#disclaimer that this is about fictional iterations not the actual historical person

[fideidefenswhore]

Every single JS novel follows the same blueprint of Jane being appalled and horrified at Thomas More’s execution in 1535, she cannot believe evil skanky AB ~made~ Henry do this…. and then by May 1536 she’s always chilling in Chelsea (More’s house which was seized by the crown) like… tehe.

[scripttorture]

Hi. I've been thinking about writing a short piece about a trial led by the Spanish Inquisition. Now we all know the inquisition was all about hypocrisy and lies - they COULD have simply executed or freed the victim on a whim, but they WANTED them to admit to their 'sins' and repent. Now I know you often say how torture isn't a good tool for extracting information. How likely it is for a tortured man to admit to crimes he didn't commit/repent for something he strongly stands for or believes in?

It’s possible. However it’s also possible that he’d die without repenting or consistently refuse to give in.

 The data we have on confession (which usually means false confession) under torture comes from historical France. The average confession rate with torture alone was around 10%.

 The London Cage, which combined torture with blackmail and bribery, managed a confession rate of around 30%.

 So it is possible. But it’s a lot less likely then most people think.

 There’s also the question of how ‘strongly’ a belief is held. Because, as much as we try to portray it as rare, history is full of examples of people who chose prolonged torturous deaths over going against a strongly held belief. (For which I will reference all of Indian history.)

 From a writing perspective I’d suggest asking how strongly this character holds these beliefs.

 Are they really absolutely, uncompromisingly willing to die for it? And is it the kind of belief that would allow them to lie easily about the belief?  Because if they're willing to die for it I don't see them compromising it under torture.

 Let’s take Batman as an example. Because I have suffered through the Tim Burton movies recently and am detoxing with the Animated series.

 The big moral core through most iterations of Batman is that he doesn’t kill. But there’s not necessarily anything contradictory if he lies about it.

 On the other hand a core belief in the value of honesty doesn’t allow a character to lie about their belief. A lot of religions (but not all) prescribe punishments (real or metaphysical) for those who renounce their faith.

 I think these sorts of plots work best when they pick different things that the character values differently and pit them against each other.

 Sticking with the Batman Animated examples, there’s an episode where one of the villains is abducted by someone who wants the villain’s help. The kidnapper plans to destroy the city and the villain doesn’t like the idea. But the kidnapper has the villain’s wife.

 And the previous episodes established that this particular villain values his wife and her safety above absolutely everything else. So he isn’t happy about destroying the city, but he’ll go through with it. Because he values something else more.

 Is there any benefit to the character to ‘repenting’? Do they actually believe they’ll be released or that torture will stop if they do? Or do they believe that a refusal to repent is the only thing keeping them alive?

 Because both are possible conclusions.

 How do you want to characterise this fictional person? Are the things they’re chiefly concerned with actually anything near what the torturers are chiefly concerned with?

 Does repentance or a false confession actually add to the story? Does it come naturally from the character?

 One of the stories I’m currently working on has two characters who are arrested and tortured.

 One is heavily involved in the political movement he’s been arrested for. He believes in it deeply and he’s very close to other people in the movement. He does not recant his beliefs or actions.

 The other wasn’t involved in the political movement at all. He was an ordinary kid and he doesn’t give a damn about the movement. He’s worried about his mum, worried that he’s failed her, that he’ll never see her again.

 If the torturers had bothered to ask him questions he’d have made up names, repented anything they asked for and signed any confession they put in front of him. Because the cause they’re concerned with does not matter to him at all. (And because he’s more then a little stupid.)

 Does torture getting a ‘result’ actually give your story anything? Is there a benefit to letting the torturers have a victory, however false or small?

 That’s a serious question, not a rhetorical one. If this is building to something, if these events are necessary for your plot to continue, if they drive or haunt your characters- then yes false confessions and ‘repenting’ are possible.

 But if neither of those things actually add anything to your story then I personally don’t see the point in giving even more focus to that 10%. The 90% are treated like a rare exception and that magnified 10% are treated like the norm.

 We’re not going to learn to engage with real torture properly until we start appreciating the reality. Changing the fictional landscape is part of that. That might mean showing the response of 90% of survivors, or 10%, but either way it should serve the story and it shouldn’t treat a 10% response like the expected norm.

 I hope that helps. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[scriptlgbt]

My story is about pirates. The MC is a trans guy and the captain is a lesbian who is some sort of big sister/mother figure to him. It's quite violent. I was wondering if it could be problematic? I know it's problematic to show trans woman being overly violent in fiction but what about cis lesbians and straight trans guys? Also, do you know about real any queer pirates i could read about? And what did pirates think about homosexuality/transness?) How was it being queer in the pirate world?

A conversation that I had, that is relevant:

ME: [PARTNER], do you know anything about queer pirates?

PARTNER: I know that there were many, and they’d sometimes be like -

ME: Sea husbands kind of thing?

PARTNER: Yeah, and one would inherit from the other’s booty, and when it was divided up, they’d share their share of the booty.

ME: [mischievous grinning face]

PARTNER: [nodding] And they might share each other’s booty.

Disclaimer: This whole thing is going to largely focus on what is known as the Golden Age Of Piracy. I’m also not a historian, I just hardcore, love pirates with my heart and soul. This is going to be a long post.

So, this is super generalized, but pirates, and even sea-faring folks in general (see: - or sea, hahahahaha - the LGBT+ history of Brighton in the UK), have tended to have a much higher rate of LGBT+ folks and minoritized people in general, throughout history. As far as most research I’ve done goes. Being in a travelling situation and having the anonymity of being able to move around with chosen family generally has great appeal to folks whose existences are filled with oppression and a sense of not belongingness. This has also applied for racialized people, women in general, impoverished folks in general, a lot of different people who wanted to reclaim a place in the world that ostracized them.

Another fun fact, the use of the term “Friend of Dorothy” as a euphemism for gay folks was investigated by the US Navy. They misunderstood it as meaning that there actually was a woman named Dorothy who could be routed down and coerced into outing her “friends” to the military. Cruise ships and others have also used this phrase to covertly advertise that there were meetings for these folks. (Source: Wikipedia | “Friend of Dorothy”) 

But to get to the pirates, specifically.

Most pirate ships largely had their own code that everyone on their ship had to agree to. Some had things like, “you’ll be marooned with one knife, and no food if you are caught not reporting loot to be divvied up by the crew fairly” and things like that. But generally, whoever ran the ship, the Captain, would get to pick the rules. And with the partial-democracy that comes with the idea of mutiny, and the more notable reliance on the labour of it all, in general, things were able to be slightly more consensus-based than the on-land governments.

There are numerous women who became pirates to take ownership of their lives in ways that weren’t permitted on-land. Anne Bonny and Mary Read are historical figures that might be worth looking into. The two of them shared lovers, sailed together, had intense care for one and other and with their dressing up in masculine-coded attire and the like, there’s a lot to go off of in assuming they may have been romantically involved with each other. If not, at least they had some iteration of what a lot of contemporary folks might find comparable to a QPR.

The concept of “sea husbands” was also called matelotage (or bunkmate) depending on your crew. It was kind of the buddy system, but gayer. With little need to consistently explain it to outsiders, folks at sea were freer to explore the different ways a relationship with another person can be, without so much worrying about how it looks to others at a passing glance. And as pirates, there’s less concern that you’ll get shit from the law for gay stuff Of All Things. 

Buccaneer Alexander Exquemelin wrote: ‘It is the general and solemn custom amongst them all to seek out… a comrade or companion, whom we may call partner… with whom they join the whole stock of what they possess.’  (Source)

It was just normal. They also had a version of health insurance where someone was compensated if they ended up disabled from battle. The compensation of death of your partner also works into this.

As for transness, these kinds of things have had fickle definitions and historically, it’s hard to be able to pinpoint specific people as fitting cleanly into contemporary cultural definitions of transness, because frankly, the past had different culture to now. When it comes to writing canonically trans characters in contexts where the language might have been different, it’s important to focus on making sure that a trans reader can identify the personal connection with that character’s experiences and feelings, just as much as it is to use language to name folks as trans. 

Representation can go deeper than surface terminology and the like, and in cases where the terminology doesn’t necessarily match, it has to. Language like, “I never really felt like a [assigned gender] - I see myself more like [desciption of actual gender identity or name for it].” - is as good as just saying the character is trans in my opinion.

Depending on where the character is from, they also may have just outright had a word in their language for their identity. 

Gender presentation was significantly freer with pirates than it was for folks on land. Things like earrings, frilled sleeves, varied hair length and similar, were not uncommon, although the gendered coding associated with these aspects of appearance had different implications than they do now. Gold earrings on seafarers were there to fund a proper burial if someone’s body washed ashore. Gendered clothing was also coded in more binary ways on land. Folks who wanted to be coded as men could do so by wearing pants and folks who wanted to be coded as women could do so with skirts and dresses. (Tangential but fun fact yet again: dressing in those big poofy skirts usually included massive pockets. They were generally not physically attached to the skirts, but if you wore it all properly you would easily be able to reach into them.) 

Pirates and other seafarers also had clothing referred to as ‘slops’ for cleaning (if they were of the rank that cleaned anyway) which were pretty wide-legged pants that could almost pass for a skirt. 

Material that pirates used for clothing was largely what they stole, but it was cut and sewn into the same shapes a lot of other seafarers wore. At the time, it was largely illegal (under English rules anyway) for people who weren’t the bourgeoisie to wear anything made with nice fabric. Rich people saw this as deceitful, and these laws enabled richer people to not mingle on an equal level with those of a lower socioeconomic status.

As pirates, if you’re already shunning the law, may as well wear full calico suits. (Like Calico Jack Rackham.)

There’s more info on pirate and privateer clothing here. (The link is to a free book in HTML format, complete with illustrations and talk of materials, and how the clothes worn at sea varied from clothes they wore when they came into shore and towns.)

I could write a book on this and still not have covered enough. But the gist is that pirates were a big counterculture of outsiders living their lives. LGBT+ people and racialized people got thrown into the mix (and jumped right in) and experienced much more liberated lives than they might otherwise. That isn’t to say they were flawlessly inclusive - there still definitely were a lot of things people thought of in congruence with colonial beliefs. There was racism and homophobia - but it looked a lot different, and was a lot lighter than you’d think. And there were some ships which banned women, but mainly I think that was because they typically didn’t have the background to hold their ground on the ships, and were considered more of a plus one to certain crew members (who brought them - the rules were specifically about bringing them onto the ship rather than them being there of their own accord) than part of the crew. Sometimes women were part of the crew.

Notably, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were in a polyamorous triad with Calico Jack Rackham. (I think a cis + het historian might argue about this but that would seem like denial to me tbh. There is much, MUCH more evidence pointing in this direction than against it, and it would be extraordinarily hard to argue otherwise.) I would definitely do some research on them!

I also recommend this book (link is the free text on WikiSource), A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates. It is perhaps the most famous contemporary record of the lives of a number of pirates from the time, including Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

As for the sensitivity aspect of this ask, I’d say that what you are describing is completely fine. As long as the violence isn’t used to dehumanize or completely demonize, I would even say that I don’t have any warnings for you about it, or precautions to advise on.

Thank you for this opportunity to infodump about LGBT+ pirates. I hope this is not overwhelming, but I’m also happy to parse out segments of this better upon request. (Our ask will be open eventually, I promise.)

- mod nat

[eekster107]

On 40k’s Recent Blandness

I was doing some thinking lately about sequels and reboots and such, and kind of hit upon what it is about the Warhammer 40k background in recent years that has kind of made me stop caring about it for maybe 5-10 years now. And this is something that affects the reboots and sequels on tv and film as well I think, and why people maybe find them a bit lacking. More under the page break.

I’m going to preface this with a disclaimer that this is 100% just my opinion. I’m going to make a lot of assertions so assume that each has “in my opinion” attached to it. We know how the internet gets a bit uppity about opinions that sound like they’re being stated as facts. It’s also a massive, probably barely coherent stream of consciousness because I’m a hobbyist blogger, not a professional writer.

In short, Warhammer 40k seems to have become a source of inspiration to itself, I’d even go as far to say the main one. And in doing so, it has lost what it meant.

What do I mean by that? Well let’s look at what 40k was, where it came from. It was born as a sci-fi version of Warhammer Fantasy, the universe being a bit of a mish-mash of popular sci-fi media. You can see elements of Dune, 2000 AD, Aliens, Lovecraft, Terminator, and many others over the years. And it combined that with a lot of parallels from human history, both in theme and actual events. All of that with a dose of absurdist and satirical humour.

I’m sure we’ve all seen plenty of posts and such lamenting the loss of the trademark humour, it being confined mainly to the Ork faction these days. I happen to share this complaint. But that’s not what I’d call the main problem, merely a symptom of it.

The main problem is that 40k’s writing has stopped going to the rest of pop culture for inspiration. It no longer looks outside of itself. It copies itself. And the thing is, unless you do a direct copy of something, you tend to lose a bit of the original. You often lose a little of the context of the original, and lose the precise blend of ideas and, perhaps more importantly, the reason that those ideas were used together in the first place. As an example to illustrate the point, The Matrix started out as a cyberpunk kung-fu movie with a little bit of a philosophical bent, and a dash of Alice in Wonderland, and some other things. But it ended up disappearing up it’s own backside in the sequels because it doesn’t really give us anything new, they confine themselves to trying to one-up the original by being more of it. It doesn’t enrich itself with much (or any) more outside influences.

All of this was okay when 40k started out, it copied a little bit from everywhere to create sort of a tapestry of homages to sci-fi, pop culture and history. But when copying it from itself, it lost that. It lost the appeal of cultural and historical references. It took from itself and lost a little along the way.

And the thing is, 40k’s lifeblood lies outside of itself. That’s where it was born and what made it what it is. I kind of feel like when you stop creating it with the original recipe, you’re not really making the same thing any more. It no longer feels like 40k because it isn’t being made the same way as 40k was. And I don’t mean literally taking more from the influences it started with, but even just by expanding the range of media and historical events that it takes inspiration from.

That’s also where the humour disappeared. Bit by bit, in taking influence from itself, each iteration seemed to lose a bit of the satire. On and on until all trace of irony was lost and much of the setting has become the very thing it used to parody. When’s the last time we had anything like the idea of an Ork warlord named after a British Prime Minister leading a re-enactment of the Eastern Front? (Battle for Armageddon board game, for those who miss the reference)

It’s been so long since we’ve had something that adds to the setting in the same manner as Space Hulk (Aliens), Gaunt’s Ghosts (Sharpe), Ciaphas Cain (Blackadder), and so many more like that. It’s become stagnant, disappearing up its own brand of macho war porn and “awesome badassery”.

I could make a whole other post about how that relates to the wider issue of reboots and sequels that we see today. But in short, I feel that when you only copy yourself, you water down the elements of the original sources of inspiration and become a pale copy.

I’ll use an example of my favourite movie. Captain America: The Winter Soldier. A sequel that, in my opinion, surpasses The First Avenger. And it does this by not trying to be The First Avenger. The first movie was clearly a war movie. TWS however, had much more in common with modern spy thrillers, your Jason Bourne’s and the like. It continues the story and expands the universe because it adds something new from a different source. And in my view, becomes even better than its predecessor as a result.

40k needs to go back to that. Stop retreading old ground and telling the same stories about the same characters, and watering them down in the process. Stop creating new characters that are just names, that have no personality beyond the archetypical “tough space marine dude”, “evil chaos man”, or “angry inquisition lady”, that are just a personification of their faction and influenced by nothing else. Because Cain and Gaunt were not the archetypal Commissar, Eisenhorn and Ravenor were not the archetypal Inquisitor, and none of them were confined to being inspired by 40k by itself. That’s why they’re memorable. And that’s why 40k’s recent fiction and characters are not.

I’ll leave one last point to show what I mean. Black Library and Forge World have been doing fantastically well with the Horus Heresy. And I believe that’s because they are not drawing inspiration purely from 40k. They can’t really, because previous Horus Heresy literature was so thin on the ground. So again, outside inspiration has come into play and enriched that part of the universe. Consider the historical influences on each of the Legions, the very idea of the Legions and their structure, the Great Crusade, etc etc. GW needs to take a good, long look at what its subsidiaries are doing to the fiction and learn a few lessons for its own good.