MoonSong
Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
Part of the disconnect is you said Mexican, not Aztec. Now this is precisely what is offensive, just wanting the windowdressing without caring about the context and significance, and how you can contribute to cultural destruction. The plethora of incorrect and imprecise depictions puts a lot of pressure on the preservation of this cultural heritage.Regarding the rest, I admit I'm a bit puzzled. I don't get the references to actual political and social situation of the country. I, honestly, don't care about it at all in this context. I'm neither trying to make an essay on real world contemporary Mexico nor writing a modern Narcos RPG setting. What I was interested in im my thought exercisa was just a pre colombian Aztec (ish) backdrop.
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I didn't see that much offensive material there. Trite, oversimplified, boring or unimaginative, sure. But "plain offensive"? I fail to get it. Maybe because in my mind Aztec, Maya and Inca are dead empires? Could be. The pre Colombian empires have disappeared so long ago that I can't relate to them as "real" just as I do with medieval Europe. It's a thing of the past. Surely most of the tropes there are wildly historically inaccurate, but there's a hint of truth in there. Human sacrifices were practiced, even if not that much as pulp fiction wants us to believe, and designing a mythology around Quetzalcoatl wrong? is it an issue? Are there living worshippers of the Aztec pantheon? Is it worse than the Norse Gods depiction in Marvel comics?
I won't talk about the Inca, because they aren't my concern, they lived literally on the other extreme of the world. They are not relevant except because they tend to get tangled too in the mess.
We are not talking of dead cultures which no longer exist, this concerns real living people today. Real living people who currently struggle to preserve their culture. Yes, this is both someone's ancestral heritage and someone's living current heritage, and neither of them have easy access to the means to put this into popular culture.
The Maya might not be an empire anymore, but the Maya people is still living to this day. With the Aztecs things are a bit more complex, because what is usually depicted as "Aztec" is actually of Pan-nahua origin -Aztecs were but one Nahua tribe, they weren't even the only tribe in charge, there were also the Alcohua and Tecpanec in charge of the empire that dominated most other Nahua tribes and many post-toltec-chichimec tribes and even surviving tribes from prechichimec times- if not an off-shot of the greater Toltec-Chichimec or Toltec-Teotihuacan traditions that went beyond just the Nahua people. A lot of what is depicted as Aztec is not really Aztec to begin with.
The comparison to the Norse and Roman traditions is also not an accurate one. For one, the nature of the change was abrupt and violent, not to mention quite recent in time. The Norse shed their ancient religion over time as they adapted to the new places they established in and their homeland was Christianized. The Roman traditions however didn't exactly die out, their pantheon was abruptly and forcefully abandoned, and this part is similar though. However notice that the Romans are the ancestors of many peoples today, -including the mixed heritage Mexicans of today- and their institutions and Cultural norms still persist to this day. Not to mention their myths got preserved by first hand accounts, while we are lucky to have some texts written from an European perspective and these things were already bastardized by decades of Aztec domination. Somewhere else I mentioned how the Aztec version of the Nahua-Zapotec-Mixtec pantheon -yes, there's no "Aztec pantheon" but rather a shared transethnic one- shows obvious signs of tampering by the Aztecs as a way to justify their domination-.
What happened in the Ancient Anahuac after the Spanish Conquest was very violent and quite recent -it is still an open wound-. It is a foundational trauma, and something we are still struggling with. On one hand, most of us are of mixed heritage and we carry both the pain of the victim and the guilt of the perpetrator, and at the same time we still long for the cultural baggage that was stripped off us. And this isn't something that happened one time five hundred years ago, this is an ongoing process of cultural destruction that hasn't stopped. This happened in my own family just two or three generations ago.
And, well, these deities aren't exactly dead gods. Their cult subsists to this day in the syncretic practices of many indigenous communities. Specially in the Maya region. The Mayans managed to preserve more of their culture than other ethnic groups, if I had to guess, because of their better writing system and their relative distance and independence from the center. This is also a bigger problem because the cultures of the Anahuac are part of our heritage, but these cultures are still living and ongoing to this day, and they suffer to preserve it -they face a lot of structural disadvantages that cannot be easily overcome while still resisting assimilation-. We making use of it is already morally ambiguous. Someone from the outside doing it is even worse, and more if it is just windowdressing and quite inaccurate.
These are the things that startle me. I see people that just seem to WANT to get angry for the slightest thing. Sure, our REAL world give many reasons to get angry, and racism is one of the worst. But I prefer when angriness is directed at real world issues, not fantasy literature, if there's no direct intent of offense.
If you don't want to offend, then do your homework. Be thorough, be accurate, and be respectful -and well, avoid using stereotypes-. I will still be personally angry -because I'm a drama queen and more aware about these issues-, but others love when popular culture gets things right, which does not happen very often. If you don't want to put this effort for your own homegame, that's ok, what happens in the privacy of your own table is nobody's business. But, if you want to publish it, at least get a sensitivity reader or two.