bidh ionann leacht damh is dó

The Vulgate Cycle repeatedly outright describes Lancelot as intelligent, well-educated and polite, you know, the things expected of chivalrous knight of noble birth. Then he does things that indicate the opposite. I kind of love that, actually. Our most glorious and refined knight, Sir Lancelot, who was raised by a fairy in a lake and is known for mauling people with little to no provocation. To me, he feels semi-feral and not in a Tumblr funnyman way, in an under-socialized child raised by wolves kind of way. The ‘Sir Lancelot is a courteous and refined knight.’ rhetoric almost feels like Camelot propaganda to offset his social blunders and misdeeds.

He just crawled out of a lake. It is literally his first day on earth.

heflapper

Camelot: Sir Lancelot is a courteous and refined knigt.

Sir Lancelot:

big wet eyes and everything

acediaooc

So he’s a Tumblr Sexyman?

#arthurian #the french just had really specific standards for what they considered courteous.

I’m trying very hard to make it happen.

brynnamonroll

I'm so endeared by the French term for a stray cat being "chat errant." This implies the existence of a stray knight. Or that a chat errant is searching for noble purpose.

#laugh tag

bluespock-blog

tag yourselves i’m studyology

#principles of intermediate.#I'm intermediate at so many things so maybe this would help

kuttithevangu

It’s been so long since I read a fantasy novel set in a deeply ahistorical time period I forgot how much lazy fantasies just take place in Victorianieval Times. They’re having feasts in great halls but also girls have governesses and thieves make their money by reselling handkerchiefs? Ok

#don't forget the regency-style balls

the place I'm staying this week is much further from where i'm going daily than i thought it was and like. on the one hand i have a small electric bike here. on the other hand it's a big ass hill and it's due to rain at least a bit basically every day and i found the hill terrifying when my brakes and pedals were bone dry. so it's gonna be a fun week 🙃 but there's absolutely no way i can walk that hill 4-6 times a day so I'm just going to have to learn to cycle on hills in the rain i guess

#I also cycled to the other end of the village and wow. if I had a bike here last year it would've changed everything #that one didn't involve a scary hill but a bike would've made it SOOOO easy #there would've been only mild hills (on an electric bike) (painful walking still)#and I would've been able to go places without stressing so much #this year I am still like. genuinely far away from them. but the bike makes them possible #walking they would not on fact be possible #pearsanta

that said i cycled it home from the pub in the dark tonight and damn I wouldn't say cycling it is NOT scary because it definitely is but I'd rather be cycling uphill on a pitch black road with no pavement than walking uphill on a pitch black road with no pavement. at least the cycling is over quicker and i have more visible lights and reflectors (also uphill is not so scary except that my almost-full battery drops to almost zero because it's just a continuous hill for several minutes and it panics, it rockets back up once I'm on the flat but i can't be SURE it'll do that and not just die on me)

#i don't live somewhere with hills so I'm not used to them #also this is not my usual bike it's my old bike #with slightly dodgy caliper rim brakes instead of disc brakes etc etc #will have to wear my grippiest shoes all week for the pedals i guess.#pearsanta

spot the week where i was with my parents, who are in their 60s and not super healthy but also not disabled and love to walk ALL THE TIME FOREVER AND EVER

(these are weekly step counts for 7-day periods. my previous record was when i was on holiday alone going for 5-mile walks every day. however unlike my parents i actually rested in between and also only did one walk per day and not like. four)

#pearsanta #two years ago I was mostly using a wheelchair so the fact this is possible is great but.#oh my god. I'm so tired #I have such a tiring week ahead and they've worn me out

over and over again it comes down to the fact that fanfiction is most people's only exposure to amateur writing

'so there's this website where literally anyone can post fiction they've written whenever they want and - get this! - a lot of it is bad' yeah no shit. what would you expect?

Relatedly:

A lot of fanfiction is specifically a type of amateur fiction that's shooting for maximum emotional gratification. 'i want these two characters to fuck nasty' 'i want this character to have a big ugly cry about their feelings' 'i want this character to get their legs broken' that sort of thing.

This approach is not inherent to fanfiction and it's not unique to fanfiction. There's whole communities of people out there writing original fiction that's aiming for exactly the same level of gratification. Most people are simply never exposed to it.

#i spent my teen years writing terrible original fiction #often in online communities that no longer exist at all #i think tbh it's one reason I didn't come to fanfic until late teens #I just... didn't need it cos I already had things filling that niche for me #me and my friends used to put our OCs through absolute hell just to watch each other get mad

#mmm big ugly cries about feelings mmmm while their legs are broken after being fucked nasty mmm

got fucked nasty so hard their legs both broke and now they're ugly crying

is anyone else's activity page not working or is tumblr just telling me to go to bed before i collapse

one of my job contracts got extended yayyy i can still get paid after september

#obair #i will have a princely £900 a month to live on. which is not ideal #but I am currently aiming for about £1100 in order to save as much as possible to keep me going during this period #so it's not that much lower and it's £900 a month that doesn't have to come out of those savings.

this is really good news BUT it did mean i had to redo all the maths on my grant application for the other contract and edit the uneditable PDF, on a tablet, while away with limited internet, and exhausted from trying to keep up with my non-disabled mid-60s parents (lmao. i cannot) for a week. and then send that back to the people who have to fill in the rest of the grant application. all for money i probably won't even get

but at least ONE of my jobs will be able to pay me in the next six months. which is good cos one of my other freelance contracts got shunted like a year or two so I'm fucked on that front :')

sometimes people take attempts at historical nuance regarding terminology to mean "people didn't use these words to describe these identities and behaviours, but these identities and behaviours still existed, because they are fundamental truths of what it means to be human", rather than "we map our current conception of identities and behaviours with these words but they are not labels that can be straightforwardly applied to past experiences of the world because identities, behaviours, and conceptions of how those fit together are culturally and historically specific" and it. frustrates me

i don't think there is a concrete external reality of sexuality that we are merely creating labels to describe. i think the fundamental experience of sexuality is shaped by the labels and ideas available to us. people will always exist who don't conform to the norms of their time and will drive the development of new terms and new ideas but they do that within their own context not because of some like........ ontological pattern

thestarsaretrans

This is honestly based on a fantasy of how history works. No field of study gets a claim to objectivity (math, physics, and chemistry may get closest) and they all serve a social function in reproducing the current social order—or, occasionally, revolting against it. It is absolutely and completely fine to apply general purpose modern labels (by which I mean, for example, gay, rather than for instance twink, which has more cultural specificity) to the past where it seems likely applicable. I say this firstly because I don't think you're completely right about how sexuality works. I think it's more a mix of nature and nurture.

But secondly, and more importantly, It's not a matter of objective truth or meeting the past where it's at because that's not fucking real. All historical writing is a political project whether its author wants it to be or not, and if you're not explicitly pointing out the incredible queerness of the history you're writing (a thing incredibly awkward to do without modern labels), then you're allowing the assumptions of a cisheterosexual society to run rampant through your historiography.

Ask why you're doing what you're doing and whose politics it serves. Reframing history has always been a mechanism of legitimacy for the oppressed and it's genuinely important for us to explicitly see ourselves as we are in history.

Sappho was a lesbian, Elegabalus was transfem, the legend of Shikandi was a story about transmasculinity, and so on and so forth. I say this firstly because of the impact I want these stories to have on the modern day and secondly because I believe it to be true. Your desire to adhere to a dead reality belies the actual living function of history as a field, which is to reproduce, or legitimize revolution against, the current reality. Anything else is liberalism and serves to reproduce the current order of things.

thestarsaretrans

While I'm at it, this is specifically important with queerness because the whole fucking reason we had to be merely "[not conforming] to the norms" instead of actually fucking able to speak what we are is because of nigh on millennia of epistimicide against us. This is an ancient political project to specifically erase our ability to name ourselves! And this kind of thinking makes me so angry in part because it's giving in to that, bowing to that, and saying "well they couldn't have known themselves as we know ourselves." Fuck that! There's a reason for that and it's thousands of years of patriarchy, violence, and intentional erasure! That deserves explicit pushback.

i'm not gonna get into a long back and forth here because i am currently away with almost no internet but honestly you're completely misreading the intentions of this (year+ old) post, which were perhaps clarified by its original tags, as well as making a whole bunch of incorrect assumptions about me, my background, and my relationship to queer history. this response feels like a really bad-faith reading of my post that is arguing with a bunch of things i did not say.

my original tags said: "we have always been here, but who We are is not an objective truth that only the modern world has words for" (precise wording may vary very slightly – I'm on mobile and can't go back to copy-paste). maybe that helps.

if you think "we have always been here" is the statement of someone who is trying to participate in the erasure of queer histories then. well. i don't know what to tell you. i'm speaking as someone whose identity is poorly served by modern labels, who doesn't feel they fit me, and who finds more that resonates with me in extensive work i have done on premodern sexualities and kinship structures, such that i therefore feel the current western models and labels, while they work for many, are neither a permanent universal reality nor one that particularly describes my experiences, emotions, aspirations, or struggles. and i write from the perspective of someone whose academic field used to BE queer history. i'm not going to dox myself with specifics but i spent several years explicitly pushing back against cishet normative readings of the past both within academic institutions and in public-facing history while being visibly queer in communities that were not always chill about that. and i did this using labels where relevant and with care, and using other phrasing where better suited. doing history well often involves complexities of terminology.

"they couldn't have known themselves as we know ourselves" is, in fact, the exact opposite of what i am arguing in this post! that's the argument I'm disagreeing with! i think quite often they did know themselves perfectly well and expressed themselves perfectly clearly in their own terms. that those terms can be opaque or ambiguous to us does not mean they're wrong for those people. and i also think, therefore, that some of queer people of the premodern world, even if they had access to our terms and our concepts, would not necessarily have used them – i disagree with models that suggest they were prevented only by ignorance because they had not developed our Modern Correct Understanding Of Sexuality™. i am not sure we are necessarily more correct about it than some people in the past were. we are just different about it. of course some people's experiences might have mapped neatly, and they might have used these labels, and sometimes historians do use them! but even now, these labels don't work for everyone, and not everybody uses them, or wants to be described by them, because they are incomplete models of how humans work. this is only going to be more true when dealing with the many ways that humans have organised themselves and understood themselves over the centuries

dismantling normative assumptions about the past also means not imposing new norms or restrictive models where they don't fit and instead exploring how individual societies, communities, and people existed, related to each other, and understood themselves. sometimes those map easily onto our labels and sometimes those don't remotely fit in boxes that we recognise. they don't fit the cishet norms either. at no point in this post did i suggest we should be using those ones either or that challenging labels only applies to the countercultural ones. at no point did i say nuance means concealing the queerness of the past. at no point did i suggest denying the behaviours, relationships, or identities themselves. i merely suggested being nuanced in how we label them and that sometimes historical reluctance to use modern labels is not erasure but care for the queer realities of those who went before us whose experiences were complex, multifaceted, and shaped by different understandings of kinship, power, relationships, etc

i disagree with you about how these identities work and should be labelled. that's allowed. personally, i think there is at least as much value in exploring the different ways that we have constructed and dismantled our identities across time than in looking for role models we can apply our own labels to, because it might help us discover more and different ways we can build our societies and ways of living in the future. the way we do things is not how we have always done them or how we will always do them. other people prefer the identification approach, that's their prerogative. but bad faith arguing with things i did not say and accusing me of heteronormative erasure that i am not engaging in or acting like i don't understand a field i used to work in is, frankly, kind of a dick move

thestarsaretrans

I wanted to write more but I sorely lack the spoons at the moment. So I'll say the most important thing, which is that I'm sorry that I assumed as many negative things about you and your approach to scholarship as I did. I'm glad you've done queer historiography before and I wish I had taken more of a glance around your blog and the tags of the original post to get context. I can fully admit that I put more anger into my original reply than was warranted. That was rude of me, and I'd like to genuinely apologize.

I still disagree with a lot of what you're saying--some of it quite strongly--but again, I do not have it in me to do a whole write-up.