𝐹𝑜𝑛𝑧𝑖𝑒

Once upon a time, in a kingdom that was not enormously large, nor very small, there lived a sad and lonely princess.

She was not sad because she was lonely, as one might believe, but rather she was lonely because she was sad. All of her ladies in waiting would chitter and pace at her bedside, urging her to rise, to dress in some of her many fancy adornments, and leave her tower to go and dance in the great hall with them, but the princess always declined.

Soon, they stopped asking.

For years, people lost their will to bother her. She was alone in her tower, and as the months passed her loneliness grew until she could do nothing else but stare out of her decorated window and sigh wistfully out it at the common people below.

But dear lord, this is not a sad tale, I promise it.

For in this kingdom there lived a strange and magical creature. Members of this kingdom might not know what it was called, or where he was from, but the magical creature had a name, and his name was Ricodimous.

Ricodimous had a face like a mouse, eyes cunning and dark, and a shell by which he rolled himself into, in case the world got too much, too loud.

One day, Ricodimous was puttering through the market when he heard the most wistful sigh he had ever heard in his entire life. He looked about, questioning, but saw nothing until he rolled back onto his shell and gazed up, up high until he could see a window over the market square, where the saddest and loneliest princess of all sat on her window seat.

"Hello Princess!" He called. And even though the distance between them was great, Ricodimous was a magical creature, and the Princess heard him perfectly.

She gazed down at the wondrous little creature Ricodimous was, and sighed again.

"Hello Ser," she greeted politely. "You should roll along, for I am not of the finest stock for company."

Ricodimous tilted his head.

"You look to me to be the finest stock of anything," he replied. "Why do you believe not?"

The princess simply shrugged.

Ricodimous pondered for a moment. As a magical creature, his guesses on the ailment of princesses were often correct.

"Your heart is aching," he declared. "But you are too shy to say it."

The princess raised an eyebrow in surprise. "You assume much, Ser."

"I assume enough. Pray, would you come down from your tower, and we shall play a game."

The princess could not deny that she had longed to play a game for a time, even if it was with a mouse like creature.

For the first time in years, the Princess dressed herself in her finest silks, and exited her tower with a flourish. Dressed in deep blues and greens, she at last came down to the marketplace and met Ricodimous by the gardens entrance.

The game they played my lord, is one similar to Croquet. I will admit my lord, that this is a game I myself have never played, so you must use your imagination with my storytelling, and simply believe that while you know the rules, so do I.

And so the Princess and Ricodimous played their game, over the course of which the Princess found herself more and more joyous. She indulged in a full commitment of the sport, soiling her finest clothes all so she could kneel in the mud and get a better angle.

Even more scandalously, the Princess was referred to by her royal title less and less, which tends to happen when one is losing a game so terribly he must roll up into his shell and rock back and forth from frustration. So over the day the Princess was called more and more by her name, Ashley, and Ricodimous was simply called Ric.

But the sun was soon to set, and all stories, no matter how brief must end.

At the end of their game there was only one true winner, and Ashley wiped her royal brow and shoot Rics paw, smiling in victory. The magical creature was not disappointed, for he promised to never give up, and that he would return the next day for a rematch.

Princess Ashley was surprised.

"You mean that you'll come back?" She asked, and she realized how excited she was at the prospect.

"Of course I will!" Ric replied. "I would never run around and desert you."

happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!

though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!

thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg:

i had no idea dumas was black until this post and i just…idk it never even occurred to me that him not being white was a very real possibility, bc that means the erasure worked that the continual erasure of black history, my history, worked and it’s all really feeding this story that blackfolk have never accomplished anything other than crime that colonialism is so horny to tell

" CEVANTES. YOU CANT SAY THAT THEN SAY ‘RAVISH ME’! "

He made me go insane because of Popeye's

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Do you design a lot of characters living in not-modern eras and you’re tired of combing through google for the perfect outfit references? Well I got good news for you kiddo, this website has you covered! Originally @modmad made a post about it, but her link stopped working and I managed to fix it, so here’s a new post. Basically, this is a costume rental website for plays and stage shows and what not, they have outfits for several different decades from medieval to the 1980s. LOOK AT THIS SELECTION:

OPEN ANY CATEGORY AND OH LORDY–