the things we cherish are small indeed

Sleep deprivation

Drugs

Pretty girl

Pretty not girl

Hungry

Stressed out

In System Collapse, Tarik says “motherless” (as opposed to something like motherfucking) and the BE corporates say things like “lame-skulled” and while you could think those are just futuristic insults as a result of linguistic drift (which they could also be), I think they’re just literal translations. It becomes more noticeable when you see how religious terms are rendered: “oh high one! Oh deity!” Which is like…sure. They could literally be saying that. But imo it makes more sense if MB is translating something they’re saying in another language.*

I think the most notable case of this is when Thiago calls Amena “my daughter.” On first read I literally thought it was just a Preservation thing but then I realized it made a lot more sense to me (a 21st century American) if he was saying something like mija but MB was just literally translating it into its archive bc that’s how it processes language.

This is also the reason for Amena’s use of Second Mom and Third Mom. It sounds kind of clunky in English but Chinese does a similar thing which sounds perfectly natural in that language (e.g. da-ge, er-ge, san-ge for first/oldest brother, second (oldest) brother, and third (oldest) brother).

Anyway! It’s a fun little detail I really enjoy about MB. There are definitely way more examples but I didn’t have time to track them all down.

Have you ever seen a violinist going APESHIT?!

Obviously there are black string players. We just don’t see them because they “don’t look like” string players.

He had a choice: Give your heart to a Fire Demon and live in an ever moving castle as you are being hunted by a vicious witch who wishes to consume you

OR

Pay back your student loans

No but for real, his undergrad would've been virtually free, in the 1980s in the UK. For the sake of the bit, he likely did not do much teaching at all to support himself in grad school, let alone taking a part-time job, and would've been cobbling together some grants for his tuition and "research," but would have taken some loans for buying books, paying rent, eating, and living on. On the one hand, he went to Swansea, at a time when rent was cheap, and his car is garbage; on the other, he spends all of his money instantly on fabulous outfits, skincare products and instruments he can't play, so he probably could rack up debt in a really impulsive irritating way. Megan does imply that he received more financial support than he deserved, and squandered it.