Flatly, you're wrong, and this is either a failure to fully process what you're reading, or an unwillingness to accept what they've written.
There's barely any of the horror of RL eugenics at all, the faintest ghost of it in OG DS' approach to Muls. They're shown to be basically superhuman, the stars of the setting, and their only floor is an inability to reproduce which is classic flaw of The Hero of a setting (often they're the last of a dead species or a robot or whatever). We never hear about any of the grim and ghastly stuff that would necessarily be involved (I'm not going to go into details), in part because OG DS is a fundamentally PG-13 setting and basically unable to explore the true horrors here.
You can pretend there is, but it's simply not possible to support textually, which is why you're not attempting to.
I... Don't think that's a reading that makes a whole lot of sense.
This makes it seem like Muls are presented as cool superheroes, but that only work as long as we ignore every horrible thing that happens to them, both individually and as a group, which is a lot. They are major protagonists in the setting, but this status is hardly enjoyable considering that the reason they're protagonists is that they're the enslaved underclass that's supposed to rise against the cruel masters that made them and abused them. "Stars" in a sense but hardly one that's trying to present them as cool dudes you want to be, unless you also like being whipped. We don't hear of every ghastly detail that the Sorcerer-Kings eugenic programs would bring because of what you just explained, the details of the breeding grounds are likely too much for a product that was PG-13, so hardly anything to blame the original writers for. To make up for it though they had the pleasant and grimdark detail about Muls' mothers dying in childbirth more often than not because Muls' babies are too big and they aren't really meant to be born naturally. The new setting is going to be 18+ anyway, so maybe there's hope for those details you want to see.
The topic of eugenics is absolutely appropriate to the setting, it's a crucial component of the tyranny of the Sorcerer-Kings and sanitizing goes against what Dark Sun should be. Slavery evokes the same exact issues, because a proper portrayal of slavery in Dark Sun that's not a dumb caricature would be to portray slavery as a fundamental component of everyday's economy and something almost everyone treats it as a normal thing, which makes fighting against it all the harder and why there's been so much resistance on this front to make Dark Sun return.
It's not sufficient to talk about how much we'd like for Dark Sun to still deal with all its darker topics if we always end up getting cold feet as soon as the setting known for its harsh topics presents harsh topics in a way that makes us uncomfortable. Either be ready for the setting to not pull punches or heed the new 18+ warning on the plastic cover.
It absolutely is part of the problem. When people believe and repeat anti-scientific nonsense as scientific fact, or just treat it as a valid scientific theory, they're damaging everyone, frankly. And you're unintentionally engaging in precisely that here, I'm afraid.
No, what's bad about eugenics is not that people believe silly things, it's that people are murdered and sterilized against their consent. This is people's lives we're talking about, not some pointless debate on how genetics work.
Besides, Dark Sun
cannot argue about anything scientifically, because it's a world with magic, elves and dinosaurs. Your argument here only holds if the publication has even a remote chance of being taken as something that can give serious scientific opinions about anything, and Dark Sun is intrinsically, obviously, fantasy nonsense that doesn't follow our rules of physics.
Could you prove my point any harder? That's the sort of thing selective breeding absolutely does.
That's not what eugenics believes. Eugenics doesn't believe you can create bizarre specialized weird organisms who couldn't survive in the wild (which is what selective breeding generally does - every single change has a cost and a consequence). Eugenics believes you can breed a "better" human, simply by eliminating the "bad" ones. That's genuinely stupid anti-scientific nonsense, and the fact you and the other poster are trying to argue in favour of eugenics on the basis of selective breeding shows you're not understanding the actual science of either thing at all.
Well, Muls have nothing to do with eugenics under these definitions then. Muls are not an attempt at making better humans, they're an attempt at making a specialized hybrid species for hard labour and war, just like maize and dogs.
I really don't know how you could read me saying that eugenics is, and I quote myself, "
brutally dehumanizing and the process involves a systemic violation of the people's free will and bodily autonomy" and end up believing that I'm somehow arguing in favour of it, but it's clear that your interpretation of my points is either deeply incorrect or disingenuous.
Do you actually believe that?
Yes.
Because my counter-evidence, I present to you the planet Earth and its inhabitants.
If we have to start sanitizing fiction because people on Earth are helplessly stupid, then I think it's time we shut down this whole "roleplay" thing entirely. People might start believing magic is real, worship demons, people might get delusional, and so on. We just can't afford the risks.
If you want my opinion though, we can't castrate our fiction because of dumb people being dumb. If there's people so stupid as to see a planet left half dead by egotism-driven madness of a few tyrants, and then see said tyrants produce a slave race that systemically demands the death of the mothers of each Mul in order to be produced, and the reason they're produced is because the aforementioned tyrants want more slaves since all their normal slaves die too easily, if upon seeing all this some people still come out thinking "actually, this is very based" then absolutely nothing anyone could or could not write is ever going to not make these people come to non-stupid takes on things.
We should not and cannot lower the level of what kind of fiction is allowed to exist in order to fir the standards of the dumbest people on Earth.
