mu

A perfectly nice girl. Historical RPF 'n' stuff, would prefer if minors didn't follow me

[muined]

It's been several years since I made this but I still like it!

[muined]

The Death of Stalin is a wish-fulfillment fantasy about what if there was a group of nice established older folks who wanted to help out with elder care and estate planning? Wouldn't that be cool

[muined]

I love the pictures of Hoover hanging out with the extended Tolson family because Clyde's mom never looks very enthusiastic. "My son loves him, I think he looks a little gay but whatever makes my princess happy"

(to be fair, both of these photos are from 1938, shortly after Clyde's father's death - you can see that she's in mourning clothes in the second, the boys took her to the Stork Club in NYC to cheer her up?)

[muined]

When we think of the most significant elder caregivers of history, do we think of...him?

Why not?

[muined]

Society if House MD had done a Taub x Masters storyline in S7 like I thought they were going to

[muined]

Midcentury ~Kremlinologists writing about Malenkov always sound like this post

[cctinsleybaxter]

happy birthday @muined (original text post here)

[muined]

Edmund fighting through physical injury to deliver me my birthday Korn...just as he (Korn) would want

[weepingwidar]

Rebecca Storm (Canadian, 1987) - The Fig Tree (2025)

[muined]

My House MD theory: Taub's marital problems stem from the haunted painting in his apartment

[muined]

@cctinsleybaxter

Made me realize that the antepenultimate scenes of both Through the Looking Glass and Catch-22 place their protagonist in conversation with two queens

[muined]

Best of my own 2021 Catch-22 liveblog

[laughlaughatme42]

[muined]

Chapter 29

"Well, it's pride month, Danby. I expect you know what that means."

"Do...do you want us to create a gay roadblock, Colonel?"

[cctinsleybaxter]

seasonal comic

[cctinsleybaxter]

Top five celeb teeth. Sets of teeth, that is. Y'know, chompers

I've never thought about this in my life.

[muined]

Not to be presumptuous, but I think he has thought about it ATP

[muined]

Environmental storytelling

[muined]

Another fun(?) Death of Stalin fact: we can see in footage and photos from Stalin's funeral that the real Vasily Stalin didn't have a mustache at that time, but he seems to have grown one at some point during his seven-year prison term (1953-1960):

[muined]

your svetlana and beria fic had genuinely altered my brain chemistry a few years ago... just reread it because of my "twenty letters to a friend" uni assignment, and it hit me as hard as it did back then. you nailed svetlana's complex character spectacularly well, and i cannot help but feel for her. my setanka! :(

Thank you so much! I feel lucky to have received a lot of thoughtful and kind comments on that fic over the years - despite it being pretty out there. The movie just provides such a good jumping-off point for fic, because, like, what exactly was the intention of the Svetlana/Beria/Kapler subplot...? What was meant to be conveyed about these characters...?

I recently came across a 2019 novel called Red Daughter which covers some of the same territory as my fic - the author trying to imagine what it would be like to have Lavrenti Beria as a Friend Of The Family, a constant presence in one's childhood. (The script for tDoS actually goes so far as to define Beria as Vasily's godfather, which has no historical basis but does sorta describe the dynamic.) Anyway, this book, Red Daughter by John Burnham Schwartz:

There's some evocative sensory details here, but why is Beria, like, beefing with this nine year old? Why is he plotting on her downfall? He's comically sinister like this throughout the novel. I get what the author is doing - he's trying to explain why Svetlana has so much venom for Beria, individually, in Twenty Letters and Only One Year.

WHICH makes me really appreciate Iannucci & Schneider's characterization choices in The Death of Stalin, because they're a *better* explanation of why Svetlana singles Beria out as uniquely evil, in her memoirs - she was genuinely closer to Beria than to the other ministers, so she felt deeply betrayed upon...finding out more about his character. Felt more motivated to condemn him. In the film, she, like, doesn't entirely trust him, but still finds him more tolerable to be around than the other ministers, because of their shared aversion to bullshitting, share forthrightness, shared outward cynicism. She looks to him when reacting to nonsense playing out in front of her. It's crack to me! I love it!

Here's a photo from one of the Black Sea holidays described in the fic, which really is, like. The Dzhugashvi-lings have chosen their sides in the Abzhazia-Mingrelia conflict. (Scanned from Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, by Miklós Kun)

Further reading: Nami Mikoyan, daughter of Terror-era Kavkaz politician Astashas Geurkov, who ended up marrying into the Mikoyan family, has given several interviews in which she talks about...what it was like to be a kid and hang out with Beria, who was fully getting his Lewis Carroll on.