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Message: <blockquote data-quote="occam" data-source="post: 9357633" data-attributes="member: 39815">I reject this as a description of my experience, and of Kara-Tur in general. When I was young, I wasn't reading Marco Polo, I was watching Godzilla, The Seven Samurai, or The Five Venoms. Kurosawa or the Shaw Brothers weren't engaging in Orientalism; they were making products for local Asian markets that later found audiences in the US and elsewhere. Tropes of East Asian fantasy such as dueling kung fu masters, noble samurai, and kaiju were established in Asia itself by Asian creators, and were appreciated on their own terms around the world (after translation.And it's clear that Zeb Cook and others working with him held a deep appreciation for their source material, and engaged in research to bring a lot of East Asian history and folklore into Kara-Tur that was outside the scope of what was familiar to their mostly-American readers. Are there some things that should be updated for a modern readership? Sure, but wholesale changes aren't required, unless thinly veiled fantasy versions of historical Asian nations and faiths just aren't your thing. I don't see more recent settings such as Rokugan, Kaidan, or Tian Xia as exhibiting vast improvements in terms of cultural sensitivity over what was done in the mid-80s with Kara-Tur.</blockquote>