The Observer, please satisfy my inner weeb
- Thread starter Abere
- Start date
I am NOT Japanese. I AM Chinese. My grandparents were born on the eastern coast, so maybe one or two thousand kilometers northeast and I might have been Japanese. But I'm not.
I don't speak/write Japanese at all. Translations are provided by Brazilian-Japanese and Australian-Japanese friends of mine. That being said, I can somewhat read kanji because it uses Chinese characters. If any native speakers have better translations for what appears in game, I'll happily accept them.
As I mentioned in my writing thread, my goal isn't to perfectly replicate Japan, but to produce a Japanese-inspired people in much the same way that the Marefolk are Mongolian-inspired, the Kervus orcs are viking-inspired and the Minotaurs are Roman-inspired. At the same time, I've to make the content understandable by western audiences, which form most of the game's playerbase, and fit the way they work into the greater world. A simple change like making the kitsune matriarchal, Imperial Family aside, has massive knock-on effects on their culture which needs to be accounted for, let alone something more drastic like the constant low-key hunger that exists in each and every one of them.
The kitsune combine different concepts and ideas from different eras of Japanese history, but I've mostly drawn from the Meiji Restoration, the 1920-30s colonial push and the Heian era in order to best parallel the situation that's going on in Savarra in the wake of the Godswar. Keros has shown up again, rebuked everyone thoroughly for almost letting themselves get colonised by the Lumians, Sorrans and Tirans of the Belharan Empire, broken the shogunate and restored power to the Emperor, balanced out the twelve Divine Clans descended from his concubines and sorted things out for now. It's been a period of technological change as the foxen, tanuki and other yokai who populate these islands sort out the ideas they've brought back from the Godswar, take what's beneficial for their society and reject what's not.
The vast majority of the foxen you'll meet in the Frostwood are second to fifth-generation immigrants who live in the Western Imperial Colonies; one of the themes I want to explore is how immigrant populations change over time in response to new environments and interaction with other peoples.
It's been a lot of work, a bunch of research, and quite a lot of band-aid handwaving and hoping people don't question things too deeply.
I knew there was a lot of work going into creating these characters, thanks a bunch for doing this and being so passionate about it.
Oh and I give my thanks to the other writers as well, I'm having a blast!
Asian solidarity, @The Observer
I’m not Japanese either, but as a Taiwanese person, I can safely tell you you’re pretty on point with the food at least in the Kiyoko meal scenes (we incorporated a lot of dishes from Japan —and technically a lot of other places because we’re a bunch of gourmets, lol—into our culture, though we definitely have some Japanese influence from the period of Japanese occupation). I was definitely excited to see a few familiar dishes.
Also, honestly yeah, trying to straight up recreate irl cultures in fantasy kinda defeats the purpose of fantasy. I mean, pretty much every good fantasy author has taken inspiration from various places as framework and then adds their own twists to make a made-up race/species interesting.
That said, I’m hyped to see future cultural explorations from you. ^^
I’m not Japanese either, but as a Taiwanese person, I can safely tell you you’re pretty on point with the food at least in the Kiyoko meal scenes (we incorporated a lot of dishes from Japan —and technically a lot of other places because we’re a bunch of gourmets, lol—into our culture, though we definitely have some Japanese influence from the period of Japanese occupation). I was definitely excited to see a few familiar dishes.
Also, honestly yeah, trying to straight up recreate irl cultures in fantasy kinda defeats the purpose of fantasy. I mean, pretty much every good fantasy author has taken inspiration from various places as framework and then adds their own twists to make a made-up race/species interesting.
That said, I’m hyped to see future cultural explorations from you. ^^