#I have seen so many white british men today

[starlightcleric]

For someone who doesn't watch things, I just spent seven hours watching things o_o

[sempsimps]

doppelgänger Francis x reader

sooo this is totally sfw within the age rating of the actual game, obviously. also might be inspired by the yagami yato of this man, maybe, slight chance, it definitely gave me some fuel to finish at least, i got over this brain rot quickly and well this took more time than i would of liked so yeah. sorry if my writing sucks :)

tags

mentioned death

mentioned cannibalism

two sides of the same one sided love (kinda)

blood (yep shock horror)

hoon man getting the love he needs <3

a bit of inexperienced writing (oh lord the horror)

sexual tension i guess (but not really)

Heather's the musical reference

British language so scary

it was late at night and door duty is slow like usual, the thing about the job was that 12 hour shifts suck, but in this time where the fear of being replaced by man eating monsters having a roof over my head and a job was quite reassuring, and well despite the company not really caring I'm glad that i didn't have to do more work then i could be awake for also my co-worker Emily she is amazing and could make a banging cup of tea, and well she likes the fact there's not nearly that many doubles at day, less work obviously. the night is tougher, way more doppelgängers at this time some were very convincing and did make me want to scream on the inside becuse of the anxiety it caused..... but i did like a challenge. also, i knew that most of the apartmenties were inside as Emily ticks them off the list and added the names who had a reasonable excuse for not being on there, and hey, i haven't died. yet despite my complaints there was a golden reason why i liked this job, and that was the resident tired eyes Francis, but he never really talked that much and it kinda made him ideal mimic bait, so i cant get attached i mean i really shouldn't as they really did try him the most for some reason.

i yawn as i relaxed into my office chair stretching my arms with a stratifying click 'mhhh almost over its 10 45 so 1 more hour and franci-' caught in my thoughts so much but the white uniform snapped my attention 'speak of the devil-! wait...' and as quickly as it came it left, as i seen the deep sunken abyss of "eyes" and a smile 'ah, i see its hoon' he really did try to get in, acting normally handing the papers over with an almost correct ID and entry form but just ya know slightly off on the looks and all he says is hoon is kind of revealing. i smiled and waved in greeting.

"Ah, hello there, nice try hoon, but i can see you. Good try though, almost nailed that ID too."

"hoon hoooon!"

"ill take that a good response"

i politely gave back the ID and smiled, throwing the entry form in the bin with the rest, so it isn't as easy to get in. Also, some of them are funny anyway. back to it i found this particular one almost as enduring as the original i was found of him so to speak, but if he got too good then off he goes and that might be a toxic trait but ill entertain him for now.

"Come on man, you know the drill, i caught you. You walk away. Have a good night though."

"hoon..."

he held his head down in disappointment and trudged away, when i was sure he left i called the D.D.D,the emergency shutters come down and footsteps can be heard by the men, i knew hoon wasn't there but to keep up the appearance to not get me fired, i had to make it seem that he keeps escaping, and not me letting him do so nooooo. the shutters come up, and the hazmat suit explains the situation in that boring tone like always.

"The clean up is complete, but the company will search for that double ganger that got away......"

yep, the same stuff zoning all that out. 'blah blah blah Jesus Christ, so much talking, just leave, please.' i kept smiling with zoned out thoughts as they spoke.

"You can continue your job"

"mh hm thanks"

the clean-up crew left slowly, god so slowly, like today, so slow. i looked over to the clock 'uuuuhhh 11 15 a half an hour till Francis gets here from delivering milk. poor soul to be fair he was half a workaholic' picking at my nails as a distraction from the boring day i seen another white milk man uniform i smile as i seen Francis, immediately going to work as he passed his paper through. but if i looked at the clock, only a few minutes passed.

"hi there"

i politely greeted, giving a small wave like i do for him 'wait it might not be him.' My face turned serious quickly.

"hm hello..."

'Huh, is he tired, or is that voice lower?' Suspicious, but i checked over the entry form, and that looked all good. now the ID 'logo yep date uh huh spelling' with the file i looked back and forth 'okay looking good finally number lets see 2 3 5 5 6' i look at the ID '2 4 5 5 6. wait 4?' Looking back over the file 'that's wrong damn doppelgänger. welp gotta kill this one he's too real.' i passed back the papers roughly, my face turning sour.

"welp, here ya go Francis, any last words?"

i didn't let him finish becuse as soon as i passed the paper through roughly i reached over with my other hand and pressed the emergency button, and speed dialling the D.D.D to get this near replica out of here, the shutter that came down was rattling from the force of the doppelgänger hitting it trying to escape, which was normal. and then silence as the shutter comes up, the now comforting yellow suit began to talk.

"The clean-up is complete. You can continue your-"

The hazmat suit slammed into the glass making a small crack, a gradient green hand with black claws dug into the back of the head, blood seeping out and staining the yellow suit my eyes followed the arm to the doppelganger of Francis i had just delt with 'oh shit this is a fucking problem' the yellow hazmat fell to the ground the hand returning to "normal" and that face comes into view. blood dripping of the perfect features, his voice lower than it should be its unnerving 'and hot- nope nope stop there wrong.' opening the desk draw digging in it for a neatly written number to only be called if the D.D.D fails. 'Where's that post-it note' a loud thud broke my thoughts, and I cautiously looked up to the double of Francis. his hand against the glass smearing some blood on the clean surface some spilling into the small crack made a few seconds earlier.

"Oh darling, how come you didn't let me in? My appearance is flawless. Entry form has nothing wrong with it, I know I'm on the list today."

He looked confused 'cute wait no evil' since I passed the papers through he picked up the slightly crumpled ID and gave an amused smirk flipping it around and pressing it to the glass so I could see it.

"Ah, I see you did read that silly ID number. You're not like the others, you're smart, and that makes me want to devour you even more."

My hand starts to tremble as I kept looking for that stupid note. The doppelganger tuts lightly with a small chuckle.

"Come on~ your phone friends can't help you. and you wouldn't want to create more of a mess~ look honey! all those delicious bodies already here"

He licked his lips cleaning them from the blood giving a satisfied hum 'oh shit that's hot- nope nope not the time' i couldn't bear to look past him at the amount of people dead, opting to keep looking for the number i knew was in this stupid desk 'come on, come on where is this fucking thing' my hand touches the gun at the back of the draw 'I shouldn't have to use this'

"OPEN THE DOOR, please open the door. Can we not fight anymore, please come on, open the door? You're scared i see that, I can set you free come on let me inside open the door open opEN OPEN!"

Teeth beared now sharp and tinted yellow eyes the same shade. His hand slammed down on the glass with an open palm he realised it wasn't working, quickly far too quickly, and he used his fist rattling the pane in its hold the crack getting bigger every thud my movements speed up 'shit shit shit shit shi- ah! there I got it.' I gripped the paper roughly and slammed the emergency button and dialled the never before used number

"DARLING YOULL NEVER KILL ME IVE BEEN WATCHING YOU FOR WEEKS ILL COME BACK"

"Hello you have contacted the-"

"YES I KNOW SEND HELP D.D.D AGENTS DOWN"

"Don't worry .... we have dispatched people to your area" BEEP

The slamming of fists and that sickening sound of flesh tearing. its the noise doppelgangers make when they lose their disguise, it made me nauseous my head dizzying from it I heard the glass smash but the metal kept me safe it was barely dented before I heard the screams of the beast and gun shots my breathing uneven my legs to my chest in the chair arms wrapped around my body in attempt to comfort myself it all went silent my heart drops in my chest but as the shutter came back up a more human looking hazmat suit greeted me rather than the round ones another one putting a new pane of glass replacing the broken one.

"Thank you for contacting us. we will inform the D.D.D of the deceased agents and give you good reference. Unfortunately, the doppelganger got away"

"Wait, what!?"

They left quickly, some carrying black bags, not saying a word 'he got away. How?' I slowly came out of my shell I had built temporarily, taking in some deep breaths. unwrapping my arms and lowering my legs back into my chair. 'I'll have a breakdown when I'm off the clock.... oh speaking of how long till Francis is here 11 55 he's late.... of course just making my day wors- never mind night is better' there he was passing an ID and entry form i already had his folder out and checked it over intensely giving a little sigh.

"mh, hello doorman you seem worked up tonight"

"haha yeah just some difficult doppelgängers, ya know"

"ha yeah uh.... I've been meaning to ask, would you like to get food sometime"

i opened the door for him and smiled wearily giving the correct paper back to the real Francis.

"yeah that would be nice have a goodnight Francis"

okay finally over Jesus Christ this took way longer than i wanted it to take becuse i have got another 3 fics stacked and schoolwork so I'm glad its over but i still don't know how to end this shit sorry if my writing sucks :]

extra note: brownie points if people spotted the heathers reference

[traxanaxanos]

Re-watched the first 20 minutes of Caretaker to see Lieutenant Stadi and her minute and a half of screen-time, as you do, and I’m trying to contextualize her scene with Tom within the conversations I’ve been seeing on my dash recently about both Tom’s treatment of B’Elanna and the show’s treatment of B’Elanna as always angry and unjustifiably so, and that the anger is because she’s a Klingon, who can only ever be angry.

The first half of Tom’s conversation with Stadi is:

"Stadi, you're changing my mind about Betazoids." "Good." "Oh, that wasn't a compliment. Until today, I always considered your people warm and sensual."

So Tom here is using a base stereotype of Betazoids to inform his interactions, and specifically his sexual advances with a Betazoid woman, and then later repeats this pattern with a different set of stereotypes in his interactions and sexual advances with B’Elanna, where he continually reduces her to his (and the show’s) base stereotype of Klingons and Klingon women specifically. I’m not really sure that the writers knew they were making this a reoccurring trait of Tom’s, given that the Stadi interaction is basically nothing and was all the way back in episode 1, but it still is then a reoccurring trait of Tom’s in that he interacts with women with alien heritage by reducing them to whatever stereotype about their species is most convenient and sexually alluring to him.

Betazoids as a fictional species mainly suffer from the misogyny in their writing; they’re at the nexus of many of Roddenberry’s sexual interests. They can read your deepest desires, they become bonded to a partner, they don’t have cultural taboos around nudity, they have looser sexual mores than the average American viewer. I think they also tend to be exoticised, not so much with the few Betazoid men we’ve seen, but when they’re women. Specifically between Deanna (played by an British-American woman of Greek descent) and Stadi (played by an American woman of Italian descent), there are these occasional attempts at coding Betazoid women as vaguely Mediterranean, exotic and different, but not too exotic. Different in a way that is sexually alluring but “safe” to a White gaze. 

Tom notes that Stadi is not performing his stereotyped version of a Betazoid correctly to try and bait her and shame her for not being receptive to his advances. He uses a similar tactic in many of his interactions with B’Elanna, only instead tells her that she is performing his stereotyped version of a Klingon correctly to shut her down, belittle her, and minimize any conversation she tries to have that may be a little uncomfy for him. B’Elanna is just being angry which is how all Klingons are. B’Elanna just has a violent personality, like all Klingons do. B’Elanna is flying off the handle over nothing, just like a Klingon would.

This stereotyped version of Klingons is rooted in the racism that is frequently present in depictions of Klingons, which is rooted in the creators racism towards people of color. B’Elanna is explicitly Latina, and the way the show and Tom positions her as being too angry pulls from the “fiery Latina” stereotype. Klingons are also either explicitly or implicitly Black, and the anger and hostility Tom reads onto B’Elanna maps onto a white racist stereotype of Black people being inherently violent or destructive.

I don’t think the show is aware that Tom has this racist essentializing tendency, and if it is, it doesn’t necessarily think its a bad thing. Trek is a series whose reach exceeds its grasp - Infinite diversity in infinite combinations has become a cornerstone of the show (or at least in the imagined truly utopian version of the show), but Trek so often uses broad stereotypes to talk about groups of people, and frequently seems unaware that this is reductive at best and outright racist at worst. At the end of the day most of the people in charge of Voyager had the most in common with Tom Paris.

[halliescomut]

Y'all want another rant??

I have seen so MANY cracked-out, poorly considered 'hot takes' this weekend, and wow are they aggravating. We can start with the continuing discussion regarding HeartStopper and it's author, who feels the fact that there are no sexual scenes in their work make it inherently better than other queer media. (Edit: The initial comment ppl point to is from 2017, but there has also been no clarity or further statements made despite this being regularly discussed, which is certainly not the norm for addressing divisive statements.) Now, the fact that she's mentioned things like this in conjunction with dismissal of East Asian and South East Asian BL, makes it clear that this is not simply a 'purity' thing, but also has racist undertones. My biggest issue though, is that it clearly demonstrates that they have not attempted to consume any of the available content out there. Are there BLs that focus on the sexual aspects of relationships? Yes, there's the Pornographer, but there's also My Dining Table. You have TharnType, but you also have My Only 12%. Hell, my absolute favorite BL is GameBoys, which first season ends in the ONLY kiss and the couple is still separated by a plastic barrier.

So how can you say that EVERY show revolves only around sex? Realistically you can't. And there's a whole slew of other issues with such statements, like the fact that for a vast majority of romantic couples, sex and physical chemistry is a vital and valued part of their relationships. Or the fact that reducing the queer media of a non-white culture down to sex alone contributes to the misleading idea that people of color are ruled by base human desires, and don't have the intellectual ability to create a romantic relationship based on something other than sex. Honestly, it's giving very British, unsurprisingly.

The reality is that in the world they created in HeartStopper, an overt focus on a sexual relationship would feel vastly out of place. Both because of the age of the characters, but the tone of the story. It's a romanticized coming-of-age/coming out story that revolves around first love. It's intention is to focus on the emotions involved in those experiences in a 'rose-colored glasses' type of way. It's why we've seen plenty of gay men criticizing the show by saying it's unrelatable. And while I don't imagine that it's 100% true representation for every gay man out there, I'd say that's based more on it being distinctly romanticized in a way the real life rarely is. I think it's also intended to be slightly aspirational, it shows a world where more often than not a queer teen's family, friends, community, and society are supportive, kind, and loving; something that has rarely been the reality of many queer adults today. It's not wrong or bad to be aspirational, it's a facet of the queer experience that is necessary, but it should not be taken as a replacement for more 'realistic' queer media, especially in an attempt to sanitize the lived experiences of thousands of queer men.

(I'd like to note that I do intentionally tag any posts that I make about HS as BritishBL because I'm a petty bitch.)

The amount of sex either alluded to or shown in a piece of media does not indicate it's value. If you have done even a mild foray into BL outside of Thailand, then you are likely well aware that Chinese and South Korean BL is often promoted as being more 'tame' or 'respectable' than Thai BL, or even Japanese BL. But if you think critically about it for even a moment, you're able to easily conclude that the reason those countries often produce queer media that's more on the level of a PG or PG-13 rating is because there are still very strict societal AND governmental standards that prevent the presentation of queer media. It's rare if not unheard of to have shows or movies based on queer written media show even a single kiss, and it's because of homophobia, when you move outside of China to places like Taiwan (which China still considers to be part of it's empire) you may see more 'explicit' presentations of queer relationships, but they often still skew towards being more in that PG-13 range. I've inserted below a chart that I pulled for another project, but is applicable here as well showing the legality of same-sex relationship as well as the legal protections of them (i.e. same-sex marriage recognition or adoption)

While for China and North Korea in particular, we have to sort of accept their word, you can see that for the vast majority of East Asian countries, same-sex relationships are not illegal, but they area also not actively supported. And while progress has been made in many places, there is still a long way to go to offering them equal opportunities and protections. And, as is always true, the negative effects of bigotry and homophobia have the largest impacts on those that live in poverty or are members of other marginalized communities. So while, you may see rich and privileged queer people from these countries living their life without much backlash, that is never going to be the lived experience of your everyday gay salaryman.

Just want to pause here and say this next part is not related to Alice in any way, it's just another aspect of upsetting to me discourse I saw this weekend.

Moving on to another very concerning discussion that I saw revolving around Mew and Top in the first episode of Only Friends. The are SO MANY comments being made on edits all over social media dissing Mew for choosing not to have sex with Top once they got to his apartment. With the vast majority saying something along the lines of 'He's hot, Mew should have just done it", "Virginity isn't even a real thing", "He knew what Top wanted when he invited him over", and it honestly gets more frustrating and disturbing from there. The #1 key to consent is that it is ALWAYS ongoing and you have the right to revoke it at anytime. It is an incredibly valid criticism of Thai BL that they waffle a little bit with that consent line, and I feel like some of the same people who argued that the sex between Lom and Nuea in Wedding Plan last week was iffy consent because Lom was clearly drunk, are spouting these bullshit opinions about Top and Mew. Consent can be and often is a VERY nuanced conversation. Mew believing that he was ready for sex with Top when he left that bar, and realizing that he wasn't once they got back to his apartment is incredibly realistic. It happens to a lot of people, and unfortunately those people are often not with someone like Top, who in that moment was willing (even if not precisely happy) to forego sex. This is a scene that shows what a reaction SHOULD be to a removal of consent. You don't have to be happy about it, but as a human who hopefully has respect for the other human involved, you should respect it.

As far as the 'virginity is a social construct thing'--you're right it is. But it is not wrong or weird for a person to prefer that there be a personal and emotional connection between themselves and a potential sexual partner. There's literally a whole sexuality where a person does not feel romantic or sexual attraction WITHOUT an emotional connection.

That's not to say that this automatically concludes that Mew is definitely intended to be demisexual, it's possible that this is fully unintentional on the part of the writer, director, or actor. But in terms of negatively reacting to this scene on public social media, you are actively dismissing the very real feelings of very real people who you may be interacting with. Because just as there is absolutely nothing wrong with being comfortable having sex without feelings being involved, the same is true in reverse. As with all things related to sex, it's about the comfort of the person participating in the act, beyond that there is no 'better' or 'right' way to feel about it.

And moving onto that last incredibly upsetting point...that Mew knew what was going to happen when he left the bar with Top, how disgusting of a take. There are literally thousands of people, most female presenting, who get asked that same question when reporting sexual violence from people they were dating, or met in bars. The dismissal of a person's autonomy because 'they knew what they were getting into' is nothing more than disgusting. It's not just a bad take, or a problematic one, it's a take that feeds into the victim-blaming society that we live in and makes it more and more difficult for survivors of sexual violence to come forward, and impedes our ability to install tenets of consent in our society as a whole. By continuing to spout such ridiculous and disgusting ideas, you are setting a standard that prevents ANYONE from revoking consent at any time and enables assaulters to pressure people into sex, or just bypass their consent completely, knowing that the likelihood of actual repercussions is very low.

So I guess TLDR- All levels of intimacy (both physical and emotional) are important in queer media, from the most innocent to the most carnal, and healthy representations of consent conversations, especially those that show people's autonomy as being fully respect should be praised, not dismissed.

[everything-is-crab]

:))

This is what I meant when I said both rightoids and liberals in India are equally dumb as fuck. Both are pro imperialists. She's not even lower caste and yet she's speaking on behalf of us. I have seen this trend in a lot of "anticasteist" upper caste women (who unfortunately have more voices than people like me, actually women from oppressed castes).

How are these people different from the white supremacists who say brown people are intellectually and socially inferior?

"At least the goras let us have meat" oh okay we're gonna ignore the 3 million lives lost in Bengal famine caused by Churchill's policies (after which he blamed it on us instead of his own greediness). Did he let those people eat meat then? Unhinged shit. They wouldn't let people fill their bellies cause sometimes instead of food crops they wanted our ancestors to grow cotton, indigo, spices, tea. Which also left areas prone to land disasters. Commercial stuff that they could sell at much cheaper prices in their own countries and others in the Western world as well. Also levied extremely unreasonably high taxes. Leaving us with no money. Delusional world these middle/upper class liberals live in where the British let us have meat. They didn't even let us have rice.

The British protected the caste system. Read Sharmila Rege's work about how the British introduced the process of "Brahmanisation" in colonial India.

This is the exact thing Hindu nationalists are doing rn! And have been doing forever! Protecting Western imperialists! Why do you think Modi is bootlicking the US so much? Do you think the farmers' protests and the after effects of globalization after 1991 are disconnected from Western imperialism?

Just because nationalists claim to be against white dominance doesn't mean they practice what they preach.

And this folks is why you need to incorporate class and gender in your analysis and not read about the work of only the middle class men of a community :)

Women and poor people matter too.

But unfortunately many earlier anti caste activists who were middle or upper class were anti Marxists and only later few like the Dalit Panthers and R.B More realized the importance of Marxist analysis for understanding modern caste based oppression more. Yes many Indian Marxists ignored casteism. But that does not mean we must dispose it as a useless theory.

But who tf cares about the Dalit Panthers or anyone else? Have you even heard of any other names that aren't Phule or Ambedka? Everyone followed and still follow people like Periyar, Ambedkar, Phule who were all from relatively well off family. And why will people who uncritically follow these people not think colonization was as bad? All of them attended British school and went for higher studies as well. The British was staunchly anti communist. They constantly resisted communist activists in colonial India. This is a privilege even today many people from oppressed castes cannot enjoy.

I have seen all these upper caste women, ignore people like me pointing this out. They think we're against education of oppressed castes (why would I advocate that for my own community?). But rather we take issue to these men ignoring their economic and male privilege and speaking on behalf of all of us.

A reminder that Periyar criminalized devadasis and read Ambedkar's arguments against Hindutva solutions to the Partition (hint: he cared more about the money that could be wasted in missionaries rather than the violence and human rights and unironically called Muslim people "tyrannical" and referred to "Muslim oppression" on Hindus). He was anti casteist, but he was Islamophobic.

To avoid with this kind of thinking, follow Dalit feminist theory. Dalit femininism from its inception has been pro Marxist (cause women make most of poor here). And they explain the effects of colonization on lower caste women (how the British introduced evidence act, a law that justified rape against lower caste women and let me remind you gang rape of lower caste women by upper caste men is a national issue. Ex the Manipur case, the rape of Phoolan Devi, the Hathras case etc). And how dowry (that earlier used to be a practice mainly amongst upper castes was now becoming dominant in lower castes as well due to capitalization of economy during colonial era). Maybe then you will understand why the British abolished sati but not any temple prostitution or other issues faced exclusively by women from oppressed castes. In fact they called upper caste women those who deserve to be protected but lower caste women were inherently deviant in their justification. But please go ahead and argue how imperialism brings "good things" sometimes.

Just read about caste reformation during colonial era. The choice isn't between hindutva and colonial era. The choice is between hindutva and hindutva along with colonial rule. Why do most liberals pretend the British never favored the Brahmins over everybody else?

White supremacy is so much better than Hindu supremacy for women of lower castes am I right guys?

This is so much better?

Also reminded of the "breast cloth" controversy. Do not mistake that anti caste activism is always anti caste for both Dalit men and women. Sometimes it favors Dalit men. And oppresses Dalit women further. Cause usually the colonizers never cared about oppressed castes but when they did, it was only for the men.

Ik many upper caste Marxists are not good at anti caste politics but I cannot separate Marxism from my anti caste or feminist politics. And as a Marxist from a formerly colonized country, I cannot ignore the imperial divide between the West (that is white dominated) and the global south (that includes India). You cannot separate the conditions of brown and black people today in the global south from the past dynamics of the colonizer and the colonized.

Lower caste women are obviously very poor. The poorest of all with least social protection. These upper caste women can sit on their asses and write papers and blogs on how much white supremacy was much cooler. But the ones from oppressed castes and working class? They don't have this privilege. They have the same burden of upper caste women related to marriage and domestic work and everything. But on top of that they have to do labor as well. And after globalization, when condition of "blue collar jobs" degraded (wages lowered, subsidies cut, worker protection rights gone etc) , the percentage of women in these fields increased. That's not a coincidence. Men always force women into lower earning occupations that have little job security. I am not gonna ignore this.

Fuck Hindutva. But fuck white supremacy too. For me neither is better. Both go hand in hand in fact. Look at the Hindu nationalists in France allying with white supremacists over shared conservative interests.

[drysaladandketchup]

The Terror, The Franklin Expedition, and The Humanity Lost In Interpretation

I’ve seen one too many posts about The Franklin Expedition and The Terror with regards to colonialism and how the intentions of the British Empire at the time means that none of the characters---nor their real life inspirations---deserve sympathy or to be seen with even an ounce of kindness, and the way some folks talk about the men on these ships, real or fictional, really rubs me the wrong way.

These men were not martyrs. Of course not. The damage done by British colonialism is massive and far-reaching, to say the least, and very apparent in the show. It’s obvious in what the Tuunbaq represents and how it suffers more with each interaction with the crew right up to its death by their hands. It’s made apparent during Goodsir’s discussion with Silna about why they’re in the Arctic, framing the futility of their actions. It’s seen when people like Franklin or Dr. Stanley or Fitzjames, among others, turn their noses up at the Inuit people, their customs, or their knowledge, because of a perceived ‘superiority’ to those they deem as lesser. Hell, we see it plain as day when all these men are suffering and dying in a land they deem ‘savage’ and ‘inhospitable’, despite the fact that we see the Inuit people living and surviving just fine in that same land.

So of course I am not arguing the message about the damage done by imperialism and colonialism under the Empire. I’m not denying that their refusal to learn from the Inuit or past mistakes did not aid in their downfall.

However, where I start to get irked is when people talk about these men as if they were not human beings. All of them. As if they were an irredeemable hive mind of brutish men who were there for the sole purpose of doing harm. Which is simply not the case.

First and foremost, I think some people need to remember one very important thing: the Franklin Expedition was not in the Arctic for the purposes of settlement or assimilation. In fact, had all gone to plan, they had no intention of setting foot on land in the Arctic at all. Britain was a coloniser, yes, but this specific expedition was to find the Northwest Passage. A waterway through the ice, a faster route to the Pacific for the purposes of trade. This expedition wasn’t to set roots or colonise anything. I’m not saying that had they succeeded in finding a viable route, that it wouldn’t have led to more colonising of the Arctic, I just mean this group of men were not there for that. They were not there to claim and conquer people or land. They were literally just sailing ships through the ice. Were they doing it under the flag of the British Empire? Yes. Were they wholly unprepared for the environment? Undoubtedly. But ultimately this expedition was one of exploration, science, and cartography.

The British Empire colonised, exploited, and abused many countries around the world. Plenty of people at home believed in the rhetoric of the ‘white man’ as a superior race; the white Englishman, specifically. Religion had a strong grip on the population. Classism played a major role in many facets of life. Laws and rules and institutions sometimes reflected harmful values and beliefs. But that doesn’t mean every single living, breathing, thinking individual at the time believed it or subscribed to it or acted upon it. Often the worst rhetoric is the loudest remnant of its time, but it rarely paints a full picture. The darkest parts of our history often overtake other narratives.

People today have a plethora of thoughts and opinions, regardless of---and sometimes in oppositions to---their leaders and governance. Yet we forget that that was the same in the past. Individualism has always existed. Tolerance and empathy are not modern concepts. Who you are as a person is not inherently defined by where you were born. Can the tenants and teachings of where you grow up and those you grow up around affect you? Of course. But people are fully capable of thinking for themselves, and changing. Growing.

What is often lost within the argument of whether or not to look at history through a modern lens, is that regardless, you cannot paint everyone with one brush. Few arguments are black and white, and never have been. History, and the people who came before us, were just as diverse, and fallible, capable of good and bad and everything in between. I find myself somewhat unnerved when we talk about people as if their very existence in a particular time or place is reason enough to denote their entire character or personality or intentions in life. Rather than just seeing them as people, living lives that were messy, fluid, complex, unique to them. It is a simple fact that we cannot hold every individual accountable for the actions of others or a group or a nation.

My point in all this with regards to the Franklin Expedition and the The Terror is that people who say ‘they were all there to do harm and therefore deserve no sympathy’ are missing a huge bit of forethought. As well as a bit of compassion, I think. Most of the men on those ships (aside from the officers and Marines, who were commissioned) were volunteers. But whether commissioned or volunteered, these men were sailors. They were there to do a job. I can guarantee that none of them signed onto this expedition thinking, ‘This sounds like a good opportunity to snatch up a chunk of land and kill a bunch of Indigenous people.’ It was simply sailing; it was how they made a living.

This expedition wasn’t ‘Manifest Destiny’, to use the American term. Find a passage to the Pacific, measure the magnetic readings to improve navigation, map as much of the still unmapped Arctic region as possible. Those were the goals. Nothing more. To the crews, it was to be a few years aboard a ship with good pay and a chance to see the world. Many likely thought it was an opportunity to be a part of what was to be an important voyage, which could earn them better standing within the Navy.

And again, I am not arguing the ultimately imperialistic intentions of the British Empire with regards to the potential results of this mission had it succeeded. I am simply saying that to vilify all 129 men aboard these ships simply for a job that, in this particular case, was not intended to do any harm to anyone, is extremely careless and misguided.

Hubris was a factor in their failure, undoubtedly. But even then, there were those on the Expedition who had traversed the Arctic and/or Antarctic before, like Crozier. They knew more than most what to expect. Of course it’s hard to say whether or not these men would have made changes to their approach or supplies or tactics had they the freedom to do so (after all, Franklin too had suffered terribly in the Arctic on a previous expedition, yet he seemed confident that nothing need change for them to survive this time around). But the fact is the rules and practices of the Empire and the Royal Navy were set in stone. In a sense, these men were also victims of their own Empire. That, and the reality that what ultimately sealed their fate was the unprecedented deep freeze during the winter of 1846 which trapped their ships.

And to the point I’ve seen people make about how the crews refused help from the Inuit: I will politely ask you to read some more books, or the oral accounts passed down by the Inuit themselves. The Franklin Expedition did have interactions with the Inuit. They did look for help once they were on foot. And by the accounts of the Inuit, help was offered. The issue wasn’t that the crews refused it, the issue was the Inuit simply did not have enough food or resources to support 100 men as well as their own community. And before someone interprets this the wrong way: no, I am not at all saying the Inuit caused the deaths of the crew who made it to land. It was a simple fact of life: the Inuit survive in the Arctic, yes, but it is still a harsh land where resources are scarce. You mind your supplies, every bit of food, every tool, every fur, every scrap of material. Nothing wasted. And you care for your community, your people. The crew sought help, and the Indigenous peoples offered what they could, but the situation was simply not ideal for anyone.

As an aside, I would like to point out that there are many cases throughout history where Europeans had normal, positive, and prosperous interactions with Indigenous peoples, not just in North America, but across the world. Not to say that makes up for the irreparable damage that’s been done to many of those same Indigenous cultures by colonialism and various Empires, I simply mean we need to remember that not every single moment in history is dark and dismal. You cannot assume some binary ‘good vs. evil’ when discussing someone or something simply because of who they are or where they came from.

But to my point with regards to the Franklin Expedition and The Terror: the Empire’s refusal to learn and adapt resulted in the loss of these men’s lives. But that should not translate into, ‘Every man on those ships deserved to suffer and die simply for being there.’ I think some people miss that side of The Terror as a show.

While it is clear in its message about colonialism and the worst things that people can do to survive, it is just as clear in its humanising of the men. It is just as clear that they were all people with lives and families, their own hopes and thoughts and wants and dreams. Men who could care and help each other as much as they could harm each other. This show is about people. About surviving. About suffering. It is a warning about hubris, but it is also a tale of humanity, and all the ways that manifests or withers. Good decisions are made, bad decisions are made, extreme decisions are made. Sometimes perspectives change, reasoning shifts, outcomes are different than expected. Because people are complex, diverse, fallible, ever-changing, imperfect.

So at the end of the day, talk your head off about the impact of imperialism and colonialism, both the messages from history and it’s message within the show. It’s very important.

But if you cannot also look at these men---their real life selves or their fictional counterparts---with even an ounce of sympathy, or empathy, then I genuinely fear how you treat people in the present, in the real world. Because if you believe death and suffering are ‘deserved’ as a solution to the world’s larger injustices (even by people who themselves are not committing those injustices, simply living under them), then you have condemned yourself to nihilism and a refusal to gauge human kindness and hope.

[hit-song-showdown]

Year-End Poll #16: 1965

[Image description: a collage of photos of the 10 musicians and musical groups featured in this poll. In order from left to right, top to bottom: Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Four Tops, The Rolling Stones, We Five, The Righteous Brothers, Petula Clark, The Beatles, Herman's Hermits, Elvis Presley, The Temptations. End description]

More information about this blog here

A lot of heavy-hitters are coming at us in 1965. Beatlemania is still going strong, continuing their rise from "famous" to "cultural milestone". Fellow English rock band, The Rolling Stones, would also explode in popularity and success around this year. The two bands were often pitted against each other for the title of commander of the British Invasion -- leading up to this poll. We're all part of history today. Rock and roll itself is starting to evolve more in the mainstream, favoring a harder, almost messier sound that would have been too intense for previous (white) audiences. Hard rock, blues rock, psychedelic rock, and garage rock will come to define the genre at this moment in time.

R&B is also having a huge moment this year, especially the music coming from the powerhouse record label: Motown Records. I talked about the significance of the label briefly in the 1964 post, and like The Beatles and Elvis Presley, there's so much behind their history that I feel intimidated to talk more. But without going too much into it, Motown Records is also notable for the image they sold along with their records. Everything from the artists' sound, to their looks, to how they carried themselves in public had to exude class and sophistication. Here's a link to an interview with Maxine Powell, the finishing instructor who worked with many of these artists. While brand recognition played a major role in this (as Motown became something of its own genre in addition to being a record label), this image was essential for crossover appeal. The music of Motown may not have been overtly political at this time, but it was still monumental in normalizing Black artists and business owners in mainstream white spaces during the height of the 60's Civil Rights Movement.

There's another major historic moment I want to touch on here, but its impact won't be seen on the polls until the next one. 1965 marks the year when American ground troops first entered Vietnam. President Johnson would demand for the monthly draft to double, conscripting 1,000 men every day. Those who are at least somewhat familiar with American pop culture already know why I'm bringing this up in a music poll. But the people who think that American music about the Vietnam War was all Creedence and Dylan may be surprised. See you all in 1966.

[jechristine]

Jewish, Muslim and Christians all have religious and ancestral ties to the land. While Jewish people didn’t come from a European power when immigrating as refugees to a majority Muslim Palestine, colonizing British power encouraged this by promising them Palestinian land with the view that those occupying the land did not own the land…colonization. The Jewish people have always had the support of colonizing powers, the partition has always been unfair to Arab Palestinians. While this is not a simple conflict and there are so many dangerous takes involving antisemitism and Islamaphobia, it will always be free Palestine for me

I also don’t think you should censor your post to avoid people “not liking it” its really important to have these discussions openly

Hm I think this is a fundamental disagreement about indigeneity.

Neither Christians nor Muslims are ethnic groups, and so however special and important particular landmarks are for them, as religious groups they aren’t “indigenous” or not to the Levant. (Yes, some Christian and Muslim Arabs have ancestral ties to the land and are themselves indigenous, too.) Jews are an ethnic group first; Jews are from the place that we know as Palestine & Israel today. They are not outsiders.

If it had been white English men and women immigrating to the area in the 20th century, I could get behind the colonizer framework. But that’s a completely different set of facts. By then, Jews had been in exile from their indigenous land, driven out and dispersed throughout the world, for hundreds of years. Some always remained, and none were ever truly welcomed elsewhere.

In the early days of the Zionist movement, most Jews imagined an Israeli homeland—even a nation—that they shared with their Arab neighbors. They wanted to come back to the place where they belonged. And where they might be safe.

Yes, Jews have had the support of the European powers (not steadfastly, however, as the British reneged on Balfour in 1939 and began placing restrictions on Jewish immigration to Israel, precisely when the Jews needed it the most). Yes the British truly fucked up (again). Yes, partition was vastly unfair to the Palestinians. Yes, the current oppressive apartheid regime is inhumane and cruel to Palestinian civilians and needs to be defeated. Yes, the last few decades of Israeli policy has created a breeding ground for terrorists. It is free Palestine for me, too. It has to be.

But none of those true facts make the Zionists colonizers, a word that we use as shorthand to say that they don’t belong, that they have to leave. And that was my original problem with so much of the discussion I’ve seen. The Israeli government has become an oppressor, and the oppressive regime must end, and Jews and Arabs must find a way to live humanely together. The conflict is so tough because it doesn’t fit into our usual frames.

[luthienebonyx]

What a truly progressive government looks like

The man in this photo is Gough (pronounced Goff) Whitlam, the 21st prime minister of Australia. Fifty years ago, on 2 December 1972, Gough Whitlam’s Australian Labor Party won the federal election, and ushered in easily the most progressive government Australia has ever had. It was a government that truly changed Australia, and set it on the path towards being the country it is today.

Gough (he was one of those rare politicians who was widely known simply by his first name. There was truly only one Gough) was tall and imposing, with silver hair and dark eyebrows, and a booming voice that delivered his razor sharp wit. When he led the ALP to victory in 1972, the party had been out of government for 23 long years, and were determined to make a difference when at last they were back in power. As you’ve probably worked out from the glorious 1970s t-shirts in the picture, the election campaign slogan was It’s Time. It featured in a famous election ad jingle, performed by Alison McCallum and accompanied by many famous faces of the time.

After winning the 1972 election, Gough wasted no time in implementing his election promises. Not willing to wait until the final results of the election were confirmed and the full ministry could be appointed, he and his deputy, Lance Barnard, were sworn in as prime minister and deputy prime minister on 5 December. Between the two of them, they held all 27 government portfolios for two weeks until the rest of the ministry was sworn in. The duumvirate, as it was known:

ordered negotiations to establish full relations with China

ended conscription in the Vietnam War

freed the conscientious objectors who had been jailed for refusing conscription

ordered home all remaining Australian troops in Vietnam

re-opened the equal pay case (for women, who were at that time by law paid less than men for doing the same job) and appointed a woman, Elizabeth Evatt, to the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, the body that made the decision

abolished sales tax on the contraceptive pill

announced major grants for the arts

appointed an interim schools commission

barred racially discriminatory sport teams from Australia, and instructed the Australian delegation at the United Nations to vote in favour of sanctions on apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia

And that was just the first two weeks.

In the three years that followed, the Whitlam government:

introduced a national universal health scheme

abolished university fees

abolished the death penalty for federal crimes

established Legal Aid

replaced God Save the Queen with Advance Australia Fair as the national anthem

replaced the British honours system with the Order of Australia

created the family court and introduced no fault divorce, the first country in the world to do so

ended the White Australia policy

introduced the racial discrimination act

advocated for Indigenous rights, including creating the Aboriginal Land Fund and the Aboriginal Loans Commission, and returned some of their traditional lands to the Gurunji people in the Northern Territory. This was the first time that any Australian government had returned land to its original custodians. Here’s a famous photograph by Mervyn Bishop of Gough pouring a handful of red earth into the hands of Gurunji leader Vincent Lingiari, ‘as a sign that this land will be in the possession of you and your children forever‘:

I’m sure there are more achievements of the Whitlam government that I’m forgetting. There were a lot.

Of course, the Whitlam government will always be seen through the lens of the way it ended, but I’m not going to talk about the constitutional crisis of 1975 - plenty of books have been written about that, including one by Gough himself - or about the various dysfunctions of the Whitlam government, particularly once the international oil crisis hit in 1973.

I just really want to point out that truly progressive governments can change their countries profoundly, and for the lasting betterment of their people. Not everything that the Whitlam government achieved withstood the assaults of the conservative government that followed it, but some did and are still with us, half a century later, while other aspects, like universal healthcare, were resurrected by the Hawke Labor government a decade later, and endure to this day.

Gough died in 2014 at the age of 98, not quite making his personal century. Tonight I’m raising a glass to his memory. Thanks, Gough, for all the things you did to make this country a better, fairer, more inclusive place.

[tandynicole]

Who Knew Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was Controversial?

Welcome to my very first blog post. Today I want to talk about the children's story that we all know and love, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Whether it be the original book, or one of the two movie adaptations, we’ve all at least heard of this classic story in some way. Today I want to focus on the original children’s book written by Roald Dahl and the controversies it has racked up throughout the years.

Let's start with a little background on the author and a quick summary of the book for those of us who may need a refresher. Roald Dahl, who died in 1990 at the age of 74, was a British author who is still considered one of the most popular children’s authors. He is known for popular works such as James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and The Witches, and his books have sold more than 300 million copies globally. He was known to voice some offensive opinions outside of his work and was also notorious for his anti-sematic remarks. Be that as it may, his works were still very successful. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published in 1964 and is perhaps one of Dahl’s most popular works, having sold at least 20 million copies world-wide in 55 different languages. It has two different movie adaptations, and has even been adapted for stage performances. So no matter which form it’s viewed in, this classic continues to lure children in with its rags-to-riches tale.

The main character of the book is an 11 year old boy named Charlie Bucket who lives in poverty with his parents and all 4 grandparents. Everyday on his way to school Charlie passes the famous chocolate factory owned by Willy Wonka. No one is ever seen coming in or out of the factory and Wonka is very secretive. Charlie’s grandfather tells him that this is due to competitors stealing Wonkas candy-making secrets, causing the factory to shut down temporarily in the past. One day Wonka announces that he will be hiding 5 Golden Tickets inside chocolate bars and that the children who find them will be rewarded with a tour of the factory and a lifetime supply of his products.

Charlie happens to find some money sticking out of the snow while walking one day, uses it to buy two chocolate bars, and discovers the final Golden Ticket in one of them. When Charlie and the four other children enter the factory they are amazed by both its beauty, and the creatures who work there. These creatures are the cacao-bean loving Oompa Loompa’s, who Wonka explains are from a land called “Loompaland”. They are described as being tiny men with white skin and golden hair who love to sing, and are the only people Wonka employs to work in his factory. As the tour continues, the other four children suffer bizarre, and sometimes painful, consequences for their selfish and bad behavior. For example the bubble gum obsessed Violet Beauregarde steals a piece of experimental gum that turns her into a blueberry. The mischievous Oompa Loompas break into songs highlighting the children's bad behavior each time this happens. By the end of the tour Charlie is the only one of the 5 children left standing, so to reward him for his good behavior Wonka gives him the chocolate factory and that's how the story ends.

Now if you’re anything like me you may be wondering, where did people find controversy in that? Well to start, Dahl had originally described the Oompa Loompas as African pygmies that Wonka found in the deepest, darkest parts of the African Jungle. However, Dahl himself changed their description to white-skinned and golden haired fantasy creatures in 1973 after many complaints and protests by the NAACP. The NAACP even went as far as to demand that the 1971 movie adaptation be given a different name than the book so people wouldn’t make the connection between the two and read the book. And now today the books publishers at Puffin Books are going to be making even more changes to the story in their New Edition reprints of the book. The Oompa Loompas will no longer be described as “tiny men no higher than my knee”, but will instead simply be called “small people” to avoid offending short people and to erase the exclusion of women. Also the description of Augustus Gloop, one of the 5 children on the tour, will be changed from “enormously fat” to just “enormous” to avoid offending heavy-weight children. I really don’t see the point in either of these changes since you can clearly see their original descriptions in both of the movies, but to each their own I guess.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory isn’t the only one of Dahl’s works undergoing these changes. They are all being edited in some way and this is upsetting many fans of the original works as well as other authors and anti-censorship advocates. British-American novelist Salman Rushdie had this to say, “Roald Dahl was no angel, but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl Estate should be ashamed.” My main question is where do they draw the line? At what point are they beginning to read these books with the pretense “how could this be seen as offensive”? Were these changes really necessary or are the Sensitivity Readers in charge of pointing these things out just that; too sensitive. I believe we’re beginning to step into the danger zone of controlling the creativity and imaginations of writers by changing their visions for their stories. Most children wouldn’t read these things and see them as offensive, so all they’re really going to accomplish is softening children and making them believe everything to be offensive. But part of life is having to learn to deal with things that might upset you, or make you uncomfortable. And children should have to learn that not everything is a personal attack.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end thank you! I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on this topic. Just remember to stay respectful towards each other in the comments section. You can disagree with each other, but still be kind and respectful, that’s how good debates work. Let me know if you’d like to hear about any of Dahl’s other works and their individual controversies and changes. And also feel free to make requests on what you think I should write about next.

[therese-lokidottir]

Feminism is something that happens in steps. The suffragette/first wave feminism was very important but it was still primary for well off white woman.

Rosie the Riveter, a feminist image that asked and showed woman that thy can step up in work that was previously only for men is something that sticks with us even to today, but once the war was over woman were told to go back into their place of domestic wives.

Diana of Themyscira Wonder Woman a character created so little girls could have a hero just as strong and cool as Superman and Batman is a feminist character. But Wonder Woman alone did not launch feminist in comics.

Feminism is many people working together for the rights of women. I don't doubt that Peggy would seen as feminist figure historically, but Captain Carter wasn't a feminist she was a solider in WWII fighting for the allies. Like, look at the British's idolization of the Queen. That wasn't something that did anything for second or third wave feminism.

omg, now Saint Margaret is responsible for the ENTIRETY of the feminist movement!!! what a gIRlbOss!!!1!!1!1!1!

When will the worshipping of this completely average white woman end?

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

We Were Something, Don’t You Think So? [Chapter 11: Buckingham Palace]

You are a Russian grand duchess in a time of revolution. Ben Hardy is a British government official tasked with smuggling you across Europe. You are hopelessly and tragically in love with each other.

This is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the events of the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the Romanov family. Many creative liberties were taken. No offense is meant to any actual people. Thank you for reading! :)

Song inspiration: “the 1” by Taylor Swift.

Chapter warnings: Language, mentions of war and violence, sexual content (not graphic).

Word count: 6.5k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @imtheinvisiblequeen @okilover02 @adrenaline-roulette @youngpastafanmug​ @m-1234 @tensecondvacation @haileymorelikestupid @rogerfuckintaylor​ @yourlocalmusicalprostitute​ @im-an-adult-ish​ @someforeigntragedy​ @mo-whore​ @mellowfellowyellow​ @peculiareunoia​ @mischiefmanaged71​ @fancybenjamin​ @anne-white-star​ @theonlyone-meeeee​ @witchlyboo​ @demo-wise​ 

💜 💜 💜   Stay tuned for the series finale, coming soon (hopefully)! Thank you for reading!  💜 💜 💜

I’ve dreamed about my family more times than I could count since leaving Tobolsk, and after I learned of their murders I dreamed of nothing at all; but tonight I’m not sure what my dreams are made of. There’s water, or rather the sound of water, immense and roaring against steel. There’s my palm gliding over a metal railing with flaking paint. There are pulsing, anonymous crowds pushing me down cobblestone streets. There are gardens full of plants I’ve never seen before, and an old woman’s voice tells me their names: eastern redbuds, blue mistflowers, scarlet beebalms, Carolina springbeauties, cinnamon ferns. There’s something sweet and ice-cold and strangely biting washing over my tongue. There are flashing bulbs of light that make the stars invisible.

I wake with no answers but deeply rested, as if I’ve slept for a thousand years. Ben is already gone, which is clever of him; cool autumn sunlight—grey with cloud cover, etched with the shadows of brittle leaves—spills in through the windows, and by now there will be butlers and maids moving through the house. I rise to find my body roped with soreness, but it’s a good sort of soreness, gratifying, accomplished: muscles I haven’t used before strengthening, corporal memories demanding to be kept. It reminds me of how I felt as a child after my first rowing lesson on the Black Lake with Papa, or after falling from a horse on my thirteenth birthday, or after carrying Alexei around on my back all day so he wouldn’t be left out of our games. Such pain has a way of making small moments indelible, and belongs just as much to the flesh as it does to the soul.

I go to the window. Above there are rainclouds rolling in from the North Sea; below there are children hurrying to school, bearded men strolling in top hats and wool coats, street vendors selling newspapers and bouquets of flowers, women pushing baby carriages. There was a time when I would have barely seen these people at all. They would have been as flat as paper, nameless, transitory, vanishing the second my eyes left them. Now I am aware—so cuttingly aware—that each has a past and a future and a family and friends, each has dreams like I do, each believes wholeheartedly that they know the story of the world. They don’t, not really, because no one does; we each know only one piece, one strand thinner than a spider’s thread, and we cling to it all our lives without ever seeing the web.

In the full closet that the Lees have generously provided, I push past skirts and trousers to find dresses, lace and silk and chambray. It’s more thought than I’ve put into my clothes since I arrived in London. I have to look more like a grand duchess today. I have to look like the girl that the king remembers.

When Ben knocks, I’m sitting at the vanity in a lace dress not unlike the one I left Tobolsk in, except that this dress is black. Black is appropriate for mourning, and across the globe there are plenty of reasons to mourn at the moment. “Come in,” I call, brushing out my hair.

Ben opens the door but doesn’t cross the threshold. He doesn’t look particularly rested; in fact, he doesn’t look like he’s slept at all. His eyes are red and his hair in disarray. He’s holding the green velvet pouch containing my family’s jewels in one hand and keeps rubbing his face with the other. “Hi,” he says from the doorway.

“Hello.” I glance at him briefly and then turn back to the mirror.

Ben waits for me to say more, to set the tone for him to follow. I don’t say anything. After a while he asks: “Do you need help? Want me to braid your hair for you?”

“No, that’s alright. I can do it.” And I can; he taught me how.

“Okay.” But Ben doesn’t leave. He leans against the doorframe and watches me, bewildered. I don’t understand why he can’t see how painful this is. I don’t understand why he thinks we can pretend it’s yesterday. At last he says: “There was a call from Buckingham Palace. I’ve been summoned to meet with the king this afternoon. Which means you have too.”

“Today?”

“At 3:00. They’re sending a carriage.”

What is this that I’m feeling? I don’t have words for it in any language. I’m nervy and tranquil and proud and cowardly, I’m so young yet so old. And each time I look at Ben, I’m starving for him. I keep my eyes on the mirror. “At last.”

“At last,” Ben echoes softly.

“3:00, was it?” I ask. “They certainly aren’t in a hurry.”

Ben smirks, shrugs. What can you do? That look says. And the answer is nothing. Royalty will behave however they want to. Something about that truth bothers me; it catches in my mind like a thorn in skin. “I suppose it’s time for me to give these back to you.” Ben sets the green velvet pouch on the floor of my bedroom. He still doesn’t step inside, and I suspect that’s more for my own benefit than his. We shouldn’t be unchaperoned while the staff are roaming the halls. We shouldn’t risk my reputation. “I’ll see you at breakfast,” Ben tells me as he leaves.

I go to the pouch and open it. Inside, like the still-glistening organs of a gutted animal, are the jewels that once belonged to the Romanovs. I sift through them—chains of silver, strings of gold, sapphires, rubies, amethysts, emeralds, topazes, diamonds, pearls—conjuring no memories of my family, feeling only the weight of a planet mined raw by other people’s hands.

For the first time, I wonder what exactly jewels like these might be worth.

~~~~~~~~~~

The vast dining room table, to my dismay, is strewn with all the trappings of a Full English Breakfast. Before I can make myself a plate—taking a polite portion of each component and nothing more, perhaps pretending to forget about the blood pudding—Ben emerges from the kitchen with a platter of thin pancakes topped with butter and cherry preserves. They’re his version of blini; they’re his version of a Russian breakfast. Ben sets them down in front of me and then sits at the opposite end of the table. Joe’s eyes leap between us as he sips a cappuccino.

Ben and I speak to everyone except each other. Mr. Lee talks about how much he is going to miss having us here. Mrs. Lee tells us about Australia, kangaroos and koala bears and endless golden beaches, and she implores us to visit her homeland one day if we can. I’ll almost certainly see Australia in my lifetime. It’s a part of the British Empire, after all.

In Italian, Joe says to me: “You must promise that you will come to New York someday, Lana bella donna. You will come and you will dine at my pizzeria and I shall become outrageously famous and wealthy. You must not forget us, because we will not forget you. You must come to New York. Do you promise?”

“Si, lo prometto,” I reply, knowing already that I’m lying, and Joe knows it too. No British monarch has ever set foot in the United States, not even when they were still colonies. Who says that I could be the first? Who says that I could have any choice in the matter at all?

I can’t just sit around all day waiting for the clock to strike 3:00, so after breakfast I take a walk to see Kroshka in the stable several blocks away. Ben trails after me—quietly, hesitantly, from a distance, like he did on the ship we left Saint Petersburg in—crunching rust-colored fallen leaves beneath his boots. In the stalls I find Thoroughbreds and Hackneys and Cleveland Bays, dignified Oldenburgs and arrogant Arabians and one massive Suffolk Punch. I give them each a fond yet fleeting scratch on the forelock before continuing on to Kroshka. She has been given the smallest stall, a dark little cubby hidden away at the end of a row. She is meant to be invisible. Kroshka doesn’t seem to mind; she dozes and chews on a mouthful of hay as I glide my palm down the length of her plain, honest face.

“Who’s a lovely mule?” I murmur. Kroshka’s long scruffy ears perk up. “You’re a lovely mule, yes you are.” I glance back to where Ben stands a few stalls away. “What will happen to Kroshka when you go to New York? You can’t leave her behind. Someone else might not understand. They might abuse her, might even send her to slaughter. She needs you.”

Ben stares at me like he’s seen a ghost, then shakes it off. “She’s coming to New York too, no need to worry.”

“Good.” Kroshka’s nose twitches beneath my hand. I offer her the sugar cubes I took from the Lees’ kitchen, and her velvety lips gobble them up. Everyone else is going to the New World. Everyone else is starting over.

“I thought you didn’t approve of the unattractive mule,” Ben says.

“She’s grown on me.”

“Animals have a way of doing that.”

“So do people.”

On the periphery of my vision, I can see him watching me, curious. He waits for me to continue. He waits a long time.

Still stroking Kroshka’s muzzle, I speak without looking at Ben. “All I ever wanted from you—from the second Mother told me you were coming—was for you to like me. Not just for being a grand duchess, but for who I was as a person. And I just assumed you would like me, that it was inevitable, like gravity or time or waves on the ocean. But then you didn’t. And you didn’t just not like me…you made me feel idiotic and unwelcome and small, so vanishingly small. I couldn’t wait to get away from you. I would have clawed through the earth with my bare hands to get away from you. But then…then…” I turn to him, tears burning in my eyes. “Ben, you made me feel alive. And truthful. And understood. And wanted. Wanted for everything I am but also everything I’m not, like every sliver of empty space, every piece of the human experience that I’m missing was an opportunity for you to teach me something new, to watch me grow, to spend time with me, infinite and cherished time. All I ever wanted was for you to like me. And now you do. But somehow that just makes all of this worse.”

“I don’t like you,” Ben says.

I smile. “No?”

He smiles back, the most hopeless smile I’ve ever seen. “No.”

Last night hangs in the air between us like spiderwebs, like a noose. We could touch it, but we don’t dare. “So I guess you’ll have a few nice things to write about me in your article.”

“There isn’t going to be an article.”

“What?” I exclaim, almost shout at him.

“I’m not going to profit from your family’s murder,” Ben says resolutely, like he’s known it for weeks. “I’m not going to profit from your heartbreak. I’m not going to spill salacious gossip that will give the world more reasons to hate you. I’m not going to be yet another person who expects you to sacrifice for their professional advantage. I’ll find something else to write about. And if I can’t, then maybe I don’t deserve to be a writer.”

When was the last time I saw him scribbling in his leather-bound notebook? Saint Petersburg? That feels like forever ago. Several lifetimes, at least. “Where’s your notebook, Ben?”

“At the bottom of the Gulf of Finland.”

“Ben…you can’t…you can’t just…I thought you…what about…?”

“The decision is made. That’s it. I appreciate your concern, I really do, but this isn’t something you get a say in.”

Across the stable from him—in the midst of horses nickering, hooves stomping, eaves creaking when the wind blows, the bleak autumn air sharp like a razor—I am shellshocked. What about his career in New York? What about the money he needs? “You should write about yourself, Ben,” I say eventually. “Your life, your family, your people. They have stories worth telling. You have stories worth telling.”

“Maybe,” he replies, but he doesn’t seem particularly interested. He doesn’t think that’s something customers would care to read about. He really hasn’t thought of a new plan yet. I find that equally heroic and horrifying. What’s going to happen to him? What’s going to happen to me?

We leave the stable together, walking without speaking but our steps in tandem. Outside there’s a street vendor braying about newspapers and candies and flowers. “Last of the season, last of the season!” he cries, waving bouquets in the air. “Get your mum or your sweetheart something nice. Buy yourself out of the doghouse. Last of the season! Last of the season!”

Ben points to flowers laid out in haphazard piles on the cart. “That’s valerian,” he tells me, making conversation so we have a reason to look at each other. “And zinnias, and helenium, and over there are calla lilies.”

I smile warily at him. “I know, Ben. We grow all of those in Russia.”

“Oh. Right.”

“The gardens at Tobolsk were crawling with calla lilies.”

“What color?”

“White, mostly. Mother called them snow lilies.”

Most of the calla lilies on the street vendor’s cart are deep purple or burnt orange or a pale listless blue, but Ben buys a white one, just one single flower. He weaves its stem through my braid until it is secured there, until the curling, vase-like petal rests behind my ear.

“How do I look?” I ask Ben. “Adorable? Formidable? Regal? A woodland faerie princess?”

“A woodland faerie grand duchess. After last night, are you even still allowed to wear white…?”

I laugh and shove him, gently, playfully. Ben chuckles and drags me into him and slings an arm around my shoulder. I breathe him in: the darkness of smoke and cologne, the light of his latent optimism. Because Ben is an optimist way down deep, he must be. You have to be an optimist to jump at the chance to start over on a new continent with nothing. You have to be an optimist to carry others’ burdens on your shoulders believing that it will, in some infinitesimal way, make the world a less violent place.

We go to Hyde Park and sit on a bench in the midst of spiraling leaves and blade-sharp wind—saying nothing, thinking everything—and listen to Big Ben strike noon, and then 1:00, and then 2:00, time receding from us like a broken fever.

~~~~~~~~~~

In the small travel trunk, I pack my copy of Tarzan of the Apes from Tobolsk, the book about British monarchs that Ben gave me, and the green scarf I bought in Moscow. The silver-thread bears shimmer as I fold the fabric once, twice, again, and then tuck it away safely. I don’t have much to bring with me to Buckingham Palace. Nothing I’ve been wearing is suitable for a princess.

I peer down at the bed, still unmade and rumpled. I go to the side where Ben slept last night and peel off the white pillowcase. When I press it to my face—tentatively, fearfully, bracing myself for no remnants of the night before—it smells just like him. And then I’m beaming without even realizing it. I pack the pillowcase in the travel trunk, then turn to the pouch containing my family’s jewels. It’s still waiting there on the hardwood floor. I close the trunk lid, secure the clasps, and wait for Ben to collect me.

He appears in the doorway just a few minutes later, grim like storm clouds. “Are you ready?”

“Almost.” I pick up the pouch of jewels. “Come inside and close the door.”

Ben does, but diffidently. “Aren’t you going to pack those…?”

“As it turns out, I’m not.” I hand the green velvet pouch to him. “I want you to have this.”

Ben is so shocked he nearly drops it. “You…you…? Want me to…?”

“You need money,” I say simply. “You won’t have a bestselling New York Times article about me to launch a career off of. It will take you longer to find your footing. But the jewels will help.”

“I…you…” He opens the pouch and blinks down at the gleaming metal and gemstones. “I can’t take these from you. No. Absolutely not.” He tries to give the pouch back to me. I refuse it.

“I owe you my life, Ben. This is the very least I can do for you.”

He is aghast. “Look, I get that you don’t really understand how money works, but even if I take these it’s not like I can walk into a bank with them and leave with cash. People are going to notice. They’ll probably think they’re stolen.”

“You can break them apart, can’t you?” I say. “Pry the stones out of the metal. Sell them one piece at a time. Someone will buy them from you, surely. Someone will pay quite a lot for them. They’ll last you years, I suppose. Perhaps decades.”

“But…but…” Ben shakes his head. “I ripped up the photograph. I didn’t get you to London in time to save your family. These are the last pieces of them that you’ll ever have.”

“My family isn’t in these jewels, Ben,” I say, my voice quiet, my eyes slick. And for once, I feel like the wise one. “They’re gone. They’re just gone. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

There is silence, and stillness, and then Ben embraces me. He doesn’t try to kiss me. He doesn’t offer any words. He just holds me until we hear clopping hooves and carriage wheels slowing to a halt on the grey cobblestones outside.

~~~~~~~~~~

Ben loads the travel trunk and then steadies me as I find my footing on the single thin, metal step. The driver is a middle-aged, mustached man who says little to us. Ben and I are left alone inside as we roll towards Buckingham Palace, each of us gazing absently out our own window.

Ben murmurs, his eyes on the streets of London: “Well, you said you wanted a carriage.”

At first I don’t know what he means, and then I remember, laughing wildly. It’s difficult to imagine being that girl who left Tobolsk in the back of a mule cart. She feels more like a sister than me. “This is the last time you’ll see me without having to bow,” I tease, trying to make Ben smile. It doesn’t work.

He rests his forehead against the cool window. His breath paints fog on the glass. “I’m never going to see you again.”

“No?” A desperate, frantic sort of distress seizes me. “We might cross paths. You can sail back to visit sometimes. I’ll arrange everything. Surely we’ll keep up correspondence, at least.”

“You don’t understand,” he says. “I can’t speak to you. I can’t be around you. I can’t wake up every morning wondering if I’ll get a postcard or a letter. If I do, I’ll never move on from this. I’ll never burn you out of me. Every woman I’ll ever meet will be standing in your shadow.”

“So after everything that’s happened, I’m going to lose you too.”

“I was never yours and you were never mine and that’s exactly how you wanted it.”

“I’ll be able to help people, Ben,” I plead softly, pained. “As a princess. As a queen.”

“Yes. When they let you, and in the ways that they let you.”

“This is really the end of us?” I can’t comprehend it. “The very end?”

“I’m sorry,” Ben whispers, still unable to look at me.

He’s beautiful like that, sad and introspective and wise because he’s had to be; and as he wills himself to forget, I force myself to remember. I commit every scrap of him—voice, scent, edges, tenderness, wrath—to my memory like permanent bruises trapped beneath skin. I study his cheekbones and the crinkles around his eyes. I count the freckles I can find on his face. I wish I had more pieces of him to take with me; I wish I had a single thread to bind us together. I wonder if David Windsor will one day be able to dull the pain of losing Ben, or if my children will, or perhaps some new man—a secretary, a guard, a Master of the Horse—with whom I’ll tumble into some blithe infatuation that my chivalrous husband will pretend not to notice. I wonder if I’ll have to learn to pretend I hate Ben in order to survive losing him…but even as the thought sweeps through me I doubt it. I can’t hate Papa for the mistakes—all those dreadful, lethal mistakes—he made as tsar. I can’t hate Mother for her weakness and her apathy. I can’t hate my siblings for being born wealthy and naïve and adored. I love them in a way that is bone-deep and immutable, without conditions, without rationality. It is the same way I will always feel about them, I believe wholeheartedly. It is the same way I feel about Ben.

“We’re here,” he says, breaking my contemplation like a flute of champagne. I startle; indeed, outside my window is Buckingham Palace.

We pass Queen Victoria’s memorial and proceed through the iron gates. There is a swarm of guards and servants waiting for us there. They spirit me out of the carriage and into the palace, Ben battling to keep pace. My single small travel trunk is carried away and disappears up a flight of stairs. I think of its contents: the scarf, the pillowcase, the book of bloodletting kings and chained queens, the novel in which Tarzan renounces his rediscovered birthright and leaves to give Jane a chance at a better life with some kind, passionless, impeccably normal man. There’s a sequel to Tarzan of the Apes, isn’t there? I think dizzily as I’m rushed through cold, gorgeous rooms. I’ll have to read it someday. I wonder what happens next.

The last time I was in Buckingham Palace there was a dusting of snow on the earth and a towering Christmas tree in the ballroom and sprigs of holly in my hair, and my parents were still alive and my sisters were giggling with me about all the eligible royal bachelors and Alexei was eating sticky toffee pudding until he had to be carried off to bed groaning but still wearing a triumphant grin on his drawn, smug, pale little face. Now everything looks different. Everything feels different. I can’t seem to wrap my head around it. It’s like returning to a place that had been so vast and magical when you were a child only to find it dull and confining and somehow…in every way…less. I wish I had never been born into royalty, or that I had never glimpsed life outside of it; I wish I was not this misfit patchwork of experiences that condemns me to belong nowhere. I wish I’d never heard the name Benjamin Hardy. I wish he was a country I’d never visited instead of a world I can’t seem to leave.

“My darling,” the Prince of Wales croons when he comes into view. He is standing beside a closed door, tall and lean and tidy and pristine, wearing an immaculately tailored suit and grinning widely, wolfishly. I had never really known what Tati meant when she complained about men being brutish and beastly and…and…hungry. Now I think I understand.

I take the prince’s hand when he offers it to me. He presses his lips to my knuckles. The hallway goes quiet. Everyone else leaves, vanishes through doorways or corridors; everyone but Ben, that is. “David,” I say.

“Your Imperial Highness.” He looks me up and down. “Good heavens, what’s happened to your hair? Father won’t even recognize you.” He yanks the tie out of my hair, unravels my braid, plucks out the calla lily and tosses it casually away. Some servant will pick it up later, surely, some servant whose name David wouldn’t be able to recall. They’ll snatch it up off the floor and take it outside with the rubbish and forget about it entirely. I wonder how long it will take me to forget about it, about the man who gave it to me. “There, isn’t that better?”

“Where…?”

“His Majesty will grant you an audience in the Throne Room.”

“Now?” I hope my voice doesn’t quiver. I hope David can’t see the panic in my eyes. Ben is still standing beside us, tense and silent and watchful.

The Prince of Wales only has eyes for me. He beams. “Now.”

He twists one shining golden knob. The door sweeps open. The Prince of Wales enters first and then beckons me inside. As I step through the doorway, I have a sudden vision of Mother radiant with pride, her face glowing and striped by shadows in the amber lamplight; I can see Papa puffing contently on his pipe by a roaring fireplace with a newspaper in his hands; I can imagine flesh and nerves and blood vessels knitting back together to cover their scattered bones as the promise of my legacy, my descendants, my fulfilled responsibility brings them new life. And then, following immediately, I see a different sort of vision, not the future but the still-lingering past: Ben whispering to me, all over me, inside of me, but not until I was trembling and gasping and begging him for it. I can still feel how eager and yet careful he was; I can still feel the mystifying absence of any pain. I can’t imagine a better initiation into lovemaking than that. I have no fear of it now, no shameful curiosity, no timid trepidation. I’d like to believe that Mother could forgive this indiscretion if it meant I would spend the rest of my life cradled tidily in the footprints she left for me.

The Throne Room is gold and red, a vivid bloodlike red. The Prince of Wales shows me where to stand. He smiles idly as he fidgets with my hair again to bring it forward over my shoulders, as he brushes a few stray horse hairs from my black lace dress. He is making me presentable. I wonder what my wedding night would have been like with him as my first lover: polite kisses, prissy words, that inevitable hissing pain that marks a woman as virtuous, an emptiness afterwards instead of a dreamlike peace. I wonder what my sisters’ wedding nights would have been like had they lived to marry princes and dukes and emperors. I can picture Olga shuddering with anxiety, Anastasia slapping unwanted hands away, Tati locking herself in the bathroom and sinking to the cold tile floor and hugging her knees to her chest. I think of all the women—girls, really—who have been sent, oblivious and fearful, into the bed of a man they barely knew. I think of their soft vulnerable flesh being roughly uncovered, prodded, invaded, reaped like wheat at harvest. And I realize, with a nauseating stab to my gut, that I will be expected to raise my own daughters to endure the same. All so that the bloodline can continue. All for the sake of royalty.

Ben is here in the Throne Room with us, lurking by the door we came in through. Why hasn’t he left yet? Because no one has told him to. Because they barely see him at all. And perhaps because he’s not ready for this to be the end of us either.

Another door, the one closest to the throne, opens. King George V strides in wearing full regalia, his medals and his ribbons and his cords. He clangs and rustles when he walks. He doesn’t seem surprised to see me. Instead, his eyes glisten as he smiles and opens his arms. “My dear,” he sighs with great sadness, and I soar across the room to him.

“Uncle George,” I sob as I delve into him, ribbons jostling, medals cold against my cheeks. He looks so much like Papa that it’s almost like being able to touch my father again, being able to atone for not saving him. It is a homecoming that knocks the breath out of me.

“You’re alive,” the king marvels softly. He kisses the top of my head. “David told me. I had understood it. But it is quite another thing to feel it firsthand.” He lifts my chin so he can look at me as the Prince of Wales observes us approvingly with his hands clasped behind his back. “You poor thing, you’ve been through so much. I can read the grief on your face.”

“My family…” I can’t finish; I choke on the words as they burn in my throat.

“They would be so proud of you, my dear,” the king says. “So very, very proud.”

I hope this is true. I hope it with every drop of blood in my veins that escaped the blades of revolution. “Thank you,” I wrench out in a jagged whisper.

“I had always hoped…Nicky and I had always planned…and now, at last, against all odds, here you are. The last Romanov. The only remaining heir of a great house. The recipient of the pity of all mankind.” He studies me meditatively. “Yes, I can think of no better match for David. I can think of no brighter future for the British monarchy.”

I belong here. I belong here. This is the only place I will ever belong. If I repeat this enough, surely it will begin to feel real. Time is whirling blindingly forward and yet standing still.

The king notices Ben for the first time. “And who might you be?” Then he recalls, boredly, like it’s an awkward logistical afterthought. “Oh, yes, the press attaché. My secretary will meet you in the Green Drawing Room. You will be given a handsome reward as a gesture of our appreciation.”

Ben should bow and dismiss himself, but he doesn’t. He stares at me, doubtful, immoveable. He’s waiting for me to tell him it’s okay to leave. He’s waiting until he knows I’m alright.

“Uncle George,” I say, regaining my composure. He does look so much like Papa, but there are small differences. The king is slightly shorter. His flesh is leaner, harder, less yielding. And while Papa’s eyes were dark and gentle and warm, the king’s are a clear and glacial blue. David Windsor has the same eyes. Perhaps one day my children will too. “I would like Ben to stay for just a moment longer. I have a few requests to make before I agree to marry into your house, and some of those requests concern him.”

The king furrows his brow and smirks, as if it is amusing that I have requests of any sort. “Alright. Go ahead, my dear.”

“Ben has a brother serving on the Western Front. His name is Franklin Hardy. I believe he’s currently in Passchendaele. I want him honorable discharged and brought home immediately.”

The king nods uncertainly. “As you wish.”

“I want Great Britain to accept Russian refugees,” I say. “There are millions fleeing the revolution. We can take some here, and perhaps France, Italy, Canada, Australia, and the United States can each match our commitment. We cannot save them all, but we can save many.”

“It will have to be discussed with the prime minister and Parliament, but I believe something like that would be possible. It would certainly make us appear more compassionate, more…sympathetic. It is a wise suggestion.”

“I want to be a patron of settlement houses that assist such immigrants.”

Now the king is no longer amused. His smile is dying like unfanned coals. His eyes are hardening like ice. “The children must come first, but yes…I suppose you may have some spare time to devote to charitable causes.”

“On the subject of children,” I say, steeling myself, making my final request. “I want permission to name my firstborn son Alexei. And my first daughter Tatiana.”

George V—King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, Emperor of India, cousin to a slain tsar, father to a shallow prince—chuckles and waves a hand dismissively, as if this is the most ridiculous thing he has ever heard. “The children will have British names, of course.”

His flippantness, his amusement…it sends a bolt through me like lightning. Why isn’t he just as desperate for some way for my family to live on? Why isn’t he still mourning like I am? Like I will be for the rest of my life? Suddenly, the king looks completely different to me. He doesn’t look like Papa at all. I ask him, my voice sharp and unwavering: “Why didn’t you save us?”

“What?” the startled king replies. The Prince of Wales recoils. Ben’s eyes widen as he covers his mouth with both hands.

“Papa, Mother, Tatiana, Alexei, Anastasia, Olga, Maria, me, why didn’t you save us?”

“You couldn’t possibly understand,” the king says patiently, as if I am a child who doesn’t know any better. “Our house, our dynasty…we are not so secure ourselves these days. The people resent our wealth in times of conflict and scarcity. They are suspicious of our German ancestry, of the fact that so many of our nearest relatives are on the other side of this Great War. They lose sight of our vital importance to their pasts, their futures. I could not risk inciting their outrage. And Nicky, though I loved him so fiercely…though I advised him otherwise…he made so many mistakes. He made so many enemies. The British people could not have stomached him.”

“It wasn’t the prime minister at all,” I realize with dawning horror, with swelling rage. “It was you who chose to abandon us.”

“My dear, I swear to you, no one believed that the Romanov children were in danger—”

“But you knew that Papa and Mother were,” I pitch back at him. “And you left them to be butchered.”

“There was nothing else to be done,” the king pleads with me. “There was no other option.”

“If your circumstances had been reversed, Papa would have saved you, your wife, your children. Nothing on this earth could have stopped him.”

“Yes, Nicky was famously weak. And that’s exactly how he ended up where he is now.”

“He trusted you,” I seethe. I can feel scalding heat in my cheeks. I can feel Ben gaping at me, not knowing what to do. “I trusted you. I loved you, I placed all my hopes in you!”

“And you have put them in the right place,” the king insists. “You are safe now. I can keep you safe. The people will accept you, they will cherish you, you are an innocent who cannot be blamed for any of the horrors that have befallen our world. When they look at you, they will see widows and orphans and wounded soldiers returning home, they will see themselves. You will inspire heartfelt sympathy. They will love you, my dear. And they will love us for saving you.” The king reaches out, strokes my cheek, gazes adoringly down at me. “The very last child of a great dynasty. The very last Romanov.”

In his cold blue eyes, I see the lifetime that awaits me if I stay here. I see duty and dispassion and opulence and hollowness. Papa wouldn’t want this for me. Mother wouldn’t want this for me, not if she really knew what it entailed. Everything in me shifts, readjusts, clicks into a new rhythm. I look across the Throne Room at Ben. He stares back, not understanding. “Yes, I am the last Romanov,” I say. I step back to where the king cannot touch me. “There will be no others after me. My children—if I have children—will not be royals. They will know nothing of my bloodline. They will not build their lives on the backs of servants and slaves. They will not kill to keep their thrones. And they will not be fathered by a prince, not here and not anywhere.”

“What do you mean?” the king asks, confounded.

“I am leaving,” I say. “I am leaving the palace now. Forever. With Ben.”

“With who?” The king peers around in confusion. “With…the press attaché…?!”

“Yes.” I glance at Ben. He is too stunned to say anything, too stunned to move. The Prince of Wales blinks stupidly at Ben, as if becoming aware of him for the first time.

The king’s eyes dart to Ben, slide back to me, and then narrow suspiciously. “Are you still intact?”

“No. I cannot count all the pieces of myself that I have lost since Papa’s abdication. But none of them were taken by Ben. He has taken nothing from me. He has only given.”

“You…you…you are a disgrace!” the king sputters. “You are a humiliation. You would be better off dead with the rest of your family. At least then you would still have some dignity.”

“Then let me be dead,” I say. “Let the world think I died in Russia. I was never here. I never rejected this offer of marriage because it was never made. I am not a grand duchess. I am a typist named Lana Brinkley. I am a nobody. And I am crossing the Atlantic with Ben to build a new life in New York City.”

“You…you…you’re what?”

“You’re what?!” the Prince of Wales echoes, shrill and petulant like a little boy.

“Let me go,” I demand of King George V. “Let me go and no one will know that it was you who left my family to be slaughtered. There are other royal women for your son to marry. And I assure you, for your purposes, I am already ruined.”

“Not ruined,” Ben says. He has appeared beside me and taken my hand.

The king is repulsed, furious, incredulous. His eyes are a wasteland, a tundra that freezes and starves. “Get out of my sight. Both of you.”

“Father…” the Prince of Wales nudges.

“Out!” he shouts at us, all three of us. The Prince of Wales departs from one door. Ben and I leave through another. The king, perhaps the richest man on the planet, is left completely alone.

All the way out of the palace—down the hallways, through the ballroom, past the ogling servants and guards—Ben never drops my hand. He doesn’t speak, but he knows exactly where he’s going. Our palms skate down golden staircase railings, our shoes pound against hardwood floors, our eyes flash under the bright electric lights of Buckingham Palace. And when I steal a glimpse of Ben’s face, he is smiling.

Outside in the brisk October air, the entire world is dying so it can begin again. I am half-terrified; I am entirely free.

[neopoint]

i think a big issue with western trans ideology is the sheer need to enforce this specific view of gender onto every other culture or misrepresent those from other cultures as their own.... like for example i’ve seen so many white people try to claim the hijra are trans women or trans in general and its like... they’re not though. they historically never have been and still aren’t. they’re hijra, they’re their own gender, they’ve always been a separate group and have never tried to enter women’s spaces nor do they let women join their spaces. hijra had a specific way of life and role in society as hijra, not as men or as women, they were revered as spiritual leaders, and the only reason this way of life was interrupted was because british colonizers deemed them immoral and criminalized their entire identity. this absolutely kills westerners though because even if they coat it up in progressive language they can only view gender in proximity to masculinity or femininity, whether you subscribe to one or the other or are “in between”. today hijra cannot live the way they traditionally did and are quite often forced into prostitution, because western laws destroyed the place they had in society and made people start viewing them negatively. many choose to adopt the western concept of trans because hijra communities don’t exist the way they did for thousands of years before british intolerance resulted in two awful centuries of discrimination and violence against them.

viewing non-western or non-white “third genders” as some primitive form of transgenderism is extremely racist but extremely common and i’m sick of it, especially when it was westerners who stigmatized said third genders in the first place. gender is a social construct, not an immutable truth or a physical reality the way sex is, and not everyone in the world wants to subscribe to your version of it or use your language for it. hijra are not “early trans people”, they were hijra, and would have stayed hijra if white people didn’t come to fuck up our entire subcontinent.

[mirrorbxll01]

The historic moment that the statue of Edward Colston, slave trader of the Royal African Company, was toppled by crowds in the centre of Bristol (UK) and, appropriately, rolled into the Harbour.

Colston was a major slave trader involved in the transportation of 84,000 enslaved African men, women & young children from West Africa to the Caribbean & the Americas. 19,000 people died on these voyages - most of whom, like Colston, were callously thrown into the sea.

The glorification of the British Empire and colonialism on the whole is particularly troublesome in the UK. As a white person, I cannot ever fathom the pain of racism, but as an Irish woman living in London I find the reverence of the Empire horrifying.

Consequently, these actions are inspiring. Like most people, even in the UK, I had never heard of Colston until today but, thanks to the actions of these BLM protestors, his name and atrocities will never be forgotten.

I have no doubt that many will attempt to attack those who tore this statue down - in fact, I have already seen many do so. I'm sure they will cite cultural relativism, the importance of remembering history and label the protesters vandals.

However, I find cultural relativism especially damaging. Slavery and racism are wrong. The when or where is irrelevant regarding moral validity. By applying cultural relativism as some sort of trump card (pardon the pun), you suggest that criticism of history is futile and ultimately condone past horrors.

Secondly, removing statues is not erasing history. Statues are not the mechanisms by which we understand history. We learn history through museums, books, TV and the internet. Statues are created to revere a great person. Edward Colston was not a great man; he was a murderer and slave trader.

And finally, I don't view these people as vandals. The people of Bristol have been petitioning and demanding that the statue be removed for some time but the local council have continually refused despite the pain felt by many. Additionally, don't ask why people tore down a statue of a slave trader - ask why it was put up in the first place.

How can you have peace when there is no justice?

Finally, although I doubt that many will read this, if anybody is interested in learning more about this or British colonialism in general then I reccomend looking up David Olusoga. He is a British-Nigerian historian and one of the finest in his profession.

Also, here's a bit of light amongst the dark - GoogleMaps were quick to update us on Edward Colston's location.

✊🏻✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿

[1greenameba]

I heavily dislike this type gentrified worldbuilding : the point of it is to make the weirdest setting possible and to have it feel relatable somehow ...

That is essentially lowering the bar .

Also i'll provide counter arguments to those points one by one :

1) pepole knew about basic hygene , however you still wouldn't have wanted to get vounded in roman times because yeah they didn't have the clearest ideas about what worked ...

Even today a lot of surgery is about putting the body in the condition to recover ,

Surgery was practiced differently in many places , and there was a lot of creativity in practices , such as cautherizing vounds, drilling the skull and a great number of practices , just a cursory look at the history of surgery on wikipedia will provide hispiration ...

Also the fact that pepole can die easily makes every fight razor blade tense , as soon as a knife is out the fact that it's hard to survive a stab vound will make the tension rise ...

If you want a fight with weapons without consequences then you want the caracters to wrestle , bet it on a game of poker or have a dialogue , it depends on what you want ...

If you can't make those things tense you're not good enough at writing ...

2) if you rely on missionary sex your take on romance is dull ,

There are a lot of practices that can be seen as deeply romantic and even replacments for sex , such as doing anal , foot jobs , fingering , tongue stuff and so on and so forth ...

Also this misses one important point :

Caracters are not real pepole ,

The most fertile woman could have penetrative unprotected sex with two testosterone filled stallion of men 3 times a day each for 3 months straight ,

And if the tone of the story is silly enough or you intend to rapresent the sex as miraculus

Then you end up with no baby ...

Again what does the sex mean ?

Is it liberatory because they finally met ? Then it depends on wheter or not they want a baby or not ...

Is it a couple that wants to have a baby ?

Depends on if how hard you want to make it

Is it a prostitute ?

Have her be pregnant a few times and have those be plot relevant ...

I don't feature a lot of sex in my writing because i am asexual so i don't see the enjoyment ,

But regardless you shouldn't throw a d12 to determine if your heroine got pregnant afther the run in the tavern ...

You want it to be a thing the caracter consider ?

Because yes that will inform how pro or anti casual sex pepole are ...

Like seriusly pepole didn't have magical and spiritual rituals around sex just because it felt good ,

It felt good but also had several strings attached , so yeah sex was unsurprisingly complicated , and it is complicated ,

If you want to write in wichever ways do so they just need consistency

3) the solution of the maker is to literally white wash history ...

One of you're writing a story set in a place that existed and had those stuff , such as the US , you should put prejudice .

If the place is made up then it depends on how you want the reader to feel and what type of readers you want to attract ,

You want to attract racists ? Don't

You want to show how regular pepole are powerless towards those things , and even good pepole may turn a blind eye if it benefits them ...

That's a type of story that is rarely written , mostly because we focus on royals and warriors and rarely on just guys ...

Racism as a modern concept originated in the early modern period , where an explaination as to why the natives in plantations and lather on black where there , while the white spaniards where on the top ...

That is remarkably similar to how caste systems in india originated : it started more like a more complex and comprensive guild system , and then it got copted by the british into somenthing very much made to devide and conquer ...

It's hard for fantasy to tackle with these concepts because fantasy rarely deals with the economy ,

The question that makes most worldbuilding crumble is "what do pepole eat ?"

Because yeah that is very much somenthing most worldbuilders too busy with cabbalistic/vedic tiers of gods and angels and with designing the sword and armour of their varrior caste won't bother with ...

And really ofthen the question where does the food comes from nowadays is

"from the hands of exploited minorities"

So really the solution of being liberal is a non solution as always ...

4) if you can't make a caracter in a codpiece be taken seriusly then it's not the codpiece ,

It's the writer ...

Also , writing is a non visual medium , how the pepole look is secondary as to how they are percived ...

It's also worthwhile to do some research in how clothing works , and to give the caracters you write a feel you think works ...

Are skirts preferred for men ? Sure go ahead ...

Are loin cloths worn over large codpieces considered modest in a culture ? Well then the optics of the rest of the culture will be weird ...

Weird and intresting really ofthen go hand in hand ...

Also before modern production metods everything was kinda uneaven and imprefect ,

So really a jacked of today being minimalist would impress a tailor of the day maybe with being finely woven and perfectly simmetric ,

But it would likely look drab and boring to everyone else ...

Also it's mostly just a reductio at incredulity , like "nobody can take X seriusly"

The writer said that with autority , since they are indeed nobody ...

As for make ups being dangerous : humans are not rational creatures , we'll do dangerous stuff for many reasons including it looks pretty , why remove that ?

5) before mechanical clocks sundials marked the hours ...

This meant that hours changed in lenght trought the year ...

It's also because there are two ways of telling time :

"Entropic" ones based on the increase in entropy of somenthing , a general description because i am describing a lot of ground here :

Water clocks , hourglass , incense clocks , candle clocks , and most modern clocks that store energy in one way or the other ...

These can work always but require energy ...

They also tend to be assiciated with human things such as dancing and singing , because they can be made to have perfect rythm ...

Meanwhile celectial clocks use celestial bodies to determine time ,

Calendars , sundials , astrolabes , and so on work with this ...

These things exist naturally they help with navigation and are also really reliable ...

Really they are both at the basis of ritualistic magic and spirituality ...

Rythm is magical and patterns are magical ...

It's for that reason it's in-cant-ation , wich shares a root with chant ...

And why astrology was such a big deal back in the day ...

Because being able to keep time accurately is fundamental for a society and kinda allows us to turn into a large coordinated organism ...

So yeah take time seriusly ...

Or at least i am saying so because i wrote a story about time recently and if you can't write it without it being confusing then it's not the fault of the concept ...

It's the fault of the writer .

You may go "pepole aren't getting it" and you may be right , but you just gotta write better ...

All skills have a lot of repetition and practice behind them ...

But in the end yes both worldbuilding and writing are artistic puruits : being adequate is more valuable than being perfect ...

Also having fun is more imprtant if you're not making this for money ...

Restricting pepole because "it's not belivable" has helped nodody , besides making most modern pop art dull unimaginative saw dust ...

That is executive talk ,

Start giving yourself wizard talk ...

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

[growingstronglikeahighgardenrose]

Anti-blackness in 19th century England, why Queen Charlotte wasn’t black, and why it doesn’t matter in Bridgerton

I’d like to start by saying Bridgerton is a very amusing piece of absolute fiction. From the dresses to the music to the fanfic tropes it uses and the books it’s based on. It doesn’t even start to pretend it’s realistic. And being a piece of modern historical fantasy made by a woman born in this age, it is alright for the showrunners to give it a modern vibe. If you want, you can trace the lineage of every duke of Hastings there has ever been and know exactly who they were and what they looked like. Everyone knows there was never a black duke of Hastings, meaning there is no harm nor a deliberate attempt at “changing history” by the showrunners. They’re not pretending they’re portraying real events and real people of 1813. Therefore I accept that in this “alternative reality regency” it is fine for people of all ranks, including Queen Charlotte, to be black. I loved Golda Rosheuvel’s portrayal, I loved her looks, her acting and I tolerate her half-ishly accurate outdated wardrobe (for those interested in fashion history: look up “regency era court gowns”, old styles were worn but Charlotte would wear normal dresses day-to-day). I’m thrilled to watch her in the second season as well.

However,  I will screech if I see people claiming Charlotte was black in real life. There were black people in Europe during all periods of history. They could be very influential and wealthy, and yes, they could even be nobility in some rare cases. There is a growing field of research tracing the steps of black people in Europe throughout time, revealing the often overlooked presence of black people. However, Queen Charlotte isn’t one of them. And I say this because claiming her to be black, would mean the British Monarchy, way ahead of its time, was accepting of black people. it would also mean the British people, who were more than a bit racist, generally accepted a (partially) black woman. Rather than Charlotte being black leading to her being described as black, I believe the confusion about her being black stems from people back in the day using racially ambiguous terms to make clear Charlotte looked ugly (because in a racist colonial world the best way to insult someone is by saying they look like a slave).

Being a historian, I do believe I have to give evidence for my claim. I’ll be using her ancestry, written descriptions and paintings. However, buckle up because you’ll be getting a lot of side information on other POC in art and literature. So if you’re interested in learning a bit about the relationship between the concepts of race and beauty in the 18th and 19th century, here we go. (note: if I use any offensive terms without direct citing someone, do let me know I will change them as soon as possible)

1.    When did these rumours start

During the Regency Era, when the world was still a very colonial one, Queen Charlotte was described by some as having a big nose, full lips and an ambiguous complexion. However, her race was never debated, until academic discussions picked up around the 1940s.

2.    Queen Charlotte’s family tree.

The Portuguese royal family definitely has Moorish blood in it. No one can contest that. Muslims and Europeans lived together on the Iberian Peninsula for 800 years. The question is whether that means that royals with a Portuguese ancestor can be called “people of colour”, and how far down the line people can still claim to be people of colour. Almost all royal households of Europe married into the Portuguese royal family at some point, yet of few royals it is said that because of that heritage, they are people of colour. That argument is only made for Queen Charlotte (imo that probably has a lot to do with the fact that the world is dominated by the Anglosaxon countries and that because of their worldwide tentacles and their language being the most universally spoken, the British Royal Family receives the most interest from everyone all over the world. Other royal families don’t get as much attention).

Note that I used the word people of colour, that is because the root of Charlotte’s supposed African heritage is not necessarily black. Let’s take a look at her family tree.

According to historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom — who dug into the queen’s lineage for a 1996 Frontline documentary on PBS — Queen Charlotte could trace her lineage back to black members of the Portuguese royal family. Charlotte was related to Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a 15th-century Portuguese noblewoman nine (!) generations removed.

Margarita de Castro e Souza herself descended from King Alfonso III of Portugal and his concubine, Madragana, a Moor that Alfonso III took as his lover after conquering the town of Faro in southern Portugal.

This would make Queen Charlotte a whopping 15 generations removed from her closest black ancestor — if Madragana was even black, which historians don’t know. That’s a lot of generations back. de Valdes y Cocom argues that, due to centuries-long inbreeding, he could trace six lines between Queen Charlotte and Sousa, which would mean Madragana’s genes were a bit more influential, but still 15 generations ago. That’s her grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grandmother.

So, let’s pretend it is true and her ancestor was black, let me be very rude. An ancestor that appears once in a person's genealogy, fifteen generations removed, represents a 215-th fraction of its descendant's ancestry. Queen Charlotte’s black ancestry would be less than 1%. In fact it'd be 0.007% (rounded up) of Charlotte's ancestry, and that's IF Madragana could be proved to be Moorish. And if Moorish was only used to describe a black person. However, the use of “blackamoor” “moorish” and “mozaraab” are not an alternative word for black. Indeed, there is no definitive skin colour attached to these descriptors.

It is generally accepted that Spanish Moors were the Muslim Amazigh (formerly known as Berber) inhabitants of the Maghreb, a stretch of land in north-Africa including parts of the Sahara, but not Egypt. During the Middle Ages, they occupied the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of southern Europe, before being finally driven out in the 15th century. The greatest period of unity was probably during the period of the kingdom of Numidia. Over the centuries, the word came to acquire a plethora of other meanings, some of them derogatory. Importantly, it cannot be ascribed a single ethnicity. Moors are not always black, this is false. They remaining people in Africa can be anywhere from Arab, to black people. But I’m not delving into north-african migration patterns and population changes. In Europe, the moors could thus be Arab, black and often mixed ethnicity, the natural result of coexisting and intermarrying with white Europeans for centuries.

http://acaciatreebooks.com/blog/royalty-race-and-the-curious-case-of-queen-charlotte/

  3. Gender, Race and beauty standards

The world of the 19th century was riddled with Anti-blackness. Part of this continued from the medieval belief that white was good, and dark was bad (see white knight, fair lady, black knight, dark magic notions that still persist today). It also does not help that during the Regency Era, Greek and Roman antiquity were very trendy. Although the old roman empire was a culturally and ethnically diverse society, regency people focussed on fashion, hairstyles and looks from the classical art period of Greece. People aspired to look like the statues: elegant, slim and dainty and wanted “noble” features (straight slim nose, even face, cheekbones, etc). That’s why in the regency era people were complimented for having “alabaster skin” or a “Grecian profile” and so on.  These medieval notions of fairness and the grecian beauty ideal, were juxtaposed against the medieval notions of darkness combined with deeply colonial conceptions of womanhood and race. In a world in which white people controlled other ethnicities, race soon became a weapon, a tool to be used against someone. Just like… gender. And yes, you’ll soon see how these two go hand in hand.

Throughout the nineteenth century the domestic world and the public sphere became more and more separate, with women being given less space to move and work. All women had to be dainty housewives: refined, sensitive and docile, clever but not too well read. Of course, this was an unattainable standard for most women. Only women in the top layer of society were able to lounge around and do nothing all day. Many had to work. Many things of what women were supposed to be: pale, soft hands, were direct signs that they didn’t have to do manual labour (out in the sun, using their hands). Women who could not fit in that small domestic sphere were increasingly (especially later on in the Victorian era) seen as unfeminine and unworthy of husbands. Coarse, manly, unfeminine, unrefined they were often called. Welcome to 19th century “masculinity so fragile”. Just imagining a woman working or reading made men felt threatened. They hated the idea women weren’t just lounging around waiting to please them and provide for them. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gender-roles-in-the-19th-century# https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pit-brow-lasses-women-miners-victorian-britain-pants

Now look at this sketch of a female mine worker, one of many.  Although the argument can be made she’s dark from the dirt, I want to point out that she’s also portrayed as scantily clad, wearing more manly clothes, being broader, wide of face and her hair appearing… quite curly.She’s the opposite of the beauty ideals, the opposite of what society wants a woman to be... and she’s suspiciously black-coded.

Pervasive and passive stereotypes of black people have come into existence since colonialism. Cruel caricatures of black people were omnipresent. Going as far as to ascribe them animal-like features with big mouths, big ears, sloping foreheads and so on. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2712263?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents

I could write a million essays on how race and sex have been weaponized in the past. When the “exploration travels” first started, and even much later in art, faraway lands were portrayed as sultry lazy or untamed women, waiting to be conquered and domesticated. Transforming countries into women was done to make them “controllable”. Portraying them as lazy and wild was a way Europeans to give themselves license to colonize them. Just like women at home, these foreign lands needed the guiding hand of cultured civilized men showing them how to do things and ruling them. So either men could control women which was perceived as good, or they couldn’t in which case the woman was looked down upon and hated. I don’t have an exact reference for this one, but it was a very interesting topic in my class on “Global History” at University. But for now this one carries a good part of the load.

https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel/

It is then no surprise the female black body became a site of seduction there for the white male’s taking. They literally became their property as slaves, just like a man’s wife was considered his property. White men sexualized black people, particularly black women, a stereotype that perpetuates to this day and age. See the link above for that as well. Black women became temptresses.

White women, of course, didn’t like that. They wanted their men to be theirs. So these 19th century Karens started hating them as well. These wild temptresses were out to catch their men with their “foreign looks”. Meanwhile white men hated the idea of white women being seduced by black men. And this, combined with the resentment for working class women, gave way to a kind of language people used to describe each other. All stereotypes (medieval+ working class women looks+ black looks) were stacked atop each other: dark, tempting, coarse, black, plump, uncivilized, wild, broad-faced, thick of lip… Hair didn’t much come into play in the 18th century since most people of high society wore wigs (which in paintings can look like type 4 hair but cannot be used as an indicator of race) but afterwards “tight coils” was also added to the list of features that weren’t deemed desirable. This physical robustness not only lies in the idea that people who work are “hardened” but by describing them with strong robust adjectives, upper class white people once again fuel the idea that these people were physiologically designed for hard work, like slave labour or mine work instead of life as a wife. See also present day notions common even in doctors how black people and black women don’t feel pain as much. A devastating prejudice that leads to black death, black mothers dying, black people’s health complaints not being taken seriously and so on.

4. Black, racially ambiguous and “foreign” coding in physical descriptions

 So we all know the memes of “Historians say they were friends” and so on. It’s a fun meme, but this carefulness in naming things stems from the fact that A) sources are made by people and people are subjective as fuck B) it is deemed a big faux pas for a historian to look at history through a 21st century lens. The rabbit hole that is historical epistemology boils down to the claim that a thing cannot exist before there is a word for it. You need to be careful that you don’t apply a term to an event, person or society wherein that term didn’t exist, or the meaning of the term was different. We shouldn’t draw conclusions about the past with present day notions. When a person anno 2020 is described as dark, we know they’re probably south-east Asian or black. However, we may not believe that a person being described as dark in the 17th century means this person is black. I shall explain.

Back in a time when black equalled inferior, people found no better way than to ascribe black attributes to people they disliked. It is hard to find out whether these people were actually darkskinned, since portraits were commissioned and painted to the desires of the clients (they could ask to be painted with white skin). We have no photographs of the time period to verify whether people did really look the way people described. With few people able to move around the country by carriage, as this was expensive, most people relied on letters, books and papers to give them accounts of events and people, so if one person claimed a person looked like X, others oftentimes had no choice but to believe the account, as they lived too far away to verify. Thus I shall focus on the world of literature, where there were no real people we can compare descriptions to, to prove that the good guys were portrayed as fair, and bad guys were portrayed as… racially ambiguous without them having to be black, or any other ethnicity.

Fairytales: Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. There’s literally no argument to be made at all. But just take a look at fairytales from the Brothers Grimm. Nine times out of ten, the evil stepsisters and stepmothers are described as dark and ungainly while the heroine is fair. If there are transformations, the evil people get transformed into gross animals like toads, while the heroine is transformed into a fawn, a bird or a swan. I’m being unnuanced here, there are definitely heroines with dark hair (see snow white, but she’s still snow white of skin) and the reasons for ugly-animal-transformations has to do with the character traits that have been ascribed to those animals. These stories circuled orally since the middle ages, and most trace their roots back to even before that time. Though the world was not yet a colonnial one, it is a sign that darker looks were already linked to bad people. These notions of darkness have been absorbed into the notions about black people during colonialism. People already lived with  concepts of fairness for good people and darkness for bad people in their heads, it became easy to continue these concepts when faced with black people.

Jane Eyre: Jane is described as green eyed (a very rare colour, most prevalent in white people), fairy-like, skinny and pale. Although Brönte tells us she is ugly (she indeed doesn’t confirm to beauty ideals at the time) she appeals to Mr. Rochester and fits more into the stereotype of beauty than her romantic rival: Berta Mason Rochester. Bertha’s laugh is “hysterical” and “demonic”, she is dangerous and injures her own brother. “What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.”

Dear reader, Mr. Rochester is described as being tempted into a marriage, to a wild foreign animal-like madwoman with dark grizzled hair and red eyes. Although there is no description of her skin colour (Bertha could very well be any ethnicity) there are clear parallels in the way she is described and the way POC were described. In the context of the 1840s readers would instantly attach this picture to their preconceptions about others with a similar look. Jane doesn’t even need to describe Bertha’s personality, the readers have already decided what she’s like because they understand that the author means dark looks= bad personality. Dark looks= foreign looks. Additionally: Blanche Ingram, Jane’s other rival was described as a fine beauty with a stereotypically beautiful body but had an olive complexion, dark hair and dark eyes. These were desirable traits in England at the time, but the darker beauty of Blanche comes with a bad personality and in the end, she too is rejected in favour of our pale heroine Jane.

Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff has long confused readers. It is most probable, in my opinion, given the context of the time, that Heathcliff was of roma origin as roma were strongly disliked in England at the time, and he fits best in the stereotypes associated with them. It’s also much more probable that an English gentleman would take in an orphaned European child than a black child, especially given he raised him as a son (british people weren’t that kind, they wouldn’t raise a black child as their son). However, the author, still clearly relies on a certain set of dark characteristics to describe him. “I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine's; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.” “He seemed a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment: he would stand Hindley's blows without winking or shedding a tear, and my pinches moved him only to draw in a breath and open his eyes.” “You are younger [than Edgar], and yet, I'll be bound, you are taller and twice as broad across the shoulders; you could knock him down in a twinkling; don't you feel that you could?” “Do you mark those two lines between your eyes; and those thick brows, that, instead of rising arched, sink in the middle; and that couple of black fiends, so deeply buried, who never open their windows boldly, but lurk glinting under them, like devil's spies?” “he had by that time lost the benefit of his early education: continual hard work, begun soon and concluded late, had extinguished any curiosity he once possessed in pursuit of knowledge, and any love for books or learning. His childhood's sense of superiority, instilled into him by the favours of old Mr. Earnshaw, was faded away … Then personal appearance sympathised with mental deterioration: he acquired a slouching gait and ignoble look; his naturally reserved disposition was exaggerated into an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness;” “His countenance was much older in expression and decision of feature than Mr. Linton's; it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation. A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified: quite divested of roughness, though stern for grace.” “He is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman”

Once again: black eyes, heavy brows, black hair. He is rough, can stand a lot of heavy burdens, seemingly indifferent to pain. He has something devilish and uncivilized about him, and is oftentimes believed dumb. Admittedly, this portrayal is more nuanced, he has a knack for studying and he does look like a gentleman. But the author is clear that it is only superficial and he is still mad within. It thus becomes very clear, already only from literature, that if you want someone to look bad, you make them look manly, workmanlike and ascribe to them black features.

For more examples of racial ambiguity, casual racism and explicit racism in English 19th century books: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/victorian-literature-and-culture/article/casual-racism-in-victorian-literature/1B4B3B0538F8B7C6B58E6D839DCFEC92.

This technique was adapted by EVERYONE. Wanted to make your enemy look bad? Then write a very uncharming picture of them attributing them with stereotypical black features. The most common remarks were: broad noses, big lips, frizzy hair, swarthy and/or dark complexians, coarse looking and unrefined. If you wanted to be really rude you could start comparing people to animals and call them wild and unhinged because “madness” was and is a very common insult. Had an issue with your wife in the 19th century? Lock her up for “hysteria” and “madness”. Got a political opponent in the 2016 presidential elections? Call her mad and hysterical. Got an opponent in the 2020 presidential elections? Challenge his mental capacities. Psychological issues and disorders have often been used to make people look bad and invalidate them. Basically everyone who isn’t reacting in a neurotypical and stereotypical male way (i.e. show no emotions and so on) was classified as “unreasonable”, thus taking away their voice. So many interesting articles and books on this.So we have an intersection between race, womanhood and mental health that are used to control and reject women.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/outreach/trade_in_lunacy/research/womenandmadness/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4286909?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

https://www.routledgehistoricalresources.com/feminism/sets/women-madness-and-spiritualism

https://www.amazon.com/Madness-Women-Myth-Experience-Psychology/dp/0415339286

TLDR: In literature bad characters were often described with physical attributes that were seen as ungainly. They were codified with animal-like, manly and mad. They also had black and dark attributes to signal to the reader that they were not the heroes of the story. Bonus: they often met a deathly or bad end. Writers did it, but so did real people when they wanted to accuse a rival (Karl Marx being one such asshole for example, http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.html ). This is why we can not always trust written accounts of contemporaries before the age of photography when a person is described with racially ambiguous looks.

5. Descriptions of Queen Charlotte:

 Just like Beethoven, Queen Charlotte’s main claim to blackness boils down to one ancestor at least two centuries before her birth, combined with contemporary descriptions of a certain hair type, wide nose and bad complexion. Descriptions of Charlotte during her lifetime describe a plain and small woman, with a wide and long nose, and lips that were not the rosebud ideal. As the court became accustomed to her, however, more people started complimenting her brown hair, pretty eyes and good teeth. Much of the imagery that has fuelled claims of Charlotte’s possible African ancestry is from the first few years of her time in England. Royal brides have been ripped to pieces by tabloids, and the public also performs a horrible hazing-like ritual(see: Kate Middleton was mocked for being a party girl, lazy and from working class background. Meghan Markle was described as an opportunist husband-snatcher. Diana was a “chubby child”. The ladies also got plenty of critiques on their looks). Once the bride gets through years of being bullied, critiqued for every little part of her being, she then suddenly comes out on the other end after a few years, becoming a darling and an attribute to the royal family. Could it be that royal brides are always, especially in a gossip heavy environment like a court, under deep scrutiny? This foreign princess hobbled off a boat, seasick, unknown by the English… And she didn’t speak a word of the language! Why would the English love her? I am not saying the accounts lie but I am saying beware of the person making the comments. Are they close to the monarch and his wife? Do they like Queen Charlotte? When where these comments made and why? And why did they choose precisely these words that had by now become commonplace to use as descriptors for unpleasant people? If we know people used racially ambiguous terms to describe people they disliked, it isn’t such a stretch to imagine they might insult a new queen with such terms.

Let’s look at what was actually said about her.

 Horace Walpole: “The date of my promise is now arrived, and I fulfill it — fulfill it with great satisfaction, for the Queen is come. In half an hour, one heard of nothing but proclamations of her beauty: everybody was content, everybody pleased.”

Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar, the royal physician to her grandaughter: “small and crooked, with a true Mulatto face.”

Sir Walter Scott: “ill-colored.”

Colonel Disbrowe (her chamberlain): “I do think that the bloom of her ugliness is going off.”

Queen Charlotte herself in a diary: “The English people did not like me much, because I was not pretty; but the King was fond of driving a phaeton in those days, and once he overturned me in a turnip-field, and that fall broke my nose. I think I was not quite so ugly after dat [sic].”

What we can conclude from these remarks that Charlotte was not very pretty, she even admits to that herself. But what are her actual physical attributes? She has light brown hair (I didn’t include a description of this, but it was generally reported), she had pale eyes (as can be seen in all paintings), was small, and had good teeth.

Above I gave two accounts that reported on her skin tone. Ill-colored could be anything like bad skin, rosacea or perhaps tanned (which also wasn’t deemed becoming for ladies). There was only one person, Baron Christian himself, calling her face what he did. As mentioned above, there can be multiple reasons why anyone would ascribe her those features, she did not have to be a “mulatto” to be described as one.

Most importantly, in a society with slavery, in which black people were looked down upon, I’d say the absence of more people calling her things like: dark, swarthy, black, mixed, brown and any and all things associated with black looks, is more telling than a few accounts mildly referring to her colour.

If Charlotte were truly the first black queen, the first black person in such a powerful position, and one of the few black people in England (less than 30 000 at the time), would there not be more talk? More descriptions of her look? She was seen every day by many people. People would be shocked, enraged, surprised, fascinated and so on. In an era when many people kept diaries in which they wrote down all they witnessed, many people would have given descriptions of her black/brown skin colour. In an era with cartoons and press… Her being noticeably black would have been a very big thing and we would have seen journalists and cartoonists draw her as dark. Cartoonists and diary writers mostly write or draw their honest thoughts. They weren’t censured.

  6. Paintings of Queen Charlotte:

Queen Charlotte’s most striking likenesses, or so it is believed, were painted by Allan Ramsay, a prominent artist and staunch abolitionist. In 1761, Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) was appointed Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King (1761-84). As well as being Principal Painter, his portraits have been singled out by many as depicting Queen Charlotte with distinctly African features. It’s believed this was his way of displaying his abolitionist tendencies. He was an abolitionist, that much is true, and he was also friends with the legal guardian of the very famous black Dido. However why would the royal couple approve blatant African features, knowing those would not be well liked in an English queen? They would not have allowed these images. Clearly, they saw in these images only a likeness to Charlotte, and yes, that could mean she had fuller lips and a wider nose. Anyone can have those features. Personally, I find that a slightly larger nose and larger lips in some paintings are not sufficient proof to call her black. But let’s run over some of the paintings.

Most paintings portray her as a typical light-skinned royal with nothing bad about her complexion. 

In these pictures she does not look black in the slightest, indeed I’d say her eyes and eyebrows look very light even, nor do her nose and lips, so often critiqued, look big, as was claimed.

Here we can see her nose looks a bit wider, and her lips a bit bigger. But is that really a convincing argument? Although certain features are more common to a certain race, they are not monopolized by one. Black people can have light hair and light eyes. It is unlikely, but it is possible. It’s just as possible for white women to have bigger lips, a wider nose, a rounder face and even… though rarely, there are white people who have no black relative they know of, white 4a hair. I’ve met a few of them. What I also want to note is that Queen Charlotte’s natural hair could have been crimped and combed until it stood upright and was stiff with powder, as was the fashion back then. It would give her hair a more frizzy look. In the picture underneath it, you can see her hair in fashionable artificially made curls that wouldn’t work on natural type 3 or 4 hair.

 However as I said before, I’m not fond of using paintings as proof since they were made-by-demand. Painters would starve if they painted their patrons unflatteringly. There are black people, indeed, even black nobles, ex-slaves, diplomatic ambassadors who had themselves painted with a dark skin colour since the Middle Ages. You can even see the distinction between people of darker-skinned sub-Saharans and North African descent in these pictures. And painters certainly knew how to paint black people for centuries (see: "The Image of the Black in Western Art" by Harvard University Press and “Revealing the African presence in Renaissance Europe”). One such example a noble who did have black heritage was Alessandro de Medici who was nicknamed “the Moor”. Moors referred to black Islamic people. His mother was Simonetta da Collevecchio, a servant of African descent. In this case the argument that many Italians are dark of complexion and have dark hair cannot be used to explain his appearance. If other Italians thought he looked like them, they wouldn’t have paid such attention to his looks because they would have deemed it normal. I’m using 3 paintings of him by 3 different artists. The first picture really is ambiguous, it is only by combining all three that we can say that yes, his looks do fit the bill. If we only had the first picture, would we really be confident to claim him? This goes to show that you can’t say someone has a certain ethnicity based on one painting.

This person was comfortable in his own skin but there were probably just as much, if not many more nobles and wealthy families with mixed blood that had themselves painted white when they were not. Who would disagree? Who would even know? Nine chances out of ten barely anyone who wasn’t from the direct neighbourhood didn’t know what they looked like, and never would. Once the POC died, all that would remain would be a very white looking painting, and no one would know the bloodline had become mixed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/29/tudor-english-black-not-slave-in-sight-miranda-kaufmann-history

 What is, then, a reliable source? An answer, for famous people, is cartoons. Just like we now attach more credibility to a paparazzi picture of Khloe Kardashian than to one of her heavily photoshopped pictures on Instagram, you can trust cartoonists to not try and make people look good. Note: cartoons are always over-exaggerations. Any physical attribute will be enlarged beyond belief for comedic purposes. King George and his wife were often pictured in cartoons. If there was anything very noticeably foreign about Charlotte’s looks, they would portray it. However, what we find is that these cartoons never portray Charlotte as darker than the other people. She wasn’t shown as being black.

Conclusion:

Queen Charlotte cannot be called black on the basis of her portraits, cartoons or bloodline. If ever there was a trace of black blood in her veins, it was so light it had become undetectable and could not have influenced her appearance. Just ask yourself this question: would you call yourself a certain ethnicity, or claim certain roots, based on one ancestor 200 years in your past? If no, then you also shouldn’t say that Charlotte had black roots or was mixed.

The case of Queen Charlotte does, however, reveal the deeply racist British society of the Georgian Era, which deemed all black physical features ugly, and deliberately used all physical traits associated to the black race as an insult. Keep this in mind, as well as rampant anti-Semitism and hatred for Roma people, every time you read a novel from the time period, or read a tasteless description of a real person from the era. People were cruelly treated based on their heritage, and even if their heritage was purely white, they could be ascribed certain racial features, just because people were racist pricks.

While that’s the unfortunate reality of the time period, I do believe we are allowed to enjoy an alternate reality as an escape, where just for once, race isn’t an issue. So continue on, Bridgerton!

Meanwhile, I’ll be here keeping my fingers crossed for the stories of real black people living in Europe, or black kings and queens in Africa, to be told in a movie or series. The entire world has always existed, it makes no sense for all period movies to keep being focussed on white people in England, Rome and the US.