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pforestsims · 2 months

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I'm a fan of traits & trait mods and I really liked Atomtanned's mod /based on Dill's Turn-Ons & Turn-Offs/. This is quite an extensive edit - I just wanted to adjust it a little for my game and once I started I couldn't stop xD

Atomtanned's Trait-Based Chemistry EDIT

& (optional mod) ONLY TO Chemistry

⚡ Download: SFS ⚡BOX

*Archive contains PDF file with detailed list of changes (added / removed stuff) and a few notes.

🟢 Trait-based Chemistry mod edit is available in 7 Languages: English, German, Finnish, Polish, Swedish, Russian, French

❕ New stuff: added Facial Hair TO (replaces Daydreamer), Business Shark TO (was: Serious), Expressive TO (was: Unique). Increased hobby and interest requirements from 5 to 8 pts, Formal wear added to Stylish TO - and more...

I also included an optional mod that switches off Zodiac / Aspiration chemistry and balances out the chemistry bolts gain - so it makes chemistry betwen Sims much less complicated. Obviously it will only be useful for those who like to control every aspect of their Sims romantic lives. Details under the cut.

You'll need Traits /and stuff required for these to work/.

Credits: @atomtanned , @lilbabydilljr , Epi for their TO replacements, @lazyduchess for Lua script

@peanuttysims for No Zodiac & Aspiration attraction (MTS2 link)

I used TS4 icons, icon mashups/ edits, and my own.

Thanks: @tvickiesims , @vegan-kaktus , @lilakartoffelbrei . Special thanks to @episims for all the support 💎🤗

*This is for The Sims 2

More under the cut:

Trait-based Chemistry mod

It will replace original TS2 turn-ons and turn-offs with entirely new ones (only hair colors and fitness/fatness are unchanged!).

It conflicts with NickM406's No More Loading the * Family mod , and Tunaisafish’s Attraction Fix, make sure you don't have tunaisafish_fix_attractiontraits package in your Downloads.

🟢 It's compatible with mods that change /or switch off Zodiac chemistry, Aspiration chemistry, or both.

⚡TURN-ONS / TURN-OFFS:

Note: I've added and removed some stuff, for example Plantsims and Bigfoot from 'Occult' TO, and Zombies from 'Undead' TO!

(This is an edit of the list posted by Atomtanned: )

Adventurous: 3 vacations, Adventurous, Daredevil, Sailor, Brave

Alien: Trait, skin, eyes

Animal Lover: 2 pet friends, Animal Lover, Cat Person, Dog Person, Equestrian

Artistic: Artistic, Avant Garde, Photographer's Eye, Savvy Sculptor, Flower Arranging/Pottery/Sewing silver badge, Arts & Crafts hobby, Creative skill

Athletic: Athletic, Equestrian, Loves to Swim, Sports/Fitness hobby, Body skill

Business shark: Born-salesperson, Ambitious, Mean Spirited, Snob, Workaholic

Charismatic (charisma): Charismatic, Irresistible, Schmoozer, Star Quality, Charisma skill

Cultured (bookish): Avant Garde, Bookworm, Film & Literature Hobby

Expressive: Excitable, Childish, Party Animal, Dramatic, Over-Emotional, Diva

Facial hair

Fitness / Fatness - original

Foodie: Natural Cook, Cuisine hobby, Cooking skill

Hair colors - original

Indoorsy: Bookworm, Computer Whiz, Couch Potato, Hates the Outdoors, Film & Literature Hobby, Games Hobby

Infamous (bad reputation): Bad Reputation*, Evil, Mean-Spirited

Intellect (high IQ): Genius, Logic Skill

Introvert (reserved): Brooding, Loner, Unflirty, Shy, No sense of humor, Grumpy, Socially Awkward, < 2 Outgoing personality points

Laid Back (slacker): Couch Potato, Mooch, Slob, < 2 Active personality points

Musical: Natural Born Performer, Star Quality, Virtuoso, Music & Dance hobby

Occult (mystical): Werewolf, Witch, Fairy, Mermaid, Supernatural Fan

Outdoorsy: Angler, Green Thumb, Loves the Outdoors, Sailor, Gardening badge, Fishing badge, Nature hobby

Outgoing (social): Irresistible, Flirty, Natural Born Performer, Party Animal, Social Butterfly, > 8 Outgoing personality points

Plant Lover: Eco-Friendly, Gatherer, Green Thumb, Vegetarian, Flower/Gardening badge, Plantsim, Fairy

Rebellious: Daredevil, Inappropriate, Hot-headed, Rebellious.

Stylish (elegance): Snob, Diva, Irresistible, Cosmetology badge, Fashion interest, Formal wear

Technology: Servo, Bot Fan, Computer Whiz, Handy, Vehicle Enthusiast, Robotics silver Badge, Mechanical skill

Tidy: Neat, Cleaning skill, > 8 Neat personality points

Undead: Ghost*, Vampire

Well-Liked: Good reputation*, Friendly, Good, Proper, Nurturing.

*"Ghosts" = sims turned into playable ghosts, with Ghost trait (and Mermaids are sims with mermaid trait, but ofc you don't need these to be able to use this mod).

🔸 Hobby requirements in Dill's / Atomtanned's versions (as well as interest) were set to 5 points, which is kinda an average in my game. I don't want TOs to trigger too easily so I've increased these to 8 points, just like Skill point requirements.

I also increased good reputation requirement from 30 to 60.

Above is the comparison of original vs new TOs, in the exact order.

FYI I've fixed the little mistake I've found in the mod - in my version stylish TO works as it should.

If you have any questions about how the game calculates attraction, read this.

And here's free version (SFS) of my buyable ReNuYu potion default, will be useful if you'd like to correct TOs for all your Sims.

"ONLY TO Chemistry" mod

Conflicts with No Zodiac Chemistry by Belladovah , chemistry mods by Peanutty (it incorporates their "No zodiac and no Aspiration"mod) and any other that contain Attraction Constants BCON and Attraction Tuning BCON.

In unmodded TS2 game, interests and skills do not play part in attraction. Trait-based chemistry changes that only to some extent because Zodiac and Aspiration are more important. To make TOs the crucial attraction factor in my game, I disabled Zodiac / Aspiration Chemistry, and tweaked bolt requirements.

This mod makes chemistry between Sims straightforward and TO-based however various bonuses to attraction also apply (!), like Beauty Wish, Vacation bonuses, bonus for very good rep or penalty for extremely bad reputation (even if your Sim likes bad guys, they will be put off by Dirty Dirtbag status, and enticed by extremely good rep). Anyways, if you use this mod and your Sims have no other attraction bonuses, then:

if one Sim has a turn-on towards the other, and the other has none, it results in no bolts

if one Sim has two turn-ons towards the other, and the other has none, Sims have one bolt chemistry

if one Sim has a turn-on towards the other, and the other has a turn-off, it results in negative chemistry

if a couple has single turn-ons towards each other, it gives them one-bolt chemistry

couple has three turn-ons, that gives them two bolts

couple has three turn-ons, one turn-off, that gives them one bolt

couple has double turn-ons, they have three-bolt chemistry

Special bonuses granted by mods for certain Traits like the "irresistible" still matter of course.

#sims 2 #the sims 2 #ts2 mods #Thanks to Everybody who helped me test trait based chemistry mod - IF you still use it pls get updated file - some stuff got edited :)#traits project

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willescrisis · 22 days

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Wille's Crisis : an essay about Kris (1934) and Young Royals (2021)

While watching Young Royals’ third season, I couldn’t get Karin Boye’s novel Kris out of my head. As a fan of Young Royals that feels very chill and very normal about it, I have hence written a five page brain-dump on how Malin Forst and Wilhelm’s characters and worlds are intertwined. (Small disclamers : I’m quoting Amanda Doxtater’s 2020 english translation of the novel and I’m french-canadian, so english is my second language.)

Who is Karin Boye ?

Karin Boye (1900-1940) was a leading figure in Swedish modernist literature and poetry. In 1920, at the age of 20, she studied one year in Stockholm to become a primary school teacher and after graduation, continued teaching, writing, militant engagement and several years of study in related fields. Among all of her works, the most explicitly autobiographical is her autofictive novel Kris (1934). This powerful novel explores the homosexuality and crisis of religious faith of a young woman named Malin Forst.

Malin Forst & Wilhelm

During her studies in teaching, Karin’s 20-years-old alter-ego Malin goes through an existential crisis. She feels completely paralyzed by her guilt due to her selfish inaction in the face of universal suffering, her lack of trust in institutions (educational, medical, etc.) and, worst of all, her doubts about her relationship with God. Kris also deals with Malin’s relationship to her own sexuality with the meeting of a classmate, Siv, to whom she will become passionately obsessed without ever talking to her.

We meet 16-years-old Wilhelm as a first year student at Hillerska. His failures as a royal figure and his complicated relationships to his loved ones make him feel powerless and guilty. He is thrown off balance by his doubts of the monarchic system, but most importantly, by his doubts of his life’s role model, Erik. Young Royals also deals with Wilhelm’s relationship to his own sexuality with the meeting of a classmate, Simon… Are we seeing the parallels here ?

While Malin’s torments lead her to shut down, Wilhelm screams. But both feel paralysed and don’t know how to exist out of the system they grew up in. And it’s the meeting of a same-sex student that leads them to a freer path.

« I want to see Siv. I want to be where Siv is. »

Previously, Malin considered the fusion of the will of the human with the will of God to be the most important of aspirations. Without this reference point, she has no will nor desire… until she meets another student, Siv. Her simple presence rekindles for the first time in the novel a desire, burning and forbidden: “I want to see Siv. I want to be where Siv is.” … And here is how this whole essay has come to exist. While watching season three, I joked endearingly with my friends about the way that Wille’s only hobby is to be with Simon, but I felt sad for him. Until I understood he’s on the first part of his self-discovery journey. His first true desire that stems from inside of him and wasn’t imposed by the system is “I want to see Simon. I want to be where Simon is.”

Interestingly enough, Siv and Simon both become a new manifestation of something that Malin and Wilhelm have lost. We, the reader, meet Malin when she is ‘grieving’ her old relationship to God and deconstructing her understanding of God as a single entity. Amazed by Siv’s ‘perfection’, Malin raises her to a kind of divine position with great powers. Wilhelm, for his part, feels at home with Simon because of the way he makes Wilhelm’s entire being comes alive, weightless and playful… A feeling of joy, innocence and safety he’s only ever felt with Erik before.

Anxious and desperate, Malin and Wilhelm are latching to their comfort person, making them their whole word in a way that has to change for them to grow up. After realizing Siv’s feeling for a fellow male classmate, Malin is shaken : “Only now could she see that she had embarken upon the false path of mistaking a person for what is highest and most beautiful.” Not only does this quote mirror Wilhelm letting go of his idealised conception of Erik, it is also mirrorring his realisation that Simon is not a perfectly stable and unbreakable anchor on which he can blindly rely on : “I have to take responsibilities for my own problem. I can’t drag him down with me.”

Don’t give it a name

An important part of Malin’s journey is relinquishing the power she gives to words, especially regarding God and her sexuality. Throughout the novel, she refuses to name the emotion she feels for Siv. On the day of her meeting with Siv, Malin thinks: “You, lips, I implore you to clamp so hard upon the unsayable, that not a word slips out to assert its malicious pettiness and obfuscation ! Be still, thoughts, don’t interrupt, for you have no idea what this is ! (...) Don’t give it a name, let it be just as it is, here in my blood and my eyes, life and sap ! The wonder of new creation need not be named.”

Wilhelm’s complicated relationship to words is shown in the way that he shouts his love for Simon from every rooftop, but does not wish to label his sexual orientation. In season three, he says the word queer for the first time and his voice is seeped with discomfort. He is not claiming this word as part of his identity and rather feels constricted by it, probably in the same way that every other label put on him has made him suffocate.

Furthermore, both Malin and Wilhelm wish to express themselves and experience the world, not through the restrictive lens of language, but through the sensory world. In Kris, after seeing Siv for the first time, Malin’s five senses awaken. A dialogue takes place between the sense of sight and hearing, reminding me of the way that Wilhelm and Simon’s intimacy is developped through the gentle touch of noses, the sounds of breathing, the glow of golden light and fingers lingering slightly above the other’s body… ‘Sight’ says “I’m confused. I no longer know whether I am sight or not. I envelop things and follow them as if I were touch, I hold my breath in quiet anticipation as if I were hearing, I breathe in, like one intoxicated, as if I were smell, and I drink in long, deep, draughts as if I were taste. (...) Could I be standing at threshold of some new creation ?” To which ‘hearing’ responds “ (...) Admit it - isn’t revelation through the senses at the same time the revelation of what lies beyond the senses, of what creates the senses, of the limitless feelings of eternal love ? (...)”

Checkmate

Kris’s narration drastically changes points of view in unexpected moments, moving from the pov of human characters to the pov of abstract entities. The two most important are BLACK and WHITE, two sources of cosmic powers playing a chess game whose game board is humanity.

On the one hand, WHITE represents the norm, also illustrated by threats from nature such as stormy and dangerous waters, cold, humidity and darkness, but also under the traits of the dominant society, whose rules and norms protect human beings while maintaining them in a position of submission and obedience. WHITE uses the anxious desire of his pawns (humans) as a weapon to subject them to the norm. And at first, Wille is WHITE’s perfect pawn : an anxious mess who becomes more and more obediant as season three progresses and whose ‘protectors’ are also the ones leading to his demise. Little (most likely accidental) nods to that parralel : Wille looses to Alexander while playing the white pieces in season two and interrupts his conversation with Simon to scream “The water is cold today !” at his guards on their first date.

One the other hand, BLACK is a chaotic power of life associated with desire, burning fire and passion destabilizing the established order. In the context of Kris, the norm is heterosexuality, while fire is the forbidden desire: homosexuality. This parallel is evident when Malin describes in this way the physical sensations caused by Siv’s sight: “There was no holy, burning voice within her. All that burned within her was a thirst for the forbidden after a single look cast in that direction” And based on that, I absolutely refuse to believe that Lisa put the hallway scene after a BONFIRE by accident.

I also don’t think the placement of the chess game during August’s confession to his friends is a coincidence. First, the board is oriented in a way where August sits at the junction between the black and white pieces, showcasing how the character is in a crucial moment in his journey : will he stay in WHITE’s cruches for ever or will he find the strenght to save himself ? And second, August puts a black king on the edge of the table. Not only does it foreshadow that Kronprins Wille is on his way out, it also indicates that it was a rebel and homosexual ‘power’ that guided him in his quest for self-determination, just as it was for Malin Forst.

I natt gick Gud under or how to make the lake scene destroy me even more

The poem in prose I natt gick Gud under (Last night God succumbed) stands out from the other chapters of the novel Kris, as it recounts the most decisive transformation of the main character Malin Forst. BLACK places Malin naked and at peace on the shore of a sea where she throws the words she denies. Finally at a safe distance from WHITE’s icy waters, she liberates herself from her paralysis to embrace her true feelings.

Last night God succumbed.

Perhaps it was just the hollow shell of name that went under.

But that shell of a name drew with it the power of death. I cast it off.

I see objects as they are, unwitting of the name attributed to them. I cast off their names.

I stand utterly new, on the shore of a sea. Conscience is no longer mine. I cast it off.

The will to life has made me naked. The will to life has made me see. I shall meet whatever comes with naked, open eyes.

Lisa describes the lake scene as almost religious. As he’s swimming naked in the lake, Wilhelm is shedding his crown prince shell. Leaving the waters, he is reborn. When he is standing on the shore of the lake in his white clothes, Lisa says “that is when Wilhelm grows up.” And for me, he’s ready to meet whatever comes with naked, open eyes.

Thank you ! Thank you to whoever read this far. Kris is a very complex book that, despite having read twice, I still don’t fully understand, so if you have anything new to add to this reflection, you are welcome to do so !

#lisa i hope you're still lurking #wilmon #young royals #wilhelm x simon #young royals analysis #karin boye #young royals s3 #literary analysis #lake scene #lisa ambjörn

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mapsontheweb · 5 months

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Indoeuropean languages in Europe

Historical Roots: The Indo-European language family is believed to have originated in the Eurasian Steppe around 4000-2500 BCE. From there, groups of speakers migrated to various parts of Europe, contributing to the linguistic diversity of the continent.

by hunmapper

Language Diversification: Indo-European languages in Europe have evolved into numerous branches and sub-branches. Some of the major branches include:

Romance Languages: Descendants of Latin, including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.

Germanic Languages: Including English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and others. Slavic Languages: Such as Russian, Polish, Czech, and Bulgarian. Celtic Languages: Including Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh. Hellenic Languages: Mainly Greek. Baltic Languages: Such as Lithuanian and Latvian. Indo-Iranian Languages: Including Hindi, Bengali, and Persian. Cultural Significance: Indo-European languages have played a pivotal role in shaping European culture, history, and literature. Greek and Latin, for instance, have had a profound influence on science, philosophy, and the development of the Roman Empire.

Language Revival: Some Indo-European languages in Europe, such as Irish and Welsh, have experienced language revival efforts in recent decades. These efforts aim to preserve and revitalize languages that were declining in usage.

Language Contact: Due to centuries of contact and migration, many Indo-European languages have borrowed words and phrases from each other. This phenomenon, known as linguistic borrowing, has enriched the vocabulary and expressions of these languages.

#maps #hunmapper #europe #igsourced #language families #indo-european languages

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useless-catalanfacts · 7 days

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The Catalan authors who were kept out of the Nobel Literature Prize for being Catalan

Did you know that there have been a handful of Catalan writers who were candidates to win the Nobel Literature Prize, but because of Spanish interference they never did?

The Nobel Prize discloses its debate and reasoning process 50 years after each edition. This means that we already know the details of what happened in the earliest editions of this Prize, which was started in 1901.

The name of the Catalan play-writer Àngel Guimerà (author of Marta of the Lowlands, Mar i cel, La filla del mar...), whose works have been translated to many languages and played all around Europe and the Americas, with many film and opera adaptations, sounded often in the Nobel committee. He was presented as a candidate to win the Nobel Prize 17 times in a row, since 1907 until his death in 1924. In the editions of 1917 and 1919, many were convinced he would win. However, the declassified documents show why he didn't: as written by the man who was then president of the Nobel Committee, Haralg Härne, Guimerà wasn't given the prize "to avoid hurting the national pride of the Spanish". In 1919, Härne writes that the objective of the Nobel Prize is to promote peace and thus to award Guimerà and show support for a minority culture would be to encourage internal conflict (🤦). The Academy decided that they couldn't give a prize to Guimerà "before awarding another writer who expresses himself in the most ancient noble language of the country" (weird way to mean "the official language", aka Spanish, because they surely didn't mean Basque). In summary, if a Catalan is to be considered, he must always be second to a Spanish man. Even when the Catalan is, in the words of the Nobel Academy, "the most eminent writer of our times", he can never be considered an equal, always must be behind.

Àngel Guimerà wrote in the Catalan language, which was discriminated against by Spanish and considered an enemy by the Spanish government and much of Spanish society. Guimerà was a firm defender of the right to use the Catalan language and that nobody should be forced to speak the imperial languages instead of their own, and was involved with the political movement for the rights of Catalan people. For this reason, every time the famous Swedish academy was considering Guimerà, the Spanish Royal Academy of Language (RAE) fought it with all its might. Nowadays, Guimerà's theatre plays continue to move thousands of spectators every year.

The same happened again with the poet Josep Carner. In the 1960s, Josep Carner was on exile, because he was a Catalan poet writing in Catalan and who stood against the fascist dictatorship of Spain, which persecuted the Catalan language and identity. Famous writers from around the world, including T. S. Eliot, François Mauriac, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Roger Caillois, supported Josep Carner's candidacy to win the Nobel, but the Spanish Government did everything possible to obstruct it. We don't know if Carner would have won or not, but he was deprived of even trying because of the Spanish government's hatred of Catalan.

Something similar seems to have happened between the 1970s and 1990s to three other Catalan poets: Salvador Espriu, J. V. Foix, and Miquel Martí i Pol, where they did not get any support from the Spanish authorities, so we don't know how it would have ended up.

Another example of what it means to have a state actively working against you because of bigotry against your cultural group.

Sources: book Det litterära Nobelpriset by the president of the Nobel Committee Kjell Espmarck, Pep Antoni Roig (El Nacional), Joan Lluís-Lluís (El Punt Avui), and Jordi Marrugat (Institut Ramon Llull).

#literatura #arts #història #àngel guimerà #josep carner #literature #books #reading #nobel prize #nobel literature prize #catalanophobia #catalanofòbia #catalan #cultures #writing #human rights #minority languages #1900s #history

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best-non-english-word-torunament · 3 months

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Final round: Haikea vs многоꙮчитїй, mnogoočitii

(poll at the end)

Haikea (Finnish)

[ˈhɑi̯keɑ]

Translation: A feeling of quiet, melancholic, sometimes even mournful longing. "Wistful" comes fairly close as a translation, though it's not exactly the same.

Finnish is an Uralic language belonging to the Finnic branch spoken by 5 300 000 people in Finland, where it is one of two national languages (the other is Swedish though it is less used, Finnish is the main language).

Motivation: It's one of the most beautiful words to say in Finnish, IMO; it has a beautiful flow to the vowels, and it almost sounds like a sigh. It's also an emotion often associated with a lot of Finnish art, literature, music and culture in general, and thus it's a strong part of Finnish identity.

многоꙮчитїй, mnogoočitii (Old Church Slavonic)

IPA not found

Translation: many-eyed

Old Church Slavonic is an extinct language that belonged to the Slavic branch of Indo-European languages. It’s closest related to today’s Macedonian and Bulgarian, but was standardised based on the dialect of Slavs living near 9th century Thessaloniki in today’s Greece by missionaries, who translated Christian literature so they could convert people easier. Old Church Slavonic was then used as the liturgical language of various Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches. A later version of the language called Church Slavonic is still in use in churches today.

Motivation: This particular instance of the word appears once in a manuscript from around 1429. It is the book of psalms, and the word is used in the phrase "серафими многоꙮчитїй," to mean "many-eyed seraphim," as in an angel. the "ꙮ", or multiocular o, is one of my favorite Unicode symbols and also symbols in general. In the next version of Unicode it's going to be updated, because it doesn't even have enough eyes as the original manuscript gave it! Looking past the ꙮ fixation, though, I'm a fan of angels and angelic imagery, as well as eye imagery. A single word for "many-eyed" is really cool to me, since I don't recall there being one in English. It's a useful phrase for more than just angels, like spiders, molluscs...

#best non english word tournament #final round #finnish #old church slavonic #haikea #mnogoočitii #good luck and have fun voting

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salteytakesonmanga · 8 months

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I know it's rare for ANY translation to do so, especially English to/from Japanese since the languages are so dissimilar, but can you think of any time where a translation added to a scene, or made it better in your opinion?

Oh plenty of times! There’s even one in this chapter. I try to call them out when I notice them because I appreciate them myself. I don’t have a specific tag for them, though.

The thing is…

Sorry, Anon. You accidentally triggered one of my rants. If you just wanted an answer it's up there ⬆️

Good translations are not rare. Good translations aren’t even rare in manga anymore. The reason a lot of people think of all translations as bad is because people used to not take translations of manga seriously. They wouldn’t give it any care or attention, they’d just whip off whatever sounded close enough, and if they got whole-ass words wrong here or there then it didn’t really matter. Because it’s just comics, right? Who cares about that kiddie crap.

Translation - good translation - is HARD. It’s not just understanding two languages. Linguistic differences between source and translated language are not the reasons translations turn out bad. It’s cultural differences. You have to understand the literature and art and history of both languages, because that informs the environment that the author wrote in and the environment the readers are reading in. You have to make sure someone can just pick it up and read. Giving people cultural context in asides and footnotes and a glossary is great and all, but the experience of reading should be about the TEXT, not about the language. A good translator has to know about cultural and regional backgrounds and tensions in both languages.

Turning a Kansai accent into a Southern accent is a great example of what NOT to do, because the two regions have vastly different cultures that aren’t comparable. An easy illustration is that the stereotype about Southerners is they’re very polite and gracious and charming and speak slowly, while the stereotype about people from Kansai is they’re blunt and aggressive and outgoing and speak fast. But it was the industry standard for years to just slap a “funny accent” on any character speaking with a dialect.

On top of all of those concerns, comics has the additional limitation of space. The translation must meet all of the previous requirements, and also fit into a speech bubble. There is no getting around that. You have to sacrifice meaning somewhere in situations like that, and in an ongoing series with as many twists and late reveals as One Piece it can be hard to guess which word is the one that is crucial to the plot.

There are times I definitely think the translators did a great job, it's usually most noticeable with wordplay and puns, but I'm not sure "better than the original" is how I'd describe that. I think it’s very risky for a translator to try to make the work “better.” The original Swedish translation of Dracula did that back in the day and what they wound up publishing was basically fanfic. (It’s supposed to be really fucking good, though. It just has no more than a passing resemblance to Dracula.)

What does “better” look like? Is it when everything makes sense and is easy to read? But maybe the author wanted this scene to be challenging so you’d slow down and think about it. Is it when you take that random joke out of the serious scene? But maybe that joke was there to balance out the tension of the scene. Is it when the characters always act the way you expect them to? But characters, like people, have contradictions and inconsistencies, and if you take those out the character will be flat and boring.

That’s why I think a good translation is one where the translator is invisible. If they’ve done their job right, you should never think about them. But then, if they’re that good, it’s easy to forget how hard they work to get the product that good. And that’s when people start to think we don’t need translators, we have language learning models and machine translation… But that’s a different rant for another time.

Side note, Viz still pays actual human translators for their work. So do Yen Press and Seven Seas, last time I checked. I’m not about to tell you to NOT pirate shit, but if you buy one of their books you’re actually paying for a person to translate it.

Anyway, sorry/thank you for giving me an opportunity to rant about this. As you can see, it means a lot to me.

#anon ask #asked and answered #saltey takes on one piece #translation #saltey says

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hedgehog-moss · 1 year

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[1] `there are often translations available in other languages long before English ones` This is really interesting! I'm familiar with translation in games, where english is often a very early target (a small game might get 0-5 translations, depending on amount of text) because the size of the market is larger.

[2] Do you happen to know why this is different for books? Is it faster to come to a deal about publication rights for some other languages to get started on the translation? Is translation to english harder (at least from French) than to say, Spanish?

The literary translation situation has long been very dismal in the English-speaking world! I don’t know a lot about video games, but are localisations provided by the company that makes the game? Because if that's the case it makes sense that games would get translated into English as a priority. For literary translations which are imported rather than exported, other countries have to decide to translate a foreign author and anglo countries (US, UK and Canada at least) are not very interested in foreign literature. There's something known as the "3% rule" in translation—i.e. about 3% of all published books in the US in any given year are translations. Some recent sources say this figure is outdated and it’s now something like 5% (... god) but note that it encompasses all translations, and most of it is technical translation (instruction manuals, etc). The percentage of novels in translation published in the UK is 5-6% from what I’ve read and it’s lower in the US. In France it's 33%, and that’s not unusually high compared to other European countries.

I don't think it's only because of the global influence of English* and the higher proportion of English speakers in other countries than [insert language] speakers in the US, or poor language education in schools etc, because just consider how many people in the US speak Spanish—I just looked it up and native Spanish speakers in the US represent nearly 2/3rds of the population of France, and yet in 2014 (most recent solid stat I could find) the US published only 67 books translated from Spanish. France with a much smaller % of native Spanish speakers (and literary market) published ~370 translations from Spanish that same year. All languages combined, the total number of new translations published in France in 2014 was 11,859; in Spain it was 19,865; the same year the US published 618 new translations. France translated more books from German alone (754) than the US did from all languages combined, and German is only our 3rd most translated language (and a distant third at that!). The number of new translations I found in the US in 2018 was 632 so the 3% figure is probably still accurate enough.

* When I say it’s not just about the global influence of English—obviously that plays a huge role but I mean there’s also a factor of cultural isolationism at play. If you take English out of the equation there’s still a lot more cultural exchange (in terms of literature) between other countries. Take Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead; it was published in 2009, and (to give a few examples) translated in Swedish 1 year later, in Russian & German 2 years later, in French, Danish & Italian 3 years later, in English 10 years later—only after she won the Nobel. I’m reminded of the former secretary for the Nobel Prize who said Americans “don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature” because they don’t translate enough. I think it's a similar phenomenon as the one described in the "How US culture ate the world" article; the US is more interested in exporting its culture than in importing cultural products from the rest of the world. And sure, anglo culture is spread over most continents so there’s still a diversity of voices that write in English (from India, South Africa, etc etc) but that creates pressure for authors to adopt English as their literary language. The dearth of English translation doesn’t just mean that monolingual anglophones are cut off from a lot of great literature, but also that authors who write in minority languages are cut off from the global visibility an English translation could give them, as it could serve as a bridge to be translated in a lot more languages, and as a way to become eligible for major literary prizes including the Nobel.

Considering that women are less translated than men and represent a minority (about 1/3) of that already abysmally low 3% figure, I find the recent successes of English translations of women writers encouraging—Olga Tokarczuk, Banana Yoshimoto, Han Kang, Valeria Luiselli, Samanta Schweblin, Sayaka Murata, Leila Slimani, of course Elena Ferrante... Hopefully this is a trend that continues & increases! I remember this New Yorker article from years ago, “Do You Have to Win the Nobel Prize to Be Translated?”, in which a US small press owner said “there’s just no demand in this country” (for translated works); but the article acknowledged that it’s also a chicken-and-egg problem. Traditional publishers who have the budget to market them properly don’t release many translations as (among other things) they think US readers are reluctant to read translated foreign literature, and the indie presses who release the lion’s share of translated works (I read it was about 80%) don’t have the budget to promote them so people don’t buy them so the assumption that readers aren’t interested lives on. So maybe social media can slowly change the situation by showing that anglo readers are interested in translated books if they just get to find out about them...

#ask #anyway it's difficult to find accurate stats for translation and compare between countries because some % you see are #for all translations and as i said technical translations / computer manuals etc make up the bulk of it #some % are averages over decades; others only for fiction or for novels & poetry etc so you end up comparing apples and oranges #but the fact remains that the three percent website (translation database) was able to list every single literary translation #published in the us year after year and it was never higher than 600-ish titles in the 2010s. it's not great #when you see much smaller countries release translations in the thousands or tens of thousands #it's also not a huge improvement over the 400-ish yearly US translations in the 00s #but they haven't released numbers for the past few years and maybe the situation is a bit better now

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mushroomates · 3 months

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Lord of the Rings hosting? Speaking foreign languages?? Love your posts!! the silly rambles of other tumblrians is my life blood currently

yeah!!!! ty for the kind words! ooooooooh hosting… stay tuned my friend that’s it’s own post :)

legolas: french. proper, france french. also european spanish, latin, and norwegian- which he will sometimes speak with gimli, but the dialects are so drastically different any communication is strained. he was taught formally, “properly” bc his dad lowkey a language purist and that’s kinda problematic but this isn’t abt him

gimli: most germanic languages, including danish, swedish, and norwegian. he speaks the common dialect, the conversational type- not the fancy literature university taught excuse of a language that legolas does. he likes to make a point that if they were on the street, legolas could read the street signs and not understand anything said to him.

aragorn: french (his upbringing), passible italian, street spanish (european and mexican), decent greek, decent norwegian and german, and some mandarin. is very quick picking up languages and speaking/understanding the local dialect

boromir: conversational italian. i’m sorry guys but gondor was based in italy and the roman empire,, and not even that but it just. feels right. im gonna say he speaks passible italian, but more… anglicized italian as he wasn’t really taught it but picked it up around family. (a lot of yelling by his dad)

frodo: knows latin. also french, spanish, and passable italian. has a generic accent that’s not to noticeable when he speaks. is a very good tour guide across europe and a great tutor if someone wants to learn.

merry: maintains a duolingo streak of easily four digits. it’s sweedish. no, he cannot understand gimli. no, gimli does not understand kerry’s sweedish either. he can, however, understand ikea directions. (it drives boromir nuts that the two people who on who can read the manual are possibly the worst at relaying them. merry because he doesn’t understand what’s going on, and gimli, because he believes he doesn’t need any manual)

pippin: tried learned klingon, but lost interest quickly. knows about eight different ways to say “your mom” and all the fun cuss words that come with foreign languages.

sam: is trying very hard to learn french. frodo is teaching him patiently and he’s picking it up rather fast. really, really hates verb congregation and gendered language.

gandalf: mandarin, greek, turkish, quebecois french, finnish, moldovan, castilian spanish, latin, pig latin, and probably more. he’s also fullent in hobbit.

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pazoo-underscore · 8 months

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about me:

Hiii, I'm Pazoo but you can call me Paz, or like anything really.

basic info: any pronouns but generally she/her, 15, lesbian nevermind im bi apparently, intp,

。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。

ALSO I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO CONVERSATION BUT IF WE ARE MUTUALS DM ME SO WE CAN TALK COS I WILL PROBABLY NOT DO IT FIRST!!

♥️:

• I love reading, but I also love buying books so I have way to many books in my physical tbr

• I am obsessed with classics, and Greek and Roman myths and literature. Also Natalie Haynes my beloved <3

• I am deranged about Murder Most Unladylike and have been since I was like 8, so DM me if you know the books and I will talk for days

• I sometimes write poetry, and have a side blog for it @writingbypazoo

• I play piano, violin and sing

• I love learning languages, at the moment I'm learning Chinese, Spanish, and kinda Swedish

• I lurk in fandoms like mcyts (qsmp, hermitcraft), Young Royals, marauders, and Percy Jackson. But I will sometimes make random posts about them so be warned

• and I sail quite a lot so might randomly post about that (I work at my local sailing place teaching so might complain about children lmao)

。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。

🎧: Taylor Swift, Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers, the Specials, David Bowie, Japanese breakfast, Sabrina Carpenter, TV girl, Olivia Rodrigo, Noah Kahan, Lorde, Girl in Red, Lovejoy, Gracie Abrams,

。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。

DNI:

Pretty basic don't be a bigot, including terfs ect. Also don't be a nonce, pretty self explanatory. And you gotta pronounce scone the right way.

Links:

Spotify if you want it

If we are mutuals you can DM me for other stuff

#intro post #hihihi #mmu #poetry #me :))#Spotify

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mightymizora · 6 months

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Talking in the comments made me want to also say in the writing advice sphere of whatever this blog is…

So much of the best fic you’re gonna read is written by people for whom English is a second or maybe third language. And it’s wild and magical that people are so talented.

And also I hope knowing this encourages you to read literature in translation, because English as a language is formally very… uh… it’s a fucking mess, okay. And there are other languages and literary traditions that are much more robust, and there are subsequently some really fucking cool things that happen when you run these forms through the cold tap of an English translation.

Some of my favourite reads of the last few years have been Mexican, Russian, Swedish, French, Polish… and there’s not been much that was originally written in English that had touched them, at least in contemporary fiction.

A great place to start is to look at the long lists for the Booker International prize if you’re curious about contemporary work!

#writing tag #kind of #I am also extremely passionate about Bengali literature and support a translation project but man we have a long way to go #one of the most beautiful literary traditions in the world and barely translated!#anyway #I started a book recs part of this blog and promptly forgot about it #but could revive it if people are interested #or just ask idk

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bluedalahorse · 1 year

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August and Rousseau are functionally the same character: the serious version

On Thursday evening, at my fanfic co-author’s encouragement, I posted about August and Rousseau being functionally the same character. This post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but there’s always been a serious, liberal arts college analysis version of it lurking in my head. I decided to go ahead and share it because what is the point of rejoining tumblr if I can’t torture the world with my Young Royals meta? (Do we even call it meta anymore? I am Fandom Old.)

So anyway, I have now written too many words about how Rousseau the horse is a narrative shadow for August, and how horse tropes are used to communicate August’s character arc. My ~credentials~ are as follows: I’m currently doing a terminal degree in writing literature for children and teenagers, and I have re-read the Felicity Merriman American Girl Books more times than I can count. I was not a horse girl in childhood, despite my mother trying to get me to be one by buying me Breyers and an alarmingly technicolor Lisa Frank notebook with a horse on its cover. (For Not Being A Horse Girl reasons there may be some errors in equestrian terminology here, but I’m gonna do my best. I invite genuine Horse Girls to weigh in with their knowledge and insight.) I have more thoughts about August as a character than I know what to do with, to the point where those thoughts have in part inspired the critical thesis on justice and privilege in YA lit that I am going to write for my MFA. These thoughts here on tumblr are merely for a fannish intellectual experiment, however, so I will not be as aggressive with the MLA and the footnotes as I would be in thesis work.

While I am an American of Swedish descent who has celebrated her Scandinavian heritage since childhood, I am still very much an American and my native language is English. Most of my lit theory here is therefore informed by the Anglo-American Horse Girl tradition, which I know got imported to a lot of other countries in translation. At the same time, I am aware that there are Swedish Horse Girl books out there, and I do not know as much about where they overlap with the Anglo-American tropes and where they differ. If anyone has knowledge in this particular area, please feel free to chime in.

Before we begin, I feel it necessary to issue a few notes about content. The first and most obvious content note is that this meta deals with August’s character arc, so I will naturally mention his releasing of the video and his other toxic masculine behaviors that harm the people around him. I will also make reference to his drug addiction, mental health issues, and possible disordered eating. In addition, there will be discussion of abusive relationship dynamics and adults invading the privacy of teenagers with the goal of controlling their romantic, sexual, and reproductive futures (particularly in the context of a monarchy securing its lines of dynastic succession.) You have been warned.

TOPICS COVERED

Horses in Literature and their General Vibe

Cinematography and Film Language in Young Royals

August, Felice, and Sara

Bloodlines and the Line of Succession

What’s next for August and Rousseau?

Horse/Power

Horses have long been symbols of wealth, status, and nobility. While literature and folklore offer their fair share of ordinary workhorses, the prince on a fancy white horse is an iconic fairy tale image. Historically, the ability to maintain a stable full of horses, specifically bred for battle or fine riding, was (and still is) a privilege only the rich can afford. Among the Romans, the second highest ranked social group after the senatorial class were the equites, named for the fact that they were rich enough to own horses they could bring to war. Fast forwarding to the modern day Young Royals, we see the wealth of Hillerska on full display in the stables. Even Felice’s parents, who have plenty of money to burn, remind her how much they spent on Rousseau.

August, of course, defines himself by his status. When we first meet him, he’s always going on about his father’s estate, bragging about flying off to restaurants in France, separating out who is nouveau riche and who is ancien regime—and so on and so forth. So what? you may be saying. Plenty of Young Royals characters are wealthy and own land. Why single out August and make him the character shadowed by the horse, just because of his money? Probably because of the other ideas horses get associated with in popular media. Horses in fiction are often temperamental, but their humans often work to control and tame horses in spite of that. There’s a certain tension and troubledness to fictional horses that makes them dangerous. Rousseau is no exception to this—Felice and others have difficulty managing him. We know August has a temper that gets the better of him. We also know he’s obsessed with control, and the first person he tries to be strict and controlling with is himself.

To put it more briefly, horses in stories can be used to open up a lot of questions about wealth and power and how that power is, well, reined in. Thematically, having Rousseau as a shadow to August’s character arc is an obvious choice.

Framed by the Stable Doors

The cinematography of Young Royals visually links August and Rousseau from the very beginning of the series. As early on as episode 1.2, a shot of Sara taking Rousseau out for a trot is followed immediately by a shot of August out on a run. (Or maybe it happens in the opposite order? Help.) These moments mirror one another—both of them are scenes of a moment of discipline and exercise, underscored by tense background music. Throughout season 1, even when August and Rousseau aren’t paralleled by the editing, they are at least paralleled by the writing.

As we move into season 2, the shots of Rousseau become more constrained as the threat of prison looms over August’s head. Rousseau is almost always behind a fence or restricted by some other architectural features. The bars(?) of Rousseau’s stall door echo the bars of a jail cell, while the trailer belonging to the Worst Kind of Horse People (TM) suggests a police van taking August away after a future arrest. These scenes almost always include Sara somewhere, and she’s often having reaction faces. As others have noted, Sara doesn’t speak much, but these visual cues offer hints about her internal mental landscape while also foreshadowing her eventual role as the one who turns August over to law enforcement.

I’m inclined to read these “imprisoned horse” scenes as Sara having internal conflict about her relationship with August. On some level, she is attempting to grapple with the fact that they’re already doomed because of August’s prior actions with the video. I don’t necessarily think this means that Sara is always thinking these things consciously and in words. Maybe it’s just a sense of foreboding in the pit of her stomach. Instead of having Sara try to articulate this in any sort of literal way, my guess is that the YR production team wanted to convey this part of her arc through visual language and symbolism. I think it works, once you’ve decided to buy into the horse parallels.

Does this mean we’ve segued into talking about the girls now? Probably. Might as well gallop ahead…

Enter the Equestriennes

Even outside of Horse Girl books, women on horseback are a repeating motif in Western literature. As various academics will tell you, equestrian women occupy a complex and problematic (in the academic sense) space on the page. On one hand, riding horses confers status upon these women and gives them some freedom of movement. On the other hand, equestrian women are often being trained for the patriarchy in subtextual ways. One thesis I looked at explains how in Victorian literature, riding was often used to facilitate female characters’ interaction with men in ways that eventually lead to marriage. You also examine the common Horse Girl cliché of that one special teenage girl who knows how to calm down the impossible horse, and understand it as a little sister to the “I can fix him” romance genre. As bastion of literary analysis TVTropes points out, ponies and the Troubled But Cute Boyfriend sure do have a lot in common.

Young Royals knows the tropes, and it wants you to know that it knows them.

Felice Ehrencrona doesn’t want to be a horse girl. Felice’s mother wants her to ride, because riding is what archetypal rich girls from Hillerska do. Throughout season one, we see Felice struggling with her riding classes and being afraid of Rousseau. While she gains more confidence with the help of Sara, she never truly grows to love being around Rousseau (as we can see by the way she quickly abandons her hobby later.) Still, for a while, Felice maintains the public image of the happy equestrian by posting pictures of herself and Rousseau to her Instagram and making additional posts that say she��s in the stables when she isn’t. Felice’s mother, believing this to be true, is delighted—until in 1.3 it comes out that Sara has been riding Felice’s horse instead, and Felice’s positive relationship with Rousseau is just a facade.

What holds true for horses holds true for boys, too. Felice’s mother is constantly putting pressure on her about boys, specifically in the way she encourages Felice to pursue Wilhelm. The fact that Felice knows stuff about the line of succession and whose babies get what rank (something she explains to the beleaguered American Maddie) suggests that Mamma Ehrencrona isn’t just interested in Felice having a nice boyfriend, she’s actually bringing marriage and babies into it. Which… is a lot. It’s so “a lot” that Felice rebels against her mother at the end of 1.3 by hooking up with August.

Although Felice’s initial act is one of rebellion, she ends up trapped back in the same place she started from, where socioeconomic status and performative gendered nonsense is prized above all else. August, after all, is still from the nobility and still comes with all that baggage Felice is getting from her parents. Felice’s relationship with August is very bad, especially behind closed doors where he’s constantly questioning her about who she’s with and where she’s going. To Hillerska at large, however, they give off the impression of being the school power couple. During moments of characters scrolling there phones we can see that in addition to being seen together, they also included photos of themselves together on one another’s instagrams. This contrast between the image and the reality of Felice’s relationship with August echoes Felice’s selfies with Rousseau.

As for Sara… well, if you nodded along to what I said before about the special teenage girl who is the only one who can tame the troubled horse, you probably already know where I’m going with this. Sara and August’s relationship doesn’t really come out of nowhere. Rather, they’ve spent an entire season taking a step closer to one another, literally and figuratively, every few scenes. You know the cliché where the horse girl visits the troubled horse every day and gets a little bit closer each time until the horse finally trusts the girl enough to eat sugar cubes out of her hand? Yeah. Same rhythm/pacing as the Sara/August scenes, and it only gets more obvious in season 2. That scene where he’s having a panic attack and she calms him down? He is a scared horse. We’re all on the same page, right? I hope we’re all on the same page.

In some ways, it’s not a perfect analogy and doesn’t always match up in a one to one way. Most horse girl books stay wish fulfillment and there isn’t always a moment of “the horse is Bad Actually, and we will remind you that the horse released a sex video of the horse girl’s brother.” But I think the horse girl novel coding speaks to what makes a relationship with August appealing to Sara in the first place. Deep down Sara wants to be special and exceptional to someone else, and she feels she understands things about August (and how to keep his emotions regulated) that other people don’t. As Sara sees it, she’s taken time to build trust with August. It’s the two of them together against really difficult odds, and she’ll take the difficulty that comes with that.

Also, while we’re here, the first place August kisses Sara is the stables. And there’s that entire conversation Felice and Sara have when Sara comes back after having sex in 2.3. I’m just saying. It’s right there. We’re all doing the math, right? We all see it?

People Of Good Breeding

Here’s where it gets even more icky.

In season 2, Felice decides to quit riding. This makes keeping Rousseau a bad investment, so Felice plans to sell him, and Sara decides to tag along. When a particular family expresses interest in Rousseau and comes to Hillerska to assess him, Sara swiftly dubs them the Worst Kind of Horse People.

What makes the Worst Kind of Horse People so upsetting to Sara? They don’t know how to respond to Rousseau, and they don’t treat him with the compassion Sara does. They’re willing to endure Rousseau’s volatile moods, however, because of he’s a thoroughbred and has a prestigious pedigree.

Things I did not know before watching a documentary about it: apparently all the thoroughbreds that exist in the world now are descended from three historical stallions. They are inbred af. IRL people who own thoroughbred stallions now will charge ~$50,000 per insemination in like a horse breeding hookup situation. Which… what? What the literal fuck. I get that this is a hobby people feel very passionate about and find fulfillment in, so I am trying not to be judgmental… and also that is a lot of money (more than half my yearly salary) for just one instance of breeding horses. So I’m still wrapping my head around it.

It stands to reason that the Worst Kind of Horse People could want Rousseau for his, um, genetic material. Anyway, let’s talk about the monarchy and the line of succession.

At the same time that the Worst Kind of Horse People are expressing interest in Rousseau, the royal court has started to pay attention to August. According to the YR fictional family tree, August is next in line for the throne after Wilhelm. Kristina’s advisors have plans to groom (see what I did there) August as a backup heir if Wilhelm keeps insisting on having free will. (Really! The audacity! Good for Wilhelm, though, we’re all rooting for him.)

For August, the idea of being elevated to spare prince, or potentially even king one day, feels liberating. Based on how he’s acting at the shooting range after his visit to the palace, he sees a chance for himself to leave his crimes behind and not be caught in his guilt. But I want to pause for a moment and consider the scene in 2.4 where he gets the phone call from the palace. Jan-Olof asks August a series of privacy-invading questions, including ones that touch on his sexual history. The final question (and therefore the one the writers want you to notice) is simply “are you heterosexual?” to which August replies that he is.

There’s a tempting rabbit hole I could go down about what it means for August to go beyond just engaging in toxic heterosexual behavior, and actually embrace heterosexuality as a label, and because it’s a tempting rabbit hole I will save it for another meta. What I want to focus on here is how sinister this scene feels. Part of that is because we (and Sara) know how blatantly and easily August is lying, and that he’s slipping back into his old, status-loving, drug-abusing self. In light of the established Rousseau parallels, however, I can’t ignore the subtext that the royal court is interested in whether or not they can “domesticate” August just enough that they can get him to eventually marry the right girl and produce a legitimate heir to the throne. That’s it. Nothing more. They aren’t interested in helping him with his addiction or getting him into therapy for his disordered eating or helping him process his dad’s death—all of which would put him in a better emotional place, and maybe even prevent him from returning to the emotionally dangerous mindset he was in when he outed Wilhelm and Simon to the entire world. On a metaphorical level, the royal court is basically treating August as livestock. Which. Is gross, actually.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We all know that August himself perpetuates a lot of gross sexual behavior toward others. Aside from releasing the video, he’s selfish and borderline emotionally abusive toward Felice, especially about sex. He constantly eggs on his classmates to stand up on the breakfast table and brag about their “conquests.” He eventually becomes extremely sweet and tender with Sara, but that’s only after he’s tried to get her to sell him drugs, bullied her family about not being able to eat lunch on Parents’ Weekend, and kissing her without her consent in the stables. August is very much Not Someone Who Respects The Sexual And Reproductive Autonomy Of Others and yet! There is this whole entire system of hereditary monarchy behind him, aiming to control every aspect of his life and violate his privacy, and he is a teenager. It’s not okay that they do it to Wilhelm either. We know they’re trying to do it to Wilhelm even now, and we get the sense they did it to Erik too, given the lines about the OnlyFans girlfriend needing to be hushed up.

I think it’s easy to say, well, August is power hungry and amoral enough that he consents to having his privacy invaded, and he does, but I legitimately wonder if he knows what he’s getting into. (Case in point: I think August really believes that the palace crowd would let him publicly date Sara. And, no. Even if Sara weren’t Simon’s sister, I can’t imagine they’d be excited about him dating the neurodivergent daughter of an immigrant mother and a father with a shady drug past. At the very least they’d force Sara to sign some pretty hefty NDAs.) My point is, you can consent to something and still end up in a weird power dynamic that’s bad for you and doesn’t honor where your feelings are. You can be a person of privilege who harms others, while still being harmed by systems of privilege yourself. And that’s precisely part of what makes August a compelling and complicated character.

Look, I just wish more people nowadays had seen the legendary 1990s anime Revolutionary Girl Utena because they would then get what I mean when I say that August isn’t Akio, he’s Saionji.

…I’m off track. My point is that the reproductive subtext in that scene is deeply unsettling and August’s nakedness in front of the window only makes it moreso. Right. Moving on.

What’s Next? The Horse and His Boy

(Apologies for naming this last section after a problematic Narnia book.)

Man. I wish I could just write August off and clamor for his untimely and violent death without a care in the world. The reality is that I’m under a curse, and that curse makes me want to see him eventually sort his life out, one way or another.

Let me be clear about what that does and doesn’t mean: I don’t mean that I don’t want to see him face consequences for the very real crime he did. I don’t mean I think he should suddenly be perfect and woke. I don’t mean that he and Sara should get back together. I don’t mean I want to see everyone forgive him. I just mean I want August to honestly confront the truth of his life so far and go “you know what? I suck. I can do better. I’m not even sure how, and I’m gonna make mistakes along the way, but maybe I can suck less.” And maybe he takes one tiny step where you’re like, if he keeps taking steps like this, this kid could turn out okay by age 40. Maybe. I feel incredibly exposed even saying this, since I know August is so widely despised by so many people in fandom, and I know other people who are okay with letting him stay in the villain zone, but I also feel like if anyone can pull off this story, it’s Lisa Ambjörn. She gets nuance, and she gets young people their flaws and their family conflicts. If YR were a different show, with a different writer and a different morality underlying the stories it tells, I would feel differently. But I don’t, and I think Lisa can pull off a complex story like that. So here we are.

(For examples of YA novels that pull off this kind of narrative catharsis, check out the character arc of the protagonist Deposing Nathan by Zack Smedley. Or pay attention to the uncle’s character arc in Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing.)

There’s a very soft acting choice of Malte’s in 2.3, where August goes to meet Sara in the stables, to ask if she wants to come by and talk later. Sara’s getting Rousseau settled for the evening, and August reaches out and pats Rousseau on the nose. If I’m remembering the scene correctly, the usually temperamental Rousseau is calm in response.

We’ve seen August act self-aggrandizing before so he can build himself up and threaten other people. We’ve also seen him engage in escalating acts of self-harm (via excessive exercising and calorie counting) when he isn’t living up to his own strict standards. What we don’t see a lot is him having compassion for himself. If we accept that Rousseau is August’s shadow-self, then this nose pat is a rare moment of self-compassion. It’s at this point in the season that August realizes he needs to exist in community with other people, and that he needs to actually process his overwhelming emotions instead of lashing out at others. He makes an effort to try and quit using drugs, genuinely connects with Sara, and even briefly defends Simon when Vincent gets on Simon’s case after the indoor rowing match. It’s a positive trajectory and a glimmer of what could have been. That lasts until his visit to the palace, when August is offered the position as Wilhlem’s backup and starts to go back to his old ways. Moreover, the pressure of becoming the spare creates new complications for August’s mental health, and he slides back into lashing out at others again.

At the end of the season, August views Rousseau as a commodity and buys him for Sara in a Grand Gesture (TM) that’s actually pretty alarming and could be categorized as love-bombing. Sara is not impressed (I suspect she’s witnessed Micke love-bombing Linda, and all her alarm bells are going off) and continues her trip to the bus stop so she can report him to the police.

I could talk about the police call and the part where Sara is playing with a small horse keychain at the bus stop, but that might be the topic for another meta. Instead I want to take a moment to think about the practical fact that August owns a horse now. This opens up a few questions: if Rousseau continues to be August’s shadow-self, what does it mean for August to buy and own Rousseau? Is August going to have to learn to take care of Rousseau now? How much farther can we extend this metaphor?

Patience, comrades. We’re almost to the finish line.

By buying Rousseau, August has allowed himself to be bought by the aristocratic power structure that’s been trying to maneuver him into royal life. He’s started to actually use the inheritance left for him by his father—not because he’s finally started to process his grief, but because he’s doubling down on the idea that he deserves his inherited wealth and that he can use it as lavishly as he wishes. What’s interesting is the way he thinks this makes him into someone Sara will stay in love with. There’s the quid pro quo of it all, which is the obvious surface reading, but there’s also another level wherein August has been raised to believe that this is the ideal of aristocratic masculinity, and therefore what Sara would be attracted to. He assumes Sara wants the prince (even if he has to be a little bit Machiavelli’s the Prince behind the scenes to play that role.) But Sara wants the trust and care and connection, and a bond that’s a little bit weird and unique and ultimately private. She also values honesty and accountability. Sara doesn’t want the prince—she wants the horse. But not the literal one. And not necessarily in a material ownership kind of way, either.

As we move into season 3, I find myself wondering what’s next for August and Rousseau. Like. August owns a horse now. Is he going to have to take care of it? Like is he going to have to learn how to groom Rousseau and muck stalls and such? I get that he’s rich and can probably pay someone to do that for him, but given the way that Rousseau is meant to be a commentary on August’s character arc, there’s a lot of narrative potential (and dare I say… humor?) in August just having to learn to take care of the horse his own damn self in season 3. I feel like it could allow for some great moments of introspection on August’s part, if done well, and could lead him to a place of radical acceptance. We don’t even have to rule out August going to jail for his crimes, but knowing that jail is not the kind of thing that will happen in the first five minutes of the first five episodes, why not facilitate some internal character growth via horse chores first?

Alternately, August will just keep doubling down on making someone else do the horse chores. This would be consistent, if nothing else. He may just continue to be horrible, in which case I am worried for Rousseau.

(Please, Lisa Ambjörn and/or god and/or Epona. I am so desperate for this as-of-present unrepentant fuckboy to have to do symbolic horse chores that end up being about him finally coming to terms with the impact his counterrevolutionary behavior has on others. Is that so wrong?)

Anyway, I guess we won’t know until season 3. Thank you for sticking around if you’ve read this far—it ended up being way longer than intended! I’m back on tumblr after being away since 2015 or so, so this post feels like a wild way to reappear. But I’m glad I shared my thoughts all the same. Have a blessed Saturday, fandom.

#young royals #young royals meta #august young royals #sara eriksson #felice ehrencrona #unabashed horse girl propaganda #mfa musings

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