#he’s like a proto one

[spectrum-color]

The fandom jokes about Gandalfs love of and absolute faith in hobbits, but like he’s a maiar so he’s seen some shit with the other races. Is there a hobbit Feanor? How about a hobbit Ar-Pharazon? Even a hobbit Sauron? The worst we get from hobbits is Smeagol killing a guy in a mugging (admittedly not great) and then spending a few centuries minding his own business in a cave eating raw fish. They are unproblematic kings.

[leroibobo]

another mena language post - i wanted to talk about judeo-arabic and clarify a little bit about what "judeo-arabic" means

the basics, for those of you who don't know: arabic, being a language that was spread over a large part of the world and has since evolved into many different forms, has many different things that differentiate certain dialects. languages/dialects can be influenced by languages speakers' ancestors spoke before, by the social structure of where speakers live, by languages they come into contact with, and by gradual evolution in pronunciation. (many letters like evolving into ones that are easier to pronounce - this is why arabic has no "p" sound, it eventually evolved into "f" or "b". the same thing happened in germanic languages to some extent, which is why we say "father" in english and "vader" in german while in romance languages it's some variation of "padre" or "père".) many arabic dialects in particular possess different substratum (obvious, traceable influence from languages people spoke in before shifting to the new one).

arabic, being a language that was spread over a large part of the world and has since evolved into many different forms, has many different regional dialects which are different for the reasons i described in the above paragraph. even though there's modern standard arabic (which is the subject of its own post), people speak regional dialects in real life. on top of that, there's a variety of social influences on different types of arabic, such as whether someone's living in the city or in the country, whether someone's sedentary or a bedouin, and in some cases religion.

in the middle east, religion was historically:

not seen as a personal choice, but as something you're born into and a group you're a part of, kind of like ethnicity;

not generally something governments actively wanted everyone to share one of at the penalty of ostracization due to sticking to your group being the more livable way of life in the area, or later, the benefits of things like imposing extra taxes on people who weren't the "correct" religion/branch (this is far from being a "muslim thing" btw, it's been in the area for a while now, i mean look at the assyrians);

an influential factor in where you lived and who you were more likely to interact with because of those two things. (for example, it wasn't uncommon for most of the people living in one village in the countryside to share one religion/branch of a religion. if your village converted, you converted, too. if they didn't, you didn't, either.)

this means that the influence of religion in different types of arabic is due to people of different religions living in or coming from different places, and who people talked to most often.

for example, in bahrain, most sedentary shia bahrainis' ancestors have lived on the island for a very long time, while most sedentary sunni bahrainis' ancestors immigrated from other places in the gulf and iran in the 18th century. therefore, while they've all interacted and shared different aspects of their dialects including loanwords, there are two "types" of bahraini arabic considered distinctive to sunni and shia bahrainis respectively, regardless of how long ago their ancestors got there. despite the differences being marked by the religion of the speakers, they have nothing to do with religion or contact/lack thereof between bahraini sunni and shia, but with the factors affecting the different dialects i mentioned in the first paragraph which influenced either group.

a similar phenomenon to this in english is class differences in accent in england. nothing in received pronunciation is actually something only rich people can say or unintelligible to poor people, it developed by the class differences influencing where rich and poor english people lived and the different pronunciation/linguistic histories in those places, as well with different classes keeping more to themselves.

the influence of religion on arabic dialects isn't universal and nowhere near as intense as it is with aramaic. some places, especially more cosmopolitan or densely populated places, are less likely to have very noticeable differences or any differences at all. in addition, certain variations of a dialects that may've been influenced by religion in some way (as well as urban dialects) may be standardized through tv/movies/social media or through generally being seen as more "prestigious", making more people who wouldn't have spoken them otherwise more likely to pick it up. (this is why so many arabic speakers can understand egyptian arabic - cairo is like the hollywood of the arabic-speaking world.) this is the case with many if not most countries' official and regional languages/dialects nowadays.

this phenomenon is what "judeo-arabic" refers to generally. like many other jewish diaspora languages, the "jewish" aspect is that it was a specific thing jewish people did to different types of arabic, not that it was isolated, possessed a large enough amount of certain loanwords (though some varieties did have them), or is unintelligible to non-jews. people were generally aware of differences where they existed and navigated between them. (for example, baghdadi jews may've switched to the more prestigious muslim baghdadi dialect when in public.) if you know arabic, listen to this guy speak, you should be able to understand him just fine.

judeo-arabic also often used the hebrew alphabet and some may have been influenced by hebrew syntax and grammar in their spelling. you can also see the use of script for religious identification in persian and urdu using the arabic script, and in english using the latin alphabet. in general, influences of hebrew/aramaic on different types of judeo-arabic aren't consistent. you can read more about that here.

"judeo-arabic" isn't a universal that definitely happened in every arabic-speaking part of the world that had jews in it to the same degrees, but it did definitely exist. some examples:

after the siege of baghdad in 1258, where mongols killed all muslim baghdadis and spared baghdadis of other religions, bedouins from the south gradually resettled the city. this means that the "standard" sedentary dialect in the south is notably bedouin influenced, while dialects in the north are more notably influenced by eastern aramaic. christians and (when they lived there) jews in baghdad have dialects closer to what’s up north. within those, there's specific loans and quirks marking the differences between "christian" and "jewish".

yemenite jews faced some of the most persistent antisemitic persecution in the middle east, so yemeni jewish arabic was more of a city thing and often in the form of passwords/codewords to keep jews safe. jews were usually a lot safer and better-regarded in the countryside, so jewish yemeni arabic was much less of a thing there, and when it was, it was less "serious".

due to the long history of maghrebi immigration to palestine, there's attestation of maghrebi influences in arabic spoken by some palestinian jews with that origin. this was also a thing in cairo to some extent.

(i'd link sources, but most of them are in hebrew, i guess you'll have to trust me on this one??)

still, the phrase "judeo-arabic" is often used with the implication that it was one all encompassing thing (which it wasn't, as you can see), or that jews everywhere had it in some way. many jews who spoke some version of arabic special to their mostly-jewish locale may not have registered it as a specifically "jewish" version of arabic (though they did more often than not). the truth is that research about anything related to middle eastern and north african jews is often sloppy, nonexistent, and often motivated by the desire of the researcher to prove something about israel's colonization of palestine (on either "side" of the issue). this is not me being a centrist about the colonization of palestine, this is me stating that academia is often (even usually) influenced by factors that aren't getting the best and most accurate information about something. i don't think we're going to get anything really "objective" on arabic spoken by jews in that regard for a long while.

for comparison's sake: yiddish is considered a separate language from german due to 19th century yiddishists' efforts to "evolve" yiddish from dialect to language (yiddish-speaking jews were said to speak "corrupted german" historically; on that note sephardim were also said to speak "corrupted spanish"). this was at a time when ethnic nationalism was en vogue in europe and declaring a national language meant declaring your status as a sovereign nation (both metaphorically and literally). for yiddishists to assert that they were speaking a language and not a dialect that intrinsically tied them to germans was to reject the discrimination that they were facing. (besides, german/austrian/swiss jews weren't speaking yiddish (leaving it with the connotation of being the language of those icky ostjuden), yiddish-speaking jews had practically zero other ties to germany/austria/switzerland, and yiddish-speaking jews (let alone the yiddishists) were almost entirely east of germany/austria/switzerland, so it's not like they were pulling this out of their ass.)

whether a jewish person of arabic-speaking descent calls it "arabic", "judeo-arabic", or something like "moroccan"/"syrian"/etc depends on who you're talking to, where they're from (both diaspora origins and today), how old they are, and what they think about zionism. despite "judeo-arabic" being what it's called in academia, on the ground, there's no real strong consensus either way because the social circumstances arabic-speaking jews lived in didn't drive them to form a movement similar to yiddishists. (not because there was no discrimination, but because the political/social/linguistic circumstances were different.) the occupation since made the subject of middle eastern jews’ relation to the middle east a contentious topic considering the political and personal weight behind certain cultural identifiers. the term "judeo-arabic" is modern in comparison - whether it's a distinction dredged up by zionist academics to create separations that didn't really exist or a generally accurate term for a specific linguistic phenomenon is a decision i'll leave you to make.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

roxy and eridan heals the soul

I just think it would be really funny if eridan got added back into the fold, nobody is particularly enthused about him being there (including karkat, whom he is paledating), having his emotional problems addressed does not actually make him less annoying (in fact, his insistence that magic is real and that he's a wizard of it kind of makes him MORE annoying), and then as soon as he steps off the meteor, he says some deranged shit and gets hit with the quadrant 2x combo for it

ERIDAN: [batshit insane rant about magic, wands, being a wizard, murdering his enemies, murdering his friends(!?), blowing up stuff using the power of believing in himself]

ROXY AND CALLIOPE, SIMULTANEOUSLY: i think i hauve covid

also, does anyone remember this tidbit from roxy's wizard fanfic?

the guy paused to remove his glasses and polished them on his sash. it came off as a seriously dramatic gesture, just as intended and also as explicitly stated in the text.

[the-mayor-of-hatersville]

I'm live and let live for the most part despite appearances, but I have to say the damage fucking,,,, the slytherin skittles as a concept has done to other peripheral characters in the marauders era? Unmatched. Is it bad that y'all are making up headcanons about these characters? Admittedly no, you can do whatever you want forever just like me. HOWEVER Is it really annoying that Every Single Character has to have a knock off marauders friend group now? Yes. Does it annoy me that characters who could be so much more complex than they are keep getting used as fodder for relationship drama with fucking Jegulus of all ships? Undoubtedly. Does it piss me off to see characters, particularly female characters, w being used to prop up death eaters who frankly are not half as interesting? Very Much So.

[mewkwota]

Since it's been years since I've greatly touched on helmetless Light/Wily Numbers, I thought it'd do me some good to run through a couple to ease my mind. Some of these also got some slight touch-ups like Plant and Crash Man. And I've never tried Gravity Man but always wanted to, so there's a quick try on him here.

Hopefully they are still recognizable by their armor.

Also, Top and Jewel Man got full-body shots because they're my faves. :>

[monsterboyblood]

Man I really hope they start letting Proto Man be silly again.

Don’t get me wrong I love how overly dramatic and mysterious he is but I just really love when he’s depicted as mysterious but also a goofy little weirdo

[regret-evatorful]

prototypes rad coolness

[serpentface]

Is Tigran's backstory of being his aunt's bookie still a thing? I've been thinking of that one pic of him(?) playing a lyre with a nervous expression on his face but is that him anymore?

"an ex-monk" makes me wonder how things have worked out between then and now

OK so the thing is. The main focus of this setting was originally the story called Blightseed, which The White Calf was a prequel to. Tigran was one of the Whitecalf characters who shows up in Blightseed. When I started actively working on it again, I ended up being wayyyy more attached to Whitecalf and focusing on it entirely, (I've also done more to develop the setting in this single year than I have in like, the rest of the 10ish years of its existence). So a lot of that stuff from a year+ ago is tenuously canon at absolute most and should be disregarded.

I don't have the full ending ironed out beyond the major plot elements and most of the character's specific fates are undecided to the point that I'm not even sure of all their survival statuses (Janeys and Brakul are currently in a Schrodinger's Buried Gays situation where they are either both Extremely dead or Extremely alive, Faiza is like 95% dead, Palo, Tigran, and Hibrides are alive, Couya is the only fully decided main character because she ends up becoming a god-emperor and antagonist for a hypothetically existing Blightseed story).

I will say the broad strokes of that outcome are still VERY likely for Tigran. He ends up being a (mostly unwitting) accomplice to a devastatingly successful coup and will probably choose to go into hiding rather than deal with potential longterm consequences. There's a high chance of him ending up as a long haired bleach-blond with torn out piercings and gambling issues working as a bookkeeper/errandboy/musical talent at a brothel, paranoid that someone's gonna come after him and convinced that he's cursed.

[oceandiagonale]

Actually, Guzman is his spanish name.

OH YEAH some other folks pointed that out too, makes sense since it's an irl Spanish name (probably why I see it around a lot!) 😳

(normally it's a surname, I've only seen it used as a first name once in a blue moon -- but also in the pokemon world it's pretty clear that naming conventions aren't the same lol)

[lotus-tower]

OUGH. well. who else is going to love them

[whatudottu]

My first thought when i saw this: TFP Ben 10

Given how this 👇 is Ben's canonical car:

You aren't too far off lmao (mostly on the colour at least).

You might not be particularly a fan of CNA from your sphere of headcanons, but considering that Ben can access another biomechanical species in the galvanic mechamorph, I'm sure there's enough of an Omnitrix work around to sample cybertronian data. Seeing as it's a Camaro you could probably have a TFP x Ben 10 crossover equivalent to TFA Waspinator maybe, a green Bumblebee (or a green hornet if you of/remember that) but it's Ben. Considering how the biomechanical Upgrade has a few biological translation issues to the point of not quite technically being a fully integrated transformation, maybe Ben would speak with his own voice like Upgrade does or maybe even through radio depending on how physically different cybertronians are to human anatomy.

I mean that specific line of thinking would only be possible if Ben snagged a sample of Bumblebee's CNA (or whatever you'd prefer) which could either be convoluted or unclimactic, though I guess if street racing in some part of the globe with a desert (aka somewhat nearby Bellwood which already exists cross universe between Ben 10 and Generator Rex) there could be some plot about his shenaniganery nearly running Team Ben off the road and messing with Kevin's own heavily modified yet fresh from 1979 Dodge Challenger to the irritation and anger of Kevin himself. Something something Bee got the attention of the wrong (mostly) humans(ish).

[tomscryingcorner]

BOOK IT!

[eliounora]

my oc, kaya! I have no idea how his glasses stay on his nose

[roxyandelsewhere]

Angels’ trueforms in their most memorable moments [26/?] - Nephilim fetus: regular nephil, sired by a regular angel (above) and Jack, sired by Lucifer (below)

inprnt | society6 | redbubble | teepublic | ko-fi

[d1sc01nf3rn0]

Of all the dumb things the cishet men in the fanbase of Disco Elysium could say, I never expected "Dora Ingerlund is bad cause she had an abortion" to be one of them.

Which is weird, cause I feel like I also should've expected them to believe such nonsense lmao.

[fitzrove]

[shaking and biting] but what does it MEAN. what does it SAY what is the THEME