No but I plan to make a post about the toxic culture here in Age of Empires II section of these forums.
Everyone here is trying to judge by age of account and forcing you to say something on a different topic when you are concentrating talk about some other topic.
I am talking about Saracens and you want me to talk about Vikings. Few days ago I was talking about Romanians and some guys wanted me to talk about Africans…
Have you thought about being less controversial about topics you pick and the way you engage with the community about these? Because from what I can read, you’re acting quite assertive in your opinions without taking into account the input of the others, that are entitled to their own opinions just as much as yourself.
AOE2’s community is by far one of the friendliest out there, but it is also a very old game. When you’re making statements and jugments about a part of the game, people will try to counter-argument and to provide counter-exemples, hence why I brought the Vikings here, to show you how what your point proceeds from a larger matter, and cannot be considered in a vaccuum, unless you want to create sterile and fake controversy just for the sake of it, like I said.
Honestly, I think the “Viking” name for a civ just does not make much sense in context with the rest of the game. It would be like having a civ named “Bankers”.
I also think “Saracens” is also not a good name for the civ, even removing the potential element of it being a slur or not, it was also used for various Islamic peoples who had little cultural or ethnic relation to each other. “Arabs” is much more clear-cut what the civ is about, and a more well-known word. I feel like the only reason people defend it is because of nostalgia.
I hardly experienced the friendly attitude of your friends. DynasticPlanet5, Mahazona, Apocalypso4826, SMUM15236 etc. have been suspecting me as their enemy since the day one I joined the forum.
Why dont you guys just ban the entry of all new forumers and play discussion-discussion with each other reserving this place for yourself only.
I think I know what’s happened here.
Basically, there is a troll who was an absolute pest on the forums. They got banned. Then they made a new account and came back, and then got banned again…and again and again and again. Relentlessly, they have been doing this for months. So for some people, it’s clearly put them on-edge.
OP BTFO and this should be pinned somewhere to discourage further topics on the same subject from being created.
I have made this point before, the naming of civs in aoe2 is hilariously bad in so many cases and inconsistently translated as well.
Some of the civs are named after ethnicities, (eg Armenians, Magyars, Japanese) while others are political groups (Saracens, Byzantines, Romans, Aztecs) and yet others are just loose confederations (Huns) and who even knows what the Teutons, Celts or Goths are meant to be.
At the same time we use exonyms for some groups (Chinese, Japanese, and most others), while using endonyms (Magyars are called Hungarians in English) for others and completely made up words for groups like the Maya (Mayans is not a word in the English language).
Additionally the translations are inconsistent. Eg the Britons are called English is several languages.
So why change all of this now? If you start changing this where do you stop?
I agree they should be called Arabs, but not for the reasons mentioned. What is a slur or not is in part subjective unless you don’t call a civ ############ and we’re not ten years old anyway. Saracens should just be split eventually and Arabs are one of the components.
You could say the same about other silly civs that do not represent anything real or too much at a time like Vikings and Celts. I’m not talking in terms of priorities but just about what is more historically correct.
To me it’s crazy how broad of a civ Saracens are and their tech tree reflects that. Every single Muslim state from 600 to 1600 from South Europe (with just the occasional Berbers instead) to inner Asia. I think it’s one of the broadest umbrellas along with Celts, Slavs, Chinese and possibly Malians and Dravidians. (And if I didn’t mention your favourite don’t take it personally please)
That’s true…there was never a unique and correct method of naming the civs that were added to the game…
I will stick to the original Saracens (Σαρακηνοί):
It was an exonym used by Christians, similar to Vikings (who actually meant only the raiders, not the Norse people) or Byzantines (a term that wasn’t even coined until after the empire fell).
Other civ names are more pressing, like the Slavs (should be Ruthenians) as other slavic peoples have been introduced since. For Saracens, keep the name change when the civ is split up like the Indians were.
Nah, Saracens sounds way cooler for a medieval civ
it’s worth pointing out that the vikings were called “northmen” or something similar by their contemporaries. “vikings” is a mostly modern word for the people.
there are lots of other cases of civs splitting into other civs later:
the game has 100 huge issues at the moment, naming of civs is not one of them
[citation needed]
Tbf the games are fantastical to some degree, so I don’t think these changes are too out of character.
“Teuton” is the latinized version of the word “Deutsch”, which is how the germans refer to themselves.
This but I’ll say changing Slavs to Ruthenians is a natural consequence of how the civ went from representing all slavs to just a subset of them as more civs were added.
The name was still used to mean “Germans”, the latin name for the Kingdom of Germany (East Francia) was Regnum Teutonicum. Hence the Teutonic Knights, “German Knights”.
Indeed, it no longer only meant that specific tribe.
well, that’s just wrong since German didn’t exist yet at as language. I googled it and it derives from proto-indo-european.
it’s more complicated than that.
-it was first used as a name for a germanic or celtic tribe ( ~200 BC)
-it was then used to denote a language (about 900 AD)
it then gets occasionally used to refer to germans. However calling the civs “Germans” or “Alemanni” would be way better, considering there were no people who were called “Teutons” in the middle ages
Either way the point is not that they should be renamed, the point is that not a lot of thought went into naming the civs in the first place
I will stick to the earlier Rus (Ρώς) tho:
“Ruthenians” has a cooler medieval sound.
