i have the attention span of a goldfish

Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS

Bat-mite or some other weirdo: I can change him back to Robin and keep him that way forever

Bruce (infinitesimal hesitation): No.

Batfamily, Justice League, everyone (scoffing): of course 'no' what a dumb thing to ask

Dick, who knows Bruce better than anyone alive:

No, they have Westron names and English names.

What you’ve got to understand is that everything Tolkien wrote was him pretending to merely translate ancient documents. He was writing as if the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were actually been written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam (or Bilba, Maura, and Ban) and he was just some random contemporary academic translating it all into English for us. 

There are many languages in his books, but generally speaking, everything written in English in the books is a translation of the language “Westron.” Therefore any names that come from Westron, he translated. Names coming from other languages, like Sindarin, he left as they were. Why? IDK. Maybe because the stories are from a hobbit perspective and hobbits speak Westron, so he wanted the Westron parts to sound familiar and the other languages/names to remain foreign? 

“But Mirkwoodest!” you cry, “The word ‘hobbit’ isn’t an English word! And the names Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck” all sounds super weird and not like English at all!”

Psych! They are in English! (Or Old English, German, or Norse.) Once again you underestimate what a nerd Tolkien was. Let me break it down: 

In Westron, hobbits are actually called “kuduk,” which means “hole-dweller,” so for an English translation, Tolkien called them “hobbits” which is a modernization of the Old English word “holbytla” which comes from “Hol” (hole) and “Bytla”(builder). 

“Maura” is a Westron name which means “Wise.” Weirdly enough, “Frodo” is an actual Proto-Germanic name that actual people used to have and it means the same thing. 

“Banazîr” is Westron for “half-wise, or simple.” In Proto Germanic, the prefix “Sam” means half, and wise is obviously a word we still use. 

“Razanur” means “Traveler” or “Stranger” which is also the meaning of the word “Peregrin(e)” This one is a twofer because  “Razar” means “a small red apple” and in English so does “Pippin.”

“Kalimac” apparently is a meaningless name in Westron, but the shortened form “Kali” means “happy,” so Jirt decided his nickname would be “Merry” and chose the really obscure ancient Celtic name “Meriodoc” to match. 

Jirt chose to leave “Bilba” almost exactly the same in English, but he changed the ending to an “O” because in Westron names ending in “a” are masculine. 

I’m not going to go on and talk about the last names but those all have special meanings too (except Tûk, which is too iconic to change more than the spelling of, apparently). 

The Rohirrim were also Westron speakers first and foremost, so their names are also “translations” into Old English and Proto-Germanic words, i.e. “Eowyn”  is a combination of “Eoh” (horse) and “Wynn” (joy/bliss). 

“Rohirrim/Rohan” are Sindarin words, but in the books, they call themselves the “Éothéod” which is an Old English/Norse combo that means “horse people.” Tolkien tells us in the “Peoples of Middle Earth” that the actual Westron for “Éothéod” is Lohtûr, which means that Eowyn and Eomer’s names, which come from the same root word, must also start with the letter L. 

The names of all the elves, dwarves, Dunedain, and men from Gondor are not English translations, since they come from root words other than Westron. 

The takeaway from this is that when a guy whose first real job was researching the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter “W” writes a book, you can expect this kind of tomfoolery.

Notes: Sorry I said “Razal” instead of “Razar” in my original post I’m a fraud. 

Further Reading: 

[image description: a ten page comic starring saiki kusuo from the disastrous life of saiki k and anya forger from spy x family.

1: a shot of the both of them walking. They are talking with telepathy.

2: anya, telepathically: do all telepaths have pink hair?

saiki, telepathically: no

anya: oh… are you a spy?! (Next to this thought is a drawing of loid forger)

saiki: no.

anya: an assassin?! (next to this thought is a drawing of yor forger)

saiki: hey, aren’t these your parents?

anya hesitates to answer.

3: saiki: I… am a normal high school student.

anya: what?! how?! You have telepathy! your life has to be exciting!

saiki: I prefer when it’s not. I don’t like telling people that I’m an esper.

4: anya think about this for a moment, before going wide eyed.

anya: does that mean you have to kill me?!

saiki: what? no?

5: saiki: why would I have to kill you.

anya: because i know about your telepathy?

saiki: watch other cartoons

anya, looking shocked: How- it’s not from a cartoon. (She is thinking of a cartoon, where someone says “you found out my secret! Die!”)

saiki: you’re replaying the episode in your head right now.

6: saiki: it seems like a better show than cyborg ciderman no. 2 at least.

anya: cyborg ciderman?

saiki: don’t watch that either.

anya: if you don’t like telling people about it (his telepathy)… do some people already know?

7: saiki thinks of his mom, aiura, toritsuka, and akechi.

saiki: a couple classmates, my family. some found out on their own.

Anya: how did it go?

8: saiki: maybe a little too well. they never stop bugging me now.

anya: really?

saiki: really.

anya looks shocked, then says: I haven’t told anyone.

saiki: you don’t have to

anya: i know, but…

9: a shot of both of them walking, this time in silence.

10: saiki: hey, if you haven’t told anyone, did you make your psychic limiters yourself?

anya: what are psychic limiters?

saiki: the cones one your head?

anya: heh. ive fooled you. These are just hair pins!

saiki: why do they look like that.

anya: I don’t know

End ID]

Reblogging your tags too x) I like the word “vod” too, tbh. 

But yes the Clones’ ties to Mandalorian culture mostly comes from the EU writers (who created Mandalore almost from scratch, btw); they had quite an impact on the fans, but their work was later almost completely invalidated by the (Lucas approved/overseen) 2009 Clone Wars show. Quite a few people called it “character assassination,” which I find really funny because… no? 

Anyway the fans never let go of this romantic notion of an all-badass, on-par with the Sith and the Jedi, essential to the Galaxy, ultra-noble Mandalore (*ahem* they destroyed their homeworlds through global war *ahem* the word “Mandalorian is never used once in Lucas’ movies *ahem*). And to appeal to them, Disney is now incorporating that image into canon. 

Since the fans love the Clones, they want to shine the best possible light on them (which I’m all on board for), so they continue this trend of Mando-worship in their fanwork. And then newer people arrive, read a fic that uses “vod,” have people tell them that “yes, the Clones are totally Mando at heart, Jango taught them everything about it and also he was the disgraced leader of the True Mandalorians, not the pacifists you see in the show,” and the newbies roll with it, and in their fic the Clones use the word “aliit,” and in the next they’re fully fluent, etc. etc.

There’s nothing wrong with the way fandom developed the Clones, of course. Fandoms will do what fandoms do (i.e completely ignore canon and roll with their own ideas). It’s just that it’s not what’s presented in the movies or TCW, or even Rebels. You wanna see Mando Clones, you pick up the pre-2009 Clone Wars comics, or the Republic Commando books (… it’s Karen Traviss, read at your own peril), etc… 

So anyway yeah I was weirded out by the ever increasing amount of fics that have “btw Cody’s real name is Kote” in the AN. Lucas named him Cody after a fictional hero from his own childhood.

Meet Commando Cody the rocket man, Sky Marshal of the Universe. He’s the origin behind Cody’s name, Cody’s jetpack (and thus all of the Clones’ jetpacks), and Cody’s rank of Marshal Commander. 

TCW does address this question of what inspired the Clones as they built their identities. In Fives’ arc, Nala Se says this:

NALA SE: I’m afraid the Jedi have inspired creative thinking in some of the Clones. That is the cause of this type of divergent behavior.

We also see that a huge influence on the younger Clone troopers is Shaak Ti - she’s the one who teaches Echo and Fives the importance of unity, tying her own understanding of it directly to her identity as a Jedi.

We see Yoda teaching the Clones that they have value at the beginning of the war:

YODA: Come, sit. Your helmets, remove them. Your faces I wish to see.

THIRE: There’s not much to look at here, sir. We all share the same face.

YODA: Deceive you, eyes can. In the Force, very different each one of you are. Rys, always focused on the enemy, are you. For inspiration, look to yourself, and those beside you. Jek, concerned about weapons you are. Weapons do not win battles. Your mind, powerful it is. Outthink the droids, you can. Thire, rush not into fights. Long is the war. Only by surviving it, will you prevail. Yes. Clones you may be, but the Force resides in all life forms. Use it, you can, to quiet your mind. 

And we see Plo do the same in the very next episode:

WOLFFE: We’re just Clones, sir. We’re meant to be expendable.

PLO: Not to me.

(By this point the Clones already have tattoos, painted armors and unique haircuts, but these are superficial ways of expressing your identity. It’s illustrated very clearly with the episode Innocents of Ryloth. Boil has a mustache and a Death Watch symbol on his helmet. Great! But he spends most of the episode griping about the hassle of protecting civilians, and using his duty as a soldier as an excuse not to take care of Numa. With the combined influences of Waxer, Obi-Wan and Numa’s delightful nature, Boil actually shows who he is by the end of the episode: a deeply caring man. That’s who is is, more than anything else. When Numa hugs him, he has his helmet on but she’s not afraid of it anymore. Because his face isn’t synonymous with who he is, no matter how ‘customized’, his actions are who he is.)

tldr: we’re told that the Jedi are the one who most fostered unity and creativity in the Clones. 

(Again, visible in Innocent of Ryloth, when Obi-Wan’s influence makes his men appreciative of Twi’Lek culture - he even teaches them a Ryl word). Decades after the war, the GAR is remembered as the Jedi and the Clones (see Hera reminding Kanan of the bond between Jedi and Clones in The Lost Commanders.)

Also, remember the remembrance thing fics are so fond of using? 

Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum - “I’m still alive, but you are dead. I remember you, so you are eternal” Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la - “Not gone, merely marching far away”

from Wookieepedia 

Guess what? The Jedi had memory moths in the pre-2009!TCW EU. 

You whisper a name to the moth and it repeats it forever. 

And actual canon has so much stuff about not actually being dead but passing into the Force, and just being on a path everyone will eventually walk, yada yada yada. 

From Return of the Jedi:

LUKE: I can’t do it, Artoo. I can’t go on alone.

OBI-WAN: Yoda will always be with you.

To the Clone Wars:

YODA (s5ep18): One with the force, they are. And our job it is to remember that we will, in time, also pass on. Luminous beings are we, but temporary vessels, our bodies are. And we shall all find ourselves here in time. A moment of silence, I ask, to remember and to move on.

So even fanon Clone culture is directly linked to the oldest and most basic Jedi principles. 

So if the Clones actually had traditions and philosophical/theological views in canon, they’d more likely to be inherited from the Jedi than the Mandalorians. No one in TCW states a connection between Clones and Mandalorians (not Maul, not Bo-Katan, not the Jedi, not Satine, not Almec, not Boba, not Hondo, not the bounty hunters, not the Republic authorities…) but TONS of what we see in the Jedi/Clones interactions points to Jedi culture being a HUGE influence on the Clones’ way of expressing themselves. 

Last little note: Jedi culture is hugely emphatic on the irrelevance of where you come from compared to who you decide to be. While the Jedi have nothing against embracing your birth traditions (see their various traditional clothes, tattoos, jewels, their different accents/languages, their acceptance of other faiths - see Barriss’ prayer statue - and the fact that they keep the names given to them by their biological parents), not all Jedi feel the need to identify with their biological people, their identity is rooted in their role as peacekeepers, as they routinely states, and in their connection to the Force and their fellow Jedi. 

Similarly, the Clones have different views on whether or not their origin defines them, some express themselves with alterations to their appearances, some don’t, and their sense of identity is most commonly rooted in their role as soldiers, their loyalty to the Republic, and their brothers. 

Same basic structure.

Clone culture draws on Jedi culture.

Pass it on.

(And I’m saying this as a fan of Mandalorian language, also, Clone Troopers calling their partner Cyare and their brothers Vode, uff, me encanta)

But it is obvious that, if you spend a lot of time with someone who is from a different culture, you are going to pick up some words, some mannerism, even some beliefs from that culture. Do you imagine a clone saying a single word of Dai Bendu? (the half canon/half fanon language of the Jedi)

Also, since some of them are close to young Padawans, it could be even more easy for the younger troopers and younger Jedi to get along and share things with each other. 

To me, it is kinda cruel to made the clones mando and nothing more. I mean, those guys have been their whole lives either in the horrible white halls of Kamino or in some horrid battlefields, or, in case of Coruscant Guard, in one of the most corrupt buildings of all the GFFA. 

In Republic Commando books, where some clones are all mando, with mando names and mando beliefs, they didn’t choose, they didn’t have an option. It was “you are mando because I want to you to be, so you will be, period”

 I agree with what jedi-order-apologist said that clone culture wouldn’t be that homogeneous either as what the Coruscant Guard, the battalions sent to the front, and the clones that stay on Komino would probably be all different from each other. The clones that actively work with the Jedi would be more influenced by them unlike the clones who don’t. Tbh both the Clones and the Jedi are seen as outsiders to the public. 

Masterpost of Free Gothic Literature & Theory

Classics Vathek by William Beckford Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë The Woman in White  & The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu The Turn of the Screw by Henry James The Monk by Matthew Lewis The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin The Vampyre; a Tale by John Polidori Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Dracula by Bram Stoker The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Short Stories and Poems An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience by William Blake The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Pre-Gothic Beowulf The Divine Comedy  by Dante Alighieri A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe Paradise Lost by John Milton Macbeth by William Shakespeare Oedipus, King of Thebes by Sophocles The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

Gothic-Adjacent Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood Jane Eyre & Villette by Charlotte Brontë Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens The Idiot & Demons (The Possessed) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas Moby-Dick by Herman Melville The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

Historical Theory and Background The French Revolution of 1789 by John S. C. Abbott Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. Bradley The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance by Edith Birkhead On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle Demonology and Devil-Lore by Moncure Daniel Conway Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism by Inman and Newton On Liberty by John Stuart Mill The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle by Frederick Wright

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

For @mace-windu-appreciationweek ;)

This is for day 6 theme “Badass”

Death, so gentle.

I like to HC that they promise to learn about each others bodies by communicating and not secretly consulting Meg, who knows and could give either advice.