#like dumbing down and simplifying the way they speak to me vs the way they speak to their fellow whites

[selamat-linting]

i let my friend explained to me about the subtlety of two different words that basically mean the same thing and now there's randos assuming i dont know bitch can be a verb. fuck off.

[janiedean]

Hey Lavi, I never got around to reading Dante, but I studied Renaissance Florence and I saw someone in that long post mention that Dante seemed to have it in for Florence? Why is that, or was that a misreading? All I can recall of Florence’s flaws for the time were it’s reputation for gay guys and prostitutes (IIRC the German word for homosexual is derived from Florence :P)

ba… er, it’s not that he had it on florence, but like, people in that post (the not italian ones) have 100% Missed The Point, so I’ll go at it from the beginning. so, quote in question (I suppose):

he and his idol/mancrush, the famous poet Virgil, journey through Hell on behalf of his dead girlfriend and everyone who he didn’t like was there and suffered punishment for all eternity and then he blames three whole popes and the entire fucking city of Florence, Italy for the shitty state of the Church and over seven hundred years later it’s played a major influence in Western culture

now, never mind that ‘it’s played’ is dumb af because ITALIAN LANGUAGE WOULDN’T EXIST WITHOUT DANTE so it’s not played for shit, but like I’ll try to not touch all the other subjects regardless of how much my eyes are bleeding just reading this sentence.

the point is that he was permanently exiled from florence because of his political stances in which the church took part and that happened before the reinassance, which is like… long and complicate so I’m gonna make it very short and simplified sorry everyone but it’s not a thing you can dissect on tumblr properly. so, list:

florence at the end of the 13th century was a republic in the context of the rivalrly between guelfs and ghibellines, pls refer to that link for specific info but basically most of the politics in italy at that point where ‘there’s a bunch of separate small republics/states fighting each other and people tend to either stand with the pope [guelfs] or the emperor of the sacred roman empire [ghibellines]’, and in florence there had been a war in between the two factions that ended with the ghibellines being sent away from the city around 1289 if I’m not getting the year wrong, dante was a guelf and a nobleman and was directly involved in the city’s politics from then onwards until the aforementioned exile;

after then there was a further split in between the guelf faction ie one wanted the pope to be less involved and the other was more with sticking with him, and dante was in the first one;

now this is the point where I should tell you that the pope was boniface viii ie someone who has since then (and during that time) been wildly recognized as one of the worst people who ever had that job ever and whose papacy can be summed up in ‘trying to have both spiritual and temporal power in each single possible way in italy and outside it’ - pls read the entire article and get to the part where he had an entire feud with philip the ivth of france and ended with him getting slapped in the face in anagni -, and who dante saw as someone who had corrupted the catholic church and was fully not doing what his job entailed ie shepherding souls and not being an emperor;

tldr the white vs black guelfs feud ended up with the black guelfs winning and exiling the whites among which dante who therefore ended up exiled from his hometown for the entirety of his life later;

now the thing that those people don’t get is that to dante/people in his situation being involved in their hometown’s politics especially when being a public figure and so on was most of their life and they had an attachment to their city that was similar to what you’d have for your country since back in the day italy was barely a cultural unit and not a political one, like fighting for your city it wasn’t the same as fighting for your *hometown*, it was the same as your COUNTRY, which means that in his context being exiled from there meant leaving the country he was born in/that he loved/felt like he 100% belonged to and never come back, not just leaving one town and going to another. like, if someone told me I couldn’t ever go back to rome in my entire life but I could stay in naples I’d still be in the same country and as I’m italian first and everything else later I’d suffer but who cares, if someone said you have to leave italy and you can never come back I’d suffer a thousand times more because italy is my damned country and the place I was born in and in whose culture I partake/that I feel at home in, that was what it meant leaving florence to him;

now, his problem wasn’t with florence, his problem was with the people who threw him out and the system which allowed it and the catholic church which instead of worrying about religion worried about politics and mingling with them, which by the way is *exactly what the catholic church does here in italy to this day no more no less*, from then on nothing has changed, and he didn’t blame FLORENCE for the shitty state of the church as OP says, HE BLAMED THE CHURCH FOR THE SHITTY STATE OF FLORENCE AND THE ENTIRE COUNTRY, and guess what it’s been seven hundred years and counting and exactly nothing has changed, which means OP’s point even more dumb because dante saying that then and nothing having changed now should witness to the fact that he was only speaking sense;

like: dante had it in with corrupt popes who turned the church into a temporal power rather than stick with the spiritual because he thought that the temporal power didn’t belong to it, which is like… the principle of separation between state and church on which each single post-american revolution constitution has been founded on sure as hell he didn’t have it in for florence when he missed it for his entire life and wanted to go back more than anything and he couldn’t because he was exiled;

now, another thing that OP doesn’t get because lmao what is context: to catholics, the pope is technically infallible. like, if you’re a catholic You Cannot Criticize The Pope, period, so the fact that dante alighieri, A Catholic In The Middle Ages, puts not just one pope in HELL but more than one in a book/poem that he wants to sell as a revolutionary work (which he wanted to do or he wouldn’t have had vergil walking him through hell) is like… a level of disruptive revolutionary literary BDE that these people can’t even conceive, because it implied saying that the head of the church was wrong and calling him out of it. which, again, for a catholic, is basically the highest BDE level in existence. and guess what, Dante Was A Catholic But Not A Bigoted One As Much As These People ThinK;

also, never mind that the people he put in hell were also people he LIKED and most of the sympathetic characters are there, but tumblr doesn’t know that he put in purgatory manfred, the not legitimate son of frederick the second, who was excommunicated by the church, which I should hope anyone can guess the meaning of - like, excommunication is The Worst Thing The Church Can Do When It Comes To Catholics -, and he still put him in a position where he could be redeemed because he repented on his deathbed (according to dante’s rendition anyway), which means that he said someone the church had expelled for good from its ranks could still be redeemed and eventually go to heaven, which was basically telling them fuck you. same BDE.

now, that is the entire point of THAT SPECIFIC THING RE FLORENCE, but I’d like to state that the way I put it is the 0,5% of the entire problem which I can’t possibly summarize because in that book he comments on the status of things in the entire goddamned nation even if it wasn’t a nation politically at that point while mixing it with his philosophy treatise and his own search to have his faith and political ideals coexist while also discussing courtly poetry and changing his language based on the needs while using the same poetric meter that he invented/came up with and no one else could manage to use again after because it was too complicated, and while he does that he gives you a summary of the entirety of greek mythology figures that he incorporated in his work, a summary of the status of things in discussions of medieval theology and philosophy and on top of that there’s some expressions which are now staples of the italian language like we use them commonly and 80% of the time ppl don’t even know he came up with them.

and that still is a badly put summary of 20% of the basic things you find in the divine comedy as a whole because there’s more than that and there’s a reason why here in high school you study it for three years one cantica per year and it’s not even enough to barely scratch the surface. and that’s why those posts give me a damn aneurysm, because if you say that ^^^^^ above is fanfic sorry but I see red.

also sorry for going off like this but you went and pointed out the one thing that irked me most about that OP but I also didn’t want to reply directly because this discussion has given me metaphorical ulcers in the past plus gave me three days of feeling really fucking down (I don’t wanna use trigger but it was the closest thing I came to that in my entire life) and I’m done engaging with people who wouldn’t want to listen but eh. XDDDDD anyway sorry for the rant I hope it was exhaustive. XD

[battlestar-royco]

im not a GOT blog, but i follow a lot of got blogs that are D(any)-oriented, because she's admittedly my favorite character since s1 (cant speak for the books). and i love her because she has problems, not despite them, and i love the weaknesses and strengths shes had thru her arc. i think we have to remember that the D fandom is a LARGE group of people, with vocal bad seeds and good seeds. I've seen San/sa stans be entirely nasty. I've seen D stans be open and critical and mindful. (1/2)

one group in the fanbase doesnt reflect them all. maybe ive had a better experience, since I’ve been following kind and analytical/critical dany fans for a while now. but through it I’ve also seen how often D fans get lumped together. Very few people think D is perfect, and its because of her triumphs and downfalls that she is appreciated. The Sa/nsa and D rivalry was fueled by the show, and I think avid stans from either side are the root of the rivalry. But outside of that, Sa/nsa is loved too

There are definitely bad eggs in every fandom, which is why I don’t follow any Sansa blogs or go through her tags much either. (I mostly just rb what’s on my feed or answer asks about her.) I find the entire Sansa vs Danielle discourse counterproductive and boring tbh, but many book and show fans (and certainly the show writers) have hated Sansa since before the Sansa/Danielle rivalry was even a thing, in a fierce way I have never seen targeted at Danielle. The average ASOIAF/GOT fan is often either enamored of or indifferent toward Danielle, while the average fan is either indifferent or hateful toward Sansa. The only place I’ve seen where Sansa really has a strong fanbase is Tumblr, but Danielle is one of the top three favorites in all the fandom (the other two being Jon and T/yrion). Everywhere else–Reddit, Youtube, etc–that basic empathy for Sansa is simply nonexistent. I often find the reason for that dislike is because she didn’t report on Joffrey when Nymeria bit him, she wrote a letter to Cat and Robb while she was an 11 y/o political hostage under duress, she wasn’t affectionate to Tyrion as a child bride, she doesn’t fight like Arya etc. The reasons people dislike Danielle is because she exercised military force to take over cultures that were not her own, and (on the show) abandons those cultures in political turmoil, and she burns people who disagree with her. Does she get unreasonable misogynistic hate because she is a woman? Absolutely. Do I think anyone’s entitled to like Danielle in spite of all her flaws? Absolutely. But I also think the Sansa hate is unfair.

Also, part of my relationship with Danielle and Sansa is and has always been independent of the fandom. Of course every character in ASOIAF/GOT has done sketchy things, but imperialism and white saviorism, especially to the degree they appear in her storyline, are things that I will never be comfortable with, and I’ve encountered several Danielle stans who say she’s not an imperialist or that the racism in her storyline doesn’t matter because she’s a feminist hero. That’s the problem I have with her story: that she’s portrayed in such a way that people can and will excuse the way she treats POC. (This is also why I can’t get behind T/yrion. People love to brush over the way he treats women and especially Sansa.) The stereotypical writing for Essosi cultures and settings also turns me off even further from her storyline as a whole. I do find some parts of her character empathetic (like how she is an abuse survivor), but I’m a lot more like Sansa than I am Danielle. For all these reasons I am much more inclined to like and defend Sansa. Danielle does get a lot of hate, but the show’s narrative doesn’t completely belittle and betray her at every single opportunity like it has done to Sansa since season 1. In fact, they’ve been simplifying Danielle’s storyline to make her succeed more and dumbing down, erasing, and enacting violence upon Sansa. In my fandom experience, Sansa needs someone in her court more than Danielle does, so that’s where I stand. I understand of course that there are toxic stans of both Danielle and Sansa, but the whole situation is nuanced, and a lot of contention has been created between the fandoms due to the show’s terrible writing.

[yukipri]

This might be a dumb question, but with your combined knowledge of Chinese and Japanese, do you have any tips on learning Kanji? I've been attempting to learn Japanese and I have the Hiragana and Katakana down pretty well but each Kanji character is much harder to remember and there are a lot more of them

HAHAHA I’m DEFINITELY the wrong person to be asking about kanji, my kanji reading skills are crap and writing is practically nonexistent ^ ^; My Japanese relies heavily on my speaking fluency, and I do alright with digital text because I can just use the dictionary, and so long as I know the furigana (hiragana reading) I know what it means, and I never studied grammar. If you happen to be at the point where you have a large vocabulary and rock solid and advanced grammar, using an online kanji dictionary add-on (Rikai-chan) and just CHUGGING through fanfiction or other Japanese text can really improve your kanji ^ ^;

But for more beginner learners, you should definitely completely master hiragana and katakana, they should be as natural to you as any other language characters you’re fluent in. Simple kanji, like the numbers and days of the week will also probably come in early.

The hardest part of studying Japanese kanji in comparison to Chinese characters is that Japanese kanji have SO many different ways they’re read, and these change depending on what other kanji they’re attached to and if it’s a verb, how it’s conjugated/what the hiragana endings are. Chinese also has multiple readings per character (and also simplified vs. traditional) but I feel that in general, it comes up less in introductory learning than it does in Japanese, which is immediate.

How you learn them will depend on your curriculum and the the pace at which kanji are introduced and how you study. My advanced Mandarin course in college introduced over 100 new characters a week, my advanced summer course 100 a DAY. Flash cards work for some people but it was just too much for me, I wrote them 1000 times in my notebooks while chanting an internal mantra of their readings/meanings, because hand muscle memory + auditory/rhythm helps me personally memorize things. Did they stick for long? No but it helped me ace most of my daily quizzes HAHA

While I’ve never tried them myself, I know that a lot of learners (especially self-study) have had a lot of success with kanji studying apps. I can’t recommend anything specifically since again I’ve never tried, but it could be something to look into ^ ^;

[roaldseth]

DO ROLAND FOR THE MEME thanks

HO BOY CAPS LOCK. YOU’RE GOING TO REGRET THIS/EVERYONE’S GOING TO HATE ME FOR THIS INEVITABLY LONG POST. I HOPE YOU’RE READY FOR a massive mix of me talking and info dumping that no one asked for.

If anyone gives me any reason to talk about this man, that is the consequence.

Why I like them

I’ll try condensing this as much as possible by addressing root(s):

There are basic understandings to why I will like a character that divides into: appearance, relatability, admiration, and general character tropes/typing (there’s also a phantom reasoning which is second-hand favoritism, but it doesn’t apply here). To this point, I consider Roland the best completion of addressing those points with the media I have engaged with.

Or it can be an illusion—that he happened to be around in a certain/critical point in my life and my decision to attach to him, for whatever reason, is nothing more than a string events that fate has placed in front of me with little to no explanation or reasoning. If Quantum Devil Saga was not released, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to replay Digital Devil Saga. If I did not replay Digital Deivl Saga, I would not have “seen” Roland.

But it’s most likely a collaboration of both of those points, as if specific requirements needed to have been met. That requirement reasoning also explains why I initially didn’t like him or the games—I didn’t have an understanding or appreciation. Now I do.

Or perhaps the reality is: I can give guesses, but I don’t really know.

Why I don’t

Assuming this is answered if the serious question was not.

Favorite scene

all of them

Power Plant—I am grouping the two cut-scenes as one whole for this. The Power Plant as a whole is a well-composed dungeon. Simplifying to terms of writing: it’s the movement that follows right after the climax. It’s right after shit gets real, real fast, and it continues that trend. And it’s when Roland and the Lokapala face their “purpose” so to speak. The Power Plant is peak Lokapalan morale. I can’t remember the exact quote I’m looking for, but to paraphrase: a soldier must preserve his life in meaningless moments, so that it can be given up during a meaningful one.

The scripted element(s) of Roland’s death exposes his character. There are points that can be used to utilize character deaths—revealing secrets (that he is/feels responsible for Greg death—the source of his guilt), which can go alongside reveling parts not typically seen (the coward-vs-courageous argument). Those are the ones that come to the forefront of my head at the moment. Essentially: it’s good storytelling execution.

Then a personal favorite, him just shoving his fist into computer monitors like: this is a good idea, guys. The Power Plant exhibits his understand—and application—of the concept of Data. “Even Indra had to live with his teacher for one hundred and one years”—from Prajapati, Indra understood the Self. From the Karma Society’s research, Roland saw a/the nature of Data. TL;DR: it’s meta. His entire character is meta.

Favorite line

It’s one of those by-chance lines you can receive if he is a party member and gives Seraph an item via level-up on the Sun:

“Data, huh? Then, is there no difference between this object and myself?”

Favorite outfit

zip-off cargo shorts and/or classic Dad™ apparel

I’ll comment on favorite part of his outfit, which is all of it a toss up between his coat and his glasses.

Maybe it’s just fanciful thinking, but:  his coat (and Indra’s plates) are vaguely like brigandine (and kikko armour). I kind of hold how he pops his color close to me, simply because I do the same thing.

And his glasses is because Indra (Idamdra) is “He Who Sees (That).” Not only does it serve that meta context, but it’s a great contrast between the Junkyard’s artificiality and a common human impairment.

OTP

Adil/Roland; Roland/Adil—however you want to arrange it.

I may not be captain of this ship, but I am willing to go down with it.

brOTP brOT3

Greg, Roland, and Adil.

I just want them to all be friends, having a good time, doing fun friend things. They disserved a beach episode, too. Let them bring Fred to the beach.

Fun fact: it takes approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes(?) to get to the nearest beach from Portland, granted without traffic or obstructions. That’s what Google said.

Headcanon

Roland was good at his craft, despite what he says. Him saying his novel is “crappy” is writer’s/creator’s bias talking.

I can’t really attest to the legitimacy of this Indra Sahasranama’s translation, because I haven’t read all/enough of the Rig Veda myself, nor am I a translator, and I’ve tried to look up some of these names to no avail, but out of all of Indra’s names listed there, Kavitamaya—most beautiful in words—is probably my favorite.

A lot of hymns attribute Indra being a Lover of Songs/ Lover of Hymns, but that name suggests that he is the “Great Poet” or a sort of hymn master instead of being an admirer.

Unpopular opinion

Isn’t liking him as the Favorite an unpopular opinion enough?

A wish

I wish I was a little bit more outgoing to just mindlessly blab about him. I see a lot of you so care-freely talk about your Favorites, but I guess that’s what tags my twitter is for. Bother way less people there… or if you want to hear me say something—probably dumb—about Roland every 5-10 days, I’m @idamdra​ on twitter too.

But, I think this ask means a wish concerning him. I suppose it is that he reaches/reached liberation (eventually). I want to believe that there was a point for him not showing up in the opening cut-scene.

I doubt he was liberated, rather just really close. He’s probably just waiting for his karma to extinguish it’s due. From my understanding (but don’t quote me), a soul can spend time in both Swarga and Naraka depending on its karma. Maybe he’s just spending some time in Indra’s heaven.

An oh-god-please-don’t-ever-happen

He’s already dead. Not much worse can happen… The only worse outcome past that I can think of is that his seeming absences of reincarnation is neither him deserving it or not, but that he just ceases—neither reincarnation or liberation. I don’t really know how that’d work though.

5 words that best describe them

Courage, responsibility, power, intelligence, and wisdom. 

That’s how I see him. I cannot speak for how others interpret him though.

My nickname for them

Very rarely, I will abbreviate his name to “Rol,” but I could not see myself calling him say “Roly”/“Rowley,” actual diminutives of “Roland.”

Additionally: I don’t think I’ve ever referred to him as Roald (unless I’m trying to explain he wasn’t “Roland” in the Japanese version). I don’t know what to think about people that tag him under both Roland and Roald. I don’t even do that. What does that mean, someone tell me.