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Al-Qadim, Campaign Guide: Zakhara, and Cultural Sensitivity
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<blockquote data-quote="Ondath" data-source="post: 8663382" data-attributes="member: 7031770"><p>But... why? It's not like the Faerunian Pantheon in the Sword Coast is representative of how Catholic Clergy worked in the Middle Ages. You can clearly have a setting with European Mediaeval aesthetic trappings without referring to the religion there, so why can't you have that in Al Qadim? It seems to me that you are looking at Middle Eastern cultures through an essentialist eye and arguing that anything that has Middle Eastern aesthetic trappings <strong>must </strong>involve Islamic religion and ideology at least to a certain extent. I don't see why.</p><p></p><p>This is a different matter than disneyification and pruning less pleasant parts of a culture even though you'd expect them to be there. <s>By which I mean, if they created a setting where there was obviously slavery, but then the story completely ignored the moral wrongness of slavery and treated them as "servants who are happy with their status and look they're treated so well!", that would be a Disneyified version of that culture.</s> But if I'm just using aesthetic trappings, I think I should be able to imagine a society without any of the political institutions in the historic Middle East. It's not like places with European aesthetic trappings have to have serfs or arranged marriages at the age of 12, so why are we forcing this on another culture's representation?</p><p></p><p>EDIT: I think my first example didn't work that well. Let me give another one: Let's say you design a setting based on Bakufu Japan. If you depicted that culture with absolutely no contact with outsiders, but failed to mention the reason (there being a xenophobic decree limiting all transport to and from the country), that would be Disneyification. But you're certainly free to imagine a setting with Bakufu Japan aesthetics where there is no Sakoku Edict and the people intermingle with others. I think the situation with requiring harems or slavery is no different than this.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ondath, post: 8663382, member: 7031770"] But... why? It's not like the Faerunian Pantheon in the Sword Coast is representative of how Catholic Clergy worked in the Middle Ages. You can clearly have a setting with European Mediaeval aesthetic trappings without referring to the religion there, so why can't you have that in Al Qadim? It seems to me that you are looking at Middle Eastern cultures through an essentialist eye and arguing that anything that has Middle Eastern aesthetic trappings [B]must [/B]involve Islamic religion and ideology at least to a certain extent. I don't see why. This is a different matter than disneyification and pruning less pleasant parts of a culture even though you'd expect them to be there. [S]By which I mean, if they created a setting where there was obviously slavery, but then the story completely ignored the moral wrongness of slavery and treated them as "servants who are happy with their status and look they're treated so well!", that would be a Disneyified version of that culture.[/S] But if I'm just using aesthetic trappings, I think I should be able to imagine a society without any of the political institutions in the historic Middle East. It's not like places with European aesthetic trappings have to have serfs or arranged marriages at the age of 12, so why are we forcing this on another culture's representation? EDIT: I think my first example didn't work that well. Let me give another one: Let's say you design a setting based on Bakufu Japan. If you depicted that culture with absolutely no contact with outsiders, but failed to mention the reason (there being a xenophobic decree limiting all transport to and from the country), that would be Disneyification. But you're certainly free to imagine a setting with Bakufu Japan aesthetics where there is no Sakoku Edict and the people intermingle with others. I think the situation with requiring harems or slavery is no different than this. [/QUOTE]
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