Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.
“Ludwig van Beethoven was of African descent, and the truth of his ethnic origins was covered up through a mixture of white powder worn on his face when out in public, the use of body doubles for portraits, and “euro-centric” historians, hiding the truth of his genetic heritage.“ – src
I’m mad that we aren’t taught this
Okay, that’s just the coolest and most frustrating thing because now I’m trying to get the mental picture of how he’d have really looked.
Aly Raisman’s speech at the 2018 ESPY awards after the Arthur Ashe Courage Award was presented to the hundreds of survivors who were abused by former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University team doctor.
I have a lot of guilt and shame about my participation in fandom. I tell myself that I ought to have outgrown this kind of external obsession by my age. I tell myself that it’s not healthy to spend so much time in imaginary worlds. I tell myself that I should be more responsible in how I use my time, how I spend my money, where I put my energy. I look in the mirror and admit that I am using imaginary people and imaginary places and my attachment to them to avoid the problems of real life.
But here’s the thing: the world is a fucking dumpster fire. Every hour I spend writing Arthur and Eames smut is an hour in which I am not paralyzed with panic over the sexual abuses inflicted by real-world men. Every minute I spend re-reading and deconstructing the way Ngozi builds queerness in Check, Please! is one I don’t spend so angry I could throw up over the threats to queer people in the real world. Every night I spend appreciating the incredible OCs of color writers create in the fanfic I like to read is one I don’t spend in despair over this administration’s institutionalized and accepted racism. The longer I consider the potential of the Avengers to save the world from the dark forces of Hydra, the less time I have to lay awake and worry about the way my country’s president is destroying all of our international relationships.
I couldn’t live with myself right now if I didn’t spend a large chunk of my time and energy and money on the real-world fight. Things are simply too bad–I cannot stand by and watch without at least trying to do something. But if that was all I focused on, I would end up hurting myself. (Believe me, I know this, because in the final few months before the 2016 election and the first half of 2017, it WAS all I focused on.) I would end up so anxious and depressed that I would need far heavier duty coping mechanisms (not to mention drugs) than the ones I use now. Maybe there are people who can sustain a full-time commitment to changing the world, without needing to hide from it a bunch of the time, but I’m not one of them. So it’s better, I think, to accept that one of the things my participation in fandom gives me is an outlet, a way to focus completely on something that, in the end, I KNOW will be OK. Doing it all the time would be unhealthy, and my real-world relationships would suffer, but doing it a lot, right now, when things are so bad? It’s part of what keeps me sane.
Everyone has their thing. For some people it’s sports, or bird watching, or collecting things, or whatever. People need hobbies and interests to help them wind down from all the stress and real life crap. For us it just happens to be fandom. But I think fandom has such a negative stereotype and negative connotation that it ends up having an effect on us. We feel stupid or guilty for something that should be completely normal. It only becomes a problem if it’s keeping you from your real world responsibilities.
And those negative stereotypes and negative connotations have a lot to do with the fact that fandoms are women dominated spaces. Men tend to engage with media they admire by learning everything about the original, where woman tend to engage by creating fan content. My dad has a huge Batman stuff colection and that’s something he can joke about with his friends. He’s never made to feel any lesser for that, and people see that as something cool about him and give him batman related gifts all the time to help out. I have male friends who love Game of Thrones and know all the minor details and spend hours of their life speculating about it. But they never experience this shame and it’s socially acceptable for them to talk to people about their hobbies. But if I tell people about my inception blog or fanfiction they low key pity me and it has a lot to do with fandom being women dominated spaces and us internalizing the idea that anything mostly enjoyed by women is embarassing and wrong. I refuse to do that.
According to people who were able to reach me anonymously before I closed the anon asks (I do have a self-preservation instinct) I absolutely shouldn’t be near fandom AT MY AGE!!!!!
What should I do? Knitting and “taking my grandchildren to the park”. Well I don’t enjoy taking any children (never wanted to have my own, hence no handy grandchildren to drag around) to the park and/or knitting nearly as much as I do enjoy Inception and YOI, you ageist fucks. I’m not ashamed of it in the slightest, except yes, I should better control the time I spend online in general. Other than that – do what you love ladies, anyone who would “low-key pity you” can have a good hard look at themselves and their own interests (beer? watching porn? online shopping for designer handbags? online celebrities hating? bashing other moms? going to white power rallies?) and shut the fuck up.
how good would it be if luna, who believes in the crumple-horned snorckack and nargles, thought that dinosaurs were made up by muggles
Okay, but consider:
Someone (probably Hermione) takes Luna to a muggle museum of natural history, in a last ditch effort to convince her that dinosaurs really did exist. They go through all of it: full and partial skeletons on display, fossil imprints of skin textures, a little video about carbon dating, exhibits on the evolution of all life from tiny one-celled sea creatures, bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped, living giant isopods and coelacanths, the whole spiel about how the dinosaurs aren’t actually completely gone, since some, like the anchiornis and archaeopteryx, were the predecessors from which today’s birds – including every owl in the Wizarding World – evolved.
Luna takes all this in with her usual calm demeanor until the very end, when her eyes seem to grow even more enormous in her face, but doesn’t say anything. After a full minute of Luna’s silent astonishment, her companion prods her for a response. “Of course!” Luna exclaims, “no wonder I’ve never found them. I’ve been going about things the wrong way!” She launches into a lengthy explanation that the records that she and her father have been using for references were copies of copies of copies of absolutely ancient scripts, so in order to find the creatures as described in them, she needed to be looking for fossils.
Luna (with Rolf as her assistant) begins searching through areas of Wizarding Britain, using magical equivalents of the muggle tools she read about at the museum (a variation on Tempus to determine the age of a magical item or creature, Cryptozoam Revelio as a substitute for ground-penetrating radar). She finds the remains of a number of magical creatures from various ages, as well as accidentally uncovering a nest of Knuckers, a relative of the dragon previously thought to be extinct. After this discovery, she and Rolf are given a bit more credence than before, and they gain the support among creature-handlers, especially dragonologists. Because of this, they get access to more regions of the world, and their team grows. Eventually Luna ends up founding the Wizarding Archaeological Society, the first institution to combine both muggle and wizard research methods at a single institution.
On the 50th anniversary of the Society’s founding, they open a museum of their own (”Everything that was, at the WAS!”), to display the various fossils of magical creatures that they’ve managed to locate over the years. Unveiled at the opening ceremonies was what would become the pride of their collection, a diorama of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in every stage of development, along with details about their habits, average lifespan, and a map of the full range of their habitat at their peak population in the mid-17th century. Their extinction at during the 20th century was attributed to rising global temperatures, as their most flourishing period coincided with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, and no specimens from any later than the 1976 Heat Wave had thus far been recovered. The disappearance of the Snorkacks, it was said, had been an early warning sign of the global climate change which had troubled the entire world, wizarding and muggle, for the better part of the last half-century. A cooperative partnership had been reached between the WAS and the Royal Society a scant decade after the WAS’s founding , allowing research witches and wizards to pool their resources with muggle scientists, in time to prevent a catastrophe that the wizarding world would otherwise have been unlikely to survive.
In her speech at that evening’s gala, Luna told the story of how it all happened, to reveal the person who had singlehandledly started this series of events, which resulted in not only a golden age of discovery in the field of cryptozoology, but also an era of peace and cooperation between both worlds, allowing restrictions imposed by the Statute of Secrecy to be loosened for the first time in nearly five hundred years, all in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Hermione Granger, who had been grumbling in her chair the entire time, rose when acknowledged. Luna Lovegood beamed at her aging friend, the witch who had gone from being her most skeptical critic to her most dedicated – and most challenging – supporter in a mere half-century.
i love that one old timey 1910s trans dude who has a tiny wikipedia page for himself that he earned entirely due to him starting fights in bars and being the city’s hottest casanova
Like this glorious jerk got arrested so many times that was literally ALL THEY HAD TO WRITE IN THE PAPER
He was a vagrant street kid and Seattle girls were all over this guy, to the point where it caused a moral panic. There’s a famous anecdote about a women proclaiming her love in Denny Park and then trying to shoot herself, but most of these reports were falsely worded in a way that suggest his female admirers were “upset about being deceived” when really they were upset that he was wooing other women, or trying to get his attention by being as extra as possible.
What you also should know is that back in the day “seduction” was a literal crime that could put you in prison (unless you married the woman you seduced) but since he wasn’t cis they couldn’t really CHARGE HIM with anything. Legend.
I especially like “Seattle Woman Appears in Men’s Clothes Because She Says Her Features Make it Possible.” I can’t imagine anything but someone going “Hey! You can’t dress like that!” and him responding “Oh yes I can. You see, I look very good.”
Steel Phoenix Studios 