Multi Racial ethnicities

[DRevan]

Ethnic Aedyr (mostly humans and elves) have fair skin and a variety of hair and eye colors, with blue and green being common.

 

Ethnic Vailians (humans and a small number of dwarves) have dark brown skin and tightly spiraled, dark brown hair.

 

From one of Josh' posts about lore. We covered some of this subject in this thread, but I'd like to expand on it some more.

 

So this idea sounds interesting, but I wonder how it's supposed to work, exactly.

In our world, when two different (human)races met, it ended either in oppression/slavery(Indian castes, Black slavery etc') or mixing(both in some cases), but rarely(if ever) in mutual collaboration to a point of forming a distinct ethnicity while still retaining their racial features.

While I understand that PE's world is different from our own, I wonder how a multi-racial ethnicity is possible.

 

What's your opinion? Feel free to give examples on how the idea was handled in other settings.

[Calmar]

IN most fantasy settings there are cities where humans, elves and dwarves live peacefully together. there is no place for racism within humanity. I think the idea of human 'races' is based around the idea that humans that look different than your kin are by nature different and possibly inferior. In a world where there are actual nonhuman intelligent species.

[DRevan]

IN most fantasy settings there are cities where humans, elves and dwarves live peacefully together.

 

Okay, but I think that there is a difference between races living in the same city that regard one another as distinct communities(like in most fantasy settings), and people of different races(humans and dwarves) that consider each other to be part of the same cultural entity(or ethnicity), which I think is what PE aiming for.

[temporalTemptation]

I am slightly concerned over this too. Racism (when dealing with either real or fictional races) in fiction tends to be of the saturday morning kids' cartoon type. It's all about very blatant hatred and oppression. Seldom do we get down to the very fine details, of the secret prejudices that people have for each other, how people are often ignorant of their own bigotry, the way a society can favour one race, how hatred can present itself in an otherwise civil world. It's almost as though there's a switch in the minds of writers that says the setting is either "very racist" or "not racist in the slightest".

 

So how different fantasy races interact when sharing the same living space is very interesting to me. How well different natural abilities or lifespans or cultural heritage of these races affect how they see each other? How do views and attitudes from long-forgotten times present themselves in terms of racial interaction? How have their cultures merged together? In what ways have they not merged? How does romance, sex or friendship present itself across these racial lines? It'd be so very easy for writers to ignore this, or to give the generic "these people like these people but not these other people" as a response, but I hope that Project Eternity will give realistic and believable answers to these questions.

[Jasede]

I believe in Ziets and Avellone.

[Tigranes]

It's one of the driving ideas behind PE that it takes a more nuanced approach to cultural differences and how they develop within the logic of the setting. Should be interesting to see that ends up.

 

I don't really think it needs to correspond in any direct manner to PC debates or to history in order for it to be interesting or relevant.