Sam || they/them || late-20s || SFW writeblr || I don't reblog images with text without Alt text or ID || ask and tag games friendly
Also me:
• personal: @careening-mind
• Silmarillion: @ward-of-irmo
• AO3: Ward_of_Irmo
What I write? Hard fantasy with excessive worldbuilding
Favourite books? The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien. The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. The Traitor by Seth Dickinson. Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Uprooted by Naomi Novik.
Fiction I probably won't enjoy? Romance. Middle grade. Most High School YA. It's just not my cup of tea.
Outside of writing? I'm a mathematician-turned-programmer who wishes they've gone into a more creative career
Silmarillion blog: @ward-of-irmo
Personal blog: @careening-mind
Read all the snippets I've posted under this tag.
DMs/Asks/Tag games? Yes, please
This blog is a mix of things related to my writing, from snippets, through info dumps, to historical trivia and inspirations for the setting. Also, cats.
I'm happy to do beta swaps.
About my writing:
Expect themes of found family, battling inner demons, finding one's identity and strength. But also, superpowered sword fights and epic locations. Don't expect romance front and centre, and don't expect characters who are minors. Most of my characters are openly queer; I enjoy seeing people I can identify with partake in fantasy adventures, without their identities being a burden.
I write multi-POV stories, 3rd person only. I'm not that keen on seemingly unrelated POVs coming together, but I love seeing group interactions through the eyes of a different person each time.
I like turning 'what if' questions into stories - what if the Chosen One was chosen by the villain? What if a Bronze Age civilisation experienced a first contact with an alien race? What would crime-scene investigation look like in a setting where people turn to dust upon death? I also love learning, and I learn by researching random areas that are tangentially related to my writing projects.
Are my fantasy settings too realistic? Maybe. Am I having fun writing it? Definitely.
About my WIPS:
The Sunblessed Realm
Hard fantasy, queernorm setting inspired by Slavic folklore and the history of Central-Eastern Europe. The age of heroes has passed. The heroes remain alive.
A list of all stories and longer snippets in this setting that I've posted.
Days of Dusk trilogy [Tag]
Swords used to be the protectors of the world, channelling the power of the Elements to fight against the Primeval Darkness. Now that the threat is contained, they are perceived as a danger themselves. Their powers are feared, while any advantages they can give are made up for with developments in science.
Info dump posts: Map || Magic system || Fashion || Architecture || Cast || Rites of passage
⚔️Gifts of Fate ⚔️
Intro post || [Tag]
The Witcher x Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: NA hard fantasy
Pitch: The hero was chosen by the villain to become might incarnate. With all due respect, he'd like to decline.
Expect gratuitous superpowered HEMA fight scenes mixed with fridge horror.
Progress: First Draft done at 107k, beta readers' feedback received
⚔️The Prince's Shadow⚔️
Intro post || [Tag]
NA military fantasy.
The hero of the first instalment was deemed to dangerous to live or be killed. The Army's spymaster and the Chief Strategist set him up to die a hero's death.
Note: This was the first story I've written in this setting, with the pitch being 'the hero has just saved the world and needs to figure out what to do with his life'. It has evolved a fair bit since then.
Progress: Needs rewriting, now that the prequel is written.
⚔️Prodigal Children⚔️
[Tag]
Political fantasy.
The last - the only - war fought by Swords took place two millennia ago, and the memory of its horrors kept the princes motivated to stop it from happening ever again. When an uprising in one of the princedoms spills over the borders, it again becomes a real threat.
Now with more intrigue and sapphic romance.
Progress: First Draft done at 128k
To do: I've got feedback to incorporate
The Truth Teller [Tag]
Intro post
Urban fantasy version of the Eastern Bloc.
Three thousand years later, the heroes of the previous stories have passed into legends. There are no more Swords to protect, Crystals to heal, or Elemental Dancers to mend and build. There are only Knacked, shunned by the society.
Progress: Outline done, writing started.
Other
The Fulcrum
First Contact Sci-Fi from the point of view of the alien species. While their civilisation is comparable to early Iron Age ones on Earth, don't worry, they have nukes.
here is your gentle reminder that there are dandelions growing through cracks in the sidewalk. there is a fence lizard on the porch who is growing a new tail. there are trees growing through an abandoned house, branches tearing through the ceiling, ferns carpeting the floor. there is life pushing forward, pushing through.
this is what I want for Edinburgh but . ominous. Branches like skeletal hands clawing at the streetlights. Nightshade sprouting in the corners. Scary moss.
Coronation done, the court awaited the raven bringing the prophecy of the new king's demise. Would it be an epic one, like slain by no man, or by the hand of his son?
The raven arrived and nodded to the king. "Heart failure."
** EtA: I was incorrect - a stroke is not a heart failure, as I thought. So the subtle clue is actively misleading to anyone who knows more than me, unhelpful to anyone who knows less.
Only shows that research is always useful, even for such a short story. **
There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people.
A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.
Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.
Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.
That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.
I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?
It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.
And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.
Polycule but it’s just two people in a romantic relationship with each other and their third who’s pretty obviously aroace but also somehow so deeply intertwined in their lives that it’d just be wrong to not count them as involved. Is this anything.
so many ways a character can be dog-coded. stray following someone home and begging for scraps. old and needs to be put out of its misery. attack dog. guard dog. lap dog. puppy that pees on the carpet from excitement. shelter dog just happy to finally have feet to curl up on. unsocialized that bites anyone trying to show kindness. silly goofy puddle monster. obedient until the leash comes off
I do find it very, very funny how the university in my dark academia is perfectly normal. no conspiracies, no covered-up murders, no cults. the inherent consuming nature of academia at the highest level is enough to make my characters go insane. it's all about forsaking everything for that elusive top spot and how encouraging prodigies to cannibalize themselves in pursuit of promised greatness can very quickly backfire horribly. but you're above failure, so you'll be fine, right? right?? no one will end up dead by the end of this, right???
Which parts of your setting are most impacted by magic or the supernatural, and which the least? Medicine, everyday life, travel, politics?
To give you an example, the fact that a monarch is immortal and unkillable would potentially affect how succession happens.
Thank you for the ask!! I'm so sorry this took me forever to answer!
This is a really tough question, as I think literally everything is impacted. I built the magic system (heiros) first and the rest of the world branched out using that as the core.
I think travel might be the least affected, although it's definitely changed how "advanced" they get with their technology. So they don't have cars, space travel, etc.
The most affected is the hardest because it's so embedded into their culture. Maybe politics, as that probably has the biggest impact on their everyday lives.
The gishars are only in charge because they're the "only ones" who can filter corrupted heiros. Also nowadays they cannot be harmed by anyone who shares the same island blood type because of the Sinni. (Nivadas are exceptions to this.)
“Are you the witch who turned eleven princes into swans?”
The old woman stared at the figure on the front step of her cottage and considered her options. It was the kind of question usually backed up by a mob with meaningful torches, and it was the kind of question she tried to avoid.
Coming from a single dusty, tired housewife, it should’ve held no terrors.
“You a cop?”
The housewife twisted the hem of her apron. “No,” she muttered. “I’m a swan.”
A raven croaked somewhere in the woods. Wind whispered in the autumn leaves.
Then: “I think I can guess,” the old woman said slowly. “Husband stole your swan skin and forced you to marry him?”
A nod.
“And you can’t turn back into a swan until you find your skin again.”
A nod.
“But I reckon he’s hidden it, or burned it, or keeps it locked up so you can’t touch it.”
A tiny, miserable nod.
“And then you hear that old Granny Rothbart who lives out in the woods is really a batty old witch whose father taught her how to turn princes into swans,” the old woman sighed. “And you think, ‘Hey, stuff the old skin, I can just turn into a swan again this way.’
“But even if that was true – which I haven’t said if it is or if it isn’t – I’d say that I can only do it to make people miserable. I’m an awful person. I can’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. I have no goodness. I can’t use magic to make you feel better. I only wish I could.”
Another pause. “If I was a witch,” she added.
The housewife chewed the inside of her cheek. Then she drew herself up and, for the first time, looked the old woman in the eyes.
“Can you do it to make my husband miserable?”
The old woman considered her options. Then she pulled the wand out from the umbrella stand by the door. It was long, and silver, and a tiny glass swan with open wings stood perched on the tip.
it's funny although a little exasperating how artists designing "princess" or medieval-esque gowns really do not understand how those types of clothes are constructed. We're all so used to modern day garments that are like... all sewn together in one layer of cloth, nobody seems to realize all of the bits and pieces were actually attached in layers.
So like look at this mid-1400's fit:
to get the effect of that orange gown, you've got
chemise next to the skin like a slip (not visible here) (sometimes you let a bit of this show at the neckline) (the point is not to sweat into your nice clothes and ruin them)
kirtle, or undergown. (your basic dress, acceptable to be seen by other people) this is the puffing bits visible at the elbow, cleavage, and slashed sleeve. It's a whole ass dress in there. Square neckline usually. In the left picture it's probably the mustard yellow layer on the standing figure.
coat, or gown. This is the orange diamond pattern part. It's also the bit of darker color visible in the V of the neckline.
surcoat, or sleeveless overgown. THIS is the yellow tapestry print. In the left picture it's the long printed blue dress on the standing figure
if you want to get really fancy you can add basically a kerchief or netting over the bare neck/shoulders. It can be tucked into the neckline or it can sit on top. That's called a partlet.
the best I can tell you is that they were technically in a mini-ice-age during this era. Still looks hot as balls though.
Coats and surcoats are really more for rich people though, normal folks will be wearing this look:
tbh I have a trapeze dress from target that looks exactly like that pale blue one. ye olden t-shirt dress.
so now look here:
(this is a princess btw) both pieces are made of the same blue material so it looks as if it's all one dress, but it's not. The sleeves you're seeing are part of the gown/coat, and the ermine fur lined section on top is a sideless overgown/surcoat. You can tell she's rich as fuck because she's got MORE of that fur on the inside of the surcoat hem.
okay so now look at these guys.
Left image (that's Mary Magdelene by the way) you can see the white bottom layer peeking out at the neckline. That's a white chemise (you know, underwear). The black cloth you see behind her chest lacing is a triangular panel pinned there to Look Cool tm. We can call that bit the stomacher. Over the white underwear is the kirtle (undergown) in red patterned velvet, and over the kirtle is a gown in black. Right image is the same basic idea--you can see the base kirtle layer with a red gown laced over it. She may or may not have a stomacher behind her lacing, but I'm guessing not.
I've kind of lost the plot now and I'm just showing you images, sorry. IN CONCLUSION:
you can tell she's a queen because she's got bits I don't even know the NAMES of in this thing. Is that white bit a vest? Is she wearing a vest OVER her sideless surcoat? Girl you do not need this many layers!
so you know that ballgown look that people default to when making "princess" designs
this is kind of the fashion equivalent of when an AI has been trained to approximate what art looks like without understanding what it's drawing or how physics work. A costume designer has general recollections of about how the dresses looked from art, and a lot of the art they're learning from is also romanticized revival recreations of earlier art, so things are getting pretty confused structurally.
(I have to blame Disney for a lot of the specific trends but to be clear this was already happening before Disney was born.)
You can probably recognize how the gestalt of the bodice evokes what would actually be two layers--a gown laced over an under-gown, maybe with a stomacher in the same color as the gown.
The skirt is the very distant legacy of a trend that starts around here, in the early 1500's:
deliberately slitting the skirt of your gown so that it shows a triangle of the under-gown peaking through.
You know what a farthingale is? it's this thing.
Reeds sewn into the skirt to give it that round bell shape without needing 100000 layers underneath. Unsurprisingly invented in Spain, where it's hot as fuck. This is also the era where the farthingale starts its evolution into the eventual hoop skirt. You see that wide "ballroom" shape in a lot of princess designs. Princess Peach is a classic example.
Farthingale becomes hoop skirt, and using basically the same technology (reeds sewn into the fabric for support) the under-gown/kirtle becomes stiffened and shaped.
Eventually you get to this very pronounced version of the "slashed skirt" shown in the left figure, below. You can see that the red skirt is probably part of a whole dress, because the red sleeves in the same fabric are visible under the outer gown. (you can also see the chemise at the edge of the neckline). They did have detachable sleeves back then, as a standard part of a gown, so the red sleeves could be pinned to the chemise instead of attached to the body of the gown.
>Right figure, you can see this shit is getting elaborate now. I think that's a white under-gown with a yellow gown and a burgundy overgown. The collar around her neck is actually a partlet, not connected to anything else, just tucked in and maybe pinned underneath the neckline. But they're starting to have separate skirts now, so it's also possible she's only wearing a yellow skirt with the overgown on top it.
At this point whalebone is coming into the picture in a BIG way, and that's when you start to get Tudor style boned gown/kirtles tight around the bust really taking off. Also boned sleeves, if you can believe that. The smooth flat conical bodice is the product of a boned kirtle, which will eventually become stays, which will eventually become a corset.
anyway by now we're fully out of the medieval period and into the early modern/renaissance.
look at this bad ass bitch, hat ON titties OUT, who is doing it like her
I went to the ren fair recently, which got me interested in the specific historical inspirations of common “Renaissance Festival” clothes and consequently bugged my sister about her research so hard that it made us miss our turn
One common outfit you see (thanks to Amazon) is this modern take on the kirtle
On the left: Amazon. On the right: a recreation of what people actually wore. You can see how we have the same basic concept with a very different execution. This is what you would call a kirtle.
Another common ren fair look is the outer-wear stays. Always with the un-collared billowy undershirt.
I want to draw attention to the lacing. Stands to reason that costumers now would use contemporary lacing rather than that of previous eras. But check out even the romantic depictions of clothing from the 1870’s below this. No grommets. That’s just pure fabric baby.
Very few renaissance era women ever wore anything exactly like the ren fair corsets. For one thing, cross lacing wasn’t common, and metal grommets were not accessible to normal clothing makers. For another, structured stays (or “bodies”) were underwear, not outerwear. (Apparently something more popular with English peasants than French peasants, who didn’t use them.)
Left: stays (underwear). Right: jumps (outerwear)
Stays are boned. Jumps are not. Stays/bodies were pretty expensive due to the craftsmanship, and a poor person would have budget for a single pair. You can imagine this investment was not as popular with women who did hard physical labor. Jumps got really popular in the mid-1700’s and largely replaced stays in working class fashion.
A brief history lesson: clothes are ephemeral; we lose them as they are worn out, cut down, repurposed, and thrown away. Before modern anthropology and modern record keeping, it was difficult for anyone to know what anyone else looked like in the past or even a country away. Words used to refer to one kind of garment kept being used even as that garment changed in structure and purpose over time. Even after paper became common enough for printing art, it wore out fast and art was lost. References were hard to get.
What we think of as “peasant garb” is actually the product of a game of telephone that travels back from Romantic Revival art, and many of those (urban) artists got their idea of what rural peasants wore from opera costumes. The costumers working at the opera were not going out to the country side to take notes on what farmers actually wore, nor did they want to. Opera is show biz, you want it to be evocative, but not ordinary. Their costumes would have been based on what urban folks were wearing, with extra little touches like a shepherds crook to make it look “rural”.
Below: some mid-to-late 1800’s artistic depictions of peasants wearing improbably nice fabrics/clothes (probably a reflection of opera costumes). The painting of the peasant girl on the right is wearing more-or-less jumps.
You can see how the romantic art depictions of unstructured vests eventually inspired the “medieval revival” styles of the 1960’s/1970’s which lives on in the ren fair. Not only the neckline of the vest, but the style of undershirt with an open neck and billowy sleeves.
Compare (unstructured, laced, outerwear):
Nobody wore that in the 1400’s or 1500’s, but they wore things that looked similar at a glance. When 1960’s artists went back looking for early modern/medieval styles to replicate, they mostly had a hodge podge of this art to reference and extrapolate from.
The fact that a historical laced kirtle with an over skirt looks a lot like stays worn on the outside, probably made this confusing for artists. Undershirts of the 1500’s were collared and high necked, however, with tighter sleeves.(Below, 1500’s kirtle)
One last example of 1800’s romanticism, this time depicting a contemporary girl. Looks familiar, right? We’re back at the ren fair, if you take the bonnet off.
It does look similar to what was being worn in the 1800’s. Here’s a cartoon showing a working class woman in the 1870’s.
TLDR; what we think of as “Renaissance” or even “medieval” peasant garb is actually a remix of the working class clothes from the 1800’s, with some confused memories of the kirtle from older art thrown in.
Structured stays? 1500’s. The blousy no-collar undershirt? 1700’s. The cross lacing? 1800’s.
Anyway. This image of peasants has always been costume & fantasy. That’s why I think it’s kind of fun that it reaches a terminus in the anachronism and fantasy of a Renaissance Festival.
Analysis of clothing by Kenna Libes in this painting depicting colonial women in the late 1700’s. Not really related to what I’m talking about, but an interesting spot between two eras.
Anna Maria Garthwaite (English, c. 1688-1763). Gown, ca. 1740s. Brocaded satin in coloured silks. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, T.264-1966. Given by Mrs Olive Furnivall.
