#tolkien not enjoying midsummer means nothing to me

[ghostlyerlkonig]

On the topic of "media cannot love you" I wonder if this is why there has been, especially in the last 4 years, a rise in begging the people in the media to talk specifically to you and affirm you, the enjoyer of the media, for it to feel good.

[mcrmadness]

"I’m not from the US” ask set: 4, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 22, 26 :) :)

Thanks! :) Here is the ask set if anyone wants to send more asks!!!

Sorry for taking so long with the answer, I got bit too excited and had a busy weekend so I’ve been writing this a little bit every day because I managed to make tired on each time because of the amount of text I’m apparently able to produce because I’m a proud Finn who loves their country a bit too much :D

4. favourite dish specific for your country?

Hmmm. This is interesting question, our cuisine reminds the German one a lot to begin with and I feel like it’s just so very... basic (like: potatoes and meat/sausages + milk products). There’s also many regional dishes that I haven’t eaten because I’m from the East Finland and those are popular in the West or so, and some of these sound really disgusting too. And I want to leave out desserts like mämmi or other foods like Karelain pies and focus on actualy dishes not... So I’d say my favorite is Karjalanpaisti aka the Karelian hot pot (UK)/Karelian stew (US) so it also has bit of Russian roots for it, too. It’s more common here in the East and I don’t know about other families, but that is what my mom makes as the main food for Christmas but sometimes she cooks it even if it wasn’t Christmas. So it’s just beef, pork  and liver stew and eaten with potatoes. The broth also tastes sooooo good if you put butter on a rye bread and then dip the bread in the broth! I usually don’t eat the beed/pork pieces because I have to chew them for so long that they become so dry and lose all the taste, but I LOVE liver. And during the few past years my mom has bought local, organic Highland cow liver and made us our own stew without the beef/pork (unless beef is organic since I only eat organic meat) and omg, it’s just so good :D

And another one worth mentioning: fried vendace! It’s a small fresh water fish (’muikku’ in Finnish) and it’s a famous dish (’paistetut muikut’) especially here in Finnish Lakeland. These are always the highlight of the summer when the vendace/fish restaurants open and you get the summer’s first (and often the last too because of money lol) fried vendace meal from a restaurant :p

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7. three words from your native language that you like the most?

- Niin kuin / Niiku / Niiko. This is a filler word, you can start a sentence with it or put it anywhere. It basically means the same as saying “like” in the middle of a sentence in English. Like, the way I’m doing now. It depends on the dialect which version one chooses to use, “niiko” is not typica for my dialect but I’ve adopted it to my speech anyway.

- Kylömä. This is a dialect word, typical for my dialect, it comes from the written word “kylmä” which means “cold”. Here in the East we like additional letters, especially vowels, so this often becomes “kylymä”. And when wanting to make it even more Savo dialect-ish, you say “kylömä”.

- Häh? / Täh? That’s right, German is not the only language with a word for the question mark mood - Finns also will say “hä???” when something goes over our heads. I think it comes from the word “mitä” which means “what”, which then has evolved into “mitäh” and from there to “täh” and finally to “häh?” But I’m not a linguist, it just sounds most logical for me like this. I also like other Finnish interjections and I wish I had similar words in English.

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13. does your country (or family) have any specific superstitions or traditions that might seem strange to outsiders?

Finland isn’t really that superstitious anymore. Back in the day, before modern religions, Finland was very much superstitious and especially into magic a lot. And there were gods everywhere, if you saw a face in the tree, it could have been nothing else but the forest god. And what still playfully lives from these eras of magic and spells are the spells we’re talking about during Midsummer. Mostly they were about running around naked and doing random things like sleeping with flowers under your pillow in order to see your future parten in your dream, or do things in order to get good luck at future marriage. But I don’t know if anyone does those anymore, we just playfully joke about them every year.

Talking of Midsummer, I think I need to mention here our tradition about: drowning. That’s right, in Finland there’s always a number of people drowning during Midsummer because alcohol and swimming don’t go together but people still go swimming while they’re drunk and then accidents happen... So, whenever the Midsummer approaches, everyone is wishing for good weather so they can go out and have fun and get drunk with others (except for me because I’m an introverted teetotaler who hates people and heat waves lol) but at the same time we’re wishing for a bad weather so as little people would drown as possible. The better the weather, the more people will drown. But still if the weather is bad, it makes everyone angry because they wished for better weather but at least more lives are saved, then... So you can basically never win, as long as people will go swimming while drunk and forget to look after their friends (because they’re also too drunk to notice someone disappeared).

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14. do you enjoy your country’s cinema and/or TV?

Not really. There only a few comedy shows that I really like - Kummeli being the ultimate best and I pretty much grew up with that show. I don’t like Finnish drama series nor movies because I just can’t stand the acted Finnish. It sounds the same as normal spoken language too but I just can SEE from the people they are acting and it gets on my nerves so much. Plus Finland loves melancholy so we can’t even have police series without it being about human relations instead of investigating stuff and people are just constantly lying, angry at each other and crying 24/7. I don’t like that sort of negativity at all, it makes me just angry myself.

Plus Finland only has like 5 different actors that are in every goddamned show and movie, and then we also have just like 3 different people who are hosts in radios and tv shows and like... why??? Kinda tired of seeing the same faces everywhere all the time!

But I have to mention that a few good movies have come from Finland during the past couple of years: Tom of Finland is actually a great movie and it’s great for anyone interested in the LGBT+ history (especially the gay community’s) too as it tells about this Finnish artist whose drawings have inspired many today’s praised LGBT+ icons too. I don’t know if you can find it with foreign subtitles or so yet as it’s mainly spoken in Finnish. The same director also made a movie about Tolkien, this one is entirely in English (apart from a few pseudo-Finnish words here and there because Finnish inspired Tolkien a lot in real life too) but it was a good movie anyway.

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15. a saying, joke, or hermetic meme that only people from your country will get?

Well, in Finland we have this phenomenon called “Suomi mainittu, torilla tavataan!” aka we get so excited everytime Finland is mentioned anywhere even a little so everyone gotta “meet” at a market place to celebrate it. It literally means “Finland mentioned, let’s meet at the market place!” No matter what is the original language of where the mention is, and it doesn’t matter if we don’t understand the language, if we can clearly tell it’s about Finland, we need to leave a comment in Finnish and go crazy about it because our lil country was noticed somewhere finally.

And here’s an extra one:

Source. Write “Finnish bus stop” on Google and you get tens of these photos. We really love our personal space.

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16. which stereotype about your country you hate the most and which one you somewhat agree with?

I don’t know if we have any wrong stereotypes? I even tried googling this and I agreed with every single one of them? :D But I googled a little bit more and apparently people tend to see Finns as very rude because of our introverted and emotionless nature and I have to disagree with this one. Yes we’re introverted (but still extroverts exist too, I myself am an ambivert) and especially our monotonous language can make us seem very emotionless as well, but the “rudeness” comes from the fact we show our respect by not paying too much attention to others. We even run away from people we know if I we happen to see them in a supermarket and they didn’t see us yet, we’re ust shy! :D I’m also pretty sure that the dark, Finnish sense of humour (we’re the kings of dank memes btw) can also often go way over other people’s heads and what we meant as a deadpan dark humour can seem like something very offending to those who have gotten used to a very different and more light-hearted humour.

Finns can seem very pessimistic. I was once watching a video, because I’m learning German, about how different the people of Berlin are to other Germans and they have this very similar “attitude” to things as people from Nordic Countries too: instead of saying “oh that’s a great one” we tend to say “well it could be worse”, but we mean exactly the same with this.

Finns are also very humble and we just HATE bragging and we don’t like it at all if someone else is bragging about themselves, which is why especially Americans easily get our nerves. We even have a saying that goes “self praise stinks” because no one likes someone who loves themselves too loudly. That’s why we find it hard to take in compliments and instead of a “Oh thank you!” you get something like “Oh that was nothing, really, not a big deal at all...” but on the inside we’re very flattered, just too shy to show our true feelings.

I guess this answers to the both aspects of this question!

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19. do you like your country’s flag and/or emblem? what about the national anthem?

The flag is a white one with a blue cross and yeah it’s nice. It looks calm and it’s just... simple. At least I don’t have trouble remembering which color is which unlike with all those flags with two or more stripes. I legit cannot remember in which order they go in which countries’ flags and whether a country as horizontal or vertical stripes. So at least that is nice, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to draw the Finnish flag either. I associate the colors with Finland because they’ve always been there so I couldn’t even imagine a different kind of flag at all.

The emblem then is a yellow lion on a red background, with some swords. And flowers because... why the heck not? No but I honestly have no clue why it’s a lion. There’s never been lions in Finland? Other than in zoos and our biggest wild cat species is lynx so... why a lion? (I clearly have to do some googling here.)

The national anthem is a bit boring one and I don’t know if I’ve ever even read the full lyrics. At least I never could memorize them... but I guess it sounds like... Finland.

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22. what makes you proud about your country? what makes you ashamed?

I’m proud about lots of things. There’s many things Finland has done right and what other countries should really learn from, e.g. how to deal with homelessness. And how a democratic country actually works. And how cops should actually be like - there’s more racism from other agencies than from the police in Finland, and withing the past 20 years only 7 people have died from polices’ bullets and they were occassions where these people were going to harm other people or themselves. And every time a police uses their gun, that will be investigated thoroughly to see if anything was done wrong there and if it looks like there was no right to use the gun, there will be consequences.

There’s also lots of things that cannot really compared to the other European countries, like the laws about animals, for example. I eat organic meat that comes from Finland because it’s nothing like the meat industry in other places in Europe (I think all Nordic Countries are a lot like Finland with this). An ex-friend once tried to convince me of why also organic meat is bad and animals get treated badly but this person did not understand that you can’t send me photos from farms in another European country far from Finland because it is so far from how things are in Finland to begin with. Our animal right laws are a lot stricter than anywhere else in the Europe and I really trust the agriculture of Finland and there are no big secrets, most farmers also have voluntarily signed up to a website that shows their vet checkup results etc. publicly, which is great because it means they care about the animals too and not just about making money. (Of course Finland is not perfect and occassionally farms with terrible animal healthcare issues are found and there’s still lots of things where we could improve, but I’m saying that, at the moment, animals in Finland [and Nordic Countries] do have a lot better rights and lives than anywhere else in Europe or even in the World we have only a small portition of the problems that are present in other European countries’ intensive farming habits on a daily basis.)

And from here we get to what makes me ashamed: our justice system. It’s way too easy on people! I mean, our “lifetime” is not lifetime, every goddamned murderer will get to walk free after a decade or so, sometimes a lot earlier if they are behaving nice, and we have already had so many cases where someone has got out and then killed yet another person. But for some reason we just can’t keep murderers behind the bars because apparently Finland believes that sociopaths won’t kill ever again if they behave nice in the jail (which btw are more like hotels here). And what about rapists, child abusers and other assholes? Oh, no jailtime, fine is fine!!! Or maybe in parole but nah, why bother put them behind the bars :) And despite the great animal rights laws, the consequences in animal rights crimes are nonexistent. You might get fined and they can forbid you from ever owning an animal again, but absolutely no one is supervising this. There’s so many animal hoarder/abuser cases where animals have been taken away and they’ve been fined and told that they are not allowed to keep animals anymore, and it won’t take too long until they again have a house full of animals, or they are again charged for animal abuse. And nothing ever changes.

But I’m also really ashamed of those loud asshats who keep shouting their right-wing views. What especially gets on my nerves is that when ever a transgender person is mentioned, these people just can’t keep their mouths shut but they just have to be there in the comments saying how... okay I don’t even bother saying what they say, you all know what transphobics say so all that bullshit and it just annoys me so much because I KNOW they are doing that on purpose to be provocative but I so wish I had some huge mallet I could beat sensibility in their heads but I also know they will never change their minds because they’ve already decided to think like that and they want to just upset others with their opinions. I just hope everyone would walk away from them because if no one answers for them, I’m sure they would stop eventually because no one bothers to continue bullying if there’s no one around to bully anymore.

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26. does your nationality get portrayed in Hollywood/American media? what do you think about the portrayal?

Very rarely. Usually it’s another “torilla tavataan” moment if Finland is mentioned in an American TV as it’s so rare, and usually then everyone will know about it even if they wouldn’t be interested in the media. Usually there’s been a Finnish person or a person with Finnish roots making that media whenever it gets mentioned (e.g. Iron Sky was made by a Finnish team). But usually it’s rather annoying because of course Russia is always mentioned everywhere and sometimes even Sweden! But Finland? Neverheard. Which probably is the reason because most Americans have never even heard of Finland and they have absolutely no clue where that is and if that is even a real place.

More often Finland is linked to Santa Claus but even then they get it wrong because Americans believe Santa comes from the North Pole and the North Pole is not in Finland (and Santa comes from Finland and not from the North Pole :D). And one common belief is also that there’s polar bears in Finland. No, there is none. Just regular Eurasian brown bears but no polar bears.