Quote Originally Posted by Alleluia View Post
People like to bring up colonialism when talking about the new world a lot, but there isn't any colonialism going on so its rather invalid, imo. They send their own people to Eorzea as mercs and traders. They have trade relations with Radz-at-Han (I think). They have some kind of diplomatic ties to Sharlyan. Far as we've ever heard or seen, this isn't some virgin culture that we're deciding whether to build a fort on or not; they're just any other city state. And we've long been in the habit of beign involved in leadership choices in other city states. Aymeric, Hien, the Nadaam, Chai-Nuzz. Its never been a colonialism expy before, I don't see why it should be considered such now just cus the aesthetics of the area are South/Central American.
I don't think the problem is as simple as 'the story says there's not colonialism so don't think about it like that'. It's sort of an inevitable specter around a story where the base pitch is 'a bunch of white people (who are generally from a European-analogue location even if geographically it's more Africa) go to the unsettled America-analogue'; even if you're not doing a colonialist story, there's a lot of tropes you could accidentally fall into. Which, in fact, they've already been doing: we've been calling it 'the New World' until now, which is... not great.

Perhaps fortunately, the lore and translation panel from FanFest did make a point of basically saying 'we know we haven't been the best at this in the past, we're making an effort to do better with Dawntrail specifically'.