#especially on deciding which headpiece to use for warriors

[wavebiders]

wow I love Linked Universe

bonus pretty boy that did not make it into the game:

[gerudosage-a]

❛  CLOSE-UP HEADCANONS.   ❜

@bransles​ asked for two, hair & six, eyes.

nabooru’s hair is, as with all gerudos, a distinctive, eye-catching flaming red. texture often differs between gerudo women, influenced by their unseen fathers, but it’s commonly accepted that their hair is always long & impossibly straight, with rumours abounding in all corners of hyrule of how it is ornately decorated & threaded with jewels. it is, for the most part, exaggeration, though nabooru will not deny that she loves the opportunity to dress up & adorn herself with fine things, as the situations which call for it are few & far between. her own hair has always been the customary vibrant red, but rather than ramrod straight, there is a gentle wave to her hair, seen most often when she frees it from its clasp at night, or the rare occasions ( such as weddings, funerals, & religious ceremonies ) where she deliberately wears it down. as a child, she preferred it just long enough that it could be safely tied back, & for much of her younger years, it reached only to her shoulders, & was often braided, to ensure it did not trouble her. as she grew, she embraced the traditional look of the gerudo & let it grow further out, to the length she maintained it at as an adult - when left to hang loose, it reaches to the tops of her thighs.

for practical reasons, nabooru has worn her hair high since she was an adolescent, embracing a high ponytail, held fast with what passed for an elastic - a small length of rope or strip of leather, tied tight enough to keep it in place. on an unauthorized raid at age fifteen ( for which she was severely punished, & now regrets for her recklessness ) she & two friends managed to get their hands on some jewellery & other accessories, & nabooru quickly laid claim to a golden clasp ornamented with the biggest jewel she had ever seen in her life. she wore it daily over the tie in her hair until her thirtieth year, in which the clasp finally broke, before deciding instead to replace it with something less ostentatious for her day to day life. that didn’t mean the golden ring she chose to replace it was plain, of course, but it was a pleasant surprise to her that her neck no longer ached from carrying the weight of a ( potentially fake ) jewel the size of her fist upon her head every day.

she also, for a small amount of time as a teenager, braided it when going on a raid, or when she anticipated a fight might occur. at the bottom of her braid, over where her second tie laid, she would slip a heavy, spiked ring, also claimed on the above mentioned night, believing that being able to swing her head & let her braid & the weapon at the end of it take people out would be an intensely cool thing to do, & would be something which would gain her infamy. she discovered instead that more often than not, she ended up hurting herself, either by the weight of the ring pulling hair out of her head, her inability to aim correctly often resulting in just smacking herself with it, or the fact that it resulted in a very visible target for those she was trying to fight against. she tried it for two weeks, & now she pretends that it never happened. instead, when in battle now, she splits between her usual ponytail, or pulling it back into a tight bun, depending on how much time she has to prepare herself, & whether or not she will be armoured during the fight.

as mentioned, on special occasions, nabooru prefers to wear her hair down entirely. for ceremonies involving her role as chief of the gerudo, she ornaments her hair with a headpiece in the traditional gerudo style, made of gold, decorated with small precious stones, & held in place both by weaving it into her hair, & liberal use of golden hairpins. it’s a rather simple piece of jewellery, all things considered, golden tines forming a sort of halo behind her head, & on more solemn occasions, she ornaments it with a silk organza veil. when meeting with the other sages, & undertaking duties relating to them, she chooses a plain golden circlet to rest atop her head, & lets her hair hang loose. it’s a tradition she regrets starting, in truth, as it’s so long it’s quite annoying to deal with when left to its own devices, & she’s ripped more than enough out of her scalp by sitting on it without thinking, but rauru is something of a stickler for tradition, & she cannot be annoyed with his complaining should she change something on a whim.

as you can imagine, living in the desert is not especially kind on the body, & the hair is no exception; serums & potions for hair health are almost as coveted in the gerudo fortress as lotions for the skin. nabooru is quite particular about her personal hygiene, & her hair is no exception. she washes it as often as is feasible, though she will begrudgingly go without if the water supplies they have begin to run low, & uses whatever shampoo-adjacent products she can in an attempt to keep it sleek & clean. she also takes great care in trimming it, that there are no dead or split ends, & though it can take a great amount of time, she brushes it thoroughly every morning & every night. sleeping with sand in your hair is not a pleasant experience, & she does everything she possibly can to avoid it.

nabooru’s eyes are one of her most striking features. upturned & deep set, deep goldenrod in colour & heavily lidded, it’s often said that nabooru’s eyes burn bright with the ferocity of the spirit she carries inside her, & she would agree wholeheartedly with that statement. the lashes which surround them are not especially long, but they are surprisingly dark, giving her an unintentional yet permanently intense look, which does work in her favour - it’s hard to stand against her, be it in battle, or simply an argument over who gets the last bread roll, when her jaw is set & her eyes are dark, & flashing like lighting. make-up is, as with most cosmetics & luxuries, a rarity in the gerudo fortress, unless they deliberately set out to steal some, but when cosmetics meant for the eyes come in, nabooru is often one of the first to scavenge from the haul. she likes to paint her lids to emphasize her eye colour, as she believes that it, besides her hair, is her most defining feature.

for most of her life, nabooru’s eyes are of no concern to her - her vision from childhood is spectacular, & she earns praise for it & the accuracy it lends her when it comes to archery, as whilst her strength allows her to nock the bow & pull the string, it is the sight she possesses which lets her hit a target from fifty paces, or one which quickly flees from her, be it on foot or on horseback.

after she is released from twinrova’s brainwashing, nabooru begins to have problems with her sight, & she never pinpoints the source, but it manifests mostly in odd sightings at the edge of her peripheral vision which leaves her in a state of lowkey paranoia, & results in anxiety becoming the background radiation of much of her adult life. she can’t fully put a name to the things she sees - sometimes it looks like insects, sometimes formless shadows crashing into her line of sight, only to disappear with the turn of her head. she believes it to be residual dark magic, meant to torment her, but with no idea how to go about identifying it, let alone how to get rid of it, she tends not to speak of it. only those whom she loves & would trust with her life ever find out what it is which makes her jump with little provocation, what sends her head spinning like a top as she frantically tries to track that which has startled her.

at the tail end of her forties, nabooru’s sight begins to go. it starts with a gradual dimming at the corner of her vision ( though it does nothing to quell the appearance of the shadows ), & she invests in a set of eyeglasses, rimmed with gold, in order to help her see better, which gives her quite a distinguished appearance, in her opinion, but they are only a temporary measure - no healer can mix a potion strong enough to save her, & she resigns herself to the loss of her sight with as much grace as she can. she has seen the rise & fall & rise again of hyrule, the betrayal of her people & their redemption, seen her daughters’ smiling faces in the sunlight, & a world thought by many to be beyond mortal reach. she cannot deny, she has seen more than enough in her lifetime than others could in a thousand. she is seventy years old when her vision leaves her entirely, but she doesn’t let it get her down too much. she has faced every challenge life has thrown at her, & overcome them all, & the family & friends who surround her have been extraordinarily supportive since the day her vision began to fade. learning how to see with her hands won’t be easy, but she has never been one to back down from what is difficult, & she has excelled at most things she has tried her hand at ( or so she says. ) why should this be any different ?

though her sight disappears, her hearing is as sharp as ever, & it helps her in training young warriors in how to be stealthy. her not being able to see them means nothing. if she can hear them, they’re not good enough. it becomes a game for the children in the fortress, to try & sneak past her as quietly as they can, & her snaps & shouts when they inevitably fail results in plenty of laughter from all involved. everything has a silver living, as they say.

[shefightslikeagirl]

CORSETS AND STRIPED STOCKINGS: OUTFITTING THE ASYLUM FOR WAYWARD VICTORIAN GIRLS by She Fights Like A Girl

These articles are best viewed on desktop, but are mobile friendly. Please excuse any strange formatting on your phone browser or the Tumblr app.

This article was longer than intended and image-heavy, so it’s been split into two parts.

PART V: AN ASYLUM MUSICAL

“And if I end up with blood on my hands, Well, I know that you’ll understand ‘Cause I fight like a girl.” - Fight Like A Girl (2014)

And now we're back to the relatively recent past, when this blog was in its infancy and the fandom couldn't decide whether to stick with the forum or run rampant on Tumblr. Fight Like A Girl (the album) was still being recorded, but Emilie did a few live dates Down Under and decided to feature the title song from the unfinished album.

To my understanding, the Harvest Festival was another one of those concerts where the show was considerably downsized because of the cost of shipping props and set pieces. But where the South American tours hadn’t pulled back in the wardrobe department, the Harvest festival did. Emilie and the Crumpets performed in one costume for the entire set. But to make up for the lack of glam, EA debuted the first costume of the FLAG era.

This costume was worn for the cover art of Fight Like A Girl, and acted as the signature corset for the very first Fight Like A Girl World Tour (2012). 

“Asylum Secrets: All of my costumes over the years have been made to look as though someone had been murdered in them and come back from the dead to enact a fabulous revenge. To achieve this, I have employed techniques from melting fabrics with an industrial strength heat gun to spraying them with solutions that no human should ever breathe. In the case of the corset pictured, I burned it mercilessly with sticks of incense before painting the fabric to make it look moth-eaten.” - EA on the creation of the FLAG corset (June 25, 2018)

Speaking of the 2012 FLAG World Tour! While there were a lot of changes from The Door Tour and Harvest Festival, this tour is probably best remembered as a transition phase between eras. There were new costumes, but… the Rat Queen still introduced the show with 4 o’Clock. There were new set dressings, but… the shadow scrim was still main stage center. The new corset was mixed in with the Rat Queen ensemble and the structure of the show hadn’t changed terribly. New, but… kinda not?

Except for that Warrior Mohawk, of course.

Upper: WVC content / eBay listing photo. Lower: Making of the Warrior Mohawk from Emilie’s Flickr account.

This is the only tour where Emile wore a mohawk for the entirety(-slash-majority) of the show. Later concerts would see her removing it after the third song. There was some slight skepticism in the fandom with its debut, sparking discourse about everything from cultural appropriation to thematic relevance, but EA didn’t make much comment on the criticism.

“[The Warrior Mohawk] signified the transformation from victim to warrior. I feel that it is important for me to let go in order that I may go on to transform yet again and create new bits of wearable magic to surprise you with... This headpiece symbolized the birth of a new era in the Asylum…. This is the headdress of a tribal Queen…” - EA, 2012 eBay auction description.

“The Mohawk headdress represents the tribal, wild element of the sisterhood that formed during the imprisonment of the inmates, and shows that, once we escape and are on the rampage to take down our oppressors, we have indeed transformed from individual, helpless victims into a strong and beautifully terrifying tribal warriors.”  - EA for Natalie’s World, 2013 (x) (x)

Another costume that debuted on this tour was the MC of the Ophelia Gallery, who had his own brand-new number: Girls! Girls! Girls!

And as for its history...

(My best guess is that this photo originated in 2009, based on her hair.)

This character is a hint at the structure of the tour (and album) to come, where it would be less about the mad girls existing inside the Asylum and more about the story of how they got there, and what happened once they were interned. Allow me to stray from the costuming topic for just a moment…

A TANGENT: OF STAGE SHOWS AND ASYLUM CONTINUITY Spoiler filled ramblings of a long-time fan.

I’ve got a running theory that The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, in all its forms, runs in parallel to the concerts. But they match each other in reverse. [Spoilers for the book to follow.]

Emilie’s first concert of the Opheliac brand was in a small venue in Chicago, alongside Lady Joo Hee. In The Asylum… book, Emily-with-a-y’s final days in the Asylum were spent with Sachiko (a character based on and formerly named Joo Hee). 

The Opheliac shows of 2007-2011 were all about the women in an Asylum singing songs and welcoming others home. Cannibals, ballerinas, pyrate captains, nymphomanics -- they all ran rampant with no apparent oversight except from Emilie herself. Rats crept and crawled onstage unbothered; toys, crumpets, and cupcakes were in abundance, often served alongside “tea,” and there isn’t a single cell door in sight.

Especially in the earliest days of the concerts, the set design had an emphasis on appearing hand-made -- not only because it was, but because it should be for these girls. This was the world EA branded for herself: a world of freedom, without judgement, earned by their own hands.

In The Asylum… book, after the Inmates take over and kill the doctors, this is very much what they do: impersonate medical professionals and welcome sick and not-so-sick girls home to protect them, nurture them, and give them the best life that the Victorian Age fails to do. They take over the Asylum and make it their own.

Then in the FLAG performances (2012-2014), the storytelling shifts. EA’s Asylum world is no longer loosely themed with inmates running amok, but adheres to a more rigid storytelling structure, detailing the struggles and despair of the girls locked up in The Asylum(-with-a-capital-T). It mirrors the bulk of the content in The Asylum… book. The carefree, whimsical stage dressings shift to bars -- a representation of the cells and gates in The Asylum. There might be a bear tied to a dreary grey harpsichord; you might even see a single rat scratching about. But they don’t have dominion here. There’s no freedom. Just the story of the girls trapped behind the bars.

And now we’re stalled on both sides of the street. We’ve met in the middle. The concerts started at the end of the book, and ended at the beginning. 

Ok, I’ll put my soapbox away. Let’s get back on track.

BACK TO BUSINESS

Where were we?

Oh, yes: Girls! Girls! Girls! and new costumes.

So let’s jump forward a little more, because there isn’t much else to say about Emilie’s costume style in the 2012 FLAG World Tour. Moving on to the 2013 Fight Like A Girl: North American Tour (and following European and Australian tours), a brand new show was brought to the stage. Full new stage set-up, new costumes, and a full new setlist. 

A costume I’ll be referring to as the “armored corset” replaced the moth-eaten FLAG ensemble in the opening number. Both Maggots and Veronica were given new costumes as well, replacing the costumes they had worn for years. 

Armored Corset, with varying amounts of sparkled (2013)

Maggie Lally; Captain Maggot / Captain Maggots

Veronica Varlow; The Naughty Veronica

The show design of this tour had Emilie in the armored corset with the mohawk for the two opening numbers, Fight Like A Girl and Time for Tea. The mohawk and the armored plates on her chest and hip were removed during the 4 o’Clock Reprise, leaving her without her armor for What Will I Remember? as the narrative moves back to the beginning of the story, before the “Uprising.”

On the subject of the corset: structurally, it was outfitted with snaps to attach the armor and allow for easy removal (see corset detail above, bottom right). The mohawk proved a more difficult challenge to remove, as it was securely clipped, pinned, and secured into EA’s hair. This ended up being corrected in the redesign that produced Mohawk 2.0.

Back to the show! By the time we get to Veronica’s Dominant fan dance, EA has removed the armor corset completely in the interim to prepare for the Girls! Girls! Girls! costume change. After Scavenger, the entire cast changes into Asylum Inmate Rags to perform Gaslight and The Key, and then changes back into full costume for the finale. Emilie wears the full FLAG ensemble from previous tours to close out the show, with varying headdresses. 

But I’m skipping over something important.

The Scavenger.

Inspired by Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, The Scavenger, a vulture-esque representation of Dr. Greavsely, appeared onstage for Scavenger. 

“This is the start of the original costume @maggotmagpie wears in our show, the one Greavesly wears in #AsylumMusical will be bonkers…” - EA on the Scavenger (February 7, 2016)

EA on Twitter/Twitpic 2012 (x)

The Scavenger was usually worn by Maggots as part of a stilt-walking performance, but if the venue couldn’t or wouldn’t allow for stunts onstage, Emilie would appear alone in the costume for the number. 

Scavenger has plenty of different “shows” (A show, B show, and C show for my theme park friends), with “A Show” being Captain Maggot on stilts.

Note: The Atlanta show featured here is a bit strange, as it uses the Stage Screen and the Asylum Bars during a tour that doesn’t feature the former. Emilie also isn’t in the normal costume for this number, using a personal scarf to cover her bloomers and bra.

“B Show” would be Emilie performing as the Scavenger, due to venue restrictions. This was actually the way Scavenger debuted, until Maggot’s first performance later in the tour. (See pictures and even more info here.)

“C Show” would be Moth’s performance in the final set of Fight Like A Girl tours, as seen below:

(There’s also “D Show,” (ha) which is this random dude performing as The Scavenger. I’ve yet to figure this out, but my guess is it was a technician stepping in at the last moment or a friend of EA from Oakland.)

Last, but not least, are the Asylum Rags. You’d think there wouldn’t be much to say here, but there is. Click on the continue link below to learn more about tattered costumes and the rest of the FLAG era, because Tumblr only allows 10 pictures per post.

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE.

Fly back… PART I: Enchant and the Faerie Queene PART II: Drowning Ophelia PART III: Vecona, Seamstress of the Asylum PART IV: Wayward Victorian Girls

Remember to visit Part III and enter our giveaway! Ends 12/1/19.

[SEE ALL CREDITS AND SOURCES HERE.]