I consider myself to be a real 90s kid. a real 1890s kid. seduce me with your knowledge of oscar wilde
J.C. LEYENDECKER
The Furnace Fire
Mix Media on Canvas
30″ x 20″
it’s psychological horror to YOU. to me it’s a romcom
it's a romcom to YOU. to me it's psychological horror
New Character Posters for The Terror
Sir John Franklin (Ciaran Hinds), Francis Crozier (Jared Harris), James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies), Dr Henry Goodsir (Paul Ready), Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen) and Cornelius Hickey (Adam Nagaitis)
If you remove everything “problematic” toward women and minorities from sincere historical fiction I am biting you biting you biting you.
Sometimes “he would not fucking say that” is when the guy living in 1852 is a third wave feminist.
This is not fully coherent but: there’s something narrow-minded about the imposition of modern values on the past that sits wrong with me. You would think that as society is broadly becoming more tolerant, we would get better at understanding that deeply flawed people in the past, who held views totally at odds with us, were still human. There’s a puritanical lack of empathy in it, a sort of “you have to agree with me, or I won’t even try to understand you,” but also “if I try to understand people who thought differently, that’s the same as forgiving/endorsing/agreeing with them.”
It flattens the characters, too. If every character holds the same modern views on Issue X at a time when they’re still realizing that X is even an issue, it’s a missed opportunity to explore how different characters might approach a problem they can’t even name yet. Maybe Victorians don’t understand “homophobia bad,” but one might try to reconcile a deep faith with desires seen as sinful; another might encounter a queer relationship with surprise that it’s not as awful as they’ve been told; another might be vehemently homophobic but feel the twinge of doubt that their righteousness stems from a desire to cause pain.
The imposition of modern views on fictional characters in the name of progress is not progressive. It’s a statement of ideological purity that removes an opportunity to understand how progressive views arise–how people who live in a society that has always thought a certain way can conceive of a better world. Those people will never have the fully-fledged views that come from years of a progressive movement, but they do have empathy: with people who are suffering, and with people who have more regressive views but could learn to think differently. It’s precisely that sort of empathy that’s missing from media where everyone has identical modern views, and it’s precisely that sort of empathy that we need today.
A while ago Falynn K. asked this question on Twitter:
"So on a tall sailing ship you have the mast, and you have the yards across it--is the yard/spar actually attached to the mast, by like i dunno, a pin or something, or is it strictly roped/lashed to it?"
This is a totally reasonable question! A lot of folks who haven't sailed square riggers might think that the yard stays put, but in fact it needs to move up and down the mast so the sails can be fully set. (Y'know how everyone's always talking about halyards? They literally haul the yard up. You're welcome.)
So to answer the question: yards are held loosely to the mast by a looped line strung with large wooden beads called a parrel. The beads roll up the mast as the yard is raised and lowered. Here's a drawover that hopefully clarifies a little:
ALTOnce you start explaining things about tall ship anatomy it's hard to stop, so there's a bit more context for how the sails work:
ALT
ALT(These are pages from my comic A Week at Sea with OHP, which you can read online here or grab as a print minicomic here.)
Hope this is helpful!
Huh. I'm not sure whether this is a difference in terminology between countries, age of ship, or what, but what is labelled the tack here is not what I know as the tack.
Here's a photo of the tall ship I was sailing last week:
The bottom square sail is the course. You'll notice it has lines coming out of the bottom corners. The line on the right is the sheet, which, as per the diagram above, is pulling the sail out and down but, importantly, it's also pulling it BACK. The line on the left is pulling the sail out, down, and FORWARD, and this is the tack.
(If you've ever read Patrick O'Brian and wondered what it means when they're on the starboard/port tack, this is it. In the photo above, the ship is on the port tack, ie, using the port-side tack.)
The tack is only used on the course. On all the sails above that, the sheets run to the yard immediately below, so are pulled forward by bracing the yards.
What makes me wonder whether it's an age thing is because the diagram above shows a very traditional tall ship, whereas the one I sail is only a couple of decades old. We have Jarvis leeches and clewlines on the side of the sails, rather than the reeflines and leechlines in the diagram.
Oh heck! This is a great catch. @derryderrydown you're absolutely right, and it's not an age thing at all. Looking at it now, that point could either be lifts or braces. This comic is several years old so I can't recall whether I was going off the terminology the crew used in that presentation for the trainees, or whether I just mislabeled the diagram. (Also doing a bit of frantic pawing through my reference library to see if maybe there is a situation where someone might refer to that point as the tack? But your explanation is spot on for what my experience of it is.)
LONG LIVE THE TUMBLR TALL SHIP SAILOR HIVEMIND.
Achievement unlocked: discovered piece of media at exact right time in your life to experience maximum peak emotional impact and infatuation
Hickey is a surpassingly lonely man certainly, but often overlooked - or at the very least something I'd like to talk about more - is the fact that he is absolutely not the only one, despite what he may think.
The Terror is a show, after all, that is as much about abject, crushing isolation as it is about love and intimacy and brotherhood in the face of tragedy. About the extent to which each man is affected by loneliness and the ways in which he does or doesn't deal with it. About whether he even understands the nature of it in the first place and by extension, whether he understands himself.
Franklin is a surpassingly lonely man too.
Think of him in the novel being deeply uncomfortable in the world and in the company of other men to the point where he resorts to bribery, however unconsciously, in order to ingratiate himself with them.
Think of him in the show gazing from the outside in at Fitzjames and the Lieutenants laughing away together at the admiralty shindig, an in-crowd Franklin has missed out on ever truly being a part of.
Think how that drives him to poorer and ever riskier decisions. Failure of the expedition is not an option for him because it will also mean a failure to improve his social standing and gain entry to that crowd.
Crozier is a surpassingly lonely man too.
Think of how the outside world has made him so, certainly - how his nationality and class and overall station in life have seen him excluded from professional advancement and romantic fulfilment.
But think also how he doesn't help himself all that much. Think on how insular and uncommunicative he stays even after he 'gets better', how right Franklin was when he said Crozier makes himself miserable, distant, and hard to love, and that he blames the world for it.
Think of how that vindictive streak and that unwillingness to communicate foments mutiny and continues to cut him off even from those who are his allies.
Fitzjames is a surpassingly lonely man too.
Think of how he holds others at an arms length with all the artifice surrounding the great gilded life he's built for himself.
Think of how desperate he is to be seen but also of the great lengths he goes to for much of the story to never allow himself to be fully perceived.
Think of the unusual, secretive nature of his birth and early life that keep him even from being able to properly perceive and understand himself until it's too late.
Think how all that insecurity fueled his ridiculous heroics and think how the reopening of old wounds from those heroics helped to doom him.
Little is a surpassingly lonely man too.
Think of how he's ignored and denigrated and absolutely hung out to dry by his Captain.
Think of how hard he works, how diligently he does what's asked of him and what's needed, and how cruelly he's forced to confront the fact that it's never going to be enough.
Think of how profoundly, incandescently angry he is about the injustices he endures and how he has absolutely no one he can truly confide in about it.
Hodgson and Irving are surpassingly lonely men too.
Think of Hodgson forever being just slightly out of step with the rest of the crew, officers and men alike. Of how he surprises even himself with how harshly and suddenly his unhappiness and insecurity turns not just into mutinous designs but into pure self-loathing.
Think of Irving being isolated and brought down by his own inherent inflexibility. Of how the rigidity of his faith and his world view in general prevents him from any great examination or understanding of his own desires or the desires of others.
Tozer is a surpassingly lonely man too.
Think of the isolation inherent even just in being a Marine, separate from but at the mercy of the officers above, and never truly integrated with the regular seamen below either.
Think of him becoming increasingly insular and distrustful as the story progresses and he loses all faith in command. All he wants is to protect everyone but the structure through which he's always done that falls down around him and leaves him lost.
That all-permeating atmosphere of isolation, that fateful lack of understanding has just as much, if not even more influence on the story as the shining mercurial little moments of love and connection do and I desperately need to parse some more coherent thoughts about that as soon as possible
PERCEVAL THE UNHAPPY, THE MISERABLE, THE UNFORTUNATE, THE FISHER KING!
Perceval, de Troyes (trans. Burton Raffel)
ALRIGHT alright. so previously I did an illustration that explained the premise of all this, that it's inspired by the narrative choices that Bresson made in his film Lancelot du Lac etc
to dive in more into it (because this is something like derivative fiction. I'm putting concepts into a blender and seeing what comes out of it): the setting is haunted by the previously existing narratives that started cannibalizing each other until it regurgitates itself into the more well known narrative beats, and something else about the invasive rot of christianity and empire mythmaking into settings. it's an intertextual haunting, if you will! and this scene takes place during the grail quest narrative, but the temptation of Perceval plays out differently.
in both Chretien (and Wolfram's) Perceval narratives, what 'wakes' Perceval up (in more ways than one. desire and self actualization in one go!) is seeing knights, something his mother tried hard to keep him from. so instead of the temptation of lust & etc in the Morte narrative taking the form of a lady, it takes the form of a knight. the temptation to renounce one's faith to serve something else remains.
so Perceval still stabs himself, but instead of continuing on the grail quest in the shadow of Galahad, he becomes the narrative's Fisher King because his earlier state of being as a the grail quest hero is creeping back into his marrow. it was waiting for an opening, and stabbing yourself in the thigh is one hell of a parallel!!!
that wound isn't going to heal buddy, and the state of the setting will now be reflected on your body. sure hope that Arthur hasn't like. corrupted the justice of the land or anything. that sure would suck for your overall health.
all the red in this sequence is because in de Troyes' Perceval, Perceval takes the armor of the Red Knight and becomes known as the Knight in Red.
and now for the citations, which I will try to order in a way that makes sense!
