#calemonsito answers

[cinnamonsikwate]

Do you know where this fandom perception that Rin was adopted by Milsilril came from? In the only comic they appear in together, Milsilril regretfully explains that she doesn't have room to take Rin on.

Was there something else I'm missing? Thanks if you do know; it's been confusing me as I feel like Rin and Kabru show Very different elements of the adoption system and that's lost when people flatten them to fosters of the same lady

so i went back to the world guide to check bc i was fairly certain that it had been said there, but you know what — i think i, like many others, have been a victim of my own assumptions 😭

nowhere in rin's, kabru's, or milsiril's entries does it explicitly state that milsiril adopted her in the same capacity that she did kabru, but because of how familiar kabru and rin seemed with each other, i somehow connected the non-existent dots that they grew up in the same household. my bad!

it does seem she stayed in elven custody up until joining kabru's party, but i think that's as much as we get from the manga and the world guide.

idk if any of the daydream hours have more info though, so if anyone else knows anything, feel free to add on to this!

[cinnamonsikwate]

ah-HA finally I see someone talking about the Talokan world building! One thing that I haven't seen anyone mention is the specific shade of blue the Talokanil turn into on the surface, but I think it's supposed to invoke Mayan Blue! The wiki article on it is (in my uneducated opinion) pretty good, but one thing that stood out is that human sacrifices to Chaac were painted that color, which is just, so profound. The detail of this film, ugh!

I discovered this when I was trying to find symbolic colors that other people would turn into if they joined the Talokanil. It was for a plot bunny that I will likely never catch, but a pre-Black Panther K'uk'ulkan saves a dying N'Jadaka by giving him the Talokanil Herb after mistakingly thinking N'Jadaka was the son of a Talokanil. I thought Haint Blue (a Gullah shade believed to ward off ghosts) would be a good ironic choice for N'Jadaka, but I'm not sure if a color so heavily associated with the American diaspora would be a good choice for a Wakandan like Shuri ��\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, I partially made this ask to plug my prompt lol. I'm disappointed that not many fanfics are doing the world building that the Talokanil deserve! Instead they're just being treated as people who sometimes go in the water at best, or invoking racist Native tropes as worst. But I loved your detailed post about their clothing! You did an amazing job at researching! Now, if only Ryan Coolger and the crew would release the 200-page bible they wrote about Talokan...

hello and thank you for this ask!

tbh i didn't look up much regarding maya blue when i wrote the clothing analysis posts, but after doing some reading, i definitely agree! many of the scholarly articles on maya blue focus on its chemistry rather than its cultural significance, but the reason researchers find it so intriguing is its near-indestructibility (sánchez del rio et al. 2011, 453-481), which i think ties in neatly to the talokanil ability to self-regenerate.

this passage from arnold et al. (2008, 151-164) is particularly interesting:

when the shaman was trying to convince fen to drink the liquid, we see someone holding what looks like an incense burner in the background. we can take the talokan plant to be a stand-in for the indigo plant, and the vibranium that it contains as a stand-in for palygorskite (a clay mineral). so all three together = maya blue.

the idea that the zamá people were sacrificing themselves for chaac's protection? damn???

anyway. i LOVE your prompt! it's very thought-provoking. i have had somewhat related idle musings, mostly because i'm not sure how realistic it is for the talokanil population to have ballooned to beyond-the-grass-of-wakanda numbers from only a handful of founders in a span of less than five centuries. i like to think that at some point they were regularly rescuing people from the surface, adding to the diversity of their gene pool and also bringing in new customs and technology.

several questions arise though: how long were they doing this, who did they rescue, and how wide was their geographic scope? we know at least one talokanil extra is afro-indigenous; the kids shuri meets in talokan aren't credited on imdb but they looked a lot whiter to me than the other talokanil, so the actors may be mixed. aside from razing haciendas and plantations on the mainland after that first time, would they also have rescued people from the trans-atlantic slave trade? would they have swum around to the pacific and rescued people from the manila-acapulco galleon trade?

which brings me back to your prompt and has me asking more questions - would chaac's blessing cover someone who is not one of his people? is conversion a prerequisite? although the idea that anyone — from indigenous americans to africans to filipinos — can become talokanil is interesting, because would that mean they'd have communities within talokan where they continue to practice their cultures? how would their different worldviews affect how they see and treat k'uk'ulkan? and — would they still be maya blue or would they take on a color more connected to their original culture? if they do take on different colors, haint blue for n'jadaka does sound pretty fitting (especially since it also uses indigo). as for shuri though, since she didn't take the unmodified talokan plant, should her skin color still change?

if i had the stamina to write fic, i'd have run away with this prompt, but unfortunately i don't, so let's put this out there and hope someone takes the bait! (fish pun intended)

i do occasionally come across fics (usually of the shipping variety) that i think do a pretty decent job of world-building, but they tend to focus on the present-day customs of the talokanil and less so on their early years (which is what i'm more interested in). i do dearly wish we get to see more canon talokan lore soon, but if ryan coogler is not involved somehow, idk if i can take it lol.

again, thank you so much for taking the time to read my meta, and i appreciate your engaging with me!

p.s. according to hannah beachler, the talokan guide is 400 pages!

[cinnamonsikwate]

basilisk balut

great timing on this ask bc i'm rereading vol. 1 & just finished ch 3 (roast basilisk).

i've never actually seen the inside of a balut (i'll stick with penoy & my ignorance, thanks) but a basilisk balut would probably look interesting, since according to dungeon meshi lore, the snake part is the main body.

would this mean that the snake half develops first? and how much chicken you're gonna get depends on how long it's been incubating? a quick google search tells me snake eggs take longer than duck or chicken eggs to hatch, so would a basilisk egg follow snake egg or chicken egg conventions or fall somewhere in between?

thanks, anon, this is gonna keep me up tonight /hj

edit: i forgot the end of vol. 1 has extras with additional info about the featured monsters. we see the size proportions of a newly-hatched basilisk to be in favor of the chicken part. basilisk balut might just look (mostly) like regular balut after all!

[cinnamonsikwate]

just wanna say I love love all your meta posts on black panther so far so ty for sharing them! also, as a fellow filipino v curious if you also came out of the movie feeling a lot of Feels™️ on seeing Talokan form to escape Spanish colonization. I literally came out of the movie imagining this whole What If scenario, where instead of basing Namor as an indigenous mesoamerican, what if they made Namor an indigenous Filipino?

One day I hope we can see more Filipino representation (the lil treat we go with Ned and his Lola was amazing), but in a way I’m grateful Coogler sought to represent a culture displaced by Spanish colonialism bc as a Filipino i feel indirectly represented as well

hi!!! salamat for the ask!

oh, definitely! i was sitting there in the theater thinking "dazurv! dazurv!" when k'uk'ulkan was meting out justice in that hacienda 🔥

my sib and i have had those what-if discussions too! although i think the major factor in talokan being in the yucatán is the chicxulub asteroid impact, which is implied to be the source of talokan's vibranium, and since we don't have anything like that in the philippines (or at all in southeast asia) we're pretty much out of the running.

it's still fun to speculate though! and i feel like talokan is very much a power fantasy for every culture that's suffered under spanish colonialism. "namor" as an enemy-specific exonym would still work in any case lol. k'uk'ulkan vs the spanish monarchy when??

i still haven't seen no way home but i did see the clip with ned's lola. thought it was cute, but i question the existence of any lola who'd stand idly by while someone in front of her is wasting food skjdksjks 😭

i don't read the comics but i know pearl pangan aka wave is filipino (from mactan, cebu). i think it would be very interesting (if she ever appears in the mcu) to have her interact with k'uk'ulkan and the talokanil, have them air out their grievances with spanish colonialism. they'd definitely have things in common, but where the talokanil were able to escape the worst of it, filipinos spent the last five centuries being passed around by colonizers in the most exploitative game of hot potato. i wanna see if she'd agree with him about burning down the world!

again, salamat for engaging! and if you'd like to share details of your "what if namor was indigenous filipino" scenario, please feel free!

[cinnamonsikwate]

like? cooking?

is this about the agonizing tasks post? bc yes lol. it took me over a year to bake chocolate cake again despite constantly declaring i'd do it soon. like i'd keep buying the ingredients but just letting other ppl in the house use them first

but if this is a generic "do you like cooking?" ask, the answer is also yes. it's usually less exhausting than baking

[cinnamonsikwate]

🫵filipino

Yup, for better or for worse, sa hirap at ginhawa lol

[cinnamonsikwate]

hey im from the cemetary but were you the one that left the red umbrella?

uh idk if we're talking about the same cemetery but afaik no one in the family has a red umbrella + the weather didn't call for any umbrellas, so i'd say no