|| Absolutely inconsequential musings by Fëanor’s writer:
You remember the part in which Fëanor’s spirit is so fierce that sets his body aflame as it leaves it, yes? So I was considering how high that flame sprang, and how strong it was, because there were his sons about him and I could bet my collection of blings that at least one of them was holding him in some way. Like holding his body and such. Or a hand, or something.
…Did that flame slightly scorch any of them? Do any of them remember the heat or the faint burn?
You know what? I always thought he had ‘calmly’ burnt but after reading this, how could I ever have thought that? It was Fëanor dude, it must have been an EXPLOSION
so what I’m hearing is that those idiots missed the best opportunity to weaponize their dying dad
If men stopped working…the world would continue on.
If women stopped working, then things would get ugly.
What?
there has been an instance where this happened. it was 1975 and icelandic women decided not to work for one day.
working as in cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children, doing chores and so on, not only “not showing up to your workplace”. women did nothing that day, except showing up in reykjavik and protesting for gender equality, equal pay and equal representation in parliament, you know, cool stuff.
you know what happened? havoc. men were left with food to cook and children they never took care of to pick up from kindergarden and entertain for the day. they went en masse to the food shops buying sausages because they could cook nothing else, they had to bond with children they never spent more than a couple hours a day with. they struggled combining their work day and the domestic tasks they had to sort out. and this just for one day.
iceland in 1975 stopped working and things indeed got ugly. so ugly that women in the following decades became woke AF and soon it happened that women became president, took half of the seats in parliament and achieved one of the best living environments in the world.
is your astonishment solved now?
We already know what happens to countries when the majority of the male workforce is removed. It is called “war.”
If you want to read Highly Documented and Very Historical accounts of how countries function without internal male labor, you can start by diving in to World War 1 and World War 2! (I’m just gonna talk about the Allied forces because my English is best
and I know the most about them, but the Axis powers had similar
dynamics!)
See, when the warring civilizations threw every able-bodied man they could at war fronts all over the planet, this left enormous labor vacuums. Not only did the countries have to function without male labor, but they also had to funnel vast amounts of food, clothing, ammunition and weapons to the men in combat. By WW2, women were needed in every possible role that didn’t include active combat.
If you send millions of men to combat, then the resulting millions of empty, necessary, “male” jobs must be done by women. That’s just how it works.
This is an British WW1 poster from 1917. It says it succinctly – every woman who takes a “male” job in the military, frees up that man for active combat.
One thing that you can’t get enough of in war is bullets! With men spending bullets but not making them, the women need to do it. These WW1 posters from around 1918 are pretty cool – the woman “doing her bit” has shades of Art Nouveau, I think.
Here’s an American WW1 poster in which the women are dressed as mechanics, train drivers, military support, manufacturers, farmers and nurses. I like the cool Victorian shoes and the baggy trousers. Isn’t it funny to think that this happened between the Victorians and the flappers?
In WW1, you couldn’t even afford to spare able-bodied men to drive ambulances in warzones. Ambulance drivers on the Front were largely women. They picked up the wounded and dying men and took them to field hospitals staffed largely by women.
By WW2, the women of the Allied nations were SO ON TOP OF THIS.
Here is a Canadian lady from the 1940s. Women in Air Force support were vital – men were the fighter pilots, women were transport pilots – as well as doing the support roles like aircraft maintenance and preparation, parachute packing, communications and intelligence, managing the radar, plotting the weather, and, of course, doing the catering. The language on this poster shows that the woman does all of this necessary work to get the fighter pilots in the air. Every non-combat military job that a woman took meant one more fighter pilot and soldier in active combat.
Back at home, people functioned fairly well without men in WW2. Everyone’s seen this American WW2 poster, you know she’s encouraging women to get into the factories and make All The Stuff!
HEY WE STILL NEED LOTS OF FOOD TO EAT AND THERE ARE NO MEN TO MAKE THE FOOD, SHOULD WE STARVE?
NO WE SHOULD NOT
THIS AUSTRALIAN LADY IS GOING TO FARM ALL THE THINGS
Land Armies (staffed by Land Girls) were super necessary to feed everyone at home PLUS everyone at war. Land Girls were used in both WW1 and WW2. While farming was a “protected occupation” (male farmers wouldn’t be forcibly drafted into the military, because their jobs were too important to a functioning society) the majority male farmworkers decided to enlist voluntarily. This left elderly or disabled male farmworkers to do intensive work. By WW2 they had some tractors to help, but most farming was still done by hand or with draft animals, especially since the steel and fuel for the tractors was more needed on the Front.
This American lady found a cool old-timey tractor, which is just as good as an ambulance…
But this British lady has to do her plowing with a draft horse! The weathered old farmer, too old for combat, is very grateful.
FOOD COMES FIRST!
okay but LOOK at some of these other Plushy Man Jobs, Necessary To Prevent the Downfall of Society, that American women needed to do RIGHT NOW TO BEAT THE NAZIS:
AMERICAN WOMEN! THESE ELEVATORS AREN’T GOING TO OPERATE THEMSELVES
I CAN KEEP GOING FOREVER
TAKE THE JOBS FROM MEN!! TAKE THEM!! SEIZE THEM!! DRILL THE THING
Oddly, even without men at work, “women’s work” still got done.
Children were still mostly looked after. Large communal childcare programs were set up (they were quickly closed after WW2, though.) Food was prepared. Households
ran. Single women stayed single. The countries functioned. The world still turned. MILLIONS OF MEN
were WIPED OFF THE PLANET but the world still turned.
In fact, the Allies won both WW1 and WW2.
And the resulting power/gender/employment vacuums shaped the gender dynamics of most of Tumblr’s parents and grandparents.
It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.
I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.
How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?
Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness – but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.
(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)
Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:
Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you – and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty – humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits – but they’re highly functional.
Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves – and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.
In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.
Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.
We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.
And by god, we will eat anything.
We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food.
We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin.
We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live.
We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground.
Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places.
We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them.
On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.
Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us
We drink ethanol (in concentrations high enough to be used as an effective as microbicide or a solvent!) for the express purpose of achieving blood toxicity and disrupting normal brain function… AS A RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY!
On the same subject, we also deliberately incinerate assorted substances and then inhale the particulate-heavy smoke and vapor resulting for the same effect. EVEN IN THE FACE OF SAID SUBSTANCES BEING CARCINOGENIC, BECAUSE WE JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
Humans do not have biological castes. Kill their commander and another will take its place. Soldiers left alone on a planet will start farming and manufacturing to survive. Farmers and manufacturers will take up arms and kill you if pressed. Just because two humans look different doesn’t mean they cannot do each other’s jobs.
Breeding does not kill them. A single human can mate dozens or hundreds of times in a lifetime. They often do so as recreation. Xenobiology team six believes they do not have a mating season but this is too strange to be true.
Their appendages are not designed for hitting, so they developed special training to make them very good at hitting anyhow.
The proteins making up their bodies are toxic and cause prion disease. Do not touch anything humans have touched. Do not consume earth foods. Fire does not adequately remove this contamination.
Humans perceive sixteen times the colors we do. Do not hide in bushes or vines from humans. They can distinguish your pelt from the foliage with ease.
We tried venting waste gas into the tunnels to kill the humans when they attacked. Turns out they breathe it.
Everything on their planet came from a single biological strain. They developed comprehensive genetics BEFORE they developed space travel.
They lack radio receptors and cannot be brought into compliance with right-thought simply by broadcasting to them. Even after we learned how to translate it into sound-waves one of their hatchlings drove the Great Authority mad by responding to every demand with a single question: “Why?”
Mashups and Exports 