3 thoughts on “The Duel Room: Office Mayhem – Chapter 3 by JustLooking9000

  1. DrewPowell says:

    As par for the course, it’s a tantalizing and titillating story, worthy of inclusion 😉 just one small nitpick, or rather, a peeve of mine, feel free to ignore it… like many languages, Slavic languages are patronymic, meaning only the man can leave behind a name, and to assign women as property to their fathers and later husbands, the suffix -a is given in the Eastern and Southern Slavic cultures, and -ova in Western Slavic ones.

    If Eva really wants to piss her off, just call her Natulhka, usually reserved for toddlers.

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  2. justlooking9002 says:

    Hey Drewpowell! Thank you so much for pointing out the error. I was able to correct the mistake and now the surname of Natasha to Veselova. About Eva calling Natulka, I guess we can chalk it up to her not knowing enough Russian to insult Natasha in her native language. Of course, the real reason is that I don’t know Russian insults.

    Also, this is actually chapter 3 of a long saga. Due to several mistakes on my part, RR thought this was chapter 1 instead of 3. He/She has been very patient with my horrible numbering system and gracefully renumbered the chapter.

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  3. DrewPowell says:

    I am a sucker for puntastic titles, which is why the reasons my series is called Disstopia stands both, obviously for dystopia, but also for dissing, cussing, degrading.

    At least in real life, certain countries technically carry the title of a nation, but isn’t one in the sense, when it comes not just to unique character (like “American as apple pie”) but also to recognizing the right of neighbors to exist not as a subjugated of them, but as a separate entity.

    I know this because I grew up being raised in a culture that longed for its once of an empire, that dreads her neighbors, and actively encourages her citizens to belittle them, and fear not, so do the neighbors as well.

    You don’t have to or need to know that, but it makes understanding characters from Southeast and Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans much, much easier. Russia has traditional rivals, like China, Japan, Poland and the Baltic states, as does China, who treats Vietnam et al like its own backyard.

    I don’t mean simply a few decades of communism, rather a longer period, which is depicted in books, paintings, movies and personal family stories. Imagine like a city in the GTA universe, where you belong to a faction, it’s very hard not just to break away from that cycle, but even to treat others as equal.

    For my own work, I use several urban dictionaries and blogs describing neologisms to track how languages change organically so that curse words also feel natural on the off chance a native speaker might or will read it. Like I said, this is just additional info, it’s only important to me, because people like me, we fight a two front war.

    Since, on the other hand, if I stick to my GTA example, specifically the fourth installment, they did a really good job in depicting not just how generally we see ourselves (and yes, the further you go east, the more we drink) but also how locals perceive us, and man, that’s not flattering. I think Spanish speakers in America get this, when they know how different they are if they’re from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominicans, Mexico, Guatemala or El Salvador, yet non-speakers see or want to see little of it that doesn’t match a stereotype already laid out.

    Thus, I don’t force my ways onto others, but I do say, being not just represented, but being so accurately (to the limits of a fetish story) in an English language story that reaches the most is a nice nudge.

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