Hello, hope things are alright with you! If you want, can you elaborate more on Dionysus and his ‘foreignness’ so to speak? As someone not white nor western, I do have moments of imposter syndrome worshipping Dionysus despite knowing that Hellenism is open and that Dionysus has associations with the east, India etc. Why do you think there’s been a surge in people outside Greece/Rome/Europe following Hellenism? Are the Theoi spreading out? Thanks! :)
Hi!
I do not think Dionysus’ foreignness translates as a nationality, identity or race. His foreignness is more about being different or outside of the norm so to speak. Dionysus has been given many origins: Middle-Eastern, Indian, Thracian etc... despite being attested as part of the oldest gods present in Greece (Linear B) and having several important hotspots in Greece.
Dionysus is the god who comes and goes, who fits nowhere because his individuality and uniqueness is too strong to be silenced under the norms of society and civilization. It really is what lies behind his foreignness.
It’s hard to really tell what the motivations are behind the newfound popularity of the gods outside of their historical geographical areas. It could be divine will, after all the gods have expanded in foreign lands before, and there could be very down-to-earth explanations such as the availability of Western media outside of the West and the rise of the Internet, which makes the sharing of information and thought reach new levels of possible.
My final words will be to tell you to be easy on yourself. Difference is the strength of a dionysian.
Hii, do you happen to have made any organizational charts of then sith military? Sort of like, how the fleets are organized etc? The new Onslaught expansion had definitely made me curious on how the Empire actually manages its resources. Also, these swtor prompt ficlets were amazing!! :)
thank you! :D
So this is all gonna be very slapdash and not very well organized, but here we go with at least an *overview*. :D
The Sith Empire’s military’s largest designation is the Fleet, First Fleet through Fifth Fleet. Fifth Fleet is the home fleet, commanded by Rycus Kilran (or whoever succeeds him if you have him die - I do not lmao). I don’t have a lot broken down from there because I haven’t needed it, but we can definitely do a quickie runthrough.
I work a lot of the Imperial military much like the Marine Corps, because it’s what I’m most familiar with, with a few changes. The Marine Corps’ largest dividing structure is Headquarters Marine Corps, the Operating Forces, the Supporting Establishment, and the Marine Forces Reserve.
Headquarters Marine Corps would be analogous to the Ministry of War, with a little overlap with the military spheres of the Council. It’s the absolute tippy top brass. (In terms of most folks in the military, HQMC is this basically nebulous concept that sends down stupid rules that we don’t like, like the tattoo policy the Marines implemented in 2007. Besides it’s all officers and everyone - ie, all enlisted folks - knows officers don’t do shit. xD )Operating Forces is a very overarching designation for regional commands with multiple services in it. In US terms, it breaks up the whole of the globe into five main commands. Its equivalent in the Sith military would be the Fleets I referenced at the beginning.
The US is covered by US Northern Command, or USNORTHCOM, and its Sith Empire equivalent would be the Fifth Fleet, the one that guards the home triangle of Korriban, Dromond Kaas, and Ziost.The Marine Corps breaks down its commands within the Operating Forces breakdown, but that’s very service-specific, though the Army and the Navy would both do so within the Fleet structure, another thing I’ll probably tinker with once NaNoWriMo is over.
Supporting Establishment is for literally everything else - everything we consider “the military” in popular culture, extra duties like recruiting or drill instructor duty, etc. Basically, your average Jane is not going to be concerned with HQMC or Operating Forces, pretty much ever. You won’t ever hear “oh I’m getting transferred to the Fourth Fleet.” It’s always going to be the direct base, planet, or ship (in the case of the Navy) that they’d be transferring to. So while a Marine might go, “Fucking A, I got orders to Barstow, I asked for QUANTICO on my request!”, someone like Pierce would be like, “Goddamn it, they’re sending me to the Adamant? Even I’ve heard their chow hall sucks and the commander loves early morning inspections.”
The Reserve is self-explanatory, though I’ve greatly expanded its role in the Sith Empire. In the reserves for the Empire, everyone trains, everyone continues to be as battle-ready as they can, because the Sith have lived with this cultural fear that the Jedi are coming to eradicate them for millennia. If you aren’t active duty, you’re Home Guard.
Once you get past this main structure, you get a lot of room to play around. In RL, you get into what the Marines call the MAGTF (Marine Air Ground Task Force). These are the largest Marine-specific organizations outside of the Fleet Marine Force designations (what I referenced a couple paragraphs ago about the breakdowns within the Operating Forces), and are put together for specific missions and dissolved when that mission is over. MAGTFs are organized so that the Marines are ready to go with everything they’ll need at a moment’s notice - ground, air, and logistics. Within the MAGTF there are smaller designations, from expeditionary units (smallest) to expeditionary forces (largest). This is how I see a lot of the Sith Empire’s deployments working - you pull together what you need and go on a mission.
For example, in Onslaught (and I’ve only finished on my JK so I could romance Scourge, so I’ve only seen it from the outside so far), you have both the iso-5 and the Silencer fleets turn up. Aside from that mainly being so SWTOR can reference stuff you’ve already done, these ships likely wouldn’t be just palling around together. Thus, seeing what was going on and remembering what happened with Corellia last time, what likely happened is that the commander of the ... whichever fleet it is I assigned to closest to Corellia was like, “we’re going to put together this, and this, and this, based on our intel on what the Republic is going to bring to this fight.” The plan for Corellia had to have been in the works for some time, but the benefit to being able to bring together a force quickly because you already have detailed information on where each of these units are is that you can mobilize quickly.
Given their history with the Republic, the Imperial military would place great emphasis on being mobile and fast-responding. A lot of emphasis would be placed on being mission-ready, having all training up to date, not dragging around a bunch of broken gear, that sort of thing. Lots of drills, lots of training exercises, etc.
that was .. not short at all, sorry. xD hopefully it’s at least a little help. :D
Hello! May I have some advice on would it be offensive if I choose to explicitly state that a character has brown skin and is from Southeast Asia but not specify their nationality? I want to include the character as there tend to not be as much positive attention towards darker SE Asians compared to lighter East Asians. (Pt1)
I'm also afraid it might give the implication that all Asians are the same etc, which is not want. It's just that her culture does not have a big part in the plot, but I've always envisioned her as a dark-skinned SE Asian and as a Thai person myself I would enjoy seeing representations of SE asians more, I just don't feel the need to go into that much detail about her culture or ethnicity. What do you think? Thank you so much! (pt2)
As a white person, I don’t really feel comfortable saying what would or not be offensive, but to me, it seems fine. There definitely needs to be more positivity for darker SE Asians, and it’s great that you’re doing that. Particularly if you don’t think her culture or ethnicity would have an impact the story, I think what you’re suggesting seems like it would work. Without knowing any more details about your story, I can’t really give any comments about what impact it may or may not have, but I trust your knowledge of your story.
My main suggestion would be to run this by sensitivity readers or sensitivity pre-readers (for before you write the whole thing), preferably of multiple SE Asian ethnicities to see if they spot or think of some issue that you’re going to run into. One thing to consider may be whether they were raised in SE Asia or are part of a diaspora community. Someone from a diaspora community will probably have a less strong tie to their ethnic background, particularly if they’re second or third generation or beyond, but I have to admit that I’m not familiar enough with the history of SE Asian diaspora communities to comment on it.
Hello! I'm an aspiring writer, and for one of my stories I want to write a fantasy about a bard whose music acts as a hearing aid for a moderately deaf person. Would this be considered offensive? Thank you so much!
Well, seeing as music is sound and deafness deals with not hearing that sound... I would say to stay away from that line of action. You could have a bard whose music is magical and creates a mist person who signs the songs they sing? This still allows others to understand the songs but in a much more accepted way.
Hi! Have Merkara ever suffered from any effects of being immersed in the dark side of the force and how does she deal with that? Or, does she just give in and let the force corrupts her? Hope you’re doing well too ❤️
Merkara is playing hide-and-seek with the dark side. And the dark side is always there, always hungry, waiting to drag her all the way down.
She knows how it works and what it does to Force-users before she even travels to Korriban because she serves in a Sith household and her Master teaches her the basics. She concludes that the dark side can twist people into something she doesn’t ever want to become, but hey, she still wants power. She wants to be so powerful that people would be afraid to hurt her. So she gives in bit by bit, taking what she needs to survive. The dark side demands something in return, and Merkara pays her dues diligently: “Take those other acolytes, take my apprentices, take my lovers, take my allies. Take them, but not me.” It’s just a matter of finding something she can afford to sacrifice.
She’s afraid of full immersion because it looks very much like slavery to her. Her research is a way for her to understand the dark side, to take it apart and see how it can be controlled. At the same time, she explores other perspectives on the Force ― she wants some alternatives to avoid relying on the dark side completely. And she tries to create her own approach.
She thinks that she’s so clever and so innovative, but she slips every now and then. It’s especially bad when she goes on her revenge rampage after ascending to the Dark Council. She loses it, tortures and murders, abandoning common sense and self-control altogether. Why struggle to be a better person if you can just set the galaxy on fire and have a good laugh about it instead? The dark side gets inside her head and whispers: “They don’t deserve you at your best, they all deserve to suffer.”
Power is tempting, but freedom is always the priority. Merkara doesn’t want to lose herself again. She can’t outsmart the dark side all the time, but she tries, and tries, and tries. If she takes one wrong step, she is going to lose everything.
This one quote from Emily Carroll captures her situation perfectly: “Oh, but you must travel through those woods again and again and you must be lucky to avoid the wolf every time. But the wolf... the wolf only needs enough luck to find you once.”
Hi, I hope your day is going well. May I ask if you have any preference on Dionysus/Dionysos or various other spellings of his name or epithets? Usually I don’t mind how they are spelled, but I’ve been getting into devotional writing and sometimes when writing a piece, I get a sense that his name has to be written this way for this piece, even when I wasn’t intending on specifying a facet of his. Have you had similar experiences?
I kinda do yes. I use Dionysus on Tumblr because it’s the correct English (latinized) spelling but in my native language we kept Dionysos, which happens to be much closer to the Greek spelling.
So, in my personal documents I use “Dionysos”. When it comes to epithets, it’s a bit more lax. There are some epithets that are more “sensitive” (for lack of better term) than others and in which case I make the effort of keeping them unaltered (either Latin alphabet with Greek spelling or just directly in Greek). It’s a bit of a case to case situation with epithets.
Same for Bacchus/Bakkhos. This one is a bit trickier because I personally use Bacchus to indicate that I’m refering to the Roman Liber-Bacchus and Bakkhos when refering to Dionysos Bakkhos. That’s mostly a terminology choice to clarify context though.
26. Who do you think is a forgotten hero we should know about and admire? :)
This is such a hard question. Many possibilities there but I’ll go with the one that has been recentely brought back up.
Marcel Marceau, born Mangel was a mime artist. He’s definitely not forgotten on that matter, however, less people know that he was a 16 year old Jewish boy when the Nazis arrived in eastern France. He joined the resistance and managed successfully 3 difficult rescue operations in 1944, all of which consisted in moving children from an orphanage in France to Switzerland where they would be safe. The cover he used was one of a boyscout bringing the kids to vacation in the Alps. Miming became the safest way to keep the kids entertained while keeping the amount of noise at a very low level, which was obviously an important factor in situations that could quickly become life-or-death ones. We’re not sure how many children he saved, but it’s likely several hundreds.
