Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8506428" data-attributes="member: 7032025">I'm sorry, it is helpful, "looking for an issue that isn't there" is one of the common problems of today, so a suggestion to avoid this is actually a very good one. No-one is complaining about these "borrowings" so why assume that it might cause a problem to someone ? Why feel uncomfortable on behalf of people who in all probability don't even care, or who would actually be proud of it ?Let me tell you a story, in the 80s I fell in love with the indian pantheon presented in the 1st edition Deities and Demigods, in particular following a reading of Lord of Light by Zelazny. So I did a bit of digging and found the ramayana, which I read and absolutely loved, and created a complete campaign based on my understanding of it, with Ravana as the BBEG and his hordes of Rakshasas of various kinds as nefarious villains (and since then rakshasas are amongst my favourite villains). My players loved it, and we still speak about it today (in particular as to how the PCs invoked Agni, burning butter and all that).Years later, I visited India, Thailand, and many countries in the east, as I was an expatriate in Singapore. These are places where these legends are part of the culture, and transcribed in particular in stories on the walls of temples. Every single person I spoke to there, tour guides, local people, museum staff, etc. were interested to know how I knew so much about their legends, recognising heroes and villains and phases of the story. So I told them, and no-one was offended. On the contrary, they were extremely pleased that I knew about their culture, even deformed as it was, about their heroes and their values.And of course, my story was certainly full of stereotypes and cultural problems, and I'm sure that I should today be crucified for that horrible cultural (mis-)appropriation (but, thankfully, I'm European <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ). But don't assume that the people that some might feel righteous about feel that way at all, it was simply not true, it was actually the complete opposite.</blockquote>

Verification