Random Questions Thread

Is there any reason why a young (in his early 20s) American man would feel a deep shame over having a completely legal and consensual sex with a young woman?

He was neither in a relationship nor raised in a conservative family. Although he is a bit conservative and religious, he doesn't really condemn premarital sex either.

He feels shame over the incident and whenever he sees the girl, who very much likes him by the way, he avoids her like she was a serial killer.

There's nothing particularly wrong about her either: she's very loud, quirky, but she is a moral and hardworking person (she's an Ivy League student planning to go to a law school). Oh, and she's freaking hot, at least in his eyes.

I was rereading passages with those two and thought to myself: Hey wait a minute, why does he avoid her again? What's wrong with her anyway?

For the context, two pages back I asked about the possibile legal consequences for an attempted suicide. The character in that question and the young man in this question is the same person.

Maybe I can say that his suicidal depression and anxiety is pushing her away?

Edited by dRoy on Aug 17th 2019 at 12:42:34 AM

Given the details you've laid out, I think you'll have to decide between changing his character, or her character, or both (like aging them down), or just removing the "shame" aspect altogether.

If you still want the same functional results, maybe it's social pressure? Or maybe they just drift apart, like in La La Land?

It looks like you've boxed yourself in a corner and something has to give.

Edited by AwSamWeston on Aug 16th 2019 at 11:16:15 AM

Yeah, upon rereading it really doesn't add up.

I wish you luck though. I've had plenty of times where I really like an idea and it just doesn't add up when all is said and done. This is exactly what people mean when they talk about "killing your darlings" (which I'm suddenly surprised there isn't a page for on here).

Edited by AwSamWeston on Aug 16th 2019 at 11:21:05 AM

A part of growing pain, I guess.

To offer a different perspective, from what you've said, I don't think it would be too odd for him to think having sex with her might have brought their relationship to a place he's not comfortable with. I think I've felt something similar when guy friends have asked me out- my thoughts immediately turn to romance, the possibility that this might lead to them wanting "more" in the future, and the fact that I'm not certain I want to ever be in a relationship. Now that I think I know what they want, I just feel super-awkward being around them. This could be a sort of anxiety, but the fact of the matter is that mental illness tends not to be rational.

He might be thinking, rightly or wrongly, "oh, shit, this might actually turn into romance." His depression and anxiety might be telling him that he doesn't deserve to be her partner, or that the sex may have led her to think he could be more than just her friend, or he's terrified that he can't live up to her or be a partner to her, or some combination, or all of the above at different points.

Of course, it depends on where you want to go with the characters. If it's not in-character for the guy to have those sorts of worries for his love life, or if they wouldn't fit with the characters' arcs, that's your call.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Aug 16th 2019 at 12:46:16 PM

Oh. OH. That's a good point!

The character in question is suicidally depressed and also suffers from aggressive thoughts and behaviors. He dreads the idea of forming a romantic relationship because he couldn't even form and maintain casual friendships. In fact, the very reason he contemplates suicide is in addition to constant nightmares and flashbacks, he feels that he is a threat to himself and others. The idea of being locked in a mental asylum terrifies him too much so he'd much rather just commit suicide and remove himself from society.

Damn, I knew the answer to my original question to begin with! Thanks for reminding me that.

... And sometimes you just need that one outside perspective to help everything click into place!

Good luck to you!

You seem to have your answer, but to put in a few more possibilities:

- She could have been in a relationship with someone else at the time.

- You mention that he suffers from aggressive thoughts and behaviours—he could have done something (or thought that he did something) during the act that his thoughts later tell him was untoward (whether it really was or not).

I'm writing a Historical Fantasy-Alternate History short story. The story is set in an alternate mid-18th century where Asians became slaves in America instead of West Africans in the OTL, and where gods, spirits and miracles roam.

The story follows a young girl chosen by the gods of Asia to guide the enslaved Asians to emancipation and enact the will of the gods of Asia. There, the girl is bestowed the extraordinary powers of the Asian gods and must learn the responsibilities of being a

I'm trying to find Asian deities that fit the associated categories listed below:

• Underworld deities:
• Weather deities:
• Tree & forest deities:
• War deities:
• Ethics personification deities:
• Nature deities:
• Ritual deities:
• Night deities:
• Animal deities:
• Tutelary deities:
• Miscellaneous (Other associations that I cannot list out) deities:

I recommend that you not try to mash so many very different belief systems together. Unfortunate Implications abound. IMHO a narrower focus would serve you better.

Unless there's another system you're more familiar with/attracted to, I'd recommend a focus on Hinduism. It has a huge and varied pantheon, plus a long tradition of mortals drawing the attention of the gods and being given - well, demanding, more like - great power in order to do amazing things. And Vishnu always seems to have some plan behind it all for the good of everyone.

That's kind of the Theme Park Version, anyway, Hinduism is obviously a lot more complex than I've described (and since I'm not a theologian, take my amateur ramblings with a large dose of salt).

Some "domains" of various Hindu deities:

Death - Yama

Storms (thunder, lightning, rain) - Indra

Fire - Agni

Luck (the good kind) - Lakshmi

Dawn - Ushas

Wisdom - Saraswati, Ganesha

Fertility - Parvati

Destruction - Shiva

Preservation - Vishnu

Creation - Brahma

The Moon - Soma

The Sun - Surya

War - Durga

And a lot more. A lot. You could spend hours on The Other Wiki and not cover them all.

Edited by Tarlonniel on Aug 21st 2019 at 6:51:20 AM

Seconding the fact that you really shouldn't lump "Asian" mythology into one big mush. We have many countries at odds with each other, and many feuding groups WITHIN the same countries, so you need to narrow things down a LOT if you want more help than "lists of deities."

I have another warning that Filipino mythology 1) got nigh-on destroyed by Spain, 2) is incredibly contradictory because there is a huge range of tribes/ethnicities and belief-systems, all of which say different things, to say nothing of our attempts to RECOVER it in the past hundred years. There are a lot of mistakes by well-meant scholars.

Plus, these are mostly the beliefs of my own particular ethnic group, the Tagalogs.

Also I might be stretching "deity" to mean "exceptionally powerful Nature Spirit," since the Philippines had a very animistic culture.

—
Underworld deities: The mythical Buwaya (NOT a regular crocodile) was a creature that resembled a huge-ass dragon/crocodile with a coffin on its back, to ferry dead souls across the sea to the afterlife.

Weather deities: Anitung Tabu, goddess of (nice/bearable) rain. Amanikable is a fuzzy deity because he used to be the god of hunters, but was mistakenly thought to have become the god of typhoons, the seasonal monsoons, and sea-storms after the first woman Ba-e rejected him (seeing as she was already married to Laki, the first man). Personally I like the storm-god version, and it is indeed a very common version of the myth.

Tree & forest deities: Uwinan Sana is a forest-god, whose permission people would ask when crossing through wild areas, and also for protection against The Fair Folk who lived there. Speaking of The Fair Folk, baliti trees (banyans or strangler figs) are often seen as homes for forest fairies, and average folk will avoid them like the plague. Partly because if you trespass in a fairy's home, they may literally curse you with The Plague. (My mother, for example, says that a relative got cursed with fucking POLIO after stepping on an anthill as a child and angering the goblins that lived in it.)

War deities: Mayari is the goddess of revolution, but she may be a newer, "borrowed" deity from the Pampangan pantheon (who instead have a male god, Mayari). After her father Bathala made her brother Apolaki the heir to the world's rule instead of her, she demanded a duel for her inheritance and the fight was so bad she lost an eye.

Ethics personification deities: ???

Nature deities: Uwinan Sana again, and also Aman Sinaya the personification of the sea. Technically Bathala is the creator-god and ruler of the pantheon, but he is often called a "giant" who lives in the sky (and has many sky-children, after all). He's also connected to making the Philippine islands rise out of the sea, and when he found out they were barren, he wandered around trying to figure out what to do until he killed a dragon and buried its corpse. Then a coconut palm sprouted from the burial spot and became the Philippine tree-of-life.

• Dumakulem is the god of mountains, who was in a relationship with Uwinan Sana until they broke up and he married the goddess Anagolay. Uwinan Sana doesn't seem to bear ill will towards either of them, but he swore to never marry after that.
• Crocodiles were seen as anything from Asian-type dragons, reincarnated ancestors, or water-gods themselves, and they protected us from the OTHER water-spirits. They were both feared and revered, not only because we have saltwater crocodiles who tended to eat humans, but because some tribes thought human sacrifice would turn a regular crocodile INTO a dragon. (Because crocs need tasty, tasty human souls to level up into dragons.)
• Apolaki is the current sun-god, and an older, unnamed Sun appears a generation back as "the dickhead who mistreats humans and is always fighting Bathala because of it."
• Mayari is the oldest and most beautiful of Bathala's three daughters (not sure if Apolaki is older or younger than she is); her two sisters are Hanan, goddess of morning, and Tala, the morning-star/Venus.

Ritual deities: ??? Do you mean gods OF rituals, or gods which are Very Bent On Rituals?

Night deities: You know that duel Mayari had with her brother, where she lost an eye? That's why the moon doesn't shine as bright as the sun. Tala is also technically a night-deity, but nobody really knows much about her anymore, thanks to Spain.

Animal deities: There is a bird-spirit/bird-goddess called Amihan, who is the personification of the North/Northeast wind.

Tutelary deities: Maria Makiling (formerly the goddess Dayang Masalanta) of Mount Makiling is the most famous one, and there are more Marias here in the Wiki article.

Miscellaneous (Other associations that I cannot list out) deities: ???

Edited by Sharysa on Aug 23rd 2019 at 2:04:21 AM

@Tarlonniel & @Sharysa What I meant to say is deities and spirits originating from the Asian regions, not 'Asian' deities/spirits. This mistake was out of time constraints and poor grammar phrasing.

At @Sharysa again, Ethics personification deities means deities that represent human values like wisdom, bravery and other, and ritual deities mean deities of rituals.

And again, I forgot about the Fertility, Elemental (Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Metal), Skill and occupation, agricultural, calamity (Plagues, natural disasters, famines...) and liminal deity categories.

Edited by AdeptGaderius on Aug 23rd 2019 at 3:00:57 AM

Not to sound suspicious, but do you know how much of this you’re actually going TO USE, or are you just trying to get a crash course in Asian deities?

Just on a practical note, the deities are all technically “characters” and we both gave you lists of ten or more. Cramming just one of those lists into your book is gonna take A LONG ASS TIME for properly fleshing them out, and if you try to use both Indian AND Filipino gods, your protagonist almost certainly has to be mixed with both ethnicities—partly because Filipino deities are very much Ethnic Deities, and partly because being born into a certain culture is the fastest way most American diaspora folks in real life are gonna even know about them.

Like, realistically? A pagan is usually NOT talking to all twelve of their major gods every day, because most people have school or jobs. Then there’s the fact that most people just naturally gravitate to one or two gods who have some type of influence over their lives, because fishermen and sailors need more help from water and weather gods than from forest-gods.

Who is your protagonist outside of the godly quest deal? What’s her personality, what are her hobbies? Does she have a job?

Gods have a strong history of helping out their devotees as much as they can, so if her dad was a fishermen and she habitually goes to Haik the sailing god because fishermen aren’t often rich and fish offerings are the only type she can AFFORD, he would probably trek through a whole bunch of forests and mountains just to keep an eye on one of his followers. Plus, even if he can’t directly help her with certain things, he’d probably KNOW about it because he’s a sailor and it’s his job to travel.

It would honestly be a lot more interesting seeing a specialized god get crafty with their help, than if the King of the Gods just rolled up to The Chosen One and went “Hey girl, we need you for a quest! Hit me up if you need help because I’m all powerful and I can Deus ex Machina your way out of trouble!”

Edited by Sharysa on Aug 23rd 2019 at 9:48:46 AM

@Sharysa: I asked for a list of deities/spirits originating from Asia because I didn't want every time I needed to know some deity/spirit, I had to go back to the Random Questions thread and slough through Wikipedia.

A question with addressing female politicians: I've heard "Madam President" for female presidents but how does it work in parliamentary governments? I'd imagine "Madam Prime Minister" for female prime ministers but what about positions lower than prime minister, like minister of defense (depending on country with Japan as one example), minister of education, etc.?

@AdeptGaderius: Still didn't answer my questions. Who is your character outside of her quest? Why is "Asia" suddenly agreeing on things within your story when the various countries are notorious in real life for fighting each other? I'm all for worldbuilding in a short story, but have you thought up any plot details/events, backstory besides the obvious main scenario, or something that would narrow things down from "lists of a dozen deities"?

Just giving her a hobby/job would seriously trim down the character count, because then we could figure out a patron god most suited to her, and one or two secondary deities who help the patron out.

Edited by Sharysa on Aug 24th 2019 at 11:00:02 AM

Oh yes, the main character in the short story is Intan. She is an 13 year old scion of a human father and a namless water deity. She is the titular Herald, a human destined to enact the will of the deities, guide the enslaved Asians to freedom and become the enlightened ruler.

Before she was summoned in a mystical dream by the deities of Asia, she worked as a miner who picked and collected salt. Her character traits is compassionate, wise, trustworthy, truthful and pious. Her basic abilities as a Herald is water lordship and healing(inherited from her mother), augury and communication between the humans and the gods.

Her ethnic heritage consists of Malay, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean and other assorted, miscellaneous ancestral ethnic groups.

The reason why the gods of 'Asia' decided to agree with each other because they are distruaght on the affairs of mortals in the countries of Asia:
In the 17th century, thousands of people originating from Asia are being transported to the Americas as slaves, even more thousands of people with Asian ancestry are working as slaves, and several countries have fell into ruin or decadence because of the slave trade. All of which was caused by Iberia trying to exploit a source of cheap labor fornthe colonies after a ban on enslavement of African and Native Amerian peoples in the early 16th century.

"Asia" is not a cultural group. It's an arbitrary geographic division of the planet.

There's no reason the gods of, say, China would care any more about slaves from the Arabian peninsula, or Russia, than they would about slaves from West Africa. Heck, as has already been pointed out, the Chinese gods might be perfectly okay with Mongolians being carted off into slavery due to inter-cultural rivalries.

On top of that, thousands of slaves is a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers of slaves in China, India and other slave-owning cultures in the region. During the time period of your story, some peoples were beginning to take a hard look at the situation, but for the most part it was still legal and profitable.

Yeah, I'll just state that this whole concept has severe and fundamental issues - I'm not even going into the "enlightened ruler" thing - and let Sharysa handle the conversation from here if they so choose.

Would it be realistic to have a character change schools every few months (6 tops), and if yes, what effect would that have on their academic progress (would it be stunted because of the differences in schools and school districts)? What if that character also had like ADHD?

@Adept: Uhhhhhhhh this is a very rose-tinted idea at best, and you might want to take a look at how Africans treat THEIR American diaspora. A lot of them consider African-Americans to be "not African enough" thanks to the cultural destruction and separation of families that America specifically practiced to break their cultural lineage... unless individuals take a DNA test to find out they genetically share a certain heritage, in which case they're thrilled to find their symbolic Long-Lost Relative.

So yeah, the various "Asian" homelands would definitely care about their OWN enslaved peoples and want them to "come home" (or at least visit and reconnect to the culture), but they'd shrug off everyone ELSE's displaced peoples because hey, it's not their problem. And if someone is, say, Chinese, they might not even NOTICE that Filipinos and other South/Southeast Asians were formerly enslaved because they have a LONG history of doing that exact thing to them.

For this idea to work without Unfortunate Implications, you need to a) scale it down to a single country's struggle to reconnect with their diaspora, or b) specifically state that the Asian-AMERICAN community is united in their struggles despite their individual cultural conflicts, because they know it's their best shot at success.

Edited by Sharysa on Aug 25th 2019 at 10:24:25 AM

I think there are a couple of alternative approaches you can try:

1. Your protagonist grows up on one belief system and gains the patronage of its gods. Along her journey, she comes across "chosen ones" of other heritages who are empowered by their gods, without her encountering said gods directly.

2. The intermixing of Asian slave communities in America gives rise to a whole range of syncretic beliefs, whose gods then materialise as distorted iterations of their "original" selves a la American Gods.

In any case, I think that it's best to tie your protagonist's relationship with her patron gods to her personal beliefs, rather than her genes. It's quite possible to have multiple Asian ethnic backgrounds without really being in touch with any of their cultures, after all, and making her a very strong believer in her faith would give her gods a better reason to care.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Aug 25th 2019 at 3:40:23 AM

@eagleoftheninth The ensemble idea is actually GREAT, because 1) I'm sick of a singular Chosen One and I would love to see the "heroes" of different faiths meeting up and working together (and running into inevitable Culture Clash because they actually have personalities due to what their faiths focus on).

However, as for "she can follow a certain pantheon without actually being related to their people:" while this would be fine with open traditions, MAKE SURE THEY'RE OPEN TRADITIONS. There are pantheons that cannot be followed by outsiders unless they marry in or get officially adopted by the people, so look them up.

One of them is the Tagalog pantheon, because bloodlines are extremely important in the Philippines. My mom has "fun stories" about when she was growing up, she and her siblings would go around picking fights with basically anyone who wasn't Tagalog, and she routinely says "[Insert non-Tagalog] doesn't know how to act!" The hatred is quite mutual among a lot of Filipinos.

Spirit-workers and traditional tattoo artists commonly say that their abilities are either In the Blood for inborn abilities, or that they can't teach their knowledge to outsiders or the spirits will get mad.

In fact, we actually seem MORE bent on bloodlines than we were pre-Catholicism, so "magic and certain skills need to be kept in the family, otherwise you get smote by the spirits" is obviously a product of Catholicism trying to stamp out our traditions, and then everyone promptly kept quiet about it around non-relatives, so they wouldn't get found out and killed by the wrong (ie, Catholic) people.

Hinduism isn't technically CLOSED, but you need to be initiated by a Hindu and you can't go the eclectic-pagan route by following their gods outside of cultural context. So while, say, a Filipino can become a Hindu practitioner/follower after initiation, conversion, and cultural knowledge, I imagine it takes a few years at minimum (a thirteen-year-old non-Hindu converting in a year would break Willing Suspension of Disbelief). Also, they do still have a caste system in society if not law, so you'd need to pick a caste for life as well, and American individuality would NOT mesh well with that.

Edited by Sharysa on Aug 25th 2019 at 10:26:26 AM

Hey, that's my original intention. In the short story, Intan is the titular Amida, an Amarelo (Asian slave) chosen by the Joss-Joss (Gods/spirits/divinities) to guide the Amarelos to freedom, enact the will of the Josses and become an ideal ruler.

She is the daughter of Masu, a sea goddess and a human salt miner. She is of Amarelo descent and holds the power of healing and water lordship, as well fire manipulation and augury.

Would it come across as plausible and normal for the younger/lower staff at a high school (e.g. the new teacher, janitor, etc) to have enough insight on the students' social hierarchy for them to caution the new student about antagonising the school's Alpha Bitch (e.g. warning about reprisals, that she's the type to hold grudges, etc)?

Or would it instead come across as weird that they even have any knowledge on the matter in the first place?

Edited by peasant on Aug 26th 2019 at 8:32:02 AM