Oct 12, 2022, 1:40 PM

@Nymeria said in MUers in the news?:

Why shouldn't someone be allowed to write a story set in an isolationist, monoethnic culture?

I don't recall anybody saying they shouldn't be allowed. In fact, I said:

@faraday said in MUers in the news?:

If you're making your own personal novel/story/etc. and want to do some kind of discrimination allegory - I can respect that.

So to reiterate - having a mono-ethnic culture is not intrinsically a bad thing. One just should ask why you're making it mono-ethnic, especially if that mono is all white. Is it really central to the story/world? Or is it just lazy storytelling (like sci-fi mono-climate planets) or implicit biases at work?

@Nymeria said in MUers in the news?:

If you're using an existing setting, the roots are defined already. I dislike tearing them up.

Skin color is rarely an essential, defining quality of those roots.

For instance, my son (an avid LoTR fan) recently did an essay on diversity in LoTR. He acknowledged that Tolkein's original lore did define the kingdoms with certain skin colors (loosely based on real Earth geography, with the region of focus being European and predominately white). However, he argues that people of color like to watch these shows too and "they deserve to have fantasy heroes that look like them." He also noted the benefits for white people seeing people of color not always being the bad guys (as Tolkein originally defined them). It would make no difference to the story if the kingdom of Rohan were patterned more after the steppe peoples of Asia, for instance, or if some of the dwarves in the Hobbit movies had different skin tones.

If an 11-year-old can see that the impact on actual modern-day humans matters more than the beloved lore of a white guy from the 1930's, I think more adults could stand to come to that realization.