ao3: elsie_ash (HP), EllisBett (SH etc) || ey/em/eir || AuDHD || not a minor || Harry Potter, ACD/Soviet Sherlock Holmes, who knows what else will catch my fancy
It's difficult to capture the milieu of an era you don't inhabit. Even capturing everything about the year 2025 - the memes, the slang, the influencers - is difficult because there isn't any single correct way to live in the current year or to feel about what's happening.
Fortunately, the internet is full of information that might never make it into the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or even Wikipedia.
When I write a story set in the past, I want to make my characters think and speak like a person of that era. I look up pictures of what people wore and how they styled their hair, and read what daily routines were like, what they might have talked about. I try to get the technology right by looking up the history of light switches and curling irons and indoor sanitation. I check to see what names were most popular for a man born in 1856 or a woman born in 1920. How many times a day was mail delivered in London in 1881? (Six.) How would people of different classes address one another in 1912? (complicated.) At what age did boys start wearing long trousers in the 1880s? (Thirteen.)
I'm not calling this research work. It's what I enjoy most about writing another period. And I love being able to drop historical trivia into conversations. (You might want to avoid being seated at the same table with me at dinner. I will talk about Victorian mourning customs.)
And it's difficult to even know what to ask yourself. There are so many things we take for granted, like the 5-day work week, compulsory education, standardized time. The best advice I can give is to read books written about a period, or (even better) read books written during that period.
One of the hardest things to get right in an historical story is how people talked. What would you call a secretary in 1920? Did that word even exist? Did it mean something different?
What about idioms? Did people say double down in 1895? Did English people say it, or only Americans? There are significant differences, even today, between the way an American uses the language and how other English speakers use the same words, even common ones. (E.g. "gotten" is American, not British.)
A dictionary/thesaurus has some information that can answer questions like these, but I'd like to share a couple resources you might not have used.
Note: there are many, many resources, and I do not claim to know about them all. These are just what I use often and find reliable.
Google Ngram Viewer scans thousands of books by publication date to give you a word's popularity across time. You can request information for a range of years, and what corpus you'd like to use (e.g. British or American English). From this you'll learn when a word came into use, when it was most popular, and when the usage fell off. If you're trying to compare synonyms, separate the words by comments in the search box.
For idioms, which are not always dated in a dictionary reference, I often just google it: double down idiom origin. From this search, I learn that it's primarily an American idiom, first noted in 1949, and its original context was the game blackjack. (It's also good to check what the sources are. AI makes too many mistakes; do your own checking.)
My favorite online word reference is Online Etymology Dictionary. It didn't give me any help on double down, but I learned that double trouble dates from 1520, double dip is first attested in 1936, and double-jointed was in use by 1828.
Wiktionary also gives usage information, and contains quite a lot of non-English words.
As for names, my favourite source is Behind the Name. It has sites for first names and surnames that will tell you a name's origin, other people who have that name, variations of it across regions. You can look up names by gender and nationality. There's even a Name Generator, and the beginnings of a Place Names reference.
In addition, it's useful to know what names were popular in what year, so you don't give a character a name that's inappropriate in a given time period. In Behind the Name, click on any name to get popularity graphs by country. Then you won't give an 1895 character a name that wasn't popular until 1985, e.g. Tiffany. Other sites list popular names by era.
I do not deny being a word nerd (1951, U.S. student slang, probably an alteration of 1940s slang nert "stupid or crazy person," itself an alteration of nut).
You may not care of characters in an historical romance are using words that weren't yet in use. I do care. It bugs me when I read a story set in a past era where the characters all talk like American adolescents in 2026.
Unless the characters are all time travellers, of course. Even so, learning the idioms of the era you're travelling to ought to be part of a time traveller's education. That's what authors are, you know. We travel through time.
If you find this helpful, please reblog! 💕 And if you have other resources, please share!
Tagging a few who write: @mydogwatson @totallysilvergirl @raina-at @lisbeth-kk @221beloved @meetinginsamarra @copperplatebeech @naefelldaurk @7-percent @thegildedbee @helloliriels @stellacartography @chriscalledmesweetie
Me: "Damn people are REALLY BAD at knowing when to tag their eyestrain art/images...either that or they just don't care about photosenitive epileptic people like me. I feel really sad now."
Person: "But Allison, what if they just don't know or understand what qualifies as eyestrain and what doesn't?"
Me: "You know what? That could be a factor...While it is always better to be safe rather than sorry (so YES people should always tag eyestrain even if they're unsure if it "counts" or not) maybe you've got a point?"
Anyways! HERE'S YOUR HANDY GUIDE TO WHAT CAN COUNT AS EYESTRAIN! I'm pulling this straight from the Artfight rules page about what needs to be labeled and filtered as eyestrain because it's VERY helpful and VERY accurate! I also know not everybody has an AF account and might not always have access to this handy guide, and this is an important resource; That's why I'm sharing it here! (under the cut)
PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!
Full eyestrain AF page link
"But Allison! How were you able to screenshot that example if you're so sensitive to eyestrain?"
I dimmed the HELL out of my computer screen and looked away while taking the screenshot and did the same when putting it into this post, that's how lol. BUT YEAH ANYWAYS!!! Once again:
PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!
quirky fourth wall breaking character but theyre just fucking. wrong about the medium theyre in. they keep making references to cinematic techniques and directorial styles and the other fourth wall breaking character is like "dumbass we're in a fucking comic book" and they are in a video game.
Your action hero just got shot in the shoulder, stitched it up in a motel bathroom, and is now running through a forest. I need you to know that a shoulder wound severs muscle, nerves, and sometimes bone, and the human body's response to that is not "mild wincing followed by full range of motion." here is what injuries actually do to peoplee...
⊹ Adrenaline is REAL and it does allow people to do extraordinary things immediately after injury, BUT it is a loan, not a gift. you borrow the function and you pay it back later with interest. Your character might genuinely be able to run for twenty minutes after being stabbed. and then the adrenaline drops and everything the body was delaying arrives all at once. the collapse is NOT weakness. it's biology collecting its debt. write the debt collection. it's more interesting than the heroic sprint anyway.
⊹ Blood loss changes cognition before it drops you. you don't go from "fine" to "unconscious." you go through a whole middle stage of confusion, poor decision-making, emotional dysregulation, a strange calm, tunnel vision, difficulty forming sentences. Your injured character making a bad call, saying something they normally wouldn't, becoming suddenly and inexplicably gentle--that's blood loss. use the middle stage. it's dramatically rich and almost nobody writes it.
⊹ Recovery has a timeline and the timeline is long and boring and inconvenient to plot. a broken rib takes six weeks and during those six weeks sneezing is a genuine emergency. a concussion means no screens, no reading, no bright lights, and symptoms can persist for months. a stab wound to the abdomen means weeks of infection risk, limited mobility, and a specific kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. Your character being sidelined and frustrated and useless for a long time is not a narrative problem. it's the story.
⊹ Pain also affects personality in ways writers skip. chronic pain makes people short-tempered and then guilty about being short-tempered. it makes concentration difficult. it makes intimacy complicated, both emotional and physical. a character who was patient and warm before their injury and is now snappy and withdrawn is not a character regression. they're in pain. pain is exhausting in ways that don't show on the outside. the people around them noticing and not knowing how to help is a whole story in itself.
I'm not the anon but I've seen The Potential since I rewatched the Soviet movies and I could swear Dr Mortimer was flirting with Holmes. THEN I READ THE BOOK. Insane.
The art sent me laughing crying it's beautiful thank you OP
My favorite headcannon I have going for LOTR right now is that the elves that are still around by the time Frodo gets on the scene are the elvish equivalent of doomsday preppers.
I forget where I read it, but I'm pretty sure that at some point there were millions of elves on Middle-earth, and by the end of the third age, it's down to a few thousand, aka a very small portion. These are the elves that got told way back in the first age, "Hey, just so you guys know, you're totally welcome to come back and live in heaven now without any worries" and responded, "No thanks, we're good!" and then proceeded to not only hold to that but survived the next 7.000 years of bullshit including but not limited to:
Multiple continents sinking into the sea
orcs
dragons
balrogs
multiple wars with Sauron, a literal divine being
The rise and fall of several human empires
more orcs
wargs
a bunch of their territory being overtaken and burned to the ground
And all of their loved ones either dying or sailing, even though we know that grief can and will kill an elf
Like, you can't tell me that third age elves start showing up in the undying lands, where everyone has spent the last few thousand years basking in the magical equivilant of free therapy and probably have as many defence measures as a suburban coldesac, and aren't viewed as the most feral, twitchy, paranoid mother fuckers; held together by suspicion, stubornness, and at least 25 contingencies for every situation they've collectively encountered during their time in Middle-earth.
My favorite examples of feral, hyper-vigilant behavior include:
Elrond: Security clearance; sure, Turgon may have threatened to kill anyone who tried to leave his hidden city, but he also took an entire army out of and back to the city at once, and then also didn't realize that his own nephew snitched on where the city was. His security protocols sucked. Meanwhile, Elrond had hundreds of strangers coming in and out of Rivendell for over 3,000 years, at one point completely surrounded by enemies and full of nothing but a bunch of refugees, and Sauron still never found it. You can't tell me that he didn't have at least 25 security checkpoints on the way into his city(sorry, house-that means it's private property, right?), even if you didn't know they were there.
Galadriel: Paranoia; This woman was magically keeping track of everyone she knew and even did it often enought that she knew what to look for of those she couldn't directly track (gandalf) and looking into their minds and testing them. All while having Sauron constantly clawing at the walls of her mind, at least for a few years
Thranduil: Spite; it was basically only his sheer audacity holding his nuclear bunker- cough cough- sorry, I meant vast underground halls together, while his next-door neighbor was some cursed ruins, a dragon-infested dwarf kingdom, and evil, man-eating, car-sized spiders on his front lawn.
Haldir: he blindfolded the fellowship when they tried to enter his city (super secret hideout), need I say more?
Multiple examples of groups of elves jumping out of trees fully armed and ambushing anyone who wanders into their territory. And while the characters seem surprised to be ambushed, they don't seem surprised that elves ambush people in general, leading me to believe this is normal behavior.
In summary, while the elves in the LOTR and the Hobbit seem all chill and fun, I like to imagine them as the crazy raccoons of the elvish family trees that wandered in 5 hours late.
I'm reading A Study in Scarlet currently and bro Holmes is iconic and all, love him, but Watson is such a character and that really should be talked about more
it's so funny to watch his thought process as he tries to figure out Holmes and eventually just being like "wow he's so cool" and proceeds to follow him along everywhere cuz Holmes says "come along come on bro let's go"
also Holmes is SO expressive why do adaptations try to make him so emotionless like bro
I wanna draw so many scenes from this. It's so chaotic. Help.
#I read this part just the other day#He literally proposes within two days it’s crazy
Every Sherlock Holmes remake that tries to make Watson the straight man does him a great injustice. Mfer is a total madlad. Everyone's like "oh he's not addicted to hard drugs and doesn't do chemistry experiments in his bedroom for fun" there are subtler ways to be completely unhinged.
Watson will show up at Holmes' place and be like "are you doing any investigations of super weird shit today" and Holmes will be like "yes I am cornering this dangerous mass murderer, you should come and bring your gun in case anyone tries to shoot us" and Watson will do it without question, thinking "I'm so glad he's got something wholesome to distract himself with so he doesn't take more cocaine".
In my dream modern adaptation there’s a scene where Holmes and Watson are trying to figure out a plan with the police and Holmes says that he can’t/doesn’t want to do something because of his autism (like it’s a loud place or a really finicky social interaction or whatever take your pick) and Watson is like “yeah, we need someone neurotypical to do this. Like me!” And everyone just turns to him with complete bafflement. He doesn’t know? Nobody told him???
I’m not a fan of ai, but I can accept that if someone chooses to use ai for their fics or their art, that is their choice. not something I agree with. but still not my business, and I will never condone harassment.
if anything, I think it’s better if these people feel comfortable enough to tag their stuff as ai, so that other people can avoid their works if they’re not comfortable with ai-generated contents.
that said, I think ai writers will stop tagging their stuff as ai entirely if people shame or harass them for it.
so now their stuff is still ai, just untagged, meaning there’s no way for others to know if it’s ai.
keep in mind that speculation, accusations and witch hunt harm genuine artists and writers as much as ai does, if not more.
so if you go to the “ai-generated” tag on ao3 just to harass people for using ai, just know that you’re not actually fighting against ai — you’re just being a bully and you’re also making people more wary of properly tagging their ai-generated works as such. so you’re just making sure they no longer tag their ai-generated stuff as ai. also you can be reported for harassment, and ao3 will not take your side. (whether or not you like it, ai-generated works are allowed on ao3, whereas harassment is not.)
the “ai-generated” tag on ao3 is there so people can either find or avoid works with ai (but in order for it to work, ai users must feel comfortable enough to be honest and tag their works properly, that won’t happen if people keep shaming and harassing them for it — the only thing harassment will do is make sure ai stuff go untagged, harassment doesn’t stop people from using ai).
the “ai-generated” tag is not there so that you can freely harass people with no consequences.
