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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Phantom_Miria" data-source="post: 9849784" data-attributes="member: 7053811">That's all fair, but after giving a fair hearing to these arguments and knowing the topic, I'm still not sure which ethnic group the Dark Sun Athasian would be parodying, and thus who would be the victim and target of the stereotype here. The trope of the "tribal cannibal" has an unpleasant history, when it was used as an accurate description of how certain real world people engaged in cannibalism and with an implicit negative moral connotation (and it was always wrong anyway because real cultures were some forms of cannibalism are socially accepted always have it involved in the context of specific religious or social rituals), but the trope doesn't have to be used like that nor it is used like that in Dark Sun.There were pics posted before, and in there I can't see any coherent cultural identity to them that can be traced back to any real culture in particular. It's just generic half fantasy tribal looks (which is amply shared inside Dark Sun aesthetics), half Heavy Metal cover look, applied to a race that has a lot of additional lore to it and has never been just about the cannibalism anyway (and, again, it's debatably even cannibalism, Halflings in Dark Sun don't eat other Halflings, just everyone else, like the Thri-Kreen also do).If it's just the abstract trope of a tribal culture that also engages in cannibalism, and it's not basing itself on anything that can be realistically be related to a real world culture, I don't think we're running the risk of reaffirming myths about certain ethnic groups being cannibals, or misrepresenting how certain cultures who once practiced ritual cannibalism actually performed those rites.The abstract trope is harmless (and it's also a trope that's not unique to the Halflings at all on Athas), what needs to be ensured is that all that stuff remains as distinct as possible from anything that could be tied to real human cultures. You can accomplish that in many ways without having to retcon anything just with some careful writing.</blockquote>

Verification