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Based on my limited googling and eyesight, best I can tell there are zero similarities between the goblin horn in the game and a shofar. Am I tripping? Is there any way in which that horn is a shofar that wouldnt also apply to the Horn of Gondor? I am genuinely curious, since to me it looks like "generic fantasy horn", which I understand a shofar very much *isn't *, but I've been seeing it repeated from people who I'd usually trust to know this sort of thing. Or maybe they haven't seen the one in game, and are just repeating the party line.
Yes. I'm seeing it repeated online too, just parroting the party line. Because you don't want to be labelled as an anti-Semite, now do you? So agree with what your betters tell you and pass it along. It's very hard to be charitable when discussing this, since it's a bunch of loudmouth and possibly mentally-impaired people donning their tinfoil hats (how obsessed do you have to be to dig down into whether or not a particular type of cheese is kosher? and then tout that online as evidence of the Big Anti-Jewish Dogwhistle Conspiracy?) and spreading misinformation, which the retweeters then swallow as totally true (since questioning only gets a target painted on your back) and spread themselves, and then people go "it has been proven she's a bad person" because they saw something someone had passed on at fourth-hand about it, and if it's on the Internet, it must be correct!
Five seconds' Googling will get you to an article about blowing horns. Is the Basque horn in the photo like a shofar or not? Are the Basques being anti-Semitic by using copies of shofars, since only the Jews ever invented using animal horns (sarcasm off)?
What I think: entirely possible the art department for the game used reference photos of shofars as the basis for the drawing of the goblin horn and indeed they might have picked it not to look like things like the Horn of Gondor because copyright infringement is a pain in the behind and studios have entire fleets of lawyers on stand-by for any perceived "whoa you copied our trademarked visuals, pay up" cases; 1612 is a year of English witch trials which fits in with the lore of the world
What the "if you don't agree that trans genocide is happening you're a bigot" crowd think: Rowling herself personally designed it to look like a shofar and picked a year of a "Fatmilk" which means "cheese" German revolt which included a pogrom and picked non-kosher cheese to insult the shofar and be an anti-Semitic dog whistle because she is a monster and every penny spent on this game goes to fund death camps for trans people
The thing is, as far as I can tell, it doesn't even resemble a shofar. I have difficulty processing how you could look at that image and think it looks like a shofar, even if youre trying to find the slightest hint of a dogwhistle. It's like if you said that the main character in RDR2 rides a sidesaddle. But thats what i struggle with. I know that a lot of people spread rumours without verifying, but what about the people that have seen both the game horn and a shofar? Is it a gutsy assumption that nobody will call them on something even if it's blatantly apparent that it's false? Is it a deliberate attempt to call a deer a horse, or make people say there are five lights? Or do they honestly, truly, in their heart of hearts believe it? It seems impossible enough that I feel like I have to be missing something, and the two horns really do have more in common than saying that a Cessna is clearly the Red Baron's Fokker Dr.I.
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There is a comment in the linked Reddit thread by someone with relevant experience who says that it is indeed not a Shofar, and also that the "anti-Semitic cheese" thing is also a massive reach (since Kosher cheese basically didn't exist for a long-ass time at all).
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