The random browsings of Goddess Thain

fucking christ I am sobbing

Do not do this to me my husband is a historical reenactor and weapon historian I know so much about this shit.

My brain is over flowing. Like like i love and hate the idea of it being Pecos Bill because on one hand I can think of 4 real humans I would want it to be and on the other Pecos Bill is BRILLIANT because he is a myth and tweeking things are less likely to hurt historians in their souls.

Also if it’s Pecos Bill she would also have his lasso.

Can refer to the six shots on a revolver, her having six guns (each with their own name, naturally*), or her nearly-supernatural abilities to follow her enemies and show up behind them (”on their six.”)

Pecos Bill might be an old man or even a myth-spirit in the way of Discworld gods (dependent on belief, fading away without it), the elderly mentor who devotes himself to training a hero/chosen one/heir to be better than he ever was. She can represent the future of the art while the old white guy represents the past, as an inversion of both many martial arts movies and many westerns where Asian and Native American characters, respectively, pass their torches to the white dude.

Pecos Bill is old, centuries old or wind-and-skies old or whatever, and his original horse has run wild with other wild horses and has many descendants now. One of Iron Six’s tasks over the years of her training is to tame and train a foal, which grows up to be her horse. 

And thus, she can learn the ways of the horses and the language of the horses, and teach them all sorts of things, so when she goes into town she can see plain as day which people the horse is afraid of, or she can teach the horse to recognize certain phrases that other people might say as a command to bite whoever’s saying it, and the result is people thinking the horse can understand human speech and talk to Iron Six.

One day some guy tries to steal her horse while she’s in a bar. Jumps on and digs his heels in and the horse just turns around, looks at him like he’s being stupid, and finds something interesting to nose at on the ground.

Dude’s friends laugh at him, dude gets angry, dude starts kicking at the horse, horse stands there calmly and then suddenly rears and dumps him off behind.

And then poops on him.

Dude gets up, furious and humiliated, borrows a whip from his friends, and is about to strike the horse with it and the horse calmly walks away.

More laughter, more fury, and that’s about when Iron Six shows up in the doorway.

Not a word.

She doesn’t go for her guns. She walks up to the guy, takes the whip out of his hand, he goes for his gun and she decks him. He hits the ground with a broken nose and the gun goes bouncing into the dust.

She picks it up, looks at it, sends it sailing into a nearby water trough. “Garbage,” she says. “Now, about my horse,” she says, and whips the would-be horse thief half to shreds.

SHE ENDED HIM!!!!

This shit.

So Hunchback is far and away my favorite movie from Disney’s Renaissance, and it always makes me so happy that yes, people seem to appreciate it, people seem to love it, but I’mma go into exactly WHY it’s my favorite, and WHY I think it’s so crucial, and WHY I think it should be required viewing for young boys specifically.

We all know that a huge bulk of the media we’ve grown up with consistently has that one frustrating message:  Being the hero means you’ll get the girl.  Many boys let this mentality bleed into reality.  We have “nice guys,” who feel that their niceness entitles them to romance, when obviously that discredits a female’s personal choice.  We all get this, we all know this, and a lot of us get that it’s a toxic message.

So check out our hero.

He’s an incredibly good person who isn’t conventionally attractive.

Check out our lady.

Super good person, conventionally attractive.

The movie so deliberately builds up Quasi’s hopes.  There’s a whole fucking song about it.

But Esmeralda, who is her own person with her own motivations and preferences, chooses another man, who is also good and also attractive.

A lot of people criticize this aspect of the movie, the fact that Quasi doesn’t get the girl BECAUSE of his appearance.  But my argument?  This is the best damn message a movie could ever send.

Because when things get dicey, when Esmeralda’s life in in danger, when Quasi would be putting his own life on the line, he knows that romance is no longer within the realm of possibility.  He knows he won’t be “getting the girl.”  He knows this, and he allows himself a moment of bitterness, he risks falling prey to the “nice guy” trope, and he almost succumbs.

“She already has her knight in shining armor, and it’s not me.”

BUT THEN HE DOES THE RIGHT THING.

He has NO ulterior motive for saving her life.  NO ulterior motive for opposing the man who raised him.  And he doesn’t know that he’ll get any reward, he knows he could straight up get killed for his actions, and yet he still acts.

And there’s no bitterness. There’s still so, so much love between him and Esmeralda, pure awesome platonic love, and love between him and Phoebus, and just fucking love all around, it’s amazing.

I’ve heard so many people express distaste at Quasi not ending up with Esmerelda.  Like he was cheated out of some kind of reward.  But have they watched the ending?

Does that look like a man cheated of his reward?  Does he look like he “lost” to Phoebus?  No dude, that’s a man who has everything he ever wanted, and that’s also a man who didn’t “get the girl.”

So I’m not really good with these things but I just had to get this out of my system. Some headcanon thoughts on some troll wrestling thing? -The main focus is on tusk & torso locking. Basically a tug of war of upper body strength. -The competitors are inside a small circle (think sumo). One way to win/get points is to push the opponent out of the circle - if their feet cross the line, they are done. Although this gets you less points than wrestling them. -Another (and the main) way is to “dominate” the opponent. The first one to get under the other and take a knee looses. -It would probably have a sort of point system with a couple rounds. The victor is whoever scores the highest point. -Touching the legs / trying other “cheaty” ways of making the opponent loose balance results in instant loss/penalty. - Basically everything below the torso is a “no touch” area - Let’s dump them in some sort of oil too to make things interesting?

Thank you Joan. 

From her wikipedia page: 

(Here’s a documentary about her in case you’re not big on reading. )

Her great-grandparents were slave owners in Georgia, and after the United States Civil War, they became sharecroppers. Trumpauer later recalled an occasion that forever changed her perspective, when visiting her family in Georgia during summer. Joan and her childhood friend Mary, dared each other to walk into “n*gger” town, which was located on the other side of the train tracks. Mulholland stated her eyes were opened by the experience: “No one said anything to me, but the way they shrunk back and became invisible, showed me that they believed that they weren’t as good as me. At the age of 10, Joan Trumpauer began to recognize the economic divide between the races. At that moment she vowed to herself that if she could do anything, to help be a part of the Civil Rights Movement and change the world, she would.

In the spring of 1960, Mulholland participated in her first of many sit-ins. Being a white, southern woman, her civil rights activism was not understood. She was branded as mentally ill and was taken in for testing after her first arrest. Out of fear of shakedowns, Mulholland wore a skirt with a deep, ruffled hem where she would hide paper that she had crumpled until it was soft and then folded neatly. With this paper, Mulholland was able to write a diary about her experiences that still exists today. In this diary, she explains what they were given to eat, and how they sang almost all night long. She even mentioned the segregation in the jail cells and stated, “I think all the girls in here are gems but I feel more in common with the Negro girls & wish I was locked in with them instead of these atheist Yankees. 

Soon after Mulholland’s release, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton E. Holmes became the first African American students to enroll at the University of Georgia. Mulholland thought, “Now if whites were going to riot when black students were going to white schools, what were they going to do if a white student went to a black school?” She then became the first white student to enroll in Tougaloo College in Jackson, where she met Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ed King, and Anne Moody.

She received many letters scolding or threatening her while she was attending Tougaloo. Her parents later tried to reconcile with their daughter, and they tried to bribe her with a trip to Europe. She accepted their offer and went with them during summer vacation. Shortly after they returned, however, she went straight back to Tougaloo College.

She ultimately retired after teaching English as a Second Language for 40 years and started the Joan Trumpauer Mulholland Foundation, dedicated to educating the youth about the Civil Rights Movement and how to become activists in their own communities. 

Like yeah I won’t deny that there are lots of people who can adequately keep a possum or a fox or a wolfdog, but for every one person who can there’s eleven people who think they can and then fail miserably.

I hesitate to call them “pets” because to me a pet is a fully domestic animal that is fully adapted to life in human care. It tames easily because that’s its default state. Alternatively, it isn’t dangerous by nature and can easily be segued into a home without painfully disrupting either the animal or the human. So a dog or cat or nonvenomous reptile would easily fit the definition of pet, where a parrot or a puma would not.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say a large or dangerous exotic can never be kept in private hands, but the amount of research, money, experience needed, time investment and legal arbitration would make successful ownership impossible for the average pet owner. Keeping a wolf or a puma isn’t so much keeping a pet as it is a total lifestyle overhaul. You now own a zoo, and you need to conduct your property as a zoo, make sure you have the right permits and the right vet, a safe enclosure, and everything else that comes with running one.

The biggest issue is that so many people who want an opossum or a fox have almost no experience dealing with difficult animals or exotics, they want one because they saw it online (or in the case of sugar gliders, because they saw them at the mall when that awful fucking Pocket Pets mill breeder was there peddling them as an easy pet like a hamster)

So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.” Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.”  YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion. 

Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts. 

Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.

Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.) 

And THIS, this is hopepunk: 

One thing I never really understood was Sleipnir (meaning “slippery one” fyi) in depictions of Norse mythology. Sleipnir is an eight-legged horse, the steed of Odin and the son of Loki, and he is commonly depicted like this:

(image not mine)

But why would you depict an eight-legged horse like this? Horses gallop the same way most other mammals run, with all feet leaving the ground at one point, so having extra feet here doesn’t seem like it could make the horse any faster. I’m also not sure it would give it any more stable footing, since it doesn’t have a wider base.

If you want a stable eight-legged form that can reach great speeds for its size, wouldn’t you want to start with what nature has already provided? Wouldn’t you want something more like… this?

(my drawing)

“But wait!” you might say, “Sleipnir was conceived when Loki, in horse-form, seduced another horse! That’s why it looks all horsey, just with extra bits!”

Well, that’s a good point, but consider that Loki as a deity was originally based off the spider, and his name even derives from the old Swedish word for spider (source). Therefore, it’s not too hard to believe Sleipnir inherited his horse half from his mother and the more spidery half from his father. In conclusion:

As far as Sleipnir having eight legs, it’s probably a reference to Icelandic horses. Icelandic horses are one of the few horse breeds with five gaits. They can do a walk, trot and canter/gallop, like most horses. But they have also evolved to have a tolt,

[ gif of a man riding a brown Icelandic horse doing a tolt. The back legs of the horse move rather stiffly back and forth, while the front legs are lifted up almost to the horse’s chest. While the horse bounces slightly, the man riding the horse could probably hold a glass of water without spilling. ] 

which is fast, smooth and noted for its explosive speed and ability to cover long distances.

The second unique gait is called flugskeið, or flying pace.

[ a light brown Icelandic horse demonstrating the flugskeið. With the exception of the wind in the horses’ mane, the upper part of the horse and the rider seem to almost be still, with the background simply zipping by them. The horse’s legs, however, move fast enough to blur. Unlike with a full gallop, the horse does not fully extend its legs away from its body. This is particularly obvious in the front legs of the horse, which lift up to the chest of the horse and land under its chin the same way as in the tolt]

It is both smooth and fast, some horses being able to reach speeds of 30 mph. Not all Icelandic horses can do a flugskeið, but you’ll notice that when done properly the legs move in unison and so fast they can blur, giving the illusion of the horse having eight legs.

Anyways, here is a video to further emphasize how cool the flugskeið is;

The thing is, until the late 1800s we didn’t know how horses moved. 

In old paintings you typically see horses with their legs stretched wide as they thought that gave the appearance of great speed. 

But it really just looks like Timmy’s big brother was being an evil bastard and bent the legs of his tin horses out . 

It’s completely unnatural looking, but horses moved too fast for us to be able to see how they moved, until Edward MAuybridge captured their motion in a series of consecutive photographs in 1878.

And for the first time we could see that all four legs did leave the ground. (and are never stretched uncomfortably wide!). 

He also created the first motion picture as the individual photographs could be put together as a series of film frames (below).