#less than wrong

[dougielombax]

Who the fuck is calling the plantation of Ulster “decolonization?”

No it wasn’t!

Miss me with that Ian Adamson Fanfiction revisionist bullshite!

(It literally served as the blueprint for England’s colonial settlements in other places! Whether in the Americas or Africa or anywhere else!)

Any historian would know that isn’t even remotely true! It’s LESS than wrong!

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

People playing Elden Ring and looking for the "good" demigod to root for are missing the point. Pick your favorite mass murdering war criminal megalomaniac with mommy issues and endlessly simp for them like the rest of us, cowards.

[stellarspecter]

@pscentral event 20: antagonists ↳ THE LORDS IN BLACK in NERDY PRUDES MUST DIE

[art-by-renaud]

I just know Monty’s gonna write a kickass nature book about the stuff he finds in Zood, man. I just know it.

[queensparklekitten]

anyways after that minecraft movie trailer i'm tempted to change my skin back to that one based on crimson/warped duality out of spite

they called the nether "a place with no joy or creativity at all" like just tell me you're too scared to go there and thus haven't experienced

-joining in on a group of piglins hunting a hoglin, letting them keep the loot, trading with them afterwards, i find that this temporarily cures the loneliness of singleplayer

-the dance they do afterwards sometimes literally just the piglin dance, hitting shift repeatedly with them

-literally just the nether music at all

-that CRESCENDO in rubedo

-that brief minor key reprise of sweden in dead voxel hhhhhhhhhhhh

-occasional crimson roots in a soul sand valley like oh there's still some life here

-wither skull hunting and recruiting piglins to help you by luring them to the fortress with gold (+ giving them gold helmets so they don't put on the skulls) i love the ways this game lets me fight alongside piglins if i want to

-the subtle animated texture of crimson and warped stems like they feel so ALIVE with that one small detail

-seeing a nether tree growing through another one

-and an extremely tall nether tree amidst the normal height ones

-and weeping vines hanging from the ceiling

-passing by a piglin that's wearing enchanted iron boots and immediately knowing you've met and traded with this one before

-parkour challenge basalt delta

-also the particles in that biome look like snow if you turn down your render distance

-STRIDERS. Literally just striders. They're like bonded creatures to me, honorary tameable mobs, you put a saddle on the one mob in the nether that would never hurt you and then go on a journey together across the deadly lava ocean avoiding ghasts together and you can't remove the saddle now unless you kill it which you can't do because it's your ride back to the portal, once that strider is saddled it is Your strider and even if you release it into the wild you will immediately recognize it by the saddle if you see it again and in such a dangerous world you have found a companion you can always trust and idk bout you but i always bond so hard with them

-and also they're kind of cute, esp with the little waddle walk

-seeing a baby strider on top of an adult one

-literally just the fact that nether biomes have all this constant looping ambience and particles in the air that makes them feel so immersive and so alive, each biome has its own unique soundscape and ambience, can you imagine soul sand valleys without the wind and the whispers and wails

-aside note the particle effects are like the animated stems in that they're such a subtle detail but they add so much, i never really noticed them until i was netherite mining and started using them to tell which biome i'm under

-the nether was doing ambience and immersion 5 years before the Spring Drop allowed the overworld to finally catch up to it

-the adorableness of baby piglins

-esp when they ride on top of baby hoglins

-PIGSTEP. FUCKING PIGSTEP. the piglins have music and it's SUCH A BANGER i've thrown ingame parties with this music disc

-seeing warped fungus in a crimson forest or crimson fungus in a warped forest

-biome borders between the two that have all this warped foliage in the crimson forest and vice versa as they blend into each other

-nyooming across a soul sand valley with soul speed 3 boots, laughing at the skeletons and ghasts who can't land a hit on you, bonus if you add a speed potion to the mix

-doing this and realizing the subtitle says "soul escapes" and you're surrounded by blue particles and realizing you're freeing them from their imprisonment (and presumably the piglins who made this enchantment are doing the same when they use it)

-the rib and snout armor trims

-gilded blackstone it's so pretty and nice and a great building block (and you can't craft it only the piglins know how to do that)

-bastions have chiseled blackstone

-and their own exclusive banner pattern

-some of them have that gold-and-quartz decorative thing that looks like some kinda statue

-apparently part of the Bridge type of bastion is designed to resemble a piglin head with the mouth as the entrance

-someone in the notes mentioned glowstone and YES how did i forget it when originally making this post, glowstone my childhood favourite block that's in my current mc username, pretty and shiny and also the way piglins used it to invent spectral arrows

-getting lost in the lore implications, noticing the huge fossils and the implications of the name "warped forest" as well as the names of some of its ambience sounds and the fact that basalt comes from rapidly cooling lava irl and next thing you know you've got a whole red string theory going that edges closer and closer to cosmic horror

-ik the fossils look like ribs but one time i wondered if they might be the fingers of something unfathomably huge

-the time i encountered a baby piglin running from a zombified one so i pushed the zombified piglin off the fortress and then gave the baby piglin a gold nugget

but hey what do i know i'm just a nether enthusiast on the "romanticizing and finding beauty in the horrifying and the forsaken" website huh

[dreamsy990]

drew some of my fav ody designs! wasnt originally meant to be also replicating the styles but thats sort of just how my brain works. except i didnt copy the lineart styles of anyone here so its DEFINITELY a bit uncanny for a couple of these (LOOKING AT YOU QINNY IM SO SORRY) but whatever

the designs featured here (from left to right) belong to: me, @gigizetz, @neal-illustrator, @irunaki, @bigidiotenergytm, @qinnyanimation, and @foopsie-daisy

[soaptaculart]

Um I like Dungeon Meshi. Btw

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."

[lygma-nygma]

Being a batfam fan is funny because people will make a post like “here’s my headcanon-“ and it’s just something that’s directly canon to the story then post about major canon events and get everything wrong.

[gammija]

tiefling jon's first day at the Archives

[dougielombax]

Repeatedly spouting “Am I wrong?” Isn’t going to make you any more correct.

[dykedvonte]

I think depictions of Anya being cruel to Curly or drawing out his suffering are artful and chilling but completely miss the point of the story and her character.

I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to have that "I told you so" moment with him but not in something callous or cold. Even if that is how it happened, she'd immediately feel guilty cause at that point she's not tormenting her tormenter or even the person truly at fault. She's doing something cathartic, similar to how Jimmy likely hits Curly to release rage he can't against the rest of the crew. She'd see herself as no different when she'd come back from the moment and see Curly cowering at her. She wants someone to take responsibility but how does being cruel to the defenseless help? Why would she want the power Jimmy has over her over Curly?

The idea of her extending someone else's pain is just so against the struggles she already faces and how she can't even bring herself to cause someone pain even to help them. Her very desire is to release herself from her own suffering and I doubt she'd even fine some sort of guilty release in being cruel to another.

[cuddlytogas]

So I accidentally almost got into an argument on Twitter, and now I'm thinking about bad historical costuming tropes. Specifically, Action Hero Leather Pants.

See, I was light-heartedly pointing out the inaccuracies of the costumes in Black Sails, and someone came out of the woodwork to defend the show. The misunderstanding was that they thought I was dismissing the show just for its costumes, which I wasn't - I was simply pointing out that it can't entirely care about material history (meaning specifically physical objects/culture) if it treats its clothes like that.

But this person was slightly offended on behalf of their show - especially, quote, "And from a fan of OFMD, no less!" Which got me thinking - it's true! I can abide a lot more historical costuming inaccuracy from Our Flag than I can Black Sails or Vikings. And I don't think it's just because one has my blorbos in it. But really, when it comes down to it...

What is the difference between this and this?

Here's the thing. Leather pants in period dramas isn't new. You've got your Vikings, Tudors, Outlander, Pirates of the Caribbean, Once Upon a Time, Will, The Musketeers, even Shakespeare in Love - they love to shove people in leather and call it a day. But where does this come from?

Obviously we have the modern connotations. Modern leather clothes developed in a few subcultures: cowboys drew on Native American clothing. (Allegedly. This is a little beyond my purview, I haven't seen any solid evidence, and it sounds like the kind of fact that people repeat a lot but is based on an assumption. I wouldn't know, though.) Leather was used in some WWI and II uniforms.

But the big boom came in the mid-C20th in motorcycle, punk/goth, and gay subcultures, all intertwined with each other and the above. Motorcyclists wear leather as practical protective gear, and it gets picked up by rock and punk artists as a symbol of counterculture, and transferred to movie designs. It gets wrapped up in gay and kink communities, with even more countercultural and taboo meanings. By the late C20th, leather has entered mainstream fashion, but it still carries those references to goths, punks, BDSM, and motorbike gangs, to James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Mick Jagger. This is whence we get our Spikes and Dave Listers in 1980s/90s media, bad boys and working-class punks.

And some of the above "historical" design choices clearly build on these meanings. William Shakespeare is dressed in a black leather doublet to evoke the swaggering bad boy artist heartthrob, probably down on his luck. So is Kit Marlowe.

But the associations get a little fuzzier after that. Hook, with his eyeliner and jewellery, sure. King Henry, yeah, I see it. It's hideously ahistorical, but sure. But what about Jamie and Will and Ragnar, in their browns and shabby, battle-ready chic? Well, here we get the other strain of Bad Period Drama Leather.

See, designers like to point to history, but it's just not true. Leather armour, especially in the western/European world, is very, very rare, and not just because it decays faster than metal. (Yes, even in ancient Greece/Rome, despite many articles claiming that as the start of the leather armour trend!) It simply wasn't used a lot, because it's frankly useless at defending the body compared to metal. Leather was used as a backing for some splint armour pieces, and for belts, sheathes, and buckles, but it simply wasn't worn like the costumes above. It's heavy, uncomfortable, and hard to repair - it's simply not practical for a garment when you have perfectly comfortable, insulating, and widely available linen, wool, and cotton!

As far as I can see, the real influence on leather in period dramas is fantasy. Fantasy media has proliferated the idea of leather armour as the lightweight choice for rangers, elves, and rogues, a natural, quiet, flexible material, less flashy or restrictive than metal. And it is cheaper for a costume department to make, and easier for an actor to wear on set. It's in Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings, King Arthur, Runescape, and World of Warcraft.

And I think this is how we get to characters like Ragnar and Vane. This idea of leather as practical gear and light armour, it's fantasy, but it has this lineage, behind which sits cowboy chaps and bomber/flight jackets. It's usually brown compared to the punk bad boy's black, less shiny, and more often piecemeal or decorated. In fact, there's a great distinction between the two Period Leather Modes within the same piece of media: Robin Hood (2006)! Compare the brooding, fascist-coded villain Guy of Gisborne with the shabby, bow-wielding, forest-dwelling Robin:

So, back to the original question: What's the difference between Charles Vane in Black Sails, and Edward Teach in Our Flag Means Death?

Simply put, it's intention. There is nothing intentional about Vane's leather in Black Sails. It's not the only leather in the show, and it only says what all shabby period leather says, relying on the same tropes as fantasy armour: he's a bad boy and a fighter in workaday leather, poor, flexible, and practical. None of these connotations are based in reality or history, and they've been done countless times before. It's boring design, neither historically accurate nor particularly creative, but much the same as all the other shabby chic fighters on our screens. He has a broad lineage in Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean and such, but that's it.

In Our Flag, however, the lineage is much, much more intentional. Ed is a direct homage to Mad Max, the costuming in which is both practical (Max is an ex-cop and road warrior), and draws on punk and kink designs to evoke a counterculture gone mad to the point of social breakdown, exploiting the thrill of the taboo to frighten and titillate the audience.

In particular, Ed is styled after Max in the second movie, having lost his family, been badly injured, and watched the world turn into an apocalypse. He's a broken man, withdrawn, violent, and deliberately cutting himself off from others to avoid getting hurt again. The plot of Mad Max 2 is him learning to open up and help others, making himself vulnerable to more loss, but more human in the process.

This ties directly into the themes of Our Flag - it's a deliberate intertext. Ed's emotional journey is also one from isolation and pain to vulnerability, community, and love. Mad Max (intentionally and unintentionally) explores themes of masculinity, violence, and power, while Max has become simplified in the popular imagination as a stoic, badass action hero rather than the more complex character he is, struggling with loss and humanity. Similarly, Our Flag explores masculinity, both textually (Stede is trying to build a less abusive pirate culture) and metatextually (the show champions complex, banal, and tender masculinities, especially when we're used to only seeing pirates in either gritty action movies or childish comedies).

Our Flag also draws on the specific countercultures of motorcycles, rockers, and gay/BDSM culture in its design and themes. Naturally, in such a queer show, one can't help but make the connection between leather pirates and leather daddies, and the design certainly nods at this, with its vests and studs. I always think about this guy, with his flat cap so reminiscient of gay leather fashions.

More overtly, though, Blackbeard and his crew are styled as both violent gangsters and countercultural rockstars. They rove the seas like a bikie gang, free and violent, and are seen as icons, bad boys and celebrities. Other pirates revere Blackbeard and wish they could be on his crew, while civilians are awed by his reputation, desperate for juicy, gory details.

This isn't all of why I like the costuming in Our Flag Means Death (especially season 1). Stede's outfits are by no means accurate, but they're a lot more accurate than most pirate media, and they're bright and colourful, with accurate and delightful silks, lace, velvets, and brocades, and lovely, puffy skirts on his jackets. Many of the Revenge crew wear recognisable sailor's trousers, and practical but bright, varied gear that easily conveys personality and flair. There is a surprising dedication to little details, like changing Ed's trousers to fall-fronts for a historical feel, Izzy's puffy sleeves, the handmade fringe on Lucius's red jacket, or the increasing absurdity of navy uniform cuffs between Nigel and Chauncey.

A really big one is the fact that they don't shy away from historical footwear! In almost every example above, we see the period drama's obsession with putting men in skinny jeans and bucket-top boots, but not only does Stede wear his little red-heeled shoes with stockings, but most of his crew, and the ordinary people of Barbados, wear low boots or pumps, and even rough, masculine characters like Pete wear knee breeches and bright colours. It's inaccurate, but at least it's a new kind of inaccuracy, that builds much more on actual historical fashions, and eschews the shortcuts of other, grittier period dramas in favour of colour and personality.

But also. At least it fucking says something with its leather.

[bylerist]

“what if byler isn’t endgame-“ what if gravity stopped working? what if the earth stopped spinning? what if the sun rose in the west? what if fish could walk? what if the duffers abandoned all narrative structure? what if love meant nothing?

[cynicalmusings]

had a couple more thoughts about socrates-esque!reader and anaxa, which i thought i may as well share:

you get a bad rap around the grove of epiphany, because you are, admittedly, rather annoying — anytime somebody’s finally submitting their thesis, you’ll butt in, ask a few questions, and suddenly three years of hard work goes right down the drain because oops, there’s a little oversight which, if you go down deeply enough, actually undermines the whole argument of the essay.

(people are genuinely beginning to leave herbs and offerings in front their doors in the hopes of warding you off. they do not seem to be working.)

point is, you’re infamous, and as a result are altogether treated pretty badly by the majority of other people; they’re rude, even though you respond to them civilly and politely, they make personal attacks on you instead of responding to your point, and so forth. (to be fair, there are some people who admire you—the majority is convinced you’re an evil messenger of some sort sent by zagreus to mess with everyone.)

you don’t care, of course—your interest lies in uncovering the truth, not what people think about you (in fact, were you concerned by people’s perception of you, you would have stopped questioning ages ago)—but funnily enough, there’s somebody who does get irked when they hear people badmouthing you behind your back (or indeed in front of your face), and this person is, surprisingly enough, anaxa.

he’ll never admit it—gods forbid, he’s far too prideful—but it really just… gets on his nerves when he hears all these nasty rumours being spread about you. if you’re going to criticise someone, especially in a debate, you criticise their position, not the person; it’s basic intellectual honesty and etiquette, and yet so many people forget it the moment you step into the room.

part of his vexation arises from this behaviour; part of it arises from a certain… fondness, one might say, which he has inexplicably developed towards you while he wasn’t looking.

so, whenever he catches people saying this kind of stuff, he will confront them. not in a particularly aggressive way, not in a way which betrays that he might, gods forbid again, actually care about and respect the subject of criticism, but he’ll go up and very flatly ask them to repeat what they said, provide evidence for their claims, and when said people inevitably come up spluttering for words, leave, and feel a tad more satisfied about it than he should.

tldr; anaxa has actually got your back, although he’ll never admit to it. nobody would guess it, considering how much you seem to get on his nerves with your constant challenges and questions to whatever he say, but it’s true. you were mildly surprised yourself the first time he spoke up from the sidelines in the middle of a debate and told your interlocutor to shut their mouth about your method of questioning and answer the question they’ve been so obviously avoiding.

anyway, let’s just hope you don’t get sentenced to drink hemlock. that would really piss him off.

[chiricat]

acheswan 🔥