Spoiler: Incest shipping Oh my godddddd I recently got into a fandom that straight up has Supernatural levels of subtext between the main siblings and And All the other fans are Purity Brigade type uglysob (I mean I AM NOT JOKING, the undertones are so blatant and pervasive that I'm half-convinced the creator ships it on the sly. There is one fic!! ONE!!!)
I just... Really miss the days when you could ship a pair of brothers and nobody particularly gave a fuck. And you didn't have to wade through an entire sea of kiddos writing essays on Why You Should Feel Bad to get to the actual goddamn fic I swear to god
I am going to sneak into the houses of all the Arknights wiki admins and seed all of their carpets with Legos. The Legos will all be engraved with "STOP BEING ANTISEMITIC" in very small writing.
The other sides say, "CONSIDER TALKING TO A JEWISH PERSON," "CITE YOUR PLAGIARIZED WEIBO POSTS," and "YOUR HEADCANONS DON'T GO IN THE MAIN PAGE." If it's one of those funny-shaped Legos I might be able to find room to complain about how bad they are at identifying birds, too.
Another thing that galls me is they're using the Weibo intro posts as sources, not only uncited, but also completely untranslated - even after five years! Not even a copy of the Google translate version that Reddit and Gamepress will usually toss up for new character info posts! I know everyone has access to automated translation these days, but come on.
hoooooo boy. Okay. The short version is, "the people who run the fan wiki for a game I play are absolutely convinced that the man-eating demons are an allegory for Jewish people and put this in the trivia and lore sections of as many pages as possible," but this is doing a disservice to the fact that they have somehow managed to achieve a brand new form of antisemitism when there were already so many forms of it out there. The less reductive version is... well, going to take me a while to type up, lolsob.
So! Arknights is a gacha game, set in a fantasy world with its own history and ecology, populated by catgirl-style furries. But it is made by people who clearly love Metal Gear Solid with all their hearts, so in order to be able to fit in a MGS-typical amount of speeches about the socioeconomic ramifications of changes in the balance of military power in post-Soviet Russia, most of the countries and many of the factions in that fantasy world are very obvious parallels to things in the real world. For instance, there's a country called "The Columbian Union" which is extremely powerful but a relative newcomer on the international scene, having broken away from the Victorian Empire while they were at war with Gaul. It's voraciously expansionist, its logo is a star, and it loves to talk about how much freedom its citizens have but everyone knows it's really a corporatocracy. It invented hot dogs and rock-and-roll. The first storyline where we went there was set in a for-profit prison and one of the characters was forced to take a job as a hitman because she couldn't afford her father's medical bills without insurance. There is zero subtlety here. However, they're smart enough about it to have a pretty good sense of how much they need to abstract, both to make the setting still feel like its own world and to make the sociology lectures make their thematic points better. An excellent example is the highly-stigmatized magic disease, oripathy, that the player organization is dedicated to seeking a cure for: in writing about it they've very obviously taken inspiration from cancer, leprosy, HIV/AIDS, and pneumosilicosis, among other things, which means the metaphor is flexible enough to talk about a lot of different angles of Shit That Happens IRL while still being its own thing as a fantasy worldbuilding element. But the one group that's always stuck out in all the very obvious theming and parallels are called the Sarkaz. The other races are mostly named things like "Feline" and "Caprinae" and "Vouivre" and "Ægir" and "Sankta"- you can usually guess what the race's animal theme is from just the name, and even if you can't, the word origin is pretty obvious. But nobody has ever been able to figure out an etymology for "Sarkaz." It sounds a little like the word "sarcasm" and its etymological roots, but there's no obvious thematic connection. It's the only race name that seems to just be a totally made-up word. Additionally, while Arknights is very careful to not have any race exclusively found in one country or any country exclusively populated by one race, you can still very obviously tell that, e.g., a majority of the German Leithanien population is goats, or that any given Lupo might have family in Italy Siracusa. However, there's no such pattern for the Sarkaz. While there is, technically, a Sarkaz nation called "Kazdel," it's a war-torn, blighted hellhole that was founded relatively recently and collapsed into civil war very shortly afterward, and probably more Sarkaz characters have zero connection to or knowledge of it than otherwise. It became clear as more of the story unfolded that this is because for most of recorded history, the Sarkaz have lived as nomadic tribes, frequently scraping a living as mercenaries. They are hated and feared and subject to sometimes-extreme racism, and the fact that they're so frequently pushed to the margins of society and forced to make a living through cruelty and violence makes it even easier for them to be scapegoated, and, well... Their animal theme is demons. Horns, pointy tails. Angel people who lose their angelic blessing grow horns that make them look like Sarkaz. There are subgroups of Sarkaz who are themed for various Halloween monsters- vampires, gargoyles, banshees. A lot of them have extremely weird and extremely scary powers that in some way involve death; there's one particularly memorable Sarkaz enemy type that will literally eat a character whole. To me, who can fucking read, the reason it's hard to match them up precisely to any real-world culture or ethnic group is because they're the demonized- it's about all the ways fear and oppression and hatred and violence feed into each other. Because the writers needed a flexible metaphor for this, the same way they needed oripathy to be a flexible metaphor, especially because the Sarkaz and their history are crucial to the central plot, because Spoiler the setting is the post-post-apocalyptic remains of a failed planetary colony, and the Sarkaz are the descendants of the native inhabitants of the planet who were displaced. Of course they didn't want to make them analogous to one specific real-life group while telling that story! The implied statements about real life would be bonkers! But before we had nearly as much information as we do now, a few people drew a line from the fact that the Sarkaz are an outcast diaspora people seeking a lost homeland to the fact that one of the more prominent Sarkaz characters, Mudrock, summons giant constructs made of earth and stone to fight, and went "Is this anything? I think it might be???" This was not, like, totally unreasonable speculation at the time; it still would have been fairly yikes because we did already have "blood magic" in the mix, but Mudrock's hammer has a verse from Proverbs written on it and some early translations of enemy names called the constructs "golems." However, it was officially translated as "colossus" instead, and later story also made it pretty obvious that "creating giant constructs to fight" is a German thing, not a Sarkaz thing. Which IMO should have been the end of it. The ranking editors at Arknights Dot Fandom Dot Com (now moved to Dot Wiki Dot GG) did not agree with me. The wiki is good at having things that can be directly copy-pasted from the game very quickly. I appreciate this. It is not good at reading. I do not appreciate this. Their mods and admins frequently write incredibly wrong things into lore and trivia articles, framed as straightforward fact, because they think they are very smart and very good at reading and writing even though they do things like write "this character song is based on this famous piece of classical music" and then link a Youtube video of a different piece with the same title. This is why my Discord status message for weeks now has been "Banned for bird fact crimes". They have decided that the Sarkaz are absolutely, definitely, an allegory for Jewish people. Therefore, because they've decided that already, they only look for potential interpretations of Sarkaz things of uncertain provenance that match this assumption... as "matching this assumption" is determined by people who frequently fail to understand the basic facts of things that occur in the story of a gacha game about catgirls with guns, let alone "anything about Judaism whatsoever." "Alma" is the word for "world" in the ancient Sarkaz language? The fact that it means "soul" in a bunch of languages is irrelevant, the only thing we need to mention is that it means "young woman" in Hebrew, that is definitely relevant! A group of Sarkaz characters use words in ecclesiastical Latin? Catholicism is totally evidence that they're Jewish! What should we caption this image of a Sarkaz character casting magic spells by writing? How about the first verse of the Gospel of John, literally anything from the Bible that uses the word "word" must be relevant! Every single Sarkaz character name and word that hasn't yet gotten an official Anglicization gets tortured into Totally Definitely Hebrew that Totally Definitely Doesn't Sound Demented To Hebrew Speakers. Every time the official Anglicization comes out, it's totally different from what they said, so then they come up with a tortured etymology for that one too. Innocent, unsuspecting people look up the wiki page on a character who hasn't been released yet and see his real name listed as "Haphanuel" and assume it was based on, like, anything, without knowing that this romanization of 哀珐尼尔 was written in purely because someone could bash it into a shape they thought they could come up with a Hebrew translation of (without speaking Hebrew). There is a character who was recently released who is named "Wiš'adel"; this is pronounced "Wish-a-dell," and her character materials explicitly spell out that this is the etymology- the "del" is as in "Kazdel," ergo, "Wiš'adel" is "wishing for a homeland." The wiki "helpfully" provides a pronunciation guide... which links to the Wikipedia page for help with Hebrew pronunciation. Which would have told them that the phoneme "W" does not exist in words of Hebrew origin. It is used exclusively in LOANWORDS. You will notice that all of this is deeply antisemitic. You will also notice that, thanks to that spoiler up there, it is also incredibly fucking yikes in a totally different direction at this very particular moment in world history. And they insist this is a blue jay.
oh my god lol............yeah insisting the demon species that purposefully is not any real world group and is used to represent anyone pushed to the margins of society is actually only representative of jews is. wildly antisemitic. like i understand the leaps of how they got there but think about it for just a fucking second before doing [gestures] All That on the wiki. thank u for the sparknotes
There's another detail that's easy for new players to miss, too - so, the game in its original Chinese will often have characters speak a different language, usually by going [X profanity] or [Y language] before a line. The English translation sometimes sticks with that, but more often they'll directly translate the line into whatever language is clearly being referenced or add something that seems fitting. So we get a random NPC cussing out another NPC in colloquial Chilean Spanish and a bird girl threatening someone with the first line of Catullus 16. However, there is also the Sarkaz language, which is - almost always - left as just [Sarkaz language]. There are a few exceptions like the aforementioned 'alma' example (which incidentally, the wiki said was totally relevant because the world is like a woman that makes lives). Now, at one point, to be completely fair, the translators did translate a [ancient sarkaz language] line into Hebrew. To be even more fair, that was then removed from the game, and someone playing that now would have no idea it had ever happened. Which to me says that someone actually noticed that and considered it wrong enough to justify removing - that the dev team, at higher levels, does not want to give the player a specific IRL culture for the Sarkaz and will have the game be patched to avoid that.
this is structured like a good news bad news post good news: did a fandom event this month and it has Rejuvenated me i am Excited About Fandom and fic exchanges again (preparing to sign up for several more as we speak!) and also everyone was LOVELY i had such a good time chatting with people!!! bad news: Spoiler: references to not-very-old past Kintsugi drama i then joined a new multifandom discord server after being invited by some potential new friends FROM that exchange and I was very excited about it (most of my friends are moving away from fandom! I need new ones who are just as stubbornly staying in here as I am!) and uhhh Chel Is Here And Really Active is this an actual problem? no probably not. but it's making me way less inclined to write in chat because i Do Not Want To Talk To Chel, and writing in chat is how you make new friends! sighs.
Spoiler: Continued reference to Kintsugi drama FWIW as someone also in that server (I assume the same one anyway), blocking someone is totally acceptable, and shouldn't affect being able to talk to and connect with other people
Spoiler: we keep goin I thought blocking someone on discord only stopped them from dm-ing you? does it do more than that? the thing I'm concerned about is (i think) mainly like. if i chat and chel responds being friendly then I have to either be friendly back (don't want to.) or ignore and come off like a jackass or somehow mark/explain that I don't want to interact and why, thus dragging drama into server where drama does not belong also i can get vaguely obsessive about when i minorly dislike someone and have easy access to them saying stupid shit so in the interest of me not losing a truly ridiculous amount of time doing things like digging into chat history like I'm researching for a 2 hour youtube video i should possibly just leave the server unless discord blocking also mutes the person you've blocked so you can't interact with or spy on THEM :')
Discord blocking hides the blockee's messages (although you can still click through to see them), and also stops the blockee from adding emoji reactions to your messages or using the reply function to your messages. They can still see your messages, and won't know they're blocked unless they try to interact with you, but if you have the self-control to ignore the "Click to see blocked content" option then you won't see anything they say! (And trust me, it's a big server, there are others who have various frequent chatters blocked and it has yet to blow up into wank <3)
If you guys use Discord on your computers, consider downloading Vencord or BetterDiscord. They're client mods (which are technically against TOS but no one has ever been banned for just using them, in fact I don't ever recall reports of people being banned period unless they were using custom extensions to do shady shit like spy on mod chats - which are not vanilla features in either mod's case) that both have a plugin that completely hides a blocked users messages, including the message that says it is blocked, and there is no gap in the chat, either, leaving you in blissful ignorance. (Also, if it's the EOD server, maybe I'll see ya'll in there! I haven't said anything in there yet cause nerves tm but.)
Oh, BTW, despite the Arknights wiki admins being so steeped in cultural Christianity that they managed to achieve a trifecta of Messianic Zionist blood libel by accident, they also know very little about Christianity! Among other things, they decided a Zerg-style hive mind was a reference to Legion because their name is localized as "We Many," apparently without noticing either that this is literally the exact opposite of what "Our name is Legion, for we are many" actually means, or the incredibly explicit connection drawn between joining the Cthulhu Collective and Holy Communion. And Karrin pointed out yesterday that for all they got snooty at her for criticizing putting "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God" on a picture of a character casting spells by writing and told her it was about him being analogous to "an Old Testament prophet" (he is not), they sure missed the fact that in the scene that picture is from, he is fighting the king of vampires. They think he is "an Old Testament prophet," and he is literally parting a red sea (of blood), and it apparently never crossed their minds that that line is about Jesus and they could have looked for one about Moses.
