You say "melting a variety of cultures together" like it was a bad thing.
To me that sounds anti-miscegenationist. It sounds segregationist. It sounds like a promotion of racial and ethnic purity as a virtue. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd hear from the nazis, the KKK, or axis-era Japan.
facepalm
Integrating cultures together and growing together is vastly different than looking at a far flung section of the world and defining it as a single monolithic culture.
You can't lump all of South America as being one culture, you can't lump all of Africa as being one Culture, you can't lump all of North America as one culture.
That is an attempt to erase people's cultures instead of appreciate them for what they are.
As an Italian, I’ll never be pissed at being equated with pizza and pasta. We have the best food in the world, let everyone know.
The mafia comparison is definitely annoying, though. It’s like comparing all americans to the kkk: kind of unfair.
Hold onto that feeling, that is what we are talking about.
Some people are really really tired of certain comparisons. It is kind of unfair. So, they are asking us to stop doing it.
I have heard people make valid complaints about the lack of representation in artwork and wish for more settings that aren't so Eurocentric. Until now, I haven't heard anyone argue that we shouldn't create settings inspired by Asia, though there's certainly room for debate over how such projects are implemented as evidence by this thread. But we can't complain about a lack of diversity or a lack of Eurocentric settings and then turn around and complain when someone creates a setting that isn't faux Europe.
And besides, can you imagine the howls of outrage if we took Kung-fu, katanas, and ninjas and attributed them to a European style culture?
Of course we should create things inspired by Asian cultures. We should just do so in a way better than we have in the past. More sensitive to the harmful tropes and making sure we aren't conflating two things that aren't the same.
In fact, it just hit me of a good example, Olrox was saying that he doesn't mind that pasta and pizza is associated with Italy, because he likes the food and the food culture. Imagine for a moment a book where the great Celtic tribes of England were the inventors of pizza and drank copious amounts of Beck's Beer (a massively popular beer in Germany).
None of that is right. And you might laugh and say "well it doesn't bother me" but let us say that that book went on to sell continuously for fifty years, and that people constantly stopped by your home town asking about the Celtic Pizza. And the company publishing the book made another, and another and another, then movies depicting the same stuff, then comics, then held conventions for Celtic Pizza. All pushing forward this warped view of your world. Can't you imagine, eventually, that it would start to aggravate you? That eventually you would tell them to at least admit that none of that is true, so people would stop associating these cultural things as being one and the same?