[locked to Iris Fortner]

[lefthertainted]

Following up on the conversation we were having before in Phoebe's journal:

I actually have reason to believe there is a force or forces at work to keep most of the non-supernatural population from noticing the supernatural. There have been a number of large-scale disasters in the past that were clearly of supernatural origin--the destruction of the Conrad Hotel, for one, and the Ten Plagues that occurred in the fall of 2009, for another--but most of the residents of the city just can't seem to even consider the possibility of a supernatural origin for these events. Occurrences such as rivers of blood and frogs falling from the sky violate a number of laws of nature as we know them, but while non-supernaturals will notice and react to the events as they are happening, only few days later they seem to have almost forgotten.

Unfortunately, when the other residents of the city do notice what's going on, there is often a violent backlash, leading to the rise of terrorist groups such as the CLF. It's all to easy for people try to blame supernatural occurrences on the supernatural community. The fact that many people don't recognize us for what we are actually gives us a degree of safety, odd as it may sound.

Comments

[sophicsulphur.livejournal.com]

Hmm, you're right. I didn't think about that, sorry.

A word for them.... Yeah, we should come up with something like that. It's kind of hard, though, isn't it? If you think about it, the difference between the supernatural population and everyone else is that they have something... well, supernatural about them. Because we came through the Rift, or have some magical power, or such. So the word to describe everyone else seems like it should be "natural" or "normal", but that doesn't work.

Maybe we need to make up a completely new word, like "straight"... well, I guess when you think about it, "straight" also implies ordinary, doesn't it? Like, staying on a straight path? Are there any other word pairs out there that we can look at the patterns of to see how they work and get some ideas, maybe? Ones that have been used for different groups like this, that don't sound bad?

[lefthertainted]

It is difficult. There are terms like "population at large," which is at least somewhat more neutral, but that only works to refer to the group as a whole. There are also terms like "common people" (or "common person") but that actually has somewhat of a negative connotation, as if people who aren't supernatural are boring and unexceptional and that's not the case. Same thing with "ordinary."

It seems like repurposing some other word will have to be the way to go. That can be one of the discussions we have at the meeting.

[sophicsulphur.livejournal.com]

I'll add it to my list of things to bring up. We should certainly raise it to everyone to see who has ideas. I'm glad you thought of it.