It's a generally shitty thing white writers do to treat real life cultures they consider foreign as just bodies of "lore" for them to mine and then to remix and recontextualize as they see fit, as though other countries are just fairytale kingdoms from children's stories
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Anonversations
And JK Rowling does this A LOT, which is why she gets people so pissed at her Like she thought it'd be clever to do a good-guy-bad-guy switch with Navajo skinwalkers and say skinwalkers were really innocent Animagi who were persecuted by evil charlatans
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Anonversations
And she treated this like just flipping the good guys and bad guys in a comic book As though the Navajo aren't REAL PEOPLE and she didn't just casually tell a bunch of REAL PEOPLE that "in my fantasy world your religious leaders are all grifters and liars"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Anonversations
The most offensive thing about it was in fact that she was surprised by the reaction It would have been better if the whole thing were intentional trolling Like if I said the Catholic Church were secretly run by vampires I would at least expect Catholics to get offended
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Anonversations
I wouldn't get all surprised like I thought Catholics had gone extinct years ago and everyone just thought of their belief system as a bunch of fun fairytales to remix to their heart's content
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Anonversations
Insert like all my favorite anime here and I'm Catholic.
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Yeah, Catholic "mythos" definitely gets this treatment. I've seen it a lot in Japanese media especially, but you get it in American vampire/monster stories, too. Like Van Hellsing or Buffy.
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Replying to @RachelNeedsANap @bratknits and
Yes, but the point is the people who write it don't get all shocked when they hear some Catholics aren't pleased.
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Replying to @sarisataka @RachelNeedsANap and
Also Catholicism hasn't been reduced to a shell of itself whose practitioners are struggling to retain their history and culture.
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Replying to @TrueMetis @sarisataka and
I know My point when drawing the comparisons to stuff like Western astrology or the Catholic Church is to point out how shockingly lazy and ignorant these little appropriations would come off if they were applied to something you were familiar with
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But it is not at all a *symmetrical situation* It's not just that someone *wouldn't* write a book where "Pisces means guitarist", it's that if they did, it would be laughed off pretty quickly and no one would actually change their understanding of the zodiac because of it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @TrueMetis and
What JKR does she gets away with because she's strip-mining cultures that are already marginalized and ignored in "mainstream" culture When I talk about what the Sikidy signs mean in Malagasy culture it sounds like I'm talking about "obscure trivia" to white people
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Replying to @arthur_affect @TrueMetis and
The offense doesn't register as offense because they're used to it, because it's normalized And because, perversely, if it were applied to them it would be such a tiny thing as to be easy to ignore, as opposed to being one snowflake in an avalanche of offenses
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