#kerala is a wild place if u can’t tell

[balrogballs]

Never say Balls doesn’t suffer for her art because I just sat through an hour-long phone call with my chattiest uncle who has asked me a good 300 questions about my life and what I had for lunch for the last two weeks, because he practices a certain folk/religious trance-flagellation ritual that I have written Maedhros to be a practitioner of in my Postcolonial!AU (as an allegory for the Oath) and I wanted to write an accurate portrayal of it 😭

(sorry for the definition being from some academic paper but there’s very little about it online because it’s a VERY niche regional practice and I only remember it because I’ve seen it done IRL)

yes i am indeed using my family consisting of an intermix of a good 4-5 religions for fic writing purposes