Latest Posts by foolish-neko - Page 2
Because series made me to think about this canon again
For years, I was confused about how to feel about Armand's book backstory.
Like. He's from Kyivan Rus', BUT at the same time from 15th century. Kyivan Rus' was feudal monarchy that existed from probably IX (at least we assume so, because it was mentioned under that name in 852, tho it's not popped from the air, you know) to 1240. From ~1240 to 1349 the country was Rus' Kingdom. After that, Ukraine was splitted between Poland, Lithuania and Moldavian principality. Tho, Ukrainians were called Ruthenians (Latin name for former nation of Kyivan Rus') up until 19th century. I've read Beauplan's and Merimee's works about Ukraine, and they call Ukrainians both Ukrainians and Ruthenians.
SO.
When was Andrii (yes, this is how you would pronounce Ukrainian variation of Ανδρεας or Andrew)? He was Ruthen from Kyivan Rus' or he was Ruthen from 14th century Rus' Kingdom? Or he was even later? Book says he was born in 1481. So, later. A lot later.
We also know that he was kidnapped and enslaved by Mongolians. Mongolians entered Kyiv in 1240, it was a 13th century, not the end of 15th.
AND I HAVE A THEORIES.
Vampires live very long. So, probably it could be a mistake. Maybe Armand is simply older. Maybe he was around in 1240. He was just a child back then. Probably centuries later he was like 'yeah that Mongolians they sold me... so... it was... um... 15th century... yes? no?' Maybe it's just miscount. And then he never bothered to fix that.
The book is written by Daniel if I remember correctly. Perhaps Armand was like 'dude I was in orthodox Christian church I didn't know what year it was, I almost forgot my name and appearance in the catacombs under Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra'. And Daniel asked Marius when he met Andrii. And Marius... Well, if you are around for 2 thousand years, you can remember things incorrectly. So, Daniel, who is American and know nothing about history of Ukraine, and Marius who maybe knows something about Kyivan Rus' because it was a huge and powerful country back then just made that. They counted and assumed that it was 1481. And it was wrong.
Armand is a liar. How we can know that his real name is Andrii? Maybe he had a friend who's name was Andrii and Armand stole it. Maybe he was Taras. Or Bohdan. Or Oleh. How we would know? And maybe he never saw Mongols. How we would know? How would Daniel know? Maybe it was just his grand grandmother who told she saw Mongolians and how they burnt Kyiv. And little Andrii (we can say he was a weirdo all along) was just 'wow I want that! how cool it would be!'. And then he was kidnapped. And assaulted. And sold as a slave. And little weird Andrii just wanted a little comfort in his misery and a cool story. And when Marius asked how Andrii was captured, he made up this cool story about Mongols. Maybe in reality it was something more... Common. Dark and common. Everything could happen. Maybe he was sold by his parents, and he denied it. Maybe it was abuse in that church. Maybe he ran away from church and somehow ended up on the slave market.
Actually, I tend to 3rd. Isn't it a western movie where little talented boy paint so beautifully that Prince Michael (Mykhailo II of Chernihiv I assume) orders one of his icons, but on the way he and his father are interrupted by Mongolians. Also, it was said that Andrii suffered an amnesia due to his trauma caused by life in a brothel. He even starts to learn how to paint from the start, like he never knew how to paint before. So, was he at Lavra at all? Was he an icon painter? We would never know. He could just go to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, point at some old icon and say he drew it.
Or maybe some part of the story is true and some - isn't. I would speculate that Armand had an education. He wasn't a son of a hunter, no. He knew about Mongols. He knew who was the knyaz in 1240. But in 1481 Yurii Paz was knyaz. Mykhailo would be long dead by that time, obviously. So, how would little poor Andrii Ivanovych from 1481 know who was knyaz back when Mongols burnt Kyiv?)) A hunters son could not, he would not have an education, he would not know how to read or write, so history? Oh no, no way.
So, simply, we do not know who is Andrii. Is he Andrii at all? Was he born in 1481? Was he even 17 when Marius was thinking he was? Was his father a hunter named Ivan? Was he an icon painter at Lavra? probably yes and Ann Rice just didn't research enough
I just was thinking about it for years since I have read Vampire Armand. All these years I was wondering how he end up stolen by Mongols in 15th century...
Tho, it would be hilarious to see Armand's icon in Vampireverse Lavra. Imagine that. By the way, Lavra still have catacombs (I was there on tour). Maybe in Vampireverse some of Andrii's friends are there. Literally, their mummies as saints. He would arrive in Ukraine, in Kyiv and like 'oooh let's go see my old friends'. 'Look, Daniel, this is Marko, I knew him. Oh, and this is Illya, he looks better now, actually'. And then he would see his icon. And like... You know how it feels to see your artwork after some time. It's just not that good anymore, you know. You can do better now. Yes, this is how he would feel. It was a masterpiece in 1490s, he painted it for a year and a half. And now he can draw photo-like detailed art on his graphics tablet.
If you read this, thank you for the attention! Love you!
Clodia pretending to be Ukrainian willager working in Kyiv while speaking russian... What a shame.
Tho, it shows western view very accurate. Would an American vampiress know that Ukrainians speak Ukrainian (what a surprise)? Would a nazi know that Ukrainians speak Ukrainian? I think we all know the answer. It would be a dark irony, but I think showrunners eather didn't know...
I'm also very sour abot tolstoy's full screan cameo, but well... At least they showed true ruzzians - how they were through WWII and how nothing changed. But still... It's so westerned. Oooh, look, they kill and torture innocent people, what a fascinating rotten creatures, let's show tolstoy's book.
Still, it would be nice to see Kyivan Armand, as he meant to be in the books. But well... At least they romanticized nazis, not ruzzis. It's a progress...
As a Ukrainian fan of VC, I am very disappointed with the plot twist of the series. Of course, this could be predicted, but I hoped to the last that Armand's Ukrainian origin would be reflected at least in the series. It is very bitter that even in the 21st century, in a series that positions itself as modern and tolerant, Ukraine was again erased from history and canon.
They turned a blind eye to Ukraine. Again. And this is right now, when the genocide of the Ukrainian people and culture is taking place. They play up the narrative of a non-existent Ukraine, a Ukraine that invisible to the world.
Okhmatdyt Children's Hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine after russian missile attack.
Oh no. Now I'm on that level of desperation when I decided to wrote original story about OC-elf because I want some dark folklore story with all that folk shit (stolen kids, stolen wives and husbands, unfair favors, charmed people washing your dirty plates for 500 years, yeah, THIS stuff) and nobody understands. I can't find a role player who would play this with me, I have nobody to talk about it... But I want it so bad. Ugh. I'll just write this story in a google-doc and no one will see it...
But... Just why. Why I'm always into something specific that nobody likes. Why not kpop lol...
ukrainian clothes of 17-19 century by zinayida vasina
Fairy: Hey I didn’t get your name.
Me: Yeah that was on purpose.
Fairy: Oh my god stealing people’s names has been categorized as a war crime for like a hundred years. Do I seem like the kind of fairy that would do war crimes?
Me: Well yes, but that’s just my impression of you personally. Not fairies in general.
Fairy: You’re smarter than I thought.
I LOVE THIS GAME
It was a great birthday gift from me to myself. That violet bloody sky is something. I love this castle soo much.
Illustrations to Ukrainian folk tales by Viktor Savyn, 1954
Alexandre Serebriakoff, watercolours of Château de Groussay (France). Serebriakoff (1907-1995) was a Ukrainian-born watercolour artist who lived and worked most of his life in France. He developed contacts with French and English high society, and made watercolour albums depicting the richly furnished interiors of French chateaux and London flats, so-called Zimmerbilden or portraits d'intérieur. It was once a popular and charming genre of art, of which older examples are often of interest for the cultural historian, but has faded from the mainstream. Serebriakoff was one of the last masters of the genre.
Pics from here, which also provides an interesting read.
Kateryna Shtanko (Ukrainian, 1962- ) Illustration of childrens tale "Золотий черевичок" (Golden shoe) from the series of folk tales "100 Казок" published by Publishing House "A-ba-ba-ha-la-ma-ha". Kateryna won 1st prize of the "Book of the Year" contest in 2003 for her work.
english fairytale illustrations by ukrainian artist vladyslav yerko
Winter in the Village of Opishnia by Serhii Vasylkivskyi, 1900s
What is the best way to financially help Ukraine? Is it better to go through organizations or gofundmes or something else I'm not aware of?
Thanks for asking, nonnie. That's very kind of you. If you or anyone else has some spare change and wants to give, here are a few ideas:
United24 is the official fundraising platform established by President Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian governmental members and directs money to all areas of the country.
The Olena Zelenska Foundation is primarily focused on medical, humanitarian, and educational aid across the country and was founded by the First Lady.
Stand for Ukraine gives you a range of charity options, depending on whether you want to donate directly to the military, or you would prefer to fund non-lethal or humanitarian aid, etc.
Come Back Alive is the main fundraising platform for the Ukrainian military. You can choose to donate to air defense, heavy weapons, demining, medical aid, overall combat equipment, etc.
Donate to Ukraine's Defenders also offers various (carefully vetted) links and options to donate to rebuilding projects, private medical assistance programs, initiatives for democracy, and others.
Folk painting on the theme "Тікай, Петре з Наталкою, іде мати з качалкою" - "Run, Petro with Natalka, the mother is coming with a rolling pin" from the collection of the Ivan Honchar museum, XX century, part 2
"Український космос" Олега Шупляка.
A friendly reminder that Ukrainians are not you political debate tool and not a scapegoat to spill all your anger towards the United States. They're living through an occupation and an attack of a state officials of which repeatedly stated that Ukrainian as an identity shouldn't exist. They live under a constant threat of death by regular russian shellings. Just because theyre white and their attacker isn't United States or because you're tired of hearing about then, doesn't mean they don't deserve to have their life, safety and rights.
37th Ukrainian Fashion Week, Project “ORIGINS” (x)
The project combines traditional wear with modern details while paying the homage to Ukrainian culture, from its origins to its present. Project curators: gallery owner and art manager Maryna Shcherbenko, folklorist and ethnographer Marichka Kvitka.
Художник - Юрій Іванович Пацан.
this used to be a city of Maryinka, as you can see it no longer exists, thanks to russians.
I'm writing this post because I don't want people in other countries to imagine an ever-present warzone when they think of Ukraine.
Think of your ordinary life. You go to work, go out with friends, build plans for a summer holiday. You have neighbours, maybe you don't know all of them well but they live next to you and you say hello when you see them. You live in a good apartment, with all amenities, modern appliances and stylish furniture. You pay bills for heating, water and electricity. Maybe you're renting out or it's your own place. You are a part of a globalized world although you don't think about it on such a scale.
And then one day there are explosions in your city. At first it seems shocking and unusual. But you hope it'll end soon. But they don't stop. They become more frequent. You witness your hometown get demolished. The places where you spent your free time or ran errands - the windows get shattered and the walls begin to crumble. It looks weird in the middle of a modern city.
Soon the explosions happen so often that you have to go and live in the basement. You, a person, who has a modern home, must move to a basement, with other people like you, where you don't get enough light or fresh air, let alone enough tap water or a decent place to sleep.
And then you witness death. In fact, many deaths, not just one. You get the news of people you knew, maybe your neighbours or relatives, getting killed. They are just gone. At some point you become so desensitized, the news of a dead body lying outside doesn't shock you. Sometimes you have to go outside and help other people dig out the bodies from under debris or bury them. Sometimes you see other apartments being on fire and you can't do anything. Nobody can and there's no point.
The shops are closed and you become so desparate that you start hunting pigeons for food. You share tiny portions with other people because, even though the conditions are terrible, you remain a human.
You lose everything that you owned and cherished. And it all happens in three months. You basically lose any sense of belonging to a modern society in three fucking months. That's what happened in Mariupol. When you see the photos and videos of people in dirty ragged clothes, looking like they came straight from the middle ages, in front of a ruined street - it's easy to think of them only like this. But they never lived like that before. They lived just like you. They had everything you had - TVs, computers, cars, internet, medical care, shops with stylish clothes. And then just in three months russia made them turn into dejected shadows of themselves who forgot what normal life feels like. That's a real tragedy and that's what russians have done and are still doing to us. They are ruining our normal life which isn't much different from your normal life.
What Ukrainians ate to survive Holodomor
(translated excerpts from an Історична Правда article): + images source
The villagers would dig up the holes of the polecats to find at least a handful of grain hidden by these animals. They pounded it in a mortar, added a handful of oilcake (from hemp seed), beetroot, potato peelings, and baked something from this mixture.
Those who managed to hide at least a little grain would grind it in iron mills made from wheel axles and cook "zatyrukha" (a concoction made from a small amount of flour ground from ears of grain).
Acacia flowers were boiled and eaten raw, and green quinoa was mixed with crushed corn cobs. Those who could - and this was considered lucky - added a handful of bran. This food made their feet swell and their skin crack.
The peasants dried the husked ears of corn and millet husks, pounded them, ground them with weeds, and cooked soups and baked pancakes. Such dishes were impossible to chew, the body could not digest them, so people had stomach aches. Pancakes, the so-called "matorzhenyky", were made from oilcake and nettle or plantain.
It went so far that peasants would crumble straw into small chips and pound it in a mortar together with millet and buckwheat chaff, and tree bark. All this was mixed with potato peelings, which were very poisonous, and this mixture was used to bake "bread", the consumption of which caused severe stomach diseases.
There were cases when village activists took away and broke millstones, mortars, poured water on the heat in their ovens. After all, anything found or saved from the food had to be cooked on fire, and matches could only be purchased by bartering for their own belongings or by buying them in the city, which was impossible from villagers that were on "black lists".
Chestnuts, aspen and birch bark, buds, reed roots, hawthorn and rose hips, which were the most delicious, were used as food substitutes; various berries, even poisonous ones, were picked; grass seeds were ground into flour; "honey" from sugar beets was cooked, and water brewed with cherry branches was drunk. They also ate the kernels of sunflower seeds.
Newborns had the worst of it, because their mothers had no breast milk. According to testimonies, a mother would let her child suck the drink from the top of the poppy head, and the child would fall asleep for three days.
In early spring, the villagers began to dig up old potato fields. They would bake dumplings from frozen potatoes, grind rotten potatoes in a mash and make pancakes, greasing the frying pan with wheel grease. They also baked "blyuvaly" (transl. "vomities") from such potatoes and oatmeal mixed with water, which was so called because they were very smelly.
They ate mice, rats, frogs, hedgehogs, snakes, beetles, ants, worms, i.e. things that weren't a part of food bans and had never been eaten by people before. The horror of the famine is also evidenced by the consumption of spiders, which are forbidden to kill in Ukrainian society for ritual reasons.
In some areas, slugs were boiled into a soup, and the cartilaginous meat was chopped and mixed with leaves. This prevented swelling of the body and contributed to survival. People caught tadpoles, frogs, lizards, turtles, and mollusks. They boiled them, adding a little salt if there was salt. The starving people caught cranes, storks, and herons, which have been protected in Ukraine for centuries, and their nests were never destroyed. According to folk beliefs, eating stork meat was equated with cannibalism.
The consumption of horse meat began in 1931, before the mass famine. People used to take dead horsemeat from the cemeteries at night, make jelly out of it and salt it for future use.
Dead horses were poured with carbolic acid to prevent people from taking their meat, but it hardly stopped anybody. Dead collective farm pigs were also doused with kerosene to prevent people from dismantling them for food, but this did not help either.
After long periods of starvatiom, the process of digestion is very costing for the human body, and many people who would eat anything would drop dead immediately out of exhaustion.
If a family had a cow hidden somewhere in the forest, they had a chance to survive. People living near forests could hunt/seek out berries and mushrooms, but during winter this wouldn't save them. People living near rivers could fish in secret, but it was banned and punishable by imprisonment/death.
Стрій з Житомирщини. Овруцький район.
Outfit from Zhytomyr region
Why Uchihas go blind from using sharingan?
I was thinking why is that so, why Uchihas go blind while Hyuga feel no side effects from using byakugan? (Aside of that fact that Kishimoto loves Uchiha clan, so they expirience the most angst and suffer)
And I have had one semi-biological conclusion.
So, some of you may be familiar with the theory that people have a lot of diseases that develop with age or appear in old age because that's how evolution and natural selection work. In other words, most people manage to pass on their genes to the next generation (that is, become evolutionarily successful) before they get diseases that most often appear at a certain age. Evolution filters out those mutations that are incompatible with reproduction, because it is through reproduction that all living things fix useful traits and pass them on. Accordingly, evolution has almost no effect (or it happens by chance) on traits that do not prevent a person from successfully surviving to pass on their genes to their children. If an individual lived to have children, it is already a biologically successful individual. Then you can die. Evolution is cruel and unempathetic.
I looked at the sharingan from this side. From the evolutionary side. Sharingan as a biological trait should take a very long time to form, mutate and change in the process of evolution. He would improve due to the fact that the Uchiha with the stronger sharingan would successfully survive and reproduce. But at the same time, evolution would no longer affect what would happen to the Uchiha's eyes after they would produce offspring at a young age. Since the genes have already been passed down, the next generation will have the same trait as the parents. Regardless of what happens next with the parents. So since blindness was not a trait that would have prevented the Uchiha from living to reproductive age, it was not weeded out by evolution in any way. In conclusion, we have a biological trait that was evolutionarily strengthened and developed, because the ability of the Uchiha to survive depended on the power of the sharingan. Uchiha with a weak sharingan died before they could have children. But the gradual loss of vision did not interfere with the clan's survival, so it was not evolutionary screened out. In this way, the sharingan was formed, which is an incredibly useful and powerful trait, but at the same time, evolution did not affect the subsequent loss of vision. Blindness isn't biologically disabling, so the Uchiha's DNA doesn't have to mutate to compensate for it. Uchih's eye blindness is just a biological process, a consequence of the fact that there was no evolutionary stimulus in their eyes to compensate for it. The Uchiha with the strongest sharingan became reproductively successful, but subsequent vision problems did not affect this. Evolutionarily, there was no need for the sharingan to find a middle ground between power and not straining the eyes and going blind as a result. Evolutionarily, their eyes improved the power of the Sharingan, but did not improve endurance. Therefore, the Sharingan is an incredibly powerful force, but there is no mechanism to overcome the consequences of using it.
don't worry everyone, we are not suicidal (mostly). The River One Song ends with "Я річку шукати чистеньку піду –шукатиму доти, поки не знайду". So, it's very life-affirming!
being ukrainian is a privilege because i get to go ніхто мене не любить ніхто не приласкає піду я у садочок наїмся червячків whenever i'm feeling down