I Like To Imagine That If People From A Fantasy World Came To Our World, They Would Lose Their Shit Over

Bilbo Baggins has ADHD! It says in the first chapter of The Hobbit that he didn’t remember things well unless he wrote them down! – Absolutely! He also:

randomly bursts into song

is driven by his emotions and impulses

took like 70 years to write a book

his mind works in ways that other people don’t follow easily

talks too much and has no idea that his listeners aren’t into it because he’s so into it

h y p e r f i x a t i o n

Speaking of linguistics fics, an idea I’ve played with but never put into practice is using maximal Latin-rooted words when characters are speaking Quenya and Germanic-rooted words when they’re speaking Sindarin.

The effect being to make the language shift more meaningful than just a dialogue tag, (maybe even to the point where I don’t always have to say it outright) and it would work by playing on associations of Latinate words as more highbrow and polysyllabic and Germanic words as more common. (Think regal/kingly, dine/eat, or educate/teach.)

It might backfire, it might be impossible (sometimes the connotations run the other way!) but I think it’d be fun to try.

Realizing that a lot of my "emotional oversensitivity" as a child was actually me not being able to distinguish between joking/sarcastic and serious tones

ATLA writers, let’s talk about steel ships and what can go wrong with them

So, I live on a steel boat. It’s pretty cushy for the most part because it has a permanent mooring on a canal (so no currents and no tides), but guys, there are things to consider when you write your Zuko’s crew fics.

In no particular order, bearing in mind that I am not an engineer:

Steel + water = rust; steel + salt water = super fast rust.

Boats like mine are traditionally lifted from the water or put in dry dock to be painted with bitumen every 2 years to prevent that.  And that’s with fresh water and only the occasonal bump against another boat to worry about.

Anywhere water pools on the deck can have a rust issue (we don’t see any drainage holes on that deck with its solid walls.  Let’s pretend they exist.)  Anywhere that can get hit with salt spray can have a rust issue

The deepest pitting (rust pockets) will be around the waterline, places that get both water and oxygen. If one of those gets deep enough it can actually rust through and you are in a world of hurt.

Coal smoke is acidic. That’s also not great for steel.

Chimneys are another place that rust through pretty quickly, which can put you in a world of hurt because smoke kills, and so does carbon monoxide.

The second deepest pitting  on a boat is generally found on the steel close to the chimney.

If water (rain or salt spray) can get in your chimney you’ve just accelerated that process.

Talking of coal fires…

Anywhere you’ve got a source of fire you’ve got problems if it isn’t well ventilated.  Where is the boiler room? Does it have windows? Does it have vents in the door? How do they control air flow to the coal (and hence the temperature of the resulting fire)?

Where you have coal you have ash. Leave ash sitting too long and it will choke your fire. Leave hot ash in a confined space and you have another carbon monoxide problem.

They’re probably having to chuck ash into the ocean like, every day.

Historically there have been chemical carbon monoxide detectors, which is one possible way you might stop your entire crew dying of a deadly undetectable gas – if Zuko has access to it.

Let’s also talk propulsion

The engine is typically the heaviest part of your boat or ship. It’s normally positioned closer to the stern, which as a result will sit lower in the water than the prow.

Fire nation ships use propellors, which we know because Hakoda’s stink & sinks targeted them.  Where the prop shaft exits the ship is another point where water can get in.  There’s a thing called a stern gland which prevents this by forcing grease into the  area where the prop shaft comes through the hull. This minimises the amount of water that can get in.

Minimum water is still not no water though! There will be a wall to contain water that gets in like this, and modern boats have a bilge pump next to the prop shaft to get rid of it.

This is another point particuarly at risk from rust! Break out the paint again.

If the bilge pump breaks and doesn’t get fixed you quickly have big problems (a neighbour actually sank because of this).

Dark paint + steel + sunlight = surfaces too hot to touch.

Also, interior temperatures that are way, way too hot for comfort.

However, the temperature drops rapidly below the waterline. I spend six months of the year wearing thick woolly socks and legwarmers and the other six months wanting to lie on the floor all the time. And I only have a 2 foot draft.

Cold water + hot boat interior = condensation, which represents guess what? – another rust risk!

Talking of bitumen paint? That stuff gives off fumes that stink and aren’t great for human health.

More to follow when I think of it and have time. I’d love to hear from actual ocean goers on this one because that’s the side of things I know absolute zip about.

I read this little fact in my King Island book and i don't see it come up in any other source and it really makes some other aspects of the culture make sense so i wanted to share:

In Inupiaq cultural tradition, men would fast when they hunted. They would get up at dawn, test the weather by standing barefoot near the entrance of the house, and if hunting was an option, they'd have a little water and no food before heading out. A man wouldn't eat anything that day until he got home in the evening

"Elrond raised his eyes and looked at him, and Frodo felt his heart pierced by the sudden keenness of the glance." - The Fellowship of the Ring, The Council of Elrond.

So. What do you want to bet that when glorfindel came back to middle earth he had a heart attack because elrond looked like maeglin.

(This means that the list of people glorfindel has considered trying to murder about this exact topic is elrond, bilbo, and aragorn. Plus a bunch of elrond's other human fosters but none of THEM fell for arwen so aragorn was def the most severe)

And since arwen is exactly like elrond in every way, this is yet more proof for my theory of "every character named twilight + son/daughter is a meaningful parallel"

There’s some really disturbing stuff in The Nature of Middle-earth; I’m not sure whether these ideas were some of the ones Tolkien considered for how orcs were created, or if he saw them as something different, but he’s provided plenty of fodder for darkfic writers.

…it is recorded in the histories that Morgoth, and Sauron after him, would druve out the fëa by terror, and then feed the body and make it a beast…it [would become] an animal, seeking nothing more than food by which its corporeal life may be continued, and seeking it only after the manner of beasts, as it may find it by limbs and senses.

Jirt, that’s a zombie. It’s dead, non-sapient, still moving around, and only driven by looking for food. And typically created by an evil power through evil means. You invented Middle-earth zombies.

And worse, [Morgoth or Sauron] would daunt the fëa within the body and reduce it to a stupor of horror, so that it was impotent; and then nourish the body foully, so that it became bestial, to the horror and torment of the fëa.

This does seem like a mechanism for the creation of orcs. Morgoth takes an elf, overpowers the fëa so that it is no longer in control of the body, and then, well, the implication is that he feeds the body the flesh of elves or men to further torment the fëa. In the short term, the hröa is basically a beast under Morgoth’s control; over time, the fëa might become more active, but horrified, sickened, and twisted by the nature of the hröa and the purposes for which it has been used. It is evil because, outside of its control, it has done and been used for horrific things that it can’t process without becoming evil.

Brr.

The hilarious thing about Sauron is that according to most versions of the legendarium, he was originally, like, a god of planning and logistics, and he initially supported Melkor’s plans for world domination because he regarded the world’s present state of affairs as inefficient and poorly organised. He’s literally what happens when you take the kid who’s fed up at everybody else fucking up their part of the group project and give him phenomenal cosmic power.

“Keep descriptions short and don’t use poetic/flowery language in a novel” “if a scene doesn’t advance the plot cut it” “avoid complicated symbolism and hinting at things, just say what you mean” “too much worldbuilding is distracting” bites you bites you bites you bites you bites y

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