[ SECRET POST #3438 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3438 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 11 secrets from Secret Submission Post #491.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[darkmanifest]

Polish folklore is definitely a shift from the Western European standard we usually get in high fantasy media, but when (usually US American) people say "diversity", what they usually mean is "not white/European". I thought that was commonly understood, but now I see why Europeans from non-Western European cultures might feel just as left out of the mainstream as people not from Europe at all.

[(Anonymous)]

of course it means non-white from an american perspective because the strongest conflicts in the US are between racial/ethnic groups that can to some extend be identified by looks alone. This has had positive effects for many white people who went to the US from europe to escape discrimination - in europe they were discriminated against for religious reasons or because they were of some ethno-cultural minority but in the US at some point they were just "white people". Yet in europe these patterns of prejudice and discrimination remain somewhat intact. Eastern europeans are looked down on from western europeans, for example (I'm from western europe and I've grown up ingrained with these prejudices), and then there's the problem that many cultures all over europe face americanization, that goes at the expense of their local cultures.
From the perspective of a white person in europe, of any of the diverse and distinct cultures and ethnicities, to be just put in the american category of "mainstream white people" and "not diverse" is pretty insulting.

(Also random anecdote: I live in a town with a US army base established directly after the war, and one of the first real-life impressions people here got from the US was that it was a "Black and White" country because the GIs came in these two varieties.the whole concept of a culture divided along these visible racial lines was rather strange and, for the generation of my mother and grandmother, belonged to places far away, the strange colonial landscapes you only read about.)

Now I haven't played the witcher, and I actually enjoyed "unrealistic" medieval racebending like BBC Merlin I don't think everything HAS to do that sort of thing. Putting the odd black or chinese "merchant" type in would have been tokenism, so I don't care for that either.
But there could have been Gypsies. That would have been realistic diversity. Were there?

[darkmanifest]

Yeah, when everything is divided along lines of "brown" and "not brown" in the US, it's easy to forget that the whole world doesn't work that way, and outside the US, just showing up at the door with pale skin and narrow features isn't necessarily your ticket to privilege (though how many cultures across the world idealize pale skin and have for centuries before the US ever came about is a whole 'nother pickle). It's funny that the same people so interested in fair cultural representation are also so quick to push the US American perspective on everyone else. Racism is everywhere, but it's not the same everywhere.

Got no idea, haven't played the game, either (not into RPGs where I can't change my avatar), but according to reviews, pretty much everybody is Slavic-looking, except for one vaguely Middle Eastern ethnic group represented by this guy. I'm pretty happy with Dragon Age's way of handling it (i.e. it's fantasy on the world with two moons and they don't feel the need to write a treatise on where the brown people come from any more than they do on how the dragons fly).