🦋

The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.

Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW.

her name was freddie oversteegen and she, at the age of fourteen, along with her older sister truus who was 16 and their friend johanna “hannie” schaft who was 19, was a part of the netherlands most famous all female resistance cell which was dedicated to fighting the nazis and dutch traitors.

among other things, they are known to have blown up bridges and railroads, smuggled jewish children from concentration camps and, as the tweet mentions, seducing nazis and then shooting them with guns that they had hidden in their bike baskets. freddie is quoted as having said that they “had to do it.” and that it was a “necessary evil, killing those who betrayed good people.”

though freddie and her sister truus were both lucky and survived the war, hannie schaft wasn’t. at the age of 24, hannie was caught and around three weeks later was executed by nazis, only 18 days before the netherlands were eventually liberated. she was shot with one only wounding her, and, before the final shot, hannie is quoted as having told the executioners: ik schiet beter, which translates to “i shoot better.”

though she didn’t survive, hannie is recognized as a national icon and a face of the dutch resistance, with her story even being retold in a movie from 1981 called “the girl with the red hair.” along with this, truus also founded the national hannie schaft foundation in 1992, on which freddie served as a board member.

freddie, at the time of her death, was 92 years old and the last surviving member of the resistance cell, with truus having died two years earlier at the age of 92.

So!

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

1. will and elizabeth’s love story

2. elizabeth becoming pirate king

3. avoiding sexualizing elizabeth or the other female pirate characters in the first 3 films by allowing them to wear period-accurate pirate outfits that aren’t tailored to be revealing and impractical for ‘sex appeal’ just because they’re women

6. I run a corseting panel at cons and literally use Elizabeth’s lace-up scene as a video clip of what historical corseting was actually like, because the only thing they got wrong in this scene is that tightlacing wouldn’t be a thing for about another 200 years (and you couldn’t tightlace with the corset style Elizabeth is wearing anyway). It’s one of the most accurate corseting scenes I’ve ever seen.

7. Will’s hat.

8. That scene with all the pirates on the gallows where that little boy starts singing Hoist the Colours? Yeah, that’s fucking legendary. The rest of AWE was kind of a trash fire, but that scene gave me goosebumps.

9. There’s this great shot in the first one where they really drive home the class differences inherent in this time period by having the governor talking about progress and civilization to Elizabeth in their carriage, and then they cut to a shot outside the carriage where a beggar gets splashed by mud from the wheel. It’s a perfect way to underline that everything is not, in fact, a nice little upper-class fairytale, and to give some weight to Will’s storyline, because he has a lot more in common with that beggar than with the governor.

10. For its time, the CGI was fucking amazing.

11. And let’s not forget the work of the makeup department, which had to actually invent new ways of putting on makeup for this movie.

12. The governor’s death scene. Holy shit.

13. They could have gone with a Jack/Will/Elizabeth love triangle, but they didn’t. There are some hints Jack is in love (or at least in lust) with Elizabeth, but he recognizes that she loves Will, and that’s that.

2. They had a woman pirate right in the first film, when the tradition is to only show male ones (hell, the PotC ride at Disney had a wench auction scene until recently). And it was a female pirate of colour at that!

3. Elizabeth may not have known how to fight in the first film, but she wasn’t helpless either. Her first instinct was to fight, but she also had the brains to recognize when it was best to hide instead. Plus when given the chance she stabbed Barbosa that one time.

4. Elizabeth’s lack of fighting ability was not simply because she was a woman, it was clear it was due to her societal circumstances, since we saw other women of different socioeconomic backgrounds being able to fight (and when given the opportunity to learn Elizabeth took to fighting like a duck on water).

5. The Hoist the Colours scene where we see pirates of multiple ethnicities and their varying flags, reminding us that pirates came in all shapes and sizes and weren’t just white men.

6. One of the Pirate Lords being yet ANOTHER woman of colour. She may not have had much of a speaking role if memory serves, but even her presence is already a big deal.

Davy Jones CGI is legendary and a ton better than some of the stuff done today 😄