I Didn't Bother to Think up a Title

More random thoughts.

• The worldbuilding of the Hunger Games is fail in general, but I realized something. Katniss is a member of a rebellion against an unjustly stratified society, a champion of gladiatorial contests, and associates herself with the memory of one of a group of thirteen that is fallen.
  
  In other words, Katniss is Megatron, Champion of the Pits of Kaon who fought under the name of Megatronus, the Fallen, one of the Thirteen. The Hunger Games is plainly Decepticon propaganda (Suzanne Collins is presumably a hologram generated by Soundwave). The Mockingjay? Laserbeak. Plainly Laserbeak.
• Searching the blog suggests I haven't mentioned this before, but if I have, scuzați. Anyway. The scuttlebutt among the half-educated is that the Grimm fairy tales are all dark and edgy, and all the adaptations bowdlerize them. The adaptations do take out some violence, but actually, the big bowdlerizer of Grimm is...the brothers Grimm. One of them, anyway. Which, I forget. But either Wilhelm or Jakob is the reason for all the evil stepmothers—in the original folktales many if not most of them were actual mothers, and that struck whichever brother as being too dark.
  
  The anthropologist in me wants to point out that those children being abandoned, e.g. in Hansel and Gretel, is a folk-memory of the real things people stoop to during famines. That's also the origin of the Jizô-cult that today is mostly associated with abortion, in Japan; they exposed infants during famines, and Jizô is the bodhisattva of the underworld and special patron both of dead children and of repentant killers. (That they bother to feel bad about infanticide at all puts them head and shoulders above the Greeks and Romans, not to mention many modern Westerners.)
  
  Also, though, if you want dark fairy tales, forget Grimm, Charles Perrault is your man. Several "Grimm's" fairy-tales show up in him first, including Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella—his book, the original "Mother Goose", was published in 1695, the Grimms published in 1812. And seriously, compare his versions with the Grimm ones. In almost every case, the Grimm one takes out lots and lots of sex and violence (and potty-humor).
• Those who would spot sexism everywhere (I've been reading John C. Wright's blog-posts about "Strong Female Characters") are sometimes hampered by their ignorance. Actually, always, the whole point of spotting isms in things is to let you feel superior to other people without actually knowing anything. It's like being a witch-smeller without even the heavy lifting of knowing the Malleus Maleficarum.
  
  But, for example, it is often considered sexist to refer to a group of women casually as "girls"—supposedly, specifically, it is "infantilizing". It may be sexist to speak more informally of women than of men (you will hear it said that the reverse is also sexist, if not more sexist, but I invite you to find East Asia on a map), but "girls" certainly is not "infantilizing". Because, hey? Linguistic illiterates? "Girl" is not only the female equivalent of "boy", it does not only mean a child. It is also the female equivalent of "guy"—it also means "a person, as such"—or didn't you notice? ("Guy", by the way, could be argued by the Men's Rights weenie to be not merely infantilizing of men, but fully dehumanizing of them, coming as it does from the effigy of Guy Fawkes burned on November 5; it also happens to have meant "butt of a joke" in British English till well into the 20th century.)
  
  The thing usually called sexism does exist, although I also think most people who use the term "sexism" are ideologues, using a class-war narrative that makes hash of anything it analyzes, and mean by the word mostly "doubleplus ungood crimethink". Sex-discrimination (in the bad sense of "discrimination") does exist; it's also not a good thing. (It exists against men too, but frankly, it has to be much worse before men are allowed to complain about it. Man up.)
• Michael Flynn, who comments on seemingly every blog I read as The OFloinn, had a series up, about how the shift from geocentrism was nowhere near as simple as everyone, even the ordinary well-versed layman (which is basically what I am, regarding science) wants to paint it. E.g., Copernicus, it seems, didn't simplify the model—the reverse, he needed more epicycles than Ptolemy.
  
  One thing Flynn points out is that the humanists, not the scientists, wanted Earth out of the center—because being in the center put Earth at the bottom; they wanted to put Earth in the heavens, where the Sun had been. It's important to remember how many of the alleged rationalists of our own day, despite claiming that religion is anthropocentric, and caricaturing geocentrism as an example, will turn around and call themselves "humanists", unironically.
  
  Of course, they also claim to be rationalists and then put everything but math and physical science beyond the reach of reason, which is an odd way of being reason's partisan, I feel. Maybe they're Little Englanders.
• There are people who will tell you it is wrong to call the smallest wavelength of visible light "purple", and insist it's called "violet". One, though, "common usage"—the average person considers "purple" to cover both that wavelength and that wavelength's partial interference with red, therefore that is the correct name for both.
  
  And two, the name for that color in English has always been either "purple", or "blue". "Violet" is the French name for a flower known in English, probably, as "stepmother" (since that's what it's called in Scotland)...which also comes in the shade of magenta considered the only proper referent of "purple"!
  
  Again: linguistics is a science. The second you tell me about words, no matter what you know about the field that uses them the way you want them used, you are stepping out of your science and into mine, because the other field is by definition not linguistics, therefore it has no authority to discuss language. Next you'll be telling the Chinese what is or isn't "qing"!
• Series-wise, of course, the very premise of Firefly is an Idiot Plot, because the opposition are pitiful strawmen in sad need of Emerald City's neurosurgeons. But episode-by-episode, too, it has Idiot Plots. Consider the case of "Out of Gas", which I had occasion to watch recently.
  
  If your ship's main power-plant is disabled, but your shuttles are not, why not just run the auxiliary life-support off the shuttles' power-plants? If you're at risk of freezing,¹ and you have spacesuits,² why not just wear the spacesuits?³ Which of course raises the issue that a 26th century spacesuit is very likely to have air recyclers, so losing the main power is moot, at least for a period of several days—and a spaceship would also have water-recyclers, among its emergency equipment,⁴ raising the survivable period to "until the food runs out". Realistically the only issue would be whether they could risk manhandling the wounded Zoe into a spacesuit, or hope there was enough air for her⁵ till she was well enough to put one on.
  
  Answer to why they don't do those several obvious things: because then the plot doesn't happen. Again, though, if your plot only happens if everyone involved makes very, very stupid decisions, your plot is bad, and you should feel bad.
• Apparently the consensus is that the death-toll of the Crusades is closer to two million than to the one-and-a-half I'd always used. Still, that's over 163 years (1091-1254)—not the 300 I usually quote, but stil. Shaka Zulu killed the same number of people in his rise to power, and that took twelve years (i.e., Shaka killed at 13.6 times the rate of the Crusades); the Mongol conquests, which took almost the exact same amount of time as the Crusades (1206-1368), killed thirty million people (i.e., 15 times the rate).
  
  One thing you seem to get a lot, in historiography of the Crusades, is blithely-stated counterfactual assertions about what was or wasn't "the custom of the time". What happened when a siege broke is the classic example. You get lots of writers saying that sacking was routine, and that it was routine because this gave besieged cities incentive to surrender. But the reaction of the lords in the First Crusade, RE: the sack of Jerusalem, and the reaction of all of Latin Christendom in the Fourth, RE: the sack of Byzantium, suggests that sacks were anything but routine, and that the people of the time regarded sacking as a terrible failure of discipline and morals and "common decency". (Of course, that enemy soldiers' discipline, morals, and "common decency" might fail them, in the event of a prolonged siege, would be common knowledge—we are the only culture in history that doesn't understand that soldiers' ability to keep discipline is a function of their morale, and morale lags the longer a siege, or any other campaign, goes on—and that would be the incentive to surrender. That's still different from the idea that medievals sacked as a matter of course, or thought that doing so was good, because we know for a fact they didn't.)
  
  Of course, as in the case of the Maarat cannibalism, a part of the problem is that people will tell what an account says, but blithely ignore how the account says it. Chroniclers talked about the cannibalism at Maarat the way we talk about the cannibalism during the Holodomor; they talked about the sack of Jerusalem the way we talk about the Japanese Internment. They talked about the sack of Byzantium the way we would talk about the Soviet Army raping and looting its way across countries it was supposedly liberating, except we don't, because our historians put everyone who opposed Nazism in a white hat (and then they talk about the medievals writing history as hagiography!).
• In the vein of the question I often ask, "Why do they continue to base fantasy stories on lies about medieval Europe, when there's so much else in the world?", there are certain developments in the prehistory of the American southwest that are a smorgasbord of fantasy ideas. ("Smorgasbord", you will note, has no H in it. It's Scandinavian, not German, so stop pronouncing it "Schmorgasbord".⁶) There's a particular type of Mimbres pottery, for example, that they don't appear to have traded; the archaeologists suspect there may have been something about those pots that other cultures didn't like (although it could also be that the Mimbres liked them too much to sell them, rather than their neighbors disliking them too much to buy them).
  
  There's a settlement, Yellow Jacket Pueblo, in Colorado, which is very largely made up of kivas (pit-house temples)—it has at least 195 kivas, to as many as 1200 surface rooms (i.e., it might have more kivas and fewer surface rooms). It dates from around the time that we find cannibalized corpses in Anasazi sites, although I don't think there's any cannibalism there. If the Anasazi are the Hopi's ancestors, I shouldn't have to tell you what cannibalism would mean to them. The fact such things were done on a large scale at one period, suggests a significance to their settlement having such a high kiva-to-house ratio—a significance you'd have to be an idiot not to be able to get fantasy stories out of.