#language and respect

[ungiorno-nellavita]

The One Word I’d Ban Forever: "Whatever"

Daily writing promptIf you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?View all responses Words have power. They can heal, uplift, and inspire—but they can also dismiss, invalidate, and shut people down. If I could permanently remove one word from general usage, it would be “whatever.” At first glance, “whatever” might seem harmless, just a casual filler word.…

[lelouch]

disclaimer yo no hice el meme namás lo saqué del feisbu

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Vibes based grading system.

(for @epistemologys, who wanted some post-canon, teacher WWX)

[userarmand]

I wandered the world with him until very late in this modern age. Time eventually destroyed our love for one another. Time withered our gentle intimacy. Time devoured whatever conversation or pleasures we once agreeably shared.

— The Vampire Armand, Anne Rice (1998)

[a-compass-without-a-needle]

This is what happened after 3.1 isn't it?

[silly-jewish-vents]

Begging, screaming, pleading with gentiles to use Hashem, G-d, or The Tetragrammaton to refer to the Jewish god specifically. Being academic or whatever nonsense you’re using to rationalize it is no excuse to butcher the pronunciation of a name that is not meant to be spoken by the culture you’re referring to. You’re not being academic. You’re just being a jerk.

Edit/additional notes for clarification: this is specifically talking about attempted pronunciations/spellings of the Tetragrammaton in areas like Academia or in conversations about Judaism centered around Jews. This is not about in terms of a religious context such as church or mosque.

The spelling of G-d with a dash instead of an o is my personal comfort level for this post. For anyone for whom that isnt their custom that isnt an issue and they can absolutely use an oh and spell out G-d fully. I chose not to for this post. I may choose to spell it out in the future.

There is technically an argument to be made for exceptionally early israelite history like canaanite era usage. Personally still makes me and others uncomfortable and feels weird. That argument does not apply to temple or onward Jewish history era.

[yukinohiko]

caleb admires the parallels between your shared childhood and current habits. when you were younger, you often found yourself chasing after him, tripping over roots and stones, following him like a puppy chases its shadow.

he always caught you, don’t get him wrong. wiping your tears after a particularly painful fall, smoothing bandages over your bruised knees, kissing your flushed cherubic cheeks. teasing and cooing until you smiled again.

you often pushed at him, one time going so far as to bite his hand when he tried to chuck your chin.

“it’s not funny,” you warbled, blinking soft, wet eyes at him. a rainswept flower he wanted to pluck and preserve — but not yet.

“I know, I know,” he said instead as he had carried you back home, lifting you onto his back while you swung your legs and wrapped your little arms around his neck. “you’re all right, though. gege won’t let you ever get hurt, not really.”

you bite him the same way years later; cry the same, too. the sedative he’d given you is slipping through your system; as you stir, you fight him at every turn while he holds you still.

really, he thinks, it shouldn’t be this difficult. he’s doing this for your own good, don’t you see? yes, perhaps his methods are a bit unorthodox, perhaps a bit coercive, but he’s only ever had the best of intentions for you.

when he says all this, so fondly, so warmly, and tries to chuck your chin and make light of the situation, you bite him. just like you had all those years ago; your teeth land in the same place they once had. his blood rushes; something hot and slow pooling like honey in the bottom of his stomach.

he slowly lifts his gaze, pupils dilating as though he were the one drugged, from the bite mark up to your face. you see the glint in his eye; the curve of his lips.

“really? again?” his smile is too sharp. it only unsettles you more, though his voice is as indulgent as ever.

your same gege, the wolf shedding his sheepskin.

“it’s not funny,” you say again, the same warble trembling in your voice. “let me go, gege.”

“don’t cry,” he coos, kissing your tears away so tenderly. “gege would never hurt you, not really. you know that already — don’t you?”

[marciaillust]

bro fuck it im workposting. i did illustrations, i storyboarded, i directed. I did many cool things in 2024 and millions of people all over the world saw em. that has to count for something

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I got some sleep (not nearly enough but I digress) and I just want to say, to continue the posting from last night, that a lot of Westerners genuinely see the Latin alphabet as the default and don't even realize it, thinking of the alphabet as being the "true" writing system while everything else (Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, etc) is an outlier. It's to the point where they see any writing system that they can't IMMEDIATELY recognize and they assume that it has to be fictional, alien, nonsense because some part of them genuinely does not even consider that their idea of what language looks and sounds like is very much limited.

You can even see this in how a lot of native English speakers treat diacritics used in other languages that use the Latin alphabet or are transliterated; the idea that Ä or Ø are pronounced differently from A or O doesn't even cross a lot of people's minds. Those aren't real letters, they're just silly symbols for use in emoticons or for an aesthetic.

[thepoisonroom]

every time a customer tries to get me to take off my mask because they're allegedly hard of hearing and need to lip read i do dream of saying "is that true???" to them because that is MY disability that they're pretending to have to be a shithead and yet i don't want to say that because if i earnestly asked for accommodation and someone asked if i was lying i would want to sink into the floor!!! but if they are lying to me i think they should feel total devastating shame and go to hell probably.

[alvinjrsgun]

propaganda im NOOOOT falling for!!!!!!!

– infantilizing lottie's decisions

– purifying lottie's decisions

– justifying lottie's decisions

– defending lottie's decisions

– not accepting that your fave can be flawed and multi-faceted

– writing off trav's sa because of the shrooms/because he's a boy

– thinking that having a favorite character means swearing up and down they've never done anything wrong

– saying 'I miss medicated/normal lottie' instead of 'I miss pre-crash/stable lottie'

[dedalvs]

Why is there no " F " in High valyrian ??

It was destroyed in the Doom. 😔

[starcurtain]

Hey! I apologize if this question has been asked before since it seems like a pretty obvious one, but where do you think the idea of Aventurine being a sex slave came from? Other than the obvious factor of it being something fun for the fandom to mess around with, I mean.

It's something I kind of took for granted as being true before playing his quest, but after finishing it I realized there wasn't really any indication. The only thing I can really think of is his master's comments about him having a good body. Is there anything in his behavior you can think of that would lead to this conclusion if it wasn't a popular fan interpretation already/kind of just an easy conclusion to reach with a slave character?

(also kind of related but what do you think of the idea that he sleeps around/with his clients to make deals? he's obviously willing to sexualize himself with the boob window, but that doesn't necessarily mean he goes further.)

As far as I can tell, the idea that Aventurine was involved in sexual slavery comes from three (maybe four) places:

First, the comment from the master about Aventurine's appearance. People were holding this comment up as refutable proof that Aventurine was used in sexual slavery on top of being tossed into the Hunger Games; however, the response from other players on this interpretation, especially the Chinese side of the fandom, was very mixed, with a lot of people pointing out that the context in the game probably meant the slave master was talking about Aventurine's ability to attract attention from fans watching the literal Sigonian Hunger Games, rather than having a direct sexual-slavery connotation.

Second, the comment from Sparkle about stripping naked and getting on his knees for Sunday. This one has way more implication in English than I think it might for an Eastern audience, actually. In English, this pretty much sounds like Sparkle saying Aventurine trades sexual favors for success in his gambles. However, I suspect the original intention in Chinese was more about humiliation. Western audiences don't have as much history with honor-based prostration, i.e. accepting corporal humiliation as a form of reconciliation that Eastern audiences might be more familiar with. And in any case, Sparkle is Sparkle. She probably just went for the lowest blow she could think of here.

Third, the general assumption that if Sigonian slaves were being chained, branded, beaten, sent to death matches, etc., it seems logical that they would also be taken advantage of in other ways. I honestly think this is probably the fairest take--many, many real slaves around the world faced (and still face!) sexual abuse, so if slaves from Sigonia were treated so poorly you could make them fight to the death for entertainment, it stands to reason they were probably also not safe from other forms of assault. We also have no idea what happened to Kakavasha in any of the years between his being a tiny child fleeing the massacre and then being purchased as a slave as a late-teens-early-twenties person. That's a very long time for a child to have to survive on their own on an extremely hostile planet and not face risks of all kinds or end up needing to do unspeakable things to survive. So I think this is at least not that far-fetched, although it's important to say there's nothing in the game that directly confirms this.

And fourth: I read a tweet semi-recently that stated that one of the Chinese (or maybe it was Japanese) names for a quest Aventurine was involved in was actually a reference to a book about a teenage sexual assault survivor. However, when I tried to verify this myself, I couldn't find any quest Aventurine was in that was based on a book about sexual assault in either English, Chinese, or Japanese. It's possible I just missed something, but I'm taking this one with a bit of a grain of salt currently, since I can't confirm it personally.

Regarding your other question, about whether I think Aventurine sleeps around to make deals...

I definitely think he does not, for one major reason.

First, I will admit that Aventurine is definitely willing to use his appearance to his advantage. This is pretty obvious. He wears incredibly flashy clothes, baths himself in cologne, overloads on glittering golden jewels, and absolutely calls attention to his appearance when working with clients.

We see him actively doing this in his Moment Among the Stars video, where he is clearly using his looks as an equal tool (to his wealth), to daze his target.

It's not an accident that he says things like "Use me as you wish," with all the explicit connotations preserved. The implication is there. However, unless he was absolutely backed into a corner, I think that implication is all it will ever be.

The reason I think this is that the devs go out of their way to give Aventurine three fairly noticeable physical behaviors in his in-game scenes:

For one, he has some of the most closed off body language of any character in the game.

Aventurine's default conversation pose is arms crossed directly and tightly in front of himself. This is like "Defensive Body Language 101." By crossing your arms, you put a symbolic barrier between yourself and the person you're speaking to, and also ensure that your hands are up and available in case you actually need to physically defend yourself.

Virtually all of Aventurine's conversations take place from this stance, no matter who he is speaking to (from the Trailblazer all the way to Topaz). He deliberately closes his pose off and tightens up his silhouette, which just sends a glaring "Don't touch me" message.

This closing off is also blatantly apparent when you compare it to the deliberately open poses he strikes while trying to make himself seem accessible to others (like tempting clients) or seem powerful (to intimidate):

Complementing this habit of closing himself off is a second noticeable aspect of his body language: He frequently avoids eye contact to the point that he even holds conversations while entirely facing away from the person he's speaking to.

I might be a bit lenient and say maybe he's doing this to on purpose to be mysterious, whoo~~ But... in all honestly, he just does this with everyone, even with Ratio while trying to talk about an actual important issue (wanting to look into Acheron's real identity). Hell, even the fake Aventurine does it to himself!

We can even say that wearing the rose-tinted glasses in the first place is another intentional barrier, one Aventurine deliberately removes in specific moments to give people the (false) impression that he's "letting them in" to his circle:

Now, this might be a bit more complicated in Aventurine's case, because eye contact has a whole extra meaning when eyes are the defining trait of your species and come with particularly challenging racial stereotypes. So it may be that Aventurine is simply used to conducting conversation while looking away to minimize racial prejudice against his eyes' unique appearance.

However, I'd also argue that the devs deliberately turned his entire model away in cutscene after cutscene to create a clear sense of being inaccessible, unapproachable, and unwilling to engage in the physical intimacy of standing closely, directly facing, and staring at his conversation partners.

While he faces away, he controls both the figurative and the literal direction of conversation, forcing people to keep their eyes on him while he is free to move as he pleases. Over and over again, it just says "I want to be the one in control. I'm not afraid to show my back to you, but you are not welcome to come near me."

And, in fact, that's a third aspect of his character's body language that I am sure the devs did not include accidentally: More so than other characters, many of Aventurine's conversations are conducted from weirdly far distances. Like, half the time he's talking, he's standing all the way on the opposite side of the room!

This habit of speaking from a-larger-than-normal distance is apparent in the first scene with Himeko...

And then in just about every other conversation too:

The bubble is twenty feet in every direction.

Like yes, he does approach and have conversations like a normal person... sometimes... But it is significantly more noticeable with Aventurine than with other characters that he often conducts whole conversations--even with his allies--from a distance. Just genuinely weirdly far apart.

Leaving space for Gaiathra, I guess.

And it's because these significant decisions were made with Aventurine's in-game body language that, when he deliberately alters his own behavior, it is instantaneously noticeable.

In 2.0, he closes the distance, the glasses come off, and he gets directly up in the Trailblazer's face.

It's uncomfortable not just because the player is suddenly being loomed over, but because this behavior has already been subconsciously established for the player as out of character for Aventurine.

The barriers the character himself was putting up are deliberately stripped away so that he can use physicality and demanding eye contact to intimidate his target. He has to reverse his own normal body language in order to come across as domineering (and, I guess if you're into that, appealing in a domineering manner).

And ummmm, just a tiny aside here because I can't resist:

This does mean that when the game goes out of its way to demonstrate Aventurine altering his own normal habit of distant and defensive body language, it is absolutely intentional.

Yes, this is a Ratiorine post in disguise. There literally isn't any other character in the game that Aventurine is shown being comfortable standing so close to and interacting with in this manner. This doesn't occur in every one of their scenes, but Ratio is the only character that this happens with repeatedly. It's not an accident that the devs literally added "They were walking side-by-side" as flavor text.

But look, I'll be fair: There's a great example of this in Aventurine's scene with Acheron too, where he closes the distance and attempts to make eye contact with her--seeking her guidance and closeness--and she is actually the one stepping away, speaking with her back turned, demonstrating her power and control (and issues with connection!) in that scene.

Anyway, this was a whole longggg tangent into analyzing Aventurine's body language, but my point is that, overall, the devs deliberately adjusted his model's actions in-game to give the impression of a person who clearly wants to be in control of every interaction he has with other people, who insists on distance over intimacy, and whose stances and habits suggest that he is significantly less accessible and open than his "Use me as you wish" motto might suggest.

Long story longer, I think that there is almost zero chance Aventurine is willingly ceding control over himself or the actions expected of him to anyone he isn't 100% comfortable with, and I think that using physical intimacy of any kind would be an absolute last resort for him. Frankly, he comes across as more likely to shoot himself in the foot than let someone he doesn't trust lay hands on him.

To me, he reads very much as "You may look, but you may not touch."

[sunn-kist]

new fandom rule. no one is allowed to headcanon a character as being fluent in ASL unless you are familiar with and can explain the significance of a) the Milan Conference of 1880 b) the DPN movement.

[greghatecrimes]

being one of house’s fellows would be so fun. he’d tell me to do something while calling me lesbian or dyke or some clever slur-adjacent pun related to being nonbinary and i’d answer with “okay, fag :)” because i know what he is. and neither one of us would report the other to HR

[sunnyrmrez]

Next part of the silly thing