watching twin peaks isn't enough I need to be trapped in the black lodge for 25 years
Do you ever think about how Tolkien’s vision of the greatest evil in the universe was something he referred to as “The Machine” which was his way of talking about accelerated industrialism and mass surveillance and he wrote multiple books where the main villains were a dragon who sits on a huge pile of treasure that he never intends to use but incinerates anyone who comes near it, a man in a giant tower who’s wrecking the environment with his factories, and an evil being who uses what’s essentially a listening device to control the citizens of middle earth. And now Amazon is making a Tolkien show. Do you ever think about that.
when people talk about writing ‘the next Lord of the Rings’ they think it’s all about the wars and the languages and the histories, and Aragorn brooding in the corner of an inn and the Balrog roaring in Moria and the ruins of Isengard, and that’s how we got Game of Thrones and several dozen cheap fantasy knock-offs every year, not to mention whatever nonsense the Amazon show is going to produce
but Tolkien’s wars and languages and histories stemmed from his love of creating - of words and history and mythos - and that love infuses into everything he writes, and if you miss that then there’s no way in hell you can replicate it
and the people who want to write the next Lord of the Rings because they want to write the next epic don’t get that the story is about the hobbits’ soft and simple lives and Bilbo’s poetry and Sam’s love language being food and Eowyn discovering hope after depression and Gandalf making fireworks for hobbits even if he is a literal angelic being, and Aragorn weeping over Boromir’s body and Theoden’s kindness to Merry, and Beregond betraying his most prized orders to save Faramir, and the unlikely friendship between Gandalf and Pippin, and the even unlikelier friendship between Legolas and Gimli, and Sam and Frodo singing to each other in Mordor, and Boromir sacrificing himself for the hobbits, and Sam’s simple love for Rosie, and the restoration of the Shire, and the friendship of the Fellowship surviving down through the ages, and peace after war and hope in darkness, and the love between a gardener and a gentleman pacifist being literally the only thing that saves Middle Earth
and that is why people who try to recreate Lord of the Rings by starting with war always get it wrong. you have to start with the love, or it’s nothing: just another empty history
Raskolnikov and Razumikhin are the emo punk gf and the pink bubblegum gf except they're men in 19th century Russia
“We’re always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can’t help feeling that that’s what it is.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It isn’t only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.
- V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
i could not be a protagonist for many reasons but the main one is that i’d 100% fall in love with the villain
"I like your personality"
Thanks, the character I've stolen this personality from killed his friend and shot himself.
I just don't believe people who say they were normal before they read the secret history because no one in their right minds would finish that whole book.
I am not the main character and I am not a side character. I am that character that just needs one more push, one more tragedy, to become the villain.
