Sketch Commissions are CLOSED for the moment. Arcana side-blog of teh midget-banana, as always #mine for stuff i draw. i cant post "sensitive" content no more but imma fully grown adult (a moment of silence) so tharr be 18+ subjects in this blog, be warned.
Just some notes i collected over the years about tiny muriel lore bits, feel free to add more:
one (possibly removed) dialogue from nadia route suggests that he fought leopards or cheetas at some point
he is good at magic
he used to wear a small loincloth, dunno what that means. either his underwear was skimpy or that julian thought hes way bigger.
he secretly likes sweets
he watched over mc when asra was away
which also means he occasionally perused the vesuvian streets and, dare i say, interacted with human people
it was indicated somewhere that he met mc before the prologue, possibly he got caught stalking them before. he had a dialogue like "you never listen" or something but also possibly removed
he did actually say he takes cold baths, in his route
ice in cereal
he is friends with multiple supernatural animals in the forest
okay i cant remember where i got this and there are so many removed bits so they might be my imagination but i remember some nameless person saying they hear chain noises coming from the forest or something like that so its possible that vesuvians know of "the weird hermit living in the haunted forest"
vesuvians are big fans of the scourge. even during the period the game takes place. multiple people sing his praises
he vaguely remembers getting sent off. he was older than asra when it happened
his blanket is likely a tapestry from his clan.
he whittles tiny figurines. him an asra have matching ones.
his stage name comes from the scourge lucio brought upon his clan
hes self conscious about his body image because due to his size kids assumed hes brutish and later on because hes immediately recognizable by people as the scourge
everywhere except his own route hes depicted more cryptic than shy
he was kept away from asra but also asra told him all about the MC so im not sure how that works
he knew about asras plan for the ritual, likely helped him
the time between his escape and the plague is a mystery
he used to give a cryptic message to the MC in the old prologue that said asra and MC get lost in their own world. kinda sounded like "you two run the fuck off and leave us to clean your mess"
he catches both asra and julian getting frisky with the MC in his hut and acts like a normal person. hes aware of the concept of sex.
this muriel bathing drama is hilarious to me bcs they underdeveloped him so much that the only fun fact they can think of about a character that they themselves wrote is a canonically depressed man's poor hygiene. its like writing "fun fact: julian is sad sometimes :)))"
guys please im begging you to calm down. your mc can teach muriel how to fuck. hes inexperienced. i was taught how to eat pussy by someone else, i didnt come out of womb knowing how dicks work, even at the age of 26, having some amount of experience at that point, i still had my partner explain to me how foreskin works. first time i was with a trans woman i froze, i didnt know what to do. its completely natural to have MC show him the ropes. thats how sex works sometimes. IT.IS.NOT.RACIST.OMG plz im begging you go out and touch some fkin grass stop throwing these buzzwords around
I wasn't initially going to write this long essay but it seems like the fandom is oversaturated by strictly modern western perception of history and I would like to offer my two (thousand) cents about fantasy.
Since the game itself hasn't done alot of worldbuilding I will have to infer certain things strictly from the aesthetics that were used on the visuals. And I will only talk about the stories presented in the game. Nothing more, nothing less. No dev tweets or headcanons.
1. Indigenous men of Arcana
2000 BC some people in today's China set on a journey towards west. Calling them nomads today means very little, since permanent settlement was not a common concept for most societies. The civilization as we know of today is thought to emerge in Mesopotamian region(all the way back 10k BC), we are still uncovering pieces of that history so I won't get into that. For now just read this without thinking of words such as "civilization" "settlement" etc. in today's context.
Fast forward to 1500 BC, in Anatolia a state, Hittite, among many other small states, triumphs. We do not know from where exactly they originated from, but the remnant of their culture can be found in modern-day Ukraine. We can, however, say that they've been in Anatolia for at least a couple hundreds of years by the time their name started to appear in historical records. They expanded by conquest. And as they expanded, they adopted several deities and traditions from the lands they occupied. At one point it is thought that they had hundreds of gods in their pantheon.
There was another big name player in the game at their eastern border, an empire called Mittani, it's not known where exactly they came to be. Records show that they were worshipping indo-aryan deities but have likely adopted the local language.
The third competitor is probably the most well-known today, Assyria. Now this kingdom had a more strict caste system than the rest, as far as we are aware. They seem to have had rather harsher rules regarding liberties of slaves. Though, much like in Hittites, it was -on paper- possible to climb the ranks and upgrade your caste.
These civilizations generally had two types of slaves, what we would consider proletariat today and captured foreigners. From the records we have today, race doesn't seem to be a concept that played a part in deciding someone's caste.
Now we have here three sizable Empires, all grappling for power, all who'd left a huge mark in world history and we are not entirely sure where any of these people originated from. We know there were already established inhabitants in the lands they occupied (Hassunas, Hurrians etc.) and we know Hittites didn't conquer their way from Eastern Europe. They may have unified the tribes/clans in the area, they may have just settled on an empty land and kept expanding. Certain things were documented, other details, were not.
Mittia falls and the other two grapple for power. It becomes a vassal for Hittites and Assyria annexes a great majority of it. Now these supposed Aryans are spread between two kingdoms.
1200 BC and Hittites collapse. Assyria swoops in and claims its remains.
Assyria cannot be stopped, it absorbs the entire asia minor, until 600 BC, when Babylonia overpowers it. Now this Babylonia, it had appeared on a land that used to be Sumer and gradually their cultures and languages had meshed together. It was already bi-cultural by the time it absorbed Assyria, who had already absorbed Hittites, who've also absorbed Mittians.
Upon their demise another kingdom goes to town on Anatolia until Greeks make themselves at home and start naming everything Greek and start speaking Greek and worship Greek gods.
At this point we start seeing a form of discrimination that is closer to modern-day racism with how people are documented, and its only 300 BC. Up until this point, no one seems to be big on assimilation. As the conquerors didn't seem to much care about the native customs. BUT much had gone undocumented so nothing's for sure.
Greeks/Macedonians rebrand their empire to Roman Republic and slowly chomp down on other Hellenistic states. Okay, so we add Armenians, Greeks and Slavs to the pile.
Let's circle back to those bunch of people from China, over the span of 3000 years they slowly made their way to Mesopotamia, establishing numerous states on the way, splitting, regrouping, intermingling with the natives, getting hairier...
Over time their population spreads to Asia Minor completely, establishing smaller feudalities which eventually merge to Ottoman Empire. They call themselves Turks, apparently. To the pile they go.
Now I'll tell you what you call all these people today, and I don't mean what you'd call them after running some DNA tests and measuring their skulls or such, what you'd call them off the top of your head. You don't call them Aryan or Slav or Yamyana. They're Persian. We call them Persian.
So there are these native Persians, living in Iran, an established country today, where they are native to. And there is this big pile of other ethnicities we collected. Whom have also meshed with Persians over the span of thousands of years. The Persians of today are not the Persians of Assyrian Empire. Cultures grow and change as they interact with each other whether through war or trade.
Why the long history lesson? Because I would like people to know what it sounds like when they write "But Muriel, a native--"
Native doesn't mean what you think it means. Indigenous or native-coding is A Thing. And I understand what people mean when they say that, because they're referring to modern western history. However, it is not the only history. Cultural genocide had been done by many people of various ethnicities to other people of varying ethnicities throughout the history. Chinese are native to China, Slavs are native to Balkans, Celts are native to Britannia. You can't just say "he's native therefore--" and expect to offload the entire history of western expansion when by the time some of these cultures were establishing trade routes west didn't even have wheels.
Muriel is native to South, in Arcana. So is Lucio. Yes, Morga's people are native to the land that they occupied. They are described as warring tribes, so I can assume that they weren't expanding, but ransacking. Which means they didn't conquer or colonize. This conflict between two tribes resulted eventually in both their destruction and both tribes only have two survivors left that we know of.
This is the history we are given. As you can see this is missing few thousand years worth of steps that I outlined -in detail- above, that results in a dominant ethnicity in a given region.
Two native tribes warring for resources is not a colonization effort. As the history shows, some civilizations we call indigenous today are alive not because they survived peacefully of the land but because they prevailed through bloodshed.
I am not telling this to advocate for one side of the other, I'm only saying that you shouldn't read these through a modern lens and instead put it in the historical context it was inspired from.
2. A brown person with a white oppressor
So we continue this history lesson from the Archaemenid (Persian) Empire which overthrew Assyrians.
I think we can safely say that all these people I talked about are a little brown. I don't think you'd call any of them white, anyhow. So these brown people were colonizing Greeks, and when Greeks rebelled, they'd be sold to slavery. (circa 500 BC)
100 CE Slave trade played such a big role in Roman Empire that there were wars named after them. Well but, who were these slaves?
Barbarians.
The word barbaroi means something like "non-greek". But if you're thinking of a hunky seasoned dark man in leathers you'll be sorely disappointed. At its inception it was used for Northerners such as Germanics or Celts. They were a quite bit paler than your average greek. (There were black slaves, mostly bought from Egypt, whom had been colonizing the norther Africa)
Somewhere around 1400 CE this Ottoman Empire stars stealing the boys of Europeans they conquered to indoctrinate them into the army, and distributes their white, pale, blue eyed blond women to noble houses. If you know about orientalism movement you know the horror stories that were told and later used as propaganda. Propaganda can have a basis in reality. They enacted raids on Scandinavian region, which I have to assume have paler people than Turks, and sell them to slavery. At some point the death rate of scandinavian slaves gets so bad that the vezir has to tell people to "protect the slaves" because even with what a native considers normal accommodations, they all die to heatstroke.
Christianity was heavily shunned by the Ottoman Empire, and the worshippers could never become a full citizen. With the genocide committed by the turkish republic later and the discrimination of armenians and rums(greeks) that are still prevalent today, its quite clear that the effects of Ottoman's islamic hegemony outlived the Empire itself.
The slavery we do all of these modern media comparisons with today begins at around late 1800s with western powers colonizing the continent of Africa. A continent which had been colonized before by brown people. I have given you a 4000 year history of slavery with every possible skin colour combination. I can personally confirm that the wounds of at least one of them are still healing. So it's not ancient history.
When everything is perceived from an American lens it erases often gruesome but nonetheless rich histories of POC. Native POC, who rose armies, built Empires, sacked and razed cities... It used to be Huns, now it's Western powers, the history of greed doesn't have a skin colour.
3. Devs are American, though
But Vesuvia isn't. It's clearly not inspired by US. Every character and action can be assessed in that context. I cannot say what the devs were thinking. But I can tell you how I read it. Vesuvia is a very Mediterranean inspired city, seems to be a cultural hub of sorts. Lucio was an outsider when he took the throne, he didn't march his mercenary armies, he instead learned the customs of Vesuvia and made his move within the political playfield.
Nothing about his story tells me he had a specific cultural background that allowed him a privilege due to his ethnicity. Nothing shows me a system that catered towards favouring him. In the boundaries of the games lore, that is.
The reason I feel the need to write this is because I believe what Lucio did to Asra's family or Muriel was wrong on a moral level, but not wrong because he was white and they were brown. When we observe the oppression of minorities irl, there's a history there. It's not about one racist man underpaying a certain ethnic minority. It's about a system that allows that, a system which is deliberately crafted to exploit people. Generations of monarchy turning into autocracy that systematically breeds nobility.
No, they haven't done that work in Arcana. Instead in the confines of the world given we have a story of this norse barbarian "civilizing" himself to charm his way onto a Macedonian throne. It could've been a triumphant tale for minorities at that time.
That's where the worldbuilding clashes with modern understanding of race politics. Because the Dev's are American. And Vesuvia was written as a modern Utopia. Call it a shortcoming on the story's part or lazy writing if you want. But you can't call it one-to-one retelling of western conquest. That is an extremely superficial and uneducated interpretation.
Advocating against oppression only means white vs. poc in todays western society. In the imaginary time period Arcana tries to emulate, it could mean advocating for scandinavians against arabs. Or advocating for arabs against indo-aryans. Context matters.
4. Religion
This one I'm not gonna go into too much detail. Everyone's beliefs differ but I would like to briefly touch on Asra's family and Devoraks.
This is a world with supernatural and pre-established gods (or god-like figures). It has a pantheon. I am not %100 certain about Judaism but I believe in both religions, witchcraft is a big no-no. In islam fortune telling is haram too. Even so I know many muslims that get their coffee fortune read or hang up the evil eye to ward of bad omens. And some of them call it the worship of false idols and shun them. So that is not to say these beliefs can't co-exist, but they wouldn't be the religions as we have them today, in the real world. If there was a fox headed man walking around that could give you tips on creating water, I am sure the holy books would have some adjustments to make.
Fandom in general agrees that Aisha is muslim-coded because of her hijab. Hijab is a form of headwear that wraps around your scalp, and it predates islam, because it's the best way to protect your head from scorching sun and your hair from lice. The clothing of natives of the peninsula getting adopted by the dominant religion isn't exactly specific to islam. Traditional balkan to armenian and georgian clothing have similar wraps. So another possible interpretation is that she's just from a hot climate.
It's not erasure to miss the coding. In a global sense, muslims are not a minority everywhere. Islam is not a dying, banned religion everywhere. I understand that it's not represented well in western media and nothing is wrong with reading the characters that way but if for whatever reason someone doesn't, it's not right to scrutinize them for it.
I know people who find it insulting to mystify their religion in a fantasy and I know people who are overjoyed by it. A religion(and its culture) is not a monolith with millions of people having the exact same consensus all the time. And you don't have to have an opinion on it. You don't have to pick a side.
What I think went wrong there was that by removing her hijab, the devs showed their lack of knowledge on the matter. There are dozens of different islamic headwraps, and various levels of modesty allowed. With differing pagan traditions in said cultures that prevail to this day. The islamic society, much like christian society, has a a culture beyond the religious beliefs itself.
Closing thoughts
I repeat, I know what people mean when they make posts about problematic aspects of the story and its interpretation of the characters. I know the devs may not have been coming from an informed mind state when they borrowed aspects of various cultures. But the fans are from all around the world, and their experiences and interpretations doesn't have to adhere to US-centric social-justice movement.
If you read this and your take away is "brown people also doing bad stuff doesn't make white people doing it right", youve missed the point.
If you thought this was written as a defense of actions of certain characters, you've also missed the point.
I wrote this because to think critically of the media we are consuming, it helps to know of the historical context of its inspirations. Theres nothing wrong with peeking inside the gate you're keeping.
I may have misused some terms, english isnt my native language and I am very bad with dates.
What did you mean by devs being American causing an issue with worldbuilding? Your essay was good reading, I'm just a little confused. Can't an American write fantasy inspired by roman history?
ofc they can, i didnt wanna go off on a tangent as the post was long enough but i can elaborate here:
vesuvia is not rome. i mean when you look at bgs, the visage seemed to be lifted from greek/persian architecture 600 BC-400 AD. blending of these two characteristics is actually very fascinating and accurate to how civilizations evolve. the time period they were going for cant really be pin pointed as easily tho, since some inspiration seem to be taken from 1400 AD baroque (palace gardens, sign posts, etc) and i dont think its an issue either, there are 2000 y/o structures that people still inhabit to this day with modern modifications and i think its fine on its own. the problem arises not from the aesthetics but with the application, imo:
- gladiatorial fights or combat as the entertainment of masses ended at around 200 AD (could be earlier, but it was after christianity made it roots at roman empire)
- some things like the stove and teapot became a thing at 15th century and it even then stoves werent a common household item for another hundred of years or so i believe.
now this matters a Whole Lot. there is a society in the mindset that is A THOUSAND YEARS behind its technology at the very least. dont get me wrong, violence as entertainment persists to this day but here we have a very specific sort of entertainment that is most primitive, using very primitive tools. its like depicting early 2000's having public hangings as a pass-time.
a non-american likely wouldnt have made this mistake solely due to exposition. because we have a general idea of what falls where, as we have museums and monuments full of our history. we keep seeing remnant in our everyday life
on top of that, vesuvia being depicted as this busy city bustling with different cultures still FEELS like its forcing the reader to assume that POC are minority. as we don't get to meet any "vesuvian" that is not white-coded. and the main cast that is foreigner never speak in any dialect or use different mannerisms, they feel assimilated in a dystopian kind of way even, which is and has never been the case for any metropole. they look diverse but they dont act diverse. theres no colour as to their customs aside from decor. muriel having tapestries, nadia's sister dancing in a certain way etc. is new to MC but its left there. and this separation of cultures as all or nothing is a strictly american issue, north american even. i cant even understand eastern turks and this indian, arab, kazakh, slav and scandinavian understand eachother perfectly at all times. when i log in to raid w my mates we argue for 5 hours over the proper way to drink tea. i havent been able to comprehend any word our serbian gm said in 5 years.
this is just an observation and i may be wrong since i only interact w american culture thru media/internet but i get the feeling that left leaning american society in general is too reluctant to get their hands dirty. by this i mean meddling with foreign cultures. the white people are not allowed in certain communities (often for rightful reasons) and the immediate assumption is that its same everywhere. its not though. in most places people are happy to share their cultures, customs, make fun of eachother for their traditions... its more like an awkward family reunion. some have vendettas and some are just vibing. when its not at the verge of extinction, you dont have to protect these values with your life, they can be played with. when my partner calls it "greek coffee" i get riled up but its not offensive, its all abit of fun. Bcs neither him nor czech ppl are personally responsible for the erasure of my culture or anything. my culture still persists.
in truth, to be true to a culture will sometimes have to make others feel uncomfortable. some parts of foreign customs are odd, it makes sense to the people exercising them as its a normal part of their life but for an outsider it can be grotesque or absurd. it can range from taking your shoes off on your way in to chopping of lambs' heads in the streets. but no, vesuvia doesnt feel remotely as chaotic, it doesnt feel like it has its own deep rooted identity in the world of arcana. cast looks like those diversity pamphlets of universities. they don't have any variety, they dont smell odd(yes, its a thing. the smell of peoples sweat differs by diet), they dont cook/eat weird shit, listen annoying music, they are just... american with a very british kinda aristocratic twist on satrinavas.
feel free to correct me, i am not too familiar with every which culture or anything, these ramblings are more of an observation than legit reconstruction
I wasn't initially going to write this long essay but it seems like the fandom is oversaturated by strictly modern western perception of history and I would like to offer my two (thousand) cents about fantasy.
Since the game itself hasn't done alot of worldbuilding I will have to infer certain things strictly from the aesthetics that were used on the visuals. And I will only talk about the stories presented in the game. Nothing more, nothing less. No dev tweets or headcanons.
1. Indigenous men of Arcana
2000 BC some people in today's China set on a journey towards west. Calling them nomads today means very little, since permanent settlement was not a common concept for most societies. The civilization as we know of today is thought to emerge in Mesopotamian region(all the way back 10k BC), we are still uncovering pieces of that history so I won't get into that. For now just read this without thinking of words such as "civilization" "settlement" etc. in today's context.
Fast forward to 1500 BC, in Anatolia a state, Hittite, among many other small states, triumphs. We do not know from where exactly they originated from, but the remnant of their culture can be found in modern-day Ukraine. We can, however, say that they've been in Anatolia for at least a couple hundreds of years by the time their name started to appear in historical records. They expanded by conquest. And as they expanded, they adopted several deities and traditions from the lands they occupied. At one point it is thought that they had hundreds of gods in their pantheon.
There was another big name player in the game at their eastern border, an empire called Mittani, it's not known where exactly they came to be. Records show that they were worshipping indo-aryan deities but have likely adopted the local language.
The third competitor is probably the most well-known today, Assyria. Now this kingdom had a more strict caste system than the rest, as far as we are aware. They seem to have had rather harsher rules regarding liberties of slaves. Though, much like in Hittites, it was -on paper- possible to climb the ranks and upgrade your caste.
These civilizations generally had two types of slaves, what we would consider proletariat today and captured foreigners. From the records we have today, race doesn't seem to be a concept that played a part in deciding someone's caste.
Now we have here three sizable Empires, all grappling for power, all who'd left a huge mark in world history and we are not entirely sure where any of these people originated from. We know there were already established inhabitants in the lands they occupied (Hassunas, Hurrians etc.) and we know Hittites didn't conquer their way from Eastern Europe. They may have unified the tribes/clans in the area, they may have just settled on an empty land and kept expanding. Certain things were documented, other details, were not.
Mittia falls and the other two grapple for power. It becomes a vassal for Hittites and Assyria annexes a great majority of it. Now these supposed Aryans are spread between two kingdoms.
1200 BC and Hittites collapse. Assyria swoops in and claims its remains.
Assyria cannot be stopped, it absorbs the entire asia minor, until 600 BC, when Babylonia overpowers it. Now this Babylonia, it had appeared on a land that used to be Sumer and gradually their cultures and languages had meshed together. It was already bi-cultural by the time it absorbed Assyria, who had already absorbed Hittites, who've also absorbed Mittians.
Upon their demise another kingdom goes to town on Anatolia until Greeks make themselves at home and start naming everything Greek and start speaking Greek and worship Greek gods.
At this point we start seeing a form of discrimination that is closer to modern-day racism with how people are documented, and its only 300 BC. Up until this point, no one seems to be big on assimilation. As the conquerors didn't seem to much care about the native customs. BUT much had gone undocumented so nothing's for sure.
Greeks/Macedonians rebrand their empire to Roman Republic and slowly chomp down on other Hellenistic states. Okay, so we add Armenians, Greeks and Slavs to the pile.
Let's circle back to those bunch of people from China, over the span of 3000 years they slowly made their way to Mesopotamia, establishing numerous states on the way, splitting, regrouping, intermingling with the natives, getting hairier...
Over time their population spreads to Asia Minor completely, establishing smaller feudalities which eventually merge to Ottoman Empire. They call themselves Turks, apparently. To the pile they go.
Now I'll tell you what you call all these people today, and I don't mean what you'd call them after running some DNA tests and measuring their skulls or such, what you'd call them off the top of your head. You don't call them Aryan or Slav or Yamyana. They're Persian. We call them Persian.
So there are these native Persians, living in Iran, an established country today, where they are native to. And there is this big pile of other ethnicities we collected. Whom have also meshed with Persians over the span of thousands of years. The Persians of today are not the Persians of Assyrian Empire. Cultures grow and change as they interact with each other whether through war or trade.
Why the long history lesson? Because I would like people to know what it sounds like when they write "But Muriel, a native--"
Native doesn't mean what you think it means. Indigenous or native-coding is A Thing. And I understand what people mean when they say that, because they're referring to modern western history. However, it is not the only history. Cultural genocide had been done by many people of various ethnicities to other people of varying ethnicities throughout the history. Chinese are native to China, Slavs are native to Balkans, Celts are native to Britannia. You can't just say "he's native therefore--" and expect to offload the entire history of western expansion when by the time some of these cultures were establishing trade routes west didn't even have wheels.
Muriel is native to South, in Arcana. So is Lucio. Yes, Morga's people are native to the land that they occupied. They are described as warring tribes, so I can assume that they weren't expanding, but ransacking. Which means they didn't conquer or colonize. This conflict between two tribes resulted eventually in both their destruction and both tribes only have two survivors left that we know of.
This is the history we are given. As you can see this is missing few thousand years worth of steps that I outlined -in detail- above, that results in a dominant ethnicity in a given region.
Two native tribes warring for resources is not a colonization effort. As the history shows, some civilizations we call indigenous today are alive not because they survived peacefully of the land but because they prevailed through bloodshed.
I am not telling this to advocate for one side of the other, I'm only saying that you shouldn't read these through a modern lens and instead put it in the historical context it was inspired from.
2. A brown person with a white oppressor
So we continue this history lesson from the Archaemenid (Persian) Empire which overthrew Assyrians.
I think we can safely say that all these people I talked about are a little brown. I don't think you'd call any of them white, anyhow. So these brown people were colonizing Greeks, and when Greeks rebelled, they'd be sold to slavery. (circa 500 BC)
100 CE Slave trade played such a big role in Roman Empire that there were wars named after them. Well but, who were these slaves?
Barbarians.
The word barbaroi means something like "non-greek". But if you're thinking of a hunky seasoned dark man in leathers you'll be sorely disappointed. At its inception it was used for Northerners such as Germanics or Celts. They were a quite bit paler than your average greek. (There were black slaves, mostly bought from Egypt, whom had been colonizing the norther Africa)
Somewhere around 1400 CE this Ottoman Empire stars stealing the boys of Europeans they conquered to indoctrinate them into the army, and distributes their white, pale, blue eyed blond women to noble houses. If you know about orientalism movement you know the horror stories that were told and later used as propaganda. Propaganda can have a basis in reality. They enacted raids on Scandinavian region, which I have to assume have paler people than Turks, and sell them to slavery. At some point the death rate of scandinavian slaves gets so bad that the vezir has to tell people to "protect the slaves" because even with what a native considers normal accommodations, they all die to heatstroke.
Christianity was heavily shunned by the Ottoman Empire, and the worshippers could never become a full citizen. With the genocide committed by the turkish republic later and the discrimination of armenians and rums(greeks) that are still prevalent today, its quite clear that the effects of Ottoman's islamic hegemony outlived the Empire itself.
The slavery we do all of these modern media comparisons with today begins at around late 1800s with western powers colonizing the continent of Africa. A continent which had been colonized before by brown people. I have given you a 4000 year history of slavery with every possible skin colour combination. I can personally confirm that the wounds of at least one of them are still healing. So it's not ancient history.
When everything is perceived from an American lens it erases often gruesome but nonetheless rich histories of POC. Native POC, who rose armies, built Empires, sacked and razed cities... It used to be Huns, now it's Western powers, the history of greed doesn't have a skin colour.
3. Devs are American, though
But Vesuvia isn't. It's clearly not inspired by US. Every character and action can be assessed in that context. I cannot say what the devs were thinking. But I can tell you how I read it. Vesuvia is a very Mediterranean inspired city, seems to be a cultural hub of sorts. Lucio was an outsider when he took the throne, he didn't march his mercenary armies, he instead learned the customs of Vesuvia and made his move within the political playfield.
Nothing about his story tells me he had a specific cultural background that allowed him a privilege due to his ethnicity. Nothing shows me a system that catered towards favouring him. In the boundaries of the games lore, that is.
The reason I feel the need to write this is because I believe what Lucio did to Asra's family or Muriel was wrong on a moral level, but not wrong because he was white and they were brown. When we observe the oppression of minorities irl, there's a history there. It's not about one racist man underpaying a certain ethnic minority. It's about a system that allows that, a system which is deliberately crafted to exploit people. Generations of monarchy turning into autocracy that systematically breeds nobility.
No, they haven't done that work in Arcana. Instead in the confines of the world given we have a story of this norse barbarian "civilizing" himself to charm his way onto a Macedonian throne. It could've been a triumphant tale for minorities at that time.
That's where the worldbuilding clashes with modern understanding of race politics. Because the Dev's are American. And Vesuvia was written as a modern Utopia. Call it a shortcoming on the story's part or lazy writing if you want. But you can't call it one-to-one retelling of western conquest. That is an extremely superficial and uneducated interpretation.
Advocating against oppression only means white vs. poc in todays western society. In the imaginary time period Arcana tries to emulate, it could mean advocating for scandinavians against arabs. Or advocating for arabs against indo-aryans. Context matters.
4. Religion
This one I'm not gonna go into too much detail. Everyone's beliefs differ but I would like to briefly touch on Asra's family and Devoraks.
This is a world with supernatural and pre-established gods (or god-like figures). It has a pantheon. I am not %100 certain about Judaism but I believe in both religions, witchcraft is a big no-no. In islam fortune telling is haram too. Even so I know many muslims that get their coffee fortune read or hang up the evil eye to ward of bad omens. And some of them call it the worship of false idols and shun them. So that is not to say these beliefs can't co-exist, but they wouldn't be the religions as we have them today, in the real world. If there was a fox headed man walking around that could give you tips on creating water, I am sure the holy books would have some adjustments to make.
Fandom in general agrees that Aisha is muslim-coded because of her hijab. Hijab is a form of headwear that wraps around your scalp, and it predates islam, because it's the best way to protect your head from scorching sun and your hair from lice. The clothing of natives of the peninsula getting adopted by the dominant religion isn't exactly specific to islam. Traditional balkan to armenian and georgian clothing have similar wraps. So another possible interpretation is that she's just from a hot climate.
It's not erasure to miss the coding. In a global sense, muslims are not a minority everywhere. Islam is not a dying, banned religion everywhere. I understand that it's not represented well in western media and nothing is wrong with reading the characters that way but if for whatever reason someone doesn't, it's not right to scrutinize them for it.
I know people who find it insulting to mystify their religion in a fantasy and I know people who are overjoyed by it. A religion(and its culture) is not a monolith with millions of people having the exact same consensus all the time. And you don't have to have an opinion on it. You don't have to pick a side.
What I think went wrong there was that by removing her hijab, the devs showed their lack of knowledge on the matter. There are dozens of different islamic headwraps, and various levels of modesty allowed. With differing pagan traditions in said cultures that prevail to this day. The islamic society, much like christian society, has a a culture beyond the religious beliefs itself.
Closing thoughts
I repeat, I know what people mean when they make posts about problematic aspects of the story and its interpretation of the characters. I know the devs may not have been coming from an informed mind state when they borrowed aspects of various cultures. But the fans are from all around the world, and their experiences and interpretations doesn't have to adhere to US-centric social-justice movement.
If you read this and your take away is "brown people also doing bad stuff doesn't make white people doing it right", youve missed the point.
If you thought this was written as a defense of actions of certain characters, you've also missed the point.
I wrote this because to think critically of the media we are consuming, it helps to know of the historical context of its inspirations. Theres nothing wrong with peeking inside the gate you're keeping.
I may have misused some terms, english isnt my native language and I am very bad with dates.
Because I just had to request this type of commission from @mineshaft-birdie! What makes this even better is she titled it "Reparations" when she sent me the final drawing. 🤣
(im really bad at making these posts but f it) ive been trying to move to czechia for years and expended my entire savings(it didnt help that my currency hit rock bottom early this year but hey, whats new) on getting a residential permit bcs EU is a lil bitch so now i dont have anything left to bring this furball to my new place. i havent been able to work properly bcs my living situation is still up in the air and id appreciate if you could consider chipping in if you happen to have some extra and you like my content
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