Fuck Monarchy - Tumblr Posts

The ✨neurodivergent urge✨ to further parse the evolutionary origins of crushes, and of the complicated, technologically-driven rise of parasocial relationships; as a way to help dismantle their sometimes distressing and distracting overwhelming effects on my psyche

Plus

The ✨anarchist urge✨ to continually challenge stories grounded in monarchial and gentry-centered settings and denounce them as classist, as very cruelly disingenuous, and as terribly problematic: given that such stories ultimately romanticize and make propaganda of characters who are of the exploitative and colonizing 1% -- ffs, none of us "commoners" would be invited to such parties! We'd be dressed in rags, frantically working ourselves to exhaustion and death in a horrifically dangerous factory, or dying of treatable illnesses in a filthy, freezing hovel, or --

Vs

The ✨mentally-exhausted abuse survivor and giddy-schoolgirl-ish urge✨ to pen a fun, heady, regency-era, bridgerton-esque romp of a romance where my suspiciously youthful and non-disabled self-insert builds a heartwarming friendship with (and subsequently falls in love with) my parasocial crush

I used to like knights as a little kid. I high-key wanted to be one.

I was fascinated by castles.

I'd draw them, and design fantasy ones made out of living trees, and play computer games about building them.

Then, I found out that chivalry was fake... and that those castles were built more or less to defend the king and the nobility from the commoners they'd stolen the land from.

I pivoted to a Samurai interest in my late teens, only to find out that the famed Bushido code, also, was invented after the time of the Samurai...by scholars who were all too happy to romanticize warriors who were really just bullies and defenders of the status quo which served the monarchs and the merchants.

( It doesn't help that any knight-in-shining-armor was most assuredly rich and high up in the ranks of nobility.

Armor isn't naturally bright and reflective like that. 😳 It took a TON of time and labor from many servants, in order to polish the armor and get that mirror-perfect effect.

So much so, that it was even used as an intimidation tactic... because if someone had shining armor, it was a sign that he had a LOT of power to throw around, and that he probably shouldn't be messed with. )

...And now I learn that the word 'villain' was created as a derogatory word for commoners.

I'm so tired of mythologized lies and canonized exploiters and warmongers.

I want to read and write stories about rebels.

About Robin Hoods.

About clerics gone apostate, and knights turned to oath-breakers who strive and learn and become REAL defenders of the realm....

Defenders and allies and accomplices and co-conspirators with the PEOPLE of the realm.

Not the "powers" that dared to enclose and enslave it.

I need cooler structures to dream of than castles.

I want to know what derogatory names the peasantry called the REAL antagonists.

I want to help break the warped, storified lens of history: both that which exists externally in our media, and all that which has been internalized in me.