MeghanIsMe

Legend of Zelda stuff:

As I have mentioned to a few people, I have shipped Princess Zelda with Urbosa for some time. But Urbosa died, probably for real, at the end of Breath of the Wild. I was lamenting to Miriam that, while Link and Sidon make an adorable casual couple (and I'd like to think Link would be good friends with Sidon's fiance too), there is a dearth of female NPCs in Tears of the Kingdom that I could see Zelda clicking with. Purah doesn't work for me, and we thought about what female NPCs exist and what they were like, and now I am writing fan fic romance fluff about Zelda and Fera, the minor character whose goal in life (in the game anyway) is finding the locations of every well in Hyrule.

I don't think I have ever written fan fic before, and I haven't tried to write fiction in a long time. I feel kind of silly, but at least thinking about story ideas and trying to write from time to time is holding my interest for now.

Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure my wanting to write stuff like this is tied to my transition in complicated ways. Miriam has commented that being with someone who is transitioning is like being with a teenager in some respects, and I do feel rather like a teenage fangirl when engaging with certain media. I'm enjoying the experience!

Random thoughts that a Calvin and Hobbes comic on Facebook (the one here inspired today:

The more I've thought about this kind of joke in the context of my own experiences with academia, the more I've wanted to analyze why this is funny despite its apparent trivialization of areas of the humanities that are important to me.

Academic journals are intended to be a conversation between specialists about complicated topics with arrays of nuance that require the construction of terms and phrases to refer to them. Those concepts do not exist in common understanding outside the field, so to discuss them readily, people familiar with them have to create their own 'code' if you will, to refer to them.

This is true in any specialized discipline. If I look at high-level physics, for instance, I have far less of a clue what is being expressed than I do in something like the title of Calvin's paper there. Just like published articles in humanities journals, hard-science journals are not written for a lay audience; they are written for other experts. Being understandable to the public is not a significant concern. (That is, indeed, a problem in itself, and science needs to be more accessible in many ways to many more people. But that's its own topic.)

So I have to wonder why incomprehensible humanities jargon gets made fun of so much more often than incomprehensible hard science jargon. Maybe it's because people have a sense that they already know about the topics being investigated by the humanities researchers? That these things are simple enough that people who are making them so hard to understand must be either engaging in intentional elitist posturing, or are disconnected from the underlying, far more simple, reality?

It's a strange double-standard. Hard-science research gains credence when it's so complex as to be incomprehensible to the layperson. Humanities research *loses* credence when it's so complex as to be incomprehensible to the layperson.