Weekly thingy and the Ten of Cups/Ileana Simziana

So I only discovered this story a few weeks ago while looking up dragon stories and it wasn’t what I needed for that, but it was definitely what I needed in my life. I’m going to give you the very brief rundown and then please feel free to go look up more info, it’s a wild ride.

But basically, an emperor’s youngest daughter (nice change from the youngest of three sons being the quester you think? MAYBE NOT ACTUALLY QUITE THAT) dresses up as a boy and goes off to serve a neighboring emperor, who sends them to rescue his captive daughter, Ileana (who is golden haired in the story but fuck it, I took liberties, this is also a Romanian story that I drew in Ukrainian dress for somewhat obvious reasons). Along the way the daughter-dressed-as-a-boy has to steal holy water from monks to defeat the giant, and the monks take . . .revenge?. . . by cursing whoever stole the water to swap genders.

AND THEN THERE IS NO MENTION OF ANY REAL ISSUE WITH THAT, THE EMPEROR’S SON JUST MARRIES ILEANA AND THEY LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. All of which makes me really want to call that character the emperor’s youngest son from the beginning because wow does this read as a fun trans fairytale to me, but in the interest of clarity I did what I did. But yeah, character dressing up as a boy, doing a traditionally male quest, then being turned into a man by what are presumably holy folk sure sounds like that character maybe was always actually a boy and just needed magic to make things right?

Anyway I was already planning to use the happy couple for the ten of cups, and they were probably going to be in Romanian folkwear (because I love traditional dress) and then, y’know, some shit started going down and I just really wanted to draw a joyous triumphant happy ending card for Ukraine right now. It’s a pretty empty gesture but aside from donating money and paying attention (both done/in progress) there’s not much else I can do, is there?

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:

This is a hard fucking week to be happy in isn’t it? I’m glad to see the outpouring of support and asylum for Ukraine; I hope people are becoming more aware of how much of this isn’t offered to other countries and refugees and will do better in future? We’re not living in a super hopeful world right now but I’m trying to hold on.

Also I’m in Texas where fucking Abbot chose to move his war on trans children forward right before primaries and despite the fact that he can’t legally do what he did it’s still going to hurt trans kids and the families that love them. Get your goddamn asses out for midterms, we need to win OVERWHELMINGLY and turnout for primaries was shit.

This section is wildly mistitled, sorry.