mercury

look at her!!!!

@smallerontheoutside your wish is my command :)

From the Refracted Lives team, happy (late) birthday to the great Jason Kane! … Oh, and Merry Christmas!🎄

Taisho Iwasaki and Madoka Hoshikaze as Jack Kelly and Katherine Pulitzer in NEWSIES (2024)

HORRIBLE HISTORIES: THE MOVIE - ROTTEN ROMANS (2019) - Costume design by Ros Little

(tags from @transitofmercury) YOU ARE SO CORRECT. and i would actually argue, on the point of 'poor katherine has to go back to her mansion if the strike doesn't work', that i don't think katherine actually does live with pulitzer. i think the line 'i offered katherine a life of leisure, instead she chose to pursue a career' implies that katherine made the choice to live independently outside of pulitzer's home, make her own money and organize her own accommodation without his help. which granted, is already something the newsies had to do anyways, and granted, katherine's stake in the strike is i guess not as bad as theirs - some people might argue that it doesn't really MATTER if katherine fails as a journalist, because she still has a life of privilege to return to. personally, i argue that if katherine fails as a journalist, a risk she very realistically ran in the strike as pulitzer had her blacklisted from every paper in town, she is returning to life of property. she's an upper class woman in gilded-age america, so she would be expected to marry, which would then make her her husband's property. she would be merged into his legal being - he would have access to her money, and the ability to make changes to her assets and financial accounts without her consent. and katherine wouldn't even be able to VOTE to change this until 1918. and yes, that's not the worst life to lead in that time period, sure - the newsies are impoverished, and she is a white upper class woman who would actually be ALLOWED to vote when suffrage was passed, as opposed to women of colour and women of lower classes. but she would be financially, physically and legally powerless against her husband. and do we think pulitzer is picking a good husband for her? do we think he's picking someone who will encourage katherine's progressiveness and rebellious streak, or is he picking someone who he thinks will 'tame' her into being a good mother and head of household? maybe katherine is in an entirely different class to the newsies, but she still lives in fear of her autonomy being ripped away from her, and she chose to bet all of that on the newsies - because even though it terrified her, it was RIGHT.

I think a lot about how “Pulitzer may own The World but he don’t own us” might be true for the newsies, but it is a lot less true for Katherine, especially at that point in her life at that time. If she can’t make it on her own as a journalist, and she’s risking that with the strike, she’s very much trapped. Like, in my headcanon Katherine still ‘lives’ with her family during the strike (but barely, she basically just goes there to sleep and spends as much of her time away from the house as possible) and only completely cuts them off in January 1900 after the Pulitzer family house fire, but either way Pulitzer has a lot more capability to directly control her than any other character. AND, to make it worse, he can still do that to her even though the strike succeeded. I would like to think that every paper in the city would recognise that she is talented and should be allowed to write, but he still has the connections to make her career even harder after the strike just because she wanted to do what she could to be better than he was… audghshshdh Katherine :(

Accurate depiction of how my day is going