fuuuuuck man the implied parallels between susie and orange make me feel insane. when she fails to defend herself against you she cries and insists its because shes just hungry. shes distinctly different from all the other flowers around her and is the least human looking and is very defensive about this (particularly her tail) and susie is very very bothered when ralsei (accidentally or on purpose) is rude to orange about this. FUCKKKKK
susie is very sensitive about having a tail at all and its been implied many times that shes never had good access to food. just. im just imagining little susie being treated like a freak and being outcasted, trying to stand up for herself, getting hurt, saying she only lost because shes hungry because shes always hungry. susie feeling small and inhuman compared to everyone else and putting on a brave face to protect herself. thinking about how that wouldve progressed into her becoming closed off and genuinely mean as she got older. ughhhhhhhh
at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you
at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.
at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly
at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.
at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.
At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.
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in hindsight, growing up as an aromantic person who didn't know aromanticism was a thing...it woulda been really easy for me to assume that something was wrong with me, that I was "broken" or "missing" some piece of humanity.
luckily I was autistic, oblivious, and had a huge ego. it literally never occurred to me to frame it as a "me" problem. i just thought every single person i knew was a dumbass
not trying to be mean, that was just the natural conclusion of a judgemental aspec teenager forcibly surrounded by other teenagers. classmates would go on and on about their Longings and Yearnings and id be like. girl u r fifteen
Reminder that âtradwifeâ is not a synonym for âstay at home mom.â Itâs specifically a part of an antifeminist, white supremacist, antiblack, antisemitic, lesbophobic, transphobic hate movement. The concept comes from Neo-Nazis who believe that Jews are trying to get white women to have children with Black men, stay single, date other women, or be trans men â instead of what they believe is white womenâs ânaturalâ role of being subservient to a white man. They believe this is because Jews are trying to orchestrate a white genocide by lowering white gentile birthrates and creating more mixed-race kids, and that they can fight this by marrying tradwives who will have lots of white babies.
Yes, I understand that language changes and that this word has shifted, but I think we should think twice before casually adopting Neo-Nazi terminology. I do think most people who use this term are describing a concept that is specifically regarding the gendered power dynamics of conservative antifeminist couples where the wife stays home, and is ideologically probably genuinely a descendant of the Neo-Nazi concept. So I understand, but I also donât think we should be doing white supremacistsâ work for them by normalizing their ideas even more.
Makes me headdesk when people talk about âJewish tradwivesâ or âBlack tradwives.â Definitionally neither of these can be a thing. Yes there can be conservative SAHMs who homestead in any community, obviously. But they are not tradwives.
And like, yeah, maybe at some point I will have to accept that the definition has shifted because I am actually a linguistic descriptivist, but that will just be a sign that Nazis have successfully normalized one of their concepts. And in any case, people should know where this term comes from.
These chucklefucks support the notion that birth control is harming women. Can it be harmful? Sure, talk to your doctor about that. But as a whole, birth control has enabled women to stay in school longer, to have higher paying jobs, to have better economic status, to keep from unwanted marriages, to keep their health in many cases, and, most importantly, to not have unwanted children. This has led to a declining birth rate, and white supremacists are convinced that white people not having babies is allowing people of color to "out-breed" and overtake the white population. Tradwives and their supporters push the idea that birth control irrevocably changes your brain chemistry (it doesn't), makes women manlier (it doesn't), makes men into women via trace birth control in the water (it doesn't), and causes sky rocketing rates of heart disease, embolisms, and cancers (mostly untrue... Birth control can sometimes cause clots but that's a rare side effect. Again, talk to your doctor).
They also push the "all natural birth" bullshit. At its least dangerous, that means forgoing epidurals during labor. On the other end of the spectrum, that means having a baby and receiving NO. NEONATAL. CARE. At all! Not a sonogram, no vitamins, no genetic testing, no glucose testing, nada. There's a big push to have no medical care and then do a home birth. So if the baby is breech, there's no way to know about it beforehand.
If you want to refer to a stay at home mom who runs the house but isn't ideologically aligned with the neo-nazi tradwife concept, could you not just call her a housewife????
The tradwife movement which is part of the larger "traditional family" movement, and that's important to know, is not just anti-science when it comes to birth control, obstetric and neonatal care, it's also anti-science when it comes to vaccinations. The anti-vaxxers immediately found common cause with these people whose goal is to reject modernity.
They also reject basic and well settled science on nutrition and food safety. It should be no surprise that the raw milk movement is directly connected to the traditional family movement.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a stay at home mother. There is nothing wrong with wanting to have a piece of land where you can raise some chickens and a nice sized kitchen garden. There's nothing wrong with wanting to live as naturally as possible and avoid unnecessary medicine or medical treatments. But that's not all this movement is, and they take it all to the worst extreme and for the worst reasons.
And let's be really truthful. Convincing young women to discard higher education and personal development to undertake this extremely labor intensive, health eroding, intentionally isolating and fully dependent lifestyle within a year or two of graduating from high school is setting them up for physical, emotional and financial abuse that will also be meted out to their children.
And when their husbands tire of them because they have put their foot down about no more babies or because they have complained "too much" about their workload or simply because a middle aged woman with life experience isn't as enjoyable to a "traditional husband" as a naĂŻve, nubile teenager, they are left with nothing. No skills, no income except whatever support they are ordered, (which will be paid begrudgingly, slowly, or not at all) and no good way to start all over again with limited money and a bunch of kids they'll still be primary parent for. And that's a part of the movement too, keeping women compliant, agreeable and silent through fear of what happens if they are left.
Nobody wins in the traditional family movement except men.
Maelle, Lucien and Catherine are on borrowing duty, but nothing goes according to plan ! The Borrowers are once again in peril !
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Here is chapter 13 ! I hope you liked it and I apologize for the wait ! Next one is going to take me some time to make too because I have other things I must work on this month !
It has just occurred to me that most people don't have a super solid grasp of how languages work, especially when compared to one another, and that this means most people aren't aware of why Rocky's speech patterns are the way they are in PHM. To those who've only watched the film, it should be noted that the linguistics are more detailed in the book, but even still, it's highly likely that most readers of the book don't know enough about linguistics to fill in the gaps left by Weir. And that's why I'm here! Let your local linguistics enthusiast fill the gaps for you.
Break for the Dashâą
I've seen people assume that the way Rocky speaks is a quirk of Eridian just being a simple language. While yes, that could be true to an extent, both the film and especially the book make it very clear that Rocky only speaks in stilted, broken sentences because of the language barrier. By the end, he speaks perfectly clearly in complete sentences with humour and sarcasm and natural sounding exclamations. Grace is at that point fluent and understands all the nuances.
This leads to the first hurdle of Rocky's in communicating with Grace in the beginning: Grace is stupid. He's not but to someone from a species that has the auditory equivalent of photographic memory (I don't think this is mentioned in the film but it is in the book), Grace's lack of such makes it difficult to share a language quickly. Grace needs spreadsheets, audio synthesis software, coding, text-to-speech in the film because he can only "hear" (read: see) in one direction at a time. He's functionally disabled to Rocky. Rocky therefore accomodates him which is very sweet. Here's a list of ways in which Rocky is most likely altering his language use for Grace's benefit:
He speaks clearly.
It's mentioned in the book that at one point Grace's translation software (which he programmed himself for all the only-film fans) fails to translate a sentence of Rocky's. Grace is confused and confirms that the software is fully functioning. He realises that the issue is the pitch. Rocky's voice dropped an octave. When he shifts it back into the range the software recognises, it's perfectly translated. This means Rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely steady and repetitive so that Grace's computer can keep up.
There's an argument to be made that Eridian might just be like that, but knowing what we know about it (pitch change for emotion, it being a highly auditorily complex language made of musical chords, most likely created from at least five sets of whatever equivalent of vocal chords Eridians have, etc.), I find it highly unlikely that Eridian would be so even.
It's much more likely that super genius Rocky, despite never having seen a computer before, quickly realised that it couldn't keep up with those variations without serious programming that Grace isn't good enough at coding to do or manually entering every variation of a word. It's simpler to just speak evenly. And clearly, any mumbling would be a nightmare for the computer to pick apart.
He uses words he knows Grace knows.
Obviously he sometimes needs to use words Grace is unfamiliar with and then they're added to the translator, but have you ever tried to speak your native language to a novice speaker and limit your language to the words they know? It's way harder than it sounds. You naturally fall into expressions and phrases and words etc. that you use with other native speakers, and you often have to repeat yourself with altered versions of the original sentences because you accidentally used words the novice speaker didn't know.
And Grace has a serious ear for language, like, the speed at which he picks up "Eridian" (I'll get to that) in the book is startling. But he's also human and learning an alien language based on nothing but gestures and their simple shared vocabulary. Rocky must be spending a lot of energy keeping himself from simply speaking Eridian as he usually does so that the computer can keep up and Grace too.
His infallible memory definitely helps him remember what words Grace knows, but language is habit, it's a muscle and you don't think about the individual words when you speak. You just have a thought and it turns into words automatically. Eridians either don't have this automisation of repeated tasks in the way humans do, or Rocky is working overtime to keep his speech in check.
He speaks in English in Eridian.
This is the big one. Most users on the English speaking internet are native English speakers and, knowing English speaking countries, most likely don't speak more than one language fluently (not an insult, just a statistic, that's just how it is when the entire world speaks your native language). It's therefore completely understandable that this part of Rocky's accommodation of Grace's slower learning went over most fans on this part of the internet's heads. And as someone from a part of the world where speaking two to three languages is standard, I still imagine it went over most of the people in my area's heads too because most people don't think about linguistics all the time like me.
Anyway, to put it simply, translation is fucking hard. It seems simple, especially if you don't speak more than one, but it's not. Even highly related languages can end up nigh in comprehensible if you translate them directly into one another. The less related the languages are, the worse it gets. A lot of things cannot be translated directly because those types of words simply don't exist in the other language.
Take Japanese. In a super simple basic beginner level Japanese sentence like "watashi no namae wa jon desu", you'd still struggle to translate it. And this is, like, almost comically expansive for how Japanese people actually speak in their daily lives. A causal, fluent Japanese sentence would be nonsense in English. Even this simple basic sentense would translate directly as something like "I my name about John is".
The reason it's so weird is because Japanese uses particles to denote the roles of words in sentences, a lingustic concept that English doesn't have. Here "no" is possessive and indicates that the subject in front of it is the owner of what follows. English doesn't have anything even close to that type of structure and it can be really difficult for an English speaker to wrap their head around the sentence structure of Japanese when learning to speak it, not because they don't understand, but because constructing a sentence like that is so foreign. It takes a lot of mental effort to rewire your brain like that.
Now imagine speaking English with Japanese sentence structure. Imagine doing that and never slipping into real English sentence structure because then your poor Japanese novice English speaker friend won't understand a word. It's not "my name is John", it's "I name John is" and that's giving you the benefit of not having to find replacements for the particles. That would be impossible.
Now imagine you've met a literal alien species and have to start speaking English with alien language sentence structure. I cannot even begin to explain how wildly different Eridian and English likely are in every single way. Hell, they're so different that they're literally unpronouncable to the non-native speaker. And Rocky speaks Eridian with English sentence structure. It's explicitly pointed out in the book. And he does this flawlessly. Never slips up in any scene we get to see. I cannot begin to communicate the mental effort that would take for a human to do. Either all Eridians are crazy good at language or Rocky is just a turbo mega genius at it. Which is honestly not at all out of the realm of possibility.
All of this is to say that Rocky doesn't speak the way he does because that's just Eridian, that would be highly unlikely. He speaks the way he does because the language barrier is THICK and he's putting his entire rocky ass into making it thinner. It's less clear in the film, untouched as far as I remember, but in the book his speech becomes more nuanced as the story progresses. He uses more articles, more pronouns, more conjunctions, constructs more complex sentences, etc. As Grace learns more words and more about how Eridian as a language works, Rocky is fittingly upping the complexity of his speech.
It's never touched on but I have no doubt they spent many an evening (I know, I know, space, let me have this) talking about how Eridian expresses common English phrases and how to say this and that etc. etc. I'm probably the only person who'd find a long ass fic of just them discussing Eridian linguistic concepts and constructs interesting but hey, that's the nerd in me. I am the one writing this post, no one is suprised.
SO, anyway, to summarise, Rocky does a LOT of work to make his speech understandable to Grace. Grace starts to learn Eridian while they're still at Tau Ceti (not made clear in the film but is in the book) but he learns Rocky's frankensteined Eridienglish rather than real Eridian. I bet a lot of the trip to Erid was spent fixing Grace's understanding of Eridian so that he'd understand real Eridian.
By the time we pick back up with them in the biodome 16 years after arrival on Erid, Grace is fully fluent, meaning he must've already done all the hard work to learn proper Eridian which is unsurprising. He's a scientist, there's no way he'd accept just learning Eridienglish and never understanding any other Eridians than Rocky. Gotta be able to catch all the juicy gossip (what new science is being done and how to convince Rocky to convince the science Eridians to let him be part of it).
Anyway, that's my long ramble about why Rocky is a damn trooper and deserves so many accolades for how hard he worked to help bridge the language gap. Rocky is canonically super smart and I need people to see how that also applies to his language use. I love this rock <3
Not my fandom, not my monkeys, but this is fascinating to me because I have never understood and do not like tone indicators like "/hj" but even having never seen the movie or read the book, just based on dash osmosis, I naturally started using "question?" and "statement" at the end of sentences in places I thought needed more clarity, and I knew none of this. I thought they understood each other through movie magic or something. The fact one of them is actively compensating for a linguistic void never even occurred to me.
minor correction: eridian language is specific about pitch; an a minor fifth means something different than e minor fifth, for example. you can't switch chords out or change keys, or your meaning shifts. octaves are the doubling or halving of the frequency (and therefore universal), so eridians use that to show major tone shifts: up an octave for excitement, down an octave for sadness.
since they don't have inflection, the use of tone markers becomes important. the book mentions two that i can remember off the top of my head: "question" at the end of a sentence, like how we use question marks; and a quaver on the first word of the sentence to denote curiosity or excitement.
pacing is an interesting question. in the movie, grace's program would probably struggle with pacing. in the book, grace uses a fourier transform / waveform analysis software to identify the chords one at a time, then translates them using a spreadsheet of english words and the sequence of chords meaning that word.
what might be different with a second eridian, that grace and rocky alone don't have to deal with, is that there are harmonics and overtones. grace's fourier transform picks out the main tones of the chord, implied to be universal among all eridians, but the harmonics are probably unique to rocky and rocky's voice box / sound production organ. (that's something movie!grace's algorithm would likely have struggled with.)
grace is definitely a lot smarter about picking up eridian language than he gives himself credit for, but he's no rocky. eridians have near-perfect auditory memory. it makes sense, for a species whose primary sense is echolocation, and whose language is based on exact frequency tones. rocky probably thinks grace's language is inefficient, being able to only make one pitch at a time, while eridians can make 5. on the other hand, humans can make a wide variety of phonemes, while eridians can only make a whistling noise described as sounding similar to whale song.
backing up op on the points that: rocky is translating to english on the fly while still speaking eridian, which is impressive on its own, and both he and grace resort to simpler grammar for communication to reduce misunderstandings. (grace is not speaking fluent english either! because there are grammatical concepts he's struggling to explain back to rocky! they frequently say to each other: "need word for [very simplified description/circumlocution].")
a big example of something english has that eridian appears not to have is commonplace pronoun/name usage. eridian refers to things fairly descriptively. the ship is simply called "ship"; grace calls it "blip-A" because it's his culture to give it a specific name. the other planets around eridani are called "second planet" and "third planet" since they are second and third from the star, respectively. eridians just call things by their name: whether the given name for a proper noun, or the object name for an improper noun.
but back to the other marker people find charming, since rocky's language has no way to convey tone without question markers, and certainly not in a way that won't confuse grace's translation, especially in the beginning, rocky keeps those in. when rocky says "question" it's really like just reading out "question mark" every time you see the "?" symbol.
Not entirely sure what you're correcting since neither I nor prismatic-bell said Eridian isn't specific about pitch but I agree that it most definitely is. I wouldn't find it remotely surprising if it was tonal in some way too. Oh and inflection is the variation of pitch or tone when speaking so Eridian most definitely uses inflection :)
However, Rocky likely can't use it much when speaking to Grace because of all the aforementioned issues with the translation software. Once Grace starts picking up on the words himself, though, I'm sure Rocky would start using it gradually. Like you mentioned, the translator uses waveform analysis that picks out the dominating tones of a given word which is explicitly mentioned by Grace in the book to be oversimplifying Rocky's speech by ignoring all the other sounds going on (overtones, etc.). He only uses it because it's good enough for his purposes. I'm SO curious what all the little intricacies of Rocky's speech mean, STARS I wish this was a real language. Is this how I get into conlang? (Probably not but my goodness is it tempting.)
And very good point that Eridians can't produce distinct phonemes like humans can! They just "whistle/sing". But with how intricate one can make anything with enough determination, I have no doubt that Eridian is at least as complex as English, if not more. Trust me, my native language has one of the most extensive selections of vowel sounds in the world and we get PICKY and will lightheartedly argue as a pastime about the most minute of vowel differences. Learners hate us <3 /lh (We are very impressed by people knowing literally anything because why would you put yourself through learning this language, please.)
To your point about Eridian having no way to convey tone, I'm not entirely sure what you mean? They could easily convey it through inflection, word order, even conjugation or declension, just like some human languages do. Eridian may only have one phoneme but they definitely get the most out of it. That's not to say Eridian doesn't use the equivalent of Japanese ă(ka) or Esperanto Äu, my point is simply that we don't know. Maybe Rocky is using "question" because Eridian is structured that way, or maybe he's using it to be absolutely sure his tone is coming across the thick language barrier, or maybe the Eridian way of marking a question simply is impossible to communicate with their limited vocabulary and simplistic use of inflection. Kinda like how Spanish questions are hard to pick up on for learners coming from "questions affect word order" languages initially because questions in Spanish rely entirely on inflection.
Oh and about the lack of names for things! I actually find this very interesting. Of course there's the cultural difference of Eridians just not caring to name things in the way humans do. However, on the topic of Threeworld, it makes even more sense that they wouldn't have a name for the other planets because they straight up didn't know they existed until relatively recently. How would they? Space has no air, they can't hear the planets. And Erid has no moon so they'd have no reason to expect that there would be more planets out there. They might've theorised there were, much like many big human discoveries were theorised to be real before being proven so, but regardless, space is a technical thing to Erid, a complicated branch of science that most people have little to no relationship to. They can't see it, much in the same way we can't see atoms. We may know they're there but only people who have an interest in it can tell you much about it, and only experts, whether formal or hobby, can really get into the details. The sky is empty to an Eridian. So even if Erid had a culture of naming things like Earth does, their own solar system would be as distant to them in their everyday lives as distant planets around distant stars are to us. Their "world three" is our "40 Eridani c" (40 Eridani is specified to be a single star in this universe :') ). Just a boring name for categorisation.
Oh also I find it very exciting that you know stuff about music because I sure do not, I am winging my way forward. If I do ever start conlanging this, I'll definitely need someone who knows music theory who I can consult. Or just learn it myself. Like normal people do on a Thursday.
ah I think i misinterpreted your sentence "this means rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely constant and steady" on that first point, my bad! my point was, rocky literally can't *change* the pitch of an entire note, because that would change the meaning of the syllable. he can add vibrato or octave shifts, which are definitely inflection, but not the way several human languages (like spanish, and english) do inflection by a literal pitching up or down of the words by some arbitrary amount. i like to imagine eridians use a lot of clarifying tone words, or have variants of words that convey more or less serious tone. kind of like japanese where the word you use changes depending on the formality/relationship between speakers and the mood?
i think we're also running into a little jargon confusion between musical words and linguistics words--tone has a couple different meanings i may have been using interchangeably (:
rocky's tone [as in the physical notes he is making] is pre-determined by the language itself since it's so musical and dependent on pitch. his speed, octave, and inflection is definitely variable!
(he just has slightly fewer ways to inflect than a pitch-variable language, or even just a language with multiple phonemes, does--he inflects using warbles/vibrato, tone-clarifying words, possibly word order though this isn't explicitly ever mentioned, and supplementary gesture, which makes it a lot like ASL in terms of emotion and question structure! i think that's pretty neat ^^ i do think the book states that "question" is a word in eridian to denote questions, although i suppose grace could be wrong about that. he's only learned from rocky, who's clearly simplifying things.)
harmonics and overtones, which are explicitly mentioned in the book as showing up in grace's waveform analysis, are highly dependent on the timbre (basically sound quality) of the instrument or voice making the notes. i wonder if eridians get picky about those things; maybe there's some sort of singing/vocal hierarchy based on who has the best-sounding overtones. they can probably identify each other by voice alone, since everyone's unique voice will have its own variation in timbre, which results in its own overtones. maybe harmonics are something that varies among different colonies of eridians, like an accent. (maybe grace's eridian-keyboard only produces the main chords, so it sounds like a heavily auto-tuned voice...) there are so many possibilities!
what makes me think eridians don't have as much of a sentimental attachment to objects/naming comes from the ship. (pronouns are easier to intuit since rocky mostly says "grace" and "rocky" instead of "you" and "i". it's kind of inconsistent though.) rocky says it's just a ship so they call it "ship", and asks grace if he named the chairs too. rocky seems confused by the culture of naming things when you could just call them by a descriptive noun. (also funny that he was the one that called 'Tau Ceti e' a boring name, since that's exactly how eridians call things.) rocky also seems unconcerned with things that break, since he can fix them.
this next paragraph is headcanon/speculation, but i think eridians' superior materials technology means (or is perhaps just correlated to the fact that) they don't put a lot of sentimental value into objects. things that break are easily replaceable. if they need something they don't have, they can build it. humans tend to form attachments to inanimate objects, but i think eridians generally don't. they don't devalue them necessarily, they just treat objects as objects and people as people, and call everything exactly what it's called. no need to make up a name for something that isn't another eridian when there's a perfectly valid word that already exists for it.
Ooooh, yeah that makes way more sense, thanks for clarifying! Yeah, he'd have to keep the correct pitch for any word he says to keep it that word (otherwise Eridian words would be looooong considering their lack of phonemes), and he'd definitely have to keep it consistently for the computer to understand any of what he's saying. I wonder if par tof the simplification of Eridian he does is forego conjugation/declension/etc. since that might be pitch dependent too. Like, the same sound at two different pitches might be the difference between past and present or something like that. There are so many possibilities, oh the temptation to conlang!
Aaah yeah, probably. When I say tone, I'm thinking, like, tone indicator type tone, not musical tones. Makes sense those would get mixed up.
(Yeah, part of my hesitance to say "question" is definitively a trait of Eridian rather than a clarifying accommodation for Grace stems from the fact that we simply don't know if Grace is right. He poses the theory as if it's a trait of Eridian but it's never confirmed to be, and the scientist in me is reluctant to claim anything that isn't outright confirmed. But from a "hehe fun with language" angle I find the idea of there being a word or sound or conjugation or whatever music stuff I don't know enough about to name that's added to a sentence to make it a question very cool! Humans with all our phonemes still do that so there's no reason Eridians wouldn't take that easy out to solve the issue of their lack of phonemes to let the pitch be variable.)
Yesss, I'm so curious about how other Eridians speak, and especially which parts of Rocky's speech are Eridian standard and which are specific to him. Do other Eridians say "bad bad bad" or whatever the Eridian equivalent is? Or is Rocky just like that? Our sample size is one and I need more, please!
And Grace's keyboard! I've been wondering every since I read that line how that sounds to Eridians. Like, no way it doesn't have limitations like how AAC devices tend to have robotic voices, simply from the limitations of that kind of software. I find it highly likely that, with a language as auditorily complex as Eridian, that Grace's keyboard sounds at least somewhat robotic, even if he mentions it has options to express emotions and such. I wonder how complex it is to use. And oh, the engineers working on that must've had a BLAST figuring it all out and probably keep upgrading it until Grace dies. Maybe even past that for other unrelated accessibility purposes. Maybe it's even based on existing Eridian AAC devices for mute Eridians! Oh, the theories are THEORISING!
And yeah, for sure! They definitely don't name things as we know at least. Rocky never once in the book or the film expresses sentimental attachment to an object, at least not as far as I remember. He has his special outfit but that's special because it sounds nice, he's not attached to that specific version of it. If it broke, I'm sure he'd just fix or replace it without much regard for the sentimentality of it. It's just material to him. I wonder why they don't have sentimental attachments to objects. Humans do because we packbond with anything, so if an object is deemed as part of our pack, we name it and personify it, and feel bad for it when it's hurt, and mourn it when it breaks as if it had died. I wonder if Eridians either don't have the same indiscriminant packbonding instincts as humans do or if their culture has just evolved to not place value into the inanimate. Much to think about!
grace says that the repetitive words were an unspoken convention to convey strong emotion (at least in part, rocky definitely said "astrophage on planet bad bad bad" at the beginning, so either rocky came up with it then because he knew grace didn't know the words for "catastrophic", or it was an existing part of eridian grammar that doubling/tripling a word increases emotional strength), probably for the exact reason that conveying tone across such different languages is difficult, but if it wasn't part of the language already, there's no way rocky isn't bringing that back into his speech habits when he gets home đ
i do wonder how much eridians change volume to show expression?
It's called the Global Justice Report, it is here. This is an actionable plan which can be sent to legislators and demanded of political parties. We could save the world within our lifetimes.
It has always been possible. It is still possible.
 On occasion youâll see a Who-would-win matchup where people try to get Steven Universe to Talk-no-jitsu a host of âirredeemableâ villains, and it really highlights something that I think gets lost in the weeds in discussions of, and perceptions of, Stevenâs character. Iâd argue that heâs not actually uniquely good at talking people down, he was just uniquely well suited to talking down the handful of people he did talk down.
He had an in with the Diamonds to start, and honestly coasted a lot on the outcome of actions taken before he was born in order to survive the endgame. He never talked Jasper down. He never talked Aquamarine down. Lapis came around but she wasnât exactly a decisive victory and the show makes a point of how she has to carry herself over the finish line. He never really convinced Bismuth so much as the material circumstances changed and put the two of them in the same camp on their second meeting. Peridot decisively feels like a feather in his cap- he made a lot of right calls in quick succession with her, and they paid off fairly straightforwardly with no backsliding - but the sucess was still super contextual in that they only worked together at all because of the mutual danger posed by the cluster. He talked down Spinel but lost her almost immediately because she (correctly!) perceived him as only having reached out to her because he needed to in order to stop everyone from dying; he didnât think far enough ahead to realize this was probably going to happen, and honestly he kinda got lucky the Diamonds showed up when they did because they might have been in that cycle for a while otherwise.
The kidâs not a rhetorical genius- his successes in redeeming his enemies are contextual, dependent on immediate circumstances, a lot of luck, and oftentimes on the person being âredeemedâ making a personal decision that has nothing immediately to do with any argument Steven made. What Steven is actually consistently good at is providing support to his friends and family, convincing them to do stuff, managing their neurosis, and this is part of why Future hits him so hard- they donât really need him to do that anymore. Indeed, one thing I really liked about Future is that it highlighted the ways in which Steven can be genuinely emotionally incompetent in ways that donât pop as much when heâs a kid. Iâm thinking of Guidance, Volleyball, and Together Forever in particular. The show actually has a very reasonable grasp of how far rhetoric and fuzzy feelings alone will get you!Â
All of this to say that if youâre treating it as a given in your battleboarding that proximity to Steven is going to result in a character being redeemed, youâre doing it wrong. Being on the television show Steven Universe is what results in a character being redeemed. If you want Steven to be why, youâre gonna have to write an actual story. With context for how they met and got stuck together for the long haul. Maybe a plot, too.
