washed-up sisters and crazed seekers!

Hibernate. Queer Old Crone. She/her. Dreamwidth. About me. Fic is on the AO3 machine. Here to frolic in hedonism. I like women, rare pairs and hurt/comfort. Fictional characters i love the normal amount: Vivienne de Fer, Anora Mac Tir, Sloane Kelly, Mel Medarda, Jaheira, Neve Gallus. Forever fandoms: Dragon Age, Star Trek, Xena, Warehouse 13, Legend of the Seeker, Doctor Who. Also enjoying: Arcane, Baldur's Gate 3, The Wheel of Time, The Musketeers, Dark Matter, Vagrant Queen, Stardew Valley, Indira Varma in general. This blog is for adults. Viv ♥

[slaughterhousefive]

I think about this Twitter poll every day of my goddamn life

[bocadelinfierno]

[storybookhawke]

Affectionately, which is your least favorite major location in Dragon Age Inquisition?

Forbidden Oasis

Hissing Wastes

Fallow Mire

Exalted Plains

Storm Coast

Hinterlands

Western Approach

Emerald Graves

Crestwood

Emprise du Lion

Bald egg / results

Voting ended onJun 2

I don't even ask this to be critical/negative, I'm just curious what region do you go "ugh..." when you reach it while playing DAI?

[redlipstickresurrected]

Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019, b. Zürich, Switzerland, d. Inverness, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada) - Nude (Marie) with Cat, c. 1950, Photography

[attyrocious]

The Queen of Wands Divine Victoria Vivienne for @dragonageannual

[willgrahamscock]

let's stay out of the fandom tags with papa

[acoolguy]

what game devs think are tough choices in games: you have to kill this person or spare them

what tough choices in games actually are: this armor will make you more powerful but it’s ugly

[sexchangedotcom]

the internet is a place for reading wikipedia articles and watching every movie for free. social media is an invasive species. never forget this

[knifefightscene]

[divorcedfranklangdon]

[divorcedfranklangdon]

[ulibeanzz]

if ur lgbt+ im curious: if u can remember, what was your first major Gay Ship?

[nevver]

It’s National Eraser Day (every day is eraser day), Present and Correct

[feldfrog]

If a fantasy world has an ancient tree of wisdom, that means it must also have young trees that are dumb as shit. Just giving terrible advice like, "the evil wizard is kinda hot"'

[coldasyou]

Fuck all this, do you wanna go get a drink?

bonus:

[flowersforthemachines]

while I'm working on re-integrating cut codex into the game I would just like to remind everyone that I'm in love with whatever Neve and Rana have going on

[spirkbitch]

They keep trying to make trek for modern sensibilities but they’re just making tos look excessively slutty

[spirkbitch]

Exhibit A

[spirkbitch]

I liked these tags but I had something to say about it

I already assumed that the dresses were a choice made by the female crew, mostly for my own sanity. They do show (very infrequently) women in tos wearing pants

And they show men wearing dresses in tng, but only ever in the background (unless you count the dress uniforms)

And obviously I like that these were included, but they were clearly a cop out decision.

“Yeah see men can wear dresses, women can wear pants. They just don’t choose to” reads as “of course I’m not sexist, women just like wearing tiny little dresses in the future”

And thinking about it from a late sixties perspective, many women did see more revealing clothes as an empowering choice to make. Men wanted women covered and modest, understated makeup, only exposed or done up for male enjoyment. Some women took that in the opposite direction and chose to wear more extravagant makeup, revealing clothing, and brighter colors. It was a progressive time, and some of the choices made in an attempt to highlight that in the show did not age well.

But at the same time, you can clearly see that some of these “progressive” points were only added in as a write off.

[anghraine]

And thinking about it from a late sixties perspective, many women did see more revealing clothes as an empowering choice to make. Men wanted women covered and modest, understated makeup, only exposed or done up for male enjoyment. Some women took that in the opposite direction and chose to wear more extravagant makeup, revealing clothing, and brighter colors.

I think it's worth emphasizing that this very genuinely is the main reason for the "sexist" miniskirts. IRL, women were often not choosing between sexy miniskirts and non-objectifying pants, but long skirts (respectable) and short skirts (rebellious). Deliberately wearing short skirts as rebellion against patriarchal control that mandated long skirts or maaaaybe loose slacks on a good day is still hardly unknown among girls/women leaving conservative communities in the USA, and was only more commonly coded that way at the time.

Sally Kellerman, the actress for Elizabeth Dehner, found the close fit of the supposedly more feminist pants uncomfortable and is often given something to hold in front of her because she was so intensely self-conscious about them. Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand) loathed the more "proper" initial look and worked with the (gay) costume designer, William Ware Theiss, to design a different, more daring and cool-looking aesthetic for women of the future that appealed to her personally. That was what resulted in the miniskirt uniform design. No doubt it served the objectifying tastes of various straight men involved, but literally zero of them were responsible for the design of Whitney's and Nichols's uniforms.

Not only did Nichelle Nichols not consider herself suffering from the miniskirt, she admitted later to sometimes deliberately lifting the skirt even higher at Uhura's station to show off more of her legs because she hadn't worked so hard on her body to not show them off. Meanwhile, Jill Ireland, the actress for Leila Kalomi, was nervous that she might have to wear the kinds of revealing costumes so many other TOS actresses did, and Theiss instead designed her the comfortable overalls she wears as Leila in "This Side of Paradise."

The kneejerk backlash against short skirts (in decidedly more reactionary eras of both Star Trek and US culture) led to both the large-scale disappearance of the skirts and the snide commentary on them throughout later iterations of Trek, with zero consideration of the fact that they were designed by a gay man to suit the preferences of the leading actresses at a time when they commonly represented rebellion. The Berman-era Star Trek productions tut-tutting at the old costumes while actually putting actresses in uncomfortable, form-fitting uniforms they disliked is ... uh, something else.

Even while the female Starfleet costumes shifted towards pants (and militarism) in the movies, btw, Nichelle Nichols insisted on getting to wear skirts as Uhura—because she liked them and she had little patience for 80s respectability.

[english-mace]

And like. Y'all get that it is you folks now in the 2020s calling the 60s TOS outfits slutty and saying they aged poorly, right? You get that we right now are in an era that has backslid, in many ways, into a greater degree of prudery and paternalism than the original (and very deliberate) filming context of TOS? With our cottagecore-repackaged tradwife influencers and Clean Girl aesthetics and starvation diets? Yeah?

Progress is not linear. We have no laurels to rest on; they've been burning a long while now and the smoke inhalation is a killer.

[anghraine]

Thank you. While I couldn't possibly keep up with all the responses to my explanation, this is something that a lot of the otherwise-positive "it has to be understood in the context of its times, it wouldn't be feminist today but it's not fair to project our greater understanding backwards" and "they aged poorly" misses.

Obviously I do think the broad social context that 60s miniskirt-wearers rebels were specifically rebelling against is important to bear in mind, but there's a lot of "we know better now/of course it wouldn't be feminist rebellion now but" that is a) not what I was saying and b) ignores the reactionary, paternalistic, prudish respectability politics that drives the assumption that there's some absolute sense in which revealing clothes are at odds with appropriate feminine dignity and admirable gender presentation, whether you phrase that in the language of conservative modesty or liberal feminism.

That's not a perspective lost to the 60s. As I mentioned in my original explanation, many of the people I know raised in conservative Christian US environments—even before the current hard swing to screeds about the degenerate art and fashion of decadent times (never very far from considering people who make/wear that art as also degenerates, and where did that term come from again?)—end up wearing things like very low-cut tops, very short skirts, very tight/"daring" clothes as rebellion against the politics and aesthetics and pressures we were raised with. Not in 1966, in 2026, today.

For some it's a phase of rebellion on the way to figuring out something else we really like, for others we discover we genuinely love the Forbidden Fashion and 90% of the discourse is just people being weird and obsessive about our bodies in a slightly different way. An Exvangelical friend of mine from North Carolina loves snazzy super-short miniskirts and was anxious when she first moved out to the urban PNW that the good people of Seattle, Washington would be shocked and judgmental, because she was so used to that reaction regardless of politics. I was raised Mormon and on leaving, found that I love really low-cut shirts because my autistic sensory aversions are particularly strong around my neck and upper chest and it's great not to have anything touching my skin there; 20 years of having to wear shirts or dresses with necklines near my collarbones introduced a completely unnecessary and avoidable level of discomfort and stress in the name of what The Right Kind of Clothes for The Right Kind of Girl was.

And repackaging right-wing fetishization of modesty in pseudo-feminist language doesn't actually make it substantially different!

Like, if the lead actress of a high-budget SF/F show today (which is what TOS was at the time) found a less revealing, less flashy outfit boring and unappealing, and worked with the show's costume designer to create a stylish futuristic outfit that would be both more comfortable and fun for her to wear, and it ended up being fairly low-cut with a very short skirt, I think we would be absolutely inundated with tedious thinkpieces about how she's an immodest slut or selling out to the patriarchy with only a thin layer of plausibly deniable phrasing, and even the CYOA phrasing would be a lot more low-effort than it would have been 10 years ago. And I fully believe people would conveniently forget that her outfit was the result of a collaboration between a gay man and a straight woman while making incessant snide remarks about how it was obviously designed one-handed etc, and find some excuse for why that's a reasonable characterization even after being reminded.

We don't live in some enlightened feminist paradise where people aren't obsessed with hyper-scrutinizing the modesty and propriety of women's appearances. If anything the trends of our era have been shifting hard, for years, towards what the miniskirt feminists were rebelling against 60 years ago.