#c: sonmi

[dareactions]

If you had to put a quote to every DA:I companion and advisor what would it be? Like what quote would fit them the best

OBS! I have not read ALL of the works that these quotes come from, as much as I love poetry and Philosophy it’s impossible for me to read everything and know EVERYTHING about every author or person out there. Should a work be written by someone who may or may not have questionable opinions or actions to their name tell me- I in no way or form associate these characters with the authors of the works the quotes are from. It’s simply the quote itself out of context that fits.

This is p new to me as a request so sorry anon if the quotes aren’t exactly what you imagned c: >

Cassandra: ‘’The obligation to speak, the awkwardness of having nothing to say and the desire to be brilliant are three things calculated to make even the greatest man ridiculous.’‘  —  Voltaire, Letters on England

Solas: ‘’You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.’‘ —  Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Dorian: ‘’One must not let oneself be misled: ‘Judge not!’ they say, but they send to hell everything that stands in their way.’‘ —  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

Sera: ‘’Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.’‘ —  Epictetus

Blackwall: ‘’Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?’‘  —  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (7.7)

Iron Bull: ‘’Law applied to its extreme is the greatest injustice.’‘ —  Cicero, De Officiis

Varric: ‘‘Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.’‘—  Albert Camus, “Three Interviews”, Lyrical and Critical Essays

Vivienne:‘’The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful to society, had that society been well organized.‘’—  Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden

Cole: ‘’Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.’‘—  Sonmi-451, Cloud Atlas

Josephine: ‘’It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.’‘ —  Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

Leliana: ‘’There are not too many truths, there are only a few. Their meaning is too deep to grasp other than in symbols.’‘ —  Carl Jung, The Red Book

Cullen: ‘‘It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.’’—  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

[newcatwords]

i’ve always wondered what it would have been like to not receive dumb messages about people like you from tv and movies. the earliest ones i remember seemed so stupid to me i couldn’t even deal with it. it was probably stuff like movies showing “no girls allowed on the team” or movies showing like “the one girl who was so amazing at sport x she was allowed to join the team...and then the boy protagonist falls in love with her and they fall in love.” that’s also more or less the story of “the lego movie”, a very popular movie and massive cesspool of gender essentialism. it’s a shame really.

so i remember being a kid, seeing stuff like “the sandlot” which i loved cuz i identified with the boys. they were kids, like me. at a certain age though i started realizing that it was a “boys” movie. the audience is meant to identify with a band of boys who are friends. the girls are on the margins of this story. it started to feel gross when i remembered how i loved the boys in the gang even though we see them ogling the teenage girl character.

“how had i not seen it before?” i wondered. it was very disturbing. what if there were other things like that that i also hadn’t noticed. these guys were gross. if i was a kid now, i wouldn’t stand for my friends behaving like that. if i was there and one of their friends and this thing happened, i’d be very disturbed and raise a stink about it and who knows how they would’ve responded...maybe they would’ve gone “aw come on!” and “why does it matter to you what we do? mind your own business.” and it would’ve felt awful and i would’ve felt betrayed. turns out they weren’t such good friends after all. imagining this, i got even sadder. i was there, i was a kid, i saw them do this (on the tv) and it just washed over me. i watched sandlot a bunch of times as a kid and loved it every time. i remember feeling warmly about it and liking it and liking hanging out with the boys. how could i have missed it...or missed its importance...or ...what the hell happened exactly??

this is the kind of question that feminism seeks to answer.

---

in i am not your negro, james baldwin says that when he was in france he “missed the way the dark face closes, the way dark eyes watch, and the way when a dark face opens, a light seems to go everywhere.” (if you’re interested in reading the full script of i am not your negro, you can search for an .srt file (srt is for subtitles) for that movie. i opened my srt in a standard text editor & could read the text fine.)

while the narrator reads this text, we see black and white film showing some black people, perhaps neighbors, being friendly with each other on the sidewalk. a black man and woman dance on the sidewalk. we see black faces opening, and the light seems to spread everywhere... (this is what i remember from the movie, but i have to double check!)

before seeing i am not your negro, i hadn’t given much thought as to whether i lived in a culture where people more show their emotion & act genuinely or where people more keep a straight face or keep their face and body more in check. after some thinking about my current community and my family growing up, i realized that i very much grew up in a culture where people were quite reserved in their expressions. there may have been turmoil on the inside, but they kept it in (as best as they could). i understand that people do this in all cultures, but i just noticed that it seemed to be the dominant way people around me were when i was a kid. 

in sharing something that he loves about his people, baldwin prompted me to think about this aspect of people and how they are in the world. a whole series of thoughts came tumbling forth: “in myself and among people i know, do we have more of a culture of keeping your face pretty neutral despite what’s going on within you, or are we open with our expressions? do i feel more comfortable in the one culture or the other? why do i feel that way? what in my history may have shaped me (and the people in my life) to be this way? did i grow up with one of these cultures more predominant in my life? and what was my experience of that (did i like it, did it feel good and safe or maybe constricting or maybe it’s triggering for me for some reason)? and what if things were different?”

(i hope you noticed the power of that last question...you can’t change something if you haven’t thought “what if things were different?”. this is portrayed in the cloud atlas movie in the story of the character Sonmi-451.)

one of the great things about learning what it’s like for other people is you discover ways of being in the world that you didn’t even realize could differ between cultures. (and here i mean small-c cultures, all the way down to the culture of a school sports team you played on, or the culture of your friends when you get together. some people refer to the culture in a workplace. these are all cultures as far as i’m concerned - they involve different common ways that people are among other people and the way they behave in these various settings, the things they do. this is also known as “practices” or “cultural practices”, which i would consider the things we do that differ in different cultures).

 over the years i’ve learned a lot of different ways that people can be in the world - ways i didn’t know were possible (because i hadn’t experienced them in my own life). for example, happy families. i sort of didn’t believe in happy families where people were warm and comfortable, where things weren’t tense when they were all together

i guess i could imagine it in the abstract, but i didn’t know how i could get it for myself. in my mind it was like “being rich”, rich where you don’t have to think about money and you can spend all the money you want. rich like the people in the movie “clueless”. sure i figured some people had that, but i had no idea how i could get that for myself. later i discovered that what i really wanted from clueless was the carefree and careless attitude, not having to worry. and there are many different paths to not worrying, “being absurdly rich” is thankfully not the only one (if it’s one at all).

ever since i could remember, my parents were telling me to tamper down my “naive” ideas. sure i may have wanted “all people to get along”, but “that’s not how the world really is.” and they said it with the grimace of the scarred. when enough adults around you tell you that x is the case and you don’t know any different yourself, you might start to believe it. especially if it keeps being borne true for the people you see around you. every adult i met seemed to be in an unhappy relationship, with strained relationships with children and a tension behind the eyes. i didn’t know then that our people were traumatized. all i knew was that things were really hard for all of them. i get tears just thinking about all that pain, even now.

there were so many things that i didn’t know i could expect for myself. for example, i remember being quite young (maybe 15) and when i considered the path i was on and thought of like “what might my adulthood look like for me?” all i could imagine was being some kind of corporate office worker lady with a husband that she didn’t love and kids who hated her. the prospect filled me with dread. i was 15 and my life looked so small. i thought i had so little control over determining the facts of my own life that i’d be trapped in this awful scenario despite the fact that i very much didn’t want it. thankfully i’ve learned since then that we don’t have to accept the outcomes that we’ve been told are inevitable for us.

perhaps you’ve never thought about how in different communities there are different customs as to whether some folks stand tall and others hunch over. does it feel different to walk tall and proud vs being hunched over & making yourself small? how would feels to be in a community of people who all walk tall or all hunch over, once a way of being is pointed out to us, there is no more possibility of accepting through ignorance a way of being that you’ve simply inherited from all the things that have happened to you in the world.

i visited my parents the other year and my dad made fun of me and my mom because we wiggle our toes idly if we’re sitting or lying around. how funny that neither my mom nor i can manage to keep our toes still, he said. he’s said this about my mom before and it never made any sense. why is it bad to move your toes around when you’re sitting around? this time i said to him “i move my toes around because i realized that it feels good. i like how it feels. in fact i like to shift lots of parts of my body pretty continuously because i realized that it feels better in my body when i do that.” he hadn’t considered it before and tried it out. i think he got into it!

i used to not move my toes around or even notice what my toes were doing, but at a certain point someone helped me become aware that there is this different way of being in the world: you can just start moving your toes when you’re sitting or lying down and see whether you like how it feels. so i tried it out and got really into it. now i do it unconsciously, just like my mom. but if it had never occurred to me that there was such a thing as these two different ways of being in the world, i would never know that i was missing out on such a great one: idly moving your toes around.

for this reason (among many others), i am interested in how things are for other people, in knowing more about how things are in different places for different people.