#ok no but my western au fucking slaps

[tricoufamily]

i don’t do blood sports after this is the fall ends and i instead do my beckett and connor western au

[marnz]

hi! hope youre doing well! i've noticed you tag fashion/gowns/etc with different fun tags like "she toppled rome with one look" and i was curious to know what details does a clothing piece have to qualify in each tag and what inspired them! thank you and take care 🤗

Anon this is the cutest question! Honestly they are aesthetic tags that I started using in like 2013 and they’ve sort of stuck with me and some i put a lot of thought into and some i’m just like ‘wow so pretty gotta slap that on my blog.’ I’ve put this under a cut because it’s a bit long

She Toppled Rome with One Look - the tag started with this picture of a woman in classic pumps standing on a roman mosaic. I liked the idea of the modern meeting the ancient and I also started using it on dresses that seemed really epic and queenly...like if Cleopatra had invaded Rome instead of having to watch Egypt be gradually colonized by them. Since I started it in 2013 it’s very “”weaponized femininity”” but sometimes i just want to admire how badass gowns can be.

Hard Queen - the idea of the female embodiment of the state, which is usually seen as delicate and feminine, wearing armor...the exploration of queens as figureheads, and how the state is inherently violent, which people see at odds with femininity (it isn’t!), how, as Charles Tilley puts it, “war made the state and the state made war.” Monarchy is a particular kind of violent state but all what we understand to be the state in a capitalist government state means all states are violent. And yet..throughout history (Elizabeth I springs to mind) queens are often seen as vulnerable, delicate, and lesser than Kings, reduced to either saintly virgin or holy mother, so it is just interesting, to me, to explore that dichotomy. Also the idea of armor being inherently masculine (no), and acknowledging how hard it is to find women wearing armor who aren’t sexualized, how androgyny is seen as masculine (ridiculous), how femininity is something, at least in my own head, that is to be queried over and over again, if only so I can have an understanding of what it means to me as opposed to what it means to the world/society. This tag is hard to explain. 

I Want To Feel Powerful - this is a line Allison says on Teen Wolf (lmao). But it has become my punk tag. If Hard Queen is about the conflict of being a delicate feminine lady but also a violent state, this is just about...wearing leather with spikes. Motorcycles come to mind.  

Metallic Overlords - my robot tag. At first it was just like, ok, robots, they’re metallic, some of these dresses look like things robots would wear, but now it’s also become, wow the violence inherent in mining and how most of the time these precious resources (jewels, gold, all of it) are the result of colonialism and blood struggle...so the overlord part has become a bit more dual edged than I originally intended

Space Goddess - celestial dresses or anything with a celestial aesthetic, especially since space is seen as as a man’s domain (lol so dumb...Sally Ride is right there) and also because space is interpreted as a godless place, a place that is beyond religion because religion and science are depicted at odds. In my opinion this is ridiculous--this is just because conservative christian/white male atheist viewpoints are given more air time than anyone else!!!!!! anyway. I like stars.

Be Your Own Pope - the Pope was the most powerful man in the western world for hundreds of years! I am interested in the vestments of the Catholic Church...I am interested in the power conferred by clothes and how clothes are symbols of authority. I am interested in the catholic aesthetic of gilt/gold/ivory and jewels and the Very Specific Shade of Red...and this may be the Protestant in me but all of this fancy stuff just screams corruption to me because Jesus was like, “i don’t fuck with rich people, they do not go to heaven” and the Catholic Church is out there doing the most across the millennia. I love the aesthetic--red/white/gold goes off--but also I must emphasize how much I hate the catholic church as an organization/power structure. And yet catholicism (all religion, really, but we’re talking about catholicism) and art are closely linked! Anyway...there’s this line from The Golem’s Eye where one of the MCs observes that the more adornment army uniforms have, the worse the actual army is. That’s what comes to mind. I have been thinking about this a lot because of my novel

History as Fashion - the idea of wearing the past, marrying it to the present, the way the present changes the past, the way our methods for making clothing are both handed down across time and lost to time...I love it. I especially love it when it’s traditional or cultural fashion, like, a lot of fashion is monotonous because of western colonialism & capitalism (arguably one and the same) and reaching across history to challenge that is metal as fuck! Clothes are important!!! 

The Sky as a Skirt - just dresses that remind me of sunsets. there’s nothing deep about this

Shoulder High We Bring You Home - “Today, the road all runners come / Shoulder-high we bring you home / And set you at your threshold down / Townsman of a stiller town.” this is from To An Athlete Dying Young by A. E. Housman, which I read in high school along with All Quiet on the Western Front. Because of this I have always read the poem as being about soldiers and specifically the way we valorize and glorify war while avoiding it’s realities, such as death. this this is literally not what it’s about but that’s ok. this is my very specific classic menswear tag, menswear that, to me, evokes uniforms. Now it’s mostly about menswear and lapels and sexy coats, but sometimes it is about men and flowers because of the line about flower garlands/laurel crown/the link between flowers and glory and flowers about soldiers...this tag is a fucking mess.

i also have non clothes aesthetic tags or tags about writing project (glowing au / devil au / time’s shroud) but yeah! i hope this was helpful/interesting and not hopelessly pretentious and dull. :) 

[awellboiledicicle]

canonspacerocklesbians replied to your post: So if anyone wants to know how Kain’s doing in...

That sounds like a super fun mod.

It actually is amazingly fun and it leads to doing the “was that a bear or a dragon” panic check while walking around and you hear a roar. Not to mention they named all the dragons in concert with another mod i have so i end up going “holy shit what did i stumble into” and then i remember i literally jsut walked out to get leather.

The only downside is you have to be really damn on the the ball with your armor and weapons if you play a melee character because the ai was reworked to make sure every single dragon can and will snatch you into the air and throw you at speed in the air toward the ground. I got picked up and thrown from the western watch tower to the Stables of whiterun about 3 times because i stayed in the open ontop the tower.  They’ll also snap you in their mouth, shake you and throw you. I knew they did that, but what i didn’t know is now they will chase you while on the ground-- by crawling if you’re under something and they know where you are. I was inside the tower and it started landing on the ramp up and shouting into the door and crawling upward to snap at me.  If lydia wasn’t protected under my ‘no dead followers’ mod and i didn’t have a healing spell, i’d have died because it would have shoved it’s scaly head into the fucking tower. 

I saw this dragon pick up a damn mammoth while i was taking a healing break, and Lydia was down, it had killed everything else, it flew up to that mountain camp toward Rorikstead [i have no idea if anyone over there is alive, i am afraid to check] killed the giants by combo of disarming shout/force shout, and dropping a mammoth on them. Then it healed itself by eating the mammoth.

It healed itself throughout the battle the more it killed things, so the only way i got to the point i could kill it, was after it had killed literally everything else and i’d been fighting it so long i leveled.  I tried to fight it melee and it ate me. Like, i don’t mean bit and threw, i mean it tossed me in the air, bit, and the screen went black. 

It makes the game a lot more “what have i gotten into” and it’s amazingly fun and challanging and in the terms of the au i’m doing it’s even better but i have a mod that lets me find more money ok. I have went through all my money not just doing quests but just finding things ok. Just buying shit to make arrows with because i went through that many. I stole some elven armor off some Thalmor and i’m going to buff that shit up immediately. I have a mod to make armor out of gemstones and i’m slapping that shit on ASAP because i am terrified of these monsters.

Worse, is the mod also beefs up the dragon priests and all i see in my future is “So kain has died about 90 times, i think i’m going to rethink this”