#I know this is an oversimplification but you're not here for A&P.

[torchickentacos]

Okay, here's my theory. Oversimplifying but stay with me. Alcohol makes POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome) worse for a lot of people. Alcohol causes vasodilation (widening of blood vessels), which leads to further blood pooling (which we already struggle with), and it dehydrates you (which also makes the blood issues worse). This means that people with POTS are more likely to pass out/feel like shit when drinking. But sodium helps POTS symptoms through a number of mechanisms that I don't feel like explaining for a shitpost, so just take me at my word and accept that salt generally helps POTS.

So THEORETICALLY if you make an alcoholic drink with enough of a salted rim, you can cancel it out and make a POTS-neutral drink. In this Shark Tank marketing pitch, I will-

[stellerssong]

Hi again. I'm on some level here to ask for a complete explanation of every aspect of Hawaiian culture that is even tangentially related to your latest fic because I know absolutely nothing and there is the ever present concern that the terms run through cursory Google Translate and internet searching will lose nuance and implications. There were definitely some references to divinities and myths and such that went over my unenlightened head. The story you wove was rich and intricate enough to be held in the mind of someone who knows less than nothing and still have great meaning and truth, but I know that it will mean yet more if I can see the threads you used to make it. (On another level, I'm asking for the explanation because I am abruptly deeply interested in a topic I had previously not thought about very much, and you seem to be significantly more of an expert than the average internet search.)

first off! well first off i am blowing you so many kisses for this very kind ask, thank you so much for giving me an excuse to ramble at (great, great, great) length.

so second off! i would just like to stress that i am very much not an expert in hawaiian language, folklore, history, culture, etc. i am neither kānaka maoli (native hawaiian) nor kamaʻāina (born in hawaiʻi although not necessarily of hawaiian ancestry), and i have not studied these topics formally/in a setting that applies academic rigor. i am an enthusiastic amateur with a personal connection to hawaiian culture, the kind of brain that likes to fixate on areas of interest, and a willingness to scrounge around for reading material. i have, i think, a decent sense of what some of the baseline texts in the field are, and a fairly good bullshit detector (and the understanding/ability to dig into things when i can't rely on the bullshit detector), but ultimately i am a layman and an outsider with corresponding perspectives and biases. i also, i will admit frankly, have a pretty sharp knowledge cutoff corresponding to the time of first european contact, just because of my own personal interests and reading preferences.

read that whole disclaimer? let your eyes glaze over while you skimmed it? good! here's my real quick (lmao) rundown of Sum Things U Should Know If You Wanna Close-Read Kīpuka:

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi 101

Good grief when I put it like that I do NOT feel qualified to tell you any of this. Anyway. We can keep it basic just so you can get a sense of the mouthfeel of the words. And just fyi ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi is the proper name of the language; i'll be using "Hawaiian" as the adjective form, sans ʻokina, assuming an English-speaking readership.

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi as it is commonly rendered today has 13 letters: 5 vowels (A, E, I, O, and U) and 7 consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W), plus the ʻokina or glottal stop (that little apostrophe-lookin' dude at the beginning of the word ʻokina, also the source of most of my typesetting woes). Pronunciation-wise, there are no silent letters and no though/through/enough-type surprises: every letter is pronounced, and all of the vowel renderings are approximately equivalent to how you'd pronounce them in Spanish or Italian. Hence, the word kuahine = koo-ah-HEE-nay rather than, like, kyoo-ah-highn, which made me feel gross even just typing it out.

The ʻokina is pronounced, and bear with me here, like the dash in the english nuh-uh. or, if you're a try-hard vocalist—reattack the vowel after the ʻokina instead of eliding it to the vowel prior. So the place-name Kaʻū is pronounced ka-OO, as distinct from the word kau which is pronounced more like kow (which is a bit of an oversimplification of the latter word, but I'm trying to be efficient here).

That leads us neatly into the other diacritical marking used in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, the kahakō or macron which helpfully appears in its own name. No worries here; the kahakō just serves as a stress marker, so you'd say kahakō = ka-ha-KO instead of ka-HA-ko, or from the example above ka-OO rather than KA-oo.

There are a couple of other little pronunciation tricks here and there. The letter W is sometimes pronounced as a V, and unfortunately I can't really describe the rules for that shift; that is one I must admit I know mostly from vibes. For example, the correct pronunciation of Hawaiʻi itself is ha-VAI-ee, but I've never heard the place-name Waimea pronounced as anything but why-MEY-ah.

Occasionally you will encounter the letter K pronounced as a T, which I believe is an artifact of the morphological shift from older related languages such as Tahitian and Samoan which do preserve the letter T as a unique phoneme. To my knowledge, the Kauaʻi dialect (spoken today on Niʻihau) also preserves the T, but most spoken ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi heard elsewhere is based on the Big Island dialect, which lacks the T. One notable exception is the word tūtū (an affectionate/respectful term for a grandparent or elder), which you really don't hear pronounced as kūkū.

Really, though, listening to Hawaiian music is how I got the language in my ear and imo it's the best way to get it in yours. Can't go wrong with Israel Kamakawiwoʻole (of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" fame), but I have a personal soft spot for Kealiʻi Reichel, Weldon Kekauoha, Amy Hanaialiʻi, and the Cazimero Brothers.

The Place-y-ness of Hawaiian Literature

This is more of a sidenote than its own heading, but I'm the one driving the essay, and I think it's an interesting thing to point out, just because it helps establish a particular perspective I wanted to keep in mind while writing this fic.

Something you might notice as you start to look at Hawaiian oli, mele, and myth is the high level of specificity of place. Hawaiʻi is, let's be honest, not that enormous of a place when you consider it on a global scale—but the specificity of localities within Hawaiian literature is kind of astounding. Not only are there loads of place-names referenced in any given work, there are unique Hawaiian names for landmarks, cliffs, peaks, hills, streams, waterfalls—even rains and winds of specific locations merit their own names.

"kīpuka" is very specifically set on the windward side of Hawaiʻi island, so I made an effort to focus my references to place-names on that region—Hilo, ʻŌlaʻa, and Waiākea are all locations on the eastern side of the island, and the one reference to Kona on the leeward side reflects the coming of someone bearing grievances (in addition to eia aʻe ka makani Kona being an existing idiom warning the listener to watch out for an angry person, the windward and leeward sides of Hawaiʻi island have a long history of territorial warfare and jockeying for control of the island). I'd also considered having the bird discussed in the fic be a different species, the kākāwahie—but that species is/was endemic to Molokaʻi, and quite honestly my knowledge of the history and culture of Molokaʻi as a separate polity is not that great.

(This is partly due to sample bias—my introduction to Hawaiʻi was within a Big Island-based context. At the same time, another thing you may notice about the better-known source texts is that many of them center around Hawaiʻi island and, to a lesser extent, Maui, thanks to the political supremacy during the unification/post-contact era of Hawaiʻi island and Maui aliʻi. Ross Cordy wrote a whole ass book about the Oʻahu chiefdoms that is simply not to be had for love or money no matter how I search for it. I am THIS CLOSE to straight up cold emailing the man and being like I WILL VENMO YOU $75 USD DIRECTLY IF YOU WILL SIMPLY JUST SEND ME A COPY OF YOUR BOOK. PLEASE. SAVE ME ROSS CORDY.)

Girl (Gender Neutral), I Cannot Explain Hawaiian Mythology, Poetics, and Mythopoetics As a Subheading in One Post

Honestly. I can't do it. But some tidbits to assist your further research:

A great deal of Hawaiian literature and oral tradition hinges on kaona, roughly "allusion" or "metaphor." In a description that is useful to precisely no one but myself, it's not unlike the complex plays on words, puns, and deep well of references used in Heian Japanese epistolary poetry. Some of it is easy to grok for newbies: for example, the concept of one's lover as a lei adorning the body, or being splashed or sprinkled with water as a euphemism for sex. Some of it goes a lot deeper, relying on historical or folkloric place-name associations, puns, and ancient practices and superstitions.

The Hawaiian "pantheon" I place in scare quotes because ancient Hawaiian religious practices and superstition were highly syncretic, often extremely localized, and more contradictory the more you read into it. In a very, very, very, VERY rough and off-the-cuff sense, though, there were thought to be four major gods: Kāne (associated with dawn, the sun, the sky, running freshwater, and irrigation-based agriculture, among other things), Kanaloa (associated with the ocean, sea creatures, and sometimes death, as an opposing or complimentary force to Kāne), Lono (god of fertility, agriculture with something of an emphasis on dryland agriculture, rainfall, and peace as embodied in the Makahiki festival), and Kū (god of war, the deified kingship, fishermen, sorcery, and quite honestly a ton of other things in various manifestations).

There were also quite a large number of "lesser" gods, the word "lesser" used just in the sense that they weren't honored to the same extent as the four previously named in state-sanctioned religious practice. Probably the most well-known of these is Pele, the volcano goddess. (I reference another in the fic, Niolopua, god of sleep—but the jury's out on whether or not that refers to an actual god or is just metaphorical in the same way that most people think of "the Sandman" as a euphemism for sleep and not a literal guy who comes into your house and puts crusties in your eyes.)

The gods were thought to manifest in a variety of forms, called kino lau (literally "four hundred bodies"). You can think of this in the sense of "Lono takes on the shape of an albatross or a tropicbird to interact with mortals, while Kanaloa prefers to manifest as an octopus," and in stories kino lau are sometimes represented that way, but in practice it's less of a Greek myth-style practice of shapeshifting and more of an animistic religious belief. The kino lau in nature embody the god and in a metaphorical sense illustrate the interconnection between divine and earthly and the presence of the divine on earth.

(HUGE OVERSIMPLIFICATION. HUGE OVERSIMPLIFICATION. PLEASE DO MORE RESEARCH AND DO NOT TAKE ONE TUMBLR POST AT ITS WORD ON THIS.)

The Endless, in the fic, are very easy to loop into the concept of kino lau, because of their canonical universality. Danny appears as a shark (a symbol of chiefhood), a pueo, or Hawaiian owl (an 'aumakua, or ancestral guardian), a manu-o-Kū, or fairy tern (a bird associated with the god Kū, likely in his aspect as a god of fishermen, navigators, and wayfinders), a kalo plant (a staple crop of ancient Hawaiʻi, a kino lau of Kāne, and a symbol of duality and rebirth), and a snowcapped mountain (a sacred site considered kapu, or forbidden, to all but the highest chiefly individuals). Despair, meanwhile, appears as an ʻalae ʻula, or Hawaiian moorhen (another ʻaumakua, but also an animal whose cry was thought to foretell misfortune), a stingray (for her barbed tail), a hāpuʻu fern (in contrast to Dream's kalo, the hāpuʻu was considered a famine food), a lava flow and its first growths (acknowledging Pele as both a destroyer and a creator of land, just as Despair also embodies hope), and a number of other things meant to embody the devastation of Hawaiʻi (rats, feral pigs, and mosquitoes have decimated endemic birds and insects; the kiawe is an invasive plant species that forms dense, thorny, and difficult-to-destroy groves; light pollution affects behavior and migratory patterns of both avian and aquatic species).

All pretty simple, obviously!

Further Resources and Recs

Okay, so, obviously I'm not going to be able to explain every single reference in this fic in a single post, though I obviously tried my damnedest. In lieu of that, I'll offer some useful resources for further reading:

Stephen Trussel's Combined Hawaiian Dictionary is a fantastic resource for vocab that incorporates several major Hawaiian dictionaries in a straightforward (well, as straightforward as this gets) text-based web page. Ulukau also has a searchable interface, which is a little easier to interact with, but I like having the Trussel for reference.

Huapala is everyone's go-to for translations of Hawaiian lyrics. I've linked to it in the endnotes of the fic for readers interested in more on "Ka Ipo Lei Manu," but it's got nearly any ʻauana-style Hawaiian song you please, and if I recall correctly even a few traditional oli. Again, another slightly old-fashioned text-based site—but we all know how to use CMD + F in a page, do we not?

Native Books is awesome if you, like me, prefer reading things in print but would prefer not to feed your dollars into the maw of the Amazon beast. A lot of the lit on Hawaiʻi was printed either a long time ago or in very small releases and is now out-of-print and difficult to find even in libraries, so it rocks that there's an independent bookseller that specializes in getting those works to an audience in hard copy. @ NATIVE BOOKS PLEASE CONSIDER GETTING ROSS CORDY TO RE-PRINT THE RISE AND FALL OF THE OʻAHU KINGDOM THANK YOU SO MUCH. University of Hawaiʻi Press is also a good source for academic texts, although their website is...mm...difficult to navigate, and do be warned that they charge academic press prices.

In terms of who to read, you really can't go wrong with Mary Kawena Pukui, a Native Hawaiian scholar, author, composer, and educator whose work is the backbone of just, a fuckton of writing about Hawaiʻi, both academic and popular. Her book ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings is worth at least a skim just to get the feel of the Hawaiian mindset; it also contains a healthy dose of myth, folklore, and history in the explanations of the sayings. Absolutely adorably, I've found two books she edited that I read the absolute FUCK out of as a child available as PDFs through Ulukau: The Water of Kāne and Other Legends of the Hawaiian Islands and Hawaiʻi Island Legends: Pīkoi, Pele, and Others. Definitely worth a quick read if you want more on the myth side of things.

As a non-specialist, I've really enjoyed Patrick Vinton Kirch's writing on precontact Hawaiʻi. For a field archaeologist, his writing is both highly engaging and very respectful of the peoples he studies, and trust me, I do get my back up easily when it comes to white people writing about Other Cultures TM, so I'd posit it means something that he passes my sniff test. A Shark Going Inland is My Chief is a great overview of the history of the Hawaiian chiefdoms from the first settlement of the islands to immediately precontact, and Kuaʻāina Kahiko offers a bit of a closer look at everyday life in a specific locality in the islands (in this case, Kahikinui, Maui).

Kamehameha and His Warrior Kekūhaupiʻo by Stephen Desha (trans. Frances N. Frazier) began its life as a serialized Hawaiian-language history of the rise of Kamehameha I. It's a dense read, and it WILL test your ability to remember who the hell all these people are to its limit—it mostly discusses the lives and times of the major players of the aliʻi class in the late precontact–early postcontact era, and when you remember that a) a hell of a lot of personal names in this tale begin with the letter K and b) the aliʻi class of Hawaiʻi practiced a mindboggling amount of political marriage, consanguineous marriage, and sanctioned adoption between blood relatives, the family trees get real complicated REAL fast. If you can hang on through all that, though, it's an intensely detailed and very vivid portrait of a culture at a tumultuous moment, it gives a great sense of how the Hawaiians viewed themselves and the world, and it's an interesting exercise in the mythologizing of the Kamehameha dynasty.

Okay, So...?

So...if you hung on through all that, god DAMN are you dedicated. Have what is quite possibly my favorite Hawaiian song for your trouble. It is, funnily enough, about a bird.

EDIT: I am retroactively making this post unrebloggable. I'm really, really glad folks have found it interesting and are looking into the resources I shared, but I absolutely do not want this getting passed around as Hawaiian Culture 101. If you want to learn more about Hawaiʻi, I must stress that you should look to a reputable source and not some schmuck on Tumblr rambling about her effortposting fanned fiction.

[antisociallilbrat]

do you think the party could defeat IT?

and yes, i did read the whole thing and i love it, i love you and your brainworms /p

- kori -

Kori! You know eventually you're going to regret asking me these things, but thank you for encouraging my brain worms. Let's do this.

Again, I've been thinking about it all day, could the Party defeat It?

I've said this before, but we pretty much know that the Loser's club were the blueprint for the Party. This is especially reflected in season one. For those who didn't know though, the Suffer brothers wanted to direct the It remake and when Warner Brothers said no, they went and created Stranger Things instead. Here's actually a pretty good article on that.

So let's set this in a universe where it's Holly that gets taken/killed by Pennywise. And I say Holly because Bill was blue print for Mike. Again though, Mike did grow into his own character in later seasons. Side note: I have whole another post with the Party and Losers Club comparisons and who was probably based on who.

Secondly let's say in this universe there's no powers and Max and El is already apart of the party. Just a group of regular kids against a monster. Can't give the Party an advantage if we're giving a fair judgement.

So Holly, she's gone. Mike? He wants to find her and kill the monster that took her. The Party obviously is going to help him, but first let's talk about how It would terrorize these poor kids.

It would taunt Mike like how It taunted Bill, with a corpse version of Holly. Also Ted and Karen, like Bill's parent's, become completely despondent to him but I would argue so would Nancy- We're going to get to that.

Lucas and Dustin would be taunted I would like to think with monsters from DnD. It's a shapeshifter after all. (Yes I know that's an oversimplification) But their fears could something else and I am open to suggestions on this.

El, who I would argue has similarities to Beverly, would be taunted with Papa and Max would be taunted with Billy. I would also argue that It would manipulate Billy into doing It's bidding like how It did with Bowers. Like how Billy was flayed, more parallels between St and It And Will, oh poor Will. I think Will is a mixture of Richie and Eddie and like how It tortured Richie, It would tortue Will with 'his secret'.

So now we know how It would terrorize them but what about Joyce, Hopper, and the teenage crew? In Stranger Things they help the Party against the dangers from the Upside Down but they're not helping against It. Especially Hopper and Joyce.

It isn't just a monster, It isn't like Vecna. It can control a whole town. Make the adults not notice the missing kids, make them numb to the evil It extrudes over the town. In Derry the parents of the missing kids eventually forgot about them. And you could argue, oh Joyce would be the exception but she's not. Bill's parents, who we know loved Georgie, forgot him. I love Joyce but she isn't overcoming that.

The teenagers are more of a different story, especially Nancy since it's her sister that got taken, but I think It would have the same affect on them. Especially since the teenage crew is so close to adulthood.

So the kids are their own. They don't get outside help like they do in Stranger Things.

It takes El, Mike finds out, and he would go to Lucas. Mike and Lucas would've gotten into the fight after Neilbolt because Lucas and Mike's friendship is very reminiscent of Bill and Richie's. Especially in season one.

They charge in, yada yada yada, all that shit goes down, they put It into an early hibernation. We know how it goes, here's how the Party deviates from the Losers Club. One them isn't staying behind.

None them are going to stay in their hometown. You could maybe say Dustin but I'm not sure. So how would they even know It came back in 27 years? Remember, It would make them forget when they grew up and left.

But let's say It called them home. They got some funny feeling and returned home, not sure as to why until they run into each other and start remembering. Because one them didn't stay behind, they have no research on how to kill It. They're already at a disadvantage.

Also we've have seen cracks in the Party as they've gotten older. I feel like the love triangle with Bev, Ben, and Bill has a lot similarities with El. Mike, and Will. If they didn't heal those cracks as teenagers I can only imagine what they're like when they return as adults. Yes they love each other, but there are cracks! And I really hate to say this, but after Mike finds out Holly is dead, I don't see him having motivation to fight It again. I don't think the Party would have made a 'blood oath'. This isn't any failing against them, I'm just trying to think of them as them and not the Loser's club.

I believe the if there was a driving force to go fight It a second time it would be Lucas. Maybe El and Will too, but mainly Lucas. Knowing there's a monster out there that no one is doing anything about is very much something Lucas would want to take care of.

I'm realizing this as I am typing this, I don't think the Party could defeat It. I hate to say that. Them not having someone staying behind really hurts them. (Mike H was the reason the Losers Club beat It, he's a badass.)

I'll sum this up: if the Party does decide to fight It as an adult, they die but there's chance they just wouldn't. I'm open to different opinions, because obviously I understand the Losers better then I understand the Party.

The reason the Party fights the monsters from the Upside Down time after time is because they're in direct danger and it's not just them. They have help. They have adults when they're kids. Mike has Nancy. There's Hopper and Joyce.

Against It, they would be by themselves, even as adults. The more I think about it, I just feel the Party wouldn't fight It a second time, they may not even return to their hometown after the 27 years.

There's more I could say but this is way too long, my God. If you read all this, thank you for listening to my brain worms. I know other people probably have different opinions and please share!

Kori, do you regret encouraging me yet? AAAAAAA

[hyacinth-halcyon-blog]

Okay so this might be a looong shot but I was trying to think of who might have any knowledge regarding this and you were the only one that came to mind (bc you're amazing and your resources are literally the best!). But I've been trying to find a modern (or hell, even an ancient) philosophical/metaphysical defense for polytheism. I know philosophy is not /exactly/ your thing but have you come across anything like this??

Philosophy is far from my thing thanks to a really bad philosophy class I took aha. But I did some poking for you to see what I could find. It’s worth noting that pretty much all of these will be Western philosophy because a) I’m more knowledgeable on the topic and feel more comfortable navigating the arguments and b) Western philosophy is incredibly elitist in its views of world religion and tends to regard polytheism as “primitive” whereas ‘Eastern’ philosophy lacks this elitism so has less of a need for these arguments.

First thing that came up was a book entitled The Case for Polytheism by Steven Dillon. Haven’t read it but the entire thing is based on this exact topic. It’s a recent-ish book. Wildhunt has a review that breaks down the book into what feels like a massive oversimplification (at least I hope it’s a massive oversimplification as someone who has had to seriously read philosophy.) The oversiplified explanation is essentially if the universe was created by something and it must have been because it isn’t essential for it to exist, then at least one god exists and then something along the lines of “number of gods relies on amount of gods perceived, multiple gods are perceived and so there are multiple gods”. As said, I really hope wildhunt failed to understand a nuanced argument and broke it down poorly because otherwise… this is not a good argument IMO and I wouldn’t recommend using it. It’s about as poor as the circular logic Descartes employs in his theory okay it’s bad and a weak argument.

The next result I could find is older and is from the philosopher and psychologist William James.  His arguments for polytheism revolve around the moral problem of evil and the diversity of religious experiences. His view of religion stems from having a pluralistic rather than monistic view of morality. In essence, his view of good and evil influences and informs his view of theology. Basically, he says that monism in religion means that evil is an inescapable moral truth and that humans have no free will in regards to it. A pluralistic view of the principal of evil allows for reducing evil, stating it to be unnecessary and combatable, and something we are not bound to irrevocably. Basically, he argues that in monotheism, evil is an inescapable part of God and human nature and how could a fundamentally good being create evil? (A trouble that theologians still grapple with.) Furthermore, if God were all powerful he should be able to destroy evil but he cannot and so he must be finite. In pluralistic theology, evil is merely one of many concepts existing and not an absolute truth nor something created by what is supposed to be a benign creator. It’s one of many oppositional forces. It also allows for free will on our parts. (I hope I’m making sense here; trying to state things simply but not oversimplify) He also explains that there are numerous religious truths and experiences and that these often contradict and yet are no less true despite the contradictions. This means that there must exist multiple divinities capable of making all these differing truths. In addition, communication means reciprocation must happen aka we influence said god as they influence us. This means that god must be limited and therefore not all-powerful, again, opening the case for multiple gods. Together, he sees this as a convincing evidence for polytheistic beliefs.

Another source - and a more modern one - is the writings of Edward P. Butler. He is a theologian and philosopher as well as a polytheist. He runs the blog Henadology and has a lot of writings worth reading. I’m having trouble tracking down a paper that looks like it gives a specific explanation of a defense for polytheism but he has writings I can’t access that look like they would.

Some much older writings in defense of polytheism are from the Greeks. Plotinus is a name that has come up a lot. I also found a paper arguing that the oldest argument for polytheism over monotheism is made by a Pythagorean by the name of Pseudo-Onatas. I would summarize this and look for specific writings by Plotinus but my spoons are super low right now. But I hope this gives you some places for your own search. :>