I am Balkan and this summarizes it perfectly. I've had first hand experience with being ostracized and labelled as a TRAITOR
(the 90s war sentiment of hating the West due to the bombings continued into the early 2000s), simply because I was passionate about English at a young age thanks to my dad being good with tech. And despite coming from ethnic parents like everyone else from the region, I got bombarded by boys pulling their eyes and making CHING CHONG sounds because I looked vaguely """Asian"""
It got so bad it spread to every other school in town and I got mistaken for a foreign exchange student because I developed a bit of an accent due to not speaking much in my native tongue from being isolated by my peers...so I fully leaned into English and hobbies in order to express myself and thus met likeminded kids who also went through the same. While my friends were great, it enabled me to further separate myself from the "
average" folk until my late teens when I realized I don't have to prove/deny myself of being a native just because I don't fit the image of a stereotypical person here. Now I get along with everyone just fine and have no issues speaking my native tongue or appreciating my culture where once I used to feel ashamed.
For that reason I can sympathize a little with Pup. I don't doubt that she probably got bullied for being black, or not being black enough because she's a huge geek — but making """black-coded""" characters isn't going to help her case because she will inevitably turn it into a stereotype. She needs to go outside and work on herself before she can express herself because living on the internet for a good chunk of her formative years has robbed her of any experience or identity. She's clearly very insecure of herself be it her gender, sexuality and heritage.
TLDR; go outside virgin lmao
