'Why "cloak-of-holding" as a name?'

When making my Neocities, I decided to give it the same name as my Tumblr URL at the time. Although I've since fallen off using Tumblr pretty hard (at least for the time being?), I just haven't had a strong enough reason to change the name yet. I'd only want to go through the hassle of changing it if I were to be absolutely sure that my new idea is worth sticking with.

For what it's worth, I certainly don't dislike the name! It's a little wordy, but I feel like it's probably fairly memorable. I mainly just haven't been identifying with the imagery it was crafted out of quite as much as I was when I thought of it, which to be fair, was years ago at this point. It was persona-character design stuff, which has always been hard to pin down very cohesively with how infrequently I've drawn, historically.

Cloaks continue to be a relevant piece of imagery for me for reasons that could just be summarized as "they're just cool," but I like analyzing stuff, so here's my thoughts on why I find them so personally appealing:

When speaking about how clothing gets perceived, a cloak has some very interesting properties. Firstly of note is its antiquity: perceptions of gender are always rooted in what is considered normal in the present, making it so that anything made less ubiquitous by its antiquity will always be harder for people to categorize cleanly into one box over another. A cloak isn't just androgynous simply because anyone can wear one, but because its unfamiliarity deprives the onlooker of an easily recognizable modern archetype of person.

There's also something to be said about the visual language of the piece. A cloak somewhat resembles a robe, which has more masculine associations of authority and power, but all the same it somewhat resembles a dress, which has feminine associations of elegance and lightness. Rather obviously, less form-fitting fabrics also obscure the wearer's figure.

It's for these reasons that I continue to see the cloak as a very explanatory shorthand for the kind of femininity I seek to accrue. An ominous Dark Souls woman kind of feminine. Deranged wizard woman obsessed with inscrutably giant tomes and casting lightning bolts at you kind of feminine. Some femininity with some real fuckin' teeth to it, you know?

I have my own handmade cloak, but unfortunately it didn't turn out quite to my specifications and I thusly have intentions of making a revision. The specimen in question doesn't come around to the front of the body enough, which makes it far too cape-like in my book, and for all the words I've dedicated here about cloaks, I do NOT fuck with capes, for the record! THIS DISTINCTION MATTERS TO ME!!! I think capes look comparatively very dumb, and they're not at all the vibe I'm going for. I'm a mysterious wizard, not some foolish king!

Here's my too-capelike unrevised cloak:

#myclaok [sic]

I didn't mean for this to become a shrine dedicated solely to cloaks, but I guess it is now. I think writing this also revived a dormant need to turn my website into my personal wizard tower.

Anyways, to finish out: The "holding" part of the cloak-of-holding namesake comes from the idea of a "bag of holding" of limitless capacity in a TTRPG like D&D, because the weight of trying to convey the infinity of your own personhood is another motif I've returned to multiple times in imagining a persona. This is also where the online nickname that my friends know me by came from; the feeling there's too much beneath your own surface.