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Even darkness must pass

@smolpoe / smolpoe.tumblr.com

I'm Katie (she/her) | Twenty-something | Multi-fandom blog | Feral med student who's trying her best. Icon by Aykut Aydoğdu. Icon on my desktop theme is a photo by Corey Arnold.
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reblogged

I know "60s housewives who invented slash fanfiction" has taken on a life of its own as a phrase, but Kirk/Spock didn't really exist until the 70s and THOSE WOMEN HAD JOBS. They were teachers and librarians and bookkeepers and scientists and they damn well spent their own money going to conventions, printing zines, buying fanart and making fandom happen. Put some respect on their names.

Salute to our troops (70s careerwomen who put their hard-earned dollars into homemade gay erotica)

It was women with secretarial jobs doing a lot of the heavy lifting, if memory serves correctly.

They had training in type setting, could churn things out quickly, knew how to organise mailing lists, and had easy access to Expensive High Tech like photocopiers.

Boss make a dollar, she makes a dime. That's why she's printing Kirk X Spock zines on company time.

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if you give “stupid” characters rural/southern accents i don’t like you and if you give “smart” characters rural/southern accents but it’s a punchline i don’t like you even more

the other day I was out at lunch with some people I don’t know too well & they got talking specifically about West Virginian accents in the context of a movie that takes place there & that the movie opted out of doing accents & one of them laughed and said “I mean, can you imagine if characters sounded like that in serious moments??” I was like yeah I can because everyone where I’m from does sound like that. Y’all are so annoying.

no need for a more specific word because it all falls under classism and/or racism.

west virginia is home to some of the strongest labor & union movements in U.S. history, from miners’ strikes to the 2018 teachers’ strikes (where 20,000 teachers went on strike together with community support).

For the last 100 years it has become very beneficial to those in power for the rest of the country to think of us as very stupid, backward, “inbred,” etc. It’s not an accident. there were real efforts made to create & proliferate the stereotype of the stupid hillbilly.

Likewise it’s not an accident that dialects like AAVE are treated as a joke. Easier to dismiss civil rights leaders if you think what they say is inherently comedic or uneducated.

a lot of people in the tags saying they live in places where they hear people mock accents & dialects a lot & it upsets them. just want to remind you that it’s up to you to challenge that in the moment. when someone makes a shitty joke at the expense of someone else, someone else has to tell them it’s not funny & why. we don’t learn in a vacuum. maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. still gotta try.

at some point you likely had an “ah-ha” moment where you realized an unconscious bias you held needed to be unraveled. likely someone else pointed it out to you, whether that was in a conversation or something you read/watched online.

it’s not enough to learn your own lesson and move on. you have to pass the lesson along.

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petermorwood

All of the following is IMO, so YMMV.

"Accent bigotry" - Irish = stupid & possibly a drunk; Northern Irish = bigoted & possibly a terrorist; RP English = educated & probably trustworthy (though also nowadays possibly a villain) - is one of the reasons I'm ... let's call it "ambivalent", about what TVTropes calls "Funetik Aksent".

"Phonetic" misspellings and dropping letters in favour of apostrophes happen at both ends of the literary social scale, but there's seldom any doubt about who's in "Who's Who" and who isn't.

The person who said this:

"Bless your ’eart, sir! I'll go up and tell 'Er Lydieship now, sir, and I bet you’ll be ’earing something in ’arf a jiffy."

didn't go to the same school as the person who said this:

"Dinin' at a London club, deah boy, then huntin' an' shootin' an' fishin' in th' countreh. Whatevah could be bettah?"

Further lot development may and should reveal that neither of those speakers are what they seem - salt-of-the-earth working class or disdainful peer-of-the-realm - but what they SEEM is telegraphed instantly by the way their speech is set in print.

(Sharon McCrumb did this in "Zombies of the Gene Pool" - a big burly man who sounds like a hillbilly villain from "Deliverance" is a linguistics professor born in the region and doing it deliberately to mock the assumptions of the people hearing him.)

Unless there's a good reason for it (for example, a character revealing their true origins by accident or for emphasis) often the only thing writing speech like that does, is to indicate These People Here Speak Properly whereas Theyum Fohx Theah Tawks Funnih.

That comes complete with baggage which the writer either doesn't know about, doesn't care about - or is fully aware of and using deliberately.

*****

Other reasons for ambivalence: a little Funetik Aksent goes a long way; it's often tiresome to read (and to write); most of all, if readers are unaware of some important detail - such as what sounds the weird spelling is meant to imitate - it's pointless.

There's an example of Unaware right in the TVTropes article, which states:

Neil Gaiman's short story "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" in "Smoke and Mirrors" parodies the New England accent found in Lovecraft stories.

No it doesn't.

For one thing, just looking at them would have shown that speech from Lovecraft stories (here "The Dunwich Horror")...

“They know it’s a-goin’ aout, an’ dun’t calc’late to miss it. Yew’ll know, boys, arter I’m gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they’ll keep up a-singin’ an’ laffin’ till break o’ day. Ef they dun’t they’ll kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an’ the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes.”

...is nothing like speech from "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar"...

"And for me, too," said his friend. "I could murder a Shoggoth's. 'Ere, I bet that would make a good advertising slogan. 'I could murder a Shoggoth's.' I should write to them and suggest it. I bet they'd be very glad of me suggestin' it."

For another thing - this is much more excusable - that writer clearly didn't know about "The Dagenham Dialogues", a series of British comedy sketches from the 1960s. performed by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

(Not knowing isn't a surprise. Those sketches aren't as famous as they might be because of the infamous BBC policy of wiping / reusing programme tapes to save on costs and storage. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" almost went the same way; a lot of "Doctor Who" and many other popular shows DID.)

What's actually being parodied are the "Dialogues" characters "Pete and Dud", playing two acolytes of Cthulhu. They're described thus:

"Sitting in one corner were a couple of gentlemen wearing long grey raincoats and scarves ... sipping dark brown foam-topped beerish drinks..."

Rather, or indeed very, like this.

The Defence rests, m'Lud.

These acolytes discuss H.P. Lovecraft's style and vocabulary (overblown and eccentric), the location of sunken R'lyeh (just off the end of the pier, but handy for the shops), Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming (though temporarily deceased), and so on and so forth.

It's an excellent simulation of Pete and Dud and yet, apart from a couple of dropped-letter apostrophes, der's nun uv d'yoojul kunstruksh'n trikz. Instead it's done by matching the repetition, pace and rhythm of the originals.

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Incidentally, "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", the titular beer of the story, is itself a parody of Theakston's Old Peculier, a not half bad dark ale.

Note the difference in spelling: "PeculiAR" means strange or odd, "PeculiER" means a kind of Christian ecclesiastical court, so that's another beery association with a temporarily deceased god. Accidental, coincidental or deliberate?

Knowing @neil-gaiman, my money's on deliberate. :->

*****

Here he is, reading "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar": Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

And here are a couple of bits of "Dagenham Dialogues": One and Two.

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neil-gaiman

I was really enjoying Peter's analysis and then suddenly I was reading about my story. He's spot on, on every point.

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kurtbusiek

Also: Why would anyone in "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" be speaking in a New England accent, good or bad, when the story's set in regular old Old England? In a Lovecraftian town, perhaps, but not a New England one.

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vaspider

I have said this many times, but I don't mind saying it again:

I grew up in coal country, in Northeast PA. The place where I grew up has gotten a lot more built up in the last ~40 years, but it's by no means suburban or urban, and when we moved there, it was ... well.

It was coal country. It's part of the Appalachian mountains.

I grew up with friends who survival hunted and whose meat during the winter was the stuff they shot in the fall. My school district closed for the first days of buck, doe, and bear season because so many people just didn't come to school those days (including teachers) that we just had those days off. My grandfather was a breaker boy, though he told us his job was 'picker,' and he went into the Navy so he could leave the mines.

I'm a fucking hick, in my heart and my soul. Those are my people. Canyon Bakehouse has a type of bread loaf they call 'mountain white,' and the wrapper of it is an in-joke between me and several of my friends.

But -- because of the part of Appalachia that I come from, and the fact that I moved to Philly as an adult and lived there for about twenty years -- I don't have the expected Appalachian accent. I'm like... a fucking stealth hick, for lack of a better way to put it, and I have an immense vocabulary. Because of those two things -- the lack of the expected accent and the fact that I write and sometimes talk like a 19th century dandy in terms of run-on sentences and voluminous vocabulary, I essentially fly stealth in most conversations.

The number of supposedly progressive people in Philly and PDX, where I live now, who say the most blisteringly racist and/or classist things about people like me in the most casual ways... it's fucking exhausting. Sometimes I have the energy to challenge it, and sometimes I don't, but man, it happens a lot, and people talk like that in front of me really openly, I think because I don't sound like they 'expect me to.'

Hicks aren't necessarily uneducated, and uneducated doesn't mean unintelligent, and intelligence isn't a marker of worth.

Good talk.

My grandfather grew up in working class Britain near the end of the Second World War. Port city where the most famous thing there is the Mary Rose (sunken ship from King Henry the Eighth’s era) and the amount of British accents among my way too many cousins (I have a lot of aunts and uncles) is insane

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happy black sails on netflix to all who celebrate

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lichfucker

[video description: a Black Sails fanvid set to the song Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels by Todrick Hall. the video focuses on Flint, especially in moments of him looking cool and powerful, with a slightly comedic tone (mostly from the song itself). end vd]

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Hozier - Unheard (Behind The EP) | Empire Now breakdown

❝ I was just trying to create this sort of nightmare-ish picture of a world, or the world as we know it, but kind of paint a rather grotesque painting of it... ❞
Source: youtu.be
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ysolt

kitten i have to be honest your misunderstanding of what 'death of the author' actually means is getting embarassing and mommy would prefer if you posted less or maybe attended some classes on literary analysis

kitten i think you might be stupid

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reblogged

best trope is the one where the character’s godlike power is also killing them btw. they don’t even lift a hand to kill the monster but now they’re delirious with fever. they save a friend’s life and said friend immediately finds them emergency medical care. they raze the enemy to nothing and it takes far too long to find their pulse with all the bruising. their friends just constantly having to patch them up and worrying over which feat will be their last. et cetera

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