Comentario 2

Piensas.

• I was thinking a while back about the TSA and the full-body scans and strip-searches. And it occurs to me, that the Wat Tyler Rebellion, according to legend, happened because agents of the King strip-searched Tyler's wife. That is, medieval peasants—and this was the the bad, late part of the Middle Ages, the thing jackasses in later eras read back into the better times before it, the true Dark Age (worse than the one Charlemagne ended) that started some time between the ascension of Philip the Fair and the Black Plague—did not put up, nor expect to be asked to put up, with something the so-called citizens of a so-called republic are simply expected to put up with, without being asked.
  
  Then again, citizens of republics have historically been more given to lickspittle disregard for their own dignity in the name of brute creature comforts than the quaint cosplaying fetishists of the Renaissance and "Enlightenment" would have us believe. Panem et circi, medieval Venice, Renaissance Florence, Enlightenment anywhere—pretty much the biggest factor allowing the senates of those republics to be as jaw-droppingly corrupt as they more or less always were (and are), is that "citizen" is not actually a term to which any dignity actually attaches, save in legal theory.
  
  Personally I wish the history of this language were well-known enough that we could identify ourselves not as citizens, but as churls—freemen of our tribes, holding in our own right (not from a lord) but willing to follow our chieftains into battle if need be.
• "Churlish" derives from "churl" because, basically, the thanes and earls (that is, warrior-nobles and chieftains, or barons and counts) had an elaborate code of courtesy, that the average freeman was quite out of his depth in—though, of course, still so formal and courteous he'd raise eyebrows at a diplomatic dinner-party (at least one held outside Asia).
  
  Basically it was the difference between "an officer and a gentleman" and the sort of person R. Lee Ermey plays.
• I realized, why try reinventing the wheel coming up with languages for a D&D game? And no, I don't mean Tolkien. Do you know how many people think just using real-world names is a perfectly acceptable method? Look at the map of the world Warhammer Fantasy Battle takes place in sometime: "Cathay"? Really? "Araby?" At least modify it a little (and yes, I do mean Elder Scrolls' Nords and Bretons, who are exactly what they sound like).
  
  So I said, huh, let's apply a few sound changes, derived from the established portrayals of elves and dwarves, to two real-world languages I've got some practice in. My elvish is Japanese, and my dwarvish is Korean (trust me, Koreans are so much like most fantasy dwarves that if one of the Warcraft games had had a dwarf campaign, "Zerg" would not be what we call those people). Modified, though—does "Quonel wuthwaemas elnithamwel wattelwath" not sound elvish to you? Because it's just "Kono musume wa oniisan wo matteimasu" ("this girl is waiting for her brother").
  
  For my "common tongue", I use...Mandarin. It seems a poor fit at first, but then you remember all those vowels (i and e among others) that are pronounced with an intrinsic r-sound. Haudier Lir sounds like a vaguely Germanic fantasy name; it's actually the Chinese name Li Haojie.
• People who run manga sites need to be slapped, sharply and often, for their miscategorizations. Just because a story is heavy on action doesn't make it shonen, and just because it's about people's relationships doesn't make it shojo. I've seen Naked Ape series—all of which are josei—tagged as shonen, and series that not only have more fan-service than a wind-farm's mechanic, they ran in Shonen Jump, tagged as shojo.
  
  Also, while apparently yuri and shojo-ai have a whole lot of overlap—even publishers themselves use the terms interchangeably—shonen-ai and yaoi have basically none. Shonen-ai (or BL, for "boy's love", as it's known in Japan), is about romance between dudes. Frequently whether the relationship is romantic/sexual or just rather-too-passionate friendship is left deliberately ambiguous. Yaoi, on the other hand, is gay porn for a female audience. Learn the difference.
• And what's funny to me about yuri is, most of it's not about lesbianism; it's just got a "male gaze" viewpoint character who happens to be female. That's not the same thing at all, and if I see one more liberal Westerner mistaking this blatant exploitation for something their identity politics should approve of, I'm gonna rampage.
• So in his last newspost, Tycho actually used the phrase "infantilizing chivalry". Snerk. No. See, the people in all the world who were biggest on chivalry were also the first people who ever said women were legal adults. All those chivalric romances were written for and sold to noblewomen. I'm pretty sure Tycho has read Dante—has he read Chretien de Troyes? 'Cause women have more control over the plot of "The Knight with the Lion" than they do over the plot of anything Joss Whedon ever wrote.
  
  No, I'm serious. Ywain undertakes his quest 'cause his wife won't let him back into his house. He fights a giant because a girl asks him to. He then has to fight one of his friends because they're opposite champions in a lawsuit-by-fight—namely, that girl's sister is keeping her from her inheritance (quick, what's it mean when women inheriting property is taken for granted?). There's a reason a medieval poet wrote that nothing in nature acts except to please women—women ran their entire world. Chivalry was a part of that—a deliberate ideological program to prevent men from using the trump card they've always used in every other society, and explicitly without equating women with children.
  
  See, there actually was an approximation of chivalry in Japan and pre-Joseon Korea, born of the combination of a transcendent existential soteriology (in this case, Buddhism) with the existence of a warrior-caste, just as in the West. Only, Confucianism being around (just as the non-Latin West was still Roman), both the samurai and the hwarang were supposed to spare and defend women, as children, because both were the non-combatant wards of their society's only legal adults. Seriously, look it up—bushido equates an insult from a woman to one from a child, thus a samurai loses dignity by being provoked by it. You don't find that in chivalry; a society where women have property and political power in their own right can't claim they don't know better when they insult people. Women weren't beneath a duel, the way peasants were (unlike in Asia, where a warrior could kill a peasant in a dispute and actually pretend he hadn't just committed murder); they were above it, the way priests were.
• And before any idiot says a word about pedestals, I cordially invite you to read High Medieval French literature. If the medievals were a patriarchal society that put women on pedestals, then so are the Navajo and the Hopi, who portray women the exact same way. (You've read Native American literature, right? And no, Sherman Alexie doesn't count.) And Navajo and Hopi women owned all the property and decided when to go to war.
  
  It will come as a shock to you, but the social mores of the Victorians or the 1950s were not the norm for the human race, and they were not the thing that literate people mean when they talk of chivalry. Those societies (especially the former) did, at their best, retain some chivalrous ideals, but all mucked up with their Renaissance and Reformation ideas about sex and class. Even so, there was a reason those people were shocked by Russian or Prussian treatment of women (to say nothing of that outside the nominally Christian world): they still retained some habits from a society whose women had more rights than their Byzantine sisters.
• Also, Tycho complains in today's post about the new Tomb Raider being "explicit disempowerment fantasy". Uh, yes. That's the people who called chivalry "infantilizing", Tycho—that they're tiptoeing as close as they can to the "Rape As Backstory"/"behind every badass woman there's a rape she had to overcome" trope without actually using it, is entirely consistent. See, the academic-feminist view that shits all over chivalry, is a fundamentally Marxist paradigm: and the revolution must always arise from the oppressor.
  
  It isn't un-feminist that so many heroines only rise to their power due to having something done to them by men (see also every heroine Joss Whedon ever wrote). It is purely feminist, in the academic sense of that word. There are no Hero(in)es of the Revolution without class-enemies to fight. Maybe you should read some Simone Beauvoir, the mother of all modern feminist theory. Women aren't even people in the Beauvoir school of feminism, they're essentially inanimate objects. Remember whose philosophy Beauvoir followed (and may have ghostwritten large portions of)—and what she let him do to her.