Hopefully this clip of the scene with Morfydd Clark's, uh, questionable emoting hasn't been taken down by the time I post it.

Really, the Elves' entire First Age history after Morgoth swipes the Silmarils & helps Ungoliant destroy the Two Trees is nothing to be proud of. They (in particular the Sons of Fëanor and Maeglin) absolutely screw with each other almost as badly as Morgoth screws with them, none of the glorious victories they won early on nor the kingdoms they establish last, and in the end they can't even leave any trace of their glory except a few relics like the Elfstone of Gondolin, because they've been so thoroughly fucked by then that they need the Valar to step in to unfuck things - and they had to sink Beleriand in the process of defeating Morgoth.

Which makes it hilarious when the intro's got Galadriel dropping a very proud and literal 'We resisted' while talking about the Elven response to Morgoth's deeds in Valinor. Complete with the Oath of Fëanor and the Noldor sailing to Middle-earth being shown on screen. Like - would you care to elaborate on what that Oath entailed and its consequences over the next five or so centuries, Guyladriel? Or how the Noldor got all those ships in the first place?

Alternate title: Amazon has an obvious Dragon Age fan on the writing staff of Rings of Power, as if it weren't bad enough already.

Wouldn't be shocked if they did that to assert dominance & humiliate weaker members of their kind, as often happens in prison and more brutal militaries like the Soviet/Russian one (dedovschina), even if Tolkien would obviously never write about it explicitly. When we do see Orcs close-up in his work, like when Pippin & Merry and then (much later) Frodo are captured by them, they're quite lacking in discipline when they haven't got Saruman/Sauron watching them and prone to lethal infighting among themselves, not unlike a prison gang or a crew of conscripts who hate each other.

That said, funny enough, it is canon that Orcs have females and reproduce 'after the manner of the Children of Iluvatar' per the Silmarillion. Bolg is explicitly said to be the son of Azog, as well, and the very human Dunlendings gave their daughters to Saruman as tribute so that he might crossbreed them with regular Orcs to spawn Half-Orcs who served as elite soldiers in the army of Isengard.

They are, that's a very bad thing in their view. Like Morgoth they despise straight - that is to say normal - people for having what they cannot have and refuse to acquire for themselves, the capacity for natural procreation, which is why they curse said normal people as 'breeders' in one breath and then spend the next plotting to groom the children of said 'breeders', as surely as the original Dark Lord tortured Elves into Orcs not merely because he needed thralls but also to spite Iluvatar.

Those groomed then accordingly work to spread the contagion, as Kiyoshi Kuromiya (who Google honored this past June) did after being raped at age 9 by becoming a huge NAMBLA supporter, just as the Orcs then spread destruction and hatred wherever they go.

But maybe this analogy gives the alphabet soup crowd too much credit. At least Orcs are said to hate their overlord as much as themselves and everything else (they're just too fearful and broken to direct their destructive urges at him), they wouldn't blather about how much they loved losing their virginity to an older rapist at age 14. Can't say the same about the likes of George Takei.

By the way, the guy Amazon's turning gay just like any frog Alex Jones can't protect - Elrond - is canonically happily married to Celebrían, the daughter of Galadriel & Celeborn, and had three kids with her (including Arwen, Aragorn's future wife).

The reviewer cited by this article also notes that Amazon made this choice on purpose (of course) precisely to spite Tolkien for being a 'heteronormative' Catholic and implies that all male Elves should be considered gay by default because a gay guy (Lee Pace) portrayed Thranduil the Elvenking in The Hobbit trilogy.

I took a quick look at how the Resident Evil subreddit was reacting to this news, and even there they're quite happy about the cancellation and in overwhelming agreement that the show was trash. Not dissimilar to how the Cowboy Bebop subreddit reacted to Netflix's Cowboy Peepoop being shut down last year, actually. Guess there's a limit to the amount of blatant garbage propaganda even Redditors can stomach after all.

Great news. Disrupting the left's control over the education system as much as possible, and by any possible means is the key to undermining their strategy of poaching other people's kids with which to fight their wars and propagate their ideology, since they sure as shit aren't having enough to do that themselves.

More ABCs, less LGBTs.

I've heard from Nerdrotic that that's actually just a Sauron cultist and 'Halbrand' (the guy seen with and seemingly set to enter into a romance with Galadriel in most of the actual marketing for ROP other than all the diversity-centric interviews) will turn out to be Sauron. Even that flies in the face of Tolkien's canon though, since Galadriel was both already married to Celeborn and consistently suspicious of even Sauron-as-Annatar (his angelic 'fair' form) from the very beginning.

IMO the most concerning thing about this story is not even that it happened at all, but that it happened in North fucking Dakota.

Oh, for fuck's sake. And these people just acquired Eidos & with them Deus Ex, too. There goes even the thinnest ray of optimism I've allowed myself in the realm of vidya.

The shame and guilt I grew up with regarding sex felt oppressive. I resented the double standard that men could be promiscuous and it would raise their status and a woman would be slut-shamed for similar behavior. My burgeoning sexuality would unfold as a reaction to these repressive religious orthodoxies, old school notions of sexual status, and trauma.

Mistake #1, disregarding the wisdom of your elders, their religion and the traditions they had cultivated over millennia as uncool.

I lost my virginity at 17 to my boss at a restaurant where I worked. And a year later, I experienced my first sexual trauma. I felt damaged and dirty and I blamed myself. Everyone responds differently to these situations—I dealt with the overwhelming shame by becoming hyper-sexual and promiscuous. The Culture was right there to pick me up and dust me off. I doubled down on being a proud slut and internalized the biggest and most damaging lie: that loveless sex is empowering. I basked in the girl-power glow of that delusion for decades, weaponizing my sexuality while convincing myself I was full of the divine feminine.

Mistake #2. But it's OK I guess, the important thing is that you acknowledge it was a mistake and have now committed to not doing more of it, yeah? Nobody respects whores, not even themselves, and you Mrs. Phetasy have at least managed sufficient honesty and self-awareness to realize this truth, though it has clearly taken much longer for you than it would have any man. That's OK too though, unlike far too much of modern society (whose flaws you yourself are only barely beginning to become aware of) I acknowledge the fundamental differences between the sexes, including how one's a slower learner than the other.

Another set of lies built on lies built on trauma. Sex isn’t just about power—it’s also about intimacy and vulnerability and trust. Things I wanted nothing to do with. Because implicit in modern dating is a complete lack of expectations –– especially those of chivalry. Whenever a man wanted to pick up the tab or pull out the chair or open the door or pick me up or take me to dinner or see me during the day or wait longer than the first date to have sex, I was shocked and suspicious of them. Was he a serial killer?

This is what happens when you take the mantras invented by subversive bitches like Betty Friedan and psychotic basketcases like Andrea Dworkin, people who would rightly have been burned at the stake or shunted out of society & left to die in a sewer at best in ages past respectively, as gospel.

I’m not suggesting we return to some Victorian era notion of sex or some 1950s era ideal about gender roles.

And there's Mistake #3, the one society cannot make if we are to recover from the Sexual Revolution and its disastrous consequences. The only true way forward out of this mess is backward, and the Taliban are showing just how it can be done if their rapid and little-talked-about purge of degeneracy from Kabul is any indicator.

I’m now 43-years-old and I’m in the first truly healthy, intimate relationship in my life with my (second) husband. We recently had a daughter.

I struggle to find the words to express my sorrow for both the husband and the daughter. They deserved better than this washed-up harlot, who even now strives to remain willfully blind to the solutions to her problems and the society which destroyed whatever potential she might have had as a wife and mother.

Sex can be empowering when you’re coming from a position of healthy self-esteem. If you’re coming from a place of trauma or insecurity, casual sex won’t heal that. In fact, it might set you back and undermine any progress regarding your feelings of self-worth. If you know your value, you’re less likely to sleep with someone who doesn’t value you. Cherish yourself and you will be cherished. You shouldn’t have to withhold sex for a man to respect you; he should respect you regardless. Sexual empowerment has nothing to do with how many people you do or don’t sleep with—it has to do with how comfortable you are in your skin—no matter your decision. It’s not about waiting until you’re in love to have sex; it’s about making sure that first, you love yourself.

I regret being a slut. I regret it because I regret that those men can say they slept with me. Still, that’s how I know I finally value myself. Every woman should feel this way: Sleeping with me is a privilege. And you have to be worthy.

More fatal mistakes. But I guess it would be too much to ask a woman, especially a whore such as this, to take responsibility for their failings - even just acknowledging them as Mrs. Phetasy has just done must have taken a truly Herculean (Amazonian?) effort. I look forward to hearing about the divorce and how much your daughter hates you in 15-20 years' time.

Vidya is part of it and what Embracer's most famous for, but actually they seem to have bought the entirety of Middle-earth Enterprises (covering even the film rights) from the Saul Zaentz Company. Unfortunately I forgot to update that part of the title before hitting 'post' and can't seem to edit titles on .win.

The Puritans were right about witches, Theodosius the Great was right about pagans, etc.

The Hobbit movies had Galadriel defeat Sauron in Dol Guldur by hulking out and using Nenya (making her resemble her 'beautiful and terrible' Ring-bearing queen form), which is fucking ridiculous. Sauron is a Maia, or angel (albeit fallen) in Tolkien's cosmology, like Gandalf or Saruman or the Balrog, and Maiar are well above any Elf in power. IIRC it was Saruman & Elrond who fought the Ringwraiths in that particular scene, while Galadriel was focused on protecting Gandalf from Sauron.

While First Age Elves did fight Balrogs, only one was able to win - Glorfindel, who killed the Balrog chieftain Gothmog at the cost of his own life; and Gothmog in turn had previously killed Fëanor, canonically the greatest and mightiest Elf ever, although he needed the help of a small army of his fellows to do it. Sauron, of course, is mightier than the Balrogs (which was why he was Morgoth's #2 guy and not Gothmog) and even in his maimed Ringless form would've been more than a match for Saruman (hence why he just gave up and joined Sauron later) & Gandalf (at least as 'the Grey'), much less Galadriel.

Frankly I'm only surprised that it took them this long. Would've thought Amazon would be following the Disney playbook and have their cast preemptively attack fans for being wacist misogynerds early on, as Moses Ingram (Reva) did well before Obi-Wan Kenobi even premiered, especially as the Tolkien fandom had been clowning on this obvious trainwreck for months already.

Word. I'd also add that this enabling of the black community's worst tendencies and the attendant results, making them into one of the most obvious preferred pawns of the current regime, has made them the most hated race in America in the eyes of the other races, no matter what they themselves think of those others. And this was before the Summer of Love!

Mark my words, the second the USA's internal situation goes kinetic and the polite fiction everyone's trying to keep up around the state of race relations today collapses, most blacks are going to be getting treated much like they were at the end of Reconstruction. And just like at the end of Reconstruction, the white liberals who used them as puppets against the interests of Southern whites (and now also Northern whites, Hispanics, Asians...) are going to cheerfully throw them under the bus and pretend they don't exist for the next 100+ years when everyone else decides to implement a final solution to the inner-city ghetto problem.

Oh well. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, writ large.

Gotta disagree that D&D are solely or even mostly to blame for the last couple seasons of GoT, tbh. They may have rushed it and made up a boatload of nonsense, but they only signed on to adapt Martin's work, not create a partially original one of their own. They did skip over a lot of stuff from the last two books as well but to be frank, like 80-90% of AFFC and ADWD is unadaptable filler that wouldn't make good television. (A fifth of AFFC is just Brienne meandering around the Riverlands, looking for a character the readers know isn't even in the same kingdom and accomplishing basically nothing of importance to the narrative)

And for all that, even if D&D had painstakingly adapted every page from those two last books in the series to stretch GoT out to twelve or thirteen seasons (with the latest season airing this year)...Martin STILL hasn't published Winds of Winter yet as of 2022, nevermind Dream of Spring. Yeah, we can't forget the next book isn't even the last in the series lmao, and realistically he's probably going to need an eighth or even ninth book to have any hope of satisfactorily wrapping up all the new plot threads he just introduced in AFFC/ADWD without rushing the narrative as badly as D&D themselves did. I honestly wouldn't be able to blame anybody for wanting out at that point (the showrunners and actors would've been working on GoT for even longer than Andrew Lincoln had on The Walking Dead by then), and GRRM's inability to finish his work means it wouldn't even matter all that much if D&D had found some eager volunteer to hand GoT off to.

As for HOTD, I'm just looking forward to how the 'yas kween slay' crowd will react to the ending to the Dance of the Dragons, which Martin already wrote fairly extensively about in The World of Ice and Fire and now the Fire and Blood books. Either they're going to melt down as hard as Dany stans did after S8 or Martin's gonna have to radically change his ending, in which case he'd further demonstrate that he no longer has an ounce of confidence or creative integrity and I'd lose respect for him that I didn't even know I still had.

So is that the game plan here, then? The FBI plants and promptly conveniently 'discovers' CP right out of Epstein's stash at Mar-a-Lago, and that'll be their overlords' excuse to toss him behind bars & well out of contention for 2024?

The racebending is almost as insulting as the attempt to portray the Dance of the Dragons as some kind of anti-patriarchal story, IMHO. When the plotline Martin actually wrote boils down to the two women at its core, Alicent Hightower and Rhaenyra Targaryen, being two power-hungry bitches who loathed each other, and it ends (as GoT the show itself did) in a resounding endorsement of The Patriarchy™ because it turns out that if you give women so much as a sniff at real power, they really will burn everything down for little to no reason.

Re: Fire and Blood. I wouldn't know, I've committed to not buying any more of the obese bastard's work after he made it clear that he was never going to finish the main series. What I posted above is what I got out of The World of Ice & Fire, his poor copy of the Silmarillion which I bought back in 2014 when the show was at its peak and there was still hope for an ending to the core series. From what I've heard Fire and Blood basically just explores some of the material first introduced in TWOIAF (chiefly Daemon Targaryen's earlier adventures and the Dance) in greater detail anyway - hardly worth the price tag even if I were still interested.

Archive

Well we've known for a while now that House of the Dragon is going to be a woke shitshow, the question is how big of one it'll be on launch. Looks like the directors, producers & cast will be going for broke. My favorite quote from the above article:

Framing the series around Rhaenyra and Alicent was an idea that came from Alexis Raben – who, as well as being Sapochnik’s wife, is a development executive at his production company. “One day, she said, ‘This would be much more interesting if it was about the two main female characters, rather than the male characters,’” Sapochnik recalls. “‘If you really focused in on the patriarchy’s perception of women, and the fact that they’d rather destroy themselves than see a woman on the throne.’ That wasn’t a perspective I have ever told before. I think it made this show feel more contemporary too.” While the pair begin the show as friends, disruption in the kingdom finds them on opposite ends of an ideological spectrum when it comes to the patriarchal structure they’re trapped in. “We said, ‘What if Alicent is like “Women for Trump,” and Rhaenyra’s like punk rock?’” Anarchy in Westeros? Count us in.

Emphasis mine.

For anyone who wants a primer on the story and doesn't give a rat's ass about spoilers, allow me to quote myself from the last time I posted something about HOTD here:

=====================Here be spoilers, for anyone who cares=====================

• The core conflict pits two factions of extremely unlikable characters - ambitious usurpers, child-killers, rapists, sadistic war criminals, all-around unpleasant jerks, etc. - against each other for the right to sit on the world's pointiest chair.

• Of these, we are meant to sympathize with the leader of the 'Black' faction: Rhaenyra Targaryen, the subject of the quote in the title. A casual adulteress and mother of multiple obvious bastard children who her partisans maintain is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne because her dad King Viserys said so, despite this blatantly contravening all the laws & traditions of the Seven Kingdoms. She will go on to sign off on war crimes, including the murder of her infant nephews and bloody purges of her enemies.

• Rhaenyra's chief supporters include her uncle-husband Daemon, who resembles an Oblivion character in his portrayal by Matt Smith, and who is a ruthless warlord on top of being an all-around dick. Also the Velaryons, the family of her first husband (who she cheated on, but everyone was cool with it because he was gay), who have been made black in this show despite the paternity of their supposed children being a major complication for Rhaenyra's claim: in the books she had a little plausible deniability, not so on the show thanks to said race swap.

• The other faction, the Greens, is spearheaded by Rhaenyra's half-brother Aegon II, a fat lazy slob who is nevertheless legally the heir to the Seven Kingdoms by every actual law & custom in the land. He eventually becomes a bloodthirsty, vindictive psycho after being severely injured in battle and having his sons assassinated by Rhaenyra's partisans. The true brains of the Green clique is Aegon's mom (and Rhaenyra's stepmother) Alicent Hightower, who can be best described as a sane Cersei (or IOW a moderately intelligent and immoderately ambitious scheming bitch, if you haven't read the books or watched GoT).

• Aegon's chief supporters include Criston Cole, a knight who leads the Kingsguard (royal bodyguard comprised of seven elite knights) and was Rhaenyra's jilted ex-lover, and his middle brother Aemond, the most violently unstable & assholish Targaryen prince around who's also the rider of the most powerful dragon still alive. He & Aemond also had a third brother in the books named Daeron, who was one of literally three named adult Targaryen royals from this timeframe to act like a decent (even heroic) human being on top of being a badass and reasonable leader. (The others were Aegon's sister-wife Helaena, a body positive princess, and Rhaenys, a cousin of their father the old king who is also the token heroic Black) Naturally, unlike the diverse and good Blacks, the Green lieutenants are all vile white men and Daeron seems to have been written out of the show entirely - notably nobody has been cast in his role, unlike his brothers.

• The story ends with the Blacks and Greens obliterating each other entirely. Like her distant descendant Daenaerys does in Season 8, Rhaenyra caps off her reign with a murderous rampage and an assortment of atrocities aimed at innocent people & hostages that turns just about everyone against her - in other words, setting the realm to the torch herself. Aegon takes his chance to kill Rhaenyra, then is himself killed by a cast of bit characters including random lords literally named after Sesame Street Muppets to make way for Rhaenyra's older surviving son with Daemon, Aegon III, to take the throne as a child. Also, the Seven Kingdoms agree to ban women from the royal succession unless all male heirs have died first, which seems like an eminently reasonable thing to do considering what the various powerful women of the setting (again, with like two exceptions) get up to over the course of the books/series.

=====================End spoilers=====================

In any case, nobody should take the leader of an organization founded to protect a child rapist & murderer, Leo Frank - a man so obviously guilty that not even the Deep South circa 1913 bought their attempts to frame a black guy for his crimes - seriously in the slightest.

Of course the Synagogue of Satan can't stand their most hated enemy so much as thinking about re-asserting power and retaking even one country from the claws of their cabal. Saint Louis was right about this piece of shit's ancestors.

More detailed information can be found in his kiwifarms thread, his arrest got featured on their front page. From what I've read it seems that this 'Gazi Kodzo' guy has been grooming homeless teenage boys and one of them calling the cops to his Georgia 'compound', but then (apparently) killing himself, is what led to his arrest.

Oh, and for a black supremacist who insists on referring to whites as 'toilet seat complexion people' (quite rich for someone with a 'toilet stain complexion') it sounds like he might actually be into buck breaking, if those mentions of him having a special fetish for white boys I've seen there are any indication.

Yeah, you didn't see headlines like this coming out of these filthy rags when the Obergefell v. Hodges decision dropped, even though freakin' California had voted against gay marriage when it was put on the ballot.