Blackswan8043 - Sky And Stars✨️

…he was always sad.

Aristotle’s philosophy on two human beings in love reminds me of Rik Garrett’s current series ‘Symbiosis’. The fate of two physical bodies that connect and form as one soul, which is similarly portrayed throughout Garrett’s mixed media photography. The Chicago based artist explores ideas regarding love, relationships, magic, alchemy and mutually beneficial partnerships in nature.

Süleymân I and Hurrem Haseki-Sultân’s wedding:

The controversial union had to be announced at some point, and the run-up to the Iran campaign in spring 1534, when the contract of marriage was sealed, was an inappropriate time for festivities, especially given the mourning for Suleyman’s mother Hafsa. Now [January 1536] that Suleyman was safely home, Roxelana may have pressed to have her stature as his legal wife made public. […] The royal wedding apparently caught some in the foreign community by surprise. “This week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the Sultans,” remarked the Istanbul representative of the Genoese Bank of Saint George. “The Grand Signior Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave woman from Russia.… There is great talk about the marriage and none can say what it means.” […] “At night the principal streets are gaily illuminated, and there is much music and feasting,” […] “The houses are festooned with garlands and there are everywhere swings in which people swing by the hour with great enjoyment.” […] “In the old Hippodrome a great tribune is set up, the place reserved for the Empress and her ladies screened with a gilt lattice,” wrote the Genoese banker. “Here Roxelana and the Court attended a great tournament in which both Christian and Muslim Knights were engaged, and tumblers and jugglers and a procession of wild beasts.” The giraffes had necks so long that to the unaccustomed spectator they appeared to “touch the sky.”

– Peirce, Leslie. Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire 

Jude Duarte, The Wicked King (2019) ♛ ♜ ♗ ♞

“‘For a moment,’ he says, 

‘I wondered if it wasn’t you shooting bolts at me…’

‘And what made you decide it wasn’t?’ He grins up at me.

 ‘They missed.’”

In India’s Thar Desert, nomads rely so much on camels for survival that the animals are revered. Livestock owners take great pride in their camels, carving intricate patterns in their fur.

🙌✨️

holding hands with someone is one of the simplest and greatest things on earth. nothing else really matters honestly

Been thinking about this since forever!!

things i do not understand about fics involving or by allosexual/alloromantic people (an incomplete list by an aroace looking for validation):

sexual attraction, obviously. like I know logically that it's a thing but I'm still half-convinced it's made up. I get aesthetic attraction, I can think of people as beautiful, but the urge to have sex is — obviously — not there.

specifically, attraction to sweat? like characters in fics will get sweaty and then people find that attractive? how??? I can logic out wanting to have sex in most cases, but this one makes no sense to me

hating someone & being attracted to them at the same time. It's why I don't like a lot of enemies-to-lovers — if you hate each other, what is the appeal of sex???

reader x character fics. I'm fine reading about romance happening to other people, but why would you want to read about romance happening to YOURSELF? isn't it weird? or is that just the aromanticism in me—

in some contexts I can conceptually understand wanting to have sex, in other ones I can't. Like... sometimes it just seems more realistic to cuddle?

finding anger attractive... ig this is related to the enemies-to-lovers stuff, but even in fics that AREN'T enemies to lovers, arguments turn into sex. why? what is appealing about being angry?

possibly tbc if I encouter anything more, feel free to add on

tbh like….i ain’t mad at either soo or so

they were always destined to fall apart in this era

soo tried so so hard to make sure that she would help him, so that no one would have to suffer, so that he wouldn’t have the legacy she heard of as a bloody monarch. she wanted him to be remembered as she saw him: a great king, and a good person. but once he became king and she became his “mistress,” as won puts it, she was inadvertently stripped of all the power she had in the palace as a court lady, and she was reduced to “sitting in her room, waiting for him to come home.” the intention was for her to become queen, but without the backing of a powerful family to support her, it became impossible. by the time so told her he would make her the second queen after she had a child, she was already broken. her best friend was killed because she was a traitor, spying on her and lying to her for years. not only that, but the one who ordered her death was the man she loved, and despite the fact that chae ryung was working against her the entire time she was in the palace and helped kill people she loved, soo is incredibly torn because she can still see in her a girl who was trying to help her family. then another friend of hers commits suicide. and then she is told that the reason the man she used to love became such a slimy, homicidal jackass was because of a warning she gave him, reminiscent of the previous king telling her he killed people in order to get the throne because she covered so’s scar. 

at this point, hae soo feels not only like she doesn’t have the power to save anyone, but like her influence on politics has had an active role in killing all the people she’s worked so hard to save, people she loved deeply. no wonder she wants to leave - it’s not that she thinks so is a monster and wants to escape him, but rather she’s gotten to the point where she hinders more than she helps, and her staying is fatal. and she can’t take people she cares about dropping like flies anymore.

meanwhile so. so. so has his hands tied everywhere he turns. someone made this great post about how people have been abandoning him since the start of his reign. the military general. his mother. baek ah. now hae soo wants to leave too, the only person he has left. and to be honest, it would be better for his reign if he let her leave, because every move he makes he thinks of her, and, as we saw with his marriage situation, he would doom himself if it meant staying by her side. but he loves her far too much to ever let her go. the only thing that finally gets him, that really makes him let her leave, is finding out about wook. and i don’t think it’s a jealousy thing - he knew years ago she had loved one of his brothers, and there’s only so many to choose from. but the fact that it’s wook, “of all people why does it have to be him” wook, breaks him. not because it’s his brother. because he’s the man who plotted the death of his oldest brother, who used chae ryung as a spy and made her a traitor (with the assistance of won), who was ready to shoot yo with an arrow like he was hunting something, who threatened him using hae soo and collaborated with his family to make his sister take soo’s place at so’s side, who used his smart brain to rally the noble families, who looked so in the eye and said “nothing is yours, it’s all mine.” it’s not that hae soo loved someone besides him ever in her life, it’s that she was ready to marry someone who at every turn tried to tear him down and their family down, a manipulative murderous snake, and despite that part of her still cared for him enough to beg for his life.

he feels like she never loved him, “wook was always in your heart,” like it was all just some scheme wook was planning or a way to hurt him using what he cared about most. so he lets her go, because he feels like she’s “throwing him away,” or, even worse, that she never cared about him to begin with. at least not as much as the guy who killed his family and hers.

and it’s tragic. and heartbreaking. and i really can’t blame either one of them.

Hürrem!Meryem’s Most Dramatic Struts