Yesterday I dreamed I had a pack of cigarettes on me and they were all pink and really glam and I was like "Oh my god aesthetic cigs.... Fuck I don't smoke and we're school (??? it looked like a college class idk)" and I was showing off my cigarettes to everyone like "look at my cigarettes they're the thin ones and they're pink!" like really committing to that glam smoker vibe but I was also really distressed because I couldn't do anything of it.
I just finished Undertale with my partner the other day (late to the party, I know) and my TSHD fixation mixed with it in my head. So the result is me making this crude little animation. idk
The Killing Time, Unwillingly Mine Chapter 2 Notes
You can read chapter 2 right here! I'd really like it if you did hehe. Without further ado, here are my historical inspirations for this chapter:
Obviously Heimerdinger and Viktor did not invent X-rays. That goes to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in the year 1895. I definitely took his story and bastardised it to fit within my fic. The idea that Viktor would invent X-rays grabbed me by my throat and I had to write it. It fits so well into his narrative of being obsessed with the limitations of his body.
Compendium Maleficarum, Malleus Maleficarum, Shams al-Ma’arif, and Picatrix are all real books. The first two were witch-hunting manuals from the 16th and 17th century while the last two were manuals for achieving spiritual magic by using alchemy and astrology and both centred on Arabic magic and are from the 13th and 11th century, respectively.
Now onto the real fun things:
Drugs!
Damn, did the Victorians love their drugs. Here’s some beautiful advertisements for different drugs you could by in pharmacies. They put morphine and cocaine in everything and it was often advertised as for children and to help with coughs as well as toothaches.
Laudanum was a very popular drug/medicine at the time and was a mixture of opium and ethanol. It was used as an all-round painkiller but mostly advertised as for ‘women’s troubles’, as a coughing medicine, and as sleep-inducing medicine for babies and children.
For a lot of Viktor’s more colourful descriptions of being high and justifying his drug use I took inspiration from the autobiographical book Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey from the year 1821. De Quincey loooved his opium and admits to taking more than a thousand drops of laudanum in a day. For reference, a recipe for laudanum as a cough mixture calls for 60 drops.
I was very thankful for this website which goes over the tools used and how in regards to smoking opium.
In canon Viktor uses shimmer and blood-magic (when he offers his blood to the hexcore, not sure what else to call it) to “fix” himself so I think I’m not reaching too far when I make him take all kinds of narcotics – that were very popular at the time! Also, in season 1 he was generally very reckless with his own well-being.
For Mel, I was partially inspired by the real-life person Sara Forbes Bonetta, an African woman who became goddaughter to the Queen Vicotria herself. Bonetta became a socialite within British society as did her daughter.
The story of how is quite tragic; Bonetta was enslaved by a rivalling African king and was given as a gift to a British Royal Navy captain, and later became ward to Queen Victoria. I do not like this backstory for Mel at all, so it’s definitely not part of my hc for this fic, but the story of Sara Forbes Bonetta is an interesting example of micro-history.
I also liked the idea that she would wear something that stands out, something artistic. The Künstlerkleid was in starch contrast to the more stiff dresses of most British women at the time. They rejected the heavy materials and constricting designs for more free-flowing, draping materials in softer, brighter colours. I wanted her to be ethereal (because, canonically she just is).
And Victorian women apparently wore open-crotch drawers... do with that what you will.
I put a lot of Greek mythology in this chapter and that is with good reason! Academics in Europe in the 19th century were obssessed with Ancient Greece – the movement was called Philhellenism. It influenced art and poetry and litterature. In the 1870s archeologist Heinrich Schliemann went to modern-day Anatolia in search of the legendary city of Troy. When he uncovered a royal cementary he was sure he had found King Agammenon’s final resting place (he didn’t, as later archeologists have pointed out) and the West was swept up by renewed interest in Greek history.
In the last notes I didn’t go into detail why the group of poets called themselves Uranians. In Greek mythology the gods have several “faces” and functions, and in the case of Aphrodite she had Aphrodite Pandomos and Aphrodite Urania, among others. Pandemos was the goddess of sensual pleasures while Urania was the goddess of love in mind and soul. Gay men in the 19th century took the term Uranian because it was believed that Aphrodite Urania was created from the semen of the god Uranus without a woman involved in the creation. In their opinion Urania was superior because she stood for the connection between minds instead of the “carnal desires of the body”.
Thank you for reading all my ramblings! It's been so fun.
The Killing Time, Unwillingly Mine: Chapter 1 Notes
The first chapter is up! If you haven't read it, I'd recommend doing that before reading this, but there are no spoilers here. I just want to delve a little into the some of the thoughts surrounding the historical I had while writing.
Victorian London was famously dirty, I fear. And incredibly stinky. Lee Jackson writes:
“Thoroughfares were swamped with black mud, composed principally of horse dung, forming a tenacious, glutinous paste; the air was peppered with soot, flakes of filth tumbling to the ground. […] The worst types of filth, solely in terms of volume, were human excrement; mud on the streets; and ‘dust’ (cinders and ash from coal fires)”
This was in part due to a rapidly increasing population (during the 1800s alone London grew from a city with one million inhabitants to six million) and an ever-growing industrialisation. And yes, livestock were kept and slaughtered within the city. Imagine the amount animal waste this produced. Waste production simply multiplied due to the increased production necessary to sustain the urbanisation.
It was pretty hard for the Victorians to reconcile that London was so incredibly filthy – considering the Victorians invented sanitary science. Metropolitan dirt was seen as a harbinger on moral decay; filth implied social disorder and festered immoral habits.
Often when we see Victorian London on TV it’s always high society and pretty. I promise you, even the upper-class ladies and gentlemen had to walk through the muck and mire.
The city of London spent a good deal of the latter half of 1800s dedicated to finding ways to clean its streets.
Source: Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, by Lee Jackson.
During the 1890s male fashion eased slightly. Coordinating three-piece suits (also called ditto suits) were worn widely throughout society. Shirts were stiffened with starch, sporting high standing collars. Neckwear ranged from cravats and narrow bow ties to ‘modern’ ties. Bushy beards and sideburns fell out of favour and men started sporting close-clipped, short beards (which is why I gave Jayce his beard).
Women's fashion loosened as well. Gone were the big bustles and ultra-stiff stays, Women opted for skirts that fell naturally from the waist but big skirts, leg-o-mutton sleeves, and high-collared shirts were still popular. Women often wore shirts and skirts for day wear, and of course more elaborate evening dresses.
Source: Fashion and Family History: Interpreting How Your Ancestors Dressed, by Jayne Shrimpton
For Lest, I was partially inspired by the clothing of the character Trixie in the TV series Deadwood, which is set in the 1870s – in particular her black-and-white striped socks.
I really dug up my uni notes from four years ago for this:
Love between two men wasn’t illegal, per se. The ’crime of sodomy’ was abolished in 1861 and within the upper-classes at least, there seemed to be a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy when it came to relationships between men.
But really, it was more so an understanding that sex outside of marriage was illegal. All sex outside of marriage was deemed pathological and sick; even the term heterosexual was used for men who had a ‘sickly desire’ for sex without reproductive purposes. Equally, many sex acts we see as ‘normal’ today were seen as unreasonable; oral sex was for example deemed a purely homosexual act. Illegal were acts that were understood as immoral and as a ‘perversion of human nature’; i.e. the Christian notion that the ‘seed’ (ew) of life should not be wasted.
The 1800s in general was a time where sex and sexuality were being defined and categorised for the first time. Terms like hetero- and homosexual weren’t used as identities either (like we do today); it was used as a way to describe the act of sex. The term homosexuality itself didn’t really come into circulation until 1890. Men who liked men likely described themselves as ‘inverts’ and the term ‘Uranian’ was used and spread by a group of British and American poets who advocated for the naturalness of male companionship and intimate friendship by using various allusions and themes from ancient Greece.
“I am the love that dare not speak it’s name” is from one such poet – Lord Alfred Douglas – and is from his poem Two Loves. Yes, Viktor & Jayce flirt by reciting homoerotic poetry at one another. I don’t make the rules.
If you've read this far: thank you! I hope this was entertaining and a little interesting, as well.
Jayvik stripper AU where Jayce is a part-time stripper, stage name "Man of Progress", to make money instead of asking for fund from the council.
He does typical pole dancing act with his hammer in tiny shorts and an apron (blacksmith theme of course). There's a section in his set where he ACTUALLY does some forging and people pay good money to see it. Obviously, there's some performance to it but just his muscle tensing while working is enough for people to be hooked. People can’t tell if they’re getting hot and bother by the heat of the fire or…something else.
It's mostly small things like rings or metal flowers he made on stage. He then auctioned off whatever he made in that session and earn extra money out of it to fund his projects. Viktor found out about it somehow and went to a show, both impressed by Jayce ingenuity and can't take his eyes of his showmanship (and… other things).
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