WWBD?

I love A Year Without a Santa Claus because in it Santa Claus suffers from seasonal depression and all people ever talk about this special it’s always about these two bozos who are barely in it and pretty much sing the same exact song

9 times out of 10, whenever I’m talking about Christmas specials with people they refer to it as “The One with Snow Miser and Heat Miser”

And you know what?

I totally get it

They both have the best song in the movie

No competition

I love these guys

Alright we're watching Christmas Movies, specifically "Mrs Santa Claus" - made in 1996 as part of the Wonderful World of Disney which used to air on Sunday Nights.

It's my favorite. With the "Muppet Christmas Carol" a close second.

The best part? Over twenty years later - gods I cringe writing that - it still holds up. Marches for women's rights, strikes, workers writes, intercultural relationships, religions existing side by side, a wife finding herself and not being ignored. All of it still could stand today.

I have the DVD because I'm old. But I think it's on YouTube. Watch it. It's worth it.

Oh yeah, Angela Lansbury is Mrs Anna Claus. Yep. This one gave her a name. And a costume I'll one day recreate but I digress.

I'm serious though. To the library to the streaming sites. Now dash away, dash away, dash away all!

When you decide to spend the Christmas holidays with your uhh enemy by travelling to her time. Cometh the hour, cometh the man 🤠

Short comic inspired by a segment of Chapter 42 of Somewhere in Time by Serpent in Red (@serpentinred) (PLEASE mind the preliminary notes regarding the fic (which is in Chapter 1), AND the author’s notes which top and tail this specific chapter cuz it is NOT a continuation of the main plot). There’s just something wholesome and grin-inducing about Chapter 42 that makes my heart grow two sizes, and the enemies-to-lovers tone remains an exquisite constant throughout the fic, so if that’s your thing, you know what to do!

I also owe a massive thanks to Nerys Dax (@nerysdax) for kindly looking over the panels and providing helpful comments and feedback. I really appreciated this since it was important to me from the outset that whatever is sketched out here remains as close to the author's story as possible, and I couldn't have confidently put this forward without Nerys's input.

Lastly, if it wasn't already obvious - please go read the fic lol

I hate the “Thoreau’s mom did his laundry” criticism so much, it drives me crazy.

Henry Thoreau did not go to Walden Pond because he thought it would be a fun adventure. He went into the woods because he was deeply depressed and burnt out. He was running from the horror of his brother and best friend recently dying in his arms, and the haunting memory of causing the Fairhaven Bay fire. His friend Ellery Channing literally gave him the ultimatum of either taking some time off to write and think, or else be institutionalized.

I think Thoreau’s mother saw her depressed son choosing to retreat into a small cabin in the woods, and was worried about him. Of course she did his laundry - just as Ralph Waldo Emerson probably brought him firewood and bread. These were not chores of obligation to support a “great” man, but services of love to help their deeply depressed 28yo son and friend.

And if you ask me, there’s a lesson in that - to “suck out the marrow of life” and “live deliberately,” one must also accept help offered from the people in your life who love you. There is no true transcendentalism or individualism without love and friendship behind it.

I tried to let this go past without comment, but it's stayed with me throughout the day. And the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.

Not for the positive sentiment that serving others can be a positive thing - precisely because no one was ever saying it couldn't be - but for how badly it mangles what it purports to be responding to.

No one ever said that the men who were only able to produce art because of other people labouring for them had had no pain or done nothing good. And no one ever said that those who supported them were always resentful and unwilling.

The point is that when people who weren't men had great tragedies and great powers of creativity, they were not supported to go off into the wilderness and explore their creative impulses and philosophies to their greatest depths.

And then we are compared to those works. And those works often PRESENT philosophies in which great works can be achieved on their own. This post is so... dishonest about what is being argued for.

Some of y'all haven't read A Room of One's Own, and it shows.

Shakespeare had great tragedies in his life, such as the death of his son Hamnet, and those obviously inform his work. But what, Virginia Woolf asks us, of Shakespeare's sister?

What would have become of the middle class woman with Shakespeare's upbringing and talent? She certainly would have been laughed out of the theatre.

We know that. Not just because of the remarks made by men of the time that a woman acting would be like a dog standing on its hind legs. But also because we can see the few, very few examples of women DID manage to write at the time, and how hard it was for them

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, with all the privileges that brings, was a philosopher and writer. She wrote the first science fiction novel. And she wrote plays. And she was ridiculed for it, and men tried to bury her existence. Despite a very supportive husband, she was widely regarded with derision as the Mad Duchess. While I wouldn't say her plays are remotely as good as Shakespeare, it's not as though she had the advantage of friendship with Kit Marlow. To be a playwright in Shakespeare's time was a collaborative effort, bouncing ideas and lines off your actors and other writers. We can see in the folios how much the plays changed from performance to performance. They weren' static. That was a novel concept just starting to be introduced by the printing press. But who collaborated with Margaret? Who batted frenzied ideas around with the Duchess?

Not Shakespeare's peers. And likely not many of her own class either.

Or try Aemelia Lanyer on for size. First woman poet to be published in the English language and her poems BLAZE with talent and pain and power.

But it was only possible because she had a female patron who supported her work, and they were both cut adrift in an inheritance dispute. You can hear it when you read The Description of Cookeham - the country house in which she and her patron briefly lived and for a while, she was free to write as men were. But it's a poem of loss.

Because they lost Cookeham. Because there is never the same financial security, and thus peace and room to work unburdened, as there is for men.

And no it's not the case that all men have it perfect and easy, but a fuck of a lot more of them have mothers or wives or sisters who will support them as they pour out their pain into the pages than there are fathers or husbands, or brothers who will do the same for a woman or non-binary person.

Woolf notes that you can see it in the cracks of the work women write. A moment in Jane Eyre where Jane thinks longingly of all she might do if she were free like a man that Woolf sees as flawed because it is not the character speaking, but the author, pouring out her pain.

Because women were always forced to write AROUND their duties, often in fear of getting caught. They could never polish freely to the same extent as men. Even Jane Austen had no study to retreat to, but would cover her pages with embroidery to hide them when she was interrupted by visitors.

It's not merely ignorant but insulting to be told that in critiquing the circumstances in which men wrote, partly supported by the labour of women, we are in some sense dismissing THOSE WOMEN. That in acknowledging that labour we are disparaging it.

This is some trad wife bullshit.

NO.

Noting that the labour of women that supported the great works of men has gone unrecognised is NOT to dismiss that labour. Nor is it invalid to critique a man who wrote ruggedly individualistic works while quietly supported by a woman, just because he had also supported others and suffered grief. That argument DOES NOT scan.

A person - anyone - needs a room of their own and a place of safety in which to write to fully explore their creative ideas.

As I lay in bed too sick to either work or write I feel this more strongly than ever.

Privilege is multifaceted, and it has never denied that those with one privilege may suffer in other ways, nor that they can do good works and support others. The critique of privilege is DOUBLY important when this is so, because those people STILL benefit from the STRUCTURES that support them over and above those who suffer the same tragedies without that support.

When Shakespeare is thrown into depression by the loss of his son he is still held up in all the myriad ways that a comfortably well-off, educated, middle-class white man in Elizabethan England can be. When Aemelia and her patron are set adrift because she and her patron are of the wrong gender, they have no one to turn to. No salvation. And we have far fewer poems by Lanyer than we do by Shakespeare, for all that many speculate she is the dark lady of his sonnets (I know, there are other speculations, but she is one).

With all the wealth and prestige of a Duchess, Cavendish's plays were only performed at home. It's not that she wasn't known in the theatrical world - it's said that when Cavendish went to the theatre to watch a play, everyone else in the audience was there to watch Cavendish, because of her eccentric reputation, but she could never be one of the Lord's Men. She could never see her works performed at the Globe. Never drink Kit Marlow under the bench.

Massive structural machines were (and still are) in play to see that it is far easier for men to have what they need in order to think and create handed to them.

THAT is the critique. THAT is the point.

Not that no one should ever support their loved ones while they write. For the most part, that's the only way for creatives to get started in having a career as opposed to a hobby.

The point is that it is MASSIVELY more common for women to quietly support men without recognition while they go off and write books that ignore the existence of women than it is for women or non-binary people to be supported by their loved ones to go off and do something creative.

It's always worth checking, when you're hot and angry that someone is beating down on your fave, that YOU are in fact beating up a real opponent, and not a straw person.

“My story has so much gay rep in it!” Awesome. How are you treating your female characters btw

This post blowing up has taught me that a lot of you think that “how are you treating the character” is asking about how they’re treated within the story, not how you, the author, is writing them. I don’t care if your female characters are goddesses or superheroes, do they talk like actual people and not a cardboard cutout with tits stapled on

“stop traumadumping to your friends tell this to your therapist” my god they paywalled human connection

Twin Stars by Luis Ricardo Falero (19th Century)

collection of posts for a very specific dynamic

marlena by julie buntin// June Bates, She is the poem // Hera LIndsay Bird, ‘Everything Is Wrong’ // Rick Riordan, 'Percy Jackson and the Titan’s Curse' // Anne Carson, 'H Of H Playbook' // cut, caitlyn siehl // Robert Jordan, Lord of Chaos

Mrs. Santa Claus | FULL MOVIE | 1996 | Comedy, Christmas, Musical | Angela Lansbury

A musical adventure in which Mrs. Claus leaves the North Pole and finds herself in 1890s New York. She explores this new world by getting a job in a sweat shop and befriending a young suffragette, only to become empowered by urban life. 

Starring Angela Lansbury, Charles Durning, Michael Jeter, Terrence Mann, Lynsey Bartilson, Bryan Murray, David Norona 1996

Directed by Terry Hughes

Music by Jerry Herman, who had previously worked with Angela Lansbury in her Broadway breakthrough as the lead in Mame.

Costumes by Bob Mackie

Nominated for five Emmy Awards