daisy-rivers replied to your post “attend a public execution and take home a length of the rope as a...”
This was actually a thing at lynchings in the American South. I'm assuming you didn't know that, but mentioning it in a joking way can be seen as insensitive. I'm white, and it's making me cringe, so worse for those whose families were among those lynched.
I don’t normally want to “break character” but this does warrant a response. I can delete the original post, but unfortunately it has been reblogged a few times and those will not be affected.
Most suggestions on this blog are very much things that happened, particularly in western Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Marzipanandminutiae has expanded on the suggestion with a little more in terms of the context it’s referring to. That context, too, is upsetting, but a great many are; we’ve covered the massacre of Peterloo where protesters against restricted suffrage and growing government corruption were killed, the theft and display of cultural artifacts and animals by imperialists, and the exploitative sex trade in London which some readers might be familiar with from Harlots or their own reading, in the past few days.
Unfortunately I can’t police every possible connotation of every suggestion submitted. I believe this one was submitted in good faith with the intent to be read as it pertains to Georgian England (raising its own questions about what we can and can’t find spectacle in--many people facing execution at the time would often be those unable to access proper defense in an often corrupt justice system).
But intent cannot control what a reader brings to information they read, and I want to do the best I can to make this blog fun for readers without morally whitewashing or censoring the era. It’s going to be a fine line to walk, and I will inevitably make some mistakes; drawing my attention to things like this will be important going forward.