#does it still count since its still indigenous?

[cyanidesurpryse]

as a gay indigenous man, i have now declared myself the ceo of olrox and none of yall can stop me. sorry but it is what it is.

[trans-leek-cookie]

the thingw the orcs in dunmeshi is sth i skirt around bc like u said it is. not a great modern take on orcs. obv not the worst it could be and kui at least did engage w trying to write a more involved lore on them rather than just having this be the same “orcs are big uncivilized brutes” version 8000000 but that element is still there. and i do think “its not the worst” is hardly what i would want to set my highest expectations to jdhdgksgd

tumblrs being a bitch n not letting me put images in so I'll just paste the text from the other ask

Nodding. ty for the info on the ways halfling racism can be compared to irl examples in “the middle east” like that rly is such a close comparison i wonder if it was at all intentional… AND FR on the whole . wishing we knew what they called themselves bc the “halfling” “half foot” thing i rly cant help but think abt how it feels like irl examples of certain groups being denigrated to category slurs its like. LOL. dunmeshi makinh me feel party to fictional racism and microaggressions against my will...

Idk Abt skirting around bc I think it's smthn we should face head on, but at the same time I'm not in a place where I can really add onto the discussion wrt orcs as a white/East Asian person. IIRC ppl have said tolkiens orcs are black and/or central Asian (Mongolian I believe) coded, which is meaningful cause he's influenced so much of modern fantasy, and thats. Y'know. Not great. Also the orcs in dungeon Meshi are essentially an indigenous group from what I remember so that's also a whole mess. Again, my opinions arent very meaningful when it comes to this, but I feel like it's incredibly disappointing to see an author who's clearly capable of nuanced and interesting commentary on racism in the context of real life and fiction (even if it's not always great it's clear she's thinking about it in some depth) really just. Fall back on tropes. Bc for the other races - human is a wider category than usual, tall men aren't always the Everyman, elves are long lived but that doesn't make them wiser, and halflings are mature, worldly and resourceful, which I feel like does a lot to break free of typical fantasy pigeon holeing. But the orcs are just sorta... The Bad Guy but Not That Bad I guess? Theoretically it's a departure from the "super evil forever no exceptions" idea of the but it's still so far behind what needs to be done to make it less of a lazy, racist trope.

Yeah, again I'm not west Asian or Arab like I said, but between reading stuff ppl online write n talking to my Iraqi friend + rereading dungeon Meshi and really trying to analyze it, it kinda stood out to me. I will say I was a little unconfident posting about it bc it's 3 things (4 if you count the name note) but theyre still really notable at least to me. The hand/foot cutting is I feel the most explicit? Because that's such a fucked up stereotype it just stands out immediately. I don't necessarily know if the half foot/middle east connection was intentional, because I assume Japan/Asia in general has a different relationship with West Asia (since they are the "far east" in comparison, so "Middle East" wouldnt really make sense?), but it could be one of those things that colonialism managed to spread. I'm not very knowledgeable about that, but even if it wasn't intentional I think it's a very interesting parallel in how language can be used to categorize people as "normal/other". So i can't say if its intentional or not, but it's definitely an interesting lens to consider the story thru. Id also say I believe halflings are said to be native to a place that's east from where the story takes place, but not the eastern continent (which is p much easy Asia). I've seen some ppl take this to mean eastern Europe, and I don't think that's wrong, but I think u could also think of it as west Asia? Idk if we ever got much info on it in story, so I might be missing some details. (Honestly I'd personally HC that halflings are generally mixed Eastern European/West Asian- not to conflate the two, but rather Im imaging the majority of them are in a kinda blended culture).

[nochd]

I haven't said anything about the Gaza situation mainly because you should be listening to people who know more about it than I do. But it's becoming apparent that this is one of those issues where people who do have personal stakes in the matter are finding it difficult to know who they can trust.

So here's what I do know about Gaza, Israel, and Palestine. I'm not going to talk any more than I can help about what I don't know. And -- let me make this super clear -- people commenting on social media, including here, to make factual claims intended to draw me to their side and treat some other category of people as my enemies, does not count as a change in my state of knowledge.

The Israeli state right now is attempting to wipe the Palestinian population of Gaza off the map. This is called genocide.

On 7 October, Hamas publicly attacked civilian targets in a manner calculated to cause widespread fear and panic. This is called terrorism.

Nothing justifies either of these actions, not even each other. The killing of innocent people is never justified by their being of the same ethnicity or nationality as some other person who is guilty of an atrocity.

Even if an innocent person benefits in some fashion from atrocities committed by another person -- as one could argue that the citizenry of a colonizer state do -- that doesn't justify violence against them. At most they might reasonably be asked to contribute to some kind of reparations.

Jews and Palestinians can both reasonably be described as indigenous to the land.

In terms of the Israeli state's actions towards the Palestinian people, and the benefits it thereby accrues, it is to all practical intents and purposes a colonizer state.

If you think the previous point justifies terror attacks on Israeli civilians, and you're a white person living in the US or Australia or Canada or South Africa or Aotearoa... then boy oh boy do I have news for you.

Most Israelis have nowhere else to go. Israel might accept Jewish immigrants without requiring them to renounce their previous citizenship, but that's because so often that previous citizenship is revoked or cancelled or at least made non-viable by their former country.

Fascist groups in the West hate both Jews and Muslims and are happy to spread hateful misinformation about either under the guise of standing up against atrocities. They are smart enough, much as we might wish otherwise, to infiltrate leftist communities if we are not vigilant.

Violent attacks on Jewish communities around the world have gone up by over an order of magnitude since October.

Most Jews, including Israeli Jews, oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza right now.

I'm not comfortable with framing the issue in terms of whether the state of Israel "has the right to exist". Israeli people, like all people, have the right to exist and live in peace. States are artificial entities, not conscious beings with the capacity to flourish or suffer, and it makes little sense to regard them as having "rights".

States do, however, have duties and responsibilities. The primary responsibility of any state, the reason why we have such things as states at all, is to defend its people's right to live in peace.

For people to live in peace, their country has to be at peace, which means that the state's duty to defend its people includes the duty to make peace when possible. The state of Israel is grossly, chronically derelict in this side of its duty.

On 7 October Israel was about to sign a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia. Hamas's attack was timed to disrupt that treaty.

Hamas of all people knows how Israel habitually responds to terror attacks. They cannot have been expecting any response much different from the one they got. From this I am forced to conclude that Hamas prefers a genocidal war against their own people to a peace in which Israel is still there.

Hamas denies the Holocaust and promotes the fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". A Western group who did that would be uncontroversially described as neo-Nazis.

The Houthis in Yemen, who are opposing shipments of aid to Israel, have slogans including "death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews". Again, any Western group who did that would be considered neo-Nazis.

Of the people who use the slogan "from the river to the sea", the percentage who use it to invoke a call for genocide against Israelis is neither 100% nor 0%.

There is a certain word beginning with Z which you'll notice I haven't used in this post. This is because it is a dangerously ambiguous word. Some people use it in the legitimate, specific political sense of "Israeli nationalism". Others use it to mean "any restraint or moderation in considering how to respond to Israel's actions". Still others use it to mean "an absence of antisemitism".

The US is an ally and supporter of Israel. I do not know the political reasons why. Wrapping those unknown reasons up in a bundle and labelling it with the aforementioned Z-word adds nothing to my understanding.

Some component of the US's support for Israel comes not from Jewish people or their allies but from Evangelical Christians concerned with Israel chiefly as a site of apocalyptic prophecy. I do not know what weighting this component has in the total mix of the US's politics.

Some people argue for a one-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians as equal citizens. Some people argue for a two-state solution where each group has its own government and laws. For each, I have seen the claim that it is the only possible solution made with great confidence by people who know more about the situation than I do. I do not know which side is correct.

I do know that any proposal where one group just isn't there any more is a non-solution.

[readingrobin]

I'm still trying to get the hang of the whole "posting content" thing, but I think providing a reading wrap-up every month will allow me a little more to work with. January was a fairly standard reading month. I was able to get through ten books, though I added quite a few to my TBR. Kind of had a mini heart attack when I realized that, according to my Storygraph, I have about 1,731 titles on there. Well, at least I know I'll never run short of reading material.

Total Books Read: 10

Total Pages Read: 3,689

Books Read:

The Devil Aspect by Craig Russell - (Review) (3.5/5)

Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster by Jonathan Auxier - All I have to say is that the best kind of children's fiction tends to be the ones that expertly balance the harsh cruelties of life, especially during the Victorian era, with an unshakable sense of hope and a lot of heart. Sweep is one of those books that doesn't shy away from the reality and history of children in peril, but there is a warmness in its pages that comes from feeling and seeing the love and protection of dear ones long since passed. Definitely a bit of a tearjerker, but in a good way. (4/5)

The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu - (Review) (4/5)

Property of the Rebel Librarian by Allison Varnes - Looking at the world around us, this book couldn't be more relevant, as book bans are sweeping across schools and kids are left without a choice in what they want to read. Though it presents a somewhat simplistic scenario of censorship gone wild, it's definitely meant as an accessible way for young readers to be introduced to the process of book banning and what can be done to make your voice heard. (4/5)

Season of the Bruja Vol. 1 by Aaron Duran and Sara Soler - A really beautiful graphic novel that highlights the conflict of surviving indigenous traditions vs. religious colonialism. Stories that point out the hypocrisy and brutality of the Catholic church scratch such a good itch for me. The world is a little shaky though, not much is exactly explained and you almost need some prior knowledge of Mexican mythology going in, but it's worth checking out. (3/5)

A Winter's Promise by Christelle Dabos - (Review) (4/5)

Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison - (Review) (4/5)

The Ivory Key by Akshaya Raman - Though it takes a while to get going, The Ivory Key does have a great readability to it as the action finally kicks in about maybe halfway through. Up until then, the book spends a great deal laying the foundation of this world: tensions between cities, the role and history of magic in this society, the dynamics of the main characters. I will say, being introduced to at least seven different important characters in the span of 30 pages is a tad overwhelming at first, but it levels out the more you keep reading. While I did enjoy it, there was nothing particularly exemplary about the story that wowed me. The Indian-inspired setting and mythology makes it stand out, but everything else used the same tropes, beats, and twists that I've seen time and time over with little to add to them. I liked it enough to want to read the second book coming out later this year, but probably not enough to keep it on my personal shelf. (3/5)

Black Panther: The Young Prince by Ronald L. Smith - Read this one in a day and was fairly satisfied with it. It'll definitely appeal to middle grade readers looking for Marvel tie-in stories, as it has a quick pace and a good amount of action and mystery. For me, I don't think I enjoyed it enough to continue with the sequel, but it was nice to see a younger T'Challa and M'Baku out of their element away from Wakanda and how dynamic changed over the course of the book. (3/5)

Scavenge the Stars by Tara Sim - For a book inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo, the story itself was incredibly simple and told fairly straight-forwardly, but I think that works in its favor. I'm at the point where I'm starting to tire of long-winded society dramas so I appreciated it for having a bit of focus. Everyone's motivation is clear, with a natural twist or two popping up along the way, plus a great amount of casual queerness. Though the world-building wasn't exactly intricate, there is a good sense of aesthetic and personality in the setting of Moray from its high status venues to the seedy gambling dens. I'm interested to see where the story goes in the sequel! (3.5/5)

Average Rating: (3.6/5)

[albertonykus]

Doraemon Movie Review: Nobita and the Haunts of Evil (1982) and New Nobita's Great Demon (2014)

What is Doraemon? The title character of the Doraemon manga and anime is a blue robotic cat from the 22nd Century who keeps an array of high-tech gadgets in a portable pocket dimension on his belly, and has traveled from the future to improve the fortunes of a hapless schoolboy named Nobita. Although relatively obscure in the English-speaking world, Doraemon is a Mickey-Mouse-level cultural icon in East Asia (and some other regions, too). The Doraemon franchise was a big part of my childhood, and there are still elements of it that I enjoy now.

Doraemon has released theatrical films almost annually since 1980, most of which involve Nobita and his friends (kind Shizuka, brash Gian, and crafty Suneo) getting swept into adventures thanks to Doraemon's gadgets. Despite being of potentially broad appeal to fans of science fiction and animated films, there are very few English reviews of the Doraemon movies, so I'm embarking on a project to write about all the films that have come out so far. Good luck to me…

Movie premise: Nobita and his friends explore Central Africa and discover a hidden civilization.

My spoiler-free take: The original is a very solid adventure film... that I cannot honestly recommend, due to the way it caricatures Indigenous Africans.

Fortunately, the biggest problems in the original are rectified in the 2014 remake, which also retains the strongest points of its predecessor. I think it’s a movie that not only gives a good sense of what to expect from Doraemon films, but is also fairly enjoyable on its own.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT

Review: This is a movie that establishes (or at least solidifies) many recurring elements of future Doraemon films. The main characters go on an adventure in an exotic setting, using Doraemon’s gadgets to live and travel comfortably. They come across an isolated society that is being menaced in some way, and team up with newfound allies to overcome the threat. However, even with the reuse of this formula and overlapping themes in later films (this won’t be the last movie that involves a dog civilization, for one), I think Nobita and the Haunts of Evil does a good job at maintaining its own identity. The creative way in which Shizuka saves the day stands out in particular, and to my knowledge remains unreplicated by any of the more recent films. Oh, and Gian gets a fair amount of character focus, too.

Shizuka-saves-the-day count (cumulative): 2

This movie and its remake both have very ominous-sounding English titles. Based on my limited understanding of Japanese, “Haunts of Evil” is not exactly an inaccurate translation, but in the context of the story, the intended meaning seems closer to “unexplored realm”. (The Doraemon movie where they actually encounter demons comes later...) That being said, this probably is one of the darkest Doraemon films. There’s more than one implied villain death, attempted assassination, actual assassination, a crocodile getting impaled through the head, and multiple instances in which one or more of the main characters almost certainly would have died without sheer luck or third-party intervention. It certainly makes for an exciting adventure narrative, if nothing else.

For fellow natural history enthusiasts, it’s interesting that this film includes cameo appearances from some obscure African wildlife.

(Note that the sapient dogs use aardvarks as their equivalent of horses.)

If I were grading based solely on the story, this would be at least a four-star Doraemon movie. However, one element in this film prevents me from even recommending it at all. There is a scene that features Indigenous African people, who are depicted with, shall we say... highly stereotyped character designs. While acknowledging that a star-based scoring system cannot fully encapsulate issues like this, the least I can do is shave off a star and add a content warning.

Star rating: ★★★☆☆ + content warning

Luckily, one does not need to watch the original to get a taste of the story, because this movie has a remake...

Review: First things first: although I cannot speak to their cultural representation, the character designs of the Indigenous Africans in this remake are substantially improved, as one should expect from a movie made in the 2010s.

On the whole, I think this is a competent remake that keeps most of what made the original film good. The biggest narrative edits mainly amount to giving some of the movie-exclusive characters more screentime and character focus, which for most part I don’t feel strongly about, but they don’t harm the movie in any notable way. I have few qualms about awarding the four stars I was going to give the original to this version.

(... Why is Shizuka the only main character who is unarmed and looks scared on the movie poster though? That doesn’t reflect her actual role in the story at all.)

And for those who liked the African wildlife cameos in the original, this one adds even more!

Star rating: ★★★★☆

Original or remake? Obviously, the remake wins based on its depiction of the Indigenous Africans alone. Even without considering that though, I have little to complain about the remake.

[writingwithcolor]

I'm writing an AU of a movie that takes place in the 1880s USA, where a travelling white character and a Jewish character are waylaid by Native Americans, who they befriend. Probably because it was written by and about PoC (Jews) the scene actually avoids the stuff on your Native American Masterpost, but I'd still like to do better than a movie made in the 1980's, and I feel weird cutting them from the plot entirely. I have a Jewish woman reading it for that, but are there any things you (1/1)

2/2 1880s western movie ask--are there things you'd LIKE to see in a movie where a white man and a Jewish man run into Native Americans in the 1880s? I do plan to base them on a real tribe (Ute, probably) and have proper housing/clothes and so forth, but right now I'm just trying to avoid or subvert awful cowboy movie tropes. Any ideas?

White and Jewish Men, Native American interactions in 1880s

I am vaguely concerned with how you only cite one of our posts about Native Americans, that was not written by a Native person, and do not cite any of the posts relating to this time period, or any posts relating to representation in media. 

Sidenote: if you want us to give accurate reflections of the media you’re discussing, please tell us the NAME. I cannot go look up this movie based off this description to give you an idea of what my issues are with this scene, and must instead trust that the representation is good based off your judgement. I cannot make my own judgement. This is a problem. Especially since your whole question boils down to “this scene is good but not great and I want it to be great. How can I do that?”

Your baseline for “good” could very well be my baseline for “terrible hack job”. I can’t give you the proper education required for you to be able to accurately evaluate the media you’re watching for racist stereotypes if you don’t tell me what you’re even working with.

When you’re writing fanfic where the media is directly relevant to the question, please tell us the name of the media. We will not judge your tastes. We need this information in order to properly help you.

Moving on.

I bring up my concern for you citing that one—exceptionally old—post because it is lacking in many of the tropes that don’t exist in the media critique field but exist in the real world. This is an issue I have run into countless times on WWC (hence further concern you did not cite any other posts) and have spoken about at length. 

People look at the media critique world exclusively, assume it is a complete evaluation of how Native Americans are seen in society, and as a result end up ignoring some really toxic stereotypes and then come to the inbox with “these characters aren’t abc trope, so they’re fine, but I want to rubber stamp them anyway. Anything wrong here?”. The answer is pretty much always yes. 

Issue one: “Waylaid” by Native Americans

This wording is extremely loaded for one reason: Native American people are seen as tricksters, liars, and predators. This is the #1 trope that shows up in the real world that does not show up in media critique. It’s also the trope I have talked about the most when it comes to media representation, so you not knowing the trope is a sign you haven’t read the entirety of the Native tag—which is in the FAQ as something we would really prefer you did before coming at us to answer questions. It avoids us having to re-explain ourselves.

Now, hostility is honestly to be expected for the time period the movie is set in. This is in the beginnings (or ramping up) of residential schools in America* and Canada, we have generations upon generations of stolen or killed children, reserves being allocated perhaps hundreds of miles from sacred sites, and various wars with Plains and Southwest peoples are in full force (Wounded Knee would have happened in 1890, in December, and the Dakoa’s mass execution would have been in 1862. Those are just the big-name wars. There absolutely were others). 

*America covers up its residential schools abuse extremely thoroughly, so if you try to research them in the American context you will come up empty. Please research Canada’s schools and apply the same abuse to America, as Canada has had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission about residential schools and therefore is more (but not completely) transparent about the abuse that happened. Please note that America’s history with residential schools is longer than Canada’s history. There is an extremely large trigger warning for mass child death when you do this research.

But just because the hostility is expected does not mean that this hostility would be treated well in the movie. Especially when you consider the sheer amount of tension between any Native actors and white actors, for how Sacheen Littlefeather had just been nearly beaten up by white actors at the 1973 Academy Awards for mentioning Wounded Knee, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act had only been passed two years prior in 1978. 

These Native actors would not have had the ability to truly consent to how they were shown, and this power dynamic has to be in your mind when you watch this scene over. I don’t care that the writers were from a discriminated-against background. This does not always result in being respectful, and I’ve also spoken about this power imbalance at length (primarily in the cowboy tag).

Documentaries and history specials made in the 2010s (with some degree of academic muster) will still fall into wording that harkens Indigenous people to wolves and settlers as frightened prey animals getting picked off by the mean animalistic Natives. This is not neutral, or good. This is perpetuating the myth that the settlers were helpless, just doing their own thing completely unobtrusively, and then the evil territorial Native Americans didn’t want to share.

To paraphrase Batman: if I had a week I couldn’t explain all the reasons that’s wrong.

How were these characters waylaid by the Native population? Because that answer—which I cannot get because you did not name the media—will determine how good the framing is. But based on the time period this movie was made alone, I do not trust it was done respectfully.

Issue 2: “Befriending”

I mentioned this was in an intense period of residential schools and land wars all in that area. The Ute themselves had just been massacred by Mormons in the Grass Valley Massacre in 1865, with ten men and an unknown number of women and children killed thanks to a case of assumed association with a war chief (Antonga Black Hawk) currently at war with Utah. The Paiute had been massacred in 1866. Over 100 Timpanogo men had been killed, with an unknown number of women and children enslaved by Brigham Young in Salt Lake City in 1850, with many of the enslaved people dying in captivity (those numbers were not tracked, but I would assume at least two hundred were enslaved— that’s simply assuming one woman/wife and one child for every man, and the numbers could have very well been higher if any war-widows and their children were in the group, not to mention families with multiple children). This is after an unknown group of Indigenous people had been killed by Governor Brigham Young the year prior, to “permanently stop cattle theft” from settlers. 

The number of Native Americans killed in Utah in the 1800s—just the number of dead counted (since women and children weren’t counted)—in massacres not tied to war (because there was at least one war) is over 130. The actual number of random murders is much higher; between the uncounted deaths and how the Governor had issued orders to “deal with” the problem of cattle theft permanently. I doubt you would have been tried or convicted if you murdered Indigenous peoples on “your” land. This is why it’s called state sanctioned genocide.

This is not counting the Black Hawk War in Utah (1865-1872), which the Ute were absolutely a part of (the wiki articles I read were contradictory if Antonga Black Hawk was Ute or Timpanogo, but the Ute were part of it). The first official massacre tied to the war—the Bear River Massacre, ordered by the US Military—places the death count of just that singular massacre at over five hundred Shoshone, including elders, women, and children. It would not be unreasonable to assume that the number of Indigenous people killed in Utah from 1850, onward, is over a thousand, perhaps two or three.

Pardon me for not reading beyond that point to list more massacres and simply ballparking a number; the source will be linked for you to get an accurate number of dead.

So how did they befriend the Native population? Let alone see them as fully human considering the racism of the time period? Natives were absolutely not seen as fully human so long as they were tied to their culture, and assimilation equalling some sliver of respect was already a stick being waved around as a threat. This lack of humanity continues to the present day.

I’m not saying friendship is impossible. I am saying the sheer levels of mistrust that would exist between random wandering groups of white/pale men and Indigenous communities wouldn’t exactly make that friendship easy. Having the scene end be a genuine friendship feels ignorant and hollow and flattening of ongoing genocide, because settlers lied about their intentions and then lined you up for slauther (that’s how the Timpanogo were killed and enslaved).

Utah had already done most of its mass killing by this point. The era of trusting them was over. There was an active open hunting season, and the acceptable targets were the Indigenous populations of Utah.

(sources for the numbers: 

List of Indian Massacres in North America Black Hawk War (1865-1872))

Issue 3: “Proper housing/clothes and so forth”

Do you mean Western style settlements and jeans? If yes, congratulations you have written a reservation which means the land-ripped-away wounds are going to be fresh, painful, and sore.

You do not codify what you mean by “proper”, and proper is another one of those deeply loaded colonial words that can mean “like a white man” or “appropriate for their tribe.” For the time period, it would be the former. Without specifying which direction you’re going for, I have no idea what you’re imagining. And without the name of the media, I don’t know what the basis of this is.

The reservation history of this time period seems to maybe have some wiggle room; there were two reservations allocated for the Ute at this time, one made in 1861 and another made in 1882 (they were combined into the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation in 1886). This is all at the surface level of a google and wikipedia search, so I have no idea how many lived in the bush and how many lived on the reserve. 

There were certainly land defenders trying to tell Utah the land did not belong to them, so holdouts that avoided getting rounded up were certainly possible. But these holdouts would be far, far more hostile to anyone non-Native.

The Ute seemed to be some degree of lucky in that the reserve is on some of their ancestral territory, but any loss of land that large is going to leave huge scars. 

It should be noted that reserves would mean the traditional clothing and housing would likely be forbidden, because assimilation logic was in full force and absolutely vicious at this time. 

It’s a large reserve, so the possibility exists they could have accidentally ended up within the borders of it. I’m not sure how hostile the state government was for rounding up all the Ute, so I don’t know if there would have been pockets of them hiding out. In present day, half of the Ute tribe lives on the reserve, but this wasn’t necessarily true historically—it could have been a much higher percentage in either direction.

It’s up to you if you want to make them be reservation-bound or not. Regardless, the above mentioned genocide would have been pretty fresh, the land theft in negotiations or already having happened, and generally, the Ute would be well on their way to every assimilation attempt made from either residential schools, missionaries, and/or the forced settlement and pre-fab homes.

To Answer Your Question

I don’t want another flattened, sanitized portrayal of genocide.

Look at the number of dead above, the amount of land lost above, the amount of executive orders above. And try to tell me that these people would be anything less than completely and totally devastated. Beyond traumatized. Beyond broken hearted. Absolutely grief stricken with almost no soul left.

Their religion would have been illegal. Their children would have been stolen. Their land was taken away. A saying about post-apocalyptic fiction is how settler-based it is, because Indigenous people have already lived through their own apocalypse.

It would have all just happened at the time period this story is set in. All of the grief you feel now at the environment changing so drastically that you aren’t sure how you’ll survive? Take that, magnify it by an exponential amount because it happened, and you have the mindset of these Native characters.

This is not a topic to tread lightly. This is not a topic to read one masterpost and treat it as a golden rule when there is too much history buried in unmarked, overfull graves of school grounds and cities and battlefields. I doubt the movie you’re using is good representation if it doesn’t even hint at the amount of trauma these Native characters would have been through in thirty years.

A single generation, and the life that they had spent millennia living was gone. Despite massive losses of life trying to fight to preserve their culture and land.

Learn some history. That’s all I can tell you. Learn it, process it, and look outside of checklists. Look outside of media. 

And let us have our grief.

~ Mod Lesya

On Question Framing

Please allow me the opportunity to comment on “are there things you'd LIKE to see in a movie where a white man and a Jewish man run into Native Americans in the 1880s?” That strikes me as the same type of question as asking what color food I’d like for lunch. I don’t see how the cultural backgrounds of characters I have literally no other information about is supposed to make me want anything in particular about them. I don’t know anything about their personalities or if they have anything in common.

Compare the following questions:

“Are there things you’d like to see in a movie where two American women, one from a Nordic background and one Jewish, are interacting?” I struggle to see how our backgrounds are going to yield any further inspiration. It certainly doesn’t tell you that we’re both queer and cling to each other’s support in a scary world; it doesn’t tell you that we uplift each other through mental illness; it doesn’t go into our 30 years of endless bizarre inside jokes related to everything from mustelids to bad subtitles.

Because: “white”, “Jewish”, and “Native American” aren’t personality words. You can ask me what kind of interaction I’d like to see from a high-strung overachieving woman and a happy-go-lucky Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and I’ll tell you I’d want fluffy f/f romance. Someone else might want conflict ultimately resolving in friendship. A third person might want them slowly getting on each other’s nerves more and more until one becomes a supervillain and the other must thwart her. But the same question about a cultural demographic? That told me nothing about the people involved.

Also, the first time I meet a new person from a very different culture, it might take weeks before discussion of our specific cultural differences comes up. As a consequence, my first deep conversations with a Costa Rican American gentile friend were not about Costa Rica or my Jewishness but about things we had in common: classical music and coping with breakups--which are obviously conversations I could have had if we were both Jewish, both Costa Rican gentiles, or both something else. So in other words, I’m having trouble seeing how knowing so little about these characters is supposed to give me something to want to see on the page.

Thank you for understanding.

(And yes, I agree with Lesya, what’s with this trend of people trying to explain their fandom in a roundabout way instead of mentioning it by name? It makes it harder to give meaningful help….)

--Shira

[parlerenfleurs]

It feels like we are living through the end. I saw a video about the scientists who tried raising awareness in front of a bank. One started crying talking about the future and his son. Another shouted that they'd tried everything.

The movie Don't look up plays on loop in my head.

Climate is a constant low hum at the back of my mind. It has been so since my childhood, living in one of the most gorgeous places on Earth, but still counting every drop of rain, looking at new buildings and thinking, this destroyed a piece of land. And yet people need a place to live. But why does it have to be like this?

The low hum isn't so low anymore. I feel weak with disbelief, weak with the draining of my optimism. Everything any of us does is too little, too late - those in power don't care. We've put them in power. We created this system. We are stuck in it, or we believe we are, and it amounts to the same thing. People care about immigration, their retirement, the price of fuel, their next holiday. How could they not? The system makes these things important, doesn't it. We can't just care about good food, helping friends, creating beautiful things, resolving issues. The issues we have are all insane.

We grab at every piece of comfort and happiness we can, because if it the end, might as well enjoy things while they last, right? I'm sitting there, drawing funny characters for entertainment. One of my friends and colleagues cannot bear it anymore, she feels how meaningless it is, that we are destroying the earth and she's drawing cartoons.

A childhood dream, turned absurd.

I feel weak with disbelief. My country elects presidents who don't care about the climate crisis. After all of this, still, it's not the priority of most people, wether we saw the branch on which we are sitting or not. They just want a cushion that's a little less uncomfy while we wait for the saw to saw through.

It feels like the end, already, because it has been decades of scientists and activists blowing the whistle and still we march on. An insane species. Or rather an insane society, that does its best to silence and assimilate indigenous knowledge and culture like a real-life agent Smith.

How did it come to this? How did it come to this?

[naladot]

Thoughts on the linguistics of A:TLA

Part 1/?

The worldbuilding in Avatar: The Last Airbender is extraordinary. The enduring fandom proves that. However, there is one element of the worldbuilding that’s always irked me a little, and that’s how they depict language. While I understand that certain things are necessary for a half-hour cartoon marketed to kids, and that even films committed to realism are never totally successful in showing the creative and exciting messiness of human languages, I still wish that A:TLA factored in real-world linguistic knowledge a little bit more. But that’s where fandom comes in, right? 

These musings are things I’ve thought about for my own fic writing, and I thought I’d share in case anyone else finds them interesting. I will say that I know a little about a lot of things related to linguistics, but no one person’s knowledge is exhaustive, so I welcome input and commentary! I’ll be posting a number of these musings, though I don’t know how many exactly yet.

Why does everyone in A:TLA speak the same language?

The short answer, again, is because it’s a half-hour kids’ cartoon that was distributed by a US television corporation. The long answer is… you’d have to bend your mind into some complex pretzels to believe that everyone in the A:TLA universe actually speaks the same language.

In the real world, multilingual societies are the norm, and monolingual the exception. Many of you reading this post probably come from a place where this is a “duh” statement, but in heavily monolingual areas/communities, it’s often surprising! Regarding multilingual societies: I once asked some friends from Kenya how many languages they know, and waited while they counted out multiple languages and explained the differing degrees of comprehension for each and the situations where they used them. Over a thousand languages were spoken in North and South America before European colonization. Papua New Guinea is famous for over 800 known languages. As for an even smaller region, the government of Taiwan recognizes 16 different indigenous people groups, each with its own languages. And actually, even supposedly “monolingual” societies like the US continue to see regional variation in accents (the US is, of course, not really monolingual, even if some people’s agenda is to pretend that it is).

Diversity is an expected feature of human languages. To say that the world of A:TLA is somehow monolingual is incoherent when we are shown cultural differences on every level except linguistic throughout the show. We occasionally get nods to linguistic change, like Aang’s great “Hotman” scene in season 3, but otherwise all the characters seem to speak and read the same language. I think a realistic version of A:TLA would require significant linguistic diversity, especially since the way societies are depicted across the show would give rise to linguistic differences.

My biggest quibble: Chinese characters as the writing system for everyone

Linguists typically divide spoken language and written language: you can be a complete master of spoken language without ever being able to read and write. From a linguist’s perspective, the spoken form of a language is the “real” language. In this sense, cultures that never develop writing are NOT considered to have more “primitive” or “simple” language than those that do. But people in literate cultures nevertheless tend to express a tight link between a language and its written form, and writing systems bear some vestiges of that link. While writing systems may spread (Chinese characters, Latin script, Arabic script), the adoption of a writing system shows some sort of interaction between cultures. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Throughout the show, Chinese characters (also known as Han characters, or Kanji in the Japanese context, Hanja in the Korean context, etc.) are depicted as the only writing system. Most of the characters are shown to be literate. Katara, for example, is shown reading inscriptions on multiple buildings/monuments (The Cave of Two Lovers, The Serpent’s Pass, etc.) as well as writing a letter for Toph. The show has (deservedly) been praised for taking the time to accurately use Chinese characters, instead of gibberish, like the movie we pretend doesn’t exist. Brkye obviously put time and care into depictions of writing and the show benefited greatly from the hard work of the consultant they worked with, so my issue is not with that at all.

My quibble is that writing systems develop within a context, and there is no reason that all of the societies in A:TLA should be using a logographic writing system (or at least not the SAME one). Elementary schoolers learning to read and write in Chinese must devote a good amount of time to the process. Even where simplified characters were introduced, children still spend a decent chunk of their schooling memorizing characters. (Of course, every language has elements which are challenging for schoolchildren, but I will focus on this writing system for now.)  As someone who learned Chinese as an adult, I can also attest that it is possible to read without being able to write—and I have many technological resources for checking definitions and radicals and so on which are not available to the A:TLA characters.

That said, it’s of course much more difficult for an adult to find the time to develop literacy in Chinese than it is for a child. But to the point, do the cultures in A:TLA show the necessary conditions for the main cast to learn to read and write in this writing system? I think it makes the most sense for the standardized version of this writing system to have spread from Ba Sing Se outward. I think this partly because the Earth Kingdom draws the most cultural inspiration from China on several levels, so it makes sense that a similar standardized writing system would develop there. I also think this makes sense because we’re directly shown that Ba Sing Se is a center of government, education (Ba Sing Se University), and literary culture (Sokka’s stint in the poetry club) in a way that isn’t directly shown in other A:TLA locations. For this reason, I will refer to Chinese/Han characters as “Ba Sing Se logographs” for the remainder of this post.

In particular, the depiction of the Southern Water Tribe doesn’t really suggest that Katara and Sokka should develop literacy in this particular writing system, i.e. Ba Sing Se logographs. At the beginning of the show, we are introduced to a culturally and geographically isolated SWT. All the men older than Sokka have left to fight in the war, and the people that remain are (perhaps unrealistically) few in number. There is no indication that anyone in the SWT is corresponding with anyone outside of it, or that the Fire Nation is attacking them on their own land anymore. In addition, Katara and Sokka are shown to take part in duties such as fishing/hunting as their role within their tribe has become increasingly important due to the absence of all the adult men.

So at what point are they finding the time to sit down and practice writing hundreds of Ba Sing Se logographs? Where are they getting reading materials to be introduced to a literary register of communication? Maybe there was a store of old SWT texts written in Ba Sing Se logographs that they use for their studies (likely from before the earliest Fire Nation raids) but by the time Sokka and Katara are learning to read and write, those are outdated. So let’s say that somehow, Gran-Gran was ordering new scrolls of epics and poetry from the occasional trade ship—does she order a dictionary scroll set as well? If you come across a character that no one in your tribe has ever read before, you can’t sound it out because logographic writing systems don’t have a direct correspondence to pronunciation. You might be able to guess the meaning or pronunciation, but if the text doesn’t provide any clues or it’s a word no one else has heard before, guessing isn’t going to do much good. In that case, young Katara and Sokka are forced to either skip the unknown word, make it up, or wait for the next rare ship and hope that the sailors have a habit of reading.

I think it’s realistic that they might be literate in a limited set of Ba Sing Se logographs which are deemed relevant to the reading material the SWT people have on hand and might use in potential trade (the show doesn’t actually suggest that anyone is trading with the SWT, but let’s say that this happens, as they had to be getting news of the war somehow). But then I would suggest that, if you want to imagine the SWT as a literate society, the SWT should also have an independent script, maybe an “alphabetic” type of script (though it wouldn’t have to be—it could even be another logographic system). Perhaps this is shared with the Northern Water Tribe; perhaps it developed independently of whatever is used in the North. What they write would be relevant and useful to them. They can journal, write letters, write inscriptions on their homes and pottery, label their clothes, keep records of conflicts within the tribe, read religious texts, map out genealogies, write down their own epics, graffiti on the walls of the watchtowers Sokka tries to build, and so on. 

If they do not have an independently developed SWT script, they are leveraging a writing system (Ba Sing Se logographs) in which new words cannot be comprehended or used. Due to their isolation, their reading material is likely to be old and infrequently updated, thus diverging from whatever is going on in the other nations. And if the SWT invents new words, they have to decide on a correspondence with a character set—which won’t be used by anyone else in the world because they aren’t really interacting with anyone else in the world at this point. So even if the SWT were using Ba Sing Se logographs as their only writing system, their isolation would naturally result in a new and regionally/culturally specific version of that writing system. And this would be the case even before the war, since they are still geographically isolated to some degree. No matter what way we set it up, the SWT in particular should diverge linguistically from other regions in the A:TLA world.

Also, it’s only after Katara and Sokka leave with Aang that they would be exposed to or have reasons to utilize many genres of writing that aren’t relevant to the SWT context. For this reason, I think it is also more poignant that the SWT has its own script, to emphasize those things which are distinctly SWT genres of writing. (Plus, the idea of Sokka and Katara writing notes that no one else can understand has so much potential!)

This whole thought process presupposed that the SWT was speaking more or less the same language as the rest of the world, though I don’t think that would be the case (as shown above). Add in a spoken language difference, and you see even more differences in how those Ba Sing Se logographs are actually used!

More thoughts on A:TLA linguistics to come.

[richincolor]

Today is Rich in Color’s eighth anniversary! Can you believe it?

We’ve read so many fantastic books over the years, so our bloggers compiled a list of eight books that we wanted to recommend to our followers. These books are ones that we love and that have stuck with us through the years. How many of them have you read?

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

In an unforgettable new novel from award-winning authors Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, two teens—one black, one white—grapple with the repercussions of a single violent act that leaves their school, their community, and, ultimately, the country bitterly divided by racial tension.

A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galuzzi, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement?

But there were witnesses: Quinn Collins—a varsity basketball player and Rashad’s classmate who has been raised by Paul since his own father died in Afghanistan—and a video camera. Soon the beating is all over the news and Paul is getting threatened with accusations of prejudice and racial brutality. Quinn refuses to believe that the man who has basically been his savior could possibly be guilty. But then Rashad is absent. And absent again. And again. And the basketball team—half of whom are Rashad’s best friends—start to take sides. As does the school. And the town. Simmering tensions threaten to explode as Rashad and Quinn are forced to face decisions and consequences they had never considered before.

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline Dancing Cat Books

In a futuristic world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America’s Indigenous people, and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. But getting the marrow, and dreams, means death for the unwilling donors. Driven to flight, a fifteen-year-old and his companions struggle for survival, attempt to reunite with loved ones and take refuge from the “recruiters” who seek them out to bring them to the marrow-stealing “factories.”

Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore Feiwel & Friends

Love grows such strange things.

For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, the lush estate gardens that enchant guests from around the world. They’ve also hidden a tragic legacy: if they fall in love too deeply, their lovers vanish. But then, after generations of vanishings, a strange boy appears in the gardens.

The boy is a mystery to Estrella, the Nomeolvides girl who finds him, and to her family, but he’s even more a mystery to himself; he knows nothing more about who he is or where he came from than his first name. As Estrella tries to help Fel piece together his unknown past, La Pradera leads them to secrets as dangerous as they are magical in this stunning exploration of love, loss, and family.

Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert Disney-Hyperion

Danny Cheng has always known his parents have secrets. But when he discovers a taped-up box in his father’s closet filled with old letters and a file on a powerful Silicon Valley family, he realizes there’s much more to his family’s past than he ever imagined.

Danny has been an artist for as long as he can remember and it seems his path is set, with a scholarship to RISD and his family’s blessing to pursue the career he’s always dreamed of. Still, contemplating a future without his best friend, Harry Wong, by his side makes Danny feel a panic he can barely put into words. Harry and Danny’s lives are deeply intertwined and as they approach the one-year anniversary of a tragedy that shook their friend group to its core, Danny can’t stop asking himself if Harry is truly in love with his girlfriend, Regina Chan.

When Danny digs deeper into his parents’ past, he uncovers a secret that disturbs the foundations of his family history and the carefully constructed facade his parents have maintained begins to crumble. With everything he loves in danger of being stripped away, Danny must face the ghosts of the past in order to build a future that belongs to him.

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan Little, Brown Brooks for Young Readers

Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.

Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.

Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.

Pride by Ibi Zoboi Balzer + Bray

Zuri Benitez has pride. Brooklyn pride, family pride, and pride in her Afro-Latino roots. But pride might not be enough to save her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood from becoming unrecognizable.

When the wealthy Darcy family moves in across the street, Zuri wants nothing to do with their two teenage sons, even as her older sister, Janae, starts to fall for the charming Ainsley. She especially can’t stand the judgmental and arrogant Darius. Yet as Zuri and Darius are forced to find common ground, their initial dislike shifts into an unexpected understanding.

But with four wild sisters pulling her in different directions, cute boy Warren vying for her attention, and college applications hovering on the horizon, Zuri fights to find her place in Bushwick’s changing landscape, or lose it all.

The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1) by Roshani Chokshi Wednesday Books

Paris, 1889: The world is on the cusp of industry and power, and the Exposition Universelle has breathed new life into the streets and dredged up ancient secrets. In this city, no one keeps tabs on secrets better than treasure-hunter and wealthy hotelier, Séverin Montagnet-Alarie. But when the all-powerful society, the Order of Babel, seeks him out for help, Séverin is offered a treasure that he never imagined: his true inheritance.

To find the ancient artifact the Order seeks, Séverin will need help from a band of experts: An engineer with a debt to pay. A historian who can’t yet go home. A dancer with a sinister past. And a brother in all but blood, who might care too much.

Together, they’ll have to use their wits and knowledge to hunt the artifact through the dark and glittering heart of Paris. What they find might change the world, but only if they can stay alive.

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender HarperCollins

From Stonewall and Lambda Award–winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time.

Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after.

When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn’t count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi–love triangle….

But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself.

[excelsi-or]

your type (pt. 7)

Hellooooo~ I’m in a writing mood lately and have been paying more attention to this story again. :) so you’ll get a few more parts this month. 

BIPOC rec: Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer; a beautiful book about botany and its influence on Indigenous people and how we can relate their teachings to climate justice. My favourite quote: “All flourishing is mutual.”

I’m also going to reblog this post with a bunch of links to support Daunte Wright as well as the protests in the U.S.

w.c. 1.4k (this one’s a bit shorter, but the next part is a LONG one. Like the longest post I’ve ever done across all my stories. I don’t want to split it up. So be prepared and enjoy :))

pairing: jihoon x OC/reader

pt. 1; pt. 2; pt. 3; pt. 4; pt. 5; pt. 6

Like every day for the last month, Jihoon is waiting for her in the hallway outside her lab. She closes the door behind her and notices the paper bag in his hand.

“I made us lunch.”

She blinks. “You made us… lunch?”

“Yeah.”

She ducks into the student office to grab her water bottle. When she reemerges, Jihoon motions with his head for her to walk with him.

“We need to talk.”

She lifts an eyebrow. “What about?”

“Just have to lay my cards on the table.”

Jihoon had gone over what he was going to say with Seungcheol, Mingyu, and Soonyoung the night before.

“It doesn’t need to be a big fancy speech,” Seungcheol said. “Just say how you feel.”

“I don’t…” He couldn’t exactly argue that he felt nothing. And his friends were clear that they didn’t think he felt nothing. “I don’t know what I feel. I just don’t think we can win this bet and we should call it.”

Soonyoung smacked the side of his head. “You can. And here’s what you’re going to say.”

“I want to be honest with you about my intentions so that you’re not confused as to why I’m hanging around you.”

She nods slowly and then takes a swig of her water. “Seems very formal of you.”

They walk right through the skywalk and take the stairs out onto the green. They find a tree to sit under. The air is warm, but there’s an intermittent breeze that makes it tolerable. He pulls two bowls of spicy ramen that he made before coming and hands one to her. It, at the very least, gets a smile on her face.

“I want you to know…” Jihoon pauses, stirring his noodles and watching the steam rise from the container. “I’m all in.”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “All into what?”

So, he doesn’t either. “This. Us. Whatever this is I’m pursuing. I want you to know that the stories you’ve heard about me are probably true, that I have hurt other people before, but I want to try with you.”

Her chewing slows, as she processes these words.

“Look,” Soonyoung had said, “it’s not lost on her that you’re a player. And Jihyo’s told hyung that some of your past girlfriends have shared… their opinions about you. You can’t hide those.”

“I know that someone like me has hurt you before and you don’t have to tell me about him ever, but I don’t want to be that guy. I want to be someone you can trust. Someone you can trust to give you the honesty you deserve.”

He’s started adlibbing off of Soonyoung’s speech. The speech had something about heaven and finding himself. It was too romantic and there was no way someone like her would buy it.

Meanwhile, her stomach is churning and she isn’t sure if it’s from the spicy noodles or from what Jihoon is saying. “You’re saying,” she searches for the words she wants to use, “you want to date me?”

“Yeah.”

“Just… me.”

“Yeah.”

She leans back against the tree and makes a point of stirring her noodles to cool them, mostly just stalling for time. A third woman had come to her while she was walking into the chemistry building that morning. It was as if all of Jihoon’s past conquests were gravitating towards her in some weird twist of fate.

Which was a strange coincidence, because Jihyo had just spent the better part of last night convincing her to give Jihoon a chance.

And now hearing Jihoon speak like this is messing with her head further.

“What happened to your date last night?” She shakes her head. “You told me you had dates lined up for the next week.”

“Cancelled. All of them.” Jihoon knew she knew about Ara yesterday. “Including yesterday’s.”

“All because you suddenly want to date me?”

“No, because I realized that unless I tell you what I want straight up, you won’t know. And my actions and what I want weren’t lining up. So…” Jihoon makes a point to catch her gaze. “I’m trying.”

“She’s not going to believe you,” Mingyu had said. “So, the best way is not to convince her that you’ll be good but that you’ll try to be better. For some reason, girls love when we say we’ll try to be better than we once were.”

She pauses. She’s about to put food in her, but sets the bowl down instead. “How many girls were there before me?”

Bewildered by this question, Jihoon says, “I can’t count that.”

She shakes her head. “Not one-night stands. Not girls you were only with for sex. Actual people that you actually dated.”

Jihoon swallows hard. Being honest here could ruin everything he’s built up until this point. “Maybe 7.”

She nods. “Name them.”

Jihoon bites his tongue.

“If you dated them, they must have meant something to you. You gave them more than a few nights.”

So, he does. He lists them off, but her face doesn’t look happy. Which maybe it wouldn’t because he’s listing off his exes, and she’s never come off as a masochist.

“Chaeyoung?”

Jihoon freezes. Almost immediately, his mind is scrambling and he’s unsure why.

“She’s in your lab,” Jihoon says in disbelief.

“What did you tell them all when they asked you why you weren’t talking to them?” She’s reaching with this question; hoping and dreading that Jihoon really is the creature of habit she’s learned him to be.

And it’s only through this sudden interrogation that Jihoon is realizing how intensely these past women of his have outted him. And it explains why she’s been distant. He hangs his head in shame, because he cannot believe he’s being called out like this. “It was something like…” He turns away from her, hoping a breeze carries his voice away. “‘I’m ignoring you now, please leave me alone.’”

“So, tell me how I’m any different to those girls. Tell me this whole thing isn’t some orchestrated game you’ve played over and over again.”

Jihoon doesn’t know how to answer.

“Jihyo told me that I was being too harsh with you. That the stories I was hearing were coming from women who had been hurt by you. That heartbreak distorts all the good parts about a relationship.” She waits for him to look her way. “My experience with heartbreak is… varied, that’s for sure. And you’re right. Your reputation is exactly how I felt like I was treated the last time I gave my heart to somebody.” She picks up the noodles and lets them slip through her chopsticks.

Jihoon can feel the tiniest flicker of hope rising in his belly, can’t explain the way his heart lifts.

“But my friends keep telling me that I’ll never know good love if I don’t let myself be vulnerable again.” She looks at him, studying his features. What she’s searching for neither of them is sure. “But I’m really, really scared that…”

Jihoon nudges her gently with his hand, careful not to touch her too much. “You can talk to me.”

Her gaze is unwavering. “I’m scared that I’m just going to be another notch on your bedpost.”

The magnitude of work required to win this bet hits Jihoon’s chest like a ton of bricks, hard. He’s sure it almost winds him. But he can see the cracks in her armour right now and he would be stupid (not to mention his friends will strangle him) if he doesn’t wiggle in just a little bit.

His voice is gentle. “I can’t promise that I won’t hurt you.”

“I never liked promises I know people can’t keep. They make real promises redundant.”

Completely fine by him.

“Can we just try it out?” He knows this formula works.

Except the pause is so long that he swears she’s going to say no. “Fine.”

His eyebrows lift, so does that hope in his belly. “Really?”

She nods, a small smile tugging at the corner of her lips. “Yeah. Really.”

Jihoon realizes that she’s definitely played his game before with other men when he glances at her lips and she smirks.

“That does not mean that you can kiss me right now.”

He smiles genuinely for the first time since they started taking. “Fine.” He recognizes the warmth spreading through his chest. It’s a nice feeling. One he hasn’t felt around anyone in a while.

“Thanks for the ramen, by the way.”

“Not too spicy?”

“I mean, yes, but it’s still good.”

“Does this mean that you’ll come to the studio and listen to those songs after work?”

She hums. “Yeah, okay.”

[witch-apologist]

I keep seeing those racist anti C/As saying well Catra wasn't confirmed a woc in the show so it doesn't count as if her skin isn't literally brown? Like what level of delusion are they on? And then when they realise their argument makes no sense, they'll say well if she is a woc she shouldn't be a cat person because that's racist (and spop does have racism issues, like most media that need acknowledgment), as if that changes the fact that she's still a woc? And if they care about that genuinely and not as a cheap gotcha then they wouldn't continue to perpetuate racism against Catra.. Not to mention, in this case there are other poc in the cast, including darker skinned poc than Catra, who are not animal people, so she is not the sole representative of poc from the show. While it'd be an issue if Catra was the only brown or darker poc: we have mermista, bow, netossa, etc.

And then they try to justify it with "its fur tho" yeah we didn't know that until season 5 and we still don't know for sure if its all fur or some fur/some skin and even if it is fur she is still going to be subconsciously viewed as a woc because she's a humanoid whose primary color is brown and also her story is very much a POC story. Being just as capable has her white counterpart but being constantly sidelined, being constantly dismissed, having to spend her entire life fighting for herself, the fact that she (in contrast to white AND princess AND she ra adora) did not have the same privelege to allow her to escape from her abusive home and become a "good guy" (cycle of incarceration and crime anyone?) Having a bitter outlook on the world because from a very young age you are shown that you are Not Welcome in the world around you. The fact that her people an indigenous people of Etheria seem to have been nearly wiped out? We never did see that faceless Magicat princess who likely maybe did not survive or was in hiding. Like she's brown fucking get with the program if Catra is white so is Glimmer since Etheria doesn't have an Asia. (Yes I saw them literally use there being no "Latin America" in Etheria to argue that Catra isn't a WOC)

[mandalorianchronicles]

So What Makes a Mandalorian a Mandalorian? || Part One

Among the main themes playing out in this season, Din’s perception about Mandalorians is a major one. Those of us who grew up with Star Wars - watched the movies, the TV series, read the books - basically consumed as much Star Wars content as we could...we have a lot of Mandalorian lore and information to  sift through and many of it is contradictory. 

For those who saw the OT, Boba Fett was the original Mandalorian. There were many books written about this one bounty hunter who had a soft spot for the nastiest characters in the galaxy. They were always writing him to have this complicated code of honor that made him sort of good, even though he was clearly bad. We *wanted* him to be good.

Then the PT came out and we got his backstory. Jango Fett was a bounty hunter who took a job as the DNA donor for the entire GAR and kept one unaltered clone for himself to raise as a son. When the Jedi killed Jango, 10-year-old Boba was left alone, nursing a deep hatred for the Jedi (or at least, for Mace Windu). His fondness for the Empire in his later years now made more sense. 

But Boba still wasn’t a Mandalorian, as nothing that the EU books or comics had released about him was counted as canon, even before Disney took over. Then TCW came out and we had even more insight into Boba. We saw his complete disregard for his clone brothers. We saw Aurra Sing leading him down a darker and darker path - but we also saw how he didn’t enjoy killing for the sake of killing either. That much, his father had instilled in him. In interviews, we discovered that George Lucas had never intended for either Jango or Boba to be true Mandalorians, something that TCW seemed to confirm when Obi-Wan Kenobi asked the Prime Minister of Mandalore about Jango and Almec stated that Jango was not a Mandalorian and he didn’t even know how Jango had come by that armor. The case seemed closed at that point, though many fans doggedly clung to the lore than Boba and Jango were Mandalorians.

Fast forward to today. We learned a few important things about Boba:

1) His armor is actually his father’s. There was conflicting lore about this as well, none of it confirmed in canon. Some said it was Jango’s, others said it was his own. Some even said that it was made of carbon steel, instead of beskar. Glad that’s settled.

2) Boba never took the creed. This was assumed by most everyone who watch TCW, but it’s good that it was confirmed. So, if you go by the supposition that true Mandalorians are not a race, but a creed - Boba Fett is not Mandalorian.

3) Jango *might* have been a Mandalorian. He was a foundling and he was given the armor by Mandalorians. That would imply that he did take the creed, but it doesn’t confirm it. Foundlings who are raised by Mandalorians are allowed to take the creed when they come of age, and then they are given their own armor. However, as we know from season one, foundlings who take the creed are all recorded in the Hall of Records on Mandalore, something that Prime Minister Almec would have had access to. He obviously knew Jango, but was emphatic about the fact that Jango was NOT Mandalorian. So, did Jango actually take the creed to become a true Mandalorian? Was he “given” the armor or did he take it? Is The Mandalorian retconning TCW or is there more to the story? We may never know. Regardless, he was killed, and Boba inherited the beskar. And now he has it back.

Which brings us back to the Din’s identity crisis in season 2. 

Din has learned some very important things about Mandalorians over the past several weeks, and I’d say he’s taking it very well. We started out with him meeting Cobb Vanth, a non-Mandalorian wearing Boba’s armor. When he took off the helmet, Din rightly assumed he was not a Mandalorian. They worked out a deal, and Din kept the armor because it belonged with a true Mandalorian.

Next, Din met Bo-Katan Kryze. When she took off her helmet, Din wrongly assumed she was not a Mandalorian. She informed him that he was part of the Children of the Watch, a fringe cult of Mandalorian zealots who believe in “the way”. I’m going to pause here and define what a cult is for people who have been debating this for the last few weeks.

A cult is “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.” In the case of CotW, their devotion is directed to the armor itself. Mandalorians existed long before they had their armor (according to legend). They developed the beskar armor to even the playing field against their ancient enemies, the Jedi...and everyone else in the known galaxy. We have seen people born on Mandalore (I’ll call them indigenous Mandalorians, even though they are supposedly not the original aliens who inhabited Mandalore) who live their daily lives without armor. We’ve seen how certain indigenous Mandalorians have rejected the warrior ways, though it’s unclear if they still swore to the Mandalorian creed - which I would love to have a canon copy of (please, Filoni?). Even the warrior Mandalorians who owned armor were not always wearing it, and certainly didn’t have a problem showing their faces. 

To the warriors like Gar Saxon, Sabine Wren, Bo-Katan, Pre Vizsla, and Fenn Rau - their armor is important to their heritage and their line of work, but it is not their entire identity. Take off the armor and they are still Mandalorians. Not so with the CoTW. Take off that armor in front of another person, and you are no longer able to put it on again. Get defeated just once in combat and an enemy removes your helmet, and you are no longer a Mandalorian. Their entire identity revolves around the beskar. It’s implied that a single failure results in expulsion from the group, unless you’re fine being that one person who walks around naked and exposed, the humiliation and shame of your failure staring you in the face behind expressionless masks every moment of every day. THAT is what makes Din’s group a cult, and if you have a problem with the term, I’m sorry. But that’s what is is. 

Moving on. Din has suddenly been made aware that “the way” is not the ONLY way. He rejects this at first, but Bo-Katan masterfully draws him into a mission that she did not need his help with to show that if he ever decided to be open-minded, he had a place with them. I’ll write more on her later, but I don’t have the time to do her justice here. She gets in her digs in true Bo-Katan fashion, but in the end, you can tell that Din has begun to accept her as legit.

Milestone #1: Okay, so some Mandalorians who swore to the creed take off their helmets in front of other people, but they can put it back on again.

Next, Din met Boba Fett and learned that he did not swear the creed. Since the armor was in Din’s possession, obviously Boba had been defeated at some point by someone (if he only knew it was an accidental bump to the jetpack by a blind Han Solo). But since Din forgot to lock up the Razor Crest with its state of the art ground security protocols which I will now never know the details of, Boba snuck in and took his armor back. He then proceeds to take out a few squads of stormtroopers with it, earning some brownie points. Remarkably, Din does not threaten to take it off him as he did with Vanth, but I sure wanted to...ahem. I digress. When Boba shows his chain code (which is apparently also a birth certificate and might have cleared up some lineage confusion in past films), Din just accepts that because Jango was a foundling, the armor rightfully belonged to Boba.

Milestone #2: You can be defeated and have your armor taken away from you and still put it back on again.

Milestone #3: You don’t even have to swear to the creed of Mandalore to have the right to wear beskar armor, as long as your father (or, sole DNA donor) was a Mandalorian foundling.

We’re seeing Din’s ingrained worship of the armor being stripped away one layer at a time. He’s learning that what makes someone Mandalorian does not begin and end with the metal plates they attach to their bodies. It’s deeper than that. And I, for one, cannot wait to see where this leads him.

[cameron-allen]

Diguemo*

Diguemo is a Demi-straight Cis F Homioavain (human bird), default age is 26.

She was created in a rogue lab in Mali (see map below) where they relied on its obscure location and the unremarkability of the building to remain under the radar to escape the governmental eyes, since human experimentation is a completely illegal violation of human rights according to the United Nations.

The scientists are local and the are fluent in two languages: Dogon, plains dialect, the local indigenous language of Mali, and French, the common language of much of Africa, including Mali. To aid in the secrecy of of the experimentation, the scientists refused to teach Diguemo either language soas to limit her ability to reveal anything of significance in the event of being found out or captured. However, they would still need to speak to her. To circumvent this issue, they learned only enough English to communicate the most basic of commands or concepts, such as yes, no, food, come, good, bad, come, go, and so on. But when she was about 10 years old, one of the woman scientists broke the rules and gave her the name Diguemo*.

As a result, Diguemo only learns to speak in a very broken and heavily accented English that speaks of her origin in Mali. She doesnt escape the prison like lab until she is 18, when the authorities finally caught wind of what was happening. The scientists let her go and told her that if she was found by the government, she would be killed. Diguemo took that to heart and avoided all of humanity to the best she extent she could.

Within the following 8 years of total freedom, Diguemo picks up enough English to have a basic conversation, though she tries to avoid talking to anyone in the first place. She is also essentially raised by the wildlife of the world how to survive and through the animals, she gains her concept of how the world works. As a result, her mind set is very simple in the best of ways and human behavior is incredibly confusing to her.

She is a very shy and timid person, very easily startled like the animals that taught her. She is paranoid of all humans and being in the serene wild, she has learned to be very intune to her surroundings, her eyes being quick to pick up everything. She has learned to listen for the silence in nature to pick up on any nearby danger. The presence of her wings makes animals very readily accept her as a part of nature. She is often surrounded by animals in an almost disney princess style and very quickly befriends the local wildlife. It could almost count as a super power.

Going along with her capabilities, Diguemo is capable of transatlantic flights, which she does frequently for the sake of her job as a professional photographer and as a form of recreation. And as a creature of flight, she has a very special ability to understand and comprehend the world from a satellite map type layout- it rivals that of a gps with her ability to guesstimate distances and the exact directions needed. It is almost impossible for her to get lost due to her incredible sense of direction and map like memory.

Going back to her job as a photographer, it was something she picked up from her shameful years of when she had no choice but to steal from humans before she became properly self-sufficient. She was determined to never have to steal again someday and when she found her calling by accident with the camera, she quickly siezed in the opportunity. As a photographer for a Nature magazine in Europe with highly sought after photographs, she is afforded the ability to remain distant from civilization while doing the thing she loves best: hanging out and exploring nature. Her photos sell incredibly well since she is able to get closer to the wild animals than anyone else- especially the more rare and timid species -and she is capable of getting incredible views and angles thanks to her ability to fly.

All of this money allows her to own a very sizable piece of land where she built herself a small house, and to buy a private security system to surround the perimeter of her land. These cameras are linked directly to her cell phone that is used solely to moniter her perimeter to ensure her safety. She can survive on the limited income since most of her needs are met by the wilderness around her.

So how does she do all of this while keeping her wings a secret? Diguemo's staple clothing is a very oversized hoodie, with the hood pooled strategically around her neck to hide the tops of her folded wings, and a black hiking backpack to help disguise the bulge on her back that the wings make. She takes these items with her everywhere she goes. And as far as the photography goes, she only goes into town once a week or so to check the mail and to get her next assignment. She can always mail her assignment in from wherever she happens to be in the world.

* Here is the link to the article where I got the name from that confirms Diguemo is, in fact, from the Dogon language. Below is the French to English translation of the relevant paragraph:

●

There is the Sahara and near by trees and a body of water with much uninhabited land, but near enough for a trek off the road. Here is a link to evidence that Dogon in the Plains dialect is the indigenous language in this part of Mali.

For more information on Diguemo's dark history in the lab, please dm me! Please be aware that it will involve torture and captivity. Dm'ing me about the specifics means you consent to hearing about that kind of dark content.

Verses

Default- modern day

Starwars

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

I've noticed people calling just about any Latine people "white" for some reason and it makes no sense to me. For example Lin-Manuel Miranda was a moc at first and now people keep insisting that he's "white" (he's like only about half European in his DNA and doesn't look white). Lin Doesn't identify as white and neither does Melissa Fumero from what I've noticed. I think I've even seen some people say that Frida was "white" and that she was pretending to be Indigenous/mestiza which is ridiculous cause even if she wasn't "50% Indigenous" she was still mestiza and her culture was literally a mixture of Spanish and Indigenous like that of most Mexicans. Nevermind that in Latin America many mixed people identify as "white" only cause that's favourable and most "white" people in Latin America are actually mixed.

I've also been thinking about how in In The Heights there's the line "faces that look like mine" that Bauela says but I'm guessing most people would say that Olga Merediz who plays Abuela is "white" cause she is light and tbh her features do actually seem to be mostly Spaniard... Who decides which Latine people count as white and who decides it? If people like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Melissa Fumero don't identify as white then I don't see how it's ok for people to insist they are white. Especially in the case of Lin when it seems to be said to justify the horrible lowkey-racist hate against him... 

_________

Part of my problem is that especially with Latine casting only the lightest and most eurocentric are achieving big things (with the slight exception of Zoe Saldana which even she’s problematic because she wore blackface to play Nina Simone THAT’S how lightskinned she is).  But as a whole and I could be wrong here but someone like Lin-Manuel had a certain amount of privilege that he had the freedom to pursue theatre in college instead of a real job you know? And then there’s his *ahem* activism. like how he pushed for PROMESA https://remezcla.com/features/culture/lin-manuel-miranda-hamilton-in-puerto-rico-controversy/

Like no he may not look white but he’s acting white in the fact that he’s siding with the imperial side instead of the mostly nonwhite island that’s been colonized twice over.  So I guess you could say the urge to call lin white is based on him glorifying slave owners and the founding fathers (especially when they were one and the same) making them accessible to kids via a glossy diversity mask you know?

And as for Melissa Fumero I know that she’s meant to be definitely Latine but her features are so eurocentric? and like she’s barely oliveskinned?  like both of the latinas on B99 are thin and waiflike there’s no diversity in body shape which would be nice to have had some real actual diversity.  I really like how Beatriz is bi now you know?  But I don’t get much in the way of them being very in touch with their latinidad. and like speaking as a lightskinned latina I know how much privilege we have.  instead of having to lightskinned latinas why could we have had a afrolatina?  as it is we rarely see any black women on that show! (take all of this with a grain of salt tho I haven’t watched since they moved to NBC).

I think the important part is that we can recognize that it used to be enough to include latines in stuff but we really need to be making more room for darkskinned indigenous and Black latines.  they’re the ones most in danger of losing their culture and being discriminated against.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230047884_Are_Latinos_Becoming_White_Folk_And_What_That_Still_Says_about_Race_in_America

ok I’m including this because its downright comical as to how some struggling anthropologists are still all gung ho about not realizing that there are white latines afro latines, as well as indigenous latines. like I think its valid if lots of indigenous southern americans don’t want to identify as latines because they didn’t grow up with either Spanish / Portuguese / French. but like can we stop saying hispanic indigenos already?

There are no simple answers to this really its more of a how much of an impact are the individual celebrities having on latinidad as a whole?  do they continue to project a whitewashed narrative of South and Central America because they themselves are so light skinned?

Or... have many mestices latines assimilated to the point that they’re doing in the US what they do in their home countries and deny having any indigenous blood because they’re desperate to pass as white?

mod ali

[lord-tathamet]

Dinner Plans

A short story almost two years of age, that I once wrote for a university class. Found it again, dusted it off, polished it slightly, but let it retain that little bit of amateurish writing simply to marvel at how far I’ve come with my writing ever since. 

Enjoy. 

For the fifth time in the last two hours did the man with the moustache and sunglasses look up from his research and look at the face of the clock of the broken church. He scowled beneath the moustache, but forced himself to look at it regardless.

4:18 pm.

They were late, as per usual. He shook his head and focused back on his literature. He made the mental note to have a number of alarm clocks be send to each of them for next time. Flatteringly Photoshopped pictures of the Mexican coast reflected in his sunglasses while his eyes skimmed through the brochure's whimsical descriptions of the rich culture of its indigenous people and beautiful beaches.  He skipped through a couple of pages until he found what he was looking for. A decidedly too sharply fined and too pale fingernail stabbed into the page displaying the photograph of an ancient, grey pyramid.

The man sitting behind the shining aluminium table was tall, narrow and sharply dressed: a suit jacket with bloodstone cufflinks, black suit-pants, a clean white shirt only slightly wrinkled and  two buttons open. His legs ended in a pair of shiny, pointy shoes. His face was stern and angular, with pronounced cheekbones and a pointed chin. Bushy eyebrows sat above the pair of sunglasses that protected his eyes against the sun, and a long white moustache grew beneath the hooked nose which gave his appearance a certain roguish charm. A wavy mane of grey-white hair surrounded his face and hid the pointed tips of his ears, giving him certain qualities akin to an old lion. It was difficult to clearly guess his age, but anyone briefly passing by and glancing at him would take him for a very spry looking gentleman in his mid-fifties.

Leaning in on his read, the man with the white moustache made a few notes on a small block of paper. The pen he used was black, ornamented with silver filigree and absurdly expensive, as was the ink held within. Next to the note pad stood an untouched and by now cold cup of coffee, its content as pitch-black as a dark winter night and reflecting the bright afternoon sun above.  Disgusting in taste and disgustingly cheap in comparison, but he needed the table, and none of the waiters would bother him as long as he had at least one beverage in front of him, as maligned and untouched it was.

Cars rolled by exhuming grey fumes, the nearby fountain shot water into the air and people passed his table. Most of them in casual summer clothes, sundresses and cargo pants and shirts and some of them even with hats to gain some shade. For a moment, the man looked up from his notes and allowed himself a brief indulgence – the eyes behind the sunglasses darted from one healthy neck to another. A small, wolfish smile parted the pale lips and if there had been anyone to pay close attention, they would have gained a brief glance at his very pointed, very sharp and unusually long canines.

“Good afternoon, count.”

The man in the white moustache begrudgingly pulled his eyes away from his current mark – a lovely Turkish woman with streaming black hair that was climbing the stairs around the fountain just a shy dozen feet from his table, close enough for him to smell the sweet mixture of blood and perfume she exhumed – and he turned to the youth that had seated herself opposite of him, soundless and sudden as if she had appeared out of the thin air.

“And to you, countess. You are looking lively as always.”

She seemed young enough to be his granddaughter, though no one within their right mind would have thought to imagine a superficial familiarity between the two. A girl of fourteen years, with a healthy, rosy complexion and flowing, lush dark hair that curled at her shoulders, the sunshine twisting golden shimmers into its waves. Large doe-like eyes that projected innocence and hid a vicious intellect, a petite body that suggested fragility and cloaked the strength to bend iron bars as if they were straws. She was in white, of course she was, a pretty, knee-length dress and a white handbag in her lap and with her hands folded atop of it. The lid of her bag, the man with the moustache noted with a mild amusement, was riddled with numerous, colourful stickers and badges, and around her wrists hung several loops and bands of tiny gemstones like rainbow wreaths.

They were the only change about her since their last meeting.

“Thank you. My sincere apologies, there was an unfortunate delay with the train between Kassel and Hannover.” She shook her head. “More than five centuries since the invention of rail transport and still a simple thing like an open door may stall a train's journey for almost an entire fifteen minutes.”

She nodded at the travel brochure still open in front of him. “Are you already planning your next journey? I thought you would stay in Berlin a little while longer.”

“I am a traveller at heart, milady. Although my beloved home will always be in the heart of Europe, the other continents do possess their own charming allure,” he replied, setting the brochure and note block aside. “And besides, it has been a while since I have last visited the Americas. There must be much exciting game to be hunted there.”

“Always about excitement, is that the reason you wanted us all to meet here of all places?” The countess nudged her chin toward the broken church spire in the background, a disgusted sneer cracking her face. “And mirroring glass everywhere around us. One of these days, your thrill-seeking hunts might cost you your life.”

“How would the youth of your seeming generation say? No risk, no fun.” The count let his eyes wander around the square for a moment. “Where is Laura? The two of you were practically bound at the hip when we last met.”

The young-seeming woman stiffened in her seat. The snarl dissolved into a very neutral, very calm expression that seemed like it was carved from marble. “Laura is... no longer with us.”

A single eyebrow rose, but otherwise the count's face remained unmoved. “Hunters?

“No.” There was a subtle tremble of her lip, the count noted, before she continued: “She could no longer bear it, she told me, moments before she drove the knife through her own neck. She betrayed me, just like the others before her.”

“My condolences.”

She nodded, her face remaining neutral. “It has been over three decades since. I have moved on as best as I could.

“In fact,” she allowed herself a smile,” I happen to have a date just after we met up with our friends.”

“You still insist on fraternizing with your prey?” The count sneered. “Now that is a carelessness that will get you killed one day.”

“Because unlike you, I seek actual companionship?” Her eyes glinted like sharp icicles in the sun. “Because unlike you, I do not wish to to prolong myself in solitude and run afoul like some pack-less dog? Because I want to spend this blasted eternity with someone like myself?”

Blue flashed and briefly turned red. For a moment, the two stared at each other with an intensity not unlike of two big cats, every individual muscle tense and ready to pounce. Then as quickly as the moment came, it passed.

“I did not mean to insult you, milady. Forgive me. I only worry about others of our kind. We are already so very few remaining,” the count sighed.

“Do not kid yourself, count. You care for nobody but yourself,” the countess replied, but she too relaxed in her seat.

The next five minutes they spent in silence. The count returned to his brochure, only briefly looking up to take notes and to send another quick glance up at the clock tower. The young woman had produced a smartphone from her handbag and immersed herself in the screen, brief smiles lighting up her face in between her typing and the brief ping of sent messages.

“Empusa will be here in half an hour,” she said after little while and looked up from the screen. “She is picking up Lamia from the airport and helping her through customs right now.”

“What about Schreck?”

“The sun is still up, remember? He will meet us after dusk.”

“His mutation is as highly fascinating as it is impractical,” the count murmured. “Why didn't they update me about it?”

“We do possess a text chain, you know. I'm surprised you are not part of it, since you are always the one organizing our meetings.”

“I refuse to touch one of those damnable Apps ever since Lestat sent around pictures of his own rectum to everyone.”

“Suit yourself. Why the Americas?”

The count tapped his finger on the table. “The Mexica people of pre-Columbian America possessed fascinating religious rites related to blood sacrifice to honour their gods...I wonder if there might be others of our kind still in their old territory.”

The countess fiddled with her smartphone. “Sometimes, I admit, I envy your ability to travel without restraint. I tried everything, yet I still must return to my family's tomb ever so often.”

“Have you considered moving your tomb in its entirety, stone by stone? There are still many old woods and mountain valleys unmolested by human hand. I am sure the hags you usually travel with would be most grateful for the exercise.”

“I have tried, once, when Laura was still with me.” A twinge of sorrow crept across her face. “I wanted to go far, far away from home and take her with me. But then, my body began to wither, my senses to decay the longer I prolonged returning to my tomb for a night. Laura, too, could not go long without a place to return to. Horse-carriages can only get you so far. And when we tried to move a single stone, what little strength I had left in that moment was about to leave me.”

The count hummed. Then his own phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out, swiped across the screen, read the message in silence. A wolfish grin split his face.  

“Then you'll be happy to know that I plan on putting an end to these laws that seem to bind us.”

“What to you mean?” The countess leaned forward, an eyebrow arched.

“I planned on surprising all of you when Schreck, Lamia and the others would be gathered with us, but I might just as well reveal it all now,” the count smiled and leaned back, hands tapered together. There was a red gleam to his eyes, behind the sunglasses. “In my studies of the Americas, I came across a new initiate to our little circle – one that shares many of my own tastes and wishes to help others of his kin. Among such, is breaking the accursed bindings placed upon us.”

He extended a pointing finger. “He is currently sitting on the other end of the Breitscheidplatz. The tall man, olive skinned, with the gold rings in his ears.”

The countess followed his direction, narrowed her blue eyes to a glint. “What is his name?”

“The old Mayan people called him Camazotz. And he might very well be one of the first of our kind to walk this earth.”

On the other end of the square, the tall, olive-skinned man with golden rings in both his ears turned his head and nodded at them. His eyes gleamed in a blood-red, and for just a moment, both of the undead nobles could catch a glimpse of his shadow flickering across the wall behind him.

For just a split-second, they saw the shadow of a bat the size of a small house, stretching its wings and enveloping the street within its grasp.

[omoi-no-hoka]

Moderately Interesting Japanese Ep. 8 Hokkaido Dialect

The typical winter scenery of Hokkaido.

One of my favorite aspects of language learning is studying dialects. I am fascinated by how language branches and adapts to new environments like some form of linguistic natural selection. Japanese is rife with interesting dialects, some of which are so different from the standard that they can sound like a totally different language to the untrained ear. I thought I’d make a series of posts highlighting different dialects in Japanese. Since this sort of post will take a bit more research on my end and I plan to find native speakers of the dialect to confirm with, they won’t be very regular, but I hope that you enjoy them!

What are some of the main Japanese dialects?

Firstly, let me tell you how to say “dialect” in Japanese, because I know I’m gonna use it and I don’t want to cause any confusion. 

方言 (hougen) Dialect

___弁 (__-ben) __ Dialect, so “Osaka Dialect” is “Osaka-ben.” 

I daresay that just about 100% of all Japanese learners are familiar with Tokyo-ben, because it is Standard Japanese. The next most popular dialect is Kansai-ben, which is spoken in the Kansai region (Osaka, Hiroshima, etc.). The Kansai Dialect can be broken down into several smaller, regional dialects. Next would probably be Okinawa-ben. 

(Caution! Some people, particularly Okinawans, consider Okinawan Japanese to be a language independent from Japanese, and they can be offended if you refer to it as a dialect. Japan’s official stance is that Okinawan is a dialect, though, so I am calling it a dialect in my posts.) 

Now without further ado, let’s actually start learning about one of these dialects!

Hokkaido-ben, namara ii!

Hokkaido is the island in green. It’s the biggest prefecture in Japan by far.

I am a foreigner and Japanese is not my native language, but I have been living on the island of Hokkaido for 5 years now and am very comfortable with the Hokkaido dialect, so I chose to introduce it to you first. Also, it’s not one that gets talked about a lot, so I figured maybe there weren’t many posts about it. 

Hokkaido is the northernmost island of Japan, and it wasn’t settled and officially incorporated as part of Japan until the late 1800′s. There is a group of indigenous people here called the Ainu who speak a language completely different from Japanese, but their language has not bled into Hokkaido-ben. (Many place names in Hokkaido are from Ainu, though).

Because Hokkaido was settled so late in history compared to the other islands of Japan, their dialect doesn’t differ drastically from Tokyo-ben. There are some minor intonation differences that, frankly, I don’t feel confident explaining. I have internalized the intonations through exposure, but I’ve never been taught it and don’t really know what is correct. So I’m not going to talk about tonal differences, and instead focus on the different words and a wee bit of grammar.

投げる　Nageru

Standard Japanese: 捨てる suteru

English: to dispose of (lit. “to throw/toss”)

To an English speaker, “throw away” feels just as natural as “dispose of.” But to people outside of Hokkaido, it sounds very unusual and the image it conjures is comedic, like someone is hurling trash into the garbage can like it’s the opening pitch at the World Series. 

Example: そこの古い新聞を投げていいよ。 Romaji: Soko no furui shinbun wo nagete ii yo.

Standard: そこの古い新聞を捨てていいよ。 Romaji: Soko no furui shinbun wo sutete ii yo.

English: You can throw away those old newspapers there. 

おっかない　Okkanai

Standard: 危ない abunai

English: dangerous, scary, a “close call”

My hostmom uses this with me, like, all the time. According to her, I’m always doing okkanai things, like walking alone at night or *gasp* going outside with wet hair. I love her so much haha. 

Example: うちの子が熊のぬいぐるみだと思って遊んでいたのは本当の子グマだった。おっかなかったわ！ Romaji: Uchi no ko ga kuma no nuigurumi da to omotte asonde ita noha hontou no koguma datta. Okkanakatta wa!

Standard: うちの子が熊のぬいぐるみだと思って遊んでいたのは本当の子グマだった。危なかったわ！ Romaji: Uchi no ko ga kuma no nuigurumi da to omotte asonde ita noha hontou no koguma datta. Abunakatta wa!

English: Our kid thought he was playing with a teddy bear, but it was actually a live bear cub. What a close call!

（手袋を）履く　(Tebukuro wo) haku

Standard:（手袋を）はめる (tebukuro wo) hameru

English: to put on (gloves)

Winter in Hokkaido is long and cold. Gloves are one of the most essential articles of clothing here, and I have heard/used “haku” so much that “hameru” sounds incorrect to me. The “haku” sounds funny to other Japanese people because it is used for putting on socks, underwear, and pants, and they will imagine you putting socks or panties on your hands instead of gloves. 

Example: 外は寒いから、手袋を履きなさい。 Romaji: Soto ha samui kara, tebukuro wo hakinasai.

Standard: 外は寒いから、手袋をはめなさい。 Romaji: Soto ha samui kara, tebukuro wo hamenasai. 

English: It’s cold out, so put on your gloves. 

めんこい　Menkoi

Standard Japanese: 可愛い kawaii

English: cute

I included this because it’s one of the famous aspects of Hokkaido-ben, but I actually don’t hear it used that much. I tend to see it on souvenir shirts for tourists more than in actual conversations.

Example: この子猫はめっちゃめんこい！ Romaji: Kono koneko ha meccha menkoi!

Standard: この子猫はめっちゃかわいい！ Romaji: Kono koneko ha meccha kawaii!

English: This kitten is super cute!

Note: Even though it is functioning as an adjective and ends with an “i,” it is not an “i” adjective. It is a “na” adjective. 

あずましくない　Azumashikunai

Standard: 居心地が悪い、嫌 igokochi ga warui, iya

English: uncomfortable (surroundings), unpleasant

This is a word that many Hokkaido people use but struggle to explain. Azumashikunai describes any place that you find unpleasant or uncomfortable, maybe due to it being too crowded, or too empty, or because it’s very cramped, for example. 

Example: 日曜日の札幌駅が人混みであずましくない。 Romaji. Nichiyoubi no Sapporo-eki ga hitogomi de azumashikunai.

Standard: 日曜日の札幌駅が人混みで嫌だ。 Romaji: Nichiyoubi no Sapporo-eki ga hitogomi de iya da.

English: Sapporo Station is always crowded on Sundays and I don’t like it.

いずい　Izui

Standard: none

English: different (in a bad way), off-kilter, something is “off”

Hokkaido people really struggle to explain izui because Standard Japanese doesn’t have an equivalent for it, but I think it can be likened to “off” in English. You got something in your eye but can’t find it and your eye feels funny? Your eye is izui. You have a hair in your shirt and can’t find it? That feels izui. Sometimes it can be a mysterious ache not painful enough to warrant a visit to the doctor, or sometimes it can just be a sense that something is “off.” 

Example: 目にゴミが入って、いずい。 Romaji: Me ni gomi ga haitte, izui. 

Standard:目にゴミが入って、痛い。 Romaji: Me ni gomi ga haitte, itai.

English: Something got in my eye and now it feels off. 

汽車　Kisha

Standard: 電車 densha 

English: (train, lit. “steam engine”)

The first time I came to Japan, I could just barely hold down an everyday conversation in Japanese. My hostparents (hostdad especially) both spoke very strong Hokkaido-ben, and during my first meal with them my hostdad asked if I had traveled from the airport to their city by “steam engine,” and I was just baffled. Wait, did he just say locomotive? What year is it? Are steam engines still a thing in Japan?! Then my kind hostmother explained that he meant regular, modern trains. 

Example: すみません、函館ゆきの汽車はいつ出発しますか？ Romaji: Sumimasen, Hakodate-yuki no kisha ha itsu shuppatsu shimasu ka?

Standard: すみません、函館ゆきの電車はいつ出発しますか？ Romaji: Sumimsaen, Hakodate-yuki no densha ha itsu shuppatsu shimasuka?

English: Excuse me, when does the train bound for Hakodate leave the station?

しゃっこい　Shakkoi

Standard: 冷たい Tsumetai

English: Cold

Being the northernmost prefecture and next door to Russia, it’s only natural that Hokkaido-ben have its own word for “cold.” 

Example: このかき氷ってめっちゃしゃっこい！ Romaji; Kono kakigoori tte meccha shakkoi!

Standard: このかき氷ってめっちゃ冷たい！ Romaji: Kono kakigoori tte meccha tsumetai!

English: This shaved ice is super cold!

とうきび　Toukibi

Standard: とうもろこし Toumorokoshi

English: corn

Hokkaido is famous for their sweet corn, and “toukibi” is a word you will hear a lot here as a result. A popular summer snack is corn on the cob with soy sauce and butter, and it’s made just like in the gif above! Japanese people tend to eat it using a toothpick, picking off kernel by kernel. So when I just rocked up, grabbed an ear and started going to town on it, they thought I was a barbarian hahaha.

Example: やっぱり、とうきびに醤油だね！ Romaji: Yappari, toukibi ni shouyu da ne!

Standard: やっぱり、とうもろこしに醤油だね！ Romaji: Yappri, toumorokoshi ni shouyu da ne!

English: Soy sauce really does go good with corn!

なまら　Namara

Standard: とても totemo、結構 kekkou

English: very, super, rather

This word is like “menkoi,” in that it is famous throughout Japan for being Hokkaido-ben, but I rarely hear it in actual conversations. I hear people use it when they are surprised by something. “Namara oishii” has a nuance of “It’s (actually) very tasty.”

Example: 曇ってる��ど、今日の天気はなまらいい。 Romaji: Kumotteru kedo, kyou no tenki ha namara ii.

Standard: 曇ってるけど、今日の天気はけっこういい。 Romaji: Kumotteru kedo, kyou no tenki ha kekkou ii.

English: It’s cloudy today, but it’s still pretty good weather.

なんぼ？　Nanbo?

Standard: いくら？ Ikura?

English: How much?

My friend asked me to go get a couple drinks from the convenience store. I came back with a bottle for her and for me and she asked, “Nanbo datta?” I thought that bo was maybe a counter for things, and desperately tried to figure out what we were supposed to be counting. Then she explained that, for whatever reason, “nanbo” means “how much (does something cost)?”

Example: そのお弁当はめっちゃ美味しそう！なんぼだった？ Romaji: Sono obentou ha meccha oishisou! Nanbo datta?

Standard: そのお弁当はめっちゃ美味しそう！いくらだった？ Romaji: Sono obentou ha meccha oishisou! Ikura datta?

English: That bento looks super good! How much was it?

ボケる　Bokeru (for produce)

Standard: 腐る kusaru

English: go bad (produce)

In standard Japanese, “bokeru” means “to go senile” or “to develop dementia/Alzheimer's.” While I wouldn’t say it’s a slur bad enough that it would be bleeped out, it certainly isn’t a kind way to refer to aging. 

So when my host mom told me, “I would give you some apples, but they’re all senile” I had no clue what she was going on about. But then she showed them to me, and they were all wrinkled like this:

Not exactly the most appetizing, but also not entirely rotten. I’m really not sure why Hokkaido-ben likens produce to senility, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because pretty much every single person with Alzheimer’s/dementia is wrinkled.

Example: このリンゴはボケてるから、パイでも作ろうか… Romaji: Kono ringo ha boketeru kara, pai demo tsukurou ka...

Standard: このリンゴは腐りかけてるから、パイでも作ろうか… Romaji: Kono ringo ha kusarikaketeru kara, pai demo tsukurou ka...

English: These apples are about to go bad, so I guess I’ll make a pie...

～べ　~be

Standard ～だろう、～でしょう darou, deshou

English: ..., right?

This is probably the most famous aspect of Hokkaido-ben. Japanese people get a real kick out of it when this white girl uses it haha. “~be” is a sentence-ending particle that functions about the same as “darou” or “deshou” in that it:

asserts the speaker’s confidence in the likelihood of something

asks for the listener’s confirmation

This sentence-final particle has its roots in the particle ～べし (~beshi) found in Classical Japanese, which had a similar purpose. Other forms of ~beshi survive in Modern Standard Japanese with the words べき (beki) and すべく (subeku). 

Here are two examples, one for each function ~be fulfills. 

Example 1: 君の飛行機はあと5分に出発するって？間に合わないべ！ Romaji: Kimi no hikouki ha ato 5 fun ni shuppatsu suru tte? Maniawanai be!

Standard: 君の飛行機はあと5分に出発するって？間に合わないでしょう！  Romaji: Kimi no hikouki ha ato 5 fun ni shuppatsu suru tte? Maniawanai deshou!

English: You said your plane takes off in 5 minutes? There’s no way you’ll make it! 

Example 2: このサラダに白菜も入ってたべ？ Romaji: Kono sarada ni hakusai mo haitteta be?

Standard: このサラダに白菜も入ってたでしょう？ Romaji: Kono sarada ni hakusai mo haitteta deshou?

Standard: There was napa cabbage in this salad too, wasn’t there?

～れ　~re

Standard: ～なさい ~nasai

English: imperative command

I really don’t like giving grammar explanations because it’s been a long time since I’ve formally studied Japanese grammar and I’m scared of explaining something poorly or incorrectly. But an upper-elementary level Japanese learner should know that there are many different levels of imperatives in Japanese that vary in politeness. In order of rude to polite, we have:

Imperatives that end in an “e” sound or ろ, as in:

死ね！Shine! Die!

待て！Mate! Wait!

食べろ！Tabero! Eat!

Imperatives that end in tte, te, or de and are not followed by kudasai

死んで Shinde. Die.

待って Matte. Wait.

食べて Tabete. Tabete.

Imperatives that end in nasai. (These are most often used by parents/teachers to their children.)

死になさい Shininasai. Die.

待ちなさい Machinasai. Wait.

食べなさい Tabenasai. Eat.

Imperatives that end in tte, te, or de and have kudasai after them. 

And then there’s super formal Japanese, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

Anyways. Back to the Hokkaido-ben. I went to a picnic here with a Japanese friend’s family, and her aunt gave me a plate of food and said, “Tabere!” I knew that this had to be an imperative, but I had never studied it before. It felt like it was the same as the rudest imperative, and I spent the whole rest of the picnic wondering what on earth I had done to have her family speak to me like that. Conventionally, they should have been using the -tte form or -nasai form with me.

After the party, I asked her, “Dude, what’s the ~re stuff for? Do they not like me?” I was close to tears I was so hurt and confused.

And that when she laughed and explained that the ~re is a facet of Hokkaido-ben, and it is the same in politeness and nuance as the ~nasai imperative used by parents and teachers to their children.

So I had spent several hours thinking that her family hated me, when really they were treating me like I was their own child! 

Example: ちゃんと野菜を食べれ！ Romaji: Chanto yasai wo tabere!

Standard: ちゃんと野菜を食べなさい！ Romaji: Chanto yasai wo tabenasai! 

English: Eat all of your vegetables properly.

The End!

This was a monster of a post. There are actually a few more words I wanted to introduce, but I had to cut it off at some point haha. I hope that you enjoyed this segment of Moderately Interesting Japanese. I plan to make more on the other dialects within Japanese, but they will take a considerable amount of time so they won’t be very often. 

Thanks for reading!