Honestly, when it comes to my own personal views? I believe that no one is beyond redemption (though whether or not the people said individual wronged are willing to forgive is wholly up to the people in question). For me, the belief that anyone can claw their way out of iniquity is not only a central tenet of my faith but also the knowledge that keeps me emotionally balanced and stops me from wallowing in bleak cynicism. I have to believe that redemption is possible for all, even if some choose not to take that road.
It always grinds my gears when people talk about redemption as if it’s something to be ‘deserved’, rather than an active choice, a verb, something a person does, with more or less variable degree of success. To redeem oneself is to take the necessary steps toward uplifting one’s soul from moral degradation. In essence, they keep equating redemption with something like forgiveness, when the two are entirely different matters and don’t have a 1:1 correlation at all. Some of my favourite redemption narratives (Anakin Skywalker lives AUs, for example) don’t really contain all that much in the way of forgiveness, because some acts simply can’t be forgiven by their victims. For me, the enjoyment of such stories comes from seeing the central character’s physical and emotional struggles with everything redemption entails, until they can achieve a weary, wizened peace with the world and with themselves. There’s an almost poetic beauty, I’ve always thought, to the words of a person who has walked in both the brightest light and the darkest shadow and it’s a real pleasure to put those sorts of words down on paper.
And yes, as I said before, I suspect that at least some of this nonsense comes from people having a visceral reaction to their own flaws being reflected back at them. For others, it’s your run-of-the-mill purity culture wankery.
I really like this for making a distinction between redemption and forgiveness. I am well on record as hating most forgiveness arcs. A lot of time, it feels like the character hasn’t earned it, but the narrative requires that their victims forgive, and I vomit inside my mouth a little. A redemption arc is just the opposite. By god, the character puts in the work. And at the end of the day, they may not be forgiven, but they do what they have to do, because they have to do it, because it’s the right thing to do. And that? That matters.
I…I recognize the joke, but these are totally different kinds of bows, each with its own benefits and suited to its user.
Bard’s using a longbow.
Longbows are awesome and take a fuckton of regular practice to use, because the muscle strain required to be a longbowman(/woman) actually deforms the arms and back of the user.
“Bard the Bowman” is still known by that sobriquet even though he’s low status, his family’s life and profession changed when the dragon attacked. Why would he be called that, if not that he’s still in regular practice and people see him using the thing over and over and over?
Longbows are less-damaged by damp than composites, being made of once single piece of wood rather than layers of material, which is handy if one lives in the middle of a freaking lake.
The longbow changed the face of warfare in real life, esp. for England. They’re effective killing machines over long distance, even against armored enemies.
Conclusion: Bard’s a tank-muscled distance shot used to fighting with good sightlines.
Legolas and Tauriel use recurve bows, albeit in different styles.
Legolas’ looks like a Turkish bow, though I don’t recall seeing him use a thumb draw (which is not mandatory if you’ve got super strong elf-fingers, I guess).
Tauriel’s looks to be a Scythian composite bow by the shape.
Composite recurve bows are much easier to use in confined spaces and at odd angles.
They have been historically used by folks who specialize in archer tricks like multiple arrow shots (a thing we have seen Legolas do).
Because of the curves, composites pack heavy draw weight (the factor that determines with what force, i.e. how fast and far, the arrow will travel) into limited space.
Short draw (the distance you have to pull back the arrow to shoot it) means a quicker release time and quicker time to get your next arrow on the string.
Legolas and Tauriel fight in a forest, not know for long sight lines or easy travel, nor for enemies who can be seen coming. They need weapons that won’t be getting caught on a bush at an inopportune time. Likewise, you see fewer spears and longswords among the elves of the Greenwood.
Conclusion: Legolas and Tauriel are guerrilla fighters from a heavily-forested territory and their weapons reflect that.
Kili also uses a composite recurve bow.
For practical purposes, note that Kili has significantly shorter arms than any of the other archers here mentioned. Long draws, like on Bard’s longbow, are not feasible and that means he’s not going to get the power he is capable of producing.
Dwarves are fucking strong, all right? That wee little bow looks very like the Mongolian horse-bow in size and shape that my friend used with a draw weight of 55 lbs. (I’m not a weakling and I can draw 35 for a decent length of time when in practice). Kili’s could easily be upwards of 75-100 lbs.
Kili’s a hunter. Likely, his main concern with a bow (when not following his uncle on an inadvisable quest) is the procurement of dinner for his family. To do that with a bow you need to be very quiet or very quick on the draw. Dwarves are not known for being super-quiet, though I believe I remember something about Fili and Kili being better at that than is typical.
Anything that can kill a deer can probably kill a person (or an orc). That little horse-bow can easily kill or maim.
Conclusion: Kili is a hunter. He uses a bow that allows for the production of a lot of power at short notice and is suited to his size and strength.
Bigger is not always most effective. Your medieval weaponry rant has concluded for the day, unless someone wants to talk to me about swords.
the greatest skill a woman can learn for herself is self reliance
to clarify … so many strong women in my life rely on men. that dependence is dangerous. ladies here are some good ref resources I’ve found helpful on my journey towards self reliance
If you’ve logged in to Tumblr in the last few days, you will have seen the GDPR warning, telling you Tumblr is part of the Oath family of sites, and requiring you to opt-in to their privacy settings.
You may not have realised that, in contravention of the GDPR rules which ban default opt-ins, if you don’t go into the ‘more options’ button and opt out of each individual sharing partner, Tumblr will share your data with a whole huge list of other companies. Like, 300 of them.
If you’ve already opted in to the Oath privacy stuff, you need to go to your Settings page:
Click the Privacy button on the right:
Then, click the little button next to ‘Cookie Consent’ to revoke it.
After confirming you want to revoke consent, you will immediately be taken to that big privacy opt-in page again. From that point we follow the steps @the-mad-duchess described – first click ‘Manage Options’:
Then, click the blue ‘Manage’ button, and expand the two lists. You’ll see five kinds of data sharing, and like 300 different companies:
The first five you can click manually more easily than using javascript. That might be enough to opt out of any data sharing – but I want to be sure. So, let’s make sure we disable every single enabled partner as well.
However, clicking on 300 little buttons to opt out of is an absurd demand. There is, thankfully, a shortcut, using your browser’s developer tools.
What you want to do is open the web console. In Firefox, you do it like this: click the little menu in top right, then go down to where it says Web Developer:
Then, click the Web Console option:
This will open up the web console in the bottom of the screen. It will have a bunch of messages in it that you can ignore:
As shown, what we want to do is copy and paste some JavaScript code into this, then hit ‘enter’, which will make the browser simulate a mouseclick on every single one of these little buttons and thereby turn them all off. The code is this:
var rows = document.getElementsByClassName("vendor-options")[0].children;
for (var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {rows[i].lastChild.firstChild.click();}
If you’re not familiar with JavaScript, let me briefly explain what this is doing. The first line finds the part of the page with all the buttons in it – specifically, the rows in the table of vendors, which is identified by the “vendor-options”. The second line goes through each of them one by one, and for each row of the table, goes inside and finds the button, and simulates a click on it.
If it works correctly, you will abruptly scroll to the bottom of the page and all those little buttons will slide to the ‘greyed out’ position. Now you can go ahead and click Done, click the OK button, and carry on using Tumblr, trusting that if they keep their word, they won’t share your data with those 300 companies.
I’m gonna chat with the New XKit devs to see if this can be added (they may already be working on it). But I hope this saves you some time.
Note also – this is not actually compliant with the new GDPR laws. The rule is that you have to explicitly opt in to letting companies use your data, you can’t have a list of default opt-ins behind a button like this. At some point, somebody will hopefully sue Yahoo/Oath and establish that in court. In the meantime, let’s keep our data to ourselves.
I have realized that Steve Rogers would have gone into the ice after The Hobbit was printed but before The Lord of the Rings was released and now all I want is him finding out about The Lord of the Rings and being so excited because “Wait, you mean there’s a sequel?!”
please please please just imagine the following:
Steve reads The Hobbit in the 30s/40s. Maybe Bucky saves up and buys it for him one year for his birthday. Maybe he picks up a copy while on the USO tour. Maybe Peggy lends it to him.
He reads it. He loves it. He goes into the ice.
He wakes up and rereading it crosses his mind but “It’s an old book now, no one’s probably heard of it.” and there are so many new things to read that it gets pushed aside.
(Or maybe he knows that they’re making The Hobbit into a movie and he’s so happy about that but he doesn’t really read into it, you know? It’s going to be a movie, that’s good enough for him. He doesn’t watch interviews, he doesn’t read articles- he hears about The Lord of the Rings, of course, but no one ever makes the connection for him.)
(“I’ll reread The Hobbit before the movies come out,” but there’s still so many new things that it still gets pushed aside.)
Someone (Nat or Sam, in a hotel somewhere while they’re looking for Bucky, or Bruce in the Tower, or whoever) flips through channels and puts on The Lord of the Rings movies and Steve is only half paying attention. Maybe he’s sketching. Maybe he’s reading reports. Who knows.
Then he hears “hobbits” and it catches his attention because wait, is that…? But this isn’t The Hobbit, he doesn’t know this story, but he’s invested now and he’s watching a little bit more.
Gandalf appears, and Bilbo, and wait he definitely knows these characters what’s going on, what’s happening here, what story is this?
“Well, yeah, it’s The Lord of the Rings, it’s the sequel to The Hobbit-”
“He wrote a sequel? There’s a sequel!?”
“…there’s technically a prequel too, mostly put together by his son, but-”
“HOW MANY MORE BOOKS ARE THERE?”
“…three in The Lord of the Rings, plus the Silmarillion, and a lot of history/meta stuff too…”
“I WANT TO READ THEM ALL.”
Steve does read them all.
(There’s a moment of loud indignation when he reads about the riddle game because “It didn’t happen like that!” He has to have the changes explained, and then it’s the funniest thing in the world to him.)
Please just imagine Steve Rogers in his office at the compound with a tiny book shelf that’s just full of copies of all of Tolkien’s works. And tucked in a corner is a first-edition copy of The Hobbit that Tony bought for him, and Steve knows that it has to be ridiculously expensive but he dosen’t care, because it’s almost exactly like the copy he used to have. And even though he knows he probably shouldn’t handle it too much, sometimes he picks it up and rereads the riddle game scene. (The original is still better, in his opinion.)
But please also imagine Steve reading, specifically, The Return of the King.
Steve reading about Frodo and Sam nearly dying on the slopes of Mount Doom, saving the world by the skin of their teeth, and it’s exactly the epic fantasy ending he was expecting. Aragorn marries Arwen, and the hobbits are heroes, and everything is right in the world.
And then they go back to the Shire.
They go through literal war, and they try to go home… but it’s not home. It’s been ravaged by the war, by technology, and “in your heart you begin to understand: there is no going back.”
And Frodo sails. Frodo sails, and even though you know that Sam still has Merry and Pippin, look at what he’s lost. He lost Frodo, he lost Gandalf, he lost the innocence of the Shire. And Sam is left behind, left to return home to his wife and family alone, and its an awful, terrible moment, that moment when you’re confronted with the reality that “We set out to save the Shire, Sam. And it has been saved, but not for me,” that winning the war can mean losing in other ways, that sometimes you don’t get your happy ending-
But that’s not the ending you’re left with. Because the last line of the book is “Well, I’m back.” and Steve, sitting in his apartment, surrounding by a future that never expected to see, that he understands and embraces but still sometimes doesn’t feel like his own world- Steve sits back, and sets the book down, and innately understands Sam’s feeling of pushing forward and finding happiness even in the light of a great personal loss. Steve has literally lived through his own Scouring of the Shire, has tried to go home only to realize that there is no going back, Steve would have every reason in the world to be Frodo and to decide to step back and find his own peace because damnit, he deserves that.
But Steve isn’t Frodo, Steve is Sam, Steve is the stouthearted and steadfast and he keeps moving forward, because he gets home and doesn’t just see the broken edges of the world- he also sees the pieces that got put back together. He sees everything he survived, and everything that the people around him survived, and when he finishes reading that book and sets it down he looks around his apartment and realizes for the first time that he’s finally managed to come home again.
Headcanon accepted
Guys, this is pretty much canon!! There’s an old comics panel (I’m pretty sure @jayleeg has posted it) that shows Steve reading Lord of the Rings!!! And saying he loves Tolkien.
Yup, that was Avengers #46 by
Roy Thomas…
And to add more food to the fodder, from Cap #255 by Roger Stern…
Steve Rogers is a big ol’ geek, just like the rest of us. 😉
Steve and the Silmarillion tho
Someone please draw a flashback of Steve seeing Asgard for the first time and being like “I AM NEVER LEAVING HERE EVER”
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