wednesday linkspam

[sciatrix]

Over on Tumblr, pluckyredhead mentioned having people ask her about potential Jewish headcanons for Daredevil's Foggy Nelson. She doesn't personally see it, and offered a number of reasons why that I thought were interesting. I personally think that Foggy reads strongly and specifically as Irish-Catholic American, which happens to be my primary background, and I added some commentary on why he seems coded that way to me.

sholio found the best three-sentence fic prompt I have ever seen:

DBZ, Vegeta, call center.

staranise would like to know where to find good-artist vibes with people writing interesting, imperfect, diverse ladies in F/F and LGBT+ relationships, as opposed to the traditional take of "perfect cis lesbians have a perfect frictionless relationship and never do anything wrong." I hope she finds a spot, because I want to know too.

breathedout has some cool discussion about "mannish" women in post-Revolutionary New England, and how gender presentation influenced how women's female-directed affections were perceived by observers.

wanderingnork would like us to take care of mental health, especially under holiday stress. (It's not remotely unusual for mental health to take sharp downturns around the holidays.)

halfeatenmoon has some additional thoughts about queerfic vs. slashfic, bouncing off some discussions I had with wellthisisnice back in September. (Here's the DW version of my post; here's the original pillowfort version; here's wellthisisnice's original post that kicked this all off.)

Speaking of,wellthisisnice has some thoughts about what asexual falling in love looks like.

jesse_the_k has another helpful guide for ex-tumblrites.

Via Deadspin, a guide to all the things America stuck inside itself and couldn't get out without medical assistance.

beatrice_otter ranted about a sweet little porcupine video that winds up being a lot less sweet than it sounds at first glance.

H/t Metafilter, Gritty's evolution from googly-eyed hocky mascot to meme to leftist avatar, explained. Better than it sounds at first glance.

Comments

[glorious_spoon]

Great roundup!

I know I saw that discussion about Foggy on Tumblr somewhere, but then I went looking and couldn't find it (ah, Tumblr). As it happens, I'm entirely in agreement with both of you, speaking as someone who is also of the Irish Catholic via NYC persuasion. Matt's the obvious one, of course, but I find it interesting how strongly Foggy is coded Irish Catholic, especially in the details that a lot of TV-Catholic characters tend to lack.

[sciatrix]

I know, right? And like I said, they're both such quintessential Good Irish Boys--Matt again, obvious, but he's the kind of obvious that winds up going into the priesthood or whatever, and if you set your hat at him you had better be prepared to be poor. Foggy's the kind that a good girl might be encouraged to marry, he's a family boy who sends money home, and he's upwardly mobile and has good prospects but will be pretty easy to lure back into the Church proper when someone does marry him. You know--double standards on the boys vs. girls with respect to religiosity, and all that. Personally, I figure him for atheist or agnostic when he's not hanging out with his family and "what? totally Catholic, sure" when he's home.

(My family has some ties to NYC, but they're two generations ago and the people in question haven't lived there for some time. So I'm glad that filters through to you, too; I mostly read the things that pluckylittleredhead identified as potential reasons people were asking about Jewish headcanons as... well, NYC culture. Or the places where Jewish and Catholic immigrants in NYC tended to run up against each other and interact, like the whole reason that corned beef and cabbage came into being as a staple to begin with: Irish immigrants were buying their meat from kosher butchers, and their corned beef was affordable. There's a long history of interaction and some degree of identification specifically between Catholic and Jewish immigrants, and that's its own long complicated thing. And in the context of Foggy himself, the child of Irish butchers, it's particularly interesting!)

You know the concept of being culturally Jewish whether or not you're really attached to the faith? I borrowed that a long time ago to refer to myself as 'culturally Catholic,' and it feels to me like the Daredevil cast have got to have someone who is culturally Irish Catholic on their writing staff who picks over a lot of their cultural writing. They really hit the right familiar notes, and they don't spend so much time on the older pre-Vatican II stuff and the lush imagery and all the things that people without that background tend to focus on when it comes to those cultures on TV.

[wellthisisnice]

!!! Thank you for including that new reply to my discussion! (Also, you seem to have missed the link to the DW version of your post)

[sciatrix]

Oof. Thanks for the note, I will fix!