Thread: The 7.3 Armour preview is offensive

Bumping this post because i couldn't have said it better than multiple have said in this thread. This is egregious and it really feels like the promises to be more thoughtful and respectful with the cultures CBU3 is taking inspiration from has been thrown out of the window. Where are the consultants in this? If you want to pull from real life cultures, you need to do appropriate research and be mindful of the connotations around the type of gear you're putting out. Please listen to all the native and LATAM players talking about these issues.

I love this game with all my heart but the multiple instances like this make it really hard to want to continue playing and come back, so much so that i'm thinking of unsubscribing from the game.

I really urge people to go read the below post -- I'm bumping and co-signing this, these gearsets need to go.

Originally Posted by burgeaux

1:1 replicas aren't necessary to inflict the same wound or draw conclusions, as many people in this thread already have. Replacing chestplates with tabards still has the same connotations. We didn't get gear inspired by the British army while going through Thavnair, the team had the tact to move away from SS/Nazi influence for the Garleans despite parallels in authoritative power. Even Star Wars is more on the nose with its visual inspirations for the empire + aren't afraid to make them wholly antagonistic. Why now?

A previous poster offered a good point with SQEX's design philosophy in Stormblood: "We can't use anything that has real-world religious or cultural connotations. If we want to make something that draws from religious imagery, ethnic clothing, and so on, it needs to be significantly altered."

The quote has become less viable due to clearer parallels FFXIV has drawn from cultures for specific narratives overtime. This can lead to disaster; conflating living people to fantasy or watering down the cultural importance of specific motifs. It implies that you can't have a respectful mix of native elements with OTHER fantasy/historical fashion influence throughout the world. Thus as a result of ignorance, or malice, these faults will trickle to repeated behavior within the community — as seen with the war bonnet, traditional Korean attire, and Sámi clothing. 2 out of 3 whose issues have not been rectified.


PROPOSED SOLUTION

1. Removing the gear entirely.
2. Removing offensive/recognizable parts of the gear (namely tabards, sashes, and the helmet).
3. Offering a dyable reskin of the Yuyeyawata gear.

These solutions have been offered the thread (which are greatly appreciated)! I just thought to condense it all to prevent information being buried further.

Dawntrail has snubbed a lot of my love for this game. At the end of the day, I want to see it get better for my black + native friends who enjoy it. *I* want to enjoy it again. It hurts to see the dev team swears they've learned, wronged their mistakes, and continue to get better — yet things stay the same.

It's been very disappointing to me that I had so much hope for Dawntrail to be culturally respectful and I am so sorry to every person whose heart has been broken by it that I did. I had been hoping that others would be able to see their own cultures joyously and share stories and history. I was at fanfest where it was stated they had cultural consultants. My only assumption now is that they were never hired in the first place. Square, please do better.

bumping to show my support

At first glace, they just seemed like they were inspired by like the Workor Zormor or the Ceremonial gear, but more historically trained eyes have pointed out the Conquistador similarities , and given narrative context of Dawntrail being set in a fantasy version of uncolonized Americas the armor seems wildly tone deaf, and inappropriate. Yikes.

Please consider changing them.

This new set of gear is wildly inappropriate for the setting of Tural given the historical implications of the design inspiration. Please do not release this. I know its already made and already planned but I would rather have a dyeable rework of an old gear set over this new gear. Please listen to the playerbase!!!! There is still time to change course on this decision before the patch releases! This is so hurtful to people. Yoshi P wants to talk about changing for the better and I believe that sentiment is great! But the team really needs to show it and put in the work on things like this. (And while we're at it, can we please change the New World set. Still begging for that too.) This game is played on a global scale with many cultures, histories, and people. It is possible to be respectful to them and still make a profit. Please please please reconsider this gear set.

I honestly hadn't had time to scrutinize the details of the previewed sets, but even my initial impression at a glance was "These don't look like they have ANYTHING to do with the source dungeon at all."

The Meso Terminal is physically located on another world, completely separate from Tural. It was built, and used, long before any exposure to Tural. In current MSQ, access to the Meso Terminal (and all of Living Memory) is extremely restricted. It is not, and never has been, frequented by Turali people. So it just reads, at best, as extremely bizarre for there to be Turali- (Indigenous American) inspired gear from there.
To compound on this, we've already had pretty expansive exposure to Alexandrian armor and fashion styles through Dawntrail MSQ and patch quests, too, reflecting fashion and armor spanning decades on the Ninth. Nothing we've seen so far from the Ninth, be it from Alexandria or Lindblum or any other area, resembles this gear set or reflects the clear historical European Conquistador elements in the designs.

The only teeny tiny itty bitty potential loophole I could possible imagine from a lore perspective would be the Milala. And even then, that would only possibly maybe cover the sets suspected to be for healers and casters. The Milala being the lalafellen refugees from the Source who used the Azem cup relic to hop to the Ninth, and brought their increased aetherial density and arcanima to that world to escape a calamity. We don't have much, if any, information regarding the Milala garb, and so technically some of the new gear could conceivably be attributed to Milala influence on their integration into the Ninth... but that feels like a stretch, at best. A flimsy, creatively bankrupt, and also somewhat lore contradictory stretch. The Variant dungeon Aloalo Island takes place on the ancestral Source home of the Milala; and if I remember correctly, Aloalo is based on real-world Pacific islands, NOT the Americas, so the real-world resemblance to Turali (Indigenous American) designs once again just doesn't make sense.

Even assuming this was the intended justification, it does nothing to address the disparity of real historical inspirations represented in this set, either. Which is objectively the more grievous offense.

There's nothing I can really add as I am not directly affected by this, and everyone else has said things much more eloquently than I would. However, I'm going to bump this and say that no sensitivity was shown here in the designs of the aforementioned gear. Please change this and please do better in the future.

Bumping this to show my support as well. It's very tonedeaf and disheartening to see, and more than a little baffling for an expansion where reaching out to others and making efforts to understand and respect their cultures was such a huge theme.

Bumping and agreeing. The overt Spanish and French colonial influences in two of the gearsets, in an expansion that features both South (and) North American pre-contact indigenous peoples, is an offensive an derivative design choice. A solution would be to offer dyeable gear made available previously, or to rework the designs so that their influences appear more congruent with the aesthetics of Alexandria. I understand that both of these are unlikely, but worth mentioning regardless. Their existence, as well as the discussion around them, has increased likelihood of bad-faith actors using these gearsets to intimidate Native + Latin American players, as continually seen with the New World Gear in hub cities across servers.

Yeah, no this is atrocious. As someone whose heritage is partially that of partially conquistadors and colonizers and also Mexican in general, this is wildly tone deaf. It's absurdly out of line with the rest of the tone that the expansions has been using so far to the point it's tone deaf ala the New World stuff in Stormblood. Co-signing, this is not okay. Literally any other expansion but this one.