Weeper or Gypsy: A Generational Divide

The Old Guard

Weeper was the name sympathetic humans gave the Iskari cousins driven underground generations ago, after they refused the Hero's gift and Andilain hunted them for it. The oldest generation still living wears the name without complaint. To them, it commemorates real suffering, catacombs and forgotten caverns and centuries of hiding, and dropping it feels like pretending that suffering didn't happen.
  They keep the old songs. The old mourning customs. The old caution around outsiders that kept their ancestors alive long enough to eventually surface into the Black Market as it exists today.

The Younger Generation

The generation raised inside an established, functioning Black Market never lived underground a day in their lives. They grew up with the Triad's protection, the Sänä's order, and licensed stalls instead of hidden caverns. To them, Weeper is a word for victims, and they don't consider themselves victims of anything.
  They prefer simply Gypsy, or increasingly, no ethnic label at all beyond Market-born. Some have taken to calling the old songs performances rather than practices, sung at festivals for coin from curious visitors rather than sung in private the way their grandparents did.
  I've sat in Togs and listened to both generations describe the exact same song, one calling it sacred, the other calling it good for business, and neither one is technically wrong. I don't know that this particular divide resolves cleanly, or that it should. Every persecuted people that survives long enough to stop being persecuted eventually has to decide what parts of the persecution they keep, and what parts they finally get to set down.
  I suspect the honest answer is that both generations are grieving the same thing from opposite directions. The old guard grieves what was done to them. The young grieve, without always knowing it, that they never got to know the people their grandparents were before it happened.
  I don't have a tidy resolution to offer either side, and I've learned not to pretend I do when I write about living cultures rather than dead ones. This one's still deciding what it wants to be. I intend to keep documenting it exactly as unfinished as it actually is.