Every vampire is all "oh drinking blood is better than any food, drugs, even sex" but I don't even believe them because all of them were literally made before the invention of really good drugs and before we got all the nice foods from the new world, so I don't trust any of their opinions. Lestat has never ate a potato and Armand hasn't ever even tasted tomaotes. The only guy I trust is Daniel Molloy who has probably tried every drug on earth, has definitely ate nice food and would be a valid judge on how good drinking blood really is.
Lestat was born circa 1760. Europe had potatoes by then. Armand was born circa 1480, though, so that part's correct. Armand has tasted neither tomato nor potato.
They did have potatoes yes but I doubt Lestat has ever had any since he was an aristocrat (even if he was a poor one)
By the 18th century, most French recipes were rooted in religion, so while orchard fruits and game birds were celebrated, anything dug from the “devil’s dirt”—like onions, carrots, and especially potatoes—was deemed fit only for peasants and swine. People believed the potato was akinto the deadly nightshade and linked to leprosy due to its spotted skin; it was deemed un-Christian, and its cultivation for human use was banned.
I knew that the potato is technically akin to the deadly nightshade, as is the tomato, in that they're all in the Solanaceae family, but I didn't know that the 18th-century French thought potatoes were unfit for [upper-class] human consumption.
Did they think the same about tomatoes, or were those seen as ok because they grow aboveground?
Actually, wait, I think maybe I have heard something about this before. Wasn't there a thing where a government started posting guards around potato fields in order to trick people into thinking they were valuable, so that they'd get over their aversion to eating them? Or something like that? Maybe somewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, if not in France? This is very faintly ringing a bell.
(Linked article is paywalled, so idk if there's something about that in there.)
I'm also still curious how they felt about tomatoes.
I think the upper classes used to believe that tomatoes were poisonous, because tomatoes are a bit acidic and rich people used something poisonous in their cutlery/dishware that the tomatoes could slightly dissolve, which would then poison the rich people. And since their dishware only noticeably poisoned them when they ate tomatoes, they figured the tomatoes were the culprits and stopped touching them.
Peasants, whose dishware was all wood and pottery, did not have this problem, so tomatoes were just fine by them.
I literally love all of you, but as a Tumblr veteran, Tumblr's main feature is the reblog feature. It is the beating heart of the dashboard and the foundation for a chronological timeline. The For You page here should not be your default setting.
You guys have got to start reblogging stuff you enjoy, especially, specifically gifs and fan art but also fics and fan theories or even hot takes if you're not afraid of a lil discourse. I'm tired of being the first or third reblog for a person's post and then seeing my blog's followers do nothing but hit like, while blogs sit there with no new posts in months or years!
Reblog more stuff please. Thank you, have a good day.
You're not even going to reblog this post are you
you don't need to write a dark deconstruction of Peter Pan where he's willing to kill people and his state of eternal childhood makes him morally ambiguous, JM Barrie already wrote one and it's called Peter Pan
To clarify, this post isn't about the misconception thrown around by clickbait online listicles that "Peter kills the Lost Boys when they get too old"*. Any real horror that comes from the story, IMO, is about Peter as a VICTIM. His very existence is a tragedy.
Peter, like a lot of mythological fairies and fae folk on which he's based, is stuck in a sort of eternal childhood not just of body, but of mind. While to another child this would obviously be a dream come true it becomes VERY clear over the course of the story that he's deeply suffering under the surface. Peter Pan was written partially as a critique on Victorian and Edwardian ideas about childhood innocence. JM Barrie, when describing some of the fundamental traits of children, calls them gay, innocent, and heartless. Peter being morally grey is text, not subtext.
I'm not saying a more adult-oriented retelling shouldn't exist, I'm a grown-ass man who still loves this very story. But shouldn't it touch on a topic less shallow?
You exist in a state of eternal play. No parents to tell you what to do - or take care of you. You have all the friends you want, until they start to grow up, and you stay the same, no matter what you do, and you don't know why. Finally one day you bring home a "mother" who isn't a grown up, and it's so much fun! It's amazing! But she starts getting scared because she's forgetting things, forgetting the way her own mother looked (her real, grown-up mother, the thing you never had, the thing you hate and want most of all), so she leaves you, and you let her go, because you have to. And maybe she comes back, but every year she's more and more different until suddenly, you don't know her anymore. But that doesn't matter, because she has another little girl, so you can have another mother, so why not start again?
And you do. And thus it will go on. As long as children are gay, and innocent, and heartless.
* That's basically a throwaway line that he tells Wendy as a sort of brag, and imo I think we're supposed to take it with a grain of salt, since Peter is established to be a habitual liar and mis-rememberer of events, especially when he thinks it might make him look cool. The Lost Boys we meet in the original 1911 novel go home with the Darling children and are adopted into the family, something which you might not know if you only saw the Disney movie, so we know they aren't "actually dead and Neverland is heaven" and Peter didn't kill them after the Darlings left. In the official sequel, Peter Pan in Scarlet (yes there is a canon sequel, it was written in 2006 by Geraldine McCaughrean after she won a contest put forward by Great Ormond Street Hospital, the owners of the Peter Pan IP, it's amazing and everyone should read it right now) we actually meet some of the OTHER Lost Boys who were banished by peter for "growing up" and are still stuck in Neverland, and they still know Wendy (she comes back every year for the spring cleaning until Peter just... forgets about her). So there's no real evidence that Peter really did kill any of the Lost Boys, and in fact more evidence to the contrary - the closest we see him come to that is when he believes Tootles has accidentally shot and killed Wendy. When it's revealed that Wendy is fine, Tootles is forgiven entirely.
These two stories work so well as mirrors to each other that I sometimes like to say that AIW is an imaginary world running on a child's version of "adult logic" whereas in Peter Pan the "real" world runs on child logic. Why do mothers seem to know everything? Well...
Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers.
Obviously your mom can literally rummage through your thoughts! This is the most out-there example but generally in the story children's ideas about the world are just objectively correct. Mr. Darling's work is very abstract except for the idea of sums and small talk, Mrs. Darling can watch her kids through night-lights, the stars talk to Peter; I often say that Peter Pan is so surreal that, were it to come out today, could only be marketed to very young children (who would accept the weirdness of a fairy tale) or adults/very advanced readers who are used to surrealism (who can understand when not everything is meant to be understood in a book). Alice In Wonderland definitely has a current day reputation of being surreal, but I think Peter Pan deserves that as well, it is BUCK-WILD in some parts.
@fagboysupreme could def explain this better than me because whatever brainworms i have for Peter Pan he has the wondrrland variety
so wonderland is in practice a reverse of neverland. neverland works on kid logic so everything makes sense to kids and only to kids, and this kind of nonsense leaches out into the real world and that's why mr. darling's job is just The Concept Of Business and why crawling into the doghouse is treated as a reasonable response to upsetting your children.
wonderland, by contrast, is as nonsensical as it is because it's about societal rules and the way children are treated by adults, none of which makes much sense to a kid. especially during the time it was written. certain sections of it parody old virtue poems that children had to read in school and that probably seemed super dumb and arbitrary but you had to do it anyway. despite having lots of personality, alice is rarely allowed to be an active participant in her own adventure because she keeps getting pushed and pulled and kicked out of places and asked to perform pointless tasks and play stupid games.
they both meet at a sort of central point of "children see things in a very specific way and adult things are basically just nonsense" to the point that mr. darling's Nebulous Business Job is more or less an equivalent to "painting the roses red", representing the vague childlike idea of Having A Job and Having A Boss You Hate
alice is also notably sort of weird? granted wonderland turns out to be a dream and in dreams you just sort of accept things as standard, but she doesn't really do that. her reactions to most things are "well hey now i don't care for your wacky talk" as opposed to "holy shit why are we playing croquet with birds??" like she recognizes the circumstances as weird but not the earth-shattering weirdness that it so clearly is.
an edgy alice in wonderland story can and should, in my opinion, be more like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" -- it should be about tangibly representing stuff like childhood trauma. or, to contrast, it could be about the fear of growing up, the fear of responsibility. but to me the best "edgy" takes on wonderland are just about taking the pre-existing twisted world of wonderland and twisting it further. Jan Svankmajer's "Alice" is a good example of this, it's a relatively faithful adaptation of the story but replaces wonderland's whimsy with a sort of beige, crusty vibe, using a lot of animal skulls and other creepy things. it relies on the uncanny valley, to an extent.
a peepan and alice crossover is something ive had in the back of my head for awhile now, because either way there's an interesting interaction. if alice goes to neverland, she'd probably have a really good time? like she certainly wouldn't question not having to attend school, at least up until what she wants out of neverland clashes with what peter wants. if peter goes to wonderland, it would further dive into the arbitrary nature of childhood, only from the perspective of a person who has never had to experience anything resembling a normal childhood. which i think is objectively cool as shit.
i also want to point out the third point of this triangle that came much much later, "Coraline", where the alternate world is instead what an adult would assume a child wants. idk that i need to brainstorm more on but theres something there about alternate worlds in service of a child's mindset.
Actually making your selfinsert overpowered and friends with all your faves and a hybrid of the coolest species and in a relationship with your crush and the long lost sibling of the villain is called having fun and its cool as fuck
dead tired today so I grabbed a coffee from the gas station & the guy greeted me by trying to say “is that everything “ but fumbled and said “e ga thebythin” and me trying to say “yeah” or “yup” just went “YIP!” in response. No survivors
Tbh I don't understand anyone who denies their favorite character's flaws and acts like they've never done anything wrong when that is like consistently the most interesting part of any character ever
I think it's actually essential to children's moral development to be exposed to short stories moderately beyond their reading level where a bunch of fucked up shit happens and then instead of offering a moral lesson or any sort of emotional or narrative resolution it just ends.
(Ideally these stories should be presented in the form of poorly curated anthologies with the most generic titles imaginable, thereby rendering their contents impossible to identify or find later in life and leaving the affected individual wondering whether they dreamed the whole thing.)
Since we're sharing our personal white whales in the notes, mine is one I read when I was like ten about a boy who travels to a post-apocalyptic future where rising sea levels have caused humanity to evolve into fish-people, has a whirlwind romance with a local girl, then resolves to travel back to his own time and prevent the apocalypse, only to discover that his fish girlfriend has destroyed the time machine while he slept. He has a mental breakdown and the story just ends. Thirty years later and I still have no idea who wrote it or what it's called – not for lack of searching!
vaporwave
pixelskylines
blakekathryn
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
