Final Fantasy IX Part #54 - Waxing Philosophical About The Current State of the Hawaiian People and Their Language and What The White Dragon Can or Can't Do About It

Part 54: Waxing Philosophical About The Current State of the Hawaiian People and Their Language and What The White Dragon Can or Can't Do About It

't Do About It

Kilika is still in an RPG ellipsis funk.

"Uncle Blank is watching plays with other dudes really part of my Foursome Training?"
"Yes. You're usually not gonna get three chicks, so you gotta get used to doing stuff with guys too"

"Wait a second...
1) Me
2) Blank
3) This Chick
4) Cinna"

"... ... ..."

"NOOOOOOO!"

"Oh, there is something I must give you, Princess."
"Received Opal!"
"Received Topaz!"

These are used to summon, uh, Shiva and Ifrit, respectively. I think.

"Well, that is all in the past..."
"Yes but what about my Dark Matter and my Garnet"
"Oh uh
I kinda sold the first one to the Auction House and the other one is OP right now"

"Hell yes"

"Now may not be a good time."
"I know... It's okay."

"First, I'll write him a love letter."

--wait a second

where the fuck is huihui

shouldn't he be like right behind me

"Second, your nerdy hat!"

See goons, when a video game tells you that a top hat is incredibly nerdy, you know it's incredibly nerdy. No matter how excessively eccentric I may become in my later years, I can guarantee you that I will never own a top hat.

well admittedly dali got away with that and a cape in public all the time, but i mean he was salvador dali

"Third, your thick eyeglasses!
All signs of a nerdy philosopher!
Will you help me write a letter?"

"sigh... children these days watch too much mtv
well at least she's misinterpreted what they mean by horny"

There are both positive and negative outside influences on languages. Perhaps the most tragic introduction into modern Hawaiian Creole English is the AAVE term "nigga," not only for its outcompeting invasive species aspect but for the conditions under which it has been introduced. It's been proliferating for about... oh, I'd say six or seven years now. Around six years ago, there was a very small portion of the young population that would refer to each other as "nigga"--mostly deluded overprivileged children from whichever racial background.

Very few people who were just leaving That Age where they are easily influenced previous to that time period and have since grown into adulthood use this term. We still use any variation of referential terms ranging from "brah" to "bu" to "faka (though even this is a more profane, yet oddly enough more playful, evolution of the older 'frickah')." Though "brah" has also fallen out of use; once something of an inflection-based shibboleth (FOB white people would enunciate the /r/ sound, whereas in proper HCE the /r/ is present but nearly non-existent and more of a flavoring of the /a/ vowel instead), it fell out of favor when it became more associated with bronzed beach bums from the west coast. Today, it is rarely used unironically, and is much more popularly applied when referring to someone who is being rather a jerk or excessively like one of those gated community haoles, and the /r/ and its vowel-like component is highly exaggerated to the point where it is bisyllabic. If you're having a hard time imagining it, it sounds a bit like Obama's first name.

Now, I very nearly took this following bit out, but if one is concerned enough about a plight, they will make it available to inform any feasibly-willing audience to read through it. Even though it is technically not a spoiler, it is both merely tangential to the sub-goal of this LP (that being, being a Very Hawaiian LP), and rather tl;dr for those who would not care to read it. And that is why it is blotched out.

BUT ANYWAY yes "nigga" has unfortunately proliferated HCE by means of rap music and lowest-common-denominator programming and once my generation passes, very much like how minor Chinese language subgroups are being assimilated into mainstream Mandarin Chinese, HCE's delicate social tiering of second-person markers will be almost completely replaced with unironic niggas. This is a very depressing notion, but it is also very real because the up-and-coming generation uses nigga exclusively and has essentially forgotten all the other second-person words in the space of half a decade.

Now, I'm not trying to blow any whistles and say "OH MY GOD CALLING YOUR FRIENDS NIGGA IS BAD" because it's perfectly fine in Standard American English or dictionaries because with those, there is no identity to break down outside of some twisted sense of almost-supremacist nationalism or imagined "language contamination via the introduction of slang"; what I'm talking about is very different from the Keep Your Black People Out Of My English movement.

When you glorify the poor, desperate, glamorous gangsta lifestyle to any group of destitute or minority peoples who don't bother inoculating their children against it, you are going to charm their hearts with some twisted, violent, make-believe world and make these impressionable people who have nobody to look up to but the silver screen and the radio want to Walk Like You And Talk Like You and you infect their language and destroy their rich, precious, and incredibly fragile linguistic identities, which may or may not be all they have left, but it is painfully obvious that it is far too late to advise multi-millionaire OGs and their industry sponsors to tread lightly. This isn't to say that other stuff--I mean, it's not like things I like are exempted--"intellectual" TV programming, video games, or the Internet, those sorts of things, are exempt from being Bad Influences. But at least they aren't outright selling us cooking crack rocks and shooting each other in the streets for the sake of prison credibility.

Sometimes, no matter how much you want to or how hard you try, you can't have become a national syndicate-published storyteller role model fast enough for these destitute Hawaiian kids whose parents tell them that reading is Evil and White and no Hawaiian ever wrote anything that wasn't a boring dictionary or an autobiography in the 1800s, you should become an athlete or a sportscaster or a policeman or a stevedore or work construction or landscaping, that's what your cousins all do except for that one who plays bass in 'Ekolu, oh maybe you can become a local musician like him! And sometimes, not having gotten there yet--not having gotten there soon enough for the ones who have already started running with some idiots who think they're, I dunno, Fiddy or The Notorious BIG or whoever despite being incredibly Filipino, because they look up to these harebrained ghetto gods, because they've never even been told what else is out there, because it's been drilled into their heads since they day they were born they can't be anything better--makes me feel terribly inadequate. But I once told a dear friend of mine that you can only save the world, and not everyone in it. I should probably heed my own platitudes one of these days.

But I digress. We're here for fun LP times! This is not Waxing Philosophical About The Current State of the Hawaiian People and Their Language and What The White Dragon Can or Can't Do About It, despite what the chapter title might suggest.

"A ship drifted ashore after a storm... Inside the ship were a woman and a baby girl...
The woman was dead, but the girl was still breathing...
Imagine my surprise, as I looked into the girl's face!
... She looked exactly like Princess Garnet, who had just passed away.
With one exception...
She had a horn!
A human with a horn...
The king ordered the girl's horn removed.
He and his wife, Queen Brahne, decided to"--

Wait wait wait hold on a sec

FF9 you are telling me that not only was there a guy who was into fucking chicks who were that fat, but somehow, she was able to birth a kid? And that it didn't die immediately from complications?

There are either wizards at work here, or--no, it was definitely wizards.

--"raise the girl as Princess Garnet...
But that girl who spoke to me... Could she be related to Princess Garnet...?"

•••

we now return you to

hot lesbian action

"I am not my mother's... I mean, Queen Brahne is not my real mother."

oh or not sorry to get your hopes up if you're into that kinda thing

I STAND CORRECTED

TIME FOR LESBIAN ACTION

"Kilika will fall in love with me the instant he reads this letter!"

doctor tot stop talking like a creepo

seriously

"I'm from Madain Sari!"

"But I thought it was only a legend."

THE LETTER is just a silly thing that plays into a theatrically-comedic plot point and is only ever used in the related scenes, but the Hard Work shows because it got its very own textured sprite.

suddenly

"AAARGH IT'S A MORBIDLY OBESE FURRY I'VE GOT TO THINK FAST HERE LET ME JUST JUMP OVER THIS BALCONY HERE"

This is another Best Scene In All Video Games Ever, along with every other Best Scene In All Video Games Ever in FF9. It certainly has a lot of them.

YOU POOP

"... deliver that letter to Kilika!"

See, in HCE, Baku and Huihui have the sort of easygoing/hardass sort of relationship that makes the Samoan language-based satire "faka" the perfect sort of thing for Baku to refer to Huihui as. It says, "We're bros; you might be a real stiff, but I love you anyway."

Or it can be calling someone a fucker, but only if you dislike the other guy. It's all very contextual and all very fun.