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What is your town/city like on its founding/independence day? - Started by: chaseawaythedark
What is your town/city like on its founding/independence day?
Posted: 30 Aug 2024, 05:57 AM

This kind of discussion has come up before but I've had my mind on the train of thought again due to end-of-the-month events. I grew up onto the idea that the day of the year of one's town/city would be a special kind of sacred. Think the birthday of your nation. It's the norm that if people feel in-tune with those around them, they celebrate it.

I currently live in a town whose date of establishment was October 27th 1779, marked by inn events, a play, and art games (I should do a tour, it makes this relevant). Before that, it was a place founded on April 24th 1834, though whatever coincides with this day is never given a second-thought, weirdly. Before that, it was a place with a date marked for January 23rd 1790, and there would be family outings and aesthetics (no fireworks or drinking though, there's a centuries-long total prohibition there).

It's only because I said something that tomorrow I get to show off festivity art (and might cosplay as Kahhori, I don't know) even though it's more of an inter-town day. It's natural there will be some people who don't think too hard about their town day, but I am surprised in my current country to not see this anywhere. Is this not a thing?

RE: What is your town/city like on its founding/independence day?
Posted: 03 Sep 2024, 03:45 PM

Absolutely nothing happens. Which is actually kind of sad when I think about it. Independence days are "just there", they're just celebrating a fact of history, a part of how the cookie crumbles. Your hometown is your family though.

Maybe I'll give out a discount or something. Free commissions or art with a reduced price for anyone who can verify it's their town's independence day on the day they request it or who can show they're celebrating it.

Also, why Kahhori? What's the story behind that/her? Is there some kind of conception going on with her?

RE: What is your town/city like on its founding/independence day?
Posted: 04 Sep 2024, 04:01 PM

BatmanWilliams:

Absolutely nothing happens. Which is actually kind of sad when I think about it. Independence days are "just there", they're just celebrating a fact of history, a part of how the cookie crumbles. Your hometown is your family though.

Maybe I'll give out a discount or something. Free commissions or art with a reduced price for anyone who can verify it's their town's independence day on the day they request it or who can show they're celebrating it.

Also, why Kahhori? What's the story behind that/her? Is there some kind of conception going on with her?

I may do that.

Marvel is known for having this approach to making characters where they try to make them feel "at home". Marvel is headquartered in NYC. NYC is the most famous and most populous city in the world. So what does it mean to them when they say they want characters to feel "at home"? They make every hero from NYC.

There are two side effects of this approach. First off... think about it. Spiderman, Thor, Iron Man... I could list these heroes in the thousands and they just about all come from NYC. I often joke that secret identities are pointless in Marvel because, if you went to school in the Marvel universe, one in four classmates in your extra large NYC school would be a superhero. Some characters come from other places, but they are few are far between, and even then, not a single character (with a certain exception) comes from Upstate New York, the slice of New York that isn't New York City. Which brings me to the second side effect.

Upstate New York (think Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse) and NYC, often referred to as Downstate New York, are in a kind of rivalry. So when you have a bunch of characters from one place and nothing going on in the other place, I guess it comes off as one of those showy moves. Enter Kahhori, who also just happens to be the very first hero to originate in the MCU and carry over to the comics (as opposed to debuting in the comics and being adapted to the MCU) and (assuming her telekinesis isn't cheating) the first character aside from Beta Ray Bill who could lift Mjolnir right off the bat (though I'm sure people will argue any Rey Skywalker type of character would be able to do that). She is from one of Dr. Strange's parallel worlds where the Haudenosaunee nation still existed in its historic form, or maybe time travel was involved a little, so not only was the initial reaction "finally, someone from Upstate New York", but she also has a connection to characters from Haudenosaunee folklore, which has always been left out of Marvel style omnism (as in, Marvel has legendary characters like Thor and Odin from the Norse treated as heroes alongside the mortals, and then they slowly made it an omnist thing adding Marvel versions of characters like Hercules, Amaterasu, Baba Yaga, etc. but they always would leave out Haudenosaunee ones, as the way stories are told among the Haudenosaunee are very literary-device-esque similar to how the Jade Emperor is told about in Taoism), which means the Haudenosaunee culture would be canon too. So cosplaying as her (which I did do, see my cosplay section for more) was a side effect of the new element of pride for the national founding date, though there is a bit of skepticism over the ambiguity of this, as not only is she specifically from the Mohawk tribe, which historically overlapped with NYC (making it possible it's more just a matter of same-place-different-time), but although she is said to be the Haudenosaunee version of a Gandalf jedi with his divine power, and Sky World (the Haudenosaunee equivalent of Asgard) is explicitly mentioned, it's just another Asgard, minus the higher beings (that and they chose to make her nemeses Spanish consquistadores, even having her personally confront the Spanish queen, rather than the English or the French who historically both coexisted and fought the Haudenosaunee...... and lost by the way, as the Haudenosaunee were said to have been Genghis Khan levels of powerful), all this causing many people to proceed with more caution (it would be like the NFL being like "yeah we'll have Spongebob sing Sweet Victory, but he'll be silenced before the actual song").

Being the 882nd anniversary to the Haudenosaunee and with events going on (but no widely acknowledged holiday), it fit.

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