cashew | Wednesday, July 31st, 2024

I'm strapped for time, so just throwing this out there:

I don't know if it's the English translation or if it's the Anglosphere fandom, but why the fuck is Aventurine constantly calling Dr. Ratio "Doctor" when in the Chinese trailer he specifically refers to him as "Professor"?

I know this sounds like I'm nitpicking but "doctor" and "professor" are completely different titles and convey different meanings. Aventurine refers to Dr. Ratio as "professor" because he's playing up "I'm just an ignorant layman, please help me oh great educator" — aka, he's clearly working the "professor/student" kink angle. (If you listen to the Chinese dub, you can tell from the acting his definitely working this trope hard.)

Meanwhile, "doctor" is used in a professional setting, usually used to convey distance and collegial respect, often towards women. (I don't want to get into the politics of academia here, just let it be known that in academia, most women have to insist on being called "Doctor" to fight back against the sexism.)

My point is, stop having Aventurine call Dr. Ratio "Doctor" and use the actual word "Professor" instead. FFS.

Edit to add: OK, so another thing that really annoys me is the way Dr. Ratio is written. This is actually an extension of my annoyance with popular media's horribly inaccurate portrayal of academia. I'm seriously tired of "smart" academic people talking like a fucking science paper. Do you have any idea how much work goes into editing the paper to make it sound "science-y"? That's literally the majority of the paper writing process. Copy-pasting the statistical program's output into a table and reporting p-values? That shit's easy. It's writing sentences that doesn't involve "so that's what I think nyah nyah nyah STFU your arguments suck" that consume the majority of the paper writing process. (Source: personally have edited too many scientific papers.)

Most people write scientists as if they've never stepped into a science department. We do not sound like robots reporting numbers and shit, OK? We're usually using double negatives, shortening words, and using "the thingy" liberally because most scientists blank on their professional jargons at the worst fucking times. Honestly, the most realistic characterization I've seen of a scientist in popular culture was Matt Damon's portrayal in The Martian. Newsflash, scientists talk like normal people. We curse, we swear, we forget words and stutter, and often resort to "how much solution do we have?" when we actually meant to ask "how many liters of buffer solution do we have left?" And we almost never use the full name of measurments, it's always "mL" or "mils" or "cc's" or "micros". Who the fuck have time to say the whole thing when you can just read off the letters?

The fact that Dr. Ratio rejected Genius Society and proclaims "ignorance is an ailment" and it is his duty as a scholar to cure the universe of it, says to me that Dr. Ratio is actually interested in being a professor and teaching students, more so than showing off his "intelligence". (An attitude I applaude him for, as I could not stand teaching and hated every minute of it.) Sure, he might be harsh with his grading, but he genuinely seem to enjoy teaching and of all the professors I've known who actually enjoyed the teaching process (rather than tolerate it as something they have to do because universities won't let you get away with only doing research), all of them heavily studied communication methodology and tried to figure out how to phrase complicated concepts into easy to digest examples using commonplace language. In fact, learning how to parse down jargon is a skill we had to learn in graduate school.

So, fandom, please, stop writing Dr. Ratio like he's some kind of weird android robot and give him normal, human speech patterns. Gah.

Also, this ends my brief foray into Aventurine/Ratio ship. I would much rather put up with horrible OOC failed faux-period drama with Jing Yuan than read another fic where Dr. Ratio can't talk like a normal human being.