Mistmaster wrote:My future take on Invidia will revolve around Vistani culture.
Then here's some tips on how to avoid cultural insensitivity, not that I think you need it, Mistmaster, but because I feel like talking to the void in hopes future authors won't remake mistakes past. I'll add more as I think of it.
Cultures are heterogeneous. By painting each domain's folk with one brush while those domains are also imitating aspects of a real world culture or country, it can and will be taken as a statement of values. This invites problems, triple so when a folk aspect is perceived as negative like "hot-bloodedness". One of the solutions: draw from multiple sources and be original.
Don't create stock characters. Consider the Hollywood Indian. In the United States alone there are ~600 federally recognized Native American tribes, at least a thousand if you add in the unrecognized ones, and probably thousands more still if you can count the tribes no longer extant. Their cultures, stories, history, and lifestyles still are and were as varied as the stars in the sky. Yet in early Westerns, the "Indian", of whatever tribe the writer thought sounded most exotic, was a savage raiding brute on horseback who scalped settlers and attacked caravans. Screenwriters recognized this depiction was problematic and soon the pendulum swung back the other way. A new stock Indian was born: The wise and noble savage in tune with the land. (Note both's resemblance to the Vistani!) The solution is to leave behind stock characters altogether and create multi-dimensional people, not plot devices, that reflect a living and breathing culture.
Avoid gothic horror's historical pitfalls.
- Gothic Horror writers often put "exotic" but real cultures and people (or their stereotyped stock character constructs) in the same bin as monsters. Bram Stoker did exactly this with Dracula and his Slovak and Romani minions, and I6 recreated the problem with the Vistani.
- "Foreign" is often synonymous with horrible and mysterious.
- Gothic horror often embeds racism and bigotry in its horror tropes. Even if you are creating an original horror, always do a history check to avoid blundering into problematic territory.
Orientalism is a trap. This one deserves its own section because Ravenloft is very invested in capturing a particular feel from an ephemeral and frankly mythical time period. Orientalism is the reduction of non-Western cultures to static undeveloped societies that rational scholars from learned Western great powers can study to reaffirm the Occident's overall superiority. Gothic horror as a historical (and modern) genre is steeped in "Orientalist" philosophy. One of the major chords in the symphony of Gothic fiction tropes is the importation of unfamiliar overseas goods, knowledge, and ideas, Western fascination with them, the changes they wrought on western culture - an age of proto-science and discovery seen through the patriarchal lens of imperialism.
Ravenloft and DnD design in general are very guilty of it. The canon was and still is predominantly written by WASPs and it shows. In Ravenloft, the domains most clearly imitating western European countries are also the most technologically and culturally advanced. Ravenloft's west-coast "Cultured Core" creates the new, the desirable, and the avant-garde in classic Western forms of course, be it opera or oil paintings. Non-occidental domains tend to be tradition-oriented, have statically kept the same practices for X00 years, and have a lower "culture-level". Japan and China-themed settings are given honorary Occident status and a concomitant boost to their technological and cultural levels because they are "cool".
"Fresh" historical inspiration is everywhere if you know where to look. The essential building blocks of gothic horror bloom in periods of rapid change, fear, and upheaval where old and familiar intersects with the new and mysterious. Southern Gothic came into its own in the wake of the American Civil War and Reconstruction period. English Gothic coincides with the period after the Jacobite civil wars. These times in flux are common and universal, but Western historical interests gloss over or are blind to most of them. There is almost certainly some inspiration lurking in your local history.
