You're here for the fic; all of it is also on my personal site.
Y'know, "deliberate refusal to code switch", especially under the all-purpose exonerating banner of funny, is a social weapon extremely familiar to people who know TTRPG spaces. It's fucking kender, it's every guy who's Just Doing What His Character Would Do Hahalol.
Comes a point I start side-eyeing the yinglet shit even more than it gets as a baseline for being 90% Phonetically Rendered Comedy Speech Impediment
There is something to be said for code switching as appropriate. There is something to be said for committing to the bit.
What that thing is to be said I'm not entirely sure, but I sure don't have the energy to do the bit for every single thing ever.
Also, I never did like the Kender. I enjoy the "small chaos elemental" vibe, but the "what if this human was child sized and an absolute irredeemable bastard" never did hit for me.
I can see a whole bunch of people just sincerely enjoying themselves, and I really don't want to be a dick to them, but the only way Chaos Gremlin doesn't provide cover and plausible deniability to I Will Cause Problems On Purpose Guy is a level of willingness to contextually back off from the bit — which is understandably hard if you're all-in on Chaos Gremlin.
Social stuff is inevitably difficult and conflicting.
It is difficult and conflicting, agreed.
But if it is any consolation, or at least explanation, the glaring difference I find between yinglet and kender is that the trope boils down to intent. Kender generally were nefarious little assholes, doing damage for fun. Yinglets I find generally to be more along the line of chaotic neutral. They're not in the "cause problems on purpose" camp, it's simpler than that. Most of them are just weird little guys doing whatever, trying to get by. The vast majority, by and large (minus a couple story-driven factions), are simply surviving through the fact that they are hapless little weirdos with fairly poor self-preservation instincts. The attraction I see isn't being an agent of chaos against the world, it's a firm lack of expectations of competence, social grace, or common sense. They're not foils in their universe, they're just trying to get by and they're not really great at it.
It's probably too late at night for me to be able to really go about this coherently, but if their whole bit was being done at the expense of others I wouldn't be here for it.
Maybe I'll try to say this again after some sleep, idk.
I'm just going to put this out here.
Once you get into "otherkin/fictionkin/etc" territory, saying, "back off the bit," becomes some weird form of hatespeech. source: not this time, but literally watched drama unfold in my time online over similar circumstances.
this sort of stuff is a minefield.
