Evil Overlord Guidebook for Treatment of Magic Creatures

This post is meant to point out and make fun of certain cliches and it should not be taken seriously. I also do not recommend anyone to become an evil overlord, this is just for people who are planning to do so anyway.

Do you want to become an evil overlord? Great black scary-looking fortress, vast armies of faceless evil mooks for heroes to kill, cool clothes, all that? Are you planning to get some cool monster to keep ordinary peasants away and make the heroes' life harder? Do you still wish to live a long life?

If you answered yes to the questions above, I have a few tips for you. I of course have never tried being an evil overlord or even a servant of one, but I am a nerd who knows fantasy cliches well enough. And honestly, there's nothing more embarrassing than a death that could have been easily avoided by treating your pets well.

You should also read this list if you want to become a fan-favourite villain and have a chance of being redeemed. People will find excuses for liking someone who murdered thousands of innocent people and burns villages just because fire looks so pretty, but they will draw the line at animal abuse. No one thinks that's cool. No one likes a villain who kicks dogs or drowns kittens. (Unless you are an attractive white man, in which case, no need to bother. You could be the worst possible human being ever and some people would still call you their baby and think that you're the purest little cinnamon roll who could never do anything wrong.)

So here's the list:

• Never hurt your monster. If the heroes somehow manage to free it, it could turn on you.
• It's tempting to keep your monster hungry, but don't do that. If you have a nice man-eating monster and you keep it hungry so it would kill your heroes, there's always a chance of something going wrong and your monster deciding that you are a better lunch than a bunch of heroes.
• Learn about the monster before you get it. Some monsters should not be kept inside a building, because they could accidentally destroy it. For example dragons should always be kept outside or in large caves. You really don't want it to set your castle on fire.
• If your monster is intelligent, talk to it. Try to keep in good terms with it. Don't enslave it or keep it imprisoned. Intelligent monsters are a great help if they're on your side, but they will also turn on you more easily.
• If your monster is one of your own creation, make sure that it either doesn't have enough free will to possibly turn on you, or that you treat it respectfully enough that it likes you. Seriously, it will only make you look like an idiot if you create the monster yourself and it still turns on you. (Looking at you, Gulnar from Robin of Sherwood. How could you even write a golem's chem so badly that it was able to decide to kill you?)

I could probably think of some more, but these are just the ones I could gather in a few minutes. Note that some of these also apply to dogs and other non-magical animals. I hope these are helpful! Good luck with taking over the world!

The Darkness of Moria (Fanfic)

Fandom: Lord of the Rings
Characters: Aragorn (and a few orcs, of course)
Ships: None
Summary: Young Aragorn is travelling alone through Moria and is attacked by orcs. Lost in the darkness without a source of light, what was supposed to be a shortcut to the other side of the mountains becomes a fight for survival.
Warnings: Well there's a bit of blood, but I don't suppose it's really that graphic.
Disclaimer: The characters and the world were created by J.R.R. Tolkien and I'm just playing with them. I don't get any money from this, I'm just having fun.

A/N: The idea to this fic came when I was checking a few facts from LOTR. I noticed that Aragorn seems more frightened of the idea of going to Moria than the idea of going to Mordor, and that just made me wonder why. I discussed it with a friend and made up a few headcanons, and finally wrote this.
   Most of this was written late at night, so there might be stuff that doesn't really make sense because I was tired and didn't realize it. This is also pretty much unedited and I had no one to beta read this, so the quality really isn't the best. Also, I know I'm not Tolkien, but I tried copying his style as much as I could. However I have only vague idea of what his text sounds like in English because I've mostly read the translations. I have absolutely no idea at all of how orcs speak in English so I just wrote something I thought would be good for them.
   I was originally planning to end the story when Aragorn gets to Rivendell, but this was quite long already and I was too lazy to write that part now. I might write a second chapter about his journey to Rivendell at some point though. We'll see...

Filk: The Music of Science Fiction Fandom

Hello! In this post I will be telling you about one of my interests, filk. I'm not very experienced filker, so I might be mistaken about some things. If you find any incorrect facts, please tell me in the comments!

So, let's begin. What is filk? There is no simple answer to it. You could say that it's folk music of the science fiction fandom. The thing is, it doesn't always sound like folk music, and it's not always about science fiction. Some people think poetry can be filk too, so it's not always even music! You could say that filk is any spoken entertainment that its creator calls filk. Except that definition doesn't cover so-called found filk, songs that are often sung in filk events but are not called filk by the original artists. For example some of David Bowie's songs could be considered found filk.

The origins of the filk are in the 1950s, where people in American science fiction conventions started changing the lyrics of folk songs to be about science fiction. Originally these songs were sung mostly in hotel rooms late at night after conventions. The word "filk" itself comes from a misspelling of the word "folk" in an essay written by Lee Jacobs about the topic. The essay was never published, but the word filk came to use from there.

Over time more and more people started making original music for filk songs, and many of the moat popular filk songs have original music. However parodiy is still a big part of filk today. Some filkers have even made parodies of other people's filk songs!


The first time I heard the word filk was in January 2017. I was at a meeting of The Finnish Tolkien Society Kontu. The meetings of Kontu are 3 to 4 days long events where you can meet other Finnish Tolkien-fans and spend a few days just hanging out and doing whatever you like. This time someone had brought booklets with lyrics to Middle-Earth -themed filks. They were all parodies of different songs, mostly in Finnish (it was an interesting experience to sing something about orcs and the Third Age to the tune of Suvivirsi). They had also brought some copies of an old filk-themed issue of Legolas, the society's magazine. Then I was taught filks were just fandom-themed parodies of songs.

Later that year, in August, I was in Worldcon. I mean, of course I was there, what else would I have done when the impossible happens and something so big is held in Finland? I think it was the first day, I'm not sure though, when I noticed that there was going to be a panel or something about filk. I recognized the word and decided to go, wanting to see what I would hear about the subject there. One thing I learned was that filk wasn't only parodies, and that it didn't have to be about fandom things, it could also be about kittens or computers or basically anything. In there I also heard Zander Nyrond's "Sam's Song", a filk song that apparently is or at least was popular in British filk events. A beautiful song, slightly sad, definitely nerdy, and I like it quite a lot.

I noticed that there were three hours long filk circles every night in Worldcon, one hour with certain theme and two hours free filking. It took some trying, but I convinced my parents to let me go to those. The only downside was that getting home well after 11pm when my train was 10 minutes late because of the storm and it's dark and wet and cold wasn't fun. Otherwise it was great. I heard a lot of filk songs, both classics like Fire In The Sky and Harry's Bar, and not as well-known ones (I'm still wondering if I can find somewhere the one about Cthulhu sung to the melody of The Internationale). I also heard non-filk songs, including Flower of Scotland, Jääkärimarssi, and what I later found out was the theme of Firefly. Mostly I just sat there silently and listened because I didn't know any filk songs yet, but I still enjoyed it.

Right now I'm kinda wondering if I should start doing filks myself, but I don't know. I'm terrible with music, I don't think I could even make proper parodies so that it would sound good. Maybe I could try poetry, but I don't really know... I can't get stuff to rhyme well enough so that I still keep the feeling and the story in, and I don't really care about poetry that doesn't rhyme and has no rythm. But the last time I tried writing anything that rhymes was my attempt to make a creepy-ish sad thing that would sound like a nursery rhyme, and even with looking online for rhymes for certain words, I couldn't do it...


I don't really know what the point of this post was, except maybe getting other people interested about this too. Anyway, I guess I'll end this one here, because I don't really have anything more to say.