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leidensygdom · 1 year

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Okay, I will try to explain this topic as well as I can. I will preface this with the fact this comes from personal experiences, and that they may not apply for everyone who has ties to this culture, but let's get to it:

What's the issue with Fortune tellers / "Exotic" circus performers, sexualized belly dancers and other forms of orientalism/Romani depictions?

So, as someone in the TTRPG world (specifically, the DnD community), this sort of trope is seen quite a lot. From the portrayal of Vistani (which has been tried to be fixed, but not... too well), to player characters in home games, as well as popular canon characters and podcasts, it's got quite normalized. Most of these tropes are based on Romani, which is a widespread ethnicity present all across the globe. Now, it feels almost strange to call it orientalism, given how Romani have been in Europe since the Middle Ages, even though they do have roots outside of Europe.

Romani face one of the biggest diaspora in the world: You will find Roma people under many names in very different countries, with cultures and traditions that can clash heavily. Their numbers can range from few hundred in some countries, to over a million in those they have a biggest presence. My own experience is tied to Spanish Roma, known as Gitanos, which is where my mother's side family comes from.

Gitanos are a widespread group, although they're most numerous in the southern part of Spain, Andalusia, where their presence has shaped the culture. Flamenco is thought to have been born from Gitano culture, and it has been adopted as a staple of the Andalusian identity, and the whole of Spain. Gitanos are hard to understand as their own ethnicity in Spain: There's been centuries of Gitanos and Spanish people mixing, and the average Andalusian is quite tan to start with (given Muslim presence there has also been pretty firm). It means it can be hard to "clock" a Spanish Romani person from a non-Romani one. It means you can find Romani people most would consider white, at least by Spanish standards. Most of the discrimination Gitanos face is cultural (and the whole ordeal can be a bit harder to explain from a more US-centric view).

Now, even when Gitanos have influenced Spanish culture a lot, they still face plenty of discrimination. They are one of the most marginalized groups out there. Laws have discriminated against them for centuries, on and off, which have put them in poverty. And poverty often develops into criminality, which has only seeded the idea that Gitanos are criminals, "lowlies", the bottom of society, "uncivilized", etc. Now, here comes a bit of my own experience with this.

My entire family is Andalusian, but both sides moved from there (the south) to Catalonia (north-east) in order to find a job during the Francoist (fascist) dictatorship. I won't get much into the specifics of the Catalan vs Andalusian beef because that's a bit of a massive topic too, but the important thing here is: My mother's side is Romani. My grandma faced some horrifying forms of discrimination, including the theft of her first child during the fascist dictatorship, which was taken from her by nuns (who ran hospitals at the time) to be placed into a "proper" family. (This is something that happened repeatedly at some hospitals during these times).

Now, she had two other children: My mother and my aunt. My aunt remained closely knit to Romani culture, and took part in it, which included marrying a Romani guy. She always did her best efforts to be part of it. I know she was into some culturally-related dances, which included some forms of bellydancing (which is also partially tied to Roma culture). But my mother decided she'd rather cut ties with her culture and become "civilised", by abandoning said culture.

This isn't too uncommon for Gitanos, to be honest. I've met a few people who come from similar backgrounds through my life. One of them was in university, where a fellow classmate gave an oral exposition about how his family had done a great job at "becoming civilised" by cutting ties with their own Roma roots. My university was a fairly progressive space, but no one batted an eye at that: The sheer hatred of Roma culture runs so deep even people who normally abhor racism and xenophobia consider Gitanos to be worth the hate.

There's a social pressure to do that, too. Everyone "knows" Gitano are criminals. I can't really even begin to explain how deeply does this sort of discrimination run. Roma are amongst the most hated minority groups in all of Europe (as well as most of the world). You will find that even in very leftist circles. People will try to erase the fact Roma have their own culture, and just make the world equal to "criminal", call them gy***** (which is a slur, btw), and detach them from being an actual culturally (and often racially) distinct group.

Now, this is only empowered by how media has taken our culture (it is almost hard for me to call it "our", given how much my mother ensured to take that away) and made it into a bad trope. Growing up, I was told my aunt was a sexual deviant who partook in indecent dances. Bellydancing is often seen as something very sexual (Wasn't, in origin), very unfitting. In media, bellydancers veer on the side of being a f*tish, and the common trope is the "bellydancer who seduces people in power for their own benefit". There's also the whole idea of shady fortune tellers and other magical tropes, that sort of weird mysticism that falls rapidly into orientalism. The idea that Roma will hex you, curse you, place an "Evil Eye" on you. And also the idea of travelling circus, people who perform in them being again full of that alluring exoticism, but beware! For they will enchant you, steal from you and run some massive criminal schemes on the way.

Now, when every tie a culture has on media is portrayed in a negative light, it's much harder for that culture to recover any sort of respect from the general populace. And that includes even people who are part of said culture, or people who have been removed from it. It has taken me so many years to unlearn a lot of these biases and realize where it has come from, and now I'm far too distant and far away from my grandmother to actually ever significantly connect to my heritage.

I've had the opportunity to witness what Romani culture is actually about, as I used to live with my grandmother during summers. A lot of the "mysticism" she took part of was actually about wards and protection. A lot of them were actually medicinal in nature, even if others were more superstitious. Red thread in the forehead for sickness and protection to curses, parfums (which contained alcohol or other antiseptics) on wounds, that stuff. My aunt was never a "sexual" deviant, she was keen on recovering and partaking on traditions from a culture that is slowly disappearing. The entire "promiscuous" idea is bullshit, Gitanos place a massive amount of power to marriage and loyalty. I had the luck to witness my cousin's marriage, which was a festivity like none other I had seen in my life, a colorful spectacle full of the most delightful attires, and my mother was whining the entire time over about how it was all an "uncivilised circus".

Now, this is why representation in media is key. Roma culture is broken into a thousand pieces and lost with every passing day. When someone decides to write an ambulant circus performer/fortune teller clad in exotic clothes full of golden jewellery, writes them as a criminal and makes the entire thing extremely sexual, they are feeding into the negative stereotypes about Roma.

Now, there's a lot of people who aren't even aware what culture does that trope even actually come from. I've seen people draw characters clad in Romani attires (often in, uh, rather pin-up or sexual contexts) and claim they're inspired by "x piece of media", where the trope is portrayed in the first place. I literally saw someone make a drawing in that way and call it "inspired by x (non-Roma) artist" instead of acknowledging where does all that come from.

I'm not asking people to not portray Roma people in media. Far from that. I just wish representation was better. Good representation is key towards making a culture seen in a more positive light, and teaching other peoples about it, and making people from said culture resonate with it. The very few times I've seen positive representations of Roma I've felt a bit of that connection with something that was taken from me. I want people to do a bit of research before giving a try to a Roma-coded character. Make an effort to not make Roma always the morally dubious fortune teller, the exotic alluring circus traveller, the bellydancer seductress. It's hard for Romani to produce widespread mainstream media because of how impoverished most communities are (because of the systematic discrimination Roma face all around the world), so the least non-Roma people can do is to be kind when they use their voice to talk or represent us.

I know this is a massive post, and I'm tagging it as "long post" for that reason, but I hope it is helpful for people. Feel free to ask or add your own experience if this is something that resonates with you too. Ask away if you want. I've been wanting to tell a bit my own personal experience, as this has always been a hard spot for me, and even if just a handful of people read this and understand what is this all about, I think it will have been worth it.

#roma #romani #gitano #romani culture #representation #culture #folk #tradition #people #spain #spanish #romani in media #bellydancer #bellydancing #fortune teller #dnd #vistani #long post

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virovac · 1 month

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Well I'm trying to figure out if there is any reason to believe the Mountain-dwelling former nomads attacked by Laios hometown are Romani coded.

I was not aware there was a stereotype in the Balkans and glad I learned if from discussion.

Thing is, they have only two sentences devoted to them and I don't know enough about

what research was done by author that inspired worldbuilding

romani portrayals in Japanese media

how common was former nomadic people in mountains warring with people

to feel I can make a good judgement about this.

If there is good reason to think this must be Romani fantasy equivalent then I understand the anger at being included in fantasy setting as a footnote character flaw of a main character. (Do not respond until you have read this sentence three times and comprehend it)

If this is the case I want to know so I can catch similar things in other media.

But I am having trouble understanding why to think its a Fantasy Romani stand in even implicitly, but also don't know if I am missing a cross cultural telephone chain of dogwhistles.

#dungeon meshi critical #romani in media #maybe

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simeon-lovergirl · 8 months

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Hola @fliaky96 te respondo mencionandote aquí para no saturar los comentarios (de todas formas te menciono a ti @leidensygdom por si quieres aprender más del tema) y responderte parte por parte, espero que leas todo ya que me estoy tomando mi tiempo para educarte debidamente. Así que leelo con una mente abierta, paciencia y calma. Sé que es largo, pero no quería que hubiera nada sin aclarar, y en los comentarios hay un límite de palabras.

"@simeon-lovergirl el término "romaní" hace referencia a los gitanos procedente de rumanía."

No. El "término" Romani, es una palabra en nuestro propio idioma (que se llama romani, romano o romanes), que literalmente significa persona, refiriéndose a personas de nuestro propio grupo (es decir, rom), y dependiendo de donde seas, las personas no Romani se llaman de una forma u otra (payo, gadze).

Nos llevamos llamando así desde hace mucho más de mil años, incluso antes de salir de la India, de donde procedemos y recibimos el nombre de Rom por ser de una casta baja en el sistema de castas indio. Y Rumanía como tal se unificó como reino en 1881, así que no, no hace referencia a nosotros siendo procedentes de Rumanía.

Mucha gente cree que venimos de Rumanía porque estuvimos esclavizados allí por más de 500 años, por eso es que también a día de hoy es uno de los países con más Rom del mundo.

"No somos una raza, porque para empezar el ser humano NO se clasifica como razas."

El ser humano desde el principio de los tiempos ha clasificado a otros humanos con diferentes razas dependiendo de su apariencia, y eso se ve claramente en el racismo que hay en el mundo a día de hoy. Literalmente estás comentando en un post sobre el racismo que pasamos en los medios de comunicación y nuestra mala representación con raíces racistas. Así que mientras el racismo exista, sí que existen las "razas". Socialmente hablando.

"Y no, no todos los gitanos somos romaníes. Una parte muy grande de gitanos procede del sur de la India, siendo el indú uno de los idiomas más detectables en el caló."

Y sí, todos los gitanos somos Romanes. Y nuestro origen es del NORTE de la India, la zona actual de Punjab, Rajasthan y Pakistan. Y por si no lo sabías, el Caló proviene de la mezcla del Romanes (nuestro idioma original, que proviene directamente del sánscrito y se parece mucho al indú como tú bien dices) con el Español al ser nuestro idioma original un idioma prohibido con el castigo de cortarnos la lengua y orejas si lo hablábamos, razón por la que en España ahora mismo es un idioma muerto, siendo los Calés (sí, incluyendo a los de Portugal y el norte de Francia, ya que España siguió los consejos de Portugal con los castigos que ellos impusieron, y los del Norte de Fracia provienen de España así que es otro tanto de lo mismo) el único grupo de Rom que no hablamos nuestro propio idioma, aunque últimamente hay muchos Calés jóvenes que están estudiando nuestro idioma.

"Se estima que la mayoría de gitanos españoles (calés) son de dicha procedencia, por ende, no somos romaníes."

No creo que haga falta que repita que somos Romanes (y no romanies, el plural en nuestro idioma es Romanes), por exactamente la misma razón que dices que no lo somos. Porque prevenimos de India y en su sistema se castas ese era el nombre de una de las más bajas, de la que formabamos parte.

"@simeon-lovergirl a su vez, la palabra "gitano" viene de "egipciano", pues por la apariencia, se creía que eramos procedientes de Egipto." "Romaní" es correcto para todo aquellos pueblos (que no razas) cuya procedencia fuera rumana. De la misma forma, a los gitanos de Andalucía se les puede llamar tambien gaché."

Tienes razón, proviene de egiptano, con lo cual sin darte cuenta me estás dando la razón. ¿Por qué nos llamarían así? Porque pensaban que veníamos de Egipto por nuestro tono de piel al proceder de India, no de Rumanía, dónde son blancos. Por eso el término racista, la slur, "gitano", está mal.

No es referente a los Rom de Rumanía, su grupo tiene varios nombres dependiendo de qué parte de Rumanía sean. Los Rudari son principalmente de Rumanía.

Y, ¿cómo van a llamarse gaché los Rom? Ese término, gaché, gachí o gachó, proviene de la palabra gadze, que es la palabra que la mayoría de Rom usa, y que nosotros en un principio usábamos (de ahí que la palabra se haya convertido en gaché con el paso de los años), para referirnos a personas no Rom, o lo que es lo mismo: payos, jambos.

"@simeon-lovergirl en 1921, el 8 de abril, lo que se busca es unificar a todos los romá. Y es que, Romaní, a pesar de no ser exacto, puede usarse como sinónimo, mas en el mandato no declaran "gypsy" como Slur: 8 de abril de 1971: hace 50 años, nacía la Unión Romaní Internacional http://www.presenciagitana.org/Entrevista-J-P-CourrierBalkans2021ES.pdf"

Investiga un poco más, sí que fue declarada una slur después de la segunda guerra mundial, puede que no con la palabra slur como tal ya que es un término reciente. Fue en el 71, no el 21, que se hizo el primer congreso Romani en el que se declaró como una palabra ofensiva que siemlre se utilizó para oprimirnos, y se declara que no es nuestro nombre, ya que nuestro único nombre es Romani, lo que es básicamente decir que esa palabra (gypsy y todas sus traducciones), es una slur.

Sino, ¿por qué se llamaría "Unión Romani Internacional"? Porque sabían que nuestro nombre es Romani, no gitano, gypsy, tzigan, cigan, y un sinfín de nombres que son traducciones los unos de los otros y que se han utilizado para oprimirnos y discriminarnos racialmente.

"@simeon-lovergirl Lo que pasa en usa, es el mal uso de la palabra. Prefirieron hacerla una slur en lugar de aprender a usarla bien. Hay otras palabras que han tenido una historia similar. El punto es el mismo: Aunque sean sinónimos, Romaní hace referencia a Rumanía, y no todos los PUEBLOS proceden de allí."

Lo que pasa es que en USA, no como en otras comunidades (tostoshispanohablantetostos), respetan el hecho de que no se puede usar bajo ninguna circunstancia si no eres Rom.

Las otras palabras que han tenido una historia similar, como lo son la nword o la palabra "indios" para referirse a los nativos americanos, "esquim*al" para los inuit, se han considerado una slur y se ha respetado, cosa que es fácil de hacer, solo tienes que dejar de decir una palabra que es ofensiva, racista y opresora para decir el verdadero nombre del grupo de personas.

Y no hay ningún punto en lo que estás diciendo, no son sinónimos. Repito que es una palabra que se ha usado desde que salimos de India y hasta el día de hoy, para oprimirnos, racializarnos y discriminarnos.

Otra vez digo que no creo que haga falta que repita que LA PALABRA ROMANI NO PROVIENE DE RUMANÍA, NOSOTROS NOS LLEVAMOS LLAMANDO ASÍ DESDE MÁS DE MIL AÑOS ANTES DE QUE RUMANÍA TOMASE ESE NOMBRE.

Procedemos de India, y allí nos dieron ese nombre.

Supongo que sabes o entiendes el inglés así que te dejo una cuenta de un Rom rumano (y sí, se puede ser los dos así como tú y yo somos Rom españoles), que hace vídeos educativos y habla de estos temas. Yo ya lo siento pero si esto ya no te ha entrado en la cabeza, paso de intentar volver a explicártelo porque parece que esto es hablar con una pared. Si quieres discutirlo, háblalo con él. Se llama @/florida.florian en tiktok.

Que tengas una buena noche, primo.

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avnasace · 2 months

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its very irritating interesting to see a lot of people hating aventurine, like yes hes sly and seems like this rich guy who cares about nothing else but money, but ironically he hasnt really lied to us so far, or screwed us over, in comparison to some other characters hes actually been honest and helpful and at least we know his motives.

also theres the whole 'he was a slave who didnt get an education and his family probably died horrible deaths' thing, and after all that he managed to crawl his way to the top of the ipc ladder by himself, aka the people who (presumably) enslaved him.

like??? of course hes not going to be a warm person helping you out of the kindness of his heart, he (presumably) got enslaved and most people who meet him are racist as fuck like???? what do people expect

also ironic the amount of people wanting darker/morally grey characters and moaning theyre not all Good or simping over TB 24/7

like just say you cant handle complex characters and go.

#his character is so interesting #like yeah hes also good looking but hes such an interesting character #also apparently he is based off romani culture which is really cool and something ive not really come across in media?#hoping for romani people its good rep ofc #i just wish people could see past the persona like hes probably not actually a dickhead #its just a coping mechanism and way if protecting himself probably like?#i feel like his character might be another furina situation #and i kinda hope so because hes so cool #sick of seeing and hearing people shit on him lmao #aventurine #ace rambles #honkai star rail #hsr #penacony

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garadinervi · 11 days

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Romany Eveleigh, "Tearouts" No. 9, (collage), 1986 [Galeries Roger Bellemare – Christian Lambert, Montréal. © Estate of Romany Eveleigh]

#art #drawing #collage #visual writing #mixed media #romany eveleigh #galeries roger bellemare christian lambert #galeries bellemare lambert #1980s

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celluloidrainbow · 7 months

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UN DÍA GRIS, UN DÍA AZUL, IGUAL AL MAR (2012) dir. Luciana Terribili & Melina Terribili Carmen is 21 years old who lives in Almanjáyar, a romani suburb in the city of Granada, Spain, and spends her days caring for her aging parents. In the mornings she studies in a home assistance course for the care of the elderly and sick, but behind the discreet attitude that she maintains in her daily life, Carmen secretly lives an audacious love that defies preconceptions. (link in title)

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tonkysexist · 1 year

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I don’t think people realize how fast “fandom drama” can can push people in to real life bigotry. I see the “it’s not that deep” sentiment a lot when I talk about the MCU and their whitewashing.

Earlier today I was following a comment thread on a TikTok video about Joe Locke potentially being Wiccan in the MCU. A fan of his started the comment thread with “I would love to see him as Billy and I think he’s talented” and within 10 comments it turned in to “Jews make up such a small percentage of the world you guys can’t possibly expect Marvel to find a queer Jew to be in the MCU”. That line of thinking just goes deeper and deeper. I’ve seen it so many times. First you only want to talk about how you don’t care about Wanda’s origins because the MCU is an adaptation and you’re such a fan of Elizabeth Olsen. Then you’re coming in my comments/inbox saying things like “The Jews want to control the media”.

This same logic applies when black actors recast originally white characters. Or when popular characters in media are reimagined as queer. I’m sorry, but it is that deep. Some parasocial defense of an actor slides so easily into real life hate speech and I’m not comfortable tolerating any of it.

#marvel #mcu #marvel comics #tw antisemitism mention #billy kaplan #wanda maximoff is jewish romani #antisemitism and media

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kitkatabasis · 7 months

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I’ve hardly seen anyone mention it, so. I think we need to acknowledge that the portrayal of the Gur is. Kinda racist.

and as much as I wish it wasn’t, GAW (game as written), Astarion is, charitably speaking, kinda racist.

Edit: just want to make it clear that I am of the opinion that BG3 itself is less racist than, for instance, Curse of Strahd. However it really grinds my gears to see that very few people acknowledge that tumblr's favorite companion is racist (and frankly, as far as I know, you can only tell him off once which is. Frankly I feel like the game should treat it like a bigger deal than it does). I can understand why you would not want to, because he is a very compelling character and it feels icky for a character you like to be racist so of course you just want to pretend that didn't happen, ignoring it feels. Not great to me.

Especially because only one of the companions is a poc and he's probably the most complained about one which I'm sure have nothing to do with each other

#bg3 #baldur’s gate 3 #astarion #astarion ancunin #cw anti-romanism #<—because in case you didn’t notice. The Gur are just fantasy romani. Wizards set as much in the 90s #dnd media include vampires but not anti-romani racism challenge FAILED EVERY GODDAMN TIME #Please don’t attack me for this by the way. Larian isn’t going to fuck you #Cw racism mention #D’s notes

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moontheoretist · 22 days

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This moment when you learn that Adventurine is Romani and that his entire planet is named with a word that in both english and slavic are considered slurs against Romani people... I guess the galaxy at large is anti-Roma if they called that planet Sigonia-IV. If Hoyo doesn't give us info that this planet was actually named differently by the people living on it that wasn't named a giant slur, then I'll have to assume that Hoyo is ok with naming a whole ass planet full of Romani-based people with a slur used against those people. And it's bad. At least Adventurine's clan is named somewhat nicely, but what does it change when every single one of them was killed and Adventurine is the only survivor?

I can't shake the feeling it's a very racist portrayal, because the meta message basically assumes that a Roma-based character can't have anything akin to a normal life. That they have to suffer, lose everybody, and become a tragic character "working" for a huge space corporation that couldn't care less about people. Only to ultimately "die" for the sake of said corporation and possibly never be able to come back from the state of spiritual death. And even if he managed, he knows that all his achievements were monopolized by that corporation and that he has virtually nothing to his name and nobody to come back to. The only positive is that he is supposedly blessed with luck by Gaiathra.

Don't take me wrong disgussing the tragedy that happens to minority groups is important and should be done in media, but there is also a point often brought up that if your group is constantly represented as struggling to get by and opressed and nothing else then people start to internalize the idea that this is the only way those characters and people they're based on can live. That there is no normalcy that they have in life, so no normalcy is expected from their portrayals. This happened to queer people. We all grew tired of being constantly only represented as a group whose only point in the story is to be visibly opressed and that we never got a chance to have normal lives as well.

If he comes back, will Hoyo give him a better life? We will see.

Still... the implications are so ugh. I can't speak more about it as I'm not Roma and I definitely don't understand the stuff enough to say anything substancial, but this just looks kind of bad as it is now.

Fortunately there are Roma creators I can direct you to for better insight in regard to Adventurine and his roma-based heritage:

In addition to the video: When I learned that Adventurine (Kakavasha) is supposed to be Romani his design stopped being ok to me. Because it means Hoyo appropriated a real life oppression of a group so they could then stick it to a white guy in a video game. It says a lot about Hoyo, who already had similar issues in Genshin Impact before. It feels like Hoyo fears melanin, because there are other Chinese video game studios who don't stray from using dark skintone on their characters and those characters are selling pretty well, so what's the issue?

#honkai star rail #adventurine #kakavasha #anti-roma #romani people #roma people #character design #media studies #hoyoverse critical #racism #fantasy racism #honkai star rail spoilers

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fromchaostocosmos · 7 months

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Attention Creatives

You need to stop with the stories, plot lines, background info, and such in your works that are things like:

The Holocaust and the Atlantic Slave Trade were not really about that it was really a cover for vampires to have a way to access to mass feeding farms found in example like The Strain and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

The Spanish Inquisition was really about vampires trying to find witches that could control them story line thanks to True Blood.

World War 2 was because of Greeks gods fighting with each via Percy Jackson.

There are shit-ton more examples of this kind of thing and it is disgusting.

The Holocaust and the Atlantic Slave Trade specifically in regards to United States part of it all and the horrific treatment of enslaved African peoples tend the most commonly used ones, I have found.

That said it does not mean other ethnic cleansing and genocides are not used as well as other major events and tragedies for very specific marginalized and/or minority groups.

These types of stories devalue our on going pain and trauma as well as degrade the memories of both the living and the dead who suffered through those horrors and the many who did not live to see it end.

Our trauma is not a sandbox that you get to play, our history is not something you to play pretend with.

All of us from the various communities that survived these atrocities, these crimes against humanity, these terrors we all each and every one us carry still the scars. Not just scars, but also still healing wounds.

We carry in us the stories of our people, the joys and the sorrows, the hopes and the fears, and we carry the dead so that they may live on in some small way.

You have no right to that, you have no right to pain, to our joy, and most importantly you have no right to recast the reason for it all.

I am so sick of it and it needs to stop.

And this is not even delving into deeper how deeply gross so many of the implications of these storylines are if you think about for just a little bit and the nasty stereotypes they help to reinforce.

#antisemitism #antisemitism in media #antiblackness #antiblackness in media #anti-romani racism #anti-romani racism in media #anti-indigenous racism #anti-indigenous racism in media #racism #racism in media #appropriation of tragedies

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dirhwangdaseul-archived · 2 years

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How ‘Lord of the Rings’ Inspires Italy’s Giorgia Meloni - The New York Times

posted the entire thing was behind paywall

ROME — Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who is likely to be the next prime minister of Italy, used to dress up as a hobbit.

As a youth activist in the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, she and her fellowship of militants, with nicknames like Frodo and Hobbit, revered “The Lord of the Rings” and other works by the British writer J.R.R. Tolkien. They visited schools in character. They gathered at the “sounding of the horn of Boromir” for cultural chats. She attended “Hobbit Camp” and sang along with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell’Anello, or Fellowship of the Ring.

All of that might seem some youthful infatuation with a work usually associated with fantasy-fiction and big-budget epics rather than political militancy. But in Italy, “The Lord of the Rings” has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-Fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes and creation myths free of Fascist taboos.

“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” said Ms. Meloni, 45. More than just her favorite book series, “The Lord of the Rings” was also a sacred text. “I don’t consider ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fantasy,” she said.

Tolkien’s agrarian universe, full of virtuous good guys defending their idyllic, wooded kingdoms from hordes of dark and violent orcs, has for decades prompted scholarly, and convention center, debate over the author’s racial and ideological biases, his view of modernity and globalization. More recently, his works have also provided a fertile shire for nationalists who see themselves in his heroic archetypes.

But in Italy, the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the maps of Mordor have informed generations of post-Fascist youths, including Ms. Meloni, who, the latest polls strongly suggest, will emerge from the election on Sunday as Italy’s first female prime minister — and the first descended from post-Fascist roots.

Ms. Meloni, who leads the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, and who has called for a naval blockade against illegal migrants and warns her supporters about the dark, conspiratorial forces of internationalist bankers, first read Tolkien, a conservative who once called Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus,” at age 11. She became a fantasy fanatic.

In her early 20s, she surfaced in chat rooms under the nickname Khy-ri, calling herself the “little dragon of the Italian undernet.” More recently, she named her political conference Atreju, an Italian rendering of the name of the hero of “The NeverEnding Story,” best known as a 1980s cult film featuring a flying animatronic character that appeared to be half dragon, half Labrador retriever.

As a government minister in 2008, Ms. Meloni posed for a magazine profile next to a statue of the wizard Gandalf. In 2019, she honored a manga character, Captain Harlock, the “space pirate,” as a “symbol of a generation that challenged the apathy and indifference of people.” Last month, she lamented that her busy campaign schedule had kept her from mainlining Amazon’s new “Rings of Power” series.

But Ms. Meloni’s otherworldly interests have as much to do with politics as personal taste.

“The genre of fantasy in Italy has always been cultivated by the right,” said Umberto Croppi, a former member of the Italian Social Movement who is now the director of a national association of public and private agencies in Italy’s culture industry. He said that the two worlds shared a “vision of spirituality against materialism, a metaphysical vision of life against the forms of the modern world.”

The modern world did not work out so well for the die-hard Fascists who stayed loyal to Hitler and Mussolini after the official Italian government switched sides to join the Allies during World War II.

After the war, many of those Fascists flocked to the Italian Social Movement, but the party’s efforts to reintegrate into Italy’s institutions eventually hit a wall. Its younger members, feeling excluded from civil society, seized on an Italian edition of “The Lord of the Rings,” prefaced by Elémire Zolla, a philosopher who was a point of reference on the hard right and who argued that Tolkien was “talking about everything we confront every day.”

That resonated with a small group of the party’s Youth Front, already bristling at the cultural dominance of the left. They saw themselves, as one of their leaders, Generoso Simeone, put it, as “inhabitants of the mythical Middle-earth, also struggling with dragons, orcs, and other creatures.” Seeking a more palatable alternative to quoting Mussolini’s speeches and spray-painting Swastikas, which, Mr. Croppi pointed out, “was easy to reproduce on walls,” in 1977, they created the first Camp Hobbit festival.

“The idea to call it Camp Hobbit came from a real strategy,” said Mr. Croppi, one of the founders. The thinking was to move beyond the old symbols and to capitalize on the party’s isolation, smallness and victimization by violent leftist enemies to make their hero “not the warrior Aragorn, but the little hobbit — we wanted to get out of this militarist, heroic idea.”

The party’s old guard was perplexed. But, with the support of hard-liners, Camp Hobbit festivals emerged as formative touchstones for the young activists. Celtic cross flags that meshed perfectly with the Tolkien aesthetic waved. The band Fellowship of the Ring played songs about European identity, including what became the anthem of the party’s Youth Front, “Tomorrow Belongs to Us.”

The song echoed a ballad “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” sung by a member of the Hitler Youth in a chilling scene in the movie “Cabaret.” Mr. Croppi acknowledged that the camps had their fair share of Fascist salutes, but argued they were “ironic.”

When Ms. Meloni entered the picture as a teenage activist in the Youth Front in Rome in the 1990s, the far right — especially in the capital — was still in a trenchlike mentality, struggling to break with the previous generation.

Francesco Lollobrigida, a leader in Ms. Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy (as well as her brother-in-law), said that he and others had a desire starting in the 1980s “to break with the patterns of a party that still had inside of it people who had been in the Social Republic, who had done fascism.”

Ms. Meloni, seated across from him, agreed.

“There was a desire to get out of that,” she said.

Ms. Meloni attended a new iteration of Camp Hobbit in 1993, which she called a “political laboratory” and where she sang along with Fellowship of the Ring and discussed culture and books.

“We read everything,” Ms. Meloni said.

The bookstore of choice for the hard right in Rome was Europa, just outside the Vatican walls. On a recent visit, it displayed titles like “Mussolini Boys” and “The Occult Origins of Nazism.” A picture of Hitler stood watch above the register next to a cup of pens.

Europa has a section dedicated to Julius Evola, an esoteric, deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated Italian philosopher who became a favorite of Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists and bourgeoisie-loathing nostalgists. Evola argued that progress and equality were poisonous illusions.

“A bit boring,” Mr. Lollobrigida said of Evola’s work.

Ms. Meloni said that instead a more influential writer at the time was the more mainstream Ernst Jünger, a German former soldier, who sought to make sense of war but also glorified combat.

But for Ms. Meloni, all of those took a back shelf to “The Lord of the Rings.” She said she had learned from dwarves and elves and hobbits the “value of specificity” with “each indispensable for the fact of being particular.” She extrapolated that as a lesson about protecting Europe’s sovereign nations and unique identities.

In the 1990s, after becoming the leader of the youth wing of the National Alliance, the party that succeeded the Italian Social Movement, Ms. Meloni started her own political festival, which she called “similar” to Camp Hobbit. But this time, she named it Atreju. “It was the symbol of a boy in battle against nihilism, against the Nothing that advances,” she said.

She joked that Italians could hardly pronounce Atreju, but she said that the annual conventions, including the first one, in 1998, which was about the dangers of globalization, had reach.

“We wanted to say that globalization, you have to govern it,” she said. “If you look around, we weren’t wrong, were we?” she added.

At the Atreju convention in 2018, the guest of honor, Stephen K. Bannon, walked by patriotic posters of “Italy’s heroes” and desks selling Evola-themed T-shirts and works by Evola. Ms. Meloni’s supporters have interpreted her calls to defend Italy from mass migration — and the replacement of native Italians by invaders — as a battle cry to protect Middle-earth. This month, at a rally in Sardinia, Davide Anedda, 21, the leader of the local youth wing of the Brothers of Italy, wore a T-shirt reading “Hobbit.”

“If you’re not from our world, it’s very hard to understand,” Mr. Anedda said, explaining that Hobbit was a post-Fascist far-right rock band and that Tolkien had written “a fundamental part of our history.”

And for Italy, maybe a part of its future.

Ms. Meloni, who seems poised to grab her own brass ring after decades in the political trenches, said that her understanding of power and its ability to corrupt and isolate a person was “closely tied to Tolkien’s reading.”

“I consider power very dangerous,” she said. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.”

@vague-humanoid @antifaspiderman @beserkerjewel

#fascism #italy #twi decades of warnings did nothing to prevent this but they've been fascist for the last decade already considering their treatment of #romani people and immigrants #italy has always been like this and now we know from infancy #librero #europe #the lord of the rings #fantasy #media

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