alley_skywalker

Continuing this from last year… Put down the first sentence of every fic you wrote/posted this last year (2021).

• “So, who do you think will lose their shit first and start throwing punches?”
• “Ten sickles,” the innkeeper said in a deep, gravely voice.
• Mercutio found Romeo with his face pressed against the chain-link fence at the back of the schoolyard, staring forlornly across the ash field exclusion zone that lay between the school and an old, abandoned factory, who’s chimneys and ragged pieces of ruined roof stuck up into the air like decrepit, ancient fingers, pointing in accusation at the sky.
• Regulus understands now why Narcissa had hated the half-mourning she and her family had had to wear in the wake of Andromeda’s disownment ceremony.
• My father is dead, Robb thinks for what feels like the hundredth time that day since they got the news from King’s Landing.
• There’s summer snow in Robb’s hair, stark white against the dark, rusty read.
• Asha’s hair blows in the wind, rough and slightly moist from the sea spray that just barely reaches them on the rocks.
• Jeyne feels as if she’s never been to the sea until she goes to Pyke with Theon.
• “At least she’s pretty. That’s already an improvement from the last one.”
• “Sev?” Evan’s voice is quiet, almost gentle from across the room, but it only makes Severus flinch.
• In his third year as a hostage at Winterfell, Theon begins to plot his escape.
• Only a few months ago, Theon couldn’t have said if he’d ever get to see King’s Landing.
• “I didn’t know where else to go.”
• War is coming.
• “I love seeing you smile.”
• Tris knows it’s a bad idea to go.
• Pansy hadn’t really expected the nightmares.
• “I hope you’re happy,” he mumbles into the bear bottle he’s been nursing aimlessly for the past half-hour when he spots Sonya’s red hair sliding into the seat next to him.
• It shouldn’t be this way, is all Benvolio can think.
• “You lot are going to get me in trouble,” Dagmer grumbled even as he set up the wooden targets, plunging them deep into the sand.
• Jeyne’s brother, Ser Raynald, is a handsome fellow, with dark hair and dark eyes.
• It starts with peach ice cream.
• He needed to pull himself together or he’d never be able to do this.
• Lady Sansa’s letter came not a fortnight after Yara could say with any certainty that things were once more stable on the Islands. For some very loose and shaky values of stable.
• “Tris?” Theon says one morning.
• Romeo comes to pray, all soft dark curls and large doe eyes.
• “Come to bed, Bert.”
• Jesse sits on the edge of the roof, feet dangling off the side, a bit like he used to do when they were kids sneaking around and hiding their childish treasures among rusty pipes and chimneys, in old, abandoned attics.
• Of all the goodbyes he said the day he left Pyke, Theon remembered Asha the most.
• Robb shows up on the last day of exams with a bottle of cognac and a roguish smile, leaning against the doorframe of Theon’s office.

So, I saw someone say that the fact that Natasha’s mother’s maiden name was Shinshin (Shinshina, actually – Shinshin is an anglicization) means that she “isn’t white.” Now…this confused me a bit because even when I was reading the book (in Russian) the first time, the last name didn’t sound particularly foreign to me. But I decided to poke around some Russian resources and see what I could find re: the name’s origins.

 The information is really pretty scarce because this is not a common last name. But. It seems like this is actually a Ukrainian-origin last name. Now, I did read a theory that the root word of the name is a Ukrainianization of a Circassian word meaning horseless/one who lacks horses (i.e. is of small means). I…can’t say how reliable this theory is, but it’s not improbably: there would have been plenty of cultural exchange in that area, especially in, what we would think of as, the late Renaissance/early Enlightenment period, especially via the Crimean Tatars. So, it’s possible that a long-ago ancestor of someone with the last name Shinshin would have been a Circassian or a Tatar. But…again, even in this theory the word is a Ukranianized version and the name itself is considered Ukrainian, not Tatar or Circassian.

 Oh, but while we’re on the subject of various Southern Russian/Ukrainian and Turkish ethnicities – I’ve also seen people point out that the text will occasionally mention Natasha’s mother having “Oriental” (literal translation being “Eastern”) features (though Natasha doesn’t seem to have inherited them.) This is a really vague description – in Russia people will use this description loosely. Anything like narrow-ish eyes or high ~Mongolian cheekbones can get your features labeled as Asian. Interestingly enough, some, otherwise very Slavic (lineage and looks wise), Russian people will sometimes have certain facial features that look distinctly Mongolian/Turkish. (This is the case with my mom and I.) I haven’t done any kind of academic research on this, but like…Russia spent a ton of time under Mongol occupation. It was all the way back when but genes are a funny thing – they sometimes pop up many generations later.

 But also, Asian (or “Eastern”) doesn’t necessarily refer to Far Eastern (like China, Japan, Korea, etc). in conversation, people will often refer to “Eastern” (e.g. “eastern looks,” “eastern culture,” “eastern customs”) to also refer to a broad concept of Asian, i.e. Turkish or Arabic/Middle Eastern. Everyone can get kinda lumped together in this definition, though, admittedly, the most common usage does refer to Far East Asia. It seems most likely to me, at any rate, that if Natasha’s mother’s family did have some non-Slavic roots (though, I would argue, these would have been a few generations back), they are more likely to be Circassian or Mongolian or Tatar or some other ethnicity along those lines.