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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Laurefindel" data-source="post: 8471198" data-attributes="member: 67296">I believe it's impossible to completely avoid being a caricature of something.At best, you can play yourself and be a caricature of yourself, but a character will never be as nuanced and complete as a real person. That's not because we suck at playing life-like characters, it's because we don't spend a lifetime playing that character, and we don't play all aspect of that character's life. Our characters are constructs of various templates in behaviour, physical appearance, and cultural belonging that we take from art, fiction, movies, people, friends, and family. In short, we all use stereotypes. Yes, even you, dear forum user.A stereotype is preconceived idea. Judging someone by matching them to a stereotype can be pejorative, diminishing, offensive, or just cliché, but stereotypes are also the building blocks that we use to create our characters. As with everything using building blocks, we can use various degrees of resolution, but we all take certain aspects of our character and emphasize those. We call that roleplaying. Thus our characters are, at least to a certain extent, caricatures that emphasize certain aspects of humankind (not unlike the characters of a novel or in a movie). Note that in this use, the word 'caricature' does not necessarily imply mockery, disrespect, or conveying a (political) message. The point I'm trying to make is that our RPG characters - ALL of our characters - can potentially be mocking or offending someone in their behaviour, traits, or political stance (in which I include racism, ableism, etc).We can avoid the major pitfalls by educating ourselves, and gain a broader understanding of other people, to avoid voluntary and involuntary offensive behaviour, but we cannot eliminate it all. To a certain extent, we must assume and 'own' these stereotypes, but it all starts with being aware of them. I encourage all sorts of threads about "Be aware that when you play this, it is offensive to these people because of that", but I try to stay out of threads that are like "Don't play this, it makes you that".As a roleplaying game, exploring a behaviour/gender/orientation/culture/appearance/limitation (etc.) that isn't ours should be encouraged. Being offensive to others should be discouraged. But one shouldn't make the other impossible. I have come to accept that this line between representation and appropriation/offense will vary between cultures, languages, sub-cultures, and even gaming groups, and that's okay and to be expected. Everything can potentially be harmful, but not everything do the same level of harm. When all is done in good faith, people can change, adapt, or keep going with conscious knowledge of what they do. In good faith, we can do all three simultaneously in relative proportions to preserve the dignity of everyone.</blockquote>

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