I agree. TBH, just the idea that someone would be automatically too racist to accept a non-white authority figure is a little suspect (I mean, given how alive and well racism is now, people reading about the early 21st century might make similar assumptions about all of us).
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Right? No culture is a monolith, all the less so before the rise of mass media, and there were US states that had abolished slavery decades before the in-game date of 1802.
it's a living
So I only bring this up because this game's all about its maritime law, but technically a mutiny has to be an open attempt to take over a ship/command — so what Nichols and the kidnappers did is murder, desertion, theft and kidnapping, but not actually The Mutiny.
Edit: Maybe that wasn't how the word was used in the 19th Century? But for the purposes of the trope, it seems like it does specifically involve deposing the captain and taking command of the ship.
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Remember a trope is about the narrative, not the specifics of a law. Even if it wasn't a mutiny in the eyes of the law, it would still count as The Mutiny for the sake of a story.
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I get that, but they don't take command of the Obra Dinn or ever even plan to, so it doesn't seem to fit the trope, either.
They still rebelled against the captain. Tropes Are Flexible.
TV Tropes's No. 1 bread themed lesbian. she/her, fae/faer
Tropes Are Flexible, sure, but Trope Decay is a thing as well. There are other tropes that cover desertion, murder, and theft, whereas the idea of taking over command really seems like it's pretty central to The Mutiny.
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Sailing ships that travelled all over the globe were multicultural by necessity — you couldn't sail back and pick up Europeans if crewmen died or deserted without a crew to sail there, after all. Sailors from India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East were common enough that there's a specific name for it, lascar
.
Black people did live and travel through Europe in the Middle Ages. A free black man sailed with Columbus, and free black tradesmen were not uncommon and relatively accepted even in the American South up until a few years before the Civil War (this page starts with a general overview before narrowing the focus to Louisiana: Free People of Color in Louisiana
). Certainly being racist was widely acceptable at the time, but there were still people who disagreed with it even then.
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