#HE ATTEMPTS TO NOT BE RACIST BY BEING AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FLAVOUR OF RACIST

[arysthaeniru]

Sometimes, a reading will take me 3 hours when it's only about 15 pages, and it's never really because it's hard, but because I take psychic damage with every other line.

[musea-reviews]

Terraria-Houten (event)

"The largest terrarium event in the Netherlands"

Location: Houten, Utrecht, The Netherlands Price: 16,- Duration: 2 - 4 hours Transport: the bus from the station to the event location only goes once an hour, so it takes some planning. You can call in a bus, but even those were usually too full to take everyone. Language: Dutch, German, French, English. Activities: buying reptiles, insects, invertebrates, rodents, and everything related to them. Date of visit: Sunday 26 February 2023 Website

so much to see

Terraria-Houten is part of the ‘’Terraria-’’ expo series, where every month there is an event like this in a different city. The price depends on the size of the event, the one in Houten being the biggest. At this event, you can shop and find good deals on enclosures, health lamps, food, substraid, but also things like insect-inspired jewellery and taxidermied animals. That is all next to the obvious main attractions, the animals for sale. The most expensive animal I’ve seen there were 2.000 euros, as this is also a good place to find rare animals they don't have in most stores. Or to get common animals for cheap. I got my beetles from a pet store, 15,- for 3. Here you could buy the same kind 5,- for 5… Insects and interbred are a rare sight in pet stores over here. So once you find a store that has them, they overprice it. But besides it all it was also fun to look at animals, even tho I feel bad for the small containers, tho those are temporary. I got to hold a giant millepede, and petted turtles, ferrets and giant snails. The event does also have a rodent section (and frozen rodent) but it's small. Fun if you're ALSO interested in rodents besides the rest, but don't go if that's your main goal. Also, if you go, you have to take cash with you and download the PayPal app. I was not prepared for this but since the people behind the stands come from all over the place and from other countries, specifically Dutch paying apps are not going to work. And at most stands, it's not possible to pay by card at all. Cash is your best option, so be prepared for that. 

buy buy buy

I myself keep a terrarium with sun beetles and isopods, but I wanted to add more, so I went to get other kinds of beetles and millipedes. At the beetle stand, I asked what beetles would work well together with my beetles, and they told me beetles are actually racist!? no, but yeah they all have a different chemical smell and things, therefore pretty territorial to other species. So I decided to not get more beetles and focused on millipedes. i was so hyped by the first one I saw that I bought it immediately, it was a black and white millipede for 5 euros, I called her Mime. As we walked further, we found a whole stand with all kinds of millipedes. I knew about the giant millepede and really want one, but the enclosure I have right now would be too small (25 litres, 6.6 gallons). They were also kind of expensive on that stand, prices of the ones I wanted ranging from 10 to 25 euros per millepede. At the back of the event, something caught my eye, 4 millipedes for 10 euros. They were bigger than the one i bought before and that was a steal. As I bought them I got the entire enclosure including some wood pieces and stuff. He clearly wanted to get rid of them, but as the rest of the stand had no animals like that, it might have been that these were used for food or something. 

Another thing I bought was homemade fruit jelly. This guy sold them for 90 cents per piece, and that was already cheap for fruit jelly. We wanted all 9 flavours, but I only had 5 euros cash left, the guy said it was fine because we were so chill! Lastly, I bought a bird leg, probably a leftover from a failed attempt at taxidermy, I'm going to make an earring out of it. 

Not the best location

The location is not optimal as the bus only goes once an hour, and walking it will take you more than half an hour. Since it was already freezing, you (and the animals you probably bought) will not appreciate this. But the event does have free parking, so your best option would be to take the car. Definitely, if you have a long shopping list with you. 

Another thing the event could do better is an advertisement or the site. If you see the site, it almost feels like it’s not their real site, but it is.. If I was looking online and found this, I would have never gone there. I only went because my friend have been there before and told me it was cool, and so that's also how they got the info about this event from other friends. From a marketing standpoint, it's almost impressive they even get people to come with a site looking like that and 0 advertisement. On the other hand, I'm glad, it was just the right amount of busy, so more people would make it chaos. 

TLDR:

+ Fun expo with cheap deals and rare animals

+ anything you need for keeping any animal + handcrafted supplies from small businesses + free advice, and the ability to ask questions + A lot of stands

- bus only goes once an hour - how you can pay differs widely from stand to stand - the site looks sketchy

Would I revisit it: yes I would, it's a cool place to get good deals and get inspired.  Who do I recommend it to:people who keepreptiles, insects or invertebrates.

[morallygreywarden]

A few days ago, I was perusing the Dragon Age wiki (as one does) looking for info on Shale when I came across this archived thread from the now taken down Bioware forums. Dragon Age fans were posting their “random Dragon Age question(s)”, and for the first few pages of the thread, David Gaider would respond to some of them. Then I came across this question and answer:

[Image: David Gaider quotes a post by poster Alistairlover94:

“@Mr. Gaider: Was the Tome of Koslun based on the Qu'ran, the Qun on Islam, and Koslun on the prophet Muhammad?”

David Gaider responds:

“Not really, no. The Qun has nothing functionally in common with Islam, and the existence of a prophet or a book is hardly unique. The Qunari play a role in Thedas similar to Arabic cultures in Medieval Europe (combined with the Golden Horde, for good measure), which is where their Middle Eastern "flavor" comes from... but beyond that any similarities are unintentional.”]

Being a Middle Eastern Muslim person myself (specifically, I’m Palestinian diaspora currently living in Canada), this post caught my eye. And... not really in a positive way.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the Qunari connected to Arabs. That was back on some Reddit thread or another, where someone suggested that the Qunari are comparable to Arabs/the Moors/the Turks because they are a “foreign race” with a “strange religion” who’d once enforced that religion across a wide stretch of land before being forcibly pushed back. 

My reaction at the time was “nah”. Maybe not a totally certain or comfortable “nah,” as I understood it’s possible that was what Bioware was going for, but more of a “nah, I don’t want to think about that, and I’m not gonna take that into consideration in my understanding of Thedas.” Fair enough, I thought, but having seen what Gaider said on the matter, I can’t really just write it off at my own leisure anymore.

I’m not the first person to talk about this. A quick search got me results like this in which people have expressed anger at this parallel before, as well as several threads questioning if the Qunari are meant to represent Muslims that make no reference to Gaider’s response in the thread I quoted at the start of this post. That said, though, I’d like to offer my own take on it here. 

I think the first and most obvious thing to point out here is that Qunari are grey, horned giants. While their obvious coding as POC in relation to their designs and the fact they are non-human characters have been criticized before, I think it’s an important thing to mention here as well. Gaider clearly states that the Qunari possess a “Middle Eastern flavour”, i.e. they’re not meant to be a direct representation of Middle Eastern people but rather have cherry-picked parts of Middle Eastern history to use as an allegory. Regardless of their intentions, clearly many people have picked up on the connection, and when you’re a person of colour desperate for representation, the knowledge that something that’s loosely meant to represent you or “play a similar role” to you comes in the form of-- well, grey, horned giants, isn’t particularly fun knowledge to have.

Now let’s unpack what Gaider actually said. 

First, he states that any similarities between the Qun as a philosophy and Islam are unintentional. I’m going to take him at his word for it; I don’t have any interest in trying to draw parallels between the Qun and Islam, except perhaps to mention that “Qunari” is only one letter and two rearrangements away from being the word “Quran,” which, yeah, real subtle. Reading too much into it? Maybe. I wasn’t originally going to bring it up here at all, but I find it kind of funny, so there it is anyway.

However, I do want to look at what the implications of that are. While there’s differing opinions on the actual subject of “Arabic cultures in Medieval Europe” (I think he’s referring to what’s popularly known as the “Islamic Golden Age”) that I’m not interested in getting into here (because while I do have some knowledge of the time period I think there are still things that I’m ignorant about due to only having heard the story from particular perspectives, and because during that time and in those regions Arabs/Arab Muslims were in the most positions of power, I don’t think it’s for me to try to assess the period with my limited knowledge), I think it’s safe to say that the actual religion of Islam was a major factor in it. And by that I mean Islam, specifically, for what it is. It played a particular role, and to look at it as simply a placeholder where any philosophy, no matter how disconnected, can be readily and thoughtlessly filled in is reductive of the religion itself. No, the Qun isn’t meant as an allegory for Islam, but it is meant to be an allegory of the role Islam played as being a central factor to the people who the Qunari are meant to be allegorical to, and I find the careless substitution here questionable. I get that this issue isn’t a unique one even within Dragon Age let alone outside of it, but it’s worth mentioning.

Now I think it’s worth it to look at the Qunari themselves and the role that they play in Thedas as it pertains to this allegory. One of the central tenets of the Qunari is that they are, as the Dragon Age wiki phrases it, “fanatical in [...] devotion, [and] prepared to wage war throughout their entire lives as part of their attempts to "enlighten" all other races in regards to their philosophy.” The Qun may have “nothing functionally in common with Islam” according to Gaider, but if the Qunari truly play a “similar role” to that of historical Arabs/Muslims, then we can’t overlook this element. (Particularly because this isn’t the first time Thedosian history has overlapped with Middle Eastern and Islamic history: the term “templar” references the Knights Templar, which was the name of the Catholic military order that fought the Crusades, of whom Middle Eastern Jewish and Muslim people were the primary victims, particularly in Jerusalem. Another example is in the name “Inquisition” itself, a reference to a group of Catholic institutions whose goal was to combat “heresy”. One of the most famous examples of the inquisiton was the Spanish Inquisition, that was formed around the decline of the Islamic Golden Age and specifically targeted Muslim and Jewish people. Several of the other inquisitions targeted Muslims as well).

The way the Islamic Golden Age has largely been depicted in the West involves the Orientalist idea of Muslims as barbarians who’d taken control of large regions with their “heretical” religion before their rightful defeat. The Qunari aren’t portrayed that much differently: they took control of sweeping regions of Thedas for a long period of time, forcibly converting masses of people to their philosophy, before being defeated by the Tevinter Imperium. The important difference here is that in real life, the details of the Islamic Golden Age were far more nuanced than that, and the labelling of Muslims as “barbaric” and Islam as “heretical” was a deliberate tactic to justify waging a war against them on the basis of their religion. In the Dragon Age universe, with respect to the Qunari, things are what they seem. While the notion of the Qunari being “barbaric” is specifically challenged, the Qunari really did convert people forcibly to their philosophy, and this is an undebated fact. 

This is a problem because this view of Muslims and Middle Eastern people still affects us today. One of the major justifications that white supremacists use for their islamophobia is the conspiracy theory of “Islamization”-- that Muslims have a master plan to convert the entire world to Islam and conquer. For the Qunari, this is literally true-- they actually do plan to conquer and convert the entire world to the Qun. The islamophobic caricature of a Muslim screaming “infidel!” to anyone who isn’t Muslim is still very much relevant today-- and the idea that Qunari view anyone who doesn’t follow their way derogatorily is a fact.  The characterization of the Qunari, as far as it is allegorical to Middle Eastern people and specifically Muslims, could be more accurately described as an allegory to islamophobic and racist portrayals of Middle Eastern and Muslim people.The existence of Qunari as a fictional entity does not challenge stereotypes, or offer a new perspective. It instead reinforces those harmful sentiments, the same ones that are echoed by those who commit hate crimes against us, and those who target us in politics and legislation. 

Like any other marginalized group, Muslim and Middle Eastern people don’t get a lot of representation. The Dragon Age series is one of my all-time favourites, and being able to see myself reflected in the Dragon Age series would be thrilling. But “representation” like this does more harm than good. While it wasn’t the intention of the developers to represent Muslims or Middle Eastern people by the Qunari except to give them a Middle Eastern “flavour,” that “flavour” is deeply embedded with a history of racism and islamophobia. It hurts twice: first, because it’s reductive of Muslims and Middle Eastern people, turning our history into something that can be cherrypicked from at the writers’ leisure without making any respectful effort to actually represent a marginalized group, and second, because that cherrypicking is imbued with stereotypes that have been and still are used to hurt us.

I hope that these concerns are considered in future work done with the game. While I’m not sure how this problem with the Qunari could be specifically addressed in the future, I think one suggestion that could help would be to make a better effort to represent Middle Eastern people in other areas of the game. @dalishious pointed out that we still don’t know much about a lot of the human cultures, such as the people of the Anderfels, and a sincere effort to write more positive and nuanced representations of marginalized people that the series has previously snubbed with human characters could help even things out more and potentially even do a lot of good.

Note: Thank you so much to @dalishious for letting me ramble about this and for looking the post over for me before publishing it! I really appreciate it :)