#and about history

[lionessfeather]

So last night as I was starting to slowly drift off to sleep, my brain suddenly stuck on something (I promise this is Temeraire related). You see, the Netherlands have used "can't get an army across lots of water" as a basic defence strategy pretty much from Roman times until we got airplanes. The extent of it has varied; sometimes it was as simple as "well the river is too big" (Romans), sometimes it was "if we break this dike right here, the polder will flood and the Spanish can't get at the city". But, from the end of the 17th century, there was a systematic line of forts along the polders and rivers that could protect the province of Holland (specifically), here shown in purple. To the south there's big rivers leading into an estuary, and then it protects the province from invasion to the east. From about 1870, it was replaced by the orange parts, as well as the brownish line around Amsterdam specifically. The yellow area is from the mid-18th century. It is basically a collection of forts, and a series of locks. Together, these can make it so the coloured areas flood to a depth of 30-60 cm. Too deep for infantry, not deep enough for boats. It protects the capital of Amsterdam (with its important harbour), and the big cities of The Hague, Utrecht and Rotterdam.

And again, until we developed airplanes and parachutists and airplane bombs and so on, this worked really well.

Now, since I've been rereading the Temeraire books, the drifting off to sleep made me suddenly realise - how would dragon aerial warfare interact with this? Which morphed into a discussion with my partner (who hasn't read the books) about how Dutch dragons would work.

The first thing I'd like to do is point out the size of the Netherlands, compared to the British Isles and to the United States:

In other words, very small. And, very importantly, it used to be even smaller; a lot of the current land was reclaimed from the sea or large lakes between roughly 1650 and 1950. Most of the west of the country is below sea level, and very wet. A fair part of the east of the country isn't very rich soils and thus not great for farming (until chemical fertiliser is invented in the 1900s) (though they did use sheep dung as fertiliser, and they would almost certainly have thought of using dragon dung as well, eventually).

So I propose that actually, the Netherlands probably would have mostly had middle- and lightweights. There just isn't the area to support a large enough population of heavyweights that they aren't all inbred. My partner suggested there is probably one heavyweight breed, and I like that idea. I think that - militarily - the Netherlands would probably have figured out a strategy for using middle-weights against heavy-weights when they are fighting alone, but preferentially use their middle-weights as support in battles when there is a larger coalition, joining whoever is on their side.

However. There may only be middle-weight dragons, there would be a fairly large number of different breeds, with different strengths. You see, unlike the United Kingdom, where England was mostly united by around 900 CE, and then the Normans strengthened that, or France, which has a similar time scale, the Netherlands is a collection of loose duchies and counties and prince-bishoprics and so on, pretty much until the 1550s. The map pictured is from 1670, after a fair amount of the lands have been united into a republic; there would likely have been more divisions before then.

They get united under the dukes of Burgundy, eventually, but even at that time, it is still the Duchy of Brabant and the County of Holland and so on. But until they come together against Spanish rule, the separate parts regularly fight with each other. Which means that each of them would have their own breeds. (Likely, Holland and Zeeland would have very similar dragons, with aquatic adaptations, who get fed on a mixture of fish and meat; the more inland regions would have more "standard" breeds. To outsiders they all look incredibly alike, but if you mention to someone from Guelders that you cannot tell their Zwarte van Gelre apart from the Brabants Blauwtje, they would be so insulted. Can you not tell that theirs is a pure midnight black while the Brabants Blauwtje is blue? However, the breeds are so alike that most of them follow a continuum. Except the Fryske Grutskens, which looks very distinct). This is also where the single heavy-weight breed comes in - I think it would have been Flanders. Flanders is a part of the kingdom of France (rather than the Holy Roman Empire, which is the power the rest of the motley collection belongs to). One of the counts of Flanders probably got a breeding pair of heavy-weights from the king of France; maybe during one of the (many) revolts. These were crossed with the native middle-weights until a new breed of heavy-weights was developed. And finally, purely for my own amusement, William the Silent/William of Orange, who led the 1548 revolution against the Spanish, would have a dragon that is actually orange. No one knows how or why it came out that colour, none of its progenitors was, it just did and he was named for it (the fact that he is Prince of Orange is a bonus).

I also think that the Dutch would be using dragons for shipping, at least within the country. It is efficient and cheap (especially the dragons that grew up having fish as part of their diet), and the Dutch have always been fans of efficient and cheap and trade. And since it's all middle-weights, that is less scary than heavyweight breeds dropping in. I don't think dragons would be used for passenger-work, but loading the big ships, that can't quite reach the harbour? Definitely. And if you have large-ish ships, but only middle-weight dragons, it's probably much easier to ship dragons across the world, so you can also have a dragon when you arrive at your destination.

To bring it back to the idle thought that started this all - the Waterlinie, aka using the water to prevent invasion. My partner and I think it would still have worked, mostly. The Romans start taming the native European breeds, so they probably could cross the Rhine. In our world, the Rhine was the limes, the border, because they can't cross it in large enough numbers; but if they have dragons and the native Germanic tribes don't, then they can. I don't think they'd have been able to hold the land, not for long, and it's not interesting enough to bother anyway. But after that, when the playing field is levelled by everyone having dragons, the water would still be a workable defence. Yes, the aerial forces can come over and wreak havoc - except everyone has dragons now and so they will try to defend it - but the infantry still has trouble crossing the water. And then, when artillery gets developed, it's still the same. You can shoot at the enemy dragons, they can shoot at yours - and the infantry still can't cross the water. I think an enemy (often the French) would try to use dragons against the forts, before they can inundate the land, but that it wouldn't work as well after.

Anyway, here are some rambly thoughts about Dutch dragons in the Temeraire universe. (Sidenote but I can't make heads nor tails of the Dutch names that are used once or twice in the books. They just don't work.)

[reality-detective]

1963 Refrigerator 🤔

[charlesoberonn]

Tell me you know nothing about history without telling me you know nothing about history

[tariah23]

White people are miserable, racist losers period. They’ve even been getting mad at Japanese people for correcting them about Yasuke as well.

[captainkirkk]

At least once a month I remember that Ozai ruled for ~3 years. That's shorter than one presidential term. That's nothing. In comparison Zuko - who suffered so much cruelty and was made to feel worthless under Ozai - ruled for ALMOST 70 YEARS. That's more than 22 times the length of Ozai's rule - and he will go down in history as one of the most influential and well loved Fire Lords of all time

[mythosphere]

"Blorbo from my shows" no. Blorbo from my BA. Blorbo from my major. Blorbo from my primary source document.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[ciderbird]

academic bias is so funny because you’ll be reading about the same historical event and one person is like “Despite the troubles that befell his homeland and near constant criticism of the court King Blorbo remained strong in the face of adversity” and the other one is like “after letting his people carry the brunt of his cringefail decisions Blorbo the Shitface refused to listen to any reason and continued to be a warmongering piece of shit. Also he was ugly.”

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

The stewards of the old world are always keen to give you a glimpse of their might... According to legend, the ancients built specialized chambers to seal away false prophets.

The Arcane is waking up.

[gumy-shark]

having mutuals who’ve never touched the mcyt fandom is so fun for me it’s like an entire cultural experience i’ve had. every so often i remember how many of my Beloved Mutuals don’t know about the mcytblr sexyman tournament. or scitties. they don’t know about the whoreslut survey.

[adhdedrn]

Second Poll.

Third Poll.

Fourth poll.

Fifth poll.

[reality-detective]

Old Lighters 🤔

[hinamie]

surprise it's yuri!!!in 2024

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

zany to me how these um actually nihilists like to pretend that "um actually love/friendship/cooperation/kindness isn't real bc we evolved that way to benefit ourselves as a species..." um YES? that's also where tool use comes from? that's where cooking comes from? am i supposed to think social bonds & tool use & cooking aren't "real" because they evolved over time instead of appearing fully formed from the ether?

sorry u can't enjoy things. im a superior being twirling a fork in my bowl of delicious noodles whilst staring in adoration at the world