The discourse seems to be making it’s rounds again, and for simplicity’s sake I’ll make my own post I stead of tacking my thoughts onto an already long chain.
It’s really easy to have that sort of knee-jerk reaction when somebody criticizes WotC for their half-hearted diversity that they pepper the cast of the story with. We can talk about how Chandra technically is Indian until we’re blue in the face, or how Gideon is Mediterranean, but Chandra didn’t even get that part of her storyline until recently and before then presented as Gaelic, and same goes for Gideon where only in recent history did the art start to reflect his Greek-centric heritage. It feels more like lip service. The only person WITHIN THE GATEWATCH WHO ARE THE MAIN, REOCCURRING CAST who is explicitly Not White™ is Teferi.
Everybody else: a side character who we only get to see for a moment and then they’re gone, like they hardly mattered.
Furthermore, the characters we have seen thus far who have been canonically LGBT are either DEAD, SIDE CHARACTERS (AND IN SOME CASES, DIDN’T GET A CARD AND STILL HAVEN’T) OR A CHARACTER WHO WAS ONLY EVER EXPLICITLY DESCRIBED AS WLW IN HER CHARACTER BIO AND NEVER EXPLICITLY IN THE ACTUAL STORY (Oviya). The subtext under subtext under implications with Chandra and Nissa DOESN’T COUNT UNTIL IT ACTUALLY BECOMES TEXT.
I love magic the gathering. Like, that’s a very obvious fact, but we can’t keep accepting and going out of our way to defend the scraps we’ve gotten. We need to expect better of the media we consume. We need to lift the bar from off the fucking ground.
This is precisely what I’ve been trying and failing to express.
This.
Whether for current characters or new ones incoming, the bottom line:
We need confirmed, main cast, planeswalker lgbt rep.
Repeat: CONFIRMED. MAIN CAST. PLANESWALKER. LGBT REP.
We can all go back and forth on nuance and what we hope, fear, or whatever, but at the end of the day, this is the most important thing that @wizardsmagic needs to keep hearing from us.
CONFIRMED MAIN CAST PLANESWALKER LGBT REP
oh yeah, and more then just one character, Wizards. Even if you give us Gruulfriends, we shouldn’t have to wait for that, and it shouldn’t end there.
One of the most powerful lessons I learned from my time as a Certified Nursing Assistant was from an elderly woman who called me Fuzzy Wuzzy.
For the purposes of this story, we’ll call this woman “Edna.”
Edna called me Fuzzy Wuzzy because I had recently started shaving my head, and the first time I came to work without hair she put a hand on my head and said I reminded her of the poem, “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t really fuzzy, was he?”
Edna was an easygoing and good natured person who had very poor vision and almost no mobility, but was very pleasant to care for most times of the day.
Except things were very difficult for about an hour every night, because that’s when Edna saw spiders.
The spiders that she saw every night covered her ceiling in a great black moving mass. This was caused partly by the confusion she experienced, and partly because her poor eyesight caused false shapes to appear and move in very dark lighting. It was terrifying for her.
She would scream and holler for someone to get rid of the spiders until one of the CNAs would go into her room and try to loudly convince her there were no spiders. Sometimes she would get so worked up that they would have to turn on the light in her room, which greatly bothered her roommate.
One night, I was working down a different hall in the health center, but I could hear Edna’s shouting from the other side of the facility. The CNA working her hall was occupied with helping another resident use the bathroom, so I went in to Edna’s room and claimed the call.
I knew there was no way I could talk loudly enough for Edna to hear me without waking up half the hall. Plus I didn’t like shouting at residents.
So instead, I took her hand, leaned in very close to her ear, and in the deepest, most reassuring voice I had I said, “Edna, do you know who this is?”
She recognized my voice and immediately stopped shouting. Then she brought a shaking hand down on my head and gave it a little rub.
I’ll never forget the sound of relief in her sigh as she took a deep breath and said, “Oh. Fuzzy Wuzzy.”
I told her she was safe and that things would be alright, and she believed me. I asked her if I could sit with her for a bit and she said yes. She closed here eyes and I held her hand until she fell asleep a few minutes later.
After that, we made a habit of me visiting her room each night I was on shift. I didn’t wait for the screaming to start because I got to know when it normally would. After a couple weeks, Edna no longer saw spiders at night. She never stopped calling me Fuzzy Wuzzy.
And more than a decade later, I’m still blown away by that experience. What an immensely powerful thing it is to be someone’s Fuzzy Wuzzy!
What a difference it makes to listen to someone, get to know them, joke with them, love them, show them respect and learn to laugh with them. And then, when they are going through a crisis, to be there. To say their name and let them hear your voice, to hold their hand, to let them feel your presence.
Even without the power to solve their problem, just to BE THERE. To remind them of brighter times and sunshine and jokes and promises of good days that can return again. To just assure them they’re not alone.
It doesn’t take a lot to be a Fuzzy Wuzzy, but OH, WHAT A DIFFERENCE IT CAN MAKE.
And I will always be grateful for the opportunity I had to learn that lesson from that special and sacred experience.
@flavoracle you always suprise me with your kindness over and over again! You are a cinnamon roll!
That’s such a kind thing to say!
I’m glad people are responding so positively to the story. It’s one of my most cherished and tender memories as an adult. 🙂
So this is the fabled story of ‘fuzzy wuzzy and the spiders’
hoi ❤ I made a penguin walker. She’s from Tarkir and she’s an aven of the atarka clan~ She made her pickaxe from a hedron she had found near ugins tomb, When she carved it, it flared up and ignited her spark which took her to Kaldheim.
The college professor looked out across the students in his class and raised a jar onto the table in front of him. Without saying a word, he began placing stones in the jar until they reached the opening.
“Tell me class,” said the professor, “how many of you think that this jar is full?” A few students raised their hands.
The professor then pulled up a bucket of sand and began pouring the sand in the jar between the gaps in the stones until it reached the top. “Now how many of you think this jar is full?” he asked. Again, a few students raised their hands.
Then the professor brought out a large jug of water and poured it in to the jar, emptying most of the jug. “Now the jar is full,” said the professor. “You see, much like this jar, many of us believe that our lives are already too full to include any more worthy endeavors, when really all that is necessary is prioritizing the tasks that go in first.”
“Hold on,” said one student, standing up. “That’s not why I raised my hand when you asked if the jar was full. The jar was full even before you started putting rocks in it. It was full of air. It’s not like you brought in a sealed vacuum tube or anything.”
“And I say it’s STILL not full,” said another student. “At an atomic level, all of the matter in that jar is still mostly empty space. Unless you plan to fill it up with matter from a neutron star, which would probably destroy the whole continent, it’s not ever going to be full.”
“And what kind of lesson is this anyway?” asked a third student. “This is a graduate level physics class, not some junior high philosophy elective. What actual college professor would be this dumb and condescending? It’s like a story from a bad email chain letter!”
“Look, I’m going to level with you,” said the professor. To the collective horror of the class, he removed his face, revealing scaly green skin and yellow eyes underneath. “I’m not really your professor. I ate him last night. I was sent to your planet to find out if there was anyone with brains worth saving before my people destroy your planet. It looks like you three fit the bill.”
Suddenly the alien professor and the three students who spoke up were teleported away. A moment later, an antimatter bomb annihilated Earth.
The Moral of the Story: Make it a priority to speak up in class. It just might save you from annihilation.
hey, if anyone could please help my family and i pay our rent for this month that would be absolutely amazing. my mom is not going to get paid in time and we recently had a flood in in our apartment that we were forced to pay for, damages and all. we’re really desperate, and i am not normally the type to ever ask for help like this.
we need about $300. anything extra will go to buying some groceries until my mom gets paid. first i’ll be buying food for our cats since i refuse to eat well until they have.
please help if you can afford to! if not, a reblog always helps too
my paypal is lilpeach52@hotmail.com
If anyone can help this person out, that would be really nice!
magicpotatolover 