#irishness

This is a pro-Palestine account, if that wasn't clear. Miss me with your accusations of anti-semitism, I learned my anti-Zionism from Jewish women. Also, I refuse to be held to a higher standard than the people in Israel ALSO protesting this genocide.

I had nothing on me so I gave him a chocolate bar. It was on fucking Camden Street. The busiest party street in Dublin.

sure!

i’ll try to keep this as brief as possible since delving into ireland’s entire colonial past would take far too long, but the important bit is as follows: colonial powers seek to other and dehumanize colonized peoples in order to justify colonialism. one way to achieve this is by fixating on the magical and mythological elements of the colonized culture. after all, why should respect be afforded to a primitive and infantile culture? surely cultural imperialism should be enforced in order to civilise the savage barbarians mocked for their preoccupation with ‘leprechauns, rainbows and shillelaghs?’

the way that h2o approaches irish identity and culture is no different. whenever bella discusses the time she spent in ireland as a child, the audience is treated to a twee irish flute motif which evokes pretty much every misrepresentation of irish culture from ‘the quiet man’ to ‘wild mountain thyme.’ the place in which bella transforms is not temporally specific, as ‘the sea caves of ireland’ are about as much of a thing as ‘the tall buildings of ireland.’ we see a younger bella, uninhibited, playing in the green fields and down by the rocky cliffs, lost in a natural, primitive setting and embracing the magic of the noble savages (read with heavy sarcasm)

later, when the girls are trying to solve the mystery of the comet, bella references irish mythology surrounding the first appearance of the comet. the audience is subjected once more to the tired flute music, and we learn of the story of aoibhe eva, a mermaid who saved the irish people using the tower of light and disappeared without a trace

what’s the harm in an innocuous story about an irish mermaid, i hear you ask? against the backdrop of every single representation of irishness as superstitious, traditional, primitive, and backward, the comet plot is a cultural hangover of colonialism. consider the ways in which the h2o writers have approached the mythos of former mermaids prior to the comet: louise, julia, and gracie are alive within the current merms’s lifetimes, and their stories are not temporally nor culturally specific in the same way

the way that the h2o writers chose to represent colonised cultures is entirely bound up in colonialism. if bella had transformed in the english countryside, or if eva had been a mermaid from florida, would the effect have been the same? let us all be wary of representations of irishness—especially those which fixate on magic and folklore—even if such representations may seem ‘positive’ on the surface!

tl;dr: ireland is a real country with real people and big industrialized cities. at the time bella transformed ireland was at the height of an economic boom and is a prosperous, developed nation, not just rural towns where everyone tries to avoid fairy rings and tells tales about mermaids and selkies while playing dodgy irish flute music. jonathan shiff if we ever meet it’s on sight

Not Patty’s Day.

There’s not a huge amount of things that rile us Paddys up but I can guarantee you this one will. Now, I know it would appear to make logical sense that it would be Patty so let me explain.

Paddy comes from the Irish for Patrick, Pádraig. To make things even more confusing, depending on where you’re from in the old Emerald Isle, Pádraig is pronounced “paw-drig”, “pahd-rag”, “paw-rick”. I’m partial to “paw-rick” myself.

They’re all correct.

(Eat your heart out Villads with a silent “d”. Irish names are the kings of random silent letters. The traditional spelling of the name “Or-la” is “Orlaith”. Clearly the “ith” is silent. Clearly.)

If I understand this correctly: Andy’s old explanation was that “Andy 1” was an alter of Amy Player’s, with no knowledge of her, and Amy “gave her life” to him. Andy 1 was Irish and wrote Sluagh. Then, Andy 2 (the “real” Andy) got therapy and realized this Andy 1 was a delusion. Where, then, does Andy 2 come from? How does this story square with Andy’s claims that Amy gave her life to an alter that is now his true identity? How does Andy explain this tangled web of bullshit today?

So Irish Andy/Andy 1 - the false personality that was a delusion - had taken over Andy life and was running it as late as 2012, was using tumblr, and was basically identical to Andy in every way except he believed he was Irish? How is anyone ever going to trust that the current version of Andy isn’t another “alter” with a “delusion” that oh-so-happens to coincide with his interests? Who could possibly believe this shit at this point?

I’m not sure whether all three of these asks are from the same person, but it makes sense to answer them together. 

The short answer is that Andy never explicitly said that all the Irish lies came from an alter, but it’s pretty clear that’s what he wants people to believe. And yes, the Irish alter was pretty much indistinguishable from the Andy of today, aside from the ridiculous accent.

In November 2011, in a long message to Carlanime, Andy said that 14 months after Abbey called to say that she was never coming back to him, he (the original inhabitant of the body) “woke up” in an unfamiliar apartment with a cat and a roommate he didn’t know. He realized that a new alter must have taken over, and this one was such a wonderful person that he decided to give his entire life over to him. This new alter was going by Andrew Blake, the name Andy had legally adopted when he and Abbey were still in California, but had no knowledge of the real Andy or of Amy Player, Victoria Bitter, Jordan Wood, etc. 

In February 2012, he reblogged an image that he captioned, “Je suis ne sais pas ce que [literally, “I am I do not know what”] in all the ways that truly matter and none of the ways people think matters.“ Two days later, he told Carlanime in a Facebook message that he (the alter) had just realized that he was “a symptom of someone else’s psychosis”. Nothing much came of it at the time, as far as I can tell, but this was the seed of the schizophrenia narrative. Five months later, he was back home with his parents, who made him see a therapist.

In September 2012, after just two months of therapy, Andy allegedly integrated all of his alters and was cured of his delusions and hallucinations. That would mean, presumably, that he was back to being his original self, the person who was born into that body, and no one else. He said nothing about this in public at the time.

The alter that Andy had allowed to take over his body and his life was supposedly running the show all through the DAYDverse years and into 2012, so by implication, Andy was blaming the fake Irishness on that alter. All the lies about being 100% Irish, speaking “Gaelic” with his grandfather, going back to Ireland to fight on both sides of the Troubles, etc. were just the alter’s “fully realized backstory,” you see. He wasn’t really lying because the alter was the one who said all those things, and the alter genuinely believed them to be true. Again, Andy never went into all of that explicitly, but that seems to be what he wants people to accept as the truth.

Andy slipped up, though. More than once. In 2013-2014, well after he was supposed to be all better and fully integrated, he was still claiming that he was of 100% Irish ancestry on both sides, that he’d primarily spent his childhood with his “Irish grandfather”, and that he was (or once had been) fluent in Irish. None of those things is true. He has never addressed this, although it’s come up in anon communities and on AA blogs a number of times. Andy’s written several times about trying to sort out which memories pertained to himself, and which were left over from the alters (all of whom had extensive backstories), so I’m fairly certain that’s how he would justify it.

Like honestly, that was amazing.

In the beginning he sounded normal (to me at least :P) like he always does you know, the little hint of an accent in his voice.

And then as the video progressed, his voice got more thick with an Irish accent and he started talking more quickly and saying Irish...things (I don't know how to say it XD). But it was great to see him reminiscing on his past and childhood. I just thought that it was so nice to see him talking about the things he remembers and the things that make it happy.

And it was funny. Really funny, lol.

ALSO