Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]

“I am reckoned a horrid brute because I had not been cowardly enough to lie down for them under such trying circumstances, and insults to my people.” - Ned Kelly

Any pronouns but he/they, unless you buy me dinner first.

  • 868 Posts
  • 5.99K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: August 18th, 2023
  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.nettoMovies & TV@hexbear.net•Matt Groening on the Future of ‘Futurama’ as the Series Gets Another Finale: ‘We Will Rise Again’English
    8·
    3 days ago

    I remember liking “classic” Futurama (seasons 1 to 4, maybe? or maybe just the whole show pre-2020? I’m not sure) when I was a kid, but 2020s Futurama… All I can recall of what I saw of that is that I found it tedious and unnecessary, and in particular there was an eyeroll-worthy joke where there’s a stand-up comedian robot who makes a joke about “non-binary robots”, and when the crowd boos this, the stand-up says, “wow, PC crowd!” (♫ FOR DET BETYR TO TING OG DET ER PÅ EN MÅTE KRAVET FOR NO’ SÅNT YEAHBECAUSE IT MEANS TWO THINGS AND THAT’S KIND OF A REQUIREMENT FOR THAT SORT OF THING YEAH ♫) — as far as non-binary jokes go, it’s harmless, but it’s still tryhard as hell. Apparently a lot of other non-binary people liked that joke, though, so maybe I’m just a sourpuss.

    CW enbyphobia

    But I recently watched The Beast with a Billion Backs, one of the 2008 direct-to-video films that make up Futurama season 5. This was a bit of Futurama content that I didn’t watch as a kid, and evidently jokes about non-binary people aren’t new to Futurama because the main antagonist of The Beast with a Billion Backs is an alien of indeterminate gender who goes by shkle/shklem/shkler pronouns. Which is neat and could be called an homage to classic sci-fi like 1920’s A Voyage to Arcturus (which has aliens that go by ae/aer pronouns), but obviously the Futurama antagonist going by neopronouns is played for a joke, so the neopronouns aren’t used at all consistently, and when the neopronouns are used it reads to me as an “imagine correcting people’s pronouns, imagine going by neopronouns at all, couldn’t be me! these people who actually respect Yivo’s pronouns have been brainwashed by this toxic parasite!” type idea. For context, the movie was released right around the time when they/them was starting to take off as a pronoun for non-binary people, and in the decade or so preceding the movie’s release there had been some comparatively prominent figures who’d started openly going by neopronouns like ze/hir, including Leslie Feinberg in 2006.

    christmas-crab-legs You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. CēterumFurthermore cēnseōI think iūs auctōriscopyright esse dēlendummust be destroyed.

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.nettomemes@hexbear.net•Yemen’s governorates, translated literallyEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole about the etymology of Aden, and my findings are that there are competing claims about the origin of the name. (Note: I do not speak Arabic nor do I have an academic background in Semitic languages)

    Theory 1: Sumerian eden “plain, desert, steppe, open country” → Akkadian idīnum “desert, steppe, plain” → Arabic ʕadan “Aden”

    Theory 2: Akkadian adānum “fixed date, time limit, period of time” → Aramaic ʿeddānā “moment, season, age, time; (Hatra dialect) halting place, station, caravanserai” → dialectal Arabic ʕadān “particular time when something is set; place of remaining, spot where one bides; bank, shore, where water meets land, water end of a journey” → Arabic ʕadan “Aden” (either a direct descendant or a doublet).

    ʕadān is also where you get ʕadana “to reside in place; to stay, bide, remain; (with al-bilad) to settle a country, region” from, which is in Arabic script[1] spelled the same as ʕadan save for the diacritics, hence this map’s claim that that’s what Aden literally means. But it seems like the actual etymological meaning of Aden (in theory 2) is probably something closer to “the station, the inns, the pit stop, the rest area”, alternatively “the end of the line”, alternatively alternatively and most boringly just “the settlement” (Christmas Island sends its regards). The through-line in any case seems to be “this is a port where you can rest between your long voyage at sea and your long voyage over land”.

    Also, Sumerian eden and the unreconstructed proto-Semitic ancestor of Akkadian adānum have both been proposed as etyma of Eden of “garden of” fame, which means that there’s a good chance Aden is cognate with Eden either way.

    christmas-crab-legs You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. CēterumFurthermore cēnseōI think iūs auctōriscopyright esse dēlendummust be destroyed.

    1. I opted to omit Arabic script from this comment because the Unicode bidirectional text kept breaking on me, curses. ↩︎

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.nettoGames@hexbear.net•"Her hot wife" - [Neptunia]English
    5·
    5 days ago

    When I was designing the protagonist of my fanime, I was originally thinking of making xem a girl. One of the big reasons I made xem an enby instead was kinda just because I felt like breast anatomy was a bit of a pain (ba-dum-tss), and the cost of getting it wrong is, well…

    Screencap from YuruYuri season 3 episode 8, depicting the character Sakurako as a superheroine with exaggerated, poorly drawn breasts, next to the character Himawari depicted crying with concave breasts. Sakurako remarks, "What's with all the tears?"

    …Not that that would be anything strange for fanime, nyaa and dare I say desuu. And even if I was sticking to the boobless route, then there are tons of mid-teenage girls without boobs and tons of mid-teenage enbies with boobs, so that alone wasn’t what solidified Narazen’s gender identity for me. I guess it was more that if I was already thinking of having a comparatively feminine-presenting character be unboobed, that looking at all the potential reasons for why such a character would be unboobed, “xe’s enby” was the explanation I was most drawn to, both because fiction is lacking in enby (esp. neopronoun) representation, and because I could weave Narazen’s gender identity into the story in interesting ways.

    (Note: Embedded picture is from YuruYuri S3E8, the breasts are drawn poorly and exaggeratedly as a bit. This is a flat-chested character’s “revenge fantasy” against her buxom friend. The linked picture is of Raku-chan, whose name is a pun on “rack” as in breasts; protagonist of the infamous parody fanime Nyan~ Neko Sugar Girls.)

    christmas-crab-legs You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. CēterumFurthermore cēnseōI think iūs auctōriscopyright esse dēlendummust be destroyed.