#vonmetternich

Tropes I Hate: Characters who are “Chosen Ones”...

Omg! I only knew about the self-chosen one [aka Frodo], but the others are cool too. Could you count Harry Potter as chosen by a person? Considering that that prophecy could be applicable to both him and Neville?

Harry Potter to me is a bit of a hybrid of good Chosen One tropes and bad ones: 

- The Bad: Harry is the chosen one, full stop. He perpetuates the old tired trope that only one person can Do The Thing (Kill Voldemort), and the narrative reinforces this by having him Do The Thing, as in he actually does kill Voldemort without there being any particular twist or consequence (he dies, but for like 5 minutes). 

- The Good: Over the course of the series, JKR does try to throw some nuance and lampshading in there. Harry isn’t the only one that prophecy could have applied to, which is good. There is an element of self-choosing, in that his parents took actions that make a more general prophecy which could apply to many people zero-in to only apply to only one. Sort of like how Soul Mates could theoretically be well done, it’s not that there’s only ONE possible person for you, there’s a bunch out there, but your life and choices can progressively narrow it down, you see? 

Another Good use of the Chosen One trope: Harry deals with consequences of being a chosen one which are negative as well as positive, he’s not universally lauded for being “chosen” and suffers a lot of grief for his celebrity status as a “Chosen One”.

Also Good, there’s some question as to whether the Wizard World itself was less prepared for Voldemort’s return, or even working as hard as they could have to dispatch him in the first place, because they had the Prophecy to sap some of their urgency to find other solutions and they didn’t come up with a lot of contingency plans if the whole “Harry Potter Will Save Us (Again)!” thing didn’t work out. (Yes I know that’s not universally true in the books, some did some didn’t, yada yada, I haven’t read them in ages.) Basically, the Chosen One trope realistically would create a problem of the “Bystander Effect” where other people don’t take actions because “someone else will handle it”.

lmao at the owl - what cartoon is he from again? it rings a bell but i can’t remember exactly

either just above the knee or else mid-thigh, nothing shorter

5: What is the prettiest language?

The ones I hear on public transport and can’t identify. I can’t hear where one word begins and where it ends, all I can hear is the music and intonations.

9: If you were granted a wish that allowed you to instantly be able to speak any language, which would it be?

Icelandic, probably. I tried several times on my own with icelandiconline.is (and it’s a fun method), but I’ve never managed to get past a certain point because I can’t really practice it outside of this website. 

18. Name a dead language that you wish to make a come back.

Etruscan! I remember when I was 14-15 and our history teacher told us after a whole lesson on them that their language was lost, and it was incredibly frustrating to know that only a couple of words had been deciphered.  

19. What is your native language / homeland famous for?

@vonmetternich

Oooh I really hope you get in! Good luck!

you can't post this and not give me the details

Ok, so I’m not going to quote long passages (too much typing, and I’m too lazy), but the gist is this: 

In 1698 some 1,500 Scots sailed to Darien in Panama to found a colony. Before they went, the directors of the trade company that financed the expedition (losing some 300,000 to 400,000 Scottish pounds in the process) interviewed one Lionel Wafer, a surgeon/buccaneer who had lived in Darien for a couple of months during the 1680s, about the living conditions, resources and indigenous population of Panama. I have no idea what he told them (there are, as far as I know, no records of the interview other than that it took place), but it did not deter them from their plans - even though Wafer’s published report of his stay in Panama is one long, continuous whine about the incessant rains and abysmal weather during the rainy season (with a couple of passages about the friendly local Amerindians and supposed gold deposits thrown in).  Well. They did get to Panama and started building fortifications (but little to nothing else, especially no fields for crops) because they were afraid of the Spanish, and rightfully so. Unfortunately, what seemed to be a brilliant, defendable place for fortifications turned out to be a swamp and thus a crappy place for a long-term settlement. Enter our friends thyphus, dysentery, yellow fever and malaria, and you end up with death rates of 10 to 15 people a day. So the sources basically go from “this is paradise on earth” to “shit, shit, we’re all dying” in a matter of months, unless you count the official reports they wrote home, which still claimed that everything was peachy. Add to that a healthy dose of clan rivalries (because this is a Scottish colony, after all), a bunch of Highlanders who only spoke Gaelic, one translator who spoke Spanish (which the indigenous Kuna spoke more than English), incompetent leadership/quarrels among the leading councillors, and lack of food and alcohol, and you get one happy colony.  The end of this part of the story is that whoever had survived this part of the ordeal left for Jamaica and the North American colonies (probably some 700 people), with only about 300 ever making it back to Scotland because unfortunately diseases don’t stop just because you’re on a ship (there is also the minor issue of King William’s III. memorandum forbidding assistance to the colonists, but that is an entirely different topic).  HOWEVER, since reports from the colony were mostly positive, a second expedition set sail for Panama before they learned that the first settlers had abandoned the colony. (There is some debate about whether the directors of the Company of Scotland knew but decided to send off the second expedition anyway.) Rinse and repeat the above, only this time the Scottish surrendered to the Spanish after being besieged for a couple of weeks, during which time (supposedly) more people died from diseases than from the actual attack. Of these settlers, about 100 made it back to Scotland, the rest died or ended up somewhere in the Caribbean or North America. (And yes, that’s about 2,000 of 2,500 people dead on the journeys or somewhere in the Caribbean.) I’m not gonna go into detail about the reactions back in Scotland, but they did include a pamphlet war where everyone blamed everyone else for the failure of the colony, the lynching of some unfortunate Englishmen, and such minor things like the Act of Union. Oh, and then some people (most certainly not looking at you, William Paterson) had the audacity to propose the same bloody stupid scheme to William III. again in 1701. The fuck? 

(In all fairness - the Spanish commanders also complain about diseases and the incessant rains, but they do seem to have their shit together much better.)