#cultural inheritance

[purefilly-connection]

We Are Who We Are — Until We Choose Who We’ll Become

We are raised by our parents — shaped by their values, their beliefs, their wounds, and the world they knew. They pour into us what they’ve learned, both the good and the harmful. And we take it, absorb it, and move through the world with that imprint. Some of it builds us. Some of it breaks us. My mother came up during the beauty pageant era. She was poised, confident, and proud — until one…

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that languages change over time is so funny to me. we have thousands of language that work perfectly well, but no that's not good enough, we need to keep fiddling with them. no not making them better, just making them different. why? well, humans enjoy making up words and phrases. for fun. enrichment activity

[logans-mormon-blog]

Obligatory "bad mormons exist" disclaimer but I love us, I love mormons. Cheesy but sincere thought: I love the way we love each other. I love feeling embraced by a ward, I love feeling like the other ward members around me look forward to seeing me, that they make an effort to include me. I love the concerted effort we put towards sincerely fellowshipping. I love ward members who text me to check in or say hi. I love how enthusiastically one senior elder has been waiting for me to try his favorite ice cream place. I love leadership who are awkward but really trying to make conversation so you feel comfortable. When mormons fuck up, they fuck up bad, but when they get it right, it WORKS. Truly the dream at rhe heart of mormonism is a tight community of people socialistically trying to improve each other's lives and idk it just makes me feel really good to see it. There is so much good in us as a community. I just love mormons.

[loriache]

honestly i'm kind of interested in the idea of laios in an arranged marriage. because obviously straight-up inherited monarchies are ...bad, to say the least! but it's what the characters are familiar with (even laios' father's extremely local, extremely minor leadership role is inherited, presumably through the male line). and it isn't just about what they think the best way to run melini is; in terms of ensuring that the other longed-lived nations respect melini's continued sovereignty, having it passed down in a manner that's close enough to their own ways for them to understand it and respect it is important. And it seems like most of the other nations have leadership through inheritance - thought that isn't confirmed for certain except with the elves.

Also, a marriage carries the potential to establish foreign allies - something melini is certainly lacking. A marriage could come with resources they'll badly need, treaties of mutual defence, money, legitimacy and political capital... not that these things can't be worked around, but if laios isn't strongly opposed, there are a lot of advantages! and i don't think he would be, because that's the framework for marriage (conferring practical advantages, building intracommunity relationships and providing a partner to do important work that he can't do) that he had grown up with. he isn't exactly a romantic and I doubt he's holding out for any sort of relationship of that nature.

Like, I don't think it's impossible that they would go with this path, because it's the most obvious and it carries a lot of advantages and it's what almost all the decision-making characters would consider normal and not objectionable. and it could be so interesting.

I think Laios would have major hangups if expected (i.e., by Marcille) to establish a genuine, romantic interest in a woman. Whether because of his sexual or romantic orientation, or just his own deep-seated trauma about rejection and being inherently disgusting and scary. And I think he'd hate the idea of having kids, too, and be very frightened of being like his father. But I don't think he'd refuse on that basis; he could cope with a marriage contract, with clearly laid-out expectations and responsibilities. And when it came to having a kid, I think he'd be reluctant to express that he doesn't want to do it, because he isn't naive and he understood when he agreed to be king it would carry responsibilities like this. It's clear from his nightmare that he already felt pressure from his parents to have children, probably magnified by the fact his father has got a position, responsibilities and wealth to pass on. Obviously he isn't a perfect martyr, so he might struggle when it comes to actually going through with it - but I don't think he'd actually, outright refuse. I think he might do it even though he doesn't want to, and I think that could be really messy in a way that appeals to me.

I don't know, there's something about negotiating these kinds of complicated situations that's interesting to me. and i love a platonic marriage. If they find a woman who has an interest in education, for example, and can work with marcille on setting up schools and universities. she'd ideally be politically savvy enough to be an able partner to laios: even though kabru can and would continue to do a lot of that, there are different spheres that a queen and a prime minister can work within!

how would their relationship work? maybe she finds laios' perspective on the world, and his frankness, unexpectedly liberating after an extremely controlled, cloistered upbringing. maybe she had a rebellious phase, has magic, or something else which makes her a relatively unpopular candidate for marriage - even as melini grows in power, i doubt that they'd be getting offers for the cream of the crop in terms of perceived value on the marriage market, because laios' relationship is a bit too ambivalent/monstrous for that, and melini too new. maybe she's a widow! an older woman, wouldn't that be cool - though they'd want her young enough that she could definitely still have kids.

certainly i think he'd be happy for her to pursue other relationships, though ideally in a manner that couldn't produce illegitimate kids. with other relationships in play, that's even more interesting. like, both kabru and toshiro have complicated emotions relating to infidelity. i think kabru would actually find it quite cathartic to be in the kind of high-status environment that rejected his mother for perceived infidelity, pursuing an affair that all parties consent to, though he'd likely be incredibly aware of the public image - since "image" is what he was rejected for. toshiro... i just really really love the way he'd feel about being the "other woman" in laios' marriage, considering his feelings about his father and maizuru. especially given how much closer he is to maizuru than his mother, being in her position...! his emotions would be so complex, it's incredibly tasty. i bet he'd make a bunch of assumptions about how laios' wife feels about it and be totally wrong, and that's so interesting. also, i think laios' wife should fuck marcille (she and falin have an open relationship).

[captainjonnitkessler]

I don't identify as Italian-American but I do identify as a New Yorker and it turns out sometimes that's the same thing

[entropyvoid]

Golden Hour (+ lineart below cut)

I took a picture of the lines for once and did some basic crappy photo editing on my phone, so you could probably print this out and use it as a coloring page or something if you so wish lol. Do with it what you will.

[preraphaelitepaintings]

Bertuccio's Bride

Artist: Edward Robert Hugues (British, 1851-1914)

Date: 1895

Medium: Watercolour and bodycolour on white paper

Collection: Leicester Galleries, London, United Kingdom

Description

‘Bertuccio ransoms with part of his inheritance the body of a gentleman from his murderers and with the residue frees from robbers a maiden who unknown to him is a princess. She is soon reclaimed but before leaving makes a contract of betrothal with Bertuccio. By the aid of a mysterious knight he meets, and with whom he changes clothes, he brings her home as his bride, and they meet the knight. Bertuccio is about to divide with him, according to their part, the wedding gifts, when everything is given up by the knight who proves to be the grateful spirit of the murdered gentleman.’

The Nights’ of Straparola, W. G. Waters’ translation.

In the mid 1890's, Hughes was commissioned to illustrate W.G. Waters' translation of the Nights of Straparola, which appeared in 1894. He produced seventeen paintings, which were reproduced in photogravure, and developed several into independent watercolours. The present watercolour originates in the frontispiece to the second volume of the Nights.

[myokk]

what are eloise's fav books? 👁️👁️

Sorry it took me a while to respond, I woke up and saw this…and I’ve been thinking about it on and off all day while I pondered🤔💓

First, Eloise LOVES reading🥹📚🫶

She is also very introverted and thinky…Eloise tends to gravitate towards books that are more about capturing the essence of what it is to be human than plot-based books. She is living in the PERFECT ERA FOR THAT😇🙏😇🙏😇🙏

Also, for some reason I feel like the wizarding world is not renowned for its literature….they spend so much time mastering magic and studying it that I really doubt they spend much time reading novels 😔🙏 but Eloise was NOT in the wizarding world…she spent FIVE years in a muggle finishing school after she was believed to be a squib…none of the muggle girls really liked her bc she never understood what they were talking about, and she never made an effort to try and fit in, so she turned to reading for the first time in her life😇😇😇 gobbling up books like Matilda😇😇😇

(now she has a whole mini-library under her bed at Hogwarts, and has gotten a lot of the fifth-years passing around books that progressively get more worn down and loved)

…ONTO THE BOOKS😤

Her favorite book is Pride and Prejudice. Eloise has never felt like she was in charge of her life, so she loves reading about Elizabeth Bennet (her complete opposite but someone she admires so much bc she wishes she could have more of a backbone). Elizabeth isn’t afraid to speak her mind and doesn’t always follow social niceties if it means compromising her happiness😇

Middlemarch by George Eliot. A beautiful case study on being human (actually all of these books are…)

She LOVES the Russians…Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Dostoyevsky (The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov…), Gogol (Dead Souls)…

Little Women by Luisa May Alcott

I feel like Eloise would have also read Picture of Dorian Gray, but it came out in 1890 and I doubt she was up-to-date with new things being published bahahahaha. Maybe she’s not so interested in Frankenstein until she actually reads it, and it also becomes a favorite💓

I personally have a lot more favorite books from this time period, but these are the ones I thought Eloise would especially like💓💓💓 (I had to give a fellow bookworm good taste😇) (yes I think I have good taste in books…doesn’t everyone think that of themselves?💓)

Anyways if you’re interested here is the list of MY top 10 books…some of them are from after the year 1900 but ELOISE WOULD HAVE LIKED THEM TOO😤

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

as someone who has most of my dragon-related fandom experience in dragonriders of pern, which necessarily has a complex relationship with its author, i would like to lean on your thoughts for a question on a different dragon media.

does the eragon fandom have meta about what counts as canon? ex. from interviews, from the illustrated guidebook, and so on. does it have a history of interpretation?

im gonna be honest I was never in the Eragon fandom, I've read the books when I was too young to have internet access and now only returned to Eragon after learning that my friend has read it too, so my "fandom" is really just the two of us brainrotting about it together and posting our thoughts on tumblr

[fatal-blow]

so im reading A Brief History of Intelligence* by Max Bennett, which discusses all of the major breakthroughs throughout evolutionary history, and first of all its just extremely refreshig to have a discussion about the brain and mental abilities that is grounded in biology

but also its stuck with me deeply that one of the first things that the book establishes is that the brains of many other animals (birds, mammals, especially mammals) are really similar to our own. which is huge when the narrative around the human brain is about how much more special and weird it is compared to other mammals

like even the simplest animals share serotonin and dopamine with us! anything after the evolution of corals and jellyfishes pretty much!

and because i interact with animals more than other humans more on a daily basis, i feel like this book really lets me get to know them. i get to learn all the things i have in common with my fish, my cats, the birds outside, the squirrel who visits me, and the more i read the more i think it's such a gargantuan disservice that's been done to other animals the way we've historically judged them to be so much...less than us.

like idk. nothing has driven home for me more that humans are just another type of animal than this book, and that's saying something because i was raised on the idea that humans are animals.

*edited to the actual book name idk why i thought it was the other thing

[streets-in-paradise]

It's a sincere question, but who is the author of that version you cited with Penthesilea's corpse? I don't remember reading that in the texts

If I remember well, i read it in a mythology handbook called " Mitología Griega" by Editorial Gradifico.

Who is the original source? No idea, often in those sorts of books the explanations go " x and y thing happened, but in some versions, it also happened w". They do have bibliographies, but you can't tell for sure of all the books they cite who came up with each thing because not every " in some versions" has a note underneath clarifiying which versions they are talking about.

@littlesparklight, please help me out if you know the original source for that one. I know I once read that there was a version where Achilles does freaky stuff with the corpse of Penthesilea after killing her, but don't know which ancient author came up with that.

Edit: I haven't been able to check in the book yet, but a google search showed this.

So this isn't an implanted memory of mine.

I didn't remember the context leading to this, and Aphrodite playing a role in sort of driving him crazy, but I knew I read one version where that happened.

[bluebirddiary]

What under-appreciated books/series's deserve more/better fan art? I would love to hear what people want in terms of fan art.

Fandoms only live on because we work at it together!

[l-in-the-light]

En, on, giri and inherited will

Inspired by @mochiajclayne absolutely fantastic post about akuen, I decided to share my thoughts about how Japanese culture concepts are everywhere in One Piece. Might be unexpected for many, because One Piece feels like such a western type of story on the surface, it's not even set in Japan. But like always with Japanese popculture, no matter if it's Death Note, Silent Hill (especially Silent Hill since it's set in America, and yet it's so Japanese at it's core) or anything else (yes, that includes all the isekais), it's always heavily rooted in Japanese culture.

Let's start with "en", it's mostly referring to relationships between people, understood in a very broad sense of the word, like the environment you live in or the whole society/community, but also relations between things. It's often connected to reincarnation, en is the connection that accumulates through many past lives. I don't have a good link in english about the Japanese concept, but it's mostly the same in China and Korea, so here you go for the last one: Inyeon (Korean equivalement of en) in Korean culture. Like yeah, it will have some differences here and there, but the core concept is exactly the same.

Law described his connection to Luffy all the way back in Marineford as "akuen". Akuen is basically "en" + "aku" (evil), a connection to someone that is ill or negative in nature. Like your experiences with that person were negative and it might be the complex result of different connections and events leading up to that. It can be because two people are on two different ends of a conflict or because the communites they both lived in or important events in their lives lead them on the path to oppose each other, or it might be because of past lives. The only way to break akuen is dying in such a way that eliminates your life from the reincarnation cycle alltogether. Ouch. But I'm pretty sure One Piece will show us an alternative way of severing akuen connection. One of the greatest things about One Piece is how it takes traditional Japanese concepts and turns them upside down, but in a subtle way.

For example, it takes the concepts of on and giri and instead twists them into a new idea altogether: that of inherited will. Both on and giri are debts you have collected in your life. On by definition is the debt you can't ever truly repay and you're always bound by it, it's the debt to your ancestors, family, also emperor (who was believed to be set on his throne by gods). It's basically the debt you gain simply by being born into a family, cared for when you were a child incapable of doing it yet by yourself. You return it by always taking care of your parents, especially when they grow older, but you can never repay it in full, you will be always bound by it until the day they die. And sometimes, if your parents die before you even are able to start repaying the favour, you will be in a very unfortunate/disgraceful position, because you couldn't fullfill your duty.

Sometimes that debt can be more sinister and as a result of "on" obligation you will be forced to do in your life whatever your parents want you to do. If you dream to become a veterinarian because you love animals, but your parents own a huge company and want you to inherit it as the heir, you're basically morally obliged to fullfill their wish and that's also a form of debt of on. It's really heavy.

In One Piece, Law calls Cora-san his "onjin", using the very word of "on" + "person", signaling his debt to Cora has the nature of on. It's not because Cora-san was his parent or a religious figure akin to an emperor in his mind. It's because he gave Law his life, prolonged it, that's why this debt is an "on". It's very heavy and Law will never be able to repay it in full.

And then we have "giri" which is also a form of moral obligation. It's a debt of gratitude, kinda a favour for a favour, this one definitely can be repaid.

That's one example of it. Another good one is Chiffon's debt to the Strawhats because of Lola. She tells Bege they need to do everything in their might to repay that debt. It's so important she puts her own safety in the second place. In short, it's when someone does something for you, you gain "giri" that will be expected to be repaid. You might have heard that strangers in Japan are reluctant to impose their help on others, that's because they don't want to impose "giri" debt on them, because forcing someone into a "giri" is considered rude/unwelcome. There's one notable exception though: they don't have that problem with foreigners, because foreigners by definition aren't expected to follow the rules of Japanese culture to that extent. Since they're outsiders, it's fine, the giri doesn't apply to them, so it's safe to help them. That's why many foreigners are often offered helped and Japan has such a friendly image in their eyes as the result. If you're interested to know more about on and giri I reccommend Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. This book gained a bad rep because of the part it played in World War II, but it's still an excellent anthropological study and stays true even today.

And then we have inherited will in One Piece. It's a debt you take over yourself to repay, a debt of gratitude. Sometimes to repay it you will have to make someone's wish or dream come true (Chopper inheriting Hiluluk's dream), to avenge them (Akazaya Nine for Oden), to do things in their stead (Luffy saving Wano in place of Ace). It's basically the same concept as on and giri, but I think it does one revolutionary thing: anyone can inherit the will. It doesn't have to be kids that take it over from their parents, especially when it's a debt that's been carried over many generations (debts like that also exist in Japanese culture). No, anyone feeling like the wish and the passion of it moved their heart can take it on themselves and carry it. That's why we have Coby taking over for Garp instead of Luffy, for example, or Yamato taking over for Oden, despite the two of them having no "on" or "giri" debts that bind them to do that. They do it instead out of their own free will.

That's why I find "inherited will" a greater concept than on and giri, despite it being almost the same. There's just one important difference here: freedom of choice. Despite sometimes being extremely heavy, on and giri are beautiful concepts, and "inherited will" brings out the best of them while saying goodbye to the most limiting part: it sets you free from the cage of on. It replaces it with unconditional love instead that doesn't imprison you. You have no idea how big such a simple change like this can be.

That makes Law's ultimate quest to find out what Cora-san meant when he wanted him to find freedom even more important.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones

[wimbledon2008]

what's it gonna take to get bobby to say uff da on screen

[kyriathanatos]

Been watching this show I loved back when it first aired called “Evil”, somehow when I wasn’t looking it got 4 seasons and made it to a series finale.

Premise is basically “The X-Files, but Christian, and the main character is Scully” and then it gets so so so much weirder from that.