Random Questions Thread

I think it would be perfectly plausible for some faculty to pay at least some attention to that stuff, especially where it concerns bullying, which is known to degrade academic performance. I think it's less plausible for teaching faculty, or really any faculty whose job is about interacting with students (guidance counsellor, school psychologist, aides, paraprofessionals, etc.) to actually say anything like that about another student, for professionalism reasons.

It might make more sense for someone who can slip under the radar, such as the aforementioned janitor, to say that. Teaching faculty might also be able to drop hints every now and again that aren't directed at the new student to not bother the Alpha Bitch if she also has some kind of disciplinary immunity by way of being a school board member's kid, or something of the like.

Which codename would sound cooler? Darklighter or Shadowplayer?

@ AdeptGalerius

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For the original idea, were you trying to come up with a pan-Asian diaspora religion? Only one thing about that sounds like any language, slang, or even concept I know of. Why does the sea-goddess' kid have FIRE-powers? What pantheon does Masu come from—or did you use some Language Drift and corrupt her name from the original?

What language does "(the) Amida" come from, and how did the pan-Asian diaspora get the name "Amarello"? I mean, the reason we're called the "ASIAN diaspora" is because, well, our half of the continent has an existing name.

Similarly, how did you get "Joss-Joss" to mean "gods," and which language did it come from? My Filipino upbringing can kind of recognize it as a corruption of "dios-dios/diyos-diyos" because the "dy-" sound often turns into "j," but repetition like that is for two extremely different situations: Emphasis/intensifying, or as a friend/family nickname that you got as a child and now it's stuck.

Either "Joss-Joss" would be a corrupted title of "God-God" as in "god OF gods, the supreme powers," or it would be a situation where the (Filipino? pan-Asian?) diaspora uses a nickname/euphemism when speaking of the "Asian" gods, either because they don't want to use their REAL names and attract spiritual attention, or ironically to protect the GODS' identities from being revealed to outsiders.

Why does fantasy-America have a RULER when we have historically rebelled AGAINST monarchy?

Did you simplify your current concept from the original one? Because if you change TOO many things about your alternate-universe, this will either take a lot longer than a "short" story to elaborate on, or you'll have to be EXTREMELY careful with world-building and setting details to make sure everyone understands how thoroughly the world got changed.

Also, just letting you know: If she's the daughter of a SEA-goddess, her dad doesn't have to mine ROCK-salt—he can just collect salt from the sea.

Double-posting because I didn't expect to write such a long response to Adept's post, sorry.

@Nukeli: They both sound pretty equal to me, in that they read like "a thirteen-year-old gamer wants to sound COOL and EDGY." What's the codename for, and is it because the character is literally Casting a Shadow with some type of power/ability?

I have two characters in a kind of a superhero-ish comedy. They both have darkness-based powers. One had actual experience and the other tries (Not so well) to be a Legacy Character of the first one.

I asked which name sounded cooler because they were the only ones i could come up with and i wasn't sure which was good for which. The first character is supposed to seem better/More badass than her 'successor' and the succesor is supposed to seem more like a bludering oaf.

Edited by Nukeli on Aug 26th 2019 at 9:13:45 PM

@Sharysa

Somewhat. The Amarelo religion (Ugama Cathay) is touched on, but it's for another story. The only references of the religion in the short story is details described of the deities and some of the practices. Writing about the titular religion in-depth would be unecessary for the story.

Intan, the daughter of the sea-goddess Masu has fire manipulation abilities because it is the manifestation of Amida's compassion. And Masu's original pantheon comes from China:
In the original version of Masu, she is referred as Mazu. In the myths concerning her original version, she is a water and sea goddess from Fujian. She was once a shamaness named Lin Mo or Lin Moniang. After her death, she was deified and revered as a merciful goddess who roams the sea, protecting her belivers through miraculous interventions. Sometimes, she is claimed to be the incarnation of Guan Yin, the Chinese goddess of mercy or the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara

As a side note, Masu's name is a result of a language drift when the Chinese language was beggining to incoporate to Basa Amarelo, a pidgin ussed by Asian slaves.

Amida originates from Japanese. In Japanese Buddhism, he is the principal Buddha. The name Amarelo comes from Portuguese word for 'yellow'. This word was used to denote and degrade Asian slaves in order to lose their identities to their previous homelands and make them subservient.

Language Drift. Joss and Joss-Joss originated from a corruption of the Portuguese/Spanish word for god, dios. It is an Basa Amarelo word for god. The plural form is used to refer the gods without uttering their names or collectively refer to them.

Double posting because I couldn't make a wall of text from the previous post.

Actually, you've probably mistaken one of the roles of the Amida as a foretold ideal ruler of the Amarelos. The main setting of the short story is 17th century Iberian America.

Looks pretty solid. Just a tiny nitpick: Mazu would've been pronounced "Ma Cho" in Hokkien/Fujianese, which was spoken by the majority of diaspora Chinese in this period, so do consider working out the pronunciation drift from there. Between the Chinese, Japanese, Malay and Portuguese influences on Amarelo culture, I'm quite curious about how the trans-Pacific slave trade works in your setting.

And yeah, do consider the "openness" of the belief systems you're portraying. Sharysa already mentioned the importance of bloodlines in the Tagalog one, and then you've got faiths like Zoroastrianism where some schools are more open than others - for example, the Indian Parsi community (the one that Freddie Mercury's family came from) is quite opposed to conversions, while most other Zoroastrian schools embrace it.

On the flipside, the localised, less-organised structures of "closed" traditions often opened them up to being supplanted by large organised religions. This was how Muslim and Christian missionaries converted the commonfolk in other parts of maritime Southeast Asia: they presented the Abrahamic God not as the god, but an exceptionally powerful one whose magic extends beyond their homelands (pretty handy if you're sailing out for that sweet, sweet trade gold and want a divine hand to guide you). Plus they had a book, which in a world before mass printing was basically magic, and one written in an arcane foreign language at that.^note Yeah, many native Southeast Asian faiths had their own sacred texts, and yeah, their destruction often corresponded with the spread of foreign religions. Colonialism do be like that sometimes. Theravada Buddhism spread through mainland Southeast Asia in a similar way, albeit with more direct intervention from the ruling class.

Considering that American slavery involved forced conversion as its MO, you'll want to think about how your slave community is going to deal with that. How to keep their hold on a divine guiding hand when the slavers' god (written in a book, no less) is so close, and theirs so far away. Ocean deities like Mazu are pretty transferable because the ocean is big and dangerous and you'll want one to keep you safe wherever you go. War deities would be very important to slaves from military backgrounds (especially as it's a niche that the Abrahamic God doesn't exactly fill), but I don't think your average slave would care for one... until they gather up in rebellion, which is a reason for slaveowners to crack down extra hard on their icons. Wisdom and tutelary deities would be similarly sensitive because of their association with learning, education and gasp books. If these things hold value to the average slave, you'd probably see them dressing up their worship in some other guise - like, say, portraying Guan Gong as an innocuous harvest god who just happens to wear armour and carry a giant glaive.

(And hey, I just saw an Indian man praying to a shrine to him near my place this morning. Goes to show how even "closed" traditions from monocultural backgrounds can spread outside their native communities - back in Australia, there's a surprising number of Indigenous folks who follow Rastafarianism, which has long outgrown its Afro-Caribbean roots.)

Finally, deities and spirits associated with specific geographic features are the hardest ones to transfer, though this didn't stop some historical slaves. One of the most poignant stories you'll find is that of the Igbo Landing in 1803, where a group of slaves from modern-day Nigeria took over their ship, ran it aground and... proceeded to walk into the water, calling for their water spirit to take them home. Faith is a personal matter everywhere, and you'll see folks holding tight onto their original traditions even as it comingle and take other forms around them. Consider which approach would best suit your protagonist, and choose your pantheon(s) accordingly. This has been your daily Wall of Text.

What is the most believable way that I can have my MC (who is a paranormal investigator) get into contact with a girl who is being detained by the police, under suspicion that they are responsible for a string of disappearances?

If the man is just a paranormal investigator, and the police know this, and no one believes in the paranormal, there may be no easy way to do it. If he can pose as her relative, or an attorney, maybe they would let him visit her. But otherwise prisoners are not usually available to the public.

Now, if he is also a fully licensed private investigator, or even a journalist, and he can present a plausible reason why his investigation or the story he is writing would involve her, maybe that could work.

All of this assumes that she wants to see him. Without her permission, that of her attorney, it ain't happening.

@Nukeli: Maybe you could tweak the mature character's codename to use "crafter/worker" instead? Paradoxical names like "darklighter" are tricky to use in the modern era because of the "thirteen-year-old edgelord" feel, but "shadowcrafter/worker" or "darkworker" makes it sound a LOT more ominous. Also, shadow-PLAYER is on the edgelord side because it makes me think of shadow-puppets made by a five-year-old.

George R R Martin's "shadowbinders" gave everyone an infamous Oh, Crap! response through seeing Melisandre's powers, and then there's the freaky mask that Quaithe wears.

@Adept: Okay, your explanations definitely make things clearer, but with the mentions of Portuguese, who exactly ARE the Asian slaves in terms of ethnicity/region? Most of the African slaves in history were from West and Central Africa, so given the heavy slant towards Portuguese, I'm assuming your Asian counterparts would mostly follow the Portuguese Empire's Asian colonies?

—
@Eagle: For "regional/ethnic deities that are hard to hold onto," syncretization was a common tactic by new converts and colonizers alike, since people DON'T give up their cultures very easily, and they frequently pretended the gods were "saints/heroes/fairies/etc" that only WORKED for the Christian God. The colonizers allowed it because it's easier to let your colonies have "folk versions of Christianity" than it is to slaughter all of your slaves.

It also backfires when inevitable Values Dissonance comes along. I left out a particular goddess from the main list: Ikapati, the rice goddess. Officially she was a goddess of agriculture, but she was also an intersex/transgender woman who symbolizes the balance of masculine/feminine energies, since a lot of Filipino tribes who met up with India adopted the concept of a "third gender" that modern folks call LGBT.

The ancient Tagalogs tried to syncretise her with the Christian Holy Spirit because they heard the Holy Spirit was "neither male nor female" and went "oh, we have a goddess that has both types of genitals, so that makes her both and neither at the same time," but this grossed out the Spaniards. They destroyed so much of her mythology and practices that there's a LOT of misinformation about her going around to this day confusing her with Lakapati, another grain-goddess, and the effects have naturally affected spirituality.

AFTER I learned I'd been mixing the two of them up, I asked why Lakapati hadn't said anything to correct me, or why Ikapati hadn't shown up in my meditations. Lakapati told me not to bother because Ikapati is dead, and Lakapati's been "filling in" for her so long that she basically IS Ikapati now.

Then the gods are constantly telling me "we had a LOT more gods than we do now, but they're all dead," and I recently got contacted by an Ilokano deity who specifically reminded the Tagalogs that our counterpart to him is dead, and he's my best shot now.

So yeah, apparently you can kill deities not merely by LACK of worship, but through outsiders Unpersoning them by force.

Edited by Sharysa on Aug 27th 2019 at 10:16:32 AM

I'm looking for a way to make the following scenario plausible. Some info added compared to the original post at a different, franchise-specific thread to make it easier for those without knowledge of the franchise I'm borrowing the characters from to comprehend what I'm talking about.

Setting: mundane Japan.

Backstory: Asuka is a Fiery Redhead high schooler with a prideful streak a mile wide, born to a long-dead German/Japanese mother and an estranged US-American father, and is currently living in Japan. She had her heart crushed when Kaji, a Tall, Dark, and Snarky James Bond-esque man proposed to his Love Interest Misato (who accepted), but then developed a crush on a boy her age named Mitsuji because he (superficially) came across as a younger version of Kaji. However, teenage recklessless culminates in Asuka having an unintended pregnancy with Mitsuji near graduation.

Present: Fast-forward about 10 years later. Asuka is a mother of twins (a son and a daughter), stuck in a loveless marriage to Mitsuji that only happened because she refused to let the kids grow up without a father due to her own troubled childhood with an emotionally abusive father and a Married to the Job (but ultimately well-meaning) mother that died while Asuka was a toddler, and strongarmed her boyfriend into marrying her after high school, arrogantly believing she could whip him up into shape.

Unfortunately, she failed miserably in that regard:

1. She was forced to drop her plans for eventual university studies in order to raise her children and maintaining the rather problem-ridden house that her husband chose as their home, becoming a housewife who occasionally does part-time dead-end jobs in the process.
2. Mitsuji turns out to have been a misogynistic Control Freak all along under that cool and handsome façade, who arrogantly thought he could "rehabilitate" Asuka from being a strong-headed tomboyish girl into a "proper" submissive Trophy Wife. The most he manages is making sure her wardrobe is devoid of anything remotely "tomboyish" or even sexually provocative (he feels his masculine superiority threatened by anything that could be construed as female-empowering, including sexual titilation), and preventing her from joining any of the local gyms to limit what physical advantage she has on him (easy when she has her hands full with looking after her kids).
3. Both she and her children suffer frequent physical abuse from her husband. Mind you, she does fight back, but her legitimate fear of him taking it out on her kids when she isn't looking limits how severe she kicks his ass.
4. Compounding all of this is the fact that Social Services Does Not Exist is kind of a Truth in Television when it comes to Japan... and her dastardly father, hell-bent on seeing her suffer for defying his own Control Freak-ness, will almost certainly abuse every connection he has to take custody of her children should she decide to risk a divorce.
5. Side note: Asuka and her husband hate each other's guts so much that they haven't had sex with each other even once in all of their years of marriage.

However, this is all just a prologue for the actual story: Namely, that one day, Asuka's miserable life takes a 180 turn when she finds her husband has inexplicably become a much better person, unaware that he's suffered the fate of Kousaku Kawajiri (read: killed and his identity stolen) at the hands of Shinji Ikari, a Cowardly Lion Nice Guy who was desperately seeking an identity to assume via the powers of his Stand in order to hide from a group of Stand-using Serial Killers that he had been hunting down, only to get ambushed and subsequently forced to go low for the time being.

The one thing I feel that I'm missing is some sort of leverage for Mitsuji to have on Asuka in order to fully justify a normally stubborn and prideful woman like her enduring his domineering and abusive behavior towards both herself and their children, rather than say attempt to run away with them to her birth country of Germany (from what I understand, there's absolutely no way the relevant government agencies wouldn't side with her once they get the full story, especially since by German law the children would be German citizens and thus protected by German law from the Japanese father's abuse).

@Sharysa:

And Spanish colonies. The Amarelos are Asian slaves originating from these principal regions used as sources:

• Indian Subcontinent
• Malay Peninsula
• East Asia
• Japanese Archipelago
• The Philippines
• Borneo
• Indochina
• Sunda Islands & the Moluccas

• Indochina is a pretty old-fashioned world for "(Mainland) Southeast Asia" and I have not heard anyone in my generation use it—or even my COUNTRY. The last time I heard "Indochine" was in a movie for high-school French class ten years ago. Sooooooo, you can basically take out the Southeast Asian countries, aside from character-relevant backgrounds.

• "East Asia" is HUGE and if dinky "lightly-populated" Western Europe still had tens of millions before the Atlantic slave trade started up, East Asia would have at least that number. You seriously need to up your scale to millions as the real-life African slave trade did... OR, you can have folks view the Chinese as having a social version of the Minor Injury Overreaction because THEY cry about losing "tens of thousands of our people" to the slave-trade, while Southeast Asia lost MILLIONS and it was basically a societal Depopulation Bomb.

• India is ALSO huge. They don't call it a SUB-continent for nothing. And considering THEIR history of British colonization, I find it very hard to believe they'd take American colonization lying down.

Edited by Sharysa on Sep 1st 2019 at 11:12:39 AM

• The 18th century was a time of mass government-sponsored manumissions (feels weird to call it "emancipation") in China and Korea, so the number of slaves had fallen pretty far from its two-million peak in the mid-17th century. The Qing Dynasty was also pretty internally stable at this point, so I don't really see it lapsing into slavery-fuelled internecine warfare the way West Central Africa did.
  • That said, it was also a period of conquest for the Qing, so a large percentage of the enslaved people in China in this period would've come from defeated foreign enemies like the Tibetans, the Jinchuan hill peoples and especially the Oirat Mongols (who were targeted for genocide after their defeat in 1758). I'm not sure if slaves from inner Asia would've made it to Portuguese Macau, though.
• The Portuguese also did trade Japanese slaves in large numbers in the 16th century, until Toyotomi Hideyoshi told them to screw off. It probably would've continued in a timeline where the Sengoku Jidai never ended, or if a more Western-friendly regime had ended up in control of Japan.
  • Manila was a popular destination for Japanese Christian emigres; a few of these also crossed the Pacific to settle in Mexico, alongside a number of Filipinos and Chinese.
• Mainland Southeast Asia ("Indochina" is an outdated colonial term) is a bit more delicate. Vietnam had a long civil war in the 17th century where the Dutch and the Portuguese backed opposing sides and, yes, got a steady supply of war slaves for their participation. The rest of it was relatively untouched by Western colonialism as far as I know - the Siamese and the Burmese took a lot of captives from their wars with each other, but they don't seem to have sold them abroad IRL.
• All the big European powers had a long-running slave trade along the Indian coast, so there's not much to change there. It never reached the scale and intensity of the Atlantic slave trade, though, so in a timeline where the Indian slave trade is a bigger deal than it was IRL, you might see the Mughal wars with regional rivals like the Maratha being even more destructive than they were in our timeline.
  • The European trade companies were also quite active in Persian ports (mainly Bandar Abbas), which is quite significant because the Persian invasion of the Mughal Empire in 1738 was basically the defining event of early 18th century South Asia - seriously, Nader Shah basically kicked down the door for the British to enter later. Between the three empires, the Afghans and the Mysoreans, I can see the subcontinent falling into the kind of Forever War that plagued the West African coast in the period (though then again, the Mughals and the Safavids both took steps to downsize slavery in their respective territories).
• The Malayan Peninsula is the interesting bit, since you seem to rely on it a lot as a basis for the Amarelo culture. It's still quite possible for Portuguese Malacca to make local allies and scrape through the 18th century, though it wouldn't have been easy considering that they'd be facing powerful enemies like the the Dutch East India Company and the Aceh Sultanate, whose navy was built and trained with Ottoman aid. In any case, the Strait of Malacca and the Sulu Sea were (and are) hotbeds of piracy and privateering, and there's a lot of captives enslaved in the process.
  • I can't comment too much on the slave trade in Borneo and the Sunda Islands, except that Portuguese Timor was kinda small, poor and got constantly invaded by the neighbouring kingdoms. They did, however, border large slave-trading sultanates like Bone and Gowa-Talloq, which were Dutch allies/vassals but not under their direct rule (yet).
  • The Moluccas are also quite interesting, since they were one of the world's most fought-over pieces of real estate in the 16th century - but IRL the Dutch had long kicked the Spaniards, Portuguese and English out at this point, so I don't know what an 18th century Iberian Moluccas would've looked like. In any case, the populace had long converted into Islam or Christianity, so there's not much native faith left compared to the rest of modern-day East Indonesia.

Anyway, just some historical background; don't have a book with me right now so I'm going off the stuff I remembered from my museum days. In real life, the Atlantic slave trade brought a state of non-stop warfare to West-Central Africa, which in a way was more devastating than the bloodier but briefer Asian wars of the period. Take note of how the politics and geography of each region might affect their part in the dynamic, not just their population, and work out the cultural makeup of your cast from there.

Also, this isn't DIRECTLY about slavery, but it is very much related—Europe's colonial period was big on putting basically any non-white people in human zoos to gawk at their "primitive" cultures and go "ISN'T IT GREAT THAT WE COLONIZED THEM? NOW WE CAN TEACH THEM ABOUT SOCIETY!"

I found out last year that soon after America colonized us, Filipino Igorots were kept in human zoos and trotted around the mainland as well as Europe to show how ALL of the Philippines was primitive and backwards. One of the main ringleaders got caught in a scandal for withholding his Filipino performers' pay and starving them, and as noted in American Horror Story: Freak Show, human zoos hung on right until a couple of generations ago.

So yeah, just keep in mind that slavery and exploiting of colonized cultures isn't always going to be a literal case of "work them to death and rape/breed them for more slaves." Even after the ACTUAL slavery is abolished, colonizers still have a hard time seeing their (former) slaves as people.

Are Cliches bad?

Only if they're badly handled. If a cliche is done well enough, it can transcend itself to the point where the audience won't care regardless of whether or not it's a cliche. But if it's handled poorly, then it'll just be something we've seen a hundred times before and there's no reason to give a damn.

Put another way, a cliche becomes a cliche because it is overused, but that implies that it is very popular before people eventually get tired of it. Tropes Are Tools, and so are cliches. It is possible to use them creatively and well, and that doesn't always mean self-awareness or parody. However, you risk being accused of laziness whether you were actually lazy or not.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 2nd 2019 at 9:17:51 AM

What’s the difference between character growth and character development?

As far as I'm aware, the terms are interchangeable.

Character growth is something most frequently experienced by young actors playing the same role for a few years. Character development is when characters become more complex, resolve problems, get new arcs, and otherwise change over time.

...

Yeah, they're basically the same thing.

Disclaimer: Apologies, if I interrupted the thread for another question about setting.

Geography Question:

I'm trying to pinpoint the location of the salt mine in my short story about the Amida. The main reason for the question is to prevent a case of Where the Hell Is Springfield? inside my head while writing.

I've jotted down evidence for the location in question:

• Located in American colonies of Spain, Portugal and Holland including the rest of the Caribbean and the Guianas.
• Near to the sea where salt is sold and transported by ship.
• A many days journey to a major slave trading port/city.
• Located to a hilly tropical rainforest with rivers, mountains and dense vegetation. The jungle is a hinterland where runaway slaves establish inhabited settlements and subsist by farming, hunting, foraging and fishing.

Salt mines in that area were usually located in the mountainous regions of Western South America. Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Chile all have large salt mining operations.

If in a Medieval Fantasy setting, it's shown that it's socially acceptable for aristocratic teenagers at the Wizarding School equivalent of a boarding school to publicly engage in what in our modern age would be called "dating", would it be plausible if such teenagers are depicted to be willing to engage in extramarital trysts, at least in secret?

@Andermann: "Character growth" sounds to me like another way of saying "positive character development", as in character development that makes a character more likeable to the reader/viewer, in contrast to "negative character development", which while also serving the purpose of making the character not "one-dimensional", makes them hated by the reader/viewer (e.g. by pulling a Face–Heel Turn).

Edited by MarqFJA on Sep 7th 2019 at 7:06:22 PM