The dilemma is stupid, to be honest. The separation between the magical and the mundane worlds is not absolute in Rowling's books and the British Empire had the tendency of attracting preppy kids from all over the world to attend it's schools. Gandhi went to London College. Seretse Khama went to Oxford. And so on. Think along the terms of going to lily white Switzerland in the 1980s and attending a school for rich kids. You'd have run into Ahmed the Khaleej Crown Prince whose real networth is that of seventeen Bulgarias and his friend Bruno the korean-brazilian kid who's actually Kim Jong Un in disguise.
Regarding ethnic diversity at Hogwarts: No doubt people could ramble back and forth saying "Teleportation and flight mean the magic world would be more diverse earlier than the non-magical!" or "Magic providing for most necessities kills many pressures that cause people to emigrate, so actually it should be less diverse!"
But the real reason that Hogwarts is more diverse in the 1800s or whenever this game is than it was in the books is that Ron "The White Hammer" Weasley has yet to stride the halls:
I got a certain perverse enjoyment out of Shadow of War (the only Mordor game I played), seeing it as some kind of deranged "What if Michael Bay had created LOTR?" experiment. Though honestly I just treated it as a Generic Fantasy Setting game and liked messing around with the Nemesis System, which is a genuinely neat mechanic (as was the way Orcs could develop countermeasures if you use the same trick against them too often). In the end, Tolkien was already likely spinning enough to power a city electrical grid, so a pair of questionably conceived games added to the pile of things he'd loathe couldn't get me too upset.
Largely agree with your point though, and I think the game will struggle a great deal to capture the appeal of the setting. Translating magic into game mechanics systematizes and limits it in a way that's fundamentally at odds with Harry Potter's approach. Simultaneously, due to its success and multimedia milking over decades, the setting is too familiar— I'm not sure if it's even possible for anything using it to recapture the sense of 'discovering a magical world' which drew kids in to begin with.
Rowling also said that Dumbledore is a faggot and that Hermione is black. We can safely assume that everything she says is pulled straight out of her ass - which also pretty much describes how the plot of the Harry Potter books seems to work out.
The dilemma is not stupid and everyone with a shred of sense knows why there's so many street-shitters, niggers, goatfuckers et al in the game, and it's not because the developers did research and found out preppy British schools were full of foreign nobility, but because they're woke Marxists pushing their disgusting ideology.
I do agree on the general inability for game systems to portray magic as it should be. Ie, mysterious and inconsistent at best. But funny magic food and spells that exist purely for pranks don't strike me as good examples of those limitations. Any game should be able to portray those.
If the devs were smart, and I'll bet you anything they're not, they would use Bully as a blueprint for the game.
what if the wizards conjured the spanish flu as a warning shot to the deep state
There was no strawman, the topic was Tolkien and his stories relation to the historical, particularly to Christianity, which Tolkien was a part of.
Racialism and eugenics were progressive movements yes, that's why I don't think the civilizational conflict between the Christian West and Islamic East previously could be described in these racial terms. It would be an after-construction, one which I don't describe as progressive out of opposition but because Tolkien would have been, his work being very Christian and anti-modern. You said, exactly quoted: "This is European whitewashing of saying racial.", speaking about the tensions between Islam and Christian Europe being described as civilizational. I asked you to expand on this view and you call this strawmanning? You literally said the Islamic conquests were racist in character and that European whitewashing made it less racial.
Tolkien opposed progressive racism and did not think in those terms. If his view of culture is an "excuse" for "latent racism" then so is also the case in Islam or any other culture which operate in a pre-modern mode. So it's all just racism in your opinion then?
No, I'm baffled by how disconnected and seemingly out of the blue your remarks were and I am wondering if you're having a stroke or if there is something coherent behind it. When I say that Tolkien was probably influenced by the cultural memory of the fall of Constantinople and such, and you say that this is "whitewashed racism" then I earnestly don't know what to make of that. Are you saying Islam versus Christianity was a race war? Are you saying that both cultures were actually racist and even if not expressed? Or that Tolkien secretly was a racialist but only used his faith as a cover but that what came before was not racist?
So genocidal people like Arabs and the Chinese are racist no matter what form their culture takes, even if race is never brought to attention? There is no difference between Han Chinese exterminating Uyghurs and early Chinese imperialist conquests when the modern conception of race did not even exist?
