How Wars Are Like Chess; How This Game Predicted The Events Leading Up To "doomsday."

irl manhunt time! (ft. a very special ender dragon)

without layout;

Thinking today about how Daedalus wasn’t c!Dream’s revenge fantasy, it was his closure fantasy.

In his heart of hearts, he was fantasizing not about destroying Sam, but about Sam understanding. Sam acknowledging what he did. Sam conceding that what he did to Dream was…

(Sam apologizing? Did a tiny, shameful piece want that, picture it, what it could look like?)

Your post on Melian being the Maia of love, and how the Ainur all had their “domains” has got me wondering, what do you think Mairon’s would have been before corruption or if his corruption had never happened?

Always an interesting question, and thanks so much for being curious about my opinion!

I think his domain was the same before and after corruption, just like Melkor.

The chaos and extremes Melkor represents didn’t need to be evil, in fact they go into how his contribution is almost a way of swirling the domains of the different Valar together, like how Melkor’s influence on Ulmo’s domain creates clouds that allowed him to be close to Manwe… that’s off topic, but I want to point out that corrupted or not we should still be able to see Sauron hold down the same skills as he would as Mairon.

My initial instinct is that he is the Maia of Order, which intensifies into a need for control when he defects to Melkor. This gives us the idea of Sauron being the order in Melkor’s chaos, making his defection an inevitable part of his nature.

Tolkien was writing LotR in letters to his son fighting in WWII at one point, and the parallels between fascism and Mordor were not subtle as a result. Sauron seeks order and to implement that he needs control and for that he needs power. This drives him, and his understanding of systems and order makes him very, very good at getting it.

The rings are very neat and orderly in concept, a heirarchy of power created with numbers significant to each race- there were 3 original elves, 7 fathers of dwarves, and we can assume based on that pattern, 9 was the initial number of men.

But I also think a lot about his symbol being the red eye, and his perception being stifling and practically a weight characters have to bear. He was initially Melkor’s spy in the years of the lamps, so information might be his domain.

Now, Aule would definitely be the Valar of knowledge, so it’s not quite that, but he has a desire to share that knowledge (see creation of the dwarfs) and Mairon was initially one of Aule’s maiar. Also, can I just say that knowledge being the forbidden fruit in Christian mythology and Aule having as much if not more knowledge of the workings of the physical world as Melkor? Very clearly this is why his Maiar keep getting corrupted.

So if I were to marry the idea of order with the eye imagery which screams observation, I think it he would end up with a domain of…

Math.

I’m kidding but I’m also not kidding. Calculations and analysis that orders the world based on observation… hyper intelligence and recognition of patterns, association with chaos…

I think Mairon is the Maia of patterns and calculations… which is basically math.

Trust a liberal arts professor to make their villain a math guy, smh.

Really, information and organization of that information are his strengths, and I think it’s really significant that he ultimately falls because he did NOT have all the information and failed to understand all the factors until it was too late.

Ok, his domain is Order, final answer. But I still secretly think it’s math.

They’re platonic soulmates your honor.

Also the author really know how to break ClingyDuo enjoyers ueueue

[spoiler]

“So if you’re going to blow something or kill someone- just fucking kill me and get it over with.”

“I will never stop trying to get you back. I love you Tommy and I’ll never let that go.“

Fic: Rewind by @a-non-ymouswriter​

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

Art by Artem Chebokha

A real cool guy :)

Also a real cool reminder that I have an instagram~ 

worst dsmp take might be ppl comparing lmanburg to colonists

no the worst dsmp take is those same people calling a bunch of white (mainly american) people "indigenous" because they don't realize that appropriating racially charged language (using it Incorrectly) to paint their little minecraft guy as oppressed to win an argument online is, in fact, racist.

for the record:

dream, sapnap, and george where there first. they are not indigenous because they Also Traveled There. dream was not born there, there isn’t a culture that was developed over many generations that the other members of the dsmp are not a part of, because he showed up two to three months before tommy got there. he is not the “native population,” he is not Indigenous, he is a white guy that traveled to a land and then claimed all of it.

if we Were to use terms like “indigenous” in this context, then it’d be for mobs with a society, like villagers or piglins. but I’m going to hazard a guess and say that All of the discourse in the dream smp would be better off if we avoided language like that. it could not more clearly be charged language chosen specifically to demonize or valorize based entirely on the Real World History connected to those terms and not the events within the story. there is no productive conversation to be had within this framework, and everyone who’s not trying to insta-win an argument by shutting it down with scare-tactics knows that. either nobody’s a colonist or everyone’s a colonist and that’s not a conversation that I think we want to have.

and for the record Once Again, even disregarding all of that L’manberg Is Not An Example Of Colonization.

the l’manbergians Were Citizens Of The Dream Smp. they did not Invade the dream smp because they lived there. they were Meant To Be There. they were Contributing To the culture of the land that they lived In (tommy making church prime with dream, the Literal main religion of the region, and building the prime path for instance).

the l’manbergians didn’t Colonize, they Seceded. because they were Already citizens of the dream smp, but they claimed a section of land (land that had been Empty Forest, dream didn’t actually know where it was at first Because it’d been unoccupied by either mobs or other players) and declared that they were No Longer citizens of the dream smp and instead wanted to self-govern.

they did not travel to a culture that wasn’t their’s, claim it for themselves, and then either force the people that lived there Out or force them to abandon their original culture for the new one. what they took away from dream Was Their Own Citizenship. was Dream’s Ownership Over Them And Whatever They Built.

any conversation about the morality of this fact has to be made with the understanding of that. dream’s rejection of their independence wasn’t about the land, it was about maintaining ownership of the people on it. dream wasn’t trying to Stop colonization, he was trying Keep The L’manbergians Inside Of His Society (under his Rule).

and if he actually goes through with his taunts...?

Lara Dorren×Avallac'h