I saw a post that was saying how great it would be for David Tennant to play Sherlock Holmes and I’m sure he’d do a great job but please entertain my counterpoint: David Tennant as John Watson and Catherine Tate as Sherlock Holmes
one of my favorite lotr facts is that gondorians speak sindarin as a first language and yet when faramir was talking to frodo and sam about cirith ungol he was like “we don’t know what’s in there.” like faramir. cirith ungol is sindarin for “pass of the spider.” do the math
some of my favorite tags on this post
Don’t forget that Frodo also speaks Sindarin, which makes this even worse.
Faramir: Hey, don’t go up the Spider Stairs.
Frodo: Why? What’s up the Spider Stairs?
Faramir: We don’t know, Frodo. We just don’t know.
to be fair, you’d assume the name means “there’s a lot of spiders here,” not, “there is one spider the size of a draft horse here.” so you go up expecting to have to shoo a lot of skeeter eaters out of your tent, and instead you have to figure out how to rope and shoe godzillarantula.
Hmmm…
They do live in a world where godzillarantulas feature prominently in mythology and history (Ungoliant plunged the world into darkness, scared the crap out of Sauron’s old boss, etc) and existed within the last century in Mirkwood. Assuming they ever talk to anyone who’s been to Mirkwood. They… probably know they were giant spiders in Mirkwood pretty recently? It’s hard to figure out how much anyone in Middle-earth has been talking to anyone else when we didn’t actually see it.
On the other hand – what if it’s the giant evil spiders’ prominence in history/mythology that’s causing trouble? What if lots of evil/nasty things/places get called “spider” just to indicate how nasty and evil they are, rather than any association with literal spiders, and it’s just… overloaded? Maybe the bad part of town in Minas Tirith is the Spider District. Maybe every tavern trying to be edgy calls itself the Spiderweb.
Actually spider/Ungoliant references could be really appealing to Gondorians trying to be edgy. They’re dark and evil! Plunged the world into darkness! But they AREN’T involved in the war they’re actually fighting, they aren’t directly associated with Sauron at all, so getting too interested in them would be creepy without being potentially treasonous. Because no one’s ACTUALLY going to worship those dangerous but not epic spiders up in Mirkwood, and no one’s heard anything from any proper spawn of Ungoliant in ages and ages.
In fact, spider/Ungoliant references might be appealing to ORCS trying to express that something is nasty and creepy! Nobody likes Ungoliant.
Maybe Faramir’s been to fourteen different Spider Caves across Ithilien, and half of them he didn’t even see regular spiders in, they’re just dark and damp and may have had orcs at some point, or something, and at some point in history someone got spooked. So you know, it’s POSSIBLE Spider Pass has something to do with spiders? But really it just means people don’t like it.
(The problem with this theory is we never actually SAW anyone overusing spider references. But it’s plausible they would!)
“The average spider on Middle Earth is the size of a dinner plate” is a statistical error. The average spider on Middle Earth is smaller than a coin. Cirith Ungol (lit: Spiders Gorge), which contains a spider larger than a horse, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
Come for the Tolkien linguistics, stay for the Spiders Georg reference
this map, by jonathan hull, shows all the places in the USA named after the devil or hell. assuming big giant awful spiders were a common thing in middle earth, it’s likely that there were a shit ton of Spider Stairways.
you don’t wander into Devil’s Lick assuming that satan himself is gonna give you a rimjob. you presumably also don’t head up Spider Stairs assuming an arachnid the size of a cottage is gonna try and eat your friend.
I’ve seen some spectacular snark coming from the case of the dead CEO, but the one in response to the request for the public’s help in finding the culprit “Sorry, snitchs get stitches and that might not be covered by my insurance.” Is among the best.
Sometimes I think about how and why some people had such a *bad* reaction to the end of Steven Universe, specifically in regards to the Diamonds living.
Even though they no longer are causing harm to others and are able to actually undo some of their previous harm by living, some folks reacted as though this ending was somehow morally suspect. Morally bankrupt, even.
And I think it might be because so many of us were raised on a very specific kind of kids media trope:
They all fall to their deaths.
Disney loves chucking their bad guys off cliffs. And it makes sense- in a moral framework where villains *must* be punished (regardless of whether their death will actually prevent further harm or not), but killing of any kind is morally bad for the hero, the narrative must find a way to kill the villain without the protagonists doing a murder.
It’s a moral assumption that a person can *deserve* to die, that it is cosmically just for them to die, that them dying is evidence that the story itself is morally good and correct. Scar *deserves* to die, but it would be bad for Simba to kill him. So….cliff.
Steven Universe, whatever else it’s faults, took at step back and said “but if killing people is bad, then people dying is bad”, and instead of dropping White Diamond off a cliff, asked “what would actual *restorative*, not punitive, justice look like? What would actual reparations mean here? If the goal is to heal, not just to punish, how do we handle those who have done harm?” And then did that.
Which I think is interesting, and that there was pushback against it is interesting.
It also reminds me of the folks who get very weird about Aang not killing Ozai at the end of Avatar. And like, Ozai still gets chucked in prison, so it doesn’t even push back on our cultural ideas of punitive justice *that much.* and still, I’ve seen people get real mad that the child monk who is the last survivor of a genocide that wiped out his entire pacifist culture didn’t do a murder.
I actually very strongly disagree. Because the diamonds weren’t just villains. They acted in abusive parental roles, in a way that kids can recognize and connect with.
Kids who were in bad family situations could look at Steven and the Diamonds, and feel seen.
But with the ending they chose, what the show ended up doing is telling the child audience “You are responsible for making your abusers change who they are. If they’re mistreating you, its because you aren’t using the right words or yelling loud enough.”
Which is the exact opposite of what the message needed to be. No, killing the Diamonds wasn’t the only solution - but when it mattered, the crew couldn’t deliver on the pacifist route required.
Killing the villain is the lazy solution. But its still the solution that tells a kid “this wasn’t okay, but they did this to themselves. It was never your job to fix the adults in your life.”
And if you want to pick the pacifist solution for that instead, you had better have the ability to back it up. We are disappointed in the ending because it failed to deliver the message needed in order to work.
Please.
A song doesn’t change that the narrative of the finale is Steven convinces the diamonds through magic words and yelling. The song is 30 seconds. The She’s Gone moment is the core of the episode, and the thing that finishes the scene, and makes white diamond magically realise all her wrongs is some snarky-last-word-quip. The episode hinges in magic words, instead of realising that Steven can’t force people to understand him.
The intended message gets lost. Badly. The crew flubbed their ending. And we are allowed to be disappointed in that.
You are allowed to feel the ending was too quick. You’re allowed to dislike it. You’re even allowed to just be wrong about it.
But if you try to tell me that the core theme of Steven Universe was “abused children are obligated to change their abusers and are at fault for their own abuse” and that the show would have been stronger, more positive, or more thematically consistent if White had died, then I am going to think you have either an intentionally bad faith interpretation, dont actually remember the show very well, or piss on the poor media literacy.
Steven’s unwavering assertion that he is himself, his love and acceptance of himself, refusing to be bullied and broken into what White wants him to be, being framed as “a snarky quip” and “magic word” and saying that it conveys the idea that children are at fault for real world abuse if they can’t stop the abuse from happening? Is unhinged and incorrect.
Go rewatch that episode. Go rewatch Future.
Or don’t. Like. Whatever. You’re allowed to be wrong. But don’t embarass yourself here.
The show got cancelled. I need people to understand this.
I will forever be screaming from the rooftops that the ending was “rushed” because the show got cancelled after the crew fought to depict the first-ever gay wedding in American children’s animation.
Source: The End of an Era art book. It’s spelled out blatantly. Cartoon Network told Rebecca Sugar “if you include this wedding, we aren’t extending your contract.” Sugar and the crew decided to fight like hell for the wedding, and the network retaliated.
Steven Universe ended prematurely, because Steven Universe was cancelled by the network and rushed into a hasty finale that the crew fought tooth and nail to get.
They almost didn’t get anything. It almost just ended.
I’m fucking tired of a major milestone in queer media representation getting shit all over for reasons that were out of the crew’s hands.
The workers got fucked. The queer artists trying desperately to represent queer stories got fucked. Rebecca Sugar got so screwed over that she took a lengthy hiatus after the show wrapped up, and after how the network and the audience treated her, I wouldn’t have blamed her if she never worked in the industry again.
Steven. Universe. Got. Cancelled.
Never forget that.
We also got Steven Universe Future and the movie, where we see these relationships several years on.
Steven dismantled the diamonds empire. He keeps some tabs on the restorative work they’re doing. He will go try to get information from them if he thinks they might be useful.
But he absolutely rejects closeness with them. All the diamonds, but white especially keep trying to have emotional connections and intimacy with him and he refuses.
He will monitor, coordinate with, and talk to the diamonds but he is also totally emotionally independent of them. He trusts Jasper more than them.
The idea that you can grow beyond your abusers, take their ability to cause harm away, and not owe them any intimacy? That’s not every abused kids fantasy but it is a lot of abused kids fantasy.
Yeah they’re there at the big final hug but Steven has basically no emotional connection with them- he’s reacting to his real family, who have been failing him but earnestly trying to help. They have mended their ways and he still refuses to connect to them emotionally and the narrative supports that.
Not every abused kid wants their abusers to fall off a cliff and die. I honestly think it’s fine if they do. But honestly a lot of them want their abusers safe but…powerless. Unable to control them materially or emotionally.
It’s not that this is Steven’s Responsibility it’s that this is a power fantasy.
And one where Steven is constantly being reminded that a whole large cast doesn’t want him to have to take on that fight alone.
The alternate message is you can only be safe if all your abusers are dead. That is the only escape. If the cosmos doesn’t strike them down for you, then there’s nothing you can do, unless you want to kill them yourself.
Which seems like not the best message to have as the default.
I don’t have a solid plot attached to this idea, I don’t currently really have the desire to drop everything to go write “The Hobbit” fanfiction, but for a while I’ve had the idea of *gestures vaguely" some post-canon story (probably some form of fix-it) taking place before, during, and after a grand dwarven opera performance in Erebor.
Because I am absolutely certain that the Lonely Mountain had an absolutely stunningly beautiful Royal Opera House (and plenty of other, less grand performance halls) that, at the city’s height, was putting at least one show every single day. Orchestral symphonies, operas and operettas, dramatic plays, dance performances… you name it, they had it and more. The various cultures of Middle Earth evidently ADORE music, dwarves absolutely included. The Company all bring instruments to Bag End to play and sing themselves off before their quest!
Also, beyond the music side of things, with how dwarves are named as master crafters? Smiths and toymakers and magicians? No way that they did not have some of the most gorgeous costumes, sets, and effects on the planet. Dwarves would go WILD with their articulated stage puppets, I know it.
One of my biggest issues with the film trilogy is that it failed to deeply explore the Company as people who had lost their home, beauty and culture included. Smaug not only killed countless people, entire families, and leave many of the survivors poor and desperate, the dragon went on to hoard their heirlooms and life’s work and leave these priceless gold treasures UNUSED. It is an additional heartbreak to imagine Smaug tearing through Erebor neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, so that he could tear out every gemstone in, say, mosaic made by someone’s grandmother that sat above the breakfast table every morning. To think that Smaug in the aftermath tore magical lanterns off the walls, the sort that might have been decorated with animals or flowers, to make some daycare walkway just a little more cheery for the children, and in his greed left a dead city in the dark.
The live-action movies put both Smaug and the Balrog in these… absolutely enormous chambers that serve somewhat unclear purposes. The king’s treasure vault and a former marketplace, I think? (Moria has been raised by goblins, I can forgive the emptiness.) It’s a quick visual depiction of Thror’s uncontrollable gold lust to give him a Scrooge McDuck room, sure, instead of anything with an actual organizational system (normally, I assume dwarves are big on sorting their vaults if they have one). Super big columns and hallways and staircases do somewhat effectively communicate the “lost glory” of Moria (I am very fond of these movies!!!), even if I also think it’s not as interesting as it could have been. And the other obvious purpose of big, open warehouse-like spaces is 1) it’s easier to animate the big creatures moving around in them generally and 2) it allows the films to show off the full-bodied visual spectacle of their big creatures.
But I think it would have also kicked ass to put Smaug in Erebor’s former Royal Opera House or something, some enormous theatre decorated across generations. That could be big! The ART (statues, fountains, banners, windows, general architecture) that you could put on the exterior, which has had its face ripped open for the dragon to get inside? The ART that you could put INSIDE (mosaics, murals, and more) as Bilbo sneaks inside? Ohhh, you could include so many potential lore references with thematic relevance!
Also, Bilbo could get jump-scared by old articulated stage puppets or something. IT’S THE DRAGON-! Oh, no, it’s some old opera prop. (Yes, we’re talking more about an actual adaptation of “The Hobbit” rather than fanfiction concepts now.)
Sure, there’s raw material treasure and coins hoarded here in this place, but there would also be musical instruments and toys and household tools and cookware and fancy dishes, wedding jewelry and anniversary gifts and family shrines and festival costumes, fountain statues and street lamps and mailboxes and business signs, and other evidence that people really LIVED here. These are all ordinary objects that Bilbo recognizes from the Shire.
We could tie these objects directly back to objects we saw featured in Bilbo’s home early in this adaptation, which he was trying to “protect” from the dwarves during their “That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates” song. There are half-burned portraits of people’s late parents here too. Did he think that there weren’t any dwarves who made doilies or handkerchiefs embroidered with flowers? Of course they made things like that too.
It’s perfectly symbolic to, say, place Smaug’s bed in an area like the king’s throne room. The dragon is now the King Under The Mountain. But I think it would be deliciously haunting to have the throne room of Erebor be empty, the throne half-broken, the silver stripped from the walls and moved elsewhere, because Smaug doesn’t care about Thror’s old audience chamber. What’s a dwarf king to a dragon? He burns the same as all the others. The dragon has instead made his bed in a beautiful public place of art and culture that was for the people, by the people, surrounded by the lovingly crafted belongings of the ordinary people he killed. Gold is gold to a dragon whether it’s in a coin or a candlestick.
I think if you really want to sell one of the key messages of “The Hobbit”, which in my opinion is: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” then you ought to throw yourself behind EREBOR being a place where food and cheer and song had value, not just the Shire. Thorin isn’t lost at the end because he’s a dwarf and dwarves don’t value such things, but because he as a specific person who makes the mistake of weighing pride and gold over people, and he comes to regret that on his deathbed.
So, back to the fanfiction idea, I think that Erebor had music again in it as soon as dwarves started living in it again. It will take decades and decades before the Royal Opera House is half as splendid as it was before, and there is a performance there with beautiful costumes and puppets and sets comparable to those that came before, some traditional historical show that is part of specific seasonal holiday for dwarves. But that very first winter, when the future still looked grim, I think the dwarves cleared out a small stage and cast the roles of this traditional musical retelling of their history among them, based on who knew the parts best, because they aren’t just miners and smiths and soldiers, and there was music again in Erebor that winter despite all the damage that the dragon did.
I’d give you an exorbitant amount of money to put version together because this sounds so amazing. Like I would get punched in the heart every few minutes experiencing the story.
That said…
I can’t believe you left this in the tags because now all I can think about is an animated version where Gimli taking Legolas to the Lonely Mountain Broadway production of “There and Back Again” is the framing device.
Talking to a customer about classic children’s lit and how many of them firmly believe that fresh air and sunshine will cure any number of unspecified Victorian illnesses. I mentioned The Secret Garden and how much I like that the protagonists are basically just feral gremlin children who are very unpleasant to be around until they somehow manage to socialize each other.
Then I said, out loud, “on a scale of Sarah Crewe to Mary Lennox, how well did you handle being raised by a nanny in Edwardian India,” and realized that tumblr really has ruined my speech patterns for all time.
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