Nothing but hair and pencils

New Release: [-The Chi-Hui Dragon-] Gothic Lolita Ouji Tailored Long Jacket

What I love about this scene is she knew he was going to support her no matter what she wrote, but she knew she would cry no matter what he said. He knew she would cry no matter what he said, and he knew he would support her when she did. It’s all predetermined and all still meaningful.

[ID: two screenshots from 'revolutionary girl utena' of nanami and touga standing in the rose garden. nanami imploringly clings to touga, who stands stiffly with his face obscured from the audience. in the first screenshot, nanami says: 'i know i have to accept that you go out with girls.'

but i digress, top ten things about nanami that make me love her more than anyone else in the world ever is the way that she’s so concerned with touga’s well-being and him not being ‘swarmed’ by girls, and at the same time. so wonderfully selfish and entitled. and at the same time. so horribly insecure and guilty about all of that. you know nanami was a terribly lonely and unnoticed child, her only ‘friends’ are lackeys she’s met within the show’s current-day timeframe, her parents ignored her (we dont need to get into whether or not that’s fortunate for her), when she says touga’s ‘smile was for me and me alone’ she really means that. like i believe her!!!! and i understand why he’s so important to her, because it’s like he’s the only person who has ever seen and loved her. and she’s so desperately sad and insecure because she killed his cat and he’s been cold with her ever since and oh god oh god i just need someone to say no one else will do it has to be you just once.

the guilt that nanami feels about Existing. being alive being born taking up space being a (weird non-)person at all. especially the guilt about killing that cat, especially the guilt about Changing her brother (which she has entirely accepted as something she did btw, always wondering why he’s so cold to her nowadays and reasoning that’s it). you know she’s repenting she’s saying over and over again i did this terrible thing and i regret it every day and im awful and terrible and selfish because i still want this one thing i need this one thing. maybe i can get it if i make sure nothing like this ever happens again. framing all these girls as ‘vermin’, a ‘swarm’, worrying herself about their intentions or uncleanliness or whatever. her brother sat catatonic in a room for who knows how long and she’s not supposed to try and fix that for him? try and make sure no one ever puts him in that state again?

i think. maybe. what im getting at here. is the princeliness of the little sister, princehood exercised by a sister. princehood here is the desire or ability to save someone, to exert control and power over them. as i said above nanami is guilt and insecurity and shame and entitlement all bundled together, and that’s partially imho because she has this idea of touga as her prince and she’s his princess, but touga rarely and minimally plays along with it and instead purposefully exacerbates this tendency of hers to. well. get possessive and defensive. and this makes all of those negative feelings they both have worse! it’s like theyre always playing this fucked up game of chicken where they just keep on expressing sentiments that almost get at how they really feel about things and then at the last second they both just regress back to these equivocations that obfuscate The Truth (not pictured here).

your identity, your dignity and your worth as a woman have absolutely nothing to do with how or why abusive people lash out at you. the insidious narrative that survivors should feel special on some level for having been worthy of their abuse is battered wife rhetoric. it's the perpetrator-system of violence grooming you to accept, and even shamefully yearn for, violence it always intended to inflict. and women are so often complicit in repeating the narrative back to each other. sometimes it's very well meaning and springs up out of the solidarity of shared experience, trying to reclaim power from situations where power was wielded against you, but sometimes it's lana del rey sadgirl coquette I need a man who'll slap me around so I know he cares. sometimes it's eating disorders and self harm. the twinning of femininity and female worthiness with suffering, associating the scars of misogynistic violence with acceptance of one's femininity by somebody who hates you, is profoundly unhealthy and profoundly unfair.

bottom line: trans women have never needed to be identifiable by their abusers at a glance to be subject to misogynistic violence. they have never even needed to be out. remember the early days of the internet when online culture was so outspokenly misogynistic as a baseline that most women just never disclosed their gender, never went on mic, never posted pictures? would anyone ever seriously argue that women weren't subject to misogynistic abuse online until they broke anonymity? and that being the case, would it ever ever seem appropriate to hear someone had been doxxed or sexually harassed for disclosing her gender and respond "heh, proves you really are a woman"?

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow 

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash 

There was a whole invisible, disregarded and mostly unrecorded economy of independent self-supporting businesswomen making clothes for sale. (The author had to pore over local records all over the UK just to pull together the information. Working women were not given much visibility or mention in those centuries.)

One thing that's really clear is most women did not make their own clothes.

Rich people had servants and professionals to make their garments, and later on couture houses. Many of them used enslaved labor which would have had to have been highly skilled.

Middling sorts had local dressmakers, sometimes professionals, sometimes a local woman or neighbor who would do it for pay. There were itinerant dressmakers too, who would come into houses and make up the family's wardrobe. And there were shops of readymade garments far earlier than most people realize.

Poorer people bought their clothes secondhand. There was a huge secondhand garment trade.

American pioneers in homespun is pure modern-day fantasy. Women in the territories had mail-order catalogues from which they could have clothes delivered by trains or by ship.

As far as I can tell, the idea of self-sufficient women doing a constant round of spinning, weaving, and sewing is a fantasy of the post-industrial age projected onto women. But spinning, weaving and clothing-making has long been a professional industry.

(worth noting that slavery was in something of a legal gray area in the UK during the 18th and early-mid 19th century when it was legal in other parts of the Anglosphere; it was never technically legal in the UK itself, but of course it was legal and commonly practiced in their colonies, and many enslaved people who were brought to the UK Were treated as though they were still de facto enslaved until they were taken back home again. And of course you don't have to rely on chattel slavery to make a business off of unfair labor practices, which was extremely common even after slavery was outlawed and/or fell by the wayside)

Source: #DRCL Midnight Children