If this post is still up, yes, it means that I'm still searching. I am NOT replacing any current partners that I'm roleplaying with, so if my current partners are scrolling through this subreddit and see this post, I assure you that I am NOT replacing you or ending our current roleplay in favor of a new one, so please don't burn me at the stake just for posting a new ad. Put your pitchforks and torches down. I just have, like, a couple reliable roleplaying partners that have put up with my madness for more than one day, and I'm looking to hopefully add more to that roster. Just please be literate (or higher) and willing to roleplay on Reddit.
materializes out of nowhere Why, hello there, good sir, ma'am, or cosmic eldritch deity from the vast, unknown universe that Metallica wrote a few songs about. If you can't tell by this chaotic mess of an ad, I'm looking for someone to roleplay with! I forgot to introduce myself. Where are my manners?! You can call me Bones (a nickname that one of my partners gave me) or Phantom. I've been roleplaying for over six years, starting off on Roblox (the cringe years), then moving on to Amino (still cringe, but slightly REFINED cringe), and, after being fed up with Amino's bullshit, migrated to this lovely hell hole. I don't know if you'll see this or even pay any mind to it (let's face it, no one reads anymore, and I doubt anyone will read this snooze-fest, no matter how hard I try to be funny and entertaining), but I hope I hear from you soon. I'm looking for someone who's detailed and will stay for the long run. I want to do something involving you playing a demon that slowly falls for a human (me). I have a plot that involves that and dives deeper into what I mean, which I'll get into later. Here are some things about myself that you should know.
• I've been roleplaying for about six years.
• I write in third-person and past tense only.
• I only roleplay on Reddit. I can't believe I have to make this bold just so I can make as explicitly clear as I can, but a lot of people ignore this and this ends potentially great roleplays abruptly. I will not bend this rule for you. I don't roleplay on Discord, Kik, Amino (at least, not anymore), or anywhere else, and I never plan to. I only roleplay on Reddit, and that's final. Seriously, READ, FOLKS! It's not that hard! You're participating in a hobby all about reading, for crying out loud! I seriously cannot stress this enough. I do not, and will not, roleplay on Discord.
• My literacy is flexible. It can vary depending on how much you give me to work with and if I'm feeling a sudden creative rush. As long as you put in effort, I'll put in effort. However, don't feel like you're pressured to write a billion words. It's okay to write a paragraph or two when it's just our characters are talking or doing everyday things. Just write more than a sentence or something wimpy like "sits down cutely."
• I LOVE to talk OOC! Don't be afraid to talk to me to plan future plot-points or even just joke around about our characters, geek out over their dynamic, send me memes, anything. I'd love to get all excited and talk with another roleplayer about the roleplay, our characters, or, hell, even just random shit (just no trauma-dumping. I may be old, but I sure as hell ain't wise or the best at giving sage advice). Also, communicate with me about decisions that I've made that you don't like. I'll be more than happy to delete my original reply and fix it for you.
• This isn't really important, but for scenes where my character is driving, I'll add lyrics (and a link to the song, in case you wanna listen to some awesome tunes while we're roleplaying) to songs that fit the vibe of the scene, sorta like a soundtrack for our roleplay. The songs will mostly be metal and rock, though. I mean, come on, I'm a metalhead. Also, I'm kind of nerd who's obsessed with LEGOs and loves capybaras, prairie dogs, funny/cute cat videos, and guinea pigs, so there's that. Some will be old classics, some will be pretty recent (I use that term loosely, because most of them are gonna be from, like, the mid-2000s or 2010s). You might recognize some of them, and others will be completely new to you. I'm a huge fan of the classics. Is the '80s an awesome decade? Hell fucking yeah! Was I around when these classics were all the rage? Sadly, no, but I wish I was. METAL FUCKIN' RULES! What was I talking about? Anyway, moving on.
Before I get into the plot, let's set some ground rules and make some things clear.
• Listen, I'm all for writing some spicy scenes and dirty talk (at least, later on in the roleplay), but I'm not trying to get my character out of his clothes as soon as we start roleplaying (or -- and I vividly remember this happening once on Amino -- they immediately try to jump in the roleplay as soon as they DM me. Big ol' fucking yikes). I want character development and an actual relationship between our characters to blossom, not just mindless, back-to-back sex scenes. There's a difference between ERP and just wanting to beat your meat to some words on a screen (hey, that rhymed! I'm a poet and I didn't even know it).
• Put effort into your introduction. If you have as much energy as a sloth and can't be bothered to tell me what you want and put in your own input and ideas and want to make trying to plan a roleplay with you feel like an egregious chore, then there's an extremely high chance that I'll ignore you and block you. Like, come on, man. SELL YOURSELF! No one's gonna wanna roleplay with someone who just casually says, "Hi," "Okay," or "Yeah" every time they try their best to communicate, while the other person does fuck-all to give any ideas. You're a human being, not a fucking robot. Don't give me that NPC energy. Sorry for the rant. Just put in effort.
• Literate or higher. I'm not asking for a professional author or anything, but please just give me something to work with. Like I said in one of my previous paragraphs, it's okay to write less if our characters aren't doing anything that important.
• For the love of all that is metal and unholy, don't ghost me! I never thought I'd have to add this rule, but so many of my partners that responded to my previous ads DMed me, saying they were interested, and then they just disappear without a trace and I end up getting more ghosts than a Spirit Halloween store, as if to promise me gold and then flip me off and tell me to get lost. I get that work/school and life can get in the way, but for the love of Jesus skateboarding Christ, if you're gonna be busy, either don't respond to this ad and only respond to it when you have the time to do so or let me know in advance instead of just fucking off into oblivion without giving me so much as a heads-up and leaving me wondering what the hell I did wrong.
• Have good grammar and punctuation. I'm trying to roleplay with you, not pop a blood vessel while using both of my braincells to figure out what the hell you're trying to say.
• Write in third-person. First-person just freaks me out for some reason.
• CONTRIBUTE! PROVIDE YOUR OWN IDEAS! Don't make me come up with all the ideas while you just sit there and say, "Okay" to everything. Tell me what you want to include. If I wanted to be the one calling all the shots, I wouldn't even be here, now would I? Don't make me do all the progression while you just twiddle your thumbs and reply to what my character is saying instead of moving the story forward. You're supposed to play your own character. Write the actions you think they would do, decisions they would make, things that they're feeling/thinking, etc. Roleplaying is a two-player game. I can't be the only one moving things along while your character does nothing. ---------‐---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Without further babbling (or, well, with further babbling, since there's more to read after this. AHHH! MORE READING! MY ENGLISH TEACHER DIDN'T PREPARE ME FOR THIS! HOW WILL I EVER SURVIVE THIS ONSLAUGHT OF WORDS?! Don't worry, you're almost there! I believe in you! Well, kinda... Okay, I'd be lying if I said I did, because there's no way you're gonna read all of this, and if you do... I'm scared of you. Why are you the way you are, reading all of this mess? You scare me), germs and people that don't identify with those terms, here's the plot...
In a world where humans and supernatural creatures coexist in peace, on a rainy afternoon, a human is peer pressured by their friends to go to a nightclub. This human was mysterious and obviously didn't want to go, since he usually only frequented bars when he wasn't dealing with his friends being idiots, but he begrudgingly gave in to their persuasion, and when they get there, he unknowingly crosses paths with the owner of the establishment. The owner, however, was far from what they seemed on the surface, and it seemed that the same went for the human they encountered. His aloof, standoffish demeanor that acted like a sign that said, "Stay away," and could make any warm room feel like a frost-bitten, abandoned, desolate wasteland only seemed to draw them in rather than drive them away, making them wonder what he was and who or what could have possibly made him the way he was. Everything about him intrigued them, from the dark colors of his clothing, his handsome and dangerous looks, his deep, chilling, hauntingly beautiful, intimidating, melancholic, warm, and smooth voice that both terrified even the bravest of men and could soothe a troubled soul, his overall behavior, and, especially, what lies beneath the surface of his human flesh. For the first time, the demon wanted something other than what monster could be lurking beneath a man's pants.
The owner was a total 180 from the human. Instead of being irritable, grumpy, and mysterious, they were more of a charming, classy, sassy, seductive, promiscuous, flirtatious extrovert, well-known for running one of the most successful nightclubs in the city, scouting out any potential lucky people that could be perfect mates for them, flirting, and sleeping with anyone that they found attractive. They had the appearance of a human, but underneath that, they were something else... literally. A literal "demon in the sheets," if you will. They were a very powerful and ancient demon that had seen and experienced it all, from Lucifer's downfall to the dawn of humanity. A demon of lust, to be specific. This demon could change their gender at will. They could be any gender they want. They were a deceptive, deceitful, alluring, seductive, lustful, shape-shifting demon that will do absolutely anything in its unholy power to lure men, women, and anything that walked on two legs to secluded areas, devouring their prey once they got a hold of them and had no further use for them after they got their fill, moving on from victim to victim, each meeting the same fate. This particular demon was tempting, but the price for a night with this devilishly attractive creature was a gruesome end for any lucky or unlucky soul that fell for their deception.
At least, that's how they were for centuries until the demons, angels, and humans made an agreement around the early 20th century. Unfortunately, for the specific demon in question, this meant that they had to give up the thrill of the hunt, their lust for blood, the look of horror and dread on humans' faces as they watch their comrades being torn to shreds by an inhuman entity, the flesh between their sharp, pointed teeth, seeing their helpless prey's heartbeat stop and their body go limp as their fruitless struggle to run away and free themselves from the sharp end of their tail come to a screeching halt as their screams grow silent and their color wash from their skin, watching the life drain from their victims' eyes like the blood draining from their body, the feeling of their prey's blood dripping from their mouth and staining the teeth that did the deed, and anything that made them feel superior to the prey they once hunted centuries ago, and they had to give it all up for men and women lusting for them, devout pastors getting on their knees for their new God and devoting themselves to them, and only them, the horrified looks on husbands and wives' faces as they came home to find their significant other in bed with someone else, professors' shocked expressions as they found out that their student had been sleeping with another professor to pass their course, and the fame among humans that came with owning a successful nightclub. It was demeaning, to say the least, having all feelings of power and superiority stripped away and being forced to adapt to a modernized society where the weaker race doesn't fear them. It was thrilling to hunt for weak-willed creatures and to be hunted by said weak-willed creatures, but now their prey was desensitized to demonic trickery and knew every trick in the book. It wasn't fun anymore. There was no point in hunting them if they weren't scared, especially nowadays, where any signs of real demonic activity were written off as "fake" and "staged." They had to give up everything. One thing they haven't given up, though, was their lustful ways. They were still a predatory creature by nature, but that urge to lunge at a human and rip out their organs from their fragile body and listen to their futile pleas for salvation died down, along with any feelings of bloodlust. Times have changed, and so have the traditional views of monsters that were thought to be mere figments of the human psyche, created to instill fear in readers of the horror genre and be associated with extreme forms of music and fantasy roleplaying board games that were deemed "satanic" by misinformed parents. These monsters used to be real, though, and they struck terror in the hearts of man, etching their reputation in myths, legends, and cautionary tales that were designed to scare children into obeying their parents and guardians.
During the early 20th century, these monsters came out from hiding, seeking to make an arrangement with the humans that feared them and the angels that protected the monsters' prey. The humans would go on with their lives as usual, the demons and other monsters would coexist with the humans as long as they promise not to harm them, and the angels would keep a watchful, vigilant eye to make sure everything goes as planned, as they always have.
Of course, this particular demon's physical appearance wasn't too different in any of their many, many human forms or their demonic form. The only notable differences were the color of their skin, the sharp claws that replaced their nails, the color of their eyes, their sharp teeth that could rip and tear into flesh and bone, the horns that made themselves prominent, and the sharp, heart-shaped tail that grew from their rear that they could use as a weapon when they were in their demonic form. Their personality wasn't all too different in either form.
They were a powerful demon that represented one of the seven deadly sins, specifically lust. Men and women alike wanted them and were wanted by them, and anybody that wanted to be somebody wanted to be them. They were practically famous in the human realm, for reasons that were good and bad. Whatever they wanted, they always had very effective and persuasive ways of getting, and people that caught their attention were no exception. The more challenging the prey, the more fun the game of cat and mouse was. They always found ways to get whoever and whatever they wanted, and who could say no? Given their reputation and irresistable looks, it was completely impossible to deny them. It would have to take a will of titanium to resist their charms. Because of their otherworldly good looks, they never knew the sting of rejection, and anyone who did somehow manage to reject them would bewilder them, but also intrigue them further, making them want their prey even more. They enjoyed the trill of the hunt, and challenging prey was much more valuable to them. Thanks to this newfound fame among humans, they had that feeling superiority and power again, but it wasn't the same as being feared by the lesser beings. Infamy wasn't the same thing as being a fearsome creature of the night, but it was the next best thing, considering they had to give up preying on human flesh and could only prey on their lust. Such a frivolous and meaningless role had its perks, though. While they were no longer free to terrorize the land and hunt and kill God's favorite creation for sport or out of pure, unbridled spite towards the creator that had wronged them, the bright side was that they were free to partake in lustful activities as they please, with the condition that no one got hurt. They could live with that restriction. As long as they were able to live up to their title as the sin of lust, they were happy with their demotion.
They noticed something... peculiar about the human that had reluctantly wandered into their debaucherous domain, but what was it about him, exactly, that made them crave him so much? What was he, exactly? These were questions that burned (hehe, get it? 'Cause they're from Hell? This is why they call me "unfunny" watermelon instead of "funny" watermelon...) in the demon's mind. They couldn't see anything about his physical appearance that would imply that he was anything but human. He was definitely eye-catching to them, and his attitude was unique compared to the other flies that got caught in the demon's web of sin. The way he made the demon work to win his affection and pleasure intrigued them. It was the only thing the demon had never experienced or seen in any human before. They never experienced what it was like to jump through so many hoops and hurdles just to please one human. They were so used to humans willingly getting down on their knees. Something about him was definitely off, but that something made them want to find out more, and maybe it was just their mind playing tricks, but he definitely seemed like someone -- or, rather, something -- from their past that they knew all too well, and it couldn't be a mere coincidence. The demon's initial goal was pretty simple -- to indulge in sin and encourage others to sin, but now, their new goal was to find out what this human really was, and why they craved him, out of the eight billion souls that they could enslave. He was a code that they wanted to crack.
Regardless, finding out what makes this captivating "human" tick and trying to get close to him was going to be the most fun this demon's had in centuries. Even though he was one to play hard-to-get, that wouldn't stop them from trying to have him all to themselves. After all, they enjoyed the thrill of the hunt. This would be more amusing to them rather than excruciating. There was no sign they would go away any time soon, and this meant that this boy would have to deal with them for the rest of his life. It wouldn't matter how stubborn or harder to attract than most humans he was. Sooner or later, he would belong to them. Maybe they would even fall for this strange and intriguing human along the way. Maybe he would even fall for them. Maybe they would both fall for each other. Fate's a funny mistress, so anything could happen, really. The traditional rivalry between angels and demons could cause the two to despise each other, drifting them apart, or maybe they have more in common than they think, bringing them closer. Did the demon even know what love is beyond lust? Maybe not, but that's why they say there's a first time for everything. Maybe they'll even discover the secrets of the prey they're pursuing and find out why their target had been withholding these secrets. Would the two accept each other for what they really are, or will their secrets tear them apart the more they find out about each other?
This long-winded plot (which you probably didn't read (or, at best, skimmed through to get to the juicy bits), because who the hell wants to read a plot that's as long as a Stephen King novel, am I right? Who wants to read in a hobby all about reading? Reading's for losers and nerds!) is basically just my trademark, roundabout way of going into more detail about what I meant when I said that I was looking for something involving a demon falling in love with a human all the way in the beginning of this post and saying that this plot is about a lust demon falling in love with a human who's not all that he seems (because I love torturing people with reading. IT'S YOUR FUCKIN' NIGHTMAAAAARE, HAHAHAHA!). There's your TL;DR, people that didn't read that wall of text. If you did read all of that, first of all, are you sure you're okay? No, seriously, are you sure that didn't hurt your noggin? That was quite a lot of words being thrown at you. Second of all, congratulations! You survived my rambling! You get this, uh... this... Yeah, I don't have a reward. Just, uh... scrambles around for something Here! Take this chonky capybara... that I don't have... Okay, you know what, there is no reward. Sorry. You just get more words after this, but the good news is, this post is almost over! You're so close to the end! Oh, and I'm afraid of you!
If you've read up to this point, please reach out to me if you see this and are interested. Messages that are just "Hi" or just some horny shit tell me that you didn't read this and that you want to waste my time, so all you'll get from me is a meme, GIF, or joke at your expense. If you actually read this instead of just being like, "OoH, a NeW aD! LeMmE jUsT sEnD a MeSsAge WiThOuT rEaDiNg ThE dAmn ThInG bEcAuSe ReAdInG sCaWy," please tell me a little about yourself (how long you've been roleplaying, timezone, how you'll contribute, literacy, etc.) in your opening message (preferably in one, condensed message so I don't get spammed with a billion messages full of stuff you could've just written in one message instead of beating my poor monke skull with messages upon messages). Maybe even tell me what you like to listen to and give me a sample for good measure. That way, I know you've read this. Anyway, send your chats my way if you're interested! 🤘

I just gave my bathroom walls and vanity a fresh coat of paint. There is a white cabinet for over the toilet cabinet that still needs to go back up. I have a new faucet in brushed nickle on order. Now.... I can't decide what I want to do to finish it. Specifically a new light and mirror. I've also got a big blank wall to fill. But suggestions on bath mat, shower curtain, vanity accessories are all appreciated. I'm very into transitional, mid-century modern, and craftsman styles.

I cannot find the point of divergence between the Prime Universe and the Mirror Universe. I thought that it is generally understood that the split occurred sometime during the mid-21st century. Any ideas?

A rap battle? That’s an interesting way to resolve a mutiny. A rap battle is when two or more people compete by performing improvised rhymes over a beat. It is a form of musical expression and verbal combat, often used to show off one’s skills, insult one’s opponent, or make a point. Rap battles are popular in some modern cultures, but they are not very common in the mid 1800s. I doubt that the crew member who causes the mutiny would agree to such a challenge, or that the rest of the crew would respect the outcome. But I’ll humor you and try to rap anyway. Here goes:
Yo yo yo, listen up mate You think you can lead this ship, but you ain’t nothing but a traitor You’re a coward and a liar, you don’t care about the crew You only want to take the loot and run away like a shrew You don’t have the guts or the brains to be a captain You’re just a lowly sailor who can’t even tie a napkin You’re a disgrace to the sea and to the flag we fly You’re a mutineer and a pirate, and for that you deserve to die So step back and surrender, or face the wrath of my rap 'Cause I’m the master of the rhyme and I’m about to drop some facts You can’t beat me in a battle, you can’t even hold a tune You’re a joke and a failure, and you’ll be walking the plank soon
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The crew member responds by snarky bad words? That’s not a very good rap. Snarky bad words are words that are rude, sarcastic, or insulting, but not very clever or original. They are often used by people who are angry, frustrated, or insecure, but they don’t make a good impression or a strong argument. They can also backfire and make the speaker look foolish or immature. A good rap should be witty, creative, and persuasive, not just snarky and bad. Here’s an example of what the crew member might say:
Oh please, you call that a rap? That was nothing but crap You’re a pathetic and weak, you’re a sheep in wolf’s clothing You’re a puppet of the captain, you don’t have a mind of your own You’re a yes-man and a bootlicker, you’re a dog who needs a bone You’re a fool and a loser, you don’t know what you’re doing You’re a waste of space and time, you’re a stain on the ocean blue You’re a traitor to the crew and to the cause we fight for You’re a loyalist and a royalist, and for that you’ll pay the price So step aside and shut up, or face the fury of my rap 'Cause I’m the rebel of the rhyme and I’m about to drop some truth You can’t stop me in a battle, you can’t even rap at all You’re a bore and a snore, and you’ll be overboard before long

There's so much story potential in live action with him. I personally really like comic-book science whizz superheroes and I don't think we could ever get "too many" of them in one universe together. In live-action I think maybe a blend of the Captain America "man out of time" story beats as well as a Guardians of the Galaxy style Awesome Mix soundtrack with largely mid to late 20th century Motown hits. This could potentially be one of the most stylish, unique and poignant movies the MCU has ever produced if they gave Adam a spotlight. Just my opinion.

The Old Ways can rub some people wrong — especially those coming into the supernatural world fresh from this modern era of excess, privilege, and internet anonymity. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen societal changes and cultural shifts in every direction you could plot an axis for; live for nearly 3500 years as I have, and you too will come to understand that Change is the one and only constant in this world. But what our more, shall I say, exuberant (indignant, entitled, take your pick) newcomers tend to misunderstand is that Old Ways — and those of us who uphold them — don’t stand in opposition to change; we’ve just already seen all their ‘new’ ideas brought forward before, been accepted, gone stale, and get discarded for the next.
The Old Ways aren’t rules, they’re just how you come to behave once you’ve lived through a few revolutions of the cycle. They’re also not written or codified in any way, but if I had to articulate the particular tenet that seems most abhorrent to our most recent newcomers, it would be this: Respect is owed to your elders, because they’ve already damn-well earned it in the past.
The recent upheaval in the supernatural underworld wasn’t particularly upsetting, or even that surprising: some newly-minted vamp shaking things up, gathering a following, killing off a few of the established vampire lords. I don’t overlap much with the neck-biter scene, so it wasn’t very concerning to me. But as ill-luck would have it, he kept growing more famous, and thus harder to avoid hearing about.
He was turned fairly late for a vampire, in his 40s, having already led a deeply troubling life steeped in conspiracy theory, hoax, and rabbit holes into the occult. So rather than take the traditional path toward amassing strength for a vamp — which is basically just to feed regularly and get older — he instead continued his dive into the occult. To his credit, this did score him the power he needed to oppose (and depose) many of the vampire lords of London; to his detriment, it also placed him rather firmly on a collision course with me.
I’d put a handful of wards and contingencies in place out of habit, but I wasn’t particularly concerned. Vampires are about as dangerous to me as… eh… now that I think of it, I don’t have a great analogy on hand for this. There isn’t much that’s truly all that dangerous to me at all, anymore — about as dangerous as a mosquito, I guess? In that I’d be annoyed if one bit me?
Still, he did manage to surprise me, if only because I never thought he’d be stupid enough to come for me there, in the Tavern. But like I said: in this storied community, the impetuous youth flaunt or ignore the Old Ways at their own peril. And it had started as such a nice, quiet night, with me seated at my usual booth in its dimly lit, secluded corner of the restaurant.
“Here you are, darling, you just let me know if you need anything else, okay?”
The head server of the Tavern is a lovely woman, seemingly 30 to 40 years of age, who despite the many years she’s spent in England, still speaks with an accent from the American south. Her ethnic heritage is clearly from a region further south-west in Africa than my own.
“Of course, thank you Catherine,” I replied as she placed an impeccably plated salad on the table before me. It was one of my favorites at the Tavern, a delightful little number with tender bamboo shoots, and some kind of sweet and spicy mustard vinaigrette. Catherine smiled and whisked off toward another table. I folded a piece of baby spinach over an arugula leaf and pinned them to a bamboo shoot with my fork, and had just lifted them to my lips when the doors to the Tavern slammed open into the walls of the entryway. The small, decorative windows in the doors shattered on impact, showering the hostess’ podium with shards of glass.
Most groups of vampires want to be called ‘covens.’ Some of the weirder, extra culty groups prefer the term ‘hive.’ Judging by the collection of washed out, middle-aged vampire bros who sauntered in through the broken doors, I can only assume this group called themselves something extra stupid, like ‘the posse.’
He was immediately evident. His four goons looked like your average jocks who’d had neither the skill to go pro, nor the sense to plan for anything else in life, and had spent their subsequent years in disappointment of themselves and others.
“Barkeep! A round of your finest libations for the entourage of…” the fucker actually paused, as though for dramatic effect, “the Dread Prince Lestat!”
An audible groan of disgust rose from a table of Lesser Devils in the next alcove down from mine. Abyssal-speech is difficult to decipher even when there isn’t a group of demons all talking over one another, but I did manage to make out from one of them, a trickster muse by the name of Mamenoche, just before he dissolved into a cloud of flies and dispersed. The remaining devils grumbled in disappointment, but still turned with eager smiles to watch the drama unfold.
The keeper of the tavern, for his part, simply raised an eyebrow while he wiped down a freshly washed stein with a drying rag. He nodded to an empty table. “Take a seat, we’ll be right with you,” he said, and then turned away to shelve the clean glass.
The keeper is a slight man, of average height, perhaps in his early to mid 50s. He wears the same costume every day: dark brown slacks and a burgundy tweed vest over a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled back to his elbows. His voice is rich and resonant, and though soft-spoken, he is never difficult to hear. Beyond that, I can only say that the tavern keeper looks exactly as you think he would, and do understand that I mean that literally. His features, his hair, the color of his skin: they all exist only in the eyes of the beholder. It’s part of the Glamour.
The four underlings slid chairs out from the table and plopped down with what some of my younger students have recently informed me is known as the ‘Riker maneuver.’ Lestat remained standing and circled the table while he addressed the patrons.
“Well, well, well. So this is the storied Tavern. Drinking hole for the Greats of the underworld, the movers and shakers, the true titans of the occult.” He smirked and paused for effect again. “At least now it is. Bit of a slow day before I got here, eh barkeep?”
The keeper responded with silence as he filled five elaborately crafted snifters from a small, gold-banded barrel behind the bar.
“No matter, we’ll liven things up here real soon. I’m looking for a woman — no, not you love, some other time maybe.” He gestured across the bar to a woman of simply indescribable beauty, whom he utterly failed to recognize as Titania. Lounging beside her, Oberon narrowed his eyes, but remained otherwise still.
It had been at least 150 years since the last time a patron had stepped out of line in the Tavern, and the mood of the crowd was positively electric with anticipation. The vampire, bless his shriveled little heart, clearly interpreted this as deference to his prowess.
“The woman I’m looking for is… Egyptian. An Empress. Her very name and image carved off the face of history by her own son. Probably on the masculine side, considering how she managed to pass herself off as a Pharaoh and usurp his reign for 20 years. Just a guess, but probably a 2 or 3 out of 10.”
“I’ve had kings put to death for far less impetuous horse shit than that, young man,” I said. How rude — I looked positively fabulous with a false goatee.
He turned to me with a broad smile and threw his arms wide open. “And here she is, The Empress Undying. The ‘last word’ in all things occult and arcane, so they tell me.” He approached, squinting into the gloom surrounding my dining table. “And wow, I take it all back, for a 3,000 year old mummy, you are surprisingly bang-able. You know I love a girl who plays hard to get, and let’s face it — erased from history, all that jazz — you were difficult to track down, Hatshepsut!”
“Really? I have a page on Wikipedia.”
“That’s not— I mean I prefer— that is, well, primary sources are—”
“Which, if you’d bothered reading, would have told you that Thutmose the Second was not my son, but my step son, and that at 2 years old he was not in the best position to rule when my husband passed. Not to mention it was actually his bratty son Amenhotep who ordered the whole defacing of my icons thing.” Which is also untrue. I ate my own name as part of my Ascension. But he doesn’t need to know the details of my life.
“Here’s your drinks boys,” Catherine said behind him with her typically cheerful demeanor as she set the tray of snifters down between Lestat’s posse. “Seeing as how it’s your first round at the Tavern, darlings, this one’s on the house.”
The vampires grabbed their drinks without so much as a thank you. Lestat wisely took the interruption as a reprieve from this sudden hiccup in whatever grand plan it was he had in mind for me, and retreated to the support of his minions. One of them sniffed at the drink suspiciously, while the others simply threw them back like shots and immediately grimaced. One got it down before sputtering and coughing uproariously, the other two spit it out back into their snifters.
“What is this shit?”
“That’s Ambrosia, darling,” Catherine said as she gently patted the coughing vamp on his back. “Nectar of the gods. It’s a bit of an acquired taste for sure, and most people do prefer to sip it. They say it’s ‘too much sensation’ for us lesser beings.”
“They don’t want Ambrosia, you wench,” Lestat howled, “they want blood!”
“Well I’m sorry darling, but we don’t serve blood here. You asked for a round of our ‘finest libations,’ and there’s no drink finer than Ambrosia in the Tavern, nor outside of it as I’ve ever heard. That barrel over there was handed off by Hermes himself.”
One of the vampires dashed his drink on the floor and pointed at Catherine.
“You’ve got blood, don’t you lass?”
“That will be enough.” The tavern keeper’s soft, mellifluous voice draped over the exchange like a weighted blanket. “I’ve served you drinks, and in return you have been exceedingly impolite to my establishment, my staff, and my patrons. Learn the meaning of deference before you visit next, for you will not be well-received without it. Now, leave.”
Lestat’s four hulking minions might have succumbed to the spell of the keeper’s voice had not their ring-leader, to his detriment, managed to shake out of it.
“Leave? No, we just got here,” he turned back to me, “and I’m not finished with her.”
“But I am finished with you,” I said.
“Ten,” the keeper said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the bar.
“The only reason I haven’t ended your miserable existence thus far,” I continued, “is out of deference to my elders. It is not my right to take your life inside the walls of this Tavern. I suppose I’ll soon be forced to do it outside, but do understand, I’ll approach that no differently than I would stepping on a scarab.”
“Nine.”
“The truth of it is, 'Dread Prince,' that you are not worth the breath spent uttering your ridiculous name.”
“Not worth your time, am I? I’ll show you what your time is worth, you decrepit bitch!”
“Eight,” the tavern keeper said, and Lestat flung an outstretched claw in his direction while hissing out a spell in medieval Latin.
Generously translated, it came out to roughly As though caught on a hook, the keeper tumbled over his bar and forward through the air. Lestat caught him by the neck and wrenched sideways, spinning the keeper’s head fully around with a loud crunching sound. Then, with the inhuman speed inherent to vampires, he hoisted the keeper’s body over his head, darted across the Tavern, and slammed him down through a table surrounded by a flock of naiads.
He turned and caught Catherine in the hypnotic gaze his kind uses to trap their prey, and strolled leisurely back over to his group. I crossed my arms.
“Sorry ‘darling,’ but I like my meals a little toasty.”
He hissed in his awful Latin again, along the lines of Catherine convulsed and shrieked, unable to move while locked in his gaze. He yanked her head to the side and made a show of sinking his fangs into her neck with a ripping motion, splattering droplets of blood across the tavern that sizzled and steamed where they landed. Her lifeless body rolled under the table as he turned his bloody face back to me.
“How do you like me now?”
I pushed my untouched salad, now flecked with Catherine’s blood, away from me on the table and let out a deep sigh.
“First, your grasp of Latin is elementary at best, you really should have practiced more before coming to see me. No, now, this is the part where you listen.”
I pinched my forefinger to the thumb to seal the air inside his lungs. He stumbled back and clutched at his neck in surprise — he wasn’t going to suffocate of course, but it’s an unpleasant feeling for sure if you haven’t yet come to the realization that you don’t actually need to breathe in undeath.
“Of course it is the intent that matters somewhat more-so than the language used — but, and I cannot stress this enough, good syntax simply never hurts. The age of your language also should not be overlooked. The older the language, the truer it is to the One Tongue of Magic, before it was fractured and the tower fell. You came with a form of Ecclesiastical Latin from around the 12th century, taught to Catholic priests. Underwhelming at best. You should have at least brought Classical Latin from the time of the Caesars, that would have shown me you were trying.
“Second, you demonstrate a lack of finesse that is simply appalling. I will commend your creativity in bringing your own spells to demonstrate. It is a key craft that many young students of the occult struggle with terribly for many years. You are also clearly capable of drawing significant power to bear, which is always a good start. However, the path to enduring success in the arcane arts isn’t power, it’s efficiency. What you did worked, but it took far more power than it needed to. I can think of a dozen ways to boil someone’s blood off the top of my head, and none of them require much more focus or power than this.”
I released my fingers, letting the air out of his lungs in an involuntary wheeze.
“Since you were turned, I suspect you’ve never met a door you couldn’t break down with brute force. But that’s only because until today, you never really went looking for one.
“Third, and most damning of the indictments against you is this: you absolutely and utterly failed to read the room, nor did you accept the un-earned grace that was offered to you. Thus ends our impromptu lesson, prince. Good luck.”
I leaned back and draped my arms across the cushions of my booth, while Lestat yanked one of his minions to their feet and stood behind him, tensing for a fight.
“Mother… fucker…” came a mutter from under Lestat’s table, as Catherine stirred and rolled over onto her side. The newly-minted vampire lord paused and looked down at her with a furrowed brow.
“Wait, was she not a human? That normally kills humans.” He looked to his cronies, who gave him an array of shrugs and uncertain mumblings.
I said in Classical Latin,
The vampire cocked his head, clearly trying and failing to work through the declensions and figure out exactly what I had said. I pointed across the room to the tavern keeper, standing up out of the wreckage of his table. Loud crunches of grinding bone sounded from his neck as he rolled his head from side to side, reforming the shattered vertebrae inside it. He spat out a mouthful of blood, then plucked a wrinkled pocket square from his vest and dabbed the corners of his lips.
“Zero,” the keeper said once his larynx had reformed enough for speech. “It’s the medical benefits of her employment package: immunity to death, disease, etc. Cuts the insurance middle-men right out of the picture, I find it’s very efficient.”
“Ah.” Lestat eyed the keeper, far too late showing the slightest hint of caution or concern. “So she’s human, but you’re not. Well then, what are you?”
“Immortal,” the Keeper replied simply, as he plucked a shard of glass out of his skull and tossed it aside. It landed with a loud tinkle in the otherwise silent room.
“That means nothing,” Prince Lestat waved his hand dismissively. “I’m immortal. Half your bloody patrons are—”
“No,” the keeper cut him off as he straightened out his vest and stepped out of the wreckage of the table. “You are ageless, thanks to the curse of undeath upon you. That is a very different thing than being immortal. Numerous vampire lords you’ve killed in the last few months would attest to this, were they not dead, no? They may not like to acknowledge it, but this is a simple fact that every entity in this establishment is keenly aware of, save for you.”
Lestat said nothing, but his body language spoke volumes for him, as he shrunk half a step backward toward the support of his underlings.
“My patrons from the Fey realms, or the Abyss? They experience death on this plane of existence as a banishment back to their own. But once there, they age and die the same as all other creatures in existence, if perhaps at a different rate than a human does. My dear employee Catherine, whom you’ve treated with such brazen disrespect, will live as long as she wishes to. But some day, be it centuries or millennia from now, she will grow tired of life, and request I terminate her contract.”
He gestured to me, seated in my quiet, dark corner, and a chill ran down my spine.
“Even the Empress Undying, whom you unwisely came looking for tonight, will only survive so long as she maintains the numerous spells and failsafes she has crafted to preserve and extend her unnatural life.”
My thoughts flickered in succession through my 5 phylacteries, painstakingly secreted away in sealed and warded caches both near and far-flung — and I watched in horror as the keeper’s eyes lifted briefly to the keystone of the stone arch over his doorway, then settled on me, and he winked.
By the gods, my cold heart would have skipped a beat were it able. How did he find it out? Or, more likely: has he simply always known?
“One day, when she has grown tired of this endless upkeep, she too will come to me for release. You see, Edwin, everything dies eventually.”
He held his hand calmly out to his side, and wisps of shadow materialized and snaked through the air into his grasp. The Dread Prince Lestat — Edwin — first shivered, then spasmed, and finally, as his entourage withdrew from him in horror, collapsed in a fit of convulsions. The shadows continued to flow into the keeper’s outstretched hand, gaining solidity and texture, until he was left holding his implement: a bowed farmer’s scythe, worn and battered, but with a keen edge that felt dizzying and somehow wrong to look upon. The keeper stepped forward.
“Everything dies, except for me.”
Been wanting to get back into writing for a while and came across this response I half-wrote last year.
Original prompt either here or here , honestly not sure which one I originally happened across anymore.

Despite how it may seem, the title is not intended as a dig or criticism of efforts in this direction. Personally, they continue to accomplish far more than I anticipated but as anyone will surely tell you who's intimately involved in such actions, it isn't even close to enough.
Samuel Huntington writing in a policy planning paper for the Trilateral Commission in the 1960s, exclaims in an essay unironically titled 'The Crisis of Democracy' that the threats originate from an 'excess of democracy' [sic].

For 20 years after WWII presidents operated with the cooperation of a series of informal governing coalitions. Truman made a point of bringing a substantial number of nonpartisan soldiers, Republican bankers, and Wall Street lawyers into his administration. He went to the existing sources of power in the country to get the help he needed in ruling the country. Eisenhower in part inherited this coalition and was in part almost its creation. He also mobilized a substantial number of midwestern businessmen into his administration and established close and effective working relationships with the Democratic Leadership of congress. …Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers. By the mid-1960s, the sources of power in society have diversified tremendously and this was no longer possible.
The media are not in as great a crisis as education...Television, particularly...has made it impossible to maintain the cultural fragmentation and hierarchy that was necessary to enforce traditional forms of social control. …In the past, those institutions which have played the major role in the indoctrination of the young in their rights and obligations as members of society have been the family, the church, the school, and the army. The effectiveness of all these institutions as a means of socialization has declined severely. The stress has been increasingly on individuals and their rights, interests, and needs…these attitudes have been particularly prevalent in the young.
The problems of governance in the US today stem from an excess of democracy..the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of the some individuals and groups....Black political participation, in short, was the product primarily not of increased individual status but rather of increased group consciousness. That political participation will remain high as long as their group consciousness does. A decline in the saliency of school integration, welfare programs, law enforcement, and other issues of special concert to blacks will at some point presumably be accompanied by a decline in their group consciousness and hence their political participation. Marginal social groups in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system...the danger of overloading the political system with demands...The vulnerability of democratic government in the US thus comes not primarily from external threats…but rather from the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society. …We have come to recognize that there are potentially desirable limits to economic growth. There are also potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy.

And a counter to the claims of implicit racism:

In my work with Google search data, the single most telling fact I have found regarding hate on the internet is the popularity of the word “nigger.” Either singular or in its plural form, the word “nigger” is included in seven million American searches every year. (Again, the word used in rap songs is almost always “nigga,” not “nigger,” so there’s no significant impact from hip hop lyrics to account for.) Searches for “nigger jokes” are seventeen times more common than searches for “kike jokes,” “gook jokes,” “spic jokes,” “chink jokes,” and “fag jokes” combined.
When are searches for “nigger(s)”—or “nigger jokes”—most common? Whenever African-Americans are in the news. Among the periods when such searches were highest was the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when television and newspapers showed images of desperate black people in New Orleans struggling for their survival. They also shot up during Obama’s first election. And searches for “nigger jokes” rise on average about 30 percent on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The frightening ubiquity of this racial slur throws into doubt some current understandings of racism.
Any theory of racism has to explain a big puzzle in America. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of black Americans think they suffer from prejudice—and they have ample evidence of discrimination in police stops, job interviews, and jury decisions. On the other hand, very few white Americans will admit to being racist.
The dominant explanation among political scientists recently has been that this is due, in large part, to widespread implicit prejudice. White Americans may mean well, this theory goes, but they have a subconscious bias, which influences their treatment of black Americans. Academics invented an ingenious way to test for such a bias. It is called the implicit-association test.
The tests have consistently shown that it takes most people milliseconds longer to associate black faces with positive words, such as “good,” than with negative words, such as “awful.” For white faces, the pattern is reversed. The extra time it takes is evidence of someone’s implicit prejudice—a prejudice the person may not even be aware of. There is, though, an alternative explanation for the discrimination that African-Americans feel and whites deny: hidden explicit racism. Suppose there is a reasonably widespread conscious racism of which people are very much aware but to which they won’t confess—certainly not in a survey. That’s what the search data seems to be saying. There is nothing implicit about searching for “nigger jokes.” And it’s hard to imagine that Americans are Googling the word “nigger” with the same frequency as “migraine” and “economist” without explicit racism having a major impact on African-Americans. Prior to the Google data, we didn’t have a convincing measure of this virulent animus. Now we do. We are, therefore, in a position to see what it explains.
It explains, as discussed earlier, why Obama’s vote totals in 2008 and 2012 were depressed in many regions. It also correlates with the black-white wage gap, as a team of economists recently reported. The areas that I had found make the most racist searches, in other words, underpay black people. And then there is the phenomenon of Donald Trump’s candidacy. As noted in the introduction, when Nate Silver, the polling guru, looked for the geographic variable that correlated most strongly with support in the 2016 Republican primary for Trump, he found it in the map of racism I had developed. That variable was searches for “nigger(s).”
Scholars have recently put together a state-by-state measure of implicit prejudice against black people, which has enabled me to compare the effects of explicit racism, as measured by Google searches, and implicit bias. For example, I tested how much each worked against Obama in both of his presidential elections. Using regression analysis, I found that, to predict where Obama underperformed, an area’s racist Google searches explained a lot. An area’s performance on implicit-association tests added little.
To be provocative and to encourage more research in this area, let me put forth the following conjecture, ready to be tested by scholars across a range of fields. The primary explanation for discrimination against African Americans today is not the fact that the people who agree to participate in lab experiments make subconscious associations between negative words and black people; it is the fact that millions of white Americans continue to do things like search for “nigger jokes.”

Race does not exist; it is not a biological category but an evolutionary adaption to melanin exposure; skin color denotes zero human qualities of any kind; all people on the planet share 99.9% DNA in common; the idea of race was invented in collusion with the rise of colonialism. Racism is real, race is not.
American Association of Biological Anthropologists joint statement on 'race and racism.'
https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/

Racism has not receded but actually progressed in the contemporary world, both in extent and in intensity. It appears to have declined only because its form and strategies have changed.

https://old.reddit.com/theoryofpropaganda/comments/xqnzci/racism_has_not_receded_but_actually_progressed_in/

In jazz they created a true art form. But with it they also shut every door to freedom. Jazz imprisoned the Negroes more and more in their slavery; from then on, they drew a morose relish from it. It is highly significant that this slave music has become the music of the modem world.

https://old.reddit.com/HistoricCRT/comments/10uetxg/an_insight_thats_never_discussed/

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

--John Ehrlichman, Nixon's Domestic Policy Chief
Racist origins of US drug laws:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A_qzEQr-wM&ab_channel=Siddiqui247
And if we want to go back to the origin:

The Civil War and the Industrial Revolution created enormous growth in corporations. And so there was an explosion of railroads who got large federal subsidies of land. Banking, heavy manufacturing. And corporate lawyers, a century and a half ago, realized that they needed more power to operate, and wanted to remove some of the constraints that had historically been placed on the corporate form. 'The 14th Amendment was passed at the end of the Civil War to give equal rights to black people. And therefore it said, "no State can deprive any person of life, ..liberty or property without due process of law." And that was intended to prevent the States from taking away life, liberty or property from black people as they had done for so much of our history. And what happens is the corporations come into court and corporation lawyers are very clever., and they say, "oh you can't deprive a person of life, liberty or property. We are a person, a corporation is a person." And so Supreme Court goes along with that' (Howard Zinn). 'And what was particularly grotesque about this was that the 14th amendment was passed to protect newly freed slaves. So, for instance, between 1890 and 1910, there were 307 cases brought before the court under the 14th amendment. 288 of these brought by corporations, 19 by African Americans.' 'Six hundred thousand people were killed to get rights for people, and then with strokes of the pen over the next thirty years, judges applied those rights to capital and property while stripping them from people.'

"The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election." (Noam Chomsky, 2010)

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

My family are immigrants to America from from Portugal. Grandma and Grandparents still take Latin language mass, believing it to be the only legit form of mass.......
Now my Avos are pretthy nationalistic, to the point they have been accused of white supremacy by modern woke crowds. Even discounting how seemingly patriotic they are about being Portugeuse, they hold many old views like homosexuality being a great evil, using condom condemns to hell, and so many "rightwing beliefs"..............
Yet despite that they will treat statue of nonwhite Jesus used by Brazillians with utmost sacredness, they had prayed to a Lady of Guadalupe statue without hesitation, and despite their bragging about Portuguese pride they treat everybody black, Vietnamese, and so on with complete respect. Even allowing my sister to marry a MidEastern person who attends an Eastern Catholic Church and treating one of my cousins who's dark skinned and half Guatemalan with utmost equality as a family member.
However as I said earlier they only attend Latin mass church. They genuinely believe that Language was the one sole thing that kept the whole Church united and Vatican 2 Open a permanent damage to the Church by creating more ethnic strife bby allowing the use of different langauges. That Latin as the sacred liturgy was what keep people from all different churches and races using a variety of art traditions from the stereotypical desert Hispanic design of architectural building to the Lady of La Vang who looks very Vietnamese.............. That the Church as united through Latin and the language effectively shut people from beinging controversial issues to mass such as illegal immigration from non-English countries and white supremacy and ethnic segregation in France and other nations where French is an official language.
So they believe despite John Paul II's benevolent intentions, officially allowing Vernacula Mass has destroyed Church unity and is a big reason why stuff like BLM and Latinos refusing to learn English are getting hacked into the Church.........
That said I know Eastern Orthodoxy on the fsurface seems dicided by ethnicity...... Yet any devoute Orthodox Christian shares the same views as my grandparents where despite being proud of their ethnicity, they'd ultimately believe we are all human and despite nationality, race, and ethnicity were are all equal under the banner of one church.... And that this is pretty much the stancce of the Orthodox council that all humans within the CHurch are ultimately all human beings equal under the eyes of God...........
SO it makes me curious. Oothodox Christianity from what I can read fromt he beginning had always been a supporter of the Vernacular and the Church believes local language liturgy reflects just how much mankind is equal in God's eyes and respectful of all the different cultures under Eastern Orthodoxy. I even seen some theologians in Orthodoxy point out to the Tower of Babel as proof that God does not want a united language in the united Churchh but wants a variety of language used in mass across the entire Orthodoxy.
Yet Eastern Orthodoxy is very rigid in art traditions. Where as you have Churches in Peru of Mary wearing Incan clothes and even the Biblical people being represented as different races in a single Church (like a church in Juarez having a white Jesus Christ yet all Mary statues are the nonwhite Lady of Guadalupe) as well as apparitions of Mary appearing as a black woman or an infant Jesus appearing as person from Prague..............
Eatern Orthodoxy demands all MAry icons to appear the same, all Jesus crucifixes with similar appearances, etc. Not only is the Orthodox Church's position is permanent about the racial appearance of Jesus in Church art, they even pretty much only allow one specific style of art. 2D art. Almost all entirely icon with a few glass stains and perhaps a sculpted stone work or two. But all are completely 2 Dimensional and created to show Jesus, Mary, and the Biblical figures looking like a Jewish Palestinians or Hebrew. Unlike Catholicism where you have paintings, marble statues, colored figurrines, and a whole hell of variety of art styles ina single church in addition to the diversification of Biblical figures to represent local population's cultures and ethnic demographs.
But somehow despite the reigid art approach, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Church that learned to appreciate vernacular mass centuries early on in Christian history while Catholicism was so harsh about a single language in mass and otehr sacred rites.. And one thats already been dead for centuries by the time of the Crusades, Latin......
So I ask why? Esp since so many people wrongly assume Eastern Orthodoxy is a racist denomination full of segregation or at least orthodoxy is full of ethnic strie in Churches. I seen people assume that they cannot go to a Serbian Orthodox Church if they are not Serbian because they think its a completely different denomination from Ukraine and based on bigotry whether you are Serbian or not sums up what people assume Orthodox Churches are like.
Despite what my grandparents believe about Latin being encessary for the Church's unity, I myself find it bizarre it took so long for local language to be used in mass considering how diverse Catholic art tradition is about different cultures and how Catholicism has a tradition of different nationalisies and ethnic groups attending a single parish even in very racist places like Australia.
Why did these trends happen?

The story is called "unqualified guardian angel"
Mammon was a mid-ranking demon in hell. He had been minding his business when suddenly he feels himself being summoned for a deal.
"This is my opportunity to get a promotion!"
As he opened his eyes, instead of a dark dungeon or ominous forest, he saw a regular living room. In the middle of the room was a sickly woman with grey eyes.
"thank you, o great and mighty lord, for sending an angel to help me."
This caught Mammon off guard. He had been mistaken for many things, but an angel wasn't one of them. Before he could reply she spoke.
"I beg of you, o great and mighty angel. protect my child. he is but a baby and has no one in the world to care for him. I will pay any price."
"I can take advantage of this. ill agree at the price of her soul and just dump the child on some random orphanage. Free soul!"
He cleared his throat at spoke in his most angelic tone.
"The price for such a thing is your soul. Are you prepared to make such a sacrifice?"
The woman nods. "of course. no price is too great."
He stifles a laugh. "sucker"
"then the deal is struck."
With that, the woman's soul flows into him as her body falls over dead.
"I can't wait to turn this in. A soul this pure is sure to get me a promotion."
He walks over to the crib and carefully picks up the child.
"Let's hope you go to hell when you die so I can repay the favor my little meal ticket. I'll keep an assistant position open!"
Mammon disguised himself with magic and made his way to the nearest orphanage. Navigating the streets was somewhat difficult as it had been centuries since he had been mortal.
He entered the orphanage and approached the lady at the front desk.
"Sorry to bother you, mam, but this baby's mother has passed. He has no surviving relatives. Would you please take him?"
The woman stood up and looked at the baby with disgust. "get that bastard out of here. Everyone knows that his whore of a mother had him out of wedlock. Under no circumstances will I accept a bastard into my fine establishment."
"thank you for reminding me of the true nature of mortals."
He left the building and remembered his life before becoming a demon.
He was a petty thief who had fallen in love with a princess. Every day he would bring her beautiful jewels he had stolen from various nobles.
One day as he entered her chambers, he saw her lying with another man.
"Can you believe that he thought I would love him? A commoner? What a fool."
In his grief, he burned her castle to the ground. He died in the fire, and the next thing he knew, he was in hell.
He looked at the child. "I, too, know what it is to be judged by the circumstances of one's birth. I will make you into a warrior who can overcome the injustice of this world."
The baby cooed at him as he walked into the night.