19 🇬🇭 | Autistic little shit who plays fighting games(Primarily KOF but also One Piece Fighting Adventure...play One Piece Fighting Adventure!) Branches out to other fighting games depending on the time of year and what my current hyperfixation is at the moment. Other hobbies at times include certain FPS games like Splatoon and Paladins,reading Webtoons and watching peak fiction like Owl House and One Piece. I would include football but fuck British football fans lmfao
pfp by @syachiiro on Twitter
L5R is an old problematic fave of mine.
Hida Gong is a character I played in a campaign years ago and I still enjoy drawing her.
She's probably the shortest of the huge women I've played...but she's still like well over 6' and towers over basically everyone.
As you can tell by my @, big same on l5r being an old guilty pleasure problematic fave.
Is L5R kind of a product of the 90s, with its weird mishmash of a lot of different asian cultures and tropes put through a questionable Kurosawa filter, where a lot of elements feel very much like some white guys thought they were cool?
Yes. Like unquestionably.
Is it still like pretty fucking cool, and does the system feel good to play, especially when you're having to run politics?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Looking back with what I've learned since then, it's not even necessarily all that disrespectful, since it did from the get go say "this isn't Japan, this is Rokugan, its own thing and we know we're taking inspiration from multiple cultures." Right there it's doing better than, like, Kindred of the East. Not a high bar but still.
The honor and glory systems are based on western stereotypes of the cultures, is probably the most guilty pleasure part, because those systems also were mechanically nicely executed and whether card game or RPG, added a lot to the fun.
A project in exactly this vein could even be done with zero problem if the creators bother to hire cultural consultants coming from and with expertise on on the cultures from whose history and myth the game world takes inspiration. Despite the mountains of criticism I have for WotC, I will recognize the fact that for the Kamigawa sets, they actually did this - and as a result, I think the Kamigawa setting is a perfect example of how the same kind of project as an L5R can be done without any major cultural insensitivity problems. If only it didn't belong to WotC/Hasbro... Ah well that's a whole other thing.
