Conversation

The more I pay attention to how religious people live, the less I’m able to distinguish it from fandoms+larps
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There’s a genre of morning TV in India (which has emerged since I left) that’s just dwell shots of idols at famous temples with devotional music. It’s not active prayer, it’s just watching the camera pan across idols. Why?? Then it hit me: examining your action figure collection.
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Polytheism is not primarily about conceptual pluralism of aspects of divinity. That’s post-hoc intellectualization. It is primarily action figures. Not just 1000 incarnations of 0-100 eigengods (depending on the extended universe), but a dozen action poses for each.
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There’s entire subgenres of temples for specific poses. For eg anantasayana temples/idols are sleeping Vishnu. Product idea: posable action figure idols that can be put in different poses. Though you can’t do variable facial expressions easily which might be a deal breaker 🤔
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Navaratri is coming up, a festival with a track devoted to literal action figure displays (kolu) where women put their idol collections on stepped displays, but freely include secular dolls. If your kid has a Barbie or spider-man doll they can legit go in a kolu
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Replying to
I miss this a lot. It was a big deal for my grandmother. I once contributed my He-Man action figure to it, because I thought it (and he) was the hottest of my toys. Lil gay me 😂
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