#peasant representation

[yunmeng-jiang]

cultivation society: yeah and you wanted... what was it again...

jgy: to be treated like a human?

cultivation society:

[ieatwormsandtheytasteverygood]

My top 3 celebrity crushes!!!! <33

Kilij Arslan ibn Suleyman, Sultan of Rum

Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (a.k.a. Salading Rex Ægypti)

yuor mum

[brunhielda]

Someone put it in words.

I don’t know if it is better or worse to be IN the production (or Directing) but- it is this same thing, and also in an entirely different way I cannot articulate.

What I know about Robinhood now can never be unlearned.

the curse of local theatre is that a show can change you forever and there is no recording of it anywhere at all and after a few years all you have are scattered memories and the knowledge that you were different before.

[tenth-sentence]

While the noble husbands represented the family at the royal court and in the wider political world, competing with other great men, summoned by the king to serve in his army or even called by the church to crusade, the women ran the great homes and lands, ordered the servants, managed the workers, commanded the peasants, sat as judges in the manorial courts, and recruited and even led fighting forces.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[physalian]

What No One Tells You About Writing #4 (100 Follower Special!)

Have you got any that deserve to be on these lists? Don’t be shy! Send ‘em over.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

*This list contains mentions of assault, #4

1. Zero cursing is better than censored cursing

I made the mistake in the early days of writing a self-censoring character, and every “curse” she said just took the teeth out of the rest of the statement. I’m talking gosh, darn, dang, etc, not world-specific idioms a la “scruffy nerf herder” or “dunderhead” instead of “dumbass”.

Look to any American TV show that so, so badly wants to use f*ck or sh*t but has to appease the sensitive conservatives who still somehow believe strong language is worse than graphic violence and horrifying psychological damage. For shame! Your characters can be angry without expletives, so rework your sentences to include equally damning insults that don’t resort to potty mouths if you’re concerned about ratings.

Or go full-throttle into the idioms of the world or the time period like Pirates of the Caribbean. Or just… don’t. There’s zero modern cursing in the Lord of the Rings adaptation and not a single sentence that censors itself. The dialogue is above vulgarity and feels more *fantastical* that way anyway.

2. “Yeah, you aren’t the target audience.”

It’s kind of hilarious seeing the range of reader reactions to two characters I intend to have a romantic relationship. Some will go “I ship it!” after the first page of them together… and another will go “wait, I thought they were just friends” up until they kiss. Sometimes you might be too subtle, other times it might be better to just accept that you can’t rewrite your entire book to please one naysayer.

When I’m pitched a fantasy adventure book that turns out to be a by-the-numbers romance where no one is allowed to be a peasant and every important character is royalty in some way, with a way cooler fantasy backdrop, I get severely disappointed. That doesn’t mean the book is bad, it just means I’m not the target audience.

3. There is no greater character sin than making them boring

Unless you live in the wacky world we find ourselves in where any flaws whatsoever are apparently harmful depictions of so-and-so and not at all written with things like ~nuance~. I will gush over your heinous villain committing atrocities because he’s *interesting*. I will not remember Bland Love Interest who’s a generic everyman with zero compelling or intriguing traits or flaws.

There’s another tumblr post out there that I cannot find that says something like this, and I believe the post goes “his crimes are fiction, my annoyance is real”. Swap annoyance for boredom and you get what I mean. So, I don’t care what your character does so long as they’re memorable. I will either root for their victory or their doom, but I do need *something* to root for.

4. The line between “gratuitous” and “respectful” is actually very thick

Less what no one tells *you* about writing and more what no one tells screenwriters. Y’all do realize you can write a character who experiences assault without actually writing the assault, right? Fade to black, have them mention it in their backstory, or have the horrific aftermath as they come to terms with it. An abrupt cut to this devastated character when it’s all over and they’re alone with themselves can be incredibly poignant and powerful. This goes with anything sensitive, especially if it’s not coming from experience.

If you want to write it or film it respectfully, romanticizing assault, for instance, is when it’s framed as if either character has earned or “deserves” it. If the narrative in any way argues that it's justified. The victim might have "earned" it for any of the BS reasons we use in the real world, or the perpetrator might've "earned" it because of temptation, desire, pressure to assert dominance, etc. Representation is important, but are you “representing” to shed light on a misunderstood and maligned topic, or are you doing it to satisfy a fetish or bias in yourself?

5. Don’t let your eyes get bigger than your stomach

Fantasy has no limitations, which means you can dig way deeper into the well of your worldbuilding than you realize, until you look up and realize you’re stuck down there. I have never seen a more obvious inevitable disaster looming than the pilot of GoT season 5. Why? Nobody has any plans. They’re all just led around by whatever side quest the writers throw them on, twiddling their thumbs until the writers deign to pull the trigger on the White Walkers.

To the point that what should be a major character can skip an entire season because his arc is meaningless. Everything in the last half of that show was one big “eventually” while the story toiled around in an ever-expanding cast of characters and set pieces (seriously, it’s hilarious how jarring the extended version of the theme music became compared to the pilot episode to fit all these locations).

When you have too many directionless characters, too many plot elements, too many ideas you want to fully mature and get their due spotlight and then somehow combine them all together for a common foe in the end, writing can get tedious and frustrating very quickly. Why, I imagine, the book series remains unfinished. Fantasy is great for being able to create such complex worlds, but don’t be the snake that eats its own tail trying too hard.

6. No one cares about your agenda if you insult them to push it

This deserves its own post but here we go. Peddling an agenda is a paradox: those who agree with you won’t need to be preached to, and those who you want to persuade will instead reject you further because they feel belittle and disrespected. This is why so many recent “strong female characters” fail on both sides of the aisle. Feminists see an annoying caricature of the movement they’re passionate about. Antifeminists see an insufferable, shallow, liberal mouthpiece when they just want to be entertained. You have failed both sides, congrats.

The answer? Write a strong, nuanced, well-developed character. Then make them a woman. I know this has been said before but this BS keeps happening so clearly the screenwriters aren’t listening. Entertain me first. Entertain me so well I don’t even realize I’m learning.

7. Today’s audiences won’t react the same way as tomorrow’s

Sometimes genres or tropes get oversaturated and need a few years to cool off before audiences are receptive to them again—teen dystopia, anyone?—that doesn’t mean your story is inherently bad because it’s unpopular (nor does it mean it’s amazing because it is popular).

You should always write the book you want to read, not the book that chases trends. I can pick up a well-written teen dystopia I’ve never read before and enjoy it. I can continue to ignore Divergent because it has nothing to say. Write the book you want to read, but then accept that you might make no money because no one else wants to read it, not because they think it’s bad. And, who knows? You might get a boom of chatter months or years down the line when readers stumble upon an uncut gem.

8. Your characters don’t age with you

Depending on how long you’ve been working on your world and what age you were when you started, the characters, concepts, morals, and story you set out to tell might no longer reflect who you want to be as an author when all is said and done. Writing can take years, some of which can be incredibly turbulent and life changing. I wrote the first draft of my first original novel in my freshman year of college. Those characters and that draft are now unrecognizable and has left a world I’ve poured my heart and soul into in limbo.

I’ve slowly creeped up my characters’ ages. My writing has matured dramatically. The themes I wanted to explore in the height of the 2016 election are just demoralizing now. That book was my therapeutic outlet and, as consequence, my characters sometimes reflect some awful moods and mindsets that I was in when writing them. But nothing in that world grows without me tending to it. It’s not alive. Despite all the work I’ve done, there’s still more to be done, maybe even restarting the plot from the ground up. When I think of what no one told me about writing, staring at characters designed by someone I’m not anymore is the hardest reality to accept.

—

If you think I missed something, check out parts 1-3 or toss your own hat into the ring. Give me romance tropes. Mystery, thriller, historical fiction, bildungsromans, memoires, children’s books, whatever you want! Give me stuff you wish you’d known before editing, publishing, marketing, and more. 

Also, don’t forget to vote in the dialogue poll!

[aedesluminis]

On Anne-Marie Robinot, Saint-Just's mother

What follows is a personal translation I did of an excerpt taken from the historian Stefania Di Pasquale's book Storie di Madri (A History of mothers) which includes a chapter on Louis-Antoine's mother. The notes at the end are included in the original work.

Marie-Anne Robinot was born in Décize on the 16th of January 1734, the daughter of Jeanne Philiberte Houdry (1712-1745) and Léonard Robinot (1701-1776), king’s counsel, royal notary and procurator in the bourg of Décize.

There are no contemporary pictures of this woman, but that doesn’t mean she was less important than others; the lack of any representation is probably due to the centuries that have passed since her death and to the destruction of personal belongings which occurred right after Robespierre’s fall and also, in particular, during the Restoration of the old European monarchies starting with the Congress of Vienna of 1815.

We don’t know much about her early years, except that she grew up among the Décize haute bourgeoisie of the 18th century and that she received a good education.

The French historian Ernest Hamel, who had met Saint-Just’s nephews for his grandfather was an intimate of the latter, wrote the following in his biography Histoire de Saint-Just:  «Madame de Saint-Just was a charming and charitable woman, who outlived her son by a few years, she was sad by nature; she had loved with excessive love this predestined son, who until the last day returned her motherly tenderness with filial adoration. » (1)

Marie-Anne was a very religious woman, attached to her family, but compared to her contemporaries, who submitted to paternal will on certain matters such as those concerning arranged marriages, and, although she loved and respected her father, she believed it was unfair that parents could decide the future of their children, especially when they were already sentimentally attached to another person. This is what eventually happened to Marie-Anne.

Mademoiselle Robinot fell in love with Monsieur Louis-Jean Saint-Just de Richebourg, knight of the royal and military order of Saint-Louis, marshal of the gendarme company under the title of Berry, son of Marie-Françoise Adam and Charles de Saint-Just.

The age gap between the two was of twenty years: he, a mature man, and she, a young thirty years old woman still unmarried.

Marie-Anne had already the occasion to show her obstinacy just a couple of months after meeting captain Saint-Just.

Unfortunately their union would have been opposed by her father, who didn’t approve their relationship since he considered Louis-Jean as a simple peasant son of humble origins. Monsieur Robinot didn’t consider his future brother-in-law equal to his rank. But perhaps was it just an excuse? At the time the Robinot family was composed of men only and a female figure, who knew how to handle domestic servants, was much needed. The young woman wasn’t evidently of the same opinion and, on the suggestion of some notary friends of her, she resorted to the only means available at the time to counter paternal authority: les sommations respectueuses.

During the Ancien Régime the law required the father’s consent to celebrate a marriage, but in case it was denied, people over 25 could counter the refusal through a process called sommations respectueuses. To accomplish that, one had to rely on a notary and ask the family members three times for the written consent. After that, if the request kept being denied, the person could still proceed with the marriage.

Determined to fulfill her dream, Marie-Anne took courage against her paternal authority and on 21 March 1766 she appeared before her father together with notary Grenot and two other witnesses both belonging to the nobility.

Outraged by such audacity, Léonard Robinot pretended to be absent. The same occurred on 22 March. The following day, the 23, the day of the last visit, Robinot left the house defeated, without uttering a single word. Happy and contented, the next day Marie-Anne signed the marriage contract and the ceremony was set for 30 May 1766.

The two married in Verneuil with a quick ritual, celebrated by the uncle of the spouse, Antoine Robinot, and among the wedding witnesses there were a carpenter, a merchant and a cabaret comedian (two of them couldn’t either read or write).

In a rage, the rest of the Robinot Family didn’t even want to go out of their house to see the spouses, especially the disobedient daughter. Surely the intimacy of the ceremony was thought necessary to avoid their reprimand.

Marie-Anne got pregnant a few months after the marriage and on the 25th of August 1767 a child was born, who one day would have made history, who would have fought and died for the freedom of his country.

The chosen name was that of Louis-Antoine, Louis like his father and Antoine like his uncle and godfather, the abbot Antoine Robinot.

The little Saint-Just was baptized the same day he was born in the church of Saint-Aré (Décize) and, according to the customs of the time, he was placed in the care of a wet nurse in Verneuil who lived in a house next to his uncle's. A few years later his sisters were born as well: Loise-Marie-Antoine in 1768 and Marie-Françoise-Victoire in 1769.

In 1771, however, Antoine Robinot died, the Saint-Just family was forced to take their son back and move to Nampcel, to the house which once belonged to Charles de Saint-Just (1676-1766), Anoine’s paternal grandfather. Marie Madeleine, sister of Louis-Jean, was there to welcome them.

They lived together peacefully for some time, then the family moved again to Marie-Anne’s paternal household in Décize.

According to the French historian Bernard Vinot, Léonard Robinot was a good grandfather, who doted on little Louis-Antoine. However the joy of that peaceful life was short-lived.

In 1776 Robinot died and the Saint-Just family moved one last time to the rural village of Blérancourt. It was a graceful and tranquil place. There, thanks to his military merits, Louis-Jean obtained consideration and privileges, usually reserved to the lower nobility.

Léonhard’s inheritance was split among his children and on 18 July 1776 the heirs sold the house in Décize to Claude Leblanc: that was the last time one could find the Saint-Just spouses’ signature in the town of Décize.

And so Louis-Antoine left in July 1776 the place where he had spent the first four years of his life forever, but he would have never forgotten the mountains and the river Loire, from where the fairies and myths of his work Organt would have come out. (2)

[...] Unfortunately a large part of the familial correspondence [between Saint-Just and his family] was destroyed both during the persecutions the family endured after the death by decapitation of Louis-Antoine and after the dreadful Restauration which started with the Congress of Vienna of 1815.

[...] Other than the pain caused by the death of her beloved son, Madame Saint-Just had to endure the humiliations of the Directory political police.

A mother who until the very end kept like relics those few belongings of her son, saving them from the thermidorian fury; today one can see those mementos in a display case placed in Saint-Just’s house, now a museum, in Blérancourt. In these cases it’s possible to admire a book of the young revolutionary man still with the violet he had put inside as a bookmark; a bronze plaque with an angel on it (once it used to be in Louis-Antoine’s bedroom) and a quill. That was all the poor mother could save, since even the young man’s clothes had been sold to the authorities.

Marie-Anne didn’t even have a grave to mourn her son, buried without clothes to prevent someone from reclaiming those tortured bodies. For Louis-Antoine’s remains were thrown into a mass grave in the Parisian Errancis cemetery, close to Parc Monceau.

Today this cemetery doesn’t exist anymore and the 119 human remains were moved to the catacombs in Paris.

From a missive by Madame Saint-Just sent to the prefecture of the Aisne Department, we know that the authorities still refused to give her back some of the belongings, despite the fact that fifteen years had passed since her son’s death:

To the Prefect of the Department of Aisne, member of the Legion of Honour. Marie-Anne Robinot, widow of the defunct Monsieur Louis de Saint-Just, former cavalry captain in Blérancourt and currently residing there, has the honour to notify you that, following the event of 9 Thermidor Year II, a commission named through a decree of the District of Chauny came to my house to seize all property titles belonging to me and my children, because of the sentence pronounced against Louis de Saint-Just, my son, representative in the National Convention; and that, as a consequence of that event another decree was released that allowed the return of the belongings to the parents of the convicts; I am in need of the titles of which I am concerned and which are currently deposited in the Archives of the prefecture of Aisne, I want to have the honour to ask the Prefect to be so kind to order the collection and delivery of my belongings through you; by doing so you shall have my most sincere gratitude and respect, Monsieur le Préfet, your humble and obedient servant. Widow Saint-Just. Presented on 18 February 1809.

[...] After the death of her son and with age advancing, on 5 June 1807, Marie-Anne decided to make a will, leaving everything to her two daughters:

To Louise, I leave a house, with a kitchen with a small cellar, an attic, a tool shed, gardens for 21 hectares with fruit trees, everything located in Blérancourt in Rue de la Chouette. To Victoire, a house with two rooms, a cellar, a hallway, an attic and office rooms, everything in Blérancourt in Rue de la Chouette. (3)

Madame Saint-Just died of a cholera epidemic four years after writing this small testament on 11 February 1811 in her house in Blérancourt, leaving the void and mourning of her daughters and nephews.

(1) Ernest Hamel, Histoire de Saint-Just, Paris, Poulet-Mallasis et de Braise, 1859, p. 26.

(2) In May 1789 in Paris L’Organt was published, it’s a poem divided into twenty chants in which Saint-Just criticized the absolute monarchy and clerical hierarchies.

(3) Claire Cioti, Saint-Just, cit.

[nathaniacolver]

the complement to short king is literally tall princess & idk why that's so hard for some people to understand

On the topic of short Link, here's your forced reminder that Link is smaller than Zelda in

Wind Waker

Twilight Princess

A Link Between Worlds

Breath Of The Wild / Age Of Calamity/ Tears Of The Kingdom

Hell even in the ORIGINAL Legend Of Zelda she looks like.. a pixel taller than him.. maybe...

Every time you draw Link taller than Zelda Eiji Aonuma cries. I've seen it, you guys, he just bursts into tears.

[concerningwolves]

Fashion history resources?

researching fashion for the various time periods has been driving me a little crazy, particularly because when you search up historical fashion, the results overwhelmingly trend towards upper class women (usually aristocracy), then upper class/aristocratic men, then middle class men/women, with little representation of working class women and even less for working class men. (This obviously depends on time period and country; currently, I'm scrounging around for references for servants in 1660s France. Non-European fashion is even harder to research).

So, I figured it could be good to start a chain of resources on fashion history! Here's two that I've been using heavily in researching my current WIP:

Nicole Kipar's Restoration Costume Comes to Life

This truly lovely website which details costumes of the Restoration (1660s England, mostly), and has a gallery collection of paintings of working class people with annotations on what they're wearing, the time period, and their specific social role (i.e., poor peasant, affluent peasant, market trader). It's designed for costume makers, but it's also useful for artists or writers. There are five parts: working class men and women, women of the gentry and aristocracy, men of the gentry and aristocracy, accessories, and a costume focus.

Fashion History Timeline

It is what the name suggests: open source fashion history timeline from prehistory to (afaik) 19th century. I haven't explored much beyond 1660s yet, and generally does seem to focus on fashion of the upper classes, but it's already been so useful.

If anyone has any websites/books/other resources to add, please do!

[tocomplainfriend]

About Viv's "is fiction" comment about Valentino

Tw: rape, slavery

I was right. What's the point of writing Slavery, cast systems and r-pe into your story if you don't wanna deal with it. You don't wanna deal with power dynamics in a world were diferent races suffered discrimination, and slavery. No, you want to write a royalty x peasant story in a world where royalty has power over them enough to enslave them for their race (imp). if vivs believes fiction doesn't affect reality. then she doesn't care about the representation of victims of SA, cause if fiction doesn't affect reality then she thinks good SA victim representation doesn't help real life surviviors... No? she just wanted to write an Non-Con relationship she thought was hot. She constantly jumps to defend that raph artist (self admited NOT-rape victim, that draws R-pe fetish content of angel with "UWU R-PING ANGEL" ) gross. I still believe even in bad representation of SA and r-pe victims as a victim you can get comfort or growth put of it.

you are writing a sensitive topic that affects real people.

[whencyclopedia]

A Gallery of Ancient Egyptian Monarchs & Nobility

The monarchs and nobility were at the top of the social structure in ancient Egypt and were supposed to serve as role models for the rest of the people concerning the will of the gods and one’s proper response to their many blessings. The king (or queen) set the standard which others were to emulate.

Not all the members of the upper-class lived up to this responsibility but were idealized as doing so in the artwork they commissioned and so were depicted as paragons of virtue, no matter how they had actually conducted themselves. This paradigm held, not only for the nobility, but for the lower classes in that statuary of servants and peasant farmers present the same ideal vision: how one was supposed to be, not necessarily how they were, although aspects of the physical depictions – such as facial features – are understood as accurate representations.

The social hierarchy in ancient Egypt descended from top to bottom:

Monarch (king or queen, only known as pharaoh beginning with the New Kingdom, c. 1570 - c. 1069 BCE)

Vizier

Members of the Court

Priests and Scribes

Regional Governors

Military Officers (generals, especially, after the New Kingdom)

Artists and Artisans

Merchants

Government Overseers and Supervisors

Peasant Farmers and Servants

Slaves

Although some social positions, like that of merchants, went up or down during different periods, the social structure remained more or less rigidly along these lines from the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150 -c. 2613 BCE) through the Ptolemaic Period (323-30 BCE). The following gallery presents a sampling of the images of many of the best-known and some lesser-known members of the Egyptian upper-class.

Continue reading...

[maniculum]

Pinned Post, or, What Is This Blog Exactly?

Given the recent influx of new followers, I figure I had better make us a pinned post so people know who we are and what we're doing. Because, as much as I enjoy just posting whatever, this is a podcast account and people should know that. Especially if they like weird medieval stuff, as that is our whole deal.

The Maniculum, available wherever you normally get your podcasts, is a show where we read medieval literature, make jokes about it, and then suggest ways to adapt it into TTRPG material (or other forms of storytelling). We try to pick especially strange medieval texts, most of which you would be unlikely to come across in your typical medieval-lit survey course, though we have done a few well-known ones (most notably our series on Egil’s Saga).

It’s hosted by Zoe and Mac. (This is Mac typing now; I do most of the Tumblr posting. Zoe sometimes posts as @meanderingmedievalist.) Both of us are medievalists with like degrees and stuff, so we at least kind of know what we’re talking about when we discuss medieval literature. Mac is in grad school, most of the way through a PhD. Zoe finished her MA a few years ago and got a job working on video games – she did narrative design on Pentiment, if you’re familiar with it.

The general structure of the podcast is that one of us (we take turns) chooses a text and reads / paraphrases / summarizes it for the other, who responds to it with comments & questions & jokes & digressive tangents. Then we close with a series of segments where we pull interesting features, ideas, etc. from the text for potential use in your TTRPG / storytelling projects.

If you want to check out the show but don’t want to start at the beginning where you have to listen to us figure out what we’re doing (the audio on the first handful of episodes is a bit rough, for instance), here are some suggestions:

Our 2022 Halloween special (link here), where we read a selection of medieval stories about undead creatures.

An episode (link here) about the dragon Fafnir and the famous slaying thereof.

The Story of King Constant (link here), a fairly short and obscure tale from medieval France. (The episode is still a normal length; the story is short enough that the full text fits comfortably into a single episode with no summarizing needed.) I include this one because I feel it’s a good self-contained representation of what we do.

The first episode (link here) of our two-parter on the Peasants’ Revolt, released to commemorate May Day 2023.

Lanval (link here), one of the most widely known stories by Marie de France. This is also good as a self-contained episode, and it's a story that may be familiar to you already.

And if you want to jump into a series:

The first episode (link here) of our seven-part series on the highly-regarded Icelandic text Egil’s Saga, about a Viking warrior-poet who is also kind of a dick.

The first episode (link here) of our ten-part series on Perlesvaus – our longest series on a single text so far, wherein we work through what might be the weirdest Arthurian romance out there.

If this just popped up on your dash, sorry for the long self-promotional post. Hope you come check us out. New episodes every other week.

[horizon-verizon]

What do you think of George referring to Aegon and Helaena as "King Aegon" and "Queen Helaena" and Rhaenyra by her name in the new (now deleted) blog?

(Webpage Link)

And I said this in the comments of this post, but repeating myself: he's writing in the mood and "perspective" of the KLers who resented Rhaenyra and loved Helaena for the "sweetness" they felt Rhaenyra no longer had. I also wrote another independent post abt what sort of love the smallfolk had for Helaena HERE, which is very important for anyone to read BEFORE reading this post bc I'm not going to repeat myself. You also should probably read THIS POST that goes into how the Shepherd characterizes Helaena vs Rhaenyra.

A) The Actual Comments I Wrote:

[*EDIT: 9/8/24*] Adding/correcting, I was describing the free indirect style:

This is a literary style that allows the narrator’s voice to share with us the words, thoughts or feelings of the characters, without telling us that this is what they are doing. This means that the character’s thoughts or words slip into the third-person narrative, subtly shifting the perspective from that of the narrator to that of the character. It’s almost as though the narrator is the character for a moment, but they’re not – they’re still the narrator. Importantly, the speech or thought is not attributed to the character (for example with a ‘she thought’ or ‘he imagined’), so the reader must pick up on clues in the text to understand that these are the thoughts of the character, not the narrator.

[*END OF EDIT*]

And in response to what GRRM said that started this whole debate after someone else asked:

B) Jaehaerys, Rego Draz, and the Taxes/Executions (for context and comparison b/t smallfolk's reactions to taxes and executions):

I don't deny that the smallfolk loved her and GRRM was being sympathetic for Helaena when he wrote that post.

I am saying that:

He was writing, in that post, sympathetically bc Helaena was so from the smallfolk and Rhaenyra was reviled both here and at large by the narrative bc she was simply the more active party while being female; Helaena never actually ruled, she was always a consort and her person was more the accessory of Aegon or as a representation of "goodness", esp when the Shepherd contrasts Helaena's "purity" to Rhaenyra's "whorish" "evil", which further encourages the peasants to riot as they are already rioting

the smallfolk's sort of love for Helanea was not the sort that comes from just appreciating the person as is but as a contrast to the person they came to despise. And from that phenomenon, the smallfolk revealed another interesting phenomenon of how the actual people, the subjects themselves, can switch between diff "definitions" of queenship. Not kingship, QUEENSHIP, precisely bc gender, ethnicity, etc. did/does affect how the public will see a ruler's actions' effects on them.

The Shepherd and Helaena v Rhaenyra ("Rhaenyra Overthrown"):

When Jaehaerys strung up Rego Draz's murderers (Rhaenyra strung up those she had executed), it was during a time of "peacetime"/no war even as it was also a time of widespread fatal illness; he had no outside enemies who could invade at the same time, bc his mother and stepfather took care of that in a sorta-similar situation when he himself was still underage ("The Long Reign-Jaehaerys and Alysanne-Policy, Progeny, and Pain"):

Rego Draz, like Celtigar but much smarter about it, still also put taxes on common KLers after he and Jaehaerys did on luxury items (nobles) out of necessity. But the smallfolk of KL still took issue with Rego and not Jaehaerys both bc of said taxes AND bc Rego was a Essosi foreigner.

So yes, Jaehaerys did have to deal with a dying and ill populace and used an actually consummate master of coin...but those taxes still angered smallfolk enough towards violence & rape & looting ("The Long Reign - Jaehaerys and Alysanne - Policy, Progeny, and Pain"):

bc they were being taxed already through a gate tax BEFORE the Shivers came ("Birth, Death, and Betrayal Under Jaehaerys I"):

Were Rhaenyra's taxes very heavy, yes. Did she have much other option during a war where food was scarce and an invasion could happen at any moment AND the greens depleted the treasury she sought to quickly fill, no. Were there rumors PLUS the Shepherd's anti dragon, anti "bad" woman preachings incentivizing already resentful and starving people to riot against the woman ruling over them who they previously loved [evidence in the next section], yes. Did Jaehaerys really go through a similar situation, even with the Shivers being so terrible, no, bc he had more than Rego Draz, he had his own mother and stepfather basically pave the rulership-way for him before he came of age to become king for him and Rego to be able to implement the taxes as well as they did. The same Alyssa and Rogar who the KLers also took issue with for the taxes they made on them when they were trying to rebuild the Dragonpit ("A Surfeit of Rulers"):

Yes, Jaehaerys-Rego fixed this situation & learned from it--once again, neither ALyssa-Rogar-Edwell nor Jaehaerys-Rego had to contend with an ACTIVE war and a TOTALLY DEPLETED treasury nor the PREJUDICE AND HIGHER EXPECTATIONS against a female ruler. So....

C) Use of the Book to Show What I Mean abt GRRM's Use of the Smallfolk's Perspective and the Timeline/Transition of such b/t Before The Fall of King's Landing and After It

Before the Fall of King's Landing, & the taxes the KLers loved Rhaenyra as the "Realm's Delight" and such a moniker in the book connoted an image of pleasantness:

("Rhaenyra Triumphant")

("A Question of Succession")

("A Question of Succession")

("A Son for a Son")

("A Son for a Son")

Refer back to the very first pic/quote I give in this section. The moment Rhaenyra showed herself to be...not so "sweet" by the taxes during a time of fear of invasions/retaliations from the greens and their dragons, starvation, etc. bc...war (which she did bc the greens looted the royal treasury BEFORE she even landed & took KL but the smallfolk didn't know about that nor would they ever come to), and the previous image of her being charming, lovely, and innocently beautiful, innocently childlike transformed into her innate cruelty.

So yes, they resented Rhaenyra and many would not have wanted her as their Queen not just bc of taxes but bc the taxes were compounded by the...disillusionment(?) of that image/character of her through said taxation. thus the lack of "Queen" for Rhaenyra and "Queen" for Helaena and "Prince" for Maelor, both people who have no power, were very vulnerable to the actions of those around them, and nearly childlike or was an actual child whether in reality or in their imagination. At least under the greens--who Helaena is inevitably connected to--they weren't being taxed and Helaena has no real power herself to ever had affected the smallfolk's life so strongly.

This is what I think is being expressed through GRRM's writing in that particular blog post.

As for reactions to Aegon's coronation, we have Munkun saying the smallfolk were "most[ly] confused" by the announcement of Aegon's coronation and saying (some) Rhaenyra's name instead VS Munkun saying that there were many cheers when the actual coronation happened ("The Blacks and the Greens"):

[fatehbaz]

In 1901, Liang Qichao, a prominent Chinese journalist, wrote an essay entitled “The New Rules for Destroying Countries” (“Mieguo xinfan lun”).

In it, he presented what he had come to understand were the patterns of nineteenth-century Euro-American colonial-imperialist world domination into which China was being drawn. Egypt is the first among five examples he cited of a people and a state crushed by these “new rules.” No simple military invasion or despoiling occupation, the new rules proceeded under a subtler logic. According to Liang, English financial advisers had inserted themselves into the Egyptian court, inducing the state to indebt itself so completely that international bankers could take over from within. This ingenious mode of domination constituted what Liang called “formless dismembering,” hardly detectable as it proceeds, and announcing itself suddenly once it has taken place. Without quite articulating it, Liang was theorizing the advent of finance capitalism in relation to colonialism, with Egypt at its core. [...]

---

Aaron Jakes [...] takes up the relation between imperialist domination through the financialization of capitalism in the colonies [...] in his comprehensive account of the British occupation of Egypt from 1882 to 1914. [...] The [financial] crises, produced in the metropole [London, Paris, New York, etc.], were analytically and practically worked out by yoking colonies as productive places and colonials as laboring and culturally marked/racially othered bodies to metropolitan concerns over empire [...], making Egypt a “laboratory in which to settle those greater questions of the Empire” (25). [...] [T]he original goal of British colonial governance was to enhance [...] cotton-growing for export to the global market and capital investment/speculation. [...] The British restructuring of rural space and agrarian social relations [...] severely constrained the room for maneuver of the Egyptian peasantry, who had long used the porousness of the relations among land, property, labor, and power to gain whatever advantages they could. Peasants were now locked firmly in place, and when [...] [financial] crisis hit, their indebtedness left them relatively defenseless. By 1905, superficial prosperity hid roiling discontent with economic development but also with colonial legitimacy. [...]

---

[T]he Egyptian journalist Ahmad Hilmi recognized the British discourse of development as “gilded speech” that created an economistic reality without accounting for the lived complexity of actual Egyptians. As Jakes puts it: “despite the occupation’s command over the means of representation, the shared sentiments and experiences of the Egyptian people were irreducible to the charts and tables that adorned the pages of Cromer’s annual reports” (118).

In comparing Egypt’s poverty to the British-produced poverty of Ireland, for example, the economic boom of gushing capital investment was revealed to be a mechanism of wealth accumulation for the few. [...] [T]he gap between rhetoric and reality [...].

---

All text above by: Rebecca E. Karl. “Review of Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism.” Jadaliyya online. 21 June 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The idea of mothering and procreation morphed into Gorky’s fascination with prisoner transformation and perekovka. The labor camp would be the mother of a new working class. Both god-building and the maternal impulse dovetailed with the author’s largest philosophical and intellectual preoccupation: human fashioning. Whether it was the literal, biological creation of the human by the maternal womb or the transformation afforded by a personal journey or individual greatness, Gorky remained intrigued by the individual’s ability for creation, journey, and self-discovery. Maintaining that humans were inherently malleable and eternally improvable, he believed in the potential for endless refinement through diligent effort.

Gorky’s special relationship to the Belomor project allows for an understanding of his career as a symbolic representation of the ideals promoted at the camp. Gorky was a staunch enthusiast of prisoner labor and even predicted the possibility of a waterway similar to Belomor in his early works; in the April 1917 issue of his journal New Life (Novaia zhizn’) he writes

Imagine, for example, that in the interest of the development of industry, we build the Riga-Kherson canal to connect the Baltic Sea with the Black Sea […] and so instead of sending a million people to their deaths, we send a part of them to work on what is necessary for the country and its people.

Gorky’s condoning of Gulag camps such as Solovki and Belomor seems paradoxical to many scholars in light of his humanitarian endeavors, and some speculate either that Gorky was ignorant of the full extent of Stalin’s butchery or that he was aware, but was in a position that necessitated acquiescence to safeguard his well-being. When viewed in the context of his philosophical outlook on literature and labor, however, his support of prison camps seems not like an aberration but rather a natural extension of his belief in violent re-birth, a belief related to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the concept of god-building. Gorky sees people and language alike in the framework of craftsmanship. Perhaps his mistake was not so much his general support of Gulag projects, but his belief that human flesh can be formed like words on a page or cement in a factory. Gorky, after all, cared more about the craft than people themselves; in his 1928 essay “On How I Learned to Write” (O tom, kak ia uchilsia pisat’), he claimed that “the history of human labor and creation is far more interesting and meaningful than the history of mankind.” Gorky was key to the canal project because his philosophical interests exemplify the very core of Belomor: the violent transformation of people through creative acts.

Technology’s magic demonstrated humans’ usurpation of God in a tangible way, with the ever-widening capacity to harness and transform the natural environment showcasing the potential of man-made machines. Soviet pilots were imagined as literal incarnations of the New Man, and the massive expansion of the Soviet aviation industry in the mid 1920s provided some of the most concrete evidence of human superiority over the divine. Short voyages known as “air baptisms” (vozdushnye kreshcheniia) supposedly eradicated peasants’ belief in God while highlighting the majesty of Red aviation. In such “agit-flights,” pilots would take Orthodox believers into the skies and show them that they held no celestial beings. Those who participated in the flights would narrate their experiences to neighboring villagers, describing “what lies beyond the darkened clouds.” This phrase served as the title of a 1925 essay by Viktor Shklovskii in which a village elder embarks upon a conversional agit-flight that he later recounts to his fellow peasants. Six years later, Shklovskii participated in the writers’ collective that coauthored the now infamous monograph History of the Construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, in which a different, often deadly, type of technological program offered the promise of conversion. In both instances, darkness will be overcome by the enlightening potential of socialist rationalism: aviation will liberate the peasants from their ignorant beliefs, just as labor will supposedly bring the Belomor prisoners to the light of Soviet ideology. Such endeavors occurred before the backdrop of a larger civilizing project, since both the rural reaches of peasant villages and the wild expanses of untouched Karelia necessitated modernization.

Yet could such projects ever be completed? Did the New Man really exist, and could his creation ever be achieved? The messianic vision of Soviet socialism necessitated that paradise lie always just out of reach.

Similarly, Nietzsche posits the development into the Übermensch as a perennially elusive goal; like the Faustian concept of striving, the individual is forever trying to perfect oneself without necessarily ever achieving perfection. This constant yearning renders the present as the future, as the purpose of today is necessarily the reward of tomorrow. In the Soviet Union, the regime assured people that the difficulties they endured were required in order to reach the svetloe budushchee (radiant future), a utopia found at the end of an interminable road. In the absence of an end result or final destination, the voyage itself becomes the site of cultural exploration."

- Julie Draskoczy, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. p 30-32

[sorenblr]

on the off chance you like Dragon Quest, can you explain its appeal? Japanese people really like it from what I've read, but it seems to play second fiddle to FF in the West

I love Dragon Quest. I have a general JRPG brain illness that isn't confined to SMT. There's even a DQIII reference in Marsyas and the Vampyr...

Anyway, I think the appeal is self-evident: the Toriyama designs, the meat-and-potatoes simplicity, the emphasis on individual vignettes that lends the series an easy, almost serialized narrative tone, the relentless charm of it all- even Sugiyama's classical inspirations stand apart from the prog-infused soundscape of the genre. The English releases also benefit from localization, injecting color and accent that conform so well to the original tone that it hardly scans as adaptation. There is a character and magnetism at play here that no other franchise dares emulate. The series is somehow totally archetypal but completely inimitable. It's a very tidy balancing act.

The individual design elements are unremarkable - the ascetic turn-based combat centered on simple buffs and damage control, rudimentary dungeon crawling, barely extant character building except where the vocation system is present- but tend to cohere under this satisfying sense of polish and planning. And while there's more mechanical experimentation across the series than is evident at a glance, DQ still has a fundamentally conservative design ethos that sets it apart from "modern" JRPGs while ensuring a consistent reception from the more settled-in demographics: liking one entry in the series is no guarantee that you'll love the rest, but you're unlikely to be disillusioned going from one game to another.

It's also difficult to overstate the domestic legacy status. In the Western imaginary, the generic JRPG probably resembles a sort of desacralized FFVII. In Japan that image has always belonged to DQ (and more specifically DQIII), where its status as the progenitor of the genre is less clouded by the decontextualization that Japanese games experience during export- less so in the globalized present, but especially pronounced during the crucial formative years for both series. The emphasis on rudiments is something that's more permissible as a result.

But that comparison relates back to FF's dominance in the West, which is mostly attributable to the series' output during the fifth console generation. More expansive allowances for 3D representation created a demand for games designed around the cutting edge. This is the moment that FF cemented its modern reputation, across three separate entries*, as a series of constantly re-inventive, systems innovative, graphical-showcase melodramas. Meanwhile, the mainline of DQ greeted the moment with a single entry: DQVII, an infamously long and plodding game that married simple polygonal backgrounds with 2D sprites in a fashion that too much resembled the rustic SNES titles of the previous generation to suit the tastes of the average PlayStation Magazine subscriber. Debuting several months after the launch of the PS2 inflamed the issue. Considering the technocratic lust for graphical bombast that informed consumer demand at the time, it's no surprise that Western markets imprinted on FF. There's more at play there- from a marketing perspective, the diminutive peasant-protagonist of DQVII was at a disadvantage against Nomura's millennial aesthetic- but that's the thrust of it.

By the time DQVIII released, FF was already dominant, enjoying a consistent stream of profit from their MMO sector even as the wait between FFX and FFXII spanned the entire lifespan of the new system. With DQIX crafted for the DS and DQX being passed over for localization, the mainline series essentially sat out the critical transition to HD, so FF maintained its edge in the West despite increasingly troubled development and exploding production costs. Things have dovetailed neatly, with DQXI charting a series-best performance in the West, filling a niche for console JRPG experiences of this scale that has been largely unoccupied since the PS2 era. FF is meanwhile occupied with recreating, in a fit of Byzantine decadence, the very title that established its grip on the Western imagination.

*It hasn't enjoyed the same critical longevity as FFVII, but it really can't be overstated how acclaimed FVIII was at release, and the move to less abstracted, more 'realistic' models was crucial to that reception.

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

François-Hubert Drouais (1727-1775) "Portrait of a Woman, Said to be Madame Charles Simon Favart (Marie Justine Benoîte Duronceray, 1727–1772)" (1757) Oil on canvas Located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York, United States In 1745 Mademoiselle Duronceray—the singer, dancer, and comedienne probably portrayed here—married Charles Simon Favart, the father of French comic opera. Among her best-known roles was that of the heroine in The Loves of Bastien and Bastienne, 1753, in which she inspired a revolution in theatrical costume by wearing authentic peasant dress. Drouais’s portrait of her seated at a harpsichord recalls traditional representations of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music.