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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 6725922" data-attributes="member: 3887">Who has ever given their consent to be fictionalized? Did Joyce get the permission from the residents of Dublin? Did David Chase get north Jersey to sign off on The Sopranos? Heck, even Karl Ove Knausgård didn't seek out the okay from, like, everyone he ever knew before publishing My Struggle -- however, I'll grant you, in his specific case he probably should have. And how does an entire cultural group go about granting consent to be represented in the first place? This sounds nonsensical to me. How can I "own" culture? Do you feel like you own your cultural heritage? "Consent" seems like the wrong word to be using here. It comes off as a rhetorical dirty trick; using a word freighted with meaning w/r/t the current discourse about sexual consent and re-appropriating it to lend emotional weight to an argument about cultural exchange.edit: let me throw this out there: misrepresenting a culture in fiction (or fiction-like things) is, usually, an aesthetic failure not an ethical one. In order for it to be an ethical failure, there needs to be (much) more than mere 'not getting it right'.  As if 'getting a culture right' was a trivially easy thing to do. Also, you first need to establish 'right according to whom?'. One of the things I dislike the most about these arguments about cultural representation in media/RPGs is this notion that "other" cultures are something you 'get right or wrong'. Like they're a standardized test you can ace with the right amount of study. Any writing about culture, regardless of the context, has to be approached with a reasonable set of expectations about how thoroughly & accurately they will address a subject the size of a 'culture'.</blockquote>

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