fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6986 ]

[ SECRET POST #6986 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6986 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

Everything has spoiler or content warnings today!

01. [SPOILERS for season 5 of Stranger Things]

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02. [WARNING for discussion of JKR/transphobia]

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03. [WARNING for discussion of rape, abuse]

[Kobe Bryant, XXXtentacion]

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04. [WARNING for discussion of pedophilia]

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05. [WARNING for discussion of pedophilia]

[Michael Jackson]

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06. [WARNING for discussion of pedophilia, suicide]

[Michael Jackson]

Notes:

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Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Tell me what you enjoy about it! To me, the main appeal is how cozy it looks. A lot of contemporary architecture and styling looks... well, like a museum. A museum that hates colors other than white, black and gray. I like soft fabrics and fireplaces and bookshelves and kitchens that invite you to sit at the table and have a cup of tea while you're waiting for that batch of chocolate chip cookies to be ready. I also love the look of English cottage gardens.

I like how cozy everything looks too! From the bookshelves to the tea cozies to the gardens. It's an ideallic lifestyle that sings to me of slow living that is so different from my 8:30-5 work life.

It reminds me of my childhood-- in part because it calls to mind the books I read and the daydreams they gave me, makes me think of Anne Shirley, of Frog and Toad, of Laura Ingalls Wilder... and in part because my grandfather built a cabin in the woods, where I spent large swathes of my childhood, dreamily wandering the woods and contemplating the fish pond, watching the birds or spotting a deer, hazy memories of my grandparents' garden, or the baking they did in the kitchen, the house full of my grandmother's little treasures-- crystals hanging in the windows, her hand-embroidered wall hanging, the art she collected, the tea parties she would set up for all her grandchildren, allowing us to use precious china cups with dainty painted flowers...

It's the foraging I learned a little about, it's the times my mother took up baking bread or making pasta, it's learning cross-stitch (and failing to learn to knit) at her knee, it's my other grandmother's collection of handmade afghans and embroidered pillowcases and well-loved roses, lemonade from her lemon tree, iced gingerbread. It's the hours I could spend reading, or exploring the creek behind our house when I was in 3rd-4th grade and we lived in a remote little town where our laundry dried out on a line and a fat tabby cat walked out of the woods, onto our porch, and chose us (me)-- and it's finding My Neighbor Totoro in the video rental store after moving to a new... not even 'town' out in the wilderness. It's learning to make butter with nothing more than heavy cream, a pinch of salt, and a jar.

It's... it's the romantic version of a life I grew up with rather than a realistic one, maybe-- but it's the life I was living when I met my best friend of nearly thirty years, the life I was living before the deaths of my grandparents, my dad. It's the life I was living before the pressures of adulthood! And it was a life where we were poor but it didn't weigh on me the same way it weighs on me as an adult, one who hasn't walked in the woods in a long time, and hasn't had a tea party with all my cousins in longer.

But, while I still can't knit, I do crochet now. And I bake. And I have a coffee mug with strawberries on it that makes me smile. And I try to carve out time to read the way I read when I was a kid. I have a Frog and Toad tee shirt that never fails to get compliments at the farmers' market or the library, where I can at least briefly feel like I'm part of the local community (and, where the farmers' market is concerned, where I can get produce locally, and little baked treats or jams). I may not be able to grow and make all my own food, but I like being able to buy it directly from the people who are growing it!

I like being able to slow down and breathe, which is not always easy and my health is so heavily exacerbated by stress. Which... makes it all the more crucial to slow down and breathe and give myself opportunities to be cozy, to be surrounded by soft things or cute things while I recuperate from the big, fast world.

That's part of the appeal to me, too. I like the idea of life being a bit slower, more time and room to breathe, do leisurely things that aren't productive in the monetary sense but add to your quality of life, stuff like that. I don't have the time or energy to do much more than work, then try to eat something that isn't junk food and the struggle with insomnia even though I'm tired, only to repeat it all the next day.

I do bits and pieces. I cross stitch! I used to bake more often, and miss it. I lack a green thumb but last year I managed to grow basil in a big pot outside my front door. I drink tea, and appreciate buttered toast a lot more than I ever imagined that I would when I was a kid. And I pick up the occasional tea cup and saucer for a collection that rarely gets used because none of my really good afternoon tea party attending friends live close enough. :(

I like it in a fash and general lifestyle way, and it basically comes down to the fact that it reminds me of my grandma and my aunt, both of whom I lost too young.

I think by fash they meant non-facist...

Oh. Wow. I'd never made a connection between the aesthetic and literal fascism.

But I also didn't realize fash was shorthand for fascism. Maybe because I don't do social media or visit far left or far right internet spaces.

I don't do social media or visit far left or far right internet spaces.

An essential way to preserve ones sanity online.

The aesthetic need not be fascistic, but it's really popular among the tradwife crowd who tend to be unfortunately fascism-adjacent.

I hate "fash" with a passion. Just say fascist and stop making it cutesy. Plus as you demonstrated, it's confusing; it took me a while to realize it wasn't short for fashionable and that was only because it was being used multiple times over in a discussion about the cottagecore to alt-right pipeline. If I just heard, "That's so fash" in the wild one time I would probably have no idea.

Me literally just learning today that "fash" is NOT shorthand for "fashionable"...

FWIW I have more often heard "fashy" as a shorthand for "fascistic" (probably easier to spell for most people too).

My parents were hippies and up until I was three we lived in a one-room off grid farmhouse with an orchard and pond and they rented the acreage to neighboring ranchers to graze their cattle, and a lot of their friends lived off the grid for a lot longer and we'd visit and stay with them a lot.

Plus I dislike the greige minimalist aesthetic where step one is to get rid of anything mismatched or colorful and step two is to buy all-new matching greige everything.

But the fascist-leaning, tradwife cottagecore stuff is a fantasy, too, that doesn't acknowledge the downsides of stuff like how much fucking work farm and off-grid living is, or that if your only income is from selling homemade jam because your husband doesn't want you working in an office, leaving him will be a lot harder, or that you can't treat every illness with dried herbs and essential oils — so much tradwife stuff comes bundled with woo. Plus just an amazing amount of ignorance and/or looking for a gullible audience, like that one tradwife photoshoot with the obligatory perfectly-made-up blonde woman in a flowy dress picking obvious giant supermarket strawberries ... out of a tree, captioned "I was born to pick fruit in the woods, not to work retail" or some shit like that.

If you're actually growing all your own food, that's subsistence farming and it sucks to do. And there's no such thing as vibe-canning, that way lies botulism. Foraging is likewise dangerous; no that carrot lookalike is hemlock or hogweed and that's before you get into mushrooms. Actually living in a little cottage in the woods is a lot of work.

The person I knew who stuck it out longest and had a picture-perfect Victorian witchy cottage in the woods was a real-estate agent and when we'd go visit, some summers my mom would help her dig a new outhouse hole and move the outhouse. The (cold) water was plumbed in from a tarp-lined hole up the hill and wasn't safe to drink, and the nearest doctor was 40+ miles away, ditto the nearest grocery store. Her kid married a doctor and moved to Chicago.

I asked my mom about canning once and she fondly reminisced about the 200+ trees in the orchard on the farm, how delicious the jam was, and then stopped and added "it's not worth it, though; I'm never canning anything again."

One day visiting some off-grid friends, being handed a pairing knife and attacking stacked flats of peaches taller than me until I felt like I'd never not be sticky or covered in fruit flies proved her point.

Tl;dr: There's nothing wrong with the aesthetic; the tradwife/lifestyle fantasy that often gets bundled with it is the fascist-adjacent part.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #6986 ]

People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...

Re: People who like cottagecore in a non-fash way...