#bc we all know those are the only three cities in europe | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

booklindworm · 3 years

Text

A rant against Karen Traviss' understanding of history and her FAQ answers

Did you base the Mandalorians on the Spartans?

<cite> No. I didn't. </cite> Fair enough.

<cite> I really wish history was taught properly - okay, taught at all - in schools these days, because history is the big storehouse that I plunder for fiction. It breaks my heart to hear from young readers who have no concept even of recent history - the last fifty years - and so can't see the parallels in my books. You don't have to be a historian to read my novels, but you'll get a lot more out of them if you explore history just a little more. Watch a history channel. Read a few books. Visit some museums. Because history is not "then" - it's "now." Everything we experience today is the product of what's happened before. </cite> Yeah, I do to. Please, Ms Traviss, go on, read some books. Might do you some good. And don't just trust the history channels. Their ideas about fact-checking differ wildly.

<cite> But back to Mandos. Not every military society is based on Sparta, strange as that may seem. In fact, the Mandos don't have much in common with the real Spartans at all. </cite> You mean apart from the absolute obsession with the military ["Agoge" by Stephen Hodkinson], fearsome reputation ["A Historical Commentary on Thucydides" by David Cartwright], their general-king ["Sparta" by Marcus Niebuhr Tod], the fact that they practically acted as mercenaries (like Clearch/Κλέαρχος), or the hyper-confidence ("the city is well-fortified that has a wall of men instead of brick" [Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus])...

<cite> A slightly anarchic, non-centralized, fightin' people? Sounded pretty Celtic to me. Since I went down that path, I've learned more about the Celts (especially the Picts), and the more I learn, the more I realise what a dead ringer for Mandos they are. But more of how that happened later... </cite>

The Celtic people are more than one people, more than one culture. Celtic is a language-family! In the last millennium BC nearly every European ethnic group was in some ways Celtic, and they were not one. Later, after the Germanic tribes (also not one people, or a singular group) moved westwards, the Celtic cultures were still counted in the hundreds. Not only Scotland was Celtic! Nearly all of Western Europe was (apart from the Greek and Phoenician settlers on the Mediterranean coasts). The word “Celts” was written down for the first time by Greek authors who later also used the word “Galatians”. The Romans called these people “Gauls”, and this word was used to describe a specific area, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, the Cévennes and the Rhine: “Gaul”. So the Celts, the Galatians and the Gauls were all part of the same Celtic civilisation. "Celts, a name applied by ancient writers to a population group occupying lands mainly north of the Mediterranean region from Galicia in the west to Galatia in the east [] Their unity is recognizable by common speech and common artistic traditions" [Waldman & Mason 2006] Mirobrigenses qui Celtici cognominantur. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History; example: C(AIUS) PORCIUS SEVERUS MIROBRIGEN(SIS) CELT(ICUS) -> not just one culture "Their tribes and groups eventually ranged from the British Isles and northern Spain to as far east as Transylvania, the Black Sea coasts, and Galatia in Anatolia and were in part absorbed into the Roman Empire as Britons, Gauls, Boii, Galatians, and Celtiberians. Linguistically they survive in the modern Celtic speakers of Ireland, Highland Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, and Brittany." [Celtic Culture: a historical encyclopedia. by John Koch] "[] the individual CELTIC COUNTRIES and their languages, []" James, Simon (1999). The Atlantic Celts – Ancient People Or Modern Invention. University of Wisconsin Press. "All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae live, another in which the Aquitani live, and the third are those who in their own tongue are called Celtae, in our language Galli." [Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico] <= I had to translate that in school. It's tedious political propaganda. Read also the Comentarii and maybe the paper "Caesar's perception of Gallic social structures" that can be found in "Celtic Chiefdom, Celtic State," Cambridge University Press. The Celtic tribes and nations were diverse. They were pretty organized, with an academic system, roads, trade, and laws. They were not anarchic in any way. They were not warriors - they were mostly farmers. The Celts were first and foremost farmers and livestock breeders

The basic economy of the Celts was mixed farming, and, except in times of unrest, single farmsteads were usual. Owing to the wide variations in terrain and climate, cattle raising was more important than cereal cultivation in some regions.

Suetonius addressing his legionaries said "They are not soldiers—they're not even properly equipped. We've beaten them before." [not entirely sure, but I think that was in Tacitus' Annals]

Regarding the Picts, in particular, which part of their history is "anarchic"? Dál Riata? the Kingdom of Alba? Or are you referring to the warriors that inspired the Hadrian's Wall? Because no one really knows in our days who the fuck they were. The Picts’ name first appears in 297 AD. That is later. <cite> Celts are a good fit with the kind of indomitable, you-can't-kill-'em-off vibe of the Mandos. Reviled by Rome as ignorant savages with no culture or science, and only fit for slaughter or conquest, the Celts were in fact much more civilized than Rome even by modern standards. </cite> That's how the Romans looked at pretty much every culture that wasn't Greek, Roman, Phoenician, Egyptian, or from Mesopotamia (read, if you want, anything Roman or Greek about the Skyths, the Huns, Vandals, Garamantes...).

<cite> They also kicked Roman arse on the battlefield, and were very hard to keep in line, so Rome did what all lying, greedy superpowers do when challenged: they demonized and dehumanized the enemy. (They still used them in their army, of course, but that's only to be expected.) </cite> They were hard to keep in line, but they most definitely did not kick Roman arse on the battlefield. Roman arse was kicked along the borders of the Roman Empire, such as the Rhine, the Danube, the Atlas mountains, etc. And mostly by actually badly organized, slightly anarchic groups, such as the Goths or the Huns (BTW the Huns were not a Germanic people, even though early 20th century British propaganda likes to say so). Though they were also decisively stopped by the Parthians. Who were very organized. Ah well. <cite> While Rome was still leaving its unwanted babies to die on rubbish dumps - a perfectly acceptable form of family planning to this "civilisation" - and keeping women as chattels devoid of rights, the barbarian Celts had a long-standing legal system that not only gave women what we would think of as equal rights, but also protected the rights of the elderly, children, and the disabled. They had a road network across Europe and worldwide trade long before the Romans ever got their act together. And their science - well, their astronomical calculations were so sophisticated that it takes computers to do the same stuff today. </cite> See? You even say yourself that they weren't actually anarchic. Also you're not completely right: 1. women (of most Celtic cultures, with one notable exception being the Irish) were not allowed to become druids, e.g. scientists, physicians, priests, or any other kind of academics, so they did not have equal rights. Also, as in other Indo-European systems, the family was patriarchal. 2. the roads they had were more like paths, and did not span the entirety of Europe; the old roads that are still in use are nearly all of them Roman. Had the Celtic inhabitants of Gallia or Britannia built comparable roads, why would the Romans have invested in building a new system on top? 3. world-wide? Yeah, right. They traded with those who traded with others and so were able to trade with most of southern Eurasia and northern Africa, as well as few northern parts (Balticum, Rus), but that's (surprise) not the whole world. 4. most people use computers for those calculations you mention because its easier. It's not necessary. I can do those calculations - give me some time to study astronomy (I'm a math major, not physics) and some pencils and paper. 5. and - I nearly forgot - the kids didn't die. That was a polite fiction. The harsh truth is that most Roman slaves were Romans... <cite> So - not barbarians. Just a threat to the empire, a culture that wouldn't let the Pax Romana roll over it without a fight. (Except the French tribes, who did roll over, and were regarded by the Germanic Celts [...]) </cite> WTF Germanic Celts? What are you smoking, woman? Isn't it enough that you put every culture speaking a language from the Celtic family in one pot and act as if they were one people, now you have to mix in a different language-family as well? Shall we continue that trend? What about the Mongolian Celts, are they, too, proof that the Celts were badass warriors? I think at this point I just lost all leftover trust in your so-called knowledge. <cite> [...] as being as bad as the Romans. Suck on that, Asterix... </cite> Asterix was definitely a Celt, and unlike the British Celts, he was not a citizen of the Roman Empire.

<cite> Broad brush-stroke time; Celts were not a centralized society but more a network of townships and tribes, a loose alliance of clans who had their own internal spats, but when faced with some uppity outsider would come together to drive off the common threat. </cite> They might have tried, but they didn't. The first and only time a Celtic people really managed to drive off some uppity outsider would be 1922 following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921*. The fact that France, Spain, Portugal speak Romance languages and the British (or Irish) Isles nearly uniformly speak English should be proof enough.

*Unless you count Asterix. <cite> You couldn't defeat them by cutting off the head. There was no head to cut off. </cite> You mean unlike Boudica and Vercingetorix. Oh wait. Tacitus, in his Annals, said that Boudica's last fight cost 80,000 Britons and 400 Romans their lives. He was probably exaggerating. But it definitely stopped much of the British resistance in its tracks. <cite> To the centralized, formal, rather bureaucratic Romans, for whom the city of Rome was the focus of the whole empire, this was a big does-not-compute. The Celts were everything they didn't understand. And we fear what we don't understand, and we kill what we fear. </cite> While that is totally true, it's also completely off the mark. The Romans demonized the druids, not every Celt, and they were afraid of what was basically an academic network. That had nothing to do with war. <cite> Anyway, Mandos....once I took a single concept - in this case, the idea of clans that operated on a loose alliance system, like the Celts - the rest grew organically. I didn't plan it out in detail from the start. </cite> That's really obvious. Maybe looking at some numbers and remembering that you weren't planning a small, local, rural, medieval community would have helped, too. I mean lets have a look at, say, Scotland (since you specifically mentioned the Picts): they still have less than 6 mio. people all together, and that's today. Mandalore is a sector. A sector of Outer Space with at least 2000 inhabited planets. How do you think that translates? It doesn't. <cite> I just asked myself what a culture of nomadic warriors would value, how they would need to operate to survive, and it all grew inexorably by logical steps. The fact that Mandos ended up as very much like the Celts is proof that the technique of evolving a character or species - find the niche, then work out what fits it - works every time. It creates something very realistic, because that's how real people and real societies develop. </cite> Celtic people were usually not nomadic! And, once again, non of them were predominantly warriors! It's really hard to be a nomadic farmer. I believe the biggest mistake you made, Ms Traviss, is mixing up the Iron Age (and earlier) tribes that did indeed sack Rome and parts of Greece, and that one day would become the people the Romans conquered. And apart from the Picts they really were conquered. <cite> So all I can say about Mandos and Spartans is that the average Mando would probably tell a Spartan to go and put some clothes on, and stop looking like such a big jessie. </cite>

I'd really like to see a Mando – or anyone – wearing full plate without modern or Star Wars technology in Greece. Happy heatstroke. There is a reason they didn't wear a lot (look up the Battle of Hattîn, where crusaders who didn't wear full helmets and wore chainmail* still suffered badly from heat exhaustion). [Nicolle, David (1993), Hattin 1187: Saladin's Greatest Victory] *chainmail apparently can work like a heatsink CONCLUSION You're wrong. And I felt offended by your FAQ answers. QUESTION You're English. You're from England. A group - a nation - that was historically so warlike and so successful that by now we all speak English. A nation that definitely kicked arse against any Celtic nation trying to go against them (until 1921, and they really tried anyway). A nation that had arguably the largest Empire in history. A nation that still is barbaric and warlike enough that a lost football game has people honestly fearing for their lives.

Also, a Germanic group, since you seem to have trouble keeping language-families and cultures apart. If we were to talk about the family, we could add on the current most aggressively attacking nation (USA) plus the former most aggressively attacking nations (the second and third German Reich), also the people who killed off the Roman Empire for good (the Goths and Visigoth), the original berserkers (the Vikings) and claim at the very least the start of BOTH WORLD WARS. Why did you look further?

Some other sources:

Histoire de la vie privée by Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès, the first book (about the antiquity) I read it translated, my French is ... bad to non-existent

The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire (about the Huns) by Alessandro Barbero

If you speak Dutch or German, you might try

Helmut Birkhan: Kelten. Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung ihrer Kultur, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien

Janssens, Ugo, De Oude Belgen. Geschiedenis, leefgewoontes, mythe en werkelijkheid van de Keltische stammen. Uitgeverij The House of Books

DISCLAIMER

I’m angry and I wrote this down in one session and thus probably made some mistakes. I’m sorry. Or maybe I’m not sorry. I’m still angry. She can’t know who reads her FAQ and at least two of her answers (on her professional website) were offensive to the reader.

#history #england #scotland #ancient celts #roman empire #mandalorians #sparta #proud warrior race #shitty research #rant #me ranting #fuck this #karen traviss

81 notes · View notes

strangeandforlornbooks · 4 years

Text

best books with morally ambiguous narrators!

all y’all’s problematic faves and villains! :) also included are third person narrators but in books with morally ambiguous leads/themes

Sci-fi

Scythe by Neal Shusterman: in a future free from pain, disease, and war, people can live forever. ‘scythes’ are given the power to decide who lives and who dies to preserve the balance. sad and kinda gives of hunger games vibes, if you like that.

Neuromancer by William Gibson: basically invented the cyberpunk genre. strange and removed protagonists. (a team of computer hackers have to face off against an evil AI). you kind of dislike everyone and suddenly you’re crying over them. one of those trippy sci-fi classics.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut: very beautiful and very very sad (same author as slaughterhouse five). the richest man in america has to face a martian invasion. more about free will and bad people doing good things than a plot that makes any kind of sense.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick: set in an alternate universe where the germans and japanese won world war two. not really like the tv show at all- it’s not an action story, and there’s not really the hope to somehow fix the world that drives a lot of dystopia stories. instead its about how people survive and connect to one another in a hopeless society.

The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow: a supercomputer convinces the leaders of the world to keep the peace for hundreds of years by taking their children hostage and obliterating any city that disobeys. what happens to the hostage protagonists when war seems inevitable? lots of morally fraught decisions and characters slowly losing their identity. (plus a fun lesbian romance)

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson: a brilliant mathematician and a dedicated marine fight to keep the ultra secret in world war two. fifty years later, a tech company discovers what remains of their story. one of the most memorable sequences in the book is a japanese soldier slowly becoming disillusioned with his nation and horrified by the war even as he continues to fight.

Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick: another one of those sci-fi classics that’s not at all like the movie. there is a bounty hunter for robots, though, as well as a weird religion that probably is referencing catholicism and a decaying society with a shortage of pets. kind of a trip.

Wilder Girls by Rory Power: girls trapped in a boarding school on an isolated island must face a creeping rot that affects the animals and plants on the island as well as their own bodies. the protagonists will do anything to survive and keep each other safe. very tense (and bonus lesbian romance whoo)

The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin: three women are gifted with the ability to control the earth’s energy in a world where those who can do so are forced into hiding or slavery. some veryyyy dark choices here but lots of strong female characters.

Historical Fiction

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters: two victorian lesbians fall in love as they plot to betray each other in horrific ways. lots of plot twists, plucky thieves, gothic settings, and a great romance.

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiwicz: a powerful roman soldier in the time of Nero plots to kidnap a young woman after he falls in love with her, only to learn more about the mysterious christian religion she follows. very melodramatic but some terrific prose.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: a blind girl in France and a brilliant German boy recruited by the military struggle through the chaos of the second world war. ends with a bang (iykyk.) very sad, reads like poetry.

Boxers by Gene Luen Yang: graphic novel reveals the story of a young boy fighting in the boxer rebellion in early twentieth century china. the sequel, saints, is also excellent. beautifully and sympathetically shows the protagonist’s descent into evil- the reader really understands each step along the way.

Fantasy

Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake: three triplets separated at birth, each with their own magical powers, have to fight to the death to gain the throne. lots of fun honestly

Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo: everyone in these books is highly problematic but you love them all anyway. a ragtag game of criminals plan a heist on a magical fortress. some terrific tragic back stories, repressed feelings, and revenge schemes.

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King: idk how to describe these frankly but if you can put up with King’s appalling writing of female characters they’re pretty interesting. fantasy epic about saving the world/universe, sort of. cowboys and prophecies and overlapping dimensions and drug addicts galore.

The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud: lots of fun! a twelve year old decides to summon a demon for his cute lil revenge scheme. sarcastic demon narrator. lighthearted until s*** gets real suddenly.

Elegy and Swansong by Vale Aida: fantasy epic with machiavellian lesbians and enemies to lovers to enemies to ??? to lovers. charming and exciting and lovely characters.

The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen: an orphan boy must compete with a few others for the chance to impersonate a dead prince. really dark but very tense and exciting and good twists.

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu: fantasy epic. heroes overthrow an evil empire and then struggle as the revolution dissolves into warring factions. interesting world building and three dimensional characters, even if they only have a small part.

Circe by Madeline Miller: the story behind the witch who turns men into pigs in the odyssey. madeline miller really said, i just used my classics degree to write a beautiful gay love story and now im going to write a powerful feminist retelling because i can. queen. an amazing and satisfying book that kills me a lil bit because of the two lines referencing the song of achilles.

Heartless by Marissa Meyer: the tragic backstory for the queen of hearts in alice in wonderland. a little predictable but very fun with a compelling protagonist

A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) by George RR Martin: ok I know we all hate GRRM and rightfully so but admittedly these books do have some great characters and great scenes. they deserve better than GRRM though. also he will probably never finish the books anyway....

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket: not really fantasy but not really anything else either. plucky, intelligent, and kind children fight off evil plots for thirteen books until suddenly you realize the world is not nearly as black and white as you thought.

Classics

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: gothic romance!! a new wife is curious about the mysterious death of her predecessor in a creepy old house in the British countryside...good twists and lovely prose.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles: not really morally ambiguous but one awful decision suddenly has awful consequences and certain people are haunted by guilt forever.... really really really beautiful and really really really sad. boys in a boarding school grow up together under the shadow of world war two.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: while imperial russia slowly decays a beautiful young woman begins a destructive affair. a long book. very russian. the ending is incredibly tense and well written.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding: I think you know the plot to this one. the prose is better than you remember and the last scene is always exciting.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie: one by one, the guests on an island are slowly picked off. one of Christie’s darkest mysteries- no happy ending here! very tense and great twists.

Contemporary

The Secret History by Donna Tartt: inspired the whole dark academia aesthetic. college students get a little too into ancient greece and it does not end very well. lovely prose but I found the characters unlikable.

Honorable Mentions

The Dublin Saga by Edward Rutherford: has literally a billion protagonists, but some of them are morally ambiguous ig? follows a few families stories’ from the 400s ad to irish independence in the 20s. beautifully captures the weight and movement of irish history.

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer: how morally ambiguous can you be if you’re, like, eleven? a lot if you’re a criminal genius who wants to kidnap a fairy for your evil-ish plan apparently!

Redemption by Leon Uris: literally my favorite novel ever. the sequel to Trinity but can stand alone. various irish families struggle through the horrors of world war one. the hero isn’t really morally ambiguous, but the main theme of the novel is extremely bad people suddenly questioning their choices and eventually redeeming themselves. sweeping themes of love, screwed up families, redemption, and patriotism.

The Lymond Chronicles and House of Niccolo by Dorothy Dunnett: heroes redeem themselves/try to get rich/try to save their country in early renaissance Europe. if I actually knew what happened in these books I'm sure it would be morally ambiguous but its too confusing for me. in each book you spend at least a third convinced the protagonist is evil, though. lots of exciting sword fights, tragic romances, plot twists, and kicking english butt.

Bonus: Protagonist is less morally ambiguous and more very screwed up and sad all the time

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: you know this one bc its quoted in all those quote compilations. basically the story of how one horrible event traumatizes a young man and how he develops a connection to a painting. really really really good.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: hard to describe but strange... not an action novel or a dystopia really but sort of along those lines. very hopeless.

#book recs #morally ambiguous protagonists #dark academia #book recommendations #mine

71 notes · View notes

dwellordream · 3 years

Text

“...Cloth fibers could be dyed at several points during production (though again, note above that dyeing was far more common for wool than for linen). Assuming wool was scoured after shearing, it could be dyed at that point (thus the phrase ‘dyed in the wool’) though unscoured wool will not generally take a dye because the natural oils of the wool will prevent the dye from setting into the cloth. Alternately, wool might be spun and then dyed either as thread or as finished woven cloth. In the early modern period, undyed woven fabrics fit for dying were called ‘whites’ and might either be dyed locally or in some cases shipped significant distances to be dyed elsewhere (in no small part because, as we’ll see, the availability of dye colors was regionally dependent).

Today, we are used to the effectively infinite range of colors offered by synthetic dyes, but for pre-modern dye-workers, they were largely restricted to colors that could be produced from locally available or imported dyestuffs. If you wanted a given color of fabric, you needed to be able to find something in the natural world which, when broken down could give you a chemical pigment that you could transfer to your fabric in a durable way. That put real limits on the colors which could be dyed and the availability of those colors.

Some colors simply couldn’t be produced this way – a good example were golden or metallic colors. If something in a dress was to be truly golden (and not merely yellow), the only way to do that prior to synthetic dyes and paints was to use actual gold, weaving small strands of ultra-thin gold wire into the cloth or embroidering designs with it. Needless to say, that was something only done by the very wealthy. Alternately, if the dye for a given hue or color came from something rare or foreign or difficult to process (for instance, in all three cases, Tyrian or royal purple, which came from the murex sea snails – if you have ever wondered why no country has purple as a national color this is why, before synthetic dyes, coloring your flags and uniforms purple would have been bonkers expensive), then it was going to be expensive and rare and there just wasn’t much you could do about that.

What dyes were available thus varied based on where you were and how much you could afford to import. Determining ancient dye availability is often tricky, since fabric so rarely survives, but we know that the Romans prized a wide range of colors; Pliny gives us some clues as to some of the more expensive dyes in his Natural History (such as saffron for a rich yellow), along with more common colors like blue (from woad), red (from madder), brown (from walnuts), and a cheaper yellow from weld. Similar sets of dyes were available in the Middle Ages, J.S. Lee notes the principal dyestuffs in use in England were woad (blue), madder (red), weld (yellow), ‘grain’ red (scarlet, this is kermes dye), cinnabar (vermillion), saffron (yellow) and various other vegetable and fruit dies (op. cit. 62). Many of these were imported; madder and weld from Germany, France and the Baltic, kermes and woad from the Mediterranean, Cinnabar from the Red Sea area. Madder, weld and woad in particular were the cheapest and most common dyes and served as the foundation for clothing color in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean (which is, consequently, why colors that can be produced by those dyes, or by mixing them, are so common in medieval artwork depicting clothing).

Eventually (‘true’) indigo blue dye came all the way from India (it was known to the Greeks and the Romans) but because of its imported nature it was an expensive luxury product in Europe prior to European colonial expansion. Indigo is a particularly good example, however, of how a dye (and its associated color, the deep blue) could be relatively inexpensive and available in one place and a rare luxury good used as a status symbol in others. While the dyes available were somewhat restricted, dyers could of course combine pigments to get composite colors, giving a fairly wide range of colors, assuming one had the money for the pigments...

The actual dying process varied based on the pigment being used and there were likely local craft differences as well. Still the process could be complex, with dyestuffs often needing to be ground down or broken up and then often heated (sometimes boiled) in order to get the pigments ready before the cloth would be immersed in the dye.

...Other dyes might require a mordant, a fixing agent which enabled the pigment to set on the fibers of the fabric. Alum was often used; in the Middle Ages it was sourced from Asia Minor and so needed to reach Europe via Mediterranean trade (although Italian sources of alum were found in 1462; it was only produced domestically in England in the 17th century and after). In other cases, as with the use of dyes produced from wood, tannic acid might be used as the mordant. Each dye had its own unique preparation process to produce the dye; some involved boiling, others fermenting, some grinding down the products and so on. Dyers needed access to quite a lot of water, both for the processes of making dye, but also to discharge the various effluent from the process – spent dye mixtures and waste water. Once the dye was made, the fibers, which might be unspun wool, spun wool thread or woven wool cloth, were immersed in the dye and then agitated; the agitation was done with a ‘dyer’s posser’ and introducing or removing the cloth was done with tongs.

...Now it is necessary to caveat this upfront: in terms of raw amounts of cloth produced, household textile production is likely to have outstripped commercial textile production until the start of the industrial revolution, so while commercial textile production is more visible to us (in part because rich businesses tend to leave records and their owners tend to be the sort of people to be literate and write things like wills which we can read) they weren’t the majority of production. So while clothiers and cloth merchants and professional weavers often get more attention in the sources (and consequently may get more attention in some modern treatments) they were likely a minority of cloth workers and cloth production prior to the early modern period.

At the same time, it is clearly wrong to think of the household production chain as being completely divorced from the commercial production chain; the two were clearly intermingled. Fullers and dyers seem to have represented a point where the two production systems converged; fulling and dying were difficult to do at household scale and required special skills and so it seems that even a household producing its own textiles would have a use for the fuller and the dyer to finish those clothes (because, again, people liked to look nice). Moreover, as we’ve discussed already, commercial clothiers often sourced the spinning and weaving they needed through the putting out system, paying domestic spinners and weavers (mainly women) on a wage or piece-work basis (that is, per-unit of thread or fabric).

...But of course there were also purely commercial workers making cloth, including elements of production that couldn’t be brought into the household (like fulling and dyeing) but also producers who worked primarily for the market. The emergence of large-scale textile production for markets – what we might term commercial production – seems closely connected to the rise of large cities, presumably because those cities contained both elites who might want to buy more (or finer) fabrics than their household could produce as well as poorer workers whose households (which might just be themselves) lacked the ability to produce textiles at all. Long distance trade was also clearly a factor that drove the emergence of large-scale cloth production; wool products were major exports as early as third millennium BC Summer (on this, note several of the chapters in C. Breniquet and C. Michel, op. cit.)

In both cases, we can see that dyers tend to be rather more highly paid than other textile workers, while second place goes to fullers (in the second chart, note that fulling, cleansing and finishing were all done in a fullery; it is the last task, I think, that would be done by the fuller himself (or herself) rather than paid workers or – in the Roman context – enslaved workers), with skilled professional weavers in the third place. The range of tax paid though gives a real sense of how there might be a considerable separation between the earning power of small-scale producers (or apprentices and other hired workers in a larger operation) and producers working at a larger scale (or making elite products).

Dyeworks (and fulleries in the medieval period) tended to be located just outside of urban centers, in part because of the smell (both kinds of work tend to smell quite bad). Because both dyeing and fulling made use of bad smelling mixtures, older scholars often assumed that the workers in these occupations were low status individuals and looked down upon. And while it is true that there does seem to have been some sense that these places were not terribly sanitary, more recent scholarship tends to show little evidence that the people who worked there – particularly the skilled, professional dyers and fullers – were low-status themselves.

In terms of the social position of cloth-makers, one indicator we can look to is professional associations and guilds. In the Roman world, professional associations (collegia) of fullers seem to have been quite common and Miko Flohr (op. cit.) argues persuasively that Roman fullers were respectable professionals, similar to other artisans – well below the political and social elite (whose wealth was in large landholdings), but not disreputable. Fuller’s collegia could be significant politically though; Flohr notes that Roman fullers seem to have been politically active, for instance, in Pompeii’s local politics (most famously dedicating a statue of Eumachia, a local aristocratic woman, outside of the ‘building of Eumachia’ the purpose of which is still under some dispute (but perhaps a market-place for fabric?)).

...So while the landed elite will have looked down their nose as textile workers (they looked down their nose at everyone), skilled professional textile workers represented fixtures in what we might see as a lower-middle-class of sorts in pre-modern cities. Because there were so many of them (and because they were attached to cloth merchants who might be truly wealthy) they often exerted a significant political and cultural pull. Thus there is an enormous range in the status of cloth-workers, from the well-to-do dyer who might be a respected professional artisan to the poorly paid spinner working in the ‘putting out’ system in her spare time when she wasn’t making clothing for her relatively poor farming family.”

- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool.”

#textiles #dyeing #history #bret devereaux #writing #ancient #medieval

2 notes · View notes

spine-buster · 5 years

Text

Alone, Together | Chapter 35 | Morgan Rielly

A/N: I just...someone call the Pope.

“First class again?” Bee asked as she looked down at the boarding pass that had just printed out from the kiosk at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. She readjusted the Louis Vuitton tote bag on her shoulder – the same one that Lucy convinced her to buy all those months ago – and looked up at Morgan quickly.

“Did you expect anything less from me?” Morgan asked, looking down at her. “I mean…really.”

Bee snorted as she took a closer look at the boarding pass in her hand, wondering if she got a window seat again or if she was in an aisle cubby. As she looked at her seat number, a peculiar word caught her eye. “Uh oh.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I think it printed out the wrong boarding pass for us. We might have to go back up to that lady who took our luggage.”

“What do you mean?” Morgan said, his tone not phased at all by the apparent error. Morgan flew all the time – this was probably a common error. Did private team jets still print boarding passes?

“It says the destination is Kelowna instead of Vancouver,” Bee said.

“That’s because the destination is Kelowna.”

For a moment, Bee couldn’t understand the words coming out of Morgan’s mouth. She looked at him like he had three heads, trying to decipher the words. “We…we’re going to Kelowna?” she asked. He nodded. “But…I thought we were going to Vancouver?”

“We are, silly. I’m surprising you with a trip to the Okanagan Valley first, then we’re going to Vancouver,” Morgan was smirking at her.

“The Okanagan Valley? You mean like B.C. wine country?”

“Precisely,” he leaned down to give her a quick kiss. “Who would I be if I didn’t surprise you with something. And don’t Morgan me.”

She sneered at him playfully. “I wasn’t going to.”

“Sure.”

“But you do…I mean…” she began, wondering if she should even say the words. “You do know we could be staying in a Motel 6 and I’d be happy.”

“Briony,” he said her name in a half-amused, half-warning tone. He leaned down to kiss her again before continuing. “What’d I say about this stuff.”

“I know, but--”

“We are going to have,” kiss, “a very good time,” kiss, “going on winery tours,” kiss, “and watching the sunset,” kiss, “over the Okanagan,” kiss, “and then we’re gonna take a roadtrip,” kiss, “to Vancouver,” kiss, “and watch the sunrise,” kiss, “over the Sunshine Coast,” kiss, “just like last time,” kiss.

Bee couldn’t help but smile at his words. She was also very conscious of the fact that he was kissing her multiple times in the middle of a busy airport. She didn’t used to be that person, but Morgan brought it out of her. She licked her lips and bit her bottom lip before looking up at him. “You’re too good to me,” she mumbled.

“You get what you deserve, Bumblebee,” he winked. “Now let’s go.”

***

When they touched down in Kelowna, they checked in at the Delta Grand Okanagan Resort on the waterfront and changed into workout gear. Morgan wanted to take Bee hiking up the mountain to see the views, and she was more than ready to comply, despite the fact that she knew she was out of shape and would probably have to stop several times along the way up the mountain. She knew the views would be worth it, and if she was a sucker for anything, it was views from mountaintops. Considering she had never been to Kelowna, she thought it the perfect introduction.

They began their hike at the base of Knox Mountain Park, following the trail diligently and making sure to stay on the designated path. There were a lot of hikers out and about due to the beautiful day outside, so there were many quick greetings and many dog pets as they made their way up. About half way up the hike, they happened upon a group of middle-aged people – Bee would say they were probably around Rocco and Clarette’s age – with four golden retrievers between them. Morgan was in absolute heaven. Everybody stopped so the dogs could be pet, and one of the men eventually recognized Morgan, so everyone posed for a group photo. Bee was pulled into it for some reason. The man’s wife was so excited that she pulled Bee in. It was all very nice, but unnecessary for her to be there. She could have at least taken the photo.

When they got to the top of the mountain about twenty minutes later, Bee gasped. There, before her eyes, was Okanagan Lake and the city of Kelowna spread out across the landscape. Though she was out of breath, probably red, and definitely sweating, she couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed at the sight before her. The vast expanse before her was almost too much to handle; too beautiful to forget. She focused hard, and long, creating a mental image in her head of the view so that she’d never forget it. She didn’t want this memory to disappear.

It was only when she felt Morgan’s arm wrap around her waist that her trance sort of ended – even then, she couldn’t look at him, too transfixed on finding every little detail to remember. The colour of the trees. The sparkle of the water. The deep blue of the sky. “It’s beautiful, eh?” he asked softly.

“Like…it’s not fair,” she said, causing Morgan to giggle slightly. “I know I said this on the boat that morning in January but you’re so lucky that you got to grow up here. Like, incredibly lucky.”

“I know, Bumblebee. That’s why I want to bring you here all the time,” he admitted. “I want you to love it as much as I do.”

She couldn’t help but smile as she finally looked up at him. “I already do.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Just by virtue of the fact that you grew up here. Never mind the views and the scenery and the people – they’re extra. I love it because you love it. Because it’s your home.”

Morgan leaned down to kiss her, not caring about how many people were around possibly watching. Sometimes, Bee had the simplest reasons for things, and for a guy who got stuck in his head too much and came up with overly complicated explanations for things some of the time, it was that simplicity that he needed. I love it because it’s your home. It was the simplest sentiment but one that brought out the best in Bee. She didn’t need anything besides the ground beneath her feet and her favourite people by her side. Everything else was extra. “I love you, you know that?” he whispered against her lips.

“You do?”

He pinched her butt playfully. “Smart ass.”

“Yeah, but you love my ass.”

“You’re lucky I do.”

***

So you’re finally working out. About fucking time, fat ass.

Surprised you’re not off fucking Fred or Tyler for your 15 minutes of fame. But then again, who’d want to fuck someone as desperate as you?

Making Morgan spend money on you again…typical. Bleeding him dry. If you were smart you’d be with Auston bc he has way more money.

All the Toronto girls are talking about you behind your back. I hope you know that. You’re still the biggest social climber ever. You think you’re hot shit but you’re not. And just because your new BFF is Aryne, it doesn’t mean a thing. Everybody can see right through you. When Aryne and Morgan dump you, it’s over for you. You’re already so irrelevant.

Why do u think u can wear tights like that omg u look like a complete whale!

Go drown urself in that lake bitch

“Is everything okay?” Morgan asked as he crawled into bed beside Bee, snuggling up to her automatically as she lay in bed with a lace camisole pyjama set. Bee had sent Angie a quick text to see how Bruce was doing, and Angie was supposed to have sent a video of Bruce back to them. She and Mason were cat and house sitting the apartment while they were away.

“It’s fine,” she sighed. “Just reading the latest messages from my fan club.”

“Fan club?” Morgan asked. When she gave him her phone and he saw the familiar layout of Instagram, he knew immediately what she was talking about and furrowed his brows.

Ur soooooooo desperate for attention

U look like a cheap hooker…like not even an escort. Ur so trash!!!!!

You should learn a thing or two from Lucy and her yoga business. AKA stop leeching off your boyfriend!!!!! You think you’re better than everyone else when you’re not. SAD!

Morgan is stupid to be with you. I don’t understand what he sees in trash like you.

“Bumblebee…you don’t…I can’t…” he couldn’t find the right words to say as he shook his head. “I’ve gotta talk to Steve again…”

“He’s not coming back from Europe for you, Morgan.”

“Briony, you shouldn’t have to be dealing with this,” he said sternly, unable to joke about this like she was. “I know how much this affects you, baby. And it’s not fair. It’s not fair that they can say whatever they want to you and you have to refrain from saying anything back. That you can’t…that you…” he trailed off.

“That I what?” she asked. She was practically able to see the gears shifting in his head.

“You can’t say anything about it…but what if I did?”

“NO,” she half-screamed, grabbing her phone out of his hand quickly before his thoughts got the best of him. She sat up in the bed and he followed her, sitting up too. “Morgan Frederick Rielly, NO. Don’t you dare. Don’t you – that would make it worse, Morgan. That’s the stupidest idea you’ve ever come up with. Could you imagine the media coverage on that? Kyle would blow a gasket, let alone Steve. Shanny might have a stroke.”

“But I want to keep you safe, Bumblebee. I need to keep you safe,” he tried to reason with her.

“Not at the expense of your good reputation with the team and in Toronto and definitely not at the expense of your career,” she said sternly. “Morgan Frederick Rielly, don’t you even think about it.”

“But Briony--”

“Don’t.”

“I don’t understand how you can handle all this. It’s all my fault,” he said.

“It is most definitely not your fault.”

“I feel guilty every day, every fucking time I have to read one of those fucking messages or see you torn up about it. Canada Day wrecked me. To see you like that…Briony, I can’t. How can you be so…how can you handle it? How aren’t you scared ab--”

“Shhhhh…” she said quietly, bringing her finger up to his lips to quiet him. “Because my love for you is greater than my fear of that.”

Morgan took a moment to internalize her words. His chest was heaving slightly, he was a bit agitated, and his mind was set on doing something about it himself if he had to, but all he had to hear was her voice, her smooth, calming voice, and all those feelings washed away. “You…”

“My love for you is greater than my fear of that, or them, or anything they say to me,” she repeated, cradling his face in her hands as she kissed him. “You need to start realizing that. They can say whatever they want, and sometimes it might hurt me, and I might cry about it a little bit, but I’m stronger than that and I’ve been through way worse.”

Morgan sighed heavily. “Bumblebee…”

“Shhhhh…” she shushed him again, her finger on his lips being replaced by her own lips. “They’re all jealous. That’s all it is. Jealously. Jealous that you’re mine and jealous that we’re building a life together. Jealous that I get this giant hunk of man all to myself,” she whispered, kissing him again. “Now…if you don’t mind, I’d like to show this giant hunk of man how grateful I am for him and everything he does.”

“B-Bumblebee…” he mumbled out before she kissed him again.

“Quiet, Mr. Rielly.”

Morgan did as he was told. He began kissing her back, softly at first, then with a fervour he reserved only for her, that only she could bring out of him. And when she began kissing along his jawline, climbing on top of his body simultaneously and rubbing her core on his thigh, all his thoughts dissipated completely, replaced with a hunger that he felt only for her. He was insatiable for her. He could never get enough of her. He wanted her always, all the time, constantly, incessantly, persistently. His body ached for hers. It was crazy, he thought, how well they fit together. How their bodies responded to one another instinctually. He wouldn’t be able to find this with anyone else – couldn’t find this with anybody else.

Her took off her lace camisole easily. With her breasts now exposed he took the opportunity to lean forward and take a nipple in her mouth, sucking and teasing and biting down gently. She threw her head back, her long hair cascading down her back, and cradled his head in her hands before tugging on the tufts of his hair gently. She took his shirt off easily. Over it went, across the room, and she moved down his body to slip his boxers off slowly.

“Briony…” he managed to mumble out as she stayed there, grabbing his already hard cock in her hands.

“Shhhh,” she shushed him for the umpteenth time that night. She began stroking it and watched as he gulped. “I got you, baby.”

“I d…I don’t want to cum in your mouth,” he mumbled. “Don’t – when I say--”

“Mmkay,” she said quickly, licking the tip of his cock. “Just say the words,” she said in an almost playful tone before dipping down and taking him in her mouth.

He gathered some of her hair in his hand to get it out of her face; he didn’t want his view to be obstructed as she bobbed up and down, his cock disappearing inside her mouth further and further until he felt the head of his cock touch the back of her throat. He closed his eyes momentarily, relishing in the feeling. “Fuck, baby,” he sighed out.

Bee let out a mischievous giggle, her fingernails digging lightly into his thigh. “You like that, don’t you?” she asked as she scratched down slowly. Morgan nodded his head desperately. “You love it when I suck your cock.”

“Y-Yes,” he stuttered out. “Fuuuck Briony, I love it when my cock is down your throat.” He felt her dip down again, her tongue swirling around the tip, licking the pre-cum greedily. “You better start touching yourself,” he told her.

He watched as she slipped a hand down her body and underneath her shorts, wiggling out of them with ease. By now, he was rock hard, and when Bee looked up at him with her big green eyes before she took him in her mouth all the way, hitting the back of her throat again, his hips buckled and he let out a loud groan. She gagged slightly, his movements shoving his cock deeper into her throat, but when he looked at her again, she was already looking at him, a slight smile in her eyes that drove him fucking crazy. “Briony…p-p-please--”

She ignored him, looking away and focusing on her movements instead, and the feeling of his hand tugging at her hair slightly so he could get a better look at her. His grunts and movements gave her the confidence to keep going, to take risks and be as daring as she could. It wasn’t long, though, before Morgan’s breath became heavier, his chest rising and falling with every gasp her took. “B-Briony…”

She moaned on his cock in response, taking him to the back of her throat one more time before her mouth left his cock with a large pop. “I want more of your cock, baby. Just cu--”

“N-No,” he stuttered out.

“Babyyyyy,” she mewled, kissing the tip.

“No. I want…I…get up here,” he huffed out.

“Ba--” she tried again, but Morgan wasn’t having any of it. His hand left her hair as he leaned forward, pulling her up and flipping her onto her back on the bed, his large body immediately over hers as he grabbed at her thighs and wrapped her legs around him. He didn’t wait – there was no time to wait – and entered her quickly, the feeling of her warm walls around his cock causing him to moan out again.

“Holy fuck Mo,” she gasped out, her legs wrapped tightly around his torso so he stayed buried deep inside of her, not allowing him to move just yet. “Fuck baby.”

“Who gets too fill you up, Briony?”

“You, baby.”

“Who?”

“You, Mr. Rielly. Only you get to fill me up,” she pulled his head down to kiss him passionately, lips and tongues everywhere.

Morgan bit down on her bottom lip, dragging it away with him as he straightened out his back and unwrapped her legs from his body. He brought them both together, keeping them over his shoulder as he looked down at her, her body flush with desire. “You okay?” he asked. She nodded her head quickly. “You want my cock buried deep inside of you?”

“Yes Mr. Rielly,” she nodded her head.

He began moving, slowly at first, her breasts bouncing along every time he thrust into her. He would watch her breasts bouncing like that all night if he could. He progressively kept getting rougher and rougher until he was pounding into her, her moans and cries fuel for him to give her more. “You like it when I fuck you like this?”

“Y-Yes,” it was her turn to stutter out. “You feel so fucking good, baby.”

He could feel the heat inside of him growing. He grabbed at her legs that were over his shoulder and pushed them forward, into her body, changing the angle so he could go even deeper. She let out a string of expletives at the new feeling, her cries out music to his ears. “S’deep babe,” she could barely get the words out.

“You like that?”

“Yes Mr. Rielly. Yes. I love it when you fuck my pussy hard like that.”

“Are you gonna make that pretty pussy cum for me, Briony?”

She could only nod her head as he continued to pound into her, fast and rough and wild, until he felt her walls clench around him and heard her scream out his name over and over again. At the sound of his name escaping her lips so desperately and full of want, he exploded inside of her, leaning further into her so the angle was just right. Bee huffed, trying to catch her breath.

“Stay right there,” Morgan mumbled quickly.

“W…What?” she asked not understanding why he’d say such a thing. Where the fuck was she going to go?

It didn’t take long for her to find out. Two of his fingers slipped into her pussy quickly, causing her to gasp out, and they began moving quickly in and out of her, not allowing her to catch her breath or settle down from her first orgasm. “Mo...” she gasped out, but instead of answering her he licked his way down her body. He was being gentle but rough with his fingers, and she squirmed as she was pinned beneath him. “Mo Mo Mo Mo Mo…” she kept repeating his name as he finally attached his mouth to her clit, lapping and sucking like he was drinking a thick milkshake. “Mo, fuck, please.”

“All mine,” he mumbled against her pussy. “All fucking mine.”

“All yours Mr. Rielly. All yours,” she breathed out, grabbing hold of his hair. Her body gyrated at the sensation and it was too much; in no time, she was cumming again, the sound of her wetness and Morgan’s fingers still moving in and out of her just amplifying it all. He lapped up every last bit before moving back up, squishing her beneath his body as he kissed her.

“I love you Briony,” he mumbled against her lips.

She could taste her juices on his lips as she continued to kiss him. “I love you too baby. So much.”

***

“Wow, Ms. McTavish, you’re a natural!” Chef Michael smiled as Bee began basting the chicken breast cooking in the pan. The chef looked over to Morgan, who had given up a long time ago and chose instead to just watch – Bee had no problem cooking his chicken breast too. “You’re a lucky guy, eh?”

“The luckiest,” Morgan smiled as he watched Bee concentrating on the basting.

“Does she cook a lot at home?”

Morgan nodded his head. “My specialty is grilled cheese and breakfast for dinner. She does everything else.”

Chef Michael focused his attention back to Bee. “Alright Ms. McTavish, we need to let it simmer now. Let’s focus on those broccolini sautéing with the garlic. Think we should add more?”

“You can never have too much garlic.”

Chef Michael looked over at Morgan again. “My kinda girl!”

“I learned some of my cooking skills from an Italian,” Bee continued, stirring up the broccolini. “If a recipe called for two garlic cloves he’d put five.”

“Who are your friends? Your family? I need to meet these people!” Chef Michael exclaimed, so enthusiastic about everything. “Let’s mince some more garlic in there.”

When all was said and done, Bee had perfectly prepared two plates of creamy chicken in a white wine sauce, roasted Japanese sweet potatoes, and sautéed garlic broccolini. It smelled heavenly, and Morgan could tell she was so proud of herself as she fixed her plate with the last of the brocollini, Chef Michael instructing her on how to present everything beautifully. When she finished, he presented them with a bottle of white wine from the winery to have with their meal, uncorking it and pouring it for them.

“You two can bring your dinners out onto the patio with you. Ray will come to clean up the pans and dishes while you eat,” he said.

Morgan nodded but Bee furrowed her brows. “Oh, there’s no need for someone to clean up. We can just do that after.”

Chef Michael paused his movements momentarily. “No no Ms. McTavish, it’s fine. Ray will be in any second with the busser to take everything away.”

“I insist--”

“No ma’am, it’s fine,” Chef Michael stressed. “It’s part of the service. You can just enjoy your meal on the patio. You worked hard on it.”

“Bumblebee,” Morgan said gently. “It’s alright. We can go.”

She looked between Morgan and Chef Michael hesitantly before giving in. “Okay. Um, thank you,” she said, more awkwardly than she would have liked. “Are you positive? Because I can just wash everything after dinner. It’s no big deal.”

Chef Michael let out a laugh. “Go enjoy your meal Ms. McTavish. And have a good night.”

Bee followed Morgan out onto the patio with her plate and wine glass, his own already on the table. She looked back into the room as Morgan closed the sliding door, watching as Chef Michael gathered all the dirty cutlery and utensils and put them all in the sink. She looked to Morgan, who had pulled out her chair for her. “Does that usually happen?” she asked.

“Does what usually happen?”

“People cleaning up after you in these fancy shmancy places,” she clarified, setting her plate and wine down on the table.

“If you request for butler service, yes. But we didn’t get that,” Morgan said, knowing that would be her next question; that she would give him one of her looks if he did. “I think it’s just a part of the service they offer with the chef. I think they figure you’d want to eat right after instead of clean up.”

“It’s a bit…I mean, I can clean up after myself.”

“Not everybody is responsible and sensible like you,” he leaned his head down to kiss her quickly. “Now, let’s eat, shall we? I want to have a romantic dinner with my girlfriend.”

Romantic it was. Morgan couldn’t keep his eyes off of her. The scenery spread out before them was beautiful – just like everything else was in British Columbia – but he could only transfix his eyes on her, watching her as she ate and listening to anything she began talking about – how it was supposed to get cool that night, how Angie had sent her a new video of Bruce with the zoomies, how Mark had texted her that they had made record profits the past month for a particular client of theirs. If her voice were the only thing he heard for the rest of his life, he’d still die a happy man.

When they finished their meal, Bee stacked their plates on top of one another. She brought them into the villa, setting them in the sink before popping her head out the sliding door. “Is there a way you can call so they can come get these plates and not bother us for the rest of the night?” she asked. “I don’t want anyone coming back in. I just want to watch the sunset with you.”

“Yeah, of course,” Morgan nodded his head, getting up from his seat. “I’ll call.”

“Good. I’m going to the washroom,” she said, disappearing into the bedroom.

After some time, Ray was back to collect their plates and ask if they wanted anything else taken care of the night. Morgan declined, thanking him, and let him go for the night, making sure to lock the door behind him as Ray left. He found it a bit peculiar that Bee was still in the washroom. He hoped the food didn’t get to her; there’d be some strongly worded complaints if it did.

“Bumblebee? You alright in there?” he called out. He glanced at the screen door quickly to see the sunset in full bloom.

“I’m okay,” she said. “Is Ray gone?”

“Ray’s gone,” Morgan confirmed. “You feeling okay, Bumblebee?”

“I’m feeling fine,” she responded, but he could tell her voice was a little off. “Can you…um…can you make sure the door is locked?”

“Already is.”

“Okay. Can you come into the bedroom?”

Morgan furrowed his brows. “Of course,” he said. “Are you sure you’re okay, Bumblebee?”

“I’m fine,” she confirmed, still calling out from the closed washroom. “Just…you know…get comfy. Change into your pyjamas. I’ll be out soon and we’ll go out and watch the sunset.”

Morgan did as she said, stripping himself down and changing into his pyjama bottoms. He sat in the chair, folding the jeans he had been wearing, before the light in the bedroom mysteriously turned off. He looked up, only the light from the sunset peeking through the window. “Bumblebee?” he saw her stand outside the doorway to the washroom.

“Hey.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Good thing you’re already sitting in the chair. Topless, even,” there was a slight laugh in her voice, not answering his question. She turned on the lamp, illuminating the room romantically. He noticed she was wearing a robe. She never wore a robe at home.

“What’s this?” he asked, his eyes wide as he noticed it was a silk robe, lace trim dangling from the ends of sleeves.

Bee smiled shyly. “Just a little something.”

“Just a little something, huh?” Morgan gave her an up-down, throwing his jeans onto the floor beside him.

“Mhm,” she nodded her head, playing with the tassels that tied the robe together. “You know…I bet all that cooking must have taken a lot out of you,” she winked.

Morgan couldn’t help but giggle slightly. “Oh, it did. I am spent.”

“Well then. Just sit back and let me give you a show,” she smiled devilishly.

“A show?” Morgan asked. Bee nodded her head slightly. “You…you planned something?”

“Is that okay?”

Morgan couldn’t help but let out a light laugh. His body already felt on fire. She had planned something – with that robe on, and whatever else was underneath it – and was asking if it was okay? “Of course baby,” he said softly. “Let me see. Let me see what you’ve planned.”

Standing far away from him, she bent over and leaned forward, placing a quick kiss on his lips. “I trust you.”

“And I trust you. And I love you.”

“Good to know. Because by the end of this I have every intention of you fucking me like you don’t.”

Morgan’s pupils dilated. He gulped nervously. He watched as Bee straightened herself out and took a few steps back, playing again with the tassels on the robe before she started to sway her hips slowly back and forth. She worked on untying the tassels slowly, achingly so, and Morgan could feel himself getting hard with each passing hip sway. Eventually, she pulled, untying the bow and letting it fall, the robe becoming looser. A hint of pink lace peeked its way out of the robe.

“Briony…” Morgan barely made out her name.

“Yeah baby?” she asked in an innocent voice, her fingertips gliding along the edge of the fabric near her chest.

“What…what did you--”

“Shhhh baby,” she cooed, approaching him slowly, seductively. “What did I tell you?”

“But baby--” he tried reaching out to grab the fabric of the robe.

She smacked his hand away quickly. He looked at her in the eye, shocked. “Don’t touch me,” she ordered. “Don’t touch me unless I tell you. Just watch.”

She saw his chest rise and fall dramatically. “Briony--” he tried to grab at her again.

“Don’t. Touch. Me,” she stressed, smacking his hand away once more. “Unless you want me to stop. Then you’ll have to take care of that,” she eyed down to the growing bulge in his pants, “all alone.”

There was a fire in her eyes and Morgan knew she meant it. This was completely new – he was completely blind-sided – but he wasn’t exactly complaining. He loved seeing this sort of confidence from Bee. He thought it partly cute, partly evil that she had planned this – masterminded it from the beginning. He nodded his head, agreeing with her. He couldn’t formulate a word. There was no point.

She took a couple of small steps back – far enough so Morgan couldn’t reach out, and far enough so he could get a full body view – and started to pull the robe down her shoulders slowly, letting it fall to the floor dramatically revealing, inch by inch, the blush pink floral lace bralette and garter set, complete with a matching pair of pantyhose.

“Oh my fucking God,” Morgan mumbled in disbelief.

A smile adorned Bee’s face. “Do you like, Mr. Rielly?”

Morgan nodded, beginning to feel an uncomfortable strain in his pants. “Yes,” he nodded his head almost desperately. “Yes. Yes. I love it,” he was a gibbering mess.

“D’you like the colour?”

“Yes.”

“And the lace?”

“Yes.”

“What about the garter? And the pantyhose?”

“I love it all,” the desperation was evident in his voice. “I love it all. Every fucking piece of it.”

“Good,” she bit her bottom lip, running her fingers along the lace of the thong that hung on her hips. She took a step towards him. “So if I came closer…” another step, “and closer,” another step, “and closer,” one final step, “you’d be able to keep your hands to yourself?”

Morgan huffed out a breath. “I don’t…”

“If I put my hand on your chest…” she moved to do exactly that, walking to his side. His head followed her as far as it could until she was behind him. “If my breath grazed the back of your neck…” she moved, again, to do exactly that as she stood behind him, her hand still on his chest as she gave the skin on his neck a quick kiss. She took a few steps so she was standing in front of him again, turning away so her back was towards him, her ass in full view. “If I sat in your lap, would you be able to keep your hands to yourself?”

She didn’t give him the chance to answer. She lowered herself onto his lap, swaying her hips back and forth for good measure. She heard Morgan grunt as she did so, absolutely fucking loving that she was getting such a reaction out of him. She felt powerful. Sexy. Sensual. She could feel the erection already in his pants and it made her the most confident she’d ever been.

“Fucking hell, Briony,” Morgan whispered. Like clockwork, it didn’t take long for her to feel his hand on her ass, even if it was just a quick caress.

She rose up quickly and slapped his hand away for a third time. He whined out in protest as she walked away from him, flipping her hair over her shoulder to look at him. “No. Touching.”

“But Briony--”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“NO! No no no,” he shook his head. “Please God no.”

“No more touching. Do you understand me?” she said, her voice seductive but stern. “No. More. Touching.”

“I won’t. I won’t.”

“Promise me,” she demanded.

“I promise. I promise you,” he was desperate, so desperate. “I swear to you, I won’t touch you. Fuck Briony, fuuuuck, I w…I won’t touch you. Not unless you tell me. Just get back here.”

“Not until you beg.”

Morgan whined out again. “Briony. Briony please.”

“Beg.”

Morgan could swear there were tears forming in his eyes. “Please Briony, I promise. I’m begging you. Come back here so I can look at you. Please. Please.”

Briony smiled, biting down on her bottom lip again. “If you touch me without my permission again it’s over. Keep your hands to yourself.”

Morgan nodded his head. “I will. I’ll keep my hands to myself, I promise. Now please. Please come back here.”

Bee sauntered over to him, bending over so her breasts, covered by the delicate lace, were right in his face. She leaned forward so the material gently grazed against his nose and lips. “Lace is your favourite, isn’t it?” she asked, already knowing the answer. Morgan nodded his head. “You always go crazy for me in lace.”

“You look perfect in it,” his voice was low. “You make it look perfect. Every time.”

She straightened out briefly so she could turn around again, her ass facing him as she sat down on his lap. “You love spanking me too, don’t you.”

She heard his sharp intake of breath. “Y-Yes,” he stuttered out.

She looked over to see his hands gripping the armrests of the chair, his knuckles almost completely white. Excellent. “Especially when I’ve been a good girl?”

“I…y…yes,” he huffed out, stuttering again. She watched as his hands shook through the grip he had on the armrests.

“Am I being a good girl right now?” she asked, grinding down against him gently.

“I’d reckon you’re being a bad girl right now.”

Bee let out a giggle, looking at him over her shoulder. “Is that so?”

“You’re being a very bad girl teasing me like this,” he reasoned.

“Whoops,” she rolled her eyes playfully at his answer. “Sorry not sorry.”

“Briony, please.”

“Please what?”

“I need to touch you,” he begged.

“I don’t think you’ve earned that yet.”

“Wh – I – please,” he continued to beg. “You don’t understand, Briony.”

“Not yet,” she shook her head. She stood up again to face him, placing her hands on his chest. His eyes were pleading with her, but she didn’t budge. “What do you think of the garter and pantyhose?” she asked again, just to torture him.

“I love it. I love it all,” he said. “It looks so, so sexy. It’s driving me fucking crazy.”

Her hands made their way down his chest and over his bulge, settling on his knees as she shifted her weight from one leg to another again and again before flipping her hair in front of him dramatically. She promised him she’d give him a show, so she was going to give him a show. She incorporated her movements into pulling his pants off of him, revealing how rock hard he was. After scratching her nails up and down his thighs, she settled them on his knees once more before spreading his legs open dramatically. Morgan looked at her wide-eyed before she squatted down between his legs, her hips swaying from side to side.

“Jesus fucking Christ Briony,” his voice was frantic as she spun around on her tiptoes, still squatted, before swaying her hips back up into his face. “Briony.”

“You like that?” she ignored his pleading tone, knowing all he wanted was to touch her.

“Yes. Please Briony, can I t--”

“What about when I do this,” she said, spinning around to face him before climbing on to his lap. She flipped her hair in his face again, and began to grind down. His hands left the armrest dramatically, ready to grab her, but with every ounce of will he had left in – which wasn’t much – he balled his hands into fists and kept them away from her. She shoved her chest into his face, her hands on his shoulders and nails digging into his skin.

“Briony – you fucking – you don’t – you can’t--” he muttered out.

“You want to fuck me with this on, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You don’t want me to take it off?”

“No. Keep it on. Keep it all on. I’m gonna fuck you so hard you won’t be able to fucking walk tomorrow,” he told her as she grinded down on him again, his cock rubbing up against the fabric of her thong.

She smiled. “That’s what I like to hear, Mr. Rielly.”

“Can I touch you? Please?”

“No.”

“Briiiiiiony.”

“Not. Yet,” she said, arching her back. “Tell me something Morgan,” she began. He gave her cut eye. Her right hand slipped down between their bodies to her hot core. “Do you like it when I touch myself?”

Morgan huffed. “I like it when I touch you better.”

“Why?”

“Because I know how to make you feel good,” he said. “Because I like making you feel good.”

“And when you get to touch me, what are you going to do to me?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

She smiled. She grabbed his cock without warning and began to stroke it teasingly. She felt his hips buckle at her touch and knew she had teased and agonized him long enough. She grinded down on his lap one last time, for good measure, feeling just how hard his cock was. “Morgan?” she whispered in his ear.

“Yes Briony?”

“Make me be your good girl. Fuck me so hard I won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”

Morgan was like a man possessed. In what felt like less than a second he grabbed her, picked her up, and threw her on the bed. He climbed onto the bed after her and flipped her over so she was flat onto her stomach, her legs spread apart for him but her ass slightly raised. She arched her neck to look behind her and saw him hovering over her. “You think you can play games like that with me and get away with it?” he asked her, his voice low and coarse and his hands went to the small of her back, pressing down so she stayed laying flat on the bed.

“You liked it, didn’t you Mr. Rielly?” she asked, her voice playfully innocent in tone. “You kept telling me how much you liked it. You begged to keep me close.”

He leaned forward so he could whisper in her ear. “Now I’m gonna make you beg,” he said, watching as her lips curved into a smile.

“Like your good girl?”

“Like my good girl,” he nodded his head. “I want to hear you scream my name.”

“Yes Mr. Rielly.”

“You can’t cum until I say so. Understood?”

“Yes Mr. Rielly,” she nodded her head, feeling his body loom over hers. He was still holding her down so she could barely move. “Mr. Rielly, if I be a good girl will you spank me?”

Morgan laughed mischievously. “We’ll see about that. Maybe if you ask nicely,” he said.

Without warning, he entered her hard and quick, unable to wait any longer. Bee cried out automatically at the feeling – everything from the speed, to the size of his cock, to his holding her down, to the angle that he entered her, made him go so deep that she swore she could already see stars. He didn’t start slow either; he was desperate and needy and didn’t have time for any of that, so he rocked into her hard and fast. She screamed out in pleasure over and over again, savouring the feeling. He was being a bit rougher with her than normal, but she loved every second of it. She wanted it. She had asked for it, and he had complied. He was doing exactly what she wanted him to do, and they had the trust in each other to do this.

The way he was holding her lower back down, keeping her in place, meant the angle was deep – and with the force he kept pounding into her with, she knew she wouldn’t be able to last long. But just as he complied – as best he could, he did slip up twice – to her rule of ‘no touching’, she knew she would have to comply to his rules now too. “Mr. Rielly,” she said between her screams and moans, “Mr. Rielly it’s so deep.”

“You like it when it’s deep like that, huh?” he asked.

“Your cock is so big and it always goes so deep,” she said, knowing it would stroke his ego. “Can you spank me, please?”

She heard Morgan huff out a laugh, barely missing a beat as he continued to fuck her. “No.”

“But Mr. Rielly--”

“No.”

“Please Mr. Rielly, I want to be spanked so bad.”

“I don’t think you’ve earned that yet,” he threw her own words back at her. She almost regretted the decision to use that language when she was teasing him – almost. But there was no way she could ever regret anything that brought her so much pleasure. “You have to beg, remember?”

Morgan could hear her whimper. “Pleeeease Mr. Rielly. Please spank me.”

She felt one of his hands leave the grip he had on her lower back and she prepared herself. Instead, she felt him grab her hair and tug her towards him, so her back was flush against his chest momentarily. His hand snaked around and went to her clit, and he bit down on the skin of her neck before moving up to her ear. “Beg.”

“Please Mr. Rielly,” she was practically on the verge of tears. “Please please please, I’m begging you to spank me.”

“If I spank you are you gonna cum?”

“No,” she answered automatically, shaking her head slightly. “Not until you tell me to.”

He smiled, a throaty laugh escaping him. “That’s right. That’s my good girl,” he cooed, pushing her back down so she was flush against the bed again. With one hand on her lower back holding her down, the other hand spanked her ass. She let out a cry of pleasure, and with another spank, another cry.

“Harder,” she mewled out

“Harder?”

“Fuck me harder, Mr. Rielly. Spank me harder.”

Her spanked her again, red marks already appearing on her ass from before. He rubbed the area gently before spanking it one more time. “You want to cum, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said quickly, not bothering to hide how close she was. “I want to cum so bad.”

“If I spank you again will you cum?” he asked. Bee nodded her head. “Then no.”

“No, please,” Bee cried out. “I can’t – I won’t--”

“Are you going to take more like a good girl?” he practically growled out, holding her down again with both hands now.

Bee didn’t answer automatically this time. She was trying to regain composure, trying to regain whatever semblance of sanity she had left in her body. “Y-Yes…” she whispered, barely audible.

“Are you going to take more like a good girl?” Morgan asked, louder to insinuate how loud he wanted her to be.

“Yes,” she said aloud.

“Like my good girl?”

“Yes!” she screamed out. “Like your good girl. Always your good girl, Mr. Rielly.”

Morgan continued pounding into her for a while, even harder than before. Bee’s cries became louder, as did the sound of cock throbbing in and out of her hot core. With the prelude leading up to this, the dirty talk, the sound of Bee’s moans and cries, and the fact that he probably could have cum while sitting in that God forsaken chair if Bee had grinded down on him just one more time, he was surprised to have lasted this long anyway. He could feel his body getting flushed and hot and knew he was close.

“Are you ready for my cum, Briony?” he asked.

“Yes, Mr. Rielly,” her voice was coarse from all the noise she was making. “I’m always ready for your cum. Always.”

He spanked her again a few more times for good measure, getting some more desperate cries out of her, before tugging her hair one last time to bring her back against his chest. “You’ve been such a good girl,” he cooed as he gave her a sloppy kiss.

“I love it when it’s like this,” she managed to get out through hooded eyes and desperate whispers. “I love it when I’m your good girl. When you take me from behind. When you fuck me like I’ve never been fucked before.”

“You like me fucking you hard and fast?”

She nodded her head. “I love it so much Mr. Rielly.”

He snaked a hand around her body and began rubbing circles on her clit. “You ready to cum, Briony?”

“Yes. Fuck, yes. Please.”

“When I spank you I want you to cum,” he instructed her. “And I don’t want you to stop. Understood?”

“Yes. Yes yes yes yes,” she said in hushed whispers.

Bee waited a few moments, and when she didn’t feel the hard smack on her ass she whined. She waited for another few moments – and still nothing. She was desperate. She was going to kill him. She was going to cum any second. “Mr. Ri--”

Smack!

She cried out, loud, her orgasm pulsating through her like a tidal wave, her entire body shaking and her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. Morgan continued to pound in and out of her with his throbbing cock, while his hand continued to rub at her clit, giving her orgasm after orgasm, over stimulating her just how she liked it. After what felt like a million of them – a million different orgasms, a million different cries, a million different moans and desperate shouts of his name – she finally, finally, felt his hot cum pour into her, filling her up as his cock twitched and throbbed inside of her. She felt his body shake against hers, his own moans and desperate calls out of her name filling the air as they rode out their orgasms together, clinging on to one another.

Bee swore she could still feel an orgasm ride through her entire body as he pulled out, the both of them collapsing on the bed trying to catch their breath. Her core was still so hot and sensitive as she curled up in Morgan’s arms, both their bodies hot and glistening with sweat. She was surprised the lingerie made it through – that Morgan didn’t rip it off half way through or take it off with his teeth or something. She was glad it got this reaction out of him.

“Bumblebee…” she heard Morgan’s voice, barely above a whisper. “I wouldn’t have done that with anybody else but you.”

She smiled, curling further into his body. “I wouldn’t have done that with anybody else either,” she responded, reaching down below their bodies to grab hold of his cock. “Thank you for indulging me. For giving me exactly what I wanted.”

“I love you so much,” he mumbled, feeling her put his softening cock at her core again, the heat still so comforting. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

***

Bee was a bit sad to leave Kelowna and the Okanagan area, after having experienced its beauty, great weather, and lovely people, but she had to remember she had Connor, Andy, and Shirley Rielly waiting for her on the other side, eagerly anticipating her presence in Vancouver for the second time that year. Earlier that morning, she and Morgan had checked out of Hester Creek Winery, where they had been staying for the past three nights, and loaded everything into their rental car for their five hour road trip to Vancouver. After a last minute stock up of the wine from the winery, and a very last minute stop at Tim Horton’s for some coffee and snacks to sustain themselves (like good Canadians) they were on their way, the GPS system directing them where to go.

“You tell me anytime you want to stop to take pictures,” Morgan said as they took the on-ramp onto the highway. “It’s going to be a pretty scenic route. Especially when we drive through the provincial park.”

“I will,” Bee smiled, stuffing a Timbit into her mouth before feeing Morgan one. “I’ll try not to stop too much. I don’t want this trip to take eight hours.”

“Nuh uh,” Morgan shook his head. “You just tell me whenever you want to stop. We can take ten hours. It doesn’t matter.”

“Your parents are expecting us for dinner.”

“We’ll call them and tell them there’s traffic,” he said, his mouth still full with the Timbit. He winked at Bee as she gave him one of her looks.

Morgan reached over the console and grabbed her thigh, exposed thanks to the pretty sundress she was wearing, squeezing it gently as the road opened before them. It was there for a while, as they continued to drive on the open road, occasionally squeezing and massaging her skin before it crept higher and higher, getting dangerously close to her core.

“Keep your eyes on the road, you perv,” Bee placed her hand above Morgan’s to stop it from going any higher. If it did, she knew he’d probably swerve off the road.

“I am keeping my eyes on the road,” he reasoned. “My mind, on the other hand, isn’t on the road.”

Bee snorted, shaking her head playfully. “You want to fuck me in this rental car, don’t you?”

“Maybe.”

She couldn’t help but snort. At least he was being honest. “Why’re you so horny all the time?” she giggled.

“You make me.”

“If you keep it up we’re gonna end up having ten kids.”

There was a silence between the two. It wasn’t awkward, or charged, or because either was tongue-tied and didn’t know what to say. It was just…a silence. A comfortable silence, the road of the car on the road filling the void, until Morgan spoke first. “We’re not having ten kids.”

Bee couldn’t help but smile. “No. Definitely not. I’m not doing that to my vagina. We’re not the Duggars.”

“Two or three is good,” he said.

Bee nodded her head in agreement. “Two or three. One of each. Whatever happens first.”

Morgan took his eyes off the road to look at her. She noticed his smile. How he was looking at her; like he’d just laid eyes on the image of perfection. “Yeah. You…you’ve thought about it, then?”

Bee nodded her head. If she thought about the wedding, and establishing a life together, there was no way she didn’t think about kids either. “Of course. You know I want kids.”

“I know. But like…”

“I want kids with you, if that was going to be your next question,” she said. “I mean, there’s no question. It’s you. I’m not having anybody else’s kids. I’m having your kids,” she stressed.

“Okay,” he said, unable to contain the smile on his face. “I uh…yeah. Okay.”

“Tongue tied, are we?”

“No,” he kept trying to contain his smile. “Not at all. Just glad you’ve thought about it too. That’s all.”

“I know…I know you’ve always initiated these conversations in the past,” she said, thinking out loud at this point. “Whether drunk or tipsy or not. But I think about this stuff do. I do love you more than I can describe with words. I just…I think because of my background, because what I’ve been through, I’m a bit less open about it. Because my mom never wanted to hear it when I was a young kid, and because I never really loved her later on growing up. But I do love you. And like…I want everything with you. A life. A house. Children. I may not vocalize it, but I do. And I don’t picture myself having all those things with anybody else. I only want it with you.”

Morgan flipped his hand so he could hold hers and bring it across to his lips so he could kiss it and hold it across his chest. “I only want it with you too,” he said, his lips rubbing against her hand. “I’ve only ever wanted it with you. And I want to give you all that.”

“I want to give it to you too. This is a relationship. A partnership. We can give each other these things,” Bee clarified.

“Yeah. You’re right. That’s what I meant,” he nodded his head again, correcting himself. “We can give each other these things. A life. A house. Children. But not for a while – children, anyway. We…we’re already building a life together.”

“We are.”

“Everything else will come in time,” Morgan said confidently. “I’m just…I know I’ve told you this before, but I thank my lucky stars every single day that it’s you in this life with me.”

Bee smiled again, unable to keep her eyes off of him. “And I thank my lucky stars you sent a mojito to my table.”

181 notes · View notes

baddyzarc · 4 years

Text

4a/7 Ruins: Legend of the Dragons

1 2 3 x 4b 5 6 7

Mizael’s legend is juicy but also confusing. Like, there is a big massive plot hole in his story. like this thing is a pulsating zit,, I’ll get to it later on and how it contradicts the show, but I considered it when making this.

Also the entire thing is is like 6000 words long with a lot of pictures so im splitting this thing up, the “read under” thing wasnt workin properly

Mizael is one of the more developed Emperors out of the group. He has a strong rivalry with Kaito, and he faces off against him in his quest to be the strongest Dragon Tamer (whatever that means, idk pokemon master). This leads to the development of not only himself and Kaito, but also an expansion on the lore of Zexal itself.

His ruins are located somewhere in the mountainous region of China. However, this location is also an illusion created by Jinlon, since it disappeared at the end of the arc—similar to Nasch and Merag’s underwater ruins —as opposed to the other tangible locations. Similar to Spartan City being based off of real-life Rome, Mizael’s ruins are based on a real place in China.

When I saw these rocky formations, I got kinda excited because these are some of my favorite geologic sites in the world.

For those unaware, this area is called the Tianzi Mountains; they are located in Zhangjiajie in the Hunan Province of China. The one in Zexal is much less detailed, but the geography is uncannily similar; I am certain that Mizael’s ruins are located in these mountains.

Tianzi Mountain is a famous tourist attraction known for being tranquil and beautiful, lush greenery and fog rolling about. If you must know, the enviroments in Avatar Blue People was inspired by this space. Its tranquility is a fitting place for Mizael’s Mythyrian Number: “Number 46: Ethereal Dragon Dragluon”.

Furthmore, to compare more of the geology, the bottom of these peaks are made of limestone. Limestone is a type of rock that tends to form caves in it (due to weathering and erosion, you know), so this information fits in rather nicely when Kaito said he explored the caves around the region.

And a really cool easter egg about this site from that fact is that one of the caves near Tianzi Mountain is the Huanglong Cave, also known as the Yellow Dragon Cave. It’s not certain that Kaito was in this cave when he found the tablet (he probably went into a random cave for all we know), but you know who is a yellow dragon living around Tianzi Mountain? Jinlon the Golden Dragon, the Guardian of the Mizael’s ruins.

This bit of geography may also explain the origins of Mizael, but I’ll get to this information later on after I explain the story of his ruins, the Legends of the Dragons.

The Legends of the Dragons is told to us by Jinlon and Mizael. The original tale is easy enough to understand with a few things that do not line up.

Long ago, Mizael was a young child living in a desert village. The village was attacked by marauders, resulting in the slaughter of everyone, including his parents. Mizael witnessed the events, and in terror, he fled into the desert.

After wandering the vast desert for presumably a day or so, he collapsed in exhaustion. On the verge of death, he was rescued by a large, yellow dragon named Jinlon.

Their souls resonated with each other, and with their strengths, they kept the peace of the land somewhere in the mountains of China.

One day, a natural disaster struck that killed masses of innocent people.

A wandering shaman blamed the disaster on Jinlon, prompting the people to call for the death of the dragon. Mizael tried to protect Jinlon, but the people refused to listen. They demanded that Mizael slay his companion if he wanted to prove his herodom. Instead, Mizael offered his own life in exchange for the life of Jinlon. Unfortunately, since the scuffle weakened the strength of the village, a neighboring army attacked them. Mizael and Jinlon were pierced by a “hundred of thousands of arrows” and died in each other’s grasp. The entire village was wiped out and erased from history.

In the subsequent set of information, it is revealed that the shaman was Don Thousand in disguise, and he orchestrated the event in order to kill Mizael as the people he swore to protect turned on him. Before Mizael died, Don Thousand embedded an Over-Hundred Number into his heart. This filled him with hate and despair, sealing his fate as a Barian Emperor.

Jinlon also revealed that when he died, the Mythyrian Number revived his soul so that he could protect the land.

This implication is fascinating since Jinlon is the only one that directly states how he became the Guardian, and if that’s true, it may explain why individuals who were closest to the Emperors (like Mach, Ponta, and maybe the prince) became the Guardians, and in some cases fusing with the Mythyrian Number itself.

I wanna state that the Guardian and the Mythyrian Number are two different beings posing as the same entity (in most cases). It’s confusing, but it’s like Ponta’s situation. Ponta represents the Mythyrian Number “Veteran Tanuki Sandayu” as well as being its Guardian in the context of the episode, but he has the option to opt out of representing the Mythyrian Number whenever he wants. The Mythyrian Number still exists with or without Ponta. He is a vehicle for the Mythyrian Number to have a duelist. This is kinda similar to the Zexal Morphs too. As Zexal Morphs, the glowing figure we see is not a single person; it is both Yuma and Astral combined as a single person. Saying Zexal I is Yuma isn’t necessarily wrong, but it isn’t completely right either. Likewise, the Mythyrian Number “picks” a Guardian after the Emperor died to become infused in it, and this pick is likely to have a strong connection to the Emperors’ past and can aid them in their journey to break Don Thousand’s curse (except Vector, but he has a unique situation).

That said, I wanna pick apart that plot point I was talking about.

This scene right here kinda screws me up HARD. Mizael is in the desert, dying. A card manifests in Mizael hands, and then Jinlon shows up.

BUT what we know from the Ruins episodes is that Jinlon was not a Number until the point of his death, so when he appeared to Mizael, he was just a regular dragon, NOT a Number Monster. This card in Mizael’s hand has nothing to do with Jinlon at all, but since it showed up before Jinlon, it implies that Jinlon IS this card. This means the show is wrong in that it said Jinlon became the Mythyrian Number at the time of his death, OR he was a Mythyrian Number all along. Either way, it’s a plot hole.

My only explanation is that the entity that gave Mizael this card is not the same person as Jinlon. They just happened to come across the same dying child and take him in around the same time. My only evidence of this is that Vector’s card floated onto him almost like divine intervention, or the fact that we don’t know where Gilag and Alito obtained their Mythyrian Numbers from; they just had them their entire lives. Incredibly iffy, and a big plot hole.

For simplicity sake, I’m going to go with the story that Jinlon was a normal dragon who became a Mythyrian Number/Guardian when he died.

But moving past this, let’s talk about one of the most obscure discussions I could talk about. And it has everything to do with this image right here:

This is a pot of food Jinlon makes at the start of Mizael’s ruins arc. So when I first saw this image, I didn’t think much of it until I saw the delectable mushrooms on the separate sides of the pot. Now, I’m quite a dumbass person, but I am rather fond of mushrooms, and I recognize the mushrooms he uses.

The one on the right side is called an Enoki mushroom (Flammulina velutipes). It is native to Eastern Asia and used in a lot of Chinese and Japanese cuisine.

The one on the left side is called the king oyster mushroom (Pleurotus eryngii). It is native to the Mediterranean regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

What I also noticed here is that this yellow, flabby thing on the left side is dried bean curd, which is a byproduct of tofu production. And what do you know, tofu first originated from China.

The other objects in the broth are unrecognizable to me, but I thought, “Was Jinlon making food that represents him and Mizael?” Jinlon is from China—I assume, as he uses a lot of imagery of the Chinese Dragon—while Mizael is maybe from China, maybe not, as the show does not explicitly state where he originates from.

My evidence for the “maybe not” part comes from a long string of flimsy evidence that I found in my efforts to find where Mizael originated from. Take all of this with a grain of salt and if anyone can interpret these better than I can (bc anthropology is my weaker point and I’ve fallen into a three day rabbit hole trying to sort this out before saying it's almost impossible without a proper time-frame) please do share because I am genuinely interested in this.

My only source is to analyze the geography. My first piece of concrete evidence is that Mizael and Jinlon lived in Tianzi Mountain prior to their deaths. Mizael also lived and fled into a desert area prior to meeting Jinlon. Modern China has two prominent deserts in it—the Gobi Desert and the Taklamakan Desert—so it is likely that he lived around one of these regions. These two pieces of evidence gives us an idea of how Mizael and Jinlon traveled. Since Mizael met a divine, mythical creature, I also assume that he had no issue getting out of the desert.

My proposal is that he lived within either the Gobi desert or the Taklamakan desert, and then he traveled out of there before winding up in Tianzi Mountain where he lived with Jinlon and the villagers before his death.

So based on this, Mizael may have originated either from modern day Mongolia, Central Asia, or China depending on if his village was located within the desert (near an oasis or something similar) or at the very outskirts of the desert. Not only that, I did some research on the prevalence of blond hair and blue eyes in past Asians in order to pinpoint his genetics (and yes, this is yugioh, rainbow hair galore, but Mizael has reasonable colors OKAY). Blue eyes originated along the Black Sea around 6,000-10,000 years from a mutation in a single individual.

From here, it spread into the rest of the world. On the other hand, blond hair appeared multiple times in multiple places in human evolution, so in the sense of pinpointing where Mizael came from, it isn’t as nearly as informative.

The Black Sea is right there.

So youre like, wow how did blue eyes end up in China, that’s so far. Humans move and they move a lot. I can see how centuries (possibly thousands of years) of migration and interbreeding will result in a Mizael. However, this also shows that it is highly likely that the ancestors with the blue eyes moved into Mongolia or the Central Asia area from the Black Sea, which is more evidence that Mizael could’ve lived in one of those regions before traveling deep into China. And because humans bring their culture as they travel, maybe the king oyster mushrooms from the Black Sea/Middle East area also traveled with them.

And before I tumble into this rabbit hole, I want to note that the people of Mizael’s village here have green, blue, and pink hair. Okay moving on.

As I finish this section of the piece, I want to note the last possible theory of Mizael’s origin. My last bit of evidence is partially about the mushrooms. Which is silly evidence, but bear with me. So in Ancient China (200BC to 20AD), there was a small town known as the Liqian City (now known as Zhelaizhai) located on the edge of the Gobi Desert. This town was famous for having high frequencies of individuals with blue/green eyes and blond/light hair. Now one such explanation for this is the “Lost Romans Myth”. Yes, myth. Since this topic has been debunked among anthropologists, historians, archeologists, biologists on how these genes got here, I need to be a little careful here since I don’t want to propagate a legend as fact.

The myth goes that lost Roman soldiers from a nearby battle settled in the area and integrated into the local population, giving rise to higher frequencies of that blond-blue trait than in the surrounding area. Geneticists have debunked this (as in, the blond and blue eyes did not come via Roman ancestry), but it could be possible that the Zexal writers found out about Liqian City and thought it was a neat story to integrate into the plot. The mushrooms come in because the king oyster mushroom is native to the regions around the Mediterraneum Sea, so if the writers accepted the “Lost Romans Myth” as a fact, they may be saying that Mizael is Chinese with ancestral roots as a Roman person. The phenotypes match, the town was in a desert, and this location is a lot closer to the Tianzi Mountains than the previous two locations.

Or maybe he just has blond hair and blue eyes just because god is a giant gecko. This is the show who has historical figures with eggplant hair and a green mohawk so,,,,

im gonna talk about the Dragons and the Ruins Duel now.

The Ruins Duel features prominent callbacks to the Legend of the Dragons as well as expanding on the character of not only Mizael but also his counterpart, Kaito Tenjo.

Starting with the cards:

So one of my favorite cards of the duel is this one with a Mizael-looking fellow getting murked by a bunch of arrows. I don’t know why, that’s just really funny to me, that Kaito has this in his deck. Like, bro

Another notable card is “Book of Moon”.

“Book of Moon” is one of the older cards (debuting during the DM era) used in Zexal. Old cards are seldom used, so when they’re present, they usually have some subtext to go along with it. Although it has nothing to say within this episode, it may be a sneaky foreshadow to the famous Moon Duel where Kaito Tenjo fucking eats shit loses his life on the Moon.

Of the duel itself, it follows a similar theme to the Legend of the Dragons. “Number 46: Ethereal Dragon Dragluon” has the anime effect that makes it unable to be targeted for attacks or by card effects if there is another dragon on your field. In order to destroy Dragluon, you must get rid of the dragons that protect it.

This is quite similar to how Mizael refused to let the people harm Jinlon, even going as far as to kill himself to protect his dragon. Seeing as the theme shows up again, it shows that this idea is a core element in Mizael’s story.

And I think it’s fair to say that Mizael has an interesting bond to dragons—for a good reason.

He is a character who absolutely hates humans.

And this isn’t appear to be the common consensus throughout the Emperors. Despite acting as though they were superior, Alito and Gilag were fawning over humans and their culture. Durbe did not care about humans; he only wanted to protect Barian World. And Vector

Mizael is an outlier. He is utterly appalled and disgusted by the fleshbags. But after considering his backstory, his hatred comes from a reasonable place.

Mizael witnessed the slaughter of his village by humans. He saw firsthand the horrors of humanity, and as a child that young, it left a traumatic imprint on him. Going back to how I think the Emperors retain most of their personalities from their original past life, an event this intense is likely to carry over into his life as a Barian Emperor. Mizael may have forgotten why he couldn’t trust humans, but his spirit remembers. Without the memories of being a human, Mizael’s distrust manifested into hatred.

And had it not been for Jinlon, a dragon, Mizael would’ve died in the desert. He trusts dragons because they were there for him in his time of need, when humans left him scarred and afraid. These events molded him into a person who connects deeply to the dragons rather than his human brethren. His ability to sense their spirit, and his strong passion for the goodness in all dragons stem from this event. I don’t think it's far-fetched that Mizael considers himself a dragon at heart underneath his human or Barian body, and remember, in terms of “Number 46: Ethereal Dragon Dragluon”, it is other Dragons that protect Dragluon.

Mizael loves his dragons. He is a character who exclusively uses Dragon monsters in his deck. He doesn’t see them as tools to use but allies to cherish and grow alongside with. Part of me thinks that’s why Tachyon Dragon was chilling in some cave in Barian World when we first met it.

This goes into the whole “duel spirits, monsters are alive” thing that is used in nearly all of the shows, so I won't talk about it. The takeaway here is that Mizael does not leave his dragon inside its card. He allows Tachyon Dragon to roam Barian World on its own freewill, and only when he requires its strength, he finds it and challenges it. If he can overcome it, proving that he is still worthy of Tachyon Dragon’s power, it will help him. Judging by his mannerism, this occurs very often. Despite being described as arrogant and prideful, he doesn’t leave his Tachyon Dragon locked away in its card for all of eternity. (Also, there is a scene where he threatens to feed Vector to Tachyon Dragon; this is likely Mizael snapping at Vector for being a Clown, but the idea that Mizael “feeds” and cares for his dragons is nice)

Kaito once asks Mizael, the master of the Galaxy-Eyes, why he himself bears such “bleak eyes”, or eyes that are world-weary and tired and empty. And as the scene transitions into a flashback of his childhood, we find out that this bleakness stems from his distrust in humanity.

Although he has given up on humans, Mizael is a person who simply cannot turn his back on his dragons. He will die before he lets his dragons fall. (And I think it’s a thing of beauty that Mizael learns to have some faith in humans after this duel, but that’s for later.)

The effects of “Number 46: Ethereal Dragon Dragluon” shows this entire side of Mizael. It also brings out the same side in Kaito, who is a reflection of Mizael in many similar and opposite ways.

Mizael and Kaito are both Dragon Tamers, or Galaxy-Eyes Masters. They are tamers with different goals, yet they are not too far off from each other.

Like in the Legend of the Dragons, when tasked with the destruction of his “Galaxy Eyes Photon Dragon” or give it to Jinlon (which translates to victory or loss respectively), Kaito behaves similar to Mizael. He would rather risk losing the duel than destroy his dragon, inadvertently proving Jinlon’s point.

These similarities and how Jinlon connects to both Mizael and Kaito goes much deeper than this duel.

So let’s head to the Moon.

#long post #tw long post #zexal #mizar #mizael #barian biology #dyzarc writes #idk why this is so long hes not even in my top 5 for barians

35 notes · View notes

gayregis · 4 years

Note

Ok i love fashion. I dk fashion. I love doing fantady historical fusions and the fashion on the show deadass kills me SO hard. It doesnt. like. nothing feels good. Theres no clear cultural influence on clothes. In TW3 at least the clothes felt like.. like I could see art and go 'oh i know what influenced that' but it feels so vague and generic in the show???

LEGIT! and it’s such a shame too because they missed so many opportunities through visuals:

it’s definitely beautiful enough. medieval/renaissance (i say renaissance as well, because the continent is more advanced than earth’s europe in the 13th century) has such great beautiful examples of design that can even be quite whimsical to an audience that is unfamiliar with it.

re: the “it doesn’t feel slavic” argument that i’ve seen on reddit. specifically in regards to the art direction, costume design, and set design, i agree, because there is a lot of beautiful cultures that could serve as wells of inspiration for the art team, but they seemed to ignore it. i’m not anything of an expert or even an amateur, but just googling “medieval polish fashion” gives some good results. there are a lot of beautiful motifs on this page that could easily be incorporated into the witcher’s designs. (in regards to casting, i don’t agree so much with this argument, bc a lot of the arguing about it lacks nuance and voices from poc, but that’s an entirely different post to make!)

they could connect characters. the main issue in MY opinion is that the dressing felt individual to characters and random, meant to just look good or intriguing but not help in telling the story. visuals tell narratives, and outfit and dress are a large aspect of this. if there is not overall motifs that can connect characters to one another, then you’re missing a great opportunity. for an example of what they did right with this, i loved how everyone in cintra had those blue sashes with their three lions on them. (also, it even made me realize as a books fan that the three lions could represent calanthe, pavetta, and ciri… lol). but i do not see any connection between ciri, pavetta, or calanthe’s outfits. this is missing an opportunity to draw a connection between them.

they could create factions and visually represent being “other.” keeping with the previous bullet point, they could extend this opportunity to whole factions. as a base example, the cintrian and nilfgaardian conflict is represented by how they have different armors… but since nilfgaard is a rich and powerful empire, their armor should have reflected this. in more peaceful scenes, they could use historical influences from different regions/nations of europe to demonstrate a difference between different witcher nations. also they could easily represent an “other” by using this faction mentality, kind of like what they did with the dryads’ outfits, because they seem so different than those in human civilizations, but they could have pushed this contrast by making the humans’ outfits to be stylized and man-made with bright colors, decorations, etc.

they could demonstrate character qualities and contrast between characters. geralt dresses in a worn black leather jerkin in the first short story in the books, and carries his sword on his back. dressing in all black (with his white hair and shining eyes) creates this image of a man similar to ideas of death, in my mind - he’s intimidating. he’s also strange for even a swordsman or mercenary, he doesn’t carry his sword like every other man in vizima. and his equipment is worn, yet he does not look old… he obviously has been in many fights. compare this to jaskier, who dresses fancifully and elegantly, with colorful jerkins and lace shirts and a plum bonnet with a feather in it. he obviously is a performer (and also kind of looks like a noble with these fancy get ups, which hints at his backstory that’s only revealed later on!) compare this with yennefer, who although she dresses extremely elegantly and nobly, dresses in all black and white. she is refined, but not gaudy and looking for attention (no offense jaskier… that’s your job!).

they could demonstrate character transitions. ciri dresses like a princess in cintra, but when her life goes up in flames along with the city and everyone she’s known and she goes to train at kaer morhen, she dresses in a shoddily-made leather jerkin sewn together quite shittily. not only does this demonstrate how she has fallen a long way on the social status ladder, but it demonstrates how very much the witchers at kaer morhen want to take care of this child, even if they’re not very good at understanding her and her needs at first. and how much she in turn wants to be like them.

but instead we just got some outlandish bullshit where yennefer wears a cage on her shoulders and a lace mask that she immediately takes off, and nilfgaardian armor that doesn’t look like any kind of armor ever made in history or in the present. costume design is not just meant to draw your eye and have you say, “oh that looks weird,” but to help the story! this is part of the entire reason that a visual adaptation to a book series was wanted!

#ask #fish-mouth #tbh this series makes me want to shift my academic focus in design to costume design out of sheer spite #or at least delve into it more

15 notes · View notes

nnegan13 · 5 years

Note

hi!! this is gonna sound weird but um do you ever think what ele and edo's futures are gonna be like? logistically speaking. like if edoardo goes to Cornell, which he absolutely should bcoz one should never forgo academic opportunities for a S.O, then id rather ele not follow him leaving behind her friends and family etc. sooo how would they survive long distance for 3/4 years? or maybe like once ele graduates school she too legs it to Cornell or some other uni in the states so theyre in the 1/2

same country at least? will they finally return to Italy at some point? what age do you think they’ll tie the knot? also what do you think ele would study? botany seems likely but I hate that subject with a burning passion so hard no. journalism maybe? I hope this ask doesn’t freak u out lol I worry over them like they’re actual people but anyways grazie e ciao! 2/2

‘do I ever think about incantava’s future’ know that I am always thinking about incantava’s future all. the. damn. time. this got real long real fast and is mostly me rambling and speculating so it’s all under the cut

thank you for the ask and know that I am 100% not freaked in the slightest bc I love talking about incantava and I also worry about them like actual people so we are in the same boat and having a grand old time anon

I love the idea that edo goes to Cornell for his undergrad and then comes back to Europe (or even Italy if we’re getting real hopeful) for a masters. with ele, I think she would definitely explore the idea of going to a school in the States, but I don’t think Cornell would be her first choice. that’s mostly cuz I HC her as being way into biology and there are definitely other universities in the US that are better for that than Cornell. no idea which one she’d go to tho. however, I can also see her happily going to school in Italy or another European country especially bc paying for school there would be a breeze compared to tuition in the US aha. that being said, I can see both of them going on to graduate school no matter where they do their undergrads.

as for the long distance, this is edo and ele we’re talking about. edo waited a whole fucking year, going out with absolutely no one, for a girl that for all intents and purposes hated him at the time, had a long term girlfriend even with his history of being a fuckboy (and as having an older brother who’s a total fuckboy, I will tell you that they take girlfriends very seriously), and considered ele his family after only having actually dated her for like three weeks. ele doesn’t need her boyfriend, she chooses to have him, and from the year and a half between her ex and edo, we know she was perfectly fine not having to date anyone or play the game. these are two people that aren’t inclined to cheat or be looking for a significant other or be casually dating. I think they’d survive long distance, especially given how much they care about the other. they think of the other as their family, ffs, that’s not a bond easily broken by distance. and American schools give long breaks, especially between semesters (#christianity lmao). I was looking at Cornell’s academic calendar for fic purposes and there are plenty of breaks for rich king incanti to jet himself or ele to wherever the other is and have quality time. I think they’ll survive long distance just fine, especially if ele decides to go to college in the US. and the time difference between NY and Rome is only six hours, and speaking as someone who’s done the whole time-difference-with-loved-ones thing, that’s totally manageable for texting and calling and stuff. they’ll be fine.

basically it’ll be a lot of facetime/skype/video calls, pretty constant texting, seeing each other during breaks bc rich king, and spending their summers together. I can see edo coming home for the summer for sure and they’ll spend it all traveling bc they’re Italian royalty lmaoooo.

I’ve said this already but I think ele would do something with biology, maybe research or teaching. that being said, the journalism and writing aspect could totally be worked into the science thing (technical writing, anyone?). she could work for a science journal or write for a research team or something like that. boundless opportunities aha. I do see your point about journalism, though. given her interest in the radio and the subject matters we know she’s chosen for her episodes, I can totally see ele going into journalism and writing and reporting on causes she believes in. both are two directions I think she’d be really happy in, but I’ll agree with you that botany is not the optimal career choice lmao.

I think Italy will always be a home for incantava, whichever city they end up in, bc of the family they do have there (filo, nonna incanti, ele’s mom even) and bc it’s where they met and grew up. I have no idea how common it is for Italians to stay in their country or not, but given that our rich king is gonna go on to do some fancy business stuff and ele’s research will likely take her all over the globe depending on what she specializes in, I think they’ll be traveling a lot and would think of Italy as a home base, so to speak.

and marriage. fuck I think about incantava getting married all the time. I can’t see them getting married until both of them are done with school, but I think they move in with each other or have a shared living space pretty quick, probably once ele finishes high school. then university plus a graduate/masters program of some sort would put ele at like ~25 and edo ~27 (I think???? undergrads take ~4 years in the US but idk how edo will go about doing it and ele may or may not do college in the US, but my research for the college!au at Italian schooling puts an undergrad+masters at being around 5 years total someone correct me if I’m wrong so I would imagine an American undergrad + a European masters would take anywhere from 4-6 years total) so yeah I think they’d get married around then. kids plus their careers is a more complicated question tho. I just imagine those beautiful babies and their incredible domesticity to keep from stressing over the logistics of it tho lmaoooooo

hopefully this is a satisfactory answer to ur questions aha. there’s just so much that’s ambiguous about them that solid plans for their future will always allude me, but I just love them being fantastic and successful and intelligent together. as long as the writers keep their hands off they’ll be ok :)

#asks #incantava #hi yeah I'm always rambling about them don't mind me #thinking about their future just get's me all *strangled noises*#I want them to be happy and my babies love each other so much that they will be don't ever doubt it #skamit writers DO NOT INTERACT

21 notes · View notes

ethercals · 4 years

Text

[ MUSE 80 ] ●● is that BEN BARNES? no, that’s just JACKSON ‘JAX’ SINCLAIR, the 42 year old CISMALE who is a ENTREPRENEUR. some say they’re UNDIGNIFIED AND HARSH, but their family and friends will swear they’re LOYAL AND BRILLIANT. when i think of them, i think of at loaded guns under desk drawers, empty bottles of bourbon, a snarling grin curving his mouth. i wonder if HIS family knows that HE’S A CRIME BOSS . ●●

wbk i’m a weak bitch, but i’ve lowkey had an idea for this muse for like seven months, so here we go!

jackson sinclair was born lucky. the eldest son of leopold and ginebra sinclair, he had a silver spoon in his mouth from the moment that he was born.

his entire life, it was clear that the sinclair name was only known for one thing: wealth. his father owned a chain of hotels, inherited from his grandfather, and his mother have her fingers in the oil business. both their families separately had more money than they knew what to do with with, and together? they were practically gods.

that’s how jax always thought of them, anyway. he idolises his parents, thought that they could do no wrong and lived their best possible lives. parties every weekend, summers in europe, never wanting for nothing because whatever they wanted, they got.

they spoiled him rotten, too. whatever he wanted, he got without argument. most of the time, anyway. they may have given him what he wanted, but if he ever acted out against their rules, he lost it in a flash. cars would be taken away and his accounts frozen if he shamed their name, his father expecting much of him as the eldest.

he got a lot sneakier after learning that lesson the hard way, and before long, he was a mastermind at avoiding their suspicions of what he was doing. school bored him, the man far too intelligent for his own good, and there were many days where he ditched to go drinking with his friends, making up for it with his grades and that he was paying the office to mark him as present when he wasn’t.

like i said, too smart and rich for his own good smh.

he was kind of rough and tough too. kinda had guzman vibes from elite? easy to piss off, even easier to get a fight out of. he was 100% that ass that had his friends hold a guy down while he beat them up.

when he graduated high school, he went to MIT to study physics and chemical engineering.

it was also around that time that jax learned about the real family business. not only had his father been grooming him to take over command of the hotel business, but of his side business. turned out mr leopold the first had control of the crime ring in all of massachusetts. he profited from everything, had control of the police as well as the drug trade.

it was a lot for jax to take in and accept, but his father had always had a way of wording things to make anything sound like it made sense. he talked jax into it, little by little. he already knew how to use a gun, and had been boxing since he was a kid, and he already had the smarts and potential to be involved in the running of that business.

even more than that, his past relationship with ariana became more intense.

he really fell in love with her, and when they found out they were having lena, that only solidified things for jax, even if he was terrified.

three kids later, jax really was feeling like he was on top of the world. he had his kids, his wife, was doing well in his transition towards taking over the family businesses. the only kink came up when ari was getting invested over her father, and everything went to shit.

when she left, he was in denial for a hot minute. he thought that she was just in hiding to escape the backlash of her father getting arrested. then a week past and no matter who he sent and what he tried, she hadn’t come home and he had no information.

he could only assume the worst. that she had been kidnapped, or killed, or worst of all, that she had simply left.

with a newborn to look after and two young kids, jax had a really hard time readjusting to what his life had become without his wife. over the years he tried his best, but he definitely had his shortcomings as a father and made mistakes in those early days.

still, he was trying. he did his best as a father, gave them freedom and all they could want, but still put his foot down when need be.

he lost his father a few years after ariana left, and he officially took over the hotel chain, as well as his underground business. he ended up buying out a chain of restaurants and taking over them to in order to expand his empire, as well as sitting on the board of his mother’s business.

has basically spent the last twenty years working his ass off. he wanted all of his business to thrive, and he completely chased the power that came with it all. he wanted everyone to know his name, or the persona he created for himself when it came to his less than legal activities. he wanted to see his kids through school, raise them the only way he knew how.

has been such a womanizer over the years at first bc he couldn’t commit to another woman again ( esp bc he was p sure they were still married ) and then just because it had become a habit.

he’s at a point in his life now that he thought he could just relax, and become more of a man of leisure. work is running smoothly enough for him, and he has been spending more and more time lately out on the yacht, attending dinner parties and underground fight clubs.

then ariana came back into his life, and found out that he’s gonna be a grandpa, and there’s the whole teddy being pregnant. needless to say he is stressed af rn and is 10/10 done with life tbh.

he just wants to go race cars and get his new drug going through the city but alas, billionaire boys club has to be hard sometimes.

personality wise, he’s kind of blunt. always looks kinda tough, stone faced and mad, and in some ways he is. he’s cocky af too, arrogant, and a spoiled shit. has a mad soft spot for his family though, and will literally kill to protect them.

always found in designer clothing, usually tailored suits or all black with leather jackets.

has a mad car collection, watch collection. basically he collects everything expensive bc lord knows the man can afford it.

i’ve rambled enough already, but yah! that’s the gist of my mans. hit that big old heart button if you want to plot!

#ashcroftintro.#musings. / jackson sinclair #vanity. / jackson sinclair #aesthetic. / jackson sinclair #soundtrack. / jackson sinclair #ask meme. / jackson sinclair #interaction. / jackson sinclair #family. / sinclair

4 notes · View notes

girlactionfigure · 5 years

Text

1/ Hi. My twitter name is Gilead Ini, and my real name is Gilead Ini. My ethnicity is Jewish. My connection began at least around 1200 BC, when a Hebrew-speaking Israelite civilization emerged in the hills of the land of Israel. It continues unbroken until today. Here's how:

2/ That early civilization developed into Israelite, Hebrew, Jewish kingdoms. A bunch of foreign invaders came and went. But whenever they could, my ancestors stayed on their indigenous homeland—like when Babylonians exiled many Jews in 586 BC… and most actually stayed put!

3/ Just 50 years later, many of the exiles came back, when a Persian army took over and Cyrus allowed a Jewish return. The Persians ruled over a province named Yehud. (Note the name.)

4/ That story repeated throughout history. Alexander the Great came around 300 BC. He died, and we eventually fought off the Greek invaders—and won! To this very day, we still celebrate that holiday. To this day, we call it by a Hebrew word, Hannukah. Unbroken connection.

5/ In the process, we picked up some styles and ideas from the Greeks. But that's always how it is with foreign empires. So yes, today's Jews, the descendants of those I'm describing, don't wear the same clothes as their ancestor, a Hasmonean named Judah. (Note the name.)

6/ There were again Jewish independent kingdoms. One was led by a Jewish queen—my genetic, ethnic, and religious ancestor. Josephus wrote about her, but apparently he was kind of a misogynist, and blamed her, including her femaleness, for the next successful invasion, from Rome.

7/ Seems like it might have actually been the fault of her two sons, who couldn't get along. You know what they say: Two Jews, three opinions. Anyway, the Romans took over. This is a pretty well-known part of Jewish history on the land, with Jews named Jesus, Herod, and so on.

8/ Josephus, mentioned earlier, was among the indigenous Jews to revolt against the guys from Rome. He failed. Hey, we're hardly the only ones to lose to them. But we put up a pretty incredible fight. That's because our connection to the land, and its connection to our religion.

9/ The Romans carved a picture of our plundered artifacts, including the Jewish menorah, on an arch back in Rome. We, the Jews, also continued to carve and draw and craft images of the menorah throughout our history, in our homeland and in exile. An unbroken link.

10/ Here's one from around 2000 years ago in Israel's Galilee. Hundreds of years later, another on a mosaic in Jericho, now ruled by the Palestinian Authority. The Hebrew text says "Peace unto Israel." And we kept it with us abroad: See this ketubah from ≈1000 CE Mastaura. Etc.

11/ Some more menorahs. Pretty incredible. Unbroken link.

stayed put in and around Judea—note the name. Jews also lived other places, and led a revolt from elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. When things turned bad, a leader of the revolt fled back to Judea

13/ Then the indigenous Jews revolted *against* Rome again. We put up a hard fight, but lost. The colonial Roman army slaughtered us wholesale, and exiled and banned us from Jerusalem, and tried to erase Jewish history on the land (sound familiar?) by changing names.

14/ This period might have opened the book on our vibrant history in Europe. But it certainly didn't close the book on Jewish history in the land of Israel. Despite the slaughter and exile, we stayed on the land during and well after the remainder of Roman rule.

15/ After the revolt was crushed, my ancient relatives who remained in northern Israel wrote one of our Talmuds. Anther was written by my ancestors in Iraq, from where the Jewish sages wrote about Jerusalem. A lot.

16/ We were still there in around 600, when Jews in and near the land of Israel helped the Persians expel the Byzantines. That was good for the Jews. But then the Byzantines struck back and won. That was bad for the Jews. They massacred and expelled us. Somehow, many stayed.

17/ We were still there when and after a foreign army invaded from Arabia. An Arab geographer in Jerusalem wrote in the 900s that, in the city, “everywhere the Christians and the Jews have the upper hand.”

18/ On the other hand, the geographer said, Jews in the land tended to work unglamorous jobs as tanners, dyers and moneychangers. (Not many Jewish doctors back then. The profession was dominated by Christians.)

19/ It goes on and on like this. The Crusaders came to the land around 1000. We know from letters written by the Jewish community in Cairo that at the time the land was dotted with Jewish towns. Jews helped fight against the Crusaders. They lost, and were massacred.

20/ Even then, small numbers of Jews remained. Saladin came from Egypt, and things got better. Then things got worse. Then better. Then worse. And that’s the story as the Jewish population became a smaller and smaller percentage of the land, but still endured.

21/ Arabs who resettled one of the old Jewish towns in the Golan Heights named their new village "Yehudia," a reference to the Jews that they knew had previously lived there. Kind of like today we refer to a state in middle America "Kansas," a reference to the Kansa tribe.

22/ We returned from abroad when we could. like the Jewish who sailed from Spain to northern Israel to develop the Kabalah.

23/ Why sail the dangerous seas all the way to Israel? That unbroken link. They had always faced east toward Jerusalem as they prayed, about Jerusalem Hebrew, in Hebrew, the language of ancient Jerusalem.

24/ The most famous Jewish poet in medieval Spain, Yehuda Halevi, wrote, in Hebrew, about the land of Israel: "My heart is in the east, and I am at the edge of the West. So how can I taste what I eat, how can it give me any pleasure?"

25/ In the modern era, President Truman's envoy to displaced persons camps full of Jewish Holocaust survivors wrote back to the president that the Jews, the survivors, “want to be evacuated to Palestine now, just as other national groups are being repatriated to their homes.”

26/ In current polls, most Jews say their Judaism is related to "ancestry" and culture even than religion. Most American Jews feel that a thriving state of Israel is vital to the future of the Jewish people. Most British Jews say that Israel plays a role in their Jewish identity.

27/ It's where we're from. Arab Muslims would sometime refer to the Negev desert as Tih Bani Isra'il, after the wanderings of the children of Israel. The guy in the first post linked to above would deny our unbroken history, and say Jews today aren't related to Israelites. But…

28/ As geneticist Harry Osterer found, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrachi Jews form a distinct genetic cluster, and their genes all show Middle-Eastern ancestry.

29/ Marcus Feldman, a leading geneticist at Stanford, noted that “If you take all of the careful genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years… there’s no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin.”

Gilead Ini

71 notes · View notes

pokemaniacal · 6 years

Note

Something that’s been on my mind for a bit that your professional word may be able to help with. Would you happen to know how ethnically diverse the Greek and Roman empires were?

very

next question please

…

…what, you want more? Oh, fine, but for the record this is not the sort of thing people just “happen to know.”

Okay so I’m assuming by “Greek empire” (remember, kids: there was never a politically autonomous and unified state called “Greece” or “Hellas” until 1822) you mean Alexander’s empire (320s BC) and the Hellenistic successor kingdoms (323 BC – 31 BC), and by “Roman empire” you mean Rome starting from the time it becomes a major interregional power (say, following the second Punic War, which ended in 201 BC) rather than just Rome in the time of the Emperors. You could spend like most of a book on each of these just corralling the data that might let us answer this question, but whatevs.

Lesson one: the ancient Greeks and Romans did not think about ethnicity in the same way as we do. In particular, they were not super hung up on the colour of people’s skin – skin colour in ancient art is more often a signifier of gender than race, because women are expected to spend less time outside and therefore have lighter skin (which is another whole thing that we shouldn’t even get into because this is an aristocratic ideal of female beauty and of course lots of Greek and Roman women would have worked outside). Arguably the most important signifier of ethnicity to the Greeks and Romans was actually language, with everyone who didn’t speak Greek or Latin being a “barbarian” (traditionally this word is supposed to come from the Greeks thinking that all foreign languages sounded like “bar bar bar,” although I’ve also heard a convincing argument that it comes from the Old Persian word for taxpayer, barabara, and originally signified all subjects of the Persian king).

In the modern world we have designations of ethnicity that are super broad and grow in large part out of early and long-since-debunked anthropological theory that divided humanity into three biologically distinct races, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid, and don’t really reflect a lot of important components of ethnicity. The thing is, as the internet will happily tell you ad nauseam, race is a social construct. Like, yes, designations of race describe real physical characteristics that arise from variation within human genetics, but the way we choose to bundle those characteristics is arbitrary, and where we choose to draw the lines is arbitrary (like, for a long time in the US, Greeks and Italians weren’t considered “white,” but today they definitely are, even though nothing changed about their genetics). If we today were brought face to face with a bunch of ancient Greeks and Romans, we would probably be pretty comfortable with assigning a majority of them to the big pan-European tent of modern “whiteness,” but if you had asked them about it, they certainly would not have felt any kinship with the pale-skinned people of northern and western Europe from whom most English-speaking white people today are descended. Those people were every bit as barbarian (and every bit as fair game for enslavement, for that matter) as the darker-skinned folk of the Middle East and North Africa. Ancient Greeks and Italians also had loads of internal ethnic divisions – like, the Latins (the central Italian ethnic group to which the Romans belonged) were a different thing from the Umbrians to their east, the Etruscans to the north and the Oscans to the south. In Greece, you had Dorians in the Peloponnese, Ionians in Attica and Asia Minor, Boeotians and Thessalians in central Greece, Epirotes in western Greece, and DON’T EVEN ASK about the Macedonians, because boyyyyyyyyy HOWDY you are NOT ready for that $#!tstorm. The point is, race and ethnicity can be basically anything that you think makes you different from the people in another community.

So yeah, Alexander’s empire. Alexander the Great conquered Persia, which was already the largest empire the world had ever seen at the time and incorporated dozens of ethnically distinct peoples (including many Greeks of Asia Minor, some of whom willingly fought against Alexander) through a philosophy of loose regional governance and broad religious tolerance. Now, here’s the thing: Alexander had no idea how to run an empire of that scale. No Greek did. No one alive in the world did – except for the Persians. Alexander didn’t have anything to replace the Persian systems of governance or bureaucracy, so… he didn’t. Individual Persian governors were usually given the opportunity to swear loyalty to him and keep their posts; vacant posts were filled with Macedonians, but the hierarchy was basically untouched. Alexander himself married a princess from Bactria (approximately what is now Afghanistan), Roxana, and had a kid with her, and encouraged other Macedonian nobles to take Persian wives as well, to help unify the empire. Unfortunately Alexander, of course, had to go and bloody die less than two years after he’d finished conquering everything, and tradition holds that on his deathbed he told his friends that the empire should go “to the strongest,” which was an incredibly dumb thing to say and caused literally decades of war, which we are not even going to talk about because it is the most Game of Thrones bull$#!t in the history of history. All you need to know is that when the dust settled there were basically three major Greco-Macedonian dynastic powers: the Antigonids in Greece, the Ptolemies in Egypt, and the Seleucids in Persia.

In terms of ethnic makeup the Antigonid kingdom is in principle the most straightforward because they’re basically still running the same Greece that Alexander’s father had conquered. Even then, you should bear in mind that a) most Greek cities had legal provisions for allowing foreigners to live there under certain conditions (“foreigners” often meant Greeks from other cities, but in principle could be anyone), and b) the Greeks had a lot of slaves (many of whom were, again, Greeks from other cities, because that’s fine in ancient Greek morality, but a lot of them would have come from all over the place), and even though the Greeks didn’t count slaves as “people” or consider them a real part of a city’s ethnic composition, WE SHOULD. The Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt seems to have had a relatively small Greco-Macedonian upper class ruling over a native Egyptian, Libyan and Nubian peasant majority. Members of that ruling class seem to have been kind of snobbish about any mixing between the two – only the very last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII (yes, that Cleopatra), even bothered to learn the Egyptian language. However, the Ptolemaic rulers did make some important cultural gestures of goodwill towards the Egyptians. They took the native title of Pharaoh, which previous foreign rulers of Egypt hadn’t, and adopted a lot of traditional Pharaonic iconography like the double crown. They also worshipped some of the most important Egyptian gods, most notably Isis, and may have kind of… deliberately created a new Greco-Egyptian god, Serapis, by blending together Osiris and Dionysus (Serapis actually becomes super important in the Roman period and is widely worshipped even outside Egypt). And then there’s the Seleucids, an empire that did nothing but slowly collapse from the moment it was established. They have a rough time of it because they have the largest land area to cover and dozens of distinct ethnic groups to bring together, and it doesn’t help that they kinda keep doing the Game of Thrones thing for about two hundred fµ¢&ing years. They often get a bad rap in history and have a reputation for oppressing the non-Greek populations of their empire, but that’s probably at least partly because some of our most important sources for the Seleucids are Jewish, and the Seleucid kings’ relationship with the Jews broke down in a fairly spectacular fashion during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (r. 175-164 BC). It’s not clear whether that’s representative of the Seleucids’ normal relationship with their subject peoples, or a worst case scenario. Also, the Seleucids tend to get painted as villains in the historical record by both the other Greek powers and the Romans, and never really get much of a chance to defend themselves because we don’t have Seleucid histories. What is clear is that they inherited all the ethnic and religious diversity of the Persian Empire, and most of their rulers were half-Persian because they followed Alexander’s example by marrying into the Persian nobility. After an initial period of conflict they also seem to have maintained cordial relations with the Mauryan Empire of India, their neighbour to the east, for several decades, and contemporary Indian sources talk about sending Buddhist missionaries into Seleucid lands, so… like, there might have been a bunch of Greek Buddhists running around the empire; that’s a thing.

Whew. Okay, so that is a criminally brief answer to-

OH CHRIST YOU ASKED ABOUT THE ROMANS AS WELL

WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME

Right. Romans. One of the major schools of thought on how the Romans were able to create such an enormous and long-lasting empire in the first place is that their openness to accepting foreigners into their community gave them an enormous manpower advantage over every other ancient Mediterranean state. Greek politics generally operates on the level of cities; even in the age of Alexander, individual cities have quite a lot of legislative autonomy. Citizenship is also something that works on the level of cities: you aren’t a citizen of, say, the Seleucid Empire; you’re a citizen of Antioch, or Tyre, or Babylon, or whatever. But then the Romans happen. The Romans are weird, because they will sometimes just declare that all the people of an allied city are now also citizens of Rome. In the early period of Rome’s expansion in the central Mediterranean, this meant (or so the theory goes) that they could draw upon larger citizen armies and sustain more casualties than their rivals. This is how they beat Pyrrhus, the Greek king of Epirus (r. 297-272 BC), when he invaded Italy in response to disputes between Rome and the Greek colony of Tarentum; this is how they beat Hannibal, the legendary Carthaginian general, even after he annihilated the largest army the Romans had ever fielded at Cannae during the second Punic War (218-201 BC). Now, at this point they are basically still just bringing in Italians, which we might consider ethnically homogenous even if they didn’t, but there’s more.

Once they really start to get going, the Romans enfranchise entire provinces at a time, like when the emperor Claudius (r. AD 41-54) decided to make everyone in Gaul (modern France, more or less) a Roman citizen. The really interesting thing about this particular decision is that we actually have a copy of the speech he made to the Senate in Rome at the time, so we can examine his rationale. Claudius’ argument is basically that being inclusive has always been what has made Rome stronger than its rivals, going right back to their mythological past, when Romulus populated his city with disenfranchised criminals from other communities (and, uh… women that they kidnapped from the next town over). The Romans believed that everything great about their civilisation had originally been learned or borrowed from someone else – metalworking and irrigation from the Etruscans, infantry combat from the Greeks, shipbuilding from the Carthaginians, etc – so it wasn’t a huge stretch for them to believe that all these people should eventually become part of Rome as citizens (well… the ones who weren’t killed or enslaved in the conquest, anyway – no one ever said the Romans were saints).

The reason Claudius feels he needs to justify all this to the Senate is that citizenship (rather than any of the forms of semi-citizen rights that Romans would sometimes grant to their allies) will make rich Gauls eligible to become Senators themselves, and occupy other high-level posts like provincial governorships. The decision affects the ethnic composition of the Senate, so even though he doesn’t actually need their permission to do it, he asks as a courtesy (the emperors’ relationship with the Senate is a weird and complicated thing). Even without being a citizen, you could actually do a great deal in the Roman government in Claudius’ time. Many of the most important jobs in the empire were ones that had existed during the age of the Republic, when Rome was theoretically a democracy, and all of those were restricted to citizens even after they stopped being elected positions – but there was also an imperial bureaucracy that answered directly to the emperor and his aides, and he was free to choose literally anyone to fill those positions. As a result, a lot of emperors deliberately picked slaves and former slaves for loads of senior positions, specifically because their lack of citizen rights meant that they could never be political rivals, and because they were a useful counterbalance to the power of the blue-blooded Roman aristocracy. And, again, slaves can be from basically anywhere. A lot of these administrative slaves were Greeks, because Greek education provided useful skills for running the imperial bureaucracy that the Romans themselves often didn’t have, but emperors could and did commission literally anyone for these positions.

Eventually the emperor Caracalla (r. AD 211-217) just decided it wasn’t worth keeping track anymore and declared that every freeborn person in the entire empire, which by that point stretched from northern England to Morocco to Romania to Jordan, was now a Roman citizen. All of these people are now “Romans,” regardless of their language or culture or religion; the only criterion is that they not be slaves or former slaves (and even if they’re former slaves, their children will be Roman citizens). And these people can move, in ways that were never possible before the Empire existed, because Rome is the first – and so far the last – political entity ever to unite the entire Mediterranean region, which allows them to wipe out piracy almost completely and jump-start trade and travel in ways that would never happen again for over a thousand years. My own research on Roman glass has led me to encounter glassblowers with Syrian or Jewish names working in northern Italy – people who were probably integral to spreading the technology of glassblowing to western Europe. The Roman army also moves people around – like, a lot. You might enlist in your home town in Syria, then serve on Hadrian’s wall and retire in northern England – in fact, we know that this happened because we’ve found stuff like inscriptions in the Aramaic language in Roman Britain.

Also Rome had, like… a whole dynasty of African emperors one time. Septimius Severus (r. AD 193-211) and his successors were part Italian, part Punic (of Carthaginian descent – ultimately Middle Eastern, since the Carthaginians were originally a Phoenician colony) and part Berber (native North African), and Severus grew up in what is now Tunisia. And that wasn’t really a big deal for the Romans, 1) because Severus’ Italian ancestry made him a Roman citizen, which trumps all other signifiers of ethnicity, and 2) Rome had already had a couple of emperors of Iberian (= Spanish) descent by this point who were considered some of the best ever, and the Iberians are just as “barbarian” as the Berbers as far as Rome is concerned. Other Roman emperors of varied ethnicities include Philip (Arabian), Diocletian (Illyrian), the three Gordians (probably Cappadocian), and Elagabalus (Syrian, and incidentally the gayest Roman of all time; like, normally I would warn you to be super cautious about using modern labels like “straight” and “gay” for Romans because they just didn’t think about sexual orientation in those terms, but I make an exception here because Elagabalus was super gay).

Oh, and just because someone will definitely bring it up if I don’t, there was a big fuss in the news a few years back because someone discovered the skeletons of what they claimed were Chinese people living in, of all places, Roman Britain. And to me, one Chinese family in Britain in the first century AD is not particularly a dramatic stretch of plausibility (a handful of people could easily slip through the historical record and just never be mentioned), but the evidence in this particular case falls some way short of “proof.” There’s chemical data that suggests these individuals grew up somewhere far away from Britain, which is well and good, but the thing that points specifically to China is not the isotopic analysis but a study of bone morphology, and trying to determine someone’s ethnicity on the basis of what their bones look like, on the universal scale of things that are sketchy, ranks “sketchy as all fµ¢&.” Again, I’m happy to believe that they exist, because China (Seres in Latin) and Rome (Dà-Qín in Chinese) definitely knew about each other, and we occasionally find Roman artefacts and coins in eastern Asia, or Chinese artefacts in the eastern Roman Empire, but the specific evidence for these individuals isn’t there, in my opinion.

…that was a brief answer. Let it stand as a warning to others.

#QandA #not pokemon

931 notes · View notes