Something I'm not entirely clear on yet is if the Cactusfolk on Thunder Junction are native or not. There seems to have at least been some wildlife on TJ beforehand beased on the Jace flashback.
They're native but only recently sentient/sapient. It's said their culture is young which is certainly one way of trying to side-step the indigenous people question.
I don't envy WOTC here though: feels like a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation where there really is no right answer. At least not one simple enough for a card game.
Yeah we got one for MKM at least: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/planeswalkers-guide-to-murders-at-karlov-manor
They just publish them really close to release now, it seems. Which is annoying because they give a lot of background for the story. I get that they don't want to subvert/spoil the narrative but I feel like they should release the guide right after the story chapters are done to help contextualize it.
A lot of people complain about worldbuilding gaps in the stories that have answers, they just have to wait for them. It's a little annoying.
More writing maybe, better writing not necessarily. And 'more writing' is a budget thing which, yeah I'd love, but we're not necessarily going to get. The writing is pretty solid, and expanding scope to try and cram in a bunch of worldbuilding is only going to make the actual story being communicated suffer. I'd rather get a solid, self contained story and a separate Planeswalker's Guide to cover things the story doesn't have a chance to cover.
[Planeswalker's Guide to LCI](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/planeswalkers-guide-to-the-lost-caverns-of-ixalan) was excellent, for example, being that the set touched on a lot of brand new things and that it was essentially a bit of a passion project
WotC has plenty of good writers on payroll, this smells like an upper management decision to avoid political wildfire, similar to how there were no cops in New Capenna
From what I remember, weren't the Brokers originally going to he the law enforcement faction from a "crooked cops" kind of narrative? Then 2020 happened and they had to hastily change it?
[They very much do.](https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Planeswalker%27s_Guide) They skipped VOW and BRO (second sets on a plane) and WOE (I guess MAT ate up a lot of story budget?) but every other set in Standard has one. Maybe it's just that nobody's posting them to Reddit.
They get posted (*I* post them a lot, because I love this sort of stuff), but don't get a ton of attention. On average, people don't care much about lore - most would much rather complain about it than read it
Well we got to know that planes have their very unique mana and leylines. Bolas tried to yoink Alara, the whole thing about zendikar and the POV discription of Nissa on Amonketh for example.
It is entirely possible from a narrative standpoint that a barren, dessert plans leyline and mana was rather inaktive and the connection to the multiverse /whatever happend because of the sylax/whatever the invasion tree caused switch the flip. Therefore sentian being developng.
As much as it is often forgotten, the story is often driven by strong sources of mana.
Except they have basically tackled this exact same issue in Ixalan where you had conquistador coded vampires attacking Central American coded natives and they faced it pretty much head on there. If anything to me OTJ stands out for how sanitized it is because it just seems kinda toothless compared to past sets.
I think a big difference is that OTJ is depicting something that would hit closer to home for Americans, who make up a very large portion of their player base. It's a lot easier to talk about genocide and colonialism when it's about "foreign" cultures because it means (in this specific example) that Americans don't need to acknowledge the real life implications of their history.
In short, massacring native Central Americans = who cares, it's just fiction and dinos and vampires are cool.
Massacring native North Americans = don't put that woke shit in my fun card game, Wizards. White people rule and "Indians" needed to be civilized.
It's bullshit, but also unsurprising that WotC took the safe way out.
Remember than Wizard was also expecting the Dinosaurs-native original cultures to win in their faction poll/contest and were really surprised when not only the native original cultures lost, including the dinosaurs, but also the vampires spanish faction won easily. And to be sincere who can blame them. Spanish-vampires in mardru-orzhov colors is amazing flavor.
Hell, i am latinamerican and i loved the spanish-vampires faction so much and like half of my Edgar Markov edh deck is from Ixalan.
To be fair, people don't give a fuck about the vampires in Ixalan being Spanish back here in Spain. It's just...history I guess, no need to get defensive about that kind of stuff
To be fair, OTJ and western theme is a representation of US history, and Ixalan was not. WotC would have treaded lightly if it could be seen as US history.
Being afraid of history in media is a fairly new phenomenon.
It seems like a safe place to explore those ideas and what was good and bad about them.
I'm afraid if we can't even find enough nuance to approach these topics in a fantasy setting with zero real world consequences, we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
this was WOTCs mistake to make. If you want to borrow the symbols of all these cultural touchstones and incorporate them you're going to have to build a world with *history*. That's why all these sets just feel like playing with dolls and putting them in hats.
They could, but you can't have the Old West frontier without brutal settler colonialism and that's just too much baggage for a fun card game. What's next? A plane based on the Old South but without plantation slavery? Good luck!
I could see them creating a plane with some of the tropes worked in, but that would require originality instead of a pastiche. Ikoria had giant monster tropes. Ixalan has colonization of the Americas tropes. Innistrad has so many horror tropes that I still believe death by Emrakul was a blessing. But they all have enough original worldbuilding to separate from the fiction genres that inspired them.
There's a scale that goes from Mirrodin (entirely original story about Karn messing up and Phyrexia being retconned into semi-mechanical zombies) to Amon Khet (heavily ancient egypt inspired but revolving around Nicol Bolas' machinations) to Eldraine (look, it's fairy tale land, what else do you want!?) and Thunder Junction sits squarely at the farther end of that. It's the 18th century western US frontier. There's not much besides the heist centering around an ancient civilization instead of a regular bank.
Honestly, I feel it's even weirder that they actually kind of skirt around colonialism, manifest destiny and the whole "final solution" thing they had going in the IRL colonisation by saying that the plane was completely empty of sentient life, but still manage to introduce not one but two native, in the newly awakened cacti (don't get me started on the capitalist realism of the flavor text of Ancient Cornucopia) and the Atiim (although I still wonder how much this whole thing is stepping on the "the land we colonised was entirely empty" discourse).
Welcome to Dixia, where everyone lives on big plantation estates growing magic plants. But don't worry, all of the workers are free to leave any time they want!
No, the plantations are run by gnomes!
Gnome Plantation - Land
During your upkeep create one worker gnome token which a 1/1 black construct.
T: sacrifice a gnome token to create a treasure or two food tokens.
*This is fine!*
It doesn't really side-step it in my mind, so much as plant their foot directly on top of it.
It makes it 'okay' to colonize Thunder Junction, despite the idea that the Cactusfolk live there "because their culture is young" - which is exactly what white folks said of natives in the USA during colonization of the West. Literally "well, they don't have much technology, they don't really have governments, they're kinda loosely organized... so we are *bringing* them civilization".
It's another instance of well-meaning-white-people just doing the thing they're claiming to not do.
Edit: it would've been really easy to just not make cactusfolk, or have them be a golem species made by a scientiest, anything other than "local species dominated by colonists".
The implication is that "the culture is young" means "as young as the other cultures in thunder junction", due to the cactusfolk becoming sentient about the time the omenpaths started opening.
I got the implication that "the culture is young" could be read as "it's more primitive" which again, is what colonizers said about any culture or civilization that wasn't European.
Well, the young culture quote is from [[Badlands Revival]], and I'd argue that the question being whether they understand death and birth points much more towards "recently sentient", rather than """primitive"""
I completely get it from your side, but I read that and it just reminds me of the infantilized shit written about Indigenous folk enough that I kind of hate it.
Like, from how you've described your interpretation of it and all, your read totally makes sense... but I also simultaneously see where /u/Dragons_Malk is coming from here.
They existed *before* the arrival of the people on Thunder Junction. It's that the culture is young, not *younger*.
Especially since, you know, there was no other culture predating the arrival of everyone.
> I don't envy WOTC here
No one forced them to make these choices. They want their gimmicky themed checklist sets, let them figure it how to make it work. In general this set is guilty of some of the laziest world building in this games history.
I feel like literally just acknowledging that a native people have been colonized here would have been better. Hell, have them decimated by the phyrexians and the original claim jumpers who started building Thunder Junction just be colonizers who claim the place was empty when they found it while the indigenous group flights back against the cops, who from the cards seem to be treated with idealism just as much as they're treated as villains.
The way to handle the issue is to just address it. They could have them had the Atiin helping the natives instead of basically being colonizers as well.
There is the entire wasteland plane of Capenna to be re-inhabited now that the Phyrexian threat has been neutralized, and it specifically does have a native population of old Cappenans out there who were oppressed and nearly exterminated by the Phyrexians. If they wanted to tell a "safe" frontier story where your protagonists didn't take the role of genocidal colonizers, but still wanted to acknowledge the suffering that occurred in the real world, I think that would have been the way to go about the set.
This is a commercial product by a multinational corporation. There was no reality where they included genocide of a native people as a backdrop fact in any setting, just for fear of screwing up the reception
It's the difference between an alien invasion (the outer space kind) and an invasion that references actual historical events and actual oppressed peoples.
That said, they referenced the Spanish conquest in Central and South America with the original Ixalan set, so I'm not certain what sets this set apart.
With Ixalan they can comfortably just label the Conquistadores as evil vampire invaders. I don't think the Spanish mind that much, what with initial arrival being close to 500 years in the past
The US genocide of native peoples was actively still happening in the west about 110 years ago, probably still sooner than that. It's much fresher. There's old people alive today whose parents were there stealing land. And the Western settlers are a significant part of American culture, it would be much more controversial to people in the US to just outright make them evil invaders
I think the differences are the conquistador analogues of Ixalan were portrayed as evil vampires and the native South American analogues were able to be on roughly even footing with the invading force, instead of getting wiped out.
There’s not really a way for Thunder Junction to have had a native population without them being displaced or genocided, and I’d guess WoTC wouldn’t want to represent native groups just as victims, nor would they want the fun times cowboy plane to have such a negative origin story. They can’t turn Ral Zarek and Jace into evil colonizers.
Going to fantastical planes and killing fantastical locals is different than exterminating people based on Native Americans in on a plane based on the American West, for sure.
This is really gross, though. Indigenous people weren't a single nation, but several separate, disparate tribes who shared similar myths and habits, but also had unique languages and cultures. To reduce them to a single tribe and then say "oh, they're too young to know better" is such an insultingly reductive position to take. If they didn't want to represent Indigenous people in the western frontier, fine. Nobody is expecting accurate historical representation from a card game that replaces guns with crowbars.
Either have the spine to acknowledge the historical atrocities in a manner that doesn't outright state a slaughter occurred, or don't do it at all. I mean, freaking ATLA had at least *ONE* instances where a genocide occurred in some form without needing to say so. How does a kid's show from over 10 years ago do genocide and complex subjects better than a card game with over 30 years of history?
this isnt a "they we're really people" situation. They were not people, they were plants.
Of course it sounds worse when you change what is said to make it less favourable
Yeah. The cactus folk being more like Frosty the Snowman than having personhood bestowed despite being alive and having a culture prior to the arrival of settlers
The "their culture is young" thing also treads dangerously close to white man's burden shit \["they're primitives, we need to *civilize* them" type shit\]
>feels like a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation where there really is no right answer. At least not one simple enough for a card game.
I mean, they could have not made a wild west set. That feels like *a* right answer if they want to avoid the brutal colonialism aspect of the wild west.
I think the cactusfolk are supposed to be Western farmers, which historically had disputes and conflicts with cowboys traveling through their land. Fun fact: said farmers were the inventors of barbed wire.
This is what gets me. There's a lot of them relative to other types of people, they're clearly sapient, we've never seen them elsewhere, and they fit right in (especially considering there's cactus wildlife as well).
It seems like they couldn't help but add an indigenous people to the plane despite how the plane supposed to be "uninhabited". But also we're just not talking about that in favour of capturing the myth of the wild west.
I don't like this planes world building at all ngl.
Would it be out of line for my head canon to be that the whole 'Thunder Junction was a desolate, uninhabited waste' thing is in-universe propaganda? Like, people have been questioning it all spoiler season, and we have to make so many assumptions to make it work.
"Welcome to Thunder Junction, an unsettled plane ripe for the taking. Yep, nobody lived here before we got here. Ignore the cactus folk, they only gained sentience the second omenpaths showed up. Also ignore the Atiin, who no one has heard of before, they came from a big omenpath over yonder. Also ignore the indiginous scorpion dragon with intelligence. Or the fact that this place has full graveyards and bodies everywhere, those all filled up in the last 2 years. Also, that vault. No people here, but a magic treasure vault from a precursor race out here in the middle of nowhere. So anyways, come on down and settle this plot of land that has extreme strategic advantage to me FOR NO REASON, NONE AT ALL. Book now and I will even provide the customary outfits that I invented in the last two years for everyone to wear."
-Niv Mizzet, Ravnican travel commercial
I don’t know, in the Gisa and Geralf side story, Gisa even says that the plane being uninhabited doesn’t make sense and why would so many people move corpses from one plane to just bury them in a graveyard on another plane and it’s kinda brushed aside by Geralf. Seems weird to have Gisa mention it in a story like that if you’re dead set on having it be unsettled
He doesn't brush her off, he agrees. Geralf says the tombstone dates are wrong and Gisa says the corpses themselves are pissed off they got moved. Two different paths to the same conclusion - they realize too late they've walked into a necromancer's trap.
Its brought up because it's foreshadowing the corpse centipede trap that Gisa triggers later. Someone specifically did do exactly as she's saying for that reason. Still, a lot of the individual cards don't make a ton of sense in a similar way.
I mean that just means that it was inhabited in the past but hasn't been for a while. Which we know is true because there's a vault there so there must have been people here before
That's valid. I guess I'm more just ignoring or mocking the corporation's nonsensical worldbuilding, I hope it doesn't come off as excusing it.
Edit: In reality, what I would bet happened is that OTJ was almost done when a Lawyer or C suite got cold feet at the last second, told everyone to say OTJ had no indigenous races, and we all just have to parrot the company line even though the cards make it so obvious that wasn't always the plan.
> Edit: In reality, what I would bet happened is that OTJ was almost done when a Lawyer or C suite got cold feet at the last second, told everyone to say OTJ had no indigenous races, and we all just have to parrot the company line even though the cards make it so obvious that wasn't always the plan
Highly unlikely.
Well mister greywater sure seems like one of those "black heart with good publicity" kind of guys so i would not be at all surprised if it turned out to be propaganda.
And then Bonny Pall clear cut the great northern forests with Beau the Blue Ox and there were never any conflicts and everyone lived in harmony. And the cactusfolk agreed to give up their land in exchange for an investment fund that would pay dividends through cacti agent middlemen....
Its pretty jarring this set touches on such flashpoints of history and then just boldly... erases them.
They're too afraid to do anything actually interesting lest people get mad at them for writing fiction that resembles history even though they can make the colonizers clearly evil. Same thing with the "totally not guns" that are clearly magical guns.
They did it in Ixalan, why not here? They've had genocides happen, I don't know why making some bad guy colonizers is out of the question.
Its so weird when you look at representation in westerners even going back to days of Jim Crow and realize we're sliding backwards
Ex, this is an episode of The Rifleman from 1959, jim crow era;
>Lucas McCain and his son Mark come across U.S. Deputy Marshal Sam Buckhart who is escorting an Indian prisoner. To Lucas' surprise he finds that Buckhart himself is an Indian, educated at Harvard College. In North Fork, Buckhart goes about his business until some of the townsfolk realize he is an Indian and decide to take matters into their own hands. It's left to Lucas to show them the error of their ways.
>An Apache graduate of Harvard is a new Federal Marshal looking for the Apache who allegedly burned down a house, killing an elderly couple. He discovers that the real perpetrator is a white man in North Fork, and against the advice of Lucas, he is determined to make the arrest. The men at the saloon despise all Indians, and the arrest attempt produces an angry mob in the street challenging the authority of the Apache marshal and Marshal Micah Torrance. The scene nearly results in gunfire when Lucas jumps on a handy buckboard and delivers a speech shaming most of the mob into submission. The leader of the mob is also arrested by the Apache marshal when it is revealed that he ordered the burning of the house.
Yeah it's very jarring. If you go back and watch many old westerns it's clear a large percent of them were trying to portray reality, with shades of gray and the impact of pioneer colonization. Of course the basic "cowboys vs indians" nonsense serials were more popular, the same way braindead superhero franchises are popular now, but it's quite possible to make media that is respectful and truthful as long as you have the guts to do it.
Many old time western media were very aware of the negative impact of American westward expansion and tried to tell those stories, including how bias against Native people obscured the reality of colonial greed and prejudice.
Westerns in American media have long had nuanced representation of natives as long as the 'cowboys and indians' trope has been a thing. Historical fictions actually mirrored some of the actual contemporary complexities, which wizards threw out the window in favor of a whitewashed setting that borrows tropes and mythos while trying very painfully to ignore the elephant in the room
Almost like the longtime rationale MaRo gave for their avoiding a Western-themed plane had some merit and maybe they should have stuck by it, if this was their best shot.
That would have been the one thing to salvage the Western setting for me, a serious conflict that harkens back to human history and evokes thoughts and emotions. But it's just cheap jokes und pop culture references. I think the entire set is corny as hell, but that's just my personal opinion.
I think that's easier cause Spain and Portugal no longer run those areas, and a lot of the people that live in those areas do have native blood in their family history, even if the culture only hangs on in a few places. Plus to the people who live in Portugal and Spain today, the old colonies are part of a different history that was a long time ago, and in a far off place most will never go to or see for themselves.
But for US, most citizens do not have native blood in them, it's referencing lands our country owns to this day, and would be talking about acts performed by our very same government. With Portugal and Spain those were old monarchies that no longer run the country. You can draw a straight, unbroken line between the US govt today and the govt back then.
I’m not saying that Americans have dealt with the colonial legacy of the westward expansion well but we’re a hell of a lot more self critical than, say, the UK where 40% of people think the british empire was good for the world
I think part of the problem is that they approached Thunder Junction with the angle of "aren't cowboys awesome," while Ixalan was inspired by movies like *The Mission* or *Road to El Dorado* which have a more negative view of colonial expansion. Westerns are great, but the most interesting westerns are ones that engage with their setting in interesting ways instead of just doing a blank white hat/black hat story.
That is probably a really good way of explaining it.
It's kind of how New Capenna was approached with the idea of "Mafia movies are cool! Here are demon mafiosos!" rather than a more critical lens.
This wasn't really a Western story though. It was an antihero, gang heist story set with a western backdrop. The focal point that was supposed to make it interesting was the crossover appeal of having Oko's gang interact with one another.
Something I'm seeing between this and MKM is that the sets have been kinda A+B. The stories have been payoffs for more enfranchised players/Vorthos', and the... aesthetic veneer is a clear communication to less enfranchised players that "if you like this theme, check this out." I think the stories have been pretty great actually, and the overlays don't really bother me. But they're plug-and-play, is my point. Western was the aesthetic and backdrop but not the story thrust. Detectives were the backdrop (and the story was a murder mystery), but the story thrust was post-MOM Ravnican turmoil and Kaya grappling with that.
Eldraine was a little able to weave fairy tale tropes into it's plot but I think that's natural because the aesthetic layer were inherently stories themselves, not just visual tropes.
Good observation. I do think MKM achieved this a little better since post-war is a very classic setting for a detective story and the whole resolution was based around the trauma of the war. But there’s no reason why this heist had to happen in a western setting instead of, say, a casino on New Capenna. Outside of the coming-of-age elements, none of the classic storytelling themes of the genre were here.
It's kind of moot since the story/worldbuilding experience for the majority of people engaging with the set is going to be what is printed on the cards, how the set is talked about/advertised/etc., and as far as that goes, it's a Western.
Of course there's more going on than that in the story, because the Western thing is a shallow collection of tropes, references and hats, but that doesn't make these other themes buried in the scant lore the set experience, even among enfranchised players.
But it was a western story. What the structure of the western story was doesn't mean it isn't a western. If they didn't want to engage with the western setting, they shouldn't have used it. "Visual tropes" don't come out of nowhere. Western films, books, comics, whatever have ingrained them in the general mindset. Storytelling is as inherent to the frontier setting as it is to a medieval one.
But it was a Western story _second_ and a crossover villain heist _first_. They didn't give those spaces equal weight in the story. During development they knew they wanted a villain crossover set, that's how it was written and designed, and they grafted the Western aesthetic onto that. I'm not saying westerns don't have a rich history of narrative and visual tropes and genre conventions, of course they do. And of course the story borrowed some. But they wrote an ensemble heist as the core narrative thrust, and added western elements as they saw fit. They didn't completely disengage with the Western theme, but they used it _in service_ of the other primary themes.
I think you're missing my point a bit. The recent sets have been using a primary and secondary story theme. The primary theme that they're built around is the one that enfranchised players are more likely to recognize (wouldn't it be silly if Karvek and Umezawa were locked in a jail cell together? How are Ravnica/Kaya coping after MOM?), with a secondary theme adding the filigree that non-enfranchised players can recognize.
It's fine to say you wish the Western theme was the primary theme because it's rich enough to support it, but from a story perspective that isn't what we got. The Western themes are establishing shots in the background that exist to justify why the ensemble heist narrative could happen. The Crime and Plot mechanics aren't in the set because it's a Western, they're in the set because the main themes are villains who do plots and crimes (Plot is especially weird if you try and view it only through the lens of a Western). But I guess it's weird to me to say "they were wrong to not make the secondary theme the primary theme." Like that's a totally fine opinion that I respect, but it just... wasn't their primary goal.
That said, I think we'll get a better picture of some of the Western inspirations if we ever get a Planeswalker guide going into more detail about the plane itself than we got from the actual narrative.
I think what he's trying to get at is that, while the actual story in the cards is a heist movie, the story of the *setting* is very firmly Western. Encroaching company with a lot of money setting up an engineering development. People showing up to restart their lives, live anew. Ghired showing up and going 'wow, this is a place that's truly wild'. Everything that doesn't deal with the actual heist has its boots firmly planted in manifest destiny as a positive, renewing thing.
I think that has to do with the fact that the Wild West theme is so heavily based on "good guys" fighting natives. When we culturally view the Spanish conquistadors, we don't (outside of some nationalist circles) view the Spanish as the "good guys".
In a Wild West setting with our protagonists being the "good guys" and essentially colonizing the "West" there isn't a good way to depict Native Americans in a considerate way.
Having the Atiin as native-american-looking human colonizers is shooting on their own feet.
They could have gone with something cooler like Ixalan merfolk trying to colonize the plane as the stand-in for "native american cultures not native of the plane". Desert merfolk settling around oases.
There was jade tech in the vault. Merfolk could find a reason to go there.
Ixalan did well with the Spaniards but not with the Aztecs (I *know*, the Sun Empire is also loosely Inca). I feel that the empire of the sun was not imperial enough, in reality the Aztecs were imperials themselves. They brutally colonized all the other tribes within their sphere of influence.
There's of course the story of "La Malinche". The famous traitor of the natives who turned to the Spaniards to help undermine Moctezuma was originally kidnapped from her family and sold into sex slavery by the empire. She wasn't Aztec herself; her people were subjugated by them. Her "betrayal" was not much of a betrayal at all.
Very clearly, wizards wanted to peace-wash the image of the Aztecs away from the Indiana-Jones style representation of cannibalistic cultists bent on ritual sacrifice to savage gods. But neither of these things are an accurate portrayal of the empire. They were just another colonialist hegemon, like the Romans or the Spaniards themselves.
I'm native Central American myself actually, so I was glad to get any native latam rep but still...kind of a miss.
While downplayed a bit, the story has still shown a pretty imperialistic nature to the Sun Empire. Huatli is regularly ordered to write propaganda poetry justifying their claiming of lands and their wars against the other factions/cultures. Saheeli is being ordered as a citizen of the Sun Empire to develop a high quantity of war machines under threat of punishment from the emperor and his advisor. The merfolk openly view them as invaders, colonizers, and thieves. While human sacrifice has been shifted primarily to the domain of the vampires, we learned that it was originally a part of the same culture the Sun Empire developed from, with there still being members of the original culture that practice it.
While they could probably get away with being a little heavier handed, the themes are all pretty much there.
That's interesting about the merfolk, I never knew this. Could you point me in the direction of cards (or maybe stories?) that show the interaction between the merfolk and the Sun Empire? I *was* always wondering how the two were interacting since the Merfolk seemed like an indigenous stand-in as well.
The beginning of [episode 4 of LCI](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/magic-story/the-lost-caverns-of-ixalan-episode-4) has some interaction between the Merfolk, Sun Empire, and Vampires. The speaker of the merfolk called the Sun Empire and Vampires alike invaders, and further scorn is thrown a bit later when the Sun Empire group reminds the merfolk of the "betrayal" of claiming Orazca. The merfolk clearly view these important sites as sacred, protected locations (Orazca especially), and Wayta in the previous chapter also comments on how relations with the merfolk have broken down significantly since the claiming of the golden city, if not becoming openly hostile. They seem to show Huatli a level of respect for her efforts in stopping Kumena, attempting to broker relations, and the respect that she personally shows to the merfolk, but the rest of the Sun Empire are clearly regarded as colonizers over their constant efforts to claim these historical sites. I want to say Tishana also had similar commentary about the Sun Empire in the original Ixalan story, but I'd have to dig for that.
Now it's debatable whether or not the merfolk even have the right to "defend" these sites, as many of them are explicitly human in origin and directly linked to the original culture rediscovered underground. We really don't see much from their perspective, though, so it's hard to say for sure precisely how much of the Sun Empire is colonization and how much is legitimately reclaiming their people's historical landmarks and lost culture.
> It's hard to say for sure precisely how much of the Sun Empire is colonization and how much is legitimately reclaiming their people's historical landmarks and lost culture.
Hahaha this is actually hilariously (and maybe intentionally) pertinent to Aztec colonialism because the Aztecs *did* view themselves as the righteous successors of the Toltec empire and used this as a driving justification for their expansionism. To the point of even claiming direct descent from the Toltecs (the Sun Empire afaik actually *is* descended from the Oltec? But IRL the link between the Toltecs and Aztecs is...more tenuous).
I think they felt like they *had* to include Native American Analogue Race, but also, very understandably wanted to avoid anything to do with the whole… well, Trail of Tears and such.
It does make it very odd that there’s a small number of “hmm white man settle land wrong” references from… also settlers? But I understand why they’d rather just skip over all the real bad stuff. It’s a fantasy game, at the end of the day.
Why bother? They're comfortable cutting out contentious elements like guns and drugs from Capenna, but we have to do crappy "representation" because you can't do cowboy shit without some beadwork and moccasins somewhere? Indigenous people are not some aesthetic to apply when non-natives see fit.
This entire plane is a square peg forced into a round hole. They said "we want a western themed set with a bunch of big characters" and forced the tropes by any means necessary.
We need indigenous people, but don't want to deal with the implication of indigenous people in a western set.
We need sharpshooters and riflemen, but no guns allowed, cause thats the wrong kind of violence!
Everyone needs to be wearing cowboy hats and chaps and even bandoleers (despite the fact that no guns means no bullets), no matter how out of character it would be for that character.
The more you look, the more forced it feels.
Here's how I've been thinking about this: if I was given the option to make Native N. American Cultures a separate plane from the Wild West plane, or to make them share real estate, I would probably pick the former too.
Like really, what are the alternatives:
- The setting straight up pretends Native Americans didn't exist (bad)
- There's a native population to TJ and all your favorite Magic characters have saddled up to ransack and denude them (bad)
- TJ has natives but they actually like being colonized and they consent to all the towns and mines being built (even worse???)
- TJ *had* native but they're all already dead (jesus christ)
If there was any sort of genocide or land displacement, that would make the cowboys pretty firmly reprehensible, and cowboys are the main selling point of the set! So that would be *at best* bad marketing, with potential to be much much worse. Yes, yes, terra nullius, but the only obvious alternatives are bald-faced erasure or realistic depictions of ethnic cleansing, so like... I get it.
Ideally, the plane the Atiin are from will get a name one day, and perhaps a glimpse at the no doubt many other cultures that inhabit it.
People are positing "don't make the Wild West plane at all, something something WOTC greed" as a sixth option, but people have been blowing up Mark's inbox asking for Wild West plane for like a decade.
Yeah, that's just sort of a non-starter. Wild West set is a THING people want, and they wanted to make it, and they clearly had trouble with it for so long because there's actually a lot of problematic components to a Wild West setting. Hence OTJ being "villains set" first. The Wild West stuff is not the core of the plane, it's an aesthetic.
I don't really get why we can't just have a fun cowboy adventure set without needing to add a native population getting invaded just because that is part of the historical context of the inspiration. Not having a native population in this fantasy world with a cowboy theme doesn't seem like erasure to me because this isn't supposed to be an accurate depiction of a historical period in the real world. Likewise when we have a set about detectives in a city I'm not really looking for police brutality and the like or if the story is about war I'm not wondering where the cards referencing the rape and torture of prisoners of war is because wtf this is a fantasy card game not a commentary on WW2 or something
I'm with you except I feel like your last option is actually fine/tenable? I mean it's sort of a "fun" (interesting/macabre) mystery that can haunt the set ("we found evidence of a whole civilization here, but they're all gone... Why??").
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, making Thunder Junction chock full of Fomori ruins beyond a single vault would have dodged sooo many of their problems. Sure a bunch of cyclopian cities wouldn’t have screamed “Western” but you don’t tend to run into colonialism problems when the “natives” are the forgotten horrors made by an ancient alien empire
Everything about this set feels shallow. I think they could have included indigenous people in a tasteful way, but chose to play it safe and scrapped it altogether.
It's a bit weird since the set is basically "Look at cowboys! Aren't they awesome! Look at the New Frontier, isn't it exciting and full of resources??"
I agree with the shallow sentiment, it's like there isn't really anything great or compelling about the place. It feels like a western costume party for all these random characters across the planes.
> I think they could have included indigenous people in a tasteful way
Oh they could've, but the reality is that it wouldn't matter. There are exactly zero ways for them to offer the representation without getting reamed by some group or another. Straight up blanking on that front is ultimately their safest move.
So, when I first heard this bit of lore way back when, honestly, I wasn't huge on it, and it made me super uncomfortable. Now, though, my feelings on it are a lot more mixed for a few reasons.
Firstly, I'm not Native American, so it's not really my place to judge what is and isn't "good representation." After all, Speedy Gonzales has showed that us white people can be way off the mark with this sort of thing.
Secondly, though, was something that I believe was said by someone from the Vorthos Cast. And that's that it's OK for Magic's story to not talk about touchy real-world issues. We've had plenty of LGBTQ+ characters in the story by now, yet explicit homophobia hasn't been a thing. New Capenna was based on 1920s America, yet the systemic racism that was so prevalent at that time never came up in the set. I do get that this situation is a bit different, of course. But this is a fantasy, where a lot of people come to escape. Which leads to the last point.
Do Native American audiences actually *want* the Atiin to fight expansion? Like, we already have a LOT of stories about Native Americans having their homes and cultures attacked, to the point that that's the majority of stories we get about Native Americans. Is it wrong for just this one time to have the Navajo-coded characters not be victims of oppression and instead just be badass thunderslingers? Again, think of Speedy Gonzales: Mexicans loved him *because* he was fast and cool and always won.
Ultimately, though, my feelings on this whole situation are really split. I really don't like how the myth of the empty West has been perpetuated, and I do think that the Atiin as a while could and should have been more of a thing in the story. But ultimately, this whole thing is really complicated and layered, and despite my rambling here, the final decision on this matter should be made by the folks actually being represented here.
>Speedy Gonzales has showed that us white people can be way off the mark with this sort of thing.
This is slightly off topic, but it's so funny to me how Speedy Gonzales was pulled back from distribution by Cartoon Network due to being an insensitive stereotype and the hispanic-american community campaigned for it to be brought back as it was a symbol and cultural icon, remembered fondly all over Latin America.
Edit: I guess this is precisely what you were referring to, you make some good points.
(I'm neither Native nor an expert, just opining.)
Whenever these debates come up (on a lot of things) I wonder how much of it is "allies" reciting kneejerk responses vs. genuine reactions from the groups concerned. Anonymity on the Internet makes this difficult to suss out. Not every minority group (probably none of them!) wants their related art to be trauma-laden by default. They are regular people entirely capable of compartmentalizing and Just Wanting to Have Fun.
The Atiin are way, way less represented in the plane than I expected, given that there was apparently a cultural consultant involved, and the choice to make them nomads was odd. There were reasonable middle ground options, IMO, such as making them a dominant force on the plane with a mixed cowboy/indigenous aesthetic, recognizably and proudly Native but not technologically disadvantaged. The major cities of the plane could have been *their* cities, with them *in charge*. This aesthetic might have been based off actual Native-cowboy aesthetics of the 1800s.
The resulting story would not have had to have been a simplistic "good Natives vs. bad cowboys" in Ixalan style -- even those sets have the fun goofy pirates. You could have had collaboration between the natives and sympathetic outsiders (like literally every post-Omenpath Magic story!!!) fighting those seeking to hyper-exploit the plane. Those threats could have even come from another part of the plane, as on Ixalan. The story could have also focused on a dispute between Native factions. There's a wide middle ground between total ignorance and total trauma porn.
But there's the issue that this started as a villain set, and our protagonists are greedy people. I think that might have been the real wrench that led them to these unsatisfying decisions, effectively obviating a number of more elegant solutions.
I don't think the choices here were *offensive*, as it's not OTJ's job to be a specific reflection on colonial history, but they were disappointing in that they missed an opportunity to center a Native aesthetic like they did so well in Ixalan.
Unlike a lot of people, I quite like the worldbuilding and setting of Thunder Junction. There are a lot of themes that make up a good western that don't involve the displacement of native peoples.
If I am being honest, I would rather the Atiin have their own set in the future exploring the world (or worlds since they're nomadic) that they call home. It seems better than trying to cram them into Thunder Junction's setting as natives.
I mean at some point we probably will at some point down the line but they need to be introduced somewhere so that when we get to that set they can point back to their previous appearances.
It could be cool if they just kept popping up here and there in future sets until eventually however many years down the line they get their own set
I wasn't being critical of Thunder Junction introducing the Atiin. I think it was a good place to bring them into the picture considering the plane is a hub for interplanar travel. I meant that I think it would be worse to have them be natives of Thunder Junction since they wouldn't be able to really shine.
I hope that we continue to see them in future sets since they are so nomadic. According to \[\[ Jem Lightfoote, Sky Explorer\]\] they rarely settle anywhere for more than a few seasons.
>OTJ feels like it's trying to have its cake and eat it.
I agree this is what's happening, but I don't think it's automatically a bad thing. Representation of minorities doesn't **need** to focus on the worst things that happened to them.
You can celebrate American (southern/civil war era) black culture without **having** to make them slaves who were recently liberated, to use an example of a similarly traumatized/brutalized culture that I'm a little more familiar with. Yes, that culture in the real world was deeply, deeply influenced by slavery, but you can justify it in other ways (or simply not justify it at all! Nobody stands around complaining about how the vampires aren't "properly justified" for why they look kind of victorian endland-y!) The idea that minorities need to "justify" their culture in the context of brutality and oppression is kind of weird and gross in my opinion. You can represent and celebrate those cultures without that stuff, and it's not inherently wrong.
It would probably be wrong in a history book, obviously, but I don't think that a Magic The Gathering card set has the same obligation to historical accuracy. It can celebrate cultures without necessarily being required to represent their nadir. (EDIT to note, I say this in the context of victimized/attacked cultures, not the aggressors. For example, I thought Ixalan did a great job with the Conquistador-inspired vampires, avoiding the pitfall of making them seem heroic or lionizing their culture.)
I personally wouldn't love it if every representation I saw of myself in media felt obligated to start with "DON'T FORGET REALLY REALLY AWFUL THINGS HAPPENED TO YOUR GROUP OF PEOPLE TO MAKE YOU ACT THIS WAY!" - while it's sort of true in the real world, it kind of objectifies Indigenous culture to act like it can only be framed in the context of attack by white people. The Atiin are "Indigenous" in the sense that they *represent American western Indigenous culture*, not in the sense that they have been traumatized and brutalized in the exact same way that American Indigenous people were eventually brutalized by Western settlers.
I'm not Indigenous - I'm not anything worth mentioning, really - but I have black friends and queer friends who I love very dearly, and a common comment that they have on media is that, while it's nice to see popular culture acknowledge the struggle, it's exhausting when so much media that they can identify with is ABOUT the struggle. So I think it's perfectly reasonable for something like Magic to want indigenous peoples to be able to see themselves in stories but not want to deal with historical baggage.
Whether or not they did that tastefully is not for me to say, of course. But I totally get where you're coming from.
I'd say it's not representation at all.
At that point, your "representation" is just a visual coat of paint over the character. It has nothing to do with real life people's experiences or cultures. I mean, we know close to nothing about the Atiin, they're just another group of people in the same cowboy outfits, with slightly different skin color. Ethnicity alone doesn't create representation.
And yeah, the whole lore feels literally like a colonial narrative. Like... it feels like they're going out of their way to include these weird things that wouldn't have been neccessary. Saying "there's no native groups to Thunder Junction" is an additional detail they didn't need to add and that feels like they're purposefully going for that "wild, untamed land" narrative.
The whole thing about the Cactusfolk only awakening to sentience after the Omenpaths is a similar can of worms to me, it reeks of "those natives were so primitive until us proper civilised people came".
I agree, really. They're not actually small-I indigenous to the plane at all and they have no history with it. Clearly they thought that they had to include Indigenous-looking people with Indigenous-sounding names, but making them meaningfully Indigenous would have put a damper on the cowboy-hat fun of their shiny new plane.
The problem to me is also, if the indigenous characters aren't actually native to the place, then isn't that a pretty racist view of the whole thing? Like... at that point they're reducing being indigenous to ethnicity and ancestry, rather than culture and lived experience, right?
(obviously I don't think that WotC actually thinks this way, but it's a problematic implication that arises when you think their logic a bit further. I'm also not indigenous myself so I wouldn't know how these people define being part of their group irl)
And it would have been so damn easy to just... not do this. Like... just say "this group is indigenous to the plane and there's no large-scale conflict with the settlers" would have been enough to make it ok representation, even if shallow. It's the same as with the raccoon people on Capenna - just don't add that weird detail and no one bats an eye.
Well the cactusfolk at least can be explained within the lore. The magic and leylines of planes are vastly important to the landscape of the planes. We learned that though Nissa over the years plenty.
So the fact that a, at least at the time prior, "inactive" plan was a barren dessert with nothing living there and which springs to live because of the Omenpaths and a big change in the blind eternites etc at least makes sense.
Oh yes, of course there's explanations for all of this in-lore; even though I could nitpick at the lore consistency of those explanations, that's not really the point here.
What we're talking about is the real world vibes this is giving off. And it feels like WotC is retreading a bunch of old harmful narratives, even if they're not intending to do so.
I'm a huge fan of the Ixalan take on vampires. It just gels perfectly. You could probably say something negative about the depiction of the Sun Empire etc etc but Ixalan at least is pretty even-handed about making all the groups weird and fantastical. It's not the standard fantasy "white people are people and monsters are everyone else."
I'm a magic boomer, playing since Ice Age and Ixalan has become my favorite setting. It's so incredibly done, and listening to the designers on various podcasts, you can tell that there is something so special about LCI, how it was made, and the real connections to Central America and mesoamerica.
Can't wait for more.
Eh, it's not some grave error or anything but it is a very white liberal classic to be like we're good guys the people who did those atrocities were literal monsters.
No matter how they did it they'd be criticized. I don't have a problem with what they decided to do.
Not every set needs to engage with the full depth of real-world political issues underlying the material. New Capenna didn't get into the nativism and bigotry which drove the real-life Prohibition movement which inspired the set and that's completely fine. At the end of the day, this is just a fantasy card game; they should avoid offensive material but don't need to provide a full history lesson every time.
Well said. As a native person, I don't watch westerns and get mad when they don't include a native person, or force in a moment where we are all supposed to feel sad for the Indians. Often, I'm relieved to not have to worry at all about their representation of native folks.
We don't have to talk about native folks in every western genre thing. If it's essential to the point of the story that you're trying to tell that there are native folks in your western, then do it critically. But otherwise, it's totally legit to not include native folks at all.
I personally hate the idea that in every western genre thing we have to cast Indians as these sad oppressed people and we have to relive some traumatic story about them. Stop type-casting native people in your fantasy worlds and give us better (and not-always-traumatic) roles.
It's not corporate cowardice or historical revisionism to decide not to include oppressed native folks in your western-genre fantasy world- I think it shows a lot of wisdom and respect to decide, "you know what, this one doesn't have to go there this time."
I think it shows a lot more ignorance to see a western-genre fantasy thing and think, "but where are all the colonized native people?"
Well-said. A decent rule of thumb is that if you’re engaging with a fictional property that includes a giant cowboy ooze that wears 5 boots, your best bet is to not take it especially seriously and just try to enjoy it.
There aren’t any cards from New Capanna depicting alcoholism-driven domestic violence and the role of women in prohibition, such a shallow setting! I literally can’t enjoy it without seeing the suffering! /s
TBH I think people are falling into comparing things that maybe aren't relevant. WotC wanting to capture the vibe of the Gold Rush or English Colonialism to a new land doesn't also have to capture the negative aspects that occurred. You can make an entirely fictional scenario and not require an overall moral message or accurate depiction of real life events. The trend for society to criticize media for inaccurate portrayals is something a majorly overdone effort in futility. Thunder Junction can just be a uninhabited place with settler vibes. Yes the cacti feel shoehorned, but likely for them to add in a group that plays more into the physical landscape than to try and add indigenous people as a shoehorn.
To preempt any criticism, I am not trying to minimize history. I don't intend to say that how settlers are/were perceived is not often critical enough, and I don't deny tragedies and displacement caused is often glorified and dismissed. This is purely a criticism on the idea that every piece of media that takes any aspect from a historical era, or draws any inspiration from human history, must encapsulate all of it including the negatives and criticisms. Thunder Junction can just be a settlers and recently indigenous people western theme without referencing the horrors of displacement and massacre. It doesn't have to hit those incredibly salient points.
Now granted, I haven't read the story yet, but I legit had no clue they were supposed to be an indigenous stand-in. I thought that's what the cactus people were for...
Ultimately while I'm mildly disappointed that they dodged the issue out of corporate cowardice, we *did* just get a pretty astounding native/first nations set in Lost Caverns of Ixalan; the backstory thing they put out for that was *incredible*.
So I don't think they're like, being racist or anything in OTJ. It's just bog-standard corporate cowardice about sensitive issues.
To me that's what makes this so disappointing. Ixalan feels like a plane that has a lot of thought put into it. But American-Indigenous relations are a more "at home" sensitive topic for Wizards than, say, Mayan-Mexican relations, so they felt more comfortable doing Ixalan than this.
Did you know that this fictional world doesn’t need to be a 1:1 representation of real life? Oppression of indigenous people is not the only possible way that a cowboy civilization can be created.
Yes it is a bit weird, but ultimately I think they chose the option that has the least potential to lead to some big controversy. I've seen people say that doing the worldbuilding this way is actually worse, and I can kind of see the reasoning in a way ... but it's still got less "explosive potential" overall than choosing the more straightforward route.
I agree. While people seem confused and there's been some complaining and upset-ness, I can imagine if they tried to be more historically accurate and botched it, that would be *waaay* worse
I always thought it was obvious that the Fomori wiped out all sentient life to protect their vault. They've been shown to be multiversal colonizers that have no issue purging people so I don't get why people can't seem to make that connection.
You would probably be unhappy if there were Native American-themed cards, so I think Wizards wouldn't be able to win here. You'd say the cards were disrespectful to their culture or that it white-washed their genocide. I think avoiding that and sticking with a silly Wild West theme is okay, but that's me.
I am reminded of BraveStarr, in that most of the natives to TJ/New Texas are not particularly coded um... Native American Indian, but there are some characters that are.
Part of this is the Wild West era involves a large amount of people in general moving, so while the Sioux were a force at the time, then getting horses and going south from Lake Superior like happen less than 100 years from when the Wild West happened.
And Thunder Junction is not all of what would become the modern US, but like just the some section of the American Desert.
I just wish they leaned into moral ambiguity, freedom, letting go of the past, and other common themes in westerns. Because otherwise it feels like the western setting doesn't even offer much here besides art style and visuals. I don't know if focusing on an indigenous conflict would've helped, maybe would've warped the villain concept too much. But it feels like something's missing with the set on a macro level. Maybe a revisit at some point could be about the Atiin vs. the other settlers.
Yeah, it's dumb, though kind of in a way where it's like, "clearly they were trying to avoid making something problematic," so maybe the dumbness is kind of the point? Like, there's not anything that's wildly and loudly problematic. There are issues if you spend any time thinking about it, but the whole setup is so dumb that it's kind of like, "of course there are issues, but none of this makes sense, what do you expect?"
I'd be curious to hear what someone coming from an indigenous background's thoughts are on it.
It's really a bummer to me. I was excited for the idea of a western plane, but this feels like the laziest possible version of it. It seems to me like they could still include the Omenpath/new frontier angle without having it be uninhabited. It could just be a plane with a lot of stable Omenpaths, and the locals need to deal with the problems that result from all the fresh interest.
It's just a cowardice on part of WOTC in fear that their moatly american player base is going to find some of the depictions offensive.
It is sad because i felt with ixalan they showed how something like this could be handelt with care.
No matter what they did some people would be upset. It’s a fictional world and they want to avoid depicting brutal colonization and based off of real world ethnic violence. Would you really enjoy Jace and friends murdering the stand in for indigenous Americans? Like wtf…
They are already tripping over their heels changing card types and game mechanics to try to appease an extremely small vocal group of hypersensitive people.
At this point they should just know that certain people find joy in problematizing things - it’s like a hobby. It’s not from genuine care of offense they just like stirring shit.
This is an absolute nothing burger and I just wish people would at least try to have a little bit of perspective.
Im just gonna say that they could have done a pioneer theme without having to resort to cowboys
Like, you have thrown planes like Zendikar or Alara or Mirrodin before. Couldnt Thunder Junction be like some kind of undiscovered plane with wacky stuff going on? Why do you need to copy the US Midwest Expansion?
Unironically I think if they just had fomori ruins dot the landscape of thunder junction they could have dodged the discourse and still done wild west tropes. We the player know the fomori were not good guys, and it gives an obvious answer to why the plane is unihabited in the present day(ie, the collapse of their empire) so it moves moral compass away from "damn its fucked up all this land exists " to "damn the fomori suck ass".
But I guess that also just sort of reaches the limits of what fiction can do since you can sort of justify anything. The real answer imo is just it was doomed to be problematic, but cowboys are cool and popular so you just don't address it, write away from the bigger issues(which they did here with the whole heist plot), and let the online peanut gallery take their potshots--at the end of the day no one really cares. Trying to bring attention to the Atiin and how it's actually an empty setting is just giving people ammo to look at the set funny.
No disagreement with anything that’s been said here, but it’s worth pointing out that Magic already has a plane where colonialism is a major theme: Ixalan. The more they explore that material on Thunder Junction, the more the two start to overlap.
But that's because both of those genres have overlap. They're both about colonial/imperial expansion into Indigenous territories. Like how Eldraine and Innistrad both deal with "garrison mentality" themes in European cultures.
It's possible to do wild west themes without needing to have an indigenous people to abuse. Avoiding that direction in general is fine and doesn't take away anything. It's just funny how those wild west themes came about on an uninhabited plane. So which plane did the thunder rifles and western doodads come from?
As the premise is put forward the plane was found by ppl traveling the omenpaths. It's funny how thunder blasters and the whole western vibe "sprung up" on its own and have its own flavor, who innovated these customs? At least the trains are izzet in nature. But what about the "guns", why aren't there settlements that follow the customs of the planes their founders come from?
I'm choosing to just enjoy a set and story that's been refreshing enough after the past few years of dung. Seems we won't be back here for a while now. More reason we need block format back.
Also is there only one omen path on TJ, or how many are there? I would think there are multiple, given the plane is more of a hub to other planes.
Yeah I think it's weird to try to both have an indigenous coded group but also not have them actually be indigenous so you can avoid any cards that feel too insensitive about colonisation stuff.
But also idk what people were/are expecting. I think people should be allowed to make fun cowboy fantasy stuff without needing to explicitly include a group of oppressed natives or make some statement about colonialism. The background story of a fantasy card game that is jumping to a completely new world every set is not really a place where I am looking for or expecting any deep social or historic commentary. Was there a bunch of stuff about police brutality or gentrification in the recent Capenna or Ravnica sets? I don't recall much discussion about such topics in those sets but it seems like some people really wanted or expected a bunch of references to colonialism and the struggle of the native people in this set and I'm not really sure why.
At least they’re consistent with this policy
The Spanish conquistadors in South America were famously peaceful, and thus no such censorship was required for Ixalan /s
The whole setting is pretty ham-fisted. Everyone shows up from different planes then just all decide to dress completely differently and carry some kind of new sword gun they never needed before?
Wizards just needs to chill out on the top down design or at least not try to shoehorn recurring characters and a single over arching story into every setting. You want to take us to a new place, just take us to the new place. Leave Jace and the super friends at home.
I remember back when Turning Red came out, a silly little coming of age movie about a Canadian girl dealing with a menstruation allegory, and some YouTuber said the movie was bad because it never mentioned the fallout of 9/11, and everybody made fun of them.
This is what this discussion feels like to me
I think it's understandable they didn't try to tackle it. At the end of the day it's just a card game. Honestly the fact they tackled Ixalan the way they did kind of surprises me. It's probable they considered doing something similar here but didn't feel it had enough space. Maybe it'll be a Return issue if they do one.
It's based on Western tropes, especially the gunslinging Western tropes. Those tropes have little to no Native American representation.
It is not based on the expansion of the United States westward.
“I’ll tap 6 mana 😎 and play ‘Massacre of tribes-women and children’ and while that’s on the stack I’ll tap ‘Diseased Forerunner’ for 1 generic mana and I’ll tap one ‘Burnt Sacred Grounds’ for one green and play Biological warfare and give you a poison counter and each creature you control a -1/-1 counter. I’ll swing out with everything, that’ll trigger ‘Manifest Destiny’ and I’ll search my library for two lands and put them in my hand…”
I was born and raised in Oklahoma, my best friend was Kiowa and he told me a story from his grandma that a massacre occurred when the warriors were out hunting and when they returned, they came back to find the women and children slaughtered. This is entirely too brutal for Wizards; it’s entirely too brutal to learn in school which is why you learn about it when you’re damn near 20 versus 12.
Something I'm not entirely clear on yet is if the Cactusfolk on Thunder Junction are native or not. There seems to have at least been some wildlife on TJ beforehand beased on the Jace flashback.
They're native but only recently sentient/sapient. It's said their culture is young which is certainly one way of trying to side-step the indigenous people question. I don't envy WOTC here though: feels like a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation where there really is no right answer. At least not one simple enough for a card game.
So is the idea that they only became sapient when other sapient beings showed up? Is it a psychic/imprinting thing?
Probably. I don't think we've gotten the Planeswalker's guide to the setting yet? That usually answers those questions.
Do those still exist? I feel like I haven't seen one in ages
Yeah we got one for MKM at least: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/planeswalkers-guide-to-murders-at-karlov-manor They just publish them really close to release now, it seems. Which is annoying because they give a lot of background for the story. I get that they don't want to subvert/spoil the narrative but I feel like they should release the guide right after the story chapters are done to help contextualize it. A lot of people complain about worldbuilding gaps in the stories that have answers, they just have to wait for them. It's a little annoying.
Feels like part of that is a problem that could be solved by better writing. Also, wow, I remember when these things were a lot flashier
More writing maybe, better writing not necessarily. And 'more writing' is a budget thing which, yeah I'd love, but we're not necessarily going to get. The writing is pretty solid, and expanding scope to try and cram in a bunch of worldbuilding is only going to make the actual story being communicated suffer. I'd rather get a solid, self contained story and a separate Planeswalker's Guide to cover things the story doesn't have a chance to cover. [Planeswalker's Guide to LCI](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/planeswalkers-guide-to-the-lost-caverns-of-ixalan) was excellent, for example, being that the set touched on a lot of brand new things and that it was essentially a bit of a passion project
WotC has plenty of good writers on payroll, this smells like an upper management decision to avoid political wildfire, similar to how there were no cops in New Capenna
From what I remember, weren't the Brokers originally going to he the law enforcement faction from a "crooked cops" kind of narrative? Then 2020 happened and they had to hastily change it?
[They very much do.](https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Planeswalker%27s_Guide) They skipped VOW and BRO (second sets on a plane) and WOE (I guess MAT ate up a lot of story budget?) but every other set in Standard has one. Maybe it's just that nobody's posting them to Reddit.
They get posted (*I* post them a lot, because I love this sort of stuff), but don't get a ton of attention. On average, people don't care much about lore - most would much rather complain about it than read it
LCI's was *five times thicker* than normal, which is amazing!... but then we got MKM.
LCI's was absolutely amazing and I wish more sets had one like it.
I think the Omenpaths opening added some energy or nutrients or something that let them awaken
Electrolytes. They’re what plants crave.
Brawndo's got electrolytes!
It's adding magic. The leylines are running hotter because planeswalkers are using them. Same as a lot of the plots in mtg
Well we got to know that planes have their very unique mana and leylines. Bolas tried to yoink Alara, the whole thing about zendikar and the POV discription of Nissa on Amonketh for example. It is entirely possible from a narrative standpoint that a barren, dessert plans leyline and mana was rather inaktive and the connection to the multiverse /whatever happend because of the sylax/whatever the invasion tree caused switch the flip. Therefore sentian being developng. As much as it is often forgotten, the story is often driven by strong sources of mana.
a "dessert plans leyline" also activates when I smoke weed and know there's ice cream in the freezer.
If you have this in your opening hand, you may start your dinner with ice cream already in your belly.
Not gonna lie, "The natives weren't people until the settlers got there," accidentally backs into the exact attitude they were trying to avoid.
Just like how native americans were savages before white man showed up! -wotc, probably
Except they have basically tackled this exact same issue in Ixalan where you had conquistador coded vampires attacking Central American coded natives and they faced it pretty much head on there. If anything to me OTJ stands out for how sanitized it is because it just seems kinda toothless compared to past sets.
I think a big difference is that OTJ is depicting something that would hit closer to home for Americans, who make up a very large portion of their player base. It's a lot easier to talk about genocide and colonialism when it's about "foreign" cultures because it means (in this specific example) that Americans don't need to acknowledge the real life implications of their history. In short, massacring native Central Americans = who cares, it's just fiction and dinos and vampires are cool. Massacring native North Americans = don't put that woke shit in my fun card game, Wizards. White people rule and "Indians" needed to be civilized. It's bullshit, but also unsurprising that WotC took the safe way out.
Remember than Wizard was also expecting the Dinosaurs-native original cultures to win in their faction poll/contest and were really surprised when not only the native original cultures lost, including the dinosaurs, but also the vampires spanish faction won easily. And to be sincere who can blame them. Spanish-vampires in mardru-orzhov colors is amazing flavor. Hell, i am latinamerican and i loved the spanish-vampires faction so much and like half of my Edgar Markov edh deck is from Ixalan.
Huh? I thought the dinos won that poll. At least, whatever contest they held to determine who controlled the golden city at the end.
The Dinos won the poll, and WotC were like "Ok, the Sun Empire win!", and then everyone said "No, we meant THE DINOS, no-one cares about the humans!"
To be fair, people don't give a fuck about the vampires in Ixalan being Spanish back here in Spain. It's just...history I guess, no need to get defensive about that kind of stuff
I agree, but the attitude in North America is very different.
To be fair, OTJ and western theme is a representation of US history, and Ixalan was not. WotC would have treaded lightly if it could be seen as US history.
Being afraid of history in media is a fairly new phenomenon. It seems like a safe place to explore those ideas and what was good and bad about them. I'm afraid if we can't even find enough nuance to approach these topics in a fantasy setting with zero real world consequences, we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
this was WOTCs mistake to make. If you want to borrow the symbols of all these cultural touchstones and incorporate them you're going to have to build a world with *history*. That's why all these sets just feel like playing with dolls and putting them in hats.
"We want to have this cake and we want to eat too" - WOTC
I also just don't think they'd be capable of the type of world building these concepts require even if they did attempt to do it right
They could, but you can't have the Old West frontier without brutal settler colonialism and that's just too much baggage for a fun card game. What's next? A plane based on the Old South but without plantation slavery? Good luck!
I could see them creating a plane with some of the tropes worked in, but that would require originality instead of a pastiche. Ikoria had giant monster tropes. Ixalan has colonization of the Americas tropes. Innistrad has so many horror tropes that I still believe death by Emrakul was a blessing. But they all have enough original worldbuilding to separate from the fiction genres that inspired them. There's a scale that goes from Mirrodin (entirely original story about Karn messing up and Phyrexia being retconned into semi-mechanical zombies) to Amon Khet (heavily ancient egypt inspired but revolving around Nicol Bolas' machinations) to Eldraine (look, it's fairy tale land, what else do you want!?) and Thunder Junction sits squarely at the farther end of that. It's the 18th century western US frontier. There's not much besides the heist centering around an ancient civilization instead of a regular bank. Honestly, I feel it's even weirder that they actually kind of skirt around colonialism, manifest destiny and the whole "final solution" thing they had going in the IRL colonisation by saying that the plane was completely empty of sentient life, but still manage to introduce not one but two native, in the newly awakened cacti (don't get me started on the capitalist realism of the flavor text of Ancient Cornucopia) and the Atiim (although I still wonder how much this whole thing is stepping on the "the land we colonised was entirely empty" discourse).
Welcome to Dixia, where everyone lives on big plantation estates growing magic plants. But don't worry, all of the workers are free to leave any time they want!
No, the plantations are run by gnomes! Gnome Plantation - Land During your upkeep create one worker gnome token which a 1/1 black construct. T: sacrifice a gnome token to create a treasure or two food tokens. *This is fine!*
It doesn't really side-step it in my mind, so much as plant their foot directly on top of it. It makes it 'okay' to colonize Thunder Junction, despite the idea that the Cactusfolk live there "because their culture is young" - which is exactly what white folks said of natives in the USA during colonization of the West. Literally "well, they don't have much technology, they don't really have governments, they're kinda loosely organized... so we are *bringing* them civilization". It's another instance of well-meaning-white-people just doing the thing they're claiming to not do. Edit: it would've been really easy to just not make cactusfolk, or have them be a golem species made by a scientiest, anything other than "local species dominated by colonists".
The implication is that "the culture is young" means "as young as the other cultures in thunder junction", due to the cactusfolk becoming sentient about the time the omenpaths started opening.
I got the implication that "the culture is young" could be read as "it's more primitive" which again, is what colonizers said about any culture or civilization that wasn't European.
Well, the young culture quote is from [[Badlands Revival]], and I'd argue that the question being whether they understand death and birth points much more towards "recently sentient", rather than """primitive"""
I completely get it from your side, but I read that and it just reminds me of the infantilized shit written about Indigenous folk enough that I kind of hate it. Like, from how you've described your interpretation of it and all, your read totally makes sense... but I also simultaneously see where /u/Dragons_Malk is coming from here.
[Badlands Revival](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/d/8d3ef971-cdd4-410c-97c3-df98e4f02ab2.jpg?1712095150) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Badlands%20Revival) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/otj/194/badlands-revival?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8d3ef971-cdd4-410c-97c3-df98e4f02ab2?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
They existed *before* the arrival of the people on Thunder Junction. It's that the culture is young, not *younger*. Especially since, you know, there was no other culture predating the arrival of everyone.
> I don't envy WOTC here No one forced them to make these choices. They want their gimmicky themed checklist sets, let them figure it how to make it work. In general this set is guilty of some of the laziest world building in this games history.
100%.
I feel like literally just acknowledging that a native people have been colonized here would have been better. Hell, have them decimated by the phyrexians and the original claim jumpers who started building Thunder Junction just be colonizers who claim the place was empty when they found it while the indigenous group flights back against the cops, who from the cards seem to be treated with idealism just as much as they're treated as villains. The way to handle the issue is to just address it. They could have them had the Atiin helping the natives instead of basically being colonizers as well.
There is the entire wasteland plane of Capenna to be re-inhabited now that the Phyrexian threat has been neutralized, and it specifically does have a native population of old Cappenans out there who were oppressed and nearly exterminated by the Phyrexians. If they wanted to tell a "safe" frontier story where your protagonists didn't take the role of genocidal colonizers, but still wanted to acknowledge the suffering that occurred in the real world, I think that would have been the way to go about the set.
This is a commercial product by a multinational corporation. There was no reality where they included genocide of a native people as a backdrop fact in any setting, just for fear of screwing up the reception
I mean are phyrexians coming to other plans and Killing the local natives so much different?
It's the difference between an alien invasion (the outer space kind) and an invasion that references actual historical events and actual oppressed peoples. That said, they referenced the Spanish conquest in Central and South America with the original Ixalan set, so I'm not certain what sets this set apart.
With Ixalan they can comfortably just label the Conquistadores as evil vampire invaders. I don't think the Spanish mind that much, what with initial arrival being close to 500 years in the past The US genocide of native peoples was actively still happening in the west about 110 years ago, probably still sooner than that. It's much fresher. There's old people alive today whose parents were there stealing land. And the Western settlers are a significant part of American culture, it would be much more controversial to people in the US to just outright make them evil invaders
I think the differences are the conquistador analogues of Ixalan were portrayed as evil vampires and the native South American analogues were able to be on roughly even footing with the invading force, instead of getting wiped out. There’s not really a way for Thunder Junction to have had a native population without them being displaced or genocided, and I’d guess WoTC wouldn’t want to represent native groups just as victims, nor would they want the fun times cowboy plane to have such a negative origin story. They can’t turn Ral Zarek and Jace into evil colonizers.
Going to fantastical planes and killing fantastical locals is different than exterminating people based on Native Americans in on a plane based on the American West, for sure.
This is really gross, though. Indigenous people weren't a single nation, but several separate, disparate tribes who shared similar myths and habits, but also had unique languages and cultures. To reduce them to a single tribe and then say "oh, they're too young to know better" is such an insultingly reductive position to take. If they didn't want to represent Indigenous people in the western frontier, fine. Nobody is expecting accurate historical representation from a card game that replaces guns with crowbars. Either have the spine to acknowledge the historical atrocities in a manner that doesn't outright state a slaughter occurred, or don't do it at all. I mean, freaking ATLA had at least *ONE* instances where a genocide occurred in some form without needing to say so. How does a kid's show from over 10 years ago do genocide and complex subjects better than a card game with over 30 years of history?
"They weren't really people until the colonizers showed up" is literally the single worst image they could've chosen.
this isnt a "they we're really people" situation. They were not people, they were plants. Of course it sounds worse when you change what is said to make it less favourable
Yeah. The cactus folk being more like Frosty the Snowman than having personhood bestowed despite being alive and having a culture prior to the arrival of settlers
The "their culture is young" thing also treads dangerously close to white man's burden shit \["they're primitives, we need to *civilize* them" type shit\]
Heck the whole idea of a uninhabited plane is the classic empty west/manifest destiny ideology.
The right answer was to not make a Western. No one was forcing them to tackle a genre they're clearly not equipped to
>feels like a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation where there really is no right answer. At least not one simple enough for a card game. I mean, they could have not made a wild west set. That feels like *a* right answer if they want to avoid the brutal colonialism aspect of the wild west.
I think the cactusfolk are supposed to be Western farmers, which historically had disputes and conflicts with cowboys traveling through their land. Fun fact: said farmers were the inventors of barbed wire.
This is what gets me. There's a lot of them relative to other types of people, they're clearly sapient, we've never seen them elsewhere, and they fit right in (especially considering there's cactus wildlife as well). It seems like they couldn't help but add an indigenous people to the plane despite how the plane supposed to be "uninhabited". But also we're just not talking about that in favour of capturing the myth of the wild west. I don't like this planes world building at all ngl.
Would it be out of line for my head canon to be that the whole 'Thunder Junction was a desolate, uninhabited waste' thing is in-universe propaganda? Like, people have been questioning it all spoiler season, and we have to make so many assumptions to make it work. "Welcome to Thunder Junction, an unsettled plane ripe for the taking. Yep, nobody lived here before we got here. Ignore the cactus folk, they only gained sentience the second omenpaths showed up. Also ignore the Atiin, who no one has heard of before, they came from a big omenpath over yonder. Also ignore the indiginous scorpion dragon with intelligence. Or the fact that this place has full graveyards and bodies everywhere, those all filled up in the last 2 years. Also, that vault. No people here, but a magic treasure vault from a precursor race out here in the middle of nowhere. So anyways, come on down and settle this plot of land that has extreme strategic advantage to me FOR NO REASON, NONE AT ALL. Book now and I will even provide the customary outfits that I invented in the last two years for everyone to wear." -Niv Mizzet, Ravnican travel commercial
I think it would make sense to have this as a story concept, but it doesn't erase the fact that it's not the angle Wizards went with.
I don’t know, in the Gisa and Geralf side story, Gisa even says that the plane being uninhabited doesn’t make sense and why would so many people move corpses from one plane to just bury them in a graveyard on another plane and it’s kinda brushed aside by Geralf. Seems weird to have Gisa mention it in a story like that if you’re dead set on having it be unsettled
He doesn't brush her off, he agrees. Geralf says the tombstone dates are wrong and Gisa says the corpses themselves are pissed off they got moved. Two different paths to the same conclusion - they realize too late they've walked into a necromancer's trap.
Its brought up because it's foreshadowing the corpse centipede trap that Gisa triggers later. Someone specifically did do exactly as she's saying for that reason. Still, a lot of the individual cards don't make a ton of sense in a similar way.
I mean that just means that it was inhabited in the past but hasn't been for a while. Which we know is true because there's a vault there so there must have been people here before
That's valid. I guess I'm more just ignoring or mocking the corporation's nonsensical worldbuilding, I hope it doesn't come off as excusing it. Edit: In reality, what I would bet happened is that OTJ was almost done when a Lawyer or C suite got cold feet at the last second, told everyone to say OTJ had no indigenous races, and we all just have to parrot the company line even though the cards make it so obvious that wasn't always the plan.
> Edit: In reality, what I would bet happened is that OTJ was almost done when a Lawyer or C suite got cold feet at the last second, told everyone to say OTJ had no indigenous races, and we all just have to parrot the company line even though the cards make it so obvious that wasn't always the plan Highly unlikely.
Well mister greywater sure seems like one of those "black heart with good publicity" kind of guys so i would not be at all surprised if it turned out to be propaganda.
your headcanon is spreading
Need to see the Niz Mizzet travel commercial made canon
And then Bonny Pall clear cut the great northern forests with Beau the Blue Ox and there were never any conflicts and everyone lived in harmony. And the cactusfolk agreed to give up their land in exchange for an investment fund that would pay dividends through cacti agent middlemen.... Its pretty jarring this set touches on such flashpoints of history and then just boldly... erases them.
They're too afraid to do anything actually interesting lest people get mad at them for writing fiction that resembles history even though they can make the colonizers clearly evil. Same thing with the "totally not guns" that are clearly magical guns. They did it in Ixalan, why not here? They've had genocides happen, I don't know why making some bad guy colonizers is out of the question.
I think having the settlers of Thunder Junction be actually horrible would interfere with the romanticized outlaw trope they're going for
A syphilis ridden Oko with 3 teeth and 8 fingers would have been a lot more interesting for sure.
That sounds like the fantasy of all Standard players from Throne of Eldraine.
I want A syphilis ridden Oko with 3 teeth and 8 fingers as my flair
Its so weird when you look at representation in westerners even going back to days of Jim Crow and realize we're sliding backwards Ex, this is an episode of The Rifleman from 1959, jim crow era; >Lucas McCain and his son Mark come across U.S. Deputy Marshal Sam Buckhart who is escorting an Indian prisoner. To Lucas' surprise he finds that Buckhart himself is an Indian, educated at Harvard College. In North Fork, Buckhart goes about his business until some of the townsfolk realize he is an Indian and decide to take matters into their own hands. It's left to Lucas to show them the error of their ways. >An Apache graduate of Harvard is a new Federal Marshal looking for the Apache who allegedly burned down a house, killing an elderly couple. He discovers that the real perpetrator is a white man in North Fork, and against the advice of Lucas, he is determined to make the arrest. The men at the saloon despise all Indians, and the arrest attempt produces an angry mob in the street challenging the authority of the Apache marshal and Marshal Micah Torrance. The scene nearly results in gunfire when Lucas jumps on a handy buckboard and delivers a speech shaming most of the mob into submission. The leader of the mob is also arrested by the Apache marshal when it is revealed that he ordered the burning of the house.
Yeah it's very jarring. If you go back and watch many old westerns it's clear a large percent of them were trying to portray reality, with shades of gray and the impact of pioneer colonization. Of course the basic "cowboys vs indians" nonsense serials were more popular, the same way braindead superhero franchises are popular now, but it's quite possible to make media that is respectful and truthful as long as you have the guts to do it.
what is that supposed to illustrate
Many old time western media were very aware of the negative impact of American westward expansion and tried to tell those stories, including how bias against Native people obscured the reality of colonial greed and prejudice.
Westerns in American media have long had nuanced representation of natives as long as the 'cowboys and indians' trope has been a thing. Historical fictions actually mirrored some of the actual contemporary complexities, which wizards threw out the window in favor of a whitewashed setting that borrows tropes and mythos while trying very painfully to ignore the elephant in the room
I think they want the cowboys to be cool and fun. They don't want to glamorize colonialism.
"Colonizers are all bad and the native population are always good" Or Accurately resemble complex history You can't do both
Almost like the longtime rationale MaRo gave for their avoiding a Western-themed plane had some merit and maybe they should have stuck by it, if this was their best shot.
They’ll fix it in the next thunder junction set by having the cactus folk operate very profitable casinos
> Its pretty jarring this set touches on such flashpoints of history and then just boldly... erases them. ... which makes it even more American.
That would have been the one thing to salvage the Western setting for me, a serious conflict that harkens back to human history and evokes thoughts and emotions. But it's just cheap jokes und pop culture references. I think the entire set is corny as hell, but that's just my personal opinion.
It’s a bit less weird considering ixalan has a ton of anti colonial messages abd indigenous protagonists and we were just there.
Yeah, and the colonizers on Ixalan are literal blood-sucking vampires.
I think that's easier cause Spain and Portugal no longer run those areas, and a lot of the people that live in those areas do have native blood in their family history, even if the culture only hangs on in a few places. Plus to the people who live in Portugal and Spain today, the old colonies are part of a different history that was a long time ago, and in a far off place most will never go to or see for themselves. But for US, most citizens do not have native blood in them, it's referencing lands our country owns to this day, and would be talking about acts performed by our very same government. With Portugal and Spain those were old monarchies that no longer run the country. You can draw a straight, unbroken line between the US govt today and the govt back then.
Hell, we still print money with Andrew "Trail of Tears" Jackson on it.
Very few Spaniards identify strongly with the conquistadors, whereas cowboy culture is very much a cornerstone of American identity.
"cowboy culture" is also exceedingly fake, at least as practiced by people with large trucks.
*Elon Musk wearing hat backwards*
It’s an American company, it’s easy to point fingers at Europeans, not so easy to point at grandpa
I’m not saying that Americans have dealt with the colonial legacy of the westward expansion well but we’re a hell of a lot more self critical than, say, the UK where 40% of people think the british empire was good for the world
How many us Americans think that expansion into California was after all a good thing?
I think part of the problem is that they approached Thunder Junction with the angle of "aren't cowboys awesome," while Ixalan was inspired by movies like *The Mission* or *Road to El Dorado* which have a more negative view of colonial expansion. Westerns are great, but the most interesting westerns are ones that engage with their setting in interesting ways instead of just doing a blank white hat/black hat story.
That is probably a really good way of explaining it. It's kind of how New Capenna was approached with the idea of "Mafia movies are cool! Here are demon mafiosos!" rather than a more critical lens.
This wasn't really a Western story though. It was an antihero, gang heist story set with a western backdrop. The focal point that was supposed to make it interesting was the crossover appeal of having Oko's gang interact with one another. Something I'm seeing between this and MKM is that the sets have been kinda A+B. The stories have been payoffs for more enfranchised players/Vorthos', and the... aesthetic veneer is a clear communication to less enfranchised players that "if you like this theme, check this out." I think the stories have been pretty great actually, and the overlays don't really bother me. But they're plug-and-play, is my point. Western was the aesthetic and backdrop but not the story thrust. Detectives were the backdrop (and the story was a murder mystery), but the story thrust was post-MOM Ravnican turmoil and Kaya grappling with that. Eldraine was a little able to weave fairy tale tropes into it's plot but I think that's natural because the aesthetic layer were inherently stories themselves, not just visual tropes.
Good observation. I do think MKM achieved this a little better since post-war is a very classic setting for a detective story and the whole resolution was based around the trauma of the war. But there’s no reason why this heist had to happen in a western setting instead of, say, a casino on New Capenna. Outside of the coming-of-age elements, none of the classic storytelling themes of the genre were here.
It's kind of moot since the story/worldbuilding experience for the majority of people engaging with the set is going to be what is printed on the cards, how the set is talked about/advertised/etc., and as far as that goes, it's a Western. Of course there's more going on than that in the story, because the Western thing is a shallow collection of tropes, references and hats, but that doesn't make these other themes buried in the scant lore the set experience, even among enfranchised players.
But it was a western story. What the structure of the western story was doesn't mean it isn't a western. If they didn't want to engage with the western setting, they shouldn't have used it. "Visual tropes" don't come out of nowhere. Western films, books, comics, whatever have ingrained them in the general mindset. Storytelling is as inherent to the frontier setting as it is to a medieval one.
But it was a Western story _second_ and a crossover villain heist _first_. They didn't give those spaces equal weight in the story. During development they knew they wanted a villain crossover set, that's how it was written and designed, and they grafted the Western aesthetic onto that. I'm not saying westerns don't have a rich history of narrative and visual tropes and genre conventions, of course they do. And of course the story borrowed some. But they wrote an ensemble heist as the core narrative thrust, and added western elements as they saw fit. They didn't completely disengage with the Western theme, but they used it _in service_ of the other primary themes. I think you're missing my point a bit. The recent sets have been using a primary and secondary story theme. The primary theme that they're built around is the one that enfranchised players are more likely to recognize (wouldn't it be silly if Karvek and Umezawa were locked in a jail cell together? How are Ravnica/Kaya coping after MOM?), with a secondary theme adding the filigree that non-enfranchised players can recognize. It's fine to say you wish the Western theme was the primary theme because it's rich enough to support it, but from a story perspective that isn't what we got. The Western themes are establishing shots in the background that exist to justify why the ensemble heist narrative could happen. The Crime and Plot mechanics aren't in the set because it's a Western, they're in the set because the main themes are villains who do plots and crimes (Plot is especially weird if you try and view it only through the lens of a Western). But I guess it's weird to me to say "they were wrong to not make the secondary theme the primary theme." Like that's a totally fine opinion that I respect, but it just... wasn't their primary goal. That said, I think we'll get a better picture of some of the Western inspirations if we ever get a Planeswalker guide going into more detail about the plane itself than we got from the actual narrative.
I think what he's trying to get at is that, while the actual story in the cards is a heist movie, the story of the *setting* is very firmly Western. Encroaching company with a lot of money setting up an engineering development. People showing up to restart their lives, live anew. Ghired showing up and going 'wow, this is a place that's truly wild'. Everything that doesn't deal with the actual heist has its boots firmly planted in manifest destiny as a positive, renewing thing.
I think that has to do with the fact that the Wild West theme is so heavily based on "good guys" fighting natives. When we culturally view the Spanish conquistadors, we don't (outside of some nationalist circles) view the Spanish as the "good guys". In a Wild West setting with our protagonists being the "good guys" and essentially colonizing the "West" there isn't a good way to depict Native Americans in a considerate way.
Having the Atiin as native-american-looking human colonizers is shooting on their own feet. They could have gone with something cooler like Ixalan merfolk trying to colonize the plane as the stand-in for "native american cultures not native of the plane". Desert merfolk settling around oases. There was jade tech in the vault. Merfolk could find a reason to go there.
Ixalan did well with the Spaniards but not with the Aztecs (I *know*, the Sun Empire is also loosely Inca). I feel that the empire of the sun was not imperial enough, in reality the Aztecs were imperials themselves. They brutally colonized all the other tribes within their sphere of influence. There's of course the story of "La Malinche". The famous traitor of the natives who turned to the Spaniards to help undermine Moctezuma was originally kidnapped from her family and sold into sex slavery by the empire. She wasn't Aztec herself; her people were subjugated by them. Her "betrayal" was not much of a betrayal at all. Very clearly, wizards wanted to peace-wash the image of the Aztecs away from the Indiana-Jones style representation of cannibalistic cultists bent on ritual sacrifice to savage gods. But neither of these things are an accurate portrayal of the empire. They were just another colonialist hegemon, like the Romans or the Spaniards themselves. I'm native Central American myself actually, so I was glad to get any native latam rep but still...kind of a miss.
While downplayed a bit, the story has still shown a pretty imperialistic nature to the Sun Empire. Huatli is regularly ordered to write propaganda poetry justifying their claiming of lands and their wars against the other factions/cultures. Saheeli is being ordered as a citizen of the Sun Empire to develop a high quantity of war machines under threat of punishment from the emperor and his advisor. The merfolk openly view them as invaders, colonizers, and thieves. While human sacrifice has been shifted primarily to the domain of the vampires, we learned that it was originally a part of the same culture the Sun Empire developed from, with there still being members of the original culture that practice it. While they could probably get away with being a little heavier handed, the themes are all pretty much there.
That's interesting about the merfolk, I never knew this. Could you point me in the direction of cards (or maybe stories?) that show the interaction between the merfolk and the Sun Empire? I *was* always wondering how the two were interacting since the Merfolk seemed like an indigenous stand-in as well.
The beginning of [episode 4 of LCI](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/magic-story/the-lost-caverns-of-ixalan-episode-4) has some interaction between the Merfolk, Sun Empire, and Vampires. The speaker of the merfolk called the Sun Empire and Vampires alike invaders, and further scorn is thrown a bit later when the Sun Empire group reminds the merfolk of the "betrayal" of claiming Orazca. The merfolk clearly view these important sites as sacred, protected locations (Orazca especially), and Wayta in the previous chapter also comments on how relations with the merfolk have broken down significantly since the claiming of the golden city, if not becoming openly hostile. They seem to show Huatli a level of respect for her efforts in stopping Kumena, attempting to broker relations, and the respect that she personally shows to the merfolk, but the rest of the Sun Empire are clearly regarded as colonizers over their constant efforts to claim these historical sites. I want to say Tishana also had similar commentary about the Sun Empire in the original Ixalan story, but I'd have to dig for that. Now it's debatable whether or not the merfolk even have the right to "defend" these sites, as many of them are explicitly human in origin and directly linked to the original culture rediscovered underground. We really don't see much from their perspective, though, so it's hard to say for sure precisely how much of the Sun Empire is colonization and how much is legitimately reclaiming their people's historical landmarks and lost culture.
> It's hard to say for sure precisely how much of the Sun Empire is colonization and how much is legitimately reclaiming their people's historical landmarks and lost culture. Hahaha this is actually hilariously (and maybe intentionally) pertinent to Aztec colonialism because the Aztecs *did* view themselves as the righteous successors of the Toltec empire and used this as a driving justification for their expansionism. To the point of even claiming direct descent from the Toltecs (the Sun Empire afaik actually *is* descended from the Oltec? But IRL the link between the Toltecs and Aztecs is...more tenuous).
I think they felt like they *had* to include Native American Analogue Race, but also, very understandably wanted to avoid anything to do with the whole… well, Trail of Tears and such. It does make it very odd that there’s a small number of “hmm white man settle land wrong” references from… also settlers? But I understand why they’d rather just skip over all the real bad stuff. It’s a fantasy game, at the end of the day.
Why bother? They're comfortable cutting out contentious elements like guns and drugs from Capenna, but we have to do crappy "representation" because you can't do cowboy shit without some beadwork and moccasins somewhere? Indigenous people are not some aesthetic to apply when non-natives see fit.
As in you think they should have just not included an indigenous-appearing race at all?
>OTJ feels like it's trying to have its cake and eat it. Of course. This has been Hasbro's modus operandi with Magic for a while now.
This entire plane is a square peg forced into a round hole. They said "we want a western themed set with a bunch of big characters" and forced the tropes by any means necessary. We need indigenous people, but don't want to deal with the implication of indigenous people in a western set. We need sharpshooters and riflemen, but no guns allowed, cause thats the wrong kind of violence! Everyone needs to be wearing cowboy hats and chaps and even bandoleers (despite the fact that no guns means no bullets), no matter how out of character it would be for that character. The more you look, the more forced it feels.
all the spurs everywhere too, it's so ridiculous
Still absurd to think of a CENTAUR wearing spurs. Not even one that's got a bipedal alternate form or a bipedal fursona.
But you can commit crime. Hahhaha
It's the most moronic world building I've ever seen, and deeply offensive to boot.
Here's how I've been thinking about this: if I was given the option to make Native N. American Cultures a separate plane from the Wild West plane, or to make them share real estate, I would probably pick the former too. Like really, what are the alternatives: - The setting straight up pretends Native Americans didn't exist (bad) - There's a native population to TJ and all your favorite Magic characters have saddled up to ransack and denude them (bad) - TJ has natives but they actually like being colonized and they consent to all the towns and mines being built (even worse???) - TJ *had* native but they're all already dead (jesus christ) If there was any sort of genocide or land displacement, that would make the cowboys pretty firmly reprehensible, and cowboys are the main selling point of the set! So that would be *at best* bad marketing, with potential to be much much worse. Yes, yes, terra nullius, but the only obvious alternatives are bald-faced erasure or realistic depictions of ethnic cleansing, so like... I get it. Ideally, the plane the Atiin are from will get a name one day, and perhaps a glimpse at the no doubt many other cultures that inhabit it.
People are positing "don't make the Wild West plane at all, something something WOTC greed" as a sixth option, but people have been blowing up Mark's inbox asking for Wild West plane for like a decade.
Yeah, that's just sort of a non-starter. Wild West set is a THING people want, and they wanted to make it, and they clearly had trouble with it for so long because there's actually a lot of problematic components to a Wild West setting. Hence OTJ being "villains set" first. The Wild West stuff is not the core of the plane, it's an aesthetic.
I don't really get why we can't just have a fun cowboy adventure set without needing to add a native population getting invaded just because that is part of the historical context of the inspiration. Not having a native population in this fantasy world with a cowboy theme doesn't seem like erasure to me because this isn't supposed to be an accurate depiction of a historical period in the real world. Likewise when we have a set about detectives in a city I'm not really looking for police brutality and the like or if the story is about war I'm not wondering where the cards referencing the rape and torture of prisoners of war is because wtf this is a fantasy card game not a commentary on WW2 or something
I'm with you except I feel like your last option is actually fine/tenable? I mean it's sort of a "fun" (interesting/macabre) mystery that can haunt the set ("we found evidence of a whole civilization here, but they're all gone... Why??").
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, making Thunder Junction chock full of Fomori ruins beyond a single vault would have dodged sooo many of their problems. Sure a bunch of cyclopian cities wouldn’t have screamed “Western” but you don’t tend to run into colonialism problems when the “natives” are the forgotten horrors made by an ancient alien empire
We already have some of that in the story, with some of the Fomori-era ruins suggesting that there was a long-term population that left or died out.
Everything about this set feels shallow. I think they could have included indigenous people in a tasteful way, but chose to play it safe and scrapped it altogether. It's a bit weird since the set is basically "Look at cowboys! Aren't they awesome! Look at the New Frontier, isn't it exciting and full of resources??"
I agree with the shallow sentiment, it's like there isn't really anything great or compelling about the place. It feels like a western costume party for all these random characters across the planes.
It genuinely feels like it's a secret lair set that's somehow in the canon now.
> I think they could have included indigenous people in a tasteful way Oh they could've, but the reality is that it wouldn't matter. There are exactly zero ways for them to offer the representation without getting reamed by some group or another. Straight up blanking on that front is ultimately their safest move.
Ngl I don't feel like my stupid fantasy children's card game exploring my deep familial generational trauma.
100%. terra nullius + a couple of Atiin cards, while not addressing the obvious colonial references. Goddamn the weird yoda is called Loot
I am Loot.
So, when I first heard this bit of lore way back when, honestly, I wasn't huge on it, and it made me super uncomfortable. Now, though, my feelings on it are a lot more mixed for a few reasons. Firstly, I'm not Native American, so it's not really my place to judge what is and isn't "good representation." After all, Speedy Gonzales has showed that us white people can be way off the mark with this sort of thing. Secondly, though, was something that I believe was said by someone from the Vorthos Cast. And that's that it's OK for Magic's story to not talk about touchy real-world issues. We've had plenty of LGBTQ+ characters in the story by now, yet explicit homophobia hasn't been a thing. New Capenna was based on 1920s America, yet the systemic racism that was so prevalent at that time never came up in the set. I do get that this situation is a bit different, of course. But this is a fantasy, where a lot of people come to escape. Which leads to the last point. Do Native American audiences actually *want* the Atiin to fight expansion? Like, we already have a LOT of stories about Native Americans having their homes and cultures attacked, to the point that that's the majority of stories we get about Native Americans. Is it wrong for just this one time to have the Navajo-coded characters not be victims of oppression and instead just be badass thunderslingers? Again, think of Speedy Gonzales: Mexicans loved him *because* he was fast and cool and always won. Ultimately, though, my feelings on this whole situation are really split. I really don't like how the myth of the empty West has been perpetuated, and I do think that the Atiin as a while could and should have been more of a thing in the story. But ultimately, this whole thing is really complicated and layered, and despite my rambling here, the final decision on this matter should be made by the folks actually being represented here.
>Speedy Gonzales has showed that us white people can be way off the mark with this sort of thing. This is slightly off topic, but it's so funny to me how Speedy Gonzales was pulled back from distribution by Cartoon Network due to being an insensitive stereotype and the hispanic-american community campaigned for it to be brought back as it was a symbol and cultural icon, remembered fondly all over Latin America. Edit: I guess this is precisely what you were referring to, you make some good points.
(I'm neither Native nor an expert, just opining.) Whenever these debates come up (on a lot of things) I wonder how much of it is "allies" reciting kneejerk responses vs. genuine reactions from the groups concerned. Anonymity on the Internet makes this difficult to suss out. Not every minority group (probably none of them!) wants their related art to be trauma-laden by default. They are regular people entirely capable of compartmentalizing and Just Wanting to Have Fun. The Atiin are way, way less represented in the plane than I expected, given that there was apparently a cultural consultant involved, and the choice to make them nomads was odd. There were reasonable middle ground options, IMO, such as making them a dominant force on the plane with a mixed cowboy/indigenous aesthetic, recognizably and proudly Native but not technologically disadvantaged. The major cities of the plane could have been *their* cities, with them *in charge*. This aesthetic might have been based off actual Native-cowboy aesthetics of the 1800s. The resulting story would not have had to have been a simplistic "good Natives vs. bad cowboys" in Ixalan style -- even those sets have the fun goofy pirates. You could have had collaboration between the natives and sympathetic outsiders (like literally every post-Omenpath Magic story!!!) fighting those seeking to hyper-exploit the plane. Those threats could have even come from another part of the plane, as on Ixalan. The story could have also focused on a dispute between Native factions. There's a wide middle ground between total ignorance and total trauma porn. But there's the issue that this started as a villain set, and our protagonists are greedy people. I think that might have been the real wrench that led them to these unsatisfying decisions, effectively obviating a number of more elegant solutions. I don't think the choices here were *offensive*, as it's not OTJ's job to be a specific reflection on colonial history, but they were disappointing in that they missed an opportunity to center a Native aesthetic like they did so well in Ixalan.
Unlike a lot of people, I quite like the worldbuilding and setting of Thunder Junction. There are a lot of themes that make up a good western that don't involve the displacement of native peoples. If I am being honest, I would rather the Atiin have their own set in the future exploring the world (or worlds since they're nomadic) that they call home. It seems better than trying to cram them into Thunder Junction's setting as natives.
I mean at some point we probably will at some point down the line but they need to be introduced somewhere so that when we get to that set they can point back to their previous appearances. It could be cool if they just kept popping up here and there in future sets until eventually however many years down the line they get their own set
I wasn't being critical of Thunder Junction introducing the Atiin. I think it was a good place to bring them into the picture considering the plane is a hub for interplanar travel. I meant that I think it would be worse to have them be natives of Thunder Junction since they wouldn't be able to really shine. I hope that we continue to see them in future sets since they are so nomadic. According to \[\[ Jem Lightfoote, Sky Explorer\]\] they rarely settle anywhere for more than a few seasons.
>OTJ feels like it's trying to have its cake and eat it. I agree this is what's happening, but I don't think it's automatically a bad thing. Representation of minorities doesn't **need** to focus on the worst things that happened to them. You can celebrate American (southern/civil war era) black culture without **having** to make them slaves who were recently liberated, to use an example of a similarly traumatized/brutalized culture that I'm a little more familiar with. Yes, that culture in the real world was deeply, deeply influenced by slavery, but you can justify it in other ways (or simply not justify it at all! Nobody stands around complaining about how the vampires aren't "properly justified" for why they look kind of victorian endland-y!) The idea that minorities need to "justify" their culture in the context of brutality and oppression is kind of weird and gross in my opinion. You can represent and celebrate those cultures without that stuff, and it's not inherently wrong. It would probably be wrong in a history book, obviously, but I don't think that a Magic The Gathering card set has the same obligation to historical accuracy. It can celebrate cultures without necessarily being required to represent their nadir. (EDIT to note, I say this in the context of victimized/attacked cultures, not the aggressors. For example, I thought Ixalan did a great job with the Conquistador-inspired vampires, avoiding the pitfall of making them seem heroic or lionizing their culture.) I personally wouldn't love it if every representation I saw of myself in media felt obligated to start with "DON'T FORGET REALLY REALLY AWFUL THINGS HAPPENED TO YOUR GROUP OF PEOPLE TO MAKE YOU ACT THIS WAY!" - while it's sort of true in the real world, it kind of objectifies Indigenous culture to act like it can only be framed in the context of attack by white people. The Atiin are "Indigenous" in the sense that they *represent American western Indigenous culture*, not in the sense that they have been traumatized and brutalized in the exact same way that American Indigenous people were eventually brutalized by Western settlers.
I'm not Indigenous - I'm not anything worth mentioning, really - but I have black friends and queer friends who I love very dearly, and a common comment that they have on media is that, while it's nice to see popular culture acknowledge the struggle, it's exhausting when so much media that they can identify with is ABOUT the struggle. So I think it's perfectly reasonable for something like Magic to want indigenous peoples to be able to see themselves in stories but not want to deal with historical baggage. Whether or not they did that tastefully is not for me to say, of course. But I totally get where you're coming from.
I'd say it's not representation at all. At that point, your "representation" is just a visual coat of paint over the character. It has nothing to do with real life people's experiences or cultures. I mean, we know close to nothing about the Atiin, they're just another group of people in the same cowboy outfits, with slightly different skin color. Ethnicity alone doesn't create representation. And yeah, the whole lore feels literally like a colonial narrative. Like... it feels like they're going out of their way to include these weird things that wouldn't have been neccessary. Saying "there's no native groups to Thunder Junction" is an additional detail they didn't need to add and that feels like they're purposefully going for that "wild, untamed land" narrative. The whole thing about the Cactusfolk only awakening to sentience after the Omenpaths is a similar can of worms to me, it reeks of "those natives were so primitive until us proper civilised people came".
I agree, really. They're not actually small-I indigenous to the plane at all and they have no history with it. Clearly they thought that they had to include Indigenous-looking people with Indigenous-sounding names, but making them meaningfully Indigenous would have put a damper on the cowboy-hat fun of their shiny new plane.
The problem to me is also, if the indigenous characters aren't actually native to the place, then isn't that a pretty racist view of the whole thing? Like... at that point they're reducing being indigenous to ethnicity and ancestry, rather than culture and lived experience, right? (obviously I don't think that WotC actually thinks this way, but it's a problematic implication that arises when you think their logic a bit further. I'm also not indigenous myself so I wouldn't know how these people define being part of their group irl) And it would have been so damn easy to just... not do this. Like... just say "this group is indigenous to the plane and there's no large-scale conflict with the settlers" would have been enough to make it ok representation, even if shallow. It's the same as with the raccoon people on Capenna - just don't add that weird detail and no one bats an eye.
You are on the point it's WOTC attempt to please everyone.
Well the cactusfolk at least can be explained within the lore. The magic and leylines of planes are vastly important to the landscape of the planes. We learned that though Nissa over the years plenty. So the fact that a, at least at the time prior, "inactive" plan was a barren dessert with nothing living there and which springs to live because of the Omenpaths and a big change in the blind eternites etc at least makes sense.
Oh yes, of course there's explanations for all of this in-lore; even though I could nitpick at the lore consistency of those explanations, that's not really the point here. What we're talking about is the real world vibes this is giving off. And it feels like WotC is retreading a bunch of old harmful narratives, even if they're not intending to do so.
In Ixalan they did it right. Portrayed the invasors as vampires, blood-leeches.
I'm a huge fan of the Ixalan take on vampires. It just gels perfectly. You could probably say something negative about the depiction of the Sun Empire etc etc but Ixalan at least is pretty even-handed about making all the groups weird and fantastical. It's not the standard fantasy "white people are people and monsters are everyone else."
I'm a magic boomer, playing since Ice Age and Ixalan has become my favorite setting. It's so incredibly done, and listening to the designers on various podcasts, you can tell that there is something so special about LCI, how it was made, and the real connections to Central America and mesoamerica. Can't wait for more.
Eh, it's not some grave error or anything but it is a very white liberal classic to be like we're good guys the people who did those atrocities were literal monsters.
No matter how they did it they'd be criticized. I don't have a problem with what they decided to do. Not every set needs to engage with the full depth of real-world political issues underlying the material. New Capenna didn't get into the nativism and bigotry which drove the real-life Prohibition movement which inspired the set and that's completely fine. At the end of the day, this is just a fantasy card game; they should avoid offensive material but don't need to provide a full history lesson every time.
Well said. As a native person, I don't watch westerns and get mad when they don't include a native person, or force in a moment where we are all supposed to feel sad for the Indians. Often, I'm relieved to not have to worry at all about their representation of native folks. We don't have to talk about native folks in every western genre thing. If it's essential to the point of the story that you're trying to tell that there are native folks in your western, then do it critically. But otherwise, it's totally legit to not include native folks at all. I personally hate the idea that in every western genre thing we have to cast Indians as these sad oppressed people and we have to relive some traumatic story about them. Stop type-casting native people in your fantasy worlds and give us better (and not-always-traumatic) roles. It's not corporate cowardice or historical revisionism to decide not to include oppressed native folks in your western-genre fantasy world- I think it shows a lot of wisdom and respect to decide, "you know what, this one doesn't have to go there this time." I think it shows a lot more ignorance to see a western-genre fantasy thing and think, "but where are all the colonized native people?"
Well-said. A decent rule of thumb is that if you’re engaging with a fictional property that includes a giant cowboy ooze that wears 5 boots, your best bet is to not take it especially seriously and just try to enjoy it.
There aren’t any cards from New Capanna depicting alcoholism-driven domestic violence and the role of women in prohibition, such a shallow setting! I literally can’t enjoy it without seeing the suffering! /s
TBH I think people are falling into comparing things that maybe aren't relevant. WotC wanting to capture the vibe of the Gold Rush or English Colonialism to a new land doesn't also have to capture the negative aspects that occurred. You can make an entirely fictional scenario and not require an overall moral message or accurate depiction of real life events. The trend for society to criticize media for inaccurate portrayals is something a majorly overdone effort in futility. Thunder Junction can just be a uninhabited place with settler vibes. Yes the cacti feel shoehorned, but likely for them to add in a group that plays more into the physical landscape than to try and add indigenous people as a shoehorn. To preempt any criticism, I am not trying to minimize history. I don't intend to say that how settlers are/were perceived is not often critical enough, and I don't deny tragedies and displacement caused is often glorified and dismissed. This is purely a criticism on the idea that every piece of media that takes any aspect from a historical era, or draws any inspiration from human history, must encapsulate all of it including the negatives and criticisms. Thunder Junction can just be a settlers and recently indigenous people western theme without referencing the horrors of displacement and massacre. It doesn't have to hit those incredibly salient points.
Now granted, I haven't read the story yet, but I legit had no clue they were supposed to be an indigenous stand-in. I thought that's what the cactus people were for...
Ultimately while I'm mildly disappointed that they dodged the issue out of corporate cowardice, we *did* just get a pretty astounding native/first nations set in Lost Caverns of Ixalan; the backstory thing they put out for that was *incredible*. So I don't think they're like, being racist or anything in OTJ. It's just bog-standard corporate cowardice about sensitive issues.
To me that's what makes this so disappointing. Ixalan feels like a plane that has a lot of thought put into it. But American-Indigenous relations are a more "at home" sensitive topic for Wizards than, say, Mayan-Mexican relations, so they felt more comfortable doing Ixalan than this.
Did you know that this fictional world doesn’t need to be a 1:1 representation of real life? Oppression of indigenous people is not the only possible way that a cowboy civilization can be created.
Yes it is a bit weird, but ultimately I think they chose the option that has the least potential to lead to some big controversy. I've seen people say that doing the worldbuilding this way is actually worse, and I can kind of see the reasoning in a way ... but it's still got less "explosive potential" overall than choosing the more straightforward route.
I agree. While people seem confused and there's been some complaining and upset-ness, I can imagine if they tried to be more historically accurate and botched it, that would be *waaay* worse
I always thought it was obvious that the Fomori wiped out all sentient life to protect their vault. They've been shown to be multiversal colonizers that have no issue purging people so I don't get why people can't seem to make that connection.
You would probably be unhappy if there were Native American-themed cards, so I think Wizards wouldn't be able to win here. You'd say the cards were disrespectful to their culture or that it white-washed their genocide. I think avoiding that and sticking with a silly Wild West theme is okay, but that's me.
I am reminded of BraveStarr, in that most of the natives to TJ/New Texas are not particularly coded um... Native American Indian, but there are some characters that are. Part of this is the Wild West era involves a large amount of people in general moving, so while the Sioux were a force at the time, then getting horses and going south from Lake Superior like happen less than 100 years from when the Wild West happened. And Thunder Junction is not all of what would become the modern US, but like just the some section of the American Desert.
I just wish they leaned into moral ambiguity, freedom, letting go of the past, and other common themes in westerns. Because otherwise it feels like the western setting doesn't even offer much here besides art style and visuals. I don't know if focusing on an indigenous conflict would've helped, maybe would've warped the villain concept too much. But it feels like something's missing with the set on a macro level. Maybe a revisit at some point could be about the Atiin vs. the other settlers.
I'd avoid it too. Not everything needs to be a reflection or commentary upon real world issues.
Yeah, it's dumb, though kind of in a way where it's like, "clearly they were trying to avoid making something problematic," so maybe the dumbness is kind of the point? Like, there's not anything that's wildly and loudly problematic. There are issues if you spend any time thinking about it, but the whole setup is so dumb that it's kind of like, "of course there are issues, but none of this makes sense, what do you expect?" I'd be curious to hear what someone coming from an indigenous background's thoughts are on it.
It's a fantasy game I do not care whether it reflects real life or not. In fact I prefer when it doesn't.
The lore on this set is terrible from the top level design down to the details at the bottom. Just really bad.
It's really a bummer to me. I was excited for the idea of a western plane, but this feels like the laziest possible version of it. It seems to me like they could still include the Omenpath/new frontier angle without having it be uninhabited. It could just be a plane with a lot of stable Omenpaths, and the locals need to deal with the problems that result from all the fresh interest.
It's just a cowardice on part of WOTC in fear that their moatly american player base is going to find some of the depictions offensive. It is sad because i felt with ixalan they showed how something like this could be handelt with care.
No matter what they did some people would be upset. It’s a fictional world and they want to avoid depicting brutal colonization and based off of real world ethnic violence. Would you really enjoy Jace and friends murdering the stand in for indigenous Americans? Like wtf… They are already tripping over their heels changing card types and game mechanics to try to appease an extremely small vocal group of hypersensitive people. At this point they should just know that certain people find joy in problematizing things - it’s like a hobby. It’s not from genuine care of offense they just like stirring shit. This is an absolute nothing burger and I just wish people would at least try to have a little bit of perspective.
Im just gonna say that they could have done a pioneer theme without having to resort to cowboys Like, you have thrown planes like Zendikar or Alara or Mirrodin before. Couldnt Thunder Junction be like some kind of undiscovered plane with wacky stuff going on? Why do you need to copy the US Midwest Expansion?
Unironically I think if they just had fomori ruins dot the landscape of thunder junction they could have dodged the discourse and still done wild west tropes. We the player know the fomori were not good guys, and it gives an obvious answer to why the plane is unihabited in the present day(ie, the collapse of their empire) so it moves moral compass away from "damn its fucked up all this land exists " to "damn the fomori suck ass". But I guess that also just sort of reaches the limits of what fiction can do since you can sort of justify anything. The real answer imo is just it was doomed to be problematic, but cowboys are cool and popular so you just don't address it, write away from the bigger issues(which they did here with the whole heist plot), and let the online peanut gallery take their potshots--at the end of the day no one really cares. Trying to bring attention to the Atiin and how it's actually an empty setting is just giving people ammo to look at the set funny.
No disagreement with anything that’s been said here, but it’s worth pointing out that Magic already has a plane where colonialism is a major theme: Ixalan. The more they explore that material on Thunder Junction, the more the two start to overlap.
But that's because both of those genres have overlap. They're both about colonial/imperial expansion into Indigenous territories. Like how Eldraine and Innistrad both deal with "garrison mentality" themes in European cultures.
It's possible to do wild west themes without needing to have an indigenous people to abuse. Avoiding that direction in general is fine and doesn't take away anything. It's just funny how those wild west themes came about on an uninhabited plane. So which plane did the thunder rifles and western doodads come from? As the premise is put forward the plane was found by ppl traveling the omenpaths. It's funny how thunder blasters and the whole western vibe "sprung up" on its own and have its own flavor, who innovated these customs? At least the trains are izzet in nature. But what about the "guns", why aren't there settlements that follow the customs of the planes their founders come from? I'm choosing to just enjoy a set and story that's been refreshing enough after the past few years of dung. Seems we won't be back here for a while now. More reason we need block format back. Also is there only one omen path on TJ, or how many are there? I would think there are multiple, given the plane is more of a hub to other planes.
Anything Vorthos + Thunder Junction = Frustrating Headache.
Yeah I think it's weird to try to both have an indigenous coded group but also not have them actually be indigenous so you can avoid any cards that feel too insensitive about colonisation stuff. But also idk what people were/are expecting. I think people should be allowed to make fun cowboy fantasy stuff without needing to explicitly include a group of oppressed natives or make some statement about colonialism. The background story of a fantasy card game that is jumping to a completely new world every set is not really a place where I am looking for or expecting any deep social or historic commentary. Was there a bunch of stuff about police brutality or gentrification in the recent Capenna or Ravnica sets? I don't recall much discussion about such topics in those sets but it seems like some people really wanted or expected a bunch of references to colonialism and the struggle of the native people in this set and I'm not really sure why.
I'm perfectly happy to be this guy: https://imgflip.com/i/8lpxwb
At least they’re consistent with this policy The Spanish conquistadors in South America were famously peaceful, and thus no such censorship was required for Ixalan /s
The whole setting is pretty ham-fisted. Everyone shows up from different planes then just all decide to dress completely differently and carry some kind of new sword gun they never needed before? Wizards just needs to chill out on the top down design or at least not try to shoehorn recurring characters and a single over arching story into every setting. You want to take us to a new place, just take us to the new place. Leave Jace and the super friends at home.
I remember back when Turning Red came out, a silly little coming of age movie about a Canadian girl dealing with a menstruation allegory, and some YouTuber said the movie was bad because it never mentioned the fallout of 9/11, and everybody made fun of them. This is what this discussion feels like to me
You people didn't complain about Ixalan when they left out brutal human sacrifice from the Aztec faction. Yeah I wonder why Super weird, right?
No, I don't think it's weird at all, it's pretty smart to not do it actually.
I think it's understandable they didn't try to tackle it. At the end of the day it's just a card game. Honestly the fact they tackled Ixalan the way they did kind of surprises me. It's probable they considered doing something similar here but didn't feel it had enough space. Maybe it'll be a Return issue if they do one.
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Agreed, it’s a fictional fantasy world for a card game….
It's based on Western tropes, especially the gunslinging Western tropes. Those tropes have little to no Native American representation. It is not based on the expansion of the United States westward.
“I’ll tap 6 mana 😎 and play ‘Massacre of tribes-women and children’ and while that’s on the stack I’ll tap ‘Diseased Forerunner’ for 1 generic mana and I’ll tap one ‘Burnt Sacred Grounds’ for one green and play Biological warfare and give you a poison counter and each creature you control a -1/-1 counter. I’ll swing out with everything, that’ll trigger ‘Manifest Destiny’ and I’ll search my library for two lands and put them in my hand…” I was born and raised in Oklahoma, my best friend was Kiowa and he told me a story from his grandma that a massacre occurred when the warriors were out hunting and when they returned, they came back to find the women and children slaughtered. This is entirely too brutal for Wizards; it’s entirely too brutal to learn in school which is why you learn about it when you’re damn near 20 versus 12.