#and who is that harming except for Romani’s but that’s another discussion

[sixthwater]

So quick note for people who are astrologers, witches, mediums, etc. like spirituality is heavy in your routine or basically a way of being.

What’s your next year looking like, does it involve some form or conflict that deals with 9H, 11H, or 7H themes. I’ve talked to about four people now and including myself I’m starting to see an interesting combination between the next transits and our solar returns next year. It’s either setting things right, standing up for yourself, or losing relationships but it always is intertwined with this somehow

And interesting how so many people are suddenly being so loudly anti-astrology or basically making skepticism their entire personality trait

[bestworstcase]

What would you have thought if Madam Canardist was designed and characterized without the racially negative stereotypes against the Romani people and voiced without an accent?

she’d be a completely different character in that case. 

her basic role in the story, as a character accompanied by a disguised/shapeshifted demanitus, who ends up facilitating the important exposition in lost and found, is completely fine on its own. so, i wouldn’t have a problem with a different, hypothetical non-racist character filling that role

in the context of... sticking with canon and the episodic cartoon format and trying not to deviate too much from the canon plot, here’s how i’d design that character:

1. obviously just... completely scrap her canon visual design. i think she should still be a woman of color, because there aren’t enough women of color in tangled. actually you know what this is all hypothetical so let’s get real self indulgent with it and say she’s voiced by and modeled after ciara renée, Because Reasons.

2. she’s still named canardist, but to lean more into the pun, demanitus’s shapeshifted form is a duck, not a monkey. [in english, a “canard” is an unfounded rumor, story, or hoax, and in french, a “canard” is a duck. :P]

3. she’s a village bard and team corona first encounters her in her hometown of fortuna. rapunzel and eugene are on a date, rapunzel sees this woman chilling with her lute and her slightly deranged looking duck by a fountain or something and is like !!!, and canardist not-very-begrudgingly agrees to perform, like, the epic ballad she’s composed about the town’s history. 

4. it turns out that the history of fortuna’s founding is absolutely fucking bizarre, like this town is a total weirdness magnet and all kinds of utterly bonkers stuff has happened and when canardist finishes the tale eugene is like hahaha, yeah right. canardist, put out by his skepticism, is like “look my duck is psychic fortuna is just Like This okay” and eugene loses it. 

5. rapunzel is intrigued by the psychic duck and wants to pay for a fortune, but canardist is like no way, your boyfriend is a jerk, get lost, so they go. they stop in the market to pick up supplies on their way back to the caravan, discuss eugene’s cynicism, hear some rumors about the thieves who’ve been terrorizing the town lately. rapunzel persuades eugene that they should loop past the fountain again and apologize to canardist for him, you know, laughing in her face and insulting her pet, and when they get there the duck is gone and she’s distraught because two kids grabbed him and ran off. cue the rest of the canon plot of vigor the visionary, with the girls and everything. except vigor is a duck. 

6. in the end, they bring vigor the duck back to canardist, and to thank them, she offers rapunzel one of vigor’s fortunes. it’s vague and confusing and won’t come into play until, let’s say happiness is—when we (and rapunzel) realize that it was warning her not to fall for the illusory happiness offered by the lorb idol. eugene is still skeptical, insisting that the “fortune” was vague and it only lined up with the events on the island by coincidence. 

7. now—fundamentally, bards were chroniclers. they recorded history. and canardist, being a rather good bard, figured out pretty quickly just who rapunzel is and, after team corona left fortuna, decided “you know what? that’s history in the making. i’m going to follow them and write down what happens.” 

8. so she hops a ferry across the sea and waits for them on the other side. rather than the whole lombard’s pass / telescope theft / nonsense with the curse, the episode after peril on the high seas is shenanigans with canardist being all, “i want to join your group and chronicle you” while team corona is like um. there’s a b plot with vigor the duck kind of terrorizing eugene/following eugene around and refusing to be shooed away; the a plot maybe has to do with a clash between canardist, who’s accustomed to nobility paying her for the privilege of having her chronicle their lives, and rapunzel, who has Uncomfortable Feelings about being important enough for a professional bard to be wanting to travel with her and write about it; maybe they still have to cross lombard’s pass, canardist helps (she’s a bard, she’s well traveled, she probably knows a trick or two), and at the end of the episode it’s like—okay, rapunzel’s not comfortable traveling with what’s essentially a biographer, but she and canardist come to some sort of agreement to go their separate ways but with the understanding that canardist is going to trail after them and interview people about what they did and at some point, when she’s ready, rapunzel’s going to give her side of the story.

9. canardist gets tied back into the narrative in brothers hook. this time it’s not because she’s following them, but because hook hand’s a friend of hers and she, completely independently of team corona, decided to show up and support him at his big gig for king trevor. it’s a much more amiable meeting and, after hook foot leaves, rapunzel decides to invite canardist along. because she’s doubling down on her decisions in the great tree, she feels more secure than she did the last time they met and letting canardist chronicle their journey no longer seems as scary. so canardist takes hook foot’s place in the party.

10. her presence then becomes yet another thing putting pressure on cass, because the thing is... it’s clear that cass is just a footnote in the story canardist is chronicling. she’s not important, in the context of the history they are making. rapunzel is. cass is on track to end up as rapunzel’s nameless bodyguard in this ballad canardist is writing and she tries not to let that bother her but it really really does. 

11. i think it’s sort of funny if canardist gets just, completely skipped over by all the whacky evil shenanigans in the shell house. because tromus recognizes that vigor the duck is demanitus and he’s like okay, that’s a grenade i’m not going to touch with a ten foot pole, and zhan tiri is like yeah good call, so canardist ends up just like, sipping tea and casually strumming her lute and making small talk with tromus while the rest of team corona gets terrorized by mirror demons and time-twisting tops and lotus dreams. 

12. so lost and found. there’s some tension in the group because canardist wasn’t harmed by anything in the shell house and that has eugene feeling just a mite suspicious, and maybe cass is backing him up too to distract attention away from what she went through and her “do i take the moonstone or not” dilemma; and partly to smooth it over canardist is like look, rapunzel, eugene, take vigor, he has something he wants to show you.

13. by this point everyone is sort of used to canardist talking about vigor like this even though he is, to all appearances, a slightly deranged duck, and rapunzel is insistent that canardist is completely trustworthy so she’s like okay!! sounds great!! and drags eugene along. the maze stuff happens. vigor reveals himself to be demanitus. it’s basically canon except he’s, you know, a duck. also it just occurred to me that i never specified what kind of duck i’m imagining when i say duck so i feel the need to do that now: 

one of these guys, but like, a little bedraggled and crazed-looking. it’s the red eyes that really sells it. 

14. anyway vigor also reveals that, yes, canardist knew he was demanitus the whole time; turns out she comes from a long, long line of bards stretching back to an ancestor of hers who knew demanitus and agreed to protect his undying birdbrained duck vessel until such time as he was ready to emerge. eugene feels bad about distrusting her, they make up at the end of the episode, she slips him vigor’s fortune about one of the group turning traitor in the dark kingdom. he’s like, fuck.

15. destinies collides happen, cass gets the moonstone and fucks off, for the rest of s3 canardist’s role is like... she and vigor stick with the group, she’s still chronicling them, but she also, because of her own history with demanitus, is able to help fill in some of the gaps; she reveals to rapunzel that gothel was once a servant of demanitus—and betrayed him for zhan tiri, and then betrayed zhan tiri for the sundrop. basically she’s how we get more of the the gothel+zhan tiri lore we were all craving in s3

16. other s3 stuff—maybe with her help team corona starts sketching out a plan for dealing with zhan tiri immediately after race to the spire, rather than putting it off until plus est en vous. maybe she gets to be a kind of foil to cass; as a bard, she’s always the one telling the story—never participating in it directly—and perhaps she has some complicated feelings about that that could parallel cassandra’s feelings about always being in the shadows, just a footnote, just a bit player, never someone the story is about. maybe she can have a cute bonding moment or two with varian the demanitus fanboy or xavier the legends buff. also whacky vigor and canardist shenanigans during lost treasure are mandatory. anyway the point here is, she’s not just yeeted out of the story 

[scarletwitching]

Not that it excuses it at all, but does the inconsistency in Wanda's ethnicity create confusion over the whitewashing issue, since she has gone from Eastern European White (correct me if I am wrong) to American White to Jewish-Romani to Romani in the last fifty years? I'm guessing the most appropriate casting would be the one at the time (2013 being Jewish-Romani). Granted Marvel as a whole has not been know for casting Jewish actors as Jewish characters (eg. Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender)

so this is by no means unusual. Romani characters? Well, what representation is there? The last sort of representation was Sim in Sherlock Holmes 2 and even then Noomi Rapace is not even sure if she has any Romani heritage. I think Elizabeth Olsen is a fine actress and plays the role well (given the material she has) but this whole thing is a missed opportunity for some actual respectful, Romani representation.

This answer got long.

The confusion in the fandom is attributable to one thing: people forget about Magda.

Most of the people who swear up and down that Wanda isn’t Romani don’t know she was previously the daughter of Robert and Madeline Frank. If they know about Django and Marya at all, they think that’s where others have gotten the idea she’s Romani and are quick to yell that adoptive parents =/= biological parents. The fandom, as it exists now, is composed almost entirely of people who grew up with Wanda as Magneto’s daughter. They don’t get confused about this because it’s confusing in canon, per se (it wasn’t too confusing before late 2014). They get confused because of erasure, both in the canon, where Magda is a Dead Mom whose purpose is to be tragic and beloved, and the fandom, which has never had much to say about her except for comics fandom-typical conspiracy theories. (She either is Mystique in disguise or had Schizophrenia, depending on who you ask.)

The only times this becomes truly confusing is when creators forget about Magda too, and as a result, imply or act as if the twins aren’t Romani or have Pietro make weird, racist comments about his own ethnicity. Tom Brevoort got in trouble after the AXIS retcon for claiming Wanda and Pietro were “more legitimately Roma* now” (exact words) because they weren’t ethnically Romani when they were Magneto’s kids. That’s nothing to do with retcons, and everything to do with female characters being treated as inessential. Moms don’t count.

That said, a lot of people who insist Wanda Isn’t Romani have an agenda. When you point out they’ve forgotten about Magda, they change tack and start talking about Harmful Stereotypes or Charlie Chaplin or some such.

The casting itself is another matter because Whedon talked to the actors about Wanda and Pietro’s Romani background (in very negative, stereotypical terms) and seems to have put it in the script before cutting it from the film. He clearly knows they’re Romani, and he cast the way that he did anyway.

Additionally, the backstory Whedon gave them is a riff on the murder** of Django and Marya by anti-Romani racists, but with racists being replaced by NATO or the American military. (It’s all very vague. He chickens out instead of giving details.) I understand why this was done. The MCU is post-9/11 American art. Its thematic core is very much dominated by questions of blowback and the Empire’s Burden. But it’s the narcissism of empire that says replacing a story about the violent, life-destroying nature of racism where the racists are the bad guys with a story about Protagonist Imperialists convincing angry victims of imperialism to chill and join the empire*** is a neutral – even positive – change. 

Casting white British and American actors and erasing the characters’ minority status in the final product only makes this worse because most victims of American Imperialism are, by the standards of America itself, people of color. It’s whitewashing of both narratives (global imperialism and the deaths of Django and Marya Maximoff) as well as the characters.

Let’s be real: MCU Wanda was probably always screwed because the MCU is so centered around American concerns and affirming America’s existence to itself. Any movie that has Iron Man or Captain America ends up being about centrist liberal Americans reminding themselves 1) we did some bad stuff but 2) we’re still great. 

Wanda, though, is not American. She’s from a part of the world where these questions of the affects of interventionism are viewed from the other side, and her backstory in the comics involves being part of a left wing terrorist organization. She is the anti-MCU, in both that way and the fact that she’s weird as hell and not “grounded.” It’s totally natural that Whedon, whose ambivalence over superheroes as power fantasies and enforcers of empire is evident not only in both Avengers movies but also in his Wonder Woman script (which has other issues, don’t get me wrong), would be drawn to her and would then recoil and get vague about whose fault things are and say, “Ultimately, there’s a lot of sides here.”

Iron Man is the protagonist of the MCU. You can’t be the anti-MCU, the anti-Iron Man, and get a fair shake.

Was that a tangent? I have a lot of feelings. 

Related to what you actually said and NOT a tangent: I’m pretty glad this has sparked as much discussion as it has because Romani characters tend to get ignored in these debates. It’s no substitute for representation, but if it makes people more aware, then it’s a step to representation, which is better than Doctor Doom or even Quicksilver have been. At least, we’re talking about it. It’s just that the road from talking to doing seems impossibly long, and we shouldn’t expect Romani people to sit around and wait for their turn.

Anyways, Noomi Rapace was just doing what Johnny Depp did when he played Tonto and invoking some possibly Romani great-grandmother or whatever. #RomaniActorsPlayingRomaniCharacters2KEventually****

*Hilariously, of course, he was… not wrong. They were Sinti before. Now they’re Roma. That’s not what he meant though.

**Yes, yes, I know. Dead parents coming back from the dead. I’m trying to keep this simple.

***None this excuses the victim-blaming of victims of American Imperialism that goes on in this fandom. You know who you are.

****In American media, that is. It’s different in Europe where directors are much more likely to cast Romani actors.

[theserpentsadvocate]

Tell HolyClothing Racial Slurs ARE a Big Deal

I have two friends getting married this summer, and I’m in both wedding parties, so naturally they’ve been sending me pictures of dresses to look at. Since my BFF is both pagan and really into LARP, she also considered some dresses from a historical/fantasy clothing site, which would be great, normally (I got my prom dress from one, and it was awesome)... but I was really disconcerted to see that one of the dresses she was looking at for me had a racial slur in the description.

This is really common, unfortunately, with sites like that, because there’s an unfortunate lack of awareness (at least in North America, I can’t speak for elsewhere) about the fact that g*psy is a really offensive and oppressive term for the Romani/Rromani people (and an offensive and inaccurate term to use for other nomadic groups like Irish Travellers).

Anyway, since the company is committed to ethical practices, I hoped they’d be receptive to a request to change the descriptions on clothing featuring that word (which also appears in the hover-over text for the tab), and I sent them a long, very polite email about it, including a link to a Romani person discussing the issue. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Evidently, HolyClothing had been alerted to this previously, but because their Facebook followers didn’t see an issue with it, and since they’re of the opinion that they’re using it in a non-derogatory way, they think it’s fine to keep using it.

I’m sending them a still polite but markedly disapproving response email, but if they want to ignore me... they’ll ignore me. However, if they were suddenly inundated with polite-but-markedly-disapproving (or even polite-and-utterly-distressed) emails and Facebook comments, that might sway them.

I’ll include all the emails under a cut. If you want to help, you can email them at  store@holyclothing.com for Customer Service, or info@holyclothing.com for Press/PR. If that’s a little overwhelming, their Facebook page is here.

Please send them an email or a Facebook message or comment if you can. If you can’t, for whatever reason, please don’t feel bad about it, and signal boost if you’re up for it.

Here’s my correspondance with HolyClothing, unaltered except for spaces for readability and editing of personal details: Bolding for clarity of formatting.

My first email to them:

Hey, I posted this on your Facebook earlier because I couldn't find your 'Contact' link on the website. I suspect this is the fault of my computer, which displayed a few bugs when I was looking through the website for other things; sometimes it's kind of temperamental.

So, here's what I said:

"I'm looking at some clothing from your shop because my friend likes them for her bridesmaid dresses, and while I really like a lot of your clothes, I'm uncomfortable about buying clothes from a company that uses a racial slur in their descriptions.

I know it's common for companies that sell historical- and fantasy-inspired clothes to use the term 'gypsy' to refer to a certain style of clothing, but it is in fact an offensive and marginalizing term to a minority group which is still persecuted today, and I would feel a lot better if you would address it, and, hopefully, change the names on articles like this one:

http://holyclothing.com/…/kyla-scalloped-hem-gothic-embroid…

Here is an article by a person who IS Romani explaining why the word is offensive and some of her negative experiences with similar branding. http://gypsyappropriations.blogspot.ca/…/problem-with-word-…

Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my concerns." Since I'm off Facebook I'd like to elaborate - I know the company is based in India, but I understand that it's run by Canadians. It's VERY common in North America for non-Romani people not to know about the offensive implications of the word, and I myself (I am not Romani) only found out this information a few years ago. I am sure that your company's usage of the word was done unintentionally rather than callously.

At the same time, as you can see from the article I've linked, using the word the way you have can cause huge amounts of unintentional harm to Romani people who see it, and who have to deal with people who have normalized it because of seeing similar things, so I really felt I had to say something immediately.

I'm very conflicted - I love most of your clothing and I'm thrilled to find an ethically-sourced and semi-Canadian company selling the sort of thing I'm so interested in... and, of course, I want to make my friend's wedding perfect for her, which includes wearing whatever she picks out. But I'm really uncomfortable purchasing from a business that uses a racial slur not just in some of their product descriptions, but in their branding.

Given HolyClothing's dedication to ethical business, I'm confident you'll address the matter in a satisfactory manner, which would send a good message to your customers, as well as distinguishing you among other historical and fantasy-esque stores who use similar branding.

Thank you so much for your time and attention,

Riley [last name redacted]

Their response:

Hello Riley,

Thank you for taking the time to email us. This has been addressed in the past with HolyClothing and more than one poll was taken on our Facebook page. We are not using the term in a derogatory manner and to date, have not received any complaints from Romani people.

We appreciate your feedback.

Regards - Brenda

And my latest email:

I'm really disappointed to hear that. I had higher expectations from you as a business.

May I suggest that you read (or reread) the post at the link I sent you ( http://gypsyappropriations.blogspot.ca/2010/04/problem-with-word-gypsy.html ), in which the large guest section details a Romani person's experience, and demonstrates how the term is no less hurtful even when not used with malice. There's also an explanation of how such use of the term contributes to erasure of the Romani people (the author of the blog is regularly told that she's not real), and gives some context to its history and utter inappropriateness when used by anyone who isn't Romani. If you require anything more than that, it's easy to find Romani people discussing or explaining this in various places online, and I would also be willing to provide you with as much additional material as you require.

I'd also like to suggest that perhaps it's time to set up another one of those polls - but even if the response doesn't condemn the term, it would reflect well on HolyClothing as a company, especially one committed to ethical practices, to do what's right rather than simply what's easiest.

(Incidentally, in my experience it is very easy to rebrand anything described as 'g*psy' as either 'boho' or 'pirate' as is fitting. If you find 'pirate' doesn't quite fit your store, you could always try 'nomad', 'hippie', 'flower child', and so on, or in specific descriptions, substitute one of your other branding terms, like, again, 'boho', or 'peasant' as appropriate. Simply dropping it from your hover-over tab description would still leave you with four adjectives which still convey very effectively the variety and type of clothing you provide.)

Thank you for your time. [initials redacted]