I haven’t seen a similar post on tumblr, but here’s a few places to donate money and find means to support those in Palestine-
Pious Project provides menstrual care kits as well as soap, shampoo, disinfectants, etc
Gaza Esims lets you donate Esims- these are used to connect to the internet and keep communication going in and out of the country
Operation Olive Branch is a spreadsheet of Gofundmes for families seeking funds to flee the country, each having a link to sponsor them
Here's a reading list from Decolonize Palestine
Stop Gaza Genocide is a google doc that is constantly updated, which includes how to contact representatives, how to protest, and various activist resources (US centric)
Samidoun provides a constantly updating calendar of protests, and you can submit ones not listed if there’s a protest happening near you (Global)
UNRWA and Care for Gaza are orgs that directly provide general aid and food
Lastly, while not inherently about Palestine, I do want to encourage everyone reading this that If you see a post regarding Palestine- a video, a photo, a livestream, a text post- Archive it with the Wayback Machine. When digital information is prone to deletion and censorship, we cannot afford to lose something as valuable as knowledge.
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A Day In Blood-Swell Swamp
Yandere Frog Hybrid x Gender Neutral Reader
(CW: Noncon, non-human genitalia, oviposition, general yandere behavior, misunderstanding, reader stuck in mud)
Word Count: 1.7k
(The yandere in this is a cinnamon roll. A real sweetie. Needed another one like him. He misread the reader's intent and is not at all a bad guy. Really hope you guys like him)
You were an artist on a mission. You were traveling all over your country to sketch the flora, fauna, and landscapes of various habitats. You had already visited several different forests and a couple of prairies.
Now you found yourself in Blood-Swell Swamp. The waters of the swamp were a deep red color. Many people in nearby towns were superstitious about the place and its odd colored water, but you knew it was just a combination of iron filled water and algae.
You rowed the tiny boat you had purchased and found a dry outcrop of trees overlooking the water logged scenery.
When you looked at the impressive sanguine waters and wetland forest sprawling out in front of you, you knew you had made the right decision.
You got out and tied the boat to a tree, the waters were still, but better safe than sorry.
Once you decided on a good spot to look at you pulled out your sketchbook. The first thing you sketched was a frog on a lily pad beside a blooming water lily. The next thing was a cluster of unique purple flowers.
After that you began the larger task of drawing the landscape as a whole.
You had just about finished when you heard a splash and then an enthusiastic male voice behind you.
"HI!!!"
You turned around and almost fell over. If the sudden presence of an unknown man behind you hadn’t been enough to scare you, the fact that he wasn’t human would have.
He was crouched down on very athletic looking legs, wearing nothing but a loincloth. He had long webbed toes and fingers that matched, though he only had four fingers. His mouth was a bit too long and his eyes were large and purple. He was a bit shorter than you but he clearly had a strong and compact body.
But the most odd thing was the color of his skin. He was a deep cherry red with the color transitioning into blue on his arms and legs past his elbows and knees.
His medium length black hair dripped as he tilted his head and spoke again.
“Hello? Are you okay? What are you doing?”
You collected yourself, still frightened by his appearance despite his so far friendly demeanor.
“Uh…”
“Are you okay??”
You flinched backwards as he stepped towards you. He stopped approaching as he noticed you were uncomfortable.
“I just… never saw a… what you are before…”
“Oh! Well I am a frogkin. I have seen a human or two before, but only from a distance.”
You were about to respond but he cut you off, he seemed to be really excited to have someone to chat with.
“My name is Cobi, what’re you called?”
You mentally scolded yourself for your rude and frightened demeanor and forced yourself to calm down and introduce yourself. You were in his territory after all, and he had been nothing but polite to you. You gave him your name and explained to him that you were an artist there to sketch the beauty of the swamp. You showed him your sketches.
“Oh wow, we don’t have any artists here. I have never even heard of sketches. We have some wall paintings in some of our huts, but nothing like this!”
The frog man was clearly impressed.
“Oh, I couldn’t live without being able to draw all the beauty around me. Hey, could I draw you? Just a quick sketch!”
If the skin on his face wasn’t already red you would have been able to see that he was blushing. If you drew beautiful things then that must mean you thought he was beautiful. The notion made his heart flutter.
“S-sure!” Cobi said in his ever chipper voice.
You spent some time sketching him, despite your original plan to get just a quick one in, he happily let you get a couple extra. One with him in the water and one of him crouched on a dead log.
When you finished your sketching you fished some sandwiches out of your backpack and offered one to Cobi. He took it and sniffed inquisitively trying to figure out what it was.
“It’s food, it’s called a sandwich.” You took a few bites of yours and then he took a few cautious nibbles before his eyes lit up and he stuffed the whole thing in his mouth at once. You had to stifle a laugh.
"Thank you, that was super yummy!"
Cobi was blushing more. You drew him because you thought he was beautiful. Attractive. And now you gave him food. Surely that meant you were interested in him right? People of the swamp didn’t just give food away! You gave food to those you liked. Friends, family, and potential mates you were courting!
Even if it was subconscious you probably were trying to court him. And he really wanted to explore the possibility of being your partner too, you were so kind and interesting.
But he didn't want to jump the gun and assume before he had a bit more solid evidence. So instead of asking or acting on what he felt all the evidence pointing to he just hung around and chatted with you a bit more while you finished your meal.
You finished your food slowly, enjoying your time getting to know the inquisitive frogkin. You answered all of his seemingly inexhaustible supply of questions.
When you finished and said your goodbyes he seemed sad, but you were a traveler. You couldn't really make lasting friendships. And then, when you started to get up, you fell right over your own feet. Your arm stuck in some thick mud with your face low to the ground and your ass pointed up.
And that was all the confirmation Cobi needed. Ass up and presenting. The universal signal to breed!
If you had been able to see his face you would have seen that he was flustered beyond measure. You were also far too preoccupied to notice what Cobi was muttering.
"Oh... well I thought that maybe you just wanted to c-court and get to know one another better... I thought.. I j-just um... well it's just that... I-I have never even done it before... but... it seems like you really want to..."
Despite it being a bit fast he supposed he had become quite smitten with you. And, well, maybe humans coupled faster than frogkin. And he really didn't want to hurt you or offend you!
"O-okay, I'll do it!" He exclaimed loudly.
You were finally almost out of the muck and were about to ask him what he was going to do when he suddenly pulled your pants down and slid his huge tongue right into your entrance. You shuddered in shock and ended up with both hands stuck in the mud.
"Wh-what are you doing!?"
Cobi wasn't paying any attention to your words, not as lost in his efforts to loosen up your hole in preparation for the main event as he was. He gripped your legs with his webbed hands as his tongue probed you as deeply as possible, kneading and throbbing and gently stretching out your insides.
The pleasure was indescribable. You wanted Cobi to stop, but time you tried to articulate a protest the only sound you managed to produce was a loud moan or gasp.
And of course the only possible reaction Cobi could have to that was to think that he was doing a great job making his new mate nice. And he wanted to feel good with you.
He removed the slimy tongue from your entrance and removed his loincloth. Cobi then aligned his engorged cock and drew circles against it with before tip before slowly sinking into your tight heat. He had held reservations about making love to you so soon into courting, but now that he was inside you the last of them had melted away.
"Oh, oh, ooohh, you feel so amazing! I-i think you were meant for this pretty artist~"
Much in the same way that your resolve had melted away under the burning flood of pleasure Cobi was drowning you in. Judging by how it felt it was no human cock. It was much longer, a little thicker, and felt a bit slimy. With every thrust you lost a bit more of yourself until you were moving back against his movements, desperately trying to chase the orgasm you were building up to.
You had just come here to help along your art and now here you were in the mud mounted like a bitch in heat and enjoying it. It would have been humiliating if you had the capacity to dwell on such matters.
There were more important things to think about right now. Like the cock breeding you. The feel of unnaturally heavy nuts smacking into you. The soft and attentive lips kissing up your backside, straining to reach your neck.
You arched your back as you had the most mind shattering climax of your life.
"I can't hold back anymore. You sketched for me. L-let me just paint your insides for you~"
And then you learned why his nuts felt so heavy as they slammed against you. As he filled you he deposited much more than just normal cum. Over dozens of small round objects flooded into you and adhered themselves to your walls.
"Wh-what the?"
Cobi plucked you out of the mud with ease and pulled you into his lap as he sat down, with his prick still buried snugly inside of you. He held you close to his sweaty body and caressed your belly lovingly.
Now that you had a moment to process your predicament and the events that had just transpired you were completely dumbfounded. One moment you were trying to get out of the mire and the next you were being fucked.
"I'm so glad you wanted to be mates~"
Your mind was reeling trying to come up with a response to such an outrageous claim. When had you expressed anything resembling such a des-
"Mmmm~" Instead you could only reply with a pathetic pleased whimper as Cobi began rolling his hips, grinding into you and very slowly fucking you for a second time.
"Don't worry, I have plenty more eggs just for my sweet artist~"
You could only lean back against him and drool as he wrapped his arms around you possessively and temporarily fucked your mind away once more.
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How Do I Make My Fictional Gypsies Not Racist?
(Or, "You can't, sorry, but…")
You want to include some Gypsies in your fantasy setting. Or, you need someone for your main characters to meet, who is an outsider in the eyes of the locals, but who already lives here. Or you need a culture in conflict with your settled people, or who have just arrived out of nowhere. Or, you just like the idea of campfires in the forest and voices raised in song. And you’re about to step straight into a muckpile of cliches and, accidentally, write something racist.
(In this, I am mostly using Gypsy as an endonym of Romany people, who are a subset of the Romani people, alongside Roma, Sinti, Gitano, Romanisael, Kale, etc, but also in the theory of "Gypsying" as proposed by Lex and Percy H, where Romani people are treated with a particular mix of orientalism, criminalisation, racialisation, and othering, that creates "The Gypsy" out of both nomadic peoples as a whole and people with Romani heritage and racialised physical features, languages, and cultural markers)
Enough of my friends play TTRPGs or write fantasy stories that this question comes up a lot - They mention Dungeons and Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd, World Of Darkness’s Gypsies, World Of Darkness’s Ravnos, World of Darkness’s Silent Striders… And they roll their eyes and say “These are all terrible! But how can I do it, you know, without it being racist?”
And their eyes are big and sad and ever so hopeful that I will tell them the secret of how to take the Roma of the real world and place them in a fictional one, whilst both appealing to gorjer stereotypes of Gypsies and not adding to the weight of stereotyping that already crushes us. So, disappointingly, there is no secret.
Gypsies, like every other real-world culture, exist as we do today because of interactions with cultures and geography around us: The living waggon, probably the archetypal thing which gorjer writers want to include in their portrayals of nomads, is a relatively modern invention - Most likely French, and adopted from French Showmen by Romanies, who brought it to Britain. So already, that’s a tradition that only spans a small amount of the time that Gypsies have existed, and only a small number of the full breadth of Romani ways of living. But the reasons that the waggon is what it is are based on the real world - The wheels are tall and iron-rimmed, because although you expect to travel on cobbled, tarmac, or packed-earth roads and for comparatively short distances, it wasn’t rare to have to ford a river in Britain in the late nineteenth century, on country roads. They were drawn by a single horse, and the shape of that horse was determined by a mixture of local breeds - Welsh cobs, fell ponies, various draft breeds - as well as by the aesthetic tastes of the breeders. The stove inside is on the left, so that as you move down a British road, the chimney sticks up into the part where there will be the least overhanging branches, to reduce the chance of hitting it.
So taking a fictional setting that looks like (for example) thirteenth century China (with dragons), and placing a nineteenth century Romanichal family in it will inevitably result in some racist assumptions being made, as the answer to “Why does this culture do this?” becomes “They just do it because I want them to” rather than having a consistent internal logic.
Some stereotypes will always follow nomads - They appear in different forms in different cultures, but they always arise from the settled people's same fears: That the nomads don't share their values, and are fundamentally strangers. Common ones are that we have a secret language to fool outsiders with, that we steal children and disguise them as our own, that our sexual morals are shocking (This one has flipped in the last half century - From the Gypsy Lore Society's talk of the lascivious Romni seductress who will lie with a strange man for a night after a 'gypsy wedding', to today's frenzied talk of 'grabbing' and sexually-conservative early marriages to ensure virginity), that we are supernatural in some way, and that we are more like animals than humans. These are tropes where if you want to address them, you will have to address them as libels - there is no way to casually write a baby-stealing, magical succubus nomad without it backfiring onto real life Roma. (The kind of person who has the skills to write these tropes well, is not the kind of person who is reading this guide.)
It’s too easy to say a list of prescriptive “Do nots”, which might stop you from making the most common pitfalls, but which can end up with your nomads being slightly flat as you dance around the topics that you’re trying to avoid, rather than being a rich culture that feels real in your world.
So, here are some questions to ask, to create your nomadic people, so that they will have a distinctive culture of their own that may (or may not) look anything like real-world Romani people: These aren't the only questions, but they're good starting points to think about before you make anything concrete, and they will hopefully inspire you to ask MORE questions.
First - Why are they nomadic? Nobody moves just to feel the wind in their hair and see a new horizon every morning, no matter what the inspirational poster says. Are they transhumant herders who pay a small rent to graze their flock on the local lord’s land? Are they following migratory herds across common land, being moved on by the cycle of the seasons and the movement of their animals? Are they seasonal workers who follow man-made cycles of labour: Harvests, fairs, religious festivals? Are they refugees fleeing a recent conflict, who will pass through this area and never return? Are they on a regular pilgrimage? Do they travel within the same area predictably, or is their movement governed by something that is hard to predict? How do they see their own movements - Do they think of themselves as being pushed along by some external force, or as choosing to travel? Will they work for and with outsiders, either as employees or as partners, or do they aim to be fully self-sufficient? What other jobs do they do - Their whole society won’t all be involved in one industry, what do their children, elderly, disabled people do with their time, and is it “work”?
If they are totally isolationist - How do they produce the things which need a complex supply chain or large facilities to make? How do they view artefacts from outsiders which come into their possession - Things which have been made with technology that they can’t produce for themselves? (This doesn’t need to be anything about quality of goods, only about complexity - A violin can be made by one artisan working with hand tools, wood, gut and shellac, but an accordion needs presses to make reeds, metal lathes to make screws, complex organic chemistry to make celluloid lacquer, vulcanised rubber, and a thousand other components)
How do they feel about outsiders? How do they buy and sell to outsiders? If it’s seen as taboo, do they do it anyway? Do they speak the same language as the nearby settled people (With what kind of fluency, or bilingualism, or dialect)? Do they intermarry, and how is that viewed when it happens? What stories does this culture tell about why they are a separate people to the nearby settled people? Are those stories true? Do they have a notional “homeland” and do they intend to go there? If so, is it a real place?
What gorjers think of as classic "Gipsy music" is a product of our real-world situation. Guitar from Spain, accordions from the Soviet Union (Which needed modern machining and factories to produce and make accessible to people who weren't rich- and which were in turn encouraged by Soviet authorities preferring the standardised and modern accordion to the folk traditions of the indigenous peoples within the bloc), brass from Western classical traditions, via Balkan folk music, influences from klezmer and jazz and bhangra and polka and our own music traditions (And we influence them too). What are your people's musical influences? Do they make their own instruments or buy them from settled people? How many musical traditions do they have, and what are they all for (Weddings, funerals, storytelling, campfire songs, entertainment...)? Do they have professional musicians, and if so, how do those musicians earn money? Are instrument makers professionals, or do they use improvised and easy-to-make instruments like willow whistles, spoons, washtubs, etc? (Of course the answer can be "A bit of both")
If you're thinking about jobs - How do they work? Are they employed by settled people (How do they feel about them?) Are they self employed but providing services/goods to the settled people? Are they mostly avoidant of settled people other than to buy things that they can't produce themselves? Are they totally isolationist? Is their work mostly subsistence, or do they create a surplus to sell to outsiders? How do they interact with other workers nearby? Who works, and how- Are there 'family businesses', apprentices, children with part time work? Is it considered 'a job' or just part of their way of life? How do they educate their children, and is that considered 'work'? How old are children when they are considered adult, and what markers confer adulthood? What is considered a rite of passage?
When they travel, how do they do it? Do they share ownership of beasts of burden, or each individually have "their horse"? Do families stick together or try to spread out? How does a child begin to live apart from their family, or start their own family? Are their dwellings something that they take with them, or do they find places to stay or build temporary shelter with disposable material? Who shares a dwelling and why? What do they do for privacy, and what do they think privacy is for?
If you're thinking about food - Do they hunt? Herd? Forage? Buy or trade from settled people? Do they travel between places where they've sown crops or managed wildstock in previous years, so that when they arrive there is food already seeded in the landscape? How do they feel about buying food from settled people, and is that common? If it's frowned upon - How much do people do it anyway? How do they preserve food for winter? How much food do they carry with them, compared to how much they plan to buy or forage at their destinations? How is food shared- Communal stores, personal ownership?
Why are they a "separate people" to the settled people? What is their creation myth? Why do they believe that they are nomadic and the other people are settled, and is it correct? Do they look different? Are there legal restrictions on them settling? Are there legal restrictions on them intermixing? Are there cultural reasons why they are a separate people? Where did those reasons come from? How long have they been travelling? How long do they think they've been travelling? Where did they come from? Do they travel mostly within one area and return to the same sites predictably, or are they going to move on again soon and never come back?
And then within that - What about the members of their society who are "unusual" in some way: How does their society treat disabled people? (are they considered disabled, do they have that distinction and how is it applied?) How does their society treat LGBT+ people? What happens to someone who doesn't get married and has no children? What happens to someone who 'leaves'? What happens to young widows and widowers? What happens if someone just 'can't fit in'? What happens to someone who is adopted or married in? What happens to people who are mixed race, and in a fantasy setting to people who are mixed species? What is taboo to them and what will they find shocking if they leave? What is society's attitude to 'difference' of various kinds?
Basically, if you build your nomads from the ground-up, rather than starting from the idea of "I want Gypsies/Buryats/Berbers/Minceiri but with the numbers filed off and not offensive" you can end up with a rich, unique nomadic culture who make sense in your world and don't end up making a rod for the back of real-world cultures.
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