Weekly thingy and the fully painted Queen of Swords/The Marsh Woman

If you’re not familiar with the Girl Who Trod on a Loaf I am unsurprised – it’s another fairytale from bisexual disaster Han Christian Andersen, and very much in the vein of The Red Shoes – awful selfish girl gets horribly punished, repents and is saved through the compassion of others. This kid’s a real piece of work, though – she starts off pulling the wings of flies for fun, so that’s creepy AF. She gets adopted by a rich woman purely because she’s pretty (as one does) and has to be ordered to go back and visit her poor family once a year. The rich woman, who seems ok despite her shitty taste in adoptive kids, gives her a nice fresh loaf of bread to take to her family, but on the way she’s crossing a boggy area and doesn’t want to get her shoes dirty so she throws the bread on the ground and steps on it.

As soon as she does that she’s frozen in place and pulled down through the ground, first to the domain of the Marsh Woman, who creates fog and mist by brewing beer underground, and then further down to a dark horrible place where she stays frozen like a statue while flies and snakes and toads crawl over her and hot tears from her mother in the world above fall down onto her face.

A lifetime later, she’s redeemed through asking for forgiveness and the grace of a dying old woman who pitied her as a child and remembers her again on her deathbed. She’s turned into a little bird and set free, and once she’s collected and given away enough crumbs to equal the weight of the loaf she ruined, she gets to go to (presumably) heaven.

It’s really beautifully written, you can read the whole story here. Anyhow, when I was looking for an older character who could be a wise, mysterious figure the Marsh Woman seemed perfect.

Places to buy stuff!

Did I miss something?  I think that’s everything.

What’s making me a happy this week:

As much as straight ticket voting would have been awesome, it was pretty great clicking on the Democratic candidate 99 times in a row. Go fucking vote!