#out and about in london

[bespokeredmayne]

Meeting her idol

@_crystal_valerie_chau posted this to her Instagram story Thursday, thanking Eddie Redmayne for the photo. “I am looking terrible today but omg I have finally met my idol,” she wrote. “All your movies are real artworks. He is the cutest, nicest and kindest.”

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i vote that next year instead of reading Dracula we do a Jeeves & Wooster Book Club. those two never got the rabid tumblr shipping fandom they deserved (disqualified for the sheer technicality of being published a century too soon). we must correct this injustice

[quantumshade]

can anyone explain to me at what point rose tyler was "unbelievably stupid". was it when she was inventing transdimensional travel

[magpie-trinkets]

continuing that "maya tries to contact claire" post, i present you the post-Spirit of Justice follow-up

[choccy-milky]

Babes you got my foaming at the mouth every time you post or update! This new chapter was so precious!!

Modern AU where the only thing that’s different was instead of an illustration of Sherlock Holmes, it’s a picture of Banana Pumpkinpatch

GIRL THE WAY I GOOGLED "BANANA PUMPKINPATCH CHARACTER" BEFORE REALIZING YOU MEANT BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH LMFAOOO 😭😭😭 but aww THANK YOU💖and this is amazing i had to draw it as soon as u sent it, i love that cloras love for sherlock holmes also works in a modern au setting. CLORAS LOVE FOR SHERLOCK IS ETERNAL

(and yes seb would read/watch it bc of her)

[kittanthalos]

#jordan li once said...

[specialagentartemis]

Shoutout to the media that comes in forms that are just kind of incompatible with your brain. Shout out to the stories you know you'd love if the format was something you could handle. Shoutout to the tv shows that I can't hold the attention to sit down and watch all the way through, the actual-play podcasts whose improvised chatter slides right off my brain, the roguelike video games whose mechanics kind of frustrate me, the action-based free-to-play browser game-worlds that I forget what I was doing when I come back each day.

I know I would love you if I could handle your medium.

[achelata]

just thinking about bucky mourning gale while sitting on his seat

[aro-bird]

Okay, for aro awareness week, I need you all to start recognizing that:

NOT EVERYONE IN THE ARO COMMUNITY IS FROM THE UNITED STATES OR EUROPE.

Please, when we're having discussions about aphobia, allonormativity amatonormativity, and other issues for the love of god STOP PRETENDING THAT WE DON'T EXIST AND LISTEN TO US!

We aren't just your token aros that exist in the other side of the world just for you to prove that we are everywhere or whatever point you're trying to make, we are living, breathing human beings and members of the aro community and we deserve respect and to be remembered not as a point in your discourse but as equals.

I am sick and tired of people just assuming that everyone in the community is either from the United States or Europe and only centering those voices in the discussion. We exist too.

[starryeyed-seer]

(This is my friend telling me about someone else)

sicko voice: hahaha... yesssss

what's funny about the amount of people I've influenced towards fallen london because of my suncrab posting is that. as much as suncrab is a huge lore spoiler for fallen london, it does not goddamn prepare you for FL in the slightest.

it's an undercurrent and the inciting incident, but... the forbidden ship is one of the least notable things going on in that cave. by far

[vonlipvig]

in honor of 10 years of dashcon, we should all pay our respects by taking a little bit of time from our day to think about our favorite characters running/going to an absolutely dogshit convention. with a ball pit, of course.

[stromblessed]

Mizu's spectacles, and the levels of her disguise

In drafting some more Blue Eye Samurai meta posts, I find myself writing out the comparisons between what Mizu can and cannot hide about herself, and how that affects how she moves through the world.

Like, I get the jokes about Mizu's glasses, if only color contacts had existed back then, etc. etc., and I think (hope) that most viewers don't take the glasses jokes seriously, as in "I don't care about the suspension of disbelief because BES is a cartoon." But I wanted to write these thoughts out anyway without burying them in a text post about something else.

I think the points I'm going to lay out here are viewed very differently by different people, so please feel free to add to this post, reply, or put your thoughts in the tags!

Not only do Mizu's glasses not actually help her that much, there's surely more to Mizu's mixed race appearance than just the color of her eyes.

In my view, this was pointed out in episode 1:

I'm willing to bet most of us were expecting young Taigen to say "blue eyes," not "ROUND eyes."

Obviously this is still about Mizu's eyes, but not even spectacles can hide their shape.

I don't think the show is obligated to point out everything about Mizu's face that isn't quite as Japanese as the people around her expect. Though the creators have said that they specifically designed Mizu - and her clothes - to read both as "white" and as "Japanese," as well as both male and female. I think there's more about Mizu's features that read as "white" than just her eyes.

This is where my own headcanons start entering the picture, but it's my impression that people can just tell that Mizu looks different, whether or not they can put a finger on exactly how.

There's the little girl who looks at Mizu and then hides on the way into Kyoto:

When there's more to your face you'd like to cover up than just your eyes, big hats are a big help!

By the way, most of these examples have to come from the first half of the season, since by the second half, either Mizu is too preoccupied with fighting henchmen, or everyone Mizu is facing knows who she is already, and she therefore has no reason to hide her mixed race identity.

It's worth mentioning that the mere fact that Mizu has to hide multiple aspects of her identity - her mixed race and her sex - results in her having to choose clothes that really, really cover her up, which doesn't win her any favors either:

(Zatoichi reference, anyone?)

If it were as easy as, for example, tying her glasses to her head and wa-lah, nobody would ever know she was half-white - then (1) Mizu would've just done that long ago, and (2) Mizu wouldn't be so on guard and on tenterhooks 100% of the time the way she's depicted in the show, even when her glasses are on.

Her spectacles sure don't help her in the brothel, which is full of observant women who are trying to seduce her, meaning they get good long looks at her:

Mizu never takes her glasses off, but they still send a woman to her who has light eyes, thinking that must be what will interest a blue-eyed man:

No wonder Mizu gets mad after this, lol

So Mizu never takes her spectacles off in the brothel, it's dimly lit inside, and the women can still tell that she has blue eyes. I'm getting the sense that Mizu putting on her spectacles isn't a guarantee that people suddenly can't tell that she looks different.

And yet no one spots that she's female.

Mizu can hide her breasts, can wear her hair in the right style, can hide what's between her legs, can walk and talk and behave like a man - and she's been doing it for almost her entire life, to the point that not only is she very good at it, but the threat of being found out as female is deadly, but isn't presented in the show as omnipresent.

Let me explain.

She threatens Ringo for nearly saying the word "girl" out loud, because while she's constantly ostracized for being mixed race, being a woman traveling without a chaperone, carrying a sword, and disguised as a man will get her killed or flogged or arrested or some combination of these things.

But in addition, it's been drilled into her since she was a child that if she is discovered as female, the combination of her being mixed race and female will identify her as someone extremely specific, someone known to some bad people, and she will be killed:

I think of it as Mizu thinking to herself, "Being found out as mixed race means I'm treated badly. Being found out as mixed race and a woman means I'm dead."

Mizu's hair is cut as a child. But she isn't made to wear a big hat, or cover her eyes somehow, or anything like that. Because hiding her sex is a more successful endeavor than hiding her race.

Ringo finds out she's female by accident, but once Mizu accepts the fact that he won't rat her out, she relaxes pretty early on in the season. Because the threat of being found out as female is mitigated pretty much 99.9%, since Mizu has gotten so good at being a man. And also, because most of the time, people see what they want to see. Even if Mizu's face makes her stand out as "not 100% Japanese," no one in the world of BES looks at Mizu's clothes, her bearing, her sword, hears her voice, and will ever in a million years conclude that she is a woman, because expectations around gender roles in the Edo period were so rigid and so widely enforced.

One detail that proved this to me is after the Four Fangs fight:

Ringo takes off Mizu's clothes so he can stitch her up, then leaves her clothes off even after he's done. He doesn't even throw her cloak over her as a blanket or anything. There's a little a straw (pallet?) as a divider there on the left, but anyone could just peek around it and see Mizu and her chest bindings. (I think it's mostly there as a windbreaker.)

And Taigen is right there, but he doesn't give a shit:

Opinions probably vary hugely on this, but my impression is that because the show doesn't make any kind of deal about Taigen being in the room with Mizu here, my guess is that Mizu isn't in any danger of Taigen thinking she's female. Even when I watched the show for the first time, I assumed that Taigen had seen Mizu out of her clothes here, and that he thought nothing of it.

Eat your heart out, Li Shang (Mulan 1998). I actually do think that this scene is a direct and purposeful side-eye to that movie, lol

There's obviously some nuance to how "severe" being mixed race is compared to how "severe" being a woman is for Mizu:

After all, Swordfather can't bear to listen to Mizu confess to being a woman.

So a Japanese man can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants in BES. A Japanese woman has limited options: marriage, religion, or a brothel. A mixed-race man is an eyesore in this story. A mixed-race woman is a death sentence.

May as well eliminate the female aspect, and do what you can about the mixed-race aspect. Because that's just realistic.

Meaning Mizu can avoid the strictures Edo society places on women. But she can't avoid the repercussions that come with being mixed race. And I truly don't think that it's just because "there's no brown contacts yet."

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

The “you know I left a part of my back in New York” to “I left all I knew, you left me at the house by the Heath” pipeline—

Something about how New York symbolized freedom and rebirth and adulthood and the then-summit of her career until it crumbled and London became the at-first necessary retreat from the world when it got to be too much to bear.

And the part of herself she left in New York symbolically could have been the part of her that still craved the attention, the performing, the superstardom, that she felt like she had to abandon to live her life. Among all the other questions about “hoax” about a painful betrayal, the questioning in the bridge is like, I left this part of me behind to make this work and you knew what it cost me, but you still did what you did. So I gave up this part of my life to make a life with you, and in the end you still betrayed me and metaphorically (or actually) abandoned me along with it.

Again not saying this is right or that that’s what hoax is about but just noting an interesting thematic parallel etc.

[regicidal-defenestration]

Religion in Fallen London is a wonderful thing

[harmione]

this may just be the funniest harmony scene to me oml

harry clocking that hermione has been DYING to reveal this information but waited patiently on account of everything that happened. and then just really indulging her.

“said harry at once” he’s like ok!!! you can spill the tea now i promise to be appropriately enthralled!!!

[sophisticatedswifts]

taylor performing betty in london • june 22nd