Hey fandom! Given the sheer amount of underappreciated characters and ships in the fandom, would there be any interest in participating in a rarepair week for the show at some point? Guidelines would be ironed out if there was sufficient interest, and comments/suggestions are definitely welcome.
Anyone else notice there's random, kind of important character info that gets dropped totally randomly and then never brought up again? Cause I sure did :D My friend and I have gone through the whole series and noted every one sentence lore drop we found. Thought the fandom might appreciate it for character study purposes!
(Organized by character and episode which it appears)
Abe:
• Abe broke off his and Anna's engagement 3 years prior to the start of the series (1x01)
• Abraham doesn't love Mary (2x01)
• Abe wanted to wear the redcoat since he was little (4x03)
Ben:
• Ben is a virgin (1x04)
• Ben studied Greek, Hebrew, and Latin (1x06)
• Ben graduated Yale in 1773 (1x06)
• "They're using your old schoolhouse as a magazine" Does this imply Ben taught there? (1x10)
• Anna comforted Ben after he cried getting stung by a bee when he was 8 (3x05)
• Ben hasn't seen Abe/Setauket in at least 3 years (1x10)
• Ben appears to want to top in bed (3x04)
Caleb:
• Caleb has been to Greenland (1x01)
• Caleb can't go back to Setauket (1x01)
• Caleb has a sister named Loretta (1x02)
• Caleb had sex with a woman in New Haven who taught him "ironic" (1x03)
• Caleb harbors sexism (1x03)
• Caleb thinks Abe "married the wrong woman" (1x03)
• Caleb's dad died "a few years back" of palsy (1x08)
• Caleb has a sister still alive with palsy (1x08)
• Caleb speaks the Oneida language (2x01)
• Caleb is bad at math (2x08)
• Caleb can play the lute (3x03)
• Caleb is not religious (4x08)
Mary:
• Mary only met Thomas once (1x03)
• Mary's brother died of croup (1x04)
• Mary's maiden name is Blake
Simcoe:
• Simcoe is Welsh (1x01)
• Simcoe has been to Guyana and the Caribbean (1x02)
• Simcoe secretly writes love poetry (2x02)
• Simcoe can be good with kids (3x05)
• Simcoe is Lieutenant Colonel by 4x01
• Simcoe is implied to be a generous lover (4x02)
• Simcoe was born in India (4x02)
• Simcoe has never set foot on England (4x02)
• Simcoe lost his dad at 10 years old (4x02)
• Simcoe wants for a wife (4x03)
• Simcoe can't stomach Cuban cigars due to losing many "dear friends" to yellow fever in Havana (4x04)
• Simcoe has respect for a WOC prostitute (4x06)
• Simcoe is willing to bottom for a WOC prostitute (4x06)
• Simcoe wants his partner to enjoy sex as much as he does (4x06)
• Simcoe thinks Washington is a man of honor (4x09)
Hewlett:
• Hewlett's never partied before (2x01)
• Hewlett draws (2x03)
• Hewlett was forced to join the military because his family faced bankruptcy from boycotts (2x04)
• Hewlett is named after Halley's comet (2x04)
• Hewlett considered killing himself (2x07)
• Hewlett is from Scotland (3x02)
• "As always" Hewlett's romance was one-sided (3x04)
• Hewlett has an uncle (4x06)
• Hewlett got a knife from his uncle who got it in Colluden from a Jacobite (4x06)
Andre:
• Andre knows what the clitoris is (1x04)
• Andre was a POW (1x06)
• Andre is a nerd for inventions (2x02)
• Andre can play the violin (2x02)
• Andre's mother was Swiss and his father was French (2x04)
• Andre has no land (2x04)
• Andre has scars from being rejected by a woman for his lower class (2x04)
• Andre is self conscious (2x06)
• Andre yeeted with Ben Franklin's inventions (2x09)
• Andre would read Shakespeare's sonnets to Peggy (3x04)
Rogers:
• Rogers was married and fell in love with another woman (1x02)
• Rogers needs to "settle his estate" (1x04)
• Rogers has read the Declaration (3x01)
• Rogers has been downtrodden his entire career (3x01)
Akinbode:
• Akinbode has "other girls" but Abby is the important one (1x04)
• Akinbode is Masai (1x06)
• Akinbode is a first generation slave (1x07)
• Akinbode means "brave one" or "warrior" (1x08)
Abby:
• Abby was willing to keep working for Anna after being freed to help her (1x04)
• Abby calls Anna "Annie" (1x04)
• Abby hums/sings at Andre's house (3x01)
• Cicero was a breach baby (4x09)
Arnold:
• Benedict Arnold values Ben's brother (2x03)
• Arnold was supposed to go to Yale before his father spent all his tuition on alcohol (2x04)
• Arnold's previous wife was named Margaret (2x09)
• Arnold's house servant escaped from Mount Vernon (4x01)
Other (Setauket):
• Deyong is married (1x02)
• Selah knew Samuel his whole life (1x07)
• Nathaniel Tallmadge fought in the French and Indian War (1x09)
• Baker is an orphan and his mother is implied to be a prostitute (1x09)
• Wakefield set up the garrison at Strong Manor and called it Fort St. George (4x01)
• Wakefield is married (4x02)
Other (Rangers):
• The Rangers have a boat (2x02)
• The Rangers are stationed at farms around Harlem (4x05)
• Rangers hang out at Shields Tavern (4x05)
• A lot of Rangers were Continentals before becoming Rangers (4x09)
Misc:
• Genevieve was a beautiful tavern wench at the Elizabethtown Tavern (1x08)
• Austin Roe and Rivington are in Abe's spy book as 724 and 726 (1x10) (Culpepper Jr is also in as 723 so cannot be used to claim Rivington as a spy)
• The Townsends have a dog named Nellie (3x05)
• Hercules Mulligan has Admiral Sanders for a father in law (4x02)
S o. A friend and I fell into watching this lovely show and couldn't get enough of it, and wanted to engage even further in some funny ways. Turn Crack definitely exists, and this is sort of in a similar vein; I'm throwing this out there because we had fun doing it and maybe the fandom will get a kick out of it too!
Upon rewatch, we decided to do a sort of meme counter, where we would call out phrases dependent upon what was happening, explained as follows:
"Ben Your Penis": The origin of this entire list. Relevant whenever there is a scene where Ben's dick is clearly visible in those pants.
"Ben Your Butt": Derivative of the former, but for scenes where that cake really shines.
"___ your penis": Also derivative of "Ben your penis", but for a time it happens to other characters. It happens to Ben substantially more than other characters, which is why he has his own counter.
"___ your tits": Occurs whenever someone's chest is very prominent and/or looking good. Used for both male and female characters.
"My BABY TM": Hardcore fangirling moment over any particular character.
✨️Homosexual✨️: Used half jokingly, but whenever something fairly gay happens in a scene.
👀 @ Violence: Getting violent to the point that it ends up hot. It was likely not intended to be attractive but too bad :)
"What Is That Accent": Whenever a character has some kind of accent that cannot be easily discerned.
"That Was Uncalled For": Whenever a character does something, as the name suggests, uncalled for, i.e. overreacting.
Serving: A character has an outfit that is particularly fabulous and stands out.
"What the f u c k Richard": Reserved for very specific moments of Richard Woodhull being a dick
"God I Wish That Were Me": Varies in use, but used when one wishes to be in the place of a character during a particular action in a scene.
These are only used once per scene (i.e. "Ben your penis" cannot be used where it is noticed and then used again in the same scene but a different shot). Total season counts will be posted per episode in one block as we get through each!
it’s hilarious to me when people call historical fashions that men hated oppressive
like in BuzzFeed’s Women Wear Hoop Skirts For A Day While Being Exaggeratedly Bad At Doing Everything In Them video, one woman comments that she’s being “oppressed by the patriarchy.” if you’ve read anything Victorian man ever said about hoop skirts, you know that’s pretty much the exact opposite of the truth
thing is, hoop skirts evolved as liberating garment for women. before them, to achieve roughly conical skirt fullness, they had to wear many layers of petticoats (some stiffened with horsehair braid or other kinds of cord). the cage crinoline made their outfits instantly lighter and easier to move in
it also enabled skirts to get waaaaay bigger. and, as you see in the late 1860s, 1870s, and mid-late 1880s, to take on even less natural shapes. we jokingly call bustles fake butts, but trust me- nobody saw them that way. it was just skirts doing weird, exciting Skirt Things that women had tons of fun with
men, obviously, loathed the whole affair
(1864)
(1850s. gods, if only crinolines were huge enough to keep men from getting too close)
(no date given, but also, this is 100% impossible)
(also undated, but the ruffles make me think 1850s)
it was also something that women of all social classes- maids and society ladies, enslaved women and free women of color -all wore at one point or another. interesting bit of unexpected equalization there
and when bustles came in, guess what? men hated those, too
(1880s)
(probably also 1880s? the ladies are being compared to beetles and snails. in case that was unclear)
(1870s, I think? the bustle itself looks early 1870s but the tight fit of the actual gown looks later)
hoops and bustles weren’t tools of the patriarchy. they were items 1 and 2 on the 19th century’s “Fashion Trends Women Love That Men Hate” lists, with bonus built-in personal space enforcement
Gonna add something as someone who’s worn a lot of period stuff for theatre:
The reason you suck at doing things in a hoop skirt is because you’re not used to doing things in a hoop skirt.
The first time I got in a Colonial-aristocracy dress I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The construction didn’t actually allow me to raise my arms all the way over my head (yes, that’s period-accurate). We had one dresser to every two women, because the only things we could put on ourselves were our tights, shifts, and first crinoline. Someone else had to lace our corsets, slip on our extra crinolines, hold our arms to balance us while a second person actually put the dresses on us like we were dolls, and do up our shoes–which we could not put on ourselves because we needed to be able to balance when the dress went on. My entire costume was almost 40 pounds (I should mention here that many of the dresses were made entirely of upholstery fabric), and I actually did not have the biggest dress in the show.
We wore our costumes for two weeks of rehearsal, which is quite a lot in university theatre. The first night we were all in dress, most of the ladies went propless because we were holding up our skirts to try and get a feel for both balance and where our feet were in comparison to where it looked like they should be. I actually fell off the stage.
By opening night? We were square-dancing in the damn things. We had one scene where our leading man needed to whistle, but he didn’t know how and I was the only one in the cast loud enough to be heard whistling from under the stage, so I was also commando-crawling underneath him at full speed trying to match his stage position–while still in the dress. And petticoats. And corset. Someone took my shoes off for that scene so I could use my toes to propel myself and I laid on a sheet so I wouldn’t get the dress dirty, but that was it–I was going full Solid Snake in a space about 18″ high, wearing a dress that covered me from collarbones to floor and weighed as much as a five-year-old child. And it worked beautifully.
These women knew how to wear these clothes. It’s a lot less “restrictive” when it’s old hat.
I have worn hoop skirts a lot, especially in summer. I still wear hoop skirts if I’m going to be at an event where I will probably be under stage lights. (For example, Vampire Ball.)
I can ride public transportation while wearing them. I can take a taxi while wearing them. I can go on rides at Disneyland while wearing them. Because I’ve practiced wearing them and twisting the rigid-but-flexible skirt bones so I can sit on them and not buffet other people with my skirts.
Hoop skirts are also air conditioning. If you ever go to reenactments in the South, particularly in summer, you’ll notice a lot of ladies gently swaying in their big 1860s skirts – because it fans all the sweaty bits. You’ll be much cooler in a polished cotton gown with full sleeves, ruffles, and hoopskirt than in a riding jacket and trousers, let me promise you! (This is part of the reason many enslaved women also enthusiastically preferred larger skirts – they had more to do than sit in the shade, but they’d get a bit of a breeze from the hoops’ movement as they were walking.)
They’re also – and I can’t emphasize enough how important this is – really easy to pee in. If you’re in split-crotch drawers (which, until at least the 1890s, you were), you can take an easy promenade a few feet away from the gents and then squat down and pee in pretty much total privacy. It gives so much freedom in travel when it’s not a problem to pee most anywhere.
People also don’t realize that corsets themselves were a HUGE HUGE IMPROVEMENT over previous support-garment styles – and if you have large breasts that don’t naturally float freely above your ribcage (which some people’s do! but it’s not that common), corsets are often an improvement over modern bras.
They hold up the breasts from underneath, taking the weight of them off your back. Most historical corset styles don’t have shoulder straps, so you’re not bearing the weight of your breast there, either, and you can raise your arms as far as your dress’s shoulder line allows (which is the actually restrictive bit – in my 1830s dress, literally all I can do is work in my lap, but in my 1890s dress I can paddle a kayak or draw a longbow with no trouble. Both in a full corset). They support your back and reduce the physical effort it takes to not slouch, helping avoid back pain. They’re rigid enough that you don’t usually have to adjust your clothing to keep it where it belongs. They’re flexible – if you’re having a bloaty PMS day you just … don’t lace it as tightly, and if your back muscles are sore you can lace it a little tighter. And you can undo a cup (or, y’know, not have breast cups) to nurse a baby without losing any of the structural integrity of the garment.
I do educational/historical dressing and people are really insistent, like, “The corset was invented by a man, wasn’t it?” “Actually, women were at the forefront of changing undergarment styles throughout the 19th century!” “But it’s true that it was invented by a man.”
Uh, well, it’s hard to say who “invented” the style but it’s very likely that women’s dressmakers mostly innovated women’s corsets and men’s tailors mostly innovated men’s corsets, honey. Because those exist too.
That time when Jimmy Carter saved Canada from Nuclear Armageddon
And people used to make fun of him calling him a Peanut farmer, ignoring that he was in the Navy and stopped a Nuclear Meltdown in Canada, and people laughed when he wanted to put Solar Panels at the White House. :T
And since Carter was a Humble guy he didn't say "Want to talk about tough.. Look Ronnie did you join the Navy and then go into a Nuclear Reactor and piss radiation for 6 months?"
[image ID: a screenshot of the notes on this post, featuring several people indicating they want to know more. End ID.]
OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself “necessary” is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?
Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.
Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (I’ve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, there’s a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. I’ve been going for 12-24.
What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.
Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.
You will notice I didn’t suggest any further pretreatment, and that’s because 1) you don’t want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.
When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatment…to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to “well, it’s old” dinginess. I was planning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. “I need to reshape it” is nothing.
Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but we’ve been trained to believe it’s all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is “normal wear and tear” and can’t be fixed.
It’s utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from “I keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasons” to “I could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectable”! The pajama bottoms I’m wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!
I do not know how often you’re supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention it’s way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I don’t wear white, so I can’t test the “it will make whites look almost-new as well” claim, but I’ve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.
Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.
Go forth. Rejuvenate your clothing. Strip your laundry.
For grease: Dawn dish soap and a toothbrush.
For blood: soak in peroxide, rinse, apply more peroxide.
For ink: alcohol. Rubbing alcohol is best, vodka is an acceptable substitute. Do not use colored liquor like tequila or whiskey. Aerosol hairspray will work in a pinch.
For red wine or grape juice: white wine.
For “what the fuck is that, anyway?” stains: OxyClean Max Force Gel Stick.
For “oh shit, there was a red shirt in with my whites” stains: I’m very sorry. Try bleach?
Spot-apply all of these. In other words don’t just toss your period panties into a sink full of peroxide, pour some peroxide over the crotch. Apply alcohol with a cotton facial pad or, failing that, a washcloth or kleenex.
Let it sit for five to fifteen minutes, then throw it in the wash. Try to use cold water; hot water will set stains.
Not me thinking about Keatlejuice's original concept involving him having hung himself over a woman and botched it and what that still entails for his character craving love and affection and importance that just continues in the second film
Posting this from the bird app since I hope it can help people.
People have been contacting the White House directly to demand a recount, especially since there has been evidence that not every ballot has been counted and will be thrown away if it hasn't been cured.
The link to contact the White House is here!
Contact the President, Vice President, get help with a Federal Agency, or request a Presidential Greeting.
The following screenshot comes from here!
If you need help writing something, check under the cut! I've provided a prewritten response from one of the replies!
"I am a concerned citizen, and I need you to hear me. I urge you to recount the ballots from this election and investigate election interference. Bomb threats have been called into multiple polling locations, causing some to close early. Domestic terrorists have burned ballot boxes. An unprecedented number of ballots have been rejected and require curing. There have been reports of polling officers allowing voter intimidation in and outside of polling places across the country and an estimated 20 million mail in ballots are unaccounted for. In addition, many people have reported that ballots were not counted for suspicious reasons such as signature invalidation which is information that vote counters do not have access to. These events have occurred in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia, for instance."
Feel free to add and change what you want, this is just a base for you to work off of.
S o. As few people are probably aware, over a year ago, I made a joke post that Joseph Pulitzer and Theodore Roosevelt are bitter exes in Livesies and that I would not be elaborating.
... As many fandom things tend to go, it is Definitely not a joke anymore. As such, I will now be elaborating as I did not all those months ago. For those of y'all willing to at the very least entertain it, strap in.
A l r i g h t so for everyone coming along for the ride, let us begin at the basics: the canon we are given to start with. Early in act I, we see even m e n t i o n of Roosevelt gets under Pulitzer's skin; he gets loud, he gets angry, he has to rein himself in. He will find any means he can to criticize and does not shy away from it.
Roosevelt does not come up again until late, l a t e game, where he shows up unannounced in Pulitzer's office. And it's where things start getting very interesting.
Pulitzer tries to be professional with him, tries to address him in a proper manner, calling him "Governor", trying to lay out his case before him from the start. But Roosevelt doesn't display much interest in this propriety. When he first lays eyes on him, he calls him "Joseph", and nothing more. Medda gets her full name, and he does not address anyone else. It's familiarity, and also some slight disrespect on Roosevelt's behalf. But it's also t e a s i n g, he smiles, he seems to enjoy watching him squirm. Not to mention the comfort in Pulitzer's personal space.
(Now kiss.)
He waves his power in Pulitzer's face, all the while refusing to call him anything other than "Joseph", despite Pulitzer trying to iron out the interaction into anything vaguely professional.
We also have the "hard heart, soft head" exchange.
Theodore where are you l o o k i n g??
After Jack manages to get a deal from Pulitzer and these two are standing up on the platform together, they continue to antagonize each other. But Pulitzer seems to be sliding into Roosevelt's game: he calls him "Teddy", a name which Roosevelt's real life counterpart despised. He moves to push his cane into Pulitzer's chest, and when Jack interrupts them, they both turn to give him this look:
I'm sorry, was he interrupting something?
Foreplay?
Sadly, here is where our canonical events end. However, now we jump into the richness of the relationship.
In the events we see in Newsies, I see this pair as bitter exes. As it so happens, based on the timeline of reality, Pulitzer and Roosevelt were in New York City at the exact same time for a while, immediately after Roosevelt's wife died. (I feel it important to note here that while I draw from real events, this is not to be intended as RPF. This is for the characters Newsies, specifically Livesies, has made of them both and only these characters. The real Pulitzer and Roosevelt led vastly different lives and neither were even present for the strike at all. So Newsies is fudging it, and so will I.)
At any rate, Roosevelt would have been young and vulnerable and emotional during this time. He and Pulitzer catch each other's eye, and after an age begin a tentative love affair. But Pulitzer can't bring himself to be open and honest with his emotions, especially not in a way that a vulnerable Roosevelt would so desperately need, and is too blinded by his own ego to see that he is causing problems.
Feeling ignored and twice brokenhearted, Roosevelt takes off to the Dakotas after the end of the legislative session without telling Pulitzer. This leaves Joseph confused and hurting, bitter and angry, and never wanting to see him ever again.
Years pass, and Roosevelt's fame grows. Pulitzer grows more and more bitter, thinking about the abandonment he's convinced himself was his reality. Until they meet again. Roosevelt as governor to confront him as a titan.
And so brings us to canon day. When your skinny, fiery, weak voiced lover crashes back into your life and he is big, loud, confident, and sexier than he's ever been.
I'm not asking you to ship it, but I'm asking you to at least consider how it can be compelling. Rekindling a love affair that ended so badly when both parties are older, wiser, and much better equipped. For those of you that want to see Pulitzer suffer, he will! That personal growth to force him out of his closed off emotional constipation, to make him confront that he isn't alone and doesn't have to be. And to slowly trust each other again.