Welcome again to everybody! Happy Lunar New Year. Make yourself at home. Go ahead and stand on that inconspicuous floor tile over there. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
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Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory (and other books), you can use z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
Was that user celebrating the Korean version of the event? Because afaik the holiday is common to all of East Asia with different countries having their own customs.
And I’ve never heard it called the “Lunar Festival” either, only “Lunar New Year” and “Chinese New Year”. But international video games often go out of their way to avoid namedropping real-life holidays so I’m not sure if we should be taking any stock in WoW. For example, Animal Crossing calls Easter “Bunny Day” and Christmas “Toy Day”.
I can’t find the original tweet I saw now, all I can get is Justin Trudeau calling it that. But yeah, my point was that it’s western governments cynically trying to detach the holiday from its roots in the west using ‘inclusivity’. They have zero interest in or care for other east-asian populations that adopted CNY, it’s purely a political maneouvre.
And yeah, I wasn’t slighting WOW, they’ve been saying Lunar Festival for almost 20 years and also don’t refer to Christmas or Easter (Winter Veil and Noblegarden respectively) and they even have Oktoberfest which they call Brewfest. I was only pointing out that that’s the only place, until this year, that I’d seen CNY called something else, and it was in a fictional universe.
Coming from a western politician, yeah it’s probably a geopolitical thing. But I don’t think everyone uses the term “lunar new year” as a way to distance themselves from China. Chicago Chinatown refers to the holiday both ways and that’s how I’m used to hearing it. I didn’t know it wasn’t like this everywhere.