Random Questions Thread

If she already outclasses the attackers in every metric and didn't want to engage in the first place, wouldn't it make more sense for her to, well, disengage?

Disclaimer: Not an offensive question.

I'm brainstorming a scene about a young girl who speaks a stirring, controversial essay about how whites were oppressed, marginalized, genocided, prejudiced and enslaved in the annals of history to her classmates.

For her speech, I've listed a few historical events where white people (people originating from Europe and the Near East) suffered oppression and terror for her script.

• The Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Genocide
• The Holodomor
• Ottoman rule in Southeast Europe
• 1804 Haiti massacres
• Internment of Allied PoWs by Japan
• Moorish rule of Hispania
• Barbary corsairs and slave trade
• Robert Mugabe's reign in Zimbabwe

What historical events would the girl use as an example of a time when white people (people originating from Europe and the Near East) were oppressed, genocided, prejudiced and enslaved in the past ?

Well, you forgot the Indian rebellion.

PS- I assume she's a villain?

Edited by DeMarquis on Apr 13th 2019 at 7:53:51 AM

Who are you referring to?

i believe he means the character making the speech

in good faith we need to assume she's the villain because the rhetoric of "whites being oppressed" is...uh, not good, to put it simply

Edited by ImmortalFaust on Apr 13th 2019 at 5:30:23 AM

Actually, the girl referring to is not a villain. She is a normal schoolgirl from America who is interested in history and not an actual racist or bigot.

• The Roman Empire.
• The Migration Period displacements, inter-ethnic conflicts and enslavement.
• The Viking expansions and slave trade.
• Charlemagne's conquest and massacres of the Saxons.
• The many, many English invasions of Ireland.
• The Sicilian Vespers.
• The Baltic Crusades.
• The Albigensian Crusade.
• The Hussite Wars.
• The Protestant-Catholic conflicts in France.
• The Thirty Years' War.
• The Polish Deluge.
• The French Crown's enslavement of Huguenot rebels.
• The persecution of the Scottish Catholics following the Jacobite uprisings.
• The persecution of the Cossacks following Pugachev's rebellion.
• The Reign of Terror.
• Many of Napoleon's campaigns, but particularly his failed subjugation of Spain.
• The monarchist/colonial crackdown on the 1848 revolutions.
• The Circassian Genocide.
• The Reconstruction-era terror campaigns by the KKK and assorted revanchist movements across the US South.
• The British internment of Boer civilians.
• The German occupation of Belgium in WWI.
• Basically the entire Russian Civil War, but particularly the anti-Jewish pogroms.
• The Irish Civil War.
• The Coal Wars.
• The Bonus Army.
• The Spanish Civil War, White Terror and the whole Francoist regime.
• WWII and the Holocaust, obviously.
• Soviet deportations of Baltic and Caucasian nations, plus the postwar communist repression across Eastern Europe.
• The Red Scare.
• The Algerian War.
• The Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian and Czech Revolutions.
• The Troubles.
• The martial law period in Poland.
• The Nagorno-Karabakh War.
• The Yugoslav Wars.
• The Chechen Wars.

Not a full list, obviously.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Apr 13th 2019 at 6:14:34 AM

I’d be a bit careful with a speech like that.

I think you have just picked the single most inflamatory, provocative scene one could possibly come up with in today's political climate. I would be real careful how you deal with it.

Just for clarification- do you yourself believe what you have your character saying?

I do not believe the words of my characters. They may be inspiring or denigrating, but they're fictional. They're not supposed to reflect the views and attitudes of me, the author.

The girl in question, she's not an actual racist or a bigot. She's a 5th grader who have rather strong, controversial stances on history. She thinks history should be taught in a way to acknowledge the good and bad parts. She believes that all humans, no matter what race, religion or any part of identity, are capable of doing great good and terrible evil, and that no identity has a monopoly over oppression.

The point of the speech she declaims is to repeatedly debunk the claim that 'whites have never been oppressed' and the extreme mindset of 'White=bad, Colored=good' to her diverse classmates and her teacher.

To make her point, she uses historical events of white people (People of European or Near Eastern ancestry) being oppressed, persecuted, enslaved and genocided as an example. She uses examples of white-on-white and nonwhite-on-white. What eagleoftheninth listed are examples of white-on-white oppression, which the girl lists in her speech.

if you're actually going to go through with this speech, using this point, it means that this character is going to come off as strawmanning her entire class and teacher. food for thought, as no one trying to discuss a sensitive topic like that will come from that angle in good faith in the slightest.

additionally, a (presumably white) fifth grader talking to nonwhite people (i can't imagine you using the word "diverse" in this context and meaning anything else) about "well it's not actually racist" or anything that could be taken as an approximation of that statement (e.g "well whites are the victim of racism too" etc) is really not a good stance.

Edited by ImmortalFaust on Apr 13th 2019 at 10:47:04 AM

I apologize for that. Take it to On-Topic Conversations instead. I'll not speak the subject to prevent politically-charged flame wars and other stuff. Thanks for reminding me the problematic implications. O'll try to be more careful when handling unfortunate implications.

Edited by AdeptGaderius on Apr 14th 2019 at 4:06:16 AM

Honestly, I would not write that if I were you. It’s not just your character who’s going to come off as a bigot, you’re going to come off as one too.

The conversation is over. I understand, I'm not thinking of the writing prompt anymore. Give room for the next poster to post the question.

Can a hero be an asshole and not heroic at all and still be a hero?

Depends on what you consider a hero is.

If it's in the classical, Greek myth kind of sense of "a doer of extraordinary deeds", then definitely. Most heroes in the Greek myths fit the description you provided.

If it's in the "role model" kind of sense, then it depends on the world they live in. If the rest of the cast and the context they live in are comparably worse than the hero, then probably yes. There are situations when altruism could be detrimental to one's well-being, after all.

Does anyone know some alternate names/terms for the collective unconscious? I know there's Alayashiki, but I don't know of any other ones.

Also, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but I couldn't find any other threads that seemed right.

Edited by Gen_Raven on Apr 14th 2019 at 12:28:25 PM

Do you mean like in a spiritual/metaphorical sense, or everyone's literal unconscious being linked together? Because the first one's gonna have many different cultural/religious traditions and then you'd have to figure out which terms are closER to the meaning you want to convey.

A lot of people just use "Universe," "Humanity," "Creation," "Dream/ing (NOT the same sense as "Dreamtime")" that sort of thing.

The only terms we have for that is Hive Mind, but maybe you can poke around at its related tropes if that doesn't fit.

Does anybody have any tips on how to write a good I Shall Taunt You speech? My protagonist is in her beast mode and she's playing cat and mouse with some local gang members.

How would two people who speaks different languages communicate with each other?

Ever seen Dakmar from Next Generation?

No

Ah. Well, in that episode, Captain Picard and an alien commander get stranded on another planet, but Picard's translator can't translate the alien's language. Because of this, the two have to learn how to communicate with each other in order to survive, which is as hard as it sounds. It's a very good episode, possibly one of TNG's best.