I don’t think adding nonbinary to Victorian’s gender system would’ve fixed their weird sexism. If anything I think it would’ve made them weirder and sexismier
Of course, fashionable Honorables may be consternated by the proper open collar blouses as there is no way to tie a bow or cravat around it. In such cases a bow may be worn upon the top hat. Or a slim ribbon may be tied around the bare neck, however, given the salacious reputation some hold for such an accessory, that is best left to married Honorables.
YES. the way this hasn’t left my mind….Like okay they’re still Victorians. They’re still sexist and homophobic. My thought for this alternate history is third gender people are expected to only marry into already married couples. And they’d probably throw in a lot of Christian Holy Trinity and Mary Joseph God imagery to religiously validate triads.
Or three people (of all different genders of course bc again. They’re Victorian) could marry all at once but the courting situation would be a nightmare.
First thought: coverture. Coverture is the legal idea that a married couple is one entity, with the wife not having an actual legal identity of her own. This is why there’s the old-fashioned convention of women taking on their husband’s entire name (e.g. “Mrs. Robert Smith”), why men could control any inheritance or money their wives had, and also the origin of some now-obsolete laws (like making it impossible for a wife to sue her husband for damages, because it’s as if she was suing herself).
This is why it was so important for women to marry well: even if you worked as a married woman (and many women did), your money wasn’t actually yours. It’s one thing to have to live with a drunk asshole; it’s worse to have that drunk asshole be the sole person who decides if that paycheck goes towards rent or more booze.
So, having a trinity/three parts of one whole entity would totally fit Victorian ideas of coverture. I think you’d still have it be men > everyone else, because they’d expect some kind of hierarchy, and even within the Trinity, God is still the leader.
Second thought: separate spheres. The Victorian era was very heavily focused on men being involved in the “dirty” business of work/politics/etc., and women being more morally pure and better suited to the domestic sphere (the whole “angel of the house” thing). Obviously this wasn’t actually or practically true a lot of the time, but it was the aspired-to standard, the thing you’d measure people against to say if they were acting appropriately as members of their gender or not.
So you’d need a third sphere for Honorables to inhabit that is completely separate from the work/domestic dichotomy, or create an entirely different three-way dichotomy. Basically, you’d need a thing to point to, like “X is very ladylike” or “Y is not manly,” but for Honorables.
So, extrapolating:
You’d still have “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Smith,” it’d just be, “Mr., Mrs., and Mx. Robert Smith” (differentiating by title, not by first name). I could actually see there being a different title for unmarried vs. married Honorables, like Master vs. Mister or Miss vs. Madam/Missus. Mix vs. Max, maybe?
I think Honorables would definitely need to have some kind of dowry. It actually might be even more necessary, because unless the guy is insanely wealthy on his own, you’re going to need enough money to support three people, not just two.
I’m having trouble coming up with a third sphere, but whatever that third sphere was, you’d need to heavily police it. “You can’t do X, that’s for Honorables” has to be part of the culture. And you’d need to police it with as much weird pseudoscientific and/or religious justification as possible. Like, you need “women’s brains physically can’t handle the strain of learning math” but to explain why Honorables can’t swim, or whatever.
Non-leadership admin, teaching, and academia as the third sphere.
The idea of who should be in charge of household accounting has always waffled between a man’s job and a woman’s job. Is teaching the realm of governesses and school mistresses or lecturers and professors. Academics are too weak and frail to be masculine but too logical and rigorous to be feminine.
Clerks and accountants and secretaries and teachers and scholars.
I can see it becoming a Mind (Honorable) Heart (Woman) Soul (Man) kind of separation, all three together making up the body. Women are suited for feelings, nurturing, caring. Honorables are suited for the pursue of pure knowledge, but lack the Will to put it to any practical use. Finally men are the one leading force that brings all the parts together and leads it into an action.
Thus, men, even if they’re unqualified on whatever area of knowledge they’re dealing with, and even if they have no understanding of their or other people’s feelings whatsoever, still possess an inherent and intangible quality that makes them the only part truly suited for decision making.
Woman: Caretaker
Honorable: Assistant/Advisor
Men: Leader
Tags:
#gender #story ideas I will never write #sexism cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
There exist another dimension called The Empty World. It’s very much like ours, in fact it seems to have been identical up until a few weeks ago, but it always seems that way. If you go there today, it was identical in late february, and if you go there this october, it’ll have been identical until september.
It’s empty, as you might guess. There’s no humans, and no animals bigger than a cockroach. The sky is grey, and it slowly rains ash. It’s colder than our world by a bit, enough to require a jacket even in summer. The streets are empty, the cars parked neatly in their garages or in lots, but they’re all empty and abandoned, their doors locked like they expect their owners to return any minute now.
The newspapers left on stands don’t mention any oncoming disaster. We have no idea what the TV or internet would have said: the power is out. The power is very, very out. Not just the grid, but batteries are drained. The cars won’t start, the emergency lights are out, and anything with solar panels seems to be getting less energy than you’d expect, even with the perpetually overcast sky.
It’s a very silent world, like the calm after a snowstorm. Sounds don’t seem to echo as much as they should, nor does sound seem to travel as far. The radio spectrum is empty except for static, there’s no one transmitting on any frequency.
There’s fewer fires than you’d expect. Even places you’d expect to soon catch fire without human intervention are still standing, undamaged. Campfires can be lit but with difficulty: something is keeping them from burning as they should. Even if you pour kerosene on a campfire it’ll barely grow, it’s like something sucked the energy out of everything.
All the locked buildings are still locked. Alarms don’t sound if you break in (understandable, given the power situation), and of course no one comes to investigate. So The Empty World is your oyster: you can break in wherever you want (provided you can physically do it: some doors are pretty hard to pry open even with tools), take whatever you want, and bring it back here.
Everything resets when you leave. You always enter The Empty World like it’s your first time there, like this just happened and you’re late to the party… but the party keeps getting rescheduled. You can even take something multiple times if you want.
When you enter The Empty World you get there at the same relative position as you are on this world. If you’re in New York, you show up in the empty New York. If you’re in Topeka, you show up in empty Topeka. So you have to travel around this world to get to where you want, and you can’t just appear in the middle of a bank vault… unless you break into the vault from this world. (So it’s great if you work at a bank and want to steal from your employer without repercussions, but not so useful otherwise).
You don’t just have to take things, you know. You can take computers and files and books and diaries. You will have to deal with recharging laptops and breaking through any security when you get back, but it’s doable.
So, imagine you’ve just gotten access to The Empty World. What are you going to do with it? What will you take, and where will you go?
This is a writing prompt if you want it to be. Feel free to write/draw/whatever about this setting!
And don’t worry about “canon”: there’s something enough weird going on with this setting that’s enough to justify variation in the setting. Maybe when you go there, you eventually find out what caused the death of the world. Maybe that doesn’t agree with what I find out when I go there. Maybe your world isn’t as empty as it seems! This is partially based on a reoccurring dream I had, and in one instance the “empty” world was full of people hiding. Hiding from what? I never found out. Maybe you will.
Just stick “based on/Inspired by The Empty World by Foone” somewhere in/on anything you make about it. Otherwise go nuts.
Some things that might be fun to explore, ones I intentionally didn’t nail down: (I have theories but I don’t want to make any of them concrete)
What’s all that ash in the air? You could stick it under a microscope/Gas chromatograph. What it is could be a big hint as to what happened to this world
I mention in one of the reblogs that two or more people can go there at a time, but there’s only one return trip. What happens to people left behind?
The power is out, and this extends to batteries. Sure, maybe the coal plants and nuclear power aren’t running anymore, but what about hydroelectric power? Why isn’t the hoover dam still making power?
As multiple people have suggested, what if you go above the ash cloud? What if you launch a balloon or a rocket?
I mention the newspapers not saying what happened, but maybe this just happened too fast for them to get a new issue out? Maybe you could go to a TV station and get their computers running again (bring in your own batteries, or bring their computers back to our world). Maybe they did cover what was happening.
There’s lots of straightforward ways to get rich by stealing and/or duplicating things using The Empty World. What’s the most interesting thing you could do by its ability to let you travel into places you couldn’t normally get to (because of guards and locked doors)?
Here’s a thought: rescuing recently destroyed/stolen things. It’s based on the world of a few weeks ago, right? What if the Louve burns down, and a lot of priceless art is destroyed. If you jump into The Empty World anytime in the next couple weeks, they’ll still be there, untouched. You could “steal” them and return them to this world.
You’re in The Empty World and you hear a scream in the distance. You brought no one with you. Do you run towards the scream or do you get out of there immediately?
Did you wear a respirator into The Empty World? Have you been breathing in all that ash? Maybe that has repercussions.
You arrive, and someone has written a message in the ash. A warning. For people like you.
I feel like you could have a setting with people raiding and “prospecting” post apocalypse setting style, but a certain percentage of them just never come back, and we don’t know why. So everyone who goes is taking a chance that whatever it is that’s getting everyone else gets them. Only a few percent die, so y’know, it could just be people having entirely mundane accidents, right?
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #(probably) #apocalypse cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
why don’t people in zombie apocalypse stories ever just wear suits of armor? you think any zombie is gonna get their shitty rotting jaws through this?
I’m gonna rip and tear my way through the zombie apocalypse completely unharmed because none of the undead hoards will be able to get through my plate mail
everyone else is like “oh we gotta stay inside the most secure places possible and never leave” and I’ll be storming through the wastelands in my bloodstained suit of armor, blasting the Doom (2016) OST and plowing my way through waves of the undead. one of them tries to bite me but his shitty rotting teeth don’t even leave a dent in my armor before I turn his head into paste. I’ll be unstoppable until I die of dehydration or something like an idiot
this goes along with my other pet peeve about zombie apocalypse stories, namely: why does no one ever think to ride a bike?
bikes are quiet- if the zombies react to loud noises, they won’t hear you on a bike the way they might hear you in a car. bikes don’t need gas, meaning you won’t be stranded if you run out. bikes are much, much easier to maintain than a car- there’s no computer that can short out, no fiddly engine bits that could kill you if you mess with them wrong. you can learn how to maintain a bike with a couple weeks’ worth of classes. almost every adult knows how to ride a bike, and without cars on the road, it’d be much safer to do.
Mark Twain essentially invented the genre of a bystander sent into a time-travel sci-fi plot just to get someone to draw this image for him. And today we can simply search for such a picture. It is a time of wonders
#holding this concept up in my mind and rotating it next to Norris and the Plague Doctors #zombies #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #apocalypse cw #illness tw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
I’d be great at violence and other crimes, I’d like to think. If that was a job, I mean.
Unfortunately the legal jobs that get characterized often as being “violence and crimes as a job” contain very little violence and crimes by weight and also have a degree of forced conformity that I don’t think I’d do well with. So I guess we’ll never know if I’d be good at them.
The point is I think museums should legally be able to assemble heist teams to heist other museums’s shit. This could solve essentially no problems, create many new ones, and destroy a bunch of priceless artifacts, but also it would be very funny and those priceless artifacts were stupid anyway.
In fact I think museums should all be allowed to steal anything from anywhere if they can get away with it, and it should be very easy to legally become a museum, with the main conditions being you can’t sell your collection and have to display some percentage (maybe 5 or 10%?) of it where it can be seen by the public (for at most a small fee, maybe like $20 tops). Heist wars. “Come to the Guggenheim, we stole davinci’s older, better woman-with-an-emotion painting and threw the Mona Lisa in the trash like the trash it is.” “Welcome to the National Museum of Brazil, featuring three insects and a bust from the British museum, one of the Benin Bronzes, the liberty bell, Two Thirds of Bill Paldorski from the US’s vinyl collection, and a terracotta soldier replica we made because the one we had got heisted by the Museum of Gabon. Also some stuff from Brazil, but you’re not here for that.” “Welcome to the Monument Museum. We were founded three years ago specifically to display the Statue of Liberty, and six days ago, as you may have heard, we successfully heisted it. It will be available for public viewing after we’ve reassembled it. In the meantime check out our Battle of May Island memorial stone and Minaret of Sinan Pasha Mosque, both of which we heisted for practice”
This would clearly be a superior world to live in.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #((this amusement not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the statement itself)) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
The thing is that the most interesting and novel invention of the MCU is a universe where billions of people turned into dust and then were physically reconstituted on the spot five years later, in a world that had just barely adapted to their absence.
That is wild. That is intense! That is a series of pathos-ridden emotionally complex doorstoppers waiting to happen. Half the entire world! All dead! And somehow we coped with that! And now we have to cope with them all being back?
A whole street of empty houses–surely not everyone there became ash. Some of them moved to better places, now opened by the mass mortality. Some of them died afterward. Who will live there now? Even if inheritances are reversed by resurrection, surely leases aren’t renewed. What the fuck happens to everyone who remarried?
What happens to the children snapped back to a world where their parents didn’t survive, or the reverse?
But they had to then hastily smooth over this utterly batshit sci-fi premise and get the world mostly back to normal working order as rapidly as possible, without too much emphasis on how literally every person in existence has been placed in a mason jar by a narcissist and shaken twice in five years.
So they could get on with more superhero whack-blam business, which is customarily done against a background of Normality.
This is, tragically, the most Comics thing these movies have ever done.
It is beyond satire that they did this immediately before and during a worldwide pandemic that everyone was pressured to smooth over and ‘return to normal’ about within 2 years if not sooner.
I’m still bummed She-Hulk wasn’t “Law & Order: MCU” featuring such disputes as
A dog’s owner is snapped and someone else adopts it. Now it’s five years later and the owner wants the dog back.
A baby’s parents are snapped and someone else adopts it. Now its’ five years later and the kid is now 6. Absolutely fucking devastating custody dispute ensues.
All the snapped people were legally declared dead and their remaining next of kin got their assets. Now some of them are demanding their money back, but their heirs already spent it.
All the snapped people were not legally declared dead, and life insurance companies are still claiming that some people who actually died were snapped so that they don’t have to pay out.
These senators were elected to a 6 year term but they only got to serve one of them before blipping. They think they should get to serve the next five years.
School funding is based on enrollment, and was thus slashed when there was only half the student population. Now everyone is back midyear and there isn’t enough funding, and parents are suing.
Tags:
#Marvel #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #apocalypse cw #death tw #illness tw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
A murder mystery film set in a medieval village. After an outbreak of plague, the villagers make the decision to shut their borders so as to protect the disease from spreading (see the real life case of the village of Eyam). As the disease decimates the population, however, some bodies start showing up that very obviously were not killed by plague.
Since nobody has been in or out since the outbreak began, the killer has to be somebody in the local community.
The village constable (who is essentially just Some Guy, because being a medieval constable was a bit like getting jury duty, if jury duty gave you the power to arrest people) struggles to investigate the crime without exposing himself to the disease, and to maintain order as the plague-stricken villagers begin to turn on each other.
The killer strikes repeatedly, seemingly taking advantage of the empty streets and forced isolation to strike without witnesses. As with any other murder mystery, the audience is given exactly the same information to solve the crime as the detective.
Except, that is, whenever another character is killed, at which point we cut to the present day where said character’s remains are being carefully examined by a team of modern archaeologists and historians who are also trying to figure out why so many of the people in this plague-pit died from blunt force trauma.
The archaeologists and historians, btw, are real experts who haven’t been allowed to read the script. The filmmakers just give them a model of the victim’s remains, along with some artefacts, and they have to treat it like a real case and give their real opinion on how they think this person died.
We then cut back to the past, where the constable is trying to do the same thing. Unlike the archaeologists, he doesn’t have the advantage of modern tech and medical knowledge to examine the body, but he does have a more complete crime scene (since certain clues obviously wouldn’t survive to be dug up in the modern day) and personal knowledge from having probably known the victim.
The audience then gets a more complete picture than either group, and an insight into both the strengths and limits of modern archaeology, explaining what we can and can’t learn from studying a person’s remains.
At the end of the film, after the killer is revealed and the main plot is resolved, we then get to see the archaeologists get shown the actual scenes where their ‘victims’ were killed, so they can see how well their conclusions match up with what ‘really’ happened.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #murder cw #illness tw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
The Monster Manual but it’s blatantly written by the monsters
mimc Mouth perfec t size for put baby in to n\ap! inside very Soft and Comfort baby sleep soundly put baby in Mimic Mouth. Put Baby In Mimic Mouth. no problems ever in mimmic mouth because good Shape and Support for baby neck weak of big baby head. Amimic Mouth yes a place for a baby put baby in mimic mouth can trust mimic for giveing good love to baby. friend mimic
Tags:
#D&D #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
a bumbling furry world osha inspector who keeps going to various kink setups like a transformation goop plant or a drone factory and, through a series of comedic coincidences, constantly narrowly dodges the universe’s attempts to do something horny to him
his name is Yakov Carl Hurley btw
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #probably #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can’t provide.
I know for a lot of people that’s irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.
So, I’ve been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it’d be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.
Like, “Oh, God, I don’t want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry”, or, “I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it’d make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?”, or “Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let’s just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble”.
Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it’d be neat.
This is actually a really cool variant solution to a real historical problem, wherein either primogeniture or other profoundly shitty customs led to wealthy parents having insufficient resources to provide for all of their children in a manner consistent with their station.
Historically, the Church and its widespread monastic structure functioned as a dumping ground for second/third/etc sons and all the daughters one can’t afford to marry off adequately, with the military eventually picking up the slack for the former post-Reformation to the point where it’s been argued that the need for something to occupy these dispossessed sons played a role in Europe’s ongoing conflicts between its nations and the eventual push of imperialism and colonization over the rest of the world.
In a world where homosexuality were more accepted, it would offer a new option: spare a comparatively-small outlay of resources from the main family fortune to equip a house and accoutrements, which would be reabsorbed into the family as a return inheritance in a few decades, and contract a marriage which would be deliberately unable to produce legitimate offspring.
You get the advantages of creating marital ties with another wealthy family, the people married therein have a spouse and the status achievements that go with marriage, and the risk that your child goes off and marries someone unsuitable or inconvenient is removed entirely, as is the risk that they could marry someone and have legitimate, inheritance-claiming children with them. Sure, they can have affairs and thus get children if they’re married to a same-sex spouse, but those children cannot be passed off as legitimate issue of the marriage, and so they pose less of a threat to the the main body of the family’s wealth.
And, thus: perfectly reasonable reason why your pseudohistorical fictional characters can find themselves in a same-sex arranged marriage!
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Fantasy setting where the kingdom has a secret police with the mission of finding any modern-world people isekai’d in so they can be whisked off to the academy and all their future knowledge transcribed
It’s a known thing that isekai events happen. All the major nations do this. The coming war may very well be tilted in favor of whichever kingdom gets the most Japanese teenagers appearing within their borders
They are worried that the flow of isekai protagonists is slowing down, what with increased traffic safety measures.
So they hire a evil wizard to send a minion into our world, with only one goal: increase the number of automobile accidents, and keep their isekai harvests bountiful.
The minion can’t return, of course. Travel is one way, unless you isekai back, and that’s a one in a million chance.
So the poor fish out of water minion stuck in our world can never return. At least they gave him plenty of precious gemstones with which to start his car-accident empire. So don’t worry, squire Musk will not starve in our world.
The real problem is that they mainly get teenagers and thus they’re pretty limited in what info they can get from them. Sure, their basic physics and mathematics have been advanced beyond their neighbors, but they’ve also got pages and pages of handwritten illuminated texts about an illustrated motion play called “The single part” and many music sheets filled with the works of some “Quick Seamstress” who lives in a distant nation across the sea in the far future.
Still, they persevere. A single trainspotter with a special interest in steam trains revolutionized the transportation infrastructure in their nation, they only need one kid who memorized the history of firearms or metallurgy to win this coming war. They’ll write down a thousand books of the exploits of Marius the lead-worker and his eternal struggle against a dragon-turtle if it gets them just one teenager who can tell them how to make this “steel” they’ve heard so much about.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #(…or‚ at least‚ won’t write *precisely* like this) #death tw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 