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[treefey]

This is an interesting thread! It made me think about the idea that progress and history are linear. that idea is so deeply entrenched into our brains that we don't even realize that we're conceiving of the past that way. In reality, things are a lot messier and tend to happen in cycles and waves. And as much as "they were a product of their time" is a sucky excuse in many cases (like, abolitionists existed in the US before it was a country), it's also true that every human is a product of their environment. So if you imagine a world where no one chooses their spouse, there are no philosophy books about "freedom," and it becomes less a question of how much two people in the past railed against the system and more a question of how they dealt with the hand they had. Remember that humans were still humans, and there are clever things women did within the worldviews and frameworks they had. A queen getting everyone to adopt her favorite fashions? That's a sign of her political power, and potentially by extension, her husband's.

History has only remembered the not "well-behaved women," but the implication when people say that that quote is that the "normal" women sat in their rooms, making no noise, and pretending they didn't exist. It wasn't that women never did anything worth remembering, but rather that their contributions were never noted. (the same goes for lower class people or anyone marginalized.) When you think about history that way, it becomes much easier to treat a woman moving abroad for an arranged marriage as a clever, stubborn human who slowly wears away at the political structures she doesn't like in her new country like water over stone. Or one who once she figures out her husband is a jerk, does something about it (takes a lover? poisons him? divides loyalty in the court that eventually leads to a rebellion?)

I'm really tired of the "woman sad about her arranged marriage" trope, especially if that woman is royalty.

I am sure that many women across time were sad about their arranged marriages, but I'm sure a lot of others were excited, ambivalent, or resigned. Again, especially if you were royalty! I am sure if you were born a princess, you were trained from birth that your whole purpose in life was to marry someone important to solidify the power of the person on the throne. And honestly, it's an important job, if it wasn't, they wouldn't have tried so hard to do it.

That woman isn't just marrying another king or prince, she's going to be an ambassador of her country. She's supposed to be there promoting good relations. She isn't just a woman being sold off, she has a job! Also, if she is marrying the reigning monarch (or the heir), she may well end up running the country if the king is off at war or he dies when the heir is really young. That happened a lot throughout history! (or maybe she marries the third son and helps him find his way to the throne. Good for her)

It just feels like a modern sentiment being projected back. In Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet's mother first brings up marrying her to Paris, Juliet's basically cool with it and says she'll try to like him. She would have known this was going to happen because that is what rich women do, they marry into another family so their two families can be buddies. What else would she even be expecting?

It wouldn't bother me so much except that it's all we see! Give me a story about a woman who is like, "Cool, I shall give it my all!" Or she's like rolling up her sleeves and planning how she's going to get the court on her side and rule France, power behind the throne style (these women are mostly portrayed as villains, but who is to say the king would do a better job?). And also, have a little faith in women's fathers? You think men in the past didn't occasionally consider the happiness of their daughters? Not even a little bit?

[treefey]

Anything but you except when Bea realizes they're pulling a Much Ado About Nothing, she makes Ben watch the Kenneth Branagh version and that's how they fall in love and maybe she decides to do some writing or acting or something, some direction instead of just "not law school"

[treefey]

Yeah, I'm caught off guard by how it hit me, and that's exactly what it feels like!

My theory is that so much of Theoden's arc is about/surrounded by death that it makes Bernard Hill dying irl feel that much worse, somehow

Just learned of Bernard Hill's passing and this is hitting me harder than I expected. I grew up watching him as Theoden and this somehow feels like losing an uncle who was there during a pivotal time in my childhood. RIP king, you will be missed ❤

[treefey]

I like this, but some parts of it feeds into the false STEM/humanities binary, which I hate.

School subjects are taught isolation from each other, and they kind of have to be, at first. However, irl they all exist simultaneously and overlapping, like engineering and architecture are art thinking skills applied to practical objects. But education has set up a hierarchy with hard sciences & engineering at the top (Social sciences like history are kind of in the middle, but since they are treated as below the "hard" sciences, I am including them when I say "humanities".)

I will never deny that there are humanities people who are absolute dingbats, but there are so many people putting information out on free forums like social media that explain history, linguistics, philosophy, and art in normal human speech. Libraries host events, people summarize research for free newspapers, bars host history profs who want to talk about their cool research. People do K-12 outreach. There are sadly still barriers to access (internet, time, $ to go to the bar, etc.), but there is also a broader cultural context that speaks to why artsy/social science-y nerds feel like they are ignored that don't have to do with their "bad" communication skills:

The US (and maybe beyond?) is going through an anti-intellectual movement rn. Many people have already had their minds made up and will not listen to any communication from experts (because they are seen as "experts"). Science is 100% not exempt from this. The amount of people I personally know who will fit any weather event into a conspiracy theory rather than entertain the idea of climate change is depressingly high. These people will only watch TikToks that conform to their pre-existing ideas.

Social media and the internet in general are run by corporate algorithms. TikTok feeds you what it thinks you're interested in, so someone interested in physics is probably not going to get the videos that explain Foucauldian philosophy super clearly or why dress history is important.

(American?) Higher ed is rife with structural issues. I've worked at a uni for nearly 12 years in a couple different disciplines. It's bad enough that higher ed is run as a business that relies on tuition $ to stay afloat. On top of that, several states have enacted "performance based funding" i.e. public unis get funding based on graduation rates. In general, this terrible for actual education. But what makes it worse is that they give the uni more $ for STEM students, actively encouraging universities to push students to those programs. Then when you think about the STUPID tuition cost, of course students are going to pick a major they think they will let them eat in the future rather than something they just like learning. And unis are BROKE because public funding has dropped, we're about to hit an enrollment cliff, economic conditions SUCK. So unis have to kill off any program not useful in the current job market to keep afloat. The people who are trying to communicate humanities & social science information are doing so from within this messy context (which sucks! you don't have time for tiktoks if you're doing your job and fighting for your department to exist!)

Issues in K-12 feed into higher ed issues. Arts programs are being removed because the solution to the "why did I learn hotcross buns and not personal finance" discourse is to remove the arts and not standardized testing, or better yet the structure where schools are funded based on their students' standardized testing scores.

Also, I love the science communication ideal. It has suffered some massive hits in practice, though. This long video/podcast from 2 pro-vax doctors (one is also a scientist) talks a little about how COVID communication failed in the US. In a non-COVID example, I personally saw how few people in my town believed the scientists/engineers that said our water was safe after East Palestine last year-- the communication was so bad, and the trust in scientists is not there. This is also not a small number of uneducated dummies. I work at a university.

Maybe outside the US or in your coastal elite towns these situations are better. I hope so

Last, in our current dichotomy, communication is a "soft skill" that falls under the humanities, and science communication is effectively an interdisciplinary course. I'm very glad it exists, but it's unfair to use that as an example on how the humanities as a whole needs to take a leaf out of science's book. More interdisciplinarity and learning from each other is the answer. Explain the blue square art like a science museum, but don't diss the art history adjunct who works 3 jobs for not making art history TikToks. Tear down STEM/humanities rift whenever possible-- we'll all be better off :)

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

[treefey]

I'm ready for it!!

king arthur, if you’re out there, there will never be a funnier time to wake up

[treefey]

Husband: Yeah, no leader can be perfect, except, like,- Me: King Arthur? Husband: ... I was gonna say Jesus, but that works too.

[treefey]

Rewatching heroes S1 before the eclipse! And I agree!

every scene that sendhil ramamurthy is in is life changing because of how beautiful he is

[treefey]

#‘it didn’t occur to me; until it was too late; that I had disabled Po; then given him a magical cure for his disability #‘thus implying that he couldn’t be a whole person and be disabled. I now understand that the magical cure trope is all too common in #‘[Fantast]/[Science Fiction] writing and is disrespectful to people with disabilities. My failings here are all my own’ #that last sentence fucking hurt

Oof. I love Cashore for catching this and fixing it, but I am much less harsh on the way she wrote Po. I know this is a trope; Daredevil and Toph have the same "blind but see so much" thing. But I think in all three instances, it's obvious that their second sight doesn't make up for the lack of regular sight, and the characters are still whole humans. Matt has to steal a burner phone and have Claire read text messages to him. Toph is super disoriented on a boat, on Appa, or on ice. Neither one wants you to feel pity for their lack of vision.

And Po... It hit me on my last reread how much he loves looking at things. Katsa says he lost beauty. He loves the striking sight of po trees and his castle hanging over the water. He loves being overwhelmed at the sight of Katsa, being lost in her eyes. He will never see her again. We catch Po at the beginning of his journey where he is still accepting this-- Matt has accepted it years, and Toph's blindness always matters more to other people than to her. At the end of Graceling, I got the sense that Po's grace didn't "fix" him, but merely protected him from suspicion. It would have been really dangerous for him to be outted as a mind reader in the immediate aftermath of Leck. He is still disabled and is still grieving and learning a lot.

Maybe I think this way because Bitterblue was already published when I first read the Graceling series, so only had to wait like 2 weeks to see how being blind affects Po. And I think it's important to note that he's farther along in his journey-- he's accepted his blindness and hates that he can't just shout it from the rooftops.

I also think if you're in a world with magic powers, it makes sense that magic can be a... disability aid, I guess? In short, I'm really glad Cashore got input and wrote Bitterblue, but I don't think she needs to feel like she failed. But a blind person may feel differently!

I’m definitely not crying over the authors note at the end of BitterBlue where the author acknowledges that earlier in the series she disabled one of her characters just to immediately magic cure him and when writing a later book had someone to consult with about if she could get around said magic cure and have him still be disabled character so she could show him being whole and happy while also being disabled

[treefey]

So everyone talks about how devastating Iroh and Momo's tales in Tales of Ba Sing Se are. Which. Rightfully, so because. Ouch. But consider for a moment, Aang's tale. It's actually about Appa. And 1) it makes much more sense and 2) underneath its fun exterior it becomes subtly heartbreaking and is worse every time you watch it

[treefey]

Toned down doesn't mean removed necessarily, so fingers crossed?

To anyone saying "it's only 4 episodes," no. It's directly mentioned in those episodes, but it's part of his character growth the whole time after, esp in the Northern water tribe. Who comes up with the idea of Katara learning waterbending at night from Aang? Sokka! That's a very different Sokka than the one who originally didn't support waterbending or his sister. Who is directly impacted by a woman having no say in her marriage? Sokka! Who is the first to recognize Toph's strengths and also to the first to support her when she needs eyes? Sokka! These scenes are so impactful because we know where he started.

I can see the complaint about the water tribes' patriarchy being bad rep of real life indigenous tribes, who traditionally don't have 1950s-type gender roles. So if that's how and why they changed it could be interesting. However, colonialism has distorted a lot of the traditional indigenous concepts irl, hence modern decolonization efforts battling erasure + generations of forced assimilation. (Like, Sherman Alexie's creepy words and actions aren't the result being surrounded by a culture viewing women as equal) I think it could be really powerful for Sokka to try to be v masculine because of the way the war has broken his family/culture, then in becoming less sexist, he reclaims pre-war traditions (idk, I like the idea but doesn't work as direct allegory to real life as Fire Nation has female soldiers)

There is also a lot of value in seeing someone grapple with and overcome their sexist attitudes in a story. It's still relevant, maybe more relevant than when the animated show came out. ATLA is very good at having well-rounded male and female characters and showing that there're different ways to be strong/a leader/a boy/a girl

Alright now this pissed me off

What do you MEAN you're going to remove one of the most important aspects of Sokka's character arc in the first season? What do you MEAN you're going to remove Sokka unlearning misogyny, accepting change and embracing his role as a fighter and protector of the Avatar in order to end the war? What do you MEAN???

[treefey]

Love it! Though, I mostly drink herbal tea, so not sure if everyone considers that tea

quick what’s ur opinion on tea. everyone who sees this is obligated to answer in some way

[treefey]

Another thing that's nice about Kel is that while she has a bunch of brothers, she first learned to fight from Yamani women

[treefey]

I'm gonna pull out the "books belong to their reader" thing. If you're aro or ace and find comfort in Kel staying single, this is not meant to take it away from you. But for me, I think they're both demi and would be happy together. They remind me a lot of Raoul and Buri, and maybe it's something they explore later in life like them. Kel does have massive aro-ace "married to the job" energy, but at the same time... She also says she wants kids later in life.

Surely Kel won't always be needed in New Hope? The war ends, treaties are drawn up, and New Hope becomes a regular town no longer full of the small that need protecting. Yes, there will always be the small to look out for. Yes, there are problems to navigate if Kel and Dom became something. There will be the issues Buri mentioned to Raoul if Kel or Dom is commanding and the other isn't, or the direct issue of Buri and Raoul if they're both commanding separate units. (As a side note, I don't like Buri resigning unless Raoul also does? I don't see her as having no job, then we're back to the problem of one being in charge of the other if she works under him. If Raoul retires, that leaves Dom to take over the King's Own, maybe, or Kel eventually) As the dust settles and Tortall becomes more peaceful, a long distance weird relationship seems less complicated. Not that Kel needs Dom or any man or a romantic/sexual partner to be happy, but I feel like there's something between them and they deserve to explore that eventually down the line. Even if it's a weird love that makes no sense to others. A "this is Lady Knight Kel and her 12 adopted children that I help raise" or an uncomplicated "we sleep together sometimes, then when we both retire (because they're gonna get old enough to do that, damnit), we're a cute old couple who lives together"

In Tammy’s newest AMA, someone asked her who Kel ended up with and this was Tammy’s response:

Actually, she doesn’t.  With Dom away so long, she realizes it’s not going to work, and moreover, the longer he’s away, and the longer she’s not attracted to anyone else, the more she realizes she’s happy just with her work, her animals, and her friends.  She likes being single.   She’s happy.

And I’m actually cooler with this than I thought I’d be because I love Kel and Dom (I haven’t been in the fandom in a minute but I love them so much) and it half confirms Kel and Dom, in a way? Yes, Kel’s happy being single, but it also confirms that Dom’s kind of the only person she’s last seriously been into and nobody’s apparently really caught her eye other than him. And if I ever return to the fandom, which some part of me is really itching to, in with Keldom I go.

I miss the little Modern AU I was doing that had a whole plan to it, but if I didn’t have two long standing projects, I would go back to it honestly.

[treefey]

Spending four years with Alanna really rubbed off on Neal. I know he's exhausted at the end of Lady Knight, but the way he harps on Kel for daring to get injured strikes me as very Lioness of him

[treefey]

I love Kel so much. Her sense of right and wrong is so strong that she calls the chamber of the ordeal, this magical room designed to force you into your fears, a bully. Who else would do that?

[treefey]

Queen Charlotte (show), how dare you. As an American I am Contractually Obligated to hate King George III, and it's not fair how swoony and sympathetic your George is