Lathbora Viran

Abortion isn’t the lesser of two evils–it is a just and good thing. So says Reverend Katherine Ragsdale:

Let’s be very clear about this: when a woman finds herself pregnant due to violence and chooses an abortion, it is the violence that is the tragedy; the abortion is a blessing.

When a woman finds that the fetus she is carrying has anomalies incompatible with life, that it will not live and that she requires an abortion — often a late-term abortion — to protect her life, her health, or her fertility, it is the shattering of her hopes and dreams for that pregnancy that is the tragedy; the abortion is a blessing.

When a woman wants a child but can’t afford one because she hasn’t the education necessary for a sustainable job, or access to health care, or day care, or adequate food, it is the abysmal priorities of our nation, the lack of social supports, the absence of justice that are the tragedies; the abortion is a blessing.

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion — there is not a tragedy in sight — only blessing. The ability to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality without compromising one’s education, life’s work, or ability to put to use God’s gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember — abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

What really impresses me about Ragsdale is this bit:

The idea that abortion kills a child, she contends, reflects parental hopes and dreams for the child-to-be, not the reality of what the zygote or fetus actually is. (It is, in her words, “proleptic,” a theological term for anticipated realities that come to be treated as extant in the here and now.) When pro-choice forces signal their partial acceptance of the abortion-as-child-murder idea, says Ragsdale — which they do when they speak of the “tragedy” of abortion — they may be motivated by political concerns, or by a desire to be respectful and conciliatory. But in the process, they’re ceding precious intellectual ground to abortion opponents, and backing themselves into a tactical corner: how, after all, can you effectively defend something for which you’re simultaneously apologizing?

What’s more, they’re also increasing the likelihood that women who do choose to have abortions will spend their lives tormented by needless guilt. “I suppose it’s possible for an intelligent, faithful person to still believe that there’s no moral difference between a zygote and a baby,” Ragsdale allows. “But there’s no reason for most of us to believe that. And I don’t.”

…”If you want a baby,” says Ragsdale, “and you’ve decorated the nursery, and bought the toys, and named the baby — and then they discover the baby’s organs are growing outside the body, and not only will the baby not survive, but the woman will be torn up trying to deliver it — there’s a tragedy. But the tragedy isn’t the abortion — the tragedy is that you needed one.

Inspired by this tiktok trend going around of people posing like greek statues and paintings + the fact that trans men and people of colour are beautiful and should be treated as such + that japanese tradition of adorning scars and cracks in pottery with gold.

And as a POC I am fed up of feeling dictated to about what I can and cannot create – as if I don’t get judged enough on my skin colour in real life, and I came into fandom to be anonymous and have a space where my brown skin doesn’t matter. So, what, you can’t create a brown character who is “rowdy” and drinks and is a wildchild, now? Even though I literally am a brown-skinned woman (and former wildchild) who drinks? Do I not exist, or something? Or am I somehow “racist” against people who look like me because I dared to be less than wholesome in my life (and I had a bloody good time, at that)?

Given that two of the names on the callout list are POC on the flimsiest of crimes based on the flimsiest of evidence, this fandom isn’t even safe for POC either – the message is “you must conform and do as you’re told, or else”. I’m glad more and more people in this fandom are waking up to this bullshit and seeing that much of the wank in this fandom is being manufactured by the same fucking group of people to take out anyone they don’t like. 

This group is literally trying to force people into stereotypes and tropes that some of us actively try to avoid. My OCs represent parts of my personality and life experiences, and I don’t care if they aren’t accurate to anyone’s experience as a person of color (or disabled person, or neurodivergent person, or queer person, etc) because they’re accurate to ME and me only. We all have different experiences as people of color and/or survivors of abuse and trying to police others based solely on our own experience is absolutely ludicrous. I’m not ‘uwu soft boy gentle soul,’ I’m more than that, and so are my characters.

What do I do if someone writes a character that I don’t like the characterization of? I close the tab, I click the back button, I block/mute/filter and move the fuck on to things that actually make me happy. These users don’t seem to have any positivity about the fandom and Dragon Age in general, and it must be truly exhausting to live a life so toxic and constantly tearing others (especially other poc/survivors) down. Reading a raunchy sex scene involving Cullen says nothing about SA survivors, positive nor negative, so stop attacking people over it.

I’m ashamed by these people who claim that they are ‘protecting’ survivors and people of color, by starting hate campaigns against authors and artists, many of which are survivors and/or people of color. It’s absolutely insulting that they have also “called out” people who disagree with them, calling them racist despite being people of color themselves. “I’m a poc/survivor” is not a ‘gotcha’ and should not be used to shut down the conversation. It does not automatically make you right. I’m begging even non-poc and non-survivors to use their discretion and critically think about the discussion at hand, not to just say “welp a poc/survivor said it so it MUST be true!!”

Literally, all we’re asking for is

don’t police our creations

don’t tell us how to be “proper” people of color/survivors

understand that no experience is the same, we all have different backgrounds–no two poc and/or survivors have the same exact life experiences

the way we cope and learn and expand from our experiences will always look different!

just!!! go do something positive instead!!! YOU’RE the ones making the fandom unsafe for people of color/survivors by silencing and shaming them in a public forum

…

…

Hi everyone,

As a PoC member of the DA fandom, I felt I have been quiet for long enough on the issues that have been presented recently. I am not here to argue against or on behalf of any individual or group, I am only here to present some information that I hope will be helpful moving forward. This is a long post, but it’s my hope that if you read it and want to help contribute to making this place better for everyone, then you will be willing to try to put what is said here into practice.

normalize owning up to your mistakes

normalize changing your viewpoint/opinion based on new information that you have acquired

fourth, hypersexualization of Cullen, a character who canonically has been a victim of sexual assault, is gross!

dude i can call my legislators and not want sexualized poc characters at the same time i dont have to pick and chose 

its all racism

I have it on good authority that Schoute is a person of color. I’d ask her myself to confirm, but that opportunity has been taken from us. Cancelling people “successfully” means we can’t actually have that conversation with the only person who could answer us definitively rather than through the grapevine.

Digital artist Daniel Voshart recreates the ‘real’ faces of Roman emperors thanks to machine learning. You can learn more about the process, discover more emperors or buy a poster here.

[Marcus Aurelius]

[Lucius Verus]

in Europe, ‘white’ isn’t a thing

in the sense that there are so many shades of white, it doesn’t really mean anything

like, Spanish white and Swedish white are different things, but we wouldn’t consider either ‘non-white’ or ‘whiter’

you can generally tell where someone’s from, but there are people who ‘look out of place’ a bit everywhere

either because recent or century-old migrations, or because of a previous population that lived there and then the borders moved or something

and: in a nutshell, Italian geography discourages friendships

that means that before the Romans came along, people generally kept to themselves, so there’s more genetic diversity the farther back you go

at some point in the Neolithic, there were non Indo-European tribes living in Italy, but we don’t know exactly where they came from

the Indo-European people, on the other hand, probably invaded from the North

except for the Etruscans, because as it turns out, Herodotus was right (AGAIN! HAHHAHAHAHAHA SUCK IT HATERS) and they actually came from somewhere in modern Turkey

which still doesn’t mean they weren’t white, btw

even today, there’s plenty of people in the Middle East who look like this:

[top to bottom: a Kurdish fighter; Iranian politician Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf; Syrian writer Samar Yazbek]

so the notion of ‘race’ as it’s understood in the US doesn’t really work elsewhere

if it even works in the US, that is

so anyway, from what we know from literary sources, the Romans weren’t incredibly dark

(btw people abroad, and especially Americans, tend to have a fixed idea of what Italians look like and act like)

(but most of the Italians who emigrated to the US came from four Southern regions - Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicilia - and because Italy basically became a united country, like, 20 years ago, it’s still a very diverse nation)

(so what you think of as a ‘typical’ Italian is probably the great-grandnephew of a ‘typical’ resident of one small village in Sicily)

and the ‘typical’ Roman you often see in movies, with tanned skin, dark eyes and curly black hair, probably wasn’t a ‘typical’ Roman at all

those traits are way more common in some areas of the South - where about 37% of the population has Greek DNA because ancient colonies

so while blond hair probably wasn’t really common (we can tell because it was greatly admired and sought after, and people generally like what they don’t have), neither were darker skin and black hair

in fact, a lot of politicians and other VIPs are described in the texts as having light eyes (light blue, green and gray) and some had blond or red hair

others died their hair blond with pigeon poop, but that’s another story

so the bottom line is - like modern inhabitants of Italy, ancient Romans were white, but in many cases you could probably tell from where their family came from, and some were ‘whiter’ than others depending on their ancestry

that said, the European past was a lot more diverse than our instinctive perception of it

there was a lot of trade going on, slaves from conquered lands, wealthy and poor people roaming about, and units of foreign-born Roman soldiers in unlikely places, so that’s something to keep in mind.

As a bonus for reading this far, here is a smiling wolf.

Pertinax

Caracalla: (UL) Vatican Museum; (UR) Met, NYC; (LL) The Severan Tondo; (LR) Naples National Archaeological Museum

Philip the Arab: (L) Vatican Museum

244–249 (died aged 45 — Killed in the Battle of Verona by Decius

Quintillus [Marcus Aurelius Claudius Quintillus]

Florianus

Carinus

Numerian

To add to the commentary above, many of the greatest men in Roman history came from provinces outside of the Italian Peninsula, but they were and have since been considered Roman (examples: the emperor Trajan was from Hispania, and Septimus Severus was born in an African province).

Later in Roman history, under Caracalla (who was born in Gaul and of mixed Berber and Syrian descent, so another Roman figure not Italian-Roman) in 212 AD all free men in the entire Roman Empire was granted citizenship. That meant that any Germanics, Africans, Latins, Hispanics, Syrian, etc. were all considered Roman! Regardless of race.

This is what encompassed the Roman Empire:

So you can imagine the intermixing that went on at the time and how the concept or “white” the way America presents it is absolutely inconsequential for the time period we’re talking about.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Commune cities formed, autonomous republic that survived exclusively on Marine trade with Spain, Africa, and East India. Amalfi, Gaeta and Venice in the 11th century were already autonomous maritime republics. Around 1100, Genoa, Pisa and Ancona emerged as independent maritime republics too.

I showed her a photo of the man who plays the angel in my film, who is both quite evidently white and is also from Greece, born and raised. Many other directors replied and told her that “Mediterranean” can mean just about anything. This same actor told me that he had responded to several auditions asking for “Mediterranean” looks, and would then tell him that he was not what they were looking for, because by “Mediterrranean” they meant “a darker skin tone”. He’d explain the same thing to them and when they’d double down on their description being accurate, he’d say, “But I’m Greek!” 

When I tried to talk about these things with other people, they always rationalized it away. (I told my dad once that my caseworker was reading my e-mails as I wrote them, demonstrating extreme disrespect for my privacy, and he said, “Well, she’s probably making sure you don’t use the internet to goof off.” I was 22 years old.)

 People tend to mock the idea that telling an adult when to go to bed, when to eat, etc., is a human rights violation, even though they would find it outrageous and absurd if anyone came into their lives to do the same thing to them.

We do know that the Chantry has no doctrine against LGBT people, and if there were laws against “sodomy” Genitivi would surely mention them, but from Genitivi’s biased word choice and actual statements, we can infer that there is homophobia in Thedas. It’s interesting to ponder what homophobia looks like in a society that hews very close to Christian Western Europe but without direct anti-LGBT church doctrine.