Me: “Don’t say it.”

My Brain:

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.'

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”

shaggy rogers is a hero

yes, he canonically has anxiety issues, but when it comes down to it, he is there for his friends no matter how scared he is. he cares very deeply for his friends and he would absolutely not hesitate to put himself in danger to keep them safe

in ‘music of the vampire’ when the vampire threatens his friends, shaggy’s first response is to grab a bunch of wooden stakes to attack the vampire with

later in this same movie when he (albeit falsely) believes he’s fallen victim to the vampire curse, he runs away and gets as far away from his friends as possible so there would be no chance of him harming them or inflicting the curse on them as well

and in ‘camp scare’ when the fish monster they’re dealing with hurts scooby, shaggy’s first response was to shatter a two-by-four across its face. watch it go down here, skip to about 1:30

during the climax of ‘legend of the phantosaur’ after struggling with his anxiety for the whole movie, shaggy overcomes it for the sake of saving the lives of his friends and the villains who put them in danger in the first place

in ‘ghoul school’, without any help from fred, daphne, or velma, shaggy saves the lives of several monster kids, and in ‘reluctant werewolf’ when he’s cursed to become a werewolf, he wins back his humanity in just under two days, again without help from fred, daphne, or velma

hell, the whole plot of ‘goblin king’ was about shaggy and scooby travelling into the realm of monsters, the very things he’s afraid of mos, so he can save his friends from being turned into monsters themselves. and he does save them

and those are just the examples i could think of off the top of my head!

shaggy is as essential to the gang as everyone else is. he’s the one who repeatedly throws himself headfirst into the path of the monster of the week to lead it into fred’s traps, despite his anxiety issues, because he’s the only one fast enough not to get caught. fun fact! he’s won multiple awards in high school for gymnastics and athletics. he isn’t just all about fear and food. he’s a friendly, caring person who would do anything for his friends, and on top of all this?

he’s only seventeen. of course he’s scared, he’s just a kid.

the mystery gang tends to unmask humans. The exceptions (authentic monsters, zombies, witches, ghosts, etc) are in certain movies. some of which (Zombie Island, the Witch’s Ghost) involve the full gang. Others (Ghoul School, Reluctant Werewolf, the Boo Brothers) have Shaggy and Scoob (and Scrappy) on their own adventures. 

oh hey and in ghoul school, looking for some peace and quiet, they get hired as gym teachers at a school for girls, that turns out to be a school for ghouls. Despite being terrified,  

they stay, become fantastic teachers, inspire their students and lead them to victory in the volleyball champion, and then risk their lives saving the students from an evil witch and spider minions. 

oh and they befriend an adult mummy, vampire, wolfman, and phantom along the way

not to mention whenever they hang with the rest of the gang, they invariably get used trap bait against their expressed wishes. but still they stick around

oh, and despite their reluctance, scoob and shaggy regularly play some of the most vital roles in the gang’s adventures, to the point the movie posters regularly feature them as the most prominent members. the rest of the gang may provide the motivation, but shaggy and scooby are the lifeblood of the show:

conclusion: Shaggy Rogers and Scoobert Doo have enormous hearts that lead them to face their greatest fears on an almost daily basis for the sake of protecting those they care about.

He has watched friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers be nearly killed and often was the one who jumped into the fray to keep that from happening. Despite Daphne often being referred to as a damsel in distress character and her alliterative Danger Prone Daphne nickname, if you watch the various series and movies, Shaggy is actually the most danger prone, most frequently captured, and also most often injured character in the series. Yes, he often jumps at things that end up being innocuous, but ptsd and anxiety are real things, and let’s be honest, if all of the above was my every day life, I’d be pretty darn jumpy too. Shaggy is the voice of reason in the group. When the gang is inevitably informed that some giant beast in the area has been rampaging about causing destruction, and kidnapping and/or trying to murder people, he has every right to voice concern over intentionally going out to search for the thing, especially when he himself attracts that danger and the supernatural more than anyone else in the gang, including Scooby. If a pathway looks dangerous and he points it out, everyone else will roll their eyes and keep going and he’ll inevitably follow them and its his feet it ends up crumbling under. His completely valid concerns are constantly dismissed and he’s usually the one who ends up suffering the consequences for it. And while I agree he would make a great green lantern, he was in canon a pretty awesome yellow lantern.

There have been many hints throughout the series that Shaggy actually obliviously wields magic and Scooby is his familiar, which was basically made canon in Goblin King and there was a gag about it in a Be Cool Scooby Doo episode. Read more about this 

here and here also here and lastly here

In the above comic, Shaggy manipulated the ring without even trying while Sinestro was both wearing it and actively trying to wield it, and then it flew off of Sinestro’s finger and onto Shaggy’s.  As his familiar, Scooby is affected by the ring too. Sinestro freaks out about them having the ability to both cause and instill the greatest fear of all. There’s another team-up comic with Green Arrow and Green Lantern where Psycho Pirate shows up and uses his ability to cause the rest of the gang to feel sheer terror and flee, this has seemingly no affect on Shaggy and Scooby because that’s just their normal state.

(just for some context bc it’s been a while since I watched zombie island)

Like, yes, Shaggy is controlling Daphne’s actions with the doll, but look at how gently he holds the figure. He treats it like his friend (and yes, it technically is) because he cares about the rest of the gang. This bit was mainly for comedic relief, but it also shows how serious this situation and the voodoo dolls actually were in the film.

And really, if you saw some Karen-Linda-intimidating-employer/CEO looking lady turn into this, wouldn’t you be at least a little unnerved?

(just for reference)

And Shaggy will sprint with Scooby in his back in most (if not every) episode.

he’s pushed a boat filled with the gang + madelyn + scooby across a lake, RUNNING ON WATER WHILE HE DOES SO (Abracadabra-Doo!)

and, if we estimate the dinghy at roughly 150-175 lbs (usually the weight for a boat this size that can easily fit 6 people), and Scooby at 200 lbs even (given that when he rode on the back of a mule alone, he caused it to collapse under his weight in SD & the Monster of Mexico), Shaggy is not only propelling himself fast enough to RUN ON WATER, he is also pushing the rough equivalent of 1000 pounds of weight across the water, at fast enough speeds to rival a motorboat

in SD Camp Scare, he also shook the metal bars of a prison cell so hard, that they broke apart and collapsed entirely, even though they were embedded in stone

and to those saying ‘well, he can’t repeat those feat bc those are oneoff deals’, oh shit you thought???

here are TWO separate occasions of Shaggy running UP rocks and LEAPING UP to different ones to escape a pit.

the first in Legend of the Phantasaur

the second in Where’s My Mummy

WHILE CARRYING SCOOBY IN HIS ARMS

You know how All Fantasy Movies™ need to create their own Fantasy Languages for the Fantasy Worlds……?  why don’t movies just…. use extant languages????

Here’s the deal. We have hella fake languages, like, say Na'vi from Avatar which was inspired a lot by the sounds in Maori.  why don’t they just use Maori??  few enough people speak it so it would still sound completely foreign to like… everyone except like 50k individuals in the entire world. And it would help encourage people to learn and otherwise dying language.

Like imagine if they hired some Maori teachers to teach the actors a little-spoken extant language instead of paying some white guy from California to invent a language inspired by real dying languages to make up some words, a grammatical structure, and an alphabet for this fictional universe.

Or what about Game of Thrones, with High Valarian, which was inspired by Estonian and Swahili.

CAN YOU IMAGINE if a wildly popular show like GoT hired Estonian or Swahili linguists and interpreters to teach actors a few phrases? It doesn’t matter if they don’t have perfect pronunciation. That’s fine???? Most people won’t know and tbh even for those who do understand Estonian or Swahili, the increase in interest in people learning their language is??? not a bad thing??? 

AND THEN I REALISED THERE IS AN ACTUAL GOOD EXAMPLE OF WHAT I WAS THINKING OF.

BLACK FUCKING PANTHER, OF COURSE. 

Wakanda uses isiXhosa as their fantasy language. The amount of cultural RICHNESS that comes from using an existing language is honestly unparalleled. And the coolest thing is, there are things in real language that you just can’t make up when a white man engineers a mde up language in his office. The amount of interest in Xhosa SPIKED after Black Panther’s release and SO MANY MORE people became aware of its existence. Do more people speak it? Who knows? Probably not rly? But at least now there is awareness of this language that only has some 8 mil speakers (that’s a little less than the population of NYC). 

And the thing is, even if there are not more speakers of it in the world in response to a movie, at least there is greater awareness of different parts of the world? Imagine using the power of popular media for good like this. People becoming aware of South African tribes, Maori tribes, small Baltic countries, Bantu languages, etc.

Like ??? few enough people are actually aware of the sounds that these languages make that would you actually know if Dothraki was actually a real language spoken by some people in the world??  It would be cool to actually help the cultures that you’re “drawing inspiration” from.

The wild popularity of Tolkien’s Elvish gets me GOING. Every now and then I’ll see that post going around showing how to form words from Elvish letters. You know what written Elvish looks like to me? It looks like Hindi. It looks like the Devanagari script (other people say it also looks like Tibetan, which I cannot attest to, but I can say for sure it DEFINITELY looks like Hindi’s Devanagari script). How consonants and vowels come together is IDENTICAL to the structure in Hindi and there are even a solid number of overlapping characters. Spoken Elvish sounds nothing like Hindi ofc but the written language sure resembles the structure with a fuckton of the same letters. Written Elvish is ostensibly stolen from Indian or Tibetan or other ‘Eastern’ written languages. Imagine if all the people who think Elvish is super sexy and cool and want to learn it actually commited themselves to learning Hindi, a language written and spoken by almost 20% of the world population? How fucking rad would that be?

(look at this elvish Tengwar that is like… literally just Hindi vowels)

I just feel like ???????? movie producers could do a lot of good??? in this very small simple way?? but instead they pay one single person to invent a language and then teach people how to speak their made up language and they have to develop 1000-3000 invented words… when they could just …. use an extant little known language and bring some indigineous languages back from the brink of extinction !!!!!!!

The part I don’t agree with is using existing languages for fantasy cultures. Not all speakers of endangered languages are going to be thrilled seeing such a personal, intimate part of their history and culture solely for the purpose that it’s rare enough for everyone else in the world not to question it.

As for the consulting part, I’m sorry, but how do you think those consultations would go? “Yeah, hi, I’d like to use your endangered language for this barbaric alien race, hope that’s okay!” And how would the consultants go about scouting out a dying language for use in their works? That’s just asking for trouble, in my opinion. I don’t think speakers of endangered languages, or any language for that matter, would appreciate their cultures being judged in such a way.

Movie directors should not be using existing languages just because a fictional culture may take inspiration from existing cultures (every single fictional culture is inspired by real cultures anyway because we, as humans, literally have no other frame of reference). Wakandans exist in the African continent of the present so Xhosa makes sense. The Na’Vi are NOT the Maori. The Game of Thrones cultures, even with all the historical inspirations from our world, does NOT exist in our world. The Dothraki are not Arab nomads. Westeros is still not Europe.

And from the other half of the perspective conlanging is A., more realistic/less appropriative as mentioned above and B., a big part of the creative process for some of us? Tolkein wrote his books around his languages, not the other way around. (And he was a legit linguist. Honestly.)

And lastly, there are some AMAZING linguists out there working to preserve dying languages, so maybe give them a shoutout. I was really lucky to get to work with a project preserving Mesoamerican languages when I was in undergrad (like ten years ago) and honestly it was incredible.

Most of these projects involved interviewing people and recording as much of the language as possible, creating lexicons and guides, and teaching it to younger people within the culture. A huge part of a language is the context, so rescuing it means the people who spoke it originally have to pick it up again—if a bunch of kids on the other side of the planet see it in a movie and try to learn it on Duolingo, they’ll maybe get the vocabulary but the cultural aspects really won’t translate (since in this scenario they’ve been removed). At best you’ll have some new dialect inspired by the original language.

This has been done successfully, by the way. Hebrew was resurrected! It can happen!

So like. I get OP’s original intent, which was sweet, but don’t shit on other people’s creativity. And don’t assume language is just vocabulary. It’s personal.

Edit: And OP’s insisting in the comments that they meant “people are stealing from these languages and should consult the speakers!!” Like that isn’t something that already happens at a professional level? That’s sort of like assuming people are stealing from the writers and artists their work is inspired by. And they dragged Tolkien through the mud. Tolkien who was most inspired by Old English. Tolkein who was… English.

This may not apply to OP since I don’t know anything about them, but I’ve heard this kind of thing before from people who share my positionality viz whiteness, being a native speaker of a variety of English that IN PARTICULAR likes to think of itself as unmarked, and being a white USian of the type that, relatedly, thinks of itself as culture-less. 

Also, as other people have pointed out, this would NOT “bring an endangered language back from the brink of extinction” because to save a language, it has to be taught to the people of that culture and community. Otherwise, it’s just a zombie language that is missing core aspects of its development, values, history, and context.

Using our languages for your fantasy or scifi inhumans isn’t going to save them, it’s going to continue to dehumanize our communities while turning our languages into fun trendy aesthetics and removing them from the context of our communities.