Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9847293" data-attributes="member: 18">Sure, I agree, but if that's the standard (and it probably should be) I don't think Central African Forager is going to fare much better. If you're talking about the real ethnic groups only their own terms are likely to be acceptable to them (and rightly so).Whereas when talking about the racialized trope I suspect Pygmy is probably still the best term (unfortunately), because that's such a multi-layered pile of racism. The sort of racism we're talking about isn't based on the real tribes to a meaningful degree, it's just local racism fed through direct colonial racism, further churned through indirect Western media racism to create a sort of weird composite called "Pygmy".Looking at these halflings I suspect a modern Athas might want to just swap to the more Giger-esque dinosaur-bone-armour halflings (still having them ride raptors etc.), and swap out "boil you in a pot" cannibalism (ugh) for something that evokes some horror (i.e. makes them seem tough and scary) without being an obvious racist trope, though to be honest given the sheer breadth of Western racism it's hard to immediately think of what that might be! (Racism, racism never changes - reading Caesar and Tacitus' accounts of the Britons, and Cicero's insane racist rants about the same, you can see a lot of identical tropes being deployed re: the Britons to ones deployed by the distant descendants of those same Britons against various ethnic groups in areas they colonized 1600+ years later!)</blockquote>

Verification