken by temptation was when he used the power of the Ring to repel Gollum.

If so, this ties in neatly with discussions I’ve seen about how Tolkien subscribes to a “not even once” view of good and evil – that in many other works it’s acceptable to do a small evil in service of a greater good, but in Lord of the Rings that always  fails.

Re-reading Fellowship of the Rings, and I got to this passage in Lorien:

In other words:

Frodo asks Galadriel, herself carrying a Ring of Power, “Could I, hypothetically, use the power of the One Ring to do something magical aside from turning invisible?” and Galadriel replies, “Yes, hypothetically, you totally could, assuming the magic you want to do involves laying compulsions on others, but I strongly recommend against it, because it would fuck up your brain.”

This was in the first book. At the end of the third book Frodo uses the Ring to fuck Gollum up, forcing him to throw himself into lava if he disobeys Frodo’s commands.

Talk about a chekov’s gun.

Got to this point in my re-read and uh. This was a lot  less subtle than I remembered it.

…

Yeah.

Interestingly, I feel that there is another layer to this, and that is Frodo’s mercy (mirroring “the pity of Bilbo” which Gandalf said would prove significant) at play, tangled up in his use of the Ring and the chain of events that would play out.

Frodo is sparing Gollum’s life here, and shaping that into his curse. He is only cursing Gollum—can only curse Gollum—as an effect of this mercy; if Gollum were dead, he could not be cursed by Frodo or the Ring; his survival makes the curse possible and serves as payment for the curse: they are in effect making a bargain here, wherein Golllum’s life and his sentence of dying in the Fires of Doom should he take the Ring again are as one, a package deal, which Gollum “accepts” by retreating with his life.

Then, once Frodo comes to Mount Doom, he cannot cast the ring into the fires; the Ring has him in thrall, since he has used it. Now into the picture again comes Gollum, whose greed for the Ring has surpassed his love of his own life—even having been cursed with death should he touch it again, he craves it and demands it for himself, taking it from Frodo by force.

Thus we see the Ring’s power divided against itself—it has defeated both Frodo and Gollum, and its defeat of Gollum inspires Gollum to fight Frodo for it, invoking the curse. And thus Sauron, who has it, now, by virtue of both its erstwhile Bearers falling under its (and therefore its Lord’s) sway, is cheated out of it by the effects of Frodo’s act of mercy.

Frodo spared Gollum, and used the Ring’s power to set a curse, and when Frodo faltered, it was Gollum whom he spared who took the Ring from him and invoked that curse, falling into the Fires of Doom and, due to the same greed that defeated Frodo, taking the Ring with him.

If there had been no sparing Gollum, there would have been no curse, and Frodo would have had the task Isildur failed at—destroying the (beautiful, useful, lovely ring)—set before him alone, and he may have succeeded, or he may have failed, or he may have tarried too long in the struggle for Sauron’s destruction to come in a timely fashion, or the resolution and the Ring’s destruction may have hurt him far beyond the loss of a finger.

Instead, there was Gollum, in thrall to Sauron yet doomed by Frodo, to take from Frodo both the Ring and the burden of destroying it. Frodo, in his mercy-tinged use of the Ring, effectively shifted the impetus behind the Ring’s destruction from himself to the doom laid on Gollum—and Sauron’s hold over Gollum made it a near certainty that the doom would come to pass: Gollum would die, and not surrender the Ring, and thus the Ring would fall with him into the fires of Mount Doom.

And Frodo … like Indiana Jones in the Chapel of the Holy Grail, could avoid falling himself by either a willingness to let go, or the presence of a loved one to hold him back. Or, y’know, Gollum deciding to bite rather than just grab. A few more options here.

This really hearkens back to old Celtic mythological geasa, and how so often someone dies because of a forced contradiction of a geas’ rules. A geas essentially allows for an easy setup of a no-win situation.

The warrior-poet-king Cú Chulainn was, eventually, brought down because he was bound by a geas. His geas was to never eat the flesh of a dog (I believe by Culann, but I’m not sure on that). Well, he got served some dog stew. He couldn’t eat it, because it was dog. But he couldn’t not eat it, because that would be extremely rude, according to cultural custom at the time - a custom so strong, it might as well have been a geas on its own. Either way, he was breaking a geas’ rules, and this magically weakens him before an upcoming battle. He - and his charioteer and horse - are slain

So, yeah, this all tracks with how geasa work. Gollum had such a strong desire for the ring that he, quite literally, had no choice but to attack Frodo for it. But, in doing so, he contradicts the geas Frodo laid upon him, and so falls.

Just came across this while reading The Two Towers:

[Frodo to Gollum]: “’I did not mean the danger that we all share,’ said Frodo. ‘I mean a danger to yourself alone. You swore a promise by what you call the Precious. Remember that! It will hold you to it; but it will seek a way to twist it to your own undoing. Already you are being twisted. You revealed yourself to me just now, foolishly. Give it back to Smeagol you said. Do not say that again! Do not let that thought grow in you! You will never get it back. But the desire of it may betray you to a bitter end. You will never get it back. In the last need, Smeagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command. So have a care, Smeagol!’”

#oh I am COMPELLED by this

yeah so was gollum

Yay! :) Galaxycon San Jose 2024 recording! :) <3

1x01

Oluwande: me and Jim, we don't do this because we like it. we do it because we don't have any other choice.

Stede: oh I hear that. here we are, just the whole band of us just killing, and having to kill, and having to – k- to kill–

+

1x06 Ed: to be honest, I haven't killed another man since

(lies, but an ideal, because)

1x10 Ed: killing Lucius being the signal that He's Really Going To Be Storybook Blackbeard This Time

+

1x10 Stede's bloodcurdling scream when Chauncey dies horribly in the forest at his feet

1x10 Stede rowing back to make amends to Ed and take him away from all this

=

this all kind of adds up to 2x08, Ed retires

but it also adds up to "piracy is not great and tarnishes your soul" which is a weird way to conduct your pirate show, undermining its premise. as a genre show it's cool and fun becaude you like the cool and fun genre of swashbuckling! the silly swashbuckling shit is everywhere, and violence ranges from the somber/chilling mentioned above to the absolutely cartoonish (and, delightfully, both at once: 1x10 Lucius shoe pop death rattle)

anyway it means there's a very fine line to tread about "what is piracy" and "what does it do to your soul" in this universe and series end *does* need to answer these questions or at least address them both

and obviously, besides Ed's retirement (fair, foreshadowed), there's still the question of "what did Stede get out of this whole adventure" and "what the FUCK was Izzy's speech supposed to be about in the tavern then"