Aredhel-erinti - Tears Unnumbered Ye Shall Shed...

i genuinely feel like The Whole Point of Jin Guangyao’s demise is that it was not justice. in-universe, it did not actually come about because of any of his deeds that we the modern audience would consider the most heinous. Nie Huaisang plotted against him because he killed Nie Mingjue specifically, and… like, Mingjue explicitly and with pre-meditation tried to kill Jin Guangyao three separate times, with the novel (my preferred text source) heavily implying he only started playing the evil music after that third time. this could very reasonably be argued to be self-defense.

i’m not necessarily interested in re-litigating which of JGY’s worst acts were, which ones were justified, which ones he maybe didn’t do, which ones were okay because they were sexy, how unforgivable any of them are, etc, but i think we can all agree that if he simply avoided killing NMJ, his other deeds would not instantly become fine. so NMJ is not the golden snitch of fucked-upness in his repertoire. it is far from The Worst Thing He’s Done.

but it is the reason that NHS hunted him.

JGY’s punishment was not about justice on a moral scale, but on a personal scale. (this is a narratively valid reason to destroy someone, btw. JGY clearly did not kill his own father because his dad was a graceless abusive imperialist sex offender and war profiteerer who ordered the slaughter of dozens of innocents and ruined countless lives. he killed JGS because JGS insulted his mother. so while i sincerely believe that NHS wanted personal vengeance, with moral justice being relatively unimportant to him, that’s not at all meant to be a criticism of him.)

to further cement it, the final blow dealt against JGY was explicitly for a deed he did not do. narratively, it would have been SO EASY to write him making a last desperate attempt to run and getting caught on a sword, or lunging for some final hostage and missing. this would be completely in line with his behaviour leading up to that point: the author created COUNTLESS opportunities for some hero or another to run him through when he was actively scheming and manipulating. but she deliberately didn’t.

she deliberately made JGY, a person who had committed so many vile deeds that anyone in the jianghu could accept his execution as just, die an unjust death, slaughtered for something he didn’t do.

(do you think the characters cared that JGY had killed some nameless working women, btw? even LXC was more concerned about his scumbag father. that time he slaughtered an entire family of civilians as enrichment for Xue Yang? to the best of my recollection, that wasn’t even brought up in the main book. that was just for us.)

i’m making this post because a lot of people have told me point blank that JGY “earned” his miserable ending by doing bad shit, that Jiang Cheng/JGY/LXC/whoever the person thinks is an antagonist because they were mean to wangxian were “punished” with horrible fates, and this is how MXTX is codifying who the villains and who the heroes are, and the story is actually explicitly about moral uprightness prevailing over repugnance. and i just think that’s kind of a lackluster reading for a text that’s so blatantly explained that in this universe, good or bad things will simply happen to people completely regardless of whether or not it’s fair.

friend izzy points out that in the world of MDZS, “justice only happens on a personal scale”. there is no societal change. there is no large-scale justice. guilt is basically determined whenever some powerful people get in a room together and agree on it. and neither of the protagonists actually bother to change this. WWX’s big heroic stand was to save a village of a few dozen family members and retreat from larger society completely. LWJ’s heroic deeds account to literally just vigilantism. and this is good. the Wen ghosts coming out of the blood pool said: that was enough. sizhui’s whole existence says: protecting a handful of “unimportant” people for a year was worthwhile.

(XXC, SL, Mianmian etc also just kind of peaced out and wandered around helping people on an individual basis. and since I’m being petty anyway, I’ll once again throw out the fact that the person who affected the largest-scale positive societal change was in fact JGY, whose watchtowers were repeatedly praised for saving countless civilian lives, by the narration and by WWX himself.)

NHS committed himself to vengeance, neglecting his duties to his sect, killing animals, catching Qin Su in it as collateral, endangering children, desecrating the grave of an innocent woman, traumatising Jin Ling and thrusting him into a massive power vacuum at age 14, and destablising the politics of the entire Jianghu because there was no other way to get the piece of justice he personally needed.

any family member of any of the 3,000 people that Wei Wuxian killed at Nevernight have exactly as much right to do to Wei Wuxian exactly what Huaisang did to Jin Guangyao.

but nobody in this story “got what they deserved”. they just got it.

Orodreth and Finduilas, one more art for fandom challenge

I really want to join in the thanks to all of you (you know who you are ;))!!! It was an incredibly kind and beautiful gesture and trust us, all of Falešné Společenstvo was in awe. It was really amazing and the best possible reward after our performance.

It's quite difficult for me to grasp that someone who doesn't speak czech would be interested in our work, let alone put so much work to the translating of our strange language, so all of this is quite surreal. But it's a great encouragement to keep going. :) Thank you!

Aredhel

As a member of Falešné společenstvo I have to thank all the people from Tolkien musical fan group. You can’t even imagine how much this means to me (and I think it’s the same for other members of FS too). I almost cried when you gave us the flowers and the “letter”… Gosh, It’s so beautiful. 

This year was especially challenging. Many of us think we were cursed and our journey is painfully similar to Enchanted Isles. Even a few hours before the Tolkiencon premiere there were so many things that went wrong (e.g. broken car and keyboard stand) and I don’t even talk about cast changes because of illnesses… 

After all those years I’m a little bit burnt out (even though compared to some other members I don’t even do a quarter of their work) and I was even feeling like quitting. Of course, I didn’t mainly because well… without a very good reason, you can’t quit a few weeks before the premiere. But the other reason was that there are people outside the traditional visitors of Tolkiencon, who enjoy our work on its own, and who even want to travel from other countries just to see us. You guys are one of the few reasons, why I had a will to continue and a will to try to deliver the best possible performance. (Unfortunately, it wasn’t the best performance. Acting and singing in the gym are very hard because of the people who sit a few meters before you and you can look directly to their faces… I really wish you could see our unofficial performance last week. It is always in a little theatre and probably because of that this, performance is very often better than the premiere one).

So, thank you so so much again. You are really amazing. And I truly hope our play was worth your journey and you have enjoyed your stay at Tolkiencon and Prague…

T.

Okay, this is pretty incredible. A 3D artist, consulting scholars and archaeologists, worked for a year and a half in Blender to create a reconstruction of pre-Columbian Tenochtitlán, complete with the surrounding landscape. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and—at least to me—gives a wonderful impression of the city as a place where people worked and lived and worshiped

I would never wish for less people to love the Leithian story but sometimes I think about how that skews the perception a lot of people have of Thingol and I get sad

Maeglin is just a tragic victim of cousinzone.

Studniční hora (Well Mountain), Krkonoše Mountains, Czech Republic

mutuals try this: reblog for fingolfin. like for finarfin

Děti Húrinovy on youtube now with English subtitles!

My heart is broken... These princes were so unique.

Scarlet Heart: Ryeo → Princes