See you, Universe…

Made a lil something to send off my favourite show. Thank you crewniverse 

Aang: I recall yes

Sokka: can I have it

Aang: …what?

Sokka: can I have his firebending. just for like ten minutes

Aang: what no

Sokka: why not I wanna prank zuko

Aang:

Aang:

I even made a cute graphic for you. 

Anyway. Here, this explanation is done after an occurance which kinda pushed me to this, so expect personal views and context rather than 100% french grammar.  And frankly, this is more a matter being polite in France rather than a grammar lesson to begin with. Just a heads up! 

‘Tu’ and ‘Vous’ both mean ‘You’. ‘Tu’ is always singular but ‘Vous’ can be both plural and singular depending on context. 

It’s a common misconception I hear from people who are learning french that ‘Tu’ is informal and ‘Vous’ is formal. This isn’t entirely false but that’s just the quick way of putting it, which leads to misunderstanding.  It’s less a matter of ‘formality vs informality’ and more ‘people you are closeand casual to’ vs ‘everybody else whom you respect as you should anybody given you’re polite’. 

What happened that spurred me to write this was a small, kind of irrelevant thing. I ordered a pizza and the delivery guy called me ‘tu’ every time he referred to me. This was a problem to me for two reasons. Slightly because I’m a client, but mostly because I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me on a personal basis (and I could also add that he was generally off-puttingly casual but that’s another can of worms). Me being a client was just a smaller problem stacked on top of the obvious ‘we’re not close’ one, but allow me to explain why that’s still relevant. 

‘Tu’ is used for family members, friends, classmates (when you’re younger) and children. It’s casual, often in a setting where there aren’t many social rules to follow. ‘Vous’ is for literally anybody else. It’s polite to call everybody ‘vous’. It isn’t ‘I respect you as a higher-up’ so much as it’s ‘You are a fellow human being I am treating decently’. 

On the subject of pizza guy, I wasn’t expecting him to call me ‘vous’ because I was a client and therefore supposedly higher than he is but because not only was I a client but we weren’t supposed to be casual in this setting. I call him ‘vous’ as I call everybody who isn’t a close friend/family ‘vous’. Lemme give a few examples. 

Waitress? ‘Vous’ Teacher? ‘Vous’ Homeless person? ‘Vous’ Bus driver? ‘Vous’ Random person on the street you’re asking for directions? ‘Vous’ The President of France? ‘Vous’ Nurse? ‘Vous’ That one guy who crashed into your car? ‘Vous’ (you can still be angry and insult them without using ‘tu’, which will be more efficient, trust me) Your psychiatrist? ‘Vous’ A client? ‘Vous’  Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte, master strategist and military leader, France’s darling child, first man to have almost managed to conquer Russia though failed miserably? ‘Vous’. 

Literally anybody who isn’t someone you know personally is ‘vous’. 

I must add that refusing to abide fo this rule gives others a bad image of yourself more than it insults them. People who call everybody ‘Tu’ are considered rude and generally unpleasant, which is looked down upon. If you see someone calling a waiter or retail worker ‘tu’ can generally be labeled an asshole and you’ll likely be right about it, for example. Young children are exempt from this rule because they aren’t expected to know the rule well. The best example I can think of this is in Le Petit Prince where the Prince asks the narrator to draw him a sheep. 

“S’il vous plaît, dessine-moi un mouton.”

He’s using ‘vous’ in ‘s’il vous plaît’(please) but the ‘tu’ imperative form of the verb ‘dessiner’ (to draw) in the same sentence. If this sentence was in correct french it would be

“S’il te plaît, dessine-moi un mouton.” or “S’il vous plaît, dessinez-moi un mouton.”

Non-native speakers will often be excused if they mess up, though! Don’t worry about that, even we know it’s hard because it’s sometimes  awkward to know whether to use ‘Tu’ or ‘Vous’ if it’s somebody you see every day but aren’t really close to (a co-worker, for example!). So yeah, if you’re generally polite and they understand you’re doing your best, it’s all good!  In the case explained earlier, with pizza guy, is that he wasn’t a non-native speaker and he wasn’t making a mistake. He was just being overly casual, perhaps on the basis that I order at that pizza place often and he delivered it two or three times already and pressured for a tip (rather than asked, in which case I would have given it willingly instead of awkwardly). It’s a mild annoyance but still enough to piss me (and others) off. 

Ehhh I could go on but that’s all I got for now, if anybody wants to add to this or ask a question or whatever, feel free! I hope this cleared stuff up and gave you some incentive! I hear there are similar things in other languages such Spanish, Italian and German, among many others! I’d love to hear how it works in other languages!

 Most people, when they think of dark academia is books (that’s the whole point) and ancient languages such as Latin or Ancient Greek. I’m here to tell you that you all are SLEEPING on brown culture. Love that is conveyed in the languages of Persian and Urdu (my native language) crosses borders. Sure, Shakespeare and Sappho wrote great pieces of literature but the stories and poems of Rumi, Manto, Hafez and Iqbal have a special place in my heart. 

Some of my favourites are:- (all are translated)

Sit at my grave with wine and a minstrel in a trance, so your smell will raise me from the dead.

HAFEZ

My lover’s sadness lit a fire in my heart that burned my chest, there was a fire in his house that burned the nest.

HAFEZ

O the day turned night, what a shame, a gazelle of kindness a lion became, my partner and lover grew tired of my words and prayers too.

RUMI

These are my personal favourites. I can always make a longer post if you all want.

Female poets deserve a whole other post.

l’Univers - the Universe

la Voie lactée - the Milky Way

le système solaire - the solar system

les étoiles - stars

l’atmosphère - the atmosphere

la gravité - the gravity

une orbite - an orbit

une nouvelle lune - a new moon

une éclipse solaire - a solar eclipse

une éclipse lunaire - a lunar eclipse

une galaxie - a galaxy

une constellation - a constellation

une comète - a comet

un astéroïde - an asteroid

un météore - a meteor

une météorite - a meteorite

un trou noir - a black hole

la lune - the moon

le soleil - the sun

les planètes - planets

la Terre -  the Earth

My Connor and Eerie dream from last night with some blank spots filled in!!

cw: brief sex mention, brief torture mention. But all ok I won’t ever hurt them too much, and this is only fluff

-

Connor and Eerie are locked in a dungeon prison thing. A villain has captured them, several members of the cursed unit and assorted cursed people, some of whom are being tortured by being tested on like animals.

People have come to collect Connor. They don’t want them to stick together because they are the center of all the investigating that will take down these evil people. In a sick twist, the evil people force fellow cursed people they don’t know to be their prison guards or else face punishment. Everyone is on guard for their own life.

Connor asks if he can say goodbye to Eerie, uncuffed, and the cursed prisoner-made-guards, having a soft spot, while knowing they are the most important prisoners- let Connor say goodbye to Eerie.

She starts to hyperventilate. “Don’t leave me, I’ll die, I’ll die!” He hugs her, her arms cuffed behind her back against the wall with huge shackles. She sobs and he rubs her back, pulling her into a hug as she starts to motor mouth. “My mom and my dad, they’ll never— and I’ll never get married, I’ll never have kids, I’ve never even had se—!!”

Connor hushes her lips and says, “Calm down, you’re talking crazy. We’ll get out of here. If you feel up to it, you and I can get married after this. And... do lots of other stuff, too, okay?” He smirks with soft eyes.

Eerie’s spiral totally halts and she turns red all over, shocked. Did he just say that? “O-okay,” she hiccups, “...In the Fair Garden dock? on a boat? And we’ll have an orchestra...”

“No. We can’t afford that. Let’s keep our fantasies realistic, or it sounds creepy like we’re actually gonna die.” He snorts.

Eerie’s eyes are frightened but her lips still twitch into an awkward smile, heart a little lifted, yet still so pained and afraid to be separated.

The prisoner guard clears their throat uncomfortably. “We need to go.”

Connor nods at them then quickly holds Eerie behind her neck, scritching her feathers a little before pulling her into a kiss, his warm tongue against hers startling her, but even more— she feels something hard and cylindrical being pushed into her mouth, and she blinks. What is he passing to her? She quickly finishes the kiss dreamily, as to not seem too shocked. He smiles at her with flash of grief and uncertainty, but also hope as he stands up. He finally tears his eyes away from her and is pushed out Eerie’s sight, the cell gate slamming behind him, leaving her to feel panicked yet again in the small space without him. But she tries to breathe. She tries to stay present like she’s learned to do. She spits the unknown item into her lap. A very slim, metal cylindrical container. She shimmies it between her knees, and lifts her knees up to her mouth, and she pops the lid off, and 5 lock picking tools and a demagnetizing strip spill out into her lap. She gasps, almost a laugh, her heart suddenly clasping onto firm hope.

A small, rolled up piece of paper also fell out. She unrolls it again with her knees. It seems to be a map of the floor written in the tiniest handwriting, with the thinnest pen. She flips it over in case she misses anything, and thank God she did.

If anyone can do this, you can.

I’ve always loved you.

-C

Eerie’s heart stammers and explodes and swoons and bursts with love and fear and hope and joy and determination and anxiety and belief all in the form of fireworks behind her eyes, tears spilling out, as well as a crazed giggle, she bites her lip, as she turns bright pink, her whole body being jolted alive with the rush of flattery, and the shocking power of requited love. She has to catch her breath, but this time in a good way. Only Connor could leave her smiling like an idiot in a filthy, dark, hopeless dungeon.