Daily Entertainment

[bjornwilde]

Sorry the DE is late. I have the day off and slept in. So....umm...Luke Cage! Sweet Christmas is it good, amIright?

Topic, okay...how much does culture (racial or otherwise) play a part in your pup's narrative? How about in the narrative you bring to Milliways?

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Amelia: Culture doesn't play a huge part in the author's narrative, which honestly drives me a little nuts. I mean, the main characters are related to Quetzalcoatl and the only way you know they aren't from a white European heritage is that they tell you. Also, if Quetzalcoatl was a dragon, living in the world, why the hell did the Spanish invasion happen at all?

I try to bring in an Aztec or Mexican heritage to Amelia, but I worry I am a) only managing to bring it in as flavor, and b)am changing the pup too much away from the canon character.

Sam: Again, culture doesn't play a huge part in the narrative. Sam is a black guy and allowed to be such in the movies, but it is a white narrative he is involved in. They do bring his culture in with his musical tastes, language, and body language, but after watching Luke Cage, I feel I need to dig deeper into his culture. He's also from the Air Force and so a military culture will be part of him as well.

Izana: Culture plays into the narrative as etiquette, holidays, and food. Izana is from a thousand years in the future (or is it two?) and from a severely stunted social pool (i.e. humanity is being kept alive via cloning and genetic engenieering from a pool of thousands I would guess). Still, I try to bring in as much Japanese culture as I can make seem authentic, with an eye for cultural shifts.

Touji: Comes from a modern day Japan and I try to keep this in mind when I play him. Oddly enough, he is way more relaxed about culture than one might think and also comes from a closeted branch of society, and so society norms aren't as important to him.

Rollo: Definitely has cultural biases and filters in place. I need to look into actual Norse culture some more tbh, but so far I am just playing him as he is show to be in canon.

Sabine: I wish I had a clear idea of what Mandalorian culture actually is since the canon reset. I'd love a Sabine or Mandalore-centric book but I don't think I am going to get it.

[harryhotspur]

Hotspur was raised to be basically the platonic ideal of his culture-- a warrior wholly dedicated to fighting, brave, honorable, with ambitions related wholly to personal glory rather than to say overthrowing the state. One very popular reading of the play is that its central conflict is between that idealized chivalrous culture and more modern and realistic ideas of realpolitik. Guess which wins! Stepping into a place that doesn't at least recognize who and what Harry is, much less admire it, has been one of his major challenges in Milliways.

what is illyria where is illyria no one knows but Viola's Jacobean English culture is important in that it's more or less essential that she comes (at least imaginatively) from a place where people are what they seem to be. Dressed like nobility? You must be nobility. Dressed like a boy? You must be a boy. Etc.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato: Aspects of culture, especially in regards to traditionalism vs modernity, tend to factor pretty heavily into the Adventure kids' character arcs -- 01 and Tri both very much take the standpoint that modernity is positive and traditionalism is destructive, whereas 02 tends to flip the script a little and present modernity in a harsher light, and traditionalism in a gentler one.

In Yamato's case, his arc (and Takeru's? But to a lesser extent?) is heavily influenced by mid-late 90s Japan's ideas about divorce, and the idea that it should involve an entirely clean split between the two families. Like, a significant part of Yamato's abandonment issues and general gruffness stems from the fact that he gets basically completely separated from his mother and brother when he's seven or eight years old.

Hawke: Ehhhhh. Kirkwallians quite often make references to Hawke as a dog lord, which is a generally derisive term for Fereldans, and Kirkwall's attitude towards Fereldan refugees factors pretty heavily into the opening of the story, but that is -- probably it, unless we're counting cultural attitudes towards mages? Characters like Fenris or Merrill have culture play a much bigger part of their storylines, but Hawke more or less doesn't.