Agarlandoffreshlycuttears asked me to talk about my love of Boromir since I have a few Aragorn hate posts out there and boy does this topic of discussion take me back.
(For the record, a lot of my earliest opinions of Boromir was formed as an impressionable 14 year old experiencing her first head-over-heels male crush (I mean seriously, look at this guy:
) but people aware of my love of Thorin have probably noticed I tend to have a thing for complicated characters who experience a fall from grace. I find them much more interesting than characters who never need to struggle with morality or see a serious risk to their soul. I don’t hate Aragorn as such, but I have a lot of issues with the way his character was handled, so I hope the negative stuff comes across as more tongue-in-cheek and critique-oriented rather than bashing.)
So let’s begin from the beginning with some very Nuanced and Intellectual™ reasons to love Boromir.
So Into This At All Times, are as a worrying number of us. Do tell~~~!!!
Hey, I’d rather y’all be into alien sex than be like ‘they have sex just like humans :D’ tbh. Btw, I am bolding things that will help if you’re just skimming for a particular piece of information. I’m gonna go on for quite some time because you just poked a ‘Special Interest’ button. Strap in, kiddies, we’re about to get weird~~
(nota bene 1: this is assuming Cardassians have two sexes and two genders. Personally I hc that humans, with our five sexes and myriad genders, are the widest and most varied of the races, with Andorians not far(?) behind. Cardassians are also fascist iirc, and fascism generally locks whatever pattern in place is most reproductive bc ‘family values’)
What’s In A Name? Taxonomy
Now, crocodilians are Archosaurs, which is a group they share with birds. I decided that Cardassians are also archosaurs, so that means I can use bird traits as well as crocodilian ones to map out their courting rituals, sex, gender, nesting, and beauty standards.
You Want Blue? Beauty Standards and Sexual Display
So in canon we know the females have blue on them. This is really interesting to me, because reptilians (and, side note, we now know birds are reptiles. yep.) usually have this pattern:
male = pretty and courting
female = big and choosing
That is why male reptiles are the colourful little ones that dance around (’me me me me me!! pick me!! look how high i jump!’ – prairie grouse, birds of paradise), give gifts (’you like blue? i got you blue. you like pebble? i got you pebble.’ – blue bower bird and adélie penguin, respectively), and compete with other males (’look how tall i can be!! look how big and strong i am!’ – lizards and turkeys/capercaille/chickens, respectively), to prove their worth to the bigger, camouflaged, discerning females.
(A friend pointed out this may be why female Cardassians are considered better at science, where males are the warriors)
So why are females the colourful ones? Well, they may be using cosmetics, which may be symbolic of their social status in some way that can’t be noted normally (such as married/not married, or sexually mature/not mature); or else it might be a beauty standard.
Putting on makeup to redden/darken our lips and cheeks, and to redden/darken our eye area, mimics sexual arousal, and so the beauty standard of this sort of makeup arose from mimicking a sexual signal. That’s the kind of beauty standard I’m referring to, not the culture-bound ones like big tits (the west) or modesty (christianity) or suchlike.
So, if the Cardassian ladies are painting the blue on their faces, then why? Specifically, why is this attractive, and why are the female Cardassians trying to be attractive? I dislike the idea that a female archosaurs would display for the males, and blue is not a usual colour for flushing, unless you have blue blood. And you don’t have blue blood unless you live in a very very cold climate (see octopuses and horseshoe crabs), so we can rule out the ‘mimicry of flushing’ possibility.
That leaves blue as being, in a pre-society Cardassian, somehow a signal of something else. But what? Are the females looking more aggressive this way? Is it status display, like with a lammergeier bathing in red dust? Is it decoration and the blue is only ‘blue’ to us, but to their eyes, which can see ultra-violet, it glimmers and flashes? Is it something that only arose when Cardassian society went all fascist and militant, and the aggressive warrior males inverted the power structure and began to rule, and needed a way to make the females seem more decorative and objectified? Well, if pre-society Cardassians were originally like bower birds, and the males collected blue objects for the females to peruse, then marking the females with blue would be very symbolic.
This is assuming, of course, that females wear blue regardless of whether they’d be interacting with other races or not. We don’t see them unless they are (afaik), so we have to consider the possibility that the blue markings are actually there for other races, who can’t tell a female from a male Cardassian and need to be told in some ridiculously obvious way so they don’t misgender anybody.
Yet another possibility, is that our idea that the ‘female’ Cardassian is the one that lays the eggs is totally wrong, and the Universal Translator is interpreting ‘female’ in a flawed and human/mammalian-centric manner (’female ones are the smaller ones that raise the young’ will skew a lot of results!!; this is like ‘any featherless biped is a human’ and someone plucking a chicken and going ‘behold, a human!’), and the smaller, blue-marked Cardassians are in reality the male Cardassians. You can also do that if you like, lord knows I certainly have done something like that with the Ferengi and with Tolkien Orcs.
Like any good scientist, I’m not going to actually answer any of these as ‘this is definitely it’ because well, it could be any of these! So I’m just gonna move on to the mechanics of sex itself.
Egg or Squish? Incubation and Gestation
Eggs or live young? That’s a big question, and my fellow Cardassian xenobiologist, badmadwolf, suggested they were ovoviviparous, which means they birth live young by means of hatching the eggs within their bodies. This is a thing some snakes do. Obviously, archosaurs do not do this, but this is fiction, and we can reasonably reach over to Serpentes and borrow a few things and call that possible for an archosaur biped.
However, if you like egg-laying Cardassians, we can also say they lay eggs–with leathery shells–and hatch them–in incubator mounds (at least, pre-society Cardassians would; technology makes the need for a big mound of rotting vegetation unnecessary–but it wouldn’t get rid of the instinct to Pile Up All The Trash Really High a la australian brush turkeys or gators).
Either way, Cardassians don’t suckle their young, and are born ready to eat what the adults eat, with teeth and all.
(I am hand-waving the obvious tits on the Cardassians in the show as being a consequence of hiring human actresses and the limitations of a human being in charge of production.)
To Cloaca Or Not To Cloaca? Genitalia
Another question is the inevitable Do They Have A Cloaca? This is all down to personal preference. Some archosaurs have a very elaborate penis and vagina situation (ducks, famously), some have ‘vents’ (passerines), and some have a cloaca, and if they have a penis, the penis lives inside it, fully erect, ready to be pushed out during mating (really!). So the question is down to personal preference: Do You Want Garak/Dukat/Damar To Have A Cock, Punk? Well, Do You?
(My answer is always Yes, Bring On The Monster Peens)
However, regardless of what answer you choose, it’s likely they still have a cloaca–and, side note, do not pee. Or rather, there’s no separate liquid and solid waste, it’s all in the same packet as it were.
Hey, Sexy! Perfume, Purring, and Foreplay
Crocodilians have musk glands, and the male spreads his scent around to let the female know he’s dtf and in the area. This is a fun thing to have in combination with forked tongues/jacobson’s organs. I’m a big fan of scent being used sexually, but that’s me. Archosaurs don’t all do things with scent (though a lot more birds do than you might think!).
Cardassians, like a lot of crocodilians, may also have a ‘mating rumble’
that they do. It’s like a purr, but lower and specifically sexual, and
all gators do it to advertise they’re dtf. Crocodiles do this too, but
I’m American and I prefer my gators.
Another thing to remember is that Cardassians probably do a lot of foreplay/courtship before getting down to the bidniss. All archosaurs, crocodilians included, go through elaborate mating dances both to earn a mate and also afterwards, the mates dancing together for sometimes hours on end. Whether Cardassians are from monogamous or polygamous types of species is up to you, the spread of that is pretty mixed through the Archosaurs, from loons mating for life and singing together every night to crocodilians mating with several different partners and producing a clutch where each egg can have a different sire.
Please Think Of The Children! Family Structure and Chick-Rearing
You can take your pick of how chicks are raised too, from a single mating system, like hornbills who wall the female up in the nest and the male brings her and the babies food; or you can have gators, which communally raise their young in nursery pools; or pelicans, who have 2-3 chicks that compete and push weaker siblings out of the nest to die until there’s only one left (seabirds are brutal); or you can have brush turkeys, where the male makes the nest and the female lays her eggs in it then fucks off; or emus, where the dads raise the babies but will also look after literally any baby emus nearby (it’s hilarious why they do this). Archosaurs have such a huge range of chick-rearing behaviours that Cardassians could literally be anything.
Canon only tells us that family is ‘important’ and that families of several generations live together and work to raise their children. That could be artificial due to some societal pressure, however, much like agriculture changed how humans underwent courtship, mating, and child-rearing.
(nota bene 2: I am only in season two and haven’t got through/got access to all
the printed stuff that may have this info, so I’m working off the
information in s02e05 “Cardassians”, and what I could find on memory
alpha)
TWS: Natasha saves Steve, by pressing him into her chest. She has to act fast to save both him and Sam, because she is the only one who saw Bucky’s gun and was able to correctly and timely predict where he will shoot. This moment is not even aknowledged, as it’s just a thing that happens. She literally is sitting in Steve’s lap for the rest of that scene, feeling around between his legs for her guns, yet nothing, no tee-hee, she is sitting on Steve’s dick ~u guys~
AOU: Natasha saves Bruce by pulling him into her chest. The camera lingers, the shot goes on and on, everything is telling “LOOK, he is ON HER it’s like they ARE HAVING SEX and his face is in HER BOOBS GUUUUUUYSSSSS THEY LOOK LIKE THEY WILL DO THE DO”. Nothing about this shows her competence, nothing about this presents her as more than an object.
There’s absolutely nothing sexual about the scene in The Winter Soldier. You know, no one even thinks about breasts and penises just as no one thinks about noses and ears. All of them are there because they are parts of the human body, but there’s no attention drawn to any of those parts, because THEY ARE NOT THE FREAKING POINT! The conduction of the scene and its camera work are focused on showing how Natasha saves the lives of both Steve and Sam.
On the other hand, the Age of Ultron scene is 100% sexual. The fact that Bruce lands with his face on Natasha’s breasts IS THE POINT OF THE SCENE. It exists for the sole purpose of sex innuendo. The scene was conducted and shot to hint at a possible relationship between the characters, most specifically a sexual relationship. Nothing in this is about Natasha saving Bruce’s life. I’m just glad that Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo performed the scene in a manner that doesn’t highlight its sexual undertones.
you know what’s the difference? one movie was directed by a disgusting sexist piece of shit
As if ObiWan could forget that shiny blue troublemaker.
In my head it goes like this –
Luke (oblivious) : He says he belongs to an Obi-Wan Kenobi. Is he a relative of yours? Etc etc
Ben (distracted and barely paying attention to the conversation): *Former master my ass, you little scrap heap. You’ve never listened to me in your LIFE. I always had to drag Anakin or Ahsoka or Padme away from what they were doing just to get you to talk to the faulty navicomputer when you were in the same damn ship and just as likely to die if I flew use through a star*
R2: *stares blankly and flashes a red indicator light like [[shut up jerkface, I had to convince the kid somehow]]*
Ben (smirking, sarcasm missing Luke by a parsec because sandpeople): I don’t recall ever owning a droid. Very interesting.
Fandom is focus. Fandom is obsession. Fandom is insatiable consumption. Fandom is sitting for hours in front of a TV screen a movie screen a computer screen with a comic book a novel on your lap. Fandom is eyestrain and carpal tunnel syndrome and not enough exercise and staying up way, way past your bedtime.
Fandom is people you don’t tell your mother you’re meeting. Fandom is people in the closet, people out and proud, people in costumes, people in T-shirts with slogans only fifty others would understand. Fandom is a loud dinner conversation scaring the waiter and every table nearby.
Fandom is you in Germany and me in the US and him in Australia and her in Japan. Fandom is a sofabed in New York, a roadtrip to Oxnard, a friend behind a face in London. Fandom talks past timezones and accents and backgrounds. Fandom is conversation. Communication. Contact.
Fandom is drama. Fandom is melodrama. Fandom is high school. Fandom is Snacky’s law and Godwin’s law and Murphy’s law. Fandom is smarter than you. Fandom is stupider than you. Fandom is five arguments over and over and over again. Fandom is the first time you’ve ever had them.
Fandom is female. Fandom is male. Fandom lets female play at being male. Fandom bends gender, straight, gay, prude, promiscuous. Fandom is fantasy. Fandom doesn’t care about norms or taboos or boundaries. Fandom cares too much about norms and taboos and boundaries. Fandom is not real life. Fandom is closer than real life. Fandom knows what you’re really like in the bedroom. Fandom is how you would never, could never be in the bedroom.
Fandom is shipping, never shipping, het, slash, gen, none of the above, more than the above. Fandom is love for characters you didn’t create. Fandom is recreating the characters you didn’t create. Fandom is appropriation, subversion, dissention. Fandom is adoration, extrapolation, imitation. Fandom is dissection, criticism, interpretation. Fandom is changing, experimenting, attempting.
Fandom is creating. Fandom is drawing, painting, vidding: nine seasons in four minutes of love. Fandom is words, language, authoring. Fandom is essays, stories, betas, parodies, filks, zines, usenet posts, blog posts, message board posts, emails, chats, petitions, wank, concrit, feedback, recs. Fandom is writing for the first time since you were twelve. Fandom is finally calling yourself a writer.
Fandom is signal and response. Fandom is a stranger moving you to tears, anger, laughter. Fandom is you moving a stranger to speak.
Fandom is distraction. Fandom is endangering your job, your grades, your relationships, your bank account. Fandom gets no work done. Fandom is too much work. Fandom was/is just a phase. Fandom could never be just a phase. Fandom is where you found a friend, a sister, a kindred spirit. Fandom is where you found a talent, a love, a reason.
At what point is Cassian always “the perfect soldier” like I know he’ll do anything to get the job done but consider:
A dangerous criminal and daughter of an Imperial Officer who has proven to have no sense of loyalty “finds” (steals) a gun and he tells his robot friend to fuck everything and just let her keep it.
Befriends a robot.
I’m not sure what exactly makes him less of a qualified soldier for befriending a robot but I still feel like there’s something to that argument.
Has to bring Bodhi with him to shoot Galen for no other reason than he has no idea what the fuck Galen, his target, looks like.
His “soldier-stance” when talking to his superior officer has a little hip-cock to make that booty pop.
Uses “you’re in shock” as an excuse to get out of arguing with Jyn and then proceeds to treat her as you should never treat someone in shock, and even if she isn’t; how you should never treat someone whose dad died in their arms literally ten minutes ago.
At the first opportunity to just say “I recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it” he runs off with Jyn to get the plans.
Cassian Andor is just Sadman MacGyver-ing his way through life with a roll of duct tape, some paper clips, and a prayer while K2 has to broadcast statistical probabilities of survival, because there is a reason K2 has to do that all the time. I feel like all of his missions before this are just him Ferris-Bueller-Running through the empire.
The reason vampires, theoretically, cannot see themselves in mirrors, is because they are supposedly soulless, and silver is a “purifying” metal.
People have been using silver and silver compounds to treat medical problems since the time of Hippocrates (so from at least around and before
460BC), with silver nitrate being used as an antibacterial/treatment for gonorrhea and other infectious diseases, from the late 1800s on wards.
It’s seen a resurgence in the last few years in the form of
colloidal silver, despite there being no real conclusive evidence that drinking it (DO NOT) will “cure” any and all ailments, ranging from skin infections to Autism or AIDS. (Yes really, that is a thing people have done. They freak out over the truly beneficial, life saving vaccine, but will gladly give their children a highly toxic compound which can result in third degree chemical burns, blindness or a condition called
argyria which turns your permanently blue), In fact I think there was a study as recent as 2010 that said it actually did the opposite and was not more beneficial than a modern antibiotic, as many quack healers have and are claiming. Shocker. (Unlike colloidal gold which is used by the medical world, primarily in detection methods and also gene therapy. It was also used to be injected into the muscles to treat arthritis and was reported to have some benefits, but I think it has since fallen out of practice in a lot of places. My Nan used to get it done to her hands.)
But Joy, I hear you ask, what does any of this have to do with vampires and silver backed mirrors?
Well the thing is, silver backed mirrors didn’t become a thing until the mid 1800s, roughly around about the same time silver nitrate et al were being fully explored for medicinal purposes, and mistakenly thought to be a cure all.
So, what do you do when someone is sick? You give them the latest cure all! What do you do if you live in a part of the world where the fear of vampires is still a thing and the cure all turns them blue and kills them? Shit, they must be a vampire!
By that “logic” all things silver must repel them in some way, including these new fangled silver backed mirrors which reflect light perfectly. That’s why you never see them in the homes of the poor buggers we’re staking into the ground after they’re dead and cutting their heads off…not poverty or lack of availability in our small town…v a m p i r e s.
And from there the new myth grows arms and legs—though possibly not a head for the poor bugger they just threw into a shallow grave covered in garlic—and the idea that vampires don’t have mirrors in their homes because they don’t cast a reflection is immortalized in popular fiction and carried over into modern mythology. (The reason for it being deadly to werewolves is down the the Magical Sympathy Law. ie werewolves are controlled by the Moon, so silver (also known as “
lunar caustic” when the nitrate crystals solidify) being one of the seven metals of alchemy associated with the moon, must reverse their power or kill them! Science! Kind of…)
And even if your mythos does ascribe to his belief (and there’s no reason it can’t! It’s a great story prop!) I feel that conversely, this doesn’t mean vampires have no idea what they look like or cast no reflection at all, purely that they do not cast a reflection in silver.
People have been hammering metal flat and shiny to make reflective surfaces long before they were using silver backed mirrors. We know that polished copper has been used by people as a mirror since around 3000-4000BC in the region that was once Mesopotamia, and polished smooth bronze mirrors have been found in China dating back to 2000BC. They were rare and precious of course, and a luxury item, so not everyone household would have had one, but even your poorest lowly born vampire would have been able to see their reflection in a dark stone bowl filled with water allowed to sit still long enough, or sitting by the river on a clear calm night.
Which means I feel like writers are missing a trick when it comes to vampires who are so glad that silver is no longer considered an effective means of making mirrors (it’s expensive and harms the earth to keep mining it for vanity purposes) and are just here for metal alloy mirrors. Like holy shit Mary, hold the receiver, we are going to purchase floor length mirrors and put them in every room, you there my good sir, Harrods as fast as you can and don’t spare the mechanical horse. It’s time to SHINE.
Don’t even get me started on when digital cameras become a thing and silver nitrate is no longer used to develop them, and they print in color. You mean I don’t have to keep getting the family portrait updated every few decades? Marvelous! The cost of blue ink is better than it was but it’s still highway robbery I tell you. Sharron, come here and help me put this on the book of faces. Yes, good. What a pity there isn’t a way to hold it back far enough for a family portrait whenever you want it. How easy it would be to commemorate moments of joy…a selfie stick?!?! TELL ME MORE
“Then you should know, Potter, that Sybill Trelawney has predicted the death of one student a year since she arrived at this school. None of them has died yet. Seeing death omens is her favourite way of greeting a new class.”
Wait wait wait
so there was a theory bouncing around that Trelawney was actually scary accurate, right?
What if every student she predicted died in the battle for Hogwarts?
THATS JUST WHAT I WAS THINKING
I’m done.
*sobs*
It’s interesting because if you go back and reread the books, every single one of Trelawney’s predictions, even the really ridiculous ones, came true. So this is actually not only possible but highly probable.
Every time JKR describes a female character in the books, they are described in completely unflattering ways unless they are Lily Potter or have just become a love interest.
Hermione isn’t ‘pretty’ until her teeth are fixed and she shows up to the Yule Ball looking “appropriately” feminine.
McGonagall’s depictions are NOT favorable, even if her character becomes well-written (ish) later on.
Luna is not described in a flattering manner.
Nor Trelawney. Nor pretty much anyone that Harry looks at long enough to give a fuck about. Ginny is merely Ron’s ginger sister until the love interest bit happens.
The kindest word used for Molly is “matronly” in terms of physical descriptors.
And while she is an enemy, the physical depiction of Umbridge is truly vile. (Thus playing on JKR’s bullshit that if you are not traditionally acceptable in appearance as a woman, you are probably evil.)
The Ugly Witch statute.
The Fat Lady.
Harry’s female companions or friends are most often not described in any way at ALL, while boys and men, even if they’re important for maybe three seconds, are far more likely to be described in great detail.
Helga Hufflepuff is treated like a joke.
Rowena Ravenclaw is treated as completely unimportant.
Pomona Sprout and Aurora Sinistra teach Harry for five years and the only reason we know what they even fucking look like is because of the movies. Same with Rolanda Hooch.
In the meantime, from the books, we know what every single male teacher Harry had a class with looked like in pretty vivid detail.
Hermione’s academic traits are a joke unless it suddenly becomes a plot point to be helpful. Then it’s right back to being mocked, especially by Ron, who JKR later has her marry. A man who disrespected her, over and over and over again, is Hermione’s perfect spouse. O-kay then. Sure.
Harry and Ron are written as treating the Patil twins abominably badly in GoF, and not only is it written to imply that Harry and Ron are right to be upset, it’s written that the twins are NOT enttiled to be upset for being treated in that manner. (Read that scene again. It’s fucking enraging.)
Lily is only ever characterized as “Died for Harry.” We don’t even get a clear picture of who she was from the memory flashback from Snape. No one talks about her. It’s always James James James James James who did all the school things, all the pranks, all the fun and trouble. Remus and Sirius never discuss Harry’s mother with him at all, even though they were supposed to be friends in sixth and seventh year…and beyond, since Lily was writing Sirius letters and showing him pictures of her kid. Still male-centric.
There are so many fucking examples of this in every single book that I could keep typing for the rest of the day, but I’m not gonna do it. I have better things to do, like sit here and writhe in pain.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 