#supralingual

[andrewkaminskiart]

There was the common light of earthly day. -Savitri by Sri Aurobindo #savitri #sriaurobindo #beyondlove #beyondspeech #beyondmind #supralingual #supramental lies the #supermind #andrewkaminskiart (at Kingston, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/ByL405cA5_L/?igshid=wybfs5n3ruju

[katsidhe]

what is the difference between ... coded and ... girl?(for example dean coded sam girl vs. sam coded dean girl?)i'm kinda confused

So a couple of people have asked me something along these lines, which gives me an excuse to go off on a rant about I interpret the “x-coded y girl” lens. My One True Lens. My OTL, as it were.

The notion of coding, linguistically, is all about communication. Literature, being a medium of both art and communication, relies on a shared culture of meaning. At its most basic sense, coding is just sets of symbols laid down by an author that are governed by certain rules, which permit a reader to infer meaning based on their mutual prior understanding on how these rules work. There are many, many types of code in literature. There’s linguistic coding, as in which denotations and connotations are ascribed to which words. There’s grammatical coding, as in what sentence structures imply about the subjects they describe. There’s the literary code of tropes, used to quickly convey eg which character is the ingenue, the hero, etc. There are structural and genre codes—for example, the generic forms of tragedy, or comedy, or parody, all of which are signaled to a reader with tropes and words and packaging meant to interact with their expectations. And of course, there are character codes. A character introduced wearing a leather jacket, in most forms of Western fiction, is being coded with “toughness”. It’s a trope, it’s a meme, it’s a code. This coding is a supralingual form of communication that relies on shared cultural semantics.

To say someone or something is “x-coded”, then, is to say that they, either through deliberate self-presentation or intrinsic characterization, communicate “x”. Maybe they associate themself with tropes that x is associated. Maybe they don’t think much like x, but they act in a way that x acts, or vice versa. Maybe they have some undefinable energy that somehow screams x, in a way that would be apparent to most audiences. Basically, how would this person or concept be written about in a book in shorthand in order to convey to the audience what character tropes we should assign them? This can be a combination of internal and external traits, as long as those traits are actively communicated in some fashion.

“-Girl”, gender neutral, is all about fandom. “Fangirl” is often a diminutive meant to characterize especially female fans as obsessive, childish, or altogether too excited about a niche interest. “Y girl”, then, is a term meant to reclaim and celebrate the act of whole-heartedly embracing fannish enthusiasm without compunction or embarrassment. But in the necessary abstraction of x-coded y girl framing, that doesn’t mean that you have to be a huge fan of “y” in particular. Rather, someone or something who is a y girl is a fan of the traits encoded by y. “Y” is often but not always aspirational: maybe y isn’t how you think or act, but it’s how you’d like to think or act. Maybe y isn’t how you’d like to be, but you deeply admire y. Maybe you don’t even necessarily WANT to value y, but you do, and your life or actions are shaped by those values. “Y girl” is about guiding lights, things we are drawn to, things we assign value to, things we secretly relish, things we can’t put down.

A Dean-coded Sam girl communicates themself with Dean tropes, but is drawn to Sam tropes, whereas the opposite is true for a Sam-coded Dean girl. I’ll give some straightforward character examples.

Ruby is Dean-coded: the toughness, the leather, the stubborn absolutism of believing she’s in the right, the charisma, the devil-may-care persona studded with moments of emotional vulnerability. Some of those tropes are internal, some external, some physical, some not, but they’re all about communication. Ruby is a Sam girl: she is ruthlessly, brutally focused on the big picture; she is more than willing to personally sacrifice pieces of herself to get to her endgame; the costs and the morality of what she’ll do to get there are completely irrelevant to the greater good. She is self-contained and internal; she doesn’t value loyalty or personal love or external reward or even some far off aspirational moral good: she wants the world shaped a certain way, and if she succeeds then nothing else matters. These are Sam-associated values. (Not to be confused with Sam-the-character’s values.)

Harry Potter is Sam-coded. He’s the hashtag chosen one; his life is studded with abuse and trauma; he was scarred with a personal connection with an evil wizard as a baby; he grapples with expectations, stigma, and fear from people around him based on that connection to evil; he’s pretty bad at controlling the narrative of his life. But he’s definitely not a Sam girl. He’s a Dean girl through and through: he thinks first asks questions never, signifying how he values courage and loyalty above effectiveness. He would never compromise himself morally for the sake of his goals, he’d never sacrifice a friend. He values personal love and emotional connections above anything else, including the world and the greater good.

The wonderful thing about my OTL is that it can classify anything, as anything. Simply come up with three to four thematically linked nouns, and start putting people and ideas and concepts into the appropriate boxes. For instance, from {beer wine liquor}, I am a wine-coded liquor girl.

[arth456recentdevelopments]

GARY SETZER — INEFFABLE (I DID NOT KNOW THE GREEN)