Any setting where the elves have weaker booze than the dwarves isn’t committing to the bit
I mean, we’re talking about people whose lifespan is Yes.
“Oh, the weak wine? That is for children. I am two thousand years old, and I daresay one sip from this highball would knock you on your ass for a week.”
Look, there’s this weird thing people do with high fantasy where they want elves to be immortal/extremely long-lived snooty aristocrats and also somehow incapacitated by imagining the taste of salt too hard. “Orcs and dwarves have the hardest booze” no they don’t, they have work in the morning! In any of these settings, elves would pregame harder than hobbits party and everyone else has shit to do tomorrow.
The average high elf builds up the drug tolerance of a mid-70s Hollywood producer and then spends three centuries studying alchemy. While humans seek immortality, the Immortals seek the elusive “philosopher’s cocaine.”
My favourite part of nbc Hannibal is how it’s generally agreed that will is a little weirdo and acts like a little weirdo, meanwhile Hannibal, who is objectively just as if not more off putting and questionable than will, is treated as a totally normal, reasonable guy whom everyone likes
Here to remind you that Will had a gun on him during mizumono and let himself be gutted and held instead of fighting back, and Hannibal had a notebook full of equations to figure out time travel because that’s how desperately he wanted to reverse time
In Digestivo right before the break up scene we get a close up of these equations in Hannibal’s book which was confirmed by Bryan Fuller
Still stuck on how Aziraphale ate that meat like he was starving. Liked he’d been starved for millennia, and he hadn’t even known it, because he’d never once been fed. But we know they don’t have to eat (nor sleep, etc.), so what he’d been starved for is pleasure. Being present in his body, feeling the joys and longings it could feel. Understanding what taste buds were made for. He hadn’t known; he’d never learned to miss it.
I was watching LOTR with friends the other day and someone pointed out that a major reasonfilm!Elrond is upset about Arwen being in love with Aragorn is because of Elrond’s own broken relationship with Isildur.
In the films Isildur and Elrond are kind of set up as….a broken failed parallel to Aragorn and Arwen?
Arwen reassures Aragorn that “he is Isildur’s heir, not Isildur himself,” and “is not bound to his fate”– but Elrond disagrees, confident that Aragorn will be just like Isildur.
Film!Elrond is so certain that trusting in mankind is a mistake that will only lead Arwen to misery because he once trusted in mankind, and the man he trusted ended up failing him. His ally from the line of Elendil ended up falling to the power of the Ring and dying; he believes Aragorn may do the same thing. He doesn’t just want to save Arwen’s life and keep his daughter by his side; he wants to prevent Arwen from experiencing the same betrayal/heartbreak he experienced.
Film!Elrond is very stoic and unsentimental, but there are all these hints at Elrond and Isildur’s past relationship throughout the series. Everyone likes to make the joke “why didn’t Elrond just toss Isildur into the fire?” but to me the answer is, partially, because he cared about Isildur. They were allies who fought side-by-side. After describing what happened in Mount Doom all those years ago, Elrond tells Gandalf that “It should’ve ended that day, but evil was allowed to endure.” And I think it’s interesting that he goes into passive voice for a moment, instead of saying that Isildur specifically allowed to evil to endure–because he’s also blaming himself for allowing evil to endure, blaming his own failure to be harsh with Isildur and take the Ring from him by force. He’s regretting that he was merciful and didn’t “just toss Isildur into the fire.”
His complicated emotions about Isildur also appear again in the Two Towers. After insisting that Arwen needs to give up Aragorn as a lost cause and travel into the West, Elrond has a conversation with Galadriel where she guilt-trips him for abandoning Middle Earth/mankind. When she asks him “do we let them stand alone?” Elrond walks into the study, and spends a long moment looking at his mural of Isildur.
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He then, in the film’s canon, agrees to send military support to one of Isildur’s descendants.“I don’t care about Isildur anymore, men are weak,” Elrond says, standing in front of his elaborate mural of Isildur and his shrine dedicated to Isildur’s sword.
And yes this is all, again, a drastic departure from his characterization in the book– most of the Aragorn-Arwen-Elrond stuff in the films is a drastic departure from the book. The films radically alter their dynamics, including eliminating stuff like Elrond being Aragorn’s adopted father and all the “their bloodlines are related” stuff and etc etc etc etc etc.
But honestly, now that I see it, this interpretation makes the film!Elrond-Arwen dynamic engaging in a way I hadn’t recognized before?
In some ways it puts Isildur into the role that Elrond’s mortal brother Elros played for him in the books, because Elros is cut from the films entirely. Isildur is the reason film!Elrond knows what it’s like to have some kind of close relationship with a mortal and then watch them die. When Elrond angrily speaks about the folly of trusting men, or insists to Arwen that Aragorn “is not coming back” so she should just get over him, he’s speaking from experience–he’s projecting his own weird failed broken betrayal-ridden Thing with Isildur onto Arwen and Aragorn.
And in this context, his hopeless monologue about how Arwen will regret staying by Aragorn’s side also feels like it’s partially from his own experience. “If Sauron is defeated, and Aragorn is made king, and all that you hope for comes true, you will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality.” When he fought three thousand years ago Sauron was defeated, and Isildur did become King, and yet…
TL;DR : Film!Elrond had a nasty kind-of breakup with a mortal man 3000 years ago and instead of dealing with it he decided “Men Are trash Weak” and began projecting all of his drama onto Arwen
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