Hello, Thank you for your post. I am a white Canadian fan of Yoon-Suin and your post highlighted some things about the discussion that I did not consider. I do not agree with everything you wrote. I find, from a subjective point of view, Yoon-Suin to be an inspired setting and personally it has made me think about how I portray different ethnicities and peoples, even if they are fictional portrayals. I find that it has made me self-reflective about these matters, however, that is just my subjective experience. I agree that the point of view of Asians and people of colour was not taken in much account by the author on his blog.
Thank you for this post and the stuff I hopefully got out of it.
Like most things I believe there needs to be balance. A balance between being respectful but also embracing the limitless potential of our imaginations.
I have no intention of writing an essay today, and while there are sadly too many examples of terrible works of fiction that have perpetuated awful stereotypes some of the most creative projects in recent history have been from creators that have crossed their "cultural borders" and played around with ideas that belong to other groups. One simple example would be the vast body of work from the Japanese company 'From Software'. They have created some of the most compelling worlds in video game history to date by liberally stealing ideas from many different European cultures and stories and reinterpreting them through their own personal and Japanese cultural lens.
Throughout all of human history as a species we have stolen every single cultural idea from someone else. We toyed with whatever we took a fancy to, then played around and folded those traditions until they suited us.
I also come from a culture that has a long history of being brutalised and nearly erased by vastly dominant colonial powers. I am a child of a refugee family. But I am growing tired of these conversations being steered slowly towards cultural segregation. Too many times I've read as people with great intentions to remove all stereotypes from fiction eventually start to propose rules that would only lead to cultural stagnation and eventual cultural death.
Instead I believe in cultural appropriation. I invite people to steal from my family's traditions. Please come and take our practises, our clothes, our songs and mix them with yours. Play in our garden and grow something new. Don't be racist but don't be afraid to take our sacred calf and add some googly-eyes. At the end of the day we will still have our culture and with your help and fresh perspective maybe we can create a new one together.
Thank you for this long comment. My ultimate aim in the post, as I say in the beginning, is not to decide whether someone should or should not play Yoon Suin or any setting, but rather to take a look at what the setting was doing. In my reading--and your mileage may vary--it's not doing very much, just adding a light gloss of orientalism to a standard dnd setting.
More to your points, I think mutual cultural influence certainly happens all the time, and that can be great. I try to be mindful, however, of the power dynamics involved and the *history* of those power dynamics. With the case of something like "orientalist" thought, the aim and result was not simply to intermix cultures and come up with something fresh, but to in fact define and hold, through knowledge, power over the other. This is why you see, for example, artifacts from all over the world in the British museum--that's a way that the "stealing" you refer to is a kind of literal stealing, and not the more optimistic admixture we might desire.
Hello, Thank you for your post. I am a white Canadian fan of Yoon-Suin and your post highlighted some things about the discussion that I did not consider. I do not agree with everything you wrote. I find, from a subjective point of view, Yoon-Suin to be an inspired setting and personally it has made me think about how I portray different ethnicities and peoples, even if they are fictional portrayals. I find that it has made me self-reflective about these matters, however, that is just my subjective experience. I agree that the point of view of Asians and people of colour was not taken in much account by the author on his blog.
Thank you for this post and the stuff I hopefully got out of it.
Like most things I believe there needs to be balance. A balance between being respectful but also embracing the limitless potential of our imaginations.
I have no intention of writing an essay today, and while there are sadly too many examples of terrible works of fiction that have perpetuated awful stereotypes some of the most creative projects in recent history have been from creators that have crossed their "cultural borders" and played around with ideas that belong to other groups. One simple example would be the vast body of work from the Japanese company 'From Software'. They have created some of the most compelling worlds in video game history to date by liberally stealing ideas from many different European cultures and stories and reinterpreting them through their own personal and Japanese cultural lens.
Throughout all of human history as a species we have stolen every single cultural idea from someone else. We toyed with whatever we took a fancy to, then played around and folded those traditions until they suited us.
I also come from a culture that has a long history of being brutalised and nearly erased by vastly dominant colonial powers. I am a child of a refugee family. But I am growing tired of these conversations being steered slowly towards cultural segregation. Too many times I've read as people with great intentions to remove all stereotypes from fiction eventually start to propose rules that would only lead to cultural stagnation and eventual cultural death.
Instead I believe in cultural appropriation. I invite people to steal from my family's traditions. Please come and take our practises, our clothes, our songs and mix them with yours. Play in our garden and grow something new. Don't be racist but don't be afraid to take our sacred calf and add some googly-eyes. At the end of the day we will still have our culture and with your help and fresh perspective maybe we can create a new one together.
All culture is appropriation.
Thank you for this long comment. My ultimate aim in the post, as I say in the beginning, is not to decide whether someone should or should not play Yoon Suin or any setting, but rather to take a look at what the setting was doing. In my reading--and your mileage may vary--it's not doing very much, just adding a light gloss of orientalism to a standard dnd setting.
More to your points, I think mutual cultural influence certainly happens all the time, and that can be great. I try to be mindful, however, of the power dynamics involved and the *history* of those power dynamics. With the case of something like "orientalist" thought, the aim and result was not simply to intermix cultures and come up with something fresh, but to in fact define and hold, through knowledge, power over the other. This is why you see, for example, artifacts from all over the world in the British museum--that's a way that the "stealing" you refer to is a kind of literal stealing, and not the more optimistic admixture we might desire.
lol, lmao