hot take but none of you are allowed to use deer/antler imagery when working with cannibalistic themes anymore. you need to be honest with yallselves on WHY you're associating deer/antler imagery with cannibalism. just because you aren't naming the name doesn't mean that the original anti-indigenous racism isn't still inherent to what you're doing.
For those who need more explanation, a well known (but often misunderstood) figure in Algonquin and Aanishinabe culture is the wend*go.
No, I'm not fully typing out the name cause we don't say that name and don't want to attract its attention. Yes, all of this is taken very seriously by us Natives.
The problem is that this very serious figure isn't taken seriously at all by non-Natives and, instead of respecting our culture and the fact we don't even say its name, its perceived as this cool monster to add to movies, video games and cool edgy OCs.
And, as with all thing Native being used and abused, misunderstood, and transformed by non-Natives, we are tired of that. It's not okay, it's not respectful.
You want a people eating monster in a story? Use anything else.
As someone who's absolutely guilty of this shite on this account...yeah you have the right to spitroast me for that. Fair is fair.
I do hope we can use creepy deer aesthetics on and about other mythological/fiction monster villains tho. As someone who had a deer almost kill their dog, I just find deer creepy and unsettling regardless.
first off: You are the single person who has responded to this post admitting some variant of having done this that actually listened to what was being said, acknowledged that you did such things while you didn't know any better, expressed an intent to never do it again, and asked for clarification on whether or not "creepy deer aesthetic" is completely off-limits with that in mind. So with that said, I want you to know that you're one of the very few folks in this post I respect sincerely.
To that end: While obviously I can't speak for Native America as a monolith, it would be my opinion that no, creepy deer aesthetics as a concept are fine. Deer can be fucked up and weird. There is a fundamental lure to the idea of a large prey animal behaving as a predator or in ways anathema to our understanding of prey. That juxtaposition and irony has a lot of narrative potential and for good reason--it fucks severely! I don't want to see it go away! It fucks hard, for Christ's sake!
But it is my opinion that the use of deer aesthetics within the specific context of cannibal themes isn't able to be used anymore. The well has been poisoned too deeply. I never said once the specific being I was referring to in nearly any of my responses, but everyone knew exactly what I meant. Even trying to purposefully distance the racism from the imagery would be useless, since the racism is baked in to the assumptions by now. Reclamation may be able to happen in the future, but first we need to accept that setting it down completely is the right play for a while. You can distance racism from creepy deer stuff by purposefully and actively distancing it from Native America and cannibalism--if it becomes a recurring imagery on its own throughout multiple types of horror, rather than being innately tied by implication to the winter hunger, that's when we could maybe begin talking about whether or not to start re-examining our relationship with it.
