#YOUNG ADZ

[rapxquotes]

No half-hearted love, love me sincerely.

Tears In My Amiri’s - D-Block Europe

[sudokuplayer]

[howhow326]

For black history month, I think we should begin popularizing monsters from the African continent the same way European monsters are overpopularized. To that end, here's a list of some of the most famous folkloric figures from Africa!

Mmoatia

Origin: Ghana (Akan)

Creature it is not: Dwarf

(Singular: Aboatia) Mmoatia are a subclass of abosom (spirits in between Man and Creator) that live in the forests of Ghana. They are short, have curved noses, backwards feet, and a unique language made up of only whistling sounds. Whistling in the forest is a sure way to get their attention. According to legend, they are phenomenal herbalists that will sometimes share their knowledge with humans. When a person gets lost in the woods, they are said to have been taken by Mmoatia. Humans who come back after being taken will become incredible medicine men. In Ghana, Dust Devils are called "Mmoatia Mframa" (Wind of Mmoatia) because they are belived to be a portal to their world similar to how fairyrings are treated in Ireland.

Mmoatia are divided into three tribes: Black, White, and Red. Black Mmoatia are supposedly harmless, while White and Red ones are always up to some kind of mischief.

Adze

Origin: Ghana (Ewe)

Creature it is not: Vampire

In Ewe culture, the Adze is a type of demonic spirit associated with witchcraft. They take the form of a fire fly that, during the night, crawls inside human beings in order to posses them. People possesd by the Adze are said to be witches, who use the spirit to slowly drain the life force of people that they envy (Old witches target the young, Poor witches target the wealthy, enslaved witches target their masters as they should).

When targeting a person, the Adze will leave it's host human during the night and crawl into the house of the victim. When it's close, it will drain blood from the victim like a mosquito.

Werehyena

Origin: Pan-African

Creature it is not: Werewolf

Just like how there are Werewolf stories all over Europe, there are Werehyena stories all over Africa. Compared to werewolves, which are said to be men cursed to be monsters, Werehyenas are actually monsters that disguise themselves as humans only to eat it's friends during the night. The people most likely to be werehyenas are village outsiders and blacksmiths, who are associated with magic.

In Angola, there is a similar (but not the same) creature to the werehyena called the Kishi. It is literally a two-faced demon that has a handsome man's body and face in the front, and a hyena's face in the back. This creature lures unsuspecting women into relationships so that it may eat them. If the Kishi has any male children with it's prey, it teaches them the art of femicide.

Mami Wata

Origin: Pan-African

Creature it is not: Mermaid (ok, it kinda is a mermaid but I need to keep the joke running)

Even more wide-spread than the Werehyena, Mami Wata is a figure so popular that it is common for water spirits in Africa to be retroactively labeld as Mami Wata and take on her iconography.

The most famous picture of Mami Wata is actually a french painting of a black Caribbean snake charmer, who west africans later identified as Her. Mami Wata is worshipped as a powerful, female river spirit that controls the flow of the river, the rate at which fish can be caught, the money that men can make, and several other things important to humanity. She is also said to be a seductress, who sleeps with unsuspecting men only to later kill them for cheating on their wives. Indeed, Mami Wata is a defender of women and a slayer of sinful and abusive men.

In many places, it is common to believe that women who drown or go missing in bodies of water were taken by Mami Wata to be taught magic. The women who return become pristessess to her, while the women who never come back become new Mami Watas.

Impundulu

Origin: South Africa (Zulu)

Creature it is not: Thunderbird (no hate, Thunderbird gets constantly thrown into things where it shouldn't be by people who don't understand it. And those people tend to be not native)

Impundulu, or Lightning Bird (NOT THUNDER BIRD), is a person sized Hamerkop bird that has the power to control the weather and summon lightning. It is also creature of evil magic, allied with witches and it has a never ending hunger for blood. It is said to sometimes take the form of a handsom young men in order to seduce women (why dose that keep happening).

Impundulu are immortal, and the ones that serve as witch familiars are passed down in the family as the old master dies and the child becomes grown. The bird is immune to gunshots, stabbing, drowning, and poison. It's only weakness is fire.

[rapxquotes]

Little moments trigger memories when I talk about you.

Lonely Lovers (feat. Ed Sheeran) - D-Block Europe

[kemeticdevotee]

Osiris/Ausir, God of the Duat, life and rebirth

Who is Osiris?

Osiris is the son of the Sky Goddess Nut and Earth God Geb. His siblings are Isis, who is also his wife, Seth and Nepthys. He was said to be one of the first Pharoahs of Egypt. He civilized the people and taught agriculture. He is the God of agriculture, life, death, fertility and the king of the Underworld, the Duat.

During Osiris' reign, his younger brother Seth, jealous of his power to rule, murdered him. Seth invited him to a party, and had out a bejewelled box which he promised to anybody who could fit inside of it. After many failed attempts by the others at the celebration, Osiris gave it a try. He fit perfectly inside the box, which would become his coffin. The box was shut, sealed with molten lead and then promptly thrown into the Nile River.

When the Queen, Isis, found out, she was devastated, and went to search for her husband's body. The myths vary on how she did this, but most say she became a babysitter for the Queen of Babylon's young son, as Osiris' coffin was tangled in a tree in the back of the palace. Once she acquired Osiris' body, she brought him back to life with her magic. Osiris then became king of the Duat. This is just one telling of a variety of re-tellings.

When the Pharoah died, he was associated with Osiris, and the heir to the throne was associated with Osiris' son, Horus.

His festivals include the Osiris mysteries, and the raising of the pillar ceremony.

Symbols

Colours green, black

The djed pillar 𓊽

Crook and Fail

Atef crown

Ostrich feathers

Soil

Acacias, willows, sycamores, cedar

Adze blade (opening of the mouth)

Offerings

Cool water, beer, wine

Bread, sour dough, grain products,

Frankincense, myrrh

Iris, orris root, easter lily

Gold, lapis Lazuli, malachite, obsidian

Epithets

Mighty One

Ruler of Life

Who is in Abydos

Lord of love

True of Voice

Divine Father

Lord of Silence

Weary of heart

Prayer

Hail to you, Osiris Lord of Eternity, king of gods, Of many names, of holy forms, Of secret rites in temples!

Lord of remembrance in the Hall of Justice, Secret Ba of the lord of the cavern, Ba of Re, his very body. Lord of acclaim in the southern sky, Sanctified by the northern sky, The imperishable stars are under his rule, The unwearying stars are his abode, The ancestors rejoice to see him. Those yonder are in awe of him.

[extraordinaryhistories]

#20 - 'Joy! Joy! Joy!' (A Sun Came bonus track, 2004)

Here’s the scoop, kids: there is no personal heaven. Jesus died to redeem you, but he also died to redeem everyone; in the eyes of the Lord, all are equal. That means that everyone on Earth has equal responsibility to pray, to worship, to love, to show mercy, to show grace unto their brothers just as they would have it be done to them. Issue is, some people need a little more of a nudge towards their God than others. How’re we gonna do that, then? How do we bring all the peoples of all the nations towards peace and a divine understanding?

Answer: we do it via synthesisers, drum machines, and a million vibrant flecks of technicolour.

And in this way, the annoyingly-punctuated ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ is a real sea change, quite unlike anything on the album it’s appended to – or anything that Sufjan was trying at the time, really. Don’t let its status as a bonus track on A Sun Came mislead you: ‘Joy! Joy! Joy’ was recorded in 2001, right around the recording of the Steve Reich-meets-Kraftwerk sophomore release Enjoy Your Rabbit. Its deeply electronic stylings make a lot more sense when considered in that context. And yet they don’t, because ‘Joy! Joy! Joy’ is something that every song on Enjoy Your Rabbit decidedly is not: a structured, melodic, vocally-driven conventional song, with lyrics and chords and a lot of synths. Not at all a shock for Sufjan to write a song like this, but certainly a shock for him to write it at this period in his development - this could pass as a Silver and Gold song, or even an Age of Adz b-side, produced some nine years before his most iconic bloopfest was released. It bears repeating that that’s the beautiful thing about this era of his music. Sufjan’s unyielding experimental drive is the very reason he has become who he is today, and you can see his fledgling brilliance in these early off-cuts, nicked and scuffed though they may be. More simply: to get to an ‘Impossible Soul’, Sufjan first had to write a ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’.

There is no doubt that ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ is a fascinating curio, but to leave its appraisal there would be to patronise what is a genuinely endearing, adorable, good-natured bit of songwriting and production. Age of Adz is a very crowded album, with detritus seeping out of every corner of nearly every song, but ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ is ‘I Want to Be Well’ on various exotic varieties of crack cocaine. At its peak it is absolutely frantic and brickwalled to high heaven – one gets the distinct impression a lot of time was spent on this one, because holy fuck is there an abundance of stuff going on here. Warbling synths release bubbles; computers glitch; vibraphones execute code; guitars scream; layers upon layers upon layers of drum machines attack the song’s pulse. When it all piles up, the sound is frenzied. I suppose this is the song’s weakest feature – there’s no single instrumental element that stands out from the sludge of the production, and it all gets a bit tiring – but there are far more egregious sins committed on songs around this time.

The surprising thing about ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ is that it doesn’t feel tokenistic. We can say this in retrospect far more easily, of course, now that we have a wealth of Sufjan electronica to pull from (and that one of those pieces of Sufjan electronica is considered by many to be his absolute finest work.) But short of the too much-ness of the production, this one actually feels complex and lived-in, and each individual element feels like the work of someone with far more experience in synth-based music than 2001-era Sufjan. That’s just emblematic of something mysterious that happened to the young songwriter around the turn of the millennium – a sudden, dramatic leap in songwriting prowess, as if all the relentless trial and error forced a switch to flip somewhere in him. The Sufjan of 1998 would have almost certainly made a mess of this song.

The Sufjan of 1998 would have also failed in another crucial way: he would not have been able to nail the song’s emotional thrust as well as he ended up doing. No prizes for guessing it – ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ is an ecstatically hopeful piece of music. Glee seeps out of every corner here, from the idiosyncratic computer glitches that fill the void between each drum hit at the song’s outset (a very well-done element reminiscent of classic Autechre) to the insistently major key chord progression. This is also true for the vocal melody. The verses have one of the odder and more out-of-character melodies I’ve heard from Sufjan; the note that he resolves to at the end of every other line (‘yes, I would like to be a man’) carries with it this sort of child-like clunkiness, saccharine even by Sufjan standards. No hints of the relative minor anywhere in this song, right through to the chorus, which neatly resolves the final syllable on the root note each and every single time. It is a resolutely positive-sounding song, almost awkwardly so – not that anyone should expect anything different from a song named ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ (so! many! loud! exclamations!). Not nearly as listenable as any of his later contented melodies, though. No pentatonic major to be found here.

Though I suppose that’s in keeping with the song’s lyrical themes. This is, like much of Sufjan’s earliest material, a Christian song, and one that insists on Christian orthodoxy in a way that seems very unhip to us modern heathens. When one thinks of Sufjan’s reckoning with his Christianity in music, one tends to think of the moments where he doesn’t appear so Christian at all. Sufjan Stevens is probably the greatest Atheist-baiter in all of popular music, and I suspect this is part of the reason that he is still so revered among the chronically God-hating cadre of online music snobs. We think immediately of ‘we lift our hands and pray over your body, but nothing ever happens’, or ‘don’t do to me what you did to America’; the moments where Sufjan expresses righteous doubt, direct challenge to God. Us atheists like it, I suspect, because we feel as if Sufjan is batting for our team here. Hell yeah, we say, you stick it to ‘em!  

I feel as if Sufjan has become viewed this way for a while now – indie music’s resident self-hating Christian, t.A.T.u. for lapsed Catholics, the man who keeps implying that one day he might just do it! He might just go ahead and cast out God once and for all! (I remember a few interviews around the release of The Ascension in which the interviewers really pushed this angle.) It’s a tempting narrative, and more importantly, an easy narrative to latch onto. Apparently too easy. Because Sufjan really is one of the most, if not the most, dyed-in-the-wool Christians in the ‘cool’ modern music scene. If his songwriting and interviews are anything to go by, he is a progressive Christian in some senses, but he is a flaming fundamentalist in most others. This is most evident in his earlier, less studied work. ‘We Are What You Say’ presents a God that will strike down nonbelievers with the force of a small supernova. ‘A Sun Came’ does exactly the same. And then there’s ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’, which is literally a song about the importance of reading the Bible closely. Like, very closely ‘Every letter, every line.’

Why should you read every letter, every line? Because it’s the only way to truly live in adherence to ‘the Kingdom’s will’. It is, as Sufjan curiously sings, also the solution for those who ‘would like to be a man’ – interesting because it directly pushes the song into somewhat atypical territory for Sufjan, where issues of gender and masculinity are directly (not implicitly) considered. I suppose this line can be read in two ways. Reading Scripture affirms one’s masculinity directly – God inherently consecrates, validates and solidifies our identity, making us all more comfortable in our own skin – and implicitly – to be an ardent follower of the text is to develop discipline, attentiveness and a fundamental ‘knowing-ness’, all traditionally masculinist qualities. Or perhaps Sufjan speaks of ‘man’ not as man-the-gender but as man-the-species, and thus argues that humanity was born from, and should naturally return to, God’s word. It is one of the more interesting lyrics from Sufjan’s early work. Plenty of ambiguity there.

The remainder of the song is less ambiguous. The four variations of the chorus here: ‘I believe in page’, ‘I read every page’, ‘I believe in peace’, and ‘I believe in joy’. The links between these lines are very clear. This is a song about joy, but it’s a song about the Bible as a conduit of joy, the only path to a sustainable world happiness. We get this spelled out to us quite explicitly in a sort of adorable quasi-bridge section that only a young Sufjan would have come up with. In a sudden transition to spoken word, Sufjan glibly asks Sharia Nova (his long-time backing vocalist and frontwoman of My Brightest Diamond, who was already involved with his projects in this early stage) what she believes in. The answer? ‘Peace and justice for all’, immediately followed by a chaotic drum break. Get your asses on the floor in the name of peace and justice!

I find this moment endearing because it is the sort of knowingly-schlocky juvenilia that Sufjan would call back to on his 2016 tour especially. Its naïveté fits the song snugly. The answers to life’s hardships, sorrows, dilemmas and difficulties? Not so difficult after all, actually. You’ll find them if, and only if, you read every page. Cause and effect. Read God’s word, find peace. Find joy.

And so ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ is one of the most uncomplicatedly, unquestioningly Christian songs in Sufjan’s entire body of work. It’s a crowded field, but this one very much stands out: a song about the glee of orthodoxy and the orthodoxy of glee, a welcome inclusion amidst countless songs that view Christianity with reverent dourness (pre-Illinois) or direct cynicism (post-Illinois). The unyielding torrent of sugar that composes ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ will inevitably be off-putting to many; its dearth of subtlety and promulgation of an approach to Christianity that many modern faithful no longer subscribe to can only have limited appeal, if we treat this song only as a lyrical product.

Part of what makes Sufjan so outstanding is that everyone can find a part of themselves in his best music. It’ll be hard for many people to find a part of themselves in ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’. Fair play, then: judge ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ by its musical merits alone. There are plenty of them. Unbridled happiness is everywhere here, and it’s created by way of a musical style that makes this one so ahead of its time that it seems absurd to find it as a bonus track on A Sun Came. So much so, in fact, that I am almost surprised that Sufjan never considered playing this one on any of his late period synth-heavy tours. Not the smoothest or most listenable song that Sufjan has ever created, but it is better than it has any right to be. It executes its message with a startling clarity:

This is the happiness that God has given us! Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!

[thetexasjerusalemcrossroads]

loose top 145 chart - list under the readmore

1. Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island

2. Car Seat Headrest - How To Leave Town

3. The Microphones - The Glow, Pt. 2

4. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92

5. Stereolab - Emperor Tomato Ketchup

6. Earl Sweatshirt - some rap songs

7. The Olivia Tremor Control - Black Foliage: Animation Music

8. Bladee - ICEDANCER

9. Prince - Purple Rain

10. The KLF - Chill Out

11. Cardiacs - A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window

12. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

13. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

14. Animal Collective - Feels

15. desert sand feels warm at night - 夢の砂漠 (Dream Desert)

16. Hiroshi Yoshimura - SURROUND

17. Duster - Stratosphere

18. bedbug - If I Got Smaller Grew Wings and Flew Away for Good

19. Prince - Prince and The Revolution: Live

20. Mike - WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

21. The Weeknd - After Hours

22. Guided by Voices - Alien Lanes

23. Radiohead - Kid A

24. of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping

25. of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

26. Guided by Voices - Bee Thousand

27. Car Seat Headrest - Teens Of Denial

28. The Microphones - Mount Eerie

29. Mew - Frengers

30. Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak

31. The Beatles - Abbey Road

32. Modest Mouse - The Lonesome Crowded West

33. Ride - Nowhere (Expanded)

34. Ween - The Pod

35. Radiohead - OK Computer

36. Fishmans - 宇宙 日本 世田谷

37. Fishmans - 98.12.28 男達の別れ (Live)

38. Massive Attack - Blue Lines

39. Stereolab - Dots and Loops

40. George Clanton - Slide

41. The Avalanches - Since I Left You

42. Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy

43. Car Seat Headrest - Nervous Young Man

44. Indian Summer - Giving Birth to Thunder

45. Moss Icon - Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly

46. Jane Remover - frailty

47. Los Campesinos! - Romance is Boring

48. The Olivia Tremor Control - Dusk at Cubist Castle

49. Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile

50. My Bloody Valentine - You Made Me Realise

51. Bladee - Spiderr

52. 100 gecs - 10,000 gecs

53. Bomb the Music Industry! - Get Warmer

54. DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Blues

55. Alvvays - Alvvays

56. The Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium

57. Brave Little Abacus - Masked Dancers: Concern in So Many Things You Forget Where You Are

58. Julia Brown - An abundance of strawberries

59. DJ Shadow - Endtroducing.....

60. Modest Mouse - Building Nothing Out of Something

61. Tyler, the Creator - Igor

62. Tyler, the Creator - Flower Boy

63. David Bowie - Blackstar

64. Nine Inch Nails - Bad Witch

65. The Beach Boys - SMiLE

66. Animal Collective - Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished

67. Nana Grizol - Dancing Dogs

68. Nana Grizol - Love It Love It

69. Gorillaz - Gorillaz

70. Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas

71. Pet Shop Boys - Introspective

72. Glass Beach - Plastic Death

73. Death Grips - the powers that b

74. Junior Delahaye - Showcase

75. Slowdive - Slowdive

76. Los Campesinos! - We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed

77. Global Communication - 76:14

78. Bright Eyes - Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground

79. Car Seat Headrest - 4

80. Vince Staples - Big Fish Theory

81. The Music Tapes - Mary's Voice

82. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam

83. Ween - Quebec

84. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz

85. Earl Sweatshirt - I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt

86. Virtual Self - Virtual Self

87. Lil Ugly Mane - Singles

88. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell

89. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Polygondwanaland

90. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Live in Brisbane '21

91. Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children

92. Boards of Canada - Geogaddi

93. Frank Ocean - Blonde

94. The Cure - Disintegration

95. Nirvana - In Utero

96. Death Grips - Bottomless Pit

97. Mike - renaissance man

98. Dismemberment Plan - Emergency & I

99. The Microphones - It Was Hot, We Stayed In The Water

100. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

101. Cardiacs - The Seaside

102. Gorillaz - Demon Days

103. Duster - Duster

104. My Chemical Romance - I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love

105. Thursday - Full Collapse

106. My Bloody Valentine - m b v

107. Black Dresses - Peaceful as Hell

108. Porter Robinson - nurture

109. of Montreal - Paralytic Stalks

110. bob hund - Bob Hund

111. Teen Suicide - i will be my own hell because there is a devil inside my body

112. Slowdive - Souvlaki

113. Cursive - The Ugly Organ

114. Ween - God Ween Satan: The Oneness (Anniversary Edition)

115. Kleenex Girl Wonder - Ponyoak

116. Sweet Trip - Velocity: design: comfort.

117. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

118. Guided by Voices - Under the Bushes Under the Stars

119. The Beatles - Revolver

120. Jane Remover - teen week

121. Glass Beach - the first glass beach album

122. blackwinterwells - Stone Ocean

123. The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Formlessness - EP

124. Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump

125. Jordaan Mason - earth to ursa major

126. Weatherday - Come In

127. The pAper chAse - Hide the Kitchen Knives

128. Kylie Minogue - Aphrodite

129. Yung Lean - Starz

130. pilotredsun - Achievement

131. Bomb the Music Industry! - Album Minus Band

132. Wu-Tang Clan - Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

133. Doss - Doss

134. Kitty - Frostbite

135. Bob Drake - Medallion Animal Carpet

136. Parannoul - After the Night (Live)

137. J Dilla - Donuts

138. Ashley Ninelives - Eagle Creek

139. Vangelis - Blade Runner - Esper Edition

140. Akira Yamaoka - SILENT HILL2 (Original Soundtrack)

141. C418 - Minecraft - Volume Alpha

142. C418 - Minecraft - Volume Beta

143. Disasterpeace - Fez

144. Toby Fox - UNDERTALE Soundtrack

145. Kero Kero Bonito - Time 'n' Place (background)

honorable mentions to round it off to 150:

146. Julius Eastman - Femenine

147. Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

148. Dinosaur jr. - You're Living All Over Me

149. Flipper - Album Generic Flipper

150. DJ Rozwell - NONE OF THIS IS REAL

[supersmacked]

mythical creatures

adze: vampire, transforms into a firefly, biting people in their sleep, killing them (ghana)

inkanyamba: gigantic, winged eel with a voracious appetite. it is associated with brutal storms (south africe)

aswang: shape-shifting monster that devours unborn babies (philippines)

dybbuk: malevolent possessing spirit that only departs after having accomplished its goal (israel)

kamaitachi: sickle-limbed weasel that can easily cut off your limbs (japan)

teke teke: ghost of a young girl who died being cut in halp by a train. she drags herself forward, her torso leaving a trail as she crawls around, seeking to dismember other people with a scythe (japan)

pontianak: ghost of a woman who died pregnant. she eats organs after digging them out of a body with her long and sharp fingernails (indonesia)

ghoul: shapeshifting demon. it takes on the form of the corpse it has most recently devoured (arabia)

draugr: an undead with superhuman strength and stamina, cannot be harmed with normal weapons (norway)

banshee: female spirit that heralds the death of a loved one with chilling and relentless shrieks (ireland)

nuckelavee: demon-hybrid that appears as a skinned horse with skinned male torso poking out its back. it breathes disease and decay (orkney)

redcap: murderous goblin that lives in ruined castles (scotland)

kelpie: emits a cry, sounding like a human drowning to lure its pray into the water. it will then plunge the prey into an underwater grave (scotland)

gargoyle: brooding winged creature said to scare away evil spirits (england)

black dog: omen of death, associated with electrical storms, place a execution and crossroads (england)

black annis: blue witch with iron talons and a taste for humans, specifically children (england)

cerberus: three-headed dog that guards the gates to the underworld, it prevents the dead from leaving (greece)

lou carcolh: serpentine mollusc that lives in underground caverns, it swallows its victims whole (france)

nalusa falaya: black, long beings that slither around and melt into shadows (choctaw)

wendigo: cannibalistic monster that was once human, driven into madness by starvation and greed (algonquian)

la ciguapa: enchanting woman with backwards feet. she lures men into the woods (dominacan republic)

chupacabra: creature that feeds on the blood of livestock (puerto rico)

bunyip: water cryptid that lurks in swamps and creeks, on the lookout for human flesh (australia)

[badassbutterfly1987]

African vampires

Obayifo- from the Ashanti in West Africa, can leave physical form as ball of light, feeds on blood of children, destroys crops

Adze- from Ewe folklore in West Africa, shapeshifts between firefly and human form, drinks blood, can possess people

Asanbosam/Sasabonsam- Akan folklore in West Africa; has iron teeth, pink skin, long red hair, and hooks for feet; lives in trees and is a guardian of forests, sometimes has bat wings

Impundulu- Zulu folklore in South Africa, takes the form of a seductive young man or a large bird, often a witch's familiar, feeds off blood

[howhow326]

Time to drop another Bayonetta OC out of pocket!

Im having a bit too much fun with this black centric picrew but also good

Name: Destinyque

Real Name: Boahinmaa

Hair: Black, long box braids

Skin color: dark brown

Skin detail: Smooth

Height: 6 feet

Scent: Cherry smell

Birthyear: 1422

Place of birth: Ghana

Habits: Winking

Fears: Nothing!

Triggers: Lumen Sages

Soft spots: Cats

Goals: Recover lost umbran treasures

Positive traits: Positivity

Negative traits: hides her insecurities

Backstory: While the heart of the Clan Wars happened in Europe, the true scale of the conflict included the whole Earth. During this time, many Witch settlements were caught unawares and wiped out by the Lumen.

One such settlement was Boahinmaa's home. Instead of being discouraged, the young girl vowed revenge. Too young to fight in the Clan Wars, Boahinmaa became one of the most fearsome and deadly witches during the Witch Hunts, able to wipe out entire choirs of Angels singlehandedly. But eventually, Boahinmaa disappeared... and Destinyque was born.

Now living in New York, Destinyque is a performer by daylight, and an Umbra Witch by moonlight. Too this day, Boahinmaa still fights to reclaim what was stolen from her. I made this all up in the span of 2 minutes lol

Contract: Madama Adze, Mother of Envy (The demonic progenitor of the Adze, vampiric demons that take the forms of fireflies in the living world. These fireflies can possess humans and give them the powers of a witch, but in exchange they must drain the blood of the living. These witches, known as abasom, typically only go after people they envy, the poor going after the rich and the elderly going after the young. Were a witch to enter a contract with Madama Adze, she would gain fantastic powers and an unstoppable fortitude.)

Weapon of Choice: Take the A-Train (4 guns: Ella, Duke, Aretha, Mary)

Weapon Origin: Created by Rodin

Beast Within Forms: Lioness, Vulture, Fireflies, Eel