• Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Yeah, like, circus side shows in Amerika in the PT Barnum era had “Circassian princesses”: they’d just grab any random pretty girl off the street and give her a curly afro — possibly inspired by papakhi but this is questionable — and they’d dress her up in some sort of titillating and obviously 200,000% inaccurate “”“traditional outfit”“”, often complete with a nice cross necklace to remind viewers that [gibberish name] is really a good Christian woman… Even though Circassians are in fact Muslims.

    So yeah, the Caucasus definitely has a historical place in the popular imagination of international-community-1international-community-2 as being “simultaneously foreign and familiar”. In that sense I guess you could say that “Circassian beauties” and their likes were just yesteryear’s big tiddy anime GF.

    I dunno, I’ve had this thought a few times, about how the Caucasus may have inspired fantasy aesthetics. For instance when I first discovered Circassian musicians like Aslan Tlebzu and Aslan Kulov, I thought, “What, like the Narnia lion?” — naturally, it turns out that “aslan” is just Turkish for “lion”, hence both the Narnia character as well as the Circassian forename. And another time when I had this thought was when I first saw the film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind — because those are very clearly supposed to be gazyri on the titular character’s chest, and I remember there was also one scene in that film with buildings that reminded me a bit of those famous Vainakh towers.