#cannot refine a sketch for the life of me
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some more sams :0 same friend from the last post told me about 'yallternative',,, how could i not put sam in something like that??? AND THEN HBW AUDIO SAM RAHDFSJGDFJHSJDHFSJFHSGHSBGSJHSF
southern man take me by the hand
#redactedverse#redacted audio#redacted sam#sam collins#redacted asmr#my art#SAMMMMMMM#PLEASE#cannot refine a sketch for the life of me#also i hope im not horribly mischaracterising him or something with these drawings SORRY IM NEW HEREASFKSDGKJS#sam collins THE MAN THAT YOU ARE.
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Secrets & Sketches
Andromache the Scythian x f!reader
I decided to create a series of loosely related one shots for Andromache (my beloved). Here’s part 1 and part 2
Summary: You were always staring at her, not knowing she was staring back.
TW: None?
Word count: +5,100
Author's Note: Hi y'all. Here's some slightly domestic fluff before the action happens and the stakes skyrocket through the roof.
Despite never having lived with four strangers before, it turned out that your new situation offered you far more privacy than you had ever experienced while living with your mother.
The woman had a compulsive need to control every aspect of your life, from what you wore to what you ate. You were barely even safe in the bathroom. The years had taught you to lie with your words and carefully crafted smiles. Knowing what she wanted to hear from you and how you could appease her temper was like mastering a second language. Your skills in the craft became more and more refined throughout the years and your confidence ultimately grew. But you underestimated your mother and made the greatest mistake of them all.
“I know you’re lying to me! What are you trying to hide from me, you ungrateful whore?”
A picture frame nearly collided with your head, chipping the door frame instead of scratching your face. The glass shattered on the floor and your body jumped twice, once at the sound and another time when your eyes settled on the damage and found that your favorite childhood photo with your grandmother was destroyed.
“Whatever you did, I will find out! You cannot lie to me, I am your mother!”
It was one afternoon you had wanted all to yourself to go see the movie Roman Holiday after school. The charismatic Audrey Hepburn, riding on a Vespa with the largest smile you had ever seen, caused strange feelings to stir in your stomach when you had first watched the trailer. She was a princess masquerading as a commoner in order to freely experience the wonders of the Eternal City. Oh, how you envied her character. Your mother, however, could only focus on how short her hair was. The shortest your hair had ever been was when you were a fresh newborn. Once it grew past your upper back, you were never allowed to cut it, despite all the other girls you knew being able to short styles.
“How disappointing.” She scoffed when a clip of her getting her haircut played. “Such a beautiful young woman and she wants to make herself look like a man? I really don’t understand your generation, you’re all confused.”
When you arrived home late that evening, she refused to believe the lie you had produced about giving some tutoring lessons after school. It was only two days later that she found the proof she wanted. While snooping through your journal she came across the movie ticket you had pasted next to your latest entry. She burned the entire thing as only one portion of your punishment.
How your mother could predict your actions, anticipate your every move, and see through every single one of your lies you did not know. It was like she knew you and how your mind functioned but could never truly understand how suffocated you felt by the twisted ways she expressed her “love” for you. She was your mother, the closest kin you had left after your grandmother’s passing and the woman that had known you for your entire existence. The fact that she birthed you was one she’d never let you forget, yet you knew she would spend your entire life trying to mold you into something you weren’t if she could. If she could never accept you then how could anybody else?
Then you met Andy, who always seemed to be in tune with whatever you were thinking. Hell, she could practically guess your thoughts word for word without even really trying, yet not once did it ever feel like she was violating your mind as your mother had. You were almost completely certain that she was fully aware of the times when you were drawing her. It was impossible not to see the art in her movements. She’d be doing something mundane yet slightly active such as washing the dishes and you’d pull your sketchbook out. The moment you put pencil to paper she would slow down ever-so-slightly. A plate that needed maybe two wipes suddenly took four or more to clean. She must have known what she was doing to you, softly smirking as she folded laundry
But did she know what it was doing to you? How intensely you felt about her and as more than just an art subject, more than someone you merely admired. Pages full of sketches, varying in detail and design, became dedicated to capturing the alluring domestic side of the ancient warrior. Every angle, every shadow was carefully reconstructed (to the best of your ability anyway) as if to preserve each moment and time so that your eyes may never forget what she looked like chopping onions on a rainy Tuesday evening. A brief moment that might be incredibly insignificant for a being that has walked the earth for thousands of years, but one that was still so precious to you. The time you spent together, even the moments everyone else might consider to be dull, were filled with color all because of her.
Why she allowed you to draw her so frequently was something you couldn’t quite figure out. This rather untraditional dance the two of you engaged in was never spoken about in words. There was no doubt that Andy would have said something much earlier had she been uncomfortable being drawn by you. A part of you enjoyed entertaining the idea that, perhaps in some small way, Andy might actually return your feelings. But at the same time, you didn’t want to be wrong and come off as an artistic creep trying to invade her privacy.
The good thing was you never had to worry about any of the others looking through your sketchbook. The one time Joe had asked if he could take a peek it hadn’t even crossed your mind that you could have said ‘no’ to him. But the smallest bit of hesitance that he had seen in your eyes as you prepared to hand over your most personal and sacred treasure immediately stopped him.
“Y/N, you don’t actually have to show me anything if you don’t want to. I was merely curious but no part of me would be offended if you want to keep your art to yourself. I will always respect your privacy first.”
His words were almost foreign to you, like ones you had only ever read on pages and later discovered were pronounced completely differently when you finally heard them spoken out loud. Still, you knew Joe meant everything he said. Though all of your new companions were certainly capable of it, none of them had ever once tried to deceive you or keep you hidden from the truth. Previously living with a pathological liar had taught you all the signs you needed to know and not once had you found a single one since joining the old guard.
It was a bit startling how safe you already felt with these few strangers you had only met a few short weeks ago. You could talk to all of them about (almost) anything, although you did worry that your endless amount of questions might annoy any one of the unnaturally older beings. Sometimes you nearly cringed at the thought of how ignorant and stupid you must have appeared in their eyes. It mostly motivated you to contribute where you could. Cooking and cleaning were not tasks you necessarily enjoyed, but it felt nice to make some type of contribution to the team. Still, you longed to prove yourself as something more, to help save lives and make Andy, Booker, Joe, and Nico proud. And maybe, just maybe, if you became worthy enough of someone like your rescuer, she might look at you differently.
┊ ┊┊
It was nearing morning hours and your endless thoughts hadn’t allowed you to sleep yet. There was a buzzing in your body, making it impossible to fully relax, even though you knew you had a busy day of training ahead of you and you needed the rest. You tried to conjure up the comforting sound of Andy’s steady heartbeat as you imagined her lying next to you, only to grow even more anxious when you began feeling guilty for indulging in such thoughts.
Did she even like women the way you did? You certainly had your suspicions and noticed the way her heart seemed to break anytime there was a mention of Quynh. The necklace that never left her neck also appeared to hold a great amount of pain and significance to her. But even if you were right, Andy had never brought up any details regarding her love life and you were determined to respect that undiscussed boundary. The tossing and turning was just an unfortunate side effect that eventually had you cave in and get up to grab a drink from the kitchen.
“Can’t sleep?” The voice of the very person you had been thinking of came from behind you as soon as you had turned on a small lamp. You let out a nervous laugh and kept a steady hand on your chest when you caught her smiling directly at you. It made you take some extra time while getting your glass of water so that your heartbeat had a chance to settle.
Andy sat at the bar sipping on a mug of coffee. Even with the light being so dim, you didn’t need it to tell her beverage was completely black.
“I still don’t know how you’re able to drink that. Every time I try it it’s like trying to swallow hot liquid dirt.”
“Really?” The Scythian chuckled and you prayed the darkness would hide your melted expression. “That’s surprising considering how you drown yours in milk and sugar.”
“Hey, we can’t all be as tough as you.”
“No one said you had to be. No one said you weren’t already.” You supposed you were tough in the context of being able to override death itself, but besides that, it wasn’t a character trait you ever considered yourself to have. Even the immortality thing was basically a fluke.
The dark haired woman gestured for you to sit down and you awkwardly lowered yourself into the chair across from her. Your glass of water looked silly standing next to her more refined drink. “Yeah, that’s me. I got tough hands covered in paper cuts and callouses from drawing.”
“Art is tough for a lot of people. It’s tough for me. I could never quite get the emotional vulnerability part down and I feel like all the best art pulls from that. I would say you could probably teach me a thing or two about drawing but you have something more inborn than that. It can’t be taught.”
“But you’ve never seen my work?” Had she? You didn’t think she’d go through your things without your permission but there was definiteness in her tone that told you her words were true.
“No,” she shrugged. Nothing in her seemed to waver. “I don’t need to. There’s this look you get in your eyes when you’re completely focused on drawing that seems to transport you to this different world. I always wonder where you go but don’t want to tear you away when you’re clearly inspired.”
You had been staring at her for so long believing that she was merely tolerating your strange behavior. You assumed she simply felt unbothered. The idea that she might have been secretly staring back never once crossed your mind.
“You… You watch me?” A beat passed and your brain short circuited, unsure of what kind of answer you even hoped to hear. If she did then was it with the same unspoken desire you held in your heart that you could be worthy of her one day? No, it had to be something far from that. Your awkward, uncoordinated behavior could only be considered entertaining at best if Andy didn’t find you pitiable. You imagined it was like watching your neighbor’s beagle after they arrived home from a medical procedure at the vet. The poor thing was so loopy yet unaware that he couldn’t walk in a straight line. Every few steps he took he’d also crumble to the floor before eagerly trying to get back up and making another attempt with the same results. That’s what she must see whenever she saw you trip over your own feet. Or how silly you looked the other day when Booker tried to show you how to hold a pistol and you shook so hard that it fumbled out of your hands.
Even with all the time in the world, it was a struggle to see yourself ever truly earning your place among the rest of the guard one day. You not only lacked combat experience but had been thoroughly sheltered from the world by your mother. She hadn’t allowed you to participate in any sports, not even the more feminine ones like dance or golf. The result was barely being able to do a push-up and having the wind knocked out of your lungs after only a brief jog.
The others had started you off with some basic self defense techniques, which caused you to wake up with sore muscles you hadn’t even known existed. Everyone was extremely patient with you, stressing the importance of slowly building up your strength and reminding you that there was no rush to suddenly reach their skill level when they’d been fighting for longer than some of the strongest empires had lasted. But then you’d watch them training together or listen to one of them recount several of the missions they completed while you were stuck waiting in the safe house. They were out there saving lives, as well as literally sacrificing their own, while you could only hope to one day do the same.
In the back of your head you could hear your mother berating you for having such ridiculous dreams. If she could see you struggling to learn a pull up she would certainly laugh at your miserable attempts. But Andy didn’t look at you like you were “perfectly pathetic” as your mother often described. No, she seemed to stare at you softly, which made you feel like you were the only person she was thinking about.
“I find you interesting. More specifically, it’s been a pleasure to watch you grow into yourself these past few weeks. You look much more relaxed.”
You were fairly relaxed, aside from the fact that your heart was currently threatening to jump out of your chest. Or if physicists could somehow harness its energy then it could power the entire world. She had just admitted to finding you interesting and you were supposed to answer back in words. You took a painfully slow drink.
“Well, it has been nice being able to make my own decisions and not have someone constantly looking over my shoulder.” You think back to an instance where you were recently baking a lemon glaze cake for the team and some icing stuck to your fingers. Immediately, you went to wash your hands as your mother would have insisted upon when it occurred to you that she no longer had control over you. Licking your fingers after that had never felt so satisfying. “Even the little choices I’m able to make now are kind of exciting. Is that strange to say?”
“Not at all.” Andy shook her head. “It’s a beautiful thing, seeing how far you’ve come in such a short amount of time. Not to mention how glad I am that you feel safe enough around us to be yourself.”
A pang of guilt ran through you. What must she think of you if you were keeping cryptic drawings of her a secret? “I really do, which is why I don’t want you to believe I’m trying to hide things from you! Not forever, at least. I trust you, and perhaps it’s more than I’ve ever trusted anyone else. But with my drawings… I suppose it’s rather complicated and I’ve never willingly shown them to anyone before. They’re nothing inappropriate, though! I would never do anything like that.”
Before you could completely melt into a puddle of despair, Andy reached for your forearm, anchoring the two of you together while helping to calm you down. Her hand was warmed from holding her hot mug.
“Hey, it’s alright, I trust you too. You don’t need to explain yourself to me. I’m flattered about the drawings and it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. I can wait until you’re ready to show them to me when you feel comfortable doing so.”
It was completely vexatious how patient Andy could be with you, or how she always seemed to know the right thing to say to make you feel better. She possessed the ability to soothe the fears you understood intimately along with the others which you had tried to suppress and nearly forgotten about. You simply weren’t used to being treated in such a way.
“How are you so patient with me all the time?” Your question came off more irritated than you intended, making you cringe inwardly. You weren’t even sure what you were really asking about.
In the few moments it took Andy to start processing the question, your thoughts finally began to come together and spill out all at once.
“I’m deeply appreciative of how understanding you’ve been, don’t get me wrong, but when I imagine myself in your position, it must be frustrating. You do so much for me, all four of you do, but you especially. I’m always needing your help with countless things even though I have nothing of use to offer in return. You’re all incredibly worldly people, capable of doing more than I ever have even before your first deaths. I’ve been kept sheltered my entire life and probably wouldn’t last a day on my own. Having me join the team probably feels a lot more like babysitting than anything else, yet you never complain about it.”
Even though you knew it wasn’t in her nature, sometimes you wished she would allow herself to be angry with you. Or if she even expressed the slightest bit of irritation then that might make you feel better somehow. You waited for Andy to tell you that you sounded ridiculous, or to make another comment about your tendency to overthink things. Nothing like that ever came.
In one swift, breathtaking movement, her hand carefully tilted your chin up towards her face so that you were caught in her stare. The skin of her thumb was rough and her green-blue eyes bore into your own, tender yet determined as they searched for something deep in your soul. Though her touch was completely innocent, it was also intensely intimate from your perspective at least. You wanted to bear your entire being to her, consciously preparing your mind and body to take in whatever words she was about to say.
“Y/N, listen to me. There is nothing you owe me. Relationships aren’t transactional and I enjoy being able to help you. You also didn’t choose this life and I can’t hold what you don’t know against you. I won’t lie and say patience comes to me easily. Truthfully, when you get to my age everything is frustrating. I’ve seen… far too much in my life aside from any type of explanation for it all and it has made me bitter. But you don’t deserve any of that and I don’t want to be that type of person anymore. I don’t ever want to turn my back on people I care about again.”
Her eyes glossed over with the hue of a haunting memory, something from her past clearly bothering her. She let go of you in the crest of the emotion and you nearly whimpered when you lost her touch, but found the rare opportunity to offer Andy the comfort she needed.
“I may not know much in the grand scheme of things, but I know you’re not bitter. Truly bitter people try to tear down everyone around them because there’s nothing misery loves more than company. You’re nothing like my mother, she wanted to control me and keep me trapped in a life where I could never have my own happiness. You set me free. Anyway, it would be hard to live as long as you have, see the things that you’ve seen, and not become discouraged with all of the wickedness that has happened throughout history. What matters is that you’ve continued to fight for others that wouldn’t normally stand a chance on their own. If you were actually as bitter as you think, you could turn your back on everyone without a single care in the world. I see how much you care for others, Andy. Bitter people only care about themselves and I don’t see how you can believe you’re one of them.”
The fact that you were so young was partially why Andy felt the need to hold herself back and take things slow with you. Although your life would never be normal, she wanted to give you the chance to choose your own path and chase whatever dreams you fancied. Right now, it was crucial to prepare you for the world and to teach you how to keep your shared secret safe. But she knew you’d want to adventure out on your own at some point, and that you’d probably want to experiment with other partners closer to your age. Andy was aware of the baggage she carried, as well as the fact that the nature of your relationship meant she held a type of influence over you. She would never allow herself to take advantage of you like that.
But one thing she couldn’t let you do was downplay yourself, not when your words touched her in ways she hadn’t felt in thousands of years.
“Do you really believe you’re of no use at all and have nothing to offer? Y/N, I’ve traveled to every corner of the world and met the wisest individuals that still led directionless and unfulfilled lives. They thought of themselves too highly, pushed others away, and in the end their knowledge meant nothing when they were unable to make meaningful connections. You have all the time you need to perfect your knowledge and learn every skill that exists or will develop in the future.”
Your head tilted in perplexity.
“What? You think we had phones or electricity back when I was growing up? I didn’t learn how to drive a car until late last century. It was really like the blind leading the blind in those early days.”
Imagining a Victorian era Andy accidentally crashing a motorized carriage or angrily shaking her fist at experimental drivers from atop of her horse was certainly entertaining. You wondered if the two of you would ever share a similar experience together.
Temporarily distracted by your smile, Andy nearly forgot the importance of the message she was trying to convey to you.
“Y/N, you’re right that you’ve never really been given the chance to grow before all of this. None of that was your fault. The wonderful thing now is that you’re on your way to becoming smarter, like anybody else can when given the right tools. What you already have, your emotional strength and intelligence, is far more rare and valuable in my eyes. You teach me to look at things from a different perspective even when I’ve felt stuck in my ways for hundreds of years. Don’t overlook how much of an impact you can make or how much we all appreciate you.”
“Andy… I… Thank you.” You try not to cry, though you know she wouldn’t judge you if you did. Viewing your emotions as a strength is something that you never considered before. They were always a weakness back when you experienced nothing but misery, and now everything couldn’t be more different. Your new life was full of evenings spent getting tipsy and laughing at the stories your friends told you of places and times that sounded unreal. It was wanting the taste of more, the promise of the adventures that lay before you and the people you would get to share them with. It was a life you could hardly believe was real and you got to spend every single day with a woman that made your heart race with a single smile. Even if she never felt the same way about you, there was no chance that you’d trade your time with Andy for anything or anyone else. “Thank you for everything. I’m glad I get to experience all of this with you.”
She almost let her resolve crumble upon hearing your words. The grip around her drink tightened, heating up her flesh to a tender sting but she persevered through it. She knew that if she touched you again then it would all be over. There would be no way she could let go.
“As exciting as everything can be, I can’t help but feel nervous for what’s to come. I worry that no matter how hard I train I won’t be prepared. No matter how much I learn, there is bound to be something I overlook.”
How right you were.
“One thing I can tell you is that there are some things you’re never ready for, even if you spend centuries preparing. People, history, and almost everything I’ve encountered follow some type of pattern maybe 99% of the time. But all it takes is that 1% chance of randomness to make life unpredictable. Even the most meticulous of plans can end up going sideways. At the end of the day, I always ask myself why I’m here or why certain things happen and I’ve never been very close to an answer. There are questions I’ve carried with me for even longer than I can remember.”
It would have been quite terrifying to hear those words from anyone else besides Andy. If she still struggled to figure things out then you were practically cursed to be clueless for the rest of your existence. Although strangely enough, it was actually comforting to hear that she shared a similar sense of existential questioning. Both of you were human even if your lifespans or biology no longer were.
“Okay, but you must have a guess for when we’ll see flying cars at least. Or do you believe people will really be able to walk on Mars one day?”
A smooth attempt to cover up her broadening smile by lifting her coffee up to her mouth might have gone unnoticed if you hadn’t been so enamored by each one of Andy’s actions. She had a harder time hiding her eyes, which playfully rolled at your question.
“Sure, I suppose it’s possible. Hey, maybe you’ll be the first one and you can tell us all about it.”
“While the prospect of accomplishing something you’ve never done is intriguing, I wouldn’t want to do it without you.”
The words left your mouth, leaving only your pair of eyes holding hers throughout a deep silence. It wasn’t often that Andy looked like she was at a loss for words but this was definitely one of those times.
Quickly, you tried to cover up your confession with a stupid excuse. “I mean if there really are man-eating martians up there they’ll want to eat you first. You have way more muscle.”
“Right,” Andy laughed in agreement. “I guess that’s all I’m good for besides being a model for your artwork. Are you fast enough to draw me up there in time before I get turned into alien food?”
“Maybe.” You blushed and tried to go for Andy’s move to cover your face with your cup, only to realize that it was practically useless when it was made of glass.
“I, uh, really wanted to get some sleep tonight before waking up for early training but I guess I’m not doing a very good job at that.”
“Sleep in, you deserve the break. You’ve been pushing yourself really hard and should get to sleep in for once. There’s no need to overexert yourself.”
“Wait, aren’t you leaving for your mission around sunrise?” Andy was planning to look for some intel in the city and you knew she might be gone for up to a few days. “Wake me up before you go so I can say goodbye.”
For a moment, all the Scythian can do is try to memorize the look on your face, wishing that she could permanently sketch the vision on paper like you could. You gazed up at her with such innocence and devotion in your eyes, as if she was simply running to get milk from the grocery store the next morning. The team had actually glossed over the more important details about Andy’s assignment and what it would entail. It wasn’t that you were unaware of Andy’s brutal past and countless killings, but you still had yet to witness such violence. She couldn’t help but worry that witnessing that side of her would not only change how you saw her, but also influence your own self perception when the time came to take another life yourself. It was painful to imagine the countless amount of years you might spend plagued by inner turmoil, hating the person you would become even if it was inevitable. She’d die in a million more excruciating ways if it would shield you from such a curse.
“Andy, are you alright?” Your voice of concern brought her back to the present. There was a slight look of worry between your furrowed eyebrows that she wished to smooth out herself, but she practiced self restraint.
“Sorry, I guess I’m a little tired too. If you want me to wake you before I leave then I will.”
With a satisfied smile on your face, you nodded and rose from your seat. The urge to ask Andy if she might join you tugged at your heart. You always slept more soundly when it was in her arms. Your nightmares were much more infrequent by now and it had been some time since you had been able to fall asleep while breathing in her scent, snuggling deep into her chest. The temptation to voice your request was almost impossible to resist, save for the fear of jeopardizing your friendship and making her uncomfortable by revealing your feelings.
Eventually, you found yourself back in bed alone and replaying your conversation. One specific realization you couldn’t get over was that Andy had undoubtedly expressed some type of interest in the art you made of her. Sure, it’s possible that it might have been in a completely platonic sense, but you held onto the fantasy of it meaning something more and decided you’d keep it to yourself, for now.
#Andromache the Scythian x reader#andromache x reader#Andromache the scythian#the old guard#joe x nicky#booker#yusuf x nicolo#nicolo di genova#yusuf al kaysani#sebastien le livre#andy the scythian x reader#andromache the scythian x reader#immortal lesbians#Charlize Theron character
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Louis/Eloise
The Royal
❝I have to. It's my duty to serve the people of Oceanic.❞
❝Listen to me. Ignore what everyone else will say. You are perfect the way you are. You are my everything, love.❞
Age: A month younger than MC
Race: Human
Gender: Male or female, depending on player choice
Pronouns: He/him or she/her, depending on player choice
Physical appearance: The Royal has slightly tanned skin due to intensive time spent in the sun, although their parents try their best to maintain the natural fair-pale shade. They have a heart shaped face framed by wavy red hair, either tamed or tied up in a bun with two small strands on the side. Soft brown eyes that can go cold at a poor choice of words and freckles dotting their cheeks. 5'7" no matter the gender.
Trope(s): Forbidden love, impossible love, royalty, [REDACTED]
As the heir to the throne of Oceanic, the Royal has a heavy weight on their shoulders that they cannot shake off—the expectations of the people and their parents often reminds them of their duty to deliver responsible decision for the betterment of the kingdom. For most of the week, they are cooped up within the castle walls, fulfilling their tasks as the one next in line. However, during a small portion of the day where their schedule is empty, the Royal will always go to visit their private shore by themself. A tradition they have upheld since they were young.
In public appearances, the Royal comes off as an understanding, charming, mature young adult—exactly what everyone expects from the heir. All warm smiles and dimples. But behind closed doors, the fake smiles drop and shoulders slacken. The fire in their eyes never goes out but they allow themself to be exhausted. Just once.
Their idea of relaxing is by standing in front of the waves, shoes off, and enjoying the smell of salty air and water. A servant usually has to come and fetch them, as they do not keep track of the time. And recently, they have been going more often due to undisclosed reasons... as well as sneaking off to town to do gods-know-what.
There have been rumors circulating around them, particularly involving [REDACTED]. Are they true? Are they not? You will have to wait until it is announced.
Chance encounters are life-changing. You don't think you would have ever noticed the Royal had it not been for Cordelia and K. And more importantly, you do not think you would have ever met them on the streets without your...unique circumstances. Little had you realized then the potential to gain a powerful ally, as well as a lifelong friend.
Fun Facts About the Royal:
There is so much lore I want to write down about them, but they would all be major spoilers for the game! So for now, take this condensed, somewhat short intro post for now. But expect to see some huge updates to this as further chapters are released!
Also would you call them "Lou"? Been thinking about an easier nickname besides "The Royal" and it's pretty cute! Though they are accustomed to everyone calling them by their first name
Their original design was going to be heavily inspired by Prince Eric from the Little Mermaid. However, it was changed to an appearance similar to Ariel. Maybe your headcanon is that he's Ariel's son or grandson? That's what mine is lol
Has a very refined taste for red wine. Likes it especially from their own kingdom but imported tastes are good too
Loves drawing. And because they live right by the sea they have a lot of sunset sketches and swirls of water in their notebook
Has a diary where they write down about their day; if you romance them you'll probably find long romantic tirades about you
Actually likes wearing crowns if it is light and only in the castle
Sheltered kid growing up—while their parents may have exposed them to monarchy politics early in their life they remained relatively naive and unaware of certain...things
Things that will remain unmentionable
Knows some secret passageways within the kingdom due to safety reasons, but they may show it to you if you are lucky enough!
Stuffed animals creep them out and they are all over the walls of the castle thanks to their father's love for hunting
No, not stuffed animals. Like actual taxidermy
Deathly allergic to gossipy people and mice—physically wilts at the mention of either one
Would buy you anything you want just to please you. This will especially show during the crushing stage, but it will be a habit that never dies down *if* you get married
Can resist puppy eyes with a huge question mark. But usually not because they are a major people pleaser. It comes with their job
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Madame Putiphar Groupread. Book Two, Chapter XXXIX
Johan Tobias Sergel's Cupid and Psyche + Ingres' preliminary sketch for his uber sexist Zeus and Thetis.
{ @sainteverge + @counterwiddershins }
The first half of the chapter attempts to give us a psychological portrayal of The Madame. She is still a jailer, still a sexual abuser. However she is given a sliver of interiority her sadian equivalents are usually denied.
The situation is Deborah carrying out her plan, which requires convincing the Madame she is making progress/learning, so that she can get an audience with the king, appeal to his humanity and be spared of a life of sexual serfdom.
As readers we move away from Deborah and see a bit more of the Madame's point of view. How does she feel about Deborah, beyond the burning and somewhat ridiculous lust we have already been described. And why do we need to know this all of a sudden? What is the point of making her slightly more humane, in her twisted way.
The portrayal technique has changed. Consider this line:
“(...) for it was truly a lover's courting, an assiduous courting, done with exquisite gallantry; this knightly gallantry of which men have lost all the tradition today. ”
(tr. Cam)
The Madame being exquisite in her so called courting of her student-cum-captive is of course in syntony with the theme of the gilded cage, the coercitive kindness Deborah (and Patrick) are subjected throughout the whole book. The refined rococo coated monsters, eating human flesh from porcelain dishes like in the Rammstein song, etc etc.
But it's an interesting detail, it's very Romantic with its nostalgia for an idealized medieval past (courtly love) and it's kind of strange because are only now told she is being exquisitely gallant (remember the childlike clumsiness of her sailing Deborah scene last chapter, or her hunger for Deborah just making her thrust herself into attempted oral sex. Not very gallant or exquisite. But she might have changed strategies, she is sadly, well experienced in manipulating her wards, she thinks she can read them and deploy a tailor made strategy according to their tempers) But it's also kind of fun her being better than the men at what Borel (and the king) seem to understand as a desire to play the part of a man.
Within the constrainments of a jailer/prisoner relationship, we are to understand he Madame really wants to seduce Deborah, to make her choose her (like Vautrin would say to Rastignanc, make a lucid choice of being with me) to win her over. So when Deborah rejects her too overt advancements, she withdraws, retreats into “ respectful boundaries” however. Her cult, we are told is “more than contemplative and less than platonic” and I'll be more crass than Borel who is really very subtle and euphemistic in this whole chapter, in open contrast to the two previous scenes with the madame which were more or less violent and/or farcical. Deborah wakes up to discover the Madame frequently masturbates and gropes her chest while she is sleeping.
And here we get the Narcisse comparison Cam was talking about:
“Deborah was roused by gentle moaning, heavy sighs, and would find a hand placed on her breast, and next to her, The Madame in a flutter, seated as if on a shore and leaning over her in a state of ecstasy as if she was contemplating herself in water.”
(tr, camille)
The Narcissus metaphor is very interesting because later theories of homosexuality attempt to define the orientation as masturbatory, not fully mature, and narcisitic: the homosexual is, in a superficial quest through the bodies of others to find a perfect mirrored image of themsleves.
Summing up: the Madame is still a jailer and a rapist, but she thinks herself decent and as having some kind of “boundaries”. Since Deborah cannot be convinced to actively have sex with her willingly, the Madame will make use of her sleeping body, once again turning her body into a sex toy, she is a doll that is dressed up and used without her having a say on it. The Madame refuses to be openly brutal and force her while she is awake, this is an act of cowardice and of supreme violence over Deborah, but the Madame thinks herself as some heroic tragic heroine for contenting herself with this masochistic pleasure. The Madame also enacts a courtly ideal that french men of the 1700's had since lost. Courtly love implies (I am no expert) adoring your sire's lady from afar, a cult that could also be less than platonic, but in principle, carnal contact was barred.
The last part of the chapter is less about psychological portrayal of the Madame and more about plot advancement. Deborah has been, extremely successful in convincing the Madame of her change (more than she'd have liked to be) so reports are sent to Putiphar, who in turn announces their success story to Pharao. We are once again illustrated about the mundane and utitlitarian functions of what we now think of as art. Many portraits of Deborah in different thematic attires are painted sent to the monarch, whose desire is inflamed. (thinking of Lord Faarquad and his indiscreet requests to the magic mirror :P) Think of Boucher's catalogue of royal mistresses in varying stages of undress... It's interesting to think how sitting for these erotic portraits was once again stripping Deborah of her agency and revictimizing her.
Pharao can bluntly express his desire to have her, she is a thing, she is his new toy. No need to beat around the bush with the captives of the Parc.
Since Deborah's pregnancy was becoming more and more apparent the staff of the whorehouse/jail are delighted that Pharao's ready to have her so soon (since waiting would imply her getting closer to birth and less easy to hide her state, Pharao was notably afraid of non virgins since he wanted to prevent the possibility of venereal diseases -for himself- as much as possible. Hence the change from soldier's widows to purchased children)
So the Madame preps Deborah for her debut, and it's sad Borel doesn't tell the reader what is the last piece of advice, the one all mothers gave to their daughters before the wedding night (we can imagine but it would be very interesting to know what was considered common sense wedding night advice in Borel's times or the 1700's) It's also interesting that the Madame has resumed treating Deborah like a virgin. Her sexual experience with Patrick could not sufice to impress her so she is still treated like a child. The Madame's child. Deborah is now given a pink dress (wish I knew if there is a kind of symbology behind the dresses color, to my contempo brain pink suggests girlyness and virginity -as opossed to the sexier darker reddish brown that set the madame aflame- are they playing up the virgin angle to decieve Pharao?) she also wears the dog collar with the king's portrait to show him -and her-who she belongs to.
A small but not insignificant detail is that Pharao chooses to visit her at two o'clock in the afternoon. This man never works, never governs, is on a permanent vacation while his lover and ministers manage the country. (In a post french revolution world, Napoleon was mindful of this idea and had David portray him still hard at work at 2 in the morning, but this is a different world altogether.)
The madame makes a false night ambiance in Deborah's room. Deborah is terrified. We are so used to seeing her in control that it's extra painful to see her shaking like a leaf, her heart violently drumming.
As soon as she is left alone deborah puts on a mourning black ribbon on her arm. Terrified as she is, she still manages to stick to the plan.
And what follows is just. My favorite brand of Romanticism, what made me become such a hardcore fan of Vautrin and Nerval, and Borel's Champavert. just savour this:
“(...) blinded, subjugated by this imposing appearance, and perhaps by the prestigious thought of herself, face to face with one of those men whose crime or the inheritance of crime turns him into the shepherd of a nation, Deborah came down to her knees and bowed her forehead to the ground; but Pharaoh took her by the hand and said:”
"crime or the inheritance of crime", to refer to monarchy. As contundent and iconic as Vautrin's "behind every fortune there is a forgotten crime."
And with that abrupt cut we end the chapter. You see how addictive the writing is, why the 3 of us couldn't put the book down in our first read.
Also interesting, Borel relies to portray the King, on a characterization technique I had only seen in Balzac's Vautrin. The character's physical limits are difuse. I mean, the king can be a ridiculous clown, as the first time we see him, an impotent seeming sugar clogged middle aged man, but now he is suddenly formidable. Not only because of his majestic attire, but his face is handsome, his build is strong and imposing, he seems young and powerful. I call this an emotional physionomy and I think it's incredibly effective. There are no concrete limits to the character's body, he is a bit of a shapeshifter, according to his mood or who his intended victim is he will change his appearance. Also perhaps, his victim's pov influences how he looks like.
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For the art ask game 8 ! 2 3 6 !!!!
hi cubey!! :D i wasnt sure if the 8 was on purpose but i answered it anyways!
art ask game!
8 | what's the most fun and the least fun parts about your process
i love doing line art (which may be surprising, considering how little i do it nowadays LOL). i think its really fun to finally watch everything come together and to refine the sketch!! i barely enjoy it more than sketching though, they're pretty tied to me.
least favorite part... probably shading. ive never been very good at understanding what parts of the body will be hit by light, no matter how many observation and life drawing classes ive taken lol. i love shading a still life! but when it comes to the human form, not so much 😭 i cannot explain how many drawings ive done, like, three layers of shading, took a step back, then deleted every layer and posted it as flat colors instead because i hated it LMAO
2 | what's your favorite thing about your style
ohhh thats hard. i really like my art in general, honestly? i dont think im a fantastic artist, but i do think its clear that i like. went. to school for it bhbjfdghjbdfjh im proud of my art!! i really like drawing noses i guess and i think my style works well for good variation there? i still need to practice more types of noses, but i think im already doing well, so ill say that! the noses.
3 | what's your least favorite thing about your style
very small thing but EARS. I HATE HOW I DRAW EARS but i also dont know how to draw them BETTER ? i used to just never draw them. then i used to do them more detailed, but it always just looked... odd. i think it looks better without the extra details because i always did it weird, but it still looks goofy. its such a small thing though that i dont know that anyone else would ever even notice LMAO also! jawlines. my style very much favors a round soft jawline, which is obviously my default (stares at my art and tries not to think about same face syndrome), but then i try and do a sharper jawline and feel like im dying LOL im trying to get better at that though, because i want more facial diversity in my art. scary and veronica marlowe i just know you have sharp fuckin faces and im trying to get better at showing this aspect of you every day
6 | warm colors or cold colors
WARM COLORS!!! orange is my favorite color! i love warm colors! i tend to use a mix of both in my art though, i like the way warm tones and cool tones balance each other out :]
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Explaining myself
I wanna explain myself and talk a bit:
I prefer to keep a low profile, be basically invisible, when it comes to my art too. Therefore I'm quite asocial here but I'm still observing what others are doing and talking about. I still suffer from an awful self-hatred and it affects me a lot... I'm gonna have a short therapy next fall but in the meantime, I just have to try to figure out by myself what could help me. I'm still not alone with this but this is my responsibility and my mind just does its best to deny everything positive about me... I don't even wanna think about how many times I have just wanted to be gone... No matter what I have achieved in life, my mind keeps telling me that I'm nothing... It's heavy to deal with this and I know that I can be heavy person to follow... I feel sorry for everything my disorder/illness causes, even it's not my fault that my mind is not okay...
I still wanted to doodle something for this post since I really appreciate people who can stand me and wish to support me, even I cannot understand why:
A rough, quick-ish Molluck sketch. This took under two hours. I might continue this one day but I'll see... My refined pieces take about ten times more time than this. Frankly, I still feel like I cannot draw Molluck properly... He is challeging to draw and I'm still studying how to draw him.
But I'm still trying to fight, even it can be difficult... Sometimes, I think that even Molluck deserves someone better than me, that I should 'leave him alone', stop doing anything related to him... It's basically just my self-hatred since Molluck is such a big part of my daily life...
It's difficult to be a content creator when I also tend to feel that I'm just ruining everything... Sometimes, I feel that I'm ruining the Oddworld feed here too... My self-hatred is just this bad... I know that I have no reasons to hate myself but I still hate myself... I still try to post my art here, even it can be difficult for me... When I think this stuff, it keeps reminding me of my Soulstorm tattoo design submission; I was about to delete my submission after I had submitted it.
I thought that this was nothing like they wanted but I was so wrong... I won. Right now, I feel that I would change this a bit but I'm not sure if it would look any better... And if someone wonders why I thought that this was nothing like they wanted, well, I just thought that my drawing looks crappy and not tattoo-like enough, being just a some kind of portrait. But the reason why I'm talking about this is that it's just such a good example of how severe my self-hatred is... Oh, and OWI hasn't contacted me yet, still, but right now, I have no will to contact them either. I'll see that later on. I have felt so depressed recently, again... I have felt better too but now, this mood hit me.
I just wanna be honest with you. I'm not perfect but neither is anyone else. This is my fight and the others have their own too. I wish that my story could have a happy ending but it's not a sure thing... I still don't know if it's even worth it... I feel too often worth of nothing, for no reason...
I feel so sorry, even this is not my fault... Mind can get sick like body too. I appreciate that you stand me, even wanna support me... It's making me cry... I feel quite often like someone to be forgotten, someone not to love, to be erased... But like my winner piece was titled, 'Don't give up!'. It's not easy but I keep trying my best.
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22/11/22 - Tuesday Nov 22rd.
guess whose motivational pikachu isnt working?
For today:
Refine the blog
correct other pages
correct article pages
Digital Drawing Workout 34
open:
start frontend mentor challenge
anatomy practice
one chapter of Blue period manga 32
if finished:
play Hades or Play Pokemon White
tranquilstudy
Day 19: How do you calm your nerves during exam season?
try breathing but it doesnt work at all. i just bear it
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lunluns autumn study challenge
Day 19: How was your day? You can talk about anything; vent or share a moment. I personally am willing to hear!
Nikis high school in Jakarta hits all the sore spots from back in high school, despite me well.... not living in jakarta lol or had any experience with romance . its carthatic. right now its 11:30 and im arming myself for when dad comes to the room to work. its sorta exhausting living here. there too much shouting and no privacy or personal space. i also need a chat with the tax people soon... i dont want to, im lonely and feel a bit too close to a failure. i have a couple of tasks at work to finish today but all i want to write is a fanfic where the main characters play videogames together. its too fucking hot outside 30 degrees celsius on a november. i need to use less social media, ill cut twitter from my laptop bcs a friend texts me on the phone and our different timezones make us never talk well, talking about chats i got into one and they are nice but they are so many i cannot tell anyone appart, but they are sweet. i miss drawing things i liked. i wonder what will happen if i drop everything just to draw pokemon, talking about pokemon txt loves pokemon, that makes them feel even more like that one comic that ended up with "maybe 20 years old me likes pokemon battles too" i should probably play pokemon., white is halfway through
my motivation right now its Taehyun shaped and he asks me if i will let the noise beat me so easily without putting up a fight, what will i do if i dont face my dreams now?
its also shaped like Kai saying that videogames and cool stories are great. He doesnt say anything else. because i want to make videogames and any person who stands and appreaciates the work people like me dreams of is exciting.
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yesterday report:
sketch the blog (OK I GOTTA)
Digital Drawing Workout 33
sketch scheadule i need to restablish goals
now playing
"did you hear amanda is going back to colorado, its 2013 and the end of my life~"
#casfightsprocastination#studyblr#studygram#study motivation#study blog#study aesthetic#studying#journaling#study with me#study notes#study buddy#tranquilfallbuddies#studyingunderthefallingleaves#astudentslifebuoy
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On the Nature of Time
We know from Einstein that time is subjective, as it depends on the location/speed of an observer in space. My question however pertains to the relationship between cognitive function and the perception of time.
My basis for this argument is almost entirely philosophical/theoretical, as it comes from a recent psychedelic experience along with my own thoughts on the nature of reality.
Upon consuming about 1.5 grams of magic mushrooms, I found myself contemplating the nature of perception.
From what I remember, the solid arrow running "backwards" is supposed to represent the motion of reality in relation to the "stationary" observer [the toothed lines]: ie reality seems to be flowing "past" us, and where reality interacts with the branches of our "Self" we can see warps and distortions. This is meant to represent the uncertainty of human existence, wherein we have the capability to alter the world around us however we please.
However my main objective in sketching this was to compare the difference between myself and my cat. It had occurred to me that if I lived in the conditions that she did, I likely would have gone insane from the boredom (due to my ADHD). That lead me to wonder what exactly was the mechanism that rules our perception of "time."
It is my belief that one's perception of "time" correlates to one's level of dissociative awareness. The more things one is aware of happening in the world around them, the more "anchoring points" one's self has to ground them to events flowing past around them. Compare this mechanism to the shutter length in a video camera; the more images it takes the slower events seem to appear.
In the case of ADHD and other neuro-developmental disorders, I believe that a core cause of increased levels of depersonalization and disassociation is due to increased sensory sensitivity combined with unique patterns of cognition. Individuals with ADHD for example often have trouble transitioning between the different levels of dissociation required in modern life, likely due to the inability to regulate their attentions long enough for a dissociative state to set in [in many cases this results in a psychological "block" wherein the Self may become resistant to dissociative change due to it's own inability to regulate it].
In the case of my cat, she simply does not have the capacity to place nearly as many anchoring points as I do. I am capable of remembering specific details about things that happened ten years ago [after some therapy anyways], yet her brain simply does not have the mechanisms required for the combination of analytical connection-making and information retrieval that we Humans do.
This raises interesting questions about the impact of the subjective differences between individual's analytical processes and their perception of reality. For example, it cannot be denied that there are those capable of an "increased efficiency in thought," and that the most reliable way to increase one's efficiency is through practice and refinement. Does this imply that should one work to improve the analytical processes within one's mind, one should expect to see an altering in their perception of time and reality? Or are one's perceptions more heavily reliant on the biological aspects inherent to every individual?
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Week 6: Digital Concept Drawings
To date doing the digital concept rendering has been the part I was both looking forward to and dreading the most. Before completing this weeks work I had never used photoshop, and avoided any and all Adobe products like the plague (I rendered everything for BENV1010 in Rhino last term, for which I make no apologies). Fortunately (?) for me there was simply no way to avoid it this week.
The final product...
I found Rob's videos invaluable in creating my concept drawings, though there were quite a few points where I had to madly google things as A) I don't use a mac (therefore the shortcuts are different), and B) things did not always go to plan.
To begin with I drew in a very rough copy of the 3 bottle concepts I wanted to take further. They were very rough, but it was good to get something on the screen quickly and messily so I had a starting point.
Blocking in the base colours for the bottles seemed to go ok, and it helped me refine the profiles of the bottles. The symmetry tool was invaluable - I hated trying to free-hand draw symmetrical shapes last week so this was no small blessing.
My layers were a bit weird which caused headaches later on. If you look closely at images 2 onwards the block colour for the bottles either hasn't been erased properly, or I somehow managed to get 2 blocks with different shades of grey from each rectangle - I have no idea what went wrong, but I did it twice and the same thing happened again so I pushed on :(
After I blocked in the colour I tried something different and created another layout layer so that I could (roughly) trace the grey masses and work out where the edges were. I then locked this layer so I couldn't alter it and put it over the masses so that I could put shade and highlight in the appropriate places. This made it much easier to do the shading as my bottles were not purely organic shapes like was demonstrated.
After removing the rough layout layer I was left with some rather uninspiring blob-bottles. I had difficulty with getting the outline to generate on a different layer and it resulted in some weird artefacts that I couldn't figure out why they existed, but just had to manually erase from the new layer. Adding additional layers for the contours ad making it look a bit more hand-sketched and "open" as a concept took a lot of time but was well worth it. I think the shading could be matched up a little bit better, but overall I was happy how it cam out.
Adding in the background really elevated the sketches and made them pop. I'm quite proud of how it turned out, though personally I think it is cleaner without the notes.
Lessons learnt:
1) Photoshop is scary, and has one hell of a learning curve, but it's so much better than trying to draw on paper, so I'll take it any day of the week.
2) Sketching skills are transferable from paper to the digital realm, so I need to continue practicing sketching if I want to be able to effectively communicate and ideate rapidly. CAD has it's place, but I have developed a new appreciation for the artistic side of IDES.
3) The order of your layer stack is important and I feel like I have only barely begun to get my head around it at this point - the layers are soo much more than just different line weights and colours as they are in AutoCAD and Rhino.
4) I'm so glad I had the sense to get a touchscreen laptop with a pen at the start of this year - I cannot for the life of me imagine how much longer this would have taken be if I only had a mouse - and I am certain wouldn't have come out as good.
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Character Creation | Exploration and Style
Exploratory Sketches
Now that I had a solid idea for my character, I decided to start exploring various shapes and silhouettes. Throughout the initial exploration phase, I tried to keep in mind the idea of an upside-down triangle, as that would give my character a more unsteady feel. I wanted this because the main character is ultimately in a place in their life where they cannot sustain their workaholic nature.
As mentioned in my initial character writing post, I also did not want to be limited by gender, as I wanted the character to be a vessel for the viewer. Additionally, I think that there are less gender ambiguous and characters that are queer coded well in modern media. So this is an opportunity to promote that aspect of the design as well. The first two sketches I did involved more feminine presenting characters, the next two more masculine and finally a more... unorthodox character idea; the notion of how the workaholic feels and views themselves after long hours of work. In other words, this is how my main character would see themselves at the beginning of the story, half dead. Which is to say, their head would not be humanoid, and instead be represented as a skull.
Refining the Sketch
When refining, I saw the opportunity to make the eyes of the skull much bigger to allow for more expression. I was inspired by the initial animation tests for The Spot from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse, where the initial idea was to make The Spot's face incredibly versatile and expressive. This was eventually scrapped as it did not match his character story, however if I were to apply this principle to my own animation, it would allow me to play around with character expressions in a very different way than I would with a those of a human.
Following the initial sketches, I cleaned up the linework and tied everything together in a much more cohesive way. I tried to make characters 1 and 4 look more ambiguous as well for the sake of representation. I also took the chance to explore different art styles in order to find which one would work best for my animation.
Clean Up and Palette Exploration
Once I ran my sketches through a second pass of cleaning, I decided to add colour to them to see which would work best. As of right now, I'm not sure how satisfied I am with the colours I have chosen here. I really like design 2, 4, and 5 as they seem the most interesting to animate (each of them contain moving parts independent from their body such as longer hair, ties, and cover layers).
In terms of colour, I enjoy palettes 2 and 3 especially. I want to try and keep my characters monochromatic to contrast them against the colourful world that I intend to create for the film, also representing their "darker" personality in comparison to the world. While I do like the jackets on designs 4 and 5, I am not satisfied with the colours I chose. I may end up making them black later. Overall I think this is a good start. Personally I am gravitating towards designs 4 and 5, but this could change at any point going forward.
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Redemption in the Face of Tribulation
Today's inspiration comes from:
Battle Prayers
by Michael Klassen & Thomas Freiling
"For I know that my Redeemer lives,
And He shall stand at last on the earth;
And after my skin is destroyed, this I know,
That in my flesh I shall see God,
Whom I shall see for myself,
And my eyes shall behold, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!"
— Job 19:25-27
"Despite the storms that rage against me, Lord God, I will not become embittered against You. Would that I respond to hardship like Job who refused to doubt Your goodness in the face of relentless tragedy and loss.
For I know that my Redeemer lives. You are my Redeemer. You transform the crude sketches in my life into priceless works of art. In Your time, You make all things beautiful (Ecclesiastes 3:11), including my life. Perform Your redemptive work — but give me Your strength to hold on until the end.
My heart’s desire is to be more like You. As gold is refined in the fire, purge me of the dross that tarnishes your character in me (Romans 5:1-4). I look forward to the day when I will be able to see the changes You have made in my life.
You see the big picture — the forest — while I can see only the trees.
Although I may not fully understand the reason why I’m in this situation, one thing I do know: You are good, and Your mercy endures forever (Psalm 106:1).
Therefore, I will not give up. I will not allow the hardships I face to dictate to me my emotions and responses. Lord, I rest myself in Your care. I trust You. You are in control, and You know what You’re doing.
Because I cannot escape Your love, I also know I can go to You in prayer.
Magnifying the Lord
I will bless the LORD at all times;
His praise shall continually be in my mouth.
My soul shall make its boast in the LORD;
The humble shall hear of it and be glad.
Oh, magnify the LORD with me,
And let us exalt His name together.
I sought the LORD, and He heard me,
And delivered me from all my fears. — Psalm 34:1-4 NKJV
This day, O God, I choose to bless Your name. I bless You because You are great, and Your greatness does not depend upon my circumstances. The problems of this world are mere child’s play in comparison to Your ability to overcome. So, I choose to focus on the Problem Solver rather than any problem. I will boast in You, O God, because nothing is impossible for You (Matthew 19:26). Only You can make the impossible possible.
I proclaim Your name, O Lord. I ascribe greatness to You, my God, for You are the Rock. Your work is perfect and all Your ways are just (Deuteronomy 32:3-4). For this reason, I place my trust in You with confidence. You are greater than my problems; greater than my sins; greater than my sickness; greater than those who oppose me; greater than the powers of darkness; greater than my own shortcomings; greater than the failings of Your people; greater than the powers of human government; greater than my limited conceptions of how big You really are. My God You are greater!
My power to overcome any situation comes only from You, because greater is He who is in me than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4). My heart’s desire is that Your great name will be made known throughout the earth, beginning in my life.
I lift my arms in surrender to the One who reigns above the heavens and the earth. There is no power on earth greater than Yours. No love stronger. No wisdom deeper. You alone stand above the earth, but You have willingly chosen to also stand beside me.
The fact that You are great, yet You choose to reveal Yourself to me through Your Son, Jesus, through Your Word, and through Your Holy Spirit, drives me to my knees in gratitude. You didn’t have to reveal Yourself to me, but You did. Now may Your greatness be revealed in my life so that others may see Your glory as well (Ezekiel 38:23).
Meditating on His Omnipotence and Omnipresence
And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, as the sound of many waters and as the sound of mighty thunderings, saying, “Alleluia! For the LORD God Omnipotent reigns!” — Revelation 19:6 NKJV
Hallelujah! For the Lord God almighty reigns! The heavens and the earth are no match for Your awesome power and might. As You spoke through Your prophet Jeremiah,
Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for Me? — Jeremiah 32:27 NKJV
There is no mountain or battle too great that Your might cannot cast it into the deepest sea. Nothing is too hard for You.
Despite Your great power, I have nothing to fear. I revere Your great name, but I need not be afraid of You because Your love is as great as Your power.
Through Your Son, Jesus, Emmanuel, You are “God with us” (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23). Clothing Yourself in human flesh, You prove Your love and willingness to meet me at the point of my need. Jesus, You are God’s power and presence revealed. Only through You can I truly be freed from my bondage to sin.
God, where can I go to outrun Your love (Romans 8:35)? You have positioned Yourself right beside me, carrying me, encouraging me, believing in me. At the end of my rope, when I feel all alone, Your Word promises that You are with me (Hebrews 13:5) and that no one can snatch me from Your hand (John 10:28-29).
And because I cannot escape Your love, I also know I can go to You in prayer. You alone have the ability to answer my requests according to Your power and might.
Because You are all powerful, all present, all wise, and all loving, I can entrust the control of my life to You without fear of being unloved and uncared for. You have raised up Your people for the express purpose that You would show Your power in us, and that Your name would be declared in all the earth (Exodus 9:16). And so here I am Lord, willingly giving to You the praise and honor befitting only You.
Excerpted with permission from Battle Prayers by Michael Klassen & Thomas Freiling, copyright Michael Klassen and Thomas Freiling.
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British Museum Visit:
For this visit we had to observe the way the artefacts and statues were curated, which involves the thought put into the way an object is exhibited. This can enhance the piece, or even change its meaning. We had to find 5 exhibits of interest. I did sketches for a few of them, some of them more rough than others, and sketch for display number 2 in particular inspired me.
The tutor mentioned about thinking about which things could be exhibited as artefacts of elephant and castle, and to do an A4 sketch based on that. I did not have to think much as I realised that really the subjects I have been drawing up into these points really can be seen as “artefacts” of the pub we investigated. So I picked the exhibit of the African vases, as I found it incredibly interesting how, put together with that structure, they look like one sculptural body and a lot more interesting to look at compared to it by itself. So I thought to draw it (more carefully and polished compared to the initial sketch) and substitute the vases for the lamps and other objects that can be found in the pub.
I made it with pencil first, where I had a lot of repositioning to do while I went along. This is one of the times of this project where I struggle due to its handmade nature and how we cannot use digital for our final pieces. One of the reasons I prefer digital is due to being able to play around with composition before anything is final and explore possibilities in a short time. However doing this was also good so I do not only rely on digital. I then decided to add colours with markers, and used posca to make the linework similar to the other pieces so that they all feel cohesive. This also allowed me to add bits of texture that I found in the pub onto the structure that is originally made of metal and does not have a lot of texture.
I really liked the result but felt like it missed something more that would make it pop. I reflected that maybe it was the background, and how I feel the colour scheme needs one more colour to make it pop, but I felt very hesitant of doing something too permanent and ruining this piece. So I went onto Procreate and made a projection of how it would look like with colour in the backdrop and use very geometrical shapes.
I was very happy with this projection and took it to a tutor during tutorial to discuss whether it was the right course of action and what medium I should use to bring this to life. I thought that maybe using coloured paper would make it more interesting and create more depth, and it would also allow me to experiment with different types of textured paper. So I bought quite a few options with different shades and finishes.
I first tried to print the projection and trace the shapes of the projection so I knew exactly what to cut, however I soon realised that no matter what I did the proportions of the shapes did not match the original hand drawn piece, so I had to redraw the shapes from scratch. I used the projection as a guide of what shapes I wanted and where, but had to freehand them on top of a tracing paper while seeing the original piece underneath.
With that I cut used the tracing paper to transfer the shape outlines into one of the papers, and cut out a few but not all of them to have an idea of how it would look like, and if the paper choice was the best.
It turned out I did not like the effect of the paper as it was too shiny, and against the light a big portion of the shapes would have a reflected glare on it. This removes the pop of the colour and the stark outline of the shapes, which made it unsuccessful. I then chose a non-shiny paper of a bit of a deeper colour that would work better, and did the same process.
I was very happy with the outcome, but went and did a few microscopic cuts to refine the shapes, leaving me with the final piece.
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It’s 🍪!
You have this ‘My Sunshine’ (?) fic where the reader is an absolute ball of sunshine and I LOVE it! Could you do a part two with Zhongli, Childe and Albedo please?
Mwah!
My Sunshine
( what an incredible choice of characters! Thank you for adding to one of my favorite fics!! )
Warning -> SFW, Fluff
Character X GN Reader | Anthology
Includes: Albedo, Childe, Zhongli
Albedo
It was the way you greeted the world around you - with pleasant smiles, patient hands, caring and compassionate eyes. You saw the world for what it could be, the beauty of it and while Albedo searched for the answer in the universe, you already seemed to have found them
He noticed you on his wanderings through the city. His hands were already moving to draw your expressions in a hope to capture everything that he possibly could - how could he capture the intensity of the sun itself, of a flower basking in the afternoon glow, or a firefly so vibrant that it burned orange and beautiful
You were bouncing on your toes, smiling kindly at the people who walked by while you patiently waited for anyone to stop by. Not many people purchased flowers every single day, but you found it wasn’t hard to proposition people with your generous smile and pin-point compliments.
“My! I have never seen something so beautiful in all my life.” You began, bending to rest your hands on your knees while catching the attention of a small young girl who had been glancing at the array of flowers at your side. She looked at you confused, a bit nervous but didn’t back away.
Reaching for a small white flower, you trimmed the leaves and hummed a little tune before turning back to her. “A lovely flower like you must attract so much goodness. Even this daisy is impressed by your radiance!" She giggled and you continued, "Would you do me a favor?” You smiled at her, eyes showing only the purest of shine. The little girl nodded her head and you began again, “Could you carry this flower and help it grow? If it's you, I'm sure it'll turn just as beautiful?”
The little girl wrapped her small fingers around the stem, her smile and giggle so powerful that Albedo was sure you cast a magic spell because as he watched her gallop away back to her parents, the flowers near you began to glisten and the sketch on his page came to life.
He was unsure how to make a connection with you, so more often than not he would find himself purchasing flowers he didn’t really have the necessity for - but perhaps if he gathered enough up, he’d have a bouquet glorious enough to equal your soul
“Mr. Albedo, pleasure seeing you again.” You brushed off your apron and turned to him. Your eyes closing and head tilting, a standard greeting of yours. “I have some rather rare flowers in stock today if you’d like to take a look.”
“I am actually here to inquire if you had any Asters; the research institute has just run out.”
“Hmm, let me check for you.” You bowed slightly before disappearing behind the many stalls and carriers of your wares. He scanned the flowers as he waited for your return. Gloved fingers inspecting the petals of flowers and, in his wandering thoughts, he began to investigate which one reminded him the most of you. “Mr. Albedo, I am sorry, it seems we are fresh out.”
“I see …”
“Ah! However, I needed to gather several other plants today. If you come back tomorrow I will set them aside for you.” You waved at the other worker as if to inform them of your intentions and quickly reached for the basket near the stall.
“Actually, would it be too much of a bother if I were to travel with you?”
You paused, staring at him with eyes wide and mouth slightly parted. What was this feeling in his chest, it hurt. “I would never pass up an opportunity to share in your company! What a splendid day this is turning out to be.”
“Thank you, I will keep out of your way.”
“Not too much I hope. So, Mr. Albedo, are you ready?” You turned to head toward the front gate and he followed after you.
“Yes, and please, just Albedo is fine.”
“Alrighty then, Albedo.” Ah, yes, that’s why his heart hurt.
There you were, the wind wrapping around you as you stood in a field of flowers - the reflection of light difficult to pinpoint for as bright as the sun shined down onto the plane below, you were just as intense and, in fact, you may be the most luminous creature to ever exist -- how could he possibly reach something like you
Childe
His world had never been bright -- from the snowy landscape that threatened every day to freeze the warm hearts that beat on its surface, to the dark void that he fought through as an adolescent, to the harsh and demanding ladder he climbed in service to his cause -- he’d never known the light … his had been seized so long ago
So when he found a flicking candle, a small flame in his dark corridor, he walked to it - ran for it - and to see the glory reflected on the other side was something he fixated on until he could hold the candle safe in his arms
He clenched his jaw and sighed. These boring briefings were never something he cared to participate in. He was more for action rather than words, so instead of listening to the updates from the short, purple-haired harbinger, he instead gazed out the open window at the city below.
Liyue had shifted from a temporary destination into a permanent one as the tasks and duties continued to lengthen his stay. At least he didn’t mind the city, not like some of the other places he’d stay at. Just as he was about to drift back to the boring discussion, he heard a voice drift up to him. A lively, giddy voice that stole all of his attention and focus, but as soon as you entered into view his minimal interest piqued into desperation.
“Wait up! You can’t tell me that this isn’t a beautiful day, just take it all in!” You spread your arms wide and spun with so much energy that the inertia made you stumble, luckily you caught yourself before running into some poor passerby. Childe smiled and rested his chin on his palm as he looked down at the loveliness that was your everything.
You laughed, and the way your hands flew to your lips to cover the sound made him jealous of those fingers. You spoke, words falling off of your tongue like sugar and he grew antsy at the thought of not tasting it. You existed, and he needed a piece of it.
Waving to his subordinate, he spoke in a hushed whisper, and while the meeting continued to drone on, he made his first step at capturing a star.
The more information he gathered, the more interactions he had with you - the more he fell into your luster, the richer his feelings grew for you
His actions were that of a child just looking for a comforting glow in their endless darkness, hands cupped to keep it alive, breathing held for fear of accidentally blowing it out - stay, please stay
He called your name, the sound of his voice dissipating in the open space as he searched for any sign of you.
“Hey there!” You called out to him, and when he looked up toward your voice, he smiled. Your legs dangled off the tree limb, your hands wrapping around the bark as you balanced there.
“How is the view?” He asked, crossing his arms and staring at you from below. How did you get up there, he wondered.
“Beautiful, I can see so much from up here. It’s like a whole different perspective.” You breathed in deeply and lifted your arms to reach for the sky above you. “How about you join me?”
“I’m not sure I can, I don’t even know how you got up there.”
“Sheer will and determination!” Giggling, he thought maybe you were actually a mythical creature in the fairytales he used to read as a kid. There was no way you could live in this world and be so positive, it had to be you were something beyond this world. “I’ll come down to you.” Twisting, you wiggled onto your stomach before letting yourself drop onto the ground below. It was further than you thought and as soon as your feet hit the earth, your body became off balance and tumbled backward.
Childe easily caught you, his sturdy chest supporting you and arms extended so your hands could have something to grab onto.
“Ooh, that was exhilarating.” Tilting your head, you turned to look at him and for a moment he felt his lips scream for yours. He wanted to let you go, but how could you when you fit so perfectly in his arms. “Childe?”
“You’re something else.” This was dangerous, you were dangerous, and now that he knew what it was like to feel the brightness of the light, he would never let the dark creep back in.
He needed you - it was apparent - and he hoped one day you’d realize you needed him too. A light like yours truly needed to shine in the darkness of places, so choose his, please choose his
Zhongli
There is no one in this world that would understand luster better than he - no one who could see the shine inside a being as clearly as one with eyes who’ve witnessed the birth and eventual death of the universe. The great Morax, the ruthless Rex Lapis, the gentle and patient Zhongli are one and the same, and the visions they’ve witnessed cannot be forgotten
So, to see a person with purity so refined, that even the dullest observers could clearly recognize, he found it nearly impossible to look away
He heard tell of a new performer joining the Pearl, someone who had shown great elegance and glorious promise at wowing the crowds. As a man who fancied the arts of all kinds, he was intrigued by the rumors and whispers. So, when the schedule showed the name of this new performer, he made his way to the boat drifting on the sea.
His lips tasted the sweet flavor of tea but his eyes soaked in the delectable movements of your body. The graceful bow of your spin, the bending and twisting of your limbs as you moved just enough to tell your story on the swaying stage. He felt the history in your dance, the pride in your fluttering fan as you moved it across your face, the snap of truth as you forced it up toward the sky. He was transfixed, as he was sure all were.
When you finished, you began to greet the many interested patrons eager to hear the sound of your voice. There was no way he could have known how transfixing you would be when he heard it.
“What a stunning performance.” Zhongli mused, his head bowing, a mirror of your own gesture.
“That is great praise from someone such as yourself.” You smiled and he was reminded of glaze lilies.
“Pray tell, what was the inspiration for your dance?”
“Ah, an insightful question, not unexpected I must say.” You laughed and moved your hands to your chest, elegant fingers resting over your heart as you answered his question. “The light of a soul has so much insight, don’t you think? If the soul is radiant, the vessel's beauty is so easily seen, and if there is beauty shining so brightly that it can communicate out to those who look, it may shift just the tides of the future.” You laughed again, a bit more unreserved than the last, and somehow more telling to your honesty. “I’m sorry, I hope that answered your question.”
“Splendidly, and then some.” He found himself transfixed, captivated by a spirit shining before him.
Spending time with you was as refreshing as standing in a mountain stream, as filling as a warm meal, as bright as the basking stars that littered the sky above and reflected in your eyes even in darkness
“Zhongli, hello again.” He wandered into the garden, the gentle bubbling of the water as it fell along the rocks provided a lovely background to your visage. Carefully, you rested your fingers against the pages of your book as you looked up at him. The shadows of the shifting trees let highlights of the sun dance across your face and he couldn’t help but capture this image in his mind.
“Good afternoon, you seem to be enjoying the day.”
“As I always am. Nature has provided such elegant and lovely conditions that it would be a waste to not thank it, don’t you agree?”
“Wholeheartedly.” He smiled, his hands gripping tighter around each other as they rested against the small of his back. It was incredible how nervous you made him; for a man who was a powerful as the mountains that looked down over the city, you made him feel like a tiny pebble in the stream begging to be touched by you. “May I join you?”
“Absolutely, anything in this world can be improved by good company, and yours is always my favorite.”
“As yours is mine.” He sat on the stone bench next to you, his hands resting on his lap as he looked out across the scenery. You moved closer to him, your arms touching as you shared in the company of each other and, while his eyes drifted to your face, he watched how your smile and good nature made the flowers bloom.
You were a compliment to his life. A perfect addition to the drift of time and as he looked at the future that stretched before him, he found your red wrapping perfectly around his amber
--
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Anti-blackness in 19th century England, why Queen Charlotte wasn’t black, and why it doesn’t matter in Bridgerton
I’d like to start by saying Bridgerton is a very amusing piece of absolute fiction. From the dresses to the music to the fanfic tropes it uses and the books it’s based on. It doesn’t even start to pretend it’s realistic. And being a piece of modern historical fantasy made by a woman born in this age, it is alright for the showrunners to give it a modern vibe. If you want, you can trace the lineage of every duke of Hastings there has ever been and know exactly who they were and what they looked like. Everyone knows there was never a black duke of Hastings, meaning there is no harm nor a deliberate attempt at “changing history” by the showrunners. They’re not pretending they’re portraying real events and real people of 1813. Therefore I accept that in this “alternative reality regency” it is fine for people of all ranks, including Queen Charlotte, to be black. I loved Golda Rosheuvel’s portrayal, I loved her looks, her acting and I tolerate her half-ishly accurate outdated wardrobe (for those interested in fashion history: look up “regency era court gowns”, old styles were worn but Charlotte would wear normal dresses day-to-day). I’m thrilled to watch her in the second season as well.
However, I will screech if I see people claiming Charlotte was black in real life. There were black people in Europe during all periods of history. They could be very influential and wealthy, and yes, they could even be nobility in some rare cases. There is a growing field of research tracing the steps of black people in Europe throughout time, revealing the often overlooked presence of black people. However, Queen Charlotte isn’t one of them. And I say this because claiming her to be black, would mean the British Monarchy, way ahead of its time, was accepting of black people. it would also mean the British people, who were more than a bit racist, generally accepted a (partially) black woman. Rather than Charlotte being black leading to her being described as black, I believe the confusion about her being black stems from people back in the day using racially ambiguous terms to make clear Charlotte looked ugly (because in a racist colonial world the best way to insult someone is by saying they look like a slave).
Being a historian, I do believe I have to give evidence for my claim. I’ll be using her ancestry, written descriptions and paintings. However, buckle up because you’ll be getting a lot of side information on other POC in art and literature. So if you’re interested in learning a bit about the relationship between the concepts of race and beauty in the 18th and 19th century, here we go.
(note: if I use any offensive terms without direct citing someone, do let me know I will change them as soon as possible)
1. When did these rumours start
During the Regency Era, when the world was still a very colonial one, Queen Charlotte was described by some as having a big nose, full lips and an ambiguous complexion. However, her race was never debated, until academic discussions picked up around the 1940s.
2. Queen Charlotte’s family tree.
The Portuguese royal family definitely has Moorish blood in it. No one can contest that. Muslims and Europeans lived together on the Iberian Peninsula for 800 years. The question is whether that means that royals with a Portuguese ancestor can be called “people of colour”, and how far down the line people can still claim to be people of colour. Almost all royal households of Europe married into the Portuguese royal family at some point, yet of few royals it is said that because of that heritage, they are people of colour. That argument is only made for Queen Charlotte (imo that probably has a lot to do with the fact that the world is dominated by the Anglosaxon countries and that because of their worldwide tentacles and their language being the most universally spoken, the British Royal Family receives the most interest from everyone all over the world. Other royal families don’t get as much attention).
Note that I used the word people of colour, that is because the root of Charlotte’s supposed African heritage is not necessarily black. Let’s take a look at her family tree.
According to historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom — who dug into the queen’s lineage for a 1996 Frontline documentary on PBS — Queen Charlotte could trace her lineage back to black members of the Portuguese royal family. Charlotte was related to Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a 15th-century Portuguese noblewoman nine (!) generations removed.
Margarita de Castro e Souza herself descended from King Alfonso III of Portugal and his concubine, Madragana, a Moor that Alfonso III took as his lover after conquering the town of Faro in southern Portugal.
This would make Queen Charlotte a whopping 15 generations removed from her closest black ancestor — if Madragana was even black, which historians don’t know. That’s a lot of generations back. de Valdes y Cocom argues that, due to centuries-long inbreeding, he could trace six lines between Queen Charlotte and Sousa, which would mean Madragana’s genes were a bit more influential, but still 15 generations ago. That’s her grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grandmother.
So, let’s pretend it is true and her ancestor was black, let me be very rude. An ancestor that appears once in a person's genealogy, fifteen generations removed, represents a 215-th fraction of its descendant's ancestry. Queen Charlotte’s black ancestry would be less than 1%. In fact it'd be 0.007% (rounded up) of Charlotte's ancestry, and that's IF Madragana could be proved to be Moorish. And if Moorish was only used to describe a black person. However, the use of “blackamoor” “moorish” and “mozaraab” are not an alternative word for black. Indeed, there is no definitive skin colour attached to these descriptors.
It is generally accepted that Spanish Moors were the Muslim Amazigh (formerly known as Berber) inhabitants of the Maghreb, a stretch of land in north-Africa including parts of the Sahara, but not Egypt. During the Middle Ages, they occupied the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of southern Europe, before being finally driven out in the 15th century. The greatest period of unity was probably during the period of the kingdom of Numidia. Over the centuries, the word came to acquire a plethora of other meanings, some of them derogatory. Importantly, it cannot be ascribed a single ethnicity. Moors are not always black, this is false. They remaining people in Africa can be anywhere from Arab, to black people. But I’m not delving into north-african migration patterns and population changes. In Europe, the moors could thus be Arab, black and often mixed ethnicity, the natural result of coexisting and intermarrying with white Europeans for centuries.
http://acaciatreebooks.com/blog/royalty-race-and-the-curious-case-of-queen-charlotte/
3. Gender, Race and beauty standards
The world of the 19th century was riddled with Anti-blackness. Part of this continued from the medieval belief that white was good, and dark was bad (see white knight, fair lady, black knight, dark magic notions that still persist today). It also does not help that during the Regency Era, Greek and Roman antiquity were very trendy. Although the old roman empire was a culturally and ethnically diverse society, regency people focussed on fashion, hairstyles and looks from the classical art period of Greece. People aspired to look like the statues: elegant, slim and dainty and wanted “noble” features (straight slim nose, even face, cheekbones, etc). That’s why in the regency era people were complimented for having “alabaster skin” or a “Grecian profile” and so on. These medieval notions of fairness and the grecian beauty ideal, were juxtaposed against the medieval notions of darkness combined with deeply colonial conceptions of womanhood and race. In a world in which white people controlled other ethnicities, race soon became a weapon, a tool to be used against someone. Just like… gender. And yes, you’ll soon see how these two go hand in hand.
Throughout the nineteenth century the domestic world and the public sphere became more and more separate, with women being given less space to move and work. All women had to be dainty housewives: refined, sensitive and docile, clever but not too well read. Of course, this was an unattainable standard for most women. Only women in the top layer of society were able to lounge around and do nothing all day. Many had to work. Many things of what women were supposed to be: pale, soft hands, were direct signs that they didn’t have to do manual labour (out in the sun, using their hands). Women who could not fit in that small domestic sphere were increasingly (especially later on in the Victorian era) seen as unfeminine and unworthy of husbands. Coarse, manly, unfeminine, unrefined they were often called. Welcome to 19th century “masculinity so fragile”. Just imagining a woman working or reading made men felt threatened. They hated the idea women weren’t just lounging around waiting to please them and provide for them.
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gender-roles-in-the-19th-century#
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pit-brow-lasses-women-miners-victorian-britain-pants
Now look at this sketch of a female mine worker, one of many. Although the argument can be made she’s dark from the dirt, I want to point out that she’s also portrayed as scantily clad, wearing more manly clothes, being broader, wide of face and her hair appearing… quite curly.She’s the opposite of the beauty ideals, the opposite of what society wants a woman to be... and she’s suspiciously black-coded.
Pervasive and passive stereotypes of black people have come into existence since colonialism. Cruel caricatures of black people were omnipresent. Going as far as to ascribe them animal-like features with big mouths, big ears, sloping foreheads and so on. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2712263?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents
I could write a million essays on how race and sex have been weaponized in the past. When the “exploration travels” first started, and even much later in art, faraway lands were portrayed as sultry lazy or untamed women, waiting to be conquered and domesticated. Transforming countries into women was done to make them “controllable”. Portraying them as lazy and wild was a way Europeans to give themselves license to colonize them. Just like women at home, these foreign lands needed the guiding hand of cultured civilized men showing them how to do things and ruling them. So either men could control women which was perceived as good, or they couldn’t in which case the woman was looked down upon and hated. I don’t have an exact reference for this one, but it was a very interesting topic in my class on “Global History” at University. But for now this one carries a good part of the load.
https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel/
It is then no surprise the female black body became a site of seduction there for the white male’s taking. They literally became their property as slaves, just like a man’s wife was considered his property. White men sexualized black people, particularly black women, a stereotype that perpetuates to this day and age. See the link above for that as well. Black women became temptresses.
White women, of course, didn’t like that. They wanted their men to be theirs. So these 19th century Karens started hating them as well. These wild temptresses were out to catch their men with their “foreign looks”. Meanwhile white men hated the idea of white women being seduced by black men. And this, combined with the resentment for working class women, gave way to a kind of language people used to describe each other. All stereotypes (medieval+ working class women looks+ black looks) were stacked atop each other: dark, tempting, coarse, black, plump, uncivilized, wild, broad-faced, thick of lip… Hair didn’t much come into play in the 18th century since most people of high society wore wigs (which in paintings can look like type 4 hair but cannot be used as an indicator of race) but afterwards “tight coils” was also added to the list of features that weren’t deemed desirable. This physical robustness not only lies in the idea that people who work are “hardened” but by describing them with strong robust adjectives, upper class white people once again fuel the idea that these people were physiologically designed for hard work, like slave labour or mine work instead of life as a wife. See also present day notions common even in doctors how black people and black women don’t feel pain as much. A devastating prejudice that leads to black death, black mothers dying, black people’s health complaints not being taken seriously and so on.
4. Black, racially ambiguous and “foreign” coding in physical descriptions
So we all know the memes of “Historians say they were friends” and so on. It’s a fun meme, but this carefulness in naming things stems from the fact that A) sources are made by people and people are subjective as fuck B) it is deemed a big faux pas for a historian to look at history through a 21st century lens. The rabbit hole that is historical epistemology boils down to the claim that a thing cannot exist before there is a word for it. You need to be careful that you don’t apply a term to an event, person or society wherein that term didn’t exist, or the meaning of the term was different. We shouldn’t draw conclusions about the past with present day notions. When a person anno 2020 is described as dark, we know they’re probably south-east Asian or black. However, we may not believe that a person being described as dark in the 17th century means this person is black. I shall explain.
Back in a time when black equalled inferior, people found no better way than to ascribe black attributes to people they disliked. It is hard to find out whether these people were actually darkskinned, since portraits were commissioned and painted to the desires of the clients (they could ask to be painted with white skin). We have no photographs of the time period to verify whether people did really look the way people described. With few people able to move around the country by carriage, as this was expensive, most people relied on letters, books and papers to give them accounts of events and people, so if one person claimed a person looked like X, others oftentimes had no choice but to believe the account, as they lived too far away to verify. Thus I shall focus on the world of literature, where there were no real people we can compare descriptions to, to prove that the good guys were portrayed as fair, and bad guys were portrayed as… racially ambiguous without them having to be black, or any other ethnicity.
Fairytales: Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. There’s literally no argument to be made at all. But just take a look at fairytales from the Brothers Grimm. Nine times out of ten, the evil stepsisters and stepmothers are described as dark and ungainly while the heroine is fair. If there are transformations, the evil people get transformed into gross animals like toads, while the heroine is transformed into a fawn, a bird or a swan. I’m being unnuanced here, there are definitely heroines with dark hair (see snow white, but she’s still snow white of skin) and the reasons for ugly-animal-transformations has to do with the character traits that have been ascribed to those animals. These stories circuled orally since the middle ages, and most trace their roots back to even before that time. Though the world was not yet a colonnial one, it is a sign that darker looks were already linked to bad people. These notions of darkness have been absorbed into the notions about black people during colonialism. People already lived with concepts of fairness for good people and darkness for bad people in their heads, it became easy to continue these concepts when faced with black people.
Jane Eyre: Jane is described as green eyed (a very rare colour, most prevalent in white people), fairy-like, skinny and pale. Although Brönte tells us she is ugly (she indeed doesn’t confirm to beauty ideals at the time) she appeals to Mr. Rochester and fits more into the stereotype of beauty than her romantic rival: Berta Mason Rochester. Bertha’s laugh is “hysterical” and “demonic”, she is dangerous and injures her own brother. “What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.”
Dear reader, Mr. Rochester is described as being tempted into a marriage, to a wild foreign animal-like madwoman with dark grizzled hair and red eyes. Although there is no description of her skin colour (Bertha could very well be any ethnicity) there are clear parallels in the way she is described and the way POC were described. In the context of the 1840s readers would instantly attach this picture to their preconceptions about others with a similar look. Jane doesn’t even need to describe Bertha’s personality, the readers have already decided what she’s like because they understand that the author means dark looks= bad personality. Dark looks= foreign looks. Additionally: Blanche Ingram, Jane’s other rival was described as a fine beauty with a stereotypically beautiful body but had an olive complexion, dark hair and dark eyes. These were desirable traits in England at the time, but the darker beauty of Blanche comes with a bad personality and in the end, she too is rejected in favour of our pale heroine Jane.
Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff has long confused readers. It is most probable, in my opinion, given the context of the time, that Heathcliff was of roma origin as roma were strongly disliked in England at the time, and he fits best in the stereotypes associated with them. It’s also much more probable that an English gentleman would take in an orphaned European child than a black child, especially given he raised him as a son (british people weren’t that kind, they wouldn’t raise a black child as their son). However, the author, still clearly relies on a certain set of dark characteristics to describe him. “I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine's; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.” “He seemed a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment: he would stand Hindley's blows without winking or shedding a tear, and my pinches moved him only to draw in a breath and open his eyes.” “You are younger [than Edgar], and yet, I'll be bound, you are taller and twice as broad across the shoulders; you could knock him down in a twinkling; don't you feel that you could?” “Do you mark those two lines between your eyes; and those thick brows, that, instead of rising arched, sink in the middle; and that couple of black fiends, so deeply buried, who never open their windows boldly, but lurk glinting under them, like devil's spies?” “he had by that time lost the benefit of his early education: continual hard work, begun soon and concluded late, had extinguished any curiosity he once possessed in pursuit of knowledge, and any love for books or learning. His childhood's sense of superiority, instilled into him by the favours of old Mr. Earnshaw, was faded away … Then personal appearance sympathised with mental deterioration: he acquired a slouching gait and ignoble look; his naturally reserved disposition was exaggerated into an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness;” “His countenance was much older in expression and decision of feature than Mr. Linton's; it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation. A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified: quite divested of roughness, though stern for grace.” “He is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman”
Once again: black eyes, heavy brows, black hair. He is rough, can stand a lot of heavy burdens, seemingly indifferent to pain. He has something devilish and uncivilized about him, and is oftentimes believed dumb. Admittedly, this portrayal is more nuanced, he has a knack for studying and he does look like a gentleman. But the author is clear that it is only superficial and he is still mad within. It thus becomes very clear, already only from literature, that if you want someone to look bad, you make them look manly, workmanlike and ascribe to them black features.
For more examples of racial ambiguity, casual racism and explicit racism in English 19th century books: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/victorian-literature-and-culture/article/casual-racism-in-victorian-literature/1B4B3B0538F8B7C6B58E6D839DCFEC92.
This technique was adapted by EVERYONE. Wanted to make your enemy look bad? Then write a very uncharming picture of them attributing them with stereotypical black features. The most common remarks were: broad noses, big lips, frizzy hair, swarthy and/or dark complexians, coarse looking and unrefined. If you wanted to be really rude you could start comparing people to animals and call them wild and unhinged because “madness” was and is a very common insult. Had an issue with your wife in the 19th century? Lock her up for “hysteria” and “madness”. Got a political opponent in the 2016 presidential elections? Call her mad and hysterical. Got an opponent in the 2020 presidential elections? Challenge his mental capacities. Psychological issues and disorders have often been used to make people look bad and invalidate them. Basically everyone who isn’t reacting in a neurotypical and stereotypical male way (i.e. show no emotions and so on) was classified as “unreasonable”, thus taking away their voice. So many interesting articles and books on this.So we have an intersection between race, womanhood and mental health that are used to control and reject women.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/outreach/trade_in_lunacy/research/womenandmadness/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4286909?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
https://www.routledgehistoricalresources.com/feminism/sets/women-madness-and-spiritualism
https://www.amazon.com/Madness-Women-Myth-Experience-Psychology/dp/0415339286
TLDR: In literature bad characters were often described with physical attributes that were seen as ungainly. They were codified with animal-like, manly and mad. They also had black and dark attributes to signal to the reader that they were not the heroes of the story. Bonus: they often met a deathly or bad end. Writers did it, but so did real people when they wanted to accuse a rival (Karl Marx being one such asshole for example, http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.html ). This is why we can not always trust written accounts of contemporaries before the age of photography when a person is described with racially ambiguous looks.
5. Descriptions of Queen Charlotte:
Just like Beethoven, Queen Charlotte’s main claim to blackness boils down to one ancestor at least two centuries before her birth, combined with contemporary descriptions of a certain hair type, wide nose and bad complexion. Descriptions of Charlotte during her lifetime describe a plain and small woman, with a wide and long nose, and lips that were not the rosebud ideal. As the court became accustomed to her, however, more people started complimenting her brown hair, pretty eyes and good teeth. Much of the imagery that has fuelled claims of Charlotte’s possible African ancestry is from the first few years of her time in England. Royal brides have been ripped to pieces by tabloids, and the public also performs a horrible hazing-like ritual(see: Kate Middleton was mocked for being a party girl, lazy and from working class background. Meghan Markle was described as an opportunist husband-snatcher. Diana was a “chubby child”. The ladies also got plenty of critiques on their looks). Once the bride gets through years of being bullied, critiqued for every little part of her being, she then suddenly comes out on the other end after a few years, becoming a darling and an attribute to the royal family. Could it be that royal brides are always, especially in a gossip heavy environment like a court, under deep scrutiny? This foreign princess hobbled off a boat, seasick, unknown by the English… And she didn’t speak a word of the language! Why would the English love her? I am not saying the accounts lie but I am saying beware of the person making the comments. Are they close to the monarch and his wife? Do they like Queen Charlotte? When where these comments made and why? And why did they choose precisely these words that had by now become commonplace to use as descriptors for unpleasant people? If we know people used racially ambiguous terms to describe people they disliked, it isn’t such a stretch to imagine they might insult a new queen with such terms.
Let’s look at what was actually said about her.
Horace Walpole: “The date of my promise is now arrived, and I fulfill it — fulfill it with great satisfaction, for the Queen is come. In half an hour, one heard of nothing but proclamations of her beauty: everybody was content, everybody pleased.”
Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar, the royal physician to her grandaughter: “small and crooked, with a true Mulatto face.”
Sir Walter Scott: “ill-colored.”
Colonel Disbrowe (her chamberlain): “I do think that the bloom of her ugliness is going off.”
Queen Charlotte herself in a diary: “The English people did not like me much, because I was not pretty; but the King was fond of driving a phaeton in those days, and once he overturned me in a turnip-field, and that fall broke my nose. I think I was not quite so ugly after dat [sic].”
What we can conclude from these remarks that Charlotte was not very pretty, she even admits to that herself. But what are her actual physical attributes? She has light brown hair (I didn’t include a description of this, but it was generally reported), she had pale eyes (as can be seen in all paintings), was small, and had good teeth.
Above I gave two accounts that reported on her skin tone. Ill-colored could be anything like bad skin, rosacea or perhaps tanned (which also wasn’t deemed becoming for ladies). There was only one person, Baron Christian himself, calling her face what he did. As mentioned above, there can be multiple reasons why anyone would ascribe her those features, she did not have to be a “mulatto” to be described as one.
Most importantly, in a society with slavery, in which black people were looked down upon, I’d say the absence of more people calling her things like: dark, swarthy, black, mixed, brown and any and all things associated with black looks, is more telling than a few accounts mildly referring to her colour.
If Charlotte were truly the first black queen, the first black person in such a powerful position, and one of the few black people in England (less than 30 000 at the time), would there not be more talk? More descriptions of her look? She was seen every day by many people. People would be shocked, enraged, surprised, fascinated and so on. In an era when many people kept diaries in which they wrote down all they witnessed, many people would have given descriptions of her black/brown skin colour. In an era with cartoons and press… Her being noticeably black would have been a very big thing and we would have seen journalists and cartoonists draw her as dark. Cartoonists and diary writers mostly write or draw their honest thoughts. They weren’t censured.
6. Paintings of Queen Charlotte:
Queen Charlotte’s most striking likenesses, or so it is believed, were painted by Allan Ramsay, a prominent artist and staunch abolitionist. In 1761, Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) was appointed Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King (1761-84). As well as being Principal Painter, his portraits have been singled out by many as depicting Queen Charlotte with distinctly African features. It’s believed this was his way of displaying his abolitionist tendencies. He was an abolitionist, that much is true, and he was also friends with the legal guardian of the very famous black Dido. However why would the royal couple approve blatant African features, knowing those would not be well liked in an English queen? They would not have allowed these images. Clearly, they saw in these images only a likeness to Charlotte, and yes, that could mean she had fuller lips and a wider nose. Anyone can have those features. Personally, I find that a slightly larger nose and larger lips in some paintings are not sufficient proof to call her black. But let’s run over some of the paintings.
Most paintings portray her as a typical light-skinned royal with nothing bad about her complexion.
In these pictures she does not look black in the slightest, indeed I’d say her eyes and eyebrows look very light even, nor do her nose and lips, so often critiqued, look big, as was claimed.
Here we can see her nose looks a bit wider, and her lips a bit bigger. But is that really a convincing argument? Although certain features are more common to a certain race, they are not monopolized by one. Black people can have light hair and light eyes. It is unlikely, but it is possible. It’s just as possible for white women to have bigger lips, a wider nose, a rounder face and even… though rarely, there are white people who have no black relative they know of, white 4a hair. I’ve met a few of them. What I also want to note is that Queen Charlotte’s natural hair could have been crimped and combed until it stood upright and was stiff with powder, as was the fashion back then. It would give her hair a more frizzy look. In the picture underneath it, you can see her hair in fashionable artificially made curls that wouldn’t work on natural type 3 or 4 hair.
However as I said before, I’m not fond of using paintings as proof since they were made-by-demand. Painters would starve if they painted their patrons unflatteringly. There are black people, indeed, even black nobles, ex-slaves, diplomatic ambassadors who had themselves painted with a dark skin colour since the Middle Ages. You can even see the distinction between people of darker-skinned sub-Saharans and North African descent in these pictures. And painters certainly knew how to paint black people for centuries (see: "The Image of the Black in Western Art" by Harvard University Press and “Revealing the African presence in Renaissance Europe”). One such example a noble who did have black heritage was Alessandro de Medici who was nicknamed “the Moor”. Moors referred to black Islamic people. His mother was Simonetta da Collevecchio, a servant of African descent. In this case the argument that many Italians are dark of complexion and have dark hair cannot be used to explain his appearance. If other Italians thought he looked like them, they wouldn’t have paid such attention to his looks because they would have deemed it normal. I’m using 3 paintings of him by 3 different artists. The first picture really is ambiguous, it is only by combining all three that we can say that yes, his looks do fit the bill. If we only had the first picture, would we really be confident to claim him? This goes to show that you can’t say someone has a certain ethnicity based on one painting.
This person was comfortable in his own skin but there were probably just as much, if not many more nobles and wealthy families with mixed blood that had themselves painted white when they were not. Who would disagree? Who would even know? Nine chances out of ten barely anyone who wasn’t from the direct neighbourhood didn’t know what they looked like, and never would. Once the POC died, all that would remain would be a very white looking painting, and no one would know the bloodline had become mixed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/29/tudor-english-black-not-slave-in-sight-miranda-kaufmann-history
What is, then, a reliable source? An answer, for famous people, is cartoons. Just like we now attach more credibility to a paparazzi picture of Khloe Kardashian than to one of her heavily photoshopped pictures on Instagram, you can trust cartoonists to not try and make people look good. Note: cartoons are always over-exaggerations. Any physical attribute will be enlarged beyond belief for comedic purposes. King George and his wife were often pictured in cartoons. If there was anything very noticeably foreign about Charlotte’s looks, they would portray it. However, what we find is that these cartoons never portray Charlotte as darker than the other people. She wasn’t shown as being black.
Conclusion:
Queen Charlotte cannot be called black on the basis of her portraits, cartoons or bloodline. If ever there was a trace of black blood in her veins, it was so light it had become undetectable and could not have influenced her appearance. Just ask yourself this question: would you call yourself a certain ethnicity, or claim certain roots, based on one ancestor 200 years in your past? If no, then you also shouldn’t say that Charlotte had black roots or was mixed.
The case of Queen Charlotte does, however, reveal the deeply racist British society of the Georgian Era, which deemed all black physical features ugly, and deliberately used all physical traits associated to the black race as an insult. Keep this in mind, as well as rampant anti-Semitism and hatred for Roma people, every time you read a novel from the time period, or read a tasteless description of a real person from the era. People were cruelly treated based on their heritage, and even if their heritage was purely white, they could be ascribed certain racial features, just because people were racist pricks.
While that’s the unfortunate reality of the time period, I do believe we are allowed to enjoy an alternate reality as an escape, where just for once, race isn’t an issue. So continue on, Bridgerton!
Meanwhile, I’ll be here keeping my fingers crossed for the stories of real black people living in Europe, or black kings and queens in Africa, to be told in a movie or series. The entire world has always existed, it makes no sense for all period movies to keep being focussed on white people in England, Rome and the US.
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Hi Cheri, do you have a biodata for those guys? I once saw their data at Tumblr (in which Tumblr I forgot...) Would you mind if you posted and translated it? Thanks 😊😊😊
Hello~ I hope these are the personal files you’re referring to, which I found on the official Chinese MLQC website 😄
Although S2 photos are featured, the details are related to S1, so no worries about S2 spoilers. Shaw’s file does contain unreleased spoilers from S1, so I’ve left him last if you want to skip it!
🦋 Lucien 🦋
Age: 26
Height: 180cm
Birthday: 15 November
Star sign: Scorpio
Blood type: AB
Identity: Neuroscientist and Visiting Professor at Loveland University
Evol: Replication
Hobbies: Observing humans, movies, sketching
Guardian Animal: Snow Fox / Black Goat
Lucky flower: Platycodon grandiflorus i.e. balloon flower
Symbol: Butterflies
-
On the outside, Lucien is a refined and handsome young professor. His outstanding temperament makes him easy to identify even in a vast sea of people. His memory allows him to remember everything he sees. Apart from possessing a high IQ, he also has an exceptionally high EQ, and he knows how to behave and carry himself in the world.
Besides this, he also has a fox-like mystery, and perceives the world sensitively and keenly. Although his words and actions are gentle, they also give people a sense of distance, making it difficult to truly walk into his inner world.
To others, Lucien is an authoritative scientist in the field of neuroscience, and has returned to his country as an elite. In the eyes of the public, he is a young neuroscientist and a Visiting Professor at Loveland University. He is extremely persistent in scientific research, and has attained extraordinary achievements in this industry. As a genius with an extremely high IQ, he has attained achievements at the age of 26 that ordinary people cannot achieve in a lifetime.
No one knows Lucien's true identity and purpose.
🍁 Gavin 🍁
Age: 24
Height: 181cm
Birthday: 29 July
Star sign: Leo
Blood type: B
Identity: Evol Special Police
Evol: Wind control
Hobbies: Motorcycle rides, astronomy, boxing, basketball, etc.
Guardian Animal: German Shepherd / Wolf
Lucky flower: White lilac
Symbol: Ginkgo
-
Gavin is a special police officer. He has a rebellious and unruly personality, but has his own set of principles. He gives people a sense of danger, so it’s difficult for people who just met him to associate him with the police. Gavin is a brave and decisive man. He has many informants from grey areas, and his own set of views on good and evil. He often breaks some of the rules that people deem conventional, and uses some less “just” means to achieve his goals. He doesn’t bother nor care to explain himself to people who misunderstand him.
Gavin has a fearless and adventurous spirit. As compared to words, his inner heart is often expressed directly through actions. He is like a lone wolf who looks lonely, dangerous, and does things in his own way.
In reality, however, he is very loyal, and will not be easily shaken once he settles on someone. He also has a gentle side hidden beneath his appearance.
⭐️ Kiro ⭐️
Age: 22
Height: 176cm
Birthday: 9 April
Star sign: Aries
Blood type: O
Identity: Superstar
Evol: Absolute charm and Absolute control
Hobbies: Music, delicious food, superhero movies, etc.
Guardian Animal: Small Bear / Stag
Lucky flower: Small daisies
Symbol: Stars
-
Kiro is a person akin to the sun. Cheery as the sun, extremely charismatic, frank and sincere, and has healing powers like a small bear. He clearly understands the sophistication of humanity and the darker sides of reality, but he will not be affected by them.
He is proud but not arrogant. He is witty and steady at critical moments, and is very reliable. Sometimes, he likes playing pranks, and is cute and sly. Kiro likes ordinary life, black technology, and has a strong talent in the realm of computers.
He is a dedicated celebrity who debuted as a child star and has put in a lot of effort on the road to becoming a superstar. Optimistic, he will not be defeated by small setbacks. He is very strict with himself and is a perfectionist. Although he is very busy at work, he never complains, and will always hope to present his best to the audience.
In reality, however, being a celebrity is only Kiro’s surface occupation. He possesses multiple identities and his own goals.
🌹 Victor 🌹
Age: 28
Height: 183cm
Birthday: 13 January
Star sign: Capricorn
Blood type: A
Identity: President of LFG, Manager and chef of Souvenir
Evol: Time control
Hobbies: Work, cooking, art
Guardian Animal: Black Cat / Lion
Lucky flower: Red rose
Symbol: Pocket watch
-
As the president of LFG, Victor, although young, has excellent business acumen and leadership qualities, and is also a capitalist who is strict about people and things. At the same time, he also has a hidden identity that can present another side of his character - the manager and chef of French restaurant Souvenir.
Decisive, only talking about rules and not feelings, everything he does has his company’s interests in mind. He is not a kind philanthropist, and will not waste time and money on meaningless things.
Like a lion, he is born with a kingly aura, and is majestic and domineering. He is based at the top of the food chain.
Although he seems cold and indifferent, there are actually soft corners in his heart which make him feel protective over weak and small things.
⚡️ Shaw ⚡️
Age: 20
Height: 182cm
Birthday: 21 June
Star sign: Gemini
Blood type: O
Identity: Graduate student from the Department of Archaeology at Loveland University
Evol: Lightning control
Hobbies: Extreme sports, rock music, street graffiti, collecting antiques, etc.
Guardian Animal: Red Panda / Shark
Lucky flower: Pink clematis
Symbol: Lightning
-
Shaw is the only graduate student in the Archaeology Department of Loveland University, and is an avid rock music lover. He is the bassist of Isolated, an underground band, and performs occasionally. He has a flamboyant personality and often gives people the first impression of “if you’re a stranger, don’t get close to me”, but the quietness and delicateness hidden deep in his heart can only be appreciated by those who are particularly close to him.
His identity is a mystery, and he often wanders between different forces. No one knows what his purpose is. The Dragonfly Eye glass bead from the Warring States period on his chest seems to have a special power which can take him across different world lines.
He is like a dangerous hunter shark in the ocean. Once he smells something or someone that interests him, he will plunder it mightily without pretence.
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☆ My contribution for @officialtolkiensecretsanta 2020 for @arianaofimladris - 🎄Merry Christmas 🎄 ☆
Scientific Curiosity
“Coincidences do not exist,” Fëanáro stated, walking over towards the anvil. “The word itself is a lazy excuse, used for everything that cannot be explained. A lazy excuse for lazy folk, unwilling to look beyond what is obvious.”
“Of course,” Curufinwë agreed. “You know I do not believe in coincidences.”
Whilst the snow piles up in Tirion, Fëanor and Curufin experiment together in the forge.
Relationship: Fëanor & Curufin
Rating: General Audiences
Word count: 1.2 k
Additional Tags: Family Feels, pre-flight of the Noldor, Science, Forging, Good Dad Fëanor
☆
The snow fell, and fell, and fell, blending with Tirion’s buildings, made out of white marble. Snowfall was rare in this part of Aman, and for the snow not to melt away immediately after falling was even rarer. It had been snowing for days and no end was in sight.
Fëanáro was not surprised to hear children’s laughter from outside. No matter how different their usual interests were, snow somehow united them. It brought a smile to his face for he, too, had loved the snow when he was a little boy.
Whilst outside, night descended and icy winds howled, Fëanáro had withdrawn into his forge to work on his latest project. A while ago, caused by external circumstances—the growing rift between Ñolofinwë and himself—Fëanáro had decided to focus some of his time away from his father’s court to work on improving the blades he had been forging all his life. Success never comes without envy. He spoke little, if at all, of the improvements he had already made.
Fëanáro’s life was no sung tale, devoid of struggles and fights, no matter how privileged he was. Creating was an escape for him, something that put his reeling thoughts at rest. A reckoning, of a kind—with himself.
☆ continue reading on AO3 or below the read more ☆
Beautiful moments, where he could lose himself in the world of science, discovering and exploring what no other has ever studied before. His interests were many and varied, but forging was always dearest to his heart. So it was unsurprising that he was to be found in the forge more often than not of late—trying to enhance the strength and the performance of his blades.
Through trial and error, Fëanor refined his approach. He devised improved alloys, investigated how to temper them for improved strength and lighter blades. Although Fëanáro was successful, he was not content with the results—good was never satisfying enough.
Fëanáro kept exact track of all the experiments he has carried out so far: the metals he used for each alloy, the exact amount of them, when and where he had acquired them. Additionally, he noted the weather conditions outside, the humidity and if Telperion or Laurelin spread its light. Although, perhaps, it was superstitious nonsense, Fëanáro had the impression that experiments carried out under Telperion’s light were more prone to fail.
The scroll has grown endless over the course of time, turned into an incomprehensible collection of information. Although his calligraphy and sketches are flawless, Fëanáro doubted that anyone would understand his experimentation journal without explanation. Curufinwë, maybe, the sole exception. He often visited Fëanáro late at night in the forge—his hunger to learn and refine his knowledge matching Fëanor’s own.
*
Fëanáro narrowed his eyes when Curufinwë came in to put a small leather bag on the anvil. “What is this?”
“Bones and ashes,” Curufin said, leaning against the anvil. Casual, with a smile playing about his lips. “I asked Tyelko to supply me with some of it after going hunting with Oromë.”
“Bones and ashes,” Fëanáro repeated, half incredulous, half curious He knew that Tyelkormo collected an abundance of these rather useless things, but didn’t know that Curufinwë has taken an interest in hunting and bones as well. Maybe, he hadn’t, but came with an idea. “What would I want with them?”
Curufinwë regarded him, his expression coming alive with creative passion. “Carry out another experiment,” he suggested. “The last time we spoke about that project of yours and the progress you made you told me that you the best results so far were obtained when you added fragments of burnt leaves to the alloy. We do not know yet what caused the strength of the alloy created that specific day. Maybe, it was a mere coincidence, however—”
Fëanáro cut him off. “Coincidences do not exist,” he stated, walking over towards the anvil. “The word itself is a lazy excuse, used for everything that cannot be explained. A lazy excuse for lazy folk, unwilling to look beyond what is obvious.”
“Of course,” Curufinwë agreed. “You know I do not believe in coincidences.”
“With the temperatures used for the alloys, even bone should be easily reduced to ash, to something else,” he said, encouraged by his father’s nod. “If ground beforehand into small particles, it could be evenly distributed within the melted iron.”
“Or simply added beforehand,” Fëanáro mused. “And melt everything together.”
Curufinwë nodded, smiling now. “Ideally, both approaches would be pursued and compared afterwards if any differences occur,” he said, throwing the little bag with the bones towards Fëanáro. “What do you think?”
Fëanáro caught it. “A good idea.”
Excitement coiled in Fëanáro’s guts. He knew it was unwise to start the experiments right away, without proper planning; but his thoughts were already fixed on the idea, an oh-so-familiar itch in his fingers. “How much is there?” he asked after a while without opening the bag.
“Roughly two hands full,” Curufinwë told him. “But it shouldn’t be a problem to order more.”
“Do you have time to help me plan?” Fëanáro wondered, sitting down at the small desk where he usually drew his sketches.
Curufinwë laughed. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked, giving the answer himself without awaiting his father’s reply. “It isn’t even close to early morning yet. I wouldn’t have entered if I hadn’t seen the lamp light. So obviously, I have time.”
It wasn’t unusual for Fëanáro to work late into the night; or rather into the next day, time just slipping through his fingers as his mind was fixed on something. His family has long adjusted to that.
Curufinwë walked towards the desk and sat down opposite of Fëanáro, curiosity aflame in his eyes. Fëanáro was certain it matched his own.
And so they began to design a set of experiments in the low light of the lamps, discussing what amount of bones in relation to the metals should be used, and how small the bones should possibly be ground, making adjustments to their ideas every now and then.
When they have agreed on six individual sets of experiments, the snow was still falling outside but morning has already come, time just slipping by with their thoughts fixed on their new idea.
*
The following days, Fëanáro did not allow himself to rest, nor did he want to rest. Once his curiosity was piqued, it was impossible to let go.
But it was worth it; it always was.
The blades he had created with the addition of the bone material showed superior strength in comparison to everything Fëanáro has ever forged. Just as he had suspected, adding previously ground bone to the raw materials at the start worked better than adding it to the molten metal—and was far easier to handle, too. The distribution was more homogenous like this, resulting in tempered steel that exhibit the same properties throughout the entire length, not brittle at all; a raw material perfectly suited to Fëanáro’s needs.
Without showing Curufinwë the initial results, promising as they were, Fëanáro set up the experiment again to prove it wasn’t mere coincidence. In order to minimize possible errors, Fëanor began the experiment at the same hour of the day and with the exact same amount of raw materials, in the exact same containers he had initially used.
It wasn’t coincidence—far from it: the strength and performance of the steel was exactly reproducible, much more than Fëanáro had anticipated it to be.
It brought a smile to his lips, and content to his heart. Curufinwë would be so delighted to hear his suggestion had worked so well. Fëanáro could not wait to share every detail with him, certain that Curufinwë wants to plan new experiments right away.
*
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