@Zerubbabel
Ok, have you seen 300? why are half of the persians abominations? is it racist?
Let's say they made a game taking south american colonization as a base and the invaders/conquerors are sadistic hedonistic abominations that only want to erradicate half of the world, should I be offended because I'm spanish?
Games are made to entertain, and many of them base their lore,races or events on the real world, if we took what you said by heart there shouldn't be any movie or game about WW1 or WW2, or serial killers or basically anything that might hurt the sensibilities of any person.
Feudal Japan was a very shitty place and it's always stereotyped in media as a place where everybody was honorable and bushido this and whatever and nobody cares, because people want to see ninja and samurai.
And if you don't like a part of the forgotten realms world-building just made the changes you see fit for you and the people you play with. And of course the same applies the other way around, I don't care what is canon and what is not I ultimately will play the game whoever I want but it's not the same for videogames because you don't have such freedom of choice, you can only play what's programmed.
TL;DR -> Let fiction have diversity in every way.
I guess it's best to agree to disagree before the debate gets anymore heated, as it seems to be sensitive topic for some.
I'm just having a normal conversation here, I don't think there's need for anyone to get heated xD
I don't want to derail this thread or have it locked, but I think the comparisons you make are rather irrelevant.
300 as a film is fundamentally a revisionist work. However, no living person can reasonably say that they are descendants of Achaemenid Armies. The work portrays a historical period over 2000 years ago between political and ethnic groups that functionally no longer exist (Modern Greeks can hardly be called Spartans; Modern Iranians can hardly be called Achaemenid Persians). There is no message in the film that you should not trust the descendants of Persians or that modern day Iranians are abominations.
Unlike fantasy, the real world has nuance. If you were a Latin American of Spanish descent, you would be right to think that being portrayed as brainless, heartless monstrosities crosses a line, especially if the message of the game is that people bearing any resemblance to you or your ancestors should be mistrusted or harmed. In reality, a good game about South American colonization would capture the nuance of the Spanish-descended peoples who would come to those lands. Certainly some came as conquistadors, while on the other hand, many were priests and workers. Still further, many tribes in those lands used the arrival of the Spanish to throw off regional hegemonies, like the Aztecs.
People want to see ninja and samurai, yes. But no piece of media in historical Japan portrays particular peoples with modern day parallels as inherently evil.
In fantasy, you can say that certain peoples are more evil than others. And you can say that is fundamental to their nature. So when you take a real world group of people who are consistently discriminated against for the stereotype of being shady thieves, alcoholics, liars, and child-stealers that refuse to integrate into a legitimate society, and then make a race based on that, arguing they are inherently that way and inherently evil, you might be teetering on racism by allegory.
Tl;dr: History has nuance. Fantasy can remove nuance. The examples you bring up don't have implied allegories about still-living peoples with ongoing oppression. The Vistani do.
EDIT:
I do think that if we can keep this discussion civilized, respectful, fair, and on-topic concerning Ravenloft, we can maintain a reasonable dialogue.
