Happy Birthday to Killua Zoldyck 7/7/2017 · 9:48pm Jul 7th, 2017
You'd think I'd have better things to do than remember the birthdays of fictional characters buuuuuuuuuuuuut.........
Okay, so if I'm going to make some mediocre blog post today, I might as well talk about stuff I've been reading up on.
As I stated in my last blog entry, I started writing my fic knowing jack squat about Hawiian culture and history (way to go, 6-months-ago me) I've since come across some pretty interesting and important stuff that I might want to draw inspiration from.
So I was watching this video by Sideways, about how disney uses languages in its songs. And at about 11 to 12 minutes in, it talks about Lilo and Stitch and how Disney used culturally accurate music in that particular film. It mentions something that I thought was pretty relevant: in an emotional scene when Nani and Lilo beleive that they are going to be seperated, Nani sings a famous song written by the last native queen of Hawaii before american occupation removed the country's monarchy and colonized it for sugar and pineapple plantations. The title, 'Aloha-oe', translates to "Farewell to Thee" and has a lot of cultural weight to native hawaiians.
And guess what my idiot self used it for.
The first chapter of my awful pony fanfiction, because I picked it up from a video about famous songs no-one knows the name of (its title appears at 4 minutes with no listed author). It was the video that inspired me to title all of my chapters after the names of random pieces of music that sounded cool.
While I'm renaming that, I also did some research while I was bored. I found these two articles, which I won't embed because they don't go to, like, Youtube or Twitter.
http://www.pulpconnection.net/2009/09/21-slang-words-you-should-know-before-visiting-hawaii-part-1/
https://www.google.com/amp/www.movoto.com/blog/opinions/moving-to-hawaii/amp/
These articles are pretty vague and probably not all too trustworthy, but the important thing that I can glean from them is that hawaiian slang is very much a thing that exists and that people use, and that you can buy spam from Hawaiian Burger Kings. Unfortunately, it's stuff like this that I won't be able to implement, because I have no experience speaking in hawaiian english slang. As for the spam...well you get plenty of that from my blog posts, so I don't see
Something else that came up again and again was the political tension surrounding hawaiian independence. I don't have the article that I first found it in, but I've seen it in plenty of the other articles that I was browsing. Apparently, tourism is the country's largest source of income. In order to increase the income, increase the tourism, right?
Here's the problem: the sheer number of foreigners that crowd onto the islands are harming local wildlife and driving up the homeless population. Places like Mauna Kea (the real Mauna Kea) are actually being fought over, something about plans to build a telescope on sacred grounds.
http://www.nature.com/news/the-mountain-top-battle-over-the-thirty-meter-telescope-1.18446
This is kind of worrying for a people whose culture, livelihoods, and persecution has been covered up in order to atracct more tourism. And I started writing this fic knowing none of this!
If nothing else, I want to put something about this in my fic. I have a part of the fic's long descrption hinting about a proxy war waged on the islands between 'the forces of land and sea', which I think can be more than just a throwaway bit of lore now.
I'm writing a pokemon-pony crossover fanfiction, so I'm not going to use any real-world wars or historical events. But, if I'm going to use a setting inspired by Hawaii, I think I should reflect how detrimental it is to have your entire island country commodified by a world superpower.
Well, that's about it for today. Hopefully I can shorten these up in the future.
TL;DR Today I'm celebrating the birthday of an anime character by writing about how misinformed I am about Hawaiian culture. Am I a functional human being? You decide!
https://www.fimfiction.net/group/215640/only-killua