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Multi-cultural, Multi-racial Fantasy races

I'm not trying to say the white cultures are the standard, and if it comes across that way I apologize. No, I'm looking at a Fantasy setting that is tech equivalent( or a little ahead) of our world. I'm taking a more scientific(?) approach to the races, and taking into account the diversity inherent in the human race from colonizing the earth, and applying it to the standard fantasy races. The parallels I'm looking for are more to add a correct name to the culture so I'm not making something up that sounds ridiculous to someone more familiar with that area of the world. So Abatwa for a culture of Dwarves that live in a sub-tropical clime versus the Shortenhotts
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
Part of how you approach this probably rests on how "human" your fantasy races are. The trend the past decade or more has been to make the various fantasy races essentially human. Elves are humans with pointy ears; dwarves are short humans. There may be quirks and idiosyncracies associated with each race, but they increasingly become stand-ins for human beings.

On the other hand, if your fantasy races are decidedly non-human, there's no reason you can't have a more monolithic culture, even despite separation by time and geography. You don't have to look at the real world and say "Hmm, here's how human cultures look" and mimic that, unless you want​ to mimic it and make your fantasy races more like the human race.
 
Yeah, but I find White hat or Black Hat on a whole race to be boring. I like the idea of these fantasy races being as diverse, divisive, and messy as we are. If they all sit around and sing Kum-by-ya, and never disagree about anything...What's the point?
 

Mindfire

Istar
Yeah, but I find White hat or Black Hat on a whole race to be boring. I like the idea of these fantasy races being as diverse, divisive, and messy as we are. If they all sit around and sing Kum-by-ya, and never disagree about anything...What's the point?

But one might ask, if your fantasy races are going to look like humans, act like humans, and bicker like humans... why not just make them humans?
 
Who says they look like humans? Well, no more than most fantasy races look human. I've been trying to sketch out various ideas that keep a humanoid appearance, but play into the fact that they're not human. Look at The Elder Scroll games or better yet, some of my notes on Dwarves

Dwarves aren't just short humans with beards. At 4 and a half feet tall they're broader than a 6 foot human, and possess a strength equivalent to a similar sized primate from our world. Their eyes are large and very sensitive to light necessitating light blocking goggles even at night to cope above ground.(light pollution is a big concern for dwarven culture.)Their ears are likewise large, like a bat's, and offset from one another slightly(The right is 2 inches higher than the left) like owls so they can orient themselves better through sound. Their clothing seems oddly colored to most races because, One color's not as important in low light, and 2 most other races don't have vision that extends into the range of dwarves so they're not perceiving the actual colors.
 

Erudite

Scribe
Likely a result of the people who kept the histories we base most of our fantasy off of.

Norse, Greek (close enough to white), Roman... I mean, truth is we're conditioned to think Sword and Sandals relates to white people, and black slaves abound (because they were white, and the slaves were black).

You need to change it via your own writing, and have good excuses for it. Most films, books, etc, just don't have the space to explain why the black people are in command of the cities, and the white people serving them.

And equality just speaks to lack of consideration to culture in a novel, so most writers steer clear of it.

I personally don't find too many conflicts of dark-skinned peoples being persecuted against in novels. There were traders in a series I used to read who were dark-skinned, and they were portrayed as cunning and shrewd businessmen. Just write it well enough, people don't actually hold too many prejudices today.
 
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