I meant to reply to this last week, but got distracted away from story stuff so... I'm replying now!
If I were to reuse concepts like the Blight Wolves for this, it'd be due to efficiency (or you could say laziness); reusing things I've already come up with rather than spending time coming up with new ideas. Though I personally like it when concepts are reused between things set in the same world.
What's the main issue with the race names? Is it similarity to existing slurs, or acknowledgement of skin colour at all? How might you go about it, if you were to choose your skin colour from just three variations on a character creator? Would White, Brown, and Black also be racist? Should there just be colours with no associated words? I've been wondering whether to ask what strangers make about this (that is, Snowskin, Sandskin, Soilskin) on Reddit somewhere, though I'm not sure where (an indie dev community, or something like r/worldbuilding?).
(Personally I was imagining what kinds of names people might come up with to describe obvious physical differences in a universe without racism, so they're plain descriptors without value judgements, though of course it's impossible to shed real-world attitudes even if the fantasy worlds we visit don't have them.)
I read this comment last week and have been thinking about your suggestions for the scenarios a bit since then, and I think overall I'd say there's something like... a difference in worldview? That is, these ideas reflect how you see the world (or at least the impression I've got of how you see the world), which is different to how I see the world, or something?
I'd say your ideas are more mature, tending towards nuance and greys and something like self-actualisation, or diversity of thought or something like that, while my worldview tends to be more cartoonish, bright, 'stylised' in a sense, accentuating differences and using them to guide directions rather than trying to smooth them out. My runes would likely be AHG, for example, extreme values, while I suspect yours would be lowercase or x values?
So the impression I got from your ideas was of nuanced characters - which I recall you saying you preferring before - whereas the ones I had in mind for these were more like cartoonish distillations of concepts to illustrate the various facets of each element.
But you could also say that your ideas are that too, they just bring in opposites in ways mine don't, so...
I don't know. I suspect that your ideas might resonate more with people than mine. But I also feel that since they're not in alignment with the way that I think, I wouldn't be able to make them myself?
I've got some more technical stuff to do, so I'll probably focus on that for a bit while thinking more about what to do with these.
I do appreciate your suggestions though, in case that wasn't clear! They'd just be quite a shift from what I already have, rather than minor tweaks, so taking them into consideration is a non-trivial thing.
If I were to reuse concepts like the Blight Wolves for this, it'd be due to efficiency (or you could say laziness); reusing things I've already come up with rather than spending time coming up with new ideas. Though I personally like it when concepts are reused between things set in the same world.
What's the main issue with the race names? Is it similarity to existing slurs, or acknowledgement of skin colour at all? How might you go about it, if you were to choose your skin colour from just three variations on a character creator? Would White, Brown, and Black also be racist? Should there just be colours with no associated words? I've been wondering whether to ask what strangers make about this (that is, Snowskin, Sandskin, Soilskin) on Reddit somewhere, though I'm not sure where (an indie dev community, or something like r/worldbuilding?).
(Personally I was imagining what kinds of names people might come up with to describe obvious physical differences in a universe without racism, so they're plain descriptors without value judgements, though of course it's impossible to shed real-world attitudes even if the fantasy worlds we visit don't have them.)
I read this comment last week and have been thinking about your suggestions for the scenarios a bit since then, and I think overall I'd say there's something like... a difference in worldview? That is, these ideas reflect how you see the world (or at least the impression I've got of how you see the world), which is different to how I see the world, or something?
I'd say your ideas are more mature, tending towards nuance and greys and something like self-actualisation, or diversity of thought or something like that, while my worldview tends to be more cartoonish, bright, 'stylised' in a sense, accentuating differences and using them to guide directions rather than trying to smooth them out. My runes would likely be AHG, for example, extreme values, while I suspect yours would be lowercase or x values?
So the impression I got from your ideas was of nuanced characters - which I recall you saying you preferring before - whereas the ones I had in mind for these were more like cartoonish distillations of concepts to illustrate the various facets of each element.
But you could also say that your ideas are that too, they just bring in opposites in ways mine don't, so...
I don't know. I suspect that your ideas might resonate more with people than mine. But I also feel that since they're not in alignment with the way that I think, I wouldn't be able to make them myself?
I've got some more technical stuff to do, so I'll probably focus on that for a bit while thinking more about what to do with these.
I do appreciate your suggestions though, in case that wasn't clear! They'd just be quite a shift from what I already have, rather than minor tweaks, so taking them into consideration is a non-trivial thing.