so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie – the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels – it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’rerealizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.
finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’
and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’
and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’
and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’
and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’
the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.
and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.
question: do you think thomas and martha wayne ever offered to make a huge donation to pbs or the children’s television workshop in exchange for bruce being able to meet some muppets. has bruce wayne been to sesame street. somewhere in wayne manor are there pictures of bruce wayne hugging big bird and snuffie. does bruce wayne still secretly consider kermit a close personal friend.
what if that christmas bruce insists on including kermit on the christmas card list. he is six and his parents humor him and let him write a personal note to kermit. a sesame street writer is tasked with writing the return christmas card. they do it the next year and the next and one year kermit writes bruce a very heartfelt letter about how much he misses jim henson, about love and grief and remembering the good times. you would think this tradition would stop when bruce was a teen but it did not. he could never bring himself to stop. bruce wayne, grown-ass batman, still sending christmas cards to sesame street.
there’s a speedrun of the video game adaptation of Clue that’s 3 seconds long and consists of the runner blindly accusing someone on the first turn and getting everything right
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