rpanons | Your privilege at any time is only as strong as the wifi signal

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thanks for actual helping instead of being a jerk like the above anon

being deliberately ambiguous about the canon as it's obscure and I don't want to be outed, also nobody would know wtf it was anyway

he lives in the NYC area, he was born in the US (for the sake of simplicity I'm also going with NYC, though they don't say where he grew up), he makes a moderately good amount of money, he went through several years of grad school, we don't know much about his parents but it's heavily implied several times that they were probably poor immigrants and probably illegal immigrants

given that he doesn't do that in canon you're probably right and I was being dumb x_X I imagine he likely spoke spanish to his parents (they're dead now) and his siblings, but probably doesn't use it every day unless he has to, particularly since he's had several years of grad school and there's some implication that he's taken deliberate pains to distance himself from his own culture (esp because he had a bad falling out with his father due to taking a less-than-ideal career path) (like he makes enough to live on but he's not a doctor or a lawyer basically, unlike his siblings)

Eh, I would say brutal honesty than being a jerk.

except the reason I asked for help was so I could avoid falling into a trap of racist cliches

it's like damned if you do, damned if you don't

ask for help and someone says that you should give up

don't ask and go do it and you come off as a racist asshole

that's not honesty that's literally just shutting someone down, without even explaining why what I asked might have been questionable or racist

like I get it, it's a pain in the ass to take stupid morons like me by the hand and be like, "hey, now, here's how society has fucked you up so you think these stupid things" but if you can't help then let someone else do it

I came here trying to learn. And hey, because of the other anons I actually figured out already one of the stupid parts of my question.

tl;dr there's a difference between being honest (Which would be, "The way you've phrased this question is kinda racist in itself, and here's why, and here's some resources so you don't make the same stupid mistake; are you sure the character in question isn't a racist cliche in his own canon?") and "don't bother even trying to play a character who isn't white or anime-Japanese"

Okay. If he's deliberately taken steps to distance himself from his own culture/background, then the chances are he simply does not choose to speak Spanish very much, if at all.

You'd be surprised how quickly things like interjections and talking to yourself swap from one language to another based on immersion. If I'm speaking my second language to other people around me on a daily basis, then I don't swap into my native language to talk to myself or to curse if I stub my toe. It's actually, at least in my experience, more of a mental effort to switch gears than to just stay in the same language for things like that.

(Obligatory ymmv; obviously I'm not speaking for all bilingual people everywhere, but this is my experience with bilingualism.)

My advice, honestly, would be to avoid showing him speaking Spanish unless he has a particular reason to, such as communicating with someone whose English is poor, trying to keep a conversation more private, etc.

no problem, friend. i'm not very in touch with my heritage, but the mexican character i play isn't as americanized as i am - so i worry about getting stuff like this right too.

anyway, like bilingual anon said, not everyone is going to speak in the same way (i'll admit i'm just a sucker for the code-switch trope though), and based on that description i'd agree with them about your character not using spanish at all unless necessary. in the same vein, he probably wouldn't face anything too bad in terms of prejudice either - maybe an off-color joke every once in a while, if anything.

Your privilege at any time is only as strong as the wifi signal

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bilingual anon

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