I never said that, it wasn't relevant to the topic at hand. Of coarse there was Cowboy Dialogue. The man character was a man without a name.

@Keeper: I feel without it, fantasy loses everything it is. It becomes like Pathfinder.

Yes. Stop asking for special privallges because you don't have European origins.

Gods I hated the Forgotten Realms, but that's all they ever push. I think it's only because R.A. Salvatore can cough out mediocre books at a breakneck pace.
I for one liked Pathfinder a helluva lot more.

Of course, Eberron is clearly the master race.

I'm personally very found of Eberron as well.

Also Spelljammer and Greyhawk can be fun.

@Lily: Was that sarcasm, I can't tell on the Internet at 1:30 am.

Greyhawk is entirely too much like Faerun, mostly because they're built way too similarly, including all the inherent flaws.

Though the one thing I liked is Faerun's ancient history dealing with the dragons. All the rest is... not that good. Particularly when the elves are five different flavors of racist.

Nah, race people are annoying. I'm surprised we haven't seen more cries of racism in magic because there's more white characters than anything else.

I once made a troll article about how WotC was racist because they nuked Jamuraa in Time Spiral, and Boggarts were a expy of old black stereotypes in the deep south (they have auntie's, are mostly harmless pranksters with simple intelligence and no self control, and they are otherwise lazy).

It sadly didn't get much bites, and as far as I know, is long since gone from the Internet.


I knew this Black Supremist in HS who did complain about it though. He had an unpleasant end, actually.

Last off topic post: I hope everyone called him racist.

Actually he got beat up one day after insulting some less than reputable good ol' boys, than moved, joined a gang, and from what I understand got shot and went into hiding (or so I'm told).

No more off topic posts.

@Original topic - It's worth noting that Arabian Nights was never intended to be part of the MTG multiverse. It wasn't even originally going to be playable with Alpha (same rules, but slightly different takes on the colours, different card backs).

@Drawing fantasy maps - I usually drew the most important stuff, or the stuff I already had some idea of on the left, but I kind of suspect that has something to do the fact that we use a left-to-right writing system. Come to think of it, I start most of my doodles from the left.

@ Tolkien - I thought the orcs were only evil because they were being lorded over by an evil god. I don't know enough to discuss other criticisms.

@ Importance of race - It has none. I remember a teacher reading a story to my class one time about a Chinese baby adopted by Americans and they want to introduce their child to "her" culture. It was sickening. She has Chinese heritage so her parents plan to take her on a trip to visit her homeland one day to reconnect with her culture or "discover herself"? That's straight up anti-humanist. That is an American person, who just happens to have a Chinese body type. Culture is not in the blood. Race is irrelevant.

@ Fantasy cultures as stand ins for real world ones - Borrowing elements from real life is perfectly fine so long as it's in the right context, and so is blatantly copying whole cultures. It's not lazy worldbuilding if you're trying to tell a fantastical story about those cultures (ex. "Geez I really like ancient Rome, but only write fantasy novels", Firefly is blatantly post civil war USA in space).
Having fantasy races match up to one culture a piece though, is messed up. I guess I can't use the term antihumanist, but it denies those races of their sense of agency. I'm fine with an all leonin nation that share common cultural elements, but don't try to sell me on the idea that all leonin everywhere conform to those same standards. Unless maybe we're talking about a small enough population that every one of them actually could belong to the same culture (ex. If all of Earth's Martians are colonists from the Olympian Republic, then they will all share Olympian cultural elements).

@ Eberrron - Never played it, but even I can tell it is inherently superior.

And remember, use frickin' quotes. There are a couple of posts in this thread that are just "@ [name] - that was a good/bad idea" or "I never thought about it that way, [name]" and I'm becoming hopelessly lost.

I rarely use quotes on my phone, and never when I am one post away from what I am responding to

@Tolkien: I would not find it impossible that the fantastic racism was unintentional, or at least subconscious. There is one simple reason for this: Tolkien hated allegories. He thought all the theories about his stories being allegories for the Bible, or WWII, or any of the other things people thought it represented, were tacky and took away from the story he wanted to tell. So if he was so adamant on there not being any intentional positive symbolism, why would he have used intentional negative symbolism? Of course, subconscious racism is something we probably should expect from a Brit raised in South Africa in the early 20th century. I think it would have been hard for him to shake that off...

It's mostly irrelevant. There's a biological basis in tea-preference between English and Japanese people, for example. (Lactose intolerance is more prevalent in Japan, so they tend to not drink their tea with milk.) But it's not like a culture is in your blood or anything and I'm just nitpicking.

The proverb on Army of Allah is very silly. I'm pretty sure a lot of people will be tired. Victories tend to be hard work.

Ok but don't you think that's really, really easy for you to say, trivially easy, considering that your culture is the culture that dominates much of the globe and aggressively and actively wipes other cultures off the map?

You're part of a system that made race not matter by taking anyone that wasn't white and ripping out their whole history and origin, and acting like race magically doesn't matter anymore does absolutely buggerall other than letting white people off the hook for what was genocide in all but name (and sometimes ultimately WAS genocide--a genocide that in some parts of the US and Canada is arguably ongoing). It hides that act of violence perpetrated against entire cultures, and hides the effects of that violence on the present in the form of systemic inequality, disenfranchisement, racially-motivated violence and sexual assault, exploitation in the prison-industrial complex, and on and on and on.

Same with the stuff Lily and Thrull are spouting. The belief that we live in a post-racial society is a white supremacist belief, and that's really all there is to say on the matter.

@Barinellos:

Yeah, I could definitely use your assistance, if you've got that kind of knowledge. Goodness knows I'm floudering on my own here.

@OL:

Your Army of Allah interpretation makes sense... I mean, we don't read Wrath of God in a literal way, and for ages it seemed like there WAS no god in Magic to be wrathful, anyway. Theros is a pretty titanic shift all things considered. But it seems reasonable to apply the same logic here.

I mean, we already ignore some flavor texts because they suck (koff Jace koff koff) so it's not that crazy to apply the same basic logic here.

It's strange how we always associate the word "Allah" with Islam. It's just the Arabic word for God.

As for the Chinese girl thing, I wouldn't stop her, but I wouldn't try to convince her that Chinese culture was "her" culture. I think people should be allowed to choose their culture instead of having people tell them what it is. Let her decide for herself which one she wants to be a part of, instead of designating her as one because of the color of her skin.

I mean, if we're really saying let her decide for herself, part of that is not dictating that she must embrace Western culture as well. And a logical extension of that is providing a context through which a choice can be made. Designating her as something because of where she was raised isn't value-neutral either, and should be resisted just as strenuously if not more so.

Like, this would maybe be different if we weren't living in a culture that actively tried to wipe any and every culture it conquered off the face of the earth through the systematic state-sponsored kidnapping of children and indoctrination in Western cultural values. But... we do. That's a part of our history of colonialist genocide, and it's not even distant history, either.

I mean I don't care about this particular person really, it's the extension of this anecdote to a general principle that I have a problem with.

Except that isn't true at all, because every culture has done that.

How many different nationalities were conquered by the Chinese, and as such, languages lost. Emperor Chin literally committed acts of genocide almost daily. The Mongols Golden Horde was so brutal that we still feel the effects of it, not too mention that if your Chinese, there is 1/3 chance you are related to Ghengis Kahn. The Ottomans were bastardly with that as well.

Alexander the Great literally wanted to own the entire world, the same with Napolean and Stalin.

The Aztec were brutal conquerers as well, it's a blessing to Pre-Columbine America that the Aztec weren't able to imagine going further outside there Walled City State than what they did.

Hell even as WW2, it was Japan's dream to literally wipe out the Chinese, and some still hold that sentiment to this day (and vice versa China to Japan).

So it isn't unique to the US by any stretch.

[rams head against a wall]

Right, yes, ethnic cleansing that was still going on in the English speaking world a few decades ago is definitely the same as Alexander the Great, and his existence makes this ethnic cleansing ok.

No, I'm saying why are you saying only white people ethnics cleansed?

Wasn't there a Rwanda genocide in the 90's?

Also there is currently a genocide on whites in South America. Why aren't you so vocal about these?

You know what else? I thought better about that post and was going to delete it, but I apparently can't, which means that it was flagged literally as soon as it was posted.

Thrull, you have been waiting and pushing deliberately to get someone heated to the point where they called you out, and you pounced as soon as you got what you were looking for. That's disgusting and shameful, and says to me that the only reason you're here is to troll.