I said last year that the WE team must have written a bible based on the Clexa debacle about How To Keep Your Queer Audience, because they seem to tick off little boxes:
Clexa fans wanted ET/ADC to have a photoshoot, do interviews together, be seen together more.
WE: Check. Wayhaught not only do photo shoots together, they tweet one another in character almost and appear at events like Clexacon and ComicCon together.
There’s some studied dedication to ensuring their queer fans are watching and happy. I suppose this should make me want to watch, but it doesn’t somehow. There’s something offputting about a straight showrunner catering content for us. I’d like to know if there are any queer writers/producers on the show. Is the WE team doing more to help elevate actual queer voices and talent – or is it just for themselves?
Not that this is a necessary thing, but if you’re putting yourself out there as this Big Ally, it must be for more than just promoting your programme or yourself, right? I admit my thoughts on this might be muddy and I might not have the full picture.
I do appreciate the fan interaction though and maybe I’m just missing out or too old.
Please no worries, that line wasn’t about her actually dying (I’m not going there), just that sense of ‘dying inside,’ when things aren’t quite right.
I think there are thousands of fics out there where they meet in different places (and have smutty times) so I don’t feel compelled to write that much :-p I don’t think there will be more side stories if only because I really really need to get on with the main one.
Thank you for reading, I’m glad you found something to like and thank you for writing.
I don’t watch much television, really and it’s hard for me to get into a programme if I’m not already predisposed in some fashion. I do see a lot of WE on my dash, lots of praise for the cast, the Wayhaught ship, etc., but it kind of makes me nervous.
Since you brought it up, does remind me we really should have a return of Xena by now. *sigh*
A really cool article about one of my weird niche interests (ask me about Renaissance recipes sometime, they’re great).
Since I have my main cookbook right by me at the moment, here’s a small sample of some flavour profiles from Renaissance England, prior to the shift in European cooking styles that’s described in this article–all of them from savoury recipes involving meat:
Rosemary, currant, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, pepper.
Shallot, mustard, nutmeg, honey, white wine vinegar.
Onion, rosemary, marjoram, thyme, savoury, bay, parsley, pistachio.
Hardly the plain boiled fare most people picture in traditional English cooking, right?
Renaissance food is awesome.
This has been intermittently getting a note or two and it’s awesome so I’m going to reblog it again. Everyone learn about one of my strange niche hobbies.
Well this is fascinating.
“Serving richly spiced stews was no longer a status symbol for Europe’s wealthiest families — even the middle classes could afford to spice up their grub. “So the elite recoiled from the increasing popularity of spices,” Ray says. “They moved on to an aesthetic theory of taste. Rather than infusing food with spice, they said things should taste like themselves. Meat should taste like meat, and anything you add only serves to intensify the existing flavors.”“
I’m laughing so hard rich classist whites got mad that poor whites were able to spice their food just like them so the rich forced themselves to believe that food tasted good in its ~natural bland~ state. And that arrogance entitled attitude is the sole reason why white ppl food is generally blegh compared to food that’s properly spiced all around the rest of the world. I’m crying 😂😂😂
Also worthy of note is the widespread belief in Victorian times that spiced, flavorful food was sinful and led to sinful behaviors.
As a small correction, rich folks never “forced themselves to believe that food tasted good in its natural bland state” – indeed, bland food was never on the table (so to speak) for the wealthy. The linked article only gives you half the picture.
While it’s true that the shift away from spices resulted in a loss of strongly contrasting flavours, it didn’t represent a loss of strong flavours altogether. The stuff about enhancing existing flavours through the use of meat-stock-based sauces isn’t just talk: dishes prepared in the Western European style can be intensely flavourful.
The trick is that those stock-based sauces are often incredibly labour-intensive to produce; some of the foundation sauces of French haute cuisine, for example, can literally take all day to prepare, and require constant monitoring during that span – unlike a spice-based sauce, you can’t just mix it up and let it simmer. Additionally, prior to the advent of refrigeration, stock-based sauces couldn’t be mixed in advance, nor safely stored once prepared: they had to be made from scratch each time, and used up immediately.
Basically, there was a shift toward methods of food preparation that were guaranteed to remain exclusive because the bulk of their cost was in labour, not in ingredients. No matter how cheap the ingredients became, the lower classes simply didn’t have the time to whip up those fancy sauces.
The upshot is that the rich assholes kept right on eating tasty food – it’s just the working class who suffered.
A couple of docus that give some interesting insight, if you’ve never seen:
“Am I ungrateful? You call me ungrateful! My life has been stolen from me. I am living in a town I have no wish to live in. I am living… a life I have no wish to live. How did this happen?”
The Doctor Is Out 