#don't take linguistic ed from it either

[caparrucia]

God fucking damn that fucking story.

Nope, not derailing. Chronicling her fucking stupidity isn't wrong, and it is definitely not wrong to explain exactly what she's done when it comes to being a fucking bigoted ghoul. Upfront and without question, I am both horrified and deeply sorry you had to go through that. Holy shit, that was wrong and goddamn unacceptable, my god.

So here's my experience. I have never read the fic. I haven't actively read Harry Potter fic since the days of MrsScribe. (I was there, Gandalf. I was a fucking idiot kid, but I was there, dammit, and I saw it happen!) But someone posted a snippet of it. This one:

“Technically, the family name was Casa de Deslizarse, but the languages in the north…well, if you gave a Castilian name to someone speaking the old Celtic tongues, it was often slurred into Slytherin. After a few years of it just becoming a worse and worse habit, we gave up and went with it. My full name is Nizar Hariwalt de León, Casa de Deslizarse de Castilla y Moravia.” The portrait looks like he’s biting back a smile. “It didn’t help to ditch part of the syllable set and compact it into deSlizarse, either. Nizar Hariwalt is half-Euskaran and half-Germanic, so no one slaughtered that one. It means little war leader.”

So there's a fucking lot wrong with that paragraph, but if you're not Spaniard or of Spaniard descent, you're not going to catch it. Yes, her Spanish is godawful and pulled straight from google translate. Yes, she does not know how to fucking conjugate a verb or how verbs work in Spanish. Everyone has pointed that out. No, let me explain.

The people of Mexico and Argentina, both speak Spanish. They might have distinct dialects, but both their languages are identified as Spanish. The people of Asturias, Galicia, Cataluñia and Castilla, do not all speak Spanish. These are not dialects, these are distinct, separate, completely different languages, the same way Portuguese, French and Spanish are not the same language. The delicate part is that during Franco's dictatorship (so, you know, half of the twentieth century), Castellano was elevated to being the "national language" and the defacto equivalent of "Spanish" and very thorough and very violent efforts were made to ethnically cleanse the other languages as well as the ethnic groups that spoke it. (Spanish as a descriptor of a language is very thorny, and you're likely to be corrected if you tell a Spaniard that they're speaking Spanish: they're speaking Castellano, or Catalán, etc.)

Specifically, though, Asturian (or Bable), is the language of the kingdom of Asturias. It has existed since the 12th century, while Castilian arrived only at the 14th century. Asturias is the seat of the crown prince of Spain - he is know as the Prince of Asturias. I mention this because even as historically important as Asturias is, it also very much got ethnic cleansed. The use of the language was heavily penalized and one of the most recurrent, infuriating things people would accuse Asturian speakers of, was that they slur Castellano. To this day people say that dismissively, particularly because Asturian is a language with a very small population of native speakers - do not fucking call it a dying language, that's gross - and yes, Asturias is very culturally Celtic and to this day a lot of the local mythology is very rooted in Celtic traditions.

So with that context, you can see how someone posted the snippet above and my jaw hit the floor. I reached out to the author, who I did not know from Adam, but they seemed to very genuinely care about this, because people were talking about the linguistics of it and how their fic was educational, and I sort of get it, all of this is in Spanish and resources are not exactly English friendly. So I assumed good faith and reached out and said something to this effect:

"Hey, this thing you wrote is not exactly racist in the traditional American sense, because they're all Spaniards, but accusing "Celtic languages" of "slurring Castilian" is super unfortunate and you might want to reconsider the wording."

I didn't even touch the rest of the things that are wrong with the sentence, such as the fact Moravia is in the modern Czech Republic, Leon is a kingdom south of Asturias (but not the same as Asturias), anything relating to Euskadi I am not competent enough to comment on, but the one friend from San Sebastian I showed this to made a disgruntled noise and said at least she hadn't called it Vizcaya, "de" is not a "syllable set" it is a preposition or the first syllable of the word "Deslizar", which she keeps using as "Deslizarse" which means "to slither" not "slithering" as I think she meant to do, and just. You know. The implications behind those choices, which would take frankly hours upon hours of European history to explain exactly why they're nonsensical if not highly improbable all things considered.

It reads like something someone wrote after scanning the English version of wikipedia and remembering that old tumblr post about cowboys and samurai being concurrent, and deciding to take THAT approach to character building. Which, you know what? Valid. It's fandom, it doesn't have to be historically accurate. It's for fun. But if you do that and you make allusions to fucking ethnic cleansing you probably should know. I would like to know, if I did that!

So I reached out, as non-aggressively as possible, because it's about European racism and Americans in my experience are just not built to understand it, because race in America is a matter of skin color and everything else is meaningless.

It bears mentioning I did this under my old tumblr name, the RL life one, which happened to have a little Mexican flag in the header and where I mostly posted about Academia and language and sort of dealt with the unresolved sexual tension between me, philology and theology.

Flamethrower instead called me a pretentious, ignorant beaner and a barely literate wetback because I said "Castellano" instead of "Castilian". She went on a tirade assuming I was Mexican-American and therefore did not speak Spanish natively, had no real knowledge of Spain at all, and was just attacking her because I was jealous she'd come up with the phrase at all. She also decried that I had no basis or sources to back up my comments and that I was basically an idiot. It was a very virulent, very aggressive strand of hateful, racist vitriol.

At which point I said "lol", out loud, because yes, I am the kind of person who says "lol" out loud, fuck you, internet. And then I blocked her and moved right on with my life.

Every few years, someone would rec me her fic or rec her fic in my periphery or attempt to gush about her fic to me, and I would politely disengage or, if persistently pushed to get into it, I would share the story about what a racist dipshit she had been to me and how I very much did not wish to spend any more time on it. Most of the people I told this story to would tell me I was blowing it out of proportion and that she's just got a bad temper because of trauma and that I should just let it go.

Those people are no longer my friends.

Watching this whole thing unfold, and digging into it and finding out everything she's done has been horrific but not exactly surprising. It's been mostly just a good endorsement to my standing policy to block any and all racist dipshits, because wow, do not have the bandwidth for this level of unhinged.

The main reason I'm loudly and upfront bringing this up now is because when I mentioned this to Jazzy, I know she discussed it in one of the FT servers. And that didn't make it into the screenshots, but I don't want that conversation, if it ever surfaces, to be dismissed by "oh yeah, SOMEONE said she was racist, lol, but conveniently no names!" So yeah. I said she was a racist dipshit. Because she was. And my original blog and the original conversation might be long gone, but I did damn tell her that specific passage was horrifically inappropriate and kind of racist and she ignored it and kept it verbatim - I checked.

She never apologized, to my knowledge she's never acknowledged it, and instead she's gone on to pretend she's a linguistic authority and spreading her misinformation and misunderstanding of the subject to who knows how many people (but fuck those people, honestly, if they're getting their knowledge wholesale from fanfic, without even a cursory attempt to verify it against credible sources, that's fucking staggering anti-intellectualism on display, but I digress).

tl;dr FT's writing was arguably racist but her reaction to criticism definitely was and her current persona of being enlightened and kind and good to others is fucking bullshit if she will not own up to the things she's said and done and publicly apologize for them.

Listen, if you're going to be a enough of a racist fucktwit to call me a goddamn slur to my fucking face, have the fucking spine to own up to it.

And if you're gonna pretend you've grownTM and become a person who isn't supposed to be a racist dipshit that calls people slurs to their faces? You still have to fucking own the fact you did it before, and goddamn apologize for it.

Anything else is fucking unacceptable.

[bushdivingbushranger]

What was going to an all girls school like, if you don't mind me asking? :)

OK anon im so sorry this is so long and so convuluted I actually got so carried away jdbKJBGKSDBGH. i'm not even sure i properly answered your question i just got overwhelmed with Love for my same-sex schooling DHGKJSDFBHG anyway, if there's anything more you want to know lmk and I will try to be concise next time 💀

Essentially, my own experience at a single-sex secondary school was fantastic—however, I know my experience isn’t universal, especially since my school was a little bit different to most, I think.

That being said, I still think that sending your daughters to female-only secondary schools is something every parent should strive to do if they can. No other learning environment will ever be as good for girls as a same-sex school.

In terms of school staff, mine was about 95% female, and 5% male. The few male teachers we had were genuinely competent men and decent teachers, they were also watched like hawks. Our principal was female, all leadership positions in the school (such as House Leaders, Year Level Co-Ordinators, Department Heads, even the chaplain) were held by women. Our school psychologists, our nurses, our library technicians, our café ladies, our career advisors, our tutors—all were women. Our school houses (think like Harry Potter houses) were named after important women in our country’s history.

I went to a co-ed primary school. And whilst at twelve you might not have the words to describe it, graduating from a co-ed space, into an all-female space is really a giant weight off of your shoulders. You don’t realise how suffocating co-education is until you’re no longer having to bear it. It feels so much more natural, so much more free! You are welcomed as you are. You can be loud and unashamed of it. We joked frequently with each other and our teachers, laughed loudly and cared not whether our laughs were ‘ugly’. I found that teachers were far more supportive than they were in my co-ed school. For example, in a co-ed school I had been told frequently to ‘pipe down’ or to ‘reel it in’ from teachers, and more vexingly to ‘shut up’ from boys due to my boisterous personality. In high school? My teachers encouraged me to audition for the play because I had ‘great projection’. In every school programme (more on those later) that I was involved in, I was the one asked to give speeches about them at assembly. I was asked to be the lead of our house chants during our sports festivals. I was asked to join the debate team because of my passionate nature, which in primary school, had me known as ‘difficult’.

Likewise, I had a friend who was by nature quiet, and loved to draw. In primary school she’d doodled on the back of a work booklet, and when her teacher returned it, she’d taken off two points and had written a comment saying something about teachers in high school not accepting work that was drawn on.

Do you know what happened when she got to high school? Our English teacher had seen the eye she’d drawn on the back of our Romeo and Juliet test and had written, ‘beautiful!’ above it. The next test, she drew a two-headed cat with witches’ hats on both heads (I remember the left head was called Turpentine and the right head was called Esmeralda). Our teacher wrote, ‘wonderful!’ above it, with a smiley face.

The next day she got an email from our art teacher that had a PDF flyer of information on both in-school and local art competitions.

Anyway, she had questions and that teacher answered every single one of them. She also personally helped her select the works she wanted to submit. She ended up having two pieces shown in the school gallery, along forty pieces made by other girls. About five years later for our final year, on that art teacher’s recommendation (and tutelage!) she took all of the visual art subjects on offer. When she graduated, her final piece was shown at a public exhibition in our state’s capital city, that honoured the best pieces done by select graduating students in the state.

So yeah. Our teachers were pretty amazing. Of course, there was the odd teacher or two you would butt heads with but that’s just a universal school experience. Our humanities classes, like history, for example, often had a unit that would focus on the female experience of a certain time period. For example, when learning about WW2, we did projects on female resistance fighters et cetera.

We had health classes that were actually focused on female health. We learnt about female anatomy (even the clitoris! Though we were all about thirteen/fourteen at this time so we found it incredibly awkward to talk about), as well as symptoms of PCOS during our menstrual unit. We learnt about contraceptive methods and devices (however, as a Catholic school they did have to tell us that whilst these methods are available, the church-sanctioned method is of course, abstinence).

Whilst the majority of the girls shaved their legs and wore makeup, as someone who did neither of those things I rarely felt judgement about it (albeit, I think there was a little for my lack of makeup, but this only lasted the first two years). A good portion of our staff also did not wear makeup, I don’t recall this ever being commented on. And, by the time we’d reached about our third year, a good portion of my year level and the ones above did not wear makeup on a daily basis. Leg hair was not looked down upon by any of us I don’t think by this year either. In fact, if you were particularly hairy often your hairless friends asked to rub your legs!

We were never short of female role-models, our staff made sure of that. We had multiple days per year when guest speakers would come and talk to us, mostly these were women who were experts in their fields—whether that be neuroscience or computer science, linguistics and literature or mathematics, politics, et cetera. The only times we really had male guest speakers was when police officers (one male one female) came to give us an assembly about sexual peer-pressure and laws around sharing nudes that was basically, “these are common (male) manipulation tactics used to pressure you into doing something you don’t want to do, don’t fall for them”.

We were encouraged to take STEM subjects, and those of us that had taken interest in computer programming were sent to coding programmes in the city during school hours! That’s how keen our teachers were to get more women into the field! This was the same with the girls interested in politics, who got to go to Model UN events, as well as mock parliaments in the country’s capitol.

We had a lot of programmes generally. A few overseas ones for girls who were in LOTE (languages other than English) classes. A few interstate ones, too. And of course, local programmes and excursions. Most of them (aside from the LOTE ones which focused on immersion) were volunteer programmes aimed at helping women and girls. The rest were about furthering our own skills or learning new ones. Majority of these were year-level based, but a few depended on the clubs/groups/classes you were in. For example, I was part of the Writer’s Club, and we took an excursion to the state Writer’s Festival and listened to female writers as well as feminist panels. We also had self-defence programmes every year.

In terms of peers I generally found everyone to be quite amiable by the time we’d reached our third/fourth year. There’s a common myth about all girls schools being filled with ‘catty’ girls who are constantly bitching about one another, but I really did not find that to ring true. There were a few fights and arguments in the earlier years, I was part of quite a lot lol but that’s honestly… just something that happens at school, at any school. Largely, we were good to each other. If someone was crying there was always someone who’d ask her what was wrong. If you missed the notes on the slide, there was always a girl willing to share her notes with you.

I think going to an all-girl’s school, and not having that much interaction with the opposite sex generally for that six-year period truly does something, I think, to your psyche. We are socialised to look down on our fellow woman, socialised to look down upon ourselves. But actually being constantly surrounded by women, and almost ONLY women, really helps to undo that. Even now I could not describe the fierce love I have for all those women and girls I came in contact with during my time there—even the ones I bickered with. Each and every single woman I met there enriched my life in some way or another. I think that is the effect of consistently spending time in any female-only space: developing a true appreciation for women. It is the only reasonable conclusion to come to.

I have been out of high school for two years, and in university for one. Among the many men I have met since, none of them have even been able to hold a candle to the any women and girls I know.

Anyway. TLDR: it slapped, send your daughters to same-sex schools!!

[ransprang]

Hiya! This is my first time requesting a matchup from any blog! I'd love a romantic match up for Fullmetal Alchemist and OHSHC. I'm pan and Female.

I'm a Scorpio, but I'm not really big on star signs, though sometimes when i had to go through papers at my old job I'd look in the Horoscope section just to see if there were any joke ones.

I consider myself an ambivert. I'm a bit shy at first and I get shaky and quiet when ordering food. But once I'm friends with someone I tend to match their energy. I also start to cuss a lot when I feel comfortable around someone!

I love to cook and bake, a lot, there's no recipe I won't try! Literally just before sending this I made Russian tea cookies! Tomorrow imma try my hand at Baklava. I also love to draw, paint and read.

I'm currently in college and taking classes in humanities, I really like to learn about the history behind the arts. It's honestly very interesting to see how art, in all forms, changes throughout time. I'm also a huge science nerd, I love space, paleontology, and biology of all kids really. I also really enjoy rock climbing and hiking, I love nature and being outdoors in general.

(I highly recommend going to South Dakota at some point if you enjoy hiking and rocklimbing, the rocky mountains are gorgeous. The mica in the ground makes the dirt sparkle lol)

I don't really have a specific 'type' but a sense of humor is a must. I'm good with PDA. I don't want to have kids in the future, unless adopted or through a surrogate.

thanks for your request anon. Your match up is....

ADMIN SAN

just kidding!! she thinks you're super cool and wants to be eat Russian tea cookies with you. Anyways, we hope you like your actual matches!!

(fmab & ohshc match ups are under the cut)

Your FMAB match up is.................

EDWARD ELRIC

SFW

He would fully roast those horoscopes with you. Nothing gives him more joy than roasting astrology sluts when mercury is going into retrograde  

You both have science is common so you could have cute library dates where y’all devour anything that piques your interest.

He’s pretty outdoorsy too since he s got to keep his body fit, especially since he s missing a few limbs here and there. He also yeets out of Resembool any chance he gets so y’all would have tons of fun travelling together

You both could also have fun camping, especially since he’ll be full of camping skills after his lil training arc as a kid! You guys would enjoy living intimately with nature, admiring it’s beauty, and of course eating ants while talking about how all is one and one is all

Ed has a decent sense of humor and you guys would have inside jokes and love roasting each other. He’s funny and knows how to have fun in his own way. Although you might wanna steer clear of the short jokes~

Ed exhibits classic fatherless behavior so in line with that, he wouldn’t want kids either (ignoring the anime)! especially after his rocky childhood

You and Ed would have wonderful cussing matches since neither of you are shy about your linguistic abilities and are happy to flaunt them ;)

PDA might be a bit hard on him, especially at first, and he would blush like a little bitch. But eventually he would get used to it and enjoy occasionally putting his cold metallic arm around you  <3

Your OHSHC match up is................

Haruhi Fujioka

SFW

You guys would meet by chance at the library, since none of the rich kids would use it too often (they prefer the library at home) and start talking over the different books. Haruhi had already seen your name on the books she checks out so it just made sense to approach you.

You guys would start dating soon enough and then you would begin requesting her at the host club too, to make sure no one else gets her for too long. You could bring her cookies and whatever else you make, and she would love them!

She would help you with your social anxiety too, and be your biggest cheerleader whenever you overcome your fears. In turn, you hold her close on stormy nights <3

She would be super impressed with all the variety of cool things you know and you guys would have a great time learning from each other. Her being a law nerd and you with your science interests!

Although Haruhi is not the most physically active she would go with you on treks if you nagged her enough. It’s good to get some physical exercise anyway! But be prepared for the host club boys following you on helicopters to make sure you both manage alright out in the wilderness

In terms of sense of humor she’s managed to develop some version of a twisted, dry wit thanks to her trauma with the ouran boys even though she mostly plays the straight man. Regardless it’s a beautiful lesbian relationship so that means neither of you have to be the straight man :)  

Your adopted kids,

admins san & sar