Welcome to urfaveisroma <3 I saved this url out of spite, and if that's not pen then I don't know what is. This blog is primarily for celebrating and discussing Romani characters in comics, but I take submissions for Romani characters in other mediums and headcanon submissions, so long as they are appropriate.
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Here are some basic rules and principles to follow. Failure to respect these rules and principles will earn you a block, so be mindful-
· If nai tu san gypsy then be quiet for the sake of devla [ie: non-roma can follow and reblog my posts, but if you're going to be weird and racist, go away]. I do not strictly mind submissions/asks, but if you cannot be respectful, and if I find your submission/ask to be purposefully offensive, you WILL be blocked.
· Do not pester me with questions about Romani culture. I am not an authority on Romani culture in every vitze and in every corner of the earth. We are not a monolith. If I feel the want or need to volunteer certain information to clear up misconceptions, I will.
· We use media literacy and critical analysis here, sir. Please do not come in my inbox and tell me a Romani comic character should not be Roma because they have been written stereotypically, especially if you aren't Romani. The fact of the matter is that characters of color across the board have been subject to racist and stereotypical writing. I do not advocate for the erasure of Romani characters' racial identities, just like I do not advocate for the erasure of any other nonwhite characters' racial identities. I advocate for the involvement of Romani writers, artists, consults, and sensitivity readers in the creative process for Romani characters in comics. I advocate for positive change, not negative change, and erasing what little representation we have in media is 100% a negative change.
All that being said, I’m not going to jump you if you make a misstep. Please don’t be afraid to send asks and chat with me because you’re worried you might say something wrong. If I feel that the mistake was made in good faith then I will correct it in good faith.
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Some basic information about me:
I am a multiracial American Rom. My pronouns are he/him. I have not decided if I want to be public about who I am on this blog because I have been racially harrassed many times over for discussing Romani characters online, therefore I think maintaining some separation and anonymity on this blog will be beneficial for my mental health. If you must refer to me at all, you can call me Vic (yeah yeah kinnie moment, blah blah).
My favorite Romani characters in comics are Dick Grayson, the Maximoff twins, and (as you may have noticed) Victor von Doom- which...is basically every major racially Romani character in comics. I am very attached to them, so I love to be sent submissions/asks/posts relating to them!
✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #641 )✅️
Please donate and share
Hello friends, I am Abdullah Salem Abdullah, 26 years old, a graduate of the University College with a degree in Information Technology - Mu
Hello friends, I am Abdullah Salem Abdullah Jaafar, 26 years old, a graduate of the University College with a degree in Information Technology - Multimedia. I used to have a beautiful family; I’m married and have four children, and my wife is pregnant.
I previously worked at a multimedia company, but because of the war, I lost my job, my home, my car, and now I have no place to live or work.
During the war, we were forced to evacuate more than four times. Each time, we had to leave everything behind without taking any of our personal belongings.
I live in northern Gaza.
We were displaced to southern Gaza, then to Deir al-Balah, then to Rafah, and now we live in an uninhabitable tent that is not suitable for living.
My daughter Rahaf was martyred in the war due to Israeli airstrikes. Now I have Iman, Malak, Basel, and my wife is in her seventh month of pregnancy.
Please, I am in desperate need of your help just to provide food and water for my children.
Please help Abdullah and his family by donating and/or sharing this post. His children and pregnant wife haven’t eaten in 5 days, they desperately need help now ‼️ $25 will buy them 1 kilo of flour, enough for 1 day. They are at $11,280/$25,000 ‼️
Your Fave is Roma: Michael Caine as Alfred Pennyworth in the Nolanverse. This is less about a fictional comics fave, but the logic is I've seen people say Dick Grayson cannot be Romani because he is English. Dick can be both English and Roma. In fact, someone close to Bruce Wayne and of the Batfam already was! Michael Caine, who was Alfred in Nolan’s Batman movies comes from a Romanichal (English Romani) family. From: Michael Caine's Wikipedia page, We are the Romani People by Prof. Ian Hancock, and in his own words from The Talks interview with Sir Michael Caine.
A Note From Chavo: I love this! I vaguely remember reading that Michael Caine is Romanichal a while ago but I’d forgotten until I read your submission. I’ll have to find those interviews sometime. Yes, one can absolutely be English and Romani! English is a nationality, whereas Romani is a racial identity. Romanichal refers to a subgroup of Romani people who primarily reside in the UK, though there are American Romanichal as well. Romanichal, like other Romani subgroups (Kalderash, Xoraxane, or Calé for example), have their own differences in culture and dialect. In easier terms, Romanichal is the ethnic identity of a specific group of Romani people. The idea of the character Alfred Pennyworth being Romanichal as well sounds quite interesting and would introduce a whole new level to Dick’s relationship with him! On the subject of Dick Grayson, this (very misguided) argument which I myself have seen plenty of times is silly and just plain inaccurate to his character. For one, his family is not English, they’re American. For another, in pre-Flashpoint comics where it was established that Dick is Romani, he is said to be Kalderash, not Romanichal. Thank you for your submission!
tragedy is when a man has so much failwife potential & yet gets assigned suave dom by the fandom and isn't allowed to be anything else. chin up king your loser energy is seen and appreciated. by me
pls help a disabled trans romani native + afronative couple survive until the 15th
URGENT: we are now in the path of tropical storm debby ‼️ heavy inland flooding is expected & our area is prone to flooding. it’s very likely that many roads will be inaccessible. we NEED to stock up on food & essentials by tomorrow afternoon.
additionally, we are still in need of funds for bills and food throughout next week until my beloved @divinemission gets his next paycheck on the 15th. the most important one is on saturday, which is an insurance bill for $140. we haven’t received any d0n4tions since my last update on our previous post. anything helps at this point. for more info on our situation, see our last post. his p4yp4l will be linked below. please share this if you can’t donate, we appreciate it 🫶🏼
Should be illegal to be potentially priced out of ancestral lands tbqh but we are struggling & if everyone who voted on the poll gave 1 dollar, we'd be past our goal. Like we said, pass this on please so we can actually eat and pay what needs to be paid - we both have an aversion to asking for help, and same for our roommates. Like the original post says, if you have questions feel free to dm either @royharper or me here, as Faith's blog lost dm privileges and we'd be happy to give more information or whatever.
We're both racialized folk and we need money to survive and effectively weather this LITERAL storm before Friday. Care about native, black and Roma people while we're actually alive and not just pass us by when we're doing the hard task of publically asking (when going without literally cannot be done because there is no food here, yona gets real sick without regular meals and we both get insanely fatigued without adequate nutrition. Plus, no one should actually ever have to go without food). I've seen people mash the goal of 3k for a new gaming laptop well over, and it's a bit insulting to see that an earnest request to help survive injustice and inequity on ancestral Skarù:ręˀ lands is being unheard (and worse, ignored when the poll was attached to this request)
If you don't care about living people, we also have pets to feed and take care of.
I've never expressed it here, to the best of my knowledge, but my family was Sinti Romani. Originally Jewish, but mostly secular by my grandmother's generation--we came here from Germany between the first and second world wars and the branch that stayed behind didn't survive. This is something I've been coming to terms with throughout my life, growing up American Romani is very isolating and I turned to my older brother's comics to sort of cope with those feelings.
Doctor Doom being a Romani character and something of an anti-hero, it spoke to me immediately. I understood he wasn't a "good guy," but to non-Romani, none of us were anyway, so that aspect never bothered me. Victor was fearless and unashamed of his origins, he was brilliant and capable and as a kid who struggled with anxiety and poor health, kind of inspiring to me, on some level?
Being Roma is as central to Victor’s character as being Jewish is to Magneto's. To disregard that for a blatant cash grab, like... my expectations from the MCU were already low, but they somehow went even lower.
I know I've posted this one before but I can never find it to reblog for some reason (tumblr search is terrible) so: DoomReed commission by the incredibly talented @pointdotiozao 💙💚
By Jonathan Lee
On Saturday, West Yorkshire Police announced that 27 people had been arrested in Leeds in ...
Leeds ‘Roma Riots’: A Story of Racialised Deprivation Eclipsed by Far-Right Hate Mongering
by Jonathan Lee
On Saturday, West Yorkshire Police announced that 27 people had been arrested in Leeds in connection with the rioting that swept the inner-city area of Harehills on 18th July 2024. Amidst far-right vitriol, scapegoating, and wider disorder in the UK, the underlying causes for the rioting in Leeds have been obscured with few talking about the Romani people at the centre of it.
The spark that set the community alight
Harehills in Leeds is one of the most deprived areas in England. Years of chronic underfunding, austerity measures, and the previous government’s vandalism of public services has left behind a community with high levels of unemployment, health deprivation, and crime. For decades, there have been sporadic periods of unrest and rioting in the area, often in response to what are seen as incidents of police ethnic profiling towards the largely British Asian residents.
On 18th July 2024, over a thousand people took to the streets in what soon became an out-of-control riot with a double decker bus set alight, a police car overturned, and fires fuelled by rubbish and wooden palettes set in the street. Earlier that day, five Romani children were taken into protective state care by social workers accompanied by the police after they had received information the family were intending to take the children out of the UK in contravention of a court order. A video filmed at the time of the removal shows a police officer dragging a child who looks around the age of ten from his home while he cries, grabs the doorframe, and fights against the officer.
An interview with a family member, and later reporting by the Guardian, stated that the court order was related to an incident in which a baby was brought by the family to hospital with a head injury that was deemed to be non-accidental. The exact circumstances of the injury to the infant are not public. Also, the reasoning and proportionality of an immediate, forcible removal of all five children cannot be reasonably judged either. However, the way in which children are disproportionately removed from Romani families across Europe is relevant to the context of the situation.
Disproportionate removals of children from Romani families
Across Europe, Romani children are removed from their families in staggeringly high numbers compared to the majority population, and even in comparison to other racialised minority groups. According to research by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), Romani children account for more than 80% of all children in the state care system in Nográd County, Hungary despite Roma only making up 20% of the local population. Care professionals in Serbia estimated that 60% of children in care were Roma, despite Roma being 2% of the country’s population. Slovakia’s care system is at least 63% and at most 82% populated by Romani children according to the ERRC (while Roma make up 6 – 8% of the Slovak population). In Bulgaria, more than 50% of children in care are estimated to be Roma by care workers and NGOs (despite Roma representing around 10% of the population). In the Czech Republic, where just over 2% of the population are Romani, approximately 24% of all children placed in early childhood care institutions for children under 3 years-of-age are Roma. And in Romania, where the family in Harehills are allegedly originally from, NGOs estimate that around 65% of all children in state care are Roma, despite accounting for less than 10% of the country’s population.
Institutional racism in the care sector breeds distrust
A combination of racial stereotypes and biases from care workers, institutional racism in the care system, and the illegal removal of children on the basis of poverty has led to this situation around Europe. In some countries (notably in Central Europe) children are removed from their families to be placed in children’s homes, rather than family environments. Children who grow up in such institutions are damaged, in one way or another, for life. They leave institutions both with the stigma of being ‘an institution child’ as well as being Romani, while no longer being part of a Romani community they can rely on for support.
In many countries the ERRC works in, the threat of child removal has frequently been leveraged as a form of coercion over Romani communities by police officers (usually accompanied by torture) to extract confessions. Other times it is a threat deployed by politicians who seek to exert control over Romani suffrage during election times.
And it's not just Eastern Europe – ERRC research in 2018 found that Romani and Traveller children in England are three times more likely to be taken into care compared to the rest of the population. The causes for the discrepancy were familiar: stereotypical views held by care professionals leading to oppressive and coercive practices relating to placement of Romani and Traveller children in state care. This is especially true for Roma from the European Union who have emigrated to the UK, often from severely marginalised and segregated communities lacking basic infrastructure and provision of services in their home countries.
While all child assessments are individual, there is a clear trend in England towards escalating cases towards removal quickly when it comes to Romani and Traveller families. The Roma Support Group have pointed to Romani experiences of direct and indirect discrimination from Children’s Services in England, as well as a lack of training and knowledge of Romani culture and specific challenges from the side of care workers as contributing factors. They also highlight that most child removals from Romani families are cases of neglect, stemming from families living in material deprivation in poor housing with poor access to services.
All this does not excuse the riots of the 18th of July, but it goes some way to explaining the reaction of a community pushed to the brink by institutional racism, material deprivation, and a very real threat of persecution by state authorities.
When tensions inflame, the far-right blame
The Harehills riot, as local Green Party Councillor Mothin Ali said, “was inevitable at some point”; a consequence of tensions reaching break point, a community neglected, and people feeling let down by authorities. It was first and foremost an outpouring of tensions in a multiply deprived area by people of differing ethnicities and faiths (including white, working-class residents).
England’s far-right instead took the opportunity to paint this public disturbance as a ‘race riot’ led by Islamist extremists. Far-right grifters hijacked photographs of local councillor Mothin Ali being present at the riots as evidence of some sort of Muslim uprising in Leeds. Councillor Ali was in fact filmed alongside another local councillor, Salma Arif, calling for calm before the riot spread, and was later seen preventing rioters from setting more fires and helping to put out flames with water. This did not stop the football hooligan and former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) from posting misleading pictures of Ali to imply he was joining the rioting. Britain First leader Paul Golding also posted the same images as evidence that Muslims “will never integrate or assimilate.” Even the newly elected MP and leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, described the riot as “the politics of the subcontinent…playing out on the streets of Leeds.” For Farage, it’s easy to get things wrong when you are thousands of miles away on a GB News funded tour of the United States, supporting the opposition leader of another country, instead of doing your job as a Member of Parliament at home.
Despite the problems of the Harehills neighbourhood being attributable to decades of austerity politics, and the direct dismantling of public services by 14 years of Conservative rule, far-right internet commentators were quick to paint the riot as an example of the failures of the two-week-old Labour government. The fact that the far-right completely ignored, or else denied, that the spark for the unrest came from within the Roma community proves that their problem is not with Islam being incompatible with Western society as they often claim. Instead, it is simply the sight of brown faces on English streets that draws them out, spitting with rage. In this sense they have once again shown their fascist face, and the deeply seated white supremacy and hatred that fuels their movements. It doesn’t matter whether the targets are Muslim or Christian, Pakistani or Romani, the English far-right still holds the same values that their progenitors espoused in Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists and Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood.
Only through working class community-organising between people of all ethnicities and faiths can such divisive politics be effectively challenged. British Roma and British Muslims must not let the far-right set the tone of ‘who is to blame’ but rather work to organise in their mixed communities to address the fundamental neglect and racism they both face, together.
Your Fave is Roma: Michael Caine as Alfred Pennyworth in the Nolanverse. This is less about a fictional comics fave, but the logic is I've seen people say Dick Grayson cannot be Romani because he is English. Dick can be both English and Roma. In fact, someone close to Bruce Wayne and of the Batfam already was! Michael Caine, who was Alfred in Nolan’s Batman movies comes from a Romanichal (English Romani) family. From: Michael Caine's Wikipedia page, We are the Romani People by Prof. Ian Hancock, and in his own words from The Talks interview with Sir Michael Caine.
A Note From Chavo: I love this! I vaguely remember reading that Michael Caine is Romanichal a while ago but I’d forgotten until I read your submission. I’ll have to find those interviews sometime. Yes, one can absolutely be English and Romani! English is a nationality, whereas Romani is a racial identity. Romanichal refers to a subgroup of Romani people who primarily reside in the UK, though there are American Romanichal as well. Romanichal, like other Romani subgroups (Kalderash, Xoraxane, or Calé for example), have their own differences in culture and dialect. In easier terms, Romanichal is the ethnic identity of a specific group of Romani people. The idea of the character Alfred Pennyworth being Romanichal as well sounds quite interesting and would introduce a whole new level to Dick’s relationship with him! On the subject of Dick Grayson, this (very misguided) argument which I myself have seen plenty of times is silly and just plain inaccurate to his character. For one, his family is not English, they’re American. For another, in pre-Flashpoint comics where it was established that Dick is Romani, he is said to be Kalderash, not Romanichal. Thank you for your submission!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Young Avengers (Comics), X-Factor (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse), Avengers (Comics)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Pietro Maximoff & Tommy Shepherd
Characters: Pietro Maximoff, Tommy Shepherd
Additional Tags: Mentioned Billy Kaplan, Mentioned Wanda Maximoff, mentioned Luna Maximoff, All of Pietro’s family but Luna owes him an apology, This is NOT an Crystal friendly space, Tommy Shepherd Needs a Hug, Pietro Maximoff Needs a Hug, Angst, Angst and Feels, Insecurity
Summary:
“The worst feeling isn’t being lonely, it’s being forgotten by someone you’d never forget.” - Peter Ferenc
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Tommy’s struggling with relationship with Billy, and turns to the resident expert on the speedster-magic user sibling dynamic. Unfortunately Pietro doesn’t have the answers, but at least misery loves company.
