so, confession
i’ve been really struggling ever since i started really examining why so many of my characters who are coded jewish are so, hmm, brawny
it didn’t click until a couple days ago, when there was that post about the goy gaze and the implicit idea within most zionist rhetoric that the old stereotype-the hunched, studious jew-was inferior
that in the last two hundred years, we have begun to see ourselves, our ancestors, our collective neshama, as being weak because how on earth could we possibly see otherwise, in the face of our trek through history (there is an argument here about how strong we must be to survive in the face of it vs. how weak we must be to have not conquered this hate, but tbh i think a lot of it is glass half full vs. glass half empty and there's not much you can do about how people see the village well during a drought, you know)
its an idea that we should have conquered the hate the world has, and why haven’t we? and we take it for granted that zionism hates the goyische world as it is, but it doesn’t really deal with the message that the old us was weak-that we were not being big enough, by not being this, strongman people
my point isn't really about zionism-zionism is a reaction to that feeling-but that idea, that we have to all be The Bear Jew instead of the Yeshiva Student
that hurts because it has claws
and looking at mirele, who i’ve repeatedly called a Davidic figure-i made her physically active, strong, curious but not a scholar by any means-that realization hurt
and so i have put off playing her for a few days because i have been dealing with that feeling
tbh i had to escape to Calenhad and other games to get away from the feeling, because usually i catch myself when i'm having a moment of self-hate, you know, so it's pretty alarming when a behaviour brings up that feeling in me, the intrinsic lashing out of horror and denial
you can tell when you're feeling it that there's a grain of truth to it, though, and i could tell as i thought about it
so