Yoon Suin and Orientalism

Tropes, Not-analogs, and Fantasy

Some years ago, my interest in the OSR and in non-Western fantasy led me to David McGrogan’s Yoon-Suin, a setting that has just kickstarted its second edition (this post is based on the first edition pdf).  Non western fantasy brings a number of issues and problems to the fore: how can one be inspired by non-western tropes without stereotyping, reducing, or appropriating?  What is the relation between narrative genre, especially the explicitly fantastical, and historical ‘reality’?  If dnd is only quasi-European-medieval, what’s wrong with a setting that is quasi-something else?  What about the implied social relations within a game world, especially when considering humanoid ‘races’?

All good questions, with no easy answers.  Obviously, people get defensive around these issues for a variety of reasons.  One is the idea that once a trace of something problematic is found in a text, it contaminates the entire work for forever.  That’s extreme, and removes a lot of context and nuance.  On the other hand, there’s an insidiousness to cultural stereotypes and exoticism; because they fall below the line of being outright slurs, some forms of exoticism and orientalist exist as culturally acceptable and ‘not a big deal.’  Therefore, nothing in the following critique is meant to suggest that you do or not buy and play Yoon-Suin, but rather I would like to see what this attempt at non-western fantasy is doing and not doing.

“It’s just Fantasy”

Before I read the setting, I had already read this quite defensive and dismissive statement on the blog the of the author, which was an inauspicious beginning.  His main point is that the setting is not an analog in any meaningful sense of the term.  He writes:

Yoon-Suin is not an analogy for anything or anywhere. Words actually have meanings, and an "analogy" does not merely mean something which just takes inspiration from another thing, or which happens to superficially resemble another thing in some way. 

That said, all ideas come from somewhere, and the root of what became Yoon-Suin did begin as me idly wondering one day why there were fantasy versions of most places in the world (Europe, China, Japan, India, and so on) but not Tibet or Nepal. I used that initial seed of an idea to create a campaign to run games in which became the Mountains of the Moon area of the setting. Yoon-Suin kind of spread from there. It sort of looks like the geography of the Himalayas and the Bay of Bengal because that's what I was looking at when I made up the map. It has some monsters loosely based on folklore from Burma, Bengal and Tibet and many which aren't. It is a fantasy version of that region of the world to the extent - probably less than the extent - to which Greyhawk is a fantasy version of Europe. In other words, it's nothing like it but has a little bit of the furniture.

The Fear of a Black Dragon podcast favorably reviewed the setting, and used the same argument for why the setting was not an example of orientalism.  The argument seems to go that though the setting is inspired by the geography, culture, and aesthetics of a given culture, it is not an analog of that culture.  Analytically, this does not make a lot of sense to me.  What constitutes an analog for a fantasy world?  Would anything based on or inspired by real world geography, culture, and history count as an analog by this definition? 

More to the point, if we are using Edward Said’s Orientalism as the theoretical frame, the question of analogy is not really relevant.  Orientalism is about the topos that Europeans create about the ‘East.’ That is, it is about the fantasy of the East, not the East itself.  Perhaps this fantasy is an analog in the way that it mapped onto real world geographies (with devastating consequences).  But the salient point of the critique is the way European scholars and artists leveraged a set of tropes, ideas, and representations to create the ‘Orient’ as an object of knowledge.  In other words, it was a fantasy ‘inspired by’ a vague appropriation of real world culture.  Perpetuating those stereotypes—the mysterious East, decadent and cruel—reproduces that topos and the control over its representation.

So it’s a cop out and very lazy when McGrogan writes “Nor is it similar to the real world. It has slug-men in it, for goodness' sake.” I’ve heard versions of this sentiment online countless times—“it’s just fantasy.  Look there are fantastical creatures in it.  Relax.” Stories of the exotic East that have fascinated the curious West—Aladdin for example—have fantastical elements, and yet despite those (or really because of those), their refashioning does the work of orientalism in establishing and controlling the narrative of what the ‘East’ is.

So…is Yoon-Suin orientalist or not?

In a word, yes, unquestionably.  Is it therefore offensive?  Not entirely.   The first edition of Yoon-suin starts as a frame narrative written by “Laxmi Guptra Dahl” and containing a hodgepodge of 18th and 19th travel writing hallmarks.  Most of the really explicit stereotypes are here, and yet they are voiced by a character who is explicitly an explorer (and one implicitly from a non-Western non-analog space in this fantasy world).  The knowledge that this character introduces is thus unreliable, quasi-ethnographic, and involves further frames as he quotes other characters. (This style of frame narrative, by the way, was also a hallmark of 19th c. British colonial adventure fiction, such as the pulp writing of H. Rider Haggard.  For this reason, it was taken up by Conrad in Heart of Darkness as a way of providing ironic critique).

The writing of Dahl is replete with stereotypes, as mentioned above.  For example, Dahl writes

It never fails to impress a visitor to the Yellow City that its citizens are by turns the wealthiest, most refined, and most educated people int he world, yet at the same time capable of the most malicious cruelties and and licentious depravities.  Like all those whose societies are ancient and rich, they are also cynical and filled with ennui.  The most singular feature of their life, which strikes any visitor the moment he arrives, is their strict hierarchical stratification, which all inhabitants obey without question. (3)

This is an ancient but decadent civilization, exotic and yet filled with ennui, and marked by an oppressive power structure.  The text continues in this way, describing a caste system or the native people of the jungle in ways that present a simplified otherness.  

This is followed by a main text written McGrogan’s voice and consisting mainly in random tables.  There are places around the edges that suggest that not everything in the initial exposé should be taken as truth; this could be expanded upon in clever ways, ways that actually require the reader and potentially players consider how they are understanding the ‘strangeness’ of this strange place.  To the extent that the text does not interrogate the opening’s supposition, I would yes, it repeats orientalist cliché.

Why is it not that offensive?

I find such clichés not totally offensive because the setting is very DnD, and DnD, by containing elements from Euro-American pulp fiction, also carries over much of that fiction’s stereotypes and aesthetics along the with the colonial sensibility of “exploration.” And a big part of Yoon-Suin’s “problematic” bits have to do with the way that it is actually very much a bog-standard dnd setting with, as McGrogan says, a bit of oriental furniture added to ‘spice things up a bit.’ This gesture of turning to the ‘exotic’ is problematic an annoying, certainly. However, if you’ve signed up for dnd, you’ve signed up for some version of this, and Yoon-Suin provides.  

This is to say that while voluminous, the setting strikes me as bland.   Where a writer like Zedeck Siew makes creatures that are evocative of a different way of thinking about and inhabiting a world, McGrogan provides statted-up baddies for the PCs to kill.  The hooks are similarly about investigations, monster hunting, and faction play in a very typical dnd way. In other words it doesn’t do more than provide some ‘exotic’ imagery and decoration for what is, at its core, a pulp fantasy experience. It’s orientalist in a bland way, that is, in a way that barely conceals what is a very generic and uninteresting dnd setting.

Final Thoughts

In the end, this setting is just dnd.  Whereas I thought I would be uninterested in playing in a Yoon-suin campaign one day because of its orientalism, I find myself turned off by its unimaginative presumptions.  I will say that any setting that models a caste system—a violent institution that very much still exists—will be a turn off for me.  Neither do I love some of the mid-2010s OSR-isms (calling sex workers “whores,” etc. (and yes of course Zak S. was consulted for Yoon-Suin)).

Honestly, what’s more offensive is the above quoted statement.  If you are from the UK, as the author is, there is room to ‘be inspired by’ particular cultures and be thoughtful and self-reflexive at the same time.  Instead we get a statement that is dismissive to the point of being insulting.  He writes

You might think it is illegitimate for me to have made it that way, maybe because you have read online summaries of Edward Said's Orientalism or half-paid attention to his writings as an undergraduate; if so, there's probably no getting through to you, except to resort to an old but sensible cliche: sometimes imitation is just the most sincere form of flattery. And only that.

He implies here that those of us concerned about representation in the ttrpg hobby or in fantasy more broadly, many of us including myself being people of color, do so because of our poor understanding of Said, itself a product of our lazy study habits.  I happen to be a person of south Asian descent, and a postcolonial scholar to boot.   And I happen to think that McGrogan should maybe be more inviting of this discussion than defensive, more self reflective than condescending in this manner.  Hopefully he will be with the second edition.