An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Categories: M/M, Multi
Relationships: Blackbeard | Edward Teach & Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet, Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet/Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Blackbeard | Edward Teach & Crew of the Revenge (Our Flag Means Death), Blackbeard | Edward Teach & Israel Hands, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Characters: Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Stede Bonnet, Crew of the Revenge (Our Flag Means Death), Israel Hands, Fang (Our Flag Means Death), Frenchie (Our Flag Means Death), Other Character Tags to Be Added
Additional Tags: Time Travel, Crack Treated Seriously, Character Study, Humour, Identity, Self-Worth Issues, Self-Discovery, Self-Acceptance, POV Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Unreliable Narrator, Blackbeard | Edward Teach Deserves Nice Things, Young Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Blackbeard | Edward Teach Has ADHD, (just like in canon. especially obvious since this is his pov anyway), Post-Season/Series 01, Co-Captains, Established Relationship, post-reunion, Man cheerfully bullies himself, Despite his best efforts it results in some genuine self-reflection, Aging, And the pains of having to witness it on yourself with no previous warning, Canon-Typical Historical Inaccuracy (Our Flag Means Death), The Arcane Ways Of The Sea, Cats may possibly be witches, Illiterate Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Literate Blackbeard | Edward Teach, He contains multitudes what can I say?, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Beta Wanted
"Fuck me!" Ed says when he finally takes in the situation. The situation in question seemingly being a younger version of himself, mid-twenties, right on the prime of the whole Blackbeard schtick, crouched defensively on deck and surrounded by half of the Revenge's crew. The Babybeard, for his part, has been shrewdly sizing him up, trying to be all subtle about it, but now makes a show of dubiously eyeing him up and down.
"Seems to me you'd be getting the better end of that deal, Old Man." Oh, he is absolutely fucking delightful, all wound up and prickly and still convinced he has shit-all to prove to anyone at all. Ed is going to have so much fun crushing his entire worldview!
"Aww, don't dismiss the value of experience," he winks, "I know a lot more about what you like than you do." He punctuates this with a delicate sip of his tea, pinky out, an airy swish of the sleeve of his wrapping gown.
~
The Mad Devil Pyrate Blackbeard has been living in kinda-retired bliss for a couple of years now, mostly going by Ed these days and enjoying a spoiled and pampered life as The Infamous Captain Edwards's co-captain, when he is abruptly faced with his worst and most fucking annoying foe yet: Himself.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.
The website is actually a great read. The "distro", as it were, is a modified version of Debian where the only change is removing the "age" field from a database in systemd. The whole point is protesting the unjust law that protects no one and is unenforceable in practice.
Protect Internet Freedom from now until forever. It's important existentially! Americans stand with UK citizens in our struggle against government censorship
I don’t do politics on my tumblr. I try and keep it a stress free zone (believe me I worry about it plenty, that’s the point of needing a place to switch off). But I just spent two and a half hours filling out that questionnaire and now I’m leaving a comment not in the tags, but where people will actually see it (and I hate drawing attention to myself) because this is important.
The governments agenda is clearly spelled out in this consultation, through the phrasing of the questions.
Excuse me while I link a video. It’s a clip from a comedy so it’s a bit exaggerated but it demonstrates the point very well.
Almost all the questions in that survey were “leading questions”. They had an inherent presumption that the person answering agreed with age restrictions, wanted more severe ones and wanted more websites and services restricted. (Believe me I take no pleasure in being correct that VPN’s are next on their target list).
This is a consultation where they try and make you look a monster for saying no. They push the “but it’s for the children” hard. Like there was one question where in order to say no, you had to not object to children sending/receiving nudes which felt wrong. I mean that’s bad, obviously that’s bad. But the answer isn’t total lockdown of the internet to verified ID.
So yeah if you are from the UK then fill this out, and fill it out carefully. Don’t let them manipulate or trick you into agreeing that mandated age restrictions are necessary, as that is what we have with this “you must prove your identity” and it looks like they want to make it worse, not roll it back.
Also section 4 I think it was, is skewed in the opposite direction as it wants to know the benefits of AI chatbot usage for kids… so slam that part too. Say no to AI and no to age verification.
When I filled this out, I focused my answers to all of these questions on *education*.
Educate kids and parents in school and at home how to recognise dangers online: Common recognisable scams, links that may contain viruses, etc.
Teach them about privacy online: Not giving your name, age, or location to strangers on the internet, INCLUDING THIRD PARTY DATA HARVESTING. That we need more protections around websites trying to gain consent to take our data.
I pushed how facial and biometric data gathering is synonymous with this. And pointed out all the existing data breaches, and how THAT puts our kids in MORE danger.
My response was the same for the AI questions. I made my answers focus on education. On how AI is doing negative things with the environment and water supplies, how AI is taking our data from those data breaches and using them for identity theft, and other crimes. etc.
All my focus went into IGNORING THE LEADING QUESTIONS THAT WANT YOU TO AGREE WITH THEM
And putting all my focus into PROVIDING EDUCATION, OTHER OPTIONS, METHODS THAT ALREADY HAVE HISTORICALLY WORKED, AWARENESS AND SAFETY CAMPAIGNS.
Put the onus on learning self responsibility, and providing open access resources on internet safety education.
You don't need to answer THEIR biasedly led questions.
You can answer the question with the problems THEY are causing, and the solutions for a better path forward.
Importantly though. Don't be rude, or swear. Or they'll likely dismiss your responses.
Be thorough. Be smart.
It takes forever to fill that form out, but it can be done in a way that circumvents their bullshit.
Protect Internet Freedom from now until forever. It's important existentially! Americans stand with UK citizens in our struggle against government censorship
Also, please beware - many of these questions are trick questions, phrased to indicate that the government is only looking for support for their dipshit ideas. Things like "Which types of websites should have minimum age restrictions?" are irrelevant, and further show they're only looking for people to support their idiocy.
Please use guides like the EFF to answer these questions.
Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without t
Age verification (or age-gating) laws generally require online services to check, estimate, or verify all users’ ages—often through invasive
First post by user englishotter.bsky.social reading:
"A quick heads up; The UK government is currently holding a consultation on the Online Safety Act. The consultation lasts until the end of next month.
Please fill it out if you live in the UK and/or share it around to get more eyes on it."
A response by an user whose handle is hidden:
"We have a chance of removing the Online Safety Act!
Any UK residents, PLEASE take the time to fill out the whole form. If we want to remove ID verification on websites that actually don't need it, we need to take action NOW!"
End ID]
The consultation is open until May 26th, 2026 at 11:59 pm.
Addition by @disabledlovingdisabled: this is for people who live inside the uk not uk citizens! if you are a non-citizen resident please take it!
The thing is, even if you were lucky and your parents taught you how to clean, they probably didn't teach you how to clean the stuff you clean stuff with, like brushes, mops, sponges, rags, and so on. Or how to clean your cleaning appliances, like a dish washer, clothes washing machine, and clothes dryer and its ducts (if you have a ducted dryer), or a carpet cleaner, vacuum, Or how to clean up clean messes, like spilled bleach or detergent.
My parents threw away all of these things (even the vacuum cleaners and the dryer) when they got too dirty to function, because no one even told them THAT they could be cleaned. Cost them thousands of dollars over the years.
All I'm saying is that cleaning is not intuitive, and not knowing how to clean is not a moral failing, but it is something you can learn.
I'm going to reblog this post with resources for learning how to clean things and how to clean cleaning things (I'm not at my desk at the moment). If you have any favorites, please feel free to add them in too!
I like this video because it does a great job of introducing the basic foundations of house cleaning (and because he doesn't use bleach, which is a common allergy in addition to being awful to inhale). He also talks a little about how to clean a vacuum. And why you shouldn't put grease from your pots and pans down the sink drain. I also love that he mentions that different houses and different people have different needs and different versions of what clean and cleaning looks like.
He doesn't mention though that the toilet seat comes off. I take my toilet seat off to clean under the hinges and clean the seat more thoroughly once a quarter.
This is another video from the same guy about cleaning and depression. This advice, especially at the beginning, can feel really really difficult and oppressive to hear. However, I find that it's generally pretty solid. But I'm autistic and so is he, so that gets a massive Your Mileage May Vary stamp on it.
I have a favorite part of this video. It's from 10:52 to 12:36. I think we could all use to hear that. There's a HEFTY pause after that one. I promise the narration does come back.
I'm also going to recommend KC Davis' book "How To Keep House While Drowning"
This is a pair of videos about how to correctly load and use a dish washer.
The first one is a quick 1 minute 30 second overview on loading. I can't find the exact video I'm looking for, so consider this a substitute for that. If I can find the one I'm looking for, I'll swap it in.
The second is a half hour deep dive on dishwashers and detergents. The short form of that is you shouldn't need to pre-rinse anything, detergent pods are overpriced and can cause problems, some dishwashers have a filter in the bottom that needs to be cleaned (but most don't), run your sink until the water is HOT before starting your dish washer, and put a little detergent in the pre-rinse dispenser when you're washing extra dirty dishes (or on the inside of the door if your dishwasher doesn't have a pre-rinse dispenser).
How to clean a front load washer (with bleach). This should be done monthly or every time you wash really soiled clothes.
With expert tips and tricks for all types of washers.
How to clean a top loader (without the removable agitator thing). This should be done every 1-3 months depending on you unit, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.
Regular cleaning of a top-load washing machine will prolong the life of the appliance and leave your laundry cleaner and brighter.
How to clean a top loader (with the removable agitator thing). This should be done every month, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.
These carpet brushes are a LIFE SAVER if you have dogs. This thing allows me to go from vacuuming about 4 square feet before my vacuum is full to vacuuming half the living room (I don't vacuum often enough. You should vacuum weekly, and I just can't.). I have to unclog the vacuum less often. It fluffs up some of the flat spots in the carpet. And I also use the brush to shampoo my rugs in the spring.
A spot cleaner (or a carpet cleaner with a spot cleaner attachment) is another life saver, ESPECIALLY if you can afford to splurge on a heated one. I see them at Goodwill or at yard sales occasionally, and they're worth picking up. The shark one in the video is great too.
This channel is gold. There's tutorials for cleaning EVERYTHING on there. Just go subscribe!
Gonna throw another potential resource at the end of this very long list, which may be potentially helpful for others like me who loathe videos. It's... the weirdest thing that has genuinely been helpful to me in housekeeping. Absolutely full of useful advice, and bizarrely still relevant in large part. (Though, caveat, research ANYTHING to do with chemicals or cleaning products more complicated than vinegar + lemon + water for modern information.)
It's America's Housekeeping Book (1941). Available for free download on the Internet Archive. (Large PDF file at the link here).
The LISTS y'all. The step by step lists. The emphasis on efficiency and arranging spaces for the least resistance possible. The basic concept of "take a tray or basket into a room when you are tidying up so you can put things that belong elsewhere on it and take them out LATER in ONE GO".
Can we include darebee.com with ao3 and wikipedia on our list of really good nonprofits with excellent services that we stan?
It's a free, no sign-up, no ads fitness resource created by professionals who view this as activism (fitness should be accessible to everyone), and it's very thoughtful and thorough.
Features I really like:
- all instructions for workout routines are diagrammed on single pages with a clean, easy to read layout
- there's 30 or 60 day programs you can follow if you, like me, don't know what to do. they take you through a rotation of workouts so you're working different muscle groups on different day for a specific purpose
- there's so much variety and there's a filter so you can find the level and your goals and type of workout you wanna do
- you don't need any equipment
- some of the programs are RPGs or adventure stories! How's that for motivation. There's also badges and achievements or something but I haven't looked that closely at how that works yet
- they're nerds. they name workouts after D&D classes. There's a Lannistrr workout, a batcave workout, a witcher workout
hate hate hate how sites are increasingly trying to make right click saving images impossible. facebook, instagram, reddit (app), pinterest*, etc... all make you jump through hoops just to save an image. can you guys not please. how ddo i make them stop. can we get one of those EU regulations or whatever that makes them all comply, or are we going to have to wait for global socialism for that. ugh
While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.
It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.
One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.
Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??
Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?
THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they're not going to have that many clothes.
What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.
Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.
Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)
Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.
In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.
Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)
Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!
As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.
With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)
They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.
When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.
So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.
...One last note:
The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn't the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)
Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it's worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).
We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)
And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches.... rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.
This, and I'll add, vast secondhand market in clothing. That one simple tunic would cost the equivalent-in-labor of a new car today, and it would change hands as many times as one.
People in Ye Olden Times--the earliest garments we have evidence of, up through the middle ages (and well beyond, for all but the wealthiest people)--didn't wear simple, box-shaped garments because they didn't know how to sew anything fancier.
They did so because a Big Rectangle had the most resale/re-use value, since it could be tied, laced, belted, or otherwise fastened to fit a wide range of bodies. The same garment could be worn throughout pregnancy, as well as before and after. If it was no longer needed, it could be passed down or sold to virtually anyone. And when it became worn at the seams or hems, it could be re-sewn as a slightly smaller rectangle, and still fit a lot of people.
In Renaissance Europe, clothing got a lot more structured--and to a significant degree, this was as a status symbol. If you wore a fitted, short jacket over tights and those silly-looking puffy shorts (or a doublet, nether-hose and trunk hose), everybody who saw you would know that you could afford to buy all that fabric and then waste a bunch of it by cutting it into very specific shapes.
And if it fit well, then they'd also know that you were (probably) the first owner of said garments. Because the clothes were still expensive, they'd still be passed down, but there was a lot more need for clothing resellers, where secondhand clothes could wait for a buyer whose body they would fit. (Used clothing was a common gift or tip for servants, and if it was something they couldn't wear, they'd sell it.) In this way, clothing styles would percolate their way down the class ladder, both in the form of actual garments that had once belonged to a very rich person, and dupes made with simpler/cheaper materials and techniques, and perhaps modified for practicality.
And that's how you get fashion cycles: once something starts showing up on too many of the common people, the rich would move on, either exaggerating the trend to a point that, outside of that fashion context, looks ridiculous--
Like these silly, silly shoes:
(Note: these are probably exaggerated; the name of this picture is "Young Man Meeting Death," and we're presumably supposed to see him as a frivolous type of person who is about to find out why he should have lived a more serious and pious life.)
--or going in a different direction entirely.
So yeah, if you're writing secondary-world fantasy, give some thought to where the clothes are coming from, and how that's going to affect the styles and choices the characters make. If your working-class character in a Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Land is wearing fitted clothing, either that society has magic spinning and weaving technology, or your character is a serious fashionista/o, who is putting in a lot of time and effort into the project.
Similarly, if that type of setting has courtiers in a dazzling variety of impractical and elaborate garments--and several different outfits of it apiece--that implies a significant degree of urbanization and upward mobility, driving a secondhand market for those items, as well as providing the skilled labor to make and maintain those types of clothes. (You know these?
There was an entire trade centered on washing & ironing these things. Separate from actually making them, I mean. It involved tiny, specially shaped irons, and buckets of starch. Royalty or major nobility might have a servant dedicated to this highly specialized labor, and people a little lower on the ladder would send them out to be done. Ideally, you'd have each of your ruffs washed and re-set every time you wore it; people did re-wear them to save money, but they got droopy fast--hence the emphasis, in paintings featuring this trend, of crisp stiffness.)
How would this all compare to leather and hide based clothing? As the material doesn't need spinning and weaving, only tanning, cutting and sewing would it be cheaper and more common?
So. Not a tanner or a cloth maker here but - tanning can be very chemically specific. For those curious my perspective is of an animal pathologist's assistant. I have cut up several cows.
You do have the opportunity to amass a lot of leather if you hunt large animals, but post the adoption of farming and herding, most people are not feeding themselves that way. And there is just more small game overall. Leather is not necessarily easier, quicker, or less expensive to make than cloth, it just depends on what resources you have that are most abundant.
So the steps to making leather are as follows:
(Under the cut because, uh. I know this stuff from my job, which is “open a dead animal and let the doctor see what’s wrong with it” and most of it is messy.)
1) Kill and skin animal. This means removing the whole skin, in as intact a piece as possible, which while harder than it seems would be something your fictional leather-working society would be way better at than me.
Actually, scratch that. Step 1 is know what kind of animal gets you the type of leather that you want. Cowhide and horsehide are thick and tough but provide a lot of usable skin. Young goats are supposedly great for thinner, softer leathers, but my professional experience doesn't give me a lot to go on there. The phrase "kid gloves" means that they are leather gloves made from young goats, aka kids, which tells you that the leather is thin and flexible.
The main cost of this step is having enough of the animals you need to slaughter. If you’re hunting, then it’s all meat to you, but if you are a farmer pre-industrially, meat might be a byproduct of animal husbandry and not the point of it. One of the main reasons to keep a herd mammal – horses, cows, sheep, goats, llamas – is milk. Milk is liquid protein and once you figure out how to make cheese it can store for longer than meat can, at least without a fuckton of salt, which is often worth its weight in gold historically. (You could also smoke it but fuel is expensive and smoking things is technically a little trickier than salting them.) If you kill too many of your female animals, you don’t get milk, and you don’t get baby animals. If you keep too many male baby animals until adulthood, they start fighting and may injure you, your valuable female animals, or the structures you have built to keep your valuable herd animals in your possession instead of your neighbors. As a herder, your reliable access to meat and hides is mostly culling immature males from your herd, which tends to lead to smaller amounts of usable hide.
2) Scrape that shit. Harder. If you do not remove literally all the connective tissue beneath the skin, your hide will rot. Your hide may still rot if you don’t tan it properly or wait too long to tan it. Or if you tan it wrong by dumping shit in water and waiting for the magic of fermentation to work right without even knowing the difference between an acid and a base.
The scraping is also a great way to tear the hide or put holes in it. If you, for example, want to make leather out of a cow that has been lying around in the summer for a day because you wisely prioritized the meat… it can get kinda fragile, depending on what the bacteria do. I have to sharpen our 21st century steel knives literally every time we do a cow or a horse, just to get through the hide at all, and I have still seen cowskin tear like thin cloth if it’s deteriorated enough.
3) Assuming you have completed steps 1 and 2, you need the chemicals to tan the animal. Historically brains have been used a lot. DO NOT DO THIS if you are a modern person who wants to hunt for meat or leather. Prion diseases like CWD live in the brain, as do a lot of viruses that will kill or disable you painfully and slowly. It’s a relatively low risk (compared to things like accidents with your hunting gun) but it’s a risk you do not have to take. Yes, this is why some states want you to turn in the heads of any deer you shoot, regardless of how many points they have. This is part of how we tell you if the deer you shot is actually safe to eat, and not full of said viruses that will kill or disable you painfully.
The other thing that you need is a steady location and a fuckton of water, because these bitches need to soak for a long time. Way longer than soak times for retting flax or other plant stem fibers. And in multiple different solutions of the foulest smelling shit that you can imagine: in addition to brains, the steps included soaking in urine, possibly dung if you didn’t have enough brains, salt curing, soaking until the hair is loosened and then scraping all that off, and then the actual tanning, which is soaking it in a high tannic acid tree bark solution until it’s ready.
You can skip some of these steps, especially if you are, say, a paleolithic hunter gatherer. But your leathers will degrade faster. They will be less comfortable and less good for your range of motion.
So the production of leather is not necessarily less time consuming than cloth. It is also resource expensive at many steps – from start to finish you need animal wealth, mineral and plant resources, time, and a lot of water that you don’t need urgently for something else, like irrigation or watering your livestock. You’ll also want to do your tanning away from where you eat and sleep, because, the odor of fermenting cowhide is not fun. Finally, it is way more difficult at every step to construct a garment out of leather: cutting it, using an awl to punch holes in it so you can actually sew, or boiling it into shape. It’s also a specialized process when it comes to the chemical aspect, more so than cleaning wool or beating flax, both of which you can produce way more of (eventually) as a small household in the middle of nowhere. Spinning and weaving are both activities you can pick at slowly – you can also get a very small child to spin yarn acceptably with practice, freeing up your adult hands to do things like the weaving, while you really can’t bring your tots into your leather working and expect them to do anything but get underfoot. And shitty cloth smells way better than shitty rotting leather.
And none of this even scratches the surface of the material property reasons why a society may prefer leather for some applications (saddles, shoes...) and cloth for others.
Addendum to the leather reblog above, but salt is also historically very expensive, and pretty crucial to most of the older European methods of hide treatment I was able to find when reading up on tanning a few months ago. I can't remember if you still need it if you're using alum, but alum is still something you're going to have to buy in order to process your skins. (From what I read, tanning with brains was an Indigenous American technique, which was rapidly adopted by the colonisers bc of its efficient use of resources that are easy to hand, but modern American sources tend to drown out everything else when looking at historical stuff online without institution access, so I wouldn't state that categorically.)
The original thread is why I cringe every time I read a fic in my home fandom – which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology – that has main characters tear each other's clothing to show how excited they are for boning down.
In a premodern context, if someone tore my clothing carelessly, let alone deliberately, we're not fucking. We're no longer on speaking terms. They're dead to me. A shirt is bad enough; at least those were comparatively disposable, and could probably be repaired in a way that's unnoticeable when you wear it (shirts in most premodern European societies are underwear, not outerwear), but a doublet? Fuck right off into the sun.
‘Ooh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.’ That's what you sound like. Tear your own fucking shirt if you're that keen.
It's such an incredibly modern trope to me. I could MAYBE understand it if it's supposed to be a flex on how wealthy someone is, but my poor as shit blorbo with his hand-to-mouth existence who owns three shirts MAXIMUM should not be doing this. Would not be doing this.
The earliest I could see that trope as plausible in my mind is the Victorian period. There was still a healthy second-hand market for clothing, but clothing production had become far more mechanised than it ever had been before, and tearing a shirt probably wouldn't send you to the poor house. (But please still don't tear a suit jacket or a woman's bodice. That's hours of sewing work alone, even after the advent of treadle sewing machines. What's wrong with you.)
Don't forget dyeing, which had to be re-done and was itself a whole fucking profession.
Indigo is one of the hardest natural dyes to start a pot of, especially without a thermometer or indigo white, so once you got that pot started you kept it going. Indigo also has to be processed into a water-soluble form by treating it with ammonia. How do you source ammonia in a pre-industrial world? Well, the local piss barrel at the tavern is full of something that will certainly turn into ammonia if you let it sit. There were almost wars over the argument of whether the dyers should have to pay money to take the piss from the tavern or whether the publican should pay THEM for the SERVICE of taking away the piss, which after all is garbage.
Dark or vivid colours are expensive, and natural dyes are not fast--that is, they fade with washing and sunlight and wear, so you have to keep re-dying them every so often. Black in particular was VERY expensive, moreso than ANY other colour. Certain fibers dye very well and certain ones do not.
Yellow and green were favourite colours of the common folk--bright yellows in particular were very easy to get with cheap dyestuffs, and you see bright sunshine yellow very often in medieval art of ordinary folks. Denim blue was middling expensive. Purple, pink, and orange did not exist as perceived colours--remember, colour is a function of language. Meaning if you don't have a word for the colour, you don't perceive it. Red was difficult and the only thing more expensive than red was, as I said, black.
Dyers and fullers had smelly jobs and worked with piss--their workshops were, like the tanner's, on the edge of town, and downwind if possible.
Oh yes, what's a fuller. Well, wool is full of oils and stuff from the ship, and you need to eliminate those if you want the fabric to be thick and warm and insulating. So you need to soak it in urine and use your feet to rub it over a special textured surface to get all the oils out and shrink and felt the fabric. Loden, felt, and duffel are all fabrics that require fulling in order to become.
Spinning was done by most everybody all the time every day; that's why you see pictures of women with long distaffs leaning on their shoulders as they go about, in some art of ordinary life in the middle ages. You could spin all day while doing everything else. Weaving, however, was a profession, usually male, and weavers were very respected people in all societies that had them.
Pulling the fleece was an activity that you had to do before the wool could be spun. The process for turning a sheep's wool into a garment consisted of many more steps than shear, spin, weave, sew.
Shear
Pull the fleece: this involved sitting around with everyone and pulling the long guard hairs away from the undercoat. A lot of stories, songs, and gossip happened during this process. It also leaves you with very nice soft hands from all the lanolin.
Comb the undercoat hairs with a brush or comb to line up all the fibres in the same direction. This leaves you with rolags or roving.
Spin using a distaff and drop spindle. This takes forever. But there was a very important, revolutionary machine that came up the silk road to Europe and changed--and I cannot emphasise this enough--EVERYTHING.
This machine eliminated the drudgery of spinning, spreading from the East to Europe starting in the late 1200s. It freed up women's time to do more, and made spinning itself a job you could make money doing--the word "spinster" is the term for that profession, and elderly women suddenly could have money of their own, support themselves. This was very important!! This was a labour-saving machine that gave more power to women in Europe and made the making of fabric and fiber faster and easier than ever before!
5. Dye the threads. It's much easier to dye skeins of yarn than it is to dye fabric or garments in pre-industrial ages, so dyeing would be done at the yarn stage. Dyeing the yarn also means you can do things like have the weft be one colour and the warp another. This results in some of the most exciting and beautiful fabric in existence:
6. Weave the fabric. The loom was another piece of technology that was constantly being improved upon, because society was built on looms. In fact, the predecessor to the computer was the loom! Look up a video of a jaquard loom sometime, you'll see it uses punchcards to "program" in the different patterns of the fabric it produces. The song "four loom weaver" is actually "power loom weaver". Power looms were another improvement that made weaving faster. The luddites were the first labour strike and organization, and it was about? That's right, WEAVING.
7. Fulling, polishing, and other finishing techniques. Moire is made by calendaring. Felt is made by fulling. Polishing, waxing, and all kinds of other techniques are used to make all the different varieties of fabric that exist. The way we live now is sad and pathetic, we don't come into contact with much in the way of variety of fabric anymore. Everything is disposable, paperthin and made of plastic or cotton or bamboo, knits mostly. When you get into historical costuming, you meet all kinds of fabrics--lush brocades, velvets, and coutils, and silk. But it's NOTHING compared to the hand-woven fabrics of times past.
Machines can make fabric fast, but it's looser than when a human is doing it. The density of some hand-woven fabrics is so great that you don't need to hem them! Likewise, the translucency of some ancient linens made in Egypt is still a mystery we're trying to figure out how to reproduce, because machine-spinning and machine-weaving meant we LOST these techniques. People who spin and weave and hand-make fiber their whole lives can make it as thin as a spider's gossamer, and not even machines can do that today. Machines are wonderful and humans should not have to labour so much if a machine can do it, but it's worth noting that just because it's made by machine doesn't mean that it's better quality, just that its cheaper and faster to make. I'm sure if we tried, we'd find ways of machines being able to do it, especially with the "sort things and detect things" algorithmic programs software engineers have come up with, the ones that detect cancer and so on.
8. Sewing the garment. I'm putting a note here for sewing bc sewing by hand is a lot easier and faster and better than by machine sometimes. I hand-sewed an entire pair of pants and the hems were utterly invisible when I was finished, it was astonishing. I also used a running stitch for most of it and that's. That's the normal stitch to use, you just backstitch every ten stitches or so and then keep going. It wastes far less thread than a sewing machine. To make those pants I only needed three stitches: running, backstitch, and whipstitch. And I learned by watching Nicole Rudolph when she's sewing, she does the same stitches for the most part! There's speciality stitches for locking in the ends of corset bones (flossing) and so on, but the majority of the long seams are just the running stitch! Needles and pins were precious commodities in pre-industrial times, and there are letters between John Adams and his wife Abigail that illustrate this, which were famously made into the latter half of the song "Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve" in the 1969 musical 1776.
Needles were at first made of bone, hand-carved, in very ancient times; but needles and pines of steel and brass were also produced later on as metalworking tech started being able to do so. These were very precious, and the little tiny strawberry that hangs off a traditional tomato pincushion, the one full of what feels like sand? That was for cleaning the rust and tarnish off your needle, so it would go through the fabric easier. You can still buy bone and brass needles in the traditional style from historical merchants, and try for yourself sewing the historical way!
Many people in fact already practise an ancient form of fabric and garment-making: Knitting and crochet! There's a much older predecessor to these, called nalbinding, that is very interesting and practised with roving rather than spun and plied yarn, and uses a flat wooden or bone needle. It creates very dense, not very stretchy things, and was used by the Norse. Nalbound things are VERY cold-proof, and eventually felt--and that's a good thing, felt is very warm stuff! My mom made me a nalbound hat once and I miss it every winter.
Now, garments were not just fabric of course. People have liked decorating everything since time immemorial, and embroidery, buttons, beads, and other things were used. Another type of decoration, one very popular in the SCA, is TRIM! Trim is made by weaving on an inkle loom, which looks like this:
This one doesn't have the cards visble, but the pattern can be produced with cards that can be turned:
This produces a brocade, and yes, you can weave letters or all kinds of patterns into the "tape" that is produced. Depending on what fiber you use, and how fine the threads, these can be trims or hair-ribbons or shoulder-straps or all kinds of things!
Lace was also a very precious and complex form of decoration, and pieces of lace were so incredibly expensive and treasured that they were passed down as heirlooms. We're used to lace being white or maybe cream, but at certain points in France, blue lace could be found. And nothing is really stopping you from dyeing your lace, or using dyed threads to make it, other than fashion and convention.
Of course, places outside Europe (which is my speciality and has been my whole life) have their own fabric and decoration techniques, from the wax resist of batik to the special tie-dye from Japan called Shibori, to ikat, to the quilling of many North American Indigenous people (not to mention wampum beads, hand-carved of shells!). Everyone likes to decorate themselves and their clothing!
have some questions re: brain tanning, because I listened to this fascinating podcast for a class that talked about how Native Americans were reviving the practice. I don't know if chronic wasting disease is a concern with brain tanning or not. but generally yeah laypeople shouldn't mess around with animal brains
also, black wouldn't be expensive in areas where wool or fleece bearing animals came in black. alpacas and llamas can be black
Hello! Shepherd and hand spinner here. Black animals are not truly black.
Here's one of my Icelandic ewes, Presley:
Icelandics are what's known as a primitive breed, that is, she's very close to the kinda sheep early shepherds would have been keeping. Icelandics and other primitive breeds have this neat ability to shed ( otherwise known as roo) their coats in the spring, unlike modern breeds, like my wensleydale, which MUST be shorn.
You can see looking at Presley's cost that she is not actually pure black. She has steaks of silver, and the tips of her wool are sun bleached to a more brown color. Sun bleaching happens with almost every dark wooled animal. Here's some lambs from a couple years ago. Only about a month old in this pic, but their black coats are already turning brown at the tips (when shorn, the wool nearest the skin is still very dark/black).
Having spun up many, many naturally black fleeces I can tell you: if you want your cloth, yarn, thread, etc to be truly black, it must be dyed. There's too much variance in animal fiber to get a consistent, deep color. White animals similarly are more of a cream color. Here's the fleece of my white ram, Appa.
He has almost no markings and this is about as white as a sheep can be, which isn't very. But crucially, it's MUCH easier and cheaper to bleach a creamy wool to true white than it is to dye a dark wool to true black. A sufficient concentration of ammonia would do it, and you can find that in... Urine!
Hell, urine was the traditional source of ammonia used in the process of fulling woolen cloth (the final step after weaving where the cloth is shrunk and felted), so it would have been pretty readily available (comparatively).
So yes. Black cloth, as in truly black, the kind you would want if you wanted your workers's uniforms to look at all polished and presentable, would need to be dyed, which would cost more.
The problem with getting all my media info from this site is that I don't know what anything with gay characters is actually about because any plot discussion I see is constantly drowned out by posts talking about how gay they are.
I bet The Black Flag has a fascinating story, but all I know is that they're pirates and gay.
I've seen hints that The Locked Tomb is intricate and fascinating, but all I really know is that they're space necromancers and gay.
I assume this new hockey show is like, a sports story? Or a romance? Maybe interesting plot happens? All I actually know is that they play hockey and are gay.
Yes I could look this stuff up if I was actually interested in consuming the media, I'm not saying this is some kind of major problem with media or anything. Just a random observation that I, someone who doesn't actively go looking for new media, have noticed that I get less fun hooks to motivate me to look for queer media, because the random stuff I see about something like Severance or The Good Place (both of which I did watch and loved) is about fascinating plots and mysteries and interesting philosophical conundrums, whereas all I see about anything with queer main characters is Look How Queer It Is. Which is great for the media landscape in general, it's wonderful that queer media is more and more mainstream, but an entirely neutral factor of any specific individual show and not much of a hook.
That doesn't sound right because people have told me that tlt is fantastic and "all you need to know is that they're necromancers and they're gay" is a description of the most bland, pointless tokenistic bullshit it's possible to write. So unless the tlt fans are lying about the quality (which I very much doubt), that can't possibly be all you need to know. If somebody advertised The Good Place as "all you need to know is that she's bi and she's dead!" or The Murderbot Diaries as "all you need to know is that it's genderless and a security consultant!" then I would track them down, break into their houses and punch them in the face for their disservices to good media.
#i remember trying to hunt for more stories like murderbot once#stumbled across a list that was like#heres a bunch of books with canon asexuals#turns out it only mentioned murderbot as one that “doesnt count” since mb never like explicitly uses the word#its as if perfectly defined queerness is meant to be its own measure of quality
Genuinely, I understand why we've ended up in this place when it comes to describing/recommending queer media - for so long, there was so little of it that, when it came to word of mouth, the presence of queerness was itself the primary basis of recommendation. If the work also happened to be good, then so much the better, but the baseline, redacted-for-ease-of-transmission signal boost was simply This Is Gay. And when there wasn't much on offer, that worked! We were desperately trying, not just to see ourselves in stories, but to prove that there was a market for more - that queer audiences would show up for queer content, even if the genre was outside our usual bailiwick.
But the more queer works are published, the less useful this rubric becomes - and to further complicate matters, the rise of trope-centered marketing for romance in general and queer romance in particular, which often borrows terminology common to tags on AO3, has trained readers and creatives alike to frame stories predominantly through the lens of character dynamics. Which, to be clear: there's nothing wrong with this in and of itself! If you want to either give or solicit recommendations based on, say, grumpy x sunshine but make it gay, I'm not about to harsh your vibe. And particularly when it comes to romance, where the character dynamics necessarily constitute the backbone of the story, it often makes sense to do so.
But there's a very salient difference between romance as genre (where the romance is the story) and romance as device (where the story contains romance) which, particularly when it comes to queer books, is frequently erased by these conventions - which results, as OP rightly points out, in queer stories with other loadbearing themes, philosophies and plots being, if not technically misrepresented, then certainly undersold in terms of all that they're doing.
The Locked Tomb series, for instance, is, indeed, about gay necromancers. It's also a purposefully anachronistic science fantasy mindfuck that plays explosively with humour, voice and genre from book to book while still remaining, in essence, a sequence of locked room mysteries. By which I mean:
Gideon the Ninth is a locked room mystery where the room is God's laboratory and the mystery is what the fuck he was doing down there; Harrow the Ninth is a locked room mystery where the room is the narrator's body (and also, at times, the space station she's inhabiting) and the mystery is how she ended up that way; and Alecto the Ninth is a locked room mystery where the room is the personality that forms in the absence of memory and the mystery is God's secret past, with the necessary caveat that God here is not meant figuratively, but in fact refers to a literal, actual, walking, talking character who is also just Some Guy. It's about the intransigent nature of bodies, the fuckiness of personhood, the eternally compounding sin of pride, niche millennial humour and the gothic, philosophical splendour of toxic lesbianism (in space). It's got a lot going on!
And, sure: it's shorter and simpler to sell it as just gay necromancers, to say nothing of the fact that this description will still hook a lot of people. It's not inaccurate; it just presumes that this is the most important thing anyone could want to know about the book, and that won't always be so!
Look at it this way: if you're already shopping in the LGBTQ section of the bookstore and ask an employee for a recommendation, and they pick something off the shelf and tell you, "Buy this, it has two boys kissing!", that's vastly less helpful in context than if you'd walked into a store without an LGBTQ section and asked for a gay book rec. You see what I'm saying? It's a scarcity mindset that we've carried over into (comparative) abundance, and it's no longer serving us well. Gay is not a plot or a genre by itself; it's a component to be explored through the lens of plot and genre - which means that, in order to talk about one, it's also worth discussing the others.
all of the above, but also can we go back to the show OP calls "The Black Flag" because I think they're conflating two wildly different shows that are both about gay pirates and I'm dying
Our Flag Means Death is about gay pirates, and is a silly little comedy where like 90% of the characters end up confirmed canon queer and the "plot" exists mostly for vibes, and tumblr went crazy for it because of the insanely high ratio of gay characters (and cast, who were delighted to engage with fandom) and because season 1 was one of the first times it turned out people hadn't been misreading/overinterpreting the interactions between the two leads and they were into each other and they did eventually get a happy ending. Also like maybe two characters are under the age of 40, 🙌
Black Sails is also about gay pirates, and is a relatively serious and gritty historical drama and a meditation on legacy, the power of story and who is doing the telling, and why you should rebel and stand up to colonial/heterosexual/normative power structures even though you know you won't win. It's also setting up the future plot of Treasure Island. Tumblr went crazy for this show on a smaller scale, though I think it's been a bit of a slow burn, because when it came out the fact that it had a full half-dozen canon queer characters, four of whom are mains and a fifth is minor but vital to the entire plot, was practically unprecedented, and yet while their queerness was integral to the plot the show was not about them Being Gay. Also because Toby Stephens deserved all the awards and got none of them
Just to expand on Our Flag Means Death too, it is a romcom, the focus of the story is indeed the love story between the main leads, but it does have a lot more thematic depth than the above description implies, which I do feel is basically a longer version of "it's gay with pirates".
It is a show deeply concerned with questioning and deconstructing What It Means To Be A Man, and a really good exploration of the ways that Toxic Masculinity and violent systems such as Colonialism, Whiteness, Class, Patriarchy, Heteronormativity, etc. create harmful cages for everyone living under them, and with no sympathy for the willing perpetrators. It's a show where the worst crime any of the characters could commit is not living authentically to themselves, or not allowing others to do so.
It's also one of the most earnest and compassionate explorations of trauma I've seen, of the ways it affects your whole life when you've been carrying it around with you for as long as you can remember, and how to learn to let go of it so you can actually live your life in a way that suits you. And related to that, it also has some very interesting things to say about the weight of emotional abuse in particular (though not exclusively).
And it does all of that while still being funny and joyful and full of whimsy, it plays really well with its tone to deliver the impact of its message.
NOTE: There’s going to be comments that make Krita sound like a pain in arse. Parts of it are. Parts of it are also really awesome, and Krita is also configurable – hence this cheat sheet for beginners to help minimise some of the pain of getting used to a new program.
TOUCH INTERFACE NOTES
Two finger tap – Undo
Three finger tap – Redo
One finger tap – Triggers the Pop Up Palette (I find this short-cut often triggers unintended, and remap to a Five Finger tap via Settings → Configure Krita → Canvas Input Settings → Show Popup Widget)
One finger touch and hold – Color pick
Four Finger tap – Go in and out of Canvas Only Mode.
Panning, zooming and interacting with all user interface elements works with fingers, but there is some switching behaviour between drawing/canvas input with fingers and pen input enabled by default. I personally do not find painting with my fingers useful the majority of the time, and choose to disable it entirely to avoid any random marks on the canvas, or lag from switch-over from the auto disable. (Settings → Configure Krita → General → Tools → Touch Painting → Disabled) This will not disable touch input for user interface elements, just touch input on the canvas.
However, palm rejection on user interface elements isn’t 100% - I found myself skewing drawings to the left to avoid resting my palm on my layers docker, so for right-handers like myself, I recommend arranging interface elements on the left, and vice-versa for lefties.
I also recommend generally working in Canvas-only Mode to eliminate the scroll bars, as my palm would sometimes accidentally jump scroll as I drew.
The touch docker is a nice idea, but not particularly useful in its current implementation, as the buttons render really tiny, plus it is not customizable, and repeats short-cuts available elsewhere. The pop-up palette and toolbars are vastly superior in functionality. Skip for now – it would be nice if one day this feature could be developed into something like Clip Studio’s Quick Access Palette.
Zayre Ferrer and Nat Torres were asked about if anything was cut regarding garlic soup, and they discussed more material where Olu and Zheng are falling in love at the Republic of Pirates. Zayre specifically noted that Zheng recognized a softness in Olu that he'd never felt like he could express before. What are your thoughts on this re: what we know about cut polyamory plotlines in the show?
okay. listen.
i know i write a lot about cut material. when you do this, it is very easy to fall into the conspiracy-theory failure mode of a lot of fan meta where you convince yourself there's a secret good version of this season of tv that happened to do exactly what you wanted and every deviation from it is due to evil executive interference. i try to be careful to avoid this (although i'm sure there will always be people who think i'm doing it anyway, and that's a reasonable thing for them to think, because it's very common). usually i am talking about plotlines where we explicitly know something was cut because the writers told us outright, or else there's really clear evidence in what's left like an expensive set that's not used for anything important or something like that, and i'm just speculating about exactly what it was and how it fit into what's left. i try to make sure i'm considering alternate hypotheses and say explicitly when i'm speculating vs when i'm confident of something. and, importantly, i always start from taking the creators at their word.
i am going to break my usual rule and suggest that they are not being entirely 100% straightforward with us here. i do not do this lightly.
ok let's look at the evidence we have for what's going on with the garlic soup situation.
vico is poly and we know it's a big part of their life and something very important to them. we know vico wanted jim to have a polyamory plotline - during the hiatus before s2 they talked about thinking it might be fun if jim and olu each met other love interests while separated and ended up settling on a poly arrangement. we know after s2, vico's talked a lot about being into garlic soup.
we know the ofmd writers are aware of polyamory and not, like, opposed to it. even aside from what they'd know from vico, djenks has mentioned multiple times that he is a disastercule believer, he's talked about other movies where he reads the characters as a throuple, etc.
when anyone from the ofmd writers' room have talked about the s2 arcs for jim-olu-zheng-archie, none of them have suggested it was ever at any point a polyamory plot. david talked about the intent being that jim and olu broke up amicably and stayed friends, and his bsky holiday special seemed to have jim/archie and olu/zheng living in different places. when nat and zayre were asked explicitly about cut garlic soup material they only talked about olu/zheng, which is consistent with the idea that jim and olu were always supposed to break up and each find new partners. i think zayre even said something like "it can be whatever you like in your heart" which seems to imply that they want to leave poly headcanons open but they aren't canon. iirc alex and alyssa said something about jim and olu breaking up too at BOF1.
nevertheless, in what actually aired onscreen, jim and olu do not ever actually explicitly break up at any point. they have a conversation about how jim kissed archie but they don't actually talk at all, or even hint, about what this means for their relationship or whether they'll have sex again.
but we know it's not like we're supposed to forget about that. jim/olu shows up in the "last time on our flag means death" recap at the start of the season AND there's a brief flashback to the jim/olu almost-kiss right before archie kisses jim, which is the sort of thing you'd normally do if you're cuing the audience to be worried this is infidelity, not something you'd do if the intent is that jim/olu was just a casual fling that won't be relevant going forward. and then they just don't resolve that?
jim and archie go to meet zheng and encourage her to rekindle her romance with olu. there seem to have been a fair number of cut scenes building to this but even without them it happens onscreen.
during the conversation jim says they and olu are like family and archie adds "family who fucked." at this point jim's like "not helping" but nobody clarifies after this whether jim and olu are still fucking, which frankly is really weird information to neglect if you're trying to wingman for your ex and you expect monogamy to be an issue. (strangely the camera does not show us zheng's reaction to learning jim and olu had sex and we never hear her say anything at all about it.)
during this conversation jim also says they and olu are "like anchors for each other." "anchor partner" is common polyamory jargon for a long-term stable partner you're committed to even if you also have other partners. vico has talked about liking that line specifically because they knew how people familiar with poly culture would interpret it.
turning to cut material. we know there was a fair amount of cut jim-olu-archie stuff in 2x05 including a conversation between olu and archie about jim's attractive qualities.
here's the big one: we know that in the pre-interference version of 2x06 jim, olu and archie had threeway sex. we furthermore know this was not some kind of vague concept that was considered and discarded early on, we specifically have been told that was still in the script up till like a week before filming and there was work being done to figure out the physical blocking of the scene before it was suddenly cut after what would have normally been the script lock deadline.
look, this is fucking weird. it is not normal for tv to have a situation that's ambiguous like this. it is not normal to do a breakup plotline where the characters never actually unambiguously break up and they stay extremely closely involved in each other's love lives with new partners and there's dialogue tossing around suggestive but plausibly deniable polyamory jargon.
like i'm trying to take the writers at their word here. i could maybe buy that it's down to all the weird cuts for time that we never see jim and olu actually talk about how their relationship has changed. maybe the "anchors" line was an adlib vico snuck in without telling anyone what it implied, although i feel like that would be unlike them.
but the group sex scene? they were trying to write a storyline about an amicable breakup where you stay friends and it involved a group sex scene between the exes and one of their new partners? the arc of the season was at some point supposed to be that jim and olu meet new crushes while involuntarily separated, then they decide break up, then olu has sex with jim and archie at the same time and then they're still broken up and jim and archie go on a mission to get olu a girlfriend? i have tried really hard to game out in my head what that would even look like and every version i can come up with sounds wildly implausible to me. like, was the idea supposed to be that they were considering a throuple but decided it didn't work? does that make sense? does that sound plausible to you? what would be the point of that? was it just kind of a shaggy dog story? and then i'm supposed to believe that on top of that all the other stuff that looks like it's hinting at polyamory is just a series of unrelated weird coincidences? and all of this was done by a writers' room that was well aware of the concept of polyamory and knew one of the actors involved in the storyline was very, very interested in it being polyamory? and i'm supposed to believe not just that the version that aired isn't canonically meant to read as polyamory but that at no point in coming up all this were they even seriously considering just making it polyamory?
i'm sorry!!! i cannot buy it!!!!!
now that being said i am not here to tell you the true vision of the jenkins cut is a beautiful fully developed unambiguous polyamory plotline that was cruelly deleted by the forces of Big Monogamy (WBD). honestly the whole situation feels much too weird for anything that straightforward. it feels to me like there was some amount of disagreement or indecisiveness in the writers' room and very possibly some back-and-forth as the scripts were developed.
i actually think it's extremely plausible that the original idea was in fact a jim/olu breakup. like, i can see where that sounds like a good idea. jim's just decided to put their revenge quest to bed and they're figuring out what to do with their life for the first time, it makes sense to maybe not be ready to commit to the first person they kissed after deciding that. so maybe they start writing that and feel like it's just not coming together, sometimes that happens, sometimes an idea makes complete sense on paper but it just doesn't ring true. or maybe vico starts actively pushing for the poly idea and convinces them (this is extra speculative, but it would make sense if they agreed to it as sort of a consolation prize for vico when they realized they'd have to cut the doctor jim plot, leaving jim with very little substantial s2 material). so for whatever reason they try to pivot to polyamory and maybe the pivot comes late and there's not enough time to really flesh it out into something that works. or maybe there was actually some repeated flip-flopping back and forth. but for whatever reason they never get the polyamory arc into a shape they're really happy with either. and then wbd comes in and starts frowning over the amount of queer sexuality in this show...
however. if i am right at all about any of this. then it's really weird how consistently determined all the writers are not to breathe so much as a hint about it. it's normal to be a bit cagey about changes and exec-mandated interference but the thing is they are not acting like this about anything else, they talk openly about lots of other plotlines that were cut. and it's really weird if it's just that wbd didn't want to do a polyamory plotline and they don't want to piss off the company, because we're at the point where djenks is saying "canceled for being gay" openly, he's been plenty critical of stuff wbd wouldn't allow, so why is this such a third rail? nat and zayre pretty clearly knew that question was fishing for them to say something about cut material that would have made the polycule explicit; confirming they at least thought about it at some point would be saying what they know people want to hear. why such absolute consistent discipline across all the writers who've talked about this if i'm right?
i don't know, okay!!! something weird is going on!!!!! i don't know what happened! but i'm telling you the official party line does not make sense here!
The only thing I can think of (and not very coherently, I've been in brainfog hell for like three weeks straight now 🫠) is that it might be spoilers for a potential s3, just like they all insisted Lucius was tragically dead even when we all knew that was an obvious lie? Like, it was left so ambiguous and rushed in the version of s2 that aired that they don't feel in good conscience that they can actually say there was a poly storyline actually left there, so they'd like to actually develop it properly in a potential s3 if the show ever gets picked up again, so they've decided to just avoid any mentions of it for now, just in case???
