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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8350670" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't understand this whole argument at all. Are people saying that demi-humans shouldn't be depicted as having characteristics identifiable with any existing human ethnicity BECAUSE it will somehow impede depicting them in a non-human way? This seems like a very forced argument. I mean, OK, I get the &quot;Elves are slavers, we should be careful about which ethnicity they resemble because it might offend someone.&quot; HOWEVER that seems like pretty much an excluded middle kind of an argument! Not only that, but its a bad argument to start with, since the elves are going to look a bit like SOMEBODY anyway. OK, maybe you should only make 'slaver elves' blue-skinned, etc. Maybe. Or maybe they contain a lot of ethnicities within their culture, or maybe you just make their culture complex enough to avoid the 'evil humanoid' problem (because that's all this is). No doubt cultural sensitivity is not always easy, but nothing about it seems to exclude any possibilities, just constrain overall presentation. You cannot avoid the work, and lame 'Thermian Arguments' or whatever are not going to change that, right?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8350670, member: 82106"] I don't understand this whole argument at all. Are people saying that demi-humans shouldn't be depicted as having characteristics identifiable with any existing human ethnicity BECAUSE it will somehow impede depicting them in a non-human way? This seems like a very forced argument. I mean, OK, I get the "Elves are slavers, we should be careful about which ethnicity they resemble because it might offend someone." HOWEVER that seems like pretty much an excluded middle kind of an argument! Not only that, but its a bad argument to start with, since the elves are going to look a bit like SOMEBODY anyway. OK, maybe you should only make 'slaver elves' blue-skinned, etc. Maybe. Or maybe they contain a lot of ethnicities within their culture, or maybe you just make their culture complex enough to avoid the 'evil humanoid' problem (because that's all this is). No doubt cultural sensitivity is not always easy, but nothing about it seems to exclude any possibilities, just constrain overall presentation. You cannot avoid the work, and lame 'Thermian Arguments' or whatever are not going to change that, right? [/QUOTE]

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