Tapdancing-eggs - Helloooooooo

So the lizard people conspiracy is a bit more complicated. There is no lizard people folklore, a man named David Icke popularized the theory on his own. Some of the people he claims are lizards are famous Jews, others are not. But there are a couple of catches. A lot of the tropes or characteristics of lizard people fit into classic antisemitic tropes like eating children and trying to take over the world. David Icke himself claims that Jews funded the Holocaust and implies that the Holocaust didn’t happen in some of his books. Since he is the one who basically created this theory, and he clearly holds antisemitic views, there is a pretty clear indication that the lizard people trope and antisemitic tropes are connected on purpose.

the problem with all of these, “X creature is an antisemitic stereotype” is…

well, if they are, it’s a thoroughly recent invention

because, yanno

Christians didn’t need to come up with coded representations of the worst things they believed of Jews

they just presented it outright

we didn’t have “goblins hoard gold and control the banks”, we had “Jews hoard gold and control the banks and steal the Host and drink the blood of Christian babies and dig up our dead”

With the exception of impenetrable allegorical works that were just allllll about symbolism, from top to bottom… Notsrim didn’t need to invent some kind of fantastic monster to represent Jews 

because to them, we’re already monsters

this isn’t to say you can’t talk about stuff in the context of specific recent creators

JKR’s goblins are grotesque little antisemitic caricatures, just as many editions of D&D made goblins into anti-Asian stereotypes

remember that there’s no One True Goblin Form. There’s no codified rule about dwarves being greedy treasure-hoarding foreigners, in spite of Tolkien. There’s no rule about how long or how pointy an elve’s ears are.

this stuff is all centuries if not millennia old. It’s gone through countless variations in how it has been told. Sometimes, to some people, “goblin”, “elf”, and “dwarf” were all names for the same thing. Sometimes one or the other was extremely specific. Sometimes they were each broad categories, more akin to something like the Japanese “youkai” or “bakemono”.

sometimes, people have sat down and decided to take these ideas and use them to conceal their hatred, to signal others who believe as they do or to try to make their bigotry seem less bigoted by making it about something nonhuman

but that’s recent

because back when people were worried about elves swapping a changeling for their baby, or an ogre in the forest

they were also convinced that “Jew” was itself a category of inhuman creature.

not to be dramatic but i would die for this cat

Role swap au where Zuko was the Avatar who got frozen for a hundred years, so when he’s rescued from the ice instead of a goofy twelve year old Katara catches this mysterious teenager with long hair and a cool scar and a fucking DRAGON

Katara: BOY???? HOT BOY?????? HOT TEENAGE BOY?????????

Zuko: *speaks*

Katara: nevermind I hate him

They’re just gal pals. 😂