Celebrim
Legend
I wasn't able to detect the difference based on the content alone. Granted, I'd have to buy it to make a full and fair review, but since he is doing deliberate pastiche (Ga'el for Gaelic, for example) then in my opinion the level of respect he is showing the cultures in question doesn't rise up to what would be my own minimum standards. I was only able to read his website, watch his video, read the previews of the three products on RPG now, and read some reviews and interviews about his product but what I saw would not have led me to think that the product was a worthwhile treatment of real world culture. First of all, the product blurb is very misleading. While ostensibly inspired by native American beliefs, what he really means by that is it is inspired by Lakota beliefs and a mish-mash of much less well researched beliefs as filtered through his own ideological biases. Only a few of the nine tribes are actually North American, with the others represent stereotypical Norse, Celts, Africans, Chinese, and so forth. He knows much more about the Lakota than he does about say the Muscogee, and more about the Muscogee than he does about China. Speaking of China, most of the setting is depicted as existing in a state of tribal bands living by the sort of late model hunter-gathering that prevailed in North America in Pre-Columbian times, with agriculture in an early state of development, except for the Chinese which apparently have this clockpunk, steampunk thing and build their villages on the back of giant turtles. But he is careful to call the tribal structure out as not 'primitive' but a choice they are making, which is undermined by the fact that in the introduction to the adventure he presents his tribes as barely making it, living a brutal existence so dark (however realistic, maybe), that it made Lamentations of the Flame Princess's consciously gothic and dark take on medieval Europe seem light-hearted by comparison. I'd no more present a North American inspired fantasy in that way, than I would revel in the brutality of serfdom when doing a more European inspired fantasy. Honestly, I don't see the treatment as inherently more respectful than say the treatment of the Vistani/Rom pastiche in Ravenloft.
Which reminds me. When last we argued about that here, people were making a big deal about the fact that the Vistani were presented as inherently magical, and that this was somehow a really bad thing because it presented them as non-human. And several of us pointed out that in fact, it was highly respectful of Romany belief since many of the Romany and certainly almost all of them historically believed themselves to be an inherently magical people. And besides which, in a fantasy context, presenting them as magical and cool was exalting and elevating their beliefs, not deriding them. Well, what do we have here when someone from a particular heritage presents there own heritage: he literally calls them out as an "inherently magical" people using those exact words.
Or, in short, I'm not convinced that your reaction to the work is based less on who wrote it than what it said. I've never thought hard about presenting North American culture through a D&D style fantasy lens, but to the extent that I have thought about it, the only intersection I see with where I would take it and his, is that I wouldn't make it inherently about colonialism or post-colonialism. But, were the product made by TSR, my suspicion is that the mish-mash would have gotten just as much push back as Chult did. As the OP pointed out, you can always find reasons to be outraged.
As a writer, what I care about most is that people understand what I have to say. I don't enjoy being misunderstood. I write to communicate.
I'm not sure that I can avoid completely being misunderstood. I know that I can't avoid causing outrage. And I really don't have a lot of respect for people that claim fiction caused them harm. I can't hardly pick up a book these days without listening to an author fume against me and rant about things that they don't really understand. It's normal in my preferred genera for the author to be highly critical of my identity and while I personally am under no immediate threat (not that I haven't personally received death threats related to my identity), that security isn't universally enjoyed. Grow some skin. Some people will not like you. You can't do anything about it. You're going to write some kids fiction with what you think are uplifting themes, and someone is going to say that it is the most toxic, cruel, and unjust book ever written. And by that they are going to mean, "I don't agree with it so it offends me." You can't stop that from happening.
There used to be an idea called tolerance. Now we think we are wiser than that, and tolerance is upheld as foolishness. We're about to find out how that works out I think.
No, which is I think one of the reasons he was happy to change it. What he saw as a realistic portrayal of the ills of society was being received as a realistic portrayal of the ills of Jews. He didn't mean to condemn the Jews; he meant to condemn the readers. When his Jewish friend pointed out that the Jewishness of the character meant it was being received by the society as a condemnation of Jews and not society, he rectified the situation by removing the Jewishness from the character and then in his next book creating a heroic and sympathetic Jewish character. It's similar to the reason that I made Drow white instead of black. It's not that I think that black Drow are racist, and it's only in part that I would worry about a black human being hurt by black Drow. It's mostly that I don't want what I want to say being misunderstood and twisted and if removing a distraction of skin color can do that, then that's a cheap price to pay (even though I think the classic dark skinned silver hair look of the drow is really cool looking).
Nor would I, but then again, regardless of your definition, I think the sentence stands up to it.
I don't disagree with that at all. What I was trying to point out is that both Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan ask the audience to treat war as something complicated, even as - and maybe especially as - the protagonists "mow down" the bad guys.
I didn't say there was any excuses. I said that bad behavior doesn't make someone less human. Yes, sometimes a good man has to endures the horrors of war to keep evil from flourishing, but then see the above cited literary works on war or read the collected works of William Tecumseh Sherman or really anyone that has had to make war in the name of a just cause. War can be ugly, can be heroic, can be necessary, can reveal the greatest in humanity, and can be among the worst of all human evils. And how we engage with war and violence can be on all sorts of levels.
It is necessary I think to say, "There but for the grace of God go I." That doesn't excuse the evil. It doesn't mean it has to be any less resisted. But it does change how you view the person. No one is a faceless villain, even when the story doesn't give us time to explore there story.
Unless they are an orc, lacking in free will, and based and corrupted, and it happens that we created some non-human villain precisely because we don't want to engage in this complexity all the time, or we are trying to take separate mythic traditions about warfare and hammer them together into something more or less unified.
I don't think there is such as a thing as a "a black story". The phrase brings back memories of painful things I witnessed but which I think were more painful for my black friends that experienced them. If there is such a thing as "a black story", then by your own definitions there are stories with black protagonists in them that are not "black stories", which implies that the person in question is not "black enough" or not "authentically black". And people who think that they are having one of those authentic black stories, seem to have no qualms about telling other black people that they are not black enough in a lot of really nasty ways. If in fact there are "black stories", then I think race would be something that is a lot more real than I think it is and further I find that there are a lot of people who claim the right to "black stories" about things that they have never themselves experienced. I'm reminded of the black person from New Hampshire that tried to tell me that as a white person I could never understand what a cotton field represented to black people. Yet she'd never share cropped cotton or dragged a 100lb burlap sack through the black mud to keep her family from starving and her relationship to that was pretty much entirely through books, with no family members in living memory to relate that experience to her, her connection to a cotton field was entirely self-adopted, self-imposed, and theoretical. I'm reminded also of the Civil War reenactor I once knew, who talked about people who wanted to get into reenacting, and how the experienced reenactors could always tell a particular type by their niave enthusiasm for one side or the other. They'd come from New York or Alabama and they'd want to live out their heritage, and they'd say things like, "My ancestor fought in the 1st New York/1st Alabama infantry regiment." And the oldbie would say to the noob, "Which one?" And the noob would look baffled, and the oldbie would say, "First New York USA, or First New York Confederate." or conversely, "First Alabama or First Alabama USA". And almost invariably it would turn out that this modern man trying to live out his heritage had ancestors who were not the ones that they'd identified with, with flag waving people snearing at ignorant southerners finding out their ancestors sided with slavery, and kids waving the flag of Northern Virginia finding out that their ancestor had refused to rebel against his country. You keep saying that race is a social construct, but when you say things like "a black story" I'm inclined to disbelieve that you mean it.
I've told this story before, but I grew up Scottish and proud of my heritage, only to discover when I actually investigated that heritage that my ancestors had lied about theirs and that they were Irish. (And I should say, that even identifying with one heritage vastly simplifies for this dicussion my own. Hint, I didn't pick Muscogee out of the air.) What does that make me? Does that mean my story can be given an adjective, or is it just 'mine'?
Last edited:
