NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SakanaSensei" data-source="post: 8581501" data-attributes="member: 7033162">Super late here, but I've been sitting on a thought about why representation of people from diverse backgrounds matters when it comes to being able to get our hands on unique content and why diversity, in itself, IS a solid selling point, even if you're someone who thinks it's unimportant. I live in Japan, so I'm going to structure this with that in mind. If you look at any piece of Japanese media, whether it be games or television, that tries to replicate feelings of western fantasy, it is very clearly different from western fantasy. The Final Fantasy series, while having giant castles of stone, is definitely not Lord of the Rings in tone or execution. Elden Ring, even having had the hand of a western author in its creation, is not anywhere near close to the same kind of world as Game of Thrones. Any anime that works on tropes of western folklore, from Fate/Whatever to any number of a million of very long titled "So I Was a Normal Everyday Businessman But Died When I Stepped On A Crack the Wrong Way and Whoops Now I'm a Paladin" isekai shows. These examples of Japanese media drawing on western influences are not inherently bad. For a lot of people, they're actively good and what they want! But I know I don't often reach for a lot of Japanese sources for my (western) fantasy kicks, because it just doesn't feel the same as (western) fantasy written by someone that grew up in the culture.  Sometimes, an outsider perspective writing something inspired by other cultures is great. If Michael Kirkbride, a former writer for Bethesda, hadn't been interested in eastern religion as much as he is/was, we never would have gotten the beautiful weirdness of the Elder Scrolls 3's lore. But no matter how much I like some "outsider" media, from Morrowind to Final Fantasy, it's never quite the same as a Persona 5 representing Japan or a Red Dead Redemption representing America. (I feel like I'm definitely showing how much more my media landscape is video games more than books.) Even Ghost of Tsushima, lauded by Japanese audiences pretty broadly despite being developed by a Western studio, had some discussion when it released about how snarky/sarcastic characters could sometimes be because it pulled people out of the experience due to how unnatural it felt in Japanese.Having products come out and knowing that it's written by a team of people of a culture different from my own tells me that it's going to probably feel different in a fundamental way than other material I've seen from people who share my cultural touchstones, and I think that's pretty neat.</blockquote>

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