True, and that's why we have Sindbad and Aladdin and so forth. But I still say that puts us Vorthos in an awkward position, because they don't make any sense in canon unless, as Thrull Champion says, we assume Earth is part of the Multiverse. But even that has its problems from a fantasy standpoint, and, with Rabiah specifically, an historic standpoint. Because it has not, to my knowledge, been established in canon that Rabiah has knowledge of Earth or Earth's historical or fictional characters, yet we have actual and (presumably) canon characters in Magic that represent them.

You got it all wrong.

When our poets looked into the infinity of the multiverse, dreaming of other worldly stories, they saw Rabiah. Much how Yotian Soldier and Ornithopter exist on Mirrodin, these idea's exist on Earth.

How does that explain, say, the Library of Alexandria, an actual library located in a factual city named for the real-life historical figure Alexander the Great?

Actually Alexander named every city after himself Alexandria.

At one point there was over 200. Clearly this was the reverse effect of another otherworldly poet drawing inspiration from us.

Since Wizards is lifting stuff from existing languages and cultures for their card sets, I see this is something similar.

There's kind of a fundamental difference between lifting motifs and lifting actual cities. I mean, for one thing turning someone's city (that is currently subject to US colonialist meddling) into an actual fantasy setting is basically Orientalism taken to ridiculous extremes. So you've taken an already deeply problematic action and made it way worse, basically.

And for another thing, I'm really not comfortable with the base logistics of explaining how Islam can exist on another plane of reality, let alone touching on how potentially trivializing and offensive that is. Is Islam the third Abrahamaic faith on Jamuraa, too? Is there a Jamuraan Jesus Christ, then? It's like the city problem but even more thorny and tangled and prone to raising extremely weird questions.

First off, US Colonialist Meddling? Care to elaborate on this one?

Now the Library at Alexandria is so legendary, it's practically a trope. Not to mention, as I said earlier, there was more than one Alexandria in Antiquity, and more than one had a library (but granted, there was only one Library). So to think that there might be a Library in a city named Alexandria isn't exactly that offensive, considering I know there is a Library in Alexandria, New York.

Also how is it Orientalism taken to an extreme, it is literally 1001 Arabian Nights, plus Djinn's, a few generic Arabian terms slapped on cards to make them sound exotic (Desert Raiders, Corrupt Witches, Treacherous Ogre are the few I know off the top of my head), a reference to Sandman to make the entire set Meta (not to mention Shahrazad), and Garfield's wedding party, and you have Arabian Nights in a nutshell.

So for the sake of argument in the third question, yes, in some form there is. Frightening, isn't it? I know your not comfortable with the idea, so if you have another solution, throw one.

Political correctness does little good but stifle freedom.

Thrull Champion: we sent an army into the real world Baghdad about a decade ago. If that doesn't count as meddling, I don't know what does.

I think you're overthinking it. It is no different than when a fantasy author uses a thinly-veiled fantasy version of a real location. Like a fantasy setting where the dress styles and architecture are extremely close to, say, renaissance Italy. It's renaissance Italy in everything except name. Bringing this back to the topic, Wizards basically just decided to go ahead and use the actual location's iconic structures and figures.

Richard Garfield never thought Magic would get as big as it is.
Suffice to say, I'm sure none of the early set designers did either.

Ok but you're acting like using thinly-veiled fantasy versions of real locations is also value-neutral. But it's not. All too often it just ends up being really racist. I mean... that's a pretty well known criticism of Tolkien? To the point where I'd expect everyone to be at least aware of the issue by now?

You can't use something already fraught with problems to justify something fraught with problems.

@Thrull:

Do you actually know what I mean when I say "Orientalism?" Because it really sounds like you don't since Arabian Nights is a good example of Orientalism in and of itself.

Also what Cato said.

Does anyone remember VLW's Unmulteyverse concept?

Keeper, not everyone knows the common criticisms of the works of popular fantasy authors.

Really? Huh.

I actually thought that had made it into the zeitgeist by now but I guess I was wrong?

I mean I can kind of run through it if anyone is actually interested... Ditto for "Orientalism," which I also thought was a pretty well understood concept but uh... I've been in Academia for a while now. >_< I mean I'm not super interested in writing a whole thing if people are just going to dismiss it out of hand but if people are interested I will.

@Luna:

Wait, do you mean the overall concept or... was it VLW that wrote the story about Earth being a manaless part of the Multiverse? I haven't thought about that in ages.

I'll definitely read it. I've never heard of Orientalism before today, and although I'm aware that one of the common critiques of Tolkein's works are that they oversimplified and all, I've never been given any clear definition or examples of why this is the case; although, I also have never actually read any of his works, so >:/


I think that he was the one who wrote it... Lemme see if I can find it painlessly. If I do I'll post it here for the benefit of all.

I think it was in our group... ... Maybe? That was years ago now. o_o Wow, this is an old project.

I think this was it. The term VLW actually came up with was "omniverse," and "Un Multeyverse" was actually yours.

Sorry Keeps, but literary criticism is a subject which people outside of a very small circle are generally pretty ill-informed about.

As for LOTR, what I dislike is its depiction of absolute evil, especially as something racial. There are bad guys (orcs), they were born bad, they're easily recognizable by their physical features, and they need to be ruthlessly exterminated. No armistice, no peaceful coexistence, no compromise, only battle to the bitter end until one side is a pile of bloody corpses.

Yeah. When you pair that with stuff about "cross-breeding" between orcs and humans leading to stronger, more evil creatures, and the fact that Sauron's human armies came from the south and west (and in the movies are depicted as a pastiche of vaguely Asian, Middle Eastern and African cultures), you get a pretty unpleasant mix. Granted, I think there's more complexity to Tolkien's stories than a lot of people give him credit for (and also I still think Tom Bombadil is cool), but... yeah, it's a pretty uncomfortable situation.

That's the problem with pastiches of other cultures. You risk creating a really sort of broad, stereotyped representation, and sometimes end up unconsciously reproducing really harmful racial and colonialist depictions. Stuff like the left-justified fantasy map (i.e. we see the western ends of fantasy continents, and the East or South is some mysterious, far-away place where people are Different), cultures where everyone behaves according to broad conceptions of the culture rather than appearing as individuals (i.e. if a race is a Proud Warrior Race, everyone is a Proud Warrior, whereas white humans are depicted as being full of diverse personality types and occupations), the evils of cross-breeding (ha ha ha oh Lovecraft you racist creep)... all of that, when you pair it with pastiches of real-world cultures, reproduces racist ideas and the transformation of different people into an alien, not-quite-human Other.

That's, more broadly speaking, a lot of what Orientalism is about. Orientalism involves the transformation of the East into a fantasy land that is at once repulsive and sensuously alluring. It's alien and incomprehensible and Westerners have no hope of relating to people from the East, but we can be fascinated by the fantastic stories of that region.

Arabian Nights actually played a big part in the rise of Orientalism in the 19th Century, since it helped inspire countless artists and writers to basically invent a nebulous East defined more by barbaric violence, the sexually-charged harem, and irrationality than, like, anything actually going on in the East or Middle East. Ingre's Turkish Bath is a perfect example of this: (NSFW)



Ingres isn't painting a real Turkey here. He's not interested in a real place at all. He's a dirty old man and he's imagining the East as a place where rough, violent Muslim rulers keep rooms full of naked women simply lounging around and fondling each other.

What this does to real people, though, is reduce their lives to a set of fictional tropes... and it goes hand in hand with colonialism, since colonialism depends on the assumption that other races are backward and barbaric and need the strong hand of wise westerners to sort them out. We saw this rhetoric leading up to the Iraq war and still hear it fairly often. Colonialism as a mindset is still alive and well in the west.

So in that context, I think it's really dangerous ideologically to take real locations and turn them into explicitly fantasy settings. Stone-Throwing Devils illustrates that danger pretty well, since apparently it referred in the story to... actual people, rather than supernatural devils. Wizards didn't realize it, and ended up printing a card that apparently was actually pretty offensive. (I don't know what the full context for that is, unfortunately. My google-fu is failing me hard right now.) There's just a lot of pitfalls here, particularly, again, in the context of the occupation of the actual Baghdad and its construction as a symbol of the Clash of Civilizations and the irreconcilability of Eastern and Western value systems.

That's basically a primer on racist fantasy writing and Orientalism. Incidentally, this stuff is a major reason why I'm still dragging my feet on Jakkard. The more time goes by, the less comfortable I am with the setting. I don't want to reproduce the same pastiche view of Native Americans that's already so present in popular culture, but to erase the presence of other cultures in a Western setting is just totally unthinkable, so I've basically gotten paralyzed. But I'm more comfortable with that paralysis than I am with shutting off my empathy, if that makes sense. I don't want to build a world on the tombstones of whole cultures.

But yeah, that's the basics of those concepts.

Sorry for being arrogant and impatient. I'm not used to be in an environment where these ideas are not just known but accepted as basic, foundational ways of understanding art that go without saying.