Leaving a fandom before the source material goes to shit but still hearing about what’s going wrong with it from the friends you made when you were into it feels like standing on a lifeboat after a shipwreck and seeing your friends still in the water fistfighting the man eating sharks circling around
The Fellowship gets on the topic of their ages one night and Boromir comes to the dawning realization that he has absolutely no idea how old any of his companions are supposed to be at all
Boromir, pointing at the hobbits: I don’t know how your ages work
Boromir, pointing at Legolas and Gimli: I definitely don’t know how either of your ages work
Boromir, pointing at Aragorn: I thought I knew how your age worked but apparentlyI was wrong
Boromir, pointing at Gandalf: I especially don’t know how your age works
Gandalf: It doesn’t, but carry on
Listen I will die on this hill. I don’t care what it says in the assorted apocrypha, if you go by the Actual Text of LOTR you can make a very good argument that Boromir is the youngest member of the group.
The hobbits are the only ones given official ages in the text, and are between fifty or fifty-one and twenty-nine. Elves and dwarves notoriously age slowly, and Gimli is the offspring of one of Bilbo’s pals, so okay, we’ve established that he’s old enough to call the hobbits young, and Bilbo confirms for them that Aragorn is Pretty Old For A Bigjobs. Gandalf is, of course, eternal.
But we are never given any context for Boromir and Faramir’s ages, except that a) they are humans and, though Sons of Gondor, not much longer lived than most Bigjobs, and b) Faramir is A QuiteYoung Man. I was absolutely convinced, when I read the books as a youngun, that Boromir, being in ‘the flower of manhood’ iirc, was probably between 25 and 30.
And it would be Freaking Hilarious, okay, for Boromir to finally get around to actually asking how old this baby-faced hobbit carrying The Ring is, and get told ‘oh, he’s only fifty, but he’s very steady for his age.’
Boromir: ?!?!?!
And then Pippin and Merry start asking everyone how old they are because this is fascinating are we all official adults here except for Pippin or what.
Boromir: …. Pippin isn’t an adult HOW OLD IS PIPPIN.
Pippin is just 29, which is why everyone calls him Pippin, it’s gonna be at least another 20 years before he can make Peregrine work. Why, how old is Boromir?
Boromir, who would rather DIE than admit to being 28 right at this moment: ….43.
All the others, weighing up his apparent age compared to theirs: Sure, sounds legit.
Gandalf, who knows for certain, does not say anything because he is absolutely certain that telling Pippin that he’s older than Boromir will be an unmitigated disaster.
BOROMIR is the BABY???????!!!!!!!
Love the take that Boromir’s canon age is just him being a fucking liar.
Aragorn, who also knows, doesn’t say anything for political reasons. He’s going to need Boromir’s dignity intact later.
Relatedly, the Appendix listing off dates and all was produced in Gondor. Their scribes should have plenty of sources. But if Gimli or whoever is right there saying that 150 years ago Boromir was 40, is that reallywhat you’re going to fact-check?
Especially if they did lie about Denethor’s name. This is nothing.
Murals showing different Soviet Women for each Republic
tried to do some digging on the source of this photo and couldn’t find anything unfortunately. i did however find some individual versions of these banners online:
cont (with a Mongolia bonus):
Some additional posters in this series:
To label these from the beginning: Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, Uzbekistan.
Lithuania repeated (with Mongolia bonus).
Russia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Armenia.
This should represent all fifteen constituent states of the SSR - if there are additional posters made of countries from outside the Soviet Republics, I’m not sure, but this should be the full collection of posters of the Soviet states of this period.
one time I was complaining to my reenactment friend about some housing issues I was having as I was getting stuff sorted out at my job and I was frustrated that I wasn’t being put where I wanted to be, and he was like “hm… maybe it’s because it’s a men’s living space? but honestly I think of you more as a guy anyway” and I nearly stopped in my tracks, because this guy is a blue-collar-job-working, MAGA-parent having firearms enthusiast who didn’t go to college and doesn’t really Get the whole gender thing, which I have never specifically talked to him about. but in that moment he got it. like, hit the nail right on the head. and I understand why—it’s not because I told him how I identified, it’s because when I do reenactments I only do men’s roles—I wear men’s clothes, I wield guns, I sleep on the ground and do the 18 mile hikes and whatnot—and to him this makes me functionally a guy in these scenarios, even if I don’t look like one. and it just utterly stunned me to realize that a lot of cis people, even conservative ones, understand that gender is a performance. they understand that gender is expressed by what you do and what you wear and stuff like that. and they’ll admit it to you straight to your face! they just can’t—and won’t—put it into those terms, even though they already believe it
all this being said I still love this friend a lot; I don’t necessarily agree with him on everything but it’s mostly a product of how he was raised and I think fundamentally he is a kind person who doesn’t fully understand. however it does make everything extremely funny because if nothing else he loves that I’m like this and is actively determined to make me More like that. but like. in the most 18th century way possible. like he wants nothing more than for me to spontaneously start liking beer and get drunk with him. it is a goal of his to get me as obsessed with pipe tobacco as he is. he is constantly encouraging me to drop large sums of money on flintlock weapons I cannot afford. I am being platonically forcemasced by a revolutionary war era british soldier
love these tags from @amultitudeofyellowrodents. so true and the team is His Majesty’s 22nd Regiment of Foot
[Image ID: Tumblr tags reading: #gender is a sport #and you are being scouted by the other team /End ID]
