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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Misanthrope Prime" data-source="post: 9786832" data-attributes="member: 6776166">So, look. I'm mixed race, live in NYC, will fight to the death to defend actual diversity and multiculturalism among living, flesh and blood humans. The multiculturalism that you and I both know is contingent on our attachment to globalized colonial empires; without those, you shouldn't expect to see a city in fantasy that resembles the one out your window.There's a reason that flesh and blood humans congregate in big cities like NYC or London. We have history, economies and technology that caused people to leave their ancestral homelands, where their physical phenotypes were at one point environmental adaptations (skin tone pretty much easily maps onto latitude here on Earth; fairer people towards the poles, darkest skinned people at the equator) and settle elsewhere.Dragonlance, as far as I'm aware, does not have any of those. There are no multicontinental empires with large oceangoing ships picking up people from one place and enslaving them in another place. There is no silk road connecting Ansalon to fake Asia so we have an excuse for katana and nunchuks to show up. And no one can just casually decide to teleport their family to Palanthas because they want to get in on the lucrative plumbing trade.If there are going to be black people in dragonlance, either the story needs to be set closer to the equator or, if it's in a more temperate region, there needs to be some sort of reason and method by which large populations of people would migrate or be taken out of their homelands to become a significant visible minority elsewhere.In FR, we have this here and there; we know why Turmish is mostly populated by darker skinned people who migrated during the fall of Imaskar, for instance. But to my knowledge, no one has ever set down and actually done this kind of worldbuilding for Dragonlance. And just saying "this city is diverse now!" or "there have been dark skinned people in this population of arctic vikings for centuries, deal with it" showcases a stunning lack of creativity as writers to me.EDIT: I don't really understand the idea that fantasy needs to resemble either your society, or the society the creators of the work were in. If I want to read a fantasy story about diversity in a dense city, I can crack open a superhero comic book or read something set in Ankh Morpork or Lankhmar. I don't need Camelot or Minas Tirith to look like NYC, diversity doesn't just mean diversity of people within a story but also diversity of stories within a medium or genre.</blockquote>

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