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targaryenrealnessdarling · 1 year

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Consequences | Prologue

Summary: Only nine and ten, she does not know much about the world and when she acquires a job at the Red Keep as a maidservant, she catches the dark and ominous attention of the One-Eyed Prince. Unsure if she even wants it, she may realise that the realm is not so kind to lowborn women, regardless of the situation they find themselves in | Word Count: 1.4k~ | Warnings below the cut!

Series Masterlist

Warnings: 18+ MINORS DNI, dark, medieval-canon sexism, dub-con, mean Aemond, manipulation, gore, blood, violence, major angst

A/N: This is intended to be a dark one, so please read all the warnings before continuing. Warnings will be highlighted when needed. Aemond’s gonna be pretty mean, self-serving and not at all very nice in this one! Basically a spoilt prince reaping the benefits, so beware. You know me, I love a bit of angst.

She liked being early to rise.

It meant that for a few small moments, she could pretend that the hallways were all her own. However brief they were. It was a small slither of peace for the young maidservant.

That was at least until the Red Keep began to wake. The murmured whispers of the staff to one another, organising the various meals for the royal family, making sure their clothes were ready and prepared, ensuring that their rooms were neat and tidy for their arrival back to their chambers and drawing their baths at their behest.

It was tough work at times, but it was good, honest labour and for her services, she was paid much more than she could have even dreamed of. That said, most of it was sent to her younger siblings where she could spare it, but it was still entirely novel and rewarding to earn her own coin.

It was a fine, clear day like any other. The servant’s quarters were bustling with busy maidservants, rushing around after their allocated jobs. Most of the other maidservants were of a similar age, but their temperaments fierce away from the forced politeness they were obligated to offer the royal family. It could very often get catty. And sometimes it was best to say little at all, where it could be helped. People talked, gossiped and made fun for themselves in the dreary, everyday lull of being at the behest of King and Queen. She did not blame them for making fun, but perhaps it was naïve of her to believe it could be done without cruelty.

One particular girl, not much older than her, assumed a role akin to a elder sister amongst the little band of maidservants. She had chestnut hair that was braided like the other staff, in plaits and pulled behind the head, stuck with pins and out of the way. Her name was Hedi, possibly short for something, but she dare not ask.

“Ah, there you are,” Hedi smiled in a sing-songy way, gesturing for her to come and join them, “you are to go to Prince Aemond’s rooms and take his clothes with you. He will be expecting his old bedsheets to be taken away,” she instructed, oblivious to the way the little maid servant's eyes widened.

“Hedi, I have never-”

“Better you meet him now and get it over with, child,” she responded, pushing the bundle of clothes into her hands, ignoring the unsure look on her face.

She had heard many things about the One-Eyed Prince. Aemond Targaryen. The second son of King Viserys and Queen Alicent.

Since her employment at the Red Keep only a few moons ago, she had rarely seen any of the royal family with the exception of infrequent refills of their wine decanters at the dinner table. And even then, it was rare she could get a proper look at any of them as the halls were dark and lit only by candles at the table, obscuring some of their faces.

She had only heard stories of them.

Upon employment, Alicent had instructed Hedi that the new staff were not to be around her first son, Prince Aegon, by any means necessary. And though at the time, Hedi was not given any more information, she told the rest of the maidservants that she surmised that some wrongdoings caused the previous staff to leave King’s Landing altogether, moon tea in their bellies and a purse of gold dragons to keep their silence.

This did nothing to calm her nerves though, for she sometimes saw him walking around the Keep. Though she was advised to not spare a glance, she felt the weight of his eyes on her, and the other maidservants said the same.

Princess Helaena was a sort of anomaly. Nobody ever really saw her. Or perhaps she just made less of a fuss compared to her brothers. The few times she had seen the Princess at the table, Helaena had been staring forward at her plate, murmuring things under her breath.

That only left him, the One-Eyed Prince everyone so fondly called him.

She had seen him only once, to her knowledge, at the aforementioned feast. He had been sitting at one end, his seeing eye downcast, looking anywhere but at the individuals he called family at the table before him. He seemed to not move an inch throughout, as if deep in thought.

She took a deep breath and walked the long, winding path to the main halls of the Red Keep, along the corridor where Prince Aemond’s chambers would be. She whispered to herself that it would be alright, that the other maidservants were just trying to rile her up with fear for the man, for they’d said that he frightened them terribly.

Willing the shake out of her breath, she stared at the door for a while, thinking that perhaps if she waited for a moment it’d be easier. But it just sent her heart racing even more. Her small fist gingerly knocked.

“Prince Aemond,” she called softly.

There was a moment of silence and muffled rustling inside the chambers, presumed to be his bedsheets.

“Enter,” a groggy, male voice called out in return.

Without thinking on it for another moment, she quickly slipped inside and though she did not mean to, her eyes briefly looked upon the Prince in his bed, halfway through sitting up tiredly. But her eyes were quickly drawn away once she had realised that there were no clothes on his person, and so with dusted cheeks she darted to the chair and placed the clothes atop it, making sure everything was there for him before drawing the curtains. Feeling somewhat flustered and out of sorts, she brushed the wayward curl from her face that had fallen loose from her braids and felt that hot annoyance as it continued to tickle her face.

She ties the curtains together to keep them drawn and her heart quickens when she hears him get out of bed, stretch with a tired groan and pad over to the table near the fireplace. He pours himself a drink of water and is quiet for some time.

“You are not my usual maid,” he says and when it is clear he is speaking to her, she turns around finally, offering a small nod.

He is tall, almost unnaturally so. He wears only his nightclothes on his bottom half and leans against one of the armchairs, regarding her with an indescribable look in his one good eye, the other has a sapphire wedged inside, and she thought it must be uncomfortable to sleep with it. For a moment, she swallows nervously, he is broad and strong looking, but not in a burly way, and on the fair skin of his bare chest she can see several scars, all silver from age and hairline thin.

“No, your grace. I was sent to attend to you today,” she responds, shockingly evenly, clasping her hands in front of her before nervously smoothing her hands over her apron.

She sees the way his tongue pokes at his cheek, seemingly annoyed, “Hm,” he responds as he sips his water, “will you be attending to me from now on?”

Her tongue wets her lips nervously, “I am not sure, your grace.”

He seems like he wants to say more, but he just stands there, across the room, looking at her and enjoying the way she continues to shrink under his gaze.

She pushes that stray hair behind her ear once more as she moves to strip the bed, working quickly and without looking back towards the quiet prince. She can tell however, how his gaze never seems to leave her, watching her with interest.

“What is your name,” from his lips it almost doesn’t sound like a question, more a demand.

Wound tight with anxiety, she tells him her name, which only makes him turn one side of his lip up in some form of a smile.

Once she has all the sheets folded and ready to take away, she stands with hands clasped, “is there anything else I can do for you this morning, your grace?”

He taps his finger against the glass he’s holding, as if in thought. And it’s extremely difficult to avert her eyes from the firm planes of his chest, but for the sake of politeness and her position, she forces herself to.

With a soft shake of his head, she gathers the sheets in her arms and makes for the chamber doors and her hand barely brushes the handle before his voice calls out her name.

“Yes, your grace?” she answers, a dusty pink covering her cheekbones with her nerves.

With a genuine, mischievous looking smirk, he strides widely towards her and her eyes never leave his face, feet planted firmly where she stands.

“I want you to attend to me from now on.”

General Aemond Taglist (DM me if you want to be removed)

@risefallrise

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aurorawest · 6 months

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The Scottish Boy by Alex de Campi - 5/5 stars

This book managed to rip my heart out at least 3 times. I loved it. Medieval enemies-to-lovers slow burn; very romantic. Kinda read like fanfiction at times but in a good way. 10/10 would read a follow-up love story about Arundel and Captain Wekena. If you like Captive Prince, give this one a try.

Reforged by Seth Haddon - 4/5 stars

Pretty good bodyguard romantasy. Ironically CS Pacat blurbed this one (another am-I-in-the-matrix moment). The world was interesting and I enjoyed the politics, though they're definitely not as complicated as other SFF politics I've gone feral over (see: Captive Prince, Winter's Orbit, A Memory Called Empire). I ordered the sequel after I finished this.

The Doctor's Date by Heidi Cullinan - 4/5 stars

A Power Unbound by Freya Marske - 5/5 stars

Where do I start? I love, love, LOVE A Marvellous Light. It's one of my favorite books ever. None of the rest of the books in the trilogy could live up to it, really, because it's so good. You'll notice I rated this one 5 stars though, because quite honestly I fell prey to a bit of The Academy Paying The Lord of the Rings Trilogy Its Due syndrome. I did love this book and thought it was better than A Restless Truth (which I still loved!) but part of that is, quite frankly, just due to the fact that I prefer m/m romance to f/f romance.

Anyway. This was such a good finale to the trilogy. I loved that the romance was a giant middle finger to purity cultists. I loved that one of the mains was Italian. I loved finally getting the story of what happened to the Alston twins. One thing I thought was really cool was how, viewed from the outside, you totally get why Edwin is such a loner. I really admire from a writing perspective how Marske pulled that off.

I feel like there's a lot to be said about what Marske was trying to SAY with this book, but I definitely need to reread it first before I can articulate any of it. The purity culture stuff is obvious, but the magic system too. I feel like Jack when he's almost able to connect everything in his mind into a bigger idea, but he can't quite get there.

I've got a special edition from Illumicrate coming, so I'll be rereading it when I have that.

Oh also, this book was the embodiment of all that one tumblr post -

The Guncle by Steven Rowley - 5/5 stars

I saw this in bookstores for years before I finally gave in and bought it. The blurb makes it sound insufferable and twee. Ignore the blurb. This was such a good book about grief and learning how to live again after terrible loss.

I Like Me Better by Robby Weber - 4/5 stars

At last I can stop getting the Lauv song stuck in my head whenever I set eyes on this book (it's stuck in my head as I type this). Pretty standard-issue YA, but it was cute and had a good message.

The Stagsblood King by Gideon E Wood - 4/5 stars

Another book about moving on from grief! This is the second book in a trilogy. When I was trying to determine if I wanted to read on beyond book 1, I scoured the internet for information about what happens in books 2 and 3. Eventually I decided, hell, I enjoyed book 1 well enough, even if what I want to happen in the rest of the trilogy doesn't happen, they're worth reading. SO, to that end, I will tell anyone looking for info that Tel gets romantically involved with a new man in this one, which, eh. I still want him to somehow end up with Vared. It was still quite good though.

In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune - DNF at pg 82

So funnily, we were at the bookstore the day I was about to start reading this, and my wife pointed out Ravensong (also by Klune) to me and said, "Do you have this one?" I made a face and said, "That's an older one of his books and I'm wary of his early work after that horrible Verania series. I don't think I've ever read an author as hit or miss as TJ Klune."

I wrote the above when I was 60 pages in and now I have officially DNFed this. Listen. You know how in Thor: Love and Thunder, Taika Waititi was clearly given free rein to do whatever he wanted, so all of his worst impulses made it to the final cut unchecked? Yeah. That's what this book is like.

Here's my Storygraph review: I see Klune is officially Too Big To Edit now. This book has exactly the same problem that his awful Verania series had—a joke that's funny at first but quickly grows tiresome when it's repeated five times per page. The emphasis on Victor's asexuality was also weird and read like Klune was just super proud of himself for writing an ace character.

Lion's Legacy by LC Rosen - 4.25/5 stars

Queer, YA Indiana Jones, but less #problematic. This book had some eerie similarities to my own archaeology adventure novel(s), which made me wonder half-seriously if I somehow know Lev Rosen? Anyway, I feared this would be very heavy-handed and not nuanced on archaeology's ethical dilemmas, since it's YA and also the current culture is to view said dilemmas as completely black and white with no nuance, but I was pleasantly surprised. It manages to examine that, queerness, and daddy issues, plus has time to be a genuinely fun and exciting adventure story. Highly recommend.

Too White to be Coloured, Too Coloured to be Black by Ismail Lagardien - 4/5 stars

I picked up this memoir in a bookstore at OR Tambo airport in Johannesburg as research for Six Places to Fall in Love, since Percy is coloured. A pretty brutal read, but good, and definitely good research. The author was a photographer and journalist through the most violent years of apartheid.

The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson - 5/5 stars

Two nonfiction books in a row?? This is the second book by Erik Larson I've read, the first being the excellent The Devil in the White City. I'm not, in general, all that interested in WWII when it comes to military history, but this book is about the day to day lives of Churchill and the people surrounding him (with brief stops to visit FDR and high-ranking Nazis sprinkled throughout). This is a very, very good book, and I recommend reading it if only as a reminder of the resilience and bravery of ordinary people under terrifying circumstances.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - 5/5 stars

Holy shit. Holy shit is this book good. Imagine the love child of Lost, Person of Interest, and Battlestar Galactica, but queer and with multiverse shenanigans thrown in.

I need everyone to read this book. Now. Yesterday. Get to it.

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the-king-andthe-lionheart · 9 months

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Hey! Can I ask you something about Jon’s parentage? Now the show just made it that Rhaegar annulled his marriage to Elia. That was dumb and executed soooo badly (what else is new about the show). But I am pretty sure in the books that won’t be the case. I mean I read that it IS possible to annul a marriage even said marriage had healthy heirs. But I am pretty sure Rhaegar can’t just get some random septon and then annul his marriage with Elia. So I think annulment is not going to be it (and it was obviously done in the show so the two hacks could be lazy and not really look into it). I saw you say that Rhaegar most likely took Lyanna as a second wife. Is that really possible? I know Aegon did it with his sister-wives but I haven’t really seen polygamous marriages in the Targaryen family since they established their kingdom. Still… that would make a LOT more sense and be a LOT better than just him annulling his marriage to Elia. Because even though they weren’t in love, Rhaegar was fond of Elia and they both loved their kids a lot. Also… if Jon is legitimate would he be the heir to the Targaryen dynasty or would it still be Dany? Because Aerys removed Rhaegar and his children from the line of succession and named Viserys his heir who named Dany his heir. Sure Aerys was insane but he was still the king which meant he could name Viserys his heir.

Hey @whitedragonwolf4961 !

I do think Rhaegar took Lyanna as a second wife because it makes no sense otherwise for the Kingsguard to be guarding Lyanna and Jon otherwise. If Jon had been illegitimate, then Viserys would have been heir due to how the succession works. So there must have been a reason for why the Kingsguard remained with Jon and Lyanna and fought to their deaths rather than follow Viserys and Daenerys to Essos.

As for annulment, as far as I know it's extremely difficult to get an annulment when there is proof that the marriage was consummated via legitimate children. The only real way a marriage like that could be annulled is through some sort of technicality, I believe. GRRM's annulment process does seem to reflect real world annulments in the late middle ages (I won't say that it was the same throughout the 1000 years that made up the European medieval era) and early Renaissance. Take King Henry VIII, when he was trying to annul his marriage to his first wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon. When he went about doing this, he used the technicality of Catherine being wed to his older brother, Arthur Tudor, when she was 15, because the Bible says not to lay with your brother's wife because it's akin to incest and thus will be cursed and remain childless. He used this to explain that this must be the reason he has not had a healthy, living legitimate son yet. Arthur died not long after that wedding though and Catherine claimed she remained a virgin and that the marriage was never consummated. Years later when Henry became king, he asked the Pope if he could wed Catherine because the marriage she had with Arthur wasn't consummated and the Pope issued a Papal dispensation allowing them to wed. Henry tried for years to annul his marriage to Catherine when she grew too old to give him an heir and he no longer loved her and I actually truly believe he believed he was being punished by God for his marriage. Finally, he separated from the church, created the Church of England, and granted his own annulment. When it came to Anne Boleyn, his second wife, she was accused of treason and shortly before her execution Henry annulled their marriage as well with kind of the same technicality since Anne's older sister, Mary Boleyn was the King's mistress before Henry fell for Anne.

Anyway, the point of me saying all of that is to say that in order for Rhaegar to get an annulment he'd have to find some sort of technicality according to the Faith, but even if he got an annulment it would mean that his children by Elia would become illegitimate because an annulment of a marriage is a claim that that marriage never happened in the first place. This to me, just doesn't make sense considering not long before Jon was conceived Rhaegar was proclaiming baby Aegon to be the Prince that was Promised which seems to me also indicates he meant Aegon to be his heir as his first born son. So I do think he took Lyanna as a second wife and in order to do this, all he would have had to do, from what I know, is just find a Septon who was sympathetic to him and willing to wed him to a second woman. Honestly I think that would have been the easy part. It would be the next part that would have been harder, trying to convince the realm to accept his having two wives while not having dragons. But considering Rhaegar was so well read I would find it hard to believe he didn't know about Jaehaerys' and Alysanne's campaign of Targaryen Exceptionalism and possibly had plans to put that into action once again. Like I don't think anyone who thinks Rhaegar took Lyanna as a second wife thinks the transition of it wouldn't be messy. And truthfully, any marriage between Rhaegar and Lyanna may have been an attempt to try to protect Lyanna and their unborn child before he went to war, and they didn't think about the consequences, but we just do not know as of yet. Hopefully we learn a lot more about their relationship in TWOW. :)

Honestly, at this point I don't think we should even try to say who is heir and who isn't because to the onlookers, it's Dany who has all of the trappings of Targaryen power. She has the silvery hair and the purple eyes of the Targaryen's and she has three dragons. No matter what she's going to be regarded as the true heir regardless of if she is by law IMO, and suffice it to say, not many people are going to believe Jon is a Targaryen so it wouldn't really matter if he was the true heir or not. Truthfully, it really is up to Dany on how high he rises or not in the Targaryen dynasty because it's Dany who is unmistakably Targaryen and it's Dany who may or may not allow Jon to try to claim one of her dragons, thus legitimizing him as a true Targaryen. So yeah, I don't think the technicalities of this really matter, especially when I don't think it's widely known that Aerys even disinherited Rhaegar. :)

#jon snow #rhaegar targaryen #lyanna stark #daenerys targaryen #rhaelya #asoiaf

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volfoss · 3 months

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Leaving it up to Tumblr to choose my next comic chronology in like... 2 months when I'm free of green lantern (2 months is not very generous I fear)

Reasoning under the cut :3 (very long)

Duke- pretty short (less than 200 issues), I really like his character from what I've seen of him. I think it will also be hell (as is the nature of most batman adjacent chronologies) but it'll be worth it... Nice and short one and also swag character

Jefferson- 1. Black lightning is very fun early on and 2. I've already made the spreadsheet so I just have to read it. He's just like... A very cool character and I like him a lot so far. I just am gods scaredest soldier with long chronos (which his isn't too bad but it's ALSO batman adjacent and those are so scary)

Barbara - my best friend Babs but also if I have to reread the killing joke I AM killing Alan Moore ok. In theory I love her SOOOO much. In practice I think the fact I'm having to keep a "how bad is the disability rep" counter next to each issue says a lot. Unfortunately. Also already made this spreadsheet but I think it would be a very bad and good time.

Clint- again in theory would be fun. He seems right up my alley but alas if I have to see Tony Stark I do fly into a blind rage. And unfortunately I think he appears a lot... And also unfortunately I think I would suffer due to blonde man disorder ok (as I always do)

Silhouette+Aaron- package deal bc they're siblings. I've already started this one and then stopped because whoever is writing the early stuff SHOULD go to hell for what they're doing. For those unfamiliar, silhouette is one of the only heroes I've ever seen using forearm crutches (pretty awesome) and her power is that she can kind of travel via shadow iirc? Which would be really cool if they didn't like... Make her lose all her clothes and mobility aids when she's doing this. Which is why I quit. But she's very very cool minus that (and in my mind... I know she's written better later on) and her brother is his own can of worms (in... Definitely a way). In theory tho I rly gotta get through their stuff

Theodore - first off: I am a FIEND for marvel 70s horror comics. Second off: he is better than swamp thing. Third off: his big red eyes. But to be serious though like .. the Steve Gerber and Gerry Conway era of man thing is SO good and like .. political in an interesting way. I just need motivation to get around to it. Also he's cutesy ok!!!

Jason Blood- another consequence of the 70s horror era fan but this guy has CRAZY lore. He's a medieval knight who got possessed by a demon thanks to Merlin and then he's just lived through the centuries and become an occult guy. Reasons why I stopped this one - sometimes old horror comics are bad and horrible. And also a like 60 issue Garth Ennis written series. But I do really wanna finish his stuff bc he's like .. DC's version of Hellstrom (which. Genuinely awesome character, if you're interested in older horror comics def check his original run out <- my plug for my silly husband hellstrom who sucks so much or whatever. He's rly good tho seriously)

Jennifer - I've already made her spreadsheet and started it but the writers are soooo fucking bad most of the time. It's actually horrific. Pros for her- pretty good character when written well (her hellcat series stuff was REALLY nice for me. But I'll always hype up patsy walker aka hellcat at any chance) cons for her- the misogyny ... And my reward for finishing it is watching the she hulk show. So take that as you will

Dracula- I started his stuff bc I was PROMISED Gerry Conway (who is like.. one of my top 5 writers. He does amazing old horror comics and made a bunch of very cool characters). And then he left like 2 issues in and it went downhill. Some of the same authors who did some of the good (other marvel vampire who is redacted for my own safety ok) issues did stuff for drac. In theory this would be silly campy 70s horror comics fun. In practice oh my god I am gaining new authors to hate so bad...

#twist rambles #comics posting #<- my tag for well... posting comics... bc i need one lol #me outting my scary comic taste...#sorry this is so long... if anyone reads my reasoning im so sorry bc thats like... 20 years long #sorry my tbr list is so long and scaryyyyy

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dietraumerei · 5 months

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2023 Book Reviews

Ok, let's see if Tumblr lets me post this (I think it shouldn't be too long?) -- it's all my book reviews from 2023! Entirely unedited and just copy-pasted in, but on the off chance anyone else is interested in it, here it is.

I finished Tolkien and the Great War which was like…¾ very good. The last quarter was a fairly inexplicable and incredibly boring discursion on the early versions of what would, essentially, become the Silmarillion. Although a lot of his early works and early conceptions of what the Middle Earth mythology would be do tie into his life and experiences as a very young man in a hellish situation, this was just like…a recitation. And it was followed by a brilliant analysis of why Tolkien turned to an older medieval storytelling form instead of the modernists that we think of when it comes to the usual WWI writing! It was so good! The good parts of this books are so good! I simply cannot bring myself to care about the phoneme shifts his languages undergo.

It did remind me that I want to return to Paul Fussell’s writing in 2024, so there is that?

Also Tolkien’s bitchy disapproval of the aesthetes is never not hilarious to me.

I finished Hogfather, about which I refuse to give any kind of review other than to say I’ve been reading it nearly every December for going on 23 years now, and it’s a perfect book and I love it.

I finished Congratulations, the Best is Over! and I feel some kinda way about it. I love R. Eric Thomas, but the longer-form essays are sometimes good and sometimes not so good? I didn’t dislike it at all, but I’m also looking forward to what he writes next, as I think every collection gets a little bit better.

I finished The Custom of the Country and oh my god I LOVED IT. The Age of Innocence is still my favorite Wharton because Ellen Olenska, but this was the book that made me scream the most. It’s funny in the way that reality TV is funny, in that you laugh because you are horrified. Undine Spragg is the most magnfiicent monster in literature. She’s horrible. I adore her. What a fabulous work of art/car crash this book is.

I finished the latest Perveen Mistry Mystery, The Mistress of Bhatia House and it was wonderful but oh my god it is STRESSFUL and kind of a hard read at times because everyone is just being a huge dick to each other. (Also there’s a pretty major plot point left totally un-tied-up at the end which is wild, but I guess it’ll get sorted next book?)

I finished Lolly Willowes which tbh I didn’t love as much as I hoped I would, but is a very excellent book with some mind-blowingly relatable bits and I enjoyed it immensely. I love Sylvia Townsend Warner but just need to go in without expectations and enjoy the rather lengthy ride. (For such a short book, it takes awhile for anything to happen.)

I read Dolls of Our Lives and the more I think about it the more I disliked it. I’m tired and lazy so here’s the review I sent a friend:

I finished Dolls of our Lives last night. I found it…okay. The editing is often bad which was depressing. It mostly felt really tonally inconsistent – they’re both historians and know their stuff, but keep putting in schticky little pop culture jokes that are a) not that funny? and b) just appear out of nowhere. If you’re going to look at AG through a pop culture lens, do it properly, don’t just randomly name-drop pop culture stuff. It occasionally dips below surface-level analysis, but it’s not super memorable and I don’t see it aging really well. (I’d LOVE someone to write an accessible book that actually does look at AG dolls both within their own cultural contexts and the context of when they were released, to say nothing of the interplay of doll + book, and maybe with an added chapter on how girls and dolls play, and what it meant to release a doll that wasn’t aspirational in some way, whether it be an adult like Barbie or a baby doll. Okay, maybe I want three books. But it feels like there’s a lot of richness to dig into, and I’ve yet to see anyone scrape more than the surface.) Anyway, 6/10, it was okay but the authors do themselves a disservice. There’s a small section at the end where they talk about themselves and how the podcast has changed them and how it came about and it’s the best bit of the book because it’s actually vulnerable and interesting, with some theory thrown in, and it’s barely shticky at all.

I will now add that I think it’ll age like milk, and I’m super disappointed.

In happier news, I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which is simply a masterpiece, and reading it was a deep and abiding pleasure. I know the twist and it still worked wonderfully on me – if you don’t know how it ends, I REALLY urge you not to spoil yourself and also to read it, for it’s wonderful and you will scream at the reveal.

I finished When the Angels Left the Old Country after @lesbrarian recommended it and it might be my favorite book I’ve read this year? Top five, certainly – it’s tense and beautiful and funny and full of love and very Jewish, and it just filled me with joy to read, even the sad parts. The comparisons to Good Omens are unavoidable, but really I find it a very different story in a lot of ways, although certainly with connections. I adored it, and it’s one of those books I can’t wait to re-read. Also every time I think about the angel too much I want to cry, but in a good way.

I also – finally, after many breaks – finished The Path the Power, the first volume of Caro’s LBJ biography. Oh my god, this book. THIS BOOK. The next time I do this I’m going to update every week on what I learned that week because there is just so much in this tome. I want to visit the Pedernales, but not in summer. The description of grass-growing was riveting. The descriptions of the lives of the farmwives before electrification was riveting (and horrific). The play-by-play for elections in the forties literally kept me up past my bedtime. And I have not even touched on Pappy O'Daniel (a real person!! who was apparently toned down CONSIDERABLY for O Brother Where Art Thou) or Lady Bird or how Caro more than once makes sure to mention that Johnson had a dumptruck ass.

Anyway, Lyndon was a vote-buying absolute fucking weirdo from birth and his mother was just as weird and his father was fascinating and I’m a little in love with Sam Rayburn. Do not let either the Old White Man History or the fact that this book is a fucking doorstop stop you, this is a masterpiece and I see why it won a Pulitzer. (whoops, looks like it was another volume that won the Pulitzer) I cannot wait to read the other volumes, which I estimate will take me about a year per book, but worth it!

I finished Menewood, about which I cannot possibly write intelligently. Hild was and is so important to me and I love that period in English history so, so much, and the immersiveness of the books, how heartbreaking and hard and wild and wonderful they are! It did push me to plan to get Hild in non-ebook format; they’re both absolute bricks so it’s easier to read the e-book but I found it super helpful to be able to easily refer to the family trees and maps and stuff.

I finished Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds and as a certified Groff stan I loved it. It’s gross and hard and has the most amazing end, and like Matrix I am excited to re-read it over and over and unlock more language and more beauty and just more.

I finished Here for It by R. Eric Thomas and loved it. It’s more serious and longer-form than what he writes for his newletter or Elle, and really benefits from it; he’s an incredibly talented storyteller. Not what I was expecting, but all the better for it.

I am DNF for A Lady for a Duke which I had such high hopes for! I don’t think it’s a bad book, but it is not a book for me, unfortunately.

I finished Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It and have a lot of feelings! I think it’s a really, really good book that’s respectful of fans and interesting, but it focuses almost solely on One Direction fandom, and I kind of wish that was clearer from the title and the summary? Like, no shade to that being the topic, but it feels like this is being sold as kind of a universal look at online fandom, and…it kinda isn’t?

(yes i’m salty there wasn’t anything about snapewives, yes this was somewhat soothed by chapters dedicated to L*rr*es and B*byg*te, YES I am afraid of 1D fangirls.)

I also read Phoebe’s Diary because I adore Phoebe Wahl and it was cool to read a middle-grade novel/graphic novel from her! (Most of the book is typeset, but there are lots of great little cartoons and drawings interspersed. I really, really liked it, although sometimes it’s a little hard to read because a) it is very realistic which means it’s like 95% about boys and boyfriends and that gets kind of old and b) it is very realistic and made me so unbelievably grateful that I never ever have to be 16 again. I would be extremely curious what a contemporary sixteen-year-old thought because it’s kind of a semi-period piece (set in 2005-6) and a few bits of it sort of…haven’t aged well from that period? (There’s one character who I think we’re meant to dislike but I love her so much because she reads aro-ace.) Anyway, I’m really glad I read it although at times it was painful, 10/10 do not miss being sixteen.

I haven’t finished anything, but I’m DNF for Sarah Vowell’s Lafayette in the Somewhat United States because I found it hard to follow and frankly incredibly boring. (I am going hard for the DNF’s these days, life is too short.)

omg so much! I read Learned by Heart in like three days, and it made my Anne Lister-loving heart sing. Truly, it broke my heart and it was so sweet and so happy and sad and just so good, I loved it and I’m hoping it triggers another bout of Lister hyperfixation.

I also read Agatha of Little Neon, which was likewise sad but sweet and happy and hopeful. It had a lot of feelings, but I loved it very, very much, and it just…made me feel good inside?

I was DNF on The Late Americans by about the sixth Sad Gay Man whose personality traits were that he was Sad and Gay and [insert one additional trait here that is shared with at least one other Sad Gay Man]. I love Brandon’s newsletter and his criticism; I did not like this novel.

I FINALLY finished Herzog! For a relatively short novel, it benefits from a slow reading – and I even basically skipped over the philosophical bits because my love for sad mid-century white men only goes so far. Anyway – a little to my surprise, I enormously enjoyed it. I don’t know that it’s, like, the greatest novel ever written and it’s edging into my ‘This got a Pulitzer? Really?’ pile, but a) I can see why it was groundbreaking and amazing and the Saga of the Everyman when it came out and b) honestly it’s really funny and interesting. It’s a little bit Odyssey-like, and Herzog is such a likeable schmuck, and just, yeah. It was great. It’s also a wonderful love letter to both the Berkshires and Chicago, and I loved the very quick Vineyard Havens moment.

Our Wives Under the Sea – a friend said this was the best book she’d read all summer, and I think it’s up there for me. It’s haunting and weird and beautiful and sad and I loved it very much.

Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community - hah, I just realized this was a gift from the friend who made the Our Wives rec! I’ve got a little theme of reading about how craft creates meaning in various communities/subcommunities, and this fits right in. It’s definitely an academic text, but I found it extremely accessible. It doesn’t present a very diverse portrait of Judaism – which the author absolutely admits to and apologizes for – but for what it is, it’s a very interesting and valuable text, and I’m glad I read it and it’s part of my collection now.

I finished Big Swiss which is one of those books I ought to hate, but I was…not necessarily loving it, but definitely fascinated as hell with it. It’s such a gross book, and Greta is so majestically self-destructive, I actually could not look away. Magnificent, 10/10 would watch barely-likeable protagonists fuck their own lives up again.

Also, not a book, but I finally read Blackmun’s dissent in DeShaney v. Winnebago County, a landmark case that essentially determined that the government is not actually expected to protect you. (Skip noted segregationist Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s ruling, but the Wikipedia article on the case breaks it down well.) You can read it here – scroll down to the very bottom, his dissent is only 4 paragraphs, and it is beautifully, wonderfully written. The ‘Poor Joshua!’ paragraph is the most famous, but I return again and again to the passage Justice Blackmun quotes from Stone’s Law, Psychiatry and Morality, and particularly the line “What is required of us is moral ambition.”

(I learned about the case and Blackmun’s dissent through the podcast 5-4, which is both excellent, and a good antidote to growing up in the shadow of the Warren Court, as I did. The Supreme Court has always sucked, it turns out. Seriously, it’s one of my favorite Supreme Court podcasts and I subscribe to, um, a lot.)

I read Brutes in about two sittings, it was so good. What a wonderful book about the horror of being a teenage girl, and I mean that in the best possible way. I loved it.

I finished, appropriately enough, Ned Boulting’s 1923 which is a beautiful book about the Tour de France and the nearly-forgotten Theo Beeckmann, and about the covid pandemic and history and tracking people and places down through time. I am an enormous fan of Ned (and David and Pete for any other Never Strays Far fans), and although this book very rarely pushes just a touch into bathos, it is mostly beautiful and wonderful and I’m glad he wrote it and I’m glad I read it.

(I finished it on June 30th, which is rather an important day in the book so I’m proud of my timing too.)

I also read A Half-Built Garden which I have a lot of very complex emotions about. I don’t know if I liked it, but I like how it made me react and think and feel and get grumpy. I’m not even sure it’s all that great, but it sure did make me think.

I finished Fintan O’Toole’s massive We Don’t Know Ourselves about Ireland in the last 50-odd years. It is very good, and sometimes very hard to read (he pulls no punches regarding either the IRA or the Christian Brothers) and I’m glad I read it.

I also finished Secrets Typed in Blood, the third of the Pentecost and Parker mysteries. It starts off the weakest (or maybe I was just in a Mood), but it is, as ever, a good, quick, satisfying mystery.

I read Elizabeth Kilcoyne’s Wake the Bones which I loved – I normally prefer a bit more gothic in my Southern horror, but the very end especially is the most incredible reveal. I could not stand the protagonist and I still liked the book, that’s how good it is.

I also read Scorched Grace, which is apparently first in a series about a crime-solving nun. It’s written as a hardboiled noir and, yep, that’s what it is, which means it’s also not good, but it’s supposed to be kind of hacky, so it works? It’s *gruesome*, but I liked it well enough, I think noir just really isn’t for me.

Oh, and I guess I’m on an Irish lit kick because I read Foster (more a novella than a novel), which I found pretty meh, tbh.

I keep starting new books and I’m now in the middle of at least two Giant Tomes, oops. I did finish Saltwater by Jessica Andrews which is better than the Kirkus review it got! It didn’t, like, change my life but it was good reliving being at Uni in the UK and also I enjoyed it, all I ask of a book.

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett: umpteenth re-read, a perfect book. I have beautiful editions of all the Tiffany books now, and hope to slowly make my way through them.

Red Shift by Alan Garner: I was heartened to learn that this is one of his most difficult books; I will be honest that I struggled, but it’s lingered in me, and I hope to re-read it many more times and keep untangling it. It is very, very good.

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford: I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, and it didn’t disappoint in the least. I’m fascinated by the Mitford sisters, and this is such a good peek into them.

It also really drives home how unutterably boring a landed-gentry upbringing was.

Trust by Hernan Diaz: ok you know how people win Oscars nominally for some meh role, but it’s clearly really for an older role that they were overlooked for? That is this book and the Pulitzer, when In the Distance probably should have won. It was fine, but I was kind of underwhelmed. Next time I’ll just read some Wharton.

DNF on Upright Women Wanted which I wanted to love very much and absolutely hated. Next time I’ll just re-read Whiskey When We’re Dry.

I did finish Murder Under Her Skin, the second of the Pentecost and Parker mysteries. It was great fun and a very good mystery and I am excited for the next one.

I finished All the Beauty in the World, the memoir of a Met Museum guard. I have an almost guilty fondness for the Met; it really should not exist, but I love it, and I loved reading this very much. I do miss easy access to world-class museums :/

I also read Michelle Tea’s Against Memoir, which has the best fucking essay of all time about the SF girl gang HAGS, but really I loved the whole thing. I’ve become an absolutely massive Michelle Tea fangirl and use her tarot book all the time and just ugh, I can’t wait to get more of her stuff.

I just finished Elie Mystal’s Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. Mystal is incredibly funny and smart and is an amazing Twitter follow if you are still on the bird hellsite. It is easy to think that funny writing is unserious, but this is deeply serious, and is a very good argument for pretty much a new Constitution that wasn’t written by enslavers. Also now I finally understand what substantive due process is, and what the difference is from procedural due process. (I also grasp the ninth and tenth amendments a little better too.) Anyway – really, if you are at all interesting in con law, or how much the Supreme Court sucks, or how broken a document the Constitution is while containing seeds of a better document, I deeply recommend this.

I finished The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows, and continue to very much enjoy Olivia Waite! This is *not* an nice, fizzy romance – the romance is, honestly, a pretty small part of the plot, and that’s not knocking it one bit. It’s queer and scary and very good. I definitely would be okay going back to a fluffy romance soon, but I’m glad I read this.

I also finished The Return of the King and words fail me, honestly. It’s been so long since I read the trilogy, but I truly cannot wait to re-read it; Tolkien is so much better than what came after, and it’s been good to re-learn that. The battle of Pelennor Fields is the scariest thing I’ve ever read. I have discovered four new emotions. I cried at the end. I mean, *you* sum that book up! (I have precisely zero desire to watch any of the new shows and whatever else comes out; the original trilogy was lightening in a bottle, and I will keep my memories warm and good, tbh.)

I finished Square Haunting, about women writers between the war and Mecklenburgh Square. It was quite good and interesting, and it was nice to build on the writers I already knew about (pretty much just Dorothy L. Sayers and Woolf), and learn about Eileen Power and just…that whole London set. I don’t know if tons of it will stick with me, but I’m pleased I read it.

Remembering Denny, by Calvin Trillin. It’s about a classmate of his from Yale, and about how people change and show different sides of themselves, about being gay pre-Stonewall and about the Silent Generation. It is very, very good. (Also FULL of people! Larry Kramer shows up at one point! And early on there’s some stuff that unexpectedly linked to my own life which was just WEIRD and kind of wonderful too.) I love Calvin Trillin so much.

Fortune Favors the Dead, an excellent little queer noir mystery, I am excited to read the next one.

The Hollow Places, I really love T. Kingfisher, love a good quick horror read. This hit a lot of the same beats as The Twisted Ones, which isn’t a strike against it, but I’m hoping for something new with the next book. Still, A++++++++ landscape horror.

I read Women Talking which was…fine? It was okay, I wasn’t blown away I have to say.

I read Hérnan Díaz’ In the Distance which I truly ought to have hated, and I don’t know if I *liked* it, but it’s going to stick with me a long time. It’s a Western, kind of. It’s dreamy, and violent, and lovely.

DNF on Charlie Brown’s America: the Popular Politics of Peanuts. There is a great book to be written on this topic. It is not this book, which quickly proved unreadable.

And I finished The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics which was fun and lovely and a nice fizzy romance, especially after In the Distance, lol. I’ll def read the next books in the series!

I have been reading at a good clip! Let’s see, I finished Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens which is about a ghost and George Sand and Chopin and making decisions and it was so joyful and so lovely and very queer. I re-read Lauren Groff’s Matrix and loved it even more the second time; I was able to snag a signed hardback copy from a friend and I’m delighted to own it because the book itself is beautiful, and it’s a dreamy read. And finally I read Calvin Trillin’s The Tummy Trilogy which is a collection of his three books that collect his food writings. These essays are glorious, hilarious, charming, a celebration of good food and good eating and regional food. I will say, though, that the final book is really by far the weakest, and I will skip it in future; the first two books are perfection. (FYI, if you do pick this up, and I really recommend it, note that he was writing in the 70′s and they are a bit of their time, but in a way that is good-humoured at least.) I’ve also got his Remembering Denny and I’m really excited to read that soon.

I finished Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and enormously enjoyed the first essay about Delany’s time in the porn theatres of Times Square. It’s character sketches and talking about how people meet and relate, and I loved it. The second essay is vastly denser and more theoretical, and I will be honest most of it went over my head. I liked most of what I grasped, although his plan for how to end catcalling of women is…certainly there.

I also read Kate Beaton’s Ducks in basically one sitting and it’s so, so good. It’s much sadder and harder than I thought it would be, but it’s worth reading.

I read Bad Land because Jonathan Raban died last week, and I am absolutely gutted. He was a magnificent writer and Bad Land was so good and so rich and a bit funny, and it got me up in my feelings as I read about him driving over the pass into Seattle, following the trail of Montanans, while I was flying into Seattle (and then going north through the rain). It’s so, so good, and I will miss Raban so much.

I also finished The Two Towers, about which I can only say that it’s kind of a weird bridge book, but it has some of the best and loveliest lines and also jesus I can’t write a review of Lord of the Rings, it holds up, ok?

I finished Bill Bryson’s 1927, his history of a fairly amazing year in American history. The occasional fatphobic jokes were…weird and not funny, but the man can write a good popular history book. It was my airport reading coming back from the east coast, and very good airport reading it was.

I finished Homewaters, which is a gorgeous book about the natural and human history of the Puget sound region, and I loved it. It’s not the fastest-paced book going, but it’s a fantastic history and goes into the biodiversity of the area, and I’m so glad I got it.

I also read A Prayer for the Crown-Shy in one sitting on an airplane. I did not glom onto the Monk and Robot books as much as I thought I would, but I liked this a lot, and found it really lovely. I hope very much that there will be others.

Finally, last night I finished reading Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages. Some chapters are better than others (or maybe I was just more awake?) – I found the chapters on Skara Brae and St. Kilda genuinely riveting, but still don’t quite remember what happened at Old Winchelsea, for example. The last chapter, on Capel Celyn, was startlingly hard to read; I have mostly left my time in Wales in the past. Not in a bad way, but there’s no point in it being in my daily life, but it was much more painful to read about my once-home than I thought it would be. (It’s also just an absolutely gutting story.)

#weekly update #sort of

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ladymorghul · 4 months

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Don’t you think fierce Alysm0nd shippers tend to overrate Alys, acting as if she was going to have some insane amount of screen time? Personally, I’m glad we’re going to get a glimpse of her early life, but she’s still just a side character. Personally, I find this ship problematic since I have read FnB. It's not the matter of shipping Helaem0nd or not. It's the matter of non-con elements and captor-pow dynamics. Moreover, I don’t buy the whole “Aemond left his family for Alys” discourse. Imo Aemond might have refused to follow Ser Criston and Daeron to KL and stayed in Harrenhall not because he suddenly stopped to gaf about his family but due to the fact he assumed Daemon would be somewhere in the Riverlands and wanted to meet him in battle? For both personal and strategic motives?

In addition, I don’t get it why ppl pit Alys against Helaena. Like alysm0nd will happen even if helaem0nd is confirmed. It could be interesting to watch how Aemond’s perception of love, as well as his attitude towards love and (for want of a better word) love interests changes as different experiences shape his personality. Plus, they're two different women, and the fact at some points on their life, they got invovled with the same guy desn't automatically make them idk? Natural born enemies?

I would also like to ask what's you opinion on kind of... "fetishizing" Alys' age and calling her a milf. Like she didn't even look her age, right? So where the hell this estimation of Aemond's sex*al preferences comes from? And why no one calls Melissandre a "milf", although she was literally centuries older than Stannis? Let alone the fact in the quasi-medieval Westeros ther was nothing unusual about women to becoming grandmoters in their early 30s.... Or even late 20s.! So, if we assume Alys wasn't a centuries old witch and just a skilled herbalist, we could risk saying she might have been only 7-9 years older than Aemond!

Sorry for the rant. I simply like the alysm0nd discussion on your blog. I will be honored if you decide to share your more of your thoughts on alysm0nd and Alys as such. BTW isn't it strange fans keep asking themselves if "Aemond wanted Alys with every fiber of his being", "loved her so much that he stopped to care about his family who never cared about him" BUT never seem to wonder if ALYS was really in the position to reciprocate Aemond's feelings?

right! the whole non con element to it and the power imbalance and the differences in life experiences and the implications for the greens just make me go nuh huh.

i think the milf thing is a bit much. i mean at some point it was the only thing attributed to al*s name. and i think it's related to how many alysm*nds reacted to alys' casting as "but she was supposed to have long black hair and be curvy and sexy"

i think calling alys a milf isn't bad per se, but the way some of her fans view/handle talking about her character in relation to her being a milf is sometimes a bit cartoonish... in their heads they combined their image of a milf + the sexy witch trope and bam, theyr kinda went err on al*s' casting

#asks #anti alysmond

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mermaidsirennikita · 5 months

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any age gap romances you can recommend? bonus points if they're historicals.

Sure!

Historicals:

After Dark with the Duke by Julie Anne Long--He's 42 and about to become a grandfather, she's 25. He's a stuff duke, she's an uptight opera singer, he has to make up for being mean to her by teaching her Italian and gets VERY hot and bothered when she's all "what's this mean because men are always saying it to me" and it's like "fuck me" lol.

What I Did for A Duke by Julie Anne Long--He's 39, she's 20, he attempts to seduce and ruin her as revenge against her brother, who fucked his fiancee.

My Dirty Duke by Joanna Shupe--She's 18-20, he's 43 and her dad's best friend and she wants him

Olivia and The Masked Duke (dad's friend, brat/brat tamer), Fiona and The Enigmatic Earl (marriage of convenience, they're both vigilantes), and Glory and The Master of Shadows (mentor/mentee with strong "teach me" vibes) by Grace Callaway all have 10-12 year age gaps. The Duke Who Knew Too Much has a similar mild age gap as well, I think.

The Arrow by Monica McCarty has a 10-12 year age gap and is a guardian/ward romance.

Shadowheart by Laura Kinsale has a 10-year gape; she's 17 and he's 27 because this is a medieval published in 2004, lol.

Joss and The Countess by S.M. LaViolette has a heroine who's 39 and a 28 year old heroine. Also servant/mistress of the house.

Meet Me in Monte Carlo by Cate C. Wells is technically a historical lol... Set in the 80s... It's a stern husband/wife who deserves better book with a 12 year gap.

In Which Matilda Halifax Learns the Value of Restraint by Alexandra Vasti has a 10-12 year gap, I think.

Duke of Pleasure by Elizabeth Hoyt has a 10-12 year age gap between a street rat girl and duke guy

Contemporary Age Gaps:

Mafia Mistress and Mafia Darling by Mila Finelli--Franke and Fausto.... are 18 and 38.... OH WELL. In his defense, he brought her over to Italy to marry his son. Shit just happened! Major books for the daddy kink crowd; she does call him paparino, because she looked it up on her phone, and he does do a full *GOES COMPLETELY STILL* when she springs it on him lol.

Mafia Madman by Mila Finelli--Enzo is 38 and Gia is 20. She does have self-acknowledged daddy kink, but they're much more on the good girlification side of things. "Make me your good girl" will live forever in my heart.

Mafia Virgin: Emma is 20 and Giacomo is I think... 36? PROGRESS!

It Seemed Like A Good Idea at The Time by Kylie Scott--Hero is 40, heroine is 25, but she attempted to seduce him when she turned 18 and her dad, his BFF, caught them. He actually wasn't going to sleep with her, so it made him really mad and now they're reunited 7 years later at her dad's wedding.

Act Your Age by Eve Dangerfield--Local 25 year old accidentally sucks her boss's dick (it was dark!) and finds someone she can unleash her daddy kink with. Casually!

Praise by Sara Cate--But of course! Heroine is early 20s, I think the hero is 20 years older. He's her ex boyfriend's dad, and she discovers she has a praise kink... with him.

Mercy by Sara Cate--Oh how the turn tables when the above hero's female bestie (34) begins domming his son (22).

Highest Bidder by Sara Cate--Another daddy kink heavy book, the hero is early 50s and the heroine is early 20s lol.

Sinner by Sierra Simone--Sean is a bad boy who ends up entangled with his best friend's little sister, because she wants to have sex with someone before she becomes A NUN. He's mid to late thirties, she's early twenties.

Salt in the Wound by Sierra Simone--Mark and Isolde are set up in an arranged engagement, but must fake that it's real for the members of his sex club. Naturally. I think the age gap is around 14ish years.

#romance novel blogging #romance novels #book recs #romance: age gap

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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Lena Dunham is adapting a story about a 14 year old girl being forced into marriage in 13th century England, an adaptation of Karen Cushman's 1994 Newbery medal winning children's novel Birdy. I am soooo looking forward to you choking on your coffee as you read this. NYT says she's writing with "medieval scholar Helen Castor"

Lena Dunham Channels a Voice of a (Different) Generation https://nyti.ms/3DOETvk

Okay, so, I read Catherine Called Birdy as a kid, and I absolutely LOVED it. There are some anachronistic bits that I realize more as an adult with a history PhD than I did back then, and it generally reflects the stage of medievalist/medieval-history accepted wisdom that was current in the 90s, not all of which is still the case today. So I am of in two minds about this. First of all, I'm not really sure that Dunham's style is going to work here, although she does apparently love the book and has tried for a long time to make this project. However, I.... will give her SOME kudos for this part:

A part of her, she said, might have wanted to dig deeper into the ugliness of medieval society in “Birdy” more than she ultimately did. Instead she was content with her protagonist’s more innocent viewpoint.

Yes, sigh, "ugliness of medieval society" as an unexamined cliche thrown in as a self-evident referent that everyone Just Knows, when will I be free. But I'm VERY glad that she's not trying to make a movie based on a YA book into Grimdark Game of Thrones, and add gratuitous sex, filth, and violence just so we Know It Is Medieval. Also in the book, Catherine (Birdy) never actually marries the horrible older suitor that her father is trying to match her off with. Instead the book ends with her engaged to his much nicer, younger, and better-looking son, an arrangement which she is perfectly happy with, so a) we never actually see her in an unwanted marriage, and b) and much of the book's narrative (and comedy) comes from her various attempts to foil the efforts of her doltish suitors. It isn't trying to necessarily reflect the complicated historical reality of medieval life (though Cushman's descriptions are vivid and she clearly did a lot of research), but pitched more as a fun book for teen girls that introduces them to the Middle Ages and Catherine herself as a lively, relatable protagonist. So if Dunham is in fact focusing on that aspect more than just the Filth And Rape Of It All, that is... good. (Yes, the bar is so low.)

I will, of course, reserve judgment until I hear/see how this material is in fact handled on screen, and whether the film is trying to be so Ironic and Hip that it doesn't succeed in actually conveying anything authentic, or includes the automatic assumption that the medieval era is only valid as a point of (disingenuous) comparison for the modern. Likewise, if people are interested in an actual scholarly take of what Catherine's life would be like (since the book is set in the 1290s), I would recommend Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270-1540, by Kim M. Philips. It covers exactly the time period in question, including the fact that young women most commonly married in their late teens and early-to-mid 20s. A betrothal at 14 would not be unheard of, but since a lot of works (including this one) are relying on the stereotype that girls got married at 12 and had endless babies starting at 13, it's useful as (ever) to point out. (The only actual example I can think of this is Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, who was married so young to assert a dynastic claim during the Wars of the Roses; Henry's birth caused lifelong complications and she had no more children. This was criticized even in contemporary records because it was not common or accepted practice, so yes.)

Anyway, in other words: there is some at least-potentially good stuff here, and some "well I'm gonna have to wait and see how that goes" stuff. I will at least give Dunham credit for not trying to make the stereotypical Filth and Rape Middle Ages movie, and if she sticks to the book, that's not supposed to be any part of it. So, yeah.

#artielu #ask #history #medieval history #women in history

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faintingheroine · 1 year

Text

WUTHERING HEIGHTS 1967

Episode 1. AN END TO CHILDHOOD

First of all, what a great title for the first episode of an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Magnificent, perfect, genius 💯

There isn’t a theme music. The nature sounds, especially the sounds of the beck serve as the opening. Again a very inspired choice. My impression of this adaptation is very positive so far.

We start with Mr. Earnshaw carrying the child Heathcliff on the moors to the sounds of the rough wind. This adaptation evidently doesn’t have Lockwood. It is a pity, but it is not a deal-breaker for me in the way not including the second generation is.

We see Hindley and Cathy waiting for their father at the window

It is atmospheric and nice considering the centrality of windows to the imagery of Wuthering Heights.

The interior of Wuthering Heights is nice and true to the book I think, it has a very Medieval feel to it.

Cathy is shouting that her father has come and her mother scolds her saying that she is a “wicked child”. The spiritedness of Cathy’s character is established early on. Cathy is older than the 6-year-old she is supposed to be in this scene.

Cathy is the one who opens the door to her father and effectively to Heathcliff.

Nelly is played by a teenager 🥳🎉. She is curiously watching what’s going on as Mr. Earnshaw arrives and then she is scolded and taken to the kitchen by her mother. Now I like the exclusion of Lockwood, it is like we are seeing the real story rather than one through Nelly’s filter. Is it too early to say that this is my favorite adaptation of Wuthering Heights? Probably.

Joseph is muttering prayers in the background.

The clothing seems 18th century. Again: 💯

This is the most characterized Mrs. Earnshaw I have seen maybe with the exception of the 1970 version. She comes off as both reasonable and bigoted and overly dramatic - which is about right. And she is not old, she is certainly younger than her husband and calls him Mr. Earnshaw (iirc in the book Mrs. Linton called her husband “Linton”). She comes off as dramatic and a “nag” because she has no authority in the household. Mr. Earnshaw shuts her down like she herself attempts to shut down her daughter Cathy. We learn that she is “ailing”, which is a nice addition considering that she will soon die.

Heathcliff speaks in another tongue and Mr. Earnshaw says that it is “Romani”. This is my favorite adaptation so far.

Nelly’s mother makes a face at Joseph who is still muttering prayers in the background.

Mrs. Earnshaw calls Heathcliff a “stray heathen”.

Hindley is the one who is hit by his father rather than Cathy here. This Cathy is more cunning and slaps Heathcliff without her father’s looking. The 6-year-old Cathy of the book didn’t have this restraint.

Mrs. Earnshaw takes brief offense that he is naming the boy after their dead son, but there is not much she can do. The power dynamic between the couple is well-conveyed and you do feel for her a bit.

Nelly’s mother washes Heathcliff rather than Nelly herself.

We have a scene of Hindley and Cathy both bullying Heathcliff on the moors. The three characters disappear for a moment and then climb a hill on horseback as adults. It is too early to make them teenagers or adults, but it is a nice transition.

Ian McShane who plays Heathcliff is white, but he has darker features than other white Heathcliffs and this miniseries is in black and white. He looks darker than the Earnshaw siblings and that coupled with the fact that he explicitly spoke Romani on his arrival makes this passable enough for me. Better than in other versions at the very least.

Angela Scoular who plays both Catherines is a good choice. She is very beautiful but not in a Victoria’s Secret way, in an English girl next door kind of way. And unlike Juliette Binoche she does look like a different person in a blonde wig.

Hindley is reasonably handsome, but in a villainous way that is hard to describe. All in all I like the casting so far.

Hindley and Cathy arrive at a lesson with the curate while Heathcliff wanders around on the moors because his horse went lame. Mr. Earnshaw scolds his children for arriving at the lesson late and compares them unfavorably with the Linton children who pay attention to their lessons and respect their elders.

It is still Cathy and Hindley vs Heathcliff which is a very interesting choice that is not true to the book. It is not the book Wuthering Heights where Cathy and Heathcliff have an unbreakable childhood bond, but as an alternative telling, I like it.

Mr. Earnshaw asks at the lesson where Heathcliff is. Hindley says that Heathcliff’s horse went lame and that he should have had a better judgment with horses considering that he is a “gypsy”, which is a reference to a common stereotype about Romani people.

Mr. Earnshaw wants to beat Hindley with his stick for his bullying of Heathcliff but Hindley runs away and Mr. Earnshaw can’t do it as he lost his power as an older man.

This is an interesting adaptation: In every aspect except Cathy and Heathcliff’s dynamic it is true to the book, down to the very minor details. But for some reason it changed the Cathy-Heathcliff dynamic.

Mr. Earnshaw is very well-characterized. He wants to be charitable but his biological children are unmanageable and mistreat Heathcliff and therefore he is angry. He calls his adopted son Heathcliff “miserable waif”, it is clear that he is a charity case, albeit a favored one. Mrs. Earnshaw has already died at this point and Mr. Earnshaw decides to send Hindley away because he can’t deal with his jealousy and spite towards Heathcliff.

Cathy seems fonder of her brother than Heathcliff at this point, but she is at least mischievous and wild, which is preferable to her being the angelic companion of Heathcliff. At least she retained her spirit.

Heathcliff and Hindley enact the horse exchange scene at the stable but their witness is Cathy rather than Nelly. Heathcliff calls Mr. Earnshaw “father” in dialogue which he never did in the book.

Racism towards Heathcliff is very emphasized. He is constantly called “gypsy”.

Oh a twist!!!!

Cathy is secretly Heathcliff’s friend but she was pretending to be on Hindley’s side, or at least was sympathetic to Hindley’s point of view as well, which is reasonable, we don’t have an indication in the book that Cathy and Hindley clashed before him being sent to college. Here she was the one who told Heathcliff to threaten Hindley with telling Mr. Earnshaw everything and to get his horse. Cathy is controlling Heathcliff’s actions. Wow! Interesting!

I have been duped by a Wuthering Heights adaptation made in 1967! I like that!

Cathy and Heathcliff play at the beck together and laugh. They are both very attractive and have chemistry.

At the house Cathy randomly opens the window and feels the wind. Mr. Earnshaw and Nelly scold her.

Cathy is the wild one, Heathcliff is quite calm by comparison.

Mr. Earnshaw asks Cathy why she can’t be like Heathcliff, he tells that Heathcliff is not of his blood but at least he obeys him. Cathy retorts that Heathcliff does what Mr. Earnshaw wants only when it suits him but does whatever Cathy wants even if he does not care to do it. Mr. Earnshaw gets a little in return for his kindness and Cathy gets whatever she wants and she can be as cruel as she pleases. Cathy says these things very playfully and Heathcliff listens to it and laughs, but still this dialogue drives our attention to the fact that the Earnshaw family treats Heathcliff a bit like a pet.

Nelly scolds Cathy for talking back to her ailing father and Cathy playfully pinches Nelly and mockingly asks her father’s forgiveness.

All of the iconic dialogue between Cathy and her father (“your mother and I shall rue that we ever reared thee”; “- Why can’t thou always be a good lass Cathy? - Why can’t you always be a good man father?”) are retained.

Mr. Earnshaw dies, Frances and Hindley arrive. Frances is presented as warm-hearted but quite silly. She first mistakes Nelly for Hindley’s sister. Based on Nelly’s facial reaction to her presence and the news of their marriage, the adaptation might be hinting at the “Nelly had a crush on Hindley” theory but it is very subtle.

A bunch of servants are very cruelly gossiping about Frances at the kitchen. Maybe this is the reason why the servants will be banished from the “house” with Frances’s arrival. I like these additions!

Meanwhile Hindley banishes Heathcliff to the fields and makes him a servant. Heathcliff is quite nice so far, and I must say that he comes off as less intelligent than his book counterpart.

Heathcliff arrives at the kitchen and servants stop gossiping and look at him curiously. A good illustration of Heathcliff’s demotion of status.

Heathcliff says that he wants to leave the house (he is clearly older than the 13-year-old Heathcliff in the book) but Cathy orders him to stay. This adaptation really makes it clear that it is Cathy who is the dominant one in the relationship, which I like.

Next, Cathy and Heathcliff frolic on the moors when he takes a respite from working. Because of the way they act in this scene, I think this adaptation would benefit from not having adult actors for these scenes (let’s be real, every Wuthering Heights adaptation would benefit from that).

They spy at Thrushcross Grange, Edgar is teasing Isabella and Isabella is shouting at him. Interesting?

The Lintons are blond which is good.

Cathy is bitten by Skulker, Heathcliff is panicked and angry, Mr. Linton threatens to send him to the gallows etc. This scene is accurate to the book. Mr. Linton comes off not as silly but as genuinely threatening, which I like.

So far I would say the weakest thing about this adaptation is Heathcliff. He comes off as not very intelligent? He comes off as Cathy Linton’s perception of Hareton Earnshaw more or less. Which is a huge departure from the book. The 13-year-old Heathcliff from the book was intelligent, perceptive, sarcastic, self-aware. Which made it all the more ridiculous that all the racists around him treated him like he is an animal. This much older Heathcliff comes off as a bit Tarzan-like, which is NOT book’s Heathcliff. Heck, in this adaptation even threatening Hindley is Cathy’s idea! All of Heathcliff’s charisma and initiative is gone! They really went with the “Heathcliff as Cathy’s whip” theory except this adaptation precedes that piece of literary criticism by a decade. The fact that this Heathcliff does not relate this episode to Nelly also hurts his characterization. That was where we had first heard from Heathcliff at length and for the first time saw how intelligent and perceptive and vengeful he is.

Catherine returns to Wuthering Heights after five weeks, the same interaction in the book about Heathcliff being dirty takes place. After Heathcliff gets offended and leaves, Hindley laughs and says “it is learning its place at last”. He calls him “it” which is certainly offensive and dehumanizing when it is used for a young man.

I really like this Hindley’s performance.

Heathcliff says to Nelly “she is not my Cathy, she prefers Lintons” or something like that. I think it is a bit too early for him to say that.

Nelly and Heathcliff have the “Emperor of China” exchange. It is quite well-done. I like Nelly’s face while she is saying it. This Nelly is a fairly minor character but I think the actress conveyed her latent resentment well and I liked her report with Heathcliff.

Christmas Day comes (in this adaptation for some reason the above exchange happens before the Christmas Day) and they did convey it with snow and some decorations.

Edgar is dressed fancier than Hindley which I like. And Heathcliff actually throws the applesauce at his clothes rather than to his face.

Heathcliff has the “God won’t have the satisfaction that I will” exchange with Cathy instead of Nelly which I don’t like. They at least had the decency to have Cathy say “the curate says it is for God to punish wicked people” rather than have her say it directly. Still I don’t understand why they made this choice when they have already established a dynamic between Heathcliff and Nelly. Heathcliff says his lines in this scene joyfully and full of hope, which makes it even more grotesque than in the book where he said it grimly. His wish for revenge is juxtaposed with the sounds of the Gimmerton band’s music and the sound of the wind.

Hareton’s birth and Frances’s death are skipped and we move on to the day of Edgar’s proposal. This adaptation definitely has the second generation so I am guessing that Hareton will be born during Heathcliff’s absence. I don’t like this change, but it is okay I guess?

Nelly is spinning when Edgar arrives, which I like. She openly tells Cathy that Hindley ordered her to make a third party to Edgar Linton’s visits to Cathy.

Cathy pinches Nelly which was a habit of hers established early on. Nelly says to her that her father was right to call her wicked. Cathy snaps. She slaps Edgar who tries to restrain her. So we have this scene which if I recall correctly most adaptations don’t really have?

Edgar leaves after this and doesn’t return that day. It turns out he had already proposed to Cathy but she hadn’t given him an answer yet, but she intends to say yes. So, the “I am Heathcliff” speech happens before she had officially accepted Edgar’s marriage proposal, which makes Heathcliff running away make less sense. He could have tried to talk with her.

We see Heathcliff’s sad facial reactions while Cathy is talking to Nelly which is a creative decision.

After Cathy delivers her little “I love Edgar” speech, Nelly asks “what about Heathcliff?”. Nelly is the one who brings Heathcliff to the conversation, she is a clear Cathcliff shipper here.

Heathcliff is already on his way to the door while she is saying “it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff”, which makes it more realistic for him to not hear the “I am Heathcliff” part.

Cathy delivers the “I am Heathcliff” part very enthusiastically and earnestly. She even hugs Nelly after delivering it. I like it.

She also seems genuinely naive about the contradiction between her two loves. The book Cathy was more aware of the romantic nature of her and Heathcliff’s relationship. Nelly was the one who brought up Heathcliff first here in this interaction.

The episode ends with Heathcliff leaving and taking one last look at Wuthering Heights. I like it, it is foreboding, and nicely parallels the first scene of the episode being Mr. Earnshaw arriving with Heathcliff.

The credits appear to the sounds of the wind.

End of Episode 1

This adaptation is far from flawless. Its Heathcliff is all wrong, which is sad because I think the casting is good in theory: Ian McShane looks more like Heathcliff than most and has reasonable chemistry with Angela Scoular. But unfortunately he was clearly directed to play Heathcliff as a bit dumb which I don’t like at all.

Edgar Linton is also too low profile; yes he is supposed to be at this point in the book but he is too unremarkable even by that standard, one of the weakest Edgars I have seen so far.

This adaptation is also very much a European TV production from 1967. Its visual and audio quality are not stellar.

I like its general aesthetics, the sets and the costuming, and it conveys the natural setting and the Gimmerton community well, but it is really lacking in Gothic atmosphere so far.

Despite this, I think that this is an underrated adaptation and is better than most adaptations of the book.

It is not as faithful to the book as I would guess it to be, it is certainly not the 1978 version. It is more daring, is a more creative interpretation. This I think is to its advantage, it can surprise the viewer at turns and is a different experience from the book. It makes substantial changes, but none of them are radical changes, they are in keeping with the book’s spirit. Outside of Heathcliff’s unfortunate characterization and the postponing of Hareton’s birth I liked the changes and its interpretation of the events.

I like that it frames the story as one of revenge, as is evident from the episode titles (which are still great btw).

The first scene of this adaptation was excellent: It had atmosphere, and it conveyed the existing dynamics at Wuthering Heights beautifully. Unfortunately, the rest of the episode didn’t live up to that scene.

Still the characters in that scene, the Earnshaws and Nelly are the strongest ones in this adaptation so far. Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw, Hindley, Cathy and Nelly are all well-portrayed in this adaptation.

I will review the second episode tomorrow.

#wuthering heights #wuthering heights 1967 #wuthering heights adaptations

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theanimeview · 1 year

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Source: https://tapas.io/series/the-return-of-the-8th-class-mage/info

By: Peggy Sue Wood | @pswediting

I love Middle Age-inspired stories, mostly because of their interpretation and integration of archetypal ideas regarding what it means to be a King, a Knight, or a Noble. It is something I’ve talked about several times on our blog and something I will undoubtedly continue to examine moving forward. However, rarely have I seen an address to the archetype of a mage, despite so many magic-class central or main characters in these medieval-inspired works. At least, that was until I read The Return of the 8th Class Mage, which is currently available on Tapas.

For those who haven’t read it, or just need a refresher, the story follows Ian Page–the highest mage in all the kingdom and world as we know it. In this particular story, mages can be born in any class, but once identified enter the status of a “mage” within their respective kingdom and must serve their kingdom in a way–whether by becoming a family’s mage, the kingdom’s mage, or a mage of the magic tower.

Source: The Return of the 8th Class Mage, Chapter 76

Ian, as a high-class magician, was a mage of the magic tower but also one that served under a specific royal, Prince and later King Ragnar Greenriver. Ian and Ragnar were friends, the best of friends. Ian supported Prince Ragnar, and it was this support that aided the most in Ragnar becoming the King.

After Ragnar becomes King, Ian says he wants to retire and hide away.

Over a short period of time, Ragnar is convinced by those around him that Ian could become a threat, and so–much to both their dismay–Ragnar betrays Ian’s trust and friendship and kills his closest friend. In a last-minute effort to preserve his life, Ian activates a spell that transmigrates him back in time to the point of him becoming a mage.

Thus begins a story of changing allegiances and setting things down a better path that is so typical of these types of stories. Now, controversy, I actually think that Ragnar probably would have been a better King over the first prince (his brother) who eventually takes the throne, as nothing in the story really made it seem like Ragnar was a bad King to the people. There was war, and other things, but ultimately he seems like a well-intentioned ruler looking to expand his borders. Rather than a bad King, it seemed like Ragnar was one who was not well-liked by those in the palace and potentially one whose early mistakes would have been avoided had he been more welcomed by his family and had he not been forced to rely on outside and corrupted help. If anything, the first prince–who fails to see the worth and merit in handling the power and responsibility of the crown–was the least deserving of becoming the King (even the princess would have been better).

Source: https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2018/12/wizardry-prophecy-and-the-origins-of-merlin/

Who or what is the archetype of the modern mage?

Magic and magicians have been around for a long time, at least in a storytelling sense. For example, in Norse mythology, Odin was a powerful sorcerer and shapeshifter who possessed great knowledge and wisdom. In Greek mythology, the god Hermes was a messenger and trickster who was also associated with magic and alchemy. However, in a contemporary lens, we might think of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gandalf and Saruman, elders who possess both magical abilities and great wisdom. We may also think of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which features wizards and witches of varied magical abilities and personalities, though notably the professors–older, wiser, and sometimes mischievous magicians that they are–would probably align more with the image of a mage or wizard in our minds. This stems from what can be considered the archetype of the modern mage: Merlin.

The exact origins of Merlin, as with other Arthurian characters of legend, is unclear, and there are many different versions of his story. Still, from the many tales he appears in, we can piece together that he is often able to perform magical feats and portrayed as a wise and powerful advisor who helps win battles and makes important decisions. He is also sometimes shown as a flawed character with a dark and tragic backstory.

When we think of a wizard, what often comes to mind is that Merlin-like figure of a wise old man with magical abilities. We think of medieval-inspired robes as their daily garb and of one with a common appearance that has an enduring personality. Sometimes the Mage play pranks. Sometimes, the Mage acts like a cranky old fellow who is leading you to the answer you seek by unusual means, and often the Mage is a storyteller. The Mage is traditionally a powerful influence and closely tied to the advisory position of a King. This traditional image takes inspiration from older examples but is commonly associated with the image of Merlin.

The Mage, as an archetype, is not subservient to the King though he is of a lower or unknown class status. Rather than subservient, the Mage is much more powerful on an individual level and othered because of it. Due to such great power, it is truly only a King that could be the Mage’s friend since only a King would have such great power and responsibility to hold because of their position. Unlike the King or a Knight, where the power comes from the people and invested interest of those people in that person’s bloodline or personhood, the Mage is one who has simply been gifted power by an otherworldly source and will not lose that power if expectations of the people are not upheld.

The Mage is different from the Knight too because he is not expected to be loyal to the King. In fact, the Mage may be suspected of disloyalty at all times because of his great power as an individual and because they have chosen to give loyalty without the same expectation of needing to keep their word with the consequences of losing their life or reputation by not keeping to said promises.

For further context, the Knight’s archetype in fiction is expected to be loyal to their lord even at the cost of their own life. This loyalty is not just a matter of personal honor, but it is also seen as essential for maintaining order and stability in the feudal society of the Middle Ages. When a knight betrays their lord or breaks their oath, they not only lose their honor and reputation, but they also jeopardize the stability and security of the entire feudal system. As such, a Knight’s betrayal is often portrayed as a catastrophic event that leads to chaos and destruction, potentially to the extent that it could cause the downfall of a country. However, a Mage’s influences, which are also large and potentially catastrophic, usually ends up working for the best because magic makes it so or because they have otherworldly wisdom and insight into the future.

In a Knight’s story, loyalty and betrayal can become central themes but are perhaps even more impactful in a Mage’s story because it is much easier to resonate with modern audiences who typically have more loyalty to their family and friends–all of whom may be of a higher or lower social and economic status–than to one’s employer (though that is not always the case).

Source: https://return-of-the-8th-class-mage.fandom.com/wiki/Ian_Page?file=Hamon.png

It is a complicated set of ideas, but one that the creator, Ryu song (류송) and Tess, completes beautifully. In The Return of the 8th Class Mage, Ian upholds that old archetype. Even after the betrayal, he never pledges support to another King candidate even though he does end up helping the first prince take the throne.

Ian keeps his word, even to the promises made in his past life, though he also pursues his own interests. He does, with the past-life approval of Ragnar, gain his revenge and won’t forgive Ragnar, which lends to the continued and lasting ideas of magic wherein the choices you make, intended or not, maintain an impact.

Of the many ways friendship and betrayal can be explored in fiction, the focus this story has on the betrayal itself, the impact it has on the characters involved whether they know it or not, and the process of seeking revenge for the betrayal rather than repairing a damaged friendship makes this particular Mage a truly a fantastic embodiment of Merlin’s archetype brought to a modern lens. Ian Page, similar to Merlin, is not really a servant to the King but an equal friend of a lower status. He is the compelling main character of his own story, one who must deal with the responsibility of his otherworldly powers and wisdom regarding future events due to past experiences along with their impact. He is one that must balance his personal interests with living in a society that demands personal wants be put aside for the greater good or for the personal desires of another. This is what makes a mage according to The Return of the 8th Class Mage, and I can’t help but love it!

#the return of the 8th class mage #the return of the eighth class mage #the mage #mage #analysis #review

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autumnbrambleagain · 2 years

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Morrowind has had a really weird modding history. In its early days, Morrowind was one of the few only fantasy games that had open, accessible modding to the degree that it had. No, let’s be honest: it, along with Neverwinter Nights, was one of the only 2 fantasy games that had any real meaningfully accessible modding whatsoever.

It also came out about the same time as Lord of the Rings, and it attracted a lot of what is a dying genre--the wicca-in-aesthetics, the kind of people who have little fairy statues all around the house, who are dragon otherkins but in the 80s understanding of dragons, people who have “winsome dragon statues” made of cheap resin sitting on their computer desks, who go to renaissance faires in vaguely-medieval dresses and buy lots of incense and quote Monty Python often.

No judgements, this is the kind of person I wanted to grow up to be as a kid and I’m deeply disappointed we never made it to that point but life kind of sucks forever, so whatever! Except for the quoting Monty Python part, we have an ENTIRE OTHER rant saved up for that.

Our point we’re trying to make: Morrowind has a very strong, very cohesive setting and aesthetic. Compared to stuff like Ultima, which had a lot of “lore” but was ultimately still very much... very much generic fantasy by comparison? Morrowind takes place in a weird place undergoing colonization, but also trying itself to execute colonization/slavery on OTHERS too.

A place with a deeply entrenched religion, a uniquely bizarre culture, it was, at the time, absolutely mindblowing to see something BESPOKE in a fantasy game when the alternative was, always, remixes of the same handful of generic Tolkein-derived nothings.

Not to say that Morrowind’s setting is honestly like, super great or mindbreaking--it was great in the CONTEXT relative to its contemporaries. Morrowind’s setting is honestly kind of bland in a lot of ways to me these days and it’s why I fuck around in my own settings so much, even if you don’t get to see very much of it. You dont’ see us playing Morrowind either not everything has to be shared with you.

ANYWAY.

Our point: Bethesda, back when it had some good things still in it, went “Here’s this bizarre fucking fantasy setting, it’s weird as fuck and has a ton of internal contexts and consistencies.”

And the modding community went “Nice, I want to put Drow in.” Some of them went as far as “dark elf” and went “Ah, the Dunmer must be like the Drow, they probably have the same culture.” Some modders went “neat, a fantasy game, here’s my mod that adds a pixie who runs a shop in Balmora!”

You had people like Sabregirl who was putting in races from their original setting so you had fox people and bird-dragons with dialogue about their space civilization. You had moogles. You had Lord of the Rings.

People just layered their generic fantasy onto Morrowind, never engaging with its weird setting, and it was wild. It was weird. It was all there--the setting was waiting to be explored, and people just wanted... here’s my magic unicorn elf dragon fantasy girl with huge eyes and dragonfly wings :3 in this... setting about racism, xenophobia, and lies.

it was great.

One of the best examples of this is the venerable and amazing Uvirith’s Legacy+Building up Uvirith’s Legacy. It’s a great, great fucking “house” mod that expands Tel Uvirith from a shitty little tower into an entire expansion pack with dozens of quests, very minor city management mechanics, a bunch of fun new characters.

Stuporstar made it out of several previous Uvirith mods and did a lot of work bringing it up to code as something new and great and all their own (although I also gutted it and redecorated the interior to suit my moods better but that’s Morrowind baybey)

And it, for the most part, does engage with the actual Morrowind of Morrowind--but it has a TON of holdovers of this older, sillier Morrowind, and I think it’s a great window into it.

It lets you be a proper Telvanni--here’s your tower, here are the slaves you hold in the basement and they’re trying to escape so you chase them down and catch them. This slave complains and makes it clear you are an absolute fucking bastard and you can, you know, free her, or you can take her out into the Molag Amur and murder her.

Your head-of-guard staff is a torture fetishist and you have a prison of prisoners you can exploit. Your library has a skeleton who lives in it. There’s a lich tomb deep underground you can break into and find the original Uvirith and you can fucking just kill him fuck that guy you’re cooler than he is. It’s very “You’re a Telvanni, they’re basically immoral, immortal assholes.”

But it also has things like an ogrim named Cartman because he’s FAT XD

It has, I think it’s a holdover from the earliest versions of the mod, a companion named: Sara N’Trasha.

Who is a Dunmer Ashlander from a thousand years ago.

Wearing modern Orcish armor.

Now, see, Dunmer Ashlander culture has names with phonemes like “Ashamal Abaddamasad” and “Ahhe-Ari Zainsumani”

This character is named Sara N’Trasha.

Sara is a Bretonic name--probably the least interesting of TES’ fantasy is a place literally called Bretony, and yes, someone named “Sara” would be from Brettony. N’Trasha... oh boy. The X’Y structure is seen in Khajiiti names, but N’ isn’t a valid prefix, at least in the time of Morrowind. Trasha also isn’t really a valid Khajiit name--Rasha is, but a “tr” sound for a female is usually followed by softer, vowel-heavy syllables. Rasha would be a male name, anyway. female names are more like “Ahnassi” “Tsrazami” etc.

Also Orc armor--I guess maybe she looted it from an Orc warrior during the 1st era wars I guess? I don’t know man.

But this is my favorite example of the complete disinterest in engaging with the setting in early Morrowind modding. They saw characters sometimes had names with apostrophes in them. They knew there were guys called Ashlanders.

Sara N’Trasha.

Stuporstar has talked about updating the mod and I think renaming Sara was on the docket, but I haven’t seen much word of any updates in years and I’m strongly tempted to just dig around in the mod and rename her myself so it doesn’t bother me as much, el oh el.

But my point is, it’s, it’s an incredible example of the complete lack of interest in very early era Morrowind modding to actually engage with the setting of the thing you’re putting so much work into. It’s mindblowing.

We have a bit of the opposite problem of that in the modern era, I think.

Uvirith’s Legacy has a bit of that, too, and it’s a good intro to this other problem: trying to alter the vanilla game to fit a plothole you yourself created.

UL also adds magic pages that summon a daedra when you interact with it. At some point, whichever modder (stuporstar or someone else??) started it went “How can Gothren have permanantly summoned Daedra when YOU the player CAN’T?”

And invented the pages as the way to summon daedra, and wrote a bunch of dialogue where oh, of course Gothren used these magic pages to summon them permanently.

Except. Except that wasn’t a plothole. We know that there are rituals that bind daedra long-term, but for gameplay reasons the player only ever gets short-term summons. It’s an example of inventing a plothole and trying to fix it.

I feel like we’re dangerously close to seeing that with Tamriel Rebuilt.

Tamriel Rebuilt’s original inception of the Telvanni lands has a lot of the touches of this old philosphy. The silly, Python-esque, do-your-own-thing stuff. There’s an edgelordy Morag Tong base where they go “Don’t kill anyone at night... a true assassin does it in the daylight... watch me cut this hair in half with a knife now.”

And they’re planning on going back to the Telvanni zones and redoing them! That’s great.

But also like, I had a look again at their design documents and on the docket is: demoting Archmagister Gothren to a Wizard or whatever. Why? Because they wrote DIFFERENT lore where there’s an even older COOLER Telvanni wizard, who fits the Telvanni lore better, and now he’s the archmagister.

They are now at the point of looking at Morrowind’s original lore and setting and going “not good enough” which is, which is fine, Morrowind is lacking in a lot of ways. Gothren is a pushover baby bitch, unless you’re using MDMD, in which case no I’m sorry I made him so he can fuck you up rightly. But he’s a boring nothingburger, that’s true, sure.

But now we have Tamriel Rebuilt considering completely redoing House Telvanni on the mainland too--which would make every single Telvanni mod that isn’t updated to match the new improved TR lore out of date.

That’s mostly because they invented an OC and to fix the plot holes their own invention caused, want to alter all of the original Morrowind, rather than fitting TR to fit the vanilla.

Thankfully they seem to be backtracking Mouths being mind-wiped mind-clones of the Wizards which they invented to fix a problem they themselves also invented--my point! My point.

We now have mods taking the lore more seriously than the base game, and creating plotholes in the opposite direction--it now makes the original game look unimaginative, so the original game is going to need to be heavily modified to fit the new TR stuff.

But there’s so many mods coming out for vanilla that also respect and improve on the lore. And now there’s no central governing body. RandomPal did TelAruhn Chronicles which makes it feel way more like a center of power for the isolated Archmagister. MDMD (that was me!) made Gothren powerful and scary so it feels like yeah, yeah this guy could have survived with a bullseye on him this long no problem.

We have mods like UL, which, even if needing a few updates to sort of fit the more lore-respectful era we’re in, reference Gothren as Archmagister. We have mort’s redone Rise of House Telvanni for goodness’ sakes.

And here comes Tamriel Rebuilt... just... planning on rewriting the vanilla game to fix a plothole they themselves invented, which will, itself, create even more plotholes with every other mod that hasn’t been updated to match their own homebrewed lore.

hurr Autumn if this upsets you so much why don’t you do something about it fuck you okay look, we don’t have the time or energy to do Tamriel Rebuilt right now. Life is really fucking dumb (so fucking incredibly dumb) and if we’re going to put that much energy into a creative work it’s going to be something of our own stuff because, honestly, honestly, none of us ever liked working in someone else’s playground when it’s so easy to make your own that just lets you do what you wanted without having to skirt dissonance levels.

Morrowind modding has always been, and will always be, kind of a giant fucking mess, and I love it for that.

I mean this is the game where the default body mod everyone based everything else around, because it was so early back in the day that no one else could MAKE body mods, the one standardized body mod we all use has giant fucking tits because LOL.

#autumn rambles #morrowind #morrowind modding

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galaxyofhair · 11 months

Text

Late Medieval Fantasy Is Kinda Boring...

...After a while, please don’t come after me lol I didn’t want to choose violence today I just wanted to rant about something on my soapbox for a minute.

So before I get into the meat of this argument let’s get one of the common responses out of the way: But it’s all fantasy, just let people do whatever pleases them and don’t critic them so hard!

Ok yes, it’s fantasy and at the end of the day it’s not real and doesn’t actually matter etc etc. However, I generally treat realism and fantasy not as divorcees but rather as more of a sibling rivalry situation: They’re different, but share a deep relationship and are secretly completely dependent on one another---IDFK

I had a longer argument for this but it essentially boils down to: Realism pleases me. Yes it’s completely possible to make fun fantasy that is 100% devoid of pesky realism and very casual and free, but if all fantasy was like that it’d be boring.

The thing I actually came here to say is this: The more I learn about history the more I’ve realized that almost all high fantasy (with a few notable exceptions) occurs in a universe that is roughly analogous to the Late Medieval Period: Plate armor, bastard and long swords, A wide range of weapons and armor types, early firearms or canons, rapiers, etc etc---Basically every D&D game, Game of Thrones, Witcher, and even the LOTR all range from the Late Medieval to the very early Renaissance. For me, plate armor is the big one---the moment you introduce full plate armor that’s clearly evocative of the “knights in shining armor” aesthetic it immediately jumps the technological development level of that fictional society up to the 1300s in my mind. To a lesser extent, claymores as well---Longswords and claymores were big popular in the Late Medieval, and Zweihanders got popular in the Early Ren---honestly I’m pretty sure it just had more to do with the quality of metals that could be produced than anything.

And again, there’s nothing particularly wrong with this approach: The LM/ER area of history is a veritable gold mine of fun, goofy, downright alien, and interesting af cultures/traditions/warfare/religion/politics---BUT, it gets boring after a while when this is the ONLY era fantasy takes place in, and it does get much better when the only option for something older than the LM is literally Classical Greece.

There’s SO MUCH COOL HISTORY---I want more fantasy that takes after some of these under-loved periods of history: I want more fantasy set in the Bronze Age, more fantasy set in the late antiquity and early medieval age---and OMG do I want more early medieval and high medieval fantasy. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla woke something up in me Dean Pelton style and I NEED more.

Give me more of the Islamic Golden Age, more of Byzantines, more Japan and China in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Personally I would love to see more from around the fall of Rome and the very beginnings of the Early Medieval period---the Dark Ages are truly a fascinating period.

At first one of the big disadvantages of writing in a non-standard fantasy setting is that there are limitations: You can’t just slap on plate armor anymore and call it a day, you gotta research and find out more about different kinds of mail, or how the Romans wore segmented plates, or how some cultures cut out metal entirely. You can’t always give your characters that bigass sword because older periods hadn’t invented that huge melting pot of weapons and armor later peoples had.

But at the same time, those limitations can be liberating and they can really help create a truly unique setting that stands out.

Of course, the other thing I would encourage when creating a fantasy setting is to mess around with weird shit that has no good analogy to history: Are the trees made of iron? Is everyone still using obsidian shards, or maybe they have weird crystals they can grow into the right shapes?

I definitely also occasionally get caught into the mood of doing the Standard Fantasy Setting, so like---I’m not here to shame. I say all of this because the right technology level paired with the right setting can be an incredible foundation for a unique world and more folks should be doing that.

#@writing #fantasy #medieval #Sponsor me Ubisoft lmao

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shop-korea · 1 year

Video

youtube

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dwellordream · 3 years

Text

“...A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).

At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).

Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.

On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.

At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).

...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.

(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)

Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”

- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”

#bret devereaux #spinning #textiles #weaving #ancient #medieval #history #writing #slavery

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procrastinatingsoicanreadfanfics · 3 years

Text

Searching home

Summary: When you stumble upon the ancient Spanish city of Algeciras, it takes you some time to realize that you’ve traveled through time. While that is terrible luck, a merchant couple takes you in. But your peace only lasts so long.

Pairing: adoptivemom!Helga x reader; adoptivesibling!Tanaruz x reader; (skeptic) adoptivedad!Floki x reader; Ivar x reader, Hvitserk x reader; Tanaruz’ family and reader

Notes: tw: mentions/attempts of s/a (this includes a raid so…) back on my time traveler shit rn, the reader is a slight OC (in a sense that she has similar outer characteristics as Angrboda)

inspired by a gifset from @ivarthebadbitch that i can’t find rn

My Norse translator: https://lingojam.com/OldNorsetoEnglishTranslator

tagged: @alicedopey | Masterlist | Part 2 | Part 3 requests are OPEN!

The only words you could say when the merchants guided you to their townhouse were “Salam aleikum.”

They seemed to understand that but smiled at your pronunciation. In time, you learned more of the language of course, which meant that you could hold short conversations with the couple and their daughter, Tanaruz.

Tanaruz took to you quickly, introducing you to her friends and pulling you along during the day to show you all nooks and crannies of Algeciras. You drew eyes to you, with your height and paleness, together with light eyes and long, blond hair that was almost white.

In turn, you tried your best to learn the language and culture and entertain Tanaruz, who found you extremely funny for some reason (you suspected it was your terrible Arabic).

While you never thought that you’d enjoy living in an early medieval civilization, Algeciras was much better than anticipated. It was clean, the people were kind and the weather warm. Your days were much simpler, with a lot of free time when everyone else prayed in the mosques.

Somehow, they respected you not wanting to go with them.

Tanaruz’ parents, Aamir and Zoha sold oranges and other citrus fruits on the market, along with chai. In the evenings, the four of you would meet at their stall to eat and close it up. It was simple, a nice reprieve from modern life. Tonight was no different.

Until it was.

Suddenly, the quiet night air was filled with screams. Panicked, you looked around until you saw them.

Men and women armed to the teeth slaughtering everything in their way. You scrambled to get up, ready to run when two reached your stall. Their faces were heavily tattooed and one of them gave you a hungry look.

Then, he turned away and stabbed Aamir. You clapped your hand over your mouth to stop yourself from screaming. Zoha’s eyes were wide with terror, searching for Tanaruz, who was crouched under the stall.

She looked over to you, a sort of beg in her eyes and you understood, diving towards Tanaruz, and grabbing her by the arm roughly.

As the two of you began running, you heard Zoha scream Tanaruz’ name, before choking on her own blood. You couldn’t look back, Aamir’s death had been bad enough.

You’d never seen anyone die, much less in front of you, and now, two people that had taken care of you out of the goodness of their hearts had been brutally murdered. Trying not to let your tears blind you, you pulled Tanaruz, who was still frozen in shock into the heart of the city.

Eventually, she seemed to regain her senses and led you to a wide, blue doorway. When you turned, a light-haired woman was following the two of you.

She followed you inside the maze of mirrors too.

Somehow, you lost Tanaruz and froze in place, not wanting to stumble into someone. You were forced to move when another one of the warriors appeared at the end of the tunnel.

He was tall and lean, maybe two years older than you with light hair and a giddy smile that looked out of place in midst of all the blood that spattered across his face.

Abruptly, you turned and ran. You could hear him laugh, before taking up the chase. But you knew the mirrors and the way you had come.

It was incredibly stupid, but you ran outside again, into the maze of the city. The mirrors were a thing of luck, but this city, this was a place where you could actually outrun him.

You weaved through alleys and larger streets, barely avoiding these men that attacked and slaughtered a peaceful people and suddenly found yourself standing in the middle of a large piazza with a tiled mosaic floor.

You recognized this place, because it was the first place in the city Tanaruz took you to play with her friends. The man appeared behind you, and you knew you were in deep trouble.

Unsure of which road to take and caught up in memories, you’d stalled, but you were determined to not let him get you. You started running again, towards one of the alleys leading out of the piazza. When you turn around, you saw him lift his axe, ready to throw it and threw yourself on the ground.

The axe whizzed past you as you felt the metallic taste of blood in your mouth and realized that you’d bitten down on the inside of your cheek too hard.

Still, you scrambled to get up and ran into one of the alleys but the men with tattooed faces cut off your escape. You turned, but the blond was standing in front of you.

Already in pain, you decided that one was better than eight and ran straight at him, breath leaving your body as you impacted with his. You landed on top of him, and he had the audacity to smirk at you, but you didn’t care, heaving yourself up again.

One of them said something in an unfamiliar tongue, but you were already running again, turning around a corner. You felt your heart sink as another barrage of warriors was in that ally and backed out of it again.

As you walked onto the piazza, you realized that you were surrounded.

“þú skulu eigletr mik takþúr, smár kat.” The blonde said, beginning to circle you like prey.

Suddenly, the blond woman rushed into the square, dragging Tanaruz behind her. She stood in front of you. You couldn’t see her face, but Tanaruz was shaking with her entire body.

“Nei! hon's minn dóttir, Angrboda!“ she shouted, before wrapping an arm around you. Unsure of what to do, you let her. You were tempted to show the blonde man the finger and couldn’t stop yourself from giving him a small, sassy nod with your head, telling him that he’d lost.

***

You didn’t expect to stay alive for long after that, but the woman seemed insistent on taking you both in. Tanaruz was silent, not eating or speaking and eyed you with something you couldn’t place when you tried to learn their language.

The woman was kind, but her insistent need to call you Angrboda confused you. Many times, you’d pointed at yourself and told her your real name, even saying it in their language but she never listened.

Hvitserk, that was what the blond man was called, looked at you like a kicked puppy every time you sneered. You would’ve felt guilty if you didn’t know that he was about to rape you.

One night, Tanaruz was crying. You tried to comfort her, but she pointed towards the woman called Helga and then her eyes. It took you a while, but you eventually understood what she meant.

Tanaruz thought that Helga had the evil eye. A charm with Fatima’s hand had been given to you by Zoha after you yourself had gotten fearsome looks, but with the liner Helga was wearing, the resemblance was even more prominent.

Quietly, you lifted the necklace from your neck and pressed it into Tanaruz’ hand.

“Fatima.” You explained, “From Zoha.” Then, in very rocky Arabic, you gently added, “I be sorry.”

Tanaruz looked at you, her mouth slightly curving upwards. “I am sorry.” She corrected, but cuddled into your arms nonetheless.

***

Kattegat was the hell you’d imagined from being a time traveler, but at least you weren’t one of the women being sold as slaves.

Instead, Helga dragged you and Tanaruz into a small house. Floki began to make something out of wood while Helga cooked a stew. You looked over to Tanaruz, feeling a deep worry. She hadn’t eaten since that night, and even then, a few slices of orange didn’t count.

Helga began to attempt to feed Tanaruz, but she wouldn’t budge.

“You need eat.” You urged her, still using your terrible Arabic. “If you leave me alone, I know won’t what to do.”

Tanaruz didn’t even correct you and that worried you even more. You crouched down before her, staring into her deep brown eyes.

“Please. You need to stay alive. When we alone, we run home.” You promised. It was unlikely, but Tanaruz needed something to hold on to.

“My home was burnt by the --------.” She said. Still, she slowly took the spoon from Helga and began eating.

Just in that moment, the door sprang open. No one stood in the doorway, but a noise made you look down. A guy that had to be your age was pulling himself over the ground.

Fascinated, you looked down at him, while Tanaruz scrambled away. She was afraid of all of them, except maybe Floki.

While Ivar looked confused, he began a quick conversation with Floki that you couldn’t follow. Then he turned to look at you, asking for your name. That you understood.

“Angrboda.” Helga said quickly.

“Y/N.” you corrected firmly. Something seemed to click in Ivar’s head by your name, but you knew him from hearsay too.

In your terrible, terrible Norse, you attempted to make conversation with him. “You Ivar. Hvitserk and Bjorn talk.” You managed. Ivar nodded.

Not really caring about whether or not your clothes got dirty, you sat down on the dusty floor and handed him a cup. Ivar glanced at Floki, as if he wasn’t sure what to think about your actions, but the man only shrugged.

“Hon's stranger mær.” Floki said. You had an idea, suddenly. You liked Ivar and wanted to show him something you’d seen in Kattegat. He looked like he didn’t have many friends his age.

Glancing over to Tanaruz, you saw that she’d curled up in a corner and fallen asleep. You looked at Helga. “I trust you to take care of her.” You said quietly in your own tongue, but she seemed to understand.

Then you turned back to Ivar. “Come.” You said, motioning with your hand to follow you. A dragging sound behind you let you know that he was coming along. The sun was already setting when you walked into the small alcove and sat down, patting the space next to you.

Here, in this alcove where it looked like the sun set the water aflame, you felt like you were at peace.

Ivar stared at you, confused but you simply pointed at the sunset. Taking off you boots and rucking your skirt up to your calves, you let the waves splash around your legs. The cool water was the only thing keeping you awake, a sudden exhaustion seeping in due to your constant awake state.

As you leaned your head on the rocks, you realized that Ivar had closed his eyes and was smiling slightly.

***

Two weeks passed, and slowly, Tanaruz was coming out of her shell. Your promise of home seemed to keep her going, but she was still cold towards most people.

She seemed to like Floki, who showed her magic tricks and let her carve with wood. He taught her Norse in turn, and she assured you that you could leave her alone sometimes. Tanaruz also liked to play chess with Ivar sometimes, to your great surprise.

Though she always lost, she seemed determined to beat him one day.

Both you and Tanaruz were relieved when Helga insisted on coming on the raid to England. The two of you only talked to Floki, Hvitserk, Ivar and sometimes Helga, all of which would be leaving.

On the last day in Kattegat, Ivar showed you his new chariot. Tanaruz and Floki came too, and you laughed as Ivar drove past, while Tanaruz gave a shy smile.

Together, the four of you walked back towards Kattegat, where a feast would see off the Great Heathen army. You were uncomfortable with taking Tanaruz, since Harald and Halfdan would be there, but Helga insisted.

The feast was loud, and the Great Hall filled as people danced and drank. Almost immediately, Tanaruz spotted Harald and Halfdan and you quickly pulled her away, into a quiet corner.

She was silent now, and you knew it was going to take her days until she would speak again. Your own hand was tightly wrapped around a cup you were holding.

A clear voice ripped you from your dark thoughts. “Angrboda.” The woman said, standing in front of you. Her name was Lagertha, and she was the queen of Kattegat.

“Y/N.” Ivar corrected, sitting down at your side. You nodded in agreement.

“You were taken on my son’s raid.” She began, slowly enough for you to understand. “But Helga decided to take you and this girl in.”

You nodded, unsure where this was going. Ignoring Ivar, she stared at you intensely. “I hope you know who you owe allegiance to.”

She intimidated you, but you didn’t let that show. “I don’t owe allegiance to any of you.”

It was probably not the best idea to butt heads with a monarch like Lagertha, but Tanaruz was shaking like a leaf next to you, and you still hated them for transforming her into a ghost of her former self.

Lagertha looked like she wanted to say something, but another brother, Ubbe, called for her.

After a while, Hvitserk sat down next to Ivar, completely ignoring you and Tanaruz. No one was watching, and you took your chance to pull her away, outside.

The cold night air was harsh on your skin, and Tanaruz began to shiver as you wrapped her furs tighter. The new clothes as well as your jewelry had been gifts from Ivar, and a few from Hvitserk, who still seemed insistent on flirting with you.

All in all, the two of you looked much more regal than two kidnapped people should. But the clothes felt like a metaphor for your gilded cage.

Tanaruz pulled you to the beach and you sat down on the cold sand. A few meters away, a foreign merchant had lit a fire, looking out into the ocean alone. Ignoring him, you laid back, trying to explain all the different stars to Tanaruz. The girl’s eyes began to close, and you picked her up. She was too heavy to carry, but you could give her a piggyback ride home.

When you’d settled Tanaruz into her bed, you walked back out towards the beach. Suddenly, you stopped feeling uneasy. When you looked behind you, a tall man was at the other end of the alley.

You’d seen him around, and he’d always filled you with unease. He was a creep, invading the personal space of slaves that couldn’t say anything about it. Speeding up, you began to walk away, but he matched your pace.

When you began to jog towards the Great Hall, he picked up his pace. Realizing that this guy wasn’t going to let off, you bolted towards the Hall, but he caught you around your waist and threw you to the ground.

Before you could scream, he clapped a hand over your mouth. You searched for something to protect yourself, finding a small rock on the muddy ground and brought it against his temple, hard.

He stumbled backwards and you got up, but there was a house behind you. He began to run towards you when suddenly, he gurgled and fell to the ground. An axe was sticking out of the back of his head.

Hvitserk stood right behind him, chest still heaving from an adrenaline rush. You felt queasy at the gory sight in front of you.

“Hello little cat.” He smirked.

You wanted to insult him, say something, but your mouth felt dry. Reaching up, your fingers felt blood trickling from a cut on your forehead you didn’t realize you had.

“Ouch.” You complained, wiping the blood off.

Hvitserk said something about Helga, and you wanted to stop him, knowing that she would be a little overbearing, but he already walked away. Then, Hvitserk turned back and pressed a knife into your hand, before disappearing again.

You sank down on the ground, still scared from prior events. A few minutes later, Helga ran into the alley, visibly shaken. Behind her, Floki, Ivar and Hvitserk followed. Ivar looked positively furious, staring at the dead body next to you with an expression of anger while Hvitserk seemed almost proud of himself for saving you.

Helga seemed unsure what to do, but Floki stepped forward and pulled you up. Only then did you notice how shaky your legs actually were. Hvitserk stepped forward to support you, oblivious of how his own actions might be uncomfortable to you now. Together, they brought you to the longhouse.

Tanaruz was still sleeping as Helga began to fuss over the cut on your forehead, just as you'd anticipated.

"Who sent him?" Ivar asked you. "Was it Lagertha?"

You shook your head. "I've seen him around. I think he mistook me for a slave."

Hvitserk snorted. "You don't look like a slave." he said. "He just couldn't control himself."

"Like you?" you shot back. He had the grace to look away.

***

Tanaruz was finally beginning to learn to speak Norse.

She was sitting with Helga, trying to copy her stitches as the woman fixed a sail. You were a little off to the side. Ivar had stubbornly put his head on your lap, silently asking him to play with your hair.

You didn't mind, watching as the other brothers loaded up crates on longships.

Suddenly, Ivar sat up. He stared at you with a suspicious expression.

“You’re not a spy. Right?” he asked.

You had to laugh. “What makes you think that?”

“The way you treat me.” Ivar mumbled. You felt your heart break for him.

“Don’t you think I’d be a terrible spy. I could barely speak Norse when I came here!” you giggled, smiling at Ivar brightly.

Ivar was still looking at you with a hint of unsurety. “What can I do to prove you wrong?” you asked, throwing your hands up in mock surrender.

He stayed silent, but a blush appearing on his cheeks told you that his thoughts were running wild. Well, if that was what he wanted…

You placed a soft kiss on Ivar’s lips, hoping that he wouldn’t immediately kill you, before turning away. “That enough proof?” you muttered, already regretting the action.

“Do it again.” Ivar commanded. Ignoring the butterflies in your stomach, you turned around and kissed Ivar, your heart fluttering at the innocence of the kiss.

“Brother we’re-“ Hvitserk began, suddenly standing in front of you. Slightly annoyed, you let go off Ivar. He let out a huff, staring at his brother angrily.

“What?” he snapped.

“Nevermind.” Hvitserk said. Was that jealousy in his voice?

You patted the free spot next to you. “Come on, tell us what you wanted to say!” you commanded.

“We’re ready to go. Everyone’s already on the ship.” He replied.

Nodding, you got up and climbed into the longship, where Tanaruz was already waiting for you. This time, she looked excited rather than scared, looking out to the sea as another passage began for her.

The peace of it all was suspicious, but you were glad that Tanaruz was adapting. She’d told you she wanted to try, if only it meant that she’d be able to go back home. You didn’t have the heart to tell her that it probably wouldn’t work.

Almost immediately after leaving, a soft rain began to patter down. Quickly, Helga gave you and Tanaruz a few furs while warriors and slaves began to cover the ship.

Under the plane of fabric, it was dark, but peacefully. Tanaruz burrowed into your side and the rocking of the ship quickly made your eyes droop with tiredness. You let yourself fall asleep, the darkness and warmth of the fur giving you a feeling of security.

Hvitserk’s POV:

He sat at the other end of the boat as he watched Tanaruz crawl into her lap and fall asleep. He still wasn’t sure what to call her, Angrboda or her actual name. He still remembered the old Angrboda. They had nothing in common but Helga’s features. Pale hair and blue eyes.

Truth be told, Hvitserk was jealous of his little brother. He was the one who discovered her. Why couldn’t he have her?

Yet she’d kissed Ivar.

Speaking of him, the nuisance his brother was now sitting next to him.

“You still want her.” Ivar observed. Hvitserk nodded before he could stop himself.

Ivar was wearing that smug grin when he turned to look at him. One that Hvitserk would’ve wiped off of him with a punch if he was Sigurd.

“You can’t keep her to yourself, brother.” Hvitserk mumbled. “She has a mind of her own.”

“Whatever you say, Hvitty.” Ivar teased cruelly. He was wearing that shiteating grin of his again. Hvitserk looked away, back to her. She shifted in her sleep, mumbling something unintelligibly as she rolled over. The cut on her forehead was barely visible anymore.

He’d saved her. Hvitserk knew why she stayed away from him, but still, hadn’t that been enough to get her to trust him.

Unlike Margrethe, he couldn’t read her.

“She’ll come around.” Hvitserk replied, settling down to sleep. He’d had enough of Ivar’s ramblings for the night. Of course, Ivar would keep on talking for the next few hours, but as long as Hvitserk nodded form time to time, he’d be left alone.

Unbeknownst to both, she was half-awake, hearing their argument through the fog of her dreams.

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