Tag: because on one hand it means you’re less likely to be living on poisoned ground

think twice before you write a mafia AU

antemisia:

tenitchyfingers:

ehsocietypretendstoomuch:

you see the problem with mafia AUs is that the author probably knows that mafia is bad but still thinks it is a minor issue. 

“yes mafia is bad but since i don’t know the real statements behind this complex and cruel mechanism because it never affected my life in a bad way, i want to take this real thing and make a romanticized story about it” this is what probably goes on in their mind.

so it’s not that they support volountairly mafia (and camorra, n’drangheta and sacra corona unita) but doing so and thinking that it’s ok to find the good side of it, well, it kind of IS supporting this crime.

because you don’t know how it fucking works, and of course it would never, and it will never, appear in a fanfiction that they kidnapped and killed the son of a rival, and to hide the murder they put the child’s corpse in fucking acid so that nobody will ever find it.
do you think this is romantic? 
well, you will never read of it in a fanfiction because THIS is what mafia does for real. and you just don’t know shit of it.

if now you’re disgusted, well, congratulations! maybe you’re finally understanding that mafia cannot be romanticized. only fought.

my standards about this went from “if you’re not Italian don’t write about mafia” to “at least watch movies about mafia that come from Italy before writing your mafia!AUs, because American movies glamorize the shit out of it” to “at least be aware that mafia is bad”. 

And still, I know not even the bare minimum in decency is going to be met, because when it’s about shitting on Italians and treating us as subhumans, and speaking over us about our own country and culture… nobody is better at that than Americans. 

I honestly avoid any post about Mafia on tumblr, because I don’t want to enter this argument and I honestly want to just forget there are people out there who actually think that the Mafia is something cool, something cute, something  you would want your OTP to be trapped in. Because if we are talking about Mafia, we are talking about being trapped, being oppressed, never being able to breathe. 

There is a big misconception that people hardly realize because it’s so the norm nowadays that what can you do? The Mafia, the one called like this, is not JUST a criminal organization. We are not talking about people just smuggling drugs, doing random illegal stuff, and going around with guns while screaming “fuck the police”. We are talking about a way of living, a way of thinking. Mafia means that if you are part of the “family” and you want out, there is only one way to that door: DEATH. 

I guess everyone has watched at some point The Godfather (I did when I was 16yo) and you know what’s the only thing that trilogy got right? The murder of Fredo by Mike’s order. The only sane person in all those movies is Diane Keaton’s character. Do you really think that in real life Vito Corleone would have left his son walk out from the family business? Think again. THAT IS FANTASY. It doesn’t work like that at all. 

Ask, Giuseppe Impastato, born in a Mafia family and thrown out of the house, then killed for his anti-mafia militancy. 

Ask Rita Atria, her too born in a Mafia family, who, after the murder of her father first and then of her brother, together with her sister-in-law went to the police and became a collaboratrice di giustizia. Her family, the entire town she lived in, isolated her. After Paolo Borsellino, the magistrate she collaborated with and who helped her a lot, was killed by the Mafia, she committed suicide. 

“You have died for what you believed in, but without you, I too am dead.”

“I am devastated by the killing of Judge Borsellino. Now there’s no one to protect me, I’m scared and I can’t take it any more.”

Do you know what her mother did? Her mother destroyed her tombstone with a hammer. Her own mother didn’t have any respect fot her because she betrayed “the family”, she didn’t submit under the law of “omertà”.

Ask Giuseppe di Matteo, who was 14 years old when, after being imprisoned and tortured for more than 2 years (he was 11 when he was captured), was strangled and his body dissolved in acid. The kidnappers had told the boy they were taking him to see his dad.

“To the kid’s eyes we appeared like angels, but in reality we were devils. (…) He was really happy, he kept saying ‘My father, my dear father’”.

 All this because his father was a pentito.

Ask Giuseppe Letizia, 12 yo shepherd who was accidentaly witness of the assassination of Placido Rizzotto, which was ordered by doctor Michele Navarra. The shock was so great that he got a fever and was found delirious and taken to the hospital the day after, where the doctor Navarra, hearing him talking of the muderer of a peasant during the night up on the mountains, instead of curing him, decided it was safer to shut him up forever with an injection. 

Ask Graziella Campagna, 17yo when she accidentally found a paper with the name of a “latitante” in the pocket of a jacket during her working hours at a laundry shop. She told her “kind” boss what she had found and so she got kiddnapped and killed right the day after. 

And you should also ask Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo, and their security detail (Antonio Montinaro, Rocco Dicillo, Vito Schifani); Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, his wife Emanuela Setti Carraro and the police agent Domenico Russo;
Pippo Fava; Boris Giuliano; Piersanti Mattarella, ETC. ETC. ETC. 

These are few of the hundreds of people that the mafia has killed. Just a bunch of names.
Actually, these are the names I think of when I go to bed at night. And you know why? Because you all need fictional characters as heroes, but these people here are mine. They gave their lives for me, me as a Sicilian.
They are my heroes, because you don’t know what it means to be a 4 yo already conscious of what the mafia is. Because a kid in my kindergarten, another little human like me, who was starting life as me, didn’t have a father anymore. Vanished after being arrested and become a pentito. And his mother to save his life and the lives of his two sisters had to make it public that she wasn’t a pentita, too.
They are my heroes because at 16 I had to learn that the parents of my best friend, who owned a flower shop, got visited ceaselessly by people who tried to scare them and who tried to tell them whom they should have voted or what they should have done, if not… 
They are my heroes, because since I was 22 I wake every day asking myself if this is the day they are going to ask my brother the pizzo. And if that happens, what should he do? Is this the day everything will go to shit? 

I am crying, because you all don’t know what Mafia is. You watch an american crappy movie and think you know what you are talking about. I’m so sorry for you, but I am also so so so angry.  Maybe I am a bit sensible because a couple of days ago Riina asked to be put under home confinement, because he says he is sick and wants to die in his house, asking for a “dignified death”. And then I ask myself, this person, who is actually confined inside the room of a hospital, does deserve a dignified death? After killing a child and melting him? After killing women and men, innocent people, after destroying my land, my region? Do you know the shame I feel every time I visit a place outsise of Sicily and someone tells me “ah, Sicily? Mafia!” As if it was something funny, an inside joke. I am sorry, but it isn’t so. It’s not a joke, it’s not a game. PEOPLE HAVE DIED. PEOPLE DIE. In Italy we have more than one national holiday in memory of all those blessed souls who were destroyed. We don’t find it cool, there are associations against the pizzo, who help people overcome the fear of living here. 

Would any of you find cool a nazi-au? An enslavement-au? An Isis-au? IS THIS FUNNY? ROMANTIC? Because I wouldn’t. And so I don’t find it funny when you write cute aus about the shit I have to live with everyday and for the rest of my life. Because the mafioso isn’t just the delinquent, the mafioso is also the citizen who stays silent, who enjoys the status quo. And you all, when you write a cute mafia-au, you are a mafioso, too. You are endorsing that lifestyle, you become part of the system too. And let me tell you, it’s shit. 

If you want to educate yourself, I suggest PIF’s movies. 

And the movie that changed my life when I was 9 yo (my mother made me watch this movie and made all her students in middle school watch it, too).