"Rings, and other Middle Earth things."

trying new brush with higushoko

‘I worked 20-hour days to make Naomi Osaka’s Wimbledon dress’

The Japanese designer Hana Yagi created the striking all-white bridal-inspired kimono that drew cheers from the crowd at the All England Club

The Japanese kimono and the traditional western wedding dress are difficult enough to walk in, let alone play tennis. But Naomi Osaka did so anyway, emerging on to Wimbledon’s Court 3 in a gown that was a hybrid of both garments to play a round of practice shots.

The dress, which drew cheers and wolf whistles from the crowd, was the Japanese player’s latest fashion display, following the gold sequinned outfit that she wore at the French Open and her extravagant turquoise and green dress at the Australian Open in January. Her Wimbledon effort was the work of Hana Yagi, a 26-year old Japanese designer, who created it alone in ten days in her studio in Tokyo.

2026 French open, designed by Kevin Germanier in collaboration with Nike:

Yagi was asked to create an outfit for the “walk on”, when players enter the court before the beginning of a match, a well-established opportunity for fashion statements. At the French Open, Osaka compared her sparkling dress to the illuminations of the Eiffel Tower. Her extraordinary Australian Open outfit was inspired by jellyfish.

Australian Open 2026, designed by Robert Wun for Nike:

But Wimbledon imposes strict rules — above all that all clothes must be completely white (Roger Federer once got a telling-off for wearing shoes with orange soles). “First, it had to be all white,” says Yagi. “Visually, [Harper] gave me the image of a kimono or junihitoe [a traditional 12-layered kimono of the Japanese imperial court]. As a part of the concept, they wanted to reinterpret the tradition in the context of sport.”

The vintage wedding dresses she had in her own stock were cream and ivory — shades unacceptable at Wimbledon. She went to shops in Tokyo and bought the pure white western style wedding dress that forms the lower part of the Osaka gown, and a shiromuku, the traditional nuptial kimono in which brides are wrapped for delivery to their new husbands.

It is this, embroidered with brocade images of cranes and cherry blossoms, that forms the upper part of the dress, but drastically restructured to allow freedom of movement. “I didn’t want her to walk with small steps — in this she won’t have any difficulty walking,” Yagi says. “And it’s not like a tight corset, but a dress that Naomi herself can adjust.” Osaka wore her playing dress, created by her sponsor Nike, below Yagi’s creation, so it had to be lighter than a conventional kimono. The other condition was that the player had to be able to put on and remove the dress quickly.

“It was my first experience of that, because all my past works were art pieces, and not really aiming to be functional,” she says. “But this has to come on and off in three minutes. I kept it putting it on myself over and over again to confirm that it worked.” The secret ingredient? Extensive strips of Velcro.

Some more of Naomi Osaka's show-stoppers:

US Open 2024. Designed by Yoon Ahn for Nike:

US Open 2025. Designed by Osaka herself:

al oído, despacio, lentamente.

Me dijo: ¡vive, vive, vive!

Era la muerte.

In it’s raw nature, the ROTS novel is where the starting point of Padmé begins along with the TPM, and AOTC novels. I don’t see her role as solely associated to “just” Anakin and I seriously doubt that GL and Stover intended for it to be read that way either. What feels intended is the emphasis that Anakin is as equally enjoined to her character as he is to hers. While I can understand undoubtedly that it may come off to some people that Padmé only exists to be Anakin’s wife, I feel like the book very clearly offers much more nuance and depth in the writing than just what’s interpreted on the surface.

A Padmé stan will always see her moments and begin analyzing every detail and inch of it no matter what, (guilty) and while I do agree that the novel should’ve included extra bits about Padmé as well, and that there are some passages provided by the book that gave us an opening to fully dive into more of her character and story arc, I still firmly believe that what we got is amazing work and content.

Like first things first is that loving Padmé means also loving and appreciating that a big part of her character is heavily associated to Anakin, if you can’t accept that, it’s sort of hard to fully accept Padmé. And I get that Anidala isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fine and I’m not saying you gotta ship them to love Padmé, but it is what it is that some characters are so heavily intertwined that sometimes it’s impossible to separate them. You have be able to understand character A if you want to understand character B, and Anakin & Padmé are these types of variants.

However, this doesn’t mean her dialogue being about him and her life with him is meant to undermine her independence and individuality. Padmé is already a well established iconic, feminist like character that can balance both her lover girl side and warrior side. The previous movies/novelizations drove the point home to show us just WHO Padmé Amidala is. So the ROTS novel gave us the chance to see the side of Padmé that’s hopelessly in love and finally at the tip of earning her well deserved, fairytale happily ever after.

When we first get introduced to ‘Padmé’ in the novel, we get the full rundown of all her accomplishments, achievements, and even a poetic composition of Padmé’s talents and her power and impact through out her career. She’s very young and she’s already pretty much achieved everything a very career oriented person could strive for. Even in the same paragraph- it highlights how compared to Anakin, Padmé is much wiser and she can understand him better than he can understand himself, levelling or even somewhat heightening her stance in comparison to the main character. If anything, this passage doesn’t undermine her character but uplifts it more.

And even throughout the book, despite that Padmé is now at a point in her life where she wants to settle down, leave duty, run away with her husband to have their child, her passion for democracy, and being a fierce advocate for freedom doesn’t let her just walk away from the chaos. A lot of her story that was included in the novel is about how Padmé can be a lover and fighter at the same time. She’s out here forming rebellions with her colleagues, trying to help her husband out with the issues he’s facing all while carrying twins inside her womb.

The novel focuses on what a strong person Padmé really is not just in political terms but also out of all that, which is part of what made Anakin fall so deeply in love with her. Even her own colleagues such as Mon Mothma rely on her to help them out with founding an entire rebellions because they know she’s the reason why there’s any semblance of humanity left in the Galaxy, and basically admitted that she carries the Republic on her shoulders. This passage right below is basically what sums Padmé up and I gotta shout out to my girl Mon for saying it loud and proud:

And Anakin is written to be the same way as her, completely and utterly obsessed. His entire arc and story in the novel, is centred around Padmé, no matter what situation he finds himself in, whether it be a meeting with the Jedi council, or a discussion with OWK, or a weird encounter with Palpatine, Anakin thoughts always lead back to Padmé. Bringing us back to my previous point that their characters are heavily interconnected.

And when Padmé discovers that Bail and Mon along with the rest of the Delegation of 2000 are making plans to move against Palpatine’s rule, Padmé doesn’t only find concern in the fact that she’ll have to keep this secret from Anakin and that breaks her heart, or that she’s planning to go against her husbands somewhat “father figure” (mentor) but she herself finds disappointment in the fact that a friend and mentor of hers is being suspected and she even argues with the rest of her Senator colleagues about her disagreement. It wasn’t just about Anakin for her, it was also about herself and the fact that she’s finally coming to terms with the truth that maybe her ally isn’t actually her ally.

There’s even a point where she comes to the realization that she would vote against Palpatine and find others to do the same because she acknowledges how corrupt things are getting under his rule, and she would do it despite the fact that she knows it would hurt her love, which showcase Padmé’s ability to dissect corruption and evil even when it’s delivered in a well wrapped confetti paper package like Palpatine and also demonstrates her ability to do the right thing even when it pains her to hurt someone she deeply loves. She’s resilient, powerful, and strong!

And of course how could I do a Padmé study without mentioning her most important and climactic moments that mark the end of democracy in the Republic and the rise of the corrupt Empire which was artfully delivered in a poetic prose that can only be attributed to Padmé herself:

Before this powerful scene, Padmé graces us with yet another glimpse inside her intelligently crafted mind by the way she advises Bail to pretend to ally himself with Palpatine’s government and asks him to encourage the other members of the Delegation of 2000 to do the same so that there’s preservation for them to continue to root the seeds of the rebellion against Palpatine’s Empire in the future. (Painful as it is, she’s fully aware that she may not be alive much longer due to Anakin’s visions.) Only someone as articulated and calculated as Padmé would’ve been able to think of a plan so long term like that and it actually work in the end. Proof of what a political genius she is and a true warrior or champion of democracy.

In "Court Martial," we're told the name of the ship that the young Ensign James Kirk and less-young Lieutenant Finney served on (the Republic). IIRC we are not told the name of their captain at the time, or anything about him, only the Kirk-Finney backstory at the Academy and then their falling out on the Republic, when Kirk's commitment to The Paperwork led to him breaking the bro code by scrupulously logging Finney's mistake instead of shielding his friend from consequences.

However, we actually do know who the captain of the Republic must have been. In "Obsession," Kirk quite clearly states that Garrovick was the only captain he served under from the time he graduated from the Academy until Garrovick's death.

We also know from "Obsession" that Kirk was a lieutenant at the time of Garrovick's death. And we know from "The Deadly Years"—aired and produced prior to "Obsession"—confirming the implication in "Shore Leave" that Kirk was then 33 and is now 34 that Lieutenant Kirk was only 23 when Garrovick died on the Farragut, during Kirk's first deep-space mission.

This means that the whole Kirk-Finney falling out happened before anything to do with the Farragut, since Kirk was still an ensign on the Republic; that he couldn't have been older than 21 or 22 at the time; and that their captain at the time must have been Garrovick, and any resulting decisions or reactions from their captain would have been from Garrovick.

The background creepiness of Bad pirate crews, which are most of them, how they tend to not have any female crew members at all, how they beckon any pretty young woman around to come play with them and join them. It's real bad. It's also like, a totally 2 dimensional portrayal of evil that is reserved for the most background of background characters.

However I think their ubiquity says a lot about how piracy is meant to be perceived by the public in One Piece, and is one of the strongest indicators of how prevalent misogyny is in-world.

It's very normal in One Piece for regular island inhabitants to have never met a Different class of pirate in their life. There's no reason for them to withhold judgement that maybe these pirates won't be like every crew that attacked before, and to wait and judge them by their actions. I mean frankly that would be irrationally weak self-preservation.

There are people who live peacefully under the flags of Yonkos who protect them, and feel loyalty and gratitude to them for it, but that seems to only be thing with very big name pirates. The East Blue, being the weakest and least populated, has no such plethora of powerful people and resulting turf wars.

So. Nami. Is very clearly implied to have never met any Different pirates before. I'm thinking about what that means. About how every group of pirates she stole from were creepy, dangerous men. How she started going out stealing when she was still a young child. How she didn't have a mother anymore to guide her or comfort her. How Arlong would grab her chin inappropriately, talk about her as a "human female", as property, and god knows what else.

How all the men in Arlong's crew treated her patronizingly, pretending they're all friends, teasing her and playing at respect when really not a single one of them ever stuck up for her or hesitated to accuse her of betrayal. Who were always ready to kill her if she refused to cooperate. Who grabbed her and intimidated her when they felt like it.

That's what she had to come back to after a close call with stealing from other predatory men, instead of the relief of home there was a dark, cramped room filled with endless hours of misery and isolation and blood. Where any one of her captors could barge in and demand new maps, work faster, where did you go, you took too long again this time. Endless threats and incursions.

I'm thinking about that her fight scene in Alabasta, where she tumbles and rips off her cape and uses it to catch her enemy's spikes, before leaping to her feet and running out the back door, all in one moment. How it makes her enemy reconsider her and think, "so the girl's not a total novice at fighting after all." What that implies about her experiences as a young thief. The times she wasn't fast or clever enough and had to fight and claw her way out. Why she always carried a staff and a knife. Why she was the only one before Chopper who had any medical knowledge or experience.

You know she was stitching herself up. And the weapons, how do you think she learned to use those? If any of the Arlong Pirates helped her it wasn't out of kindness and it wasn't gentle.

Then I think about Nojiko, and Bellemere's memory, and the only softness in a hard life. How easily Nami connects to every young woman experiencing hardship that she meets. How completely she dismisses the struggles of men unless they mean something to her and are going through something terrible. The way that Nami only has sympathy for women and children is easily noticeable in-text, but it's also something confirmed in those words by the author. And it's clearly because of the life she lived, the men who had all the power and only abused it, who saw her as nothing but a girl to take advantage of, without anyone aside from her sister clearly knowing and caring about any of it.

Nami clearly isn't bitter, she doesn't think the world owes her recompense, on the contrary she knows she is far from the only person in the world to suffer the things she has suffered. She is endlessly reaching out and kind, but only to those that she isn't sure would get help without her. Certainly, before Luffy, Usopp, and Zoro, no man ever reached out a hand to her without an ulterior motive.