Obsessed with missions powered by guilt

I’ve been watching suits for the past few months and I’m OBSESSED.

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s “about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.

Ask yourself, how does this piece make you feel? (No wrong answers)

Look for an artist statement nearby. What does it say about the artist and their relationship to their work? What does the artist say that they are trying to convey with their art? What contextual clues can you pick up from what they say about their background, or what they omit?

Look at the title of the piece. What is the artist saying about their work by naming it that, either explicitly or implicitly?

Look at the medium. Is there anything about the piece that stands out to you, knowing what it's made of?

Look at the year it was made. What cultural events might have been happening around this time? Was this piece part of a particular art movement? What was the purpose of that art movement, and what was it trying to say?

Ace and Aro Pigeons 💜💚

When really it is "I find it unnerving how fast people make fun of physical disability and equate it to moral goodness when you make it slightly ok to do so in context."

Well, you see, I'm talking about them as real historical people with real disabilities and not the Targaryens.

However, there's so much going on with that approach to it, so here are my thoughts in no particular order:

This idea presumes so much choice that just did not realistically exist for so many people. Archdukes and Archduchesses more often than not had no say in their marriage partner, because marriage wasn't about what they wanted. You, woman in this family, have to marry your cousin because it's what is best politically, and how you feel about the concept doesn't matter one way or another. This happens to men too, though less so, but off the top of my head you can look at Crown Prince Rudolph's marriage being more or less decided over his head. So, preference to marry a cousin you barely know really isn't factored in at all. You're lucky if your parent cares about you being happy in the marriage.

It's not about purity, it's about politics. The rule isn't that you had to marry a relative, it's that you had to marry a Catholic from a ruling dynasty. Add in the idea that this was chosen for you from a set of politically advantageous matches, because daughters and sons are assets to be used strategically, and you get a lot of marriages into the same set of families. As crass as it is, letting your children marry downward is wasting a bargaining tool. For the Habsburgs, the religious bar is also important and pretty constraining, especially when they aren't on good political terms with the other major Catholic powers (France and Spain) so you get Italian state and Bavarian marriages. If you keep reinforcing those alliances through marriage, that also means you're probably marrying a relative. Look at how quickly they leap at having new options when Belgium is established as a friendly Catholic state.

The above problem is complicated when someone in your family becomes Grandmother of Europe. Maria Theresa's extensive marriage politics means that a lot of the possible marriage candidates are almost certainly related. This is also, by the way, how we get Victoria's hemophilia being so widespread in the Courts her children married into, and everyone seemingly being cousins by World War I.

There is a lot of "might" going on with how disability works here. Ferdinand I's Wikipedia page ("citation needed" all over the place by the way) is littered with how his disabilities "might" be caused by heredity. But they could also be caused or compounded by many of the other things that caused birth complications or disability to be more common historically, like insufficient medical knowledge about prenatal care, insufficient maternal nutrition, or infections during pregnancy or after birth. Epilepsy certainly isn't constrained to just when your parents are related to each other.

Look me in the eyes and tell me that historians routinely acting like this man (who actually functioned pretty well in a world without anti-seizure medications) had no sentience because he had a disability from birth is schadenfreude.