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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beleriphon" data-source="post: 7647030" data-attributes="member: 27847">Oriental also has the connotations of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism" target="_blank">orientalism</a> where everything from the basically the Middle-East through to Japan is lumped under exotic, weird, and static by Europeans. Look at the Orient Express route, it ran (runs? Is it still a thing?) from Paris to Istanbul. You know, seat of the Eastern Roman Empire, the place that is still considered part of Europe. But it wasn't Christian so it was exotic and strange.Look at the story of Aladdin, its sent in the "Orient", usually depicted as vaguely Chinese in illustrations, but everything about story says Arabia. This why Oriental tends not to be entirely appropriate, it is both too broad and incorrect to be fair.To truly represent some of the cultures in Middle-East through to South-East Asia and the Indian Subcontinent requires a huge amount of work. We're all generally familiar in Europe and North-America with certain bits of European history and myth. I can probably talk about using Zeus in an RPG and not have to explain too much. If I make references to something from the Upanishads, the Mahabharata, or Kojiki that I want to adapt to D&D then I'm going to have to explain, a lot more.There's also the distinct problem that most Asian religions are still actively practiced. Hindus are probably the group of people with the oldest extant religion in the world. Roughly 80% of Indians identify as Hindus, that's 1.5 billion people that whose way of life that can be turned into a crumby pastiche meant to amuse me.A non-D&D example and a video game: Dragon Age. There's a schism between the two Chantries in the games. This shares history with real European history (several points actually), something most people are familiar at least in principle. There are similar schisms that are equally as important in Asia, but they have to be explained in greater detail and can't rely on cultural osmosis to fill in the blanks. Because that detail takes away word count other areas either end up as old stereotypes that were never accurate or recycle something modern from the region that is based on its own history and locals recognize as a fantastic/absurd as Minsc and Boo but we don't have the cultural backing to identify as being abnormal.</blockquote>

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