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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9647111" data-attributes="member: 18">Like I said, the issue for me is when you whitewash real world settings, not when you have faux-[time/place] settings which don't have the same deep and horrific societal issues.Like, if your characters are in a Victorian-ish, vibes-wise/aesthetics-wise but entirely fictional society/setting and it doesn't have child labour and truly horrific treatment of the poor and women and non-white people have rights, that's cool, I'm into it.But if you set in the real world, or even approximately the real world (i.e. where there are actual historical figures, countries, etc.), and do all that, then you're getting into some really gross (to me) whitewashing territory (and also sometimes it doesn't even add up - a lot of societies were built on the back of horrific treatment of certain groups - not even minorities in many cases, just less-powerful groups, and shouldn't function without that). I think if a game does go out and say "This isn't realistic, this is romanticized and is mimicking a particular kind of fiction", like Pendragon does, then yeah, you cut it a lot of slack. But a lot of early "steampunk" and 1800s-set stuff stuff didn't do that, didn't acknowledge that things were effed up at all. Castle Falkenstein being a prime example - I'm never going to be able to play a game which thinks rich aristocrats and industrialists in the 1800s are "cool people".And it's notable that most faux-[time/place] settings do dial back the horrors as it were - particularly faux-medieval ones! Those that don't tend to be kind of grimdark.Re: medieval, if we had a game set in supposed "medieval England", where there was some vague pretense of realism, but it was incredibly sanitized and whitewashed, then yeah, I wouldn't be keen on that. You don't have to lean into the horrors (i.e. you don't have to have a GRRM attitude to sexual violence - that seems to be kind of ahistorical at most periods anyway), but if you're whitewashing, that's not my vibe, and I don't think it's cool. At least acknowledge how romanticized and silly your game is! I think that's much more common nowadays.Also personally, I think we have a serious problem in the English-speaking West with romanticizing specifically the 1800s (and 1700s in certain circles) which is far less true of most other eras (except the Roman era), which makes this particularly questionable to me. This was specifically an notable issue in the UK in the 1990s, where one of the major parties was literally fetishizing and romanticizing the Victorian era as part of their platform, which made some steampunk fetishizing the same era quite uncomfortable to me.</blockquote>

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