Yoon-Suin is Not an Analogy for Anything or Anywhere

I have been quite lucky that Yoon-Suin seems to have escaped online culture wars relatively unscathed; before it was released I worried some people might make bad-faith readings of racism and orientalism in it, but rather pleasingly, they mostly haven't. That said, I do occasionally come across negative posts about it on various online platforms, mostly describing it as "problematic" or words to that effect, because it is wrongly thought to be an "analogue" (I hate that word; it makes me think of watches, and anyway, "analogy" is itself a noun) for real world places and cultures. 

I want to take the opportunity to write a definitive statement on the matter, mainly so that when I see people making this kind of statement (as in a recent thread on Reddit which I won't link to), I can direct them here.

Yoon-Suin is not an analogy for anything or anywhere. Words actually have meanings, and an "analogy" does not merely mean something which just takes inspiration from another thing, or which happens to superficially resemble another thing in some way. An analogy is a thing which is very similar to another in at least one important respect, and is generally used a method for illustrating something about that other thing for the purposes of argument or clarification. In other words, an analogy is not just a resemblance between X and Y. It is an observed similarity between X and Y which reveals something about one or the other.

Yoon-Suin is not intended to reveal anything about anything in the real world. Nor is it similar to the real world. It has slug-men in it, for goodness' sake. And a city populated by people cut in half. There is no analogy being made or drawn in it. None whatsoever. If you are worried that is my intention, don't. If you are worried others will draw that inference, that's their problem. 

That said, all ideas come from somewhere, and the root of what became Yoon-Suin did begin as me idly wondering one day why there were fantasy versions of most places in the world (Europe, China, Japan, India, and so on) but not Tibet or Nepal. I used that initial seed of an idea to create a campaign to run games in which became the Mountains of the Moon area of the setting. Yoon-Suin kind of spread from there. It sort of looks like the geography of the Himalayas and the Bay of Bengal because that's what I was looking at when I made up the map. It has some monsters loosely based on folklore from Burma, Bengal and Tibet and many which aren't. It is a fantasy version of that region of the world to the extent - probably less than the extent - to which Greyhawk is a fantasy version of Europe. In other words, it's nothing like it but has a little bit of the furniture. 

You might think it is illegitimate for me to have made it that way, maybe because you have read online summaries of Edward Said's Orientalism or half-paid attention to his writings as an undergraduate; if so, there's probably no getting through to you, except to resort to an old but sensible cliche: sometimes imitation is just the most sincere form of flattery. And only that.

In closing, I did once, perhaps stupidly, make the statement that Yoon-Suin is "Fantasy Tibet by somebody who has never been to Tibet and knows nothing about it, but likes the idea of yak-folk." (Some people call Yoon-Suin "fantasy China" or "fantasy India" or "fantasy South-East Asia"; please, if you're going to call it "fantasy-anything", which you shouldn't, then call it "fantasy Tibet, Nepal and Bengal and a bit of Tajikistan and also Burma".) I thought it would be evident when I wrote that sentence that I had my tongue firmly in my cheek and was self-deprecatingly calling attention to the fact that I am a very ignorant person, not a student of real-world cultures in any formal sense, and was poking fun at myself and others in that position. I forgot that people who comment on Reddit don't understand irony and themselves have egos too massive to contemplate self-deprecation.