#pwbi

My first ever DnD character was an elven druid called Nehtë! She was pretty fun to play as but I ended up giving her to a friend and playing as Marcon instead. In that sense, Marcon would be my first.

When I was around 15 or 16 years old, I was starting to get very active on Tumblr and was also experimenting around with my opinions. One of those opinions dealt with LGBT+ identities. Now, exploring Tumblr at a young age can be a mess at times, but add on being a confused teenager and the environment of Tumblr?

I went for a year or so thinking I was a pansexual lithroromantic and I cringe every time I remember this phase. I would go on to think I was pansexual for 5-6 years before gradually coming to terms that I was a lesbian.

I tried to research up on all these various genders and sexualities and I thought they were all 100% legit. But, they aren’t. They’re harmful to those of us in the LGBT+ community, in some ways they are biphobic or transphobic. Many of these are sexualities for interests or genders for personality traits.

Tex: What’s your theme? If it’s set in Meiji-era Japan, to pick an example, you wouldn’t have cell phones, nor the people wearing togas (unless it was someone trying to be Extra™, especially since the Meiji-era occurred after Ancient Greece, and Europe-Japanese relations exist during this period - but I digress). Having a good handle on what your theme(s) is/are will naturally delineate boundaries for what type of ideas can even be implemented.

This is, unfortunately, where being good at research would be very helpful. Even if you’re not writing a historical whatsit novel, knowing the finer details of your source materials will guide you into ideas that are complementary to the ones you’ve already incorporated.

To continue the idea of a story set in Meiji-era Japan, knowing what details composed Japanese culture in general, but what historians define as “Meiji” (years, yes, but political events? Diplomatic ties with foreign powers? Inventions? Artistic movements?) is a strength rather than a weakness.

Meiji-era Japan saw their own Industrial Revolution, and with that came the dawn of the modern textile era. Cotton and particularly silk saw a sharp increase in production - and with automation comes more human capital available for invention. In this instance, that means a greater creativity in textile designs, especially since it was no longer restricted to locally-available quantities or time-restricted manufacturing methods.

As Japan adopted a mercantilist economic model during this era, that meant more exports - but what they were exporting weren’t raw goods, it was finished products. Remember that greater opportunity for creativity? This is where that came into play. Textiles, in this example, became another vehicle for art, and thus culture (this was Japan’s main export, something you can still see in many forms today).

Yūzen-dyed fabrics became popular in this era (The Japan Times). If we poke around a little, we can deconstruct this. Yūzen mimicked upper-class silk brocades by applying dyes with a stencil of rice paste, in a workaround of sumptuary laws - and also much cheaper than brocade!. It’s a resist-dyeing technique, too, of which there are several methods in Japan alone.

So what can we do with this information?

We have a source culture - Japan. We have a source era - late 1800s to early 1900s. We have a popular textile - silk. We have a popular method of decorating said textile - resist-dyeing with a rice paste.

All of these things are new avenues to find compatible ideas. We can progress yūzen fabric forward in time to the modern age, as it’s just a technique, and do things like… I don’t know, put Pikachu on a silk blouse. Both of these things are culturally Japanese. That’s one new idea.

The time period means we can look to other places during the same relative era. A Victorian hair wreath wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows, since it’s from the same time period, the UK and Japan had diplomatic relations (so a character’s knowledge of the custom could be bluffed), and Shintoism would provide a plausible reasoning for hair wreaths popped up without Victorian interaction - reinventing the wheel, so to speak. That’s a second new idea.

The textile medium opens up a great many things. Silk wallpaper is a thing, as are silk sutures (which would mean a jump in interior design and medical technologies, respectively). That’s the third and fourth new ideas.

The textile decoration method, though I’ve already discussed a particular usage of yūzen. Do you know what another similar method is? Batik. You stamp through the dye-resistant medium rather than leaving gaps to float dye to dye the fabric, but you could make up some intermediary points between the techniques to bridge the gap. What if some artisan discovered they could apply the rice paste and etch in designs, and then floated the fabric in dye? That’s a fifth idea.

By knowing the context of my example of a source material - Meiji-era Japan - and pulling something superficial from it - yūzen fabric - I’ve come up with five new ideas that are complementary to my sources:

Pikachu-decorated silk blouse

Hair wreaths

Silk wallpaper

Silk sutures

Yūzen-etched (rather than gap-leaving) designs

These are all consistent with my theme because they come from my theme, and only branch out by maybe one or two degrees in the variables I’ve described for each.

Yeah I don’t really see too much about Skyward Sword compared to other Zelda games like say Wind Waker so I try my best to post/reblog what I can! And I’m glad! :)

You can do this? You can totally drive from place to place and do freelance work or odd jobs, capitalism makes that possible lol