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a Secret Santa retrospective.
Ledaal Fog for Clone-Artist
Crushed Lotus Petal for @sagedarkwoods
Yoriun for koshindou
Iabo for mousewrites
Kaerbasi for Wofuru
Sagacious Chyne for @gwydion666
Xendrick for perfect-defense-d20
Yarona for @akaittou
Bunny for @hilow
Black Ice Shadow for @grimmjowjaegerjaquez
Iselsi Taren for @fiontan
Haruhi for @moe-d-puff
Seren Witt for @keirangoldenwatch
Vervain for @eatenbyfaeries
Kifimbo for @fourwillows
it's nice to feel the improvement and the nostalgia. year 1 was conceived of and run by @myrastuff. years 1-5 were hosted on deviantart. forgive me for not having up-to-date screen names for several past participants; let me know if you are them or know what they're going by now.
hope we'll have many more "editions" to come.
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Everything My Light Touches
Happy Calibration @fourwillows! it was fun getting to design a couple accessories for Kifimbo and his intense Solar swag.
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I really love how efficient and to-the-point this character design is. Rags! Lantern! Crazy purple sword! Every element is purposeful.
whoops need a ref of Moth for my Secret Santa....
this is my Hollow Knight deathknight, Melee Apocalyptic Dusk Caste wanderer. they are called the Flame-Eating Moth, and they wander the Underworld and Labyrinth alone except for their little glow worm friend in the bottle and the wickedly sharp soulsteel sword Thorn, granted by great dead titans on the edge of nothing.
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Cold Fire Hunter for @grimmjowjaegerjaquez and ping for @shiftingpath, thanks for running Exalted Secret Santa this year!
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Exalted Secret Santa post
Here's three character options!
Kifimbo is a Zenith Caste who likes to dress up. Pick him if you want to design an outfit! He's got a couple of visual motifs to hold onto - the rising eye and the little curly chevron, sometimes a sun-calendar kind of thing or a horned disc. His anima is the three-eyed feathered lion.
Kingfisher is a Secrets Sidereal. He's just got the one outfit. If you'd like to do a combat scene, he practices a martial art with a trident and katar.
Siyanda is a Twilight who specializes in quieting ghosts and spirits, which he stores in his pink-sapphire sword.
I'd prefer not to see any injury or horror stuff. Demons being weird but not gory/violent are fine. Please notice that all these characters are dark-skinned, not European light.
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hey real quick if youre a studyblr or even just a person in academia and
🌟 are neurodivergent and/or struggle with mental or physical health problems that impede on your academic performance
🌟 are a first gen student or otherwise feel a bit lost navigating this world compared to your peers who might have a bit more uh,, nepo baby energy
🌟 really hate the corrupt and elitist parts of academia but also love your studies and your dreams too much to give up on it
🌟 genuinely want to better the world with your education not just dangle it over people as part of a god complex or use it to help gatekeep knowledge
🌟 just generally kinda feel like academia wasnt really built for you but you are determined to make it so that it is, if not for yourself then for future generations at the very least
interact with this would you? you dont even need to follow if you arent a studyblr or dont want that on your dash, i just feel chronically alone out here sometimes and i could use the reminder that i am definitely not the only person feeling like this and not the only one fighting this fight. if this post only gets one note thats good enough for me lol
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Oh joy..the “Discourse” (??) about Women in Magic is back...
First of all..this shouldn’t be discourse. It pisses me off.
Second of all, if you have something to say, things like “But everyone deals with the issues,” or “just get over it,” or “don’t be so special snowflake,” or “this isn’t even an issue,” or “feminism doesn’t belong in Magic,” or “but but, I’ve never seen a woman be disrespected!”or “women are actually the problem in Magic,” or “actually men face the same issues as women” or ANYTHING LIKE THAT
Just. Don’t. Freaking. Say. Anything. Keep your mouth shut.
Seriously, I am not usually this blunt or mean,I try to be nice to everyone, polite and kind I hate being confrontational, but just keep your mouth shut, you’re making yourself look like an idiot and you are the problem
I. Am. Done. Dealing. With. It.
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This dude is why we need dudes in the community who are willing to step up and support their marginalized compatriots.
Mmmhm
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This isn’t a question of inclusion—I agree that the inclusion was done well in THS and LRW and I’m optimistic that it’ll turn out well in KLD as well. “Inspired by my religion” is not my point of contention. It’s a question of respecting the sacred.
There is a critical difference between the hypothetical four-armed vedalken (4AV for short) and the treatment of the gods in THS.
That is, in the case of Theros we have a really clear division between what’s sacred (Nyx frame stuff) and what’s profane (other stuff), and that division follows the ancient Greek division: nymphs and gods and spirits and whatnot are divine because they’re from Nyx/Olympus, and the things of the material world aren’t divine because/and-so they’re not.
4AV does not respect that division. Instead what it does is take a sacred image from Hinduism—the many-armed, unearthly-skinned divinity—and assigns it to a totally non-sacred subject, basically a space alien. That’s like if I made a Near East setting in MTG and introduced a species of self-fertilizing, highly buoyant treefolk who appear to die, but three days later they wake back up from dormancy, and introduced a religious hero of this stock into that setting. I mean, yeah, that’s Jesus imagery, but I’m assigning it to a totally non-sacred thing. I’m explaining away the virgin birth, water walking, and the resurrection—things that mark Jesus as sacred—as incidental, mundane properties of his species.
Crossing that line makes it feel less respectful than the approach taken in Theros, where it doesn’t cross.
With the Vedalken now confirmed for Kaladesh, someone asked me why wotc didn’t go with the four armed vedalken from Mirrodin. Wouldn’t you think, this person suggested, that a four armed blue skinned dude would fit better with the hindu theme, and things like shiva or whatever?
Vedalken Certarch from Mirrodin. Not a deity.
Well, straw man questioner compiled of multiple people i spoke to today, that’s an interesting train of thought, but not a good direction to go in. The idea of turning the gods of an actual religion practiced by 1/6th of the people of the world into a fantasy race is full of problematic notions. As I say over and over, it’s not about respecting the faith or the gods, it’s about respecting the believers, and not telling them that the only value their faith has is in creating fantasy cards for you to play with. And it would be a tad on the nose for the newly respectful and diversity inclined WotC to do something so crass.
But rather than dwell on the negative, let’s turn this into a teaching, and talk about why the Hindu gods look like they do instead.
Lord Vishnu from Vaikunta- Totally a deity
I’m not gonna go into too much detail about the symbolism in this picture, and save that for a post about Vishnu himself, but rather just talk about why the gods look so different in general.
In a word, the gods are meant to be Otherworldly. The skin coloration, which ranges from Black (Kali, Krishna) to White (Sarasvati, Laxmi) to Red (Hanuman, various other goddesses) to Purpley-Blue-Greenish (Shiva, Vishnu, Rama, Krishna, others), has a lot of inherent meanings based on the color schemes, but mainly exists to set the deities apart from humans. The idea is that even in their mortal avatars, they’re still so beyond us that they distort the core human nature through their very energy. It also helps to pick out the gods in various artistic depictions. In stories no one ever comments on the fact that Krishna is blue or whatever, because the implication is they’re suppressing their coloration to live out the Human life as needed for the purpose of the story, and it’s meant to help us as readers pick out who is who. And often times, you’ll see gods depicted with more human skin tones to show off that they’ve taken mortal shells.
Similarly, the numbers of heads and limbs serve to show that the gods are just that much more than us that we can’t even perceive how they appear. Each of the hands has an item or weapon or is in a mudra of benediction or the like, to indicate that the deity is just doing more than we are possibly capable of, at all times and places simultaneously. We see four hands, because your brain expects something to be there, and fills in the gaps with the closest approximation. The same holds true for multiple heads, with the implication being that the deity is focusing on many separate things at one time. Sometimes, the multiple heads represent the various forms and avatars of the deity, showing that they’re all just One.
So yeah, I really hope that the creative team chose not to give us multi-limbed blue skinned beings for Kaladesh, and I hope I’ve explained why =)
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If you are not reading my buddy talinthas, you should start!
A thrown spear seen from the front looks very different from the same spear seen from the side
Yesterday I asked some friends for writing prompts, because I wanted to talk about Hinduism, but wasn’t feeling any particular topics. One hit me with the following, and it’s been entangling my mind all day long -
“If I apply my knowledge of Western religions to try to understand Hinduism, in what ways am I hopelessly wrong? “
If I may use a cliche, Holy Cow. That’s one hell of a brain melter there. It’s an incredibly important question, and incredibly complex. I daresay, answering this is the entire point of every blog and podcast I do about hinduism. I doubt i’ll be able to answer it in one post, but at least I can set the stage.
(ok, so in the first three drafts of this, i started delving deep into Orientalism, Max Muller, Aryan supremacy and the invasion theory, and it got really muddled really quickly, without actually aiding in answering the question. All of that extra context is really important, but not at the cost of clarity, and are each worthy of reflections on their own.)
Consider an archeologist, delving away at the ruins of a long forgotten civilization, whose language has yet to be deciphered. In digging through the middens, they find a relic of a bygone age, a small humanoid figure with golden yellow hair, incredible muscles, and arms pointed towards the sky. Whats more, they find a number of similar figurines throughout the village. Surely these are divinities, the archeologist muses, for they are all over the place. These people must have had an incredible belief in the skies above.
That, or dragon ball z was a fad one year before the apocalypse and every kid had a son goku sitting around.
Post-Enlightenment Europe’s experiences with Hinduism were a lot like that. They deciphered Sanskrit (and founded the field of linguistics along the way–not gonna lie, William Jones is one of my heroes no matter how problematic he was at times) and started in on trying to understand Hinduism by going back and reading the Vedas and other foundational texts, with the help of Bengali scholars and pandits.This _seems_ like it should be the correct way to go, right? Read the texts in their native source, get the locals to help?
Two problems with this- First, Hinduism as practiced was not, and is not, the same as the religion of the vedas or the ancient epic tales. It draws on these texts, yes, and is obviously built out of the bricks and stones of Vedism, but religions are not static entities, and the faith had evolved significantly in the 4000 years between the era of the early Aryans and the 1700s. Hell, most of the gods weren’t even the same, let alone the modes and meanings and practices of worship.
Secondly, the Bengali Pundits that the British and Germans relied on to help decipher the ancient laws and texts were not merely Hindu sages, but were a class of European educated westernized scholars who tended towards the idea that India and Indian culture were backwards and desperately needed to become European in order to advance. Conveniently, this was exactly the attitude held by the Brits and Germans. So these scholars pushed on the ideas that Hinduism was all caste systems and stratified classes and throwing women into the funeral pyres of their husbands and all sorts of other things which together told a crazy story of backwards pagans living in the dark ages, but when taken with the whole of Hinduism were actually just goku statues stuck in the corners of very large houses.
These scholars and academics took their translations and interpretations back to the continent and spread far and wide their understanding of Hinduism, writing children’s textbooks and so on and so forth, leading to this weird concept the west has today. Hinduism as a peace loving purely vegetarian religion that believes everything and everyone is god and never takes offense to anything and yoga and incense and cow worship and sitars and samosas and that it has millions of gods and only one god and one god that is actually millions of gods but also no gods because we all are gods so the soul in me bows to the soul in you, namaste.
And this, of course, let to all sorts of exploitative con men coming out and trying to make a buck off of deluded westerners with stuff like “Hot Yoga” or “Transcendental Meditation”.
Meanwhile, Hindus back in India are completely oblivious to all of this until they started migrating out en masse in the 50s, 60s and 70s, to places like the UK and US and Canada and anywhere humans live. Suddenly, these people were confronted with completely bizarre ideas that had become entrenched in society, like the idea of a “Hindu Trinity” of Creator Brahma, Preserver Vishnu, Destroyer Shiva, and nary a mother goddess in sight. Think of how confusing this must have been for a person from Gujarat, from a family of devout worshippers of Krishna, who had never even been to the house of a worshipper of Shiva, let alone a temple, to hear some American tell them that Shiva is the end bringer. Or the Bengali worshipper of Kali finding out that whoops, she’s actually part of a cult that sacrifices humans.
And they shrugged it off, because who cares what westerners think? These first gen immigrants were too busy with their native communities and their families back home to worry about how their culture was being portrayed in media they didn’t consume or taught in schools they didn’t attend. Frankly, most of these people looked at moving West as merely a really long commute that was going to end with a return to the motherland once the day’s work was done.Thirty some odd years later, they realised that whoops, not only were they not going back, but their kids who had been born in the meantime, were learning more about hinduism from school than from home, and what they were learning was completely baffling and wrong.
See, when they left India, Hinduism as a singular entity wasn’t really a thing, as much as it was a way to differentiate from being Not Hindu, ie christian, muslim, jain, or whatever. People didn’t think about what it meant to be Hindu, or go around declaring their Hinduness. They worshipped their family deities and listened to lectures from popular gurus and watched religious stories get retold on tv as soap operas and went on with their lives. People weren’t taught how to be Hindu as much as they drank it in with the water and breathed it in with the air. So when these folks moved away, they had no idea that faith and culture was a thing to be taught and transmitted, and moreover they had no idea how such a thing was done.So folks from my generation ended up learning about Hinduism in our sixth grade history classes, or in our random indian cultural sunday schools, where you learned a few generic prayers and how to read hindi/gujarati/tamil/whatever. By and large, everything we knew about faith was from watching our parents at home, and passively taking it in.But that’s where the trouble started. We didn’t think of ourselves as Hindus or Indians, but we absolutely weren’t Christians or White, and even if we didn’t know it, they certainly did, and awareness was transmitted. And suddenly, we were forced to defend our faith using their texts, and ended up either absorbing and believing that those were true statements, or rejecting the issue entirely and caving to conversion or apathy/atheism.
Now, obviously this isn’t every case, and is really a super broad generalization. After all, I came through and became even more hindu than my orthodox parents, in all truth. But the problem as highlighted in the prompt question is absolutely true- By looking at Hinduism through the perspective of Abrahamic faith and Western philosophy, you’re going to get it very wrong.
But how, though? Well, that’s for the next post =)
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If you LIKE pineapple on pizza, reblog this post.
And if you DON’T like pineapple on your pizza, reblog THIS POST.
I’m doing a census on this ongoing argument please help it’s obviously important.
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Here’s some equipment I designed!
900 Follower Giveaway: Win a SEALED BFZ land collection!
Omnath approves!
Click the read-more for contest information! If you plan to enter, REBLOG THIS POST WITH YOUR CONTEST ENTRY. It might also help to tag me in the post if you’re worried about it not being seen.
Keep reading
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Unanswered Asks, slightly elaborated on
So, the other asker missed the mark somewhat, but here’s a better version of their question: Why is every non-white planeswalker character a singular, tokenized version, and in some cases they are monsters? There’s only one Asian man. One disabled person (who’s not a human). No black women at all. Until Commander 2014 Koth was the only black man. One gender nonbinary person (who is a terrifying faceless monster). Until Narset (the only neurodivergent representative) there was only one Asian woman, and the other one is a bunnygirl. Peter Mohrbacher tried to make Nissa look like a black woman and it seems like it lost him his relationship with you. The ADs clearly don’t mind when Gideon is depicted as unambiguously white even though he is supposed to look Indo-Iranian-Greek.
Not comfortable with it, Wizards.
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If your answer to ‘What would you want from a new Star Trek show?’ is ‘Firefly’ you’re incorrect sorry try again
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I think that Cookie Monster cake is just piped frosting and actual cookies, that’s ok in my book
Creative Cakes That Are Too Cool To Eat
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Said in better words than I said it. This Kaladesh stuff hurts, bad.
On Chandra, colonialism, and race
Hi Mark,
Please feel free to pass this letter on to the creative team if you get the chance.
I’ve been a player for a very long time, starting in the Dark/Revised, taking a break around weatherlight, and then back from Innistraad, and I have to say Magic is currently the best it’s ever been. The story is cohesive, the cards play amazingly well, there are a host of formats, and obviously an epic sized player base.
More importantly, Magic has been incredible in expanding inclusivity, with your equal representations of genders and races and age groups in your game. Hell, you even have diversity of faiths, though having my favorite planeswalker Ajani being an iconoclastic Atheist Jesus does make me wince a little =)
So this renewed focus on making mtg as accessible as possible is why i’m writing this letter. A bit of background- I’m of Indian Hindu descent, and my culture, as you might guess, isn’t particularly well represented in western pop media. As a lifelong nerd, it’s been a little frustrating and saddening to have no one to related to except for crude caricatures like Apu on the Simpsons or something. And ever since i first discovered Arabian Nights, I’ve hoped MtG would set its sights on South Asia, and give me a chance to explore my culture through my favorite game.
I’ve played D&D for a long time as well, and it’s been spectacularly awful at handling indian stuff, from the remarkably tone deaf way it gave Hindu gods stats in Dieties and Demigods to the cat-headed backwards hands rakshasas, which god knows where they got em from. I hoped MtG would be different.
On Wednesday this week, you guys put out the backstory of Chandra Nalaar, and set her in a Steampunk plane based on apparently Punjab in India. At first I was incredibly excited, because woo, India! However, the more i thought about it, the unhappier I became.
For one, Chandra (whose name is the Moon god) is about as Irish looking as they come. ((aside- what’s with all the great female Red legends having indian names? Jaya and Radha? It’s not particularly cool to take Radha, one of the most beloved goddesses of Hinduism, and have her as some bloodthirsty elf lady, but that ship has long sailed))
Now, that’s perfectly fine! Chandra’s character has been established for many years now, and there’s nothing wrong there. However, she’s in a town called Ghirapur, which is obviously Indic, and her mom’s name is Kiran, which is a very common north indian (mainly punjabi) name. This doesn’t jive with the art, which has pretty obvious europeans hanging around.
And then there’s the issue of the Akhara, which you guys use as a Colosseum. I get how you came up with it- someone during one of your design meetings googled for how to say arena or training center or something and came up with that from wikipedia, but i think you guys stumbled here. Akhara isn’t just a gym or dojo. It’s a holy structure for hindus, a place sacred to various gods, where monks go and study physical arts. Yeah, that sounds completely D&D, but they all function as temples as well, to Hanuman, or Vishnu or Shiva. Plus, the largest groups of Sadhu-saints in india are organized in Akharas. They’re effectively huge denominations of Hindu thought and philosophy, and have guided the faith (in a general sense, as Hinduism is a pretty decentralized religion) for centuries.
But fine. Let’s just accept that you guys use Indian names and stuff for your setting and art. By the time i’ve seen it, it’s well past too late to do anything anyway. But the issue that bothers me more is the blending of Steampunk and India, which is a much thornier issue.
So Steampunk is basically an offshoot of the works of folks like Jules Verne, taking Victorian era feelings of exploration, invention and discovery to the nth degree. Gears everywhere, top hats and coal and wire rimmed glasses, you get it. God, acting as if i know more about art aesthetics than the magic team!
Where the issue comes from is the other half of steampunk- the thing being explored and discovered and enlightened. Steampunk, and pulp adventure before it, are predicated on the idea that there is a civilized (read-white,european,christian) elite going to the wild unknown (brown, african/indian, pagan) to bring enlightenment to the ‘other’. If you go back and reread Around the World in 80 Days, you’ll be astounded at how absolutely condescendingly racist that book is when it comes to describing other cultures that Fogg encounters. His trip to India is especially egregious.
Now, i totally love the steampunk aesthetic, but it’s really hard to separate that from the aspects of colonialism and othering that go along with it. And then add that to the fact that you’ve basically got all pale white people in the art that came with Chandra’s story, and that everyone has Indian names and onion domes and it’s all very Disneyfied Mughal India, and you start to get the feeling of erasure. Or at least I do. Here it is, my dream setting, an Indian plane in MtG with awesome gears and steam and the whole thing, and indian names and indian cultural references….and no indians. And the plane is full of engineers!!
Mark, it hurts.
Finally after all these years, everything about my culture is ok for magic extept me? I still have no one that i can identify with, except for these seeming interlopers who have come and replaced me in my home. And yes, i fully admit that this sounds a little overwrought, but i *love* magic. I’ve played it for 2/3rds of my life. It’s my favorite thing in the world behind my culture and my wife and son.
So this one hits a little close to home. Khans block had Naga and Rakshasas, but fine, i could just chalk that up to generic D&D monsters. Chandra, though…Mark, My aunt is named Kiran. Her hair is very much not red, and while she is an engineer, there aren’t many gears in her life. Chandra was one of the names I was considering giving my son. (I settled on Aakash. Instead of the moon, we went with the sky).
I understand how business works, and how the magic development schedule works. The fact that i know her plane’s name at all means that this is all basically unchangeable and locked in stone for pretty much the rest of the game’s life. But I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I didn’t at least share my feelings about this, my favorite game.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for Magic.
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