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thedreadvampy · 3 years

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Tbf on the Martin thing while i know that's not what you meant the reason alot of people got pussy was cause it was right about the time they'd been an issue with acephobia in the greater fandom already and the way you phrased it tbh did really feel like you were equating ace!Martin and Martin being infantilised in a post about martin being infantilised being bad. Basically it kinda sounded like you didn't want people hc-ing Martin as ace because it was infantilising (which also then linked back to some shit that happened with ace discourse) and the post blew up a bit and that mixed with you Knowing Jonny and you coming off pretty aggro or not wanting to give a straight answer on what you meant (or that's what people felt you were doing) yeah that's why that went that way.

Tbf I'm not really interested in relitigating who was right and who was wrong in that particular argument, I feel the way I feel and other people feel differently and I think everything's pretty much already been said like six months ago. I asked because I couldn't remember what happened not because I was longing for the days of pointless arguing.

however because I can't resist digging myself deeper Ever I'll relitigate it anyway under the cut

I have little to no involvement with the wider fandom so I'm not sure how their acephobia was on me in any way

I could have worded the post better but I maintain it takes a pretty bad faith reading of the post to think that my problem is with ace Martin hcs when I specifically said both in the post and the tags and further clarifications that I was talking about the way that people desexualise fat, queer and abused people OUTSIDE of ace hcs

I have said about a zillion times that me knowing Jonny doesn't mean I know shit about TMA and that we've literally never talked about it. which being the case it is pure wild that people think it's a reasonable reason to treat me like some sort of voice of authority.

I have also said about a billion times and will say again that people aren't in fact entitled to demand a full accounting of a stranger's opinions out of the blue. like it is, in fact, confusing and surprising to me the degree to which people took personally the idea that a stranger could be annoyed or disinterested in discussing something that they wanted them to talk about. that's why I keep thinking there must be more to the anger about me from certain users. but like nah apparently 90% of the reason people get pissed off at me is either a) Using The Wrong Tone To Talk To Myself On My Personal Blog which they interpret as attacking them personally or b) Not Being Constantly Available On Demand To Answer And Reanswer Questions That Shouldn't Even Be Questions In The Full Knowledge That Any Poor Wording Will Be Treated As Malice. Sorry, my tone's getting a tad aggro again, I do recognise that, but I find it really frustrating to have it consistently treated as deeply inherently suspicious and/or malicious to not immediately rattle off a perfect answer to "questions" which are fairly thinly veiled traps. like there is no good answer to "what's your opinion on ace people." "ace people exist" is not a matter of opinion and I could just say "ace people are valid and good and fine uwu" which is like. True. but also utterly trite and validates the idea that point in a random stranger's inbox to grill them about Which Minorities Are Valid Uwu is in any way an acceptable or boundaried way to behave. Which I don't believe it is, and treating it as if it's a totally normal and fine thing to do just to get people to leave me alone would be pretty unprincipled imo.

Like I say I've said all this before, I'm just retreading old ground. But in terms of the Why Did This Blow Up, yeah I hear what you're saying but even trying to step back from my own experience and view this from outside, I'm still pretty surprised that a kind of shittily worded post at a bad time (from a blog that was pretty detached from the wider TMA fandom) followed by an Insufficient Disavowal of extremely nebulous accusations of acephobia, ended up being such a big thing.

Like literally. the majority of the messages I was getting were i n c r e d i b l y broad and vague. they said things like "what's your opinion on ace people" and "are you an aphobe" and I repeatedly answered them saying "I mean ace people exist and are my friends and comrades, what's the question?"

And I hope that when people raised specific issues about my actual conduct I answered them. I certainly tried to, to the best of my abilities - like I got a bit defensive initially but I agreed that my wording in the Martin post was poor and I did my best to clarify my intention (which had been to say "IF WE ASSUME THAT Martin isn't aroace," which I thought was a fair assumption when from context I was talking about a Martin being written in sexual or romantic relationships, but which I phrased as "Martin isn't [list of items including aroace]" bc as with most of my posts I wrote it in one go without reading it back). I kept saying that if people were specific about what was wrong with my conduct specifically, what they wanted explained and what they wanted me to change, I was happy to discuss that, but I wasn't happy to give some sort of Simple Definitive Answer to broad questions that were not mine to speak authoritatively on and which I often was like "I can't even begin to tell you my opinions on the answer until we unpick the question a LOT" (like. yes I could say honestly that I believe that ace/aro people are queer as a topline answer but if we go any deeper than that then we need to unpick what queerness is, what aro/aceness is, what context we're talking in, what is meant by queer spaces, etc etc and it's not something I would feel honest giving a yes/no answer to when a lot of people mean a lot of different things by the question, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't.) And it's not helped by the fact that when I have tried to answer questions in a way which feels honest, which inevitably gets long and ramble bc that's how my brain works, people have repeatedly got really hostile not because of what I say but because I've written an answer longer than "yes I fully agree with every possible permission of your point." like literally I have had people rant about how I'm being defensive or dodging the question when a) they haven't actually read my answer by their own admission and b) I'm literally. answering the question. it's fundamentally baffling to me that giving a short unnuanced answer with the intent of getting someone off your back is seen as less "dodging the question" than giving a paragraphs-long thoughtful and inconclusive answer. like this isn't a fucking debate. I'm not here to win an argument. I'm here to think about what I believe and why, and sometimes an honest answer is neither simple or conclusive.

idk man this post is actively unhelpful to everyone but me, but while I don't WANT to relitigate this every time I mention it I DO want to be absolutely clear that I have thought about all these things at length. some things were my fuckup, some things I stand by, but I still think it ended up with a response wildly disproportionate to the actual mistakes I made.

(which were there. evidently. but it seems like a very strange and spiralling way to react to "person who words things ambiguously and doesn't always give immediate clear responses to broad questions about complex issues")

#'what we're not going to do is persistently relitigate things'#*proceeds to write Another Billion Word Essay relitigating things*#apologies friends i have 0 self control #btw anon for clarity: where i say 'you' it's an impersonal you i don't mean. you. as a person.#I'm not going like YOU ANON YOU DID ALL THIS #but i am uhhhhhhh like yeah? i know all this reasoning? i just think they're bad reasons?#which i explained like. multiple times. they're all to me pretty based in a way of thinking i just can't wrap my head around #where there's like. no boundaries between individual and community actions and everything is personally addressed to You The Viewer #even if it Very Explicitly Isn't #like it's really. really hard for me to account for because i can't understand how you get to that headspace #(again impersonal you)

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icannotreadcursive · 4 years

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Sometimes, people have different--very different--sets of headcanons and sets of ships etc for a given piece of media and cast of characters because they have basically different understandings of who those characters are.

A lot of times, that’s just because every fan as their own unique life experience to apply when engaging with and interpreting a work, so they see different things reflected back.

But when it comes to what I call Legacy Characters--characters that have had their story told and retold, adapted and readapted, reinvested and reset time and again; such as comic book characters--a huge part of who a fan understands a character to be is determined by what versions of that character they’re familiar with, what aspects of different versions have coalesced in their brain to form their sense of that character in general. Usually, the biggest influence there is which version of a character that fan encountered first.

I see both knock-down drag-out fights and casual disrespectful disparaging comments within some fandoms--especially big comics fandoms like Marvel--that on the surface of them are more of the typical dumb “my interpretation is the only right one and anyone who disagrees is wrong and Doesn’t Understand The Media” stuff, but that I am SO SURE mostly boils down to this issue of having very different but all equally legitimate senses of the characters from having familiarity with different appearances of the character, or in a different order.

For instance--using what I find to be the most glaring case as an example--the Marvel shipping wars amongst Steve/Bucky, Steve/Tony, Sam/Steve, Bucky/Natasha, and (increasingly) Sam/Bucky shippers. Sometimes the Pepper/Tony, Pepper/Natasha, and Bruce/Tony shippers join the fray.

These conflicts get so nasty. Even a lot of the more chill shippers, when prompted, have very ugly things to say about ships other than their own and the people who support them. Allegations of racism, misogyny, fetishization, and general toxicity run rampant and are often talked about as though they are the only possible reasons someone could ever have for shipping or not shipping a given pair.

I want to make it clear that I personally do ship or have shipped several of the above, including ones that mutually exclude each other. There’s a few I’m neutral on up there, and one that kinda squicks me--we’ll get to that later.

Every single one of them is a perfectly good ship. None of them are inherently fucked up in any way and I will not hear any argument to the contrary.

Do some supporters of these ships get overzealous and obnoxious? Yes, that’s kinda why we’re talking about it, but that’s not a problem with any of the ships themselves.

I’ve noticed some patterns around people being into particular ones of these ships and their personal histories with various Marvel media.

Steve/Tony: mostly comics fans at this point, either were into the comics before the MCU became a thing or the early days of the MCU got them into the comics and they’re now more into the comics than the films. Because there’s a LOT of material in the comics to support the ship! There’s so much! Including the fact that in one comics reality where Tony is a woman, she and Steve get married!

Now, there was a ton of this’ere Stony fic that got churned out in the early days of the MCU, a lot of it from fans getting into this world for the first time through the phase 1 movies, at which point other potential partners for these guys either hadn’t been introduced as characters yet, or hadn’t been fleshed out. A lot of film-main (as opposed to comics-main) Stony shippers moved away from the pairing as the MCU continued, Bucky became the counterpoint of Steve’s Character arc, Sam got brought in, Pepper and Bruce each got more screen time, and the dynamic between Steve and Tony in the films got increasingly adversarial in a way that’s less sexy more fucked up.

The battle cry against Stony from other factions, especially from the Steve/Bucky camp is usually “but they’re so toxic!” and, I mean, yeah--if your sense of these characters is primarily based on how they are in the MCU, they are. But in my experience, even if they’re working MCU events and settings, the Steve and Tony being imagined by Stony shippers aren’t really that Steve and Tony.

Steve/Bucky: look, Stucky is an MCU thing. Articles have been written and published about the fact that the dynamic between Steve and Bucky in the MCU follows the beats of an epic romance to a T. The basis for this ship is all there on screen--throw in a little bit of history nerd mojo and you’re in deep.

By my observation and estimation, most new or formerly-very-casual Marvel fans who came in via the films and remained film-mains, and who are inclined to not-strictly-heteronormative shipping at all went the Stucky route. Folks who initially shipped Stony then switched to Stucky are pretty common. People starting with Stucky and then switching to any other ship with Steve to the exclusion of Stucky? Very rare. And while for a lot of people Stucky is their OTP in the strictest sense, I do see a lot of Stucky shippers who are here for other ships as well, either in an alternate realities kinda way or an amicable exes/polyamory kinda way.

The only people I’ve seen who have a problem with Stucky as a ship (other than “my ship is a different ship, therefore this one is bad and wrong”) are comics-mains whose sense of Steve and Bucky is heavily informed by runs of the comics in which Bucky is significantly younger than Steve and kid sidekick type figure. For them, the dynamic between the general forms of these characters leans mentor/student or protector/charge, so the inclination is to read the MCU relationship as fraternal, because it being romantic is squicky based on their sense of the characters.

Sam/Steve: comics-mains, film-mains with significant comics familiarity, film-mains who just aren’t into Stucky for one reason or another, or film-mains who are just really into Anthony Mackey which is a perfectly valid reason to get behind a ship. People who know Falcon from the comics seem much more likely to be into this ship and also more invested in this ship. I’m not qualified to say much about support for this ship from the comics themselves because my personal familiarity with Marvel comics doesn’t include much of Sam Wilson at all, but I am absolutely qualified to say there’s support from the films, especially CA:WS.

The worst vitriol against this ship tends to come from overzealous Stucky OTP shippers who really need to remember that fandom is supposed to be fun, and flat out racists. That must be acknowledged and needs to be addressed. Fandom racism in general, and against Sam in particular is a thing and it can absolutely be a factor in shipping.

However it’s not inherently racist to just not ship Sam/Steve because you see them as bros, or because Stucky is your OTP, or because you ship Sam with someone else, or whatever. Worthwhile to take a minute to examine why you don’t ship it, if you don’t, and check that for racial bias in how you view and treat Sam as a character, especially if you’re white.

Sam/Steve and Stucky are the two ships I see coexist the most! A lot of people ship both of them separately and exclusive from one another, but a lot of people also go ether the OT3 or the “Steve and Sam were definitely a thing for while there but now they’re not” route.

Bucky/Natasha: comics-mains or film-mains with significant comics familiarity, particularly for the comics worlds in which Bucky and Natasha are a couple, which seems self explanatory as to why that correlates. Not a lot for it in the films, Nat and Buck don’t interact much in the films that we see, and they’re kinda trying to kill each other in much of what we do see. But, like I said, they’re a thing in some of the comics so there we have that.

This is the one that squicks me. Clearly it’s a super valid ship; depending on the canon it’s a canon ship. Frankly, they make sense together, canon or not--their individual backgrounds as spysassins and with brainwashing etc means they’d be able to understand one another in ways no one else around them really can. But my personal amalgamation of these characters from the films and what comics I’m familiar with has Bucky having been Natasha’s teacher when she was a kid in Red Room. So I cannot ship it, I can’t do it.

The fact that I personally am squeaked by it has absolutely no impact on the fact that it’s a good ship, and the fact that it’s a good ship cannot and does not negate the fact that it squicks me.

Bucky/Sam: okay, there’s not a lot of this out there yet, but what there is seems to mostly be coming from film-mains who either don’t ship or co-ship Stucky and/or Sam/Steve, and who really liked the dynamic between these two in Civil War, and I guarantee you we’re about to get so much more of this ship with Falcon and Winter Soldier premiering. I’ve already seen some hate directed at this ship from the same places Sam/Steve gets hate. I predict, though, that this one will also get co-shipped alongside Stucky by the less strictly OTP of those shippers and I’m curious to see what the dynamic ends up being between Bucky/Sam shippers and Sam/Steve shippers as this camp grows.

In conclusion, I guess, note that not shipping a ship doesn’t have to mean attacking that ship (and it shouldn’tI) and not liking a ship, even being deeply uncomfortable with a ship for your own reasons doesn’t mean that ship is bad. We’ve all got our own individual sets of experiences both in life and with the characters in our fandoms that can dramatically change how we see those characters and their relationships to one another. This gets especially complicated and diverse with Legacy Characters like those from sprawling long-running comics multiverses. Someone’s understanding and interpretation being different from yours does not make either of you wrong!

As long as no one is an asshole about it it, it’s actually really interesting and cool to compare interpretations and see how your understandings overlap and differ, to think about what bits of canon have been formative for you and what personal experience may have made you inclined to interpret certain things certain ways.

Fandom is supposed to be fun. Shipping is supposed to be fun. You can and should hype up and express love for your own ships without tearing down others.

#long post #meta #fandom etiquette #marvel #shipping #stucky #stony #sam/steve #bucky/nat #bucky/sam #squick is a useful word #don't be an asshole

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notjustabooksims · 4 years

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(Lol it’s not a writing challenge wtf Louise - it’s a writing tag, but in my defense I made the graphics while waiting for my job interview and I felt like I was dying).

I was tagged by @thesimperiuscurse for this, which I am legit hype for because I saw this one and thought it was so cool. And well - here we are. Thanks, Lila. 💕

R U L E S | List five things that you, without fail, weave into or explore in your stories, whether it be specific themes or tropes, character archetypes, allusions to other literary works.

This is basically every story I’ve written. Thinking back, almost all the stuff I’ve written has included some type of (mostly emotionally) abusive relationship, whether it’s with a parent, a romantic partner, a friend, or some combination of these. It has long weirded me out that I had this fascination, but it made sense once I realised that some of my familial relationships are marked by, if not outright emotional abuse, then at least by a good deal of neglect and controlling behaviour. A lot of my stories explore the after-effects of abusive relationships, the damage they do to a person, and how those effects come to light when seen through the lense of a loving, supportive partner or friend. Case in point: Vittoria’s whole relationship to Carlo brings to light how messed up her youth was. Enzo’s relationships with Lorenzo and Gina make him stand up against abuse. Lia’s relationships with her brothers and later Teo do the same for her... it’s all over the place! (It would have cropped up in the sequel to CoM as well for Nadir). And if there’s one thing I want to say through my stories, it’s that it’s always okay to cut someone out of your life if they’re no good for you. Family or friends, it doesn’t matter - you never have to let people hurt you.

Nadir has anxiety which makes him seem like a brooding dark boi and Enzo gets anxiety attacks when he stands up to dad. If I’d ever made the direct sequel to CoM, Genevieve would have had some anxiety/PTSD related to the experiences in the Tournament as well. It’s no secret I deal with anxiety issues myself, so I add anxiety into a lot of stories. One thing I’ll never do, though, is make any character heal via insta-cure. Hence why both Enzo and Lia (and probably the whole family) are in therapy even years after leaving. Therapy, therapy for everyone!

Mmm, yes pleeease. There are usually elements of this to the stuff I write. If it’s not an outer conflict like “rich bois aren’t supposed to love thieves” or an inner one like “I shouldn’t love you because I’m too dangerous for you”, I love me some forbidden love. (Wow, that’s a lot of love). There’s something so delicious about characters who want each other badly, but they can’t or won’t be together... of course it aaaaall builds to that moment when they just can’t help it and give into the feeling. Oh, it’s just the best.

This is even more pervasive than even the abusive vs. healthy relationships in my writing. As mentioned before, Nadir looks like a brooding dark boi, but he’s really a soft nerd boi. Celeste is a pretty, fun-loving blonde who will absolutely wreck your shit. Carlo is a dangerous gang leader, but also the softest soft boi who loves his family and whose main kink is consent. Gina is a gun-toting badass lady, but she loves art and family and she’s terrified of being hurt. Enzo acts cold and arrogant, but is actually a soft boi who cares a lot about his sister. Lia is a pretty, spoiled rich girl who’s actually perceptive, intelligent, and hard-working. Teo is a grumpy grumpster who’s... yeah, you guessed it, he’s a soft boi. I could just have said “soft bois” here, but I think it holds true for so many of my other characters. It’s a good way to subvert expectation while also making a character likeable, I think.

I tend towards bittersweet endings. It’s not because I think happy endings are dumb or for kids - fuck that noise. Optimism and happiness are valid as heck, thank you very much. But I like just that little bit of bitterness in my endings, because I think the good stands out stronger in contrast to the bad. Case in point: in CoM Nadir isn’t completely bad and Genevieve gets a purpose other than the Tournament, but they’re also not together and it might before she can really be comfortable with him after what he did. In the ending to gen 1, Carlo and Vittoria are both alive and well, but they’re forced to live apart. For gen 2, Gina and Enzo are together and happy, but Enzo still suffers from anxiety and other after-effects of abuse, plus he’ll never be able to reconcile with his dad.

I’m tagging @storiesbyjes2g, @itssimplythesims and @amphoraesims, if you guys want to. If not, that’s okay. And if you want to do it, go ahead and do it. I love this tag a lot and I want to see tons of them.

#taggy thing #long post #i'm so very sorry

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argumentl · 4 years

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The Freedom of Expression Ep 14 - The Party To Protect The People From The NHK (N Koku Party) commences "Same sex, same name stealth operation".

K: Hi this is Dir en grey's Kaoru, starting this episode of The Freedom of Expression. Joe san, Tasai san, welcome....Well, recently, who knows whats really happening?

J: Yeh, its troubling. I've been spending a lot longer looking at my phone and computer. I've been getting a lot of coupons. My favourite shops or brands are all going online...well, no ones going into the shops, so they can only sell online. So i've been getting coupons like, if you spend over a certain amount, you'll get 20,000yen off.

T: I see.

J: I think like, 'Waa, I wanna spend!'..but then I think, actually since April, I've had less work so I need to restrain myself. I experience this conflict every day for about 15mins. Like, whats wrong with me?

T: I see.

J: Thats thier strategy.

K: If you have free time...

J: Thats it.

K: You'll end up spending money.

J: Normally, they have expirations, and I just think 'Aghh', so its really...

K: You can't help buying stuff, right?

J: I do end up buying stuff!

K, T: *laugh*

J: I really do! I bet there are people out there addicted to coupons! Aren't you? Are you ok?

K: Well, im ok. I just shop by mail order.

J: Ahh

T: I see

J: People are shopping like that a lot right now.

T: Hiranabe san, who works at our place, he's got a lot of offers from night time establishments, and he's troubled as to what to do.

J: Oh, to get him to go there?

T: Yeah. He got an unprecedented amount of messages.

K: (quietly) Unprecedented?

T: Like, 'please come, please come, please come'.

K: He only gets them now? Cause he'll be quick to spend.

J: How is Hiranabe san doing?

T: Well, as expected, he seems scared. He's in his 50s, it looks like he finally understands that his life might be in danger if he caught the virus. He wears a mask, he wears pollen protection glasses. When he goes outside he's like..'the virus won't get in my eyes'.

J: Sounds like a terrorist! Thats just like him.

T: He flipped 180°. He used to be the guy who says, 'Im not wearing a mask'.

J: Oh, really?

T: He's that different now.

J: Well, Im a similar age to Hiranabe san...

T: I can't believe it!

K: I can't believe it.

J: So, what was it?..Its risky, if you are over 50 its more dangerous?

K: Ohh right, yeah.

J: If you catch it, there's a higher death rate at this age?

T: Also, men are more at risk, right?

K: Yeah.

T: They are saying the death rate is higher for men.

J: Well, we are among that group. Shall we get on with the main topic? I thought we'd go with a topic that is unrelated to corona this time.

' "N Koku Party's 'same name, same sex' stealth strategy for Shizuoka no.4 district Lower house by-election". With the death of Mochizuki Yoshio, the LDP's former environment minister, candidates standing for election are the LDP's Fukuzawa Youichi, an independent group of the unified opposition's Tanaka Ken, independent candidate Yamaguchi Kenzo, and the Party Against the NHK (N Koku Party)'s Tanaka Ken, whose name is the same as the unified opposition's candidate. N Koku's Tanaka Ken uses the same kanji, and has the same reading as the unified opposition's Tanaka Ken. The opposition parties, electoral commission, and local media are racking thier brains about it. If a vote is for 'Tanaka Ken', there will be no way to distinguish between the two. Its a proportional division system, so ambiguous votes will be split according to the overall percentage of votes. The electoral administrative committee have taken measures to change the rule that makes a ballot paper invalid if it includes anything other than a candidate's name, to allow a candidate's age to be written aswell. As a result of this, with the aim of reducing ambiguous votes, the unified opposition are promoting 'Tanaka Ken - Age 42' in thier election cars, posters, and online in order to attract votes. On the other hand, N Koku's Tanaka Ken surprisingly hasn't taken any action. He has refused pre-election interviews with the media, hasn't published an campaign bulletin, he doesn't appear in election posters, he has no plans to visit the area. There are expected to be people voting who are unaware that two Tanakas are standing for election. As for N Koku's aim, their leader, Tachibana, had this to say.."We want to test how the votes will be split when there are candidates with exactly the same name. We are not appealing for votes either online or on the ground. We are a weak political party, and want to know how we stand *1'.

There's also suggestion of running another female candidate named Koike Yuriko for Tokyo governer. I thought we could talk about this kind of same name/sex disturbance strategy which the N Koku party has set up.

T: Its amazing, isn't it?

K: So are they doing it to siphon votes?

J: It seems like it, yeah. Especially, that would be the aim if it was for Tokyo Governor.

T: They said they wanted to test how the votes would be split, so like you said Joe, for Tokyo Governor, if it was someone else called Koike Yuriko, they would want to get the data of how the votes are split.

J: Well, its not about freedom of expression, but there is nothing illegal about what they are doing in terms of the election, so its totally ok for them to do this. What do you think, Kaoru?

K: Well..*laughs*, even if you ask.....its interesting but...how will it end up? But, well, hmmm...its fine, isn't it?

J: As it happens, I've been on a radio event with Tachibana san once. And also...well, in this kind of election, a candidate who no one is expected to vote for is called a bubble candidate, the most famous example is Mac Akasaka. I've worked with Mac Akasaka before, so I've listened to what these kind of guys have to say. I mean, certainly, these guys are laughed at and made fun of a lot, but apart from the question of what Tachibana Takashi is doing, to be a candidate for Tokyo Governor, you have to pay a deposit of at least 3 million yen. And if you recieve under a tenth of the total valid votes, you have to forfeit your deposit. The Tokyo Governor elections get about 5 million votes, so if you get under 500,000 votes, you will lose your deposited 3 million yen. As for national elections, the deposit is 6 million yen. So you can call it a prank all you like, but they are spending a lot of money to do this. What a lot of bubble candidates will tell you is, its not free, so they are doing this with the intention to win, they do think thier ideas will improve the country, improve thier party. If there was no financial risk, it would end up at the level of annonymous postings on SNS. But after they've actually paid money, most of them will start electoneering. Making election posters costs money, and there's the cost of gas to run a car to go handing out flyers, and all sorts of things like that. It will end up costing another huge chunk of money in election costs. So in doing this, there is another side to these guys other than, 'they are just idiots'. Maybe they are trying to get people to change the way they see elections, instead of just routinely voting for the faces they know.

T: Well this case has great advertising effectiveness.

J: It does, yeah.

T: Tachibana san's name has really been sold with this.

J: It has.

T: Like, with his own business, and on you tube and stuff *2.

J: Well, as for my personal opinion, I remember Uchida Yuuya running for Tokyo Governor. You can still find his political broadcast on youtube, its great. If you compare Yuuya san to Tachibana san, honestly, Tachibana san seems to have more of a knack for it.

T: Its interesting seeing that kind of political broadcast on NHK. ????*3

J: Well, even in times such as these, we are still having elections. From now on, due to corona we'll probably see new ways to vote and new ways to do all sorts of other things.

K: Its created a need to re-think things, like with the custom of personal seals...in Japan there's a big custom of 'You have to do it this way', or 'You need it on paper'.

J: Yeah, as you mentioned Kaoru, the custom of using personal seals...in the end, even Japan's IT minister also stands as the head of the organization to retain personal seals. Somehow in Japanese society, one of the things companies insist on is the personal seal. There are those who ask why they can't just settle things digitally, but if the minister responsibile for advancing IT is also the head of a group advocating to retain the personal seal, there is a clash going on now. This is the kind of time to think about changing the political system.

T: Things would change a lot if we switched to online voting.

J: They would change, yeah. If young people started voting a lot online...

K: Yeah, right now, in the situation we have now, I think people are starting to think about future.

J: Yes, in that respect, although its very difficult with corona around, I feel like we are starting to wake up to the things we have just put up with till now. I mean, what comes next? In particular, with coronavirus, a lot of countries' governments have taken on huge powers, and in some countries its almost like a corona dictatorship. So, its very difficult, but we really need to slightly re-think the way we carry out elections and the way the state operates from now.

T: We, ourselves are a part of it, right?

J: Yes, yes...Yep, so, same sex, same name...it even hard to search for him. I wonder what this candiate actually intends. ?????*4

K: He's not showing his face much.

J: What will he do if he wins? ...Eh? Hello??

K: Is he sleeping?

Kami: Yes, yes.

J: Were you asleep, Kami?

Kami: No, I was waiting till you called on me.

J: Oh, you were waiting? Oh, sorry.

Kami: I've had a thought.

J: Oh, have you?

Kami: I have...Um, Joe should run for the N Koku Party.

J: *laughs*

K, T: Ohhh

J: Me?!

T: Thats a good idea.

J: Would it be ok, though?

T: In the Tokyo Governor election.

J: In the Tokyo Governor election? Which election?

Kami: It would be ok, yeah.

J: Would it?

Kami: Yeah, anything is ok.

J: *laughs* You couldn't participate in the election could you, Kami? You don't have voting rights?

Kami: No, I don't, but instead, I can make myself into substance.

J: What?

Kami: By pretending to be a citizen.

T: Prentending to be a citizen?

J: Oh, is that it?

K: So that means you could pile up votes for someone?

J: Right?

Kami:...No, I can only do it once.

J: Oh, so you can only take on substance once?

Kami: Yeah, yeah...a bit like Devilman.

T: Ah, like Devilman.

J: But if you could do that, surely you'd be able to do it will two or three people? I feel as if you've just made that up.

*K laughs*

J: Did you just make that up, Kami?

Kami:...Yes, I did.

K: *laughs*

J: He did.

K: I feel like his heart hasn't been in it for a while now.

T: *laughs*

J: Kami, has your mind been elsewhere?

Kami: Ye...uh, no no no.

K: He said yes!

J: *laughs*

Kami: Crush the NHK.

J: Yes, crush it.

K: Well, on that note, I think we can finish here. Thank you, please tune in next time. Please subscribe, thank you very much.

J: Please do.

Kami: Vote for Joe!

*1 I think the confusion arises here, because rather than ticking a box, Japanese voters have to actually write down the name of the person they are voting for.

*2 Think thats what he meant.

*3,4 Couldn't catch these bits.

#dir en grey #the freedom of expression #tfoe #kaoru #薫

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bigskydreaming · 4 years

Note

IGN’s recent Bat-focused article (Batman: What Does Red Hood Need to Do to Get A Good Story?) praises fanfic writers and also is an amazing critique of how stagnant Jason has become under recent DC management and I’m so surprised at how good it is and how well thought out the solutions were

Hmmm. I just looked it up and I mean, I’m not trying to start anything but I both agree and disagree? Like, it makes some points for sure, I mean, its not like its saying things that I haven’t said a thousand times about Dick, like.....these characters need to be allowed access to a full range of emotions, both good and bad, in order to be fully fleshed out, so I mean yes on that premise alone I absolutely agree this is as true for Jason as it is for Dick or anyone else.

Tbh my only real criticism of the piece is it thinks Jason exists in a particular predicament the other characters aren’t in as well. And that I just don’t agree with, like they kinda lost me a bit with their first paragraph:

His complexities and moral ambiguity make him a compelling and distinct character among his more strait-laced Robin-brothers. Sadly, the character has seen little growth since his rage-filled reintroduction into comics. The ‘former Robin becomes a villain’ idea was enough for DC to coast on for a while but since rejoining the heroes, Red Hood has done little else.

First off, this may just be me being pedantic but I’m ALWAYS going to go fetch a grain of salt before continuing reading anything that pits Jason against his brothers in a war of his moral ambiguity against their strait-lacedness. Because to me, that’s just a fundamentally shallow view of the Batfam that caters to the idea that they each must have their own distinct niche in order to be fully viable individual characters, when a) no, and b) they don’t fit neatly into the niches people keep trying to slot them into and it never ends well for anybody.

Like Jason is morally ambiguous in a lot of ways too, yes, but umm, even if we assume that the writer is only speaking of Dick, Tim and Damian, we’re talking a guy who beat the Joker to death with his bare hands and has ten assassins and mercenaries on his speed dial and who co-led the Outsiders, a guy who was deeply immersed in weighing the pros and cons of getting revenge for his father by getting Captain Boomerang killed and is forever being DMed by Ra’s because he’s convinced he can get Tim to say He Has Some Points Actually, and the kid who was an assassin with a body count by age ten and who has struggled constantly ever since his debut to define his OWN personal view of morality that is not wholly predicated on what he was taught by any single individual.

And this is a big part of where I part ways with the article, because I think it falls into the same trap that a lot of people do by believing fanfic is inherently better by doing the same thing from just a different angle. Fanfic CAN be better than the canon, I absolutely believe that, I believe it is at times, but to do so, it has to like, BE BETTER. It has to do things differently, and not just paint a slightly different veneer over the same things. Like, pedantic though it might be, I outlined the above issue because its a mode of thinking the canon absolutely falls into again and again, and just like the writer of that article themselves, like....I think fandom as a whole is no different?

Like, yes there are great stories about Jason out there, some writers have done great and interesting things with him, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a huge trend in fandom of doing the exact same thing I see here.....which is honestly a huge part of the exact same problem the article is decrying canon for......LIMITING Jason (and all the Batfam) by reducing them and their stories to finite niches as a way of spotlighting them as different from their siblings.....except they’re not that different! And that’s okay! They don’t have to be! Families can have lots in common, families DO have lots in common due to like.....shared variables during their formative years.

I mean Jason was heavily influenced by environmental factors in how and where he grew up before he ever met Batman, but like the article goes into itself, he was no less influenced by Bruce himself as his father figure.....which is something he absolutely has in common with his siblings, thus its not hard at all to see how his siblings could have similar complexities and moral struggles that stem from trying to reconcile Bruce’s influence with the many other things and people that have influenced their childhoods.

And similarly, while the article is dead-on about Jason’s stagnancy....this is something that applies in equal measure to the rest of his family, because they’re all facing the same issues in terms of how DC views and utilizes them, and fandom as much as it likes to condemn DC for doing just that....frequently does the same thing. Like, Jason’s stuck in canon, absolutely......but Dick keeps being popped out into his own microcosm to experience a couple years of stories that essentially turn him into completely different characters isolated from every communal part of his character’s history, and then ERASE everything that’s happened at the end of each of these stories and reset him to square one.....and that’s just a different kind of stagnancy that again, still never allows for actual character progression or development. Tim has LITERALLY been regressed back to Robin, like a hard reset that’s its own kind of stagnancy and Damian has had years of character development upended just to kick him back to where he started, effectively strip away all the connections he’s developed at least in any meaningful way, etc.....and the same holds true for Babs and Cass and Steph and even Bruce himself IMO, in a lot of ways.

Its absolutely a problem, but its a problem that extends far beyond just Jason even if he is a great example of it. And its also a problem that extends into fic itself, and that’s why I don’t agree with a lot of the conclusions that article draws beyond just the fundamental “these characters need to be allowed access to a full range of emotions.”

Yes. That. That right there, THAT I think is crucial, but I think that writer needed to widen the scope a little to take in the full impact of what that actually MEANS for the characters....so as to not accidentally repeat the same problem they’re being critical of by essentially arguing for a full range of emotions for Jason....while still defining or viewing Jason through a finite lens of “the more morally ambiguous Bat character, at least as compared to his brothers.”

Because its that last part that’s so detrimental, because it seems like such a little thing at first, until you realize that essentially its just putting a ceiling, a cap on how far those full ranges of emotions can be expressed. Like the problem with Dick Grayson in canon and fanon is NOT that he can’t be written with a full range of emotions.....its that his character absolutely can encompass a wide range of opinions and viewpoints and emotional stances from “I don’t believe in killing as a first option” to “I absolutely can, will, and have beaten a damn clown to death for joking about murdering my brother”.....and he can still walk away as Dick Grayson after expressing both those things, because his character is big enough to include them both. HE’S not limited as a character, its canon writers and fandom writers that both heap artificial limitations of their OWN on him, say that his character is so defined in such a specific way that there’s no way for the latter expression of his character to actually be IN character.....and the fatal flaw here is fully fleshed out characters are never just one thing. They don’t fit in niches anymore than people do, and notice the problems we all run into when we try and pigeon hole people as being just one thing, like humans can’t be contradictory or act against their own self-interest or be hypocritical or evolve or even regress past prior viewpoints....basically, any time you try and sum up a human being in one line, no matter how accurate that description is, there’s still SOME things that are going to be left out of that picture.

Now, these things don’t always have to matter that much, like if I look at a serial killer and say that’s a serial killer, like, I might be leaving out of the picture that once he helped an old lady across the street and didn’t kill her and he doesn’t even know why, and I for one, simply do not care that I leave that out of the picture. Its irrelevant to the big picture for me. I can acknowledge that it adds a smidgen of nuance to that particular picture and then go yeah but also I don’t care, nuance denied.

But in terms of fictional characters, these things that get left in the discard pile when we try and sum up characters as just one thing, like, they can be hugely significant, because characters unlike real people, are simply WHAT WE MAKE OF THEM. That stuff that’s been left out of the big picture look at that character because its stuff most people to DEFINE what that character looks like have deemed irrelevant....its still there, and still perfectly relevant for anyone who wants to pick that stuff up and make something of it, use it to change the overall picture or even just point to ways and places that picture can absolutely encompass and include these other elements and STILL fundamentally be that same picture, that same character.

And this isn’t to say that characters can never be written out of character, its to say that usually IMO what ACTUALLY makes the difference between something being out of character and something just being an unexpected but still valid character choice is just.....how these things are executed. The latter is when writers make the effort to JUSTIFY their character choice, to sell audiences on why and how this is absolutely something this character would do, to take them on a journey of what led the character to making this choice and let them see how those steps actually line up, that’s an actual journey that character might take. The former is when writers just don’t bother and are just like, well here’s a thing that character did, and you know it was in character because well that’s the character and that’s what I wrote them doing lol, what more do you want. No. Yawn. Next.

But the trick is if you’re going to try and make a character a SPECTRUM of emotions and choices rather than just a same datapoint recurring over and over again endlessly, a literal sticking point that never advances, never progresses, never changes......you have to actually give that character free range to utilize that spectrum of emotions and choices.....not just confine them to accessing all those possibilities but ONLY within a narrowly defined niche that is its own kind of limitation.

A character can START from a logline, absolutely. Can BEGIN in a narrative niche as a way to INTRODUCE them as seemingly different from their surroundings or their peers when they do not yet have the backstory, the evidence of past stories and character choices readers can use to interpret their actions or guess their choices.....but narrative niches, IMO, are meant to have a shelf life, an expiration date. They’re a seed for characters to grow FROM, to grow PAST, not return to over and over again.....because that’s when a niche just becomes another house that stagnancy built.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughts and the article mention.....it was an interesting exploration of thoughts for me even if I didn’t ultimately agree with a lot of what was already said....still a worthwhile read though I think and I mean hey, its cool if you still agree with it more even if I don’t, lol. This is just my take.

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hashtagartistlife · 4 years

Text

and then there were none

Ichigo Kurosaki, college student, gets roped into a dorm game with a long tradition and finds it a little more than he bargained for. Kuchiki Rukia, college student, has never done anything by halves-- and that includes stupid traditional dorm welcoming games. The r.a.s regret the day they placed her knife in his hands.

There was a tumblr post going around that I can no longer find about a welcoming game at an American college dormitory. The basic idea behind it was that everyone in the dorms get a plastic knife with someone else's name on it, and they had to find that person and 'stab' them with the knife (just a simple touch was counted as valid) to 'murder' them. The 'victim' is then out of the game, and they had to hand over their own plastic knife to their 'murderer'. Whoever is on the 'victim's plastic knife was the new victim for the 'murderer'.

My first instinct upon seeing anything vaguely amusing is always 'make it ichiruki'. So here's the fic about it.

(There's two chapters planned, and please don't ask me when the next chapter will be up, it's not high on my priority list. But it WILL come, some day. I don't make it a habit to abandon fic, even though sometimes it seems like I have. Promise.)

___________________________________________________________

So, college dorms were pretty wild.

For small-town Karakura boy Kurosaki Ichigo, living in a co-ed dorm at a university in America has been nothing short of an eye-opening experience. There are people walking around barefeet in only a towel. Some girl set off the smoke alarm because she was cooking cup noodles in the bathroom at 2am. He’s pretty sure he’s heard his dormmates having sex through the walls on more than one occasion, and the food served at the cafeteria is only edible about half the time. All in all, it’s a little bemusing, but not at all unpleasant, and by the third week of his move he thinks he’s settling in ok. His room is mostly in order, and he’s made at least passing acquaintances with the people on his floor. His English is improving at a frankly astonishing speed, and classes don’t start till next week. He’s figured out which stall in the bathroom spits out the most reliable hot water, and he really thinks he’s got a good handle on this whole ‘dorm living’ thing—

that is, until he gets back to his dorm room one night to find a plastic knife shoved under his door.

“The fuck…?” he mutters, trying to figure out if this was an American befriending ritual, or maybe someone was just attempting to threaten him (badly)? Did his room look like a trashcan? Did Chad (he thinks that was his name) from room 209 remember what he said about not having a grasp on American cutlery yet and decide to help him in a subtle way?

He raps on the door next to his, and a muffled voice yells ‘who is it?’

“It’s Kurosaki from 206,” he replies, and the door cracks open to reveal a single brown eye and a strand of auburn hair.

“Oh, hi, Kurosaki-kun!” Inoue Orihime from 207 was…. an odd girl. She liked putting parsley in her coffee and read astrophysics textbooks for fun. But Ichigo doesn’t remember her ever being this defensive— she’d always been enthusiastic about greeting people, so the way that she refuses to open her door more than an inch is uncharacteristic of her. “What’s wrong?”

“Well, I just got back from the library and there was this knife shoved under my door—”

At this, Inoue screams and slams her door shut; Ichigo is left more than a little bemused. “Inoue? What the hell— it’s only a plastic knife!”

“I know that, Kurosaki-kun! As if I’m just going to let you win this— but by the way, this is terrible strategy, now I know to avoid you like the plague—”

“Strategy?! Inoue, what the fuck— wait, is this plastic knife meant to mean something? Is this some American etiquette thing? I have no idea what’s going on. Please explain to me what this knife means—”

Inoue opens her door a crack again, and looks at him suspiciously.

“Wait, so you didn’t hear the murder announcement at breakfast today?”

“Murder announcement?! Jesus FUCK, who died—”

“Nobody died, Kurosaki-kun, don’t be overdramatic—”

“AS FAR AS MY ENGLISH SKILLS GO, INOUE, MURDER MEANS SOMEBODY DIED—”

“Wow, you really don’t listen to the breakfast announcements at all, do you?” Inoue sounds supremely unimpressed, but at least she opens the door a bit further; except what the hell is she only wearing a towel—?!

“Inoue why the fuck are you only wearing a towel—”

Inoue waves her hand like that��s a negligible detail. “Just got out of the shower, but also murder strategy. You’re immune if you’re naked, and some of the second years recommended this. I’m in this to win, Kurosaki-kun, there’s a whole year’s supply of cup noodles in this for me—”

“Wait, what? Cup noodles?” That got his attention. Anything that scored him a whole year’s supply of free cup noodles was okay in his book. Questionable towel-wearing included. “Now you really gotta explain what’s going on.”

“I should leave you to rot, one less person to compete against for me.” Inoue purses her lips. “But you were the first one to pour a bucket of water on that fire I started last week, so fine, I’ll let you in on the murder details.”

“Not a sentence I thought I’d ever hear in my life, but cheers, America,” Ichigo mutters.

“So basically, murder’s a game that the whole dorm plays every year,” Inoue starts explaining, and Ichigo’s still trying to get over the weirdness of the word murder being used so casually— “and everyone gets these plastic knives with someone’s name written on them, and the idea is you have to stab that person with the knife and ‘’’kill’’’ them. Then you get their knife, and you just keep killing people and collecting knives until you’re the last person left! Hmm, there were a couple of rules, you can’t kill someone in the dining room or their own rooms, and you’re immune if you’re naked, but I think that was it? Anyway. So yeah! That’s what’s going on here!”

Ichigo squints at his knife in the half-dark of the corridor that, for some reason, has had all its lights screwed out. “Ok, that’s…. Great, I suppose? What happens if I don’t know who the person on my knife is?”

“Then you find out, Kurosaki-kun! This game was ostensibly devised so that we make friends, you know.”

“There are no friends when it comes to a year’s free supply of cup noodles,” Ichigo says, and Inoue claps her hands.

“Precisely! You’re getting the hang of it now. Ergo, for the next week, I don’t know you, ok? Good luck!”

Inoue slams her door shut, and Ichigo shuffles back to his room, feeling slightly more enlightened than before.

But still—

“Who the hell is Rukia Kuchiki?”

__________________________________________________________

By the second week of Murder, Ichigo’s seen enough naked butts to last him a lifetime. It seems that voluntary nakedness is a vastly preferable fate for many than losing a shot at a year’s supply of free cup noodles, and honestly if that doesn’t sum up the average college student mindset Ichigo doesn’t know what does. (He’d probably be a lot more judgemental about it, though, if he hadn’t spent at least a few hours earnestly contemplating the strategy himself.)

Thankfully, he and Chad have an alliance of sorts that makes him wearing a towel round the place redundant. He’d enlisted the giant’s help in identifying his would-be target, and after ascertaining that he wasn’t the name on Chad’s knife either (Chad had one Asano Keigo as his victim, Ichigo only knows him as that guy who swallowed a whole tablespoon of cinnamon powder on a dare), the two of them had agreed to watch the other’s back. Chad was set to pull off his first attack tomorrow, but Ichigo still had no clue who or where Rukia Kuchiki was.

Part of the problem was that the dorm was so friggin’ huge; there were four wings, each with five floors, and each floor had ten rooms. That was 200 potential students he had to parse through to find his victim, and it wasn’t exactly like he could go around asking people if they knew her. Murder had amped hostility on campus up by 300%, and almost nobody stopped for idle chatter anymore.

Whoever had devised this as a way of promoting friendliness and unity on campus was a giant fuckin’ moron.

“Still no word on Kuchiki?” Chad asks, after another day of paranoia and stalking Asano to make sure the plan goes off without a hitch, and Ichigo shakes his head.

“Are they even real at this stage? Are we sure I haven’t been given someone who doesn’t exist?”

“Ghost student?”

“Fuckin’ potentially? Who the fuck knows with America.”

Chad hides a smile behind his rickety old guitar and starts tuning. “I’ll ask around my bandmates tomorrow, if you’d like.”

“Naw, s’alright. I don’t want word to get out that I’m looking for them. What kinda giant flashing beacon that says HEY, I’M YOUR POTENTIAL MURDERER, right?”

“If you say so.”

“I do.” Because dammit all, Ichigo’s serious about this thing. A whole year’s supply of cup noodles is no joking matter. Speaking of which, he wonders how Inoue is doing with her murders…

_______________________________________________________________

Inoue, as it turns out, is doing swimmingly. While Ichigo has done little more than sit around and twiddle his thumbs, Inoue has already racked up an impressive collection of plastic knives— three, she informs him that night, while cheerfully throwing him a celebratory can of leek soda (Ichigo gingerly sets it down behind her sofa when she's not looking). She was making good headway on her next victim, as well, and if all went according to plan she'd have her fourth knife tomorrow morning—

“But, you know, Kurosaki-kun,” she muses, sipping on her own can of beetroot soda (where did she get these concoctions from!?), “You're awfully cavalier about this whole thing. For all you know, you could be my next victim,but here you are, sitting on my couch. Or do you just not care about cup noodles?”

He snorts. “If you ever got ahold of my knife, I'm pretty sure I'd be dead before we even got to have this conversation.”

“True,” she concedes— credit where credit is due. “So nobody’s popped up to try to kill you yet?”

“Nope,” he replies, popping the p a little. Honestly, that was the only thing making him feel better about his complete inability to murder anyone— the fact that whoever had his knife was having just as much difficulty tracking him down. One week in, and he'd not seen hide nor hair of this Rukia Kuchiki person, and, big dorm or not, her (her? Ichigo assumes it's a girl, though Rukia is very unusual for a Japanese name) elusiveness is getting to be extremely impressive. “But Chad is watching my back for me anyway. I'm covered.”

“Hmm.” Inoue purses her lips. “That's a lot of faith in someone you've only known, for, what, three weeks?”

“Chad is trustworthy,” Ichigo says firmly. He stands and stretches up to the ceiling, stifling a yawn. “And speaking of Chad, I better get to bed. He's ambushing Asano tomorrow, I told him I'd be there for backup.”

Inoue waves. “Good luck to Sado-kun, then. I’m gonna stay up a bit to refine my own dastardly plans.”

He shakes his head and opens the door, peering out into the corridor to make sure the coast was clear. He and Inoue were literally next door neighbours, but you couldn't be too careful these days. “When you win this thing I'm gonna be expecting free noodles from you occasionally. Remember I stopped you from burning down the whole dorms last week.”

“I'll consider it.”

“‘Night, then.”

“Goodnight, Kurosaki-kun. Dream of Rukia Kuchiki tonight!”

“At this stage,” Ichigo mutters, as he slips back into his room, “anything to help me find out who the hell she is.”

_______________________________________________________

Drastic times call for drastic measures. The next morning, after a successful ambush on Asano (Chad is now +1 plastic knife; his new victim is called Yammy Llargo), Ichigo tracks down someone he'd been avoiding ever since his move to America and claps a hand on her shoulder.

“Hey.”

Arisawa Tatsuki whirls around and body-slams him into the ground. “Who the fuck do you think you— Ichigo?”

He winces. “Hi.”

Tatsuki puts her hands on her hips and does not offer him any help getting up. “Oh, so you're talking to me now?”

“I just said hi, didn't I?”

“You know, you're such a fucking asshole, did it ever occur in your pathetic little brain to apologise—”

“I'm sorry,” Ichigo mutters sullenly. “Look, I'm sorry I didn't tell you I was also going to college in America, I'm sorry you found out only when you bumped into me at the dorm welcoming party, it's just that we had that whole farewell party for you and we had that touching goodbye and, look it's just awkward that I got a second round admissions letter the very next day, it's like saying bye to a friend and then finding out you're walking the same way to the carpark, ok, it’s embarrassing—”

“Oh my god, you drama queen. Were you ever planning on telling me? Ever? Your best friend since childhood?”

“... I might’ve planned to tell you at the beginning of the next semester by pretending I was on exchange,” he admits. Tatsuki throws her hands up in the air.

“You were going to avoid me for a whole semester?!”

“Look, I didn't know I’d end up in the same dorm as you, ok? It's a big campus!”

“Un-be-lievable,” she says, turning on a heel and walking away from him. “You know what, keep ignoring me. Don’t hang out around here. I don’t want your incredible loser vibes accidentally rubbing off—”

“I said sorry, didn’t I? Wait, wait, I had something to ask you!”

“Sorry doesn’t pay my bills, Ichigo!”

Ichigo catches up to her and falls into stride. “You don’t even pay bills! You’re on a full scholarship!”

Tatsuki manages a smug smile. “If you’re so jealous, maybe you should have kept up with karate.”

Ichigo grumbles. “Yeah, right, like I had a chance at a physical education scholarship with you in the same dojo.”

“I’m glad you’re finally acknowledging my superiority—!”

“You beat my ass continuously from when we were six to sixteen, I threw away any pride I had a long damn time ago.” He makes a face at the memory, then shakes his head to refocus. “Anyway, this isn’t why I was here. Listen, have you heard of anyone around here called Rukia Kuchiki—?”

Tatsuki cocks her head to the side at that, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Kuchiki…? Name sounds familiar. Why?”

Ichigo feels his heart speed up in his chest. “What, really? Where did you hear it? Do you know her?”

And now she was grinning again and— oh, no, Ichigo does not like the look of that smile. “Why do you want to know?” she asks, and the question is laden with suggestion. Ichigo flushes.

“None of your damn busi— look, it’s not what you think—”

“Aw, my little mama’s boy Ichigo is all grown up, I remember when you used to go crying to your mom for a scraped knee and now you’re chasing after women—”

“It’s for murder, you absolute pain in the butt! She’s my target!”

Tatsuki bursts out laughing, hearty peals of laughter bouncing off the courtyard walls. “Alright, alright, I get you. I was just teasing, Ichigo, geez. Anyway, the name sounds familiar, but that doesn’t mean I know her. I can’t remember where I’ve heard it before.”

Ichigo deflates as quickly as he’d been riled up. “Are you serious right now—?”

“Hey, you can talk, mister ‘I’m-really-bad-at-remembering-names-and-faces! And yeah, I’m serious. I don’t have a stake in murder anymore. I got killed two days in.”

Ok, that surprises him. He raises a skeptical eyebrow. “What, really? Who the hell did you in?”

“Some girl named Orihime Inoue,” she grumbles, kicking a nearby rock. “Tae-kwon-do black belt, apparently??? She doesn’t even look the type!”

Ichigo makes a noise of sympathy and understanding. He should have guessed.

“Anyway, now I’m roped into helping her. So I don’t think I’d be able to tell you about Rukia Kuchiki, even if I’d known any more about her. Victims who are murdered have to help their murderer, and all.”

Ichigo frowns. “Wait, those are the rules?”

“That’s what Inoue said.”

“............ I am about 95% sure that those were not part of murder rules.”

There’s a short silence between the two as they process this.

“...... scary girl,” Tatsuki finally says, in a grudgingly admiring tone.

“I’ll say.”

The two of them stop their brisk walk in front of a huge pair of doors emblazoned with the words GYM, and Tatsuki waves him off. “Anyway, I gotta go train now. Any further questions before I go?”

Ichigo thinks a bit. “Yeah, why drama queen? Since I’m a guy, shouldn’t it be drama king?”

“Do I look like a linguist? You always scored better than I did at this stupid language. Take it up with whoever your hero was, Willy Shakealot or something?”

“Shakespeare,” he says sharply. “And Shakespeare wasn’t a linguist. In fact, I’m pretty sure linguists really hate him. He made up a lot of weird words and shit.”

“He did? Huh. Didn’t know you were allowed to do that.”

“You’re not, Shakespeare just gave zero fucks.” Ichigo shrugs and takes a half-step back, raising his hand in a goodbye salute. “Why else do you think he was my hero?”

Tatsuki rolls her eyes. “Whatever. You’re still a loser.”

“And you’re a bitch. Let me know if you remember anything about Kuchiki.”

“Only if we get to go halves on the cup noodles.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Then I’ll think about it, too.”

That was probably the best he was going to get out of her. “Later, then.”

“If you can bear the embarrassment of us meeting again despite already having said goodbye, then sure.”

Ichigo shakes his head and lets her have that parting riposte. He hadn’t won a single match, verbal or physical, against Tatsuki since they’d been in diapers; he figures, what with the way his luck was going lately, that he wasn’t about to start now.

__________________________________________________________

Just as Ichigo walks away, a tiny girl brushes past him on her way to the gym. Her black hair falls short and sleek, tickling her jawline and the nape of her neck, and the clean scent of cucumber and mint follows in her wake. She jostles him a little, bumping into his elbow, but Ichigo hardly notices the slight press of her body against his, small and light as she is. She mutters a hasty apology, and disappears into the building before he can formulate a reply.

Ichigo shrugs and goes on his merry way.

_______________________________________________________

The third week of murder brings about a calamitous change in the game as Ichigo knows it, due to several factors:

Orihime Inoue kills not one, not two, but three people in quick succession;

Someone finally stages an attack on him, but runs away without having completed the deed, and

Chad dies.

Not literally, of course, but Ichigo has to admit, the figurative loss still hits him pretty damn hard. Chad takes it as stoically as ever, with a shrug and twitch of his eyebrow, and goes back to working on music for his band.

“Does anything faze you?” Ichigo wonders, after Chad hands his knife over to Inoue (because of course it was Inoue who took him out. Of course).

“Puppies.”

“Fair enough.”

“Kittens, too.”

“... Right.”

“And birds. And rabbits. And small children—”

“So basically, you’re a sucker for anything cute?”

Chad shrugs again, which Ichigo takes as a yes. He crumples up his soda can and lobs it into the bin.

“You were attacked today, too. Aren’t you worried?”

Ichigo considers it. “A bit, yeah. Sucks that you got taken out of the game. But you can still watch my back when you can, right? I’ll go halves on the noodles with you.”

Chad nods. “When I can. I might be busier with my band soon, though.”

“Understandable. I’ll try and keep myself alive in the meantime. At least I know who’s aiming for me, now. Neru? Nel?”

“Neliel Tu Odelschwancke.”

Ichigo stares. “How the hell do you remember that?”

“She’s in my music theory class. And she has green hair. She’s not hard to miss.”

“Well, good. Should make it easier to see her coming.”

Chad smiles. “Your hair isn’t exactly hard to miss, either.”

“Aw, shut up. I take back what I said about the noodles.”

They sit in companionable silence for a while, the sounds of Chad tuning his guitar the only thing between them. Eventually, Chad breaks the ice.

“And Kuchiki?”

Ichigo huffs a dry laugh. “No fuckin’ clue who or where she is. I’ve even been asking around, now that a lot of people have been dropped from the game by dying. But nobody seems to know who she is, even though everyone says her name sounds familiar. It’s driving me up the goddamn wall.”

“When I first heard the name, I thought that too.”

“What, that it sounds like a name that’s going to drive me up the wall?”

“No, that it sounds familiar.”

At this point, Ichigo is more tired than exasperated. “Yeah, s’what everyone says. Whatever. I’ll either find her or I won’t, right? No point getting annoyed over it. Better just focus on staying alive, because I swear to god if I die before finding out who she is I’ll be pissed.”

“You better hope,” Chad says gravely, “that Inoue doesn’t get her hands on your knife, then.”

“You, me, and the entire dorm population, mate.”

________________________________________________________

Ichigo drops by Inoue’s room that evening, just to check he isn’t next on her list. He’s lucky— he’s not. But some poor fucker by the name of Uryuu Ishida is.

“I waited outside his room all day and he didn’t even exit once!” Inoue’s saying, brandishing the knife with his name on it like a conductor directing Beethoven’s Ninth. “What kind of— of social recluse does that?!”

“Damn,” Ichigo replies, ignoring the fact that he did exactly that for days on end during the summer holidays, rereading The Compleat Works of Shakespeare in English and Japanese. “Sounds like a loser.”

“Apparently he’s like— the dorm cryptid,” she says, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “Nobody’s— nobody’s really seen him in the flesh. They’re not sure he even exists. They think he’s second-year pre-med and that he was valedictorian of his grade last year, but nobody knows for sure.”

“Inoue, how did you manage to find out all this in the span of a day?”

She looks at him like he’s insane. “I, uh, talked to people?”

“I talk to people too! But nobody knows who Rukia Kuchiki is. Nobody. Zilch. Zip. Nada. At this point I’m about 98% sure she doesn’t actually exist.”

Inoue sighs pityingly. “Kurosaki-kun, you’ve been talking to students, haven’t you?”

Ichigo’s confused. “Who else would I talk to?”

Inoue just puts a finger to her lips. “Can’t tell you. Trade secret. But really, Kurosaki-kun. There are much easier ways of going about this game, you know.”

“Fat lot of good that’s going to do me, when you won’t tell me,” he grumbles. He takes another look at the name on her knife— Uryuu Ishida, may he rest in peace— and thanks his lucky stars that it isn’t him on there. “Anyway, I better be off. Good luck with the new guy. Not that you’ll need it.”

“Good luck with Rukia Kuchiki, because you’ll definitely need it.”

Hell, did everyone make a secret pact today to take the mickey out of him? Ichigo’s too tired to argue, so he just leaves Inoue to her planning and calls it a night. Maybe he’ll have better luck tomorrow.

____________________________________________________________

It takes Ichigo a few seconds to remember who she is, he’s been so tired lately.

Green hair, he thinks, absentmindedly, before he remembers his conversation with Chad yesterday and yelps, scooting back a few metres.

“You— Neliel?”

“That’s me!” His would-be murderer is bright and vivacious, and way too perky for this hour of the morning. Aside from the curious green hair, she’s also got a scar between her eyes and a reddish— birthmark? Tattoo? Ichigo doesn’t know— across the bridge of her nose. “Morning, Ichigo!”

Ichigo’s already halfway across the courtyard by the time she stops him. “Wait! Wait! I’m not here to kill you this morning!”

“Yeah right!” he yells back. “I’m not dying before I find out who the hell Rukia Kuchiki is! Try another morning!”

“You idiot, I’m already dead! Check the morning lists if you don’t believe me!”

Ichigo stops and whips out his smartphone. “You stay right there,” he says, glaring, and Neliel complies, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender. He scrolls through the dorm noticeboard, and, sure enough, there is her name: one of the last people to be murdered last night.

“See? I don’t lie,” she says, reproachful, and Ichigo shoves his phone back into his pocket and approaches her cautiously.

“What do you want?”

Neliel shrugs. “I just thought I’d warn you about your new potential murderer? Thought that might be good manners, and all. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but, well. Your new murderer’s…… yeah.”

“My new murderer’s… what?”

She looks intensely uncomfortable at this. “He’s. Well. He’s…. He’s not a friend, per se, but I’ve known him since we were little and I feel a bit responsible for him— uh, he’s a bit rough sometimes, but he won’t actually kill you. I think. Look, just keep your eyes peeled, ok? Anyway, enough of this depressing talk in the morning. Who’s Rukia Kuchiki? Why are you so keen on meeting her?”

Wow, that was so transparent a topic change that Ichigo’s almost impressed. “No, no, go back to my murderer, what were you saying about him?”

“— so, Rukia Kuchiki, huh, cool name, sounds kinda familiar, wonder where I’ve heard it before—”

“Neliel. You were talking about my new murderer and actual murder in the same breath. This does not give me a lot of reassurance, you feel?”

“—no, wait, actually, Rukia Kuchiki,” she mutters, her brow furrowing. Then her expression clears, and she looks up at him with a bright smile. “Oh! You don’t possibly mean Dia—”

And just as that happens, the lockdown alarms go off.

_______________________________________________________

The loudspeaker in the middle of the courtyard bursts into life with a crackle of static.

“Attention all residents. This is not a drill. Please make your way to the nearest lockdown location in an orderly fashion. Attention all residents…”

By the second round of the announcement, both of them manage to unfreeze; Neliel curses and starts to turn away, but Ichigo grabs onto her wrist.

“Oh shit— I have to go find Donddochakka and Pesche—”

“Wait— Rukia. What were you about to say about Rukia?”

She shakes his restraining hand off with ease. “I’ll tell you later! I have to go find my friends!”

“No, goddammit! Tell me now! It won’t take you that long!” Ichigo yells, but she’s already disappeared into the throng of people. Ichigo kicks a nearby rock and consults his phone to find his nearest lockdown location— the gym, apparently. He joins the crowd moving slowly in that direction, mind still grappling with Neliel’s last words.

Rukia Kuchiki? Oh! You don’t possibly mean Dia-

Dia? Who the hell was Dia?

But he’d have to deal with that later; he walks into the gym and spots Tatsuki, waving at him from a corner with Inoue. He makes his way towards them.

“—n’t believe that he still won’t come out of his room, who does he think he is— there are safety regulations in place—” Inoue is saying, fingers curled around the knife that still says Uryuu Ishida. Tatsuki attempts to placate her with a long-suffering expression.

“Maybe he’d already left before you came— hi, Ichigo.”

“Hello, Kurosaki-kun! And ridiculous— I was there at 6 a.m. in the morning. What sort of self-respecting college student wakes up before then?”

“6 a.m.?! Orihime, that’s. That’s stalking—”

“Stalking’s not stalking if it’s done in the name of free cup noodles—”

“Stalking is always stalking! God, whatever, we’re continuing this another time. Anyway, Ichigo, did you hear? Some nutjob got onto campus with an actual knife.”

Ichigo flinches. “What? Jesus. I hope Chad’s ok. Where’d you hear that from?”

“From the r.a. over there.” Tatsuki points with a chin, and indeed, several r.a.s are in deep discussion, all of them with a serious look on their face. “They’re gonna make an announcement about it soon. Apparently it’s a scrawny dude, black hair in a ponytail, wearing a dirty white hoodie and jeans. There’s police cars arriving, shit’s crazy.”

“I’ll say.” At least it was a knife and not a gun, Ichigo thinks, toying idly with his own plastic knife. He halfheartedly scans the crowd, looking for any unfamiliar faces— surprisingly, he finds that he knows most of them already, by sight if not by name. He wonders if any of them are Rukia Kuchiki, and finds himself hoping that, wherever she was, she was somewhere safe.

It’d be a bit of a downer if she was actually murdered before he managed to get around to it.

The gym doors open again to let some of the stragglers in, and Ichigo allows his attention to be turned by the motely crew that walk in: a tall, thin man who is built rather like a stick insect, a hulking guy who looks about as wide as he’s tall, and a smaller, scrawny dude who is wearing nothing but a towel as a fundoshi around his waist (goddammit, Ichigo thought that tactic had died out by the first week). And, almost buried by the mass of bodies around her, a head full of green hair.

Ichigo blinks, and then he starts pushing through the crowd to get to her.

“Hey. HEY! NELIEL! WE GOTTA CONTINUE OUR CONVERSATION FROM EARLIER!”

Neliel looks up in his direction, and frantically starts mouthing no at him. Ichigo doesn’t give a shit. He’s going to find out who Rukia Kuchiki is, and he’s going to find out now.

“Don’t give me that crap! You said you’d tell me later! Well, it’s later now, so out with it—”

“No, I swear to god, Ichigo, not now—”

“Ichigo?” The stick insect dude suddenly looks viciously interested, and Neliel claps a hand over her mouth. “As in, Ichigo Kurosaki?”

Neliel shakes her head. Ichigo glares at stick insect dude.

“If I am, who the fuck are you?”

Nel buries her face in her hands, and stick insect dude smiles— and shit, can people even smile that wide? Ichigo feels a chill run down his spine.

“Your death,” stick insect dude says, and he lunges.

Scrawny dude, black hair in a ponytail, wearing a dirty white hoodie and jeans.

Ichigo sees the glint of a knife held in his hands, and suddenly realises he’s going to die—

“No!”

That is, until a short, black-haired blur shoots out from the crowd and jumps in front of the knife meant for him.

It sinks in to the hilt, and Ichigo watches the girl’s eyes widen in shock with a horror that robs him of his own voice.

________________________________________________________

Both girl and assailant crumple to the ground, and Ichigo’s frantic with worry; he reaches the girl first, hoists her up onto his lap, expecting blood. She was so small; what the hell was she thinking, jumping out in front of him?! She coughs, great big hacking things that he wouldn’t expect from someone her size, and Ichigo holds her around her shoulders, worried out of his mind.

“Are you ok? Hold on— where did he stab you? Are you bleeding—”

In response, the girl wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and lunges at the felled assailant.

“You missed, you cowardly shitstain, I don’t know what you’re doing on a campus but you’re going to rot in jail for this—”

“Young lady—! Enough! Back away and let the cops deal with this—”

“Nnoitra! I told you to leave that stupid knife behind, you idiot—”

“Ow! OW! Don’t just fucking watch, Nel, get this crazy woman off me, what the fuck—”

“ENOUGH!” The r.a.’s have made their way over by now, and manage to separate the two brawling figures; stick insect dude is being held back by Nel and her two other friends, while the girl is being restrained by an r.a. Ichigo sits on the floor between them, feeling like he just missed something.

“Wait, hang on, what’s— what just happened— didn’t you get stabbed?” he asks the girl, who is looking very un-stabbed. She glares at stick insect dude.

“He missed,” she spits, and stick insect dude howls in indignation.

“I did not miss!” he hisses, and throws a crumpled plastic knife onto the ground. “I had him! I would have had him straight in the gut if it hadn’t been for you jumping in for your boyfriend!!! The fuck, dude! This is sabotage! What have you got against me winning cup noodles?!”

Ichigo stares at the plastic knife bearing his name, crushed like an empty aluminium drink can, and slowly starts piecing the incident together.

“Wait— so you're—”

“And now I've lost the element of surprise. You scrawny little bitch,” Nnoitra snaps, and Ichigo thinks, a little wildly, that he had no business going around calling anyone else scrawny. He eyes the limp black hair and dirty white hoodie of his assailant and attempts to make sense of the chaos around him.

“You’re— you had my knife—?”

Nnoitra rolls his eyes. “What, can’t you see? You impaired or some shit?”

“Oh my god, Nnoitra,” Neliel groans. “Can you keep your big fat mouth shut for half a second—”

“Oh,” comes a small sound from the black-haired girl, and Ichigo turns to see her slowly flushing crimson. “Oh.”

“Oh,” Nnoitra mocks, before Neliel smacks him in the head. “Ow! Nel, you bitch, she is clearly the one in the wrong here, would you knock it off—”

“Well, what the hell was I supposed to think?!” the girl demands, now completely red but with an indignant expression on her face. “You matched the description for the armed intruder perfectly! Not to mention, who plays Murder like they're actually trying to kill someone?!”

“This is why I was trying to warn you,” Nel says to Ichigo in an exasperated aside. “And those are just his last set of clean clothes.”

There's a short silence as everyone digests her words, Ichigo and the girl both eyeing Nnoitra’s hoodie like they seriously doubted Nel’s definition of ‘clean’.

The girl clears her throat and speaks for all of them. “Gross.”

Nnoitra flings himself against Nel’s restraint. “You bitch, I'll fucking cut you up—”

“Enough!” an adult finally makes their way onto the scene, and everyone looks at the harried professor with varying levels of relief. The girl, in particular, lights up at the sight of him.

“Professor Ukitake—!”

“What’s going on here?” he asks in a tired sort of way, and the r.a.s hasten to answer him.

“A minor altercation— you know our dorm tradition, Murder—”

“Ah, that damn game,” he mutters, looking extremely distracted. His gaze sweeps over all of them, assessing the situation. “Nobody’s actually hurt, then?”

“No sir,” the girl answers, prompt. The professor nods at her, before turning to the r.a.s for the full story. By now, the police have made it into the evacuation area as well; the three parties convene for a minute or two, discussing the details in hushed voices, before they all turn to Nnoitra and Nel.

“In any case, Mr. Gilga,” Professor Ukitake says apologetically, “although it may be coincidental, it is true that you fit the description for the armed intruder rather perfectly, I’m afraid. The police would like you to accompany them to the station, just for a little while, until the intruder situation is solved. If that’s ok with you—?”

“Wha— the hell it is! I was just tryna murder Kurosaki over there—”

The professor winces. “Mr. Gilga….. That’s really not helping your cause there.”

“Oh, c’mon, it’s just a game—”

“I told you,” Nel interrupts witheringly. “I told you to leave your damn knife behind, didn’t I? Just go with the officers for now, Nnoitra. It’s just til they catch the real intruder, and quite frankly, I don’t trust you around Ichigo right now.”

“Don’t be a sore loser, Nel, just because I murdered you last night—”

Two policemen place a hand each on Nnoitra’s shoulders and escort him out, Nnoitra complaining the whole time but not daring to retaliate. Nel shakes her head and makes an apologetic face in the direction of the smaller girl. “God, I told him… sorry about all this, Di. I might go with him just to make sure he doesn’t get himself arrested… you really alright? Not hurt anywhere?”

“Who do you think I am?” the girl scoffs. “I’m fine. Never did understand why you’re friends with him, though.”

Nel grimaces. “Yeah, sometimes I wonder that, too. Anyway, I’ll see you later at the gym, we can talk about this then.”

“Tell your stick insect friend not to lunge at people with knives in the future, whether they’re plastic or not.”

“Will do. Bye!” with another apologetic half-wave, Neliel and her two other friends take off after Nnoitra. Ichigo, still feeling somewhat bemused by the proceedings, finally turns and manages to get a good look at his…. saviour(?), for lack of a better word.

She’s short. That’s his first impression, the fact that she is so goddamn short and good lord, she might actually, literally be just half his size, if the way the top of her head only comes up to his chest is any indication. Aside from the height (or lack thereof), she seems fairly nondescript: short black bob, black leggings and a t-shirt with a flannel tied around her waist. She notices him staring and holds out a hand.

“Diana. We could have met in less embarrassing circumstances, but I guess as first meetings go ‘jumped in front of a knife for you’ isn’t a bad start. You alright?”

Ichigo takes the proffered hand and is promptly surprised by the firmness of her grip. “Fine. I feel like I should be the one asking you, though. You're the one that got stabbed.”

Diana rolls her eyes. “Please. As if anything wielded by a guy that skinny would ever be able to hurt me.” She grins, all teeth, and whoa, Ichigo may have to reconsider that first assessment of her. He’s suddenly flustered, red dusting the skin over his cheekbones as he tries to come up with a response. She has the bluest eyes he's ever seen.

Thankfully, the professor from earlier spares him. “Miss Kuchiki!” he calls, and Diana turns— he wants to have a few words with her, it seems, and she gestures to him that she'd be over soon. She turns back to Ichigo to say goodbye.

“Well, take care, I guess I'll see you around--"

Something clicks in his brain like lightning, and he catches her by the wrist.

“Wait. Kuchiki—? Like, Kuchiki as in Byakuya Kuchiki Kuchiki? Kuchiki as in the Kuchiki Wing in the Main Library Kuchiki? As in one of the shareholders of our university Kuchiki? That Kuchiki?”

“Shut up, fool, not so loud—!” She snatches her wrist back and looks around worriedly, though by now people’s attentions have moved on from them. She answers him in a resigned tone. “Yes, that Kuchiki. He’s my brother. It's not something I like to advertise.”

Ichigo’s mind is teeming like a nest of ants. “Why— no, never mind that question. Diana’s not a Japanese name, though--"

“It's my English name, obviously,” she snaps. “If you wanted my full name it is Rukia Kuchiki. Why are you so interested in my name anyway? Shouldn't you at least tell me yours first?”

A slow grin spreads over his face; the kind of grin that Tatsuki had once told him made him look like the supervillain in a bad shounen. He takes a step in closer to her, and Diana— Rukia, irritated, stands her ground.

His hand slips into his pocket.

“I'm Ichigo Kurosaki,” he tells her.

In one fluid motion, he pulls out his own knife and taps her with it on the shoulder. Those blue eyes of hers widen first in disbelief, and then in outrage.

“You— no. No, you can't possibly— you couldn't!!”

“Nice to meet you, Rukia Kuchiki,” he smirks, flipping the plastic knife over to display her name.

Rukia closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose, like she has a headache coming on.

Then she opens her eyes, takes a deep breath, and socks him in the face.

#BLEACH #ICHIRUKI #KUROSAKI ICHIGO #KUCHIKI RUKIA #BLEACH FIC #WRITER LIFE

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idk-my-aesthetic · 4 years

Text

a concept

U know how in the comics Aang starts rebuilding the air nation with ppl who are basically converts to their religion? By like teaching them about the air nomad’s ways and stuff?

What if he gave some of them air bending using energy bending? And they could start re-building the air nation and it’s culture by teaching them everything!! They could even start moving back into the temples now that they could fly and rebuilding

They’d even have the bison!! According to the wiki aang found a living herd after the war !!

Idk just. As a Jewish person genocide stories are really really personal to me. And the thought of being the last of my people is terrifying

I just really want the air nation to have a chance to rebuild in a natural way. And I think that like letting ppl choose to convert and gifting them with air bending would probably be the best way

Ik aang’s kids and grandkids have air bending but trying to rebuild an entire nation from one bloodline is.... not the best idea

And I also know that in lok a bunch of ppl are given air bending, but that whole story really rubs me the wrong way (no hate to lok though!! There are parts I like!!)

Under the cut is basically an explanation as to why I take issue w/ it and find it mildly offensive/an essay about cultural appropriation in general lol. but i don’t wanna kill ppl’s dashes so if you wanna see the explanation check there

but i really think that aang like.... allowing ppl to convert, and teaching them, and gifting them w/ airbending in the most natural/best way for that story to go and i wanted to share that!! :)

anyway time for a whole essay because i.... apparently need to explain and justify every single one of my opinions. i’ma blame the adhd.

I have 2 main issues w/ the new air bender plot. a) the air Nomad religion/culture is pretty explicitly seen as a closed one and b) it’s sort of a cop-out.....

so... first:

Air bending is pretty explicitly a huge part of the air nomad culture and religion and is extremely spiritual. bc of how religious and spiritual it is the idea of ppl just.... randomly being given it really rubs me the wrong way.

It’s really really hard for me to explain this or come up with an irl example, bc these ppl didn’t ask for air bending, or try to gain it in anyway. So it’s not really their fault. But to me it feels almost like accidental cultural appropriation? If that makes sense

Which like. cultural appropriation is obviously bad. Even in the comic I originally referenced (the promise) Aang is initally really really offended by the people practicing the air Nomad religion when he first finds out!!! Which he should be!!!

There’s a difference between cultural appropriation, culture appreciation, and sharing culture. The first is bad, and the second 2 are good when done correctly.

Ima use an irl example w/ Judaism just bc using this personal experiences is apparently the only way my brain knows how to explain things

Scenario 1: Amanda (who is xtian) decides to research the Jewish holiday of Passover and the traditions behind it just bc she’s interested in it

This is cultural appreciation! She’s just learning about smthn she finds interesting. This is generally ok! although in some cultures there is knowledge that you are not supposed to know or discuss if you are not part of that culture and you should 100% respect that if it is the case

Scenario 2: Amanda learns about the Passover seder and decides to throw one herself

Dont fucking do this omfg. This is cultural appropriation. Passover is a super important and religions holiday! It’s one of the high holy days and celebrating it on her own isn’t ok!

Scenario 3: Amanda asks her Jewish freind Alex if she can come to his Passover seder

This is cultural appreciation and cultural sharing!! It’s totally valid!! She respectfully asks to join in and be included!

it’s diffrent from cultural apropriation for one huge reason. she is joining in, rather than celebrating it on her own with no jewish ppl present

Scenario 4: Amanda eats gefitlefish just bc she likes it

this is appreciation! even though there are no jewish ppl involved! bc gefiltefish isn’t a holy/religious/spiritual thing.

different aspects of different cultures have different levels of importance. as a general rule, if smthn is holy/religious, you should not do anything with it, unless invited by someone of that culture. if it’s not then you can generally do it on ur own (though there is some grey area there. ie, moccasins are smthn that aren’t religious to native americans, but if ur not native you shouldn’t be producing and selling them. if you want moccasins by them from actual natives)

scenario 5: amanda contacts a rabbi and starts the conversion process

this is...... just conversion lol. when she is finished with the process (which can take months/years) she’ll no longer be xtian and be jewish!! just as much as anyone who was born into judiasm. she’ll be able to host her own seders and any of her children will be jewish as well :)

sorry for the really long thing!! but i felt it was necessary to show the difference between some concepts that seem similar but are actually vastly different!!

anyway, i hope y’all understand the difference between cultural appropriation/appreciation/sharing. if ur asking urself “ok why does it matter tho” friendly reminder that alot of irl ppl have been murdered for trying to peacefully observe their cultures/religions :)

including the air nomads! (hey segway...)

they are literally hunted to extension because they are part of one culture/religion. you could argue it’s a racism thing (which it is) but race, culture, ethnicity and religion are all inherently tied. see: almost every non-xtian religion worldwide

SO. when you consider that a) the nomads were killed for their religion b) airbending was incredibly significant part of that religion, isn’t it weird that random people who have 0 connection or interest in that religion suddenly have airbending??

again it becomes like accidental cultural appropriation. which you can’t really blame the characters for in-world

but, these aren’t real ppl. they’re characters in a situation that was written by real ppl, real ppl who can and should be criticized

not that i’m trying to call the creators bigoted in anyway! this dosn’t seem like anything that was meant to be offensive. and it’s not really that offensive unless you think about it. to me it just seems like a plot point that wasn’t fully thought through. i don’t bring it up to shame the creators, just as a way to show others why it’s smthn not to be repeated

and, to show a better way to do a similar story

the reason i went so in depth w/ the explanation of cultural appropriation vs appreciation vs conversion is bc i wanna show why a different way of approaching a similar story would have been better

the reason i think my whole idea (of ppl basically contacting aang or the air nomads, converting to the religion, and then being gifted air bending through energy bending) is better than ppl being randomly gifted it is bc conversion takes work

to convert to any culture or religion you a) need a connection to someone in that culture (usually made by reaching out to a religious leader) and b) need to actually be accepted by that group in order to be considered one of them. it takes work and dedication. it’s a literal transfer of culture!! it’s just... ack i’m not good at explaining it

but dosn’t it make so much more sense that ppl who actually worked to integrate themselves into the culture and become one of them are givin airbending? not because it’s a privilege but bc they need to first become part of the culture in order to have any right or claim to it

but by just giving it to random non-benders it’s basically the reverse!! yes they later learn the culture and religon, but???? thats not how that works??? wtf???

i feel like i’ve been talking in circles and i’m sorry if i’ve bored everyone to death but i hope u understand my point.

anyway! next thing! (i swear this part will be way shorter)

by just making a bunch of random ppl airbenders it basically retcons one of the longlasting effects of the 100 yr war and almost just... erases the impact of the air nomad’s genocide

which. is gross and uncomfortable. genocide stories are touchy subjects and smthn that need to be treated with respect

just giving random ppl airbending it’s almost like the genocide didn’t matter at all. which i take a huge fucking issue w/ ok and i don’t feel like i need to explain why

instead of a natural rebuilding of the air nomads it’s just fixed with spirit magic. it’s just... an insult to the really compelling and well written genocide story that was in atla and an insult to the irl ppl who related to that story

so. yeah.... again i’m not trying to call out the creators, i again think this plotline was more accidentally insulting than purposefully

i already propsed a better way to do it by allowing converts to gain the ability to airbend. (hell it dosn’t even need to come from energy bending or aang. the air nomads were incredibly spiritual, maybe a spirit gifted it to the ppl who earned it instead of random fucking ppl)

but the other reason that converts instead of just.... random ppl gaining the ability is better is bc there aren’t gonna be that many ppl to convert!! there’s not gonna be some sudden boom in the airbending population!! theres would still be a story of the nation slowly healing and rebuilfing itself instead of the insulting sudden magic fix

oof. sorry for the long freaking thing. i literally went into this just wanting to share an idea and instead spent over an hour analyzing this stuff lol....

i hope this was coherent but if anyone’s got questions about anything i said feel free to @ me or shoot me an ask :) as long as ur polite and stuff i’ll answer to the best of my ability

#atla #airbending #atla meta #avatar tla #avatar #avatar the last airbender #aang #aang atla #atla worldbuilding #cultural appropriation #idk how to tag this also i am big tired #lok #genocide #tagging for blacklist #/ just in case

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lingthusiasm · 5 years

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Transcript Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time. 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 41 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about tense and how different languages talk about time. But first, we are very excited to announce the launch of the Lingthusiasm LingComm Grant.

Gretchen: Yes. When we started this podcast, we were fortunate to be in a position where we could put some of our own money into the project to get us off the ground until our lovely patrons started coming in.

Lauren: Now we’re in a position where we want to pay it forward, and we want to help the next generation of awesome pop linguistics projects find their feet. We’re giving out a $500 US grant to a project that helps communicate linguistics to a new audience.

Gretchen: With your help, if we reach 800 patrons by May 1st, we can give out three of these grants. We’re really looking forward to seeing the applications come in. Applications are due June 1st. You can see more details about the LingComm grant and how to apply on our website. We’ll link to it from the show notes. It’s lingcomm.org – two Ms in “comm.”

Lauren: We know that some of you may be really passionate about the idea of there being more linguistics communication projects out in the world but don’t have the time or the expertise. If you really want to help support us in the LingComm grants, we’ve created a new tier at the Patreon called “Phil-ling-thropist.” For every person who supports us at $50.00 or more at that level, we’ll drop the number of patrons that we need to meet the three-grant goal down by 10. You will be as effective at 10 other patrons.

Gretchen: Don’t feel like you need to do this, but if you’re somebody who has a real job and this isn’t a lot of money to you, then this is an interesting thing to do with it. We’ll also send you a Lingthusiast mug after three months at this tier, so you can share your lingthusiasm that way.

Lauren: Of course, patrons at any level will help us meet the 800-patron goal to give out three grants.

Gretchen: If you’re also excited about showing off that you’re a lingthusiast, we also have a new sticker that says, “Lingthusiast, a person that’s enthusiastic about linguistics,” which we’ve added to the $15.00 level on Patreon. Go check out the Patreon. We have new stuff there!

Lauren: Speaking of the stuff at the Patreon, we now have a Discord server for all our Ling-thusiast and above tiers, which is the first Discord server I’ve ever been on. I’m learning a lot.

Gretchen: It’s been really fun to see people join so quickly because there’re actually a lot of people who are already joined and are chatting about things like interesting linguistics links that you come across, conlanging, learning languages, linguistics memes – we even have a channel where you can talk to each other in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which was a fun challenge – and other interesting linguistics things that you come across around the internet.

Lauren: Lots of different channels. All very lingthusiastic – typing, chat. I feel like it definitely has an old-days-of-the-internet-user-group vibe that makes me really happy.

Gretchen: It’s been really fun to start hanging out there. I think people are really enjoying that. Join us in the Discord!

Lauren: Our current bonus for patrons is bonus content from our interview with Janelle Shane in which we walk through creating a Lingthusiasm bot that generates Lingthusiasm transcripts. We walked through that in detail, and then we read some of our favourites.

Gretchen: If you would like to hear what Lingthusiasm would sound like if it were written by a neural net who is very enthusiastic but doesn’t really know that much about actual linguistics but finds some keywords sometimes, you can check that out. Definitely stay tuned for the part towards the end where we prompt the neural net with both Lingthusiasm and Harry Potter fan fiction. You get the most magical Lingthusiasm episode ever.

Lauren: This and 35 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Okay, Gretchen, I’m gonna do some real-life sentence elicitation so we can look at some examples of how tense works with time. Are you ready if I give you a bit of a prompt?

Gretchen: Sure. Let’s go.

Lauren: Tell me about something that happened yesterday in the past.

Gretchen: I’m walking down the street yesterday, and I see this bird, right? This bird starts coming towards me.

Lauren: Okay. I am definitely gonna ask you about the rest of that story later, but for now, can I have an example of something that’s happening or could be happening right now in the present?

Gretchen: Well, let’s pretend that I’m not just literally recording this podcast with you because that’s a little bit too meta. Let’s say I’m just sitting at home right now, and I’m eating a delicious cake, and you’re drinking a cup of tea.

Lauren: Mmm. Right. I might need to go get a cup of tea. Before I do that, let’s have an example of something that is going to happen later in the future.

Gretchen: I’m going to the airport tomorrow, fly out to Rome at 10:00. We arrive the next morning, and then –

Lauren: Are you going to Rome tomorrow?

Gretchen: No. No, I’m not. It’s just the first place that I thought of. I’m not going anywhere.

Lauren: But, man, now I want a cup of tea and pizza.

Gretchen: One of the things that I think is really interesting about these examples is that because I’m a bit of your confederate in this experiment, shall I say.

Lauren: Yeah. This is not naturalistic data at all.

Gretchen: Because I’ve been briefed. One of the things that I was able to do is I was able to talk about something that happened yesterday and something that’s happening right now and something that is gonna happen tomorrow, but I was actually able to use the same forms of the verb for all of them. Let’s do a little rewind.

Lauren: Right. In the past, you used the verb –

Gretchen: “I’m walking down the street. I see this bird.”

Lauren: Present.

Gretchen: “I’m sitting at home. I’m eating a delicious cake.”

Lauren: Future.

Gretchen: “I’m going to the airport. We fly out to Rome.”

Lauren: I think the answer is that the relationship between tense and time is not as straightforward as we might think it is. We don’t have a past tense that is always used with past events.

Gretchen: Right. Normally, if you’re in a Ling 101 class and we’re talking about tense – or you’re in a language class and you’re talking about tense – and the definition that everyone gives about tense is, “Well, it means time.” It kind of does, but it also kind of doesn’t. This is the complexity that we’re gonna be trying to unravel for the rest of this episode.

Lauren: We have something that’s happening with grammar. We’re gonna call that tense. We have something that is happening with the flow of time that’s in the real world – where there is language being spoken or not – time is still ticking on. I mean, we’ve talked about how to conceptualise time in an earlier episode, but just thinking about the flow of time and then tense as a grammatical construct that relates to it but doesn’t perfectly map onto it.

Gretchen: What I was able to do in this experiment is I was able to use the English present tense to talk about actions in the past, and in the present, and in the future. What’s interesting is that – so English has another tense, which is the past tense, and I can’t quite do all three of these things with the past tense.

Lauren: Give me an example of the future with the past tense.

Gretchen: “I sat at home right now” is problematic. That has some tension there. It gets really tricky if I wanna say, “I went to the airport tomorrow.” That – hmm, no.

Lauren: I definitely don’t have that as a valid utterance in this real world, no time travelling sense of how language works.

Gretchen: Putting time travel aside, this is not how English works. Many linguists talk about English as having two tenses – past and non-past. What this means is that the non-past tense is the one that I can use to talk about any time space and the past tense I can only use to talk about the past. That’s why I’m able to say, “I walked down the street yesterday,” but not, “I sat at home right now” or “I went to the airport tomorrow” because the past tense is really restricted but the non-past tense can be in any of these times.

Lauren: It also speaks to something that I think sometimes people find a bit confronting about studying linguistics, which is that the way that they’re taught the idea of grammar in English language classes or in grammar classes is that we have a past, present, and future. But from a linguistic analysis, English is treated as a language with a past and non-past distinction. The non-past includes present and future constructions.

Gretchen: And sometimes this weird version of the past that’s used for storytelling purposes. Many kinds of past in English you do actually wanna use the past tense, but there’s this one very specific storytelling thing where you can use the present – or more accurately, the non-past – even in something that happened in the past to make it seem more vivid and more relevant to a particular current time. You’d have a harder time saying something like, “The Norman conquest of English happens in 1066.” That would be a harder sell for English. You’d really wanna say, “happened,” there. You could say, I guess, “William the Conqueror comes across the English Channel, right? And he’s got this big ship.” There, you’re using the present to make it very vivid.

Lauren: I feel so much more compelled when you use that present in past.

Gretchen: That makes it seem very vernacular, very storytelling-y. I’m doing this casual thing where you’re not gonna see that in a traditional history textbook, but you might see it in a fun, vivid history podcast type thing.

Lauren: I was kind of surprised when I took an English grammar linguistics subject just how many different grammatical constructions around tense there are in the English because I had this very simple idea that there was a past, present, future – done, done, done – and it’s like, “Ah, this is why the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is such a massive book” because I hadn’t really thought about the fact that the tense that you use in that narrative past using the present form is – the time is in the past but the tense is not just using a past tense.

Gretchen: This is why it’s useful to have – why not just call it “time” if tense just means “time”? Why not just say “time”? Well, it’s because there’s actually this difference in that the tense refers to specifically a thing that is done in the shape of a language can be somewhat independent from what’s actually going on in the world that you’re referring to, as in the case where you use the present to talk about the past. It doesn’t somehow make it the past. What about the future? Because, Lauren, it seems like English, we can definitely talk about the future.

Lauren: There are forms that I can talk about like, “I will go” – well, I won’t go to Rome – but “I will go to Rome tomorrow” or “I’m going to go to Rome tomorrow.” I can do that for “tomorrow” in a way that I can’t do it for “yesterday.” There’s something happening there.

Gretchen: The analysis of this in English is that “will” and “gonna” are treated like other types of things where you can add these sort of semi-verbs. If I wanted to say, “I can go to Rome,” “I might go to Rome,” “I wanna go to Rome,” “I have to go to Rome,” “I will go to Rome,” “I’m gonna go to Rome” – all of these are the category of “modals,” but we’re not gonna get into the terminology here – all of this category of, “Here’s this additional word that you can add that adds this additional information.” Sometimes, that’s a time-related piece of information. But sometimes that has to do with desires or possibilities or other types of additional meaning. That’s not how English talks about tense. English tense generally is something that’s part of the verb itself, whereas this is this additional word that gets added. It’s less obligatory in the future because it’s a lot more legit to say, “I fly to Rome tomorrow,” and “I will fly to Rome tomorrow,” and “I’m gonna fly to Rome tomorrow.” All of these are pretty good. Whereas, this case of “I’m walking down the street yesterday” is really this very one limited context. With “I fly to Rome tomorrow,” there’s a lot more places where you can use that. You don’t have to do this thing with “will.” You have these other options like “gonna” or just using the non-past form of the verb.

Lauren: There’s something about obligatoriness when it comes to tense.

Gretchen: It kind of reminds me of – remember the episode where we talked about evidentiality and how some languages you have to indicate the source of evidence that you have for something and other languages you can indicate the source of evidence, but you don’t have to?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: There’s this similar thing going on with tense where, in some contexts, you have to indicate this piece of time information – or in some languages – and in other contexts you don’t have to indicate this time information.

Lauren: For English, it’s a language where evidentiality is completely optional. You can add some words to express a phenomenon. Then tense, especially with the past/present distinction, is obligatory.

Gretchen: Mostly obligatory. I think everything is a continuum, right?

Lauren: Yeah. I definitely am always wary of anyone who has discrete and absolute categories for things because every time you’re like, “It’s obligatory,” you’ll find a context in English like that narrative present where you’re like, “Oh, no! It’s broken my brain.” Whereas, if you take a “Let’s just look at what the language is doing and build up our analysis,” it causes a lot less existential anxiety.

Gretchen: That’s the other thing about looking at what a language is doing is that it’s often useful to look at it internally based on whatever this language does in really unambiguous cases where it’s tense. That’s what we can use as our diagnostic for these more ambiguous cases. If English didn’t have past tense either, then maybe we would say that “will” was a future tense. But because English does this thing with suffixes generally or irregular forms of the verb to be past, then we can say, “Well, ‘will’ is clearly doing that’s different from that and it seems like it makes more sense if we group ‘will’ in with ‘can’ and ‘might’ and ‘should,’ rather than grouping ‘will’ in with the past ‘-ed’ ending.

Lauren: I think that’s fair enough to start with the examples of what we have that are people are very strongly expressing their reliable feelings about the grammar – and work up from there. There’s a quote that says this really pithily, which is, “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey,” which is from Roman Jakobson in a 1959 book.

Gretchen: That’s really pithy because it lets us say, “Well, languages can all talk about time or they can all talk about sources of evidence but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they all have tense or they all have evidentiality because those are the grammatical reflexes of those things in the real world.”

Lauren: Just as we talked about English not having grammatical evidentiality, we have languages that don’t have grammatical marking of tense. The thing I find interesting about these examples is when we don’t have something – English speakers are like, “Well, of course we can get by without evidentiality,” and then it’s a bit more of a leap for someone who’s used to speaking a language with grammatical tense imagining speaking a language without one. But if a language must convey something with tense, that’s gonna be very different to being able to talk about time more generally – without it being part of the grammar.

Gretchen: Because even if a language doesn’t have specific things that only do tense stuff, they’re gonna have words like “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “in the future” or “in the past” or something like that. That’s still gonna let you convey that. It’s similar, again, to doing number on words. We have “dog” and “dogs” in English but we could also just have “one dog” and “two dog” and “many dog” and we would still be able to convey that information even though we wouldn’t have the specific, additional grammatical thing that’s conveying that information.

Lauren: Languages like Vietnamese and Thai and Mandarin and Burmese all don’t have these grammatically obligatory markers. People will, if they need to in context, use words in much the same way in English we talk about tomorrow or later or whatever. They don’t have that same obligatory verb marking.

Gretchen: I think that there’s a Latin-based prejudice that a lot of – especially the European tradition of approaching language which is like, “Well, if it’s not a prefix or a suffix, it’s not grammar.” That’s not what we’re saying because you could have a short little word – Mandarin, for example, has a question particle that you just put in sentences to make them a question. That’s a grammatical feature. English doesn’t have an obligatory extra word to add to questions just to make them questions. That’s a case where you do have something that’s obligatorily grammatical. So, it’s not saying that there aren’t other obligatory grammatical features that you can do even if your language is a bunch of short words rather than fewer, longer words, but it’s, “Is this obligatory?” “Is this something that you have to add to something?”

Lauren: If we had to say “now” in English any time we talked about the present, then that’s as much a choice of grammar because of its obligatoriness not just because it’s something that sticks on the end of a verb.

Gretchen: One interesting example that came up for me recently when it came to languages having tense is Scottish Gaelic, which is a language that I studied briefly when I was in middle school and then I’ve been returning to because they added Scottish Gaelic to Duolingo and, you know, it’s a language. Something that’s interesting about Scottish Gaelic is that it kind of doesn’t really for the most part have a present tense.

Lauren: Ah, interesting. So, you can obviously, once you start thinking about each language has a different way of approaching segmenting time up into grammatical tenses, it can be interesting to look across languages as to how they segment them. Vietnamese doesn’t segment time up into any specific grammatical tenses. And then a language like Scottish Gaelic has – it has a future and a past? Is that what happens?

Gretchen: Well, the thing that makes me hedge it a lot and say, “kind of doesn’t really,” is because the only verb that has a present tense form is “to be.”

Lauren: Okay. That’s a big one.

Gretchen: Right. It’s a really important verb and it does a whole lot of stuff. Then, all of the other verbs have future forms and past forms, and then they also have – and this is where you get a little bit tricky – they also have forms like the sort of de-verbal noun form. If you have a verb like “see,” there’s no just “I see.” That’s not a thing you can say in Scottish Gaelic. Irish, I think, works differently. So, I’m not talking about Irish. I don’t know how Irish works.

Lauren: I’m trying really hard to not respond with “Hm, I see.”

Gretchen: You can say things like, “I am,” in Gaelic but you can’t just say, “I see.” What you want to say instead if you’re talking about the present is “I am seeing.”

Lauren: Because you are using the “be” verb to do the present heavy lifting.

Gretchen: Exactly. You can say, “I am seeing,” “I was seeing,” “I will be seeing,” and this all uses the same form of “seeing,” which is the noun-y form – the same one that you could use for something like “Seeing is great.” Then, you also have separate forms of the verb “to see,” which mean “will see” and “saw.” In the future, you can say, “I will be seeing” or “I will see.” And in the past, you can say, “I saw,” or “I was seeing.” But in the present, all you have is “I’m seeing.” There’s no just “I see.”

Lauren: It’s a bit like the English future in terms of obligatoriness being a slightly squishy concept.

Gretchen: Right. Obligatoriness is slightly different, and this is why. It kind of has a present because “to be” conjugates everywhere in all of the different forms. It’s also weird because “have,” which you might think is also a pretty basic verb, is expressed in Gaelic by saying something is “at” someone. If I say, “I have a cat,” I would say something like, “A cat is at me.” That’s how I say “have.” Again, you can just use “be” to convey “have” because it’s got this idiomatic construction. This was something that confused me when I was first learning Gaelic in middle school because they only taught us the verb “to be.” They taught it to us in a whole bunch of tenses and stuff, and they taught us these forms like “will be seeing” and “was seeing” and “am seeing” – all with the same one form. It was like, “Guys, I just – are you gonna teach us any other verbs at some point rather than just this one ‘seeing’ form? Surely there are more verbs in this language.”

Lauren: You were going into it with your English speaker category expectations.

Gretchen: Right. On the one hand, being an English speaker gave me an advantage because English also does this in a lot of contexts, right? English often says something like, “I am seeing” or “I am eating” or “I am walking down the street,” rather than “I walk down the street” or “I eat” or “I see.” English does this more than a lot of European languages. Some people have proposed that English does this thing because of influence from Scottish Gaelic, and this link has not been proven, so it is probably not actually true. It would be a fun hypothesis if it was true, but it’s not. English does do something similar just not quite as robustly. It was really confusing to me because I was coming from having learned French, where I was given all of these verb forms, and then they were trying to keep it easy for the Gaelic learners and just give us the minimum stuff you need because you really can get very far with only “to be.”

Lauren: We’ve seen some languages with a couple of tense distinctions like English or Scots Gaelic. We’ve seen languages with no tense distinctions. If we go the other way, we can look at languages that have multiple tense distinctions beyond what we see in languages like English. They segment that passage of time up into much smaller categories.

Gretchen: Yes! I love more tenses.

Lauren: Once you see this, you’re like, “We are really underperforming in the tense category department.”

Gretchen: It’s always really exciting to see something you don’t have and you’re like, “Ooo!”

Lauren: The examples I’ve always heard of have come from the area of Papua New Guinea, which just has wonderful levels of language diversity.

Gretchen: Papua New Guinea has, like, a sixth of the languages in the world, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Like, 1000 languages.

Lauren: Islands and mountains all do great things for linguistic diversity. Tifal is a language of Papua New Guinea in the Ok family. It has at least six tense distinctions. There is a present tense. Then, there is a “yesterday” past, a distant past, and a very remote past. Then, going the other way, there is a near future and a distant future.

Gretchen: Very nice. I like it.

Lauren: These are all distinct suffixes that are added to the verb to indicate the time relative to now of something that you’re talking about.

Gretchen: Again, it’s one of those things where there are ways of saying this in English but they’re not as obligatory or as directly encoded in some sort of obligatory thing. You can always say, “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Or sometimes people make this distinction between “will” and “gonna.” But you don’t have this robust way of distinguishing between these different – you know, remote past and just simple past.

Lauren: If I talk about when I was in school, I’m probably using the distant past rather than the “yesterday” past. Context does a lot of heavy lifting and we often don’t give it enough credit when it comes to things like marking time.

Gretchen: Well, yeah, because you might, in some contexts, talk about when I was in school as the recent past because you’re contrasting that with something that happened 1000 years ago. Then, in other contexts, you might talk about it as the remote past if you’re talking with somebody who graduated last year.

Lauren: A language may have particular grammatical categories but sometimes, when you look at how they’re used, there’re particular conventions. I don’t know specifically for Tifal, but it may be that the very remote past is only used for origins and legends and myths and those kind of things. They’re not for the time that humanity has been living like they are now. There’s multiple things happening here. There’s the tense marking – it’s how it fits with actual time. Then, there are also genre conventions like we talked about with the English narrative past that uses the present.

Gretchen: Right. Again, even if you have a language where there’s a tense that indicates this myth and legend type past, it’s like how in English you use “once upon a time” to signal that something’s a fairy tale, but you can also use “once upon a time” to signal that you’re talking about something as if it’s a fairy tale. When you say, “Once upon a time, these two linguists got together and started a podcast,” this doesn’t mean that it’s a myth, but it’s we’re talking about Lingthusiasm’s origin story as if it were a myth using the myth frame even though, yes, very clearly this happened in a fathomable past where we were actually there and it’s not like Cinderella where it’s a fairy tale story.

Lauren: Context and genre are really important when we’re thinking about how language is used as well as the abstracted structure of it.

Gretchen: I think it’s neat to emphasise how these different types of tenses can be subverted so that there’s a canonical use and then there’s a playful use where you could put something as if it’s in that space as well. We talk about tense as “It’s time,” but it’s not always, strictly speaking, “time.” Another thing that comes up a lot when you talk about tense is other relationships that people could have to time. Sometimes, you talk about something as being an ongoing thing, or you talk about something as happening at one discrete point, or you talk about certain attitudes that you have towards whether something is happening or not. Those are generally lumped into different categories like mood and aspect, which can relate to tense but aren’t exactly the same thing as tense. I think we have to save those for another episode.

Lauren: We’ve already talked about evidentiality, which is often lumped into those categories. We’re talking about tense now. We’ve still got aspect and modality to look forward to.

Gretchen: Stay tuned for more things about how we think about time. But this one is just about where it is with respect to the personal timeline.

Lauren: Once you start looking at the variation, and you’re like, “Oh, I would like three past tense distinctions.” Another thing that would be very nifty is a grammatical tense that is specifically for the current day. If we want to give it a Latinate category, the hodiernal tense, from Latin for “today.” It’s always so much fancier when you say it in Latin, for real.

Gretchen: I know! It’s really fun. I always try to not get too bugged down on the terminology, but then sometimes learning that there’s actually a fancy terminological word for something is the most delightful part. You can have a hodiernal tense.

Lauren: Hodiernal tense is in Mwera, which is a Bantu language of Tanzania. And apparently, Gretchen, the passé composé in French in the 17th Century was possibly used as hodiernal.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s neat. So, passé composé in French, if you were to literally translate into English, it’s like putting “have” before all of your past verbs. Things like, “I have written,” “I have gone,” “I have seen,” “I have walked,” except it’s used in French as a general past. You would say something like, “I have walked,” when in English you would say, “I walked.” There is this other form in French that’s equivalent to “I walked” which is only used in literature now. It’s not used in ordinary conversations or even in casual writing. It’s one of those cases where something starts out as this restricted, casual, only “today” or something tense, and then it gets gradually expanded into being used as a default, unmarked past tense. Then, the other one becomes literary.

Lauren: Also a good reminder that the role of tenses aren’t fixed and static forever. Language is always changing, and evolving, and maybe one day English will have something we can call a definite grammatical future just in the way that French, for a brief period in the 17th Century, may have had hodiernal tense for a while.

Gretchen: That is neat. Certain words that start out as being very concrete can achieve this level of grammaticalisation. This is a thing that I really enjoy about grammaticalisation because when words become used grammatically, they often also get shorter. The original form, the concrete one, can’t necessarily shorten the same way as the grammatical one. Here’s an example – you can’t say, “I’m gonna the airport.”

Lauren: No. That does not sit with me.

Gretchen: You can say, “I’m gonna go to the airport.”

Lauren: Yes. That’s fine.

Gretchen: You think of “going to” and “gonna” as being equivalent to each other. They kind of are, but not in the literal sense. If I’m like, “I’m gonna the airport,” uhhhh... something’s broken – doesn’t work. Whereas, you can say, “I’m gonna go to the airport,” “I’m gonna fly to Rome,” or something like this, but you can’t do it in that bit. The same with “will,” which starts out meaning something like “want” or “wish” before it went to future.

Lauren: As in, like, a legal will?

Gretchen: Yeah. Exactly.

Lauren: Like, a thing that you write. Yeah.

Gretchen: But when it refers to the future, it can get shorted into “-ll,” as in “I’ll” or “you’ll” or something like this. But you can’t have “my last’ll and testament.”

Lauren: I think my brain got broken by trying to think of – that does not work, no.

Gretchen: No. It just doesn’t work. Even though “will” starts out as meaning “want” or “wish,” this “-ll” bit, that can only be used in a tense sort of way. Maybe that’s where – if we develop a future tense in English – that’s where it will develop. That would be interesting because that would be putting future tense on “I” and “you” and other pronouns rather than putting it on the verb like we currently do.

Lauren: There is definitely cases where we have tense being on things other than the verb in other languages. English wouldn’t be the first language to do this. But when you’re used to thinking about tense as being a feature of the verb and being marked somewhere very close to the verb, it is definitely – English wouldn’t be the first language to do this. One example of a language that can do this is Kaiadilt, which is an Australian language. If you wanted to have a difference between the sentence, “I will go to the beach” and “I went to the beach,” you mark it with a suffix on the noun “beach.”

Gretchen: So, “I go to the present beach,” “I go to the future beach,” “I go to the former beach”?

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess you can do this in some restricted contexts in English. You can say, “My former teacher” or “the late Mr. So-and-So,” or “This is an ex-parrot,” and that can refer to something that is no longer whatever the thing is.

Lauren: These are suffixes that go onto the noun in the way that we think of tense suffixes going onto a verb.

Gretchen: Right. But these are specifically talking about – it’s not that it’s not a beach anymore.

Lauren: No. It is still very much an existing, ongoingly, beach.

Gretchen: That’s interesting. It’s just that I’m not there anymore. Okay. Sometimes, we talk about language being constrained by the biological laws of human anatomy. There’re certain sounds we can make, there’re certain sounds we can’t make. There’re certain ways we can configure our hands. There’re certain ways we can’t configure our hands. Sometimes, we talk about language as being constrained by the fact basically all of its speakers of human languages are on this pale blue dot that’s revolving around the sun, and we have words for days and years because we all share this as part of the human experience. I think maybe another element of this is talking about languages being constrained by physics. We don’t have any natural human languages that have words for the tenses involved in time travel because time travel, so far, is not a thing, so none of the languages have had to develop them. But, in theory, this could happen.

Lauren: This would be very difficult to approach as an English speaker because, as we’ve demonstrated in this episode, one of the ways we test the obligatoriness and the grammaticality of tense as opposed to talking about time is to check people’s intuitions because if something’s obligatory, then removing it or changing it should change people’s intuitions. If you’re talking about using past tense, we expect that events that are bounded by the past can’t be interacted with in the same way as events that will happen in the future. We use that as part of our intuition building. Can you imagine, Gretchen, how much linguistic theory would be broken if suddenly a whole bunch of sentences could be valid because people could time travel?

Gretchen: Right. So, saying something like, “I was there tomorrow” or “I will be there yesterday” – suddenly, maybe you need to be able to do this because you’ve time travelled.

Lauren: The Cambridge Grammar of English is already big enough, and this is my main argument against time travel.

Gretchen: It’s already, like, 2000 pages, and if it’s time travel, we’d need to double the size of the tense chapter.

Lauren: It’s gonna be a lot of work. It could be fun though.

Gretchen: I think it could keep linguists employed for a long time figuring out how to do this.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. To listen to bonus episodes, join our Discord chatroom, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include a special neural net generated episode of Lingthusiasm – where we read out the results of the neural net – the future of English, and onomatopoeia. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is Ancient City by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #episode 41 #transcripts #podcast #time #tense #grammar #time travel

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mimzy-writing-online · 5 years

Text

Writing a Blind/Visually Impaired Character: Blind Jokes

The question is, should you include blind jokes in your story? Is it okay or is it offensive? How can you avoid being offensive?

We’ll talk about all that.

So if you haven’t seen me around yet- Hi! I’m Mimzy, I’m a writer and I run a writing advice blog. This blog is full of writing advice posts I personally made as well as posts from other people that I found useful. There are also writing memes, tag games, and wip updates. I sometimes share updates from my current work in progress, A Witch’s Memory, which features a blind main character.

This post is part of an extensive guide to writing blind characters that continues to grow with time. Link to the masterpost of those guides:

https://mimzy-writing-online.tumblr.com/post/185122795699/writing-a-blind-or-visually-impaired-character

Disclaimer: I am a visually impaired person who has been living with blindness for about two years now. I have lived with the world seeing me as blind and I know how it treats me because of that. I have made plenty of blind jokes in the past. I have also written two blind characters. However- in this particular case, it is more my opinion than fact, and someone with different blind experiences than me might feel differently.

Some blind people love blind jokes, others hate them. Some will make them because they are blind, but will hate when sighted people make them. Everyone is different and all their experiences and opinions are valid. I’m of the opinion that everyone deserves to have their boundaries respected, and for some people that means not making jokes about their disability.

“Well, my blind friend loves blind jokes! I can make them!”

Maybe with that specific friend, if they’re really okay with that, but if another blind person tells you to stop- you MUST STOP. It’s basic human respect, and someone living with a disability deserves respect.

So, should you make blind jokes in your story? Read to find out.

I think the best thing I can say is to proceed with caution and to think this through.

This starts with your blind character. Answer some questions-

What is this character’s sense of humor outside of blind jokes?

How does this character feel about their blindness?

Have they been bullied or discriminated against or treated badly because of their blindness?

What kind of bullying and discrimination was it? What did those people do?

How comfortable is this character in social situations? With friends? With family? With strangers?

What kind of confidence does your character have? Both in themselves and in their abilities and disability?

Answering these questions might tell you how your character feels about blind jokes.

Someone who is more sarcastic or who has darker humor might love blind jokes. Someone with a more tame or a flatter sense of humor might not like them.

Someone who hasn’t accepted their blindness yet, or who struggles with it, might not like jokes because it’s still a sensitive subject.

Someone who was bullied by others might have had blind jokes made about them. This has a double side. It might cause them to hate blind jokes altogether. It might cause them to want to reclaim blind jokes so that others can’t use it against them.

How comfortable they are in a situation might change if they make them or not.

Blind jokes can be a bit like self-deprecating humor. Insecure people make self-deprecating jokes to cope with their insecurity. Other insecure people don’t, because those jokes make them feel worse about themselves. Confident people might make self-deprecating jokes because it doesn’t affect them. They might also not do that.

It depends on the person.

So some blind people make blind jokes, others don’t. Some love when other people make blind jokes because it proves how comfortable they are as friends, some hate hearing sighted people make blind jokes.

Should your sighted characters make blind jokes?

I’m of the opinion that they shouldn’t. For a lot of people, their only exposure to people with disabilities is through media and public figures with disability. That is true for me as well.

I know lots of people with invisible disabilities, I know very few people with visible disabilities. And in person I’ve only met one or two people who are blind or visually impaired. Most of my exposure to the disabled community is through the internet.

And I’m disabled.

So abled people have even less exposure than that, and have fewer reasons to reach out to the disabled community. So their exposure comes from media.

Which is why sighted people so easily believe the myths of blindness.

Quick run down of myths:

Myth: blind people see nothing. Truth: only 10% of people living with blindness see nothing. Most have at least some light and shadow perception.

Myth: all blind people have a cane or guide dog. Truth: a lot of people who are legally blind or who are low-vision don’t have either, usually due to the idea that they “see enough” to not need it, which often times comes from internalized ableism and not being “disabled enough” for accommodations.

Myth: all blind people have cloudy or messed up looking eyes. Truth: The appearence of someone’s eyes depends on the cause of their blindness. Examples- Cataracts create a cloudy-film over the eye. Retina diseases are internal and don’t affect the outside layers of the eye, creating normal-appearing eyes.

Myth: all blind people wear dark sunglasses. Truth: some do, some don’t.

Myth: all blind people have super hearing. Truth: blind people learn to use their hearing and other senses more than their sight.

But all these myths are perpetuated by media, and people with no real life exposure to a subject rely on media.

Guess what! Your stories are media and people will learn through your stories.

So how you write your character affects what people know and think about blind people. So if your character says “yeah, blind jokes are cool all the time and I never mind” then readers are going to think that’s the universal truth for blind characters.

“But my blind character’s sense of humor is perfect for blind jokes!” you say.

Great! Just be aware of the fact that you’re teaching your readers to make these jokes, so maybe set aside some time in narrative for the blind character to explain that not every blind person likes jokes, or that some who do might not like it from certain people, or might find some jokes more offensive than others.

“But this particular joke is hilarious!” you say.

Are you sure? Because to date I’m not sure I’ve met a sighted person with an actually funny and original blind joke. In fact, it seems most sighted people make the same universal crappy jokes, some more maliciously than others. For the first year of blindness I didn’t mind it, but after a while of multiple repeats and some toxic friendships I grew to hate them.

“You really hate blind jokes, don’t you?”

Well, no. I like blind jokes from actual blind people who experience being blind.

And I do make jokes, but I make blind jokes for one specific reason.

It’s not to make my disability “easier to deal with” or use humor to help the complicated emotions a disability gives me. My blind jokes aren’t a coping mechanism. I’m very happy, and I don’t see my blindness as a curse at all.

The reason I make blind jokes is to make my blindness “easier to deal with” for sighted people, especially when meeting strangers. Because sighted people always feel awkward when meeting a blind person, and also because many people don’t really get that I’m blind or don’t know how to ask about it. So I make a joke or two to show I’m comfortable talking about it, followed soon by a non-blindness joke to show that I’m still a real person behind my cane and my sunglasses.

(Yes, I wear sunglasses. I am that stereotype, but that’s because I’m painfully, medically light sensitive. Not all blind people wear sunglasses all the time, and those that do use it for many reasons, i.e. fashion or light sensitivity or not having to worry about being judged for a lack of eye contact)

“So blind jokes are only funny when blind people make them?”

Usually, but that’s because they know when they find a joke offensive, and have heard all the generic ones before, and know when they hear one they like. They’re not going to make the unfunny, offensive ones because they know better.

Okay, I lied. I’ve maybe heard one or two actually funny blind jokes from a sighted person in my blindness experience, but those were occasions when someone wasn’t trying to make a blind joke, it was something said that was funny in the moment.

Like my girlfriend at the time running a red light and saying “don’t ever do that when you learn to drive” and then stopping to realize I would never learn to drive, but that she’d said it because she was teaching a friend how to drive and was getting into that habit of giving advice while in the car. And she said, “wait, never mind, you’re never going to drive.”

It was the absurdity of the moment combined with the strange high of being in the crazy situation of being lost trying to find our way home after a great date and running a light in a unusually quiet street in the middle of the night. I was already in an elated place and the mood was great and that’s what made the joke enjoyable.

“Okay, I still don’t know the difference between a good and a bad blind joke. And my character is still the kind of person to make them, so what do I do?”

Oh, great, so here’s my final piece of advice.

Hire a Sensitivity Reader

(Or find a blind beta reader if this is fanfiction)

Sensitivity readers are for authors looking to publish their work professionally, where their name is on the line and if they miss the mark when writing a minority it will reflect badly on their name and on future published works.

Publishing houses have their own editors to review manuscripts before they’re published officially, and they usually hire their own sensitivity readers as well. Why? Because their name is on every story they publish, so they’re also accountable if a book featuring awful bias and inaccurate stereotypes is published through their company. That’s not to say they won’t occasionally print one rotten apple of a book that slipped through the cracks, but they know to invest in people who identify the rotten apples.

If you’re self publishing, then you already don’t have a copy editor to make sure everything is in place, and you certainly don’t have a sensitivity reader.

When you’re self publishing you will be investing your own money into getting this book out into the public, so invest your money wisely and make sure this book isn’t ready to cancel itself the second someone realizes how awful the representation is.

“So I need a sensitivity reader for one disabled character?”

Uh, you need a sensitivity reader for just about everything. Sensitivity readers are not just for disabled characters.

There are sensitivity readers for all the minorities and unique experiences you could think of, and then some. Sensitivity readers have unique backgrounds and they use their life experiences to read your book through the lens of that background. They will tell you when you were inaccurate about something, when you used a stereotype or wrote something problematic, and hopefully keep you from publishing something that could be damaging to your book and your reputation as a writer.

Please note, you can choose to ignore their feedback and advice. You’re not required to listen to them, nor are you required to get one, but going without may put you at risk.

I’m going to quote from the Quiet House Editing and their website. They are a company that connects you to sensitivity readers, child readers (if you’re writing children’s books) and beta readers. And their website has an extensive list of different types of sensitivity readers (some of which I’d never considered before)

Their website

http://www.quiethouseediting.com/diversityreading.html

Subjects that diversity readers may be able to help you with (not an exhaustive list):

Adoption (all aspects, including transracial and international adoptions) Ageism Alcoholism, substance abuse Bullying, cyberbullying Class, socioeconomic and poverty issues, first-generation Culture Domestic violence Eating disorder, obesity, body image Emotional abuse End-of-life care, death attitudes, hospice and palliative care, etc. Ethnicity and race Feminist and gender issues, including abortion Geek culture (dealing with a love of comics, anime, etc.) Generational issues (i.e., millennials, baby boomers, etc.) Immigrant culture Indigenous cultures LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, but this category can also include intersex, asexual, pansexual, and other terms) Mental illnesses and disorders (anxiety, autism, depression, bipolar, OCD, paranoid personality disorder, dissociative disorder, Stockholm syndrome, PTSD, ADHD, schizophrenia, and more) Physical illnesses and disability. This includes chronic illnesses, as well as illnesses with a severe impact (cancer, for example) Religion, atheism, paganism Sex abuse and sex assault, including child sex abuse and rape Sex workers, porn performers Tokenism (being the only person of a race or culture in a group)

I’m going to add some links to articles about sensitivity reading that I’ve read recently that can help explain the process more thoroughly, including finding a sensitivity reader, the money and business aspect of it, and what you can expect from their services.

https://blog.reedsy.com/sensitivity-readers/

https://writerunboxed.com/2017/03/03/what-a-sensitivity-reader-is-and-isnt-and-how-to-hire-one/

So, in conclusion:

You can write blind jokes, I’m not saying you absolutely can’t. I’m saying you should be careful when doing so. Proceed with extreme caution. If you can, you should find a sensitivity reader.

If any blind people want to give their perspective and opinion on the subject, please do so. I’m only one blind person with one experience, and it’s not universal. Blindness is never universal.

Hey, did you like this advice? Do you like this blog? Do you want to support it?

I give free writing advice, answer asks, and give private consultation for writing blind characters, all for free.

I have set up a ko-fi as a way to save money for self publishing costs for A Witch’s Memory, which includes a blind main character and is in it’s first stage of editing.

I have zero intention of ever charging for the services of this blog, but financial support is always appreciated. You never have to donate if you don’t want to, I never expect that, but even a few bucks goes a long way in helping me get there.

My ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/mimzyreiner

Thank you for reading and making it this far!

#writing advice #writeblr #writing a blind character #writing community #actuallyblind #my advice #mine #blind character #sensitivity reading #blindness

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thecoleopterawithana · 5 years

Video

youtube

‘(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess’ was written during John Lennon’s stay in Bermuda, from June to July 1980, and recorded upon his return to the studio, on 14 August 1980. It wouldn’t be heard by the general public until 23 January 1984, on the posthumous album Milk And Honey.

The lyrics go as follows:

Forgive me, my little flower princess For crushing your delicateness Forgive me, if you could forgive me

Forgive me, my little flower princess For selfishness Forgive me, forgive me

Well, I know there is no way to repay you Whatever it takes I will try to The rest of my life I will thank you Thank you, thank you, my little

If you’ll forgive me, my little flower princess Never too late unless you can’t forgive

Time is on our side Let’s not waste another minute ‘Cause I love you, my little friend I really love you

Give me just one more chance And I’ll show you Take up the dance where we left off The rest of our life is the, my little

I’m home

Overall, the song seems to strike the same apologetic tone previously expressed in ‘Jealous Guy’ (1971) and ‘I Know (I Know)’ (1973).

I didn’t mean to hurt you I’m sorry that I made you cry Oh no, I didn’t want to hurt you I’m just a jealous guy

— ‘Jealous Guy’ (1971)

I know what’s coming down and I know where it’s coming from and I know and I’m sorry (yes I am) but I never could speak my mind

— ‘I Know (I Know)’ (1973)

“The rest of my life I will thank you” gives a sense of gratitude for the other’s love and presence in his life, further explored in ‘Now And Then’ (1978).

I know it’s true, it’s all because of you And if I make it through, it’s all because of you And now and then, if we must start again Well we will know for sure, that I love you

— ‘Now And Then’ (1978)

“Take up the dance where we left off” shows hope in a reconciliation that they have “the rest of our life” to experience, as found in ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ (1980) and ‘Grow Old Along With Me’ (1980).

It’s been too long since we took the time No-one’s to blame, I know time flies so quickly But when I see you darling It’s like we both are falling in love again It’ll be just like starting over, starting over

— ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ (1980)

Grow old along with me The best is yet to be When our time has come We will be as one God bless our love

— ‘Grow Old Along With Me’ (1980)

Nevertheless, this feeling that “time is on our side” doesn’t take from the urgency to get together and “not waste another minute”, similarly dealt with in ‘Borrowed Time’ (1980) and ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ (1980).

Now I am older ah, hah The future is brighter and now is the hour

— ‘Borrowed Time’ (1980)

It’s time to spread our wings and fly Don’t let another day go by my love

— ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ (1980)

Regarding the endearments used during the song, we find the classical ‘little friend’, famously used by aunt Mimi in reference to Paul. (It is also worth noting that, tongue-in-cheek or not, in French ‘petit-ami’ means boyfriend).

Also, the song is called ‘My Little Flower Princess’. It is known that Yoko Ono has reported hearing Paul being called ‘John’s princess’ around Apple.

But it’s John’s thing with flowers as a metaphor for love that fascinates me the most.

Forgive me, my little flower princess For crushing your delicateness

…

Forgive me, my little flower princess For selfishness

John, after some introspection, has reached the conclusion that his relationship with Paul was destroyed by “inattention or inadvertence of selfishness”. He seemed self-aware enough to realise that his half of the “blame” was a problematic possessiveness:

Q: Do you think that a new attitude towards love and relationships – would it be fair to say we’re getting away from the property concept of relationships? John: Of owning the other person? I think – yeah, we could be. But uh… That’s all very well intellectually, but when you actually are in love with somebody, you tend to be jealous and want to own them, possess them a hundred per cent. Which I do. Yoko: Yes, it’s real life, all that. And I do it too. John: But intellectually, before that, I thought – right. I mean, owning a person is rubbish, but. I love Yoko, I want to possess her completely; I don’t want to stifle her, you know? [Yoko laughs] And that’s the danger, it’s that you want to possess them to death. But… that’s a personal problem of mine. Yoko: But we’re doing alright now – just very nice, you know. In other words, I think— John: It’s after the beginning, when it cools down a bit – not cools down, whatever, it st– uh, whatever the word is, you know – that you can allow each other to breathe. Yoko: Yes. When you relax a bit, you know. John: But at first you tend to strangle each other, I think. Yoko: And [inaudible] we’re starting to relax— John: And because you have so little as a child, I think it is, you – when once you find it, you want to hang onto it, you grab it so much you tend to kill it.

— John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Women’s Hour Interview for BBC Radio 2. (28 May 1971)

John even goes as far as to recognise that him not feeling loved enough as a child by his parents, was the original cause of all his insecurities and franticness. So desperate was he for love, that he ended up “crushing its delicateness”.

A decade later, we get another glimpse into his matured perception of the nature of love:

Q: As Tom Robbins half-facetiously asks in his most recent book, “How do you make love stay?”

John: Trying to possess it makes it go away. Trying to possess somebody makes them go away. Every time you put your finger on it, it slips away. Every time you turn the microscope’s light on, the thing changes so you can never see what it is. As soon as you ask the question, it goes away. Peripheral vision is what it is. There’s no looking directly at it. Try to look at the sun. You go blind, right? Now that doesn’t mean you don’t have to work on it. Love is a flower and you have to water it.

— John Lennon and Yoko Ono, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

John suggests that not only being possessive of the person you’re in love with “makes them go away”, but that the love itself is subject to some weird kind of observer effect, in which the mere act of trying to understand the relationship alters it — “As soon as you ask the question, it goes away.” (And this specific example is, in my opinion, another crucial clue about what went down.)

This philosophy that love is ruined by conscious interference and the specific choice in words — Love is like a flower — seem to have been heavily inspired by the D. H. Lawrence poem ‘Mess Of Love’. (Note that D. H. Lawrence has been referred to in the Beatles presence).

We’ve made a great mess of love Since we made an ideal of it. The moment I swear to love a woman, a certain woman, all my life That moment I begin to hate her.

The moment I even say to a woman: I love you! — My love dies down considerably.

The moment love is an understood thing between us, we are sure of it, It’s a cold egg, it isn’t love any more.

Love is like a flower, it must flower and fade; If it doesn’t fade, it is not a flower, It’s either an artificial rag blossom, or an immortelle, for the cemetery.

The moment the mind interferes with love, or the will fixes on it, Or the personality assumes it as an attribute, or the ego takes possession of it, It is not love any more, it’s just a mess. And we’ve made a great mess of love, mind-perverted, will-perverted, ego-perverted love.

But while Lawrence urges us to accept the fleetingness of love (going as far as to say that it’s its own ephemerous, untouched and undefinable nature that gives it meaning), John clearly wants to strike a compromise. Because while he admits he was probably crushing this delicate flower by “wanting to possess it to death”, you still have to water it, Paul!

In fact, John’s first known comparison to love being like a flower reflected more his unmet expectations than his own role in the end of the relationship.

Love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard, or just think it’s gonna get on with itself. You gotta keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it, and be careful of it, and keep the flies off and see that it’s alright, and nurture it.

— John Lennon, 'Man of the Decade’ Interview (2 December 1969).

John was clearly feeling neglected, hurt by the “kind of insensitivity [Paul] would have”. And his own desperate need to acknowledge the love and have it validated — coupled with Paul being “scared to say ‘I love you’” — escalated into a vicious “mind game” where John was ready to do absolutely anything to get Paul’s attention or some sign that he cared, including destroying the Beatles.

It seems fitting then, that around the same time, an emotionally exhausted Paul was marvelling at the self-reliant and giving nature of the new plants in his life:

When we are in Scotland we plant stuff – vegetables – and we’ll leave them there, and of their own volition they will push up. And not only will they push up and grow into something, but then they will be good to eat. To me that’s an all-time thing. That’s fantastic. How clever! Just that things push their own way up and they feed you.

— Paul McCartney, interviewed for Life Magazine (16 April 1971).

I like to think that by 1980, at the time this song was written, they had matured enough to “work it out”.

John knew he couldn’t be possessive to the point of crushing the flower, or selfish enough not to realise that he also has to water. With his more self-assured persona, he would probably learn to recognise and accept Paul’s Acts of Service for the love expression that they were, and eventually even help Paul himself overcome his own insecurities regarding saying Words of Affirmation outside the plausible deniability of songs.

Unfortunately, despite their beliefs, time was not on their side.

But like Yoko said:

Once you know somebody, you can never unknow that person. And knowing is loving. So you can never get out of love. There might be misunderstandings and separating for other reasons, but love is always there. Staying together is just one form of love. Maybe that’s a strong love and expression of love. But love is a soul thing. It always stays there.

— Yoko Ono, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

John himself had said it to Paul some years prior:

Bless you wherever you are

Windswept child on a shootin’ star

Restless spirits depart Still we’re deep in each other’s hearts

…

Bless you whoever you are Holding her now, be warm and kind hearted

And remember although love is strange Now and forever our love will remain

— ‘Bless You’ (1974)

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curtashiism · 4 years

Text

Some reflections on autism, femininity, and my nonbinary identity

So... I grew up in a conservative city. (Let’s just say not all parts of Washington state are as lovely as Seattle.) My parents were, and still are, remarkably progressive for their generation- they never had an objection to same-sex marriage- but it was very much a place where “gay” was an insult, something to be mocked, not a valid identity.

I was lucky, beyond words, that when I came out as a lesbian, my family, at least, accepted it without question. There was some surprise, and from my mom there were a lot of well-meaning but innocently offensive questions and comments, but they never wavered in their support. I got them both “proud dad/proud mom” buttons from Pride last year and they were THRILLED to have them.

It seemed really clear cut back then. I was a lesbian. And since the lesbian community is so open to women who aren’t really feminine, I didn’t feel the need to doubt anything.

But the doubts were there, and had been since I was little. I was a “tomboy” as a kid, not of the “plays sports” variety but of the “hates anything girls stereotypically do” kind. I hated dresses and skirts, and threw a fit when my mom would make me wear them for special occasions. You could forget about makeup. The only feminine trait I kept by choice is my long hair (but obviously that’s a non-exclusively feminine trait since many men keep long hair too.) My mom asked me once, one of her innocently insensitive comments, “well, if you’re a lesbian, and you don’t do anything girly, what makes you a woman? Is it your hair?” and I told her no. I didn’t have an answer for what did besides “that’s what I am.” Because gender identity is more than physical characteristics, after all, and she is still wrong that you have to be “girly” or have something that makes you so to be a “real” woman.

But, I really only ever answered “woman” to the gender question because it was the default. I knew I wasn’t a transgender male, and so therefore, by the thinking instilled in me growing up, I had to be a woman. But it never felt exactly right. Sure, it didn’t feel WRONG, but it didn’t feel right. I never felt like other, cis women do, you know? Cis women LOVE being women. I didn’t. I was just like... “oh, whatever. Sure, I guess, yeah, let’s go with that.” I hate how large my breasts are, I hate my period, and when I think about sex, the thought of being penetrated repulses me. (Which is one part of why I realized the “lesbian” label applies to me... except [TMI alert] I don’t like the thought of women putting things inside me, either.) Further, I have tokophobia (the fear of pregnancy, as well as the fear of becoming pregnant) and used to get very upset when my mom would tell me I’d be a great mom, or “when you’re a mom you’ll (x)” because I hated how the very idea of pregnancy made me feel.

And, I mean, I know all those things don’t have to mean I’m not a woman. Lots of cis women feel the same things I listed. I’m not saying those are why, those are just little ways I felt different from others that always had me wondering. But even then, I still thought it was a combination of me being a lesbian and me being autistic. Cause, lots of autistic girls are also not into “girly” things. We tend to have sensitive skin, which makes things like fancy clothes or makeup or jewelry difficult if not unbearable. (Again, you can be girly without liking any of those things, I’m just listing some of the easier to explain examples here for the sake of brevity.)

So, those explanations kind of helped me make an identity for myself. I was a woman, because I wasn’t a man. And I may not have been really “girly”, but lots of others like me weren’t either. I was just another lesbian woman.

But then recently I saw this Tweet going around about pronouns, and each person would retweet it with a list of pronouns and their thoughts on being called each. (I think it was she/her, they/them, he/him, xe/xir, it, and some other neopronouns.) And I thought about how I would feel in each situation. My appearance is still really feminine, and I have a very high-pitched voice, so there is a 0% chance I would ever be called he/his “in the wild”. So, this was the first time I thought about being called anything but she/her.

She/her- well, that’s what I already am. Yeah, sure, go for it, I thought, and then went down the rest of the list.

They/them- Nah. I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel right at all.

Xe/xir- God please no.

It- If anyone ever calls me this I will punch them repeatedly.

Other neopronouns- No, this really doesn’t work for me.

Then I thought about he/his.

You know that noise you make in your head when someone types “!!!!!” ?

That’s how I felt.

It just... it felt so AMAZING!!!

So then I had to do some thinking. Maybe I was just a much more butch lesbian than I thought? I always did act like “one of the boys” with my friend groups in school.

But that didn’t seem right either. Because the more masculine terms I imagined people using to and about me, the happier I felt. Then over the next few days, some close friends of mine who I requested to do so started calling me “bro” and other masculine things as a bit of an experiment for me, and it just... it felt really damn nice.

Feminine language didn’t, and doesn’t still, make me feel bad or dysphoric or anything. If we put my feelings on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “I’m about to cry” and 10 being “I’M SO HAPPY!”, having feminine language used for me is like a 6. It’s a “yeah, okay” sort of thing. But masculine? That’s a solid 10. I just smile every time I see it.

But as good as it felt, that created a bit of a problem for me. Because it felt a little too good to be a matter of being butch. So I was forced to engage in that dreaded activity known as “introspection”.

While I was trying to figure out what this all meant, I started looking at stuff people had written about being nonbinary. A lot of it made sense, really. Especially when people talked about subtle forms of dysphoria. Not all of it is hating your body, they explained. It definitely is a thing that happens to some people, but it takes lot of other forms... including stuff like what I listed above.

Feeling persistently different. Or even just feeling that it would be cool to have body parts change, even if you don’t want it enough to actually go out and change it. Cis people, they explained, would be horrified at the thoughts of changing anything. “It would be kinda cool if this was different” is still a form of dysphoria, still a decidedly NOT cis thing.

I know I’m not a trans man because I don’t want a lot of masculine features, like a deep voice or body hair, but I don’t enjoy a lot of my more feminine features either. So... nonbinary, because I’m neither, and I don’t WANT to be either male or female.

I’m still not sure what this all means for me, if it means making any significant changes or not, since this is all still pretty new for me. The only things I really know right now are that she/her or he/him pronouns are both fine, but I don’t like they/them, and I’m still going by Lexi online because I really don’t mind it at all; like I mentioned, feminine things don’t give me dysphoria or anything. I guess I could start going by Alex like I do IRL, but I don’t feel the need to.

And I also know that I’m only ever going to be out online, never in real life. I have transphobic siblings- even if they can understand me being a lesbian, trans people are a bridge too far for two of the three of them. One of them makes “attack helicopter” jokes and the other is outright a TERF. The other is open but admits to not knowing much about trans identities (which is fine!). I don’t feel like trying to explain to them what my nonbinary identity means when I’m still trying to figure out what my identity means myself.

I don’t really know why I made this post, really, since it only elaborates on what i said when I came out as nonbinary last week. I guess I just wanted to be open and honest with y’all since you’ve been so kind and supportive, so I wanted to let you know how I feel.

So, that’s that. Thanks for reading and listening and accepting, all. :)

#nonbinary

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