[meme] cultural questions!

toss some numbers my way

Misty 13 & 14

13) in-game? pagan! literally just pagan, the former dictator who used to do awful things to the people around him in order to keep them close, and therefore gets her. so really, the real answer to this is that she doesn't feel at home or among her own kind with much of anyone; she desperately wants connections, but she feels very isolated not just

socially, but emotionally, too. she knows she's different, and feels that that sort of makes her a class unto herself. she loves the team and wants to be a part of them, and looks back on their time in the woods together so incredibly fondly, but they're still not her kind

14) oh go i am so bad at AUs, lmao. pls hold on this one while i think

i think if she'd been upper upper class growing up, like 1%-er rich, that would have mitigated a lot of the bullying and ostracism she went through as a child because other kids would have been more willing to put up with her being socially off-putting if being friends with her meant sleepovers at fancy mansions and spring break trips via private jet

but i don't actually think that lack of ostracism would have made misty any better, it would have just made her worse in new and exciting ways

she would have learned to manipulate in a different way (and she would have 100% known that none of them liked her for her), she would have gotten angry and bitter for different reasons, her anxieties would have been about different things

Shaw: 3, 10

Shaw 4, 12, 14

3) i'd say solidly middle class growing up, and probably the same as an adult; her apartment is a rathole, but i think that's more indicative of her ~vibe than it is of what she can or can't afford, and some of the jobs she's had are ones that would have paid well

then things get complicated in canon, though; she ends up presumed dead, but then ends up employed by a billionaire with basically unlimited resources, but then he loses those resources and she ends up operating under a cover identity that has to subsist on a retail worker's salary in nyc

(which means she has to go for cheap food and alcohol, which sucks)

she doesn't have any obvious class-based biases; she's neither disparaging of poor people, nor an eat-the-rich type

10) yes, but not necessarily as much as one might think! she's very much a "what you see is what you get" type of person on the whole, and so while she doesn't really act differently around friends, her friends are more used to her and are able to read her better/pick up on her nuances in a way that strangers generally can't, which means the vibe of her

interactions with them tend to be quite difference even if her surface-level behavior is the same (or at least very similar)

her hometown is new york and she acts accordingly around her fellow new yorkers by not talking to them without a good reason for it, lmao

heritage-wise, she's iranian-american, and is pretty acculturated to both cultures; there have almost certainly been times when that's come with some "stuck in the middle, not fully fitting into either category" feelings, particularly when she was growing up

we unfortunately don't see her interact with other middle easterners or middle eastern americans much at all, but i'm sure there is some level of cultural shorthand when she does, ex. she spends some time with an iranian taxi driver at one point and speaks farsi with him, uses farsi idioms that wouldn't work in english, etc

(technically this was in a simulation and didn't actually happen, but she's still herself, so how she acts within them still says something about her even if literally everything/everyone else is artificial/constructed)

more when i get back from dogwalking!

4) i'd say center left - largely liberal on a lot of issues (pro lgbtq rights, pro women's rights, anti religious extremism and appreciates the hell out of the separation of church and state), but with conservative leanings in some areas (very pro military, anti corrupt cops but largely pro cops as an institution, disparagingly calls people "a bunch

of hippies" at one point)

honestly, she's anti extremism in general, and largely believes in reforming from within the system whenever possible - i'm sure there are plenty of situations where she believes revolution and fully overturning the status quo is justified, but she doesn't believe the US is one of those, and acts accordingly

12) it depends on what the thing is and how strongly she believes it! by and large she's not really here for debate, but if it's an important enough issue to her and/or important people to her, she'd be willing to talk it out, especially if it was an issue of morality

if it's an issue of methodology, she'll squabble and hiss and then relent to the rest of her crew

14) aaaaa the tough one again LET ME THINK

a very funny realization: i'm more of a lefty than basically all of my characters put together, except for tiffany, who is basically an anarchist at this point

EXCEPT tiffany hasn't thought about earth politics in like seven years, and so if she were called any sort of leftist her reaction would be a strong and immediate "i am not a liberal"

".......... wait"

"shit actually i think i am a liberal now"