#Barbarians in Ireland

[bijoumikhawal]

you do realize that actual Scottish and Irish people have in fact, criticized how people talk about the Fae, and done so specifically on Tumblr

its fascinating how very very surface level 1920s-ish jazz age inspired aesthetics are very popular (see: hazbin hotel and electroswing and the endless wave of bowtie pinstripe character designs from the 2010s) but the vast vast majority of people who are into that seem fundamentally disinterested in actually engaging with actual jazz age art and culture because that would require engaging with black art

[vintagegeekculture]

The Evil Little Hairy Cave People of Europe in Pulp Fiction

From the 1900s to the 1940s, there was a trendy theme in occult and horror stories that the explanation for widespread European legends of fairies, brownies, pixies, leprechauns and other malicious little people, was that they were a hereditary racial memory of the extremely small non-human, hairy stone age original inhabitants of Europe, who still survive well into modern times in caves and barrows below the earth. Envious of being displaced on the surface, these weird creatures, adapted to the darkness of living underground and unable to withstand the sun, still mean mischief and occasionally go out at night to capture someone.... usually an attractive woman....to take to their dark caves for human sacrifice.

Displaced by the arrival of Indo-European language speakers at the dawn of the Bronze Age, these original, not quite human stone age people of Europe were driven deep underground into caves and barrows below the earth, where they went mad, adapted to the darkness and acquired a fear of daylight, became extremely inbred, in some cases acquired widespread albinism. It is these strange little people who gave the descendants of Europeans a haunting racial dread of places below the earth like mines and caves, and it also is these strange, hairy troglodytes who originally built the uncanny and mysterious menhir, fairy rings, and stone age structures of England, Scotland, and Ireland that predate the coming of the Celts and Romans.

In some cases, these evil troglodytes are usually identified with the mysterious Picts, the pre-Celtic stone age inhabitants of the British Isles. In some cases, they are identified with the Basque people of Spain, best known as the inventors of Jai Alai, and the oldest people in Europe who speak a unique language unrelated to any in the world.

The original codifier of this trend was Arthur Machen, a horror writer who is less remembered than his contemporary, Henry James, but who may be the best horror writer in the generations between Poe on the one end and Lovecraft/CL Moore/Clark Ashton Smith on the other. His story, "the White People" from 1904 (a reference to their strange cave albinism) was a twisted Alice in Wonderland with a girl who is irresistibly attracted to dark pre-Roman stone age ruins and who is eventually pulled underground.

In addition to being a great horror writer, Arthur Machen was a member of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, an occult organization, and was often seen at the Isis-Urania Temple in London. Many of his works have secretive occult knowledge.

H.P. Lovecraft in particular always pointed out Arthur Machen as his single biggest inspiration, though he combined Machen's dread and occultism with Abraham Merritt's sense of fear of the cosmic unknown, seen in "Dwellers in the Mirage" and "People of the Pit."

Another and scarier example of this trend would be "No Man's Land," a story by John Buchan, a Scotsman fascinated by paganism and horror, who often wrote stories of horrific discoveries and evil rites on the Scottish moors. He is often reduced to being described as a "Scottish Ghost Story" writer, a painfully reductivist description as in his career, Buchan wrote a lot of thrillers, detective, and adventure stories as well. In later life, he was appointed Governor General of Canada, meaning he may be the first head of state to be a horror writer.

It was Buchan who first identified the cave creatures with the Picts, something that another Weird Tales writer decades later, Robert E. Howard, would roll with in the 1920s.

Howard is a very identifiable kind of modern person you often see on the internet: a guy who talks tough, but who was terrified to leave his small town. He created manly man, tough guy heroes like Conan the Barbarian, Kull, and El Borak, but he himself never left his mother's house. It's no wonder he got along well with his fellow Weird Tales writer and weird shut in, HP Lovecraft. With 1920s Weird Tales writers, despite your admiration for their incredible talent, you also can't help but laugh at them a little, a feeling you also apply to a lot of Victorians, who achieved incredible things, but who are often closet cases and cranks who died virgins ("Chinese" Gordon comes to mind, as does Immelmann).

With Howard, his obsession with the Picts and the stone age cave dwelling people of Europe started with an unpublished manuscript where at a dinner party, a man gets knocked out and regresses to his past life in the Bronze Age, where he remembers the earliest contact between modern humans and the original inhabitants of the British Isles, the evil darkskinned Picts. This is a mix of both the "little cave people" story and another cliche at the time, "the stone age past life regression novel," another turn of the century cliche.

Still with the Picts on his mind, Howard would later create Bran Mak Morn, a Pict chieftain, who predated Kull and Conan as his Celtic caveman muscle hero. Howard was of Irish descent and proudly anti-Colonial and anti-British, with his Roman Empire and Civilized Kingdoms as a stand in for the British and other Empires, which he viewed as rapacious and humbug, a view shared by his greatest inspiration, Talbot Mundy. His "Worms of the Earth" gets to the heart of why these little cave people scare us so much: they remind us that we live on land that is impossibly ancient and we don't fully understand at all.

It was another Weird Tales Writer a decade later who wrote one of the last stories about the little hairy cave people of Europe, though, Manly Wade Wellman in 1942. Wellman was mainly known for creating the blond beefcake caveman hero Hok the Mighty set in stone age times, and for his supernatural ghost stories of Silver John the Balladeer set in modern, ghostly Appalachia (like many ex-Weird Tales writers, he made a turn to being a regional author in his later career, in the same way Hugh B. Cave became a Caribbean writer), but Wellman also had a regular character known as John Thunstone, a muscular and wealthy playboy known for his moustache who used his great wealth to investigate the supernatural and the occult. Thunstone had a silver sword made by St. Dunstan, patron of Silversmiths, well known for his confrontations with the Devil.

Most John Thunstone stories featured familiar stories, like a demon possessed seance and so on, but one in particular featured a unique enemy, the Shonokins.

The Shonokins were the original rulers of North America, descendants of Neanderthal man displaced by American Indians. This fear that the land we live is ancient and unknowable and we just arrived on it and don't know any of its secrets is common to settler societies, who often hold the landscape with dread, as in Patricia Wrightson's fantasies of the Australian Outback. It was easy enough to transport the hairy cave people from the Scottish Moors to North America. I suspect that's what they are, a personification of a fear shared in the middle class, that in the back of their minds, that everything they have supposedly earned is merely an accident of history, built by rapacity and the crimes of history, and that someday a bill will come due.

A text page in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales gives strange additional information on the Shonokins not found elsewhere:

Since then, there have been too many examples of evil cave people who predate Europeans. Philip Jose Farmer's "The All White Elf" features the last survivor of a pre-European people who live in caves. A lot of other fiction of course has featured the Picts, but according to our modern scientific understanding, which describes them as much, much less exotically, as a blue tattooed people not too different and practically indistinguishable from the Celtic tribes that surrounded them, and which they eventually blended into.

[darklydeliciousdesires]

Immortal Beloved - Chapter One.

Oh guys, when I tell you I was touched beyond words at how this was received by you all. I have been sitting here squeaking with joy at your lovely reviews! If I have missed anybody out in my thank you notes, please take my humble apology and know that I appreciate you so much for taking the time to both read and offer feedback.

Okay, so on with the first chapter, then. You'll notice here that my imagination weaves with canon to make some slight changes, such as giving the boy's (and Ada's) mother a name, also I wrote John only to have one child with his late wife. It made sense to me, not having to pull focus from the plot too much by having to characterise four little ones on top of everything else.

So yes, here we are, then. I think I'm going to choose Thursday as our update day and keep it to once a week posting. Those who know me of old know that I often like to throw in a little surprise update sometimes, though! Once again, thank you so much for the feedback, and I truly hope you continue to enjoy it :)

Previous chapters - Prologue

Tag list - In the comments

Words - 4,057

Warnings - Adult themes + vampire content throughout. Minors DNI!

“John?”  

He was still in a daze as he entered the back room, seeing Polly lift her gaze from the paper she read in front of the crackling hearth, her dark eyes narrowing slightly. “You’re bloody white as a sheet. If you’re about to be sick, go back outside. I’ve neither the desire nor patience for mopping up the contents of your stomach.”  

“Nah, I’m... I’m alright, Pol,” he began, his voice just as vacant as the expression upon his face, the toothpick between his lips practically dangling.  

She wasn’t convinced by his statement, placing the paper upon the arm of the chair and rising to her feet. “John, you look like you’ve seen a ghost, and you...” She sniffed his breath, her mouth down turning as she scoffed, “and you stink like a brewery floor. What did Tommy say, eh, about getting in this state. Look at you!”  

Her admonishment barely even landed; John still in a state of shock at what he’d witnessed, his eyes flitting to the table. Whiskey. Yes.  

Polly’s gaze followed. “No. There’ll be no more of that. You’ve had enough.”  

Finally, he moved, side stepping his aunt as he reached for the bottle, uncorking it rapidly and drinking from it directly. “Believe me, Pol. After what I just saw, all the fucking whiskey in Ireland ain’t enough.”  

She folded her arms, watching as he crashed down in the chair opposite the one she’d been comfortably sitting in. “Well, you don’t look hurt. Whatever it was, it can’t have been that bad.” 

“Not for me, but...” he began, taking another swig of the golden liquid within his grasp, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve as his eyes found hers, “for the fella outside missing his head, I can’t say the same.”  

“You bloody what, John Shelby?” Her voice rose like a siren, Polly’s authoritative boom filling the space. “A Rasmussen, I take it? And since when have you been in the habit of lopping off heads and leaving the evidence all over the bloody street? Holy shit, you boys will be the death of me!”  

She then studied him a little closer. No blood. He'd have been covered in more than just a fine misting of crimson, should he have removed somebody of their head. It also wasn’t John’s style, as far as despatching of an enemy went. He was a gangster, not a barbarian. She wouldn’t have even pegged his elder brothers for such acts, and their bloodlust far exceeded John’s. Her statement was about to be recanted when her nephew offered his reply.  

“No, not me. I didn’t do fuck all!” he corrected, gulping back more whiskey, the shock starting to soften as his muscles began to unclench, one by one. “It weren’t me, but you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what I’ve just seen out there.”  

“Is that so?” she charged, moving swiftly to stand beside his chair. “Try me.”  

He pointed his index finger towards the door, his eyes rounding once more as he relived it in his mind. “A woman, a fucking woman in a white dress, covered in blood, moving faster than I could see. She fucking... grabbed this fella, right, like he was a kiddie’s doll, bit into his neck, and then ripped his fucking head off. I ain’t lying to ya. I swear on my soul, that’s what I saw. She had these teeth, teeth like a fucking wolf.” 

Polly lifted her chin, a wave of cold dread sloshing through her insides. She knew exactly what John had seen, but could scarcely believe it. They were back. “You’re drunk. Go to bed.”  

His eyes narrowed, leaning forward in his seat. Her answer, it had been a little too swiftly delivered. “You believe me, don’t you? You know what she was.” 

“I said go to bed.” 

“I ain’t going nowhere until you tell me what the fuck that thing outside was.” Yes, Polly could be firm, but so could her nephew. It was a trait that ran strongly through the Shelby blood. She sighed, her shoulders dropping, striding to the cabinet and fetching two glasses.  

“Pour.” John met her instruction wordlessly, tipping the whiskey into the glasses she held, taking the other from her. Polly sank into her seat, sipping her whiskey and pulling a cigarette from the case beside her, lighting up. “Your great-grandmother used to call them the shadow walkers, but it’s only since that Bram Stoker fellow wrote his novel that there’s been a commonly known name for them. That woman you saw, John, she wasn’t human. She was a vampire.”  

John was baffled, and his face showed it. “But they ain’t real. I’ve heard of that book you’re on about, Dracula, isn’t it? They... they’re fiction.” 

A light snort sounded from Polly’s nose, her cigarette glowing as she took a fierce drag upon it. “Most people think that they are. They think of them as nothing more than monsters of make-believe, dreamed into existence by the imagination of a brilliant novelist.” Pausing, she smirked darkly, sighing through her nose. “I wish to god above I was one of those people. They keep themselves very well hidden, the vampires. And who would believe it, that these blood sucking creatures of the night truly exist, eh? Seeing is believing, though, and by god, John. I wish you hadn’t seen her. Those things, they’re evil incarnate.” 

“She saved me life,” he admitted, eyebrows rising a fraction. “That man, and apparently three mates of his, they were all waiting for me. The one missing his head was Samuel Rasmussen. She knew him by name.”  

Polly cocked her head slightly. “What did she say to you?”  

“Not much,” he sniffed, sipping his drink. “Said what I’ve just told you, then said my blood smelled like earth and fire, other things an’ all but I forget what. Oh, and that I was the most beautiful creature she’d seen in a long time.” 

She smiled, nodding slightly. “Well, she got that part right. You take after your mother in that respect.” It never ceased to amaze her, just how much John resembled Thora, her late sister-in-law. His blue eyes, lily skin and auburn hair came straight from her. “I’m warning you now, though. What she did for you won’t have been out of sheer magnanimity, oh no. There’ll be a reason behind it, and whatever that reason is, I am telling you, John, you’ll want for no part in it.” 

He smirked, feeling a little more himself. “What if the reason is that she just wants to fuck me?” 

Immediately, he found his ear clipped. “Fucking hell, Pol!” 

“Take something seriously for once in your fucking life!” 

He rubbed the side of his head, chewing aggressively on his toothpick. “I bloody am.” 

Her snort dripped in sarcasm “Like fuck, you are. You’d want throwing right into the loony bin if you even contemplated that, you bloody daft boy!” She remained forward in her seat, her dark eyes fixing him in an unbreakable stare. “Don’t trust her, not even for a second, or it’ll be your head ripped off your shoulders and left out for the coppers to find next. You hear me?” 

“You make it sound like I’m going to see her again,” he mused, swirling the whiskey around within the glass tumbler before sinking it.  

“You will,” she assured, her tone bitter. “You will see her again, because like I said, they don’t do anything without good reason to, those creatures. But you’ll be prepared. Carry a silver knife and get up to the church sharpish, fill a little bottle with holy water from the font. When weaponised, silver will kill her and the water will burn. And whatever you do, John, never, ever invite her into this house. She can’t get in unless she’s invited.”  

He had to wonder how, exactly, Polly had such a wealth of knowledge over them. “Have you ever met one before? You talk like you know them of old.” 

“No, thank god, but your great-grandmother Boswell, she had. Those campfire stories she told us as babes, we knew they weren’t fibs. We heeded her warnings. They’re drawn to gypsy blood, you see, something about it being palatable.” 

“She didn’t bite me, though,” John reasoned, Polly scoffing lightly. 

“If she’d just taken out four other fellas, she probably wasn’t hungry. That’s what they need to survive, the blood of the living. Trust me, she’ll be back, but you’ll be prepared. Stab her in her cold, dead heart and forget you ever met her. Don’t even think twice about it. We’ve got enough to be reckoning with, what with these fucking Rasmussen’s and the pile of shit they’re throwing our way. I don’t need the worry that you’re being stalked by the bloody undead on top of that.”  

“Why didn’t you mention any of this to us before?” 

Sinking her drink, she cleared her throat, reaching for the bottle. “And have you think I’d gone loopy?” Her snorted words brought a smile to John, Polly continuing. “We just don’t speak of them any longer. They’re rare, not an everyday threat. I’ve never heard hide nor hair of them since hearing nana’s stories, since I was just a young girl.”  

As the lie fell from her lips, Polly felt conflicted. She had to protect him, though. Keep the details scant. Besides, he was too drunk to take on anything else. Indeed, there was more she could have explained. She decided against it, clamping her lips between her teeth for a moment. 

“Hang on,” he spoke, frowning a little. “What did you mean, when you said undead?” 

“They aren’t alive anymore, John.” She paused, picking a little fleck of tobacco from her lip. “They walk and talk, but they’re not really living. Something about how they’re made, I don’t know the details, but yes. Undead. An enchanted corpse, basically.” 

“I dunno about enchanted, but she was enchanting,” he began, the corner of his mouth upturning. “She was bloody beautiful.” His face further softened as he remembered that feeling of magic lingering in the air between he and her, the pull to her, her essence shining like the brightest star within a pitch-black sky.  

“John, no. Absolutely fucking not.” Her pointed finger only momentarily wiped the growing smirk from his handsome features. “I mean it, do not even consider a fucking dalliance with a bloody vampire!”  

He shrugged slightly. “I’ve took worse to bed.” 

“John!” Her acerbic bite of his name had him in soft fits, the whiskey seeming to do the trick in placating the fear he’d felt at the time, now he was no longer in peril. “Your fucking face when you walked in here not ten minutes ago, looking like you’d seen a ghost. I was surprised your trousers were still dry, you looked that afraid!” 

“Bloody hell, Pol. I was only pulling your leg,” he laughed, rising from his seat. “Don’t worry, I ain’t stupid. I’m going to bed. Maybe all of this is just a drunken dream, I dunno.” Suddenly, her foot shot out, kicking him in the shin. “Ow, what the fuck?” 

“Did that feel like a dream to you?” 

“No, it feels like it’s gonna be a whacking great bruise on me leg!” 

She smirked, entertained at herself. “Good, might have knocked a bit of sense into you. Goodnight, love.” 

“Yeah, night, Pol.” 

He departed for the stairs, ambling up quietly so as not to wake Finn, entering his room and shivering upon the removal of his coat. His stripping of clothes into long johns and a vest was done at speed, diving under the bed covers and burrowing beneath the many woollen blankets. He hated that his room was the farthest from the chimney breast, meaning the heat didn’t ever reach the room where he could see his breath clouding through the darkness, it was so bitterly chilly.  

The knocking through of the three houses that allowed for their once illegal bookmaking endeavours to be run from the Watery Lane properties meant one large communal home, Tommy and Arthur’s abodes flanking the three, John remaining within the house he’d been born in twenty-eight years previously. It was the home he and his late wife had lived in, before he’d sadly lost her four years previously. 

Closing his eyes, he felt the pull of sleep tug at him, drifting off into dreamless slumber, awoken the following morning by the sound of the milkman’s cart doing the morning deliveries. Oh, his head. He needed tea and jam slathered toast, and quickly. Heading downstairs, he warmed enough water to have a wash and shave, combing his hair and returning to pull on a suit, opening the front door to take the milk in off the front step.  

“Morning, Mr Shelby.” 

“Morning, Jack,” he called back to the milkman, his cart paused, John turning to see a throng of people gathered a little further down the lane. “What’s all that about?”  

“Some kids found a headless body down by number six, so I’ve been told. The bobbies are on their way. Shocking business for a Wednesday morning, I can tell you!”  

John’s heart skipped on a beat as the night before rushed back over his neurons. He truly hadn’t been dreaming. “Blimey,” he began, feigning something as close to shock as he could, craning his neck a little further, able to make out the figures of his elder brother’s there surveying the scene, the local constabulary appearing right at the bottom of the lane. “Wonder how he ended up headless?”  

Jack lit a cigarette, his chest tightening as he coughed. “Might be best not to know, eh?” He paused, John seeing it, the unspoken statement there upon the milkman’s face. Grim discoveries close to a Shelby dwelling. Of course, he suspected it had something to do with him or his brothers, but Jack was much too cautious to speak it. Their reputation preceded them, after all.  

“I’ll be moving along now, Mr Shelby.” He flicked the reins, clicking his tongue. “C’mon, Beamish. Walk on.” The giant, bay shire horse snorted before continuing to the next house, Jack’s lad jumping off the back of the cart to lay the required bottles next to each door, both getting a good look at the grizzly scene as they passed it by, Tommy and Arthur having a brief chat with Sergeant Moss before walking back to meet John on the doorstep.  

The former cocked his head back in the direction of the small crowd. “Know anything about that, John? How one of our adversaries came to be missing his head almost right outside our front doors?” He’d recognised Samuel’s face as it lay wide-eyed upon the cobbles ten feet from his body, remembering him from the race meet. 

Tommy watched as his younger brother stepped back into the house, his mouth thinning. “I think we need a family meeting.” With the elders of the Shelby family assembled, cups of tea poured and cigarettes lit, John recounted the events of the night before to his brother’s, Polly interjecting with details that backed up his story. Tommy listened passively, but Arthur, well... 

His gruff laughter sounded through the air, sweeping a hand through his hair. His laughter was not mocking, though. It carried with it all the hollowness of fear. “A bloody what?”  

“Arthur, you know he’s telling the truth,” Polly stated defiantly, her eldest nephew still laughing, laughing to stop himself beginning to shake with fright. 

“What a pile of old shit! A bloody vampire, eh? Fucking hell, you two have lost your faculties if you’re expecting us to believe that!” Turning to his brother, Arthur was surprised to see Tommy completely unmoved by the story, his face unflinching, taking another drag of his cigarette.  

“Come on, Arthur,” he spoke evenly, sipping his tea. “Nobody is having you on, and you know it.” Turning to John, he placed his tea down. “This woman, John. Long, dark hair with a tattooed throat and chest?” 

He nodded a little dumbly. “Yeah, that’s her.”  

Tommy sat back again, flicking ash into the nearby ashtray with a sniff. “She’s been watching the house for a couple of weeks now.”  

“And you didn’t feel the need to mention that to anyone?” Polly charged him with, a deep frown settling between her eyebrows.  

“Speak not of the shadow walkers, lest ye bring them into the light. That’s what our dad used to say,” he revealed, Arthur scoffing immediately as he threw himself to his feet. 

“I ain’t listening to this load of old cobblers! Fucking mad, the lot of ya!”  

“Arthur, you know it’s true. You saw what I did on that night,” he reasoned softly, Arthur’s agitation winding tighter by the second as he paced the flagstones. “It’s time to face up to what happened.” 

“What night?” John demanded lightly, looking between them. Silence followed. “One of you better give me a fucking answer.”  

Tommy paused, bringing his cigarette to his lips once more. “I’ve thought about that night here and there over the years, but never mentioned it. Dad told us not to breathe a word to anyone,” he began, Arthur making a start for the door, almost throwing it off its hinges and slamming it behind him.  

Jerking his head in his wake he raised his eyebrows a fraction. “Terrified the life out of Arthur, so much so that he pissed himself. He’s never come to terms with that he witnessed, refuses to acknowledge it ever happened at all. He can’t comprehend what he saw, what we saw on that night, when dad took us up to the Black Patch when we were nippers to visit family. Now, I don’t know how much Polly revealed to you, but they aren’t spoken about, the shadow walkers as our gypsy kin always referred to them as, but for centuries, they had a pact.  

“Gypsy blood to a vampire is what a fine wine or whiskey is to us, so for hundreds of years, vampires would guard the camps in exchange for feeding upon that blood. That was, at least, until the pact was broken. I don’t know why, and neither did our dad, but one night they returned, to hand out the punishment they felt befitting of that broken pact.  

“Our dad did perhaps the only honourable thing he ever has as a father, and got on a horse, riding us out of there to the nearest church where he hid us away until the dawn. Vampires cannot walk upon hallowed ground, nor can they stand in the daylight, lest they burn to ashes. The rest of the camp weren’t so lucky. People were attacked, only very few surviving, but in a state of dread that one day, they’d be back. I suppose that day was last night, for I highly doubt she’s acting alone.” 

John immediately stared at Polly. “Did you know all of this?” 

She nodded in confirmation. “I did.” 

“So why the fuck didn’t you tell me last night?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing. 

“Because you were drunk as a lord, John. What I said was enough explanation without going into the finer details, of which I wasn’t sure you’d be able to absorb. I’m fucking surprised you comprehended even half of what I told you, to be frank.” 

John’s puzzlement was clear as it ghosted across his face, sighing as he rubbed his brow. “But it don’t make no sense. If she was here because she wanted us dead, some kind of further punishment for our kin breaking the pact, then why am I still alive? She could have had me head off, just the same as she did to Samuel fucking Rasmussen, but she didn’t.” He felt his heart flutter as he remembered how fondly she’d gazed upon him. God, she was such a beauty. 

Tommy shrugged lightly. “At a guess, I’d say she wants to rekindle the blood pact. Why she’d choose us and not one of the other families out there, well, I can’t answer that.” 

“Which means she probably wants something else from us, something greater,” a frowning Polly mused, the dread in her voice quite clear. It was a distinct change to her usual confident, self-assured tone. 

“And we’re not about to give her the chance to even broach it.” Tommy then turned to John, his eyes wide. “You’ll carry a silver knife upon your person from now on, as we all will. Her kind are not to be trusted. Killing that man, I suspect was to lure you into a false sense of security. Vampires are immortal; they have all the fucking time in the world to exact a plan. She’s biding her time.” 

“She didn’t only kill him,” John snorted, jerking his head to the right. “Coppers will find another three bodies somewhere out there soon enough.” 

Tommy rose to his feet, keen to move to his office and begin the day. “All the more reason not to trust her when she returns. Mark my words, John boy. She’ll be back. She’ll be back, I tell you, and it won’t lead to anything good.”  

All talk of vampires, blood pacts and a family history unknown to John meant that he could forget his pounding head for a short time. After his refuelling with toast and tea, he walked through to the offices, grasping the ledger and beginning to write, the space soon filling, the usual loud chaos abounding.  

Hangovers and mysterious, vampiric women aside, John’s day ended certainly more favourably than the previous. The favourite at Epson, Shamrock Pride pulled up lame in the fifth race, just as he was intended to. This netted a very tidy profit for them, John finishing his day with a spring in his step because of it.  

The Garrison for a whiskey or three? Whyever not.  

“Daddy?”  

The soft grasp of a tiny hand curled his little finger, John pausing from pulling on his overcoat to look down into the big, green eyes of his daughter, Katie carrying a book within her grasp.  

“You should be in bed, pige.” Pige. Short for pigeon, the fond pet name for his only child from his short marriage to Martha, his wife taken from him by the cruel clutches of consumption when Katie was mere baby in arms.  

Poking out her bottom lip, she proffered the book forth. The Velveteen Rabbit. It had to have been their fourth read through at that point, the book only published six months before. “Please?” 

He sighed softly through his nose. “Go on,” he spoke to his brother, “I’ll catch up with you.”  

Arthur nodded, leaving John to place his coat over the back of the fireside armchair there in the front room, adjusting his trousers as he sat, Katie scrambling onto his lap. “Right, where were we?”  

Opening the book, the cloth binding soft and velvety against his fingers, John laid the well-worn leather bookmark across Katie’s legs, stroking her strawberry blonde curls as he began to read. Ten minutes, give or take, and she would nod off with her little rosy cheeked face nestled against his chest.  

Eleven and a half minutes later, and the soft little piglet snorts of a babe in slumber filled the space, John smiling down at her. “Let’s get you up them stairs, eh, pige?” Once he’d placed her into her bed and covered her in blankets, he laid a kiss to her forehead, whispering his love before creeping out, overcoat thrown on and a cigarette lit before stepping out into the frigid night.  

Snowflakes fluttered down over the streets of Small Heath, John feeling winter tingle as his cheeks, the flames of the blast furnaces offering a roar of warmth as he passed them by, the lights of The Garrison twinkling through the inky gloom.  

“John.” 

The whisper of his name echoed through his ears, John turning, his eyes scanning for the source. Nobody. On he walked.  

“John.” 

It was louder than before this time as once again he halted, turning, looking for the female to whom the voice belonged. He almost dived out of his skin when upon his turn back, there she was.  

The vampire looked even more breathtaking to him than she had the night before. 

[riotouseaterofflesh]

You can wave a white flag; you can be an old woman or a newborn baby or someone else who visibly poses no threat whatsoever; you can be an Israeli hostage calling for help—if they see you, they will try to kill you. The five-month massacre in Gaza is not collateral damage, or an unfortunate side effect of the war against Hamas. There is no war against Hamas. Just this. The only military objective is to kill piano teachers and poets.

What I find really unbearable, though, what sticks in my throat like a clammy marble of rage, is the combination of mass murder and smugness. Israeli soldiers keep filming themselves committing smug atrocities. There’s one video I can’t stop thinking about: not even close to the worst thing the IDF has done, but maybe the most galling. An Israeli soldier stands in the ruins of a classroom in Gaza. He pulls a framed certificate off the wall and smashes it. He takes the time to erase the lessons from the chalkboard. Big man! How brave, this soldier encrusted in body armour and grenades! How heroically you defend yourself against a room where young children learn to read! But that really is exactly what he thinks. He thinks he’s being brave. Standing up against the oppressors of the Jewish people. Refusing to walk meekly into the gas chambers. He even writes it on the now-erased board: עם ישראל לא לפחד; the people of Israel aren’t afraid. Elsewhere Israeli soldiers posed in Gaza’s parliament building, grinning like they’d just taken the Reichstag. What a victory! This murderous ratissage into a city that’s been under Israeli occupation their entire lives, and their parents’ entire lives too. Then they planted dynamite around the building and blew it up. The entire country is mad off this stuff, and I do mean mad: saucer-eyed, loony. Israel’s foreign ministry shrieks like a funeral drunk whenever any government dares to raise an objection to its killing spree. Spain is Hamas! Ireland is ISIS! The whole world is made of Hitler! They also think they’re being brave. A lonely voice for justice. Confronting a cruel world with its complicity. At the Kerem Shalom crossing, protesters draped in the Israeli flag dance and sing and block aid shipments from entering Gaza. More famine! More disease! More stillborn children! They think they’re being brave too. The arctic glint of righteousness in their eyes. Even the more liberal sectors of Israeli society are getting in on it. Someone who was in Tel Aviv recently told me that most liberal Israelis don’t really have the emotional bandwidth at the moment to care too much about Palestinian suffering. They know what’s happening just down the coast from Tel Aviv, but it doesn’t register. They’re still in shock after October 7th, still worried sick for the hostages, still mourning the dead. It’s too early to worry or mourn for anyone else. The person who told me this didn’t think this Zone of Interest-style sociopathy was a bad thing. He didn’t understand why I found it so hideous. In a way, it’s also brave. It takes courage to let yourself really feel what you’re feeling, to sit with your grief, to admit that you hurt. It takes courage to be so emotionally complex. Not like the barbarians on the other side of the fence.

This madness is not limited to Israel. Everyone remembers being bullied at school. Even celebs, film stars, supermodels, beautiful and charismatic people, all seem to have had a hard time of it when they were kids. Some people build the entire foundation of their adult life on having been bullied as a child. You were such a misfit, you were so interesting and different… But nobody seems to remember being the bully, and I promise you that at some point in your life, you were also the bully. I certainly was. I couldn’t comprehend the senseless sadism of the kids who’d gang up on me, back when I was seven years old with dyspraxia and a speech impediment. What had I ever done to them? How could anyone bear to be so cruel? But somehow, all that stuff went out the window as soon as I encountered anyone lower down the totem pole than I was. My cruelty wasn’t senseless. Other people had been cruel to me, which made me a victim: anything I did was, by definition, fighting back, being brave. After all I’d been through, didn’t I deserve to experience the joys of power? Just a little? As a treat?

[nickandros]

"the temptation to take advantage of the helpless state of roman britain" and other normal sentences i've read recently.

i am going to create parallels that should have me thrown in prison.

[lambergeier]

2023 bookpost 🥳🥳🥳

43 books read this year! about 2/3rds of last year's number, but i fell off pace in summer and for the last two months and never actually have a target or care about my pace anyways, so 43 is a good solid number imho. as last year, full list with light commentary below, recs are bolded:

JANUARY

Neuromancer by William Gibson

The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation by Miriam Pawel (i am punished for my desire to learn more about the two governors brown's effects on the state of california with: family hagiography. should have known tbh)

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman (SOOOOOO GOOD. apocalyptic/religious horror in 1350's france during the black plauge. for fans of the terror, and fans of people who are in love but for whom the love won't alwayshelp!)

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (hilary ilu u were one of the greatest novelists of the past hundred years it was an honor to be alive at the same time as you. this could have been 200 pages shorter. ilu tho)

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Seamas O’Reilly (short, sweet childhood memoir of the irish writer/comedian who, famously, tweeted that story about meeting the president of ireland on ketamine.)

FEBRUARY

Either/Or by Elif Bautman (girls can i tell you. i didn't realize this was a sequel until like 100 pages into the book. that was on me.)

Two Doctors Gorski by Isaac Fellman (ah mr fellman. lol)

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka (really cool piece of fiction, first half told from the collective viewpoint of a group of regulars at a public swimming pool, second half about the one specific swimmer who's losing her independence to dementia. short, packs a punch)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (UNDEFEATED!)

One Man’s Terrorist: a Political History of the IRA by Peter Finn

Nightcrawlers by Leila Mottley (love to see local 22yos succeed wildly. does NOT mean this book was good god bless)

MARCH

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (to be clear, if you are not a cormac mccarthy fan, these books will not make you his fan. they are very much about this man's incredible hopelessness regarding a world that has invented and used the atomic bomb. what can be redeemed, etc etc. i loved them, despite a major part of the plot being consensual sibling incest, they were beautiful and phenomenal, they were not light reading)

APRIL

A Smile in his Lifetime by Joseph Hansen

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (cannot recommend the audiobook highly enough. emma read the paper copy to catch up to where i was in the audiobook so we could listen together on a car trip, and she agreesTM that the audiobook is the way to go)

MAY

Barbarian Days by William Finnegan

The Dark Lord of Derkholm by Dianna Wynne Jones

JUNE

We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (really really really cool nonfiction about ireland since the 1950s, part autobiography, more parts cultural history of a very quickly changing nation. fascinating to read this within 12 months of finn's one man's terrorist, which was a very leftist history of the IRA, and keefe's say nothing, which was an only very slightly leftist history of the IRA that was most interested in like, how compelling the history is (not a drag on it). o'toole not as big on the IRA as the other two! understandable!)

JULY

The Binding by Bridget Collins

The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander (for all fans of the history of the story of the illiad!!! short and passionate!)

Flux by Jinwoo Chong (solid new debut scifi - who thought it could still happen!)

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy

The Witch King by Martha Wells (this book sucked ass!!! have mentioned this several times already this year!!!)

An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien (some things about this book were fun, many were infuriating, absolute worst had to be the insistence that in the future: therapy would solve even more problems that it does today :))

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (see my beautiful wife's post on the subject)

Stay True by Hua Hsu (beautiful, deserves the pulitzer, not 100% my thing but still very good)

AUGUST

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (the voice was hard to get used to for the first 50 pages, but i ended up really liking this tbh. i've never read copperfield, so not sure if that improved the experience)

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

The Boys by Katie Hafner (a mistake to read this, but at least the twist was funny! there wasn't anything else in the book, but only a partial waste of time at the end)

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (finally read this, which has truly polarized my extended social circle, but i ended up liking it. i didn't always get what it was doing 100% of the time, and didn't so much feel compelled to find out, but i tore through it and will always be a sucker for a story about that doesn't fix you but does keep you alive. can see both sides of this debate)

American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts by Chris McGreal (we have to kill every sackler. solid history of the epidemic. EVERY sackler.)

SEPTEMBER

The Season by Kristen Richardson (half-baked history of the debutante social ritual. but, not like there's many other histories of the subject!)

All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (funny, contained extensive dirtbag lesbian behaviors, but lacked some heft at the end)

In Memoriam by Alice Winn (do you s2b2? do you want some solid, tome-like origfic? do you want all of those things and also siegfried sassoon rpf? well great news!)

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller (pleaseeeeeee tell me if you have read this or do read this it was SOOOOOO GOOD and i had NEVER heard of this guy before!!! fantastically written prose, everything builds with infinite dread to a single horrible punchline, i am still wowed thinking about it)

The Trees by Percival Everett (haha hey wanna get fucked up. dark dark dark comedy)

OCTOBER

Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale (really enjoyable if slightly overlong romance novel that i got off a rec list for historical romances with disabled love interests. does a really good interesting job of giving the love interest full breadth and agency despite severe processing impairment following a stroke)

Mobility by Linda Kiesling

The Rachel Incident by Rachel O’Donahughe

NOVEMBER

NO BOOK NOVEMBER MFS

DECEMBER

Not Even the Dead by Juan Gómez Bárcena (would also like to know if anyone else has read this so we can try and figure out what the fuck was going on right at the end!! also the fact that this is primarily about mexican history, written by a spaniard, with the specter of the US very prominent in the book is like. hm i would love to be able to read some mexican press reviews of this lol)

When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era by Donovan X. Ramsey (picked this up following the opioid book, which discussed but didn't go deep on how the country's reaction to the opioid epidemic was so vastly different from the crack epidemic. put a lot of stuff into context lmao.)

WAIT AT SOME POINT THIS YEAR I REREAD RUMO AND HIS MIRACULOUS ADVENTURES BY WALTER MOERS. I DON'T KNOW WHEN. DIDN'T WRITE IT DOWN. BUT I DID REREAD IT. 44 BOOKS. shout out to mr. moers for writing some extremely fucking creepy books for teenagers <3

okay i was gonna do more about like general trends and vibes of this year's books, also about the four books i am still reading rn lol, but i have been typing for soooooooooooo long so i'm just gonna reblog with more thots in the morning. stay prepared everyone

[dailyanarchistposts]

Footnotes, 151 - 200

[151] See Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Oldenburg, 1887. Münzinger, Ueber das Recht und Sitten der Bogos, Winterthur” 1859; Casalis, Les Bassoutos, Paris, 1859; Maclean, Kafir Laws and Customs, Mount Coke, 1858, etc.

[152] Waitz, iii. 423 seq.

[153] Post’s Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Familien Rechts Oldenburg, 1889, pp. 270 seq.

[154] Powell, Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnography, Washington, 1881, quoted in Post’s Studien, p. 290; Bastian’s Inselgruppen in Oceanien, 1883, p. 88.

[155] De Stuers, quoted by Waitz, v. 141.

[156] W. Arnold, in his Wanderungen und Ansiedelungen der deutschen Stämme, p. 431, even maintains that one-half of the now arable area in middle Germany must have been reclaimed from the sixth to the ninth century. Nitzsch (Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, Leipzig, 1883, vol. i.) shares the same opinion.

[157] Leo and Botta, Histoire d’Italie, French edition, 1844, t. i., p. 37.

[158] The composition for the stealing of a simple knife was 15 solidii and of the iron parts of a mill, 45 solidii (See on this subject Lamprecht’s Wirthschaft und Recht der Franken in Raumer’s Historisches Taschenbuch, 1883, p. 52.) According to the Riparian law, the sword, the spear, and the iron armor of a warrior attained the value of at least twenty-five cows, or two years of a freeman’s labor. A cuirass alone was valued in the Salic law (Desmichels, quoted by Michelet) at as much as thirty-six bushels of wheat.

[159] The chief wealth of the chieftains, for a long time, was in their personal domains peopled partly with prisoner slaves, but chiefly in the above way. On the origin of property see Inama Sternegg’s Die Ausbildung der grossen Grundherrschaften in Deutschland, in Schmoller’s Forschungen, Bd. I., 1878; F. Dahn’s Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker, Berlin, 1881; Maurer’s Dorfverfassung; Guizot’s Essais sur l’histoire de France; Maine’s Village Community; Botta’s Histoire d’Italie; Seebohm, Vinogradov, J. R. Green, etc.

[160] See Sir Henry Maine’s International Law, London, 1888.

[161] Ancient Laws of Ireland, Introduction; E. Nys, Études de droit international, t. i., 1896, pp. 86 seq. Among the Ossetes the arbiters from three oldest villages enjoy a special reputation (M. Kovalevsky’s Modern Custom and Old Law, Moscow, 1886, ii. 217, Russian).

[162] It is permissible to think that this conception (related to the conception of tanistry) played an important part in the life of the period; but research has not yet been directed that way.

[163] It was distinctly stated in the charter of St. Quentin of the year 1002 that the ransom for houses which had to be demolished for crimes went for the city walls. The same destination was given to the Ungeld in German cities. At Pskov the cathedral was the bank for the fines, and from this fund money was taken for the wails.

[164] Sohm, Fränkische Rechts- und Gerichtsverfassung, p. 23; also Nitzsch, Geschechte des deutschen Volkes, i. 78.

[165] See the excellent remarks on this subject in Augustin Thierry’s Lettres sur l’histoire de France. 7th Letter. The barbarian translations of parts of the Bible are extremely instructive on this point.

[166] Thirty-six times more than a noble, according to the Anglo-Saxon law. In the code of Rothari the slaying of a king is, however, punished by death; but (apart from Roman influence) this new disposition was introduced (in 646) in the Lombardian law — as remarked by Leo and Botta — to cover the king from blood revenge. The king being at that time the executioner of his own sentences (as the tribe formerly was of its own sentences), he had to be protected by a special disposition, the more so as several Lombardian kings before Rothari had been slain in succession (Leo and Botta, l.c., i. 66–90).

[167] Kaufmann, Deutsche Geschichte, Bd. I. “Die Germanen der Urzeit,” p. 133.

[168] Dr. F. Dahn, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker, Berlin, 1881, Bd. I. 96.

[169] If I thus follow the views long since advocated by Maurer (Geschichte der Städteverfassung in Deutschland, Erlangen, 1869), it is because he has fully proved the uninterrupted evolution from the village community to the medieval city, and that his views alone can explain the universality of the communal movement. Savigny and Eichhorn and their followers have certainly proved that the traditions of the Roman municipia had never totally disappeared. But they took no account of the village community period which the barbarians lived through before they had any cities. The fact is, that whenever mankind made a new start in civilization, in Greece, Rome, or middle Europe, it passed through the same stages — the tribe, the village community, the free city, the state — each one naturally evolving out of the preceding stage. Of course, the experience of each preceding civilization was never lost. Greece (itself influenced by Eastern civilizations) influenced Rome, and Rome influenced our civilization; but each of them begin from the same beginning — the tribe. And just as we cannot say that our states are continuations of the Roman state, so also can we not say that the mediæval cities of Europe (including Scandinavia and Russia) were a continuation of the Roman cities. They were a continuation of the barbarian village community, influenced to a certain extent by the traditions of the Roman towns.

[170] M. Kovalevsky, Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia (Ilchester Lectures, London, 1891, Lecture 4).

[171] A considerable amount of research had to be done before this character of the so-called udyelnyi period was properly established by the works of Byelaeff (Tales from Russian History), Kostomaroff (The Beginnings of Autocracy in Russia), and especially Professor Sergievich (The Vyeche and the Prince). The English reader may find some information about this period in the just-named work of M. Kovalevsky, in Rambaud’s History of Russia, and, in a short summary, in the article “Russia” of the last edition of Chambers’s Encyclopædia.

[172] Ferrari, Histoire des révolutions d’Italie, i. 257; Kallsen, Die deutschen Städte im Mittelalter, Bd. I. (Halle, 1891).

[173] See the excellent remarks of Mr. G.L. Gomme as regards the folkmote of London (The Literature of Local Institutions, London, 1886, p. 76). It must, however, be remarked that in royal cities the folkmote never attained the independence which it assumed elsewhere. It is even certain that Moscow and Paris were chosen by the kings and the Church as the cradles of the future royal authority in the State, because they did not possess the tradition of folkmotes accustomed to act as sovereign in all matters.

[174] A. Luchaire, Les Communes françaises; also Kluckohn, Geschichte des Gottesfrieden, 1857. L. Sémichon (La paix et la trève de Dieu, 2 vols., Paris, 1869) has tried to represent the communal movement as issued from that institution. In reality, the treuga Dei, like the league started under Louis le Gros for the defense against both the robberies of the nobles and the Norman invasions, was a thoroughly popular movement. The only historian who mentions this last league — that is, Vitalis — describes it as a “popular community” (“Considérations sur l’histoire de France,” in vol. iv. of Aug. Thierry’s Œuvres, Paris, 1868, p. 191 and note).

[175] Ferrari, i. 152, 263, etc.

[176] Perrens, Histoire de Florence, i. 188; Ferrari, l.c., i. 283.

[177] Aug. Thierry, Essai sur l’histoire du Tiers État, Paris, 1875, p. 414, note.

[178] F. Rocquain, “La Renaissance au XIIe siècle,” in Études sur l’histoire de France, Paris, 1875, pp. 55–117.

[179] N. Kostomaroff, “The Rationalists of the Twelfth Century,” in his Monographies and Researches (Russian).

[180] Very interesting facts relative to the universality of guilds will be found in “Two Thousand Years of Guild Life,” by Rev. J. M. Lambert, Hull, 1891. On the Georgian amkari, see S. Eghiazarov, Gorodskiye Tsekhi (“Organization of Transcaucasian Amkari”), in Memoirs of the Caucasian Geographical Society, xiv. 2, 1891.

[181] J.D. Wunderer’s “Reisebericht” in Fichard’s Frankfurter Archiv, ii. 245; quoted by Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 355.

[182] Dr. Leonard Ennen, Der Dom zu Köln, Historische Einleitung, Köln, 1871, pp. 46, 50.

[183] See previous chapter.

[184] Kofod Ancher, Om gamle Danske Gilder og deres Undergâng, Copenhagen, 1785. Statutes of a Knu guild.

[185] Upon the position of women in guilds, see Miss Toulmin Smith’s introductory remarks to the English Guilds of her father. One of the Cambridge statutes (p. 281) of the year 1503 is quite positive in the following sentence: “Thys statute is made by the comyne assent of all the bretherne and sisterne of alhallowe yelde.”

[186] In mediæval times, only secret aggression was treated as a murder. Blood-revenge in broad daylight was justice; and slaying in a quarrel was not murder, once the aggressor showed his willingness to repent and to repair the wrong he had done. Deep traces of this distinction still exist in modern criminal law, especially in Russia.

[187] Kofod Ancher, l.c. This old booklet contains much that has been lost sight of by later explorers.

[188] They played an important part in the revolts of the serfs, and were therefore prohibited several times in succession in the second half of the ninth century. Of course, the king’s prohibitions remained a dead letter.

[189] The mediæval Italian painters were also organized in guilds, which became at a later epoch Academies of art. If the Italian art of those times is impressed with so much individuality that we distinguish, even now, between the different schools of Padua, Bassano, Treviso, Verona, and so on, although all these cities were under the sway of Venice, this was due — J. Paul Richter remarks — to the fact that the painters of each city belonged to a separate guild, friendly with the guilds of other towns, but leading a separate existence. The oldest guild-statute known is that of Verona, dating from 1303, but evidently copied from some much older statute. “Fraternal assistance in necessity of whatever kind,” “hospitality towards strangers, when passing through the town, as thus information may be obtained about matters which one may like to learn,” and “obligation of offering comfort in case of debility” are among the obligations of the members (Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1890, and Aug. 1892).

[190] The chief works on the artels are named in the article “Russia” of the Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, p. 84.

[191] See, for instance, the texts of the Cambridge guilds given by Toulmin Smith (English Guilds, London, 1870, pp. 274–276), from which it appears that the “generall and principall day” was the “eleccioun day;” or, Ch. M. Clode’s The Early History of the Guild of the Merchant Taylors, London, 1888, i. 45; and so on. For the renewal of allegiance, see the Jómsviking saga, mentioned in Pappenheim’s Altdänische Schutzgilden, Breslau, 1885, p. 67. It appears very probable that when the guilds began to be prosecuted, many of them inscribed in their statutes the meal day only, or their pious duties, and only alluded to the judicial function of the guild in vague words; but this function did not disappear till a very much later time. The question, “Who will be my judge?” has no meaning now, since the State has appropriated for its bureaucracy the organization of justice; but it was of primordial importance in mediæval times, the more so as self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. It must also be remarked that the translation of the Saxon and Danish “guild-bretheren,” or “brodre,” by the Latin convivii must also have contributed to the above confusion.

[192] See the excellent remarks upon the frith guild by J.R. Green and Mrs. Green in The Conquest of England, London, 1883, pp. 229–230.

[193] See Appendix X.

[194] Recueil des ordonnances des rois de France, t. xii. 562; quoted by Aug. Thierry in Considérations sur l’histoire de France, p. 196, ed. 12mo.

[195] A. Luchaire, Les Communes françaises, pp, 45–46.

[196] Guilbert de Nogent, De vita sua, quoted by Luchaire, l.c., p. 14.

[197] Lebret, Histoire de Venise, i. 393; also Marin, quoted by Leo and Botta in Histoire de l’Italie, French edition, 1844, t. i 500.

[198] Dr. W. Arnold, Verfassungsgeschichte der deutschen Freistädte, 1854, Bd. ii. 227 seq.; Ennen, Geschichte der Stadt Koeln, Bd. i. 228–229; also the documents published by Ennen and Eckert.

[199] Conquest of England, 1883, p. 453.

[200] Byelaeff, Russian History, vols. ii. and iii.

[psalm22-6]

June 1907 Century Magazine published a letter said to be addressed to an Italian Count Victor A. Pepe, written by Victor Hugo, and translated into Italian "probably" by Hugo's secretary. The Count's daughter, Countess Rozwadowska, came into possession of the letter, believed to be unpublished, and shared it with the Century Magazine. However, I haven't been able to find out any more about Pepe or Rozwadowska. You will probably recognize the letter in question (which I will put below the cut) as the one Hugo wrote to the publisher of the Italian translation of Les Miserables, M. Daelli of Milan. Perhaps it was first published in English in 1907 but it had definitely been published in French as early as 1890, at the end of the edition of Les Mis published by Émile Testard and I believe it was included in the original 1862/3 edition of the Italian translation, based on a google translate of this auction listing. The last mystery for me is the signature, which doesn't look to me like Victor Hugo's signature at all. The letter was apparently quite interesting to English-speaking readers and I found several newspaper articles discussing its publication. If you know anything else about this letter please share!! I'm sure I've read something else about it...somewhere....

HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.

You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Misérables is written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: "Open to me, I come for you."

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism, that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin. Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent rags on man.

Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone. The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same thing as to understand the Gospel badly.

Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism be yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance, whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization acknowledges?

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience? military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy? Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris? What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons. Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes! Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves, Miserables.

From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.

I resume. This book, Les Misérables, is no less your mirror than ours. Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,—I understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.

As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.

This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French, Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more, human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.

Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.

In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight, with having transgressed the bounds of what they call "French taste"; I should be glad if this eulogium were merited.

In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"

This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one phrase in your letter. You write:—

"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: 'This book, Les Misérables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French read it as a history, we read it as a romance.'"—Alas! I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it, sir. Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished sentiments.

VICTOR HUGO.

[lupeloto]

tag game

hi so i love tag games and interacting with everyone soooo here’s a little tag game i made if anyone wants to join! inspired by @deedala ‘s tag games!!!

📺favorite tv show? shamelesssss whatever

🕴️ favorite character? mickey *gasp* and fiona *nobody is surprised*

💋favorite relationship in the show? i guess those two gay mfs, ya know the big one and the smaller one *crowd booes, throws tomatoes*

👯‍♂️fav sibling relationship in the show? fiona and ian asf‼️ my girls fr

🎨favorite art form? film and/or television!

⚡️a talent you wish you had? any of them….but specifically drawing

☀️what is one thing that can always make your day better? my puppy dogs🐶

🎬favorite fictional character of all time? mickey milkovich he’s like everything to me or whatever

🌅dream place to travel to? ireland!

🎈you’re planning a huge party, what’s the theme? it’s twilight themed, everyone has to dress up as a character

🍕favorite pizza topping of all time? canadian bacon and pINEAPPLE

🥂you can pick ONE celebrity to have dinner with…who? ayo edibiri… would absolutely killll to pick her brain for a moment

🎥favorite movie that you kinda know is bad but you still love? grownups for sure

👖how would you describe your style? black with a little bit of pink in there as well or as my family calls it “angel of darkness”

🖤finally, something making you smile this week? possible snow in my area this week! and my lovely friends

i’m sure some of these have been in tag games before but if anyone wants to join in! @mickeysgaymom @heymrspatel @gallawitchxx @lingy910y @creepkinginc @milkovichrules @michellemisfit @mybrainismelted @krysmiss @golden28s @mmmichyyy @stocious @ardent-fox @jademickian @deathclassic @vintagelacerosette @creepkinginc @such-a-barbarian @scurvgirl @transmickey @depressedstressedlemonzest @callivich @sweetbee78

[moorishflower]

Hello, I create food from fiction and fanfiction, and love your work! Although I follow many stories you write, I was leaving some to read later because I can't hold too many WIPs in my head and you are such a prolific writer! So imagine my delight when I decided to start your Little Histories because the premise was too interesting to not read right now, and there was an entire chapter titled food?!!! Aaa!! So this is me just saying that I plan on making some foods from this story and will tag you and your story too! I hope that's fine.

And my question was: what is a full English breakfast? Based on your story and Google, it seems to include at least sausages, baked beans, fried mushrooms, runny eggs (sunny side up?), and also bacon, toast, fried bread (?), toasted bread, grilled tomatoes (?), black pudding (is this mandatory?). What should I absolutely include for the sake of the story?

Ok thank you and I can't wait for more updates to this sweet story!

Hello my dear! Thank you for the ask and the message, and can I just say that people who recreate food from books and fic are WIZARDS like you have a power that fascinates and compels me and I cannot wait to see what you come up with when you do!!! <3

So a traditional Full English breakfast is a massive undertaking and there's a reason why it's called a FULL English lol. The absolute musts are:

Sausage (If you're making this at home, it's kind of whatever sausage you like to use best. Breakfast sausage is popular.)

Back bacon (Specifically back bacon, what we'd call Canadian bacon in the US -- I think streaky bacon i.e. iconic American bacon is used sometimes, but much more rarely and it's definitely not traditional)

Sunny-side up eggs

Fried bread (You'll see this sort of interchangeably referred to as "toast" when looking at recipes and I do the same in my fic, but it is specifically bread fried in butter or oil, though I prefer butter)

Tomatoes (Cut in half, seasoned with salt and pepper, and then seared flesh-side down until they get some color. They don't have to be cooked through, though it depends on your preference)

Beans (Beans are a MUST according to anyone from the UK. You need British style beans, which are different from American-style baked beans. I've been informed that Heinz makes a British style canned beans, but I will be really honest -- the few times I've made a Full English I did not add beans because I'm a filthy Yank loool)

Optional Ingredients:

Mushrooms (Some people will say that these are required, but if you don't like mushrooms, you don't need them. These get browned and caramelized in a bit of oil or butter, with s&p for seasoning if you want!)

Black pudding (Also called blood sausage. If you like it, you love it. If you don't like it, nothing on earth will make you eat it. Black pudding gets sliced and cooked the same way as sausage. It's much harder to get in America (though I've heard if you have a local butcher you can sometimes get it), so I've never actually had it.)

Potatoes (There are some people who will stab you for mentioning hash browns in the same breath as a Full English and there are some people, like me, who are filthy Yanks and prefer potatoes over beans. For those of us who are heathen barbarians, the frozen triangular hash browns are fine, lol.)

There are regional variants that I'm not getting into because they aren't mentioned in the fic (Scotland, Wales, and Ireland all have specific additions), but these are the core things that make up a Full English! Thank you so much for reading, I'm so so glad you're enjoying so far and I hope you're having fun and continue to have fun!!! <3

[fearsmagazine]

THE WATCHERS | Official Trailer & Images

You can’t see them, but they see everything.

From producer M. Night Shyamalan comes “The Watchers,” written for the screen and directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan and based on the novel by A.M. Shine. The film follows Mina, a 28-year-old artist, who gets stranded in an expansive, untouched forest in western Ireland. When Mina finds shelter, she unknowingly becomes trapped alongside three strangers who are watched and stalked by mysterious creatures each night.

(L-R) OLIVER FINNEGAN as Daniel, OLWEN FOUÉRÉ as Madeline, DAKOTA FANNING as Mina and GEORGINA CAMPBELL as Ciara in New Line Cinema’s and Warner Bros. Pictures’ fantasy thriller “THE WATCHERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

Where are. Who are. What are...

“The Watchers” stars Dakota Fanning (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Ocean’s Eight”), Georgina Campbell (“Barbarian,” “Suspicion”), Oliver Finnegan (“Creeped Out,” “Outlander”) and Olwen Fouere (“The Northman,” “The Tourist”). The film is produced by M. Night Shyamalan, Ashwin Rajan and Nimitt Mankad. The executive producers are Jo Homewood and Stephen Dembitzer.

GEORGINA CAMPBELL as Ciara and DAKOTA FANNING as Mina in New Line Cinema’s and Warner Bros. Pictures’ fantasy thriller “THE WATCHERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

Joining writer/director Shyamalan behind-the-camera are director of photography Eli Arenson (“Lamb,” “Hospitality”), production designer Ferdia Murphy (“Lola,” “Finding You”), editor Job ter Burg (“Benedetta,” “Elle”) and costume design by Frank Gallacher (“Sebastian,” “Aftersun”). The music is by Abel Korzeniowski (“Till,” “The Nun”).

New Line Cinema presents “The Watchers,” set to open in theaters internationally beginning 12 June 2024 and in North America on June 14, 2024; it will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures.

[catluvver118]

Tag Game

Thanks @krystallouhoo for the tag.

Name: Trish

Whereabouts in the world are you? West of Ireland

Do you have any pets? Yes, my cutie cat Ellie.

What do you do for work? I work in education

Favorite fruit? Lemon

A pet peeve of yours: people that take up more that one parking space

Are you a fast walker or a slow walker? Somewhere in the middle?

How do you usually wear your hair? above the shoulder bob

Sunny days or rainy days? Much prefer sunny days but living in Ireland i am very used to the raining days - just had the wettest July!!!

What time do you usually go to bed? around 11 - 12am

what time do you usually wake up? when I'm working around 6.30 and when I'm off around 8am

if you were a cartoon character, what would be your everyday outfit? crop jeans, comfy top and an oversized hoodie.

Something you’d like to learn: I can speak very basic Irish but I'd like to learn it fully and be fluent.

And finally, tell me something that made you happy recently: My sister and niblings visited - love them to bits

Reckon alot have done it but I'll tag @mybrainismelted @softmick @irideunicorns @jademickian @francesrose3 @gallabitch73 @gallavichlover19 @juliakayyy @such-a-barbarian @auds-and-evens

[agentleem]

My Favorite DND campaign I played in

We were a group called "The Leviathan Company," but I forgot how exactly we got that name (might've been the leviathan we fought). The players were -Zeta: Warforged Barbarian (my character). The very first thing he did in life was make a religion on their origins (Which involve Red vs Blue references, warforgeds, and gnomes). They then proceeded to absentmindedly harass the country side before joining the party. He has an absurd and nonsensical view of the world, and little thing like "common sense" isn't going to stop him from doing something ridiculous. He has handaxes installed in his hands and a crossbow in his mouth that he ate. While not confirmed, I often joked that Zeta's innard are rather lovecraftian and eldritch. After the campaign ended, he invented Mac n Cheese on accident. -Dar MakDerlad: Human Fighter, noble from a fictional country that his player wrote lots of lore about--including a language--which is Australia and Ireland combined, put in snow, and with the same general views of a warhammer city. He is quickly-angered, prone to graphic threats, heavily racist, but loyal to the point that he'd give his life if he betrayed his friends. He chills out at least a slight bit, don't worry. Also, he is both gay and homophobic, and half the campaign is about trying to revive his dead boyfriend (and other war buddies too). -Anakiir Mortis: Drow Sorceror, skilled in alchemy, a scholar, hails from beyond the lands. He is the smartest of the group and tries to expand his knowledge. Tied with Dar as the morally worst person in the party. He used to have a pet fish named Marvin that he would feed magic items to increase the strength of. However, he released Marvin to fight the Leviathan. He is also gay, but I'm pretty sure his player confirmed that to one-up Dar. His backstory is spoilers, and I might tell this story later (and Dar's player is trying to write a novel on it) -Lily: High Elf Rogue and Sorceress who works in an underground crime syndicate, stealing riches from nobles. Unsurprisingly, she hates nobles with a burning passion. She tries to live her best life. Racist against Dwarves and Gnomes for personal reasons. She joined the party because her syndicate had to lay low as there weren't many jobs at the moment. She is also a Lesbian, and bought a Tiefling slave girl to romance (Btw, her player probably made her for horny reasons, but he ended up giving her excellent development) -Sir Ivan, Human Paladin of Emotep, the God of Food, Money, Bitches. He is the moral compass and straight man of the group (due to being the only one who isn't gay--or asexual, in Zeta's case). He is the standard lawful good, except it's actually done in a good way instead of a stupid way. He also has a backstory that's spoilers, so I'll refrain from telling. Some NPCs that joined them: -Cyren Arafir: High Elf Bard originally hired as a one-night stand for Anakiir, ends up becoming an integral party member. -Doc: Human Cleric of Emotep the party yoinked one day. The DM accidentally gave him Dr Ned's voice from Borderlands. -Lila: Tiefling Rogue, mute slave girl that Lily bought. She got killed in the fight with the Fish King, but she got better. -Marvin: Fish-turned God, was fed magic items by Anakiir until he ascended in the fight against the Leviathan of Kua-Toa making. Current Wherabouts are unknown. -Child: I forgot his name but luckily it's spoilers, so I don't have to tell you right now.

I might detail some of the sessions that happened in this campaign.

[thelaithlyworm]

Idle Days on the Yann

And so we came into the central stream, whereat the sailors lowered the greater sails. But I had gone to bow before the captain, and to inquire concerning the miracles, and appearances among men, of the most holy gods of whatever land he had come from. And the captain answered that he came from fair Belzoond, and worshipped gods that were the least and humblest, who seldom sent the famine or the thunder, and were easily appeased with little battles. And I told how I came from Ireland, which is of Europe, whereat the captain and all the sailors laughed, for they said, “There are no such places in all the land of dreams.”...

-

This was an interesting one to work on. Lord Dunsany was one of the Great British Fantasists, often big on lush dreamscapes and surreal travelogues over 'plot', though some of his stories of daring but ill-fated thieves find echoes in Conan the Barbarian and Lankhmar. He was, however, very much of a different age to what comes to mind when we think 'fantasy novel' these days. He inspired H P Lovecraft and corresponded for years with Arthur C Clarke, and one of his non-fantasy books, Curse of the Wise Woman, is half luxurious descriptions of hunting in the wilderness and half 'the difficulty of growing up among the sectarian disputes of The Troubles.'

Which, I think, is why this particular story of his sticks with me so much, as they travel down the river in the care of their many little gods, and remember their tiny cities, and every night go to sleep to the Helmsman praying, 'To whatever god may hear. ... wherever sailors sleep or helmsmen watch: guard, guide, and return us to the old land, that has known us: to the far homes that we know. To all the gods that are. To whatever god may hear.'

[uniofaberdeen]

Study reveals new insights into the origins of Scotland's mysterious Picts

Scotland's Picts have long been viewed as a mysterious people with their enigmatic symbols and inscriptions, accentuated by representations of them as wild barbarians with exotic origins.

But a newly published study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Aberdeen and Liverpool John Moores University is helping to shed new light on the origins of the Picts.

The Picts were first mentioned in the late 3rd century CE as resisting the Romans and went on to form a powerful kingdom that ruled over a large part of northern Britain, in present-day north-east Scotland.

In the medieval period, the Picts were considered immigrants from Thrace (north of the Aegean Sea), Scythia (eastern Europe), or isles north of Britain but as they left few written sources of their own little is known of their origins or relations with other cultural groups living in Britain.

Archaeologists have conducted the first extensive analysis of Pictish genomes and their results have been published today (27/04/2023) in the open access journal PLOS Genetics.

The results reveal a long-standing genetic continuity in some regions of the British Isles, helping to build a picture of where the Picts came from and providing new understanding of how present-day genetic diversity formed. The findings also confirm descriptions by the great English historian Bede of the far-flung eastern origins of the Picts as one of myth and fantasy.

The researchers used Identity-By-Descent (IBD) methods to compare two high-quality Pictish genomes sequenced from individuals excavated from Pictish-era cemeteries at Lundin Links in Fife (Southern Pictland) and Balintore in Easter Ross (Northern Pictland) to those of previously published ancient genomes as well as the modern population.

Dr Linus Girdland Flink of the University of Aberdeen, senior corresponding author of the study, said: “Among the peoples present during the first millennium CE in Britain, the Picts are one of the most enigmatic.

“Their unique cultural features such as Pictish symbols and the scarcity of contemporary literary and archaeological sources resulted in many diverse hypotheses about their origin, lifestyle and culture, part of the so-called ‘Pictish problem’.

“We aimed to determine the genetic relationships between the Picts and neighbouring modern-day and ancient populations.

“Using DNA analysis, we have been able to fill a gap in an understudied area of Scotland’s past.

“Our results show that individuals from western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Northumbria display a higher degree of Identity-By-Descent (IBD) sharing with the Pictish genomes, meaning they are genetically most similar among modern populations.”

This genetic make-up was distinct from areas of southern England where there is a greater relative degree of Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Dr Adeline Morez from Liverpool John Moores University, lead corresponding author of the study, adds: “Our findings also support the idea of regional continuity between the Late Iron Age and early medieval periods and indicates that the Picts were local to the British Isles in their origin, as their gene pool is drawn from the older Iron Age, and not from large-scale migration, from exotic locations far to the east.

“However, by comparing the samples between southern and northern Pictland we can also see that they were not one homogenous group and that there are some distinct differences, which point to patterns of migration and life-time mobility that require further study.”

The analysis of mitochondrial genomes from Lundin Links has also provided an insight into another Pictish myth – that they practised a form of matriliny, with succession and perhaps inheritance going to the sister’s son rather than directly through the male line.

“In a matrilocal system we would expect to find females staying in their birthplace after their marriage and throughout their life.

“At Lundin Links, diversity in the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA suggests this was not the case. This finding challenges the older hypotheses that Pictish succession was passed along the mother’s side and raise further questions about our understanding of Pictish society and its organisation.”

[the-wild-nerdy-gay]

So I’m thinking about writing for some of my cosplay OCs

There are definitely five I would write for so I’m going to introduce you to them now. I only have photos of four of them though so I will update with the final photo of the last one once I get them.

Naevys Torlana 🪻🐍

She uses she/they pronouns. They are fae and have some pretty powerful magic. They were once a member of the spring court but left it when she fell in love with a human. She moved to the wild court that resides in the fae wilds, they have far less rules about what fae are and are not allowed to do which gives her more freedom. They have a snake familiar named Asphodel who is very loving and quiet cuddly. They continuously fall in love with the reincarnation of their first love who eventually regains the memories of their past lives together. They wait in the fae wilds for the day when their love (this would be the reader) reincarnates as a fae in the fae wilds. Fae are either born or a human can reincarnate as one, coming out as a fully formed adult fae from a tree in the fae wilds. They are loyal, bright, big on found family, a leader amongst the wild fae court, and powerful magician, and quite flirty in both a romantic and a platonic sense. They do have some darkness in their past and are not afraid to get their hands dirty if it means protecting someone or something they care about.

They have similar vibes to the Howl’s Moving Castle movie if that makes any sense.

Quotes from them:

“My darling, if I could give you every star in the sky I would.”

“You will always be the most precious being in the world to me.”

“If they so much as raise a finger against you I will make the heavens weep over the atrocities I would commit to keep you safe. I will become the worst monster imaginable and not lose a second of sleep over it if it meant protecting you.”

Some nicknames they use are ‘my darling’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘angel’, ‘dearest’, and ‘my love’.

Love language:

Giving: words of affirmation and acts of service.

Receiving: quality time and words of affirmation.

Ghewnah Reh ☕️🗡️

She is set in a modern fantasy setting and is an orc barbarian. She uses she/her pronouns and goes by Gwen or her last name, Reh, to make it easier on people. She’s really down to earth and fun, she tends to be up beat and friendly. If I had to relate her to a character I would say Kirishima from mha. She’s very loyal to her friends and very hard working. Her best friend is a character later down on this list. She is very muscular under that loose fitting clothes and loves to lift up her friends both physically and emotionally. Absolutely is the type to run up and hug you while spinning you around in the air while laughing. She is very tall, I don’t care how tall you are she is at least a head taller. She is canonically 7’6”. She is very close with her family and she considers her friends to be family. She can enter a rage much like other barbarians which makes her hit harder, hit easier, run faster, lift more, basically it enhances all of her physical abilities. She works very hard to never make anyone afraid of her though, and if she can feel her anger rising she often asks if she can be excused for a few moments to calm down so she doesn’t yell at someone she cares about. You basically never have to worry about her yelling at you in other words but she will protect you with everything she has in her.

Quotes from them:

“There’s my favorite person!”

“I’ve got you, don’t worry.”

“I will always be here for you. If you ever need anything I’ll do everything I can to take care of it for you. I care about you so I’ll take care of you.”

Nicknames they use are “baby”, “sweetie”, “baby bug”, “cutie”, and “babe”.

Love language:

Giving: physical touch and acts of service

Receiving: physical touch and words of affirmation

Captain Nova ‘Devil’s Charm’ Oakley ⚓️🌊

She is a pirate Captain and her ship is known as the Scarlet Revenge. She uses she/her pronouns. She is from Ireland pre potato famine but she has lost the accent mostly due to not being around people with that accent for a very long time. She is known for being incredibly charming, hence the nickname, and a fierce fighter. She treats her crew like her own and everyone on her ship eats before she does. She left home due to not being accepted so because of that she accepts all walks of life on her ship with open arms. She is hot and she knows it which leads to her being slightly cocky but not in the way where she acts like she’s better than you more in the way that she’s incredibly confident. She is very protective of her crew and sees them as her family but she doesn’t vocalize that, it’s more shown through her actions. If one of her crew members seems out of it she will often take up their job so that they can rest and is always there to talk to.

Quotes from them:

“My beloved horizon has nothing on your eyes.”

“What’s mine is yours.”

“I would trade every scrap of gold I have ever come across just to see you smile, love.”

Nicknames they use are ‘love’, ‘my darling’, ‘my treasure’, ‘my perfection’, and ‘my beloved’.

Love language:

Giving: gift giving and acts of service.

Receiving: quality time and acts of service.

Dr. Jeanine ‘Gene’ Travis 🧪🧬

Gene is somewhat of a mad scientist and has a habit of using themselves as a test subject. They technically use any pronouns but prefer they/them. They use any pronouns in the sense of as long as you get their attention that works but since they prefer they/them that’s what I’m mainly going to use. They invent all kinds of things with a specific interest in genetics which is why they tell everyone to call them Gene as in genes and genetics. They prefer that to their actual name. The scar on their face and neck is from an experiment gone wrong and the purple on the other side of their face is from another experiment. Due to the stress their body was under at some point part of their hair turned white. They tend to be very excitable especially if one of their inventions is working. They are the kind to drag you over to show you while excitedly rambling about what it is. They have little to no regard for their personal safety but other people’s safety is their top priority, they will make you follow all lab safety rules and make you stay back at what they deem to be a safe distance from anything they are working on. This is for a reason but that comes later. They do have a really bad habit of not taking care of themselves so you will have to make sure they eat and drink water and they can become way too invested in their work but if you are sick or hurt they will practically teleport out of their lab to your side and absolutely baby you to no end. They also tend to make things to make your life easier, like if you have issues cooking they will make a robot to do it for you. All and all they are very caring just also very eccentric.

Quotes from them:

“Oh good, you’re here! I have something to show you!”

“No no no no no! Stay back behind the yellow line.”

“The speed of light has nothing on how fast my heart beats for you.”

Nicknames they use are ‘my spark’, ‘my inspiration’, ‘sweetie’, ‘babes’, and ‘lab rat’ as a joke.

Love language:

Giving: gift giving and quality time

Receiving: acts of service and words of affirmation

Gakhael Gozzgen 🔧🪨

This is the one I don’t have a photo for but they are a goblin mechanic and is best friends with Gwen who is further up. Gakhael uses any pronouns but in the sense of whatever is funniest at the time. The tiktok audio that goes like “So she- wait what are your pronouns? Oh I use any. Okay so bingus-” is literally their ideal. Gwen has this on lock btw. For simplicity in writing I will stick to they them unless I’m writing dialogue but please you could use anything in place of a pronoun for them and it would make them so happy. They have green skin and pointy ears and they are absolutely decked out in shiny stuff when they aren’t working. They have yellow eyes as well and they dress very colorfully. They are also quite chaotic so be warned. Basically think like incredibly hyperactive adhd and really bad at controlling it, I imagine them like me on my bad days and when I forget my meds. They are incredibly loyal though and if you need a single thing fixed they have it covered, no questions asked. They love to be helpful and they will drag you out on some of the weirdest and most fun dates imaginable. They are also quite short, they will likely have to look up at you because they are 4’6” and only come up to Gwen’s hip. The easiest way into their heart is giving them literally anything shiny, it could literally be trash you found on the side of the road and they would treasure it forever. They will climb you if you give them the chance though and they are also ace.

Quotes from them:

“Where is my- oh there it is! It was hiding behind you, babe!”

“You brought me a shiny…. I love it! I’m going to go put it in my jar!”

“I fixed your water heater, it was making a weird noise.”

Nicknames they use are ‘babe’, ‘sweetie’, ‘my fuel’, ‘my missing piece’, and ‘my assistant tall person’ as a joke.

Love languages:

Giving: gift giving and acts of service

Receiving: gift giving and words of affirmation.

So that’s all of them for now. I really love all of these characters and I’m excited to write for them. I’m also thinking about doing some small audio clips of them for requests as well since I do have slightly different voices for all of them, those would be rare but I’m willing to take requests for them. If I don’t do an audio of them though I will write it if for some reason I can’t do a recording. I mainly plan on writing for them though. I also do make videos for them over on my tiktok but Naevys is the only one who has videos so far. I hope you love each of them as much as I do and thank you to @lovinkiri who has actually drawn Gwen before and encouraged me to do this when I mentioned it to her. Let me know who your favorite is, I’m excited to know 💖💜💙