@yanethyrael / yanethyrael.tumblr.com
remember when you were 10 and you would hang out with your friends in order to Look At The Computer together like you went to their house and experienced the information superhighway together. and then leave
How fucking old are you people?
normal amount
If any of y’all didn’t know, there’s a free online library, aka
and I found like, twelve ebooks I’ve been wanting to read on there, and blasted through like three of them during the course of a boring-ass shift.
Guy there are books on magic on there.
There’s books on EVERYTHING there!
Wouldn’t this be bad for authors though? or is this like a normal library where they get /some/ money?
It’s like a normal library. Libraries can upload ebooks there and let people check them out through openlibrary if you have an openlibrary account, or it can point you to nearby libraries that have physical copies of the book for you to go and check out. If you check out books via openlibrary it counts towards the count of books checked out from the library that uploaded the ebook, and they can use it in their reporting and funding and stuff.
There’s like 150 libraries partnered with openlibrary so far.
They also have copies that you can check out if you are print-disabled.
You can also ‘sponsor a book’, which means you pay the cost of the ebook you want openlibrary to acquire, and then they can add it to their collection and let people check it out.
I sure did!
And click on a title even if it says ‘no ebook available’ and scroll down, ‘cause sometimes that just means “all of the copies of ebooks are checked out right now but you can get on the waitlist when it’s back in”
This is part of the Internet Archive! I’ve posted about this before. Please go, it’s amazing.
signal boosting because BOOKS
Oh!
Yelena: You are like beautiful Russian doll, Kate Bishop.
Kate: How so?
Yelana: So many layers.
Kate: like an onion?
Yelena: You make me cry when I cut you.
Kate: Then don't cut me. Duh.
Yelena: You are so small at the end.
Kate: *Swipes near empty bottle of vodka from Yelena* You're done.
Yelena: Definite Russ-onion doll baby.
idle Jaskier-related notion:
Joey Batey is really approximately the same size and shape as Henry Cavill, and there are a number of clever techniques in pretty much all Jaskier's costumes to hide this fact and make him look about three or four inches narrower than he actually is. The costumers work really really hard to make him look that twinky, often with cleverly cut shoulder decorations that pretend he's trying to look bigger than he is and have the actual effect of making him look a lot lighter.
On a Doylistic level this makes sense, because it's hard to make Geralt look Huge and Imposing next to your non-combatant harmless sidekick if said sidekick is a jacked six foot burly man.
On a Watsonian level, however, the notion of Jaskier as this big meaty dude aggressively arguing with all his tailors to ensure that he looks as non threatening and foppish and entertaining as possible while also looking as sexy as he can (for a Jaskier definition of sexy, at least) is generating considerable entertainment for me this fine morning.
"No! My shoulders must look slender!"
"But, sir, you could look ripped!"
"Absolutely not! I must look slim and gentle and unassuming!"
"As you wish, sir... So do you wish it to be cut with much excess fabric, so that you look small and also very wealthy to afford so much?"
[howling] "No! I must look slender and gentle and also above else very attractive!"
Geralt doesn't notice any of this until they try to share a tiny hostel bed on the road and Jaskier cuddles up to him and abruptly there is no more room in that bed
I need a full picture costume run down of this by someone in the fashion field stat
Ask and ye shall receive! I may not work in the fashion field but I do work in the costume production industry for theatre/film so this is totally my area. Using clothes to change someone’s appearance is super common, and Tim Aslam’s costume design for The Witcher is actually a really good example of this, so buckle up because this is a long ride!
Creating an illusion like this has two main components: shape (the style lines created by the clothes), and fit (the way the clothes hang on the person’s body), and is the result of close collaboration between the designer and the production team.
We’re going to talk about season one, because that’s where the difference is the most obvious. Take a look at Geralt:
First, let’s talk about shape. The goal here is to make Geralt look strong and imposing, and the best way to do that is to exaggerate the triangle of his upper torso. See how much broader his shoulders look than his waist in both images? A loose shirt over tight pants is a classic way to establish this, because the shirt blousing at the waist (note that the pants sit high up at the natural waist) makes the hips looks narrower in comparison. Note also that his shirt has an asymmetrical closure - a centered vertical line down the shirt would make him looks slimmer, while the off-center one adds width.
His armor does this by giving him those massive shoulder pieces, which both lengthen and raise his shoulder line. I would estimate that they raise Henry Cavill’s shoulder line by a good two inches just from the bulk of the leather alone. His torso armor also does a really clever thing by having a very subtle V shape to the vertical lines, making his waist look smaller. If you count the number of stripes above and below his belt (again, sitting high at the natural waist), you’ll notice that the narrow stripe at the front edge of the armscye disappears, which allows the side stripes to make that V shape.
Now let’s talk about fit. The fit of Geralt’s shirt looks simple but is actually super specific. It’s very easy for an actor to get lost in a shirt that is too loose - if there’s too much extra fabric then it will just make the actor look smaller by drawing attention to how baggy it is. This shirt fits just right: the sleeves are full enough to allow for movement but still relatively fitted (and rolling up the sleeves actually also helps add breadth to Geralt’s torso by continuing the horizontal line at his waist). The body of the shirt fits smoothly across the shoulders and chest, and has just enough fullness to drape at the waist without feeling baggy.
Now let’s look at Jaskier.
We’ll start with this look. Shape and fit are very interconnected here so it’s just gonna be a jumble. First thing I notice: the jacket. Unlike your traditional fantasy/historical doublet, all of Jaskier’s jackets end at the waist, rather than continuing into a peplum/skirt like Geralt’s armor does. This cropped jacket is evocative of childhood/immaturity, an association that is generally considered to have its roots in schoolboy uniforms of the 19th and early 20th century (see the image of schoolboys wearing “Eton Jackets” below)
Jaskier also tends to wear his jackets open. This creates a vertical line down his torso, which is generally slimming, but it also totally obscures the shape of his torso. The brain is going to take the line of his hip, which we can see, and the armscye of his jacket, (which actually looks to be cut ever so slightly artificially narrow but it’s hard to tell) and fill in a line between them, which is likely going to end up being slightly narrower than his actual ribcage. He does have poofs at the top of his sleeves, which can be a technique used to add width, but if they’re cut and fit carefully you can actually hide some of the breadth of the shoulders inside the poof and make it look like the fullness comes from the poof and not the body.
Note: the “armscye” is the technical name for the armhole, but specifically the torso part. The corresponding sleeve part is the “sleevehead.”
Again, we have another open jacket, this one with strong vertical lines. See how the line of Jaskier’s hip flows up through the edge of the doublet all the way up through the armscye? This makes his torso look narrower despite the jacket’s shoulder tabs. In contrast, this line is always broken on Geralt’s outfits, whether at the waist with his shirt or with the giant shoulder pieces with his armor. Jaskier’s pants also tend to fit more loosely, which de-emphasizes the triangle of his shoulders to waist.
Okay this is my favorite image to illustrate everything we have going on here. Look at Jaskier’s jacket. What’s the first thing you notice? The bright yellow inset slashes in his chest. The high contrast in color draws the eye inwards and distracts from the breadth of his shoulders, where we have another cleverly cut poof. His jacket is again cropped, with strong vertical lines, over the baggiest pants he wears in the season.
Now look at Jaskier and Geralt together. Jaskier is all about long vertical lines, while Geralt’s predominate lines are either horizontal or diagonal. Additionally, Jaskier’s hips look even to his shoulders, even if they’re not, and Geralt’s shoulders are exaggerated. The two characters have a very different presence, even if the actors underneath are similar.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to costume design! Creating the illusory effects like this is one of my favorite things and I am excited to share!!
…ok I love this but … why didn’t they just hire a real twink?
They hired Joey Batey because he showed up to the audition with an actual lute upon which he played and sang a song he’d written the night before called “The Lion Cub of Cintra” based entirely on the role he was auditioning for. Batey happens to be basically built as a fairly meaty guy, one of those people who seems to put on both muscle and fat fairly effectively, although judging from his music he is often worried about being seen as fat. He is not a small man and will never be a small man, but he is very committed to the role, a musician in his own right when he’s not playing Jaskier, and generally plays the role fairly well. Personally I am glad we went with “musical talent” as a higher priority in our casting than waifish slimness.
one thing the tags have been quietly driving me nuts about on this discussion is also... look okay, my original shitposting from last year? is very much based on the belief that the body you’re born with does not define who you choose to be. Jaskier’s costuming choices are most interesting to me as a conscious choice for several reasons, and I’m gonna rant for a sec because look I had a point there I wanted to jokingly but very seriously talk about and the costuming shit is all very well and good but I wanted to talk about what it means for the character to choose to dress and present himself this way. what does it mean in story fucking terms to have a big buff dude that presents himself as non-combatant, as vulnerable, as gossipy and a little swish but not a physical threat?
see, masculinity is often defined negatively, as “whatever isn’t feminine”, and the constructed artifice of deliberate appearance modification is pretty clearly coded feminine in mainstream Anglo culture (which is what I have access to, gender is complicated, but I’m going off here). what this means is that visibly trying to control your appearance and the way that people perceive you is something that is often assumed to undermine masculinity, which has all kinds of super special social drawbacks for men/AMAB folks who don’t perform masculinity well because misogyny+sexism+transmisogyny do fun things together.
you’re allowed to control your appearance if you pretend that the reason you’re doing so is totally divorced from the way you look (I’m lifting weights to be strong/lifting weights because I want to be hot) and the artifice you use to execute the effects is completely invisible to the viewer (not wearing any kind of visible makeup, for example). so just from that perspective, the fact that Jaskier dresses consistently to make himself seem a certain way is interesting to me. his gender presentation is a deliberate choice, and it is a deliberate choice that erodes his social status in masculine posturing rather than shores it up.
the fact that Jaskier’s size also makes him a potential threat to other people and that he acts to minimize that is also interesting in the context of the way he earns his income. it’s heavily implied that he probably secures some of his patronage through a form of sex work (i.e. his patron the Contessa, who is both paying him and sleeping with him, which ends when she throws him out of the sexual relationship). moreover, he’s an entertainer, and being muscular and large isn’t very helpful when you earn your living via your fine motor skills: damaging your hands is potentially devastating if you earn your bread playing a lute, and getting into fights is therefore dangerous for his livelihood. threatening entertainers don’t relax people into parting with money and food and shelter.
we think of being threatening as an asset in all circumstances but that is fundamentally not the case. a large, hulking, threatening Geralt will incur a certain amount of posturing from dudes who want to feel big and scary and important in their home communities; Jaskier is likely to get ignored by coming across as meek and fairly non threatening. it’s a deliberate strategy, and we know it’s deliberate because he has the bulk and body size to present himself the way Geralt does if he wants. so he doesn’t want to do that, he must want to be perceived as expressive and a little swish and not dangerous at all and approachable, and he has clearly worked hard enough to get that across that it fooled a really ridiculously high fraction of the folks in my notes here.
this post has been really resonating with delighted surprised trans folks among other things and hey! I see y’all! you are still whatever gender you feel most comfortable in even if your body isn’t cooperating right now. you can choose a lot of the way you will be perceived by thinking about your clothing, your movement, and your postures, and you can learn to do all those things with practice and thought.
and I just think it’s neat seeing a character who easily has the body type to do a very normative gender thing choose to do a non-conforming thing in a way that you absolutely do not see much in media, because usually they fucking hire the twink instead of doing all that work to get the right gender presentation, and the story fucking suffers for it and people who aren’t naturally skinny waifs don’t get to see nice things that look like them in the show.
so.
that’s why.
Transcript: garbled & enraged yelling muffled by water.
Ceasar be like “i cannot believe my friends in the senat would stab me” my brother in Mars you were actively abolishing their republic
Giant rats in fantasy universes inevitably lead to specialist giant rat catchers, once all the new adventurers start thinking that killing giant rats in the tavern cellar is somehow beneath them.
And in the field of specialist giant rat catchers, there inevitably comes a Jack Black (no not that one) who after years of killing giant rats starts catching giant rats alive. And once they start catching giant rats alive they start watching giant rats for the first time, and they get the wild thought to try breeding out the bloodlust in the species and see what’s left.
And soon they have pens full of half-tamed boggle-eyed rats, sweet as honey and big as malamutes. And after that, all it takes is one noblewoman eccentric enough to see them in the street and think “I simply must have them.”
And that’s how giant rat fancy starts.
@kedreeva I know you do show mice, not fancy rats, but this made me think of you.
was explaining to my mom on the phone the concept of a cosmic horror and she hit me with the one hit k.o. of "oh you mean like horton hears a who?"
Explain???
me: yeah so basically a cosmic horror is the fear of a godlike being or entity so much bigger than yourself and your perception of the universe that your brain cant possibly comprehend it, often leading to some sort of madness in the stories because of this "break" in your perception of reality because this entity is so incomprehensible to your limited worldview. the concept is credited to h.p. lovecraft because of stuff like cthulu but the guy was also a massive-
my mom, interjecting: ah, so like horton hears a who. i get it.
#wait so like#does the LEGO movie count#they manage to escape into the human world and it’s all hazy because they don’t understand#and the people were controlling them the whole time
SURE SURE THE LEGO MOVIE IS A COSMIC HORROR WHY NOT
The LEGO movie absolutely counts, and it's treated that way from the characters' points of view. Emmett describes The Man Upstairs as having "hands like giant pink sausages, like eagle talons mixed with squid" which sounds like a human trying to describe an eldritch horror.
Just think, everyone and everything in his world is made of Lego pieces. They are as fundamental as the subatomic particles that make up our world.
From the characters' perspective, the humans are gods that created these fundamental elements as drastically simplified playthings imitating their own world. Imagine finding out that the periodic table of elements was constructed by gods in order to build a simulation of something thousands of times more complex, and we are just simulations being puppeted by these gods for their amusement.
This also explains why objects like the Kragle and the Scepter of Q-Tip are considered "relics" with unnatural powers—they are discarded items from the higher, far more complex reality that follow the rules of THAT reality, not the characters' reality. That is why they can influence the character' world in ways not normally permitted by that reality.
This puts a whole new perspective on the scene where Lord Business uses the nail polish remover on Good Cop/Bad Cop to ERASE HIS FACE.
I do not remember liking this, but clearly past me has good taste
I’m experiencing such joy thinking about how excited youd get when you hear the sound of hooves coming down your street - it’s the post!! It’s coming!!
Like an icecream truck response but for mail
“I do declare, I have me here a parcel for ya.”
i’ve just seen someone ask, “ao3 is problematic, tumblr is problematic, is there nowhere to go, is nothing sacred???”
like…. no.
it’s not.
there is nowhere sacred for fandom-at-large to go. and i don’t think there is anywhere sacred that fandom-at-large can go. wherever we go, by definition, would be profane: profanus, outside the temple. doesn’t necessarily mean dirty or bad. profane is just where we are, outside the temple. that’s the space where everyday life is lived.
if you are waiting for a “perfect” space for all fandom, where no monsters can ever tread, i am sorry, but it doesn’t exist. it can’t, not out here, beyond the temple. no open-access platform (like ao3, like tumblr, like twitter) will ever live up to perfect ideals for everybody all the time. (that’s not a reason not to strive for decency, of course! and you can sensibly ban nazis and illegal materials and porn bots and harassment without doing what tumblr’s doing, which is panicking and throwing everything it owns out a window.)
but we are all just humans, from anonymous trolls to moderators: everything we can build is still just built by people. people fail. people forget. people ignore. people are too busy, too greedy, too idealistic, too short on resources, too whatever, to be perfect. so if you want a big open cross-fandom platform to play in, what you get is profanity. in a very broad sense.
if you want a perfect space, a sacred space, you have to build it inside the temple. i don’t mean that in a specific religious sense: not a Jewish or Christian or Muslim sense. i mean, you are going to have to build a pure fannish temple and keep the profane world away from it: specifically, you’d have to keep most of the world out. it couldn’t be a place for fandom-at-large: it would have to be a place for fandom-at-small. for the few. because you are going to have to build doctrine and enforce it. you are going to have to define sin and cast sinners out. and no free open social media platform is going to do that for you: you’d have to do it yourself, continuously, rigorously, defensively, judgementally, like a guard at a gate. like a god.
“that sounds like a lot of work!” oh, it is. it’s a lot of work to gatekeep. “oh, i’m not talking about being a gatekeeper, i just want bad stuff gone!” mm-hmm. i understand. i genuinely do. but let me know if you find an easy, cheap, non-exclusionary way to let hundreds of thousands of people with very different backgrounds and beliefs post millions of pieces of only universally acceptable, non-problematic, perfect content. i’ll be over here holding my breath.
IS NOTHING SACRED?
Ma’am, this is a whorehouse.
A Tiki bar but instead of appropriating Oceanic cultures and religions, it’s all Garbled Catholic Iconography.
Me *points to cherub*: can you make that but hollow so I can fill it with Mai Tais?
The walls are covered in Lorem Ipsum but if anyone asks, all the staff say it’s a sacred, mystical text.
Bar snacks are all shaped like communion wafers, but, like, salted
You stick your tongue out and a waiter in short shorts and a Roman collar gently places one onion ring on your tongue.
Mini crucifixes instead of drink umbrellas
fun fact: there’s literally a bar with this exact theme in vancouver called hail mary’s! it’s catholic themed and there’s a confession booth and the bathroom is styled like hell
you say that and then you´re not going to add pics?
I’m really glad this post is making the rounds again (yaaaay validation) but it kills me that folks are reblogging versions without all the lovely pictures!!!
Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."
My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity.
Why'd you hide this in the tags
I mean this is pretty much EXACTLY want the man was doing. Had an anthropology professor tell me one that "The Art of War" wasn't a book of bragging rights by a suggessful general, it was meant as a humble manual on how *Any moron* could do this.
Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like... oh... you cannot comprehend before the internet.
Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like... actually doing so? Used to be harder?
And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.
So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.
But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.
And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.
And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?
And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!
And I was like, and how do you do that?
And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!
And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.
Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.
Well then he should have searched harder!
How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?
He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.
(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)
And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.
Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.
But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.
Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.
(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)
If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.
But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.
Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.
I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.
If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.
I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.
We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This just applies to so many things in life. If you don’t know that you don’t know something, how can you ASK about it?
Also research is a skill, not an innate ability in all humans. Research is actually a variety of skills and they're not always exactly the same when you're talking about when and where you're researching.
Knowing the best way to google something isn't the same as knowing how to find something in a reference book isn’t the same as knowing how a card catalog works and how to navigate research when you have limited access to physical materials.
Sometimes even when people want to educate themselves, they're lost and confused.
And then when they ask... They get beaten down for daring to ask instead of "educating themselves" because people forget that asking questions from sources you trust is part of trying to educate yourself.
We also tend to forget that, with institutional problems, there's an actual freaking institution dedicated to keeping people from having access to information, flooding the sphere with propaganda, discrediting sources of information that contradicts the institution, and twisting the context of information that cannot be ignored, and keeping the population angry and afraid for the express purpose of making them resistant to logical analyses.
I grew up in Alabama in the 1970s and 1980s. I was in the Rich Kid's neighborhood, with the good schools. I was, surprisingly enough, taught that Racism Was Bad, and that, while there were other factors that contributed to the Civil War, if it weren't for the slavery thing, there would not have been a war. The problem is that I was also taught racism had been pretty much solved when that nice Dr. King got everyone to hold hands and sing without any violence, because he preached that violence was never acceptable, because after all how can you solve any problems if you upset people? Oh, sure, there's a few racist people out there, but it's not that bad and that's how they were raised, so That's Just The Way It Is.
And I'm going to be honest with you, if I hadn't been the queer autistic kid, I might never have questioned it at all, but the institution classified me as a second-class citizen. And even now, as I am leaning in on 50, I'm still encountering ideas that were drilled into my head, and that have shaped my thinking, that just don't hold up anymore, and I have been making an intensive effort to expose myself to alternate perspectives.
I'm not saying not to upset the status quo. I'm not saying you gotta appease them. I'm not even advocating for "civility". I'm saying recognize that is possible to be brainwashed with poisoned ideas without actually being a completely, irredeemably evil person.
“The prince just fell in love with Cinderella because of her looks!”
Wrong. Okay, picture this–
So there’s the prince, okay? He’s like, smack dab in the center of the ballroom, and he is like, horrifically aware that this whole ball thing is a result of his dad falling into a panic about the royal lineage or whatever and he’s stuck listening to highborn girl after highborn girl, all lined up, introducing themselves like, “Oh yeah my family’s been a longtime supporter of the crown, and I think you’re cute, *cough* I’ve been told I have child-bearing hips *cough* Who said that? Anyway–” and Princey boy is just smiling through it, he has been the center of attention for entirely too long, he misses his emotional support horse, and is just internally like “Someone please kill me now.” And then… he sees her–This isn’t a love at first sight thing, this is a ‘what the hell is going on over there’ thing, because this girl has not gotten into the Debutante line for a solid 45 minutes.
She’s just at the hors d’oeuvres table going HAM on the prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, and like, she’s polite about it, she’s happy to move aside for other people grabbing punch and canapes (and she’s really so sweet with the wait staff, it’s kind of cute because they’re like… definitely not used to being acknowledged) but it’s like, “Damn girl, did you not eat today?” and then the prince is kind of stuck with the uncomfortable thought of ‘how many girls starved themselves to fit into a corset for this.’ And then the Prince realizes he’s missed the past 4 Debutante introductions because he’s watching Mystery girl hork down crab rangoons. So he’s like, “Excuse me” and manages to break free from the never-ending parade of girls who will hop on his dick for status.
And as he’s approaching Mystery Girl, it’s kind of hitting him that something’s not quite natural about her. Not fake, but not quite real. But at the same time this whole evening’s been just a whole circus of people acting fake as hell, so like, someone seeming a little off doesn’t seem bad, necessarily. And he sidles up to her like, “Hi,” and she’s like, “Oh–hey, have you tried the tapenade?” and she points to one of the plates, and at this point, he could hit her with the “You don’t know who I am, do you?” deal or the “Very funny, I see your play” deal, but at this point it occurs to him that, no, he hasn’t had anything to eat throughout this whole damn ball, partially because of being stuck in the debutante parade, partially because of nerves, and there’s something so disarming about the question that he grabs a crostini and she still seems so food-focused that it doesn’t seem possible that this is a play. So they both grab little plates and ditch the party.
She pretty much clears her plate in under two minutes and then has half of his plate, he’s cool with it, mostly he’s just absolutely fascinated listening to her.
See here’s the thing about Cinderella:
1. She doesn’t know he’s the prince. Like yeah, he’s been at the center of the room, but she’s kind of spent half the party eagerly looking around everywhere she’s allowed to go (”Have you seen rose garden? Have you seen the solarium??” further confirmation that she doesn’t know who she’s talking to) and the other half stuffing her face with food.
2. She assumes she’s never going to see anyone here tonight again, and no one recognizes her, so she has no filter.
So she’s just talking about whatever with this guy. He seems cool. She talks about her friends, who are rats. She makes little outfits for them. Sometimes they bring her little gifts. She is already the coolest person the prince has ever met because of this. She pretty much offhandedly talks about whatever is fucked up about the kingdom that would take his advisors two hours of hemming and hawing and watering down to address. She just says it like it’s nothing, just funky little things she’s observed, and again, she’s not aware that he’s the prince, but it’s still pretty damn bold to bring up at a literal royal ball.
She… seems to have the majority of graces that lots of girls from Respectable Families™ have, but there’s something strange about it, something simultaneously broken and hardened, like the way you can see where ice has thawed and re-frozen. Also the way she talks about her family, and the way she avoids talking about her family– is raising several red flags, not in the “Oh this is another person trying to take advantage of me” sense, but in the “Oh fuck, something’s gone really wrong and you need help” sense and also lowkey a ‘damn is she even getting fed?’ sense. But he can’t say, ‘Hey, that’s not fucking normal for people to say that to you or treat you that way. We need to get you out of there,’ without sounding crazy himself, so for now, he’s just going to chill, make sure she’s comfortable, and keep enjoying the evening. She’s somehow befriended like 4 of the waitstaff so they’re willing to cover for them while they disappear for a little bit, and they get plenty of time to talk, but eventually it hits her that she hasn’t danced yet and she’s like “Come on! I bet we can make the prince jealous!” and he just bursts out laughing at that like “hell yeah, let’s make the prince jealous. He’s a real asshole.” Like clearly she’s having a good time, so who is he to make it weird? So they head back to the ballroom and they dance. And our girl, Mystery Girl, Cinderella, while they’re dancing, becomes acutely aware that everyone is staring. That doesn’t seem quite right. Like, yeah she’s hot, she knows she’s hot, but at least a good third of the party should still be focused on the prince, right? Where is that guy, anyway?
Oh.
Oh wait.
Oh shit.
And Princey Boy actually picks up on her realization and they whisper argue for like 3 minutes. “Why didn’t you tell me?! Now I feel like a goddamn idiot!” “I dunno it was nice being treated like a normal person” “Well me treating you like a normal person makes me a goddamn felon or something did you consider that?!” “Hey–Hey–it’s cool–you’re cool–I think you’re amazing, and if anyone says shit about you, I can shut it down.” “Well I don’t like that! That’s fucked up!” “I agree. It is fucked up, but I believe in you, and I think you should have a chance, and I’m here to back you up. I know power is fucked up right now. I know. But are you cool with working with me to change that?” And our girl Cindy pauses on that for a couple seconds, because.. she’s just spent hours with this guy and like.. she knows he’s a good guy, she knows he means well, so she’s like, “I don’t know how long I can actually work with you.” and the prince is like “Look, I know your home situation is complicated right now, but I really think we can–”
And then the bell starts ringing.
It’s midnight.
And then she takes off in a panic, and our prince just met the coolest person ever, and like, he’s pretty sure whatever situation they’re headed back to is fucked up, and all he’s got going to find her is a shoe. A shoe.
i wanted to do a rec post in a while so i gathered some of my favourite fics i read this year and which stayed with me in a way. thank you to all these wonderful writers that made my year brighter (or sadder, occasionally) with their little masterpieces <33
if you didn’t like captain marvel, I can’t help you. It catered to a very specific demographic and that demographic is me
