counter, original, spare, strange

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There is a continual need for funds to buy food, water, and medicine, but Israel's destruction of infrastructure in Gaza means that jobs are nearly nonexistence.

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we know that Orlais conquered Fereldan and that Fereldan gained its independence, and that Tevinter and the Qunari both fight for control over Seheron and are resisted by its native population—but there's nothing at all in the history that should give somebody from Fereldan (as Hawke is) the idea that Seheron is the "land of spices" in the way that India was to the English

The concept of "race" absolutely does exist in Thedas, as has been confirmed by dev comments out of game, written in World of Thedas vol. 1, and in-game dialogue. Darker skinned people in Thedas canonically suffer from colourism/racism. This is a choice the devs made because I guess they couldn't possibly imagine a fantasy world where that doesn't exist.

The entirety of Thedas is colonized... but even after human colonization, we have a plethora of examples of human-run nations colonizing other human-run nations. Mostly from Orlais and Tevinter. And in terms of specifically colonizing for the purpose of extracting - well, Kirkwall is right there, with its history of being nothing but a mining colony for Tevinter. We don't even know what happened to the people who lived in the area known as Kirkwall prior to this, other than that they existed, because we're just not supposed to think about it I guess...

There is indeed canonical confirmation that Seheron exports spices. From Hard in Hightown: "They say you can buy anything in the Lowtown Bazaar. It's mostly true. On the right day, you can find vendors hawking spices from Seheron..." And the writers have indeed thrown around the word "exotic" to describe Rivain (and Rivaini themselves) especially.

The "smells of spices" probably stems specifically from this line of dialouge from Sten in DAO: "I miss the smells of Seheron. Tea and incense and the sea. Ferelden smells of wet dogs."

@/icewa1ker has gone into greater detail about what a mess of orientalism BioWare has inserted into the games when it comes to Rivain especially. Really great posts.

Derogatory comments about dark skin are not the same thing as the concept of "race" that trans-Atlantic chattel slavery and colonialism created irl over the course of the late 17th-19th centuries—the idea that there are different biological "types" of person with different traits, legal statuses, etc. There's nothing in the history of Thedas that would produce this type of "race," because chattel slavery was never based on phenotype along the lines of skin color. I think this is probably a case of the writers importing irl values because they lack imagination. At a stretch & to be generous, I suppose you could say it's analogous to certain aesthetic shorthands and stereotypes about dark coloring that existed in Europe prior to the invention of this specific conception of "race" (these ideas were then harnessed into the service of "racism" proper as it developed).

I didn't say that Thedas doesn't have systems of imperialist extraction. I said that it doesn't have systems of imperialist extraction that run along the same lines as "racial" ideas based on geography / phenotypical things like skin colour, where darker people are associated with 'colonised' status. People irl talk about the "global North" versus the "global South," "imperial core" versus "imperial periphery," or "East" versus "West," to express the point that histories of colonialism have created conceptions of global geography where different racial "types" of person, or different "types" of civilisation, exist in different places. There's an irl historical conception that hotter and "dirtier" climates produce darker skin and racially degenerate stock over evolutionary time, & that's where we get racially "inferior" people from. This doesn't line up with anything in Thedas:

Orlais conquered (and then lost) the Dales and Ferelden; the Tevinter Imperium conquered (and then lost) (parts of?) the Free Marches; the Tevinter Imperium and Par Vollen fight over Seheron. There's no concentration of colonial power in one small area in this map analogous to Europe; no continent that is fought over by various imperial powers from that region analogous to the scramble for Africa; nothing analogous to the fighting between the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Dutch over Indonesia as a way of controlling the Asian spice trade. This specific colonial history is what created the association between "exotic" lands and "spices," and there is no reason for it to exist in Thedas.

3. I don't think that a place merely exporting a certain type of good is enough to create this kind of exotified, romanticised association between that good and that place—as I said in the OP, historically what happened is that the "Orient" was "reduced to stereotypes of [itself] to drive a market for 'exotic' goods." This is Said's argument in Orientalism.

I suppose you could assume that part of what the Qunari and the Imperium are fighting over Seheron about is control of trade routes for spices and other goods? I think that this would be pretty unimaginative and boring, though, and a major loss of the ability to think through alternate histories that fantasy ought to give us. Like you said, it's probably just the developers & the fandom having an association between "distant place with hot climate" and "spices" based on their own colonialist ideas, and not really interrogating that.

There is a continual need for funds to buy food, water, and medicine, but Israel's destruction of infrastructure in Gaza means that jobs are nearly nonexistence.

You can help this family stay alive through genocide by donating via:

GoFundMe

Or via:

venmo (@gothhabiba) paypal (paypal.me/Najia) Cashapp ($NajiaK)

all with note "🍓" or "strawberry"

There is a continual need for funds to buy food, water, and medicine, but Israel's destruction of infrastructure in Gaza means that jobs are nearly nonexistence.

You can help this family stay alive through genocide by donating via:

GoFundMe

Or via:

venmo (@gothhabiba) paypal (paypal.me/Najia) Cashapp ($NajiaK)

all with note "🍓" or "strawberry"

we know that Orlais conquered Fereldan and that Fereldan gained its independence, and that Tevinter and the Qunari both fight for control over Seheron and are resisted by its native population—but there's nothing at all in the history that should give somebody from Fereldan (as Hawke is) the idea that Seheron is the "land of spices" in the way that India was to the English