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I am Jean Moreau. I will endure.

Just wanted to thank @korakos for sharing The Sunshine Court with us. It is everything I didn’t know I needed. ❤️‍🩹

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I have this theory that we never get robin's real name bc the book is written in english. This can go two ways:

One, we start to follow Robin's story the moment he leaves China, so what we see is basically people trying to westsize him, we can see this by the fact that kuang keeps giving the emphasis to people saying "he looks english under certain lights", and is there a more english name than Robin Swift??? So we didn't get his name cause the moment he got it back, it was him returning to his roots, finding himself whole again and not half of two things that cannot coexist, therefore we, as english speakers, we're not invited to be a part of that. Bonus point that the only other non-western character he's close to never calls him Robin, but Birdie, and when Lettie tries to use it he feels weird, like it's wrong.

Two, the simple fact that it's written in english stops it. I study chinese and I can undoubtedly say that she couldn't just throw a name there with no explanation, she'd had to put the character, and then the 拼音, and then she'd have to translate it and explain it, and something would still get lost in translation. Choosing to give us his real name would totally break the narrative.

Anyway, be it one way or another, I think it's great

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Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?

R.F. Kuang, Babel

(via

smokefalls

)

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babel, and why i love it (SPOILERS!!!!)

ok im terribly late to reading it, for its not sold in many places where i live, so i found the pdf luckily.

babel is a book about colonialism and racism and oppression, it is about revolution and battling your inner conscience (in my opinion at least, i'll elaborate later). it tells the story of robin swift coming to the prestigious royal institute of translation or better known as babel, where during his yrs there he discovers that the glamourous oxford university isnt such a righteous place. his loyalty is tested, blood is shed and tears fall which leads up to a revolution to stop an incoming war.

there are many reviews regarding how its racist to white ppl (which is astounding to even think about) and that its not accurate as women werent allowed to go to university in the 1830s but im not going to talk about that, that much. i wanted to speak on the actual translation/language aspect of it.

throughout the book, translation and language r some of the main themes (obviously) but the impact it has on the people, both in the book and irl is smth i havent seen anyone mention. language isnt just a form of communication but it is part of our culture, it is part of our identity, and during colonial times many languages suffered, they were being erased as they were "barbaric" or "strange" they were banned and anyone who spoke them was punished like in victoires chapter. robin, ramy and victoire all can barely speak their native languages, robin has almost fogotten cantonese, ramy has very basic knowledge of bengali and victoire is never given a chance or is permitted to speak in haitian creole. they lost one of the main things that connects them to their motherland, they only have their appearance left. they will never be able to talk to their ppl properly.

victoire was frustrated that haitian creole isnt recognised as a proper language like how in their exams, her match-pair wouldnt be counted properly as haitian creole wouldnt be used much hence its "useless" in the eyes of prof. leblanc. she was beaten when she would speak haitian croele in her house in france. when she first came to babel she was correcting herself from "kreyol" to "haitian creole" and was unsure if she could even study it.

robin realised that prof.lovell actually knew more than him about his own language, his mother tongue. he could barely stand being back in canton and he felt isolated in a way as everything changed and was new and so was the language even though he was born hearing and speaking it.

not much is talked about this with ramy except that he barely knows bengali, even though hes fluent in english, latin, greek, arabic, persian and urdu. he knows 6 languages and in his chapter he is sed to "absorb languages like a sponge" and that he recited poems or writing in other languages he didnt know perfectly, even down to tone, only after having it read to him once but he barely knows his mother tongue.

this relates to modern times as many languages of previously colonised countries rely on english words like in india u will barely hear the word pathshala, instead u will hear school. in mauritian creole when people speak they will slip in english words, like "netwai whiteboard la" which means clean the whiteboard.

we dont know our language fully because of the erasure of them.

theres also 1st gen immigrant children where their mother tongue is smth they barely hear or they forgot after a while, they feel so incredibly disconnected once they realise. this is how robin is and this is how i am too, i was born in europe, then at 7 i moved to england and now im somewhere entirely different, i dont remember my mother tongue, i dont dream in it. which ultimately makes u lose ur voice in a metaphorical way.

u cant speak because u dont know how.

another important thing is the purposeful mistranslations and burning of books, thats not fully discussed in the book although it would have been a nice touch. colonisers purposefully mistranslated things to control the masses because when they burnt our books, they burnt our language, knowledge and people. and the exploitation of our languages like the statue at univ of william jones sitting at desk and 3 hindu sages on the floor infront of him exists, and how missionaries were taught our languages to help in conversion.

now onto the 1830s inaccuracies and racism:

its the fucking 1830s do u think white ppl were nice to poc at this time, like slavery just ended in the eyes of the law for britain but still continued in other places like america. reverse racism doesnt exist, white ppl can be prejudiced against but u lot r not oppressed and never will be, u lot wont be killed for being white, so stop crying. and about the women wouldnt be at university in the 1830s thing its fiction, r.f. kuang took some liberties.

and that is all i have to say, dont start an argument, anyways babel is great, go read it!!

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Found while cleaning old drafts: some meta on Robin, Lovell, Griffin, their relationships, and the all-consuming many-sided nature of empire:

I'm really fascinated by Griffin and Robin's similarities to Lovell and their reactions to it: that they are polar opposites both narratively and in their roles and relationships, that Lovell is a simple villain and a clear evil while Robin and Griffin are victims of his actions, but that none of them can escape the fact that being raised by him has horribly imprinted onto them traces of Lovell as well. Griffin taking his last name and defiantly giving name to what Lovell refuses to acknowledge, Robin getting mistaken for Lovell by his son, all the places where Griffin is mentioned to be similar, and most of all the fact that Lovell himself is the one most discomforted by the similarity. Lovell both intentionally makes them in his image for the sake of convenience but also avoids it, because his ability to use them as tools hinges heavily on his complete dehumanization of them based on race, the similarities reveal something he isn't ready to confront. It reminds me of the concept of 'total empire' according to 'Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism', where colonization is as defining for the colonizer as it is for the colonized, and the colonizer brutally enforcing their will on the colonized has the flip side of the colonizer becoming changed by their own consumption of the goods of the colonized, goods projected onto the racialized bodies of the colonized, making their own identities through what they've taken. Babel brings that up over and over very blatantly through comments on how the British define themselves with foreign goods, but Lovell and the tension in his similarity and relationship to Griffin and Robin read like a sort of microcosm of that as well. He cannot acknowledge what he's imparted onto them because it would say something about himself that he can't accept. On the other hand, Robin doesn't directly confront his own connections and similarities with Lovell for most of the book, but Griffin does, he's the only one out of the three of them who forces it into the open. It's very telling that the beginning of the end (of Lovell) is tied to Robin doing the same, forcing their connection into the open and making Lovell look it in the eyes. I think there's something so compelling about Robin-Griffin-Lovell and their relationships, a multifaceted dynamic that tends to get glossed over for painful reasons I can understand, but one that nonetheless has a lot to say about the themes of the book, presented a little more subtly.

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I saw someone recommend Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang as an example of a fantasy story with no romance in it, and tilted my head curiously, thinking about what radically different things a story can mean to different readers. Because when I read it, I saw a significant subplot devoted to deliciously subtle, tragically unrealised queer love story between Robin and Ramy.

It lived in unanswered questions and charged silences*. It was hard to look at, hard to understand, in a world with such rigid expectations and strict social rules. It was a forbidden love on multiple levels, between two boys who were meant to devote their hearts and minds to serving the British empire above all personal concerns, between two boys who were meant to love women if anyone at all. In a story all about the magic of words, it was unspoken, unspeakable, but still not unacknowledged. They knew, or almost knew, and were getting gradually, infinitesimally closer to someday putting words to it, if only between themselves, until Ramy died and all that possibility died with him.**

It's about being closeted. It's about meeting the first other person you've ever known who's like you. It's about inching towards something you have no roadmap for. It's about the long history of tragic homoerotic vibes between British academics. It's about the love that dare not speak its name. It's about yet another thing the Translation Institute took from Robin, that's simultaneously yet another thing the Translation Institute gave him.

It's about another thing Letty's privilege blinded her to. A white woman wanting a brown man, and killing him for rejecting her***, never seeing the reason in the same way that she never saw the racism her friends were subjected to on a daily basis. A love triangle, mirroring the one between Griffin, Sterling and Evie, though Letty didn't know it was a triangle and couldn't even imagine that Ramy might care for Robin instead or that Robin might have his own desires beyond comforting her in her heartbreak. Robin asked Ramy why he didn't dance with her, and he said Don't you know why?*. Later that night Letty wept drunkenly into Robin's shoulder, asking Why doesn't he see me?, and he knew better than to tell her the truth****.

*p. 244:

"She wants you," Robin said. ... "Very badly. So why—" "Don't you know why?" Their eyes met. Robin felt a prickle at the back of his neck. The space between them felt very charged, like the moment between lightning and thunder, and Robin had no idea what was going on or what would happen next, only that it all felt very strange and terrifying, like teetering over the edge of a windy, roaring cliff.

**p. 410

One day Robin would ask himself how his shock had turned so easily to rage; why his first reaction was not disbelief at this betrayal but black, consuming hatred. And the answer would elude and disturb him, for it tiptoed around a complicated tangle of love and jealousy that ensnared them all, for which they had no name or explanation, a truth they'd only been starting to wake up to and now, after this, would never acknowledge.

***p. 503

"I think she wanted him dead," he continued hoarsely. "You could see it on her face – she wasn't scared, she knew what she was doing, she could have aimed at any one of us, and she knew it was Ramy she wanted." "Robin ..." "She loved him, you know," he said. The words came out of him like a torrent now; the floodgates were broken, and the waters could not be stopped. No matter how devastating, how tragic, he had to say it out loud, had to burden someone else with this awful, awful suspicion. "She told me, the night of the commemoration ball – she spent nearly an hour weeping into my shoulder because she wanted to dance with him, and he wouldn't even look at her. He never looked at her, he didn't ..." He had to stop, his tears threatened to choke him.

****p. 249

"I wish he would see me," she kept repeating. "Why won't he see me?" And though Robin could think of any number of reasons – because Ramy was a brown man in England and Letty the daughter of an admiral; because Ramy did not want to be shot in the street; or because Ramy simply did not love her like she loved him, and she'd badly mistaken his general kindness and ostentatious verve for special attention, because Letty was the kind of girl who was used to, and had come to always expect, special attention – he knew better than to tell her the truth. ... He had the oddest feeling of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been as old as history.

(Despite how long this ended up getting, footnotes and all, I'm not trying to argue that my interpretation is right and the 'no romance' interpretation is wrong - I love the ambiguity, and think it's genuinely fascinating how this reading jumped out so clearly to me, a bisexual who spent a significant amount of my late teens pining over my best friend while coming to terms with my sexuality, while another reader with a different perspective saw something else entirely.)

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Some images from this stream, Quackity, You’ve out done yourself.

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/rp

I would definitely vibe if season 3's Crimson Egg Arc has a background sideplot of just people trying to kill Tommy and failing miserably while Tommy remains oblivious to everything as he plays Animal Crossing.

If trying to killing Tommy is played for laughs and doesn't really affect him, then I'm all good.

Bonus: Sam Nook and Awesamdad knows what's going on and keeps interfering while keeping Tommy in the dark.

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with bad being so protective of the red blob egg stuff all that is going through my head rn is “bitch i’m a mother, no drama” and akdjsjjd

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/rp dream just brought up the thing schlatt gave him to join his side again on bbh’s stream!! and it’s a book??????? possibly containing information???? and apparently puts him in danger if people find out he has that information???????

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me, frantically switching between streams to try and keep track of what’s going on: i am fucking crazy, but i am free

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“She could tell the moon, “move over, and I’ll sit in your place.” ممكن تقول للقمر اتاخر و اقعد مكانك”

— Egyptian expression; used to describe women with a very pretty face. “How did bride look?” “She tells the moon to move over to sit it his (the moon is masculine in Arabic) place.”

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I just wish people realized how insulting and minimizing what wtfock has done is. Like, you have Muslim fans and fans of color waiting patiently for the fourth season to come around, because of course, no one ever thinks of switching Noora’s or Isak’s season with Sana’s, do they? And after shooting has to be cancelled, after wtfockdown had a total of 6 clips that didn’t develop Yasmina at all, but had enough time to do a full storyline of Robbe and Sander cyberboning, and Zoë and Senne getting back together, season 4 is finally announced and… It’s not even not about Yasmina. It’s not even about Moyo or Luca. 

Instead of trying to rationalize this decision by saying it’s important that Yasmina’s season happens during Ramadan or during freefest or they had already shot a lot or mi abuela fuma, why don’t you think about how pissed off you would be if a remake decided to switch Isak’s season with Sana’s, and then when it was finally time to air, they said, “you know what, we’re going to make season 4 about the trials and tribulations of being a straight, white, cis teenie local celeb.” What if Skam NL rose from the ashes and announced season 3 is going to be about Imaan and season 4 is going to be about Isa’s hot female straight cousin, and we’ll see if Lucas VDH ever gets his season. 

Like… Have a fucking bit of empathy, for fuck’s sake, instead of doing this transparent shit of asking people to be ~nice~ and not ~mean~ and telling them not to watch if they’re going to be ~negative~ but also chiding them for announcing they won’t be watching and asking them to ~wait until the end~.

Like you really would rather have a nice tag where everyone is super positive about the season, than allow Sana fans time and space to be upset about THIS, the one time in 7 remakes that NRK has allowed a remake to do one of the first four seasons about a topic that has NOTHING TO DO with Sana’s season. (Or Eva’s, Noora’s or Isak’s.)

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only thing i agree with dads on is when it rains and they say ‘we needed that’ bc like. we did

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if someone could photoshop andrew’s head onto troy’s during “bet on it” i’d be forever in your debt

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