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Transcript Episode 95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about our default assumptions for learning new words – whether as kids, in a classroom, or while travelling. But first, we have new merch.

Gretchen: We have three new designs for merch. First off, we have some t-shirts, stickers, and badges, buttons, pins, whatever you call them, that say, “Ask me about linguistics.” They look like one of those classic, red “Hello, my name is” stickers only with “linguistics” instead of you name for those times when you’re maybe at a conference or an event or going about your life, and you want people to know that they can skip the small talk with you and talk directly about linguistics with you.

Lauren: We also have t-shirts that say, “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have,” which is not untrue.

Gretchen: This is a classic kind of sentence in linguistics more commonly found as “More people have been to Russia than I have,” but that was less funny and self-referential on a t-shirt. These are called the “comparative illusion,” which is when the first time you read that sentence with the comparative in it – “More people have been to Russia than I have” – you’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense. Wait. Hang on. What does that even mean?” That’s the illusion part. The illusion is that it makes sense. If you think about it longer, then it doesn’t make sense.

Lauren: It doesn’t make sense.

Gretchen: If you wear a shirt that says this – or a hat, or you carry around a mug or a sticker or a tote bag – that says these things with, of course, the word “shirt” swapped out for the relevant object – because we know how to do that – then people might do a double-take when they see it. You can confuse people, which sounds fun.

Lauren: This t-shirt is available in an old school typewriter-looking font. All of our shirt options are there on Redbubble with a range of different cuts and colours. We have relaxed-fitted classic t-shirts as well as hoodies, zip hoodies, and tank tops.

Gretchen: We have a secret third design, which we will be talking about later this episode – dun dun dun.

Lauren: Mm, suspense and mysteries.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode is about the word “do” in English, and why it’s weird compared to basically every other language, and how this only started happening in the past few hundred years.

Lauren: To listen to this and many other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Plus, patrons got to find out about this new merch a few weeks ago. If you become a patron now, you’ll be the first to find out about future new merch and other behind-the-scenes updates. And you get to hang out on the Lingthusiasm Discord server to chat with other linguistics fans. Plus, of course, getting a whole bunch of bonus episodes and just helping us continue making the show for you.

[Music]

Lauren: I want you to imagine you’re visiting a place where you don’t speak the language. You’re standing in a field with one of your new friends. It’s a lovely day. You’re enjoying the scenery. And a rabbit scurries by. That person you’re standing with says, “Gavagai.” What do you think they are referring to?

Gretchen: I wanna say that they’re talking about the rabbit. This is a word that means “rabbit,” probably, in whatever that language is.

Lauren: Possibly.

Gretchen: But, in principle, it could mean a lot of other things as well. It could mean “scurrying” or “creature,” “animal,” or, as the philosopher V. W. O. Quine said, “Lo, un-detached rabbit parts,” which is just a very bizarre mental image.

Lauren: This is indeed a classic linguistic thought experiment from the philosopher V. W. O. Quine.

Gretchen: It’s also found in philosophy of language as well as linguistics. The philosophers sometimes also talk about this anecdote from a more philosophical perspective. The thing that’s exciting to me about it as a linguist is that it’s this pretty good approximation and distillation of the kind of challenge that you have when you’re trying to figure out some words in another language, and you don’t have someone or a book that can do some translation for you. You’re just like, “Well, here’s this word that’s been said in this context. What do I think it refers to?”

Lauren: I also appreciate how this one little thought experiment, interactional moment, set Quine on a philosophical train of thought that took up an entire book. Quine’s 1960 book Word and Object takes this thought experiment as its starting point to tease apart a lot of the issues around how we make and share meaning, especially across languages.

Gretchen: He’s got 200-plus pages of pretty dense philosophical argument around this idea of how we make and share meaning, and that this initial moment – we have some biases as humans towards what we think people are likely to be referring to when they give us a word randomly like that.

Lauren: And some systematic ways we can go about confirming whether our hypotheses and biases are correct there.

Gretchen: Right. We might be wrong. This might be a particular species of rabbit. This could be a young rabbit, an old rabbit, a male rabbit, a female rabbit. There could be more that we’re not aware of in this particular context, but it gives us this start. We tend to assume that words refer to whole objects in this particular way and not just the rabbit’s ears.

Lauren: The Gavagai thought experiment has almost gone from thought experiment to fairy tale in linguistics and philosophy. I feel like it’s a story that we tell and share. It’s always “gavagai.” It’s always a rabbit. It’s become immortalised in this way.

Gretchen: “Gavagai” is such a catchy name. He’s just a little guy. It’s this cute rabbit.

Lauren: Quine did some great branding there.

Gretchen: We decided to make some merch that has this great woodcut-type sketch of a rabbit with the caption “Gavagai” and “Lo, un-detached rabbit parts” from our artist, Lucy Maddox.

Lauren: Fun fact about the quote that we put on the t-shirt. “Lo, an un-detached rabbit part” is something that I always was told as part of the story of Gavagai.

Gretchen: Me, too, yeah. Is that not what he said?

Lauren: Going back to Word and Object, he never quite used that combination of words in reference to Gavagai. He did say, “Lo, a rabbit,” or “It could mean ‘un-detached rabbit part’,” but he never used this particular combination of words. It’s kind of become part of us perpetuating the folk story rather than us directly and specifically referencing Quine.

Gretchen: I think because “Lo” has this old time-y feeling to it, and also that “un-detached rabbit part” is such a weird and memorable concept, that, yeah, I guess people must’ve just shoved them together in memory because I could’ve sworn that’s how I was taught it. Fascinating. This is our tribute to the folk tale aspect of Gavagai. Also, because it’s very catchy, and it’s a fun little name.

Lauren: This is our third item of merch that we have available now. It’s incredibly cute. We have it in a range of colours. It looks amazing on different coloured t-shirts. We’re so happy to get to continue the story of Gavagai.

Gretchen: It’s got this whole retro-futurism Vaporwave aesthetic if you combine the colours in particular combinations, or you can get this very traditional woodblock look depending on which colour combination you pick. I think it’s really fun as both historical and also modern.

Lauren: I think there’s always been something charming about it being a rabbit.

Gretchen: There’re other linguistic experiments that also involve rabbits. We’ve talked about how Bill Labov, who’s a famous sociolinguist, did a rabbit experiment with some children where they were feeling shy, and so he had them talk to a rabbit instead of to an experimenter. There’s a nice tradition of rabbits in linguistics. Gavagai is also available on children’s t-shirts and onesies if you have a kid who you want to dress up as a famous linguistic thought experiment.

Lauren: Speaking of kids, I feel like a kid would be very chill with just having a rabbit pointed out with “gavagai” because they have to make sense of the world as they’re living in it. Children tend to have this assumption that you are referring to a whole object. You’re not just referring to the ears of the rabbit, but you’re referring to the whole rabbit at once.

Gretchen: Yeah. This is called the “whole object assumption,” and it comes up quite a bit when people are analysing child language acquisition. How do kids learn so many words so fast? Part of it is because they’re often making these sorts of assumptions, which are sometimes wrong, about the generalisability of the words that they’re learning. They’re often at this particular object level of “rabbit” or “truck” rather than “wheels” or “ears” or “yellow” or “fuzzy” or “animal,” which are both more or less levels of granularity as applied to the object. They’re often doing it at this object level.

Lauren: I feel like language learning apps and textbooks also sit at the whole object bias level as well. They also make use of this.

Gretchen: Yeah. I’m taking an ASL class at the moment, and the textbook that we’re using, which I’m told is a very popular textbook, called Signing Naturally, it does this thing where it’s trying not to imply that ASL signs have these direct translations into English words. It’s trying to get you to consider them as meanings themselves that may not correspond directly with other languages because it’s its own language. Sometimes, it’ll give several possible English translations – English words or phrases to translate a sign – and sometimes, wherever it’s possible, it’ll give pictures instead. For example, for clothing, you’ll have a drawing of a dress, but it’s a drawing of a particular dress that has a colour and a style to it. Then you have to make this generalisation in your head of “That’s a dress, and I’m probably meant to assume that this is the sign for the concept of dresses in general and not be overly narrow on the specific style of dress or overly general on this could be any article of clothing.” Or they’ll give a photo of a dog, and you’re supposed to conclude, okay, this is a sign for “dog” in general not “Fido the dog,” or “golden retriever,” or “mammal.”

Lauren: It would be very impressive and counter-intuitive if you learnt the word for “dalmatian” before “dog,” or they just went through and being like, “The only dog you’ll ever need to refer to is Snuggles here.”

Gretchen: Dalmatians, apparently, are often d/Deaf, so there’s a whole section about dalmatians in this textbook.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: This is also based on your level of awareness of the granularity that humans tend to communicate at with pictures. This is not uncommon for language textbooks and apps that they’re trying to avoid translation, which is all very well, but instead, they’re doing this baked-in level of assumption about what this one picture corresponds to which is inevitably less general than a word because the word “dog” refers to the whole class of dogs, but a picture of a dog necessarily has to be a specific dog that looks a particular way. I mean, alternatively, they could give you a whole bunch of different pictures of different kinds of dogs and refer to them all as “dog,” which is more like what a baby has because they’re learning the language and the whole world, but in practice, it does work pretty effectively to rely on this type of assumption. This thought experiment can tell us about why.

Lauren: I also like that Quine chose a nice, almost textbook animal. It’s a small, independent – if you don’t have rabbits in your ecosystem, you probably have some other small, scurrying, possibly mammalian creature that you can substitute in. It’s a nice in-the-real-world object, but not all of us walk in and start looking at random animals passing by. If you’re starting to do, say, linguistic fieldwork in a language you don’t know much about, the question is always “Where do you start?”

Gretchen: When I’ve taken classes where you bring in a speaker of a language that nobody in the class knows anything about, there’s often a grad student in a different department at the university who’s like, “Yeah, I’ll do this side job. Sounds fun.” We’ve often started with greetings, which is polite, and then sometimes with some verbs. But we have this shared classroom context, which is also artificial.

Lauren: Sometimes, you just want to get a sense of the kind of way that words sound and the way the language feels. One really common way of getting a sense of the language is to collect a wordlist, so using a shared language and asking someone to translate common words into their language.

Gretchen: The wordlist thing is such an interesting puzzle because if you’re thinking about, okay, I wanna compare several different languages or compare this language to other languages that’ve had people do documentation on them, you wanna try to collect a very similar wordlist across different languages. Also, languages arise in different cultural contexts, and they say different things. What one language might have words for might not be the same as another language. How do you pick a set of words that languages are really likely to have in common?

Lauren: The good news is you don’t have to do that work. There is a list. Much like Gavagai is a meme, I feel like the Swadesh List is a bit of linguistics meme in the language documentation world. This is a standardised list of common vocabulary that people will often collect for a language that they’re documenting.

Gretchen: This is a list that’s named after a language named Morris Swadesh, by the way. When I first encountered it as a grad student, I was like, “Ooo, what does it mean to ‘swadesh’ something?” and it just means to name it after a guy.

Lauren: I thought it was an acronym. I was like, “Yeah, ‘W’ probably stands for ‘words’,” and it just kind of didn’t flesh it out. We could retronym it.

Gretchen: The thing about Swadesh Lists is reading through them is this fun experience. There’s many Swadesh lists because people can’t agree, obviously, on what the most basic words should be or how many of them there are. I think Swadesh’s first list was 100 words, and then there’s a 207-word version.

Lauren: Why the seven? That’s what I’ve always wanted to know.

Gretchen: There was this 100-word list. Then someone else came up with this 200-word list. But the 100-word list actually had seven words that were on it that weren’t on the 200-word list. They got merged together with these extra seven words.

Lauren: I’ve always wondered where those seven words came from because it made it sound very intentional and scientific.

Gretchen: Absolutely not.

Lauren: Just to be very clear, the Swadesh List is like, Morris Swadesh, who was a brilliant linguist, but he came up with this list based on his intuitions about what were words that were likely to be existent in as many of the world’s languages as possible while also being independent of cultural influences.

Gretchen: I think we should just read this – at least the 100-word list, which is shorter.

Lauren: Oh, yeah.

Gretchen: People can click through to the longer 207-word list if you wanna see what the expansion pack looks like. Let’s start with our 100 starter Pokémon Swadesh list and maybe give a bit of commentary about the list. They’re very handily grouped – at least this list that I have is grouped into topics. We have words related to the here and now.

Lauren: “I,” “you, “we,” “this,” “that,” “who,” “what.” This is the classic order that I have done Swadesh Lists in, absolutely.

Gretchen: Then there’s some versions of the list that split “you” into “you (singular)” and “you (plural)” because, of course, English merges those, but most languages don’t. Then we have words related to quantity or amount.

Lauren: “Not,” “all,” “many,” “one,” “two,” “big,” “long,” “small.”

Gretchen: And then a few words related to people.

Lauren: “Woman,” “man,” “person.”

Gretchen: And animals.

Lauren: “Fish,” “bird,” “dog,” “louse.”

Gretchen: The four animals.

Lauren: I mean, the absolute irritation of living your life with lice, I can see how he would’ve put this on the list.

Gretchen: Lice are truly a ubiquitous part of the human experience, unfortunately. Then we have a section of words that are related to parts of plants.

Lauren: “Tree,” “seed,” “leaf,” “root,” “bark.”

Gretchen: There’s a clarification that this is “bark of tree” not “bark of dog.”

Lauren: But also because the next word on the list is “skin” as in “[person]” because tree bark and human skin can actually be the same word in a lot of languages, so they just wanna really clarify.

Gretchen: Then there’s a bunch of words related to internal parts of the body.

Lauren: “Skin,” “flesh,” “blood,” “bone,” “grease,” “egg,” “horn” – I think we’re moving beyond humans here – “tail,” “feather” – oh, we’re back to humans – we’ve got “hair,” “head,” “ear,” “eye,” “nose,” “mouth,” “tooth,” “tongue,” “claw,” “foot,” “knee,” “hand,” “belly,” “neck,” “breast,” “heart,” “liver.” We’ve gone all the way through the body.

Gretchen: A sort of interesting assortment of words related to body parts both of humans and animals and also plants – like “seed” and “leaf.” Then we’ve got a bunch of verbs related to actions the human body can do.

Lauren: “Drink,” “eat,” “bite,” “see,” “hear,” “know,” “sleep,” “die,” “kill,” “swim,” “fly,” “walk,” “come,” “lie,” “sit,” “stand,” “give,” “say.”

Gretchen: Then we’ve got some words related to natural weather-y phenomena.

Lauren: “Sun,” “moon,” “star,” “water,” “rain,” “stone,” “sand” – that’s beyond weather. We’re just into nature now. “Earth,” “soil,” specifically, “cloud” – “not fog,” it says – “smoke.”

Gretchen: You can get a sense of human activities.

Lauren: “Fire,” “ashes,” “burn,” “path.”

Gretchen: Also “mountain” in this set. It’s hard to break them up into groups because they follow this trajectory of “burn,” “path,” “mountain.” I can write this short story.

Lauren: Again, very clearly “not hill.”

Gretchen: Also, English alphabetical order is almost guaranteed not to be alphabetical order in any other language, so this is not gonna help at all.

Lauren: It is actually a good flow, and it’s really nice to have them semantic and not in some random alphabetical order when you’re talking to people because they’re gonna be thinking of “smoke” more easily if you’ve just said “cloud” than if you’ve just said “small.”

Gretchen: There’s a selection of colours. Our basic colour list has five colours.

Lauren: “Red,” “green,” “yellow,” “white,” “black.”

Gretchen: Yeah. That’s a choice. After “black” comes “night,” which, again, semantically related.

Lauren: Also true.

Gretchen: Then we’ve got a few adjective-y things.

Lauren: “Hot,” “cold” – both of those specifically of weather – “full,” “new,” “good,” “round,” “dry.”

Gretchen: Then just finally, all by itself with no real semantic category-ness –

Lauren: “Name.”

Gretchen: – which, you know, is an important word, but yeah.

Lauren: Swadesh is there with 99 words, and he’s just like, “Ah, that’s a really good one. Got to get that in.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: These are concepts that he thinks are ubiquitous to the human experience, which may or may not be the case. Not everyone lies in places where there are mountains or where there’s enough water to swim in. There certainly are some aspects of these that you could definitely dispute. But it’s kind of fun to be like, “Yeah, we all have the moon. That’s neat.”

Lauren: And it’s always been a sense of like, “This is just a list not because it is necessarily objectively the most universalisable set of words,” but it’s just like, “Look, I think this is a pretty good list.” And everyone’s been like, “It’s pretty good. It does the job. We get 100 words, and we can start comparing languages.” I’ve definitely done this with a whole bunch of different dialects and, as I’m going through, being like, “Oh, these people have kept a final K on these words. That’s interesting.” It does the job, and we’re all pretty realistic about that.

Gretchen: There’re lots of people who’ve proposed alternative versions of Swadesh lists, including Swadesh himself who proposed several different versions because there’s this sense that this is an evolving thing. But like, names for parts of the body – that makes sense. The longer list, we’re not gonna read all 207, but it has more verbs on it. It has more kinship terms, so it’s got “mother,” “father,” “wife,” “husband,” some of these kinship terms. It’s just got more of everything. You can expand it in various directions. Something that I think is really neat about the Swadesh lists is because they’re this thing that has this cultural history of being collected in a lot of different places, you can try to do these very large-scale analyses comparing a whole bunch of languages because, for many of them, something like a Swadesh List exists, whereas a list that had a whole bunch of more culturally specific items on there – so there’s not a lot of food on this list other than “fish” and like –

Lauren: “Liver.”

Gretchen: – “leaf” and “bark.” Because with food, you could run into this problem of like, well, okay, in this part of the world, we wanna have “rice” on the list, and in this part of the world, we wanna have “corn” on the list, and in this part of the world, we wanna have “potatoes,” we wanna have “wheat,” or we wanna have something else for your staple starch, which is really culturally important but changes depending on where you are.

Lauren: In the corner of the world that I work in with the Sino-Tibetan language family, there is actually an area-specific set of word lists that are much more culturally specific and were created by a team looking at, specifically, the relationship between all the languages in this big family. You do get a lot more words that, if I were just translating them into English, would be “rice,” but you have, like, “rice as it is growing on the rice plant,” and then you have “unhusked rice,” and then you have “husked, uncooked rice,” and “cooked rice” – all of these things we just translate as “rice” as like, non-agricultural English speakers who eat rice as one of many different staple carbs, but much more of that cultural specificity that Swadesh was actually trying to avoid with this list of 100 words.

Gretchen: But I have so many different words for ways that I can eat potatoes.

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: Or bread. They could be French fries. They could be chips. They could be mashed and baked. And it can be a baguette or a loaf. But yeah, there are different levels of cultural specificity. I also find it interesting that there was another linguist who came up with a Swadesh list for signed languages. Because if you do this traditional Swadesh list for a signed language, a lot of sign languages use fairly similar ways of expressing pronouns like “I” and “you” because you can use pointing, and body parts because you can point to the body part or otherwise indicate it some way.

Lauren: You’ve got them right there.

Gretchen: So, if you compare signed languages, and your list contains one third body parts – which this 100 Swadesh list is at least a quarter body parts – you might be like, “Yeah, they’re all totally so related because they all indicate the eye by pointing to the eye.” He was like, “Look, we’ve got to have a list that’s not like that for comparing sign languages that has other words on it because otherwise you’re gonna overestimate this relationship. The first 10 words on James Woodward’s sign language Swadesh List – they are in alphabetical order, which, you know, gives you a sense of the spread – are “all,” “animal,” “bad,” “because,” “bird,” “black,” “blood,” “child,” “count,” and “day.” Again, fairly cross-cultural concepts but not as many body parts.

Lauren: That’s cool. I didn’t know there was a sign-specific list.

Gretchen: It’s neat to think about the different types of relationships that a Swadesh List can be trying to express.

Lauren: One of the things I always find interesting about the Gavagai thought experiment is that there is this assumption that you’re talking about the rabbit and not the moving because some languages will place more emphasis on the movement of animals as a way of describing and distinguishing them. You see in the Swadesh list as well we have some basic noun things, and we have some basic verb action items in that list. I have occasionally had to double check and act out some of those actions to make sure we’re definitely talking about the same thing. One example of specific verbs that I often think about is Nick Evans’ description of verbs for different kinds of macropods hopping in the Kunwinjku language, which is spoken in The Top End in Arnhem Land in Australia.

Gretchen: Macropods are things like kangaroos and wallabies?

Lauren: Things like kangaroos and wallabies. There’s a whole world of different hopping creatures of this type in Australia. You also have wallaroos and pademelons in different parts of Australia – and many different types of kangaroo.

Gretchen: This is really an area about which I know very little about the flora and fauna.

Lauren: Yeah, in the way that in doing the Gavagai merch, I learnt there’re so many more different types of rabbit than the pet bunnies and the random wild rabbits that were released into Australia by white settlers.

Gretchen: Okay, I’m learning some things about animals.

Lauren: There’re different verbs to describe “the hopping of.”

Gretchen: In English, if I was talking about kangaroos – and, I guess, wallabies and wallaroos sort of look like smaller versions of them – I would just say, “The kangaroo hops,” and “The wallaby hops,” “The wallaroo hops.” I would describe these animals differently using the name of the animal and describe their action as being essentially the same thing.

Lauren: Yeah. Whereas in Kunwinjku, you have a different verb for if you’re talking about the hopping of a black wallaroo compared to an agile wallaby. For the antilopine wallaby, you have different verbs depending on whether it’s a male or a female hopping.

Gretchen: Wow.

Lauren: What’s really nifty about this is that sometimes it is actually easier to identify the difference between some of these macropods based on the way that they hop rather than just looking at the animal itself.

Gretchen: Oh, I guess because if most of the time when you’re seeing them, they’re in motion, then it’s really the movement that’s telling you what the different species is.

Lauren: You have all of this cultural knowledge – like when you start unpacking what “gavagai” means, who knows what kind of cultural knowledge might be tied up in that. Before, we were just talking about, like, whether it’s male or female, but there could be all kinds of things about the particular breed of rabbit. You can tell from the way that it scurries. Or it could be one of those snowshoe hares in North America.

Gretchen: You mean the ones that change colour and turn white in the winter to match the snow and then brown in the summer to match the ground?

Lauren: Yeah. It could be that you see a rabbit with your friend, and then six months later, they say, “Gavagai,” again, and you’re like, “Oh, so brown and white rabbits,” but no, it’s only the snowshoe hare specifically that is brown at one time of year and white at the other time of year. You are never going to get that kind of knowledge from just your first interaction with a language and its speakers and the world in which they live. That’s gonna come with way more engagement.

Gretchen: I think the other nice thing about the Gavagai story is it reminds us to be curious and humble about our first attempt at figuring out the meaning of a word and realise that there can always be more going on with a word than is apparent at first glance.

Lauren: And that just because you don’t immediately have some scientific classification for what you’re doing doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have knowledge and value included in that.

Gretchen: This is one of the things that gets me about – you know these things that go around on social media occasionally where like, “There’s no such thing as a fish. ‘Fish’ is not a scientific category. It is a category of humans who went like, ‘Yeah, little swimmy thing. That’s a fish’.”

Lauren: Yeah. In the way that people get very exercised about whether something is a fruit or not.

Gretchen: And there are so many more items in the world for which this is true once you start digging into it. There’s this Tumblr thread about how not only is “fish” not real but also “trees.” There is a convergent evolution of “Make the plant tall.”

Lauren: I do like the person who centres with like, “Oh, you thought fish were a problem. Have I got news for you about lizards.” And you’re just like, “Ah, this is actually a thing for everything.”

Gretchen: “Trees” aren’t a whole coherent taxonomic strategy, it’s just that being a tree is like becoming a crab. It’s like when a plant wants to become tall, it trees itself. Like palm trees and evergreen trees are not related to each other. There’s a whole bunch of bushes and other plants in between them that are more closely related.

Lauren: I think this is why lexicography and making dictionaries and writing dictionary entries and making sense of the relationships between different meanings of a word is as much an art as a science. You can have all these objective facts about rabbits or about lizards or about fish, but at the end of the day, it’s like, “How are people actually using this word?” You have to pay attention to that.

Gretchen: And the fun part is that linguists similarly don’t have a coherent taxonomic definition for what a word is.

Lauren: It’s true.

Gretchen: Because there are folk meanings that things have where you’re like, “Well, I know what a tree is good enough, which is, it’s a tall plant.” That’s fine. Or “I know what a word is good enough. I’ve said some.” But the borderline of like “Is ‘can’t’ one word or two words?” or “Is ‘twenty-one’ one word or two words” – this gets a little bit messier. It’s actually okay. Because actually all the words work like this where you have some examples that are really clear cut, and some examples that are fuzzier, and we’re just really good at dealing with these fuzzy examples.

Lauren: I really love going from that first Gavagai moment to spending a lot of time with a language as a learner or as someone describing the language, and then coming back to those early notes that you make, and going, “Ah.”

Gretchen: “I was so wrong.”

Lauren: Or I just happened to be talking to someone who used the more formal word for “hand,” and everyone else just uses this other word. Or it turned out I thought that was the specific word for this thing, but it’s just a more general word.

Gretchen: Or that’s a word that people say, like “thingamajig” when they don’t actually know what it’s called, and I thought it was the actual word for this thing.

Lauren: Yes. It turns out that I thought we were both talking about the verb “to flap your wings and fly,” but they just gave me the word for the little insect. That was a bit embarrassing. I’m glad we fixed that one up.

Gretchen: That’s one of the challenges with trying to learn a language by translating a list is that it can give you this one foothold into “Here are some things, maybe, that are going on,” but also you don’t get that full nuanced take, and you’re reliant on nuances in the translating language, which – as in the case of English where we don’t necessarily make a distinction between a singular “you” and a plural “you” – may introduce some really weird complications when you’re going into another language.

Lauren: Well, ignoring the word “nuance” there, I think if we’re not going to use a word list, we should go fully and completely and 100% in the opposite direction. And that opposite direction is monolingual – only using the language of the people that you’re working with – full, monolingual language learning, language documentation.

Gretchen: I’ve never done this because I’ve only ever been in environments where people were multilingual, but I have seen a demonstration of this at a linguistics conference. The demonstration was also pretty artificial. They got a linguist who was used to doing this, and they got somebody who worked at the university – in some other job probably – who also spoke a language that the linguist didn’t speak, and they said, “Okay” – you and I were doing this, Lauren. We definitely share English in common, but we could probably do a monolingual fieldwork situation where you spoke Nepali the whole time, and I spoke – you don’t speak much French, right? I could just speak French.

Lauren: I could learn. I could do fieldwork on you as a French speaker, and I could do it through Nepali so that everyone in the audience had the experience of not sharing a language with either of us.

Gretchen: Right. I probably wouldn’t be a great choice for this because you would probably want somebody who’s moved here from France, but if you and a friend have different languages, you can try this for yourself where you don’t speak any of the languages you have in common, and you see what you can figure out about each other. One of the things that I noticed about this demonstration is that it focused very much on the physical at the beginning. I don’t know how much the speaker was briefed ahead of time, but the linguist had some objects, like some sticks and some rocks, because I think they were very much trying to simulate this like, “You’ve shown up somewhere, and you don’t know what objects are gonna have in common culturally, so you’ve got to rely on things in nature.” I remember that the linguist did like, okay, if I hold up one stick, what are you gonna say? If I hold up two sticks, what are you gonna say? If I hold up three sticks –

Lauren: Oh, the reckon the difference between those might give us some early numbers and/or plural marking.

Gretchen: Exactly. Then if I hold up this stick, and I drop it, maybe I’m gonna get a verb, but it might not be a verb, right?

Lauren: But if I have “stick” and a verb, suddenly I can start figuring out the order that words go in in a sentence.

Gretchen: Right. Then if I have two sticks, and I drop them, do I get a different verb? If I take a rock, and two rocks, and then I drop the rocks – you can start getting some things that you can compare. You’re still dealing with very physical, tangible objects, but yeah, the idea is that maybe you can figure out at least some things about the language. What does it do for number? What does it do for nouns and verbs? And then slowly build up into acting out more and more complicated scenarios. You know, you have the linguist running around on the stage and being like, “Okay, well, maybe you’ll give me a word that means ‘running,’ or maybe it’ll mean ‘walking,’ or maybe it’ll mean ‘movement’.” You’re not quite sure. But you can try to get to this position.

Lauren: I do think Quine would be super happy to know, though, that we’re doing everything really – we’re really thinking about words, aren’t we? We’re collecting words for some items and some actions, and we’re really trying to figure out how to mediate our experience of those things through words.

Gretchen: I was wondering when I was sitting there watching one, like, “How much of this is the participant getting briefed ahead of time?” Because I wouldn’t wanna do a demo on a stage unless someone told me what they were trying to do. There were 100 people watching this. How much of these assumptions around if I hold something up, am I asking for the name of it? Or what am I asking for? I was having my own indeterminacy of translation moment of like, “How much can we rely on what I’m assuming the translation’s gonna be actually is what the person’s saying?” If you were doing fieldwork on French on me, and you have a stick, and you drop it – French doesn’t have one single word that means “drop.” It has a two-word fixed expression that means, basically, “let fall,” which is used in contexts where I would use “drop.” But you would have no way of knowing that this is actually a two-word phrase; that this is just what people say in this context.

Lauren: I might come back later when I’ve accidentally fallen over, and you’re like, “Are you okay? You fell.” And I’ll be like, “Ah-ha! I can put these two ideas together.” But again, I think this is the difference between going from knowing nothing about a language to, at the end of an hour, you can figure out a lot, but that’s still just a fraction.

Gretchen: And then you can spend the rest of your life figuring out what – yeah.

Lauren: And I do love, like, Quine spends multiple pages early on in his Gavagai thought experiment being like, “Okay, once you’ve got ‘gavagai,’ and you’re pretty sure it’s ‘rabbit,’ but you’re gonna spend all this time figuring out if it’s ‘rabbit’ or not, and you’re probably gonna wanna learn pretty early on words for ‘yes’ or affirmation or agreement or ‘no.’ But how are you gonna know what they are? You can’t rely on gestures.” I do appreciate that Quine was aware that a headshake and a head nod can mean very different things in different cultures.

Gretchen: Absolutely they can mean different things in different cultures.

Lauren: You can’t get ahead of yourself on any of this. You have to collaboratively build this dynamic relationship with people while you’re figuring things out.

Gretchen: I think that’s the thing about the artificiality of the monolingual fieldwork being a demonstration that happened at a conference and not something that I really know a lot of people who’ve done. That’s that it highlights this, in many ways, very underprepared linguist who’s not very community centric, right.

Lauren: “But I did get some sticks before I got here.”

Gretchen: “I just picked up this stick. I didn’t do any attempt to try to find a speaker who lived closer by to me who was bilingual in a language that I already spoke. I didn’t have any attempt to try and make contact with the community and ask them if they wanted someone to come in and take up all their time and do this.” It’s not a “I’m gonna try to figure out some things about my own language” as somebody who’s potentially from that community trying to interface with the literature. It’s got this very colonial “I’m gonna go off and do some exploring” vibes.

Lauren: I mean, Quine’s thought experiment – he does a very good job of not giving you too much context. I’m pretty sure he’s using the word “native” in a general 1960s way where you talk about someone being “native” in French, but like, that is a part of the context that has not aged greatly. Ideally, you would be seeing more people documenting their own languages and working with their own communities and not having to do this kind of outsider-coming-in fieldwork.

Gretchen: This very presumptive fieldwork that you’re gonna rock up in a village, and they’re gonna have nothing better to do than talk to you.

Lauren: About pointing out rabbits.

Gretchen: Yeah. Maybe they’ve got their own interests and agendas, and that’s not something that’s on the radar of this. Yet, I think that there’s still a joy in realising that we can transcend communication barriers or differences and that – despite the many, many cultural differences – can figure out what each other means because we do have some default assumptions.

Lauren: I mean, this is what I love about the Gavagai moment, and I think this is why I really wanted to see Gav brought to life as a little scurrying bunny because in that moment in Quine’s thought experiment, humans are really good at managing this relationship between ourselves, and that humans are actually very good at existing in a shared, multi-lingual world.

Gretchen: We can go from that fragmentary understanding that we all have as kids or that we may have as visitors and people in contact with people that we don’t share a language with for so many reasons to making sets of shared assumptions and, ultimately, getting into the position where we can use our existing language to understand yet more language and deliver those sorts of explanations to each other or have those sorts of arguments about what a tree is or what a fish is or what a fruit is to gain that deeper connection and understanding of the culture and nuances of language in general.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or at lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them, including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our new Gavagai rabbits on scarves, shirts, and more; “Ask me about linguistics” as a sticker, a shirt, a pin; and “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have,” or substitute “bag,” “hat,” etc. – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include the history of “do” in English, comparatives and superlatives, and linguistic mix-ups like spoonerisms, Mondegreens, and eggcorns. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #podcasts #episodes #transcripts #episode 95 #gavagai #quine #semantics #words #meaning #translation #indeterminacy of translation #philosophy #philosopher

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butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway · 2 months

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I have a really hard time on Tumblr sometimes and I have this issue with a lot of people and places so it's hardly tumblr specific, but it's also really hard to describe/convey to others. Let me try to scaffold it out

I spent my entire childhood being called an anxious person, and being forced to keep my anxiety internal, and this is overall really bad for me

The one useful tool I was ever given for BOTH reducing externally visible distress AND total distress is to pair anxious/distressing and "strengths based" thoughts. Whenever I say or think something related to distress, I take a moment to reframe the thought into a pair of thoughts - one non-judgemental observation of the need speaking through my distress/how I might meet it, and one non-judgemental acknowledgement of my feelings. It's energy intensive, and it takes a while to learn how to do it in a way that is clarifying rather than erasive. But it genuinely always makes me feel like I have a better handle on things, like I'm less inclined to spiral or end up with a disrupted mood or function, and also now consistently get **the opposite** commentary about being a very positive person who's good at conveying and opening up that positivity for others (at least in my professional life)

There are some people who take my doing this as an invitation to argue with me about why, actually, the distressing stuff IS VALID AND RIGHT AS A FRAMEWORK rather than understanding why I might be shifting away from it. You'd think this would happen most when I talk to other people and "reframe" something they've said, but actually this happens the most often after I have just finished expressing my own thoughts about a thing and someone seems to decide that "framed in a functional way" is equivalent to "hasn't thought enough about the problem areas" and start going off about all the "bad" or "hard" or whatever parts of a thing.

I cannot argue BACK with these people when they do this, because arguing back is dragging me back into a headspace that directly contributes to my suicidality, however side-stepping the issue by CONTINUING to insist on framing things the way I do often leads to them REPEATING their points in different ways in an attempt to "convince" me or "correct my misunderstanding" and I kinda have to be like. Not a misunderstanding. I know what you said and am simply not sharing that space with you. Why is it so uncomfortable for you that we are on different pages about this thing that you feel the need to force me into a distressing place for me rather than move on now that we've both shared our thoughts on the matter?

I can only spend so much of my time around a person rigidly reinforcing my own protective cognitions before I just. I can't talk to them anymore. I need to leave and do other things in other spaces with people who can talk to me about things from the same strengths-based perspective for a while

A lot of people use this to accuse me of spending time in echo chambers because they LITERALLY CANNOT FATHOM a space in which one can be critical of a thing without explicitly being "negative" about it, and assume that if everyone in a space is coming from a strengths based perspective that they're all uncritical fans or at least don't criticise in that space. This is just an objectively untrue assumption and I actually vastly prefer the constructive criticism of things within those strengths-based spaces

You can't ask people to stop doing this, or make them believe (if they don't already) the impact this might be having on your mental health, and if you try, people take it VERY personally and will start being MORE "negative" about EVERYTHING they say without even realizing it (saying "positive" things about one thing directly by "pulling down" something else, using satirical praise language like "fuck you" or "i can't stand it I'm going to die" or etc to refer to things they are happy with/enjoying/liking/etc, pivoting off your "positives" with immediate "negatives", etc) which makes the dynamic more intensive to cope with for me. Even when I try to convey this stuff to someone or point out examples, it quickly worsens the issue to the point that it's literally better for me to stop doing so and go back to quietly exiting when I'm overwhelmed.

A lot of people, when all this is discussed for them, will say something to the effect of "this is how I enjoy things I love!" And I get that. I do. But why? Why is the only way you are able to enjoy a thing by putting it or something else down? If it were ONE OF THE WAYS you enjoyed things, I'd 100% get that, and have no issue with it! I do wish that it was more common for groups of people to just enjoy things "unironically" tho, because it's a space I have a much easier time existing comfortably in, and those spaces being hard to find and maintain is part of why I struggle to socialize much. It's hard for me (literally, in terms of asking more effort of me, and emotionally in terms of the impact it has on my mood) to be around people whose only access to enjoyment is to insult, belittle, or point out the problems in something. It makes me sad not to spend as much time as I'd like to with people I like because of this incompatibility, and it makes me frustrated that I have never found a way of sharing with others what is happening in this dynamic in a way that has any concrete impact on the outcome. I have sort of learned to just NOT share it with others and instead do all the heavy listing of navigating the issue on other people's behalf and taking breaks when I can no longer do that so that I can keep relationships or spaces or conversations that are important to me.

Tumblr is, to put it mildly, almost nothing but this dynamic. So despite being a system I am most suited to in terms of posting options, conversation topics, access formats, etc, Tumblr is a space I feel best taking regular breaks from.

Tumblr is far from the epitome of this in my life. But it's a space where I see the most. I want to say etiquette? Social "respect" indicators? Built around this kind of behavior/framework. Like. Tumblr is a space of differing social contexts, but a lot of the connected ones across subcultures on the platform are informed by this framework because it is non-ideological and so gets conveyed as a more universalizably etiquette system I think. So there's a lot of like. Expectations of how you interact with others here that default this framework (for very functional reasons I think lol, i just don't know that it was done on purpose rather than sort of stumbled into?) are really normalized in a way that is especially risky for me given how much work I have to put into resisting this framework on a personal level

I often feel very lonely, because I have found a degree of distance that gets built into my dynamics with people. Throughout my life, there have been people who put me up on a pedastal, and people who set me far below them in capacity and cannot fathom my functionality, and of course people who manage both at once in different areas. But it's been hard to build and maintain relationships where I trust I am seen specifically as a peer and where this anxiety/complaint oriented framework is not one of the dominant cultural forces in play socially.

There are gaps in all this still in my brain, but. I dunno, I get tired sometimes. I wish I had a space in my life where I felt fully seen and where I could just sort of sit and build something up with someone for a while.

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goodluckclove · 5 months

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(about the what keeps you from writing post) personally the thing that i struggle with when it comes to writing is just focus. i can't focus on writing for shit, and even if i really like an idea, it feels like it just never gets down on paper, you know

So, uh, I'm going into this under the assumption that you don't have something akin to ADHD. I have something in that vein, I think, but I don't know the extent of it and therefore do not feel qualified to give advice on how to manage it. Especially for a beginning writer, because if I'm on that spectrum it's definitely more hyper fixation than executive dysfunction at this point.

I have a colleague who comes to me a lot when she's struggling to focus on actually putting words to proverbial paper. What I usually say is something along the lines of If I were to tell you to write me a hundred words of your story right now, how would you react? What would you think?

If focus is not symptomatic when it comes to art, it usually has a meaning.

Maybe the idea is interesting, but you don't know where to start. If this is the case, good knows - you can just start literally anywhere. Preferably the angle that sounds the most interesting to you. Imagine you're eight years old and you have the whole afternoon to play in the park with your favorite toys, what would be the first thing you'd act out with them?

It might not be the right start for the finished project, but it's a start. Throwing words at the wall is a valid strategy for a lot of people, and it's better than doing nothing at all.

Or maybe it's different. Maybe you've been working on an existing idea and you've suddenly lost focus on it. Why keep writing, when you can instead scroll the Google Image search results that come up when you search "sweaters for rats"?

I've found when that happens, a quality answer is often to purposefully break your own rules. It's kind of an old NaNoWriMo trick that I'm frankly surprised I don't see more new writers using. I think there's a new culture in the scene where you need to start off with the exact methodology and craft of an established author, which baffles me endlessly. Not only is it patently untrue, but by doing this you're denying every new writer's God-given right to be a crazy fucking gremlin.

Stuck in your story? Kill a character. Make two other characters kiss. Add a fucking dream sequence. Oh but people won't like it buddy will you? Will it make you laugh or smile, or generally just be interested in your own story? Because that's what matters. That's what's going to give you a finished project. You can make it normal later if you want, but if you choose not to you'd also be making some crazy artistic gumbo and I will definitely be coming back for seconds.

The key is that it has to be something that you genuinely think is cool and funny and exciting and neat. Because you like it, not because you think other people will or because you think it makes you look better or more profound. If you use any weird trick or plot point in absolute, unironic earnestness, I genuinely believe the worst thing you'd end up with is a finished first draft that needs some restructuring.

Which doesn't sound too bad to me!

#writeblr #writing community #writers on tumblr #on writing #writing tips #writing resources #writing asks #writers supporting writers

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llycaons · 3 months

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okay and here's p2. imagine me walking around going HELLO? HELLO? HELLO? HELLO???

armand isn't in a forgiving mood, which I can understand, but louis IS in excruciating pain so making him apologize NOW, and partially for TRYING TO DIE feels really petty

and now he's talking about selling...dude that's cold

HELLO?

armand. dude. what the fuck. stop torturing daniel to get back at a guy who's like half-dead. I wish this dl had subs bc armand going THIS IS FINE WE'RE ALL FINE is insane

we talk a lot about louis's trauma since the story IS about him but daniel recalling details like what products were being advertised on tv while staring at the cellophane-wrapped neighbor is like extremely horrifying and I don't like his unwarranted hostility and cruelty towards louis but given that experience I can understand his wariness the beginning of s1 better

the off-tune kazoos in the background. really fucky. im so scared

armand torturing someone louis likes in front of him to 'understand'...I guess the gloves are off. at the end of s1 everyone was claiming freaking out and claiming armand was WORSE than lestat which i think is pretty patently untrue but this man. this is real fucked up. I don't understand why louis stayed after this except...what, to make claudia's death not a waste? to have something to do to stave off his suicidiality?

I mean something they do have in common is being really obsessive and controlling over louis's affections/attention

'BARTERING WITH DESIRE IS THAT WHAT MAKES YOU FASCINATING' SAYS THE FORMER SEX SLAVE

daniel says he's good at getting people to open up which is funny because we have rarely seen this skill in the interview here

but ALSO. armand asks this and daniel actually engages, doesn't just yes-man to stay alive

well. a little

*physically and mentally torturing a guy who you're holding captive* DO YOU THINK I'M BORING????

armand's from delhi

'eager black hole' to contrast louis's tearful confusion

daniel's not hunting for the truth, in this moment. what's the point to his question? no point. fuck your boyfriend

oh shit, instead of armand and louis vs. daniel now it's louis and daniel vs. armand. hurry, he's almost back!

the feet in the sand!

one of the podcast groups I listen to is CONVINCED louis and armand want daniel to reveal some secret he apparently has, and that's the entire purpose of this interview and that's what 'we can have him saying what happened next in no time' means. I really don't understand that assumption. it just sounds like they're trying to control the narrative. but the interview structure is upended now. louis is asking daniel - try to remember! try! go back to the chair. what was happening? what was he saying?

it's also so disturbing hearing louis periodically beg for armand to help him from the bedroom. he can't even move on his own! it hurts! and he doesn't have claudia anymore :(

based on what I know about the novel it sounds like they ramped up armand's malice in this episode. oh wait no he goes and does it

you can see his big vampire fang wounds right there too

*leaning over your grievously wounded boyfriend* so why are you still so obsessed with your ex?

ahhh so louis's description of lestat WAS exaggerated compared to what he shared privately with armand. and armand theorizes this is because...he wants lestat to chase after him again? unhinged, but both of them have made poor decisions when it comes to lestat so I'm not surprised by the suggestion

🙄 over armand being like 'ohh im trapping you in ~empathy~ so I guess I'll selflessly leave you to the man you really want as an act of service' as if louis wasn't HALF-DEAD and lestat wasn't his abusive ex OUT FOR BLOOD. more like acts of DISSERVICE amiright

FUCK HE CONTACTED LESTAT????

okay I SQUEALED 'YES IM HERE'!!!!!!!!! BITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOUIS IS SAYING NO!!!! WHAT A NIGHTMARE!!!!

'oh hon hon hon louis louis whet hes heppened why hev you injured yerselfff mon cher mon cher' omggggg and armand CANT SAY I LOVE YOU SCREAM

'you left me for death' way to make his suicide attempt about YOU

this is such an insane comment to make and I apologize in advance but this would never happen with wangxian because lwj knows the importance of being selfless and supportive and doesn't take suicide personally. wow such a strong couple 💪actually how funny is it that I'm watching this messy complicated show about toxic relationships between awful immortals and going 'hmm NOT getting a lot of fanfic wangxian vibes from this' like yeah I should read more romance but I simply do not like it! so many of the tropes are boring and played out!!! what's a girl to do!!!

REST

SUDDEN TENDERNESS??? ARMAND?????

ah no. the softness of murder

this speech he gives must be close to what they said to their prey in the theater. he's very good at it. your future is bleak and will be full of regrets. living is hard. do the easy thing instead and die here instead. and I'll take care of you. I'll hold you. rest now. rest

and we know that obviously daniel doesn't die here so it's not so much tension as the somberness and weight of the moment. it's a beautiful scene, and terribly tragic. a murderer - a predator - is convincing his victim - his prey - to give up. to simply stop resisting, and allow himself to be consumed

but daniel has two daughters and a successful career in the current day so we know that's not how this ends. louis again! not asking. maitre and arun. the script is flipped once again. who's really in power in this relationship for long? daniel must live as a testament to our companionship. let him go. so armand does

and what DOES louis see in daniel? is his long-neglected humanity returning? what is he saying to him, in his excruciating pain?

oh my god. reading his own book. he remembered every word. he gave him a lifeline. he gave him a lifeline. because there are stories out there and they need to be told, and daniel is passionate about telling them, his life matters, and he isn't inconsequential. and no matter how his marriages crumbled or his daughters stopped talking to him or his career stalled or his health faltered that was always going to be true. daniel's life mattered, and it mattered that louis saved him that night.

and louis taking on the voice of a god or angel...wow. wow. damn

the precise edit on daniel and louis's memories. of course it's armand. just like the ruler, slicing away the pages of claudia's journal so neatly.

louis's feetsies 🥺 so sweet

louis and daniel vs. armand....louis easy and calm, and armand slightly nervous - what have they been talking about while I was gone? san francisco?

HELLO. I PRESERVE YOUR HAPPINESS WHEN YOU CAN'T???

WHY DOES THAT SOUND SO FAMILIAR?????!!!! HMMMM ARMAND????

#breathless and overcome. what a fucking episode #best show on tv right now for SURE #possibly one of the best episodes of tv I have seen in years #iwtv lb #iwtv spoilers

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burst-of-iridescent · 2 years

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Can I get your thoughts on this post claiming Mai and Toph are very similar (and that Zuko clicked with Toph immediately because she reminded him of Mai)? https://at.tumblr.com/i-was-talking-to-momo/everyone-else-took-a-really-long-time-to/nyh2nz26iuay

whoooo boy, there are a lot of (sometimes just blatantly untrue) assumptions being flung around in that post.

much of what op says about mai reads more like headcanon than anything actually shown to us in the show (when was mai stifled to "the point of being incredibly depressed and borderline self-destructive"? when do we learn in the show that mai taught herself to throw knives out of boredom? how did mai "never learn to interact with people her age" when she's been friends with ty lee for years and seems to have no problem socializing at a fire nation party?) or is barely substantiated within the show (mai's alleged "repression" at the hands of her parents is told to us - not shown - in a single scene in the third season).

on the other hand, there is actual proof for toph being sheltered and repressed by her parents: we see the difference between who she is on her own/with the gaang vs with her parents. the toph who fights in earth rumble tournaments and picks her toes and speaks her mind without hesitation is not the same toph who wears dainty clothes and allows herself to be led around and meekly obeys her parents' wishes despite her own desire for freedom. there is a clear distinction between who toph feels she has to be, and who she really wants to be, and this is made clear from her very first episode.

by contrast, mai has the same apathetic, indifferent demeanor almost all the time, no matter whether she is with her parents, her friends, or her boyfriend. even in the rare cases that she does show emotion, usually smiling or smirking around zuko, it is undercut by the lack of true understanding and connection in their relationship, which makes her show of emotion feel meaningless and shallow (the only time that mai does seem to show genuine emotion and vulnerability is around ty lee, but unfortunately these moments are too far and few between for me to consider it real depth and growth for mai, much as i ship mailee). unlike toph, there are no real cracks in the facade with mai, which seem to imply that the way mai acts is who she really is, not who she feels she has to be.

i also have to laugh at this part: "Out of the entire gaang, Toph is the one that Zuko understands and empathizes with the most."

toph is the one zuko understands and empathizes with most, huh? that must be why toph was the first person in the gaang zuko felt a kinship with and reached out to - nope, that was katara. well, that's why he opened up about his deepest conflict and trauma to her and she did the same in return - whoops sorry, katara again. never mind, at least zuko and toph took an intimate field trip together related to their moment of connection over their shared trauma - oh wait.

i don't disagree that toph and zuko would have a strong friendship, or that they wouldn't be able to bond over similarities in their upbringing, but unfortunately the show just didn't expound on their relationship as much as it did with zuko's relationships with aang, sokka, and (especially) katara. it's blatantly false to imply that zuko bonded or clicked with toph the most out of anyone in the gaang, and even more so to say that it was because she reminded him of mai - both because toph is vastly different from mai, and because zuko himself didn't truly understand or click with mai in the first place.

ultimately, much of the problem with mai's character comes down to the fact that she's extremely underdeveloped (and the season that tries to expand on her character is also the one where her arc revolves almost entirely around her boyfriend) so comparing her to toph - a main character who received far more depth and development in a single episode than mai did throughout her whole arc - is a task doomed to fail from the start.

#anti mai #anti maiko #toph #zuko #toph meta #don't get me wrong i LOVE me some toph and zuko friendship #but it's just blatantly wrong to say that they were the closest/clicked the most out of anyone in the gaang lmao #we deserved more for sure but the show didn't give it to us #imo toph was also a victim of the inconsistent shoddy writing in book 3 and her character did kind of get shafted #but she did get DEVELOPMENT which is more than mai can say #asks

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skaruresonic · 10 months

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Not trying to choose sides but blocking isn't a bad thing and nothing really anyone should lose sleep over, I block idw sonic fans and I block nsfw Sonic artist, sorry, makes me uncomfortable. I also block Prime sonic fans because those fans get triggered as soon as you point out how bad it is too. XD

I'm in the fandom on my free time, I don't want to deal with negativity or annoyance and I don't want to argue hours on hours about why I like or don't like this one Sonic thing. It's a waste of all of our time. Gotte focus on the games we love right?

I'm lucky so far I have not once been bothered by Satam fans whenever I call the show a pos. :P

Again, I don't mind blocking for curation's sake. I mind when people make a big moral issue out of it, especially when A.) blocking anyone even tangentially associated with us suggests someone out there may be keeping tabs on us, and B.) they still complain that we owe them a "conversation" even after being blocked. I know they're not being good faith, they just want an excuse to lecture and stonewall you forever.

No offense, as I know you didn't mean this, but even chronic discoursers have hobbies and concerns other than discourse; just because all you see is what a person posts online doesn't mean that's the only thing they do.

Personally, I've been straying more into VN work. Spent all day yesterday creating a few ambient sounds with SoundTrap.

---

I'm lucky so far I have not once been bothered by Satam fans whenever I call the show a pos. :P

Yeah idk what it is, but some SatAM fans (note I'm not saying all of them) are the most insecure fans I've ever seen. The show's been off the air for decades, and yet if you speak about it in an even mildly negative manner, someone will roll up to your post like "SatAM gave us GREAT TELEVISION and they did their best with the crumbs the games gave them." It's weird too because Omens devs the occasional outlier notwithstanding, you don't see Sonic X fans behaving as though X was still relevant to the series. Not only is "poor SatAM creators had nothing to work with" laughably untrue given the evidence we have at this point, (evidence which includes Ben Hurst's own words btw, but somehow they're just as allergic to his words as they are toward Ian's whenever he says something that doesn't fit their narrative), I like their assumption that the game purists ought to appreciate, or at least overlook, the implication that the games are less deep and fleshed-out than the TV show.

And then they pull surprised Pikachu faces when you're like "hey could you not shittalk the core series in order to elevate your dead, obsolete, and largely niche continuity? pls and thank"

#asks

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philosophicalparadox · 7 months

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You know, I’ve been thinking.

There’s a particular mentality that I see quite often on Tumblr and all over the damn internet that I just don’t vibe with, and have never vibed with: the “Actions are (to varying degrees of exclusivity) what you should judge a person by” rhetoric.

And it wasn’t without some hard thinking as to why exactly that mentality bothers me, but I think I found the answer in a very ironic medium: because It’s quite literally A Slippery Slope.

How? Because judging actions without context very quickly becomes judging actions without evidence.

And it’s all fine to say, “well no one would be so dense as to not give context a chance to explain a person’s behavior” but that is actually what ends up happening more often than not with people of that particular mindset, because I notice a stunning overlap between people who believe actions are the best measure of morality and people who can’t distinguish explanations from excuses.

Which leads to a slippery and twisty rabbit hole of finding reasons why people’s context for their behavior is “just an excuse” and criminalising them anyway, even when their actions are perfectly justified.

I have known people like this IRL. I grew up with people like that, actually, so maybe I am a little biased towards the assumption of danger inherent in that mode of thinking.

But it really rubs me way the wrong way when people harp on about how reasons don’t matter as much as actions, when they actually mean that intentions are not an excuse for harm.

To quibble, the difference between an excuse and an explanation is rooted in fact, not feelings. There is a categorical and linguistic distinction between those:

Excuses are about deflecting responsibility. They’re quite often lies or exaggerations.

Example: a kid breaks a vase. He knows he will be in trouble for it, so instead of explaining why or how it happened, he tells a wild fib or something close to one so he avoids being in trouble; alternatively, say your boyfriend gets angry and breaks a mirror. Rather than confessing that he lost his cool and wants to fix it, he instead says things like “well I can’t help it when I’m angry” or “that wouldn’t of happened if you didn’t make me” etc.

very often excuses look identical to blame-shifting and has lots and lots of “but poor me” vibes.

Explanation is not about deflecting responsibility. It’s about explaining what happened and why. Simple right? Eh, not always so. More often than not children learn young that excuses by themselves don’t cut it, and learn to work explanations into their excuses to make them sound more believable. But the hallmark of an excuse never changes; it’s always about not being held responsible.

The issue is that too many people who see actions and outcomes as the main stalk for moral values is that they pick and choose when they want to call something an excuse based on how they feel about it. If an explanation seems untrue, it’s automatically an excuse, regardless of further proving or the person’s demonstrated willingness to accept responsibility. This is the fundamental spirit of callout posts. It no longer matters that you are trying your best to make amends if your actions condemn you simply for your having done them.

“But,” I hear some of the people I am sure reluctantly follow me these days say, “I’m not that hardcore! I just don’t like it when people give more attention to a person’s intentions than the fact that they’ve caused harm to me or someone else”

And that’s valid. What isn’t is making the assumption that because you can’t see what’s going on in the accused’s head, that you just automatically know what’s happening in there. What’s not cool is when you claim knowledge in ignorance of how and why things happen because “it doesn’t matter, it’s done now, and I want to see JUSTICE!”

And that, my dears, is why history repeats itself. That is why abusers walk free while victims are believed to be the perpetrators. That is why people get bullied in callouts that could not possibly matter less. Because when people cry “JUSTICE!” What they usually mean is “I want to see them bleed/be killed/be punished!” Not “they’ll get what is appropriate to them to render them harmless or to amend the problems they caused”

No one is owed forgiveness. But if you get SO fixated on “they did bad, therefore do bad to them” then maaaaaybe it’s time to examine why exactly you feel that way. And possibly get a therapist. (99% of the time it’s because of the way their, usually socially conservative, parents raised them)

And it all seems to start with “ But Actions Speak Louder Than Words” as a specific justification for “others Actions are the center of my moral philosophy and damn the consequences”

#mini rant #philosophicalparadox has a thought #you’re not obligated to agree #but if not then you probably won’t like me

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offlineblues · 2 months

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blah blah just yapping about perception of friendship stuff and experience with autism's loneliness making it a struggle

i have issues with RSD due to my autism and sometimes i make myself sick with worry. aka it's the perceived rejection that may or may not exist regarding others and events. or things like not being included or not being invited or not feeling like i have been given permission to join in on things because my company wouldn't be enjoyed. and especially that my friendship isn't valued

it's not so much that the actual rejection really happens anymore as often as it did in the past, but rather... it is just an expectation. even if it doesn't happen, i'll expect it because of that spiral of thinking and past experience with isolation... which leads to some interpersonal issues on my end because i'll begin to convince myself that the other person or group of people must not care (generally untrue assumptions that depression worsens tenfold)

usually when i bring it up after thinking of a good way to say it (sometimes it isn't the best because i make mistakes and act impulsively as any human does when they feel emotional) and say "ah this is really irrational i apologize for verbalizing it but i don't want you to have to read my mind that i feel something is off and never let you know". and people have, almost every time, said everything was fine in a more specific way that i can understand... and then i stop worrying about it as much and can not feel like a burden. and i feel that things get back on the right track!

of course, there are some people it is safe to say these kinds of things to and some people who are not safe to say these things to because they probably wouldn't take it the right way or we never seemed close enough to talk to begin with. i don't really like ghosting people or just leaving if i feel that i can express it, so i'll make an effort if you want to make one too. y'know what i mean? it's not wrong to want friends or people to acknowledge and care about you. it's okay to be upfront and honest about what you experience and change the expectations if it's needed. that's no problem. i want to be fair in the end to those around me...

just... it's kind of the end of the road for me when i express those irrational feelings i have about communication and mutual desire to be around one another and someone basically confirms that... yes, they are in fact treating me differently than others, avoiding me, and/or don't wish to be around me. like, oh... we can just stop then. because i can't risk being triggered into a spiral over someone who said outright that they don't care and then don't ever try again, haha.

it really sucks trying to be social and feeling like you fail others somehow by being a failure yourself (because i already fail at being normal enough in general it feels like) i am masking so hard irl that i sometimes struggle to feel anything i do is good enough in the safe spaces i do have to be my authentic self

#caroblogging

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lutethebodies · 2 months

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hey just letting you know, I really enjoy your Cannor/Minthara ship posts. You're one of a handful of the regular shippers I know who thinks about, like, long term relationship stuff with your oc and Minthara, beyond the puppy love years and actually considering how they'd manage to live/work/survive together without it all breaking down.

keep it up, you're appreciated ^_^

I hope anon will forgive me if I jump off their very kind note to mention a few reasons why I think I might be good at what they noticed about my character pieces like the one they mentioned.

First, age. I was recently told in no uncertain terms (by people much younger) that it's both hilarious and pathetic for me, a 47-year-old person, to post on Tumblr about anything at all, let alone BG3 character ships. I think someone even said "you're as old as my parents, just stop." And, well, whatever. I made a dumb and needlessly negative mistake (which earned me a lot of other weirdly reductive and untrue assumptions, and because this is the internet, all of it will of course live forever somewhere) on a topic I'd already covered better in non-negative ways. But it ultimately doesn't matter, because life is cringe and self-flagellation is performatively silly and nobody who cares about me judges me for blogging on Tumblr anyway.

However, I think my age (at least in terms of life experience) helps me think about interpersonal behavior and relationships in ways that younger people might not. I don't wanna go full Joe-Biden-in-denial about this—because who the fuck am I, really?—but the fact that I'm still married to the same person after 18 years (with 8 more together before that) speaks to what I've been able to learn and know about how these things work. (Pro tip for a successful marriage: don't have kids; we don't and we're very happy about that.). So that's a bit of an obvious self-insert in what I write for Cannor.

Second, employment status. After decades in the professional design/marketing world, I'm very fortunate to (post-quarantine) be able to freelance part-time as a creative professional and stay home as a house-spouse. I can make art and record songs and write posts and bike for exercise pretty much when I want, as well as take care of housework. It's really inspiring and I like to spread inspiration whenever I can. I also think it's important to be a proud house-spouse as a cishet USAmerican man because even now (get your tiny violins ready) we are still mocked as unmanly and societally useless if we don't have the right job title or don't make more money than our wives or don't have 6 kids or whatever it is that a man's man's man is supposed to be like. Fuck that noise.

I have no problem being a man who is, in many ways, overshadowed by what my spouse does in her life and with her career. She works hard, she's really good at what she does, and is really patient with a flighty artist guy at home. That's how love works for us. (She would probably be annoyed at the mere fact of me getting hung up on all this shit, btw). Most of my "career" work has been ephemeral (that's marketing for you), and I value my decades of making art and music way more anyway, even and especially since it's a hobby and I'll never be celebrated for it. So that vibe goes into my Cannor-Minthara headcanon as well (remember folks, self-insert is not a sin).

Finally (and I say this as a reminder to myself as much as anyone else): think before posting. Don't put needlessly negative things out there, because the world will oblige you in return a hundredfold. Perhaps obvious, but always a lesson worth re-learning. Believe it or not, some old people do realize when they need to re-learn shit.

Now, if you don't mind I'd like to go back to being laughably cringe on main.

#i don't know what to tag this as

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antianakin · 2 years

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Okay, I have seen 1x03 of The-Show-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, here's some thoughts all in one post again.

So... my feelings on Crosshair are very negative and my feelings on Cody are very positive which made this episode a little bit of a rollercoaster ride to have to watch. I have literally zero interest in watching Crosshair keep being a fascist and being wow kinda not happy with the way his dumbass selfish bullshit choice is working out for him. I have zero sympathy, he had other choices, he's been given options by people who claim to care about him, he's continuing to be the asshole he's been since season 7 of TCW, I do not care, someone just shoot him and put him out of his misery please. I'm NOT happy that they used Cody for this, a character they knew fans were attached to and interested in, a character who got pulled OUT of the Kenobi show where he seemingly had a bigger role to play, just to be part of a catalyst for Crosshair's story. If we never get to see Cody again and continue to follow his story now that he's AWAY from Crosshair, it will be a complete waste of this character.

That being said, I DO like that Cody ultimately left the Empire and isn't dead. My assumptions for how Cody would be treated in this show was pretty low and quite honestly, they still are. They could still bring him back to kill him or just never show him again and we never find out where he went or what happened to him. I'm also realizing that Rampart could've lied and Cody MIGHT be dead or undergoing torturous experimentation and we only discover this later and that could end up being a final straw for Crosshair or something.

My expectations are in the GROUND here.

I liked the parallel of the moment where Cody is ordered to execute Governor Ames and Palpatine telling Cody to "execute Order 66" on Obi-Wan. This seems to allow Cody to CLEARLY put some things together as he stares at the body of this woman who trusted him, who recognized that she was probably going to be murdered either way whether she let the new governor go or not and chose to go out as the person who tried for peace one last time. She decided not to go out as a murderer. Cody just standing there with his weapon down, his helmet OFF, a direct contrast to how he puts his helmet back ON after Obi-Wan leaves and he gets the call from Palpatine, so he's a faceless drone when he makes the order to blast Obi-Wan off a cliff.

I don't know what this is supposed to imply about the chips at this point, quite honestly. Is Cody's chip still active, but there aren't any Jedi actually nearby so its effects are sort-of lessened? Is Cody's chip mostly INACTIVE now that it's been over a year and so its effects are lessened? Were the chip's effects ALWAYS sort-of laser directed at the Jedi but Cody kept his critical thinking skills which has now led him to sort-of think AROUND the chip? I have no clue. The chips were a really cool introduction to the franchise's lore because it allowed the clones to be individuals, but the more they do with the regular clones in this show, the more confusing they get and the stupider the chips have become. They should've left it as just "the chips overrode the clones' wills and personalities to force them into basically acting like the droids they prided themselves on being better than" rather than whatever this is.

The only other interesting part of the episode to me were Governor Ames' comments about Dooku and Mina Bonteri.

Before TOTJ came out, I PROBABLY would've assumed that we were intended to see Ames saying "Dooku was right" as an ironic untrue statement. That sure, the Republic was corrupt, but we know that Dooku was also a MAJOR part of being the reason it stayed corrupt, the reason it fell and became an Empire. That he probably didn't even truly intend for the Separatists to win the war because it just wasn't a part of the Sith Plan.

But after TOTJ and the way it chose to present Dooku, I'm a lot less trusting of Filoni's shows. I think we're maybe intended to see a certain level of truth to this, that yes, Dooku WAS right, the Republic WAS corrupt and look what it became because it was so corrupt! That the point is not that Dooku was ALSO corrupt as shit, but that the Republic maybe COULDN'T have been saved.

Ames also brings up Mina Bonteri and the events of "Heroes on Both Sides" and "Pursuit of Peace." Which... we can assume from in-context clues that the Separatist leadership (i.e. planetary leaders and senators who aren't involved in anything military) have exactly zero clue what's actually happening during the war. They have no idea what Dooku truly is, they don't have any idea that the Corporate Alliance is LEADING THEIR ARMIES, they don't have any idea what their armies are DOING OUT THERE to innocent civilians in their names. They're so entirely brainwashed that Lux can literally walk up to them and say "Dooku assassinated my mother, a Senator you all loved and trusted" and get declared a liar for daring to speak out against Dooku.

So when Ames says "Mina Bonteri and I tried to put forth a peace proposal and Palpatine just rejected it" it makes sense within universe for her to believe something so vastly untrue. For her not to KNOW that Mina was literally assassinated by Dooku before that proposal could really go anywhere, that Dooku and Grievous attacked Coruscant itself to scare the Republic Senate into believing that the peace proposal was a trap so they would reject it. It makes sense that she would've been lied to about all of that and kept so insulated that news of those events never would've reached her.

But again, I have lost all trust in Filoni's ability to portray things in a nuanced way, and so I can't tell if we're supposed to remember that or if we're just supposed to think the Separatists were right and totally good people and it's the REPUBLIC who was evil the whole time.

It would be an interesting moment if I thought we were supposed to understand that Governor Ames has been lied to just as much as Cody has, that her belief in Dooku and the Separatist government is as blind as Cody's was in the Empire. Cody promising peace only for Crosshair to shoot Ames from behind him, just like Mina promising peace only for Dooku to attack Coruscant, killing all chance of peace ever happening. It was never going to happen in either situation because neither Cody nor Mina nor Ames have enough power to be able to anticipate the betrayals from their own sides striving to keep peace from being an option.

But I don't know if I believe that. And so then it just becomes a flat, half-assed mess of a moment. Which feels a lot more in character for this show, let's be honest.

#anti tbb #tbb wank #commander cody #marshal commander cody #anti crosshair

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navree · 1 year

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Hi! Have you seen Domina s2? If so what are your thoughts on it?

Hey!

I have not seen Domina s2, nor have I seen Domina s1, because I just have genuine issues with it. I dislike where they chose to start the story, I dislike the way they've characterized a lot of these figures, I dislike a lot of what they've done with the history and their interpretation of the motivations behind it. And considering that Augustus is one of my favorite historical figures to read about and he already has a tendency to get really bad representations due to the people he was surrounded with (HBO Rome had Antony as a main character so of course their interpretation of Octavian, his final nemesis, was God fucking awful), it's infuriating.

Like, one of the reasons I like these figures and this period of history so much is that what actually happened was just so fascinating that I want to jam as much information about it as possible into my brain (I've harped on this before, but it is insane to me that Octavian, at the ripe old age of 22, decided to have 300 defeated and surrendered enemy soldiers slaughtered as human sacrifices on Julius Caesar's altar on the anniversary of his assassination, that is a crazy story and I wish we had more info about it) as permanently as possible. So whenever people decide to mess with that, it not only irritates me as an enjoyer of the history, but it also makes their story more dull because nothing these people come with for the sake of "ratings" is ever going to match up to real life (no, Colleen McCullough, Octavian disowning his mother based on a debunked historical theory is not more interesting than a 19 year old's only living parent dying unexpectedly a year after the only father figure he's ever known/close uncle/actual adopted father was brutally murdered thereby thrusting him into a position of extreme pressure and visibility and kicking off a personal revenge quest that led to the eventual reshaping of the Western World, sorry). And it especially doesn't work when you're relying on tropes that everyone has already seen done before.

Livia Drusilla as some conniving snake manipulating everything behind the scenes to suit her own ends is an incredibly tired trope, it's the main characterization given to nearly any interpretation of her and I've never liked it. Augustus being a power hungry tyrant who only cares about making himself a living god and nothing else is an incredibly tired trop, and it too is the main characterization given to nearly any interpretation of him and I've also never liked it. I don't even know what to do with their version of Agrippa because he just seems like a wet chihuahua half the time (and then has this insane line of "I put you where you are and Livia kept you there" that I really wrote 3k words in response to because for one, he would not fucking say that and for two it's literally untrue and for three he would not fucking say that!!!) and honestly every interpretation of him has been borderline schizophrenic (the Elizabeth Taylor movie made him significantly older than Octavian when they were the same age??? tf????). I've already seen Rome and I, Claudius (well, not really, but I have skimmed them on occasion), I don't need a rehash of old hackery. Give me something new, something interesting, something that can actually fit who these people were attested to be, and certainly more interesting than old shorthand based on ahistorical assumptions.

Domina honestly shot itself in the foot by starting the story after the Last War of the Republic (I think it starts in 27 BC when Octavian is declared Augustus, which is three years after the war against Antony), because the years between the Ides and Actium can genuinely have great character work for all of these people. And it can especially have great character work for Livia, seeing how she handled the tumultuous time leading up to eventual war, and especially how she handled Rome and the family and the politics during the time that Octavian was off at war and then in Egypt. So you've got old news characterizations that don't jive, you have boring made up stories that aren't anywhere near as fascinating as the actual history, and to make it worse you're focusing on the more placid years and bypassing any of the stuff that's actually going to be of interest and really getting into the meat of, you know, Octavian's rise to power and eventual turn into a living god, which seems to be what this show is trying to chronicle too.

And honestly? Honestly? I despise whatever the Hell they're trying to do with Livia and Agrippa. For one, again, scheming cheating whore is a tired trope, it's a tired trop that I don't care to apply to Livia. For two, it's a cop-out. I've said it before, I said it when Rome tried to do Agrippa/Octavia, it's a cop-out to try and add some tension to Agrippa by pairing him with the first woman you can find in Octavian's inner circle. No relationship that this man had, with anyone, is going to be anywhere near as interesting as the one he had with Octavian. No fictionalized, ahistorical romance with Octavian's wife or Octavian sister is going to approach the dynamic that Octavian and Agrippa had with each other. If you want to add some romance between Agrippa and a member of the Julio-Claudians, don't be a scaredy-cat and have it be with Octavian. The mutual devotion these two felt for each other, the way that Agrippa never tried to seize power even though he could, choosing instead to be Octavian's lieutenant, his attack dog, the loyalty Octavian showed Agrippa even when they were teenagers, the way these two were by each other's sides for nearly Agrippa's entire life (Agrippa predeceased Augustus by about thirty years), the longevity of the relationship and the reciprocity of it, it's all ripe for someone to do something great with it. And nobody's ever really gotten it right, there have been elements from different places that have had moments, but nothing that's had it right from start to finish. I mean, for God's sake, during Augustus's near fatal illness that I know was in Domina's first season, Augustus literally gave Agrippa his signet ring so that, if he died, his legions and followers would follow Agrippa immediately and see him as Augustus's anointed successor, and the show didn't have any of that. Insanity. Quit pussy-footing around it. If you want to add an "Agrippa loves and desperately wants something he's not sure he can have", have that something be Octavian, not Livia.

All in all, I just really don't like this show, for so many reasons, and I think they did nearly everything wrong except for maybe a few isolated things here and there, and I have absolutely no intention of watching it. Honestly, if you want good content on this time and any of these people, it's probably better to find a good nonfiction book on the period or biography on the key player that interests you the most and just read that.

Also I hate that horrible fucking wig they stuck on TGC when Augustus was literally a blond historically. Like, seriously, you have TGC there (and with all those gifsets showing how alike he and Olivia Cooke are it's a crying shame they didn't cast her as Octavia, the fancasting exists in my dreams), Augustus is attested as having been a blond pretty boy, fuck off with your terrible wig and let him use his natural hair, Roman men tended to have hair the length that most modern men keep their's nowadays anyway.

#personal #answered #anonymous #anti domina #god sorry for the rant i didn't mean to get as heated as i did #my thoughts on domina are that i don't like it #honestly once hbo agrees to pay their writers and actors what they deserve #they should just let me make the augustus biopic show #just give me free reign and as many seasons as i want and let me go to town i'd do it right

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kylorenisadorkable · 3 years

Text

How TROS Failed Rey

These are just my opinions and from my personal perspective, if these things worked for you in the movie then cool, but this is why it was never going to work for me.

A Feminine Power Fantasy

Growing up in the 90s there wasn't a ton of media that had female lead characters. I grew up with strong female characters but they were often relegated to being the token girl of the group (see the Smurfette principle), the story was never centered around them and we never got to experience things from their point of view or really get to know their story. It felt like I was being asked to relate to male characters but boys were never asked or expected to relate to female characters.

Just as young boys see themselves as Luke, leading the adventure I also wanted to see myself as the main character. I wanted to have my own adventures.

When I first saw TFA, I went in knowing nothing about the movie. I had seen the OT and the Prequels as a kid and I had thought they were ok but I wasn't a huge Star Wars fan and in hindsight I really think this was due to the lack of female representation, Leia and Padme are great but I never really felt like I really got to know them as people. Not to mention that these characters are 2 women out of a cast that's predominantly male, it just seemed like the message LF was sending was that Star Wars is for boys, yeah girls can watch it if they want to but this isn't a series that is meant for you. So as you could guess I wasn't really expecting much from these new Star Wars movies, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I fell in love with Rey's character during those first 3 minutes of her introduction. During this brilliant example of “show don't tell,” story telling they were really able to convey so much about Rey's character and personality, I really began to care for her and felt like I understood her, as I could relate to her loneliness and isolation in my own way. And I was excited to see a story from a major fantasy/adventure franchise told from a feminine perspective. It felt like I was finally getting the representation I wanted to see.

So what happened? How did we go from Luke's line “And I will not be the Last Jedi” which is essentially him “passing the torch” to Rey, the next generation, to “One day I will earn your brother's saber?”

As if the saber didn't already choose her in the Force Awakens? Why did they decide that all of a sudden Rey was unworthy? Didn't Yoda say “that library held nothing that the girl Rey didn't already posses?” which yes was a clever way of saying that Rey already took the jedi texts with her but was also implying that she already had everything she needed within herself to be a jedi (courage, humility, compassion etc...). Why did they take a step backwards in the last movie in the franchise? Insisting that Rey needed to train, that she suddenly wasn't good enough?

I can't say for sure what happened to lead up to this point. Was it just that the creative team gave in to the pressuring of a loud minority of alt-right youtubers and bots. Were they relying on Reddit and Twitter for public opinion rather than doing actual marketing research? While I think that this was definitely a big factor I think there was just a general misunderstanding of the characters on Terrio's and JJ's part to begin with.

What Does Rey Want/Need?

To know where they went wrong, we have to ask ourselves who is Rey? All characters have a story goal, or the thing they want. By the end of the story the character will either get what they want after some struggles of course or learn that the thing that they want isn't what they need. So what does Rey want? To understand what she wants we have to first understand her wound or past experience that caused emotional pain and interferes with the character's life. Rey's wound stems from her abandonment. Along with the wound, comes the concept of the false lie. What is a lie that the character believes about themselves that we as the audience knows is untrue? Rey's lie is first, that her family is going to come back for her.

The other lie she tells herself is the belief that she is worthless because she was abandoned, as she tells everyone she meets “I'm no one“ or “I'm just a scavenger.”

When Daisy Ridley was asked in an interview why Rey says she's “No One.” Ridley says it's because our relationships to people define so much of who we are and without relationships then who are we? This makes sense considering that our parents are major influences in our development and in how we think about ourselves through much of our lives.

Rey seeks out parental figures, thinking that through them she'll figure out where she belongs. “Whoever you're waiting for on Jakku, they're never coming back. But there's someone who still could. The Belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead.”

Rey initially believes that Maz is referring to Luke and when she later sets off to find him. She believe that he is going to be able to give her answers, and provide her with the belonging that she longs for, but Luke ultimately ends up disappointing her but finds comfort in her relationship with Ben.

This goes back to the idea that what Rey thinks she wants, Isn't necessarily what she needs. As JJ stated in the directors commentary of The Force Awakens, “So there was a very powerful idea that what she desperately wanted was belonging, which she’ll get, but just not how she expects.”

JJ and Terrio try to fullfill Rey's need through “found family” the family she finds with her friends and the resistance, but I think there is more to Rey's desire of wanting family that can't be satisfied by this alone. Finn, Poe, Leia are definitely a part of her journey in finding belonging but they're not the final piece to the puzzle. Otherwise she would have felt completely fulfilled by the end of The Last Jedi when she is on the Falcon surrounded by her friends.

I think part of Rey's desire for family, is also the desire to be understood, to be “seen.” Rey even tells Finn in TROS that “People keep telling me they know me. No one does.” We hear Ben's response in the trailer “But I do...” (which was cut from the movie)

Ben has always been shown to be the person who truly “sees” Rey. He sees even the aspects of herself that she doesn't like to acknowledge. Recognizing that her holding on to her parents is affecting her negatively and that if she really wants to “find herself” she needs to let go.

Which is why when Ben says “You have no place in this story. You're nothing. But not to me.” What is really being expressed is “I don't care about where you come from and I see you for who you are.”

This is why I believe that Ben was always suppose to be the final piece to the belonging Rey is searching for. As their narratives are intertwined. They both satisfy each others needs as characters, Rey's need to be seen for who she is and Ben's need for reconciliation and healing within his family.

Rey Palpatine

Rian Johnson said that when he began working on The Last Jedi, he wrote out all the character's names and next to them wrote what would be the hardest thing for that character to face. For Rey, this was that she needs to stand on her own two feet and define who she is for herself but JJ and Terrio seemed to have misunderstood this as Terrio states that,

“We also thought that Rey’s arc cannot be finished after Episode VIII. You can leave Episode VIII and say, “Well, now, Rey is content. She’s discovered her parents aren’t Skywalkers, or whatever, and that’s fine.” But so much of her personal story was about where she came from, what kept her on Jakku all those years and the trauma that shaped her. We see quite strongly in Episode VII that something mysterious and troubling happened to her. Although she did get some answers in Episode VIII, we didn’t feel that that story was over. We felt that there were still more questions in Rey’s head about where she came from and where she was going. So, that was the other big idea that we had to address in this film. Rian’s answer to, “What’s the worst news that Rey could receive?” was that she comes from junk traders, and that’s true. She does come from junk traders; we didn’t contradict that.”

Rey's conflict wasn't that she came from junk traders. Rey didn't care about “legacy.” Her conflict stemmed from her abandonment. Rey thinks she's “a nobody” not because of her parent's occupation or lineage but because she feels that she must be worthless because why else would her parents give her up? Rey learning that her parents sold her off for drinking money, that they didn't want her, was already a difficult and traumatic truth to overcome. Star Wars is a coming of age story, in the OT Luke grows from being a boy longing for adventure to discovering what it truly means to be a Jedi (following your principles and having a compassionate heart). Rey's journey is about letting go of childhood trauma and discovering her own independence.

It's also strange seeing as JJ had previously stated during The Force Awakens press tour that “I really feel that the assumption that any character needs to have inherited a certain number of midi-chlorians or needs to be part of a bloodline. It's not that I don't believe that as part of the canon, I'm just saying that at 11 years old that wasn't where my heart was. And so I respect and adhere to the canon but I also say that the Force has always seemed to me to be more inclusive and stronger than that.”

And there was still conflict for her to overcome. The one person who she felt truly understood her is now the supreme leader of the first order, will the resistance discover their connection? Will they see her as a traitor? All of this had the potential for great external and internal character conflict, but for some reason they didn't see this as conflict enough to sustain a whole movie?

Instead they gave Luke's character arc in the OT of having a dark side relative to Rey. “Discovering that you actually descended from your adoptive family’s greatest enemy, the same enemy who corrupted Anakin Skywalker and is responsible for the destruction of the Skywalker family in the first place, felt most devastating to us.” This doesn't make any sense to me as it feel like they just gave Rey Luke's internal conflict of being afraid of his dark side, I don't think this was ever a problem for Rey. In fact, in The Last Jedi she leapt into the dark side cave to face her darkness (her abandonment). Luke even says “You went straight to the dark and you didn't even try to stop yourself.”

The dark side cave in The Last Jedi was symbolic of Rey coming to terms with her darkness (the parts of herself she wants to hide). It relates back to Jungian psychology (which much of Star Wars is based on) that people can only become whole through understanding both the light and shadow aspects of their personality. So it doesn't make sense for Rey to be afraid of who she is in the final movie when she just finished a journey where she learned to accept who she was?

Rey Skywalker

Terrio says that the decision to have Rey take on the name “Skywalker” was a way to show that “you can choose your ancestry.” Which is not true and also a strange thing to say considering the trilogy started with this:

But even if this was just awkward phrasing and what Terrio meant to say was that she considers the Skywalkers her family. Does this make sense considering that she didn't have a great relationship with Luke to begin with?

I've seen it argued that she took the name as a way of honoring Leia but Leia never took the name or considered herself a Skywalker. Also this is another step backwards for Rey's character as The Last Jedi was trying to assert that Rey does not need to keep looking for parental figures to define herself.

So why must she be a Palpatine, a Skywalker and “all the jedi” anyways? I think this was done for two reasons, the first was because by killing Ben they were going to kill the last of the Skywalker family and they wanted to keep the name tied to the franchise, in case they need the characters for future projects down the line, so they just pushed it onto Rey. The second reason is that I think they were trying to appease the misogynists' who spent the last 4 years calling Rey a “Mary Sue” so they explained her power away through powerful male lineage. It just feels so weird to me, like the creators are saying that we should like Rey not because of who she is as a character but because of who she is in relation to all these other characters we know you like (Luke, Leia, all the jedi that use her as a vessel etc...)

Daisy Ridley has even expressed her frustration with the Rey's lineage debate multiple times, “I love that Rey is such a great character, they’re like: ‘No, no, she has to be… she has to be-’She’s her own person! Let her be her guys, let her live.

Yet even at the end of the final film poor Rey can't seem to catch a break as she's once again asked for her last name. She once again has to justify herself for just existing. Why are surnames suddenly so important in Star Wars now anyways? Shouldn't the correct answer be “just Rey,” now that she's come to accept who she is and where she's come from and shouldn't that be good enough? What happened to the message of anyone can be a hero? That you don't have to come from or align yourself with a powerful family legacy. That we all have the power to make a difference?

TROS seems to be constantly asking Rey to prove herself. And weirdly enough it reminds me in a strange meta way of my own experience being a woman in the fandom and being constantly asked to prove that I'm a “True fan” (whatever the f@#% that means...) to prove that I'm worthy of consuming and participating in this content that male fans feel belongs solely to them.

In Conclusion

So what did our heroine gain in the end? Did she find family and belonging? No. So what does she have in the end? A yellow lightsaber (for merchandising purposes) and a surname of a dead family? I guess she finally has an answer to give all the nosey nellies, obsessed with ones pedigree that have suddenly popped up all over the galaxy.

It's not a satisfying ending for her, as she's basically right back where she started. Alone, in a desolate desert, once again staring face to face at an old woman (an old woman which at the start of the Force Awakens symbolized her fear of growing old and wasting away her life on Jakku).

Terrio states that this is not meant to indicate that Rey plans to stay here, “The very last thing Rey would do after all that is to go and live alone in a desert.” but when that is the last shot you chose to end the movie on then what is the audience suppose to think? The bigger issue however, is that Rey's ending holds no significance to her or her journey. Terrio says that “In our thinking, Rey goes back to Tatooine as a pilgrimage in honor of her two Skywalker masters. Leia’s childhood home, Alderaan, no longer exists, but Luke’s childhood home, Tatooine, does. Rey brings the sabers there to honor the Skywalker twins by laying them to rest — together, finally — where it all began.” Tatooine, the Lars homestead and the twin suns, don't mean anything to Rey. You know who did mean something to Rey? Who was the one person who understood her, who she had an intimate relationship with, who she explicitly states she wanted to be with? Ben. But he's gone too. But clearly a light saber and surname are more important. Again this all comes from a lack of caring for what Rey wants.

I just wish that the Sequel Trilogy had stayed Rey's trilogy, that she got to be a heroine in her own right not because she was a skywalker, or a palpatine or from some other powerful family. I will always love Rey but I will always hate what they did to her and I'm tired of people invalidating my feelings and telling me that it was a good ending or that it was empowering. I just want heroines to be taken as seriously and to have all the same privileges as male heroes. Let them stand on their own without connecting them back to every male hero in the franchise, let them be their own character, and finally just let them be human, let them fall in love and have relationships if they want to. Male heroes are never considered to be less of a hero for having a love interest, so why are female heroes? Basically what I got out of the Rise of Skywalker, was that it was created by a couple of guys that loved Luke and the OT and could care less about Rey and that's truly heart breaking.

#rey #rey nobody #reylo #ben solo #rey deserved better #rey deserves better #bring ben solo back #I love rey #aTROSity #just rey #reunite the dyad

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ruby-whistler · 3 years

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There are three types of misinterpretation of c!Dream in my opinion; and by that I mean anyone's take ever, whether it's a c!Dream anti or a c!Dream apologist or a c!Dream enthusiast. That's right, I'm making an essay about how in my mind everyone is wrong. This is how I lead debates please don't unfollow me-

1. misunderstanding or overdramatizing evidence

c!Dream apologists; g-guys. I'm not saying he isn't traumatized, but look. I really used to believe he was just everyone's victim and hurt and mentally unstable, and I'm not saying he isn't at all, but I changed my mind because I feel like the evidence doesn't,, point that way at all. Your emotions are valid, but your takes are very removed from what the rest of the fandom thinks because you take little hints and try to make them into some big angsty point within canon.

The evidence we have proves he is more ruthless than anything; even the content creator says that. He doesn't say why he does progressively more ruthless things, and he does say it's for his ideals and out of good intentions, but he doesn't say anything about him being hurt into doing it.

I'm not saying he isn't hurt. But making analysis of an entire character based on something that is barely supported by canon isn't the way I roll and I feel like it's one of the reason why people assume all c!Dream apologist are going to woobify the character,, because some of them really do that.

I don't mind portraying him as hurt by what's happened in canon, because that is a completely safe conclusion, but jumping to the victim side of the scale seems a little bit like painting a completely different picture than what actual canon says. (Note: talking about pre-Pandora c!Dream here.)

There is tragedy in someone being driven by the environment, circumstances and themselves deeper and deeper into corruption, but it feels like by only considering that the entire character is limited to one side of the argument.

I like to also see the side of him that will hurt people because he thinks he has to, because he wants to succeed above all, the side that will ruthlessly murder and manipulate and be calculative and clever and even self-destructive about it because he believes that'll get him towards his ultimately selfless goal.

That's my morally complex bastard.

A lot of people seem to be mistaking or ignoring that for the sake of saying he is just... hurt and that that is an explanation of his actions, and even though they don't use it as an excuse, it feels a little cheap.

And here we come to the core of the problem: an emotional vs. rational explanation for the character's actions.

Because the thing is, with enough evidence, you will see that nearly (we'll get to that in a bit) everything he does can be explained rationally. Everything is connected, everything is the most logical and efficient and merciless route straight from point A to point B, because c!Dream is fascinatingly smart when you look deeper into it.

He knows what he's doing. He knows his actions are awful, and he doesn't care - not because he would be some evil person, but because his mindsets cause him to justify such things, and mindsets are more complicated than feelings.

There is a lot to explore in that direction of the character, but that is material for another essay.

In short, people seem to enjoy removing all of his agency in favor of explaining his actions emotionally rather than from a rational standpoint which results in inaccurate analysis.

Do I think it is completely understandable he attacked L'Manberg?

Absolutely.

Do I think c!Wilbur painted him as a villain to benefit his own power?

Yes.

Do I think he utilized the villain persona as an intimidation tactic and often went overkill with no regard for anything but accomplishing his goals and that he slowly became more and more willing to do bad things of his own accord because he became determined and distrusting of the world to the point of committing horrible actions?

100%.

Analysing that part of the character is the most interesting part, when you consider it - and an important one as well.

2. ignoring evidence

c!Dream antis; please. Stop saying he doesn't care or explaining his actions with obsession or assigning him personality traits or motives that he literally doesn't have in order to demonize him I beg of you.

It's so many basic and easily debunkable assumptions that can be explained with what we actually know of his motives. People will ignore both canon and the authors' words to paint him as some monster with no nuance, which he is not.

We only know so much about him, but people will ignore and deny even the little bit we have for the sake of making him the literal personification of evil and erasing the fact that he is a complex and human character. Just accept he can be accurately analysed beyond hate and let people do it if you don't want to do so yourself.

3. assuming the evidence we have is everything you need to determine a final approach and that nothing outside of the presented evidence exists when certain details prove otherwise

c!Dream enthusiasts; this was the only and biggest problem I've had since being introduced to much more rational interpretations of the character - which is emotions, and one of the biggest reasons why c!Dream gets dehumanized in the first place; the fact that we have little to no showcase or explanation of them in canon.

You see, c!Dream is a reserved character. He likes withholding his plans, withholding his feelings and information from the world.

However, since all we can really get out of watching his actions alone is the rational side (and that is deliberate by both the writer and the character, narratively and personality-wise) people slowly begin to assume there is no emotional side to his actions at all.

Which I find,, untrue. Between the people who erase the rational side of the character and those who erase the emotional side, there is little middle ground, but I don't really find either of them right either.

Because neither would be an accurate representation; just because he doesn't actively showcase his feelings doesn't mean he doesn't have them, and the few inconsistencies that are too small a detail for us to put everything together show that he does have an inner emotional world beyond what we see.

The character does work beyond what we know, and expecting that everything can be explained purely by rationality because that's all we see of him seems a little bit jumping the gun.

It leads to a less person-like view of a character who in reality simply doesn't like showing people the way he feels, and I don't really find that fair to him. It is best to accept there are things we can't say for sure, or to say an emotional interpretation can also be valid at times.

It is both important not to deny him agency and not to deny him the ability to be genuinely hurt by others or changed by his environment.

Both of these can coexist, especially in

the correct interpretation

Ok this is a joke.

I have literally no idea. I'm just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks - he confuses me beyond belief. The only person who knows about both the emotional and rational side of the character enough to have their interpretation unquestioned is cc!Dream - but when we do try to find answers, it is important for us as well that we do not ignore any aspects or possible aspects of the character, because that is the only way to get useful results out of our analysis.

Sorry this was crit of basically every take about the character I have ever seen but I needed to get my thoughts out.

#dream smp #c!dream #ask to tag as crit #long post #idk i'm big on the c!dream pos #but woobification & dehumanization & demonization are #all equally a problem in the fandom #with the character

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aminiatureworld · 4 years

Text

Time and Chance

Characters: Albedo, Childe, Diluc, gn!reader

Word Count: 4,028

Warnings: Swearing

Premise: Confessions are tricky things. Sometimes it takes week, maybe months, maybe years of building up courage for one to happen. And sometimes life throws the oddest wrenches in our paths.

In which the reader confesses.

Author’s Note: I may or may not have decided to go full sappy this week, but I didn’t want to overwhelm you guys with my overbearing angst. Also I thought it was cute. Originally I wasn’t sure if I wanted the reader to be the one doing the confessing or whether it should be the character. I decided upon the reader on a whim essentially, with the idea that I could do the character later. We’ll see! The title today is reference to one of my favorite novels, written by Sharon Kay Penman. If anyone likes historical fiction I’d highly recommend it.

Today’s characters are Albedo, Childe, and Diluc. Tomorrow will be Kaeya, Xiao, and Zhongli. And maybe Keqing.

Like I said in my past post Happy Valentine’s Day! Although this time it’s Valentine’s Day proper.

Albedo

In your defense, who wouldn’t fall in love with Albedo?

The mysterious alchemist of Monstadt; sharp as a tack, insatiably curious, and blessed with an ethereal sort of beauty on top of it. Who wouldn’t fall in love with such a person?

And that was the problem. You’d sort of taken it for granted that everyone loved Albedo, and in that assumption you’d found a particularly distasteful discovery. That if everyone loved Albedo then you were hardly going to be the only one asking after his time. And, following that line of thought, you figured it’d be incredibly rude – not to mention supremely irritating for Albedo – for you to confess your feelings.

And it wasn’t as if you two were the closest in the world. Although you wouldn’t say you were total strangers either. You instead drifted in that odd in between; more than acquaintances, not quite friends. Or at least that’s how you interpreted it. Albedo didn’t seem to be the person with inclinations towards friendship in general, a not altogether untrue or wild assumption, so you remained content where you were, happy with the conversations you had, with the times he’d trust you with a piece of equipment or would explain to you in detail what he was working on. I mean, surely that was enough?

Absolutely not. Even in your state of perpetual irritation and fretting over your feelings, you knew that simply ignoring them was a ridiculous solution. When did that ever go well? Miscommunication was the relationship killer, no matter what type, and what could be more of a misunderstanding than this? You didn’t even know what he thought of you for Seven’s sake!

So you’d resolved yourself to telling him. Even if he’d be irritated surely he’d appreciate your honesty. And even if he didn’t you needed to tell him, for yourself if not for him.

It was with this in mind that you approached him one afternoon as he was working outside.

“Um, Albedo?” Your voice had taken on a slightly weak tone, as if you didn’t have enough air all of a sudden. It sounded weird, and you kind of wished you didn’t have to hear it. But that was par for the course when dealing something like this, although it didn’t make it any easier.

“Oh, sorry I didn’t notice you there.” Albedo turned around to look at you. You noticed that he’d swapped his regular tools for a paint set and an easel. Glancing at the painting you were struck by how he’d somehow managed to depict Cider Lake so accurately with so few brushstrokes. Never did you think about how the slight ripples that appeared in it could look a bit like circles. It was altogether impressive, and for a moment you forgot what you were doing, or perhaps you’d pushed it out of your mind.

“Was there something you wanted to ask?” Albedo’s voice pulled you out of your artistic musings. Evidently you weren’t going to be able to get out of it now. Come hell or high water, you were going to tell him.

“Well, so… you see, I… I really love you and your work!” The words came tumbling out, dropping like stones in the suddenly charged atmosphere. Almost immediately your nerves were replaced with a distinct sinking sense. “Uhm, rather. I mean –” you tried to begin again, but your voice had suddenly turned quite small, and you found yourself unable to continue.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Albedo’s voice was calm but not unkind, for a moment you felt your face grow warm. Was this actually going to happen? It’d be impressive considering how you’d botched it. “I’m so glad to hear there’s someone else interested in my work. I find that unfortunately a great many people take the world around them for granted. That you do not is commendable.”

You found you weren’t really sure what to say; admittedly the only thing going through your mind at the time was something along the lines of Holy shit. Holy shit I fucking blew it.

Okay, so maybe that was an absolute train wreck. Still, you’d gotten that far, and at this point you felt like it’d be harder to stop and deal with the memory of your botched pseudo-confession than to try again. So you steeled your courage and after a week or so you found yourself ready.

This time you tried for as he arrived at work. Originally you were going to wait for afterwards, but you found the anticipation was tearing you apart, and so decided for before. The anticipation, combined with your slight exhaustion, was nearly unbearable; and a not so small part of you kept telling yourself that this was a terrible idea, but you were too far gone.

“Fancy meeting you here at this time.” There was certainly surprise in Albedo’s voice, but he was smiling, and didn’t seem to mind at all when you stammered out that you wanted to ask him about something. He simply nodded, before unlocking his lab and gesturing for you to go in first.

You loved Albedo’s lab. Various pieces of equipment gleamed in the early morning light, everything properly labeled and put away; a stark contrast to the clutter of Albedo’s desk, filled with papers and the odd sample. The whole room was surprisingly nice in general, floors made of wood, painted over with a type of resin as to keep it from being properly damaged, multiple windows keeping the space surprisingly airy, and the smell of various herbs filling the air, though not so much as to be overpowering. You’d once mentioned to Albedo that the space seemed much to homey to be a proper lab. He’d merely laughed, replying that all homes should be comfortable, no matter how out of the ordinary.

Now you used said comfort and familiarity to ground yourself. This time you’d do it. This time for sure.

“So, um about my question?”

“Yes?” Albedo replied, dropping a few things on his desk. You took a breath, steadying yourself before pushing on ahead.

“Well… you know when I told you I liked you and your work?”

“Of course. I was very happy to hear it.” Albedo’s tone remained opaque, you had no idea how your words were registering.

“Well, you see, I wasn’t being completely clear. What I meant was more… well… well I like you, more than your work.” Seeing the look of confusion on his face you sped up slightly. “Not that I don’t like your work of course! It’s just, it’s just…” you were foundering again, feeling stupidly embarrassed. Becoming more and more frustrated with yourself you shook your head. “What I mean is I like you. Personally. And I like you a lot, more than just as acquaintances or as maybe friends. And I know that this is kind of out of the blue and kind of intrusive, and I’m sure there are a lot of people who like you. But I just wanted to tell you because, well I don’t know, just because.”

You took a deep breath, feeling as if you’d said altogether too many words. Glancing towards Albedo you saw a look of slight shock on his face. A feeling of dread was creeping up on you. Maybe it would’ve been better to say nothing.

“Well, I’m certainly flattered,” Albedo began, all your hopes beginning to sink. Urging yourself not to look away your nevertheless started picking at your fingernails, praying that at least the rejection would be over soon. “though I’m not really sure what you see in me. I’m hardly the ideal sort of person. And there certainly don’t seem to be many people who like me.” Albedo paused then; staring at him you found yourself in slight disbelief, sure that the sudden blush painting his cheeks was a figment of your imagination. “That being said, I cannot say that I don’t reciprocate your feelings. In truth I feel quite foolish now, only for assuming you were uninterested and refusing to try my hand at my own confession.”

“Really?” You didn’t mean for the tone of your voice to come out as so utterly disbelieving, but you couldn’t help yourself. Slightly light-headed you took a step forward, closing the space between you and the suddenly bashful alchemist in front of you. “You like me too?”

“Yes.” Albedo nodded slightly. “And, well, since you like me as well, might we…”

“Might we?”

“Might you do me the honor of becoming my partner?”

You found yourself giggling hysterically, half from the sudden release of nerves half from how ludicrous the situation had turned out to be. Seeing Albedo, looking for the first time uncertain and nervous, you stopped. Your face burst into a smile and you nodded.

“This is quite dramatic. But of course, of course I will.”

“I’m glad. But, might I say something?”

“Yes?”

“I wish you’d told me after work. If only because I’ll never be able to concentrate now.”

Childe

If you had to describe your crush on Childe in one word it would be: idiotic. If you had to describe it in a sentence it’d be; incredibly irritating but also impossible to ignore.

You liked Childe, you liked him a lot. And you couldn’t blame yourself. Childe was the ideal sort of partner; charismatic, athletic, with eyes that could make your heart skip a beat and hair that was asking for you to run your hands through it. Childe was attentive too, full of words that would make anyone swoon a bit, and always ready to listen, agreeing with you on every point and reacting just as you wished.

But that was the problem. Childe was a façade, his personality had been honed to be as sharp and as deadly as a knife. Of course he was understanding and charismatic and a perfect person to hold a conversation with, what else could one expect of a member of the Fatui?

At first you’d desperately tried to ignore your feelings, as if they were somehow embarrassing. You felt vaguely guilty for carrying a flame for Childe, as if you’d managed to fall into a trap you’d seen a ways away. It was an unpleasant feeling to be sure, and you tried to bury it as much as possible, sure it’d go away.

But it didn’t go away, instead your feelings somehow seemed to become more and more stubborn, as if insisting on leading you down the path that many fools who interacted with the Fatui had fallen down before. Childe was at the forefront of your mind.

You noticed when he passed by you, shooting you a blinding smile which always turned into a self-confident sort of smirk, no doubt a result of your inevitable blush. You noticed the way he always seemed to ask after your interests, but never failed to avoid more personal topics that might make you uncomfortable. You noticed how he laughed at your odd half-jokes and the way that his hand brushed your once, causing you to withdraw your own as if burned, stammering out a “nothing” when he asked what was wrong.

But still you refused to tell him. Surely that was what he wanted, another person who could be called upon to give information to the Fatui, or perhaps assist in their dirty work. That wouldn’t be you, that would never be you.

It was snowing on your way home, blocking out the normal sounds and casting the world in an eerie sort of beauty. You wished that it wasn’t so late, cursing yourself for once more forgetting how early the sun set. It didn’t help that it was blindingly cold, and that you were dressed for weather that was at least ten degrees warmer. Hurrying along you were thinking about the meal that you were going to have, unaware of the slick patch of ice lying in front of you.

“Whoah, be careful!” You were yanked out of your thoughts with alarm. Glancing around you quickened your pace, shoes slipping immediately on the ice. However instead of a hard fall on the street you found a pair of arms wrapped under yours. Glancing up you found your face only centimeters away from Childe’s.

“Sorry for causing that.” Childe’s voice was clear as a bell, marking the contrast between the two of you in your mind. Lifting you up he chuckled slightly. “I should’ve realized that a random voice yelling at you would be alarming. Nothing bruised I hope?”

“N-no.” You managed, face burning. You’d never gotten this close to Childe before, not really, and the experience was going straight to your head, as if you’d suddenly gotten very, very drunk. Shaking your head you shifted your glanced towards the ground. “Thank you.” You managed, although your voice was soft enough to be inaudible. You were still trying to process what was happening. One question kept replaying itself in your mind, why had he called out, why had he noticed you?

“I’m glad!” Childe’s voice was a beautiful thing, and you found you couldn’t really think when listening to it. “I was a bit worried I wasn’t in time.”

“Yeah…” you replied. Suddenly the situation dawned on you completely, and you found yourself looking at him with no little suspicion. “Why do you pay so much attention to me?” You blurted out.

“What do you mean?” The expression on Childe’s face was one of perfect confusion, but you could tell that he’d been somehow caught. The tone of his voice was suddenly muddied, as if you were hearing his uncertainty for the first time. This gave you courage to press forward.

“I mean it. Why, why do I always see you? I mean, why do you even pay attention to me? I’m not the kind of person to forget who you are, the fact that you’re a member of the Fatui. I won’t be roped into your schemes, no matter how much I like you.” Shit. That last part was supposed to be only in your head. For a moment you weren’t sure if you hadn’t actually hit your head somehow.

Childe looked frozen, his expression blank, filled with disbelief as well as… bashfulness? If that’s what it was it certainly didn’t fit the normal vision of Childe, still you found yourself somehow compelled by it. This was a part of the real Childe.

“I… didn’t realize you’d notice. Now I feel found out!” He chuckled again, but this time it was distinctly nervous, and he turned to the side slightly. Suddenly he paused, and his eyes snapped towards yours. “Wait, rewind. You like me?”

“…Yeah.” I mean what were you supposed to say?

“I can’t believe this.” The widest grin spread across Childe’s face, and he started bouncing on his toes slightly, it was very cute you could give him that.

“You’re ignoring the rest of my words. Personal feelings or not I still hate the Fatui, and I still don’t know why you’d target me anyways.”

“It’s cause I like you, can’t you tell?” Childe’s words rammed into you, utterly unexpected; seeing you shake your head he once more closed the space between you two. “No, I mean it. I like you. I just can’t believe that you like me back.” He let out another huff of laughter. “I can’t believe I’m this lucky, I’ve never been this lucky. Well, I’m sorry that I came off like I was some Fatui creep, I promise my occupation doesn’t include systematic wooing of civilians.”

“How can I trust you?” You were trying to stand your ground, but in reality you’d already fallen. The situation was too much, and what little resistance you’d managed to hold on in the past weeks was tearing to shreds before your own eyes.

“Because I wouldn’t lie about this.” Childe was suddenly still, his expression deadly serious. “I promise I wouldn’t lie about something like this. The fact is I like you, I like you a lot. I know my job is… unconventional to say the least; I also know that it’s entirely fair if you don’t want to associate with me because of it. But at least trust in my feelings being real, okay?”

What could you do? You nodded, a short “I trust you” falling from your lips. The feeling of happiness was surprisingly sedate, mixed with nerves, yet also somehow filled with contentment. It felt so good, it felt so good just to let go and accept what had happened. You liked Childe, you liked him so much, and he like you too. What more was there to say?

“May I ask you something?” Childe asked, voice slightly husky. Your faces were once more barely apart, and you found that you could stay like this for ages and ages.

“Yes?”

“May I hold your hand?”

You let out a laugh, smiling brightly as you slid your hand into his.

Diluc

You weren’t even sure how this one happened.

It wasn’t that Diluc wasn’t the perfect kind of guy, I mean if he wasn’t you probably wouldn’t be falling madly into one sided love with him. It was just that you two didn’t actually have much of a chance to interact with one another, what with him being the manager and part time bartender of a surprisingly vast winery, and with you being an adventurer and someone not likely to get plastered any time soon.

But the few times that you had interacted with him, usually something to do with guarding the alcohol he was exporting, had been enough to cement an intense infatuation in your mind. There was just something about him; whether it was his voice, his polite yet intense form of speech; his mannerisms, always perfectly on time with what he needed, something which helped you and the Guild immensely; or his general charm, okay look he had great hair; you’d simply gone mad for him.

And mad indeed you were. Though you weren’t about to become a stalker – besides being incredibly creepy on principle since when did that land a person in anything but jail – you’d taken to trying to find out a least a little more about him. Because if you were going to be infatuated with someone it should at least be for more than his organizational skills and the fact his hair would look great in a high ponytail.

And what you’d found out only built upon your crush. The fact that he found the Knights of Favonius lacking, though perhaps a bit unconventional, was ultimately reasonable, or at least justifiable. You liked also that he refrained from drinking, and not just because the idea of ending the night sick in the bathroom was something that haunted you a bit. The more you learned the more you wished that you were in a situation where your feelings could be reciprocated, or at least where you could become friends of some degree. Really you just wanted him to notice your existence, sure he could pick you out in the endless sea of adventurers.

So you planned on introducing yourself at some point, at least as his almost designated wine protector. The only problem was when. Diluc seemed to be busier and busier these days, and when he was around he seemed muted, as if he was carrying something. You couldn’t bring yourself to add to his burden your own baggage. So you said nothing, and as your crush grew so did your dejection.

It was a lovely summer evening and, seeing as your apartment had becoming stifling in the daytime, you’d taken a walk, snaking through the streets of Monstadt before exiting via the back gate, glad to see there were no guards around. Walking down towards the banks of the lake you slipped off your shoes and dipped your feet into the water. Letting out a sigh you sat down and tilted your head back, enjoying the slightly breeze on your face, trying to take your mind off of the past months of agony. The world faded into background noise, and you found yourself in a state of pseudo peace, glad to have it, if only for a moment.

“Watch out!” A familiar voice broke through your reverie. Turning your head towards the source of your disruption you saw a masked figure as well as a cryo abyss mage. The mage, having correctly decided you were going to be easier to deal with than the actively armed person, suddenly appeared right in front of you. Acting on instinct you pushed your hand in front of you, letting electricity bloom from your fingertips.

As the abyss mage lay stunned your felt an arm wrap around your waist, dragging you a ways away. “Wait here.” The person carrying you said, before running back to fight. Finally getting a good look at your savior it was all you could do not to gasp. Despite being the cold hard truth you still found it hard to believe, and for a second you wondered if you hadn’t passed out somewhere and were having a particularly fantastic dream.

Finally the fighting was over, lifting yourself up you jogged over to the man who could only be the Darknight Hero.

“Master Diluc?” The words flew out of your mouth.

“Just Diluc please.” Diluc shook his head. “Forgive me for being a bit rough. Cryo abyss mages and electro users rarely work well together.”

“It’s perfectly fine!” You replied eagerly. “Really, thank you!”

Diluc offered a smile in reply, one that immediately made your heart seize up. Suddenly you remembered who the person in front of you was. Seized at first with something akin to embarrassment you also came to a sudden realization. This might be the only chance.

“Diluc?”

“Yes?”

“Well, can I say something?”

“Of course you may.” Diluc relaxed his stance, leaning slightly forward. Your face was burning, you really weren’t expecting something like this to happen, but it was now or never.

“I realize this will be quite sudden, but I… I like you.” You felt the urge to add on something, some explanation or apology, but unfortunately, or perhaps thankfully, you found you couldn’t say anything more. Running your fingers through your hair you lowered your head slightly, not wanting to see the expression on his face.

“Can I say something?” Diluc’s voice was gentle, and you couldn’t help but look up at him. Though you wouldn’t say his stance had changed very much, he somehow seemed more relaxed, something you weren’t expecting.

“Of course! I realize what I said must really be a shock, I’m really sorry.” You let out a pathetic sort of laugh.

“Don’t be sorry. I realize what I’m about to say must be equally as shocking. But, the fact of the matter is I like you as well.”

“I didn’t realize you knew I existed!” You replied, still not ready to drop your defense mechanisms. Diluc stared at you, a perplexed expression on his face.

“I’m quite surprised by that, I thought that my request for you to be the guild member in charge of the Winery would’ve been an indicator. Forgive me, I didn’t realize that you were unaware.”

“I thought that was a decision by the Guild to make things easier.” You admitted. “Although I guess I just didn’t want to admit that you might be aware of my existence.”

“Why?”

“Because that would’ve been scary! I mean, what if you didn’t like me, not in that way, just… in general.”

“Well I like you a lot.” Diluc’s voice was soft and warm.

“I like you two.” You replied, voice barely above a whisper.

As he escorted you back to your home the two of you spoke about a myriad of things, some important and some quite mundane. You found that having your feeling reciprocated had truly opened up something in you. Suddenly everything seemed so much realer, made manifest by Diluc’s presence. You couldn’t believe it really. What had failed with months of planning had succeeded in a matter of moments.

And all because of an unsuspecting abyss mage.

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