Nancy, 23, Slytherin, Gemini (Scorpio rising, Capricorn moon), INFP. Cynical idealist. Queerer than a three dollar bill. Literal rule 63 Han Solo. Kingsman blog @roxy-not-brogues
The homoerotic subtext of lotr/the hobbit is all very well and good, but I would also like to point out, since this isn’t talked about very often, that these books are, in fact, canonically very queer, considering that asexuality/aromanticism run rampant in them
Could you expand on this? It sounds interesting but I can’t think of what you’re talking about off the top of my head.
I’m so glad you asked!
So the first thing that comes to mind is Boromir. I remember reading a quote from LOTR, which I don’t have right now, so if someone knows what I’m talking about and would like to add it, please do, but basically it talks about how Boromir never cared much for romance or finding a partner, and he was dedicated to Gondor.
The second thing I’d like to point out is the dwarves. Here is a quote from Appendix A:
“The number of dwarf-men that marry is actually less than one-third. For not all the women take husbands: some desire none; some desire one that they cannot get, and so will have no other. As for the men, very many also do not desire marriage, being engrossed in their crafts.”
So basically this passage is confirming that about 2/3 of the entire dwarf population is aro/ace, which personally I find really very cool!
I would also like to note at this point another aspect of the dwarves just in general being very canonically queer, which is that they don’t really have any sense of gender roles, so while they presumably have biological gender, it’s not something that really influences their culture. But that’s a whole other thing.
On top of Boromir/the dwarves, the majority of Tolkien’s characters live out their lives as bachelors. Neither Bilbo or Frodo ever married, and Tolkien confirmed in the appendices that neither did Thorin. Legolas and Gimli of course live out their lives together, and you can interpret that how you will. Now this is great for homoerotic subtext, and personally I love headcanoning many of his characters as gay/bi, but it also just shows that in Middle Earth, romance in general isn’t necessary to live a happy life.
Anyways, these are just my cursory thoughts. People are welcome to add on with their own!
relevant quote from appendix a: “Boromir, five years the elder, beloved by his father, was like him in face and pride, but in little else. Rather he was a man after the sort of King Eärnur of old, taking no wife and delighting chiefly in arms; fearless and strong, but caring little for lore, save the tales of old battles.”
Thank you! That is just what I was looking for
The Ainu are canonically sexless.
I would happily make the argument that the elves are on the ace spectrum. Despite all our jokes about The Nature of Middle Earth being a sex book, it’s honestly a lot about when they don’t have sex. Ignoring the first few generations who were super horny.
Sex is a ‘delight’ but they do it just to have children and then eventually the desire for intercourse fades. They also marry for love and companionship, not sexual desire.
Don’t forget they don’t have sex outside marriage. Because, again, sex is just a thing you do to have kids. And that’s how I, as an ace person, feel about sex. It’s just a thing, I have no strong feelings either way.
I get that a lot of the sex stuff is in line with Catholicism, but it also sounds like “a Catholic trying to make asexuality godly, decades before asexuality was a concept.”
LOTR is, to me, the ultimate asexual fantasy. So much of the love in those books is defined by the love between friends, platonic bonds of affection, not sexual desire.
Eowyn loved Aragorn and Faramir for how they treated her, not because they were hot.
Elrond loved Celebrían, but put off marriage because it was the right thing to do, he didn’t rush to have sex.
Galadriel’s love for Gimli is purely platonic and a jab at her uncle.
Merry and Pippin follow Frodo because he’s their cousin and they care about him.
Celebrimbor and Narvi forged the Doors of Durin as a testament to their friendship.
This all makes me super happy, but I’m really hoping that somewhere in this post’s 4,500 notes someone has pointed out that 1/3 of dwarf men + 1/3 of dwarf women ≠ 2/3 of all dwarves. XD
Free Graphic Novels (DC, Marvel, Image, etc), Music, TV shows, and music on HOOPLA.
Free music that you can KEEP on FREEGAL
You are PAYING for all this with your tax money - USE THEM. Most likely systems will have all 3 or 2 out of 3, so if you aren’t sure call your local library’s reference/information desk and how you can get set-up or started.
Hey, highkey from a library worker:
Overdrive has a new mobile app called LIBBY I find it easier to use. It’s the same content as Overdrive just better for mobile. Overdrive and Libby both let you send items to your kindle as well.
Can confirm Overdrive is amazing.
I work in the largest library system in my state (17 branches in total).
I use it not only for ebooks, but movies as well.
Other FREE resources to check with your library for are:
Freegal Music (download and keep music, including current music)
Hoopla Digital (borrow ebooks, e-audiobooks, e-graphic novels, stream movies)
If someone says libraries are a thing of the past…
BOOP THEM IN THE NOSE WITH YOUR KINDLE!
Don’t discount libraries as “quiet” places.
THEY ARE ALIVE!!!
THEY ARE LOUD!!!
THEY ARE YOUR DOORWAYS TO KNOWLEDGE!!
Also if you can’t find something particular at your library and want to support local book stores, Libro.fm is basically the exact same thing as audible, but it lets you choose an indie bookstore to purchase through instead of your money going to Amazon.
Also, authors get paid when you access their books with Overdrive. I get royalties from them through my distributor. Go wild! :)
november 5th 2020 was so powerful that it triggered a chain reaction to make 2012/2013 tumblr stan culture come back by force in every way possible and now we got canon destiel, rtd coming back to doctor who and a teen wolf movie????
“Why are all the guys in this DILFs” they say, and then you look it up and it’s the usual lot of fresh-faced twentysomethings, but, like, one of them has a moustache.
The dad crop is getting harvested earlier and earlier every year
The paranoia and obsession underlying this ideology is really something
I think this illustrates really well how trans exclusionary radical feminism actually reinforces gendered expectations of what a man/woman should look like, sound like, act like, etc. and leads to stringent policing of gender along hegemonic, patriarchal norms rather than anything liberating or radical.
Also once something is deemed strange or taboo or hated, it’s detractors invariably develop an intense fascination with it. This goes double for bodies, and often leads to the weirdly erotic tone that terfs assume when talking about trans people.
Trans exclusionary radical feminists are trapped in this spiral of hatred of and obsession with trans bodies.
ive worn heart shaped glasses for almost 4 years and they are just like my Thing and i love them so much and so often people will say shit like Oh Id Love To Wear Something Like That But I Could Never Pull It Off and like… babe no one can theyre heart shaped glasses u dont wear them to look flattering or stylish or whatever u wear them to make ur soul happy
stop worrying about whether u look Nice and start worrying about whether u look like You
i didnt articulate it well so i just wanna clarify. the point of this post was not “fuck the haters wear what you want” it was “fuck the idea that clothes and accessories exist to make you look good they should exist to make you happy”
My mom was a fourth grade teacher, which meant that she did multi-subject education. And she used to do what she called the NFL Project. The NFL Project was when students were randomly assigned NFL teams.
They had to write a letter to the NFL team they were assigned to, they had to do a research project to find out where the teams practiced, they had to write a letter to the mayor of the city the teams practiced in, they had to keep track of their team’s statistics, they had to do research about the state history of the team they’d been assigned to, and they had to do a presentation.
It was a big project. She provided all the materials, she made sure there were copies of the newspaper sports section in her classroom so the kids could stay on top of stats. The students got this project in their first week at school and it wrapped up right around winter break, so it wasn’t like it was an all-day “today we are doing statistics” thing or “today we do research, today we write a letter, today we make a presentation” one-week project, it was five to ten minutes a day in various subjects that got organized into a presentation at the end of the semester. The kids could work together, they could work independently, they could ask my mom or the librarian or their parents or their older siblings for help. They just had to end the semester with a report on the team’s history, the stats for the season organized into a chart, copies of the letters they’d sent (and copies of any of the responses they’d gotten), a two-page social studies report on the state where the team played, and a presentation to the class about their favorite thing they had learned while doing the NFL project.
The kids fucking loved it. And for years I spent my winter break going to the classroom and organizing the bulletin board with a huge map of the US and materials from each student’s report, showing the work that the students had done that semester. It was a way of getting kids engaged with classwork, because who cares about statistics at 10, probably nobody, but if you get a set of pencils from the Jets NOW you want to learn about the team. The Jaguars sent one kid a jersey one year. The city in Minnesota where the Vikings practice sent postcards for every student. Part of this was happening when Schwarzenegger was governor in California so one kid got the Terminator’s autograph for part of his project.
I think maybe the thing that I admire the most about it in retrospect was the way that it taught actual project management to young students. I don’t actually know of that many schools that have projects more than a month long for 10-year-olds, and I think it’s a great concept. I didn’t get something like that until I was a senior in college, and it would have been a great skill to learn younger.
Anyway, in 2006 my mom had to stop doing the NFL project because the district wanted to focus on raising their test scores. She was specifically told that if she kept doing the NFL project she would not be rehired at her school.
She even wrote up what standards each part of the project worked toward - the kids had to make graphs because “organizing information into a bar graph” was a specific standard for students that age. “Writing multiple paragraphs on the same subject” was a standard, which is why the letters to the cities and states were multi-paragraph. The project WAS standards based.
But the administrators wanted to make sure that the students had more practice with reading the kinds of questions that would be on the tests because most of the student body spoke Spanish at home.
My mom taught at that school for another ten years; the school’s test scores never showed any marked improvement with test-based lesson plans.
My mom’s project wasn’t the only thing like that that got cancelled. There was another teacher who had a craft-based thing that was similar, and a 7th-grade teacher who did a kind of history/social studies Magic Schoolbus LARP thing who was told not to do that anymore. Eventually my mom was told to stop having her students write journals for ten minutes a day because it wasn’t being taught from the textbook and wasn’t being taught to the test.
People joke (haha, it’s funny, it’s a joke, right?) about American education being used to prepare students to be good employees instead of to be critical thinkers or independent people, but legitimately it seems like NCLB directly incentivized “students sit quietly in a box filling out bubble sheets and have no unsupervised or creative work time.”
Literally this, they remove every shred of creativity and learning and enforce a false scale of success that measures those who score well on tests as the best when that is not very useful
