#also this book is from 1890

[bones-n-bookles]

Thinking (once again) about how my ex would get mildly irritated and/or dismissive of my book collecting, and now dog boy is here telling me I gotta get this old ass book that came into our work, and saying it would be sick to read at my place

[jessicas-pi]

She did not shrink back, though the pupils of her eyes dilated. Was it the wildest thing in the world which happened to her—or was it not? Without warning—the sudden rush of a thought, immense and strange, swept over her body and soul and possessed her—so possessed her that it changed her pallor to white flame. It was actually Anstruthers who shrank back a shade because, for the moment, she looked so near unearthly.

“I am not afraid of you,” she said, in a clear, unshaken voice. “I am not afraid. Something is near me which will stand between us—something which DIED to-day.”

---

behold: my artistic contribution to the small but enthusiastic You Should Totally Read The Shuttle (1907) By Frances Hodgson Burnett campaign

[archduchessofnowhere]

The Ducal Wittelsbach family and their relatives, early 1890s. From left to right, standing: Karl Theodor, Duke in Bavaria, Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria, Archduchess Elisabeth Amalie of Austria, Duchess Sophie Adelheid in Bavaria, Archduchess Maria Annunziata of Austria, Princess Maria Immacolata of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Duchess Marie Gabrielle in Bavaria.

Sitting: Archduchess Maria Teresa of Austria (née Infanta of Portugal), King Francesco II of the Two Sicilies, Queen Marie Sophie of the Two Sicilies (née Duchess in Bavaria)

Via As Infantas de Bragança e a Sua Descendência - História das Filhas de D. Miguel by Dativo Salvia Ocaña

[tomwambsgans]

tom's straightguysona was constructed by looking to the emphasis of exclusive heterosexuality without necessarily macho masculinity in 40s-modern middle america as well as academia, particularly the excusable effeminacy granted to men in the upper classes due to it simply being a mark of man being civilized, which is perfectly fine so long as you openly lament the loss of true masculinity. and greg's straightguysona was constructed by listening to weezer in middle and high school

[laulo821]

this morning i witnessed a post on here that made me clench my fist so hard... is that what y'all always feel like when you see a poor take???

[thedynamic]

The worst part about writing a novel is that you have to write it

[fagrackham]

i get rambunctious abt architecture

[yeoldenews]

It’s Dear Santa time again!

Every year since 2010, I have spent the month of December posting children's Dear Santa letters.

Publishing letters to Santa in the newspaper first became widely popular in the late-1890s, though scattered newspapers did so as early as the mid-1880s. I believe this sudden explosion in popularity was at least partially the result of the famed "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause" editorial which was published in The New York Sun in September of 1897.

In large cities Dear Santa letters often acted as a method of getting needed clothing and supplies to impoverished children when parents might be ashamed to ask for charity. Subscribers to the newspaper could choose a child’s letter and provide the items they asked for. The most common requests were shoes and coats.

Sometimes newspapers offered prizes for the best letter (which I suspect often acted as another clandestine form of charity as the winners were often letters asking for basic clothing and school supplies.) Though these prizes could range from the ordinary (a sled or a doll) to the extravagant (a $20 gold piece or a live pony.)

Often local stores would enter children in a drawing if they mentioned the store in their letter - which on occasion would result in children hilariously name-dropping every store in town just in case.

Writing Dear Santa letters was also commonly an activity done at school, often following some rough form letter. These letters are fairly easy to spot as they often hype up what a good student the child was and include effusive praise for their teacher (who would likely see the letter before it was sent.)

So why have I spent hundreds of hours of my life over the last decade reading tens of thousands of these letters?

Children's voices are largely absent from the historical record.

Dear Santa letters offer an extremely rare opportunity to see history unfold through children's eyes - in their own (often creatively spelled) words.

1914′s “Remember the children in Belgium” becomes 1918′s “Please visit my brother in France”.

During the Great Depression the very common phrase “I know you’re poor this year too Santa” gives a glimpse into parents' attempts to explain to their children why they might not be getting as much this year.

1939′s “Be careful flying over Europe” becomes 1945′s “Since the war is over you’re making bb-guns again right?”

Requests for toy flying machines become aeroplanes become fighter jets become space shuttles.

Dolls and wagons become Shirley Temple merchandise and Erector Sets become Barbies and Star Wars action figures.

But through all these changes one thing remains clear throughout 130+ years of letters to Santa, despite the rapidly changing world around them - children have always been children.

I hope you enjoy these letters as much as I do! (All decade+ of posts are tagged “Dear Santa” if you’d like to see more than just this year’s selection.)

I wish you all a wonderful holiday season! I hope you can delight in whatever brings you joy, be that family, friends, food or just curling up with a hot cocoa and a good book.

But whatever you do, please don't forget the true meaning of the season - feeling awful sorry for Patti.

Hapy Holadays and Marry Crimes!

[contemplatingoutlander]

Trump continues having rallies in historic all-White "Sundown Towns," where Blacks had to leave by sunset.

Ayman Mohyeldin discusses the implications of Trump's having held rallies in Aug. and Sept. in four "Sundown Towns," where in the past Blacks had to leave/be off the streets by sundown. The rallies were held in Howell, MI, La Crosse, WI, and Johnstown, PA., and Mosinee, WI. Below is the video that Ayman posted on X.

AYMAN: "When your slogan is the nostalgic phrase Make America Great Again, a campaign tour of 'sundown towns' helps us all understand the America that Donald Trump is yearning for."

Trump keeps sending out his racist "dog whistles," while at the same time claiming that it is really "Whites" who are being discriminated against, and campaigning that he will ban the discussion in schools of "divisive" topics, like critical race theory, and instead promote a "patriotic" educational curriculum, like the whitewashed one developed by the 1776 Project in his last administration.

BlackPast: Sundown Towns:

Sundown Towns are all-white communities, neighborhoods, or counties that exclude Blacks and other minorities through the use of discriminatory laws, harassment, and threats or use of violence. The name derives from the posted and verbal warnings issued to Blacks that although they might be allowed to work or travel in a community during the daytime, they must leave by sundown. Although the term most often refers to the forced exclusion of Blacks, the history of sundown towns also includes prohibitions against Jews, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and other minority groups. Although it is difficult to make an accurate count, historians estimate there were up to 10,000 sundown towns in the United States between 1890 and 1960, mostly in the Mid-West and West.

The Green-Book

The rise of sundown towns made it difficult and dangerous for Blacks to travel long distances by car. In 1930, for instance, 44 of the 89 counties along the famed Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles featured no motels or restaurants and prohibited Blacks from entering after dark. In response, Victor H. Green, a postal worker from Harlem, compiled the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to accommodations that served Black travelers. The guide was published from 1936 to 1966, and at its height of popularity was used by two million people.

[edited]

[marzipanandminutiae]

would you have any reading suggestions to learn more about the earrings are evil era??? I've never heard of that aspect of fashion history and I am curious

Oh man, it was wild

you saw the first stirrings of it in the 1890s, when you started to get (mostly white and middle-to-upper-class) proto-feminists arguing that ear piercing was barbaric- keep an eye on the racist undertones there; they will come up again-and forcing women to suffer for fashion. I cannot emphasize enough that, until that point, ear piercing had been pretty much normal for this race/class/gender group. For centuries. You see criticism of the practice here and there, but nothing that really stuck.

The objections slowly increased until roughly the mid-1920s, when everything reached a tipping point and pierced ears became largely taboo for most white Americans and Brits of northern/western European descent. If that sounds HIGHLY specific, it is- communities from southern and sometimes eastern Europe retained cultural practices of ear piercing, to the point where it was often used as a point against them by mainstream society. It was also associated with Latino people, Black people, and the Romani, which. Yeah. I don't need to tell you how that went down.

It also developed associations with sexual immorality and/or backwards thinking. One newspaper letter I read came from a teen girl in the 1940s, wondering why she shouldn't pierce her ears if her very respectable grandmother had piercings. The response was something like "well, they did all sorts of things in the Bad Old Days that we shouldn't do now." True in many ways, or course, but...piercing your ears? That's the hill culture decided to die on as far as antiquated behavior that we should leave behind? Apparently yes.

Earrings themselves never went out of style, which led to the birth of clip-ons and screwbacks. Ironic that the "don't surfer for fashion" crowd was so eager to embrace screwing tiny vices onto your ears, but there we are. My own mother (born 1953) remembers her mother (born 1926) always taking off her screwback earrings immediately after getting home from a party, literally in the foyer of their house the second the door shut. There had been adaptations for unpierced ears before- Little Women, published in 1868, describes Meg March hanging earrings from a flesh-colored silk ribbon tied around the base of her ear -but they'd never caught on like this before.

However, the pendulum was soon to swing back. After just 40 years of Piercing Panic, in the 1960s, girls began piercing their ears again in droves. As piercing moved from the slumber party or summer camp back to the professional jewelers whose families had been early professional piercers in the 19th century- and to befuddled doctors who had no idea what they were doing yet still received piercing requests -cultural commentators had no idea what to make of it. Some decried the new trend while most took an air of bemused neutrality. My personal favorite article expressed surprise that "Space Age misses" were adopting these "Victorian traditions."

(In 1965, my grandmother took Mom to the anesthesiologist down the street who was offering to pierce his young daughter's friends gratis, and got it done. My grandfather had strongly disapproved of the idea, but in the end it took him a week to notice the new earrings.)

As to sources...honestly, I've just gone to Google Books, specified a time frame, and typed in "ear piercing," "pierced ears," "pierce ears," etc. Tons of primary sources at your fingertips, though I'm not always great about documenting or saving what I find. There's not much written about it formally, I've found- no books or scholarly studies. It may just be too close in history to attract much academic attention, though I find it fascinating.

This little blip where something that's been normal for most of western history suddenly became taboo for a hot second.

Also my ear piercings just turned 20 five days ago, commemorating the date that I was taken with much ceremony to Piercing Pagoda (and that horrible gun; it's a wonder I didn't get keloids) to get me out from underfoot while the Thanksgiving feast was being made. Grandma got hers pierced on the same day, at age 78. Happy Birthday, Marzi's ear piercings!

[karmathenightowl]

Here's how I imagine Lady Elizabeth Godwin when she was alive compared to her reanimated self. I was inspired by MANY different visual ideas and concepts like the original Frankenstein book, late 1880s strongwomen, and 1890s fashion.

Here was my aesthetic mood board!

Since the og Frankenstein book describes the flesh of the creature to be yellow and translucent, rather than the popular green flesh seen in most film adaptations, I applied the former to Godwin's flesh of her head. Plus I wanted to really go for that corpse like appearance, particularly with the hollowness of her eyes.

The outfit she wore on the night of her passing was inspired by late 1880s bustle dresses. I saw that the og book of Bram Stoker's Dracula is set in an unspecified year of the mid 1890s, so I had an idea to make her reanimated self reflect the clothing/dresses of that era. Like having her upper part be a balloon sleeve dress with a blouse, and the lower part being a scarp of fabric from a late 1800s Balayeuse. I mentioned in my first character designs for the main pcs that when Godwin asked Igor for clothes, I imagined he made an outfit for her based on scraps he had in Frankenstein's lab. This also included chainmail above the blouse and under the dress coat based off of a Victorian Burlesque outfit. Godwin's gotta protect her new body somehow haha

This last part is just me rambling at this point but I thought this was fun to include. The two women flexing are Josephine Schauer Blatt aka Minerva, and Laverie Vallee aka Charmion (right). They were both strongwomen in the late 1880s, with Minerva having great talent in weightlifting and professional wrestling, while Charmion also performed in vaudeville trapeze. Just a fun little discovery I came across when looking up muscular build ideas for Godwin based on Justin's description :)

[ankh-morpork-times]

Discworld The setting of the comic fantasies by the novelist Terry Pratchett (b. 1948), a flat planet supported by four elephants riding through space on a giant turtle. There is no central character in the stories, although Death appears in each and is prominent in several. The first book in the sequence, The Colour of Magic (1983), was essentially a parody of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and other fantasy writers, but the series went on to create a world of its own, each of the volumes being self-contained. Much of the enjoyment of the stories derives from the strange names of characters and places, such as the wizard Igneous Cutwell, the kingdom of Djelibeybi, the Unseen Univesity situated in ANKH-MORPORK and Lady Sybil Olgivanna Ramkin, the latter's richest resident, married to Commander Samuel Vimes. See also RINCEWIND.

— Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 19th Edition (Susie Dent)

[niuniente]

I stumbled upon a BBC recording from 1970, where two women in their 90's were interviewed about their teenage years. These women had been born in 1880's so they were in their teens in 1890's-1900's.

One woman recalled how her brother had seen this weird machine on a shop window, and women working with these machines. It was a typewriter and the place was hiring women to learn how to type with it. She also was bicycling a lot in her teens, and told a story how she once accidentally drove into a policeman. She and her friends were summoned to a court and fined 5 shillings each for this preposterous activity. The magistrate has been most horrified and disgusted that these young women hadn't been horse riding but bicycling when this collision happened!

It was amazing to hear. These women has gone such a huge jump in development of society and technologies from 1880 to 1970! I can't remember where I heard it but when we look back at time, humanity globally has advanced between 1900-2000 as much as in the previous 5000 years.

These ladies had seen the dawn of electricity; the very first electric cars and horse-pulled handsome cabs turning into busses, taxes and cars; Titanic; two world wars; suffragette movement fighting for women's rights and women getting these rights; the Wright brother's first plane and it leading to commercial flights and eventually to the moon landing; rise and falls of nations in Europe and changes on European map; the changes in workplaces and work place regulations; the development of radio; the whole history of TV; the fast changing clothing styles by each decade; the invention of plastic. They were born just 4 years after a telephone was patented in 1876.

I'm a pre-internet era child. Pre-mobile phone era child. I can recall when news told how this thing called internet is now open and how we predict it to become important. I can tell how huge difference mobile phones, emails, internet, video services, art programs etc. have done to the world. I'm every day grateful for the internet and technology because it was brought me to all I dreamed of and wanted as a child. Endless amounts of movies, comic, pictures, information, connections to everywhere in the world, exploration. Niche books and stuff I could never even see in my whole life without internet! In a need of a certain character reference? Just google it! Want to see that particular scene from a movie or a game? Go to internet, it's there!

And yet, I can never experience the same gigantic jumps as these 1890's teenagers did.

[fatehbaz]

About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About geographic imaginaries. About how Empire appeals to and encourages children to participate in these scripts.

Was checking out this recent thing, from scavengedluxury's beloved series of posts looking at the archive of the Budapest Municipal Photography Company.

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940."

And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe?

(The use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives probably already well-known to many, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through nemfrog's posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

"Africa is for your consumption and pleasure! A special game celebrating German achievement, brought to you by the N*stle Company!"

1930s-era German national aspirations in Africa. A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids!

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time British.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism and imperative-of-empire in British scientific and pop-sci literature, especially involving South and Southeast Asia. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I was recently looking at, specifically about European (especially German) geographic imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

[pluckyredhead]

…Sorry if this is a bit weird but do you have any queer romance book recommendations? I ended up finishing the last binding trilogy because you posted about it (you have excellent taste lol) and I’m a bit stuck at the moment with what to read next.

Not weird at all! I absolutely have recs! Also Freya Marske has a brand new book out called Swordcrossed if you want more of her writing. (For people who are not anon: The Last Binding is an Edwardian historical fantasy romance trilogy and it's excellent.)

Okay recs:

KJ Charles: My favorite queer romance author, hands down, and also the most prolific! She's written over 30 queer historical romance novels (and one queer historical mystery), mostly M/M, all historical and set in the UK during various time periods ranging from the 1810s to the 1920s. My two favorite things about her work: 1. It draws very heavily on the history, meaning that her characters never come across like modern people in historical cosplay. And 2. she's great at creating genuine conflict between or around characters. I have read too many romances where everything is uwu softness and nothing hurts but Charles's characters are always either fundamentally divided by politics, class, ethical perspectives, lies, and/or tragic backstories, OR they get along fine but a murderer is trying to kill them, OR, in the best of her books, both.

My favorites are probably The Will Darling Adventures (1920s trilogy all about the same couple fighting a criminal secret society), A Seditious Affair (1810s, a radical firebrand and a Tory government official accidentally fall in love while having extremely kinky sex), An Unnatural Vice (1870s, "spiritualist" con artist and the crusading journalist trying to expose him), and Any Old Diamonds (1890s, The Saddest Boy in the World hires a sexy jewel thief to rob his horrible father, kink ensues), but you can really start anywhere - Think of England is where I jumped on and it's nice because it's more of a standalone (there is a companion book but Think of England comes first). If you liked The Last Binding, you might want to start with her Magpie Lord series because they are also fantasy romance. (Freya Marske is a big KJ Charles fan and it shows, in a good way.)

Allie Therin: Sticking with the fantasy romance angle here for a moment, Therin has a 1920s trilogy called Magic in Manhattan that is all about the same couple, a prickly magic-user named Rory and the big hunky WWI vet who loves him, as they fight various evil magicians. (HUGE oversimplification but you get it.) There's a spinoff trilogy, the Roaring Twenties Magic series, which has two books out so far. I love NYC, the 1920s, fantasy, and queer romance, so obviously I love all of this.

But I'm particularly obsessed with her Sugar and Vice series (also a trilogy, first book is out already and the second one comes out next month) which is set in modern day Seattle and is about an empath named Reece and the super dangerous empath hunter called the Dead Man who may or may not be here to kill Reece, and also there's a serial killer on the loose. This one is a suuuuuuper slow burn (they don't even kiss in the first book!), so you have to be patient but I read the second book early and yeah I'm obsessed and desperate to talk to other people about these books.

Charlie Adhara: More paranormal romance! I wrote about these books at greater length recently, but the short version is: FBI agent gets transferred to the super secret werewolf division of the FBI and partnered with a hot werewolf, they fall in love, spend five books developing into The Ultimate Power Couple, I'm in love with their love. There's a spinoff series called Monster Hunt but only one book is out so far.

TJ Klune: I probably don't have to tell anyone about TJ Klune anymore and I'll admit he can be hit or miss for me but I did really love Wolfsong. As long as we're talking werewolves.

Dessa Lux: Okay these are more erotica than romance but Omega Required is a comfort read for me, which is funny because I'm not usually an omegaverse gal. But this is about a very sweet alpha doctor who offers a marriage of convenience to a very traumatized omega and it's literally just nonstop cuddling and soup. She also has a series that's just ever-growing werewolf gangbangs, if that's a thing you're into. Like. A cartoonish amount of werewolves at the gangbang. It's delightful.

Cat Sebastian: I will admit Sebastian is also a little bit hit or miss for me. I loved her very first trilogy, the Turner series, which is very much in the vein of KJ Charles (Regency romance, class divides, lots of conflict). She wrote some more 19th century stuff after that and then moved into mid-20th century romance (50s-70s) which is honestly very rare. She also basically...stopped writing any conflict at all. I would say a large portion of her books after the Turner series can be accurately described as "two best friends who are secretly in love with each other sit in the same house/apartment and enjoy each other's company until they get together." I know a BUNCH of people who absolutely love that and they are well-written! But I really have to be in the right mood for them.

Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy: Okay I am not a hockey person, but you must, you MUST read Him and its sequel, Us. Hockey-playing BFFs, one is gay and secretly in love with the the other, the other one is like "I don't think I'm into dudes but I'd better give you 300 blowjobs to make sure." (Spoiler: he's into dudes.) Honestly the stupidest men imaginable. I love them so much. Bowen has written a few other queer romances solo and I'm working my way through her back catalog now.

Rachel Reid: Yes it's more hockey romance but. BUT. Heated Rivalry. Two of the top players in the NHL, on rival teams, have famously hated each other for years...and have secretly been fucking since they were rookies. Reid is another one where I'm still working my way through her books but Heated Rivalry is something special.

I am SURE there are more I'm forgetting but this is long so I'll stop it here for now! Also folks should feel free to reblog with further recs, she said selfishly.

[the-magiarcheologist]

Hogwarts Legacy Timeline

I've gone deep into research to try to put together a timeline of events that happened before the start of the game.

Ok, let's break it down! (I'll provide my sources for all of this)

And let's start with the most shocking: when anne gets cursed.

Almost everyone assumes (logically) that she got cursed sometime during the fourth year or the summer before the start of fifth year. But, in the book "The Art and Making Of Hogwarts Legacy" there is a short paragraph introducing Sebastian and here is what it says:

If we take this info as legit (and I think it is since that book was written by the people developping the game) then Anne has been suffering from that curse for far longer than anyone thought!

That also means that Ranrok opened the first repository over a year before our MC starts at Hogwarts and discovers ancient magic.

Before we start the mission 'It's all Gobbledegook" with Amit, Lodgok tells the MC that Ranrok orginally unearthed Bragbor's journals that had been long lost. From these journals, he discovered that wizards had hidden for 'repositories' full of magic that Bragbor had built for them. He knew all of this was connected to five names: Rackham, Fitzgerald, Bakar, Morganach and Rookwood. Ranrok then sent Lodgok to begin the search at Rookwood castle.

Sebastian also confirms that Goblins first arrived at Rookwood castle. Before we visit his sister, he tells MC: "No one has felt safe here since Ranrok's Loyalists took a peculiar interest in that castle over there - Rookwood castle."

Miriam was actually already at Rookwood castle, conducting her research on ancient magic, before the Goblins arrived. That is how Lodgok meets her. She had already found the container (with the portkey inside) and was studying it. (Lodgok tells us this after we complete the mission with Amit).

Other Goblins join Lodgok at Rookwood castle to search it. At this point, Rookwood must have joined hands with Ranrok and allowed the Goblins to tunnel under Rookwood castle to search for the repository. (We overhear Rookwood telling Ranrok: "I allowed you to tunnel under my family home!" when we first visit Rookwood castle to start the second trial from the Keepers).

The Goblins find the first repository and Ranrok is thrilled. That is when Lodgok tells him that he met Miriam and that he trusted her and allowed her to continue her research on the container independently. Lodgok does not really know what happens after that but we know that Ranrok eventually found her and killed her. So Miriam died sometime between Ranrok finding the first repository and the start of the fifth year.

The only other thing we know to try to piece together when Miriam died is that shortly before her death she first sent George Osric a letter warning him about Ranrok's activities (presumably she knew that he had accessed the first repository) and then "before [George] could respond" she also sent him the container. Since George himself says he had not had time to respond to her first letter before he received the container, that probably means only a few days went by between Miriam being worried about Ranrok's activities and when he found her and killed her. (We learn all of this from George Osric in the carriage going to Hogwarts.)

The other interesting thing is that George tells Prof. Fig that he had received Miriam's first letter (and the contained shortly after), "months ago". Rookwood sort of confirms this when he tells Ranrok that he spent "months and countless Ministry favours" locating the container (he says this when we overhear his conversation with Ranrok at Rookwood castle). So this means that Miriam died several months before september 1890.

This raises a lot of questions: Why did George Osric wait that long to tell Prof. Fig that he has received a mysterious container from his wife before her death? Also, why did Miriam send the container to George and not her husband? Were Prof. Fig and his wife estranged? Did Miriam not trust Prof. Fig? But that's the topic for another post I suppose...

Anyway, after Goblins started searching at Rookwood castle, they also started searching at other locations connected to the 5 names of the Keepers. (We know this, again, from Lodgok before we start the mission with Amit). That is when they arrived at Isidora's house. We don't know the exact timeline between them arriving at Isidora's home and the fire during which Anne got cursed. This could have happened before Ranrok found the first repository. But it happened after Ranrok and Rookwood started their alliance since Rookwood was at Isidora's house with the Goblins. So I think it happened after Ranrok had already found the first repository but we can't be sure.

Anyway that's all I've got! Have I forgotten something?