#also for some reason ive made italians extinct im sorry italians

[userdogmeat]

Faith, Hope, and Love

@falloutober 8

cw: religious content/discussions

“You ever went to one of those, General?” He asked with a tip of his head, directing her attention to the decaying Concord chapel that stood at the end of their patrol route. A symbol of the past and long dead tradition.

Nora nodded matter-of-factly, “I went to that very one.” 

It was hard not to sound impressed at Nora’s casual revelation, “No kidding.”

“Every Sunday.”

“I didn’t peg you for the religious type.”

Nora chuckled as she shook her head, “No - no,” she corrected, “I’m not - I wasn’t, never was. But - uh, Nate was, shockingly enough.”

He couldn’t help the way he soured at the mention of his name. Nate, her dead husband, the one Nora refused to talk about. “Interesting,” he nodded, he hoped that the conversation would end there - the way most of their conversations did if they weren’t directly about Minutemen business. 

Preston wasn’t quite sure why they hadn’t really bonded. Sure, he hadn’t made much of an attempt other than the usual casual pleasantries and small talk but talking had never quite been his forte and apparently, it hadn’t been hers either. He’d known her for nearly seven months now, they’d fought side-by-side together on more than one occasion, they had reclaimed the Castle, rebuilt Sanctuary, and yet, here he was eager to kill the conversation he had just started just moments ago before Nora did it for him. 

She had been so quiet during their travels together, only willing to indulge on the basics of who she was - or had been. Nora was a lawyer, a desperate mother in search of her infant son, and a widow to a soldier - a religious soldier. Had that been common before the war? He had so many questions for Nora - questions that he was confident she’d never answer in conversations that they’d never have.

“He was Italian,” she said simply, her voice pulling him out of his thoughts and drawing his attention to her, “Nataniel De Luca.”

“Italian?”

Nora glanced over at him, her expression just as curious as his before chuckling. “I forgot that that’s not a thing anymore, I guess. Italians and their Catholicism, or whatever. Italians,” she began to explain with an awkward pause, her fingers tapping at the rifle slung at the ready in front of her, “they're from Italy - obviously - which is a country in Europe, and they are - were - for the most part Catholics, which was this huge religion and Nate’s family. They were - uh, they were pretty devout Catholics. Church every Sunday, only fish on Friday’s, the rosary every single evening kind of Catholics.”

Preston listened intently as she continued, he hadn’t heard this much ever come out of her - let alone about a topic like this.

“And don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like I minded. It was just something that I didn’t grow up with but it was fine. It gave me something to do, provided a community that I never really had growing up, I liked it.” 

He could hear the uncertainty in her voice, the way she was still trying to convince herself two-hundred years later. 

“I had to if I wanted to marry him.”

Preston shot her a pointed look and Nora quickly shook her head, “No! He wasn’t forcing me, he never would’ve - maybe his family was - but it was the church that demanded it. If we wanted to get married by the church - ,” she pointed to the building ahead of them, “if we wanted to get married in that church, then I had to go.”

“You got married there?”

“Mm-hm,” she nodded, “we were going to baptize Shaun there, too.”

Were.

Preston felt her pain radiate into him, his own chest aching as Nora blinked back tears that had begun to well into the corners of her eyes, the way they always did when her baby’s name was brought up. It was one of the reasons Preston never asked, he knew just how much it hurt her.

“Do you mind - ,” she started, pausing to wipe away a fallen tear, “do you mind if we go in for a second?”

“No, not at all.”

Preston stepped into the chapel before her, his laser musket drawn high as he scanned the nave for any unwanted surprises. It was surprisingly empty, spare for the debris that had accumulated from centuries without care.

“It’s clear,” he called back to her, offering his hand to guide her in.

Nora took in a shaky breath before hesitantly taking his hand. He squeezed it gently as he cleared some of the ceiling rubble away out of their path with his boot, only letting go after Nora had. He stood and watched as Nora took a few hesitant steps forward, her fingers gliding over the pews armchairs and pulling up streaks of dust from the dark wood until she finally stopped.

Preston watched as she kneeled next to the pew, her lips uttering words that he couldn’t quite make out as her fingers tapped her forehead and chest before taking a seat without a sound. 

They were like this for quite some time, her sitting in the pew just a few rows from where he was standing and for the most part he watched her: the way she just sat there, staring at the empty pulpit. It wasn’t until he saw the shake of her shoulders that he moved, quickly stepping forward to stand at her side.

“Hey,” he whispered as he climbed into the pew next to her, careful to not startle her, “talk to me.”

“I miss them, Preston,” she cried, tears now flowing freely, “I miss my family.”

His hand fell quickly onto her back, a tender hand rubbing small circles into her back as he tried to soothe her, “I know, Nora. I’m sorry.”

Nora fell into him, her head resting against his chest as he tightly pulled her into him and she cried, his free hand brushing the hair that began to stick to her tear-stained face while loud sobs filled the chapel as Nora wept for her husband and baby. 

Preston held her close for as long as she needed, perhaps for as long as he needed. He’d never been one for physical affection, never once straying past a good pat on the back with his Minutemen comrades but this - this - right here, right now. It was what the moment required.

He stared ahead at the pulpit at the end of the nave’s long corridor, his eyes fixated on the crumbling statue of a woman holding a baby that stood a few feet behind it. And it wasn’t Nora and Shaun but just an unknown mother and her beloved baby boy, a beloved baby boy that the mother must have held and loved, the same way that Nora had loved him. And so it was Nora, the unknown mother who had never held faith but had always loved her son. And he knew right then and there that he would do anything to help her get him back.

#falloutober #sole survivor #preston garvey #preston garvey fo4 #fallout 4 #fo4 #fallout fanfiction #i know that this prompt was days ago but ive had this story idea on my mind for awhile now and wanted to give it a go #userdogmeat creates #i thought the song was fitting as the sole survivor was the first thing i thought of the first time i heard this song #also for some reason ive made italians extinct im sorry italians #falloutober2023 #falloutober 2023 #Spotify

[tlbodine]

Hi! Im writing a story that has to mix fantasy and reality, Ive always been interested in folklore, cultures, and beliefs of other people. All of these things are involved in my story, I wanted to add in a character that is Native American (Her name is Rosalie), I'm on the fence because I don't want to touch something that I shouldn't. How should I go about this? Should I change her ethnicity, Should I in someway make it my own? Or how should I write it or should I write about something else.

This is tricky. And the answer is going to be really long. Sorry. 

I want to make it clear that I am not myself in any way a representative of Native people or claiming to be one. I’m just a white lady who grew up near the reservation and have had maybe more interactions with Native American cultures than a lot of people. But at the end of the day, I’d defer judgment to people closer to the people being specifically affected. 

So, with that disclaimer out of the way. Here’s the thing. I’m not here to tell anybody what they should or should not write about. But I can hopefully give you some stuff to think about that will help you decide. 

Thing One: “Native American” is not a monoculture. There are 574 tribes federally recognized by the U.S. government. They are all culturally distinct. They each have their own histories, mythology, religion, food, lifestyle, and so forth. So before you go creating any Native OC, you’re gonna want to narrow that down to a tribal affiliation. 

You can do this one of two ways. You can choose a geographic location and then look for a tribe who lives in that area, or you can choose a tribe and then root them in that geographic location. Of course, a Lakota Sioux could live in New York, but she wouldn’t be from New York, you feel me? 

Writing about “Native Americans” without understanding their tribal affiliation and history is like writing about “Europeans” as if Italians and Russians and Greeks and Germans were all the same. 

Thing Two: If you’re going to be talking about mythology/folklore, you need to do your research while also recognizing that a lot of the most accurate and authentic information is not going to be accessible to you. 

A lot of Native cultures are “closed” cultures in the sense that they’re not going to teach sacred knowledge and rituals to outsiders. They’re just not. It’s none of your business. They’re not hiding this information from you because they want to be greedy, they’re hiding it because until 1978 it was illegal for them to practice their religion in public in a lot of the country. A lot of things from Native cultures have been erased forever or diluted by outside influences. 

So this means that if you’re writing a character whose life includes or is influenced by traditional culture, there are some things you won’t be able to portray accurately. And I personally think it would be disrespectful to just make something up, especially if you don’t make it extremely clear that you’re making it up. 

For an example of how this could work: The film Dance Me Outside is a really great mystery-thriller set on a reservation, and I heartily recommend it. But there’s one scene where one of the characters has married a white guy. She brings him home to her family and, for plot reasons, needs him to be out of her hair for a bit. So she sends him out with some of her male relatives to keep him occupied. They decide it would be hilarious to do a “naming ceremony” to give him an “Indian Name.” It’s very clear in the narrative that they’re making this up as they go along -- they are creating what they think he thinks a naming ceremony would look like, and he’s gullible enough to go along with it because he’s eager to please (and at this point very drunk). The scene is very funny and advances the plot and develops some characterization without ever actually revealing any secret/sacred knowledge. 

But in general? If something is sacred to a tribe? You don’t get to fuck around with it. You don’t get to put your own fresh spin on it or just make up stuff that “sounds” authentic. Because...

Thing Three: You will encounter a TON of fake or inaccurate information out there. Just, a ton. Because here’s the thing. White folks didn’t just commit genocide against Native people. It wasn’t enough to destroy their people and their culture. White folks have a really long history with appropriating their culture. 

So the situation is that you get a group of people whose ancestors were actively hunted like animals (there were bounties for scalps!), sent to forced re-education camps where they were frequently abused and scrubbed of their culture and language, and who were not allowed to practice their religion under threat of law. And at the same time, aspects of those religions and cultures -- that the people who made them cannot practice! -- are taken and absorbed into pop culture.

Yeah. It’s shitty. 

So when you’re researching, you need to be absolutely certain that your sources are coming from actual Native Americans from the tribe you want to write about and not from white folks who think some aspect of their culture is neat. Because, personally, I feel like cultural appropriation -- in the context of Native Americans -- is continuing to perpetuate genocide, and that feels icky. 

Thing Four: Modern Natives =/= Historical Natives. 

There is this....weird, colonialist tendency to imagine Native Americans as...living fossils, or quaint backwards people who live in old-fashioned ways, or as a thing that used to exist but not anymore. I get the impression talking to a lot of people that they think Native Americans stopped existing in the Wild West days. Like “Indian” is a category in their head alongside “Cowboy” and “Samurai” and “Pirate” or whatever. 

But that’s not, like....the case. Modern Native American people exist, and they have varied and complex relationships with their culture and history just like everybody else. Some people live on reservations and practice traditional religious and cultural practices. Some people live in small towns or cities and practice a mixture of modern and more traditional lifestyles. A lot of them are Christian. Some blend cultural aspects of their tribe with Christian aspects of religion. And so on and so forth. It will 100% depend on the individual! 

There are also aspects of cultures that get blended across tribal affiliations! This is especially true among the sort of “powwow culture” groups who dance competitively or trade crafts at powwows and fairs. 

Anyway the whole thing is VERY COMPLICATED and honestly not something you’re going to learn from reading a book. It’s the kind of nuance that’s only going to make sense to you if you’re hanging out with Native people and understand their individual lives. 

Thing Five: There are a ton of harmful stereotypes and things you maybe don’t even think about or realize are stereotypes because there is so much misinformation out there. I feel like almost every representation of Native Americans in media is bad because most of the stories are written by folks who just don’t know what it’s like to be Native, and they’re writing for a White audience. 

PHEW. Okay. That was a lot. If you’re still reading, THANK YOU. 

So what’s my answer to your question? 

I think it really depends. Why do YOU want to write a Native OC? Are you willing to put in some time and effort to research them? What kind of story are they going to feature in? I think by and large, people outside of a culture shouldn’t try to write stories about being that culture. As in, like, I don’t think a white person has any business writing a story to “illuminate the struggles” of Native people or anything like that. 

But if you want one of the characters in your horror novel to be Native because the story takes place in an area with a lot of Native people, sure. That makes sense. And if that person’s frame of reference is flavored by their culture, sure, go for it. 

But I certainly would not recommend writing a story that, for example, re-casts a sacred/mythological Native American figure as a monster (cough, Wendigo, cough), or one that creatively reimagines the mythology unless it is exceptionally clear that the mythology is being reimagined and is not meant to be accurate at all (because otherwise it runs the risk of further polluting an already almost-extinct culture). 

So...that’s my opinion. I hope this was helpful!