Some Crane Wives Pride Flags I've Made, Because Their Photos Always Have Such Cool Lighting. I'm Also

Rings of Power meme dump part 5!

I didn't have all these files anymore so I had to go get them from my Pinterest, the first image got a little cut off for some reason sorry.

Pope Francis has died.

I know to a lot of people on the left and in the LGBTQ+ community, he wasn’t exactly seen as a holy herald of progressive values. That said I think he was more helpful to our community than we have ever really given credit.

The Catholic Church is hugely entrenched in the past. They may not ever accept gay marriage within our lifetime. But if you compare Pope Francis to any other Pope that came before him, he did more to progress the Catholic Church than anyone else ever has. He constantly spoke out saying that the church needed to accept LGBTQ+ members. He has denounced laws that criminalise homosexuality. He supported same sex civil unions—which I was literally taught was evil and dangerous when I was in Catholic high school. Transgender people can be baptized and same sex couples can be blessed because of him.

He was never enough, of course. He has affirmed the teaching that gay marriage is not spiritually possible and prior to becoming pope he opposed the legalization of same sex marriage. He has said gay children should seek psychiatric care. He has also been even less accepting of transgender people than same sex couples.

But at the same time he was the most empathetic Pope to have existed in the past several hundred years. I have left the church because I no longer believe in God, but I do recognize that the Catholic Church has power over huge swaths of the world. My mother still believes in her Catholic faith and has always stood by this idea: it’s impossible to move a behemoth organisation like the Church overnight. She stays in the community because she wants it to become better. She pushes, in her own small way, a little bit every day towards what she thinks is right. In this conversation, that is the acceptance of LGBTQ+ youths. Pope Francis was helpful in moving the Church away from a stance of hate. Now I hope that whoever the cardinals choose next for pope is someone who joins her in pushing that ball forward.

recovering from a simple cold really takes incredibly long when you have a chronic illness...

like please i wanna be able to do at least some things again

Rings of Power meme dump part 8!

Tolkien: Elwe and Olwe had a brother called Elmo

Me: I am a serious adult taking things seriously

Me:

Me:

Character Thoughts - Elwing

I don’t think that Elwing throwing herself into the ocean had anything to do with possessiveness about the Silmaril. For me, it recalls two other scenes in Tolkien’s work.

One is Frodo’s defiance at the Ford of Bruinen: “By Elbereth and Lúthien the Fair, you shall have neither the Ring nor me!” A desperate defiance against evil when you’re at the end of your rope and the end of your strength (and retreat to water, and unexpected rescue).

And the other, even more strongly, is the Fall of Fingolfin. She’s just lost a desperate battle; she sees everything she knows and loves and has built falling into ruin and fire; she can’t stop any of it. But she can fight the people who did this to her, and she can hurt them, even if it kills her. She can’t outright duel Maedhros (he’s been probably the greatest swordsman in Beleriand for ten times longer than she’s been alive; that would quite possibly be a more unequal fight than the Duel of Fingolfin and Morgoth), but she still has a way to hurt him. You don’t get the Silmaril, and you don’t get to kill me. You don’t get to win.

The central thought underlying it is not ‘mine’; it is ‘fuck you’.

It is not about her keeping the Silmaril; it is about the Fëanorians not getting it.

I don’t think she knows just how well she’s succeeding at hurting them - everything in her life tells her the Fëanorians are monsters as bad as or worse than anything from Angband, not beings capable of remorse - but she knows she’s denying them the one thing they want. And Maedhros and Maglor are left knowing that the worst thing they’ve ever done was, as far as their goals are concerned, completely pointless.

She’s not ‘abandoning her children’. She’s already lost her children. She has no way to save them. She has no reason to believe they would be spared, whatever she did. The twins are of no use to the Fëanorians. The Fëanorians have already shown themselves willing to murder children, her brothers, that actually did have value as hostages. If Elwing handed over the Silmaril there’s no reason for her to believe they wouldn’t just kill her and her children for spite.

It can’t be emphasized enough that the Fëanorians are the monsters of Elwing’s life. Angband is a distant name and a threat. The murderers of Elwing’s father, her mother, her brothers, the twice-destroyers of her home, are the Fëanorians. They are her Morgoth.

"average elf uses 3 brain cells a year" factoid actually statistical error. average elf uses 0 brain cells per year. Braincells Elrond, who lives in Imladris & uses 10,000 brain cells every day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

I think if providers laugh at us while we’re explaining our concerns we should be able to turn them into piñatas for precisely 40.3 seconds

do you ever think that elrond, who was born amidst war and lost nearly his entire family, created a house of his own to look out for all the war-torn, displaced families seeking refuge ?