#idk how to spell hodgson......

[vomittedsoap]

How characters in AMC The Terror would drink their coffee (/morning drink)

John Franklin: Black, your grandpa's instant Kirkland brand coffee. Either that or 7/11 big gulp that smells like motor oil and piss. Owns a "world's best boss" mug but uses it as a pen cup.

Francis Crozier: black (with whiskey). Jopson makes it for him in one of those plaid Thermos or green old-fashioned Stanley.

James Fitzjames: he takes Starbucks and Dutch Bros very seriously. Big fan of a chai latte as well. Anything with cinnamon sprinkled on it. (insert Larry David Latte joke from Crozier)

Blanky: Same as Crozier but with some sugar and cream

Jopson: owns a French Press that he uses to make Crozier's coffee, drinks his with just a LITTLE sugar but a lot of milk. Also likes espresso sometimes. Drank from a simple white cup or whatever's available.

Hodgson: uses Jopson's French Press (and lost the lid one time). Adds CoffeeMate flavored creamer, pumpkin spice is his fave but hazelenut is fine. Really enjoys stupid mugs so most of the mugs on the Terror belong to him. His favorite is the Rainforest Cafe frog one.

Little: a double-quad-shot of espresso in a Solo Cup means nothing to him. But alas he drinks it anyways. Such is life. Sometimes will have a coffee in Hodgson's mug with a picture of a kitten and puppy playing on it.

Irving: insane amounts of sugar and milk, but will never admit it. One time a shipmate accidentally mistook it for his and instantly spat it out. Irving claimed he didn't know whose it was. The mug changes but says his favorite is the one with John3:16 on it (but actually he covets the Rainforest Cafe frog mug).

Goodsir: actually he's an herbal tea guy. Likes chamomile or things with rose/lavender. Brews them in a mug Hodgson gave him that had some dumb science pun on it, a gift for which he's unnecessarily thankful.

Stanley: black. No fun allowed.

Tozer: regular coffee with french vanilla creamer. Normal.

Hickey: Panera lemonade that kills you. Also takes sips from Crozier, Tozer, or Irving's drinks when they're not looking. ("if you have a milkshake... and I have a milkshake... and I have a straw; see? Watch it. My straw reaches across the room... and starts to drink your milkshake: I... drink... your... milkshake!")

Gibson: doesn't like coffee, but is a big fan of coffee-flavored things.

Collins: espresso with lead and an extra side of lead (with whipped cream)

Silna: Haznelnut latte with which to take her ibuprofin. Lord knows she needs it. Drinks from a baby-blue Stanley Goodsir gave her.

[synesindri]

so admittedly i did think it was a little bit random when they started calling the mutineers a coven but i've seen the light now so here are my thoughts on this kickstarted by this description of a common 19th century british witch archetype:

literary representations of witches would also be underpinned by popular tales recorded by folklore collectors in most parts of Britain, which portrayed such people as utterly wicked, possessed of all too effective magical powers, and ending up brutally punished by death or injury

— ronald hutton, "Witches and Cunning Folk in British Literature 1800–1940," p29

1. "utterly wicked." i mean. no justification needed for this one probably.

2. "possessed of all too effective magical powers." not directly, but hickey is weirdly unaffected by sickness and starvation and exposure and exhaustion compared to the others (a lot of his off-the-rails behaviors/mentalities later on do map on reasonably well to symptoms of lead poisoning and other things going on, but like, he isn't bleeding or losing teeth and i would sell my soul for my skin to look the way his does even during the very worst of everything, so). he also clearly has a lot of power over many of the men, in an understandable leadership way that is more reliant on charisma, bribery, planfulness, and situations than magic, but it does seem kind of magical at times

3. "ending up brutally punished by death or injury." hard to get more brutally punished than literal bodily bifurcation. the rest of the "coven" likewise meet brutal ends.

4. devil shenanigans. lots of focus during this time period in british lore on witches and devil worship. obviously the tuunbaq is not a or the devil and it is troubling to suggest as much (even in its role as a fabricated entity that does not actually belong to the culture it has been inserted into). nonetheless, it is presented fearsomely in a way that seems likely to be understood as demonic or hellish by a christian crew such as the men of terror and erebus (it might even be described as such canonically? i don't remember specific examples and i haven't checked). certainly everyone has a good christian "avoid that thing" reaction to the tuunbaq — everyone except hickey, who finds it appealing and sees an opportunity to seek power through it, much as folkloric and literary witches of the era were depicted as doing through the devil.

5. christian inversions and rejections. the mutiny arguably really kicks off with the murder of lt. irving, the most outspokenly christian person in the group. christ symbolism through the "punished as a boy" scene through framing and posture. as lt hodgson so kindly spells out for us, cannibalism and (catholic) communion both involve the consumption of human blood and flesh. at mutineer supper time i was briefly convinced they were about to say grace (totally subjective on that one but whatev). hickey going up the hill to listen to his thoughts was very prophet-like imagery. hickey's final speech rejects god and religion. probably there are more examples but i think that's enough for this post that is already longer than i planned for it to be.

6. sexuality part 1. witches of the time and place were associated with non-normative sexual practices (including homosexuality, promiscuity, femdom, sexual coersion, so on and so forth). hickey is directly depicted in a sexual and romantic relationship with another man (who is also the one who first suggested mutiny in the first place, solidifying the narrative importance of the connection between gay people and mutiny. be gay do crimes but for serious). idk what the stance in general fandom scholarship is about the hickey-tozer dynamic, but i would say that is plausibly depicted as at least being implied to be not 100% heterosexual, which is particularly notable because that has important potential effects on how the power structure of the mutineer camp works — a chaste rank-based collegiality has a very different vibe than a situation where the main guy in charge and his second in command might be fucking (or kissing, or holding each other's faces in a sort of tender pseudo-religious way, or whatever else they might have been getting up to together) — this is getting a bit off from witchcraft but certainly there are many comparable depictions of witches coercing powerful men to do their bidding by using sexuality (see my non-existent au i just thought of just now that's based on lewis's the monk, i guess???)

7. sexuality part 2. witches also were notorious for doing castration to people. sorry, irving.

8. sexuality part 3. perhaps most notably witches were regarded as having sexual relationships with the devil. none of the mutineers ever gets it on with the tuunbaq obviously (although i feel confident that some adventurous fic writers out there have probably made this a subject of their study), but it is KIND of attempted symbolically. i talked about this already but it bears repeating here that the tongue is an erogenous body part generally, and there is possibly some mild extra narrative emphasis on that symbolism for hickey specifically, so the metaphorical self-castration of him cutting out his own tongue and offering it to the tuunbaq is a little bit giving weird sex. it's also giving nun/priest/monk-like disavowal of the potential for (at least a few types of) sex with human beings in favor of pledging oneself to a deity.

9. human sacrifice. common trope with witches, and the clear point of hickey's dragging everybody up that hill with him when he goes also to attempt to sacrifice part of his own human self to the tuunbaq.

10. identity. this is a little less solid but there's often kind of a sense that witches aren't who they claim to be? see lewis's the monk again, with (spoilers, i guess) the character of monk rosario revealing himself actually to be matilda, a seductive witch, who eventually does a double reveal that she's a demon. the "i'm not really cornelius hickey" reveal is giving that, a bit.