If Any Of This Could Be Accurate Or Not Tbh Im Too Sleepy To Care Rn (ha Funny Joke Rabble)

Art by 三叠色 Size

I really liked Eret’s reading of Ozymandias today so here’s a quick edit of it overtop of Sad-ist’s Ozymandias animation!

Watch the original animation here

On Dragons (in Tolkien’s World)

The metaphysics[1] of dragons in Tolkien’s world is something of a mystery due to Tolkien’s principle that evil cannot create, only corrupt. So where do dragons come from? Are they just twisted forms of some pre-existing animal? But if so, how are they intelligent and self-aware? Are they corrupted Maiar? But if so, why do they need time to age and grow, as we see with Glaurung?

My theory is that the raw materials of dragons are existing animals[2] that have been twisted, just as the raw materials for werewolves like Carcharoth are actual wolves. (Carcharoth is raised from one of the ‘regular’ werewolves and then ‘he became filled with a devouring spirit’.)

But the spirits that inhabit dragons aren’t Maiar, in my theory. The Silmarillion says that “in the domination of his servants and the inspiring of them with evil [Morgoth] spent his spirit”. I think that, once the dragons were full-grown, Morgoth was splitting off parts of his spirit and putting it into the dragons, so that each dragon is in effect a little piece of Morgoth. It would explain why he guarded them so carefully, and kept most of them until a very last resort in the War of Wrath.

And it would explain the behaviour and power of Glaurung. When he first leaves Angband, during the Long Peace, he basically just acts like an animal. In the Narn i Hîn Húrin, he’s a very different character, malicious and scheming and deadly. And he pursues the children of Húrin like it’s a personal vendetta, which is striking. The other powerful servants of Morgoth either have at least some of their own motivations and goals, like Sauron, or show no distinct personalities, like the balrogs. But Glaurung is very deliberately, and precisely, and maliciously carrying out Morgoth’s goals to destroy Húrin’s family, and he seems to take it personally and revel in it despite never having met them. He’s manipulative and deceptive and very much like what we saw from Melkor back when he was active and scheming and not hiding in Angband. Even when Glaurung’s dying, he’s more driven by finding final ways to hurt the Children of Húrin than by the fact that he’s dying. And this makes sense if the spirit that’s animating him is, in effect, part of Morgoth.

And it explains why Morgoth was so weak by the end of the War of Wrath - he’d split off so many parts of his power that he had much less left in and of himself than any of the Valar did. In all likelihood, most of the other dragons had less than Glaurung, because Morgoth had less power to use by the point that he was making the winged dragons.

It also lines up with something else Tolkien said, that parts of Morgoth’s power remained in the world even after he was cast into the Void, and that power remained particularly strongly in gold. And what is it that dragons hoard? Gold. And The Hobbit states outright that the simple fact of having been hoarded by a dragon makes gold more dangerous and corrupting, at least to people who are vulnerable to it (like Thorin, and the Master of Lake-town).

This also deals with the same kind of metaphysical problem Tolkien had with orcs: how can a sapient species be entirely and universally evil? If dragons are bits of Morgoth, if they don’t have spirits with independent origins they’re inherently evil; you can’t have a good dragon in Middle-earth.

(And another benefit of this theory is that it makes Bilbo Baggins even more of a badass in retrospect for holding his own in a conversation with Smaug.)

[1] Fun fact: this term comes from the title of the book Aristotle wrote after his Physics. It literally just meant Physics: The Sequel and we’ve made a fancy philosophical term out of it.

[2] Dinosaurs, maybe? :D

/dsmp /rp

Thinking again about how Dream's trust in other people got irrevocably torn down throughout the prison arc. How even after all the blackmailing and all the murder attempts, Dream had expected people to be fair and play by the rules. To keep their word, just like he always did.

But then Sam almost immediately deviated from the prison protocol. He isolated and starved Dream, he let a torturer in and trapped Dream's one chance of escape in the cell with him. Sapnap threatened to kill him if he ever got out. And it got to the point where Dream believed that Techno, one of his only allies, would not even come back for him.

When he was finally free, Dream decided that the only option left was to kill everyone who was against him and Punz. Otherwise, he thought the others would "force" them to revive whoever they killed. It wouldn't surprise me if he imagined that this "forcing to revive" would likely entail torture. He had already seen how far some people were willing to go for the power of revival, after all.

No longer would Dream give people the benefit of the doubt. No longer would he trust them to treat him fairly, to see him as a person. Either they sided with him, or they died.

Art by SODA ABO

No one makes Galadriel spooky enough. Like yea I get she’s the most beautiful elven maiden the world has ever seen but she’s also downright unsettling.

I bet she fuckin stares at people without blinking for like a solid five minutes and then when you finally ask her what fuck is up she tells you how you’re gonna die.

good guy, isn’t he?

Roller Jousting - Queen Joan by Johnson Ting

Art by Tomas Duchek

Art by Juluurkhan Khalgaev