#antebellum fandom

[dustzvacuumcleaner]

New York Whigs

Seward and Weed and Greeley back in 1838

They got a Brutus!Greeley/Caesar!Seward for the election of 1860 so I drew heheh

Then a non-relevant Vidal Lincoln scene bc I dunno when to post this fheidhwhcgd

[dustzvacuumcleaner]

Babeeeeeee

MVB slugcat based on @doodle-blight 's MVB

[amrevyourengines]

So I stumbled across this meme on reddit...

But the comments section had the real gold:

[icarusbetide]

are you normal or did you feel melancholy when you realized that the historical figures you think of as the "young generation" due to the time period you engage with, were one day the old ones? because i saw art of lafayette and washington's aides de camp right above art on henry clay's generation and it hit me like a sucker punch.

yes they are all dead white men from over a century ago but damn. alexa, play the times they are a-changin.

[anteabbie]

Okay I caved and made a history meme page on instagram its @/ushistoryhoodfights

[floofyquenchiest]

2023 historical figure art 🤯

(See alt for the who the figures are)

[themintiris]

i hate andrew jackson with a passion but his childhood was absolutely insane

[dustzvacuumcleaner]

Say thank u Harriet Lane

Major shoutout to Harriet Lane for making the seating plans for like every White House dinner. Can you imagine the stress. The nation rested upon her shoulders

[dustzvacuumcleaner]

Monroe and John Quincy as the president and his secretary of state

[elumish]

I think one ongoing challenge to establishing any sort of meaningful community standards in fandom as to acceptable behavior or content is that a lot of people are unable to separate out the idea of standards or moderation from harassment.

There's a refrain you see a lot that amounts to, everyone who thinks that there should be content moderation (or "censorship") either harasses anyone they think is posting unacceptable content or stands with harassers.

And even ignoring the fact that harassment is done by a vocal minority and not anything amounting to a majority (by virtue of the nature of harassment, a very small number of people can make a lot of awful noise), those simply are not the same thing.

Content moderation or community standards aren't harassment, and there are a million ways that they have been done, both on and off the internet, without harassing anyone.

And harassment is done by people at every ideological position. It is not uniquely an action taken by people arguing for content moderation in fandom, and it never has been in the history of the world. Every single ideological stance has some awful people in it, and whatever position you take on anything, the total set of people who agree with you also almost certainly has people who are harassers.

So people get very caught up in conflating the ideology (content moderation or standards in fandom) with an action they perceive as being associated with holding that ideology (harassment) and refuse to meaningfully engage with the ideology because they can just argue that it is an ideology inextricably tied with harassment.

I want there, genuinely, to not be any Nazis or Nazi apologists or slavery apologists or genocide apologists in fandom. And I think that there are ways to get a lot closer to being there that don't involve any harassment at all. But if you read the first sentence in this paragraph and thought "I'm not sure I'm really okay kicking someone out of fandom just because they're a genocide apologist," or "But what if this censorship catches people who aren't really slavery apologists but just people who are horny about the idea of antebellum Southern plantations?" please know that you are part of the problem.

[power-chords]

Music lovers of the mid-nineteenth century were young, middle class, white men and women, often newly arrived in American cities, who, for the first time in history, focused more on hearing public concerts than on making music themselves at home. For many Americans in antebellum cities, the chance to hear professionally performed music simply for the price of a ticket was astonishing, wiping away the necessity of having to learn an instrument, find sheet music, and practice. Indulging in its convenience was the mark of someone fully participating in the sophisticated culture of the city. But music lovers imbued their participation in this enterprise with unexpected enthusiasm. They did not just attend concerts; they depleted their savings to do so every night; they described their feelings about what they heard in diaries, and they waited, longingly, for their favorite performers to return so that listeners could hear those performers again and again.

Take Walt Whitman, who, as one of the earliest music lovers, developed a fascination with concerts while a journalist in New York City in the mid-1840s: on the “free list” for concerts, he was able to hear most of the major virtuoso performers who passed through the city in the late 1840s and early 1850s and would frequently rhapsodize about his favorite opera singers. Although Whitman never had any formal musical training and never learned to play an instrument, music affected him with such force that he described his listening experiences in poems, journal entries, and reminiscences throughout his entire life.

[...] As the concert business grew in the 1850s, spectacle became one means of competition between promoters, especially in the form of the “monster” concert format that, at its extreme, put literally thousands of performers onstage at the same time and necessitated the building of huge, temporary performance halls, the size of several contemporary football fields to accommodate such ambitions. The novelty of these performances for most people was the overwhelming physical experience—a kind of sonic rush of instruments, crowds, and applause.

For music lovers, though, sensation was not a novelty but rather a desired ideal for all performance experiences, whether in a temporary coliseum or a “lecture room” at a dime museum. Music lovers were attuned to the power and quality of performed sound at a visceral, almost intuitive level. Voices had to “strike” or “move” them to be important. In response to opera, especially, music lovers often expressed an overwhelming visceral ecstasy, with music “filling their souls” to the point of losing composure, something that was excitingly dangerous and quite cathartic within the behavioral strictures of middle-class Victorian culture.

—Daniel Cavicchi, “Fandom Before 'Fan': Shaping the History of Enthusiastic Audiences,” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, Vol. 6 (2014)

[victorsandvanquishers]

The Red House (and all who live in its walls) - Chapter 22 - END

Fandom: DC Comics

Ships: Bart Allen/Kon El <3

Ratings: M+

Warnings: Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers; Southern Gothic Horror; area man continues engaging in consensual necrophilia

Story Synopsis: When former child star and Metropolis sweetheart Kon 'Superboy' El loses the last vestiges of his career to rampant partying and a budding alcohol addiction, he's forced to move into an old house in the Georgian woods because he can't afford his apartment or his bills anymore. Never the quitter, Kon embraces the crumbling antebellum house and all of its possibilities.

[Bart Allen/Kon El, No Powers AU, Gothic horror romance; retelling of Superboy 1994]

Chapter Summary: All's fair in love, war, and hacked employee databases. In other words, the tale of Kon El and Bartholomew Heinrich Allen finally comes to a riveting end.

~~~

Aaaand finish! Thank you to everyone for reading and enjoying this book! I actually finished writing it in about four months, but I wanted to take everyone on the slowburn ride with me. You could say I've had this weirdo retelling in my mind for a while now. Years of not-so-carefully-thought out planning lol, but hey, I'm in my thirties now, so I can spend a couple of hours a day crunching words with my favorite midnight oil. And that's precisely what I did! I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Thank you, and until next time. See y'all at the next BartKon rodeo!

and leve comiiiiints (~˘▾˘)~

[newx-menfan]

Laura Kinney isn’t the “Goodie Two Shoes” fans make her out to be…and other thoughts… 

Part 1: “The CRINGE”

Let’s be honest- we all KNEW I would eventually get here…after doing write-ups on Surge, Hellion, AND Prodigy…since X-23 is one of my all time favorite characters…

If there is one thing that drives me totally NUTS about X-23 fandom though (and fandoms, in general)… it is this weird fan attitude that Laura Kinney…aka “X-23”…aka “Wolverine”… can essentially “Do No Wrong”….

She’s the “BETTER” Wolverine. The less “TOXIC” version. The PERFECT Wolverine.

You see it in comic clickbait articles ALL the time- Laura is, essentially, the PERFECT answer to all the problems of the original character….

If you happen to mention ANY sort of criticism against X-23, textually or just about the character ingeneral - “She’s a bad friend”… “She can be kind of selfish”… “she is objectively a derivative character that is based off of a more popular X-Men”…people will look at you like you just kicked their puppy or said something really cruel…

And what’s interesting to me about all of this is… X-Men is KIND OF a book essentially about very flawed people, all trying to survive. That was, after all, Marvel’s WHOLE sell for years- they had the “relatable”, “real” characters…. where DC comics had “Gods”.

You would think, with characters EATING another planet, living out problematic “antebellum” Dark Phoenix fantasies, having psychic affairs, saying the “N-word” repeatedly, starting out as villains… it’s kind of accepted that ALL OF THE OTHER X-MEN have made terrible choices at some point or have been written BADLY….

Yet if you go on X-Men twitter… you will regularly see fans yelling that Jean Grey “is the most powerful X-Men” ever, Gambit or Logan are just these perfect “girl-dad’s”, or Storm can essentially NEVER be wrong…

And the PROBLEM with this is…it’s made writing these characters ALMOST LOGISTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE…

When Jean, for example, is at GOD LEVELS and ALWAYS morally right… what can you feasibly DO with her character anymore? If you create a villain to match her insane power levels… fans will be upset and complain that the fight wasn’t “fair” and inevitably pull up some vague comic panel to argue just why Jean really should have won …If a writer decides to de-power her OR makes her go evil, fans often will inevitably view it as sexist… so how can you write Jean Grey as still relatable? 

New relationships or Scott Summers dying?- Fans often get upset when writers break up the iconic Scott/Jean or Logan/Jean ships…or accuse writers of romanticizing toxic relationships…

Put her in a teaching/mentor/Headmaster role?- we saw what happened when writers tried it with Kitty, Storm, and Logan…they just became pretty boring….

Often writers solution seems to be… just killing Jean off…

This isn’t to shoot down criticisms like “Women in the Refrigerator Syndrome”, “plot armor”, ect…but I do think it’s important to talk about how… possibly… fandom has gone too far the other way… that fandom is basically guaranteeing characters will inevitably become obsolete or unusable… or cause writers to inevitably just repeat the same five stories for nostalgia sake, because they can’t do anything “new”…

This isn’t JUST female characters either- I would say characters like Gambit, Wolverine, Cyclops, Batman, and several others have pretty much the same logistical problem…they’ve been hyped up SO MUCH…that you can’t really DO ANYTHING with them anymore, for fear of angering their large fanbases….

Laura has relatively quickly developed this problem, and it seems like the shelf life of comic book characters is burning out quicker and quicker…

What is it about Laura, that makes her immune to any real criticism within her fan base, in a comic book series where it’s kind of accepted that every character is in some way…horribly flawed?

I am going to go through in these posts talking about why Laura really isn’t the perfect character readers constantly make her out to be… that she actually IS pretty similar TO Logan and a lot of the complaints against him CAN be tied to her as well… and that the biggest problem currently facing Laura AND COMICS in general right now, I would argue, is that writers are not able to admit that Laura or any of the other characters ARE sometimes wrong…or to quote Kitty Pryde…sometimes kind of a “jerk”…

———————————————————————

Part of the reason no one criticizes Laura, is because of her tremendously tragic backstory.

Essentially a modern version of “Frankenstein”; Laura is created to be a replication of the “Weapon X” experiment in miniseries “Innocence Lost”. (I know people tend to focus more on the “Pinocchio” allusions from the book, but I find the  “Frankenstein” allusions more relevant…)

Sarah Kinney opts into this program, because, like Victor Frankenstein: she desires scientific exploration without ethical scrutiny. 

Focused more on pushing the realms of scientific discovery instead of considering the consequences, Sarah manages to create a viable clone, with the caveat that it is female, because the “Y” gene from the sample is too damaged. It’s only when Rice, another scientist with a Wolverine-vendetta, forces Sarah to be a surrogate to Laura as punishment for her insubordination, that the ethical considerations truly start to come into play for Sarah…

Laura experiences extreme torture, radiation poisoning to activate her mutant powers, coating her claws without anesthetic, creation of the trigger scent (a pavlovian odor that causes her to black out and go berserk), forcing her to kill her Sensei and other targets (and her puppy, according to Liu…), and many other horrors while there.

Sarah, after seeing Laura’s potential for good after Laura spares Rice’s illegitimate kid from being murdered and Laura helping  track down Sarah’s kidnapped niece; tries to free Laura and destroy the facility…

Which leads to Rice coating Sarah with the trigger scent and having Laura murder her.

While Laura DOES manage to escape…she now has to live with the fact that she killed her own mother for the rest of her life…

This is pretty much the bare bones summary (I ignored Sarah’s own history of childhood trauma and abuse and the Rice subplots)….

Laura then goes to track down Sarah’s relatives in “Target X”, bonding with Megan, the angsty traumatized niece that had been kidnapped previously and develops her first real human connection.

It’s hard NOT to like Kyle’s adorable version of Laura; watching her riding on roller coasters with Megan, peeping in on people in windows, accidentally getting Megan into trouble by mimicking teachers, hanging out at the boardwalks in San Fran…. Laura is socially inept…but in a relatable way…

Things go to hell however, when it’s discovered that Debbie’s boyfriend is actually a facility agent and spying on them…

Laura fights the Sabertooth-like Kimura, saves Debbie and Megan, helps them go into hiding, and then attacks Logan with the plan to kill them both…only to get captured by Shield….and then is freed by Captain America…

Again a bare bones summary and nothing to really criticize, since Laura has little engagement with people in these situations and is the victim, despite doing some really horrible things. It’s a pretty reasonable storyline and it is, again, a modern comic retelling of “Frankenstein”…similar to “the Incredible Hulk”….

Laura is the monster of modern science, desperately seeking the answers of what it means to be human…

Sure…she kind of/sort of tries to kill Logan…but it’s understandable considering the situation…(and it’s not like Logan doesn’t have a history of trying to kill his own family members in comics…)

“NYX”…good and bad…is kind of the story that PUSHES the TRAUMA NARRATIVE to a ridiculous degree…

I get why on multiple levels…people, including Craig Kyle himself (writer of “Innocence Lost” AND ”Target X”) …HATE NYX.

And truthfully… I personally remember rolling my eyes, the first time I heard about it when it came out…

“NYX”, written by Editor Joe Quesada, was the first introduction of Laura, and technically came out BEFORE “Innocence Lost”/“Target X” but after Laura’s appearance on the tv show “X-Men Evolution”. Canonically…it’s a little more challenging but most fans AGREE NYX comes AFTER “Target X”….

Laura is in NYC and being trafficked by Zebra Daddy (yes…that IS HIS NAME IN THE BOOK…); becoming mute and withdrawn. 

When a john kills himself she meets another mutant, Kiden Nixon, and joins a ragtag group of homeless mutants…there’s a whole subplot about Kiden’s dead dad…Zebra Daddy comes after Laura and she kills him to save her friends…

In the end, Laura abandons her friends (because Laura has to be a “lone wolf”); but bumps into them years later after joining the X-Men…

While I will fully admit there are parts of Laura’s story that ARE handled pretty well…there’s also A LOT of voyeuristic panty shots in the art….a ridiculous amount of hand waving…and constant over-theatrics…

———————————————————————

Laura really is that character that teeters on an edge of cringe….

“Female Clone of Wolverine”- admittedly sounds cringeworthy to a non-comic book reader… (and people who remember HOW BAD “the Clone Saga” was…)

“Dating and obsessed with a ‘Draco Malfoy-esque’ sorta toxic copy of Jean Grey”- soundscringeworthy…right?

“Tortured weapon who is forced to become a teenage sex worker out on the streets of NYC and is goth and self harms…”- 100% sounds like an over the top show on CW….

I DO OBJECTIVELY GET why, when Laura first popped up into comics, a lot of male Wolverine fans saw her as just this “edgy CW-like attempt at new readership”… (technically she was CREATED on Warner Brothers “X-Men Evo”…so that’s not totally an inaccurate summary either…)

A teenage Wolverine…with boobs…

Hell…the director of “Logan”, James Mangold, didn’t want to feature her as a teenager…because he thought it sounded like a “CW show”….

“NYX” did feel like something out of a Frank Miller, “Batman: Year One” hallucination. That’s not to say it’s a BAD comic…but it definitely reflects the era of the 2000’s where everything had to be “gritty”….female characters were all heavily sexualized…it was at a time where “Skins”, “Misfits”, and “Gossip Girl” hyped up underage teenagers doing drugs, partying, and having risky sex….

One of the covers of “NYX” literally features Kiden with a pacifier…heavily hinting at “rave culture” and “ecstasy” usage…

I know a lot of modern readers take offense to this book and Quesada…but I do see the other side of it. A big part of Millennial early counter culture WAS indie sleeze….it WAS very hedonistic…it did fit the time period it was created….

“NYX” is a as much of a product of Millennial culture as “Academy X”, “the Ultimate verse”, or Grant Morrison’s “New X-Men” was… it was the same as how “Generation X” or “Jim Lee’s X-Men” was for the 90’s…how all of Claremont’s “Uncanny” and the spinoff books were products of the 80’s culture…and how Kirby’s “X-Men” was for the 60’s…ectera, ecetera…

And the common trend with all of them? They all have some PRETTY CRINGY MOMENTS.

I’m 100% sure, in ten or twenty years, we will look back and criticize how this era of comics incorporated embarrassing parts of youth culture…or writing styles…or counter culture…

But at the same time…her backstory… DOES start to feel a bit ridiculous. It does start to feel like this manufactured, over the top modern “Oliver Twist” or “Great Expectations” to get fans to essentially accept and sympathize with this fairly new character…Like someone just took a bunch of random origin stories and dumped them together in blender, to make the ultimate “SAD” character…

Is Laura really ALL that different from ridiculous characters like Adam the X-treme? Or Birdbrain? the lost Summer brother…Vulcan?

Yet we don’t take any of those characters overly seriously…

It’s moments like watching fans debate whether it’s right or wrong to use the Codename “X-23” for example, screaming at fans who are fine with it because they realize she’s ultimately a fictional character and Marvel on some level needs “brand recognition”…that even if her backstory does deal with real topics and issues…. do you remember that Laura’s backstory is pretty comicbook-y and absurd. 

As “cringy” as Laura SOUNDS on PAPER…she works because the writing ultimately did what it was supposed to do. Laura has objectively some of the BEST MODERN COMICS and even books like NYX, are pretty decently written, even if the subject matter and handling and culture are outdated from it.

Laura IS a great character…but she’s also kind of on edge of “cringy”…

And where we can kind of ACCEPT that cringe with Logan and his weird nose-less era…or Gambit referring to himself in third person… or pretty much EVERYTHING about Kitty (ninja…pirate…teenage prodigy…weird waifu for literally every male writer); Laura is this one character that you can’t criticize…or if you DO, it has to be solely around the sexualization of the character…and not the character itself…

I do understand fans getting attached to certain characters…in seeing their OWN trauma represented IN the character and reflected back…but at some point…I do think you have to see the humor of it all too…

That Laura isn’t ALL that DIFFERENT from other products of their time- like clone Superboy…FantomeX…Quentin Quire….Bloodstorm…Maggott…Adam the X-treme…

She just had better writing.

[amrevyourengines]

And this was all so Dickenson could get payback for a friend over losing a horserace to Jackson.

[artbyjessicajewett]

Hi everyone! I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Jessica and I was a previous user of Tumblr before it was bought. I decided to come back.

Today I'm not so much a fandom person (my first account was a Supernatural and Destiel vibe) as I am living my "real" life as an artist, author, historian, and disability rights activist. I'll be 42 in February and I live on the border of Ohio and West Virginia - like, literally on the border. I can almost throw a rock and hit West Virginia from my apartment building. Living here after spending over twenty years in Georgia has been a fresh change. Georgia is not a great place for people with complex disabilities like mine. I get much better medical care and access to state services here in Ohio, which is why I came here. My ancestry is Appalachian anyway, so this does feel like home in a strange way.

My art is what I do the most. This is me doing a commission order a few years ago.

You're immediately wondering about my disability and why I do everything with the tools in my mouth. I was born with a condition called Arthrogryposis and that just simply means my joints have very little range of motion. Much of my body is stiff. So I taught myself to play with my toys, markers, etc., with my mouth rather than my hands before I could even read or go to school. It was natural for me. I live a happy life and I'm not upset about being born with this disability. You don't have to feel sorry for me because I don't feel sorry for me.

At this stage in my life, I'm working on art commission number 91 with about 50 more on my wait list. My work specializes in black and white pencil portraits, mostly of different historical periods. Most of the art people order from me has to do with my ability to interpret their previous lifetimes (yes, reincarnation) as well as introducing them to their spirit guides. I do regular art with no spiritual complex as well, like family portraits, friends portraits, pet portraits, architecture, fan art, original characters, some fantasy, witchcraft, folk magic, paranormal, historical events, etc. I'm heavily trained in realistic very detailed portraits, so if you're looking for anime or cute illustrations, I'm probably not your woman.

This is the last commission I finished.

This is an interpretation of that customer's spirit guide as they appeared before they died. This is "my style" of art, as they say. I like to do color art too but I finish black and white orders much faster.

Besides art, I'm a lifelong student of 19th century history in America focusing on women's roles, families, social issues, disability history, and LGBTQIA+ history. I was in school to specifically become an antebellum and Civil War historian before chronic illnesses forced me to drop out. Higher education 20+ years ago was a casserole of nonsense when it came to helping disabled students succeed. Don't get me started.

I'm also a lifelong paranormal researcher focusing mostly on hauntings tied to antebellum and Civil War America including old folklore. My mother and grandmother were Missouri folk magic practitioners. I was raised in an understanding of the unseen world. I also collect reincarnation cases from the Civil War period sparked by my own case from that time. I'll talk about that elsewhere if you want.

Follow me here if you like. I'm just getting started. I have to relearn how to use this app.

-Jessica

Shop: etsy.com/shop/ArtByJessicaJewett

If you're not interested in art, I also accept tips if you enjoy my content. I'm at $ArtByJessicaJewett on CashApp, at Jessica-Jones-1002 on Venmo, and PayPal.me/ArtByJessicaJewett on PayPal.

[icarusbetide]

every once in a while i get antebellum posts on my feed and i'm like... yes....i see some names....i may have seen before....IS THAT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS SON OF JOHN ADAMS? THANK GOD I RAN INTO YOU, LET'S TALK ABOUT YOUR FATHER REAL QUICK

i suddenly become the world's biggest elitist. if you aren't the child of an important revolutionary war figure then i don't know or care about you!

every single day i tell myself i will get into antebellum era and unlock a whole new world of history tumblr content and every single day i end up rereading the same letters from the same 20 people i already know. once i figure out what tf was in the 1790s philadelphian air i promise i will join y'all! 19th century politics you will not escape me further.