#faerunian canonical diversity

[leomonae]

Kara-Tur is your Faerunian east Asia, incidentally! BG2 had a companion who was from there (Yoshimo, and just to warn you, any wiki article etc about him will have just massive spoilers if you haven't played that game).

Also Sarevok's old lover, Tamoko, who left him over the whole trying to become a god thing, was from one of the nations of Kara-Tur. Sarevok may or may not have gotten her killed, depending on player choices. BG2:ToB actually ends with him going to bury her in her homeland.

Fantasy and Racism

For those who have not heard about it yet: There is a very racist and queerphobic game mod for Baldur's Gate 3. A mod that basically removes all queerness from the game as well as modding all non-white characters white. All obviously under the excuse of "but that is realistic because medieval fantasy world". Which is bullshit. I talked about it before. But it is bullshit and we all know it.

It is one of the reasons I so rarely engage with a lot of high fantasy media. Because so much of it - especially of course the big franchises - kinda succumbs to this idea of a very white, very straight, very cis medieval period, in which disabled kids probably are also like killed by the time of their birth or get "fixed" with magic.

Of course there is diverse high fantasy out there. But definitely the "norm" for the genre is something else. Now, of course there are works that still work in themes about this (The Witcher most of all), but yeah... A lot of high fantasy media LOVES TO HIDE behind the "oh, but that would be wrong historically!" excuse.

And as someone who is a history nerd, I never stop to get super angry about this. The middle ages were actually fucking queer and there were a lot of people who lived openly queer. We know about medieval trans folks, too - and given the fact that we know about less than 1% who lived during those 1000 years - there were a ton more.

We also know that there were people from Africa, the Arab world and Asia living in medieval Europe. Some of them have come there with the Romans, others have come there for research and trade. (The first European person in Japan, was a Roman, by the way.)

Meanwhile most of fantasy is very unrealistic when it comes to things like how society works or how HISTORY ITSELF works. Like, so much of medieval Europe was directly influenced by how Roman society, Christianity and the indigenous cultures of Europe interacted. But guess what? Most fantasy worlds do not have something like Rome in their background, do not have an institution like the Catholic Church, and also do not have any indigenouity. Your average fantasy world was born with folks having medieval technology and over the next 2000 years are very unlikely to develop past medieval technology. Which is very, very unrealistic. But guess what the folks who whine about gays in their medieval fantasy do not complain about?

And that is of course without going into the most obvious stuff: There were no elves in medieval Europe. There were no dwarves, no halflings, no gnomes, no orcs, no goblins, no dragons, no magic, no... Do I need to go on? And there was also not a big group of people running around raiding some old graves and ruins (which were also trapped with all sorts of magic and what not). And indeed there were no gods that threatened to END THE FUCKING WORLD at least once per decade.

Heck, speaking about Baldur's Gate 3 itself, I am more frustrated that there are not more non-white persons around. Like, the only east Asian character I have interacted with was Cazador as far as I remember, and that... is not really great representation, you know? Like, I would have liked to have another non-white companion at least.

Especially as... Well, Faerûn/Toril is not the real world. So, for fuck's sake. The folks within that world can crossover as much as the IP holders want them to.

I mean, fuck. You know what exists within Faerûn? CHOCOLATE! Something that not only was not available in medieval Europe because the beans grew in the Americas, but something that in the form we associate with it was not invented until the 19th century!

Just, yeah. Fuck people who complain about "historical accuracy", because something is diverse and includes rep. Just fuck them.