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the nascar fandom is in shambles rn bc the official account posted #yascar with a link to pride merchandise and a real life reply was ‘smh no longer supporting nascar has been going downhill since they banned the confederate flag’
like fr fr
Man, I kinda wanna be like Silence Brand! but unfortunately “Yascar” is like really, really funny
I’ve been listening to Ai/Solate a lot recently and it got me to think about Unknown Mother Goose again and how it’s an absolutely fantastic song that’s such a deep personal view into wowaka’s relationship with Vocaloid and how it was ultimately what made him successful in music but also completely isolated him as an artist and one thing that wasn’t ever brought up in ForgetfulSubs’ translation nor have I seen ever brought up anywhere else is a Japanese-specific grammar oddity.
If you know literally anything about Japanese you’re probably aware that unlike English, which only has one first person pronoun of “I”, Japanese has multiple, each with their own levels of politeness and implications of gender and rank etc. etc.
Generally, in songwriting, the pronoun used is 僕 (boku), a pronoun that is polite and familiar. It implies the speaker is male but many female songwriters will use it too, as it’s become sort of a lyrical standard.
This is the first line of Unknown Mother Goose:
Noticeably, the first person pronoun used is あたし (atashi), an exclusively female first person pronoun almost never used in lyrics (and even less frequently in lyrics not about romantic love/not trying to appear ‘cutesy’ to a male audience). Why this unusual pronoun choice? Though あたし has three mora, it is pronounced as two syllables, and 僕 could be easily substituted. Even if wowaka didn’t want to use 僕, he could have used 私 (watashi), a word nearly identical in sound with the same number of mora but with fewer gendered connotations.
Japanese is a pronoun drop language, so not every line that has “I” translated into it actually contains a first person pronoun. However, あたし is used a couple more times until–