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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8492788" data-attributes="member: 7026617">That's of course the problem with this sort of thing.  Some particularly associations are blatant enough almost anyone can see the problem with it; if you've used African culture as the basis for your civilization of ape-men you either are really oblivious or really don't care.But in other cases you just have to kind of make a decision, and even the fact some members of the culture don't like it might not be enough (because some members of a culture are going to see almost anything as a veiled slam, especially if they're members of a historically oppressed culture.Let's give an example.Let's say you have a group of Dogmen.  You assign them to a culture based on Croatia.  Now, I'm half Croatian and often consider "dog" a good shorthand for what I consider virtues (loyalty, determination, working with others well when needed) but others would focus on their more negative associations and find it an insult.  Is my view more legitimate than theirs?  Theirs than mine?That's why I think this is a bottomless pit, and while sometimes you really need to look at something and go "This was really a terrible idea and I'm startled you didn't realize that" you can't use a completely open-ended definition of offense, or you never do, well, anything, because the chances are any culture you assign to a group is going to look like some real world culture to one degree or another; even if you try not to that's overwhelmingly likely to be the case.  And any set of cultural traits that is not abnormally bland is going to likely have some obvious things that look, well, bad to a modern eye, and you end up pulling a lot of conflict out of a setting if you avoid that (which doesn't mean you shouldn't do so if you think people will find it harms their enjoyment more than it benefits things, but it also doesn't mean you should automatically avoid it either).So at some point I can't help but think you should make an honest effort not to be offensive just for color, and if not everyone accepts what you've done, just shrug and acknowledge that there's always going to be someone who finds what you do offensive.  Try to listen to the complaints and see if you've missed something, but go with your own judgment in the end.Edit to make this clear, I am not talking about the specific work at hand; that appears from description to be a pretty clearly not-thought-all-through example from a time period when ethnic stereotyping, often in pretty malign ways, was the day.  But over and above my opinion about actively suppressing creative work no matter how malign, its just a particularly clearcut case, and doesn't really tell you how to handle more common ones.</blockquote>

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