#because of cultural and racial differences

[the-martyrfication-of-the-matron]

Yeah, objectively in America, specifically in North United States, where they have a much bigger history in regards to "what type of white" you are, Italian is only somewhat recently "white." Up to the 1950s, Italians were called the n-word pretty consistently. Like, knew an older Italian fellow (70's) who would use the n-word acuse well, that was the word used against him in his youth. (Not right, but I wasn't gonna argue with the man as a 10 year old who knew this man would give me candy for good behavior)

America's history of white on white racism is fascinating in a morbid way, but it is much more prevalent in the northern states since those were greater hubs for immigration. South is still mostly skin color/non-white attire and features. Though, from my very limited knowledge, North United States probably shares more in common with how European countries express their racism and xenophobia.

In the UK, Italians are considered pretty much not-white too, at least in the area I live in. Like people will say they’re white, and that they have no problem with Italians, and then be a dick to Italians on the basis of their ethnic features and I’m not sure how people can… be that way and not notice it.

Europe can be really racist, and xenophobic, and a lot of people don’t realise because they’re in their little white-British echo chambers. I’ve gone to a muslim-Asian majority primary school, and schools with a significant Eastern/central-European student-body since then, and so Y’know being around people from different backgrounds means you hear a lot about how they’re mistreated because of that, if not see it firsthand. I’m not saying this makes me perfect, but it gives perspective.

I’ve also got a French-hating father and a fully French name (from my mother’s side) so I get some of the ‘oh the French are assholes’ comments thrown my way by him and others. Which isn’t really anything to me, my family isn’t even French. But it just goes to show people will hate on anyone for literally just seeming foreign. And then will go ‘lol we’re not racist like Americans’ because they forget that America’s history of slavery and racism is Britain’s history of slavery and racism.

[actual-corpse]

Who the fuck decided the word "curvy" equaled "fat"?

Because they can go fuck themselves.

[hussyknee]

Nahel the child killed by french cops was not black he was maghrebi, of algerian origins

My bad! Thanks for the heads up, I made the correction both at the top and bottom of the post.

[juror4]

It's ridiculously and infuriatingly difficult to find some casual history material on the Moors because all anyone cares about is classifying whether or not they were Black... Shut up! I want to know about the arts and the science and the clothing and the crafts and the poetry and the battles and the culture! I don't want to do race science!

[stitchlesswitch]

Sweetheart are you sitting down

Tired: finding a sealed tomb from Egypt or some other non white culture and declaring it cursed

Wired: doing the same for the catholics

[tuulikki]

The thing is that the portrayal of Neanderthals as having been inherently grotesque and alien to H. sapiens is something we will never have proof of. But we do have proof that, in different locations and in different populations across time, we all found eachother desirable. We saw eachother and wanted to touch. And the offspring were held by their mothers and raised and had their own offspring in turn.

When you look for the first proof that H. sapiens found Neanderthals repulsive, you have to wait until the Victorian era, when the white masters of empires were busy portraying Neanderthals as stupid, brutish, and (of course) dark-skinned.

In more modern times, we’ve had people arguing that instead of seeing Neanderthals as Benighted Savages, they should instead be seen as Noble Savages, (allegedly) cruelly destroyed and driven from their lands by H. sapiens. Which one of their two you believe says more about your modern political views than it does about ancient H. sapiens.

And, whether we construct Neanderthals as Savage or Noble Savage, the fundamental assumption we project into the unfathomably distant past is still that H. sapiens saw Neanderthals as an Other, with the language we use being almost explicitly that of modern racial dynamics.

But we have no proof of any of that. We have no proof of hostilities. We know we co-existed and we had sex. That’s it.

Humans obviously have sex with some humans and kill others. We also know that, when small groups of humans occupy vast spaces with infrequent contact with others, unique cultures will always form, some more hospitable, some more neophobic/xenophobic. But many cultures of small settlements placed among huge unpeopled landscapes place supreme emphasis on hospitality to strangers. Plus, we fucking love other social animals, as evidenced by how we befriended wolves.

I’m a humourless weirdo and a wet blanket about popular constructions of Neanderthals as “monstrous”, and I freely admit it. But that’s because it’s tied up in legacies of imperialism. Not only that, but it also privileges one culture (yours, mine, modernity’s) as being most human by implicitly assuming we can project it onto people in the past. Since you don’t pretend that all global cultures share exact same values as you do, it doesn’t take more than a few moments’ reflection to realise you can’t do that to the past.

[mbat]

dude its twice now that ive tried to play origins multiplayer minecraft servers that happen to be mandatory roleplay for some reason and its just wild that they like, want you to come up with a whole entire person before even playing, especially with worlds that feel... bare bones as fuck, from the information they give

like they give an origin story of the world and maybe like one or two sentences on the races or cultures, and then theyre like 'okay now give your character an entire in depth personality, backstory, family history, job, life goal, childhood dream, credit card number-'

like... with what info ?? with what basis??

the second one ive joined isnt as strict as the first one, seeing as i joined the minecraft server before i even realized there was character applications, and no one really paid me any mind at all or acknowledged me

but there was one i joined like 2 years ago that you had to get your application approved before gaining access to the server, and they direct you to their wiki for reading up on the world and stuff... but again, bare bones as fuck. and i exaggerated before slightly, but fully seriously they asked me 'oh, and where did your characters origin come from? their grandparents getting infected? how did they become this way' and its like. DUDE I DONT KNOW, WHO CARES. WHO WILL ASK ME THAT IN THE ROLEPLAY??? like where am i supposed to even get any of this shit from, the two paragraphs you typed about the world origin story??

i didnt finish the application because that was stupid and it wasnt worth it imo. shame, cause the custom origins were cool, but theres always other origins mods and servers

like... i guess other people work different from me, cause clearly these servers have people in them that somehow came up with functioning characters, but that aint me. if i make a character in a game, their personality and story comes to me while im playing, through their experiences and appearance and the choices im given in the world.

and also literally no one is ever going to fucking ask 'lol so how did your bloodline get mutated?'

[bixels]

Overwatch is also so fucking weird about Chinese culture too cuz they wanna appeal to us so bad but they only have ONE Chinese character. So yeah, for Lunar New Year why not dress the British character in yellow-face and traditional Chinese clothes and have her represent one of our most famous deities? What do you mean that's in bad taste because the British invaded and colonized us and started wars and got us addicted to opium cuz they were angry about port tariffs? Here, we dressed the white Swiss lady up as a cool Chinese Phoenix too, is that better?

its crazy that overwatch is just that way with the japanese. i think a sasunaru shipper in 2010 would write more respectful depictions

[escapistcatontheinternet]

i love the extras of dungeon meshi in how it fleshes out the world because they make it so much more evident how race affects every part of the story while avoiding the zootopia racism problem. like obv a main theme of the story is like, humanity and desire, 'to eat is to live', etc, but since the majority of it takes place in the dungeon isolated from society and thru the lens of laios, the racial aspects play out more like shadows on a wall for most of the story.

then in the extras we get comics like this

which at a glance fleshes out the racial aspects via a character explaining the racial rules of universe - humans have x amount of bones, while orcs and kobolds have more. however, if u take it less straightforwardly, it points out how the concept of 'human' is a constructed concept in the world. the fact that there are different categories of human in different parts of the world based off of what types of humanoids occur there is already a demonstration of this. in response, the bones explanation seems to kabru and the characters as an objective way of measuring humans vs nonhumans.

but obv, when the culture was deciding what humanoids were humans and nonhumans, they weren't blindly analyzing skeletons and then deciding. just visually, one can glean that orcs and kobolds look less like the ingroup of tallmen, elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc. the bones explanation appears as a justification for that immediate prejudice under a scientific guise - I'm sure that one could come up with the same number of physical differences between a gnome and an elf that they would find between a tallman and an orc. it sounds a lot better to say 'well, an orc has 230 bones while a human has 206' then 'well, an orc looks ewwww yucky yucky to me while a human looks normal'.

and what i like abt the comic is that the characters take the explanation at face value for the most part. when a contradiction is brought up in the oni, kabru can neatly slot them into the predetermined number of bones framework. bc that's kinda how it works irl - there r cultural prejudices that we can posthumously justify, and if we find something outside of it, we can twist it to fit into our predetermined binary. however, since the reader does not live in a world where there are orcs and kobolds to be prejudiced against, we can see that flaw in the cultural logic. when the party encounters the orcs, the number of bones has no bearing on their humanity. They r shown to be cliquish and distrusting of outsiders, but not any more than the elves are later in the story.

tldr dungeon meshi worldbuilding is so good

[lizardsfromspace]

I do have to impress on anyone who wasn't around for it how batshit the reality boom of the 2000s could be. Especially on Fox.

Here are some 100% real 2000s reality shows:

Who's Your Daddy? A woman has to guess which of eight men is her biological father. One of them really is, and if she guesses right she wins $100,000. If one of the seven fake dads convinces her to guess them, he wins $100,000.

Black. White. A white family learns about racism by living a month in blackface, while a black family spends a month in whiteface. The black family was a real family, but the white family was just some actors hired to put on blackface to prove racism exists

Without Prejudice? Five strangers decide which of five strangers gets a cash prize based off clips and their answers to political questions. Cancelled when one of the choosers openly said he'd eliminate all black contestants

Welcome to the Neighborhood. Three conservative white families in a Austin subdivision decide which diverse family gets to move in. Unaired due to being literal housing discrimination

Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay. Two straight men try to pass themselves off as gay and whoever seems more gay gets $50,000. Unaired due to. Due to. Due to

Playing It Straight. A woman tries to find love among fourteen men, half of whom are straight and half of whom are gay, and she must eliminate two men she believes are gay each week. If she ended up picking a straight man in the end, they'd split a million dollars; if she picked a gay man, he'd win a million dollars

Boy Meets Boy. This was Playing It Straight but starring a gay man and he had to eliminate straight people

Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? He wasn't a multimillionaire. He didn't even have a million dollars in liquid assets. He had a battery conviction Fox claims they didn't see. Because it was the 2000s, somehow this ended up with the woman he won being widely vilified and turned into a national punchline. How dare she complain about a massive corporation tricking her into marrying a lying abuser, good thing Matt Lauer's there to take her down a peg

The Swan. A "ugly" woman is given plastic surgery and wins a prize if she's the hottest at the end of the season. If she's not hot enough by the show's standards she's eliminated and called ugly on national TV

The Biggest Loser. Overweight people engage in competitive crash weight loss that often led to awful health complications. Studies showed basically everyone on the show regained any weight they lost once it was over and they didn't have abusive trainers demanding they take huge health risks to win a competitive weight loss competition. Like the others, this one was cancel-oh, it was a massive hit that ran for 18 seasons? Yikes!

Wife Swap and Trading Spouses. These were the same show and had a wife from one family go to another family that was different politically, racially, culturally, religiously etc. Most famous for the God Warrior

At the time people focused on the likes of Fear Factor but looking back it's wild how many of the worst shows toyed with politics. So many of these shows have a premise that's like "what if we exposed these conservatives to these people they hate?" or hyping themselves up as Important Experiments. Then they'd freak out when they got the kind of viral bigoted freakout they were trying to construct the whole time.

There were also a bunch of horrible reality shows, thankfully this time mostly unpopular, in the 2010s that based themselves around economic themes as a response to the market crash, but that's a story for another time

[hiwaaranit]

I should have known if I brought up wc I’d have to talk about. But it includes of a lot of issues with feral/furry designs that use feathers in hair. I don’t necessarily know why the conversation only started and stayed in the wc fandom when horse/wolf/lion feral fandoms are still doing the same thing.

Now having feathers in the design isn’t a racial attack first thing off because there’s a lot of context around what feather’s are used, the shape, and where they are placed. If the look is anything like "rave Coachella looking tribal fantasy feathers and beads" it’s probably insensitive. I’m not to sure why it has to be feathers, I honestly think the wc fandom are holding themselves back when it comes to forwarding designs in a unique way. Tail feathers are also left out in this conversation as well, one or two feathers or feathers in the shape of a birds tail are fine but bunched together feathers are leaning to close to how we have our horses wear feathers. This is in the context of the design already looking like a "medicine cat" already its bad. it’s like those yt girls wear feather head bands but animal addition.

I’ve talked about this before but silhouettes are so important, like Native American stereotypes are on the global scale you cannot escape this silhouette you just have to avoid it. There’s no "but it’s in so many other cultures" no it’s not it’s totally unique to our people that’s why people flock to it because it’s so "mysterious, sacred" whatever their weird twisted up reason is. There’s so many unique ways to break this silhouette you just gotta be more creative. And I feel like instead of being more creative and coming up with totally different ideas it’s just easier to lean on these visual native stereotypes to get across "wild mythical nature fantasy"

I could get into the horse fandom and the weird situations they’re doing over there but that’s another crazy thing. I should say because someone will ask, ostrich feathers on like show horses or knights or puss in boots style is fine not the same thing (breaking the silhouette) they’re not related.

And it comes down to understanding what you are drawing and where this imagery comes from, I’m not gonna get my feelings hurt because of your design but I’ll question why are you drawing stuff like that. You cant remove that cultural/stereotypical imagery, and if you don’t care about it then you don’t care about the history or how it looks on your character and art.

I made it this far on the internet but if you want to be conscious about these things good on yea it doesn’t take much☺️👍

Edit: can’t believe I gotta say this but yes other cultures utilize feathers, if people are using feathers that are used in their culture then don’t harass them. That’s weird have some common sense. Ostrich feathers, peacock feathers it’s actually so interesting how native birds to an area affect the culture there.

[gatheringbones]

[“When I asked focus group participants again about body hair and their desires for women, Adam responded:

That’s what makes the woman different, her body, I don’t mind uh having hair in certain specific parts on her body um . . . in general I . . . like woman to be clean. Just in certain areas. But like I said, down in the genital, like it’s okay for me.

Hair, for Adam, Musiteli, and other participants, served as the visual representation of the differentiation between “men” and “women.” Further, Adam referred to a woman being hairless not only as “proper” but “cleanly,” as well.

Often, when I asked participants specifically about genital hair, the response was that they did not prefer hair due to cleanliness, hygiene, and other such myths surrounding body hair. The idea that hairlessness is cleanly is reflected in colloquial discourse (e.g., “clean shaven”). Ryan, an Indian American, cis-het man, explained to me his distaste for a “bush” or a large amount of hair genitally:

I just think like it's better to sometimes, maybe, fully shave it, like coordinate with your partner if you're going to do that, because then it could help but like, yeah, if like two people both have bushes then like you don't know what's going on. And, also, it's just like, cleaner. Like in terms of like keeping it clean. It's easier when you have less hair in those areas.

When I asked Liz, a cis-lesbian, Latina woman, whether she cares if a woman shaves her armpits and genitals or not, she similarly responded, “Yes (laughs). Yes definitely. It’s just . . . um . . . how should I call it? Hygiene. Hygiene.”

In Ryan, Liz, and Adam’s discourse, pubic hair is conceptualized as unclean, non-hygienic, and obtrusive. Such ideas, again, are not mere individual preference but are instead shaped by cultural and generational understandings of hair. Herzig highlights that “the normalization of smooth skin in dominant U.S. culture is not even a century old,” with such ideas arising during the same years as the Cold War with individuals in the United States describing “visible body hair on women as evidence of a filth, ‘foreign’ lack of hygiene.” Porn and the framing of sexually explicit material have also shaped cultural understandings of pubic hair. While pubic hair removal for women went out of vogue after the nineteenth century, it became popular once again in the 1980s, in part, due to pornographic depictions largely including hairless vulvas, and more recently, hairless bodies for men, as well. Cultural discourse surrounding pubic and body hair is, thus, shaped by racialized, gendered, and xenophobic understandings of the body and hair. The fact that these ideas are shared by immigrant participants/participants of color does not deny the racialized and xenophobic roots of such discourse, so much as it highlights the internalization of racism and xenophobia by immigrants and/or people of color, as an adaptive response to the racism of society.

As participants conceptualized hair as animal-like, masculine, and/or filthy, they also conceptualized of it as excess or surplus to the human (woman’s) body. Pubic hair shaped their idea of what it means to do womanhood and to be a woman. As such, participant discourse not only was shaped by racist, sexist, and xenophobic conceptualizations of hair that have proliferated in the United States but also cissexist concepts of manhood and womanhood as opposite, different, and biologically based. That which is “improper to manhood/womanhood within White schemas of a gender binary are unnatural, unclean, and undesirable.”]

alithia zamantakis, from thinking cis: cisgender heterosexual men, and queer women’s roles in anti-trans violence, 2023

[zygon-commander]

I think Discovery does a good job with having queer characters in a futuristic sci-fi setting where they feel queer by the viewer’s standards AND queer within the setting of the story, but without it seeming like cultural standards have just been frozen for a few hundred years.

No one conceals their queerness or seems at all anxious or self-conscious about it, but Adira’s coming out is still treated like a significant moment and something that brings them closer to Stamets, and Gray mentions transitioning by name as something that took up his time and attention. The queer members of the Discovery behave like a family, like a unit within the crew.

From this, you can vaguely take away that the concept of queerness and queer community exists within the Federation, but not homophobia (at least as far as we see).

This is what I’ve always wanted from Star Trek and it’s so simple, but I think a lot of people fail at this when it comes to writing real oppressed groups into fantastical settings. “This character is different, but we can’t persecute them, how will we characterize them?? That’s scary… I’ll just ignore it.”

I remember watching a redlettermedia review of some nutrek (a bad idea) where they were complaining about forced wokeness and citing an episode of TOS where Abraham Lincoln calls Uhura a racial slur (just realized how stupid that sentence is) and she’s unfazed because she’s never experienced racism so it has no weight to her. The boys concluded that since racism, countries, war, etc. no longer exist on Earth, then human characters shouldn’t be so aware of what cultural categories they are. As if blackness would disappear without racism 🤨 and ethnicities would disappear without countries 🤨 and pride in one’s culture and heritage would disappear without wars 🤨. I think this is a common point of view that doesn’t really make sense, and I’m glad TV writers seem to be changing their minds (or just hiring minorities as writers lol).

Picard is still French without the country of France, and Sisko is Creole, and Dr. Culber is capital-g Gay, and Riker is a proud trombonist (a distinct social category of the twenty-first century). Good for them.

[0alix0]

Overusage of Lore

a lot of people tend to say that bioware put little to no lore into Veilguard, and i might be on a minority on this to me it's way too much and way too shallow

The entire game feels like writers just scream at you "Look at all the magical thing we have!! So we have Titans! And Evanuris! And Illuminati Those Across the See! And-- are you listening? You better listen cuz there are more! We have Shadow Dragons! We have Griffons! We--"

OMG calm down it's not a fucking Warcraft

the best thing in DA was the way it beautifully showed real life issues through the lens of medieval fantasy world.

The dalish weren't so fascinating because they had an entire language made for them and pretty tattoos. They were fascinating because they were enslaved, fought for freedom, then got their land taken away YET STILL continued to fight for survival, for their cultural identity, their children and their children's children, for freedom. Literally combination of native american's and jewish history. Because despite having one goal they all had different approach and opinion about other of their kin: city elves (those disconnected from their culture) and half-elves ("can they be considered elves?" "should they be allowed to be a part of dalish?").

The city elf origin wasn't so memorable because every npc had a backstory with a length of bible. It was memorable because it was the most obvious analogy on racial oppression, segregation, colonialism and fetishism in the entire franchise. Because it had the guts to actually show in details the horrors of these things.

Broodmothers weren't so horrifying because it's a female mixture of jubba hutt and a fucking pudge from dota with a detailed explanation their anatomy. They were horrifying because they were paralleling a very real misogyny, mistreatment, the way how women in some countries are seen as nothing but a walking uteruses, where the only thing they're good for is to give birth

AND bioware doubled it while doing the same thing with Orzammar, cast system & Rica!

The Circles weren't so interesting because we've got dozens of pages in WoT explaining their hierarchy/fraternities. No, they were interesting because it was literally a bunch of medieval GULAGs with a function of a mental hospital, it showed what mistreatments happen there, the abuse, child abduction and enforcement of religion.... And from the side of templars it was a discussion about professional deformation, addictions and the way high ranking people abuse those to control their underlings.

..... And you know, if we were back in origins, griffons, for example, would've probably been used as a parallel on irl eco terrorism. it might've been about how Wardens despite their good nature unintentionally bonded the general association of the entire animal species to their order and abused this connection to the point when the species was beyond preservation!

and btw, then that decision in davrin's quest would actually had any meaning, instead of throwing wardens into mud (again) and turning isseya into a villain for no fkn reason.

lore is only good as long as it's used for purpose, when it has things to discuss, not just exist

i don't fucking care about titans/evanuris/and other shit because they're just a 30 pages long article in codex and WoT trying to explain magic and write DA timeline almost to a fucking mesozoic era. it's BORING. Get me emotionally invested, then i'll care

[mashkaroom]

Translation thoughts on the greatest poem of our time, “His wife has filled his house with chintz. To keep it real I fuck him on the floor”

It’s actually quite tricky to translate. Because it’s so short, each word and grammatical construction is carrying a lot of weight. It also, as people have noted, plays with registers. “Chintz” is a word with its own set of associations. Chintz is a type of fabric with its origins in India. The disparaging connotation is from chintz’s eventual commonality. Chintz was actually banned from England and France because the local textile mills couldn’t compete.

Keep it real” is tremendously difficult to translate -- it’s a bit difficult to even define. It means to be authentic and genuine, but it also has connotations of staying true to one’s roots. Like many English slang words, it comes first from AAVE. From this article on the phrase:

“[K]eeping it real meant performing an individual’s experience of being Black in the United States. As such, it became a form of resistance. Insisting on a different reality, one that wasn’t recognized by the dominant culture, empowered Black people to ‘forge a parallel system of meaning,’ according to cultural critic Mich Nyawalo...The phrase’s roots in racialized resistance, however, were erased when it was adopted by the mostly-White film world of the 1970s and ’80s....Keeping it real in this context indicated a performance done so well that audiences could forget it was a performance.This version of keeping it real wasn’t about testifying to personal experience; it was about inventing it.”

One has to imagine that jjbang8 did not have the origins of these phrases in mind when composing the poem, but even if by coincidence, the etymological and cultural journeys of these two central lexemes perfectly reflect the themes of the poem. The two words have themselves traveled away from the authenticity they once represented, and, in a new context, have taken on new meanings -- the hero of our poem, the unnamed “him”, is, presumably, in quite a similar situation.

Setting aside the question of register, of the phonology, prosody, and meter of the original, of the information that is transmitted through bits of grammar that don’t necessarily exist in other languages -- a gifted translator might be able to account for all of these -- how do you translate the journey of the words themselves?

In my translations, I decided to go for the most evocative words, even if they don’t evoke the exact same things as in the original. The strength of these two lines is that they imply that there’s more than just what you see, whether that’s the details of the story -- what’s happening in the marriage? how do the narrator and the husband know each other? -- or the cultural background of the very words themselves. I wanted to try and replicate this effect.

Yiddish first:

זייַן ווייַב האָט אָנגעפֿילט זייַן הויז מיט הבלים

צו בלייַבן וויטיש, איך שטוף אים אופֿן דיל. zayn vayb hot ongefilt zayn hoyz mit havolim.

tsu blaybn vitish, ikh shtup im afn dil

This translation is pretty direct. There is a word for chintz in Yiddish -- tsits -- but, as far as I can tell, it refers only to the fabric; it doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation as in English. I chose, instead, havolim, a loshn-koydesh word that means “vanity, nothingness, nonsense, trifles”. In Hebrew, it can also mean breath or vapor. I chose this over the other competitors because it, too, is a word with a journey and with a secondary meaning. Rather than imagining the bright prints of chintz, we might imagine a more olfactory implication -- his wife has filled his house with perfumes or cleaning fluids. It can carry the implication that something is being masked as well as the associations with vanity and gaudiness.

Vitish -- Okay, this is a good one. Keep in mind, of course, that I’ve never heard or seen it used before today, so my understanding of its nuances is very limited, but I’ll explain to you exactly how I am sourcing its meaning. The Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (CYED) gives this as “gone astray (esp. woman); slang correct, honest”. I used the Yiddish Book Center’s optical character recognition software, which allows you to search for strings in their corpus, to confirm that both usages are, in fact, attested. It’s a pretty rare word in text, though, as the CYED implies, it might have been more common in spoken speech. It appears in a glossary in “Bay unds yuden” (Among Us Jews) as a thieves cant word, where it’s definted as נאַריש, שרעקעוודיק, אונבעהאלפ. אויך נישט גנביש. אין דער דייַטשער גאַונער-שפראַך --  witsch -- נאַריש, or “foolish, terrible, clumsy/pathetic. not of the thieves world. in the German thieves cant witsch means foolish”. A vitishe nekeyve (vitishe woman) is either a slacker or a prostitute. I can’t prove this for sure, but my sense is that it might come from the same root as vitz, joke (it’s used a couple of times in the corpus to mention laughing at a vitish remark -- which makes it seem kind of similar to witty). I assume the German thieve’s cant that’s being referred to is Rotwelsch, which has its own fascinating history and, in fact, incorporates a lot of Yiddish. In fact, for this reason, some of the first Yiddish linguists were actually criminologists! What an excellent set of associations, no? It has the slangy sense of straightforward of honest; it has a sense of sexual non-normativity (we might use it to read into the relationship between the narrator and the husband) -- and a feminized one at that; it was used by an underground subculture, and, again, the meaning there was quite different -- like the “real” in “keeping it real” it was used to indicate whether or not someone was “in” on the life (tho “real” is used to mean that the person is in, while “vitish” is used to mean they’re not). It’s variety of meanings are more ambiguous than “keep it real”, which can pretty much only be read positively, and it also brings in a tinge of criminality. Though it doesn’t have the same exact connotations as “keep it real”, I think it’s about as ideal of a fit as we’ll get because it’s equally evocative of more below the surface. I also chose “tsu blaybn vitish”, which is “to stay vitish”, as opposed to something like “to make it vitish” to keep the slight ambiguity of time that “keep it real” has -- keeping it real does< I think, imply that there is a pre-existing “real” to which one can adhere, so I wanted to imply the same.

The rest is straight-forward. “Shtup” is one of a few words the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (CEYD) gives for “fuck”, and I think it has a nice sound.

Ok, now Russian

женой твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками

чтоб не блудить с пути, ебемся на полу

zhenoy tvoy dom napolnin fintiflyushkami.

shtob ne bludit’ s puti’, yebyomsya na polu

In order to preserve, more or less, the iambic meter, I made a few more changes here -- since Russian, unlike Yiddish, is not a Germanic language, it’s harder to keep the same structure + word order while also maintaining the rhythm. I would translate this back to English as:

“Your house is filled with trifles by your wife. To not stray off the path, we’re fucking on the floor”

So a few notes before we get into the choice of words for “chintz” and “keep it real”. To preserve the iamb, I changed “his” to “your”. This changes the lines from a narration of events to some outside party to a conversation between the two men at the center. Russian also has both formal and informal you (formal you is also the plural form, as is the case in a number of other languages). I went with informal you because I wanted to preserve the fact that his wife has filled his house not their house, as someone pointed out in the original chain (though I don’t think that differentiation is nearly as striking in the 2nd person) and because it’s unlikely you’d be on formal you with someone you’re fucking (unless it’s, like, a kink thing). I honestly didn’t even consider making it formal, but that would actually raise a lot of interesting implications about the relationship between the speaker and the husband, as well as with what that means about the “realness” of the situation. Is, in fact, the narrator only creating a mirage of a more real, more meaningful encounter, while the actual truth -- that there is a woman the husband has made promises to that he’s betraying -- is obscured? that this intimacy is just a facade? Is there perhaps some sort of power differential that the narrator wishes to point out? Or perhaps is the way that the narrator is keeping it real by pointing out the distance between the two of them? there is no pretense of intimacy, the narrator is calling this what it is -- an encounter without deeper significance?

Much to think about, but I actually think the two men do have history --  i think the narrator remembers the house back when it was actually only “his house” and was as yet unfilled with chintz. We also don’t know what they were calling each other prior to this moment. This could be the first time they switched to the informal you. 

Ok moving on, I originally translated it as “твой дом наполнен финтифлюшками жены”. Honestly, this sounds more elegant than what I have now, but I ultimately though removing the wife from either a subject or agent position (grammatically, I mean) was too big a betrayal of the original. The original judges the wife. She took an active role in filling the house. If she were made passive, that read is certainly a possible one -- perhaps even the dominant one -- but it could also read more like “we are doing this in a space filled with reminders of his wife and the life they share” -- the action of filling is no longer what’s being focused on. Why do I say the current translation is inelegant? I feel you stumble over it a little, because it’s almost a garden path sentence. This is also an assset though. “Zhenoy tvoy dom napolnen” is a fully grammatical sentence on its own, and it means “Your house is filled by your wife” -- as in English, the primary read is that the wife is what the house is full of. If the sentence makes you stumble, perhaps that’s even good -- we focus, for good reason, on the relationship between the two men, but in a translation, the wife is able to draw more attention to herself.

Ok, chintz: I chose the word “финтифлюшки” (fintiflyushki), meaning trifle/bobble/tchotchke, because it, allegedly, comes from the german phrase finten und flausen, meaning illusions and vanity/nonsense. Once again, I like that the word has a journey, specifically a cross-linguistic one.

Keep it real: this one, frankly, fails to capture the impact of the original, in my opinion, but allow me to explain the reasoning. “Stray off the path” implies, again, that there is some sort of path that both the narrator and the husband were on before the wife and the chintz -- and one they intend to continue taking, one that this act is a maintenance of. It brings in a little irony, since the husband very much is straying from the path of his marriage. “Bludit’“ can also mean to be unfaithful in a marriage (as, in fact, can “stray”). The proto-slavic word it comes from can mean to delude or debauch -- they want to do the latter but not the former.

As for register -- “shtob” is a bit informal. I would write the full version (shto by) in an email, for example. The word for fuck, yebyomsa, is from one of the “mat” words, the extra special top tier of russian swears, definitely not to be said in polite company (and, if you are a man of a certain generation or background, not in front of women; it’s not that the use of mat automatically invokes a male-only environment, but if we’re already thinking that deeply about it. But while we’re on the topic, i will say that in my circles in the US, women use mat much more actively than men (at least in front of me, who was, up until recently, a woman and also a child).)

Ok i think that’s all the comments i have!

[sailing-ever-west]

Okay but can we talk about how Big Mom is like one of the best portrayals in fiction of the problems with exoticism?

Narratives where one group hates the other for racial, cultural, physical, or other reasons are common, and although they still require nuanced execution to really be meaningful, in essence they're fairly easy to set up. "You're different, so I hate you and want you beneath me."

Exoticism, on the other hand, is something I really don't see dealt with as much. It takes more thought to explore the idea that oppression can be expressed not as outright hatred of certain traits, but through sensationalizing and commodifying them. Thinking a trait is cool or beautiful, but taking away the rights of the person it belongs to.

The way Totto Land is run demonstrates this perfectly. On the surface it's "accepting" of all races, people of all shapes and sizes, but not being directly attacked and discriminated against is held over all of their heads in order to exploit them for continued donations of their literal life force. Acceptance is conditional on their usefulness.

Big Mom also literally collects living creatures in a scrapbook zoo for her own entertainment, and creates beings bound to her will out of inanimate objects. She's enchanted with the idea of Brook as a living skeleton, holding him like a doll and playing with his hair (relevant that it's an afro, imo), only upset at his apparent "death" because she's lost her new favorite toy.

It's shown perhaps even more starkly with all of Big Mom’s children. She births offspring of every race in order to have their powerful traits under her command, and discards the fathers once they've added to the gene pool as she wanted. It's a tool of imperialism to get those people groups under her reign. And as shown with Pudding and Katakuri, she can sometimes personally be disgusted by the physical traits of her mixed children and make them feel the need to hide, only tolerating their appearance in hopes they'll be useful. She can't stand that Pudding looks like a beautiful human girl in every way except for that "gross ugly eye," a necessary evil that is only a positive if it grants her powers. She discriminates against her daughter even while benefiting from her.

It all feels so reminiscent of "oh, I only date Asian women because they're more attractive and have good wife traits," and "you're so pretty, but you'd look better with straight hair," and "white and Filipino couples make the most beautiful babies, that's who I want to marry," and "wow, you're so pale, I could barely guess you were Mexican," and "black people are just naturally better at sports" and "you'd look better with a tan" and "you'd look better if you were lighter" and "black hair is gorgeous but it doesn't look professional" and "I'm dressed up as a Gypsy/Indian/etc." and "I want a curvy girl but actually fat people are gross," and "I'd love to have a gay best friend lol, as long as they don't make it their whole personality," and "autism is your superpower! why do you act so weird though?" and on and on and on.

Big Mom is a fascinating and surprisingly realistic example of obsession with unique traits despite giving no actual respect to the people who have them. Once again, Oda, hats off on shockingly accurate depictions of oppressive systems.