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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 9450610" data-attributes="member: 85555">They were treated differently, I think in large part because OA was inspired by a lot of Chinese and Japanese martial arts media* as well as American martial arts movies that were caught up in the ninja and kung fu crazies but Medieval Europe was pretty poorly portrayed too if you are looking for things like cultural accuracy. I remember when I went to college and started learning more about the middle ages. D&D was completely off-base in just about every way. Which is fine. It is a game. But it used all of Europe interchangeably, was littered with anachronisms. It also was a lot closer to Europe in the 1700s than in the 1300s in terms of what settings looked like. It didn't have any real sense of what Feudalism and Manorialism were. You could rip D&D apart for its failure to capture European cultures as well (I would even say if you are taking a lens that prioritizes things like sensitivity you would also find problems in how it treated certain European  cultures versus others----not sure this is a problem as stuff like barbarians are useful tropes, but many of the same complaints would be there). Now D&D definitely was more familiar with western cultures, as its creators were American. So the odd ball stuff could be much weirder in things like OA.  To go back to my first point though, OA and more European style D&D were grounded in grounded in very different genres of media. Something some people also probably don't understand is what it was like culturally in the west living in that kung fu/Ninja craze period, when 'karate' was magic. I grew up in the 80s and this stuff was everywhere. Shogun was a big miniseries when I was a kid, Bruce Lee movies were still huge and Bruce Lee was this legendary figure people talked about on teh playground during recess. Chuck Norris was a big star and Hong Kong martial arts movies aired on Saturdays. It is what led a lot of us to get into martial arts as well.  In some ways it could be disrespectful. In others it helped create an interest in media from countries we wouldnt' have otherwise explored. But a lot of the ignorance at the time was because this stuff was all in translation. The subs were often misleading. And we didn't know the source material because most of the source material for things like 70s Shaw Brothers wuxia films hadn't been translated into English. A good example is a movie called Web of Death. I highly recommend this film for anyone who is interested in wuxia and wants an example of a highly gameable film. But there is a sequence where I believe one of the masters is meditating and maybe reciting a sutra. But the english dub has him say the lords prayer instead because they didn't think an American audience would get the cultural reference. Also Americans watching it at the time wouldn't know the plot had basically taken scenes from different books in the Condor Heroes trilogy and spliced them together for a unique storyline. Part of my point is this stuff almost became its own genre. It is sort of like if you go into Chinatown and go to a martial arts movie shop (the last one I went to was like 8 years ago so not sure how many of these are around anymore. There is a whole subculture in America around this stuff that is its own unique thing. There is a culture of viewing and appreciating built around the bad subs *which is worthy of emulation IMO because Hong Kong Films and japanese films were so much better than american movies at the time at capturing action),</blockquote>

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