[ SECRET POST #5226 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5226 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.



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02.
[Gong Jun as Wen Ke Xing in Word of Honor]


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03.
[Scrubs]


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04.
[Back to the Future]


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05.
[Star Trek - Picard]


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06.
[Fire Emblem]


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07.
[Joy of Life]






Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 20 secrets from Secret Submission Post #748.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You can speak for your own experience, but every member of a culture's diaspora has a unique relationship with their mother country. The author of this book series has the right to determine her own place in relation to Russian culture, and I'm not sure everything you've said about her connection to the culture or lack thereof is even accurate. How are we to know? The fact is, many children of the diaspora grow up outside of their parents' culture and struggle to reconnect to varying degrees, but my stance is that all attempts to interact with one's mother culture are valid if done in good faith. We can certainly criticize these attempts on literary merits -- lazy research is lazy research, no matter who's doing it -- but coming from my perspective as a person living within her birth culture and seeing many gatekeeping efforts directed at diaspora writers, this isn't really something I want to get behind.

And cultural appropriation may be intended to be a neutral term but its usage in this comment thread (and in most places on the Internet, honestly) certainly isn't. And that's why I think we should stop throwing it around casually when it's neither helpful nor accurate.

[(Anonymous)]

Ayrt

She has the right to claim many things, but if she doesn't distingush between male and famale names and doesn't know that you can't get drunk on kwas then I can call bullshit on her deep connection and I'm really tired of seeing the "well, she has some X ancestry" as some sort of argument that means that "ut's okay" that her writting is lazy and she did not are about the culture enough to do her research properly.

I have no desire to turn it into a deep discussion about disapora writers, because it's complicated, varies between racial and ethnic groups, and I do think there is a lot of difference between fully formed diaspora cultures and people who just happen to have some sort of ancestry, so let's say we agree to disagree and end it at that.

CA as a term might not be useful, but the whole discussion is tiring, because it keeps getting rephrased into "has she done something wrong" or "is she allowed to do this", when I'm mostly here being annoyed that she found Russia interesting enough to use it to get her (let's be hoenst, fairly standard) YA novel stand out, but did not take any care with how it looks to people who actually know this culture. This feels very annoying. That's all.

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly, I can't believe how much of a big deal the name thing is. Not only do fantasy stories use wack naming conventions all the time, but if you really have to find a logical real world explanation for it, well people with opposite sex names exist in many countries. And again, her connection doesn't have to be "deep". There is no "must have this level of cultural in-ness" prerequisite before you can engage.

I think if you assume that much malice in the author's intention then yeah, you're going to be annoyed.

[(Anonymous)]

Lol, it's fandomsecrets, we come here to air petty annoyances, and I certainly am not actually loosing any sleep because some American author or another once again proved that they can't be bother checking basic things up at any point in a lenghty publishing process or before they put millions of dollars in tv adaptation :) It's not the first time and it won't be last.

And really, I don't think there's a point in this discussion. You clearly have never had it done to your cultural signifiers by a representative of the globally dominant culture, so you can't imagine why it's annoying (mildly, but still). This conversation, with all its assertions that it can't be possibly a big deal to a native speaker to hear their language butchered (the pronunciation on the show is atrocious, but I guess I should just not hear it?), is honestly a bit patronising. But whatever, it's out there, people like it, it's a success, nothing will be changed in the future series. End of the story.