Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.
On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.
In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.
In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.
Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.
Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.
Okay, but like… While I love this, I think you’re putting the cart before the horse!
What if it’s not that humans were cultural imperialists, but rather that “human” is a social construct? Humans are the “default”, the “youngest race”, and often have the most visible genetic diversity. And although only a few races bother to have a name for part-human hybrids, mixed-race romances are attested to in plenty of stories.
So what if “human” is the word for the product of millennia of introgressive hybridization? What if “human” is the word for a genetic “mutt”, someone who’s a smidgen of most races, interbreeding for so long that they’ve become something new?
Or what if Common is taught as a religious language, like Hebrew and Arabic are in our world, and humans just happen to come from the same area where the prophet-bookwriter came from, so they speak the language natively?
Or what if humans are the language-nerds of the universe, the only race that goes around inventing dozens of new languages just for fun? So when there’s a new spell or invention, or when you need to translate a concept, you turn to the nearest human and go “hey, come up with a word for this.”
(This also explains why some spells have great names, and some are damned ridiculous. Like Mr. Tenured Elf Professor is going to do research to double-check his TA’s spell names?)
(”Smith, give me a name for this spell.” “Fuck, I don’t know, it’s fire that’s sorta like an arrow, right? Call it a fire arrow?”)
(Also: WAY too many things end up being dick jokes.)
in our dtd game, which is space fantasy, our gm has declared that ‘common’ is pretty much esperanto. it’s a constructed language designed so every species humans interact with can make/hear its phonemes. old earth languages still exist. murphy the space cowboy also speaks english, chinese, and a little spanish. he can swear in irish gaelic, though his accent is terrible. none of these are ‘common’; common is its own thing.
In the heart of the fairy mound, there were two identical
cradles, each with an identical infant inside.
“One of these babies is the one you bore,” said a fairy.
“The other is the changeling we left. You may leave our hall with whichever
child you claim as your own. Choose wisely.”
“But they are both
my children,” the human mother protested indignantly.
The fairies whispered amongst themselves in surprise and
confusion. At last, one asked, “How do you mean?”
“I came to get back the child you stole from me, the one who
is mine by blood. I never agreed to give my adopted child back to you.”
Perhaps her words touched the fairies’ hearts; or perhaps
her stubbornness impressed them; or perhaps they simply found the argument
amusing, novel enough to merit a reward.
She left the fairy mound, an infant in each arm, and brought
them home.
It’s hard to remember the first time it happened, isn’t it? It’s been said to you, around you, about you so many times that pinning it down to a first time feels as pointless as patterngift (because, really, who cares if you always know how to pair stripes with more stripes?). As soon as you hear the phrase, Good girls don’t, you have a million words, phrases, treatises ready to fill the space that follows. Good girls don’t curse, good girls don’t have sex, good girls don’t shout or drive fast or dream big.
But the one that haunts you is this: good girls don’t use firegift.
It’s not an official rule, and no one would tell you it was, but just the same, they’d repeat the rule-that’s-not-a-rule and look at you with an expression as if to say Not my fault. This is just the way things are.
Gifts arrive sometime in your late teens. You know this. You can sort of judge when it might come based on when your parents’ did, but like your first period, it’s always a surprise. When you were very small, you imagined what it would be like to have firegift. You ran around with the girls and boys in your neighborhood battling villains made of ice or wood or who breathed combustible gasses, and you took all of them down with your own two hands, blessed by firegift. When you were a little older still, you heard the story of girls in other countries who kept their families alive with the simplicity of their gift. You heard the story of the woman saint, given firegift to save an entire people.
But at some point, you realized those were the exceptions. Those were the girls who weren’t like other girls. And their stories were qualified by others.
By the pilgrim girls who didn’t know any better and set fire to an entire colony one hard winter.
By the slave girls who were deemed too dangerous on account of their gifts and were murdered on discovery.
By the immigrant girls, penniless and starving, turned away at the gates.
By the lesbian girls incarcerated and drugged until fire was nothing more than a distant memory.
That doesn’t happen any more. At least, not in the same way. In today’s world, a girl with firegift can have a mostly normal life. She can go to school, get a job, find love, but she won’t ever be quite like other girls.
You know about those girls. They are sharper, they are stolen kisses and cigarettes and combat boots. They are confidence and wicked smiles and tattoos. They do things other girls don’t and maybe that other girls shouldn’t. You’ve heard them say it, Not like other girls. And it felt true, but also like something said about them before it was said by them.
You’ve spent days wondering what you’d do if yours was firegift. Hide it, probably. Join the ranks of “giftless” girls who are pitied, but not ostracized. It’s more common for girls to go giftless than for boys to, and no one thinks twice about it.
No one in your family has firegift. There’s no reason for you to worry over it the way you do, but on a random day in August, as you sit on your bedroom floor picking out the perfect outfit for the first day of your senior year, your hands spark and catch fire. You clap them together immediately.
The first thing you do when the fire is gone is check to make sure you are alone. You are. The second thing you do is look in the mirror to see if anything else about you has changed. It’s a strange impulse. Gifts don’t come with physical changes, but you feel different, so you peer into the mirror to see if anyone might tell by looking at you that you’re no longer like other girls.
Can they?
Probably not.
For a moment, your mind fools you into thinking things are as simple as they were when you were small. You feel the thrum of power in your fingertips, in your very heart, and you are eager to open your hands again and fill them with fire.
Firegift. You have it.
Now, you panic. Your mind fills with stories about good girls and other girls and you wonder where you fit between them. Is there even space between them? You discover you have so many questions and if another gift – any other gift – had been the one you ended up with, you’d have answers. You know exactly how the world opens up for those with numbergift, with earthgift, with musicgift. And for anything you didn’t immediately know you’d be able to Google! Can you Google? Does someone monitor questions about firegift? Will they track you down? Alert your parents?
Downstairs, you hear your parents clattering around in the kitchen, prepping dinner and pouring their evening glass of wine. You try to imagine what it will be like to tell them and see the panic and sorrow on their faces. You try to imagine what life will be like now that you’re not like other girls.
And then you stop. You look at your hands. You palms are open, empty. They are marked by the same lines that have always been there, your thumbs are disproportionately shorter than the rest of your fingers, and the underside of the knuckle on the middle finger of your left hand is scarred from a childhood fight against an imagined ice villain. These are the same hands you’ve always hand. You are the same girl you’ve always been.
And that’s when you understand. The girls who are not like other girls were created by the same stories that told you what good girls are and what they aren’t.
You have firegift. And you are exactly like other girls.
Natalie C. Parker is the author of the Southern Gothic duology Beware the Wild, which was a 2014 Junior Library Guild Selection, and Behold the Bones (HarperTeen). She is also the editor of Three Sides of a Heart, a young adult anthology on love triangles publishing from HarperTeen, Dec. 19, 2017. She is the founder of Madcap Retreats, an organization offering a yearly calendar of writing retreats and workshops.
I have this headcanon that Takao is super wooby lovey dovey when he first wakes up cause he’s not coherent enough to be the absolute troll that he is 99% of the time
I have a midotaka situation
holyshitdonttalktomeaboutbackgrounds i dont even know what im doinnng
Lawful Good: lurked for a month before posting to consume all fan content in their area of interest, internalise tagging conventions, and learn what content is already well-represented and what is lacking. fills in gaps in the fandom oeuvre out of a sense of community responsibility. alerts people who were like “why isn’t there fic of this” that there is now fic of this and includes author’s notes acknowledging those people by name for inspiring said fic.
Neutral Good: writes fic in response to prompts or community discussion. beloved by those who follow and interact with them. potential ouroboros relationship with fanon, where they both contribute to the development of fanon conventions and perpetuate them.
Chaotic Good: “I know no one asked for this but the idea wouldn’t leave me alone so HERE, HAVE THIS THING THAT I POURED AN UNREASONABLE AMOUNT OF MY LIFEFORCE INTO. FREE ME FROM THE GRIP OF THIS FEVERED MUSE”
Lawful Neutral: scrupulously researched, impeccably canon-compliant fic. author may go out of their way to mimic the canon narrative style as closely as possible. readers’ comments are likely to include “wow, this feels like it could have been an actual episode of !” high proportion of missing scenes, alternate POV scenes, and character interactions that should have been given screentime in canon but were tragically underutilised.
True Neutral: had an idea, wrote it, and posted it. may not be aware of the fandom zeitgeist or may simply not care. doing their own thing and feeling the fulfillment of an idea properly manifested. lower average hitcount than many other alignments due to lack of engagement with fandom or fanon and potential redundancy to already-existing fanwork. may be dabbling in a fandom they have no specific intention to revisit.
Chaotic Neutral: AUs, expies, self-inserts, reader-inserts, reader-directed/choose-your-own-adventure fic, crack, etc. We’re all mad here! Mad and having so much fun.
Lawful Evil: “I have no justification and no excuse, but enjoy this exhaustively-tagged, morally unconscionable character torture! I sure did :)”
Neutral Evil: fic would not have existed if not for the motivating power of spite and frustration with the fandom (or, in certain end-of-the-bellcurve cases, the source media, but in general spite/frustration toward the source media is common in any alignment). whatever other motivations there may be, the fic is an express Take That of greater or lesser subtlety. this author is so mad. why is everyone doing this wrong? WHY MUST THEY BE THE ONE TO RIGHT THIS WRONG? THEY’LL SHOW YOU WHAT THIS CONTENT SHOULD BE. THEY’LL SHOW YOU ALL!!!
Chaotic Evil: wants someone to suffer. is it the cause of their spite, whom they are using Take That fic to call out? is it their readers, whom they are trolling, whether with badfic or with a poisoned-apple plot that seems to be all the reader desires before it takes a horrible twist? is it the creator(s) of the source media? it doesn’t matter, as long as someone experiences regret as a result of the fic’s existence.
