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pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.

bincliff

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

haemey

Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.

lone-pylon

hey, you, you're finally awake

othellho

Ingram, John Henry, Flora Symbolica: The language and sentiment of flowers, (London: 1869).

angel-bazethiel

What, How, Why is Flame Alchemy?

–or how Roy Mustang can potentially bottle up a star. –or I’m sleep-deprived and writing this fic that relies on a deeper understanding of how Flame Alchemy works and I’m posting what I thought of bc why the hell not? and if I read another post saying it’s plain ole combustion and how easy it is, I will probably lose my mind –or goddammit, where is Flame Alchemy?????

Content:

I. Introduction II. Mass-Energy Equivalence and Nuclear Energy III. Flame Alchemy? More like Nuclear Alchemy (and Other Myth Debunking) IV. Why would someone study such a research topic? V. Summary

Note: Long post and a lot of Science ahead.

goddessactuality

cloevr

Joel Hopkinson, Reverie Saw 2014 (?)

muffinlance

Sokka is captured aboard Zuko's ship. At some point during Tea & Interrogation with Iroh and Zuko, he lets slip that he's the son of Chief Hakoda.

“Chief Hakoda?” the Prince of the Kill It With Fire Nation repeats, like his brain is as stupid as his face. Or like he just realized he’s taken a high-value hostage, redeemable for one (1) ransom against an enemy leader.

“Did I say Chief Hakoda?” Sokka laughs, nervously. “I meant, ah—”

“Shut up, peasant,” the prince shouts. And then sort of… chokes on his own words, getting redder and redder.

---

“Perhaps a break, Prince Zuko?” says Uncle, like this is… like this is the tea-time social he’s set the table for.

Zuko is in the hallway with the door slammed behind him before he can think. Thinking. Thinking is a thing he needs to do, and Uncle’s proverbs only ever leave his thoughts feeling twisted around, and—

And that is not a peasant that sacrificed himself, to give the Avatar a chance to flee. That’s a fellow prince, or whatever the Water Tribe would call him.

---

“So,” Sokka says, spinning the teacup between his cuffed hands contemplatively. “How much poison would you say is in here? And what kind?”

The old man is sputtering indignantly, but Sokka is very seriously considering taking his first sip. If it’s laced with something to loosen his tongue, well, can’t get much worse there. It’s not like he knows where his dad is. Or anything useful. Certainly not more useful than handing the Fire Nation the son of their fleet’s leader. And if it’s something deadly, well...

He doesn’t know what his dad would do or give to get him back. But it wouldn’t be good, for the war or the world or their tribe.

He figured he’d die, when he’d shouted at Katara to go, take him and go. He hadn’t realized how much worse this could get. Was getting. Because the son and heir of Fire Lord Burn Them All was out in the hallway, thinking.

---

Zuko thinks. About what his own father would do, if he were to receive a ransom letter. The disappointment. The… repercussions.

---

“You’re what?” Sokka asks.

“I am releasing you,” His Shoutiness repeats, through clenched and grinding teeth.

“Huh,” Sokka says, and takes another sip from his cup, because oh, this is hallucinogenic tea. Good stuff. “Care to explain that?”

---

No, Zuko wants to shout. But this is the fellow son of a world leader. Zuko hasn’t had many friends, and he’s not looking to add the Water Prince to that atrophied number, but.

But he could understand.

“You stood and fought when you could not win, for a cause you believed in,” Zuko said, and he didn’t know why Uncle suddenly looked so pained. “I will not demand trinkets from your father for your return. If he hears of this, it will not be from me. You will be released at the nearest neutral port.”

---

Like an undersized fish, Sokka did not say.

“That is… very honorable of you,” Sokka says, and doesn’t know why the prince looks like he’s been gutted.

esmeralda-anistasia

#Sokka: why yes my sister is a waterbending prodigy why do you ask#Zuko: projects onto Sokka HARDER

muffinlance

Tags by @lizardlicks

#the nearest neutral port just so happens to be kyoshi island #why say aang and katara what are YOU doing here??

Zuko is grinding his teeth SO HARD he did not come here to start an international incident and he WON'T start one stop looking at him like that Uncle he is doing something Honorable the Southern Prince said so and so help him he is going to KEEP BEING HONORABLE while the other boy is watching even as the Avatar creeps closer and closer one little side step at a time looking all curious and hopeful

like an actual child

THE BENDING PRODIGY SISTER IS THANKING HIM REPEAT ZUKO IS IN THE SIGHTS OF THE BENDING PRODIGY SISTER

she is smiling at him and sounds incredibly sincere

(and also confused)

and he KNOWS what "sincere" smiles from sisters mean

abort abort abort

maybe he can get his ship away from here before she "accidentally" sinks it

(clearly her bending fumbling at his ship was a clever disguise, if she'd REALLY been that bad she'd have been CAPTURED, had she been MOCKING his crew? clearly that was the only--WHY IS THE AVATAR STANDING AT HIS ELBOW)

No really WHY is the unfathomably powerful (literal child) right next to his elbow and GRINNING up at him

And talking about how Zuko is a prince. And Sokka is a prince.

(the sister is laughing behind her hand REPEAT the sister is laughing abort abort abort--)

And since there's two princes and an Avatar here on this neutral island why don't they have

why don't they have

peace talks

"I will make tea!" Uncle beams and instead of using that as cover to retreat back to their ship goes to do so IN THE VILLAGE and Zuko

Zuko can't leave him alone with these people

So there he is. On Kyoshi Island. Incapable of admitting in front of Prince Sokka and Princess Katara and Avatar, The that he might

maybe

not have the ability to create legally binding agreements like a real prince should

which is about when Zhao shows up. And you know who doesn't have the legal right to INTERRUPT peace talks?

Motherturtleducking Zhao

which is to say

he is sincerely sorry, Father, for the overstep of his position

and rest assured no formal promises were made

but please see the enclosed First Draft treaty between the Fire Nation and the United Southern Water Tribes

(as well as a small request for reparations to Kyoshi Island, for peace talk hosting and minor fire damage)

And rest further assured that he has taken the joint advice of Avatar Aang and General Iroh

And will be traveling with the Avatar to facilitate communication with the Dragon Throne

Until such time as the Fire Lord commands him not to

Sincerely,

Your Most Loyal And Obedient Son

Zuko

frankencanon

#anyway that's how Zuko spends all of season one on Team Avatar #The Fire Nation they encounter: are. are you a traitor #Zuko: The Father Lord has been fully appraised of the situation and I am under his direct command let us pass or YOU are the traitors #Ozai. meanwhile. #takes until season two to start regretting his habit of burning his son's correspondence on sight (via muffinlance)

vanyamire

some quick lotr studies :]

prints

taylornprice

tomatooooessss

keperaz

just a wizard and his cat

viewfindercomics

Figurin’ Out How to Draw Houses (2025)

dct239394cvvd098dffgggp

you ask me whats in the locket that im wearing and when i open it up its a lovelier meadow than earth physics allows for and the air looks like the wind knitted it out of gold and wonder. the grass and red flowers look like every heaven. i close the locket and youre sad for the rest of your life about something you cant name

dct239394cvvd098dffgggp

this is a pulitzer to me

prokopetz

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

veteratorianvillainy

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

persephoneshadow-deactivated202

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

prokopetz

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

observethewalrus

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

ainedubh

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

slitthelizardking

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

lierdumoa

This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

destinationtoast

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

olderthannetfic

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

And then we will ship an OT3.

kyraneko

I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.

whetstonefires

Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.

headspace-hotel

Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it

totallysilvergirl

ALWAYS reblog.

angelselene

Going back a few posts—make the significant other significant in a buddy cop scenario and you get an OT3?

Absolutely what happened in White Collar.

zegherevanmale

noblenico

This has taken hours of work comparing different, yet similar fonts and the book cover titles.

All completely hand drawn. I present my own version of the locked tomb font.

For your own use:

It’s currently only letters right now.

I will update as I work through numbers and symbols.

finnlongman

You know, I've seen manuscript abbreviations that looked like text-speak, but hand-drawing emojis to stand in for the word ceann (head) in a passage about Cú Chulainn being beheaded is taking that all to a new level

(The line from another manuscript: "Is ann sin d'éirgedar datha aille iongantacha do cheann Choingculoinn")

Manuscript is RIA 23 H 10, Oidheadh Con Culainn, written in 1808.

finnlongman

BREAKING NEWS HE DID IT AGAIN

"a cheann do bheith ar an ngad" but obviously when talking about heads on sticks we should just draw a ☹️ instead

finnlongman

He just keeps doing it. Every time somebody gets beheaded in this text, the word "ceann" gets replaced with 😐 And a lot of people get beheaded in this text (thanks Conall), so this happens a lot.

"Do bhain an 😐 de" He struck the head from him

danikatze

Mighty Nein animated is almost here!!! I didn't feel like colouring this drawing before, but it felt right to finally do that for this occasion. Also I don't think a lot of people noticed that their heads form a nine before, so I made it really obvious this time lol

Close ups below the cut!

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