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Maedhros! Ordered by Molly ❤️ 

Well guys! I was dreaming about such a commission for a long time! Because my small-big dream is to create the portrait gallery of feanorians but as usually - I have no time 😢 And… it has happened! 😍 Thank you, Molly, for such a wonderful possibility 💐🌹

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Apparently there’s now a commitment to developing a progressive and social-justice-oriented sex ed curriculum to replace it, which, yes, that’s approximately 95% better than my wildest dreams.

who has two thumbs and just found out that she and two other teachers threw a big enough hissy fit at a staff meeting to result in regressive and dangerous sex-ed curriculum being scrapped for an entire large metropolitan school district

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who has two thumbs and just found out that she and two other teachers threw a big enough hissy fit at a staff meeting to result in regressive and dangerous sex-ed curriculum being scrapped for an entire large metropolitan school district

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Hoop skirts are also air conditioning.  If you ever go to reenactments in the South, particularly in summer, you’ll notice a lot of ladies gently swaying in their big 1860s skirts -- because it fans all the sweaty bits.  You’ll be much cooler in a polished cotton gown with full sleeves, ruffles, and hoopskirt than in a riding jacket and trousers, let me promise you!  (This is part of the reason many enslaved women also enthusiastically preferred larger skirts -- they had more to do than sit in the shade, but they’d get a bit of a breeze from the hoops’ movement as they were walking.)  

They’re also -- and I can’t emphasize enough how important this is -- really easy to pee in.  If you’re in split-crotch drawers (which, until at least the 1890s, you were), you can take an easy promenade a few feet away from the gents and then squat down and pee in pretty much total privacy.  It gives so much freedom in travel when it’s not a problem to pee most anywhere.

People also don’t realize that corsets themselves were a HUGE HUGE IMPROVEMENT over previous support-garment styles -- and if you have large breasts that don’t naturally float freely above your ribcage (which some people’s do! but it’s not that common), corsets are often an improvement over modern bras.

They hold up the breasts from underneath, taking the weight of them off your back.  Most historical corset styles don’t have shoulder straps, so you’re not bearing the weight of your breast there, either, and you can raise your arms as far as your dress’s shoulder line allows (which is the actually restrictive bit -- in my 1830s dress, literally all I can do is work in my lap, but in my 1890s dress I can paddle a kayak or draw a longbow with no trouble.  Both in a full corset).  They support your back and reduce the physical effort it takes to not slouch, helping avoid back pain.  They’re rigid enough that you don’t usually have to adjust your clothing to keep it where it belongs.  They’re flexible -- if you’re having a bloaty PMS day you just ... don’t lace it as tightly, and if your back muscles are sore you can lace it a little tighter.  And you can undo a cup (or, y’know, not have breast cups) to nurse a baby without losing any of the structural integrity of the garment.

I do educational/historical dressing and people are really insistent, like, “The corset was invented by a man, wasn’t it?”  “Actually, women were at the forefront of changing undergarment styles throughout the 19th century!” “But it’s true that it was invented by a man.”  

Uh, well, it’s hard to say who “invented” the style but it’s very likely that women’s dressmakers mostly innovated women’s corsets and men’s tailors mostly innovated men’s corsets, honey.  Because those exist too.

it’s hilarious to me when people call historical fashions that men hated oppressive

like in BuzzFeed’s Women Wear Hoop Skirts For A Day While Being Exaggeratedly Bad At Doing Everything In Them video, one woman comments that she’s being “oppressed by the patriarchy.” if you’ve read anything Victorian man ever said about hoop skirts, you know that’s pretty much the exact opposite of the truth

thing is, hoop skirts evolved as liberating garment for women. before them, to achieve roughly conical skirt fullness, they had to wear many layers of petticoats (some stiffened with horsehair braid or other kinds of cord). the cage crinoline made their outfits instantly lighter and easier to move in

it also enabled skirts to get waaaaay bigger. and, as you see in the late 1860s, 1870s, and mid-late 1880s, to take on even less natural shapes. we jokingly call bustles fake butts, but trust me- nobody saw them that way. it was just skirts doing weird, exciting Skirt Things that women had tons of fun with

men, obviously, loathed the whole affair

(1864)

(1850s. gods, if only crinolines were huge enough to keep men from getting too close)

(no date given, but also, this is 100% impossible)

(also undated, but the ruffles make me think 1850s)

it was also something that women of all social classes- maids and society ladies, enslaved women and free women of color -all wore at one point or another. interesting bit of unexpected equalization there

and when bustles came in, guess what? men hated those, too

(1880s)

(probably also 1880s? the ladies are being compared to beetles and snails. in case that was unclear)

(1870s, I think? the bustle itself looks early 1870s but the tight fit of the actual gown looks later)

hoops and bustles weren’t tools of the patriarchy. they were items 1 and 2 on the 19th century’s “Fashion Trends Women Love That Men Hate” lists, with bonus built-in personal space enforcement

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as much as I appreciate the fact that there are people in the Silmarillion fandom who are willing to see Melian as more culpable and responsible for various ills than the text seems to indicate, I feel like this comes at the expense of an aspect of Elu’s character that I wish more of us would explore

namely, Elwë Singollo, Monster Fucker

this guy comes upon a minor god in the woods, a god that we aren’t even told is in a recognizable human form, and his innate reaction is “I’d tap that”

then once the enchantment lifts (over them both, not just him) and his free will is back in action they immediately get to babymaking and kingdom building

not only that, it’s his descendants that are interested in interspecies romance

he’s the equivalent of a Tumblr blogger crushing on Venom, only he got his wish

you go, Elu

never stop for anything

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I may or may not have put in an application to write for Cards Against Humanity.

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Hey I want to let @elodieunderglass and the rest of Tumblr know ...

... I had a godawful couple of months of bad professional experience and my university leadership deciding that instead of supporting me when students were ableist and homophobic, they were going to reinforce the ableism and homophobia and make sure I lived in fear of professional consequences for my students’ ableism and homophobia!  And basically I was terrified and hurt and had my trust in people I respected broken, and I had days where I couldn’t break out of the suicidal thoughts, and I’d wake up in the morning struggling bleakly to defend myself against accusations and knowing that it didn’t matter, and ... yeah, it has been a bad time.

In addition to good support from the actually competent and trustworthy professional and academic mentors in my life, including my goddamn amazing wife ... this little comic and this method got me through it.

“Thank you, anxiety, for reminding me that teaching is so important to me.”  “Thank you, sense of helplessness, for reminding me that this matters a lot and the stakes are high.”   “Thank you, sense of betrayal, for helping me keep in mind that there are specific people who SHOULD be acting better, and those people CAN be held accountable.”  “Thank you, disappointment, for making sure I guard myself emotionally against those people and put my energy into contacts with more integrity.”  “Thank you, anger, for reminding me that I am not the problem here.”

This has gotten me to a place where I am able to do advocacy for myself and others around this issue, and facilitate networks of people making sure that the leadership is aware of critical oversight on the topic, and find the paths to support for myself and blaze those paths to support for others.

 and ... yeah.  This is a good method and it worked for me.

on the validity of recognizing emotions

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I wish that at the end of a fic Ao3 would give you links to similar fics

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so: moroccan gondolin, persian nargothrond, ottoman thargelion, mexican rivendell, turkish hithlum

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Luke’s arc in the new trilogy makes a lot more sense to me when I consider that the headfake of Return of the Jedi is that Yoda was wrong.

I’m somewhat biased by having been a Jedi Apprentice fan in the aughts, but even in the OT it’s pretty clear that Luke is only successful by surpassing his teachers.  Redemption remains.  Love and self-sacrifice are more powerful than destiny.  Yoda couldn’t square these ideas with his bone-deep cognitive dissonance about predestination, where he did/should have/did know that this was all Fated.  Luke manages to fight through all of these notions about inevitability and destiny.  Arguably, this is the basis of Luke’s heroism; he sees beyond what he’s told is heroic.  It starts from that moment of looking up at the twin sunset over the desert, and ends in “I’m going to don the black clothes and go save Darth Vader or die trying” -- however dimly, Luke perceives something beyond the verbal and ethical barriers laid around his life.

But ... who could he ever talk to about this?  Leia, probably, but there’s a lot to complicate their three-year twin-bond after Endor.  Anakin would get it, but, well, see above.  Luke thus struggles to resolve and articulate an idea that he came to independently, but can’t find any support for or representation of in the world around him.  There’s no one to refine this conclusion against, no one to help him iron out what he’s intuited into what he thinks.  In a world where drastic action is replaced by the everyday -- which is perhaps equally important, but there’s a lot less adrenaline to bolster one against self-doubt -- he’s consumed by his inability to turn his raw beliefs into the refined matter of faith.

That’s why the (admittedly rather silly) motif of the unread sacred books is there -- he’s not lost his principles so far that he’s allowed himself to sink into this doctrine that condemns them, but there’s nothing to replace it with that does match his principles.  He’s obviously gotten there on some level -- “fuck destiny; I’m going to my father” did happen, and the interesting thing about the ~dark heart of the island~ is that Luke lives on top of it and is able to remain in solitary balance -- but he lives in a world where no one has the shared experience to let him articulate and affirm his beliefs about redeemable evil.

So, The Last Jedi Luke is a cautionary tale about the importance of the supportive community in turning one’s deeply held beliefs about justice into a workable ethos that can be lived by outside of crises.

(I may be the last person in the world to arrive at this, I acknowledge that.)

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…do you accept constructive criticism, my lord

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beren, a Virgin, telling people abt finrod’s death: yeah, there was a lot of moaning and groaning and biting, so he definitely fought the werewolf

luthien, definitely not a virgin: oh honey

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I think I’m going to bookmark this post and give it to my students as an example of how two totally different readings of the same artifact grounded in different critical lenses can yield different conclusions while both being nuanced, intelligent, and totally valid.

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happy pride month who was your first viddy game girlfriend, mine was elizabeth comstock