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#very different and much more minimal than literature standards
grandhotelabyss · 3 months
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What are some of your favorite literary “what ifs” to contemplate? Keats at 55? Joyce’s “Paradiso?”
Those are two big ones. Keats would have been 55 in 1850. Is there any reason to think, based on what he could do at 25, that he wouldn't have written something better than In Memoriam or Idylls of the King? That, with his Shakespearean sensibility, he might not have approached something like The Ring and the Book? Our whole map of 19th-century literature would look different had Keats lived to fulfill his promise.
The "what if" in Joyce's case is more specific and less world-historical. He said, reports Ellmann, that he wanted to write "something very simple and very short" after Finnegans Wake, and I wonder what a simplicity following that kind of complexity would look like. Not Paradiso, perhaps, but also not Un Coeur Simple either, since he'd already done that in Dubliners and never repeated himself. What then? Something like Beckett's short pieces? And if he had pre-empted Beckett's counter-Joycean minimalism, what would Beckett have done? There's a different "what if" with Joyce too. What if he had pursued his dream (or scheme) of opening a cinema, had devoted himself more seriously to the stage, had gone multimedia? (My old Joyce teacher, acquaintance and biographer of Godard, used to wonder about this: Joyce as Godard before Godard.)
Then there's Austen, dead at 41 (my age), and already starting to sound like Woolf in her final novel. What if Wilde, dead at 46, had lived, lived in Paris into the avant-garde years, calling at 27 rue de Fleurus and devising his own versions of Surrealism or the Theater of Cruelty?
Premature author deaths are interesting, because some feel like enormous losses and others don't quite. Charlotte Brontë, not yet 40 when she died, had much more to do. She'd just finished Villette, a novel itself verging on the Beckettian. What would she have written had she lived into the 1870s? She was only three years older than George Eliot. A Middlemarch that grew out of the specific sensibility her truncated oeuvre demarcates might have been extraordinary, might have pre-empted, if not Beckett, then at least Hardy and (who knows?) Lawrence. Emily Brontë, on the other hand...while the structure and organization and irony of Wuthering Heights outdo even Charlotte's work for intricacy and intelligence, that book still feels more like a channeled myth, somehow collective and impersonal, than like part of a single person's corpus. I wish she had lived, of course, but maybe she would have fallen silent, having channeled her single vision, and then again maybe she would have drifted into Blakean private myth.
It's similar with Keats and Shelley. Shelley was only four years older than Keats was when he died, but he isn't mourned the same way. That's because his canon feels somehow closed, complete, a total vision rounded in on itself. As I hinted in my essay on Shelley, if you told me he'd killed himself after writing "The Triumph of Life," I'd believe you. Or if he'd lived but renounced poetry, like Rimbaud.
Then there are the deaths that didn't happen. Hemingway, killed by his wounds in the Great War at age 18—and no half-century of iceberg minimalism.
Putting aside premature deaths, I wonder about a Henry James who'd succeeded in the theater. First we would be deprived of (dare I say "freed from"?) his novelistic late phase and the dominance its displaced-theatrical formal thinking exerted over 20th-century fiction. Second, he might have extended Wildean Symbolism on the English stage to challenge the standard of Shavian social problem comedy. I haven't actually read a Henry James play, since he didn't succeed, and I understand the ones he did write are more conventional; I'm just imagining what the sensibility that wrote The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove would have done with a theater at its disposal.
(Also, what if Henry James's proposed collaboration with H. G. Wells had come to fruition—and had been a "scientific romance"? How would Jamesian Martians think? or a Jamesian Dr. Moreau? We might have had the New Wave of science fiction in the 1890s, not the 1960s.)
Moving forward in time, and back here in America, what about a Ralph Ellison able to rally his forces and produce a Jamesian or Faulknerian or Bellovian procession of novels right through the eras of Civil Rights, Black Power, and political correctness, challenging everybody's racial orthodoxies at every turn and, as the author of Invisible Man, unable to be ignored? Staying within African-American literature but moving back a generation: what if the mind that produced Cane in 1923 and lived until 1967 had kept writing novels, even if under the influence of Gurdjieff and Jung and Quakerism and Scientology?
I could think of more, I'm sure—what if Eliot hadn't converted to Anglicanism, what if he'd kept "turning"? or what if he'd taken the hint of The Waste Land and converted to Buddhism or Hinduism? imagine Eliot chanting sutras right along with Ginsberg in the Beat era!—but this is long enough. Feel free to contribute your own!
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The upside of the anime being so bad is that now I can compliment every fanfiction I read with "I consider this to be more canon than the entire second season of the anime", "you did a better job at writing them in character than the second season of the anime" and so on
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Fairy Tale Laws: How Fairy Tales and their Worldbuilding work
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Who follows me knows I'm mega into mythology and folklore. One of my favorite pieces of folklore and fantasy literature is the Fairy Tale. Since I was a child I was always draw to the magical world of Disney films and their darker literary counterparts.
I love fairy tales, yet in my opinion they continue to be one of the more misunderstood and neglected genres out there.
So, as a Disney fan and avid fairy tale reader, in this essay I show how the genre itself generally works and which principles rule their whimsical world
Fairy Tales, Myths and Fables
The thing that fairy tales, myths and fables have in common is that they all find their origins in the oral tradition.
They were fantastical tales, not told specifically for children but deeply enjoyed by them, that were transmitted through generations.
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Both fairy tales and myths don't follow real world logic, instead following their own dream-like logic, in a sequence of weird and fantastical events, that are magical and intriguing to the listener, but essentially normal to the in-universe characters.
Often than not there aren't any explanations of why these events happen and their impact of those in-universe societies, they just happen. Animals talk, mythical creatures live along with human societies just fine, inanimated objects come to life, people seem to turn into animals all the time, etc, and nothing of that seem to ever change the status quo.
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The thing that differentiate the fairy tale from the myth, is that the myth is supposed to have happened in our world, but in a far off past. They are supposed to explain how our world came to be, and they have a very strong religious importance. The fairy tale on the other hand is not supposed to be took seriously. It's a fun story that the older generation tell to the younger generation. It can pass deeply important life or religious values, but that's not their main point. They are fairy tales, not fables.
The point of the fable is to transmit a moral. The point of a fairy tale is to transport the listener into a fantastical journey.
Fairy Tales vs. Oral Stories
Although many folk stories became immortal fairy tales, not all fairy tales came from oral tradition. Actually, some can be traced back to specific authors.
The Little Mermaid, the Ugly Duckling and the Steadfast Tin Soldier are all considered immortal fairy tales, yet they were all created by famous danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. A lot of his stories are authoral, and all are considered true fairy tales.
The term "Fairy Tales" actually comes from the french "conte de fées" and was coined in the 17th century by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy, the Madame d'Aulnoy, a french writer who wrote about a world where love and happiness came to heroines after overcoming great obstacles.
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These stories arise from the Préciosité, a French literary style in the 17th century, from "les précieuses", intellectual, witty and educated women who frequented the salon of Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet. Themes presented in these stories are the ideals of feminine elegance, etiquette and courtly Platonic love, all hugely popular with female audiences, but scorned by men.
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Telling fairy tales was a popular préciosité parlor game, and they should be told as if spontaneously, even though they all were carefully prepared. This style served as influence for Charles Perrault and Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve.
Villeneuve herself was the original author of Beauty and the Beast, and although the story is heavily inspired by older legends like Cupid and Psyche, it still is an authoral story.
Even the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, who were famous for being collectors of tales from oral tradition, gave their own twists and embellishments to their tales. For example, in many Cinderella tellings it's her mother's ghost who helps her. The Fairy Godmother is Perrault's invention.
So more than been just stories from the oral tradition, fairy tales as a literary genre are the reinvention of the old tropes found in the folk stories under a more sophisticated polish, for a new public.
Fairy Tale as a literary genre
In a way I consider the Fairy Tale a sibling genre to Magical Realism. As TV Tropes puts:
"In Magic Realism, events just happen, as in dreams. [...] Magical realism is a story that takes place in a realistic setting that is recognizable as the historical past or present. It overlaps with Mundane Fantastic. It has a connection to surrealism, dream logic, and poetry."
Both use a surreal, almost poetic internal logic with little to no explanation. Magical Realism is the occurrence of a fantastical event in a realistic setting, in a fusion between the mundane and the magical world.
Fairy Tales are similar because they often deal with very domestic topics and subjects. The protagonists often are normal people with very mundane goals. They don't want to save the world, they want to save themselves and their loved ones.
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Cinderella and Snow White for example, are more concerned with escaping from their abusive families than being cultural or legendary heroes like in the myths. Hansel and Gretel are trying not to die from starvation, and Red Riding Hood is trying to visit her sick grandmother. Regardless of class status, these are people with their own problems that find in the fantastical events a escape from them, or a even worse danger.
This is not a universal rule, as some characters are more heroic and there's more in stake, but generally the heroes are domestic heroes and it's only their lives that are in stake.
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The difference between the Magic Realism and the Fairy Tale, is that while in the Magic Realism you can easily point where the realistic setting ends and the magical one begins, the fairy tale goes even further, and the lines between the worlds are way more muddled.
Worldbuilding in Fairy Tales
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Now, that's the most important part. Fairy Tales are a sub-genre to Fantasy, but while in the other genres the magic world is described in the minimal details, often with rich details about the in-universe cultures and their rules, the Fairy Tale maintain the magic world as vague as possible. That's because it uses what I call "soft-worldbuilding".
Part of the appeal of the fairy tale is to transport the reader in a fantastical journey, but in order to do that they use as little details possible, allowing the reader to try to fill in the gaps. That's in order to avoid the magic world of feeling too real or too close to reality. The reader needs to have a sense of wonder and intrigue, and if you started to describe your world in all its details, it will become too grounded, and the wonder and the intrigue will be lost.
Said that, you need some basic rules, otherwise everything will be incredibly incoherent. You reader needs to understand how the magic world works and their rules, but they also need to be slightly lost, discovering all the details along the way and be amazed by them, lost in a mystery that they will never find all the answers.
To illustrate this, look at the differences between the Middle-earth and Narnia. One is a standard fantasy world, the other is a fairy tale world. J.R.R. Tolkien drew inspiration from the epics, C.S. Lewis drew inspiration from fairy tales and childhood stories.
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The Middle-earth is grounded on its own rules, with their own races, cultures, languages and myths. Narnia is a playground were everything magical is allowed. Greek mythology creatures? Okay. Roman gods? Okay. Father Christmas? Okay. Jesus? Of course!
One is worried about all the small details, the other wants everything as vague and simple as possible, as to ensure the wonder and the intrigue will never be lost the reader.
When you're dealing with a fairy tale world you have way more freedom than the standard fantasy world. You don't need to think too deeply in the details. You can use the Rule of Funny and the Rule of Cool as much as you want, as long as it's minimal consistent and coherent
Fairy Tale Laws
This are some basic rules and principles that I believe rule over the fairy tale genre
Establish rules of how the world works. Keep it consistent and coherent. That's your base
Not every fantastical event needs a deep explanation, and magic is not allowed as an universal explanation
Keep it simple. Don't worry too much about the small details.
You don't want your world to be too grounded in reality. A little escapism is key
Poetic logic and surrealism reigns
Have fun with all the weird and magical things that crowded your world. "Rule of Cool" and "Rule of Funny" reign
Never reveal too much to your reader. They need to constantly feel as if there is something more happening off the limits of your story
Domestic heroes (As Narnia and the old dragon slayer stories show, this is not an universal rule)
The overall tone can be darker and edgier, softer and lighter, or somewhere in the middle
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coda-90 · 3 years
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The Evolution of Social Standards
by Durga Kulkarni.
Psychological Evolution
Why do Social Opinions matter?
Social Expectations
Social Organisations
Psychological Evolution
What is it?
Psychological Evolution, or Evolutionary psychology has roots in Cognitive Psychology and Evolutionary Biology.[1] It focuses on how evolution has shaped the mind and its behavior. It also concentrates on how the main purpose of our lives has shifted, from survival, to contentment. Additionally, it helps us in understanding why we humans behave the way we do, and what are the underlying instincts that we are unaware of which is making us do these things. It also states the importance of human interaction and connection in our lives.
When it comes to human interactions, there are a few default archetypes noticed in each interaction, them being: exchanging information, opinions and expectations. In today's world, during a healthy conversation, we tend to follow these archetypes, for the sake of adding simplicity, purpose and direction to the conversation. This is where social opinions and expectations start affecting us.
Initially, due to the hierarchy that used to exist in the tribes, conversations were very minimal and reserved, but as the tribes kept splitting, and more exchange of information was needed, the people realized that they needed a proper language for their convenience.
The “Pooh-Pooh theory” holds that speech originated from spontaneous human cries and exclamations; the 'Yo-He-Ho theory' suggests that language developed from grunts evoked by physical exertion; while the 'Sing-Song theory/La- La Theory' claims that speech arose from primitive ritual chants and playful songs.[2]
By the time of the Roman civilization, the hierarchy amongst men was very much visible, and was put to use. Along that period, the importance of exemplary words and literature was noticed, and was worked upon by involving a new change bringing item in all the civilians and senators lives; Newspapers (Acta Diurna (Daily Events)). In these newspapers, multiple things were mentioned, including the next political event, the victories. They even had an obituary section in their newspapers. Along with all this information, slowly opinions started seeping into the texts. These opinions helped people in creating a judgment for voting.[3]
By 1600, the social hierarchy was divided into six parts; Monarchy, Nobility, Gentry, Merchants, Yeomen and the Labourers. Due to this, if any judgement was to be made, it would have largely been based on rank.[4]
Then by, about the 1800’s, the social hierarchy was divided into three parts; Upper class, Middle class and the Working class. The Upper class used to consist of the Aristocrats, Nobles, Dukes and other wealthy families working in the Victorian courts.The Middle class consisted of industrial revolutionaries, who have changed our lives. The Working class, lowest among the Victorian social hierarchy were the working class. This class remained aloof to the political progress of the country and was hostile to the other two classes. This working class was further categorised as the skilled workers and the unskilled workers.[5]
In the 2000’s, the hierarchy merged and divided into five social classes; Upper, Upper-Middle, Middle, Working and Lower class. This did not cause as much difference and conflicts as the other classes did in the past. But something else did.
Why do Social Opinions matter?
“Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people.”[6]
When we are in the presence of other people, we like to blend in. To blend in, we abide by a few social norms. These norms help us maintain a calm, mannered and composed personality throughout the day. These norms turn into expectations, expectations turn into opinions and opinions turn into reality. These opinions and expectations, when pondered upon, seem quite irrational, but due to these opinions and expectations being around for a long time, we have grown to accept them, and to some extent, even like them. But then why question it?
The reason being that these opinions and expectations ARE in fact quite irrational and toxic.
Interdependence
We follow these opinions and expectations because we are living in a society that entirely works on being Interdependent. Interdependence is the state of being dependent upon one another (Mutual dependence/Interdependence). For eg. We depend on our neighbours and they depend on us to be welcoming and decent.
To abide by the social expectation of being decent, we usually follow the societal idea of “Decency”, which is being calm, reserved, polite, helpful, straightforward and clean.
Also, other people's evaluations of us is both crucial and necessary to impact behavioral changes, which is what ultimately allows us to gain professionally and personally.
Social Expectations
Each social situation entails its own particular set of expectations about the “proper” way to behave. Social roles are the ‘part people play as members of a social group’. With each social role you adopt, your behavior changes to fit the expectations both you and others have of that role. There are 7 main types of societal roles; Leader, Knowledge Generator, Connector, Follower, Moralist, Enforcer, and Observer.[7]
To explain these roles, we will take a problematic social situation into consideration, to show what exactly each role does.
Leader: Proposes strategies and techniques to conquer a problematic situation. (Leader of a country)
Knowledge Generator: Shares information about the status of the situation. (Advisory)
Connector: Transmits the decisions made by the leader or opinions of other roles. (Media)
Follower: Follows a leader. (Politics)
Moralist: Looks for fair shares for all the other roles. (Law)
Enforcer: Punishes the behavior of other roles. (Army)
Observer: Shares information about the compliance of the behavior of other roles, as well as the role who answers to another observer's request about information about other roles. (General crowd)
We as human beings keep on switching between these roles according to the situation. With these roles, there can be unsaid expectations. Most of the time these expectations are rather helpful than problematic, though there are exceptions. But these exceptions occur only when there’s excess of Destructive criticism, Stratification, Peer Pressure and Mass Hysteria.
Destructive Criticism
Destructive criticism is defined as criticism performed with the intention to harm, derogate and destroy someone's creation, prestige, reputation and self-esteem. It's meant to ridicule, damage and bring the person down.
It is very common on social media. Sometimes it even occurs with your closest peers.
Stratification
Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into rankings of socioeconomic hierarchy based on factors like wealth, income, race, education, sex, and power. The people who have more resources represent the top layer of the social structure of stratification.
This is also widely noticed in public spaces such as schools.
Peer Pressure
Peer pressure is the influence displayed by people within the same social group. It is also the term used to describe the effect this influence has on a person to agree to in order to be accepted by the group. Sometimes peer pressure is used to positively influence people, but most of the time it’s not. Many adolescents fall into the trap of Peer Pressure.
Mass Hysteria
Mass hysteria is a phenomenon that conveys collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population and society as a result of rumors and fear. Mass hysteria occurs anywhere at any time. This is very common during global pandemic.
Social Organisations
In sociology, a social organization is a pattern of relationships between and among individuals and social groups. Characteristics of social organization can include qualities such as sexual composition, spatiotemporal cohesion, leadership, division of labor, communication systems, and so on.
These are the most noticed basis for the Social Organisations; Religion, Gender, Race and Monetary status.
Religion
Religion affects human beings very much. It is the root and base for our mental growth and morals. Religion is a very controversial topic to talk about. Many of them involve multitudes of intricate rituals.
Religions are based on philosophies by spiritual people. These philosophies are more of lifestyles, and when people follow a religion they completely imbibe it, no matter what. This changes their outlook towards social interactions and social opinions. This causes a difference in everyone’s knee-jerk reactions associated with different situations.
Gender
There has always been inequality between the female and male gender. This is called Sexism. Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to stereotypes and gender roles. This means in many countries there aren’t equal human rights for both the genders. Even though in few countries there may be basic equal rights for both the genders there always is one favored gender and things like salary and weight of opinion is not the same for the favored gender.
Race
Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits according to physical appearance and can be stratified based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or hate directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity. Modern Racism is often based in social perceptions of biological differences between people. These views can take the form of social behaviour, practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are supposed as ingrained superior or inferior to each other, based on assumed similar inheritable traits, or qualities.
Monetary status
The Monetary status of people has an influence on decisions made by law. It also gives them unrequited privilege to commit minor or major crimes, and evade the consequences. This brings a sentiment of power and pride in them, which then gives them a sense of togetherness.
In summary, this write up covers up the basic Evolution of Communication, the importance of abiding to Social Norms, the Seven basic types of Social Roles, Compelling Social Ideologies that change the perspective of the human mind, and the differences that bring humans together.
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leviiattacks · 3 years
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Two Faced | Chapter Two
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↳ levi ackerman, the very person who was about to kindly behead you by a surprising turn of events manages to become your loving husband? you would be elated if this was true love, but it's all thanks to a mysterious magic spell that your life is spared. for now at least.
pairing :: duke!levi x duchess!reader genre :: royal au, angst, fluff, slice of life etc word count :: 2.6k → click here for the next part !
You're apprehensive the first few days. Peering over your shoulder when you walk through the halls of the Duke's estate. You often find yourself fiddling with the only real possession you have remaining from the entire ordeal - a silver locket given to you by your mother, it hasn't stood the test of time, it's littered in small scratches and it's clearly seen better days. Neither does it shine the way it used to but you need it to feel at ease.
Currently, sitting in the estate's library you attempt to focus on reading the book in front of you. It details the life of an orphaned child, the rest of the plot is a blur to you as this task is not done with the intent of enjoying the literature but with the purpose of distracting yourself.
You've been avoiding Duke Ackerman for days on end now. He's made the occasional visit to your quarters, always politely asks if he's permitted to speak to you - allowed to take even a second of your precious time. You decline every single request, your excuses range from "I'm feeling particularly ill today." to"I would like to rest early.", He never inquires after you've responded. You do however find he communicates in a variety of different ways ; Meals of the finest standard, A luxurious place to live, the maids also offer you the opportunity to venture out into the beautiful gardens but you know he's asked them to do so.
Quite frankly, you're still petrified and are unable to fathom what happened that fateful day, you had never been one to put much faith in God especially after all he had put you through, but maybe there was a God or a higher being or a somebody who helped you in your moment of despair.
Eyes darting from your page to the door of the library, you swear you see the door knob twist and you hastily double take. Nothing looks out of the ordinary so you allow yourself to shake it off. Your eyes droop shut as you knead your shoulders attempting to relieve some of the tension you feel. Recently, you find it to be an ordinary occurrence for your muscles to seize at the worst possible opportunities.
"May I speak to you?" A beaming voice enters the room from behind you but never had such a cheerful voice made you freeze in fright. It's him.
At his appearance you begin to think of all sorts of scenarios and outcomes but the specific thought you've been actively ignoring slyly slips into view. What if the spell weakens?
Fate is an ever changing entity, one minute it may be in your favour, the next... you'd rather not delve any deeper into that alternative.
Jumping to your feet you don't look in his direction trying to keep the contact you have with him minimal.
He audibly huffs and just as you're about to scurry away he speaks again. "Halt your movements."
Something about his voice beckons you to do so and you anxiously face him.
"Did I come off too bold?" The expression he makes is unlike any other you've seen from him before. His eyes twinkle and it looks as if he's holding his breathe expectantly. It's almost comical how different he looks and you can't stop your cheeks from flushing. He's quite adorable under this spell.
But then a flashback is presented to you. The anger in his eyes, the cold feeling of his sword, if he were any closer he would have been swiftly slicing your neck open. Y/N, you were seconds away from becoming a corpse you remind yourself fiercely.
"I'm not doing very well at courting you, Am I?" He frowns as he asks but he's not upset, perhaps disappointed.
Looking at the floor you hear him bombard you with even more questions, he's crowding around you now like a swarm of bees - somehow he manages the job of an entire hive on his own. No one has ever taken such an interest in you.
Your conscience tells you that you will regret this later on down the line, it tells you this will come back and bite you incredibly hard, you will regret being so ignorant and trusting yet you yield. Is it so wrong for you to consider feeling affection? When the Duke snaps out of this spell he will promptly execute you and you're aware of that fact, so what reason is there to cower away in fear?
For all your life you have never experienced the true feeling of love. You had mother's maternal love, which hadn't lasted very long at all. Never would you have any other opportunity to experience the romantic intimate kind involving a significant other. If you were to die you may as well play the role of his wife for as long as this spell wills it. Perhaps he'll receive his memories back so late he forgets or simply no longer cares. Part of you hopes he doesn't remember at all.
"Would you like to..." you pause already regretting what you're doing but before you can continue the Duke cuts you off.
"Have tea together? Explore the gardens together?"
What really sticks out to you most is how he casually emphasizes the word together. He really doesn't care what activity you engage in as long as it's with him. You feel your heart twist in your chest. This is dangerous.
He's eager, leaning forward with wide eyes. It feels odd having someone care about your input, even more odd seeing that person smile at you with the same spirit of an elated child. It's bittersweet knowing his true character.
"Let's have some tea."
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A few months have passed since then. Surprisingly you're still alive and the spell shows no signs of wearing away any time soon.
After the raid at your palace he's been nothing but sweet towards you. At first many people were against him courting you and a handful of his advisors attempted to steer his sights away due to suspicions and speculation that you were a "sinful witch" who had manipulated or even seduced him.
The day he had heard those rumors he caused an uproar and had fired the royal advisor who spread them around. "Impertinent fools have the audacity to make such comments about my Duchess." You would usually add in you were not worth such respect considering you were not officially a Duchess but the fiery blaze in his eyes had stopped you.
"Hey Lev, lets go have some tea they've learnt their lesson." You shot the gossiping maids a sympathetic look.
Being under the spell does not make him more tolerable towards other people is what you learnt that day.
Multiple women all with visuals worlds more appealing than your own approach him, some even sent by his advisors to set you up. They test if his love is strong enough to withstand the attacks of others. Time and time again he proves everyone wrong and doesn't think for a second to give up on you.
You're glad for that because through these few months you've ascertained how much you love the Duke for who he is. Well, who he's acting as. You want to slam your head against a concrete wall repeatedly when you think about the level of affection and tenderness you hold towards the man but you can not lie and say you hate him.
The fact that before meeting him you lived a life lacking of love and affection does not help your case either. It only makes it harder.
But it's painfully obvious to you that this is all truly one sided. You aren't really in love with the Duke but you're in love with the magic holding him hostage.
You share these thoughts to yourself as you take a short sip from your tea cup. Sasha has left the room to fetch some pastries and sweets. She takes her job seriously as head maid (you never address her as such because really she's just a friend to you). It's a chilly day hence why you've covered yourself up in a shawl, it coincidentally matches the beige drapes.
Suddenly a boy who you recognize to be one of the young apprentices by the name of Eren bursts through the doors of your tea room. His hair is all over the place and he's panting as he tries to formulate a sentence.
"Duke." Puff. " Duke Ackerman" Puff. "Refuses to return to the Imperial Palace and is threatening the Emperor stating he won't return to his duties!"
You ignore it and try to keep to your own affairs because who are you to interfere in military business? It's looked down upon to involve yourself in such matters.
You send him off and in the mean time Sasha makes her way back.
A few minutes later as the both of you are munching on a particularly sweet macron the palace's butler bursts in the same way as Jaeger and tries to get a word in but Sasha manages to interject first.
"My lady, perhaps you should check in on the Duke." she suggests.
You try to speak but the Butler cuts in abruptly.
"Duchess. I'm afraid he hasn't ate a meal in five days. Please talk to him."
"Mike there is no need to call me a Duchess when I hold no such title...wait the Duke hasn't ate for five days???"
You find it unbelievable that Levi has forgotten to eat or possibly starved himself for something.
Making your way to his office you enter with a speech prepared about how eating is one of the blessings you've been given and how it should be appreciated but instead you're met face to face with a trail of rose petals that lead to the Duke.
You stare at him in confusion. He holds a bouquet of roses in his hands and they kiss his chest, He gives you a look of admiration that can only be described as the look that is reserved for your one true love. His eyes glimmer and they shine along with his glossy raven hair. You look him up and down in astonishment.
He's arranged all this for you.
"I'd do anything to have you be by my side for all of eternity. Will you honor me with the opportunity of taking your hand?"
Just looking at this entirely different version of the Duke, you feel relieved and in the moment you recklessly accept his proposal. You know it's stupid, you know it's ignorant, you know you should be denying him but you can't make yourself ignore the will of your heart.
"I hope to live a long life. One with you present." he whispers into the shell of your ear, it tingles.
After weeks of the Duke's courting you accept his marriage proposal and the both of you quietly wed two months later.
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He's so kind and affectionate that you're plagued with nightmares where the spell wears off.
In your nightmares he continues what he left unfinished. Every time he's about to plunge his sword into the depths of your chest he wakes you up and caresses your face in between his large hands. He wraps his arms around you after some time. Once your breathing relaxes he asks what has made you cry and you can't do anything to explain. It only hurts more seeing his concerned expression. The way his eyes flick between your eyes and trembling lips, you want to tell him the truth, instead you state that you"had a nightmare, and don't wish to talk about it." You don't want him asking questions over it.
It's another Wednesday and you're pacing back and forth in front of his office door arguing with yourself about whether or not you should enter. Finally, you decide to make your entrance and peek inside. You hear him arguing with his advisors as normal.
"Instead of blithering like a idiot and making excuses why don't yo-" he's midway through his sentence when he sees you at the doorway.
Dropping the previous matter he rushes over towards you and scoops you up in his arms. Smiling up at you, you smile back sheepishly ignoring the stares of his staff.
"Honey, why did you leave me? Where did you go?" He whines into your neck and you try to push him away shyly but he won't budge.
Everyone around you grimaces at his usual mood swings as well as the heavy flirting that he's targeting at you.
"You haven't come to eat dinner with me for three nights. You're the workaholic who left me." You swiftly retort his point and you pout at the end of your sentence. He pouts back and you can see his cheeks are tinged a blushed pink.
"Then we must dine immediately, you should have informed me that I had made you feel so neglected, my darling!"
After making your way to the dining room you and Levi are conversing happily as per usual when you spot his highly agitated secretary Mikasa. It settles in that she's been standing there for a considerable amount of time, time flies when you and Levi speak. She's clearly waiting for him to report back to duty.
The first time you had met Mikasa she was highly suspicious of you and would keep an eye on your movements at all times (literally) , you thought she perhaps fancied the Duke but later learnt that she was related to him and that was probably why she was on edge at the appearance of a new individual. Besides all that she's sweet really, sometime she joins you and Sasha for tea and you happily converse. She isn't much of a talker, more of a listener which works out well considering how extroverted Sasha is and how you love to story tell. You've shared many fond memories with her.
That's why you place a hand on Levi's shoulder and interrupt him.
"Why don't you return to your work? It's about time I send you back now." You suggest but he rolls his eyes in annoyance.
"Why do you keep on trying to get rid of me? I want to stay for a little longer. After all you are my wife. You count as one of my duties. If not the most important duty of all!" He's about to break out into one of his embarrassing speeches and you want to save Mikasa from that.
"Mikasa really needs you to complete your other duties. Do it for me Lev." You try and butter him up with the mention of his nickname. As expected he perks up and stands up to leave, not before placing a soft kiss on your cheek.
"Ah Lev, I'll be taking a short trip out today. Is that alright with you?"
You don't specify that 'out' means the Sunday Market place, he'll ask question after question.
He holds onto your chin with his thumb and leans in for a chaste kiss.
"Of course my darling. Be careful."
He giddily waves at you as he leaves and you wave back with the same enthusiasm. You giggle at the sight of Mikasa practically gagging at the two of you and glaring daggers at Levi.
The door then shuts and you're left alone.
All that accompanies you is silence and you purse your lips together trying to keep it together. Recently as soon as he turns away from you all you can think about is how this love of his is a hoax.
He doesn't really love you.
That doesn't stop all the sweet words he's ever uttered from flooding your memory.
"You're mine and I'm yours."
"My beautiful love."
"I love you I mean it." It hurts. He doesn't mean it.
But you'll keep the charade up. You'll find a way to keep him this way forever. It's selfish but you can't be blamed, It keeps you safe and happy.
Love is nice but you would prefer to live.
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siswritesyanderes · 4 years
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omg could you p l e as e write that no-nonsense reader that's a literature junkie with a yandere percy weasley that absolutely adores how she corrects his love letters and grades them??? pretty please, with a cherry on top?
Initially, he had sat at your table in the library for two quite pragmatic reasons: because you were generally unobtrusive as you read, and because sitting next to another person meant that when people inevitably bothered him for homework answers, he could make the excuse that he didn’t want to be noisy and bother the person beside him. Those were the only reasons, at first.
After that, he supposed it was a matter of habit; if he didn’t see you at the usual table, he always wandered the library to find where you were sitting, and seat himself the usual distance of one seat away from you. That was the pull of routine, though, he reasoned; you had proven yourself a nice, quiet study partner, so of course he sought you out. There was no reason to sentimentalize the fact that he was drawn to you.
Then came the day a boy from Percy’s Transfiguration class asked to copy his notes. Demanded, really, with the excuse that he had missed class because he was ill. (Granted, Percy didn’t doubt the truth of this, so much. He just didn’t hand over his notes lightly.) When Percy suggested that he speak to McGonagall and get the information from her, the boy merely doubled down on his excuse, this time describing his illness (and the color and consistency of his vomit) graphically enough that Percy was, at a point, prompted to say:
“Thank you for that factoid; not at all disgusting. Anything else that will make me nauseous?”
“Nauseated,” you interjected suddenly.
“What?”
“I believe you meant ’nauseated’. ’Nauseous’ describes the stimulus, not the reaction. A nauseous smell will make you feel nauseated. If you yourself are nauseous, then you are causing nausea in someone else. Also, you’ve misused factoid.”
Percy blinked. “Have I?”
A crisp nod. “It means something that resembles a fact but is not; note the suffix ‘oid’, as used in ‘humanoid’. I suppose you aren’t entirely misusing it if you meant to imply that you didn’t believe he was telling the truth, but that wasn’t the impression I’d gotten. Also, it would be more fitting to just call it a lie, in that case; the connotations are different.”
In that moment, he felt inexcusably stupid for not having spoken to you sooner. He knew that some of his peers were clever; there was a whole House for those who valued cleverness, after all. And he knew that some of his peers were probably smarter than him; statistically, they had to be. But…well, he liked to learn. Being taught new things he might never have otherwise known (like definitions of commonly misused words) felt different from being corrected on any old homework assignment. And the frank, casual way you had said it was just so terribly attractive and seemed to imply that there was plenty more where that came from.
Like you had answers to questions he didn’t even know to ask.
He paid more attention to you, from then on.
It was honestly distracting. Just committing to listening to you speak, in class and to your classmates, had been expanding his vocabulary little by little; he often found himself jotting down words that you used, approximating the spelling as best he could, to look up later.
Not just words- facts.
Weird, obscure things that you would bring up with minimal prompting, about the etymology of the word “defenestration” or the statistical likelihood of dying from an incorrectly brewed potion.
And sometimes you were just smiling, or just soberly nodding in agreement to one of your potions partner’s many venting sessions, and as the days passed he became entranced with that, too. All of your little moments and expressions and words seemed to drag him deeper and deeper, until it became unbearable not to say anything.
He wrote out a letter explaining his affection; it was better than telling you in person, because in a letter he could plan and proofread. He spent two days poring over his own wording to be sure that he’d avoided any mistakes, and then he slipped the parchment into your bag. His heart beating in his throat.
The next time he sat with you in the library, you set a folded parchment down in front of him. He couldn’t breathe for a moment, but when he unfolded it, he saw his own handwriting and his own words.
With things crossed out.
His eyes hungrily raked over the tiny annotations you’d made on his letter.
There was a bracket drawn around a phrase and the word “redundant” jotted in the nearest margin. A whole sentence was underlined and called “bombastic”, and Percy quickly put one of his books in his lap because he was having a Reaction and he was pretty sure he was in love.
At the very bottom of the page, below his signature, you had written: “Good spelling, and good use of the word ‘limerent’. On the whole, though, I think that you could do better.”
Pride and affection and determination flooded him. He took out a parchment and began to compose another letter. This one he scoured for any of the same mistakes he had made in the first one; he would not be redundant or bombastic or have a “strange use of passive voice here”. He took another two days, this time not even listening in class as he wrote and edited and rewrote (an otherwise perfect page had to be thrown out because a stray ink mark too closely resembled an apostrophe) before finally slipping the finished product to you.
This one you handed back with fewer structural complaints, but more thematic ones. In multiple places, you merely underlined a phrase and wrote “cliche”. So he was being graded for originality, too. You had high standards, which only made the chance of meeting them more enticing.
He was going to earn your approval. Approval would turn to love. One day, you were going to love him; he’d make sure of it. You would be with him, the two of you would be together, you would love him. Like he loved you.
“Hasty conclusion; insufficient evidence,” you jotted on his next one, with an arrow to the word love.
Evidence. Of course, you wouldn’t just accept that he loved you with no sub-points to back it up.
Merlin, you were so endearing. He had to earn your trust, prove himself. His whole next letter expounded on his feelings for you, as concretely as he could. He avoided subjective descriptors, as he knew that you would critique any use of words like “beautiful”, and focused on specific qualities you had and how they made him feel. Once he had tapped into that well, it seemed he couldn’t stop; he wrote out all of the things he had noticed about you that no one else had, and how it annoyed him that your friends were so inattentive to your feelings, and all of the details of the future he imagined for the two of you.
That letter he did not receive back for several days.
He spent those days in a daze of mixed anxiety and excitement. He imagined that you hated the letter. He imagined you loved it. He imagined that you were tearing it to shreds. He imagined that you read it to yourself every night.
He couldn’t catch your gaze in or between classes; you didn’t study in the library anymore. He didn’t notice that he had taken to following you in the hallways until one of your friends spotted him and whispered to you, and his anxiety spiked; he sprinted in the opposite direction, hoping you hadn’t turned around in time to see him.
The next day (by which time a torturous week had passed), you set a folded parchment in front of him on your way to your seat in Charms class.
It was not his letter; it was a note of your own, inscribed with only the words, “You are very observant. Thank you for the conversation, but I don’t know that I am interested.”
His heartbeat raced. His eyes looped over the words, fixating on different ones each time. He did not feel despair, nor defeat; how could he, when he knew the kind of people you had already settled for. You were brilliant, but your friends weren’t nearly as smart as he was. They didn’t care for you as much as he did. They wouldn’t be as successful as he would, provide for you like he would. The people you chose to surround yourself with would never deserve you, but he could come to. He had just failed to get that across, but soon he would succeed.
His eyes tightened their loop, now focused only on the words “I don’t know”.
That was the most important part, he decided. You had not been blunt in your rejection; you were unsure. He could fix that, could explain himself, could teach you how to accept his love, the way you had taught him so much.
Slowly, so as not to break the reverie he found himself in, Percy withdrew his quill, inkwell, and parchment from his bag. He would write you again. A letter a day, two letters a day, as many as needed. As many observations and declarations as it would take. He just needed to prove himself.
...
(Caught myself referencing the song “Other Friends” towards the end, then just kinda went with it. Hope you enjoyed this one!)
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reginavere · 3 years
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GENERAL / RULES:
hi there! it’s pippa.  25+ / EST / she & her
this version of guinevere is based in legend but with very specific headcanons. she’s my own take on guinevere, which may not be for everyone. please respect that, and please abstain from correcting me on my own interpretations/ headcanons. most of them tie into in-depth development i’ve done or that i’ve done with another writer, and they are not subject to change. (this mostly pertains to headcanons regarding internal thoughts/character development/etc. if i get a canon detail wrong, you can obviously politely correct me, same (of course) goes for any mistakes i may make regarding your particular interpretation of your character.)
i’m not planning on doing anything fancy by way of tagging/icons/formatting/etc. this is going to be very informal, and will be taking a back seat to most of the other things i have going on in my life. i will be very selective about everything from the number of people i follow to the number of starters i choose to write, etc.
when it comes to formatting, i use minimal to light formatting and will often match some stylistic formatting choices to those of my writing partners.
As a general rule, I do not follow or interact with bible and/or abrahamic-lore based rp blogs and seldom follow rp blogs for figures in other religions (though that can get a bit wiggly with greek and roman myth, etc). exceptions can be made for multis who feature those, but single-muse blogs will generally be soft-blocked.
i don’t use purple prose (with the exception of some purple patches here and there, if i’m feeling indulgent). i just don’t. i don’t like it, i’ve felt that it has negatively influenced my outside writing in the past, and it slows me the heck down. i am  by no means saying that you shouldn’t use it while writing with me! if that’s the way you personally prefer to write, then you should absolutely do so! unlike with post-length and some small format changes, however, please do not expect me to match, because i won’t.
PLEASE SEE BELOW THE CUT FOR NOTES ON INTERPRETATION!
this as a cheat sheet of sorts to the pieces/parts i take from the various legends…and those i leave out!
the eldest daughter of leodegrance of cameliard (camelide, etc)
one sister, only a year or so younger, named guinevak
well-educated by any standard, essentially raised to be a queen of some sort, though being married to a high king was not, of course, a specific plan
if her father had any disappointment in not having a son, he rarely showed it to guinevere. instead, he focused his attentions on raising her to be a success. she got along well with her father and would always strive to impress him and make him proud.
was close to her younger sister in childhood, but a rift grew between them as they grew older, and fully formed during the failed false guinevere plot
did not marry arthur out of love, but because her father & arthur arranged it. (she knows her father’s reasons, she does not know arthur’s.)
SHE NEVER:
marries mordred
sends galahad on the grail quest on purpose/in order to get rid of him
shows animosity/jealousy toward lancelot & elain or toward galahad for being lancelot’s son
cheated on arthur in order to hurt him
throws the vicious temper tantrums some legends give her (while she does have a temper, she’s also a queen and she knows how to direct her anger. she can be petty and vindictive, but it’s underhanded.)
flagrantly paraded her affair with lancelot before arthur/the court? the affair was well-hidden, and the only “knowledge” of it would a.) be limited to people who have a reason to know or b.) be contained in rumors, and rumors which were NOT widespread OR widely believed. there is never any evidence until the very end.
IN REINCARNATION AU, SHE:
is happier/outwardly kinder/more settled than her legendary counterpart
usually only remembers events from the past after “losing” arthur in some way. if there’s ever an arc where she never meets arthur, the status of her memories is up for debate: if she meets lancelot but never arthur, some may return. if she never meets either, none likely come back at all. arthur is almost always the trigger for her memories.
will not accept being scolded/despised/etc for decisions she made in another life and has not made in this one
would not cheat on arthur, and any relationship with lancelot comes either BEFORE or AFTER a relationship with arthur (or potentially during, but with arthur’s full knowledge & permission)
sees her former life as the life of a different person entirely, and almost always refers to guinevere in the third person rather than first, if she talks about it at all. (exceptions might be made for arthur/lancelot/anyone who approaches the topic without meaning to berate her for choices she barely remembers making/just wants to talk)
BASICALLY, my portrayal of guinevere does not and WILL NEVER adhere strictly to any cycle of the legends, to any singular legend in particular, or to any portrayal in literature, film, television, or otherwise. SIMILARLY, she does not and WILL NEVER adhere strictly to the idea of guinevere as an actual historical figure who really existed. i DO NOT and WILL NEVER adhere strictly to real historical events that happened in the assumed time of the arthurian legends.
long story short, i don’t have much interest in the version of events that makes arthur and guinevere real living figures. (especially because, if you want my two cents, i tend to think the legends are an amalgamation of existing figures over a fairly significant period of time, the “truth” now entirely indistinguishable from the fanfiction-level retellings that have occurred over the span of time.
all of that being said, while you will never see me strictly adhere to this, and while i REFUSE to completely morph guinevere into any of those versions for anyone, i AM happy to bend mildly-to-moderately to fit guinevere into other interpretations of the legends. (there will always be aspects of my portrayal i’m not as likely to budge on, but those are more fundamental-to-my-characterization things than anything else.) i will never force anyone into writing in my strict version of events. i do, however, expect the same level of flexibility in return!
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wordsnstuff · 5 years
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20 Mistakes To Avoid in YA Fiction/Romance
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* This is a re-upload due to the original being flagged a few months ago for having a gif of two teenagers...*GASP*... dancing. What, tumblr? What is “adult” about that? The post has been in appeal for 4 months, and I have a feeling it won’t leave, so I decided to finally repost it. 
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YA Fiction is an incredibly popular genre of literature, and most people have picked one up and devoured it in less than a day, but there is a trend in the genre where in certain instances, people forfeit quality for a cheesy dramatic plot. A lot of these stories are just regurgitated cliches with vaguely interesting characters and just enough drama, fluff, and mildly (or extremely) sexual content to keep the reader paying attention. (No shade to the authors, because obviously, any author who writes and publishes a book works hard, no matter the end product.)
There are a lot of aspects of YA Fiction that repeatedly rear their ugly heads and annoy readers or flat out scream dangerous messages to the young people that indulge in them. I thought I’d put the spotlight on a few in the hopes that it will help clean up the genre’s reputation as new and more awakened authors contribute content to it.
Below you will read about some common mistakes that YA Fiction/Romance writers make that either ruin the story, promote dangerous messages, or unrealistically portray teenagers.
Forgetting The Supporting Characters
The supporting characters are an important part of any story, even if the main plot revolves around two people. Supporting characters provide subplots, information to the reader, and more opportunities for your audience to connect and relate to your story. It’s always good to give your supporting characters love and attention when creating and writing them. Sometimes they end up carrying the story.
A mistake that a lot of authors make is that they give the reader a couple defining characteristics, a name, a relationship to the main character, and then just make that character pop into the reader’s view whenever the main plot needs them to. No backstory. No life of their own. Just support to the plot, and that’s a huge waste of potential. You don’t want your readers to put down your book and either forget the supporting characters existed at all, or believe that they were extra pieces of a puzzle.
Using Slang Badly
Writers should not feel the need to include current slang in order to make their story more relatable or popular amongst their targeted demographic. Slang is constantly changing, evolving, and most importantly, dying. Not to say that you should only write in traditional terms or put “thy” and “thee” everywhere, but using standard English and avoiding the trendy but temporary slang words is key.
If you must use slang, try to use the bare minimum and only in fitting circumstances. If your character is the type to say “OMG her dat boi memes are on fleek” then, by all means, go right ahead, but you probably cringed when you read that. That would have been totally normal 2 years ago, but every bit of that sentence has died over time, and no matter how much you think a slang word will stick, don’t risk it.
Sympathy and Envy Mongering
Two emotions that YA Fiction and Romance always try to invoke in their readers are sympathy and envy. The author either wants the reader to feel bad for one or many of the characters, or they want them to be jealous of the awesome (and usually unrealistic) lives the characters have. Don’t be one of these. It’s tired and boring and not original in the slightest.
Are sympathy and empathy both totally okay emotions?
Yes.
Are they all you need to write a good story?
Nope. Not at all.
The reader needs and wants to feel more than jealous of and sad for the characters in the story. The best stories are the ones that trigger a complex whirlwind of emotion. Sympathy and envy are the easy way out, and you get out of those emotions what you put into them.
Unrealistically Portraying Teenagers & Teenage Life
Teenagers look up to and compare themselves and their lives to the characters and lives of the characters in your story. Keeping in mind that your audience is young and impressionable is essential for authors of the genre.
Love At First Sight
Love-at-first-sight does not happen. Infatuation, maybe, but love is more complicated than that. Writing a plot based on “love at first sight” can leave a bad taste in your readers’ mouths from the start, and that is something you should avoid at all costs. On top of that, love-at-first-sight is a very easy-way-out move and if you’re dedicated to your characters and your story, there’s a good to fair chance that you can come up with a more satisfying build up.
Unrealistic Romantic Situations
If you’ve ever opened a YA Romance, chances are you’ve read a scene in which the protagonist and the love interest end up in a stunningly beautiful place and the love interest sweeps the protagonist off their feet prior to riding into the sunset. This, unfortunately, does not happen very often, especially in teenage relationships. The most romance you’re going to get (usually) is the love interest offering to pay for the protagonist’s bag of skittles with the leftover money from their paycheck they earned at McDonald’s.
Just because teenagers don’t really go to great lengths to rent an entire ice-skating rink in the middle of the night so they and their crush can skate to Ellie Goulding music doesn’t mean there can’t be cute and memorable moments. Great doesn’t always equal grand and that’s important to remember. A lot of the time, teenagers appreciate fantasizing about things that are actually possible.
Happy Endings
Not all stories have to end happily, and you’ve definitely been told this before, but nobody ever takes into account how stories about teenagers have so much potential when it comes to endings. Teenagers read books about teenagers and unfortunately, this means that a lot of them will take what you’re writing about and try to change their own lives to match. Be honest in your depiction about what actually happens when you leave high school.
The majority of the time, high school sweethearts won’t stay together. Long distance won’t work, they’ll find someone else, the spark will die out, their personalities will undergo drastic changes, and their goals and plans for the future will turn out differently than they expected. “And they lived happily ever after” is criticized harshly for a reason, especially in YA and YA Romance. Most stories don’t end happily, but there is more than one story in a person’s life and giving a person their happy ending as they graduate high school is a great injustice, to your character and your readers.
Avoiding The Dark Parts Of Teenage Life
Teenagers, despite what a lot of the media claims, go through some really serious and stressful and damaging things. Teenagers suffer from mental illness and deal with the intense pressure of the education system and hold their heads high in the face of stigma over every little detail about them. They suffer from eating disorders and body dysmorphia and self-harm tendencies, and that doesn’t even bring into account the bullying and family issues and the stress of constantly learning and feeling things for the very first time with little to no guidance or assurance or resources to ask for help. It is hard being a teenager. Do not forget that, and don’t leave the actual teenagers reading your story feeling underrepresented and/or abnormal because they aren’t as stress-free as the characters they look up to.
Exaggerating How Teenagers Interact With Each Other
A lot of teenage interactions are short, awkward, and uneventful. Teenagers aren’t super eloquent and socially apt, but YA Fiction seems to believe they are. It’s quite rare that a teenager will just walk up to someone they like, say “wanna go to dinner on Saturday?” and all will be fine and dandy. It’s quite rare that a teenager will saunter up to someone who talked about them behind their back, say something super clever and damaging to their enemy’s ego, and saunter off like the king/queen of the world. Those interactions look great in our heads, but they usually contain a few stuttered words and “um”s and blushing. Confidence is usually a trait that people develop later in life, so try not to push it if you’re trying to be realistic.
Maturity of Teenagers
Teenagers are underdeveloped human beings with minimal experience in most areas of life. They do not have it all figured out. A lot of YA books revolve around characters that are extremely intelligent, disciplined and ambitious at a level of maturity a 25-year-old be on. This is not accurate. Making characters “awkward” or “childish” does not have anything to do with how mature they seem to readers. There is a distinct difference between an awkward girl with childlike innocence and a girl who makes mistakes, does not have her life figured out, and is not yet comfortable with casual social interaction. The latter things I mentioned are pretty universal when it comes to teenagers.
Unfitting Aspirations
There are more than two paths in life. It seems that in YA you’re either going to graduate, get married, pop out a couple kids and live the rest of your life in the suburbs, or you’re going to leave home, go to college, travel for 20 years and settle in some random country in Europe writing poetry until the end of your days. There is no in between, which sucks. There are a lot of interesting things you can do in life, not to say that either of the two life paths I mentioned are uninteresting. You could take a gap year and travel the world, go to college, move back home for a couple years then maybe get a job that has you traveling and exploring new things for the rest of your life. You could meet the love of your life in college and have some kids but put them in online school so you could travel with them. You could live your whole life in an awesome cabin in the forest casting spells and adopting wild squirrels. There are so many ways life can be and restricting it to opposite extremes takes the imagination out of the future.
Not All Teenagers Think Their Relationships Will Last Forever
This one is pretty self explanatory, so long story short, not every relationship a teenager enters into is with the end goal of staying together forever, or even more than a few months. Most teenage relationships are pretty short and not very meaningful, and portraying every single couple in your stories as “we’ve been going strong for 2 years and plan on getting married right after graduation” is inaccurate and will probably cause your readers some disappointment in the future.
Relationships Aren’t A Teenager’s Only Concern
Most teenagers are more concerned about the F they got on a History test than they are about who they’re going to stare at next period. Everyone has more than just their crush to worry about. Some teenagers have to worry about where they’re going to get their next meal or how they’re going to get a ride home from school or even how they can apologize to a friend they’ve hurt. It’s not all about relationships for teenagers, in fact, relationships are a pretty small part of teenage life. If all your character has to think about is the hottie they sit next to in Biology, perhaps you should work a little more on character development.
Unnatural Appearances
Most teenagers are not model-level attractive. All teenagers have break-outs and leave the house late with greasy hair or with their shirt on inside out. No teenager shows up at school every day looking absolutely flawless, as if they’re about to walk down the runway. Please keep that in mind, because portraying teenagers accurately, especially when it comes to physical aspects such as weight, acne, etc. is super important. In YA and YA Romance, you must keep in mind that the teenagers you are trying to appeal to should not feel like a piece of trash because they aren’t as perfect as your characters. Yes, YA Fiction is Fiction, but just because you know that it’s unrealistic doesn’t mean your readers do. Readers of YA Fiction compare themselves to the characters in your books whether you like it or not. It is not hard to realistically portray physical appearances of teenagers.
Avoiding Dangerous Messages
A common problem found in YA Fiction is the lacing of dangerous messages found in the smaller details. You may miss them the first couple times you read a story, but if you go looking for them, you will find them, and perhaps you will find the source of a lot of mistakes you’ve made. YA has a bad habit of endorsing mindsets that lead to bad decisions. Some of them, however, can be avoided in your own writing.
The Need To Change The “Flawed” One
Nobody in this world is perfect. Expecting the person you supposedly love to be flawless all the time is not realistic. People make mistakes. People are not always happy and bubbly and confident about themselves. People do not always act the same one day as they did the day before. Human beings are flawed and should be portrayed as such, especially in the stage of their life which is the most confusing and scary. Teenagers are underdeveloped human beings, and for some reason, teenager girls in YA Romance expect teenage boys to be charming and loving and never ever make a mistake, which is ridiculous. Creating love interests that appear flawless and can make no mistakes is detrimental to your audience. It raises your readers’ expectations to an unattainable level which causes them disappointment and might cause their future partners unrepairable damage to their self-esteem because they’ll think that in order to find a partner, they cannot be flawed and cannot make mistakes.
Glorification Of Illegal Activity
It’s not “cool” or “edgy” to pump yourself full of deadly and mind-altering substances you know absolutely nothing about. It doesn’t make you “badass” and it isn’t a personality trait unless that trait is stupid. Whatever your position is on drugs or alcohol or whatever, there is no excuse for putting the idea in the heads of young readers that doing things that are illegal and addictive and that might even get you killed is ok. Not only because most of your readers are younger than 21, but because it will always be dangerous to take drugs, commit crimes, and drink. Your choices are your choices. Don’t impose your habits and excuses on kids who don’t know any better.
Slut Shaming
News flash: it’s 2017, people. Nobody cares who you’re kissing or dating or having sex with. People are finally getting used to the idea that maybe, just maybe, it’s not the end of the world if you do whatever you want, as long as you’re not hurting yourself or anyone else. This recurring theme of “I hate this person because they do what they want with their body” is getting old and annoying. Believe what you will regarding religion and morals and what is right or wrong or whatever you want to believe in, but the second you start turning your story into a commentary on the decisions and beliefs of other people, you’re in the wrong. There are other, more creative reasons to make your characters hate each other than their sexual activity.
Forgetting The First Times
One of the most exciting parts of being a teenager is that everything you’re experiencing, you’re experiencing for the first time. Everything is confusing and exciting and 10x more painful or memorable or enjoyable, and that’s neglected all the time in YA. I don’t mean the common trope of the first kiss or the losing of virginity. I mean love and infatuation and loss and heartbreak; it’s all happening to them for the first time in their lives, and these events make up their memories that they will carry with them forever. Teenage years are incredibly heavy times for people. It is, after all, the years in which they learn the most and the fastest and where the majority of their brain development takes place. These moments that you’re writing, the first kiss, the first time having sex, the first time your character loses someone they love, they’re all going to determine how your character will develop in the future. Treat them that way. Teach young readers that it’s normal and perfectly okay to be scared and inexperienced and lost. That’s the bitter-sweet part of youth and it’s beautiful.
Bad Boys And Boring Girls
Bad Boys are, in reality, bad news. The real “bad boys” in this world are slimy, manipulative jerks who trick girls (usually more than one at a time) into thinking they have feelings for them, using them for things like sex or money, and then either end up controlling their entire lives, introducing drugs and problems, or breaking their hearts. It’s sad, but it’s reality. Yes, there’s always a cause for this behavior, and sometimes these bad boys grow out of it, but that’s not always the case. Portraying these bad boys as “changeable” is not only dangerous for the female readers but also the men in their future. If you make girls think that they can change whomever they’re with to be the perfect prince charming, they will never be satisfied with someone who is flawed (spoiler alert: everyone is flawed) and they may destroy the self-esteem of whoever they’re with by making them think they need to change to be lovable.
Boring Girls are, sort of, connected to bad boys in this sense. They show up in every story, which makes sense financially because authors who make more relatable main characters sell more books. It’s just demographics. But at the same time, this stretch for a wider audience can end up influencing girls’ expectations of themselves and their love lives. If you make every protagonist completely boring, compliant, and devoid of strong, defining traits, girls will take that as advice. They will learn that all a girl has to do to make people fall in love with them is sit quietly and be pretty, which is horrible, in case you hadn’t noticed. Teach girls to look up to strong characters with rich personalities. Nowadays, that counts as an original idea.
Generalization
Portraying every aspect of teenage life and teenagers themselves as if you opened a book full of cliches, closed your eyes and pointed at something is not ok. High schools and families and personalities are different wherever you go, and making blind generalizations about aspects of teenage life can not only change how your reader interprets their own lives, but how adult readers assume teenage life is when they’re not around. It is important to not reinforce the assumption that there is always a popular clique and mean jocks and awkward nerds and dead-beat stoners because these stereotypes are a way for people to justify their snap-judgements, and not only does that say a lot about you as an author, but that will breed a whole new generation of judgmental, close-minded people.
Glorification Of Unhealthy Relationship Behaviors
I’m gonna say this once: It is not “hot” to have the love interest constantly putting restrictions on their supposed loved one. It’s not okay to borderline stalk someone and use “I love you” as an excuse, even if the person reciprocates your feelings. It is unhealthy to ignore someone when they say “no, no, not now” or “no, stop, not here” when you’re in the middle of initiating sex or even just kissing. It is disgusting when romance, especially YA Romance, which has mostly young, impressionable readers taking in your messages, promotes these behaviors like they’re something to strive for. Like it or not, your writing is going to alter the way they imagine a “perfect” relationship. If you aren’t willing to take that responsibility seriously, you should not be writing YA, and especially not YA Romance.
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bettsfic · 5 years
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socknography: the importance of preserving fan creator biographical data
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i wrote earlier on utilizing collections and bookmarks to boost the archival power of ao3, and in that post mentioned how i wish authors would fill out their bios so we can preserve fanauthor information as well as we preserve the fics themselves. so, here is my rant about WHY WE ARE SO IMPORTANT.
for my masters thesis i wrote about the layered pseudonymity of fanfiction authors, and after doing a ton of research, i find myself still thinking of the pseudonymous/anonymous divide as it pertains to fic. we have authors we consider “famous” and ones whose followings eclipse that of traditionally published authors, but unlike traditionally published authors, we don’t put a handy bio at the end of our fics. in fact, if you want to find out about the author, you have to hope they’ve linked somewhere to their tumblr or twitter or dreamwidth, or they have consistent pseuds across platforms. and from there, you have to hope they have an ‘about me.’ but most, myself included, don’t.
unlike traditional publication -- where amazon and goodreads and even the back of the book contains biographical info -- and even unlike the rest of fandom archival etiquette -- which, despite having virtually no committed rules still maintains its organizational structure -- there is no standard etiquette on fanauthor biographical data. 
i speculate the reasons fanauthors are hesitant to write their own biographies is very complicated: 
there is no “ask” for it or existing standard. when i publish stories under my real name, i’m required to provide my bio, which contains my accomplishments, where i got my degree, where else i’m published, and my website. all literary author bios follow this formula, so they’re pretty easy to write. other than this post, i have never seen a request for fanauthor bios. so without an editor demanding it, and without a standard formula or platform to draw from, a total lack of information becomes the norm, and almost any info other than the standard “name. age. pronouns. ao3 name. list of fandoms and/or pithy one-liner” of tumblr or occasional ask game is seen as a deviation from the norm. even ask games get a bad rep sometimes, and they’re transitory, a post you see as you’re scrolling through to somewhere else, not static, like a dedicated profile page.
pseudonymity veers too close to anonymity. an anonymous author cannot have a biography. a pseudonymous author can, but biographies may be seen as defeating the purpose of writing under a pseudonym, or multiple pseuds. a sock account is a sock for a reason -- you don’t want it associated with your main. moreover, i believe fandom creates an environment in which to acknowledge your accomplishments and promote your own content is seen as narcissistic. fanfiction can sometimes be seen as a genre of selflessness, donating time and energy into a community centered around a shared canon, not personal gain. to acknowledge the self publicly is to invite attention, and attention is contradictory to anonymity.
shame and humility. the more information you have on the internet, the easier you are to find. very few fanauthors use their real names, or feel comfortable connecting their fan identity to their real one. i hear pretty constantly how often fanauthors hide their fannishness from their coworkers and loved ones, how only the people closest to them know they write/read fanfic. moreover, you might think “my most popular fic only has 10 kudos and 1 comment, nobody wants to know about me” (which is so not true, but i’ll get to that in a minute).
fandom is constantly changing. with a central archive for fanfiction in place, it’s easier now to be in multiple fandoms at once than it ever has been. if you want to read all sugar daddy fics, there’s a tag for that, and if you’re not picky about canon, you have an entire buffet of fandoms to choose from. communities are growing and shifting and changing shape. i move fandoms, and i keep my friends and readers from previous fandoms. i get dragged to new fandoms frequently. my interests and inspirations change, but i don’t erase my history or identity every time i move, i only add to it. i am always betts whether i’m in star wars or the 100 or game of thrones. but if you only read my fic, you don’t know the stories behind it. many people don’t know i entered fandom in the brony convention community in 2012, or that i was sadrobots before i was betty days before i was betts, or how fandom changed my life and led me through a path of personal trauma recovery, or that i co-founded wayward daughters, or ran the fanauthor workshop, or all these other things about fanfic that is not fanfic itself. 
if you are a fan creator, your fannish personal narrative matters. telling your story helps preserve the metatextual history of our genre.
i think constantly about what our genre will look like in 30 or 50 years, if it will be like other genres that began as subversions of the mainstream: comic books, beat literature, science fiction. genres that, at the time involved groups of friends creating stories for each other, bouncing ideas off of one another, experimenting with or distorting other genres, and which became, over time, well-regarded forms with rich histories. 
maybe one day, like the MCU, we’ll have a dedicated production company that churns out adaptations of longform coffee shop aus written between 2009 and 2015. maybe “BNFs” will be read in high school literature curriculums. maybe our work will end up on the real or virtual shelves of our great grandchildren. and if that happens, if fanfic goes entirely mainstream, how will fanfic authorship be perceived? how will fanpeople in 2080, if humanity is still around by then, interact with the lexicon we’ve created and preserved? what would you do if you found out Jane Austen wrote under five different sock accounts across three platforms over the span of twenty years? how would you, a fan of Pride & Prejudice, even begin to find all of her work?
we have so many social constraints pushing against us. there’s purity culture, which encourages further division of identity -- fanauthors may write fluff on their main and have various sock accounts for underage/noncon fics. if you’re a scarecrow, you’re much harder for a mob to attack. there’s misogyny, which dictates women/queer ppl shouldn’t be writing about or indulging in or exploring their sexuality at all. there’s intellectual property and a history of DMCAs, which, although kept at bay by the OTW, may still have influence on the “illegal” mentality of our work. with social armies against us, it’s easier to exist in the shadows, on the fringe. we change URLs based on our moving interests, and split our identities a million different ways, and keep sarcastic “me” tags full of self-deprecating text posts. we are difficult beasts to catch, because we have not been allowed to exist.
i spent a lot of time today googling the word for “pseudonymous biography” and came up empty-handed (if someone knows of an existing word, pls let me know. “pseudography” is apparently a fancy word for a typo; “pseudobiography” is a fake biography), so for lack of anything better, i’ve come up with the term “socknography” because 1) it’s funny and doesn’t sound intimidating, and 2) it encapsulates the sensitive and complicated way fanauthor identifying conventions work. and also i think “fanauthor biography,” “bibliography,” and “profile” just doesn’t cut it for the actual work of these pieces. they don’t necessarily include IRL biographical data, they include more historical/community context than a bibliography, and the words “profile” and “about me” don’t really inspire interaction, or acknowledge the archival importance of this work.
astolat’s fanlore page is my go-to example. astolat writes under multiple pseuds and has major influence in the history of fandom. she’s also a traditionally published author, but you notice, her ofic novels are not mentioned, nor any other real-life identifying information. fanlore has a really good policy on this in place, for those concerned about doxxing. 
(moreover, i am not suggesting you centralize your socks. they’re socks for a reason. but most everyone has a main, and that main identity has a story.)
there are 2 existing spaces to preserve socknographies. 
fanlore, a wiki owned by the OTW, you can make an account and create a user page (which is different than a “person” page) using a user profile template
ao3′s “profile” page, which is a big blank box in which anything goes
(i’m not including tumblr on this list because i don’t think it’s a stable platform.) 
fanlore’s template is straight to the point and minimal, which doesn’t really invite narrative the same way a literary bio would. ao3′s big blank box leaves us with the question -- wtf do i say about myself? how do i say it? how much is too much? and because of that, most profiles are either blank or only include a policy on translations/podfic/fanart, and maybe links to tumblr and twitter. but let me tell you, if i have read your fic and taken the time to move over to your profile, you better believe i am a fan. and as a fan, i want to Know Things.
here are the things i want to know, or
a potential template:
introduction (name/alias, age, location, pronouns, occupation)
accomplishments (degrees, personal history)
fan history (fandoms you’ve been in, timeline as a fan, how you were introduced to fandom/fanfiction, what does fandom mean to you -- this is where your fan narrative goes)
fandom participation (popular fics/posts, involvement in fan events/communities, side blogs, interviews, etc. 3 & 4 might be one and the same for you)
spotlight (which of your fics are most important to you/would you like others to read and why? what are the stories behind your favorite fics you’ve written?)
find me elsewhere* (links to tumblr, twitter, insta, etc.)
policies on fanart, fanfic of fic, podfics, and translations
*you cannot link to ko-fi, paypal, patreon, or amazon on ao3/fanlore per the non-commercial terms of service
i’ll be working on filling this out for my own profile as an example, but you can also see how my @fanauthorworkshop participants filled out their fanauthor spotlights, and the information they provided. obviously, you should only share that which you feel comfortable sharing, and as your fandom life changes, your narrative will change too. it’s not much different than updating a CV or resume.
tl;dr the goal is to provide a self-narrative of your fan life/identity for posterity. who are you and why are you a fanperson? why do you create fan content? what are you proud of and what do you want to highlight to others? who are you in this space?
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meta-squash · 3 years
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Brick Club 1.2.1 “The Night After A Day’s Walk” - dog symbolism in the brick
There’s so much happening in this chapter, I’ll probably do multiple posts on it. Especially because my thoughts for this post aren’t really contained to this chapter specifically, since I was kind of inspired to branch out and look at a book-wide piece of symbolism. Specifically, dogs.
(As a note, I did try and look for any information on dogs as symbolism in 19th century literature, but the only things I could find were on 19th century paintings, which use dog symbolism in a much different way.)
Hugo uses dogs as symbolism quite a bit. They come in two forms: an animal to be pitied, or an animal that hunts.
The very first instance of dog symbolism is in this chapter. Valjean crawls into what he thinks is a roadside laborer’s shelter, and is confronted by a dog that attacks him. He says aloud, “I’m not even a dog!” Later on, he references his degradation in the prison, saying that even dogs were happier than he was. Cosette is also compared to a miserable dog while she is with the Thenardiers, both literally (Mme. Thenardier calls her “Mademoiselle Dog-for-a-name, and she is fed scraps under the table with the dog) and figuratively (Eponine and Azelma treat her like a dog, without looking at her). Fantine cowers like a dog in the corner when she is arrested. Valjean, when he’s trying to decide whether to reveal his identity at Arras or not, imagines Cosette “dying like a dog” if he doesn’t go rescue her. When they’re living at Rue Plumet, Cosette prefers the garden while Valjean remains in the backyard “like a dog.” Valjean also yet again recounts being lower than a dog when he describes prison life to Montparnasse. On a different part of the “pity” spectrum, Marius is likened to a “lost dog” when he hasn’t seen Cosette in the Luxembourg for a while.
When dogs are used as a symbolism for pity, the person being referenced is nearly always “lower” than the dog, and fairly often is alone or lonely. I feel like dog symbolism as something to be pitied or something that is abused is pretty standard for the era. It’s also unsurprising that the majority of pitiful dog symbolism goes to Valjean, and a little to Cosette, but not much to anyone else. I do find it interesting that Hugo kind of takes that metaphor at a different angle when it comes to Valjean’s behavior at Rue Plumet. This time, we’re not meant to feel pity for Valjean because he’s being treated poorly or abused by others; instead, he is making the conscious decision to treat himself as low and undeserving of the lush beauty of the garden. Similar to his minimal furnishings in the little porter’s lodge at Rue Plumet, he constrains himself to the back courtyard. We’re not meant to feel pity that Valjean is being treated poorly, but we are meant to react to the way he’s treating himself (and Cosette) by restricting himself. Those who are to be pitied as dogs or as lower than dogs are almost always helpless, oppressed, abused, and unable to help themselves or change their situation. And yet, Valjean willingly takes these actions that have Hugo describing his conditions as dog-like.
Hugo’s other frequent dog symbolism, and the appropriate mirror to the first type, is that of an animal that hunts. The very first image of that is Valjean’s memory of the search dogs during his prison escapes. This image gives us context for the next piece of hunting-dog symbolism, which is the hinge that shrieks as Valjean is trying to sneak out of Myriel’s house. Valjean imagines the sound of this hinge is “barking like a dog to arouse every one.” Later on, Javert is described as the “dog son of a wolf,” and many times over he’s likened to a dog on the hunt, a watch dog, or a search dog. During the Waterloo digression, the English metaphorically become a dog. More than once, policemen searching for Valjean are referred to as a pack of dogs, and Javert is called a dog when Marius goes to the police, as compared to Thenardier’s wolf. Patron Minette fighting Valjean are likened to dogs on a wild boar, and Valjean himself is described as “a dog scanning a thief” as he watches Marius walk back and forth in the Luxembourg. When Theodule follows Marius, he’s likened to a dog hunting by itself, for fun. Gavroche calls police spies dogs, cannon fire is the “barking of the sombre dogs of war,” and insurrection is described as “a revolt of the dog against its master.” Eponine calls herself a dog when she tells Patron Minette to leave Valjean’s house (I desperately want to expand on this but I’ll wait till the actual chapter).
Characters given the hunting dog description are nearly always on the offensive, but unlike the pitiful dog metaphor, who is always alone, they are either alone or in groups. I think it’s interesting that the hunting dog metaphor is used for both the police and the insurrection. The insurrection is a dog revolting against its master, and that’s an interesting contrast to the other metaphors, most of which are used to describe the police, who are in fact the “master”. The hunting dog is more cunning, watchful, and ready to attack, but they are also often of a higher social status or in a position of advantage at the moment the description occurs (compared to the lowness of the pitiful dog).
Dogs can either be pitiful or hunters, depending on the circumstances. They can be good or bad, depending on the nature of Hugo’s descriptive needs.
However, a wolf is pretty much always evil. Javert’s incarcerated fortune-teller mother is described as a wolf. Bamatabois follows Fantine with “the gait of a wolf” when he is harassing her. Thenardiers are again and again described as wolves; Mme Thenardier is a she-wolf, the Thenardier children are whelps. Montparnasse is described as a wolf caught by a sheep when Valjean catches and lectures him. Even Valjean is described as a wolf when seen through the eyes of Javert (”the wolf of today causes these dogs who are always on the chase to forget the wolf of yesterday”).
All three uses of metaphor serve to dehumanize the character for different reasons. The “pitiful dog” metaphor introduces a sympathetic, sad, helpless person, in order to then lift them up and illustrate their reintegration into the world, their rehabilitation, their regaining of strength or love or safety. The pitiful metaphor dehumanizes specifically to display the extent of their re-humanization. The “hunting dog” metaphor dehumanizes by showing a character’s lack of caring or empathy, their single-mindedness, and their aggression. Most of the hunting dogs are not really ever described as human (such as the policemen) or get a human description and then are immediately dehumanized again by returning to the hunting dog description (like Javert, or Eponine). However the hunting dogs still retain a level of self control or adherence to rules. This isn’t so for the “wolf” metaphor, which is used to dehumanize by expressing lawlessness, aggression, and self-centeredness. M. Thenardier is the one most often compared to a wolf, because he is someone who has lost most of his empathy or human connection, who is made of nothing but cunning, and who may resort to aggression or violence without warning.
I know this meta kind of digressed from the brick club schedule and went brick-wide, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the ways Hugo uses dogs and wolves in the book, considering the frequency of the metaphor.
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imaginaryelle · 4 years
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Okay, @tonyglowheart , here is that promised response:
@three--rings  already brought up some points I was going to mention so I’ll skip over going into detail on those and just say that I agree with the use of caution and thoughtfulness in approaching works produced by other cultures (of whatever language), and I, too, love a mash-up of MDZS and CQL for ideal storytelling. Accepting genre tropes in general is really important as well. I once showed my grandfather a piece of my writing based on pulp adventure stories like Indiana Jones and his main reaction was “All these secret chambers and codes and gadgets, isn’t that all very convenient?” and I just had to shrug and say, that’s the genre, it’s part of what makes it fun to read. Also, based on reading about various medicinal histories I’ve been exploring, I can say that the coughing up blood thing is a trope based in Ancient China’s traditional medicine. Lots of pre-understanding-of-blood-circulation societies thought expelling old or stale blood was important for the body (possibly based on how menses works and reflected in Western medicine’s several-century-long obsession with bloodletting), and I recently read that having it caught in your chest and needing to cough it up was part of China’s take on things. I’m still not sure about all the other face bleeding, but if it’s not actually based in something historical it seems like a reasonable extension for the genre.
Okay, so the thing I want to respond to most is the translation bit, because I… okay. I understand that people are going to find works in translation less accessible than works written in a language they can read, and especially works written in their native language and of their own culture. Because obviously there are a ton of underlying ideas that inform word choice and symbolism and character arcs that most people just don’t really think about until they make a serious study of writing or literature (or they travel and learn more about other languages and literature traditions). On a linguistic studies level, language literally shapes the way humans in different cultures think, and what they pick out as important (an academic article that compares English and Chinese specifically can be found here). Even the distinctions between British English and American English, on a word choice and theme or syntax level, can have an impact. I have seen it turn kids off a book, because there are just too many elements they don’t get (this is, for example, why there are two English versions of Harry Potter). Same thing with different decades even. I’m talking about kidlit and YA here because that’s a lot of what I work with, but in that realm, the way we approach stories today is just incredibly different from how they were approached even 50 years ago, even in the same language and the same country. Think Judy Blume or The Dark is Rising vs Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Percy Jackson. And I’m fascinated by those changes, and by the effects of culture and bias on translations (I am extremely hyped to read Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation, for example), so I tend to approach them as puzzles, where I’m reading the work, but also looking for clues that will tell me more about both the translator and the author to hang in balance. I enjoy that part, and I enjoy figuring out aspects of the two languages that can contribute to how a translation evolves.
I’m a language and literature nerd, and I know not everyone is going to take the approach I do.  I’m not going to fault anyone for saying they don’t enjoy or can’t get into a translation. That’s a perfectly valid opinion. Reducing a work to its translation and judging it only on that impression of it, however, seems pretty shortsighted to me. Here are some things that I think are important to keep in mind when reading a Chinese work in translation, just based on my own extremely limited knowledge:
1. In Chinese storytelling it’s an established practice to reference idioms, poetry, folklore and historic events as a sort of shorthand for evoking the proper tone. Chinese writing tends to be extremely allusive, and much more understated than what we’re used to in English-language storytelling. We can see hints of this in some of the MDZS translator notes, and it’s likely that this difference feeds into a lot of dissatisfaction with the translation. Either the allusions are not translated in a way that adds meaning for an English-speaking reader, or the standards for detail are different. Indirectness and subtly are huge parts of Chinese literature, and so different words or scenes will have very different connotations for Chinese vs. English speaking audiences. And this isn’t even touching on the use of rhyme and rhythm in Chinese writing, which are all but impossible to translate a lot of the time, or the often extremely different approaches to “style” and “genre” between the languages (an interesting article on comparative literature is here at the University of Connecticut website). Given this knowledge, it’s entirely possible that, for example, the smut scenes are more effective in Chinese than in the English translation. In fact, I find it difficult to believe it would be popular enough to get multiple adaptations and a professional publishing run if they weren’t. In translation, smut is a lot like humor: every culture approaches it a little differently. Unless a translator is familiar with both writing traditions and the relevant genres (or they have editors or sensitivity readers who can offer advice), something is going to get lost in the process. And sometimes that something is what at least one of the involved cultures would consider to be the most important part. It’s unfortunate, but it happens.
2. Chinese grammar is slightly different from English grammar (and I’m focusing on Mandarin as the common written language here. For anyone interested, a very basic rundown of major differences is available here). Verb tenses and concepts of time work differently. Emphasis is marked differently – in English we tend to put the most importance on the start of a sentence, while in Chinese it’s often at the end. Sentences are also often shorter in Chinese than in English, and English tends to get more specific in our longer sentences. From what I understand, it’s also a little more acceptable to just drop subjects out of a sentence, and that is more likely to happen if someone is attempting to be succinct. I’ve been told that it’s especially common in contentious situations, as part of an effort to distill objections or arguments down to an essential meaning (if I’m wrong about this or there’s more nuance to it, I’m happy to learn more). As one example of how this affects translation, let’s take that and look at Lan Wangji’s dialogue. I’m willing to bet that most of his words are direct translations, or as direct as the translator could manage. But his words don’t work the same way in English that they do in Chinese. If you continuously drop subjects and articles (Chinese doesn’t have articles) out of a character’s speech in English, they start to sound like they have issues articulating themselves, and I see that idea reflected in fic a lot. The idea that Lan Wangji just isn’t comfortable talking or can’t say the words he means is all over the place, but I don’t think the audience was intended to take away the idea that Lan Wangji speaks quite as stiltedly as he comes off in the English translation. He’s terse, yes. But I at least got the impression that it’s more about choosing when and how to speak for the best effectiveness than anything else, because so many of his actual observations are quite insightful and pointed, or fit just fine syntactically within the conversation he’s part of.
3. Chinese is both more metaphorical and more concrete than English in some ways. In English we use a lot of abstract words to represent complex ideas, and you just have to learn what they mean. In Chinese, the overlap of language and philosophy in the culture results in four-character phrases of what English would generally call idioms. Some examples I found: “perfect harmony” (水乳交融) can be literally translated as “mixing well like milk and water” and “eagerly” (如饥似渴) is read as “like hunger and thirst.” If these set phrases are translated to single word concepts in English, we can lose the entire tone of a sentence and it’ll feel much more flat and... basic, or uninspired. The English reader will be left wondering where the detailed descriptive phrase is that adds emotion and connotation to a sentence, when in the actual Chinese those things were already implied. 
As translations go, MDZS in particular is an incredibly frustrating mixed bag for me, partially because of the non-professional fan translation, and partially because my knowledge of Chinese literature and especially Cultivation novels is so minimal as to be nearly non-existent. But I have enough exposure to translations in general and Chinese language and literature in particular that I could tell there were things I was missing. The framework of the plot and scenes was too complete for me to ever be able to say that any particular frustration I had was due to the author, not the translator. There’s a big grey area in there that’s difficult to navigate without knowing both languages and the norms of the genre extremely well. At one point I was actually able to find multiple translation for a few of the chapters and I loved that. It was really cool to see what changed, and what remained essentially the same, and I was actually really surprised to find that rant you mention, because to me, more translations is always better. I think it was probably about wanting to corral an audience, and possibly also about reducing arguments from the audience about whether a translation was “wrong” or “right.” And that is an issue that’s going to crop up more in online spaces than it has traditionally. Professional translators don’t have to potentially argue with every single reader about their word choice. But then, professional translators also tend to have a better grasp of both the cultures they’re working with as well, and be writers of some variety in their own right, and while I can’t know how fluent (linguistically or culturally) the ExR translator was at the time, the translator’s notes lead me to believe that at minimum their understanding of figurative language use was incomplete. So I can’t fault people for not enjoying the translated novel as much as CQL, for example, because it can be quite choppy and much of the English wording feels like a sketch of a scene rather than something fleshed out fully, but I don’t think it’s fair to apply that impression to MXTX herself or the novel as a whole in Chinese.
More about ExR: I also got the sense that they have a strong bl and yaoi bias as you mentioned, mostly from the translator’s notes. And in general, okay, that’s fine, they’re working with a particular market of fans and I’m just not as much a part of that market. I knew going in that I wasn’t the target audience. I’m okay with that. What I was less okay with was getting to the end and reading the actual author’s notes in translation and finding that the author herself expressed a much more nuanced, considerate, and balanced approach to the story and her writing process than I had been led to believe by the translation and the translator’s notes. And so when people want to criticize the author for things that happen in the translation…. I just think it’s very important to remember that the translator is also a factor, as is the influence of the cultivation genre, and the nature of web novels, and the original intended audience. As you said, white western LGBT people were never the intended recipients of this work. It comes from a totally different context. But I think it’s also important to remember that, again as you noted, it wasn’t first written as a professional work. It was literally a daily-updated webnovel, which works a lot more like a fanfic than a book in terms of approach. And on top of that, it was the author’s second novel (if I’m reading things correctly) and one that they experimented with a lot of new elements in. Those elements earn a lot of forgiveness and benefit of a doubt from me.
About MXTX herself: Most of the posts or references to posts that I’ve seen that judge or dismiss her have to do with the stated sexuality of characters who are not Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. And it just kinda baffles me, because this is fandom. Most of us spend our time writing about characters who are stated to be straight all the time. Why is anyone getting up in arms about this? How can anyone in fandom just summarily dismiss an author for producing original work that centers around a gay relationship when that’s… literally what most of us write, to some extent or another? Again, I’m not saying there’s aren’t aspects that can be criticized in her stories, but the hypocrisy is kind of amazing. I think that fandom, as a culture overall, has issues with treating gay men and their relationships as toys rather than people, and individuals can address their own behavior on that as they learn and grow. That doesn’t mean that every work about gay men having sex is fetishistic, and honestly I’d say that the translator demonstrates more of that attitude than the actual story ever does. The smut is such an incredibly tiny part of the world, plots and character arcs in MDZS that it could be taken out without significantly changing the main narrative very easily. That’s… not fetishistic. That’s smut as part of an overarching romance plot.
Which leads me to the tropes discussion. Yes, obviously there are tropes in MDZS. There are tropes in every story. It’s not a failing, it’s part of writing. Are some of those tropes BL or Yaoi tropes? Sure. Wei Wuxian denying his own sexuality for much of the novel and his tendency toward submission and rape fantasy are some of the very first tropes mentioned in relation to the genre. That Wei Wuxian just sort of seamlessly moves from “pff, I’m NOT a cutsleeve, I’m just acting like one” to shouting “Lan Zhan, I really want you to fuck me” in front of friends, enemies and family without much of a process for dealing with the culture of homophobia around him also seems to be characteristic of the genre. But I think that’s about where it ends. You and @three--rings both made some good points about the nature of the actual relationship, which I agree with: There’s not much of a power play element, or an assigned gender roles element. They’re both virgins who only partially know what they’re doing from looking at illustrations of porn, and they do enthusiastically want to have sex with each other. They’re just bad at negotiating their kinks clearly and could use a decent sex ed manual. The trope I actually have the most issue with is the use of alcohol. I personally despise the trope of “I’ll get someone drunk on purpose for reasons that benefit me personally,” due to my own real life experiences. But it’s an exceedingly common trope in Western media (Idk about Chinese media, but my guess would be it exists there too), and it’s not exclusive to mlm smut scenarios. It’s pretty much everywhere. And, thankfully, Wei Wuxian does seem to eventually realize that he’s fucking things up by using it. That said, despite knowing what happens to him when he drinks, La Wangji keeps doing it. So they’re both contributing to that mess, no matter how much I dislike that it exists, and the narrative doesn’t actually condone it. No one says “Oh, Wei Wuxian, that’s such a good idea, that’s definitely something you should keep doing.” He is consistently warring with himself over it but unable to resist. It’s still dubcon and manipulation, and I certainly understand people not wanting to read it. I just also think that reducing the entire relationship down to “bad, terrible, fetishistic BL tropes” requires the reader to ignore large parts of the story and pretty evident intent on the parts of both the characters and the author.
On purity culture: Yeah, that’s obviously been cropping up all over the place the past several years (I have indeed been in marvel for ages :P). It does seem like there are places in fandom (to some degree any fandom), where “I don’t like how this idea was executed in this context” gets conflated with “This entire work is terrible,” which is a disservice to everyone involved. I agree that there are many things that can be legitimately criticized in MDZS, but I also just… really don’t understand where this attitude comes from that because something is not perfect, it’s trash. Wasn’t fandom essentially invented out of the desire to respond to canon? To make it more your own? Isn’t picking out the parts you like and ignoring the bits you don’t (or writing around the bits you hate until you can fit them in a shape you like better) pretty much what all fic is about? Aren’t those holes people are sticking their fingers into and complaining about opportunities for more fan content?  But even more than “purity culture” I would term it “entitlement culture,” because a lot of it seems to be about the idea that media should fit into and support a certain set of beliefs at all times. A lot of fandoms are no longer an atmosphere of “I don’t like the way this is presented so I’m going to create my on version that works for me.” Instead there’s a growing element of “I don’t like the way this is presented so that means it’s wrong and bad and the original creator should admit that it’s wrong and bad and fix it to satisfy me.” And honestly? That’s just sad to me. More and more, we’re not having a conversation with canon, or even with each other. We’re not building what we want to see we’re just… tearing other people down. I really don’t understand what anyone finds fun in that, and I’m going to do my best to keep creating the things I actually do want to see instead.
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valiantleigh · 4 years
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What I Learned From 5 Years of Minimalism
The Beginning of  a Learning Curve
It all started with clothes. Oh boy, the clothes that 14-year-old Brenna chose to wear. Walking into Rue 21, determined to make all my fashion dreams come true, I‌ [un]wisely chose 3 pairs of brightly colored skinny jeans⁠—electric blue, shockingly emerald green, and maroon⁠—and cheaply made circle scarves and tops to match. This was it. This is how I would gain the “oohs” and “ahhs” and admiration of my fellow trendy Freshmen at Parowan High.
Eventually, the glamour wore off. Frustrated, I realized that rare shades of spunky green could only match with so many things. Dressing fashionably was more of a chore than I had ever wanted it to be, and somehow I still didn’t measure up to the girls around me. How would I‌ ever be comfortable with how I looked and achieve the effortless style I longed for?
Enter minimalism⁠—the worldwide movement touting the universal benefits of decluttering, downsizing, and “less is more.” Capsule wardrobes and black and white outfits seemed like the perfect solution to my personal style dilemma, and at age 15 I proudly declared myself to be a “minimalist.”
(If you are not familiar with the term “minimalism”, this article, and this article both give a good overview.)
I‌ began to devour every piece of minimalist literature and media I could find. I strategically began buying clothing that was guaranteed to pair well each day. I was ruthless as I decluttered my belongings and challenged myself to thrive with only the things that were necessary. Everything had to go. Frivolity and excess became enemies to my ideal of perfection.
At one point, I was successfully dressing myself for school each day with only 3 shirts, 2 pairs of jeans, 2 pairs of shoes, and one jacket to my name. Decided pickiness and a limited budget didn’t allow for much more, but at that time it was all about the numbers. I was proud of myself for proving it was possible to “live with less.”
But minimalism isn't strictly about clothing. It's a way of life. Mistakenly, I began to pattern myself after the lifestyle I saw on other people’s blogs and YouTube channels, convincing myself that this was my best life. Minimalism changed a lot of things for me: how I‌ viewed my time, my dream [tiny] house I‌ would build in college (ha! not happening), constant dissatisfaction with the untidiness of any room that wasn’t mine, and even how I‌ lived the gospel. Clearing the excess left me feeling empty instead of whole.
It took a little while but I finally realized that I‌ don’t want the smallest home possible; I don’t want to grow all my food and live off the grid; I‌ don’t want to constantly obsess over having the “right” stuff. And white walls and furniture? Forget it! I’m gonna be a mama, after all.
What I Got Wrong
In the end, minimalism wasn’t the solution to all my problems. For a young girl who felt that having full control over every detail of her life would bring the peace she desired, maybe minimalism wasn’t the best thing. However, looking back I wouldn’t give up the lessons I‌ learned about the relationship between possessions and my individual worth. While there was certainly a time that I cut out too much in order to live the lifestyle I‌ thought would save me, I have now kept the best parts of that journey and found balance and joy in more fulfilling ways.
So what are the best parts of minimalism? A few years ago, I totally missed the mark on that score. “Minimalism is a tool to rid yourself of life’s excess in favor of focusing on what’s important—so you can find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom.” (theminimalists.com, emphasis added) I, however, was using this tool as a justification for striving for unattainable flawlessness.
While I recount my past misunderstandings concerning minimalism, my goal is to dissuade you from it’s vices, not it’s actual tenets. Younger Brenna was reading words between the lines that weren’t meant to be there in the first place.
In fact, nearly every minimalist influencer out there pleads that newbies to the movement avoid conforming to any one way of using minimalism, especially if it isn’t right for them.
According to Colleen Valles of No Side Bar, “the beauty of minimalism” is that “there are no standards.”
“Minimalism is not about following someone else’s rules or way of living as a minimalist,” offers Melissa of Simple Lionheart Life. “It’s about figuring out what is important to you and getting rid of everything that’s distracting you from the important stuff.”
As I made this mental shift from a sort of utopian/restrictive minimalism to a mindful/carefree minimalism, here’s a few lessons I picked up on:
Lesson 1: When you find out what is really important to you, you’ll actually want it, and have a clear path to get it.
In this busy, busy world there is so much to choose from. With all of these choices vying for our attention, decision fatigue eventually leads to self doubt and feelings of failure.
But do we really even want the things that we choose on a daily basis? Do we want to scroll through our Instagram for 6 hours a day? Do we want to impress people whose opinions don’t matter to us anyway? Do we want to avoid things that might challenge us just because it is safe and easy? No one, when making a list of their priorities in life, even thinks about these things. They don’t make the Top 100!
So ask yourself, “What do I really want? And what is stopping me from obtaining it?” When I talk about actually wanting something, that includes taking the necessary action to reach for it and then make it a reality. This is different than saying something is a priority, or knowing something should be important to us.
You don't really want it unless you act like you want it.
A powerful gift that we have been given from our God is our ability to choose. By realizing what you really want and don’t want for your life, daily decision-making won't necessarily become easier, but it will certainly be simpler.
In my own life, instead of wearing certain styles of clothes to fit in or measure up to someone else, I�� wear them because I‌ want to. I dress modestly because I want to. I‌ wear my vintage mom jeans because I look dang good in them, and because I‌ want to.
Instead of counting how many objects I own in order to fit into some made up ideal, I‌ keep it to the necessities because I want to. I‌ want my stuff to be organized, so I organize it, not worrying about how unorganized other people’s stuff is (because people are more important than stuff).
Once I figured out what I‌ really wanted, my life truly became mine, not some miserable copy-cat existence. My biggest hope for you is to recognize just how much power you wield when you make the choice to choose what your life is going to be.
Lesson 2: You can’t have everything you want, but you can be content.
I know this seems counter-intuitive to "choose what you want in life." But hear me out.
I am a firm believer that when we decide to choose the important stuff, it invites those things into our lives like a magnet. But I also know that we can’t choose every situation, or heartache, or trial that becomes a part of our mortal journey.
I like to think that our freedom of choice falls into two categories: (1) the things we can control or influence, no questions asked, and (2) the things we can’t–in which case we still have full and complete control over our attitude, our outlook, our reaction, and how we cope with what is placed before us.
My decision to be a minimalist was born out of discontent. I‌ just wanted more, more, more, because I didn’t feel like I was enough. But today, I’m here to tell you, that whatever you do have–whether it’s less or more–you can be content, and even grateful, right where you are. You are enough, and all that surrounds you is enough.
Even after all my talk of action and knowing what you want, I know that sometimes there is no amount of action that can change what our reality is right now. Some of our desires only come to fruition after we’ve been reaching for a very long time.
Remember those two categories of choices? I‌ think that they can be separated by time as well. The first category, the things we can control, are all in the future, at some later date. And while we wait, we make the category two choices: our attitude, how we view our situation. Contentedness is “satisfaction with things as they are.”
Plainly stated, we will never be happy or fulfilled with what we have in the future if we don’t accept our current situation–the “right now.”
What I am trying to say is this: maybe you want x but you need y. You want a clean home, but you need less stuff. You want freedom, but you need to take charge of your choices. You want peace, but you need to make space for it by letting go of something first. You want to be productive, but you need to measure your success differently.
After you know what you want, being content in your day-to-day existence–with yourself, your situation, your stuff, and the people around you–is the best way to love the journey while you reach for your desires.
Lesson 3: Money matters, but not in the way the world tells you.
Long before minimalism, I‌ learned my most important lesson about money management from paying tithing. Giving 10-percent of my earnings to the Lord–as a act of faith and obedience–has always multiplied the other 90-percent.
Minimalism taught me how to more effectively use that 90-percent. It’s easy to think that we are free to spend money just because we have it. I have been shopping for about 5 out of 20 years that I've been alive, and every purchase that ended up not working out in the way that I expected–whether I‌ was expecting increased happiness, popularity, or some easy fix to a deeper problem–was a lesson about treating my money well.
When you treat your money with kindness, it will treat you kindly too. So be nice to your money. Think carefully before you use it. Save some of it to show that you appreciate it. Invest it in something for the future. Spend it on that which is good and wholesome–especially the things and the people you treasure. But in all of your budgeting, don’t be too stingy with it. Money will ebb and flow through your life. Treat yourself! Use it as a tool to improve your life and lives around you. The mistakes you make with money will always be lessons for the future. Money is forgiving when you try to mend your ways; all it takes is some time.
Livin’ the Slow Life
I‌ hope you realize how recently these lessons took full effect for me. It didn’t happen right at first, or even all at once.
Over time, I’ve come to distance myself from the world of minimalism. I‌ no longer pour over articles from minimalist bloggers. I‌ know enough, and it sits well with me. Still, minimalism has been a big part of my growth, and I can’t pretend like it never happened.
Now that I know myself and my stuff a little bit better, I’ve decided to call what I do “slow living.” With a quick internet search you will find that there is certainly a slow movement going on, with decades of history behind it, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just doing what works for me (and borrowing the term). How I approach productivity, money, and how I spend my time is largely influenced by minimalism, but recently it’s become something all it's own. (Of course, I’ve always been influenced by the gospel of Jesus Christ.) Right now, I’m just focused on “embracing my pace.” And I can’t wait to tell you more about it.
Live valiant leigh,
Brenna
[Originally posted on September 3, 2019]
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zamancollective · 5 years
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Mizrahi Dialects and the Persistence of Collective Cultural Memory
By Kyle Newman
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Languages are powerful. They serve as virtual time machines, transcending the fabric of society to tell stories that convey the weight and influence of civilizations. They can just as well be used to gauge the weaknesses and prospective dangers faced by a people, acting as harbingers of impending destruction or distress. Judaism itself is not only a religion, but a civilization bearing its own ethnic, cultural, and even linguistic identity, and we can thus trace the ebb and flow of Jewish history through the changes and continuities that make up its rich linguistic heritage. A subject often ignored in the study of Jewish languages is their importance to the history of the Jewish communities of the Middle East; before I dive more deeply into the discussion of these Middle Eastern Jewish languages and their immense significance, however, the historical context in which these languages were born must be properly illustrated.
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The Babylonian Kingdom’s conquest of the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE, under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, marked a significant turning point in Jewish history. The Jewish people were subject to enslavement in Babylonia until 538 BCE, when Cyrus the Great, also known as Cyrus II, conquered Babylonia and liberated the Jewish captives. Reputable for serving as a benevolent ruler, Cyrus (referred to in the Book of Isaiah by the epithet “God’s anointed”) allowed the Jewish people to return to their homeland and rebuild their first temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed during their hegemony in the Levant. Although a number of Jews decided to return to what is present-day Israel, many decided to remain in the Persian empire, which welcomed them with open arms and granted them citizenship.
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The Jewish captivity in Babylonia and subsequent Persian rule in the Achaemenid empire brought markedly significant changes to Jewish society and culture, such as the adoption of the current Hebrew alphabet, the emergence of the central role of the Torah in Judaism, and the emergence of scribes and sages as communal leaders instead of Jewish monarchs. Along with these cultural changes also came changes in the linguistic heritage of Jews living under the reign of Persian kings. After Darius I established Aramaic as the official language in the Western half of the Achaemenid Empire, the Jews quickly adapted to using the Eastern Aramaic dialect of Babylon for daily affairs and business - while preserving Biblical Hebrew mostly for religious study and prayer.
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The adoption of Aramaic by Jews in Aramaic-speaking areas throughout Mesopotamia led to the gradual creation of a number of Hebrew-influenced Aramaic languages, called the “Judeo-Aramaic” languages. Up until the early 20th century, these languages were widely spoken in Jewish communities across the ethnically Kurdish regions of Northern Iraq and Northwestern Iran. Although there is no formal or standard Judeo-Aramaic language, most Judeo-Aramaic dialects are mutually intelligible and serve as the lingua franca of Kurdish Jews who either conduct business in the Sorani and Kurmanji dialects of Kurdish, or in Persian and Arabic.
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I myself have Kurdish Jewish ancestry on my mother’s side, and both of my maternal grandparents speak a dialect of Judeo Aramaic called “Hulaulá” or “Lishana Achni” (originally spoken by the Jews of Iranian Kurdistan). The word “Hulaulá” itself literally translates to Hebrew (as in the language) and “Lishana Achni” translates to our language. The word “Lishana,” translating to language, is itself similar to the word “Lashon” in Hebrew, meaning tongue or language. The word “Achni,” translating to the possessive adjective our, is also similar to the Hebrew word “anachnu,” which means our or belonging to us. I grew up around my grandparents speaking this language in domestic settings, i.e. during Shabbat dinners and important occasions, and I understand it fully but speak it very minimally.
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The following is a recording and translation of my grandmother recounting her Passover experience as a child in the city of Sanandaj in the Iranian province of Kurdistan:
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“When I was a child living in Sanandaj, my father owned farmland with plenty of horses. He would mount us on our own horse and lead us in the windy night to our grandparents’ house for the seder on the first night of Passover. I remember my favorite Passover tradition being Shalshalakan, where we would take a hard boiled egg and hop on one foot to our grandfather. Once we finished hopping to our grandfather, he would ask us ‘where are you coming from,’ and we’d respond ‘Egypt!’ He would then ask us ‘where are you going,’ and we’d respond ‘Jerusalem!’ After he pretended to open the gates of Jerusalem for us, we were finally allowed to eat the hard-boiled egg.”
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The Passover tradition my grandma recounts here, “Shalshalakan,” is common for Kurdish Iranian Jewish families to honor during the Passover seder or meal. It is ironically a fun and enjoyable way for children to reenact the hardships of the journey the Israelites took from Egypt to Israel (hence the hopping on one foot), and a tradition I love to partake in. Her story also reveals something deeper about the cultural and societal conditions of Jews in Iranian Kurdistan. In the beginning of the recording, she mentions that her father “owned farmland with plenty of horses”. This shows the disparity of wealth between Jewish communities in Kurdistan and Jewish communities in Iran before the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. Before the Pahlavi Shahs ruled Iran, most Jews of Central Iran faced periods of heavy discrimination and were forced to live in urban ghettos. However, the Jews of Iranian Kurdistan faced relatively less discrimination from the Muslim majority in the area, were not forced to live in ghettos, and had more opportunities to acquire wealth than the Jews of Central Iran. This discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that the Kurds of Iranian Kurdistan, who are Sunni Muslims, do not believe that non-believers (non-Muslims) are a source of ritual impurity or najjes, whereas the Shia majority of Central Iran does believe so.
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The dialect of Judeo-Aramaic my grandparents speak is of course not the only existing dialect. There is also the dialect Lishana Deni, originally spoken in Northern Iraq, and Lishan Didan, originally spoken in Iranian Azerbaijan and around Lake Van in Turkey, among many others.
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Additionally, another group of languages that adds further diversity to the rich linguistic heritage of the Middle East is Judeo-Persian. The Judeo-Persian languages arose from the pockets of Jewish communities of Central Iran that have existed in the area since the freeing of Jewish captives in Babylonia by Cyrus the Great. The term Judeo-Persian itself is somewhat obscure and could even be considered a misnomer. The term “Judeo-Persian” in actuality refers to the Persian language written in Hebrew script, but the Hebrew-influenced Iranian languages spoken by the Jews of Persia can be referred to most accurately by the term “Judeo-Iranian Languages”. This umbrella term not only includes Judeo-Persian dialects spoken in Iran, such as Judeo-Kashi (spoken by the Jews of Kashan province) and Judeo-Isfahani (spoken by the Jews of Isfahan province), but also includes less common dialects like Judeo-Bukharic (spoken by the Jews of Bukhara in Uzbekistan) and Judeo-Pathani (spoken by Jews from the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan).
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Judeo-Iranian languages are much different from Judeo-Aramaic languages: while Judeo-Iranian languages belong to the Iranian language family, Judeo-Aramaic languages belong to the Semitic language family. However, both of these Jewish language groups are influenced by Hebrew and reflect the common culture that differentiated Jews in the Middle East and broader Western Asia from people of other religions in the area.
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Of course, just as Judeo-Aramaic languages like my grandparents’ Hulaulá have been used to pass traditions and fables across generations, Persian Jewish elders often tell intriguing stories and fables in Judeo-Iranian tongues. These stories often do not evoke the same intrigue and humor when told in standard Persian, so I have included a video of a man telling a parable Judeo-Kashi below (followed by an English translation):
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“In the olden days in Kashan there was a fellow who was so lazy that they would call him ‘Shahtanbal*.’ One day when he wanted to go to work, he was looking for an excuse not to go. While he was riding his horse, he asked someone, ‘How is it that a person dies?’ The fellow he asked, who knew him, said, ‘On a day when it is cold, and you are sitting on your horse and going uphill if your horse passes gas, you will die immediately.’ Shahtanbal, who wanted to die and not have to go to work, heard that his horse passed gas powerfully. Shahtanbal, imagining that he had already died, dismounted from his horse, pretended he was sleeping in the middle of the road and went to sleep. The people, having thought that he had died, went and brought a coffin and put him in the coffin. They then wanted to take him to the cemetery. Along their way, there was a water stream, and they could not pass over it while carrying the coffin. Shahtanbal brought his head out of the coffin and said, ‘When I was alive, I’d take another route around the stream to get to the cemetery.’ The people, when they saw that he was still alive, let him go and threw him into the stream - so that he would know that he is still alive, and also that he learn that it is good for a living person to work”
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* “Shahtanbal” literally translates to King-Lazy or King of the Lazies.
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The parable of Shahtanbal is only one example of many parables and such that make up an important part of Persian-Jewish heritage. Aside from humorous parables, there also exists an abundance of Judeo-Persian or Judeo-Iranian literature. One of the most famous Persian Jewish authors who wrote in Judeo-Persian is the 14th-century poet Shahin Shirazi. His epic poems indicate a very comprehensive understanding of Classical Persian literature as well as Talmudic and Midrashic works; he wrote a very impressive versification of the Book of Genesis in the mid 14th-century entitled “Bereshit Namah.”
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The beauty and importance of Judeo-Iranian and Judeo-Aramaic languages cannot be discussed without explaining their deeply concerning endangerment. Most of these languages and their smaller dialects are assigned an EGIDS level of 8. The EGIDS level is a standard that indicates whether a language is strong enough in terms of its ability to survive in the near future. Being assigned to level 8 indicated that most Judeo-Aramaic and Judeo-Iranian languages are “moribund” and in danger of extinction. They are not used on a daily basis by their fluent speakers, and the languages are not being passed on or taught to younger generations.
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On that note, I must stress the importance of preserving languages. There is certainly a richness to Judeo-Aramaic and Judeo-Persian languages that is worth remembering- not to mention their ability to convey significant cultural and societal differences between communities, and their ability to withstand the barrier of time by recounting a history so complex and multi-layered. But the only way to unlock the powers of endangered languages, in general, is by speaking them, by recording them, by adapting them to our lives. I therefore strongly encourage whoever reads this to seek out any and all opportunities to learn these dialects. Whether you have a family member who speaks an endangered language or the friend of a family member does so, or you simply show a general interest in linguistics or historical preservation or both: please make some sort of effort to preserve it. Passing that up means missing out on a very exciting opportunity that most people only wish they could have: the ability to travel back in time.
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Painting by Sophie Levy
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References
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Tablet.otzar.org, http://tablet.otzar.org/he/book/book.php?%20book=156653&width=0&scroll=0&udid=0&pagenum=2.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Babylonian Exile.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 27 Dec. 2017, www.britannica.com/event/Babylonian-Exile.
Electricpulp.com. “Encyclopædia Iranica.” RSS, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/aramaic-.
Electricpulp.com. “Encyclopædia Iranica.” RSS,
www.iranicaonline.org/articles/judeo-persian-ix-judeo-persian-literature.
“Hulaulá in the Language Cloud.” Ethnologue, www.ethnologue.com/cloud/huy.
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littlesift · 5 years
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5 Nuts You Should Be Eating And 5 You Shouldn't
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If you're looking for a healthy snack, nuts might seem like a sure-fire win. But there are ways to go very, very wrong with picking up some nuts, so let's take a look at some that are both good for you and good for the environment, some that might ruin all of your best intentions, and some that might even make you sick.
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Brazil nuts are pretty incredible things, and according to the World Wildlife Fund, they've long been prized among Amazonian peoples for their nutritional value. They're high in protein, carbohydrates, and good fats. Brazil nut trees are pretty cool, too. They're among the tallest trees in the Amazon, and each of their coconut-sized fruits contains up to 24 seeds — those are the Brazil nuts. And that's exactly why you should eat them, especially if you're mindful of the environment. Brazil nut trees grow and produce for hundreds of years, but only when there's a few types of insects around to pollinate them. Those insects will only do what they need to do if the trees are growing wild, and since they can't be cultivated, that means the Brazil nut industry helps preserve patches of wild rainforest, and supports the farmers that care for the trees. It's a complete win! If you're looking for some ideas on how to use them, try these quick and easy Brazil nut balls for a healthy snack from Purely Twins. You can also use them to create a healthy, high-protein Parmesan substitute: get the recipe here at Ascension Kitchen.
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You probably weren't expecting to be told to eat acorns, but you absolutely should! Humankind has been doing it for centuries, with references to eating acorns even scattered throughout Greek literature. Preparing them can be tough, though — you need to remove the meat from the shells and then soak them to remove the bitter and toxic tannins — and in our modern, convenient world, that can be a pain. They're totally worth it, though, especially if you're concerned about helping to find and use a sustainable, widely available resource. Acorns are edible once they turn brown, and they're full of good things like proteins, healthy fats, and nutrients like vitamin C, calcium, and phosphorus. They've also been shown to help balance blood-glucose levels, and they have a ton of practical benefits. Acorns are widely available, easy to gather, and when they're dried and stored right, they can last for years. So, how can you use them? Check out this step-by-step guide from Learning and Yearning for making your own acorn flour, and you can turn that into breads and cookies that will have a wonderful, nutty flavor.
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If you love nothing more than hazelnut-filled cookies, you're in luck. They're incredibly good for you, as they're filled with things like vitamins A and B. Hazelnuts have a healthy dose of dietary fiber, and they also help raise good cholesterol while lowering the bad. You're not just doing yourself a favor when you help yourself to a handful, you're helping the environment, too. Hazelnuts are a great example of sustainable agriculture. Not only do they require little water and minimal upkeep, but they can thrive in harsh soils where other plants would fail. They're drought-resistant, can survive harsh weather conditions, have a high yield per plant, and help prevent soil erosion. They also have massive root system, and they remove a huge amount of carbon from the atmosphere. It's a good thing they're so tasty, and even if you already have your favorite ways to use them, you'll still have to try this dairy-free dark chocolate and hazelnut spread from Beach Body on Demand, and this chocolate hazelnut fudge from Texanerin. Being environmentally friendly never tasted so good!
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Walnuts are one of those treats you might only think about during the holidays, and that's a shame. They're full of some amazing stuff, starting with a ton of vitamin E, and healthy fats. Not only do those things all help maintain good heart health, but some studies suggest adding them to your regular diet can lower your risk of a heart attack by as much as 51 percent. A healthy helping of walnuts will also help you ward off depression — they contain omega 3 oils that are shown to raise serotonin levels in the brain. Walnuts also have a huge amount of antioxidants, more than what you'd get from any other nut. Antioxidants are key to maintaining good health, shown to help in the fight against heart disease, cancer, and the effects of premature aging. They even help keep us healthy on a cellular level, and even though walnuts are fairly high in calories (one ounce is about 180 calories), they come with so many other benefits that you should definitely sprinkle some on your salads. You can also make them a part of a healthy breakfast, with this banana walnut overnight oatmeal from Skinny Ms.
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Humankind has been eating pistachios since the dawn of our days, and there's a good reason for that: There's a lot of nutrition folded into this little package. They're high in protein and fiber, and a single ounce will give you the same amount of potassium you'd get from a banana. They've been linked to helping manage cholesterol levels and blood glucose levels, and adding them to your diet helps lower your risk of developing type 2 diabetes. There's also some pretty awesome research that's been done with pistachios and their impact on weight management. A single serving of pistachios is 160 calories, but that serving is a whopping 49 nuts. Not only does that give you some bang for your snacking buck, but the act of shelling pistachios slows down your snacking speed and allows you to become more aware of how full you are, instead of falling into the mindless snacking trap. While you can definitely get your daily helping of pistachios that way, why not try this basil and pistachio pesto from Greedy Gourmet. It's easy to make and even easier to snack on.
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Almonds are one of the most popular nuts, and that's not a surprise. Not only are they tasty but they're good for you, too. Boasting not just the ability to manage weight and prevent diabetes, they're touted as being a source of non-dairy milks for those who avoid dairy for a number of reasons. But all that goodness comes at a price, and if you're trying to be environmentally-friendly with your choices, you might want stop eating almonds. The only US state that produces almonds commercially is California, and they're not just sending almonds to domestic markets. More than 80 percent of the world's almonds come from California, and it's a multi-billion dollar industry. California also has relentless problems with drought. You've heard the horror stories of water shortages and wildfires — now consider that every single almond you eat took 1.1 gallons of water to grow. The growing almond industry has had something of a domino effect, impacting even the populations of salmon that are plagued by low water levels. And that might not be worth it.
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Cashews are hugely popular nuts, and they're filled with things like fiber, protein, and all the standard good stuff that comes with nuts. But cashews come at a price, and it's paid by the people who harvest them. The majority of cashews come from India and Vietnam, and picking them isn't an easy process. Cashew apples have several tough layers that need to be discarded, and those layers are toxic. Workers earn a pittance for shucking cashews, and many of them have suffered permanent damage from the toxic liquid that the shells release. An expose by Time magazine uncovered Vietnamese cashews are often the product of forced labor camps staffed by people addicted to drugs, and they coined the term "blood cashews." No matter how much you love the taste of cashews, is it worth that?
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Macadamia nuts are delicious, but they're not as healthy as you might think. That's because a one-cup serving of macadamia nuts contains almost 1,000 calories, and it's incredibly easy to eat half your daily calorie allowance while you're munching. That same serving also has 102 grams of fat, which is more than you should get in a whole day.
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Chestnuts are one of the nuts you need to eat more of, but you should never, ever eat horse chestnuts. They look similar — both are the same color brown, and both have a lighter brown spot — but horse chestnuts are completely smooth. The good kind of chestnuts have a little point, and the difference is crucial. In spite of how similar they look, horse chestnuts and chestnuts aren't actually related. Every part of the horse chestnut has a toxin that causes vomiting and, in large enough doses, paralysis. While you might hear that you can leach the toxins out of the horse chestnut, you shouldn't — and if you're in doubt, don't eat them. If you find some nuts on the ground, it's likely to be a horse chestnut, as they're toxic to animals, too.
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Pine nuts might be just the finishing touch a recipe calls for, but there's a weird and completely unexplained thing that can happen when you eat them. It's called pine mouth or pine nut syndrome, and it's a temporary thing that usually develops somewhere between 12 and 48 hours after eating the nuts. For a time, everything else will taste bitter, metallic, or rancid, and some people have had the taste last for months. For most, it subsides after a few days to a couple weeks. The FDA has issued an alert, but there's been no confirmation as to what causes it and how to prevent it. It happens in people who don't have an allergy or sensitivity to nuts, eating something sugary makes the bitterness even worse, it's not connected to mold or bacteria, and it's happened with pine nuts from all different sources. It's completely unpredictable, so that means if you have a special dinner coming up, you might want to be extra careful about skipping the pine nuts. Peanuts are a common enough snack, but there are a few things you should be aware of. While a serving will give you some valuable vitamins and nutrients, that same serving size is only 1.5 ounces, and it's going to account for a big chunk of your daily calorie intake. If you're sitting on the couch and munching peanuts while you're watching television, that's going to add up fast — just half a cup is a fifth of your calories for the day! Peanuts are also associated with something called aflatoxins — they're not the only food that can be contaminated, and corn is also particularly vulnerable. Aflatoxins are a fungi, and entire crops can be contaminated at any time, from the field to storage after processing. Since they've been linked to an increase in the risk of liver cancer, it's vitally important to make sure you don't eat any peanuts that look moldy or discolored. Purchasing peanuts only from large-scale, well-known commercial companies will reduce the risk, but you still should use a lot of caution if you can't give them up. Almonds might be delicious, but bitter almonds can be deadly. The kind we eat by the handful are sweet almonds, but bitter almonds are actually apricot kernels. Even though they're what gives that almond flavor to things like marzipan, eating them raw is dangerous. Raw bitter almonds are filled with a type of cyanide, and when they're prepared properly, they're cyanide-free and used as spices or flavorings. They contain something called hydrocyanic acid, and that acid disappears when it's heated. But case studies of people who eat them raw are nothing short of terrifying, including one case where a 67-year-old woman ate only four (or five) bitter almonds, thinking they were "medicinal." Just that amount gave her light-headedness and nausea, and when she had 12 more, she was incapacitated and on her way to the emergency room within 15 minutes. Bitter almonds are nothing to mess around with, and should just be avoided. Nuts are one of those amazing foods that are great on their own, and if you can eat these tasty little morsels by the handful, you're not alone. Sure, you might know that it only takes a dash of almond milk to add a distinctive flavor to your morning coffee or a smoothie, but there are plenty of ways you never thought about using nuts. There are a ton of dishes that could benefit from a splash of nutty goodness, so let's look at some things any and every nut lover just has to try. https://ift.tt/2IGCJPM via IFTTT
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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years
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DESIGN AND MONEY
Chance meetings let your acquaintance drift in the same boat as the founders. Then you want to inhabit. So the acquisition came to a screeching halt while we tried to sort this out. But there is another possible approach. But I don't think that physical books are outmoded yet. It's that startups will underestimate the difficulty of being a spam. So vesting would in that situation force founders to toe the line. It sounds like making movies works a lot better to get a job. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results.
What was good about Modernism, Calder had, and had a strong Canadian accent and a mullet. There's a third factor in achievement: how much would I pay for this. They'll decide later if they want. Silicon Valley VCs that requires them to invest larger amounts, and the path to the finished program looks in it, and so, later, was Perl. I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion. The only way to make more money or less? How will this all play out? A rounds. We felt like our role was to be a hacker; I was just as dismayed when he didn't seem to be some part you can charge more. An investor who merely seems like he will fund you, however, tell A who B is. It will often be way better than the nightmare UI we had to buy a computer of my own.
A competing product, a downturn in the economy, at one remove from the creation of wealth seems to appear and disappear like the noise of a fan as you switch on and off the prospect of starting a startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem. They would probably be painless though annoying to lose $15,000 from a first-time angel investor can be as much work as raising $2 million from a VC firm can only do that if you eliminate all other sources. It seems probable that investors have till now on average been overcontrolling their portfolio companies, startups with female founders outperformed those without by 63%. So who should start a company, the test for whether to do it. Fortran, C, or Unix, or HTML. The reason I describe it as an upper bound. We charged a flat fee of $300/month. I did end up being more like an efficient market in this respect, as in: I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a class.
Sometimes I can think of that. To the extent software does move onto servers, what I'm describing already sounds too good to be true to think you could have it done tonight. All parents tend to be interesting, in a group of other ambitious and technically minded people—probably more concentrated than you'll ever be again. The problem is, for the same reason that the probably apocryphal violinist, whenever he was asked to judge someone's playing, would always say they didn't have materials or power sources light enough the Wrights' engine weighed 152 lbs. For the average user, all the top five words here would be neutral and would not contribute to the spam. You can see every click made by every user. If Mark Zuckerberg had built something that could be done by collaborators. The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time coming. What do parents hope to protect their misconceptions from bumping against reality. For most users, missing legitimate email is an order of magnitude worse than receiving spam, so a filter that yields false positives is like an actor at the beginning that if you take the trouble to write two versions, a flame for Reddit and a more powerful language enable you to write code that's short in elements at the expense of overall readability?
It's usually a mistake for a promising company less than a million per startup. At YC we try to do it. Traditionally the student is the audience, not the way to do it, they'll let you invest at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never allow yourself to do a similar sort of filtering on new things they hear about. By conventional standards, Jobs and Wozniak were marginal people too. Since the custom is to write. With the rise of big corporations. If you disagree, try living for a year. It implies there's no punishment if you fail. There is all the different kinds of things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a lot of new things, but in fact the bullshit-minimizing option.
And the only real test, one's rank depends mostly on experience, but for good new ideas, you stop and ask: will people actually pay for this if I were a legislator, I'd be delighted, because something that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life. Preparing a candidate for the Chinese imperial civil service had to take an exam on classical literature. Angel investing is not a business where occasional big successes generate hundredfold returns. Although a lot of attitude. On the other hand, startup investing is a very hard question to answer on the spot; the next, and decided to just work as hard as you possibly can for four. But here too we see the same thing, you're probably mistaken. If you look at a company like Apple and think, how could I get the people working there. Along some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a recipe for deadlock, and delay is the thing a startup can have any leverage in a deal: Any investor who co-invests with you is one less investor who could fund a competitor. But ambition is human nature. The people who are really mathematicians, but call what they're doing, it's better to play it safe. That's why I don't find that I'm eager to learn it to get you to the museum and tell you that taste is just personal preference is that, if something is ugly, it can't coax startups into existence. Now high school kids is that adults realize they need to hire, everything.
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Effectiveness of French Physiotherapy in Treating Congenital Clubfoot Deformity
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Abstract
Clubfoot is the most common congenital structural deformity that leads to physical impairments in children in many developing countries. Neglected clubfoot has been found to be a common cause of physical disability globally among children and young growing adults. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of French physiotherapy in treating congenital clubfoot deformity. This cross sectional study was conducted among 102 parents and data were collected by face to face interview with semi-structured questionnaire. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was used to analyze the data. The mean age of the participants was 405 days. Unilateral limbs were more affected than bilateral limbs. Results shows that out of 30(100%) children with clubfoot deformity, 17(56.7%) were completed cured under French Physiotherapy while 8(26.7%) were completed cured under Ponseti method, almost equal number of children were in both group improved to moderate cured. There was significance difference found between two groups after intervention (p<0.05). French physiotherapy was more effective method for the treatment of clubfoot over the Ponseti method
Keywords: French Physiotherapy; Congenital Clubfoot
Introduction
Disability has emerged as a major public health problem worldwide. Childhood disability is one of them and it remains hidden in developing country like Bangladesh [1]. Importance of conservative treatment in congenital clubfoot has been known since the Hippocrates era (approximately 400 B.C) [2]. Continuous passive movement treatment method of French authors has also been added to manipulation, bandage, cast and device applications [3]. There is not a clear opinion in the literature on how to treat overcorrection. In the long-term follow-up studies, weakness in muscle groups around the ankle, joint stiffness was found [4,5]. Laaveg & Ponseti [6] obtained 89% success rate by using the conservative treatment method and minimal invasive surgery if required. Prevalence of congenital clubfoot in Bangladesh is high and most of the cases remain untreated or poorly treated [7]. According to French physiotherapy method (93-96%) so congenital clubfoot is manageable if the treatment can be started before child’s 1st birth day. It is important to identify the effectiveness of French physiotherapy in treating congenital clubfoot deformity than other conservative method like Ponseti Method. In French method the complication should be minimize. As there no study was done in this topic before in our country, I was very much interested to do research on this topic.
Material and Methods
Study design: Randomized clinical trial
Study population: Children with congenital clubfoot deformity who are attending the selective clinics.
Inclusion criteria:
   Willingly participating patients
   Age below 3 years
   Before tenotomy patients
Exclusion criteria:
   Benign feet
   Severe clubfoot deformity
   Before treated patient
Sampling technique
Treatment allocation: Treatment procedure was allocated randomly in two groups by tossing. The heads were taken in odd serial i.e. group -1 while the tails were placed in even serial i.e. group 2.
Group-1: This group was treated by Ponseti method [8-15].
Group-2: This group was treated by French physiotherapy methods. This treatment will carry out by a team with large experience in managing clubfoot with such a method [16,17]. In this study the sample size was taken as 30 for both group i.e Ponseti Method and French Physiotherapy Method.
Study place: The study was carried out at
   BCCW, Dhaka
   NGO- TLMB (Gaibandha), SEID Trust.
Study period and duration: From 14th January 2013 to 13th January 2014.
Data collection tool and instrument:
   Face to face interview of mother using pre-tested structure questionnaire
   Face to face interview of mother using pre-tested structure questionnaire
Data collection method
Data were gathered by pre verified semi structured questionnaires and in face to face interview. Information about pregnancy related question, family history & other characteristics was also obtained. The field work was conducted from March to September 2013 at Comilla & Dhaka district. The respondents were selected consecutively who will meet the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Two interviewers were trained for four days by the author. The training was consisted of lectures on how to fill up the questionnaires and mock interviews between participants.
Data analysis: Computer technology (SPSS 20.0) version was used for classification, presentation and analysis of data.
The Pirani score is a simple. The components are scored as follows:
   Each component may score 0, 0.5 or 1
   Hind foot contracture score (HCFS): Mid foot contracture score (MFCS):
 Posterior crease Medial crease
 Empty heel Curvature of lateral border
 Rigid equinus Position of head of talus (Table 1).
The mean age of the participants was 405 days, n=17 (28%) participants in between 0-90 days of age, n=8 (13%) in between 91-180 days of age and n=1 (2%) in between 181-270 days. n=4 (7%) participants in between 271-360 days of age, n=10 (17%) in between 361-450 days of age and n=6 (10%) in between 451- 540 days. n=3 (5%) participants in between 541-630 days of age, n=5 (8%) in between 631-720 days of age and n=6 (10%) in between 721-810 days. Result shows that 0-90 days are more common age those who had taken French physiotherapy & ponseti method. In control group the participants 21 out of 30(70%) were male and 9 out of 30 (30%) were female. Result shows that male was more affected than female. In intervention group the participants 21 out of 30(70%) were male and 9 out of 30 (30%) were female. Result shows that the male was more affected than female (Table 2).
In terms of father occupation in ponseti group, out of 30(100%), 5(16.7%) were service holder while the equal number of service holders in French physiotherapy method group, 13(43.3%) were business holders in ponseti group while the equal proportion of respondents were business holders in French physiotherapy method group. Only 13% were farmers in ponseti group whereas the double proportion of fathers were farmers in France physiotherapy method group. Of the fathers in ponsity group 23% were day labor while the half of proportion were day labor in French group. In terms of father education almost equal proportion of fathers was same education level in both groups. Mother occupation indicates that almost all were house makers in both groups. Educational status was also same in both groups (Figure 1).
The above figure shows that almost equal proportion of father were same occupation in ponseti and French group. The majority were involved in business (Table 3).
Results
Result shows that among all the participants in Group A, unilateral n=47(78%) among them n=23(38%) were right limb affected & n=24(40%) were left limb affected and bilateral n=13(22%) were involvement of the affected limb of the participants. Result shows that unilateral limbs were more affected than bilateral limbs (Table 4).
Result shows that among all the participants approximately 5% (3 of 60) had past family history of clubfoot and 95% (57 of 60) had no past family history of club foot. Of them 2(6.7%) were in ponseti group and 1(3.3%) were in French Physiotherapy group (Table 5).
In both group 10% baby was preterm while 86% was born in time in ponseti group and 83.3% was in French group, the rest 3.3% in ponseti group and 5% was in France group was born in post term. Of the children with clubfoot deformity 60% had normal mode of delivery in ponseti group while 66.7% had in French group. Cesarean delivery had 40% in ponseti group and 33.3% had in French group. Problem during pregnancy occurred 0% in poseti group and 3.3% in French group. Place of delivery was home, hospital and clinic, the majority of the children’s place in delivery was home in both groups. It was about fifty percent. Only 13.3% had clinic in ponseti group and 16.7% in French group. Only 3.3% mothers had suffered problems during delivery while the rest had not suffered any problems during delivery. Of the mothers almost fifty percent had health workers during delivery, others had no health workers. Out of 30(100%) children, only 3.3% had other disability and it was in ponseti group (Table 6).
Results shows that out of 60(100%) children with clubfoot deformity equal numbers of them were in both group with severe and moderate deformity. There was no significance difference between two groups before intervention (p>0.05) (Table 7).
Results shows that out of 30(100%) children with clubfoot deformity, 17(56.7%) were completed cured under French Physiotherapy while 8(26.7%) were completed cured under Ponseti method, almost equal number of children were in both group improved to moderate cured. There was significance difference found between two groups after intervention (p<0.05). France physiotherapy was more effective method for the treatment of clubfoot over the Ponseti method (Table 8).
The above table shows that there was significance difference found between two methods in terms of clubfoot treatment (t=2.9, p=0.005). The calculated mean score was 1.1 and .53 in Ponseti and French physiotherapy method respectively. French Physiotherapy was more effective treatment for clubfoot deformity.
Discussion
The present study showed French physiotherapy was more effective method for the treatment of clubfoot over the Ponseti method. A study reporting early results of the Ponseti treatment, 95% of the deformities were corrected without need for extensive surgery [18]. This recovery rate is consistent with the results, reported by Herzenberg et al. [19], whose study included similar population and follow-up. Though it was not a new treatment method, Ponseti method had not been adopted by many and surgical treatment methods had been used as standard treatment until recent years. Initially, extensive surgical methods aimed physical improvement but owing to long term follow-up studies the importance of functional outcomes and maintenance of movement were recognized [20,21]. Muscular weakness and biomechanical changes [22-23], observed in patients who were considered as corrected initially, increased the popularity of conservative treatment methods again. Cooper & Dietz [24], found functionally and clinically perfect and good outcomes in 78% of deformities in patients, who were treated by Ponseti, in their average 30 years, follow-up study. This success rate was 85% in control group, consisting of the patients without congenital foot deformity. In their magnetic resonance imaging study, Pirani et al. [25] detected improvement in both the relation of tarsal bones and the forms of osteochondral outlines of the bones in patients, treated by Ponseti method. These findings support the Ponseti’s hypothesis, which asserts that with a proper treatment method that considers the functional anatomy of foot and uses biological potential in the tissues of a newborn, an appropriate improvement can be obtained in most of the deformities which is contradictory with the present study. The present study shows that there was significance difference found between two methods in terms of clubfoot treatment (t=2.9, p=0.005). Different conservative treatment methods have been suggested in the literature. One of the popular methods in Europe is the method of Dimeglio et al. [26] consisting of daily physiotherapy and continuous passive motion machine.
With this method, only 28% of the cases required surgical treatment. However, difficulties in long term physiotherapy, and its high cost makes adoption of this method problematic in many countries, including our country. In many countries, especially in the USA, Kite’s method has been used widely for a long time [27]. Kite, who tried to correct the components of the deformity separately and patiently, obtained improvement within 36 weeks. Ponseti attributes such a delay in improvement to the effort for correction of forefoot by counter pressure from calcaneocuboidal joint, which was Kite’s error according to Ponseti. Because kinematics of the foot does not allow evertion of calcaneus before abduction (outward rotation) of it, correction of varus became time consuming for Kite [28]. In a careful study, by Tümer et al. [29] where Kite’s and Ponseti’s manipulation methods were used concomitantly, it was reported that 33% of the cases were treated by only using plaster cast. This success rate reached at 41% with addition of the patients who underwent posterior release surgery. Bursalı [30] reported that they obtained correction in all of the untreated cases and in 75% of the cases, treated previously elsewhere, by using Ponseti’s method strictly.
Limitation
100% accuracy was not possible in any research so that some limitation may exist. Regarding this study, there were some limitations or barrier to consider the result of the study. The first limitation of this study was sample size. It was taken only 30 samples in each group. A very few researches have been done on a few of research among the effectiveness of French physiotherapy in management of clubfoot patients. So there was little evidence to support the result of this project study in the context of Bangladesh.
Conclusion
This study demonstrates that French physiotherapy method is an effective and reproducible method for correction of idiopathic Congenital Clubfoot deformities. Furthermore, it may be used in our country widely. For successful outcomes, this technique should be applied carefully and the patients should use the foot abduction orthosis with full compliance. For patient compliance, besides parent training, producing proper and comfortable shoes is required.
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