Look, when I say “representation matters,” I believe that the most important thing is for people who are often ignored in arts and media to see themselves there.
But I also mean that it’s important for white/hetero people to see people who aren’t white/hetero.
Here’s the thing. I was raised in a very white/hetero community. Every friend I had was white. I never had a black person in my classroom until late high school. I never had a black teacher until college. There was one out-gay student at my high school. One. And I saw what shit he had to go through by being out.
And, if I’m honest with myself, most of the adults in my life were racist and homophobic. They were good, loving people…to me. But they were also racist and homophobic.
And as a kid through my teen years, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that didn’t affect me. I parrotted the adults in my life, which meant that I often parrotted their hate and their prejudice. I’m ashamed of those attitudes now–now that I’ve had education and met people who were different from me and travelled the world and put aside hate.
But then? It was easy to excuse racism. People who weren’t white and straight didn’t exist in my world–and they didn’t exist in the world I saw on television and in books and on the radio. It was easier to live in the bubble of that world.
Representation matters to white people, too. It is important for white people to see diversity. Not as a token, not as “politically correct”–the white people who feel that adding a minority character to a storyline is pandering are horrible people who are entirely missing the point. I’m talking about the white kids who don’t see minorities in their lives, but who see a black girl and a white boy being friends on Sesame Street. I’m talking about the straight teen reading More Happy than Not, I’m talking about the white teen empathizing with Malala Yousafzai. The more representation we have, the more we hold a mirror through the world rather than whiting-out people who aren’t like the majority, the better our world is.
Representation matters.
THIS.
I grew up in freaking white bread Utah but I always gravitated toward minority friends because I had PoC friends in the media I watched. Which probably sounds super weird, but because of the aforementioned Sesame Street and Family Matters and etc etc etc, I grew up with a different view on it. I deeply emphasized with the stuff I was watching and reading, so even though I am sooo not perfect, I was a lot further out the gate than a lot of my local peers.
And our media today gets better and better and includes more and more… and we, as we get older, have more power to help it grow and spread and get into the hands of future generations.
Representation is so so so so important for EVERYONE. We all desperately need it.
Both of these are very bad, Viktor, don’t do this to people. Putting unnecessary stress on peeps you love is manipulative and wrong.
Also, marriage shouldn’t be used as a conditional reward… especially for something that Yuuri has so little control over. Even if he does everything in his FS and SP perfectly, he could still lose. That’s pretty shitty to do to him, AND THEN announcing it in front of everyone without any prior discussion just makes it WORSE.
Off the top of my head, it jibes with what I’ve discovered in other sources.
Queuing this with a reminder to self: add that Cartographer’s Guild thread link to this, it has more details w basically the same numbers.
… things i never did: add that link. Ahem.
Just to add re: horses re: typical 4 gaits
Walk is an average of 4mph Trot is an average of 8mph Canter is an average of 16-20 mph Gallop is an average of 25-30 mph
Your gallop is probably only gonna be 40 mph if a) your horse is really fit or b) your horse is built for running, a la the English Thoroughbred or the American Quarter Horse. Your horse also needs to be pretty physically fit to sustain a gallop for more than a couple of miles. Top level eventing equines, at the peak of physical fitness, only sustain a gallop for about 11 minutes/4 miles, and that’s a tremendous effort resulting from serious conditioning, and is also including going over/through various terrain and obstacles that the average horse might shy away from. If your horse hits that speed, they will need to recover immediately afterward, either through stopping, or going at the walk.
Your horse will probably be able to maintain a relatively high speed for longer if they are alternating between walking and trotting, with some cantering.
Good references for horse travel include the Pony Express, literally any cavalry program, and modern-day endurance racing.
More on horses and distance.
Message riders, including the Pony Express, would switch horses so they could run a horse to exhaustion without killing it and then grab another fresh one while a groom took care of the spent horse. Which would then do another run after it had recovered. Pony Express riders would switch horses about every 10 miles. Also, the riders were restricted to 125 pounds. Most Pony Express riders were teenaged boys. So, how far did a Pony Express rider ride in a day? About 75 miles. Still not 100. Could you do it? Probably, with multiple horses, but you’d be riding yourself beyond exhaustion and it’s more likely you’d fall off from tiredness, bluntly.
Stage coaches also used a similar system to maximize speed. A stagecoach could cover 60 to 70 miles per day. This was, by the way, the fastest way to travel in Regency England.
100 miles in a day on a single horse?
The Tevis Cup is a 100 mile race with a time limit of 24 hours. In 2016 the winning rider, Karen Donley, rode Royal Patron to the finish at Auburn at 9:48pm, having set off from Robie Park at 5:15am.
This means it took her 16.3 hours to cover the 100 mile distance on a single horse.
The Tevis Cup is the most difficult endurance ride in the world.
After such a ride, both horse and rider would be spent. They take days to recover from these rides. Days.
The horses have to be at least 8 years old to compete at the top level. They’re checked by a vet regularly, and these horses and riders train extensively.
There is absolutely no way horse and rider could cover 100 miles in a day and be fit for anything else afterwards. Furthermore, if a top race rider is taking 16 hours to do that distance, with anything quicker likely to kill the horse…
70 is more reasonable, but they’re still not going to be much use.
So, how far should you have your character travel on horseback in one day.
The answer is 20-30 miles, maybe 40 if they’re on a road in level terrain. Less if they’re having to trailblaze, use game trails, etc. That is assuming that your characters know how to ride and that their horses are in appropriate condition.
It’s also assuming you don’t have a wounded, unconscious companion tied across the saddle. Or have a pack horse. Dead weight – unconscious or dead bodies, the deer you just killed, your packs, or somebody who doesn’t know how the heck to ride slow horses down considerably.
The distances are similar, by the way, for mules.
I’m going to add this because no one else will:
Most tractors’ top speed, on a highway, is about 20mph.
If you’re writing someone driving down a rural road (backroad or highway) during the spring or the fall, there’s a chance that they’ll be caught behind a tractor. You wanna frustrate someone, have that happen to them.
Since it’s midnight and I have a flight to catch at 5am, why not break down this little argument scene?
This scene is short but it’s important. We tend to quantify closeness by the times we see Viktor and Yuuri kissing, hugging, or otherwise acting explicitly intimate, but this little argument is just as important in conveying a shared emotional intimacy between the two.
It’s pretty obvious from the start that Viktor doesn’t care about the damn nuts. He seems irritated already by the beginning of the scene, and I don’t think it’s because of the missing bag. Judging from Yuuri’s flustered state, he’s probably been dragging them all over, re-tracing their steps panicking trying to find the bag he lost.
Viktor is patient so he’s gone along with it, but even he has his breaking point. Despite his irritation, he does what Viktor tends to do when he’s angry, and hides his feelings behind a fake smile. He’s aware of Yuuri’s anxiety which is probably why he’s placated him up till now, but he’s no saint and anyone would be tired and frustrated after being dragged around a city looking for a missing bag. Still, he doesn’t want to upset Yuuri further, so he appeals to logic: the shop is closed, aren’t you tired?
Yuuri isn’t having it, though. He sees right through Viktor’s fake smile and he knows what he’s doing. He hears Viktor’s words and feels that he is being blamed for a ruined evening. He doesn’t like it and he tells him so.
This scene feels so realistic to me because it’s an argument I’ve had with my own girlfriend many times. The argument of semantics. There is no resolution here because neither Yuuri nor Viktor is really in the wrong. They’re just both in bad moods: Yuuri, because the bag got lost and he feels bad about it and thinks that Viktor is mad at him because of it, and Viktor, because the nuts don’t matter to him and he just wants Yuuri to stop fixating on it and let them enjoy their evening.
What’s so striking is that neither of these characters is confrontational. Yuuri tends to fall into self-deprecation and, as previously mentioned, Viktor hides his feelings behind a smile. Yet, here they are, getting peeved at each other over something so minor. And not only getting mad but expressing that anger. For characters that tend not to do that, it speak of an extremely strong mutual trust.
They know that an argument isn’t fatal to their relationship. They trust the other to not abandon them if they exhibit anything other than an agreeable attitude.
And then they walk in silence and the argument resolves itself. They don’t have to part ways, they don’t have to break everything down verbally, they just need to cool down and give each other the time and space to do so.
I feel it’s rare to see such a realistic couple’s tiff. Normally, things are always 100% wonderful or extremely dramatic. But sometimes these little arguments pop up, sometimes someone gets hangry or anxious or tired and they take it out on their partner because that’s who is available and–unconsciously or not–that’s the person you know won’t abandon you just for showing a non-ideal side of yourself.
I was never skeptical of Yuuri and Viktor’s relationship to begin with, but especially not now. We’ve seen them tackle so many different hardships together, we’ve seen Yuuri correct Viktor when he really was in the wrong, and now we’ve seen them resolve a minor clashing of personalities respectfully and maturely. This is a couple I can realistically see staying together. They’re not together for convenience, they’re not together just because they idolize each other or find the other hot–they truly seem to understand one another and work well together, and it makes their relationship a joy to watch.
like there’s this whole thing in this book about how your brain grows stronger and healthier by practicing responding to stress in healthy ways,
because if a stressor is predictable and you feel a sense of control over it, you habituate and stop reacting to it,
but if it’s random and unpredictable you have the opposite response and become sensitized, so your reaction actually gets more and more extreme.
(if you hear a loud noise at predictable intervals you’ll soon stop noticing or reacting, but if you hear it at random intervals you’ll become sensitive to it and anxious.)
so one way to help people who have adverse reactions to reminders of trauma is to give them control over how they’re reminded of the trauma,
because it helps the brain practice responding to stress in a safe way so you can habituate to the stress response.
which is why if someone tags something for a trigger and you still choose to look,
it’s actually an act of healthy resistance against your reaction to that trigger (because it teaches your brain to habituate),
but encountering something triggering in a random and unpredictable way actually increases your stress response and makes you more sensitive to the trigger.
so people who are against trigger warnings because “you have to learn to cope” are actually taking away your tools for learning to cope,
because encountering stressors in a way that further strips you of control over your trauma is never, ever helpful.
it’s a lot of stuff i kind of knew but integrated and explained with more context and science
[spaces added and brief caps removed for accessibility]
Also why books about the tough stuff are extremely helpful. Fiction is our key to coping in the world.
