I mean, I’m pretty sure Lin is supposed to represent what Chihiro’s future might be like if she accepted her role in the bath house and didn’t try to maintain her own identity and values. She’s not a bad person, but she’s hedonistic to exactly the extent that the bath house culture allows her to be as an employee and has no ambition beyond the system of favors, bribes, and petty intimidation between low-level workers. She’s traded her individuality and opportunity to better herself for the security of predictable exploitation and she doesn’t seem to regret it.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Lin is the only other major character who looks human throughout the movie - I’m not certain she started out human, but I suspect she may have, and may have fully traded away her humanity. I do think it’s significant that she, unlike Chihiro and Haku, doesn’t reclaim her name at the end of the story.
She doesn’t want her independence or identity back. Her purpose is to eat and look pretty.
Alternate interpretation: I always thought Lin meant to be a comforting presence.
She’s the first bathhouse worker who is kind to Chihiro, helping her get her clothes and navigate her first work assignment and sneak food. One of the core themes of Spirited Away is finding your footing in a new and terrifying place, and Lin and Haku are key allies in Chihiro’s struggle to gain the skills and self-assurance she needs in order to thrive.
Lin’s human appearance helps us and Chihiro feel more sympathetic towards her . Her familiarity with the system of favors and bribes makes her appealing as a role model who can demystify Chihiro’s new environment for her. Unlike the more inhuman occupants of the bathhouse, Lin looks like someone Chihiro could become in the future, and that’s a good thing! She’s living proof that the bathhouse is not such a monstrous and scary place. Because Lin treats the bathhouse like home, Chihiro begins to see it as a home, too.
And once Chihiro starts to think of the bathhouse as her territory, she realizes that she has agency in this place as well. She uses its rules to her own advantage to free Haku and herself.
And that is the point of Chihiro’s journey in Spirited Away: it’s a metaphor for starting over in a new place and overcoming fear of the unfamiliar. After all, the frame story is Chihiro’s family moving to a new city. At the beginning of the movie, Chihiro is despondent, unhappy to be leaving her old friends behind. By the end, after making it through the spirit world, she’s taking a much more active role in helping her parents settle into their new home.
Medievalists of Tumblr: what inaccuracies annoy you the most in movies set in the Middle Ages?
Mine is probably the ‘everyone was constantly caked in mud and only wore grey and brown’ aesthetic.
Same. Also the idea that “women were property so they did nothing but sew and have babies and the time was inherently backwards and violent”
the complete absence of christianity from pop culture perceptions of the medieval period really bugs me (or it being relegated to the fringes and a few monks somewhere)
like… this was a major part of most people’s daily lives even if it didn’t necessarily look like christianity as we know it. also medieval theology is fucking wild! where are all the debates about cannibal babies in pop culture medieval stuff? WHERE is the twelfth century werewolf renaissance? the fuckign infancy gospels?? give me weird medieval theology you cowards
A lot of them had already been mentioned, so may I add
“The dishes were only bland soups and maybe some moldy bread”
I’m studying English language and literature, not History, but like… Pork vs Pig… Deer vs Venison… Cow vs Beef… May give you the idea THEY FUCKING ATE MEAT AT LEAST GODDAMIT
And not even like we do
Where’s the feast with venison? The ridiculous amount of salmon and other fishes? The little gardens full of spices? Or the trade of exotic foods? Slaughtering season was celebrated in some places not that much ago (like… I saw one when little), why not portray one?
And more importantly
WHERE’S THE CHICKEN WITH HELMET???
GIVE ME CHICKEN WITH HELMET OR GIVE ME DEATH
Yeah, and for better or for worse they were much less picky about which animals they ate than we are. Porpoise, anyone?
Medieval people loved their spices; The Forme of Cury has a lot of flavours I’d associate more with Indian food than anything else. Even if you weren’t a wealthy seasoning-loving king like Richard II, you could still have garlic, onions, and herbs.
Also please link me a picture of the chicken with helmet if you can, I need to see this.
Here it is
Here’s a link with more info. Apparently the dish is called Singing Chicken… But that’s a chicken with a helmet
Hollywood has a tendency to portray the past as “just like today, minus whatever of today’s things we know they didn’t have.” There’s no concept that the past had things that today doesn’t.
The idea that people used spices to cover spoiled meat is similarly stupid and utterly infuriating.
And yes, the gaping absence of religion from depictions of the Middle Ages is jarring.
All of this, but mostly that they existed in a sepia toned world with no color, pattern, or texture.
Going off the colors of textiles, the assumption that their textiles were always crude and rough compared to today’s. Think of the twills and brocades! The cloth of gold! The silks, and the wool so gauzy you could see through it! The soft wool clothing! The quality and variety of fabric we have available has plummetted since the industrial revolution.
beyond conventional spices the medieval cook and especially the resourceful housewife would have been exploiting herbs by the fistfull on a level we today cannot comprehend, like we dont even know what some of the names of herbs they used even mean anymore and they grew them like suburban homeowners today grow ugly border hedges. whatever soups they had access to had a decent chance of being something that would be 100% locally grown and every bit as flavorful as any regonal dish today withiout having to resort to saying ‘well they could possibly have been eating curry’ instead of giving them a flavor identity of their own. just because ‘spice’ isnt readily available dont assume ‘flavor’ is out of reach, the aromatics they used would be on par with the modern french concept of mirepoix
but, moving past the kitchen the two things that irk me are that everyone toiled miserably and everything was grey stone, rudely carved buildings, shoddy construction unadorned
well yeah, if you went to a decrepit ruin thats been abandoned for centuries it would look like that, but not when people lived there! you see the shows and movies and sweet baby cheese the kings residence looks like a dank basement and sometimes he doesnt even have a change of clothes
when castles were in use they were prominent displays of power and wealth, whitewashed so that even small amounts of light reflected well inside them so that they illuminated well, paintings and murals in a riot of colors and displaying personal tastes, tapestries that may be the local lords wife, aunt, or grandmothers gift to them as tappestry making was a popular hobby at court where women gathered to gossip and giggle while making vibrantly colored decorations that are usually dismissed because the only ones that survive had endured about 500 years of sun damage, smoke damage, and uncertain cleaning history
that clearly showed the people of the time valued color, had style, and only occasionally made horses look like a dog made out of play-doh. even people who didnt live in a castle still had access to paint to liven up the plaster walls of their homes, brightly dyed fabrics and flowers were as available to them as
and they sang, constantly. what we assume was a life of toiling in the mud from dusk till dawn the whole year was typically a relaxed paced life of 10 hour a night sleep in a comfortable bed where work didnt start untill you had your flagon of ale and a song with your buddies as you walked to the field, you sang as you worked, took three ale breaks from work while singing, and then you sang as you walked to the tavern so you could sing while you played nine mens morris or cheated at mancala because you thought the miller was too soused to notice. we barely know any of the songs they sang and humanity is less for it, a scant handfull of them do remain and its just beautiful to hear what a table of tavern patrons would break into song about to prove they werent too drunk for another round
song and story were all day every day, theres a reason the most well known middle english text was canterbury tales- whose narrative was that a selection of travelers on the way to the same location had an ongoing bar-bet about who could tell the better story, asking bartenders to judge the complexity of these stories, all of which were absolutely valid as just shit you would say to another drunk in a tavern, would give modern soap operas a swift kick in the pants and its sad that it takes a historian to tell you just how crass and lowbrow humor they were on a similar vein to how so many people somehow forgot that shakespear was lowbrow humor for the commoner and not somehow too sophisticated for rubes
it wasnt just bards who would own an instrument, instruments are wood, leather, string, bone/horn, or even clay… those are all commonly available and affordable if not straight up FREE items to someone in the medieval world so a hefty chunk of the population would have an instrument and know how to use it, anything from a wood flute to a simple drum to an ocarina. many designs were even specifically for travel so you could always have it at the ready
how about this- in all the versions of robin hood i have -EVER- seen the most historically accurate any of them got was the scene in kevin costner ‘king of theves’ where friar tuck was singing to himself while on the road ‘women wine and whoring’. not just because its one of the only times in any medieval period movie ive seen someone singing to pass the time in the mind-numbing hours of traveling before the invention of the car radio, but ALSO because they based the tune he sings off the classic ‘ Bache Benne Venies’, the oldest known drinking song we still know the words and tune of and let me tell you that song slaps
talk to me about historical accuracy in movies and ill tell you that tolkein writing hobbit songs for walking, drinking, or describing what an elephant was was more historically accurate then all of GOT passed through a sieve to collect every grain of stray element of medievalness
gaily dressed hobbits full of pie, sitting in a well decorated room full of beautiful hand carved furniture, on their fifth ale, and singing about the man in the moon getting shitfaced is about ten times historically accurate as most anything else i can think of if you ignored the historical accuracy of them being hobbits
There were also lots of non-white people in the middle ages but you don’t ever see it in pop culture
Also baths. Bathhouses. Medieval bath culture. It was all over the place. Occupational dirt was fine, but you were expected to get rid of it as soon as you could. And to wash up in the morning and before meals.
And also: let’s not lose touch with the kind of world where you go to the hairdresser’s, find there’s a one-hour wait because your hair guy is setting someone’s broken arm, and so you grab some sheet music out of the rack on the wall, take the cittern down off its peg, and start doing your own cover of the latest hit while your fellow waiting-for-a-hairdo people pass around a bottle and sing along (and maybe critique your fingering).
a few weeks ago i was playing smash ultimate and my brother was like “you play with final smash on?” and i was like, yeah, my dude, i play the ridiculous cartoon character fighting game where byleth and captain olimar can brawl to the death in green hill zone and funnily enough i dont turn off the magic floating ball that lets them do the biggest silly bullshit. im playing this game in the kitchen
“you play with ITEMS???” like YES its literally the silliest game possible by design, if i wasnt supposed to play as isabelle and spend the entire time assembling a giant gun to blast bowser off the side of palutena’s temple it wouldn’t be a fucking option
why would you buy a game where you can make Donkey Kong beat Solid Snake to death with a flower on the back of a giant turtle and then…not do that
Where else can I make Pikachu bonk cloud off of whispy woods with a baseball bat?
I just had a guy proudly unfollow me because I said mean things about Nazis.
I took a quick scan of his page and he’s an underweight, single dude that’s obsessed with guns and violence and openly and proudly a pedophile.
Damn, Nazis, you just love comforting to stereotypes don’t you?
I just realized that any Nazis reading this won’t be smart enough to parse that comment so I’ll dumb it down for you.
Nazis are only Nazis because they’re too stupid and pathetic to get anywhere in life so they blame others for their own failure and resort to fantasies of violence because they’re impotent, weak children that are desperate to be strong.
They’re also all pedophiles.
The best part about posting anti-Nazi posts is that you get to find all the Nazis following you and either they leave or you get to block them!
I think another takeaway from this post is also just how recently segregation was. We like to think of it as being a long time ago, but we have two presidential candidates who were not only alive during segregation, but who were also old enough to be politically active at the time.
I was born in 1963, and Bernie Sanders has been fighting for equality my entire life. He’s still out there joining picket lines on the regular, too–and not just in election years.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
