oooooh, lmao naughty Dwarf children playing pretend. Thorin was dressed as his grandfather, and he had pilfered Thror’s crown (!!!) and was wearing a coverlet as a cape. There was cheese involved (it was the Arkenstone). Dis-the-baby was standing in for Hrera with a rattle for a sceptre. Her scowl was on-point.
Frerin was to be Thrain, and he was doing his very best to draw the scar over his eye in ink. He couldn’t quite get it right, and so he used his sleeping father as a model. Thrain is tall, and Frerin couldn’t see properly, so he clambered up onto the settee to see better.
He was carrying the ‘Arkenstone’.
He fell. Thorin tried to catch him. He tripped on his ‘cape’.
Ink and cheese everywhere – over everyone, but most especially on Thrain. The crown ended up with cheese all over it. It was a memorable awakening.
Dis was the only one who emerged unscathed. Fris walked in at precisely that moment, took one look, and walked straight back out.
Thrain’s beard was blue for a good time afterwards, and it took a while for the smell of goat cheese to fade.
Ooooh, this may be a convoluted answer. Here we go!
Here’s my Aelir tag, so you can get a handle on who she was. I’ll separate this answer out into each of the princes, so you can get the gist of their relationships.
Laindawar When he was born, Aelir often bundled her eldest child onto her back as she raced through her beloved woods. Laindawar grew to toddlerhood sitting under green eaves beside his mother, or strapped to her as she clambered and danced and leaped through the trees.
Aelir was an odd sort of duck. She was tall, dishevelled, nearly squirrelish in her manner, not very talkative at all. Her eyes spoke more than she did. She was more at home with her trees than in the company of other elves, and Laindawar most definitely absorbed this tendency. He too is a loner more content under the branches. This is not only due to his own natural tendencies, but to those early formative years spent with his mother, alone but for the wind in the leaves and the soft puff of their breath.
As he grew, Laindawar was brought forward into the world of his father: the court, the business of being a crown prince and a political figure. He would retreat to his mother as an escape, for the peace and rest her presence brought.
(Thranduil did likewise, funnily enough. Aelir was a calm, wild haven for them both.)
As Aelir sickened, Laindawar’s resolve to kill all the evil in the forests hardened into something diamond-plated and implacable. He has never given up.
Laerophen Our awkward giraffe was born several years after his brother, and he was at one glance obviously Thranduil’s child. He had the hair, the eyes, the height! Yet he was in spirit a retiring soul, and preferred the quiet and his own company.
Also, it appeared that he was made mostly of elbows and knees.
It was for Laerophen’s sake that Aelir began to stay longer and more frequently in the palace. It was Thranduil who taught him to read, but it was Aelir who sat with him and listened as he devoured all the books around him and told her about what he had learned in excited piping tones.
She often brought him out of his rooms, just the two of them (three, if Laindawar were willing to take time away from his hunting). Unlike Laindawar and Legolas, Laerophen would walk through the trees by his mother’s side. He would not leap from bough to bough. She would hold his hand.
She taught him the bow, though he did not show any especial gift for it. But he loved the time with his mother, and so he worked diligently at it.
When she left, Laerophen’s world contracted to his rooms once again. The only one who could coax him out was Legolas.
Legolas Their little green leaf was such a shock. SUCH A SHOCK. Aelir had been sickening for centuries – how was she to know that this was any different? But there it was, she was due another child. Weakened as she was due to the poisoning of the forests, she worried. God, did she worry.
She needn’t have worried, not for him. Legolas was walking before he was crawling, desperate to stand and do everything right now!! NOW!!! He wanted to see everything, know everything, touch everything. He was, unlike her quiet eldest children, noisy. He cried loudly, sang loudly, laughed loudly.
He was effusively affectionate.
Everything in him bubbled over with curiosity and joy.
Aelir brought him into her forests as much as she was able, and strapped him to her back as she had for Laindawar. Unlike his brother, Legolas did not enjoy being confined to such safety. As soon as he was able, he wriggled free to dangle and clamber and run just as his mother did. “Look Naneth! Look at me! Look what I can do!”
He made her laugh helplessly and happily, even as the shadows under her eyes deepened.
I dunno if y’all are following the official Terry Pratchett page on facebook or not but ever since the US election results came out they’ve been posting text images like these:
[Quote: “Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.”]
and honestly the thought of Terry Pratchett throwing shade from beyond the grave is all that’s keep me going some days.
I saw one comment from saying something along the lines “well you shouldn’t post this, you don’t know how he’d feel about it”
No. If you read ANY of his books it’s clear how he’d feel about this nonsense.
I saw those comments and laughed my ass of because Terry was, and remains, a bastion of righteous rage and hope in a world weakened by fear and hatred. He told us plainly, Suffer Not Injustice—to take light into dark places and to care for those in need, not because it is kind or good but because it is right.
He’d be going absolutely fucking SPARE if he were alive to see the world as it is today. And
I don’t just mean over the US elections, I mean Brexit, I mean
Aleppo—the whole god damn world—he’d be going utterly Stoneface-I can’t be having with this-Librarian Poo.
And he’d damn well do something about it too.
NGL there’s been a 3rd thought in the back of my head when I’m wondering if I’m doing enough and if anything I do matters that whispers with wide-eyed horror–
“–but Terry Pratchett would go SPARE.”
The only upside to 2016 is that Pterry may in fact resurrect out of pure, unbridled rage.
“And ANOTHER thing…”
lately I am constantly reminded of the conversation between Granny Weatherwax and Mightily Oats in Carpe Jugulum:
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.” “Nope.” “Pardon?” “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” “It’s a lot more complicated than that–” “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–” “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”
when people point out a scene/particular line(s) that tugged at their heartstrings
when people ask for your meta of your work that they enjoyed so much
when someone comments on a fic you wrote 982783113502 years ago
getting recc’d
just the small happiness in knowing you made someone out there smile on their way to work/home or at school, in knowing you warmed someone’s heart somehow
Aw Yiss 