grishaverse-chaos

[grishaverse-chaos]

Feeling an incredibly weird specific nostalgia but what piece of media defined 2020 for you (as in you spent that year with it) mine is mtv's catfish

[grishaverse-chaos]

The name "Jane" is a female version of "John", and if Wikipedia is to be believed it developed not out of "John" directly but as a more novel and upper-class version of the then-commonplace "Joan", also a female version of "John", in the manner of the Kayleighs of today.

But "Joan" is still weird, because it's like that for no clear reason -- the original masculine/feminine pair here is like Johannes/Johanna, which explains nothing! It ends up in German as Johann and Johanna, and stress changes can induce vowel changes, but you'd expect that to work the other way round, with the unstressed O becoming shorter, so it seems to just be that "John" and "Joan" appeared at different times and the need to distinguish them kept the latter from drifting as far as the former. You can see the same general thing happening with "Steve" and "Steph", with the opposite gender/vowel length relationship.

So this isn't very systematic, obviously, and it hardly ever happens. But isn't it tempting to imagine us adopting a convention of gendering names by ablaut?

Bill (m.) -> Beele (f.)

Jeff (m.) -> Jafe (f.)

Bob (m.) -> Bobe (f.)

Dan (m.) -> Dane (f.)

Mike (m.) -> Make (f.)

Greg (m.) -> Graygue (f.)

Keith (m.) -> Kayth (f.)

Scott (m.) -> Scote (f.)

James (m.) -> Jymes (f.)

and so forth

[grishaverse-chaos]

My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

[grishaverse-chaos]

If you see this post you’re legally required to tell me at least one trans woman headcanons you have for a canonically male character, I never get to see transfem headcanons like that, give me them, and for equality of my own please know estrogen could have saved Insector Haga and Dinosaur Ryuzaki I will not elaborate, also Yuya.

[grishaverse-chaos]

Fantasy setting with magic neatly organised into elemental spheres, except each magic-using culture disagrees with all the others about what the primordial elements are, what their associations and correspondences are, and even how many of them there are. Spells always interact with other spells from the same magic system as though its elemental theory is complete, consistent, and correct, but when spells from two different magic systems come into contact it all goes a bit sideways, often in ways that require flowcharts to explain. Like, you think Ground Type vs. Rock Type is bad? There are five separate, mutually exclusive spheres of magic all called "Fire". The Sylvan Confederacy's "Water" magic explodes on contact with the Empire of the Five Pillars' "Water" magic and nobody knows why.

[grishaverse-chaos]

Latest Sketch-a-Wish voted on by my lovely Patreon members for August! Inspired by Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde #2) by Heather Fawcett, featuring Emily and Wendell in some morning afterglow. I love how Emily is being indecisive about doing the traditional romantic things before Wendell wakes, but then he cuddles up with her anyway, deciding for her. Too cute. I kept his bedhead just for you, Em.

[grishaverse-chaos]

Do you think urban fantasy settings have porn discourse? Like all the races have different ideas of what they find appealing and how it should be presented. Drarves mostly write erotic literature in runes and you would not believe how slow burn that shit can get. You're five volumes in before the two main characters figure out each others' genders and realise that they may be attracted to each other.

Orcs don't really do narrative arts, they figured out advanced chemistry before writing, and they manufacture perfumes specifically meant to mimic the scent of an orc in heat and then jack off to the smell. Having an orc roommate in college is unbearable.

Gnome porn is unspeakable. Do not speak of gnome porn.

Elvish porn, regardless of media type, features more humans than the uninitiated would expect. This is largely because elvish mating customs are just as slow-paced as those of dwarves, so the myth of humans as wildly promiscuous hypersexual turbosluts is somewhat based in reality: the culture shock that elves often encounter in mixed relationships, where the human partner whom they have been appropriately courting in a perfectly respectable way all of a sudden throws all propriety in the wind and goes "hey we've been together for ten years, do you want to see my tits while they're still this good?"

[grishaverse-chaos]

This website has a list of cities by latitude that you can search if you're not sure; alternatively, google "[place] latitude."

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[grishaverse-chaos]

it bothers me that you often don't really hear about people having a "favorite album" the way they might have a favorite movie or favorite video game

[grishaverse-chaos]

it’s officially two years since joever. swifties: please reblog and tell us how you found out about the news and what you thought originally 🫡

[grishaverse-chaos]

do u guys collect stuff (irl)? tell me what u collect

[grishaverse-chaos]

hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.

[grishaverse-chaos]

ahhhhhh omg I didn't know there was going to be a proshot?? that's incredible, I can't wait

thank youuuu <3 what are you studying at uni? I'm looking at courses myself rn and deciding where I want to apply

HII MAYHEM <3

(its fae)

omg hiiii how are you doing? it's lovely to hear from you <3

[grishaverse-chaos]

omg that sounds awesome!!! I saw hadestown last year and it's so good holy shit, I love it so much! school is also pretty intense for me rn bc I have exams next summer 😭 but outside of that I'm doing pretty well, I got to go to a model UN conference last weekend which was really fun

HII MAYHEM <3

(its fae)

omg hiiii how are you doing? it's lovely to hear from you <3

[grishaverse-chaos]

HII MAYHEM <3

(its fae)

omg hiiii how are you doing? it's lovely to hear from you <3

[grishaverse-chaos]

A small hamlet that grows first into a town, then into a city and finally blooms into a whole independent city-state within a generation due to the arts and industry produced by its booming community of magic practicioners. Their society thrives within it, everyone who is personally not a wizard of some sort has at least one family member who is. It's not odd at all to hear someone explain that their whole family uprooted from wherever they originally lived and moved to this place when it turned out that one of their children knew magic.

There's talk about starting a college of magics, but that never gets founded, and is truthfully not really even needed - the whole city is a college of magic. Teaching one's own is considered a duty, and here everyone of magic is kin to another. It is not only perfectly acceptable to stop someone whom you've seen practicing a magical skill incorrectly or inefficiently if you yourself know a better way, it's your downright duty to do so. Refusing to teach what you know is as unthinkable as refusing to share endless and infinite fruit with someone starving.

Within generation the thriving city-state is envied for their power and goods - things, tools, craftsmen and teachers from there are worth their weight in silver if not gold, to the point where hacks and frauds will claim their goods were from there for the prestige. The thriving society is accused of hoarding up all the magics, and running a monopoly on the whole industry. Wizards who could have made a passable living anywhere else still flock to the city for a better education, even if only for the prestige of getting to say that they have done so - as it is known that a magician from anywhere else, who has not lived and been trained here, can only be second best at the very best.

The city-state is accused of depriving everyone else of the prestige of magicians, but the citizens, residents, and visiting students are not allowed to forget their history: The little hamlet it originally was never hoarded the wizards, or forced anyone to come to this place. It was merely the only place where the practice of magic had not been made illegal.

[grishaverse-chaos]

I don't think fantasy writers play enough with the concept of the different fantasy races having distinct ethnicities. Like imagine a group of mixed peoples, where the dwarves are all roasting each other like dwarves do, and one of them remarks that when he first saw one of the other dwarves in the group, he mistook her for a man. The other dwarves in the group blink in surprise - the closest that dwarves will go to an audible gasp of shock - and she pulls out a knife and tries to stab him.

Once the dwarves have been separated from each other and the situation has calmed, one of the humans asks another dwarf what that incident was about. Naturally a human woman would have been insulted too, but dwarves are so jovial about insulting each other, why was this matter different?

And the dwarf who was asked explains that there are things you can brutally insult another dwarf about, and there are things you simply do not touch. The dwarf-woman in question is from a completely different region of The Great Underground as the others, and her people have different norms about what kind of patterns men and women braid into their beards. The dwarf insulting her wasn't only insulting her appearance, he was being racist.

The human is surprised to learn that dwarves have different peoples, and the dwarf looks at them like at an idiot. Of course they do, they even look completely different from each other. And the human listens as the dwarf lists off various distinguishing clothing details too nuanced for a human to notice, and then how dwarves coming from different corners of the world have different physical traits, according to what kind of conditions their local stone types dictate.

The human spots a connection and goes oh! We have that too, though ours are not about rock types and tunnel air, but the weather aboveground. Humans' facial features vary by how hot, cold, arid or windy their ancestors' homelands were, and our skin tone varies by how much the sun shines in their native region.

The dwarf frowns at the last part, going "I thought you people just paint your skin and dye your hair for fun", and the human admits that yeah, we do that too, but not all the time, and not the whole skin. The dwarf asks, what of that tall woman the colour of dravite, her palms and the soles of her feet were lighter than the rest of her. Does that mean she paints herself dark to be more beautiful?

The human says no, that just happens naturally. Maybe it's because one's palms and feet aren't exposed to the sun as much, so they are paler.

The dwarf nods, still unsure whether this is actually legit or just the human habit of lying for fun, and proceeds to ask about the wild northman of their party. He is as pale as an olm, but the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet are dark. Are they painted, or naturally that way?

No, the human answers. That guy just doesn't bathe.