Having joined this fandom so late in the game, I was disappointed to find that all the events and such that used to be held for these great shows (and their follow up comics) have since ended, so I decided to start this as a way to bring some (un)life back into the Tumblr side of the fandom and show the world it hasn’t dusted just yet. This will be a fic and art exchange for all fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series. I hope you guys will be as excited for this event as I am.
Sign ups will be open until November 30th, 2023 at 11:59 EST. Starting December 1st, 2023, I will start sending out the info to each person about their giftee.
Posting Day(s) will be from January 1st until January 7th., 2024 Your gift may be posted on any of these days, and I will be reblogging them here in a spread out manner so as not to spam anyone’s dash.
we’ve rated this before but a bunch of people have tagged us in it lately so i just wanted to reiterate that this kitty is almost definitely fine! it just hates the texture of the floor. cats often do this kind of exaggerated walk when touching something they don’t like, and the body arch/poofy tail indicates surprise.
last time someone also pointed out that the floor appears somewhat unfinished where it meets the linoleum, so it may be something that was just installed and the cat hasn’t experienced it much before.
[Caption: Tweet from twitter user SALEM VOID @thewarmvoid. “Idk who needs to hear this but there are a lot of good things left. There are a lot of good things coming, and there are a lot of good things waiting for you. There are people you haven’t met yet who are gonna love you, in familiar and in novel ways. There is a lot of good left.” End caption.]
i think one of the reasons i get mildly annoyed about worldbuilding threads that are 200 tweets of why you should care about where blue dye comes from in your world before saying someone is wearing blue is that so few of them go up to the second level of “and that should impact your characters somehow” - i don’t care that blue dye comes from pressing berries that only grow in one kingdom a thousand miles away if people are casually wearing blue
a couple of people reblogged this so i was thinking about it again (ok i’m almost always thinking about material culture worldbuilding tbh) & a lot of my problem is that these kinds of worldbuilding threads and posts treat it like an obligation and not an oppurtunity –
“blue dye is rare” is a world fact that could be a plot obstacle (character is a dyer and needs blue cloth, of the right shade, for a festival); a clue (main character notices someone wearing blue and realizes that they’re in disguise); a way to inform character (main character sees a blue banner and thinks its owner is showing off); and any number of other things, from small to large.
and if the rarity doesn’t serve any of those functions in your story, then the existence of blue dye is not important enough that you, as the author, need to consider it.
i’m a trends and forces guy - i believe any given worldstate is created by billions of coinflips leading up to that moment, some random (the sun rose on the day of the battle and gave one side victory) and some more directed (a law was enacted with a specific intent). expecting, as an author, to have generated a worldstate that coheres and connects in the same way and with the same complexity as ours is going to lead to paralysis more often than it is to interesting worldbuilding, or worldbuilding that supports the story you’re trying to tell.
Yeah you don’t need to know where everything comes from. What you need, which I think a lot of these demands are actually angling for, is a good intuitive sense of where your setting differs from your present reality.
I don’t care where they get their common blue dyes if it’s not relevant to the story, but I do care if the narrative’s handling of clothes and their color reflects a ‘pick out entire readymades from the mall’ relationship to wardrobe in a technological and social milieu where that is not logically an option, and there’s no sign they’re going for one of those surreal modern-pop fantasy settings.
You really do see this quite regularly, coming from writers who just haven’t thought about it; they haven’t noticed their own cultural framework is historically contingent and actually super abnormal.
'Who domesticated wheat’ and 'where does the blue come from’ are very handy as sort of shortcut checkpoints to make sure you’re making regular contact with material worldbuilding at all–if you know where the blue is from you don’t need to decide where the red is from also; you’ve done the important bit of aligning your thoughts about clothing color with premodern dyeing practices. Other details will tend to accrete on that surface now as they arise.
But yeah if these are approached as literal dictums you just overbuild to no purpose.
Just to give you some idea of why even rags were very valuable in any pre-industrial setting, here are some facts about fabric production throughout history.
In the Viking era, when drop spindles and vertical looms were the height of technology and every step had to be done by hand, it too about seven hundred hours to make a blanket big enough for one person. First you had to harvest the fiber that you were going to use, then you had to clean it and prepare it, then you had to spin it, then you had to weave it and then you had to finish it.
To support a household of five, and keep them supplied with a bare-minimum of fabric needs (so they weren’t naked or cold), took approximately 40 hours of work per week just on textile production. In a reasonably prosperous family, everyone would have two outfits (one for every day work, and one nice one, and when the nice one became too worn or stained to be “nice” it would be your everyday outfit and (if you were lucky) you would make a new one to be nice, and your old everyday outfit would be either passed on to someone or (if it was in too bad a shape for that) would be cut up for various other uses.
As technology progressed, all of the steps in fabric production ended up taking less time; for example, the spinning wheel spins thread much more quickly than the drop spindle does. But it was still a hell of a lot of work.
In the 18th Century, here’s the life cycle of bed sheets:
They start out as sheets (flat, both top and bottom) and are needed because they are MUCH easier to wash than your sheets than a blanket. As sheets get used, they develop worn patches to the middle. Those get darned. When even darning is not enough to save them, you cut them in half down the middle, flip the pieces, and sew the edges together so that what had been the edge is now a seam down the middle and the worn parts are on the edges (where the fact that they’re worn doesn’t matter much). When the new center gets worn out, you cut the fabric apart and turn the usable bits of fabric into pillow cases. When the pillowcases get worn out you turn the usable bits of fabric into handkerchiefs.
And the pieces of fabric that are truly too worn to be used any longer were not thrown out: they were sold. To a ragpicker. Someone whose entire job was buying rags and scraps from households and then selling them on to merchants and tradesmen who could use them. Rags too worn to be used as fabric any longer could be made into paper, for example. Or used as stuffing padded/quilted garments or cushions.
And there wasn’t any level of wealth at which that wasn’t true. Being rich didn’t mean treating textiles (and most other goods) as disposable–it meant hiring more servants to do the mending and remaking and repurposing for you.
Because it was always going to be cheaper to pay for the human labor to eke every bit life out of those textiles than to pay for new textiles.
No, you don’t have to include every detail about your world.
But maybe we shouldn’t be so insulated from the basic question of “Where Things Come From” that it’s an arduous and burdensome task to think about where your characters’ clothes come from
Like. This has to be connected to the fact that so few people think about where clothes come from in Real Life, right?
And how colonialism and exploitation of people has made it so easy to have just, no idea how much labor goes into a thing or what resources it takes to create the thing
To be a good worldbuilder, you gotta think about your own world.
