#watlcitf

[mallowstep]

Consider this ask your free pass to dump some watclif historical nerdery on me. I too have an irrational amount of love for certain periods of history and I know how hard it can be to bottle it all up. <3

kjlfdsj don't fret my irl friends/family already know to be careful what historical dramas they watch with me

mom: i thought harlots had really good costumes

me: did it, mother, or were you just distracted by the pretty colours?

anne with an e is one of my biggest victims because like. they're generally so good. i have nothing but praise 90% of the time. and then they'll give someone a scarf that's clearly plucked out of claire's like come on you're better than this.

historical dress is one of my biggest passions, going right back to me checking out "a history of dress" when it was like. almost as big as i was. god those were the days.

anyway, we're not here to talk about that, because the history of irish independence is Fascinating.

so uhh to summarize briefly bc i'm not in the mood to do sources, england colonizes ireland and then that causes the potato famine and then ireland says "fuck this shit" and they proceed to fight for their independence and well. we all know how that goes.

wait do we? uh, crash course, during brexit, one of the major hold ups for negotiations were centred around northern ireland vs ireland (republic of ireland) because well. there's uh, there's not supposed to be a Hard Border between them because last time there was bad things happened.

(also, the derry girls on netflix is a fun exploration of this time period. no words to accuracy because while i think the troubles are a really interesting time, i don't know much about daily life during them because i'm more into early 20th century stuff, and a great appreciation for like. post-classical stuff.)

right but anyway. so you have a huge suppression of the irish language and culture by the english. the schools forbid the speaking of gaelic which like ✨so cool of you england✨

there's a big gaelic revival tho! right around the time of watlcitf, because pre-wwi there's a huge movement for home rule

anyway you have a lot of stuff going on with ulster irish and immigration politics in the us and! right so a lot of irish emigration is of catholics, which was uh. you know not considered exactly great in the us either.

irish catholics were systematically pushed out of their language, land, and culture by the english. not that that's news, but i feel like? i feel like not a lot of people know that?

like england has colonized Everywhere. and it's always the same story.

i can't begin to express how terrible the great potato famine was, and like. god.

anyway gaelic as a language continuing to exist as a primary language for Anyone is cool and should be valued actually. like. fuck i have a lot of thoughts about this and this is a Warrior Cats Blog so sorry for anyone not expecting to get hit with ramblings on linguistics but.

gaelic is very cool! it's got all sorts of ~funky sound stuff~ going on with how it mutates as a grammatical feature like. love u gaelic so glad the english failed to exterminate you.

in conclusion: i'm not sure if you gained anything from this because i kind of just rambled on until i got to my inevitable end conclusion of talking about linguistics.

[mallowstep]

visual impairment in the uk in the early 20th century preliminary research

so it's july, disabilities pride month, i'm researching for watlcitf (1910s ireland au), and i figured i should share what i'm looking at.

(the title for this post is so incredibly specific but that's because most research is. my previous post for watlcitf was like, 2k words exclusively going through census data for one census and one county in ireland. i named maybe twenty characters.)

anyway, disclaimers out of the way, tagging @foxstride because i think they'll be interested in this, let's get started.

unlike last time, i have a specific research goal: to determine what jay's life, as a blind person, would be in the uk (specifically, ireland) in the early 20th century (specifcally, 1900-1914), given that he's from a well-off family.

so i have the benefit of being a bit more focused.

unfortunately, i don't have a great backlog of information. i can't just pull up the national archives and start going through census data. that's alright, what else is research for?

i'm going to try to keep to things that are broadly accessible, but if i can't find things on the internet, i will be turning to my university's library resources.

getting my footing

so after checking that the obvious search (various combinations of the keywords form the title) didn't pull up anything particularly useful, i started going after disabilities in general in early 20th century england.

(i know i'm not set in england, but i also know that i can find broad coverage of information about the uk by starting my research in england.)

before i do that, thoough, we did have britannica's history of the blind, something i found fairly unhelpful. i already know braille was around by the 1910s, and then for some reason it tailspins into the us, which is exceptionally unhelpful.

(an interesting story might be sending jay abroad for a better education, but this is not that particular historical au.)

anyway, as per usual, britannica told me a lot of what i already knew and didn't offer any good leads to new information. (i draw the line at buying books for a fanfic. this is a one-shot. i am going to have written more about my research for it than the actual fic. sigh.)

so next up: historical england's a history of disability, which covers a wonderfully long time range, making it good for anyone from the middle ages to the recent past.

i jumped straight to disability in the 19th century, because their 20th century starts covering 1914 and on.

for those following along at home, the 4 headings in the sidebar are clickable links to articles with more information.

i know jay is going to be living at home, so while i did skim through the section on asylums and workhouses, neither of those are applicable here. we're skipping straight to the daily life of disabled people.

since about 50 years pass between the main time period of this article and my time period, i'm not sure how much i can rely on the attitudes section, but jumping off places.

some key quotes:

"These were the ambivalent Victorian attitudes towards disability - a combination of fear, pity, discomfort and an idea of divine judgement."

"Henry Fawcett (1833-1884), blinded as a young man, became Postmaster-General in 1880; he introduced the parcel post and the postal order."

"In 1838 the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read was formed and in 1866 the Worcester College for the Blind ('for the blind sons of gentlemen') became the world's first further education provision for disabled people."

"In 1868 the British and Foreign Blind Association was formed by Dr Thomas Armitage, initially to promote the use of braille. It was to become the Royal National Institute for the Blind."

"In 1894 the first branch of the Guild of the Brave Poor Things (motto: 'Happy in My Lot') was formed as a self-help group for people with physical disabilities. They described themselves as a group to "make life sweet for the blind and crippled folk of all ages"."

so great! that gives me a good number of jumping off places. nothing ideal, but it's a start.

henry fawcett

seems like a good enough start. researching attitudes won't help me entirely, here, mostly in that i'll be better off starting with other things and seeing what i pick up.

well according to wikipedia, he was blinded as an adult while he was already in education.

that's incredibly frustrating.

moving on.

royal national institude for the blind

as i know this exists, i figured it's as good a place to start as any.

sticking with wikipedia, because frankly, sticking with wikipedia is as good a place to start as any, we're on the wikipedia page for royal national institute of blind people

wikipedia's history summary was saddening.

moving on.

rnib's history page is next up on the list.

well, the first key takeaway is the adoptation of a braille magazine ("progress") and braille contractions. i'm not doing an overview of braille here, because these research posts are primarly for my own benefit, and i'm comfortable with my understanding of braille as it stands.

alright, i'm frustratingly limited in what i've learned, but i'm making progress.

the white cane

i took a bit of a change of course. we went back to the drawing board: literally just googling "history of blind people" in vain hope but lo! i actually stumbled upon something.

a list of facts about the white cane lead me to the wikipedia page for the white cane lead me to an archived web link about the history of orientation and mobility and good lord! have i finally started getting somewhere.

this is entirely focused around the us, and i'm not going to type up a summary here as it's quite long.

that said, it's alltogether helpful. the biggest takeaway is that mobility was taught by individual teachers going home to home. exceptionally helpful tidbit, that is.

the thing with historical research is that there are things that feel like reasonable assumptions to make often aren't, so i feel quite happy in that knowledge.

to the specifics: ireland

alright, while i'm mostly unsatisfied with what i've done, i want to move on. i have a feeling that i'm going to need to revisit this. i actually just changed the title to preliminary research to account for this.

sigh.

so we've moved to the history of ncbi, the national council for the blind of ireland.

they were founded in 1931, meaning that my instinct to start in england was correct, but still. their history page confirms that home teaching is the big thing at the start.

summary and moving on

okay so i went to do some research into the history of education in the england (the status of ireland vs england is at the moment Complex, but suffice to say that for most purposes i'm searching for english history) to see if i could find any sort of wrap-up about home tutors vs schools, and.

lo.

i found something fairly useful. it's an elemetary education act for blind and deaf children, which, like, god. so useful.

laws are just. good ways of establishing the general outlook of a time period.

so.

unfortunately.

it does not apply to ireland and scotland, and yes, i do have to do research into the history of education in ireland, but i feel i have hit some kind of nebulous conclusion.

because this is half research notes and half helpful information for others (if anyone else needs this kind of specific information), i'll try to summarize here

schools were possibly able to handle blind students. by "handle" i mostly mean "provide a seat and something resembling education", but that's better than nothing.

most mobility, braille, etc., skills seem to be taught by instructors going home to home

thanks to the relatively low traffic, population density, etc., blind people seem to have a decent amount of mobility

that's all for now. my skills in research are not historical research, so i can't promise that like. i have the best critical thinking skills here. etc. etc.

<3

[mallowstep]

wr2 your 1910s Ireland human AU, I couldn't help but notice Jay got the same name as Bramble, which strikes me as a bit odd since I would assume he would favor his sighted son and thus Lion would be the one to get the Jr. treatment. I know it was based more on matching the first letters of the name but I can't help but wonder if you have something in mind for that little detail. Is Jay perhaps the eldest? Are they even triplets here?

"when all the leaves change in the fall" research (but really just names bc i got tired) masterpost

(quick name context: bramble = joseph, jay = joseph, lion = ian. i'm gonna use their canon names in this ask, but that's the names thing the anon is talking about)

they are not triplets!

i'm still working out a lot of the details for this au lmao.

but no, jay & holly are twins, leafpool's kids, and lion is squirrel and bramble's kid, and he's younger. i'm not 100% sure how much older than him they are.

but yeah my focus is really the heatherlion drama, and i decided that it would be better to have jay & holly as exasperated older siblings than have them all be the same age.

by similar logic, bramble is much chiller. i mean, he's the same character, but like. he's no villain. y'know?

also, i'm not sure when kids are named? again, still doing research and working out the details, but there's a chance jay would be named before his blindness was known. and he does look more like bramble at birth.

(jay and holly both have black/really dark brown hair from crowfeather, similar to bramble. lion has lighter brown hair, i think. or red hair from his mother. again, the details are still being worked out. i have the core idea in place, but i need to figure out a lot.)

anyway! i'm gonna end up writing about jay and holly bc they get the Po3 plot and i think it's interesting.

(ashfur is not involved lmao.)

also! like my real logic here is...sometimes you have to thread the needle of "historical accuracy" and "ease of reading." if this were a modern au, i'd be a lot less conservative with the names. but keeping main character names somewhat similar was pretty crucial.

ian and lion have a really similar sound to me, so i accepted sacrificing the first letter, but considering jay was right there, i couldn't give lion a j name.

it's really more about the ease of confusing with another character, in my mind.

i'm fine with having heathertail's dad be named john even tho crowfeather is also named john bc heathertail's father doesn't matter. do we know who heathertail's parents are? i cannot remember and i do not care they don't matter in this au i just wanted their names as back up.

but naming lion joseph would just be inviting confusion imo.

it's always tricky with this, and i'm ngl, the names are like 50% of why i'm very very very very very cautious to write a human au. (40% is that i like that they're cats and 10% is the amount of research i put in.)

so anyway yeah, the in-universe answer is that it's because jay and holly are older and named first, the out of universe answer is "well, it felt very confusing to do it any other way"

[mallowstep]

when all the leaves change in the fall — research masterpost

so i’m writing a human au set somewhere in the 1910s in ireland (really, around 1905-1914ish), and i just needed to throw all of my links and such into one place.

it’s…not a heatherlion fic, but it’s not not a heatherlion fic

anyway, well, you’ll see. if you want to read this.

census data (introduction)

so i was able to find the census data for 1911 in ireland. those of you who are up to date on your irish history (pun intended) may be aware that in the nineteenth century, england “unionized” with ireland.

i can’t believe i’m saying this on a fucking warrior cats blog, but we’re not doing irish history discourse. it’s a complex issue. i come from a family of irish catholics. draw your own conclusions.

anyway.

there’s a lot of important and relevant history that i’m skipping over because this post is supposed to be for me, and you’re not here to read irish history, but basically: there’s a 1851 census and a 1901 census, and nothing in between.

in short, it’s quite lucky i have the census data for the time i need.

since i was able to find this (and i gotta say, it wasn’t easy, like, usually i’m like, “research is just a thing i do” but it was surprisingly difficult to find), and like most national archives it’s…not to be rude, but the site is ugly.

but here’s the home page for the data, with helpful other links including a tram timetable. (and yes, that is very exciting. if you’ve ever written historical fiction, you know how exciting that is. if not, welcome to my descent.)

i was originally focusing on individual names, but i have to name the whole family, and i have all the data, so let us begin.

irish history (short version)

jk you do need a bit of knowledge to understand my decisions.

if you don’t know, the 1850s is approximately the great potato famine. if you don’t know anything about it: it’s worse than you imagine. extra credits did a good series a while back.

england’s rule over ireland will lead into the troubles, a religious conflict that wasn’t…well, okay! let’s just say, it’s like, a joke that you don’t want to talk about it because people feel strongly about it. hopefully, most of you don’t. i do, but i’m being not biased, okay?

anyway, feature history did a two part series if you want to get caught up.

finally, you may ask, matthew, why the heck are you writing about such a weirdly specific time in history? to which i say: well, i wanted to have a religious conflict between heather and lion’s families, in such a way that it would make sense for them to grow up and realize they couldn’t be friends.

my mother’s family is irish and my dad spent a lot of time in northern ireland when i was a toddler, so naturally, it was just a thing i knew about. to the point where it had an impact over my name. it’s a long story that i’m not telling here.

anyway, when i think religious conflict that spirals into a real, violent conflict, i think: catholics and protestants in ireland. it’s far from the only example, but it’s one i know a lot about.

so why, then, am i starting in the 1910s? well…i need heather and lion to be friends growing up, and there’s a particular crisis leading up to world war one that makes 1914 a good date for this fic to cover.

also, i like this era of historical fashion.

alright, now that we’re all on the same page, i can get into what i actually want to talk about.

lion’s family

so now that i have my census data, i was able to actually look through specific families to name people after. that’s right, i’m…at the point in my life where i researched specific families and counties to name my human au warriors after.

this is why? i never talk about the…i think now 3? human aus in the work. like, i can’t say, “okay, there’s holly in this one” because like, her name might be holly in one and minnie in another, you don’t know!

anyway, i searched by head of family, under the following criteria:

church of england

can read and write

married

english (language)

3 living children

and then paged through every result to get just those with (at least) 2 sons and 1 daughter.

that gave me fourteen families. i saved all of them to a one tab list in case my first choice didn’t work out.

my first choice being the harris family.

i had a lot of good choices (one family with a daughter named violet was particularly tempting), and another with a son william and a daughter annie mary, but i liked the harris family just…in my gut.

that gives us:

bramble: joseph henry

squirrel: henrietta

jay: joseph henry

holly: henrietta lillian

lion: ian roy

which, well, i hope you can see why i chose them, even though this is a lionblaze centric fic and they don’t have an l in there.

great! am i going to backfill past this? not unless i need to, which is the point of me making this well documented research. i’m going to go through some of the other families at the end to find a leafpool name, because we do need her.

heather’s family

next up! we need a family of catholics in the same general area as the harris family.

so, back to the search.

i was able to narrow it down to the same street as lion, which is great.

honestly, the weirdness of this does not escape me. sue me, it’s warriors fanfic, i like researching. i could do this and just stitch together several families, or something, i don’t know. there’s something appealing to me in knowing that i have done my due diligence.

anyway, we’re again searching by head of household, and:

roman catholic

married

irish and english (language)

1 living child

cork (county)

fermoy urban (ded)

king street (townland/street)

and i again went through and kept only families with at least one daughter. or really, a wife, husband, and other female person in the house.

you can view that list here.

the flanagans were the clear winner here, with their singular daughter named hannah. (parents: john and mary.)

breezepelt’s family

and after that we’re still not done because i need crow, night, and breeze.

i’m searching with the same criteria, this time, though, i’m only keeping families with at least one son.

while i’m doing this, shout out to paddy patrick for being a real person.

here’s my full choice list. this time, i want to match crow’s name more than breezepelt’s, because there aren’t a lot (if any) b names. nightcloud would be nice, too.

i had a tough choice to make here, because there was a norah & john, and a cornelius & catherine. (couldn’t i just combine them? you’re missing the point. this is fun, i’m having fun.)

i ended up going with the cotters, because i preferred james for breezepelt.

this gives us

crow: john

night: norah

breeze: james

are you having fun with two johns? i sure am.

also worth pointing out is that people aren’t actually on the same street. i’m not searching with exact match on. they are all still in the same county, and that’s good enough.

extraneous

i have more than enough names to name any character i need, but some character names i may need.

leaf: looking for single, church of england, women. we’ll be using irene may key

fire & sand: just to fill in where leaf left off, thomas james & alice elizabeth, respectively.

cinder: had to remove the church of england restriction to find her, and then i had too many choices (i’m not paging through like 100 people, okay?), so i decided to search under injury “other,” just to narrow down the options. i chose sarah hanan, who also lives with her brother (nice touch).

and at this point i decided i had more than enough names and the ability to hunt down more whenever i needed them if they came up.

other stuff

i was going to do more than names but then i got tired whoops. it’s like, almost 1 am i’ve been doing this for like an hour.

anyway, that’s fine bc i know a lot about the other stuff i was going to talk about and now you know! i’ve done a bunch of families because that’s how much i care about accuracy.

[mallowstep]

i’m glad some of you appreciate the historical au because i’m not lying my true nerd as a very specific time period of history is showing

[mallowstep]

You pronounce ibtwicm like "wind"? I'd always pronounced it like /'ibt.wikəm/. If it sounds like an actual word like stolag, I think I have an easier time remembering (and also that's why watlcitf stumps me so much, I either read it as "Walt Cliff" or "what cliff"). But anyway, the question, what other fics have non-obvious nicknames in your head?

Uhhh I don't Think so?

Whatever a moon has always meant (wamham) is one of my favorites. Usually I just think wham tho.

Make moonshine out of moonlight (mmoom) usually becomes moon

Basically I tend to smoosh them down to one syllable. Exception: I internally refer to mtbnsof by its full title. I think bc there are so many one syllable words that it's just as fast basically.

Waiting for me (wfmisus) is "wif-mus", sounds like Christmas. But its official mateo nickname is sunlight.

I carry your heart (icyhwmiciimh, or just icywm), is usually just "ich" but like the german word.

What else...

I still affectionately call ashes "that au I'm not writing"

Hedera helix is just hedera bc I like saying that. Ilex aquifolium is either Ilex or I A (Like saying the name of each letter)

Most of my fic nicknames (ficnames?) are just one word from the title tho. Or httg which is "hnnng" because that's how I feel when I need to say that title.

But wind, sunlight, weather, sadness, hallelujah, moonshine, etc.

I don't use them as tags bc it usually takes me a long time to refer to a fic enough times for me to know what to call it. It's not always obvious what word it's going to be.

[mallowstep]

@jaceladag

wysydotw is such a nice title, I don’t know why I keep forgetting. Also, I absolutely need to check I’m correctly spelling it, it’s watlcitf right? The one set in Ireland in I forget the exact timeframe?

probably bc i haven't posted it yet lmao...i remember the dotw part because it looks like dotc. i'm not even kididng. it goes wysy feels like wysiwyg type acronyms, and ends in dotc but with a w.

the way i remember things is weird.

also bc whitewater as an au has no tangible distinction from wysydotw other than astatine.

anyway, yes, it's "when all the leaves change in the fall" = "watlcitf", which i pronounce as "wait cliff"

quick acronym rundown

this is far from all of them (i have 58 fics at time of writing), but here are the main ones/the ones i tag the most/the ones i think about the most, until i get the main notion info page operational again. some might not be published.

hitds — here is the deepest secret nobody knows — qpr blue and thrush au where they keep the kits

stolag — saccharine tithes of love and glory — “seer swap au”; an au where seers (medicine cats) are sent to another clan

mtbnsof — “may there be no sadness of farewell” — squirrelstar au that starts at the end of lost stars

ibtiwicm — “i’ll believe the wind is calling me” — tpb au where cinderpaw travels to windclan after her injury

wfmisus — “waiting for me in some unholy sunlight” — shrewpaw lives au

wysydotw — “would you say you depend on the weather” — wanderer (loner) po3 au

icbtyssm — “i’ll come back to you someday soon myself” — med cat dove au inspired by “flightless dove, poison ivy”

hh — hedera helix — my canon compliant ivypool fic series

wcte — “what catches the ear; what catches the eye” — jaypoppy fic feat. a different style

ww — without warning — a night circus au. (this is NOT whitewater, whitewater is tagged with one word. whitewater is the au title for wysydotw.)

hopefully this helps anyone a little lost in the sea of letters

[mallowstep]

@jaceladag

You’re 100% valid, I too love hearing about linguistics

god i think the takeaway here is i'm a huge fucking nerd, but what else is new?

anyway, i'll definitely be continuing to post my research as i go. next up is school systems, to make sure my vision works, and then it'll probably be an as-i-need-it basis.

that and finishing my research on visual impairment.

Consider this ask your free pass to dump some watclif historical nerdery on me. I too have an irrational amount of love for certain periods of history and I know how hard it can be to bottle it all up. <3

kjlfdsj don't fret my irl friends/family already know to be careful what historical dramas they watch with me

mom: i thought harlots had really good costumes

me: did it, mother, or were you just distracted by the pretty colours?

anne with an e is one of my biggest victims because like. they're generally so good. i have nothing but praise 90% of the time. and then they'll give someone a scarf that's clearly plucked out of claire's like come on you're better than this.

historical dress is one of my biggest passions, going right back to me checking out "a history of dress" when it was like. almost as big as i was. god those were the days.

anyway, we're not here to talk about that, because the history of irish independence is Fascinating.

so uhh to summarize briefly bc i'm not in the mood to do sources, england colonizes ireland and then that causes the potato famine and then ireland says "fuck this shit" and they proceed to fight for their independence and well. we all know how that goes.

wait do we? uh, crash course, during brexit, one of the major hold ups for negotiations were centred around northern ireland vs ireland (republic of ireland) because well. there's uh, there's not supposed to be a Hard Border between them because last time there was bad things happened.

(also, the derry girls on netflix is a fun exploration of this time period. no words to accuracy because while i think the troubles are a really interesting time, i don't know much about daily life during them because i'm more into early 20th century stuff, and a great appreciation for like. post-classical stuff.)

right but anyway. so you have a huge suppression of the irish language and culture by the english. the schools forbid the speaking of gaelic which like ✨so cool of you england✨

there's a big gaelic revival tho! right around the time of watlcitf, because pre-wwi there's a huge movement for home rule

anyway you have a lot of stuff going on with ulster irish and immigration politics in the us and! right so a lot of irish emigration is of catholics, which was uh. you know not considered exactly great in the us either.

irish catholics were systematically pushed out of their language, land, and culture by the english. not that that's news, but i feel like? i feel like not a lot of people know that?

like england has colonized Everywhere. and it's always the same story.

i can't begin to express how terrible the great potato famine was, and like. god.

anyway gaelic as a language continuing to exist as a primary language for Anyone is cool and should be valued actually. like. fuck i have a lot of thoughts about this and this is a Warrior Cats Blog so sorry for anyone not expecting to get hit with ramblings on linguistics but.

gaelic is very cool! it's got all sorts of ~funky sound stuff~ going on with how it mutates as a grammatical feature like. love u gaelic so glad the english failed to exterminate you.

in conclusion: i'm not sure if you gained anything from this because i kind of just rambled on until i got to my inevitable end conclusion of talking about linguistics.