View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
+ Show First Post
purposeful_glory
"You're welcome. Reports will be more seldom once he's out by the Dwarves..."
"Yeah, I know. I was planning not to talk to him for a few centuries anyway, when all this started, so somehow I'm sure I'll cope."
"I do try not to harp on about it, but left us to die. I think my reaction was appropriate."
purposeful_glory
"I wouldn't have said 'Quendi' if you said you were planning to never speak to him again, but you said 'a few centuries' as an explanation for how you'll cope with the downgrade from twice-weekly updates."
"For a while I wanted to never speak to him again, but it was always fairly obvious that if there's going to be coordination on facing the Enemy some of us are going to have to set grievances aside, and I have the mixed blessing of finding that very easy to do, so I never really thought it'd be 'never'."
And I'd probably have obsessed over news about him. He'd have gotten married for political reasons or something and I'd have silently thrown a tantrum for weeks. ...I was really never going to be very good at it.
purposeful_glory
Apparently the other host is considering some arranged vaguely-political marriages with locals. I objected. Not particularly forcefully, but I objected.
Is that unacceptable where you're from?
purposeful_glory
No, not really. I'm pretty sure my parents are married because Vanaheim really wanted Odin to go away and leave them alone and it was somehow implied that a pretty husband would make that happen more smoothly.
It should have occurred to me that overexposure can engender concerns as much as underexposure.
Romantic love is a concept we - invented in Valinor is an exaggeration, but certainly the ways we conceived of it in relation to marriage were invented in Valinor. It doesn't surprise me that my cousins are delightedly throwing out every norm at whose roots they can identify a Vala.
Romantic love is a concept we - invented in Valinor is an exaggeration, but certainly the ways we conceived of it in relation to marriage were invented in Valinor. It doesn't surprise me that my cousins are delightedly throwing out every norm at whose roots they can identify a Vala.
purposeful_glory
If you could get all the right answers by finding people who were very bad at finding the right ones and doing the opposite of what they suggested, it'd be a lot easier than it actually is.
I do not disagree.
purposeful_glory
I said, what was it - She rifles through her notes, pulls out her remark about how none of the factors differing between here and her mental prototype were improving the matter.
At a guess, 'end marriage' is high enough on my uncle's list of priorities that they're being more nonchalant about it than they should.
purposeful_glory
Maybe. I don't think that excuses it; I mean, I object even among non-immortal populations.
Really? Why?
purposeful_glory
I'm sufficiently confused about why you asked that question that I don't know how to construct an informative answer.
I don't have a concept of what marriages are 'supposed to be like', and while I understand why Fëanáro wants them destroyed entirely I don't personally have strong feelings in any direction. Wars involve asking people to die for you. My uncle's style of war involves asking people to swear themselves to the everlasting darkness for you. Making two families into one seems like - as good a goal as any other, and the only objection that occurs to me is that the parties make a permanent commitment for an impermanent end, which is why it surprises me that you'd object even were that untrue.
Men here are supposed to get something after they die, I don't know what. Eru doesn't just destroy them when they die.
purposeful_glory
And he did such a great job last time he picked out someone to run an afterlife, so I shouldn't be worried? Has an excellent track record with understanding the concept of marriage in a way that's palatable to me?
Granted. Mind, if I saw it that way I'd be tempted to just forbid marriage, it doesn't seem like choosing someone because you desperately want to sleep with them gets better results a millennium down the road than choosing someone because it'll promote ties between your people.
purposeful_glory
Lúthien says that the mechanism by which marriage works is not so baked into the system, actually, that it's somehow expectation-based. I'm not sure how thoroughly informed she can possibly be considering she had to replace key moments in the process with the phrase "do you think anyone's told me", though.