I did it for love

teachers objected. my parents went to bat for him. “it helps him focus.” some teachers insisted it was noisy, in which case he was allowed to make origami instead, but for the most part he continued to make chain mail.

he gave me a roman short sword for christmas when i was 14. i think he’s given me a total of 5 swords over my lifetime and like 9 pieces of armor. he just has always loved metal. of course he joined the SCA the moment he heard about it.

since my thing was textiles, i reciprocated by sewing, knitting, weaving, and embroidering pieces for his reenactment costumes. when we got our dad into reenactment, i helped him put together his persona as well. now, we’re welsh on mom’s side, and from all over the silk road on dad’s side. so my brother went with a welsh persona, and that was pretty easy, because patterns from the british isles are well researched and easy to find, and a lot of SCA folks are into that. but dad and i decided to be silk road traders, and that was HARD. it took us years to put together historically accurate costumes. i cut up a lot of used kimonos from ragstock, i tell you what.

and you know what my dang brother did? he learned to make mongolian arrowheads in a weekend. three goddamn days and he was like “here have a dozen, i dun wanna learn fletching so you do the rest.”

Lady this is a skinny influencer in a frilly white dress that's never had dirt on it, with her hair in professionally-done beachy waves, doing a photoshoot in a field using a basket of strawberries bought at walmart as a prop.

the thing is: it doesn’t appreciably do that, because the feathers wick up water and mud, which cancels out any insulation advantage they might hypothetically confer, and also it wasn’t even put there on purpose.

the Leg Get More Hair gene is just linked to the Bones Get More Big gene. when you breed any lineage of horses to have bigger bones–not just taller, but chunkier–the leg hair just happens anyway. so every single breed of draft horse has feathered legs, and even carriage horses like friesians get feathers once they hit a certain threshold of lorge.

tomboy, meaning “this child is clearly queer but let’s hope it goes away”

sensitive, meaning “clearly neurodivergent and often distressed but let’s keep going until they grow numb”

self-sufficient, meaning “next to zero trust in parental figures’ ability in various aspects of parenting”

however, you got one thing wrong 

This is how well-fitted corsets look on large bodies! No one’s tits are getting crushed.

‘But, Pancake!’ you ask, ‘Aren’t stays supposed to squish the tits?’

No. That’s a myth, probably started by either the Victorians or Hollywood (or both, as these things go).