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some trans and nonbinary positivity cats for you!!

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No offence, but after watching The Old Guard, I’m done with accepting excuses for not making a gay couple explicitly canon in an action movie

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BTS of Luca Marinelli’s shoot for Style Magazine Italia

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So please don’t save something Waste not, save nothing Lose the halo, don’t need to resist A lick of the lips and a grip on your hips

I heard you fam’~ The cry for more long haired Nicky as well as more crusader times was very strong, so I had to comply.

However, over on discord kind people are throwing mad ideas at me and even though my back said no, my muses said yes so there we go- you get a two for one deal! Nicky and Joe from the crusades to now~ (n they’re still just as dirty n bloody lol)

May I also introduce you to additional goodies: Crusader time outfits inspired by the originaly AC aaaaaand Comic complient height difference! OwÓ~  first time I saw in the comics how much taller Nicky was compared to Joe I may or may not have had a mild seizure. And during that seizure a voice told me that it is now my holy mission to spread the good word n somehow make it happen with the movie actors too. I hope I succeeded :’D

and… you’re welcome? lol  I also put this one up in my shop cause I just really like how it turned out

(ps: click the link- this amazing lady took an already fantastic song n gave it a completely new flavour with her indie version of it. freaking love it!)

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«Ogni volta che ripenso a quel film, scrivo a Luca Marinelli. Luca è stato uno dei regali più belli che mi ha fatto Non essere cattivo.» - Alessandro Borghi (2020)

Been reading interviews where they talk about each other and staring at their photos for hours and... I mean, do they have a particular shipname ??

To see how happy they are to have each other makes me emotional.

#alessandro borghi #luca marinelli #non essere cattivo

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Luca Marinelli + Alessandro Borghi Two of the best rising Italian actors who also love each other very much ❤︎

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the funniest thing abt the old guard is nicky just blurting out weird profound sounding shit all the time and everyone reacting with “dude what the FUCK are you saying”. hes gay and dramatic and cant read a room to save his life and i ADORE him

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The Old Guard: A Joe/Nicky Historical Primer

If you’re like me, you’ve just recently fallen ass-over-teakettle for The Old Guard, a newly released Netflix movie which takes some of my best-beloved fictional tropes (badass ladies! found family!), mashes them together, and queers the traditional action movie in great ways. You’ve got the implied past relationship between Andromache and Quynh, and the textually explicit relationship between Joe and Nicky, the immortal warrior husbands of my heart.

And if you’re like me, you want lots and lots of fic that explores the many centuries that they’ve all spent together! And if you’re a deeply nerdy historian like me, you want that fic to be as authentic as possible. (Unless you want to deliberately just play with past-as-aesthetic, à la A Knight’s Tale, which I’m not going to judge!) I’m not a specialist in the history of the Scythians or of Hồng Bàng-period Vietnam, so I’m not the person to write a primer on Andromache or Quynh’s likely backstories. But I am a historian of the Middle Ages (12th/13th century, mostly), so here are some resources that might prove helpful for you when writing Joe/Nicky fic.

Yusuf and Nicolò Timeline

This timeline is based on movie dialogue, what can be gleaned from Copley’s wall, from the props seen in the end credits, and from additional promo material where that doesn’t contradict the movie canon. (There are conflicting bits of para-canon out there that just can’t be made to coincide re: how many centuries the Immortals have spent together.)

1066: Joe is born Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn al-Kaysani, the son of a merchant trader family from the Maghrib (not sure if the specific region of North Africa is ever specified). First language Arabic?

1069: Nicky is born Nicolò di Genova, a former priest who takes the cross (listen, as a historian of religion I have Notes on this backstory for him but sure, whatever). From his toponymic, he’s almost certainly from Genoa in what is now Italy. This means that his first language was almost certainly a dialect of Ligurian, a sister language of modern standard Italian.

1099: Jerusalem, Nicky and Joe die for the first time

17th century?: England when Andy and Quynh are captured.

1834: Saõ Paolo

1850s: Crimea

1914-18: Western Front

1936: Spain

1940s: Pacific Theatre

1956-59: Cuba

1960s: USA

1967: Oslo

1968: Cuba

1975-79: Cambodia

1992: Nicky attends an English-speaking college

1992-1996?: Sarajevo

Early 2000s?: Democratic Republic of Congo

2019: Turkey, Morocco, South Sudan, France, England

Or, to sum up: two guys from opposing sides meet up during a war in the Middle Ages, kill one another a bunch but realise none of the deaths are sticking, fall in love, and live together happily ever after, and I think that’s beautiful.

This schematic map of Jerusalem is partly visible in the end credits. As you can probably tell, this wasn’t intended for use as map to navigate by, but instead points out some of the most important places in and around Jerusalem from a Christian perspective. National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague, KB, 76 F 5, fol. 1r.

First Encounters

Ask most people to list things they associate with the Middle Ages, and the Crusades will probably make that list. We tend to think that we know what the Crusades were about just because they show up as backdrops a lot in pop culture, generally with armoured knights going up against turbaned foes in dusty settings.

But movies tend to get it wrong a lot of the time. (Know a medieval history professor, particularly one who specialises in the Crusades? Ask them what they think of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Oof.) So too do a lot of popular references to the Crusades, which often frames these wars as “a clash of civilisations” between white Christian Europeans and brown Muslim non-Europeans. This kind of framing is pretty inaccurate and very reductive. It’s not really the product of a direct engagement with the medieval primary sources, but is a product of later centuries of reinterpreting, reimagining, and repurposing the meaning of the Crusades. (Particularly in the 19th century, when white European colonisers wanted to find past precedents to justify their expanding empires.) It’s also something that uses hindsight to make a single thing out of a confusing, sprawling series of conflicts loosely connected by geography and purpose.

In other words, in 1099, Nicolò wouldn’t have thought of himself as “a Crusader on the First Crusade”. He’d have most likely thought of himself as a “pilgrim” or “soldier of Christ” who’d gone on a “journey” or “[sea] crossing” to Jerusalem. He may have thought of Jerusalem or the Holy Land as specific goals to capture (but not all Crusaders did). But that did not necessarily mean he specifically set out to fight against Islam.

In 1099, Yusuf would have thought of what was happening not as the first in a series of conflicts, but rather a continuation of many decades of Frankish aggression against the Dār al-Islam, the Muslim world. (In the eleventh century, western Europe was comparatively speaking a marginal, underdeveloped, rural backwater, and so there was a tendency on the part of Muslims to clump all western Europeans together as pale, hairy “Franks” (the people of Francia, modern France) who were smelly and had an uncouth tendency to shit and fart in public.

The first time they met, Yusuf probably thought of Nicolò as a Frank. Not sure what he thought about his toilet habits, though.)

Various waves of travel associated with the First Crusade, 1096-1099

Why Getting the Backstory Right Matters

The Crusades happened a long time ago, but like so many aspects of the Middle Ages, they still aren’t over. This is because they continue to have political, social, and cultural resonances for people around the world. The Crusades (or certain framings of the history of the Crusades, at least) are used to support a whole spectrum of extremist politics and are actively used to promote violence in the 21st century: whether that’s Anders Behring Breivik writing a whole manifesto calling himself a latter-day Knight Templar before murdering 77 people, or Osama bin Laden condemning contemporary Western policies as a new Crusade, or the Bush administration framing its own actions approvingly as a Crusade. (There’s a depressingly long list of examples I could add here.)

Writing backstory fic for Joe and Nicky that leans into the “clash of civilisations" interpretation of the Crusades obviously isn’t anywhere near comparable to any of the examples I just gave. But I think it makes them less interesting as people, and strips nuance out of their backstory—while also wrongly assuming conflict between different groups as inevitable (particularly when it comes to the Middle East and interactions between peoples in the Middle Ages as less complex, pragmatic, and layered than they are today.

Plus, y'know: it’s wrong. 

The Crusades weren’t a Hollywood movie or a video game. They were a complex, messy, multidimensional set of conflicts that involved real people. The First Crusade wasn’t the inevitable clash of two eternally opposed groups. It was a complex event that was the result of a whole bunch of factors including the popes not getting on with the German emperors, the Normans wanting to conquer even more places, the Byzantines engaged in ongoing conflict with the Seljuk Turks, economic motivations, an entire concept of penitential warfare, and, yes, religious fervour. But it wasn’t “just” about religion in the same way that no war today is about “just” one thing.

Or, to put it another way: you don’t want Joe to describe your understanding of his past as infantile, do you?

(Also, think very, very carefully before you use existing Crusader imagery/memes about Nicky. Even if you’re doing it to be funny or sarcastic, the vast majority of those memes have some pretty nasty contemporary connotations. Nicky would be very unimpressed with you for associating him with the alt-right.)

Overviews by Modern Scholars

Susanna Throop’s The Crusades: An Epitome is a very accessible, short recent introduction to the Crusades and how people have thought of them over the centuries. I strongly recommend it. You can pick up up a paperback copy for cheap, or download the e-book version for free from the publisher’s website.

If you want to read more in-depth about the First Crusade specifically, Jay Rubenstein’s Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse is a good, narrative-driven overview, while Paul Cobb’s The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades looks at things from a medieval Muslim point of view.

Christopher Tyerman’s God’s War: A New History of the Crusades or Thomas Asbridge’s The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land are also decent introduction, but you’ll have to invest a lot of time in reading them. (They’re bricks.)

(If you want to write something where Andy and Quynh appear, I’m sorry to say that for a variety of reasons including a dearth of sources, there’s just not a lot of scholarship out there about women and the Crusades. If you’ve got access to an academic library, there are a handful of journal articles but that’s about it, though someone is working on a biography of Mélisende of Jerusalem right now so keep an eye out for that! If you are also a nerd like me.)

Try to avoid: Steven Runciman (groundbreaking in his day, but now dated and superseded by a lot of later research), Amin Maalouf (a novelist, not a historian, and it shows), anything ever shown on the History Channel, or Bernard Lewis (Joe… Joe would not have liked Bernard Lewis.)

Voices from the Middle Ages

It’s tough to find sources from the Middle Ages that are available freely online in an accessible modern translation. The Internet Medieval Sourcebook will crop up high in any search result, but it’s ancient in internet terms (started in the mid-90s) so there’s a lot of link rot, and it is also largely made up of older, out-of-copyright 19th century translations that often show their age. (Generally speaking, if a translation is old enough to use “Mohammedan” or “Moslem” instead of “Muslim”? Hit the back button.) Some more recent, reliable translations of sources about the Crusades and the Crusader states can be found here, here, and here. The Database of Crusaders to the Holy Land will give you info about the kinds of men and women who went on Crusade 1095-1149.

If you’re willing to hunt out books in print, this bibliography is a fab list of translated texts from medieval and early modern Iberia and North Africa. In particular, Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291 and The First Crusade: “The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres" and Other Source Materials are good collections of materials from a largely western European perspective.

Usama ibn Munqidh’s writings offer an eyewitness account of the Crusades from a Muslim perspective. In his travel narrative, ibn Jubayr recounts the pilgrimage he undertook from Spain to Mecca and Medina, and his other journeys in the twelfth century. It’s not specifically about the Crusades, but it will give you a wonderful insight into the diverse, dynamic Mediterranean world that Joe and Nicky were born into.

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i made a thing

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24 LGBT+ Books by Black Authors

I’m seeing a lot of the same books on my dash, so I spent a few hours researching some lesser-known books. These books fall across a variety of genres and age group. 

24 LGBT+ Book by Black Authors 16 Books by Transgender/Non-Binary Black Authors 27 LGBT+ YA Books by Black Authors

Ways you can help

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Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli as Joe & Nicky in The Old Guard (2020)

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Nile: why are Joe and Nicky sitting with their backs to each other?

Andy: they had an argument.

Nile: then why are they holding hands?

Nile: Joe gets sad when they fight.

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I want to write a post about Nicky calling Joe pet names in arabic like hobbi and hayeti and habibi and rouhi and asel and kalbi and Joe in return calling him tesoro and amore and anima and vita and cuore.

this is it this is the post.

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but are we not going to talk about joe casually wipping up this amazing drawing of nile just by memory ? an actual artist

i can bet you this man has a whole sketchbook dedicated to drawings of nicky sleeping in different places throughout the 1000 of years

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I see y’all’s The Old Guard coffee shop AU’s and i raise you: canonverse coffee house, given that coffee started in the Arab world and spread through Malta and Venice into Europe. 

16th century Joe: habibi lets go to Venice I’ve heard the marble statue scene there is rocking 

16th century Nicky, perpetually tired and used to drinking five cups of قهوة a day to Feel SOmething: hayati no not without coffee 

16th century Joe: it’s fine babe we’ll just take some with us. 

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so, i’ve finished my third rewatch today and this time i really paid attention to the end credits and noticed this in the “section” dedicated to joe and nicky

now, that painting is actually this painting, by Renaissance artist Paolo Finoglio (and it dates back to mid-17th century)

it represents the duel between Tancredi and Clorinda, two characters from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (or Jerusalem delivered in English). long story short, he’s a christian and she’s a muslim, he loves her and she doesn’t, pretty standard epic poem stuff. their duel happens under the walls of Jerusalem— Tancredi kills Clorinda without recognising her, and it’s only when he removes her helmet that he recognises her as his beloved. which, like, already rings several bells like killing your beloved??? during a holy war??? that you’re fighting on opposites sides???

but what’s Even Better is that Torquato Tasso is only one of the many people tackling the subject of the Crusades and the chansons de geste around Charlemagne’s paladins and in fact the Gerusalemme liberata wouldn’t exist without Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, which in turn wouldn’t exist without Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (if you’re wondering, the Furioso is arguably the most famous of the three, at least in my school experience, bcos Boiardo’s too niche and Tasso’s too religious lol)

and those too have a romance between a christian and a muslim— in this case, she’s christian, and her name is Bradamante, and he’s a muslim, and his name is Ruggiero. he’s kept prisoner by his wizard dad Atlante she wants to save him they get separated a whole lot of times he falls in love as well and converts to christianity bcos of course he does [Clorinda does the same as she’s dying and like, these are Renaissance authors in Very Christian Italy so it’s pretty much to be expected], and then her parents want her to settle down but not with Ruggiero so she says “fine i’ll marry whoever can best me in combat” and guess who bests her in combat it’s Ruggiero and then they marry and start the house of Ariosto’s noble patrons bcos he had to somehow make their feeding him worth their while so what better way than to invent ancient and mythical roots for their house i mean he was just continuing what Virgil started

what i mean to say is that the story of a christian warrior and a muslim warrior falling in love during the time of the Crusades while fighting on opposite sides is very much recurrent throughout Renaissance literature and art and i’m not saying that Joe and Nicky waltzed into 15th and 16th and 17th century Italy and had everyone from Boiardo to Ariosto to Tasso take several seats and be like “wow look at that i want what they have i have to find a way to at least work some of that into my poem” while also having given birth to the very archetype itself but that’s exactly what i’m saying

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How do you make people fall in love with you

challenge them to a duel