#Cultural Connectives

[jedi-starbird]

Rex: So General Kenobi, how come you speak mando'a?

Obi-Wan: I've always been interested in the culture and I spent a year on Mandalore for a mission in my youth :)

Rex: I see, what about you, General Skywalker?

Anakin: Huh? Oh Obi-Wan used to drop me off in mando daycare when he went to get laid in little Keldabe, fun times, they taught me how to headbutt someone.

[theseyellowdays]

One thing I genuinely think the fandom forgets or underestimates is just how weird Neil is. Like we paint him to be this carismatic, flashy, cocky bad boy, but in reality he's stingy, skittish, balks at anything more personal then his thoughts on Exy and Cannot for the life of him socialize. Like in the Raven King, right after Seth dies, he straight up goes:

"Neil had to patch things up with [Allison] somehow, but he didn't know where to start. He'd never been good at winning people over. Someone like Allison wasn't likely to be his first success. "

Neil's spent his life living on the outskirts of "average" life. Ergo, he's cagey and flighty and so far removed from normal that even among the Foxes he'll always be a little unpredictable and odd. And you know what, good for him; we all deserve an antisocial introverted asshole to raly behind.

[hakucho-art]

TOKYO GHOUL MIKU

[myfairkatiecat]

I feel like Lucy Gray’s fashion sense had an influence on the Capitol. It’s mentioned in the book that she’s wearing makeup, which is notable to Coriolanus and he wonders where she got it from since it was barely becoming accessible again in the Capitol. In the movie one of his classmates mocks what she is wearing, asking if she thinks she’s a clown. It isn’t common to dress like her, but she owns her own style and the Capitol LOVES her. Coriolanus, as he tries to get sponsors for her, makes the case that since she is Covey perhaps she isn’t really district at all, in fact she’s really more Capitol than anything… and perhaps it rubbed off. Perhaps her sense of extra-ness, her fun makeup even at the reaping, her colorful dress at a dark occasion….perhaps that’s one part of her legacy that never truly goes away, even when the name of Lucy Gray Baird is erased from the memories of the people of Panem.

[justarandombrit]

I will literally never be over the Grace-Blinky connection, I'm sorry

[s0fter-sin]

mermay idea

mers keep their faces covered as a way to indicate social status and familiarity. warriors have intricate masks, handcrafted when they win their first battle and the more detailed a mask is, the more accomplished the wearer is. they're rarely shed and are only taken off for their closest kin and mates

warrior bull shark mer!soap seeing human!ghost, seeing his skull mask and immediately knowing he's a high ranking warrior; one to be feared going off the numerous scars covering his body

an ideal and worthy mate, so long as he can prove his prowess

so he follows him as he's deployed on a mission near the ocean and is smitten when he sees how ruthless and capable he is; bathing himself in his enemies blood. he keeps his distance, not wanting to tempt fate but ghost spies the tip of his fin cutting through the water

and he's nothing if not an opportunist; kicking the bodies off the pier to the waiting jaws below

but soap? all he sees is the first step in a courting ritual

and he has to come up with something truly brilliant to match such a glorious offering

on ghost's part, it's been difficult getting people to understand the depths of his dependence on his mask. price thinks it's something to overcome, gaz and other soldiers just think it's an accessory to help with intimidation

the few partners he's tried to have thought he was someone to "fix"; nothing more than an object, a notch on their belt to prove how "good" of a partner they were to put in so much work to make him better. it always leaves him feeling violated, more so than if they'd just taken his mask off outright. one night stands were hardly worth it either; scratching a physical itch but falling so short of the intimacy and connection he craves that he feels worse off than he'd started

when he finally meets the mer that's been hunting him across the country, sees the bright red mask so artfully hewn and attached to his face?

it's like looking at a reflection of himself

he might have finally found the understanding he's been searching for

[leisi-lilacdreams]

posting this while i'm in the mood to share

maybe i'll get it done before the actual new years OTL

i want to a series of 12!boys in more japanese settings and i have some ideas

[genderkoolaid]

european italians when italian americans have their own pronunciations & spellings because we are a linguistically isolated diaspora & most of our families spoke regional dialects instead of standard italian when they immigrated anyways:

[butchniqabi]

white people who have very obvious guilt from taking part in gentrification: individual white renters arent responsible for gentrification, actually

[pygmy--tyrant]

one trc opinion i have that i don't really have an entire explanation for is that i think blue and henry are the only characters with like a normal knowledge of pop culture. like they've seen movies they've heard music. henry definitely more than blue but despite the fact that blue's tastes would be more weird I DO think she knows about more mainstream things. she has heard top 40 radio she has watched a disney channel movie she is capable of making references. everyone else on the other hand? gansey is not aware of anything that came into being this century. adam gives strong 'doesn't listen to music' energy. you ask him what he likes and he's like i don't know. i just don't listen to music. ronan is probably the most perplexing case because we already know he had a weird fucking childhood in which he only read alice in wonderland (and i believe it) and YET in his routine in cdth he has a designated 'movie night'. WHAT movies is he watching! i simply refuse to believe this man is capable of making a Reference. at least not a normal one. he'll just cite whatever irish myth his dad told him about as if everyone else is gonna be like oh you're so right ronan this is JUST like that part in the táin bó cúailnge. am i making any sense tonight ladies. gansey does not know who taylor swift is

[cubbihue]

Peri's no good terrible bad day just seems to get worse and worse!

Timmy's hoping his baby brother didn't hear the whole conversation. But with that expression on his face, Timmy suspects it may be a bit too late for him. Timmy's companion scurried away as soon as he noticed Poof. A Pixie can sense drama and conflict from miles away.

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[em0-opossum]

"can I be [x gender] if I..." "can I still call myself [x term] if..." yes. yes. if you like the term then use it. do whatever you want forever. labels are just little words we use to categorize our infinitely complex existential experiences on this floating rock !! no two people who use the same label are going to experience it the same way and that's the beauty of it !! use "contradictory" labels, use labels that don't make sense to anyone, change your label every day or not at all, explore anything and everything, use no labels at all or every label under the sun, confuse people or correct them or let them assume things rather than explaining, I promise nothing other people think about your identity is worth your happiness !!

[queermasculine]

Maybe a stupid question but one I've asked myself, what's the difference in between a butch and a masc for you ? Is there one ?

not a stupid question! "butch" is an older word with more meanings across time. to straight people it's been a military style haircut, a male name (still a few old guys named butch in the US), and a fairly uncomplicated synonym for masculine. to lesbians, bisexuals and gay men, it's been all of the above, but it's also had a whole host of other connotations specific to us and our own ways of loving/performing masculinity. a lot of the different meanings of butch have faded or fallen out of fashion over the years, but the word has more or less kept its purpose among lesbians, giving it the lesbian tint it has today.

"masc" is a much newer term, and unlike butch, i don't believe it's ever been widely used by the straight mainstream. (not a lot of grandpas named masc out there.) it's my impression that masc first spread out from gay guys on grindr, or at least that played a big part in popularizing it, and it's been used pretty much exclusively in an lgbt context ever since. in that sense it's the word with the more explicitly queer origin, despite having a much shorter history. having risen to popularity in the age of social media, masc carries none of the historical baggage of butch, and as such it's a more open-ended term, implying very little about a person beyond their masculinity. you can see this difference exemplified in google search results: while looking up butch will primarily yield information about the word's significance to lesbians, masc will net you more neutral descriptions, like "a person whose gender identity is masculine, but who is not necessarily a man."

despite all that, masc and butch usually serve the same function (to express the masculinity of the subject) and are used pretty much interchangeably in many contexts. also worth noting is that the lesbian association of butch is not a rule, just an observation i've made about modern perceptions. bisexual women have always used butch (and femme) alongside lesbians, and to this day you'll still encounter gay men – usually older – who identify as butch. so in conclusion, if you're trying to pick what label to use for yourself, i wouldn't worry about it too much. both terms have room enough for you in them.

[adiradirim]

From right to left: Beya Melamed; Bulgaria, 1890 - Jewish bride after the wedding; Turkey, early 20th century - Torah ark curtain made from a woman’s dress; Izmir, Turkey, 1929 - Wedding dress belonging to a Jewish family from Edirne, Turkey; early 20th century, gifted to museum exhibition in memory of Colombe Papo

Worn in the 19th and 20th century for weddings and other occasions by women across the Balkans and Anatolia, bindallı dresses were typically made of velvet in deep jewel tones. They were decorated with extensive gold embroidery of floral designs, which give this group of dresses their name, meaning thousand branches. This Ottoman-derived yet European-influenced style marked a transitional period between uses of traditional and modern western fashions.

The dresses - adopted from the surrounding culture as a fashionable item without any Jewish specificity - took on unique Jewish meaning through their use in the synagogue, where they became ark curtains, Torah mantles and binders, bimah covers, and the like, frequently with added dedicatory inscription. The donation of dresses and trousseau items by women to the synagogues created a personal bond between the women and the synagogue. The habit of donating these textiles to the synagogue endured long after the original embroidered bedclothes and dresses had gone out of fashion, and the transitional bindallı fashion thus remained alive in Sephardi synagogues long after the passing of the brides who wore the dresses.

[remma-demma]

Thinking about people not liking what happened at the end of dawntrail like… hmm.

Did you not remember the stuff with the Yok Huy. Nobody is gone if you remember them. The phrase that’s been with us for nearly the entire game, “For those we have lost….” Emet Selch entrusting us not only with the legacy of humanity in general but specifically with the memories of the Ancients and Elpis.

Just because people are gone doesn’t mean they aren’t still with us.

But the people of Neo-Alexandria are kept from that. They can’t remember anyone they’ve lost because their memories were stolen and locked away in an eternal purgatory, unable to move on or be reincarnated. The quest where you go to the graves in Heritage Found was a big moment where I was like. Huh. This fucking sucks actually.

The endless are just computer simulations, and they exist because Sphene can’t bear to let them go. Can’t even let her living citizens mourn or carry on legacies.

And that’s not even mentioning the fact that she needs the souls of innocent *living* people to power this all.

I think it’s a really good metaphor for the digital age, becoming disconnected from our irl communities, uploading your entire life on social media. Profiles of loved ones who have passed on. AI chat bots providing temporary comfort but no real human connection. All of that technology requiring enough energy to slowly but surely contribute to the destruction of our planet.

It all seems pretty clear to me as an allegory but like, I guess some people just didn’t make that connection? Or maybe they just don’t think about all the AI stuff in the same way I do.

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.