LAST EDITED ON Nov-06-20 AT 05:22 PM (EST)
Act I: "En Famille""En Famille" - "With Family".
the débâcle of 10 Floréal - The assault on Scarlet Mansion that cost Remilia and Flandre's parents (among others) their lives took place on the night of 10 Floréal, Anno II, on the (very strange, and short-lived) Gallian revolutionary calendar. To the rest of the Western world, it was April 29, 1794.
KRAFTSTOFFLAGER - Because the best jokes keep on coming back.
mon vieux - Literally "my old", this is an expression that is used as an affectionate tag for men, as in the English appellation "old man". She's teasing him about his "in my old age" quip, as well as the fact that, even as an immortal time traveler, in absolute terms he's still about five years younger than she is.
We'd just managed to save a lot of lives - The occasion in question was the celebration of having driven the Blue Suns away from Goodyear in Star-Crossed.
a ruby, or perhaps a garnet - They're both red garnets, which tend to be rather more blood-colored than rubies (they're usually a bit pink).
unmistakably a mausoleum - The first draft of the proposal scene from Book 1, Act VIII took place here, but ultimately I decided it was too formal and rewrote it in the more intimate setting that appeared in the finished story. Still, it meant we'd already built the set. ;)
carved bas-relief of... a rose, the other a tulip - White roses were Victor's calling card throughout his adult life, while the black tulip was the family emblem of the Teerlincs and part of the insignia of Teerlinc & Brouwer.
The food changed - This scene was contributed on these very forums by long-time reader Cassie "The Traitor" Heath—spontaneous, and far too pretty not to use.
mon grand frère - "My big brother," rather more formally than she usually says it.
Act II: "La Grande Rencontre"
La Grande Rencontre - "The Great Meeting".
Gut. Alles in Ordnung. - "Good. All in order."
c'est fini - "It's over," as in "Period, end of story, I will not discuss this further."
You smell nice - Erica's familiar is a dachshund—part terrier, part scent hound. The nose always knows.
roses and candle smoke - The rose scent comes from the soap used to clean both persons and laundry at Scarlet Mansion.
reading Simenon in the original - The most recently published Inspector Maigret novel at the time this scene is set was probably Maigret à New York.
Bon soir, mon amour! - "Good evening, my love!"
Won't you come in? - Gryphon was not entirely sure this would work; after all, he doesn't own the castle. But apparently however the mystic provision against vampire entering dwellings uninvited works, he's close enough.
now our marriage needn't be morganatic - A morganatic marriage is a form of marriage that used to be relatively common among European aristocracy (and especially royalty, and particularly German-speaking royalty). They were concluded when the parties getting married were of differing social strata (e.g., one a royal and the other of the lesser nobility, or one a noble and the other a commoner), and generally what they entailed was that the party from the lower caste would not gain parity with the higher-ranking spouse from the marriage, nor be treated as an equal by the higher-ranking spouse's peers in social situations. Any children of a morganatic union, while not considered illegitimate for other purposes, could not inherit their higher-ranking parent's titles or any assets entailed to said titles.
Remilia is being very sarcastic here, obviously. All of the aristocracies from which her title stems, those of medieval Cisbelvia/the Sacred Romagnan Empire and the Gallic ancien régime, are long exinct by 1946. Cisbelvia hasn't been a country since the 1200s (it was annexed by Magyarovia), the Sacred Romagnan Empire dissolved in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars, and the Gallian aristocracy, much battered by the 1789–99 revolution, was abolished altogether at the end of the Second Gallian Empire in 1870. Although she would still be afforded the title "Countess" by address in modern Gallian public life, it would only be as a social courtesy. (Compare the way IRL descendants of the abolished gentries of, say, France and Germany often still have their titles in their names, but they have no legal meaning.)
(Ironically, Karlsland's aristocracy is still a going concern, so when she marries Count von Katädien over there, suddenly she'll be a "proper" countess again!)
Fahnenjunker Barkhorn - Fahnenjunker is a German term for an officer candidate. It was historically prepended to whatever enlisted rank the aspirant officer held, usually that of a non-commissioned officer. For instance, at this stage of her career, Chris holds the full rank of Fahnenjunker-Oberfeldwebel—roughly, Senior Flight Cadet or Acting Pilot Officer, on top of an enlisted rank equivalent to master sergeant. (She doesn't know it in this scene, but she's soon to be commissioned and promoted to leutnant on the basis of her performance in Freiburg. That would have happened fairly soon anyway, as she completed her officer candidate training, but her battle record moved it along. Her name probably doesn't hurt either, to be fair.)
Academie van Brugge - The Dutch/Flemish name for the Academy of Bruges, formerly one of the foremost schools of witchery in that part of Europe, which is in the process of being re-established at the time of this story.
Benjamin, mon amour, tu essaies de me faire peur à mort?! - "Benjamin, my love, are you trying to scare me to death?!"
C'est le vingtième siècle. - "It's the twentieth century."
You heard me, young man. The twelfth August, 1503... - Remilia's birthday, as mentioned here, is not canonical; as far as I know, Touhou characters don't have officially established birthdates. I arrived at this date solely because while I was writing that scene, I was listening to "The Eve of the War" from Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds—in which the Journalist mentions that the first Martian cylinder was launched "at midnight on the twelfth of August".
mon cheval - "My horse". Not mon chevalier, "my knight", which would be a more typical Gallic endearment.
bouillabaisse - Provençal fish stew, traditionally served with the fish plated separately from the broth, and accompanied by a cayenne-pepper mayonnaise spread on bread. As the text suggests, it originated in the southern fishing port of Marseille, and like many modern-day delicacies that sprang from fishing ports, was originally a way for the locals to get some use out of unsalable trash fish.
the film they saw was a comedy - Gilles Grainger's Leçon de conduite (Lessons in Conduct), starring Odette Joyeux and Gilbert Gil.
the last thing we need in this place is a door guard - In The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Meiling is the gate guard for the Scarlet Devil Mansion, and a lot of fan works portray her working conditions as appalling—she's often depicted without shelter of any kind, nor even a place to sit. This has led to a second fan works convention wherein she's usually standing there asleep (as part of the overall "lol incompetent Meiling" trope).
Ich werde das notieren - "I'll make a note of that."
Act III: "Déclaration de Position"
an altogether more violent path - If this were an animated medium, you'd be able to tell pretty readily that it's some form of kung fu.
"Déclaration de Position" - "Position Statement". (Admittedly, this one's... not hard to figure. :) As in "a collect telegram to the Right People explaining my position."
Académie Gaulois - A learnèd body dedicated to the accumulation and distribution of arcane and scientific knowledge, similar to Britannia's Royal Society. Not to be confused with the Académie Gallique, which is the regulating body of the Gallic language.
more like an outpost - This was, at the time, one of the farthest-outlying farm communities of the still-fairly-recently-established colony of Zipang, a hundred miles or more from the nascent capital city of Saikyō.
Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk - The Church of Our Lady and the Burg (in this setting, our lady of what is not entirely clear), built between the 13th and 15th centuries, boasts the second-tallest brick tower in the world. It's not the oldest or the most ecumenically important church in Bruges (those honors go to the Chapel of St. Basil the Great in the Basilica of the Holy Blood and St. Salvator's Cathedral, respectively), but it is by far the grandest, and would have been the only acceptable place in town for the eldest daughter of Cornelijs Coenraetszoon Teerlinc to be wed.
pot-au-feu - Traditional Gallian beef stew. Customarily served, like bouillabaisse, with the broth separated and served as soup, then the meat and vegetables as the next course.
Vittorio Monti's "Csárdás" - The presence of this piece in this scene is a slight anachronism; Monti's interpretation of the csárdás (a traditional Hungarian dance) was published in 1904, during the period when Remilia had abandoned the music room and never left the house, so by rights she oughtn't to know it. But it fits the visual I had in mind for this scene so perfectly, and is such a beautiful piece of music, that I couldn't resist the temptation to apply a little poetic license. Remilia is particularly drawn to Hungarian (in her world, Magyarovian) music anyway, perhaps because of her family's ancient roots in the region.
Boccherini's String Quintet in C Major - This has been the end titles music to Our Witches at War all along! The spontaneous duet between Remi and Sakuya is inspired by the final scene in the motion picture Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, which features the film's two protagonists doing the same.
erhu - A Chinese bowed string instrument, sometimes called a "Chinese fiddle", although the technique for playing it is nothing like that of the Western violin. In the world Meiling comes from, it's native to the Earth Kingdom.
tsungi horn - A fictional wind instrument from Avatar: The Last Airbender, originating from the Fire Nation. It looks like a small sousaphone or marching-band tuba, but sounds more like a woodwind.
mieux aimé - "best belovèd".
the "Hornpipe" from Händel's Water Music - Similarly to the above, it's anachronistic for Remilia to know this specific much more modern organ arrangement for this piece, but we may assume that in the context of the story, it's her own arrangement and not one transcribed by an English organist in the year 2019. I probably didn't need to spell that out, but what the hell. As an aside, Remilia and her parents were alive during Händel's lifetime (1685–1759), and it is not entirely out of the question—given Count Victor's love of music and his established correspondence with other European expat luminaries in England—that she knew, or at least met, him.
the Honorable Vincent Auriol - Based loosely on the real-life French statesman (1884–1966) who was the first president of the Fourth French Republic from its establishment after World War II until 1954. Our version should not be taken to resemble the real person except superficially.
Prime Minister Ramadier - Paul Ramadier (1888–1961), the first of the thirteen different heads of government the Fourth Republic had during Auriol's presidency. (The real-life Fourth French Republic was not a great success, which is why we now have the Fifth Republic.) Under the Fourth Republic, the head of government's actual title was President of the Council of Ministers, but since this was easily confused with the office of President of the Republic, in practice the term "prime minister" was virtually always used in English to describe the office (premier ministre or just premier in French). Under the present Fifth Republic, the same office is officially called premier/prime minister.
Commander of the Royal and Military Order of Saint-Louis - The Order of Saint-Louis was the principal dynastic chivalric order of the ancien régime. It has been replaced in the modern French Republics by the Legion of Honor. "Commander" was the middle of the order's three ranks, above Knight but below Knight Grand Cross.
get me Septième Bureau - To give its full title, le Septième Bureau du Ministère de l'Intérieur ("the Seventh Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior") is the Gallian civilian government's principal agency for managing, coordinating, and recording non-military matters to do with magic and the supernatural—compared to, for instance, the Liberion federal government's Department of Paranormal Affairs. (Matters of military magic are handled by the appropriate department within the Ministry of the Armed Forces.)
It should not be confused with the former Gallian military intelligence agency, le Deuxième Bureau de l'État-major général ("Second Bureau of the General Staff"). Deuxième Bureau was the intelligence arm of the Third Republic's Army General Staff, which perished along with the Third Republic itself when the Neuroi occupied Gallia, and was not reconstituted by the Fourth Republic (at least not under that name). In its day, Deuxième Bureau was notable mainly for wildly underestimating the potential threat posed by the Neuroi in both twentieth-century Neuroi Wars and blithely assuring President Pétain that Ostmark and Karlsland fell because their armed forces were insufficiently patriotic.
Act IV: "Magie Domestique"
molto bene - Italian: "very good". I don't know why he said it in Italian either.
Magie Domestique - "Household Magic".
a tragedy worthy of Sophocles - Sophocles of Attica (ca. 497 BC–ca. 405 BC) was a Greek tragedian, one of only three a handful of whose works have survived to the modern day. He is believed to have invented the theatrical concept of scenery, as well as the dramatic technique of breaking the action up into scenes. Sophoclean tragedies revolve around a strong sense of fatalism, the characters being caught up in events beyond their control (or even, sometimes, their understanding). His plays are notable for their character development and a reduced reliance on the chorus to explain what's going on; the most famous surviving one is Oedipus Tyrannus (also known as Oedipus Rex), a retelling of the legend of Oedipus (the Greek king who unwittingly murders his father and marries his mother, from which the modern psychological concept of the Oedipus complex takes its name).
an outbreak of jiangshi - Sometimes called "Chinese vampires" in the West, jiangshi are, as Remilia notes, really more like the Western conception of zombies: animated corpses that go rogue and feed on the delicious braaaains lifeforce of mortals.
whether they had notes stuck to their faces or not - Depending on the pop culture interpretation, jiangshi are often described as being either animated or controlled by paper talismans attached to their foreheads.
the Pas de Calais - As in, the Gallic name for what the English-speaking world knows as the Strait of Dover, the narrowest point of the English Channel (la Manche to the Gallians).
Incidentally, though it doesn't come up in the text, flying across the Pas de Calais is something that vampires of Remilia's line can only do at slack tide. When the tide is running, it counts as a river for "cannot cross flowing water" purposes. Fortunately, it's narrow enough that if they time it right, they can easily get all the way across before the tide reverses and starts running the other way, but it's not a trip to be undertaken without planning and care.
what, for instance, was a "dogwatch"? - In Age of Sail vessels, the dogwatch was a watch that was two hours long instead of the traditional four, and was usually timed around the evening meal, so that the watch schedule would be slightly staggered (meaning that the same watch crew wouldn't always be stuck on the graveyard shift) and more of the crew could be fed together at once.
The standard joke about dogwatches, which is repeated several times in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, is that they are so called because they are curtailed.
the job of replacing Meiev - Remilia's previous lady's-maid, who resigned to get married, as female domestic servants generally did in that era. "Meiev" is an Alsatian nickname for women named Marie-Eva.
Divine Flash Donnerwetter - The spell cards shown here are not as they are in the Tōhō games, since magical combat in the world of Our Witches at War is not danmaku. In the games, I gather, they're mostly ways of varying and powering up bullet hell patterns; here, they're more like canned Evocation spells. This one being a thunderbolt, it's named Donnerwetter after the German word for a thunderstorm (literally "thunder weather"). The naming pattern ("descriptive phrase, keyphrase") is meant to be reminiscent of the way the cards are named in the games, though (compare, for instance, Illusion Sign Killer Doll, one of Sakuya's canonical spell cards).
Act V: "Une Inconnue Bien Connue"
"Une Inconnue Bien Connue" - "A Well-Known Unknown" (or "Stranger").
my little sister is a naturist - "Naturist" is an earlier, more euphemistic term for what we would today call a nudist. Not to be confused with a naturalist, which is a person interested in the science of the natural world. I once saw a poorly translated document which claimed that President Theodore Roosevelt was "a famous naturist before entering politics," which would be an... interesting alternate reality, but, uh, no.
Fusōnese witches get things done - They're not always things anyone else particularly wants to get done, but that's another story.
Don't get in my face and you'll get to keep yours - Also sometimes translated, "Don't start none, won't be none."
a little smitten with Emanuel - Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), known to personal acquaintances by his third name and better known to subsequent generations as C.P.E. Bach, was the second of Johann Sebastian Bach's sons to survive to adulthood. A noted composer, performer, and teacher of keyboard instruments in his own right, he bridged the Baroque and Romantic periods of Western music both chronologically and musically. In the summer of 1730, he would have been 16 years old.
I'm not giving you an open license to make love to anyone who may wander up and ask - Please note that Remilia is using the phrase "make love to" in an older, broader sense than we usually think of it nowadays. In Victorian English, it connotes the whole range of amorous behaviors—verbal professions of love, kissing, petting, what might now be summarized as "canoodling"—rather than merely being, as it is today, a euphemism for sexual congress.
(Compare the way, if you're not familiar with Victorian conventions of word usage, the Sherlock Holmes stories may be startling in re the frequency with which Dr. Watson ejaculates, and the context in which it often happens. :)
do we really need electricity, though? - A question confronted by the proprietors of every stately home in the Western world when electrification started coming in. Some held out for decades. William H. Vanderbilt's house was electrified by Thomas Edison himself circa 1880—and almost instantly DE-electrified by Thomas Edison himself when the wiring caused a fire and Mrs. Vanderbilt demanded the whole system's removal.
wish I hadn't lost my JJ200s - Exactly when and why Meiling owned a pair of Joo Janta 200 super-chromatic peril-sensitive sunglasses, and of what use they were to her, is a mystery for another time.
immortalizing a mere lady's-maid - Not literally. If Sakuya is immortal, it's not because of the painting. It's just a painting, not, like, the Picture of Dorian Gray.
Aw, jeez! My gazebo! - I never imagined I would ever have occasion to give a character this line, but here we are.
a pair of stamped tags - The wartime British forces' equivalent of American dog tags, these were made of pressed fiber rather than metal.
Oxton, L. RAF. Flight Lieutenant. U. 3263827. - These five items were recorded on all British identity tags of the period (oddly, they didn't include blood type as American tags did). They are the serviceperson's name, branch of service, rank, a code denoting religion (and thereby preference of chaplain), and service number.
In Lena's particular case:
- "Flight Lieutenant" is an RAF rank that, a bit confusingly, denotes a company-grade officer equivalent to a captain in forces that use army-style ranks (such as the United States Air Force). What other forces would consider a (first) lieutenant is a "flying officer" in the RAF—even the ones who aren't pilots.
- "U" is the code for a Unitarian, that is, someone who believes in a unitary divinity and/or cosmic creator (as opposed to the trinitarian belief common to many branches of Christianity). IRL, non-Universalist Unitarians are still a flavor of Christian; in (this variant of) the World Witches setting, where Christianity is evidently not a major religion if it exists at all, Unitarianism instead stems from a streamlining of the older polytheistic religions, and functions more or less like deism (the belief that a singular, omnipotent Creator set up the universe, but has since buggered off and left it to its own devices).
English Unitarianism, as described above, should not be confused with Unitarian Universalism, which is no longer inherently Christian, although I gather individual followers of same may still decide that they are.
- With the right reference materials, it's possible to work out from an RAF member's service number precisely where and roughly when they joined up (sort of like decoding the VIN of an automobile). Lena's service number comes from a block of real RAF service numbers that, for one reason or another, were never assigned to anyone.
unless you've done some reincarnating - Technically, what Lena's talking about isn't reincarnation so much as parallel incarnation. In essence, the mishap that gave her her time-manipulating powers also fragmented her into infinite aspects, each of whom inhabits a particular spot in a particular timeline, but they're all also the same person. Or, put more succinctly, in the EPU multiverse, all Tracers are the same Tracer. :)
I was born in Seven Dials in 1930 - Seven Dials is a neighborhood in central London, part of the St. Giles district of the Borough of Camden. It's so named because its central feature is a seven-way road junction, in the middle of which stands a column with six (yes, six) sundials on it (because the junction was originally meant to be only six roads). Today, it's a heavily gentrified upscale shopping area with boutiques and fancy restaurants, but in 1930 the area was still, as it had been for at least the previous century, a notoriously poor and rough part of town.
à la mode suburbain - "In the suburban mode", i.e., served on individual small tables in the living room. TV set not required.
unlike certain vampires I could name, I can control myself - She's throwing shade at the Draculs again, not Flan.
Act VI: "L'Intérêt d'une Divulgation Complète"
L'Intérêt d'une Divulgation Complète = "The Interest of Full Disclosure".
the waffle story - This is true!
requiescat in pace - Latin: "[may] they rest in peace."
made on a base of troll fat - As you might imagine, given how rare and hard to kill trolls are, this is a very expensive ingredient.
Remicciatola - An Italian-language affectionate diminutive made by adding a suffix (compare, e.g., the (O)Russian -ochka).
the medieval Latin original - Funnily enough, he'd have had much less trouble with this than the Middle Gallic version.
awake and alive... - Gryphon quoted this passage in Mio's formal Force initiation back in New Tricks.
Uu~! - A comedy sound effect which is something of a trope in Touhou fandom as a noise uttered by the more cutesy and comedic interpretations of Remilia. Occasionally spelled "Uu~☆!" just to make it even harder to guess how it's pronounced.
contrefilet et frites - This is one of those French dishes that sound really fancy, but are in fact just regular food. It means "steak and fried potatoes".
Ausgezeichnet. Ich werde mich darauf freuen, meine Geliebte. - "Excellent. I shall look forward to it, my belovèd."
Act VII: "Le Départ"
rich as Croesus - Croesus (595 BC–546? BC), king of ancient Lydia, was so renowned for the wealth of his kindgom that his name remains a proverbial byword for a holder of great riches today. In part, this mythological status derives from the fact that Lydia under Croesus issued the first known gold coins of standardized quality (and therefore value).
chicken fricassée - A dish in which chicken is pan-browned, like a sauté, but then simmered in a sauce or broth, like a stew. Sakuya's particular version of it involves a cream sauce, which is a bit unusual by classical fricassée standards.
Le Départ - Literally means "the departure" in French, but also connotes a beginning.
What do you care what other people think? - The title of the second volume of physicist Richard Feynman's memoirs, taken from a catchphrase his first wife, Arline, used to taunt him with whenever she felt he was getting too timid about some social custom or another.
the Karlslandic city of Cheeseburg - Not to be confused with Cheeseberg, the Cheese Mountain, which is located in central Thuringia.
(this is not true either)
I'll put you down as my huscarl - As Gryphon notes, the huscarl (in modern English, housecarl) was a sort of bodyguard in high-placed medieval Nordic and Germanic households. Housecarls were freemen, not slaves or serfs, and were paid for their services, but tended to be better-trusted and more loyal than simple mercenaries. Over time, as with many medieval jobs, their role became less practical and more ceremonial, and they more or less went out of style by the twelfth century.
As a land right on the edge of the Karlslandic territories, Alsace wouldn't have been too strange a place for the higher households to have housecarls in Count Victor's early tenure there (although they would have disappeared long before Remilia's own time).
In the more serious interpretations of Meiling's canonical job (i.e., the ones where she's responsible for security in general, not literally for just standing next to the front door and getting beaten up by every random joe who wanders by), she could easily be described as Remilia's housecarl.
pieces by [Couperin] other than "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" - Such as "Le Tic-Toc-Choc ou Les Maillotins", Ordre 18 from his Third Book of clavecin pieces ("Les Barricades" is from the Second).
The Prince of Denmark's March - The Wikipedia page for this piece notes that it was played at the wedding of Prince Joachim of Denmark in 1995. I guess if you are literally the Prince of Denmark, it's kind of obligatory. As it was composed by an Englishman circa 1700, its title probably refers to Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708), who was Queen Anne of England's husband.
unless I'm loading silver hollowpoints - For the record, he isn't. Hollowpoints don't feed very well in 1911s anyway.
she noticed that the safety was on - Flandre doesn't check, but if she had, she'd have found that there wasn't even a round chambered. Why would there be? It was only a show duel, and Gryphon comes from an age that is much less casual about carrying loaded handguns than they were in World War II.
I intended to wear this for our wedding day - It may say something about Remilia's attitude to these things that she considers what any twenty-first-century woman would consider perfectly ordinary underwear outrageous enough to be suitable for the first use of one's marriage bed, as it were.
did you join the Barovian Navy - Being a landlocked country, Barovia (one of the many tiny Carpathian principalities in the vicinity of the Belv River valley, and one of the few never consumed by Magyarovia or Dacia) has no navy.
Luna Moth night trainer - The Luna Moth is a variant of the venerable and much-loved de Havilland DH.82 Tiger Moth biplane trainer, optimized for night flying. Britannian and Farawaylander Night Witches learn to handle themselves in the dark on Luna Moths, after having learned basic daytime flight with Tiger Moths. Lena borrowed this one for her ferry flight to Ribeauvillé because taking her experimental, ultra-high-performance Hornet seemed like overkill—and it's fortunate she did, since a crashed Hornet would have been a lot harder to repair.
>>"Une Inconnue Bien Connue" - "A Well-Known Unknown" (or
>>"Stranger").
>
>Although not well known for some of us, it turns out. :P In this instance, it specifically means well-known to Gryphon.
>(I don't really play Overwatch. They lost most of my interest when it
>came out there'd be no story mode when there's obviously a really
>fucking interesting story going on!)
Yeah, I don't either, for largely the same reasons (well, that and I just don't think multiplayer-only games are fun), but the lore has always interested me even if (or, well, it's me, so maybe because) the actual game's developers are almost entirely wasting it. Also (as we have seen elsewhere on the Forum recently), BZA is big into it. Including a witch version of Tracer in OWaW was originally her idea, and dropping her into this particular plotline started as a set of jokey Twitter DMs between us that eventually reached that magical "y'know, actually, I think we have to do this now" critical mass.
>Regardless, I think there is one telling take away that Flan has from
>her period of insanity: she now has a very much zero-fucks-given
>attitude. Albeit the happy variety. Azalyn is gonna eat her up.
Well, she'll certainly want to. Whether she'll get the opportunity... no data at this time. :)
>>Fusōnese witches get things done - They're not always things
>>anyone else particularly wants to get done, but that's another
>>story.
>
>Not quite following here, but I've always been kinda dense that way.
Just that they have a reputation for being decisive and proactive to an extent that might be described by members of other cultures as "precipitate", "headstrong", or occasionally "mad". The received wisdom is that if a witch from Fusō sees something she thinks needs doing and it isn't getting done, she'll just go and do it, generally without consulting anybody first. Granted, a lot of this reputation was established singlehandedly by Mio Sakamoto, but not all of it. :)
>Aside: it could be said that this is an aspect of Japanese culture
>that isn't usually touched on. Basically, it has to do with gender
>roles within a Samurai household. Yeah, the man of the house sets
>policy and goes and makes bacon and all... But it's the lady of the
>house who makes the magic behind the scenes happen and generally
>ensures that the household operates like a smoothly oiled machine.
>Rightfully so, the wife of a Samurai is herself considered Samurai.
IIRC, they were also expected to be able to ruin somebody's day if they had to.
Medieval English society kind of worked that way, too. Less with the "ruin somebody's day" part, but in a well-off medieval household, the man of the house, for all that he was legally master of his demesne, owner of all within it, and so forth, customarily did not possess the actual keys to the house or any of the rooms, lockable containers etc. within it. His wife had them.
(This is not necessarily just a medieval thing. Theodore Roosevelt famously had no idea how much money he had or where it went much of the time, so he mostly wasn't allowed to spend it himself. Edith handed him $20 each morning, and in the evening he couldn't have told her what became of it if his life depended on it, which is why she only ever gave him $20. That was substantially more money in 1904 than it is today, of course, but the point remains. :)
>So it's no surprise that it'd be the Fusonese witches that are the
>stone-cold killers when it comes to the "Honey Do" lists at various
>JSF Squadrons.
This also partly stems from the culture of the Fusōnese armed forces, which places great emphasis on officers' initiative (particularly the Navy). "If something needs to be done, don't whine to your superiors about it, just get it done" is drilled into IFN officers at Etajima.
>At first when I had read through the relevant bit, I had at first
>thought that Remillia was speaking of the father and not the son.
They both visited, but it was the son she was a little sweet on.
>Thing is, many historians suspect that, due to the content of letters
>between Bach and the rest of his family, that he had a form of
>Tourette Syndrome. It really does do Bach credit, though, that if he
>was indeed afflicted with Tourette Syndrome, that he was able to make
>the social connections that he had made despite that.
In his era, a man could get away with a lot of social faults if he was a big enough damn genius. :)
>>Aw, jeez! My gazebo! - I never imagined I would ever have
>>occasion to give a character this line, but here we are.
>
>I don't think I've seen this used anywhere else in particular,
>though...
Well, true, but I still never imagined anyone would ever have occasion to say it before it happened.
>>unlike certain vampires I could name, I can control myself -
>>She's throwing shade at the Draculs again, not Flan.
>
>And few people can sass like the French can. It's practically an art
>form.
REMILIA
Now go away...
(readies Gungnir)
... or I shall taunt you a second time.
--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
