Tian Xia World Guide prompts a messy, public reckoning in the Pathfinder 2E subreddit
Instead of celebrating a new book, users and moderators spent a week exhuming interpersonal ghosts.
If you visited the Pathfinder 2E community on Reddit over the past week, there’s a pretty good chance you ran into half-serious discussions about appropriative samurai, mods overstepping their boundaries, and a higher-than-usual amount of discourse unrelated to tabletop RPGs. Instead of poring over Paizo’s newest book, the Lost Omens Tian Xia World Guide, players spent the week increasingly fixated on a moderator post that ostensibly warned against casual racism that unintentionally surfaced an ocean of rotten animus towards r/Pathfinder2E’s moderation team. What followed won't surprise anyone familiar with the scrutiny placed on volunteers that cultivate online fandom spaces, whether that’s Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit now or Google+ in the past—a breakdown of compassion made no less tragic by its mundanity.
On April 24th, head moderator u/Ediwir published a post titled “Tian Xia, real world parallels, and a serious moment” before pinning it to the top of the subreddit’s feed, placing it above all other discussions. Within, the moderator cautioned players against trafficking in harmful stereotypes and casual racism toward Asian cultures while they discussed the book’s titular fictional continent. Tian Xia represents Golarion’s broadly Eastern analogue, and its newest exploration was written and edited by dozens of prominent creators from coastal and continental Asia. The moderator specifically mentioned samurai, ninja, and the “magical Asian” monk, invokes Edward Said’s Orientalism, and references tabletop RPG’s own deep history with problematic depictions of these cultures.
