CONTENDER, the Heavyweight Prequel
a deancas boxing au by valleydean (emmbrancsxx0)
read parts I-III | playlist | trailer
SUMMARY: Brooklyn, 1924. During their rise to fame, two professional boxers at the beginning of their careers meet and begin a turbulent affair. Set to the backdrop of opulent parties, dark-lit speakeasies, and the bright spotlight of the championship ring, Dean and Cas get caught up in boxing's seedy underworld.
CHAPTER PREVIEW:
Dean unhooked his arm from Lisa’s and faced her. “Drink?”
Her brown eyes lit up. “In a minute. I want to dance.” She grabbed both of his hands and dragged him toward the dance floor. Dean laughed, letting himself be led. He grabbed Lisa by the waist and started twirling her around to the beat of the lively tempo. A singer’s voice sounded over the instruments.
Some others I’ve seen might never be mean
Might never be cross or try to be boss but they wouldn’t do
As Dean spun, he scanned the room, searching for any celebrities, athletes, or socialites.
His eyes landed on a man standing in a small crowd chatting in the corner of the room. He didn’t seem to be doing much talking though—or listening. He looked almost irritated to be there. He was in a navy tie and a simple, tailored black suit that was only a few shades darker than his wavy hair. The fabric stretched across his arms and chest. The only items he wore that stuck to the party’s theme were gold Eye of Horace cufflinks that winked in the light. The petite brunette woman hanging off of his arm was a lot more dressed for the occasion, from her headband to her feathered dress to her sheer stockings, but Dean only spared her a passing glance.
In Dean’s arms, Lisa giggled and twirled the two of them around. Dean barely registered it. He swiveled his head back and forth, keeping his eyes on the familiar man as if they had been magnetically bound to him. He was the prizefighter from the underground rings. Dean had seen him a handful of times over the years, but not recently. Since the last time, he’d bulked up, and his skin was tanner, but that might have been the warm lights hitting his face. They made his shadow stretch tall and high on the wall behind him.
Images of the first time Dean had laid eyes on him flashed to the forefront of his mind.
The giant going down in a bloody heap like David slaying Goliath. The way the prizefighter’s chest rose and fell in labored breaths. The blue eyes that swept across the frenzied crowd to latch onto Dean’s as the police pulled him away. The shock of the East River’s frigid waters when Dean launched into them.
He could feel those same waters now. Choppy and laced, dark, all-consuming. His skin numbed.
He watched the prizefighter raise the cigarette pinched between his fingers to his dry lips, watched his mouth wrap around it and the way his chest ballooned while he took a drag.
Then, just like on that night a few years ago, the prizefighter realized he was being watched. Those same blue eyes raised toward Dean’s. He lowered his cigarette and exhaled, the gray smoke puffing from his mouth and dissipating in a cloud around his face. He pressed his jaw together, forming a solid line beneath dark stubble, and he stared back unflinchingly.
Dean’s body was moving on its own. He was only vaguely aware of the way Lisa pressed against him, of the way they swayed and twirled. He looked over her head, barely realizing that his mouth was hanging open.
He didn’t know what this staring contest was, or if the prizefighter recognized him, too.
The prizefighter’s cigarette was burning to nothing where it hung at his side, raining ash down on the marble floors.
It had to be you, wonderful you, it had to be you!
Dean hadn’t registered that the song had ended and they’d stopped dancing until Lisa said, “Okay, now I’m ready for that drink.”
Dean kept the prizefighter’s blue stare, assessing him, trying to anticipate his next move. If he’d break left or right; if he’d try to back Dean against the ropes or wait for Dean to come to him. With such calculating eyes, Dean knew the prizefighter was doing the same to him. He tightened his jaw and dipped his chin, bracing himself for the inevitable incoming blow.
Got any extremely feel-good happy summer fics? Like Kind of a Forever Deal, but not necessarily taking in a summer camp - vacations and road trips and basically summed.
We thought you’d never ask! Here is a mini summer heat fic rec list for your vacation destiel needs. The mods picked the fics based on following very serious criteria - summer vacation, heat, beach, and happies.
I. Reviewed and unofficially submitted or recced fics:
Après by imogenbynight [unintended summer vacation in France!]
Castiel Novak: Tomb Rider by emwebb17 [Cas is searching for Dean all over the world!]
Carnival Oasis by violue [summer carnival and tulips]
Crossroads State by mercy [teacher Cas summer romance]
The Distance of the Setting Sun by murron [frolicking at the beach, international vacation]
Domesticated by kototyph [zoo keeping in summer heat]
Drop Anchor by almaasi (unofficially recced here) [pirate au, deserted island]
The Great Escapist by 8sword [college au summer vacation]
Imperfect Proposals by fallen_angel_meg [pretend boyfriends on a road trip, what could go wrong?]
Kind Of A Forever Deal by komodobits [ultimate summer camp story!]
The Knights and their Bees by niitza [countryside beekeeping!]
The Least Bad Option by thestoryinsideme (submitted rec)[pretend boyfriends and beach!]
Love in the Wild by thursdaysfallenangel (submitted rec) [reality TV in jungles of Costa Rica]
Never Not Fantastic by thestoryinsideme [beach, turtles and a secret affair]
Of Sun And Sea And You by jinxedambition [beach and surfing!]
Out to Drift by beenghosting [summer heat and dusty motels]
Pacific by moosefeels [eerie summer heat road trip]
Pies and Prejudice by linoresearch [baking tv show in summer heat]
Ready to Fall by lemonsorbae (submitted rec) [pretend boyfriends on summer vacation]
Should’ve Just Asked by scaramouche [Cas’ summer stay at Winchester mansion is so confusing]
The Summer Holds A Song (We Might Sing Forever) by obsinatrix & annundriel [smutty beachside vacation!]
Though the Course May Change by imogenbynight (submitted rec) [pretend boyfriends at couples resort]
Three Funerals and a Wedding by englandnwouldfall [LARPing is like summer camp, right?]
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth by mishafied (submitted rec) [Jurassic Park dinosaurs, duh!]
II. Some new recs!
Feel Good by justkeeponwriting [T, 9,290 word count]
Dean and Castiel first meet at a summer camp.
Go Out and See What You Can Find series by endlessrain [NC-17, 61,600 word count]
The thing about summers is that they seem like they last forever, then suddenly it’s slipping through your fingers, and you’re scrambling to enjoy the end. Dean learns that this is true for other things as well, as he works as a counselor at Camp Kripke, the summer after high school. In an enclosed environment like Kripke, rumors fly faster than the zip line, and suddenly everyone’s talking about him and the attractive head chef.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by aileenrose [M, 9,600 word count]
Just like every summer, Dean and Sam are tracking tornadoes. Surprisingly, it’s the nerdy computer scientist that sweeps Dean off his feet.
Ten summers by belwrites [M, 33,000 word count ]
Dean is thirteen when he starts going to Uncle Bobby’s summer camp, and when he meets his best friend, Cas Novak. Over the next ten summers, Camp Wooded Falls becomes the backdrop for friendships, romances, and drama as they move from high school to college and ultimately into adulthood.
III. Other resources:
Check out these related tags from our tag page - celebrity, pretend boyfriends, road trip, vacation, pirate au, bath shower, crossovers.
Dean and Cas go abroad fic rec post
Destiel Smut Brigade (DSB) - Summer Heat Fic Dump - Writers and the prompts are here and the fics themselves can be found here.
UPDATE: July, 2019 - here’s some more summer related fics from our latest recs!
Pride 2019 destiel fic rec list
Destiel AU, vol.1 - Summer reading List
The Return Policy by castielrisingabove [impromptu road trip to break accidental bonding, how about that?]
The GBB is a blog focused completely around appreciating the archangel Gabriel from the CW TV show Supernatural. We’ve run some Gabriel Bangs in the past and we’re going to continue to and in addition to trying to add some smaller low pressure events throughout the year when there isn’t a bang happening. The world just needs more Gabriel.
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Here are the 2024 vaccine recommendation schedules. They’ve already been wiped from the cdc site. Save them and share widely, especially to your friends with kids.
This video has been getting AI accusations and it isn't! All these types of woods exist! Though some of them are local names, I was able to track all of them down! Here are all the woods shown in the video!
Purpleheart Wood: Peltogyne genus, native to Central and South American rainforests. Freshly cut it's light brown, then turns into rich shades of purple. It turns brown in UV light so it has to be finished with a UV inhibitor to keep those gorgeous colors.
Namnu (various): A type of precious wood found in China/South Asia, sourced from various different species of trees, hence the different examples shown here. High grades of the wood are known for the optical effect shown in the video. Unfortunately the types of trees that produce the wood are all critically endangered, which is why the examples shown are all items or pillars or fragments of pieces. The species are all strictly protected and new trees cannot be harvested.
That example in the video is just that one video that goes around with the inside of a tree that's been struck burning while it still stands, but sometimes trees that have been struck by lightning and are cut down can have neat burn patterns in the wood (example), as the lightning goes to ground, so some people might want that. Who am I to judge.
Chicken-blood vine wood: Species is Spatholobus suberectus and it's only that bright when it's cut, it dries to a more woody color. Here's a page with examples of what the wood looks like when it's dried and some things made with it.
Amber wood: This one took a while. There's a video out there claiming this is "petrified amber wood". That's not possible, I'm a geologist I would know. Since the video is in Chinese originally I presume, "amber wood" must be a translated local name. It's sandalwood, which has that gorgeous bright red color. Even tracked down the video the clip is taken from. "Chandan wood" is another name for sandalwood. Which smells amazing.
Rosewood: The most well known of the woods here in my opinion. There's a number of rosewoods, all in various shades of pinks and reds. True rosewoods are from the genus Dalbergia. Sadly they're all endangered, but illegal harvesting continues.
Purple hainan huanghuali: Dalbergia odorifera, the Chinese rosewood.
Pink oak - Likely pink ivory (Phyllogeiton zeyheri). You need a permit to cut down one of these trees, but it really is that pink. One of the most expensive woods in the world, up there with sandalwood.
Burmese huanghuali: Rosewood...3! This is either Dalbergia oliveri or Pterocarpus indicus, but given that Pterocarpus indicus is descripted as having purplish heartwood, I'm guessing it's Dalbergia oliveri. Though it's not a true rosewood, Pterocarpus indicus is also sadly endangered.
Liudao wood: This is Abelia biflora, though it looks like it has been reclassified as Zabelia biflora recently. Either it only looks like that when the bark is being peeled or it's the lighting in the videos. BUT this wood is used in making Buddhist prayer beads because of both its grain pattern connects to philosophy and its mention in Tibetan Buddhist texts.
Thank you for all that work!! I recognized some of the woods (since my siblings in law woodwork) but not all of them, and was going to look into them when I woke up, but you've gone and brought up all the treasure from the rabbit hole!
THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they're not going to have that many clothes.
What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.
Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.
Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)
Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.
In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.
Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)
Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!
As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.
With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)
They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.
When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.
So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.
...One last note:
The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn't the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)
Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it's worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).
We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)
And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches.... rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.
This, and I'll add, vast secondhand market in clothing. That one simple tunic would cost the equivalent-in-labor of a new car today, and it would change hands as many times as one.
People in Ye Olden Times--the earliest garments we have evidence of, up through the middle ages (and well beyond, for all but the wealthiest people)--didn't wear simple, box-shaped garments because they didn't know how to sew anything fancier.
They did so because a Big Rectangle had the most resale/re-use value, since it could be tied, laced, belted, or otherwise fastened to fit a wide range of bodies. The same garment could be worn throughout pregnancy, as well as before and after. If it was no longer needed, it could be passed down or sold to virtually anyone. And when it became worn at the seams or hems, it could be re-sewn as a slightly smaller rectangle, and still fit a lot of people.
In Renaissance Europe, clothing got a lot more structured--and to a significant degree, this was as a status symbol. If you wore a fitted, short jacket over tights and those silly-looking puffy shorts (or a doublet, nether-hose and trunk hose), everybody who saw you would know that you could afford to buy all that fabric and then waste a bunch of it by cutting it into very specific shapes.
And if it fit well, then they'd also know that you were (probably) the first owner of said garments. Because the clothes were still expensive, they'd still be passed down, but there was a lot more need for clothing resellers, where secondhand clothes could wait for a buyer whose body they would fit. (Used clothing was a common gift or tip for servants, and if it was something they couldn't wear, they'd sell it.) In this way, clothing styles would percolate their way down the class ladder, both in the form of actual garments that had once belonged to a very rich person, and dupes made with simpler/cheaper materials and techniques, and perhaps modified for practicality.
And that's how you get fashion cycles: once something starts showing up on too many of the common people, the rich would move on, either exaggerating the trend to a point that, outside of that fashion context, looks ridiculous--
Like these silly, silly shoes:
(Note: these are probably exaggerated; the name of this picture is "Young Man Meeting Death," and we're presumably supposed to see him as a frivolous type of person who is about to find out why he should have lived a more serious and pious life.)
--or going in a different direction entirely.
So yeah, if you're writing secondary-world fantasy, give some thought to where the clothes are coming from, and how that's going to affect the styles and choices the characters make. If your working-class character in a Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Land is wearing fitted clothing, either that society has magic spinning and weaving technology, or your character is a serious fashionista/o, who is putting in a lot of time and effort into the project.
Similarly, if that type of setting has courtiers in a dazzling variety of impractical and elaborate garments--and several different outfits of it apiece--that implies a significant degree of urbanization and upward mobility, driving a secondhand market for those items, as well as providing the skilled labor to make and maintain those types of clothes. (You know these?
There was an entire trade centered on washing & ironing these things. Separate from actually making them, I mean. It involved tiny, specially shaped irons, and buckets of starch. Royalty or major nobility might have a servant dedicated to this highly specialized labor, and people a little lower on the ladder would send them out to be done. Ideally, you'd have each of your ruffs washed and re-set every time you wore it; people did re-wear them to save money, but they got droopy fast--hence the emphasis, in paintings featuring this trend, of crisp stiffness.)
How would this all compare to leather and hide based clothing? As the material doesn't need spinning and weaving, only tanning, cutting and sewing would it be cheaper and more common?
So. Not a tanner or a cloth maker here but - tanning can be very chemically specific. For those curious my perspective is of an animal pathologist's assistant. I have cut up several cows.
You do have the opportunity to amass a lot of leather if you hunt large animals, but post the adoption of farming and herding, most people are not feeding themselves that way. And there is just more small game overall. Leather is not necessarily easier, quicker, or less expensive to make than cloth, it just depends on what resources you have that are most abundant.
So the steps to making leather are as follows:
(Under the cut because, uh. I know this stuff from my job, which is “open a dead animal and let the doctor see what’s wrong with it” and most of it is messy.)
1) Kill and skin animal. This means removing the whole skin, in as intact a piece as possible, which while harder than it seems would be something your fictional leather-working society would be way better at than me.
Actually, scratch that. Step 1 is know what kind of animal gets you the type of leather that you want. Cowhide and horsehide are thick and tough but provide a lot of usable skin. Young goats are supposedly great for thinner, softer leathers, but my professional experience doesn't give me a lot to go on there. The phrase "kid gloves" means that they are leather gloves made from young goats, aka kids, which tells you that the leather is thin and flexible.
The main cost of this step is having enough of the animals you need to slaughter. If you’re hunting, then it’s all meat to you, but if you are a farmer pre-industrially, meat might be a byproduct of animal husbandry and not the point of it. One of the main reasons to keep a herd mammal – horses, cows, sheep, goats, llamas – is milk. Milk is liquid protein and once you figure out how to make cheese it can store for longer than meat can, at least without a fuckton of salt, which is often worth its weight in gold historically. (You could also smoke it but fuel is expensive and smoking things is technically a little trickier than salting them.) If you kill too many of your female animals, you don’t get milk, and you don’t get baby animals. If you keep too many male baby animals until adulthood, they start fighting and may injure you, your valuable female animals, or the structures you have built to keep your valuable herd animals in your possession instead of your neighbors. As a herder, your reliable access to meat and hides is mostly culling immature males from your herd, which tends to lead to smaller amounts of usable hide.
2) Scrape that shit. Harder. If you do not remove literally all the connective tissue beneath the skin, your hide will rot. Your hide may still rot if you don’t tan it properly or wait too long to tan it. Or if you tan it wrong by dumping shit in water and waiting for the magic of fermentation to work right without even knowing the difference between an acid and a base.
The scraping is also a great way to tear the hide or put holes in it. If you, for example, want to make leather out of a cow that has been lying around in the summer for a day because you wisely prioritized the meat… it can get kinda fragile, depending on what the bacteria do. I have to sharpen our 21st century steel knives literally every time we do a cow or a horse, just to get through the hide at all, and I have still seen cowskin tear like thin cloth if it’s deteriorated enough.
3) Assuming you have completed steps 1 and 2, you need the chemicals to tan the animal. Historically brains have been used a lot. DO NOT DO THIS if you are a modern person who wants to hunt for meat or leather. Prion diseases like CWD live in the brain, as do a lot of viruses that will kill or disable you painfully and slowly. It’s a relatively low risk (compared to things like accidents with your hunting gun) but it’s a risk you do not have to take. Yes, this is why some states want you to turn in the heads of any deer you shoot, regardless of how many points they have. This is part of how we tell you if the deer you shot is actually safe to eat, and not full of said viruses that will kill or disable you painfully.
The other thing that you need is a steady location and a fuckton of water, because these bitches need to soak for a long time. Way longer than soak times for retting flax or other plant stem fibers. And in multiple different solutions of the foulest smelling shit that you can imagine: in addition to brains, the steps included soaking in urine, possibly dung if you didn’t have enough brains, salt curing, soaking until the hair is loosened and then scraping all that off, and then the actual tanning, which is soaking it in a high tannic acid tree bark solution until it’s ready.
You can skip some of these steps, especially if you are, say, a paleolithic hunter gatherer. But your leathers will degrade faster. They will be less comfortable and less good for your range of motion.
So the production of leather is not necessarily less time consuming than cloth. It is also resource expensive at many steps – from start to finish you need animal wealth, mineral and plant resources, time, and a lot of water that you don’t need urgently for something else, like irrigation or watering your livestock. You’ll also want to do your tanning away from where you eat and sleep, because, the odor of fermenting cowhide is not fun. Finally, it is way more difficult at every step to construct a garment out of leather: cutting it, using an awl to punch holes in it so you can actually sew, or boiling it into shape. It’s also a specialized process when it comes to the chemical aspect, more so than cleaning wool or beating flax, both of which you can produce way more of (eventually) as a small household in the middle of nowhere. Spinning and weaving are both activities you can pick at slowly – you can also get a very small child to spin yarn acceptably with practice, freeing up your adult hands to do things like the weaving, while you really can’t bring your tots into your leather working and expect them to do anything but get underfoot. And shitty cloth smells way better than shitty rotting leather.
And none of this even scratches the surface of the material property reasons why a society may prefer leather for some applications (saddles, shoes...) and cloth for others.
Addendum to the leather reblog above, but salt is also historically very expensive, and pretty crucial to most of the older European methods of hide treatment I was able to find when reading up on tanning a few months ago. I can't remember if you still need it if you're using alum, but alum is still something you're going to have to buy in order to process your skins. (From what I read, tanning with brains was an Indigenous American technique, which was rapidly adopted by the colonisers bc of its efficient use of resources that are easy to hand, but modern American sources tend to drown out everything else when looking at historical stuff online without institution access, so I wouldn't state that categorically.)
The original thread is why I cringe every time I read a fic in my home fandom – which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology – that has main characters tear each other's clothing to show how excited they are for boning down.
In a premodern context, if someone tore my clothing carelessly, let alone deliberately, we're not fucking. We're no longer on speaking terms. They're dead to me. A shirt is bad enough; at least those were comparatively disposable, and could probably be repaired in a way that's unnoticeable when you wear it (shirts in most premodern European societies are underwear, not outerwear), but a doublet? Fuck right off into the sun.
‘Ooh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.’ That's what you sound like. Tear your own fucking shirt if you're that keen.
It's such an incredibly modern trope to me. I could MAYBE understand it if it's supposed to be a flex on how wealthy someone is, but my poor as shit blorbo with his hand-to-mouth existence who owns three shirts MAXIMUM should not be doing this. Would not be doing this.
The earliest I could see that trope as plausible in my mind is the Victorian period. There was still a healthy second-hand market for clothing, but clothing production had become far more mechanised than it ever had been before, and tearing a shirt probably wouldn't send you to the poor house. (But please still don't tear a suit jacket or a woman's bodice. That's hours of sewing work alone, even after the advent of treadle sewing machines. What's wrong with you.)
Don't forget dyeing, which had to be re-done and was itself a whole fucking profession.
Indigo is one of the hardest natural dyes to start a pot of, especially without a thermometer or indigo white, so once you got that pot started you kept it going. Indigo also has to be processed into a water-soluble form by treating it with ammonia. How do you source ammonia in a pre-industrial world? Well, the local piss barrel at the tavern is full of something that will certainly turn into ammonia if you let it sit. There were almost wars over the argument of whether the dyers should have to pay money to take the piss from the tavern or whether the publican should pay THEM for the SERVICE of taking away the piss, which after all is garbage.
Dark or vivid colours are expensive, and natural dyes are not fast--that is, they fade with washing and sunlight and wear, so you have to keep re-dying them every so often. Black in particular was VERY expensive, moreso than ANY other colour. Certain fibers dye very well and certain ones do not.
Yellow and green were favourite colours of the common folk--bright yellows in particular were very easy to get with cheap dyestuffs, and you see bright sunshine yellow very often in medieval art of ordinary folks. Denim blue was middling expensive. Purple, pink, and orange did not exist as perceived colours--remember, colour is a function of language. Meaning if you don't have a word for the colour, you don't perceive it. Red was difficult and the only thing more expensive than red was, as I said, black.
Dyers and fullers had smelly jobs and worked with piss--their workshops were, like the tanner's, on the edge of town, and downwind if possible.
Oh yes, what's a fuller. Well, wool is full of oils and stuff from the sheep, and you need to eliminate those if you want the fabric to be thick and warm and insulating. So you need to soak it in urine and use your feet to rub it over a special textured surface to get all the oils out and shrink and felt the fabric. Loden, felt, and duffel are all fabrics that require fulling in order to become.
Spinning was done by most everybody all the time every day; that's why you see pictures of women with long distaffs leaning on their shoulders as they go about, in some art of ordinary life in the middle ages. You could spin all day while doing everything else. Weaving, however, was a profession, usually male, and weavers were very respected people in all societies that had them.
Pulling the fleece was an activity that you had to do before the wool could be spun. The process for turning a sheep's wool into a garment consisted of many more steps than shear, spin, weave, sew.
Shear
Pull the fleece: this involved sitting around with everyone and pulling the long guard hairs away from the undercoat. A lot of stories, songs, and gossip happened during this process. It also leaves you with very nice soft hands from all the lanolin.
Comb the undercoat hairs with a brush or comb to line up all the fibres in the same direction. This leaves you with rolags or roving.
Spin using a distaff and drop spindle. This takes forever. But there was a very important, revolutionary machine that came up the silk road to Europe and changed--and I cannot emphasise this enough--EVERYTHING.
This machine eliminated the drudgery of spinning, spreading from the East to Europe starting in the late 1200s. It freed up women's time to do more, and made spinning itself a job you could make money doing--the word "spinster" is the term for that profession, and elderly women suddenly could have money of their own, support themselves. This was very important!! This was a labour-saving machine that gave more power to women in Europe and made the making of fabric and fiber faster and easier than ever before!
5. Dye the threads. It's much easier to dye skeins of yarn than it is to dye fabric or garments in pre-industrial ages, so dyeing would be done at the yarn stage. Dyeing the yarn also means you can do things like have the weft be one colour and the warp another. This results in some of the most exciting and beautiful fabric in existence:
6. Weave the fabric. The loom was another piece of technology that was constantly being improved upon, because society was built on looms. In fact, the predecessor to the computer was the loom! Look up a video of a jaquard loom sometime, you'll see it uses punchcards to "program" in the different patterns of the fabric it produces. The song "four loom weaver" is actually "power loom weaver". Power looms were another improvement that made weaving faster. The luddites were the first labour strike and organization, and it was about? That's right, WEAVING.
7. Fulling, polishing, and other finishing techniques. Moire is made by calendaring. Felt is made by fulling. Polishing, waxing, and all kinds of other techniques are used to make all the different varieties of fabric that exist. The way we live now is sad and pathetic, we don't come into contact with much in the way of variety of fabric anymore. Everything is disposable, paperthin and made of plastic or cotton or bamboo, knits mostly. When you get into historical costuming, you meet all kinds of fabrics--lush brocades, velvets, and coutils, and silk. But it's NOTHING compared to the hand-woven fabrics of times past.
Machines can make fabric fast, but it's looser than when a human is doing it. The density of some hand-woven fabrics is so great that you don't need to hem them! Likewise, the translucency of some ancient linens made in Egypt is still a mystery we're trying to figure out how to reproduce, because machine-spinning and machine-weaving meant we LOST these techniques. People who spin and weave and hand-make fiber their whole lives can make it as thin as a spider's gossamer, and not even machines can do that today. Machines are wonderful and humans should not have to labour so much if a machine can do it, but it's worth noting that just because it's made by machine doesn't mean that it's better quality, just that its cheaper and faster to make. I'm sure if we tried, we'd find ways of machines being able to do it, especially with the "sort things and detect things" algorithmic programs software engineers have come up with, the ones that detect cancer and so on.
8. Sewing the garment. I'm putting a note here for sewing bc sewing by hand is a lot easier and faster and better than by machine sometimes. I hand-sewed an entire pair of pants and the hems were utterly invisible when I was finished, it was astonishing. I also used a running stitch for most of it and that's. That's the normal stitch to use, you just backstitch every ten stitches or so and then keep going. It wastes far less thread than a sewing machine. To make those pants I only needed three stitches: running, backstitch, and whipstitch. And I learned by watching Nicole Rudolph when she's sewing, she does the same stitches for the most part! There's speciality stitches for locking in the ends of corset bones (flossing) and so on, but the majority of the long seams are just the running stitch! Needles and pins were precious commodities in pre-industrial times, and there are letters between John Adams and his wife Abigail that illustrate this, which were famously made into the latter half of the song "Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve" in the 1969 musical 1776.
Needles were at first made of bone, hand-carved, in very ancient times; but needles and pines of steel and brass were also produced later on as metalworking tech started being able to do so. These were very precious, and the little tiny strawberry that hangs off a traditional tomato pincushion, the one full of what feels like sand? That was for cleaning the rust and tarnish off your needle, so it would go through the fabric easier. You can still buy bone and brass needles in the traditional style from historical merchants, and try for yourself sewing the historical way!
Many people in fact already practise an ancient form of fabric and garment-making: Knitting and crochet! There's a much older predecessor to these, called nalbinding, that is very interesting and practised with roving rather than spun and plied yarn, and uses a flat wooden or bone needle. It creates very dense, not very stretchy things, and was used by the Norse. Nalbound things are VERY cold-proof, and eventually felt--and that's a good thing, felt is very warm stuff! My mom made me a nalbound hat once and I miss it every winter.
Now, garments were not just fabric of course. People have liked decorating everything since time immemorial, and embroidery, buttons, beads, and other things were used. Another type of decoration, one very popular in the SCA, is TRIM! Trim is made by weaving on an inkle loom, which looks like this:
This one doesn't have the cards visble, but the pattern can be produced with cards that can be turned:
This produces a brocade, and yes, you can weave letters or all kinds of patterns into the "tape" that is produced. Depending on what fiber you use, and how fine the threads, these can be trims or hair-ribbons or shoulder-straps or all kinds of things!
Lace was also a very precious and complex form of decoration, and pieces of lace were so incredibly expensive and treasured that they were passed down as heirlooms. We're used to lace being white or maybe cream, but at certain points in France, blue lace could be found. And nothing is really stopping you from dyeing your lace, or using dyed threads to make it, other than fashion and convention.
Of course, places outside Europe (which is my speciality and has been my whole life) have their own fabric and decoration techniques, from the wax resist of batik to the special tie-dye from Japan called Shibori, to ikat, to the quilling of many North American Indigenous people (not to mention wampum beads, hand-carved of shells!). Everyone likes to decorate themselves and their clothing!
Thank you to everyone who participated this year; we had a total of 215 fics submitted this year! Please don’t forget to leave kudos and comment when you can to show these authors some love!
New Episode Alert: “It’s A Verse Before I Know It.” Interview with compo67, SPN FanFic Author
Good god y'all. We're kicking 2025 off with a bang. Kasey got to fulfill a fandom dream this week by talking to the incredible @compo67!
Grab snacks cos it's a long one this week. But hell, how do you stay succinct when talking to someone with this kinda bibliography? If you've been around for more than 5 mins, chances are you've read something by Cal. They've got fic for every taste & so many of them are full verses in their own right.
And you gotta stick around to the end to hear Kasey's utter shock that a reference they were sure wasn't actually a reference really WAS! (I promise it will make sense when you listen lol)
Listen on Spotify
Watch on Youtube:
A Verses Virtuoso joined Sandra and Kasey in this episode! If you’re a lover of Wincest or J2 fanfic, then you’re more than likely familiar
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:52 - When did Cal get into Supernatural?
00:04:53 - Was there Supernatural bingeing?
00:06:46 - Cal’s intro to Supernatural was bumpy
00:10:27 - Is it Sam or Dean for Cal?
00:15:06 - Mystery Spot thoughts
00:21:20 - Some of Cal’s favorite characters
00:23:54 - Did Cal watch Supernatural to the very end?
00:35:12 - Does Cal have any canonical ships?
00:38:52 - When did Wincest click for Cal?
00:44:12 - When did Cal’s love of fanfiction begin?
00:47:46 - What came first, original fiction or fanfic?
00:51:33 - The Verse Virtuoso
00:58:34 - The Chicago Verse
01:01:16 - The richness and diversity of the Chicago neighborhood
01:02:08 - Has the show ending affected any of Cal’s story directions?
01:03:32 - The comfort of writing
01:06:17 - The breadth and bits of Chicago Verse
01:09:42 - Cal’s personal imprint on TCV
01:13:37 - It Takes Verse
01:20:19 - Big Bang Experiences
01:22:59 - Minutes Past Midnight Verse
01:24:42 - Voicing diversity and being inclusive in fiction
01:39:59 - Palo Alto Verse
01:46:46 - The ebb and flow of writing inspiration
01:50:21 - Deciding between Wincest or J2
01:52:47 - Fielding readers’ requests and making friends in fandom
01:54:59 - Have fic expectations changed in fandom?
01:58:30 - The highs and lows of the SPN fandom
02:01:16 - Does Cal have a favorite fic baby?
02:03:27 - The archiving of fanfic
02:05:52 - What writers does Cal fan over?
02:12:28 - Cal’s fanfic classic recs
02:14:09 - The Compo connection!
02:21:26 - Kasey’s last question
02:23:09 - The dino love comes full circle!
02:28:36 - Words of wisdom from Cal
02:35:49 - Final thoughts and Outro
Oh my goodness! I had the immense honor of joining Sandra and Kasey for an episode of "Idling in the Impala"! Thank you to them for having me on, I enjoyed this so much. <3
Ok so I’ve been playing for 18 years and i’m a string teacher. Can i just say how IMPORTANT it is for young kids to see a BLACK, MALE-PRESENTING PERSON playing, nae, SHREDDING on a violin? I’ve know maybe 5 black people who played stringed instruments throughout my schooling and teaching (predumably because i’m an upper middle class white woman). In districts where the population is predominantly black, funding is always low, so the instruments are crappy. Kids quit, or the program is dismantled. I’ve seen very few professional string players who are black.
Obviously there are black string players. We just don’t see them because they “don’t look like” string players.
This person is the real deal. They were clearly classically trained, and seems to have some fiddle training as well. How cool is that?
