thinking about aria and briar’s nationalities/cultures because they are so different in such interesting ways
aria is chinese, but she was raised in england, specifically somewhere like alston moor in cumbria. very remote, very cold, very dramatic countryside, all stone walls and hills and old estates and tiny villages where everyone knows everyone else’s business. her family lives in this massive old manor estate, the kind of place that feels less like a home and more like a threat with windows.
the parkinsons own ridiculous amounts of land, including a nearby muggle town they collect rent from, because of course they do. proper old pureblood landlord behaviour. very “we don’t involve ourselves with muggles except when they owe us money.”
her chinese heritage is there, but her family mostly ignores it or buries it because they’re obsessed with seeming like the perfect old pureblood family. they care more about the parkinson name, the estate, the bloodline, the money, the image. anything too obviously cultural gets treated like something private at best, embarrassing at worst.
so aria grows up with this weird gap in her identity. she knows she’s chinese. she knows there are traditions and language and food and family history somewhere behind her, but it’s all been pushed into corners and treated like it matters less than pureblood society. she probably gets bits of it from older relatives, staff, letters, food, old objects, half-remembered stories, but not enough to feel fully connected.
and that definitely affects her.
aria being loud and punk and impossible to control is her refusing to be polished into some perfect pureblood manor girl. her family wants old money silence, she becomes noise. her family wants heritage hidden, she becomes impossible to ignore. she’s disconnected from parts of her culture because of them, but she’s also angry about it, even if she doesn’t always know how to say that.
she’s very much chinese and english and pureblood and northern countryside girl all at once, but none of those things fit neatly together for her, so she makes herself into a problem instead.
briar, meanwhile, is cypriot and british. very mediterranean, with turkish and greek sides to her family, and she grew up visiting cyprus a lot. she definitely has citizenship, speaks turkish as her first language as well as greek, knows family recipes, family gossip, family traditions, and has grown up around a lot of culture in a really everyday way.
and the greek side matters too, because briar isn’t just “turkish” or “greek” in a neat little box. she’s cypriot. that distinction is really important to her.
she grew up with both sides around her. turkish language and turkish-cypriot family stuff, greek-cypriot relatives and traditions too, similar food, similar family habits, similar music and hospitality and loud relatives and everyone acting like feeding you is a sacred duty. the cultures overlap a lot, but they’re also treated differently by the people inside them, especially because turkey and greece have so much history and tension between them.
so briar gets very stubborn about being cypriot rather than letting people split her into “turkish or greek.” she’s both, but also not fully either in the way people try to make her choose. she’s a blend. that’s the whole point.
she probably gets annoyed when people act like cyprus is just an extension of somewhere else, because to her it’s its own place, its own identity, its own home. she can speak turkish first, have greek-cypriot family traditions too, grow up british, and still be cypriot before anything else.
it makes her very aware of how identity can be complicated without being confused. other people might want a simple answer, but briar doesn’t owe them one.
she’s not “half this, half that” like someone cut her into pieces.
the whole thing, all at once.
but she was raised mostly british, somewhere like leicester. middle-class city girl, normal house, normal streets, lots of different cultures around her, not some isolated pureblood estate situation. she has a much more rounded relationship with her background than aria does.
briar’s family still has culture woven into daily life. food, language, holidays, visiting relatives, family expectations, hospitality, music, stories, all of it. but they’re not painfully strict about it. it’s just part of the house. part of how people talk. part of what gets cooked. part of what gets argued about. part of who she is.
but she is also very accidentally colonised in the funniest way because this girl is mediterranean and still cannot handle the sun or heat. she goes to cyprus and immediately starts melting. everyone else is fine and briar is in the shade with sunglasses, water, factor 50, and the expression of someone personally betrayed by the sky.
her relatives are like “you are from here” and she’s like “emotionally, yes. physically, apparently not.”
so briar has this softer, more grounded cultural identity where she’s connected to where she comes from, but also very obviously british-raised. she speaks turkish first, but she moves through england easily. she knows cypriot traditions, but she also complains like someone who has experienced one mildly warm day in the midlands and decided it was a human rights violation.
aria’s culture is something her family tried to bury under pureblood image.
briar’s culture is something her family kept alive in the kitchen, the language, the holidays, the relatives, and the everyday noise of home.
aria is disconnected and angry about it.
briar is connected but still awkwardly british about it.
and that contrast is so fun because aria grew up in a manor surrounded by land and silence, while briar grew up in a city surrounded by people and culture and normal life. aria is all inherited power and rebellion against it. briar is warmth, roots, and accidentally needing to sit down because the mediterranean sun tried to kill her.
