A Place to Snooze @taskitron - Tumblr Blog

THE BROADSIDE BALLADS

❖❖ An early modern dark fantasy of ghosts, intrigue, folk horror, and slow ruin. ❖❖

The sun is dying. The world grows cold. And the dead do not rest.

Type: 18th Century & Regency-Inspired Dark Fantasy · Rating: 3/3/3, 21+

Welcome to Arngate — a teeming, haunted metropolis of over a million living souls and uncountable dead. A place where the fog never quite lifts and the canals run black as ink. Part Georgian London, part Republican Rome, part haunted dream, Arngate is as much a being as any mortal. It is a city of coffeehouses and cutthroats, of Senators and smugglers, of eerie magic and crumbling grandeur. A Golden Age of Highwaymen and Pirates — and of every schemer bold enough to seize it.

Among the inhabitants of the city, and of the Known World, are:

❖ Mortals — merchants, magistrates, sailors, spies, opera singers, underworld fixers. Armed with nothing but wit, nerve, and ambition.

❖ The Cursed — transformed by malign magic into something more and less than human. They possess strange powers entwined with monstrous hungers, terrible secrets, and compulsions that cannot be denied.

❖ The Dead — ghosts, wraiths, and revenants who refuse to leave the living world. They haunt. They scheme. They lie.

❖ The Changed — magicians leaving their humanity behind. One lives only as a reflection trapped in mirrors. Another sits surrounded by floating eyes that see all possible futures. What would you sacrifice?

❖ About Us ❖

❖ Original setting — Jane Austen meets film noir meets folk horror, with ghosts

❖ Deep political intrigue and a rich criminal underworld

❖ Eerie, unsettling magic with real consequences

❖ Family scheming, old grudges, treacherous seas, and a world unraveling

❖ Collaborative worldbuilding — your ideas shape Arngate

❖ Welcoming community and character-driven, literate writing

❖ Guidebook ❖ Main Forum ❖ Canons & Want Ads ❖ Discord ❖

isbergillustration

Hey! Just sending a DM too to request the Prideful Awooing illustration. I love it! And would like to purchase a print of it from you, if possible. In honor of Pride I am making it my mission to support ONLY queer artists this month - which isn't very hard, haha because art and the alphabet mafia kind of go hand in hand, but I love discovering new artists and your post popped on my feed and I went down a rabbit hole through your website and am absolutely obsessed with your style. much love xoxo

Hi, thank you so much! I very much support supporting queer artists<3 I put it up [prints link], but it's not in a ton of sizes unfortunately. It's a digital doodle over a photo of a half finished painting, and to be honest I was on the fence about posting it at all, never mind making prints, so I wasn't prioritizing resolution. Anyway,

gatheringbones

[“My mother passed down to me a generalized disappointment with men. Very young, I saw resentment written on her body, which was, however confusingly, a map on which I located my own flesh and my own frustration. It seemed she was blackmailing and bitter toward me not only because being a single mother taxed her but also because she was still looking for love, finding only cruelty in its place. Any connection—between the violence and violation she experienced in her sex life and the challenges of motherhood—was murky for us both. But I sensed in her, always, a repudiation of the roles of both mother and woman, even when, at times, the closeness the two of us shared felt stifling. When I was in the third grade, she had an abortion and told me about it on the night of the procedure as we bathed together. The water that night, like all her stories and like all her baths, was scorching yet therapeutic, and I must have begun to understand then the impossible task women face, which my mother taught me through her storytelling, but also night after night as we burned off the day together in the bath. To survive as a woman in this world, she seemed to say, we must regularly destroy the shit we have collected inside our bodies.

There was not, to my knowledge, any alternative. But I knew that some women in our family had resisted motherhood, for reasons I didn’t quite understand. They did away with unwanted pregnancies in clinics, or in bedrooms, or tried. My great-grandmother, Jean, gave herself multiple abortions at home. My mother told me Jean used hangers repeatedly, disfiguring her reproductive system over time, but it’s possible Jean used other abortive methods, and that these were simply cultural images of abortion my mother patterned on to what she knew. Jean was white and came from money, and although her father forbade her from going to the women’s college she wanted, she was educated at a finishing school meant to prepare her for marriage. Safe abortion may have been possible for Jean, living just outside of Chicago at the turn of the century, because of her race, class, and marital status. It’s also possible that Jean was raped in her marriage and then suffered through abortions alone, though it’s hard to say how Jean herself would have categorized the way her body fit into her marriage—whether she endorsed a kind of marital duty. But given how many times my great-grandmother had to do away with unwanted pregnancies, I have always assumed she simply couldn’t say no to the man she lived with, who was known to be an angry alcoholic who drove a Duesenberg and threw big parties.

Jean died before menopause due to complications caused by a final at-home abortion, never getting the chance to know her body as something other than a maker of children. The details of those complications are lost to time and the haziness of generational memory. But I know Jean’s life was altered by legal and medical institutions that endorsed a husband’s ownership over his wife, and that didn’t see women as capable of making choices about their bodies. Even so, whenever my mother spoke of Jean, she spoke only of my great-grandmother’s sadness. My mother was ashamed of Jean’s depressive tendencies, as though they issued from some flaw within—something perhaps we carried in ourselves, too. Jean’s feminine melancholy was, for my mother, just another thing Jean could not rid herself of, however she tried—and it was, perhaps, the thing my mother, too, was always trying to overcome. Ultimately, my mother came to see her own dark periods the ways she saw Jean’s. My mother’s alcoholism, her trouble with men, her imperfect motherhood—these she would come to see as indications that there was something broken in her, rather than in the world.”]

amanda montei, from touched out: motherhood, misogyny, consent, and control, 2023

viralfrog

starridge

having a pet kinda awesome wdym i got a little scoundrel running around named after the guy in dracula who eats bugs

starridge

my scoundrel eats bugs too. nominative determinism

starridge

the people have asked to see the scoundrel and who am i to deny you

mr renfield, ladies and gentlemen

majomeowjo

your thang looked easy to draw. he wasn't

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

A rapscallion!

danimoonemoji

A curmudgeon!

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

A silly fellow <3

broadsideballads