My cast list for any new Lord Of The Rings is also the cast list of Ted Lasso, a thread.
Let's start with an easy one: Aragorn. No fucking second breakfasts for any fucking hobbits or any other fucking muppets with this Aragorn.
"Gandalf Greyhame, a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor, Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus; The Independent. A question: is it secret? Is it safe?"
"Like, you got me axe, innit, bruv?"
"Bor-O-Mir, do do, do do do
Bor-O-Mir, do do, do do do."
Legolas.
"They are taking the hobbits to Isengard, whose recent environmental policies I simply cannot approve of."
Galadriel. Typecasting, really, but come on.
"The whistle is OURS precious, isn't it, yesss."
Pippin
"Pipe weed is life! The Shire is life! Second breakfasts is life!"
Merry can walk from the Shire to the fields of Pelanor while partying because she and her crew are MAD FIT.
"I can't carry it for you, Mister Frodo, but I can carry you."
"Well now look, I am as lost as a troll without mapquest when it comes to findin' this here Mordor but I guess if you need somebody to schlepp this little old ring a bit futher, just call me a schleppdog, or maybe just by my name if that all seemed a bit too convoluted for you."
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve, or wait, no, that's four halves, isn't it, oh *gagging sound* oh bother."
"Anyway, why shouldn't I? Why shouldn't I keep it? It's MY desk."
"Well dip me in the Anduin and call me a goblin, but this here Emyn Muil's more impassable than the roundabouts you all have at every intersection around here; never can get the hang of those things."
"There is no strength left in the world of Men, Gandalf. They're scattered, divided, leaderless."
“I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman the Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours! I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly. But you… have elected… the way of… pain! And honestly, dear, I think appearing in public with that hat is very brave—good for you.”
"Heeden ba' ta Minas Tirith, aren't yeh?"
*growls*
"Esen't et's yer, like, destineh?"
"Will you be there?"
"Course. Natural. Denethor's me da. It's me sacred duteh, esen't eh?"
"Then I'd rather fucking walk to fucking Mordor, you wanky shit."
"So Sam, tell me, if a scorned wife tossed her severed husband's member at me and I was so surprised I ducked and hid but my electrician didn't, then..."
"Then Bobbit lobbed it at a hobbit who was shy-er in the Shire than the wire hire, Mr. Frodo"
"Well that's what I thought."
"My company are those loyal to Rohan, and for that we are banished. The White Wizard is cunning. He walks here and there, they say, as an old man hooded and cloaked. And everywhere his spies slip past our nets. But not the nets I protect, mon ami."
“The women of this country learned long ago, those without swords can still die upon them. I fear neither death nor pain. And I will crush you at keep-away. Every single time.”
Hey mate! merry mate! ring a dong a dussie!
Oi, man! Wicked, man, can I get an ussie?
Ring a dope! hop and lope! Fal lal la you’re legend!
They’ll fuckin kill you, mate, and call you a bell-end!
“I’m the faster rider. I’ll take him.”
"Why would you give the fucking choice to me? I've been shit. I'm an ill chooser. Since we lost fucking Gandalf and fucking passed through the fucking Argonath my fucking choices have gone amiss. Now Borimir's fucking dead, the prick."
Denathor isn't in thrall to the palantír. He's just Dutch.
Recasting Denathor, and we'll let one actor play both princes of Gondor.
"If I should return, think better of me, Father."
"That will depend on the manner of your return, ye second-rate prince of Man-us Tirith, ey? Ey? You're shite, boy-o. Joking, Joking. You're utter shite."
"I do not know what strength is in my blood, but I swear to you I will not let the Man City score. Nor our team fail."
"OUR team ... like harmoneh, innit. Synergeh, like. I'd eh followed yeh, meh brother... my captain... my king."
"Good. But you're still a fucking prick."
“Coaches always so polite, yes! Wonderkid brings them up secret ways that nobody else could find. Very nice friends, O yes my precious, very nice."
“We wants it, we needs it. Must have the whistle. They stole it from us. Sneaky little coachesses. Wicked, tricksy, false!”
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Mace’s question seems like a non sequitur, since the topic was immigration. It’s actually part of a unified supremacist frame of domination.
The question invites us into a frame where a woman must be defined. It's very important to refuse the invitation by rejecting the frame.
In this frame, a woman is a *thing* that must have a definition. Once you accept that premise, all that's left to determine are where the boundaries are and who gets to establish and enforce those boundaries. So, from the fascist frame, it is a border security question of sorts.
There's a moment in Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic where the newly freed drug boss says to the drug lawyer who had been working behind his back "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse? Because I don't."
At this point the lawyer knows he is in deep shit. 🧵
(By the way this thread is part of a longer essay, but if I lead off the thread with a link to an outside source, it usually gets crushed by this site's dork owner and his algorithm shenanigans, so here you go.)
Anyway the lawyer knows he's in deep shit because "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse" means "I'm not buying your bullshit," and if newly-freed-drug-lords-behind-whose-back-you've-been-working aren't buying your bullshit, then it is murder goon o'clock.
One thing I’ve noticed is, the meanest tables are often popular ones. Sometimes they are the most popular. My observation here would be that bullies know that cultivating friendly relationships is useful and necessary for effective bullying.
Any abuser knows they need accomplices. If dad is getting drunk and beating mom up he’s going to need everyone to keep nice and quiet about it, and if anybody squawks then it’s got to be quickly framed as something bad being done to him rather than the other way around.
If it looks as if the truth of the story is about to get around he’s going to need people to stand up for him in that moment and say things like this: “Nooooo! Not him. I know him. He would never. He has never been anything but nice to me.”
When people decide to leave the place they are and move to a different place, there’s an observable order to it. The order is very important.
So, in movement, there is the moment of arrival at the destination.
But before that moment, there is the actual journey. We began here. We moved until we got there. We put one foot in front of the other. We set sail and kept going until we arrived. The aircraft cut its way across the sky. This is the journey.
There's so much scandal all the time, it can be hard to remember where we are, much less how we got here. But they say it's important remember the lessons of the past, or else we're fated to do...something, I forget what, I forget, I forget.
It's really hard to know where to begin when it comes to where we are. There's only so much sheer volume of blatant corruption and noxious hate that a person can stay aware of even if they're trying. Eventually something pushes out.
It came out this week that NC Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson has in past years spent his time posting pro-slavery and pro-Nazi comments on porn sites, and other things of that nature, many of which are so bad CNN, who broke the story, declined to print them.
Conservatives keep telling us they're oppressed, and when they define what form the oppression takes, they explain that other kinds of people ... exist.
You know what? Let's do it. Let's actually do it. I think we ought to oppress conservatives.
Other people *should* exist. 🧵
Let's oppress conservatives with a kind and open and generous world that they will hate and fear specifically because it will care for everyone, even them, while it refuses any longer to accommodate the revenge fantasies that they call "self-defense."
At the bottom of it all, it strikes me that conservatives are driven by fear. They're big fraidy-cats, scared specifically of the ongoing danger of good and necessary things, of openness and diversity and peace and plenty.