#Octopath Neha

[blazlngblade]

TRAVELERS 177 - 184

177 - Pirro | 178 - Ochette | 179 - Grieg | 180 - Morffins 181 - Nivelle | 182 - Neha | 183 - Partitio | 184 - Isla

177 - 184's ARTISTS

177 - @linderosse 178 - TheLostArts (Twitter) 179 - @fantaseagal 180 - RedSilvers (Twitter) 181 - @eros-vigilante 182 - Ally Bit (Twitter) 183 - Logi (Twitter) 184 - PokatoFry (Twitter)

Full Credit List:

If you are the artists of these Travelers (177-184), you are now welcome to upload them independently!

Feel free to tag me (@blazlngblade) so I can update the Full List with your posted drawings for additional credit!

[eros-vigilante]

still taking octopath traveler + cotc playable requests on my vnmo (linked in pinned post). $5-9 for a sketch and $10+ for a colored of any ot1/2 protag or cotc playable. exceptions are joshua and neha. tatloch would be my redesign (the first image).

[blazlngblade]

Neha, a fortunetelling dancer, is now playable.

Like Grieg and Morffins, she is a Twin World/Solistia Traveler.

I don't have too much to say on her. I'm still a bit meh on all these Twin World Travelers debuting and then playable about 45 days, and then poor Gohfeld's short of two years on waiting to be playable.

[eros-vigilante]

here's a short thing i wrote in anger about the design of a character from cotc, neha, as i'm going to link it as supplemental to a post about issues with octopath.

this is neha:

The mark on an Indian person's forehead is called a "bindi" (for dot) or a Tilak/Tilaka/Tika. Neha is "a popular Hindi/ Sanskrit Indian feminine given name." So, Neha is Indian.

Why does she have a crystal ball? "using crystal balls was widespread within the Roman Empire" and the first result for "Indian fortune telling" is a practice about parrots (the animal). You don't picture a Roman when you think of a fortune teller though, do you?

Belly dancing is the most prevalent stereotype of a middle eastern woman. It originated in Egypt, Asia Minor (Turkey), and Spain. It is not an Indian dance.

The generalization of belly dancing being applied to any middle eastern dancer (or even just the assumption that middle eastern women wear similar outfits) is the fault of some guy from New York City. Bloom states, "when the public learned that the literal translation was "belly dance", they delightedly concluded that it must be salacious and immoral … I had a gold mine."

It wasn't supposed to be, and was made that way by the appropriation and commodification of it. "A social dance… is performed… by ordinary people (male and female, young and old), in their ordinary clothes. …these events may be gender segregated."

Some professional dancers were educated, high class people who sang for events, or sex workers. Male Egyptian sex workers were discriminated against, and given a nickname that became used as a homophobic slur. (So Harry shouldn't exist as a belly dancer).

Know that there are many posts and articles about orientalism and belly dancing that are way more detailed than this; this piece was an attempt to very simply summarize what makes stereotypical belly dancer characters so inaccurate using Neha as an example.