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

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The thread got locked before I was able to post my reply to this but I actually think this reminder is important enough that I'm going to post about it here too. My response:

"This feels like a fitting time to remind people that the split between words like gay/lesbian and bisexual/pansexual/etc is actually fairly recent history still. Lesbian used to mean "any woman who has an interest in women" regardless of any additional interest in men or other genders, and it was, in fact, due to prominent political lesbians (a precurser to modern day radfems which is what the term TERF references) that the term was narrowed to exclude "women who also like other genders besides women" from the lesbian community.

Your sister called you a TERF because the reasoning and definitions you are using come DIRECTLY AND EXPLICITLY from the political community that term references. Your sister continues to identify as a lesbian sometimes because it is fully her right to do so, and ABSOLUTELY NOT YOURS to deny her language that reflects her experiences. Your response is to continue denying her the right to her language. You should probably read up on some community history before you decide to make another "joke" about this fight you keep starting with your sister.

Maybe you could start here with Stonewall UK's resources on the history of bisexuality: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/about-us/news/short-history-word-bisexuality#:~:text=In%201859%2C%20anatomist%20Robert%20Bentley,understand%20this%20as%20being%20intersex.

From the text:

"But if people in the past didn't use the term 'bi', how did people attracted to more than one gender describe themselves?

There is no simple answer to this question. Some didn’t use an identity label at all, preferring not to categorise their relationships. Some understood themselves as heterosexual, while others identified as gay or lesbian. Others described themselves using percentages or ratios, such as ‘60:40 gay:heterosexual’. When the term ‘gay’ was first popularised by gay liberationists in the 1970s, it often linked radical politics and same-gender attraction, but didn’t necessarily exclude people who were attracted to, or had relationships with, multiple genders.

One interviewee I spoke to during my PhD recalled: “There was a general understanding that sexuality was some sort of spectrum, and that people would move along it from time to time”. It’s also important to note that this terminology is particular to English-speakers in the West, and that elsewhere in the world there has been a diverse range of approaches to sexuality and gender that often reject binary categorisations. In many cases, these approaches have been restricted or prohibited as a legacy of colonialism.

It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the current understanding of bisexuality, as an orientation or capacity for attraction, became widely accepted in the UK as "the more common usage". Around this point, we started to see bi groups and events being established. The UK’s first bi group, London Bisexual Group, was formed in 1981, followed by other groups in Edinburgh (1984), Brighton (1985), Manchester (1986) and Glasgow (1988), as well as a London-based Bisexual Women’s Group. A magazine, Bi-Monthly, was founded, as well as two bi helplines in London and Edinburgh, and the UK’s longest continually-running LGBTQ+ community event, the annual BiCon."

Bisexual inclusion under the language of lesbian or historically equivalent terms was the norm until nearly the 80s, when political lesbian/radical feminist ideaology began to argue that their inclusion diluted or endangered the community. A good place to read up on how this process occurred is Out History: https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/lesbians-20th-century/lesbian-feminism

From the text:

"In essence, lesbian feminists tried to untie lesbianism from sex so heterosexual feminists were more comfortable. But they still had to find an effective way to address the accusation that their masculinity was somehow complicit with men and patriarchy. Lesbian feminists responded by distancing themselves from stereotypes of “masculine roles,” maleness, and patriarchy. One way they were able to do so was by disentangling lesbian sexuality from heterosexuality and re-conceptualizing heterosexual sex as consorting with “the enemy”. They capitalized on dominant assumptions regarding female sexuality, including ideas of women’s romantic and nurturing sexuality versus men’s aggressive sexuality. They were then able to draw a distinction between lesbian sex and heterosexual sex, claiming that lesbian sex was “pure as snow” since it did not involve men. For example, “…the male seeks to conquer through sex while the female seeks to communicate” and “…lesbians are obsessed with love and fidelity” (Echols, 218).

Using this ideology, lesbians successfully billed lesbianism as an ultimate form of feminism--a practice that did not involve men on any emotional level. In this way, heterosexual feminists were seen as inferior because of their continued association with men. Lesbians took on a “vanguard” quality as the “true” bearers of feminism."

Another great paper on this history and the way its impacts continue to present within the community is L v. B and Feminist Identity: Examining Lesbians’ Bi-Negativity and Bisexuals’ Lesbian Negativity Using Norm-Centered Stigma Theory: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359801347_L_v_B_and_Feminist_Identity_Examining_Lesbians'_Bi-Negativity_and_Bisexuals'_Lesbian_Negativity_Using_Norm-Centered_Stigma_Theory

This is a research case study of how one lesbian magazine participated in the construction of an "us vs them" barrier within the lesbian community in order to recast the historic presence of bisexual women as an urgent and unwelcome invasion. While DIVA was surely not the only lesbian publication to participate in this work, it provides an excellent example to understand how that work was done: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405904.2014.974634

From the text:

"In the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian feminists quarrelled over definitions of lesbianism that appeared at times to include bisexuals (see Rich's, 1980, lesbian continuum, which ultimately elided any perceived distinction between exclusively lesbian sexual activity and ‘woman-identification’) and by turn to cast bisexual existence as unwelcome ‘infiltration and exploitation of the lesbian community’ (Zita, 1982, p. 164). The ‘issue’ of bisexual inclusion became increasingly visible as the gay liberation movement abandoned a constructionist critique of sexuality and gender categories and opted instead for an essentialist, quasi-ethnic homosexual identity. The idea of being ‘born gay’ produced campaign gains by problematising homophobic arguments revolving around choice, but simultaneously reinforced the homo–hetero binary (Barker & Langdridge, 2008; Epstein, 1987; Evans, 1993; Udis-Kessler, 1990). In this way, an ethnic gayness rendered bisexuality indefinitely liminal, outside of both heterosexuality and homosexuality, and claimed by neither. Mainstream media, too, depicted sexuality as dichotomous (Barker et al., 2008).

It is precisely the imagining of bisexuality as something (constantly flitting) between these two supposedly immutable realms that appears to be at the root of any ‘trouble’. Bisexuality has been conceived of by members of the gay community2 as a ‘stage’ between rejecting a heterosexual identity and ‘coming out’ as homosexual (and as Chirrey, 2012, shows, is constructed as such in coming out literature); those claiming it on a permanent basis have been derided as cowards who are ‘really’ gay, but wish to retain heterosexual privileges (Esterberg, 1997; Evans, 1993). Bisexuality in these terms is thus derogated as an illegitimate sexuality (McLean, 2008) and is imagined as an alternation between two separate worlds, for which promiscuity is a necessary condition (even in positive appraisals of bisexuality, Welzer-Lang's, 2008, participants largely describe a sexual identity premised on multiple relationships; see also Klesse, 2005). Both like and unlike ‘us’, the bisexual woman is able to move in either realm, an ‘amphibian’ (Babcock-Abrahams, 1975) whose transgression between categories threatens boundaries and the identities constructed and maintained within – an ‘awkward reminder’ (Baker, 2008, p. 145) of internal difference and potential inter-group similarities where (the illusion of) the opposite offers comfort and validation (Taylor, 1998). The links they forge between the constructed lesbian and heterosexual worlds allow bisexuals to ‘infiltrate the lesbian and gay community, use its facilities for their own gratification, and then retreat into the sanctuary of heterosexual normalcy’ (Humphrey, 1999, p. 233). It is in this light that we can understand McLean's (2008) participants' decision to preserve the assumption of homosexuality in ostensibly queer spaces. Bisexuals have been denigrated as neither committed to gay politics nor oppressed enough to be ‘our’ concern (Evans, 1993; Ochs, 1988). Further, by linking the lesbian and heterosexual worlds, bisexuals form what feminist lesbians consider(ed) a conduit through which ‘our world’ is contaminated by contact with men (see Wolf, 1979). Bisexuals are thus dangerous pollutants, in Douglas's (1966) terms."

You don't need to agree with your sister's decisions around her identity in order to respect them as well as the history she is tying herself too by making those decisions. You DO need to understand that our language as a community is in a constant state of evolution, and many people will have very personal reasons for maintaining older/more historically associated useages of our language/terminology.

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jurisffiction · 1 year

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here's to languishing 🥂

i feel like i need to take this invitation to add commentary to my post that i was thinking as i typed it and wanted to clarify then but held myself back because i've been working on not compulsively vomiting my thought processes to everyone out of the hypervigilant response born of being misunderstood my whole life.

but you opened the floor. so! i typed languishing because it's the word that came to me first, but then i recalled all those pandemic mental health articles that framed 'languishing' as some type of pathological and definitive term next to clinical depression – some kind of specific state of unnerving stasis of self. and i thought to myself, well, that's not what I'm doing currently, so should i be describing my current action as 'languishing'? is that what I want the reader to associate and conjure in their mind?

but then i remembered i'd opened with the word languid, an obvious relation, though 'languid' manages to carry with it instead a sense of purposeful insolence; a disinclination, a near-luxuriating in laziness in contrast to languishing's connotations of discordia of the mind and body. so i left it as languishing, knowing at least that i meant it far more as an extension of my initial and intentional languor and not a indictment of myself.

now, however, i'm more curious. two lead questions: are those connotations i have actually common for others? and if so, how do two forms of essentially the same word hold such differing connotations? how separate are their etymological roots, really?

the oxford english dictionary (quite useful for tracking changes in meaning over time) marks the earliest records of 'languish' as a verb c1325 as our understanding of weakness or feebleness, but quite close c1380 it lists a "now-archaic" use to describe a "droop in spirits; to pine or brood, esp. with love or grief", and, by 1567 (also now-archaic) "to waste away with longing for; to yearn (to do something)". now that's what I'm talking about! (the oed also notes some usages as "chiefly poetic;" which i would like to specifically shout out.)

all of that—for languishing— seems to fit moreso for my usage of languid than the descriptions listed for languid itself: first recorded in 1595 (as 'weakness', again, though the note of 'listless' strikes true for my use) though by 1727 there is an association to 'leisurely; unhurried' and 1723, of peacefulness.

so what have i learnt here. I suppose that i had somehow completely conjured the periphery of my understanding of the word 'languid' out of thin air for myself, but/and some of the connotations i insist on are at least part of the archaic understanding of the older 'languish' regardless.

and as for my specific commentary notes, i'd clarify i meant both terms exclusively in archaic sense; the most resonant wording of such being the oxford languages': to assume a sentimentally tender or melancholy expression or tone; to pine with love or grief.

#asks #long.#long post #.#I ALSO NEED YOU TO KNOW I TYPED THIS ALL UP 8 MINUTES AGO THEN #SORRY NO. 22. 22 minutes corresponding with someone re what exactly 'a' means for a year record. Who didnt know then we had to work it out.#But now i've learnt something new!

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reanimatedcourier · 4 years

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How to Write Indigenous Characters Without Looking like a Jackass:

Update as of December 26th, 2020: I have added a couple new sections about naming and legal terms, as well as a bit of reading on the Cherokee Princess phenomenon.

Boozhoo (hello) Fallout fandom! I'm a card-carrying Anishinaabe delivering this rough guide about writing Indigenous characters because wow, do I see a lot of shit.

Let's get something out of the way first: Fallout's portrayal of Indigenous people is racist. From a vague definition of "tribal" to the claims of them being "savage" and "uncivilized" mirror real-world stereotypes used to dehumanize us. Fallout New Vegas' narrated intro has Ron Perlman saying Mr. House "rehabilitated" tribals to create New Vegas' Three Families. You know. Rehabilitate. As if we are animals. Top it off with an erasure of Indigenous people in the American Southwest and no real tribe names, and you've got some pretty shitty representation. The absence of Native American as a race option in the GECK isn't too great, given that two Native characters are marked "Caucasian" despite being brown. Butch Deloria is a pretty well-known example of this effect. (Addendum: Indigenous people can have any mix of dominant and recessive traits, as well as present different phenotypes. What bothers me is it doesn't accommodate us or mixed people, which is another post entirely.)

As a precautionary warning: this post and the sources linked will discuss racism and genocide. There will also be discussion of multiple kinds of abuse.

Now, your best approach will be to pick a nation or tribe and research them. However, what follows will be general references.

Terms that may come up in your research include Aboriginal/Native Canadian, American Indian/Native American, Inuit, Métis, and Mestizo. The latter two refer to cultural groups created after the discovery of the so-called New World. (Addendum made September 5th, 2020: Mestizo has negative connotations and originally meant "half breed" so stick with referring to your mixed Latine and Indigenous characters as mixed Indigenous or simply by the name of their people [Maya, Nahua].)

As a note, not every mixed person is Métis or Mestizo. If you are, say, Serbian and Anishinaabe, you would be mixed, but not Métis (the big M is important here, as it refers to a specific culture). Even the most liberal definition caps off at French and British ancestry alongside Indigenous (some say Scottish and English). Mestizo works the same, since it refers to descendants of Spanish conquistadors/settlers and Indigenous people.

Trouble figuring out whose land is where? No problem, check out this map.

Drawing

Don't draw us with red skin. It's offensive and stereotypical.

Tutorial for Native Skintones

Tutorial for Mixed Native Skintones

Why Many Natives Have Long Hair (this would technically fit better under another category, but give your Native men long hair!)

If You're Including Traditional Wear, Research! It's Out There

Languages

Remember, there are a variety of languages spoken by Indigenous people today. No two tribes will speak the same language, though there are some that are close and may have loan words from each other (Cree and Anishinaabemowin come to mind). Make sure your Diné (you may know them as Navajo) character doesn't start dropping Cree words.

Here's a Site With a Map and Voice Clips

Here's an Extensive List of Amerindian Languages

Keep in mind there are some sounds that have no direct English equivalents. But while we're at it, remember a lot of us speak English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The languages of the countries that colonized us.

Words in Amerindian languages tend to be longer than English ones and are in the format of prefix + verb + suffix to get concepts across. Gaawiin miskwaasinoon is a complete sentence in Anishinaabemowin, for example (it is not red).

Names

Surprisingly, we don't have names like Passing Dawn or Two-Bears-High-Fiving in real life. A lot of us have, for lack of better phrasing, white people names. We may have family traditions of passing a name down from generation to generation (I am the fourth person in my maternal line to have my middle name), but not everyone is going to do that. If you do opt for a name from a specific tribe, make sure you haven't chosen a last name from another tribe.

Baby name sites aren't reliable, because most of the names on there will be made up by people who aren't Indigenous. That site does list some notable exceptions and debunks misconceptions.

Here's a list of last names from the American census.

Indian Names

You may also hear "spirit names" because that's what they are for. You know the sort of mystical nature-related name getting slapped on an Indigenous character? Let's dive into that for a moment.

The concept of a spirit name seems to have gotten mistranslated at some point in time. It is the name Creator calls you throughout all your time both here and in the spirit world. These names are given (note the word usage) to you in a ceremony performed by an elder. This is not done lightly.

A lot of imitations of this end up sounding strange because they don't follow traditional guidelines. (I realize this has spread out of the original circle, but Fallout fans may recall other characters in Honest Hearts and mods that do this. They have really weird and racist results.)

If you're not Indigenous: don't try this. You will be wrong.

Legal Terms

Now, sometimes the legal term (or terms) for a tribe may not be what they refer to themselves as. A really great example of this would be the Oceti Sakowin and "Sioux". How did that happen, you might be wondering. Smoky Mountain News has an article about this word and others, including the history of these terms.

For the most accurate information, you are best off having your character refer to themselves by the name their nation uses outside of legislation. A band name would be pretty good for this (Oglala Lakota, for example). I personally refer to myself by my band.

Cowboys

And something the Fallout New Vegas fans might be interested in, cowboys! Here's a link to a post with several books about Black and Indigenous cowboys in the Wild West.

Representation: Stereotypes and Critical Thought

Now, you'll need to think critically about why you want to write your Indigenous character a certain way. Here is a comprehensive post about stereotypes versus nuance.

Familiarize yourself with tropes. The Magical Indian is a pretty prominent one, with lots of shaman-type characters in movies and television shows. This post touches on its sister tropes (The Magical Asian and The Magical Negro), but is primarily about the latter.

Say you want to write an Indigenous woman. Awesome! Characters I love to see. Just make sure you're aware of the stereotypes surrounding her and other Women of Color.

Word to the wise: do not make your Indigenous character an alcoholic. "What, so they can't even drink?" You might be asking. That is not what I'm saying. There is a pervasive stereotype about Drunk Indians, painting a reaction to trauma as an inherent genetic failing, as stated in this piece about Indigenous social worker Jessica Elm's research. The same goes for drugs. Ellen Deloria is an example of this stereotype.

Familiarize yourself with and avoid the Noble Savage trope. This was used to dehumanize us and paint us as "childlike" for the sake of a plot device. It unfortunately persists today.

Casinos are one of the few ways for tribes to make money so they can build homes and maintain roads. However, some are planning on diversifying into other business ventures.

There's a stereotype where we all live off government handouts. Buddy, some of these long-term boil water advisories have been in place for over twenty years. The funding allocated to us as a percentage is 0.39%: less than half a percent to fight the coronavirus. They don't give us money.

"But what about people claiming to be descended from a Cherokee princess?" Cherokee don't and never had anything resembling princesses. White southerners made that up prior to the Civil War. As the article mentions, they fancied themselves "defending their lands as the Indians did".

Also, don't make your Indigenous character a cannibal. Cannibalism is a serious taboo in a lot of our cultures, particularly northern ones.

Our lands are not cursed. We don't have a litany of curses to cast on white people in found footage films. Seriously. We have better things to be doing. Why on earth would our ancestors be haunting you when they could be with their families? Very egotistical assumption.

Indigenous Ties and Blood Quantum

Blood quantum is a colonial system that was initially designed to "breed out the Indian" in people. To dilute our bloodlines until we assimilated properly into white society. NPR has an article on it here.

However, this isn't how a vast majority of us define our identities. What makes us Indigenous is our connections (or reconnection) to our families, tribes, bands, clans, and communities.

Blood quantum has also historically been used to exclude Black Natives from tribal enrollment, given that it was first based on appearance. So, if you looked Black and not the image of "Indian" the white census taker had in his brain, you were excluded and so were your descendants.

Here are two tumblrs that talk about Black Indigenous issues and their perspectives. They also talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia.

However, if you aren't Indigenous, don't bring up blood quantum. Don't. This is an issue you should not be speaking about.

Cherokee Princess Myth

"Princess" was not a real position in any tribe. The European idea of monarchy did not suddenly manifest somewhere else. The closest probable approximation may have been the daughter of a chief or other politically prominent person. But princess? No.

Here is an article talking about possible origins of this myth. Several things are of note here: women from other tribes may have bee shoved under this label and the idea of a "Cherokee Princess" had been brought up to explain the sudden appearance of a brown-skinned (read: half Black) family member.

For a somewhat more in depth discussion of why, specifically, this myth gets touted around so often, Timeline has this piece.

Religion

Our religions are closed. We are not going to tell you how we worship. Mostly because every little bit we choose to share gets appropriated. Smudging is the most recent example. If you aren't Indigenous, that's smoke cleansing. Smudging is done in a specific way with ceremonies and prayers.

Now, a lot of us were forcibly converted. Every residential school was run by Christians. So plenty of us are Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran, etc. Catholicism in Latin America also has influence from the Indigenous religions in that region.

Having your Indigenous character pray or carry rosaries wouldn't be a bad thing, if that religion was important to them. Even if they are atheist, if they lived outside of a reserve or other Indigenous communities, they might have Christian influences due to its domination of the Western world.

Settler Colonialism and the White Savior Trope

Now we've come to our most painful section yet. Fallout unintentionally has an excellent agent of settler-colonialism, in particular the Western Christian European variety, in Caesar's Legion and Joshua Graham.

(Addendum: Honest Hearts is extremely offensive in its portrayal of Indigenous people, and egregiously shows a white man needing to "civilize" tribals and having to teach them basic skills. These skills include cooking, finding safe water, and defending themselves from other tribes.)

Before we dive in, here is a post explaining the concept of cultural Christianity, if you are unfamiliar with it.

We also need to familiarize ourselves with The White Man's Burden. While the poem was written regarding the American-Philippine war, it still captures the attitudes toward Indigenous folks all over the world at the time.

As this article in Teen Vogue points out, white people like to believe they need to save People of Color. You don't need to. People of Color can save themselves.

Now, cultural Christianity isn't alone on this side of the pond. Writer Teju Cole authored a piece on the White Savior Industrial Complex to describe mission trips undertaken by white missionaries to Africa to feed their egos.

Colonialism has always been about the acquisition of wealth. To share a quote from this paper about the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples: "Negatively, [settler colonialism] strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others." (Positive, here, is referring to "benefits" for the colonizers. Indigenous people don't consider colonization beneficial.)

An example of a non-benefit, the Church Rock disaster had Diné children playing in radioactive water so the company involved could avoid bad publicity.

Moving on, don't sterilize your Indigenous people. Sterilization, particularly when it is done without consent, has long been used as a tool by the white system to prevent "undesirables" (read, People of Color and disabled people) from having children. Somehow, as of 2018, it wasn't officially considered a crime.

The goal of colonization was to eliminate us entirely. Millions died because of exposure to European diseases. Settlers used to and still do separate our children from us for reasons so small as having a dirty dish in the sink. You read that right, a single dirty dish in your kitchen sink was enough to get your children taken and adopted out to white families. This information was told to me by an Indigenous social work student whose name I will keep anonymous.

It wasn't until recently they made amendments to the Indian Act that wouldn't automatically render Indigenous women non-status if they married someone not Indigenous. It also took much too long for Indigenous families to take priority in child placement over white ones. Canada used to adopt Indigenous out to white American families. The source for that statement is further down, but adoption has been used as a tool to destroy cultures.

I am also begging you to cast aside whatever colonialist systems have told you about us. We are alive. People with a past, not people of the past, which was wonderfully said here by Frank Waln.

Topics to Avoid if You Aren't Indigenous

Child Separation. Just don't. We deserve to remain with our families and our communities. Let us stay together and be happy that way.

Assimilation schools. Do not bring up a tool for cultural genocide that has left lasting trauma in our communities.

W/ndigos. I don't care that they're in Fallout 76. They shouldn't be. Besides, you never get them right anyway.

Sk/nwalkers. Absolutely do not. Diné stories are not your playthings either.

I've already talked about drugs and alcohol. Do your research with compassion and empathy in mind. Indigenous people have a lot of pain and generational trauma. You will need to be extremely careful having your Indigenous characters use drugs and alcohol. If your character can be reduced to their (possible) substance abuse issues, you need to step back and rework it. As mentioned in Jessica Elm's research, remember that it isn't inherent to us.

For our final note: remember that we're complex, autonomous human beings. Don't use our deaths to further the stories of your white characters. Don't reduce us to some childlike thing that needs to be raised and civilized by white characters. We interact with society a little differently than you do, but we interact nonetheless.

Meegwetch (thank you) for reading! Remember to do your research and portray us well, but also back off when you are told by an Indigenous person.

This may be updated in the future, it depends on what information I come across or, if other Indigenous people are so inclined, what is added to this post.

#fallout 3 #fallout 4 #fallout 76 #fallout new vegas #fallout 1 #fallout 2 #fallout: new vegas #ozhibii'ige

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a-dragons-journal · 2 years

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are most people in the otherkin community this strict about terminology? because my first otherkin space wasnt really that strict about it (which im begeinning to think is a rarity), and so far my experience of the wider kin community is scary and confusing because of this and i wanna know if i can unfollow you and not have to deal with that or if its a wider thing. IM NOT A KFFER IM JUST OVERWHELMED

I'm not... really sure what you mean by "this strict" - I can't recall anything particularly terminology-focused I've posted/reblogged super recently, so I'm not sure what you're asking about here ^^; Assuming you mean, like, "kin as a verb" discourse and the like, I'm personally probably on the stricter end in terms of personal preference, but I'm also not, like. Going to assume that you're fake if you use words in a way I don't personally like, and I apologize if I've come off that way at some point recently.

In an effort to answer your question, a rundown on my personal opinions vs wider community opinions on a few of the Controversial Term Usage(TM) within the community (if you meant something besides these three, you're gonna have to clarify, I'm afraid, because they're about all I can think of that you could possibly be referring to ^^;):

Kin as a verb ("kinning," "I kin [x]"): Probably the most universally disliked and side-eyed. There are definitely spaces where people won't care, but most serious 'kin spaces are not going to love you using "kinning" language, because of how strongly it's become associated with KFF (and, in my opinion at least, of how it's contributed to the KFF problem). This is pretty much the only one I'm liable to actually actively correct people on, though I still usually keep my mouth shut when we're in casual conversation and someone drops "I kin [x]".

Kinnie: A lot more up in the air; a fair number of serious otherkin either use "kinnie" for themselves or won't care if you use it for yourself. There is definitely a chunk of the community who will side-eye you for it, but it's a lot less controversial than "kinning." (Personally, I definitely don't want it used to refer to me, and I will complain if you call us "the kinnie community," but I don't really care if you use it for yourself.)

Kin with: Very few people care. There are a handful of mostly older 'kin who don't like "I'm kin with [x]", but that particular discourse has mostly gone by the wayside in favor of having bigger fish to fry. (Personally, I don't care, and I use it myself.)

I am sorry you've gotten a bit spooked by the community - there's a bit of, uh, tension regarding correct terminology usage right now, courtesy of KFF, and it's leading to some overcompensation in terms of vehemence defending correct grammar and term usage. Like I said, I have pretty strong opinions myself, but the last thing I want is for people to be driven away from this community when they belong here because people were too aggressive about grammar.

If you want, please always feel free to send an ask or DM me if you have more specific things you want to ask about (like I said, I'm not wholly sure what recent post(s) you could be referring to with this one, so I may not have actually answered your question very well, sorry).

#otherkin #rani talks #asked and answered #anonymous

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aenor-llelo · 3 years

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Okay my Discord server asked me to make a post about orp!wilbur’s extensive crime list and how/why some of them are crimes in the first place, because most/all of them are actual offenses irl Somewhere, or at least were at some point.

-Disrespectful behavior towards the Noble Houses and agents of the Crown. (Multiple counts) -Attempts to incite political criticism, dissent, and debate towards the Noble Houses and agents of the Crown. (Multiple counts)

This is kind of a given, but just for the record, there are countries that have censorship laws about the government, and attempting to open critical discussion of politics can fall under that kind of criminalization.

It may or may not also be a joke about the trial of Socrates.

-Causing distress of uncertain origin to animals belonging to the Crown.

This mostly falls under tampering with royal/government property.

-The promotion and reproduction of banned media.

This right here is related to censorship laws again. Specific books and music can and have been banned from distribution and production for discussing taboo or censored topics.

-Arson. (directed towards own property)

This is specifically illegal in urban and city areas. Burning trash is a pretty common thing in rural areas but very illegal in building dense places due to risk of fire spread.

-Inciting physical altercations. (Multiple counts)

That’s just a pretty ubiquitous law, don’t start fights with people in public.

-One instance of attempting to fight a nautilus in the Community House public aquarium.

Same reason as the royal animals offense, but also falls under public disruption and disorderly conduct.

-Street vending in unpermitted areas.

Street vending tends to actually have a lot of laws attached to it in terms of what/how/where you can sell.

-Using a shotgun in a residential area.

Like arson on private property, this is another urban v rural legal distinction. In many countries, gun usage and possession, especially outside the Americas, is heavily regulated (I understand the US is different but The World Is Not America).

-Handling fish in a suspicious manner.

This is a very poorly worded IRL law about handling illegally obtained fish.

-Busking.

If I recall correctly, this is one of those regional laws that are deliberately hostile to homeless people, because busking is often associated with street begging.

-Parkour.

Yep! Parkour is very illegal on anywhere considered private property in many places, because the owners of private property don’t want to be liable for parkour injuries.

-One count of public indecency. -Vandalizing public spaces by placing unpermitted photography.

Another “generally illegal everywhere” law, though what counts as public indecency or vandalism will vary by region.

-Causing distress by consuming inedible/hazardous materials in public view. (Multiple counts) -Threatening (though not provably committing) bestiality as a form of verbal harassment.

Causing distress can file under harassment/disorderly conduct, and in some places actions that could be taken as self harming/suicidal behavior are criminalized.

orp!wilbur has committed so many crimes over fundy’s lifetime.

#orphan's path #orp meta #aenor-llelo

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aer-in-wanderland · 3 years

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구미호뎐 | Tale of the Nine Tailed - Lost in Translation EP02

Back by, possibly not popular, but certainly very enthusiastic demand: my sister’s and my continued adventures in mistranslation and cultural subtext. You can find EP01 here. Buckle up and settle in for another monster post because, wow, a lot happened in this episode. Contains spoilers.

Prologue

We open with a sweeping view of Baekdudaegan as Yeon narrates about his past as the god who presided over it. For context, Baekdudaegan is the biggest and most famous mountain range in Korea, taking up an enormous swath of the Korean peninsula (to the extent that it’s often referred to as its ‘spine’ or ‘backbone’). So Yeon wasn’t lying when he said he was a ‘major’ mountain god. ;)

Yeon: You could say these were my Leeds Days. I was the master of Baekdudaegan, a mountain god who controlled the wind and rain,* and a gumiho who was, from the start, of a different caliber than the mongrel foxes you see in Hometown of Legends. ...Or, I was.”

[*Note: Can also be taken to mean ‘the natural elements’ in general.]

When Yeon refers to his ‘glory days,’ the term he uses is ‘Leeds Era’ (리즈시절). Originally a sporting term for the height of a footballer’s career, in Korean, the expression has come to be used to describe a person’s bygone glory days. The modern figure of speech (complete with English loan word) makes for a funny counterpoint to the Yeon we see on screen and recalls the mint-chocolate loving American TV show enthusiast we’ve known him as so far.

The other modern reference he makes is to Hometown of Legends (전설의 고향), which has been the title of numerous dramas and movies (1977-2018) centered around Korean myths and legends. This is basically the equivalent of an alien referencing the X-files. Overall, the narration serves to remind us just how modern our gumiho has become and clashes humorously with the visual onscreen.

Yeon’s above narration concludes with the first appearance of little Ah Eum, who immediately proceeds to pet the mighty master of Baekdudaegan as if he were her pet dog pfft (thus the ‘....or I was.’)

As an aside, tvN released some backstory information revealing that Ah Eum had gone to find Yeon in order to pray for rain. Which means she pet him in spite of that lol We also know from the past-life sequence in episode 10 that she had actually been warned never to venture anywhere near his mountain because a 1000 year old gumiho lived there. It’s almost as if her guardians don’t know her at all...

For anyone keeping track, Ah Eum uses banmal with Yeon from the very beginning. We find out why later. As a princess (even one who had been discarded), she’s used to outranking everyone around her and therefore speaking almost exclusively in banmal. To be fair, with her temperament, Yeon being a 1000+ year old mountain god probably just wasn’t enough to get him an automatic pass from her. Point for Ah Eum/Ji Ah character continuity.

Yeon: If I could rewrite* my past just once, I would return to this moment without hesitation. So that that child could never find me.

[*Note: Literally, ‘A/S my past,’ which I’m pretty sure has its roots in computer usage. So again, thoroughly modern vocabulary from the former master of Baekdudaegan.]

We transition from young to grown Ah Eum with a sweep of the Red Umbrella. According to tvN again, this umbrella was actually a gift from Ah Eum to Yeon, and it’s also the same umbrella Yeon still carries everywhere. It’s somewhat poetic, then, that it was this umbrella that lead Ji Ah to him. So, a meaningful item on multiple fronts.

Yeon: Some called it, ‘the scandal of the age that shook Baekdudaegan.’ To think, a mountain god who had given his heart to a human... Nowadays, it would have felt like a disciplinary hearing, but I didn’t care a whit. I liked her [presence] permeating my woods.

As you might have guessed, this love story ends in tragedy. Someone stole her life. Once she crossed the River of Three Crossings, I would never be able to see her again. I couldn’t hold on to her, but nor could I bear to let her go...so I resorted to abusing my power.

The BGM playing as Yeon narrates the ending of his tragic story is ‘The Parting at the River of Three Crossings,’ which I think of as the epic love theme of TotNT alongside ‘Sad Fate.’ Why do I keep mentioning the BGM? No reason, other than that it interests me. ;)

On a linguistic note, Yeon’s line, ‘Someone stole her life’ caught my attention from the first time I watched this due to his unusual usage of the word ‘life.’ Korean has multiple words for ‘life.’ The one that would typically be used in this context is ‘moksoom’ (목숨), which I think of as having the nuance of one’s life force. So to steal one’s ‘moksoom’ would mean to kill them. Instead, he uses ‘insaeng’ (인생), which is more like the life one leads. To steal someone’s ‘insaeng’ sounds more like a case of identity theft. As we find out later, that actually is what Imoogi did, and this hinted at that linguistically.

I’m not sure how well this translated, but the gesture of Yeon kneeling is both epic and heartbreaking. Kneeling is a very weighty gesture in Korea, so for Yeon to use his godly powers to freeze the very River to the Afterlife only to kneel and beg for one last moment with Ah Eum is just... It’s a momentous enough gesture for Taluipa, the ultimate stickler for rules, to make an exception and grant his request.

The fox bead: In Japanese lore, a fox’s bead is often akin to its life force, but that’s clearly not the case for Yeon. In Korean lore, fox beads are sometimes called ‘the treasure of a fox’s lips,’ since the bead is supposedly located within the fox’s mouth (and can thus be stolen/gifted with a kiss). Some tellings claim that someone who swallows a fox’s bead gains understanding of all things and phenomena in the universe, while others say they grant the bearer’s wishes.

Yeon continues his narration, describing how he’s encountered women with Ah Eum’s face over the centuries, but that none of them were her. For anyone interested, you can find my hot take on that here.

Okay, can we please have a spin-off of Yeon hunting down folklore monsters in Japanese-occupied Korea Gaksital (2012)-style?

Fun fact: Based on some of the still cuts they released, there was actually a deleted scene in which Yeon pulled the late-Joseon era Ah Eum look-alike aside, checked her for the fox bead, and then erased her memories. (And by ‘fun’ I mean, ‘why would you delete that??’)

“I’ve been waiting for you.” Iconic.

Fun fact: Lee Dong Wook picked this as the most memorable line of the drama due to it’s thematic echoing across multiple episodes.

On the topic of the tranquilizer, there was a deleted scene in episode 1 in which Ji Ah very openly 'borrowed’ it from Shin Joo’s vet clinic because she already suspected Yeon was a fox: fox fur, Fox Ridge... She was taking a pretty big gamble though since he’s not exactly your average fox.

It’s worth noting that Ji Ah doesn’t say she was ‘looking’ for Yeon (although she was, because she’s a go-get-‘em kind of girl); she says she was ‘waiting’ for him. I took this to mean she was waiting for him to return and make good on his threat to kill her (since, not only had she not forgotten, she’d been actively sticking her nose into anything remotely supernatural or unexplainable), at which point, presumably, she planned to turn the tables on him.

Episode 02 Title Card: I’ve Been Waiting for You

For anyone wondering how Ji Ah managed to get Yeon back up to his penthouse, apparently she told the security desk her boyfriend was drunk and boldly took him back up in the elevator (presumably with help) haha

Possibly coincidentally, Yeon’s first line to Ji Ah when he regains consciousness is the same as his first line to little Ah Eum: ‘Do you want to die?’ (minus the sageuk speak)

Ji Ah’s line, “I wouldn’t be sipping tea here if I was worried about that,” would more literally be: “If I valued my life, would I be sitting here drinking flower tea?”

Lol Ji Ah. “Want a cup?” is such a classy power play.

Sub: “After the stunt you pulled, you’re actually offering me tea?” Ha. Also, what Yeon literally says is: “You pulled that variety-esque stunt, and your next line is what? ‘A cup of tea’?” ‘Variety’ here is an English loan word meant in the sense of ‘variety shows’ (ex. Running Man or 1 Night 2 Days), though to my knowledge, no one has ever been tranquilized on one.

The following exchange was littered with enough small things I would have changed that I’ll just translate the whole thing here for reference:

Ji Ah: When a man and a woman have that level of physical contact, don’t they usually also drink tea or eat meals together, too? These days, the whole pure and noble act doesn’t go far.

Yeon: Whether it does or not, when you’re at a disadvantage, isn’t it considered common courtesy to come [to the table] having put aside either your pride or your self-esteem [i.e. at least one of the two]?

Ji Ah: Listen until the end before you determine who’s at a disadvantage.

Yeon: (Nodding) In exchange, if my thinking still doesn’t change, you’ll pay the price for having tested me.

Ji Ah: Price?

Yeon: Your sight (literally ‘eyes’). I’ll be taking your eyes that have seen what they shouldn’t have.

Ji Ah: Deal. (literally, ‘call’ as in poker)

Rang & Yoo Ri Crash a Funeral

In the off chance you were wondering why this is basically the only time we see Rang driving Yoo Ri and not the other way around, it’s because Yoo Ri is ‘in character’ as the daughter of a major conglomerate and wouldn’t be expected to drive herself if there was another person in the car. In Korea, there’s a whole code of etiquette around who sits where in the car.

Instead of ‘Lee Rang-nim’ the subs have Yoo Ri addressing Rang as ‘sir.’ That just strikes me as so distant and cold...

To my thinking, this scene was peak ‘Hoket-dan.’ It was nearly the same level of over-the-top campy as some of the old supervillains. If I’m being perfectly honest, I was worried at this point that Rang’s character would turn out to be equally 2D. Joke’s on me though, ‘cause this later became a hilarious character quirk when Sajang says to Rang, “It can’t be that you came to enjoy watching me die?” and Rang responds, “I love doing that! Look, I even brought popcorn. I even go about visiting funeral homes and stuff on purpose.” lol

Ji Ah’s Gamble

Okay, but Yeon actually took her up on tea haha I love it.

Subs: “So you’re a fox that’s pretending to be human.” The word they use here (and throughout the drama) is ‘doongap’ (둔갑), which is literally ‘to assume the form of.’ Unfortunately, there’s no verb in English that neatly conveys that, so this gets subbed a lot of ways. I’ve mostly been translating it as ‘transform,’ but that’s more properly ‘byeonshin’ (변신). Sometimes with translation, the best option still isn’t great.

It’s also worth noting that this is actually not what Yeon is doing here, since he sees those sorts of tricks as beneath him. Yeon is a cheon’ho; his human form is his own.

Sub: “What a lame reaction. A normal human being would scream...” More literally: “What kind of reaction is so lacking in sincerity? Generally, if [you’re] a human, I should at least get a scream...” Again, both ‘reaction’ and ‘scream’ are in English, and, somewhat humorously, Yeon uses the verb + juda (주다) form, implying he was hoping to elicit a scream with his reveal pfft

Sub: “No. I knew something like you would exist somewhere out in this world. I started directing a TV show about urban legends so I could catch you myself.” This is mostly fine, but what she says more literally is: “No. I knew something like you would exist somewhere in this world. In order to catch [one] myself, I buried my bones in a TV show about urban legends.” To ‘bury ones bones’ means ‘to devote oneself entirely to’ and implies more drive and dedication than in the sub. The subject is once again omitted, so she could mean Yeon, but I think she actually means ‘things like Yeon’ more generally.

Yeon’s line to Ji Ah when she asks him about their long ago encounter was subbed as: “I followed the smell of blood, and I ended up saving a little kid. But I can see that she’s very ungrateful.” I would translate this as:

Yeon: I smelled blood and followed it, and ended up saving some little girl (lit. young child), but now I see that that child is trying to repay a favor with enmity.

The expression Yeon uses here, to ‘repay a favor (eunhye) with enmity (wonsoo),’ is a common turn of phrase. It’s the Korean equivalent of ‘biting the hand that feeds you,’ or ‘repaying good with ill.’ Considering eunhye has actual consequences for Yeon, he doesn’t seem all that put out.

Lol Something about Lee Dong Wook’s delivery of Yeon’s line, “So you lost your parents...” reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote: ‘To lose one parent may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’

Sub: “I’m not threatening you. I’m taking my chances.” This should be: “You’re mistaken. I’m not threatening; I’m gambling.” This turn of phrase is rather clever in Korean since ‘threat’ (협박) and ‘gamble’ (도박) are only one syllable off. In terms of the subs, while ‘gambling’ and ‘taking my chances’ are similar on the surface, they’re different enough in nuance that I would consider this a mistranslation. ‘Gambling’ implies an informed, calculated risk, whereas ‘taking my chances’ gives the impression of improvisation and leaving everything up to luck.

The Funeral Parlour

This scene is Rang in a nutshell. I actually don’t have much to comment on linguistically, but it was definitely an important scene for establishing Rang’s MO and motivations.

Shin Joo & Yeon

Yeon and Shin Joo meet up at the ice cream parlour to debrief on the situation with Ji Ah, and it’s cute how Shin Joo is more indignant over what went down than Yeon.

Subs: “It’s like we exist to repay people for their kindness.” This has been grossly paraphrased due to lack of cultural context. His line is literally:

Shin Joo: It’s not as if we’re magpies meticulously repaying our eunhye! Geez, how long do we have to be bound by that sort of premodern contractual relationship?”

This is another Korean folktale reference, this time to the story of The Grateful Magpies. I elaborated on it a bit here.

Yeon: “It’s old-fashioned but romantic. And it's also a fox’s dignity.” ‘Romantic’ here is the French loan word ‘romang’ (로망). In contrast to the English ‘romantic’ (which is also used), ‘romang’ is used to refer to ‘anything marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized.’ ‘Dignity’ could also be translated as ‘grace of character.’ Yeon’s preoccupation with style/swagger/dignity is enough of a recurring theme (and occasional joke) that it features in his character profile.

For anyone keeping track, Shin Joo refers to Ah Eum as ‘Ah Eum agasshi.’ ‘Agasshi’ meaning ‘miss’ or ‘lady.’

Shin Joo’s line is subbed, “Does she bother you?” but it should be: ‘Does it bother you?’ where ‘it’ refers to the fact that Ji Ah so closely resembles Ah Eum.

Sub: “I’ve seen tons of people who looked like her for hundreds of years.” It’s actually not ‘tons of people,’ but ‘a couple’/‘several’ over the course of hundreds of years. Let’s be honest, people as pretty as Jo Bo Ah just aren’t born every day. ;)

Yeon’s line may be overly blunt, but it’s sweet that he calls Shin Joo, ‘Shin Joo-ya.’

Back over to Ji Ah. The way this scene suddenly switches from sentimental to horrifying is great. I also like that it’s unclear when she fell asleep. The boundary between reality and unreality is as blurred for the viewers as it is for Ji Ah, and it leaves us with a similar sense of disquiet.

In case it wasn’t already clear, it’s the tooth on this skull that leads Ji Ah to Eohwa Island. She sees a skull with an identical tooth in the news and goes to investigate.

Afterlife Immigration Office

LOL Hyeonuiong briefing the newly departed on death via powerpoint is hilarious. The powerpoint reads: ‘A Guide to Hell for the Dead, Presenter: Hyeonuiong.’ The red sigil on the right bears the characters ‘十王’ (the Ten Kings), so I guess this is an official, Afterlife-approved slideshow. heh

Side note: I’m impressed with the way this show seamlessly shifts between genres. We went from emotional to creepy to funny without it feeling forced or jarring (or at least, it didn’t to me).

The powerpoint (complete with webtoon) continues cheerily: “Hell! What is the Afterlife?” / “The 10 Types of Hell.” pfft Who made these slides? Whoever they are, point to them.

Subs: “You know King Hades, right?” WOW This is bordering on cultural whitewashing if you ask me. This should be King Yeomra (aka King Enma). He’s one of the Ten Kings of the Afterlife, and quite arguably the most famous.

The sub here says Taluipa is Yeomra’s older sister, which is understandable since the antiquated word Hyeonuiong uses (누이), doesn’t specify older or younger. We find out in the final episode, though, that Taluipa is actually Yeomra’s younger sister. As far as I’m aware, this is not part of the original lore.

Lol Yeon being a drama king: “I’m going to take revenge! Thanks to her, my obligatory military service has already gone on for 600 years~!” (You’re not fooling anyone, sir)

“No way! A man’s hair is his life! My red-brown...” Fun fact: It was actually Lee Dong Wook’s idea to make Yeon’s hair red-brown, both as a nod to him being a fox, and to give him a more otherworldly look.

Why do the gods keep saying reincarnation is random when everyone we see reincarnated kept their face??

‘Oh my god” lol Watching kdrama characters react in English never gets old. Possibly because there’s something exaggerated or overdramatic in the conscious decision to use English instead of Korean.

A++ response from Yeon. I saw something going around to the effect of, ‘this show really just said love is love,’ and I love that. Point to the writer.

The BGM here is once again ‘Thread Rings.’ Given where it keeps being used, I’m fairly certain they’re somehow related to Ji Ah/Ah Eum... (So I guess there actually is a reason I’m paying attention to the BGM ;p). Lee Dong Wook just disclosed the behind the scenes scoop on the rings in his latest VLIVE.

This bulgasari is such a mild-mannered person. Like Shin Joo, he calls Ji Ah ‘PD-nim’ and speaks politely and deferentially.

Not for anything, but I really liked Jo Bo Ah’s delivery of Ji Ah’s line, ‘I saw a corpse.’ Her little mannerisms really sold Ji Ah to me as a person and not just a character.

Bulgasari: “That dream, can you sell it to me? I want to play the lottery.” In addition to the concept of symbolism in dreams, Koreans also have a common notion that dreams can be bought and sold. It’s funny, though, when you consider he’s probably just planning to eat the dream.

I love whenever Taluipa calls Yeon, ‘Yeon-ah.’ She’s normally so prickly that it’s notable when she's affectionate. Also, seeing as Yeon is older than 95% of our characters, there aren’t many who might address him like this with the affectionate diminutive.

Heh, Yeon refers to Ji Ah’s favor as a ‘civil complaint.’

When Yeon asks Ji Ah for her parent’s times and dates of birth, what he’s actually asking for is their ‘saju’ (literally, ‘four pillars’). You can find my explanation here.

The Snail Bride

Bok Hye Ja: “It’s the first time he’s brought someone (literally ‘a person’).” Normally this would mean, ‘it’s the first time he’s brought a guest,’ but in this case, I’m fairly certain she means, ‘it’s the first time he’s brought a human.’ ;)

“I won’t ask you to understand.” This was another exchange that made me love Ji Ah. I found her frank and sincere apology refreshing.

On a personal note, I loved watching Yeon recalibrate his estimation of Ji Ah in this scene. And it was also a scene in which viewers got to recalibrate their impressions of Yeon. Yeon is feigning indifference, but he makes a point of asking after Ji Ah’s feelings, which is not insignificant. It’s also in sharp contrast to what we’ve seen of Rang so far.

Oh my gosh, THAT PUFFBALL DOG (and it’s name is Bean-ie) XD

Minor detail, but where did Shin Joo get his necklace? Wait. OH MY GOD. Shin Joo is the Aquaman of TotNT. Yeon gets to be Batman and Superman rolled into one and Shin Joo’s power is that he ‘talks to fish animals.’ Dead.

Lol Ji Ah watching Yeon eat. I feel like this is a running joke. In the tales, gumiho notoriously eat people’s livers, so seeing him eat normal food must be a bit eye-opening.

The text description for Shin Don was left untranslated in the version we’re watching but it reads: In A History of Goryeo, there’s record of Shin Don, a monk from the time of King Gongmin’s reign (1351-1374 C.E.), having been an old fox.

Subs: “Is it true that the monk of Goryeo Dynasty was a fox?” Us: ‘Yes, the one monk in all of Goryeo and for all of Goryeo. Guess he’d have to have been a fox in that case.’ This should probably have been translated as: "So then, Shin Don...is it a fact that the Goryeo monk Shin Don was a fox?”

Ji Ah: “Oh my god.” heh

Do You Really Want to See It?

Wait, they walked all the way from Insadong to Digital Media City? Okay, this is one of the (few) pitfalls of being fairly familiar with Seoul. Sometimes it’s really obvious when two locations don’t connect and then it pulls me out of the drama. I think we’re supposed to believe that the Snail Bride is in the vicinity of Ji Ah’s broadcast station, seeing as her team are lunchtime regulars, but the the two neighborhoods are nowhere near each other.

Yeon’s line in the subs here is: “A. I’m a busy man. B. We may currently be living in the same world, but there is a big difference between where we come from.” Personally, I would have translated this as: “Firstly, I haven’t got that much free time. Secondly, we may be unavoidably living mingled together, but the world I belong to and the world you belong to are incontrovertibly different.”

Subs: “Those who got a peek at my world ended up going crazy or dying young.” More literally: “In the past, there have been those who got a glimpse of the world’s secrets. Well, most of them either went mad or had their lives cut short.”

Minor detail, but Ji Ah’s response subbed as: “I don’t care. I’ll stay out of your way. Just don’t disappear.” should more literally be: “Just don’t disappear from my sight (lit. ‘from before me’).”

The sub on Ji Ah’s line here reads: “She (Sae Rom) and I both had nightmares.” What she actually says is: “Me and my hubae also had nightmares,” meaning that she (Ji Ah) and Jae Hwan had nightmares in addition to Sae Rom. Which is why Yeon refers to them as ‘contagious’.

Okay, is it just me, or does LDW look exceptionally unreal in this scene?

Bulgasari

I’m not familiar with the actor who plays the bulgasari (pretty sure he’s a new face), but he did a great job making his movements uncanny here. The firey CG effects are fun too.

Heck yeah! Yeon sure knows how to make an entrance. Seeing as how he instructed Ji Ah on what to do, I’m pretty sure he was there the whole time......show-off.

Once again, I’m digging the fight scene underscored by ‘The Uninvited.’ I would happily watch an entire series that’s just Yeon and Ji Ah solving supernatural cases and hunting down baddies who disturb the peace.

The Smirk™ XD I’m 90% sure this was another LDW ad lib.

Lol Yeon. Subs: “Really? Then am I the jerk here?” More literally: “Really? Then I guess I’m the only bad guy, huh?”

On a linguistic note, the bulgasari speaks to Yeon in old-timey speech, once again playing up their mutual identity as creatures of lore.

It’s only at this point that, prompted by Ji Ah, Yeon finally reveals the bulgasari’s identity. This is accompanied by a brief chyron telling us that they appear when the world is in disorder, and Ji Ah supplies that they eat nightmares.

To elaborate a bit, bulgasari are one of the better known Korean creatures of lore. There are two different sets of hanja for them: (bulgasari 不可殺伊 ‘can-not-kill’) and (bulgasari 火可殺伊 ‘fire-can-kill’), which explains why, depending on the telling, they’re either un-killable or only die by fire. In traditional lore, feeding them metal makes them grow larger and stronger, which, while not the case in TotNT, is probably what inspired the coin-gobbling.

Subs: “Yes they are especially fond of broadcasting studios, which are packed with people. Eating metal reveals their true identities.” That subtitle went a bit sideways. It’s not that they like broadcast stations in particular, but crowded places like broadcast stations. So it should read: “They like places with lots of people, like the broadcast station, and if you feed them metal, they reveal their true colors.”

Okay, Yeon’s line that’s subtitled as, “The hostage will answer,” is more literally: “Hey, hostage. Try answering me.” It’s worth noting that, while he calls her ‘injil-bun’ (injil = hostage + bun = the polite word for a person), he’s still speaking to her in banmal, so he’s once again being cheeky.

It’s taking some license, but I would translate Yeon’s question to Ji Ah here as: “In this moment,* what exactly can you do other than rely on me to save you?” which is essentially what he means. [*Note: literally, ‘at this timing,’ and once again, ‘timing’ is in English.]

We get a series of short scenes lining up some of the side characters who will become our key players on the island: the fisherman find the severed head, Ji Ah grills Detective Baek about the case, and Rang approaches Pyung Hee with his usual devil’s bargain pitch. I didn’t really notice anything here that I think is important enough to the central plot or characters that it’s worth commenting on (especially given how massively long this post is already), so I’m just going to call it good and move right along. ;)

Pfft I definitely wasn’t expecting the bulgasari to be literally chilling in Yeon’s freezer (not that he had a choice). This is somewhat interesting given they’re typically thought to be weak to fire, not ice.

Subs: “I’ll die even if I tell you where he is.” More literally: “Whether I die in this way [by Yeon’s hand], or that [by Rang’s], it is all the same.”

Brother Complex

Sub: “Don’t even think of hurting her.” More literally: “Just try touching one hair on her head.”

Oh my gosh Rang’s face ㅠㅠ This was the first time I felt Kim Beom really got to display his acting chops in this role, and boy, was I glad to see it. This was also when I knew Rang was going to make me cry.

Yeon: “You’re acting like this because you lack affection.” The expression Yeon uses is ‘aejeong gyeolpip,’ which literally does mean ‘affection lack/want/absence,’ but I would have translated it as ‘affection-starved,’ since saying Rang ‘lacks affection’ could also be interpreted to mean Rang is incapable of expressing affection.

Yeon: “Why’s that?” Lol Lee Dong Wook. Also, this one line is cheekily in polite speech.

Subs: “Just because of a woman you gave up your position as a mountain spirit, left the mountain, and you even...” More literally: “Just because of one mere human woman you gave up your position as a mountain god, turned your back on the mountain, and..!!”

Yeon: “Yes, I know. I even abandoned you.” Rang-ah~ ㅠㅠ I recently received an ask as to whether or not I believed Yeon had truly abandoned Rang, which I answered here.

Oof, Yeon giving Rang advice as an older brother. In Korea, nagging is seen as a sign of affection. You may recall Ji Ah was very excited for her dad to nag her about her boyfriend in episode 12.

Sub: “You crazy fool.” Rang literally calls his brother a ‘michin nom,’ ‘michin’ meaning ‘crazy.’ ‘Nom’ is a pronoun that, depending on how it’s used, can mean anything from ‘guy,’ to ‘jerk,’ to ‘bastard.’

Sub: “I don’t need to know.” Actually: “There’s no need [for you to tell me].” The two are subtly different. Yeon’s saying he’ll find out on his own, not that he doesn’t want to know.

Fun fact: Kim Beom said in his script reading interview (before they started filming) that he was a bit worried about his onscreen dynamic with Lee Dong Wook because, while Rang has to hate Yeon, LDW is a hyung that KB likes so much in real life. What a cutie.

We cut briefly over to Ji Ah on the phone with Jae Hwan, asking him to look after Sae Rom while she chases down the skull lead.

As an aside here, Ji Ah calls Sae Rom, ‘Kim-jak’ (short for ‘jakga,’ meaning ‘writer’). In Korea, it’s common to refer to someone by their role or title. This might indicate distance, but Ji Ah’s shortening it makes the term familiar and speaks of their camaraderie. In the subtitles, this has become, ‘Ms. Kim,’ which is oddly distant given their frenemyship.

The Island

Is it just me, or does it feel like there should have been a scene here explaining how and why Yeon came to be on the boat? I’m assuming it got deleted due to time constraints, but I feel like it was needed.

Pfft The way Ji Ah pops up from behind Yeon, cutting comically into the dramatic shot of Lee Dong Wook’s windswept profile + BGM was great.

In case it wasn’t already apparent, Kimite patches are used to alleviate sea sickness, so this is further undermining the mood of a second ago haha

Yeon’s line is subbed: “I’d like to keep it to myself,” but this should more literally be: ‘Let’s each work individually/play it solo.’

Sub: “No, thank you.” What Yeon actually says: “Hard pass.” hahaha (Literally: ‘I’ll immediately/urgently decline,’ but tonally, ‘hard pass’ is closer).

The subs have Yeon’s line as: “You need to be careful what you pay attention to.” I would have translated this as: “If that’s the reason [you’ve come], go back. You mustn’t recklessly lend an ear [to such things].” His tone and phrasing are both surprisingly gentle.

Subs: “My guts keep telling me, that this is a very suspicious combination.” Well, my guts keep telling me, that this is a very suspicious sub haha I would have translated Yeon’s voiceover as:

Yeon: The same boat...the same island...a woman with the same face as that girl. My instincts speak to me relentlessly, telling me there’s something amiss about this combination.

Pfft The contrast between Ji Ah's dismount from the boat and Yeon’s.

Lol Yeon’s ‘excuse me’ was totally rude

For the record, from the moment Yeon sets foot on the island, he speaks to everyone in banmal. That’s bad form towards any stranger, but it’s especially rude considering their age. Sure, Yeon’s way older, but they don’t know that.

Ji Ah mouthing “What?” in English haha

Yeon clocking the effectively creepy villagers. Turns out the right BGM and camerawork can make anything creepy. Point to the director.

Settling in on the Island

Ji Ah’s line subbed as, “I thought you didn’t want to be involved,” should more properly be: “I thought you just said we should each play it solo?”

Yeon’s line is similarly mis-subbed as: “I changed my mind. Don’t let it bother you.” What he actually says is much ruder: “I’ll do what I want! Butt out.” Which explains Ji Ah’s affront heh

Lol Yeon walking right in front of the camera. Anyone who has ever had a pet recognized this moment.

I love how Yeon is being completely tactless and insensitive but then grudgingly course-corrects when Ji Ah glares daggers at him.

Fisherman (subs): “It gives me a bad feeling in my mouth.” Excuse me, what? haha The line is: “The more I think about it, the more it bothers me.”

Lol Ji Ah: “In the documentaries I watched, they say digging holes is your speciality” (complete with digging gesture).

Fun fact: Ji Ah blocking the way with her leg and Yeon burrowing under it was something Jo Bo Ah and Lee Dong Wook came up with themselves. Ji Ah’s line was scripted, but I’m nearly positive Yeon’s comeback of, “Burrowing is my speciality,” was an ad lib by Lee Dong Wook. Once again, casting Lee Dong Wook is the gift that keeps on giving.

WAIT. Subs: “You can’t go.” / “Borrowing is my specialty.” Hahaha What even? Cheon’ho Lee Yeon: professional mooch.

The way we then cut to Yeon ‘burrowing’ into a freezer of ice cream is just perfect. Point to the director.

Once again, Yeon is talking to all the village elders in banmal.

“You have a terrible service mentality.” pfft

OH. Ji Ah’s response to the misogynistic fisherman is just A++

Her line here is literally: “Oops, I’m afraid I’m overflowing with ‘jeong.’” ‘Jeong’ (情) can be a little hard to translate. It literally means ‘emotion’ or ‘affection,’ but the way it’s used linguistically can be a bit complex. The sub here was: “I’m afraid I was too generous,” which I actually think is pretty decent. The turn of phrase in Korean though, using the word ‘overflowing’ while over-pouring on the man, made her response doubly witty.

Hah. I love the way Yeon just raises his eyebrows when he comes out of the market and spots her.

Subs: “How dare a witch from outside come here and...” He actually calls her a ‘michin nyeon’ meaning ‘crazy bitch,’ so the line is: “Crazy bitch, where do you think this is that you dare...”

Ji Ah’s line that begins, “If you’re going to hit me...” is just SO great. We stan (1) queen.

Subs: “Nice. You’re tough.” This is a bit hard to translate. Yeon’s line is literally: “Oh~ What ggang is like this?” ‘Ggang’ can be translated as ‘guts,’ ‘tenacity,’ or ‘persistence.’ Naver dictionary describes it as: ‘a personal trait found in one who never gives in, when put in whatever difficulties,’ which is so spot on for Ji Ah. I might approximate this as: “Woah~ Just how gutsy are you?”

The way he's just like, ‘I approve. Here, have a shikhye~’ is mildly adorable. Did you buy that for her, Yeon, or were you planning on having two but decided she’d earned one? haha

Ji Ah’s response is equally great. The sub says: “That was nothing.” which isn’t a bad option for a subtitle, but what she literally says is ‘saesam-seureopge’ (새삼스럽게), where ‘saesam’ means ‘now? at this point? after all this time?’ So she’s basically saying, ‘You’re bothering with that observation, over that little stunt, after everything else you’ve seen me do?’ haha

“I plan to mooch off of you as much as possible.” Pfft I love how Yeon actually moves to stand behind her just to underscore the point. That’ll be Lee Dong Wook again.

Wow, these are some sketchy old people.

Subs: “People aren’t the only ones with eyes and mouths.” What he actually says is, “Are people the only ones with eyes and ears?”

The Forest Spirit

Wow, the lighting in this scene is just A++ Point to the lighting team (or is that just natural? It feels almost too pretty to have just been natural).

I was too distracted by Lee Dong Wook to notice the first time, but Ji Ah’s face when Yeon shushes her is great haha

On a linguistic note, this scene is one of the few in which Yeon code switches to archaic speech as he’s addressing the tree spirit. It’s the linguistic equivalent of him putting on his ‘mountain god’ hat. (He still speaks to Ji Ah normally, though).

We cut briefly to the mudang (shamaness), and I’m sorry, I know this is a traditional way of speaking, but it always makes me laugh because it’s so over-the-top.

The spirit addresses Ji Ah as ‘agasshi,’ which would be strange if she was actually a modern young girl, but makes sense for a spirit who’s at least 600. Overall, it helps to remind viewers of her supernatural-ness.

Yeon telling Ji Ah she did a good job is so cute. I feel like they’re rapidly becoming a quirky tag-team duo and I’m 100% here for it.

Mudang: “His body returned to shore before his head did! Your father!” This line was explained in the backstory collection.

Okay, the mudang needs to dial it back like 10 levels here.

Possibly just me, but Yeon swatting the air with his hand as he peers into the cave struck me as vaguely fox-like.

Minor detail again, but the chyron here is subbed as ‘Jangsansa Cave.’ It’s actually ‘Jangsan sagool,’ not ‘Jangsansa gool.’ ‘Sagool’ is written with the characters 蛇窟 meaning ‘snake hole.’

Lol Yeon freezing mid-motion when Ji Ah tells him to stay put. That is 110% Lee Dong Wook’s sense of humour. Praise the drama gods for Lee Dong Wook - this show wouldn’t have been half as fun without him.

Fun fact: This cave is actually intimately tied to Ah Eum’s past with Imoogi and the story of how she came to be his ‘bride’ (read: sacrifice). I translated the tvN description here. I actually think this was fairly important information, so it’s a shame it wasn’t covered in the drama.

Sleepover with a Gumiho

When Ji Ah asks Yeon why he’s insisting on staying at Pyung Hee’s, his response is subbed as: “I have my reasons.” This is more properly: “You don’t need to know.”

Sub: “We don’t eat that crap!” Yeon’s line doesn’t have a subject, but this should properly be: “I don’t eat that crap!” We know from Yeou Nui that some gumiho in this world actually do eat liver.

“Heard of the Chinese liver fluke?” Ha. Yeon literally says ‘kan distoma,’ i.e. ‘liver distomiasis’ or ‘liver fluke’. While there was a well-known outbreak in China, it isn’t inherently Chinese. There’s a Korean word for it too (간흡충), but once again, Yeon opts for the loan word, adding further humour to the gumiho disavowing liver consumption - for health reasons, no less pffft

The BGM playing as Yeon sees Ah Eum in Ji Ah is once again ‘Parting at the River of Three Crossings.’

Bok Hye Ja’s line to Shin Joo is subbed as: “He went to the island to find this reincarnated girl?” The word she uses is actually ‘gakshi,’ which is an antiquated word generally meaning ‘bride’ (as in ‘the Snail Bride’), but it can also just mean ‘young woman.’

For the record, the Snail Bride speaks to Shin Joo in banmal, who speaks to her in jondaetmal

Shin Joo: “Contrary to how he looks, he’s the devoted type, after all.” Et tu, Shin Joo?

Shin Joo’s line is subbed: “As if that’s a good thing,” but I would have translated it as: “Romantic, my foot!”

Sub: “At least once in our lives we come across that one person we want to give our lives to.” This should be: ‘risk our lives for.’

Sub: “I won’t ever devote myself to love. My goal will be to protect Mr. Lee.” Actually: “I won’t ever risk my life for love. I’m going to protect Lee Yeon-nim!”

“Well that can also be called love, can’t it?” Thank you for this, Show. I know some people think TotNT champions romantic love above all else, but I simply don’t agree.

When Yeon checks Ji Ah again for his fox bead, the BGM playing is once again ‘Thread Rings’

I love how they did the CG on whatever is happening with Yeon’s powers here. I would have loved to have gotten more of an explanation of the fox bead and its powers (and Yeon’s, for that matter), but alas.

I love that Yeon tucks Ji Ah in even after re-confirming (or so he thinks) that she isn’t Ah Eum. It was important to me that he came to like and appreciate her for herself before learning that she was, in fact, his lost love.

Morning on the Island

Ji Ah wakes to find Yeon gone, the blanket tucked around her, and her expression tells us she’s onto him: sure, Yeon can be a grump, but he’s also a complete softie. heh

Yeon is, once again, talking to the elders in banmal. Why do I keep mentioning it? Because no matter how many times I see it it’s still funny.

Okay, Lee Dong Wook has this way of pointing at things with his entire arm that I find ticklish. Yeon ends up coming across like a petulant child. On a cultural note, in Korea, pointing at people like this is considered impolite.

Yeon dangling the ginseng behind Ji Ah as extra incentive pfft Wild ginseng can be massively expensive in Korea (on the order of hundreds of dollars), so this is actually a very effective bribe.

Also, can we take a moment to appreciate that Yeon woke up before dawn, and, instead of going back to sleep, went into the mountains to hunt for wild ginseng, then set about using it to bribe the elders into answering Ji Ah’s questions for her. Entirely of his own accord. Like I said: softie.

Side note: Lee Dong Wook’s eyebrows are working overtime in this scene and I’m honestly a little jealous.

The newspaper Jae Hwan finds at the library is dated August 13, 1954, which Ji Ah immediately recognizes as having been just after the Korean War (if you’ll recall, this is when the forest spirit told them something ominous had come to the island).

This newspaper is actually really cool. You can see how, in the past, Korean newspapers used a lot of hanja in addition to the phonetic hangeul, similar to modern Japanese. The headline reads, “Headless Corpse, Discovered on Eohwa Island, Investigation Hits Dead End.” (頭 없는 屍身, 漁花島에서 發見, 捜査迷宮으로).

Okay, to be honest, this final scene - absent the extra context given in the next episode - made me question Ji Ah’s smarts again. I wondered why she was chasing down the clearly unstable guy just to question him, but it makes sense once you know she meant to warn him his life was in danger.

As usual, Yeon knows how to make an entrance. Cue ‘Gumiho’ theme.

Yeon stopping when Ji Ah tells him to never stops being satisfying.

The BGM playing as we cut over to Rang is ‘The House of Ghosts.’

Okay, those shots of Thirsty and Hungry were full-on horror movie and I actually kind of like it? I never watch horror as a genre, but for some reason, I found I missed this spooky element when it dropped out of the later episodes.

Oh, I like that Yeon went and made her a poultice. Very ex-mountain god of you, sir.

“Long time no see, Lee Yeon.” Iconic. And creepy. I love the attention to detail Jo Bo Ah displays in the difference between how she acts Ji Ah vs. Imoogi. Imoogi’s voice is higher pitched, and gives off more of a loose-cannon feel compared to Ji Ah, who speaks in a lower, more grounded tone.

Sub: “It’s me. The person you’ve been waiting for.” Imoogi literally says: “It’s me. That thing you’ve been waiting for.” This is obviously a big clue since normally one wouldn’t refer to oneself in such a way. It also reflects the fact that, unlike Terry-Imoogi, Jimoogi perceives no value in Ji Ah herself. (Yes, I call Ji Ah-Imoogi ‘Jimoogi,’ and sadly, no, I didn’t come up with it).

Yikes, Jimoogi tracing Yeon’s face was all menace and zero cute. Point to Jo Bo Ah.

Boy, this show really knows how to make an exit.

Blue Mooooooooon!! The guitar (bass?) riff is just so catchy.

And that concludes Episode 2. Thank you to everyone who commented on the first one. If not for your encouragement, I probably wouldn’t have continued. I also genuinely enjoy hearing from people, so send me your thoughts! This is a weird, unprecedented mashup of a live reaction post, behind the scenes info, and detailed language and culture notes, and I’m still learning how to balance the three. Your feedback is always welcome.

I’d also like to take a moment to credit my sister, who, in addition to weighing in on a lot of the translations, is also the chief researcher and fact checker for these. I, meanwhile, am in charge of bad jokes and snark. I mentioned before that these take longer than you might expect, but it’s really true. The time we spend watching the episode is actually the least of it, and as much as I enjoy them, they are a huge time suck.

So. This is what I’m going to do. If you’d like to see more of these, or if you enjoyed this, or if you’ve enjoyed any of the translations or commentary or whatnot I’ve been posting recently, please consider buying me a coffee. If you follow the link, you can buy me a $2 cup of virtual coffee. I’ve never done this before, but I’ve decided to give it a try. It’ll help me to gauge how much interest there is, and, possibly more importantly, it will help me to justify all the time haha. If and when I’ve established there’s enough interest, I’ll proceed with Episode 3. ;)

#tale of the nine tailed #totnt #lost in translation #구미호뎐 #kdrama #korean language #korean culture

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jinruihokankeikaku · 3 years

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"Communicating Doors" by The Extra Lens (John S. Darnielle and Franklin Bruno)

A somewhat close reading that got a bit out of hand, because I couldn't find any interpretations of this song online. First, the song in question -

Campaign down from Atlanta Five-hour drive to the coast...

So here's our establishing shot. We establish the setting - somewhere on the Atlantic or Gulf coast in the Deep South - Jacksonville, Destin, Pensacola, Mobile, Panama City, and Charleston/Folly/Sullivan's Island are all possibilities. But what really stands out about this line, and sets the tone for the song as a whole, is the usage of "campaign" - a protracted venture to establish political or military control. The narrator is on a mission. They're struggling against some kind of opposing force.

...brought whatever we thought we'd need To pierce the skin of a ghost.

So the extreme ambiguity here is deliberate; it's a device JD uses fairly often, usually to comic (or at least tragicomic) effect. The narrator's deflecting, ensconcing the truth in what seems at first a slightly awkward metaphor (do ghosts even have skin?) to avoid the shame or embarrassment of saying it in so many words (despite the fact that he seems to assume we already know what he's referring to). So what exactly is the narrator referring to here? This becomes...slightly more clear as the story develops, but here we get an important hint both as to whatever "whatever" may be, and as to the object of the narrator's campaign.

In JD's oeuvre, ghosts show up quite often indeed, and this isn't even the only time they appear to be less-ghostly than they seem - for example, in "The Young Thousands", "ghosts...are prepared to take on substance...[and] have been learning how to breathe," and in the unreleased "We Shall All Be Healed (Rose Quarter Drifting)" a ghost is referred to as having once been able to "bite" the narrator. An outtake from Get Lonely, "Keeping House", establishes this as explicitly and as matter-of-factly as anything, and several times over - "Cursing the moment that saw him draw breath / The ghost on your doorstep is starving to death.... [S]oaked wet with rain...he clutches his stomach / And howls at the pain.... [T]he ghost on your doorstep has to eat / Same as you." This example makes it clear that the ghost in question is a bodily thing, and that the narrator and his newly introduced cohort(?) mean to do it bodily harm.

What makes a ghost a ghost, then, if it's still breathing, still hungry, still contained within fragile skin? A few vague ideas come to mind, but as the narrative presses forward, a more clearly defined notion of ghostliness begins to take form.

Left your car at the hotel, rode up seventeen floors And checked ourselves into separate rooms With communicating doors.

So, there's the titular refrain. Before we unpack the really interesting part - that is to say, the character of the relationship between our narrator and his companion - it's probably important to establish what the term "communicating doors" could be referring to. I had a vague idea, but I wanted confirmation, so I searched the Web - and was rather surprised to find little in the way of architectural jargon, and a whole lot in the way of articles on a 1994 stage play of the same title, written by Alan Ayckbourn, which - without derailing this post even further - seems to be a sex-comedy slash farce slash thriller, set - perhaps notably - in a hotel suite that travels through time. Now, to be clear, I have no idea if John Darnielle and/or Franklin Bruno had even heard of this production, and it would be a stretch further still to suggest that they were inspired by it - it premiered in England and seems to have received little recognition beyond three sentences on Wikipedia and a number of (mixed) reviews. However, the play predates the song by over 25 years, and is the first thing that shows up when one enters "communicating doors" into one's search engine so, like, make of that what you will.

Incidentally, the term "communicating door(s)" doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia page of its own, or even a dictionary entry. However, a trip to the StackExchange "English" forum proved that I was not the only one asking this question! There were several answers presented, with the common consensus seeming to be that a communicating door is any door between two rooms, among which rooms neither was a corridor, antechamber, hallway, or other common/shared space. They're sharing a suite and a car, but they're staying in separate rooms. This ghost-hunting partnership is strictly business, I guess...

....and that brings us back to the question of what the deal with ghosts is. Our protagonists (deuteragonists?) want to harm it physically, which is something that - if the rest of JD's body of work is to be believed, can be done to a ghost. The ghost's not dead. It's not spiritual, divine, or even especially ephemeral. If we assume that its description precludes its being a literal lingering mortal soul, we might need, then, to return to other ghosts that haunt the discography of them Goats et alia. A brief overview of the mentions of ghosts in the Kyle Barbour's The Annotated Mountain Goats, which covers the vast majority of John Darnielle's public songwriting between the early 90's and the mid-2010's, suggests that ghosts are typically - but not always - difficult or painful to interact with, and in many cases are actively malevolent. They haunt not only former / temporary domiciles (see "Genesis 3:23", "We Shall All Be Healed", "The Young Thousands"), and doorways (communicating or no) (besides the song currently on the dissection tray, see "Keeping House") but also dreams and traumatic memories, sometimes even in "armies....numbers far too high to measure" (see Tallahassee's "Idylls of the King" and All Eternals Deck's "Outer Scorpion Squadron"). The common thread here is, of course, liminality: an old apartment, a hotel suite, an illicitly infiltrated childhood home, and the depths of troubled sleep are all points of transition, places one has left or is soon to be leaving. Ghosts - living, breathing, and hungrily biting as they may be - are remains, artefacts, vestiges lifted out of time. With that in mind, let's return to our narrator's campaign.

Lay on top of the covers, turn the fan up to full Chase a memory around my head - silver satin, and wool. Close the bar at the harbor, say goodnight in the hall Smash the lock with a midnight knock - and the rest I don't recall.

That seems to have escalated rather quickly. The narrator tries to cool off, both literally and figuratively, because it gets hot down here. Once alone, he continue his pursuit of "a memory" which is, if not identical to the "ghost" in question, almost certainly a sort of synecdoche for it. After an unspecified length of time in futile pursuit, he comes up with only a few disjointed shocks of fabric. Sheets, perhaps, which might seem like ghosts from a great distance- you see where I'm going with this. He comes up empty-handed, give or take, and reunites with his companion at a bar down by the Harbor (this is totally me projecting, but I want to believe that this reinforces my theory that it could be Charleston, a city known for having one of those). They stay there - presumably arming themselves for the hunt - until they are politely asked to not stay there anymore and leave without any quarrel whatsoever, I'm sure. They make it back to their suite more or less intact, return to their respective rooms from the hall (which is to say, through strictly non-communicating doors), whereupon - true to JD-narratorial-form, he recalls only "smashing the lock" on the titular doors before we fade to black by way of Franklin Bruno's delightfully jaunty instrumental bridge. (And...scene.)

When our narrator's anterograde amnesia abates, we return with a final verse and another establishing shot, perhaps from a balcony 17 stories above the harbor:

Stones rise out of the water; water eats at the stones. I know people who dig up graves Just to label the bones. All that poison we swallowed, seeping out through the pores And floating over the transoms Of communicating doors.

The particular significance of the water, and the stones rising out of it, is of course open to any number of interpretations, or none at all. However, I do think it's worth noting that the opening line in this verse is the only line in the song to describe the natural world. It's stated directly and impersonally, as though the curtains have pulled back to expose something primal and eternal. On this brief threshold between oblivion and wakefulness, the narrator is experiencing a moment of enlightenment and/or disillusionment. He witnesses the Earth eating itself from high above, and then returns abruptly to his internal monologue (though in this verse, of course, he could as well be addressing his companion as could he the listener).

The narrator's return from liminal clarity, the passing of the moment at which the veil between the ghosts and the rest of us is "pierced", is evidenced by his abrupt change in tone in the following line. He re-asserts is subjectivity twice, here, in one line - first by stating for the record that he "knows people" (of which people he is not one), establishing a degree of separation between himself and what he's about to say, and second by returning to his original evasive metaphorical conceit - which conceit is, of course, now totally transparent to the listener. These guys he happens to know "...dig up graves / Just to label the bones." The fact that he's not, of course, just referring to some guys he happens to know, is evidenced by the fact that the two (marginally) distinct euphemisms he uses - "piercing the skin of a ghost" and "digging up graves" are both idiomatic stand-ins for the same process - that of "chasing down [memories]", of reaching bodily into the past. The only difference here is that, in the final verse, he admits that he knows why "people" do this - something he'd been hitherto unable or unwilling to do. He knows the motivations of the people he's referring to - and he provides no evidence, because he doesn't need to. Both he and the person he's now addressing, presumably from within the same room, know what he's talking about.

Sometimes it becomes necessary - or, at the very least, comes to feel necessary to label the past, to classify it, because a memory without context is a frightening, saddening, and confusing thing. A memory without context is a hungry ghost, "scanning the hallways nightly....searching for a sign." And just as the rising tide, over millennia, eats away at stone, the things one doesn't understand about one's own past add up, eroding - first imperceptibly, then catastrophically - the terra firma of one's identity in the present.

"But," - to borrow a quote from "Going to Marrakesh" another, earlier Darnielle-Bruno collaboration - "it's not right, and it's not nice / to try to kill the same thing twice." As our narrator and his companion are sweating out the poison, imagining that all that's toxic within themselves drifting away, over the transom, across the threshold to another place and time - the question of the ghost's whereabouts remains unanswered. As is the case with so many of John S. Darnielle's stories, we, the listeners, don't know what happens next. We don't know what ghosts yet haunt our narrator. The narrator probably doesn't either. So it goes.

~~~

#john darnielle #the extra lens #communicating doors #tmg

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meandmyechoes · 3 years

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More assorted opinions (to add) on Mando Ep5 to conclude the madness

I think this is an episode where geography/ethnicity has a heavier hand in your reception than other episodes: the Asian landscape, the Japanese theatre influence, and the cursed fight choreography.

this episode looks better in stills than moving. Yet the director is exactly responsible for the flow.

poor juggling between catering for the large crowd of fresh audience versus easter-egg level of consolation reward to animation stans, that reflects in visual and script

A formal address of accuracy vs. *stunts purpose & health*

the sensibility of The Mandalorian becoming its self-sustaining miniverse versus the out-of-place sentiment of they massacred my daughter and the real-world ramifications of her usage.

concerns for future storytelling directions of the entire Star Wars franchise

can i really bear a blow-to-blow evaluation of how ooc it is, and back up my own statement about ‘she moves more like anakin or obi-wan than herself’

I’d love to tear down the ‘why can’t we just enjoy ahsoka finally in live-action’ crowd but i’m gonna gatekeep right here because i haven’t seen them appreciating ahsoka in animation before last friday. If you truly understand Ahsoka you’ll know animation is the best medium. so I’m really pinpointing the word ‘finally’ here. But yes, please enjoy with free conscience if you like it. and let us be concerned for the ramifications shall such lack of care is well-received.

Post date: [4/12/2020 23:37-0:11]

It’s been a week and I’ve caught reviews where I want to. Hearing others’ views has helped me particularly this week, so I’ll be addressing the first point on geography.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the nationalities of people/mutual on here before, but I do find some gravitation of opinions in particular to the direction of this episode. Sure the bigger fish is the racial representation, then there’s the hardware of a caricature Chinatown, and the software of unimpressive choreography.

I feel like I keep repeating myself on this but I’m gonna keep writing here albeit again anyway. When you have such hardware issue glaring at you, it’s kinda hard to immerse oneself into this half make-believe world. (y’know, instead of a full, animated one). Every production slip-up is gonna remind you a corporation is behind this and they didn’t do their research to the best they could.

But the actual problem. Bedlam summed it up very well in her post and I, as part of the majority in terms of ethnicity, don’t carry the same weight on such experiences. I only knew, something was up but I couldn’t imagine growing up with that image. It is certainly something that bothers me, but it’s still a distant annoyance instead of a source of constant frustration.

The Walled City by itself feels very small? What resources are the Magistrate trying to rip anyway? What gain is there to control this city? Why is one Jedi able to besiege to whole army of them? The basic setup already lack sense. I watched a pair of local dudebros breaking down the episode today. Ironically, the breakdown is longer than the episode itself. It did shed light on why the fight scenes are so ooc for Ahsoka: She has two swords, but she’s slashing them in parallel instead of delegating defense and attack.

We’ve seen parallel slashing before, most notably against Vader (a much larger opponent) as she leaps to slash his mask. I’m not sure I can recall a second occasion. They were right in that the three consecutive parallel moves made her attack cumbersome, and very predictable. Not to mention there was barely any reason for Ahsoka to sneak up on an armour she would recognize, and one with a baby, in the first place.

The dudebros also mentioned her fighting style wasn’t “Jedi-like”, as in comprised of sneak attacks and shadows in the mist, much more like a classic lady wuxia. I’m not so sure about this comment because I’m not quite sure what “Jedi-like” is supposed to be the first place. I think they meant chivalry? as in announcing your attacks and wishes and posing? Well I’m more interested in how during the opening scene, she was all sneak around and ruthless and efficient, but it’s suddenly an honour duel with the Magistrate as she’s about to finish the job?

The one thing I really wanna discuss is ‘Regression’. I hadn’t put my pen down then about whether I’d deem this incarnation a ‘regression’ of Ahsoka’s character. I’ve now decided it’s not too harsh a comment to pass. When we last saw her in Rebels epilogue, technically she didn’t have a character. It was only the white robe and a distant gaze that convey her wiser years. But we also knew exactly what landed her in that Gandalf role - her confrontation with Vader and her journey through A World Between Worlds. We knew she made a promise and keeps it. From that point, you’d want to ask more questions about her. I didn’t get any of that from this character. There’s nothing Ahsoka does this episode that cannot be accomplished by any other Jedi. I call it a regression, because once again, we’re only shown one facet of this person, instead of being drawn into wanting more of her story.

The confusion surrounds the logistics of why she is liberating towns, or her connections to Bo-Katan, instead of the mystery of her (lack of) growth. While we’re here, it is unbelievable they used Bo-Katan as the informant, but did not mention Ahsoka’s role in Mandalorian history at all. That, would’ve been what I’m more interested in exploring, because we’ve all seen (not enough of) her exploring the Force before (and the Mando show is not the right stage), but her aid in the Siege of Mandalore and the Clone War should’ve been what connected her personally to Din! They’ve both survived the Clone War, and saw how civil war damaged Mandalore, they should’ve been discussing that, and Ahsoka providing an alternative picture to what audience has been shown ‘Mandalorian’ in TCW/Rebels before. If only they’ve taken this path, Ahsoka’s character would progress in a new perspective, instead of circling back to a cat warrior. :(

#m5 madness #myechoes #t'day's been a slow day huh #i think i wrote at least 6000 words on this topic both languages combined #(on top of the hours i spent screaming into my phone)#add later maybe #maybe

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calliecat93 · 4 years

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Top 5 Things I Disliked About Red vs Blue: Season 2

When I decided to do this series, I knew it was gonna be hard to do lists for Blood Gulch. Not because I can’t think of anything I like or dislike specifically, but as I said before, BGC is mainly comedic driven. The worst I can say is ‘this isn’t funny’ and critique the earlier production standards. Which that’s kinda mean since they were working with what they had and trying to learn to do the show. As such, I have to reach on Dislikes for these and S2 was a tough one in that regard. I managed to come up with five, but GOD I had to stretch haaaard on it.

But still, I did it. Just remember, take this with a grain of salt. So here we go, Top 5 Things I Disliked About RvB S2.

#5. Doc

If you asked me which of the BGC to write out and never bring back… I’d probably have to pick Doc. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate him, but I’ve also never loved him. He comes off more whiny than funny, and most of the time he’s only funny due to the back and forth with O’Malley. Otherwise, usually… he’s just there. Even here in S2, while having a pacifist medic in a cast where several are trigger happy could lead to some funny stuff, Doc was just an annoyance. The situations he got into were funny, like getting knocked into the Warthog when the Blues unknowingly made it go rogue, but he was literally just there for the ride. Something IDT later season really improved aside form 16 and 17, which tbh I think is stretching it.

IDK, I just find Doc whiny and kinda boring. Even if he’s meant to be the annoying, disrespected nice guy, doesn't Donut kinda fit that slot already? Heck, they both even have the recurring ‘disappear for seasons and then suddenly comes back’ joke. The only times that I feel invested in Doc is when he has O’Malley, which is how he re-entered the plot here. I’m gonna save more about that in the S3 posts, but on his own? Doc just… doesn’t really work and I didn’t really miss him in between the Reds dumping him and him reappearing when O’Malley infected him. It’s also a flaw IDT recent seasons have really fixed, though they are trying. Plus I don’t hate Doc and some jokes with him do work (the gag of his naming made me giggle), I'm just… indifferent. But that’s why he’s at the top of the list since the most I can say is I find him whiny and not as funny,

#4. The Cyborg Subplot

So due to losing Lopez and because he’s Sarge, Sarge decides to turn one of the Reds into a cyborg to do all the stuff that Lopez did. He settles on Simmons. Now in and of itself, the subplot is fine. It leads to a good few jokes, like Grif trying to ruin Simmons’ parts after the surgery or a few gags like Simmons shooting his own foot and of course, faxass. While IDT the season would have been hurt without it, it has plenty of funny bits. Sow hat’s the problem. Well… like I said, cutting it wouldn’t have hurt anything. It kinda is just there to give the Reds something to do during the O’Malley and Tex stuff since otherwise, they’d just be standing around and taking… well, more than normal. Otherwise, it’s only significance plot-wise is Tucker tuning into their frequency, which is important in the finale when he picks up Vic and Sarge’s conversation.

So yeah, the subplot isn’t all that important. But it is still funny, so I don't mind it being there. But nowadays… how much so we see this come up? I mean Grif got mutilated by a tank and got another guy’s body/organs haphazardly stitched on. Simmons, while he possibly gave up those parts to Grif willingly, was otherwise forcibly converted into a cyborg. This… hasn’t really come up again. I mean the only time I think Simmons mentioned it in-show was as a brief joke in S11. Nine seasons later. I don’t think Grif’s side of it has come up at all ever again. Though… considering you can only get so many jokes out of this setup since everyone is always in armor, I do understand why. Though I feel with Simmons’ side at least, they could play with it some more, both comedically and maybe even storywise. But that may be my need for Simmons content talking…

So yeah, the subplot was okay. It’s at Number Four since I don’t hate it and it was funny. I just feel like nothing would be lost without it, especially since it pretty much never comes up again. Maybe one day though, who knows? At least the fanfic writers keep it alive XD

#3. The Caboose Forgetting Church Thing

Okay this is brief, but it does annoy me. During the whole trip into Caboose’s mind, Caboose’s memory of Church gets shot. As such, Caboose forgets who Church is. Makes sense, O’Malley killed the personification of Church in Caboose’s mind, so his mind would forget it. It also explains why Caboose got, well… for lack of a better way to put it, intellectually challenged later on due to having three AI’s in his brain and all the chaos that broke out. But Caboose forgetting Church lasts like… one episode? Maybe two? Anyways, Burnie explained on the commentary that it was just too hard to write out so they did one joke with it, and then just dropped it. Probably for the best... but then we have to figure out how this works in-continuity... damn it.

Really this is only on here because it forces me to try to figure out how this is possible in a show sense. Which yeah I probably don’t need to, but I am a continuity loser who tries to piece together these things. If I had to guess, maybe the memory of Church fixed itself somehow or Caboose was able to recall after being around Church for a little while. But I honestly really don’t know, and trying to think it through hurts my brain. It also did little to nothing either story-wise or comedy-wise, at least we got a few jokes out of the cyborg subplot. IDK, I feel like they gave up on it too soon. But then again this is the saga where they’ll break/ignore continuity for the sake of a joke and that’s just how these seasons worked. Hence why I put it smack-dab in the middle.

#2. Some Holdover S1 Issues

You can tell that there was a mass improvement in terms of production for Season Two. Pacing felt stronger, more was going on, characterizations began to settle in, and they even began to form more of a plot. They clearly had a much better idea of what they were doing now that they got through Season One and I think things like Matt becoming more involved in writing and production as well as Gus moving back to work on the show really helped as well. That being said, not everything got resolved. Most did, but there are still a few holdouts.

Audio mixing is a LOT better, especially when it comes to effects. The filter is still a little distracting, though better compared to S1. Not all the characterizations really set in. Grif and Donut are about 75% there and Simmons and Tucker are probably the least set in stone. The traits are there, like Simmons clinginess to Sarge and Tucker actually showing some competence when forced to, but nothing set in stone. Donut’s also on the right path with his hobbies and tendency to babble into TMI territory, but the voice is still off and his personality isn’t quite there yet. There’s some other, but I’ll touch on it in the Likes list. Some jokes could also still drag, like the whole switch joke where some of Church and Tucker’s back and forth went on a little too long.

We’re clearly making progress, but the mark hasn’t quite been hit. It’s still an improvement over S1 though, the pacing especially. This is nitpicky, but still it’s there. But hey it’s progress, and that is never a bad thing. So yeah, RvB is still evolving here, but the progress bar is loading steadily and trust me, by S3 I think we’ll be settled in… well, for the most part.

#1. Some Outdated Humor

The BGC was made from 2003 to 2007. Obviously, there’s gonna be some stuff that is outdated. Take the graphics themselves for example. Halo has evolved, so the game can look a little outdated, especially when you compare the original footage to the remastered footage. Let's put it this way, VIC is uncanny in the remaster… and is utterly horrifying in the original version. Thank God that the DVD is the remaster and I was spared of looking at that monstrosity. Visuals aren’t the only thing though, some pop culture references can also come off as outdated, like Creed joke in the RL vs Internet PSA. So can some of the humor that shows how stupid we were back only two decades ago.

There are… some jokes that are uncomfortable to listen to. For example, there’s the Grif shaming himself joked by saying he’s a girl and likes ribbons in his hair. It’s not the worst joke and clearly, it isn’t made to offend… but nowadays I think it could look offensive to certain individuals. It didn’t necessarily offend me, but it did kinda make me feel uncomfortable when I first watched it, but it could be me thinking it over too hard. There’s also the casual usage of the R word. Last season it came up a bit, but I noticed it came up more frequently here. Not excessively, but there were quite a few instances where it was treated as a casual curse word. Obviously back in 2004 we didn’t realize this was an offensive term, and I think they’ve even said that they regret the casual usage of it during the early years. You certainly would probably not hear that word used unless maybe to emphasize how terrible a character is, but even then I think they’d be more careful.

Now obviously RvB uses a lot of adult and offensive humor, especially in this era. I guess you can kinda call it the web version of South Park, only RvB has never really resorted to shock humor. It puts it above many, /many/ animated adult comedies in that regard. Still, when you run for this long, you’re gonna have some outdated elements. It’s not necessarily their fault, it just shows that times has changed. Still, it does make some stuff hard to look back on without cringing, and I imagine that the Founders would agree. So yeah… there’s just some stuff that wasn't fun to look back over and S2 isn’t the only offender, but this was where it stood out to me and took me out of the moment. As such, it is Number One.

(Top 5 Likes)

#rvb #rvb reviews #top likes/dislikes

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naruhearts · 5 years

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Okay, Monika, hypothetical question time: it's Season 15 and they *finally* have room in the budget to afford to use ONE Zeppelin song and only once. What song should it be and how should it be used?

OH NO, why ask me one of the hardest questions of all time, nonnie?!?

Hopefully I’m up to the task, and I sincerely apologize in advance, since I can’t help myself and this post will probably turn out to be Destiel-related *rubs hands together*

I have like, a few mainstream Led Zepp songs off the top of my head that I’d REALLY want SPN to use, but I’ve decided to list down the pretty obscure ones (well, what I personally think is obscure) especially when we recall that Dean is a simple and sentimental yet complex man, and I wholeheartedly believe obscure Led Zepp turns his gears — obscure music, not watered down by popularity, is personal; it’s evocative and can be as intimate as lovemaking. After all, part of Nick the Siren’s inherently sexual seduction of Dean included discussion about obscure Led Zepp records, and Dean was so impressed — so into Nick’s Led Zepp trivia — that strippers couldn’t even distract him!!

Another example of Led Zepp as representative of sexual/romantic seduction and generally holding sexual/romantic subtext just in case anyone’s forgotten [JO to DEAN, her crush]:

Most importantly *points at all the Led Zeppelin + Destiel meta* Led Zepp chronicles the love story of Dean’s parents, where John Winchester himself impressed Mary Campbell in the romantic context with his own knowledge of their songs, and this romantic narrative mirror is passed down intergenerationally via the infamous TOP 13 LED ZEPP MIXTAPE that Dean gave Cas, his own subtextual lover, in 12x19.

Led Zeppelin holds such deep, intimate significance — holds such a substantial sexual/romantic history — with Supernatural’s narrative that Dean also used the band and his parents’ love story to prove to newly resurrected Mary Winchester that he’s her son:

So, going off of the above, first I’ll narrow the list down to my personal 4 songs that evoke romance (I mean, Led Zepp do croon about platonic relations, but like I said above, according to their historical narrative usage on the show, they belong in the “Cock Rock” category of rock music for obvious reasons):

1. The Rain Song

2. Thank You

3. Fool In the Rain

4. What Is and What Should Never Be

Out of these 4, I’m gonna have to choose The Rain Song from Houses of the Holy!! It’s been my favourite ever Zepp ballad since I was a kid. 7 minutes and 39 seconds long, it’s an extensive orchestral gift that always spoke to me. The song drips sentimentality; it’s full of gorgeous swelling riffs, with acoustic guitar and polyphonic keyboards that build to a soulful peak while Plant compares his lover to the sun/ultimately pledges his love for them (how true love altered his life) using swoon-worthy poetic metaphors about the different seasons—

It is the springtime of my lovingThe second season I am to knowYou are the sunlight in my growingSo little warmth I’ve felt beforeIt isn’t hard to feel me glowingI watched the fire that grew so low, oh

It is the summer of my smilesFlee from me, keepers of the gloomSpeak to me only with your eyesIt is to you I give this tuneAin’t so hard to recognize, oh

These things are clear to all from time to timeTalk talk, talk, talk

Hey, I felt the coldness of my winterI never thought it would ever goI cursed the gloom that set upon us, ‘pon us, ‘pon us, ‘pon usBut I know that I love you soOh, but I knowThat I love you so

These are the seasons of emotionAnd like the wind, they rise and fallThis is the wonder of devotionI see the torchWe all must hold

This is the mystery of the quotient, quotientUpon us all, upon us all a little rain must fallJust a little rain, oh

Here’s a blurb on The Rain Song that I posted to Pillowfort:

The Rain Song is a beautiful marriage between operatic/suite and their multi-genre blues/rock sound.

Again, knowing Dean the simple and sentimental man, he wouldn’t want to choose mainstream tracks just because they’re mainstream. Picking out THIRTEEN Led Zeppelin tracks out of 108 recorded from 1968-1980 is a complex artistic ability in itself - a daunting yet boundlessly fulfilling task in that their whole conscious/subconscious being decides which songs are worthy before gifting their HEART to the apple of their eye…the one they are in love with - which of their favourite/top songs successfully strip the gifter naked, down to their personal bare bones, for the giftee —> This is who I am, Cas. You are worthy of me. This is what I think of you, what I feel for you, what I want from you.

Based on canon (subtext and text), I bet you that the Rain Song is part of Dean’s meticulously arranged mixtape set for Cas. In particular, wow THEMES, with the seasons representing change…cyclical new beginnings, realizations, feelings, desires, communication, self-actualization, and optimism for the future.

Sigh. If I had time to spare, it’d be super cool to actually make a mixtape replica with all 13 tracks on it…

*Listen to it, friends!! Flail with me over this song :P*

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It’s really hard to think about how they should use it, because honestly, there’s SO many possibilities!! Should it play during Dean and Cas’ hopefully blatantly romantic and emotional S15 reunion? In the car when Dean fixes Baby’s tape deck which could symbolically coincide with him and Cas finally being on good terms post-love confession (heck, during a love confession)? In Dean’s bedroom as they make well-deserved love? Endless scenarios, nonnie!! And we have fanfic for it, too.

If we’re talking canon realism, I could genuinely see this playing in the background as an orchestral aside to Dean and Cas spending quality time with their family (FAMILY, romantic and familial interactions unfolding as the song plays) (pre-series finale, epilogue, or other).

And then the camera pans to them sitting on the couch together, no personal space, limbs practically glued together, and they look at each other during a singular visual moment cluing viewers in to the exact nature of their relationship, taking the subtext out of text, with the most romantic, gooey-eyed, respectful, intimate gazes and secret knowing smiles upon their faces…(although I’d like textualization to be physical as well, particularly a blatant romantic can’t-be-no-homoed kiss and handholding, because we already see them engaging in heavily romance-coded domesticity, and they deserve equal M/M media representation).

It’s what I (cautiously) hope for.

#my stuff #otp: mixtape #led zeppelin #spn s15 speculation #spn s15 #my meta #destiel #the greatest love story ever told #supernatural #long post for ts #led zepp + destiel #cautious optimism #deancas #the rain song #endgame destiel #canon destiel #textual destiel #bisexual dean #4x14

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andrewuttaro · 4 years

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Hypostatic Thoughts: Why Purgatory is RAD

When I was a Youth Minister I had to come up with a lot of “get to know you” games. They are part of the everyday life of ministry: you find icebreakers and games to get youth comfortable with sharing and eventually learning and forging a relationship with Jesus. One of these icebreaker questions I remember vividly was threefold: What is the craziest thing you’ve ever heard? What is the craziest thing you’ve ever done? What is the craziest thing you believe? I don’t recall my responses to the first two questions, but I remember that icebreaker went before the lesson on the Eucharist and Communion because the Catholic teachings on those are something crazy by most other Christians’ standards.

I do remember my response to the third question: What is the craziest thing you believe? I remember sitting in my office and giving it a good long think. I landed on purgatory. The teaching of Purgatory is canon within Catholic teaching, so I spoke about it for a little bit that day. I’m certain there was a lesson on the Last Things as well and in the Catholic Church no discussion of Heaven and Hell is complete without a part of Purgatory. It’s a sneaky fun topic to talk about. No Catholic teaching is falling out of popular favor quicker than purgatory except maybe celibate priesthood but that is a discussion that deserves a blog post to itself.

I do believe that Purgatory is very important. In fact, I think it’s crazy to believe in the Christian God without a belief in Purgatory. There is a very sharp criticism of Christian faith that is rarely talked about. Why would an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God subject his son to crucifixion? Why would a God who claims to be all-loving subject anyone who dies disbelieving in him to eternal damnation and suffering? That God couldn’t possibly be a good God. That God is evil actually. The crucifixion point is a little bit more complex but the traditional Christian retort of “to save our souls” isn’t much of an explanation. This is essentially the Problem of Evil question. To be very clear every Christian denomination believes God is good and that God is just too far beyond the comprehension of human minds to truly understand any of this, but the question remains: How can the God of Christianity be good? My answer: purgatory.

The Catholic Church has maintained an explicit teaching on purgatory since about the tenth century AD. While there are biblical moorings for the teaching, like we discussed in the last Hypostatic Thoughts blog way back in August (The Kingdom Christians don’t want), this one is more implied. Without getting too bogged down in theology, the very acute intellectual flaw in Christianity we just described in the problem of evil is in part taken care of via purgatory. In a way… God doesn’t send anyone to Hell. He doesn’t really send anyone anywhere in terms of the afterlife. The thing about an ever-loving God is that he’s personal. He wants to be with you. After we die, God wants us to be with him. It’s very clarifying to think about the Christian afterlife this way: there isn’t places you go so much as degrees of distance from God.

Before going any further with this let’s talk about the first reason Purgatory is Rad: because of God! Who is God? This question is immense but for the sake of this blog post let’s keep it on point: God is the being whom no greater being can be thought of. Imagine what you think God is: he’s bigger and better than that. That is literally the canon teaching on God. He’s too beyond incredible to comprehend. God is literally too wonderful to be comprehended across Christian theology. That’s why it’s so incredible he’s loving and wants to be with us according to the way the Christian myth is built (when I say myth I’m using the theological usage of the word, not the meaning fake or not real). Once again though, that is another blog for another day. So if God is this wonderful being too great for our minds to comprehend why wouldn’t we want to be with him? Give it a totally non-religious thought for a minute: after you die wouldn’t you want to go to the greatest being in existence? Mind you: this being by such a nature would be the answer to every question and fulfillment of every desire. He’s so wicked rad that to think you want to go anywhere else is kind of missing the point of who he is.

Purgatory, like most religions with one God for that matter, doesn’t work at all if God isn’t a worthy goal. So if God is the worthy goal for us than life can be thought of as getting ready to go be with him. In the parlance of sports, life is training camp. To stick with the sports metaphor: in the teaching of purgatory, purgatory is a practice during the regular season or playoffs. It’s getting ready to be with God after you’ve already entered game-time. This is the second reason Purgatory is rad: you’re not in a gray, limbo zone when you’re there; you’re there training to be… you! That sounds egotistical and millennial AF but in the understanding of who-God-is that we’re working under, God is, in the very being of who he is, the fulfillment of ourselves, the complete satisfaction of our being. In sappy romantic comedy terms: He completes us. We are most ourselves when we’re with God. Getting to heaven to be with God then is like winning the Stanley Cup or the Superbowl to go back to the sports metaphor. Just like winning a championship or an Olympic Gold is the fulfillment of what being an athlete is, so too is getting to heaven the fulfillment of being human. Purgatory is the training ground that gets us to victory circle.

That second reason is A LOT so let’s talk about that some more. If God is the fulfillment of everything we were made to be, and purgatory is more training for that fulfillment, than God is good because he gives us every opportunity to be with him as we need to be. Heaven is the completion of Purgatory in a way, in other words a stop on the way to heaven. So if God doesn’t send people to Hell and purgatory is God giving us every chance possible to be with him than who is in Hell if anyone? That’s a great question that is somewhat contentious in contemporary Christianity. Some thinkers these days will tell you Hell simply doesn’t exist. I’ll tell you personally I don’t know if anyone is there, but I think Hell needs to exist just like Heaven and Purgatory if you believe in the Christian God. There has to be a place for people who just don’t want to. People who may know all this stuff about God but just say no thanks, nonetheless. The third reason purgatory is rad sheds some light on this: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell aren’t exactly what you think they are.

Purgatory is very metal. If you’re into punk rock culture in anyway I don’t see how purgatory isn’t the embodiment of how you feel. The most punk thing about it is the third reason its rad AF: you don’t have to exit one way. In the Christian faith there is free will at every turn. That sentence may sound insane if you’ve ever been annoyed to be dragged to a Church event or join in an awkward blessing before a meal but it’s very much true. Jesus implores us to join him but never forces anyone into his friendship. Yes, Free Will is crucial here and with that in mind it’s time to go really deep. Remember the problem of evil we talked about at the beginning of this article? We can look at people and see victims of circumstance, but it’s also impossible to say real evil doesn’t exist. Evil does exist. But it really only exists as a deprivation. It’s the lack of a thing more than its actually a thing. Evil is a lack thereof, not something unto itself.

If you don’t want to be with God you really don’t have to be. While Hell is often imagined as torturous inferno its better understood as freezing cold. It’s a distance from the warmth of a relationship with God. The Devil himself is imagined in the classic Dante’s inferno as frozen into a lake with his arms crossed in resolve. He made his decision. He wants to be there. Nobody is evil because they’re born that way, people are evil because they lack something whether that be patience, hope, self-love or plain old empathy. That may sound like a pivot back to victimhood but again, it’s very intentional. No one is in Hell who doesn’t want to be there. Let me say that again: nobody is in hell who doesn’t want to be there. Just like the Devil some of us choose in spite of perhaps even the distant sight of the all-wonderful God, to move away from such a being. There is choice in the afterlife too in the Christian world. This is why all of Christian faith is built around redemption. God wants us to make the choice! He gave us Free Will from the literal day one. It’s our choice.

That’s the third and final reason Purgatory is Rad in your humble blogger’s opinion. Purgatory is the most jarring reason the Christian God is good and free will exists. We are given every opportunity to exercise our free will for the purpose of going where we want to go. The evil in our lives that may hold us back from exercising our free will is a deprivation of something else at the absolute worst. Purgatory maybe a pretty wild thing to believe in, even if you consider yourself Christian; but its also pretty essential if you want to believe your God is good.

Thanks for Reading.

#Religion #blog #purgatory #catholic #christian blog #christian #faith

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weirdmirrors · 5 years

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Study of Nostalgia

The second chapter of my dissertation is on nostalgia. I have been conducing a bit of research on nostalgia in my previous studies, and in particular, in my manuscript Debris of Utopia. I opened it to take notes on my notes and perhaps use something in my dissertation. Debris of Utopia and my dissertation have been functioning like a small system of connected retorts.

Political - socially acceptable to be nostalgic for the Soviet times, as opposed (at least recently) to the Nazi nostalgia. And it is understandable: Soviet project was a project for the world that still has its appeal.

Nostalgia for the Soviet times is not nostalgia for the Soviet times but a meta-nostalgia, nostalgia for nostalgia: "I sometimes think that what one deals with in the post-Soviet spaces is the sedimentation of ruins, the rubble that left from the ruins of the Soviet constructions and infrastructure: not with ruins as such but rather with ruins of ruins. And the affect that they bring is, in fact, not nostalgia but rather the meta-nostalgia: a nostalgia for the nostalgia. While nostalgia is an experience of longing for something that may or may not have been there, the meta-nostalgia is longing for the purity of this experience. But the always-already-polluted can only dream of purity."

Ruins produce nostalgia: "Ruins are generative in terms of affect, producing nostalgia and melancholy, and also creating lacunae of experimental social / bodily explorations and not-always-legal or simply frowned-upon usages."

Nostalgia is acute: "Gazing at ruins and exploitation of ruins is pleasurable, and the nature of this pleasure is complex, from purely distanced aestheticized savoring of the “elegiac elegance” of ruins to the more acute feelings of nostalgia and loss. Yet Soviet ruins, I tend to forget, ascribing my own sensitivities of a native observer to others, are foreign to the Western reader. Rann suggests Soviet ruins are attractive for a Westerner because communist iconography, refined and redefined, stripped from its threatening meaning, is a veritable succession of images of a dissolved empire: “Russia and eastern Europe serves as an imaginary space in which western nations can play out their own crises of identity, without having to confront them directly” (Rann, 2014). In other words, Russian ruins serve as a mirror of a polished shield looking at which Perseus does not risk to be blinded by the Medusa Gorgon’s exterminating sights."

Nostalgia is mythology-producing: "Similarly, it is too compelling to announce the Soviet past to be the past and to overlook the summoning of this past conducted most notably by the state in contemporary Russia, to say that whatever is happening now is something entirely different from the past. The USSR’s was a revealing collapse. It still is. This existence in the non-existence of the Soviet Union is still so painfully evident in a multiplicity of manifestations as perhaps its very presence wasn’t. The collapse of the USSR has started, and it is not near the end of its unfolding. Like the collapse of the Roman empire, it will reverberate through the centuries. Not surprisingly, therefore, not only the empire is thought and described in dualistic terms, but that it is also likely to evoke the sense of nostalgia in the observers. The sense of nostalgia is going to be purified by those invoking it until it reaches that ideal vision of empire which is entirely fictitious, mythological, and also mythology-producing. "The unexpected and the unsurprising" merged in the collapse of the USSR, according to Yurchak (282). But for whom was it unsurprising? Surely for many people, as Yurchak himself attests, the end of the Soviet Union was the personal tragedy. There was a lot of the staggering—not just the surprising before, during, and after the collapse. In “Conclusion,” Yurchak writes: “This book began with a paradox: the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union was completely unexpected by most Soviet people and yet,…most of them also immediately realized that they had actually been prepared for that unexpected collapse.” (Ibid). But is this such a paradox? People seemingly smoothly went on with their daily lives. What else was or is there to do? Is it not what "always" happens in the times of significant transformations and social changes? Who can, goes on, and who cannot, does not. The latter might look quite differently. People could depart for the inner emigration and engage into escapism, find for themselves enclaves where the life goes on as if nothing happened, and people could die. While many didn’t die, many did. While in some regions the collapse went (seemingly) smoothly, in others there erupted wars and military conflicts, often with ethnic component and civil wars: Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Tajikistan. Many-years Chechen wars and the currently unfolding hybrid war between Russia and Ukraine is the consequences and the continuation of the collapse."

Nostalgia is “sentimental” in Etkind's reading (somewhat tautologically): "Alexander Etkind writes about the affective register of the “high Soviet period” that he defined as stretching from 1928-1953, overshadowed by the common knowledge and reluctance, impossibility to speak about gulag, as the atmosphere of “coercion, violence, and angrst,” which resulted in the “complex of feelings—fear, bewilderment, resentment, compassion, and mournfulness.” (Etkind, 2013, 30). For those who grew up in the Soviet republics which were on the subaltern position towards Russia, the mixture includes “political guilt, sentimental nostalgia, and apocalyptic mindset” (Ibid, 33). Etkind derives this formula from the analysis of Grossman’s novel Everything Flows, the protagonist in which recalls his childhood memories unfolding in the Caucasus, the land subjected to colonization by the imperial Russia and the enduring colonial practices during the Soviet time and beyond. I spent summers of my childhood in Ukraine, the country in many grievous entanglements with Russia; Summers here are about it. These feelings are familiar, but the affect that I lived are different. As much as guilt was present, there was denial."

I do not have nostalgic feelings about school: "Nostalgia is likely to emerge in connection to the memories of childhood, school years, family time, the blessed bygone are when our parents were young, the world was bigger, felt fresh, and trees were huge1. But I do not have any nostalgic feelings in connection to school."

Allegiance to nostalgia: "At the end of the Soviet times, young critics of Communism refused to wear ties. I, to the contrary, had been wearing my tie for longer than anyone else in class, longer than it was appropriate. Even teachers squinted at it, annoyed. It was my inverted resistance, directed, for some reason, at the new fashions, rather than past injustices. And, I think, it was my first pledge of allegiance to the all-encompassing, eternal nostalgia."

To evoke your nostalgia by describing my nostalgia is my goal: "Soviet nostalgia, Stalinist nostalgia, Mao nostalgia, and recently not admitted to the public spaces Nazi nostalgia, which seems to resurge, all coincide in the feeling: Life was far better during the past regime. You might have been killed but you were young; after all, you still might be killed, but you are no longer young. A collection of fleeting glances and interrupted shadows that I file, catalog, and number for my and, hopefully, your amusement, dear reader, is, for sure, endless. There is always something to elaborate upon, something to add, and something to retract. The politics of revocations and additions is complex. A non-intentionality of this phenomenological project is absolute and exceeds itself. I am trying to convey the value of valueless objects, a preciousness of things that are nothing in your eyes. Things are just present; they do not necessarily do anything except for making you understand me. I was swung in the cradle of ruins; I fetched debris out of the nonexistent and the unimportant. For an observer. All I want is to make you love my debris the way I loved it. My only intent is to contaminate your vision, to communicate the bittersweet disease of nostalgia for the world you did not know. To express longing for a never-existed past, for a number of glimmering pasts, in fact, contesting pasts which hint at the tournament of the futures. I want the world to conflagrate my slow exitless burning. I was born at the Parthenon of the Soviet civilization. I am an absolute cosmonaut, suspended in space, surviving the cosmic shipwreck. Hence the method: I do not document that much or situate it in any context, as I create an affective feel."

The work of nostalgia is transformative: "My mother and her friend’s braids, their heels, their modest chintz dresses add to my vision of Maidan Nezalezhnosti. This is the work of nostalgia transforming things and adding the second dimension to the reality."

Nostalgia is sickness: "With the social transformations that begin with the goal of ultimate obliteration of previously existing social relations and structures, many things die leaving next to no trace, which partly accounts for the severe forms of nostalgia for the Soviet times. Such nostalgia bears the semblance of homesickness, since a former Soviet citizen, never mind her allegiances, is displaced even having never transgressed the borders of the country. She did not go anywhere; instead, the borders in one moment trembled and shifted under her feet. One day hundreds of thousands of Russians found themselves living abroad without moving, and everyone had awakened in a different country altogether."

Apart from the nostalgia for the USSR, there is a wide-spread nostalgia in Russia for the 1990s, the time of social transformation: "Many of those who were young during the 1990s, recollect the time with nostalgia and regret, others, with horror or simply grudgingly, but most remember gazillions of details comprising the zeitgeist."

Ostalgie: "Oustalgie can refer to different aspects of Soviet experiences not only pertaining to the East Germany but to the former Soviet space in general."

Indulging in nostalgia is a method: "Indulging in nostalgia might become a method of understanding it—all the more alluring since it is predetermined to be imprecise. Ruins do not offer the full story, only hint at it and thus allow the observer to inhabit it, “to experience historicity affectively, as an atmosphere” (Boym, 2001, 15)."

Pages 152-158 devoted to nostalgia.

Then "nostalgia" largely disappears, although does a work because it is used to classify things along the lines of what they trigger: "Nostalgia is easily triggered by taste, smell, memory of disappeared texture (hand cream). From Proust’s famous madeleines, the connection of the taste and memory has been well established: "She set out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changed that were taking place." (Proust, Swann’s Way, 2012, page number)"

Caitlin's nostalgia: "My colleague Caitlin once remarked that during her fieldwork in Lebanon she could not even begin smelling the lemon trees, and I was greatly surprised: “How so? One could not choose, usually, whether to smell or not.” Olfactory sensations impose themselves on the preceptor. “But I mean, for someone it would be easy,” she replied. “Someone would say, maybe, ‘My grandma had lemon trees in her garden,’ but not I. My grandma did not have lemon trees, you know. That’s why when I was talking with that woman, and she was sharing with me her nostalgia, all the evocations that lemon trees had to her, I was not going along. She was only two years older than me and could not possibly remember the civil war in Lebanon; it was imprinted upon her, along with the lemon trees’ smell. I found it was hard to situate myself in the same mode evoked just by the lemon trees.”..."I was failing to be in this nostalgia with her.” Caitlin explained."

Nostalgia is evoked by audio and sound: "Nostalgia is triggered and propagated by the audio, by sound. Alexei Yurchak describes how compact radio transmitters brought to life new socialities deterritorializing the grand Soviet narrative (Yurchak, 2006, page numbers)."

We can make ourselves experience nostalgia: "Nostalgia is a reenactment, a reproduction of scenes that have been repeating. Nostalgia could be spontaneous, but it could also be deliberate. One sets herself out for the pleasant and poignant experience of recollection, and the listener signed themselves in to be reminded or enlightened, by virtue of being present with their cup of coffee with petals."

Photography is one of those technologies that reproduce nostalgia: "If the music, being a sound, and not unlike taste or texture, store nostalgia, if everyday technologies and the yesteryear technological advancements that rapidly go out of circulation can produce nostalgia, photography will be one of these technologies."

Family photography perhaps more than other types of photography has a potential to evoke nostalgia: "Perhaps Soviet family photographs will communicate to the attentive observer something about photographs in general, as well as about nostalgia, the imperial, the ephemeral, and the empyrean."

Nostalgia can be a powerful market motivator: "As if playing this game or possessing the object today would have given the former player or owner the sense of the days of childhood perhaps returning. All too often the first urge upon recollection of something long gone is to seek reacquisition. That’s why nostalgia is not only a feeling, a state of mind, or complex affect, but it can be a powerful market motivator."

Nostalgia turns terrible things into great memories: "Nostalgia turns terrible things into great memories."

Digital nostalgia (not a developed concept).

Nostalgia can be exploited by the state and by the agents active on the market: "Doubtlessly, Longing for Sleep project is not the only project exploiting the nostalgia for the Soviet times, debris “too worthless to plunger” (Brown, 2015) reframed as “another man’s treasure” are everywhere you look. (Examples include Crêpe De Chine and Georgette crepe “vintage-looking” fabric patterned in the Soviet style—in huge wide-branching flowers; ice cream rebranded as the “Soviet plombir (ice cream) sold in Russia and beyond, and something else perhaps I could use here.) All of it shows that nostalgia is the good to be sold, that nostalgia is turnable into money; it is able to bring revenue, and generate different communities, be it a huge and hard to define community of the “Soviet ice cream” eaters, or a refined little community of the former Soviet blankets’ wearers."

Nostalgia comes in surges: "Some two years before that, in one particularly unbearable surge of nostalgia, I searched the Internet for this lamp and found it, to my amazement, for sale on eBay."

Another two pages on nostalgia: 248-249

Of nuclear threat and its now almost-nostalgic affect: "What once was disturbing becomes merely nostalgia-inducing even if the threat itself did not vanish."

The post-Soviet nostalgia is syncretic: ). "In 2015, in Moscow people spotted (and there was a news item about it) that the high-school graduates sported the Soviet-school-style dresses, but the aprons were cut into the dresses. No way to take the apron off. It appeared to me that there was something symbolic about it: the apron as a part of the dress was a perfect metaphor for the Soviet nostalgia: it combined the previously familiar elements into the totally new whole, the order of things was rearranged the way it has not worked before. The syncretic nature of the Soviet nostalgia was thus revealed. One thing that does not belong attached to another, centaurus hybridized with griffin, the deer wearing the cherry tree for antlers, Stalin framed as a Christian saint, use the German photographs to illustrate the narrative about the heroism of the Red Army, and all of it for the purposes of reaching the authentic is, evidently, the common principle of the plastic restoration, the imperial nostalgia that does not really want the past restored, but merely toys with some of its aesthetic elements the meaning of which it nonetheless discounts and to the separate existence of which it refuses to attend."

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1 “When the Trees Were Tall,” the film by Lev Kulidzhanov, produced in 1961.

#nostalgia #Etkind #Yurchak #USSR #Soviet project #Boym #anthropology #affect

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