#oh and obviously lakynn

[ebooksupremacy]

I know this is an old post from months ago but Oobah Butler is a real person and I hope that poor boy doesn't share a name with any Hoover characters. No one deserves to Google their own name and turn up an abusive love interest in a badly written romance.

really been getting everyone with the colleen hoover name round in my booktok book quiz . possibly my finest work tbh

[bondsmagii]

As a recovering former American (recently left to move back to the Motherland) I can say that Americans REALLY do forget that the rest of the world exists, no exaggeration. Like they know it’s there In Theory but are suspicious that it’s there In Practice. That’s why American college kids who study abroad are so obnoxious because they’re learning for the first time that other countries and people exist and every country is not in fact modeled after America. Am I making any sense??

honestly sometimes this kind of thing can be endearing because I have never met tourists as genuinely enthusiastic about everything as American tourists, and to be fair American tourists, at least where I’ve experienced them, are harmless. they can be a little obnoxious (have any of youse ever hear of indoor voices? why are your accents so loud!!) but when you compare them to like, English tourists, I know who I’d rather be stuck in a hotel with lmao. it’s really endearing to realise that Americans are genuinely that enthusiastic, too, and they’re not being sarcastic or anything. they’re just fucking fascinated by everything!

but what you described is like, the other side of this coin. Americans seem to be so insulated from the rest of the world that they genuinely don’t even consider that things are different, and it’s especially annoying in online circles where Americans will yell at you for something that is just not relevant at all where you’re from, nor was it ever relevant. obviously being Irish I’m coming at it from that angle, but there are so many examples I can think of; the whole cottagecore thing is just one of many. just recently I saw a bunch of Americans lumping in Gaeilge names with “white people names”, saying it was racism that people are expected to be about to pronounce “made-up white people names” like Kaheightlynn or Lakynn or whatever but find the names of POC to be too hard to pronounce (which is true!) but then they were using names like Saoirse and Domhnall as examples and just... no. that’s not the same thing. in America, Irish-Americans are usually white and privileged, but saying that so someone like me is so fucking inappropriate considering I’m from Ireland, a place where in living memory I would have been shot dead by colonisers if they asked me my name and I said Miceál (my name!) instead of Michael (the English version -- not my name!) because my language was illegal! so no, it is not the same if an Irish person gets upset that you can’t say Saoirse or you call it a made-up white person name, and it has nothing to do with white privilege in America!

I could honestly go on with these kinds of examples. it’s such a headache. it’s like Americans see Irish people and go “oh, white!” and forget 800 years of murder, oppression, colonisation, cultural genocide, and full-on genocide.