#the interacted a total of like tree times before this episode

[respectwomenjuice]

throwing tomatoes rn

[littleandless]

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON SEASON 2 FINALE: MY THOUGHTS

i mean, wow.

tyland getting some screen time yay. also, i was glad to see the trend of dyed beards represented on screen FINALLY. game of thrones shied away from that.

aegon and larys running away together…doomed yaoi</3

honestly i’m glad they made aegon’s broken dick part of show canon. first of all, he deserves it, but also…it means he’s about to get perverted in a different way. maybe larys will introduce him to voyeurism.

jacaerys has gone full-on bratty failson, which is kind of pathetic and sexy of him tbh.

ulf went from harmless idiot to dangerously irreverent soooo quickly. i know he has a dragon or whatever but he should at least pretend to kiss ass for the moment. like hugh! he knows the value of appearances.

how the hell did gwayne even find out about alicent and criston fucking? am i meant to assume he extrapolated that from the intense sniffing of the handkerchief?

i love how nihilistic criston cole has become. no more shiny white veneer, just a bald-faced suicide mission. he doesn’t fear death. the only thing holding him back since that night when alicent found him was her. and now he sees the futility of it all. so yeah, let’s embrace death! yippee!

this episode added so much to helaena’s character. after we see her and daemon interact in his weirwood vision, it cuts to her in the next scene, in the same outfit with the same facial expression. we’ve had 2 seasons of helaena making prophetic statements, but they were always full of metaphors, and her dreamer status seemed more like something that happened to her rather than something she did. but this episode turns that assumption completely on its head.

the weirwood vision was INSANE! BLOODRAVEN! DAENERYS! THE WHITE WALKERS! it reminded me that we’re being told this story for a purpose. grrm didn’t write a spin-off just for the sake of making a few extra dollars. it’s all connected. we’ve been hearing about the dance since shireen baratheon taught davos seaworth about it in season 5 and joffrey spoiled the ending in season 3 of game of thrones. and when ser duncan and baby egg finally appear on screen in a knight of the seven kingdoms, witnessing the blackfyre rebellions amd interacting with brynden rivers, things will be recontextualized yet again. the impact of all of these characters reverberates for centuries. you see it everywhere in a song of ice and fire. even if you’re not much of a reader, i implore you to read them anyway. and i’m not just saying that. even if grrm never actually finishes the series, i will die swearing that it was totally worth the read. if you have any love for these characters at all, give it a shot.

back to helaena: her scene with aemond was fucking fantastic. away from the eyes of their mother, each of them is more themselves than ever. aemond isn’t just an incel a wounded aggressor and helaena isn’t just a wounded dove. they both have a clarity of purpose, and they are in direct opposition to the other’s. aemond “come with me, help me defend us and all we hold dear” and helaena “it won’t change anything, it’s over, you’re already dead” it had me on the absolute edge of my seat. i felt like a dog in need of a stuffed animal to annihilate with my teeth. THIS IS CINEMA.

back to daemon: from his first scene in the episode, we see a resignation that wasn’t there before. he accepts the maddening nature of harrenhal, he accepts alys hovering over him at night and leading him to the weirwood tree, and he doesn’t brush off her words. he embraces the power of this place as well as the finality of what it reveals to him. there will be no more yearning or grasping, at least not for his own purposes. he knows what he must do. he submits to rhaenyra as he submits to his impending death.

the scene between alyn and corlys was so powerful. idk maybe it’s because i have daddy issues too, but it moved me a lot. watching your father forsake you for his trueborn heirs while you toil ceaselessly for survival, and then witnessing the downfall of everything he holds dear, and then finally…finally he acknowledges your value. knowing that all your success as a ship captain is attributed to the man who didn’t or couldn’t give you shit else. trying to compensate for decades-old wounds. all of this and he can still barely stand to meet your eyes. GOD.

another illicit rhaenicent scene! so much sexual potential and they just keep squandering it!

but seriously, that scene was insane. alicent has completely given up. “here, have the castle. take king’s landing. i’ll open the door for you. fuck, take my son too, take it all.”

all of their relationship encapsulated in a single conversation! everything boiled down to its base essence: i clung to honor and tradition and resented you because you didn’t, and now i’ve done some of the same things i always judged you for and i’ve realized it doesn’t matter. i just want this all to end.

that’s it, guys! that’s their whole dynamic! hell, that’s the whole show basically! but it’s too late! it’s too late! it’s too late! it’s too late! it’s too late! it’s too late! it’s too late! it’s too late! it’s too late! it’s too late! it’s too late!

someone redesign the sigil of house targaryen as a dragon eating its own tail and wrap this shit up

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode 'How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones'. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about nonbinary speech with Dr. Jacq Jones. They’re a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. But first, our most recent bonus episode was about various kinds of fun mishearings and missayings and misparsings that people make in songs, in phrases, in idioms – all sorts of, like, you know when you hear “an acorn,” and you think it might actually be “an egg-corn” because it’s like the egg of the tree? Well, we talk about what strange things that you mishear, or misparse, can tell us about how language works. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to this bonus episode, many more bonus episodes, and help us keep the show running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello Jacq!

Jacq: Hi Gretchen!

Gretchen: Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Jacq: Thanks for inviting me. It’s awesome.

Gretchen: Before we get into all of the cool research that you’ve done about how nonbinary people talk that you’re working on, let’s talk a little bit about your origin story. How did you get into linguistics?

Jacq: Okay, well, I mean, how far back do you wanna go, I guess? I was a high school dropout. I was in my teens. I was going around North America, in Canada and the United States, working and this and that. I decided I wanted to go back to school. I did get into an adult education programme and finished up my high school. It was in a really small town in rural Alberta. It had a community college, and they didn’t have that many classes. I went into geography.

Gretchen: That’s super related to linguistics.

Jacq: You’d be surprised.

Gretchen: Great.

Jacq: Yeah, because I had spent time in the southern United States and in Alberta and in Ontario and things, and so I liked seeing all the different places. I went into geography. For people who don’t know, geography has these two big branches. There’s physical geography and human geography. Physical geography is rocks and trees and mountains and weather, and human geography is how people affect the world and how the world affects people.

Gretchen: So, like cities and stuff.

Jacq: Yeah, right. So, I was sitting in a class, and we were talking about how goods move across borders and how a lot of human influences – including language and political borders – can affect the movement of goods and, alternatively, how languages can be stopped by things like mountains.

Gretchen: Oh! Okay.

Jacq: You’ll have dialects that won’t go over the top of a mountain because you have this physical barrier. I was like, “That’s amazing.” Somehow, something about this interaction between this natural world and something like language, which is very, sort of, in your heads – but of course, you’re not gonna walk up a mountain to go talk to the person on the other side.

Gretchen: I live in Montreal, which doesn’t even really have a mountain by proper mountain-people standards, and I don’t wanna walk up that mountain just to talk to someone at the top. I totally understand that prehistoric people also did not wanna do this.

Jacq: Exactly. People, you know, live along rivers, so you have languages and language change and language contact all along these natural systems. That was the bug.

Gretchen: That’s fascinating. That’s so cool.

Jacq: And then I went from this community college – this adult education programme – to university, took a linguistics class, and as they say, that was it. Fell in love with phonetics and acoustics and all the meaty bits inside of you that create language. And here we are.

Gretchen: You do sounds – phonetics, how people talk – and specifically, I first encountered your research when I was in New Zealand last year at the New Zealand Linguistic Society Annual Meeting in Dunedin. You were giving a talk about your dissertation on how nonbinary people talk. How did you get into that topic?

Jacq: Sure. I think for most linguists, if you can press them, for most people in academia, what you’re into – there’s always something personal in it. There’s always something in what you’re doing. As a nonbinary person, navigating the 2010s – the late 2010s – trying to navigate what “gender” means, I kept catching myself really interrogating, really thinking about how I interact with people around me and what assumptions they’re going to put on me, what assumptions I’m putting on myself. You know, I’m getting on the bus, how low do I wanna talk to the bus driver? Just really silly stuff like that.

Gretchen: Like, are they gonna “sir” or “ma’am” me to show how they’re parsing my gender?

Jacq: Exactly. And do I want either of those options? Not really.

Gretchen: Which are both wrong.

Jacq: But if I can barely figure out what being nonbinary means to me as a nonbinary person, how can I expect the, you know, 60-year-old parent that I’m talking to, or a random person at the coffee shop I’m talking to, to understand all these backflips that I’m trying to do in presenting my gender? I mean, I’m into phonetics. I’m into acoustics. I’ve always been interested, linguistically, in this space between “This is how people talk because they are from Canada,” “This is how people talk because they’re a woman” – or because they’re a certain socio-economic class, or this – versus “This is how a jock or a burnout talks,” “This is how somebody asserts their identity.” When you’re looking at gender, that’s really this difference between a lot of stuff that we’re taught growing up and a lot of stuff that people might argue is inherent – a lot of stuff that is constrained by physiology, in some ways, by your existence in a meat suit – but you still always have control over it. That’s where this is. Part of it is being nonbinary and wanting that legitimacy of examining the numbers and proving that I exist, and nonbinary people exist, which are not represented historically. That’s changing now. And so, wanting that studying me and people like me to show “Hey, we exist. This is a thing that we can measure. This is a thing that we can look at,” and studying why, and yeah.

Gretchen: If you study all the other nonbinary speakers, then they’ll just tell how you need to talk now. So, that’ll be really handy.

Jacq: I mean, that’s part of it, too, right, is something that’s really exciting about studying nonbinary people during my dissertation – and I think that this is very much changing for the better, and I’m so happy that there are so many more options for young people in terms of gender and for old people in terms of gender and for anybody in terms of gender, but at the time, it really felt like all the templates that were out there were very binary – all the methodologies for studying speech, all of variation studies, everything, was, “This is how men talk,” “This is how women talk,” “This is how you’re supposed to talk if you’re a man or a woman,” or you want to present yourself – it was all binary.

Gretchen: I remember even when I was just being trained at grad school, everything was very binary. People weren’t even really questioning that. Even 10 years later, it seems like there’s been a lot more people thinking that through.

Jacq: Exactly. That is so amazing. From the point of view – putting on the researcher hat – studying it at the point where the speakers are making these first decisions without any templates – without a YouTube person to look at to model this kind of language on – felt really exciting.

Gretchen: And then somebody else who’s doing this study in another 10 years or 20 years or something when possibly nonbinary identity may have coalesced a bit more, then they have this to compare to as a baseline to see – it’s not often we get to watch a new gender evolve in real time. I mean, that’s not quite true because non-cis people have always existed, but the coherent, legible, nonbinary category, we get to watch it evolve in real time.

Jacq: Exactly. Traditionally, in these linguistic studies of dialect formation, that’s the 10-dollar word. You’re looking at something that’s very geographically bound. You have a group of people from one dialect that are moving to another place for another dialect. You have this contact, and you can study things coming out of that. But for nonbinary gender, even now, I can say, “Aw, there’s so many more nonbinary people out there.” I mean, realistically, if we think about our own networks, we do not have – I mean, I guess I can’t say this about everybody – but most of us don’t have a huge amount of nonbinary people in it compared to how many other LGBT people or how many other men or women – there just aren’t that many nonbinary people. We do tend to find each other, but we don’t have these big communities.

Gretchen: There’s a certain clustering, but it’s also not absolute, and there’s lots of other stuff. Do you feel like the internet has an influence on how nonbinary people talk?

Jacq: I think it does in the sense that the internet – and in particular, that kind of American sphere of the internet – influences everything that everybody does all of the time in some ways. But I also think that gender – sex and gender, in particular – these core identity things interact so strongly with where we are and our immediate context that it’s not quite as – in terms of speech, I don’t think it’s quite as strong. I did have one participant – if I can talk about my dissertation a little bit.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, please, no, tell us about how the nonbinary people talk.

Jacq: One of my participants, Istus, is nonbinary and very femme. One of the things I talked about at that conference talk that you saw me – the slides are on my website, if you wanna take a look.

Gretchen: Excellent, we can link to those.

Jacq: Sweet. Istus is nonbinary and also very femme. This is something that really challenges the stereotypes that we have. Even me as a researcher coming into this had this idea of you have these men and women, and then you have these nonbinary people that are challenging these stereotypes, but “nonbinary” is not necessarily “non-femme.” So, Istus’s femininity was very nonbinary. When she talked about trying to construct her voice, this femininity that she wanted to get across, she would talk about putting on, basically, a Californian accent. She would say, “I can talk like this, and I sound very feminine, but I also sound like I’m smiling all the time, and I’m not that nice a person.”

Gretchen: Is Istus a New Zealander? Because you’re doing your PhD in New Zealand.

Jacq: All of my participants were from Christchurch (Ōtautahi), New Zealand. They were mostly between the ages of 18 and 22 – so this really specific first year of university cohort where you’re learning your identity and really stretching out from under your parents’ wings for the first time. I also had a couple of participants that were over 40. That’s interesting because it also challenges our stereotypes of gender as this static thing that you’re a man or a woman. When we look at how language can change over time, we don’t always think about how the people that are speaking can change over time.

Gretchen: A lot of the most visible nonbinary people are younger, but there’re also older people who are saying, “Oh, these young people have described a word for this thing that I’ve felt my whole life, and actually, I’m also this identity, and now there’s a word for it.”

Jacq: Absolutely. I mean, being a 45-year-old nonbinary person, you don’t necessarily want to speak like a 20-year-old nonbinary person, right.

Gretchen: Totally.

Jacq: If 20-year-old nonbinary people are trying to navigate what sex and gender is, if you’re 40, there’s that much more history of trying to figure all of this out.

Gretchen: Absolutely. Going back to Istus, who is the subject of the talk that you gave at the New Zealand Linguistic Society, one of the things that struck me about this talk when you were doing it is that you had participants take selfies of what they wearing at the same points as they were doing recordings. They did a bunch of recordings with different people in different environments, so you could see how they changed how they talked in relation to both what they’re wearing and also who they’re talking to.

Jacq: Absolutely. Because I think all of us have this experience of thinking about how we’re perceived by somebody else. That perception, for many of us, isn’t limited to just our voices. We don’t exist as a voice that wanders around in the ether.

Gretchen: We are not disembodied voices. We are meat suits wearing clothing suits.

Jacq: Yes. Which is super frustrating for many people, too. I call these recordings “in the wild” because I had this idea of David Attenborough following – “And here, he encounters the cis person.” But yeah, knowing that how we choose to present ourselves in that way is gonna change the way that we talk. This is pretty established. Also, the person that we’re talking to is gonna change the way that we talk. If you’re talking to your parent, you’re gonna talk to them differently than if you’re talking to your boss. We know this. But I was particularly interested in the way that these gendered relationships are navigated for nonbinary people.

Gretchen: Do you have an example of how some of your participants talked differently with different people?

Jacq: One example is Istus would play with makeup in really interesting ways. When I had the participants come, they would show me their selfies of these recordings, and I’d say, “Describe this outfit to me,” so I could see what they found really important because what you choose to wear has a lot more different – like, you know what is significant to what you’re wearing versus you don’t know if I’m wearing my lucky socks. That kind of thing.

Gretchen: Yeah, I dunno if your socks are lucky. I dunno if this is, like, the same shirt I’ve been wearing for three days which gives it a different valance to me compared to “Oh, yeah, this is my favourite shirt that I never wear, and I only wear on special occasions.”

Jacq: Istus didn’t have this in a picture, but she described her “stealth outfit,” which was every aspect of the outfit presented very masculine – sort of a suit jacket and loafers and this kind of thing. But every minute aspect of the clothing was actually feminine. The buttons were on – I can’t remember what side buttons are supposed to be on – but the buttons were on –

Gretchen: Neither can I.

Jacq: – the buttons were on –

Gretchen: The feminine side.

Jacq: Yeah, and the shoes were from the women’s section. There was this whole stealth coding that Istus was doing for herself – not for other people unless they’re cued in.

Gretchen: If she needs to go about as someone who doesn’t want her gender remarked on that particular day.

Jacq: Yeah, then she can choose where that gets presented. She would also wear different kinds of makeup. She would describe it as “enough eyeshadow so you can’t see the bags under my eyes” was one of her quotes.

Gretchen: Love it.

Jacq: The other quote was “makeup for the sake of wearing makeup” versus makeup that you would wear sort of a more natural face. You’ll forgive me if I get any of this wrong. I am not a makeup person. It was interesting because the – in her voice – the feminine cues that she used would change based on how overt her makeup was.

Gretchen: This is something that stood out to me about your talk, the makeup thing, because I’m very femme, I’m very cis. To me, I want all of my gender vectors or all of my gender points in the femme tally. But what Istus did in this thing was, if she was wearing makeup, she would do less femme gender vocal cues, like she’s counterbalancing the gender points, and as long as you have enough in the femme category and enough in the masc category, then it balanced in her head for whatever her personal definition of “balanced” is, which isn’t how I approach gender but is a really interesting thing that I learned from your talk.

Jacq: Aw, thank you. I’m glad that you found it interesting. Yes, Istus – and this is a theme throughout all of the participants. I should say that I also interviewed binary participants – men and women – and there were certain themes there, too. I don’t want to leave them all the way out.

Gretchen: Totally. You gotta have a control group.

Jacq: Yeah. But for the nonbinary participants, there was this – in my dissertation, I called it “incongruence” – but this idea that if you want to create some kind of mixed signal or if you wanna create something that isn’t quite in the two boxes that the people who are listening to you maybe have, then you can either take cues from both, or you can try to find some kind of middle ground. Those are two quite different things. Something very overtly feminine in your physical presentation combined with something a little bit less feminine or more masculine in maybe your vocal presentation, that can still get to something that isn’t binary in a way different than being very neutral-sort-of-middle-ground is.

Gretchen: The neutral-middle-ground is like, “I’m just gonna wear a hoodie and jeans because every gender can wear a hoodie and jeans, and then nobody will be able to perceive me as any gender at all,” whereas in a clothing way, doing something that has mixed signals would be like, “Okay, I’m gonna have a beard and also this super sparkly eyeshadow” or something like that.

Jacq: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that wasn’t quite where any of my particular participants went. But the idea that if you only have these two options, and you need to create a third option, there isn’t only one way to do a third option. There isn’t only one way to be nonbinary. A lot of how you do that, I found in my dissertation, is based on your own personality, which is like, “Oh, surprise, people have agency in how they talk,” and some people don’t like wearing super sparkly eyeshadow.

Gretchen: Totally. But also, sometimes you need to do the academic version of establishing that baseline because you could say, “Well, based on my friends, a lot of them which are nonbinary, people seem to do these strategies,” but having written it down in this academically legible place and gone through and done it with some statistics or something lets you say, “Okay, here’s what we have in terms of what we know now and maybe this would change in another decade if there becomes a more socially legible category of nonbinary-ness.”

Jacq: And I think, also, part of including binary participants in this work is to bring nonbinary people into both an academic conversation that’s already happening, which is, again, that sort of talk of legitimacy and saying, “Here’s an established body of work,” and bringing a “new population” – I’m making finger quotes; they’re not actually new – but bringing a different population – an “understudied” population, let’s say – into the fold, at the same time, that allows you to interrogate what’s already there. We have this whole body of literature that ignores that nonbinary people exist –

Gretchen: But that also doesn’t ask cis people or people that we’re presuming are cis, “How did you know that you’re cis? How do you know your gender? What are you doing to signal your gender with your voice? And how much of that are you doing deliberately?”

Jacq: I think that that’s really valuable, too, the idea that – I mean, there’s nothing that says a cis person isn’t allowed to think about masculinity, or how they present masculinity, or how they present femininity, or what that means. I mean, personally, I think it would be really useful if more cis people did that. If more people just thought about gender in ways that weren’t binary, talking to the binary men and women in my study, I was a little bit surprised, but it was amazing to see – I mean, some people never thought about it. There’s questions about “How do you feel about being a woman?” or being a man, and people said, “I dunno. I never thought about it. It just felt right.” But not everybody. Some of the participants that I spoke to did deeply interrogate their gender at some point in their lives. One of my cis male participants talked about thinking that maybe they were trans for a while and then realising they weren’t. I think the fact that we, as people – and also, we as linguists doing these studies on language – can interrogate even binary gender from these perspectives is really valuable.

Gretchen: This was something that came up in a recent episode that we did about the vowel space and how gender affects the vowel space, which we can link to. One of things that I find neat about that research is that even kids who haven’t gone through puberty yet who still have all identical vowel spaces or vowel spaces with as much variation as they have in heights but nothing specifically affected by the physical changes of puberty are still doing social genders and actually have different vowels based on the genders in their heads even though their bodies aren’t affecting what sounds they can produce yet.

Jacq: That works the other direction, too. We often think of puberty as this thing where a bunch of stuff happens to you, and then you pop out the other end like, talking and looking like –

Gretchen: A gender, now.

Jacq: A gender. You are this. But that’s not – I mean, the variation that almost any given human can produce is so much wider than the constraints of physiology. I’m not the only person to look at this. I know that Viktoria Papp has done really excellent work with transmasc people. Lal Zimman also works with transmasc populations a lot, too. You can take testosterone, and it can thicken your vocal folds, and it can create a drop in pitch, but that’s not what it means to talk like a man if you’re transmasc. That’s not the end of it. At the risk of summing up someone else’s research in two sentences, what you tend to see, I think, in Vietze’s work is a drop, an initial drop, from testosterone, and then it kind of pops back up again with the idea that, as people become more comfortable in their bodies and in their lives and in their situations, there’s less pressure to perform some stereotypical masculinity and more to just be the person they are, the transmasc person they are, or the nonbinary person they are.

Gretchen: That sounds neat. We can link to that study so that if people want to hear more than the two-sentence summary version, they can follow up on that.

Jacq: And Lal Zimman’s work is amazing. Every single thing that Lal has written is fantastic, too.

Gretchen: Yes. Everyone’s in the Lal Zimman fan club. So, you have a corpus, which is delightfully called, I think, “The RAINBO Corpus.”

Jacq: Yeah, “Recorded Audio-visual Interviews with nonbinary and Binary Orators. It’s “RAINBO” without a W.

Gretchen: Oh, and it spells “RAINBO” – that’s so good!

Jacq: For the sake of the acronym.

Gretchen: That’s such a beautiful acronym. You have six nonbinary participants in there, and six binary participants, and they held this speech that you looked at the pitch of it, and you’ve looked at how they do their vowels and things. You also have a talk and a paper, I think, you’re working on that’s co-authored with one of those research participants who then de-anonymised themself from the previous anonymous corpus work that they were in.

Jacq: Yeah.

Gretchen: I find this really interesting because there’s this interesting balancing act in academic between, “Oh, I’ve got a research participant. They’ve got sensitive data. I’m going to preserve their anonymity,” and also, sometimes when people are telling us really interesting things about their lives or their language choices or their identities, giving them credit for that intellectual contribution to the work which names them – yeah, can you talk about this balancing act about participant and researcher collaboration?

Jacq: Absolutely. I would love to. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I don’t want to portray myself as an expert. There is a whole other body of work where your collaborators, your language consultants, work very closely with the researcher, but that’s not always the same methodology as the bigger picture, what we call “variationist,” studies where we’re trying to look at large groups of people and how they speak. Kaspar is the name of the person that I worked with. And I got their permission before this episode – I asked them how they wanted to be referred, and they said, “Okay.” We’ll call them Kaspar, which is great because that’s their name, so it’s super easy for me to remember.

Gretchen: But they also had a pseudonym in the study originally.

Jacq: Yeah. In the study, if you read my dissertation – which you don’t have to, but if you do – in the study, they were called “Alex.”

Gretchen: Dissertations are notably very long and, often, in the years after a dissertation comes out, people will write some shorter papers that summarise small bits of the dissertation. Keep an eye on Jacq and their website. Maybe there’ll be shorter versions. But if you really wanna read the whole dissertation or skim through it and pick out the bits that look interesting to you, we will link to it.

Jacq: I had set up, for my dissertation, you know, as a – I think there’s something else. Dissertations are a long work, and you’re learning as you go. That’s the point. When you’re planning these ethics and all of the things in planning this dissertation, you go through the process that has already been established. I did that. It’s fine. Kaspar came and was recorded. It ended up, as it happens, after I had done my data collection, Christchurch is not a huge place. Kaspar and I were in the same social circles, and we became friends after the data collection. Every once in a while, we would talk about the work that I was doing and stuff I was studying because they were super interested. They have a background in mathematics, and they’re familiar with linguistics, so it’s not like they knew nothing about linguistics.

Gretchen: So, when you were showing them some pretty graphs, they were like, “Oh, cool, graphs. I like those.”

Jacq: Yeah. And then I can’t remember if I asked them or they offered to do some proofreading before I had submitted it, and I sent them a draft. I got it back, and there were smiley faces and frowny faces on a lot of stuff. Then because we’re friends, we went and hung out and talked about it, and there’s something different. You’re participating in research. You’re getting recorded. And then research comes out. You know that you’re maybe nonbinary. You’re this population. And then you see yourself on a graph that plots your pitch somewhere, and you know what the stereotypes about feminine pitch and masculine pitch are. I mean, I did a bad thing in that sense. I hurt somebody, right, in not earth-shattering ways, I don’t think – or at least Kaspar didn’t tell me it was earth-shattering.

Gretchen: But in frowny face ways, yeah.

Jacq: And we share this perspective of the importance of examining new populations using established methodology and these traditional ways of doing things to grant – whatever you wanna call it – some kind of legitimacy from the academy – or however we wanna navigate this – but then this is still real people that are given little dots or little diamonds and plopped on a graph. I can say in 300 words how this isn’t meant to tell people how gendered they are; this is meant to examine nonbinary people and compare them on equal footing with binary populations, but of course, nonbinary people don’t come to the table with no baggage, with nothing behind them. You come, and you come with a gendered upbringing, a gendered – you exist in a world, right. You can’t just not.

Gretchen: Totally.

Jacq: That was really hard. We had a lot of conversations about that through the course of proofreading a dissertation and submitting it and trying to get to a point. And I didn’t have – because of the way that the ethics works – I couldn’t contact every other participant afterward and get the same insights and things. But it’s not all bad. Kaspar expressed to me how interesting it was and how amazing it was to see their plots there and the joy of seeing themself not in the ASAB cohort that they expected versus the sadness when they came a little bit too close or that kind of thing. We gave a talk about this and, hopefully, a paper that examines that a little bit more. The other benefit is that, now I have a collaborator and a co-author, it means that we can do a lot more really interesting stuff with data.

Gretchen: Well, and if they know all this math, you can do such cool math.

Jacq: And we can track them over time, and we can do new recordings and even stuff about how these interviews with people, or these recordings, are still a snapshot in time. Things aren’t static. People change, and people’s interpretations of themselves are reinvented constantly. I’m really excited. Watch for that paper.

Gretchen: That sounds really cool and really exciting. We will look forward to the Jacq-Kaspar collaboration, Kaspar-Jacq collaboration. You can keep swapping your names for who goes first if you do a whole bunch of different co-authorships like people do.

Jacq: It made me glad that I wasn’t recording myself.

Gretchen: Were you sometimes interviewing or the interlocutor?

Jacq: Yeah. We did these “in the wild” recordings, and then we had the traditional sociolinguistic interview with all of these questions. We recorded me at first thinking there might be accommodation stuff, but then it’s also just like, I can’t transcribe, like, 400 million hours of –

Gretchen: So, “linguistic accommodation” is the thing where, when you’re talking with someone, especially if you like them or you’re trying to get along with them, you talk more like the person you’re talking to, which happens to lots of people lots of the time. I certainly do it. And you were thinking, well, maybe if people are talking more like you when they’re talking with you, then that might shift things, but also, you end up with a lot of data.

Jacq: Yeah, that’s true. It ended up doing a little bit of spot checking. It didn’t seem quite there because of these outsider-insider relationships of I am Canadian sitting in New Zealand interviewing people. There was enough of a gulf that it didn’t seem –

Gretchen: They didn’t all start sounding Canadian when you were interviewing them. I’m shocked.

Jacq: They weren’t like, [stereotypical Canadian accent] “Oh, hey, thanks for interviewing me.”

Gretchen: Maybe this is a good segue actually because you’re a fellow Canadian, hello, “Welcome to the podcast, eh” – [laughter] – who’s been living in New Zealand for nine years now.

Jacq: Yeah, almost a decade.

Gretchen: Amazing. We’ve had a previous interview with Ake Nicholas talking about Cook Islands Māori if people want to hear someone with a more New Zealand accent.

Jacq: Actual New Zealand accent.

Gretchen: An actual New Zealand accent. But this is presumably a linguistic experience for you. Do you wanna say anything about what it’s been like? Do you talk differently to people other than me who don’t have a similar Canadian accent?

Jacq: It’s kind of hard to know. I think there’re a few things. I noticed about four or five years in that I was losing my Canadian raising. We had gone somewhere, and I said, “Aw, look at those three houses.” I was like, “Ah! What did I just do?” Instead of saying /haʊsəz/, I said /haʊzəz/. I was like, “Ugh.” Which is funny because when I lived in Canada, I never noticed Canadian raising. It was one of those things that was so –

Gretchen: So, Canadian raising, which we actually haven’t talked about on Lingthusiasm yet – so maybe someday in the future –

Jacq: What!

Gretchen: – is the thing that is responsible for the differences between how I say the vowel in “house” [noun] versus “house” [verb] or in “height” versus “high” – “height,” “high,” “house,” “house.” I will say, I don’t Canadian raise that much, so it’s a difference in terms of how you say the vowel between /t/ and /d/ or /s/ and /z/. There’re some people who say something like, “about,” more like /əboʊt/. There’s a stereotype that Canadians say /əbʊt/, and that’s not true. I want to correct that right now. People in lots of other English-speaking environments don’t do this Canadian raising, and you noticed that you were stopping doing it. Anecdotally, I also notice people that move to Canada do start doing more Canadian raising, so this seems to be one of the ones that’s flexible in people’s speech.

Jacq: Yeah, I think that’s true. It’s funny because it’s so stereotyped in Canada. I don’t think it’s as strong as the stereotype, but it’s definitely sticky in a weird way. I did lose it. But probably, in this interview, it’s back.

Gretchen: It clicks back in.

Jacq: Yeah.

Gretchen: Any other things that you’ve noticed?

Jacq: I remember when I first landed in New Zealand – so New Zealand is non-rhotic. There’s no R. Words that are spelt E-A-R, like “ear,” and words that are spelt A-I-R, like “air,” have merged, so they’re pronounced the same. I was sitting on the airplane waiting to disembark, and the announcer came on, and they said, “Could everyone exit via the /ɹiəɹ stiəɹz/?”

Gretchen: Oh. [Laughs]

Jacq: I had this moment of, like, cows stacked up at the back of a plane. Like, and it’s sat with me, and I think it’s because the context wasn’t quite enough for me to get – but I was like, “Rear steers? Rear steers. What?”

Gretchen: Well, it’s what you exit the “ear-plane” by, obviously.

Jacq: “When you exit the ear-plane by the rear steers, or alternatively, exit the airplane by the rare stairs,” which are the stairs that they don’t bring out that often.

Gretchen: We have to save the rare stairs and the fine china for guests.

Jacq: Exactly.

Gretchen: That’s exactly the kind of thing that, especially, when you’re hitting something out of context, and they seem to be more fond of using that, so if you weren’t used to that particular phrase, either, it would catch.

Jacq: Yeah, and I mean, you’re also in a new place and all of this, and you’re trying to pay attention because you have to do what the airplane people tell you because that’s the rules. I have one more anecdote that is very deeply only Canadian and New Zealand overlap.

Gretchen: Please, I wanna hear it.

Jacq: Maybe this is only western Canada. We’ll see. So, Gretchen, what do you call the front row of seats in the classroom?

Gretchen: Oh, that’s where the “keeners” sit.

Jacq: That’s where the “keeners” sit, right, that’s the “keener” seats, right?

Gretchen: I dunno if I have “keener seats” specifically as a phrase, but like, absolutely, totally understand you when you say this.

Jacq: So, if somebody’s a “keener,” that’s the person at the front of the class, yeah.

Gretchen: Absolutely, yeah. I have told people about this Canadianism myself.

Jacq: Amazing! I’m glad it’s a super salient Canadianism.

Gretchen: I’ve introduced Lauren to it, in fact.

Jacq: So, it’s not a thing in New Zealand. They don’t have keeners, but New Zealanders say “keen” all the time.

Gretchen: Oh, but for something different.

Jacq: You’ll say – and apologies to any New Zealanders if I get these pragmatically a little bit wrong – but you’ll say, “Ah, I’m going for coffee. Is anyone keen?” Or you might say, “Ah, the movie’s coming out next week,” and someone else might say, “Keen,” like they’re keen to go.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, yeah, I think I could say, “I’m keen to go,” but not “keen” by itself in a phrase like that.

Jacq: No, and I think that my impression – my 8-year-old, 9-year-old Canadian impression – is that you don’t really use “keen” – because it has a little bit of that odd, negative – I mean, it’s a “keener” thing, so unless you’re really claiming –

Gretchen: That you’re a big fan of Star Wars, and you’re a Star Wars keener, and you definitely have to go see the new one.

Jacq: If you’re keen to go to Star Wars, you wanna be in the front row.

Gretchen: Of course! Yeah, okay, yeah, I sort of get that. It’s not as neutral. It’s like you’re really actively excited. You’re not just like, “Oh, yeah, I’d be good to go” or like “I’d be down to go.” “I’d be keen to go” is like, “I’d be so keen to go! That would be great!” not just like, “It’d be fine.”

Jacq: Yeah, but if you’re keen, you’re like, “Yeah, I could” – if you wanted to be extra, you could double up the New Zealandisms and you could be “keen as.”

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard the “as.”

Jacq: You could be “keen as,” but I don’t know – that’s where my knowledge of New Zealand lexical items stops is at “as.”

Gretchen: I love “keener” as a Canadianism because my prof friends will be like, “Oh, one of my keeners came to my office hours today,” and they’ll mean that student who’s always asking really good questions and is really excited to be there and stuff like that. It’s very positive when my prof friends who were all themselves keeners back in the day use it. Maybe some people use it negatively, but I sure don’t know any of them.

Jacq: If you are a keener, then “keener” is quite positive, but maybe less so if you're not.

Gretchen: Maybe less so. So, you finished your PhD, and you’re teaching now. I have been told that you make students stab themselves with toothpicks for science. Can you tell us about that?

Jacq: I would love to tell you about that, with a caveat: I tell students to very carefully try not to stab themselves with toothpicks, but it doesn’t quite translate. I teach phonetics, which involves learning about all of the sounds and how we make them. If you’re a speaker of English, you might be familiar with this little sound called “R.”

Gretchen: R is a sound, yes, that I’m familiar with.

Jacq: The alveolar approximate, the /ɹ/ noise. The R sound, the /ɹ/, can be made about 16 million different ways. There’s something like eight or nine different things that you can do with your mouth that will get you close enough to /ɹ/ for people to understand you.

Gretchen: Oh, wow. When I was learning phonetics, they told us there were two different ways, and there’s actually six or eight of them.

Jacq: There’s two different tongue positions, and that’s where the toothpick comes in. But you can also do – there’s different stuff with the back of your mouth. Some people have lip rounding, and some people don’t. Some people raise this and that – yeah, there’s different ways to do it. But you were right when you were learning phonetics.

Gretchen: But because it all produces approximately the same sound, kids just hear adults making the sound, and they experiment with their mouths to produce The Sound, and because the meat suit part of our throats is kind of squishy, you can manipulate it in different ways and end up with the same thing that comes out.

Jacq: You get close enough. In English, we don’t have a lot of other stuff in that area, too. When you think about it, if you’re a kid, if you think about something like a /p/, if you’re a baby looking at a caregiver going /p/, you can really see that, right, but a /ɹ/, you get a face, and you don’t really know what’s going on.

Gretchen: You just get a blank face. You can’t see what they’re doing. With something like a /k/, you can’t necessarily see what they’re doing, but the sound is very distinct that they’re making. /ɹ/ is this approximate sound, which is why it’s called an “approximant” in the International Phonetic Alphabet because it’s just sort of like, “Eh, I dunno.”

Jacq: Close enough, yeah. What you get is you have this sound where there’s a bunch of different ways to make it, and also a bunch of speakers that don’t really know how they make it. When you say something like a /k/, you make that sound, and you’re like, “Oh, my tongue goes here.” But when you’re making a /ɹ/, it changes – depending on where it is in the word – all this stuff. As you learned in your phonetic class, there are two ways that your tongue can be shaped when you’re making a /ɹ/ sound. This may blow some people’s minds because they never thought about it before and didn’t realise that the other way is possible. The two big ways are – they have a million different names because of course they do – but one is called the “bunched R,” usually.

Gretchen: This is when your R, like the back part of your tongue sort of crunches up or gloms up into a bit of a shape at the back that doesn’t actually touch the roof of your mouth.

Jacq: The back of your tongue is all crunched up, and the front of it is down at the bottom of your mouth. The other way to do it is often called the “retroflex R,” or the “curly R,” so you have bunch-y R and curly R. The curly R – the retroflex R – the front of your tongue is curled up and back a little bit.

Gretchen: It’s almost like the tip of the bottom of your tongue is touching, or almost touching, the roof of your mouth.

Jacq: Yes. Which one do you make? It’s hard to –

Gretchen: I know which one I make!

Jacq: Awesome! One of the important points of science is confirmatory analysis. You should replicate this finding and see if it still holds true. If you wanna know which R you make, there’s a way that you can do this with just a toothpick. It’s really easy. All you do is you take a toothpick, a clean one – and make sure you wash your hands – and then you take your toothpick, and you make an R sound – /ɹ/ – or you can pretend you’re a dog and go [imitates dog growl], something like that, just make your /ɹ/ noise. Then you take your toothpick, and you rest it on your bottom teeth or however you wanna – kind of have it centrally into your mouth – and as you go /ɹ/, slowly and carefully, and not stab-ily, put the toothpick into your mouth, and then go, “bleh,” stick your tongue out. The toothpick will either be touching the top of your tongue or the bottom of your tongue.

Gretchen: Whoa! And this tells you which R you have?

Jacq: Yes. And if it’s touching the bottom of your tongue, you’re making a retroflex – you’re making a curly R. And if it’s touching the top of your tongue, you’re making a bunched R.

Gretchen: So, you’re either a curler or a buncher, and you can tell this based on which side you are. I actually went looking for toothpicks so that I could try this and ended up finding a cotton swab, like a Q-Tip, before I saw my toothpicks, and so I tried this with a cotton swab and did not stab myself. This is the safety conscious version you can do if you like because it also works.

Jacq: As long as it’s clean and your hands are clean, that’s a good, safe way to do it.

Gretchen: I’m a buncher, which I thought I was, and I have just confirmed that.

Jacq: Anecdotally, in Canada, it was usually about 50/50 when we go through classes, or we try it. This is in Alberta.

Gretchen: And in New Zealand is it also 50/50, or is it different?

Jacq: In New Zealand, there are a lot more bunchers. I think this might have to do with New Zealand being non-rhotic. I don’t have a paper on this. I don’t know anything. But there’s also a lot less lip rounding. In Canada, lip rounding is almost universal, like it’s on Rs a lot.

Gretchen: Yeah, I lip round.

Jacq: But in New Zealand, that’s not the case. Most people don’t round their lips.

Gretchen: Jacq, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. As we ask at the end of every interview, “If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?”

Jacq: It would be that you’re the boss of your language. How you communicate with people – it’s all on you. People can tell you how they think you should talk. Even linguists can say, “Well, this is how people talk.” But if you’re not feeling it, do something different. You can change it. You can do whatever you want, communicate however you wanna communicate. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all of the podcast platforms or at lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. You can find our co-host, Lauren Gawne, on social media, and her blog is Superlinguo. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. You can find our guest, Jacq Jones, on their website at jacq.land – that’s J-A-C-Q-dot-L-A-N-D. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus episodes include spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns; secret codes and the joys of cryptic word puzzles; and inner voice, mental pictures, and other shapes for our thoughts. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Jacq: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[magical-girl-coral]

Summarizing Mushishi Episodes Like Onion Articles - Part 2

Banquet at the Forest's Edge - Local business owner finds all those stories of people getting inventive ideas while on acid trips might have a good point after all.

The Warbling Sea Shell - Local dad is forced to admit that maybe isolating his only child from other human interactions might not be what's best for them.

Beneath the Snow - "I have never been better" says man who's terrible mental health has reached a level where it is affecting the weather around him.

The Hand That Caresses the Night - Local teen breaks family curse by admitting his father was actually massive shithead.

Mirror Lake - Local teen so damn annoying about her heartbreak that her own doppelganger had to put a stop to it.

Floral Delusion - Local man with a weird ass library and sketchy medicine is revealed to be a major creep, shocking no one.

Cloudless Rain - Local woman loses the ability to cry and somehow it becomes everyone's problem.

Wind Raiser - Local teenager runs away from home to become a professional whistler.

Valley of the Welling Tides - "Is breast milk secretly trying to kill you" and five other fascinating articles written by nutjobs.

Depths of Winter - Traveling man becomes a god's squeak toy for an entire winter and somehow comes out unscratched.

Cushion of Grass - Local orphan ruins an entire ecosystem by liking an egg too much.

Fragrant Darkness - Local family man finally escaped a time loop only to go straight back in it when the future doesn't turn out well.

Lingering Crimson - Top four fun stories to tell before bed that will make your children afraid of their own shadow.

Hidden Cove - How one codependent relationship between two women nearly turned their village into a hive mind.

Thread of Light - Local kid's anger issues mysteriously disappears after finally being allowed to meet his mother for the first time in ten years and gaining a healthy support network.

Sea of Otherworldly Stars - Local girl accidentally enters the twilight zone to get back at her sister.

Azure Waters - Local woman loses everything thanks to several water filled accidents and still manages not to develop a phobia around it which is a bigger miracle than her son being half fish.

Lightning's End - Local woman so bad at being a mother that the lighting that keeps striking her son seems like a better parent in comparison.

Mud Grass - Feel bad about your own brood? This family can't stop killing each other for five fucking minutes!

Tree of Eternity - Local man gains the ability to see into the past in the price of his legs by trying out this totally legal vegan meal.

Bonus:

Path of Thorns - "I am the most normal person I know" says man after confessing he hasn't had a soul in years.

Bell Droplets - Young girl believed to have autism was actually a forest child all along while still being autistic.

[melissa-titanium]

uh violence ask game

12

ok . ok. i'm gonna talk about my two current faves right now because imFucking deranged

khan. im so serious .he is so fucking interesting i honest to god havent rewatched md in a hot second but if you think about his concepts & how he acts in ep 7 AND HONESTLY EVERY SINGLE EPISODE THAT HE'S IN . he's just. hes just so interesting??? i don't see people talking about him alot for reasons that are totally justifiable but just once i wish to see character analysis that isnt about n or uzi..

i want to know about his dynamic with nori. i want to watch his descent into depression (?) after she died & i really, REALLY want to see his redemption. because he does care. everyone is capable of change, and even if he's had a few hiccups in his appearances in the show, i really think he can improve. he DOES care. even if he's forgotten how to show it. i find the conflict between him and uzi very interesting esp involving n. because i think he understands n's a good friend for uzi but there's that innate fear he's immortalized in his brain after having to put down his wife who was attacked by the very creature uzi's new friend is.

the guy's clearly traumatized. he lost his wife, he's emotionally distanced from his child, he's clearly poured himself into his work. and this is from the . like. ten minutes of screentime he's gotten. like COME ON. even if you have no interest in him you have to admit there's a lot there to unpack. even if you have no interest in HIM, you have to admit it's fucking hilarious that his pringles logo ass pulled NORI of all drones. come on. i'm also very curious because he seemed to be a drone that came from before the core collapsed... assuming he and nori were similar ages, he must have had personal run ins with humans. i wonder what that was like

i can completely understand where people are coming from when they say they dislike him because he reminds them of their dad. but i guess i have a different opinion on him cause of how My dad was? i don't know i don't want to get super personal about fictional robots but to put it bluntly i don't have a relationship with him. a lot of factors in my life that weren't directly his fault lead him to being pretty absent in my life and i guess i connect alot to khan because i kind of. wish. he w as . my dad ? i dont know. khan is like an exact parallel of my dad if he Cared. so like. yes :) i have a weird affinity for khan haha. mr uzi!

ok. mob psycho. other than my absolute faves who are hilarious & underrated , inukawa, goda, mezato and TOME <3333 ... my absolute fave has to be tsubomi motherfucking takane. i have not read the reigen spinoff, but i'm REALLY fucking hoping we get to see more of her in the spinoff. because. she's so interesting. she's so fucking interesting.

the entire series presents her as this unobtainable thing of goodness, the end-all of mob's goals. this is ESPECIALLY emphasized in the show which makes her (in the words of ONE i think) more heroic in appearance... and by that i mean they gave her yaoiful eyes. like they made her really pretty in the show to emphasize how mob's looking at her through rose tinted glasses, which is such a cool detail because as the story progresses we see her with her original comic design as mob realizes she's just a person like him! she's literally the driving force of the entire narrative, but barely gets ANY screentime... in the moments we do see of her, she shows a lot of interesting traits. but BESIDES her interactions with mob, there's so much more i find interesting about her. i've only been into mp100 for a month and ive only watched it maybe 6 times so please forgive me if my information is skewed.

in the divine tree arc... dimple points out how she's very openly honest about her wants and is not afraid to deny someone, no matter how forceful. she's literally the only fucking person next to teru who was described as being able to withstand the mind control. not even fucking reigen could.

she rejects a shit ton of people in one of the arcs i can't remember. but literally the fact that someone asks her "why :(?!" when she rejects them and she's like. oh do you really want to know? and goes out of her way to ROAST THE FUCK out of this random ass guy.

in the confession arc, mezato talks to mob about the things she's learned about tsubomi (which is gay as hell btw. i know she's a reporter but god damn) about the fact that she appears to feel strongly about maintaining her image. she's very polite upfront with friends she talks with, but when she's alone/away from other people seems to drop that facade into something more disinterested/distant... which sort of tracks, considering a lot of people only want to connect with her because of her looks/the popularity she can give them by interacting with them. that gets exhausting, i can sympathize lol. she also seems to have trouble trusting others / feels like she's constantly got to be on guard. maybe her place in the school's hierarchy is really the only thing she has? i don't know, but her reaction to literally. sneezing in front of other people was so overblown it really seemed she thought her life would be ruined if her friends saw her needing a tissue which is so interesting to me.

EVEN RITSU DESCRIBES HOW DISINTERESTED SHE SEEMED IN OTHER PEOPLE when she left them playing hide & seek as a kid LOL. like she's in her own little world. my takeaway from her scenes is that she's constantly keeping everyone else at arm's length because she doesn't trust anyone. to her, everyone just wants to get close to her because they want the positives coming from being near her, not because they want to get to know her. everyone seems to know her behind her mask... which i know i said i wouldn't compare her to mob (and i'm not! i just find this comparison interesting, she's incredible on her own) but they have this in common from my understanding. mob has also hidden himself away from the world via insane suppression & masking because he had an experience that taught him that expressing himself was dangerous. tsubomi hides herself away from the world with masking I Think because she believes it's dangerous/can cause unnecessary grief to get close to other people because they'll always fuck with her in the end (hence the fucking. sneezing scene IDK WHAT TO CALL THAT SCENE HAHA)

so like. mob's infatuation with her is like him grasping at a life that's out of his reach... when in reality, she's not on a higher level than him -- she's just like him. i don't know i'm thinking about this now. okay. i really like tsubomi.

[themattress]

So, I love the Makai Tree arc from the Sailor Moon R anime.

I love the voices for Ail (Alan) and En (Ann) in the old DiC dub.

But dear God, do I absolutely HATE how the old DiC dub butchered their conclusion.

The arc was being fairly well translated, all things considered, until we hit the last three episodes. In Episode 11, the dub script does not appear to be caught up with the visual storytelling. The episode keeps on cutting to this shot of the Makai Tree as things go wrong:

This is meant to signify that the Makai Tree, which is a tree that takes in energy and then gives it back to its children (Ail and En in this case), has been getting the wrong energy from its children and as such is giving the wrong energy back. Energy that is forcibly taken from others out of selfishness will convert into negative energy that only heightens Ail and En's bad qualities. That is why Ail and En are suddenly contemplating murdering Mamoru and Usagi respectively out of jealousy even when they hadn't ever done so in the past, and why Cardians under their control are going crazy and lashing out indiscriminately. But in the dub:

Ann: That's weird. Every time someone's nice to me, I feel so much better; I keep seeing the Doom Tree, growing strong and healthy.

OK, first off, that's not the Doom Tree. In case you didn't notice, there is a tortoise and a hare at the bottom of the screen. This whole scene is meant to be Usagi offering to help Natsumi with her schoolwork because she thinks she's ahead in their wager and she may as well be kind to her losing rival, with Natsumi thinking this is like the Earth story of the Tortoise and the Hare where the hare loses a race because of its overconfidence in beating the tortoise.

So that's the first of three problems with this scene's translation. The second problem is that Serena says that she's willing to try and get along with Ann because Alan turned out to be such a cool guy so she wants to give his sister a chance, and....huh? Serena's interactions with Alan (as are Usagi's with Seijuro) have consisted him always weirding her out with his pretentious flirtations, him being a rival to her love interest, and one of her friends losing her crush on him when she learns about his messed up views on love. So there has been nothing about him to make her think he's "such a cool guy". In the original, Usagi is willing to get along with Natsumi for the same reason she's willing to get along with Seijuro: she's kind to a fault and wants to see the best in everyone even if she quarrels with them or finds them irritating. Her entire romance with Mamoru and her friendship with Rei hinges on this quality!

Third and most importantly, turning this scene into a touchy-feely bonding moment between Serena and Ann implies Ann is improving, that she's starting to learn the error of her ways, when as I stated before it's literally the opposite: she's supposed to be getting worse. She literally attempts to kill Usagi right after this conversation, and then again in the subsequent two-part finale. So this creates a huge whiplash effect and renders things incoherent. Is the dub suggesting Alan and Ann would improve if they only stopped intaking energy at all, even when they would literally die if they did that? A point they beat into our heads repeatedly?

And then there's the finale. Beyond more mention of "the Negaverse" since DiC wants to fool people into thinking these clearly unconnected villain groups are part of a single whole, we get perhaps the most insulting, totally-missing-the-point alteration of dialogue in the series.

Here's the accurately translated Viz version.

Ail: Why did you risk your life like that? Usagi: I'm willing to risk my life…to protect anyone I truly love. (Ail is shocked). En: My, how noble of you. (En pushes Usagi backward with another blast.) En: C'mon, time to beg for help, you weak little human. Usagi: I don't care what happens to me. Just please spare Mamoru's life. En: What a stupid request to make! But if you think your own life's not precious; oh well, then. (En keeps blasting only for Mamoru to shield Usagi each time.) Ail: ….Beautiful….so very beautiful….Is this what it means to love? En: Ail? Ail: En, I see now. Love can not be forced. En: Huh? Ail: Don't you get it? Love is something that is built together….by caring for each other. En: You don't know what you're saying! Makoto: He's right! When you truly love someone, the strength of that love gives you the courage to overcome anything. (En is about to lash out again when the Moonlight Knight appears.) Moonlight Knight: All the creatures of the universe are friends. Instead of fighting against them, open up your heart to them. (En is visibly on the verge of tears). En: That's easy to say! But you could never understand all the pain that we've been through! Our pain comes from us wandering the entire universe for so long with no-one ever caring about us! Ail: En… En: We had to take whatever we could! And if we hadn't done that, we never would've survived! Moonlight Knight: Nothing good comes out of stealing. It only brings shame, heartache and hate. En: YOU SHUT UP! (En blasts the Moonlight Knight into the Makai Tree, which absorbs him and goes haywire.)

The purpose here is not only to show Ail learning the true meaning of love through introspection and showcasing how En can't do the same because she's consumed by her negative emotions built up over a long time, which is why she ends up learning through the emotional impulse of protecting Ail than from harm instead, but also to show that Ail and En are not evil. It's a point En's voice actress even made: they are misguided but not malicious at heart. They are turned evil through the bad energy from the Makai Tree, but that makes them no more culpable than Mamoru/Endymion before them or Chibiusa/Black Lady after them. That's why Usagi, Makoto and the Moonlight Knight are trying to talk sense into them.

And now here's the DiC dub.

Alan: She's even braver than I thought. Serena: You don't know what bravery is! Or friendship! All you know is EVIL! (Alan is shocked.) Ann: That's right! So glad you finally noticed! (Ann pushes Serena backward with another blast.) Ann: Renounce your love for Darien and I might spare you. Serena: No! I'll never renounce my feelings! True love can't be taken away by anyone! Ann: You're a sentimental fool but I can make you change your mind in a flash, Romeo! (Ann keeps blasting only for Darien to shield Serena each time.) Alan: I've never see anyone…so sad! Maybe…maybe this is wrong. Ann: What is? Alan: This destroying love. It's such a beautiful thing. Can't you see how they love each other? Even if she is our enemy, it'd be wrong to destroy them. Ann: You're just weak, Alan! Lita: No, you're the one who's weak! You don't have any real friends! And the only emotions you know are hatred and vengeance and jealousy! Ann: Can it! (The Moonlight Knight appears.) Moonlight Knight (asshole tone): It's a bad scene, Sailor Scouts, but nothing we can't handle! These poor misfits can be beat! (Ann is visibly on the verge of tears). Ann: Misfits!? You have no idea who you're talking to, Turban Boy! Listen! It takes more than some stupid little rose to beat the power of the Negaverse! You'll see what this misfit can do! Moonlight Knight (asshole tone): Your jealousy has blinded you, Ann! You just can't bear that Darien's dumped you! Ann: He has noooooot! (Ann blasts the Moonlight Knight into the Doom Tree, which absorbs him and goes haywire.)

WOW. So not only are Alan and Ann made out to look worse than their original counterparts with Alan's shock now coming from called nothing but evil then being half-assed with saying "maybe" what they're doing is wrong and Ann behaving nothing but evil (complete with "Negaverse" dialogue) with her sad rant about the pain and loneliness she's suffered being removed (even Ail's "En..." is just cut altogether), but Serena, Lita and the Moonlight Knight all just insult them rather than try to reach out to them. "No bravery or friendship, nothing but evil", "weak with no real friends and only knowing hatred, vengeance and jealousy", "poor misfits angry at being 'dumped' that have to be 'beat' instead of healed"....it's horrendously out-of-character for all involved and against the message of the arc and arguably the whole anime metaseries. It's like DiC took Sailor Moon's "I'll punish you!" catchphrase to the most literal extreme and made her a hero who punishes evildoers indiscriminately instead of a hero who tries to reach out and help evildoers she knows have good in them and/or are in pain like Ail/Alan and En/Ann. And much like the scene in detention, it also creates a huge whiplash when Alan and Ann end up being redeemed. The heroes tell us they're evil and weak cowards who can't feel anything positive, then they proceed to prove them spectacularly wrong and there's just no commentary on it and seemingly no awareness on how bad it makes them look. Geez, I didn't care for the Moonlight Knight to start with; now I hate him!

So thanks a lot, DiC, you fumbled the ball in the very last inning.

Buuuuut maybe I can forgive you just for this:

[nezumidou]

I've been thinking about the degree of loss experienced by Laudna, given the last episode. Not in relation to her actions, but in her experiences in general. And it feels so infinitely vast...

She lost her life at the hands of the Briarwoods in a horrific way. With the responsibility of a better future for herself and her family, she ended up serving as an effigy just because of her apparent resemblance to a person she had never heard of before. She was separated from her parents, then tortured, and they also died in circumstances that have not been detailed. She woke up hanging from a tree in a body she didn't fully recognize as her own. She was stripped of her identity until she lost even her name at some point along the way. She was unable to return to her home, either because it no longer existed or because she had to flee the town due to her undead status. Maybe she couldn't carry too many belongings with her, or she lost them along the way—her most valuable belongings were part of the costume she wore when she died. She also suffered a sudden plunge into total poverty. An even deeper one than what she experienced during her previous life. These losses were not only deeply personal, but they also represented the loss of a whole community. And just like that, Laudna found herself to be the last remnant of a past that no longer exists as it once did.

I've been thinking about how we'd see those days depicted. I envision the undead roaming the streets of Whitestone, amidst the wrecked streets and ruined buildings, and the corpses strewn across the ziggurat. How many bodies? How many lives? She lost not only her family, but also her neighbors and the people she frequently encountered in her daily life. It's the absolute loss of everything she has known. The erasure of her Whitestone.

A community is a source of identity for those who belong to it. Every community possesses unique traditions, values, social norms, and a wealth of knowledge cultivated through generations and countless interactions. That's all part of Laudna's loss, too.

After everything was set and done, the survivors of an event like the one that occurred in Whitestone surely relied on each other to begin rebuilding their lives. They searched for their loved ones and found a way to honor their departure. At the same time, the collective established strategies to deal with the destruction of both their bodies and their lifestyle, their economy, their political institutions, and their human capital (how many family lines simply ceased to exist?). Over the years, they managed to re-establish their identity as Whitestone residents in one way or another.

But not Laudna. She woke up to the desolation of a completely destroyed community, unable to access validation for the atrocities experienced. In the blink of an eye, she was transformed into something foreign. To the point where her name, along with those who shared the same fate in the Sun Tree, is undoubtedly absent from the historical accounts of the events. Was there even time to do something for them? No one in her family survived, so no one searched for her. And as far as we know, no one took the time to put a story behind those bodies either.

She lost her life in every sense. She lost her body in a variety of ways. She lost her community and was left behind when it was time to rebuild. What happens when the conflict seems to be over for everyone except you? When peace talks take place while you are still struggling to survive? When it's only you, the memories, and your killer's voice in your head?

Sometimes I think about Laudna's loss. And I'm struck by the brutality of those initial moments and their heartbreaking manifestation years later.

[greenteaandtattoos]

Do you think Rosegarden still has a chance? I know that shouldn't be my takeaway from today's episode...my brain is just in a weird place and I'd like to know your opinion

So, here's what I got to say about this, anon.

I don't think it's off the table. Oscar undoubtedly has a crush on Ruby. He has been seen repeatedly more concerned about her well-being than the others:

Miles has said that their relationship is built on "adorable awkwardness and immense respect and admiration for each other", which I found to be a pretty good foundation for a relationship if there ever was one. We've seen how quickly Ruby and Oscar have come to trust each other, especially when you look at the Dojo Scene in A Necessary Sacrifice, and see that Oscar was the first person that Ruby had opened up to about her traumas and fears surrounding Beacon and the battle ahead.

On top of that, Oscar was also the first person to ask how Ruby was doing. The others try to support Ruby, but they haven't really been looking at her. She's struggling, she's been struggling, and she keeps it all bottled in because she doesn't want to burden them, and Oscar doesn't think that's okay. If he's allowed to be afraid, then she is, too.

Of course, that Dojo Talk was one of the memories Ruby thought of when she was activating her silver eyes in Our Way to defeat the Leviathan:

They also have many parallels, including several Ruby-centric songs that talk about trees:

The lightning doesn't take advice from anyone The willow doesn't need to learn to stand - Rising

The tears that you’ve shed May find a tree to water - Until the End

What I'd give in exchange To be happy without trying

To her tree - Inside

I do not believe that's a coincidence. Certainly not when the tree stanza in Until the End plays right as Yang is asking where Oscar was in the V7 finale. And, to add to that, the Until the End motif plays in the beginning of Divide, specifically when Oscar is staring into the fire.

And, of course, we cannot forget about his blush, as I mentioned. He canonically has a crush on Ruby. Some may say, "Oh, but he blushed when Neon called him cute", and to that, I say, duh! He was embarrassed and feeling awkward because he likely has never had that sort of attention before.

But the thing is, we've had many times of blushes in RWBY, and all it takes is a little analytical observation to recognize the context of them.

For instance, we have blushes that represent awkwardness:

In these moments, Blake and Oscar were feeling awkward at the moment. Blake was feeling a little awkward over Yang's opinions on her new outfit, and Oscar had just been flirted with, probably for the first time.

Then we have blushes that represent embarrassment:

Ruby and Nora were feeling embarrassed at the moment. Ruby had been complimented out of the blue and, well, Nora had landed in a position that put Ren in "visible panties" range.

Next, we have blushes that represent relief:

Ruby was relieved at this moment. hadn't seen Yang in nearly two days, their last interaction being a fight, lost total connection with her, watched Salem invade Atlas, and was hunted down by a monster that turned out to be a fucking Person.

Up next, we've got blushes that represent anger:

Ruby was pissed right here. She was about to comfort Oscar, who was looking like he was hit by a train thrice times over and then saw Emerald. The person who she once thought was her friend, who betrayed her and helped take down Beacon, and subsequently led to the death of Pyrrha and Penny the first time.

And finally, we have blushes that represent attraction:

Definitively, all of these blushes were from their attraction. Blake was calling Sun a dork while he did a silly little dance, back when they were doing the BlackSun route, Yang was very clearly attracted to Blake at this moment, and Ilia had literally confessed to being attracted to Blake.

And then we get to Oscar's blush in Divide:

He blushed when Ruby touched his shoulder. He did not blush when she comforted him, he did not blush out of embarrassment or awkwardness or relief, he blushed when she touched his shoulder.

There is no context beyond attraction that makes sense for the reason of his blush.

Blushing, used in tandem with common tropes, is used as a device in storytelling, especially in visual storytelling, to portray emotions, and as we've seen above, it can be a variety of different emotions. But it is irrefutable knowledge that blushing used as a tool to portray romantic attraction is the most common trope.

So, to get to the point I wanted to make: they need to resolve Oscar's blush. Whether it's one-sided and he eventually loses it like Blake with Sun and Weiss with Neptune, or he and Ruby get together, at some point, it needs to be addressed in one way or another.

Beyond his crush, there are many parallels the two have, including narrative tropes such as chosen ones, and as Miles said: "Ruby chose adventure, adventure chose Oscar", sun/moon symbolism, a search for their identity, and both having been burdened with the fate of the world and mankind without their consent, with Ruby being a silver-eyed warrior and Oscar being a like-minded soul to Oz, and thus being his next host in the merge. Those are just to name a couple.

Another thing is that RWBY has put a heavy emphasis on souls. Ruby is a "smaller, more honest soul" and a "simple soul", while Oscar is a "like-minded soul", so they have that parallel. Both have direct ties to one of the biggest and most important aspects of the show.

And of course, we have the manor fumble in As Above, So Below and the almost-hug during their reunion in Ultimatum:

I could go on and on, but I won't, because I want to get to the second part of my answer. That being, I also don't think it's as likely as I previously hoped it would be. They've got a LOT going for them, in my opinion, but in all honesty, so does Nuts n Dolts.

Altercation at the Auspicious Auction definitely has a lot going for it in terms of giving us Nuts n Dolts crumbs, more than any other episode, I'd say.

We have the scene with Jinxy, where when Ruby bids for the jade doll that she's drawn to, he asks Ruby to give up "enough hope to fill [the] jar", and then the scene angles the jar where it looks like the doll has "filled" the jar.

That right there says that Ruby saw Penny as hope. As her hope. And now it's gone. She lost her once, got her back, did everything in her power to protect her, and failed. She failed, and Penny is dead.

And after that scene, we get Penny's eulogy:

"The weapon of a powerful warrior. Not just a powerful warrior, the most powerful to ever live. She was touched by magic and she gave her life for thousands. She took a message of hope to the stars and she saw the world through better eyes".

I'll just say now that Penny's eulogy is one of the most beautiful and gut-wrenching things I've ever heard. It also shows that Ruby saw Penny in a different light than other people. She quite literally saw her as better than the rest of the world, or more accurately, more pure.

Truth be told, this episode has absolutely made me go, hey! Nuts n Dolts might actually be confirmed canon! And honestly, I wouldn't be particularly upset about it. I like Nuts n Dolts. I just prefer it in an AU sense. I have some particular criticisms of their relationship in the show that turned me away from them having a canon relationship, but I really do like the ship in any other sense.

I'm not sure how they would go about this because Penny is dead; I don't think a relationship is possible unless they did some resurrection shenanigans, which I personally don't like, not to mention that Penny is supposedly a part of Winter now, so I'm not even sure how a resurrection would be done.

But otherwise, I do think that Nuts n Dolts has a good chance of being confirmed canon. But I also think that Rosegarden is still on the table and has a pretty good chance, too. As a hardcore Rosegarden shipper, I'd be ecstatic if Rosegarden became canon, but we don't always get what we want, and really, RWBY isn't a romance show.

So, it's not like I'd get hung up on it if it doesn't. I'll be bummed, then get back to the story and characters, because ultimately, that's what I'm here for.

TL;DR:

Yes, I think Rosegarden still has a pretty good chance, just not as much as before, and I think Nuts n Dolts has a decently high chance, too. I won't be upset if Nuts n Dolts is confirmed, I love the ship in AUs. I'll be bummed if Rosegarden doesn't get confirmed, but we're all adults and we should recognize that shipping is meant for fun, not wars, and move on with our lives no matter what ship gets confirmed.

Or Ruby doesn't end up with anyone, I get my aro rep, and we continue writing fanfiction and drawing fanart of our ships.

[xieyaohuan]

Writer Tag

Thank you for tagging me @blindmagdalena and @saintmathieublanc! ❤️

How many works do you have on AO3?

43, but many of them are one shots and one of them is a translation.

What's your total AO3 word count?

203,854.

Ca. 120,000 of those words were banged out in just a few months during a single manic episode in 2017.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Ravishing a God (which is still incomprehensible to me as tickle fics normally never get many kudos lol)

I've got you pegged (rushed fic and cringy title)

All a king should be (a collection of 47 drabbles of 100 word -- I want to do a drabble challenge like this again for Homewell or Butchlander)

All God's children took their toll (it's not been abandoned)

Under the Twisted Weirwood Tree (my only crossover fic; I really want to finish this one even though it's no longer my fandom)

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I usually do unless it's hate (and sometimes even then)

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

This is a tough one because most of my A Song of Ice and Fire fic is angst lol. Probably Heart of Darkness? Maybe Joanna (despite the relatively 'happy' ending)? But it's a pretty stiff competition.

What’s the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

I would say Spinster, which is still pretty angsty.

Do you write crossovers?

I've written only one, Under the Twisted Weirwood Tree, which sets A Song of Ice and Fire characters in a semi-modern AU based on The Purge. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding for this one!

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yes. I gave the wrong name to a character, which REALLY upset at least one person. I think I responded to them in good faith the first time, and then the second time told them to kindly fuck off.

I also used to post my fic on ff.net, where people seem to consider yelling at the author a legitimate type of feedback, and I definitely got a lot of that, but I don't consider that hate since it's just how people on ff.net interact.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I do, in all kinds of directions, but I don't think it's my forte lol.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I think I might have had stuff reposted to websites I didn't know without credit, but it might have just been one of those mirror sites that didn't include all details??

Not to be cavalier about plagiarism, but my internal reports at work get stolen all the time, so with fic, I honestly don't care, since, unlike at work, I'm not actually losing any money. I think if someone took my fic, passed it off as their own, and then got famous with it, I might feel different about that, but that's never happened to me.

I plagiarized @deliciouskeys' title once (for The Dollhouse), but not intentionally because I'd been working on that fic for a while and didn't realize until after publishing the first chapter that my title had been taken.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not that I'm aware.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes, I co-wrote a fic with a fandom friend over 20 years ago, but we ended up never publishing it. Haven't co-written any fic since then, and I don't think I'd enjoy it.

What's your all-time favorite ship?

I don't think I have one since that would require me to maintain an obsession over decades, which is not how my brain works.

What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

A bunch of fic I wrote for ASoIaF like Lions of the Realm and Fatherly Love. I won't to finish all my fic because I hate not to, but with these two, I'm pretty certain I never will. Probably a few others in that same category out there.

What are your writing strengths?

This doesn't really show in my current fandom, but I think I have some pretty unique ideas. I'm also willing to experiment and play around with concepts, which I generally consider a strength on the whole.

What are your writing weaknesses?

I lean towards GRRM's ways of telling a story, but without the skill of being able to pull it off (and to be fair, he's failing, too).

Also, I will say that writing in a language other than your native language will limit you in some pretty fundamental ways that can't be overcome, and that can be frustrating.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

The most I do is insert individual words and phrases, and I only do that for languages I actually speak.

I did write one fic in which several of my characters spoke with pretty heavy dialect, and if I were to rewrite that fic now, I would really tone that down.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Published: Lord of the Rings

Unpublished and without realizing what I was doing: Asterix and Cleopatra, probably

What's a fandom/ship you haven't written for yet but want to?

I haven't written published any real Maevlander or real Starlander, and I definitely want to change that.

What's your favorite fic you've written?

Hard to say, but I really like Moonlight on her Face. I'm also rather attached to Ravishing a God, but I don't count that because for something to be a true favorite, it has to outlive my obsession.

I'm late to the party on this one and have lost track of who has already been tagged, so I'm not tagging anyone, but consider yourself tagged if you want to do this!

[zvtara-was-never-canon]

Hello! Your blog is the first place I ever read that Zuko/Katara is a "feminist ship" and I am soooo confused, because

Their very first interaction* literally looks like "the female character is captured, helpless** and completely at mercy of the male character, who is the one holding her captive and is obviously trying to use her" - and some (many?) people watched this and thought: "mmm, I do really want this two to get together". And then they called it a feminist ship.

Like, WHAT?! This looks very much NOT feminist.

*every time before Zuko either didn't notice Katara or intentionally ignored her. Even earlier in the very same episode, when the pirate talks about Katara and Aang, because they were the ones who showed interest in the scroll - Zuko is only focused on Aang. They never had a single face-to-face scene before, I checked.

**Katara was tied to the tree until Momo helped her, so I guess she could not break free by herself

Oh, they don't just claim that Zuko and the entire Fire Nation are feminist (and that said feminism totally extendends to the women belonging to the nations they are invading, conquering and/or commiting genocide against) - they claim that the mere act of shipping Zutara is feminist and NOT shipping it is sexist because Zutara is "the female gaze" or whatever the fuck.

Some of them really went "I am a woman and I like this, therefore it is inherently a feminist thing, and anyone who dislikes this is womaning wrong."

Honestly, fandoms need to let go of this need to make everything feminist, or queer, or just generally "woke", and calling everyone who disagrees a right wing lunatic - and I'm saying this as a bisexual feminist that is related to a bunch of right wing lunatics that are still defending the guy that tried to become dictator of Brazil after losing the presidential elections.

Fiction doesn't have to be a mirror of our actual morals/political beliefs, and the romances in it don't need to be healthy. It should simply be about "What would be the most entertaining/coherent choice for the narrative and themes we are going for?"

No need to pretend there are no "problematic" aspects to things we like, or that everything we dislike has something inherently evil about it.

Zutara could have been the healthiest ship ever or the most unhealthy dynamic ever seen on screen - I wouldn't care about either possibility, I just want something that is both fun to watch and makes sense for the story. To me, Zutara doesn't fit either, therefore I don't like it.

It's as simple as that.

[animehouse-moe]

My Happy Marriage Episode 7: Glamorous Lady of Summer

Through cinder and ash, life will find a way to persist. Perhaps in a new and different form, or in a completely new area. This latest episode of My Happy Marriage (which I'm a day late posting, sorry) understands and executes on the concept rather well, leaving quite a few pieces in the balance for viewers to bite into in the mean time.

Overall it's a more sluggish, or maybe better described as methodic, episode. It essentially hits the reset button on plenty of characters and story arcs, allowing the series to take a step forward into its wider world. It's certainly not bad, it's just.... almost disinteresting. The episode is certainly at risk through the front half to maybe even two-thirds of turning people away due to the simplicity with how it approaches the subjects involved.

Of course, not all is typical or expected, as there's certainly good pieces here and there. The idea of Miyo's mother (and subsequently her own powers) being tied to the Sakura tree is well done and poses an interesting question: whose power is being used? Is it the same? The Sakura tree clearly represents Miyo's mother, but in the same breath it also expresses Miyo's life up until this point. With that in mind, it's possible that the Sakura "stored" (or more likely sealed) Miyo's powers away. But that doesn't leave me with an answer that I find perfectly satisfactory. To extend on it, it feels like not only was it Miyo's power that was in the Sakura, but her mother's as well. In fact, I'd go as far to say that the power is one and the same. Regardless of interpretation, it's undoubtedly a piece that needed to be explored and I'm really hoping they convert on the appearance of it rather quickly.

Following Miyo's encounter with her mother's stump (a bit of a weird phrase, for sure) she finds Kouji amidst all the rubble, and the two strike up a conversation. It's solid, well thought out, and does well to close out the tension and partially heal the rift between the two of them. Kouji finally addresses the piece of him that he was avoiding, and a similar story is said on Miyo's end. There's not a lot to add to the interaction simply because it's very lightweight and serves only to deliver on that which it wants to. I suppose the only thing to add is that I enjoy they had this warm talk in the same location that they usually would, at least before Miyo was sent off to the Kudo household.

And just to close out the front half, Kaya is sent to be a servant in a new home. Not too surprising as it's a form of punishment and brings the idea of noble to servant full circle with her story alongside Miyo's. I really don't mind it, but it feels a little too on the nose. Remaining within Japan, getting put directly to work as a servant, it feels too right for the situation. Personally, given the awareness and sort of background noise that's provided by the international world, I feel like sending her abroad to a Japanese household or something similar would have been a more sensible choice. It gives Kaya a totally new perspective as well as a reason to slowly blot her out from the story if need be. Keeping her in Japan just feels like they want to keep her around for just the right moment for Miyo, that her story does not have a suitable end. But yeah, just to re-iterate, I don't mind the current trajectory of her story.

From here we move on to the back half which is far more interesting, and does a better job overall with its material. Even just simple things like the addition of Kiyoka's elder sister to expand on the cast. Though they make it into a one-two punch as they reveal her story partially through her character design. A far more modern and Western air wafts about her and her clothing, with simple things like the pearls displayed around her neck or decorating her ears. Or, things as obvious as the short hairstyle. The point remains that she's giving the air of someone up to speed with the times and the outside world.

As for why she's showed up? Well, it's to give Miyo lessons on how to be a lady, and to fill the gap of Kaya as the "sister" in relation to Miyo. All in all it's a smart and rather effective move that also helps move our story along, even if just by a little bit. She brings energy and excitement into the fray, and drags the plot closer to a slice of life.

We don't dwell on Kiyoka's sister for that long though, as the episode must keep going. Following her up we move to a grouping of monks surrounding a large stone, focused in prayer or incantation. Very quickly things get out of control however, and the evil that they were sealing away in the massive stone is released.

I'd like to point out that while these spirits/yokai have two pairs of three eyes, thanks to how they appear at distance with the glow, the two in the background have what appear to be glowing heart eyes. A rather funny happenstance for sure.

Anyways, on the event itself. The idea is interesting, but feels underexplored. It makes sense, but it doesn't add up. These people are in the middle of a forest praying away in the middle of the night? Their fire that they seem to consistently use destroys the barrier? There's not enough built around the scene to make it make sense. There's no change over of people to show that it's an around the clock thing, and there's nothing to directly indicate to viewers inherent foul play with the spread of the fire. Undeniably, the words of Kiyoka's superior that follow this scene confirm that there is suspected foul play, but in the moment there's nothing that tells viewers what's going on.

Now, just to tie a neat knot on this episode, the production on it wasn't great. There is lots of off model work, the direction is rather flat and straightforward, the animation isn't impressive by any means, and the layouts/boarding really tend to linger and focus on closeups. By all means, the production is reeling from the effort put into the prior. Not anything to be wary of, but just worth pointing out as a pitfall of the episode.

At the end of it all, this episode does well to sever ties to the story arc prior to it and attempts to press onwards to explore the supernatural aspect instead. I think there's a lot more potential in it than there was the Cinderella story, but I also think there's even more danger in how they approach it. Whether or not Miyo involves herself directly and is given agency is an important piece considering her background. Even though she gets to better learn how to be a lady, Kiyoka exerts control (though for the right reasons) to limit Miyo's options. It's not bad, but continuing to lock her up and place her in the direct care of another feels, like it is for Miyo, very much limiting. So to reiterate, I'm still hopeful, just a little on edge.

[a-mag-a-day]

MAG 75 - baking in the kitchen (apple something)

"My brother Grant was always afraid of heights. I remember we used to climb trees as children. He would always get scared halfway up, and it would be an hour of coaxing and reassurance before he managed to climb down. He still tried to climb them, though." - I'm the same. I always wanted to climb trees, it looked fun! But at 2 meter up tops I would get scared. Looking down already gave me vertigo and I felt, as though I suddenly lost every sense of balance. Same on ladders.

"Stairs were often more of a problem, especially if there were windows from which he could see the ground getting further away." - As long as the stairs are properly closed off, I don't have a problem. If it's just a railing to put your hands on I'll probably try to stay as far from the edge as possible. I get a lot of intrusive thoughts as soon as I'm somewhere high up with only a railing… It's just like the railway bridge in episode 5 of I Am In Eskew. I'm technically not afraid of heights then, I'm afraid of my own mind.

"I mean, it’s not that I don’t love him or anything, he’s my brother, it’s just that we’d always got on best when we spent most of our time apart." - I don't get (equal) relationships like that, when the focus is on "most of the time apart". I totally get that there are friends you dearly love but just wouldn't want as a roommate, or wouldn't want to spend vacation with. Living together (even if it's only for a week like the vacation example) is something entirely different. But, saying you get along best when most time apart? Why bother? What actually is this "getting along" then? (I get, that this is often something that's referred to family members. When there is a sense of "I have to do something with that person once in a while because we're related". But even then? When there's no reason to interact with that person?)

"Normally I would have reminded him that leaving a window open invites burglars" - on a scale of burglars to librarians, what would Mike Crew be? xD

"I’d love to say that next thing I knew I was on the ground with a broken arm, but I remember every second of that fall. Like it was happening in slow motion." - Oh, there we have the Matrix Effect again, as someone told me it was called in an earlier ask.

"My phone had been smashed in the fall, and when I asked Grant to use his, he got very quiet and told me sheepishly that it, like his keys, was still inside the house." - Who lets their phone at home when going out?? Even in 2006! XD

"I did not invite Grant, which you would have thought would make him think twice about coming with me, but you’d be wrong. As soon as I mentioned it to him, he was online checking if there were any more seats on my flight. There were." - Oh the disappointment, the contempt even at "There were". Also wtf this is so super out of line to just invite yourself like that.

"Then he kept bugging me to change my hotel booking to a twin room until I finally relented and did so. Every time I mentioned something I was planning to do he would invite himself along, generally getting me to arrange it and saying he’d pay me back." - I know someone like this, but hey are also a master of gaslighting so I cut ties. Grant though doesn't sound manipulative or malicious in any kind. He sound just naive. Guess it makes it even more a tragedy for the statement-giver to blame himself. It probably would have been easier to rationalize if he somehow thought his brother deserved it. (Though I'd be careful with this. Certain fates you don't wish your worst enemy.)

"I think that’s why I decided to take him up Tour Montparnasse." - So I googled that building because I also have no idea what that is. The rooftop observation terrace is actually well secured, there's not only a metal railing but a glass box surrounding you when you stand near the barrier. I would probably feel proper uncomfortable standing there, but not totally lost since there is no physical way for me to get over that barrier.

That part with the text messages, the picture and what the statement-giver heard when his call went through is really cool again. I love unlogical spaces like this with no escape (and by love I mean in that way of fascination for horror. I wouldn't actually love being in that situation xD).

"I really hope Grant is dead. Because, if not, I have a horrible feeling deep inside that he’s still on that ladder." - I like the moral dilemma of that statement. The guilt of the statement-giver about something happening that totally was out of his control, but it still happened because of his actions. Who would have thought it could have such dire consequences. Very similar to Jon's arc…

"but it also puts me in mind of the fate of Robert Kelly, the skydiver who fell for far longer than he…" - There a significant change of recording at "the skydiver who fell for far longer than he…". I wonder what happened here? Because these statements surely are never simply in one take, there are always cuts. So why does this one sound so different all of a sudden? Also Jon here making the connection between Crew and Fairchild.

The circumstances of Jon receiving all tapes from Basira are great! Oftentimes you can feel that some things just HAD to happen in order for the story to progress with no other reason behind it. While Jon getting access to all the tapes was still something that needed to happen, it does feel natural and relatable. Basira is angry that the police is so careless and blatantly lying to cover everything up. The police probably also doesn't care about the tapes so Basira takes them to someone who does care. It's like Jon says. The police lost Basira's loyalty. And by the time they notice the tapes gone, it's probably just fine by them. One less weird thing to deal with.

I'll be honest, I'm not sure I'd be able to handle that kind of brother in my life any better than the statement giver did 😬

[selfindulgenttiger]

Childhood Clues

I was discussing with someone today the fact that, to be diagnosed with autism as an adult, you have to have shown signs in early childhood. Depending who you ask, that's before age 6, age 8, age 11, or age 18. With so many people (women most often) being diagnosed as adults, some people are questioning the frequency of diagnosis. (Untreated C-PTSD and PTSD symptoms can manifest very similarly to autism.) That started me reflecting on my own childhood behavior and what clues were missed or dismissed. I wanted to catalogue them (because I'm autistic and that's what we do with information). This is stuff from early childhood to pre-teen years. Category A: Deficits in social communication and social interaction

This area of the diagnostic criteria is the hardest for me to judge, because you don't really see your own deficits in this area. If you don't understand what the social rules are, you don't see how you are breaking them. What I can say is that I never made friends easily, and I wasn't particularly bothered by that until I was old enough to realize I was perceived as weird because of it. From second through fourth grade, I don't remember having a friend. I typically spent recess walking in a circle around my favorite tree, which I enjoyed. I was the outsider everywhere. I didn't make friends in Brownies, I didn't make friends in my performing arts classes, I was even "the weird kid" among the gifted kids. Another part of this is your nonverbal communication. There are literally dozens of photos of me with a flat affect from early childhood. Smiling never came naturally to my face. And I assume there was something off about my eye contact and general manners, because I remember my dad explicitly teaching me to make eye contact, smile, use people's names, and express warmth. (He had read it in a book, so obviously this was novel information to Dad, too, that he felt compelled to share.)

Category B: Repetitive behaviors and restricted interests.

This? Not so hard to spot. I knew I was different in this way. I just didn't understand that it meant something. The first point is basically stimming. Where to begin? Lifelong constant knuckle-cracking. Nail, cuticle, and lip biting till I'd bleed. Knee-bouncing. Echolalia in the form of this high-pitched screech sound I enjoyed making, and singing the same songs again and again and again and again. (I still sing them when I'm really stressed.) My interests were definitely what they mean by "restricted interests" which is basically what we'd call "obsessed" in the lay vernacular. Like I became obsessed with mice from around 7-12. I accumulated 41 mouse stuffed toys that I did not play with but arranged in a tableau. I wanted pet mice, even though they're very short-lived compared to other pets and I'd have total meltdowns when one died. I would talk my parents into getting me another and tell them I'd be able to handle it this time, but I never could. (I also collected Weebles, Barbies, Smurfs, and Cabbage Patch Kids, but no other stuffed animals. Most kids have a mixture of different stuffed animals, but I only wanted mice. I didn't actually really play with the other toys either. I just liked having collections and creating tableaux.) Star Trek was such a fixation from elementary school on. Every year they'd have a 3-day Labor Day weekend marathon on one of our local stations. I would try to stay up for all three days. One year, on day three, I yanked the phone out of the wall for having the temerity to keep ringing during a favorite episode. I had all 79 episode titles and descriptions memorized. I sneakily studied my uncle's copy of the technical manual for the Enterprise, even though he didn't want me touching it because it was collectible. One of the greatest disappointments of my young life was not convincing my parents to take me to the convention. I never played soccer or particularly liked soccer, but I went to all the Strikers games with my dad. He would buy me a program and I would memorize the roster of every team. Then when he'd say "great play by number 12" I would tell him all that person's stats. I didn't love the game, but boy, did I love the stats.

Another thing that falls under this category is sensory sensitivities. I had the stereotypical autistic girl hypersensitivity issues (which for the record are screaming when your hair gets brushed, rejecting blue jeans and socks because of the seams, and complaining about the sound of electricity in the walls or bugs walking). But I also have my own oddball ones, like rejecting shoes. I had to have the tips of three toes reattached before age 10 because I wouldn't even wear shoes when riding a bike or walking outdoors. My poor parents had to take me to the ER so many times. (I still cannot bring myself to keep my shoes on any more than is strictly necessary.)

I also rejected any clothing that was textured (so no corduroy in the 70s) or had heavy seams (no jeans even at the height of the Gloria Vanderbilt trend). I would steal my dad's work shirts because they were smooth. For several years, I went to school in scrubs I got at a yard sale. (Scrubs. In middle school. You can guess how that went.) And finally, of course, the overstimulation issue. I had a meltdown and ended up fighting with my mom or crying at every holiday gathering ever. I ran away from my own 10th birthday party and hid for half an hour because my grandmother was going to give me a kiss. My mother loathed taking me on vacation because I invariably got super excited and then overstimulated and then had a meltdown. By the time I was a teenager, she swore she'd never take me again.

When I look back, yeah, it was very clearly there but no one knew what it was. I just seemed like an unruly, melodramatic, weird kid. (And maybe not all the weird in my family.)

[empressofmankind]

God I hope you don’t mind me dumping that here but your story about you having a crush on kid Buggy when you were at the approximate age just hits me so hard and I don’t have anyone to talk about this with so here goes:

Way back when the anime first got translated in my neck of the world and I was a wee pre-teen, my friends quickly latched onto either Zoro or Sanji as their anime guy crushes. I used to pretend they were both not my type and that I didn’t crush on anyone in the series but that was a lie. A coverup to a truth I felt I couldn’t admit to my 12-13 year old gal pals. I had the most massive fucking kid crush on Usopp. He hit all of my buttons, he was fun, he was a bit of a coward but not to the point he was unlikeable, the episode that show him and Kaya meeting for the first time had him sitting on a tree branch in front of her window like he’s a goddamn Aladin type Disney prince. Just goddamn he did a number on me. But again, back then he felt like the weirdest option to get a crush on so I kept my mouth shut because teen me couldn’t take the teasing.

Some time passes and I haven’t watched OP for a long time, didn’t really care about it that much. I hear about the live action show and apperantly… it’s … good? Interest peaked. Watching it and having a great time. Getting back into the fandom. Find out there are a lot more people like me who not only have Usopp as their favorite but also think he’s super cute. Jacob Romero Gibson playing him helped a lot but, there are also a bunch of posts about people loving his animated form and appreciating him and many of them stating they had wee little babby crushes on him as well, even before timeskip buffed him up too.

And it’s like… it’s mildly emberassing to think back on baby’s first Blorbo ™️, but it’s also just so satisfying to be like “Uh-huh, yeah. This character is great. I know. I Love him!” And People wholeheartedly agreeing. And now I’m slowly making my way trough the series again and it’s just… so good. I am sorry for dumping this all on you on anon but it’s just my way of toasting to you in a very “To us! Us weird adults that used to be weird little kids with even weirder little crushes. We always had the best taste.” Way.

I am so happy you feel good about it now! I loved reading about your experience so don't apologise! It's all good! I like it when people interact with me over fandom. And I feel pretty special rn that you'd tell me this, Anon. I bet it is so recognisable for a lot of us. I can totally understand you keeping that under wraps as a baby, especially surrounded by Sanji and Zoro fanbabies. I apparently told everyone who wanted to hear and plenty who didn't. And, honestly, I still do that, haha. The live action being good had me so shook as well, because live actions have been doing so terribly poorly. But I am down with Ward as Buggy.

[beholdthemem]

I've got some time before work, so let's see what episode 5 has in store. The visit from Lady Briarwood’s dead minions in 4 was arguably the scariest thing I've seen animated, so I'm already afraid.

Thoughts:

- "Oh man, being bad is so EXCITING!"

Sometimes Keyleth seems like she is living in a totally different genre than the rest of the party, and is still sort of adjusting. Like. Keyleth feels like somebody decided to take a Disney princess, put her in a Rated R For Gore, Nudity, And Sexual Situations tv show with the full expectations that she’d die horribly, and instead the princess decided “Well, when in Rome...” and taught herself to kill. How long did it take for her to learn how to swear?

- “...ooh. I don’t wanna know.”

“...”

“...no, that’s a lie, I absolutely wanna know! Tell me, what’s all this about?”

I completely understand why Vax keeps coming back to spend time with Gilmore, he is DELIGHTFUL.

- Is Vex the older twin? I feel like Vex is either the older twin, or THINKS she’s the older twin. Something about her interactions with Vax have this lovingly exasperated vibe of ‘Ah yes, my idiot little brother and his trusting-to-a-fault heart’ which is objectively hilarious because I think she’s the only person in the world Vax could be considered overly trusting in comparison to.

- “And here I thought you were practicing your resting bitch face.”

“Excuse me? My bitch face??”

I need to start making a list of Best Possible Things For Percy To Say In That Fancy Accent. I can HEAR the indignant quotation marks.

- Okay, I think I got it- Vax’s outlook is like. He lost a family before, but he’s gradually starting to feel like he’s found another in Vox Machina, and is looking to encourage that. Vex’s policy is that she lost a family before, is keeping fierce hold of what’s left of it, and has zero interest in adding new people to the remainder because she doesn’t trust them not to potentially fuck her/Vax/Trinket over, accidentally or otherwise. 

I wouldn’t have originally guessed her to be a control freak, but I think she is, a little? Just sort of in the sense that she went through something so traumatic and wildly out of her control early on that she cannot feel safe and comfortable unless she’s in charge of whatever situation she’s in.

- OH MY GOD, WAIT, THAT’S WHY SHE GETS ON WITH PERCY, BECAUSE HE’S THE SAME WAY. I’ve been trying to figure out why she just tolerates everybody besides Vax but seems genuinely invested in figuring Percy’s shit out, it’s because he’s the only one whose approach to life she understands, and she wants to give him the help with it that she didn’t get.

- CAN’T LADY BRIARWOOD JUST KEEP ASTHMATIC LITTLE PURSE DOGS LIKE EVERY OTHER RICH PERSON?!

- Scanlan I need you to understand that this is attached to a dog. You are frenching a dog right now. That is a new and unique low.

- “Come ON Percy, FASTER! HYAH!”

“This thing was not built for speed and DID YOU JUST ‘HYAH’ ME?!”

What is it about life or death situations that bring out the old married couple in these two? This feels like that scene from the Incredibles where Bob and Helen are arguing over the fastest route through traffic to get to the supervillain downtown.

- So the twins have a dad, and Daddy Issues to go with it. Hoo boy.

- Seeing what Whitestone’s become after hearing Percy describe the way he remembered it feels like another death.

- I knew we’d be coming back to the people the Briarwoods ‘invited for dinner’, but there was a moment there where I thought it was going to be what was left of the corpses of Percy’s family hanging from that tree, left up there as a constant reminder to the villagers of how easily Lord and Lady Briarwood can remove obstacles to what they want- and how much joy they get out of doing so. For your sake don’t be one. You’ll fail, and they’ll have fun making an example out of you for trying.

[one-strugling-bean]

Random Thoughts on HTTYD RttE S2 (Ep1-7)

(This one is a lot bigger so gonna divide it by episodes)

Ep1 - why do the twins get so many pets

Snotlout's sadness over not being able to train his dad, that was funny

"What did he do?" "He's Snotlout's dad" "Enough said" - there is more than one way to interpret this and i think im gonna take the protective! Astrid one

Ep2&3- Okay, im gonna make a wild guess and start assuming this show is gonna be hurting Astrid a lot

How strong is Toothless?? He's just able to carry a Mostrous Nightmare like that

Hm, gotta say I'm disappointed Heather betrayed them already - like, with Dagur being her brother and all, one immediately expects a betrayal to happen eventually, but this was really fast and too sudden I'd say

Im gonna make another guess before i move on with the episode, and that is Heather is either double-crossing Dagur or she'll regret going on to his side and goes back to helping the Riders

Also, not sure how to feel about Ryker yet - he seems too competent and too much of a real threat for this show. Then again the show does seem to building itself up to a more serious plot

Ruffnut pickpocketed the guard omg yessssssssss

Ep4 - aww, it's nice to see the twins caring about eachother

Aaaand Ruffnut got really pissed at Snotlout for his stunt, wow

Fishlegs is such a cute nerd ahhh

Omg Snotlout's been bitten so much, Ruff has 0 chill

I swear this scene on the cliff with the twins is just, so weird. Its supposed to be kinda emotional but its so so silly and bizarre i can't pay total attention to the actual emotional part - guess that's just the twins for you

Snolout should've died like, 3 hours ago pretty sure

He caught a wolf in that state???

This episode was so so weird but so so enjoyable

Ep5 - Heyy it's Spitelout time - cant wait

First few lines of the two 'louts interacting and they're already giving me Draco&Lucius vibes

"Hope you're at least smart enough to figure that one out" - eh excuse me, le what. He just called his son stupid in front of all his friends and threatened him at the same time. Okay yeah, im starting to understand why no one likes this guy

God that axe is so getting destroyed

Fishlegs and Ruffnut got married, poor Fishlegs

Meatlug!! Ruff, don't throw the lady out!

Astrid is once again so so done with Snotlout - can't blame her honestly, the guy has butter fingers

Okay, that beach scene went a whole lot better than what many made me expect, but then again, it seems Hiccup, Astrid and Snotlout were expecting worse too

The scene was scary until Spitelout talked - the music, the dark of the night, the clear fear of Snotlout confronting his dad and the apprehension in both Hiccup and Astrid's faces

Not as afraid of the man anymore, but still not a fan - also he's voiced by David Tennant so he's gotta get a pass

"We're the model of a modern viking family" this made me laugh a lot, my humor might be broken i know

Ep6 - Hookster? That's a new one. Another extremely original nickname to add to the list of Hookfang's nicknames given by Snotlout, right next to Hooky and Fangster

"He's really become a tyrant, huh?" "Power'll do that to ya" Twins, don't ever change

Aw Barf&Belch are gratefuuuul, that's cute, i rarely see anything about them anywhere, this is nice to watch

"Ah, no Toothless, don't laugh! You're better than that!" Ha poor Hiccup

Nooo don't ditch the double-headed baby, he's gonna get caught by hunters!!

Hiccup is just giving me tired dad vibes this ep and I'm loving it

Ahhh Barf&Belch are sho cute, how come I've never noticed this??

"I guess we're gonna have to put you in some real danger" yeahhhhh don't ever ask that of the Thorston twins

The look of pure happiness and giddy excitement on Tuff's face as they saw the tree trunks roll down towards Hiccup is everything

What is "Bjorn Boars"

"I can only think of one man that souless" Of course it's fucking Snotlout, how did i knowww

"WHAT. IS. WRONG WITH YOU??"

Okay, what did the twins do to make Snotlout go along with this, i gotta know

"Unfortunately, we weren't expecting Thor's mighty hammer to meet Snotlout's paper jaw" I swear this kid delivers the best one liners

I love how the ending is just mass destruction of the ship

"Will someone tell this lunatic it's over?!" Hiccup deserves so many breaks

Ep7 - "Heather won't be a problem, okay?" Hmmmm i had wondered how Astrid had been able to escape so easily from Heather on ep3 without us seeing their fight - im guessing Heather revealed to Astrid that she's playing double spy

Aw cute Thorston sandwich, but damn does Snotlout look annoyed. Good for him

Yeahhhh i saw that alliance coming

"You can't just run off on your own. I rely on you, Astrid" Oof, that hurt

"Dagur was right, you don't look like much" Astrid was right, you look like a psycho" "Not exactly the compliment I would've led with" These lines are fun

Ha, sassy, taunting Hiccup is fun Hiccup

"I saw it! You did that on purpose!" Uhm, excuse me sir, how did you see that? Your back was turned!

So, Ryker is indeed smart. Like, he's intelligent and an actual threat. Me likey the high-ing of stakes

"Maybe if you didn't move and kept your mouth shut!" Fishlegs sassying the others brings me endless joy

"Feels like they're going left. No, right. Left. Which one's which??" Mood. That's me everytime someone asks where's left and right

"Heather's not evil? There goes that dream" What does that mean? Im confused

Aw, Fishlegs, you're nice

Yeah, i hope she knows what she's doing too Hiccup

This is getting too long, so gonna stop this here

Im really excited to see where this is going now, and apparently people like to read my dumb commentary so the 2nd part of season 2 should be coming soon