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therealvinelle · 3 years

Note

Ok I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I'm just now copying your Norwegian Bella AU into a text translator, and if you don't already have 50 people in your inbox demanding a translation then shame on ALL OF US because this is glorious! And while Google Translate does have a certain charm (it translated "piper hun ut" as "she beeps") I'm curious to see how you'd put it in English.

Troquantary is referring to this post. In which Bella doesn't speak English.

Fun fact, you're the only one who's gone into my inbox to request this. I was so sad, had the translation half-written and everything, but I was too proud to beg. So thank you, Troquantary, for popping this ask.

As for the dictionary fuckups, sounds about right. I made a few typos, too, that made Google Translate suffer even more. (Such as managing to mix up "henne" (her) and "hendene" (hands), resulting in Aro patting Bella instead of clapping his hands. Poor Google.)

Also, there are a few cultural references and language things that would be lost in the translation, in an attempt to keep them I included notes clarifying things.

Some things, like Aro and Carlisle's very old man way of speaking, are easier said than done to translate, you'll have to bear with me there.

Additional notes are that I added a few things to this version, many of them because translating is hard, but a few because while translating I thought "oh you know what would be much funnier-" and then wrote that.

Alright, without further ado:

When Renée left Charlie she did not go to Florida, she went to Oslo. And she went all in to make her daughter a true Norwegian, hiring Norwegian nannies and making sure never to speak English around the child. Since transatlantic flights are expensive, little Bella Swan rarely got to visit her father, and as such she never did learn what should have been her native language.

She quickly forgot what English she did have in favor of Norwegian, with the exception of words like “Yes”, “No”, and “I’m Bella”.

The few trips she took to visit her father were all the more awkward than in canon since she couldn’t play with the Black kids. Let not the blame fall upon Charlie: he took Norwegian classes and speaks conversational Norwegian. He can’t speak to Renée, because her Norwenglish is incomprehensible even to Norwegians, but he can communicate with Bella.

Not that he’s had a lot of chances to do so.

Bella makes it to seventeen years old, she’s in second grade at Handels* and is a major outsider among the preps there, and then Renée marries a handsome skier**. Together they shall travel the continent all winter to participate in as many skiing races as they can, and in the summer they’ll take gigs at Hurtigruta to see the coast.

*“Handels” is the nickname for an Oslo high school infamous for its pupils being rich and beautiful blonds who are going to be CEOs when they grow up.

**Skiing as a sport is huge in Norway

***Hurtigruta is a famous ferry that travels across the Norwegian West coast

Bella, who sucks at skiing and is too young to work at Hurtigruten, takes the hint.

With dread in her stomach and dictionary in hand she goes to her father in America.

Where she doesn’t speak the language.

Faen.

Charlie gives her a car, and I wish this meta was set in the present because I could have joked about electric cars and the automat only driver’s license*, but Twilight is set in 2005 so I can’t. The car part proceeds without drama.

*An increasing number of Norwegian youth take the driver’s license for automatic cars only, and we’re the country in the world with the highest percentage of electric car purchases.

School is worse than in canon, because she is now a thousand times more sensational than if she was merely the new student. She is from another country! All of Forks keels over with excitement.

To make matters even worse, our girl doesn’t understand a word of what people are saying.

She is too awkward to let them know she doesn’t know English. It’d become a thing, and they might think she’s dumb. To be fair, it’s not good that she’s been through primary, secondary, and now a year and a half of high school and still sucks at English.

So she nods, smiles, mumbles “Hi, I’m Bella” to the new faces, and blushes heavily when anybody says anything.

People assume she’s shy. That’s a bit boring, but oh well.

She has her biology class with the redhead hottie she noticed during lunch. She watched him and his family, they were fascinatingly pretty, but she doesn’t know anything more about them. Sure would have been great if she could have asked the tiny girl (was it Jess?) about them.

Biology proceeds as in canon - Edward badly wants to eat the delicious girl, but fortunately doesn’t.

She runs into him in the office when he tries to switch to another biology lesson, but she has no idea what he’s saying so she only has the suspicion that this somehow concerns her. Which is still uncomfortable, but Bella is probably the problem here. The hottie surely can’t be.

He’s missing from school for a week, Bella finds that weird.

He returns, and to her great horror he starts talking to her.

“Hello”, he says.

Bella dies inside. He’s too handsome!

"I'm Edward Cullen," he continues, and ok, she got that. The hottie is called Edward, that’s good to know. She’s not sure she caught that last name, though, Köln?

He says something else, it’s gibberish to Bella even though she’s concentrating, and at the end there he says “Bella Swan”.

She gulps.

"I'm Bella Swan," she confirms and nods. That should be correct. God, she hopes it’s correct.

He smiles a crooked, boyish smile. She’s awed. She didn’t think it was possible to be so beautiful.

He says something else.

Bella didn’t catch it.

She blushes even harder, she hasn’t been more embarrassed in her life. Here he is, the most handsome guy in all the world, and she has nothing to say to him. Literally, they don’t speak the same language.

She should tell him.

It’s one thing to chicken out of telling the town she doesn’t speak English, but there’s something different about Edward Cullen. He deserves the truth.

But...

He’s the most beautiful person she has seen in her life. He is American, too, so the odds of him knowing Norwegian are microscopical. If he finds out she doesn’t understand a word he says he’ll stop talking to her, and selfish as she is she doesn’t want that.

So with a slightly guilty conscience (but not enough to fess up) she contributes to the conversation with enough words and smiles to pull through. "Yes", "No", "Thank you", and "That's nice".

He is surprised by several of these answers, but instead of giving her odd looks and losing interest he grows more invested in the conversation.

Class ends.

The next day the near accident happens, and he saves her. She is stunned - dear god, did he just pick up a whole car? After teleporting across the parking lot..?

Soon she’s in the ER, and more than a little bit stressed about that fact since she knows the Americans have a terrible healthcare system.

She hopes Charlie has an insurance.

An insanely beautiful man walks into the ER, and Bella is shocked. He is just as handsome as Edward and Edward’s lunch friends!

He introduces himself as Carlisle Cullen, and Bella can only assume this is someone’s older brother. Possibly related to the blonde girl.

He smiles at her, says something, and she answers, "I'm Bella Swan."

He frowns.

That must have been the wrong answer, then.

His hands return to investigating her scalp, and to her great surprise he switches to perfect Norwegian, "kjenner De* noe ubehag når jeg holder her?" Do you feel any discomfort when I touch here?

*De is the Norwegian polite pronoun for “you”. Du = thou = the French tu, and De = you = the French vous. These polite pronouns went out of use in the 1980’s, save for when addressing royal persons, and would be considered antiquated in 2005.

He hurries to add, "Norsk lærte jeg i... fjor sommer. Det var et nettkurs." I learned Norwegian… last year. Online class.

"Hvilket da?" Which one? Bella asks, because Charlie needs to hear about this. The doctor has beautiful, if slightly outdated, pronunciation.

The doctor’s smile turns uncertain. She gets the feeling there’s something he doesn’t want to say. "Husker ikke," I don’t remember, sier han etter en litt vel lang pause.

That’s a shame. And weird.

"De hadde hellet med Dem i dag, som ikke ble truffet av den bilen." You were lucky today, not getting hit by that car. he then says, noticeably changing the subject.

"Det var ikke hell, det var Edward," It wasn’t luck, it was Edward, she replies sharply.

The doctor definitely looks uncomfortable.

She continues, "Han krysset skolegården på et blunk, og plukket opp hele bilen. Jeg så det," He crossed the schoolyard in a moment, and picked up the whole car. I saw it,

The doctor laughs. "Om han kunne det hadde nok gymkarakteren hans vært meget bedre. Nei, frøken Swan*, jeg beklager å si at det høres ut som at De er litt omtåket. Det er helt normalt ved hjernerystelse." If he could do that, his PE grade would be a lot better. No, Miss Swan, I’m sorry to say you seem confused. That’s normal with concussions.

*Addressing a young woman as “frøken” is even more outdated than using polite pronouns.

Why does Bella get the feeling he’s lying?

She’s discharged.

We’ll jump ahead to her trip to La Push - that trip uneventful, since Jacob knows she doesn’t speak English. They stick their hands in their pockets and stare at the sea.

The next day she’s shanghaied to Port Angeles, because apparently she said “Yes” at the wrong time when talking to Jessica (Turns out Jess’s name was Jessica!) and accidentally said yes to a day trip to Port Angeles.

Like in canon she wanders away from the others, and as in canon she is nearly gang raped. And again as in canon she is saved at the last moment by Edward.

He buys her dinner, and she can’t believe her own luck- and misfortune. A date with the most handsome guy on the planet (hence the luck) and she can’t say a word to him (hence the misfortune)!

He says things to her, lends her his jacket, and really this is it for Bella, she’s peaked, life can’t get better than this.

(That’s a lie, it would be better if she spoke English.)

He’s so amazing.

She’s gotten pretty good at navigating conversations with him, so she nods and aha’s her way through.

In his car on the way home the tone takes a more serious turn.

He asks her about something, and it’s a serious question, that much she’s gathered. She answers in the confirmative.

He is silent.

Did she say anything wrong?

(Edward, on his end, just asked if she knows what he is. She said yes, so calmly, not even a trace of fear in her.)

A few days later he takes her out on a walk in the woods.

He shows her a meadow in the woods, and when he steps into it he lights up in the sunlight.

Bella is in shock.

She knew there was something different about him, but- holy cow. This guy isn’t human.

Is she dating a god?

She stumbles into the clearing after him, and they spend a day together where he says things, and she can barely hear any of it (nevermind understand it) because she’s so distracted by how pretty he is.

The next day he takes her to a house in the middle of nowhere. She doesn’t want to guess that this can be where he lives. Surely gods don’t live in houses?

He shows her inside the house, and introduces her for Dr. Cullen and a lady with a name she doesn’t catch.

Bit weird that these two are acting like a couple of parents, they’re far too young and divine for that.

Edward shows her around in an old-fashioned office, and she doesn’t know what to make of i when she sees a painting of Carlisle. Edward launches into a long story when he sees her watching it, unfortunately she doesn’t catch any dates or artist names. At one point she heard the word “suicide”, though, and that’s not good.

She doesn’t get much out of the story.

The baseball game doesn’t happen because Bella didn’t pick up on what Edward wanted and didn’t realize she was being invited to a thing. They spend the afternoon watching a movie instead.

The relationship continues, impeded slightly by communication problems, but she’s mostly able to cover those up.

Until her birthday comes around.

She gets a papercut.

Jasper lunges at her. Edward throws her into a glass table, and then everyone is leaving.

Carlisle is kind enough to switch to Norwegian when he’s stitching up her arm, perhaps remembering the last time she was his patient. "Jasper har ikke vært på dietten vår så veldig lenge." Jasper hasn’t been on our diet for very long.

"Diett?"she asks. She’s never seen Edward eat anything. She wasn’t clear on what the Cullens ate, honestly she thought they were above such things. She was thinking maybe photosynthesis. The knowledge that they apparently eat food astounds her, but diets?

"Dyreblod istedenfor menneskeblod," Animal blood in stead of human blood, Carlisle clarifies.

Whachasay?

Carlisle gives a slight smile. “Jaspers liv som vampyr fikk en brutal start." Jasper’s life as a vampire got off to a brutal start.

...

Vampire?!

Bella’s missed something here.

Oh dear lord, oh fy faen, she has missed something.

“Åja”, uh huh, is all she can say, and suddenly she’s very aware of the fact that she’s sitting there with a bleeding arm.

And Carlisle.

Who is a vampire.

Over the course of the following conversation Bella makes a host of discoveries.

Edward has been a vampire this whole time, and he’s a telepathic vampire. Whether Bella should be a vampire too or not has been a matter of hot debate, but due to religious reasons Edward doesn’t want that.

Carlisle also brings up how Edward died of the Spanish flu.

"Jeg var under den oppfatning at Edward fortalte deg bakhistorien min?" I was under the impression Edward told you my back story? Carlisle asks at one point, and Bella just has to ask very nicely if he’d be so kind as to repeat it.

Turns out the guy is nearly four hundred years old.

Jaha.

Jahahaha jaa ha.

That’s… a lot.

She wanders out of the house in shock, and hardly notices Edward’s strange behavior over the next couple of days.

One day he picks her up at school, and takes her behind the house.

That works out.

He’s a vampire, but he never hurt her. He is endlessly beautiful, perhaps easier to love now that she knows he’s not a god. He’s her Edward, and that’s suddenly easier now that she knows.

They can still be together.

But now that she knows this about him, it’s about time he knows something about her as well.

It’s time to finally be honest with him.

So when he opens his mouth, she opens her mouth as well, but she doesn’t get any further than to “Edward-” before he launches into a monologue.

She’ll have to wait until he’s done before saying her piece. It’s a bit embarrassing, but it doesn’t seem like he intends to stop talking anyway.

And what he’s saying seems to be serious, so it’s probably best to let him finish.

Edward concludes his monologue by kissing her forehead. Then he disappears.

Where did he go?

A big unsure, Bella goes back to the house. She’ll just have to wait until he gets back.

She doesn’t know what to think when Charlie returns from work and tells her the Cullens have all left.

Oh, god.

Edward must have found out she doesn’t speak English.

She made a mockery of him.

He has every right to leave.

Knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to live with.

Bella sinks into a depression.

The hallucinations begin, as in canon, though Hallusinward speaks Norwegian. Thank god for small mercies.

The friendship with Jacob (dictionary in hand) blooms, as someone has to help her see those hallucinations.

The cliff diving happens, and Alice shows up. Bella’s not sure what this is about, but she has gotten good enough at English to know that something bad happened, and Alice wants them to do something.

She’s a bit surprised to find herself on a plane to Italy, though.

Alice tells her to “Run to Edward” and ok, she got that, actually.

So she saves Edward.

After that she’s taken into the sewer, which turns out to house dozens of vampires.

Bella, Edward, and Alice are received in some kind of hall, where an unusual vampire has quite a bit to say. She understands some of what he’s saying, at least the part about “la tua cantante”. She knows a bit about Italian, see, so she knows that he’s talking about a song now.

She wishes she knew the context.

At one point he takes her hand, and appears fascinated by it. She wonders if he’s a palmreader. Not very vampirey, but what does she know.

He asks her a question.

"Yes," she says.

Saying yes has gotten her this far, after all.

But when he lights up and claps his hands together, and Edward and Alice stare at her in shock and betrayal, she knows she must have said the wrong thing.

The two are dismissed from the room before Bella can do or say anything, she’s just listening to Edward make a racket outside in the hallway.

Not good.

The unusual vampire brings her further down in his sewer palace to a basement, and she is given comfortable clothes to wear.

This is getting terrifying.

The vampire leans towards her - and she chickens out.

"Jeg snakker ikke engelsk!" she squeaks. "Non habla ingles!" I don’t speak English.

Han stanser, og ser forvirret ut. "Que- Hva behager*?" I beg your pardon? spør han etter et øyeblikk.

*A very formal, and slightly outdated (you can use it, but people will think you’re putting on airs. And they will be right) way of saying “excuse me?”

Sobbing, Bella tells him the whole story, from how she didn’t want to be the weird kid in school to how she’s now somehow in Italy without knowing why nor what she just agreed to.

When she’s done the vampire starts laughing.

"Dette forklarer jo en hel del," This explains quite a bit, ler han. "Men, kjære Bella, jeg er redd det ikke endrer noe." But, my dear Bella, I’m afraid it changes nothing.

He tells her that she has agreed to serve him and his army of undead warriors into eternity.

Well fuck.

"Du skal få slippe det, når du ikke visste hva du samtykket til - men skjebnen din forblir den samme. Loven er loven." You’re released from that promise, as you didn’t know what you agreed to - but your fate remains the same. The law is the law.

After a moment of silence, during which she looks terrified, he hurries to add, "Vi har en lov. Du må bli en av oss." We have a law. You must become one of us.

A law that Bella Swan has to become a vampire?

People are finally speaking Norwegian, and Bella is still lost. And it’s too embarrassing to keep pestering this poor, polite man with questions.

So she nods.

He gives her a glittering smile, and bites her.

When she wakes, Aro offers her an English course. A language course that, naturally, leads to her staying in Volterra. Why not learn a few more languages while we’re at it, dearest Bella?

Some time later Edward breaks into Volterra to save his Rapunzel, only to barely recognize her now that she’s a vampire who says things. Lots of things, she talks all the time now. WHAT DID ARO DO TO HER.

Too mortified to admit that she never spoke English, Bella claims she’s been brainwashed.

Aro is having too much fun to correct her, and the whole sad affair sets off a regrettable flood of rumors.

#troquantary #norwegian things #bella swan #twilight #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #evighetens kyss #evighetens kyss meta #evighetens kyss renessanse

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kendrixtermina · 3 years

Text

Simple Tritype Finding Redux

So remember how a while ago I made that post about how to find your tritype, which was somewhat popular, but also kind of rambly and theoretical?

Apparently the peeps at the Big Hormone Podcast had an episode which did sort of the same thing of looking at the “setting” of each individual center, but they expressed it much more concisely & punchy & much more useful

So, for those who don’t have time to listen to 2 hour of pod-cast (which honestly, includes me too, I should be doing something else rn), here’s a summary:

Heart Center

2 fix

basically more warm compared to other ppl with the same core type

casually touchy-feely, way more likely to hug, put their arms on you etc. (this can be very obvious in cultures where that’s less usual - ie, easier to spot on a North American man than a French woman)

4 fix

more guarded compared to others of same core type

stresses their tastes & preferences (ie, rant about music they really don’t like)

suspicious of hype & overly popular things - some tedecy to be the contrarian voice in a conversation

3 fix

especially if it’s the 2nd fix this can show as being more positive and/or better at self-motivating and a tendency to follow trends or fads

but it’s just as likely to show as just less obvious emotional coloration, or just adaptiveness/ social perceptiveness, or even ‘icyness’ - so you’ll often arrive at this by principle of exclusion.

2 Methods/ ‘cheats’ you can use here:

Typing someone else:

Apparently useful question here is to look at how people introduce themselves, cause the heart fixes represent different parts of identity & it’s all about what someone stresses. For example, the people who will open with something relationship-related (”Hi I’m soandso, I’m a parent”, “I’m a wife”) are probably 2-fixes. If they start out mentioning their job or some kind of accomplishment (”I’m a doctor”, ”I climbed X mountain recently”) they probably have a 3 fix. Whereas a person with 4 fix will not reference anything external but mention their tastes, interests and sentiments. (eg, “Hi, I’m Soandso, I like reading, writing & nerd stuff”, “I live on a farm where I keep peacocks.”)

Typing yourself:

Think of this as a ‘should’ that you feel. A person with a fix doesn’t run around all day helping people (especially if their core type is something very different), but they might feel that they should be a source of help. Someone with a 4 fix might feel they ‘should’ be suspicious of anything that’s too hyped and popular, while someone with a 3 fix might kick themselves for not mentioning some archievement to their friends when this might have impressed them.

Head Center

Basically, just look at what they do when they don’t know something. Like, imagine for example that your little sister has a question and you don’t already know the answer. Do you immediately ask someone, google it or point her to a trusted source? Six. Do you first speculate based on your preexisting knowledge & maybe then google it if you’re not confident? Five. Do you list multiple ideas for what the answer might be or where to find the info? Seven.

6 fix

Checks external sources first, thinks second, may then corroborate the conclusion before accepting it

try not just to get the answer, but a sense of who thinks what. May warn you against other PoVs - this can lead to bringing morals/ politics into it even when it seems out of place.

Other people need to learn to look at sources and ‘cui bono’ questions at some point, six fix ppl often do this immediately & pay attention to sources from the first.

At best you get 15 year olds with scarily excellent bullshit detectors, at worst, middle aged ppl whose opinions are entirely copypasted.

5 fix

Reverse of 6: Always speculates first based on whatever knowledge they already have, and checks sources second, if at all. Internal resources dominate. (eg if the question is about tigers, they might say ”It’s like this in cats, so it might be similar. It fits with how Tigers live in jungles, too”)

Might just make a theory & throw it out there to see what happens

Might bring up a dark/macabre/disturbing topic without realizing. (6: “Are you defending cocaine addicts?” 7: ””Please don’t talk about murder on the table, we’re eating!”)

Tend to look for a point of distinction or underlying principle

7 fix

List multiple ideas or facts rapidfire

while the other two sit down to launch into a treatise, the 7 either keeps the engagement level high by focussing on the more exciting parts, or just moves on.

Cares less about cohesion, hanging on to a point or arriving at a final conclusion so there can be a ‘kaleidoscopic’, multi-perspective quality to the answer

Similar to how the 6 might think about the moral implications, the 7 thinks about the entertainment value & novelty . In the example with the little sister, the 7 fix person would say stuff that the child will find exciting.

Body Center

This where it might be useful to listen to the podcast yourself cause they talked a lot about body language cues that would be much more apparent if you were a core body type or at least a sensor in the mbti. I have no sense of this so I can only relate the parts that I understood

8 fix

gives whatever the core type is a bolder, more unapologetic vibe

tend to “just do stuff” & more confortable doing it without mapping out all the consequences. Think the one person who says which restaurant to go to when no one wants to make a decision or gets bogged down on discussing pros and cons

More likely to get physical. If you’re a withdrawn type & it’s your last fix you might not actually throw down, but you might feel like you want/should if you could get away with it. Or you might just curse like a sailor.

9 fix

generally softer compared to others with same core type. They might be the most assertive & energetic 7w8 or 3w4, but still want to hear the other sides’ point.

have an accepting, nonjudgy vibe

listens/connects more, much more able to be convinced

1 fix

sharper, precise, discerning vibe - feel satisfaction or repulsion in their body as ‘alignment’ or lack thereof

speaks a bit like a teacher or art critic with the intention to improve things

persistent, especially about complaints. Might bring up the thing that bothers them over & over again; may come off picky

I also warmly recomend the tritype roast podcast.

I did indeed get roasted, and so can you~

#enneagram #tritype

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dragonrajafanfiction · 3 years

Text

Caesar and the MC should be Best Friends - Hear me out

This sounds really strange at first to hear. But the game did a terrible job of summarizing the story and showing the characters. The MC should be Best Friends with Caesar, check out why, below the cut.

Act One: The Premise (The MC will be referred to as Female because my character is female and I’m too lazy)

The MC has been trained to fight and use her abilities since she was a child. She’s been competing against others for the privilege of being the best as well. By the time she’s arrived at Cassell, she’s seen horrors that not even the Cassell Trio can boast of seeing.

Caesar in the meantime is planning his wedding. But Nono is AWOL. He’s getting no feedback from her and it leaves him just shooting in the dark for what ‘sounds cool’ For all of Caesar’s big talk, he realizes that he’s not really reaching Nono’s heart and he’s feeling a bit lost.

In the game: You save Nono in the game.

Why you would grow closer to Caesar: This is not easily reconcilable with the novel’s opening scenes, so if we stretch and pretend you arrive before Nono goes on her Walkabout, that would make one HECK of an impression on Caesar. He would have seen immediately that you are a step far above Luminous. Being a self-described ‘maniac’ he would not have been shy about approaching you and telling you you’re 10x what Luminous is.

Caesar is mischaracterized in the game to a great extent. While his misogynstic leanings and need to be ‘tHe LeADer’ is played up probably for laughs, he’s not that over the top. Here’s how he’s portrayed in the Novel.

Anjou put the two of them (Caesar and Chu Zihang) together and actually wanted them to sincerely cooperate? The move was similar to keeping lions and tigers in a cage, with Lu Mingfei stuffed between them like an innocent red panda. But Caesar decided to do his best, because this time he is the team leader. The success or failure of the task related to his honor, and for honor, he can bear anything. Along the way, he repeatedly warned himself to be generous, to have a leadership style, to be a corporal... Take Chu Zihang as a corporal to "victory", Caesar's heart is much more comfortable. This time he is immersed in the pink mood of preparing for the wedding, and he is feeling very charitable, even to Chu Zihang this serial killer looks more appealing.

There’s no way Caesar would ignore you as the MC. You would be of utmost interest to him. Far more interesting than Chu Zihang and Luminous. He takes responsibility for you as part of the team, he owes you one for Nono, and wants to see you succeed, probably more than anyone else there.

Act 2: Your arrival in Japan

The game skips the whole opening sequence introducing you to Chisei and Sakura. In the novel, those fancy Kimonos were given to you by Anjou and yes they all come with umbrellas. The whole scene is supposed to be funny. Chisei is mistaken for a tour guide, Lu Mingfei compliments Chisei’s Chinese in his own broken Japanese and fantasizes about cute maid cafes, Chu Zihang freaks Chisei out with his golden eyes by accident. So I imagine the MC stumbling and falling trying to walk in Geta.

But things get serious when the police show up and you realize that you’ve entered the country illegally and are now about to get arrested. The MC might voice that this make sense “Because I don’t have a passport or any identity. There was no way I’d ever get into the country.”

After Chisei loses the police, you’re taken to your rooms to stay for the night.

I wrote a little piece about this ‘here’

Why the MC and Caesar would grow closer: At the end of this scene, Caesar is completely isolated, drinking in his room and texting a silent Nono. This scene would change with you as the MC there. This would turn into an opportunity for you to bond. Perhaps you would notice him texting, talking about his love of Nono. You could touch on your past with him for the first time, or not, depending. He’d probably say something enthusiastically fiery and confidence building. He wants you to trust him and trust in yourself. For all his flaws, Caesar is very LIKEABLE and easy to understand. You don’t get into positions of power like his without some level of Charisma.

Act 3: The Mission Details

In the Game: This whole scene goes missing.

In the Novel: You take a whirlwind tour of Genji Heavy Industries. It’s an engineering marvel that is practically embedded in the central infrastructure of Tokyo (The building is seriously impossible and amazing but that’s for a nother post.).

You sit down with Masamune for tea. Immediately, something jumps out at Caesar.

“Are you Japanese?” Caesar gave Masamune Tachibana an examining look..

"I'm only half Japanese and the other half Russian." Tachibana said.

Caesar frowned, which made him think of the soviet icebreaker Lenin involuntarily.

"I've been in Japan for many years, and a lot of people don't see that I'm half Russian, Mr. Gattuso.” Tachibana said, inquiringly.

"Accents, your accents have Slavic characteristics, and you'll distinguish between hard and soft consonants, which are typical Russian pronunciations." Caesar said, "You're not just Of Russian Descent, You've Lived In Russia."

This is Lu Mingfei and Chu Zihang have no say in the matter since their two mother tongues are Chinese. But Caesar was aware when he heard the first words of Tachibana Masamune. He grew up as a different kind of man who could speak English, French and Spanish fluently in addition to Italian, and he could tell the language characteristics of every language spoken in Europe.

Even the wind demon villain Lang and yuan child in this seat are showing a surprised expression, it is clear that other owners do not know this matter.

Why this would bring you closer to Caesar: Not only would you pick up on the exact same thing, but he would speak with the same Russian accent as the MC. Languages are regional, Russia is a HUGE FREAKING COUNTRY. It would be no mistake that the Russian accent - Tachibana’s Russian accent - would match the MCs regional one. Depending on how much your MC would have told Caesar, Caesar would have picked up a whole lot. Why you were awakened now, why you were sent on this mission... but that’s not even all!!

Later on, Chisei shows up after Tachibana leaves. He’s given you more information on the Lenin and why its sinking seems suspicious. But then he says this.

"Yes, the Lenin passed through the nameless port of northern Siberia, took a precious dragon embryo, and the port was destroyed in a fire. No one knows where the embryo is going to be shipped, the final destination may be Japan, or it may just pass by, but apparently it failed to reach its destination and the dragon embryo fell into the depths of the trench. Embryos have been hatching slowly over the years, but we haven't been aware of them. ”

Now depending on how much your MC might tell Caesar at this point he may or may not notice more parallels between the story of the Lenin and your story. You’re a hybrid, from Siberia who survived not just a fire but a bombs and getting shot. Heck imagine being the MC listening to this and realizing that this mission is intimately connected with you. In the game this happens way late, but in the novel it’s right at the start!

Why this would bring you closer to Caesar: At this point none of this would have been shared between any of the others. This is something only Caesar and you would know, shared knowlege that would likely mentally bond you two as allies.

The next scene is just more obvious bonding time. They all discuss likes and dislikes, their personal goals, dreams, loves, and ideals. The MC would still have Caesars favor but Caesar would fall more and more for Chisei’s charms. He’s bored and wants to see some ‘real gangster’ stuff. So Chisei obliges and takes Caesar to an operation between two rival gangs fighting over turf.

This would be the first time you’ve seen Caesar actually get serious for once intimidating some gangsters in a comic store. But after that’s all over, he immediately gets interested in the comics. This is very important to note that Caesar is rarely serious about anything. And if he is it doesn’t last long. He tells a long story about wanting a PS2, staying up all night to play Star Ocean when the housekeeper smashed his console. So he purchased 200 consoles, gave the housekeeper an axe and every time he smashed a console he replaced it immediately and kept playing. Finally, they let him play video games 2hours a day after his riding lessons.

This is important. Caesar is pushy and insistent and confident because he HAS to be to be himself and defy his family. This is is something even Chu Zihang can respect and he makes up with Caesar after, realizing that Caesar’s way towards him wasn’t personal, good or bad, he’s always acting out towards his family.

With you, Lu Mingfei and Chu Zihang closer than ever, it’s time to actually go on the Mission. So lets recap: Caesar the Leader has pulled the team together, taken you off on entertainment, on adventures, and now just now, on the way to the mission. cooked for everyone while speedreading the the instruction manual for the Lenin.

Why would this bring the MC closer to Caesar? Uh, maybe because he seems pretty freakin’ competent? Almost effortlessly so? As Chu Zihang so succintly puts it: “Sometimes I admire Caesar. Whenever and wherever there are goals, he’s rarely afraid and never discouraged. In a group of people he will always be the one who inspires fighting spirit. People can choose how they live, Caesar is the kind of man who asks himself to live like a hero." The MC who has never felt so helpless in her life, could have easily been inspired by Caesar. That maybe she CAN get back to the Lenin, figure out who killed her friends and give him exactly what he deserves.

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faintingheroine · 3 years

Text

A Little Princess - Chapter 2

- “"She has silk stockings on!" whispered Jessie, bending over her geography also. "And what little feet! I never saw such little feet."

"Oh," sniffed Lavinia, spitefully, "that is the way her slippers are made. My mamma says that even big feet can be made to look small if you have a clever shoemaker. I don't think she is pretty at all. Her eyes are such a queer color."

I like to think that this a Cinderella reference, since A Little Princess is essentially a Cinderella story of fortune lost and found and apparently Burnett liked writing Cinderella stories in her romance novels for adults.

-“"Oh," sniffed Lavinia, spitefully, "that is the way her slippers are made. My mamma says that even big feet can be made to look small if you have a clever shoemaker. I don't think she is pretty at all. Her eyes are such a queer color."”

“She isn't pretty as other pretty people are," said Jessie, stealing a glance across the room; "but she makes you want to look at her again. She has tremendously long eyelashes, but her eyes are almost green."”

- “”She was a child full of imaginings and whimsical thoughts, and one of her fancies was that there would be a great deal of comfort in even pretending that Emily was alive and really heard and understood. After Mariette had dressed her in her dark-blue schoolroom frock and tied her hair with a dark-blue ribbon, she went to Emily, who sat in a chair of her own, and gave her a book.

"You can read that while I am downstairs," she said; and, seeing Mariette looking at her curiously, she spoke to her with a serious little face.

"What I believe about dolls," she said, "is that they can do things they will not let us know about. Perhaps, really, Emily can read and talk and walk, but she will only do it when people are out of the room. That is her secret. You see, if people knew that dolls could do things, they would make them work. So, perhaps, they have promised each other to keep it a secret. If you stay in the room, Emily will just sit there and stare; but if you go out, she will begin to read, perhaps, or go and look out of the window. Then if she heard either of us coming, she would just run back and jump into her chair and pretend she had been there all the time."

“"Comme elle est drole!" Mariette said to herself, and when she went downstairs she told the head housemaid about it. But she had already begun to like this odd little girl who had such an intelligent small face and such perfect manners. She had taken care of children before who were not so polite. Sara was a very fine little person, and had a gentle, appreciative way of saying, "If you please, Mariette," "Thank you, Mariette," which was very charming. Mariette told the head housemaid that she thanked her as if she was thanking a lady.

"Elle a l'air d'une princesse, cette petite," she said. Indeed, she was very much pleased with her new little mistress and liked her place greatly.”

What prompted me to do this reread was critics calling Sara an “idealized child figure” and people on Goodreads calling her a Mary Sue. It is true that Sara has a unique beauty, is very intelligent and very rich. But she is also consistently described as “odd”, “queer”. While she is “special”, she doesn’t act or think like children are expected to. Even her make-believe has a seriousness and conviction to it, she is very self-conscious and self-aware about her pretense that Emily is a real child and tries to convince herself of the validity of it, and she acts more like an author of fiction rather than a typical child playing with her doll. She doesn’t really like others’ company. She is clearly distinct from cheerful and friendly characters like Heidi, Pollyanna or Anne Shirley (though Anne is also imaginative).

Sara’s odd traits are endearing to others because of her class status and her intelligence. Her pretentiousness, daydreaming and excessive politeness are endearing traits for Mariette in a child that she is supposed to serve. And they are tolerated in a child that others are predisposed to want to be friends with because of her riches. Sara’s uniqueness makes her look like a little princess in her frilly dresses, if she were born poor and less intelligent she would be stigmatized for these weird traits, and she wouldn’t be raised to be so polite to stop herself from saying something wrong. In effect Sara’s story is about a weird and intelligent child whose “weirdness” is tolerated and even admired because of her class privilege and of what happens when that privilege is taken away from her.

- “"As your papa has engaged a French maid for you," she began, "I conclude that he wishes you to make a special study of the French language."

Sara felt a little awkward.

"I think he engaged her," she said, "because he—he thought I would like her, Miss Minchin."

"I am afraid," said Miss Minchin, with a slightly sour smile, "that you have been a very spoiled little girl and always imagine that things are done because you like them. My impression is that your papa wished you to learn French."

If Sara had been older or less punctilious about being quite polite to people, she could have explained herself in a very few words. But, as it was, she felt a flush rising on her cheeks. Miss Minchin was a very severe and imposing person, and she seemed so absolutely sure that Sara knew nothing whatever of French that she felt as if it would be almost rude to correct her. The truth was that Sara could not remember the time when she had not seemed to know French. Her father had often spoken it to her when she had been a baby. Her mother had been a French woman, and Captain Crewe had loved her language, so it happened that Sara had always heard and been familiar with it.

One of Miss Minchin's chief secret annoyances was that she did not speak French herself, and was desirous of concealing the irritating fact. She, therefore, had no intention of discussing the matter and laying herself open to innocent questioning by a new little pupil.

"That is enough," she said with polite tartness. "If you have not learned, you must begin at once. The French master, Monsieur Dufarge, will be here in a few minutes. Take this book and look at it until he arrives."”

Writers like Roald Dahl and even Lemony Snicket are sometimes rightfully praised for depicting the way adults oppress children as a class of people unlike the more idealistic depictions in classic children’s books. But this passage of A Little Princess is such a realistic depiction of the way adults talk over children and don’t listen to them. It also reminded me of an Iranian film I have recently watched called Where Is the Friend’s House? where a small child couldn’t even ask the most basic of questions to adults. Adults are so loud and they can’t hear you when you are seven.

Sara’s mother is French. I think she is white and her relatively exotic looks are caused by her mother being “Mediterranean”. I think it wasn’t uncommon for multiracial Anglo-Indians to assert that they were partially of “Latin” origin to explain their looks; I have once watched a video where a girl learned that her Portuguese grandmother from India was actually Indian all along via DNA test. But I don’t really think that it is the case here, though it can certainly be interpreted that way.

“”Sara's cheeks felt warm. She went back to her seat and opened the book. She looked at the first page with a grave face. She knew it would be rude to smile, and she was very determined not to be rude. But it was very odd to find herself expected to study a page which told her that "le pere" meant "the father," and "la mere" meant "the mother."”

Sara is undoubtedly a very polite and nice child. But I like the way her politeness isn’t presented as simply an inherent, natural trait but as something that she actively tries to embody. This is what makes her distinct from a simple idealized child figure, you see her actively trying to be (and sometimes struggling to be) what she is.

- “Miss Minchin glanced toward her scrutinizingly.

"You look rather cross, Sara," she said. "I am sorry you do not like the idea of learning French."

"I am very fond of it," answered Sara, thinking she would try again; "but—"

"You must not say 'but' when you are told to do things," said Miss Minchin. "Look at your book again."

And Sara did so, and did not smile, even when she found that "le fils" meant "the son," and "le frere" meant "the brother."”

Everyone who remembers their childhood can remember the frustration Sara feels here when adults simply do not let her speak and talk over her. “Adultsplaining” much (I am really sorry for coining this word)?

- “Monsieur Dufarge began to smile, and his smile was one of great pleasure. To hear this pretty childish voice speaking his own language so simply and charmingly made him feel almost as if he were in his native land—which in dark, foggy days in London sometimes seemed worlds away.”

Burnett was multinational, which means that the book lacks the jingoistic and xenophobic tone that can be present in other classic British children’s books. She has been dunking on the foggy weather of London for two chapters in a row now. This does not excuse the way she depicts colonialism and the Indian characters, but it is still worth noting.

“Miss Minchin knew she had tried, and that it had not been her fault that she was not allowed to explain. And when she saw that the pupils had been listening and that Lavinia and Jessie were giggling behind their French grammars, she felt infuriated.

"Silence, young ladies!" she said severely, rapping upon the desk. "Silence at once!"

And she began from that minute to feel rather a grudge against her show pupil.”

I wish I could say that an adult teacher getting angry at and harboring a grudge against a child because of her knowing more than herself and making her look wrong for a minute is unrealistic, but I can confidently assert based on personal experience that it is unfortunately wholly realistic.

Sara’s perfect French can be read as another “special” trait that makes her unduly idealized. But she knows it because she has been hearing it since her birth, not because she is a genius.

Sara’s knowledge of French and her slightly pretentious nature come to have consequences for her, as the last line of the chapter foreshadows. As I have said, Sara’s knowledge and her “annoying” traits are tolerated by Minchin because she is so rich, when she loses her privilege they will become a motivation for her to abuse her. Despite its romanticization of wealth, A Little Princess does a good job in showing how the same traits can be regarded differently based on your class privilege.

I am really enjoying this reread. The book is still very good and fun to read.

#a little princess #a little princess reread #frances hodgson burnett

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postmodernmulticoloredcloak · 3 years

Note

Marghe. MARGHE. I can’t link you like this, but I need you to google “babygaga 20 Italian words baby names” and then fucken liveblog your reaction to the whole article, including (this is v. important) the editorial note at the end. Please I need to witness another soul leaving their earthly body like mine did

I’m scared. Alright.

I suppose you’re talking about an article titled “19 Italian Words That Make Perfect First Names For Babies” (wait, weren’t they supposed to be 20? Did they edit one out?) written by a person called Miriam.

“There’s no better place to find inspiration than in the land of romance and pasta.” Please don’t tell me you want to name babies after pasta. Hello this is my son, Strozzaprete. Wait, no, that’s cool af.

The first sentence is “The Italian language is one of the Romance languages. The others are French, Spanish, Catalan and Romanian” n-ngh-that’s-nevermind.

“They were the languages that originated from the Romans, hence the reason that they are referred to as the Romance languages. And they certainly are romantic. In fact, they are so lovely that many words in any of the Romance languages would sound amazing as baby names.” No, they aren’t. Miriam what are you doing.

Miriam apparently visited a few Italian towns, “and by the end of the trip, I was already speaking basic fluent Italian, which was quickly forgotten after leaving”. Miriam I speak in Italian with American students professionally, you were not speaking fluent Italian.

Miriam. Miriam

“I thought it would be fun to find 20 beautiful Italian words and to talk about how they would make the perfect first names for babies. While some of these words can be found in baby name databases, others can't yet.” MAYBE THERE IS A REASON THEY AREN’T THERE MIRIAM

“Since there are plenty of Italian words that sound beautiful but don't have the best meanings behind them, they may never be considered to be used as a name.” BUT DON’T HAVE THE BEST MEANING?? MIRIAM WHAT ARE Y

19 Peri (Apericena)

That’s. That’s the single ugliest and most hated word in the Italian language and you. You are. Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh all the saints in Paradise.

Listen there are still 18 to go and the first killed me. I am dead. I am no longer in this plane of reality.

“When you hear the Italian word Apericena, you can't help but appreciate how pretty it sounds.” YOU DON’T!! WE HATE IT WITH A PASSION!!

“After learning that this word is associated with adult beverages, then that would be a reason that some parents would even hesitate to use this for a baby's name. And the question is why? Names like Vin which is French for wine, Bellini which is a cocktail, Cassis, Brandy, Chianti, and Merlot have been used as baby names many times.” WELL THESE NAMES WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE USED AS NAMES EVER THIS IS AGAINST GOD’S PLAN FOR HUMANITY. Why is the Church obsessed with gay people when clearly the thing that most offends God’s love for humanity is thijkjklklklklj

18 Roca (Rocambolesco)

Whatever, call your son Rocambolesco, what’s stopping you, society is in shambles, the devil has taken hold of hearts, angels cry.

17 Gia (Passeggiata)

Miriam

16 Abbi (Abbiocco)

ABBIOCCO

She fucking wants you to call your baby after when you get sleepy when you’re not supposed to

15 Magari

Like, why

14 Lina (Sorellina)

Just give your daughter a fucking complex, why won’t you. Supernatural but the characters are called Older Brother and Younger Brother

“I did a search to see if this word is in baby name databases and I have not seen Sorellina in any of them. That means it either has never been used for a name or if it has, it has been rarely used to the point that it has never been recorded” ASK YOURSELF WHY, MIRIAM

13 Daje

NOOOOO MUOIO STO MORENDO DIO SANTO

12 Meri (Meriggiare)

Literally no Italian can think about this word without thinking of the poem so why won’t you call your daughter Cigola la carrucola del pozzo. Or Ho sceso dandoti il braccio. This is my eldest, Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato. Wait, this is Supernatural again

“There are many baby names out there that have meanings that are worse than that.” Miriam please think about what you just said

11 Lino

A name? An actual name people have other people call them? Did I get a stroke?

No, of course she’s not referring to the name Lino, but the fabric linen. Of fucking course. Have you met my twins, Cotton and Wool. Fuck, there’s probably people called Cotton and Wool in the United States

10 Gracie (Grazie)

Wait if it’s Gracie then it’s not Grazie, what the hell

9 Gattara

PFFFFT just call your daughter crazy cat lady and she will grow up a normal person I promise

8 Perla

Actually, that’s a name already. Fun fact, my own name comes from ancient Greek margarita which means pearl, so, can’t judge this one.

7 Allora

6 Lacrima

Listen. Listen. This not only means ‘tear’ as in what your eyes produce when you cry, but it’s also impossible for a native anglophone to pronounce anyway, is it worth it? is it worth it Miriam? is it?

5 Tesoro

No, okay, this is weird as an actual name, but it’s a common way of calling your partner or child, also I watched Lilli e il Vagabondo, it says Tesoro and Giannicaro are legit human names, so.

But it’s also how Gollum calls the ring in Italian, so maybe don’t.

4 Auguri

Fghjklklkjhklkjkl

3 Salve

Dio Santissimo. This is my child, Hello

2 Cucciolo

That’s-that’s- that’s this guy’s name

1 Gio (Giorno)

Oh God, at this point this is fucking normal, just call your child Day, whatever, it’s the least weird option on here

No. No no I don’t wanto to believe t-

Editorial Note: This article has been updated on March 18, 2021 to replace the baby name "Cazzi (Sticazzi), Tura (Sprezzatura), Culaccino, and Lino (Topolino)" for a more suitable recommendation. (March 19, 2021) this article has also been updated to remove an entry

W-what was the entry that can’t even be named. WHAT WAS WORSE THAN STICAZZI

WHAT WAS WORSE THAN STICAZZI, ANON

#anon #why did you do this to me

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fatehbaz · 4 years

Text

Sorry. This might be annoying and excessively long. Among people interested in psychogeography, ecology, folklore, bioregionalism, urban geography (and Empire, hegemony, anti-imperialism, to a lesser extent, I guess?) there is a quote that gets circulated from time to time. I’ve seen the quote in academic articles, sure, but also on the W0rdpress blogs of, like, birders, hikers, gardeners, “bioregional animists,” and “woods aesthetic” fans. But why do both academic authors and popular/mainstream writers and bloggers and such consistently remove the end of this sentence from Michel de Certeau’s memorable statement: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

Gonna revel in the wonders of the garden, the forest, the landscape, the other-than-human lifeforms, and yet not willing to explicitly address the vulnerability, the cascading extinction, the tightening noose of imperial hegemony and carceral systems threatening it all, landscapes, lives, entire worlds? What de Certeau is referring to here is the way that imperial/dominant power structures (European modernity, Empire) try to subdue, erase, destroy smaller, alternate, and/or non-Western cosmologies, to make it seem like Empire is the only possible world that can be constructed. And so landscapes become sanitized, especially in cities, and de Certeau says that such sanitized places are “uninhabitable” because they are so cold, because Empire tries to standardize experience, rather than allowing localized connections tor regional landscape. But the alternative worldviews, the histories, have not been fully erased, and exist in the cracks and crevices of modernity, and so there are “ghosts” of alternative worlds which live on. And it is the remnants of other worlds, or the glimpses of other creatures (animals/plants/etc.) or other surviving worldviews (graffiti in the subway, which rejects order and control), or the hopes of possible better future worlds, crevices where the “failures” of modernity can be glimpsed, which make a place habitable. “Haunted geographies.”

Here’s a sentence fragment from a different author, writing about de Certeau:

“exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration”

This kinda thing.

This fragment comes from a criticism of early-20th-century Euro-American academia’s so-called “folklore studies” but I think it also describes much 21st-century academic interest in “ecological knowledge” and non-Western cultures. I have a feeling that this behavior is similar to what contemporary upper class careerist-academics in academic anthropology departments and those “studying the utility of traditional ecological knowledge” are doing when they superficially throw around words like “decolonial” or “Haraway’s Chthuluscene” in their article abstract for Cool Points without actually having given much through to the way they and their sponsoring institution, in their thirst for prestige or good optics or whatever, are in fact continuing to perpetuate dispossession and appropriation of Indigenous/non-Western knowledge. And on some level, it is deliberate and calculated, though not always a conscious act on the individual author/researcher’s part. Intentional power consolidation masked as passive chauvinism masked as benevolent paternalistic concern for “primitive peoples” masked as genuine respect. What’s happening is a recuperation, the subsuming of alternative cosmologies and ways of being. Hypothetical Nat/Geo article, variations of which you’ve probably seen before: “How can we utilize Indigenous knowledge? Can traditional knowledge help us battle climate change?” Empire, those in power, hegemonic institutions colonizing knowledge, thought, cosmology.

Plenty has been written, especially in recent years, of a “plurality/pluriverse of worlds in contrast to one imperial worldview/cosmology” and also the paternalistic attitudes of Euro-American anthropologists, but the mid-century work of Michel de Certeau, in my opinion, anticipated a lot of this disk horse. Here’s the fuller quote:

-----------------------

“In recent years, especially since 1960, scholarship in the service of popular culture has been of Marxist inspiration, or at least ‘populist’ in spirit,” de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacque Revel wrote in a 1980 essay, “but does the scientific operation it undertakes obey different laws than it did in the past? On the contrary, it seems to be dominated by the mechanisms of age-old excommunications…to conceal what it claims to show” (de Certeau 1986, 121). This opening statement encapsulates much of de Certeau’s thinking about the history of folklore studies. Tracing its development in successive stages from the late eighteenth century to the “heyday of folklore” in France’s Third Republic (1870-1940), the authors argue that the eighteenth century aristocratic vogue for “the popular” concealed a powerful movement toward the domination of the peasantry. This movement involved both exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration.“ The idealization of the “popular,” as they put it, “is made all the easier if it takes the form of a monologue. The people may not speak, but they can sing...The intent [of folklorists] is both to collect…and to reduce (de Certeau 1986, 122).[...] The governing ideologies driving the emergence of this obsession with the folk were not static, however, and therefore, in order to understand the development of the politics of culture in folklore studies, scholars must examine, at each point, its “subjacent postulates” (de Certeau 1986, 123). For instance, following the domination imbricated with the origins of folklore studies in the 18th century, by the mid-nineteenth century, the authors describe folklore as taking on a paternalist role vis-a-vis its subject. The collection of folklore by this time, embodied especially in the works of Charles Nisard (1808-1890), is not just a chronicle of its elimination by the elite, but a protective function executed by the elite on behalf of the incompetent peasant. In this view, de Certeau and his colleagues observe, “the people are children whose original purity it is befitting to preserve by guarding them against evil readings” (de Certeau 1986, 124, original emphasis). [...] This, then, is the basic outline of de Certeau’s historical critique of both the conceptualization of folklore and the discipline of folklore studies, as well as the core of his critique of cultural studies in the late 20th century. Interestingly, however, it is also the core of his larger understanding of the workings of modernity.

From: Anthony Bak Buccitelli. “Hybrid Tactics and Locative Legends: Re-reading de Certeau for the Future of Folkloristics.” Cultural Analysis, Volume 15.1. 2016.

--------------------------------

So there is a popular quote from Michel de Certeau (French interdisciplinary scholar, 1925-1986), which seems to have been yet more popular since, like:

(1) 2010-ish with elevation of Mark Fisher’s work; “object-oriented ontology”; “dark ecology”; apparent academic elevation of ontological turn in anthropology; and the white-washed Euro-American academic language of traditional ecological knowledge, “decolonization,” etc.,

And also since (2) 2014/2015 in “popular” media, with apparent mainstream-ing or “revival” of folk horror, alongside elevation of eco-horror, Anthropocene disk horse, etc.

(In my anecdotal experience, at least, reading about geography, folklore, psychogeography, etc. in online spaces from M.S.N chatroom days onwards.)

I’m of course very wary of de Certeau’s interest in and celebration of Freud (come on, bro) and also the implications of de Certeau’s Jesuit background and early interest in missionary stuff (gross). But de Certeau did write some thoughtful and nicely-phrased stuff (in my opinion) about the importance of subverting imperialist/hegemonic cosmologies; how Euro-American academic institutionalized knowledge reinforces power; imperative for combating hegemony/carceral thinking by connecting with landscape; the “memory” of places; the “hidden” histories of landscapes, etc. And he wrote this decades before academics started stealing from Indigenous people of Latin America and getting into pluriverse stuff.

Anyway, one quote in particular seems most popular. but almost every single instance where i’ve ever seen this quote shared, it always cuts out the last few words of the statement. The quote is from what might be his most widely-read work, the “Walking in the City” chapter of his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life. (it’s a pretty brief chapter which is available for free online; might take 30 minutes to read, if you’re interested.) The quote as translated by Steven Rendall: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

The “inversion of the panopticon” portion is almost always left out of the quote. even in academic writing or in the writing/blogs/whatever of people who otherwise seem like they would be down with anti-imperialism or something.

So, it comes across to me as if contemporary (2005-2020) academics and activists interested in, like, folklore or local horticulture or psychogeography will like ... take the “cute” fragments of these excerpts, but don’t want to “stir the pot” by presenting these writings in their fuller context, a fuller context which calls-out knowledge appropriation and explicitly trash-talks Empire.

And de Certeau’s not just writing about folklore or geography. He’s writing about taking action, about practicing alternative ways to relate to landscape in direct contrast to imperial cosmologies, academic/institutionalized/gatekept knowledge, and carceral thinking. (He’s famous for this; he emphasized “tactics” and “action.”)

So this guy is, of course, human, and had disagreeable and/or outright problematique associations. You can argue with his writing extensively. his publications are a mix of great, cool, iffy, “meh” and “bad take bruh.” But de Certeau was ahead of the curve in anticipating the way ambitious US academics would see “the decolonial turn” happening in academic anthropology in the 1990s/2000s and then weaponize it in a way that preserved their power dynamic and institutional power while still paying lip-service to “decolonization.”

But besides dunking on the imperialist foundations of Western institutionalized knowledge systems and the cunning employment of geographic re-worlding and re-naming in creating propaganda and imperial cosmology, and besides being ahead of the curve in anticipating re-enchantment trends and folk horror ... One thing I like about de Certeau’s writing is the emphasis on action, practice, and doing things to counter dominant/powerful cosmology’s attempt to destroy folk/non-Western worldview. Encouraging something like:

Take action. Books are cool, but books are not a substitute for action. Girl, you wanna study landscape, place-based identity, folklore, and how to escape the panopticon? Gotta put the theory texts down occasionally. Please go walk around in the forest; if you’re in the major city, don’t despair, just look at the moss growing in crevices betwixt the cobblestones. Imagine the ghosts, the histories, the stories, who died, what was lost, what’s come before. Power is trying to subsume all, but Empire gets anxious and flails because they know that there are gaps in their cosmology, cracks and breakages where other worlds seep through or can be glimpsed, retrieved, renewed. They know their cosmology can’t account for the diversity of life, the plurality of experience. There is not one world, but many. Find the crevices, the cracks, in the dominant power structures, and break them further. You can help to escape the tightening noose, the planetary-scale plantation, by using your imagination, cooking a meal, taking a walk.

#whatever #sorry for all this

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pandaemoniumpancakes · 2 years

Text

General Introduction to the 'Bloom's Major Literary Characters’ series.

Character, according to our dictionaries, still has as a primary meaning a graphic symbol, such as a letter of the alphabet. This meaning reflects the word’s apparent origin in the ancient Greek charactēr, a sharp stylus. Charactēr also meant the mark of the stylus’ incisions. Recent fashions in literary criticism have reduced “character” in literature to a matter of marks upon a page. But our word “character” also has a very different meaning, matching that of the ancient Greek ethōs, “habitual way of life.” Shall we say then that literary character is an imitation of human character, or is it just a grouping of marks? The issue is between a critic like Dr. Samuel Johnson, for whom words were as much like people as like things, and a critic like the late Roland Barthes, who told us that “the fact can only exist linguistically, as a term of discourse.” Who is closer to our experience of reading literature, Johnson or Barthes? What difference does it make, if we side with one critic rather than the other?

Barthes is famous, like Foucault and other recent French theorists, for having added to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God a subsidiary demise, that of the literary author. If there are no authors, then there are no fictional personages, presumably because literature does not refer to a world outside language. Words indeed necessarily refer to other words in the first place, but the impact of words ultimately is drawn from a universe of fact. Stories, poems, and plays are recognizable as such because they are human utterances within traditions of utterances, and traditions, by achieving authority, become a kind of fact, or at least the sense of a fact. Our sense that literary characters, within the context of a fictive cosmos, indeed are fictional personages is also a kind of fact. The meaning and value of every character in a successful work of literary representation depend upon our ideas of persons in the factual reality of our lives.

Literary character is always an invention, and inventions generally are indebted to prior inventions. Shakespeare is the inventor of literary character as we know it; he reformed the universal human expectations for the verbal imitation of personality, and the reformation appears now to be permanent and uncannily inevitable. Remarkable as the Bible and Homer are at representing personages, their characters are relatively unchanging. They age within their stories, but their habitual modes of being do not develop. Jacob and Achilles unfold before us, but without metamorphoses. Lear and Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello severely modify themselves not only by their actions, but by their utterances, and most of all through overhearing themselves, whether they speak to themselves or to others. Pondering what they themselves have said, they will to change, and actually do change, sometimes extravagantly yet always persuasively. Or else they suffer change, without willing it, but in reaction not so much to their language as to their relation to that language. I do not think it useful to say that Shakespeare successfully imitated elements in our characters. Rather, it could be argued that he compelled aspects of character to appear that previously were concealed, or not available to representation. This is not to say that Shakespeare is God, but to remind us that language is not God either. The mimesis of character in Shakespeare’s dramas now seems to us normative, and indeed became the accepted mode almost immediately, as Ben Jonson shrewdly and somewhat grudgingly implied. And yet, Shakespearean representation has surprisingly little in common with the imitation of reality in Jonson or in Christopher Marlowe. The origins of Shakespeare’s originality in the portrayal of men and women are to be found in the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, insofar as they can be located anywhere before Shakespeare himself. Chaucer’s savage and superb Pardoner overhears his own tale-telling, as well as his mocking rehearsal of his own spiel, and through this overhearing he is emboldened to forget himself, and enthusiastically urges all his fellow-pilgrims to come forward to be fleeced by him. His self-awareness, and apocalyptically rancid sense of spiritual fall, are preludes to the even grander abysses of the perverted will in lago and in Edmund. What might be called the character trait of a negative charisma may be Chaucer’s invention, but came to its perfection in Shakespearean mimesis. The analysis of character is as much Shakespeare’s invention as the representation of character is, since lago and Edmund are adepts at analyzing both themselves and their victims. Hamlet, whose overwhelming charisma has many negative components, is certainly the most comprehensive of all literary characters, and so necessarily prophesies the labyrinthine complexities of the will in lago and Edmund. Charisma, according to Max Weber, its first codifier, is primarily a natural endowment, and implies a primordial and idiosyncratic power over nature, and so finally over death. Hamlet’s uncanniness is at its most suggestive in the scene of his long dying, where the audience, through the mediation of Horatio, itself is compelled to meditate upon suicide, if only because outliving the prince of Denmark scarcely seems an option. Shakespearean representation has usurped not only our sense of literary character, but our sense of ourselves as characters, with Hamlet playing the part of the largest of these usurpations. Insofar as we have an idea of human disinterestness, we tend to derive it from the Hamlet of Act V, whose quietism has about It a ghostly authority. Oscar Wilde, in his profound and profoundly witty dialogue, “The Decay of Lying,” expressed a permanent insight when he insisted that art shaped every era, far more than any age formed art. Life imitates art, we imitate Shakespeare, because without Shakespeare we would perish for lack of images. Wilde’s grandest audacity demystifies Shakespearean mimesis with a Shakespearean vivaciousness: “This unfortunate aphorism about art holding the mirror up to Nature is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.” Of Hamlet's influence upon the ages Wilde remarked that: “The world has grown sad because a puppet was once melancholy.” “Puppet” is Wilde’s own deconstruction, a brilliant reminder that Shakespeare’s artistry of illusion has so mastered reality as to have changed reality, evidently forever. The analysis of character, as a critical pursuit, seems to me as much a Shakespearean invention as literary character was, since much of what we know about how to analyze character necessarily follows Shakespearean procedures. His hero-villains, from Richard III through lago, Edmund, and Macbeth, are shrewd and endless questers into their own self-motivations. If we could bear to see Hamlet in his unwearied negations, as another hero-villain, then we would judge him the supreme analyst of the darker recalcitrances in the selfhood. Freud followed the pre-Socratic Empedocles, in arguing that character is fate, a frightening doctrine that maintains the fear that there are no accidents, that overdetermination rules us all of our lives. Hamlet assumes the same, yet adds to this argument the terrible passivity he manifests in Act V. Throughout Shakespeare’s tragedies, the most interesting personages seem doom-eager, reminding us again that a Shakespearean reading of Freud would be more illuminating than a Freudian exegesis of Shakespeare. We learn more when we discover Hamlet in the Freudian Death Drive, than when we read Beyond the Pleasure Principle into Hamlet. In Shakespearean comedy, character achieves its true literary apotheosis, which is the representation of the inner freedom that can be created by great wit alone. Rosalind and Falstaff, perhaps alone among Shakespeare’s personages, match Hamlet in wit, though hardly in the metaphysics of consciousness. Whether in the comic or the modern mode, Shakespeare has set the standard of measurement in the balance between character and passion. In Shakespeare the self is more dramatized than theatricalized, which is why a Shakespearean reading of Freud works out so well. Character-formation after the passing of the Oedipal stage takes the place of fetishistic fragmentings of the self. Critics who now call literary character into question, and who proclaim also the death of the author, invariably also regard all notions, literary and human, of a stable character as being mere reductions of deeper pre-Oedipal desires. It becomes clear that the fortunes of literary character rise and fall with the prestige of normative conceptions of the ego. Shakespeare’s lago, who wars against being, may be the first deconstructionist of the self, with his proclamation of “I am not what I am.” This constitutes the necessary prologue to any view that would regard a fixed ego as a virtual abnormality. But deconstructions of the self are no more modern than Modernism is. Like literary modernism, the decentered ego came out of the Hellenistic culture of ancient Alexandria. The Gnostic heretics believed that the psyche, like the body, was a fallen entity, mechanically fashioned by the Demiurge or false creator. They held however that each of us possessed also a spark or pneuma, which was a fragment of the original Abyss or true, alien God. The soul or psyche within every one of us was thus at war with the self or pneuma, and only that sparklike self could be saved. Shakespeare, following after Chaucer in this respect, was the first and remains still the greatest master of representing character both as a stable soul and a wavering self. There is a substance that endures in Shakespeare’s figures, and there is also a quicksilver rendition of the unsettling sparks. Racine and Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens, follow in Shakespeare’s wake by giving us some sense of pre-Oedipal sparks or drives, and considerably more sense of post-Oedipal character and personality, stabilizations or sublimations of the fetish-seeking drives. Critics like Leo Bersani and René Girard argue eloquently against our taking this mimesis as the only proper work of literature. I would suggest that strong factions of the self, from the Bible through Samuel Beckett, necessarily participate in both modes, the sublimation of desire, and the persistence of a primordial desire. The mystery of Hamlet or of Lear is intimately invested in the tangled mixture of the two modes of representation. Psychic mobility is proposed by Bersani as the ideal to which deconstructions of the literary self may yet guide us. The ideal has its pathos, but the realities of literary representation seem to me very different, perhaps destructively so. When a novelist like D. H. Lawrence sought to reduce his characters to Eros and the Death Drive, he still had to persuade us of his authority at mimesis by lavishing upon the figures of The Rainbow and Women in Love all of the vivid stigmata of normative personality. Birkin and Ursula may represent antithetical and uncanny drives, but they develop and change as characters pondering their own pronouncements and reactions to self and others. The cost of a non-Shakespearean representation is enormous. Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, evades the burden of the normative by resorting to something like Christopher Marlowe’s art of caricature in The Jew of Malta. Marlowe’s Barabas is a marvelous rhetorician, yet he is a cartoon alongside the troublingly equivocal Shylock. Pynchon’s personages are deliberate cartoons also, as fat as comic strips. Marlowe’s achievement, and Pynchon’s, are beyond dispute, yet they are like the prelude and the postlude to Shakespearean reality. They do not wish to engage with our hunger for the empirical world and so they enter the problematic cosmos of literary fantasy. No writer, not even Shakespeare or Proust, alters the available stock that we agree to call reality, but Shakespeare, more than any other, does show us how much of reality we could encounter if only we retained adequate desire. The strong literary representation of character is already an analysis of character, and is part of the healing work of a literary culture, which implicitly seeks to cure violence through a normative mimesis of ego, as if it were stable, whether in actuality it is or is not. I do not believe that this is a social quest taken on by literary culture, but rather that we confront here the aesthetic essence of what makes a culture literary, rather than metaphysical or ethical or religious. A culture becomes literary when its conceptual modes have failed it, which means when religion, philosophy, and science have begun to lose their authority. If they cannot heal violence, then literature attempts to do so, which may be only a turning inside out of the critical arguments of Girard and Bersani. I conclude by offering a particular instance or special case as a paradigm for the healing enterprise that is at once the representation and the analysis of literary character. Let us call it the aesthetics of being outraged, or rather of successfully representing the state of being outraged. W. C. Fields was one modern master of such representation, and Nathanael West was another, as was Faulkner before him. Here also the greatest master remains Shakespeare, whose Macbeth, himself a bloody outrage, yet retains our imaginative sympathy precisely because he grows increasingly outraged as he experiences the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth. The double-natured promises and the prophecies of the weird sisters finally induce in Macbeth an apocalyptic version of the stage actor’s anxiety at missing cues, the horror of a phantasmagoric stage fright of missing one’s time, of always reacting too late. Macbeth, a veritable monster of solipsistic inwardness but no intellectual, counters his dilemma by fresh murders, that prolong him in time yet provoke him only to a perpetually freshened sense of being outraged, as all his expectations become still worse confounded. We are moved by Macbeth, however estrangedly, because his terrible inwardness is a paradigm for our own solipsism, but also because none of us can resist a strong and successful representation of the human in a state of being outraged. The ultimate outrage is the necessity of dying, an outrage concealed in a multitude of masks, including the tyrannical ambitions of Macbeth. I suspect that our outrage at being outraged is the most difficult of all our affects for us to represent to ourselves, which is why we are so inclined to imaginative sympathy for a character who strongly conveys that affect to us. The Shrike of West’s Miss Lonelyhearts or Faulkner’s Joe Christmas of Light in August are crucial modern instances, but such figures can be located in many other works, since the ability to represent this extreme emotion is one of the tests that strong writers are driven to set for themselves. However a reader seeks to reduce literary character to a question of marks on a page, she will come at last to the impasse constituted by the thought of death, her death, and before that to all the stations of being outraged that memorialize her own drive towards death. In reading, she quests for evidences that are strong representations, whether of her desire or her despair. Such questings constitute the necessary basis for the analysis of literary character, an enterprise that always will survive every vagary of critical fashion.

#harold bloom #character

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randomnameless · 3 years

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what annoys you the most with 3H? The fandom or the missed opportunities from the game?

Oh.

The fandom takes the first place, because while it was funny to craugh seeing those bad takes, 2 years after the release of the game those takes are still endorsed and built upon and it’s just impossible to discuss about FE16 without being sure that the person you’re talking to is talking about the game, or the redshit takes.

Still, I firmly believe fandom wouldn’t be that cesspool of incessant drama if the localised version (especially NoA?) didn’t take wild directions with the game. It’s incomprehensible how a game in its OG version can be saying green but the localised version everyone talks about “corrected” it to “blue”.

Scripts are more or less the same, but the directions given to the VAs?

rant under the cut about directions, voice acting and people arbitrarly pushing an agenda despite the media they’re supposed to translate/bring to non-jp crowds.

I pointed it in an earlier post (or earlier posts?) but as a french person I grew up with the 4Kids dub, which was infamous for, uh, “translating” things for western audiences, even at the cost of coherency and let’s not even talk about the source material this thing doesn’t exist. Remember the Shadow Realm from YGO? .

I watched a short anime a few years ago about the anime industry (Shirobako?) and I remember a character trying to become hired as a voice actor/seiyuu - she had to learn and to feel the character - she has to know the character as much as the author who created them.

A few years ago, I didn’t feel as if the dubbing cast worked on their characters as much as the OG!voice actors. For a recet exemples I was rewatching a certain anime with the fr dub - basically a former underling fights against his superior who became a traitor, and even if his superior doesn’t regret turning into a traitor and ultimately became a giant fly, the underling always respected his superior and treated him with proper forms of adress. In the “early 2010 dub” I watched yesterday? Yeah no, guy’s talking to him as if he is talking to his friend in a pub.

Even now, while the quality of the voice acting has improved (and I feel like people take their jobs way more seriously for the dubbing industry) - i was the first surprised with SoV’s VA - we have now directions. Because the manga/anime/game isn’t, uh, good enough or whatever, the dubbing team decides to go off and do its own thing, regardless of coherence or, worse, what was the intent/core of the og game.

I am playing MH:Rise, the game is set up in a more or less traditional “ninja” village, with a lot of old japanese (? feudal? idk) aesthetics. The devs said they wanted to return to the roots of the saga and based new monsters on Yokais, mythological monsters from the japanese folklore. When you meet a new giant monster to hunt, you have small cutscenes to introduce said monster sung with a Noh theater aesthetic (i just looked up on wikipedia i thought it was kabuki but kabuki isn’t the only form of theater whatever the more you know).

NPCs in the MH series speak their own language, often called the MHese (a bit like the sim language). IDK if it is because this opus has a japanese aesthetic, but you can pick a jp voice acting instead of the MHese (same voice actors but talking in a different language). Or you can pick the US/ENG dub, with, I suppose, US VAs. I’m not complaing about the lack of FR dub, I’m rather happy with it tbf. But, for some reason, despite the aesthetic, the yokais, the pagodas in the background, the samurai flagship cat, the katanas and whatever, I thought the Noh style cutscenes weren’t going to change, or maybe someone would try to sing in English. But it isn’t the case, the US/ENG version of those cutscenes aren’t Noh style sung, they were completely revamped, so no traditionnal songs and instruments in the background, instead have a dude describing the monster you’re about to face in a cheap National Geographic imitation.

Why remove this? Was it because US!Capcom thought the western world wouldn’t understand the Noh references (but could still understand the general “aesthetic”, just, ban on the songs?) or some shit? They couldn’t remove the flagship cat’s samurai armor to swap it for a GI uniform, so they banned the Noh cutscenes? Why?

It is the same shit NoA pulled out with the Fates localisation, Suzukaze became Kaze because... reasons?

Maybe I’m biased because I’m french, and apparently Wonder France is one of the biggest consumer of anime/manga outside japan, but the mere idea that something can be changed because it’s not “western enough so the audience wouldn’t get it” pisses me to no end, and this is why, in the beginnings of Internet (YT videos with 4 parts, megaupload etc etc) everyone I knew who watched anime ditched everything dubbed to watch the very same episode but subbed (one of my friends even worked on her english with subs!).

Back to FE16 because this is your question and I ranted enough, I cannot stress it enough regarding Rhea, but while I do not doubt Cherami Leigh made a great effort and worked her best with the tools given to her (to this day I still cannot fathom how she managed to dub Mae and Rhea, they’re so different or not seiros is genki!rhea if only leigh was given that script) Leigh!Rhea isn’t Inoue!Rhea. NoA (I harp on NoA but I suppose NoA oversaw the dubbint process/effort, NoE is inexistent) had an agenda and a reading of Rhea that isn’t the same as NoJ.

“You worthless piece of garbage” doesn’t exist in the og!script - but more importantly, delivering this, Inoue!Rhea isn’t furious, she is upset and desperate. Leigh!Rhea is furious, Cherami Leigh does an admirable job at conveying NoA!Rhea’s fury - but this is not the same character NoJ wrote. If NoA gave the same directions NoJ gave Kikuko Inoue to Cherami Leigh, I’m pretty sure the “Rhea BaD” crowd, the eating babies takes and whatever shit redshit comes up everyday would be way reduced.

Maybe @nilsh13 has redshit take saved talking about this, but if we’re not talking about the same character, what kind of discussion can even happen? (I’m sure someone someday pulled the “well i played the localised game so i’m not talking about the og script with you but with the localised script” to defend some smelly take)

Missed opportunities can be fuel for fanfics.

Discourse based on fandom drama (at this point NoA itself is part of the fandom with their “religious extremis/zealot” take)? Nothing can salvage it. I genuinely like to talk about FE16 (especially lizards), but since every topic became a landmind because of the fandom drama, even making posts in good faith can be used as a fuel for drama, or completely diverted from their original goal to suit, again, some faction war between lizards and a certain someone.

Tl; dr : Fandom.

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tea-at-221 · 3 years

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So, let's delve a bit into the Spanish dub of Supernatural.

I'm going to go through a lot of terms here, and a lot of basics, in order to increase people's level of understanding as to how the dub may possibly have come about the way it did.

This post will provide information and, I hope, allow some members of the fandom to move forward with their own theories with more reassurance. Information is power. I will define and clarify industry terms to the best of my novice ability to make it easier for others who wish to do their own research.

This post was inspired by the fact that I've been part of multiple fandoms in which queerbaiting has played an enormous part: I am tired of seeing fandom friends left devastated and without answers, no emotional resolution in sight. So this post is, in spirit if not content, largely dedicated to my fellow Johnlockers and Queliot shippers. And most of all, for Quentin Coldwater, who deserved not just better but the very best.

Disclaimer: This is my own research and there is a bit of speculation involved; I can't guarantee 100% that I will get everything right (I hit some very frustrating walls looking up what should be easy-to-find facts), but I did a *lot* of work for this. Other people will doubtless be able to clarify points/give better specifics/correct what I've gotten wrong. I am not promising a concrete answer to “SPN gate” here, as without more information than we currently have that is impossible to declare with certainty.

More under the cut.

All that having been said, onwards (see end for sources):

First, who airs the Spanish dub of Supernatural?

Answer: the Warner Channel.

Why? It goes back to who owns The CW.

From Wikipedia (2): "The CW Network, LLC, a limited liability joint venture between the CBS Entertainment Group unit of ViacomCBS; and the Studios and Networks division of AT&T's WarnerMedia, the parent company of Warner Bros., former majority owner of The WB. The network's name is an abbreviation derived from the first letters of the names of its two parent corporations (CBS and Warner Media)."

Warner Bros apparently is the side that handles the delegation of dubbing to outside studios. So, who does Warner use for their dubbing? Perhaps multiple studios, but the two I found in the course of my research were SPGStudios(5) (who specifically handle localization for Latin American Spanish productions) and Iyuno Media Group (formerly BTI Studios)(3).

What is localization?

Simply put, it refers to the translation of the home language of the show in question to the language of the new market it's entering. So, Supernatural 15x18 is translated from its native English to Spanish for Latin American viewers.

And what exactly *is* dubbing (actually called revoicing within the industry; dubbing is a widely-recognized term, however, and it's pretty well understood what is meant by it)?

Here is the Merriam-Webster definition:

"1 : to add (sound effects or new dialogue) to a film or to a radio or television production —usually used with "in"

They dubbed in the music.

2 : to provide (a motion-picture film) with a new soundtrack and especially dialogue in a different language

The film was dubbed in French and Spanish.

3 : to make a new recording of (sound or videotape already recorded) also : to mix (recorded sound or videotape from different sources) into a single recording"

There is a slang term, "dubby," which refers to any overdub that is comically jarring and obviously a dub. The history of dubbing has been such that this has become a way to think of and recognize it: by how awful and ineffective it used to be when it came to foreign films sloppily overlaid with English dubbing.

However, we are in the midst of an age of networks and companies scrambling to play catch-up, eager to use modern technology to create more effective, convincing dubs. In short, they see the moneymaking potential of presenting finished works that viewers may not even realize *are* dubbed without careful inspection. It's true that a good dub is about 10x more costly than subtitling, but it's hard to satisfy the viewer's desire for escapism if they can't suspend disbelief because they're busy reading.

The truth of that is reflected in internal statistics Netflix (for instance, but not just them) parses to gauge viewer interaction and retention with their various shows: when comparing subtitled vs. dubbed shows, it's easy to see which is the winner.(1)

So to be sure there is no nefarious intent here, we would need to be able to identify the following:

A.) What exactly was the process for this dub?

B.) Who decides what changes to make during a dubbing process?

C.) Who approves those changes?

*Can* there be such a thing as a "rogue translator," as Misha Collins put it? (I am going to clarify here that I think Misha is an upstanding person who believed the best of the show he was involved in and all the people who made it, so his assumption of a rogue translator makes sense in the context of that emotion-based reasoning).

I'm not sure which studio did the dub for the Latin American Spanish version of Supernatural; if I had access to that episode perhaps it's mentioned in the credits. You'd think that would be simple enough to figure out anyway, but I was unable. So maybe someone can take a look and let me know. But, as an example, here is how SPGStudios outlines their localization (dubbing) process:

1.) They make a digital or analog transcription of a show/movie.

2.) The translation, or localization, is done by their staff (in any of 40 available languages their staff can speak). When translating, they translate for meaning and then adapt for time, tempo, and style. They say that "extensive experience is required to capture the essence of the language dialog while accounting for variances in speaking time between the source and destination languages." i.e., wording/word choice will be kept as true as possible to the original intention of the native language, but at the same time the translation will need to use its chosen wording in a way that fits what is being shown on-screen. To produce a convincing/pleasing dub, they won't replace a word like "looked" with a longer phrase like "scanned the horizon" because it's not going to match what's onscreen. That would be venturing into "dubby" territory.

3.) They perform the ADR process: the voice actors (in this case it would normally be Guillermo Rojas performing for Dean Winchester, though it appears things may have been different in 15x18, possibly due to covid) record the new dialogue to replace the original actor's performance.

4.) The newly recorded dialogue goes to the sound editorial department "to ensure that lip-synch is optimized and technical aspects of the vocal performance match the original."

5.) All of the new audio--including dialogue, music, and sound effects--is mixed together to emulate the quality of the original production as closely as possible despite the changes in rhythm that resulted from the dialog having been translated.

6.) Designers, animators, and VFX editors assist with the localization or enhancement of graphics, if needed.

7.) Localized Master: SPG has a 'traffic team' who 'ensures that all client delivery and storage specifications are met, including file formatting, labeling, and uploading." So in other words, the files are heavily encrypted (or that's how I read this).

Presumably, after all steps are performed, SPGStudios transfers the show back to Warner, who then distributes it. The other studio, Iyuno, makes it very clear that *they* can coordinate and handle all distribution themselves to a vast number of networks. That means that if the client desires, Iyuno can send the finished product directly out into the world.

There seem to be two types of scripts that can be given to the dubbing company:

1.) "In-Production Dubbing indicates that dubbing production is active in tandem with post production. In-Production Dubbing fulfillment partners should expect potential changes to source materials."(4)

2.) "Final Asset Dubbing indicates that dubbing production takes place after final delivery of the show. All source assets will be in a final state. The dubbing fulfillment partner should not expect any changes to the source materials."(4)

Without knowing which of these was agreed upon for SPN 15x18, it is very hard to say exactly where or if additional edits may have been performed on the original material that weren't performed on the translated material (in other words, earlier draft).

If the studio was given the episode as an In-Production Dubbing project, this could explain why the title of the Spanish translation reflected the original script title, "The Truth," rather than the final title in English, "Despair".

Assuming this difference was unintentional, rather than a calculated marketing ploy re: audience enticement (which seems admittedly unlikely), then yes, it could indicate a screw-up on someone's part. The question is, was the dub company given the task of generating the title card, or did some other graphics department handle that before the project made it to them? If the latter is the case, the choice to add "Me too" instead of "Don't do this, Cas" could be either a conscious choice on the dub studio's part as sort of a nod to what they thought "the truth" was, or could just be them going with what they were given and making their translation choices based on something else, such as rhythm/timing.

SO, could there have been an original script that had Dean say "me too" in response to Cas, which then went through translation and made it out into the world? Teeechnically yes, but one would assume that the original script and original *footage* would have to have arrived at the dub studio together if the script is being transcribed in-house as SPGSTudios outlines in their process. I'm going to reason that the odds of them using a later edit of the visual--one that contained what in this instance we would be assuming was Warner's preferred dialogue ("Don't do this, Cas") yet choosing to stick with their own audio revoicing of the (supposed) original script/visual's "Me too, Cas" with its now subsequently poor timing, seems unlikely.

So either they would likely have to redo the exact same "Me too" audio again (having made the choice to keep the original dialogue, while also having to work under pandemic restrictions re: travel and talent availability) to make everything match the visual footage time-wise, OR, it was simply a matter that the English scene always was just as we saw it, but that the studio chose to interpret the script the way they did and were able to do their timing the first time around to match accordingly.

This still leaves a question in the air regarding the origin and fate of certain clips of Dean's more visually emotive reaction to Castiel's confession that have been floating around the internet. I've only seen very very brief glimpses of them, myself, and I'm not certain that they're really evidence of anything other than more than one take having been done of that scene, which wouldn't be uncommon and doesn't necessarily point to a conspiracy.

I also want to state that in the wake of 15x18, I opted to protect my mental health rather than follow every development/rumor/speculation that cropped up in the aftermath, so there’s probably a lot that I’m leaving out of this post that may be pertinent. Do me a favor and do assume that I know nothing of it. lol

I will also add this about the other studio, Iyuno: they are very careful to state on their site, repeatedly and with great pride, that they are committed to presenting the world with the smoothest, most true-to-the-original localized version of a film or show possible. Quote: "...our entire team of staff wants nothing more than to make every single one of our partner's content feel as if it were never translated." They are not fucking around. They want to please the client. Would they have done something like the translation in question without any direct go-ahead from Warner? It seems unlikely, though they don't outline their process on their site the way SPG does.

Notice that in the SPGStudios process outlined above, there is no mention made of a review step in which the studio presents the translated dialogue to the client for approval re: the new wording. That doesn't mean there isn't a review step; however, without seeing the contractual agreement that was made between Warner and whatever dub studio they used, or knowing Warner's preferred process by some other means, it's difficult to be certain whether or not there was a review process for the translated script. I did find evidence that Netflix reserves the right to review such translated scripts before air.

Speaking of Netflix, I will include here what their translation requirements are, as I did find those. They, like Warner, also use Iyuno Media Group much of the time for dubbing (voiceover style dubbing in which they apparently like to leave the original language audible underneath, so that's slightly different from revoicing, but I'm working on an assumption that the general expectations are the same for both):(4)

"1. Translation Requirements

1.1 Main Dialogue

All main dialogue in the source (original) language should be translated unless specifically noted.

Due to timing limitations, some of the dialogue may be condensed/truncated as long as it retains all essential elements of the plot.

Please refrain from dubbing redundant words such as character names and repetitions.

Additionally, do not recreate laughs, hesitations, reaction noises, etc."

I'm looking at that bit: "Due to timing limitations, some of the dialogue may be condensed/truncated as long as it retains all essential elements of the plot."

So let's say just for argument's sake that this is pretty standard language provided to the dubbing studios. Netflix is a giant, so I'll proceed with that assumption given the lack of more concrete information:

Does it really change essential elements of the remaining plot to have Dean return Castiel's declaration of love? Forgetting about the outside, emotional ripple effect such a declaration was bound to set off in the viewing audience, no. The two characters have no further scenes together, nor does Dean go on in the next episode to immediately embark on a new relationship, or tell anyone that Cas said he was in love with him but he couldn't return it because he didn't feel the same. So technically, no rule was broken. And that is what it comes down to, if you're thinking like a lawyer reading a contract: specifics, not theoretical implications or consequences.

So, possibly what we have is something that was simple to add and easy to get away with/argue for: translated dialog that fit a dub better due to its length, and didn't actually change anything plot-wise (or at least, the argument for that could easily be made). This points to the painful crux of the matter: why would the Spanish version of Supernatural which aired in Latin America allow Dean Winchester to return Castiel's declaration of love with a "Me too, Cas"? Could it *really* be as insulting as the fact that "Yo a ti, Cas" would be a quicker, smoother dub than "No hagas esto, Cas"? ("Don't do this, Cas" in English.) Or did they see something they could get away with, and a reasonable argument to provide for it, so they went ahead and claimed a small LGBT+ victory?

Is someone, somewhere, getting in trouble for all this? Maybe. But could action be taken against them? That would look pretty bad, public-relations-wise, for the party expressing condemnation if that got out. Could Iyuno, or whatever other studio (again, I don't actually know which one handled the dub) theoretically feel a ripple effect from the fallout of this? Could they quietly suffer a drop in acquisitions/revenue for "reasons unclear"? Sure. That sort of thing happens all the time, so theoretically yeah.

Whatever the reasoning behind the decision to have Dean return Cas' declaration of love, surely they didn't have to do it. Surely they could have chosen some other phrase that fit. But they chose to do exactly what they did. I don't know what went down, in the end, or whether censorship was indeed involved, but I will certainly say that I think it was a brave and admirable choice that was made with the Spanish dub. It doesn't undo the "bury your gays" trope of course, but for some LGBT+ audience members it surely provides a sense of validation and maybe even lends a little hope for better representation--which is long, long overdue.

Thanks if you read this far. I hope that even though it’s not perfect it will be helpful in some way.

Sources

(1) https://www.indiewire.com/2020/02/subtitles-vs-dubbing-what-you-need-to-know-1202212800/amp

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_CW

(3) https://www.iyunomg.com/

(4) https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/115016062708-Dubbed-Audio-Style-Guide-VO-Style-Dubbing

(5) https://www.spgstudios.com/localization

#spn gate #destiel #supernatural #queerbaiting #lgbt #lgbt+#lgbt representation #15x18 #dean winchester #castiel #johnlockers #queliot #queliot shippers #quentin coldwater deserved better #spn family #they silenced you

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theladyofdeath · 4 years

Text

Alone in the Ashes {2}

A Court of Thorns and Roses fanfction, characters belong to Sarah J Maas. Modern au. Revolves around Nesta x Cassian, Feyre x Rhysand, and Elain x Azriel. Other characters appear throughout. Based on multiple prompts sent in by anons tbr below.

Warning: Mature content. Alcohol abuse, verbal abuse, sex, language, eating disorders.

For summary & chapter index, click > Alone in the Ashes {Acotar}

Word Count: 4.4k

A/N: And so it begins.

Comment to tell me what you think, or to be tagged! x

“When you spend so long trapped in darkness, Lucien, you find that the darkness begins to stare back.” ― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“I’m so sorry, you poor bastard,” Feyre breathed, after learning that Cassian now lived across the hall from her eldest sister.

He chuckled, drinking from his glass. “She doesn’t seem that bad. That guy of hers seems like a real prick, though.”

Feyre snorted. “Don’t get me started.”

Cassian opened his mouth to speak but Rhysand leaned over. “No, seriously, don’t get her started.”

Feyre nudged him in the shoulder, causing him to laugh. “Anyway, where’s Azriel? He said he’d be here by now.”

“Had to go get Mila,” Cassian said, finishing off his glass. “Unexpectedly. Just texted about a half hour ago. There was an incident, apparently. The police called this time.”

Feyre nodded, understandingly. It wasn’t the first time Azriel’s plans had changed last minute, but when he was called on, he always went to get Mila.

Rhysand waved the bartender over, calling for another beer. “Karaoke night. Added you to the list, Feyre.”

Feyre froze. “Uh, no. I’m not going up there. Not after last time.”

Cassian grinned as Rhysand said, “I thought you gave a beautiful rendition of Like a Virgin.”

“Fuck you,” she murmured, and cursed herself for smiling.

A live band played in the corner, the lead singer getting far too into it. He’d taken his shirt off and given it to a drunk girl cheering him on about thirty minutes before, and after that, Feyre just hadn’t been able to take him seriously.

“Alright, I’ve had enough sadness,” Feyre said, hopping off her bar stool and handing her tall glass to Rhysand. “Come on, Cass. We’re going to dance.”

Cassian groaned, but it was all for show, because the moment he was on the dance floor, he had his arms around Feyre’s waist and he was swinging her around.

“You should ask Rhys!” Cassian yelled into her ear above the music. “He’s a better dancer than me!”

“But this is how I get all the ladies to notice you!” Feyre yelled back, grinning from ear to ear.

Cassian laughed, and spun her in a circle.

Feyre loved to dance. She didn’t do it often, only when she went out with the boys. She used to dance with Mor, but she was always busy with school, lately, since she decided to further her education. She wanted to be a doctor. How selfish.

She had called her on the way to the bar, with Rhysand in the car with her, behind the wheel.

Stop studying and come dance with me, she had said into the phone.

Mor had laughed. It’s finals week! A few more days and I get to come home for the summer. Then, we will dance, I promise.

Until then, she had Cassian.

And every time Feyre brought Cassian out onto the dance floor, the girls gravitated toward him.

True enough, as the second the song ended and another was beginning, a tall, blonde woman with a short black dress and combat boots had come up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. The second he turned to face her, Feyre hurried away.

Rhysand was laughing, watching the scene unfold. He handed Feyre her glass as she sat back on her stool.

“Works every time.”

“You’re the greatest wing man,” Rhysand agreed, pressing his bottle to his lips. “Alright, now it’s my turn.”

He set his glass on the bar top before standing up and holding out his hand. Feyre drained her glass before putting her hand in his.

He pulled her close to his body. He smelled of lavender and vanilla.

“Have you been using my soap?” she asked, leaning forward to talk into his ear.

He laughed, his breath hot against the side of her face as he said, “That depends...will you be pissed if I said yes?”

“Damn it, Rhys,” she said, unable to stop her grin as one of his hands found her waist, the other still in her hand.

They danced, and Feyre found herself loving every minute of it. Everything came so natural with Rhys. For the first time in a long time, Feyre was enjoying herself without any thought of all she had been going through.

That joy was nice, while it lasted.

Because half an hour later, Rhysand was pulled back by the shoulder and knocked to the floor by a fist that belonged to a man, all too familiar.

“What the fuck?” Feyre yelled, looking into Tamlin’s deep, green eyes.

“I knew it,” he hissed. “I fucking knew it.”

It was what he had accused her of, once more, when she was at his apartment that morning, getting the rest of her things.

You fucking Rhys, yet? He’d asked.

Feyre never answered him. She just got the box of her shit and left.

Rhysand was back on his feet, a bruise already forming on his eye bone, Cassian having come to Feyre’s side.

“Fucking whore,” Tamlin spat, then Cassian was standing in front of Feyre.

“You need to leave,” Rhysand said, as the music died down, obvious that there was a scene about to play out.

Feyre was mortified.

“Why?” Tamlin asked, turning around to face Rhysand. “This is a public space, I am just as welcome here as anyone else.”

“No,” Rhysand said, eyes narrowed. “You’re not.”

“Says the guy that was just knocked on his ass.”

Cassian took a step closer to Tamlin’s back, just as Rhysand took a step closer in front of him. “You need to leave, Tam.”

“Tam,” he repeated the old nickname. “Been a while since I heard that from you. Or Feyre, for that matter. But, I suppose she would stop calling me by my nickname the moment she started fucking you-”

Rhysand’s fist met Tamlin’s jaw, and Tamlin stumbled, catching himself before he could fall onto the floor.

Feyre’s eyes went wide as blood trickled out of the side of Tamlin’s mouth.

Tamlin started forward, but Cassian intervened, pushing Tamlin back by his shoulders. He whispered something feral into his ear, which made Tamlin stop. He looked from Feyre to Rhysand, shook his head, and walked out. Cassian looked back at the band, and said, “Where’s the music?”

They started up again and people began dancing like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Feyre’s hands were shaking, though, as she excused herself and hurried to the restroom. She locked herself inside of a stall and cried.

She was pissed.

Pissed at Tamlin, pissed at the sight of him, pissed that he came to ruin her night.

She was pissed at Rhysand, pissed that he’d punched her ex. He was better that than, better than to stoop to Tamlin’s level.

She was pissed at herself. Pissed that she cared. Pissed that it bothered her at all.

The door opened, and loud footsteps trailed to the other side of the stall door.

“Feyre.” A soft knock. “Open up.”

“Fuck off,” she said, wiping at her eyes.

“Open the door or I’ll crawl underneath and this floor is disgusting.”

Angrily, Feyre unlocked the door and pushed it open.

Rhysand was standing there, arms crossed. The bruise beneath his eye was turning a soft shade of blue. “I’m sor-”

“I’m ready to go home.”

Rhysand frowned. He reached out for her hand, and she let him take it. He pulled her toward him, into his chest, and wrapped his arms around her. “I’m sorry. Okay? I got pissed. I caused a scene. I’m sorry.”

“You can’t just go around hitting people,” she said, voice muffled into his shirt.

“I know,” he said.

“And I can stand up for myself without the two of you brutes causing a scene,” she said, referring to him and Cassian, who was most likely back to dancing with the tall blonde.

“I know,” he said, and leaned back, taking her face into her hands.

His eyes were full of worry, full of regret.

She understood where Tamlin was coming from, she supposed, in the fact that it would not be the craziest thing for Feyre to end up with Rhys. He was her best friend and she loved him, more than she loved most people, differently than she loved anyone else.

But they had never done anything. They had only ever been friends.

“Let’s go back out there. Drinks are on me,” he said.

“I thought they were already on you,” Feyre said, and Rhysand grinned, although it didn’t meet his eyes.

“I am sorry,” he said. “You can hit me, if you want.”

“Tempting,” Feyre mumbled, before pushing against his chest. “I’m going to poke you in your bruise when you least expect it.”

Rhysand laughed. “Feel better, do you?”

Feyre rolled her eyes, then pressed her lips to his cheek. Rhysand tensed, but it quickly faded. “Thank you for defending my honor, you savage caveman.”

Rhysand’s smile was contagious as he took her hand and led her back into the bar.

He called for the bartender and ordered a round of shots.

~~~~~

“Hungry?” Azriel asked, looking in the rear view mirror of his truck.

Mila sat in the backseat, her pink Velcro shoes kicking wildly. “Yes. I want chicken nuggets.”

Azriel chuckled. “You always want chicken nuggets.”

“Yeah,” she said, as if it were obvious, “because they’re yummy.”

“Alright,” he said, “but then we have to go home and get ready for bed. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, slowly. “When can I see Rhysie?”

Mila loved Rhysand more than anyone else. He was her man.

“Tomorrow, maybe. He’s not home tonight.”

“Is he somewhere being naughty?” she asked, giggling.

Azriel snorted. “Probably.”

He pulled into the parking lot of a fast food restaurant and parked. He unbuckled her car seat and carried her inside on his hip. Her arms were wrapped tightly around his neck.

After ordering, they sat near a window and ate chicken nuggets, french fries, and chocolate shakes.

“Is mama okay?” she asked, looking up at Azriel with big, brown eyes.

She may have only been four, but she saw far more than most people thought she did. Her mother, included.

Azriel set down the chicken nugget he was about to eat. “Yeah, babe. She just...she needs to get a little help, you know?”

Mila nodded, slowly, not quite understanding. “Help?”

“Yeah, from a doctor,” he explained, popping the chicken nugget into his mouth. “Here, know what you should try?”

Mila blinked. “What?”

He took the lid off her chocolate shake and dipped a french fry into it before putting it into his mouth.

Mila scrunched her nose. “Ewww!”

“You don’t know if it’s ewww until you try it,” he winked. “Try it and I’ll give you a dollar.”

Mila’s eyes grew wide. “A whole dollar?”

Azriel nodded. “Mhmm.”

“Fine,” she said, sassily, before dipping a french fry into her milkshake. She took a bite and thought about it for a second. “That’s yummy.”

“Told you so,” Azriel said, before dipping another french fry into her milkshake.

She stuck her tongue out at him.

He stuck his tongue out at her, too.

She giggled, and continued to eat.

And once she was full, Azriel carried her back to his truck and strapped her into her car seat before taking her back to his apartment. The minute he pulled in, she was already fast asleep. She’d had a big day.

He carried her up the stairs and unlocked his apartment door. After slipping off his shoes, he carried her to the back room, the guest room, which was dominantly covered in Mila’s belongings, and laid her down. He took off her shoes and covered her with a blanket.

Mila flopped around before she opened her eyes, sleepily. With a yawn, she said, “G’night, Uncle Az.”

“Goodnight, babe,” he whispered, and kissed her forehead before clicking on a batman nightlight and cracking the door behind him.

He meandered into the living room and slumped down in his chair. He grabbed the remote but didn’t turn on the t.v.

It wasn’t the first time it had happened.

And it wasn’t that he didn’t like having Mila. He loved having his niece with him, but that wasn’t the point, that wasn’t what pissed him off.

Mila was only four, living in a world she didn’t deserve. She was tossed into a situation the moment she had been born that wasn’t fair.

He fished his phone out of his pocket to see if anyone had called, but his screen was blank. Unsure of what happened with his sister after he’d picked up Mila from the police, Azriel tossed his phone on the side table, turned on the t.v., and settled back into the comfort of his lazyboy.

Mila believed that the crack of dawn was an appropriate time to wake up.

He’d better get some sleep.

~~~~~

“Mother’s tits, Feyre, your breath smells like shit.”

Rhysand had carried her up the stairs, and she had giggled in his face the entire time. By the time they were inside of their apartment and he was dropping her on the couch, he could hardly breathe from the overwhelming scent of tequila.

“Thank you for carrying me,” she sang, reaching up for him.

Rhysand shook his head, slipping off one of her sandals, then the other. “You are so fucking drunk.”

“Says the guy that gave me the shots,” she laughed, and then Rhysand turned on a light and she groaned. “Turn it off!”

Rhysand grinned. “Alright, come on. Let’s get you cleaned up and in bed.”

“No,” she said, yawning, snuggling into the couch. “This is where I’m staying tonight. Right. Fuckin. Here.”

“Let’s at least brush your teeth,” Rhysand said, laughing quietly. “And take a quick shower.”

“You just wanna see me naked,” she slurred.

Rhysand lifted a brow. “If I wanted to see you naked, I would’ve made up an excuse a long time ago. Come on.”

A lie, but she cooperated, nonetheless.

She clung to him as she stumbled down the hallway. And when she fell into the little bathroom, Rhysand flicked on a light, causing her to groan again. Rhysand, paying her whininess no mind, lifted her up onto the counter top of the vanity and turned on the sink. He grabbed her toothbrush, and put toothpaste on it, before handing it to her.

She blew a raspberry at him.

Rhysand shook his head, exasperated. “Very mature. Open up.”

“No.”

“Come on, Feyre, open up.”

“Nooooo.”

“Open your fucking mouth, Feyre,” Rhysand laughed, pulling at her bottom lip.

“Fine,” she groaned, obnoxiously, and opened her mouth, wide.

Rhysand, oh so patiently, brushed her teeth for her. “Spit,” he ordered. She did so. Then, he handed her a tiny cup full of water. “Rinse.” She did that, too.

“Better?” he asked, rinsing off her toothbrush before putting it back in the holder.

When he looked back to Feyre, she was staring at him. “You’re really fucking pretty.”

Rhysand snorted. “So I’m told.”

She took his face in her hands and squeezed his cheeks. His lips popped out as he rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna start the shower. Alright?”

She shook her head. “No, not yet.”

Her voice had grown quiet, her hands on his face loosening. “Do you love me, Rhysand?”

Rhysand lifted a brow as Feyre’s hands trailed down his cheeks, his neck, to his chest, where they rested over his heart. “You know I do.”

“Your heart is beating super fast,” she slurred, eyes bright.

“You are a beautiful woman, Feyre,” Rhysand said, smiling fondly. “But you are not a pretty drunk.”

Feyre scowled. “Start my shower, peasant.”

Rhysand huffed a laugh. “Yes, my Lady.”

He turned to do just that, but she pulled him back by the neck of his shirt, until his face was only an inch from hers.

“Will you join me in the shower, Rhysie?” she crooned.

Rhysand had imagined her asking him that so many times throughout the years, but her breath did not smell like mint-coated-tequila in any of those fantasies.

“As tempting as that sounds, I don’t think-”

She pressed her mouth against his, hungrily, and Rhysand froze. Her tongue slid against his, her teeth nipping at his bottom lip.

He pulled back, hastily, and cleared his throat. “Um….I think we should-”

Feyre leaned forward and heaved, puking violently all over Rhysand’s jeans. With nothing left to do, he sighed, gathering her hair into his hands as she cleared her stomach. “You should be happy I fucking love you, Feyre, darling.”

When she was done, her eyes were glazed over, watering, her skin pale, clammy. He waited a few minutes, holding back her hair with one hand and rubbing her knee with the other, before asking, “Done?”

Feyre groaned, eyelids growing heavy.

“Alright.” Rhysand pulled off his vomit-covered jeans and t-shirt and tossed them in the corner before taking off her tank top, tossing it in the corner, too.

“Take off your jeans, Feyre,” he ordered, gently, “unless you want to wake up smelling like shit in the morning.”

Rhysand laid a towel down on top of the mess on the floor and helped Feyre to her feet, where he unbuttoned her jeans and helped her slip them off. Her eyes were already fluttered shut as she sat back on the counter top in her bra and panties. Rhysand covered a washcloth in warm water and soap before cleaning around her mouth and down her chest, her abdomen, and her thighs - everywhere the vomit had landed. When he was done, he gathered her up into his arms, and carried her across the hall to her bedroom.

She was already sound asleep when he laid her down and tucked her in.

After shutting her door, in nothing but his boxer-briefs, Rhysand cleaned the vomit off the bathroom tile and vanity before gathering all the dirty shit and putting it into the washing machine. After taking a quick shower himself, he stumbled into his bedroom and fell onto his bed, face first, moaning as his bruise, where he’d been punched, made contact with his pillow.

It had been a hell of a night.

~~~~~

Nesta stared at the opposite side of the bathroom stall as Tomas thrust himself into her. She tried to fake the noises of pleasure at first, but she eventually gave up as the boredom grew.

Tomas leaned back, eventually, breathing heavily as he took in her expression. “You’re not enjoying this at all, are you?”

Nesta sighed. “I’ve fucked you too many times. Now, it just feels forced and never lasts long enough.”

His eyes narrowed and he stepped back, dropping his grip on her thighs.

She reached for her jeans on the dingy floor as he zipped up his pants and fled from the stall.

“Seriously?” Nesta called after him. “Quit acting like an ass.”

Her jeans were halfway up her legs when he left, leaving her alone in the restroom.

Once she was dressed, she left the stall and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was still looking good, hanging loosely behind her in curls. Her makeup was hardly smudged.

Pulling out a cigarette and her lighter, Nesta left the restroom and fell back into the loud, busy club. She pushed her way through the crowd until she was out the front door, into the parking lot.

When she got to their parking spot, Tomas’ car was gone.

“Fuck!” she yelled, looking around, exasperated, but he was already gone. “Fucking prick.”

She took a drag of her cigarette before running a hand anxiously through her hair.

It was dark.

She lived five blocks away.

It was not the best part of town.

She pulled her phone out of her back pocket, but it was dead. Of course.

With a sigh, and a hope that no one jumped her, Nesta began to walk back home.

Nesta liked the dark, the quiet. She liked being alone.

The only reason she had kept Tomas around for so long was because he was convenient. He bought her whatever she wanted and was able to find the shit that was hard to find. Now, she found all that a ridiculous reason to keep him around.

She dented his pride, and he had abandoned her at two in the morning.

Nesta walked quickly, looking around her often. She finished her cigarette and tossed it in the bushes, crossing her arms across her chest.

Behind her, a black truck turned the corner, driving slowly in her direction.

Nesta’s heart began beating fast, her pace picking up, just a little bit. She didn’t want them to know she was afraid, didn’t want them to think she was vulnerable.

Hopefully, soon, they would pass her and let her carry on with her walk.

She had four blocks to go.

The truck did not speed up. In fact, as the truck got closer to her, it slowed down more.

She walked even faster, her feet starting to hurt against the pavement in her thin flip-flops. But before she could panic any further, the truck was beside her, and the window was rolling down. “Need a ride?”

She didn’t look their way. She kept her eyes forward, walking quickly, chin held high.

“Nesta!”

Her eyes shot to the road, where Cassian was looking at her with a curious expression.

Nesta stopped.

Cassian stepped on the brakes.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she asked, arms crossed. “You can’t just drive behind a woman in the middle of the night on an abandoned street!”

Cassian raised a thick eyebrow. “Well, I thought it was you from back there, but I just wanted to be sure. Stopping for a random woman would have been creepy.”

Nesta scoffed. “We don’t know each other. To you, I am a random woman.”

“True,” Cassian agreed. “But we’re neighbors and I’m friends with your sister. So. Get in.”

“No, thanks,” Nesta murmured, pulling another cigarette out of her pocket. “I’m fine.”

“Come on,” Cassian said, following her, slowly, as she started to walk, again. “Get in the car. It’s not safe for you to be walking out here alone and you know it.”

“If I get in the fucking truck will you shut up and let me ride in silence?” she asked, turning to meet him, once more.

Cassian took a few seconds to debate it. “Yeah, alright.”

Nesta rolled her eyes as she went to the truck, but when she pulled on the handle, it was locked. “What the fuck?” she looked at him, annoyed.

“Cigarette stays out,” he said.

Nesta’s lips formed a straight line. “Seriously?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, mocking her tone. “This is a new truck, it won’t be smelling like shit. Put it out.”

Nesta scowled, but did as she was told before opening up the door, this time unlocked, and climbing inside.

Cassian didn’t move.

Nesta sighed. “What now?”

“Seat belt,” he said, and she swore she saw humor dancing in those damned hazel eyes.

She furiously strapped on her seat belt before grinding out, “There.”

“Good,” Cassian grinned, putting his truck in drive. “Do I want to know why you were walking down the street alone?”

“You probably do,” Nesta said, “but I won’t tell you.”

Cassian chuckled. “Fair enough.”

They rode the next few blocks in silence, Nesta staring at the dashboard, Cassian sneaking glances at her, every so often.

“I think you think it’s charming when you look at me like that, but it's not, and I prefer you cut it out,” she mumbled, as they pulled into the parking lot of their apartment complex.

Cassian shook his head. “I think you think people are looking at you when they’re not.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re insufferable.”

“Insufferable,” he repeated. “Nice word. What others would you use to describe me?”

He parked the car and she got out.

She was halfway up the first flight of stairs before he called from behind her, “A thank you would be nice!”

Her middle finger greeted him as he started at the stairs behind her.

“You’re welcome,” he purred.

Nesta wanted so badly to come back with a retort, to turn around and snap at him, but she didn’t. She was tired. Exhausted. Mentally. Physically. Emotionally.

All she wanted was to go to bed.

After reaching her apartment and digging her key out of her pocket, she opened the door and shut herself inside. A moment later she could hear Cassian’s door open and close behind him.

~~~~~

Elain should have been sleeping along with the rest of the city but she had too much energy.

She played her music, softly, careful not to wake her dad.

She did pushups for a minute.

Looked in the mirror.

Did sit ups for a minute.

Looked in the mirror.

Mountain climbers.

Looked in the mirror.

Leg extensions.

Looked in the mirror.

Flutter kicks…

She was breathing hard nearly an hour after she had begun, sweat glistening on her skin.

She stripped off her clothes and after one more glance in her bedroom mirror, she got into the shower. She let the cool water wash over her skin, let it wash away the impurities - the sweat, the stench, the thoughts she couldn’t shake.

She found her mind wandering all day, those thoughts running wild, after she had seen Graysen’s instagram.

She was so beautiful, his girlfriend. Long, auburn hair, striking blue eyes.

She was who he preferred.

Even when they were together, she was who he preferred. There was a time Graysen had loved her, she knew that, but that didn’t make it any easier when Elain got home early from work one day and saw her little blue car parked in their driveway.

Elain and Graysen were to be married in two months.

But they would not be getting married anymore.

Elain no longer warmed his bed, Elain no longer woke up next to him every morning, Elain no longer kissed him goodbye as they both left their home to go to work, to make money, to save for their future.

Graysen no longer loved her. Graysen no longer found her worthy. Graysen had grown bored with her, bored with the perfect, sweet, Elain Archeron.

The image still burned in her mind.

She had opened their front door and saw her shoes lying by the welcome mat. Noises of pleasure flooded out of the bedroom, from the bed where Elain and Graysen slept every night.

Elain would never sleep another night with Graysen in that bed again.

She and Graysen would never share anything again.

Not even the endless void that he’d created in the depths of her soul, nor the voice of insecurity, the voice that sounded a hell of a lot like his, that never left the back of her mind.

Elain hated him.

Elain loved him.

Elain hated that her love for him wouldn’t fade, hated that she still felt the pain so strongly, too strongly, as if it had just happened yesterday.

As the water grew colder, Elain sunk down into the tub and closed her eyes.

Perhaps she would sleep there tonight.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tag List (to be tagged, comment or send me an ask!)

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Prompts:

{ “I’m gonna fuck you so hard that you forget you ever met that asshole” - Feysand } -anonymous

{ “How about Nessian needing to fake date when they go home for the holidays?!” } - anonymous

{ “could u pls do like an elriel fic where azriel is like this mysterious bad boy and elain is a goody two shoes lik aaaaa i cant get that image out of my head” } - anonymous

#fanfic #fanfiction #tacmc AITA #nessian #feysand #elriel #acotar #acomaf #acowar #acofas #sjm #modern au

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gascon-en-exil · 3 years

Text

A Game of Thrones 10th Anniversary Season Ranking: Part 2

Link to Part 1

Time for the bottom half of the list. The four seasons here will surprise no one, but the order might.

#5 Season 6

You can tell what I most what to talk about here...but there's an order to these things.

S6 actually has a bunch of great ideas, but they drown beneath the most slapdash plotting and character work the show has seen yet in order to set the stage for the narrower conflicts of the last two seasons. It's notorious for bringing back characters who haven't been seen in a season or longer only to kill them off (Balon Greyjoy, Osha, Hodor, the Blackfish, Rickon, Walder Frey) or awkwardly graft them back into the main plot (Sandor Clegane, Bran). There are plot threads that ought to be compelling but are too rushed in execution, like the siege of Riverrun, Littlefinger's hand in the Battle of the Bastards, or Daenerys's time back among the Dothraki and then finally getting the hell out of Meereen. Arya hits on the only interesting part of her two-season sojourn in Braavos - a stage play, of all things - only for it to stumble at the end with a disappointing offscreen death and some incomprehensible philosophy ahead of the start of her murder tour of Westeros. There's also so much cutting off the branches, enough to be conspicuous; the final shot of Daenerys leading an armada of about half the remaining cast she assembled partially offscreen says that better than anything else. Well, not anything....

Highlight: Without exaggeration, the opening of S6E10 is easily my favorite sequence in all of GoT. The staging, the music, the mounting suspense even as it becomes increasingly obvious what's about to happen, the twisted religious references particularly in Cersei's mock confession to Unella, Tommen throwing himself out a window because he can't deal with the reality of how terrible his mother is, how Cersei gives absolutely no fucks whatsoever about murdering hundreds of people at once in a calculated act of vengeance largely prompted by her own poorly thought out actions - I love it all. It's the single most masterfully-executed act of villainy in the whole show - Daenerys torching King's Landing probably has a higher body count, but the presentation there is all muddled - and if I had any doubts about Cersei being my favorite multi-season major character they were silenced in this moment. The explosion of the Sept doesn't sit perfectly with me, because I liked the Tyrells and because of what I said about deaths like theirs and Renly's in the previous post under S2, but I think that unease only cements the strength of this sequence. It's an overused phrase in fandom these days, but GoT at its best is all about moral greyness that gives its audience room for multilayered reactions. Cersei nuking the Sept and making herself the sole power in King's Landing, which in a sense is just a more overt example of the kind of character/plot consolidation elsewhere represented by Daenerys's armada, is one of those events that's impossible to approach from a single angle if you care about any of the characters involved. And hey, it's not in the books (yet, presumably), so unlike Ned's death or the Red Wedding the GoT showrunners can take the credit for realizing this one.

Favorite death: Even leaving aside the Sept and related deaths there's a lot of good ones to choose from in S6. Ramsey is cathartic but too gory for me, Osha's was a clever callback but a little delayed, it's hard to pin down specific deaths when Daenerys incinerates the khals, and Arya only gets half credit for Walder Frey and his sons when she saves the rest of the house for the opening of S7. I'm thinking Hodor, not so much because I enjoy his character or the manner of his death but because it's a clever bit of playing with language (that must have been hell to render in other languages for dubbing) wrapped up in some entertainingly murky consent issues and some closed time loop weirdness. It's all very...extra? Is that the word for it?

Least favorite death: Offscreen deaths continue to be mostly letdowns, in this case Blackfish and the Waif. Way to botch the ending of Arya's already near-pointless Braavos arc, guys. Speaking of Arya, this spot goes to Lady Crane, whom the Waif somehow kills with a stool or something. It's a dumb way to send off an entertaining minor character.

#6 Season 8

I swear that I'm not putting S8 this high solely because of Jonmund kind of sort of happening. I've never been very interested in either of them and the sex would be far too bear-on-otter to suit my pornographic preferences, but even so the choice to close out the series with them is hilarious.

I really don't need to elaborate on why S8 is down here; everyone who's ever watched the show has done as much in the nearly two years since it wrapped up. I do however need to explain why I've ranked not one but two seasons below it. My biggest argument here is that I don't believe it's fair to critique S8 for problems it inherited from earlier seasons. A non-comprehensive list:

Mad Queen Daenerys: unevenly built up beginning from S1 and continuing in some form through every following season

The questionable racial optics of Dany's army: also seeded as early as S1 and solidified by S3 with the Slaver's Bay arc

Cersei only succeeding because she makes stupid decisions and then lucks out until she doesn't: apparent from S1, directly lampshaded by Tywin in S3, fully on display with the Faith Militant arc of S5-6

Jaime not getting a redemption arc or falling in love with Brienne: evident with his repeated returns to Cersei throughout the show as one of the most consistent elements of his character, particularly in S4 and during the siege of Riverrun in S6

Tyrion grabbing the idiot ball/becoming a flat audience surrogate mouthpiece: started in S5 around the time the showrunners ran out of book material for him and wanted to make him more of a PoV character and his arc less of a downward spiral, although I've seen arguments that changes from the books involving his Tysha story and Shae set him on this trajectory even earlier

The hardening of Sansa's character: began in earnest in S4 and never let up from there

The strange ordering of antagonists: set down by S7's equally strange plot structure - the Night King had to come first with that setup

CleganeBowl and the dumber twists: from what I've heard the whole thing of writing around fans on the internet guessing plot twists started pretty much when the book content ended, so S5-6 maybe?

Yes, there's plenty to criticize about S8 on its own merits...but just as much that was merely the writers doing what they could at that point with deeply flawed material.

Highlight: This may sound cheesy, but the better parts of S8 are almost all the cinematic ones, whether that's E2 being a bottle episode with tons of poignant character send-offs before the big battle, a handful of deaths with actual satisfying weight like Jorah's and Theon's, and an epilogue that incorporates both closure for individuals and the broader uncertainty of messy socio-political systems that GoT has always been known for before working its way back to the Starks at the very end for some tidy bookending. Even imperfect moments like the Lannister twins' death and the resolution of Sansa's character felt weighty and appropriate based on what had come before.

Favorite death: Forget about the audio commentary attempting to flatten Cersei's character; Cersei and Jaime Lannister have an excellent end. Cersei especially, as the scenes of her stumbling her way down into the catacombs as the Red Keep crashes down around her really show off how her world is abruptly falling apart and how she retreats into her own self-interest at the end in spite of her demise being at least partially of her own doing. There's some stupid moments associated with these scenes, like Jaime dueling Euron to the death and CleganeBowl, but I can excuse those when the twins end up dying exactly where you'd expect them to: in each other's arms, in a ruined monument to their family's grand ambitions that, like Casterly Rock itself, was taken from another family.

Least favorite death: Quite a few dumb ones in S8 have become forever infamous. Missandei sticks out, and for me Varys too just as much because of how the writing pushes him to do the dumbest thing he could possibly do purely for the sake of killing him off ten minutes into the penultimate episode. But no one belongs here more than Daenerys Targaryen, killed at the height of a rushed and uncertain villain reveal by a man who takes advantage of their romantic history (who is also her family, because Targaryens) to stab her in a moment of vulnerability - pretty much only because another man tells him that Daenerys is the final boss. Narratively speaking that might be the case, but even so this is the end result of multiple seasons of middling-to-bad buildup. Not even Drogon burning the symbolism can salvage that. Also Fire Emblem: Three Houses did this scene and did it better.

#7 Season 5

...Yeah, we're going to have to go there.

Sansa's rape is not a plot point that personally touches me much. It's terribly framed in the moment and the followup in later seasons is inconsistent at best, but it's not a kind of trauma I can relate to. On the other hand, in the very same episode Loras is tried and imprisoned for homosexuality, and Margery faces the same punishment for lying for her brother. That hits much closer to home, not just for the homophobia but also for the culture war undertones of the not!French Tyrells persecuted by a not!Anglo fanatic who later reveals himself to be the in-universe equivalent of a Protestant. The trial is just one part of Cersei's shortsighted scheming, just as Sansa being married off to Ramsey is part of Littlefinger's, and both of them get their comeuppance in the end...but it's unsettling all the same. I especially hate what the Faith Militant arc does to King's Landing in S5, swiftly converting it from my favorite setting in GoT to a tense theocratic nightmare that only remains interesting to me because Cersei is consistently awesome. What's more, pretty much everything about S5 that isn't viscerally uncomfortable is dragged out and dull instead: the Dorne arc, Daenerys's second season in Meereen, Arya in Braavos, Stannis and co. at Castle Black. The most any of these storylines can hope for is some kind of bombastic finale, and while several of them deliver it's not enough to make up for what comes before, or how disappointing everything here builds from S4. S4 has Oberyn, S5 has the Sand Snakes - I think that sums up the contrast well.

Highlight: S5 does get stronger near the end. As much as his character annoys me I did like the High Sparrow revealing his pseudo-Protestant bent to Cersei just before he imprisons her, and there's a cathartic rawness to Cersei's walk of atonement where you can both feel her pain and humiliation and understand that she's getting exactly what she deserves (and this is what leads into the climax of S6, so it deserves points just for that). The swiftness of Stannis's fall renders his death and that of his family a bit hollow, but it's brutal and final and fittingly ignominious for a character with such grand ambitions but so little relevance to the larger story. The fighting pits of Meereen sequence is cinematic if nothing else, and even the resolution to the Dorne arc salvages the whole thing a tiny bit by playing into the retributive cycles of vengeance idea (and Myrcella knows about the twincest and doesn't care, aww - no idea why that stuck with me, but it's cute all the same). Oh, and Hardhome...it's alright. Not great, not crap, but alright.

Favorite death: I don't know why, but Theon tossing Myranda to her death is always funny to me. Maybe because it's so unexpected?

Least favorite death: Arya's execution of Meryn Trant is meant to be another one of the season's big finale moments, but the scene is graphic and goes on forever and I can't help but be grossed out. This is different from, say, Shireen's death, which is supposed to be painful to witness.

#8 Season 7

I can't tell if S7's low ranking is as self-explanatory as S8's or not. At least one recent retrospective on GoT's ruined legacy I've come across outright asserts that S7 is judged less harshly in light of how bad S8 was. If it were not immediately obvious by where I've placed each of them, I don't share that opinion.

Because S7 is just a mess, and the drop-off in quality is so much more painful here than it is anywhere else in the series except maybe from S4 to S5 (and that's more about S4 being as good as it is). The pacing ramps up to uncomfortable levels to match the shortened seasons, the structure pivots awkwardly halfway through from Daenerys vs. Cersei to Jon/Dany caring about ice zombies, said pivot relies largely on characters (mostly Tyrion) making a series of catastrophically stupid tactical decisions, and very few of the smaller set pieces land with any real impact as the show's focus narrows to its endgame conflict. As with S6 there are still some good ideas, but they're botched in execution. The conflict between Sansa and Arya matches their characters, but the leadup to that conflict ending with Littlefinger's execution is missing some key steps. Daenerys's diverse armada pitted against Cersei weaponizing the xenophobia of the people of King's Landing could have been interesting, but there's little room to explore that when Cersei keeps winning only because Tyrion has such a firm grip on the idiot ball and when Euron gets so much screentime he barely warrants. Speaking of Tyrion's idiot ball, does anyone like the heist film-esque ice zombie retrieval plotline? Its stupidity is matched only by its utter futility, because Cersei isn't trustworthy and nobody seems to ever get that.

And how could I forget Sam's shit montage? Sums up S7 perfectly, really. To think that that is part of the only extended length of time the show ever spends in the Reach....

Highlight: A handful of character moments save this season from being irredeemable garbage. As you can guess from my screencap choice, Olenna's final scene is one of them, even if Highgarden itself is given insultingly short shrift. S7 also manages what I thought was previously impossible in that it makes me care somewhat about Ellaria Sand, courtesy of the awful death Cersei plans for her and her remaining daughter. The other Sand Snakes are killed with their own weapons, which shows off Euron's demented creativity if nothing else. I like the entertainingly twisted choice to cut the Jon/Dany sex scene with the reveal that they're related. And, uh...the Jonmund ship tease kind of makes the zombie retrieval team bearable? I'm really grasping at straws here.

Favorite death: It's more about her final dialogue with Jaime than her actual death, but again I'm going to have to highlight Olenna Tyrell here for lack of better options. She drops the bombshell about Joffrey that the audience figured out almost as soon as it happened but still, makes it plain what I've been saying about how Jaime's arc has never really been about redemption, and is just about the only person to ever call Cersei out for that whole mass murder thing. There's a reason "I want her to know it was me" became a meme format.

Least favorite death: There aren't any glaringly bad deaths in S7, just mediocre or unremarkable ones. I still think the decision to have Arya finish off House Frey in the season's opening rather than along with their father at the end of S6 was a strange one that doesn't add much of dramatic value.

#Game of Thrones #GoT

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