Something About Carrying Burdens And Protecting Oneself 

DSMP ANALYSISBLR AWARDS WINNERS!

At long last, the winners have been declared! With 57 total nomination forms and 381 total final vote submissions, here are the results! Equal congrats to all the winners, runner-ups, and nominees who didn’t make it into the final vote, your work is highly appreciated among the fans so give all yourselves a pat on the back!

Below the cut are the winners, show them some love! ( and to the winners themselves, feel free to use this as bragging rights whenever your authority is questioned ;) )

{I was unable to properly format images of the full % charts, so if you want to see a specific one just send me an ask and I’ll gladly screenshot & share it.}

Czytaj dalej

Okay, question for people smarter than me: What would c!Dream and c!Wilbur's interaction have been like in and after the scrapped lore? I'm wondering if it was maybe intended to be an earlier version of the c!Dream-c!Purpled alliance, but that would obviously play out very differently with c!Wilbur. Food for thought.

honestly i do think cdream blamed ctommy on a lot of his problems bc it has easier than see the nuance in what happened to him and his actions on exile weren't bc of obssesion with ctommy but more of a taking out his anger with him. And it's interesting how both cdream and ctommy blame each other in ruin each other lifes Instead of seeing the nuance and the other people in their lifes that contributed to that happening

this but also

Summer sketches by Daria Zarankina

now there's going to be a funny question: what rational reasons does he have for burning himself in lava? XD

there's nothing else to do obviously 🙄 it annoys the warden and getting a predictable reaction out of him is Useful :) and it's not like it does any real damage soooo. you see he's causing himself repeated pain for very well thought out reasons that he's completely thought through !! knowing how other people will react is Useful. and it shows how not fazed at all he is by pain which is also Useful. and yeah the answer is he's being very rational about it obviously even if it might look like he's not because he's showing sam that he's insane which is important to keeping up the ruse and again the pain doesn't mean anything. so yeah.

happy birthday, daydream

there’s still people who loves you

Palia by Jeremy Fenske

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

Some Greco-Roman dsmp au stuff again

Tommy: “Techno, is this the right way down to the Underworld?”

Techno: “So listen here, Theseus, did I ever tell you of the time I wrangled the drakon of the Hesperides?”

Wilbur (the butterfly): “Have you ever eaten sand? My father let me play on the beaches of Crete, once.”

And then there’s Eret with the “If it is for the prosperity of my kingdom, any sacrifice is worth the end result.”

Art by Lena Rivo