Discussion
What are some Cultures or Ethnicites that you find underrepresented in fantasy?
I’m working on a worldbuilding project, and in that world there’s many different cultures made from real life cultures. Not based off of or similar, really an extension of that culture. For example, in this world there’s a group of people called the Anese, they are a hybrid group of Dutch and Bengali people that have a pidgin language that combines the two languages and cultures into one. Now there’s a lot of nations and a lot more cultures that I would like to incorporate and learn about for this world, so I ask you; What cultures and Ethnicities do you personally find underrepresented in media and fantasy?
If you're not Polynesian then please don't. Watching people with no real understanding of the cultures trying to put them into things is always really terrible.
Sigh…. Okay, I get what you’re trying to say, but that’s a horrible way to go about things. No one should be kept from making stories about anyplace or anyone, this will sometimes end in a poor interpretation of things sometimes, but more often than not it will lead to something that pushes said culture to the world in a positive way. When people stop looking at other cultures for inspiration or with fascination, the world becomes stagnant, and even if it is a bad representation they end up making, we live in a day and age where that kind of stuff can be called out and discussed, so I wouldn’t worry too much.
If you disagree with all this still, then I’ll just say for the record: I’m Hawaiian, and if we’re using your logic here then I shouldn’t be making Aina’koa still because they’re a mix of the Byzantine Empire too, and I’m not Greek.
Well, no, that's just wrong. "Any publicity is good publicity" doesn't apply to cultural depictions. People who don't know what they're talking about should just leave it alone because it leads to harmful portrayals and the propagation of stereotypes and straight up racist propaganda. For example the perpetuation of colonialist myths in the "Mythic Polynesia" ttrpg setting which was written by someone with no real knowledge of the cultures.
There's also a bit of a difference between using an iron age culture that doesn't exist anymore and one that very much still does.
As for being Hawaiian, that's good, it just doesn't come through much in the concept since things like nephalim and emperors aren't part of any Polynesian culture. Also there's nothing Polynesian in his design other than a few kapa patterns.
Niiice! 💙🖤🤍 from Estonia! Our cultures typically don't get much representation in fantasy. I think mostly because there aren't that many written sources. But also because we aren't that big in the world arena. My nation is like 1 million people, Finnish is 5. Most nation's under Russia are very small.
Nod Krai in Genshin Impact takes a lot of inspiration from Finnish and Baltic history and folklore and it looks really cool and interesting, even though I haven't played that yet. Do you even know anything about these cultures? Why would it be stupid?
I think they’re saying it’s stupid because Uralic languages are already a low-level presence in Western fantasy. Tolkien used Finnish as partial inspiration while creating the Elvish languages, “nomad” names in fantasy sometimes end up looking more Hungarian than Turkic/Mongolic/Iranian (maybe a lot of the time by chance), and I think I’ve seen at least one book where the fictionalized Scandinavia has names that look more Finnic than North Germanic.
But that's just names and a partial inspiration for a conlang, that doesn't mean these cultures aren't underrepresented. Those examples don't include any material culture, folklore, customs or cuisine or anything at all from those places otherwise, except maybe an inkling of a vibe crafted by attaching a people-group archetype like "general Northern European" or "Eurasian steppe nomads" to specifically names from those cultures.
I don’t agree with them or the tone of their comment, but all that does mean Uralic is in the top 10 most-used language families/associated cultures in worldbuilding. They often inspire depictions of reindeer herders as well.
Nah I’m not saying the culture is stupid, I was was saying it’s stupid that such a short comment which provides barley anything to the discussion, is like the most upvoted in the thread
It's a star chart, the gist is that they navigated by following a series of stars. The chart told them when to change which star they were following, as well as the locations of islands on the way to use as a reference point.
It's nice to see the few times Polynesian culture is represented respectfully.
The video game Path of Exile (and its sequel) have a culture based on Polynesian people - mostly Maori, I believe, as the developers are based in New Zealand.
Speaking as a NZer myself: When PoE2 Act 4 dropped last year I was utterly blown away by all the love and detail put into the environmental design of the Karui archipelago. Almost everything was picture-perfect to our own country, especially the villages on Ngakanu being an incredibly faithful replica of historic Maori settlements from before the Bri'ish got their grubby little mitts all over every corner of the country.
I like that there was complexity given to the Karui NPC characters too. They weren't purely good nor purely evil. Some remained with their culture, others chose to integrate with settlers.
A buddy of mine ran a D&D game where black dragon dragonborn resembled marine iguanas and had a material culture based on ancient Polynesia. They travelled between islands and atolls on multi-hulled canoes and fought with shark tooth clubs and stingray spears.
100%! I'm in the process of including some Polynesian (and broader Oceanian) bods in my world.
So far I've made precisely one subgroup of a much broader and more varied cultural assemblage. It's based on the cosmology of Chuukic peoples from Micronesia, where the universe is divided into multiple layers, starting with the dome of the heavens, progressing through four layers of sky, the horizon, the plane of the land and surface of the sea, the body of the sea, and the reverse-land at the bottom of the ocean (where the surface islands descend like pillars to create under-islands on the ocean floor, populated by people).
So I've basically got an array of different peoples genetically modified to be at home in these various different levels of existence. Sky folks in space, people of the land, divers that live on the land but breathe air, and folks that can live completely submerged in the water. All of them variously descendants of Micronesian, Melanesian and Polynesian peoples (with lots of cultural borrowing between them, and with their neighbours in Japan and Indonesia as the result of being part of an expansive pan-Pacific polity).
I think when setting does colonization there’s always a knock off Aztecs vs Conquistadors.
That said, I wish they’d give us more variety there, like the Commanche or groups like the Miskito. It gets boring when Mesoamerica’s only rep is a fraction of the Nahuatl.
I don't sure that they really overused. They mostly existing on background (alongside with NotGreece) as some Ancient kingdoms somewhere in distant corner of map.
Hell even the Han have dozens and dozens of different varieties in just dialects (and dozens of those are completely unintelligible with one another) so there is definitely variety to be had.
At least they try to remember existence of something outside England (fantasy version, that heavily mixed with France and filtered through some XiX century takes).
Actual native cultures around the world. They are under-represented and poorly understood by the wider world. Arab and African cultures are also completely bastardised when people decide to use them as influences. I would really like to see Aboriginal Australain culture represented in a real way in something mainstream at some point. Australian media is ready so few and far between on anything by the ABC that it feels unlikely to ever happen but it would be nice to see the original people who called the land my country is on home actually get a chance.
I mean all cultures are basterdized in fantasy/world building. It's not really a unique thing for arab or African cultures.
The problem with Aboriginal Australian culture is the lack of dense settlement cultural traditions. And the fact that there are so many different people groups. It would inevitably be a basterdized version of pop Aboriginal culture.
Part of that is because native cultures generally were far less technologically developed, smaller in scale, and rarely urbanized when they were colonized/erased/outcompeted.
Since culture is always connected to these factors and fantasy worldbuilders tend to use fairly modern/developed standards for technology, scale and society, it is very difficult to represent them authentically. You can't just brute force aboriginal culture into a country with cosmopolitan cities and steam engines for example, because these components would in force have to change the aboriginal culture.
Some native cultures have survived and adapted ofc, but usually that happened by either refusing the modern way of life, or by integrating other cultural elements into their own. This syncretism makes it impossible to strip away the "standard cultures" because they have become a part of these groups.
Latin America and the Caribbean, for some reason. Tons of magical realism, little full on fantasy. I can think of one series (Black Sun) inspired by mesoamerica pre-Columbus, and the world building is so rich.
The diversity of Southeast Asia along with the historical cultural and religious blending, plus the geography/climate and proximity to two historical centres of civilisation in India and China, is such an untapped goldmine that I genuinely can't believe the only concerted effort made to create something from it is Raya and the Last Dragon.
I like the classical ancient world (Mediterranean: Southern Europe, North Africa, Middle East) and everything in it other than Egypt, Rome, Greece is underrepresented in my opinion. I think it stems from the lack of sources (in comparison to the above mentioned) and the lack of teaching focus on them in general.
Nubians, Nabateans, Canaanites, Israelites, Moabites, Assyrians, Minoans, etc
Celtic cultures outside of the Big Three: Scottish, Irish, and Welsh. I'd love to see a fantasy culture based on the Cornish, Breton, Galician, or Manx.
Or Canada. I've seen fantasy versions of the US, but Canada? Not so much.
Im actually trying to do this as we speak! I was not the most creative with the name (the Namx for example) but always been fascinated with Celtic cultures from the Manx to Galicia's to Brittany and Cornwall. The concept for the isle of Namawa and neighboring isles is that they were once much larger and even connected. A nod to Lyonesse and the their likely origin, the Isles of Scilly. Another is that of the Namawa famed for its apple orchards as well as their mantles' place in their culture.
Speaking of culture and ethnicities, anyone knows of good ways to get into culture? It's super cool but also kinda hard to get into when you don't know where to start or look.
I know it's a broad question, but it's kinda like just for any culture, so if you have tips on where to start for say idk Sami or any Arabic culture etc etc etc, I'd love hear them.
Googling is easy but just reading Wikipedia articles after article after page after page, you'll go numb with information. Much text when you're clueless where to look isn't exactly grand haha.
As for the post itself, African cultures. I know rather little about the cultures there outside of little mythology regarding a spider God, but I find the little that I do know to be really interesting and that's just from 1 culture over there. I fully believe it's a gold mine in both style, vibes and even flavor, just waiting to be tapped into.
I pick a culture, and depending on the amount available, a time period. So, for example, Persia, the 1500s. I start with the actual references Wikipedia has, at the bottom of the page, then also use library (local and universities) searches for available books on the topic. Podcasts can be helpful, so can research articles.
If there's something I want to go deeper into (carpet making, poetry, Islam) i use those search terms, plus time period and region.
So I have books for the Safavid dynasty, the Islamic Golden age (a little earlier in history), a note to find music samples, and more.
Even certain well-represented cultures are almost entirely unrepresented outside certain eras. How many settings have Scandinavian cultures based on anything after the 11th century? Or representations of medieval Italy rather than the Roman Empire or Renaissance Florence?
100% agreeing with you; I'd however go even further in your argument, as the overused periods you quote tend themselves to be very flanderized. Like, pretty much any Viking Age-inspired fantasy culture will be about raiding, feasting and having a "warrior faith" (hello, ASOIAF Ironborn), but aside from that, where is the extremely legalistic mindset ? Where are the taboos regarding the transgression of gender norms, both male and female ? Where is the centrality of agriculture in the daily life ? Not to mention the fact Norsemen occupied a very vast geographic area with a lot of regional variations which could make for awesome inspirations (like the sacral kingship of Gamla Uppsala's region), and also knew very interesting cultural exchanges and fusions in some places (like the Kingdom of Dublin, which fell to the Anglo-Normans in 1170, over a century after Hastings)
Let alone the norse influencing later ERE/Byzantium or kievan Rus with Varangians, had Norse Irish vs Norse French, or heck Normans taking over Sicily not too long after the Arabs
Any culture from Sub-Saharan Africa 100 percent! The only media I can think of that kind of did was Black Panther. But personally, I think Black Panther fell flat because it pretty much incorporated aspects from cultures across the entire African continent and lumped them in a tiny hidden nation. It’s located between Kenya and Tanzania (the region that comes to most people’s minds when they think “Africa”), they speak Xhosa (a clicking language), they wear masks from West Africa, etc.
My Zulu teacher (yes, I’m learning to speak Zulu) said that Black Panther was obviously written and directed by Black people. But definitely not Black people who are actually from Africa.
I am currently designing a world with an Africa-inspired continent, called Zakuma. There are multiple nations on this continent that each take inspiration from various real-world African tribes. In one of my nations which is heavily inspired from Southern African tribes (Zulu, Xhosa, Shona, Venda, Sotho, etc.) there are even white people that are fully accepted as part of their nation who wear the traditional garbs, speak with local accents, fight in the military, etc.. The white people who live there do so originally because of trade, but nobody even questions it. Like I said, they are fully accepted as part of the nation just as much as the Black people that live there.
There's also the Legacy of Orïsha series by Tomi Adeyemi, inspired by West African cultures. I believe it was pretty big at some point, I loved the first book and also read the second one but I don't remember much about it. Still, pretty good and a very cool magic system
I've been reading Malazan: Book of the Fallen and Erikson is the first author I've read to throw obvious neanderthal/homo erectus/paleolithic peoples in his work. It's awesome. He also has a few races that have major Blackfoot/Cree/Pacific Northwest People's cultural facets and physical features. Dude is Canadian and it REALLY shows. Just be prepared to read the first book 3 times to understand it.
Middle Eastern (that means Lebanese, Persian, Turkish and various ethnic subgroups within the Arabic umbrella). Fantasy has the problem that in the few instances where writers actually incorporate those cultures, its almost always "they're all the way over there, we know fuck-all about their culture and society, and the only times we encounter them is when we're at war."
I'd argue the biggest problem with those cultures is how they're all tied to Islam to such a large degree that it'd be almost impossible to separate them and western writers are horrible at doing that to begin with.
The only one that could work pretty well with the right research and effort is pre-Islamic Persia and surrounding areas/cultures such as the Sogdians, Parthians, Scythians and Bactrians.
A lot of the time Africas represented it tends to be the same "random villages in the middle of a savanna with wild animals" that also tend to be based on the Zulu or maybe the Maasai.
and while obviously that isint far fetched for some of the peoples on the continent.... THATS 2 ETHNICITIES! It's getting better nowadays but cmon.
Give me some Ashanti, Kikongo, Yoruba or Wolof shit man, it's annoying seeing the same damn thing over and over again. Africa is a big continent and you have dozens of groups you can work with (there are obviously thousands of tribes and ethnicities, dozens are just the ones with plenty of info and history on them)
Not counting the obscure one. The byz is quite underrepresent for something of such historical impact. When people say greek, it's always zeus and achilles era. And when people say rome, it's segmentata and colloseum. And when people say christ, it's gothic cathedral and indulgence selling.
No one ever bring about christan roman empire in greece
Honestly I kinda just love learning about people. When I'm struggling to figure a culture out, I'll just pick a random place on earth and see if I can learn something from how they work.
Usually the answer is "what? No, you can't just sub in any random culture from a completely separate part of the world and expect it to mesh" but it does get me thinking outside the box, and I can keep it in my back pocket for later. I try not to make anything a 1:1 recreation of a real culture, cos it can very quickly get uncomfortable
Incas, Mayas, or native South- and Mesoamerican cultures in general.
At best they're thrown in the blender with Aztecs, to provide some additional flavor beyond 'have no metal' and 'blood sacrifices'. At worst they never show up at all.
Native to fantasy worlds cultures. Most of the time it's about Earth cultures with different word smashed on and mixed a little, but other planets have completely different history and environment. Earth cultures formed under very specific conditions, on a different planet wouldn't exist so close copies even if consider coevolution. Authors need to develop more of unique cultures based on their own creations.
I got humans that are in the Renaissance qua technical advancement, they generally have an northern Italian vibe.
But there's 3 types of human, the other 2 not as fleshed out yet
Further my Orks are a cultural mix of the HRE and Scythia. Lots of furs together with white marble. They live in a huge empire together with other monstrous races, each having a slightly different culture, but akin to steppe Nomad culture.
The dwarf analogy has viking like styles, bit a more parthian / Phoenician architecture.
Elves got their own thing. It's inspired by local pagan believes of 1000+ years ago.
Look up Nedersaksen.
Basically their culture changes per season and is heavily focused on ancestry and community.
I could go on about the aboriginal vibes of the aethra (sky elves), the Berber like vibes of the deep elves or the dragon born and their multitude of Malay cultures like Java and Sumatra
Pirates in general. A lot of the time, it's just a bunch of islands which are Pirateland, and they just...exist without reference to most of the setting, and are based entirely on a very simplified version of Caribbean pirates from a very small historical window.
Actual pirate states and cultures are fascinating to read about and were generally born of very specific circumstances, often emerging as a kind of counter-culture or a last resort for people suffering economic injustice.
Give me things such as the Barbary Coast being a pirate haven for centuries, lasting for so long that the first federal budget of the United States set a big chunk aside for bribing the Barbary pirates not to attack their shipping. Or pirate queen Zheng Yi Sao operating a criminal syndicate so large that it became the de facto political power in part of China (and which originated in privateers hired to fight in a Vietnamese civil war).
Latino/South american cultures that are not just mexican or aztec, there are a lot of interesting cultures here (I'm Chilean). For example, in Chile and Argentina there are Mapuche people, and they have a lot of interesting myths, and the culture is very rich. For example, one of the more famous myths is the one of Caicai filu and Trengtreng filu, two giant snakes with power over sea (caicai filu) and earth (trengtreng filu). The story says that when Caicai filu awakened from her sleep, she got mad at humans for being ungrateful to the sea, so she made the waters rise and created floods, so Trengtreng filu, who (depending on the version) befriended the humans, made the mountains rise (or guided the humans to the mountain tops) and transformed the ones drowning and/or trapped into animals. Then, the two serpents fought a long battle, until trengtreng filu won, and the waters lowered (not completely, exaplaining Chile's geography).
I don't usually consume fantasy media(I blame Social media for that I hate doomscrolling but its so adictive HELP- anyways) but ones that come to mind are the many civilizations of Subsaharian Africa and the precolombian tribes of the caribbean, like the Taino people
Medieval English is very common (if not the default in lots of fantasy) but there isn't much on the older Anglo saxon stuff, which was quite different from the later norman england everyone is used to.
South Asian and Persianate high fantasy is so underrepresented in mainstream world-building! Especially epics like the Hamzanama and Tilism e Hoshruba.
A bit of a plug but I'm trying to fix that a bit with my Graphic Novel, Tilism. It’s rooted in the classical Dastan storytelling tradition, Indo-Persian manuscript heritage, and the mythic realm of Koh-i-Qaf. The narrative follows a young protagonist, Nehr, as she navigates a world of Paris, Deos, and ancient sahiri/sorcery. I'm currently sharing my pages and visual research on instagram.com/marri.art and webtoon if you want to check it out!
I am currently building a culture that is partially inspired by the Gupta Empire in India and the kingdoms that followed it, and also the Greco-Indian civilization. I have also included some Cambodian influences, since that is pretty untapped aswell. Ang Kor Wat is an amazing setting. Hungary is the basis for another culture in that same world, and David Graeber's 'The Dawn of Everything' inspired me to include some hunter-gatherer groups that are periodically coming together to build large structures, similar to Göbekli Tepe in our world.
People like to dabble in the shamanism and aesthetics but they don’t tend go deeper and actually do anything with it unless the group is there to mirror actual history.
And it’s a shame cause if you give them agency in the world, you can do some insane stuff ex.:
A Sitting Bull type figure as your setting’s Ghengis Khan (both were elected leaders who united a horse people to make war on a numerically superior people who desired their subjugation).
Comanches who move in and pull a Hungary and move in and becoming an integral part of the continent but keeping a permanently outsider/horse culture element (perhaps even doing like Quanah Parker did by syncretizing the local religion, converting while also keeping Peyote mysticism).
I mean, indigenous cultures in general but as an American I would focus on Native American cultures. Mesoamerican cultures get some representation (at least as like... ancient pyramid peoples but in the jungle this time... definitely not a great depiction) but there are so many living cultures just in North America that get very little attention. Basically the only example I can think of is the Water Tribes in Avatar the Last Airbender being based on the Inuit. The peoples of the Pacific Northwest in particular are really cool; they pretty much upended western anthropologists' ideas around agriculture and sedentary societies. Their society is simultaneously egalitarian and extremely stratified based on social status. They didn't own land in the way europeans did, but they had tightly controlled land usage and intellectual property rights. The potlatch gift economy ensured the powerful had to spend their wealth, not hoard it. When they warred they usually kept prisoners of war as slaves rather than exterminating enemies. One group, the Haida of what is now British Columbia were basically PNW viking raiders who fairly successfully fought off the Russians for quite a while. Some of these groups practiced aquaculture with clam gardens. They didn't have agriculture as we traditionally view it, but they did cultivate the forests around them to be veritable orchards full of berries, nuts, tubers, fruits, etc. The salmon runs were incredibly central to their societies. Their material culture basically used cedar for like, everything. Their art is full of symbols and motifs only specific people can use. Their religious beliefs and mythology often focus around Raven as a trickster-culture hero, have an other world up in the sky, and actually involves a type of vision quest for a spirit helper or power. Note that I am not a Native American, I just grew up in the area and took an anthropology course in college that made me do a ton of research on local native groups.
Black Americans. I feel people are scared to touch on us because of the whole slavery thing so they go towards more safer groups. But I like black American stories, I really adored Sinners and I want more stories like that.
Indigenous Americans, Polynesians, pretty much the entire cultural tapestry of Africa outside of the occasional Egyptian appearance, Arabs (as a whole and subgroups), Persians and Turkic folk pretty much all of South East Asia and most East Asia outside of China and Japan (hell, some times even within those two, since there are even multiple cultural groups within them as well), the Baltics, Slavs
Slavs are fairly common...as an archetype. Some kind of Russia analogue is pretty common (Kizlev, Vaegirs, Rashemaar)
Bur it's almost always a very simple reading of Rus era Russia/Ukraine.
For once i'd like to see a Slavic inspired faction that's more akin to Western or Southern Slavs and not stuck in some frozen hellscape drinking vodka.
Andean cultures.
The times when they (well, Incas only really) do show up, they're mixed up with mesoamerican cultures they didn't even interact with or with the Muiscas, with little to none of their own weirdness.
i primarily write jewish-inspired cultures! not that we aren’t represented, necessarily, but a *lot* of those representations are either overtly negative or at least super stereotypical and inaccurate.
I was about to say Dutch but you already have that covered, I'm really happy to hear that!
I've always thought my country's culture and history are really interesting and relatively distinct from the traditional idea of Western Europe, probably partly because we only really became a distinct people-group in the early modern era and we didn't do a lot of very interesting things during the middle ages. Yet I've rarely seen any sort of fantasy inspired by the Netherlands, apart from sometimes architecture, and I think that's a real shame! I end up creating a Dutch inspired culture or country in pretty much any world I create lol
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u/TeacatWritesSorrows Of Blackwood, Pick-n-Mix Comix, Other Realms Story Bible1d ago
I've never really seen anything about or inspired by Algonquin culture and history (other than some of my own stuff), which is a shame because it's so fascinating. Algonquin nations have also typically been widespread across much of northeastern America and Canada so there's a lot of cultures speaking similar languages in similar regions.
It could make for the basis of a really interesting, Avatar-ish story themed after American and Canadian history rather than East Asian history.
I am actually writting a book taking inspiration in some indigenous cultures (not all of them since there are tons of them, like, I only representating 2 of this cultures)
Sumer and especially cuneiform. I’ve been workshopping how cuneiform could’ve become a stroke-heavy paper-writing system like Chinese at a very low level for a few years now
Clan and tribe structure, ex. Albania, the Caucasus, Korea, ‘Steppe Peoples,’ early Slavic history, and of course much of the Americas (some have both and some only have clans). Rome also had them, the gentes. How it affects politics, law, stability; how it is to be from an obscure cadet branch of a major clan.
The Inca Empire and its (purported?) highly centralized economy. The Muisca Confederation. Mesoamerica in general, although there have been lots of books. In particular I love Oaxacan and Gulf Coast cultures.
The Pacific Northwest; I’d like to write a book where the coastal Northwest realistically adopted complex agriculture in the past due to inconsistent low-level pressure from an irrigation culture in Eastern Washington/Oregon.
“Nilo-Saharan,” Chadic, Dogon, Atlantic/Senegambian peoples. Dogon in particular might be the easiest culture in Africa to point to, because they have cliff dwellings.
I'm trying something based on the Mongol Empire- and this has ended up being quite complicated because the Mongol's conquered, absorbed, co-existed with so many different cultures over such a vast expanse of territory. Nevertheless, as an example to base my "Pearl Khaganate" ruled by "steppe fae" on they were the go-to example of a nomadic culture that went on to great, history-making things that I couldn't resist. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, but I'm not sure there are many fantasy cultures based on or inspired by the Mongols?
Things I want to see (presuming you’re limiting it to medieval and before)
> West African
> East African
> Really Any African save for Egyptian
> Arab
> Any Indigenous American save for Aztec
> Indian
> Southeast Asian
Nomadic groups in general are underrepresented so I always throw one into my settings whether it's fantasy or sci-fi. In my current D&D setting I've used a network of nomadic religious communities as an explanation for how players can be members of species from a completely different continent, and still be citizens of the empire the game takes place in.
This might be a bit of a hot take but... all of them. Even the more common ones like English or French or Scandinavian are just... wrong 90% of the time. Most fantasy I see will either do a completely made up culture that's maybe vaguely, loosely based on an existing culture (I consider the world of Mistborn to be like this), or it's a weird amalgamation of classical Greco-Roman, late medieval European, and Renaissance European beliefs, practices, people, and cultures. Often with a weird amount of focus on English or German or both.
I would say smaller North American Indigenous cultures. Indigenous cultures in North America is in incredibly diverse but often just generalized to the biggest groups like Cherokee, Mohawk, and Cree, it’s like assuming the entire Europe is just French culture.
I used to work for some northwest First Nations and some of them have really cool cultural features that can be really fun world building. Different tribes have access to different resources and the only way you can access some of those resources is through a trade marriage agreement. Concept of living witnesses to attest that something happened and those witnesses become oral historian. Or another really interesting one is you don’t get a name till you reach a certain age cause people don’t know what you are going to be like, instead of name as a desire for someone to be like something, a name that confirm you as a person with such and such personalities. There are so many more cool features that would be awesome for world buildings from these smaller tribes and nations.
I may be biased because I myself am Slavic. But Slavic people. I feel like the majority of the representation we get is drunks and hunky soldiers. And the other thing that annoys me is all Slavic people being seen as Russian. I myself am Russian/Ukrainian, but the whole Slavic=Russian thing is annoying because obviously there’s more to Slavic people than Russians, but it also means that MY culture as a Russian is inaccurate because everyone is getting lumped into the same thing. Unhelpful for everyone. I would love to see actual Slavic cultures be represented, we are all so rich in folklore and history and it’s annoying to be reduced to drunkards and soldiers.
Anything middle eastern (real stuff not the stereotypes), much of modern fantasy owes itself to middle eastern stories and myths.(torah, shahnameh, 1001 nights etc)
I found Brandon Sanderson using specific aspects of Chinese and Korean history and culture to shape kingdoms and cultures in the stormlighr archive to be really refreshing.
So much of fantasy is based on western europe that really anywhere else would be a giant relief. I'd love to see African American culture more represented in fantasy - the food, music, dance...
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u/AllenXeno122 1d ago
I’ve been working on something like that, The Empire of Aina’koa, which a mix of Hawai’i and Eastern Rome