Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 8349847" data-attributes="member: 42856">I feel the push for more self-representation in game alien races tend to make them even less alien. [USER=7006]@DEFCON 1[/USER] mentionned that we already define other species by comparison to humans and that it's very difficult to roleplay anything else than "funny looking humans with a differentating trait". But the more alien species are described as closely resembling humans ("hello, I am a pakistani-looking elf")  the more difficult it is to assign them non-human traits.Humans are not known from their tolerance to other species. With the exception of a few pets that we adopt but impose a lifestyle onto anyway,  we tend to either eat them or destroy them (and their habitat) for our convenience. An alien species could very well see demi-XYZ with the same view we image having sex with animal. And should have no more qualm at killing humans as we have qualm at killing a dangerous animal. Most of us wouldn't go out of our way to kill a bear -- though some do it for sports -- but most wouldn't balk at the idea of eliminating crocodiles from a settled area. If you're in a world where the elves are like that, where they justify the Wild Hunt as a fun sport and kidnapping human children to replace them with changeling like acquiring a pet, is it really important to have them "representative" of your ethnicity? Would it be even acceptable to have a pakistani-looking elf slaver race? (because, it's not slavery, it's owning a pet... Humans have dogs, don't they?) Of course, humans would say that they are sentient being, something the elves could very well not recognize as a good criterion for determining who you own and who you treat as equal). Wouldn't you want that alien elf NOT to resemble humans at all?Instead we're entering a self-feeding loop: people want to play inhuman races (including clearly monstrous ones, like the Tolkien orcs or the Dark Elves) but they want to roleplay them as "funny looking human" (hence the conceit of "I am from Menzoberranzan, but I'm special) that is the transitional step, then everyone want to play them as human with stat bonuses, then as they are cleary recognized as human, people want to identify with them and self-insert in the setting (instead of aknowledging that they are playing a role, like an actor playing Hitler in a movie not being actually embracing Third Reich ideology) and then, ultimately, it becomes difficult from writers of a particular setting to assign inhuman mentality to inhuman species because of the way most of them are played. And since they are depicted as quasi-humans and not from another species, people will want to play them as humans... until the point when they are effectively funny looking humans in the lore, and we could make them humans altogether with just cultural differences without losing anything.</blockquote>

Verification