16th August 2020, 7:43 AM
Oh don't drag Tolkein into this.
My suggestion is simply calling them "species" and allowing their personalities to vary far more widely within a culture. A culture is not the individual, it's more of a statistical average of a group of individuals. There are klingon lawyers. There's saiyan engineers. There can be a minotaur paladin. Special traits should stray away from things like "good at goldsmithing" and towards more absolute things like "driders are the only ones that can spin freaking webbing from their butts"
Related to this, it's important to recognize the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural blending. Wearing another culture's stereotypical garb and costuming as say a native American, that's appropriation. On the other hand, wearing a set of mocassins because you just think they're confy without going the whole "hey I'm this race for fun" route is just cultural blending. (And no, there's no situation where blackface is "blending", it's ALWAYS cultural appropriation and racist.)
My suggestion is simply calling them "species" and allowing their personalities to vary far more widely within a culture. A culture is not the individual, it's more of a statistical average of a group of individuals. There are klingon lawyers. There's saiyan engineers. There can be a minotaur paladin. Special traits should stray away from things like "good at goldsmithing" and towards more absolute things like "driders are the only ones that can spin freaking webbing from their butts"
Related to this, it's important to recognize the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural blending. Wearing another culture's stereotypical garb and costuming as say a native American, that's appropriation. On the other hand, wearing a set of mocassins because you just think they're confy without going the whole "hey I'm this race for fun" route is just cultural blending. (And no, there's no situation where blackface is "blending", it's ALWAYS cultural appropriation and racist.)
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)