#this is how i relax

[kinixuki]

A cluster of buildings

[candlelit-acedamia]

People enjoy gifs, right?

[bloody-wonder]

lymond & themes: identity

so as you probably remember from my excessive freaking out about it, two weeks ago i finished the lymond chronicles and had mixed feelings about the ending. on the one hand these books felt like the best thing i’ve ever read but on the other they left me extremely frustrated. now that the fog is gradually lifting i want to go back and get to the bottom of why the last two books, if i try to take a rational unbiased look at them, missed the mark of my expectations so completely. i will probably make several posts about this and the first one is gonna be about lymond’s identity crisis.

(i wrote this mostly to put my thoughts in order but i’m very interested in your opinions as well, especially if you also felt let down by the ending)

at the end of pif, in an absurdly brutal type of climax only dorothy dunnett can get away with, lymond is forced to kill his own son. (i believe khaireddin is lymond’s and oonagh’s child not just bc it makes more sense thematically but also bc of this argument: although gabriel didn’t care for either child, he did arrange it so that one of them lived in relative comfort while the other one was sold into sexual slavery and it makes no sense for him to arrange the harsher fate for a child that wasn’t lymond’s, especially given that he would’ve had to additionally switch them). if i overlook the over the top absurdism of the live chess game, i have to admit it does bring one of lymond’s key features - him being the mastermind manipulator, the calculating puppeteer - to its extreme, forcing him into the role of a god which he didn’t ever exactly shun, although “the position is already adequately filled”, and forcing him to pay for it by having him solve a kind of trolley problem. the narrative puts him into a position where he has to make an impossible choice and making that choice nearly destroys his psyche.

this, to me, is the gravest psychological problem that lymond had to face throughout the series. the challenges he faces before pif have more external nature and the biggest internal issue he has (apart from lingering pre-canon trauma) is that he kinda is too cool for this world and doesn’t know what to do with his life. although emotionally devastating on the in-universe level, lymond having to kill his son is extremely narratively satisfying bc it makes some of the most admirable qualities of our hero lead him to disaster. these qualities - the aforementioned cleverness as well as his resolve to sacrifice a child in order to free the world of a megalomaniac psychopath, readiness to sacrifice his own happiness, impartiality and lack of prejudice against the child of his enemies - are intrinsic to lymond’s character and they are what makes him take an action that throws him into the pit of despair. basically, forced to choose the lesser of two evils, he did everything right and yet there can be no triumph, no satisfaction bc the traits that made him make that choice are a part of who he is, bc his is the hand of the executioner. it doesn’t matter that the tragedy is not his fault “objectively” bc subjectively he knows he is part of the reason everything happened as it did.

his inner integrity thus compromised, his emotional arc post-pif had to be about reconciling these two truths and incorporating what he did into his understanding of himself in a way that doesn’t make him go mad. learning to live with it, to put it simply. this was where my primary interest as a reader lay and i really hoped dunnett would write a “dealing with your trauma” narrative that doesn’t resort to the “x cures trauma” trope. in the end she did not deliver but this i will maybe talk about later in a separate post. what i’m getting at in this one is that somewhere between pif and checkmate the issue of having murdered his son became inferior to the issue of mommy having possibly had a sex life outside marriage.

you see, for me it was absolutely obvious and essential that a big part of why lymond refuses to go back to scotland is that he can’t bring himself to face his motherland, to look his mother and the rest of his family in the eyes after what he did (not to mention, having to meet kuzum - the living reminder of what happened). this is one of the reasons why i am so annoyed with philippa in trc - bc her function is to call lymond out for not having the courage to face his problems, the problems in question being his shady heritage and somehow not the fact that he freaking caused his son’s death and had to watch it happen before his eyes! at first i thought this is philippa being insensitive but then i realized that it’s just the narrative not so subtly replacing one major psychological problem with what to me looks like a much lesser one in order to make the latter the narrative and thematic focus of the last book. we’re led to believe that whatever feelings lymond has on account of khaireddin he buried in russia and that although the matter still weighs on his mind it’s not as important anymore as his very probable bastardy. he uses his worst memory as a scathing riposte in a conversation with margaret lennox and later comments to philippa that his way of dealing with trauma is facing his triggers (playing chess or music, having sex) head on and doing whatever he has to do until he becomes numb to the grief it causes him. which is certainly unhealthy but fine by me since it’s in-character for lymond. my question is however - is it in-character for him to care about sybilla being an adulteress and himself being a bastard more than about having killed his son? bc checkmate makes it look like the former issue is much more difficult for him to overcome than the latter.

no matter how i turn this aspect in my head i simply can’t bring it into accordance with my idea of lymond. firstly, why would he care (so much) about sybilla’s “virtue”? lymond is a man of the world, he has seen some shit and he knows what kind of person gavin was. while his dealings with women certainly reflect the period typical beliefs about chastity and if you look closely he may even be called low key misogynistic (lisa hopkins has made some interesting remarks about this p. 12), i don’t think that lymond, being so well-versed in self-reflection and irony, would not be self-aware enough to simply follow the mores of his time uncritically and hold sybilla for a lesser woman just bc she had an affair. like many people lymond probably had an idealized vision of his mother in his head, but i don’t think he’s a kind of person who, when this vision is shattered, would discard his mother altogether. 

secondly, why would lymond care (so much) about being a bastard? sure, a part of our identity can be defined as being a child of one’s own parents - something lymond gets partly deprived of when he starts to suspect that he’s an illegitimate child. but has lymond’s identity ever really hinged so much on being a rightful, legitimate crawford? if you ask me he’d be the last person to want any connection to gavin. lymond has been estranged from his family for many years, then after gok he spends a very long time travelling, gets ties to other places like sevigny and gives up his title of master of crawford to his nephew. one of his most appealing features is that he seems to be from everywhere and from nowhere at the same time. lymond’s family is certainly very important to him but is it really the cornerstone of his identity? in checkmate, during a family argument at an inn in dieppe, richard asks lymond what he is and his answer is to open the window and let richard hear the people in the streets chanting his name for he is the one who has just reconquered calais for france. this deliciously overdramatic gesture is very important bc in my opinion it showcases exactly what i’m getting at - that lymond’s identity isn’t built on his origins but on his achievements. the french are chanting his “french” name (sevigny) but the important thing is they still have in mind the hero who made this national triumph possible. and if lymond’s identity is based on his own (mis)deeds and achievements rather than on someone else’s (mis)deeds committed before he’d even been born, then how can the plot about the mystery of his heritage overshadow the one about the trauma of and the blame for his son’s death in this account of his identity crisis?

i can see how after finding out that he’s a bastard lymond would’ve been shocked at first but then would’ve come around and healed the wounds to his ego with self-deprecating remarks, as he does. i don’t think he’d have made this big of an issue out of the whole matter, especially given that he only needed to talk to sybilla to find out the whole story and that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. (the idea that he might not be able to talk to sybilla bc of other things, idk maybe the ones having to do with killing his own child, is not addressed by the story). but what he did instead is shutting sybilla off completely which happens to be the major hurdle of the last book and consequently of the entire story. the conflict gets resolved and his identity restored only after he finds out that he is not, in fact, a bastard. the narrative wants me to believe that lymond really cared about not being a bastard that much but i simply don’t find it plausible. maybe i’m looking at this with too modern an eye but it seems to me as not big enough an issue that it can just hijack the climax of the whole saga. and given that this honestly melodramatic subplot has replaced what i think of as the most compelling challenge lymond had to face, i felt cheated of catharsis.

[thevastnessof]

my mom is getting me a bike as a birthday/graduation gift and im so excited to get even more lost in neighborhoods and parks bc i can cover far more distance in a short amount of time

[aggressiveviking]

these two should cuddle already!

[moodyvoid]

Listen to true crime podcasts and play Slime Rancher

[emichelle]

[mywickedtruth]

[motherflunker]

I’m playing around with a coloring the finale. Good, bad? Who knows D 

[raccooncityaliens]

I'm somehow at another uni party which is more like a cabin getaway and I keep finding myself alone at the fire

Mostly because if I can sit by a fire in the middle of nowhere I WILL BE THERE no matter if there's anyone else

Just... Big fire.... Good...

[chrisbangs]

3RACHA :: MAHAGRID

[soothifying-sounds-asmr]

undefined

Playing a Homemade Huaca, a Three Chambered Vessel Flute by kinfolkcermaics

[turtletoria]

wordgirl is on the brain again 

[bloody-wonder]

the gritty realism of aftg characters speaking german

so the other day i read this meta about neil, nicky and the twins speaking german and, although it's fun and interesting, it was written by a native german speaker so most of it is pretty unrealistic - which ig is in keeping with the spirit of aftg, but nevertheless it inspired me to share my own thoughts on how these people who haven't been learning german for that long tbh would actually talk.

an accent

they all have it

yes even neil and nicky have it bc several years are not enough to get rid of it

the thing about the accent is that it's a Bitch. you aren't gonna get rid of it easily. learning a language is one thing, but getting rid of the accent is a different matter entirely - if you wanna do it, you'll have to fucking dedicate yourself to it, take regular classes with a pronunciation coach or some shit

yeah i know neil had to blend in but wanting or needing to have no accent won't really help you get rid of it. it doesn't work like that unfortunately

although nicky has been learning german longer than neil, his accent is worse bc he didn't have an additional motivation of having to blend in. usually, people will progress to a certain level where their accent doesn't hinder the understanding of what they say and stop at that. even if you really want to get rid of it, it won't happen or will happen very slowly just bc subconsciously you know that people understand you anyway. we don't know anything about erik but i doubt he's that person who will correct nicky's pronunciation after every sentence. ig nicky gets better at it when he moves to germany for good but in aftg he has that juicy american accent

the twins' accents are atrocious bc they don't have any motivation to improve their speech nor do they regularly talk to native speakers. they pronounce v as w (instead of f), z as z (instead of ts) and a as ei (instead of uh). and yeah ik andrew has eidetic memory but unless it influences how his toungue moves in his mouth it's not gonna be of much help

all of them say schwul (gay) instead of schwül (humid) regularly bc umlauts are difficult. aaron is probably the only one who gets mad at himself for messing up and tries to pronounce schwül correctly. the rest of them don't care and are content with only ever using the word schwul in both cases bc if god didn't want you to call the weather gay, he wouldn't have made the word schwul much easier to pronounce. nicky can pronounce both words but uses schwul more often on purpose

grammar

as far as i remember the twins had german in high school - and you can't really learn a language in a basic school course. nicky helped them a bit but i doubt that took the form of regular lessons several times a week so their grammar is probably all over the place

der/die/das nutella? how about der/die/das vogel instead?? grammatical genders are totally random and they are near impossible to learn, especially if your first language is english. you learn the genders of the words you use often in your day-to-day and professional life but with the rest you just kinda rely on your intuition and hope for the best. this is where andrew's eidetic memory would come in handy, but the rest of them are screwed. they probably just live their lives misgendering german nouns. if you speak german, just imagine all those aftg dialogues that are supposed to be in german, except half of the nouns are misgendered :)

mixing up dativ and genitiv? how about using exclusively nominativ for all the words in the sentence?

before you utter a sentence in german you have to think very carefully about your life choices: is the sentence in the past tense? do you need sein or haben? if it's in the present tense, is the verb you're gonna use separable, perchance? is there a subordinate sentence? bc you'll need a different word order for that. the german sentence is a mine field that can be navigated in spoken language only if you actually practice your speaking skills intensively and regularly which i don't think the twins have ever done or do. and it looks like they speak pretty fast and don't think ahead about what they're gonna say so i'm 99% sure all the grammar gets thrown out the window

they wouldn't really mix up formal you and informal you bc there's no one they have to address formally in german. they don't use Sie, it's not on their minds. what they do mix up however is du (informal you singular) and ihr (informal you plural)

fluency and cultural references

nicky's german is the best out of the four of them bc his relationship with his partner happens in this language. the reasons are practical (he probably talks to erik rather often) as well as psychological (what purposes you use the language for and what people you speak to in it have a big impact on your progress). btw he and erik probably only talk in german and can't switch to english at will bc when you establish a relationship in a language it becomes "the official language of your relationship". it's weird but this is how it is for many international multilingual couples

the rest of them are hardly fluent bc fluency isn't determined just by how long and where you've been learning the language but also by how often you use it and for what. it doesn't look like neil and the twins talk german very often and they use it only as their "private language" - which basically means they don't use it for anything. unless they will regularly join in on nicky and erik's conversations their german will get worse and worse

as for the very niche cultural references, i doubt that andrew and aaron really know any. neil knows some but doesn't really care anymore bc he doesn't live in germany anymore. with foreign culture, especially with all the proverbs and memes and old media you're supposed to learn as you grow up, there's the information itself and the emotional connotation that people who have grown up in this culture attach to it - and while you can explain the former to an outsider, you can't make them feel the latter. which is why i believe all the stuff neil and the twins learn, they forget very quickly. nicky maybe not so much, just bc erik probably talks to him about it constantly

tl;dr aftg characters speaking foreign languages fluently works only if you don't think about it too much ://

[black-quadrant]

how tf do people just relax

[arty-tardigrade]

I'm just here hyperfixating on the jaded, foul-mouthed kiddo. You know how it is.