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Racism in RPGs, especially related to fantastic races
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6210162" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>So, I tend to group beings in a fantasy universe into two categories:</p><p></p><p>1) True Aliens: These beings don't really have any free will. They are acting out an inherent nature, and indeed in many cases are the embodiment of some idea. So they don't really have the capacity to change at all. If the alien is literally the incarnated spirit of murder or terror or decay, it can't really help being what it is and can't even really evaluate its own place in the universe. It's just acting out a principle. These beings can be irredeemably evil, and arguably the only way to get rid of them is rid the rest of the universe of the principle that they manifest. Slaying one, or more to the point banishing or exorcising one, doesn't really help except on a local scale. Hating a particular alien doesn't make you evil; it makes you sane. Hating the alien that incarnates pederasty is the exact same thing as hating pederasty. You can't see that about people, even a pederast. There is no level of evil a person or a people can stoop to that reduces them to this. It might reduce them to something that needs to face justice for its crimes, but it doesn't cause them to be 'not people' in the sense that an angel, slaad, or fiend is 'not people' and can't be related to people. </p><p></p><p>2) People: People have to some extent a choice in the matter. In fact, the people in my universe call themselves the Free Peoples, because they are aware that they have choice and that this distinguishes them from literally everything else (which are referred to collectively as Servitors). Now, just because they are people, doesn't mean that they are human. They could have radically different biologies, cultures, and inclinations to the extent that they are also alien. My campaign has seven, and only seven kinds of Free Peoples. The most obvious choice of a stereotypical villain among the Free Peoples are the Goblins because well, they are ugly. Additionally many people in the world believe, without going into the elaborate back story why they believe this, that the Goblins are no longer counted as Free Peoples and are in fact now Servitors. The reason for this is that the most common definition of what it means to have free will among the people of Sartha is the freedom to choose your own god, and the people of Sartha believe that the Goblins have lost that ability. As a campaign level secret I will state here something I wouldn't normally state in game, and that is, those people are wrong. The Goblins remain a Free People. The fact that there are no good goblins doesn't mean that the Goblins are irredeemably evil or that they've lost their free will, and I have a whole campaign I'd like to do at one point around that.</p><p>However, none of the races of Free Peoples in my campaign is meant to be commentary on any real race in the real world. Idreth for example are defined by having collective racial memory; a trait not found in any real race. Elves are defined by living for centuries and having a real connection to nature; a trait not found in any real race. Indeed, even the ethnic groups of humanity aren't meant to be commentary on any real human ethnic group. Sure, the Drestrians can be loosely equated to the Germanic peoples, and the Concheeri to the Gaelic peoples, the Mokoheen to the Polynesians and so forth. But that's only because creating novel cultural traits for humanity is hard, and in any event some of these won't really fit in. Who are the Har? Jews? Doesn't really fit. Chinese? Fits pretty well, but skin color is all wrong. And if the Tumessi are Romany, then their history is totally and completely different than the history of the real Rom, and why are they the main inhabitants of the place most like The Holy Roman Empire (and not the Drestrians). Honestly, you could probably equate the whole bunch of them to the different ethnic groups of India (on of my main inspirations) and make closer matches. In short, I've really no interest in commenting on ethnicity or specific racial conflicts of the real world, and reading that into my text is putting something that comes from the reader and not me into the interpretation. </p><p>If you get all sensitive about the depiction of the ethnic groups or races in the text, you are missing the point. If one racial group is picked upon, I'm commenting as much about how high schoolers form into mutually exclusive cliques that deride the other social groups as I am about how humanity divides itself up. I'm not really interested or focused on one particular scale of man's inhumanity to his fellow man, but the appearance of division, strife, and persecution in my stories is meant to comment on all division, strife, and persecution regardless the scale - from the Down's syndrome kindergartener whose toys are smashed by neighborhood children to genocide at the scale of one stone age tribe killing off another and enslaving its surviving women to modern nation states committing democide against their own people. I see these as inseparable problems, and focusing on one portion of the picture misses the larger one. IF I wanted to comment on one particular racial conflict, I'd write historical fiction - not fantasy. I'm not a huge fan of simple analogies.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6210162, member: 4937"] So, I tend to group beings in a fantasy universe into two categories: 1) True Aliens: These beings don't really have any free will. They are acting out an inherent nature, and indeed in many cases are the embodiment of some idea. So they don't really have the capacity to change at all. If the alien is literally the incarnated spirit of murder or terror or decay, it can't really help being what it is and can't even really evaluate its own place in the universe. It's just acting out a principle. These beings can be irredeemably evil, and arguably the only way to get rid of them is rid the rest of the universe of the principle that they manifest. Slaying one, or more to the point banishing or exorcising one, doesn't really help except on a local scale. Hating a particular alien doesn't make you evil; it makes you sane. Hating the alien that incarnates pederasty is the exact same thing as hating pederasty. You can't see that about people, even a pederast. There is no level of evil a person or a people can stoop to that reduces them to this. It might reduce them to something that needs to face justice for its crimes, but it doesn't cause them to be 'not people' in the sense that an angel, slaad, or fiend is 'not people' and can't be related to people. 2) People: People have to some extent a choice in the matter. In fact, the people in my universe call themselves the Free Peoples, because they are aware that they have choice and that this distinguishes them from literally everything else (which are referred to collectively as Servitors). Now, just because they are people, doesn't mean that they are human. They could have radically different biologies, cultures, and inclinations to the extent that they are also alien. My campaign has seven, and only seven kinds of Free Peoples. The most obvious choice of a stereotypical villain among the Free Peoples are the Goblins because well, they are ugly. Additionally many people in the world believe, without going into the elaborate back story why they believe this, that the Goblins are no longer counted as Free Peoples and are in fact now Servitors. The reason for this is that the most common definition of what it means to have free will among the people of Sartha is the freedom to choose your own god, and the people of Sartha believe that the Goblins have lost that ability. As a campaign level secret I will state here something I wouldn't normally state in game, and that is, those people are wrong. The Goblins remain a Free People. The fact that there are no good goblins doesn't mean that the Goblins are irredeemably evil or that they've lost their free will, and I have a whole campaign I'd like to do at one point around that. However, none of the races of Free Peoples in my campaign is meant to be commentary on any real race in the real world. Idreth for example are defined by having collective racial memory; a trait not found in any real race. Elves are defined by living for centuries and having a real connection to nature; a trait not found in any real race. Indeed, even the ethnic groups of humanity aren't meant to be commentary on any real human ethnic group. Sure, the Drestrians can be loosely equated to the Germanic peoples, and the Concheeri to the Gaelic peoples, the Mokoheen to the Polynesians and so forth. But that's only because creating novel cultural traits for humanity is hard, and in any event some of these won't really fit in. Who are the Har? Jews? Doesn't really fit. Chinese? Fits pretty well, but skin color is all wrong. And if the Tumessi are Romany, then their history is totally and completely different than the history of the real Rom, and why are they the main inhabitants of the place most like The Holy Roman Empire (and not the Drestrians). Honestly, you could probably equate the whole bunch of them to the different ethnic groups of India (on of my main inspirations) and make closer matches. In short, I've really no interest in commenting on ethnicity or specific racial conflicts of the real world, and reading that into my text is putting something that comes from the reader and not me into the interpretation. If you get all sensitive about the depiction of the ethnic groups or races in the text, you are missing the point. If one racial group is picked upon, I'm commenting as much about how high schoolers form into mutually exclusive cliques that deride the other social groups as I am about how humanity divides itself up. I'm not really interested or focused on one particular scale of man's inhumanity to his fellow man, but the appearance of division, strife, and persecution in my stories is meant to comment on all division, strife, and persecution regardless the scale - from the Down's syndrome kindergartener whose toys are smashed by neighborhood children to genocide at the scale of one stone age tribe killing off another and enslaving its surviving women to modern nation states committing democide against their own people. I see these as inseparable problems, and focusing on one portion of the picture misses the larger one. IF I wanted to comment on one particular racial conflict, I'd write historical fiction - not fantasy. I'm not a huge fan of simple analogies. [/QUOTE]
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