Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Spanish for Our Lady of Holy Death), often shortened to Santa Muerte, is a female deity or folk saint in Mexican and Mexican-American folk Catholicism. A personification of death, she is associated with healing, protection, and safe delivery to the afterlife by her devotees. Despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, her cult has become increasingly prominent since the 2000s.
The worship of Santa Muerte is condemned by the Catholic Church in Mexico as invalid, but it is increasingly firmly entrenched in Mexican culture.
Santa Muerte is also seen as a protector of homosexual, bisexual, and transgender communities in Mexico, since many are considered to be outcast from society. Many LGBT people ask her for protection from violence, hatred, disease, and to help them in their search for love.
Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories.
We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls.
Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left.
This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left.
And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left.
And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right.
Until these are the bowls.
Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other.
This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl.
This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference.
This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.
The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss.
This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world.
I mean, imagine your party guests arrive
Oh my god they are adorable!
And they see their bowls
But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.
I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?
But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat.
And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant.
And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.
*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*
sorry if i’m being a party pooper but because rabies is apparently the new joke on here ??? please remember that rabies has an almost 100% fatality rate after symptoms develop so if you’re bitten or scratched by an animal that you aren’t 100% sure is vaccinated then GO TO A DOCTOR. it’s not a joke. really.
One of the most mesmerizing things about online communities, is when spending enough time with like-minded people, the facts and consequences of reality begin to melt away.
Suddenly, rabies isn’t as dangerous as everyone says, the earth is flat, the moon landing was faked, and Steven Universe kin drama is a legitimate threat.
that’s a good way of putting it. while thinking abt making this post i kept thinking “i’m afraid this is gonna end up like the tide pod thing” but didn’t know how to articulate it so thank you for that
I mean usually I’d say people need to go outside, but I fear if they’re rabies fetishists that’s the exactly what they want
I need to emphasize: Rabies does not have an “almost” 100% fatality rate. Rabies has a 100% fatality rate, period. Ebola has a fatality rate of about 50%. There are six people in recorded history who have ever contracted rabies and survived. Six. Six human beings. Ever.
The fatality rate of attempted suicide with a firearm is 82.5%.
All six of those people were complete flukes. They’re outliers. We haven’t been able to figure out how to recreate whatever the hell it was that saved them and not anyone else. If you are exposed to rabies, and don’t immediately receive intensive post-exposure treatment, you die. Not “probably” die, not “it’s as good as a death sentence”. You are dead. There is no remote fractional percentage of a chance that you will not die. It’s terrifying and painful and ugly. It’s not a way anyone in this world deserves to die.
If you’re not sure whether something was rabies exposure, go to the fucking hospital to be sure, because by the time rabies symptoms begin to manifest, treatment is no longer an option. By the time you suspect you have rabies, it is far, far too late. By the time you start showing symptoms, there’s…nothing that anyone can do anymore.
At that point, the only option is called the Milwaukee Protocol, which, again….we’ve NEVER created an effective, reliable way of treating rabies once it manifests. In practice, it mostly consists of putting you in a medically induced coma–not in any real hope of saving your life, but to spare you the pain of feeling what happens to youwhile you die of rabies.
I genuinely have no idea to what extent rabies has become an actual joke on the internet or if it’s just that one guy who so help me god had better be some kind of satire, but…rabies is fucking terrifying. “Possible rabies exposure” is one of the scariest phrases I can think of.
None of this is fearmongering. Don’t fuck around with rabies.
