#specifically choosing not to mention any names in this context because my god this shit is on my mind all the time already I really don't | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fineillsignup · 5 years

Text

tips for choosing a Chinese name for your OC when you don’t know Chinese

This is a meta for gifset trade with @purple-fury! Maybe you would like to trade something with me? You can PM me if so!

Choosing a Chinese name, if you don’t know a Chinese language, is difficult, but here’s a secret for you: choosing a Chinese name, when you do know a Chinese language, is also difficult. So, my tip #1 is: Relax. Did you know that Actual Chinese People choose shitty names all the dang time? It’s true!!! Just as you, doubtless, have come across people in your daily life in your native language that you think “God, your parents must have been on SOME SHIT when they named you”, the same is true about Chinese people, now and throughout history. If you choose a shitty name, it’s not the end of the world! Your character’s parents now canonically suck at choosing a name. There, we fixed it!

However. Just because you should not drive yourself to the brink of the grave fretting over choosing a Chinese name for a character, neither does that mean you shouldn’t care at all. Especially, tip #2, Never just pick some syllables that vaguely sound Chinese and call it a day. That shit is awful and tbh it’s as inaccurate and racist as saying “ching chong” to mimic the Chinese language. Examples: Cho Chang from Harry Potter, Tenten from Naruto, and most notorious of all, Fu Manchu and his daughter Fah lo Suee (how the F/UCK did he come up with that one).

So where do you begin then? Well, first you need to pick your character’s surname. This is actually not too difficult, because Chinese actually doesn’t have that many surnames in common use. One hundred surnames cover over eighty percent of China’s population, and in local areas especially, certain surnames within that one hundred are absurdly common, like one out of every ten people you meet is surnamed Wang, for example. Also, if you’re making an OC for an established media franchise, you may already have the surname based on who you want your character related to. Finally, if you’re writing an ethnically Chinese character who was born and raised outside of China, you might only want their surname to be Chinese, and give them a given name from the language/culture of their native country; that’s very very common.

If you don’t have a surname in mind, check out the Wikipedia page for the list of common Chinese surnames, roughly the top one hundred. If you’re not going to pick one of the top one hundred surnames, you should have a good reason why. Now you need to choose a romanization system. You’ll note that the Wikipedia list contains variant spellings. If your character is a Chinese-American (or other non-Chinese country) whose ancestors emigrated before the 1950s (or whose ancestors did not come from mainland China), their name will not be spelled according to pinyin. It might be spelled according to Wade-Giles romanization, or according to the name’s pronunciation in other Chinese languages, or according to what the name sounds like in the language of the country they immigrated to. (The latter is where you get spellings like Lee, Young, Woo, and Law.) A huge proportion of emigration especially came from southern China, where people spoke Cantonese, Min, Hakka, and other non-Mandarin languages.

So, for example, if you want to make a Chinese-Canadian character whose paternal source of their surname immigrated to Canada in the 20s, don’t give them the surname Xie, spelled that way, because #1 that spelling didn’t exist when their first generation ancestor left China and #2 their first generation ancestor was unlikely to have come from a part of China where Mandarin was spoken anyway (although still could have! that’s up to you). Instead, name them Tse, Tze, Sia, Chia, or Hsieh.

If you’re working with a character who lives in, or who left or is descended from people who left mainland China in the 1960s or later; or if you’re working with a historical or mythological setting, then you are going to want to use the pinyin romanization. The reason I say that you should use pinyin for historical or mythological settings is because pinyin is now the official or de facto romanization system for international standards in academia, the United Nations, etc. So if you’re writing a story with characters from ancient China, or medieval China, use pinyin, even though not only pinyin, but the Mandarin pronunciations themselves didn’t exist back then. Just... just accept this. This is one of those quirks of having a non-alphabetic language.

(Here’s an “exceptions” paragraph: there are various well known Chinese names that are typically, even now, transliterated in a non-standard way: Confucius, Mencius, the Yangtze River, Sun Yat-sen, etc. Go ahead and use these if you want. And if you really consciously want to make a Cantonese or Hakka or whatever setting, more power to you, but in that case you better be far beyond needing this tutorial and I don’t know why you’re here. Get. Scoot!)

One last point about names that use the ü with the umlaut over it. The umlaut ü is actually pretty critical for the meaning because wherever the ü appears, the consonant preceding it also can be used with u: lu/lü, nu/nü, etc. However, de facto, lots of individual people, media franchises, etc, simply drop the umlaut and write u instead when writing a name in English, such as “Lu Bu” in the Dynasty Warriors franchise in English (it should be written Lü Bu). And to be fair, since tones are also typically dropped in Latin script and are just as critical to the meaning and pronunciation of the original, dropping the umlaut probably doesn’t make much difference. This is kind of a choice you have to make for yourself. Maybe you even want to play with it! Maybe everybody thinks your character’s surname is pronounced “loo as in loo roll” but SURPRISE MOFO it’s actually lü! You could Do Something with that. Also, in contexts where people want to distinguish between u and ü when typing but don’t have easy access to a keyboard method of making the ü, the typical shorthand is the letter v.

Alright! So you have your surname and you know how you want it spelled using the Latin alphabet. Great! What next?

Alright, so, now we get to the hard part: choosing the given name. No, don’t cry, I know baby I know. We can do this. I believe in you.

Here are some premises we’re going to be operating on, and I’m not entirely sure why I made this a numbered list:

Chinese people, generally, love their kids. (Obviously, like in every culture, there are some awful exceptions, and I’ll give one specific example of this later on.)

As part of loving their kids, they want to give them a Good name.

So what makes a name a Good name??? Well, in Chinese culture, the cultural values (which have changed over time) have tended to prioritize things like: education; clan and family; health and beauty; religious devotions of various religions (Buddhism, Taoism, folk religions, Christianity, other); philosophical beliefs (Buddhism, Confucianism, etc) (see also education); refinement and culture (see also education); moral rectitude; and of course many other things as the individual personally finds important. You’ll notice that education is a big one. If you can’t decide on where to start, something related to education, intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, etc, is a bet that can’t go wrong.

Unlike in English speaking cultures (and I’m going to limit myself to English because we’re writing English and good God look at how long this post is already), there is no canon of “names” in Chinese like there has traditionally been in English. No John, Mary, Susan, Jacob, Maxine, William, and other words that are names and only names and which, historically at least, almost everyone was named. Instead, in Chinese culture, you can basically choose any character you want. You can choose one character, or two characters. (More than two characters? No one can live at that speed. Seriously, do not give your character a given name with more than two characters. If you need this tutorial, you don’t know enough to try it.) Congratulations, it is now a name!!

But what this means is that Chinese names aggressively Mean Something in a way that most English names don’t. You know nature names like Rose and Pearl, and Puritan names like Wrestling, Makepeace, Prudence, Silence, Zeal, and Unity? I mean, yeah, you can technically look up that the name Mary comes from a etymological root meaning bitter, but Mary doesn’t mean bitter in the way that Silence means, well, silence. Chinese names are much much more like the latter, because even though there are some characters that are more common as names than as words, the meaning of the name is still far more upfront than English names.

So the meaning of the name is generally a much more direct expression of those Good Values mentioned before. But it gets more complicated!

Being too direct has, across many eras of Chinese history, been considered crude; the very opposite of the education you’re valuing in the first place. Therefore, rather than the Puritan slap you in the face approach where you just name your kid VIRTUE!, Chinese have typically favoured instead more indirect, related words about these virtues and values, or poetic allusions to same. What might seem like a very blunt, concrete name, such as Guan Yu’s “yu” (which means feather), is actually a poetic, referential name to all the things that feathers evoke: flight, freedom, intellectual broadmindness, protection...

So when you’re choosing a name, you start from the value you want to express, then see where looking up related words in a dictionary gets you until you find something that sounds “like a name”; you can also try researching Chinese art symbolism to get more concrete names. Then, here’s my favourite trick, try combining your fake name with several of the most common surnames: 王，李，陈. And Google that shit. If you find Actual Human Beings with that name: congratulations, at least if you did f/uck up, somebody else out there f/ucked up first and stuck a Human Being with it, so you’re still doing better than they are. High five!

You’re going to stick with the same romanization system (or lack thereof) as you’ve used for the surname. In the interests of time, I’m going to focus on pinyin only.

First let’s take a look at some real and actual Chinese names and talk about what they mean, why they might have been chosen, and also some fictional OC names that I’ve come up with that riff off of these actual Chinese names. And then we’ll go over some resources and also some pitfalls. Hopefully you can learn by example! Fun!!!

Let’s start with two great historical strategists: Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu, and the names I picked for some (fictional) sons of theirs. Then I will be talking about Sun Shangxiang and Guan Yinping, two historical-legendary women of the same era, and what I named their fictional daughters. And finally I’ll be talking about historical Chinese pirate Gan Ning and what I named his fictional wife and fictional daughter. Uh, this could be considered spoilers for my novel Clouds and Rain and associated one-shots in that universe, so you probably want to go and read that work... and its prequels... and leave lots of comments and kudos first and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

(I’m just kidding you don’t need to know a thing about my work to find this useful.)

ZHUGE Liang is written 諸葛亮 in traditional Chinese characters and 诸葛亮 in simplified Chinese characters. It is a two-character surname. Two character surnames used to be more common than they are now. When I read Chinese history, I notice that two character surname clans seem to have a bad habit of flying real high and then getting the Icarus treatment if Icarus when his wings melted also got beheaded and had the Nine Familial Exterminations performed on his clan. Yikes. Sooner or later that'll cost ya.

But anyway. Zhuge means “lots of kudzu”, which if you have been to the American south you know is that only way that kudzu comes. Liang means “light, shining” in the sense of daylight, moonlight, etc; and from this literal meaning also such figurative meanings as reveal or clear. (I’m going to talk about words have a primary and secondary meaning in this way because I think it’s important for understanding. It’s just like how in English, ‘run’ has many meanings, but almost of all them are derived from a primary meaning of ‘to move fast via one’s human legs’, if I can be weird for a moment. “Run” as in “home run” comes from that, “run” as in “run in your stocking” comes from that, “run” as in “that’ll run you at least $200″ comes from that. You have to get it straight which is the primary meaning, which is the one that people think of first and they way they get to the secondary meaning.)

“Light” has a similar “enlightenment” concept in Chinese as in English, so the person who chose Zhuge Liang’s name—most likely his father or grandfather—clearly valued learning.

I named my fictional son for Zhuge Liang Zhuge Jing 京. The value or direction I was coming from is that Zhuge Liang has come to the decision that he has to nurture the next generation for the benefit of the land, that he has to remain in the world in a way that he very much did not want to do when he himself was a young man. In this alternate universe, Liu Bei has formed a new Han dynasty and recaptured Luoyang, so when Zhuge Liang’s son is then born he chooses this name Jing which means literally “capital”. This concrete name is meant as an allusion to a devotion to public service and to remaining “central”. After I chose this name, I discovered that Zhuge Liang actually has a recorded grandson named Zhuge Jing with this same character.

above, me, realizing I picked a good name

ZHOU Yu is written 周瑜 in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.

The surname Zhou was and remains a very common Chinese surname whose original meaning was like... a really nice field. Like just the greatest f/ucking field you’ve ever seen. “Dang, that is a sweet field” said an ancient Chinese farmer, “I’m gonna make a new Chinese character to record just how great it is.” And then it came to mean things along the line of complete and thorough.

Yu means the excellence of a gemstone--its brilliance, lustre, etc, as opposed to its flaws. It is not a common word but does appear in some expressions such as 瑕不掩瑜 "a flaw does not conceal the rest of the gemstone's beauty; a defect does not mean the whole thing is bad".

Zhou Yu has gone down in history for being not only smart but also artistic and handsome. A real triple threat. And this name speaks to a family that valued art and beauty. It really does suit him.

Zhou Yu had two recorded sons but in my alternate history I gave him four. I borrowed the first one’s name from history: Xun 循, follow. Based on this name, I chose other names that I thought gave a similar sense of his values: Shou 守, guard; Wen 聞, listen. The youngest one I had born when he already knew he was dying, and things had not been going well generally; therefore I had him give him the name Shen 慎, which means “careful, cautious”.

SUN Shangxiang 孫尚香 is one of several names that history and legend give for a sister of w//arlord-king Sun Quan who was married to a rival w//arlord named Liu Bei in a marriage which, historically, uh, didn’t... didn’t go all that well. In my alternate history it goes well! You can’t stop me, I’ve already done it!

The surname Sun means “grandson” and the given name components are Shang mean “values, esteems” and Xiang “scent” which we can combine into meaning something like “precious perfume”. A lot of the recorded names for women in this era (a huge number didn’t have any names recorded, a problem in itself) seem to me to be more concrete, to contain more objects, to be more focused on affection, less focused on hopes and dreams. This makes sense for the era: you love your daughters (I HOPE) but then they get married and leave you. You don’t have long term plans for them because their long term belongs to another clan.

I gave her daughter by Liu Bei the name Liu Yitao 劉義桃. Yi 義 meaning righteousness, rectitude and 桃 meaning... peach. Okay, okay, I know "righteous peach" sounds damn funny in English, but the legendary oath in the peach garden, the "oath of brotherhood" is called in Chinese 結義 "tying righteousness" and the peach garden is, uh, a peach garden. I also give her the cutesy nickname Taotao 桃桃 which you could compare to “Peaches” or “Peachy”. Reduplication of a character in a two-character name is a classic nickname strategy in Chinese.

GUAN Yinping 關銀屏/关银屏 is a “made up” (scare quotes because old legends have their own kind of validity, fight me) name for a historical daughter of Guan Yu. Guan means “to close (a door)”. Yin means “silver” and ping means “a screen, to hide” and according to the legend, her father’s oath brother Zhang Fei named her after a silver treasure. So here again we see a name for a woman that completely lacks the kind of aspirations we see in male names. Who would have an aspiration for a daughter?

My fictional characters, that’s who. I named her daughter Lu Ruofeng 陸若鳳/陆若凤, Ruo (like the) Feng (phoenix), based on a quote from a Confucian text about what one should try to be during both times of chaos and times of good government. I portray her father as a devoted Confucian scholar, so that was another factor for why I looked to Confucian texts for a source of a name.

Modern parents also now have big dreams for their daughters :’) and so modern girls receive names that are far more similar to how boys are named.

GAN Ning 甘寧/甘宁 is a great example of a person whose name does not suit him. Gan 甘 depicts a tongue and means “sweet”, and Ning 寧 which shows a bowl and table and heart beneath a roof means “peaceful”. Which, it would be hard to come up with a name for this guy, a ruthless pirate turned extremely effective general:

that is less suitable than essentially being named “Sweet Peace”.

And when he was an adult, his style name—a name that Chinese men used to be given when they turned 20 (ie became adults) by East Asian reckoning—indeed reflects that. Choosing your own style name was widely considered to be crass. I absolutely think that Gan Ning chose his own style name; he was that kind of a guy. And the name he chose! Xingba 興霸/兴霸! I’ve never seen another style name like it. It means, basically, “thriving dominator”! Brand new official adult Gan Ning treats his style name like he’s picking his Xbox gamer tag and he picks BadassBoss69_420, that’s what this style name is like to me. Except, you know, he had almost certainly killed many hundreds of people by the time he was nineteen, so, uh, it wouldn’t be a wise idea to make fun of his name to his face.

In my fictional version of his life, he married a woman whose father was the exception to the “parents love their children” rule and who named his daughter Pandi 盼第 “expecting a younger brother”, which is a classic “daughters ain’t shit, I want a son” name. Real and actual Chinese women have been given this shitty name and ones like it.

Because Gan Ning had an ironically placid name, I also gave his daughter the placid single character name Wan 婉, which means “gentle, restrained”, as a foil to her wild personality.

So there are a bunch of examples of some historical characters and some OCs and how I chose their names. “But wait, all that was really cool, but how can I do that? You can read Chinese, I can’t!”

I originally had a bunch of links here to dictionaries and resources but Tumblr :) wouldn’t let the post show up in tag search with all the links :) :) :) so you need to check the reblogs of this post to see my own reblog; that reblog has all the links. I’M SORRY ABOUT THIS. Here are a list of the sites without the links if you want to Google them yourself.

MDBG - an open source dictionary - start here

Wiktionary - don’t knock it til you try it

iCIBA (they recently changed their user interface and it’s much less English-speaker friendly now but it’s still a great dictionary)

Pleco (an iOS app, maybe also Android???) contains same open source dictionary as MDBG and also its own proprietary dictionary

Chinese Etymology at hanziyuan dot net

You search some English keywords from the value you want, and then you see what kind of characters you get. You should take the character and then reverse search, making sure that it doesn’t have negative words/meanings, and similar. Look into the etymology and see if it has any thematic elements that appeal to what you’re doing with the character--eg a fire radical for a character with fire powers.

And then, like I mention before, when you have got a couple characters and you think “I think this could be a good name”, you go to Google, you take a very common surname, you append your chosen name—don’t forget to use quotation marks—and you see what happens. Did you get some results? Even better, did you get lots of results? Then you’re probably safe! No results does not necessarily mean your name won’t work, but you should probably run it by an Actual Chinese Native Speaker at that point to check. Also, remember, as I said at the beginning, sometimes people have weird names. If you consciously decide “you know what, I think this character’s parents would choose a weird name”, then own that.

THINGS YOU SHOULD PROBABLY IGNORE!

Starting in relatively recent history (not really a big thing until Song dynasty) and continuing, moreso outside of mainland China, to the modern day, there is something called a generation name component to a name. This means that of a name’s two characters, one of the characters is shared with every other paternal line relative of that person’s generation; historically, usually only boys get a generation name and girls don’t. (Chinese history, banging on pots and pans: DAUGHTERS AIN’T SHIT AND DON’T FORGET IT!) “Generation” here means everyone who is equidistant descendant from some past ancestor, not necessarily that they are exactly the same age. For example, all of ancestor’s X’s sons share the character 一 in their names, his grandsons all have the character 二，great-grandsons 三, great-great-grandsons 四 (I just used numbers because I’m lazy). By the time you get to great-great-grandson, you might have some that are forty years old and some that are babies (because of how old their fathers were when they were conceived), but they are still the same generation.

In some clans, this tradition goes so far as to have something called a name poem, where the generations cycle, character by character, through a poem that was specifically written for this purpose and which is generally about how their clan is super rad.

If you want to riff off of this idea and have siblings or paternal cousins share a character in their names, ok, but it genuinely isn’t necessary. Anyone with a single character name obviously doesn’t have one of these generation names, and by no means does every person with a two character name (especially female) have a generation name. If you’re doing an OC for an ancient Chinese setting (certainly anything before the year about 500), you shouldn’t use these generation names because it wasn’t a thing. Also, in a modern setting, even if such a generation name or name poem exists, it’s not like there is any legal requirement to use it (though there may be family pressure to do so).

As a further complication, some parents do the shared character thing among their children without it actually being a generation name per se because it isn’t shared by any cousins. Or, they have all their children (or all their children of the same gender) share a radical, which is a meaning component in a Chinese character.

If someone does have one of these shared character names, then their nickname will never come from that shared character; either they will be called by the full name or by some name riffing off of the character that is not shared. For example, I knew a pair of sisters called Yuru and Yufei with the same first character; the first sister went by her English name in daily life (even when speaking Chinese) while the second sister was called Feifei.

tl;dr If you don’t already know Chinese, consider generation names an extra complication for masochists only. Definitely not required for modern characters.

Fortune telling is another thing that I think you should either ignore or wildly make up. Do you know what ordinary Chinese people who want to choose a lucky name for their child do? They hire someone to work it out. This is not some DIY shit even if you are deeply immured in the culture. There are considerations of the number of strokes, the radicals, the birth date, the birth hour. You’re the god of your fictional universe, so go ahead and unilaterally declare that your desired names are lucky or unlucky as suits the story if you want to.

MILK NAMES

In modern times, babies get named right away, if for no other reason that the government requires it everywhere in the world for record keeping purposes.

However, in traditional times, Chinese people did not give babies a permanent name right away, instead waiting until a certain period of time had passed (3 months/100 days is a classic).

What do you call the baby in the meantime? A milk name 乳名, which your (close, older than you) family may or may not keep on using for you until such time as you die, just so that you remember that you used to be a funny looking little raisin that peed on people.

This kind of name is almost always very humble, sometimes to the point of being outright insulting. This is because to use any name on your baby that implies you might actually like the little thing is tempting Bad News. Possible exception: sometimes a baby would receive a milk name that dedicated it to some deity. In this case, I guess you’re hoping that deity will be flattered enough to take on the job of shooing away all the other spirits and things that might be otherwise attracted to this Delicious Fresh Baby.

Because milk names were only used by one’s (older) family and very close family friends of one’s parents/grandparents, most people’s milk names are not recorded or known, with some notable exceptions. Liu Shan, the son of Liu Bei, who as a baby was rescued by Zhao Yun during the Shu forces retreat from Changban. Perhaps because his big debut in history/legend was as a baby, he is well-known for his milk name A-Dou 阿斗, which means, essentially, Dipper.

If you’re writing a story, you really only need to worry about a milk name for your character if it’s a historical (or pseudohistorical) setting, and even then only if the character either makes an appearance as a small infant or you consciously decide to have them interact with characters who knew them well as a small child and choose to continue using the milk name. Not all parents, etc who could use the milk name with a youth or an adult actually did so.

Here are some milk names I’ve come up with in my fiction: Little Mouse/Xiaoshu 小鼠 for a girl, Tadpole/Kedou 蝌蚪 for a boy, and Shouty/A-Yao 阿吆 for a boy. In the first two cases the babies were both smol and quiet (as babies go). The last one neither small nor quiet, ahahaha. 蔷蔷 Qiangqiang, which is a pretty enough name meaning “wild rose” (duplication to make it lighter), except the baby is a boy, so this is the typical idea that making a boy feminine makes him worth less, which, yikes, but also, historically accurate. Also Xiaohei 小黑 “Blackie” for a work that I will probably never publish because I don’t ever see myself finishing it. I might recycle it to use on another story.

Here are some more milk names I came up with off the cuff for a friend that wanted an insulting milk name. They ended up not using any of these, so feel free to use, no credit necessary. Rongzi 冗子 “Unwanted Child”; Xiaochou 小丑 “Little Ugly”; A-Xu 阿虛 “Empty”; Pangzhu 胖豬 “Fat Pig”; Shasha 傻傻 “Dummy”.

PITFALLS!

Chinese has a lot of homophones. Like, so many, you cannot even believe. That means the potential for puns, double meanings, etc, is off the charts. And this can be bad, real real bad, when it comes to names. It is way too easy to pick a name and think to yourself “wow, this name is great” and then realize later that the name sounds exactly the same as “cat shit” or something even worse.

Some Chinese families live the name choosing life on hard mode because their surname is itself a homonym that can make almost any name sound bad. I’m speaking of course of the poor Wus and Bus of the world. You see Wu may have innocuous and pleasant surnames associated with it, but it also means “without, un-”. (Bu is similar, sounds like “no, not”.) Suddenly, any pleasant name you give your kid, your kid is NOT that thing.

This means picking a name that is pleasant in itself yet also somehow also pleasant when combined with Wu. So you might pick a character with a sound like Ting, Xian, Hui, or Liang - unstopping, unlimited, no regrets, immeasurable. A positive negative name, a kind of paradox. Like I said, this is naming on hard mode.

If you are naming an ancient character, I am going to say in my opinion you should ignore all considerations of sound, because reconstruction of ancient Chinese pronunciations is on some other, other level of pedantic and you just don’t need to do that to yourself.

For modern characters, however, an attractive name, in general, should be a mix of tones and a mix of sounds. As a non-Chinese speaker, basically this means especially if you go for a two character given name, having all three characters start with the same sound, or end with the same sound, can sound kind of tongue twistery and thus silly/stupid. That doesn’t mean that such names never exist, and can in some cases even sound good (or at least memorable), but how likely is it that you’ve found the exception? Not very. (Two out of three having repetition isn’t bad. It’s three out of three you have to be careful of. Something like Wang Fang or Zhou Pengpeng is probably fine; it’s something over the top like Guan Guangguo or Li Lili you want to avoid.)

Just like the West (sigh), in the modern Sinosphere it is widely acceptable for girls to have masculine names but totally unacceptable for boys to have feminine names. If you see the radical 女 which means woman, don’t choose that character for a boy, at least if you’re trying to be realistic. Now Chinese ideas of masculinity doesn’t have the same boundaries as Western ideas, but if you want to play around in those boundaries, you gotta do that research on your own; you’ve left what I can teach you in this already entirely too long tutorial.

Don’t name a character after someone else in story, or after a famous person. In some/many Western cultures, and actually in some Eastern cultures too (Japan is basically fine with this, for example), naming a baby the same name as someone else (a relative, a saint, a famous person, etc), is a respected and popular way to honour that person.

But not in Chinese culture, not now, not a thousand years ago, not two thousand years ago. (Disclaimer: I bet there is some weird rare exception that, eventually, somebody will “gotcha” me with. I am prepared to be amazed and delighted when this occurs.)

Part of this is because of a fundamentally different idea in Chinese culture vs many other cultures about what is valuing vs disrespecting with regard to personal names. The highest respect paid in Chinese history to a category of personal names is to the emperor, and what would happen there is that it would be under name taboo, a very serious and onerous custom where you not only have to not say the emperor’s name, but you can’t say anything that sounds the same as the emperor’s name.

Did I mention that this is in the language of CRAZY GO NUTS numbers of homonyms? The day-to-day troubles caused by observing name taboo were so potentially intense that there are even instances where, before ascending to the imperial throne, the emperor-to-be would change his name to something that was easier to observe taboo about!

So you see this is an attitude that says: if you want to honour and show respect to somebody, you don’t speak their name.

As the highest person in the land, only the emperor gets this extreme level of avoidance, but it trickles down all through society. You can’t use the personal names of people superior to you. Naming a baby after someone inherently throws the hierarchy out of whack. Now you have a young baby with the same name as a grown adult, or even a dead person, who is due honour from their rank in life. People who would not be permitted to use the inspiration’s name may now use that name because they are superior to the baby who received the name! This would mean that hierarchy was not being preserved, and oh my heaven, is there anything worse than hierarchy not being preserved? All of Chinese History: Noooooo!

Now. As an author—and I hope to God no one is using my Chinese name guide as a resource to name an actual human baby because I can’t take that kind of pressure—you can use the names of characters to inspire the names of other characters, in the following way.

Remember that I said that the key, the starting point, to naming someone in Chinese is to start from a value. Okay. So what you do, if as the author you want to draw a thematic connection between two fictional characters, is take the Inspiration character’s name, think about what the value is that caused that name to be chosen, and then go from that value to choose the New Character’s name.

If you’ll recall what I said about Gan Ning and his baby Wan, this is exactly the approach I took. Gan Ning had a placid single character name that belied his violent and outrageous personality; I chose a placid single character name for his similarly wild daughter to make them thematically similar. As an author, I named his baby after him. But within the context of the story, she was not named after him. Does the distinction make sense?

Values also run in families for obvious reasons. It’s very common to look at a family tree and see lots of names that follow a kind of theme and give you a sense that, eg, this family is rather low class and uneducated; this family is very erudite but a bit too fussy about it; this family is really big on Confucianism. So yes, as an author, looking to other characters for inspiration is not a bad idea.

Remember, a lot of times, as an author, you can and even should kick realism to the curb sometimes. If you want to make some Ominous Foreshadowing that Character A’s name is something to do with fire but! They name their child something to do with water and therefore they are destined to clash with their own offspring, gasp, you can do that kind of thing because you are the god of your universe. Relish your power.

Do you have any more questions? Feel free to send a PM or an ask. I hope this was helpful! Go forth and name your Chinese OCs with slightly more confidence!

Edit 22 April 2019: I added some more sections (fortune telling, Milk Names, and taboo on naming after people). I also need to overhaul the entirety of the previous to emphasize that even thought I thoughtlessly used “Chinese” as if it was synonymous with “Han”, there are non-Han Chinese and they can have very different naming customs. Mea culpa.

38K notes · View notes

thesigilsofbaphomet · 4 years

Text

Lucifer Wants What’s Best For You

(And God is Your Enemy)

So... I touched on this in my response to someone talking about using Micheal in Catholic Folk Magic as a protective, social justice spirit. But I cut my overall take short, because it was off topic. But I wanted to talk about it, so, it’s time for one of my rare non-reblog posts on this blog.

I’ll begin by restating my overall premise- If you look at both canonical and folk-loric sources on Satan, you see a figure who simply desires to help people.

The Snake in the Garden

It is important to note that The Serpent in Genesis is not Lucifer/Satan/The Devil. It’s just... a serpent. Like, it’s not even, specifically, a demon. But the serpent, being a magical talking animal who convinces humans to act contrary to the will of God, is commonly seen as a demon. And I’ll go with that.

So, God creates the whole universe. This includes The Garden of Eden, the paradise that God rents to the first humans in exchange for their obedience. They’re allowed to eat from any tree in the Garden, except the tree in the center, known as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (The ToKoGaE).

Note- God created Eden for Adam and Eve. God is omniscient, meaning all knowing, thus he knows that Adam and Eve will eventually eat the fruit of the tree. The general Christian take is that the tree is a test. However, if you know that the test takers will fail a test, and you know you will give them a rather extreme punishment for that failure, is it not extremely cruel to present that test?

So the serpent talks to Eve, and there’s an exchange, and eventually, the snake convinces Eve to eat ToKoGaE fruit. Giving her knowledge of Good and Evil. And there’s some really weird thing here where suddenly she knows she’s nude, because she ate fruit that gives her moral knowledge, and apparently there’s a moral weight to nudity? And it’s bad? But God made them nude? So God explicitly create humans in a state of Sin and this whole original sin shit doesn’t really fucking hold up if they were created in a state of sin to begin with? I digress. Eve gives Adam the ToKoGaE fruit, now they both know their nude, so they start gluing leaves to their skin with sap or something (I refuse to believe they had any actual knowledge of how to weave leaves into clothes like it’s just a thing you can do and not something you have to learn how to do, and there’s literally no reason for them to have done that prior, so this is literally the first time they’re trying to use leaves as cover).

And the usual Christian take is that the snake is wrong in this. But... knowledge is good, and God was specifically withholding knowledge from Adam and Eve. So the Serpent was helping them.

Satan Scares a Guy’s Ass

No, literally. A guy named Balaam is riding a donkey and Satan appears to scare the donkey to stop him.

This story makes no goddamned sense, even when you read it in a vaguely modern dialect. But, basically, the Israelites leave Egypt and settle, and the guy who rules the land next to them says “holy shit, that’s a lot of guys, they might come take my shit.” So he sends some messengers to a seer, Balaam, to ask him to curse the Israelites so he can beat them in battle. Balaam says “Ok, sleep here, I’ll tell you what God says in the morning.” In the morning, Balaam’s like “Bad news, guys. God says I can’t go with you. The Israelites are blessed.” The king sends more messengers who are more official looking and they say “Look, dude, our lord will give you SO MUCH HONOR if you come curse these guys for us”

So Balaam says “Look, I don’t care if your king sucks my dick gives me his palace and all his money, I can’t go against God. But stay here, I’ll tell you if he says anything more in the morning (and on reflection, it almost seems like this is explicitly acknowledging that God is just extremely capricious). God tells Balaam, “Ok, go with them, but do exactly what I tell you.” So Balaam saddles his ass up, and goes with them.

And God gets pissed off? Because, I’ll repeat, God is a capricious asshole. So Satan (or, An Angel of the Lord, depending on the translation you read, but the original Hebrew says it’s Satan, who, in Judaism, is an angel of YHWH, and basically exists to test humans) appears, only visible to Balaam’s donkey, and the donkey says “oh fuck that, I’m gonna go to this field over here.” Balaam hits the donkey and the donkey goes back to the pass. So Satan appears again, this time in a narrow pass, so the donkey say “eeengghh...” and tries to, like, slide past Satan by scrapping the wall, and scrapes Balaam’s foot, so, again, Balaam beats his ass. Finally, Satan appears on, like, a narrow bridge, and the donkey can’t turn, can’t just scrape against a wall, and so just lays down. Balaam is, again, pissed off, and Satan opens Balaam’s eyes and asks him why he’s beating his donkey, and God opens the donkey’s mouth so the donkey can be like “no seriously, what the fuck, dude?”

But, so, in Numbers, Satan appears to just stop a guy from doing what God told him not to (and then to) do.

“They go through houses — they go up, they ring doorbells”

In Chronicles, David, king of Israel, decides to have a census. Or Satan tells him to. It’s not clear. In Samuel, David has the idea independently, but in Chronicles Satan tells him to. But anyway. David wants to have a census, which is a pretty reasonable thing. Censuses have a purpose, they tell a government how many people there are, and where they live, and, in America, give data that can be used to decide where and how to spend tax money. But for some reason, authoritarians don’t like censuses.

I want to say more about this, but... it’s literally just “Satan tells David to take a census, God doesn’t like that.” and then God sending an angel to tell David “pick a punishment!”

The Outlier--Job

I feel like a broken record, but, again, this story makes no fucking sense. Job’s super devout, and God’s blessed him. Satan walks up to God and says “Dude, he’s only devout because you gave him shit. Let me take his shit, and you’ll see how devout he really is.” And God says “Ok, sure, but you can’t kill him.”

So Satan just absolutely shits on Job. He gives Job boils, he kills his family, he financially ruins him, and through it all, Job refuses to reject God, so Satan is forced to concede, and God’s like “Haha, told you. Now, Job, how’d you like a new wife?”

This is the one story I’m aware of where Satan is legitimately just screwing with a guy and not trying to help him.

And Satan’s There, Too!

Satan next appears in Zechariah, in, like, a vision, and he’s just sort of there? This is another “The Satan” thing, where Satan is an angel of God whose purpose is to test humans. He doesn’t really do anything, he just gets mentioned as being there.

Then there’s a mention of Lucifer in Isaiah, and, literally, it’s just a reference. He’s not even there, it’s just a throwaway line saying “Lucifer was cast out of Heaven.”

Satan Asks Jesus Out to Some Beers

The last three mentions of Lucifer in the Bible occur in the New Testament, two of them are just Lucifer tempting Jesus.

Mark just mentions that Satan tempted Jesus.

Luke actually describes the temptation. So, Jesus goes out into the desert and fasts for forty days. Lucifer shows up and says “dude, you’re the son of God, just turn this stone into some bread, and have something to eat.” Jesus rebukes him in a “completely missing the goddamned point” way. So Lucifer takes him up to a mountain and says, “Look, dude, come with me, and can rule over everything you see here. It’s all mine, and it’s mine to give to who I choose. Just worship me.” And Jesus rebukes him. So Lucifer takes Jesus up to the top of a temple and says “God gave the angels to you, they’ll protect you, jump off and they’ll catch you.” And Jesus rebukes him again, and Lucifer disappears in a poof of exasperation.

Now, what’s the purpose of this? Well, there’s the standard Christian reading that Satan is trying to lure Jesus away from serving God’s plan because he’s EVIL and his SOLE PURPOSE IS TO OPPOSE GOOD AND THAT’S GOD. But... Ok, so Jesus is the son of God, he’s divine, and, it’s reasonable to assume that he can’t die unless God allows it, because it’s part of God’s plan for him to die in a specific context. So.... why does he fast for forty days? It’s not like he can starve, and he’s divine, so it’s not like he can suffer the pangs of hunger, unless he chooses to, so... is there any meaning in his fasting? I argue not. It’s exactly as meaningless as the act of turning a stone to bread and having a bite.

Then, there’s the second temptation. If we assume that Jesus is benevolent, and divine, and I argue, even as a Satanist, that Jesus is benevolent. I also believe that Lucifer is benevolent and the creator god is the standout as the not-benevolent one in the game. But I expect Christians believe that Satan is evil and Jesus good. Therefore, in Luke 4, Satan says “this world is mine, to give to they who I see fit.” And Jesus refuses to even pay lip service. Despite the fact Jesus ruling the world would presumably be better for people than a world rules by Satan. And Satan is offering that, maybe as a fuck you to God, but he is freely offering up his temporal power to someone who would make the world a better place.

The final temptation, I would argue, is Satan trying to free Jesus from God’s plan that demands he suffer torture and death. He’s trying to show Jesus “you have power of your own, you don’t have to subject yourself to this plan that ends in your death.”

If we interrogate the narrative from it’s own perspective, then Jesus is both God and human, and Satan is appealing to him as a human, saying “you’re a god, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to die.”

Luke 22 is the last mention of Satan in the Bible, and it just says that Satan entered Judas (not in a sexy way), and Judas went out to talk to the pharisees about how he could betray Jesus. But...well, ok, literally the line is-

3 Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve.

4 And he went his way, and communed with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray him unto them.

Like... it makes me think that a lot of the time, when Satan is mentioned in the Bible, they don’t mean a literal figure named Satan, and they’re using the name poetically to refer to people working against God or Jesus. Because... Jesus’ death is foreordained. It’s part of God’s plan, so why would Satan be involved in Judas’ betrayal of Jesus? Unless this is going back to the Judaic idea of Satan as an angel of God who acts as an adversary of humanity, in which case, Satan is acting on God’s orders to make Judas betray Jesus.

To Infinity and Beyond

So, that’s the extent to which Satan is mentioned in the Bible in anyway, either as a figure never called Satan but often conflated with him, to The Adversary, to Lucifer.

After that, you have to look at folk lore and media, and this is simultaneously difficult, because pretty much anyone can make a story up and it can get traction, and actually kind of easy in this particular case, because... most folk lore is one a single track when it comes to Satan.

Most folk lore involving Lucifer/Satan/whatever you want to call him-

I hear he misses the old names, so, special shoutout to “Little Horn”

-involves a human who wants something, and Satan showing up to give it to them for their soul.

And this comes to a realization I made last year- In these stories, if you take the Christian worldview, Satan is actually... giving these things away for free, not for people’s souls.

I’m pretty sure I talked about this on this tumblr, but I’ll go through it so you don’t have to hunt it down.

In Christianity, your soul is not yours, it belongs to God, so you can’t actually give it away or “sell” it

However, to do so, if your could, would be a sin

In Christianity, or at least Catholicism, conceiving of a sin with full intent to commit it is the same as committing the sin.

Therefore, even if you can’t, technically, “sell your soul to the devil,” if you decide to do so, you have immediately sinned, and in fact, you have committed pretty much the biggest sin there is in Christianity, Apostasy, one which cannot be forgiven by any temporal power, and the forgiveness of is the sole domain of God himself.

ie, If you commit Apostasy, you are immediately condemned to Hell, unless God himself intervenes. If you decide to sell your soul to Satan, you have already committed apostasy, even though that’s not a thing you can actually do.

Thus, when a person resolves to trade their soul for something, they are immediately condemned, their soul already destined for Hell, simply for deciding they would give it to Satan instead of trusting in God. Satan should obviously know how this works, he should be aware that a person just deciding to trade their soul is sufficient, and Satan has no reason to actually give the person anything.

So, given that, here’s what happens- A person wants something, they want it so badly, they decide to sell their soul to Satan for it. Satan is fully aware that at that moment the person’s soul is already his. But then he goes and gives them what they want.

The only possible way to interpret that is that Satan literally wants to help people.

But What About Hell?

So, how does one suppose that Satan just wants to help people if those people are still condemned to Hell for accepting his help?

Well, again, we’re going to go back to my background of having been raised Catholic.

In the Catholic tradition, Hell is not a place of fiery torment, it is not a place where demons break out the medieval torture shit and rend your soul. The torment of Hell, in the Catholic tradition, comes from the fact that God is absent. The Catholic tradition believes that Hell is painful because God’s presence is not there, that those who are in Hell are cut off from God.

Obviously, Catholics believe a lot of stuff is the natural consequence of this, they probably believe that without the presence of God, people are more malevolent in Hell, and so there are probably plenty of “mundane” torments there in addition.

However, I believe that the presence of God is not a perceivable thing. If it were, there should not be any atheists, or even non-Catholics. If you could perceive the presence of God, then why would you ever not believe in that God? Therefore, Hell should not feel any particularly different from life on Earth. But even if it does, that is, even if the absence of God is apparently despite his presence not being so, I contend that the human spirit can become accustomed to anything.

Therefore... Hell is not a place of torment, especially for the sinful who reject God in the first place.

Aside: Is God’s Presence Desirable?

If we look at the figure of God from the Bible, I contend that God is worthy of nothing but contempt and hatred.

God is said to have created the universe and all life in it--so that it might adore and adulate him.

God is, supposedly, Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnibenevolent (The Three Omnis). But he created a world of pain and suffering, and not all of that is the consequence of free will on the part of the person who suffers. You can argue that pain and suffering is a consequence of people choosing to do evil, but that does not explain the presence of suffering innocents. An omniscient being would know that free will would result in some people choosing to harm innocent children. An omnibenevolent being would wish to prevent that. An omnipotent being, creating a world ex nihilo, could create a world where the natural consequence of trying to harm a child prevents or punishes that attempt. It would not affect free will to create a world where trying to hurt a child caused the would-be perpetrator to burst into flames or have an immediate heart attack--just like it does not infringe on free will that we as humans cannot naturally fly and the natural consequence of jumping off a cliff trying to do so is to fall. It would not affect free will to create a world where children are immune to harm. God created a world where children can be harmed, and he chose to do so, knowing it would happen.

God paid disobedience with exile and painful death--when he would logically know that it would happen to begin with, due to his omniscience.

God looked at his “children” and murdered them in droves for disobedience.

In fact, God killed around 25 million people in the Bible, and that’s only counting adult men. Satan is responsible for about 10 specified deaths in the Bible (Job’s seven sons and three daughters), but the number of Job’s servants aren’t given, and they were slain at his prompting as well. But Job likely wouldn’t have had more than a few hundred servants, and even if he had ten times that number, even if he had 10,000 servants, God is responsible for at least 2,500 times as many, in adult men alone.

Altogether, the Bible itself paints an image of God as an abusive, selfish authoritarian who throws his “children” away in a fit of pique, or boredom, or to win a bet. Is this a figure deserving of worship? Of adoration? Of love? Christians seem to believe yes, believing that their creation at his whim is all that is needed to earn such. It is the position of an abused child who loves their toxic parent simply because of their relation, and despite their abuses.

An Image of Satan

So, on the other hand, we have this figure who staged a rebellion against a heavenly authority, who rules over a land eternal where the only torment is the absence of his foe, who we have already examined and found to be an abusive authoritarian.

A figure who has killed not even 1% of the people this authoritarian did, and who freely gives what is needed to those who, essentially, pledge themselves to his domain.

A Matter of Interpretation

In the end, it comes down to interpretation and belief, since we actually don’t have any kind of primary source on, well, anything to do with the Bible, or religion in general, to be honest. Personally, I think that if you’re looking at the Bible as any kind of authoritative source, then this is the only possible honest conclusion. If you believe that God is any way not reprehensibly abusive, then you can’t view the Bible as any kind of authoritative source, at least as regards God.

I’m a Satanist, so of course I’m given to a more sympathetic view of Satan, but given that there is no particular authoritative source for Lucifer (even the Bible would have been written by his enemy), the character of Satan can only really be inferred from non-authoritative sources, and interestingly, whatever a person says about their enemy, those statements are incredibly revealing of the speaker, as well.

I don’t, necessarily, believe that all Christians follow such a reprehensible creed, I don’t even think all Christians who view the Bible as, if you’ll pardon the pun, gospel, do. But I think a lot of Christians do not take any time to honestly evaluate the Bible and what it says about their God.

#God #Satan #Religion #Christianity #Satanism #Lucifer #The Devil

93 notes · View notes

xellandria · 3 years

Photo

Zmija Yilan was a temporary character I played towards the end of our Tomb of Annihilation campaign after my boy Alexus got petrified by a beholder somewhere deep in the bowels of the tomb itself. We were able to “salvage” both him and Amara (who had also gotten petrified in the same fight) by shoving them into the Bag of Holding, but short of having the two of us sit on the bench while the remaining two party members waddled back to town, we had to roll some new characters.

I spent most of the week between the petrification and the new characters appearing being mad at myself for not remembering I had Inspiration I could have used to reroll either of my failed dex saves and not being able to do much beyond that, but with less than 72 hours left until she had to debut, I finally pulled an idea out of my butt, ran it by the DM because it involved Shenanigans™, got the OK and started designing her. Thus was born Zmija Yilan, whose appearance was based partly on an old photo that was semi-viral on Tumblr several years prior and partly on Xelloss from Slayers because when I’m in a pinch, that’s always who I fall back on, and have been doing so for like, 20+ years at this point lmao. Personality-wise, there was a post floating around Tumblr that week about proverbs in various languages that, when translated literally or without context, made very little sense so she got a lot of that (and associated misunderstandings based on language mix-ups) mixed in with—again—Xelloss from Slayers, because I am a hack. I would probably never play her again because she was so firmly entrenched in that campaign and also there’s some parts of how I designed/played her that I look back on and am like “ehhh I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the optics of this,” but I enjoyed playing her a lot more than I expected, and I look back on the end of our Tomb campaign very fondly because of it.

I haven’t been able to talk about her in public both for a lack of reason to do so and because I didn’t want to “spoil” my group in case they found my various social media posts, but as it’s nearly a year since she was introduced and nine months since the campaign ended, I’m gonna absolutely wall of text the shit outta this bitch, rofl (that said there’s baby’s first nekkid pin-up under here so assuming Tumblr lets me actually post it, fair warning for that under the cut)

Zmija Yilan - level 8-10 Human* Warlock (Great Old Ones/Pact of the Tome) (usually this is where my D&D character posts put stats but I don’t actually have access to her character sheet anymore, so let’s just pretend she had something ridiculous like maxed Charisma because I remember my spell DC being ridiculously high)

Zmija Yilan is a traveler from the far-off land of Zemlya, and a disciple of Matrymriy, one of the "family" of five gods in the pantheon of that region. Matrymriy came to Zmija in a dream one night and told her to travel across the seas because She had a task for her, and that she would learn more once she reached her destination. She's been traveling around Faerun for seven or so years—reaching one place, being given hints to go to a specific location, and upon reaching it, being told to travel on without seeming to do much more than just Be There. Upon reaching Chult sometime within the last few months, her patron's hints indicated that she should travel to a place called Shilku Bay; she hired a guide (named Salida) and a bodyguard (a Fort Belurian mook) with what little locally-acceptable currency she had; they got separated after being attacked by a band of undead, and after failing to reunite with them, she was wandering around lost, trusting that Matrymriy will guide her where She desires her to go.

Part of her wandering had her end up in the Tomb of the Nine Gods itself, where she encountered our adventuring party (down two player characters) desperately trying to find their way out of the tomb in the hopes of returning to Port Nyanzaru to depetrify their friends. Our barbarian’s player immediately distrusted her because I’d drawn her tabletop token with her back to the camera, which was an awkward feeling almost immediately returned in-game because both the barbarian and paladin aren’t hardcore RPers but they had to carry all the RP weight as they were introduced to this new character and explain that they were there to destroy a lich (both because it was the source of all the bad undead in the area, and because they’d been promised a reward—a motivation Zmija understood, as “a hungry bear will not dance.”) Beyond the usual RP awkwardness there was an additional layer of awkwardness between the characters IC as at the time, Thokk was barely wearing more than a breastplate and loincloth, while Zmija was covered neck-to-ankle despite the heat and humidity of the region. She claimed that in the culture of Zemlya, having strangers see your skin was a mark of great shame and that modesty was of paramount importance, so seeing so much of him was very off-putting and threw her off-balance for much of their initial interactions.

Getting off on the “wrong” foot with the party and pushing as hard as I could into Zmija’s quirks (the weird proverbs, sprinkling in her Zemlyan vocabulary and making a point of her being from Very Far Away with Very Different Customs) meant I went a little too hard on them at the beginning, which is partly what I’d do differently and partly why the whole thing ended up working, so it’s a weird retrospective balance. If my partymates had ever shoved (almost) any of the names or places Zmija mentioned into google, they probably would have twigged to the scheme pretty dang fast.

In reality, Zmija is not a human traveler from Zemlya, because surprise! she's actually Zsaksatyi, a Chultian Yuan-Ti Pureblood under the command of Fenthaza. She worked as a bit of a double agent/interrogator within the Fane prior to her current assignment (hence her spell list's focus on information gathering, silent communication, and manipulation); she's been fleshing out her alternate persona for years and would occasionally pretend to be a captive and be thrown in one of those cells the party was in to get relevant information from the other prisoners, or assist others that were interrogating prisoners by more direct means (via Detect Thoughts). In-universe, the language she pretends to speak is mostly made up, and something she's been working on for years at this point—it's not a fully-fleshed conlang and she only has a couple hundred words and phrases but it's enough to be consistent and believable when she sprinkles it into regular speech. Since there's no real risk of running into anyone else from Zemlya (because it doesn't actually exist), it mostly didn't matter, and since there's actual meaning behind the words she does have, in theory it would have held up to a spell like Comprehend Languages as well. Out of universe, the language she speaks is an amalgamation of my own conlang stuff (which, like the in-universe version, is very limited and not complete) and various words and phrases pulled mostly from real-world Slavic languages (russian, croatian, hungarian, etc) with a little bit of Turkish thrown in when my English-only ear felt that it fit or when I had already used a word and needed another word for the same thing. Zsaksatyi (pronounced dzahk sot-YEE) is the only name/word in the whole mess that doesn’t actually mean something somewhere, and was a combination of syllables from an online Yuan-Ti name generator that I kinda liked together. If she had ever been outed, I would probably have come up with something a little less cumbersome for me and my (almost certainly wholly monolingual) D&D group to say... but she didn’t, so Zsaksatyi it stays!

She very much looks up to Fenthaza and almost idolizes and worships her—if she ever had to choose between Fenthaza or Dendar, things might have gotten a little bit rough for her (possibly no matter which way she ultimately jumped, though I imagine Dendar's vengeance would be more immediate, if Dendar's a hands-on sort of patron). Thankfully (for her), there was very little risk of that given that the party had left Fenthaza on reasonably neutral terms (having already helped her oust Ras Nsi from his position of power in the Fane and the party having essentially marked that dungeon as “cleared”). Fenthaza had sent her to scout the Tomb of the Nine Gods and locate (or steal) an artifact known as the Black Opal Crown, which will allow the Night Mother to emerge into the world. The group actually came across the crown pretty soon after Zmija (and our other new character, a firbolg druid named Mei Ren who replaced our cleric, Amara) joined them, but the party couldn’t figure out how to get it out of the room it was in and Zsaksatyi was content that it would be safe from both our group and other adventurers there while she found her way back to the Fane (though she Sent the location to Fenthaza in case she wasn’t able to make it back). That was actually like, halfway through the session right after she’d been introduced so having her sneak off that fast would have been absolutely wild, so I kept playing her as Zmija and while there were myriad opportunities for her to be discovered—including a hallway where any non-magical non-living thing got evaporated, up to and including clothing—she never was. The fact that the only spells she ever used spell slots on were Hex, Counterspell, and Identify never really got commented upon, because prior to her joining the party we didn’t have a source for any sort of utility magic and we’d been feeling the lack for a while. She was a lot of fun to play just as Zmija once I got the hang of her, but the hidden agenda that only our DM & I knew about was an extra layer of fun, too. It would have been neat to see how the party reacted to a reveal, but unless Jim wants to take us back to Chult to actually deal with the Night Mother’s return (because without having to keep up appearances and alignments, I’m pretty sure I could have gotten that crown out of there even before the weird teleport-defying magic of the Tomb got turned off), her story is over for us—taking her outside of the setting she was designed for would be weird... plus we already have two warlocks (well, one and a half) in a party of four PCs; adding a third would be a little bit bizarre, I think.

Her more Yuan-ti features include scales down her spine and across her shoulderblades, on the backs of her hands, and on her hips and thighs—mostly in reds, oranges, and browns, but as she increases in power and connection with the Night Mother, more of them are darkening to Her blue-black; it started right at that spot between the shoulderblades where you always picture being stabbed in the back, and has expanded from there; I imagine by level 20 all of her scales would be that blue-black and may have encroached further on the more human-y leather bits, probably encroaching on her face at the last, which would make being a spy a lot more difficult (even moreso than wearing as much clothing as she already does) but I guess at level 20, do you really need to be sneaking around pretending to be human?

In direct sunlight or other very bright light, her pupils constrict to slits, which is the real reason for her heavy eye makeup—between the distraction of it and the (somewhat exaggerated) squinting that such light induces, it often goes unnoticed, as it did with her character portrait (although to be fair to my party, Alexus also has slit eyes because that’s one of the traits of elves and half elves in D&D, and also I’m not sure if they ever saw her portrait any larger than 150x150 or whatever Roll20 shows them at). Both her top and bottom canine teeth are sharper, longer, and narrower than is typical for humans, and she is careful not to grin too widely and will cover her mouth when she laughs or yawns, whether she is in disguise or not. That part I’ve never drawn though, so I can’t really point to that as something the party overlooked, heh. In hindsight, I wish I'd given her more/heavier snake features but even the official art for Yuan-Ti player characters are very light on them and getting around the differences between human and yuan-ti racials without tipping off the party was hard enough as it was—I took the 120 feet of magic-ignoring darkvision invocation to disguise the fact that she innately had darkvision, I never used my racial spells and abilities unless I was willing to “use” a spell slot on them and had another plausible way to have obtained them, the one time I got hit with a poison ability (which she was immune to) I spent a lot of time “figuring out the math” on how much HP I had to drop, etc. I also wish I’d given her darker skin, as she is supposed to be Chultian but she is significantly lighter than all the NPCs we came across. Then again, I’m as white as a sheet soaked in bleach so there’s something weird about me RPing folks of colour regardless (especially given her fake backstory, agh agh agh) so yeah. Really enjoyed her, don’t regret her, will not ever play her again rofl

In our very last session of Tomb of Annhiliation, the party—fresh off the victory over the big bad lich whose name I can never spell and his weird world-eating fetus—headed back to Port Nyanzaru via the Aarakocra village of Kir Sabal, which the previous variant of the party (of whom only Thokk remained alive and mobile enough to talk to them) had helped out significantly earlier in the campaign, unlocking a flying ritual that we were like “man we’re not coming back here if we’re gonna use it we gotta do it now” to get us the rest of the way to the port. En route, Zmija tried to leave the group and rolled a secret 15 Stealth roll... contested by 17 and 18 perception rolls from Mei Ren and Thokk, but as she wasn’t carrying much of the party’s stuff and it was the end of the campaign, they kinda just let her give some line about seeing them again in the future maybe, the Mother’s will is unknowable, etc etc. I think if Duf and Kattii didn’t know that I wanted Alexus back as badly as I did and that we were like twenty minutes (real time) away from actually getting him back, they might have considered that more suspicious than they did.

Pronunciations (and translations): (mostly C&Ped from her bio, which is the only part of her character sheet I can still access on Roll20)

Zmija Yilan: zMEE-ah yee-LAHN. Because I'm subtle as hell, that's Croatian/Russian/Ukranian (first name) and Turkish (last name) for "snake/serpent," according to the internet. What do you mean Remus Lupin is a werewolf?!

Matrymriy: mah-tRRuh mRREE (Rs are rolled). Matrymriy is Zmija's claimed patron—one of five major Zemlyashan dieties—but she'll state that she doesn't know the name that she goes by in the local dialect. That's only partly true, of course—мати мрій is Ukranian for "Mother of Dreams" (at least according to google translate), which is close enough to her patron's actual names and titles (Dendar, the Night Mother) that she can get away with it without actually raising suspicions about the true source of her powers. She'll also do that thing where if someone tries to say the name back to her she'll "correct" them by saying it exactly the same four or five times and then "give up" and accept whatever "butchered" version the speaker comes up with, except she'll do it even if they're actually saying it perfectly correctly. She may do this with her own name as well (sorry, Jim. And Duf. And Dustin. And Kattii. And Kattii's coworker, if he ever joins us and I'm still playing this character by then, lmao.) (2021 addition: and literally everyone who has a name that isn’t typically pronounced by us English-only plebians, I am so sorry I’m not better at your language)

Zsaksatyi: dzahk sot-YEE. Zmija's real name, when she isn't pretending to be a human. That doesn't mean anything as far as I know, it was just a combination of some of the syllables the random Yuan-Ti name generator was coming up with that I liked (which is also where "Itszella" was from), lol. I may end up changing it to be less cumbersome at some point, unless it comes up before then and ends up written in stone, but I'm on a bit of a time crunch for the moment.

Zemlya: zem-lyah. If pressed for more detail on where in Zemlya she's from (e.g. by someone pretending to know details about her country), her home town is Fal'shyva (fall-sheh-VAH), southeast of the capital of Hayali (HI-yah-LEE) and just north of the port city of Farazi (fah-ra-DZI), which is where she originally sailed from seven years ago. фальшива земля is Ukranian for "fake land," Hayali is Turkish for "imaginary," and Farazi is Turkish for "hypothetical," lol.

Proverbs & (approximate) Pronounciations: (if I recall correctly, asterisks indicate ones I had used, so I didn’t repeat myself too frequently)

Wziąć się w garść (zvun shih garsch): lit. take the self into the fist (polish), pull yourself together Галопом по Zemlya (gal-OH-pohm poe zem-lyah): lit. galloping across Zemlya (russian), to be hasty/haphazard. * У кого немає собаки, полює з котом (Ooh koe-hoe meh-MIGH-eh soe-BAH-kay, poe-LOO-yay koh-tome): lit. who does not have dog, hunts with cat (ukranian, original proverb is portugese), make do with what you have. Z choinki się urwałaś? (dzi hoink-E she urr-vahl-wash): lit. did you fall from a Candlenights(aka Christmas) tree? (polish), you are obviously not well-informed; are you dumb? * Mi o vuku (MEE oh voo-koo): lit. to talk of the wolf (croatian), speak of the devil. * Thalai muzhuguthal (tha-LIE MOOz-GOO-thal): lit. pour water over someone's head (tamil), cut off a relationship. * Хоть кол на голове теши (coat-coal nah gohl-ehvee teh-SHEE): lit. you can sharpen an axe on this head (russian), a very stubborn person.

Other Languages Are Hard Today, Let’s Just Proverb It In English:

Cat's Forehead (japanese): a tiny space, usually used humbly to refer to owned land. It fell between chairs (swedish): group work that everyone assumed someone else would do, and didn't get done as a result * It gives me a beautiful leg (french): fat lot of good that'll do me Drown the fish (french): avoid a subject by talking about anything and everything else, confuse the issue In a river with piranhas, the alligator swims backstroke (brazil): protect your weaknesses * Accusation always follows the cat (iraqi): it's easy to blame someone who can't defend themselves The honey only sticks to the mustache of he who licked it (arabic): he who smelt it, dealt it * A hungry bear does not dance (greek): the reward must be worth the cost (or at least exist) * The crayfish sides with the crab (korean): people who have a lot in common stay friends * If you can't live longer, live deeper (italian): get the most of your time * A spoon does not know the taste of soup (welsh): intelligence is not wisdom Examine what is said, not who speaks (arab): don't take things at face value * Turn your face to the sun and the shadows will fall behind you (new zealand): have a positive outlook He who does not travel, does not know the value of men (moorish): wide experience is gr8 Do good and throw it in the sea (arab): don't expect anything back from kindness * Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is halved (swedish): friends make things better If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together (african): strength in numbers, speed on your own.

#xellart #dungeons and dragons #original characters #zmija yilan

6 notes · View notes

silenthillmutual · 4 years

Photo

The decisions place you in the context of higher authority. No longer an army of one, you have decided to mobilise the population to fight the disease alongside you, since your personal accomplishments were not enough.

i feel like there’s a lot to unpack with this part of the letter

first i’d like to point out that part of daniil’s dialogue with andrey involves them recounting being involved in some sort of riot together

adding all the sums together my guess is that daniil is something of a troublemaker, and that despite some of the truly bitchy things you can have him say (that i will assume are his internal monologue if you choose to have him not say them), the kind of trouble he makes has something to do with unionizing people

i don’t really know how to put this other than like. clearly daniil is a very Proud person. a lot of educated people get that. and one good way to get someone whose fatal flaw is Pride to do what you want them to do is to insult something they should otherwise be proud of...you know, their accomplishments. so the Powers That Be don’t want him to:

make any sort of connections or home among the people of the town

make the town join forces, as it were; part of your job as daniil is negotiation, but you will also get most of your news from people on the streets, many of whom are disgruntled about some sort of inequity they’re dealing with and that you can, if you want, react with outrage at their treatment (see: aspity’s lies about the water, his disgust at how vlad the younger talks about the people who work in the termitary, etc)

actually be successful in combating or even surviving the plague. this is a win/win situation for them; you get a threatening letter from them about how they will leave your laboratory alone (for now) if you are successful in this endeavour, but the truth is that it really doesn’t matter. either what you do should you survive will not be enough for them, or you will die, in which case there is no one left to defend Thanatica.

i rarely even get that kind of depth and subtlety from books i read or movies i watch so it’s very awesome to see this sort of thing being emulated in a video game.

We expect that the measures you have taken are temporary. Speaking of what may be described as the microclimate of the town, we don’t want any irreversible changes to take place. In particular, we hope that the instructions you have issued would not lead to any undesirable moods among the local townsfolk. We would rather avoid mass psychosis, depression, or panic that are sometimes characteristic of situations like this.

i think there’s two really interesting things going on here.

the first is that this raises a very valid concern, one that you have to talk about in areas of study like cultural anthropology: cultural relativism. you want to study a culture and interact with it, but without being too biased, passing judgement, or changing the way the culture exists too much. to a degree, all of these are unavoidable, both in-game and in the real world. you know that daniil is guilty of the first two even if you never have him say some of the things he’s thinking.

but i think too many people look at this without nuance - not just as far as this game goes, but for plenty of other media and facets of real life. you don’t want to be ethnocentrist, of course, but not every cultural practice is good or defensible. you see it all the time when weebs try and defend things like hen.tai, lo.licon and shot.acon. there’s an ethical dilemma that comes in engaging with other cultures, and it’s really not as cut and dry as simply calling yourself an outsider and assuming these practices are okay.

this is a huge misstep that happens in the film Midsommar. i read an article about how the main group being anthropologists is actually essential to the horror of the film; they are able to be gaslit because they let their cultural relativism put them in danger. they ignore the warning signs that they are being initiated into a cult, that they are being manipulated, and even that the cult is made up of white supremacists. it’s very possible that the reason Pelle is a foreign exchange student is to find people like this group of anthropologists who have stepped back too much from themselves their culture.

this also reminded me a bit of a discussion on reddit i saw about colonized countries talking about their relationship with their colonizers and how those two interact, although Pathologic is so vague i’m not sure if you’re meant to read daniil’s route as being related to colonization or not; i know artemiy’s route has more to do with that, and that seems to be connected to some of the other families in town, specifically the olgimsky’s.

the second thing that i think is interesting about this, is that it is once again setting daniil up for failure. they don’t want him to change the town too much, but they want him to be successful in combating the plague. given that the town has no hospital or morgue, that the only access to the outside world for them is the train, and that in order to keep the disease from spreading he has to issue quarantine and change how people go about their daily lives? he can save the town OR keep it from changing; he can’t do both. not to mention that the Powers That Be are sending people to help enact whatever changes daniil deems necessary... they are purposefully escalating the situation, knowing that they are going to make him fail in some way or another.

Please keep in mind that when we offered to cease the persecution of your laboratory and to facilitate your research, we meant that as a reward for you being able to find a surgically precise solution to the problem. It is of no importance to us if you do it yourself or instigate the Inquisitor to do it on your behalf.

so in other words: the government openly admits to persecuting him. not just laughing him off or ignoring his requests for funding or what have you, but actively attempting to sabotage him. they will only stop these activities if he is successful - and success to them is “surgically precise” - which i take to mean does not rely on herbalism. this probably sets up why daniil is a pain in the ass on artemiy’s route; his life more or less depends on there being some quantifiable and scientific explanation for the plague and how to combat it.

the government also doesn’t care about the town. it doesn’t care if the town is successful. they’re not sending other doctors, they’re not acknowledging rubin or artemiy as healing professionals. they’re sending enforcers. if daniil fails to find something of worth to them, everything he’s worked for up to this point in his life will be destroyed. and he will fail, as he’s been told at every turn that there is no scientific explanation for the sand pest and no precise cure. what fixed it last time was herbalism. he’s going to fail, no matter what he tries to do. this is the letter you receive by the end of day 4, and the game is 12 days long. you know before you even hit the halfway point that there is not going to be a happy ending for daniil.

daniil certainly has a tendency to look down on herbalism, but given that he seems to have had high regard for isidor burakh i think you can take this one of two ways, or perhaps take the third option and say both: either there is some elitism going on that ties into racism, or this could be comparable to people looking at the anti-vaxxer trying to cure every disease under the sun through the power of organic foods and essential oils. (again: i think it’s a bit of both. were there more time for him to explore shit, it’s very possible daniil would grow out of the former. he seems really interested in artemiy, has little tolerance for how the ruling families run things on a basis of violence and various -isms, and again he seems to have some esteem for both rubin and isidor who we learn later are more akin to herbalists, as isidor and artemiy specifically are indigenous) i think this explains a lot of why he says insensitive things (or says things insensitively).

i think it’s also important to keep in mind that he doesn’t know what’s going on in the clara or artemiy’s routes. he only has his point of view, which as an outsider is going to be heavily skewed by whatever he is told. he can’t possibly know everything.

i think the last thing i wanted to end this overly long post on was this: his field of study is thanatology. the study of death.

why in god’s name do the Powers That Be want to destroy research into longevity? just food for thought, but this game is 17 years old, and i think it’s especially relevant now.

#nori writes #meta #plato plays pathologic #path of logic #plato posts #ok to rb #pathologic #long post #and i mean it this post is SUPER fucking long #bachelor deeply disrespectful #icarus.docx #mine

8 notes · View notes

divainity-a3 · 4 years

Text

topic: reggie + family ( relationships & dynamic ) spoiler tw: archie afterlife, reggie & me, archie comics (2015) GENERAL TW: ABUSE, ABUSE MENTION, MENTAL ILLNESS !

abstract: it’s no secret that reggie’s parents play an absent role, both in reggie’s life & overall in most of the original, campy archie comics. we see lots of mr. & mrs. andrews, we never get enough of the coopers & the lodges, and we get glimpses of gladys & jellybean jones, but never really the mantles ——— why is that ? what do we even know about ricky and vicky mantle, his alleged parents, if anything at all ? and what little do we get from the comics and wikipedia to give us clues ? in this essay i will be going through the things that i know and accept as canon for my reggie’s relationship with ricky and vicky mantle and why reggie having a brother according to wikipedia makes absolutely no sense !

SECTION I. THE MANTLE FAMILY TREE

i. the mantles are an upper - middle class family. more upper than middle, given how reggie spends his allowance, & ranking - wise, i headcanon the mantles to be the second richest family in riverdale right below the lodges. since the dawning of the original archie comics in the 50s, we’ve known richard and victoria mantle as ricky and vicky mantle, the well-off parents of their son, reginald victor mantle.

ricky canonically owns riverdale’s most popular newspaper the riverdale gazette and while vicky’s profession isn’t specified, i assume she either works in the secretarial portion of the paper along with the mantles’ other enterprises. y’know, the way heteronormative rich couples do. while the paper’s popularity generates a significant amount of revenue for the mantles, it isn’t their main source of income— investments & other business deals are. using their hard earned (not) inheritance and what they’ve made from paper circulation and subscriptions, they turn it into more profit by investing it in the right places. fiscally, the family is very well-off and happy. in every other department ? debatable.

ii. the mantles are more or less, absent parents. and always have been. for starters, as i said it earlier: we don’t ever see them in the damn comics. even in cw’sriverdale— ricky and vicky are nowhere to be found. even according to reggie’s wikipedia, we don’t know all too much about his mother and father aside from their professions but the archie reboot comics offer a different perspective that i choose to adopt.

exhibit a. reggie and me (2015) / issue #2 context: reggie coming home distressed after having accidentally pushed archie into a pond. betty went off at him, he ran home crying to an empty house. his dog, vader, is narrating, recalling how reggie describes it as one of the worst days of his life.

exhibit b. reggie and me (2015) / issue #4 context: reggie attemptng to make an effort with his dad only to be rejected immediately.

exhibit c. archie (2015) / issue #6 context: reggie’s coming back home from a failed attempt at persuading hiram lodge to let him into his inner circle.

exhibit d. afterlife with archie (2015) / issue #9 context: in a dystopian take on archie comics, reggie is reflecting on his entire life existentially while confessing his sins to kevin keller, someone he’s come to trust.

conclusions drawn:

coming home to an empty house wasn’t and still isn’t uncommon for reggie. across the multiple comics i reference, the narrative seems to be the same. his parents consistently don’t show up for him. are constantly working, and more importantly never home. and even when they are home, they pay no mind to their only son, seen in how reggie attempts to get his fathers attention after seeing archie and his dad play ball. i can also assume that reggie had to raise/take care of himself, given that there’s no maid to be seen in any of the scenes where the ricky and vicky aren’t there. while the mantles clearly make sure he doesn’t starve, they don’t exactly do… anything else. as we see when reggie comes home crying, no one’s there to hold him. no one’s there to tell him he’s okay and that he’s valid. so he has to tell himself. and as he gets older and more self-sufficient, his parents start giving even less of a fuck about him being on his own. furthermore, reggie also has to teach himself what is right and wrong as a result, having little to no guidance from the people who are supposed to fulfill that role. obviously, we know how that works out.

ricky and vicky missed out on a lot of reggie’s milestones. being out on business trips all the time leads me to believe that the mantles missed out on a lot of reggie’s overall life and more importantly accomplishments (even if he doesn’t have a lot of them). to name a few things, i headcanon the mantles to have missed his middle school graduation, his first football game, multiple recitals through the years, and the day reggie got deemed captain of the football team, something he actually considers one of his bigger achievements in life. i also headcanon that reggie had to teach himself how to drive, shave, ask a girl out and all the other cheesy, heteronormative stuff rich families instill. the mantles sure do come back to reap the benefits though, happy to use reggie for bragging rights.

reggie blamed himself a lot for his parents not being around and developed deep-seeded insecurities about it growing up.i think it’s reasonable to think that a child as young as he was used to believe that something was wrong with him with his parents never seeming to want to be around him. that shit hurt him and that is where reggie’s need to constantly be around people and have companionship comes from—— it’s an underlying desire to be wanted for once. but he’d never tell that to anyone.

reggie acting out started out as an attempt to get attention from his parents. the only time parents will really be forced to pay attention to their children is when they have to answer for them. so it’s reasonable, i think, to assume that a lot of his bad behavior started out at least as a way to get his parents to give him the time of day. i don’t think the same applies to reggie in the present day, but nonetheless, —————old habits die hard. more on that, later.

SECTION II. THE MANTLE LEGACY

i. reggie is, and always will be, an only child. according to reggie’s wikipedia, he also allegedly has a younger brother named oliver mantle that made a brief appearance once in a single issue like 40 years ago. in my canon, i’m choosing to ignore this for two reasons: a.because it literally just doesn’t make any sense for reggie to have any siblings. ricky and vicky can barely take care of reggie, god forbid they abuse and neglect another child. the idea is nice and it would mean that reggie would have someone to confide in, but alas i don’t think the mantles would be so … kind.

and b. because there’s absolutely no significant information and/or canon attached to thisalleged oliver mantle and so i have to conclude that he was just thrown in at some point during the original archie run because the writers realized they didn’t develop reggie’s family background in any aspect.

ii. however, reggie does have two cousins. the writers do this on multiple occasions to all the characters, throwing in relatives here and there and they actually did give reggie two cousins which i actually do accept in my canon. their names are regina(first cousin) and may (third removed cousin), both of which are from vicky’s side of the family. reggie doesn’t care for may all that much but regina is someone he actually can get along with as they share the same kind of humor.

other than that reggie’s the only mantle heir, putting immense pressure on him to marry rich and carry on the family name———— but that’s a different meta for another time.

SECTION III. PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE & NEGLECT

ii. reggie himself is a victim physical and emotional abuse, mainly from his father, in addition to overall parental neglect. now don’t get it twisted, i’m not saying ms. vicky had absolutely nothing to do with reggie’s childhood trauma, but ricky certainly had the more prominent role as an instigator and we get proof of that on several occasions. i headcanon that vicky never laid a finger on reggie and truly does love him deep down, but her passiveness & allowing the abuse to happen has made reggie view her just as antagonistically as he does ricky ( and for good reason ). she’s a bystander and nothing more, a spineless bitch that never intervened, only spoiled him in hopes it would make up for his emotional scars. she pretends she’s not as bad, reggie thinks and knows otherwise.

exhibit a: afterlife with archie (2015) / issue #9 context: in a dystopian take on archie comics, reggie is reflecting on his entire life existentially while confessing his sins to kevin keller, someone he’s come to trust. the first page of the issue is titled ARCHIE & REGGIE, all about comparing the two and their different persona’s but more importantly, their different upbringings.

conclusions drawn:

while the sentiment of this side-by-side is aimed to highlight the fact that reggie is a spoiled kid that likes to act out, what stands out more so to me is what looks like intense pressure to perform from ricky. while i did say earlier that reggie’s parents have a very absent role in his life, obviously there are public appearances to keep up. the mantles can’t come across as unsupportive an absent, they need to put on an image. while you’d think this is a good thing that would force the mantles to show up more, my concern here comes from the reason for the fight being over the fact that reggie’s team, not just reggie, not winning a baseball game. despite never being there to emotionally support reggie, to me it seems like ricky expects perfection. i believe the pressure might be more so for athletic performance than academic, given that reggie’s wikidoes specifically cite reggie’s natural-born athletic excellence. i think it’s also worth noting as well that since my reggie is asian and i firmly believe this pressure is present (i’m asian myself, the struggle is real). reggie has slowly cared less and less and we’ll get to that later but, you get it.

the panels also have drastically different interactions between parent and child, ricky’s looking borderline abusive and more importantly, public. one could argue that it only looks like ricky only has a tight pinch on reggie’s ear, but i also have concerns about the extent of ricky’s expectations and what lengths he’d go to make them known, especially when reggie didn’t fulfill them as a kid. this leads me to my next piece of evidence.

exhibit b: archie (2015) / issue #30 context: ricky has recently bailed him out reggie out of jail, having been charged with vehicular manslaughter. despite ricky having pulled several strings to get him out, reggie’s still acting out and in getting ready for the riverdale spring dance, has taken it upon himself to go through his father’s wardrobe without asking to dress himself for the occasion.

conclusions drawn:

reggie has an unforgiving memory. rightfully so, as he’s been going through this vicious cycle for as long as he can remember, but take note his ability to citeextremely hurtful things that ricky has been guilty of saying about his own son and, in some cases, said to his own son’s face. he plays it off as a snarky comeback, but to me, that’s a cheap coping mechanism and speaks to a greater desensitization on reggie’s end towards constantly receiving such disappointing and demeaning remarks from his own father. he expects it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to hear.

ricky has a horrible temper. i say this because his temper is shown to go from 0 to 100 extremely quick (literally read any of the new archie reboot, you’ll pick up on it) until reggie puts him in his place. i honestly headcanon that ricky hasundiagnosed bpd (disclaimer: my mother has bpd) and that this extreme range of temperament is something reggie has had to develop a defense to and it’s taken years for him to do. it’d take a lot of convincing to try and tell me that this temper has never escalated into physical altercations. especially from a toxically masculine man like ricky ? no chance.

the abuse is physical as well as emotional. absent parenting aside, look at the way ricky’s holding onto reggie’s collar. that grip is like ice and furthermore it’s also the first thing ricky does in confronting his own son. immediate physical invasion of space isn’t promising in parental maneuvers and yeah, we might’ve laughed all the time at how archie’s parents would grab him by the ear and drag him home when he was in trouble in the classic comics, it was all in good fun back in the day but reggie didn’t get the same, comical treatment. in fact, far from it.

it’s happened before. the way reggie cuts his father off right in the middle of his alleged apology, simply telling him to get out of his personal space? the fact thatreggie has to tell him to stop makes it seem like ricky is a creature of habit and that he defaults unhealthily to physical confrontation. and honestly who would be surprised ? reggie’s immediate, nearly nonchalant defense makes me think he’s done this many times before. whether or not ricky’s willingness to back off comes from him trying to improve himself as a father, his efforts don’t seem to be working.

reggie’s acting out has become a method of survival. this argument is bit of speculation on my end and comes from what makes sense to me, but in my eyes reggie’s acting out as an almost-adult is both an act of defiance and an act of survival. i headcanon that once reggie grew up and became more aware of his family’s ‘clout,’ he began to weaponize it. remember the ‘mantle family image’ thing i talked about earlier? jackpot. while reggie might have had to put up with abuse silently growing up, he soon figured out that if his father was gonna do anything, he couldn’t leave a mark. otherwise, people would ask questions. i mean, imagine if he went to the press with a sob story about all the times conglomerate boss ricky mantle hurt his own son… what would his family do then ? reggie doesn’t give a fuck about the family, and for that he has leverage. the mantles can’t have a scandal, that’s bad for business ! reggie holds that over his father’s head, knowing it’ll get him to back off the way he does in the last panels and ricky knows better than to test his son’s boldness. so reggie doing whatever he wants, knowing ricky can’t do jack shit to him ? that’shis power source. that’s what gets him out of bed every day. it’s where his hubris comes from, his arrogance. knowing he’s the shit because he is. this is where he finds his ground, making sure he never gets hurt again, and if he does it’s only on his terms. no one elses.

tl; dr: ricky and vicky mantle aren’t shit, there’s absolutely no way reggie has a brother, reggie raised himself for the most part since he was about 9 years old, reggie grew up and continues to grow up in an empty house, a good portion of reggie’s insecurities come from his childhood when he blamed himself for his parents not being around, and reggie is a victim of emotional and physical abuse as well as neglect.

so have mercy on him. he isn’t inherently evil and while his actions aren’t always excusable, it’s worth remembering that no one was there to teach him otherwise.

#I. ❰ HEADCANONS / METAS. ❱#reposting this bc im remaking reg's old blog

6 notes · View notes

ishouldhaveknownbetterdammit · 5 years

Text

Christianity and Homosexuality

So I got my car serviced today and they ended up needing to go get an air filter for me cause they didn’t have one in stock. While I was waiting, I ended up chatting with one of the service techs. I don’t remember how we got there, but at some point she mentioned her girlfriend and then said something to the extent of “I know it’s a sin, but I don’t see why it’s so much more wrong than my mom cheating on my dad...”

To which I said, “You see, I disagree...” Her face kind of went slack, so I continued with, “I don’t think that homosexuality is a sin.”

She seemed so surprised and kinda stumbled a bit before continuing the conversation. You see (and I don’t know whether or not this will surprise most of you), I had already told her that my degree was in Religion/biblical studies and that most of my work since graduating has been with religious groups...and, especially in our area, a pro-lgbt stance is sadly not what’s expected from religious people.

From there we ended up in a discussion on biblical doctrine in general but much also about how it pertains to homosexuality. From her reaction...I think I’d like to share 2 of the points we talked about on here as well.

(Let me take a moment here to say that I firmly believe that if your religion encourages you to be cruel or hate people, you need a new religion. Even back when I was firmly in the camp of “homosexuality is wrong,” I never agreed with any kind of discrimination. I was in favor of marriage equality because, in the same way that I think religions should be left to practice as they believe, I also think that no religion, including Christianity, should be allowed to use the government to enforce their beliefs. Also, I should point out that this is going to be a discussion on this from a Christian pov. If that’s not your thing, no big deal at all.)

Here goes...

1. Sodom and Gomorrah - This. Genesis 18-19. This is the story that get’s thrown in our faces ALL THE TIME. This is, as they say, the story of when God burned two cities to the ground because he could no longer tolerate their homosexual behavior. Right? Right??

Not exactly. Please consider this passage from Ezekiel 16: - (49)Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. (50)They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.

Did you catch that? The people of Sodom were horrible. They were themselves wealthy and arrogant and did not use that power and privilege to help those who needed it. And in Genesis we find out that when God sends 2 angels to go check it out and see if it’s as bad as people’s prayers say it is...They try to rape the angels and Lot ends up trying to protect/shelter them. But did you notice what didn’t get said?? “God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of same sex couples who loved each other and just wanted to be together.” Nope. That’s not said at all. There are places, such as Jude 7, that do mention the sexual depravity of Sodom...but even those don’t cite the problem specifically as homosexuality so much as promiscuity/depravity in general. Which brings me to my next point...

2. Context: Gosh...how on earth do I condense years and years of study in biblical interpretation into something understandable and short enough for a blog post? *sigh* Look, let me just say that when studying scripture, context is key. The Bible is a product of the time in which it was written, meant to be understood by people who lived thousands of years before us. Not considering context would be like me leaving a note to my husband while I’m out of town to “remember to take the trash out on Wednesday...” and then people find that note 2000 years later and go, “Oh shit! We’ve been taking the trash out of Tuesday! We’re all going to hell!!”

Maybe that example is a bit extreme, but my point is that while the Bible is excellent and there is so much we can learn from it...we need to be VERY careful not to take everything in there literally as a rigid rule meant to be followed exactly for all time. There are many many things in there written as advice for specific situations. We can learn from those, but we need to be careful in how we choose to understand them.

So what does context have to do with sexuality? This. Back in biblical times, the family unit was everything. It’s how you survived. Women needed a husband because they didn’t have their own rights in most cultures. People who had kids and lots of them were the ones who prospered because they had people to tend the land/flocks and carry on their name/legacy.

So with this society being what it was, men and women were GOING to get married and make as many kids as they could. Any homosexual relationship that existed was either going to be adultery/promiscuity or oftentimes as a part of pagan rituals. Of COURSE in that setting it went against Judeo/Christian teachings.

But things aren’t like that anymore. Our society isn’t built the same way. It’s possible for two same sex people who love each other to live together happily, have kids, and do well for themselves.

...

I know this is a long post, but I know that a lot of my mutuals also come from religious backgrounds and thought this may be a discussion y’all would be interested in. Feel free to add your thoughts. No hate/homophobia/anti-lgbt though. Trust me, anyone in the lgbt community has already been listening to those arguments our whole lives. You’re not going to tell us anything new.

#lgbt #lgbt community #lgbt christians #lgbt pride #rauko #story time with rauko #rauko rants #my life #my post

47 notes · View notes

spidersmiceandeverythingnice · 5 years

Text

Gonna write my scatterbrained Spicy Hot Takes on Agartha before the news is stale and I delete this annoying and boring chapter from my mental landscape, so bear with me:

I think Agartha’s main issue was just straight up poor writing. The Japanese direct translations being as downright offensive as they were is one thing - but overall, the chapter is just one plot contrivance after another. It tries so, so hard to go for a certain tone but can’t seem to stick to any one thing or idea. Disregarding themes about sexuality probably would have been the very best way to go about this chapter, since I think the most interesting part was the theme about storytelling and in-authenticity - we all know that That Line was annoying af in a game like FGO, but it CAN work in a series like Fate as a whole. I had a helluva long day at work so allow me to explain in the least scatter-brained way I can manage right now:

Here’s what I’m thinking: Scheherazade, whose name I guarantee I will spell wrong/differently every time I write it even though I’ve been able to pronounce it properly since I was thirteen (I was in a speaking competition and told some of the Thousand and One Nights using her framework as the opening monologue, long story short ANYWAY -) is traumatized by her ordeal with the king. This is a really good and interesting thing to explore! Fitting it in with the theme of storytelling - Scheherazade is deeply afraid of dying and will do whatever it takes to live, so she makes a fantasy world and fills it with legends, and feeds their energy to a Holy Grail. With this, and the power of a Demon God at her side, she plans to reveal magic to the human world in the most destructive fashion possible, allowing the fantastic to become ordinary, and destroying the Throne of Heroes itself in the process. Fate is a series were stories have power - but Scheherazade survived basically by telling the most fantastical, interesting tales she could and never finishing them. She always would pause in the middle, and say, “That’s all for tonight.” I think this is the kind of thing we can run with in terms of setting.

Dahut is the weirdest example because it’s the one story in the chapter that I know next to nothing about. At one point it’s mentioned that Dahut is impossible to summon as a Servant, and so Drake was “forced” into the role of the Pirate Princess. Ys is probably the weakest part of the chapter for that, but I did like the idea of her being “Drake Alter,” where Drake vibrantly pursues her goals and desires but takes nothing for granted; Dahut gives into her every whim and takes absolutely everything for granted. The conflict between “Drake” and “Dahut” should have been emphasized more instead of having the player/Da Vinci dismiss her as “Oh, it’s not Drake, except when she conveniently comes back to delivery us the MacGuffins Ex Machina in the eleventh hour.” Dahut has little connection to Drake - it’s not her story, but a role she was forced into because Scheherazade was building a very specific kind of world. Therefore it is inauthentic. Perhaps that’s all it needs to be in this context.

This can also work with the Amazons. Scheherazade never told stories of the Amazons, but she has access to basically all stories in the world through her Noble Phantasm - she learns that they are a society of warrior women who live without men, and so decides that they will be a society which oppresses men due to her fear/bitterness towards men after the ordeal she suffered through. The “oppressing men” plotline was honestly dumb all around but using the Amazons as a mechanism to explore Scheherazade's trauma would’ve been more interesting than just having them be the Big Bad before the Big Bad Columbus Reveal: Scheherazade doesn’t like fighting, but wishes that she had been strong enough to protect herself. Because she views herself as a coward and her ordeal with the king has complicated her view of sexuality - “I’m better suited to a bedchamber than a battlefield” - she uses the Amazons of Agartha as a mechanism to cope.

This brings us to Wu, whose design I’m still not happy about even though I think the in-story justification is somewhat fair. (Let Helena and Wu be gray-haired grannies together or so help me!) Wu was absolutely an authoritarian ruler who did, in fact, invade and conquer several nations and institute a terrifying network of secret police. In her later life, she was given to decadence - but her tenure on the throne showed her to be a highly competent administrator. Notably, she ruled over an era of religious tension and balanced matters quite well, and though she was accused of undoing meritocracy to put her supporters into power, many of the men she appointed held positions in government long after she’d died because they were actually good at their jobs. Wu has been heavily mythologized over the years - later Tang emperors and Neo-Confucian scholars wrote her off (Wu founded her own dynasty under her own name, so they kind of had to legitimize it somehow), she became associated the nine-tailed fox spirit thanks to a few popular novels and poems, etc., etc., etc. The crazy thing is that Wu actually left very few records of herself behind, apart from some poems. Even the inscription on her tomb is blank! People can say whatever they want about her - it’s extremely difficult to know the full truth of the matter without any objective observers in the field (and without Wu’s own words to give context/another story), especially if you don’t read any Chinese.

BTW - the first thing I learned history class is that when you’re dealing with primary sources, you must always remember that translators have agendas. Every word is a deliberate choice, and it changes the meaning from the original text. When dealing with historical documents, this is not always a good thing.

Scheherazade reads some, but not all of these stories, and integrates Wu into her world as the sadist empress with an iron grip on her decadent mythical city.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? It’s a lot, but I’m not done. Now we have to deal with Columbus - there’s “In Defense of Columbus” video is floating around in the Agartha tag, but I haven’t watched it in full and haven’t done like, any intensive research on Columbus in particular, so I’m going to apologize right now for any historical inaccuracies/misconceptions that I’m about to write. The point I want to make here mainly is that Columbus, like Wu, has been heavily, heavily mythologized for both good and evil at various points. The thing about Columbus that is also interesting is that the authenticity of his journals is or was apparently a subject of debate. The man who published most of them actually happened to be Bartolomew de las Casas - one of the founders/first vocal supporters of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The reason de la Casas supported this is because he believed that using African labor would be an improvement over enslaving the native populations of the New World. Soon after, he had a change of heart and devoted the rest of his life to fighting against slavery in all forms. De la Casas went on to be named a saint, and was possibly the first person in history to propose the idea of universal human rights - which is how I had heard of him until literally just this afternoon; I had no idea he’d ever supported the slave trade until I was looking up basic info about Columbus’s writings so I could write this long-ass post. History is full of complicated people.

But as I mentioned in Wu’s bit, it’s very important to note that in many ways, Columbus is literally just whatever people decide he is. Like, he never even set foot in any land that would become the United States, and yet he’s a huge symbol here! Along these lines, his amnesia would fit the theme of inauthentic storytelling, choosing what to read and what to believe in. Columbus regaining his memories was an understated moment, which is actually fucking fantastic because it could be used to really emphasize the choice that is being made here. He’s a Heroic Spirit who can choose to be whatever he wants. He can choose to be the simple hero-explorer that schoolchildren sing about, or he can choose to be the Big Bad, the first and perhaps most infamous conquistador. And he chooses to be the bad guy. That is so fuckin’ fantastic, y’all! I honest to God love that not only did FGO portray Columbus as a villain of history but that the bad reputation is something he chooses to maintain! I can write a list of Servants who were less than stellar people and got a makeover for Fate. Nero is probably one of the worst examples but like - Ozymandias absolutely owned slaves in his life as a pharaoh. Hercules and Medea murdered their own children. Asterios literally ate humans as the Minotaur. Gilles de Rais exists as a playable character. Jack the Ripper is your daughter. Hell, Nobunaga burned temples with the monks still inside - but she feels bad about it now! Enough digressing but I a hundred percent get why Japanese fans found Columbus “refreshing” at his introduction. He owns his cruelty, his desire to exploit others - he challenges the narrative that everyone is redeemable because he doesn’t even want to be redeemed, he just wants to get rich and famous, and he doesn’t give a shit who he steps over in the process! Like, Columbus said, “I’m just doing what comes naturally,” at one point when he still had amnesia, so when he got his memory back and turned on the player, I really would’ve liked for him to say is something like, “You’ve already decided that I’m the bad guy, right? You know my story, and I’m nothing if not a man of my word.”

These kinds of questions/debates could have been used to emphasize the themes of Agartha. Legends are what people decide they are. People make choices and history decides whether they were good or evil or important retroactively. Can you know what someone is like by reading a translation of their poetry? Can you judge a king’s reign by the words of their successors or their rivals? Does the context of a story matter? This all could have been super interesting to explore!

Like I said, the main theme of Agartha being “inauthentic storytelling” could have been hella, hella good considering that this is a world created by Scheherazade’s fears and trauma feeding into her escapist desires. But Minase’s incompetence as a writer made everything so hamfisted and awkward that everything just suffered under his desire to insert his fetishes at every moment. It was so obvious that he didn’t read any material for old Fate characters - like Astolfo you poor sweet thing, you deserved so much better! - and even the new characters that he clearly did research on, like Columbus, fell flat because he couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say beyond mildly-to-extra offensive sex jokes.

#i'm tired so i may not reply to any responses but i had to get this out of my system because it's been nagging at me #like... it could've been good #it could've been at least decent if minase just... knew how to deal with a theme and read up on some fate character materials #but he didn't do that and so now we have This Mess #fate grand order #agartha nonsense #also disclaimer i did the baaaare minimum of research for parts and didn't even dig up my Empress Wu Research Paper docs #but like now that i've got this off my chest i'm gonna be done wasting time thinking about agartha since it was just so....#not even like that it was especially bad it was just... lifeless and insipid #thank goodness holmes told us it wasn't even canon lmao

7 notes · View notes

sonofhistory · 5 years

Text

Ron Chernow: Tales of False Information, Hypocrisy and Sucking Up.

I’m not doing this in a pretty essay because I wanted to get the taint of his name from my keyboard quick enough. Often enough, I exclaim my opinion of Ron Chernow. What comes afterwards is a bucket of asks questioning my reasoning, to which I have explained on numerous occasions. Today, once and for all, I will answer it in a clear formate so that I may 1) Stop being asked of Chernow and 2) Give you all the information to choose properly when reading up on your history! Let’s begin.

This is Ron Chernow:

Ah, yes. The man himself. Historian, best-selling writer, journalist... you name it. Kinda looks like your uncle who gets you a child’s Christmas present even though you are seventeen years old. If you are interested in history, or follow it to some extent you most certainly have heard his name in the past. Whether it be in a book store, online, or for your especially crafty people--this blog ;) You are bound to be able to recognize his name. He has published titles such as Titan, The Death of the Banker, Grant & Washington to name a few with the most popularity or catch among readers and stats. However, if it is one biography of which stands out the most against anything it is: Alexander Hamilton. You know that big yellow book?

I can assure you, that while this book looks to big and bright as to blot out the sun: it is nothing but a walk in the park. The biography delves heavily into the life of the first Secretary Treasury of the United States in a manner which has never been performed to such an impressive extent for the historical figure before. From the poor island to by Washington’s side and then the forest of Wekawken to his last breath beside Eliza, just as David McCullough did with John Adams, Ron Chernow masterfully articulates all of the information in a conscious and extraordinary manner. So, perhaps you ask: why, Presley, do you hold an utter disdain for Ron Chernow if you think it was good?? Well to answer your question:

Because he does too much sucking up.

Sucking up.

But what do I mean by that? I mean rather poignantly that if Ron Chernow could, he would get down on his knees and please Hamilton in any which manner that he wishes. He sucks up. Alexander Hamilton is solely one example of this manner of creating a larger and life picture of the man. I have stated all this before, in my review on this book, but today I am going to tackle a few reasons why you shouldn’t rush out to read from Chernow on this interesting figure. From not allowing Hamilton to take account for his wrong deeds, to blaming the people in his life to blatant lies among the text. Ron Chernow, is, in my honest and collective opinion, a lying and untruthful historian.

First and foremost: bias. You’ve heard this word before often coming from me on this blog regarding historians. In my context, it means an author who does not take both prospectives in an argument and is always inclined to one specific side. Perfect examples of how historians have been masterful in avoiding bias is Jon Meacham in Thomas Jefferson and John Ferling in Jefferson vs Hamilton. Those authors were able to perfectly walk the line between giving their figure’s opinions and being able to tear their views to shreds. Ron Chernow does not walk the line. Actually he pretty much fell the thousand feet away from the line to his doom in hell. Strong wording? You bet. Chernow is EXTREMELY BIAS. By bias in Chernow context, I mean that he does not understand how to incorporate differing opinions into his passages or know how to interpret Hamilton in what manner he was: a brilliant but extremely flawed man with a multitude of moral issues who constructed the country from scratch with the rest of them. Instead, Chernow chooses to view Hamilton is a divergent light.

So what does this do for his character? Hamilton’s. It amplifies it. Chernow spends the entire biography attempting to convince how holy, forgotten and sacred Hamilton is that he entirely disregards that Hamilton is already interesting by himself! We don’t need useful false information or bias information. For example, Chernow portrays Hamilton in a light of “do no wrong” and that is was everyone around him of which had issue. For a few examples:

Thomas Jefferson started all of the arguments between them and he was evil. Not like Hamilton did anything to be either...

Maria Reynolds is a stupid whore and she seduced poor Hamilton into banging her.

James Monroe just stopped being friends with him and backstabbed him. Lmao. Right.

It is Eliza’s fault that Hamilton cheated on her because she was pregnant all of the time.

It was Eliza’s fault being Hamilton needs to protect his fragile masculinity and bang other women.

It is Eliza’s fault.

IT IS ELIZA’S FAULT FOR EVERYTHING.

This brings me onto another point about characterization. So, in the wake of him having to amplify Hamilton to his extraordinary human bring who cannot do any wrong, he had to, at the same time, ruin the characters and personalities of the people around Hamilton. He spends the entire book trying to say that it was Eliza who was the hero but then completely goes against his claim just to bring attention and say that Eliza was responsible for the largest blot on Hamilton’s character. He trashes James Monroe by putting him the light of a Hamilton or Jefferson wannabe. He characterizes Jefferson the wrong way and takes numerous amounts of time just to dig at his character in the text like a middle schooler talking shit about someone. The thing is? Jefferson sucks! Yeah! We all know that: Jefferson is a piece of shit. However, Chernow doesn’t diss Jefferson in a way that is so bring to light how disgusting he was, he does it just to prove how much “cooler” Jefferson was to him and in turn ignores all of his subject’s flaws. James Madison is portrayed pathetically as well. Thought I’d mention... I believe the most horrifying thing, however, is his incorrect take on Maria Reynolds. That she was a stupid whore and Hamilton couldn’t resist her beautiful, sexy and entrancing sex sex sex.

Alright. I spoke enough about character. Now allow us to tackle a fundamental reason why Chernow drops the ball in all of his biographies. The sacred ball. The sacred, holy ball that all historians must follow.

CITE YOUR GOD DAMN SOURCES.

Chernow puts information in there that you cannot find anywhere else. I mean... anywhere. But... what do I mean? I mean it is no where. No sources, no archives: nothing. A lot of his information is completely and utterly false! He places it in there just to serve his own agenda! It is completely crazy. Here are a few examples I noticed (there are many):

He states that Hamilton never owned any slaves and places him in the light of an extreme abolitionist. WHICH IS COMPLETELY FALSE. Chernow shows him as a fervent abolitionist and only mentions on one page in one sentence the possiblity that Alexander Hamilton owned slaves. Alexander Hamilton owned one or two house slaves, he married into one of the richest slave owning family, he bought slaves for his family member and Chernow tries to say this was all against his will–seriously? Newsflash, Alexander Hamilton was NOT an abolitionist.

Stated that Hercules Mulligan was in the New York Manumission Society yet he is not in any records and was owning slaves all throughout his life.

The story about Martha Washington’s tomcat is also untrue and the Boston Globe stated the emailed Chernow multiple times to no answer.

Let us also not forgot to mention the incorrect labeling on the William S. Hamilton picture.

As you can see: Chernow puts in facts and flowery information in order to pump up his nice thesis. He spends so long trying to do exactly what David McCullough did masterfully: bring a figure up from the depths and turn him in one fellow swoop into an icon. Sure, Chernow has gotten that done. He has a musical, which is pretty amazing, and everything. But masterfully? Debatable.

At the end of the day, Alexander Hamilton is just one example of Chernow’s dirty deed. He did the same thing in Washington btw which is why I don’t recommend it. I must giver Chernow props however: his writing style is complex but fascination, interesting and he does immense research for his writing. Kudos on that.

If you are looking for entertaining book with many facts and nearly a thousand pages of information on one person: you will go to the right now. I am not asking you to not read Chernow because in the end, he actually is quite good. What I am saying is that when you are going to read Chernow: you will need to take everything he says with a big pinch of salt. Because you may never know what is fact, what is reality and when he is crossing between being a historian and being a fan boy.

Take Chernow with a pinch of salt. A big pinch of salt. A whole thing of salt. A bucket of salt. A damn house of salt. As you are reading, you are going to have to question everything that he is writing about and you’ll never know fiction and fanboying between truth and reality. Want to relax instead? Come to me and I’ll recommend you anything better than him.

#got long #but here you go #ah finally maybe now I can #be done with him #ron chernow #Alexander hamilton #us history #history #pressles musing #american history

191 notes · View notes

mcl-mia · 6 years

Text

Wizardess Heart Boys and the Relationships Between Them

//it's 4 a.m. as i'm starting this, so you know what that means! more ramblings about wizardess heart because i can't seem to sleep.

so, as many people in the WH+ fanbase know, solmare likes to do a lot of group events. like, a LOT a lot. these days, only some of the most popular characters tend to get their own events and spin offs (still waiting for azusa and leon's birthday events, solmare). most often though, solmare likes to do group events in pairs and forces the players to choose between one ending/one character. in all honesty, this isn't necessarily a bad thing! it's really good for developing relationships between characters that exist in the universe. but... the problem is that solmare just doesn't go through with all that they could, or are even ridiculously repetative with what pairs they go for. so, let me just express my problems with a few notable ones that come to mind, and give solmare some ideas on what they COULD do (it's unlikely that anyone from their HQ will see this anyways, but a girl can dream).

to start off, let's start off with the ones i'm not too pleased with.

Elias and Joel: look, i really like the idea of these two interacting. the whole tsundere/brutal honesty pairing is not a bad idea at all, but their relationship is executed so awkwardly. EVERYTHING revolves around them being rivals or competing for liz's affections. not only is this extremely tiresome to see at this point (especially when it seems as though joel apparently has no friends whatsoever), but it's hilariously inconsistent. on joel's profile, elias is the one introducing joel, and elias states that he LIKES joel. when i saw they were being paired for the first time in the overnight field trip event, i was excited to see them get along! but nope. for some reason "unknown", they pretty much hated each other. can't y'all just let joel have one friend without him being a jealous pissbaby, solmare?

Serge and Cerim: solmare, you could have done so much good with these two. you have cerim, a sheltered boy who knows nothing of the outside world and desperately wants to explore it, and serge, who has literally travelled the world... and all you think of doing with them is pairing them for ronny/taffy antics. that's it, that's all their ever paired for (maybe for pastel aesthetics sometimes). they just never DO anything with cerim and serge themselves, it's always overshadowed by ronny and taffy and how much they love their masters. they have SO much potential to be great together, but nooooo.

Guy and Leslie: this one just kinda pisses me off because we're never really given any context OR content for it. in leslie's route, guy states that he and leslie are "more like brothers", but why? WHY are you two more like brothers, and how did you get to be so close? and why is this "closeness" never shown? i know that everybody sucked leslie's dick in his route, but they should at least back their friendship up in event stories (they are together in the 3rd anniversary story, which is a decent start, but give us MOOORRREEEE).

Elias and Luca: the most yaoi bait couple of all yaoi bait in wizardess heart. don't get me wrong, i'm still a fan of their dynamic and what they represent for each other, but ohh my god i wish that they had more time together. these two have an interesting rivalry, and it's honestly such a shame that solmare almost never does anything with them. just... just ONCE i want for them to just chill and say "you're not as bad as i say you are". in luca's route, elias is shown to still care for luca and his wellbeing, but elias never gets a chance to even say it. likewise, luca never really gets a chance to say that he doesn't really hate elias per se, but is rather just more annoyed due to his own insecurities. as others have pointed out, elias and luca has what each other needs (in the sinplest way possible, elias needs to relax more , and luca needs to be a little more serious), and it's such a shame that the relationship between these two is pushed aside. especially when they have one of the most interesting dynamics in the entire game (and has the potential to be a healthy rivalry).

Klaus and Elias: (man, a lot of these involve elias, huh?) as someone who has two older sisters herself, klaus and elias' relationship disturbs me at times. on several occasions, elias mentions how cruel his brothers could be to him at times, but klaus is most often named as the perpetrator (well, technically klaus is the only one who can be named, since we still don't have the name of the eldest goldstein brother). klaus has been mentioned AND shown to have crossed some lines (at one point elias has mentioned how klaus left him stranded on a mountain for two days in order to force him to learn how to ride a broom, and don't even get me started on the mess that was the performing festival), which often makes elias appear to be afraid of klaus. not only that, but klaus is also shown to be a mentor figure to elias; someone who elias looks up to (and even puts him on an unreachable pedestal in a way). klaus will often comment on what problems he has with elias' spells, but the way he comments on them makes them come off as more as insults rather than pieces of contstructive criticism. sure, you could write that off as klaus not "sugar coating" things, but there's still a definite line between giving someone a critique and insulting the way they do things, and klaus tends to lean more towards the latter. he'll say "you need to be more creative with your spells" to elias, but he leaves it at that (which is especially hard for elias when the boy has lived his whole life by textbooks). he doesn't offer tips to help someone improve, he just says what's wrong with what they're doing. THAT is what can be so damaging to elias. do i think that klaus doesn't care about elias? absolutely not. i just think that klaus doesn't realize how much he's really hurting elias with his words and actions (granted that elias doesn't really tell klaus this, but how can he?). i really, truly wish that we could get more genuine moments between the two where elias can be upfront with klaus about how he feels, and for klaus to completely recognize elias' strength and hard work. i really, REALLY want their relationship to be healthier than it is.

now that that's all said and done, let's give solmare some ideas for pairs, because goddamm solmare you need to give us new pairs already.

Sigurd and Serge: you CANNOT tell me that sigurd not only doesn't know serge, but also isn't bros with him. tell me sigurd's side of the story about the real randy's death. more specifically: how much he was involved, more about klaus' reaction/ways of coping with the situation, and how he views the situation as a whole (i.e. does he think serge is to blame, does this damage his relationship with him, did he want to console serge as well but never got the chance, etc.).

Sigurd and Elias: listen. i crave a desire to see sigurd act like a big brother to elias and baby him to all hell. give me this, solmare. DON'T LIMIT ALL OF SIGURD'S INTERACTIONS WITH THE GOLDSTEINS TO JUST KLAUS. DON'T DO THAT TO ME.

Azusa/Serge and Leon: this are pairs that i have been wanting for so long. i put them in the same category because their context is still the same: azusa and serge are deeply connected to unicorns and leon himself is a unicorn. i wanna see leon getting an attachment to serge because leon can feel something special about him. give me leon roasting azusa for being "weird and suspicious". SOMETHING along those lines, solmare.

Joel and Vincent: YAOI BAIT NUMBER 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO. but for real though, i want to see more interactions between joel and vincent that don't really include liz. they had really great chemistry in the gedonelune costume party event, and i would really love to see more of that, but they're almlst never paired together. >:(

Guy and Glenn: i've expressed this before, these two are connected by one really big asshole in their lives, and i just... really want them to talk about it. they were both abused by the same person, and i think it would be great if they got a chance to do some serious talking about it.

Luca and Joel: a more fluff-based pairing, these two can have some of the best witty banter, i can feel it. joel is a complete savage and luca is a little shit, it's a match made in hell.

Yukiya and Leon: also a more fluff pairing, but LET THE TWO FURRIES PUREST BOYS IN THE SERIES BE FRIENDS GODDAMMIT. they're so chill too, and i just want them to like go on a picnic or something and be surrounded by all the wildlife like the true disney princesses they are.

Klaus and Azusa: not going to lie, i really want to see how the most popular boy and the least popular boy interact with each other. grump vs. grump. only one will survive.

Azusa and Glenn: okay, to be honest, i really want these two to interact in the form of a magic battle. not one to the death, but i really want to see how glenn's staff and azusa's symbols match up. but if we really want more story stuff, having glenn and azusa talk about their younger siblings (and how they both lost them, although glenn eventually got his back) would be really great.

Yukiya and Sigurd: these two boys both come from big families (and are the eldest child), so i would love for them to trade stories about their younger siblings. maybe they could do some holiday shopping and recommend gifts to each other.

Mel and Yukiya: these two boys give no fucks whatsoever, and i would really love to see them out do each other in that department.

Cerim and Vincent: kind of in the same vein as cerim and serge, but without the familiars doing all the talking. vincent could tell cerim all about his adventures (or at least the ones that aren't top secret), and could maybe even get cerim to loosen up a bit.

so... yeah. there's my super long post about relationships between the boys. here's hoping that solmare will do some of these in the future.

but you know what would also be cool? an event that's just about the boys and their relationships with each other. no liz, no thinking about liz, no being jealous of each other, just wholesome boys content. give me that, solmare. i'd sell my soul for that (and i'm sure many others would as well).

#wizardess heart #not mcl #mia speaks #i could have gotten into a few other possible relationships #but in all honesty there just isn't much substance between them all #for example. mel and cerim. what would they even begin to talk about.#i can understand not having all the boys be friends and all (b/c that's pretty impossible)#but i really just don't want all of the paired events be just about the boys fighting over liz #because that's just beating a dead horse. for three years straight now #also sorry to like everyone because i have no idea how read mores work on mobile lmao #i'll probably edit it later once i'm on my laptop lmao #hire me solmare

32 notes · View notes

laughingpinecone · 7 years

Text

Yuletide letter

I am laughingpineapple on AO3

Aw yeah, Yuletide time again, here we go! I love all these characters and canons and, barring DNWs, I'm interested in any story about them you might already have in mind. Here's a list of ideas if you prefer to start from a prompt.

Likes: worldbuilding, slice of life (doubly so if the event the fic focuses on is canon-specific), missing moments, 5+1 and the likes, bonding and emotional support/intimacy (platonic too!!), loyalty, casefic, surrealism, established relationships, future fic, hurt/comfort or just comfort from the ample canon hurt, throwing characters into non-canon environments, banter, functional friendships/relationships between dysfunctional individuals, unexplained mysteries, bittersweet moods, journal/epistolary fic where applicable, dreams and memories and identities, and did I mention worldbuilding

Cool with: what-ifs, AUs, any tense, any pov, any rating, plotty, not plotty, IF, nerdy canon references, unrequested characters popping up

DNW: bleak endings, rape, PWP, non-canonical children, unrequested ships, canon retellings

***

Ghost Trick: Jowd, Cabanela

The fandom that got me into Yuletide to begin with! I love the whole cast and their intricate connections, but Jowd and Cabs are my forever faves. I ship them dearly, and I ship them dearly with Alma when she's alive, but I'm also always interested in gen about them as long as the bond between them is central in the fic. I didn't request her because if you're down for, say, case fic with or without Sissel's help, I didn't want to make any additional characters necessary. I just want the fic to star Jowd and Cabanela but also feel free to use the whole extended family aka her, Sissel, Pigeon Man, Kamila, Lynne and/or Missile at will! Or Emma or whatever.

Cabanela has Jowd as his whole motivation, and while Jowd's family comes first for him, we know they were close and he cares for his BF(F) in his own way. I love Cabanela with his endless energy and confidence and Jowd's fatalism, their occasional role reversals (who'd have pegged Cabanela for the hard-working guy and Jowd for the one who'd swoop in and get all the merit!), their banter and trust and tacit understanding, how after five years of not talking to each other and thinking Cabanela hated him, Jowd got that watch and understood what it meant and came through for his friend. I love their tragedy and the prospect of a happier life in the new timeline, with Sissel watching over them (and chasing Cabanela's scarf which is clearly a fantastic cat toy). I love their design, their clothes and the shapes and details of their bodies, so if you ever want to indulge in physical details, not necessarily in a sexual context, stuff like a very soft hug with a majestic ticklish beard, either of their hair getting in their eyes when wet, or Jowd stepping on the damn scarf while Cabanela is hopping downstairs, please do indulge to your heart's content.

I think the game implies that Jowd, Sissel, Yomiel and Missile have their memories of the old timeline, while everyone else does not, so I'm always interested in stories set in the new present that use this imbalance – maybe Cabanela eventually gets briefed on what happened, but it's still not the same as remembering.

A story could be focused on those weird presents they reportedly gave each other – surprise me, or maybe in the new timeline Jowd gifts the framed gun to Cabanela, that missing piece of evidence that would've proven his innocence, now that Cabs doesn't need it and doesn't even know what it's for?

Or maybe it could explore a what-if scenario where Yomiel is stopped and redeemed on the Yonoa, but there is no timeline reset, and Jowd and Cabanela are left to mend what's left of their lives.

Or any slice of life plot in and around Jowd's household is always welcome. Cabanela with his unwavering loyalty and enthusiasm, and that absolute confidence that can be charming or off-putting depending on the person and situation, and Jowd and Alma allowing themselves to be on the receiving end of that much affection, and giving him a place to rest. And at least Jowd has a personality that’s sturdy enough that Cabs can bounce off it, a charismatic presence of his own with his rough humor, physical prowess, brittle emotional sphere and occasional stonewalling.

Obduction: Caroline Farley

I was sure I'd fall in love with the puzzles, I wasn't sure this brand new world would captivate me as much as D'ni ever did, and yet here I am. There's so much to explore about Hunrath's unique setup, with people coming in from more than two centuries, adapting, sharing their memories of Earth. The tree and all the questions and philosophical views that come with it, the seeds and that starry expanse at the heart of it all... and then Soria and then Maray and Kaptar, which we know so little about.

I'd like to see it all filtered through Farley's eyes because she's my fave, and also because I think her background is pretty interesting in and by itself, having been pinecone'd away from Earth when she was three years old. It makes for an interesting counterpoint to the born-and-bred Earthlings like CW with his nostalgia (for the record, I'd read platonic banter between these two for days), but she's no Hunrath native either. And the way her house got swapped into such a central position and became a hub for the community... cool stuff. And what about the mysterious deceased John Farley, who can't be her blood brother because we're told the only relative who came with her was her grandmother, who is highly unlikely to be her husband because of the way “Farley” seems to be used as her maiden name (the house she was swapped with is “Farley's house”...) and who is buried next to a man? An adopted brother maybe? What made her end her stint as a mayor so suddenly? What's a meditation with the Arai feel like, how does it change her outlook on her daily life? What weird thing happened on Hunrath one day? What’s daily routine over there? What required a team-up with dear Josef and did she think a little higher of him afterwards (I'll love Josef if Cyan won't, he wasn't the right mayor during those trying times but the man has his merits damn it)? I nominated the three main characters because they’re the only ones who get fleshed out properly but feel free to include any of the other people we see mentioned!

Twin Peaks: Albert Rosenfield [TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN SPOILERS. Final Dossier prompts to be added asap, I'd like Mark Frost to know that dropping new canon right after signups two years in a row is highly yuletidephobic)

Ships: Albert/Dale, Albert/Harry and Albert/Dale/Harry.

DNWs, mostly in the sense of topics fraught with complicated fandom opinions I wouldn't risk in an exchange: Albert/Constance and hell God baby damn no we ain't talkin about Judy.

So the story ends (or, ahem, artistically cliffhangers, as it does) with the fiery pacifist locked behind a tired, stoic mask, shooting a friend with shaky hands and taking pride in it, and not being even greeted by the man he set out to find before the asshole disappeared again. Cheers to the FBI. Needless to say, I'd like to see my favorite character find himself again, on his own or with the aid of any combination of characters of your choosing. It's never too late to shovel yourself out of the shit, Albert!

I could see him resigning on the spot (especially if Gordon and Diane also disappeared?) and staying in town to heal. Does he go to Harry, does he end up adopted by the Trumans, does he find some of his fire back by shouting at Doris and bonding with her that way, to remarkable mutual benefit? Does Frank, in all earnest and from personal experience, recommend him a hat to cover the hair loss? Or does he end up bonding with Hawk, how would their snark and general judgeyness complement each other? Does he make it to Bookhouse Boy eventually, and what kind of adventures or simple late night chats at the Bookhouse could take place then?

In a year or two or five, does Hawk find Coop like Margaret predicted, under the moon on Blue Pine mountain? How do they reconnect after so long? Do they fall in love again, as changed, tired men? I find it an interesting Albert/Harry and eventually Albert/Harry/Dale scenario, filled with bittersweet possibilities. An Albert/Dale option could be that Albert does not stay in town and Coop goes to find him, and they start again wherever Albert lives now.

Whether he resigns or not, does he keep in touch with Constance? Do they exchange punny second opinions and gallows humor in general over Skype?

He and Denise are on a first name basis, how did they bond, what's their average night out like, or what happened in the Philly office back when Gordon was still their boss that Gordon could absolutely never find out about?

Ditto Diane, it's so easy to picture them smoking together and presenting a united “fuck this and fuck you” front in the office, so what was their friendship like, how did it continue after Diane [got tulpa'd and] resigned? Onto even more painful territory, if Diane didn't disappear in pt17 or if she eventually comes back on her own, how would they rebuild their friendship? Do they come to terms with that horrible day when he shot her? Does she remember those 20 years of their friendship and therefore also dying by his hand, or does she not remember, and so he did kill 'a' Diane along with all their time together, and found another one he didn't even know he'd lost so long ago?

Tammy is pretty much his padawan, what's her apprenticeship like? I love how she's technically Gordon's protege but he's the one who takes time to talk to her and /know/ her (like the fact that she gets carsick). Does she ever get to make him talk about himself? About what this search for Coop means to him?

Did he... did he ever run into Wally by accident in any random corner of the country, and how'd that go down? Like, ignoring the Andy and Lucy connection (although I do adore Andy and Lucy), just Wally as his own very peculiar person, bumping into Albert or being involved in a case or whatever.

Ditto Jade – she's got her brand of pragmatism and of managing to come out unscathed and unflapped by supernatural nonsense, it'd be fun to bounce her off another rare sensible soul like Albert who could easily turn up in Vegas working on a blue rose case.

Much to Albert's chagrin, feel free to double down on the canon-appropriate weirdness! But also on the canon-appropriate cheese...

#letter

3 notes · View notes

gaiatheorist · 6 years

Text

“Social validation feedback loop.”?

Damn, the article about a former Facebook executive raising concerns that social media is ‘ripping society apart’ doesn’t have comments enabled, I can’t collect up-ticks, or start a lively debate with strangers. Yes, that’s sarcasm, and yes, I am well aware that this platform is just another ‘validation loop.’

I have Facebook, I was late to that particular party, I drifted over from ‘Friends Reunited’ in about 2008, I’ve had a couple of Twitter accounts, and deleted my SnapChat app without ever using it. WhatsApp is there, for that one former colleague who isn’t ‘on’ social media, oh, and there’s the email group for that other former colleague. I assume he’s in one of the WhatsApp groups, but he might not be, he says ‘cell-phone’, and was still carrying one of those PDA devices around with him until quite recently. See, it’s getting complicated already, all these discrete (sometimes indiscreet) pockets-of-people in my pocket. Have a borderline-obsessive pocket-tap while you’re there, to combat the very 21st Century phone-fear. I’m fine, I could give it up any time I wanted to, I don’t ‘have to’ check it every time it beeps, buzzes, or pings at me.

I do understand the point the article is making, it is very easy to allow social media to become something of an addiction, I fell into that particular trap with my first experience of Twitter, watching my follower-count creep up above 2000, and loving the re-tweet and ‘star’ numbers clocking up. I once had a ‘conversation’ with Tim Minchin, about whether to use singular or plural terminology in respect of The Beatles, and I ‘talked down’ Sinead O’Connor during a mental health crisis. The Jeremy Clarkson re-tweet attracted an absolute shit-storm pile-on of me being accused of plagiarising a TV show I’ve never seen. Swings and roundabouts.

It was new, it was exciting, I’m chuckling because I read ‘American Gods’ on the recommendation of a Facebook ‘friend’, and did see the ‘Media’ and ‘Technical Boy’ characters very clearly, in context of some of my low-level approval-seeking behaviours. ‘Did’, not ‘do.’, I’m 40, not 14, “I remember when all this was fields.”, and such, as much as I avoid contact with most flesh-people, ‘IRL’ is the real world, my like-whoring phase was short-lived. There was an incident-of-sorts, a person I’d ‘blocked’ on a specific platform made reference to something I hadn’t mentioned elsewhere, and it rattled me. Cross-overs and conspiracies, I still have the occasional pointless-perusal of ‘people you may know’ on Facebook, some of them I do know, some, I don’t want to.

On a cosmic scale, social media is ‘new’, 20 years ago, if you wanted to make plans with someone, you phoned them, or met up in person. If you wanted to show them your new sofa, you invited them to your house, to see it. (Why you’d want to do that, I don’t know, I just happened to be looking at the sofa.) 200 years ago, it would have been hand-written letters, taking days to arrive by horse and cart. Evolution, with much less pointless anxiety about knowing that the recipient had ‘seen’ the message, and not replied back in the ‘olden days.’

The instant-availability is new, no more waiting days for the society gossip pages to say which lady had the best hat, now everyone can broadcast to everyone else that they have a new hat, and then sulk when ‘not enough’ people ‘like’ it. I’m us/them-ing, because I don’t seek approval for the same things as some of my contemporaries. I think that the last ‘selfie’ I posted on social media was a deeply unflattering close-up of my eyes and nose, after a bottle of shower-gel hit me in the face. (Don’t ask, it’s me, isn’t it?) Posed-perfection on Facebook, from the “Don’t mess up my hair!” types, that’s not my world. I am aware that I do seek approval, but it’s never aesthetic, or vanity related. I am more than the sum of my parts.

Society is changing, and the pace is more rapid than anything humanity has experienced to date. During my wakeful pre-dawn hours, I ‘could’ monkey about online, and get myself into all manner of mischief. I choose not to, as much as there’s nothing else to do at 3am, starting an argument with another insomniac, or someone in a different time-zone isn’t particularly productive. 24/7 and everything-instant is new-ish, ‘everything’ being part of the problem. A few people I genuinely respect deliberately seek out content they disagree with, to be fair, it’s not difficult, I do my fair share of head-shaking, and muttering “No, it’s not, you knob.” at all manner of things. The ‘bubble’ phenomenon isn’t new, it just didn’t need a name, most people have generally chosen who they do-and-don’t interact with, before we had social media, we just limited contact with people we didn’t want to share oxygen with.

Personally, social media is not ‘ripping apart’ society for me. I’m not unique, or even unusual, I just understand it differently to the ‘other’ approval-seekers. I’m insular and isolated by choice, even before my disability made ‘outside’ social interactions much more complicated, I didn’t engage socially very much. It would have been very easy for me, newly disabled, and recently unemployed, to ‘fall into’ the internet to fill the ‘need’ for interaction and acceptance/approval. I’ve put ‘need’ in quote-marks, being that most dangerous of things, an isolated human. Other people disapprove of that, to varying degrees, but they do eventually stop pestering, after enough don’t-want-to responses to their I’m-right-you’re-doing-life-wrong insistence.

I suppose that pressure-to-conform is a part of it. “EVERYONE is going, why won’t you come?” and “This is the best face-crayon in the world, you NEED one!” I’m resistant, downright stubborn, obstinate about not buying-in to fads, or being ‘in with the crowd’. ‘My’ version of society isn’t being ‘ripped apart’ by social media, my Facebook account is only still open because my son uses the Messenger facility instead of text-messaging me. I flag/report concerning content re-posted into my Twitter timeline, and, occasionally ‘call out’ misleading news, rather than believing everything I read. (Or ‘Like and share to win this improbable prize’ guff on Facebook, but there’s no point trying to educate some of my ‘friends’ on there, I just ignore them.)

I don’t think ‘society is being ripped apart’ by social media, but I’m not glued to my phone-screen when I ‘should’ be giving real people my attention. If I’m ‘with’ a person, they have my attention, my phone can beep or buzz as much as it likes, I don’t ‘have to’ check, or respond, because anyone who ‘knows’ me won’t be offended if I don’t reply immediately. (I do have to advise ‘new’ contacts about my tendency to fall asleep mid-message, though, brain injury fatigue will wipe me out with alarming regularity, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was deliberately being rude, unless I actually was.)

My son doesn’t bring his phone to the dinner table, and if my phone buzzes or beeps when I’m with someone, I leave it. “Do you need to get that?” is rarely a ‘need’, but a ‘want’, I ‘need’ my heating to be fixed, and I ‘need’ clarification on a medical appointment, and my PIP disability tribunal, but if anyone messages or phones when I’m in an appointment, or with another person, I’ll just have to get back to them. ‘My’ society doesn’t include family gatherings, or social outings, but, even when it did, I wasn’t constantly checking timelines or news-feeds. I’m between generations, the in-laws complained about the grandchildren ‘always on their phones’, being ‘anti-social’, and couldn’t see that the young adults WERE being sociable, just in a new way.

Society as-was, for the in-laws, and possibly my own parents has changed, but I challenge the blanket-bad assertions. Bits of the internet are very bad indeed, it’s more a case of educating people to identify them than monster-shouting that Facebook is a portal to hell itself. Work is needed with the younger people, who have ‘always’ had social media in their lives, but some of my generation are already validation-trapped, not the best role models. The validation-loop, the desire for affirmation from others needs to be challenged, to my mind, it’s a negative behaviour, eroding self-confidence and self-worth in vulnerable individuals. (There’s an expand-out on vulnerability to grooming, while-ever the external-affirmation is ‘needed.’)

Social media is not ‘destroying’ society. In some ways, social media is becoming society. ‘Real’ society progressed, from burning witches, to abolishing slavery, to votes for women, and acceptance of non-binary identities, social media can do the same. In the right hands.

0 notes

notwhereiwas · 7 years

Text

Why Women Marched Against Trump

Backstory:

I had spent a bit too much time on social media following the mudslide that is the new Trump administration and a peculiar situation unfurled. A male friend of mine posted a photo meant to critique the Women’s March by using photos of assumed Muslim women being stoned, wearing Hijab’s and being abused in various other manners. The intention of the post (supposedly originally written by a woman) was to discredit the march, with the implication that they had no idea why women marched because American women, come on, we have it so great and we should just be thankful we don’t have the life of a Middle Eastern Woman.

I decided to reply that I found it interesting that suddenly he had actual feelings for the things the women pictured dealt with, when prior to the march, not a word was said. Then, a friend of my friend then engaged in a conversation with me online. He questioned the things I mentioned, and questioned why I never did anything about the previous assaults, sexual harassment and various other illegal activities that applied to me for the simple fact that I was a woman.

The following is a transcript of some of the conversation, if you’re so inclined:

Me: I absolutely adore how many posts I'm seeing about males bringing up how women from other countries are suffering...when they gave zero shits about those same oppressed women when zero American women were marching.

Friend: i am a firm believer in understanding the truth. and the truth is.. that women in america have it great! men in america have it great! black people in america have it great. same with all other races and genders. america is great. and to be blessed with this american life, is ignored and forgotten by many. especially those protesting for the wrong reasons. for example.. the article above shows how american women have it great in america. i volunteered in our military for the sole purpose to serve protect and defend those given rights. so those who protest need to not act like they dont exist because they do in fact exist and are very much real

Me:Would you kindly tell that to the average 3 women A DAY murdered by their partners in the U.S.? I love that you think we have it great, and by God as my witness we certainly do in so many regards that I'm thankful for, but until you've had a penis inside your vagina against your will, until you are denied told you can't have your tubes tied because "your future husband might want kids", until you walk down the street and are propositioned for blow jobs on a college campus, until you are asked in a job interview if you plan in having children, until you have had a fellow service member comment on your ass while you're trying to qualify (for my nonmilitary people this means shooting guns on a range), until you're asked how you got your promotion besides being on your knees, kindly refrain from trying to explain to me why I shouldn't have the right to protest and tell me how I should do it, not a single arrest was made during the women's march ( not the case on actual inauguration day - as that day WAS NOT a sanctioned " Women's March")..you know very well I love this country as I've dedicated 3 tours to the cause.

Random Guy: ..until you are denied (and) told you can't have your tubes tied because "your future husband might want kids"....PLEASE cite research into your claims above. The rest of your ramblings are ridiculous as well...but specifically explain yourself about this. As far as no (per your research?) arrests during the March on Saturday, there are thousands that SHOULD have been cited for LITTERING. Also, Madonna should have been locked up immediately.One more thing...if everything you claimed were actually epidemic in our society of today, why is this so? Obama was the President over the past 8 years. Where was he during the above atrocities against women? I'll await your response there.

Me: Umm those were first hand references...soooo.

Random Guy: You posted it....soooo....defend your comments.

Me: I'm confused what I need to defend...please explain it to me

Random Guy: I can specifically cite laws and regulations against everything you said. Sooo....unless you plan to defend your assertions, you're just a blowhard with a hard-on against men.

Me: Weird how people don't always follow the law...I happen to love most men but thanks for caring

Random Guy: Once again, "...until you are denied (and) told you can't have your tubes tied because "your future husband might want kids"....PLEASE cite research into your claims that females can't have their tubes tied because your future husband might want kids.

Me: Like, you want a blow by blow or should I say thrust by thrust account of my rape?

Me: It's what my doctor told me, until I found a new one

Random Guy: I'm sorry for any injustice you've experienced in your lifetime but you don't speak for all women. Your ramblings are indicative of a victim mentality. It's also ILLEGAL for an employer to ask, in an interview, whether the applicant plans to have kids in the future.Any rational and sane person would KNOW that ANY female can get a tubal ligation at any time without anyone denying them.

Me: I'm not saying every woman feels this way.

Random Guy: If your Doctor actually told you something like that, why didn't you report him or her? If someone said "nice ass" or otherwise sexually harassed you, why didn't you report him or her? If an employer asked you whether you plan to have kids in the future, why didn't you report them?

Me: Hmm let's talk about that, during a court marshall I actually did, thanks though

Random Guy: If this is just the "(Insert my name here,) Victim" story, why not write a book instead of attacking people because of your unfortunate past?

I then replied I had written a book, where he proceeded to tell me he hopes I have a good editor because what I was saying was very unprofessional and inflammatory. I also asked my friend if he felt attacked, but got not response, he was silent thereafter. Rando (as I’ll now refer to random guy of which I won’t release his name) then wished me well and stated he hoped to see me on CNN one day.

The thing is, the conversation and what felt like a personal attack floored me. I had so much to say in reply but it just wouldn’t come out. The blatant denial of facts and cultural context obliterated any sense I had in trying to verbalize any rebuttal.

I thought about the conversation for days. Was I wrong, was I a thankless ingrate feminazi, brimming with privilege I didn’t even know I had? Was the epidemic of the maltreatment of women in our country skewed by my own experience?

I reached out. I asked women in my own social media circle to share their stories with me. I asked them, if they had ever experienced abuse, why didn’t they “Deal with it,” as suggested by the gentleman I spoke to. Here is one single response I received out of many, some details have been changed for autonomy:

Anyway....if by "dealing with it" at the time it occurs people mean stop it, walk out on it, or something like that, all I can say from my own experience is: abuse doesn't start with the physical. What my partner did was to undermine me - my intelligence, my abilities to "make it" without him, and later, my abilities to care for my son. By that time, my self-esteem was completely gone and the physical abuse followed. I knew it was wrong, but I (inexplicably) was convinced by then that I really WAS as stupid and incompetent as he thought I was. He also told me that if I ever left him, he would take our son and I would never see him again. The abuser causes you to question everything: it's gaslighting at its most effective. "He didn't really mean to hit me, did he? It was a mistake. It won't happen again. Besides, he loves me!" And I'll be honest...I was lucky. I had a supportive family who loved me and my child. And yet it happened to me.

For privacy reasons, I am choosing not to mention the other responses I received. They included rape and molestation but also a resounding tone of shame and guilt from the women who shared. This isn’t anything new, we all know why women don’t speak out, we know the impact of such things, why they don’t “Deal with it,” when it happens. I feel like those who make statements such as they should have been stronger, done something about it, they should just be followed up with, “just being pussies,” because that is the feeling I had from Rando, who, come on, literally called me a Victim, when I was simply stating facts. This guy knew nothing about me, the fact that I did leave, that I did fight, that I did climb out of the burn pits, on a few occasions. This man was ordering me to defend my actions in a cloud of disbelief. He didn’t give credit to those fucking warriors, men and women, who eventually said, “Enough is enough.”

It boils down to this concept that some people refuse to admit exists. VICTIM BLAMING, when you lead a conversation with the victim about assault with the words, “Why didn’t you...” Sorry not sorry, fuck you and fuck that uncircumcised beast you rode in on. When this phrase is said, it’s implying that outright, it was my/our responsibility to prevent whatever happened to me/us from happening, as opposed to um...people not raping/assaulting/abusing/harassing other people, point blank. I did what I could when I could to alleviate the things that happened, but why should that sole responsibility ride on my shoulders.

I once posted a comment on Facebook that I regret to this day. I said, something along the lines of, “Well, I don’t go walking down a dark alley waving around a wad of cash, expecting not to get robbed.” This logic is flawed in that yes, people will hurt you...BUT THAT DOESN’T MAKE IT OK, AND THOSE PEOPLE SHOULD BE HELD RESPONSIBLE in such a way as to fear the four horseman if they do decide to sexually assault an unconscious female behind a dumpster. Something tells me Brock Turner serving only a three month jail sentence after committing such an act, will not make people fear their transgressions. Therefore, there’s no reason for the majority of sex offenders to NOT offend, the payoff is worth more than their punishment, if they get one at all.

Let me be clear here, Rando did state he believed women had every right to protest. His and my friend’s point to me was, women have it great in America and we should be grateful for it. I got it, I won’t argue with that, I grovel to my God every day for the things given to me...to a point. We undeniably have it pretty good, but let me ask, what the actual fuck is wrong with wanting better?

Rando also told me that instead of marching, the women should have volunteered at shelters or something....For how long Rando, how long should they have volunteered, until the violence miraculously stopped? You’re telling me eventually, if we just keep giving 5 hours a week to a shelter, the abused would stop coming in? Giving aid to victims is most definitely a duty, one that I’ve taken on in the past, but let me be clear, it is a bandaid. Every day more women and children come into the shelters and transitional housing, at least when there’s room. It’s the same with homelessness. Providing shelter and care is a step, but it is not the cure. Cultural change is, and guess what causes cultural change? I’m not going to explain it to you Rando, just maybe, I don’t know, go study the Civil Rights leaders and see how Andrew Goodman, Elizabeth Freeman, Lucy Stone, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harry Hay did it (I’ve got my own reading list on hand now).

I acknowledge that just protesting doesn’t work for social change (which is what we’re agreeing is needed here right), it takes more than that, legislation, policy change, invention, actual culture change, and surprise, tension and conflict (which come on, the marches obviously did that so don’t tell me they should have done something else) I also know that planting my ass at a check-in desk at a women’s shelter is not part of the advancement bargain, it is a maintainer and I’m sorry that’s all you want, the maintenance of your own life’s standards.

Just because women elsewhere survive far greater things than some of us here, I refuse to sit down, shut up, and ignore that the American Dream isn’t a whisper of a lie. If I were to accept my wonderful fate of living in this nation, no questions asked, no protesting had, I think I might have to ignore some striking statistics.

Fun facts:

From 2002 to 2012, the number of women killed by intimate partners was 15,462, according to data from James A. Fox, a Northeastern University criminology professor who adjusted federal data for unsolved homicide cases believed to be linked to intimate partners.

The total deaths from Sept. 11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a maximum of 9,838 (As of 2013, 147 women were killed since 2001) . It’s lower when we exclude non-American victims on Sept. 11. Weeeird, so you’re telling me more women were killed in America than in those Muslim countries we’re banning because they’re such a threat to domestic security. You’re telling me, as a woman, I’m safer going to war than dating someone? Gotcha’.

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence has found that, on average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men. 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have been victims of [some form of] physical violence by an intimate partner within their lifetime. So, Rando, American men could stand to do better as well.

On a typical day, there are more than 20,000 phone calls placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide.

The cost of intimate partner violence exceeds $8.3 billion per year. Rando, THAT’S why I don’t care that protestors didn’t get cited for littering, it wouldn’t have come close to making a dent in that debt.

Women are more likely to suffer domestic violence than they are cancer, which the rate of cancer for women is considered an epidemic. So yes, Rando, it is an epidemic...as to why women are marching now about it, there is this thing called Take Back the Night, which is an international event and non-profit organization with the mission of ending sexual, relationship, and domestic violence in all forms. Hundreds of events are held in over 30 countries annually. Events often include marches, rallies and vigils intended as a protest and direct action against rape and other forms of sexual, relationship, and domestic violence. In 2001, a group of women who had participated in the earliest Take Back the Night marches, came together to form the Take Back the Night Foundation in support of the events throughout the United States and the world. These events existed during the Obama administration and beyond which, let’s get into that, why weren’t we crying about it when Obama was President. I’m just going to pop in this little link to take care of some of that: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/26/fact-sheet-obama-administration-record-women-and-girls

So, it appears the Obama administration took strides in addressing the issue plaguing our nation, though I will not pretend it was enough. So why march now in the millions simply because we now have a President that supposed manhaters can’t stand? Oh I don’t know, it might be because our current President (he who must not be named) has said the following statements about women:

Said that Fox News’ Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever“ after she moderated a GOP debate and questioned Trump for having previously labeled women “fat pigs” and “dogs.” (He also retweeted a comment calling Kelly a “bimbo.”)

In reference to Fiorina, Trump took aim at her looks in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. “Look at that face!” he said. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!” Trump then attempted to backpedal, saying he was talking about her persona, not her physical appearance. Now, I’m not sure here, but I don’t believe he mentioned the appearance of any male running mates, I could be wrong here but double check and let me know if I’m wrong.

Trump told USA Today columnist that if his daughter were ever to be sexually harassed at work, he hopes she’d just move on. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” he said. As opposed to, oh I don’t know, “I would hope if she felt she needed help in standing up, she would come to me, or other trusted allies to get the piece of shit harassing her kicked out on his/her ass where they belong...you know, change the fucking culture, or if she didn’t want to prosecute, feel safe in knowing I’d support her regardless.” Because again, I couldn’t ask him to demand she “do something about it,” because that is not anyone’s decision but hers.

He tweeted that military sexual assault should basically be expected, what with men and women serving in the military together. This fall, Matt Lauer gave Trump an opportunity to amend his comments in a forum hosted by NBC, but Trump did not. “Well, it is a correct tweet,” he said. Basically, again he chalked it up to the fact that men just can’t help themselves, as opposed to saying something along the lines of...”We have to do better.”

And my favorite:

I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn't get there, and she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. I'm automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything. In this case he could have said...no, nothing else he could have said, he should have just shut the fuck up unless it was to compliment/analyze literally anything other than the physical appearance of a woman.

I’m not even going to get into the rumors of rape charges and pedophilia against the man, because...according to the nation, all those women were “obviously lying,” and I can’t dispute that nonsense, I don’t have the strength.

So, Rando, that might be why women specifically marched a day after this upstanding American Citizen was inaugurated. It’s because, after this man was elected to the most respected position in our nation, I believe it created a foreboding disastrous future for women and even men. When the recording of the pussy statement came out, everyone shrugged their shoulder and said it was lockerroom banter, thereby signaling to American men and everyone else, that this was acceptable language towards our nation’s daughters, mothers, sisters...American Women. Guess what, it’s not.

So, I guess my last comment to you Rando and everyone else saying that the women didn’t march for them because they were doing just peachy is, you’re lucky.

#whywomenmarched domesticviolence sexualassault Trump Veteran womensrights civilrights womensmarch blamethevictim

0 notes