Noting unusual to see here. Just a man with his voodoo dolls
Okay, so it wasn’t just my imagination that Christopher sounded weird last week. 
I really want to know if they found that tiki bar.
Germaney? <.< He’s going to Equestria?
Papa Legba! Whoa!
So wait, does that mean Rambler is the guy in the red hat ???
Damn, getting to see Robert Johnson in action at last is awesome. 
I love this transference of debts and favors stuff. That cover absolutely delivers on its promise of what lies inside!
So his way of getting out of this bargain is convincing his employer that wages and benefits aren’t worth the labor. Love it.
I guess he qualifies as an anti-villain? It’s such a hard label to explain.
Hey now, “Adam and Christopher” is anapestic, that’s a meter!
That’s weird, I thought there were five Virtuosos, too.
Oh! The second doll is the Rambler one, he is the guy in the red hat!
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Believe me, they found that tiki bar. 
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Well, that was appalling.
In the original Robert Johnson folk tale episode C&A did, the “Papa Legba” thing was a brief mention for what people might have claimed in the 60s, quickly retconned to being Gloomweaver. It was a bit uncomfortable, but that is in fact the sort of racist garbage that people would toss off and then a later writer would hurriedly retcon to save a character, so I didn’t mind it so much.
But here.
Here Christopher and Adam have decided to un-retcon the racism-solving retcon, and then double down on it and make it so much worse. They’ve taken one of the most powerful, influential, beloved and respected figures in a marginalized religion, one that constantly struggles with being literally demonized by white American culture, and they’ve reduced him to being a scheming Monkey’s Paw-bargaining minion of Gloomweaver, based entirely on the fact that a couple of racist white folklorists in the 60s decided that Legba had to be a Devil-analogy because he was connected to crossroads.
This was atrocious. I’ve never had to mark an episode of this podcast as something that I have to warn people against listening to before. I hope I never have to again. It’s wildly tainted Rambler as a character and now I’m dreading any future appearances of him.
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There’s this food for thought from Wikipedia:
In his study of the Delta blues, Robert Palmer discusses the appearance of Legba in blues lyrics and lore. Palmer notes that Legba can be referred to/identified as “the Devil”, “Papa Legba”, and “The Black Man” throughout the history of the blues.[8] This is also made clear in ethnomusicologist Bruno Blum’s text for the CD box set Voodoo in America ,[9] where reference to Papa Legba, deity of roads and crossroads, in Robert Johnson’s iconic song “Crossroads” is explained.
Add on that in their fictional history this comic releases in 87 just a year after that Crossroads movie.
Yes, those would be the racist White folklorists that I was talking about.
edit I started this as an edit but then a post happened, so I’m moving it down for clarity for readers.
Actually, no. I’m going to go a little bit further into this.
Jeysie, in the past you have discussed your Catholic faith a bit, and the fact that you’re a touch uncomfortable about Fanatic because of how C&A usually take care to treat other religions well and she’s not very Catholic.
So I’d like you to imagine for a moment that C&A unveiled a story in which Nightmist is dealing with the baby-snatching Virgin Mary, a monstrous figure that comes to women in the night who are suffering, and who promises to bring them peace, and then she murders their husbands and steals their babies.
And when pressed on this, someone explains that actually, a folklorist once said that the urban legend of Bloody Mary could be connected to the Virgin Mary, and therefore the Virgin Mary is a Satanic figure. And not only do they say that, but a lot of people say that. Enough people that someone sees that you have a statue of the Virgin Mary, and they say, “Oh, you’re into black magic, cool.”
That is the level of what’s going on with Papa Legba here. That’s how bad this is.
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@FrivYeti I’d say send in a letter about your concerns and have C&A respond based off that information. As I wouldn’t assume their intentions is be that overtly racist as you are implying.
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One, looking into these people I’m not coming across anything that indicates they were considered racist.
Two, these people mentioned are simply chronicling the way the Delta blues culture characterized Papa Legba, and those blues are associated with Robert Johnson. So the operative question to me is: What was the makeup of the musicians who formed the Delta blues culture?
(Actual question, I don’t know this answer.)
It’s also kind of coincidental to bring up Catholicism when Haitian voodoo involved them borrowing from and changing around Catholicism to mix it with their own traditions, in a manner called syncretism.
I’m a little surprised that I have to say this, but you do not have to intend racism to commit it. Most people don’t sit down and say, “I know, I would like to do a racism today, what would be the best way to do so?” What they do is lazy research, reductive assumptions, and oppressive implementation of unexamined statements.
“We have already seen that Peetie Wheatstraw was a natural child of Legba. He became the “Devil’s Son-in-Law” because of a shotgun wedding between an African view of music’s spiritual power and the English language, which offered no words to express the many facets of that power. By reducing the complex figure of Legba to the one-dimensional character of the devil, Christians demonized many important facets of of African spiritual life and branded the blues as “the devil’s music.” Peetie Wheatstraw and other African American musicians, like the blues-singing cartman in Invisible Man, responded by flauting their supposed connections with the devil and insisting on the life-enhancing powers of secular music.”
“Children of Legba: Musicians at the Crossroads in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” Thomas F. Marvin, American Literature, Vol. 68, No 3 (Sep 1996)
And it’s not really coincidental at all. The syncretic aspects of vodoun, whose existing and current practicioners most closely identify Papa Legba with St. Peter, were the result of an attempt by Christian slavers to stamp out the African folk religions of the people they were enslaving. The blend of those folk religions with Christianity was how those beliefs and practices survived, despite the best efforts of later evangelical Christian groups to continue to associate them with devil-worship.
I mean, the reason that I brought up the comparison was that I thought you might have a bit of sympathy for the idea of one of your most revered idols being made a mockery of, but it’s still not a complete coincidence.
I absolutely will be sending in a letter about my concerns, but I felt the need to post here because I sort of assumed that other people would be sharing that. I’m a bit taken aback that the response has been so stridently in favour of the character.
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I think that’s mostly because most of don’t know much or anything about Vodou. I know parts of the Robert Johnson mythology and I imagine that’s a lot of what others only know.
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The response is not necessarily in favor of the character, it’s more that people who may be less educated than you on the subject are trying to understand the issue before immediately agreeing that Christopher and Adam are doubling down on a racist narrative.
It may not be intentional, I know tone doesn’t always come across clearly in writing, but your initial post came across as “C&A intentionally injecting racist ideals into their stories” and I think you may have just caught people off-guard.
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I kind of want to clarify here.
The times I’ve complained like with Fanatic being a bad Catholic or with the Irish Independence thing, they’re solely failures of basic empirical research. And in neither case am I irritated because I think C&A were besmirching my idols (As I feel God, Jesus, Mary, and the saints can take care of themselves and there’s no shortage of stories that do weird things with them all, anyway) but because they were misrepresenting real human beings and real history.
In this case it seems that C&A were intentionally echoing the Delta blues culture and specifically in relation to Robert Johnson’s music, so this isn’t a matter of C&A’s “lazy research” nor C&A making things up themselves, it requires digging into what that Delta blues culture consisted of in terms of musical references, who put them there, and as a result if C&A should be referencing that culture.
And, I’ll be a little more clear: You ask me if I feel protective of my idols while we’re discussing the depiction of a religion which freely borrowed and changed my religion’s idols into their own. It’s an unexpected angle to take.
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This, yes. I don’t like weighing in definitively on topics I don’t know anything about and don’t have a ready way to research facts on, and in this case, I don’t and I don’t.
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Thank you all for being so respectful and thoughtful in this discussion! I can’t tell you how much it’s appreciated. 
I love this community, and this is a great example of why.
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Count me in on the “not in favor” group. I felt like trying to pull in the comic-book Voodoo detracted from the story. Can do deals with demons on the crossroads without that. I tried to tune it out as just one more example of C&A harming their stories with the “metaverse” level stuff (yes, I know they like the idea of looking at stories as they would have been told at the time… but this level of, call it celebration, of things better left in the past is something else). I’m reminded of how a person I knew it college was… rather irritated with Stargate SG-1 when (back in… '04, wow I feel old) they introduced Amaterasu as one of the aliens posing as gods. He was Shinto. His objections mirror what you’ve brought up, FrivYeti.
Seems like it would have been better to keep the recon that Gloomweaver was using the character of Papa Legba as a disguise, or have it be someone else using that disguise in the service of Gloomweaver. I can see this possibly being saved by having Johnson’s power to take on others deals being a gift from the REAL Papa Legba (who might be a bit upset at a pretender using his name), but I’m not sure if that would just be making that worse.
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Todays episode they did read your email in the questions section.
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