Calling your mom Ma'am is definitely a thing in southern US states. I remember when I was a kid my cousins came up from NC and it weirded me out that they kept calling their mom ma'am. I live in SC right now and nice lady I know who has a young son insists that he call her ma'am as well. Something about respecting your parents, but as someone from the north where ma'am is more formal and used for like... customer service and stuff, it strikes me as weirdly devaluing for the kind. Chalk it up to culture clash I guess.
IIRC, they're not in the equivalent of the south, though? They're in the Delaware/Maryland/Virginia area. EDIT: What Acey said.
Didn't Connie say the Maheswarans had moved a lot? Maybe it got picked up earlier on? (I agree on the culture clash and the whole ma'am thing seeming weird. Tho I might call my mom ma'am if I was in serious trouble.)
Yeah, but Connie and her parents used to move around a lot and that's one reason why she doesn't have a lot of friends IIRC. Even if I remember it wrong, it doesn't rule out having it as part of her mom's upbringing. Also idk if it's just because I'm from NY, but I definitely consider Maryland and Virginia to be southern states, since they are bellow the mason-dixon line. Pennsylvania and New Jersey are as far south and west as the Northeast region goes. maryland and bellow are the southeast, and ohio and west are midwestern.
Hm, yeah. To me calling a parent ma'am or sir means that you are seeing them as an authority figure like a teacher rather than as family, and it feels disconnected-from-family/like a generally pointless but visible show of parent's authority, so a kid doing that pings me in the Wait What No. But it'd make sense if it's an actual normal family thing that I've just never encountered.
@Acey can we talk about PearlRose yes/no/maybe? Because I like what you're saying but I'm also a sucker for overwrought pining and I would really, really love to see fic about Rose being condescending but also thinking of her as a person even if she doesn't understand the implications of a romantic relationship, or treats her relationship with Pearl the same way she treats her relationships with humans (entertainment) but still treating her better/more radically person-like than most Homeworld gems and askjdlfjsdfjk Actual Maryland Southerner chiming into say yes, DelMarVa is the setting and yes, southerners call their parents ma'm. The thing with Maryland is most of the population is clustered around DC or Baltimore, both of which are liberal cities, so the liberal population far outweighs the rural Conservative and hence some people get the impression Maryland is not Southern. But it is. It absolutely is. Fusion Cuisine is kinda... meh. I liked Alexanderite. I don't feel it was particularly well written. And I do like that Connie's overbearing parents were eventually addressed and not just handwaved.
Yeah, seconded. I don't have any problems with Fusion Cuisine on that count. Mostly I didn't like it because I was feeling secondhand (thirdhand?) embarrassment and panic on Connie's behalf the whole time.
I found Fusion Cuisine uncomfortable because of embarrassment squick and also because I love Connie, but she kinda fucked up by telling her parents Steven had a heteronuclear family. She is a kid and it is understandable and all but I had trouble understanding why heteronuclear was the thing. Maryland is totally Southern. My dearest friend in the history of ever is from there. Also, West Virginia seceded from Virginia to join the Union, but it is also Southern culturally.
Oh, definitely! It's something I'd love to see examined in more detail, and I'm all for that, be it in fic or even in canon. I just don't think, between the extreme power imbalance and Pearl's brainweird and Rose's tendency to be condescending towards those "below" her (which is probably a lot of Gems, even assuming that she was actually a Quartz and that the Pink Diamond theory is false--Quartzes seem to be pretty highly-ranked, if Peridot's commentary and Jasper's status are any indication), that it would be healthy.
Same! Why couldn't they tell them the almost-truth that Rose died? Then Connie's parents would feel like asses demanding to see both of Steven's parents... xP
Because Connie is a child with rigid, controlling parents who has learned that her parents want her only to interact with things that are Totally Normal and Definitely Not Lower Class, and to a kid growing up in a modern USAdian analogue culture, a middle-class, heterosexual, nuclear family is what they've had drilled into them as 'normal'. It's entirely possible she considered and discarded other options of what to tell her parents, even though they were closer to the truth and thus an easier lie to uphold, because she felt her parents would reject anything abnormal and she'd lose her only friend. Considering how hard it's been for Connie to reason with her parents by herself and have them accept what she says, and how they only have come to unbend when faced with extraordinary evidence that their rigidity and controlling behavior is harmful and not founded in reality, I can totally understand why she'd want to try, in her childish way, to make her friend seem to them to be as acceptably normal as possible.
Southern USer here, and I can't even count the times I've been told "you say ma'am, not 'what' when I call you", mostly by my stepmom but also by teachers and coaches. Fusion Cuisine made me uncomfortable because I have an embarrassment thing, but the phone conversation sounded entirely normal to me. My mom didn't enforce it with her, but "yes ma'am" was my expected response to any other female authority figure. Same thing with my best friend, and she's from Virginia. I did think Connie's parents were weird in that they're really aggressively Normal (in the expected societal norms sense) in the context of a show that is really not about the expected middle class lifestyle, but in general, even the episode that showed how controlling they can be, Connie's over scheduled life and the way they parented didn't strike me as off, because most of the (very firmly upper middle class) people I grew up around led lives almost exactly like that. Almost everyone in my high school and neighborhood had too many extracurriculars and lied to their parents a lot, and none of their parents knew a lot about them. Nightmare Hospital was actually the first notion I had that people with "normal" non-abusive families weren't necessarily like that. So, y'know, go SU for showing me that.
Oh yeah to throw in my experience-- I'm mostly from Florida, and my parents weren't even strict and I'm not that formal with them, but if they're telling me to do something, I'll probably respond with a yes ma'am or yes sir. My parents actually told me to ma'am and sir my friends' parents and I was always told I was really respectful kid, lol.
I was actually born in the south (North Carolina), but I was young enough when I moved to California that I don't remember the customs as well. I do remember NC being a lot more...formal, I guess? In regards to talking to adults, anyway. Like, in the part of CA I grew up in, most adults went by their first names with their kids' friends (so my friend Emily's mom was Kirstin instead of Ms. Olsen, my friend Rowen's mom was Laura instead of Ms. Rinaldi, my friend Paul's mom was Annette instead of Ms. Sweet...). My understanding is that that's also atypical, and that my area was just really laid-back, but I can definitely see a culture clash being a thing in general.
Re: why not "died in childbirth", I would guess that Connie told them about "Steven's mom" at some point, meaning either Garnet, Amethyst, or Pearl, and then that was that? She may even had said that "she" wasn't his biological mom, his biological mom died in childbirth. But I assumed it was for referring to the gems. Also, I had no idea about all this ma'am stuff! Interesting to know.
It is utterly baffling to me to learn that calling parents ma'am and sir is normal in the South US. Thanks for sharing your experiences! Granted every time I think of that I still reel in confusion. I'm more used to calling my friend's parents, or sometimes family friends, uncle or auntie (tío y tía). I have generally been good at adapting to differences in cultures depending on city and country, (the trick is to err on the side of very polite, especially as children. We're well received this way and apparently polite but eager children are very endearing) but that would have thrown me in for a loop. It still is throwing me in for a loop. It makes no sense to me and I'm having trouble absorbing this even with evidence!
it has been my experience that sir and ma'am is for any family member grandparent or older, parents when you are in trouble, teachers, and strangers. i've also had family friends called aunt (name) or uncle (name) even though they weren't blood related to me. i'm from texas though, and that's usually considered as south as you can get in the US (even though it's not geographically true). sorry for the late addition to the convo, just wanted to add my two cents. edit: i also used to get confused about which was which to my family's amusement, like calling my great grandpa Ma'am all the time. lil me did not understand gender at all.
Laser Light Cannon hooked me on the series, because watching scenes with Greg is really nostalgic for me. He's like... the laid back and funny parts of my dad, and the musician who drives a van who kinda needs direction in life part from my step-dad. My stepdad even taught me how to play instruments like Greg and Steven. Greg is one of my favs man. I don't care if he's problematic dad cause my parents are problematic too. He gives me the warm nostalgia fuzzies.
