I don't normally have much of a sense of humor about the LOTR movies or Certain Choices (all the choices) made with Faramir and Denethor.

That said, I do find it a little bit funny that, in the attempt to make Faramir sympathetic in ROTK, it leans so far into poor teary-eyed woobie Faramir who is regarded with undiluted tragic(??) contempt by his awful and also incompetent and unhinged father. A lot of the rationale for the choices made in TTT came down to "Faramir is too perfect and invulnerable for film." But book Faramir is at his most vulnerable in ROTK, and arguably his most flawed.

@venndaai once helped me find the in-GW2 Ascalonian who best articulates my GW1 feelings, and I just ran across the character again after averting another Searing:

ICON <3

gwgan replied to this post:

Yes! M&M7 is one of my favorite computer games of all time, in part due to in-game Arcomage. Takes forever to get to Nighon, though.

I've now seen the MTG Éowyn/Faramir card, and it's really a pity Faramir doesn't look more like the older MTG version. This one's design is almost comically bad IMO (especially considering how good Aragorn is, when Denethor and Faramir should at least somewhat resemble him). Éowyn looks great, though.

I may put together a longer post about this later, but something I feel very strongly:

Fantasy as a genre does not need to morally justify its existence.

I see "fantasy can do and say really important, profound things, but most of the time it's just escapist trash" going around pretty regularly. But it is no more incumbent on fantasy to say Important Profound Things than on any other genre. It's no worse for it to be escapist than for anything else to be—that's part of what fiction is!

It's not to say that fantasy or any other genre, or particular trends in any genre, are above criticism, but that fantasy-specific condemnations tend to trade in wild double standards.

Memory is such a strange thing. I forget so much, but also ... when I was in high school, my grandfather would proudly have me list off Austen's novels in order of publication to show off how "good" my memory was. But I can't remember most sequences well enough to do math beyond basic addition/subtraction/times tables. I don't always remember if I've eaten or if I've been to a certain place or where things are, even in places I've been to many times.

Also, awhile back, my mother was trying to remember how you get to the game-inside-the-game from a video game we loved in the late 90s/early 2000s. It was like a light flicked on in my brain and I was like, oh, you have to help this guy, I think Darren Temper, who lives by the stables in your fief and track down his brother, and you find out his brother died and recover the remains. And Darren wants you to keep the brother's card deck because The Pain Is Too Much and then you can play the game with your deck in taverns throughout the world and there's a reward for winning the game in each tavern. But you can play as many times as you want. Oh! And you have to go back to the Tempers later because Darren lives with Ashen Temper and she teaches fire magic mastery...

This time around in GW2, I discovered that sitting on the benches in The Dead End bar looks different than sitting elsewhere:

#mood

I received this years ago but missed it somehow, and was just going through asks today—but my best friend and I actually did this last year and going from the end of ROTS (my favorite, for a Suffering value of favorite, part of the PT) through RO was extremely quality pain. I was like, "okay but now we have to watch Return of the Jedi."

I haven't! I keep thinking of it, but have never gotten around to it.

I've seen (and received) memes asking fic writers about their favorites among their own fics. But, thinking about it, my favorite parts of my own writing tend to be individual sections or chapters.

So I'm wondering, for the fic writers out there, do you have favorite parts of your fics? If you had to pick, say, five sections of your own writing, what would they be?

I'm autistic and headcanon a bunch of my faves as autistic, also! But I'd like to leave part of the Autism Headcanon Sweepstakes up to you, the people:

"Peak autistic character" means whatever it means to you!

I'm replaying Living World Season 1 with Gwen, and just got to the introduction of Marjory, my beloved <3

I don't know who was like "you know what this game needs? A lesbian necromancer noir detective" but a thousand blessings on them and their house.

I am eternally amused by Mrs Gardiner pausing her effusions to dissect Wickham's vs Darcy's attractiveness—Wickham's kind of prettiness just gives him this look of goodness, you feel like he's got to be a great person, while Darcy's kind of prettiness is like, perfect features, which is nice and all, but not the same ... though there's something about him as well that makes it hard to believe he's actually bad, even though he's got to be a bad person because Our Pal Wickham would never lie, but Darcy does have such a nice mouth, you notice it when he talks—

Elizabeth: this is how I die

@crossedwithblue asked me to ramble about Catherine Darcy from my Elizabeth/f!Darcy femslash fic and the biracial Darcy-Fitzwilliams in that fic. I am always glad to ramble about my fic, so!

In the fic, the main exposition about the Darcy-Fitzwilliam family history (thus far) comes from Wickham, always a dubious source, but he's mostly not lying outright. Catherine's grandfathers, Lord Harcourt and Sir James Darcy, were great friends who saw themselves as also great trailblazers because they were very into "the East Indies" in their way, and personally traveled to India (more specifically, to modern Kerala). The circumstances that led to them shocking their social sphere by bringing back a pair of beautiful and wealthy Indian women as their wives were never much talked about in the family, so Catherine herself only knows so much. Certainly, all concerned would have considered it a great impertinence for anyone (esp those outside the family) to actually ask about their motives.

Catherine does have the impression that her grandfathers both considered themselves quite noble for going through with the marriages, but that Sir James had a more realistic idea of the difficulties Lady Harcourt and Lady Darcy might encounter in their society. It's only an impression because she never knew him; Sir James died young, leaving Lady Darcy as a rich widow with one child, a very young son. Catherine did know Lady Darcy and was on good terms with her until she died, when Catherine was about eleven.