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#academics mention
yeoldenews · 1 month
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While we’re on the subject of names, is there an explanation for how traditional nicknames came about that are seemingly unrelated to, or have little in common with, the original name?
ie- John/Jack, Richard/Dick, Henry/Harry/Hank, Charles/Chuck, Margaret/Peggy/Daisy, Sarah/Sally, Mary/Molly, Anne/Nan, etc
I am actually over a week into researching a huge follow-up post (probably more than one if I’m being honest) about the history of nickname usage, so I will be going into this in much, much more detail at a hopefully not-so-later date - if I have not lost my mind. (Two days ago I spent three hours chasing down a source lead that turned out to be a typographical error from 1727 that was then quoted in source after source for the next 150 years.)
As a preview though, here’s some info about the names you mentioned:
The origins of a good portion of common English nicknames come down to the simple fact that people really, really like rhyming things. Will 🠞Bill, Rob🠞Bob, Rick🠞Dick, Meg🠞Peg.
It may seem like a weird reason, but how many of you have known an Anna/Hannah-Banana? I exclusively refer to my Mom’s cat as Toes even though her name is Moe (Moesie-Toesies 🠞 Toesies 🠞 Toes).
Jack likely evolved from the use of the Middle English diminutive suffix “-chen” - pronounced (and often spelled) “-kyn” or “kin”. The use of -chen as a diminutive suffix still endures in modern German - as in “liebchen” = sweetheart (lieb “love” + -chen).
John (Jan) 🠞 Jankin 🠞 Jackin 🠞 Jack.
Hank was also originally a nickname for John from the same source. I and J were not distinct letters in English until the 17th Century. “Iankin” would have been nearly indistinguishable in pronunciation from “Hankin” due to H-dropping. It’s believed to have switched over to being a nickname for Henry in early Colonial America due to the English being exposed to the Dutch nickname for Henrik - “Henk”.
Harry is thought to be a remnant of how Henry was pronounced up until the early modern era. The name was introduced to England during the Norman conquest as the French Henri (On-REE). The already muted nasal n was dropped in the English pronunciation. With a lack of standardized spelling, the two names were used interchangeably in records throughout the middle ages. So all the early English King Henrys would have written their name Henry and pronounced it Harry.
Sally and Molly likely developed simply because little kids can’t say R’s or L’s. Mary 🠞 Mawy 🠞 Molly. Sary 🠞 Sawy 🠞 Sally.
Daisy became a nickname for Margaret because in French garden daisies are called marguerites.
Nan for Anne is an example of a very cool linguistic process called rebracketing, where two words that are often said/written together transfer letters/morphemes over time. The English use of “an” instead of “a” before words beginning with vowels is a common cause of rebracketing. For example: the Middle English “an eute” became “a newt”, and “a napron” became “an apron”. In the case of nicknames the use of the archaic possessive “mine” is often the culprit. “Mine Anne” over time became “My Nan” as “mine” fell out of use. Ned and Nell have the same origin.
Oddly enough the word “nickname” is itself a result of rebracketing, from the Middle English “an eke (meaning additional) name”.
I realized earlier this week that my cat (Toe’s sister) also has a rebracketing nickname. Her name is Mina, but I call her Nom Nom - formed by me being very annoying and saying her name a bunch of time in a row - miNAMiNAMiNAM.
Chuck is a very modern (20th century) nickname which I’ll have to get back to you on as I started my research in the 16th century and am only up to the 1810s so far lol.
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fairydrowning · 1 year
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ما هو الحب في رأيك؟
أن تبتسم حين يبدأ احدهُم بالحديث معك، دون أن يخبرك شيءً مميزاً، فقط 'مرحباً.'
What do you think is love?
To smile when someone starts talking to you, without telling you anything special, just 'hello.'
– Mahmoud Darwish
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hedgehog-moss · 2 years
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(replying to this post)
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That’s a good example of the perils of domesticating translations! It seems obvious that if you try to adapt an ongoing series by changing a main character’s hometown so it’s more local, at some point you’re going to run into problems, like a whole book where they visit their hometown, which will need an in-depth rewrite so it stays coherent.
The France-French translations of Baby-Sitters Club were still set in the US, so the characters had names that were slightly domesticated so as not to frighten French children, but not so much that it wouldn’t make sense for these girls to be American—e.g. Mary Ann became Mary-Anne vs. Anne-Marie in Québec French, and Dawn and Stacey became Carla and Lucy, which still sounds American to a French kid, but not as unconscionably American as their original names. (Part of it is finding names that won’t be difficult to pronounce—but the Famous Five kids had easily-pronounced names like Julian and Dick, and they still ended up heavily Frenchified, into François and Michel. And the books were set in Brittany in the French translations, instead of England, even though French kids could have handled reading a story that was set five metres to the left.)
I remember feeling puzzled about Nancy Drew at one point, because she’s such a household name in anglo literature and I’d never ever heard of her, so I was like, we’ve translated every other popular anglo series, why have I never seen a Nancy Drew book in a French library? And then I discovered that Alice Roy from the “Alice” book series in French was, in fact, Nancy Drew. It blew my mind—Nancy Drew is Alice!! omg, I did know her this whole time. I read somewhere that the French translation re-named her because French kids would have no idea how to pronounce “Drew” and because they would be more likely to associate “Nancy” with the French city of the same name, so it wouldn’t feel anglo enough. So, amusingly, it was a mix of domesticating and foreignising. 
One type of domestication that’s regrettably popular in children’s literature is “temporal” domestication—when you re-translate older books to modernise the language and remove references that would “confuse” today’s kids (not talking about changing aspects of the books that wouldn’t fly with today’s sensibilities, that’s another discussion.) In revised editions of the Famous Five books in the UK, “shall / shan’t” were changed to “will / won’t”, dated words like “horrid” became “horrible”, “trunks” -> “suitcases”, etc. It’s a form of domesticating translation—from 1950s English to modern English. Personally I’m not a fan of it, because in a lot of instances, “modernising” prose for children is synonymous with pruning it and dumbing it down.
In French children’s literature spatial domesticating is losing steam while this kind of temporal domesticating is on the rise—we now feel like French kids can handle reading about an English boy named Julian who lives in England, rather than making the story about François in Brittany, but apparently kids can’t handle reading about a boy who lives in the 1950s and speaks accordingly. In recent re-translations of the Famous Five books they changed the passé simple conjugations to the less complex present, and the “nous” to “on” in the kids’ dialogue among other things, to make the text less formal, more modern—and simpler. The Spanish revised editions have examples of both trends—George calls her father “Padre” in the original translation and “Papá” in the modern one (temporal domesticating—the UK reprints do the same thing, changing “Father” to “Dad”); the kids having tea was initially translated as “tomar el té”, while the new translation changed it to “merendar” (spatial domesticating—and sure, it’s a similar enough concept, but it erases cultural differences. If you’re reading about English kids you can accept that they refer to their snack time as la hora del té rather than la merienda...)
Idk, I think kids who enjoy reading can handle books about fictional children that don’t live and talk just as they do; identifying with people who are quite different from you is part of the fun of reading. I remember reading as a kid the Comtesse de Ségur children’s books which were written under Napoléon III, and the 19th century language was a delightful aspect of them—the fact that little kids my age used imperfect subjunctive in casual conversation was hilarious to me. I was saying in my previous post that domesticating your translation too much evinces a lack of respect for your reader’s ability to handle unfamiliar concepts, and I think we should try to have a little more respect for children in that regard.
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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
Mod opinion: I've read this book for a college course on trans stories and I didn't really like it (the other book we read in its entirety for the course was stone butch blues though, so it had tough competition, but I really did not enjoy middlesex because it treats the intersex character horribly). Also note that this book is heavily criticised by intersex activist for its interphobia and fetishization of intersex bodies.
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With the way Walt wasted no time to start abusing Jesse as soon as they partnered up, and considering Walt treats Jesse like he's his son AND his wife... Do you think this means Walt had been bursting at the seams to abuse his real son and real wife this whole time, and only with Jesse did he have a chance to do so?
*Pushes glasses up on nose as though I am a respected scholar in a legitimate field of study* Ok so I hate to answer a compelling question with a kind of roundabout, not at all concrete answer but here goes: Walter wants to do whatever Walter wants to do, in the moment, without having to concern himself with that pesky, pedestrian little irritant known as ye olde consequences. He’s your basic old white fart who, because he grew up with the oxymoron of the white man as a vehicle for both exceptionalism and the Everyman, believes that consequences should not apply to him, and feels that he has been hard done by because, shocker, his stagnancy prior to the beginning of the series hasn’t resulted in everything he ever wanted falling into his lap! He does abuse both Skyler and Flynn over the course of the series, the assault on Skyler in season two being the most overtly violent of these instances, though it is heavily implied in season five that this isn’t even a one time occurrence; “I can’t even keep you out of my bed!” It’s also in season two that he peer pressures his teenage son into drinking to excess to gain the upper hand in his one-sided pissing contest with Hank, and this mirrors the ways in which he flexes his control over Jesse in front of Gus and Mike. Walter is dangerous precisely because he doesn’t view himself as an abuser, it’s not like he wistfully daydreams about slouching around the house in a wifebeater, terrorizing his wife and kids until they walk on eggshells around him. In fact, he’s shown throughout the series to act like a little pissbaby throwing a little pissbaby tantrum whenever he’s treated by his family like the monster he is. He wants to be able to act on his anger, to rape his wife and bully his son, without being subject to any of the organic repercussions these actions would inevitably induce. He doesn’t want to play the part of the mild-mannered family man anymore, or put in any of the work required to keep up that front, but he still wants to be seen as the provider and benevolent patriarch. He wants to have his fucking cake and eat it to.
That’s where Jesse comes in.
Walter loves Jesse, he does. The problem was never that he didn’t love Jesse, it was why he loved Jesse. Walter loves Jesse more than Flynn, that much was confirmed by Vince in a quote I can’t find anymore for the fucking life of me so you’ll just have to take my word for it ig. Walter might even love Jesse more than Skyler. But he doesn’t love Jesse as a person so much as a conduit, as an indispensable resource. It’s pretty vital, actually, that the person Walter projects all his shit onto isn’t a part of his immediate family, because then Jesse can be whatever he wants him to be. It’s great for Walter that Jesse’s a junkie, because then, according to societal norms, he doesn’t have to see Jesse as human when he’s taking out all of his anger on him. When Jesse isn’t being malleable enough for his liking, or even if Walt’s mad about something else entirely, then Jesse’s just a junkie, a nobody, an ungrateful, petulant fuck-up. When Walter is being rightfully shut out by his family or needs Jesse for some material task, then Jesse is practically family to him. They’re partners. It’s a terrible burden to put on an impressionable 24-year-old, a pretty fucking shitty thing to do to someone who trusts you, more than they should, and an impossible exception to live up to, to be someone’s everything.
So when Jesse inevitably fails at it, inevitably falls short of this perfectly imperfect idealization of himself, he is punished, horribly.
Walter never would have done the things he did to Jesse to Flynn, or to Skyler.
He doesn’t love them as much.
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annabelle--cane · 5 months
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saw a post the other day where someone was frothing mad about a poll that went around asking about preferred lgbtq community terms where "queer" swept with like 70% votes, and it was all the usual stuff, but the thing that got me is the poster said something like "you guys are trying to make 'queer' the academic term" and. comrade "queer" has been the academic term. for decades. it's really easy to see looking at the library in my school's queer student center, you see books published in the 70s and 80s referring to "gay studies," then "gay and lesbian studies" in the 80s into the early 90s, then "queer studies" in the mid 90s onwards. I don't think it was even a particularly pointed language choice, a single syllable word is just a lot easier to print and say than several words or an acronym that keeps changing and rearranging every few years. like. this is so so not a 2010s phenomenon of young people not knowing what they're talking about.
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atthebell-moved · 1 year
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hi, i completely agree that the fandom has a problem with misogyny and often fails at self-introspection. my question is, do you have any resources/tips/thoughts on how to be better about it? even, how to recognize it in yourself the first place? "ok i'll stop being a misogynist now" is a lot easier said than done, especially for people who might not be that educated on the subject, and majority of the people in this fandom are quite young as well.
this is long as fuck and possibly somewhat incoherent bc it took so long to write but i did my best
my biggest tip for people who don't know much about misogyny is to look at your own behavior and learn how to clock what you're doing as sexist.
are you criticizing a female creator? think about why you're doing it, what the actual beef you have with them is. if it seems to be just a sense of discomfort or thinking they're annoying or overly loud or pushy, think about male ccs who act the same way and why you dont consider them annoying. are you annoyed with them for being on a male cc's stream? why? does it feel like theyre taking up too much attention? do you get annoyed with them for talking too much or flirting with guys? for gaming especially-- do you get annoyed with them for not knowing something or being "bad" at a game? think about why that is and why its just funny when a male cc is bad at games or doesnt know something.
a HUGE problem i see in this fandom is the Madonna-whore complex, repackaged as the little sister-racist dichotomy (kudos to @yourlittlemenace for that phrasing).
if a female cc is deemed to be "playing nice" (doesnt talk too much, is "nice", streams with male ccs but doesnt flirt with them, isn't "overtly sexual"), she's the little sister of the group. all the male ccs "protect" her, she literally folds their laundry, she doesnt call out how people treat her, and the fandom pretends that this is a normal and cool way to treat women who are public figures. this also goes for mom/big sister/etc. if you think you haven't done this, think about all the aus where you've forced puffy into some kind of maternal or sisterly role when it made no sense. then think about how pissed people got when she decided not to be the server therapist and was "mean" to Tommy (in lore, with permission. that she didnt even need to get. see that clip i rbed earlier from her podcast.)
if the fandom decides she doesnt play nice, if she flirts with male ccs too much or stands up for herself or points out how unfair it is that she's being treated this way, she gets demeaned, harassed, and shunned by the fandom. consider, again, puffy. consider how niki flirted with wilbur and talked about misogyny and got called a racist for *checks notes* "speaking to schlatt and fundy" and "not being a native english speaker". she got called a slut and a queerbaiter for kissing another woman despite being bisexual.
consider how hard people went down on hannah for having said the r slur several years back versus how hard they went on dream for the same thing. and how people dug it up as a direct response to her being on stream with dream. consider how every time hannah talks about how unfair it is that the mcc subreddit treats her like trash, she has to delete all her tweets bc they harass her to hell and back and act like she's an asshole for pointing out their hypocrisy.
the fandom doesnt do this across the board; i shouldnt have to say this, but its not an everyone versus no one issue. some people do this outright and loud, some dont seem to realize theyre doing it, and a few people dont do it at all (incredibly rare, i can count on one hand the number of people who genuinely seem to try to avoid these issues, which is why im complaining).
in terms of lore, have you ever once done analysis on a female character? why do you think you haven't? the bechdel-wallace test is an (imperfect) way of gauging how a piece of media ignores women and prioritizes men. think about the fact that there are FOUR female ccs on the DSMP and they are continually ignored in favor of male characters. consider that puffy and aimsey both talked about trying to do genuine lore and getting shafted, either because no one was online and wouldn't put in the effort to stream with them or because they received insane amounts of criticism for breaking anything on the server, despite the clear lack of "no griefing" rules and the precedent that you can blow other people's shit up (tommy leveling one of puffy's builds, amongst many other examples).
a quick thing about ships: have you ever wondered why m/m ships are so popular? the general consensus amongst people who care about feminism and are into fandom studies is that for a long period of time, m/m was hugely popular because women are so rarely written as full and complete characters in any media. so people took to engaging with m/m ships and writing about them because they were the most fulfilling relationships, and because misogyny led them to be predisposed to be uninterested in female characters.
say an m/m ship is incredibly popular, something like, i dunno, john watson and sherlock holmes from bbc sherlock. lets also say the canonical media presents one or both of the characters with a female love interest. how do you think a fandom that prioritizes m/m ships and is primed to be disinterested in women as characters (either because of our society's role in teaching people that women do not matter or because of fandom's history in assuming female characters are not fleshed out) is going to react? if you said theyre going to send undue amounts of criticism her way and act like its an act of homophobia to give a canonically straight character a female love interest, congrats, you've figured out a huge component in fandom misogyny. take this, amplify it over several decades, and add the psychic damage that supernatural gave society. queerbaiting is bad but mistreating female characters in service of nonexistent queer relationships is also bad.
this is relevant in general but i also believe its relevant for the dsmp because of the complete lack of m/f ships. aside from phil and kristin, who are literally married irl and kristin isn't even on the server, there are no m/f ships that involve female creators. this is not, despite what you may think, due to the inherently yaoi nature of minecraft roleplay. this is because the creators, including the male ones, are afraid of the blowback of m/f flirting and how fucking awful people are to female ccs anytime it happens. once again look at niki. as another example, consider how notfounders harassed the living daylights out of mxmtoon for flirting with gnf on twitter. if i was a cc i would avoid it like the plague too considering how happy people are to dig shit up about them or accuse them of being a slut or an attention whore/"pick me girl" for speaking to a man.
one last thing, this is more about fanart than anything else but stop drawing women to look like teenage boys. the amount of fanart i see where i literally cannot tell if someone has drawn niki or tommy is fucking insane. niki has curves. draw her with them. if you cannot draw women or people outside a very specific body type you cannot draw. fatphobia and misogyny have a clear overlap.
i cant think of anything else and ive already spent forever on this. look into feminist media analysis. think twice about how you react to female ccs & female characters. consider not just what characters have interesting stories but who is allowed to have interesting stories. you might be neglecting someone who has a lot going on because you're dismissing a female character as inherently less likely to be interesting. you might not even know someone has an interesting story because the fandom neglects it so completely.
as a final little note: like i said earlier, if you're not familiar with gender & sexuality studies, you may not know this, but homophobia and transphobia are rooted in misogyny. the idea that gender is immutable and rigid is because of the patriarchy. this is why gendered slurs are used against queer people and why queer men in particular get accused of and demeaned for being feminine. your understanding of queerphobia is incomplete without considering how sexism plays a role.
also go read everything rayne fisher-quann has ever written but especially this piece on getting woman'd and listen to you're wrong about
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faeofdusk · 7 months
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MLM ships are like "we used to be so close, but we once got angry and said really mean things to each other, and our relationship still carries a lot of tension from that ):" while WLW ships are like "Yeah, she killed my father in front of everyone, but she also feels bad about it so I think it's time we move on from that (:"
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flananjan · 1 month
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mahal kita my medicine
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inspired by this song <3
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chiquilines · 4 months
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Yeah yeah genderswap kiribaku are getting me through the week what about it
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tizian-a · 6 months
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october, the happy month before seasonal depression hits
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sisterdivinium · 11 months
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If we are to take a deep dive, it is best to assure the place we're leaping from is stable, so let's do that by starting with the obvious.
The subject in both of these sentences is the same: the Halo. Both of these characters have borne it. Both sentences present the same grammatical structure and answer directly to one another despite the distance in time and space between one and the other's utterances. To Ava, the receiver of these conflicting messages, both claims prove themselves to be ultimately true, for the Halo acts as a gift, in granting her a second chance at a life she never had, and also as a burden, as it imposes on her responsibilities and demands of her sacrifices she would otherwise have never known.
But the show itself openly invites us to dig deeper, so we should not be contented with the obvious alone.
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If there is always more, then we must peel back the surface and peek at what is underneath if we are to grasp at least a fraction of the functioning of Warrior Nun in different levels—be it in small scale, pertaining to the characters themselves, or be it in large scale, including how all of it relates to us as viewers in the end.
These two moments of season one are but a fragment of the show’s comprehensive universe, but we will examine them closely to see just how much meaning we can find in them, deceptively simple as they seem.
As mentioned above, the grammatical structure of both sentences is shared between them: “the [subject] is a [noun]”. This could lead to some sort of direct description we associate with the act of definition, of explaining what something is, as in “the pope is a man” or, to use the same reference as Mother Superion and Shannon do, “the Halo is an object”. In fact, had this been the case, we would have been closer to Ava’s own conclusion of the Halo being “a hunk of magic metal embedded in [her] back”, as this is a characteristic anyone could ascribe to it upon examination.
Yet the words used by both former warrior nuns are “gift” and “burden”. If they describe the Halo, then it is not in terms derived from objectively observable traits it possesses (such as it being made of metal), but in a wholly subjective manner. When Mother Superion and Shannon say the Halo is this or that, both imply that it is this or that as relates to themselves. In relaying what the Halo supposedly “is” to Ava, they pre-interpret it for her, infusing it with their own points of view—their beliefs. What they say of the Halo is much more a reflection of who they are than anything the Halo in itself could be.
A) The gift
A gift is, as we know, a present. It presupposes a giver and a receiver, as well as some degree of gratitude on the part of the latter, even if justified by politeness alone.
Mother Superion, embodying the authority of the Catholic church, framed by candles and an altar behind her while making use of short, straightforward affirmations, does not need to clearly state who occupies these positions: we can safely infer that the giver here is God and the beneficiary of this divine benevolence is Ava. A definiteness is patent in the sentences that follow—here is the power of the institution at work, for if Mother Superion starts out by “defining” the Halo, now she defines Ava through it. An inversion takes place, as the woman allows the object to define the woman (as “God’s champion” who “fights in His name”) rather than the other way around. The church, the Halo construct Ava as a subject, subjecting her to certain ideas of what she should be. She is the warrior nun despite having no say in it, not being a warrior and much less a nun.
At first sight, it wouldn’t make sense to interact with Ava in these terms, especially if, by this scene, Mother Superion has already read her file. It wouldn’t be difficult to deduce how expressions crafted with religious colours might impact an audience that does not show any religious proclivities. Furthermore, the tradition of rhetoric has always taught that speakers ought to adapt to their listeners if they wish to get their point across, so either Mother Superion is incompetent at communication, lacking sensibility and skills, or she is making a calculated move—one that is fully supported by her hierarchical position. After all, superiors seldom need to rationally convince their subordinates of doing something given how the latter are compelled instead by power dynamics to get in line—or else.
The strategy doesn’t really work on Ava.
In semiotic terms, we could even argue that there is something confusing happening in this scene—a narrative phase of manipulation (wherein someone tries to get someone else to accept and do something), we could say that it contains hints of both seduction (a positive commentary on the interlocutor—it’s not just about anyone who can be god’s champion, so this is a positive distinction) and intimidation (the threat of negative consequences if the interlocutor doesn’t comply—there is an implied order in the sequence, meaning Ava cannot refuse to be “God’s champion”). Ava might not share in this world-view, but it is what the church and its followers propose: a gift from God is a positive value. Being chosen by God to do something, even fighting and possibly dying in the process, is a positive value. Lilith is standing right there beside them and, at this point, she would surely agree and see nothing of this exchange in a negative light.
Yet Ava isn’t a nun and indeed she does not perceive any of these “honours” as being desirable. Mother Superion’s stance, the image she presents of herself as a strict nun herself when Ava has been mistreated by them all her life, equally gives her no reason to be persuaded, much on the contrary.
The manipulation fails. Ava is told God gave her the gift of life… And that now she is to endanger and potentially lose that very same life as some sort of gesture of gratitude. The logic is unimpressive at best and frankly absurd at worst.
Within the framework of the church, however, it makes perfect sense. Misattributed and misconstrued as it might be, the motto of credo quia absurdum is still pertinent: “I believe because it is absurd”. That a god should grant life only to claim it back through violence is perfectly acceptable if one believes in this god’s unquestionable authority rather than seeing this demand as something ridiculous or cruel.
The very concepts of God, service, battle, duty, blessings only make sense to the faithful, something Ava isn’t. She’s just a puny little individual resisting the pressures brought upon her by a powerful institution.
She and Mother Superion are only speaking over one another, not really having a conversation; Ava doesn’t care to listen to what the church has to say, she doesn’t take it seriously, and the church likewise does not take her individuality, her person into consideration.
However, we would do well to remember that Mother Superion is not simply a mouthpiece for the church—she is also Suzanne, lowly little individual with lowly individual desires and resentment just as Ava.
And, regardless of the effacement of self that monastic as well as military institutions enforce on their members, just as Ava’s subjectivity isn’t neatly negated by direct statements in line with reigning dogma, Suzanne’s own subjectivity also seeps through her words and attitudes. If not blatantly, at the very least there is a remarkable struggle taking place within her, suggested by her use of language as well as her demeanour.
The Halo, after all, defines her as well.
If bearing it is the greatest honour, a mark of God’s favour, if it defines a person, then losing it has an equal power of definition. The distinction it confers on someone is inescapable, for good or ill, and either one dies gloriously as “God’s champion” or one survives it, survives its removal, and is deemed rejected and unworthy by this so magnanimous God. The Halo soaks up all of the positive value ascribed to it—meaning those who lack it adopt a negative one in contrast, be it Suzanne who had it and lost it or even Lilith, who should’ve had it and didn’t.
Still it is considered “a gift”, something given by God… One could say it is a form of grace.
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Suzanne’s noun and Vincent’s verb have the same origin, of course, the same stem. Despite the argument between them in this other scene, ultimately there is agreement between the two of them judging by their choice of vocabulary and Mother Superion’s reaction immediately afterwards. If this were not true in some degree, there would have been little need for Mother Superion to correct Ava in the first place, for Ava calls the Halo “a hunk of magic metal”, yes, but she also refers to it as “top prize”, as a reward—which, unlike “gifts”, are meant to be earned, to use Vincent’s comparison. There is a mixture of concepts here.
Without wanting to overcomplicate this text, let us say that ideology is a certain way of understanding the world and that it constructs and is constructed by our discourse, our use of language. One of the functions of ideology is that of attempting to smother contradiction, to smoothen the world’s complexities, simplify them, rationalise them away, however incapable it truly is at accomplishing that given how reality is too complex to be so tamed. Here, then, we see a notable sort of contradiction in Mother Superion’s discourse (in her ideology) that isn’t easily solved: a detail, a problem left out from the thought system. She agrees that grace, in the form of the Halo or not, is given, yet she treats it as if it were earned. This is a crack in the wall; it’s an idiosyncrasy, proof of a subject torn between the different voices that compose her subjectivity, the fragments, the different discourses that, put together, make her up as a whole.
What could be more contradictory than calling something which has scarred her physically, mentally and emotionally a “gift”?
If we create and are created in turn by means of discourse (“you are God’s champion”), if we can only understand and interact with the world when it is mediated by discourses and their correlated ideologies, what would it have meant if Suzanne had assigned another value to the Halo?
The inversion of values would certainly have ejected her from the church. If the Halo, to her, gained negative value, thus allowing her to retain some amount of positive value, her participation in the institution would be impracticable. She would be at odds with the dominant ideology, its structures, its rules… And she would face the resistance Ava faced by assuming such antagonism.
And sure, she might have regained some sort of “freedom”, but what would she have then lost? Resentment or not, there appears to be one central, recurrent positive value, one central desire to most characters in Warrior Nun and it would not be far-fetched to assume Suzanne shares in it herself and is unwilling to part with it.
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B) The burden
Needless to say that if there is a generous deal of “burden” to Suzanne’s “gift”, there is also some “gift” in Shannon’s “burden”, judging by her mentioning the family she gained through bearing the Halo. Curiously enough, the dynamic of receiving something and paying for it with that very “gift”—Shannon getting a family and losing it by the very same means—is identical to the dynamics involved in getting Ava to accept her fate as warrior nun, by “paying” for the “gift” of life by risking that very same life in battle.
Shannon has received the “gift”—and fulfilled her role to perfection, allowed to thank God for it personally… If the Halo was taken from Suzanne, Shannon is the one “taken” because of it, alongside other ex-bearers.
Here there are no euphemisms. Shannon has lived the consequences of being “God’s champion” until the very end, so she has no need for distorted truths meant to keep things in order, to avoid questioning the principle of order itself which is the institutional view. There is still a struggle (there is always a struggle) as she admits to finding something positive (a family) through her loyalty to the cause even if the cause is what kills her and other women like her. The contrast between Mother Superion’s speech focused on individual responsibility and Shannon’s avowal of how it is “too great for one person to bear” tells us more than enough about how they each envision individuality, community, the possibility of action, who can make it come about—how life and death, different paths, different destinies, inform perception of the same thing.
Their values are inverted.
Mother Superion’s “gift” is Shannon’s “burden”; Mother Superion’s tendency, while alive, to value death (“You fight in His name”) is countered by a dead Shannon’s valorisation of life (“So much promise unfulfilled. So much life unlived. And for what?”) The scenes are in direct opposition to one another, they respond to one another as mirrored images.
So much so that the reply is not merely linguistic, hidden away in dialogue, but quite evidently displayed in visual terms as well. A mirror offers us reflections that are inverted—left in place of right, right as left—and so are these scenes inverted in relation to one another: in the moment of saying the sentences we’re concerned with, Mother Superion and Shannon stand in much the same place. If we do not notice, it is because the camera pans around in different angles—with the former, we watch the scene from a point at Ava's left, while the latter is shown from an angle at her right. We are literally treated to reflected images, seen from opposite points of view.
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Colour, too, guides our reading of both scenes set side by side. With Mother Superion, we are in the realm of the church and its associated earthly tones as established throughout the first season, whereas Ava’s vision of Shannon paints the dream church in a shade of blue. Blue is, of course, the hue which had been mostly tied to Jillian Salvius, to ArqTech, to science. With science comes the concept of reason, as opposed to the sepia haze of faith.
Mary is also drawn against a backdrop of bright blue sky when she is investigating the docks and relying on her reason rather than her faith concerning Shannon’s death.
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Shannon’s opinion on the Halo might be just as subjective as Mother Superion’s before her, but it is filtered through personal experience and observation, through reason rather than blind belief in a mission.
Yet we are forgetting something. Ava, having died already, claims there is nothing on the other side. If that is so, why is she meeting Shannon now? And why is this meeting taking place in circumstances that reflect previous events in an inverted manner?
As dreams often reuse what we have lived when awake, re-rendering our memories, transforming them, so it is possible that Ava is not having a vision but a dream—that she is talking not to Shannon, but to some facet of herself, Ava, manifesting as Shannon after connecting with her memory through the warrior nun book.
As Ava clings to it and the knowledge it affords her, it would make sense for her conscience to finally figure out a proper retort to what she heard of Mother Superion in that earlier moment, a retort fuelled by new information and by her own reasoning. At the very least, it would be more plausible to consider this hypothesis than to assume her vision of Shannon is a real communication with her spirit granted by the Halo, for, if we are witnessing a new phase of manipulation, then the message being transmitted this time concerns the Halo’s “lifecycle” itself—and how it must be brought to an end. If it is sentient as some characters believe, why would it let Ava meet Shannon and be exposed to the idea of working against the Halo’s own interests of perpetuation?
After all, the implications behind Shannon’s words are evident: again, if the Halo also defines the woman, then it defines sister Shannon, sister Melanie and all other warrior nuns going back to Areala with one word which will soon apply to Ava and whomever follows: that word is dead, crushed under the burden.
And this time, the message, a sort of compassionate provocation (“a burden too great to bear”—even for you), hits its mark, inspiring Ava to end the tradition and be the last warrior nun.
We are not in the semantic field of religion, even if it is there, in the background, being answered to; here we are not speaking of God or battles fought for this distant general in the sky, but of family, of women slaughtered in the name of a mission. This is no longer some ethereal question but an immediate concern. Whether this is Shannon or Ava herself subconsciously masquerading as Shannon to facilitate her own “awakening”, the point gets across now that it is transmitted in language that makes sense to Ava, now that there are common values between speaker and listener.
One could even hypothesise that, at this point, Shannon being a former warrior nun lends credibility to her words in Ava’s mind as she is a woman experienced in this role Ava is supposed to play.
If so, we can also understand the bridge of empathy that is built between Ava and Mother Superion later on when it is revealed that Suzanne, too, was a halo bearer and that she, too, has carried this “burden”. Both forge new understandings of one another through this common background and a personal exchange that is nothing like their first encounter—when the “gift” is said to have rejected the older nun, when its “burden” is divulged to Ava.
As Ava recognises Shannon, so do Ava and Mother Superion eventually recognise one another as well—so do they begin to comprehend how they did carry similar values, only obscured by their dissimilar ideologies and their resulting language use. If no other, then the value of family is what binds them together through Suzanne’s new disposition to embrace all of her sisters and Ava’s newfound conduct in considering them her sisters to begin with. They come closer in the catacombs and, at last, meet halfway by season two.
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Yet we, the viewers, as touched by this miscommunication that ends well as we may be, after all of this talk of gifts and burdens, we remain none the wiser on what the Halo actually is.
C) The energy source
As previously exposed, we are kept in the dark because most sentences that speak of this iconic object in the series are subjective, focused on the characters’ own relationship to it or their ideas about it rather than any substantial data on what it might truly be apart from a “hunk of magic metal” currently in Ava’s back.
Perhaps because we spend so much time with the nuns, satisfied as they are with the logic of plain belief instead of concerned with tangible, provable things that can or should be explained. The most we get is the information on how the Halo is some kind of weapon, an amplifier attuned to the bearer’s body and soul.
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Enter Jillian Salvius.
While her understanding of the Halo is admittedly insufficient, her research on it limited, her available vocabulary and scientific knowledge too slim (!) to encompass such an item, she does not say something like “the Halo is a mystery” or “a conundrum” as she says of Lilith later on. It would be true, just as it being a “gift” or “burden” is true considering those who called it thus, yet Jillian uses another sort of language instead.
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Being a scientist, doctor Salvius opts for what we consider to be appropriate scientific modes of speaking, that is, by creating an impression of objectivity. It is not her personal reaction or opinion of the Halo that she offers, but whatever traits she can see or learn of in that moment: an energy source, an object that defies physics, a foreign body of undefined material. Ava “translates” this as being “an alien battery”, but the fact is that we are served a definition of the Halo unlike those we had before. It isn’t much, but for once we are not given a character’s personal interpretation of it…
Or so it seems. We none of us are capable of being fully objective, for none of us can rid ourselves of our selves—Jillian posits the Halo as an energy source, which seems innocent and impartial enough, but soon afterwards we understand what that means to her.
In themselves, the words “energy source” don’t carry many other connotations. Yet, for Jillian, these words that seem so neutral and “scientific”, so clear cut, do not sustain the facade of objectivity. She has spoken of energy before, it is an active component of her research, a common word in her lexicon; to Ava, “energy source” is “a battery”, but to Kristian and Jillian, who are part of ArqTech, who know what goes on within its walls, these words automatically acquire another meaning.
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Yes, that of a battery, but one with a very specific purpose. Under the guise of neutral discourse, a very personal interpretation of the Halo, just as if it were a “gift” or “burden”, lies hidden. It is an energy source—one that doctor Salvius can potentially use to power her contraption. It is a “solution”, perhaps even a “gift”, of circumstance if not of god.
And it, too, defines Ava despite herself. When it fails, Jillian says she was wrong about Ava, not the Halo, thus conflating the two.
In the end, even she who might well be the smartest character, the one most closely connected with science and concrete knowledge, cannot guard herself from letting the unsaid (or “unsayable”) slip through her lips. She, too, in spite of her apparent objective language, exhibits a subjective kind of relationship with the world around her, influenced by the ideologies that cross her being.
D) Ending thoughts
Perhaps, when all is said and done, we are never truly able to follow that maxim we’ve seen more than once on Warrior Nun.
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Perhaps we simply cannot think or act if we do not perceive things as at least partially related to ourselves.
It is not necessarily a bad thing, though, as long as different views can coexist, as long as they do not trample one another, as long as one person or group don’t elect themselves as the owners of truth, attempting to eliminate all who do not follow them as Adriel tried to do. In a democracy, in a place and a moment in history where there is freedom of thought and creed and speech, the phenomenon of various voices competing for the spotlight, taking turns under it is normal and healthy.
Warrior Nun gives us a fascinating insight on the multiplicity of voices that compose a society, even if there are elements of it which seek to suffocate those voices. It is a microcosm where different ideologies, through language, are confronted with one another, where they struggle to make sense of things—and where each of those points of view over a given subject might carry a morsel of truth. The Halo is a piece of metal and a gift and a burden and an energy source; none of these ideas or perceptions necessarily exclude the other, none is “more correct” than the other because, if so, then the question would be: as regards which character?
To Ava, at least, it is all these things and maybe more.
There are attempts to implant a hegemonic interpretation of facts. The very story of Areala, Adriel, the Halo’s trajectory along the centuries, how this is “the way it has been for one thousand years” is a strategy to cement a singular view. The repetition, the constant reworking of tradition, telling this story over and over with each warrior nun… That is the church at play, ideology trying to fill in any gaps, keep things as they are, conserve them and the structures that organise them, guaranteeing that things have one certain sort of sense and not another, one value, one meaning.
But life is not stagnant and people are not all swallowed whole by ideology even when they subscribe to it willingly, as a member of a church would. There are always things that cannot be explained, things that are beyond the scope of ideology—contradictions, pesky little details that escape the invisible goggles with which we look at reality. The truth is that it is far more complex than we can contain it with a few buzzwords, man-made or divine. There is always another side, always a reply, a constant dialogue between our different ways of seeing, understanding, being and, therefore, speaking.
A more visible example comes from those scenes in season two where Yasmine and Adriel are both telling the exact same story, only through their own perspectives, interpreting it in their own ways.
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The show provides many opportunities to see how varied human voice can be, how the point of view of whoever is telling the story bears a mighty influence on the narrative, whether consciously or not, malicious or not. That, in turn, may inspire us to look around us, in the real world; to look at how we are representing things, others and even ourselves as well as how others represent us through the words we use.
This is not an exhaustive study, long as it is. As said before, it is but a glance at two scenes, two little lines of dialogue which are, however, intimately connected with others, with the stuff of the entire show—with the stuff of life. We could write more on how possessive pronouns and other sorts of phrases with the idea of the Halo “belonging” to someone or being “owned” by someone are used, just to remain in the area of discourse about the Halo alone.
But the present text has given all it had to give and its author does not wish to be a burden on her readers any more than she already has been.
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saintbleeding · 8 months
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beguiled charmed and besotted thinkin abt sasha james and her weirdgirl rizz to be entirely honest
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yeoldecryptid · 1 month
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Fictional foods I would like to much on
the raspberry cordial from Anne of Green Gables. I don’t know what cordial is, but it sounds yummy.
Chicken paprika from Dracula. There’s got to be a reason Jonathon tried to get ahold of the recipe.
Cider from Discworld. Discworld isn’t exactly known for containing good food, but something tells me that Disc made cider would hit different.
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discoidal · 2 months
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just found this mag and i love itttt it's in the mood a magazine about media and they have a page with the names of the films that's linked to the stuff like essays or poetry or reviews written abt said films (< forgot how to explain anything coherently) somehow they dont have anything on ginger snaps rn tho
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^^ like so! i think u guys might like to read stuff or submit to this or whatever, havent worked w/ them or anything so idk how they handle submissions ive just been enjoying reading thru the names i recognize
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sparky-is-spiders · 7 months
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I can accept basically any trans/nb reading of Jon however my personal favorites are transmasc Jon who transitioned physically and socially as early as possible and just never mentioned it to anyone cause it wasn't any of their business OR Jon being the most repressed transfem/nb in existence. They'll be talking about gender or whatever and Jon will be like "it's normal to feel totally disconnected from your gender all the time and also vaguely want boobs. That's just a guy thing I think." only for whoever they're all talking to to go "wtf no?? It's not????"
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