(PSA - I am often woefully inelegant. I do not mean to be culturally insensitive - anything but! If anything I say offends, please let me know and please know it's not my intention <3)
Sometimes, when I go to a foreign country and see beautiful things that are very different to what I might see at home, I feel a strong urge to somehow include those things in my writing, and they make me wonder if I could somehow "transplant" one of my stories - usually set in northern European-type settings - to a setting with warmer climes.
But then I think... no.
Take, for example, if I wanted to write a story set in a country with rice paddies and rice terraces. I then have to write a climate where rice grows, and a culture that grows around rice as a staple (rather than bread or potatoes). Dress changes. Eating habits change. And realistically, skin tone changes (because of that Vitamin D/folic acid equation). Culture changes, to a culture that I don't understand and would feel uncomfortable writing.
So I suppose my question is this: to what extent can you mix cultures? Can you create a Russian type palace and court, but filled with black courtiers? Can you write an Asian setting with elements of European culture? These are fantasy universes where, supposedly, we can suspend disbelief - but can we?
Basically, for me personally, I'm very aware that I'm a white European, and white Europeans make mistakes all the time in trying to represent other cultures in literature. And while naturally having a diversity of authors writing a diversity of settings is ideal, writing yet another European fantasy to add to the pile doesn't seem much better.
Often you hear advice regarding writing characters of a different race to yourself, or differently abled etc that you're perfectly entitled to write that character, but not to write a story about their experience of being that thing. But how does this apply to fantasy settings, where the whole world could be outside of your culture? Do you have free rein, because the world is made up? Or is it still very much a "stay in your lane" situation?
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