#western civilization 1 notes

[er-cryptid]

#studyblr #notes #history #history notes #historyblr #world history #world history notes #western civ #western civ notes #western civilization #western civilization notes #western civ 1 #western civilization 1 #western civ 1 notes #western civilization 1 notes #anthropology #anthropology notes

[abiiors]

haunt // bed - pt. 1

a/n: a while ago, i wrote do me a favour after which i said, i would write a matty hate sex fic. well this is it (and perhaps a bit more than anyone asked for), read dmaf again if you want to refresh your memory, or don't. there are 3 parts to this + an epilogue. i also know very little about western weddings, so ignore the inconsistencies lol.

a note about the banner: the photo in it is only meant to describe the dress, not the race, body type, hair colour, etc of the reader <3

minors dni! part 2, part 3

wc: 2.7k

see u in an hour xx

charli’s text flashes on your screen, illuminating a small corner of the dimly lit room. it’s not that late in the day, in fact, it’s quite early—only about 10 am. you’re supposed to be hurrying around the room, checking for any last minutes things you might have forgotten. you won’t be back home until tomorrow after all. yet here you are, surrounded by the things that should have been packed in your bag last night. 

the dress, laid out on your bed, feels like a weapon; red silk slippery enough to slide between your fingers effortlessly. “a wily vixen”, that’s what charli had called you when she'd seen you in it for the first. the thought of that day—bridesmaids dress shopping with four other excited girls—brings a small smile to your face. 

everything laid out here is a weapon really; your four-inch, sharp heels, the delicate and dainty diamond jewellery, the makeup you plan on wearing—blood red lipstick, a perfect shade match for the dress. an expensive crystal bottle of the same perfume you have used for the past six years. 

familiarity breeds contempt. familiarity is also an excellent knife to twist in someone’s gut. because everything here, today, is meant to maul and wound him.

see you in an hour babe, love you. you write back and chuck your phone onto the pillow where it bounces a little before nestling between its creases. you stare at it, maybe your body still yearns for a call that will never come? no more can’t wait to see you up there. no more cheeky selfies in a state of half-undress. just a smooth, black screen.

right then…time to get going. 

charli has been flittering around the room for the last twenty minutes. her white dress fits her like a dream, her makeup is a work of art and her excitement about marrying george is so palpable in the room that at least one person squeals or sighs every five minutes. 

most importantly, the smile on her face is a permanent fixture. and every time you look at it, a warmth spreads through your body. she deserves this—the happiness, the celebration. the happily ever after. no matter how your marriage ended, you won’t stop believing in it for her. 

“so!” charli walks over to you and takes your hand, “how do i look?” she twirls and the dress swirls around her, the tiny crystals catching light and making her shimmer like starlight.

you laugh in response, “like george is about to go into cardiac arrest the minute he sees you!”

the pair of you giggles like teenagers. you can so clearly picture it before it has even happened. the joy and love that will shine on george’s face; his excitement, quiet yet infectious and for a brief moment you’re transported back to your own walk down the aisle. 

small, unsure steps, worried about falling flat on your face in those tall heels, but all of that had evaporated the second you had seen his tear-stained face. and the bright smile that had bloomed a split second later. 

but that’s how long the ache lasts; a brief moment. it’s bad enough that you’re going to have to be civil to him, there’s no need to make it worse with unnecessary nostalgia. 

besides, there’s her to think about. 

she in question is a beautiful, leggy blonde who is at least seven years younger than him. not that you’ve seen either of them today…yet. it’s only because you and charli got drunk one night, four weeks before the wedding, and she felt bad about keeping it from you that matty had a plus one. and that’s how you fell into the rabbit hole of scrolling through this girl’s Instagram profile at two in the morning. 

if you thought you knew his type, you would be dead wrong. physically speaking, she is the exact opposite of you—someone who looks like they belong on a giant billboard in times square, perfect and stunning. then there’s the more questionable aspects of her feed. the flat tummy tea adverts and the paid partnerships with various brands that are always under fire for being unethical.

but that’s the ugly green monster rearing its head. it’s not like you aren’t known for indulging in vanity every once in a while. 

she will be here today, no doubt, clinging onto his arm like a decorative little thing—woah, where did that snide thought come from?! you shake your head to yourself, at least a little embarrassed. he’s not even here yet and he’s already screwing with your head; pushing you back into old jealous and insecure habits. someone clears their throat. 

nora, one of charli’s longtime friends, has her champagne glass raised. a toast. she takes a deep, shaky breath and smiles tearily at the room, about to give her sentimental speech when a resounding knock echoes and cuts her off before she has even begun. 

five heads turn to the locked door and you happen to be standing closest to it. 

‘i’ll get it,’ you tell no one in particular, hand already on the doorknob. the possibility of it hits you way too late. 

it hits you right as his clean-shaven face comes into view. 

it has been ten months. ten months since you gave up the last name healy and changed it back to your maiden name on all your official documents. it had felt like a form of catharsis, getting it done with such urgency back then. but you also remember the days when you would be asked to state your full name and stagger a little at how odd it sounded to no longer have healy in it. to not have a ring around your finger to fidget with. no one to hold you at night. 

but back to now. back to here. 

it’s not hard to see that he has changed a lot in the last ten months. he looks serious; not necessarily sombre—it’s his best friend’s wedding, after all—but mature, more grown up. the grey in his hair, in his beautiful curls, is now much more prominent. the crow's feet around his eyes are more or less the same (and it sends a small pang through you; has he not laughed recently?). his mouth holds—held—a faint smile that’s already slipping, already morphing into a thin line. the exact same face that you woke up to for years now turning into a mask of carefully arranged neutrality.

“charli,” he whispers roughly and then clears his throat, “here to check on charli.” and just like that, he steps past you and into the room where he’s engulfed into a hug by the bride (and slapped on the bum by another bridesmaid but you ignore that for now).

pointedly, you also ignore the sting that comes with being sidestepped so easily. 

you stand by the door, back still to the room, for a second longer than necessary. it doesn’t even register that you’re letting the warm spring air in. is this really how little seeing you impacts him? it must have. because if he’s here then she is also here. 

“tell him i’m fine!” charli’s voice brings you out of your thoughts, making you shut the door softly. “and tell him not to meddle, i’ve got my girls.” she looks at you over his shoulder and throws a wink. your gut tells you it’s nothing but a charity gesture, just trying to gauge the tension between you two. guilt gnaws at you—she shouldn’t have to play peacemaker, she shouldn’t have to worry about two adults behaving themselves. 

“only doing my duty here,” matty raises his hands defensively, “keeping the groom happy.” 

the rest of them tease and taunt him playfully while you take the time to admire—no, simply look at—his suit. it’s nowhere near as nice as the one he wore at your wedding, of course not. but it’s beautifully made, tailored to fit and accentuate his muscles. and there are a lot of those now, that much is evident from the way his sleeves stretch over his biceps. he fills it out nicely, not that he didn’t before, but something about the fabric straining across his arms does funny things to your stomach. funny, you thought that feeling was a thing of the past. then there’s the navy trousers that compliment his backside rather nicely. 

there’s a part of you that is appalled at all these observations you have been making but there’s another part—bored and much more matter-of-fact—that reminds you that there’s nothing under those clothes that you haven’t seen, touched, licked or sucked before. there’s nothing new. he is still the same as he was before, just now with a few extra muscles. 

“go away,” charli’s nudges him gently toward the door. “we’ll be out in fifteen.”

he hugs her just before he leaves, dropping a friendly kiss on her head. after everything you’re glad no one had to pick sides in the divorce. you’ve at least managed to hold the friend group together, even though the same can’t be said about your marriage. 

matty leaves just like he came in, sidestepping you and making sure he’s looking straight ahead. there’s a brief second however—a fraction of one really—when he slows down and breathes in. his adam’s apple bobs roughly and his face struggles to hold the blank expression. 

but it must have just been you projecting right? no one can go through that much in half a second. 

“there you are, darling,” denise walks in on you mid-smoke. “i was looking for you.”

she’s in a beautiful pink dress that brushes her knees and makes her look ten years younger than she is. you blush slightly at having been caught smoking; it’s a recent habit, not one she would be aware of, and you don’t want her to judge you for it. 

“denise,” you try to hide the half-smoked cigarette, “you look beautiful.”

she pointedly looks at your hand and laughs. “my son does enough of that.” then she straightens up, as if bringing matty so casually into this conversation was a mistake. you suppose it was—it does make your heart skip a beat. 

“i just wanted to say hi, darling,” she adds hastily, “and look at you…” her eyes scan you from head to toe, linger on your face for just a second before she smiles again. “simply stunning.”

“thank you.” your voice comes out in a whisper, fighting to get past the lump in your throat. you didn’t think there would ever come a day when she would have to so formally stop by to ‘say hi’. yet here you are, almost a pair of estranged mother and daughter. 

“i don’t…” she starts but shakes her head minutely, “i don’t want to condescend you. but are you okay? with matty bringing that girl, i mean.”

that piques your interest. “that girl?” you stifle a little giggle. “sounds like you don’t like her…”

denise shrugs, leaning against the wall and looking at the bushes in front of her. “she’s okay, i guess.” then she takes a bit to smooth out her dress. “but she’s not you.”

“dearly beloved…” the officiant, charli’s godfather, begins, which you tune out instantly. weddings are lovely and romantic, wedding speeches are dull and boring. besides, like it or not, something else has captured your attention. 

you stand behind the bride, holding the ring she’s supposed to put on george later. and right in front of you stands matty, holding the matching platinum band in his hands. adam and ross stand behind him, smiling and occasionally laughing along with the rest of the guests. you tried it at first too, to only keep your attention on george—who looks very handsome and beams wide the whole time—but it’s impossible when you feel your ex’s piercing stare right on you. 

you would have thought he would stick to the little ignoring act from before. instead, his eyes have lingered on you from the second you walked down the aisle as a part of the processional. tracking your every move, every small step. frankly, it’s insulting. does he think you would ruin the wedding as some sort of diabolical revenge against him? you scoff internally; of course, he would think such self-centred thoughts, it’s just all about him, after all.

you raise an eyebrow at him. what’s your fucking problem?

he smiles back; an arrogant curl of his mouth that turns his face from sweet to insufferable within a matter of seconds. you, his eyes seem to say, you’re my problem. 

well too fucking bad then…

you huff and look away to the side at the guests. it’s only about fifty people from both sides. just family and friends—a lovely kind of intimacy the couple had asked for. you smile at george’s parents who sit in the first row. his mum dabs at her eyes, clearly overwhelmed with emotion. and behind them sit denise and tim. right next to her. 

she’s exactly what she looks like on her instagram page. dainty and beautiful, picture-perfect elegant. her whole face looks like it could be hand-crafted by the gods (or very expensive surgeons according to the snide little voice in your brain) but her eyes are bone dry. 

that’s because she doesn’t belong here, your brain chimes in. not among your friends and your family. 

well, ex-family…

her name doesn’t immediately come to the forefront of your mind. all you know from that drunken night is how charli made you block all her socials at the end of it. as if you were going to go back to them again and again. as if you have no purpose in life other than obsessing over your ex’s new girl. 

she sighs, then looks out the window with a bored expression on her face and you have to focus your attention back to the bride and groom before you do something drastic. not before you catch matty looking at you from the corner of your eye, however. 

not just at you…he’s staring at the plunging neckline of your dress that shows off your cleavage wonderfully. with the big window to your side, it’s so clear to see every little detail of his face—his teeth gnawing on his bottom lip (he’s unaware that he’s doing it. you know that for a fact). his pupils that are blown out wide, making almost the entirety of his eyes look black; dark and hungry. 

your mouth curls into a smirk, arrogant enough to mirror his own. well, this is interesting. 

matty’s mouth presses into a thin line. even now, after you caught him so red-handed, he’s trying to deny it. but you don’t miss his ears turning the telltale shade of pink. 

“...and i promise to love you for the rest of my life.” george’s voice breaks on the last word, the tears flowing freely but he smiles through all of it. in front of you, charli’s shoulders shake. they haven’t even put the rings on each other yet and they’re already emotional. it makes you laugh, and surprising, you feel the tears escaping your eyes.

i promise to love you for the rest of my life. that’s what matty had said too. i promise to dance in the kitchen with you and do all my silly little romantic gestures. i promise to never let you fall. i promise, i promise, i promise…

so many of them unkept, so many of them just pretty words spoken on a perfect day in front of a tearful audience. 

“i do!” charli squeals before the question is even finished, making everyone laugh. a wet chuckle escapes you at her infectious joy. 

“do you, george, take charli to be your lawfully wedded wife?” the officiant asks. 

“i do,” he says patiently and charli sticks her tongue out at him. 

you sincerely hope they stay like this for the rest of their lives—polar opposites who complete each other. not people who are so similar, they don’t know how to exist in the same space anymore. 

matty smiles, first at the couple and then, shockingly, at you. husband and wife he mouths. 

jarringly still, you smile back. 

i would love to hear what you think 🤭

#matthew healy #matty healy #matthew healy x reader #matty healy x reader #matty healy angst #just angst #angst fic #matty healy fanfiction #the 1975 #the 1975 fanfic #george daniel #ross macdonald #adam hann #matty the 1975 #matty healy imagine #matty x reader #angst writing #the 1975 fic #matty x you #the 1975 angst

[awritesthings1]

The Midas Effect (Part 1)

Pairing: Anakin Skywalker x Royal Reader

Summary: After the King dies, the Dark Ones invade the Capital and burn your palace to the ground. You plan an escape, which ultimately fails and seemingly crash lands you back in time. Will the help of a familiar Jedi be able to save you from your fate?

Word Count: 2.5k+

Note: This is a oneshot, but consists of 2 parts.

AO3 link

Next part

-

When the sun begins to ache, and the birds catch the last worm, darkness floods the land. Vermin scurry through sodden trenches, squealing in delight at a moldy pastry found next to an unearthed tree. They come in the night, like shadows chasing you down the hallway. Your father called them the Dark Ones; vicious spirits starved of the violence they craved.

You never imagined they would come like this. As a child, your father reassured you they were nothing more than monsters that lived under your bed. Of course, he wrapped an arm around your trembling shoulders while tears rushed down both cheeks. He laughed a moment later when you told him you had seen a shadow under your bed the other night. You were too small to understand.

Growing up with the epitome of luxury, monsters living under your bed was your biggest worry. With a palace cherished by those before you, and love built into the walls, it was easy to forget how lucky you were. Your father was never King to you like he was to everyone else. He was the man who checked under your bed for monsters, and said yes when your mother said no.

Now, your old life is ashes in a pile of rubble.

Because the monsters didn’t live under your bed, they lived in Imperial bases.

“Would you like something to drink, my Lady?”

A gentle hand rests on your shoulder, pulling you from your thoughts.

“No thank you.” Your nose scrunches at the noise of the bubbling pot. It was too loud. What if the Dark Ones heard and were making their way up the mountain at this moment?

Vee, your maiden, knew you like the back of her hand. When you were born, she tied herself to your wrist for better or for worst. In her own right, she became your mum while your parents were busy doing whatever ruling a country meant. But with that came the inability to lie or hide things. “They won’t find us up here, now come have some tea.”

You pick at the dirt under your nails, considering her words before reluctantly grabbing the ceramic mug being shoved into your hand. The older woman sits next to you by the fireplace. Silence thins over the cackling flame, fanning away the curious insects.

You watch a spider spin a web in the corner of the miniature brick house. Luckily, a rural traditionalist farmer had found you and Vee picking at his crops and offered you some shelter for the next few days. You doubt he would have offered otherwise if you weren’t the next heir to the crown. Most traditionalists preferred to stick to themselves, living off the land the same way ancient civilizations would have.

A thunderous attack on the western front claps across the mountainside, rocking the earth beneath your feet. You are careful to clutch at the stone tiles as your drink spills into the cracks. Dirt gathers in your hair, no doubt sprinkling into the tea boiling over the fire.

That was how most of your nights started now.  

From the corner of your eye, Vee speaks up. “We can’t stay here forever. The war is getting closer.” 

You stiffen at her words, tucking your knees into your chest. “No, I cannot leave my people to fend for themselves… This is their home.” The last word bites into your flesh. You shift away from her embrace, feeling the heat of the fire burn closer to your skin. You accidentally inhale a deep breath of smoke, bursting out into a coughing fit.   

“I know, this was my home too,” Vee begins, soothing her hand down your back. “But I want to leave. My husband is waiting for me on Alderaan, and you are the only person keeping me from him.” When your coughing settles, you look to her and see tears brimming her eyes. She reaches for your hand. “Please, don’t make me stay.” 

The thorns in the palace gardens never stung as much as this. You wish you could wrap a bandage around this just as easily. But this was bigger than you, and who were you to subject her to this when she only stayed out of loyalty to your parents. 

“One more night,” you promise.

Her braid swings from her shoulder as she reaches to wrap a ratty blanket across your lap while simultaneously pulling you into a tight hug. “One more night,” she agrees, “but we leave Caridaan this time.” 

Despite not wanting to admit it, she was right. After spending months living back-to-back in freezing mountainous terrain, biding time was fruitless. Sitting around had only made you pity yourself.  

You nod your head. “First thing tomorrow,” you agree, “arrange a ship to Alderaan.” 

The woman squeals in your ear, embracing you in a tight hug. The rags drag against your skin at the contact, briefly making you flinch. You certainly won’t miss wearing whatever Vee hastily stitched together once your old clothes became unmendable. A warm dip in the refresher wouldn’t hurt either.  

As the woman settles by the fire and huddles her body from the elements, you wait until her chest lulls into the familiar rhythm of sleep. Rising from your spot, you drape the blanket over her shoulders, pulling it to cover the rest of her body. Quietly, you step outside. 

The horizon is buried under countless layers of clouds and midnight shadows. But on the cliffside, a chill of frigid air ghosts past your neck, triggering a flare of goosebumps down your arms. Golden streaks light up the night sky, but it’s not beautiful or mesmerizing. It’s disgusting and twists your stomach in a way worse than hunger. Because each light is a life being snuffed out. Fires, bombs, and weapons lay siege to little villages and peaceful communities, all in efforts to take the Capital. 

To take your throne. 

And while you may not live up to the name of your father, or be anywhere near powerful enough to stop the attack on your planet, you just may know one person who might.

-

Outside your window, a ghastly storm howled across Caridaan. Not that you had noticed, of course, because you were too occupied preparing your hair for bed. Dressed in your silk nightgown, you pinned it back carefully until the movement of your door drew you away.

The gentle steps of your mother rounds the corner. Your shoulders drop at the sight of her. Vee is by her side, nervously picking at her nails.

“Your father couldn’t come to wish you a good night, so I am here.”

You recognise the wavering tone in your mother’s voice when she speaks. Her eyes linger on the floor as she purses her lips, swallowing a shaky breath. The hairs on your arm raise.

Your mother was never an emotional person.  

“What happened?” You question, peaking a glance at Vee who looks equally as disturbed as your mother.

“Nothing, my dear.” Her voice cuts off, supressing a sob.

The tension in the room pulls taut.

Your mother attempts to blink away tears before reaching for a tissue on your vanity. “…It’s just that…” She doesn’t finish her sentence, scrunching the tissue into her palm and bursting into tears. You rush over to hug her without question. She trembles into your arms, gripping the back of your nightgown like a vice. “It’s your father.”

You suck in a breath at her words, the scent of a distinguished candle lingers.  

“He’s dead.”

-

A sudden jerk of the ship throws you headfirst into the wall.

“Maker! Are you hurt?” Vee cries out from her seat in the cockpit while squeezing the armrests to death.

Her voice is lost to a flood of alarms and a grunting engine. You crumble to the ground, clutching your throbbing head with a groan.

“Hold on! We’ve been hit!” Cries the Alderaan pilot, dipping the ship into a nose dive.

Your soul leaves your body as you are flung into the ceiling of the ship faster than you can blink.

“They’ve circled us!”

“Well? Do something!”

Desperately, you clutch at anything to ease your descent when the ship levels out. Fighting through the splitting pain in your head, you cling to a pipe heaving frantically for a break. When the ship levels, you drop down only to spit out the mouthful of blood and hair in your mouth. Without wasting a moment, you scramble to lock yourself into the closest seat.

Explosions continue to shake the ship, spinning your thoughts around.

“M’good” you mumble incoherently to no one in particular.

A series of coughs explode out your lungs, when a gush of freezing air pricks at your skin.

“Emergency hatch is open!” The pilot yells while flipping a few switches and pressing a big red angry button.

Vee’s hand reaches over her armrest to squeeze your hand. Tears are pooling down her cheeks.

Was this how you die?

The moon glares from behind Vee’s head, blinding you momentarily before a dark figure crosses your vision. Biting back the pain, you glare at the silhouette, desperately trying to work out if you were seeing things.

The Alderaan pilot struggles for what only could be seconds before a bright red light slashes at something before disappearing into the dark. You hear the pilot plead before they are carelessly shoved away from the console. You turn to Vee to gauge if you were imagining things, but she appears to be transfixed at the same sight.

“Hold on!” The dark figure commands.

You don’t think to question it as both you and Vee let go of each other’s hands to clutch the armrests.

Within a matter of moments, you feel the ship pull towards the ground. Your heart is thumping loud enough for the cockpit to hear. Fire catches at the descent of the ship, illuminating the cockpit with flaming gold light. Blood rushes to your head, consuming your vision in vivid white. Despite your grip, you begin losing sensation in your fingers. Fighting to stay conscious, a fierce scream rips from your lungs before the weight of your body disappears.

This is death. This has to be death. Your head was no longer in pain, and the feeling in your fingers had returned. You feel cold drops pelt your back as you hunch over on something sodden and gasp for air. You violently cough up your lungs, as your eyes adjust to your surroundings.

A rush of adrenaline laces through your veins.

Pulled straight from the pages of a horror story, the palace you once called home sits quietly up the hill.

Shivers wrack your body. You were dreaming, you had to be. But the violent pelting of rain soaking the ground beneath your knees says otherwise. You unwind your fists from the sodden grass, clutching your muddy clothes in disbelief. Upon closer inspection, you recognise it to be the slip you use to wear to bed. You pull at them, expecting your fingers to slip through the fabric like they would in a dream but the silk brushes against your skin the same way it always did.

Your blood runs cold. This was impossible. The palace burned down in the invasion.

“You know you shouldn’t be out here this late.”

You jolt, twisting around to see the Jedi Knight that guarded you in the months following your father’s death. Rushing to stand, your back is as stiff as a board while you watch him incredulously. Mud squelches under his boots when he moves to wrap his robe around your shoulders. He appears to be unbothered by the rain, instead squeezing your shoulders to give you a gentle nudge towards the palace. Your feet refuse to move.

“Anakin?” The disbelief in your voice is evident. “What’s happening?”

Anakin’s curls are plastered to his face as he squints through the rain to meet your eyes. His mouth hangs slightly agape, blinking at you sceptically for a moment before exhaling with an amused smirk. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t think you would pull something like this just to get my attention, princess, but I’m flattered,” Anakin remarks, stepping over you to sling his Jedi robe across your quivering shoulders.

Your nose fills as tears build in your eyes. Frustration, anger, fear and relief battle for your next words. “I’m scared,” you decide without much thought. The tears and exhaustion slip into your voice as you snuggle into the warmth of his robe.

The smile on the Jedi’s face falls, immediately gathering you up into his arms. Your nose presses into the nape of his already soaked neck, gasping for air between each sob. Anakin doesn’t mind though, letting you shift your weight into his body. The rain continues to pour down, plastering your now translucent nightgown to your skin. Ever the gentleman, his gaze shifts to the sky, blinking away the rain drops falling into his eyes. Your cries sink his heart but he knows that if you two were to stay out here any longer, you would surely catch a cold. Carefully, he maneuvers your arms around his waist then bends to cradle the back of your thighs and carry you through the mud to the palace.

You are too immersed in gripping the back of his shirt and crying into his shoulder to care. Maybe you were dead and this was the afterlife. But what about Vee? And your people? Had you left them all to die?

Your wet feet slap onto the stone tile as Anakin sets you down. “Am I dead?” You hiccup.

Anakin’s head shakes. “No, but I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

You sniff, nodding gently while you take in the appearance of the room connected to the back entrance. It looked the same way you had left it before the fire. The candles were all snuffed out except for the one Anakin had lit and held to see your face through the dark. Even the boots of the servants looked hastily tucked beneath the table.

“Go change into something warm,” Anakin’s spare hand cups your cheek to draw your attention back to him, “I’ll have some hot tea ready.” His thumb wipes away the remaining drops of rain on your skin. You forget to breathe at the touch of his real hand. It’s short-lived though as he retreats through a door into the servants kitchen.

You are left in the dark, partly expecting to wake up any second. For a moment, you think you might be slipping away then realise it is only a draft from a window a servant must have forgotten to close. Reluctantly, you step closer, shutting the window quietly. You consider going to your room to change, but you know you can’t face crossing the threshold and reliving all those memories. So, you settle for one of the spare servant attire draped over a hook before meeting Anakin in the kitchen.

#anakin skywalker x reader #anakin x reader #anakin fanfiction #anakin x you #anakin skywalker #hayden christensen #star wars anakin #sw anakin #star wars #star wars fanfiction #anakin skywalker x you #anakin imagine #clone wars anakin #anakin skywalker imagine

[sgiandubh]

Such unsmiling people

The comment that moved me the most after posting that August 10 diatribe came from a very special blogger, @myrthil23. I promised her a longer, thoughtful answer, so here it is.

I share with her way more than meets the eye and with a bit of deductive skills, you could easily place us very specifically on an European map. To be honest, I was surprised (and then absolutely thrilled, of course) to find someone like her hanging on in here. But this is not the only reason prompting a response - her comment made me think a lot about a couple of relevant things.

For those who loathe foraging for reblogs, here goes:

In the colorful Shipper family, the Eastern Europeans are (supposedly) the unsmiling ones. This is one of the stubborn clichés that informed the Western gaze, especially in Communist times. Unsmiling, foreboding and unfathomable people: I am not smiling, I am laughing while writing it, because if anything, Myrthil, @zeya-zg, a couple of others and I do share a superb ability to use bullshit-o-meters, an unsinkable sense of humor and a hefty dose of sarcasm. All of these are basic, compulsory street smarts if you want to survive, God knows how, a nuclear winter of sorts.

Imagine you grow up in a world with empty supermarket shelves but permanently sold-out concert halls, where trivial details such as cotton swabs, potato chips (crisps, heh), political parties or The Last Tango in Paris are virtually unknown. Imagine your family is either cautiously aligned to some public idiocy they loathe everyday at home, teaching you at the same time to never talk to strangers. Or even worse, a political pariah, for reasons that have everything to do with the way you sip your tea, as Ella Fitzgerald would say. The latter situation (mine) was something very much akin to a civil death. And you just knew you could never be, for imbecile but firm reasons, an architect, a lawyer or even an epidemiologist: jobs way too sensitive to entrust the enemies of the people (and their spawn) with.

What is left for you, then, when the view from your window, in 1982, is something not very different from this photograph:

(side note: these people are staying in line to buy 1 kilogram of sugar for each person, which was the monthly allowance fixed by law in my country, from 1980 to 1989; you could only buy those with Government-issued tickets, not unlike what happened in the UK during WWII or what you can see in series like The Handmaid's Tale)

When all is seemingly lost, you will still have, in no particular order: books. Music (including piano lessons). Sports. Each other (although that was overall more complicated than it seemed). Going to the opera and never taking off your winter coat inside, but enjoying every second of it. Impromptu dinners by candlelight during power outages ("wir machen ein bisschen Stimmung"/let's make a bit of atmosphere, grinned my aunt). Foreign languages (a must). Fits and giggles and jokes galore. And the ability to adapt to just about anything, anywhere.

When change finally reached us, many had the almost surreal opportunity to go West. Some came back, others didn't, simply because they chose to continue elsewhere their pursuit of happiness. And yes, Myrthil is right, that fabled West was always something to behold and measure up to. In my case, it was almost too easy, but then I consider myself really lucky: going to live in Paris, at 18, felt both as homecoming and being left alone (and with unlimited credit) in a candy store.

So, here we are. We may have discovered Sylvia Plath a bit late, but I think we are decently knowledgeable about Chaucer. We sometimes may sound Edwardian and if we do, you should probably blame C.E. Eckersley's Essential English (this is how that life-long affair started, for me). And if anything, we bring another, perhaps even more inquisitive, angle to these strange things we are dealing with daily, in here.

But for the love of Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, don't you ever dare tell us what to think and with whom to talk. Don't call us stupid. Don't call us liars. Historical reasons prompted a durable allergy to sanctimonious speech and yes (I can only speak for myself) I will always, always react. Because we do not deserve the arrogance of people who have no idea of how it really was to grow up somewhere in Eastern Europe during the Eighties. Oh, and something else, lest I forget: being pariahs never bothered us - we can cope.

Other than that, we should go along just fine. :)

PS: @claraisabelcampohermoso, you probably don't know how your gif made me smile. Nadia will always be Nadia: a humble, warm person with a terribly heartbreaking story.

#fandom #Youtube

[bentosandbox]

It’s actually not a ‘top/most butch AK woman’ poll ...kinda

sorry at first i just wanted to archive some of my favourite comments (even though most of these should be edited copypastas) from that poll on weibo; explanation for title at bottom of post because i got carried away as usual

Those who don’t vote for Gladiia, Aegir will spit on them, Laurentina will drag them from Rhodes into the deep sea, their descendants will be abandoned by Skadi, and their soul will suffer from Nervous Impairment. But for those who vote for Gladiia, even if they didn’t pull any Abyssal Hunters, the Second Captain will forgive them and unclog the toilets on Rhodes Island, Fate will offer them an extra favour, and Revelations will always be by their side¹🙏 To those who don’t get how Gladiia is a 1² , farewell!

Vote for Gladiia! (Crawling in the dark)(Screaming)(Twisting)(Creeping in the shadows)(Screeching)(Writhing)(Screaming)(Crawling)(Tumbling)(Scrambling)(Splitting)(Hissing)(Stops moving)(Low roar)(Squirming)(Dividing)(Walking onto shore)(Warping)(Spasming)(Floundering)(Attacking indiscriminately)

Are you looking for【Margaret Nearl】⁉️ The Radiant Knight🌞？Or (this) golden pegasus🐎？Or perhaps Kazimierz’s most radiant King of Kings💜 🎐No matter which one you are searching for💐 💦 Whether you are just a passer-by or a fan of Margaret Nearl💖 She is Terra’s fiercest T³🥰Rhodes Island’s no.1 Top🏅Her strength and Blazing Sun side-by-side 🎀 Today(’s forecast) will be Sunny with a star falling🌟Please give a vote to Margaret Nearl💑 ​！！！

Margaret Nearl, my groom, my husband, my betrothed, my Husbando, the source of all my desires, my yearning, my dreams, my lover whom I will never part away from, to not cast a vote for Margaret Nearl would be kind of sad, for it means you cannot appreciate this kind of combination of hard and soft with eye-catching beauty, those who do not vote for Margaret Nearl will be in trouble 🙏

What does the cat say? Meow; What does the goat say? Baa; What does the cow say? Moo; What does the dog say? Saria you are the no.1 T on Rhodes 😆 Your impartial gaze makes me lose my mind 😆 So handsome I cry until my tears hit the corners of my mouth and turn into the Qiantang River’s tidal bore You are my god and my star lighting up the darkness in my life You let me make sense of the world I turn I jump I dance a tango on the balcony you made me realise that God does exist 😆

Saria is such a gentle and strong father whose love is like a mountain and yet a conventional woman should stand on top of all lesbians Husband without you I really don’t know how I can continue living

Hoshiguma (is) my 184cm T-sis forever!!!! Who would refuse a Lungmen civil servant!!! Firefighting on the Lungmen gay bar frontline⁴!!! Rides motorbikes and goes on joyrides everyday and drinks and grills(BBQ)!!! If she’s not a 1 then who is!!! If Hoshiguma isn’t a 1 then there’s none on the whole of Terra! If Hoshiguma isn’t a 1 the entire Terra is 0!!!! (licking screen emote x7)

The 194cm Hoshiguma from the closed beta test isnt enough to make you dizzy?? 😲😲😲😲😲

TL notes

1. IS3 mechanic references 2. basically 1 = top 0 = bottom (switch is 0.5) sorry the girlyaoi is real

3. Okay so the poll’s ‘judging criteria’ is actually 无敌炫酷 铁T灭火器 which is something like ‘Unrivaled dazzling 铁T Fire Extinguisher’ “What is that word you didn’t translate” I hear you ask

Okay so... I don’t think translating 铁T to just ‘butch’ like that one twitter account did carries the whole meaning. (shout out to that one QRT that was something like ‘wtf y’all definition of butch is ???” YOU’RE RIGHT)

If you look up 铁T it gives you pretty much the same definition that looking up stone butch on wikipedia gives you; “so T is butch then?” WELL... the etymology of T comes from ‘Tomboy’ but ermm basically it’s not a rigid label that can be easily translated to western/globalised terms but more of a fluid identifier used very specifically in chinese spaces, this article is a pretty good read

So anyway that’s why I left the Ts as-is (FWIW when i first saw it i was like is that a no.1 handsomegirlbossmalewifehusbandwomanthattops contest???)

further reading material

4. what’s up with the firefighter/extinguisher???

It’s a reference to a really old clip from a Taiwanese variety show where the host was describing how he went to a gay bar and it caught on fire and the owner fled while the T from the T-bar opposite them picked up an extinguisher and offered help

tl;dr: 1)‘butch’ doesn’t really cover it

2) they’re not using the term in CN literally either (my take on a badly worded transliteration would be something like ‘who would be the ultimate handsome chivalrous top’ if you take off the first few layers of shitposting) that’s why none of them in the poll look like butches lol

And that’s why I voted Hoshiguma even though I don’t think she fucks/is a 1 but i also don’t think saria is a 1 either but that is for another day

#arknights #i should tag all these tl posts under something #bentotexto

[mask131]

The myth of Apollo (4)

As with Dionysos previously (see here), the Dictionnary of Literary Myths of Pierre Brunel offers two different articles about Apollo. Here is the loose (but free !) translation of the second one, « Apollon, the mythical sun ».

APOLLO, THE MYTHICAL SUN

Pontus of Tyard wrote in 1552: “Of all the poetic gods, Apollo is the one that has been the most disguised by the fables and the etymologies of his name.” The mythical figure of Apollo, which has been turned in Western literature as one of the most conventional figures there can be, was considered by ancient mythographers as an extremely complex character, because he was given many names and many properties. Apollo is first and foremost an universal archetype of the Divine, of which literature kept – alternatively as much as indiscriminately – three main names: Apollo(n), Phoebus, Sun. The chronological evolution of the god allows us to isolate and separate the solar god (as a symbol) from his mythological adventures, since the solar Apollo is more present within poetry than within legends.

I/ The names of the Sun

In the Platonic tradition, all the way to the end of the Renaissance, numerous significant and diverse etymologies were invented for Apollo, all reflecting the various functions of the solar god. Within the name Apollo(n), interprets can read as much an idea of destruction as an idea of freeing (from the verb “luô”, to untie) or purification (from the verb “louô”, to clean). This reflects the “drying” effects of the sun, which can be negative or positive – and thus is a survival of the ambiguity of the archaic god.

The interpretations found within the “Cratylus” (see the previous part of “The myth of Apollo”, “The Antique Apollo) allow us to define the four main attributes of the god: medicine, divination (both seen as manifestations of “purification”), music and the art of shooting with a bow. The name Phoebus has been associated by Isidor of Sevilla with the endless youth of the ephebe (e-phoebus), while Cartari (in 1556) linked it to the vital light (phôs, light, bios, vie). For Platon, the name of “Sun” within Ancient Greek meant he who “nuances” the colors (“helios”, the sun in Greek, derived from “aïoleïn”, to nuance) ; and all the ulterior commentators assimilated it with the Latin “Sol”, tied to the adjective “Solus” (the sole, the unique, the lonely), a link which can be found in the neo-Latin languages (in French “soleil” and “seul”, for example). Cartari, who was follow the works of Plotin and Macrobe, linked this precise etymology to the Greek name of Apollo that he translated as “he who is not multiple” (“a” as a privative + “polu”, many) – highlighting again the important idea of unity within the idea of the sun-god.

II/ Main attributes

The mythographers of Renaissance made a very useful synthesis work that offers us in their roughly definitive state the various interpretations of the myth of Apollo, compiling together the commentaries from Antiquity, the interpretations from the Middle-Ages, as well as the point of view of some Oriental civilizations. Within his “Images of the Gods” (1556), Cartari divides the solar myth in a series of elements linked together as part of a long allegorical chain:

1) The sun represents at first, in the diversity and universality of its effects, an archetype of the Divinity. The Assyrians assimilated it to Jupiter as the soul of the world (because through all the other gods, it was always him who was evoked). As such Macrobe noted in his “Saturnals” that all theology always returned to the worship of the sun.

2) As a symbol of eternal youth, as the allegory of the always-new day, of the always-resurrecting light, Apollo is depicted as beardless (except for the Assyrians) and is associated with Dionysos.

3) Because of its central position within the Universe, it is called “heart of the heaven”, by analogy with the vital function of this “pulsing” organ within the human body. The sun is the source of light that communicates their movements to the other astral bodies. It is why Apollo is sitting in the middle of the nine Muses, allegories of the nine celestial sepheres, and with them he embodies the Harmony and the Universe, as a symbol of “symmetry and concordance” (according to Tyard). As such the Music of the Spheres, that R. Lulle will represent through the “Great Lyre of the Universe”, is reflected in Apollon’s association with Music and Poetry (Poetry which was originally simply the art of singing).

4) The rays of the sun are depicted by the arrows of Apollo (just like by those of his sister Diana). They can penetrate the very core of the earth – it is why there is an archaic tradition according to which Apollo is a chthonian or infernal god (and can sometimes be called Hecate, since the primitive gods were without genders).

5) It is due to the purgative and drying effects of his rays that Apollo is also the god of medicine. Mythographers tie this function of the god to the fable of the snake Python killed by Apollo soon after his birth: they assimilated Python to the mythical Flood, as a principal of morbid humidity wrapped around the earth.

6) The attribution of the laurel to Apollo, and the fable of Daphne, are explained by the medicinal virtue of the plant, the always-green plant that never rots, and that the mythographers saw as a symbol of Health. The laurel is also tied to the alchemical symbolism of Humidity, because Daphne was metamorphosed thanks to the intervention of her father, a river-god.

7) Finally, Apollo is the god of divination, because he is the eye of the sky, he sees all and he reveals all secrets (hence why in mythology Apollo was the one who denounced the adulterine love of Venus and Mars). He has the role, within the Universe, of the eye within the human body – he is the “spy of the intellect”, the “censor” or the “rector”, and his eminent position makes him a sign of omnipotence. Cartari described a hieroglyph that designated the sun as a scepter surmounted by an eye – which would identify the mythical sun with the idea of royalty.

Such a synthesis – within which each of the god’s main attributes were defined and linked together – as the interpretative model which was used as a basis for all ulterior poetry. For example take Du Bartas: in his “Sepmaine ou Création du Monde », in 1578, the sun, which is not a god anymore but a mere « ornament of the sky », is always designated by metonymy through a series of names that resume all the attributes of the solar god in his cosmic function: Phoebus with gold hair, the blond Titan, the Torch of Laton, the Archer, Apollo giver-of-souls, the Fountain of Heat, the Life of the Universe, Giver-of-honors, King of the Sky, Eye of the Day, Censor, Torch of Delph, Torch of Delos, he who “makes the face of the world young again”. In a parallel way, from Cartari’s work, the different aspects of the character will be slowly simplified until he simply becomes the god of Poetry, crowned with both sunrays and laurel leaves, sitting among the Muses on top of mount Parnassus, always holding his lyre (which can sometimes represent him in his entirety), distilling the poetic inspiration under the shape of the Hippocrene spring (created from Pegasus’ hoof), a spring that Ronsard will describe as “the fountain of verses”.

III/ The philosophical Sun

Symbol of the Philosophical Gold in the alchemical tradition, uniting the fundamental opposites that are the fire and the water, the dry and the wet ; or a symbol of the divine creative soul within Orphism and Pythagorism, the go of Poetry s the very image of all creation within the Neoplatonic literature, in which Apollo with his lyre is always associated to his “mortal double”, Orpheus. Within the Renaissance, Apollo was the god who inspired the “Poetic Fury”, without which the lyrical production cannot be: it is under his influence that (according to Ronsard’s Hymn to Autumn) the spirit can “penetrate the secret of the heavens” and the soul “rise among the gods”. It is under the sign of Apollo that the soul finds back its celestial origin through the effects of the divine enthusiasm (from the Greek “theos”, god): this is the Orphic origin of poetry. For Ronsard and the poets of La Pléiade, the “inspired Poet” is both the “prophet” and the “priest” of Apollo (hence why in the 16th century it was believed that the Sibyls and the oracles were exceptional poets).

This Neoplatonic interpretation of the myth, which confuses the two main attributes of the god, prediction and lyrical art, this same tradition that shaped the image of Apollo we have today, relies on the commentary by Marsile Ficin of “The Symposium”, which divines four different divine “furies”, associated with four patron-deities. First is the highest, the poetic fury, which is caused by the Muses ; second is the “mystery fury” or the sacerdotal fury, which proceeds from Dionysos  ; third is the prophetic fury, given by Apollo ; fourth is love, and it originates from Venus. Despite the distinction marked within this text between the Muses and Apollo, poets usually invoke indifferently one or the other – the god understood as the “universal principle” and the Muses as allegories that represent the individual repartitions of the poetic virtues. It should be noted that within the Neoplatonic context, Apollo is not opposed to Dionysos – rather their functions are complementary. The god of divination, who is also the god of the penetration of divine secrets, forms a couple with the god who initiates humans to the divine Mysteries ; it is to the point that they are called “brothers” by Pontus of Tyard, who explains the epithet of “Delphic Apollo” by a fake etymology “adelphos”, “brother”, for the “fraternity considered between Denys (Dionysos) and Apollo”.

For the Neoplatonicians, if Apollo is one of the poles of the duality of the world, he is rather opposed as the One, as the universal principle, to Diana, who embodies Nature – that is to say the Multiple. According to the Platonic idea taken back by Giordano Bruno in “Eroici Furori” (1585), the Nature (Diane) is the mirror of the God (Apollo). Apollo is the absolute light whose essence must be hidden, who blinds and kills those that see it directly, and thus he can only be perceived through his reflection. A variation of this idea, developed by Léon Hébreu in 1535) made Apollo the “simulacrum of the divine Intellect”, while the Moon was the “simulacrum of the soul of the World” and acted as an intermediary between the divine plane (the intelligible world) and the corporal plane (the sensible world). This conception has been very influential in term of literary posterity, because it means in a very explicit way, that the sight is a sense that must be valorized: the sensitive vision, the one of the eye, is to be identified with the intellectual vision, the one that allows thanks to the spirituality of the light to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly and the good from the evil. The supremacy of the eye above all other senses will be abundantly developed, in poetic and metaphorical ways, from the 16th to the 17th centuries. Even within the anatomical descriptions of the baroque poets, the eye appears as an intermediary between the sensible and intelligible world, as a double of the Sun, whose light shines upon the minds as much as upon the bodies.

#the myth of apollo #apollo #phoebus #greek mythology #poetry #renaissance #greek gods #sun #symbols #symbolism of the sun #solar myth #roman mythology #diana #dionysos #symbolism

[anarchoherbalism]

Some things that drive me up the goddamn wall:

Western medicine is not that old. CHARITABLY its like, 400ish years old, but all the most popular ways of defining western medicine (e.g. based on the modern scientific study) really only apply to information-generating and medicine-distribution practices that started in the late 1800s and were codified in THE TWENTIES. Sure, no ideas come out of nowhere and modern western medicine absolutely has a lineage and if you want you could make a good argument for tracing that lineage back to say, Galen. (Side note: american Doctors love to claim Galen when it makes them sound Storied and Dramatic but foist him off on us stupid herbalists as soon as anything controversial by modern standards comes up). But what's a lot more important to think about is that prior to the past hundred years or so, the diversity of actively-practiced, available medical traditions that existed in "the west" was so much greater than it is today, and if you go back another hundred or more years it's bigger and bigger. For most of human history in most parts of the world medicine has been a great, fluid cultural field (like cuisine! or religion! in fact these three subjects overlap quite a bit!!) that becomes forcibly homogenized and codified as part of nation-building. That has happened and is still happening here in the west as empire seeks to homogenize culture, through, yknow, genocide; and minority medical philosophies are deligitimized, criminalized, and culturally persecuted. Indigenous and folk traditions survive in small bubbles of people desperately trying to keep them alive.

Following from #1, the majority of people on the "left" to postleft & whatever recognize, at least nominally, that this is Bad. However, what most white people seem to be doing with the idea that Cultural Extermination Is Bad is grant some kind of nebulous exception status to their nebulous idea of "Indigenous medicine" while otherwise paying lip service to the western medical progress narrative: What "we" do now is so much better than what "we" "used to" do. First of all, "we" here is an incoherent concept unless you want to buy into the idea that dominant western culture (or civilization more broadly) is an inevitable evolution that all cultures will come to, which is uhm. Social darwinism. Second of all, "used to" is just a straight up lie in most cases unless it's very narrowly referring to any number of practices that were codified in like, 1930 by the still-budding medical establishment and have since been discarded by the extant medical establishment. Diverse, Indigenous & folk medical traditions are still fucking around and alive and being used, adapted and added to. Some are holding on by a thread and plenty are very closed practices now out of defensiveness, while others struggle to be known more widely because of medical licensure laws that claim to be about "safety" but were always about stamping out minority medical traditions. What a lot of motherfuckers miss is that when the western medical establishment tells the story about how everything is so much better now and we know the right way to be, they are telling the same story I told under heading one. The nonviolent story of progress that "we" just "discovered" "new ideas" is conveniently shuffling around the genocide and criminalization that are STILL actively trying to stamp out the """"old"""" ideas.

Does all of this mean that we should just willy nilly accept/use/treat as valid every single thought anyone has ever had about medicine? Fuck no! People have bad ideas sometimes! Medical traditions are LIVING traditions for good reasons. It just means that I wish people would sit down and THINK for a second before making a claim about non-western or historical medical traditions, ask themselves "is my only source for this claim the current western medical establishment?", and if "yes", spend any amount of time trying to find an alternate perspective. If you can't find any source that isn't affiliated with genocide and forced cultural assimilation on the practice you want to talk shit about, ask yourself "why isn't there a proponent of this practice around to defend it?" and like, go from there.

I truly do not care what medical philosophy any given individual person feels most comfortable using for themselves. Your reasons for preferring western medicine might very well be rooted in shit i disagree with/find abhorrent, I might think you could be happier (or more likely to survive climate collapse) if you were at all open to any strategy other than the one that's entirely dependent on empire and extraction, but I am frankly too tired and too busy to be remotely invested in what people I don't know are doing with their bodies. What frustrates me is how little critical thinking is being done when it comes to medicine, how comfortable everyone seems to be with incoherent cognitive dissonance when it comes to criticizing specific instances of oppression/nationalism/racism/etc in western medicine but still buy the overall narrative in a way that renders those critiques superficial, and how successful the project of western medical nationalism has been at claiming a monopoly on the story.

#theory #these thoughts are part of a big essay about disability and “alternative medicine” but that's probably going to rot in my drafts and i felt #like these parts are important. so.

[paganimagevault]

Cyrus the Great with a Hemhem crown from Pasagardae 559-530 BCE.

"The four-winged guardian figure representing Cyrus the Great or a four-winged Cherub tutelary deity. Bas-relief found on a doorway pillar at Pasargadae on top of which was once inscribed in three languages the sentence "I am Cyrus the king, an Achaemenian." Scholars who doubt that the relief depicts Cyrus note that the same inscription is written on other palaces in the complex."

"Cyrus II of Persia (c. 600–530 BC; Old Persian: 𐎤𐎢𐎽𐎢𐏁 Kūruš), commonly known as Cyrus the Great and also called Cyrus the Elder by the Greeks, was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, the first Persian empire. Under his rule, the empire embraced all of the previous civilized states of the ancient Near East, expanded vastly and eventually conquered most of Western Asia and much of Central Asia. Spanning from the Mediterranean Sea and Hellespont in the west to the Indus River in the east, the empire created by Cyrus was the largest the world had yet seen. At its maximum extent under his successors, the Achaemenid Empire stretched from parts of the Balkans (Eastern Bulgaria–Paeonia and Thrace–Macedonia) and Southeast Europe proper in the west to the Indus Valley in the east.

The reign of Cyrus lasted about thirty years; his empire took root with his conquest of the Median Empire followed by the Lydian Empire and eventually the Neo-Babylonian Empire. He also led an expedition into Central Asia, which resulted in major campaigns that were described as having brought "into subjection every nation without exception". Cyrus did not venture into Egypt, and was alleged to have died in battle while fighting the Massagetae, an ancient Eastern Iranian nomadic tribal confederation, along the Syr Darya in December 530 BC. However, Xenophon claimed that Cyrus did not die in battle and returned to the Achaemenid ceremonial capital of Persepolis again. He was succeeded by his son, Cambyses II, who managed to conquer Egypt, Nubia and Cyrenaica during his short rule.

Cyrus is well-known for having respected the customs and religions of the lands he conquered. He was important in developing the system of a central administration at Pasargadae governing satraps in the empire's border regions, which worked very effectively and profitably for both rulers and subjects. The Edict of Restoration, a proclamation attested by a cylinder seal in which Cyrus authorized and encouraged the return of the Israelites to the Land of Israel following his conquest of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, is described in the Bible and likewise left a lasting legacy on the Jewish religion due to his role in ending the Babylonian captivity and facilitating the Jewish return to Zion. According to Isaiah 45:1 of the Hebrew Bible, God anointed Cyrus for this task, even referring to him as a Messiah (lit. 'anointed one'); Cyrus is the only non-Jewish figure in the Bible to be revered in this capacity."

-taken from wikipedia

#persian history #cyrus #persia #iranian #antiquity #antiquities #statue #sculpture #art #history #ancient history #pagan #paganism

[nedjsmlfavs]

Marriage in France: A Comprehensive Guide for Fanfic Writers

Before we begin, please note, I am not French. I’m merely a writer who does their best to be accurate and always invites (kind!) corrections when I get something wrong. That being said, I was able to get some input on this from those who have lived in France and all of my sources are French Government Websites and articles/books written by people who purportedly live/d in France, so this is coming from seemingly legitimate sources. Do with that what you will and believe French people over this guide. I’m only making this post so that I can link to it any time I write a wedding in one of my fics since I like to give the cultural context I'm working from, but I realized my notes were getting WAY too long for my usual author's note.

Part 1: The Engagement and the Fiançailles

Yes, French people get engaged, but they have traditions surrounding the event that differ greatly from other western countries.

The first thing that differs is the engagement ring. While these are a thing in France, it’s not traditional to wear them as soon as you get engaged. Instead, most people wait until their fiançailles (engagement party) to wear the ring in public. A traditional part of the fiançailles is the presentation of the ring from the proposer to the proposee.

While the ring presentation is part of the fiançailles, the fiançailles is NOT the engagement. The engagement is going to take the standard western form of being something meaningful to the couple and can be private or public, ostentatious or simple.

No matter the style of the engagement, it’s unusual to announce anything about it on social media. Instead, tradition dictates that the couple tells their families first and then they go around telling their friends. This all culminates in the aforementioned fiançailles, a big dinner (or even weekend away) where both families are invited to meet and celebrate the couple. Do note that it appears that the fiançailles is traditionally family only. I didn’t see anything that mentioned friends being invited, though one site did mention having two fiançailles, one for family and one for friends. Once the family fiançailles has been held, the engagement is officially public and the ring can start being worn in public.

As for what that means about rings being part of the engagement, well, I couldn’t find a clear answer on that one, which probably means that it varies from couple to couple. There were definitely mentions of the ring being chosen post engagement and that makes sense since you don’t wear it right away. Another thing that varied from source to source was the tradition of asking the parents for the bride’s hand. This was a thing in France for sure and appears to still be considered more ‘traditional’, but it also seems to be less common these days as is true for most western countries.

Sources for this part

Source 1 Source 2 Source 3 Source 4 Source 5

Part 2: Bachelor and Bachelorette Parties

Yes, these are things. I didn’t research them much, but here’s two sources which talk about them:

Source 1 Source 2

The more important thing to note is that there are no bridesmaids and groomsmen in France. Instead, the couple just has “witnesses” and their gender doesn’t matter. Legally, you need two to four of these guys for you civil ceremony, but it appears that you can have even more at your celebratory ceremony. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, let me explain.

Part 3: The Civil Ceremony

In France, it’s standard practice to have two weddings. The first one is a legal ceremony done at city hall or whatever the local equivalent is. The second one is a traditional western wedding and can be religious or secular. The reason for this double wedding tradition is that, in France, religious leaders and such cannot legally marry you. Legal marriage is solely a civil affair.

While the French seem to view both ceremonies as culturally important, the civil one is the only one that’s required from a legal standpoint and it requires a lot of paperwork. It’s also something that you can’t do just anywhere. You have to get married at the town hall where you live and there’s a whole bunch of requirements for proving residence.

A quick note on Paris: Paris’ municipal system is complex with each arrondissement having its own city hall that’s there to serve those living in that arrondissement. In other words, you and/or your spouse have to live in the arrondissement where you’re getting legally married.

The civil ceremony is conducted by the mayor or their appointee and is usually only attended by the couple’s immediate family and their witnesses. As best I can tell, it’s common for those in attendance to wear something nice, but not necessarily the same thing that they’ll wear to the second ceremony even if the second ceremony is that day. Brides in particular often have two dresses: the fancy one for the second ceremony and something more casual for the civil ceremony.

As for what the civil ceremony looks like, here’s the guide from the Paris government’s website

On the day of the celebration, you and your guests must be present at the time indicated so as not to disrupt the organization of all the ceremonies. The wedding ceremony is public.

You, as well as your witnesses, must have an identity document. In case of difficulty in understanding the French language, the presence of an interpreter is mandatory.

The celebration of the marriage must be done by an officer of civil status, at the borough town hall, in the presence of at least 2 witnesses (4 witnesses maximum).

The ceremony lasts approximately 20 minutes.

The civil registrar reads several articles of the civil code relating to the rights and duties of the spouses (in the civil code, articles 212 and 213 , the first paragraph of articles 214 and 215 and article 371-1 ).

The civil registrar asks you about the existence or not of a marriage contract and verifies your wish to marry.

The marriage certificate is signed by you, your witnesses and the registrar.

The family book, in which will be given the civil status information concerning you, will be given to you at the end of the ceremony. The information relating to your joint children will also be included in your family record book (the family record book can be provided later if the children are registered in the family record book if they were born in a municipality other than Paris).

That “family book” or “livret de famille” is a really, really important legal document in France. Here’s a quick overview of what all it’s used for.

Sources for this section

Source 1 Source2 Source3

Part 4: Party Time

Once you’ve been legally married, it’s time to have your big wedding with all of your friends and family. While this second ceremony can technically take place any time after the civil one, it’s apparently standard practice to have it either right after the civil one or on the following day. This will limit where you can have your party since you can only get legally married in the place where you live. It also means coordinating your appointment for you civil ceremony with your plans for the big wedding. So it’s not surprising that some couples ignore the tradition and do the party months later. That party can be religious or secular and follows the standard format of western weddings (ceremony of some sort followed by a reception).

And now a bunch of random facts about French weddings that I don’t want to have to look up again:

Brides do wear white gowns and walk down the aisle, but apparently fancy gowns are not really a thing according to multiple sites and a quick glance through the collections of French wedding dress designers. French wedding dresses don’t have beading or heavy fabric. They tend to be pretty light and airy and with minimal decoration. Which made it annoying to figure out what would make Marinette’s dress special when I was writing that, so I went with some ideas focused around lace. Subtle embroidery would likely also fit.

Grooms usually wear three-piece suits.

The witnesses (bridesmaid and groomsmen equivalents) and family of the couple wear whatever they want so long as it’s formal enough. The idea of coordinated outfits bought specifically for the wedding is considered weird, though it apparently isn’t odd to have a general theme to make sure that the outfits don’t clash.

The French cry of congratulations is “Vive les Jeunes Maries!” or “long live the young newlyweds” no matter the age of the couple.

It’s apparently normal to have a time where appetizers and alcohol are served (the vin d’honneur) that lots of people are invited to and then a dinner which a smaller group is invited to. This is not rude in French culture and is done to keep the cost down.

The dinner for the reception is long and consist of lots of speeches and fun times. Embarrassing videos and pictures are quite normal as are games between courses. Sometimes guests even put on performances like songs or they have live entertainment. That doesn’t mean that dancing isn’t a thing, it just tends to not start until quite late. As in, around midnight and it continues on for hours. That first dance is usually started by the bride and her father, who then hands her off to the groom midway to finish the dance.

It’s not usual for French couples to have registries. Instead, people just give cash.

Originally had a note here that brunch for the guests the next day is standard, but a commenter informed me that they've never seen that, so I'm guessing that was more of a "normal for the people who wrote my articles" than a general French tradition.

Sources for this Section

Source 1 Source 2 Source 3 Source 4 Source 5

If I got any of that wrong, please feel free to let me know! I did all of this research so that I can at least try to be accurate while writing a French couple living in France which means that I want this to be accurate.

#writing research #resources #ml leak free

[er-cryptid]

Achilles and Homeric Values

-- Homer’s work emphasized the protection of one’s pride and one’s family and property

-- Achilles was the fiercest warrior on the Greek side

-- he stopped fighting because his pride was wounded, as a king refused to give him his war prize

-- Homer wrote Odysseus as pure, Hector as good, but Achilles was the most human

-- Achilles’ lover Patroclus sees the Greeks are demoralized

-- Patroclus puts on Achilles’ armor and leads the Greeks

-- Patroclus dies at Hector’s hand

-- this enraged Achilles      -- his lover killed      -- Trojans thought they could kill him      -- his honor and family assaulted

-- Achilles fights again

-- he calls out Hector

-- Hector dies

-- Achilles desecrates his body

#history #historyblr #history notes #world history #world history notes #western civ #western civ notes #western civilization #western civilization notes #western civ 1 #western civilization 1 #western civ 1 notes #western civilization 1 notes #studyblr #achilles #patroclus #hector #prince hector #homeric values #homer #iliad #the iliad

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

Why people in Dracula speak German

So, since the first chapters of Dracula are the talk of the town right now, it is a good time to talk about Habsburg government and linguistic policy. There is a lot of passing detail that hints at the diversity of the empire that are worth unpacking in the first two chapters. And there is a good historical reason why German is a useful language for Jonathan.

There is a read more because this gets a little long.

For those not familiar with this region, it may not be immediately obvious that this is the Habsburg (or perhaps more familiarly the Austro-Hungarian) Empire. Jonathan doesn’t explicitly mention it. And there isn’t really a need to, since a contemporary reader would have recognized it as such. Romania existed as a state starting in the 1860s, but did not have its modern boundaries. Transylvania remained a part of Hungarian half of the Habsburg empire until World War 1, when the Treaty of Trianon would greatly expand Romania’s borders to include Transylvania. 

The location markers that we are given tell us that this story is taking place right at the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian empire. 

This area had been part of the empire since the Austrians and Hungarians drove the Ottoman empire out of this part of Central Europe. Which the Count alludes to in this description, although clearly from a Romanian perspective:

It may be a bit less clear to a modern reader that everyone Jonathan encounters is living under Habsburg rule. The empire isn’t very visibly present because authority was often devolved to local governors on these peripheries.

But even without all that information, it is evident that he’s traveling through the Habsburg empire from center to periphery. He starts his travels in Vienna and travels through Hungary (he mentions seeing Budapest out of the train windows), and then into Transylvania. It provides a frame for Jonathan’s own biases as a Londoner. He sees Vienna and Budapest as familiar (and “Western”) because they are imperial cities, and the countryside as unfamiliar and “Eastern.”

The way Jonathan refers to places is also a clue that he’s orienting himself based on imperial maps - which would have been in German. He calls the city Klausenberg as opposed to Cluj-Napoca (or Kolozsvár in Hungarian) and calls the town closest to the castle Bistritz (instead of Bistrița or Beszterce.) It is very evident that he’s using German imperial records to plan this trip.

The multinational nature of the empire appears in passing as he comments on the Czechs, Slovaks and Slovenes as he passes them. Interestingly, he doesn’t feel the need to point out that the townspeople are either Rumanian (Romanian) or Ruthenian (Ukrainian). The geographical placement would have made where he is in Transylvania a cultural crossroads between Magyars (Hungarians), Ruthenians and Rumanians. There is no question that the Count is Romanian, since he speaks of the Magyars as invaders. The slip into surname first conventions in the most recent part is a bit more ambiguous since that naming convention appears in both Hungarian and Romanian (though in Romanian it was reformed out in the later 19th century.)

So, why is Jonathan able to get along fairly well in German? Because it is the imperial language. While there was no top down imposition of German in the Habsburg empire like Russian in the Russian empire, it was a useful language to have some grasp of. It was used for government positions, so many educated people learned it to become civil servants. People like innkeepers, who Jonathan notes having enough of a grasp of the language to interact with him, would learn it because travelers might come from any part of the empire and it was a useful lingua franca. The Count speaks it perfectly presumably because he uses it to interact with the imperial government when he does come into contact with them and to conduct legal business.

Whether Jonathan would have had even more success communicating in Hungarian is an interesting hypothetical, since this is the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But, it is also early enough after the Compromise that elevated Hungary that widespread Magyarization hadn’t really taken hold. Though Hungarian is a markedly harder language. Jonathan barely knows German; he definitely would not be able to function in Hungarian.

#dracula #dracula daily #some historical information about the setting for those interested #hello I am a Habsburg historian who finds these things interesting

[dailyanarchistposts]

Footnotes - Part 1

I don't want to post the whole book without the footnotes; but it seems obnoxious to put the footnotes in a bunch of tags, so that's why I'm only tagging this with the book title.

[1] Sam Mbah and I.E. Igariway write that before colonial contact nearly all traditional African societies were “anarchies,” and they make a strong argument to this effect. The same could also be said of other continents. But as the author does not come from any of these societies, and since Western culture traditionally believes it has the right to represent other societies in self-serving ways, it is best to avoid such broad characterizations, while still endeavoring to learn from these examples.

[2] “The Really Really Free Market: Instituting the Gift Economy,” Rolling Thunder, No. 4 Spring 2007, p. 34.

[3] Robert K. Dentan, The Semai: A Nonviolent People of Malaya. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979, p. 48.

[4] Christopher Boehm, “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No. 3, June 1993.

[5] Amy Goodman, “Louisiana Official: Federal Gov’t Abandoned New Orleans,” Democracy Now, September 7, 2005. Fox News, CNN, and The New York Times all falsely reported murders and roving gangs of rapists in the Superdome, where refugees gathered during the storm. (Aaron Kinney, “Hurricane Horror Stories,” Salon.com)

[6] Jesse Walker (“Nightmare in New Orleans: Do disasters destroy social cooperation?” Reason Online, September 7, 2005) cites the studies of sociologist E.L. Quarantelli, who has found that “After the cataclysm, social bonds will strengthen, volunteerism will explode, violence will be rare...”

[7] Roger M. Keesing, Andrew J. Strathern, Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective, 3rd Edition, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998, p.83.

[8] Judith Van Allen “Sitting On a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women.” Canadian Journal of African Studies. Vol. ii, 1972, pp. 211–219.

[9] Johan M.G. van der Dennen, “Ritualized ‘Primitive’ Warfare and Rituals in War: Phenocopy, Homology, or...?” rechten.eldoc.ub.rug.nl Among other examples, van der Dennen cites the New Guinea highlanders, among whom warring bands would face off, yell insults, and shoot arrows that did not have feathers, and thus could not be aimed, while another band on the sidelines would yell that it was wrong for brothers to fight, and attempt to calm the situation before blood was shed. The original source for this account is Rappaport, R.A. (1968), Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven: Yale University Press.

[10] “The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker,” The Catholic Worker, May 2008.

[11] Graham Kemp and Douglas P. Fry (eds.), Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies around the World, New York: Routledge, 2004. Semai murder rate, p. 191, other murder rates p. 149. The low Norwegian murder rate shows that industrial societies can also be peaceful. It should be noted that Norway has one of the lowest wealth gaps of any capitalist country, and also a low reliance on police and prisons. The majority of civil disputes and many criminal cases in Norway are settled through mediation (p. 163).

[12] Robert K. Dentan, The Semai: A Nonviolent People of Malaya. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979, p. 59.

[13] Dmitri M. Bondarenko and Andrey V. Korotayev, Civilizational Models of Politogenesis, Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2000.

[14] Harold Barclay, People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy, London: Kahn and Averill, 1982, p. 98.

[15] Christopher Boehm, “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No. 3, June 1993.

[16] The victories of the movement and the failure of the IMF and World Bank are argued by David Graeber in “The Shock of Victory,” Rolling Thunder no. 5, Spring 2008.

[17] The paragraphs regarding the Hill People and Southeast Asia are based on James C. Scott, “Civilizations Can’t Climb Hills: A Political History of Statelessness in Southeast Asia,” lecture at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, February 2, 2005.

[18] Alan MacSimoin, “The Korean Anarchist Movement,” a talk in Dublin, September 1991. MacSimoin references Ha Ki-Rak, A History of the Korean Anarchist Movement, 1986.

[19] Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, New York: Free Life Editions, 1974, p. 73.

[20] Ditto, p. 73. The statistic on Graus comes from p. 140.

[21] Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press, 1975, pp. 206–207.

[22] Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, New York: Free Life Editions, 1974, p. 113.

[23] The criticisms of the this and the following paragraphs are based on an interview with Marcello, “Criticisms of the MST,” February 17, 2009, Barcelona.

[24] Wikipedia, “Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca,” [viewed November 6, 2006]

[25] Diana Denham and C.A.S.A. Collective (eds.), Teaching Rebellion: Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca, Oakland: PM Press, 2008, interview with Marcos.

[26] Ditto, interview with Adán.

[27] Melford E. Spiro, Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia, New York: Schocken Books, 1963, pp. 90–91.

[28] Robert Fernea, “Putting a Stone in the Middle: the Nubians of Northern Africa,” in Graham Kemp and Douglas P. Fry (eds.), Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies around the World, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 111.

[29] Alice Schlegel, “Contentious But Not Violent: The Hopi of Northern Arizona” in Graham Kemp and Douglas P. Fry (eds.), Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies around the World, New York: Routledge, 2004.

[30] Melford E. Spiro, Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia, New York: Schocken Books, 1963, pp. 83–85.

[31] Gemma Aguilar, “Els okupes fan la feina que oblida el Districte,” Avui, Saturday 15 December 2007, p. 43.

[32] Natasha Gordon and Paul Chatterton, Taking Back Control: A Journey through Argentina’s Popular Uprising, Leeds (UK): University of Leeds, 2004, p. 45.

[33] William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex, Ithaca, New York: ILR Press, 1988, p. 5.

[34] Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2002, pp. 183–187.

[35] Michael Albert, Parecon: Life After Capitalism, New York: Verso, 2003, pp. 104–105.

[36] Diana Denham and C.A.S.A. Collective (eds.), Teaching Rebellion: Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca, Oakland: PM Press, 2008, interview with Tonia.

[37] Ditto, interview with Francisco.

[38] Cahal Milmo, “On the Barricades: Trouble in a Hippie Paradise,” The Independent, May 31, 2007.

[39] Technically, human elders provide a reproductive function because they store obscure types of information like how to survive natural disasters that only occur once every several generations, and they can also serve to increase social cohesion by increasing the amount of living relations within the community — for example the number of people with the same grandparents is much larger than the number of people with the same parents. However, these survival benefits are not immediately obvious and there is no evidence of any human society making such calculations when deciding whether or not to feed their toothless grannies. In other words, the fact that we avail ourselves of the benefits of the elderly is a reflection of our habitual social generosity.

[40] Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press, 1975, p. 270.

[41] Neille Ilel, “A Healthy Dose of Anarchy: After Katrina, nontraditional, decentralized relief steps in where big government and big charity failed,” Reason Magazine, December 2006.

[42] Albany Free School website (viewed November 24, 2006) www.albanyfreeschool.com

[43] Natasha Gordon and Paul Chatterton, Taking Back Control: A Journey through Argentina’s Popular Uprising, Leeds (UK): University of Leeds, 2004, pp. 43–44.

[44] See chapter 5 in Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, London: Pluto Press, 2008.

[45] The description of the New Guinea highlanders in Jared Diamond’s book (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, New York, Viking, 2005), particularly the portrayal of their curiosity, wit, and humanity, does a great service to dispelling the lingering imagery of so-called primitive peoples as grunting apes or noble savages.

[46] “Wikipedia survives research test,” BBC News 15 December 2005 news.bbc.co.uk

[47] “Editorial administration, oversight and management” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org

[48] Patrick Fleuret, “The Social Organization of Water Control in the Taita Hills, Kenya,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 12, 1985.

[49] Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, New York: Free Life Editions, 1974, p. 66.

[50] Ditto, p. 88.

[51] All the quotes and statistics in the paragraph come from Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, New York: Free Life Editions, 1974, pp. 88–92.

[52] Ditto, pp. 75–76

[53] George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. Oakland: AK Press, 2006, pp. 84–85

[54] The Stonehenge Free Festivals, 1972–1985. www.ukrockfestivals.com Viewed 8 May 2008.

[55] The Curious George Brigade, Anarchy In the Age of Dinosaurs, CrimethInc. 2003, pp. 106–120. The statistic from Ghana appears on page 115.

[56] Emily Achtenberg, “Community Organizing and Rebellion: Neighborhood Councils in El Alto, Bolivia,” Progressive Planning, No.172, Summer 2007.

[57] Although the author of this piece chooses the term government, the underlying concept should not be given parity with what in Western society is considered to be government. In the ayllu tradition, leadership is not a privileged social position or a position of command, but a form of “community service.”

[58] Emily Achtenberg, “Community Organizing and Rebellion: Neighborhood Councils in El Alto, Bolivia,” Progressive Planning, No.172, Summer 2007.

[59] All the quotes on Symphony Way come from Daria Zelenova, “Anti-Eviction Struggle of the Squatters Communities in Contemporary South Africa,” paper presented at the conference “Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations,” at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, June 2009.

[60] Oxfam America, “Havana’s Green Revelation,” www.oxfamamerica.org [viewed December 5, 2005]

[61] Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, New York: Free Life Editions, 1974, pp. 163–164.

[62] This theory for the fate of Easter Island is convincingly argued in Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, New York, Viking, 2005.

[63] Eric Alden Smith, Mark Wishnie, “Conservation and Subsistence in Small-Scale Societies,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 29, 2000, pp. 493–524. “As population density and political centralization increases, communities may exceed the size and homogeneity needed for endogenous systems of communal management” (p. 505). The authors also pointed out that colonial and postcolonial interference ended many systems of communal resource management. Bonnie Anna Nardi, “Modes of Explanation in Anthropological Population Theory: Biological Determinism vs. Self-Regulation in Studies of Population Growth in Third World Countries,” American Anthropologist, vol. 83, 1981. Nardi points out that as decision-making, society, and identity go from small-scale to a national scale, fertility control loses its effectiveness (p. 40).

[64] Bruce Stewart, quoted in Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2000, p.162.

[65] Jared Diamond, Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed, New York: Viking, 2005, pp. 292–293

[66] For example, the United States and Western Europe, responsible for most of the world’s greenhouse gases, are currently forcing hundreds of millions of people to die every year rather than curtailing their car cultures and reducing their emissions.

[67] The ten percent figure and mention of the two attacks in Germany come from Nathaniel C. Nash, “Oil Companies Face Boycott Over Sinking of Rig,” The New York Times, June 17, 1995.

[68] Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, New York: Viking, 2005, p. 277.

[69] H. Van Der Linden, “Een Nieuwe Overheidsinstelling: Het Waterschap circa 1100–1400” in D.P. Blok, Algemene Geschiednis der Nederlanden, deel III. Haarlem: Fibula van Dishoeck, 1982, p. 64. Author’s translation.

[70] This analysis is well documented by Kristian Williams in Our Enemies in Blue. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2004.

[71] In 2005, 5,734 workers were killed by traumatic injury on the job, and an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 died from occupational diseases, according to the AFL-CIO “Facts About Worker Safety and Health 2007.” www.aflcio.org Of all the killings of workers by employer negligence between 1982 and 2002, fewer than 2000 were investigated by the government, and of these only 81 resulted in convictions and only 16 resulted in jailtime, though the maximum allowed sentence was six months, according to David Barstow, “U.S. Rarely Seeks Charges for Deaths in Workplace,” New York Times, December 22, 2003.

[72] These are widely available statistics from US Census bureau, Justice Department, independent researchers, Human Rights Watch, and other organizations. They can be found, for example, on drugwarfacts.org [viewed 30 December, 2009].

[73] Wikipedia “Seattle General Strike of 1919,” en.wikipedia.org [viewed 21 June 2007]. Print sources cited in this article include Jeremy Brecher, Strike! Revised Edition. South End Press, 1997; and Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Perrenial Classics Edition, 1999.

[74] Diana Denham and C.A.S.A. Collective (eds.), Teaching Rebellion: Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca, Oakland: PM Press, 2008, interview with Cuatli.

[75] Alan Howard, “Restraint and Ritual Apology: the Rotumans of the South Pacific,” in Graham Kemp and Douglas P. Fry (eds.), Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies around the World, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 42.

[76] Both observer quotes from Jamie Bissonette, When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: a true story in the movement for prison abolition, Cambridge: South End Press, 2008, p. 160.

[77] One can’t help but compare this to the British spreading opium in China or the US government spreading whiskey among indigenous people and, later, heroin in ghettos.

[78] Natasha Gordon and Paul Chatterton, Taking Back Control: A Journey through Argentina’s Popular Uprising, Leeds (UK): University of Leeds, 2004, pp. 66–68.

[79] Graham Kemp and Douglas P. Fry (eds.), Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies around the World, New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 73–79. The cross-cultural study is M.H. Ross, The Culture of Conflict, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

#anarchy works

[adarkrainbow]

Fables: The Ultimate Catalogue! (A)

Here it is! A complete list of all the fairytale, nursery rhyme, mythical and literary references in Fables, both the main comic book series and its various spin-offs! This “catalogue” was created by me looking throughout the series and collected editions, adding to my personal knowledge quick Internet researches, and completing it all with the Fables Encyclopedia (which despite its official status has several things wrong in it). I didn’t get absolutely everything - some references I did not get, but I will keep a separate post for them. Enjoy!

SPOILERS AHEAD, SPOILERS AHEAD!

This post will cover the issues of Fables, the main series, 1 to 59 (from “Legends in Exile” to “Burning Questions”) + A Wolf in the Fold story + The Last Castle one-shot + 1001 Nights of Snowfall 

Note that I might have missed a few references, which I have placed in my series of posts “Searching for the reference” - if I ever find additional things, I will update this post.

The main characters

# Snow-White: The princess from “Little Snow-White” by the brothers Grimm, but also the sister of Rose-Red, from “Snow-White and Rose-Red” by the same brothers. She is the “civilized child”, “good sister”, “refined princess”, “order” to Rose-Red’s “wild child”, “disobedient sister”, “crude peasant”, “chaos”. 

# Rose-Red: The character from the brothers Grimm fairytale “Snow-White and Rose-Red”. She is Snow-White’s counterpart in many way. She is the peasant girl to her sister’s princess, she is the wild child to her sister’s obedient/civilized child, she is the ruler of the Farm and its animalistic realms where Snow-White governs Fabletown and the human Fables. 

# Bigby Wolf: The Big Bad Wolf. An “archetypal” character representing the “Western myth of the wolf as a voracious killer, man-eating, cunning, terrifying beast” - even tough real-life wolves are actually shy and do not attack men in normal circumstances He was the wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood” and from “The Three Little Pigs”. His original fairytale incarnation, as the giant, all-devouring wolf-son of the North Wind, was revealed by Willingham to have been inspired by the Fenris Wolf of Norse mythology (Willingham wanted his depictions of fairytales to have roots in ancient myths, the same way the “oldest Sleeping Beauty is Brunhilde’s circle of fire”. His human persona in today’s Fabletown is inspired by a bunch of detective and spy characters - most notably by the detectives of the “film noir” genre, though he has a disheveled Columbo-like appearance, coupled with a gruffness and inherent violence typical of a “wolf” like character: he has been described by people as “Dirty Harry meets Wolverine meets Humphrey Bogart’s detective roles”. His position as the love interest to the main female protagonist/Snow White-related woman is also clearly inspired by the character of “Wolf”, from “The 10th Kingdom”.

During his adventures in World War II he happened to become Fables’ equivalent of “The Wolf-Man” from the Universal Horror movies (he even lived through “Frankenstein meets the Wolf-Man” as he had to fight the creature of Frankenstein - Willingham confessed being a big fan of the Universal classics). In fact, we know he was the main source of the werewolf myth in our world (or maybe the reverse, it is unclear with Fables), since he is a shapeshifter able to turn into a giant wolf, a human being, or an in-between, he can only be killed by silver, and he had a friendship and alliance with Count Dracula (see below). We also learn from his backstory in “1001 Nights of Snowfall” that he used to be a twisted version of the “ugly little duckling” of his family, the runt of the litter mocked by his brothers, then turned into the biggest, baddest, most powerful of magical wolves.

# Boy Blue: Snow-White’s assistant comes from the nursery rhyme “Little Boy Blue”. On a play of him being tied to the color blue and playing the trumpet, he is also a talented musician of blues music. Also an expert in jazz, his favorite song is “Blue Skies”, and he apparently will always refuse to play “Tijuana Taxi”. When describing his tragic love story with Little Red Riding Hood, he calls it a parody of an “insipid O. Henry tale”. His adventures in the Homelands, with a mask on his face, the Witching Cloak and the Vorpal Blade, turned him into a legendary figure mixing various influences - his mask, cape and sword evokes the character of Zorro, he calls himself at one point the “Blue Avenger” (which seems to be a comic book nod, as Boy Blue is seen to be a big fan of comics), and he is called by many the “Black Knight” which, on top of being a reference to the archetype of the “Black Knight/Dark Knight” in typical Arthurian tales, might be a reference to Batman aka the “Dark Knight”, another dark super-hero with a half-mask and cloak that fights in the shadows of the night. Rose Red later describes this new persona of his as “the swashbuckler supreme”, “better than Errol Flynn” (the actor who played the most famous cinematic version of Robin Hood). 

# Jack: Of his full title “Jack of all Tales” (a pun on “Jack of all trades”). Jack is ALL the Jack of fairytales, or almost all of them. He starts out as the Jack from the English Jack tales (Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant Killer, Jack o’ Lantern) but he is also promptly revealed to be the Jack from nursery rhymes (Jack be nimble, Little Jack Horner, Jack and Jill). He is also the “Appalachian Jack”, or the “Mountain Jack of American folklore” - the Jack of those folktales carried from Europe over to the Appalachian mountains (the issue “Bag O’Bones” is a retelling of the Appalachian story “Soldier Jack” or “The Man who Caught Death in a Bag”). AND he is tied to the “Jacks” of card-games, aka the four Knaves, that he can summon in his hand during any card game (he even sings the gambling song “Jack O’Diamonds”). The Fables Encyclopedia notes that the oldest Jack tale would be “Jack and his Stepdame”, and mentions how Jack is the English version of the stock-character of fairytale known as Ivan un Russia, Hans in Germany and Juan in Spanish-speaking American countries. Willingham also mentions in the Encyclopedia that “Jack who jumped over a candlestick” is another one of the nursery rhymes part of the character. 

Jack is one of the tricksters of the Fables world - though he represents the “dark gray” kind of trickster. He is a chronical liar and thief, always acting out of selfishness and base desires (greed and lust), constantly throwing himself into “get-rich-quick” plans and not truly caring about anyone else but himself. This anti-hero is also constantly stuck into a cycle of failures and successes: while by essence he has luck on his side, as he is the very embodiment of the “designated hero” or the “non-heroic protagonist”, chance alway provides him the opportunities to fulfill his dreams and to escape his ordeals, his character however also means that every time he puts together a succesful scam or gets where he wants, he will lose everything and be forced to begin everything from scratch again. The Fables Encyclopedia does point out that this isn’t part of the traditional Jack character, who is usually an “unlikely hero”, the simpleton or the weakest of three brothers, who, with courage and resourcefulness (and luck) overcomes obstacles. But Willingham explained he wanted a “trickster without the charm, a bad boy who never learns despite his frequent comeuppance”. The only Jacks that aren’t him are Jack Sprat (from the nursery rhyme) and Jack Ketch (the executioner).

# The Black Forest Witch, or Frau Totenkinder: She is introduced as the witch from “Hansel and Gretel”, who survived being burned in her own oven, but she is revealed by “The March of the Wooden Soldiers” to have been in truth much more than that. She is an “archetypal” character who was the anonymous, unnamed or barely-mentioned witch of numerous other fairytales - and she even was involved in several stories where she did not appear as a character, since her desire was to keep herself hidden from the world. Her two titles are mere aliases: “The Black Forest Witch” refers to the deep, dark forest she lived in, the Black Forest of actual Germany, and the type of cake “Black Forest” all at once. Frau Totenkinder is a German name meaning “Miss Child-Killer”, formed of “Toten”, to kill, and “kinder”, “children”. In general, I also suspect she was influenced by the character of the Witch from “Into the Woods” (notably for reasons we will see in later parts of the series). 

We get her full backstory in “The Witch’s Tale” (1001 Nights of Snowfall) and we learn she has been  the witch from Rapunzel (though this version of Rapunzel is quite different from the one we know) and the witch who cursed the Frog Prince and the Beast into their monstrous shapes (it was a hobby of her to turn handsome, rich noblemen into various animals under the pretense of “helping” them finding their “true love”). She also participated in the creation of famous stories/characters, though she never appeared in them: she blessed Lancelot of the Lake with the ability to win any combat as long as he remained pure of heart, she created the Three Billy Goats Gruff to get rid of a bridge infested by trolls, and she gave the Pied Piper his enchanted flute to lure the children of Hamelin away as a personal revenge on the town.  She played the role of an haruspex in a city similar in design to Ancient Rome (before, she was a shaman for a Prehistoric tribe), though the prophecy she delivers through her gore-reading are biblical in nature (Joseph’s famous “seven years of plenty, seven years of famine”). And finally we learned that she caused one of the “good daughter rewarded, bad daughter punished” type of fairytale, in the likes of “Diamonds and Toads” or “Frau Holle” - except her “punishment” was killing the vain, mean sisters, cooking them into pies and feeding them to their mother. 

# Beauty and the Beast: A couple from the fairytale of the same name, first written by madame de Villeneuve, but rewritten and made famous by madame Leprince de Beaumont.

# Prince Charming: THE Prince Charming of various fairytales. He isn’t all the princes of fairytales, but he was (in chronological order), the prince-husband of Snow-White, who after his divorce with her became the prince-husband of Briar Rose, and after his divorce with her became the prince-husband of Cinderella. His womanizing ways lead him to be compared to the famous Casanova (though his modern behavior evokes mostly a nicer Don Giovani). I suspect he was inspired by the characters of the prince brothers from “Into the Woods”. He also technically makes an homage to the character of Harold Hill from “The Music Man”, as he uses some sentences from his song “Ya got trouble” during his campaign for mayor of Fabletown. 

Fabletown citizens and buildings

# King Cole: The mayor of Fabletown is Old King Cole, from the nursery rhyme of the same name.

# Bluebeard: From Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” fairytale. 

# Trusty John: He is Faithful John, from the same name fairytale of the brothers Grimm.

# Ambrose/Flycatcher is the Frog King, from the brothers Grimm fairytale of the same name. He usually sings various folk-songs and nursery rhymes tied to his frog state, such as “Frog Went A-Courting” and “The old lady who swallowed a fly”. Due to him being not pretty-looking, not very bright or intelligent, and usually dismissed and pushed into lower positions, he is also explicitely referred to in the story as “the village’s idiot” of Fabletown. The reason Willingham chose “Ambrose” as his name is revealed in the Fables Encyclopedia to be: Willingham simply likes the name Ambrose ever since he discovered that Merlin the wizard was sometimes called “Merlin Ambrosius”. (In fact, Willingham, by choosing this name, indirectly predicted Flycatcher’s future Arthurian character-arc). 

# Grimble, the troll security guard, is one of the several bridge trolls of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”. I say several because, when Buckingham drew the “Animal Farm” arc, he kept putting in the background an orange-fur covered creature with a green hat - the Encyclopedia reveals that it was Buckingham’s reusing another of his designs of the “Bridge Troll”, taken from the “Merv Pumpkinhead” comic series, a spin-off of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” that was the first collaboration of Willingham and Buckingham (Merv Pumpkinhead, Agent of D.R.E.A.M.). (Similarly, in Frau Totenkinder’s backstory she explains that when a bridge troll is killed, another soon takes his place, as they are an entire species). The Encyclopedia also reveals that Willingham originally envisioned Grimble as a big burly security guard, but Lan Medina (one of the artists working on Fables) rather drew him as a “Wally Cox, Barney Fife sort of fellow”, and Willingham adored the dichotomy of the glamour and true character. 

# Bufkin is one of the winged monkeys from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, by L. Frank Baum.

# Cinderella is from Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella” (and not the Grimm version since her slippers are here of glass, not gold).It is in fact the name of her shoe-shop: The Glass Slipper.

# Pinocchio is from “The Adventures of Pinocchio” by Carlo Collodi. 

# Fabletown itself (and the Fables as a whole) are named after the genre known as “fable”. The Woodland Luxury Apartment, Fabletown’s unofficial town hall, refers in name the typical fairytale forest, and in role the main castle at the center of every fairytale kingdom. In its gardens we find statues of Alice with her kitten and white rabbit (from “Alice in Wonderland” AND “Alice Through the Looking-Glass”) and a statue of Humpty Dumpty (from the nursery rhyme of the same name, plus Alice in Wonderland). (My notes mention a statue of Dorothy and Toto from The Wizard of Oz, but I am not certain of it?)

# The streets of Fabletown are named after various authors. Bullfinch Street is named after Thomas Bullfinch who wrote the famous “Bullfinch’s Mythology”. Kipling Street is named after Rudyard Kipling who created classics such as “The Jungle Book” or the “Just so Stories”. Perrault Street is named after Charles Perrault, who wrote the famous “Mother Goose’s fairy tales”. Andersen Street is named after the fairytale author Hans Christian Andersen. 

# The “I Am The Eggman” diner, on top of being a pun due to being owned by Vulco, one of the crow-brothers, is a reference to the lyrics of the song “I am the Walrus” (itself a reference to “Alice through the Looking-Glass”). The Edward Bear’s Candies shop is a reference to the teddy bear that inspired the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh. The Branstock Tavern is a reference to the Barnstokkr tree appearing in the Völsung saga. 

# While not part of Fabletown, Gottfried’s Steak House seems to be a reference to Gottfried von Strauss, a poet famous for his work on “Tristan and Yseult”. The waitress there, Molly Greenbaum, serves as a reference to the folk song “Molly Malone”, that Prince Charming actually sings as he leaves her (I also mistook her for a nod the nursery rhyme “Miss Molly had a dolly”). 

# The Knights of Malta Hospital is a reference to the real-life Knights of Malta/Knights Hospitaller. Working in it, we find Doctor Swineheart (from the Grimms’ “The Three Army Surgeons”) and Nurse Sprat (actually Miss Sprat from the nursery rhyme “Jack Sprat”). Jack Sprat himself lives with his wife in Fabletown.

# The Forsworn Knight, the undead hanging knight haunting his rusty armor, has his identity secret up to this point - but the “Fables Encyclopedia” explained that his title was a reference to how the knights of the Arthurian mythos are only known by their nicknames: The Knight with Two Swords, the Dolorous Knight, the Green Knight, the Savage Knight... 

# Briar Rose is the character from the brothers Grimm’s version of the “Sleeping Beauty” story (though the fact she was blessed by fairies as a baby comes from Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty”). 

# Bluebeard (and then Charming’s) goblin butler, Hobbes, has been identified by several as a nod to Thomas Hobbes. However I think it might rather simply be a reference to the “hobgoblins”.

# The Lewis Antiques shop seems to be a reference to C.S. Lewis, the inventor of Narnia (given it is “antiques”, an old wardrobe comes to mind), though it could be also a nod to Lewis Carroll. Nod’s Books has been identified as a reference to “The Book of Nods” by Jim Carroll. The Chateau d’If Fencing Academy is a reference to the real-life castle made mythical by Dumas’ “The Count of Monte-Cristo”: in fact Edmond Dantès himself runs the Academy. The Web ‘n Muffet Market is a reference to the nursery rhyme “Little Muss Muffet” (she lives now as Mrs. Web, having married the spider Mr. Web). The Yellow Brick Roadhouse is a reference to the Yellow Brick Road of Oz. 

# There are two shops seen in the comics but who’s true owners are only revealed later. One is “Ford Laundry” which is a laundromat runned by the Scottish bean nighe, Mrs. Ford (because she is “The Washer-Woman at the Ford”). The second is the Grand Green Florist shop, revealed in “A Wolf Among Us” to be the shop of Auntie Greenleaf, from Schlosser’s “Spooky New-York” anthology. 

# The 13th floor witches include (beyond Frau Totenkinder), the “Fairy Witch” or “Great Fairy Witch” (actually the witch from Andersen’s “Thumbelina”) and Mr. Grandours, the sorcerer-king from “The Wizard King” (Willingham took the translated version from Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book, though the fairytale origin is actually the knight of Mailly “Le Roi Magicien”, in his “Illustres fées” - the Illustrious Fairies of Le Chevalier de Mailly). When evoking Mr. Grandours in the Encyclopedia (which falsely refers to The Wizard King as having been invented by Lang), Willingham also said when designing his character he thought of all the various magical bears in fairy tales, good or wicked - and his human form is meant to evoke a “Leonid Brezhnev-kind of character”. 

# Thrushbeard is from “King Thrushbeard”, a fairytale of the brothers Grimm. Mark Buckingham designed him after comic book creator Alan Moore.

# Kay is a character from Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”. 

# The boy who cries wolf is from the Aesop fable of the same name (and lives on the seventh floor of the Woodland Luxury).

# Ichabod Crane is a character from Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. Willingham insists in the Fables Encyclopedia that he wanted to depict Crane as he perceived him when reading the original story, aka as “kind of an ass, of the prickly, pompously self-impressed sort”. 

# The Stone Soup restaurant is a reference to the very widespread and famous folktale “The Stone Soup”. The Andersen butcher shop is another nod to Hans Christian Andersen (here mixed with the word “Delicatessen”). The reparation team/company in charge of remaking Fabletown after the March of the Wooden Soldiers is called “N Rhyme” - aka Nursery Rhyme. 

# Gudrun is the goose that lays golden eggs - made famous by the “Jack and the beanstalk” fairytale, but finding her roots in one of Aesop’s fables “The goose that laid golden eggs”. As for her name, it is the one of the wife of the Germanic mythical hero Sigurd/Siegfried. 

# Barbara Allen, one of the victims of the rogue zephyr, is from the folk-song of the same name, “Bonny Barbara Allen”. 

# Mowgli is the main character of Kipling’ “The Jungle Book” (he is also explicitely compared in-universe to “Tarzan” (from “Tarzan of the Apes”), though Willingham in the Encyclopedia explains he prefers Mowgli over the other because he was “Tarzan before Tarzan”. 

# Rapunzel is the character from the brothers Grimm story of the same name. 

# Fair Katrinelje, Vulco’s part-time girlfriend, is from the brothers Grimm fairytale “Fair Katrinelje and Pif-Paf-Poltrie”.

The Farm residents and buildings

# The Farm plays various roles. In design it is described by Rose-Red as “Old Macdonald meets Walt Disney meets Munchkinland” - Old Macdonald had a farm being a traditional children song (later quoted to describe the Farm), the Disney reference being related to Disney Land the amusement park (the architecture of some buildings has been noted to be similar to the Neuschwanstein castle, which inspired Sleeping Beauty’s castle for Disney) , and Munchkinland being a reference to the colorful landscape of the MGM movie “The Wizard of Oz”. In terms of role it also fulfills the idea of the “farm” where pets are supposedly sent when they die and parents want to hide it to their children. In its first appearance, the “Animal Farm” arc, it plays the role of the titular “Animal Farm” from George Orwell’s book of the same name, and Goldilocks purposefully makes a gory reference to William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”, comparing the Farm to the island of the story.

# Colin, Posey and Dun are the three pigs from “The Three Little Pigs” (Posey and Dun coupling as the pigs from Orwell’s “Animal Farm”). They are later replaced by three giant brothers turned into pigs, Johnny, Donny and Lonny. The giant brothers notably recite the iconic lines “Fee fi fo fum [...] I’ll grind his bones to make my bread!”, coming from “Jack and the Beanstalk”.

# The Farm hosts the Rhinoceros from “How the Rhinoceros got his skin” (Kipling’s “Just So Stories”), the Three Billy Goats Gruff (from the Norwegian fairytale of the same name), Henny Penny (from “Chicken Little/Henny Penny”), the Owl and the Pussycat (from the poem of the same name), the Hare and the Tortoise (from the Aesop fable of the same name), several flying monkeys (from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”), a red-cap (from English-Scottish folklore), and Puss in Boots (from Perrault’s fairytale of the same name).

# The buildings of the Farm include a pumpkin-house similar to the one of Jack Pumpkinhead in the “Oz” books ; mushroom-houses taken straight out of the “Smurfs” comic books and cartoons; the shoe-house of the “Old Woman who lived in a Shoe”, as well as Baba-Yaga’s chicken-legged house.

# Goldilocks and the Three Bears (Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Boo Bear) are from the fairytale of the same name.

# Weyland Smith, the original caretaker of the Farm before Rose-Red, is a character from Germanic legends, Anglo-Saxon folklore and Nordic sagas, present “from the Poetic Edda to Beowulf” to take back the words of the Encyclopedia.

# The B’rer Fables are animal fables taken out of Afro-American folktales (most famous through the “Uncle Remus” books): we have B’rer Rabbit, B’rer Bear, B’rer Gator. In “Sons of the Empire” we also find out B’rer Wolf is here. 

# The “Jungle Fables” or “Kipling Fables” are characters of Kipling’s The Jungle Book: Shere Kan the tiger, Bagherra the panther, Kaa the python, and Old King Louie (the latter was a mistake of Willingham who forgot King Louie was a character invented by Disney and not from the original story). We later learn Baloo the bear is also at the Farm. 

# The Farm hosts several characters briefly caricatured in the background to avoid the copyright of Disney, such as Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, or Bambi.

# All the birds of the nursery rhyme “The Death and Burial of Cock Robin” are present in the Farm - since the events of the nursery rhyme are enacted in “Animal Farm”. Cock Robin itself is actually a Fabletown bird - and the Fables Encyclopedia notes that he is actually the protagonist of a whole cycle of nursery rhymes, including “Cock Robin got up Early”. 

# The Farm hosts various characters from “Le Roman de Renart”, “The History of Reynart”, the Reynart stories of medieval France. Reynard the Fox and Noble the Lion are the most noticeable one, but we also see Brun the Bear in the Farm (identified by Buckingham’s sketch-notes). Ysengrim the wolf also appears in “Sons of the Empire”.  Reynard the fox is here notably much more pleasant and amiable than his medieval counterpart - in “Fables Encyclopedia”, Willingham explained that the first trickster of his childhoo was Bugs Bunny, a “monster of chaos”, and that for Reynard he wanted to create a “slyer, wiser and more subtle” form of trickster. 

# The Farm has numerous nursery rhymes characters. From “Hickory Dickory Dock” we have the mouse that ran down the clock. From “Hey Diddle Diddle” we have the cow who jumped over the moon, the dish and the spoon (plus in King Cole’s “Fair Share” backstory we learn there’s also the Little Dog who Laughed). We also have the Three Blind Mice (from the nursery rhyme of the same name). As well as “Mr. Sunflower”, from a nursery rhyme by R. André. 

# Three characters from “The Wind in the Willows” are here: Mr. Toad, Mr. Mole and Mr. Badger.

# Numerous small-sized humanoids live in the Farm: Tomb Thumb (an archetypal character of English fairytales), Thumbelina (from the fairytale of Andersen of the same name) and a community of Lilliputians (from Swift’s “The Travels of Gulliver”). The Lilliputians have created a “mounted police” riding “field mice” (which I believe to be some of the field mice from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”). In the Fables Encyclopedia, it is noted that the idea of the Mounted Police of Lilliputians, of tiny sergents riding on mice to do cop duty, actually comes from the song “And the Mouse Police never sleeps” from Jethro Thull’s “Heavy Horses” (even though the original song referred to a cat). 

# Several characters of the Alice books can be found here, most notably living playing cards, the Cheshire Cat (from “Alice in Wonderland”) and the Walrus (from “Alice Through the Looking-Glass”). 

# When the rebels have to be executed, the one called for the job is Jack Ketch, a historical figure turned “archetype/stereotype/common nickname” for executioners in England. He is also revealed to have been the executioner of Prince Charming’s realm, and the Fables Encyclopedia has Willingham explaining that, for him, Jack Ketch isn’t actually a citizen of Fabletown but rather the name given to whoever takes the role of the executioner of the Fables community - it is a job, a position. 

# John Barleycorn is from the folk-song of the same name.

# Mary and her little lamb are from the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb”, while Miss Mousey and her frogs are from the folk-song “Frog Went-A Courting”.

# Peter Cottontail is present at the farm - “Cottontail” being the alternate name of the famous character known as “Peter Rabbit”. And while Peter Rabbit is most famous by Beatrix Potter’s writings, the character’s alias of “Peter Cottontail” comes from the novels of Thornton Burgess, such as “Old Mother West Wind” or “The Adventures of Peter Cottontail”.

# There are lot of little detail-characters that are here merely to evoke common sayings or beliefs. For example we see at one point a snail with a roof and chimney on its shell, evoking how it is said that snails carry their house on their back ; and at another point we see the duo of a snail with an umbrella and a ladybug, which is a reference to how the two animals are used to predict the weather to come (rainy weather for the snail, sunny weather for the ladybug).

The Adversary and his forces 

# The Adversary/The Emperor was designed to evoke the archetypal “evil overlord/dark lord” of epic/high fantasy. To be more precise, he draws a lot of inspiration from Sauron/Morgoth of “The Lord of the Rings”. A tall, dark, gigantic creature of darkness clad in a terrifying armor, whose plan is to conquer by blood and slaughter the entirety of the universe, whose armies are made of all sorts of awful monters (mostly goblins, with some trolls, giants and dragons thrown in the mix), and who enslaves evil sorcerers as top-agents... The reference is pretty obvious.

# The Adversary is also meant to have a devilish symbolism. The monsters creating his armies are noted to have been summoned from hellish dimensions or to be demonic in nature. He is served by sorcerers and witches. His name, the Adversary, can be translated as “Satan” (the Accuser, the Enemy). And in flashbacks he is depicted as a satyr-like entity, with one theory calling him a divine being cast out from heaven - a fallen god, or maybe fallen “angelic” entity.

# The last attack/invasion of the Adversary onto the European Fable-realms, the events of “The Last Castle”, are noted to coincide with the Napoleonian Wars over Europe - meaning the Adversary is also a fairytale version of Napoleon somehow. Though the way the Empire rules its conquered countries through the “illusion of freedom” and “puppet-kings”, the way they exist through a vast bureaucratic system confiscating all magical artefacts and enslaving or killing sorcers, their method of invading/annexing countries to their rule, imposing a strict list of permitted holidays and sending spies in the countries resisting them... It is all meant to evoke the Soviet Union and its Eastern Block during the Cold War. 

# The wooden soldiers sent by the Adversary to Fabletown are meant to evoke the “Men in black” from American urban legends/alien tales/ufology. The idea of an army of wooden soldiers created by an humble person that rose up to the rank of great evil is also an accidental parallel with “Urfin Jus and his Wooden Soldiers”, the second book of the “Tales of the Magic Land” series by Alexander Volkov (a Russian rip-off of the Oz books). 

# Baba-Yaga, the witch from Slavic folklore and Russian fairytales, is one of the top-agents and “right hands” of the Emperor. She oversees for him the land of the Rus (the Fable equivalent of Russia), and she has alongside her three magical knights - taken from the fairytale “Vasilisa the Beautiful”: Bright-Day the white horseman, rider of the dawn ; Radiant-Sun the red horseman, knight of midday, and Dark-Night the black horseman, rider under the stars. Willinghma noted that if he played into the most horrifying and frightening aspects of Baba Yaga, it was because she was his personal bogeyman and “nightmare monster” as a child. One of the rulers of the Rus lands, while under the Adversary’s control, is Ivan Tsarevich, a recurring character of Russian folktales. 

# The leader of the Adversary’s forces against Colonel Bearskin and the Last Keep at the End of the Known World is the Count Aucassin de Beaucaire, from the French medieval story “Aucassin et Nicolette”. 

# Chernomor, used to serve under Aucassin de Beaucaire (or alongside him) and became the governor of the “world of Kardan”, one of the frontier-worlds of the Empire. If you go to the Wikipedia article, Chernomor is listed as coming from the poem “Ruslan and Lyudmila” which is partially true - but the Fables Encyclopedia reveals that this version of Chernomor actually comes from the poem/fairytale “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” by Pushkine - in fact, it is this poem that Chernomor reads to himself during his first appearance. 

# In quite a twist from his Sauron-like appearance, the heart of the Empire isn’t some Mordor land. In fact, as it turns out the Empire is a vast thriving bureaucratic empire meant to evoke the Roman Empire (or Byzantine Empire, due to the very bureaucratic nature of the management of the empire). The land at the heart of the Empire shares the same name as the Capital City of the Emperor (or Imperial City): Calabri Anagni. This name is made up of “Calabri”, the name of the region of Italy forming the “point of the boot”, and “Anagni”, an ancient town of central Italy. It is indeed the Homeland equivalent of Italy, and in fact the Imperial City was drawn based on the sketches and illustrations of Ancient Rome by Piranesi. Plus, the situation of the Fables living in an “exile” and a “diaspora” because of the Adversary’s conquering Empire is meant to evoke the destruction wrecked by the Roman Empire against the Jews - more specifically the Jewish-Roman Wars. 

# Willingham takes some time to explore the life and day-to-day activities of the lower-ranked goblins and soldiers of the Empire, humanizing them in their usual duties (such as tax collecting). I first I thought it was just a reference to a similar thing Tolkien did with his orcs (see “The Return of the King”) but then it clicked when I realized the “day-to-day story from the point of view of lower-ranked members of the evil empire” +  the evil empire recruiting and enslaving sorcerers and wizards as its “new nobility” + Willingham’s love for military stories and dark, gory battles...  There is definitively here an influence of Glen Cook’s The Black Company. It would make the Adversary influenced by another famous duo of “evil overlords” of fantasy: The Lady and the Dominator.

# Buckingham explained that Ogren and Throk, the goblin duo of issue 36, were inspired by the numerous British humor comics he grew up with as a child.

# The Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the same name is another one of the “great ladies” and right hands of the Emperor, just like Baba Yaga. In this version of the tale however she seems to be heavily tied to the evil mirror of the tale - she has a mirror above her throne, Buckingham revealed that the fragments of the shattered mirror are ornating her queenly outfit, and it is because of her that Kay ended up with a shard of the mirror in his eyes. Willingham sneaked a “Song of Ice and Fire” reference in the comic as, when she arrives in the Imperial City, the guards keep shouting “Winter is coming!”. Her name, “Lumi”, is the Finnish word for snow. And in the Fables Encyclopedia, Willingham revealed that the reason she became such an evil character in “Fables” is because through her he wanted to evoke a famous fictional character he could not have the rights to: The White Witch of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia. 

# The true identity of the Adversary (the Sauron/Morgoth-like Emperor being merely a “puppet”) is revealed to be none other than Gepetto, from “The Adventures of Pinocchio” who, after being enroled in a “benevolent conspiracy” against the megalomania and stupidity of local lords, slowly climbed up the ranks and became corrupted into the machiavelic, bloodthirsty tyrant he is today. In the Encyclopedia, Willingham notably said he wanted to get as far away from the Disney’s version of Gepetto as possible, and return to the character as described by Collodi, as a “cantankerous old grump”. The situation of Gepetto, a little old man behind a fake, artificial all-powerful imperial figure, is also very reminiscent of Oscar Diggs/The Wizard of Oz’s situation from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum. 

# Gepetto takes his powers from the Blue Fairy that he kidnapped and locked away - the Blue Fairy is Willingham’s strange mixture of the Fairy with the Turquoise Hair, from Collodi’s original tale, the Blue Fairy (Disney’s version of the previous) and the “original” folklore of fairies, aka the “fair folk” of the British Isles: Willingham insists on the fickle, capricious, strange and alien behavior and mindset of the Fairy. 

# The other two main agents of the Emperor, beyond Baba-Yaga and the Snow Queen, are the Nome King (a recurring antagonist from L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, now governor of Oz for the Emperor) and Hansel - the boy from “Hansel and Gretel”, who grew up into a witch-hunter and Great Inquisitor. He isn’t just designed after the Puritan witch-hunters of the “witch trials” of America: he actually was a key part of those trials. During his brief time in the Mundane World he participated in almost all of the witch-hunts throughout Europe and America. He did not start them, but he followed the witch madness everywhere it went, and took a key part in the trials and executions of the so-called witches. He is said to have been in France, Germany and Switzerland, with the Würzburg witch trials and the Salem witch trials being explicitely cited (in the latter case he was the one who encouraged the execution of Susannah Martn). Trieste is also said to have been one of the places Hansel dwelled (though I never heard of witch trials in Trieste? But there were so many I can’t possibly know them all...).

# The Snow Queen’s plan to invade Fabletown, relying on four steps being “Pestilence - Fire - Winter - Famine” is of course very reminiscent of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Christian lore - Pestilence/Conquest, War, Famine and Death. The Snow Queen’s plan for an “eternal winter” are explicitely compared to “Fimbul” - aka the Norse winter predicted for Ragnarök. Among the creatures that serves her and that she plans to send in the world, she mentions the “ice giants”, which is actually a term designated a category of creatures in Norse mythology (the rest are however non-specific entities, not exact reference - frostlings, boreal spirits, fire imps...). The sorcer used to illustrate the “Pestilence” part of the plan, Tom Harrow, was actually designed after Neil Gaiman - it was Mark Buckingham’s gift to Gaiman, who had been the best man at his wedding. Finally, of the two fictional diseases the Snow Queen mentions (the Skold brownpox and the Red City Plague), the later seems to be a reference to the “red plague” from “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe.

# A last note, taken from the “Fables Encyclopedia”: the armor of Lieutenant Oakheart, a random character among the wooden soldiers of the Empire (seen in issue 52), was actually inspired by the cover of the album “Want One” by Rufus Wainwright. 

Magical artefacts:

# The Seven-League Boots, from Charles Perrault’s Little Thumbling, are kept by Fabletown.

# The Vorpal Blade from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” poem (and “Alice Through the Looking Glass”) is in possession of Fabletown (and becomes Boy Blue’s weapon later).

# The magic beans, from Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack keeps trying to scam people by pretending he still has them, when in truth he lost them a long time ago. It is revealed in “Happily Ever After” that in truth Fabletown got hold of the last magic beans, which form the only way to reach the Cloud Kingdoms where the giants live. 

# Bluebeard keeps a hook in his office - it seems to be the hook of “Captain Hook”, from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. 

# Snow-White’s office contains a sword in the stone (from the Arthurian myth), various Arabian oil lamps (a reference to “Aladdin”), as well as several Greco-Roman statues (a copy of the Venus de Milo, statues of Mars and Neptune...). 

# The Fairy Witch’s magical barley seeds from which little women are grown are from Andersen’s fairytale “Thumbelina”. 

# Bluebeard might have owned “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” - because there is the painted portrait of a man we keep seeing in his castle, that is not him, so... 

# The magic mirror of the evil queen from “Snow-White” is kept in Snow-White’s office, as well as the torn of head of the Frankenstein Creature (nicknamed “Frankie”). 

The Last Castle one-shot

# The titular “Last Castle”, of its full name the “Last Keep at the End of the Known Worlds”, is actually the castle from the Norwegian fairytale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”, located by those directions, and beyond the “House of the Four Winds”.

# Little Red Riding Hood is from the fairytale of the same name (the brothers Grimm version, since in her story the wolf was defeated by a woodsman).

# Robin Loxley, or Robin Hood, is from British folklore and English literature. We also see two of his Merry Men: Friar Tuck and Small John. 

# Colonel Bearskin is a higher-ranked version of the titular character from the brothers Grimm fairytale “Bearskin”.

# We have two characters from Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”: Lady Britomart, the “warrior damsel”, and the Red-Cross Knight (Saint George by another name). 

# The twelve crow-brothers are from the Grimm fairytale “The Twelve Brothers”.

# Old Pellinore is a king from the Arthurian legends.

# Tam Lin, the “lover of the fairy queen”, is a character of English folklore and folk-songs (the “Ballad of Tam Lin” is his most famous depictions).

# Herman von Starkenfaust is a character from Washington Irving’s “The Spectre Bridegroom”.

# The Little Tailor that “got seven at one stroke” is from the brothers Grimm’s “The Valiant Little Tailor”.

# The Kings of Madagao and Bornegascar are the rival kings from the piece of Ambrose Bierce “Two Kings”, from his “Fantastic Fables”.

# Beaucaire and Bearskin fought many battles against each other, two of which I got the reference of: the battle of Boxen is an homage to the fictional world created by C. S. Lewis as a child, while the battle of “Oakcourt” is a reference to the legend of wise, fair and just kings holding their courts under an oak. When Blue Boy confronts Chernomor in the beginning of the “Homelands” arc, he also mentions the “battle of Vesteri”, which is apparently the battle told in the poem “Tsar Saltan”, the one where Chernomor appeared with thirty-three warriors (though the events described in the poem are apparently a false retelling of the actual events, which were the invasion of the Adversary’s army, and unlike what the poem claims Chernomor lost the battle). 

# Possibles references I am not certain of: Among the refugees at the Last Keep, there is a white-bearded wizard with a pointy hat all dressed in grey, that I think might be an homage to Tolkien’s Gandalf. There is also a solidly built young man with a goat near him that I believe to be “Blockhead Hans” from the brothers Grimm fairytales. 

The Homelands:

# The Tin Woodman, Jack Pumpkinhead, The Scarecrow and a Munchkin, all from the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, are seen fleeing the invasion of the Adversary in the “Legends in Exile” flashbacks.

# The flashbacks of “Legends in Exile” also reveal Don Quixote and Pancho (from the novel “Don Quixote”), and a queen on a sleigh pulled by swans - which I believe to be a reference to Andersen’s “The Wild Swans “fairytale.

# The two first conquests of the Adversary (after his “native land”) were “The Emerald Land” (The Land of Oz, invented by L. Frank Baum) and “The Kingdom of the Great Lion” (Narnia, created by C.S. Lewis). We even see an unnamed version of Aslan, killed by the forces of the Adversary. 

# The world of the Rus is the Homeland equivalent of Russia, the land where Slavic folktales dwell. It is drawn in the style of Ivan Bilbin (a famous illustrators for fairytales such as “Vasilisa the Beautiful” or “Prince Ivan, the Fire-Bird and the Grey Wolf”). When Boy Blues travels through the Rus lands, he comes upon the “Mice Burying the Cat”, a recurring motif and scene in Russian lubok and folktales. 

# In the arc “Arabian Nights (and Days)”, the realm of Karse is name-dropped as one of the lands conquered by the Adversary. Some people think it might be a reference to the kingdom of Karse, from Mercedes Lackey’s books “The Heralds of Valdemar”. 

# The Cloud Kingdoms, located in the sky, populated by giants and only reachable through magic beanstalks, is a reference to “Jack and the Beanstalk”. Cinderella calls it mockingly “Cloud Cuckoo Land” - an insult to the absurdity of the kingdom itself, but a subtle literary nod to Aristophanes’ famous play “The Birds”, where Cloud Cuckoo Land is an utopian city in the city. The giant squirrel friend of Cinderella in this realm, Radiskop, is revealed in the Fables Encyclopedia to be Willingham’s version of Ratatosk, the squirrel of the Word-Tree from Norse mythology (the poem “The Saying of Grimnir” is evoked by the Encyclopedia). Cinderella also plays on the expression “castles in the sky” when describing the Cloud Kingdoms - an idiom meaning an unrealistic plan or impossible dream. 

# In “The Sons of the Empire”, we follow the side-quest of a group of Fables stealing food from the imperial table: these three Fables are the Gingerbread Man (from “The Gingerbread Man” fairytale), and Mr. Porky Pine with Chicken Ripple (characters actually coming from Neil Diamond’s song “Porkupine Pie”, from the Moods album). 

The Great Powers:

# The devil himself appears in “Bag O’Bones” in a “Southern USA folktale” incarnation, as an old, disheveled black man waiting in the bayou to play card games with souls as the final bet - he is called here “Slick Nick”, or “Mr. Nick”, but due to his old-looking appearance, he quickly is called “Old Nick”, a very traditional nickname of the devil in the English language.

# Death, aka the Grim Reaper, appears in “Bag O’bones”.

# The North Wind, father of Bigby, is of course the very embodiment of the North Wind. Personified winds pop up from time to time in fairytales, and the North Wind most notably appears in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (a fairytale already referenced by Willingham previously). But “Mr. North”’s depicton as an old man ruling over snow and coldness is also clearly meant to enter into the archetype of “Father Winter/Old Father Winter” or “Father Frost/Grandfather Frost”. Buckingham noted that while he originally drew him inspired by Peter Wyngarde playing Jason King (see the television series Department S/Jason King), he then decided to prefer the way the character was originally drawn by Mark Wheatley in “1001 Nights of Snowfall”, as more “Norse god-looking”.

The servants and affiliated creatures of the North Wind are called after different types of winds: Mistral is a violent wind of southern France, Squall is a sudden or violent gust of wind, Whiff is a puff of air, and the Zephyrs are light breezes.

# The d’jinns are here a very dark reinterpretaton of the djinn of Arabian folklore and fairytale, reinvented as amoral creatures of pure magic that have to be bound for the sake of the entire world. These d’jinns were purposefully designed as dark parodies of the Genie from Disney’s Aladdin: like him they have blue-skin, black hair, and a “tail of smoke” for legs. As per the common legend most carried on by “1001 Nights”, the d’jinns were trapped in magical bottles by “Sulymon the Wise”, aka King Solomon. However, unlike the tradition presented by the “Arabian Nights”, in the Fables world King Solomon co-worked with Daedalus (a genius-inventor of Greek mythology, reinterpreted as the “greatest sorcerer-scientist” of Sulymon’s time) to create the magical bottles. And, Sulymon had to trick the d’jinns into getting inside the bottle, by using the same ruse displayed in the fairytale “The Fisherman and the Jinni”.

# Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus, of the American Christmas lore, exist in the Fables world, and while it is strongly hinted in the main series, the Encyclopedia confirms they are “god-like” entities in the Fables verse, close to the other Great Powers.

The 1001 Nights of Snowfall one-shot

# “Be careful what you wish for” seems to have been loosely inspired by “The Little Mermaid”, or rather forming an ironic inversion of it (especially of the more modern retellings like Disney’s), since it is about a girl wishing to explore the world, and asking a witch to turn her into a mermaid to discover the sea. The Fables Encyclopedia mentions that the girl’s name, Mersley Dotes, is only similar to the song “Mairzy Doats” by pure coincidence.

# The seven dwarfs of the Grimm “Little Snow-White” are present in “The Fencing Lesson”, and their entire system of “being an underground realm digging constantly for ore and gems” is inspired by a very traditional depiction of dwarfs ranging from Norse mythology to Tolkien - the way John Bolton draws them as ugly; misshapen, bald beings with bulbous heads or strangely-proportioned limbs reminds me of the art of Brian Froud.

# In the “Diaspora” story, Snow-White says she bought a magical stone that makes soup - it is another reference to the folktale “Stone Soup”. 

# The “Christmas Pies” storyline takes place in the world from which Reynard hails from - a medieval-time valley filled with speaking animals (the setting of the Roman de Renart). I will not name all the characters we see here, but if you know your Roman de Renart, you will recognize several such as Brichemer the deer, Noble the lion, Fière his wife, Grimbert the badger, Couar the hare, etc etc... The legend of “the miracle of the Christmas pies” seems to have been invented by Willingham here - but not out of scratch. If you know your Christmas lore, you know that miracles happening during the “nights of Christmas” are very common, that pies are tied to Christmas in the English tradition, and that magical food or miracle-food in Christmas is also a staple of folklore. An interesting note is that you can see the version of Christmas celebrated in Reynard’s homeworld is not the one celebrated in our world, because they have “Seven Nights of Christmas” - whereas we have the “Twelve Nights”. Filling the pies with stones so that, after eating it, the animals will be too heavy to move is also a recurring motif in folktales and fairytales involving capturing or killing devouring monster or gluttonous animals (most famous of which being the Big Bad Wolf stories). 

#  Colonel Thunderfoot and the talking rabbits of the “Thrumbly Warrens”, in “A Mother’s Love”, have been revealed by Willingham to have been inspired by the rabbit-society of “Watership Down”. 

The Arabian Fables:

# The Arabian Fables are clearly all coming from the most famous collection of Arabian fairytales, “One Thousand and One Nights” - they notably have a very common use of flying carpets, items mostly found in this book (and the Arabian legends of king Solomon). They also have manticores - creatures of Greek folklore, but believed to have lived in Persia (another manticore, giant-sized this one, appears in the non-referential world of Skold in “Homelands”). 

# In “1001 Nights of Snowfall”, the frame-story is literaly the frame-story of “One Thousand and One Nights”, but with Snow-White taking Scheherazade’s place as the one trying to survive Sultan Shahryar. 

# The delegation arriving in Fabletown in “Arabian Nights (and Days)” is centered around Sinbad - the famous Sinbad the sailor whose stories are told in “1001 Nights”. He has two companions which I have yet to identify as references or pure invention - but one, Yusuf, is very clearly the embodiment of the archetype of the “evil vizir” of Arabian tales coupled with the “wicked, scheming sorcerer”. People online have identified him as a possible take on Disney’s character of Jafar from their version of Aladdin, but Buckingham revealed that his design of Yusuf was actually inspired by Doctor Who’s The Master, as played by Robert Delgado. 

# Aladdin and Ali Baba, two heroes of the most famous Arabian fairytales, are said to live in the Homeland version of Baghdad, where Sinbad also dwells.

# One of the co-conspirators and allies of Yusuf is Sid Nouman - aka, Sidi Nu’uman from “The Caliph’s Night Adventures” (sub-section “The History of Sidi Nu’uman”). The identity/appearance the d’jinn takes to reach out to him is the one of “The Fair Persian” - one of the two main characters of the 1001 Nights tale “Noureddin and the Fair Persian”. 

Other things:

# In “Legends in Exile”, Rose-Red forces Bluebeard to keep their engagement secret for a year. This evokes a common trope in fairytales where a character is asked to keep a secret, or a vow of silence, for a given period of time - or where a character has to hide their marriage for a given number of years. 

# “A Wolf in the Fold” reveals that, when Bigby first arrived in the human world, he stayed in the 17th century Carpathians, and became friend with a certain “undead count” - yes, Count Dracula, from Bram Stoker’s novel.

# Before Willingham decided to have the European Fables be Christian in religion, he seems to have considered a more fantasy-like religion for them, as the chapel seen in the Knights of Malta Hospital in “Animal Farm” doesn’t have any religious imagery. Instead, its stained glass depicts fabulous beasts: a dragon, a unicorn, an hydra and a phoenix.

# The desk of Grimble has two books inside of it which are references. One is titled “Shreck!”, a nod to the Shrek movies, while the other is literaly titled “Troll Bridge by Neil Gaiman”, a reference to Gaiman’s reinterpretation of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” fairytale.

# During Bag O’Bones, Jack (as a Confederate soldier just out of the Civil War) sings the minstrel song “Gwine Run All Night”, aka “De Camptown Races”. 

# At one point, the trio formed by Flycatcher, Boy Blue and Pinocchio go buy a series of Fabletown-produced comics, which are all parodies of actual super-hero titles. The Uncanny Oz Men are “The Uncanny X-Men” for example, the Fairytale Four are the “Fantastic Four”, the Tin Man is “Iron Man”, and the Stalk Thing is the “Swamp Thing”. “Red Hood - Little Riding Returns” might be a reference to “The Dark Knight Returns”, while the Un-Mundy... Maybe it is “Superman”? 

# When John Barleycorn explores one of the Emperor’s towers, where stolen magical items are kept, we can see the head of Baphomet sculpted on a disc. During the same quest, the other Lilliputians left behind believe that John must be with “some elf-king’s daughter” by now: this is a reference to Lord Dunsany’s “The Elf-King’s Daughter”. Finally, as John Barleycorn goes searching for the old cottage of the Fairy Witch, he orders his mount to go “Straight ‘til morning” - a sentence lifted from “Peter Pan”. 

# Kevin Thorn is compared by his colleagues to agent Mulder, from the show “X-Files”, due to being the only Mundane immune to the Fables “do not notice us” spells.

# During the “War Stories”, the project of the Nazi scientists couple two references: on one side it is named Volsüng (after a character of Norse mythology, tied to the Volsunga Saga), on the other the topic of mass-producing artificial soldiers raises the fear of it being too similar to the golem of Jewish folktales.

# In-universe, Jack took an opportunity out of the great hype surrounding fantasy movies caused by the (then still new) release of the “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy - in turn, he himself plans to do a “better” version of them, centered around his own tales. 

# The Witching Cloak does not come from a precise story, but gathers various elements and powers usually attributed to magical cloaks and capes. For example, its powers of invisibility are similar to the Germanic tarnkappe of Siegfried, while its teleportation powers can remind of the flying cloak of feathers of Freyja in Norse mythology, and its invulnerability can evoke Herakles’ famous Nemean Lion pelt. In a similar way, the Witching Well (which is the Fabletown equivalent of a cemetery AND afterlife) is not coming from a precise story, but is born of a general rule and belief in the world of fairytales and folktales that wells are gateways to the otherworld and the dwelling of supernatural beings - as well as closely associated to death and the afterlife. One famous fairytale that has a well perceived by theoricians as a gateway to the afterlife is the brothers Grimm “Frau Holle”. 

# Willingham loves to play around with the topic of numbers in fairytales. For example, Bigby was one of seven brothers, tried to kill his father seven times, and himself has seven children. Meanwhile, when Cinderella has to fulfill a mission in the Cloud Kingdoms, everybody involved in it forces her to wait three days for her services - much to her annoyance as she wonders exactly WHY everybody asks for three days. 

# In “The Sons of the Empire”, an annoyed Prince Charming calls ironically the Beast “Gunga Din”, after the character from Rudyard Kiplng’s poem (later adapted into a movie).

# In “Jiminy Christmas”/“Father and Son”, the children of Bigby mention numerous fictional equivalents of cartoons and toys - but one in particular was talked about in “Fables Encyclopedia”, “Ranger Danger”, aka “Ranger Mike Danger”, that Willingham explained to have been the Fables equivalent of real-world G.I. Joe or Action Man. 

# As a last note: the original plans of Willingham for the Adversary’s identity and origin story was to have him be Peter Pan. This is why the descriptions of the Adversary in “Legends in Exile” are so strange in retrospective: he is described as “wood sprite” that became something much more bigger or dangerous, or a fallen god cast away from divine realms, while being depicted in the flashback as a satyr-like being - it all points out to Pan of Greek mythology. Couple this with the fact the Adversary was said to come from “beyond the shores of Never”, aka Never Land, and you understand it is Peter Pan. Willingham’s plan was to have an evil, corrupted, demented version of Peter Pan that wanted to expand his Neverland/playing ground to all the worlds nearby, hence the creation of the Empire. The same way Peter Pan would have been the “big bad”, Captain Hook was also supposed to appear as a heroic figure fighting the Adversary - he notably would have had a plotline about saving the Lost Boys, who as it turns out are an army of children Peter Pan stolen away from the worlds he visited and conquered. However Willingham discovered that the characters were not in the public domain at the time, still under copyright, and so he had to change his plans - limiting himself to having them depicted in battle in the front page of “1001 Nights of Snowfall”. 

#fables #fables comic #fairytale comics #bill willingham #mark buckingham #fairy tales #fairytales #nursery rhymes #grimm fairytales #andersen fairytales #perrault fairytales #norwegian fairytales #french fairytales #literature #fantasy #poetry #One Thousand and One Nights #russian fairytales #russian folktales #folktales #fairytale archetypes #fairy tale archetypes #references #the fables catalogue #neil gaiman

[eternal-echoes]

“Father Stanley Jaki is a prizewinning historian of science-with doctorates in theology and physics- whose scholarship has helped give Catholicism and Scholasticism their due in the development of Western science. Jaki's many books have advanced the provocative claim that far from hindering the development of science, Christian ideas helped to make it possible.

Jaki places great significance on the fact that the Christian tradition, from its Old Testament prehistory through the High Middle Ages and beyond, conceives of God-and, by extension, His creation —as rational and orderly. Throughout the Bible, the regularity of natural phenomena is described as a reflection of God's goodness, beauty, and order. For if the Lord "has imposed an order on the magnificent works of his wisdom," that is only because "He is from everlasting to everlasting" (Sir. 42:21). "The world," writes Jaki, summing up the testimony of the Old Testament, "being the handiwork of a supremely reasonable Person, is endowed with lawfulness and purpose." This lawfulness is evident all around us. "The regular return of seasons, the unfailing course of stars, the music of the spheres, the movement of the forces of nature according to fixed ordinances, are all the results of the One who alone can be trusted unconditionally." The same holds for Jeremiah's citation of the faithful recurrence of harvests as a demonstration of God's goodness, or the parallel he draws "between Yahweh's unfailing love and the eternal ordinances by which Yahweh set the course of stars and the tides of the sea."1”

- Thomas E. Woods Jr., Ph.D., “The Church and Science,” How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

—

1. Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscilating Universe (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986), 150. "The coupling of the reasonability of the Creator and the con-stancy of nature is worth noting because it is there that lie the beginnings of the idea of the autonomy of nature and of its laws."

#Catholic #Christianity #quotes #Thomas E. Woods #Western Civilization #science

[demetrio-student]

Latin #1

Latin Language and Culture Mastery

Course Duration: 2 Months

Objective: To achieve proficiency in Latin language skills, including grammar, vocabulary, translating, and cultural understanding.

Course Structure

Week 1—2: Foundation Building

Week 1: Introduction to Latin Basics Day 1—3: → Introduction to Latin alphabet, pronunciation, and basic greetings → Study noun declensions (1st and 2nd decisions) and basic vocabulary → Practice conjugating verbs (present tense) and forming simple sentences

Week 2: Building Blocks of Grammar Day 4—6: → Dive deeper into noun declensions (3rd, 4th, and 5th declensions) and adjective agreement → Expand verb conjugations (present, imperfect, future tenses) and study irregular verbs → Translate short passages and practice identifying grammatical elements

Week 3—4: Intermediate Level Mastery

Week 3: Grammar Refinement Day 7—9: → Review noun and verb conjugations → Study case usage (nominative, accusative, genetive, dative, ablative) and their functions → Translate longer passages with emphasis on grammatical accuracy

Week 4: Vocabulary Expansion Day 10—12: → Introduce thematic vocabulary sets (e.g., family, occupations, nature). → Practice using new vocabulary in context through reading exercises and writing assignments. → Explore Latin idioms and expressions.

Week 5—6: Advanced Language Proficiency

Week 5: Advanced Grammar Concepts Day 13—15: → Study participles, gerunds, and gerundives → Explore complex sentence structures (subordinate clauses, indirect speech) → Analyze and translate excerpts from classical Latin literature

Week 6: Translation and Composition Day 16—18: → Focus on translation strategies and techniques -> Practice composing original sentences and short paragraphs → Write journal entries in Latin reflecting on personal experiences or topics of interest.

Week 7—8: Cultural Immersion and Enrichment

Week 7: Roman History and Culture Day 19—21: → Study key periods of Roman history and significant figures → Explore Roman mythology, religion, and daily life → Research and present on a chosen aspect of Roman culture

Week 8: Latin Influence and Legacy Day 22—24: → Investigate the influence of Latin on modern languages and disciplines. → Learn about Latin in contemporary contexts, such as legal, scientific, and academic usage. → Discuss the enduring legacy of Latin literature and its impact on Western civilization

Week 9—10: Mastery and Review

Week 9: Consolidation and Review Day 25—27: → Review all grammar concepts, vocabulary sets, and translation techniques covered. → Complete comprehensive exercises and quizzes to assess understanding and retention. → Seek feedback from peers or instructors on areas for improvement.

Week 10: Culmination and Reflection Day 28—30: → Apply acquired skils to translate and analyze a challenging Latin text. → Reflect on the learning journey, noting progress and areas of growth. → Set goals for continued Latin study and exploration of related topics.

Course Conclusion: Congratulations on completing the Latin Language and Culture Mastery course! You have acquired a solid foundation in Latin grammar, vocabulary, translation, and cultural understanding. Continue to engage with Latin texts, practice speaking and writing in Latin, and explore new avenues for deepening your knowledge and appreciation of this rich and influential language. Valete! (Farewell!)

#Latin #Latin learning #personal course #Latin online #Latinblog #Latinblr #studying #studyblr #student #history #course #<33 #DemetrioLatin

[ineffable-opinions]

What Did You Eat Yesterday (season 2)

Kinou Nani Tabeta? Season 2 (2023)

Ongoing review: Love. Rating: 8/10 so far.

What I liked:

The post-de@th arrangement episode

Shiro san’s mother inviting KenjiShiro to share grave in the name of cost minimization.

Kenji’s reaction to this.

The way he changes the address from oka-san to oka-sama. How he asked Shiro to take his mother’s side in this imagined family feud. Kenji now is the man I wish to marry. Where can I find such a husband! I love Shiro’s confusion upon seeing Kenji’s reaction.

Side note: Why the f*ck is Shiro not inviting Kenji to join his household? What is he waiting for? I know real people don’t follow BL logic and that KenjiShiro don’t think of their relationship to be of a settled happily-ever-after type. But still! I don’t think Kenji’s family would object or ask for the other way around.

3. Shiro being thrown off guard by propriety and informality.

Shiro babe, you can offer financial assistance to your parents but don’t give it in one go, unless they ask. Don’t make it obvious, filial-piety coat it. Tell them this is what little you can do to show your gratitude for having raised you. You can also send them money in installments: the money you gave them already is going into making it possible for them to save and afford this for themselves. You can also win lotteries. Strike that, that’s too Gu Hai. For those who didn’t get that: HaiLouyin, in the danmei novel Addicted, indirectly fulfils filial piety by arranging random lucky draws that gets Bai Hanqi, who refuses to accept money, a lot of consumer durables.

4. Shiro apologizing for having let his parents mistreat Kenji. Kenji’s maturity despite his sadness on the matter.

5. Kenji is probably one of the most femme characters: he reflects so much of traditional femininity.

Barbershop drama

Barbershop owner and wife pretending to be civil for the sake of their child.

This is such a protective thing that parents do.

2. Owner’s wife’s decision to divorce once her daughter gets into uni and to leave the barbershop.

I am not a big fan of people springing well-thought-out decisions on others. I also believe that people can change, and that can be for good. That marriage ended with owner’s infidelity; the band-aid had to come off someday.

3. The ikemen hairdresser’s straight forward attitude and the customers who seem to appreciate it.

4. His girlfriend

I am not very happy with her choosing to leave him. This kind of self-sacrificial letting go really doesn’t suit a BL character, does it? Aren’t you supposed to fight for your love? Also, if the ikemen is able to let her go so easily, maybe it’s not worth it. But then he kept her stuff untouched. Also, she looks so good, such a scholarly beauty.

5. I love how the ikemen love drama.

Much water has flown through the drain

This is so anti-Great Indian Kitchen (2021).

GIK is a Malayalam drama movie that holds a mirror to sexism in praxis in Malayali household. Drain water appears prominently in GIK.

2. Shiro’s past - being weak/cheap uke! Aka simp. Kenji feeling jealous.

3. Kenji not being Shiro’s type.

Kenji’s care and attention winning Shiro’s heart. This is the greatest BL trope – that there is someone who treats so well you’ll love them regardless of everything else. Kindness wins!

4. Shiro having treated Kenji with sincerity from Day 1 as seen from the recollection of the first meal he prepared for Kenji.

KenjiShiro is the closest thing to an arranged marriage couple, not the western romance trope bullshit. The proper, south-Asian kind. Sometimes people marry people who are not their type but treat them with sincerity and affection befitting a spouse.

5. Shiro admitting that Kenji is his boyfriend.

6. More than that the simulation!

The cousin one got me crackling like nothing else. That’s the go-to lie that couples, including straight ones, tell their nosy ‘well-wishers’, especially landlords, where I live.

Shrine-visit

Main CP & secondary CP going to shrine together.

Cherry Magic! 30-sai made Dotei Da to Mahotsukai ni Nareru rashii (2020) did this before.

2. Shiro praying! The household happiness charm!

This happened contemporaneously with I Can’t Reach You (2023) with charm drama involving teenagers.

3. Shiro having never done this with friends or at night.

4. Kenji wanting to party at Nichome and Daisaku X Gilbert CP turning him down.

Ten years since they last visited Nichome! This is some relationship flexing, saying we are an old-married couple without actually saying it.

5. Discussing parents and single kids.

Filial piety pain.

6. Building with a history. “I’ll eat in bedroom,” was the funniest.

Kenji thinking that Shiro was contributing more to the rent. Shiro, please stop being so-so. Add Kenji to your household already.

Wataru kun

He toes the line between the BL’s classic bishonen Gilbert and someone suffering histrionic personality disorder. This could be intentional; I don’t know for sure since I haven’t read the manga. If not, then screenwriter, director, actor or all can be held responsible for it.

This is a BL. Characters like him are supposed to feel at home here and find the right partner too. This has been achieved. So, this is less of a criticism and more of a praise. 

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Aside: Turns out post-death arrangements are cheaper in Japan even without purchasing power parity adjustments. If it was not for my desire to be buried under Mimusops elengi flowers…

#きのう何食べた？ #kinou nani tabeta? #jdrama #jbl #what did you eat yesterday #japanese bl #japanese series #bl jdrama