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:maple2: maple classic™ :bot: @squirrel

hey, fiction writers/game designers/worldbuilders/etc

brazil is not a hispanic country

we do not speak spanish

"hernandez" is not a brazilian surname

@InspectorCaracal literally any sort of media (especially video games) where characters are given a name and a nationality

whenever it falls on brazil the name is always something decidedly not brazilian

@squirrel

*starts worrying about her own efforts in this arena, despite it being only peripheral characters involved in the whole book*

(I think I researched it enough, hope I did, probably Ameri-failed pretty hard tho)

@sydneyfalk if you researched at all you did a better job than 90% of the games with brazilian characters in them

@squirrel

I researched somewhat deeply namewise, enough that when I tried to create another character who was a viewpoint character in a short fiction in a very different setting with a Brazilian name I at least knew what I was looking for and (again hopefully) it came out as something plausible, esp in a future setting as opposed to a present-day one

some Google Maps street views, some research into the time of year and the political and law enforcement structures of the area

so I guess?

@sydneyfalk the specific case that upset me and prompted that toot could've been mitigated by a simple visit to wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_

so yeah you're probably miles ahead

@squirrel

I went past that into family history of the area and larger structures of names and how they're commonly used for civil servants/officeholders

I did use Google Translate for the small amount of Brazilian Portuguese that's in it, but I did that to fact-check a pair of sources for Brazilian slang phrases and common usage

and I limited THAT to one actual line, IIRC, or possibly two (but one was a simple "thank you" and not a vulgar one -- vulgarities are complex and need more care)

@squirrel

I mean, honestly, I wasn't "trying to do better than 90%", I was trying to do my best and I wanted it to come out decent

so I wanted it to make sense

so I needed it to be very close to the current-day Sao Paulo, since the setting wasn't extremely divergent in terms of those things at the time

sarcasm mocking ppl who know nothign about brazil Show more

@squirrel for real tho as an american i never realized how little people aren't taught about Brazil until I became good friends with a Brazilian teacher and its kind of BS :/

@squirrel I had reached my mid-30s before I heard my first word of (European) Portuguese, and only because my former boss has a Portuguese dad who spoke it. I thought it would sound close to Spanish, but strangely, it sounded almost Russian to me, and could never be confused for Spanish.

@thor Brazilian Portuguese is even further away, sounding close to nothing like European Portuguese

@squirrel That's interesting. I'm not convinced that many people here in Norway are aware that not only do Brazilians not speak Spanish, but Portuguese, but it's not even the same as the Portuguese spoken in Portugal. Again, I was only alerted to the fact by my former boss. We are generally vague on the differences between South American countries, except we know that Peru is "pan flute and mountains Latin America" and Mexico is "hats, guitars and maracas Latin America"...

@thor likewise i know people who think Norway is mostly just death metal bands filming in snowy forests

@squirrel I theorise that the goths only come out at night or stay in the shadows, because you never really see them around.