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Dimas and Satrio's Excellent Adventure
I signed up for Racebending Revenge at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
dark_agenda because do you know how long I've been threatening to write Indonesian!Winchesters? Since March, apparently. And then I missed the July 2 posting deadline because I was off celebrating someone else's independence day. LOL. Better late than never! ALSO, the icon for my Dreamwidth post is pretty much the appropriatest in many ways. Someone randomly made a map of Indonesia the background for a Winchesters icon, and hey! Now it's time for Indochesters.
I have grand plans to write more in this 'verse, but here are two ficlets for now. 'Verse summary: They follow the trail of the thing that killed their mother from West Java, Indonesia to the USA. This is Satrio. This is Dimas. Handy-dandy Indonesian/Sundanese translations are here.
North for the Winter
Pre-series. One of the few times their father took them north in the wintertime. "Do we even have a word for snow?" 590 words.
Jejak Kaki
Early S1. Brothers on the road, rediscovering. The title means 'footprints'. "It's not that Satrio has anything against his mothertongue, but Dimas speaks it like he's making a point." Also 590 words.
And now for some cultural identity soapboxing!
Differing attitudes about multilingualism is something I brought up in my aforelinked post about Indonesian!Winchesters, wherein I realized that to racebend them into Indonesian immigrants, I had to languagebend as well. In the USA, the kind of multilingual exchanges that Dimas and Satrio have seem to be associated almost exclusively with immigrant/multicultural families. Sure, both Indonesia and the USA have their lingua franca (Indonesian and English respectively), but Indonesia also has hundreds of living languages, several of them older than the lingua franca itself. A lot of people grow up speaking the regional language(s) alongside Indonesian.
As an exercise, I tried writing SPN fic in Indonesian, and one of the things that struck me was how compelled I was to have Sam and Dean switch between Indonesian and Sundanese. It's pretty common in Indonesia to switch between Indonesian and the regional language, but I was weirded out writing it because Supernatural, like much of the media I consume, is adamantly monolingual. But it's like, if I were writing SPN fic in Indonesian (and not even with Indonesian!Winchesters! Even if I were still writing about white American Winchesters, but in Indonesian), I couldn't have it be 'authentic' or whatever without also having Sam and Dean slip into Sundanese occasionally. And that's just 'cos I'm from West Java. If I were from Sumatra, Sam and Dean might slip into Batak, and if they were from Bali, they might slip into Balinese. I love to complain about how stiff and formal Indonesian subtitles for movies and television are, but I guess it makes sense now that I think about it. If the subtitles were gonna include slang and authentic cadences, which region's slang and cadence would they go with?
I reckon one of the things about American bilingualism is that there seems to be this tendency to assume that the non-dominant language is imported. In the US, the Spanish comes from Latin America, the Mandarin from China, etc. In Indonesia, languages like Javanese and Sundanese have been around for over a thousand years. Indonesian is the new kid on the block, its current incarnation having branched off from Malaysian during colonial times and standardized under the self-interested eye of the Dutch. This is not to say that Sundanese and other regional languages have remained unchanged throughout the years, and neither is it to say that these languages coexist without hierarchy and threat, but that is a whole 'nother kettle of fish for another time. My point is that multilingualism is more the norm in Indonesia than it is in the USA, and I reckon part of it is because in Indonesia, it is not perceived to be a sign of foreignness.
So now throw English into the mix! My family and I talk pretty much like how Dimas and Satrio talk, except not about killing monsters. A sentence has at least two languages, and we conjugate interlingually. Convention seems to favor monolingual stories, and translation seems to assume Language1-to-Language2 transitions. For purposes of this project, however, I decided to keep Dimas and Satrio's dialogue multilingual. After all, if your default is Indonesian and English, how do you decide which parts of your identity to italicize?
I've also been wanting to write Indonesian!Pevensies since a year ago. That's still on the to-do list, as is Muslim Indonesian Jimmy Novak. I also just signed up formundane_bingo and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
spnsupporting because I am a crazy person. I've yet to get my bingo card, but my spnsupporting characters are pretty predictable.
dark_agenda because do you know how long I've been threatening to write Indonesian!Winchesters? Since March, apparently. And then I missed the July 2 posting deadline because I was off celebrating someone else's independence day. LOL. Better late than never! ALSO, the icon for my Dreamwidth post is pretty much the appropriatest in many ways. Someone randomly made a map of Indonesia the background for a Winchesters icon, and hey! Now it's time for Indochesters.I have grand plans to write more in this 'verse, but here are two ficlets for now. 'Verse summary: They follow the trail of the thing that killed their mother from West Java, Indonesia to the USA. This is Satrio. This is Dimas. Handy-dandy Indonesian/Sundanese translations are here.
North for the Winter
Pre-series. One of the few times their father took them north in the wintertime. "Do we even have a word for snow?" 590 words.
Jejak Kaki
Early S1. Brothers on the road, rediscovering. The title means 'footprints'. "It's not that Satrio has anything against his mothertongue, but Dimas speaks it like he's making a point." Also 590 words.
And now for some cultural identity soapboxing!
Differing attitudes about multilingualism is something I brought up in my aforelinked post about Indonesian!Winchesters, wherein I realized that to racebend them into Indonesian immigrants, I had to languagebend as well. In the USA, the kind of multilingual exchanges that Dimas and Satrio have seem to be associated almost exclusively with immigrant/multicultural families. Sure, both Indonesia and the USA have their lingua franca (Indonesian and English respectively), but Indonesia also has hundreds of living languages, several of them older than the lingua franca itself. A lot of people grow up speaking the regional language(s) alongside Indonesian.
As an exercise, I tried writing SPN fic in Indonesian, and one of the things that struck me was how compelled I was to have Sam and Dean switch between Indonesian and Sundanese. It's pretty common in Indonesia to switch between Indonesian and the regional language, but I was weirded out writing it because Supernatural, like much of the media I consume, is adamantly monolingual. But it's like, if I were writing SPN fic in Indonesian (and not even with Indonesian!Winchesters! Even if I were still writing about white American Winchesters, but in Indonesian), I couldn't have it be 'authentic' or whatever without also having Sam and Dean slip into Sundanese occasionally. And that's just 'cos I'm from West Java. If I were from Sumatra, Sam and Dean might slip into Batak, and if they were from Bali, they might slip into Balinese. I love to complain about how stiff and formal Indonesian subtitles for movies and television are, but I guess it makes sense now that I think about it. If the subtitles were gonna include slang and authentic cadences, which region's slang and cadence would they go with?
I reckon one of the things about American bilingualism is that there seems to be this tendency to assume that the non-dominant language is imported. In the US, the Spanish comes from Latin America, the Mandarin from China, etc. In Indonesia, languages like Javanese and Sundanese have been around for over a thousand years. Indonesian is the new kid on the block, its current incarnation having branched off from Malaysian during colonial times and standardized under the self-interested eye of the Dutch. This is not to say that Sundanese and other regional languages have remained unchanged throughout the years, and neither is it to say that these languages coexist without hierarchy and threat, but that is a whole 'nother kettle of fish for another time. My point is that multilingualism is more the norm in Indonesia than it is in the USA, and I reckon part of it is because in Indonesia, it is not perceived to be a sign of foreignness.
So now throw English into the mix! My family and I talk pretty much like how Dimas and Satrio talk, except not about killing monsters. A sentence has at least two languages, and we conjugate interlingually. Convention seems to favor monolingual stories, and translation seems to assume Language1-to-Language2 transitions. For purposes of this project, however, I decided to keep Dimas and Satrio's dialogue multilingual. After all, if your default is Indonesian and English, how do you decide which parts of your identity to italicize?
I've also been wanting to write Indonesian!Pevensies since a year ago. That's still on the to-do list, as is Muslim Indonesian Jimmy Novak. I also just signed up for
mundane_bingo and spnsupporting because I am a crazy person. I've yet to get my bingo card, but my spnsupporting characters are pretty predictable.
no subject
This. It's so clichéd, but I'm going to bring up the stupid melting-pot metaphor. After all, even English is imported to America. It IS the dominant language now - though, I wonder, how many Americans would call English their first/dominant language? A large amount of the people I know grew up bilingual. The only reason English is dominant for them is that American convention makes it be dominant in the general flow of society. Anyway, the point I was getting at is that I would love to see, if we're sticking with the vein of SPN, American Indian Winchesters. Right there is the culture that I think we can fairly definitively say has the longest, deepest connection to America.
I'm an English-speaker. I'm sort of fluent in Spanish, but only if I'm in a place where Spanish is the dominant language and thus I can't slip back onto English as a safeguard, and my Spanish is school-based, not culture-based, so I'm sure I'm in fact missing out on a lot. But anywho - sorry, I keep rambling because it's really late - my point here is that I think I would really enjoy multi-lingual media. It would probably be more difficult for me to get hooked on the tv version of your Satrio and Dimas 'verse than all-English Supernatural, simply because it would take more effort for me to understand it, but ultimately that could only be a good thing, I think. Having to go look up translations, figure out cultural references and markers and just in general to be exposed to something more world-aware than good ol' English all the time...that would be a really really good thing.
The moral of this story is that I really love Satrio and Dimas so far, and I love the way you're writing them, and I'm really looking forward to more.