‘Life is very full of sex, or should be. As much as I admire Tolkien —
and I do, he was a giant of fantasy and a giant of literature, and I
think he wrote a great book that will be read for many years — you do
have to wonder where all those Hobbits came from, since you can’t
imagine Hobbits having sex, can you? Well, sex is an important part of
who we are. It drives us, it motivates us, it makes us do sometimes very
noble things and it makes us do sometimes incredibly stupid things.
Leave it out, and you’ve got an incomplete world.’ George R R Martin (source)
no disrespect to george rr martin but this quote cracks me up bcos every time i see if I’m just like, no george… you can’t imagine hobbits having sex. ;P
FOUND IT & I say again: I can imagine hobbits having sex just fine.
Georgey boy here forgetting Sam’s 13 kids.
he didn’t forget about them. he just doesn’t understand where they came from.
That’s even funnier, then.
george rr martin, looking at the gamgee family tree and crying: wh-where… where did they all come from…….
this man is apparently under the impression that we need sex scenes to understand that sex exists in any given story universe and honestly that explains so much about his writing
this just in, tolkein doesnt have object permanence. its probably why the wraiths had such trouble finding the ring.
[If you found my blog because you’re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. I strongly suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff - she’s a great writer and she specializes in folklore and geomythology, it doesn’t get much cooler than that - but if you can’t and you’re interested in the subject - well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.]
Griffins: a very mysterious mystery
“A race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.”
The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don’t really fit in anywhere. They have no powers, they don’t help heroes, they’re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they’re not even monsters - people thought griffins were legit - real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say, ‘Frog, what’s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there’s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway’ and yeah, that’s a very good point - except for one thing. See, what’s creepy about griffins is that we’ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same.
Like, here’s how people imagined elephants.
This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it’s hard to imagine stuff you’ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it’s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins - art or books, they’re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that’s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh.
And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that’s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely lived there and definitely came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you’ve got Greeks going, ‘Mate, the Scythians, you know - they’ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I’m not even shitting you rn’ while on the other side of the Urals - wow and amaze - you’ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the ‘bird-monsters’ and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.
(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)
And anyway, do you know what else those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more obsessed with griffins than the Greek were. Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies?
And it’s probably all they ever talked about, because that’s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.
(Another important note here, not that I’m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek ‘intelligentsia’ and they can all fuck off and die and we don’t care about temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking griffins goddammit. Uuugh. /rant)
So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like ‘the field of the white bones’ and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren’t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains, ‘griffins’ had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils - and, more precisely, protoceratops skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them ‘a damn nuisance’.
And guess what they look like.
Just fucking guess.
[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]
Also, fun detail if you’re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you’d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah - as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is waiting for him behind the next hill. And that’s what he’d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare’s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they’re fucking real and there’s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing’s something you’re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors.
Man, don’t you just love mythology?
(How fossils influenced mythology: part two, Cyclops, will be up soon.)
honestly missionaries are evil. the idea of traveling the world to tell people Who Didnt Fucking Ask that their beliefs are wrong in the hopes that theyll adopt your beliefs seems sinister
So in lore, vampires have this trait that I’ve almost never seen used, and that’s the fact that vampires are OBSESSED with counting things. Like, the Count on Sesame Street was almost certainly created specifically as a vampire because of this piece of lore.
Like, I read this vampire book years and years ago that explained that a surefire way to protect yourself from vampires getting into your house was to spread a ton of seeds on your doorstep–poppy and mustard seeds were particularly recommended for the purpose. Basically, if you suspected someone to be a vampire, all you had to do was drop a sackful of seeds on the ground in front of them.
If they didn’t immediately start counting them, they were not a vampire. However, if they WERE a vampire, they’d be seized with the urge to count all the seeds and they would not budge from that spot until they knew how many seeds there were in total. The point was to keep them there until the sun came up and killed them, because if they hadn’t counted all the seeds by sunrise they wouldn’t be able to leave. Presumably you could just go about the rest of your evening as normal, though no word on whether it’s possible to make them lose count and start over.
Having remembered this piece of lore, I want fewer stories about brooding tortured Edward Cullen-esque vampires. I want to start seeing more stories about math nerd vampires.
Vampire accountants who are an honest company’s best asset and a corrupt company’s bane because they are frighteningly accurate with the accounts and will not hesitate to blow the whistle on a CEO scamming money because fuck you for making the numbers wrong.
Vampire cashiers that don’t need to look at the register screen because they already mentally calculated your total. 10-items-or-less vampires who know goddamn well you have 20 items in that basket and NO, you cannot just slip in with the rest.
Vampire math tutors who are constantly in high demand and have to hold lotteries to see who gets to be tutored by them.
MATH NERD VAMPIRES
If anyone would like the term for this, it’s arithmomania.
“But sir, he’s a vampire!!!”
“Vampire or not, he’s the best damn accountant we have here, and i’d let him drink my blood before i fire him!”
“still less of a leech than Matt in legal. Fuck matt”
Okay but also, vampires as drug dealers- a profession that requires extremely quick, extremely accurate counting. “You’re 5 dollars short.” “There’s 50,000 dollars in there at least, how the fuck did you count that fast-” “Pay up or I will drink you like a slurpee.”
Turbo from Ralph is good and unexpected villian too and with good subtle hints as well.
Thisthisthisthisthis
You can’t just make a character start being evil with no explanation or foreshadowing or any character hints whatsoever. It makes the viewer feel cheated.
King Candy was already a good villain to begin with, coming off more as a well-intentioned extremist. He gave Ralph what he wanted up front with no strings attached, and then convinced him that doing something bad was indeed for the greater good, then came the twist that he was lying the whole time.
Revealing the fact that he has a secret identity was the icing on the cake.
