#peasants eat gruel

[jimkinnz]

homunculus facts¡

try using the 5 finger method to remember the 5 most common kinds of homunculi in the north pacific region· the thumb for sloth <hitchhiking>' the index for greed <pointing at the things they want>' middle for wrath <obvious>' ring for lust <i shan,t say>' and pinkie for pride <same letter>•

envy and gluttony are obviously more common in the midwest•

strong smells waft from a crock left unattended in my corner of the lab• master is pickling garlic again•

in other news' i,m not as hungry recently as usual•

it,s because i,m eating rocks•

a grocery list blew under the door of warren,s place• that guy eats too much oatmeal•

[peasantexchangeprogram]

funniest historical posts are those that are like misconception! (era/region) people actually *something that was only available to the higher class*

[blue-cray0n]

Occasionally, I catch myself thinking maybe reddit isn't all bad... then I remember the entire site should fucking burn

[airitree]

Im sorry but I would probably eat the fuck outta some slobby wet British food, I know it’s rightfully hip to lash those blokes for their cuisine, but I unironically would eat pie and mash, and try that wigan kebab. I’m so serious, if u gave me a platter of some shit like this

I would eat it without hesitation. I’m so hungry

[cashmere-caveman]

whats your favorite soup

ever since i was a kid i've really loved grießnockerl soup which is a regional dish and basically consists of semolina dumplings (no filling just semolina egg butter salt and nutmeg! they swell to roughly the size of chicken eggs) in a vegetable or chicken broth :) in our family it was a sick day staple and even now when i feel shitty i often make this soup to cheer up and get energy back!

other favourites are pumpkin soup, noodle soup, onion soup, cauliflower soup (w fresh baguette!!), pea soup, flädle soup (traditional soup made from broth and leftover pancakes (think more like crêpes) - maybe sounds weird but tastes delicious), tomato soup etc etc i could go on for ages!!!! i love all vegetable soups i have ever encountered apart from minestrone and potato soup (sorry)!! i just think theyre neat :)

do u have any Big Opinions on soup!

[vydumaj]

I really do everything I can to avoid flying unless it’s impossible any other way, but the price difference for mine and my sister’s trip… €800 by train €340 airplane…

[knightsickness]

robert era westeros dashboard simulation

🫁 maidenless

JON ARRYN DEAD 🦀🦀🦀

🐉 rhaegarsvalyria—deactivated

imagine you are lost targaryen princess danaerys marrying your dear brother, prince viserys targaryen 🤍👰🏼‍♀️

📜 citadelscribe

deactivated… king robert got them

🐺 starkupdates

if you don’t speak politics ned’s basically saying ‘not this time, cunt - papa wolf ned isn’t letting you fuck with his pack. while we’re at it, you’re a terrible jouster, bitch!’ to jaime lannister. who else is doing it like him!!

🥘 bowlofbrown

crying at this they’re both lords they DO NOT care if you live or die. what’s wrong with you people

🌞 bowedbentbroken

aren’t their families literally intermarrying

🪵 riverlandspussy

serfs would stan a dog if it was landed

🐊 lizardlion

bracken dick would be good if they didn’t talk about how much better they fuck than the blackwoods the entire time

🌳 oldegodluvrr

why house blackwood stays 🔛🔝

🗝 livesbythefingers

i have terrible news about what blackwoods also talk about during sex

🔥 melisandre

the red represents projected support for STANNIS BARATHEON - king robert’s once and future HEIR

🦑 saltmalewife

shitting myself at this

🐦 muttonmouthed

stannis there’s doubts near the bloody gate watch out !!

💘 luckylikestcriston

🎭 silkyourstreet

every so often someone accidentally reinvents the fourth council of baelor

🦀 celtigwhore

how is crone not sweeping do you people hate women

🫁 maidenless

JON ARRYN STILL DEAD 🦀🦀🦀

🐴 littlestfrey

why are we celebrating? what did he do? /gen

📜 citadelscribe

known cuckold

🌞 bowedbentbroken

do you think littlefinger and varys ever no i shan’t say

🪸 patchpatchpatchface

on earth, the lords eat roast, and the peasants gruel !! in hell, the lords eat gruel, and the peasants roast !!

🪨 dragonstoner

another patchface banger

🦑 saltmalewife

the man cannot miss

[virtual-minotaur]

my little tasteless crispy rice chips treat. ^_^

[homunculus-argument]

The more you look into it, the funnier the whole myth of The Grim And Depressing Dark Ages is, in the extent in which it covers everything. Like no matter what area of medieval life you look at, the common misconception of it is something bleak, drab, colourless, joyless and smelling like shit. Like at best, an average peasant's life was repetitive, boring, joyless and smells like shit, and at worst it was terrifying, hopeless chaos that smells like blood and rotting plague corpses. I mean okay it was like that sometimes, but not all the time. They had enjoyments in life. Like consider food.

Medieval peasants' food wasn't just grey wet gruel for every meal and hard bread if you were lucky. One major staple food that was commonly eaten by peasants across Europe was pottage. I think every time and culture has some variation of the "just throw whatever we've got at hand in there and boil/fry/cook that shit" sort of meal, and for medieval peasants, that was pottage. And as the name would imply, it's made by throwing the aforementioned whatever-you-have-at-hand ingredients into a pot and then boiling that shit. And that's what's for dinner every day unless it's a special occasion.

And yeah eating the same damn boiled mush every damn day probably doesn't sound much less depressing than just eating bland gruel, but that's the thing, the pottage wasn't the same thing all the time, every time. The ingredients varied by whatever was available at any given time, by harvests, by what herbs are in season and what produce happens to be in the most ample supply. Different ratios and combinations of the same ingredients, fresh or dried or otherwise preserved, changing from season to season.

Freaking imagine being a medieval peasant whose favourite food in the entire world is spring pottage with meadowsweet mead, best thing you can think of. You've heard talk of finer meals, roast boar with wine sauce that they cook for kings, but you're pretty damn sure that it can't better than the pottage you get on the first weeks of May. The one meal that you'd have every day year round if you could, but you can't, so it's the highlight of your year. The thing you look forward to for months at a time. You're sure that is what is served every day in Heaven, and not only are you 100% down to physically fight somebody about it, you absolutely have. You broke your nose, it never quite healed right, and you regret nothing.

And then spring finally comes, and you've been eagerly keeping an eye on how all the right ingredients start to reach their right time, and not only have you been looking forward to May ever since the snows started melting because that specific Best Goddamn Pottage is the only thing you can seem to think about, everyone in your household has been looking forward to it as well - because it's the only thing you seem to talk about, too, and they're sick of hearing about it.

And this year it tastes like shit.

[kaijuno]

“Overnight oats” “grind culture” “tiny homes” you are a peasant that eats gruel

[objectstore]

my debut character for the electric remains object camp: Jacques.

info about them under the cut

Name: Jacques (pronounced Sz-ahk) ("jack" works too. just not jak-quez)

Pronouns: they/it

Object: Jack of hearts playing card

Favorite Color: Royal blue

Character Information: [cracks knuckles] ok soooo Jacques is an adult modern object, who is a hybrid between organic and electric objects. While they are majorly organic, having to eat food and being able to bleed, they have some electric traits (which are more detrimental than anything). This includes “glitching” on occasion, which is exceptionally painful for them. Their most notable trait is their ability to “pop out” of their card. Their arms are slightly stretchy to complement this. They physically can’t remove themselves from their card’s background entirely. Even if they could, doing such would induce fatal injury. It can’t bring foreign items into the card with itself, the only thing exempt from this are its two hand axes (which. are actually a part of itself). Despite its two-headed appearance, Jacques is a single entity. It prefers to use its top head more than its bottom head. Has blue blood and yellow tears because I thought it would look cool. Jacques descends from a eusocial colony of playing card objects who all worship and serve the demands of their creator, an organic computer tower they call “The Dealer”. In. Card People Land (name pending). Their societal class is determined by the value of the card they are (a three of diamonds card would be equivalent to a peasant, queen of clubs would be. well. a queen etc). Jacques, being a jack, had a pretty decent status, though it’d sometimes dream about being the emperor of its own nation. One day, they left to get supplies only to come back to find that everyone in their colony, The Dealer included, had disappeared. Since then, it's been aimlessly wandering the wasteland in search of any semblance of wealth or power, hardened to the harshest of conditions (lie). Absolutely refuses to show compassion to anyone, out of fear that they too will vanish. If you express any sort of companionship to them its brain will short circuit (metaphorically).

Personality: Imagine if Principal Scudworth from clone high 2002, Rouxls Kaard from deltarune, and Hamlet from Hamlet were one guy and also french. Words to describe them more specifically go as follows: Egotistical and entitled, classist, greedy, mistrustful, and aggressive yet cowardly. [grabs them shakes them vigorously]

Goal: Being the very last of its kind, Jacques sees it as their duty to keep the legacy of the card kingdom alive at all costs. Even better, they might be able to live out their fantasy by crowning themselves the ruler of the safe haven.

Favorite food: Gruel. It LOVES a good slop.

[lucydonato]

incapable of eating overnight oats without thinking of that post that's like "you are a medieval peasant eating gruel"

[cloudberry-sims]

As Florina couldn't stay home with Robard alone , Quentrell took them with him almost everywhere.

The fish that was caught wasn't enough for fish soup , but it could be turned to gruel , a delicacy all peasants have the displeasure of eating daily.

Much like they had a choice, especially without a merchant or marketplace to buy from. At least it was food.

[adarkrainbow]

The Yaga journal: A system of supernatural characters

Baba-Yaga’s house, as depicted in Bill Willingham’s Fables 

The second article of the journal is “The Baba Yaga and the other supernatural characters of the fairytale. Do they form a system?” by Lise Gruel-Apert.

The Baba Yaga, or the crone. The princess, or fair maiden. The dragon, snake or devil. These are a few of the several supernatural characters that the hero or heroine of the fairytale meets during their quest. Vladimir Propp heavily talked about them in his “Historical roots of the fairytale”. This article doesn’t want to study these characters from a psycho-analysis point of view, because Gruel-Apert considers that the psychoanalysis doesn’t include enough the economical and socio-cultural context of the fairytale. This article will try to study the baba Yaga in her context, in the socio-cultural environment of which she belongs. 

However the writer mentions that such a reading can lead to many mistakes - because no matter how many interpretation and analysis one gives to a fairytale, it will stay blurry and unclear, for the fairytale itself is a foggy and unclear material. It is the realm of the “Once upon a time”, of the “In a certain kingdom, in a certain State”, where nothing is clarified. Ever since the 19th century, numerous fairytale interpretations were created, each following the different fashion of the time (first were the “moralizing” interpretations and the “Christianizing” interpretations, then came the “mythology” interpretations and the “meteorological” ones, then the “psychanalytic” ones, etc...). Gruel-Apert shares the opinion of a certain Luzel on this subject: that the mistake is that each searcher tried to stick only to one theory, reducing the fairytale to this exclusive theory. So the author of the article wishes to do an “inductive” rather than “deductive” study - that is to say, just like Propp, going from the text towards the formation of a theory (instead of taking a theory and applying it to the text). 

As Propp repeatedly said, the fairytale relies on the separation between our world and the “other world, the other side”, and on the travel from one to another - and the supernatural characters of the fairytale belong to the “other world”. The baba Yaga is the most emblematic, fascinating, and yet mysterious of those supernatural figures.

I) The Baba Yaga

Should we say “Baba-Yaga” or “the baba Yaga”? Should there be an article? It is hard to tell since the Slavic languages do not have articles, so technically speaking both ways are correct. However the Russian term “baba” is not a first name, or a person’s name, it is actually a word meaning “the woman of the lower class, the female peasant”. As for the name “Yaga”, it might be a deformation of “snake” - so her name might mean the “Snake woman”. The baba Yaga has several “aspects” to her character.

1) The abductor baba Yaga. Appearing suddenly out of nowhere, she steals away a little boy to roast him. But tricked by the boy-hero, she rather eats her own daughter. She appears as a huntress, and moves around in her mortar - she waits until she can rush on her prey (a prey that “smells like a Russian”, that is to say is alive). She is a cannibal, and she is a character revealing a society that is based on hunting but also knows primitive agriculture (the use of the mortar). She appears in tales such as “Small-Thomas” or “Filiouchka” (tales number 78 and 80 of Afanassiev’s fairytales). 

2) The warrior baba Yaga. In the tale “Small Piece” (tale number 76), tricked again by the hero, the baba Yaga kills her forty-one daughters instead of the forty-one brother-protagonists (including Small Piece/Small Bit). Near a lake, the baba Yaga fights them: she is as an Amazon, riding on a horse, with a fire-projecting shield. There is a clear divide between girls and boys. In the fairytale “Ivachko-Bear-cub” (tale number 105-106) she fights the companions of the hero, and cuts from each of them a strip of skin on the back. The hero inverts the situation by cutting three skin-strips from the back of the baba Yaga. The baba Yaga escape him, and returns under the ground, where she lives with her daughter - but the adult daughter betrays her mother to go away with Ivachko-Bear-cub. There is a divide baba Yaga/hero, but also daughter/mother. 

3) The donor baba Yaga. The hero of the story reaches a small isba in the forest, undergoes there trials, and receives gifts allowing them to cross from one realm to another and fulfill their goal (the quest of the desired person). According to Propp, the little isba marks the frontier between the two worlds.

4) The baba Yaga guardian of the realm of the dead. According to Propp’s analysis, the small isba is equivalent to a coffin: the Baba Yaga fills it from one corner to another, she is lying down on her stove with her nose touching the ceiling. She has a leg of bone, and she hates the smell of living things. Propp interprets the stay in the small isba as a remnant of the initiation rite of primitive societies, which caused a “temporary death”. For him, the baba Yaga is a caricature of the ritual’s leader.

5) The baba Yaga (or the Crone) mistress of the forest and of the wild animals. In “The Beauty of all Beauties”, tale number 119, she is said to rule over all the animals of the world - the beasts of the forest, the fishes, and the bird. In the sylvan world, the woman/mother/crone is the ruler. 

6) Baba Yaga as a sexual or familial character. The author rejects the analysis of Propp that claims “While she is mother and mistress of all animals, she doesn’t have human children”. She points out that, while it is true she doesn’t have a husband or a son, she has daughters (sometimes one, other times three, sometimes many more). As for her sexual attributes, fairytales insist a lot on her breasts, instead of her genitalia. She is said to have her “teats tied to a hook” in one story, which proves that it is rather the maternity of the baba Yaga that is interesting, rather than her sexuality proper. 

7) The soldar side of the baba Yaga. In two famous stories (Vassilissa the Beautiful, number 75, and Maria Marievna, tale 121) she commands the celestial phenomenon, but this aspect is quite limited in tales. 

In conclusion: if the Baba Yaga was perceived as the leader of an initiation rite, as a great goddess with multiple attributes - but she is before all a spirit tied to the forest and the hunt. She has daughters rather than sons, and her behavior changes depending on genders: she defends girls but attacks boys, there is a clear “maternal clan” at work. Like many spirits of nature, she is benevolent and malevolent at the same time, which manifests in the trial she imposes to the hero. For Propp, her ugly appearance and old age were meant to say that she belonged to a “dead and outdated religion” - she is an “archaic character”. 

II) The princess

The character of the princess also corresponds to the various names of: The Maiden-Tsar/the King-Girl ; the frog princess ; the daughter of the baba Yaga ; Vassilissa the Magical ; the Beautiful Daughter. 

She is of a beauty that is hard to describe - her beauty is equivalent to the one of the sun, as she is tied to the day and to gold. The princess is also tied to the water of springs - in “The Water of Youth and the Beautiful Girl”, tale 135, the water of youth and life appears out of her hands and feet. There are three different “subtypes” to her. First subtype: she is the beautiful girl ravished away, but strangely in the other world she is found as a ruler and not as a prisoner, the captured prey becomes the one giving orders. This contradiction hasn’t been studied enough for the writer of the article. Second subtype: she is the Girl-King, an Amazon character with an immense strength and leading a group of female warriors. When the hero finds her sleeping, her breath is “like the one of the oak tree’s leaf” (Water of Youth and the Beautiful Girl), and in one version of the story collected by Khoudiakov “apple-trees grow from her arm-pits”. She symbolies the sleeping earth. Third subtype: Vassilissa the Magic One, the frog-princess, they are the creators of a civilized nature, they invent agriculture, they invent marriage, they are cultural heros. 

III) The snake or the adversary

The snake is the main form taken by the “Adversary”. But he appears under different names: the she-snake, the dragon or she-dragon, Tchoudo-Youdo, the devil, the Hurricane, Kactcheï the Immortal. 

The word meaning snake in the Slavic languages is “zmeja”, a word coming from “zemlja”, the earth - the snake is the animal that comes out of the earth. In Slavic legends, the snake has positive sides: he has the power to heal, he owns riches, he guards the hearth. In some fairytales he is even the magical helper (Helena the Wizardess, tale number 182). 

However, most of the time, the dragon wishes to live with a maiden or a woman that was ravished (Roll-little-pea, tale 96-98) or to devour her (The Apple of Youth and the Kingdom below, tale 133). The dragon will also try to eat the hero (The Dragon and the Gypsy, tale 111, The two Ivan-sons of soldier, tale 117). Hence why the hero has to fght the dragon: the hero will cuts his heads, which will be difficult because he has many and they grow back. A second fight, more dangerous, is the fight with the mace - the head of the snake or dragon has to be placed under the earth. It is an archaic fight that highlights the monster’s tie to the earth - the same way the creature tried to eat the hero, the hero needs to have the creature “eaten” by the earth. The third type of fight, the most dangerous of all, is the one that happens when the dragons are killed, and when their women and mother enters: the mother-dragon opens a maw that goes from the heaven to the earth, and gulps down everything in front of her. The hero is only saved by a miracle, and never by his own means (it is a group of blacksmiths or a winged horse that saves the day). We have here a fight with a female figure of devoration. So the female dragon is extremely unpredictable and dangerous.

Another role of the dragon is to try to marry the hero. He has so many females around hm that he can ask the hero, before the fight “Do you come to marry one of my sisters or daughters?”, while the hero answer “I am not here to marry in your family, I am here to beat you up!” (Hurricane the Brave, tale 100). While this function of “wedding-planner” is not that present for the dragon, it is very present for the Tsar of the Water or for the devil. The Tsar of the Water, Tchoudo-Youdo, the devil/Tchort, all belong to the category of the “Adversary”. Surrounded by wives and daughters, they are tied to the motif of the “sell in advance”, aka “Give what you have in your house without knowing it”. These demonic characters take a son away from his father to marry him. They are marriage-creators as much as devourers. 

IV) The relationship between the Baba Yaga and her daughter, the Hag and the Maiden

Sometimes the Baba Yaga is merely the guardian of the kingdom of the Beautiful Girl, and she is submissive to the latter (variations of the “Water of Youth” tales, tales 134, 136-138, 140). However these two characters, of different generations and cultures, are often tied by a parentage. Sometimes they are mother/daughters (the hero married the Baba Yaga’s daughter in “Go I don’t know where, bring back I don’t know what, tale 164) ; other times they are aunt and niece (in Tchoudo-Youdo and Vassilissa the Magic Girl, tale 172) ; and they can be grand-mother and grand-daughter (the tales on the Finiste bird, tales 179 180). The young girls or the maidens are always descendants of the baba Yaga - a baba Yaga who herself has sisters. However the baba Yaga is never part of the hero’s family - she is of the family of the wife, of the bride-to-be, of the searched woman. 

However these characters are opposites. Sometimes the opposition is direct: in Ivachko-Bear-cub, the daughter of the baba Yaga wishes to leave the world of her mother, and tells the hero how to kill her. The character of the baba Yaga daughter’s is simple: is she is a child, she will be killed accidentally by her mother, if she is adult, she will have her mother killed. Meanwhile, the characters of Vassilissa the Magic Girl/the princess frog are more complex. They create a wold different from the one of their mother/aunt/grand-mother, a world not relying on the forest and the hunt, but on field and agricultures: they realizes agricultural and domestic chores, which are unusual in the wild and sylvan world they come from, they train and domesticate animals, they build bridges and palaces, through their dance they create civilization or prepare weddings. They do not attack directly the baba Yaga, but they create a new world, and so they wish to leave the archaic world - and thus fight other supernatural beings.

There are however many common points between the Old One and the Young One. The princess of the silver-kingdom in “The three kingdoms”, tale 93, welcomes the hero by saying “Until then I had never seen nor smelled the body of a Russian man, but today one is here before me!” - which are the exact same words the baba Yaga uses in other tales. In “The Two Ivan-sons of soldier”, the story ends when the beautiful maiden turns into a lionness, swells up to monstrous proportions, and devours the two heroes. So the maiden can eat people, just like the baba Yaga... In a variation of “The princess-frog” tale (number 207), the character is indeed the regular frog-princess that can “create from a gesture of her hand, gardens and meadows” - but she has a threatening cannibalism. When she arrives at her mother’s home where the hero is hidden, she says “It smells like a Russian man! If Ivan-tsarevitch was under my hand, I’d rip him to pieces!”. Strangely here it is the mother that moderates her daughter, and advices the hero: the mother/daughter roles are inverted, the daughter fulfilling the role of the ogress, while the mother is civilized. But the hero still ends up figuratively devoured, since the frog, now in love with him, takes him away to her “seventh kingdom”. In the tale “The Water of Youth and the Beautiful Girl”, the titular Beautiful Girl, raped in her sleep by the hero, kills him, then after calming down and finding him to be a pretty boy, she heals the deadly wound with the water of youth-and-life that comes from her hand - the man is resurrected and they marry. So in conclusion, between the two different generations, we find two characters malevolent and benevolent at the same time, two cannibals, two characters tied to nature (be it wild or civilized nature), two characters placing trials on the hero, and whose advice always leads to a wedding.

V) The relationship with the male monster

We saw that the male monster (the dragon, Tchoudo-Youdo, the Tsar of the Water, the devil) is at the same time concerned with devouring and marrying. His second role, as a marriage-driven character, is quite enigmatic when present in the dragon’s character - and to see things a bit clearly, we must look at other male supernatural characters. 

The water monster, the devil, Tchoudo-Youdo all have an unclear physical appearance, but their names reveal their heretical nature. They are called the “Miscreant Tsar”, “Tchoudo-Youdo the Outlaw”, “The Tsar with an unbaptized forehead”, “Satan”, “the devil” or “Hell”. They have a female entourage: they only have daughters, sometimes a sister. The daughter is an essential figure that can even be part of the tale’s title (The Devil and the clever girl, tale 173). But the baba Yaga also appears though this female parentage. In “Tchoudo-Youdo and Vassilissa the Magic One”, tale 172, baba Yaga reveals that Tchoudo-Youdo is her brother. And just like the male monster, the baba Yaga also has sisters (such as in “Finiste-Clear-Falcon”, tale 180). And we also saw earlier that Vassilissa the Magic Girl, who can be the daughter of Tchoudo Youdo, also is regularly the daughter, niece or granddaughter of the baba Yaga (or of the Old Woman of the Forest): we are here in a family. But which type of family are we confronted with? If we study the members of the baba Yaga’s family, we discover the intervention of a “father” or even of two fathers. 

For example, let’s look at “The Tsar of the Water and Vassilissa the Magic Girl”, also known as “The Devil and the clever girl”. This tale is as ancient as it is famous: in the fairytale Aarne-Thompson Index, it is the AT 313. It is found in numerous places in Europe, its most ancient traces date back to Babylon, and the myth of Jason and Medea relies on its structure. It is very present in the oral fairytales of France, and of course in Russia it has numerous rich and archaic versions. The starting scene in the Russian tales is relatively stable: a travelling tsar is thirsty. As he is about to drink from a lake, a monster appears out of the water, holds the tsar’s beard and says he will only let him go if he gives him what he has in his home, without knowing what it is. The tsar, who believes he knows everything, agrees, but in truth he gave up his recently newborn son. The son will only be given when he reaches puberty - this is the motif of the “sell in advance”. However the monster out of the water - the Tsar of the Water - turns out to be the father of Vassilissa the Magical Maiden. So we have a fairytale with two fathers - the father of the hero (Ivan-tsarevitch) and the father of the intended bride, Vassilissa. But we have an anomaly here: the first father, Ivan’s father, didn’t know that he was about to have a child, while the second father, Vassilissa’s father, knew that the first father was about to have a child. As a result it seems that the first father’s isn’t regularly in the presence of his wife, or maybe doesn’t form a true couple with this female partner - he might be a man from a different clan than her. But the father of Vassilissa seems to be from the same clan as Ivan’s mother, since he knows what is happening to her, he knows that she is pregnant. The first father is a new father, an ordinary and biological father, with a very limited power, while the second is a powerful sorcerer, talented when it comes to marrying his daughters - because Vassilissa has variously numbered “sisters”. 

The daughters of the powerful sorcerer can be three, twelve, or seven 77 in the tale 172, or a hundred - and nothing is ever said about their mother, so maybe they are not actually sisters, but cousins, and maybe the tsar of the water is their uncle rather than their father. We can take into account the fact that, even in modern Russian, the wors “brat” and “sestra” mean as much “cousin” as they mean “brother/sister”. So the father of Vassilissa might be her father-uncle, and we would come back to an archaic form of family. The father-uncle is the male leader of a family unit where only girls and wives are taken into account when drawing the bloodlines. The baba Yaga, who is also defined by her descendants, belongs to this clan and, by her role of guardian, by her orders, she “leads” this clan in her own way. It seems thus that Ivan’s marriage is organized by the clan of his mother, while the father of Ivan has no voice to the chapter. So, in the Russian fairytale, there is a very clear clan-structure, of “maternal clan” type, with an old woman, guardian of the order, a male leader, father-uncle, and numerous daughters or sisters, forming the uterine bloodline. 

Maybe we can have more clues if we look at the epic Russian songs - much more misogynistic than the Russian fairytales. For example, in the famous novgorodian song “Sadko”: after a shipwreck, Sadko is at the palace of the sea-king. The sea-king wants to marry him with one of his three hundred girls, but Saint Nicholas appears and tells Sadko: “Choose the last girl that will be presented to you, but do not make love with her, only then will you be able to return to Novgorod”. Through his abstinence, Sadko finds himself the following morning all alone, but back in his hometown. If he had not restrained himself, he would have been absorbed, “drowned” by the maternal clan of the sea-king. We find here again the “swallowing” theme: for the hero, champion of the patriarchy, marrying in a maternal clan means disappearing, be absorbed, be swallowed. 

[imperialstark]

Tony trying to defend his love of overnight oats (mans an LA gurl thru and thru u know he has his with flax and oat milk and berries) to Steve, who ate ACTUAL gruel and porridge growing up is like… why would you eat this when you can literally eat gold plated bacon and eggs and not even blink?? is this some Marie Antoinette peasent roleplay???

MARIE ANTOINETTE PEASANT ROLEPLAY DJGHHFHDHD

no bc tony IS an LA girlie and i love that for him he already has the green smoothies down AND the bitchy little sunglasses 💖💖

i do feel like tony would eventually get steve on the overnight oats train and it becomes a part of their nightly routine where they get their oats ready for the next day as a couple ���

[knightsickness]

was born in the wrong generation (just thought of the joke ‘in hell, the lords eat gruel and the peasants roast’ which would have absolutely killed in 1387)