A side blog for reblogging cool art + other interesting things
Art blog: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/snallyghaster
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/snallyghaster
They don’t call them rainwings for nothing. They got the rain on them or something.
They’re so relaxing to color lol. The “base” coloration usually only shows up when asleep or just very distracted, tired, sick, etc. Emotion colors+patterns are involuntary, like us they can have some control over it but often it’ll show on their skin in Some way if they’re mad, scared, etc. Getting the skin to align with the chosen color takes practice to refine into something they like, but more or less just takes some thought to keep together(kind of like remembering you’re breathing every so often). Same with complex foliage disguises, those are a bit harder since they have to focus on copying what’s around them and quickly changing colors when moving. Very skilled rainwings can move and change colors very quickly, while younger or less skilled ones keep more simple shapes and color schemes (taking a while to change).
Pet rainwings were a thing before the war, mostly in skywing and sandwing upper-class circles. Their queendoms were just starting to get into that southern area and just go crazy claiming territory and looting resources (as far as they could get into the jungle, that is. It’s very dense and deadly, a lot of it remains unexplored by anyone other than rainwings). It is generally understood NOW that rainwings are also intelligent, at the time it was thought they were some kind of pretty rainforest creature that could mimic your actions and speech, they just didn’t seem “dragon enough”: very small claws, (seemingly) no teeth, weird eyes, weird beak, short limbs, no Queen, no difference between sexes/little hierarchy, they eat fruit, they sit around for a lot of the day/don’t hunt a lot of the time, the list goes on. They realized soon enough that they weren’t animals, the rich just didn’t care. Anti-other dragon sentiments and the increased wealth gap made having another dragon as an accessory very popular and a symbol of status (especially since it costs a lot to have fruit and veggies brought in to keep them alive). Even if they don’t really care for the concept , any sandwing or skywing royal or noble of any notoriety has a collection of rainwings just to keep up appearances. It’s kind of like people who irresponsibly keep big cats, except that’s a whole person youve got in that cage.
Slightly related fun fact, some rich dragons also keep scavengers as pets (like in canon). Similar fucked ethics behind that.
Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)
Fun fact: the Catholic Church did not stop doing this after Edgaro Mortara. During WW2, many Jewish children were put in convents or catholic-run orphanages for their own safety. Sounds nice right? Except after the war ended, when parents or surviving relative went back to claim their children, the church went, “uhhh, actually they’re catholic now, no take backs!”
The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”
What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.
Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.
Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII’s silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in 1943 and the Vatic
I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.
Idk what my point is here, just that there’s such a clean link between evangelizing, cultural/religious imperialism, and how damaging and horrifying a religion can be when it is thoroughly convinced of its own superiority. And that unless an institution is forced to change, it probably won’t change on its own.
this shit is still happening daily - "christian" families adopting kids from other countries (or white settlers adopting native kids) and force-christianising them is just normal, never mind the pope
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