The good folks at Buzzfeed asked me to write a bunch of break-up texts between various literary figures (as this is part of my house of wheel) when I was in the office yesterday, and I have obliged. It was very fun, even though my hand hurt after writing roughly four sentences in pen, because I have lost the skill of writing things out by hand entirely.
ZELDA MY LIGHT
MY LOVE MY OWN
I HAVE FINISHED THE BOOK
I COULD NEVER HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOU, MY GENIUS ANGEL
oh i’m so glad you think so
i actually wrote a book too
WHAT
YOU’RE HYSTERICAL
I CAN’T UNDERSTAND A WORD YOU’RE SAYING
i’m saying that i wrote a book also
YOU’VE GONE MAD
MY POOR BROKEN BLOSSOM
I’M HAVING YOU COMMITTED
(Seriously though, why did Arwen have to give up immortality just to marry drab old Aragon? Why not just marry him, enjoy your marriage for what it is, grieve his passing for a century or two, and then carry on with LIVING FOREVER?)
i love you SO much
oh my god
me too
so much
i can’t wait to spend our lives together
yeah i can’t wait to spend the rest of your life together
wait
what
i am gonna miss you SO MUCH
after you die
You can read the rest here.
Tags: buzzfeed, texts from
God imagine having to deal with Elf shit day in and out “Do you remember when- no wait that was your great grandfather, I forget you weren’t around then you all kind of look alike. So like why do you age? Is it something you can stop? Is it fun? What are babies and what are they good for?”
Oh, wow, this place has really changed. It was so amazing fifteen thousand years ago when everything was illumined by the light of the world trees and we all lived in beauty and happiness.
I like the castle that you built there, though. It’s…nice. Very stony.
Arwen and Aragorn has always been too Buster-Bluth-dating-Lucille-Austero for me.
“She changed him as a baby!”
“So that’s why she didn’t look surprised.”
Well, they are first cousins, 50 jillion times removed…
I’m sorry, did I just read “drab old Aragorn?” DRAB?! OLD?! ARAGORN?! Like, I knew that I was a woman when my preferences shifted from Legolas to Aragorn. Don’t ever, ever try to sully his beautiful name.
The mark of womanhood is truly thus.
When I wised up and realized that Aragorn would be mostly silent but always make sure I knew he loved me- game over. He’s basically the Luke Danes of Middle Earth. Legolas would drive me nuts with his constant ~*~deep~*~ sayings. (Oh really? Blood has been spilled? In this war we’re having? Who would have THOUGHT.)
Oh my god, Aragorn IS the Luke Danes of Middle Earth. Someone fanfiction this quick!
Hmmmm.
Arwen and the hobbits are sitting around a campfire, smoking very long pipes. Aragorn returns, carrying a dead boar.
ARAGORN: I found some wild onions, and there’s a little bit of lard left, so your choices are liver and onions, or roast pork.
MERRY: Carnitas?
ARAGORN: That requires hours to stew, so no. We must make three more miles by nightfall.
SAM: Is nightfall when we’ll have supper?
ARAGORN: No, this is supper.
PIPPIN: I thought this was dinner?
ARAGORN: This is dinner and supper at the SAME TIME, do you want LIVER AND ONIONS or ROAST PORK?
FRODO: Maybe some ham? Ham and eggs? To tide us past supper?
PIPPIN: Or bacon and eggs?
ARAGORN: Both bacon and ham require a several-week curing process, and WE HAVE NO EGGS.
ARWEN: Coffee?
ARAGORN: We have no coffee.
ARWEN pouts.
ARAGORN: YOU ARE THE EVENSTAR, DO NOT POUT BECAUSE THERE IS NO HOT BEVERAGE.
ARWEN: But coffee?
ARAGORN: WE ARE AT WAR WITH THE MEN OF UMBAR, WHO ARE THE ONLY PRODUCERS OF COFFEE.
ARWEN: Coffee and roast pork?
HOBBITS: Roast pork! Roast pork!
ARAGORN sighs bitterly, pulls out a small bag of coffee from his pack, puts water on the fire, and begins to butcher the boar.
PIPPIN: You don’t have a french press?
This is the best.
Elrond takes Aragorn golfing, gets him drunk, and talks him into retaking Gondor as king so he doesn’t have to be embarrassed about introducing him as his daughter’s boyfriend.
Celebrían comes back to Middle Earth as she judges Aragorn unworthy of her daughter. She tells Gilrod that “it’s not too late to fix things with Arwen” but Gilrod makes a mess of things because he’s so set in his vagabond ways.
Boromir and Jess: basically the same dude?
YES
Oh man I am not used to getting the things I demand, thank you so much!
It was a delight! Thanks for the opportunity!
my preferences run more along the Eowyn lines (QUEER LADY BURRRRN)
I would not have thought you would be an Eowyn gal (I GET THE BURN THO, SOLID, 10/10) but then I don’t think Galadriel needs anyone at all.
EOWYN. Literary love of my life.
#teamfaramir
And I knew I was a woman when my preferences shifted from Frodo to Aragorn. All I can say is that I did not *get* why people liked Legolas until I saw a picture of Orlando Bloom in his normal hair. Long blond hair on a dude just doesn’t do it for me I guess.
Viggo Mortensen was only ever attractive when he was Lucifer in The Prophecy; briefly, beautifully, and then never again.
certainly not when he played some burgundy-turtleneck-wearing strider.
sorry
FALSE. Have you seen Hidalgo? Just a sweaty, road-stained Viggo and his horse. Unf.
I’m so, so sorry that you must live life with this burden.
hey man I’m just saying, I wore that same burgundy crushed-velvet mock neck thing in middle school some several years before Aragorn thrifted it for his coronation and it didn’t look good on me either. well, it looked marginally better.
Arwen better watch out because if Aragorn continues his taste patterns of aping my adolescent style for fancy dress occasions he is going to show up for his twentieth anniversary in something flared on the bottom and RIT-dyed black on the top. although I do still have a crushed velvet coat he can borrow if he wants, Macy’s c. 1996 or ‘7, nips in at the waist, looks pretty ok I think.
<3
It’s hard for me to follow text message conversations online because I always forget which speech bubble is which unless I have my phone in my hand. It should be totally intuitive with these, but somehow it still confuses me.
The book makes it all pretty and text-like with bubbles around the words & stuff. It’s great!
Never having anything other than an ancient Nokia that used to be my mother’s, I don’t understand the speech bubbles at all. How do I know who’s saying what?
One person is on the left, the other’s on the right. In your actual own phone, you’re on the right and the other person is on the left.
There’s a bit in A Moveable Feast where Hemingway claims that Fitzgerald was very upset that Zelda had told him he had a very small penis and would never be able to satisfy a woman and that was the source of her mental/emotional problems. So they went into the bathroom and pulled their dicks out and Ernest reassured him that his Lil Fitzgerald was perfectly adequate.
Because OF COURSE Hemingway is such a manly man’s man that other men feel compelled to seek out his approval on their wangs.
Jesus, those two. So fucking insufferable together. Like, bringing out the worst in Hemingway probably wasn’t hard to manage, but did they have to keep working so much at it?
HEMINGWAY: Scott, you will never be a great writer if you keep drinking so much.
FITZGERALD: It’s 11 AM and you’ve had 2 whole bottles of wine and a whiskey. In fact, you’re drinking brandy right now.
HEMINGWAY: But I never drink after dinner and that’s what matters.
There was also an understated passage in which Hemingway explains to Fitzgerald the concept of “you’re a grower, not a shower” that was very challenging to read.
My god, I…I might have to read some Hemingway. (Laughing at Fitzgerald never gets old.)
Only way I would ever go into a bathroom to compare dicks with Hemingway would be for an opportunity to kick him in his exposed nuts.
THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN MARRIED THEY DESERVED EACH OTHER
Hey I ship it.
& it’ll free Zelda to run away with Arwen!
I just listened to the Stuff You Missed in History podcast episode about the Fitzgeralds and F. Scott was SO butthurt every time Zelda wrote a book, like he thought she was going to air out all his secrets. And then he wrote all those essays about how he was the saddest sad cracked plate no one loved ever forever alone, and it was like, “dude, what are you complaining about”
That sounds like a pretty good hate-listen. Are other episodes good? I could use some more educational/interesting podcasts other than radiolab and as opposed to all the comedy ones I listen to on my commute.
Oh man I listen to TONS of Stuff You Missed. It’s been hosted exclusively by women for the past three years (and they keep it light and fun and not at all dry), and they have tons of episodes focused on awesome women from history, both famous and not-too-famous. They’re pretty Western history-heavy but they’re doing a series on China’s The Great Leap Forward right now and have done lots of episodes about Japanese, Chinese and Korean history as well as cool things from Middle Eastern history. My favourite episodes are always the spooky ones like serial killers, unsolved mysteries, and famous hauntings, which usually all come out around Halloween!
THANKS! I’m listening the hell out of that, writing a reminder on my hand right now.
I really like how they focus on the people that made history and what they were like rather than just regurgitating facts – like, the Laura Ingalls Wilder episode is a great example because instead of rehashing the stuff we all know like her life on a farm in the prairie as a child etc etc, they talk about her adulthood and her career as a writer.
The most recent episode I listened to was about Hetty Green, this super eccentric woman who became a billionaire because she was so good at investing and the stock market and basically being an extreme couponer (she told dry cleaners to only clean the hem of her dress and refused to pay for washing the whole thing), and initially I was like “ugh don’t care about Wall Street” so I resisted listening to it. When I finally did I found it super fascinating – they establish that she kind of did terrible things to her family in pursuit of making more money but also that she was discriminated against for being one of the only women on Wall St. So good!
That reminds me of an eccentric tycoon old woman character in one of those Vonnegut books that always bleed together in my mind. I kind-of feel bad for this because there’s gotta be, at least I hope there are, a lot of other eccentric rich older women.
Sound like my next binge-listen after I’ve done all the Rex Factors!
I always felt that the Return of the King movie included all the extra Aragorn/Arwen stuff at the expense of the CANON, ACTUALLY IN THE BOOK EOWYN RECOVERING AFTER BEING ALMOST MORTALLY WOUNDED AND WRESTLING WITH HER DEMONS AND CONQUERING HER TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES AND ALSO GETTING SOME and am resentful toward Peter Jackson et al. for it.
I am resentful toward Peter Jackson for multiple reasons. And that is one of them.
Oh, WORD, I was very upset that the only bit we saw was her and Faramir together at the end for like 2 seconds. Anyone seen the extended editions? Is it better in those?
YES they have actual scenes and it is much less than the book and doesn’t focus on the emotional growth at all but it’s enough for shipping!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHnlyjkkRco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdZ5f0XZdqs
I am still SO BITTER that they cut the Eowyn/Faramir kiss that was CANON and PERFECT for the screen. I mean, what more do you want — they have their first kiss with the rising of the sun, I mean COME ON .
Eowyn and Faramir had the only compelling love story in the entire series. And Eowyn’s kickass character is really the only reason why I bother re-reading those books and don’t just watch the movies.
“Seriously though, why did Arwen have to give up immortality just to marry drab old Aragon? Why not just marry him, enjoy your marriage for what it is, grieve his passing for a century or two, and then carry on with LIVING FOREVER?”
This is what Tessa does in Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices series and I love CC for writing it that way.
Best way to resolve a love triangle: make the triangle-ee immortal so she gets to marry both of them at different stages in her life, and then remain eternally perfect as the men around her perish.
The mark of womanhood for MY generation was when your crush on Luke was eviscerated by your lust for Han.
ETA – This should have been in reply to BobofSeals. Get it together, intensedebate.
Wait people had crushes on Luke? Was I just precocious?
I did.
We did, but that’s for those of us who remember seeing A New Hope when it first came out.
Well, technically, Lúthien chose to be mortal for Beren’s sake, so there is precedent. But Tuor got promoted to immortal to be alongside Idril so there’s also precedent there.
The Simarillion would have made a much better epic saga than turning the freaking children’s novel of The Hobbit into three movies — but, hey, the Simarillion has too many strong women for Peter Jackson to handle.
(also, I also feel that Peter Jackson fundamentally does not *get* hobbits, so the Simarillion would’ve made a better movie then anyway)
Which raises the question of exactly what Luthien was thinking, unless it was entirely to piss off her dad, which I would understand. I mean, Beren was great and all, but immortality.
(Actually, Peter Jackson wants to do a Silmarillion movie so bad he cries about it sometimes, but Christopher Tolkien has sworn he will never sell the film rights, so.)
Ultimate teenage rebellion: “Ugh, Dad, you’re the worst! I’m going to forsake immortality and just die.” (It might be noted that Melian did not think that Thingol was worth dying for, but, I’m not sure that Maia could even chose to die).
Re: Peter Jackson — thank you for the update! My poor opinion of Chirstopher Tolkien just rose … my opinions earlier were based on nothing other than completely avoiding reading articles about Peter Jackson and just forming my own negative opinions in my head.
Yeah, but turning the King of Gondor immortal sounds like a terrible idea, politics-wise. Think of all the assassination plots.
Jackson does not have the rights to the Silmarillion, and Christopher Tolkien hates him so there’s possibility of getting them.
YES
Best way to resolve a love triangle: make the triangle-ee immortal so she gets to marry both of them at different stages in her life, and then remain eternally perfect as the men around her perish.