Logan (2017)
the grim adventures of billy and mandy was such a fucking weird show but i have so many memories from it like… engraved in my brain like i’ll never forget about billy repeatedly shouting “destroy us all”
When English isn’t your first language, reading fanfics in your first language (if there are even any) becomes so much more embarrassing???? And sometimes I wonder why native English speakers don’t get that feeling when they are reading in their native language???
scrolling through the comments on this people with at least three separate native languages have chimed in to agree that English is the porn language. This… is amazing. I never knew.
oh oui. tu m’étonnes.
There is actually an interesting cultural/linguistic theory of explanation for this! I’m not a linguistics expert, just a person who likes learning languages, so my explanation will probably be a bit muddled, but I hope people find it interesting anyhow. You can read a relevant paper here; the authors of the paper call this phenomenon (or a phenomenon that’s very similar to it, at least) “emotion-related language choice theory,” but I don’t know if there’s a widely accepted term for it yet, despite the fact that people have been studying it for– I think close to 20 years? Quite a while, anyhow.
So basically, the cultural “naughtiness” of swear words/taboo words in your first language is something that’s very deeply ingrained– you might not hear these words at all in your early years, and if you do hear them there’s a good chance that there was some shame/reproach/anger involved if someone slipped and used them around you, or if your peers whispered them to each other on the playground to show how cool and grown-up they were. Also, people are generally very thoroughly versed in the complex nuances of how and when to use swearwords in their first language, and they fully understand the cultural weight of using these words to convey intense emotions.
When we’re reading, speaking, or writing in a non-primary language, however, we don’t bring all of that cultural baggage with us. For years linguists assumed assumed that it was easier to talk about highly emotional topics in one’s native language, because people generally feel more comfortable speaking the language(s) they’ve grown up with. A newer theory, however, posits that sometimes it’s actually easier to discuss these very taboo topics in a second or non-primary language, because we don’t have that culturally loaded sense of shame and emotional intensity weighing us down. Reading, for instance, smutty fanfic in a second language allows us to have a degree of removal from the topic at hand, which can be very liberating, because we get all the fun and excitement of reading smut with a great deal less socio-cultural nonsense.
(There’s another at least tangentially relevant thing here that I know even less about, which is a recently-studied mechanism wherein our brains basically refuse to fully translate non-primary language words with negative connotations all the way back to our native language, which lets us maintain a greater degree of distance from the negative thing, but I’ve been rambling for long enough, so I’m just gonna link the paper, and if people want to hear more about it I’d be happy to expound: link).
i’m like heinz doofenshmirtz because i, too, like being petty, singing off-key, and over-sharing my deepest traumas for no discernible reason
I also think of myself as evil but am at best a minor inconvenience.
Trying to unload some of my drafts before the new year. These have been sitting since January or February I think.
Like Sans on Video Games, I had a whole bunch of these x on y prompts written up. This was actually the first one– the swear jar. Everyone’s cursing habits. I just never got around to drawing up the rest of the cast.
But here’s all the headcanons anyway under the cut! I love doing stuff like this and the laughter one.
tfw your new human friend doesn’t come back from the dead
and other
assortedbummer scenarios
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