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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 8555902" data-attributes="member: 6803643">Right, that makes a lot of sense, and frankly, I've wondered this for years but not so much that I had spent time looking into it. >_>But now that I see the turbans on the heads of the Thayans in the book, and now that the issue has been raised, I'm not wondering about it. Of course, turbans are used by cultures throughout South Asia, Southwest Asia, and North Africa, so one could easily lean into completely different cultural crutches for Thay vs Calimshan (vs Zakhara vs Mulhorand, etc). I just would rather that my fantasy not lean on cultural crutches but create something new yet familiar. Put it in a blender. I don't mind a spaghetti western bounty hunter like Cad Bane, but he's not John Wayne, he's a Duros, and that alien of a difference, and his placement in a setting of alien worlds, interacting with planet-wide cities and desert planets and volcanic hellscapes and misery mire slug-ruled gangster worlds means we're not just telling John Wayne Cowboys in Space. But there are genre tropes there. So I don't MIND the genre tropes explored with Thay and Calimshan etc. But what I do mind is that Calimshan is a Disneyland cutout stashed right in the middle of Fantasy Europe on a landscape more similar to the Pacific Northwest until suddenly the deserts of Calimshan (I guess maybe Calimshan is like the south California desert to the south of Amn's more San Franscisco/Mediterranean climate?). Anway, what I mean is that if it's just a one-to-one cultural paste, it's bothersome. Thay is less so, but it still feels odd to have turbans in it. I haven't gotten the book yet, but I would hope that the Thayan culture leans a bit more into Persian/Mughal/Greco-Indic vibes than to more Arabian Nights, just now in the mountains with evil red wizards.</blockquote>

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