suddenly was kinda confused about what exactly ‘ragripper’ is meant to mean on Alternia so I looked it up and came across a really great line in Kanaya’s introduction
You are a SEAMSTRESS or a RAGRIPPER or a TREETRIMMER or a LUMBERJACK, whichever you care to be…
and on first read it just seems like those are four different professions, and that Kanaya is just a jade of all tracks, but then you think about how treetrimmer and lumberjack are clearly just two names (one Alternian and one terrestrial English) for the same thing…
what Kanaya’s saying is that she works with cloth and with wood, and that she can refer to herself by lowblood vernacular (ragripper, treetrimmer) or highblood vernacular (seamstress, lumberjack) as she pleases because of her unique midspectrum class! i think that’s really cool.
so the implication is that ‘ragripper’ is literally just an Alternian synonym for seamstress (and a pretty fitting one, considering the Alternian aversion to complex fashion essentially reduces the practice of crafting garbs to the act of ripping rags)
a treetrimmer, is, of course, a real thing; it’s not a profession, though, or a thing you do, it’s an implement for trimming trees.
but a ragripper is also an implement! not in the real world, obviously, but a Ragripper is also a chainsaw on the Alternian market!
and if you only put a little bit of thought towards it, the fact that the lowblood words for professions are also the names of objects has pretty unfortunate implications if you ask me!!
