Since the Fontaine region of Genshin Impact was announced I've seen some harebrained takes (or more like, people pointing out how harebrained these takes are) about how it's not accurately representing France and/or the United Kingdom. Now as much as I think this situation is Hilarious (are you really going to defend France? France??), I do feel like there's an important part of "cultural appropriation" discourse et. al. that people keep missing: the power dynamic.
Like, that's the key point as to why cultural appropriation is bad! It's when Hollywood takes, say, an Indian culture and make it part of the story but with zero respect to the source material. When they misrepresent it, there's few avenues for real Indians, to whom this culture is not simply set dressing but their entire life, to fight back e.g. to inform people who watched that Hollywood production; they already aren't going to watch an Indian production with more lived-in experience.
But if you're an Indian studio misrepresenting how, say a hamburger is eaten? Who cares. There are one billion more movies and stories and whatever featuring hamburger. Everyone knows how hamburgers are eaten. Such is the power of America's cultural hegemony.
This is a similar dilemma when e.g. a story where a character is traditionally white is represented as black, versus the other way around, or when a gay couple portrayed as straight in later adaptations. Like, on a surface level, stories are at the eye of the beholder. A couple is implied to be gay but you headcanon them as straight? Extremely valid, go off, canon is dead. But in terms of mass-exposure, there are already a lot of white characters. There are already a lot of straight couples. They're the ones in position of power. A joke can only punch up; if you punch down that's just being an asshole.
Anyway, back to the initial example of Genshin. Putting aside the fact that regions in Genshin are never meant to represent a single real life modern-day region anyway (it's fine if Fish n Chips is invented by Fontaine people, you guys), this is why Fontaine "misrepresenting" France is lol lmao while Sumeru "misrepresenting" West Asian culture cuts deeper. The former has cultural power (everyone know what a baguette is), the latter doesn't; the latter is still so often treated like a novelty. So I'll accept Western Asians being a little twitchy about how Sumeru is presented, but Fontaine can suck it.
(For the record, I'm only partially a culture that's part of Sumeru (nautical Southeast Asia!), and I think Sumeru is pretty cool, except for the character designs, which mostly sucks. You should listen to Indian/West Asia/Middle Eastern people whose culture get cribbed more though.)
(By the way a fun fact: nautical Southeast Asia is such a cultural hodgepodge with influences from China, India, Middle East, and a lot of European influences too (thanks colonizers), modern uninformed gen-z might even look back at our history and label literally everything as "cultural appropriation". But it isn't, because back when the hodgepodge of our culture was being formed the power dynamics is very different. Ah hell, culture-forming is a neverending process, so we're still doing that, melting cultures together, even more so in this digital age. But this is an essay for another day)
What I'm saying is, when something cribbed from a culture that you don't perceive as part of theirs, it's not always "cultural appropriation". It's not always bad. You gotta look at the power dynamics too, what everyone gains or lost from it. Yeah ok that's a good conclusion to end this with. bye
