‘And seated a little apart was a tall man with a fair and noble face, dark-haired and grey-eyed, proud and stern of glance. He was cloaked and booted as if for a journey on horseback; and indeed though his garments were rich, and his cloak was lined with fur, they were stained with long travel.’ – The Council of Elrond, The Fellowship of the Ring.
“But Maria explained and painted their life cycle. Their metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. She not only explained that process, she showed which plant species each butterfly species was dependent upon. This book revolutionised the study of insects in Europe. But it also helped Maria raise the funds to embark upon a journey to study the more exotic creatures that she knew she would find in the tropical regions of the Dutch empire.”
David Olusoga, Civilisations, ep. 6 ‘First Contact’ (BBC 2018)
Pointless LOTR headcanon of the day: Frodo & Merry both take after their mothers, meaning Frodo looks more like a Brandybuck than a Baggins and Merry looks more like a Took. This is a constant source of petty contention.
(Pippin meanwhile absolutely takes after his father & is the most Tookish looking)
Merry: call me a Took one more time
Gandalf: if it looks like a Took and acts like a Took it’s a Took
Merry: I will END you
Gandalf is the only nonhobbit in the fellowship who understands the minutiae of Took Vs Brandybuck Vs Baggins rivalry & he delights in it, everyone else baffled
Frodo: look it’s perfectly simple. The Brandybucks don’t like the Tooks because they play golf and think they’re better than everyone because they occasionally go on adventures. The Tooks don’t like the Brandybucks because they live on the wrong side of the river and like boats. And nobody likes the Bagginses because they’re annoying.
Aragorn: are you… Including yourself in that
Frodo: I said what I said.
Frodo: now the Bagginses don’t like the Brandybucks OR the Tooks because they’re highly disrepectable but also richer than they are. And as far as a lot of the Bagginses are concerned I’m a Brandybuck because I grew up in Buckland and I have the Brandybuck Profile
Merry: which just means he’s not pug-ugly
Frodo: quite.
Aragorn: this is all ridiculous. Keep going.
Gandalf: Hm now I wouldn’t say UGLY but… every Baggins I’ve ever met has been perfectly Round or perfectly Square… There is no middle ground.
Gimli, baffled: Frodo isn’t round OR square
Merry: that’s because he has the Brandybuck profile
Gimli: so… Is he a Brandybuck…
Merry: ABSOLUTE not
Frodo: slander!! I’m a Baggins how dare you
Pippin: was your father a Round Baggins or a Square Baggins
Frodo: my father… Was the ROUNDEST Baggins who ever lived… A perfect Sphere of hobbit…
Gimli: What about your uncle. Is he round or square.
Frodo: Please tell me you’re kidding my uncle is the most Tookish Baggins to ever live and that includes physically
Bilbo ‘looked… exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father’. He’s a round Baggins imo
A lot of these pics are from Horses Inside Out which is an organization that paints horses! They use their painted ponies to teach about anatomy, biomechanics, and they advocate management and training practices based on the physiology of the horse. They’re an awesome org with a lot of really cool resources and publications!
Tip for all my student readers: if you’re too lazy to use a bibliography creator like NoodleBib or RefWorks, let Google generate your bibliography entries for you. All you have to do is google the article/book title in Google Scholar, click “cite” at the bottom of the search result, and copy either the MLA, APA, or Chicago cite into your word document.
Signal boost because omg how did I not know this in college?
Since registration is starting soon I figure this is ample time to remind the six people who look at my Tumblr that citing your sources is really important in college and that this will be your best friend forever.
If you’re in high school and want to go to college? Learn to source! You’ll be way ahead of the curve and it’s 100% more important than knowing what the hell a predicate nominative is.
I use http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ to figure out how to cite for my papers, and it’s been quite useful for the three years I’ve been at this!
Another good citation website is mendeley.com. You need to create an account, but it’s free. You can search through their database or they also have a browser extension which you just need to click once you’ve opened the article (or even just the abstract). From there it gets all the info you need to cite the paper, as well as downloading PDF files of it if they’re available. The citations will be in your library on the mendeley webpage and you can copy and paste them in the most common citation formats from there.
And you have those citations for as long as you have a membership at mendeley; they’re saved to your personal library. Incredibly helpful when you need to go back and find old papers for things.
Furthermore, if you’re like me and you need to use a weird citation style that isn’t as common as APA or MLA (I use the Geological Society of America formatting for most of my papers), you can download the free desktop app and it’ll properly cite your sources in even more citation styles.
I think aside from the Yikes factor, which I don’t really have the authority to address, the Nagini reveal is really emblematic of the problem Fantastic Beasts and most prequel films have. Namely, does it really matter?
And the answer is truly no. How does Nagini formally being a woman impact the later events of the Harry Potter universe? Is it a weakness of Voldemort’s to exploit or a hindrance to the heroes? No, she accomplishes those things just fine as a normal snake. Is her involvement in the events surrounding Grindelwald important? No, because it wasn’t worth remembering, not by Dumbledore or Voldemort or anyone else. At the end of the day, this new information was not necessary, and therefore not worth the time to include in the original seven books.
And that’s what’s wrong about this whole Newt Scamander, Fighter for Dumbledore angle. Because the books and therefore the history and worldbuilding do not support it. Scrimgeour doesn’t tell Harry “you’re Dumbledore’s man through and through, just like that Scamander bloke” because Harry was one of a kind to Scrimgeour, not just the update to a previously existing prototype. There’s no chapter in Rita Skeeter’s tell-all book devoted to Dumbledore’s special relationship with Newt, because it didn’t exist matter. Newt does not participate in the Order of the Phoenix or attend Dumbledore’s funeral, so whatever bond they have in these films does not survive. Which begs the question why any of it matters.
The characters of the Harry Potter Wizarding World do not know Newt Scamander for being a hero in the war against Grindelwald; they know him for being a magizoologist. Rowling can retcon it for these films, but she cannot go back and change the text she already wrote which shows just how unimportant of a story these five films must be to never even crop up as a footnote in Harry’s story. When Newt was just a vehicle for the Beasts, that was fine. Harry is not Charlie or Hagrid, for whom Newt would have been a far more important figure.
But this push to have a Good vs. Evil conflict, and more importantly for a Cinematic Universe, renders Newt’s revised story completely irrelevant because we know it was irrelevant to the characters of the future we were first introduced to and loved. If they never cared, why should we?
If they were worried that they needed conflict, they could have made SOMETHING more befitting to magical creatures than this.
Wizarding World poachers…Muggle poachers…Wizarding World bureaucrats who are willing to let a magical creature go extinct because its more convenient… The focus of one movie alone could just be a specific creature causes trouble in a Muggle area, and he has to keep both muggles/wizards from losing their collective shit about it. There can still be fun hijinks with other creatures along the way (Niffler in a jewelry store could have fit into that, I know they love to use them as a representation of the Fantastic Beasts franchise because they’re so cute and troublesome. Doesn’t have to change at all. In fact, it would make for MORE Niffler.) There can still be a run-in with loveable goofy muggle dude who rides along for the journey. And with employees of MACUSA, or whatever Wizarding government of what ever place they end up, who end up sympathetic to the cause to save the creatures.
That’s what I thought we were gonna get, and what I still want. I signed up for fantastical beasties, magic, and a dorky but brilliant Hufflepuff. Not pale, Wizard-Nazi Johnny Depp and other unnecessarily Edgy!characters.
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