Weekly thingy and The Hermit/The Secret Faery
Welcome back, my squishy chocolate chip mini muffins!
It might be a hot minute before the next card – the Wheel of Fortune is a rough one for me to figure out. I’m fairly sure it’s going to be designed around ‘Donkeyskin’; she has a perfect circular path from beautiful princess to pitiable serving girl back to princess, I just haven’t figured out how the heck to show all that on one card agh.
But today is The Hermit, and that one was fairly easy!
I had one false start before I realized the character would work better on a different card (vague vague super vague), but the only issue when I picked this character/trope/repeating theme is that she almost never gets a name. Mother Holle in Grimm’s fairytales is one version, but a version that reads less hermit-y to me, so she’ll likely turn up elsewhere – maybe in the lesser arcana. But in tons of different stories, the hero or heroine runs into a fairy in disguise.
Let’s go with a specific example that you’re likely to know – a cruel stepmother sends her sweet, hard-working stepdaughter out into the woods, where the girl meets an old woman staggering along under a huge bundle of sticks, or begging for food, or trying to draw water from a well. The girl obviously helps her immediately, and she’s rewarded; when she speaks, pearls and diamonds drop from her lips. (Which honestly sounds terrible to me but again, fairytale rewards are what they are and you just have to go with them.) When the girl gets home with her fabulous new source of wealth, the stepmother immediately sends her lazy, bitchy daughter out to get rewarded the same way. The girl is rude and dismissive to the secret fairy, so she comes home spitting out frogs and snakes instead of gems. This, granted, seems worse, even though I’m generally pro-frog and snake and find them pretty cute. Not in the mouth, though, please.
So that’s the basic idea -she wanders the wilderness testing travelers for virtue and rewarding or punishing accordingly.
Places to buy stuff!
- TEEPUBLIC: mostly t-shirts, a few other products. Watch for sales, when shirts drop from $20 to $14!
- REDBUBBLE: Just, I don’t know, a ton of different stuff. T-shirts are more expensive than Teepublic, but there are a lot more options.
- AMAZON: Home of the Geeky Gals Coloring Book! Daydreams and Whimsies! AND NOW, The Neurotic Owl Compendium!
- ETSY: paper dolls, a knitting bag pattern, and a bunch of vintage dolls of various sorts from my collection
Did I miss something? I think that’s everything.
What’s making me happy this week:
- I might maybe get to hang out in person with some friends tomorrow? I hope I hope I hope? We are all fully vaccinated and have already decided we’re a good hangout group, it’s just been hard for one of them to find time and energy lately with work schedule, so fingers crossed.
Neurotic Owl 