You know... It is REALLY easy to do the whole "voodoo doll" trope or practice while avoiding any cultural appropriation, religious misrepresentation or racist cliche. Just... don't call it "voodoo".
Because if you are not aware, this practice of using a doll or figurine to bewitch or curse or put a spell onto a person, is actually older than the creation of vodou and its various branches. It can be found in medieval Europe. Several European countries have their own specific words and terms for this magical practice - a pratice attested since very early days. Heck it was even present in Greco-Roman Antiquity!
So... there is nothing forcing you to constantly say "voodoo doll" when talking about a spell-through-puppet. Except a bad habit that the United-States media imposed onto the rest of the world, I guess...
And, as the bitter old cynical soul that I am, I will definitively grumble something about how it is very telling that Americans did not choose to pick one of the several European terms and words for this magical practice and rather latched desperately onto a term related to a discriminized, fantasized and misrepresented Black religion... grumble grumble grumble.
But I will be fair to Americans and leave the possibility of the doubt. Because we all know the common American is a bit too lazy to do thorough research or be interested in anything outside of its own country, and so it is possible that all those people did sincerely believe that the idea of "magical bewitching figurines" was created on American land - because as we ALL know, everything was invented in America and for or by Americans, right? So of course it is bound to be the "voodoo doll" because it can't possibly have existed before the United-States were founded right?
Grumble grumble grumble.
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So me and my friend, who are equally obsessed with Ariana just like went on FaceTime and had a deep discussion about Ariana. We’re seeing like so much hate or negative energy towards Ariana’s personality on TikTok and honestly my friend and I are thinking that Ariana is so integrated with Glinda now that I think she subconsciously put on this like nice girl persona so, she doesn’t piss off the studio executives at wicked. Glinda is the good witch so the fact that she has home wrecking allegations against her is probably not a good look for her from the studios perspective. But I feel the only reason that the negative press has continued is because Ari is not in her like bad bitch Italian energy that she was in 2014 through 2019. She’s just like trying to be a nice girl and just trying to let it all go over her head and stay focused and be in the present but I think that’s also hurting her because she’s not being truly authentic, like I feel like her instinct is tell people to “shut the fuck up you’re wrong”. but now she can’t do that because she is suppose to be this bubblegum pink princess. And she’s the lead of a major two-part movie franchise so there’s a lot of money invested into her.
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sometimes I remember that random ass take about how Michael Trevino shouldn’t have been casted as a white character and it leads to me spiraling about how the show portrayed werewolves as lesser/base-instinct monsters that could never conquer their beast selves (without untriggering their werewolf gene and rewriting their dna essentially) and then said that the werewolf gene was indigenous and they were “discovered” when they killed the white babies and children of their colonizers
and basically fuck the show on a lot of levels, but also, most importantly to the original thought, if we’re gonna critique a poc actor for playing a “white” role (which mind you brought the expansive tvd main cast to two non-white members) maybe first consider the apparent inherent whiteness of the role- and if the reason he’s textually white (being that his parents are seen as such- forgetting grandparents who would’ve carried the gene) isn’t more to do with him being the werewolf the narrative brings closest to redemption or goodness- even that which they snatch away from him and then require he lose his werewolf side before inevitably dying for his past sins
all to say- the show fucked up in a lot of places, and Ty and Bonnie saw the brunt of that- if you wanna call it racism or something else, it still saw an uneven divide in the depiction of werewolves and witches who weren’t white and played by white actors and given magical status/vampirism
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People’s comments over episode 3 of Mando on Facebook is somehow the thing that’s making me lose my mind. I’ve seen stupid comments and ridiculous opinions on everything under the sun in the past, but this is the straw breaking the camels back for me.
Complaining that they don’t even remember the characters… sigh. I may be biased since I had taken the time to rewatch season 1 and 2 AND Boba Fett before season 3 aired - but even if I hadn’t rewatched, I don’t understand how people don’t remember the Doctor who is linked to Grogu for fucks sake. He also literally explains the Dark Troopers to us. You know, those same Dark Troopers that Luke fucks up entirely in that super awesome, badass sequence?
Attention span of gnats, I swear. I also don’t get the people who are somehow against world building. Like, how dare you? Some of us want substanceeeeee.
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Before I see any more nonsense or confusion about the riots currently happening in France against the death of Nahel.
Yes, it started as a protest to denounce the unfair death of a young man shot by the cops and what looks like a hasty cover-up by the police. But it isn’t that anymore. Because the riots that are currently happening are not protests, but pure “riots”, pure waves of violence and nights of urban warfare. What do all those rioters do? They attack the police stations... but they also attack the town halls, and the prisons, and the supermarkets, and the schools, and frigging habitation buildings. They attack everything without reason, because clearly these are people not here to support the family of the kid or to really protest against the situation, they’re just here because this last in a long series of violence protests allows them a perfect “cover” and “justification” for just pillaging and destroying everything. Because this is one of the two things that are heavily insisted upon: these riots are an excuse to pillage. We have hundreds and hundreds of shops that are attacked and stolen from during these riots - supermakets, computer shops, video game shops, shoe shops, jewelry shops and even book shops... Tell me how stealing away from a supermarket or stealing hundreds of Nike is supposed to be an anti-police movement or a support to a dead teenager? Same thing with the burning of cars - because you know where they burned cars? In poor neighborhoods. These rioters, most of them the “youth of the banlieue” (because they are mostly teen and young adults, and come from the “banlieue” and those same poor neighborhood supposed to be the target of police “unfairness”), burn the cars of their neighboor, of other poor people around them, and they destroy the shops of their own neighborhoods, and destroy the local schools. This shows the incoherence and madness of those riots - they want to so-call “protest” to defend the poor neighborhood and “all but ghetto in name” from the “violence” of the French institutions... But they do that by literaly destroying themselves their own neighborhood and attacking the same people they claim to riot in the name of.
Heck, this went one step further now as they have started blocking and attacking habitation buildings. We have the testimony of random families, with young kids, who didn’t have anything to do with all that, but that yesterday night almost got killed because they were stuck in their building by the rioters, with the toxic fumes and flames of the car burning underneath entering the flat, and without the firemen intervention they might have suffocated to death. These rioters just to loot pubs or cigaret-shops, put into danger and nearly kill kids, just because they want to attack any building in sight (including habitation buildings) and burn whatever they can find.
This is actually the culmination of a long process and history which has been pointed out and talked about before, but up until now there was always nuance to bring “Yes they did that but” “No, it isn’t all like that”, “We can’t put it all in the same bag”... But this is the first time we have an unanimously bad thing where there is “finally” no possible excuse to invoke. Year after year protests lost the ability to be peaceful as they devolved more and more into riots - many people using them as simple excuses and occasions to let out a primal anger and a destructive violence, and thus attacking anything and anyone. Same thing with the pillage - more and more as time goes by, protests and riots result in pillage of shops (and always “interesting” shops like Apple or Nike, don’t get things wrong, when you go steal an Xbox, it is clear you’re not stealing food). Add to that the growth of a true hatred of police in France - not just police but also firemen, somehow. In France there is a wave of hysteria where a lot of people seem to have a burning hatred for any form of “men in uniform” (it was at first just against the police, but now it has extended to firemen too), to the point a regular “game” in difficult and criminal neighborhoods is to call the police, only to throw stones at them when they arrive ; and similarly when firemen try to put out fires during riots or protests, nowadays they get BEATEN UP by the same rioters who started the fire. People keep saying “Yeah but the police did bad stuff, they deserve the anti-cop hate”. Okay, then can you explain the ANTI-FIREMEN HATE? The same people who claim “Death to the cops” also beat firemen up just because they try to do their job, aka prevent the destruction of the criminal rioters from becoming more dangerous. There is a true “hatred of the man in uniform” (or the woman in uniform, because of course there’s a gender-equality in this hatred, and no matter the gender, anyone wearing an uniform will get beaten up). It is also tied to the massive rise of attacks and harassment and violence towards mayors and deputies all throughout towns and villages of France - anyone who seems to represent or embody any “institution” or any form of the “government”, even FIREMEN for heaven’s sake, will become a target of violence and hatred.
And to this devolution of the “protests” into meaningless riots allowing an outburst of violence and theft ; and to this general wave of hysteric-hatred of all those wearing a “uniform” ; you need to add the mix of growing “casual violence” in France coupled with the feeling of impunity that grows in the most dangerous and criminal neighborhoods and communities of France. The “urban rodeos”, the rise of violence against pharmacists, the harassment of nurses in the street, and many more...
I will also point out something about these protests for Nahel, this so-called “marche blanche”, something that made me think “Yep, this is going to go wrong.” or rather “This will not go a good way”. The presence of Assa Traroé by the side of Nahel’s mother during the protest. You might have heard of her because she is the sister of Adam Traore, another young man killed by the police during an arrest, and whose death caused massive protests and outrage, notably because he was black, which added to the topic of “police violence” the discussion of “police racism”. Assa took in charge the wave of protest and contestations surrounding her brother’s case, she made herself the “representative” of all the victims of police violence and police racism in France, she became the face of not only a social but also political movement, she worked hard to make the name and face of her brother the symbol of all the “innocent” victims of an “unfair” police brutality... But I put “innocent” in such a way because the big problem with the Traore family is that they are not innocent. The Traore brothers were notorious criminals, a clan renowned for drug dealing, racket and theft - a very important fact to keep in mind when you notice that the group formed by their sister, “Truth for Adama”, paints a picture of Adama and his family as innocent, lawful citizens that were harassed and killed by the police just out of racism and certainly not because they used weapons to racket junkies and scam people. And let’s not even talk of other nasty things surrounding the Traore case, such as how the group “fighting” for Traore had put up clearly anti-semitic messages, and the constant contestations of any testimony proving that maybe the Traore brothers weren’t such nice guys as it seems, or the general fear surrounding the Traore clan in their neighborhood... All of that to say - Assa Traroe did a heavy social, political and legal work to depict her brothers as innocent victims and the absolute embodiment of the “innocent victim of police brutality and racism”, infiltrating herself in any other case and protest, always putting her brother’s name alongside the ones of ACTUAL INNOCENT VICTIMS. And this is what disgusts me a lot - there are actual innocent victims of police brutality, cases where really good kid and nice guys got destroyed by racism, but they all get swept under the enormous glorification the Traore clan and its movement created for deceased criminals and definitively not nice guys. Heck, she also was one of the key players in the general confusion between French people killed by the police and the cases of black men killed by the police in the USA - she was the one that organized a protest for Georges Floyd IN FRANCE, manifesting and calling forth the FRENCH GOVERNMENT to do something about racism in the USA, and somehow invoking Floyd’s death as a symbol of police brutality “in France”? You clearly see the political thinking of this woman.
So to see her alongside Nahel’s mother, at the head of the protest, clearly made me go “Yep, that’s going to go bad”. And also seeing Nahel’s mother actually laugh and smile in the very beginning of the protest, as if she had a good time? That’s something I haven’t seen people talk about and that left me even confused, there were images on TV on her literaly having fun at the beginning when the protest put itself together, before she put on a “serious grieving” face - your son died yesterday, he isn’t even buried, and you’re laughing and smiling at a protest supposed to denounce the unfairness of his murder? It felt strangely wrong and I do not know why and how, since there was no sound recording just pictures, but... yeah it was weird.
But to return to the original point I wanted to make: before anyone goes saying “Oh, a teen died by the police’s hand? Then the protest must be legitimate.” know that they are devolving into meaningless, senseless and dangerous riots that pillage video game shops, attack book-shops and habitation buildings, burn the car and destroy the schools of the same poor and difficult neighborhood they claim to “represent” and “protest for”, and are just a massive wave of pure, undiluted, blind hatred and violence targetting everything and everyone - a violence which clearly doesn’t have anything to do anymore with Nahel’s death, a violence purely for the sake of violence. It is very sad to say, but this clearly isn’t about him anymore, and these people managed to completely cover up and soil his death with their mass pillage and bloody stupid riots.
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So many saying:
"Oh! Why do all the other romances in the epilogue get kisses while Astarion gets just hugs! Where is our kiss?!?!"
I think you're missing the point...
For non-ascended Astarion, nothing is more fitting or more perfect than that hug. Why?
This is a man that had been abused for over 200 years. A man who was forced to use his body to lure people against his will. A man who tells you that he has used his body sexually and otherwise that just the act of sexual intimacy has been tainted for him.
In Act 2, as he tells you all this, allowing an extremely vulnerable side of himself to be shown to you. Asking for reassurance that he was more than a cheap tool. What does Tav/Durge do?
They hug him. Hold him tightly. And the Vampire has no clue what to do because he, in 200 years, has never been touched like that unless it had sexual implications. For the first time, he is being touched for pure, vulnerable intimacy and love. And in that moment, he accepts the safety of your arms, and holds you. Craving not a touch of lust, but love.
So yes, a hug is far better than a kiss in my regard. At the end of the day, no matter what, he wants to feel that safe feeling of your arms. No expectations, just pure love.
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Trying to figure out which swtor class would be most related to a scientific field researcher. It’s either the beginnings of an oc, or just background ideas for the reader in the Feral fic.
I’m so excited to begin writing it but I want more ideas before I truly begin 🥺 I start writing things and then never have an end in mind. It’s not the best method for me.
But when I play swtor I just want to stab at people and twirl around with a double saber 😂 Dark side stuff is just too fun and my inner 6 year old is excited to be an evil bitch Sith.
My science gal is gonna be totin’ a blaster and wit only. Maybe bounty hunter would work…? Urrrgggh. I read imperial agent subclasses and I’m not convinced it would be right. It just has to be on the Imperial side. I cannot figure this out. Fsfsjsjsj
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