R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I wonder how many other Revenants there will be… Just Rytlock and the PC? A few NPCs in the new zones? Or NPCs all over Tyria?
technically speaking, all PCs are canon. sure, you’re the only one involved in the personal story, but every other PC you come across is a “professional adventurer”.
Sure, but that’s not really what Koviko’s asking. It’s a question of whether ANet’s going to retroactively fill up the world with revenants, and if so, how they’ll go about it.
To address the question: way I see it, if this is indeed going to be a retcon, they’ve got two options- they need to either seed the world with revenant NPCs, or handwave it as a particularly difficult/esoteric/plain rare ability, one out of reach of the NPC masses. If they don’t make a visible choice, it’s going to end up looking like the later anyway.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That’s something I’ve been thinking about too. There is profession specific dialogue in-game now, even if it is so scarce it may as well be non-existent, and expanding on that system would be the easiest way to ease the revenant in- but I’d want to see it expanded for all professions, or else we’ll end up with the revenant getting far more of a unique experience than any of the other options. My concern is that while it seems easiest, it’d still require devs to comb exhaustively through existing dialogue for places to work it in, or else change dialogue or add new NPCs altogether, and it’d be much, much more low-key then added PS or something linked intrinsically to traits. Their response after the event infusion in… the first October, was it? It indicates they aren’t willing to put in such a hefty investment for something that makes so little a difference to your average player.
It occurs to me now that there is a new opportunity for them, though- specializations. The initial offering of one per profession might be a bit niche, but depending on how far they take the system and how much variety they allow within the class archetypes, building story around specializations could easily fill the same roll as the profession quests in GW1, just at the opposite end of the experience, and even allow for a greater degree of customization than the original.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I am skewed in my perspective, since I never played with more than a single other actual person in GW1, but I think the balance thing you’re talking about is a side effect of hard vs. soft trinity design. Both have their pros and cons, and the Six know there’s little chance of me saying anything about it that hasn’t already been said, but it bears pointing out that it’s not a matter of one succeeding at doing the same thing better than the other, but rather of the two being designed to play different ways.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I dunno… the way the personal story was structured, it would have been prohibitively difficult. If it was put in the early parts, you’d need one per race per profession- that’s 40 additional instances, or as you suggest full chapters (the later, if on the scale of the smallest arc that actually got put in, would be by itself half as many quests as were in the game at launch). And if not at the beginning, then where? The racial stories don’t all come together until after you’ve been handed off to your order. From there, I suppose they could’ve replaced the lesser race arc with profession stuff, although that space still would’ve been better filled with well-written order specific plots.
Personally, I think the best opening they’ve had for that kind of content would’ve been the traits system, either when it was initially being conceived or when it was revamped. It frustrates me that instead we just were sent to yet another merchant- who doesn’t even have dialogue!- and then had it additionally tied to absolutely random bits of what was already in the game, with no actual differentiation by profession.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
Well, there were profession-specific quests that helped flesh out the flavor of each class, in Prophecies and Factions, anyway. Pity those died out over time. Alas, the idea doesn’t port well, or at all, really, to GW2’s systems.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
My gold is on them not mentioning it at all- a ‘soft’ retcon, if you will, that revenants were around all along. After all, it doesn’t make any more sense for Rytlock to personally teach a new player the profession, especially if you’re inclined to allow that there’s going to be thousands of them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Actually, there are a couple- in Metrica, the boss golem south of the reactor is powered by the souls of kidnapped refugees, and the complex in the north-east that made it is said by the heart to be generally geared towards that kind of research.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Point taken, there are a lot of factors. But why wasn’t she using her elite guard to combat the Branded? Why didn’t she use her handmaid (who is also a powerful mesmer)? Either of these options would have bought her the same amount of time summoning Logan would have, and she would not be sacrificing the once in a lifetime chance they had to take down the dragon.
Counterpoint: the only reason Logan’s presence bought time is because he released the charr prisoners. That seemed not to have occurred to anyone else, and even if it had, without the pendant Logan carried they never would have trusted him. Even so, they were pushed just about to the breaking point before Jennah got her cast off. While I certainly agree Anise is Logan’s equal in most situations, on a battlefield I don’t think her and two other Shining Blade could buy a fraction of as much time as (checks book) apparently “hundreds” of charr.
If she needs a bodyguard, and has to go to a wandering vagrant to get one, well, she needs to prepare better.
To me, that seems like evidence that her feelings for Logan are actually genuine.
But, since this was phrased as a fun rp warning… yes, my human likes Jennah where she is. Human society is an unfair trap unless you happen to have the right parents, and the Seraph tend to oppress first and extend sympathies later, and sure, there is undeniably something very shady about the Shining Blade. Nobody’s that perfect. But Jennah? She’s kind, but more than that, she makes a point of keeping her hands clean, of believing in honor and dignity as part of being human, of holding herself to a standard. Caudecus is a slimeball, and his wealthy friends- sorry, Ministry- are fops, fools, or cronies. I’d rather have a powerful leader with principles than a helpless one who’d do anything. Besides, we have faith in her. I know your kind don’t get that, and maybe that’s why you’re stuck with the leaders you’ve got.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Well, seeing as 100 coppers=1 silver, and 100 silvers=1 gold, if 1 copper=1 dollar than 1 silver=100 dollars and 1 gold=10000 dollars. I’d put a copper at closer to a cent (silver at a dollar, gold at a hundred dollars)… although, wasn’t there a dev interview recently that said something along the lines that they can’t be compared to real-world currency?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It was the White Mantle in Beyond that found out how to tame them.
*brigands who the Mantle employed. Unless I’m mistaken, none of the Mantle themselves had pet drakes. Before that, though, Dagnar and later other Summit dwarves were riding one, which I believe is the mount referenced in the OP.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s been a long time, and I can’t promise I’ll try to find it again, but I do remember a sylvari somewhere on the second level of the Grove mentioning the nightly sort of dreaming with an uppercase D.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Gonna preface this by saying we don’t have anything remotely comprehensive on how post-death works in Tyria. Consider everything from here on to be extrapolations based on fairly scant evidence.
@Aegrahm the lore does conflict, I’m afraid. The Prophecies manual is where the whole trapped in your body thing comes from, but our own personal experience in GW1 shows that it’s not true. As far as we can tell, a wide variety of human souls, quite possibly all of them, do go at least as far as the Underworld, where Grenth sorts (sorted?) them out into appropriate afterlives. The Nightfall manual, for what it’s worth, says that “Civilized humans know that when they die, their souls pass on into the Mists, the realm of the afterlife. Some spirits linger in this world, or find ways to walk back into the realm of flesh…” That last bit I believe refers to ghosts.
@Bunji As far as we’ve seen, only humans go to the Underworld. What happens to other races is a bigger mystery- we know from the ghosts we’ve seen that at least asura, norn, and charr (and jotun) have spirits, and we see in the Realm of Torment that in at least certain situations charr spirits can end up in a Mists-based afterlife, but we don’t know if that’s the norm or not. As for those races themselves, I believe norn are the only ones that we know specifically believe in an afterlife- asura, iirc, just believe they’re recycled by the Eternal Alchemy to some degree or another and leave it at that, and I can’t remember ever seeing a charr even address the subject.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Assuming, of course, they don’t have better integration of story and open world this time around. It is an issue they’ve known they’ve had, so I’m hopeful that they’ve got something better coming.
As far as age, remember that we’ve also seen Scarlet and, if we’re accepting Nightmare as corruption, Cadeyrn turn, giving actually roughly equal numbers of turned vs. resisted. I think it’s simply a result of the disproportionate story presence first- and secondborn get.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Hm… you’d probably have better luck with that in fan-gen. Lots of quaggan hate here, and we can often be too busy picking apart what’s in the game to help build outside it.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
tequatl is becoming the next elder dragon
Tequatl is dead in-lore.
Well, tailless, at least. All the points the OP made about Zhaitan could apply to Teq as well.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That, and Ascalon is entirely landlocked. Really there’s nothing much else you can do with that map but shrug it off as the Mists getting it wrong.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
It’s possible that what it’d take will be no less than people rioting on the streets demanding for it and making it abundantly clear that it will be political suicide for anyone to oppose it.
Put like that, it seems even more peculiar that Anise, embodying the apparatus by which the Queen could best secretly catalyze that level of popular support, has been set up to be at loggerheads with Logan.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I… think she’s saying yes. I remember there being some comment in the early PS about her having a hard time sending Caithe in. It sounds like she’s referring back to that- kind of a ‘oh good, you remember, so you know this is a pain in my roots’.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That… seems unlikely. There’d be six moons.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I think I’ve seen it maybe once or twice in the Black Citadel, but yeah, it seems like it was an idea that got shelved very shortly into the writing.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
The anti-villain thing really isn’t tied much with the other aspects we’ve discussed, but… as for why I feel it’s happening? Deep or relatable villains are kind of the hip thing in this day and age. I know I certainly tend to like them better. The easiest way to build those into a black-and-white story where you interact more often via shooting than monologues is to add extenuating circumstances (e.g. the mursaat were doing what was necessary to survive/preserve the world) or good intentions (e.g. Scarlet was trying to make Mordremoth die) to a villain who still has a lot of unanswered questions that could fit them, like either of these examples. We even see a little the other way around, starting with a hero and wanting something to tarnish them a bit- you might be familiar with the posts that want Kryta to be more hawkish, or took Canach’s side even before we were written to persecute him.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
As far as the two theories you’ve mentioned go, Wind… I believe the problem there is that we found ourselves in a position where we were repeating the same points very regularly, on plot threads ANet can and has gone years without going back to. Put simply, everyone who’s been around for a while became entrenched (a longer while than I’ve been, for the mursaat, but from what I’ve heard the circumstances may have been similar.) I don’t feel any of us want to feel ANet’s wrong, it’s just that it got to the point where we lost sight of what was ANet and what was us.
As for generally seeing people contest popular theories, I think it boils down to a matter of methodology. To oversimplify, you have the group to whom theory crafting is “wouldn’t it be exciting if…”, who tend to get the force of the hype train behind them, and those who treat theory crafting as a way to try to predict the most likely future course of the plot, who tend to be a lot harder to beat down in an argument. If you squint at it hard enough, it’s a case of unstoppable force vs. immovable object.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t see the plant resemblance, honestly, beyond coloration- and even that looks much more like an animal mimicking a plant than an actual plant.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
@Cure, what the Arah ritual seems to do is technically break the mental link between dragon and minion, allowing the minion to develop/recover (unclear) a will of its own. Use of the term corruption aside, since it really has no bearing on this anyway, we know that the sylvari are capable of existing like this- it’s been the state of their whole race for the last 25 years.
@Erukk unfortunately, if there is a mass turning, that’s probably true. Still, if circumstances make it feasible, I’d like my character to at least be able to attempt the ritual. Partly because it’s the right thing to do, and partly because my inner asura would be fascinated with the results and what they reveal about the process.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Another thing to note is that despite mord’s attacks, none of the playable races (except sylvari) seem to corrupted, instead there bodies are just left hanging off vines.
We’ve seen a corrupted charr in the trailer.
The thing Rytlock takes down with a spear? Really doesn’t look like a charr, imo.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
To be fair, qarinus, just a couple patches ago we discovered an ally we had worked together with tortured, experimented on, and murdered what amounted to children, or at least minors. Regardless of how uncomfortable it may be to see, it is ground ArenaNet have proven they’re willing to tread, and so it is fair game for speculation about where they might go in the future- especially seeing as the trailer on this subject hinted at what certainly appeared to be a lynch mob.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Imagine a massive group encounter fighting alongside allied ‘foreign’ NPCs. These NPCs call out directions (verbal telegraphs) that only language-empowered players can understand, which they can then translate for the other players, empowering the group as a whole.
shudders
Playing telephone for a zerg? What have we done to deserve that?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
They are dragon minions now, and act like them. Do you show Risen mercy? Mordrem wolves? No. So why show mercy to Mordrem based on humans instead of wolves?
Kill all corrupted Sylvari, I say. And treat those who aren’t corrupted (yet) with suspicion… for your own safety.
The difference here, I think, is that we now know that a cure is possible, whereas for the entirety of the personal story, while we were cutting risen down in droves, it was believed there wasn’t one. That new information alters the moral equation, imo.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Incidentally, Shiren, how does thousands in the course of a few years constitute a handful? It doesn’t seem like that degree of slaughter could be sustainable. Would Kryta be any stronger if it was depopulated? Would an alternative timeline where only mursaat live to constitute it be preferable?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That does, however, fall into the “die free or live a slave” conundrum. Like drax said, trying to wipe humanity out might be considered more honest, and honesty is at least as big a concern as hostility when it comes to trust.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
But the inside of the wurm, if I remember right, looks like the tunnels under the forts we fight the champs in. I’m not willing to call it either way yet, but it certainly seems possible the wurm was at least corrupted by Mordremoth.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I remember seeing that a while back (sylvari whispers, as Konig guessed), but really that only seems to be suggesting the Nightmare Court, and even that not explicitly. I wouldn’t mind the Wychmire events getting tied to Mordremoth, but I certainly don’t see that quote adding anything more to the case.
Konig, any chance you might remember who that Priory NPC is? It sounds like my character hasn’t been as thorough as she should have…
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Primarily, I want to know why they glow colors now. Beyond that… everything? Religion, culture, government, and history are going to be my primary interests, in roughly that order. If we get a new written language for them, that would also be a nice bonus! I also want them to not be whitewashed, a la charr. I know a couple people have been bouncing around the idea that the ones we fought weren’t representative of the race as a whole, or that they might have changed since then, but I’ve been wanting a grayer alliance of convenience for a long time now, and I actually guessed early in Season 2 that the White Mantle might be our opportunity to have that. Going over their heads and dealing directly with their masters would be just as good.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
@Bruno that was later… and that was Colin, too, unless I misremember utterly.
EDIT: “Mordremoth has already corrupted much of the sylvari race, and it just destroyed the Pact fleet containing many of the heroes of Destiny’s Edge. Mordremoth’s power is growing, his corruption is spreading…”
That’s what I was mentioning.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
@Erukk that humanoid has, as far as I can tell, an identical texture to some of the mordrem we’ve seen, as did the fire-breather with him. As for the ones that actually have scales… well, we’ve speculated about the possibility of a race of dragons before. Maybe we have our proof?
I’m not sure if anyone but me will care about the distinction, but what we see aren’t exactly hylek as we know them. One kind looks very strikingly similar to GW1 heket, and the other is small and lanky, more of a skritt like build than a hylek like build, although still clearly a (tree) frog. If I’m not mistaken, didn’t the EotN manual describe heket and frogmen as cousin races? Perhaps we’re seeing more along that vein.
@Bruno It’s certainly a possible interpretation, but the reason it stood out to me was because he didn’t say anything indicating that he meant the ones with the Pact.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
They don’t look alike, but the symbol on the door certainly looks like a much more elaborate version of the bandit emblem.
Anyway, other lore elements that might be discussed here- apparently Glint hid something in the Maguuma around the end of GW1, we’ve got Rytlock ushering in a new class that seems to be a heavily armored ritualist- channels the Mists, specific ‘legends’, with Jalis and Mallyx mentioned as examples. And did I hear O’Brien letting it slip at the beginning that most of the sylvari have turned?
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
That’s indirectly my point, Konig. Yes, if you take the trouble, you can line it up so you get icebrood in the story- and just as easily, my first, and second, character never went near them as part of their stories. Everything we’ve had with them so far has been considered optional stuff, things you can miss without hurting the main story, or at best things you can work through to get to what the narrative treats as important. At no point is fleshing them out a priority- consider how many icebrood talk to us, compared to how many risen. Arguably, feel free to deduct the ones in HotW, on account of seriously subpar dungeon story. What does killing Pet Svanir Wolf #557 tell us about the icebrood? How does wading through them in the dredge holes flesh them out beyond “living creatures whose mind was corrupted by the dragon, body covered with ice”? My argument is not that they have no presence- it’s that their presence is treated as incidental.
That… was a lot rantier than the point required. Tad confrontational too. My apologies, I find expounding addictive this late at night.
@slowpoke we learned how a relatively small subset are turned and operated. Remember, what we’ve seen so far is just the fringe of Jormag’s activity. We hardly know anything about the icebrood beyond the Sons of Svanir, let alone Jormag. As for want, I’m going to take the boring out and admit I don’t really care; my point was observing that the reason the differences between the two factions seems surface deep is that that’s how far the story’s gotten into them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
But it’s all been secondary, and never directly about them anyway. The closest we’ve had is EoD, where an icebrood lieutenant is the goal of the first 2/3 of the book, but they only appear in a handful of chapters, and we aren’t given much information on anything besides said lieutenant. In-game? We fight them when dealing with the Sons of Svanir, we fight them when dealing with the dredge, we fight them when traveling through the overworld, we fight them when saving the grawl, the quaggan, and the kodan- but at no point has it actually been about them, and it’s tied up in the racial personal story or dungeon or hearts, all the realm of side story, to boot.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
I think Malafide’s objection, Kossage, is that such things are hidden. Mix a few raisins into your porridge if you will, but their presence doesn’t change that whether you enjoy the meal or not will still hinge on how bland you find porridge.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
@Koviko to the best of my knowledge, the game only states that the luminaries were born within the first corresponding time of day. That they were first of their cycle seems to hinge on a possibly misremembered interview that no one can seem to turn up, as is the idea that the Firstborn were spread out over more than a day- in other words, unless further evidence surfaces, those ideas are unsubstantiated.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I don’t think they’re too similar- or more to the point, that they’ll turn out to be too similar. It’s just a matter of being the two dragon minion factions who have yet to have a plot dedicated to them, and so being largely undeveloped beyond “these are minions of a dragon” and surface level aesthetics. There are all sorts of small hooks and quirks that can only be heard about from one or two places in the game, and I expect at least some of those will be expanded upon, or other new information will be introduced, when the spotlight passes to them.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
No, I don’t want another LA story yet either. Ideally, I’d see the place rebuilt and then not made the primary focus of a patch again until one or two dragons down the road. That said, the plot there should really be progressing in the background, at least until it gets to a point that’s reasonable to persist for an extended period of time.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
There is a problem with that explanation, though- sylvari are connected on an empathic level through the Dream, and are able to sense when one of them is Soundless, as well as that Malyck was disconnected from their Dream. The only way non-Pale Tree sylvari would be able to infiltrate is if they never came into contact with Pact sylvari- seeing as they make up roughly one-fifth of the organization, no easy task. I suppose it is possible that they were passing themselves off as Soundless, but if so we’ve got another idiot ball storyline- we should have passed on to Trahearne that we’d learned that the Dream is protection against Mordremoth, and he should have therefore been suspicious if an influx of unprotected sylvari started circulating through the ranks.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
One minor correction, DorDor, not that it takes away from your point any- the Forgotten, between the games, are said to have disappeared from the Crystal Desert. We don’t know when it happened, or where they went, but they’re quite simply not around anymore.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’m with Windu here. Every definition of racism I’ve ever seen was centered on superiority/inferiority or hatred, not disregard- caring too much, not too little. If anything, it’d seem to me that protesting your culture being mixed with another’s is racism- are Japanese influences unworthy of standing alongside Chinese influences? Cultural sensitivity is a good thing, but when crafting fictional settings that don’t even imply that they’re portraying the real world, it’s a very minor concern… unless you’re selling to countries where racism is powerful enough to affect sales, I suppose.
Try studying sociology and perhaps you’ll have a better definition.
First off, bear in mind that the only value in a word is insofar as it is able to represent a common meaning to the largest possible pool of people. In any case, the ‘better’ definition is the one you find in the common dictionary, not the one that is used within a specific field of study.
That said, while I thoroughly hated the subject, I have taken a sociology course, and to quote directly from the textbook: “racism: a set of beliefs that one’s own racial group is naturally superior to other groups.”
As for the history between China and Japan, I don’t seek to downplay how horrible that was, and I agree that it’s insulting to the memory of the victims that Japan doesn’t educate their citizens on the subject. Turning that hate around on an entire culture, however, is just that- playing tit-for-tat with collective punishment, matching racism with racism. It’s not stepping up to be the better person, it’s not any claim to the moral high ground, and it certainly isn’t the responsibility of western-based producers to support and accommodate that hate. If ArenaNet or NCSoft has decided to, that’s their prerogative, but I don’t believe it’s the right decision.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
(edited by Aaron Ansari.1604)
At a guess, Glint’s lair, but I don’t know if we know for sure.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Because Glint HAD TO BE GIVEN free will, by the races the dragons were fighting. That was a pretty major point in the dungeon path. It was the Forgotten ritual that gave her the ability to choose.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
Hi all,
Can anyone confirm whether we have fought any sylvari that were not born of the Pale Tree?
So far, we have not. Scarlet was definitely of the Pale Tree, and I can’t imagine Aerin came all the way from Malyck’s tree. Without Mordremoth driving him he’d have no reason, and the survivor accounts indicate he underwent a comparatively rapid but nonetheless notable personality shift as the corruption took hold, ruling out his being pre-corrupted.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.
I’m with Windu here. Every definition of racism I’ve ever seen was centered on superiority/inferiority or hatred, not disregard- caring too much, not too little. If anything, it’d seem to me that protesting your culture being mixed with another’s is racism- are Japanese influences unworthy of standing alongside Chinese influences? Cultural sensitivity is a good thing, but when crafting fictional settings that don’t even imply that they’re portraying the real world, it’s a very minor concern… unless you’re selling to countries where racism is powerful enough to affect sales, I suppose.
R.I.P., Old Man of Auld Red Wharf. Gone but never forgotten.