my gender is flash bastard @tigersinlondon - Tumblr Blog

We are beginning to really have comparable screen time with VM and the M9 now, and I’d just think it’s funny that VM - even early on at a like for like level - were well respected members of society (more so than the M9 are - which is crazy since they just helped facilitate peace talks), but you were just so much more likely to find them drunk and disgracing themselves at the local tavern.

hexblooded

I love seeing people who haven’t watched C1 assume VM were so much more put together than the M9 when it’s actually the other way around. Sure, the M9 look like a chaotic bunch of dumbasses but VM actually were a chaotic bunch of dumbasses, but with respectable people aura.

trinket-buddy

Level 12 VM was the Briarwood arc! The whole thing with the cows was right at the start of that! They were just absolutely ridiculous, especially at like for like levels. Percy still had his pact with Orthax. The incident with The Door was during this time. They were well respected when Keyfish happened. Tary and Grog in the shop in Vasselheim. They were level 17 for both of those!

lostsometime

#i mean the chaos thing is true #but also vox machina put effort into being recognised #and while they all had mildly sketchy backgrounds on the whole they had nothing to fear from authority figures? #like vm are how adventuring parties in dnd are recommended to be #you’re supposed to gain favour from important people and establish a home base and all of that #and like… sure vax was in the clasp for a bit and they met percy in prison but extenuating circumstances #they also saved a city and then stayed there #whereas matt gave the m9 plenty of opportunities to establish the same shit #but they ran away from all of them because they’re largely people who fear authority figures and need to stay anonymous for survival #they’re starting to get the respect in rosohna that vm had in emon #but they started a lot later #(and to be fair even vm had political figures who hated them) #(percy just happened to own a city so that goes a long way in letting you do what you want)

I’ve seen a post (that i, frustratingly, can’t find now to reblog) that talks about how the main difference is that VM were largely Somebodies even to start with, while the M9 are basically heroes that grew out of Nobodies - which is so interesting because we also got to start with M9 at level one when they were nobodies, but got kind of dropped in on VM after they were established adventurers! So our audience experience coincidentally maps to the type of characters we’re watching.

It’s a bit like how classical theater was about kings and prophets and princes? and one of the huge upsets in the creation of modern theater was just - why don’t we tell the stories of people who aren’t important? why don’t we shine the spotlight on the common man?

So in VM we have:

Percy - a lord who is basically the king of a minor city-state let’s be real

Keyleth - going to be the leader of her people and also one of the most powerful people in the world, if she gets there. Tiberius used to call her “princess,” and that wasn’t sarcasm.

Speaking of — Tiberius! People forget about him, but he was a member of a wealthy and highly politically important family in Draconia

Later, they have Tary, who also starts off titled - though they learn eventually that he doesn’t have much in the way of actual political clout, but! Still!

This isn’t counting the titles that people acquire, because everyone becomes important and famous when they lead an adventuring life, that’s part of the game! But that’s 4 members who started off, level one, as nobility.

The most “important” person in the m9 at the get-go is probably Jester, and that’s just by proximity to her famous mom. The rest are almost aggressively common in their backgrounds. Fjord was an orphan. Veth was a housewife. Caleb grew up as a farmboy and joined the party already a fugitive. Yasha lived in what even she describes as “the wastes,” and when we met her she was a bouncer in a circus. Beau came from a wealthy background, but when we met her she’d already distanced herself from that - and it’s worth noting that her father is wealthy but not nobility. And as far as influence goes, at the start of the show she was basically a dropout from monk school. They’re not the kind of people anyone expects to save cities and end wars. It wasn’t their job to do it, they weren’t raised to shoulder that responsibility, they’re just a bunch of good-hearted assholes who got their shit together enough to do some amazing things.

c-is-for-circinate

I suspect I can help here! Pretty sure the post referenced above is this one, which I wrote circa the episode they returned the Beacon (almost half the campaign ago, now, which is wild to contemplate.)

And yeah, level for level, it is still wild to me just how much VM were disasters day-drinking in the local tavern but projecting this aura of Authority, while the Nein still have such a complicated relationship with it. I keep thinking about what would happen if the Chroma Conclave or its equivalent did attack Wildemount just now.

Because I do think the Nein would step up! I really do. They have grown so much in terms of taking responsibility for things so much larger than themselves, compared to where they were when I first wrote that post. But I don’t think they’d do it the way Vox Machina did–under the general assumption that, “yes, obviously, we’re the people who are Supposed To Take Care Of This, you can all just get out of our way while we do this job (please don’t look at the idiots behind the curtain)”.

I think the M9 would mount up and deal with whatever catastrophe had come their way under the assumption that, if not them, nobody else would–and probably they’re not qualified, and definitely they don’t have to, except there’s nobody actually in charge they trust to do it and it turns out they actually care what happens to the innocent people down below who get squashed by things like marauding dragons.

And yeah, that comparison is endlessly fascinating to me, too.

reserve

(con’t.) Each ship housed hundreds of men; Grundy, like his fellow-convicts, lived with fifty other inmates in a crowded cell. The work was backbreaking, and the conditions brutal. Shortly after Grundy’s arrival, yellow fever swept across the island, and he watched in terror as more than a hundred other prisoners died. Grundy spent six and a half years in Bermuda; when he returned home, to London, he summarized his experience, in a scathing complaint to the Colonial Office, as “the most soul destroying and hellish ever devised by man.”

In his letter, Grundy charged the prison administration with several counts of mismanagement: gross and inhumane punishments; quartermasters and guards “guilty of drunkenness, debauchery, blasphemy, and theft”; and the absence of religious and moral instruction for the convicts. He asserted that the surgeon did not care for the sick under his charge, and that guards allowed convicts to work illegally in private businesses off the ship. But the full force of his contempt was reserved for his fellow-prisoners. Midway through his account, he apologized for what he was about to reveal, then described how, on the prison ships, sex between men was not only tolerated but conducted in plain sight. “I am prepared to prove that unnatural crimes and beastly actions are committed on board the Hulks daily,” he wrote. “For some years Sir I have wished for the opportunity I now have of bringing to light the foul deeds of a Convict Hulk. They are indeed Sir ‘seminaries of crime.’ ”

Grundy recounted how, soon after arriving in Bermuda, he saw two men engaged in “filthy action” in the middle of the day. He instantly reported them to officials. The men—Samuel Jones and Burnell Milford—were charged with “being found in a position ‘derogatory to the laws of God.’ ” They were given twenty-four lashes each, and their pay was suspended. “Being a new prisoner at the time, I thought I should be generally supported,” Grundy wrote. “But such was not the case.” The convicts retaliated against him. He was ostracized, and some of the men threatened to put him “to sleep.” He also felt unsafe among the prison guards—who, he claimed, did not like it that he had exposed the ship to criticism.

What happened between Jones and Milford, Grundy had learned, wasn’t an isolated incident: “the abominable sin” was practiced “to such an extent,” he wrote, that many of the convicts “boast of it.” He underscored, too, that this wasn’t just sex: the men would refer to their relationships as marriages. The practice became so commonplace, according to his account, that “marriage” was the rule rather than the exception: “if they are not ‘married’ as they term it, it is out of the fashion.” In his telling, at least a hundred men aboard the prison ships in Bermuda had same-sex partners whom they considered spouses.

Today, the official archive of gay marriage is still in its infancy: in the United States, June marked the fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which provided gay couples with the legal right to marry. That decision, which followed the legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.K., in 2014, was a breathtaking victory—recognition of a people and culture long unrecognized by the law. But we would do well to remember, too, that queer people considered themselves married long before the state sanctioned it. The convicts on Grundy’s ship—deprived of basic rights, exiled from their homeland, abused by the officials and guards of the prison administration—adopted the language of marriage even when the mere act of sex risked brutal punishment.

Historically, court documents—typically concerning criminal investigations into sodomy—offered the most detailed proof of the existence of queer people. But, as the historian Charles Upchurch has argued, in “Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform,” such records provide limited evidence. During the Victorian era, punishment for sex between men would typically have taken place in the family, not the courts, since a public affair would have risked a family’s reputation—and, besides, having a son or brother in prison would reduce household earnings. Sex between men didn’t automatically mean permanent exile or public hanging; most families could hush up such affairs long before the authorities were contacted.

The convicts on the Bermuda hulks, living far from their families, were no longer tethered to these customs. They might have seen, too, how colonial officials took advantage of no longer living under familiar forms of social scrutiny and religious codes; British soldiers and officials raped and enslaved women throughout the Caribbean, establishing a new set of unspoken rules and mores that rarely found its way into the official records. In the colonies, matters of sexuality were all but absent from the recorded bureaucracy.

Grundy’s letter, buried within a thick ledger of Colonial Office records in the British National Archives, is a rare exception. Finding an official document that describes queer sex this early in the nineteenth century is highly unusual. (It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century, when “homosexual” and “heterosexual” were invented as medical categories, that more written evidence of the existence of what we might call gay communities emerged.) Historians have found examples of people using the terms “marriage,” “husband,” “wife,” and “spouse” to define queer relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even earlier—Jen Manion, in her book “Female Husbands: A Trans History,” provides invaluable scholarship on the subject—but these were usually isolated cases. In February, a researcher at Oxford announced that he had uncovered a farmer’s diary from 1810 espousing tolerance of same-sex attraction. That document articulated the attitude of one man; Grundy’s letter describes in astonishing detail a robust culture of same-sex intimacy, involving dozens of men, that flourished for years.

Coercion, strikingly, is absent from Grundy’s account. This does not mean that sexual violence did not take place on the hulks. Without the voices of the other prisoners, it’s impossible to know definitively. But what seems to enrage Grundy most is the mutual consent of the men he describes. The men aboard the hulks created an entire set of rituals and cultural values, with “marriage” not just a word used to justify sex but a term of devotion. When older inmates were given the occasional opportunity to make extra money as shoemakers, cooks, and servants, they often spent their earnings on gifts for their partners. The older men would “strain every nerve to procure for [their partners] as many of the good things of this world” as possible, and they would “incur all sorts of risks for them.” Some men starved themselves so that their partners would “have plenty,” or saved up for “canvas shoes” to replace their partners’ uncomfortable, prison-issued pairs. They washed their younger partners’ clothing and competed with one another to prove “who can support and clothe his boy the best.”

The convicts’ story echoes that of other people in the early nineteenth century who borrowed the language of marriage to describe relationships that the government wouldn’t recognize officially. Enslaved people throughout the antebellum South defined themselves as married despite the fact that they were excluded from the legal institution of marriage. In her book “Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century,” Tera W. Hunter includes an account from Thomas Jones, a formerly enslaved man from North Carolina: “We called it and we considered it a true marriage, although we knew well that marriage was not permitted to the slaves as a secret right of the loving heart.”

Like the law, history relies on evidence in order to reconstruct the past. Without it, queer people, especially before the late nineteenth century, are mostly absent from the record, their lives rarely seen, their intimacies reduced to speculation. When investigators from the Colonial Office visited Bermuda to make an official inquiry into Grundy’s complaints, they couldn’t get anyone to corroborate his account—which is little surprise, given the punishment that would have followed for everyone involved. The allegations were dismissed. According to Grundy’s original letter, the authorities in Bermuda would have been loath to record what was happening on the hulks; silence was more convenient. “They didn’t seem to know anything about it,” he wrote. “But the truth is, they don’t wish to know.”

This wish not to know has rendered much of the story of queer sexuality invisible to historians. But, even with such a limited archive, it’s not difficult, when reading Grundy’s letter, to imagine how marriage might have conferred a sense of humanity and normality on the lives of the convicts, as a way to make meaning of the endless toil and to create a new world among those banished by society. One might even imagine their self-described marriages as assertions of a right to be included in an institution that wouldn’t accept them for nearly two centuries.

From here. By Jim Downs, the Gilder Lehrman and N.E.H. professor of Civil War studies at Gettysburg College, is the author of “Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation.”

#lgbtq #queer history #history

archer973

Watched The Old Guard on Netflix last night, and fam, it is SO GOOD

Short synopsis, the leader of a group of immortals - Andromache of Scythia, also known as Andy - is dealing with the disillusionment of spending centuries upon centuries fighting to help the world, only to see it get filled with more hate and violence everyday. Then, just after she and her group are betrayed and exposed, a new immortal is called for the first time in ages. This new immortal is a young black woman named Nile who is a Marine serving in the Afghanistan. Nile is brought into the fold, but struggles with the thought of abandoning her family. Things come to a head, and an unexpected turn of events pulls Nile into the conflict she had been trying to avoid.

Now, the reasons I loved this movie:

Canon mlm interracial couple who are literally the epitome of true love and the absolute sweetest (and who both survive! No Kill Your Gays!)

Gorgeous action scenes. Beautiful mix of ancient and modern weaponry being used by people who make it seem effortless.

FOUND FAMILY

LIKE SO MUCH

Seriously, these guys love each other so much and have spent centuries together and it shows

Well rounded characters who are flawed and multifaceted and actually written like real people

Flashbacks give a real sense of time and history and depth, but also don’t clog up the storyline

When one of the characters hurts, you hurt

Seriously, I cried like five times and it was beautiful

Directed by a black woman! First superhero movie (The Old Guard is based off of comics bearing that same name) to do that! And she did a fantastic job!

Lack of stereotypes! The sniper is a warm sweetheart, the Middle Eastern man is effusive with his love and happiness, the tortured drunk never uses his trauma as an excuse to be an overt asshole (honestly, when he talks about it, my heart hurt for him), the young black woman talks about how much her family loves her and how she will be missed and is sickened by the carnage she sees

The Big Evil Plot is kinda secondary to the emotions of the characters. Lots of emphasis on how immortality has effected them and the different ways these different people have dealt with it.

Disillusioned warrior woman is shown how to hope again by the young black woman and their relationship is precious

(and also a very cute queer goth cashier who deserves the world)

Literally folks, the whole movie is about drawing strength from your loved ones (and not just romantic partners!) and how we are stronger together and that one small act of kindness can change the world.

Long story short, best movie I’ve seen all year and absolutely now in my top five favorite action movies. And they did a set up for a sequel! So if you have Netflix and enjoy the movie, please drop a line to them and tell them how much so this great franchise doesn’t get buried!

#the old guard #to watch

buckybarsn

You’re a child. An infant. Your mocking is thus infantile. He’s not my boyfriend. This man is more to me than you can dream. He’s the moon when I’m lost in darkness and warmth when I shiver in cold. And his kiss still thrills me even after millennia. His heart overflows with the kindness of which this world is not worthy of. I love this man beyond measure and reason. He’s not my boyfriend. He’s all and he’s more.

#the old guard #OH I NEED T WATCH THIS

politedemon

get to know me meme ★ [3/10] musicals ↳ for the wretched of the earth, there is a flame that never dies. even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.

#les mis #oooh what production is this?

replicated-archive

notbecauseofvictories

Can you tell me why Frodo is so important in lotr? Why can't someone else, anyone else, carry the ring to mordor?

but someone else could.

that’s the whole point of frodo—there is nothing special about him, he’s a hobbit, he’s short and likes stories, smokes pipeweed and makes mischief, he’s a young man like other young men, except for the singularly important fact that he is the one who volunteers. there is this terrible thing that must be done, the magnitude of which no one fully understands and can never understand before it is done, but frodo says me and frodo says I will.

(when boromir is thinking of how he can use the ring to defend gondor, when aragorn is thinking of how it brought down proud isildur, when elrond is holding council and gandalf is thinking of how twisted he would become, if he ever dared—)

but then there’s frodo, who desires nothing except what he has already left behind him, and says, I will take the Ring.

it is an offer made out of absolute innocence, utter sincerity. It is made without knowing what it will make of him—and frodo loses everything to the ring, he loses peace and himself and the shire, he loses the ability to be in the world. It’s cruel, the ring is cruel, it searches out every weakness you have and feeds on it, drinks you dry and fills you with its poison instead, the ring is so cruel.

and frodo picks it up willingly. for no other reason except that it has to be done.

(the ring warps boromir into a hopeless grasping dead thing, the power of the palantir turns denethor into an old man, jealous and suspicious, it bends even saruman, once the proudest of the istari, into a mechanised warlord, sitting in his fortress and bent over his perverse creations—all the best of intentions, laid waste)

but there’s a reason gollum exists in the narrative, which is to show—well, to show what frodo might have been. because even as frodo grows mistrustful and wearied, as the burden of this ring grows heavier and heavier, he is never gollum. he is gentle to gollum. he is afraid—god frodo is so afraid for 2/3 of these books he is so tired and afraid, but he keeps moving, he walks though it would pull him into the ground, because he asked for this, he said he would.

someone else could have carried the ring to mordor, I suppose. the idea of a martyr is not dependent on the particular flesh and blood person dying for some greater purpose. but such a thing has to be chosen, lifted onto your shoulders for the right reason, the truest reasons, and followed into the dark, though it would see you burnt through and bled out.

I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.

curlzformetal

@wearepaladin

#its being emotional abt frodo hours

jourjean

itspileofgoodthings

I know that Peter’s Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy technically has flaws but also....it doesn’t. It’s perfect.

byjoveimbeinghumble

‘Are these magic cloaks?’ asked Pippin, looking at them. with wonder.

‘I do not know what you mean by that,’ answered the leader of the Elves. ‘They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are Elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.”

- Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 8: Farewell to Lorien

This is how I think of Jackson’s movies. Yes, there are serious flaws - Gandalf’s de-powering, Gimli as comic relief, and Faramir, namely - but come on.

Remember when the guys making their chain mail invented a new method for quickly producing large amounts of it by hand? Remember Miranda Otto walking down the street, practicing sword positions? The guys who forged all of the swords - for leads and for extras? The men and women riders who volunteered to be riders of Rohan? The costume designers who designed the inside of Theoden’s armor (which no one would ever see) so beautifully that Bernard Hill said he felt like a king? The friendships between the cast, and their size doubles, and the stuntmen?

When they made that movie, they put all that they loved into all that they made.

melusinemuse

#just hundreds of people who went ‘sure let me try this’ #and they made something breathtaking #and then they made it 12 more times in different sizes ( @byjoveimbeinghumble )

#lotr #yessss

pissvortex

i think if nothing else this is proof that the police are scared of the country seeing how peaceful autonomous zones like seattle are without police

pissvortex

“heh if you guys hate the police so much i’d like to see you guys live without us there to help you!!!”

“wait hold on”

#police brutality

fjoundfjamily

@ohnoitsadalek knows

[id: a screenshot of a message that reads “the real q is always does your dnd char FUck”]

fjoundfjamily

reblog this and put which of your dnd characters fuck in the tags

#vole (half orc bard) absolutely fucks and shes a very attentive lover but she doesnt really do one night stands #i think guinevere might be ace? but i havent decided yet... i think i play her as ace #mirlan has never fucked bc they are much too busy being a very important person and a self righteous dick #(theyre in love with another pc for the very first time and they Do Not know what theyre doing which is Hilarious to play)#dnd

artsymeeshee

it sure is

#gravity falls

itshaps

This semester I assigned myself to draw Portugal in the Steven Universe style! Tbh I can’t even believe they all done SMH! Steven Universe and @rebeccasugar is a huge inspiration to me

Well! Here’s some of my faves! Enjoy!

#i LOVE this #the style is so identifiable op you did a really great job imitating it but also making it yr own !#art

mirkwoodest

One of the ballsiest things Tolkien ever did was write 473k words about some hobbits called frodo, sam, merry, and pippin and then write in the appendices that their names are actually maura, ban, kali, and razal.

mirkwoodest

This just in: Eowyn and Eomer’s names actually start with the letter “L.” [source for other nerds]

mirkwoodest

#wait so they have hobbitish names and common names?

No, they have Westron names and English names.

What you’ve got to understand is that everything Tolkien wrote was him pretending to merely translate ancient documents. He was writing as if the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were actually been written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam (or Bilba, Maura, and Ban) and he was just some random contemporary academic translating it all into English for us.

There are many languages in his books, but generally speaking, everything written in English in the books is a translation of the language “Westron.” Therefore any names that come from Westron, he translated. Names coming from other languages, like Sindarin, he left as they were. Why? IDK. Maybe because the stories are from a hobbit perspective and hobbits speak Westron, so he wanted the Westron parts to sound familiar and the other languages/names to remain foreign?

“But Mirkwoodest!” you cry, “The word ‘hobbit’ isn’t an English word! And the names Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck” all sounds super weird and not like English at all!”

Psych! They are in English! (Or Old English, German, or Norse.) Once again you underestimate what a nerd Tolkien was. Let me break it down:

In Westron, hobbits are actually called “kuduk,” which means “hole-dweller,” so for an English translation, Tolkien called them “hobbits” which is a modernization of the Old English word “holbytla” which comes from “Hol” (hole) and “Bytla”(builder).

“Maura” is a Westron name which means “Wise.” Weirdly enough, “Frodo” is an actual Proto-Germanic name that actual people used to have and it means the same thing.

“Banazîr” is Westron for “half-wise, or simple.” In Proto Germanic, the prefix “Sam” means half, and wise is obviously a word we still use.

“Razanur” means “Traveler” or “Stranger” which is also the meaning of the word “Peregrin(e)” This one is a twofer because “Razar” means “a small red apple” and in English so does “Pippin.”

“Kalimac” apparently is a meaningless name in Westron, but the shortened form “Kali” means “happy,” so Jirt decided his nickname would be “Merry” and chose the really obscure ancient Celtic name “Meriodoc” to match.

Jirt chose to leave “Bilba” almost exactly the same in English, but he changed the ending to an “O” because in Westron names ending in “a” are masculine.

I’m not going to go on and talk about the last names but those all have special meanings too (except Tûk, which is too iconic to change more than the spelling of, apparently).

The Rohirrim were also Westron speakers first and foremost, so their names are also “translations” into Old English and Proto-Germanic words, i.e. “Eowyn” is a combination of “Eoh” (horse) and “Wynn” (joy/bliss).

“Rohirrim/Rohan” are Sindarin words, but in the books, they call themselves the “Éothéod” which is an Old English/Norse combo that means “horse people.” Tolkien tells us in the “Peoples of Middle Earth” that the actual Westron for “Éothéod” is Lohtûr, which means that Eowyn and Eomer’s names, which come from the same root word, must also start with the letter L.

The names of all the elves, dwarves, Dunedain, and men from Gondor are not English translations, since they come from root words other than Westron.

The takeaway from this is that when a guy whose first real job was researching the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter “W” writes a book, you can expect this kind of tomfoolery.

Notes: Sorry I said “Razal” instead of “Razar” in my original post I’m a fraud.

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my gender is flash bastard