Inside my Random mind @tamaras-random-little-corner - Tumblr Blog

Captive living weapon whumpee: You think you can bribe me with fancy food and rest and this blanket? I’m not that soft. I’ll never tell you anything!

Caretaker: …This is standard humane treatment for POWs. As required by international law?

LWW: I’ll never break

istadris

Related to my other post about Laurence ready to fight with half of the Corps, it's so funny how in return everyone assumed the worst of this stuck-up Navy jerk only to be smacked in the face with the reality of William Fucking Laurence

Granby : I have never met the Guy before but I will hate him on principle until the end of my life.

Laurence : hello, I'm here to upheaval your entire life.

Celeritas : are you asking the day off because (like Rankin) you think being a captain means enjoying life while your dragon does the work ??

Laurence : no??? I'm just double checking with you if it's okay to go buy a mega expensive gift for Temeraire since I won't have time for it when actual training starts ?

Celeritas : oh... so you don't think we're mindless animals overcome wit rut (like Rankin does)?

Laurence : I was just asking advice about Temeraire's puberty ! I never had a dragon before! I'm learning everything as I go!!

Harcourt : that's Captain Harcourt to you. Great, another of these guys who will microagression me all day and make me fight just to be respected...

Laurence : oooookay I just had my entire worldview of gender roles turned upside down and I'm still Very Confused about it but I understand that your gender is Fellow Officier and your prefered pronouns are Captain and Harcourt, so from now on that's how I'll address you because my mother didn't raise a rude jerk.

Berkley : are you the fucker implying I'm mistreating my Maximus ??

Laurence : why, is pampering your dragon too hard for you?

Berkley : ...oh shit, he actually understood the assignment!

Jane : this upstart Navy macho thinks he can abuse his authority to keep me from my daughter and deprive her of having fun while the rest of the boys do aa they want? Don't worry Emily dear, mama is on the war path.

Laurence : oh. Oooooh I get it now, so she wanted to spend time with her mom - that is, you! I'm so deeply sorry ma'– *captain*, sorry, still getting used to it–look, I just didn't want to let a ten years old kid wander streets alone!

Hollin : uuuuuuurgh, as if I didn't have enough work with that behemoth of an Imperial, his neat freak captain asks me to clean another dragon's harness. It's not like he minds!

Laurence : he minds very much and god help me I will make sure poor Levitas is loved as he deserves.

Hollin, two weeks later, crying : you're right and I would die for Levi

Laurence's crew : that Navy guy thinks he's better than us just because he packs neatly, has a neckcloth and an entire ship mast up his ass.

Laurence : No one else has seen this deadly tear in the harness mid-flight which means it's my duty to risk my life to save my entire crew.

Rankin : finally a fellow nobleborn with proper manners and isn't obsessed by these dumb beasts :) I'm sure we'll be great friends :) :)

Rankin : what is "boss battle music" and why am I hearing it right now

emily-e-draws

mid-flight ✨ (a set of commissions for @boltlightning, of the dragons from her delightful PotC + Temeraire crossover fics!!)

hatosyscurls

Laurence: I'll have to forego my ship and my crew and my friends and my home and my betrothed and it'll be the hardest thing I've ever done but I will Harness this Creature for my King and my Country

Laurence 10 minutes later: if you so much as insinuate that Temeraire doesn't deserve a daily bath and cuddles and story time, I will free your head from the rest of your body

hanna-writes

I don’t know if anyone else had this experience, but early on in His Majesty’s Dragon, we find out that China has been breeding dragons for intelligence for thousands of years, and then two pages later we meet Volly.

…So I obviously put two and two together and spent the next few chapters genuinely believing that true draconic sapience had only been achieved by the Chinese.

chipper-smol

How would you describe a dragon to someone who has never seen a dragon?

chipper-smol

"Horse but make it a lizard and give it bat wings and horns"

didnt know how to interpret "make it a lizard" so i wrote lizard and drew an arrow pointing to the horse so people know its a lizard. Also didn't know what bat horns were so I gave it a horned bat nose

"A body like a big cat but completely covered in scales, the head of a crocodile with the horns of an ibex, and the wings of a bat on its back"

On it boss o7, ive mashed all these animals together and threw scales all over it. This the dragon you saw?

"Take a lizard, extend the neck. Add a pair of bat wings to the back. Add horns and sharp teeth."

Seems like we're onto somethin' boss! Though idk how it'd be so fearsome bein such a small thing.

"Big-ass lizard with wings" "big lizard" "Giant lizard" "Big fucking lizard"

don't seem too special?

"Imagine a winged alligator that was 70 feet tall and aware of its existence"

i dont know if this is a dragon but it could definitely be some kind of god

"Dinosaur with wings and horns?"

Dunno which dino you were talkin about so i just picked a random one. Stegosauus :}

"Big snake with legs and horns that can breathe fire"

Ah. Hm.

"A dragon is like a tree, in that it's a made up category for a broadly similar type of mythological creature that has no relationship to other dragons, but you know a dragon when you see one the way you know a tree when you see one."

kingfucko

this is literally exactly like medieval bestiaries. a description which was game-of-telephoned out of an ancient account from somebody who might have seen the animal in question, being misinterpreted by an artist who has not seen it

you-have-startled-the-witch

okay lads i spent an irresponsible amount of time making these, please enjoy them

(for the record that’s uss constitution, hms speedy, & hms victory in order)

sleepy-dog-boy

I want more chronic pain whump. Give me a cocky, independent character who suddenly can’t walk because a sudden rain storm aggravated their old leg wounds and now they have to lean on a friend to get home. Give me a usually stoic character shaking with pain during a flare up. Give me a character who’s finally healed having their first bad pain day and abruptly feeling like they’re back at square one.

galexibrain

‘You will take prodigious care of William, will you not? He has always given me twice as much anxiety as any of my other children, and he is forever getting himself into scrapes.’

Lady Allendale being wholly unsurprised by anything Laurence could ever do

travellingdragon

Please remember to decorate your dragon! (with real gold and jewels of course)

one-and-five-nines

Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.

ardatli

YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.

This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were

1) so vital, and

2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.

“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)

prismatic-bell

If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?

They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:

If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)

And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.

The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”

Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.

And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.

specialagentartemis

Until this post you didn’t know, because it’s not true. It is not fair at all to say it turned the tide, because in real life, it did not. Prismatic-bell got Revolutionary War history mixed up with a subplot from Eragon where the rebel princess funds her rebellion against the dragon emperor with lace like this (and a huge deal is that she’s using magic to make it, to undercut the local lacemakers).

That thing with Abigail Adams and lace did not happen. I went looking. I scoured JSTOR and my university library collections. I asked my friends who are into textile history. I read a book full of all the Adamses’ collected letters to each other. No reference to lacemaking ever came up anywhere. (In fact, there’s a letter in which she asks John Adams to send her cloth and handkercheifs from Europe that she could sell for a profit back home to make money for what appears to be her own family/household; here’s another with a similar request from 1780. Funding the war is not mentioned.) Here’s a record of Martha Jefferson buying lace in 1778, so she probably wasn’t making it! Here’s a letter from John Adams in 1778 suggesting sumptuary laws to stop people from wearing too much ribbon and lace, because mostly it was coming from England and he didn’t want American money going to England! Here’s a 1780 record of a conflict over profits of selling French fabric and lace in America, something that didn’t stop and was still very profitable. These are the kind of things that come up when you search for Revolutionary War era primary source references to “lace.” You can look at them yourself. Massive quantities of American lacemaking by Revolutionary women to fund the Rev War just did not happen.

The pins thing, meanwhile, is because pins were imported from England, and were being jacked up in price massively—and probably refer to dress pins for securing clothing, not needlework or lacemaking.

prismatic-bell truly just Says Shit. Which is unfortunate that xe also hijacks otherwise true and meaningful posts to do so.

aviantide

I finished reading Temeraire some weeks ago and can't keep it together anymore I mean I NEED to know if the fandom is still alive??? HELLO? Am I alone on this island or are there some nice people around to pat my back while I sit down and weep bc I feel like I'm 10 years late to the party