Okay, this is in incredibly petty nitpick, but: if you’re writing a fantasy setting with same-sex marriage, a same-sex noble or royal couple typically would not have titles of the same rank - e.g., a prince and a prince, or two queens.
It depends on which system of ranking you use, of course (there are several), but in most systems there’s actually a rule covering this scenario: in the event that a consort’s courtesy title being of the same rank as their spouse’s would potentially create confusion over who holds the title by right and who by courtesy, the consort instead receives the next-highest title on the ladder.
So the husband of a prince would be a duke; the wife of a queen, a princess; and so forth.
(You actually see this rule in practice in the United Kingdom, albeit not in the context of a same-sex marriage; the Queen’s husband is styled a prince because if he were a king, folks might get confused about which of them was the reigning monarch.)
The only common situation where you’d expect to see, for example, two queens in the same marriage is if the reigning monarchs of two different realms married each other - and even then, you’d more likely end up with a complicated arrangement where each party is technically a princess of the other’s realm in addition to being queen of her own.
You’ve gotta keep it nice and unambiguous who’s actually in charge!
Okay, I’ve received a whole lot of asks about this post, so I’m going to cover all of the responses in one go:
1. The system described above is, admittedly, merely one of the most common. Other historically popular alternatives include:
The consort’s courtesy title is of the same rank as their spouse’s, with “-consort” appended to it: prince and prince-consort, queen and queen-consort, etc. This is how, e.g., present-day Monaco does it.
The consort is simply styled Lord or Lady So-and-so, and receives no specific title. I can’t think of any country that still does it this way, off the top of my head, but historically it was a thing.
(Naturally, your setting needn’t adhere to any of these, but it would be highly irregular for it to lack some mechanism for clarifying the chain of command.)
2. The reason why the consort of a prince is historically a princess even though those titles are the same rank is basically sexism. This can go a couple of ways:
In many realms, there was no such thing as being a princess by right; the daughter of a monarch would be styled Lady So-and-so and receive no specific title, so the only way to be a princess was to marry a prince.
In realms where women could hold titles by right, typically a masculine title was informally presumed to outrank its feminine counterpart. So, e.g., kings outrank queens, princes outrank princesses, etc.
In either case, no ambiguity exists.
(Interestingly, this suggests that in a more egalitarian setting where masculine titles are not presumed to outrank their feminine counterparts, or vice versa, you’d need to explicitly disambiguate rankings even outside the context of same-sex marriages. Food for thought!)
3. It would also be possible to have two kings or two queens in the same marriage without multiple realms being involved in the case of a true co-monarchy. However, true co-monarchies are highly irregular and, from a political standpoint, immensely complicated affairs. If you’re planning on writing one of those, be prepared to do your research!
4. The next rank down from “countess” is either “viscountess” or “baroness”, depending on which peerage system you’re using.
(Yes, that last one actually came up multiple times. Apparently there are a lot of stories about gay countesses out there!)
History wants so badly for Cleopatra to be beautiful. Like they can’t conceive of Rome being intimidated by anything less
because being a linguist, fleet commander, and powerful ruler doesn’t matter, only her looks
Her Arab contemporaries raved about her being very interested and knowledgeable in the sciences.
She completely reformed the system in Alexandria, and Egypt at large; making it much more of a functional powerhouse.
She did what 300 years of her ancestors couldn’t: Managed to get the support of both the Greek AND Egyptian subjects she ruled.
There is a sculpture that has been identified as her, through comparisons to coins minted under her rule, that proves beyond a doubt that she wasn’t particularly beautiful.
It isn’t that people just happen to believe it by mistake. Rome was fucking terrified of her and painted her as a vapid, scheming, beautiful, sex obsessed queen to discredit her to their people. She was a threat, and that was how they handled it. The unfortunate thing is that that is the most surviving record of her. A smear campaign against one of the smartest, most powerful women in human history.
Wait, wait…. Is that seriously it? How their clothes go?
that genuinely is it
yeah hey whats up bout to put some fucking giant sheets on my body
lets bring back sheetwares
When you’re carding, spinning and weaving everything from scratch, using the big squares exactly as they come off the loom must seem like a fucking brilliant idea. 90% (or more) of pre-14th century clothing is made purely on squares (and sometimes triangles cut from squares).
How did they get the fabric so fine it draped like that? Was that something medieval europe forgot? Or do I just have a completely misguided image of historical clothing?
The way they could get away with pinking and slashing doublets in the 16th century was partially because the fabrics were so tightly woven that you could simply cut a line on the bias and nothing would fray.
Modern fabric machining sucks ass in terms of giving us any kind of quality like the kind human beings produced prior to the Industrial Revolution.
*yells about textile history*
somtimes I get SO MAD about modern fabric sucking i stg
What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?
My science teacher said he thinks that’s true actually
Yeah this is actually pretty much exactly what is going on. It’s why anti-oxidants are such a big deal. Bonus fact: oxygen oxidizes stuff in your cells or, in other words, it’s not toxic, just setting you on fire
very very slowly.
What if there are aliens out there but they subsist on entirely different substances and they’re just scared as shit of us and our crazy ass hell planet? Once in a while some alien anthropologist type suggests checking out the people on this inhabited planet out towards the galaxy’s edge. The other aliens just look at the naive academic with horror. No!! We do not go to that world. That is where the DEATH BREATHERS live. They recreationally consume poisons and are more or less composed of biological fire. Their atmosphere is made of rocket fuel. We must leave the DEATH BREATHERS in peace. Do not go there. Do not.
I tend to always reblog posts about humans being terrifying weirdos to aliens.
okay but…that is actually what went down on earth about 2.5 billion years ago.
Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).
We are literally descendants of the DEATH BREATHERS and cyanobacteria is our deadly mother.
The cyanobacteria holocaust is so big, it doesn’t even have a cool name; it’s just called “The Great Oxygenation Event”; the *second* most apocalyptic extinction event in our planet’s history is the one that’s called THE GREAT DYING (the Permian-Triassic event, about 252 million years ago).
This shit makes like the rock-throwing that wiped out the dinosaurs look like kindergarten.
OH HOW I LOVE THIS POST. It makes me so much happier about being alive. I AM BURNING VERY SLOWLY. *hugs it*
In a private cemetery in small-town Arkansas, a woman single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when their families wouldn’t claim them.
-Source
One person who found the courage to push the wheel is Ruth Coker Burks. Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
How have I never heard of this?
People like her should be remembered. And even more importantly, we must remember that there was a time in our history when we needed someone like her.
“When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: ‘Someday, all of this is going to be yours.’
‘I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,’ she said. ‘Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?’"
"Hemingway and James Joyce were drinking buddies in Paris. Joyce was thin and bespectacled; Hemingway was tall and strapping. When they went out Joyce would get drunk, pick a fight with a bigger guy in the bar and then hide behind Hemingway and yell, “Deal with him, Hemingway. Deal with him.”"
Between this and the story about him reassuring F. Scott Fitzgerald re dick size, I’m developing a picture of Hemingway as the mother hen of the disaffected white male literary set of the early 20th century.
He probably called up Steinbeck sometimes and was like I CAN’T EVEN WITH THESE DIPSHITS and Steinbeck was all “That’s what you get for living in Paris, asshole”.
Not enough people talk about the fact that Leonardo da Vinci was gay. Like, he’s literally the father of modern technology and one of the smartest human beings to ever live and I never ever learned in school that he was gay.
If all the LGBT people are as “DOOMED” as the bible thumpers think we are, hell, at least we’re in good company.
I was about to say I can’t believe I didn’t know this
and then I remembered the American education system
Yes, I can fucking believe I didn’t know this.
But yeah. Leonardo da Vinci was gay. Pass it on.
Leo painted a picture of his lover as Jesus and that’s the image we use today
Oh man that is sad. I’m sorry your teachers are failing you.
Some Leonardo facts you should tattoo on your heart:
He was actually convicted for sodomy at age 24, but the allegations were dropped for lack of testimony. The charges affected him immensely, as he was by all means, a very private person.
Da Vinci’s models for Christ are unknown. The claim that he depicted his lover as Jesus most likely arose from the bullshit about Cesare Borgia being the inspiration for White Jesus™ combined with the allegations that Leonardo and Cesare were lovers…There is little to no support for these claims. However, it’s speculated his lover Gian Giacomo Caprotti was the model for his St. John the Baptist.
He was universally beloved (minus Michelangelo lollll), like the nicest, funniest, gentlest, handsomest man you’d ever meet. He was generous beyond words, treated everyone equally, and loved to play pranks.
He was also fuckin’ ripped. It was rumored he could bend a horseshoe in half with his bare hands.
Often wore pink and other vibrant colors.
Rumored to sleep approx. 2 hours a night.
Was left-handed and ambidextrous. He was dyslexic, possibly had ADD, and suffered from frequent paranoia.
He was his own worst critic and often destroyed his work. He still left behind over 13k journal pages, filled with sketches and so many dick jokes.
His last words were: “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”
Would buy caged animals from the market just to set them free. He was allegedly a vegetarian.
For a time he kept a pet lizard and made him a custom set of wings and horns. He would routinely scare the shit out of people with his ‘dragon.’
My all time fave: While staying in the Vatican he would invite guests into a residential room which had been filled with cleaned/dried animal intestines that he had sewn together. He fastened a bellows to the end of the intestines and proceeded to inflate them. Onlookers were so excited to see DaVinci’s new ”invention” that they didn’t even realize this asshole was just blowing up a giant balloon and pinning them to the wall holy shit I love him so much.
Where is the musical. Lin-Manuel Miranda, fix this.
my fave greek history story to tell is that of agnodice. like she noticed that women were dying a lot during childbirth so she went to egypt to study medicine in alexandria and was really fucking good but b/c it was illegal for women to be doctors in athens she had to pretend to be a man. and then the other doctors noticed that she was 10x better than them and accused her of seducing and sleeping with the women patients. like they brought her to court for this. and she just looked at them and these charges and stripped in front of everyone like “yeah. im not fucking your wives” and then they got so mad that a woman was better at their jobs then them that they tried to execute her but all her patients came to court and were like “are you fucking serious? she is the reason you have living children and a wife.” so they were shamed into changing the law and that is how women were given the right to practice medicine in athens
HARRIET TUBMAN ESCAPED FROM SLAVERY AND THEN WENT BACK TO GET OTHERS. LIKE, I KNOW YOU KNOW WHO HARRIET TUBMAN IS AND THAT SHE DID THAT, BUT I JUST WANT YOU TO TAKE THAT IN FOR A SECOND.
HARRIET TUBMAN WAS HELD CAPTIVE AND BOUND TO UNPAID, BACK-BREAKING LABOR SINCE BIRTH UNDER PENALTY OF TORTURE OR DEATH. SHE MANAGED TO ESCAPE THAT LIFE, AND SHE TURNED THE FUCK AROUND AND WENT THE FUCK BACK TO GET EVERYONE ELSE WHO WAS STILL TRAPPED IN IT. AND THEN SHE DID IT AGAIN EIGHTEEN MORE TIMES.
WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS UNSURE WHETHER OR NOT HE WAS PREPARED TO MAKE A STAND AGAINST SLAVERY, HARRIET TUBMAN BASICALLY SAID HE SHOULD STOP BEING SUCH A DIAPER BABY AND THAT GUYS WHO ARE TOO SCARED TO END SLAVERY DON’T DESERVE TO WIN WARS.
NOT ONLY DID SHE SECRET OVER 300 SLAVES TO FREEDOM ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, BUT SHE ACTED AS A SPY FOR THE UNION ARMY DURING THE CIVIL WAR, AND BECAME THE FIRST WOMAN TO LEAD AN ARMED ASSAULT IN THE CIVIL WAR. THAT RAID BROUGHT FREEDOM TO OVER 700 SLAVES IN ONE GO.
SO I JUST WANT YOU TO STEW ON THAT FOR LIKE A MINUTE. ACTING IN THE SHADOWS, SHE WALKED INTO HELL ON EARTH 19 TIMES TO SAVE HER FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS FROM THE TORMENT SHE ENDURED, AND THE SECOND SHE WAS GIVEN EVEN A MODICUM OF POWER, SHE MANAGED TO FREE SEVEN HUNDRED SLAVES IN ONE DAY.
I GUARANTEE, HOWEVER IMPRESSED YOU ALREADY ARE WITH HARRIET TUBMAN, YOU ARE FALLING LIKE AT LEAST 40% SHORT OF HOW IMPRESSED YOU SHOULD BE WITH HARRIET TUBMAN. SHE IS ONE OF THE BEST EXAMPLES OF BADASSERY IN THE ENTIRETY OF AMERICAN HISTORY.
OKAY LISTEN IN ADDITION TO MAKING BOTH CAPTAIN AMERICA AND MOSES FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT LOOK LIKE A PAIR OF GODDAMN UNDERACHIEVERS SHE DID ALL THISWITH CHRONIC PAIN FROM A TRAUMATIC HEAD INJURY.
WHEN SHE WAS FUCKING TWELVE YEARS OLD SHE TRIED TO INTERVENE IN THE BEATING OF ANOTHER SLAVE AND GOT HER HEAD CRACKED OPEN FROM IT. A CHILD. A CHILD BORN INTO SLAVERY. AND SHE WENT UP AGAINST A PISSED OFF WHITE MAN WHO LITERALLY OWNED HER TO TRY AND HELP, LIKE, SHIT, I DON’T WANT TO GO TOE-TO-TOE WITH PISSED OFF WHITE MEN AND I’M WHITE AND IT’S THE 21st CENTURY. SO OKAY THEN HERE’S THIS WOMAN, FIVE FOOT NOTHING, DISABLED, HAD NARCOLEPSY AND HEADACHES AND VISIONS, DECIDED THOSE VISIONS WERE FROM GOD, AND PERSONALLY DELIVERED A THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS FROM ONE OF THE CRUELEST FORMS OF ENSLAVEMENT IN HISTORY. OH, AND AFTER ALL THAT SHE LIVED UNTIL SHE WAS FUCKING NINETY.
The Island of Discussion, Glencoe, Scotland. It was a place to settle disputes. A place to resolve differences. Officially named Eilean a’ Chomhraidh, the Island of Discussion is small and alone.
This island has served a noble purpose for many, many years. Over 1,500 years or so. When clansman had a disagreement, this is the place they went to work it out.
The rules were simple. When there were quarrels or arguments, the feuding parties where taken out to the island and left alone. Left there. With whiskey, cheese, and oat cakes. And they didn’t leave the island until the dispute was settled. The result, in over 1,500 years, only 1 recorded murder in the area.
