Persephone Garnata @persephone-garnata - Tumblr Blog

karis-the-feral-sideblog

lurker-lenore

clinticalthinkr

For anyone wondering what Wild Rabbit could be writing about if not minotaur smut.

carys-the-ninth

"The magic system is never fully explained" yeah that's how life works. Imagine having a story set in modern day America and the characters have several pages of exposition on combustion engines and telecommunication networks before we get to the plot

et-in-arkadia

i think this is absolutely correct and good writing advice but also victor hugo would like to have a word with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1832

bendingsignpost

victor hugo would like to have many words with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1831

yellow-cat

actually hate that the bodys response to anything is nausea. ate too much? nauseous. ate too little? nauseous. an imaginary threat got you scared? be nauseous. on your period? you guessed it. sawed into your hand and need to go to the emergency room? perhaps throwing up into your open wound will be of help

mothermara

remember to bury the dead with a phone, everyone. these days the ferry terminal at the river styx wants you to download a fucking app

petrareads

don’t lie to me, all of you were either a ‘dreamt about owning a book cafe with floor to ceiling shelves and lazy cats’ kid or a ‘dreamt about working in a very old library uncovering secrets and blowing dust off paper in some archive’ kid and it shows.

the-ginger-hedge-witch

…What do you mean “were”?

astroboots

What do you mean or?

doomsday-dj

There was recently a copyright infringement case in YA and I need everyone to know that the following sentence was in the legal decision:

“Hot, sexy, dangerous boys, central to virtually all young adult romance novels, cannot be copyrighted.”

fandom-man

scholarlypidgeot

@moethh don't hide this in the tags

homunculus-argument

For the longest time I opted on the side of "no coffee, potatoes, etc" in fantasy writing, on the argument that if I was writing a pseudo-european medieval story, featuring elements brought to Europe by colonialism would imply the existence of colonialism, and if I was going to include that kind of elements, I could not just mention them casually, it would have to be a major theme of the story.

Then I scrolled past a post on tumblr specifically about "can you have potatoes in a fantasy setting for no reason" that had pics of Peruvian potato farmers and asked "are you really too much of a coward to not write these people into your stories?" (the tone was probably not that accusative, I paraphrase from my own perspective of this), and something clicked in my head, and this epiphany manifested in my head as Gordon Ramsay yelling

"IT WAS NOT THE FUCKING COLONIALISM THAT INVENTED THE FUCKING POTATO."

curlicuecal

OP's way of thinking about storytelling is so perpendicular to mine that I had to read it 3 times to even understand where they were coming from but yeah, for sure. Decolonize the potatoes of your mind.

fallenstarworkshop

The thing people need to fucking get through their fucking heads: Unless you specifically write it to be, YOUR MEDIEVAL FANTASY WORLD IS NOT MEDIEVAL EUROPE. You actually CAN just DECIDE that potatoes developed there naturally! You have that right! And any time someone says to you "You can't have potatoes in your fantasy world, potatoes didn't exist in medieval europe," you just say "my fantasy world is not medieval europe".

capricorn-0mnikorn

Another quoted (partial) tag: "[...] and I will bite you on that hill"

Love that. Stealing that. Biting So much better than dying.

forestlich

You can just decide potatoes developed there naturally.

Hard disagree with this. Potatoes as an energy rich, nutrient rich, non-perishable, ultra-fertile super-power crop are simply not fucking "natural."

Why this mindset is inherently racist, a history lesson:

In the North Americas, nomadic tribes tended to "natural" gardens that they harvested all year round. They moved from garden to garden for each harvesting season. They did intensive cultivation of the landscape but it involved things like cutting away dead branches and not ripping up an entire plot of land to destroy the whole soil layer. Human intervention actually prevented further soil erosion and helped create a (superficially) undisturbed looking biotope, that actually thrived under human domestication.

(This is for any clowns who keep saying "We are the virus - nature is healing": This ecofascism ignores how native and harmonic farmers can instead enrich the biosphere instead of exploiting it. American soil also does not support European-style agriculture, that's how you get the fucking Dust Bowl and why USAmerican farmers are now trying to adapt Native American techniques to combat the natural disaster their colonist ancestors created in the first place.)

Then the Europeans came, gazed upon these beautifully cultivated gardens, where you could walk from one fruit-ladden branch to the next and called it: Paradise. They did not see the careful human hand that had created it, for it was from a culture invisible to them. God's creation erased humanity's creation, their agricultural expertise.

The lazy savages were so lucky that they lived in the literal Garden Eden, where they didn't have to toil like proper Christian farmers. How fucking lucky and undeserved of them! Surely us civilized, hardworking farmers deserve this natural, untouched land more than them! Initiating Genocide.exe...

Why the potato exists in the first fucking place:

The Incas lived in a horribly mountaneous region with fuck all to eat. European-style Agriculture is horribly impossible to achieve because the soil dries out easily in the mountains and gets flown away. There's a reason why the Inca developed these amazing watering systems and stair gardens and it's not because they fucking looked pretty! But because they were necessary.

The potato was specifically cultivated to grow in all kinds of soil because fuck all else grew there. You know how in Andy Weir's The Martian, the protagonist literally just survives off of growing potatoes and tomatoes (and later only potatoes) in Martian soil? That's not going to happen with any two random European crops. Probably not even ten or twenty of them, because they take too long to grow or won't grow in the first place. Or he just doesn't know how to grow them. With potatoes, you plop them in the Earth/ Mars and you're done. Strand him on Mars with lettuce and carrots and he fucking dies of starvation. End.

The Inca were simply playing agriculture on hardmode compared to Europe. Literally just compare the list of domesticatable animals: Cows, pigs, sheep, goat, horses, donkeys, as well as dogs and cats (probably more I'm forgetting).

What do the Inca have? The fucking Llama. Which is why the Llama is similarly utility-stacked compared to the potato: It gives wool like a sheep, milk and meat like a cow, can be ridden like a horse, carry goods like a donkey, traverse mountains like a goat and guard like a dog. Give it a couple hundred thousand years and a bored homo sapien and it's going to catch mice like a cat too.

The biodiversity of domesticatable fauna and flora pre-human cultivation is simply higher in Europe. There's literally no need for some ancient farmers to perfect one single crop, when there's so fucking many to choose from. It makes zero evolutionary sense. We've had starvation events in Europe but we've also had the potato blight, which is going to happen if you do mono-cultures and invest in only one crop. Trust me, if the Inca could have lived in an area that supported our bio-diversity, the potato would simply not exist.

It's basically the same reason why in Alien, Xenomorphs can't be naturally evolved because they're beyond apex predators - SSS tier. Mother Nature doesn't care about perfection. It sees "Good enough" and lets you pass with a C- at best. Potatoes are the crop version of xenomorphs.

If I see potatoes in your fantasy story, there better be some fucking apocalyptic extinction event or radical biotope transformation pre-whatever medieval timeline you're writing or you just don't understand anything from evolution, cultivation to colonialism and I will be saying so.

Like, write the fucking fantasy potatoes, you fucking assholes. But write them well. Understand and research evolutionary forces and be creative.

Lazy worldbuilding is not only lazy worldbuilding - it can also be racist. I don't know why I have to keep telling people to stop being either and then I'm the one getting clowned on for it.

alarajrogers

OK, this seems like far too strong a position for the actual facts.

Fact: In real life, the Incas bio-engineered the potato because the Andes mountains are inhospitable and cold and don't have a lot of large land animals.

Fact: Most mountain ranges are like that if they're tall enough.

Fact: The Arctic and subarctic are also like that, and definitely exist in Europe, as do mountain ranges.

Fact: Your fantasy "Europe"-like region could be actively trading with a mountainous, cold landmass close by where there are no large animals, basically displacing the Andes mountains to more or less Iceland; or, the Andes Mountains-like area could be on the same continent but to the far north, or it could be on the other side of a mountain range that's sufficiently tall that no large animals got from one side to the other until recently, or any number of potential explanations. Or, they could literally be trading with South America because magic makes it a lot easier to safely go great distances without accompanying technologies that would normally be required.

Fact: It's fantasy. "A wizard did it" is an acceptable explanation.

Fact: Many fantasies take place in a world where there was a previous, more powerful and advanced civilization, that has since fallen; that's how you get ancient magical artifacts that are more powerful than anything anyone is making today.

Fact: Many fantasies take place in a world with active gods. "A god did it" is also an acceptable explanation in such universes.

So yeah, you can't say "potatoes naturally evolved in this Europe-like continent" because potatoes did not and could not naturally evolve, as you said. But they didn't need to be bio-engineered by a civilization on the other side of the planet whose isolation made them profoundly vulnerable to disease, so they were easily conquered and colonized because they had no resistance to the conquerors' diseases. They could have been bio-engineered by a wizard living nearby. Or a god. Or the people who live up North. Or people on a different inhospitable mountain range. Or travel over great distances is significantly more plausible in this magical world. Or they came from another dimension. They could be arriving via trade. They could have always been here in the memories of the people who lived here because yes, there was a bio-catastrophe five thousand years ago. Or because we used to trade with someone who had had a bio-catastrophe and now the potatoes have been here so long no one remembers where they came from.

Colonization is only one means by which the Europeans could have gotten the potato, and if it's a fantasy world, there are a lot more means than that.

And in many stories, there is no real opportunity to go into a dissertation about where the potato came from. If wizards and gods exist, you don't need to explain that the potato, bio-engineered in our world, was magically created in this world; it can be left for the reader to guess. If there's a fallen civilization that was more powerful than this one -- the existence of powerful magical artifacts -- then sure, maybe they made potatoes. If you establish that trade exists at all with faraway lands, then maybe potatoes were a trade good. But odds are, your chaaracter, unless they're a botanist or a historian, doesn't know any of that, and if the story is about a team of unlikely adventurers teaming up to prevent an unspeakable evil from rising to power, there may be no one in the story who would know that in your universe, potatoes come originally came from a sub-Arctic mountain range a thousand years ago but are now a staple crop in your Europe-like landscape. As far as your characters know, potatoes are potatoes and they've just always been there. This is actually indistinguishable from "the writer didn't realize potatoes were genetically engineered in the Andes." Though if that's the writer's angle, maybe they could establish the existence of said land to the north where the winters are hard and few large land animals can survive on the mountains, and then those of us who know where potatoes really come from could at least speculate on their origin in the story.

You do not need to explain in your story where your potatoes came from. You really don't. It would, however, be a good idea if you knew, because it will help make your writing consistent. If there's a nature goddess famous for creating food crops good for her worshipers, you don't need to explain that she made the potato for people to be able to guess that. Just having her exist is a plausible reason why potatoes might be here.

And the idea that colonialism was inevitable, that your fantasy Europe had to get all the cool shit that doesn't grow in Europe by conquest and colonization, is itself pretty horrible. Italy didn't get pasta by conquering China, they got it by trading with China. You could even imagine a New World where colonization didn't happen, maybe because the powerful spirits the natives were able to summon easily beat back the weakened magic of invaders thousands of miles from the home territories of their own powerful spirits, maybe because magical healing works so no plagues weakened the natives and made them ripe for conquest, maybe because whatever reason you wanna come up with. Then, just because colonization didn't happen doesn't mean trade doesn't happen.

frustrationinexcelsis

I'd also note, regarding the trade routes thing, that Europe does not actually appear to have had a very wide selection of domesticable plants and animals, insofar as few to none of the crops and livestock used there originate from it.

Goats, sheep, wheat, barley, oats, and most Eurasian legumes were all domesticated in the Near and Middle East, with the majority of their early sites being along Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean coast, Anatolia, or Mesopotamia -- the famous Fertile Crescent. Housecats are also Near Eastern in origin.

Pigs had two loci of domestication, one in China and one in the Near East. Cattle likewise, with the western aurochs subspecies being domesticated to form taurine cattle in the Near-Middle East band and the eastern one to form zebus in India.

Chickens were defintely domesticated in India, and the oldest records of beekeeping are from Egypt.

The horse might be a borderline case, insofar as horse domestication occurred in the western Eurasian steppe in a region that today we might view as split between Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Definitely unconnected to Western Europe. Donkeys, for their own, are from subsaharan Africa, and were first domesticated by pastoral groups in Nubia and the Horn of Africa who benefited from a pack animal adapted to hotter, dryer conditions than cattle.

Cabbages and allied plants might be of European origin. So there's that.

So how did all of these get into Europe? Trade routes. All of these had spread in a broad band from India to Spain starting in the Neolithic and ending by the Bronze Age, by and large. Some occurred later -- water buffalo arrived in Europe during Roman times. I wouldn't know about the pasta thing, but the traditional way to make pizza is actually with water buffalo mozzarella. But all of these things have been there for so long that, as seen here, they're no longer thought of as something that came to Europe from somewhere else. The Bronze Age was a very long time ago, after all.

Hardly surprising, right? They're all very useful plants and animals, and if there were channels of communication available all of these traveled far and wide -- there was no reason for them not to. If the guys living in the next country over had access to some food or draft animal or to some crop that seemed handy and useful, that was evidently all the incentive that people needed to try them out themselves. Why not? This would be why you see these things outside of their original contexts -- donkeys make the most sense originating among people living somewhere hot and dry who need a hardy pack animal for those conditions, and horses make the most sense originating among people who need to move a lot, frequently, in a very wide open area with lots of grass, but once domestication happened they spread fairly quickly.

So in this context, if there had been an accessible route between the Andes and southern-western Eurasia at the time, potatoes would also have spread along it. In a fantasy world, there likewise wouldn't need to be a more involved explanation for the presence of potatoes than a consistent trade route between wherever the story's taking place and a culturally-geographically suitable area for the domestication of potatoes, such as a high, cold mountain range.

charl0ttan

huge fan of the depth of a good purple but another area that draws me is definitely around aquamarine/turquoise/seafoam. you can not go wrong once the green starts getting just a tinge more blue. a gal could certainly do worse than to pull over there and stay a while

charl0ttan

something earth shattering going on here

emily84

this is why one of my favorite all-time paintings is Ship in Stormy Seas by Ivan Aivazovsky... he was really onto something there

a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time

is-there-a-boat

THERE IS A BOAT BY IVAN AIVAZOVSKY!!

clayandsorcery

Ivan Aivazovsky could paint glowing water. One of the GOATs for sure.

homunculus-argument

Great prank concept: choose a target, get a few photos of them, then find an artist who can replicate some extremely specific type of historical art, commission the artist to draw a portrait of the subject in that exact style, and then have the picture saved up somewhere for the next time your target starts talking shit. So you can reply to them with

"Didn't ask, don't care, also you look exactly like this drunk guy pissing into his own mouth in a medieval manuscript" and sending them a picture that looks exactly like them as a drunk peasant guy pissing into his own mouth in a handwritten medieval style manuscript. Because it is.

homunculus-argument

Other great art pieces to commission of people who mildly annoy you:

As the husband standing in a bush in a renaissance mythological painting, watching in anguish as Zeus fucks his wife

French satire cartoon of a grievously insulted pompous wig noble sulking over getting ignored at an orgy

Getting stomped by the chariot of Alexander the Great in a classical mosaic

Same style but just getting stomped on by Alexander the Great

Erotic mural of a weeping, desperately horny human figure begging for the attentions of a satyr and getting rejected

Ugly renaissance baby jesus.

homunculus-argument

transjudas

i’m really feeling good about 1066 for king harold, you know? think it’s gonna be one of those standout years someone could make an embroidery about

elumish

I honestly think Gen-Z and younger simply does not understand how recent widespread smartphone adoption is.

I am not that old, and I didn't have a smartphone until probably late high school. For most of my life, many if not most people were not walking around with a magic internet machine in their pocket that they pulled out and used constantly for everything.

sandumilfshous

reblog if you remember having to ration your text messages and accidentally opening the internet on your phone was the end of the world

mothmanmagicalboy

no sorry i dont really use instagram, i can contact you via ouija board, spirit box, fluctuations in temperature, flickering lights, and certain rituals. i am also on tumblr.

pomrania

“This reads like fanfiction (it feels like it was written by a preteen, and most of such things posted publicly are fanfic)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (it has a focus on character and relationships, like the style of a lot of modern fanfic)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (it keeps referencing people and events with the assumption that the audience is already familiar with them, like how fanfic doesn’t need to rehash the source material)”

pomrania

Some further suggestions from the notes:

“This reads like fanfiction (it’s a love story for the ages as long as you can overlook that the author keeps misspelling ‘you're’)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (you can tell the author was having a blast writing this and now so do you reading it)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (the author is clearly info-dumping about a very niche hobby of theirs that they’re passionate about)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (the characters keep getting put in increasingly weirder situations which you’d normally only find in fanfic)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (the author felt the need to rehash the characters from when they were first introduced instead of after several years’ worth of character growth)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (it feels like it had no editor)”