Seriously, for 7.6 mil this is a bargain – your very own Rivendell/Imladris, for real, in Oregon! Check out the pics, the place is a Tolkien lover’s dream!
one of the weirdest ways that language is evolving in response to the internet is that “bad words” just. do not have the same impact anymore. i constantly forget that some people think ‘fuck you’ is a terrible insult
so threats and insults have to start getting really out there if the person wants to even mean anything. if a person told me to die i’d shrug it off but if i opened a post’s tags and saw “op i will sneak into your house and replace all your shoelaces with cooked pasta” do you know how shaken i’d be? do you know how upset i’d be if i saw “op is the personification of the look you share w other people in the grocery store when some dude is causing A Scene™
for no reason”
So you are saying English curses on the Internet are becoming more like Yiddish curses?
I sincerely hope so but I can’t say I’m familiar with yiddish curses and i am begging you to tell me a few
My Personal favorite is:
“May all your teeth fall out, except for one, to give you a toothache.”
“May you grow like an onion, with your head in the ground.” “May God visit the best of the 10 plagues upon you.”
and my personal favorite:
“May you get stuck in an outhouse just as a regiment of Ukrainian* soldiers has filled up on prune stew and beer.”
*this joke joke reflects the combo of fear and disdain the Jews of that region had for the soldiers of their non-Jewish governments in a time where pogroms and kidnapping with forced enlistment was common. The soldiers were often the tools of those attacks. This should not be said to reflect any modern day attitude towards Ukrainian gentiles. (No Ukrainian soldiers were harmed in the making of this curse, but many, many Jews were…)
My favorite Yiddish curses are the ones that start out sounding like they’re wishing you good fortune and then have a PLOT TWIST.
“May you grow so wealthy that every single day you can wake up in a brand new bedroom in your enormous house, and put on a brand new coat, and go down a brand new staircase and out a brand new door, and climb into a brand new fancy carriage, and have a brand new driver take you to a brand new doctor, and he won’t know what’s wrong with you either.”
Þrymskviða. Compressed down, it goes like this: A Jotun steal Thor’s hammer Mjolnir and says he’ll only give it back if he’s given Freyja to marry, as she is the most beautiful goddess in all of existence. The gods argue over what to do for a while before Heimdall suggests they stick a bridal veil on Thor, says he’s Freyja, and pretend they’re giving Freyja (Thor) to the Jotun to marry so Thor can get close enough to the Jotun to steal Mjolnir back.
Now typically when people talk about this story, it’s with an element of disbelieving comedy. “Oh my god, who would believe Thor was a woman, let alone Freyja, the most beautiful goddess in the world?”
But I propose a different way to look at the story.
See, different cultures have different beauty standards. Modern western beauty standards may be a delicate hourglass supermodel, but that’s not always been the case. Greece, for instance, depicted Aphrodite like this:
Yeah. A Greek sculptor was told “sculpt the goddess of beauty” and they thought “alright, fat rolls, that’s where beauty is at, let’s do this”. And everybody else apparently agreed with them, because up went the statue. Beauty is a malleable concept is what I’m getting at.
Now this is where it becomes relevant that Freyja is not just the goddess of love, sex, and beauty. She’s also the goddess of war. And the righteous dead. Goddess of war in the same Viking warrior culture that gave us shield maidens, women who wielded seven fucking kilogram (15 lbs) shields in combat.
Sooooo … when the Norse storytellers said, “This is Freyja, goddess of war and the righteous dead, who rode giant murder cats into battle, she is the most beautiful goddess in the world”, I’m guessing they weren’t thinking of her as some willowy waif. No, I’m guessing they probably thought more along the lines of:
190 cm (6′3″), broad shoulders, built like a brick shithouse, with a jawline like whoa, and fully capable of murdering everything in her path.
Put in that context, the story of Thor dressing up as Freyja sounds less like a punchline about “how could anyone ever mistake Thor in a veil for Freyja?” and becomes more a case of “ohhhhhhhhhhh, no wonder all the gods thought this plan would work”.
It did, by the way. The plan totally worked.
it wasn’t thor’s figure that almost gave him away, it was his bad manners. he was snarfing down all the food and drink, and the jotun was like “hey i thought freyja was a LADY” and they had to explain it like well she was so psyched about the wedding that she hasn’t eaten for days.
at no point did the jotun add “also she’s fucking ripped wtf?” because yeah. of course she was. she was a war goddess.
some people: robots will see the cruelty of man and will destroy us
MIT scientist: let’s make this robot evil on purpose
Okay, let’s clarify….Norman is not evil. Norman was just fed an amount of reddit captions about death, while another AI got standard reddit captions, and then both did rorshach tests as an experiment to show how easily algorithms could be bent. For example, where the standard AI saw “vase with flowers” Norman saw “a man is shot dead”.
Since Norman has shown no actual desire to harm any living thing, merely a fascination with death, I propose we rebrand him as the first Goth AI.
Attack on Titan is and always has been imperialist propaganda written by a Nazi supporter. The idea of the walls and their fragility is meant to criticize Japan’s antiwar policy, and the Titans coming back after 100 years is meant to imply that if Japan doesn’t start having wars and breaking down their “walls” and conquering the East again, other countries will come to terrorize the region. What bothers me most having watched the first season of it is the line about “Living like livestock”. It asserts the notion that to live without imperialism is a form of complacency, like somehow the country isn’t living life to its fullest if it isn’t out pillaging and raping the peoples of Korea, Manchuria, Indonesia, the Pacific Islands, etc. I will say that it’s actually really poorly written, so the ideas the writer has don’t come across super strongly, but it’s still seriously dangerous stuff.
Add to that the fact that so many characters have German names and that the setting seems to have a lot of european and specifically German vegetation and architecture becomes obvious that the writer wants viewers to feel nostalgic for the Axis Powers. It’s really infuriating to me as a Jewish person because it’s supporting a political climate under which the genocide of my people could resume even when we just now have the same Jewish population worldwide as we did pre-Holocaust. It’s fucked up and now that people are talking about it coming back for a second season after so long I want to urge you all to please boycott it.
-Stephen
Lol yes! Unfortunately it’s all true! For instance, the character called Dot Pixis is based on general Yoshifuru Akiyama, a famous war criminal during the occupation of Korea who Attack on Titan’s writer, Hajime Isayama, called “frugal and respectable” on his twitter account. Popular character Mikasa Ackerman is named after a warship in the Russo-Japanese war, a war over which power would violently occupy Korea, according to the show’s own damn official guidebook (Which I cannot link to because it’s a book) and wikia page.
In a separate reply to this post, a friend of mine has also noted that the character called Erwin Smith is named after a Nazi called Erwin Rommel who, despite occasionally defying orders he deemed “unjust”, was still a fucking Nazi and still took part in the Holocaust. I did find a source for this albeit not the best one. But it should also be in the official handbook as Outside Kou apparently claims that the origins of characters’ names are in that book.
And if you don’t find it bad enough that these characters are designed to be nods to imperialist/nazi history, then what ought to convince you the show should be boycotted is that it isn’t for shits and giggles. Hajime Isayama actually does support Imperialism. He named and designed those characters as homages to nazis and war criminals for a reason. Not because he thought the names were cool. He actually worships those military institutions. So I’ll say it again. Boycott Attack on Titan.
-Stephen
EDIT: Tumblr is a fucked website, so the reply that was made by user ramen-catholicism saying “Lol no” that prompted me to make this addition is not showing up on my computer as part of this post. Also some links aren’t showing up underlined in the second paragraph so if you want them you have to hover over my words with your cursor to find them… sorry
koutetsujou no kabaneri is a good substitute with less nationalism and much prettier character design overall
While this is sort of a valid interpretation in a purely theoretical (???) sense, and the author seems to be apologetic or denialist of war crimes, which is not acceptable, it’s a pretty heavy accusation to say he advocates going back to imperialism, especially considering Japanese culture. Hayao Miyazaki also got flak for saying Japanese WWII plane engineers were awesome (not a quote), even if he isn’t pro-war. Some Japanese people have a habit of honoring people that did awful shit but had traits that would be virtues in another context, and this seems to be a cultural thing, which may seem baffling, but is not objectively wrong (like war crime denial). The references to historical figures in the manga may not be as apologist as the post makes them out to be when taking this into account.
you know i truly try not to get angry on this hell site but could you honest to god shut your mouth the fuck up because as someone whose country was colonized by japan, those are valid as shit criticisms. the japanese government has refused to compensate the colonized countries, ESPECIALLY the women they kidnapped and sexually enslaved (many of these women are still alive btw), there is still heavy anti-korean, anti-chinese, anti-vietnamese racism present—actually, the whole country is pretty discriminatory towards any non-japanese east/southeast asian people
japanese culture of course presents itself as “nice” and “polite” and rich because the country of japan literally got to where it is by colonizing and exploiting other countries and ravaging them and landing many people into poverty. your insistence that it’s just “a cultural thing” and that japanese people just HAPPEN to be ignorant and MEAN WELL and is fucking infuriating because THAT IS LITERALLY WHAT THEIR PROPAGANDA IS INTENDED TO MAKE YOU THINK. a lot of anime is FULL of propaganda that wouldn’t be apparent to non e/se asians.
also “the wind rises” totally gives off propaganda vibes—the planes were made off the slave labor of chinese and koreans and subsequently used to bomb them but do you ever hear those people mentioned in the film AT ALL lmao horikoshi was not just a nice guy that made a silly mistake
just bringing this back because season 3 will be out in July 🙂 fuck this show
Wanted to bring this back lmao. Japan should never not be reminded of their war crimes just because they make nice things. I don’t make that concession for the USA and I certainly won’t make it for the country of thousands upon thousands of rapists who refuse to pay reparations to their victims.
The youngest living comfort women were 14-17 years old during the war. Raped by a line of Japanese soldiers all day. Just because the word “Japanese soldiers” doesn’t invoke the same hateful reaction as “Nazis” doesn’t mean they weren’t just as bad, and in many different ways, worse.
some of y’all are really like “please boost this i’m 24 years old and my parents are refusing to pay my cell phone bill and it’s enabling my depression. they also want me to move out and find a job to support myself and i am actively fearing for my life. here is a link to my paypal and gofundme as well as my amazon wishlist featuring nonnegotiable amenities mandatory for my survival such as this flower crown anime boy pastel sweater with the text ‘soft boi’ on it. help support a victim of emotional abuse and gaslighting"
Death By Catchphrase 