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writingwithcolor · 3 years

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Gay Mixed Korean & Korean Names and Terminology

@theablaireking-main asked:

I’m a queer slavic person writing a contemporary queer romance and I have 3 questions about it:

Gay Korean character, other PoC

My main character (K) is a gay man, who is half-Korean on dad’s side, half-white (American) on mom’s; & his love interest is a white bi man. I’m pretty sure I won’t end up fetishizing him as I have been doing my research and I’m writing him as 3D and rounded, but I was wondering: my other Asian male characters (1, maybe 2 Korean men & 1 half Filipino, half Black) are all straight. Should I make one of them gay or bi in order to show more diversity in appearance and personality in queer Asian men? I have only planned the main arc of the story, so I am not 100% sure about which side characters will make it in (except for the two Asian men I mentioned, they are definitely in there) but in my previous draft - I’m basically rewriting the whole thing from scratch - all the queer men were white and all the MoC were straight and that’s maybe not the best. I think did it because I was too afraid to handle the complexities of intersectional representation.

As a half-Korean lesbian, I feel pretty close to this topic. I think subconsciously, both in communities of color and white communities, there’s a lot of association with queerness and whiteness, and I often find myself debating whether to choose between going to a queer space or a space with other people of color. I think when you have three max people of color and only one of them is queer, and then you have all the other queer characters being white, you may be inadvertently following those subconscious biases, and I’m glad you were able to realize the complexity intersectional representation brings.

If you already have one Korean character that’s gay and you’ve done your research on how not to fetishize East Asian men, why not add another one? If you’ve done your research well, I don’t see why you shouldn’t make another man of color queer–I think it would be great representation of queer people of color and it would do more to alleviate the isolation queer people of color feel in their community. It would also reduce the risk of you inadvertently creating one monolithic version of “queer Asian man”, which definitely can’t hurt.

–Sophia

Naming a 4th-Generation Korean-American

This Is about names as I couldn’t find much relevant info online. So K is a 4th generation Korean immigrant in the US. Is it okay to give him a Western own and family name, or would that border on erasure? If I give him a legal Korean name, can it be Western “own” name and Korean family name and would the family name come before his own name? Or Western first “own” name, Korean “second” name and Korean family name? Would it be disrespectful to have him use a Western last name publicly, so he would be distinguished from the K pop idols, as he makes American pop and he feels his culture is more American culture, rather than Korean culture (he obviously still feels connection to Korean culture and likes Kpop, but he was born and raised in the US after all.) Also he doesn’t know Korean very well, outside off some basic stuff (how to say his name, hello/bye, ask for directions, order food etc.)

Speaking from my own experience as a 3rd-gen Korean, I have a Western first name and a Korean middle and last name, where my middle name is considered my “Korean” name, I suppose, although I refer to myself by my first Western name.

My initial gut reaction to having him refer to himself with a Western last name in order to separate himself from Kpop idols is pretty negative, frankly. Even though he makes American music, I see no reason why he should whitewash his own name to distinguish himself from Korean music–I’d like to remind you that Kpop is literally just pop music, in all its separate mini-genres and sounds, that just happens to be in Korean. He can be both Korean and American, and assuming consciously or not that if someone has a Korean last name, they must make Kpop, is playing into a stereotype.

Let this character keep his culture and make the music he wants to make. There’s no need to whitewash his name–especially his last name and the name of his family.

–Sophia

My first question upon reading “4th generation Korean” was “so… is this character somehow miraculously a full-blooded Korean?” Because frankly, by four generations I would be surprised if he didn’t have any non-Korean heritage, and if his father has non-Korean heritage then it wouldn’t be odd for your character to have a Western last name. This doesn’t mean I encourage your character using a Western name to differentiate themselves from K-pop, just that I genuinely find the idea of a 4th-gen Korean not having any non-Korean heritage unlikely.

A related thing I’d like to ask is, are both his parents 3rd-gen Koreans? As in, they never really lived in Korea? Because in that case, I’m genuinely wondering how much of Korean culture he would have had exposure to, other than through the media. Him being 4th-gen means that the first generation of immigrants most likely came to America before the second world war, and probably at some time during Japan’s influence-turned-annexation of Joseon (the country that eventually was split into North and South Korea). Going that far back, it’s quite plausible that the first generation might have come from what is now North Korea. They might also have a more Japanese accent when speaking English (my grandmother’s cousin lives in America and actually has this problem), and if they even have Korean given names (whether it’s legally their first or middle name) then it might not be something remotely common in modern Korea.

-Rune

Is it okay to use “Blaisian”and “Eurasian”?

I don’t live in an English speaking country (writing in English), but I was wondering if it was okay to have my mixed race characters jokingly refer to themselves as “Eurasian” (white + Asian) or “Blasian” (Black + Asian). Would they allow people close to them to do it too, or would it be seen as offensive if coming from people who don’t share their ethnicity? Or perhaps offensive coming from a white author?

I’ve seen mixed Black & Asian folks use the term “Blasian” (not in a joking context but just a casual one), but “Eurasian” is…something else entirely. I’ve never seen that term used by a white/Asian person, and I’m white/Asian with white/Asian friends. Eurasia is a continent…lol… Honestly the only term I’ve seen used for white/Asian is “half”/”halfie” (the second one’s YMMV and I don’t recommend it) and that’s specifically for half Japanese as far as I know.

~Mod Rina

During the 1990s and the 2000s, “Eurasian” was a term often used to describe half-white/ half-East Asian models who were perceived as having the ideal combination of European and ~ exotic ~ East Asian features (ex. Devon Aoki). Within Central Asia and Eastern Europe there are people who accurately use this term to describe themselves, but I share this information to make you aware of potential fetishistic implications. I do not recommend googling “Eurasian mail-order brides.” It is regretfully a thing.

- Marika.

I’ve seen white+Asian people refer to themselves as “Wasian” in the same way Black+Asian people refer to themselves as “Blasian”–that seems like a more appropriate name than “Eurasian” in this context

–Sophia

#Korean #Korean man #Korean names #names #terms #terminology #history #Korean History #submission #fetishization #asks

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fermented-writers-block · 4 years

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Who and what is Kikimora?

Although she has only made a single appearance in the show with just barely three lines to her name, Kikimora is an interesting character to me in what her apparent position and possible inspirations could mean in terms of the overall plot and history of the Boiling Isles going forward.

Starting off, it is interesting to note how, so far, Kikimora is THE most respected character we’ve actually seen in the show - as Belos has yet to make an official appearance - as well as having one of the biggest yet understated impacts on the plot. Of course, the former can be inferred by how Lilith - THE leader of the best of the best witches outside of Emperor Belos himself - defers to her in a subservient manner, but for someone with such little screentime, Kikimora’s appearance set into motion an impending deadline that Lilith now has to fulfill soon if she wants Belos’ end of their promise.

Additionally, it’s a subtle detail, but Kikimora’s use of just Lilith’s first name implies a ton of familiarity between the two and or that Kikimora is much, MUCH higher ranking than Kikimora in the hierarchy. As for figuring out what position she fills, well:

She is most likely Belos’ right hand woman after all, and quite literally at that.

However, besides the literal wordplay of her design, I’ve been looking into the origins of her name and found that "kikimora" refers to a kind of spirit within Slavic mythology of which there are two kinds: one from the forest married to the spirit Domovoi,and the other from the swamp married to the spirit Leshy.

There's conflicting accounts on whether kikimora are evil or simply a difficult spirit to appease between the sources I could find, but a common thread seems to be a close association with spinning and being a symbol of impending misfortune with her psychic abilities.

However, what I find most interesting and what I’d like to focus on here is the way she is most commonly depicted in terms of appearance. Between the unclear translated details of her exact stance and attitude towards humans, all of the sources I’ve seen more or less agree that she is a kind of powerful house spirit that is small enough to pass through keyholes, and that she is either a goddess of or are highly associated with chickens - sometimes bearing chicken feet like the ones in the drawn rendition below:

As to why I find this detail interesting, for those of you who haven’t been following my discussions with my friend @sepublic, we have been working on plotting out the various possible narrative parallels between the characters of The Owl House and the in-universe characters of the Good Witch Azura series for a while now, with Luz and Amity being Azura and each other’s Hecate, Eda and Lilith as the old lady/mentor figure, and King and Emperor Belos as the likely small animal companions/proclaimed group leader.

With these parallels established, I have come to the conclusion that there is a FOURTH set of characters - one whose correlation in the Azura books we’ve yet to see or hear about, but will play an important role in both the overall Owl House plot and the in-universe Azura series - of which Kikimora makes up one half on Amity’s side.

Assuming that Kikimora takes a decent amount of inspiration from her namesake in a number of ways, the most likely candidate for her parallel that I can see is - as surprising as it may seem - none other than Hooty, aka this goofball:

TLDR: Why I think both Hooty and Kikimora might turn out to be/have been bird-themed deity-like entities supporting their respective rulers, or how the epic kaiju fights were in our houses all along

To explain what I mean, with the major fan theory that King used to be the Titan/an actual king of demons and some of the recent character interactions these last few episodes, I believe that Hooty and Kikimora might be even more similar than just the mythological connotations behind Kikimora’s namesake.

For a long while now, I have been theorizing that Hooty will turn out to be a powerful owl-like spirit or being with a very severe case of power and memory loss, but to be more specific here, I think that Hooty - or the Owl Deity as I’ve taken to calling the being in the owl mural - used to be King’s second in command.

Here, I think such a revelation would fit well with the kind of misdirection present within The Owl House’s storytelling. After all, for as much as Gus picking Hooty in UW was played as a joke, one must remember that Gus had been looking for THE most interesting, accomplished, and noteworthy person he could get, and it would be just like this show for Hooty to turn out to actually fit that criteria, much like Luz’s “bad girl chosen one” description in WBW being extremely applicable to Amity the next episode.

In a similar vein, while King immediately shutting down Hooty’s declaration to become his recruit in AitE was a quick and funny joke in the moment, Hooty calling himself King’s “faithful pal” and the bonding moment the two shared after the carnage when King found himself ultimately relying on Hooty’s strength in the end feels to me much like the Owl House writers setting up hints for what kind of dynamics the two might have had in the distant past.

Now, I know you must be wondering how exactly this would further tie into Kikimora being parallels with Hooty. Well, the thing about that is that I suspect that both of them played a major role in helping their respective rulers come to power a long, long time ago.

Specifically, as two bird-based deities - not necessarily gods or chicken-based ones per se, but incredibly powerful beings that might have been seen as akin to such - that King and Belos turned to for help in different ways.

I admit that this sounds like a pretty major stretch - especially in regards to Kikimora and her three lines of dialogue - but given the multiple posts of evidence-adjacent details I’ve made for Hooty being the Owl Deity, I think this would make the correlations between the two all the more cleaner.

With King and Hooty, I could see the latter potentially being the former’s first loyal follower and or main enforcer of his will, a reliable friend and powerhouse that King depended on until both of them were overthrown and reduced to the sad state we see them in now.

And with Belos and Kikimora, I could see the former having been a fresh new recruit in King’s army back then, one who became fed up with his arbitrary demands and impulsive abuses of power - much like Private New Guy in AitE - and called upon Kikimora for her help in staging a mutiny against Hooty and King. Meanwhile, I could also see the latter being themed after a different bird within the world of The Owl House than chickens, potentially even being the basis behind Lilith’s corvid iconography and maybe the wings on Belos’ symbol.

That said, to contrast Hooty and King’s relationship, perhaps Kikimora and Belos’ is more transactional in nature befitting how in some folklore, kikimora - when pleased with the family of the house she resides in - apparently serve as their guardians and can warn her family of impending disaster with her powerful psychic talents, whereas only when she is displeased does her mischief to act up for the residents within. As such, Belos may or may not be doing something to make sure he keeps her favor as an asset to use and keep control over her/to enhance her powers, something which possibly could even be connected to the apparent search for items of eternal youth.

Though just to get this clear, I am NOT saying that Kikimora is the real mastermind behind everything while Belos is a mere figurehead. Rather, I’m suggesting that Belos and Kikimora might be more like business partners in crime compared to the possible past friendship Hooty and King might have had.

Furthermore, to develop Hooty and Kikimora even more as foils of each other, I think it would be rather fitting if the latter was revealed to have been in this picture the whole time as Belos’ castle itself:

After all, I’ve made note before of how the majority of the Owl House looks like it used to be a portion of a large “Owl Temple,” so considering how Hooty is the house itself and how Amity and Luz’s groups are positioned on opposing extremes, it would make sense if Kikimora leaned into the “house spirit” aspect of her inspiration by being Belos’ castle itself - or at least, being able to animate it, that is.

I mean, there IS always the possibility that she will stay closer to her inspirations and be a separate entity from Belos’ castle - aka where she’s still capable of traveling through keyholes and that’s how Kikimora was involved with Belos’ mutiny by sneaking through Hooty’s mouth entranceway - but personally, I think it’d be rather fitting if in a reversal of folklore kikimoras, she was the keyhole of Belos’ castle instead.

After all, if she IS the castle like Hooty is the Owl House and both of them turn out to be deity/bird-like beings, then I predict that we might get to see a clash of the titans somewhere down the line after Hooty regains his former form and memories - potentially even having gotten back the rest of the Owl Temple to more evenly match Kikimora in scale for a battle of epic proportions.

Overall, to summarize, I think Kikimora and Hooty will turn out to be parallels in terms of being powerful bird-themed deity-like entities, being capable of becoming and or already being giant “castle/temple demons,” and being/having been the respective second-in-command of Belos and King.

As for how they would contrast with the other, it’s too early to tell with how little we know of Kikimora at the moment, but judging from how the other characters between Amity and Luz’s groups parallel each other, it will be rather interesting to see how her personality and motives might serve as a reflection to that of the Owl Deity across the extremes of individualism vs conformity.

#the owl house #owl house #the owl house theory #owl house theory #the owl house hooty #emperor belos #kikimora #theory #speculation #amnesiac owl deity hooty theory #long post #VERY long post #you would not believe how long I've been sitting on this post #man do I hate it when my blog's tagline kicks me in the butt for months on end #anyways I hope you'll enjoy these thoughts and ramblings of mine

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bigbrotherlouis · 4 years

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for @1000-directions - winterhawk sickfic // bonus appearances of nat and sam // gratuitous projection of my slavic upbringing on characters (as usual) // ~2k

(forgive me if my characterizations are off, i don’t really go here. unbeta’d.)

it starts with a sniffle. clint sneezes once and then again, in quick succession. it’s loud and bucky looks at him with wide eyes.

“allergies,” clint tells him, wiping his nose on his sleeve. he sneezes again. “they get bad this time of year.”

“okay,” bucky says uncertainly. “do you need… something?”

clint sniffs, a gross, wet sound and looks at bucky pleadingly, a miserable expression on his face. “nope. just a tissue.”

“get your own damn tissue,” bucky mumbles but gets up anyway, dropping the whole box in clint’s lap. clint pats him on the thigh as thanks.

except, the next morning, clint wakes up with even more of a sniffle and a voice like sandpaper. he winces the first couple times he talks and then shakes his head, patiently signing whatever he needs to say instead of saying it out loud.

“feel gross,” he signs. bucky’s eyebrows furrow.

“still allergies?” he signs back, slowly, making sure every motion is crisp.

“don’t know.”

“can i get you anything?”

clint shakes his head and then rolls over, shoves his head back into the pillow, groaning slightly. bucky’s hand, the human one, hovers over clint’s back where it’s pushed up over his spine and he spreads his fingers, an inch from his skin. people like physical touch when they’re not feeling well, right? it won’t hurt clint if bucky touches him when he’s sick?

he can’t remember. he can’t remember and he can’t bear the thought of hurting clint, even accidentally so he pulls his hand away, tucking both his arms behind his back. it’s better to be safe than sorry.

he startles when clint coughs, a sharp sound in the sun-warmed room, a deep thing that comes from his belly and wracks his shoulders. he groans when it’s done, sinking further into the pillows, and bucky flees into the common area before he does anything he can’t take back.

“‘sup, bro,” natasha says from where she’s perched on the counter, cross-legged. she’s got a bowl balanced on her knee and a coffee cup in her hand. “you look like you’ve just seen baba yaga.”

“clint is sick,” bucky tells her, still frowning, and goes to look through their fruit drawer. there’s a variety there, accommodating everyone’s needs.

“oh, that sucks.” she pauses. “well, i think it does. i don’t think i’ve been sick.”

“me either,” he says, a smidge of relief seeping through him, as it always does when nat’s experienced something similar. “not with a cold.”

nat laughs. “we weren’t allowed. neither assassins nor ballerinas get sick, dyevochka. ras, dva, tri, padyom.” she makes a face. “no sickness. what are you doing?”

“looking for a lemon.”

“a lemon?”

“yeah,” he says as his fingers wrap around said fruit and he brings it out, carefully held. “do we have honey?”

something sparks in her eyes. “ah, for the tea. yeah, i think there’s some above the stove.”

he nods and rummages around in the cabinet, frowning when he pulls out the bear-shaped container. “this is not good honey.”

“tell me about it,” nat says, snorting into her coffee. “you would think with the food budget we’re allotted tony would splurge on the good stuff, but nope. he keeps buying that.”

“there’s none of the comb.” he touches his finger to the top and tastes a drop, his frown getting deeper. “it tastes like plastic.”

“it sucks.”

“it doesn’t do anything, for sickness or allergies. we should get some more.”

“be my guest. i think the corner store carries some.” she swings her legs out and stretches them, pointing her toes as gracefully as a ballerina. “we used to buy great big jars of the good honey off the side of the road in bulgaria. cheap as dirt and it lasted forever. tasted real good, too.”

bucky can imagine it, the way the gold spreads over your tongue as you eat it off a spoon, the pieces of beeswax squeaking against your teeth as you chew the honeycomb. it’s so vivid it feels like a memory. it might be a memory. he’s not good at figuring out what is real past when steve confronted him on that overpass.

“does he have a fever?”

“hmm?” he says, pulling himself out of his puzzling. natasha tips her head to the side, like she’s thinking.

“clint. is he running a fever at all.”

“oh. i, uh, don’t know. how do you know if someone has a fever?”

“usually, you can feel it with your hands.”

he flexes the joints on his metal hand, almost unconsciously. “i didn’t check. i didn’t-- can you touch someone when they’re sick?”

“yeah, usually. same rules apply as when they’re healthy, though,” she says as she launches herself from the counter, landing quietly on the balls of her feet. bucky nods. he knows the touching rules: only with permission, and only carefully. steve had sat them all down when bucky had moved in and made sure everyone in the tower was aware that touching was okay (for bucky) but not if it was a surprise (for clint).

“i think he might’ve fallen asleep.”

“that’s good, sleeping is good when you don’t feel well.”

“how do you know so much about this?” he asks uncertainly, following her back into clint’s bedroom. well, clint and bucky’s bedroom, now. “if you weren’t allowed to be sick?”

“i’ve been out longer than you have, bucky. most people get sick. sam does, and tony and pepper, and i think i saw nick fury sneeze once.” bucky blinks, shaking his head. nat laughs. “point is, i’ve been around it a little. chut’-chut’. how did you know to make lemon tea with honey?”

“just felt like it was the right thing.”

“see,” she says. “you know what to do, at some level.”

she nudges open the door and creeps into the room, the blackout blinds still pulled half down. clint hasn’t moved except to be able to breathe, flat on his belly. he coughs as they get close, cracking an eye to look at them both.

“what’re you doing?” he rumbles and bucky crouches down by the bed, pressing his finger to clint’s mouth so he’ll stop talking.

“nat wants to know if you have a fever,” he signs.

“maybe a little. achy.”

“he’s achy,” bucky repeats for nat’s benefit as she puts her palm on clint’s forehead. he makes an appreciative noise at the touch, turning his chin up into the feeling.

“figures, he’s hotter than normal. not enough to worry, but definitely hot.”

“nat says you’re hotter than normal,” bucky tells clint and smiles at the weak look in clint’s eyes. “didn’t mean it as a joke.”

“i am always hot,” he replies before coughing again, twisting onto his side so he can breathe better. nat rolls her eyes, patting him carefully on the head.

“sure, big guy. here, bucky and i will run you a bath, okay? it’ll make you feel better.”

“okay,” clint croaks when bucky translates, pushing himself up so he’s sitting. it makes him cough yet again, and he buries his face in his elbow, hacking. it sounds a little like a chainsaw.

“a hot bath,” says natasha, mostly to herself, and then makes for the bathroom.

sam walks in on them after his morning run (maybe his second morning run? bucky’s a little unclear on how many runs he goes on, exactly, in the morning but they’re either very long or he’s doing something else. bucky should look into that, once clint is feeling better.), his shirt damp with sweat and a question already on his lips.

“what the hell is going on here?”

“clint is sick,” bucky says, cutting onions into thin slices. clint groans from his seat at the table, wrapped in a comforter so only the top of his hair is visible. “we’re helping.”

“by making a salad?” sam asks, his eyebrows halfway up his forehead. bucky shakes his head.

“it helps with a fever if you put these on his feet,” explains bucky and he thinks sam’s eyes might bug out of his head.

“uh. what? how?”

bucky shrugs. “don’t know. it’s just what they told us to do.”

“they? who’s they?”

“they,” bucky says, because he can’t actually remember. “they.”

“oookay,” sam drawls out, his eyebrows still raised. clint sniffles pathetically. “you don't need to rub a red onion on clint's feet, bucky," he says. "we have fever reducers. you can buy them in tablets or syrup, even."

"red onion is for the cough,” natasha says, poking her head out from where she’s looking through the tower’s extensive pantry. “we're making him a vinegar bath for the fever.”

“a vinegar… bath?”

“it draws out the infection,” she says. sam pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

“i don’t-- are we living in the fifties, perhaps? why the hell are we turning clint into a salad, just because he’s sick?”

“you already used salad,” bucky points out and sam glares.

“fine. why are we trying to make a hawkeye pickle in the bathtub?”

“because he’s sick,” natasha replies crossly, emerging with a bottle of apple cider vinegar in her hands. “keep up, wilson.”

“is this some kind of soviet thing?” sam asks after a minute. “like, are you against medication? or do you genuinely just forget it exists?”

“why would we buy medicine when we have vinegar and onions?” natasha says. bucky’s not certain if she’s joking or not, if he’s being honest.

“and whiskey and lemon and honey,” he adds. “also for the cough.”

“i-- you know what? i’m not going to argue any more about this. i’m just going to go down to the walgreens; text me if you need anything.”

“dosvidanya, samuel,” nat sings and he halfheartedly waves over his shoulder. “now. i think we’re ready.”

they haul clint back into the bathroom and run the water hot, hot enough that clint hisses when he touches the water. nat’s dumped her vinegar in the tub as bucky quickly strips him down to his boxers. his skin is flushed, pink and warm, and bucky worries to himself as clint sinks into the water.

“feels good,” he says. he really must be stuffed up because he doesn’t even complain about the vinegar smell, just sighs deeply.

“i’m going to go text sam to bring back real honey,” says nat, pushing up from the floor. “you stay with him and make sure he doesn’t drown. that was a joke.”

“i know it was,” bucky grumbles, a moment too late, and nat’s chuckles bounce off the tile as she leaves. clint sighs again, his breath rasping a little, and stick his toes out of the bath to nudge bucky in the side.

“thank you,” he signs, the movements sloppy with exhaustion. “for taking care of me.”

“i don’t think i’m doing a good job.”

“i feel better, so you’re doing okay,” clint says and pokes where bucky’s eyebrows are furrowed. bucky’s fingers, the real ones, sneak into the water to check the temperature and then clint’s pulse when he breathes too fast.

“babe,” clint says aloud, a smile turning up his mouth. “it’s just a cold. i’m not dying.”

“colds kill people.”

“relax,” he insists and then pauses, licking a drop of water off his thumb. “is there… vinegar in this?”

“yes.”

“huh. that’s new. never had a vinegar bath before.”

“me and nat agreed it was good for you.”

clint laughs lowly, the sound rebounding around the room, and reaches out to comb his fingers through bucky’s hair, going frizzy from the humidity. “i think maybe living in eastern europe had a bigger effect on you both than you think.”

“sam’s getting you medicine, i think. the real kind.”

“nice of him. this bath isn’t bad, though. might even be helping.”

“you’ll drink tea after this,” bucky tells him. “and sleep some more.”

“okay,” clint says around a yawn. “i can do that.”

on an impulse, bucky leans forward to press his lips to clint’s forehead, smelling vinegar and feeling the fever under his mouth as clint hums.

“feels nice,” he says when bucky’s leaned back, tipping his chin up. “i think i heard somewhere that kissing has antibacterial properties.”

“you’re going to get me sick.”

“you’re a ninety year old assassin. i think you can handle a cold, if you can even get sick.”

it’s a fair point so bucky obliged, even though he was always going to oblige, slotting his mouth against clint’s and letting clint control the kiss. it doesn’t last long, barely a few seconds, as clint pulls away to cough, bending forward over his knees. bucky smooths a hand down his back and taps lightly, feeling the way his lungs expand as he breathes.

“ugh,” clint mumbles when he can form words. “ugh, i’m done in here, i think.”

“okay.”

bucky helps him up, carefully rinses the vinegar away, and towels him dry. ever so gently, he gets clint into clean clothes and then back into bed. the sheets are clean; sam or nat must’ve stripped the linens while they were busy.

clint sighs when he settles, catching hold of bucky’s metal arm before bucky can pull away.

“stay with me?” he asks quietly with his eyes half-lidded, tiredness pulling at every inch of his body. “please?”

“yeah,” bucky says without hesitating, climbing over him and onto the big bed. clint scoots closer before he’s even settled and sticks his cold feet on bucky’s legs, making him jerk and swear.

“you’re warm.”

“i know. “

“feels nice,” he mumbles, blinking heavily. he’s already halfway to sleep so bucky curls an arm around his shoulders and pulls him closer. he resumes his stroking as clint snores, fingers tangled in the hem of bucky’s shirt. bucky couldn’t leave if he tried, not that he would try.

clint sleeps through the afternoon, through the light changing in the bedroom and nat bringing in a cup of chicken soup and sam throwing a pack of nyquil at them both. bucky sits there, moving as little as he can, and smiles when clint tucks his face into his chest.

#winterhawk #hope it's okayyyy #marvel fic #marvel #clint barton #bucky barnes #mine #my fic #blehhh #love u steph #long post

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markslittleproblems · 4 years

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Misogyny knew no Iron Curtain.

A few years ago I heard in an report (that I cannot find anywhere) the interview of several Russian young women who stated that Russian society was a “post-feminist” one, meaning that, according to those same women, thanks to the former Communist regime and the apparent equality between workers, between comrades, Russia was now past the feminist fight for equal rights and, even more baffling, that women in Russia used misogynistic conceptions of femininity to their advantage. Men open the door for them? Neat, they have power over them. Men carry heavy things to spare them the inconvenience? Great, who wants to carry things anyway?

I was mad. Firstly because Communism never reduced the gap between men’s and women’s conditions in Russia. Secondly because supposedly taking advantage of being treated like a fragile bird or being shown politeness will never qualify as an empowerment. Thirdly, because from what I see now in my surrounding, Slavic women are far from being the epitome of feminism. At least, not the women of my family.

Given the quasi-mutic nature of my father, I will never know whether his marrying of a Ukrainian woman six years ago was an attempt to reach for his Slavic origins, a Freudian mimesis of the parental couple, or a mere coincidence. I have other theories about the ease with which you can, as a middle-class man, buy a blond wife from those self-proclaimed post-feminist countries, but I shall talk about this later.

I’ve been raised by my mother, a French woman, who spent years urging me to be financially independent, to never bond to a man so strongly that I shall be blinded by some of the things he might do. When I failed my driving exam, she sarcastically told me that I had no other choice but to be driven around by my future husband now. My mother kept on being what I thought was a feminist, yet she kept on bonding to the wrong men and now I’m quarantined with her and my depressed and hypochondriac step-father who tells her every day in the privacy of the whole house that she’s heartless, fat and ugly.

I wish France, like Mother Russia, were a post-feminist country.

Reading Critical theory at university made me aware of the fact that what I despised about women and men around me was despised by other women. It made me aware that heterosexual couples around me reek of internalised misogyny, of symbolic or straightforward violence. For a long-time I fought against my initial instinct to reject feminine figures who were not completely emancipated from the male yolk, because I thought that feminism was exactly that: embracing all types of representation of women, celebrating them. Housewives, cheesy princesses and Audre Lorde alike. Even the quirky French MeToo movement faced the primal cry from those women who like to be “importunées”, bothered, catcalled, harassed, as though their outdated vision of seduction ought to be yet another version of femininity.

Now I do not care about despising those who could find themselves in other situations than their current one for love. The present state of masculinity does not provide a nice and respectful version of The Straight Couple. Always women are in chains, be it mental workload or domestic violence. Even my mother failed to be the bra-burner I thought she was.

My Ukrainian step-mother and I are two different species. She smacks my hand when I bite my nails, calling me a “psychopath” (her words, not mine); she thinks literature does not serve any purpose and that I should have read Economy instead; she complains about my not wearing any makeup and my “not naturally” dyed hair, because men prefer women like this. I worry because now that she achieved French nationality, she will be able to vote for the far-right at the next presidential election. Most importantly she accepts the daily humiliation my father puts her through. I must admit that she is a great deal stupid on top of being racist, homophobic, islamophobic, and so on and so forth. But I can assure you that he married her exactly because he would have the upper-hand: she did not speak any French before moving in, her diplomas were not recognised in France and there is a natural tendency in her to submit to men. She wants to be taken care of, she does not want to work, she wants shoes and daubs to hang in the living-room.

I imagine that is what those Russian women called a post-feminist attitude; I imagine that making the most of my father’s money in order to have a better life is my step-mother’s take on misogynistic advantages.

I know Slavic women are not all like her, nor like my Polish grandma. I have read Akhmatova’s poetry.

Yet my Russian teacher in high-school was obsessed with Chanel purses and fur coats. She thought I had not understood the exercise when I matched the skirt with the male character and the trousers with the woman on my working sheet. In chemistry class in Saint Petersburg I had a massive fight with a classmate about lesbians. My Russian penpal’s family follows the same model of nurturance any other sexist society does. Russia is not post-feminist at all, period. Misogyny knew no Iron Curtain.

But now that Audre Lorde came into the picture, I can finally articulate the unease I feel when I hear some Russian lady say that using misogynistic patterns to a woman’s advantage is the ultimate proof that Russia is beyond feminism. Now I can just say “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.

I try my hardest to criticise the master’s house – my father’s house as far as my step-mother’s case is concerned. Yet sometimes I find myself in a situation of connivance. Because I laugh at her, because I genuinely think she is stupid and hopeless, I laugh at all her sisters, her equals, her comrades, I “divide and conquer”, like Lorde phrased it. I do not know how to finish this paper other than by saying that education offered me the opportunity to distance myself from those patterns as much as it gave me the opportunity to despise the willing or unwilling participants of such dynamics.

#feminism #post-feminism #mysoginy #audre lorde #the master's tool #lesbian #lesbian feminism #lgbt #queer feminism #queer essay #feminist essay #essay #russia #russian feminism #second generation immigrant #i'm mad #iron curtain

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edgepunk · 4 years

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you know what? lets put our whole head inside the hornets nest: v*ltron 🔥

pffpfffffff oh no. okay. I’m gonna put this under a read more as a precaution because this is even worse than shit-talking the ME fandom, again don’t r/b pls

Ke/th is overrated and his character type is kinda overdone and boring, I don’t really understand why people like him so much. I could blame the writing, he hasn’t changed a bit. I was rooting for him to get more comfortable around the other characters, but he still acted like a douchebag towards them. Also the whole “not all G/lra” shtick he was pulling was so icky, he’s white, he’s part a race that’s been committing genocide for centuries (and you could say they’re n*zi coded because I see the similarities) and he makes A//ura, a black woman, feel bad for being mistrustful? Gross. (again. bad writing. but fuck it. there’s no excuse for this kind of thing. the writers were racist.)

Also a lot of the G/lra have Slavic-sounding names which doesn’t sit right with me, because the US loves painting us as the villains all the time. I hate it here.

P/dge is an entitled brat who’s also an asshole towards L/nce all the time and it’s not the “oh we’re friends we like to tease each other” kind of way, but she straight up drags him down and insults him. It’s not cute, she’s rude as fuck. I used to like her but as time progressed I started disliking her.

L/nce is also overrated, I’m all for role swap AUs but the fans have stolen so many core traits from other characters that it’s just L/nce with the personality of, say, A//ura or Sh/ro.

A//ura x L/nce was gross and sexist as hell, L/nce just ended up as the Nice Guy trope and A//ura was reduced to nothing but his trophy. I can’t stand this ship, I appreciate the shippers that try to fix it, but canon has ruined it for me to the point I feel sick to my stomach when I see them together. It’s just Sexism Extraordinaire.

While I ship it I kinda don’t care about Ad/am, his character came out of nowhere and had little screentime for me to care for him. We don’t even know what kind of person he is, you can’t judge him from like one minute of screentime. Still shitty they fridged him, he didn’t deserve that kind of fuckery.

#this is...a lot lol #azurassong

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bifacialler · 5 years

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theskoomacat replied to your post “Why I have a dubious opinion about Baba Yaga in contemporary media”

as a slavic person: she literally eats babies in many tales. not to diminish the narrative and historical complexity of her character but was always used as a forest bogeyman for kids. she is never presented as a noble wise woman she is a half dead cannibal prone to cursing people. i mean if you really want to get inspired by the real version go for it but what you are saying is in the same vein as "medusa's curse is for her protection" it's just not correct

As a slavic person to another slavic person: I understand where you are coming from, and if you don’t mind, I shall expand on some points that you made, and explain why I approach her whole “cannibalism” part in the way that I do.

Disclaimer: I am more familiar with the mythos around Baba Yaga within the confines of Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian folklore. If you have information regarding the Baba Yaga mythos from other Slavic cultures (Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and so on), feel free to share, I would love to learn more. [Like I recently learned about the concept of powerful human souls called Zduhači within Montenegro/Herzegovinian/Serbian folklore who would epicly battle each other with storms and stuff and if that is not amazing, I don’t know what is.]

Yes, in the post-christianisation revamps of the tales Baba Yaga is diminished to the boogeyman to fend kids away from the forest under the reasoning that she will eat them, and has multiple hand visual cues of being cannibalistic, most importantly a fence out of human bones. (Not surprising, since the only form of paganism that was accepted with introduction of uniformed religion was through elimination of major pagan deities [destruction of places of worship, throwing their totems into the river and so on] and demonisation of the lesser vedic creatures). More so, in majority of tales the woman starts off her meeting with a person by saying “go away or I will eat you”. I spend couple of hours this fine morning searching for a single tale where she actually does - there are multiple where attempts are made, always failing due to ingenuity and expression of kindness of the protagonist towards other characters present: for example, in Afanasiev’s Baba Yaga, the girl feeds the cat and the dog, gives a girl a kerchief so she won’t stoke the fire, oils the gates and so on. and they help her escape. I found one (1) story in which Baba Yaga manages to actually eat someone - it was mentioned in Encyclopedia of Russian Mythology by Eriashvili/Madlenskay/Pavlovskii - and it was her daughters (which are a pretty rare occurence in the collective of the Baba Yaga tales), but since being eaten by Baba Yaga was another way to get to Nav’ (one-way trip, so to say), and they were already of the mythical kind thus belonging to the Nav’, being shape-shifters and such, it really has no weight.

Baba Yaga is not nice, never was, because she is indeed half-dead, and presented as such. [She is also heavily implied to be blind, but that’s a separate topic.] She literally exists in two planes simultaneously: in Yav’ and in Nav’. Being tightly associated with both cult of Mara/Mora and cult of Makosh (there is a pretty fascinating dissertation published in 1999 covering Yaga/Makosh juxtaposition called “The ambivalent images of Slavic Panteon”), it is her primary duty to conduct the rites of transformation and passage (mostly similar to burial rites), which didn’t mean she had to be hospitable about it - would be surprising, considering the character coming to her is either seeking the entrance to the underworld which is Not For Mortals (if we are talking heroic tales), or are send to her to die (most of women/children characters). [Also, I read a theory that she does the Russian version “Fe, fi, fo, I smell the Englishman’s blood” because as the smell of the dead is unpleasant to the living, the smell of living is unsavory to the dead aka those from the Nav’. Which is hilarious, since not only someone barges into her house demanding things, they also reek to kingdom come, possibly of black tar, so I’m inclined to say #same.]

To say that she is not noble is true - she has a right to, she is a nasty old woman who honestly doesn’t want to deal with all that - but to say that she is not wise is to omit one of her 4 archetypes, Yaga the Giver, who is a literal keeper of magical knowledge (props to Propp, once again). This is particularly interesting when taken in juxtaposition with her Yaga the Kidnapper archetype, because within those tales we can she that she is duped EXTREMELY easily. To the extend that it might be suggested that there is no possible way that she couldn’t see all of that coming. More so, it turns to pretty much comical to me, because whenever a child/young girl would be demanded to do something, in came in a form of “Do this, or I will eat you”. If she truly wanted to eat them she wouldn’t go through all that. This is a character, in her Yaga the Warrior archetype, who was able to beat the person half to death for breaking in her house. Yaga helps those she deems worthy of her help. There are tales in which Yaga is antagonistic, but these are later tales, featuring creatures like Koshei, a post-13th century character.

Baba Yaga to me is absolutely fascinating in her complexity, so yes, I prefer to take her through the prism of 200 years worth of folkloristic and mythological study, rather than solemnly through later itinerations where most of the complexities are reduced to superstition and concepts like holy/unholy and good/evil, which are not really that interesting to me, and I genuinely think she deserves better.

#theskoomacat #slavic mythology #baba yaga #longpost

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roxannepolice · 5 years

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Don't you have a feeling that Rey might be given too much agency again? You know, Polish version of the teaser makes no doubts that Luke is talking to Rey exclusively. Although it would be more interesting to have Luke talking to both of them. I'm afraid they (LF/Disney) would do everything to make Rey the only righteous and flawless heroine worthy of Skywalker's name and legacy - it really bothers me because Ben's story in all this might be reduced to a cautionary tale and this would be a waste

I’m not sure agency is the best word here, tbh, because protagonists (i.e, structurally speaking, characters bringing about major changes in the plot) have much agency by definition and if anything, I’d say that the essence of Rey’s frustration fuelling is that she is explicitly shown to have much potential to drive the plot but still ends up mostly being driven by it. Maybe it’s supposed to be some meta jedi philosophy thing, but I came here for a story not The Path of Righteous Jedi or 2517 Thoughts of Mace Windu. But I see what you mean and what can I say, I’d lie if I said this isn’t my major nightmare, along with thousands of generations line being a callback to Rey’s cave vision meaning she’s the real chosen one, incarnation of force’s avatar or something… which is where we stop dealing in myths (parthenogenesis, subverted prophecies, etc.) and start dealing in comic books at their worst (I’m as fast as sound! And I’m as fast as light! But I’m even faster than light! But I’m more faster than light than you are!).

Still, fusion is a b*tch. Last time polish translators had problems whether The Last Jedi is singular or plural, now I really pity them for having to translate The Rise of Skywalker somehow, without summoning Ethan Hunt to break into JJ’s safe to read the script (as a side note, there are times I’m soooo curious how the dubbing procedure works with all the secrecy will the Mouse kindap Dorociński, have him record Ben’s lines and then wipe his memory? and are the translators only allowed to translate one line and then sent away?). Then again, apparently they already came up with a more neutral translation of the trailer, which, at the very least, means they’re just as much in the dark as we are - and at least one other slavic translation (czech) went for gender neutral translation. If anyone has more translation insights, please share!

As a side note, while thinking about this ask I again reflected on a complaint I frequently hear even from the people who generally like the sequels - the movies are overcrowded and as a result agency gets overspread among many different characters, no one seems to get the screentime due and so character prominence needs to be artificially pumped up with sloooo moooo fliptops. Also, people end up overfocusing on P*e and oversympathising with Hugs because they’re the only new major characters to appear in both episodes and have personalities that are neither at odds with their backgrounds nor need to be guessed assuming they’re in denial.

#asks #tros speculation #tros trailer #translation reflections #for the record: *oversympathising* is to be understood purely in textual context not moral #as in the author didn't expect people will sympathise with this character so much

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officialravendc · 6 years

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Crimson Summer

Here’s a new story, for the first time in forever. Prompted by and dedicated to @princesscochlea.

"The rose was sweet like rotting death, like caramelised bones, a kind of corpse bruleé... and his eyes, pure glaring yellow. The colour of fear."

Iarina swears she's being stalked by Koschei the Deathless. But that's impossible, because Koschei is a character from a fairy tale. But as she searches for a saviour, something grim and ancient threatens to devour her city.

Read this story on AO3, or click here to keep reading!

There hung Koschei the Deathless, fettered by twelve chains. Koschei entreated Prince Ivan, saying:

'Have pity upon me and give me to drink! Ten years long have I been here in torment, neither eating nor drinking; my throat is utterly dried up.'

The Prince gave him a bucketful of water; he drank it up and asked for more, saying:

'A single bucket of water will not quench my thirst; give me more!'

The Prince gave him a second bucketful. Koschei drank it up and asked for a third, and when he had swallowed the third bucketful, he regained his former strength, gave his chains a shake, and broke all twelve at once.

'Thanks, Prince Ivan!' cried Koschei the Deathless, 'now you will sooner see your own ears than Marya Morevna!' and out of the window he flew in the shape of a terrible whirlwind.

- “Marya Morevna” (1890)

Deep in the woods, a single sick rose twisted its way up through the snow.

From a young age Iarina knew the shape of good and evil. Good was warm, human, charming; evil was the figure she glimpsed late one night out of her bedroom window staring up at her as she froze closing the curtains. It was quite clearly there one moment and the very next not - a lurking shadow, suddenly reduced to a brief flash of white and then nothing. Iarina could not explain this. It was like nothing she had ever seen, not outside of the TV, and so her teenage mind performed a strange leap of logic and snapped straight to the events of a faerie tale she had been told earlier that evening.

Iarina’s mother liked to spend the winter evenings weaving rich tales about the Faeries, the Dreaming Folk, like the Baba Yaga and the Firebird. These were the tales she had been told as a child, and her mother had been told as a child, and so on. These were old stories, stories with ancient roots in the cold Russian dirt – so it saddened and soured her when they failed to take hold with her teenage daughter. The slums of St Petersburg were a dismal and messy place that felt like a bit too much for a small, poor girl to take in. Iarina would rather be listening to easy stories of dashing American superheroes and tyrant aliens than grim complex faeries. It had been a while since Putin’s sardonic smirk had gently draped a new Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe, and the only escape from the perpetual uncertainty of politics was into simple uncomplicated fantasy.

This was why it came as a surprise when Iarina ran down the stairs one night and demanded a retelling of Marya Morevna. Her mother was taken aback, but complied gratefully until Iarina asked her to stop.

“Mama,” she said, “I saw him outside my window.”

Iarina, it seemed, had developed a fear of the archetypically brutal Koschei - Коще́й - the Deathless.

“The other tales I told you, they were based on respect,” said her mother. “A Baba Yaga? Something to be feared, yes, but also something to which you defer. If you treat her correctly, she will protect you.” She truly believed in the things she spoke of. “These are forces of nature, Iarina. Sheer elements. But Koschei?” She scoffed. “Koschei is a warning about trust. About deceiving appearances. He is not a god, a king or a spirit. He is dead. That was the punishment for his hubris.”

“But Mamulya – ”

“Don’t you ‘But Mamulya’ me.”

“Mama, you said to fear the Baba Yaga and her like, but…”

Iarina stopped, because it felt like someone was listening, and jumped when her mother spoke.

“…But?”

“But those stories are just fairy tales.”

Koschei was the Wife-Stealer, the hunter of young women, the ancient predator of Slavic folklore. No wonder, then, that he particularly struck a fearful chord with Iarina, who had to avoid men like him on her way to and from school each day. The trouble was Koschei was magical, and immortal, and probably much faster than anybody else she knew. Despite the fact that handsome young Ivan Tsarevitch had long ago killed the Deathless and burnt his lying corpse, something of him felt pertinent. Real. Current. Iarina had to admit that she fancied the concept of Ivan Tsarevitch, to the extent that her admiration of Prince Ivan was the only thing that matched her unnatural terror of Koschei. She was sure Ivan would carry her away as he had warrior princess Marya Morevna. She was sure.

A farmer by the outskirts of St Petersburg came across a great field of roses encroaching on his property. He went inside to call the police. They laughed at him, but five minutes after he put down the phone he was dead.

For a long time, Iarina had a vaguely embarrassing thing for Superman. Superman was simple and kind and good and wore bright colours to show that he meant well. He was a sort of prince, she thought, combining her two interests of aliens and superheroes rather neatly.

Then Ivan came along to vie for her affections, and of course he rapidly usurped the Big Blue Boy Scout, because he was Russian. Iarina knew of no Russian Superman. If he existed, she reckoned, he would be dour and grey and complicated. Ivan was not complicated. He had a sword and he killed bad men and was handsome and swept princesses off their feet.

Ivan kept Koschei and the Faeries at bay.

Trudging through the snow back home in the dark mid-afternoon, Iarina thought she saw movement in the gap between a couple of concrete shacks. A flurry, a flush of rich tail, like an animal out of a Disney movie just behind a thick pile of trash. Iarina came to a halt, staring curiously at the pile, and was about to take a step towards it when she noticed a pair of cruel eyes looking back at her from one of the windows. They peered coldly through a gap in the blinds, glaring bright yellow like a hungry tiger.

Iarina ran home and didn’t look back.

The roses crept along the roadside and down into the sewers. The smell was sweet like rotting death, like caramelised bones, a kind of corpse brûlée. It drifted on the breeze and suffocated three people in their beds. Despite the sugary stench, some insisted on picking the roses. Those who did shrivelled like dead petals and in minutes became screaming skin husks by the roadside.

“Iarina,” said her mother, “you’re being ridiculous.”

“You’re just saying that,” Iarina responded. “I can tell by your pale face and clammy hands.”

Her mother was silent for a long time. Iarina waited patiently if unhappily, but when the response eventually came it was terse and vague.

“I do not believe in Koschei,” her mother said. “He is a tale for unhappy widows to muse on and nothing more.”

“But Mamulya - ”

“No more questions. Go to your room.”

“Please!”

“Go to your room!”

Nothing more was said, though the silence was fraught with the ghosts of arguments.

Iarina found herself praying for Prince Ivan’s tenuous existence. She felt lost, scared, alone; she needed a confidant or protector or partner. The other girls at school ignored her already, and now that her mother had refused to support her the long walk home became bleak and harrowing. Iarina needed Ivan, because Koschei's shadow frequently tripped down the alleyways and loomed like a great tower under puddles of streetlight. She could swear there were eyes watching her too, ravenous demon eyes searching incessantly from the stark rooftops.

Iarina prayed, and hoped, and feared.

The roses had crawled a dark circle round the underside of the city, snaking grotesquely through the buried pipes and tunnels. They did not hesitate for the icy winter, spreading their knotted, thorny roots down into the brick and turf to take hold – and then, all of a sudden, it was time.

Iarina was lost.

These were streets with which she was familiar, streets she knew by their coarse individual feel on her feet. She could have charted her course home in her sleep. So why was she in unknown alleys, worn cobbles strange beneath her sole?

The mist closed in, bringing with it a flake or two of snow. The street was quiet.

So, so quiet.

So quiet that when Koschei stepped out of a narrow passageway just in front of her, Iarina couldn’t even scream for fear of disturbing the silence.

Koschei the Deathless looked like he had killed the Grim Reaper and climbed inside its skin. He made for a towering, skeletal figure in a smoky black shroud, and out of the peaked hood burst a pair of bright yellow predator's eyes. Iarina felt that hunting yellow, the colour of fear, as it wormed its way into her brain and down her spine.

So she turned and ran. Koschei reached for her, thin pale fingers stretching from the ragged arm of his cloak, but she slipped past his clammy grasp and ducked into another fog-swollen alley. Her feet pounded at the cobbles, Koschei’s hobbling step gaining pace rapidly from behind. Iarina flung herself round a corner onto a wider street, then back into another passageway, breath hissing through her teeth in short, panicked strokes. Fists balled, movement violent, adrenaline coursing. Legs like pistons – swinging round a drainpipe – throwing down a stack of empty crates – blood pumping like a drum through ears – harsh inhalations – clutched side – frantic searching gaze – painful exhalations – a cry –

“HELP!”

And as if to answer her call, there stood wonderful, strange, beautiful Ivan.

The Prince Tsarevitch was swaddled in rich fabrics, gold and red and woven like tapestries. His mouth was wrapped against the chill, but as Iarina stared at him in amazement and relief he pulled the scarf aside to reveal his warm, human eyes and confident smile. To his left stood a silvery, glittering unicorn, and to his right a coppery, glowing fox. Iarina recognised its tail as the one she'd seen some days prior slipping behind the trash in the alley. To think she’d been that close to safety, and had she followed her instincts then she would never have had to worry about Koschei at all. Ivan gestured in a kind of old-fashioned bow, and the animals inclined their heads towards her. It seemed as if he was about to speak, but then a dusty dry breeze wafted over Iarina from behind.

Koschei stood there, hunched, eyes glaring a blaze of red. Rage peeled off him like steam, his stance one of utter hatred. As Iarina stepped back towards Ivan, Koschei's glare flicked towards her for a second and darkened slightly before returning, brighter than before, to Ivan.

“Stop,” said Koschei in a mangled, unrecognizable voice, but Ivan waved his hand and the copper fox pounced to intercept. Iarina turned and ran, following Ivan and the unicorn down the barren street.

The gutters were littered with Koschei’s victims, skin shells that might have once been people. Iarina gagged as she fled, the sickly smell invading her nostrils and burning cold fire through her sinuses. Tendrils clasped the bodies, holding them close to the floor, pulling them into the drains. Ivan looked back, checking on her, then started at a roar and a flash of light behind them. Koschei burst through the edge of the mist in pursuit, the molten remains of the copper fox dripping from his clawed fists.

Ivan waved - the unicorn turned and struck, bearing Koschei back into the fog on its horn. Koschei grunted in pain, then vanished from sight. Ivan beckoned frantically, and Iarina followed his reassuring gestures, turning out into an open plaza. Suddenly she recognised this. They were back in the real world, in the city centre. Just up ahead, instantly recognisable, was St Petersburg’s famous Lion Bridge. Ivan’s eyes creased with hope, and the message was clear – over the bridge lay safety.

Either side of the great bridge archway waited stone carvings of those great alert cats, guarding the causeway stoically. Before the Prince and Iarina could reach the gate, however, there came another roar and flash of light as Koschei emerged from the mist behind them, bony hands soaked in both his own blood and the silver blood of the unicorn. Ivan stumbled onto the bridge, shook off one layer of the rich fabrics he wore, and draped it over a lion statue.

Ivan stroked the pelt, and the statue came alive, sheathed in gold. Iarina rushed onto the bridge, and the lion sprang at Koschei, just moments behind.

“No!” cried Koschei. “Stop! Stop!” But Iarina was already on the bridge, following her Prince, and Koschei struggled against the beast.

“Iarina Vasiliev!” Koschei pleaded. How did he know her name? “Don’t go with him. You are in terrible danger.”

“Yes, I am,” Iarina retorted angrily, stopping and turning. “From you.”

“From me?” Koschei asked. The lion roared, but Koschei hit it with a burst of purple light and it whimpered back a couple of steps, struck fatally. “I am not here to hurt you, Iarina.”

Iarina stared at him for a long moment. “But of course you are. You are Koschei the Deathless. Wife-Stealer. Girl-Hunter. You are a predator, a murderer, and worse. I can tell by your eyes. They are like an animal's.”

But Koschei's eyes no longer glowed yellow. Now they were soft and sad. He stroked the lion, shushing it as its semi-life melted away in his hands, and spoke.

“If I am like an animal, like a predator, then why am I not the one sending animals after you? The fox is a predator. The lion is a predator. And tell me, why do you think the unicorn has its horn? It is not to make it look pretty.” Although Iarina could not see Koschei's face, he looked expectant.

“It is for killing,” Koschei continued after a moment. He then reached up with both hands, still looking at Iarina, and slowly pulled the cloak back from his face. From under the hood there emerged a striking visage - hair as black as a raven's feather, lips red with her own crimson blood, and that same blood in tracks down cheeks as pale as the snow.

“You see,” said Raven, for it was she, “I am not Koschei.”

Iarina reeled. Who was this woman, this she-Koschei, this contradiction in terms?

“Do you know the story of Koschei the Deathless, Iarina?” the woman asked.

“ – of course,” Iarina said in a small voice.

“Then tell me how Ivan found Koschei in Marya Morevna's tower.”

Iarina stuttered, then began to recite: “There hung Koschei the Deathless, fettered by twelve chains. Koschei entreated Prince Ivan, saying – ”

“That’s it,” the woman said. “He appeared helpless, vulnerable... in short, exactly what a hero like Ivan wanted to see. Somebody to be saved.”

“What are you saying.”

“I'm saying, Iarina, that things are not always what they seem. So yes, I look scary, but...”

Her voice drifted as she looked up over the bridge. Iarina followed, and found Ivan, golden and handsome, standing on the other side.

The lamps lining the sides of the causeway glowed soft and somehow distant in the mist. Iarina's slight frame shivered in the middle of the bridge, over the icy water, trapped between Ivan and the woman Koschei. The strange woman was thin, sallow, unsettling; the colour of her irises twisted and shuddered like a jammed video cassette even though her gaze was calm and fixed. By contrast the Prince was warm, comforting, beckoning with his no doubt toned physique and deep blue eyes. Snowflakes drifted down, melting on Iarina and Raven's flushed faces.

“Why is he so perfect, Iarina?”

“Shut up.”

“The snow is sticking to him and staying there. He's empty and cold inside because he came from the ice and the snow.”

Iarina turned again, desperate. “Shut up!”

“And it hasn't talked once. I don't think it even understands the concept of language.”

“Stop talking! Koschei talked. He used his words to trick Prince Ivan into freeing him, because he was evil and dark and wicked, and so are you!”

Raven shifted. “Why did he appear? How did he appear? He’s a fairy tale, a story, nothing more!”

Shouting now, she gripped the plinths on either side of the bridge's entrance and leaned in. “You wanted a hero, a perfect saviour Prince, and down came the faeries or daemons or something from up in the dark stars or deep in the heart of Russia's collective imagination and made that, that thing there, and it wants you, it needs you, it lives and breathes you and as we speak it keeps eating and eating and it has to stop.”

Iarina was still watching the Prince, who shook his head and smiled, reaching slowly into his robes.

“And I can stop it,” Raven continued, “but you have to make the choice to reject it. You have to do this. You have to turn and walk away.”

“But,” said Iarina, on the verge of tears, “but...”

“But what?”

“But he brought me a rose.”

The Prince was holding it in his left hand, a gnarled beautiful thing, with the thorns and the petals and the scent, and somehow both he and it were utterly disgusting.

Raven's eyes were a deep purple, and Iarina felt a great sadness and love wash over her, and her tears welled up and split dark rivulets down her face.

“Oh, Iarina,” said Raven,

“...Roses only grow in the summer.”

“My father was terrible too.”

Iarina didn’t know how to respond to that.

“I can feel it in you,” Raven said. “I feel what you feel.”

“How?” Iarina asked, somewhat lamely.

“Magic,” Raven responded.

Iarina looked down at the pile of golden robes where the Prince had once stood. “The sun is up already.”

“Time passes quickly in strange places,” said Raven, wiping blood from her face, “and this is one of them.”

The Prince had looked on, motionless, as Raven twisted her hands and tore it into little chunks of writhing maggoty meat and roots full of rot. Now it lay in a hundred different places, a silent blast pattern, a thing departed. The fog, as if on cue, had eased and retreated into the distance.

“It made some sort of circle under the city,” Raven continued. “I think it was building something. Some lost broken magick or other.” She took hold of Iarina and turned her away, walking her back across the bridge. “Truth is, I don’t know what it wanted. Or if it’s dead. Or if death is a state that even means anything to it.”

They reached the broken lion, stepping off the bridge. “For all I know, it could have been an inanimate function just dipping into our universe. Like a gamma ray - infecting one cancer cell, something that spreads, making more, and so on.” Raven looked at Iarina. “But you’re safe now.”

“Are you a Baba Yaga?” Iarina said, after a moment.

Raven looked at her, then off into the distance, then down at her own hands.

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m not sure I’d know if I was.”

“What do I do now?”

“Go home, get some rest,” Raven said. There was a moment, and then the ghost of a kind smile crept onto her face. “Believe in stories.”

For an instant there was a pure white after-image, then a whining tone like a badly tuned radio, and Iarina was alone.

Epilogue

The roses wilted, one by one, stretching back from the woods to the farms to the streets. As they died, they let out little puffs of air, like sighs of relief.

The streets were empty but for a young woman running out towards the slums. Her head was purged of princes, as it had been of Kryptonian strongmen before. Instead it was full of someone else, someone tangible and present and – complicated, for once.

In fact, something that had been said about her father came back to her, and she began to wonder why she had cared for men at all.

One rose, with a Herculean effort, tore its roots free from the dying knotted network. It was an attempt to hold on to life that lasted for a few brief instants before the boot of a running girl came down, flattened it, and kept moving on into tomorrow.

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arbenia · 6 years

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The question of the ethnic and cultural continuity between the early Illyrians and the mediaeval Albanians, besides being one of the most attractive issues of Balkan history, has also acquired a political dimension in recent decades. This is not the first time such a thing has happened in history.

It was the Croats who before anyone else put forward the claim of being descended from the glorious Illyrian people, to the point of identifying themselves with them and giving themselves the name of Illyrians. For centuries, the Croatian language was simply called Illyrian. It is thought that Vinko Pribojevic (Vincentius Priboevius) in the 16th century was the first to include the history of the Illyrians in what might be called a political program.

Pribojevic idea; countering the ideology and threat of pan-Germanism, he used the splendid history of the Illyrians in order to demonstrate a cultural and especially historical superiority to the GERMANS, Italians, and Hungarians. According to Pribojevic, both Queen Teuta and King Agron were Slavs, as were Alexander the Great, Diocletian, and even Aristotle and St. Jerom.

After him, Mauro Orbini, another Croat historian, relaunched the pan-Slavic idea in his well-known book, "Il Regno degli Slavi, hoggi corrottamente detti Schiavoni," published in Pesaro in 1601. The book met with great success and exerted a major influence on historians and politicians of subsequent centuries. Now nobody doubted that the Slavs, especially those of the western portion of the Balkan peninsula, were the direct descendants of the Illyrians.

Illyrian was the tongue spoken on the east coast of the Adriatic, and the land inhabited by the southern Slavs, especially the Croats, was Illyria. The Croats adopted the name Illyrian for themselves, though more when abroad and in foreign-language publications than within Croatia itself.

In the first half of the 19th century, the title Illyrian acquired a clear political function among the Croats. The leaders of the Croatian national movement called themselves "Illyrians" (Ilirci). Moreover, the theory of the Illyrian origin of the Croats was at this time embodied in academic form by Ljudevit Gaj, the greatest ideologue of the national movement. It was he who published a book entitled "Who Were the Old Illyrians?"

This treated the question from a historical angle, but which political aims. Gay knew full well that any theory of a direct descent of today’s Croats from the old Illyrians was somehow an exaggeration. However, he believed that the name Illyrian would be the cement binding together the South Slavs in a new cultural and economic entity and a powerful political alliance that could confront the age-old enemies of the South Slav peoples.

The Illyrian ideology of the Croatian national movement was leavened with same doubtful ideas. It was not by chance that, after initial enthusiasm, critics of the idea grasped its weak points and easly refuted Gaj’s basic thesis of the South Slavs.

The political and police authorities of Vienna and Budapest rightly saw the notion of the Illyrian origin of all the South Slavs as a dangerous idea, because it could become an acceptable basis to devise a political program for all the south Slavs. It is therefore no wonder that in 1843 the authorities banned the use of the name Illyrian to designate the Croat national movement.

As time passed, the idea of a direct link between the Illyrians and the Croats was gradually abandoned. It was the writer and philologist Bogoslav Sulek who delivered the final blow to the theory of the Illyrian origin of the South Slavs. In 1844, he published a treatise on the idea that the South Slavs could not be considered the direct descendants of the ancient Illyrians, but that the Slavs living in the western part of the Balkan peninsula were the result of a long and complicated ethnogenetic process involving the Illyrians but also the Romans, Celts, Goths, and, finally, the Slavs.

It was in the second half of the 19th century and especially in the 20th century that the Illyrian problem acquired a political meaning for another Balkan people, the Albanians.

The problem of the direct descent of the Albanians from the ancient Illyrians was originally purely academic. Researchers attempted to solve this problem on the basis of data that were not always certain or complete, relying mainly on historical and especially linguistic evidence.

The question has for years been obscured by political arguments that have frequently prevailed over academic ones. Of course, this is not the first such case in history. On the contrary, it is enough to recall the way in which Italian archaeologists at the time of fascism attempted to justify Mussolini’s conquests in the Mediterranean basin, how the Greeks today exploit data for the sake of their plans to annex Northern Epirus, and how the Serbs claim that any place where Serbian monuments or graves are found must belong to the Serbian state.

There is no need to recall other similar cases, for those we have mentioned suffice to show how archaeologists have placed their skills at the behest of national politics and ideology. Serbian archaeology and historiography have subjected the Albanians in general to such treatment, especially in Kosova. After World War II, but especially after the serious events in Kosova in 1981, Serbian archaeologists set to work to refute the theory of the Illyrian ethnic of Albanians.

They are indeed not the first to cast doubt over the historical continuity between the Illyrians and the Albanians. Some specialists, especially Germans, including C. Pauli, H. Hirt, G. Mayer, and F. Cordignano , raised the question of the origin of the Albanian language and the Albanians in general. On the basis of what they considered to be scientific data they drew conclusions that disagreed with the theory that the Albanians are an indigenous population.

Even though we do not today agree with their conclusions, we must emphasise that their arguments had no political or still less anti-Albanian overtones, and that they must be taken into consideration with proper seriousness when the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Albanians is discussed.

The politicisation of the problem that was later to become the hallmark of Serbian archaeology and historiography began with the Croat linguist Henrik Baric, who had close ties with Serbian academic and political circles. (6) Baric was a very capable linguist, but the motives impelling him to formulate his Thraco-Moesian theory of the origin of the Albanians remain dubious. His theory rests on linguistic data.

The fact that the same linguistic material can be used in support of such diverse theories may alarm any student approaching this problem. Without denying linguists their right to formulate their conclusions on the basis of linguistic material, we must say that there also exist today a large quantity of archaeological, anthropological, ethnological, and ethnomusicological data.

The large amount of research in recent decades has thus made it much easier today to tackle the problem of the ethnic origins of the Albanians than 50 or 100 years ago. The result achieved by workers in different disciplines in recent decades have reduced the importance of the work that relied on now obsolete linguistc evidence, and have made the autochthony of the Albanians, i.e. increasingly indisputable.

This conflict between new scientific result and the defenders of now obsolete theories is a phenomenon that can be explained by the increasing politicisation of the issue of Albanian ethnogenesis. In fact, the theory of Albanian autochthony has never been disputed with such determination and savagery as today, precisely when so much scientific proof has been produced in its support.

Nevertheless, the number of researchers still today refusing to take into consideration the many arguments supplied by different academic disciplines has shrunk, or, more accurately, absolutely the only researchers who deny the theory of Albanian autochthony are Serbian. Serbian archaeologists and historians began long ago to dispute the autochthony theory, but this opposition increased especially after the great Albanian revolt in Kosova in 1981. It was therefore a consequence of a political event rather than of new scientific data.

The Serbian archaeologist Milutin Garasanin represents a special case. In 1955, he wrote an article in the Prishtina periodical "Përparimi", in which he asserted that the Albanians are the direct descendants of the Illyrians. In the years that followed, Garasanin increasingly fell into line with other Serbian researchers who denied any such descent. This shift became still more evident in connection with the problem of the ethnic allegiance of the Dardanians, who inhabited the Kosova region.

This problem became one of the most disputed in archaeology and history, assuming apolitical character after 1981. The Serbs vigorously attacked the idea that the Dardanians were ethnically Illyrian. Not because they were led to this conclusion by scientific evidence, but purely because Kosova was "the cradle of Serbian history" and "holy soil" for the Serbs, and as such could not have been inhabited by a people that were of Illyrian stock and hence claimed by their descendants, the Albanians.

In the past, Serbian researchers had not always been of one mind in allocating the Kosova region to the ancient Daco-Moesians. Milutin Garasanin himself, in his survey of prehistoric Serbia in 1973, openly admits that on the basis of their place names and personal names the Dardanians can be considered Illyrians, and that a Thracian and perhaps Dacian element is evident only in the eastern parts of their territories.

However, when the Serbian Academy of Arts and sciences in 1986 organized a series of conferences on the ties between the Illyrians and the Albanians, this same Garasanin announced that the Dardanians cannot be considered Illyrians because they were ethnically more closely connected with the Daco-Moesian substratum.

It is easy to explain this change in Garasanin’s stand. We are now in a period of history in which relations between the Albanians and Serbs of Kosova, and not only within this region, have dramatically deteriorated and no Serbian researcher can freely express his opinion over the Illyrian-Albanian question without exposing himself to the danger of changes of high treason.

It would be impossible to trace here the progress of the press, television, and radio campaign waged by Serbian researchers against the idea of Albanian autochthony. It is enough to recall an entertaining incident in this campaign which took place in Zagreb in 1982. Two years previously, in 1980, the first volume of the Encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia (Secon Edition) had been published, in which there were two entries, one entitled "Albanci" (Albanians), and the other "Albansko-Jugoslavenski odnosi" (Albanian-Yugoslavian relations).

On pages 75-79, the Albanian historian from Kosova, Ali Hadri, had written the part of the entry under "Albanci" that dealt with "the origin and development of the Albanian people," in which he stated that the Albanians are the descendants of the Illyrians. The linguist Idriz Ajeti said the same, considering the Albanian language a successor to the Illyrian tongue.

When this volume had come off the press, the Albanian revolt in Kosova had broken aut, and when the Serbian edition of this same book was under preparation, the Serbian representatives on the Encyclopaedia’s central editorial board rejected the text that had already been published in the Croat edition (which they themselves had approved), and insisted that the two entries should be reformulated according to the ideas of Serbian historians. A long and bitter debate then took place within the editorial board, and was soon reflected in the Zagreb and Belgrade newspapers. Ten contributions from historians and archaeologist were commissioned in order to prepare new versions of these entries.

At that time, the Serbian members of the editorial board could not impose their ideas on others. This meant that the new version that was printed in subsequent editions of the Encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia included textual changes in the sections dealing all mention of the continuity between the Illyrians and Albanians.

Although unable to change what had already been published in the Croat edition, the publisher of the Encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia printed the new versions of the two entries and sent them to subscribers, requesting them to insert them in the appropriate place.

The debate within the Encyclopaedia’s editorial board was also echoed in political circles. At the ninth Congress of the Serbian Communist Party held in Belgrade on 27-29 May 1982, a bitter argument broke out over the ethnic origins of the Albanians. The congress of a political party was of course not the proper place to discuss an academic problem of this kind, but the question had apparently assumed a political character and could not be confined to academic circles.

It was nothing les than the incident involving the two entries in the Encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia that became the spark setting off this unexpected debate at the Serbian Communist Party: Congress. The Albanian linguist Idriz Ajeti referred to this scandalous incident in his speech in order to show that many Serbian researchers and journalists were politicising the issue to the extent that only a political forum could settle it, by political means.

Disgusted by the assaults of the newspapers, Professor Ajeti movingly defended at this congress the theory of the linguistic ties between the Illyrian and Albanian languages, and also the ethnic continuity between the Illyrians and the Albanians.

His speech met with an immediate response in the congress hall.

Pretending not to understand why a purely academic problem should become a discussion topic at a political congress, the Serbian historian Jovan Deretic asked in pathetic tones what point there was in politicising the question of the Albanians’ ethnic origin.

Why should the Albanians be the descendants of the Illyrians and not of the Thracians ? There was no point in dragging this question out of its academic context – on condition that the Thracian theory was accepted. The Illyrian theory could not be correct, simply because it was an expression of Albanian imperialism, nationalism, etc. According to Deretic, the Illyrian theory had "a slight whiff of racism" that reminded him of the theory of a pure Aryan race, "and we know very well who inspired that theory."

Immediately after Deretic, Petar Zivadinovic took the floor. Zivadinovic was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Serbian Communist Party at this congress. For him, science had still not solved the problem of the ethnic origins of the Albanians, but, although he had never dealt with such academic questions, he knew very well that the Albanians could not be descended from the Illyrians.

The historian Sima Cirkovic also though that the Illyrian theory "stank of racism."

The newspapers at this time were full of articles about the speeches at the conference. "Politika," a Belgrade newspaper with little tolerance for the Albanians, published an article under the headline, "No Campaign, But Creative Criticism."

This newspaper apparently did not stop to consider that this stream of articles written by people who did more to compromise these authors than the Illyrian theory of the ethnic origin of the Albanians.

The book "The Albanians and Their Territories," published by the Albanian Academy of Sciences in Tirana in 1982, and in an English edition in 1985, caused considerable commotion. Albanian authors from Kosova were attacked especially harshly because their work demonstrated the autochthony of the Albanians in the province of Kosova.

These authors attempted in vain to explain that all the articles included in this volume had been previously published in Yugoslavia and were therefore common knowledge long before the book appeared. (18) The attacks persisted because this book discussed what was the most delicate political problem in Kosova.

The campaign against the Illyrian theory intensified alongside the progressive deterioration of the political situation in Kosova. Serbia’s best-known historians appeared on the scene, including the linguist Pavle Ivic, who proceeded to ruin a large part of his own scientific work in order to prove that Serbian and Croatian are a single language. He had never tackled the problems of the Illyrians or Albanians, but it nevertheless emerged that the Albanians could only be of Thracian, not Illyrian origin.

In an interview for the Belgrade weekly NIN, Professor Ivic listed the linguists who have considered the Albanian language a descendant of Thracian and then recalled the well-known but now obsolete argument that the Albanians could not have lived on the Adriatic and Ionian coast, because they possessed word for fish.

According to Professor Ivic, the problem of the Illyrian origin of the Albanians is complicated, but there is nevertheless no question of any doubt that the Albanians are not descendants of the Illyrians and are therefore not indigenous to the province of Kosova. This is precisely what the journalist interviewing him and the magazine’s readers wanted to hear.

A controversy then sprang up in the pages of this magazine between Professor Ivic, Mehmet Hyseni, and Shkelzen Maliqi.

On one hand, all this controversy and debate encouraged the Albanians to study more deeply the problem of their ethnic origin from the archaeological and ethnographic point of view, while it drove Serbian researchers to the point of denying the results of their own work. In 1982, when this problem had become an inflammatory one in what was then Yugoslavia, the Academy of Sciences in Albania organised a national conference on the formation of the Albanian people, their language, and culture. At this conference, which was attended by many foreign historians, many specialists tried to present all the evidence that their different academic disciplines could offer to solve the problem of Illyrian-Albanian continuity.

As in reply to this conference, the Serbs had the idea of organising in Belgrade, under the auspices of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, a series of conferences that were to tackle problems also dealt with in Tirana. The conferences, that were attended solely by Serbian historians, took place in May and June 1986. Their papers were later published in a book, in Serbian and French editions.

A careful reading of the contributions of Ms. F. Papazoglu and Professor M. Garasanin reveals at least a kind of uncertainty in their arguments. These writers sometimes even imply that they do not favour an unconditional rejection of the Illyrian theory of the Albanians’ ethnic origin.

Of course, writers of propaganda have paid no attention to the academic evidence, and have not grasped these authors’ doubts, but only the evidence that suit their anti-Albanian campaign. Aware of the simplification which the complicated problem of the Albanians’ ethnic origins had undergone, professor Garasanin was careful to point out that the Albanians are undoubtedly a palaeo-Balkan people and that the Illyrian element played a part, albeit a minor one, in their formation.

Garasanin asserted that there can be no question of a direct continuity between the Illyrians and the Albanians, because the Illyrians disappeared from history during the five centuries of Roman occupation. The Albanians are therefore a people who were formed in the middle ages from small remnants of peoples, including the Illyrians, who inhabited the western Balkans in classical and mediaeval times.

There is no need to continue. However, we would like to end by emphasising that the misrepresentations of the Serbian academic community in connection with the ethnic origin of the Albanians are part of a long and painful story of abuses of this kind, which have been nothing but political propaganda paving the way for military repression. This is the meaning of the way for military repression. This is the meaning of the campaign by Serbian historians and journalists against the autochthony of the Albanians in the lands they inhabit.

#albanian #balkan #nationalism #albania #kosovo #kosova #Illyrians

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jpolish-writes-queer-ya-fantasy · 6 years

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(1/2) Hey Cap! I'm white w no culture (well, I'm Slavic but all I know is Baba Yaga and borscht which doesn't really help). I want to portray cultures that I'm not used to. How do I as know-nothing write about different cultures? Research, I know; but where? History books don't seem to help; can't exactly have characters think "we were invaded in 1111 AD for farming land" it's just not relevant. And I'm in school I can't devote more than my spare time to researching every last bit of a culture.

(2/2) (is this how you’re supposed to break up asks idk) Also, there’s portraying racism. I don’t really plan to have it as a major theme if I include it at all—while discussing racism is obviously very important I feel like it’s also important to portray people doing it right by not being racist, like female-led movies not always directly addressing sexism (like most Disney movies). Am I correct in thinking that? Can/should I leave it out? If not, how do I write it?

An important and good question, my dear!! I’m really glad you already know the research thing – that said, you have a point. Research is so damn important (as discussed on blogs like @writingwithcolor), but at the same time it can rarely, if ever, give us the day-to-day richness that we often seek to portray in our works. For this reason, it’s often helpful to write (alongside research, of course) about people with cultural experiences that you’re actually familiar with. What I mean is this: my fiancée and I were talking the other day about whose homes we’ve been in, and who’s been in our homes, in relation to our writing. What draws us to write about people whose homes we’ve never been into? Who’ve never been welcomed into our homes? How will these experiences and intimacies – or lack thereof – show up in our writing?

How can we write people whose experiences are different than ours as fully-developed, multi-dimensional human beings, while not erasing the importance of their specific experiences? It’s a question that, if – especially as a white writer – you ever feel you have the answer to, you need to start again. I guess what I mean by that is, never stop asking the questions you’re asking me right now, and never stop refining those questions as you write. Relatedly, a lot of it really involves a self-reflective examination of why you’re drawn to writing cultures you’re not used to: the answers to those questions can often point you in helpful directions.

In addition – and perhaps before anything else – I’d encourage you to challenge the idea that whiteness means having “no” culture: I grew up thinking that way as well, and it took me a while (too long) to learn that the invisibility of whiteness as itself cultural experience (different, of course, in different places and countries etc) is itself a place of white supremacy and privilege that we white folks live in and write from. Examining the ways in which your whiteness is, like mine, a tremendously culturally-laden thing would actually be a great place to start in your writing.

Being white never means having no culture: instead, the idea we grow up with that we have no culture is part of the ways that white supremacy is so pervasive that it seems invisible to us, because we have the privilege to ignore it/not notice it. White culture is everywhere: and therefore, like air, it seems invisible. Sort of like heteronormativity: cis straight folks who aren’t ace don’t often have to think about the ways that straight cis culture is everywhere. So, thinking those things through, too, will be an important starting point, as well.

In terms of depicting racism, depends! What lives are you drawing for your characters? What everyday experiences just sort of happen that they might or might not think too hard about, but that nonetheless impact the flow of their lives? What structural oppressions do they experience on the daily, and how do they talk (or not talk) about them with their peers? These kinds of questions can alter the original question a bit, so you’re not thinking about what’s the politically savory thing to do with your books, but rather, creating three-dimensional characters in a three-dimensional world that refuses to reduce your characters of color to being just about racism while also refusing to erase its existence. Thinking about that three-dimensionality can often be a more world-building question than just the one of ‘do I or do I not bring up racism explicitly’, you know?

I’m really happy that you’re grappling with these issues. I am by no means an expert – my pores leak with white privilege ery day – but I know that the more we grapple, and the more we fight to create space for writers of color to get published before we do, the better the world of literature can be!

Keep on keeping on, and feel free to ask follow-ups!

#racism in writing #white writers #white supremacy in writing #whiteness in publishing #writing tips

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dydturktek · 5 years

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NEM KURUTMA HİZMETLERİ

#Nem Kurutma Firması

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vampireadamooc · 5 years

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As Always: text is provided only in the event of access expiration or post deletions from the hosting site. Whenever possible, always read the article at the link.

DISSECTING ‘DRACULA’: A CHAT WITH VAMPIRE EXPERT STANLEY STEPANIC Associate professor Stanley Stepanic has been teaching “Dracula” for more than 10 years. Students line up to take the popular class.

October 29, 2018 Jane Kelly, [email protected] The University of Virginia offers a wildly popular course called “Dracula.” Coming out of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the course has appeared on student-generated lists of the top classes that ’Hoos should take before they graduate. Course Hero, an educational technology company, even named associate professor Stanley Stepanic, who teaches “Dracula,” a master educator.

With Halloween nearly upon us, UVA Today caught up with Stepanic for a fun Facebook Live event. He discussed his course, his teaching style and why Dracula is important, and even offered some spooky Dracula movie suggestions.

Over half of Stepanic’s course covers Slavic folklore. “Basically, the character Dracula is used as a vehicle to really understand human experience,” he said.

We asked Stepanic to share the top 10 things people should know about “Dracula,” Bram Stoker’s famous 1897 Gothic horror novel. Here is his list.

1. Bram Stoker deleted about three chapters at the start of the novel to save space, streamline the story and reduce the cost of printing. The original notes Stoker left behind indicate he removed characters and a different structure, including a trip through a Munich “Dead House,” or morgue, and a paranormal researcher.

2. The primary remains we have of this missing section of the novel is a short story published by Stoker’s widow, Florence. It appeared for the first time in a 1914 short story collection, “Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories.”

3. The Dracula character was inspired by several things, but in literature the most important is arguably “Carmilla,” the most important tale of a female vampire ever written. Stoker knew the author and worked for him as a drama critic. Stoker also took ideas from other works of vampire literature, including “The Mysterious Stranger.” This work has long been attributed to an anonymous author since it first appeared in English in 1854, but in actuality it was simply a translation of the German tale “Der Fremde” (“The Stranger”), first published in 1847 by Karl Adolf von Wachsmann.

4. The original title of the novel was not “Dracula,” but actually “The Un-Dead.” Stoker considered at least two other titles, “The Dead Un-Dead” and “Dracula or the Un-Dead.” He settled on “Dracula” roughly a week before publication.

5. Stoker’s character Count Dracula was not called Dracula at all originally. In Stoker’s notes, he indicated at one point simply “Count _____,” with a blank as written here, and then eventually began to use the uninspired name “Count Wampyr,” which he appears to have taken from the Serbian.

6. Count Dracula was not inspired by a real historical figure, Vlad the Impaler, as many people believe. Stoker came across Vlad III Dracula while researching a book about the region of Romania during a visit to Whitby, England. In the text of this book the name Dracula appears three times, and one of them is actually referencing another person. The history the character Count Dracula presents in the novel is actually a conglomeration of ideas Stoker pieced together, some plagiarized from earlier works.

7. Though Stoker is well-known today, he was not in his own day. He was a minor light at best, and made almost nothing off “Dracula” – roughly a little more than $3,000, adjusting for inflation in 2018 dollars, hardly a salary one could live off of. That’s not surprising, considering writing was not even his primary job; he was foremost a theater manager.

8. The first foreign-language edition of “Dracula” was actually published in Icelandic in 1901, a curious choice. Even today, scholars aren’t certain of Stoker’s relationship to the translator, who used Stoker’s original preface which connected Dracula to Jack the Ripper, and even rewrote significant parts of the novel. It even has a different title: “The Powers of Darkness” would be the translation of it in English. In essence, it is a different book.

9. Stoker was primarily remembered for managing the Lyceum Theater in his day, and his biography about his employer, Henry Irving, was praised as his most important contribution to literature. This was his “Personal Reminisces of Henry Irving” (1906).

10. Were it not for the copyright battle against “Nosferatu,” a 1922 German film that bootlegged the plot of “Dracula,” Stoker’s novel may never have become famous. The legal attention brought by Florence Stoker, and the subsequent stage versions of “Dracula” that made it to film eventually, led it on the path to fame. It is largely adaptations of “Dracula” that made it famous, not the novel itself.

Stepanic will headline a free online “Digital Book Club” session with UVA’s Clubs program Tuesday at 8 p.m., leading a discussion of Anne Rice’s 1976 novel, “Interview with a Vampire,” that revived the vampire genre. Stepanic said if you’ve not read the book, watching the film will do just fine. Those interested can register here.

#Stanley Stepanic #by Jane Kelly #tags preserved for the comments of the OP

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disorientedblog-archive · 6 years

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Zhoushan Island

by Kevin Mei / photo: the author

do i even have a(n) accent, argot, brogue, cant, dialect, enunciation, elocution, idiom, inflection, jargon, language, lexicon, lingo, lingua franca, localism, locution, mother tongue, native tongue, parlance, patter, patois, phraseology, pronunciation, provincialism, regionalism, slang, speech, street talk, talk, terminology, tone, tongue, vernacular, vocabulary, voice

For many travelers, the disorienting experience of going abroad is the encounter with a foreign language. The inability to fluently express yourself diminishes your identity, circumscribes interactions solely to the realm of practicality, of greetings, farewells, and thank yous, of “my name is” and numbers and directions, yes’s and no’s. You understand what it's like to be an immigrant, the guesswork grammar and telltale reproduced pronunciation. More easily reduced to a concept than a person. You feel like you're complex, that the people around you similarly hold multitudes, but if only you could understand and be understood, be islands connected by oceans of words.

I don't think I ever really bothered to interrogate my origins. What can I say? In elementary school, I filled out forms that inquired about ethnicity and language. Asian > Chinese. Primary language > English. Language spoken at home > ... "MOM! Do we speak Chinese?" "Yes." "But what kind of Chinese... I've heard Mandarin; what do we speak?" "Shanghainese." Good enough, until I met enough Shanghainese classmates in high school. "Oh yeah, Shanghainese is just easier to say because everyone knows Shanghai. We actually speak Ningbo." Ningbonese. By the time I had met enough people from Ningbo to know that my words didn't quite sound like Ningbonese, I turned to Google to figure out what I spoke at home. It's the Wu dialect. After I graduated college, my dad wanted to take me on my first trip to China. It was only then, at the cusp of adulthood, it was made clear to me that my parents come from someplace called Zhoushan. Really, I speak some variant of Wu that we can just call Zhoushanese. A city and a suffix make a language and a people.

On the night I fly out for Zhoushan, my mom drives me from Flushing, Queens (2010 U.S. Census: 69.2% Asian, 9.5% White) to Canarsie, Brooklyn (2010 U.S. Census: 81.0% African-American, 2.6% Asian, 5.9% White), and drops me off at a corner a block away. I take my deteriorating suitcase (empty, for the salted eel I would smuggle back) out of the trunk and she watches from the car as I roll up to an indistinguishable red townhouse. She drives away. Uhseh ("the third" of three brothers and my dad), uhnya (“grandma”), and uhya (“grandpa”) are sitting in the living room, China Central Television playing on a small boxy cathode-ray screen. We sit around smiling and appraising each other. The damask pattern on the red-and-gold velvet wallpaper looks to me, at times, like the stares of sinister samurai masks.

Our wordless reverie is interrupted by a Pakistani driver from some unknown and quasi-professional car service come to pick us up for the airport. Uhseh tries to cajole our driver with wildly misinformed assumptions about the Middle East. His voice crescendos with each expression, as if building up to something, but there’s nothing at all. In the backseat, Uhnya, who doesn't speak or understand any English, also gets the sense that Uhseh is acting daft, and tells him, "Shut up, you imbecile." (Aside to me: "Sick in the head, amirite?") Uhseh doesn't handle embarrassment or shame well. He blusters at our driver and tries to haggle the price down. The driver can't take the nonsense. "Listen, I also drive for Uber. Why didn't you just call an Uber? Like everyone else does! I could've driven you for a third of the price." The same scene recurred throughout my maiden journey to the motherland. Uhseh likes to flex his poor social-animal faculties. At the airport for our return flight, he "strikes up" conversation with some Ukrainian workers who were in China for employment on oil tankers.

—Ukraine? Excellent country, right?

—My man, we are being invaded by Russia.

—Oh, Russia! Russia is so strong! So powerful. You don't want to mess with Russia. If I were you, I wouldn't mess with Russia.

[...]

—You guys make excellent yogurt! Yes! You guys! Very popular, very famous for it. Good job!

[...]

—Me? I'm from America. Yes, I love America.

I don't like the way Uhseh talks… halting gravelly stuttering and stalling words tripping, falling down, treading over each other, slurrrrrring loud intimidating covering up nothing-words… not speaking… properly… Mandarin. I can't believe I never noticed this inability. Of course, he can make himself understood, but what came out of his vocal organ was still the mish-mash of someone confused between his patois and putonghua. It came across whenever I asked: What does that character mean? How do you say this word properly? What's the tone? What's the pinyin? And unable to admit his ignorance, he'd ply me with palaver and circumlocution. What does that sign mean? Rumble ramble power of tigers fighting against mountain fires. All the sign expressed was: "No smoking."

We landed in Shanghai, when it was too early for airport shuttles, so we overpaid to take a taxi to a bus station. The sky was overcast. The city covered in murk. Was this pollution or just a foggy morning? It rains. My dad is irritated and getting into arguments, feeling as if he is being constantly cheated. ("Why didn't the taxi driver let us off exactly in front of the bus station?! TA MA DE!"). I have my iPhone stolen at the bus station. I'm disappointed that, not one day in, I won’t be able to take any photos of my month-long stay. Everyone else expresses more upset about it than I do. The drive to Zhoushan is full of soupy loops of white vapor, at times lifting their ponderous loads so I catch glimpses of cranes and partially-started construction. Amazing how much construction is happening in China. My dad decides to sit next to me at one point and impress me with the landscape. Look over there, he points at a spot in the thick opaqueness. Your [disreputable family member] taught there (like Trump praising dictators, it irks me Uhseh is so enamored of this person). It's beautiful and one of the most well-regarded schools in this region. Cool.

Hours later, we happen upon a red sea. I always imagined that my parents came from some poor rural village in the hinterlands of West China, deep in central Asia. Instead, they come from some poor rural village in an archipelago in the East China Sea. Zhoushan consists of more than a thousand islands, and before the investment of billions of yuan in the twenty-first century and the construction of cross-sea bridges, was only accessible by boat. Our bus takes us across the second longest bridge (G9211 Ningbo-Zhoushan Expressway) in the world, over water the color of ochre, clay that formed my ancestry.

Wikipedia on Zhoushan: Sixth National Population Census of the People's Republic of China in 2010 gives a population of 1,121,261, with 1,109,813 Han Chinese. I did the division: 98.98% Han Chinese. I long to speak English. To meet someone else and have a conversation in English. People didn't know who I was here. I couldn't make jokes. I hang around a shopping center most days. I read Moby Dick at Starbucks. The unfortunate thing about wanting to meet another foreigner is that I don't look like a foreigner myself. Before I open my mouth, no one would know my background, but the moment I try to order a pork bun: "What?! Putonghua please. I don't come from this part of China. Xiaodi, are you aboriginal?" Once, I see a hipster in KFC. An American hipster. I couldn't square myself up to say hi. He takes his ironic graphic tee and beat-up Herschel bookbag, hops on a skateboard, and glides away. I walk after him, but he gets farther and farther until he's turned a corner and gone. Another time, I see a group of Slavic laborers with a Chinese translator and lingered near them, taking in their rough inflected declarations for coffee and chicken. I send desperate emails to friends at night, but it doesn't make up for a verbal lack, a desire for complex portrayal, here.

My mom told me to seek out her childhood friend Le Jun, who foresaw that automobiles would one day populate Zhoushan Island, apprenticed in the niche trade of auto repair, and is now a successful business owner. He invited me often to extravagant meals at his resort restaurant and to his family's New Year's dinner, where I entertained people through my Zhoushanese. For all that I benefitted from his hospitality, he gained by making me his novelty item, showing me off to business guests and political patrons. I was always introduced as that American who can't speak a lick of putonghua but is fluent in Zhoushanese.

I wasn't fluent. I wrote my college essay on the language barriers that existed in my household. I spoke English with my brother, Zhoushanese with my mom, and she spoke Mandarin to the man cohabitating with her. I imagine this is a problem for many children of immigrants who never fully learned their parent tongues. When my mom got into arguments with that temporary stepdad, I didn't understand. When I got into arguments with my mom, I couldn't express simple concepts like "you're being controlling," never having learned the Zhoushanese for "control." Intimacy is difficult without mutual intelligibility in the diction beyond practicality. I still can't share the things that occupy my mental space, except in English. My Zhoushanese is utterly practical. And unless one becomes a linguist, these provincial "dialects" aren't something one can easily pick up.

Around New Year's is when people my age came back to "rural" Zhoushan for the holidays. I met many of my cousins, who used slang like niubi around me. Because they couldn't communicate well with me, they mostly ignored me, felt me to be a burden or a potential danger ("don't tell my dad that I smoke"), but they reminded me of the joys of fluency, the ease with which they joked and made their personalities felt, with friends at a bar, playing Overwatch at a wangba—what Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia" in the novel, I saw in their languages that expressed their hip millennial culture, their Internet-speak, their negotiations between being "good" twenty-something-year-old sons and with their twenty-something-year-old desires to live. They said no one really speaks Zhoushanese anymore in their generation. You go to school as a kid, you learn putonghua, and that's the language you dream in. Zhoushanese isn't common and therefore isn't useful (although I've always loved that I could always assume that others couldn't understand what my family and I said to each other). As a language, it's functionally defunct. Moreover, my expressions were antiquated, vintage. Zhoushanese had moved on from Zhoushan, had been carried away by my family into the pocket world of our domestic life in Flushing and hardened in the amber of our speech. Le Jun would tell me: "Nobody says that anymore. I haven't heard that phrase since I was a little kid. You speak my grandparents' language, an old dialect." He made fun of my word for fish, "awng," explaining it's what adults might teach children when they're trying to learn "fish," but I had never lost it, never been corrected about it. Perhaps an approximate analogy would be the hypothetical scenario of calling a cow "moomoo" as a kid and ordering a "medium-rare moomoo" as an adult.

Though it's difficult to recall specifics, I have a general sense of constantly trying to explain something, but failing, ideas becoming mangled and warped and all that trying too hard and being incoherent making me appear and feel foolish. Yet despite all this frustration at being unable to communicate, unable to translate what I can express in English to everyone I met in Zhoushan Island, how ironic that I'm unable to adequately express my experience in Asia with English. My friend showed me pictures of her own trip to China, particularly these food stalls in which dung beetles, scorpions, silkworms, starfish, and centipedes are served on skewers. While the scorpions and starfish were recognizable, I asked her what the other critters were, and she had no idea. Zhoushan being an island is famous for its seafood and I can't even describe the variety of aquatic life I saw on display in supermarkets and restaurants. Ribbonfish, cuttlefish, blobfish (my most joyous discovery of something I didn't expect to find in real life and especially as a comestible). I can't describe them because I just don't have the words for all of them, not in Chinese, not in English. I wonder if I knew the words in Chinese, if they would be translatable. Other foods I am very familiar with and have never been able to translate. What does it mean to know the names, in English now, of food items like nilou (Bullacta exarata) or arbutus? Because surely, when my mother serves those tiny salty mollusks packed in reused plastic jars and tells me stories of her childhood picking them out of muddy beaches in Zhoushan, or when the arbutus wine (also in reused jars) is broken out and I'm told I can only have a few of those dark purple berries max, that these experiences have been a part of my identity, experiences I couldn't articulate before without knowing what the hell to call the Korean mud snail.

I have had an inordinately hard time thinking about "self-discoveries" in experiencing China. My sense of identity has not changed. My trip to China was not an experience in how I perceive myself but in how I perceive others, how others perceive me, and how I can communicate my identity, and seeing that all the aforementioned has been for a great part dependent on language. My sense of identity has not changed but my means of talking about it has, though still limited by what I can and can’t express. I feel my relatives in China are stuck with only a vague sense of who I am that I have very little influence over. It’s been a great loss that I’m not fluent in Mandarin or Zhoushanese, not only on the trip but throughout my life, in my familial relations and growing up in a predominantly Asian hometown. And despite my fluency in English, by never learning the vocabulary to talk about my ethnic identity, from not even previously knowing the name "Zhoushan," I have not been able to talk about certain aspects that make up my cultural and ethnic identity. Self-making through language-learning—it will always be a work in progress. Language, in the broad sense of what and how we speak, reveals both indirectly and intentionally so much of ourselves and reminds us what islands we all are.

Kevin Le Mei visited Asia for the first and only time in January of 2017.

#china

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gardencityvegans · 6 years

Text

Anya Kassoff’s Vegan Borscht

https://www.thefullhelping.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Anya-Kassofs-Vegan-Borscht-2.jpg

It seems a funny time for me to be making borscht, which is often thought of as a winter soup, but when I passed the farmer’s market last Saturday it was teeming with beets and cabbage. I picked up both before I knew what I’d do with them.

There’s a story at the start of Anya Kassoff’s beautiful new cookbook, Simply Vibrant. The main character is Anya’s grandfather, Aleksei Gerasimovich Golub, a shoemaker who was born in the North Caucasus before the Russian Revolution of 1917. One of the fables he passed along to his grandkids involved a long ago, early morning trek through the streets of Blagodatny. Aleksei was nursing a hangover from the previous evening’s festivities, and he suffered under a rising summer sun.

Aleksei paid a visit to an acquaintance who lived along the route to work, secretly hoping that this hospitable friend would offer him a drink of cold milk. The friend—Pyotr Vasilevich—did just that. Aleksei refused once, partaking in a custom in which it was polite for a guest to refuse offerings of food or drink initially and for a host to then insist. Pyotr insisted in keeping with the custom, but Aleksei was hit with what Anya calls “a stubborn, Slavic politeness that often overcame him” and refused a second time. He expected a another offer, but it never came, and so he trekked back out into the heat, parched and unsatisfied.

Anya claims that her grandfather told this story so often that she suspected that something about it haunted him, even if he found it humorous. She writes,

“What I took away from my grandfather’s account is that chances are there to be taken and opportunities don’t come around every day, so it makes great sense to take hold of them with a strong grip. I think about this moral of missed chance often, and have used it as a guiding force in my own life. It helps me see the big picture, and I often ask myself whether I’m accepting my glass of milk or letting it go. When it comes to my professional life, which today involves cooking, coming up with recipes, and dreaming about food, I’ve found one very straightforward way of fulfilling the moral of my grandfather’s story: cooking with the seasons.”

This is all my very roundabout way of saying that, even if Anya lists the borscht as a winter recipe (one of the nice features of her new cookbook is that recipes are marked by season), it felt like a fulfillment of her invitation to seize chances to use my beets and cabbage in this beautifully colored, delicious soup.

I didn’t review Anya’s first cookbook, The Vibrant Table, on my blog, but it’s one of the most creative plant-based cookbooks I’ve come across, and her blog, Golubka Kitchen, is a favorite. Anya’s recipes are always playful and nourishing, but what I think love most about them is their color. They’re always a joy to look at: fresh, bright, and vibrant indeed.

Simply Vibrant is tribute to seasonal cooking, but it shares the qualities that I love about Anya’s other books: thoughtful recipes, an emphasis on whole foods and cooking from scratch, and a sense of connection to tradition. Anya often interjects stories about her family and her roots into her headnotes, and she offers up many recipes that are or have been inspired by traditional Russian fare.

Reading her blog and books, I feel as though I’ve been transported to a kitchen in which many generations of people have prepared food with love. As someone who doesn’t have a strong family food history, it feels like a treat to be invited into Anya’s home.

A friend asked me early this winter if I had a go-to borscht recipe, and I really don’t, so I’m happy to accept Anya’s as my first. Really, it’s her mother’s. Anya writes that “my mother came up with a unique vegetarian version of her beloved staple in an attempt to give us kids lighter, healthier fare.”

When I first read the recipe, it seemed as though it demanded a lot of slow simmering and layering, and even though school’s out I wasn’t sure about the time involved. I often take liberties with cookbook recipes, but I follow Ina Garten’s suggestion of always making a recipe exactly as written, or close to it, the first time I make it. That way I know what it’s supposed to taste like, and I get a sense of what each ingredient and step contributes.

I’m so glad I made the recipe as Anya relays it, rather than taking shortcuts. She notes that her mom’s way of “gently steeping a gigantic amount of various vegetables in their own juices gives this vegetarian borscht irresistable flavor,” and she’s right: not only is it incredibly flavorful, but it’s better if you let it sit for a day before eating. Allowing the flavors to meld makes a huge difference.

Anya claims to have a very intuitive approach to cooking, so while I wanted to be faithful to her technique, I did throw in my own small flourish, which was a big splash of red wine vinegar at the end. I love acid, and even though the tomatoes contribute some of their own, I thought it brought out even more flavor from the soup. I served mine with old-fashioned pumpernickel bread (both on the side and ripped into rustic croutons), but I love Anya’s suggestion to stir in something creamy (vegan sour cream, cashew cream, or yogurt would all be great).

Anya Kassoff's Vegan Borscht

Recipe type: soup, main dish

Cuisine: vegan, gluten free, soy free, tree nut free

Author: Anya Kassoff

Prep time: 20 mins

Cook time: 1 hour

Total time: 1 hour 20 mins

Serves: 10 servings

Ingredients

1 large or 2 small carrots

2 medium parsnips

1 medium red beet

1 large yellow onion

1 small celery root (optional)

2 green bell peppers

1 small jalapeño

1 tablespoon coconut or olive oil (I used olive)

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

½ medium head green cabbage

4 to 6 yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into small cubes

1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes

7 garlic cloves, minced

¼ cup finely chopped fresh dill, plus more for serving

¼ cup finely chopped fresh parsley, plus more for serving

A splash of red wine vinegar (optional)

Vegan sour cream, cashew cream, or yogurt (I love the Forager brand plain cashew yogurt), for serving

Instructions

Peel the carrots, parsnips, beet, onion, and celery root, if using, and remove the seeds from the bell peppers and jalapeño. Roughly chop all the vegetables to fit into the feeding tube of a food processor with a shredding attachment. Shred all the vegetables and transfer the mixture to a large, heavy-bottomed soup pot.

Add the oil to the pot and season to taste with salt and pepper. Turn the heat to medium and let the vegetable juices release and start simmering, then reduce the heat to low, cover the pot, and let the vegetables cook gently in their juices for 30 minutes, until all the juices are released and the vegetables are soft.

Meanwhile, change the food processor attachment to a slicer. Roughly chop the cabbage to fit into the food processor's feeding tube, and slice it using the attachment. Alternatively, thinly slice the cabbage by hand. Transfer the cabbage to a large bowl and cover it with cold water; set aside.

After the shredded vegetables have cooked for 30 minutes, place the potatoes on top and pour in enough water to cover the potatoes completely. Increase the heat to medium, bring the liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and cook, partially covered, for about 10 minutes, until the potatoes are soft.

Meanwhile, bring a kettle or medium saucepan of water to a boil. Drain the cabbage and add it to the pot with the potatoes and shredded vegetables. Pour the boiling water over the cabbage, filling the pot but leaving some room for the tomatoes. Add a few big pinches of salt. Simmer for 15 to 20 minutes or until the cabbage is soft, then add the crushed tomatoes and bring the soup back to a boil over medium heat. Taste for salt and adjust if needed. As soon as the soup comes to a boil, remove the pot from the heat and stir in the garlic and herbs.

For best results, let the borscht come to room temperature and then refrigerate it overnight so it can develop fully in flavor. When you're ready to serve it, reheat the borscht on the stove. Serve with sour cream and more chopped dill and parsley, if desired.

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Other recipes in the book are similar to this one in that they might involve a stepwise process, but it’s not random: if different vegetables are cooked separately, for instance, it’s so that each kind is perfectly tender, rather than over or undercooked. Many of the remaining recipes are incredibly simple, including the salads and bowls, the basics, and the vegetable sides.

The book also includes a whole chapter of porridges and pancakes (my kind of breakfasts!), wraps and rolls, risotto, paella, and pilaf, and noodles, pasta, and pizza. There are so many things I’m eager to try that I don’t know where to start, but I’m keen on the Bukhara Farro Filaf (a spin on plov), the spelt fettuccine with melted rainbow chard, the chickpea and kohlrabi salad wraps, and the couscous stuffed collard greens in coconut curry sauce. The book isn’t all vegan, but it’s very predominantly plant-based, and most of the recipes can be veganized with non-dairy substitutions if they aren’t vegan already.

I’d love for one US reader of this blog to have a copy of Anya’s bright and bold tribute to seasonal fare! Enter below for a chance to win a giveaway of Simply Vibrant; as usual, I’ll pick a winner in two weeks.

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It’s been a big week around here, so I’m winding down slowly and intentionally, grateful that it’s now Friday and a weekend is on the way. I’ll see you for Sunday’s roundup.

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oovitus · 6 years

Text

Anya Kassoff’s Vegan Borscht

Anya claims that her grandfather told this story so often that she suspected that something about it haunted him, even if he found it humorous. She writes,

Anya Kassoff's Vegan Borscht

Recipe type: soup, main dish

Cuisine: vegan, gluten free, soy free, tree nut free

Author: Anya Kassoff

Prep time: 20 mins

Cook time: 1 hour

Total time: 1 hour 20 mins

Serves: 10 servings

Ingredients

1 large or 2 small carrots

2 medium parsnips

1 medium red beet

1 large yellow onion

1 small celery root (optional)

2 green bell peppers

1 small jalapeño

1 tablespoon coconut or olive oil (I used olive)

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

½ medium head green cabbage

4 to 6 yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into small cubes

1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes

7 garlic cloves, minced

¼ cup finely chopped fresh dill, plus more for serving

¼ cup finely chopped fresh parsley, plus more for serving

A splash of red wine vinegar (optional)

Vegan sour cream, cashew cream, or yogurt (I love the Forager brand plain cashew yogurt), for serving

Instructions

3.5.3240

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It’s been a big week around here, so I’m winding down slowly and intentionally, grateful that it’s now Friday and a weekend is on the way. I’ll see you for Sunday’s roundup.

The post Anya Kassoff’s Vegan Borscht appeared first on The Full Helping.

Anya Kassoff’s Vegan Borscht published first on https://storeseapharmacy.tumblr.com

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