#historical typings

[marzipanandminutiae]

why are skirts inherently evil and oppressive in historical fiction until men are wearing them

I've never heard anyone going on at length about how Universally ImpracticalTM the garb of a Scotsman or an ancient Roman politician are

suddenly everyone has a concept of situational practicality that previously was not there

[tapeworrmart]

Overprotective 🦂

[queerromancerecs]

Hi! Do you have a list of historical f/f romances? I have read all historical f/f by Olivia Waite, Annick Trent, KJ Charles, Cat Sebastian, and Jess Everlee, and i can’t seem to find any others! (Also read Freya Marske’s historical fantasy). I love historical queer romance and I don’t mind reading mainly m/m (or other queer pairings) but I’d really like to get some more f/f in the mix!

Well you've mentioned the big names in this ask (and mentioned Sarah Waters in your second ask) so I asked around on my main first and received two recs from @strinak which were The High Priestess by Parhelion on AO3 (it was originally a novel published by Torquere) and Romancing the Inventor by Gail Carriger.

There are some historicals here under the ship type f/f tag, though some might be considered f/nb as well as I can recall.

I've also recced a shorter historical f/f here which is also under that tag. And have read some on AO3 as well, though the only ones I can think of offhand were written by KannaOphelia

But if anyone here has any more, feel free to comment or reblog with a comment (or submit it as a post, so I can officially tag it.)

[despazito]

while we're at it i hate that whenever somebody brings up tibetan mastiffs nowadays they're almost always referring to the viral overbred monstrosities coming out of china and not actual normal tibetan mastiffs.

if you're going to a registered breeder who regularly shows their dogs in AKC/KC/CKC circuits, they will look something like this:

in recent decades it became fashionable to breed very exaggerated dogs as a status symbol for wealthy people in china, nothing about these dogs are practical it'll cost an arm and a leg to keep groomed. these are very extreme examples of the breed and really really shouldn't be normalized as the desired tibetan mastiff type:

for contrast, here's a bitch from the 1920s bred in UK and old photos from central asia, yes they were large but were never meaty or extremely heavy-set dogs, they should not look as if they're constantly fighting gravity.

[mag150cul-de-sac]

me when the historical costuming inaccuracy is a design choice, makes sense for the characters, etc: nice

me when the historical costuming inaccuracy is due to cost cutting, unreasonable time crunches placed upon the costumers, trying to appeal to modern fashion, etc: frothing at the mouth /neg

[visenyaism]

Fire and blood is just not good enough for me to care about tiny inaccuracies

i’ll be a book purist for the main series i’m a real feastriot because it’s a 10/10 to me. but I just don’t have it in me to be a shooter for fire and blood. It barely clears a 4/10 outside of certain moments and it’s just so shallow. grrm at his least creative and most misogynistic 

[clove-pinks]

Étude du matin by Paul Gavarni, March 9, 1839.

Still in the 1830s, although these two young men are spiritually in the 1840s already with the long hair and questionable facial hair decisions. One smokes a trendy chibouk pipe and shows a great view of straps on his trousers.

[silverpsychedelic]

Some random ghost dad sketches. Kyle is at it again

[wonder-worker]

Wild how we know that Elizabeth Woodville was officially appointed to royal councils in her own right during her husband’s reign and fortified the Tower of London in preparation of a siege while 8-months pregnant and had forces gathering at Westminster “in the queen’s name” in 1483 – only for NONE of these things to be even included, let alone explored, in the vast majority of scholarship and historical novels involving her.

[soupmanspeaks]

Michael streamer au where he plays all of the in universe fnaf games to see of they're accurate as to how the events actually unfolded

(No see the reason why glamfreddy constantly needs charge every hour is because he's secretly running a high cpu video game in the background, trust)

[meirimerens]

the bickering habit

[moon-pepper]

I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that understanding history is necessary to prevent the worst parts of it from repeating, so I spend a lot of my free time trying to learn about things like colonialism, slavery, genocide -- and it worries me to no end to see how much the majority of people don't seem to understand even about events everyone is familiar with. I used to be baffled that anyone could genuinely believe slavery was "just how things were back then", but it makes sense when you realize that most history lessons only deal with what the people in power decided to do; public outrage about a particular action only matters in the historical context if that outrage led to actual mass revolution. Even before we get to the layers of whitewashing and propaganda constantly applied to history, there's an innate bias toward treating major political movements as though they just appear and disappear entirely at random. Which leads me to wonder...

Do fellow gentiles realize that the Nazis weren't new?

What I mean is that most coverage I see of the Nazi ascension to power in Germany presents them as this new, fringe group that came to power out of nowhere through solely violent means. Sometimes there will be explicit mention of the fact that antisemitism was extremely prevalent throughout Germany (occasionally even the rest of Europe!) prior to Hitler's political campaign, but oftentimes it seems implicit that mass antisemitism in Germany began when the NSDAP first formed. Even when the prior existence of antisemitism is brought up, the Nazis are portrayed as a new, unique evil; they did things that no democratic society would ever dream of doing, things that could only be achieved by either completely hiding them from the public or by threatening anyone who spoke against them. "Nazi" is simultaneously an easy epithet for any excessively cruel or restrictive person and a label that is far too severe to seriously apply to anyone because the Nazis were so evil in a way that nobody else was that nobody is truly deserving of comparison.

The thing is, though, that the policies put into place by the Nazi government in order to enable their genocidal end goal weren't original. Even setting aside the fact that they're often viewed as the inventors of genocide despite Hitler openly admitting that he got the idea from the treatment of Indigenous peoples by the U.S.A. (highly recommend watching this BadEmpanada video to learn about that), very few of the Nazis' beliefs or actions were original to the Nazis. The conspiratorial, racially-puristic ideas that the Nazis touted were derived from contemporary conservative thinkers all across the West, and many of the antisemitic legal policies they implemented as part of their Final Solution were practices that had been standard throughout Europe for centuries prior.

The infamous yellow-star badges used to identify Jewish citizens? Those were first devised and enforced the region (by both Christian and Muslim rulers) at least as early as the 800s; it was 1215 when Pope Innocent III declared that all Jewish and Muslim people living in Catholic lands should be required to wear identifying clothing with the explicit goal of segregating them from Christians. The Nazi ghettos to which Jewish citizens were forcibly relocated were inspired by ghettos which had existed to segregate and isolate Jewish populations for centuries; the only real difference is that these new ghettos were just preludes to concentration camps rather than being meant for long-term habitation. Just about every part of Western society had some form of restriction (mandated or voluntary) banning Jewish people from occupying certain jobs or limiting their presence in universities going back centuries before the Nazis existed. There were more than 350 years where Jewish people were not legally permitted to live in England.

The reason I bring all of this up is because, even among people who are conscious of Europe's widespread antisemitism prior to the rise of Nazism, there's a strong notion that the Nazis were so detestable because they came out of nowhere; that they completely defied the norms of the day and took their antisemitism to a level that even the deeply antisemitic societies of past Europe never would have.

In reality, the Nazis weren't much of an escalation -- they were a return. Legal segregation, expulsion, and even slaughter of Jewish people really only began to end when the Enlightenment came and public sentiment in the West began to favor secular government. The first country to abolish legal restrictions on Jewish people was Revolutionary France in the 1790s. Russia maintained its restrictions on Jewish citizens' rights up until it also saw revolution in 1917. The idea that Jewish people were responsible for all of society's ills and needed to be subjugated and exterminated was not a new idea that took hold of Germany due to its economic suffering after World War 1; it was a very old, very popular idea that most of Europe had only just begun to abandon and which was brought back in full force the moment it became politically convenient.

Consider how this compares to present-day politics. Jewish Germans were only granted equal rights in 1871 -- Adolf Hitler's father and mother were 34 and 11 years old, respectively -- and when the Nazi Party formed only 49 years later, the majority of adult Germans would have grown up in or been raised by parents who grew up in a world before religious desegregation. The Nazi Party's promise to the German public was not to introduce a newly bigoted society, but to bring back the bigotry they had grown up with and ensure that it would never leave again; they succeeded by using Germany's post-war suffering to "prove" their society was declining and blaming that decline on a recent major societal change, thereby convincing Christian Germans who were still deeply antisemitic that you see? we let the Jews have rights and not even fifty years later everything is awful. Many Germans did not need to be lied to or forced into supporting the Nazis because, to them, the Nazis were just fighting to revive the "Good Old Days" of their youths.

As a political party, the Nazis were functionally identical to all of the modern-day pundits eagerly proclaiming that racial equality and LGBT equality and religious diversity and welfare policies are destroying the country. Any period of significant economic downturn, any large cultural shift, any major catastrophe no matter the cause is automatically the decline of Western Society to them -- and the blame for that decline is always placed on the most relevant pro-equality social movements. What makes the Nazis unique is not their goals or the beliefs that fueled them; what makes the Nazis unique is that they're the latest and largest example of a group like them gaining power and then rapidly losing that power, which makes them simultaneously martyr idols for subsequent fascists and sacrificial vessels through which liberals can pretend the world's evils were expunged.

Any major shift in favor of granting rights to the oppressed inevitably stirs up a proportional conservative backlash with the effort of reversing course -- not just by revoking those new rights, but by making the previous inequality worse so that it becomes harder to undo again. If we care about ensuring an equitable future, it is vital to understand that the fight for that future does not end with a law being passed. It ends only when equality for all is so well-established as a social norm that there is no way to benefit from pushing for its destruction. Do not get complacent.

[goldenstarprincesses]

Alfred: An academically smart and intelligent man that probably has multiple college degrees on top of his formal colonial aristocratic English education

Also Alfred: Stunned into tragic silence in the 1940s when finding out the trojan horse story was just a legend

[ya-boi-joule]

messy self-indulgent doodles with inconsistent proportions time

bojan and jure dressed in 1780s fancy coats woo

kris dressed in regency clothing

thank you for listening

[icarusbetide]

so all the descriptions of people calling hamilton "slender" "small" "youth" "stripling" and "boyish" are just telling me that he had the look vibe and body of timothee chalamet is that correct

[harrietvane]

Doorway onto the Renaissance spiral staircase in the Château Royale, Blois