#it's not just a homogenous “other”

[sciderman]

I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with so much Iranian hate and drama <:[

oh anon. hate to break it to you (a lot of people make this mistake) but iran and iraq are two entirely separate nations.

and also i think reducing it to the words "hate and drama" kind of doesn't cover it, anon.

[inchidentally]

https://x.com/MERCL4REN/status/1743286121973555513?s=20

find the difference level impossible :D but seriously, this tweet gave me a stomachache from laughing so hard.

THERE'S MY TWO CREEPY TOO SIMILAR VESTAL VIRGINS THAT MAKE ALL THE MEN ON THE GRID (except lewis) GO HUUUHHHHH???

[chalkscrub]

revisiting my roots as an artist - never sketching, never planning, and going straight to the inks. and also drawing traditionally again. with some digital colours

speaking of my roots as an artist, so many people say my art is cute/storybook/wholesome vibes which is funny cause i started off drawing a lot of bloody evil gorey demon things. 14 y/o me would not be happy with me for going down the route i ended up taking - i wanted to be edgy.

[un-pearable]

the kyoshi flashback in Avatar Day and the sheer scale of ba sing se in comparison to…. literally everywhere else in the world really has me thinking about the politics that lead to such distinct “nations”. it makes way more sense for a land as vast as the earth kingdom to have once been earth kingdoms with local land disputes between feudal lords - as we see with the conflict kyoshi ended - only for a world-spanning war to have driven first the lords to unite under ba sing se’s banner for protection, and then as the war continued, increasing waves and waves of refugees and oma shu standing as the only remaining hold out due to their unique position (top of a mountain - most other earth kingdom towns we see are in valleys) such would explain how many ruins and ghost towns we see throughout s2 but also the improbability of a land that big to be unified under a single leader for that long

[aptericia]

I was looking through the tags in that "are you White" poll, and it was really interesting how many people said they were "technically" half & half but only considered themselves to be White.

And thinking about it, most of the mixed White-and-non-White people I know irl (especially White-and-East-Asian people) also identify only as White. My sister looks very similar to me and says she doesn't feel comfortable identifying as PoC, even though I use the term for myself. Although culturally I'm not very Asian, I have had people assume I'm not from the US, assume I can speak other languages, and assume all sorts of Asian stereotypes about me such as that I'm nerdy or care a lot about food. I think White and Asian people alike see me and understand that I am "their race", but also know that I am "other" in some way.

Idk I just find it really interesting and I wonder how common an experience that is... I feel like I've fallen a bit into the trap of thinking that all half-White people (in the US and Canada anyway) have somewhat similar experiences to me, and it's both disorienting and pretty cool to be reminded how incorrect that is.

[isthereintruthnobeauty1968]

fun potential what with so much of the ds9 cast being nonhuman people for worf to mention some relatively obscure human cultural thing offhand and kira/jadzia/quark/odo/etc assuming it's a klingon thing

[voluptuarian]

You know, very rarely do I run into accounts of historical cannibalism that are completely new to me. But I did today and I'm frankly completely taken aback by this

Fro the article: "The Guangxi Massacre comprised a series of lynchings and massacres in the Chinese province of Guangxi between 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution. The official record shows an estimated death toll between 100,000 and 150,000. Methods of murder included beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, and disemboweling. In specific areas, including Wuxuan County and Wuming, Nanning, hundreds of incidents of human cannibalism occurred—even though no famine conditions existed. According to records that have been made public, at least 137 people were eaten, with thousands of people having participated in the cannibalism... In 1993, The New York Times stated that the incidents reported from Guangxi were apparently the most extensive episodes of cannibalism in the world in the last century or more. They were also different from any others in that those who took part were not motivated by hunger or psychopathic illness. Instead, the actions appeared to be ideological: the cannibalism, which the documents say took place in public, was often organized by local Communist Party officials, and people apparently took part together to prove their revolutionary ardor."

[macrocosmus]

no words make me more upset than "you live in america, speak english." my great-grandparents were forced to assimilate and now a century later the same bullshit keeps getting pushed on folks... i felt so much joy in high school when all the asian kids across different cultures realized they all never spoke english that much at home, so they didn't need to speak english with their friends either. i feel so much joy when im just out at the grocery store and hear so many different dialects and languages, it's mostly spanish i think, and that's just good. and now im jealous. i wasn't born to be monolingual. im mourning something that was taken from me decades before i was even born. im supposed to know italian, i was supposed to be at least bilingual, and now im stuck monolingual throwing myself at language learning resources as an adult, desperate to try to wrap my brain around something that should have been there since before i spoke my first words. and its a slim chance i'll actually be able to walk along side someone and have a conversation in anything other than english, at least for a long time, because its not just knowing another language that i need, its speaking it, not as an exercise, but in mundanity.

i wasnt supposed to be monolingual, and now im struggling to fix that as an adult

[withonelook]

tatimaxxing (something big just happened to me but i can't talk about it on this blog because ive posted face)

[godsworstson]

having a culturally diverse friend group is so fun because how else would I hear badly translated jokes that make no sense in any other language or watch drunk people fighting in two different languages

[annamariedarkholmes]

the way that adult men working both in the x-men office and “influencer” fan-adjacent spaces always behave so performatively extra about gambit will never stop being weird to me. it’s such a nasty underhanded way to gatekeep his (mostly female lbr) fans under the guise of (repeatedly asserting) mere personal preference

[cosmicdreamgrl]

well. that was........everything i expected and yet i'm still massively disappointed

[yellowocaballero]

related to the previous ask you answered, if you’re up for it - incredibly curious about how you research stuff for your writing. I feel like you’re so good at capturing all these little details of a life with such humour that I’m always going ‘how is yellow meg caballero not x identity’ (which is obviously not true & just the sign of a good writer, etc etc but still). Are you just out here talking to five million different types of people?? And understanding them??

Yes hello hi <3 <-- catching up on ask

I really do have the awful habit of swerving dramatically out of my lane and talking about shit I have no business talking about. I don't even do a lot of research, or at least not as much research as I should. I'm genuinely a terrible person to emulate here. But as for like how it tends to happen.

One half of it is. Patrick Stewart voice Writing fiction.

jaklsjdflksadf the other half is like...yeah, I talk to a lot of people. I like people a lot. I find everybody really interesting, and even if I don't like somebody then it's still interesting to have learned about a new kind of person. Over the internet especially is so much fun - everybody has at least one thing super interesting about them! Everybody has a unique trait or has had an experience totally unfamiliar to me. I also just really have an eclectic knowledge of a shitton of extremely useless stuff, I watch a lot of random-ass YouTube essays, all of it. Baby I got information even I don't care about for days lol.

Some of my characters are based lowkey off people I know. Sometimes they're based off me at different points in my lives, or the kind of person I used to think I was. I think most often they fit into a category of people I've met in my life - for example, for an OC I'm writing right now, she's based off this type of person I know. And in there I look for what I always liked about those people, what I always related to about those people, and how I always interacted with them. They're often kinds of people I don't even necessarily like. You never really want to do "well im writing [marginalized group] so I'll just make them [friend from marginalized group]", but for me once I meet and talk to enough people from that group kind of the experience and perspective that being in that group gives you emerges. The 'why' of the experience stands out, and you can go deep into that.

All that said, I look for the similarities instead of the differences. My MK stuff isn't about being a system (cuz not that.), it's about having a highly stigmatized mental illness, and somebody's relationship with their identity as a mentally ill person, which is something I can understand. Lots of my SW stuff was about...existential dread, lol. I do just know a fuckton of neurodivergent and trans and etc people. And I think we do just project - I'll interpret a character as having my experiences instead of another's, because I'm SUPER loose with characterizations lol. But yeah I'm just constantly talking to people about their experiences and if you do that enough then a bigger, more relatable experience emerges lol. Everybody knows that there's really only like five emotions.

That being said I made a joke in a recent Moon Knight fic about how baby Marc liked baby Steven at first just because he would wake up and his bed would randomly be made. And my sys friend was like "HOW did you know about chore ghost??". So. Lucky accident a lot of the time I think. Thanks for the Q though, I'm happy I succeed at this!

[yisanged]

the japanese-korean stuff is always just this weird elephant in the room.... idk. a lot of the times the stuff like in that one orv arc is just really uncalled for but at the same time it doesn't feel right ignoring all the bad blood there just to say oh this is hashtag problematic or whatever. idk it's not a topic i know as much about as i maybe should what with being a usamerican with parents that have made no great efforts to keep me super tied to korean culture other than just like. the food. but it's hard to get good information on it with all the polarized uninformed biased opinions out there. my parents themselves aren't the most impartial sources either. idk idk. whatever

[starlit-mansion]

i actually am living for the shot in the arm the movie is going to give william fanart

[the-punforgiven]

Sometimes I am reminded that For Honor can be both the most fun shit in the world and also the most viscerally unfun thing to ever exist in the universe and it depends entirely on who you're fighting and how many of them there are