#extradirty
if i look back, i am lost
Misplaced Lens Cap
oozey mess
DEAR READER
we're not kids anymore.
Xuebing Du
Sweet Seals For You, Always
blake kathryn
Peter Solarz
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Monterey Bay Aquarium
art blog(derogatory)
NASA
roma★
KIROKAZE
No title available
Cosmic Funnies
trying on a metaphor
Kiana Khansmith
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Canada
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
@wortfinder
Where are all the active writing blogs. I swear I follow everyone and three weeks later they abandon their writing. Whomst is active
Can active writing blogs reblog this please
on a little hiatus right now. More enjoying the mainblog. But definitely around
@official-german-translationen
How I love that German has a rather long word for ‘car insurance’ but merely three letters for ‘existential despair and the meaninglessness of life’.
Priorities
Editing with cats.
Look, I made another comic sans presentation. This time for my WIP The Book of Souls. Check out the first one, in case you missed it or check out the wip page for the trilogy.
Keep reading
Thanks to my writerly friends @andtheotherwriter and @wortfinder and general madness I now have:
a chest hair chart
a list of my characters as food
a highly inappropriate head canon involving a strap-on
given the word butter a weird connotation
I love you guys, my life would suck without you!! <3
I am not saying which of those was me
And mine without you, @madmoonink. ♥
Also, @wortfinder, I could be mean and say which ones were me. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I mean, between the butter and the strap-on ... that doesn’t make much of a difference, does it?
Thanks to my writerly friends @andtheotherwriter and @wortfinder and general madness I now have:
a chest hair chart
a list of my characters as food
a highly inappropriate head canon involving a strap-on
given the word butter a weird connotation
I love you guys, my life would suck without you!! <3
I am not saying which of those was me
Antagonist as the Protagonist: Alternate WIP Summary Ask
I asked a few people this question last week as part of Storytelker Saturday, but the answers I received were so amazing that (thanks to a comment from @dove-actually) I’m now throwing it open to everyone.
Summarize your WIP from the antagonist/villains perspective.
I know this isn’t the easiest question as it could expose spoilers, but seeing as people rarely think of themselves as ‘the bad guy’, I find it fascinating to see how they justify their actions.
Reply to this post or send me an ask, as I really want to know! Even if we haven’t interacted before. And if you want to add a link to your actual WIP summary, do that too.
This tag is awesome and I had so much fun thinking of an answer!
An ongoing war with shapeshifters, a wife who clearly loves someone else more than him, one dense son and two completely incapable ones, keeping his secret dungeon secret, that one prisoner that just won’t break - Falk Sonnenzorn, Lord of the Northern Cape, has many things to worry about. Will he be able to hold his land and his family together?
Wow, that sounds A LOT more porny than it is. However, I do suspect Falk to have a certain preference for people in chains...
I’m gonna tag @chris-the-dragonslayer @andtheotherwriter @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword @introverteddumbass @ungeheuerteuer @merlucito-booksandstories @kainablue @pheita and @potatusvicious (only if you guys like!)
I feel tagged!
For an alleged genius tactician, Quinn has an amazing amount of problems. Like that job he hates but can't get out of or that team he cares way too much for and somehow has to keep alive. When he is tasked to aid a bunch of terrorists, he must decide between loyalty and survival. Then his boss makes a vital mistake.
I tag: @humanformdragon @wolveswingsandwrenches
Quinn <3 <3 <3
Me too. Me too...:D
Antagonist as the Protagonist: Alternate WIP Summary Ask
I asked a few people this question last week as part of Storytelker Saturday, but the answers I received were so amazing that (thanks to a comment from @dove-actually) I’m now throwing it open to everyone.
Summarize your WIP from the antagonist/villains perspective.
I know this isn’t the easiest question as it could expose spoilers, but seeing as people rarely think of themselves as ‘the bad guy’, I find it fascinating to see how they justify their actions.
Reply to this post or send me an ask, as I really want to know! Even if we haven’t interacted before. And if you want to add a link to your actual WIP summary, do that too.
This tag is awesome and I had so much fun thinking of an answer!
An ongoing war with shapeshifters, a wife who clearly loves someone else more than him, one dense son and two completely incapable ones, keeping his secret dungeon secret, that one prisoner that just won’t break - Falk Sonnenzorn, Lord of the Northern Cape, has many things to worry about. Will he be able to hold his land and his family together?
Wow, that sounds A LOT more porny than it is. However, I do suspect Falk to have a certain preference for people in chains...
I’m gonna tag @chris-the-dragonslayer @andtheotherwriter @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword @introverteddumbass @ungeheuerteuer @merlucito-booksandstories @kainablue @pheita and @potatusvicious (only if you guys like!)
I feel tagged!
For an alleged genius tactician, Quinn has an amazing amount of problems. Like that job he hates but can't get out of or that team he cares way too much for and somehow has to keep alive. When he is tasked to aid a bunch of terrorists, he must decide between loyalty and survival. Then his boss makes a vital mistake.
I tag: @humanformdragon @wolveswingsandwrenches
Ok, writeblr, I have to be honest. I’m just a little bit exhausted and I could really use a laugh. Tell me about your funniest character. What are they like? What kind of humor do they use? I want to hear all about them AND (extra challenge for those who are able/willing) see a little excerpt of their comedy in action.
Reblog, comment, or send an ask with your answer. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join!
I tag every post with ‘writeblr conversations’ for those who want to follow or blacklist. If you want to be a part of the conversation every week, let me know and I’ll add you to the taglist! @tjswritingstuff @gettingitwrite@gooseandcaboose @julesruleswrites @dawnhorizons @kd-holloman @reininginthefirewriting @writingonesdreams @brb-writing @celstefani @kirstenmcwriter @no-negativity-writes @bardicfool @nemowritesstuff @wortfinder @katekyo-bitch-reborn @weareallfallengods @carnationwrites @seylaaurora @naavakaiho
My funniest character is Nathanael. He’s a notorious mom friend with a big mouth and a careless attitude. He’s a technomancer with a slightly skewed sense for legality and a French accent. He loves bagels and croques. Eating them, creating them. Cheese, of course. Computer games. Computers. A challenge. And what he loves the most is his friends.
For a moment it looked as if Nathanael wanted to walk over, but then he turned away and gently pounded his forehead against the refrigerator door three times. After the last time he rolled his head in her direction, his cheek pressed flat against the cool metal. "I swear we will do everything to keep this from happening,” he said, “but please do not let me live with the knowledge that you two died as virgins." "I'm not ...,” she stuttered. “Dariush ..." "Eheh." He raised a warning finger. “I don't want to know anything about your sex life. What you do in bed is your business and your business alone.” Lara just opened her mouth when he followed with a wink. "Just do something."
Writing is 50% “I have no idea what I’m doing” and 50% “I am a genius”.
Fun little thing about medieval medicine.
So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.
It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.
The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.
I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?
I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”
I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P
I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers.
Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.
This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”
Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)
All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.
it’s important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be “just timekeeping, they weren’t just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!” but it’s also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking
Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldn’t also have logical basis behind it. But that’s a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things aren’t contradictory. They’re part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.
*INHUMAN SCREECHING*
M Y T I M E H A S C O M E
You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.
STORY TIME
Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.
Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.
But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.
BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.
Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:
Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.
For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus.
With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:
Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.
Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.
Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.
A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I don’t know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts.
Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.
What an interesting find.
Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:
This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.
It worked well.
It worked extremely well.
So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as it’s more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witches’ brew freakin murdered it.
Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.
Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this.
To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic.
Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.
All that to say: Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Further reading:
The 2015 Ancientbiotics report: A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity
NPR: ‘Ancientbiotics’ Researchers Look For Old Fixes To Modern Ailments
Mental Floss: 20 Anglo-Saxon Remedies from Bald’s Leechbook
Read a paper about how scholars are building on the work of the Ancientbiotics project to better understand how to apply ancient ideas effectively to modern medicine.
Look through Royal 12 D XVIII for yourself! Bald’s eyesalve recipe is on f. 12v and looks like this:
Tips on writing a character who’s ADHD
Courtesy of yours truly, an actual person with ADHD (who’s just slightly sick of bad ADHD characterisations)
We don’t ramble randomly, we infodump. I see a lot of writers writing ADHD characters as speaking these enormous, unbroken paragraphs on essentially whatever topic happens to be current, which isn’t how ADHD works. We might be long-winded at times (though really, not any more than non-ADHDers are,) but when it comes to those signature rambles, it’s about a topic we’ve hyperfixated on. Often, these topics seem random to NTs, but for us it’s very specific and topical. Often times, I’ll have only a handful of functioning hyperfixations at a time, and it’s usually something you can put under a specific header (cold war history/biology/etc., a particular band/genre, a specific show, and so forth.) My advice? Get a sense of your character’s hyperfixations before you write it in; Rick Riordan does a fantastic, albeit slightly heavy-handed, job of doing this with Leo Valdez in Heroes of Olympus. (another VERY IMPORTANT tip: just don’t write big unbroken paragraphs of rambling if you’re expecting me to actually read that shit. As an ADHDer it’s like physically painful for me to try and sift through that lmao)
We experience a wide range of emotions, and we experience them very strongly (AKA we’re not just balls of hyperactivity and joy.) Intense emotions are a hallmark of ADHD, which is why a lot of the time we seem super happy and energetic all the time to non-ADHDers. It’s a L O T more socially acceptable for us to express the intense happiness we feel, not so much the other emotions we feel just as intensely. Particularly for impulsive-type ADHDers, the main emotions we struggle to regulate are excitability, irritability, frustration, and dysphoria, all of which are emotions we’re taught from a very young age to be ashamed of and hide (which happens, in my experience, like this: you exhibit the strong emotion, you act in a way that is seen as unreasonably intense to non-ADHDers, and rather than learn to cope with the intensity of the emotion we’re taught to turn it inwards.) When we experience these intense negative emotions, we internalise it like we’re taught to, and our emotions appear more subdued to the people around us, though we still experience them intensely. We’ll typically close off and downplay our state if pressed, but in my experience we open up to people who we know to be ADHD/ND. That being said, we’re not always able to internalise it–especially (honestly, almost exclusively) when stressors pile up/when we’ve dealt with it for so long–and that’s when we explode. Because we experience emotion a lot more intensely than non-ADHDers, we almost always cry when this happens. I’m talkin’ ugly cry people. I’ve got hella information on the subtleties of a good ol’ fashioned ADHD-brand meltdown, which would make this post even longer than it’s already doomed to be, so if you’re interested in some tips on that feel free to shoot me an ask!
Our thought process is not random; we have highly-associative brains. Please. For the love of GOD. Stop fucking characterising us along that “OOH SQUIRREL” line of bullshit. I’ll come directly to your house and curse your shins to bump against every coffee table you encounter. Don’t fucking test me. Our thought process is highly-associative, which essentially means our brain makes more connexions between memories and thoughts when they’re being solidified, which results in memories triggering thoughts that wouldn’t occur to non-ADHDers. These links might seem tenuous when you don’t have a highly-associative brain, but they’re there, and they’re fairly evident on the part of the person with ADHD. And as a writer nota bene, don’t retroactively make these associations–in other words, don’t try to justify the link after it’s made just because a subject change is plot convenient for you. Try your best to make these transitions organic if you’re gonna include them. A good example of this is Jake Peralta in Brooklyn Nine Nine: he makes pretty sizeable leaps in topic, but the transitions always make sense.
ADHD is highly comorbid with other neurodivergencies. I’ve not met a single person with ADHD who is *only* ADHD; I personally have almost ten other neurodivergencies I’ve been diagnosed with. The most common comorbidities are: anxiety/depression (every ADHDer I know has at least one if not both of them,) autism spectrum disorder, and dyslexia. ADHD is a developmental disorder, which means our brains are fundamentally structurally different from NT brains, and this lends itself to the presence and development of other conditions. Don’t be afraid of including those other conditions/symptoms in your character’s story for realism! That being said, for the most of us, our ADHD is the most prominent condition we have, so we identify with it the most. The way we often see it, ADHD is the *main* condition, and the others feel like tag-alongs (this isn’t always the case and it isn’t always true, but that’s how we tend to interpret it.)
Our symptoms get worse when we get tired or stressed, but especially tired. When we’re stressed but reasonably rested/fed, we typically have the mental faculties to perform pseudo-neurotypically (we do decently well with controlling our symptoms,) though they might become slightly more pronounced. Lack of sleep/mental rest amplifies our symptoms and inhibits our ability to control them, most noticeably in our working memory (remembering/following instructions, immediate task completion, concentration, etc.) Just as NT/non-ADHDers become scatter-brained as they get increasingly stressed, so do ADHDers. The two main differences are that 1) it’s more pronounced and has a lower threshold, and 2) we (conveniently for you!) have a set list of symptoms that are going to react predictably to this.
We are very aware of our symptoms, thank you very much. While there will be times where my symptoms slip out and I’m not paying attention to them, nine times out of ten I’m very painfully aware of how non-NT I’m acting. When I simply can’t slow down my speech for the life of me, when I feel myself rambling about a hyperfixation, when I get stressed over something little and have an emotional outburst, I know. A lot of authors miss this, but ADHDers are very early made aware of why we’re perceived as different, and often times that’s done so at the expense of our self-esteem. Our ADHD doesn’t exist in a vacuum in our minds, and we’re very often self-conscious about how we’re socially read because of it. If you’re trying to get into the mind of a character with ADHD, that’s an important dimension to keep in mind. The self-consciousness factor is usually diminished when we’re around ppl who know that we’re ADHD, but when they show up around people we haven’t told we’re ADHD, we’re not usually quite so keen to share it. While this probably isn’t the same for all people with ADHD, it’s been my experience at the very least.
Anyhow this has been sitting in my drafts for God knows how long, so I’ll just release it into the wild. ADHDers, if you have any other tips, or want to share your experience, please feel free to add on!
I am the rare animal of ADHD without pronounced generalized anxiety. I got myself a lovely case of traumatic anxiety 1 1/2 years ago, but am now back on my baseline, or even better, because I got some therapy and could smooth out some bumps. But we DO exist.
On Representation, Diversity, and “have characters of color just don’t write about the experience of being a person of color”
Alright. I’m gonna piss a bunch of people off and also confuse a bunch of well-intentioned white people because I don’t think that you can write about a character of color without talking about the experience of being a person of color of a certain culture.
Seriously. There’s so many conversations celebrating how people have narratives where it “doesn’t matter” that one of their characters is a person of color and that their characters’ identity as a person of color “doesn’t affect the storyline” or whatever.
I’m going to cut right to the chase here: as a reader and storyteller of color, I’m not a fan of narratives where race doesn’t affect the story.
My race and culture and ethnicity ABSOLUTELY impact the way I perceive the world around me! For instance, many South Asian families bond with lively debates and discussions and lovingly roasting their family members. The way that I develop positive relationships, often with a solid dose of conflict and loudness and argument, is therefore fundamentally different from the way a white person would develop relationships; in fact, many white people are intimidated by how loud South Asians like myself are. We’re dramatic and loud and love jokes with wordplay! That’s just how it is and it means I form bonds with people differently.
I also have different values. White people are often more individualistic in culture, with more weird distant formal bonds with their parents (shit like referring to their parents by first name or, on the other end of the spectrum, calling their dads “sir”???) as opposed to the more comfortable and closer bond I have with my parents, where my family is all up in my shit literally all the time LMAO.
Literally white families are SO DISTANT to the point where white people consider practices like co-sleeping with your young child, something very common in South Asian families, to be child abuse?? Like, as if keeping your baby in a crib in another room where they’re not close to you and it’s harder to hear them isn’t dangerous but apparently suffocating a child while sleeping (which is very rare especially since co-sleeping is a practice that has gone on for MILLENNIA) is the bigger threat here??
White kids might perceive that as invasive or a violation of their privacy; I don’t perceive it that way because of the way South Asian families are structured. There’s a stronger emphasis on closeness with family. Of course, there are situations of kids being estranged or difficult family relationships or child abuse in South Asian families as well, but family is more valued in my culture.
The plants I put in my garden are different because of my identity; flowers like bela (Arabian jasmine) and bougainvillea and roses and gladiolus and marigolds and such things are what I’m fond of because of biases based on what my parents and grandparents like. I even once grew nenua (a type of squash). (I’m gonna get my hands on a raat ki rani soon I hope!!) And, of course, not every South Asian is partial to these flowers, but there’s definitely a cultural aspect as to why I personally like them!
The colors and patterns I gravitate towards are also different! I’m not a big fan of western “neutrals” and I find bright colors more appealing, especially because hey, those vibrant shades look better on brown skin! And GUESS WHAT, part of why the western world gravitates towards neutral colors in formalwear is because of colonialism and a disdain for the vibrant colors and dyes that colonized countries used. I love wearing jhumka earrings and statement necklaces and bright, vibrant jewelry as well. Now, obviously, this isn’t the case with every South Asian, but there is certainly some level of impact on these choices from my culture and upbringing.
Hell, even the food I eat is different! I drink chai in the evenings. I gravitate towards spicier dishes and better seasoning. I don’t eat meat other than fish/seafood and chicken and occasionally turkey because of cultural stuff, though ofc lots of South Asians are vegetarian and on the flip side lots of South Asians DO eat red meat and stuff.
And this isn’t even universal to ALL South Asians by any means, because my parents are specifically Hindu and from northeastern India and I’ve grown up in California! And there’s so many other details I could go into but for the sake of not writing a twelve-page essay I’m stopping here.
Basically, my point is, I don’t want representation where race “doesn’t matter” to the story. Race impacts so many aspects of my life and how I perceive and interact with the world around me.
It’s ridiculous to me how so much “representation” is basically just starting with a default of a white character, making her brown, avoiding the stereotypes, and that’s….it. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel authentic to take away cultural impacts on your characters. People start with white western archetypes and tropes and try to mold them to fit characters of color, instead of starting off with an authentic character of color, and it really, really shows.
Especially because Tumblr and writeblr are such white spaces, and also because culture is usually picked up from the environment as opposed to online, the conversations centered around “representation” are always about “don’t do x stereotypes” as opposed to how to actually learn about other cultures and actually….write a character of color. So many of y’all only know how to NOT write a character of color as opposed to how to ACTUALLY write a character of color.
I see so many lists of tropes and things to not include in stories, and not enough things about values and family structures and food and fashion and ways of developing relationships and all that fun stuff that will shape who you are as a person.
And some of y’all don’t even TRY to, I dunno, engage with the culture of your character of color to actually write them. For instance, if you’re writing a South Asian character, go explore South Asian cinema! Go make South Asian friends who can tell you little details about their lives as they, y’know, exist and are your friend! In general, explore the movies and literature and music and dance types and food and drink and whatnot of the culture your character is from! Form relationships with people of those cultures; it’s the internet! I know this is a super white space but there’s PLENTY of poc on here! Make an effort, not just to avoid harmful stereotypes, but to write a character of color whose identity actually MATTERS.
When I’m reading escapist fantasy/sci-fi/romcom/etc. literature where characters aren’t being hurt by racism, I don’t want a story where RACE doesn’t exist, I want a story where RACISM doesn’t exist. I want cultural understanding, empathy, and compassion!
I don’t want a role a white character would play just switched out with a character of color.
For instance, in the movie To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Lara Jean’s identity as East Asian is reflected in her fashion choices; book author Jenny Han lent inspiration for this. The Yakult drinks she likes, inspired by Korean tastebuds, plays a role in the story, too. These are details that don’t necessarily heavily impact the plot; it’s a fake-dating high school romcom. But they make a more real, fleshed-out character. They’re little details, little in-jokes and references, showing that the character’s race and culture actually MATTER to the story.
There’s a part in Pacific Rim where Raleigh Beckett, a white man, is frustrated with Mako Mori, a Japanese woman, for not going against the wishes of her father figure, Pentecost. When he tells her she doesn’t have to obey him, she responds, “It’s not obedience, Mr. Beckett. It’s respect.” This depicts her cultural understanding of family and respect; her relationships and her responses to things are impacted by her culture.
This is what I’m talking about! In order to write an actual character of color, you MUST write about their experiences to a certain extent. Of course, don’t make your characters of a certain culture a monolith in terms of personalities and responses and all that, but understand how they may be similarly impacted by their identities.
Now, don’t write a whole damn novel about a character coming to terms with their racial identity and coping with racism, but you absolutely MUST holistically incorporate their identity into your narrative.
Otherwise, it’s not actually representation. It’s you essentially writing a racebent white character. It’s you using a white default and trying to adapt it to totally different experiences.
This is eye-opening and excellent.
“I don’t want a role a white character would play just switched out with a character of color.” Right on point. Ex.: “Die Hard.” Neither the black guy member of the gang, the black limo driver, or the black hero cop show anything important about being persons of color.
Also: “My race and culture and ethnicity ABSOLUTELY impact the way I perceive the world around me!” If the story has a character of color, the storyteller must be sensitive to why the color matters. And if color doesn’t matter, why is the person of color there at all?
But …
Referring to “white folks” or “white kids” doesn’t tell us much, unless the author is seriously going to argue there’s no significant difference among Americans, Irish, Brits, French, Italians or Germans, for example. Or even between kids in California and kids in Mississippi.
“For instance, many South Asian families bond with lively debates and discussions and lovingly roasting their family members. The way that I develop positive relationships, often with a solid dose of conflict and loudness and argument, is therefore fundamentally different from the way a white person would develop relationships; in fact, many white people are intimidated by how loud South Asians like myself are. We’re dramatic and loud and love jokes with wordplay!” Has the author never been to Greece or observed Greek families interacting with each other?
Stereotypes and tropes are too easy. ~ JBB
Hey there, I’m glad you found this eye-opening! I made this post a long time ago as far as social media goes and I just wanted to say that I addressed some of what you’re critiquing in an older reblog here.
Also do wanna quickly say that I do happen to have white friends from different parts of the world (including Greek people like you mentioned here) and we’ve bonded over cultural similarities like what you’ve addressed in here as well, particularly after I made this post.
Have a nice day! <3
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What did RWA do, if I may ask?
I included a link to a thread that explains everything that is going on, but basically, the Romance Writers of America association has decided to side with ethical claims against Courtney Milan, because she fired back against racism in the genre.
Y’know, the thing an association that claims to be progressive and inclusive should want people to do. But yeah, nah. Certain authors were white—I mean—quite upset at Milan for calling out their racism, and this is apparently the hill the RWA has chosen to set itself on fire on. So go off, I guess.
Lemme get this straight; the RWA basically imploded over a couple of hack authors not taking criticism well?
“Hack” is… not quite the right word I’d use for a number of the authors involved. Some of them are bestsellers with rather long and profitable careers. But then again, there’s no accounting for the taste of conservative rich white women, their expendable income, and the droves in which they support other Nice White Ladies who hold, shall we say, certain values.
But yes, to put it bluntly, the RWA chose a racist hill to die on then nuked itself out of orbit with every new layer of scandal that’s been revealed since. I’m honestly not sure how they thought this was going to turn out, but whatever it was, they thought wrong.
If nothing else, the racists have come out of the woodwork in their droves to defend their own, showing their entire asses for everyone to see, which again, weird cliff to die on but I suppose if their victim complexes make them happy…
