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Transcript Episode 46: Social dance of phatics

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 46: Social dance of phatics. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 46 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about phatics, the parts of conversation that we use for their social meaning rather than their literal meaning. First, exciting book news! The paperback version of my book about internet language, Because Internet, is out in the world very, very shortly or possibly after if you’re listening to this more than a few days after it came out.

Lauren: If you’ve been thinking about buying Because Internet and you’re like, “I just need it to be cuter,” the paperback version is officially 200% cuter. It is so tiny and cute.

Gretchen: Or if you’re a person who likes to have the spines of books bend between your pages as you read them, I understand. You can now get that in paperback. This is a book all about various aspects of language on internet. We did a whole episode last year when it came out in hardback about various aspects of internet language when it comes to emoji. We’ll be talking a bit more about internet-y things in this episode as well. If you like thinking about how we text and how we email and how we use memes and all of these types of things, or if you wanna know how other people are doing these things, this is a useful book for you.

Lauren: You can still buy the hardback or listen to the audiobook if, for some reason, you are not into adorably cute, very bendable paperbacks.

Gretchen: Yes. People have been saying very nice things to me about the audio recording, which I did myself, so if you like hearing my voice on this podcast and you would like to hear my voice for nine hours straight without any Lauren, you can also do that with the audiobook.

Lauren: I should record a little backchannel track for people who just want to pretend it’s an extended version of the podcast. “Hm, that’s interesting!”

Gretchen: Like a ten-second loop, “Oh, how interesting!” so you can just stick it in wherever you want in the audiobook.

Lauren: “Yeah!” “Ooo!” “Ahh!” “Uh huh.”

Gretchen: This sounds like a brilliant plan. We need to work on that.

Lauren: Yes. This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about music and language. It’s our 41st bonus episode, which means you can get that and 40 other bonus episodes of the show, if you’ve listened to all of the main episodes, at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Lots more lingthusiastic content out there for you to enjoy.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hey, Lauren!

Lauren: Hey, Gretchen!

Gretchen: How’s it going?

Lauren: No bad. How are you?

Gretchen: Pretty good.

Lauren: It’s nice weather today.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s pretty hot here actually.

Lauren: Ah, yeah, right. I forgot it’s summer for you.

Gretchen: Oh, right. You guys must have your sweaters out by now.

Lauren: It’s a bit chilly in the morning.

Gretchen: Yeah, well, okay.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah. All right.

Lauren: I better let you go.

Gretchen: Okay. Great to see you.

Lauren: Have a nice one.

Gretchen: Yeah, you too.

Lauren: Bye!

Gretchen: Bye!

Lauren: See ya!

Gretchen: Bye!

Lauren: You hang up.

Gretchen: Click noise. Insert special effect here. I don’t think we decided whether we were having an imaginary street-side conversation or an imaginary phone conversation because I feel like the beginning of that was imaginary street-side conversation and the end part of that was imaginary phone conversation.

Lauren: The best thing about it was that was a conversation where we ostensibly didn’t say anything meaningful, but we had a whole conversation.

Gretchen: It’s a conversation that most people have probably had in some form or another. It’s extremely familiar. It’s very ritualised.

Lauren: That’s because the language that we use in greetings, in leave-taking, is something that is less about the literal content of what’s being said and it’s more about the social meaning of starting a conversation or ending a conversation or just acknowledging each other’s presence by talking about the weather.

Gretchen: Acknowledging the world – it is a bit hard to talk about the weather over the internet, as we’ve discovered, because we don’t necessarily have the same weather, which is the version that you have when you’re meeting someone on the street. In many cases, it’s less about the specific words that’s being said and more about the social function of “I’m acknowledging that you’re here. We’re having a ritualised exchange.” It’s like doing a little social dance. We have a couple steps of a waltz, or a macarena, or whatever your dance of choice is, and then we move on with our day. It doesn’t have to be a conversation that has a lot of content to it. We still have this acknowledgement of each other’s presence.

Lauren: This dance-move ritual speaking is known as a type of speech called “phatic” or “phatic expressions.”

Gretchen: “Phatic” is one of those great words that I find myself telling people about a lot because it’s like everyone’s encountered phatic expressions – there’s these things like “How are you?” and “Hello,” like the first thing you learn in a language class. Yet, the word “phatic” itself – it’s P-H-A-T-I-C – it’s less familiar even though these things are so very familiar.

Lauren: We’re so used to these phatic interactions that until something jars with them, we don’t often notice them. We can go through our day using many phatic greetings and leave-takings, but we don’t always notice them until they maybe go off the rails or we’re trying to do one set of dance moves and someone else is doing another.

Gretchen: Especially, sometimes you get a phatic expression that starts changing – it goes according to certain fads, I guess, not that kind of “fad-tic.” One of these examples is with what you say in response to “Thank you.”

Lauren: See, I always get in a little bit of trouble because my first reaction is always to be like, “No worries.”

Gretchen: Right. That’s the very Australian response, right?

Lauren: Yeah. In fact, someone was like, “Well, you say ‘You’re welcome.’” It’s just like, “Ah.” Yeah, I guess that is an answer as well, but it’s not my first, informal default.

Gretchen: I feel like “You’re welcome” is the version that shows up in the English language learning textbook not so much the version that I actually say on a regular basis.

Lauren: What do you normally reply to a “Thanks” with?

Gretchen: I think I would say, “No problem,” maybe also “No worries” sometimes. I think it’s spread here. But “No problem” is definitely one of the defaults for me. This can create some tension because if all of these are accomplishing the same thing – they’re the thing that you say in response to “Thank you” – they’re all fitting in the same function socially. But because if you’re used to one and you hear the other, you might interpret it more literally. That can sometimes make people start over-examining and questioning the individual words in that. “What do you mean ‘No problem’? Of course it’s not a problem! What do you mean? Of course it’s not a ‘worry’!” Or like, “Well, you are welcome. Are you not welcome?” People can get very caught up in the literal meaning of phatic expressions when something’s undergoing a change, like changing from “You’re welcome” to “No problem” to “No worries” or these kinds of things and think that somebody, therefore, in this interaction must be doing something wrong, when it’s really just the like, okay, language changes sometimes. This is one that’s undergoing a particular change. People are using it phatically.

Lauren: I think when everyone is joining in a square dance, you don’t really notice that you’re all seamlessly participating in the same dance. Then, if someone pulls some other moves, it can feel very disconcerting.

Gretchen: It’s like, oh, now I’m doing the chicken dance in the middle of the square dance.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: There is an interesting example of this that came up for me when I was in UK. I think I was specifically in Canterbury. I was going into various shops and, you know, people do – like, you say “Hello” when you go into the shop. People were saying to me, “You all right?” And I was like, “What do you mean? Is something wrong?” Because to me “Are you all right?” is like “Are you okay?” That’s what you say to someone who’s fallen down in the street and you need to know if you need to call an ambulance or something.

Lauren: Or you’re just checking whether you’re bleeding from the head or something.

Gretchen: Right. Like, “Are you gonna be able to get up by yourself or do you need some assistance from a passers-by?” Right?

Lauren: Oh, no. You were getting too sucked into the literal meaning. They were just saying, “Hello. I’m starting this interaction.”

Gretchen: Exactly. They were really saying the equivalent of where I would say, “How are you?” or “How’s it going?” Once I started going to the second and the third and the fourth shop, I started figuring this out. The first one I was like, “What’s going on?” But then you hear it again and you’re like, “It must be me. I am the outsider here.” Whereas, the inverse – I think if you say, “What’s up?” to at least some British people, they interpret that as like, “What’s wrong?” The same passer-by fell down in the street and you’re asking if they need assistance. Like, “What’s up?” some people interpret that way. Whereas, to me, it’s just like, “Oh, how’s it going? What’s up?” they all mean the same thing.

Lauren: I like when people get very distracted by what the “it” is in “How’s it going?”

Gretchen: “How’s what going?”

Lauren: Which in Australian English can be completely reduced to /haʊz gɑ̃/.

Gretchen: “How’s goin’?”

Lauren: Yeah. Just to show that it really is ritualised, you don’t even need to clearly articulate it.

Gretchen: I had this fun experiment that I would do in high school on my poor, unsuspecting classmates.

Lauren: I love a good Gretchen proto-linguist story.

Gretchen: I’ve now memorialised this story in the pages of Because Internet because I was leading into discussing phatic expressions on the internet and I was like, “Oh, I need an offline example, so I’ll write this down.” So far, no one has contacted me about this. I don’t know if they noticed at the time. What I would do is there was this thing that people would do which, you know, is possibly the case in any high school, I dunno, where you’re walking down the hallways between classes and you see your friends who aren’t in the same class as you. You’re like, “Hey, so-and-so, what’s up?” “Hey, what’s up?” And you just keep going as you’re passing each other in the hallway between one class and the next. I realised, because I was a budding linguist, that sometimes people would say, “What’s up?” “Not much.” “Nothing much.” Sometimes, people would say, “How’s it going?” “Good. How are you?” These were accomplishing the same thing. I didn’t know the word “phatic expression,” but I was like, “These are accomplishing the same thing.” So, what I did was if people said, “What’s up?” I would say, “Good. How are you?” And if people said, “How’s it going?” I would say, “Not much. What’s up with you?”

Lauren: I do like it when people do this unintentionally because they’re both on autopilot for their own dance moves. I’m not surprised that you of all people decided to use this as an opportunity to try that out.

Gretchen: Look, it’s very typical. I will grant this.

Lauren: What was the response? What was the early data collection?

Gretchen: The thing is, is like, people wouldn’t notice. This is why I think no one from my high school has emailed me to be like, “Hey, I read this thing in your book and I remember you doing this.” Because I just didn’t say anything. As long as you do it without missing a beat and just kind of as if it’s totally normal and natural to say, people don’t notice because they’re both accomplishing the same thing phatically. It’s when you catch yourself and you’re like, “Oh, what’s up? No. I mean, how’s it going with you?” Then, people – like, “Oh, no! Something’s broken” because they’ve recovered the literal meaning. But as long as you just treat it as a dance, it’s kind of like when I was learning how to do swing dancing for a while. When I was learning how to do it, the most important thing was just to not stop. If you stopped and were like, “Oh, no. Did I get that step right?” Whereas, you could just keep going and, even if the steps weren’t perfect, you could figure it out.

Lauren: This is basically me when it comes to dancing, yeah.

Gretchen: I feel like we should specify that we’re not talking about the kind of dancing that you do when you’re alone at home in your pyjamas and you’re just rocking out in front of the computer. We’re talking about the social dances that require you to take into account other people and how they exist and move together without people in some fashion.

Lauren: As long as you move some limb on every beat of the macarena, you can pretend to be keeping up.

Gretchen: I wonder how much you could mess with the macarena and still have people think of it as a recognisable macarena. This sounds fun.

Lauren: I feel like high school corridor Gretchen would approve this experiment.

Gretchen: How badly can I misspell the YMCA dance? Just wondering.

Lauren: Other than people mis-stepping or deliberately mis-stepping, the other time phatics can break down and people get a bit unable to navigate them is when the literal context breaks this ritualisation. If everyone’s going through a bad patch at the same time, and you call someone up and you’re like – the default to start that conversation is “How are you?” It’s just like, there’s also this second layer of the dance where you can all be like, “Yeah, look. Fine, I guess,” where the tendency to just wanna say, “Yeah, fine. How are you?” is at loggerheads with the fact that we all know we’re going through a bad phase at the moment. It’s like, “Ugh.” But I also really appreciate that if you are going through a bad phase, it’s still completely fine as part of the ritualised dance to be like, “Yeah, I’m fine.” You don’t actually have to engage with someone if you don’t want to.

Gretchen: Exactly. There are non-responses you can give, “Not too bad” or “Oh, well, it’s a day” and just keep going with that, which means you don’t have to give maybe strangers in a café or something this great insight into your interiority because you’re not actually friends. You can just do the ritual dance and you have done the dance at the ritual level and it can be okay to stay there with other types of acquaintances.

Lauren: The other time I really notice the ritualised nature of phatic expressions is when I’m learning a new language because they’re often, like, Day 1 Chapter 1 of a textbook. You learn how to say “Hello, how are you?” “Good-bye. Have a nice day.” You also just have to use them a lot if you’re speaking a language or if you have a good language teacher who makes you use these in every class. They often are also the things that stay in your brain the longest.

Gretchen: They have that ritualised response – it’s like one person yawns and so you need to yawn. One person says, “How are you?” and you can’t help but reply, “Good. How are you?” even if you’re not thinking about it too hard.

Lauren: Once you learn the steps to the dance in a particular culture or language, in Nepal, for example, instead of “How are you?” or talking about the weather, the opening move of the dance is “You eaten?” And you reply with, “Yeah, I’ve eaten” or “Haha, not yet.”

Gretchen: That’s great.

Lauren: But until I really got the hang of it being a ritualised dance, I’d take it really literally and be like, “Oh, well. I had breakfast a little while ago, but I’m not that hungry now, so maybe I’ll eat later.” People would just be like, “What is happening?”

Gretchen: “Why are you doing this?” Because of course you’ve eaten at some point in the past, but maybe it was too – yeah.

Lauren: They were just like – I was just moving the conversation on. I am actually calling to ask you about going out this afternoon, and I’d been stuck on eating still.

Gretchen: It’s also funny. I’ve noticed this especially doing radio interviews for the book actually is because when you’re on the radio, they want you to do a mic check. To do a mic check, they usually just talk for 30 seconds about anything. The standard question that they ask you is what you had for breakfast. They don’t care what you had for breakfast. They don’t care if it was healthy. They don’t care if you just had coffee. They really don’t care what you had for breakfast. They just need you to talk for 30 seconds. The first couple times I went into a radio station and they asked me what I had for breakfast, and I’d be like, “Uh, you know, oh, did I have eggs or cereal this morning?” and really have to think about it very hard.

Lauren: They’re just asking you a very function question and you are taking it way too literally. You’re like me in Nepal.

Gretchen: Exactly. This is like the “Have you eaten?” question in a couple different places that people can do this. I also noticed this in Montreal when I moved here because sometimes you learn a phatic expression in a textbook that’s not actually the current phatic expression anymore or in a particular area.

Lauren: “Ah, thank you.” “You’re welcome.”

Gretchen: Right. If you learned “You’re welcome” and then show up in an English-speaking area and everyone’s saying, “No problem” and “No worries” and you’re like, “Oh, no! No one prepared me for this.” I remember shortly after I moved to Montreal, and I had learned my language textbook, like, the way you say, “My name is” is “je m'appelle Gretchen” or whatever.

Lauren: Even as someone who speaks no functional French, I know that is how you say that in French.

Gretchen: The literal translation of it is like, “I call myself.” It’s using the verb “to be called” like an “appellation.” Whereas, the vernacular way that people actually say this, at least in Montreal, is generally “Moi c’est Gretchen.” This means literally “Me, it’s Gretchen.”

Lauren: Translating these things literally never works well.

Gretchen: Right! The literal translations never work particularly well. Completely different words, same social function. I remember I was at a crowded party or something. I think I might’ve actually been trying to swing dance.

Lauren: Excellent.

Gretchen: It was a bit of a loud environment. And somebody gestured to themself and was like, “Moi c’est” whatever this person’s name was. I was like, “What? What am I supposed to say to this? What do you want in response?” It was clearly this ritualised thing. Then, if you wanna ask someone else’s name, you could say, “toi,” like, “you,” which, again, is not how I have learned to do this in the language learning classroom sense.

Lauren: Oh, my gosh. You had to learn new dance steps and new social dance steps at the same time. What a champion.

Gretchen: I know! It’s so poetic. What a metaphor we have going.

Lauren: I love cross-cultural examples of phatics and ritualised speech. I’m actually very disappointed in the lack of examples on the Wikipedia page for these. If people want to share examples – but even more excitingly, if you want to edit the Wikipedia page so there’s more than English and then a couple of Japanese and Persian examples because there is a lot of cross-cultural variation.

Gretchen: That’s so public-spirited of you, Lauren. It’s always really interesting to hear people’s examples and it’s very salient to you when you trip into something that’s not the phatic expressions you’re used to. The ones you are used to are so non-salient until something happens. It’s a really fun area of stories in different languages or different cultural circumstances.

Lauren: Another place I really enjoy people playing around with phatic expressions is in fiction, especially because we’re both big sci fi and fantasy readers. Being set in different worlds or different times, it’s such a great opportunity to play around with these rituals and create norms that are very different to ours.

Gretchen: Absolutely. One example that I really like is from The Just City by Jo Walton, which is set in an ancient Greek-esque fantasy world where one of the characters is fictionalised Socrates. The characters all say to each other when they greet each other, “Joy to you,” in English.

Lauren: Oh, that’s nice.

Gretchen: Yeah. Which is this different greeting from, you know, “Good morning,” “Good night.” It very clearly has this function of a greeting and a farewell, I think, they also say when they’re leaving. I asked Jo, because she’s a Montrealer and I know her, if this is a translation of something. She was like, yeah, this is a translation of a greeting “χαίρετε,” which gets used both in Homer and Plato and all the way up to Modern Greek that people used, sometimes translated as “Rejoice” but also “Joy to you” is a reasonable English translation.

Lauren: Cool. So bringing a set of phatic rituals from one culture and language into the fictionalised world as part of giving it a bit of an authentic flavour.

Gretchen: Right. This explanation isn’t in the text anywhere. You don’t need to provide this additional context to a reader because they can figure out that the characters are arriving and leaving and greeting each other. It just helps emphasise it is a bit of a different world. Especially probably saying something like, “Good-bye,” which in etymology is “God be with you,” might strike you as kind of weird in this context where there is Athena and Apollo and not a god that is the form of the one that’s the etymology of “Good-bye.” It provides a useful little nugget of world building to have the phatic expressions also be different.

Lauren: It’s one of the things I really enjoyed about working with P. M. Freestone on the language construction for her Shadowscent duology is that she thought really hard about plausible in-world phatic expressions. So, the leave-taking ritual is “Stars keep you,” which is related to the star wheels, which are related to destiny but also navigation and a few spoiler-y plot points that I won’t mention from those books. It’s just one of the little things that really situates you in a world outside of our own. I always really appreciate that.

Gretchen: It’s that extra thing that indicates something in the book. There’s also the classic “May the force be with you” Star Wars leave-taking expression.

Lauren: Which always rubs up against the phatic expression of “And also with you” from Catholic church excursions in my childhood.

Gretchen: Yeah. I definitely had enough exposure to this that I am like, “And also with you?”

Lauren: It’s like, oh no, we’re mixing up two dances here.

Gretchen: I think that speaks to the power of the phatic expression as a dance that often has a call and response or a first part/second part – or multipart – thing where you do have this impetus to respond in a particular way, the same way if someone just lets “How are you?” hang. You’re like, “No, no, no. I need to resolve that.”

Lauren: I’ve actually been very pleased in my elaborate multi-year Star Trek television-watching deep dive that I’ve been on to discover the response to “Live long and prosper” is “Peace and long life.”

Gretchen: Oh, that’s very nice. I know the first part but not the second part.

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, you can just reply with the gesture. You can reply by repeating. But there is actually a call and response option there which really fits with that phatics as dances where you’re both making moves.

Gretchen: There’s the new world-building task of make a two-part phatic construction. It’s not just phatics in face-to-face communication. It’s also there are written phatics. One of my favourite kinds are these letter-writing conventions where you have these very elaborate greetings and farewells. This is not as common in the modern-day email. There’s this great example of that in the musical Hamilton where in the archival records between these two characters – well, real people, I guess – they have exchanged a bunch of letters that culminate in them fighting a duel. But they sign each of these letters, that are clearly very angry because it ends in a duel, with “Your obedient servant” even though they’re really annoyed at each other.

Lauren: I feel like that is an even more extreme version of the saying that you’re fine when you’re not fine.

Gretchen: Right! Clearly, you’re not an obedient servant. This irony is so noticeable to the modern reader that there’s a song in the musical about them fighting the duel which has as the chorus the obedient servant part because the dramatic irony is just too tempting for a modern reader. Although, back in the day, it’s not particularly ironic because this was just a stock phrase.

Lauren: They were just signing off their letters as they were taught.

Gretchen: That’s just what you put. That’s kind of like saying, “Sincerely.” Sometimes, you can send someone a really nasty letter and still say “Sincerely” and you’re like, “Ha ha ha! I hate you but sincerely.”

Lauren: Yes. I feel like we maybe are more attuned to the dissonance in writing because we, just like with writing as a practice itself, have to learn it very overtly, often at school. I still remember having lessons in how to set out a letter. There is a lot about learning phatics that happens throughout your childhood years, which I find interesting because we tend to think about language learning as this thing you get out of the way by the time you’ve gone to school. You can speak but learning the more elaborate dances of these phatic turn-taking expression dances, we do it our whole life as we move through different places where we need to practice them.

Gretchen: There’s this really brilliant example of this from Winnie the Pooh.

Lauren: Oh, excellent.

Gretchen: Which, I think, children’s literature often illustrates this literalness because adults find it very funny. It goes, “‘And how are you?’ said Winnie the Pooh. Eeyore shook his head from side to side. ‘Not very how,’ he said, ‘I don’t seem to have felt at all how for a long time.’ ‘Dear, dear,’ said Pooh, ‘I’m sorry about that. Let’s have a look at you.’”

Lauren: Oh, bless poor old Eeyore.

Gretchen: Poor Eeyore.

Lauren: Poor Eeyore not feeling very well and not realising that he was just meant to say, “Fine. How are you?”

Gretchen: Or even, “Not so great,” but – there’re ways to say, “Not so how,” but it’s not the “How are you?” “I’m not how at all.” Or “How are you?” “How do I what?” which was one of my favourites as a kid.

Lauren: That’s a good one. In Nepali, one of the informal ways, instead of saying, “Have you eaten?” is to just say, “How’s it?” I definitely need to say, “Tik chha.” I definitely like, the first many times that was said to me, was just like, “How’s what? What am I meant to be replying about? I don’t even know what I’m meant to be talking about let alone how it is.” I feel for Eeyore on many levels there.

Gretchen: I think “How do you do” is a really good example of one that’s gotten older and become more deprecated. I wouldn’t expect anyone to say that now. I had one teacher in school that would say, “How art?” whenever he would see us in the hallway. It was just the thing that he said.

Lauren: That is the person who still practices Medieval court dances while we’re all doing the macarena.

Gretchen: This is like, yeah, you’re doing a different dance, but it was still very clear in context, right?

Lauren: That is an adorable affectation.

Gretchen: Sometimes, I say, “how goes” and I don’t know where I got it, but people seem to understand it. Maybe it is a semi-literal translation from French because in French “ça va” is like “goes it” or “it goes.” I think another part of the child language acquisition bit that happens at an older age is also acquiring things like phone scripts like, what do you say when you’re on the phone? Because it’s not quite the same as when you’re greeting someone in person.

Lauren: Oh, my gosh. I used to hate the phone. My mom used to – I remember being overtly coached by my mom in what I should say, and she was like, “And then the person will say, ‘Hi, this is blah. Is your mom there?’” I just used to be like, “Okay. Are you sure they’re gonna say that?” I just hadn’t got the dance moves down pat and it felt like a lot more effort. My mom was like, “I already know exactly how this phone call’s gonna go. It’s fine.”

Gretchen: I find as a kid I really hated trying to pick up the phone, too. Even as a young teenager I really hated picking up the phone, especially once I sounded old enough that people thought I might be my mom, but I still clearly wasn’t. Now, as an adult, I find myself using the scripts that I overheard my parents use. If I need to spell my surname over the phone, I spell it the same way my mom spelled it in the same groups – M-C-C, U-L-L, O-C-H. You pick up those ritualised bits of conversations. It’s easier for me to do it as an adult because I’m able to just directly access the adult rituals rather than try to do this weird child-mediated ritual of like, “Is your mom there?” I never heard my parents do that half of the conversation.

Lauren: You’ll be shocked to know that once I got the phone script down pat, I used to enjoy messing with it.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Of course you did!

Lauren: Which used to happen a lot because, as I’ve probably talked about in the naming episodes, both of my parents are called “Chris” for short. So, people would be like, “Hi, is Chris Gawne there?” And the only acceptable moves usually are, “Yes, I’ll get him for you” or “No, he’s not in at the moment. Can I take a message?” No one expects the, “Which one?”

Gretchen: Because, especially if they only know one of your parents, I guess then they think they know unambiguously who they’re asking for.

Lauren: Very satisfying. Once you get comfortable with the script, the power that it allows you to have is very satisfying.

Gretchen: One of the things that I was fascinated to find when I was diving into the research on this for Because Internet is that when the phone was introduced as a piece of technology, this didn’t just stress like you and I and probably a lot of people out as kids, this stressed out the whole society.

Lauren: That is actually really reassuring.

Gretchen: Right? People were really unsure about what you should say when you pick up a phone because how do you say, “Good morning” if you don’t know if it’s morning where they are or, like, I dunno. There were a couple options that were proposed for things that one could say on answering the phone.

Lauren: Was one of them “Hello”?

Gretchen: One of them was “Hello.”

Lauren: Okay. Good.

Gretchen: One of them was “Ahoy hoy.”

Lauren: Oh, Gretchen, we have squandered an opportunity that was presented to us as a society.

Gretchen: The thing is, is that now “Hello” is this general-purpose greeting, but it wasn’t at the time. It was a thing you said, like, “Hallo” to summon dogs and stuff.

Lauren: Oh.

Gretchen: “Hello” was not a greeting at the time.

Lauren: Right. It’s not like they were just like, “Well, we’ll take this thing we use face-to-face and use it on the telephone.”

Gretchen: No, no, no. This was like, “We’re gonna invent this new greeting.”

Lauren: Ah.

Gretchen: For a while it was like this telephone thing that one said and people who said “Hello” face-to-face were a little bit gauche. It’s kind of like some people get worried now if people say “LOL” or “OMG” face-to-face, and you’re like, “I don’t know. That’s an internet thing. Can you actually say that out loud?” Then it was like, “But you’re saying ‘Hello’ and you’re not on the telephone.”

Lauren: “Ahoy hoy.”

Gretchen: “Ahoy hoy.” Another suggestion which I’m pretty glad this one didn’t catch on was “What is wanted.”

Lauren: Oh, that sounds very – that is a very aggressive first move.

Gretchen: It’s very abrupt. One of the suggestions for what you said when you finished your phone conversation was just “That is all.”

Lauren: And just hang up?

Gretchen: Just hang up.

Lauren: I mean, I think it would’ve been better for everyone to stop us from the endless good-bye loops if we had just, as a society, accepted that that was the phatic conclusion.

Gretchen: Well, I think there’s actually something really useful about those good-bye loops though because when you say good-bye to someone in person, you get to watch them pull away from you, if necessary, you know, very Mr. Darcy-esque like, oh no, I’m gonna watch them pull away from me. You have this gradual leaving. Whereas, when you hang up the phone or when you hang up a video call for that matter, the rupture is very final. You hang up and then it’s over. You need more steps to have happen so that you don’t just feel like, “Well, that’s over and that’s done.” You need a longer turn-taking or leave-taking process. I think about the same thing doing video calls where you have a whole group of video-called people. Everyone’s waving at each other as you’re leaving. That’s kinda that signal, when everyone’s doing the wave in the video, that now you can click on the X and you won’t be missing anything because you’ve all synced up on the waves, which is a lot easier to do in the video space than it is in audio only.

Lauren: For sure. The anxiety about phone greetings reminds me a lot of the almost annual put it in your calendar discussion about anxieties over how to start and end emails. As a society, we still haven’t collectively agreed on a “Hello” equivalent.

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s several and it depends on which subculture you’re in. It’s interesting because in text messages the norm is very much in the other direction. You often don’t begin a text message or a chat or something with like, “Hey, how are you?” I think people often view if you just send someone an instant message or a chat message, some of them it’s like, “Hey, how’s it going?” without any indication of what you want from them. It’s sort of weird. If you’re gonna start a conversation with someone in chat, you have the responsibility to introduce a topic because that way they know what they’re getting into when they send that first reply. They can judge if they have time to respond. It’s more like, “Hey, just have this question about this thing” or “I just saw this link and I thought you might like it.” Then, the person knows when they start replying what kind of conversation they’re trying to enter into. But in email, it’s the inverse. You get this sort of, people making fun of grandparents texting of like, “Hi, so-and-so. How’s it going? Here’s this thing. Love, Grandma and Grandpa” in the text message. Whereas, in email, the inverse is the case where you do wanna have these greetings and people who don’t send the greetings, sometimes they’re the ones that occasion angst or which greetings you pick occasion a lot of angst.

Lauren: I think we should go back to “Your obedient servant.”

Gretchen: One of the examples that I actually had in Because Internet of these elaborate phatic expressions in letters was, “To the right noble and valorous Sir Walter Raleigh” from this letter from Edmund Spenser. I cited this as an example of like, nobody does this anymore. Then, there was a class who was reading the book as part of their internet linguistics/digital media communications class, and one of the students sent their professor an email with “To the right noble and valorous Professor so-and-so” because of the book. I was just so pleased about this. They told me about it. I was just so delighted. Maybe we should go back to this. It’s also one of these cases where as long as someone isn’t actually sending you a nasty email where they call you nasty names, which is definitely they’re definitely trying to be very rude if they’re doing that, but if the case is like, “Is this person using a comma or not?” “Is this person using ‘Hi’ or ‘Hey’ or ‘Dear’ or something,” like everyone here is trying to be polite. Those are all things that people are trying to be polite or someone is signing off like, “I hope you’re well” or “Hope you’re bearing up” like, “Hope you’re doing as well as possible under the circumstances.” There’re all these different variants that one can use and they’re all trying to be polite. I think that thinking of them as part of the unified class of phatic expressions can help us relax a little bit about trying to read too much into the messages that we’re getting or getting really worried about the messages that we’re sending other people because it’s a reflection that, ultimately, everyone’s trying.

Lauren: I really like thinking about phatics as this more abstract attempt at a cultural dance because it makes me far more relaxed about when these friction points happen, and people maybe don’t use the forms you expect. It allows me to reflect on my own choices and how I am maybe doing social politeness. It also just makes me really satisfied when you and someone else get all the dance moves right in a little interaction in a shop and you can think about it more in terms of the social interaction it’s achieving rather than the specific steps that you’re taking.

Gretchen: I think this is one of the things that attracts a lot of people to linguistics is having this stuff of like, “Oh, here’s this thing I took for granted that I haven’t thought about and here’s actually what’s going on” or “Here’s this overt description of what I’m doing” and this can make it easier to do the dance and not worry that, oh, maybe it’s inauthentic because the authenticity is doing the dance. We’re participating in a particular dance, and you’re seeing someone who’s doing this dance, and there’s still space to have the deep heart-to-heart conversations. But not all the conversations that we have need to be that heart-to-heart. There’s a space for both kinds of interactions.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, schwa badges, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, my book about internet language, now available in paperback, is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. You’ll see me make a small cameo in Chapter 5 of Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and wish there were more? You can get access to 41 bonus episodes right now to listen to at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and other rewards as well as helping keep the show ad free. Recent bonus topics include music, linguistics for kids, and linguistics and numbers. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their lives.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is Ancient City by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #episode 46 #podcasts #transcripts #phatics #conversation #pragmatics

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tsukkismoonlight · 3 years ago

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hello! i do bio checks due to my rules (also please read those if you haven’t! and scroll to the end so you can read the line that lets me know you’ve read them! if you don’t want to publicly display your age, you can message me and it’ll be deleted right after!) but i noticed yours and thought i’d help!

you have to do it on the web version — go to settings and click edit theme — but basically when you want to link smth, the format is: a href= (insert your link here)>(insert word of choice)</a> and that’s it!

if you want to link more than one word, it’s usually smth like (link format here)>(first word of choice</a> (non linked words) then the link and word of choice again!

for ex: i’ll use my current bio to help! “forty eight hours can indeed change the world.”

it would look smth like this: <p>(first link)>forty eight</a> hours can indeed change the (second link format)>world</a>

tips: be wary of your spaces for linked words, they’ll become linked too and can throw off the look of the phrase!

lmk if you need to know anything else!

First!! Thank you so so much!! Ive had someone else tell me how to put the links but it was so long ago and I lost the screenshot!! Ill have to work on my bio later when i get home !

Alsooo i totally forgot that my age/name/anything isnt in my bio but im 20! People can call me Maddi or mads or maddox, ive got a little bit more info on my MHA page @out-of-my-way-extras ! The about me post might be a bit old and in need of an update but yeah !

#manager's recs #karasuno's mailbox

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vegan-kaktus · 4 years ago

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Tutorial: How to default the penguin

@grilledcheese-aspiration asked me if I had any step-by-step tutorial on how I defaulted the penguin, but I had none, so I made one! :-D (beware of long post and many pictures beneath the cut)

Before we begin, this is a tutorial on how to default the penguin and add new meshes to it, not just a simple texture replacement. If you’re wondering why I’m making a tutorial on this it’s because the penguin has too many morphs and can’t be exported out of Milkshape, but I found a way around that :-)

With that out of the way, you have to have SimPE with NVIDIA DDS, Milkshape with the plugins and the seasons expansionpack of ts2 installed. It might be possible to do this with blender or any other meshing program, but I will only be showing how I did it with Milkshape.

If you know how to extract files etc (the basic stuff), you might want to start at Part 2: Adding new meshes, 4. I would say this tutorial is fairly beginner-friendly, since I did my best to show every single step.

Part 1: Extracting neccessary files

1. Open up SimPE, search for “penguin” in finder and click on start:

(bigger image)

2. Scroll down a bit until you find the files we need: penguin_surface_txmt*, penguin_tslocator_gmdc, penguin_untagged0_shpe and penguin-surface_txtr. Double click on them one at a time to open them, then right click - extract and save them somewhere (you might want to name them txmt, gmdc, shpe and txtr so it’s easier knowing what’s what).

*I use Nopke’s penguin fix so if you do as well and don’t want your added mesh(es) to the penguin to be covered in snow, extract the txmt from his fix instead of EA’s original.

(bigger image)

3. You’ll want to double click on the penguin-surface0_lifo file if you’re planning on editing the texture as well to get the highest resolution of the texture. You're not supposed to extract it though, just right click on the image and choose export and save it somewhere.

4. Make a new package in SimPE: File - New or CTRL + N if you use any of Chris Hatch’s updated versions of SimPE.

5. Right click somewhere in the middle of SimPE and choose “Add”:

6. A window will pop up. Locate your extracted files (txmt, gmdc, shpe, txtr) and import them all, then save your file and give it a name.

Part 2: Adding new meshes

1. In my case, I’m going to show how I added the hat, but it should be fairly the same for whatever you want to add to the penguin, the only difference will be the joint assignment later.

2. Open your accessory/whatever’s mesh (in my case, the hat) in SimPE and export the gmdc by right clicking on it and choosing “extract”, then save it somewhere. You have to extract one texture as well. Open up a recolor, right click on the image and choose “export” (like you did with the penguin lifo file).

(bigger image)

3. Open up Milkshape and choose File - Import - Sims2 UniMesh Import V4.09A, then a window will pop up.

(bigger image)

4. Now, if your mesh you’re planning to add to the penguin is too big/small, you’ll want to import that mesh first and use Tools - Scale All... (it’s the third option from the bottom) and play around with it a bit until you get it the right size. I usually do it like this:

import mesh, scale and then import the penguin mesh to see if it’s the size I want. If not, I undo the import (CTRL + Z or Edit - Undo) and then undo once again to get the mesh back to original size. Then I do “scale all” again and repeat the process until I’m happy with the size.

Why you have to do it this way is bc if you have both the hat (in my case) and the penguin mesh in Milkshape when you use “scale all”, everything will scale, including the penguin mesh.

When you import the penguin’s mesh it will ask you if you want to “Create Blend Groups?” and then it will ask you “Some Skin Weights do not total 100%. Do you want these corrected?”. It doesn’t actually matter if you choose yes or no, since we will not be exporting the penguin mesh anyway so you can choose no but I clicked yes on both options bc you never know.

5. To move your mesh around in Milkshape, go to the “group” tab and double click on your mesh group to select it (it should turn red) and then go back to the “model” tab and click on “move”, then use any of the three grey windows to move your selected mesh around.

When you're happy with the size and have put the new mesh where you want it to be on the penguin, click on your mesh group in the group tab and rename it if you want. I named my hat group like this: (click on rename after you’ve edited the name, otherwise it won’t save your new name)

6. Then click on comment. A window like this will pop up:

7. If you renamed the group, you have to write your new name at the top after “ModelName:” like seen in the image above. After ModelName: [insert your group name here] you should have something like: Opacity: -1 and NumSkinWgts: [a number between 1-3] like also seen in the image above. Click on OK to apply the changes. By now you’ll want to save the file as a .ms3d just in case something goes wrong. It’s always nice with a backup. You can save it by going to File - Save As... (or CTRL + SHIFT + S).

8. Now that you’re done with the mesh and has saved it as a .ms3d file, delete the two penguin_surface mesh groups and all their morphs if you clicked yes to the “Create blend groups?” (in other words: everything but your added mesh group). After that you’ll want to export it by going to File - Export. Export it as Milkshape 3D ASCII and save it somewhere.

(bigger image)

Part 3: Bone assignment

1. Before you can import the new mesh, you have to go to Extra - Preferences and check the "Advanced Mode" box then restart SimPE.

(bigger image)

2. After restarting SimPE, open up your .package file with all of the penguin extracted resources in SimPE and click on the penguin_tslocator_gmdc. Click on “import” and choose your exported Milkshape 3D ASCII mesh. It should then be added to the gmdc like this:

(bigger image)

3. Click on the groups tab, then select your newly imported mesh group. Now, you want to click on the bar under “Joints:”

(bigger image)

4. Then this list will pop up:

5. Now all you have to do is find the correct joint to assign your newly imported mesh to. It can be tricky to find the right joint, or perhaps it’s just me not being comfortable with joints yet haha :p I’m thinking the joints with “0, 0″ may be empty joints, in other words: the penguin doesn’t have/use them, but I’m not sure (but it makes sense, doesn’t it?). Anyway, when you’ve assigned it to what you think is the correct joint, click on “assign” and then click on commit to apply the changes.

Part 4: Creating necessary resources

1. Now that you’ve successfully added the mesh to the penguin, we need to create a txmt, add a txtr file and edit the shpe. We’ll start with the txtr.

If you want to edit the penguin’s texture, right click on “penguin-surface_txtr” and choose “Clone” so you get two of them. Open up your photo editor of choice, import the penguin-surface0_lifo_512x512.png and edit it (if you want to that is). When you’re done, save it as a .png, click on one of the two “penguin-surface_txtr”, right click the image, choose “Build DXT” and import your edited texture. Commit the changes. (These steps are shown down below if you don’t know how to import it.)

2. Click on “penguin-surface_txtr” and rename it to whatever your new mesh name is. In my case, it’s “penguin-hat_txtr”. After you’ve renamed it, click on “Fix TGI” (this is important since it gives your edited resource a new instance number so it won’t overwrite the original resource you extracted (or cloned it from). Right click on the image and choose “Build DXT”.

(bigger image)

3. Choose DXT3 or DXT5 (I never use DXT1, it completely destroys the quality. DXT3 is the one I use 99% of the time) click on “open” and find your mesh’s texture and choose it. Click on “Build” an then commit to save the changes.

4. Now it’s time for the txmt. Click on “penguin_surface_txmt” (remember you have to extract the txmt from Nopke’s fix if you don’t want your added mesh to be covered in snow during winter) and change the name to your new added mesh’s name. For me, this is “penguin_hat”. You’ll need to edit it in 4 places. After editing, click on “Fix TGI” and then on “commit” to save the changes.

(bigger image)

5. Now for the shpe. Click on "penguin_untagged0_shpe” and click on “add”:

(bigger image)

6. “Subset Name” is your mesh group name (the mesh group name in the gmdc) and “Material Definition File” is the txmt. For me it’s “penguin_hat” in both. Click on commit after editing to save the changes.

(bigger image)

7. And you’re done! Save the file, drop it in your downloads folder and see if everything’s working. If you use “boolprop testingcheatsenabled true” you can shift + click on the mailbox and under “Make NPC ...” you can choose “penguin” to force one to visit your lot. Simslice also has a penguin summoner here (<- booty link) it’s the “penguin_summoner.rar”. This is much faster than waiting for the penguin to randomly come by.

Help etc.

I think I’ve explained every step correctly, but it’s very possible that I’ve forgot something or made a mistake somewhere. Let me know if you find any! Also, if you can’t understand something, let me know and I’ll try to explain it again.

And ofc, if you need any help, feel free to comment, send an ask or message me :-)

#tutorial #ts2 tutorial

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bonnienapierfilm · 4 years ago

Text

WORKFLOW + CCT

Final Project - Scene Recreation

Recreation of a scene from Baby Driver (2017)

https://vimeo.com/491846046

The original scene

https://youtu.be/rvYnnJ1zsUE

Crew

Jack Birrell - Director, Bonnie Sanderson - Editor/Producer, Alex Caldow - DOP/ Producer, James Fox - Sound, Samuel Tabotta - Sound/ Camera operator.

Starring

James Fox - Bats, Bonnie Sanderson - Doc, Jack Birrell - Baby/Eddie, Alex Caldow - JD.

Pre-Production

When choosing a scene, we mainly listed films we love. However, after giving it some thought, using ShotDeck to minimise the search for a scene requiring a couple teen actors would have been helpful, as Baby Driver requires multiple actors of multiple ethnicities. After a search for suitable actors, we had to settle with using ourselves (not an acting course). Due to Cal from our group having to leave for home early, we only had 4 from the group left over, meaning the group shot would be impossible to film unless we where to set it up and just watch what was being filmed from the monitor. So James Fox from the course offered to help out (lifesaver) and played Bats as well as some camera and sound operating.

We took some photos of the rough costumes and props so we could get a feel of what the preparation would be like on shoot day.

Myself, Alex and Jack went charity shopping for props and costumes. We found a great suit for Doc and a blue patterned shirt for Eddie. We had to compromise with a plain yellow t-shirt for JD and just rolled the sleeves up, as well as sticking paper to a red jumped we bought for Bats. The rest of the props came together quite easily, finding toy cars and recreating the black board using paper and white pen.

The studio we planned on filming in already had tables and chairs so that wasn't a concern, however we should have thought about the background. As the original scene has a busy background and some green on the pillars, if we had found something green to compensate for this it would have been better. So, most of the problems we faced where linked with the location in which we filmed, although it’s probably the best we could have found due to time restrictions and covid. The walls were incredibly white and made our shots look quite flat and generally just uninteresting compared to the original scene.

Alex had planned out all our shots in terms of lighting, lenses and framing. It helped us stay really organised on the day of the shoot and I feel it would have been a lot more troublesome hadn’t Alex prepared this.

The planning document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iKBeYIbA3CZMcQUt0Q6a2EaaEuKo9VwPZ71b34jAyw0/edit?usp=sharing

Production

Sadly, we ran into struggles before even reaching the shooting location on the shoot day. Sophie from our group had to pull out due to potential covid carrying. This meant we had no one to film the group shot, after messaging a few people, Samuel Tabotta came to our rescue! We had booked the studio out from 9:30am until 5pm, thanks to Ben who stayed longer so we could use equipment and put it away, luckily we managed to get it all filmed in time and he didn't have to stay too much later than 5pm!

We bounced Sachtler lamps off a bounce board to create a more soft lighting then filled the rest with an LED light. The lighting wasn't exactly the same but filming a daylight scene in a blackout studio was always a worry of mine, I had felt myself forgetting this was a lighting exercise and not just a fun project to recreate a scene we love.

Some shots were more complicated than just stills. So, in addition to trying to recreate the lighting and set, we had to recreate the same shot movement. For sliding shots we put a soft t-shirt on the table and placed the camera on top of it, with someone simply pulling the jacket from left to right to get the movement. This wasn't the best method however was the best we could could do with what we had, as first years are not allowed to use tracks.

For the long push in, I brought my skateboard from home and Alex slowly pushed the end towards our actor, Jack. I also had to control the focus, so we took many many (many many many) takes until we finally took one we where happy with that wasn't too shaky. We also needed to record sound for this shot, so James had to sit on the ground to be out of the frame, we forgot to book out a mic pole, so he held his arm under the table to get Jacks monologue. Due to taking so many (many many many) takes, I'm sure his arm was in a lot of pain afterwards.

Post-Production

Myself, Jack and Alex edited together back at the accommodation, taking around 3 hours to get it all done. Editing is what I am more attracted to within the film industry, so I requested to do most of the work. I especially LOVE watching scenes perfectly edited to the soundtracks Baby Driver is an obvious favourite for me (if only Spacey hadn’t linked his bad name with a good movie!). I think the music within the scene aided the edit as we could time the shots with the beats of the music, I think we were ever so slightly off but for a first time music edit, I was pretty proud of our work. Alex had noticed a pen clicking sound within the scene, so we recorded the sound and inserted it at the correct times - which I do feel adds to the tension of the scene, making me realise even the smallest unnoticeable details are just as important to a scene. When grading, it was quite difficult as we had so much white in our takes, and getting the contrast needed for the scene was a challenge as it would black out our actors when putting even the slightest contrast. Resulting in a flat image in our final.

Comparison (I like)

Bar the obvious loss of a blue grade on the original,, I feel we all did quite well acting considering we are not acting students! I am proud of the attention to detail we had put into the props as I feel it makes up for the incorrect colouring and loss of set depth.

Comparison (I dislike)

This shot is a far cry from the original. I think it was a shot we had taken after getting the sound working so felt stressed and short for time. It is a low (ish) angle and I feel we shot from too straight on. As well as the very off colour grading, this shot is very unsimilar to the original, however it is used in the fast paced montage at the beginning with music, so it’s a shot that was least important to us to get spot on.

Overall, I am proud of the outcome. We put in a lot of work and despite being a project for uni, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process (despite being stressful). The crit was the next day, the feedback from the module leaders and class made me very happy. There was an appreciation for the detail we put into the props and editing, and a comedic tone was received which I was hoping, as getting into a suit and playing a 50 year old man (60?..70?) was funny to me. We haven’t done a great deal of editing and colouring, so from the knowledge we had I think we did as good as we could have.

(A photo of Jack checking our framing that I like)

#workflow+cct

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magi-labyrinthofmagicwiki · 5 years ago

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Heya, is there any tutorial/standard to make a page to? I'd gladly help out with this, but I have no idea how to make pages

Hi! Thanks so much for asking! This is a long post, so get ready!

To make a page, you can either click the new page button or a red link

Next, you’ll enter the name of the page. Note: If you clicked a red link, the name will already be entered for you.

You’ll be taken to a blank page. While it’s best to work in Source Mode, as a beginner it will be easier for you to use the Visual Editor, which is what will pop up. (note that once the code gets too complex on a page, the visual editor won’t work) The first thing we’ll want to add is a template. Click the “insert” button to view the menu, then click “templates.”

We want to add the WIP Template. This will add a cute little picture and box that lets people know that the page is a work in progress. It also puts the WIP category on it so that it’s easier to find. If you were editing in source mode, all you would have to write is {{WIP}}.

No need to enter anything here. It’s all set up for you.

Now that you have the WIP put in there, you can add an infobox. The infobox makes key information easy to find. The catch is, sometimes entries in it involve a bit of coding. Click insert>infobox. This is what will open.

(Note: I had to take a screenshot of the text above because some of the code wasn’t showing. I completely overlooked that typo and now Grammarly has it underlined in red to shame me for perpetuity.)

Since I already had the picture uploaded, all I had to do was search for it. But! I should have given it a better name when uploading it so that when I searched for “south sea monsters” it would pop up. A better file name would have been South_Sea_Monsters.png

I filled out everything I know here, so it’s time to click Apply Changes again.

Our page is starting to look pretty!

This is how it looks in the source editor

It’s good to check in there to learn how the coding works. Some things can only be done with the source editor and with coding, like anime and manga tabs for the infobox pictures. Next, we add the main text.

Bolding and creating headlines can be done using the formatting bar like you would in a word processor. Adding sources is easy too. With your cursor at the end of the relevant sentence, click Insert>Reference

You’ll get a little box that looks like this:

When adding sources, it’s important to be sure to note if you’re referring to AoS or someone will look in the main series and they won’t find what they’re looking for! The chapter (Night) is the most important information to include, but please include the page and volume information if you have it.

Now the page is set up!

This is what it looks like in the Source Editor. As you can see, the coding is pretty easy to pick up.

It can be a good idea to check similar pages to see what headings and formats they have. Now, you have the bare bones of a page! At this point, it’s a good idea to save. You can always go back and edit some more!

Leaving a summary is nice because it lets others know what you changed.

That’s a nice page! But, if you’re like me, you forgot something…

The categories! As I said earlier, the WIP category makes it easy to find pages that need work, but it can also help keep the wiki organized in other ways. You’ll find the Add category button at the bottom of the page. You can check similar pages to see what kinds of categories they have, but in this case, we haven’t made any similar pages. I’m going to put them in the Kingdom of Sindria category because they’re common there. If I’m messing up, I suppose someone can always fix it later ^^; Mistakes aren’t a big deal.

Go ahead and click that save button! That was a lot of work! Do you have to do all that?

NO!

This is our Sindrian War page.

It’s nowhere near finished, but the page is at least a little bit set up, so it makes things easier for someone else later. If you want to just make the page and write a few sentences, that’s fine.

For more help, you can go to this page or join the discord. My ask box is also open, so feel free!

#wiki help #tutorials #answers

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haikyuu-fanfics · 5 years ago

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FAQ/About

Hello and welcome to haikyuu-fanfics! This is an archive for various fics, events, writers, prompts, etc.

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#blog update #updated october 2019 #about #haikyuu #haikyuufanfics

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kumoriyami-xiuzhen · 5 years ago

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Hakuoki Hijikata Biyori Track 7 Translation Attempt+ update

Update first (and at the end): found the Shinsengumi Oni-tan translated in Chinese~!! Unfortunately I have no time to read it right now and I’m not sure if I’m missing anything as there are nine tracks on the CD (+1 song which I didn’t find translations for, not that I’m going to do any lyrics translations).... Somehow I managed to get a ton of other translations while I was at it though... *sigh.*

Anyway, this is the last of my stock for translations from Chinese to English that I actually started a month ago (like my music transpositions I tend to do more than one at a time) but kinda forgot about since I got distracted by the Saito short story (priorities, haha. in general it’ll go: Saito> hijikata/kazama/yamazaki/sano> sakamoto>souma>souji>heisuke>iba>sanan>nagakura or something like that if I were to put an order to it for pairing characters and more lore(in relation to oni anyway though there’s only one drama that fits this criteria rn)>personal entertainment value> something really long>monologues (I like interactions more [on that note the 8th HT biyori is only with hijikata so i’m pushing that off til later), in terms of me choosing something I suppose).

Here is my translation attempt with lots of machine help for the 7th Hijikata Biyori Drama.

Enjoy...

Hakuoki Hijikata Biyori Track 7 Dispute “ 争吵 “

Translation Attempt by KumoriYami

Going forward, ‘( ) and /’ will be used for personal edits/places changed for better flow/uncertain points while [ ] will be used for personal notes unless brackets are being used in a short story translation where they’re also used for thoughts (only got 7 of those tho).

Nagakura: I can't take it anymore! Let's do it! Heisuke!

Heisuke: That's my line, Shinpachi!

Nagakura: Ohoh! (You're) pretty confident (alt: Pretty confident, huh)! Don't cry afterwards!

Heisuke: Shinpat-san you really are!(---> Really Shinpat-san , you!(?))

Nagakura: What did you say/are you saying?

Heisuke: You coming?

Nagakura: Coming!

Heisuke: Haven't started yet! (-->Haven't even started!)

Nagakura: Really, you’re so hot/It’s so infuriating you/ You people really well done ah!/Really, you’re so hot-headed/ Really, you’ve got such a temper!

[ I have no idea what to do with this sentence and this is just all the mtls of the sentence with the last 2 being my not exact interpretation of “真让人火大啊你!” will probably go with the 2nd last one though?????? an acquaintance translated this as: you really making people mad ]

Heisuke: What did you say/are you saying?

Hijikata: Hey! What are you arguing/fighting about!

Nagakura: Hijikata-san, don't stop me!

Heisuke: Haha, don't stop it (him)!

Hijikata: What's going on? Are you fighting?(-->What are you fighting about?/Why are you fighting?)

Nagakura: Fighting? It's not about boring/trivial things// anything so trivial.

Heisuke: Yes! It's/This is a fight between men!

Hijikata:...You guys, what’s the reason (for) this time? Is this a fight over food again?

Heisuke: Aaaah!!!

Hijikata: Hey, what happened, Heisuke?

Heisuke: I remembered! That is, the fish that I was going to have for dinner the day before yesterday, my share was, it was eaten by Shinpat-san !

Nagakura: Ee?

Hijikata: That being said, Heisuke came back very late that day.

Heisuke: Yes, yes. When I returned, the rice was still there but all the (side) dishes were gone.

Nagakura: ....Why are you saying/implying that I took it(/them)?

Heisuke: This is something that only Sano and Shinpat-san would do!

Nagakura:.....No, not Sano?/ Then, then what about Sano?

Hijikata: Harada wasn't at headquarters that night.

Nagakura:............

Heisuke: Look! This is/it was Shinpat-san!

Nagakura: Then, I have to ask, was it Heisuke who stole my blanket last night!

Heisuke: Eh?

Hijikata: Speak of which/On that subject, it was really cold last night.

Nagakura: Right, Hijikata san. I found that my blanket was gone! I felt like I was going to freeze to death when I woke up this morning! [will need a better way to phrase this later]

Heisuke:...H-how do you know that you didn't move it when you fell asleep? Because Shinpat-san has bad sleeping habits.

Nagakura: How can/could (I) be skilful/clever--> How could that happen/How could I do something like that! You took it/ it's you who took it!

Heisuke: I, I don't know (anything about it!)!/ I don’t know what you’re talking about!

Hijikata: Aah, enough! i know i know! For such a stupid reason? Really, just fighting for this?

Heisuke: What are you saying/talking about, Hijikata-san!

Nagakura: Dishes(/food) and blankets are different things!

Heisuke: We won't be fighting over such trivial/boring (stupid) things/(reasons)!

Nagakura: Oh, yes! (We're) not kids! right, Heisuke?

Heisuke: Hijikata-san, you looking at us like that will make us feel troubled!

Hijikata:....Then what was the reason for this fight?

Heisuke: Areh?

Nagakura: Areh?

Hijikata: What happened for the two of you to act like this (then)?

Heisuke: Eh... what's the reason?

Hijikata:....Well, I need to see Kondou-san about something. Later/See you later.

Heisuke: Wa-wait a sec/moment, Hijikata-san! No need to look so tired, we have a reason!

Nagakura: That is/Indeed/that's right! now please wait a moment! because Heisuke will come up with a reason.

Heisuke: Why is this my responsibility! Shinpat-san started it/this!

Nagakura: What are you saying! It's because Heisuke immediately came back right away! (--> It’s because Heisuke suddenly spoke up) [I think this is referring to responding right away]

Heisuke: Ah, I can't take this anymore (of this)! Let's do this/it, Shinpat-san!

Hijikata: You're continuing to fight/You're fighting again.

End

-----

So I found translations for all of the Hijikata Biyori Tracks so I’ve added them to my growing list of things to torment myself with (*insert pitiful laughter here*)... also the audio for this is on youtube so I may get to making an srt file and a subbed video in the future though it’s a low priority since those tracks are grouped together and it’s a pain in the ass to go and cut videos since I hate timing stuff and my video editor isn’t great with that.

Regarding the Hana no Shou Reservation Bonus short stories that I plan on translating, I’ve only found stories (side note: a bunch of translations online can’t be accessed by simply clicking their links for some reason and I don’t know how to avoid getting stopped by their host websites) for: Saito (done!), Hijikata (80%ish done), Yamazaki, Kazama (40% done but i hate translating his stuff in general since his way of speaking is weird in Chinese, difficult to translate, and i’ve taken a creative license with a bunch of his stuff which might cause things not to be accurate -.-), Harada, Souji, and Heisuke. As I have way too many things on my list now (seriously it exploded since a friend of my sent me a link that gave me +20 dramas to look at including the Shinsengumi Oni-tan drama...), I don’t have any intention on looking for the stories for Sakamoto, Shinpachi, Sanan, Iba, and Souma (again, sorry, but I don’t wanna accidentally give myself more things to work on lol). If someone sends Chinese translations of them my way however, I will add them to my list.

One of these days I’m going to add a page to my tumblr that basically lists what drama audios I’m looking for since I got the names/pics for some of them which would really help if people want the stories to have audio.

#Hakuoki #Hakuouki #hijikata biyori #hakuoki drama cd #hakuoki drama translation #hijkata toshizou #nagakura shinpachi #toudou heisuke

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agentravensong · 6 years ago

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Why Frisk, Chara, & Kris Being Non-Binary Is More Than Just a Headcanon

An UnderTale/DeltaRune Analysis

Since DeltaRune came out, I’ve been sucked right back into the Undertale fandom. Unfortunately, while I’ve seen tons of great fanart and interesting theories relating to the game, it seems the introduction of a third playable human character who isn’t explicitly male or female has also somewhat re-sparked the debate about whether the genders of Frisk, Chara, and now Kris are up to the player’s interpretation.

On one side, you have people saying to just respect everyone’s headcanons about these characters, down to deciding their pronouns. On the other, you have people saying the three characters being non-binary is part of their thematic purpose in the games, on top of being positive canon representation for a rarely recognized group.

I fall into the latter camp, and this post will explain why. (WARNING: long and text-heavy post)

NOTE: This post was written in late 2018. Since then, I have made an updated version with additional points in Google Docs, which I then used as the script for a YouTube video. As such, this post should be considered an incomplete, though still sound, version of my argument. If you have the time, rather than continuing to read this post, please click the above link(s) to read the Google Doc and/or watch the video for a full understanding of the topic.

If you find yourself repeatedly coming back to this post for whatever reason, remember that my ask box is always open! I’d be more than happy to clarify my position :D

A quick definition to start us off: if a person is “non-binary”, it means that a person doesn’t see their gender as being exclusively male or female. Many non-binary people prefer to be referred to by the pronouns “they/them/theirs” instead of “he/him/his” or “she/her/hers”, since “they” is already a gender neutral pronoun.

Also, just in case someone doesn’t understand this, a person’s gender identity is not necessarily related to who they are romantically or sexually interested in.

This post will be split into six sections of unequal length, with the focus progressing from literally interpreting the text to Toby’s intentions and the outside impact of having these characters be non-binary.

1. The basics: All 3 characters are referred to exclusively by gender-neutral pronouns in the games.

Let’s go character by character, shall we?

FRISK

It’s admittedly hard to find examples for this, since most of the time people are talking about Frisk in-game, they’ll be talking directly to them in second person. However, while looking through screenshots provided by the UnderTale Text Project, I found these:

Thank you, Alphys!

EDIT: Hey look, a more obvious example I somehow forgot about!

CHARA

All of the following quotes come from the character Chara was supposedly closest to in the entire Underground, Asriel. As you read, think about this: if Chara’s preferred pronouns were anything other than they/them, why would Asriel not use their correct pronouns here?

“Chara hated humanity. Why they did, they never talked about it. But they felt very strongly about that.”

“When Chara and I combined our souls together, the control over our body was actually split between us. They were the one who picked up their own empty body. And then, when we got to the village, they were the one who wanted... to use our full power.”

I’ve seen some people take Flowey’s mentions of Toriel in his New Home Genocide monologue to be confirmation that Chara goes by “she/her”, since he doesn’t refer to Toriel by name... even though Chara wouldn’t have been awake at that time, and when Flowey DOES talk about Chara in this monologue, it’s in second person, since he believes YOU are his old best friend. This misconception isn’t common, especially these days, but I figured it was worth addressing.

KRIS

Out of the three humans, I think Kris is the one who people are most likely to associate with a specific gender based on their name. But despite the theory videos and such you may have seen where people referred to Kris as “he”, this is not reflected anywhere in-game.

(Got these screenshots of DeltaRune’s code from this tumblr post)

The lines in the first photo are what Susie says when she’s trying to break Kris and Ralsei out of prison, and you have the option to suggest to her which way to go. The second example. according to Kris’ page on the DeltaRune fandom wiki, is said by Ralsei earlier in the game, if you do not run to complete the clock puzzle to open the door right after reuniting with Susie. Unlike the first example, it is clear in this case that Kris is the only one being referred to.

I remember seeing someone somewhere argue that Susie and Ralsei don’t know Kris well enough to know their “proper” pronouns. When it comes to Ralsei, I can see that argument... but did you notice that he knows both Kris and Susie’s names without asking? It seems he knows more than he lets on... and while Susie certainly wasn’t friends with Kris before this, the fact that they’re in the same class is enough for me to think she would have heard Kris be referred to by their preferred pronouns at least in passing by this point.

And that’s it. Frisk, Chara, and Kris are never referred to by other pronouns... with, admittedly, one exception:

Why does Chara use “it” for themself here? If I had to guess, it’s likely a combination of them being a ghost of their former self without a soul of their own (Flowey’s shown us how much your personality and sense of self is tied to having a SOUL) and the corruption from the Genocide run (remember that gaining LOVE affects a person’s mentality). They see themself as a demon, no longer a person. Whether that’s literally true to any extent or just how they feel after everything they’ve been through doesn’t really matter, I just wanted to cover this point before anyone else could bring it up. It’s not like it makes them not non-binary or anything.

To be clear, not all non-binary people go exclusively by they/them pronouns. Some prefer to go by masculine or feminine pronouns for their own reasons; some go by “neo-pronouns”, ones invented specifically for those who identify as non-binary; and some people go by more than one set of pronouns. However, in the case of Frisk, Chara, and Kris specifically, the fact that they only go by they/them pronouns makes them non-binary, and using any other pronouns for them would be incorrect (even if you have them go by they/them AND he/him or she/her).

Really, that should be enough to prove that the three humans being non-binary is canon. After all, you never have any of the other major characters in Undertale or DeltaRune explicitly state “I’m a girl” or “I’m a boy”. We know their genders because of the pronouns everyone refers to them by. Sure you’ll see gender-bends of those characters, but no one ever claims that those are on the same level of validity when it comes to canon as the actual canon.

But I know that isn’t enough for the people who came into this post disagreeing with the premise, so let’s actually get to countering some of their arguments, shall we? The main argument, of course, is that the humans’ are all meant for the Player to at least partially craft identifies for, including deciding which pronouns they use. But first...

2. Small Fish First: Other characters who are obviously not meant to be self-inserts use gender neutral pronouns.

...I want to cover the easier to counter idea that they/them pronouns are meant to just be, for lack of a better term, “placeholders”; the pronouns you use when you don’t know a person’s gender, rather than being valid permanent pronouns on their own.

If this were true in the case of Undertale and DeltaRune, you’d expect the humans to be the only ones referred to by these pronouns. They’re the ones whose identities are left ambiguous so the Player can project onto them, right?

But that couldn’t be father from the truth. In fact, the majority of the monsters you encounter in both games are referred to with gender-neutral pronouns (they/them and/or it), if any pronouns at all.

Now one might say, “But none of those monsters are really meant to be individual characters.” I get why you’d think that. But you’re forgetting at least one person...

Yup, Napstablook, despite what many fans have assumed from what I’ve seen, does not go by he/him pronouns, but they/them. And it’s not just in the narration either. Undyne does too in certain phone calls with Papyrus. ...Then again, she barely knows Napsta, and we see in DeltaRune that she defaults to they/them when talking about people whose gender she doesn’t know (specifically in that game, Alphys).

But that isn’t my last example. One of the few people who was ever close to Napsta was Mettaton (before he became a celebrity). And what does Mettaton say after Blooky calls in to his final show?

What this proves is that Toby recognizes they/them pronouns as valid for an individual in his work, which I hope makes buying that he purposefully made all three humans canonically non-binary easier for skeptics to swallow (we’ll get back to whether he DID purposefully do that later).

But I’ll acknowledge that there IS a difference between the three humans and the other characters in the games who use they/them, due to their relationship with you as the Player. So with that tangent out of the way, time to diffuse the “everyone can have their own headcanons about the kids’ genders” argument.

3. Thematic Context: All 3 humans have moments of asserting their agency, and part of the game’s subtext is how they each relate to the Player, rather than them all being blank slates.

Again, we’ll go character by character.

FRISK

This section is, admittedly, the one with the least evidence compared to the rest. But here’s what we have, and it’s pretty obvious:

After this moment, as was shown earlier, the other monsters know Frisk’s name and will refer to Frisk in the third person with they/them pronouns. Now, consider this: If Frisk used other pronouns, wouldn’t they have corrected the monsters here? Sure Frisk don’t talk without being prompting much throughout most of the game, but considering how they just shared their name, something equally as personal as their pronouns, I don’t think it would feel too out of place here.

Alternatively, if Frisk’s gender was up to the Player’s interpretation, the Player could have been given a prompt to correct the other characters with the “proper” pronouns for Frisk. You could argue it would be pointless this late into the game, but couldn’t that logic apply to the reveal of Frisk’s name as well? In this case, the lack of such a moment speaks more to me than having such a moment would.

Now, I totally get why people would project onto Frisk up to this point in the narrative, including assigning them different pronouns. It wouldn’t be a plot twist otherwise. Even their design seems to lend to that, with the unrealistic bright yellow skin Legos and emojis have to make them more race-neutral, and their emotionless, unchanging facial expression (though it’s worth considering that most of the other character’s overworld sprites don’t change expression much either; I’m pretty sure Alphys’ overworld sprite keeps her dopey smile even when she’s talking about the depths of her depression and failure at the end of the True Lab section). And this actually works to UnderTale’s benefit through most of the game, making the connections you forge with the monsters feel more personal.

The significance of this moment is that it asks the Player to be willing to change their perspective. Throughout the True Pacifist run, you help Frisk to change the mindsets of the characters you come across; this is most obvious with Undyne, who has been raised to see all humans as the enemy, but comes to admit that at least “some humans are OK, I guess” after befriending you. Along the way, you learn that there’s more to these monsters than first impressions may suggest (again, Undyne being a great example). Now, the game is asking you to look deeper one more time, and presenting you with the challenge you’ve posed to all the other major characters: are you willing to recognize Frisk’s autonomy; to understand there is more to this person than you first saw?

EDIT: Hey, remember that screenshot from earlier where Flowey asks you to “let Frisk live their life”? He’s literally asking you to let Frisk be free and truly themself, rather than resetting and taking control of them again. So there’s some more food for thought.

CHARA

While you are the one who names Chara (the reason for which will be considered in the fourth section of this post), consider these points:

1. If the purpose of Chara’s entire character was meant to be just a reflection of you as the Player, then why give them a “true name” at all?

2. Chara’s backstory is integral to the setup of UnderTale’s plot, and provides a good amount of hints at their original personality, easily making them less of a “blank slate” for the Player to project onto than Frisk.

3. Chara makes a clear distinction between the Player and themself in their monologues at the end of the Genocide route. In case you forgot, here are some reminders.

First meeting:

“Your power awakened me from death.”

“My ‘human soul’, my ‘Determination’; they were not mine, but YOURS.”

“With your guidance, I realized the purpose of my reincarnation.”

“Together, we eradicated the enemy and became strong.”

If you agree to ERASE the world: “You are a great partner.”

In the abyss:

“Interesting. You want to go back.”

“You want to go back to the world you destroyed.”

“It was you who pushed everything to its edge. It was you who lead the world to its destruction.”

“But you cannot accept that. You think you are above consequences.”

“Perhaps, we can reach a compromise. You still have something I want.”

“Then, it is agreed. You will give me your SOUL.”

Second meeting:

“You and I are not the same, are we?”

“This SOUL resonates with a strange feeling... You are wracked with a perverted sentimentality. ...I cannot understand these feelings any longer.”

“I feel obligated to suggest: should you choose to create this world once more, another path would be better suited.”

To say there is no connection between Chara and the Player would be unfair. I mean, if they hated humans their whole life, why do they end up taking out that rage on the monsters, the ones who were actually kind to them, in the Genocide run? Like Chara says themself, you guide them, teaching them definitively that “in this world, it’s kill or be killed”; and the influence you have on them is much more obvious if you subscribe to the Narrator Chara theory (but that’s a whole other can of worms).

Like with Frisk, Chara presents the Player a challenge, but in a more subtle way: can you recognize that YOU are at fault, rather than blaming your actions on a damaged kid who learns from your example and never got the chance to grow beyond their mistakes? And part of meeting that challenge is recognizing that Chara is, or at least used to be, their own whole person.

KRIS

Now we get to the really fun part. DeltaRune as a whole seems to be delving even deeper and more explicitly into the relationship between the playable character as an unwilling vessel and the actual Player than Undertale did. Outside of the prevalent message that “Your choices don’t matter” (which I’m guessing will end up more like the “kill or be killed” of this game rather than DR’s intended final moral), the main evidence towards this is how the game starts.

1. A red soul appears on screen when the unknown speaker (presumably Gaster) asks you if they’ve successfully connected with you. The soul is what you control throughout this sequence. The implication? The SOUL in this game is a manifestation of you as the Player. In fact, considering some of the Chara quotes I mentioned earlier, this could be true of UnderTale as well.

2. You spend time making a vessel, only for it to be discarded, because “No one can choose who they are in this world.” This lack of choice is actually foreshadowed when you choose which legs you prefer, since all but the last choice are the same. The game is pointing out right away how superficial these choices are.

3. The speakers says “Your name is...” and Toriel seemingly finishes the statement by calling out “KRIS!”

The message of points 2 and 3 combined is pretty obvious to me: we don’t get an empty vessel to put ourself and our ideas into in DeltaRune. Kris is NOT an empty vessel; they have an already established backstory and personality, which we get multiple hints at (mostly when going around town at the end of the demo).

The fact that you have to go through this creation process on every new file, even after beating the game, suggests it’s more than just a framing device, but directly tied to the game’s narrative and/or themes in some way. So, let’s keep this scene in mind as we look at Kris’ defining moment at the end of Chapter 1.

In the middle of the night, Kris is wrestling with themself in bed until they fall out. Their walk is very stilted and jerkish, reminiscent of a zombie, or someone possessed.

Kris opens and closes their hand a few times before digging into their body and pulling out their soul, their eyes blank. (Notice how this doesn’t seem to actually leave a hole in their chest or anything? Almost as if the soul was never a part of them in the first place...)

They go to the wagon and harshly YEET the soul into the cage (the flavor text for which mentions it has already seen a few crashes... has something like this happened to Kris before?).

Kris walks back to the middle of the room, as if to purposefully stand in the center of the DeltaRune symbol on the floor, then pulls out a knife from seemingly nowhere, and turns to the camera with a red glow in their eyes.

Now, I totally get why most people will immediately assume that Kris has been possessed by a post-Genocide Chara here. I’m pretty sure the visual similarities between this scene and the one that plays if you choose to stay with Toriel in a soulless pacifist run in UT are intentional.

But remember how we mentioned the red SOUL, at least in DeltaRune, is a manifestation of the Player? This is actually reinforced in this scene, because you’re able to move the SOUL back and forth within the cage.

We’ve been controlling Kris via that SOUL the whole way through the game, and now? Kris is done with us. THIS is their prime moment of agency in Chapter 1 - reclaiming ownership of their own body - and I doubt that it will be their last.

There’s a ton of other stuff I could mention about Kris, like how:

* they had their own save file, which you overwrite at the first save point

* multiple NPCs in the town will comment on Kris seeming more talkative or looking off today, because YOU’RE making them interact with people

* Kris’ ability to play the piano is worse than normal with you controlling them, according to the hospital receptionist

* the narration says Kris feels bitter if you throw away the one possession in their inventory, the Ball of Junk (”bitter” isn’t the emotion one would feel if they did this of their own free will)

or all the hints at Kris’ true personality as an introverted, codependent prankster. But that could be a post in itself. My point is that, if Frisk and Chara’s individualism from the Player was subtle in UnderTale, this is pretty straightforward, if you know where to look.

And if these three humans are all their own characters, then shouldn’t we consider what seemingly little we DO know for sure about them as canon? We all take their names to be canon, so why not their pronouns?

That’s the bulk of the argument done. But when discussing canon, there is one thing that always has to be considered:

4. Can We Know The Creator (Toby Fox)’s Intentions?

Well, not really.

Some may bring up the one tweet where Toby suggested to name the fallen human (Chara) “your own name” as evidence that you ARE meant to project yourself into these characters.

However, I think you could just as easily argue that doing this ADDS to the impact of when Frisk, the character you physically control, confirms themself to be their own person with their own name, rather than a mold for you to pour yourself into.

And though Chara does make it clear that they themself as a character are separate from you, the whole Genocide ending monologue does hit harder when the person reprimanding you for their sins, who describes themself as “the feeling you get when your stats increase”, shares your name.

While putting this post together, I came across this interview Toby did about Undertale back in September 2015, and took particular note of this section:

While this technically doesn’t confirm or deny anything either way, how hard would it have been for Toby to say, “Well the protagonist is meant to have their gender be up to the player’s interpretation”? I doubt he would have gotten more backlash for that then he would have for definitively saying that Frisk is MEANT to be non-binary (though I doubt that would have stopped people from making them male or female anyway).

Then again, the article does start with the interviewer saying this:

“I told Toby Fox to skip questions he didn’t find interesting, and boy did he take me at my word.”

So maybe he just didn’t have anything worthwhile to mention.

I can’t say with certainty that Frisk and Chara’s genders were never meant to be up to the Player’s choice, even after what I mentioned in section 2 (and I doubt Toby would want to make a statement on it at this point). Same with Kris, for now.

However, if the rest of DeltaRune ends up going in the direction I suggested in the previous section, I honestly would not be surprised if there’s a moment where Kris confirms they are nonbinary, as a show of agency and individualism akin to Frisk telling Asriel their real name. I wouldn’t really call it a “theory”, and it’s hard to speculate what the other chapters of the game will at all be like based on what relatively little we have... but I wouldn’t have mentioned it here if I didn’t think it had any validity.

5. Why Does This Matter?

Outside of the previously mentioned stuff relating to the games’ themes/messages about choice, agency, and individualism, there’s one big reason: representation.

How many games can you think of where there are any explicitly non-binary characters? How many where that character is a major one, who doesn’t get treated as particularity different from the others just on the basis of the pronouns they use? And how many of those games are even close to the popularity of Undertale in its hayday? Even expanding these questions to media other than just video games won’t net many more results.

For people who are striving for representation, seeing posts like “Just let people have their headcanons :)” can come across as the OP not understanding how much that representation means. Even worse, coming back to the point I made in section 2 of this post, it could be seen as the OP denying that being non-binary is just as real and concrete as being male or female (a problem which more mainstream representation of non-binary people would help solve!).

But don’t just take it from me. After all, as a binary cis girl myself (”cis” meaning not trans), I can’t speak generally for all the trans and non-binary Undertale and Deltarune fans out there. So allow me to link some posts which provide their perspectives:

This first post is from before DeltaRune was released, and mainly focuses on Frisk, but goes in-depth on the topic (and the OP provided me some feedback on my post, so if they see this, thanks!)

I came across this post just while scrolling through the DeltaRune tag about why this stuff matters to non-binary fans.

This post is specifically about how using they/them pronouns for the kids is preferable whether or not it’s literally canon.

Here’s another post from the same person covering some common counter-arguments.

And if the other posts are too long for you to bother reading after going through mine, this one sums up the point in one sentence.

I know some people flinch at the mere mention of the word “representation”. I know that some will argue you shouldn’t need to see representation of a group you belong to in a piece of media in order to be able to relate to the characters and/or feel validated yourself - because I’ve seen people make this argument. But, I mean, I certainly find it easier to relate to characters that I share traits with; that’s just how humans work. It’s probably the main reason why people assign different genders to Frisk, Chara, and Kris in the first place! Besides, who does it hurt to include more diverse characters?

Oh right, there’s the idea that “forcing” creators to include representation is bad for creativity or whatever. Well good thing that’s not what this is about! As far as I know, no one is telling Toby he has to ADD new characters to fulfill a quota; the characters in question (Frisk, Chara, & Kris) already exist in his work. The point of this post is to show that the three of them were MEANT to be non-binary from the start (assuming I provided enough proof to convince you), so people won’t continue to erase that representation. By making them binary cis boys or girls, you’re only taking away from the original text (and giving people more to “complain” about).

Honestly, what does one even have to gain story-wise from assigning different genders to the human kids? I can’t remember a time I saw where making them strictly boys or girls added anything to their characterization or opened up different story possibilities (I’m sure you could could up with a theoretical example, but compared to the endless fanworks that DON’T do that, they hardly make a dent). Speaking beyond just Frisk, Chara, and Kris, characters being non-binary shouldn't affect how you ship them. You can give such characters more overtly masculine or feminine designs/appearances, but still have them be non-binary and go by they/them pronouns (most people don’t naturally look androgynous after all). In a work with voice acting, casting someone with a more masculine or feminine voice to play a non-binary character shouldn’t stop you from portraying the character as non-binary either - just refer to them with the right pronouns!

And if people who find your work continuously misgender your non-binary characters or ask what their “real” gender is, don’t let them get to you. You don’t need to respond to every such comment, but when you DO respond, clearly state that these characters are non-binary, politely correct the people who refer to those characters by the wrong pronouns, and, if worst comes to worst, block the people who won’t respect that. Before you (using “you” for the rest of this paragraph to refer specifically to my fellow binary cis peeps) can even think to argue “that sounds like too much work” or “it’s not worth the potential controversy”, remember that non-binary people in real life have to deal with this crap far more often than we do, and for them, it’s personal. If they can handle it, why can’t you?

Yes, Frisk, Chara, and Kris are fictional characters, not real people. But more representation of non-binary people in media helps others learn to understand and respect them, both in fiction and in real life. Honestly, it’s beyond time for people to accept that “they/them” aren’t “placeholder pronouns”, and the genders of people who use them aren’t up for others to judge. It’s just who they are, and really, how hard is that to respect?

If nothing else will convince you, think of it this way: if you’re not in the group being affected by a discussion like this, and you don’t care about the people in that group, keeping yourself out of the conversation saves everyone time and energy, without hurting anyone.

6. Conclusion

So, to briefly summarize this essay-length post’s main points:

1. Frisk, Chara, and Kris all go solely by “they/them” in their respective games, so having them go by any other pronouns is technically diverting from canon to the same extent that gender-bending any other character would be, NOT a valid interpretation of the original text.

2. There are other individual characters in these two games, such as Napstablook, who are referred to by they/them pronouns, even by those who were close to them.

3. The three humans are all shown to be more than just blank slates for the Player to project themself onto, making the stuff which IS definitively said about them (specifically, their names and pronouns) canon parts of their characterization unless directly proven otherwise.

4. We can’t assume Toby’s intentions, but even if he didn’t initially make Frisk, Chara, and Kris gender neutral for the sake of giving non-binary people representation, many people have taken it as that. Thus, seeing others say that the humans’ genders are up for interpretation is interpreted as those people not respecting non-binary identities as valid on their own.

The one other point I can think people might bring up would be the idea that kids as young as Chara or Frisk wouldn’t identify as non-binary because they wouldn’t understand the concept. To that argument, I’d suggest looking up videos about people who realized they were transgender as kids. In general, if there are concepts in this post you didn’t quite get or agree with, research is your friend!

Speaking of which, as this post I came across in the DeltaRune tag yesterday pointed out, fun fact: “non-binary” is an umbrella term that still leaves some slight room for personal interpretation when it comes to the humans’ genders! To use myself as an example, I personally headcanon Chara as firmly agender, Kris as a a demi-boy (someone who only partially sees themself as male), and Frisk as genderfluid (meaning that their sense of gender regularly changes). However, despite the nuances in their gender identities, I only have them go by they/them pronouns, their canon ones, in my fanworks. Doing otherwise not only goes against canon, but can be considered misgendering, and thus should be avoided.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t make up ANYTHING about what Chara, Frisk, and Kris are like either. People have plenty of headcanons about the backstories and other quirks of characters like Sans, Undyne, Mettaton - basically the whole cast of both games - and there’s nothing stopping you from doing that for the human kids. I certainly have my own ideas of what Chara and Frisk’s lives were like before they fell into the Underground. The difference is that those are speculating on things not outright said in canon. But Frisk, Chara, and Kris going by they/them pronouns IS canon, and should be respected as such.

At the end of the day, neither I nor anyone else (not even Toby) can outright stop people from having their opinions about these fictional characters. But since I had some free time this weekend, I figured I could take a stand for something I care about relating to a fandom I’ve emerged myself in for the past few years. My main hope in making this post is that you’ll understand why certain people disagree with the seemingly righteous stance of “It’s all up to interpretation, just let people do what they want!”. And if you knew nothing about non-binary identities before, hopefully this was educational for you!

If you have any remaining questions or suggestions relating to this post, feel free to reblog with your feedback or send me an ask. Until then, this is Agent Raven, signing off.

#deltarune #delta rune #undertale #frisk #chara #kris

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