Noodspoods

She's just trying to pay her student loans

hiiii.... been a while since i uploaded anythin... have some daforge ^_^ watching TNG so far has been an Experience for sure

The Freeman's aboard the Enterprise...

me: well, it's a woman who's financially supported by the man she's dating, and she lives with him and usually keeps house and cooks for him

her: and they're not married?

me: well, no; hence "girlfriend" rather than "wife." I know that may alarm y-

her: oh calm down I know about Kept Women. he has no legal tie to her, though? she has no sort of standing with him in the eyes of the law? only his word that he'll follow through?

me: yes

her: and remind me again- you don't have to be financially dependent on a man anymore, right? there are more than like three careers open to women that will let you support yourself at a decent level now? and society isn't pressuring you 24/7 to get married and stop working outside the home?

me: yes

her: so these women. CHOOSE to be dependent on a man. who could leave them at any moment without legal consequence. because they don't like their jobs. the jobs, while imperfect, that let them live on their own, answerable to no-one

me: yes

her: that had better be some absolutely amazing jewelry they can pawn off if he leaves them, then

me: it's usually not

her: THERE'S NOT EVEN SECURITY JEWELRY?!

me: oh by the way they blame feminism for "having to work"

her:

her: I became fully dependent on my in-laws who hated me, after my husband died two years into our marriage, because I was a 23-year-old orphan with no marketable skills in any avenue besides Running A Household and the only men left unmarried in my social circle were widowers thirty years my senior. I also couldn't establish lines of credit as a widow because the merchants said my husband dying so soon meant that I didn't have stable enough income. and that was entirely legal

me: yeah

Two, because fashion *is* art (which is maybe a less controversial take now than it was a decade ago) and it's important that we recognize when great fashion inspires us.

Three, because acknowledging how much time great mangaka spent studying fashion *is* recognizing just how much hard work and effort goes into their creations.

For instance! ☝️🤓

- Sailor Pluto wears the Karl Lagerfeld-designed Chanel gold chain dress from their Haute Couture Spring/Summer 1992 collection. Even the jewelry takes cues from the runway styling as worn by Christy Turlington

- Neo-Queen Serenity's dress is inspired by the Il Palladio gown from Dior's Haute Couture Spring/Summer 1992 collection. It's not a full lift— the manga's version plunges in the back whereas the neckline of the original is fully straight, among other stylizing on the details of the gown

- Black Lady's outfit was inspired by the styling done for Kate Moss for YSL's 1994 print advertisement campaign for their Opium perfume

Here’s an example from JJBA. Araki references fashion media a LOT in his art, especially with the signature JoJo poses people know and love. Here’s some more:

Do not work on your days off.

"But--"

Do not “answer a few emails” on your vacation

Do not work off the clock

We would regularly have guest speakers on a variety of topics - an anorexia patient, a person who’d studied abroad in the USA, a person who freestyled their further education (this was about to be abolished so not an option for us, but still an inspiring talk), a person who’d refused their military service and was instead doing community service (and why), and so on and so forth.

At one point we had a guest speaker come talk about it his work with juvenile delinquents.

He was the overseer of a house where these kids (our age! Some younger!) lived - not a prison - and where they would receive schooling to complete their mandatory primary education in a setting where social workers were on hand to assist and basically the whole point was to nurture the kids in an attempt to prevent them from choosing a life of crime and/or become dependent on the welfare system due to inability to work. They had support, teachers, people who believed in them, etc.

And yet these kids were failing. They were unruly, anxious, restless, spent their breaks smoking or going to the corner shop for soft drinks or snacks and were too wired to settle down at night to sleep so would often wind up sneaking out and causing trouble - even if the trouble was only some half asses graffiti on a bus stop .and in the morning they would be too exhausted to get up and would take half a day - until lunch, when they would be going on their corner shop lunch break - to wake up.

The problem was: these kids weren’t eating proper food. They were subsisting on nicotine, sugary snacks, and Coca Cola. So this guy, who’d heard of our school, got in touch and requested meal plans and then introduced mandatory breakfast and lunch, with dinner still optional, all following our school’s carefully designed meal plans (vegetable frontloaded with only 100g meat per person, one vegetarian day, one fish day, all bread made with whole meal flour. And since this was Denmark, dinner was a “cold table” i.e. rye bread with various topping choices, salads, and any lunch leftovers reheated as a side). And he made it mandatory for all the staff too, and assigned seating groups with a staff member (we had this at our school too), so that each meal resembled a family meal.

And suddenly these kids were having complete breakfasts with oatmeal porridge and yogurt and toast and some fruit and milk and orange juice, which gave them a solid source of energy to start the day, and they had a hot meal for lunch, and after a about a week of this dinner attendance skyrocketed. The kids weren’t restless and anxious anymore. Most of them voluntarily quit smoking and most of them stopped getting a soft drink from the corner shop too - they weren’t hungry anymore, so the sugary craving went away. These kids, just because they were getting three solid meals every day, flourished. They could concentrate in class. They were awake in the morning. They didn’t stay up late wired and restless. They all graduated and went back home and didn’t see the inside of any system, welfare or criminal, again. These kids didn’t want to be troublemakers - they just (for whatever reason) didn’t have the foundation they needed to succeed and that foundation, it turned out, was proper nutrition.