Summer Smith (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomhigh2024-09-13 07:19 am
somethingwithturquoise) wrote in fandomhigh2024-09-13 07:19 am
The Weird, Wonderful, and WTF World - Friday, First Period [09/13].
"Today," Summer announced, as the class gathered and settled in the Danger Shop Classroom Sim because she still thought that was the funniest place to hold a class, "is Friday the Thirteenth, a day that has, for a lot of cultures here on Earth, been given an association with bad luck. Which is, of course, something I'm tempted to dismiss as silly, but we're in a fucking interdimensional nexus, I'm sure there's someone out there who comes from a place where Friday the Thirteenth really is some pretty messed up stuff that you need to take very seriously, but, where I'm from? It's seriously just an arbitrary coincidence based on a calendar and time periods that we made up in the first place, so...." She shrugged. "Meh.
"But that said," she continued, "it being Friday the Thirteenth means it's a good opportunity for me to be on theme and talk a little bit about bad luck superstitions in Earthen cultures! So, okay, let's break some of these things down:
"The unluckiness of Friday the Thirteenth actually comes from the concept around triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen, which actually spawns from an old Norse myth around twelve of the gods having a nice little dinner party, and the trickster god Loki wasn't invited, which, you know, rude, and so Loki arranged to have Höðr to shoot Balder, who was kind of everyone's favorite, and kill him, and therefor, everyone was sad and it was an unlucky day, and so thirteen sort of became an unlucky number because number thirteen will kill your faves if you don't invite him to your party. Which is sort of, like...okay, if you don't invite a thirteenth person to your party because the number thirteen is unlucky, and then that causes bad luck because the thirteenth person is pissed off about, then doesn't that just keep self-perpetuating itself? Like, you can also see this in other things: there's that fairy tale where they don't invite a fairy to bless the princess and she ends up cursing her. There's the whole thing with thirteen people being at the Last Supper with Jesus Christ, including the dude that sold him out to the Romans like a bitch. It's so ubiquitous that some buildings don't even have a thirteenth floor, just to be safe.
"How the Friday part came in was a little less clear, but a couple of authors in the 19th century attributed the combination as particularly bad, and then it just took off in the cultural zeitgeist in the 1980s thanks to some slasher films. But there's also some variation. Like, it's Tuesday the Thirteenth that's unlucky in some Hispanic and Greek cultures, and it's Friday the Seventeenth that some Italians get all worked up about.
"Like I said, a lot of these superstitions have really dumb origins, and I'm sorry if you sincerely believe in them or they actually do mean something in your world. Other popular ones include black cats being symbols of bad luck because in medieval times, black was associated with death and they sort of got a reputation for being witches' familiars and harbingers of some really bad shit, sort of like crows and sometimes black dogs. But the cats got the bigger bad wrap through culture in particular.
"Or walking under a ladder. This one goes all the way back to Egypt and the dead and how ladders represented sort of a bridge between the realms and that disturbing them or messing with them angered the spirits, so don't fucking walk under them or else. And then Christianity stole it like they did most of their shit that and ran with it as a symbol of the Holy Trinity or whatever so some of them went so far as to say walking under a ladder was blasphemous. Which, yeah, okay, sure.
"Maybe you've also heard that breaking a mirror gives you bad luck...up to seven years sometimes! That one goes back to the idea that mirrors, since they cast a reflection of you, hold a bit of your soul. They thought the same with cameras and stuff for a bit, too, or at least some people, I'm obviously not talking about everyone. But the idea stuck around long enough that, if the mirror broke, then you pretty much screwed that part of your soul over to be stuck in the mirror forever. Tough luck, buddy, indeed.
"So, yeah," she nodded, "lots of weird superstitions out there in the world, but it's kind of interesting how they came to be. And I focused on mostly Western ones; we didn't even get into how fucked up the number Four could get you in Chinese culture, or why you need to hide your belly button during a thunderstorm, or how you should never give your partner shoes because it means that they'll just run away from you..."
....did she just consign herself to never get nice shoes from Stark pretty much ever now? Maybe!
"...point is, there's a lot out there, this is just scratching the surface, and that's what we'll be exploring today: superstitions, what brought them about, how their weird, and maybe some of your own, that you either find particularly interesting or that you ascribe to yourself. Do you believe there's merit in these superstitious beliefs? What purpose do you think they serve that they'd be so prevalent in so many cultures throughout the years?"
You know, like an actual class for learning stuff!
"But that said," she continued, "it being Friday the Thirteenth means it's a good opportunity for me to be on theme and talk a little bit about bad luck superstitions in Earthen cultures! So, okay, let's break some of these things down:
"The unluckiness of Friday the Thirteenth actually comes from the concept around triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen, which actually spawns from an old Norse myth around twelve of the gods having a nice little dinner party, and the trickster god Loki wasn't invited, which, you know, rude, and so Loki arranged to have Höðr to shoot Balder, who was kind of everyone's favorite, and kill him, and therefor, everyone was sad and it was an unlucky day, and so thirteen sort of became an unlucky number because number thirteen will kill your faves if you don't invite him to your party. Which is sort of, like...okay, if you don't invite a thirteenth person to your party because the number thirteen is unlucky, and then that causes bad luck because the thirteenth person is pissed off about, then doesn't that just keep self-perpetuating itself? Like, you can also see this in other things: there's that fairy tale where they don't invite a fairy to bless the princess and she ends up cursing her. There's the whole thing with thirteen people being at the Last Supper with Jesus Christ, including the dude that sold him out to the Romans like a bitch. It's so ubiquitous that some buildings don't even have a thirteenth floor, just to be safe.
"How the Friday part came in was a little less clear, but a couple of authors in the 19th century attributed the combination as particularly bad, and then it just took off in the cultural zeitgeist in the 1980s thanks to some slasher films. But there's also some variation. Like, it's Tuesday the Thirteenth that's unlucky in some Hispanic and Greek cultures, and it's Friday the Seventeenth that some Italians get all worked up about.
"Like I said, a lot of these superstitions have really dumb origins, and I'm sorry if you sincerely believe in them or they actually do mean something in your world. Other popular ones include black cats being symbols of bad luck because in medieval times, black was associated with death and they sort of got a reputation for being witches' familiars and harbingers of some really bad shit, sort of like crows and sometimes black dogs. But the cats got the bigger bad wrap through culture in particular.
"Or walking under a ladder. This one goes all the way back to Egypt and the dead and how ladders represented sort of a bridge between the realms and that disturbing them or messing with them angered the spirits, so don't fucking walk under them or else. And then Christianity stole it like they did most of their shit that and ran with it as a symbol of the Holy Trinity or whatever so some of them went so far as to say walking under a ladder was blasphemous. Which, yeah, okay, sure.
"Maybe you've also heard that breaking a mirror gives you bad luck...up to seven years sometimes! That one goes back to the idea that mirrors, since they cast a reflection of you, hold a bit of your soul. They thought the same with cameras and stuff for a bit, too, or at least some people, I'm obviously not talking about everyone. But the idea stuck around long enough that, if the mirror broke, then you pretty much screwed that part of your soul over to be stuck in the mirror forever. Tough luck, buddy, indeed.
"So, yeah," she nodded, "lots of weird superstitions out there in the world, but it's kind of interesting how they came to be. And I focused on mostly Western ones; we didn't even get into how fucked up the number Four could get you in Chinese culture, or why you need to hide your belly button during a thunderstorm, or how you should never give your partner shoes because it means that they'll just run away from you..."
....did she just consign herself to never get nice shoes from Stark pretty much ever now? Maybe!
"...point is, there's a lot out there, this is just scratching the surface, and that's what we'll be exploring today: superstitions, what brought them about, how their weird, and maybe some of your own, that you either find particularly interesting or that you ascribe to yourself. Do you believe there's merit in these superstitious beliefs? What purpose do you think they serve that they'd be so prevalent in so many cultures throughout the years?"
You know, like an actual class for learning stuff!
Listen to the Lecture - WWWTF, 09/13.