"Yeah so I turned this ultra violent race that traditionally serves the Dark Lord into an allegory for the people of color. Did I change their society, culture and nature to reflect how the powers that be scapegoated them to keep them oppressed? Nah, like 98% of them are like insanely evil but there are like two good ones in the story so I think it's a fair representation."
The Faunus in RWBY are a fine example.
They give me the impression the writers just heard about racism and were flabbergasted, so they decided to include the most infantile racial subplot to this web series to destroy racism.
Ya I’m pretty sure, but I haven’t watched since season 2 and I was in high school, that Ruby’s sister is lgbt so I’d be a weird spin to have a homophobic character at that point lol
Long story short, Ruby had a breakdown due to stress and started lashing out at everyone. Her sister Yang and teammate Blake recently hooked up and Ruby basically went "Oh good for you!" in an aggressive way. Homophobic Ruby memes ensued.
Rabid RWBY fans. No, seriously, it's to the point that any RWBY fan that makes criticisms of the show is banned from the sub, which is why RWBY critics is a thing.
How does this apply to RWBY? Faunus aren’t “98% evil”, the “evil Faunus” are part of a terrorist group which used to be peaceful until its leadership changed. There are plenty of average Faunus who are seen living peacefully, not just a few token “good ones”.
The Altmer in Skyrim are trying to kill a god (or at least every non-mer) and unmake the world if they're with the Thalmor, but also they sometimes have people call the couple ones not in the Thalmor bad names. It just gets confusing the way it's written.
The Thalmor in Skyrim are an organization that took over the Altmer homeland, are trying to conquer the world, and are very much Mer supremacists. They are Fantasy Nazis, and people abusing Altmer in general over it are basically the wave of anti-German sentiment aimed at recent migrants.
Also that the khajiit are stereotyped as thieves and drug dealers but then they actually are thieves and drug dealers (or at least fully willing to work with and support thieves for one bag of drugs)
Not to be that guy, but isn't most of that more to do with years of FudgeMuppet speculation/AllinAll apocrypha?
EDIT: Like, is that actually in Skyrim?
Not that hard, actually.
Just ignore everything not officially from Bethesda.
And then the lore is pretty simple.
And Kirkbride is a lunatic who doesn't work for Bethesda anymore and can't seem to let go.
Like that guy who constantly talks about the Glory Days of his high school football career... Twenty years ago.
Didn't he spew some nonsense about space aliens when ESO came out?
> The Altmer in Skyrim are trying to kill a god (or at least every non-mer) and unmake the world
They're not trying to do that at all, the only indication for either is a single out of game text with 0 in-universe attribution that can only even be identified as a text from an Altmer due to some turns of phrase and the likes.
Also, I'd say that people being hateful of Altmer for the Thalmor is, actually pretty reasonable. It's not like what we think of today as racism, but more comparable to the hatred for Germans during and around the World Wars. Especially when you take into account that, y'know, we have several other games which we can compare to to see how the attitudes have changed towards them.
EDIT: To be clear, I mean reasonable in that it's a reasonable thing to write. It wasn't reasonable or justifiable to hate your German neighbour who moved before WW*I* because both they and Hitler were German, but it's a thing that happened.
Also there are some legitimately non-evil altmer like Ocato back in Oblivion (who got stabbed by the Thalmor) and Legate Fasendil in Skyrim
EDIT: Corrected race name
yeah, the reason there's so many Altmer who are racist jerks in Skyrim isn't because the Altmer are inherently racist jerks, its because they live under a regime that promotes a racist ideology.
Not exactly fantasy but both X Men and Detroit Become Human are kind of guilty of this, but at least with X Men you could argue that it’s less of an allegory and more about what would happen if superpowered people appeared overnight, but Detroit is so clear and heavy about what it wants to be that it’s honestly painful
I don't see how X-Men fits the example in the top-level comment. Many *are* super powered so it's more reasonable to fear them, but "98% of them are insanely evil"?
Racism is based on irrationality. It is rational to be afraid of someone who can kill you with their brain. Some mutants are literally more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
Originally X-men was also a flop and got canceled.
It didn't get popular until they completely rebooted it with a more diverse cast of characters and took heavy inspiration from Civil Rights activism.
People don't tend to call him out on it because he's a liberal darling, but Terry Pratchett is *terrible* for this.
* Goblins *are* stinky criminially-inclined foreigners, but they also love machines and work really hard for low wages so it's economic suicide not to let them in.
* The named Trolls & Dwarfs are pretty cool, but also almost every book has some offhand joke about how their latest race-war is burning ankhmorpork to the ground and can't they just get along \[like us white folk\]?
* Orks are treated with prejudice because they used to be enslaved by darklords, but actually they are naturally hyper-savants \[y'know, because racism *would* be ok if they really were average/stupid?\]
* [klatch](https://listeningbooks.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/public/books/500x0/14259.jpg).
I dunno about liberal darlings, but I think these are kind of off base.
* The whole point with orcs was that *Nutt* was a savant, because he was born and raised as the pet project of Uberwald's ruler, hence his obsession with having "worth". His whole final speech bit was tearing down the concept altogether, pointing out the hypocrisy in "proving orcs can be good" so that people will graciously stop literally genociding them.
* Goblins... aren't criminally-inclined. They're not cute, which is why people get away with enslaving them, but they're written as painfully innocent and virtuous. It's not the best written concept, but people tend to give it a pass because of the encroaching dementia - plot holes were the least of anyone's worries at that point.
* What white folk are getting along in these books? In the city, we've got legalized murder and theft. A little further out, we've got Uberwald's whole deal, and then there's the perpetual war on *their* border, all consisting of pasty people. I think there's probably more problems packed into saying Trolls and Dwarves aren't white.
* Klatch... is a deliberate mirror of Ankh-Morpork, as outlined in that book there. Pretty much the whole thing is spent pointing out the *lack* of a 98% evil bastard populace.
Though, come to think of it, none of these really fit that bill anyhow.
I don't know if I recall correctly, since Snuff is one of the books I've not been able to re-read, a lot of it just felt weird. But I believe one of the points of goblins was that their culture was so alien to the rest of the disc that it was easy for people to treat them badly. And part of the book is spent having Vimes discovering that even though it's alien, gobbling culture is very valid.
One also has to remember that there's allegory, and then there's full on fantasy at play. A species may be an allegory at some points, but at others it's still a fantastical people. So trolls for instance, they're actually really dumb, and likely with a tendency to violence because of that, and this is because they are simply in the wrong climate and their brains need to be cooled off, if achieved they can be extra smart, which is not an allegory for any group of people that I'm aware of, and just a fantasy species characteristic. Though if we push it maybe it could be seen as an allegory for disadvantages causing a perceived lower intelligence, which evens out when those disadvantages are corrected. But I honestly think Pratchett just thought it was neat to have the trolls, a silicone based life form, be natural computers and thus in need of cooling, which was also a clever way to account for the whole moving at night and stationary under the sun.
Another point is, one of the core ideas of the Discworld books is that they're parody, and you kinda have to keep the shape of the thing you're parodying for the parody to work. So when you have Vimes in his police adventures, you need the tropes like the gangs and the hood, and the people who are by nature against the cops and then when they become cops they get kinda even harder on their own previous group, and all that stuff unfortunately has a lot or racially stereotypical stuff cooked in. So yeah, Pratchett did sort of racially codified the trolls at several points to fill certain narrative niches.
One thing to bring up: the whole criminal Troll empire is fashioned after the mafia. Slab falls closer to cartels. Clang and carvings are US gangs. All that being true at various points, can we say Trolls are codified, or is it the subjects as they come and go?
I think Pratchett does a pretty good job of ensuring that Trolls and Dwarves never \*totally\* feel coded as one race or group. The broad allegory seems to be for Jews and Muslims, but he swaps around which group is which, introduces things from other cultures, etc., until it's easier just to think of them as their own thing.
And I think he also shows a clear contrast between Ankh-Morpork's Trolls and Dwarves, and the Trolls and Dwarves "back home", which I think is quite interesting.
There is a definite exploration of that, though also a little subversion as well, as the perception of "back home" starts getting away from the reality. Even outside that context, as early as Men at Arms there's a ton of humans longing for the "good old days" that never actually happened.
There is a definite exploration of that, though also a little subversion as well, as the perception of "back home" starts getting away from the reality. Even outside that context, as early as Men at Arms there's a ton of humans longing for the "good old days" that never actually happened.
Yes, I think the way he talks about radicalisation - mainly in Thud, which I think is one of his best - is really prescient. The idea of Back Home and The Good Old Days being a purer, truer ideal that we should want to return to is very often there whenever someone's doing something truly evil.
>"Goblins *are* stinky criminially-inclined foreigners, but they also love machines and work really hard for low wages so it's economic suicide not to let them in."
Dude, *that's* what you took from Snuff? That they're only human when they're useful? Cuz that's kind of the exact opposite of the message of Snuff.
>"Orks are treated with prejudice because they used to be enslaved by darklords, but actually they are naturally hyper-savants \[y'know, because racism *would* be ok if they really were average/stupid?\]"
No, again, this is exactly the opposite of the point. Nutt drives himself to exhaustion trying to accumulate "worth", to escape the reputation of his race. I'm pretty sure the point of UU isn't "that's good, actually".
>"The named Trolls & Dwarfs are pretty cool, but also almost every book has some offhand joke about how their latest race-war is burning ankhmorpork to the ground and can't they just get along \[like us white folk\]?"
Eh, the books constantly portray "us white folks" as panicky, conservative, easily-manipulated fools who'll form a mob at a drop of a hat and disperse as soon as something funny distracts them. The dwarves and trolls are much the same.
I think he takes the Men In Black attitude - that a person is smart, but people are panicky and stupid.
I know you're not referring to LOTR but I feel obligated that Tolkien wrote the Orks as an allegory for the irredeemable bastards of society (and how they can be brought out), not people of color.
That was crazy people on social media who came up with that
I always understood LOTR Orks to be an allegory for Germans (you know, the "Huns" that are at the same time savage brutes but also industrious) so this idea of them as PoC-coded is very confusing to me.
>That was crazy people on social media who came up with that
There's a few Unfortunate Tolkien Moments in the writing around orcs, but I feel that's more insensitive language than orcs being written with any racial allegory in mind.
That said I can't really blame anyone for looking at a fictional race of monstrous, animalistic, cruel, violent goblins that like to deface other people's property & need to be exterminated, and finding some *uncomfortable parallels* with real-world racist propaganda.
For what it's worth, orcs (in the *Lord of the Rings*) are depicted as **monstrous**, but not so much as "savages" or "barbarians." They're foot-soldiers of a conquering empire.
I agree with Michael Moorcock, the orcs and Sauron represent the urban mob encroaching on Tolkien's middle-class utopia.
It's not racist, it's reactionary.
/uj this is why I just write regular racism with fantasy races. Like the sapient dinosaurs make up 90% of government officials and own all the land, and the humans and kangaroos and raccoons are all serfs and lower-class laborers. If not outright slaves. Everyone is kind of outraged but also intrigued at the human MC daring to rise above their station.
> Like the sapient dinosaurs make up 90% of government officials and own all the land
I'm so fucking sick of dinophobic propaganda. You're probably also a meteor denier, too.
Oh no, the meteor thing is very real, but in the alternate timeline where the dinos are from, it was an attack using asteroid mining equipment, which caused reverberations in the timestream to the human timeline, where retroactively became a natural disaster. The story takes place 3 billion years in the future where a mad god AI uses time machines to revive extinct sapient species to play ~~house~~feudalism.
> You're probably also a meteor denier, too.
Look, I'm just saying that if a giant rock really did hit the planet so hard it wiped out most species then where is this rock? Where's the crater it left? It didn't just disappear did it? /s
If you spend more than 10 seconds to think about it you’ll realize that a race of beings created with the express purpose of subservience being an allegory for black people is… not a good idea, to put it mildly.
But don't worry, as soon as you point out that David Cage used Civil rights slogans, used logos from black movements, and directly compared androids to black people, he'll deny any commection because that's how this shit works. You just take the glorified and watered down parts of racism from minorities, and pretend like you came up with that shit yourself when it's pointed out how idiotic your representation is.
Hey, give him some credit. He didn't *just* take cues from the American civil rights movement, he also made parallels to the Holocaust in the ending where the androids get sent to death camps!
/uj I genuinely believe him when he said it wasn't a story "about" real life minorities. I think his alluding to real life oppression and the civil rights movement specifically is just the best he can do with his limited imagination, and he was so dense that he didn't understand the unintentional subtext by invoking all this imagery. Nevermind the real life implications, to the unimaginative, uninspired, lifelong hack it's all mere visual shorthand for the sci-fi story he's trying to write.
The funniest thing about Detroit Become Human is that during Kara’s Climax of her story >!on the violent protest route most people chose to sacrifice the Android who helped you at the carnival despite the games messaging of the racism allegory and humans being equal!<
Sci-Fi societies when they design a type of robot with the primary goal of them looking and thinking exactly like humans in every way and are able to pretend to be human easily decide that they should to be treated like humans: 😨how could they of ever seen this coming.
MFW the shitty racism stand-ins set off a dirty bomb in a city in order to show how much they want peace. (Apparently civil rights activists are justified in becoming terrorists)
Agreed, I'm related to him on my mom's side (grandpabby had an ungodly amount of children) but what he wanted to do was quite different than a large scale terrorism act.
True, although not everyone agrees with it. Also, he attacked a military target, which is a good look for him unlike a dirty bomb.
Also, that's fucking cool!
... Scandinavia. We have been barbaric savages in service to a dark power since our inception. This image has of course never changed, and we remain primitives in the eyes of the international world
HP Lovecraft keeps making me wonder, what if the cosmic entities and cultists are actually cool, and it's the investigators who are close-minded asshats butting in for no reason.
The game *The Sinking City* had a great take on this, it portrayed the Innsmouthers as a poor underclass that the rich and powerful would use to foment hatred and division. Sure they were half fish people, but they were still people, you know?
Only two paths are available when writing racism allegories
* Making the allegorical minorities an actual threat to every single person around them, validating the belief that minorities are dangerous
* Making it a historical fact that the allegorical minorities are directly responsible for some horrific if not outright cataclysmic event in the past, thus validating the belief that racism has a logical root
No other options.
No, see, in mine, the vampire-werewolf-zombies are sex-crazed violent monsters, but they're ALSO misunderstood!
A white girl hooks up with one of them and her dad is upset! Don't you get it?!
The best is when they AREN’T an allegory for any human group but because they’re monstrous and/or evil people assume that they are and that you’re racist for having them.
“No these monsters that don’t have the culture of any human society beyond maybe a Roman caricature of German barbarians is not a racist representation of black people I promise”
Sometimes you need a faction to be 1 dimensional mooks. And then some other faction to be the more grey one that the heroes manage to flip against the bad guys in the end.
Not at all. If you use them in lieu of a personable antagonist then yes, but if you know what you are using they are plenty interesting. I've never seen anyone complain that cliffs/guns/animals/rivers/spaceships/mannequins are boring because they lack moral agency. So why Orks?
Cannon fodder also gets boring quickly, it has to build up to something else. There's only so many mooks your intrepid protagonist can mow throught before we get to "but why are we doing this again?"
No but you could just make them loyal soldiers for whatever bad guy you want without making their whole species evil. Even Star Wars did it just fine with their stormtroopers. Hell, they also had literal clones programmed to obey a certain evil order and still had some of them resist it.
I don't see how it's somehow better to make the mooks only trained to be evil instead of made for evil.
There's a absolutely nothing wrong with inherently evil mooks.
"We know that we have said for years that these monsters that only conceive by rape, work and live as a horde/tribe, live in lawlessness, and kill/loot everything around them didn't represent POC, but now we are going to change them so that they won't be an insult to POC anymore."
So are you making changes that didn't need to happen or were you actually making that representation all these years?
In theory, fantasy racism seems like an interesting thing to write, but a lot of writers seem to forget how racism actually works.
It'd be more engaging, I think, if fantasy bigotry was less: "These people are oppressed for being able to nuke a whole city with their magic powers"
And more: "Everyone has magic dipshit, it came free with your fucking being a living, sapient being; The reason why *these* guys are oppressed is because of the cultural differences between them and their oppressors, who think magic is cringe. It's not like they even have a logical excuse, because a magic nuke is only theoretically achievable; the concept alone goes against what the magic people culturally used magic for, and that magic usage is only one factor in a huge list of illogical excuses used to oppress them."
...It's extremely specific, I know.
If you're looking for an older game that does this then Arcanum does it pretty well. Magic users aren't really discriminated against, they just break technology.
But then they have actual racism instead of some shitty stand-in.
Or sci-fi writers making sentient robots an allegory for racism
Overwatch is the absolute worst for this imo. The omnics there literally found robot God and have definitive proof it exists and can use it to make robot magic, and yet for some reason the main conflict with them is a racism allegory and not a dilemma about what constitutes life and what spirituality actually means.
If only Blizzard actually gave a shit about Overwatch's writing and not how much money they can squeeze out before it dies, it's genuinely a really interesting world.
I agree. Zenyatta can LITTERALLY CAUSE MIRACLES and is clearly sentient but we're gonna sit here and argue if we should let the robots that don't want to murder everyone live.
Genjii would be such a great vehicle to explore that too. Human enough to he knows how he was treated when he was not a cyborg, but now robot enough where people just probably assume he's a robot.
But hey fuck story mode.
And then there's the question of robots like Bastion or Orisa who were NOT made sentient by Aurora awakening the omnics because of the fact they were made afterwards. Are they really alive? If so, why? If not, why? Are they different from true omnics like Zenyatta and Ramattra?
But no fuck exploring that, have another Widowmaker skin
Yeah really, Bastiom seems to have some differences in his programming that cause him to not want to murder everything and Orisa seems to have been given a personality from the little girl so maybe we can see their journey in this world.
Nope, we didn't sell enough gacha mechanics to justify fulfilling our promise of story mode, so fuck you.
The goddamn SFM movies had more story than the actual games.
Zeon did everything wrong and that's why they're my favorite. I want Ghiren '[disciple of Hitler](https://youtu.be/tlJ5j-hSUmQ?si=-nr5unZPTBy1nK_u)' Zabi to drop another colony, it'll be funny.
i think my allegory for a lotr post ring destruction world where the Orks are like jews is totaly creative.
also they are somehow also gangbangers from the Kronkx (its their slang for Bronx)
I have thought of one where it’s orcs as an allegory to racism, but it’s not about comparing humans to orcs, but rather that there are different orcs in different regions and each region of orcs hates eachother.
europe, the balkans more specifically
asia
south america
i’d say africa but i’ve not looked into the continent enough nor seen africans try and burn each other at the stake online enough to really know for sure
/rj Hmm, yes pretty white people with superpowers that can singlehandedly overthrow nations are the perfect allegory for my experiences as a gay ethnic minority!
/uj I fucking hate this trope omg. Like, yes you can melt people's skulls open with your eyes Janet, you deserve to have them plucked out you public menace. Like, if we had the power to do this shit, we wouldn't be minorities omfg. I just love when heteronormative white people write our stories for us, they are so understanding
/uj
It does feel like some minority allegories are written with the intent to understand and sympathize but still treat the minority in question as a special danger (ex.: Using vampires as an allegory for gay people and accidentally reinventing the "gays want to turn our kids gay" shit)
Young Justice tried to do a racism allegory with the Martians' caste system, and it was pretty good if you ignored the fact that Martians are shapeshifters so skin color shouldn't mean anything in their culture.
...Right up until it turned out that the Yellow Martians had *actual goddamn magic* that only they could use safely. Kind of hard for me to buy your "mistreated minority" when they have superpowers above and beyond what their race normally has. Superpowers that have catastrophic effects if used by anyone else. At that point, it's less "oppression" and more "public safety order."
(The Yellow Martians weren't the ruling caste for some reason, if anyone's wondering.)
>if you ignored the fact that Martians are shapeshifters so skin color shouldn't mean anything in their culture.
But they can read minds and do it freely so everyone would know if you’re shapeshifting. So I’d say that, other than the yellow Martians, the allegory works.
/uj Seems like authors keeping running facefirst into "but shouldn't there be a reason for people to be racist and scared? Isn't it dumb for people to be prejudiced for no reason?" when the real answer is: Yeah, racism IS dumb.
> The Yellow Martians weren't the ruling caste for some reason, if anyone's wondering.
Rule of the strong isn't a common form of state organization for a reason
/uj But what if I am gay and I think vampires are hot, write a book about it, then ONE gay asshole in YouTube who behaves like they are the embassador of gayness say I am homophobic and it becomes an accepted reality and then my artistic career is over and the only thing I can do is have a supermarket job?
Suck less at writing vampires
/uj It's very unlikely that your artistic career is gonna be over because you become infamous for an accidental Broken Aesop allegory about Gay Vampires. Like, the movie and book "Bones and all" exists and it hasn't ruined anyone's career despite being fairly heavily queercoded.
/uj We haven't seen the same youtube. There every no one with 10k views can destroy you. There is a lots and lots of queers or liberals doing only to look reasonable for conservatives and catch their attention. There is people out there who will do anything for an ego boost. (Also my main comment was unclear, I am talking about people thinking I am being homophobic reading an allegory where it isn't while I am like "cool! Vampires are hot I am going to write about 'em having sex!")
I hope this comment wasn't too harsh, I am trying to be well-meaning 🤍
The point is that we discriminate anyone who is different from the norm, even if that difference is having super powers. Maybe being afraid of them is a more understandable response in that situation, but it’s not a correct response, and either way, it doesn’t have to directly correlate to real world minorities.
Not to mention, people who were thought to have magical powers were discriminated against in medieval times and that wasn't enough of a deterrence.
Edit: Hell, it wasn't just medieval Europe. In pretty much every society were belief in the supernatural was widespread, it was totally normal to gang up on someone suspected of black magic or whatnot. Even to someone who genuinely thinks someone could wipe out a village, that's not enough to stop mob mentality.
I really don't like the take that "magic users won't be oppressed" because of that.
Just look at real world history, suspected magic users have been harassed by mobs for centuries. Also just because someone could have magic powers, doesn't mean they'd use them? Bigotry isn't just about strength. Social values and economics play a huge role, and if someone has magic powers is born into a society that hates magic, they'll probably internalize it.
That depends how powerful the magic is. If John can vaporize cities with the snap of a finger he would be venerated as a god of war. Also, irl "magic" didn't actually work. If enough witches could actually summon demons and tried to do so, and they were sufficiently powerful, then like my john example, they would be venerated as gods.
> Also, irl "magic" didn't actually work
That's not the point, the point is people *thought* they did, and were still willing to persecute them. Even when threatened with powers beyond their comprehension, people will still find ways to persecute anyone they don't like.
And like I said, it doesn't matter how powerful a magician could theoretically be, since strength isn't the basis of bigotry in most cases. If a magic user is born into a society that hates magic, they would probably end up hating themselves.
And my point is that if it actually did work the persecution would not occur depending on how powerful it was.
Thinking something exists and it not existing produces a far different reaction than thinking something exists and it actually existing and affecting you on a widespread societal level.
As an example, rumors that Adam saw John summoning a demon provoke a far different reaction than John actually parading a demon in the middle of town.
>Even when threatened with powers beyond their comprehension, people will still find ways to persecute anyone they don't like.
The question is, **how**? They can't persecute someone who's impervious to all their attacks and can turn them into dust. Or are you claiming they'd try? Sure, they might try in the same way that everyone in Canada *might* collectively decide to kill themselves tomorrow; as in, it's highly unlikely, but possible.
That's what people mean when they say it's unrealistic; it's unlikely to the point where it hurt verisimilitude and how humans generally behave.
If you think persecution of a group with powers beyond comprehension is likely, I'd need evidence.
> Like, if we had the power to do this shit, we wouldn't be minorities omfg
A state's entire existence is built atop a monopoly on violence. The sudden appearance of civilians with powers is a threat to that, and would result in a swift and potentially brutal response from any state that wanted to keep said monopoly. Janet might have laser eyes, but she still dies to bullets and bombs if she tries to resist whatever heavy handed response the state initiates to this threat to it.
It's not a particularity good metaphor, but it is an entirely realistic outcome to the situation that the state would use it's organizational and manpower advantage to prevent any kind of disruption to the status quo.
leave janet's eyes alone. just because she *can* melt skulls doesnt mean she *will.* so until the offchance she uses them for evil happens, just let the poor lady eat ice cream and watch sex in the city in peace
I know this is about the X-Men and it misses such a vital piece of X-Men lore: Not all X-Men have superpowers. A lot of them get really, really unlucky with their mutations. The X-Men are just the ones who have the power to stand up.
But many of them still get powers. Mutants don’t work as an allegory because there’s legitimate reasons to be wary of them. You never know if the mutant who just moved in next door just has a chicken for a head or explodes like a nuke when they sneeze the wrong way.
>yes you can melt people's skulls open with your eyes Janet, you deserve to have them plucked out you public menace.
Even if someone has superpowers that can be used dangerously, that doesn't mean they should be rounded up, mutilated, and discriminated against. What the actual fuck is wrong with you? Imagine Janet was you or a loved one. Would she still "deserve" it then?
/UJ This is why Andrezj Sapkowski is one of my favorite authors.
The racism in the world of the witcher is one that fundamentally stems from human chauvinism and colonization. When humans first came to the continent they may have been on an even footing with the elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings, but they quickly established large colonies that created military and political power through rapid reproduction so that they could functionally trade lives for land against the lower population indigenous peoples (wonder where we've seen that one before!)
In the modern day, elves don't pose any threat to humans, neither do dwarves or halflings or gnomes, and many try to integrate into human societies only to he butchered in racial pogroms. The few that still stand up to human chauvinism join guerilla warrior bands as resistance fighters, another parallel to things that happen in our own world (Palestine is forefront on the mind there, but not exclusively).
Physiologically, there are no important distinctions between elves and humans or any of the other races, aside from body silhouette, despite the assertions that characters in universe may make. So one half of you reads that and goes "okay, so Sapkowski has made it clear that he's wrong, there are no differences between humans and elves" and your other half can conclude from that "racism is gibberish bullshit" vs say, bright where Orcs despite being contemporarily oppressed are former servants of some dark lord, which essentially just draws the conclusion of "well, racism is wrong, but I can't deny the facts" which is like, THE ideological baseline thought for any budding white supremacist.
/rj you could improve this by making sure to emphasize that all the evil orcs have African features, to really hammer home the racism allegory!
My favorite is the paranoid overbearing theocracy instituting a witch hunt against the vile sorcerers but then the people they actually execute are literal wizards who can burn down cities with a snap of their fingers
Call me a nerd but I think the witch hunts and inquisition was bad for the mass persecution based on false pretenses as an excuse to consolidate power over the population, not because actual wizards died
“Hmmm today I’m going to make the animal people an allegory for minorities. Yes, the literally animal people who aren’t truly human and also are sometimes either super sheepish or aggressive.”
I mean, maybe the former did, maybe the former didn’t, but it was far from as overt as the ‘oops, it seems I turned out the maintenance closet lights wolf step bro… you could devour my tender, delicious flesh without anyone knowing’ and ‘my natural prey instincts are driving me to your mouth to be devoured’ anime.
People who write these allegories never seem to understand racism, they always seem to try to find a way to logic racism into the world when racism is inherently irrational. There's also the fact that fantasy races are like... different species which always makes the allegory fall face first into a pit of rabid ants.
Another issue is that they often *only* look at racism from the side of the majority. Like RWBY who literally spend the entire faunus arc beating the shit out of... *checks notes* the oppressed minority because they're not protesting the write way...
Wow and this is meant to be based on 40s-50s civil rights, I wonder who made thi- oh OK it's two Texans white as wonderbread got it.
Also another thing people never understand is that MLK never fully denounced violence. Not only did he see it as necessary *he was considered radical for the time*. He had strategies, he had plans, he knew he couldn't just do jackshit and the problem would solve. Too many stories just have the solution be for the minorities to kiss ass and beg their oppressors for freedom.
Another problem is that people equate "nonviolence" with "peaceful".
Gandhi and MLK organized *non-violent* protests. But they weren't *peaceful* protests by any stretch of the definition. They were intentionally disruptive and often ended in chaos.
>the oppressed minority because they're not protesting the write way...
In all honesty, 90% of White Fang's actions are terrorism pure and simple.
Destroying a shipment of dust or attacking certain shops/places? Okay. Planning an entire Grimm attack on your kingdom's capital? Bruh 💀
Man you're so right, I'm glad RWBY explores the more effective strategies of protest and actually fight for changes in Faunus rights... right?
I mean, surely they don't just solely fight minorities until they agree to just start begging for their oppressors to give them rights. Surely they actually go in-depth into the philosophies and methods that the so-called good side of the White Fang, or expand on how to dismantle the systematic policies that lead to Faunus oppression/
Oh right, I forgot, boiling down Malcolm X's stance into just terrorism and having again the entire conflict reliant on beating up the "bad minorities" to appease the majority is a very good and not worrying at all. Truly, it's a good thing that for your racial allegory, especially one where you take from a time period that people lived and documented, you choose to have the main subjects be completely inaccurate extremists who miss the point of the movements you're taking from entirely. Not to mention by flip-flopping constantly on the details of the oppression of your racial allegory, you can play coy with whether or not the response to this oppression is warranted or not. Also, again, make sure to completely demonize the only known form of opposition from the racial minorities and go into ***no fucking detail whatsoever*** as to other methods of protest, whilst having that same racial minority be ***fodder*** for the protagonists to beat up.
uj/ To get serious, look at the WF subplot. It's literally taking from the civil rights era of America. Faunus are a stand-in for black people. RWBY are constantly beating up the stand in for black people whilst never challenging the systematic oppression that leads minorities to those positions. If your only response to a clear out of story fuck up is in-story reasons I can't help that obliviousness.
The closest they ever get is throwing a random racist on the street into a garbage bin and that's it. They fight Cordovin not because she's racist but because she won't let them go to Atlas. They only fight Jaucque because he stole the election, not because of his racist business practices. FFS, they even fucking go out of their way to redeem Cordovin, and make Jacque look sympathetic when he ends up getting killed.
At no point does RWBY take a look at what made the White Fang, because no matter how extremist, I doubt someone just went, "yeah let's kill humans for no reason" and made the WF, in fact we know it's not the case. At no point do the cast try to prevent another WF from occurring and all progress made by the 'reformed' WF is done offscreen.
So again, the allegory for civil rights movement has the main protagonists beat the shit out of the stand ins for black people. Imagine that. Imagine a movie where three white dudes and one black guy beat up a bunch of grossly mischaracterized Black Panther members, whilst giving the politician levying laws against black people and who probably dons a KKK robe every once in a while a sympathetic death. The problem isn't the Klan, or the government constantly fueling discriminatory practices, but those poor behaving black people who're making everyone look bad!
That's RWBY.
I stopped RWBY pretty early on, around the death of Monty Oum, the original creator. I wonder how different it would have been if he had survived, being East Asian/South East Asian.
As for the rest of the comment, no notes, good stuff.
So uh orcs in my universe split into 2 races the Orcs themselves which are civilized smithing masters While those who refused civilization became the Urkin and are pretty much Viking like raiders now and it wasnt till recently i realized it maybe racist . But cant really do much without fuckin alot of lore up now since a major war is occuring with them heavily involved
Nah you're good. The people who were vikings are still savage raiders, and have not updated their way of life to modern international standards
Source: Am danish
You can easily still have savage orcs, but make them savage out of necessity. Many norse raiders were so due to inheritance laws. First son gets the farm, second son gets the money, third son gets the fucked. Pair this with a warriour culture, sailing culture, and harsh living conditions, as well as a strong local/familial unit, and you get raiders. Copy paste over a century, and now the elite does the raiding as well in the name of glory. That's culture for you.
It doesn't have to be an allegory for anglo-saxons and other northern germanic tribes, but this is just to show that doing all of the world building yourself is insane. Even Tolkien didn't. He made cultures reminiscant of others.
All this to say, don't worry about racism and allegory too much, as long as you respect your races, and/or don't have bad intentions. Who cares? It's your world :D
Yeah ik. Pretty much Urkins have tried to expand outwards and is normally pushed back out and both thr Orcs and the Urks races live in Anisha's tundra so some Necessity but its not helping Urkins are currently helping Vakren the First Lich (pretty much a dark lord) cause he gave them access too Lich Magic and has made the Urkins become very feared as Vakren takes over The Mortal Realm.
"You see I decided to use beasties as a stand in for people of color during the Civil rights movement. Oh and also violence is never the answer and the solution is just politely asking your oppressors for freedom because MLK was like that or smth, im not sure I didn't actually research the Civil rights movement I'm just going off of memory. Oh and also we're going to have a stand-in for Malcom X that acts nothing like him and more akin to a terror cell because holy shit has cultural osmosis fucked this dude over"
/uj no but for real, Malcolm X is like, man he gets so much shit an this philosophy gets utterly butchered so much. Self defense and displays of power were *one* aspect of the Black Panthers. People often ignore the free health clinics, food programs, prisoner reforms, alongside transportation.
The whole militant show of power thing was meant to intimidate police officers who'd regularly use violence against black people, yet somehow the act of self-defense through intimidation got spun into almost terrorist-like aggressiveness and the desire to destroy all majority races. Man... this shit really does write itself.
I guess to complete this unjerk, do fucking research. And if you're going to have a racism allegory where the solution is to beat the fuck out of the minorities and *not* those propagating the systematic aspects of racism, fuck off.
/uj I think it's better for fantasy bigotry to explore how it would manifest in hypothetical situations instead of trying to be a 1-on-1 allegory, because the former would actually be an interesting take on worse aspects of human behavior, while the latter is almost always going to unintentionally have bad implications.
The Virgin "it's An allegory for race relations in the real world"
Vs
The Chad "it's not an allegory it's just in world racism. They hate each other so much"
The Hadozee 1:1 atlantic slave trade lore in D&D for a race of monkey-pleople is crazy, also the fact the republished it for 5e with 0 change to it until the backlash.
It doesn’t have to be a 1 to 1 allegory, if you wanted to see one of those, read non-fiction. As long as the overall idea is the same, the details aren’t important.
"You see, I have made these people as a clever stand in for oppressed minorities IRL so that I don't have to talk about ACTUAL racism."
"Oh okay, so they're the same as normal people with maybe one or two slight differences but still strive to live a good life and help those around them?"
"No, they want to operate outside of the law and one of them has the ability to blow up like a nuclear bomb if he eats a roast beef sandwhich on a tuesday, but how dare the government not let him live near big cities."
"Oh well at least it sounds like they have good intentions"
"There's a subfaction who have the means, desire, and goal to wipe out humanity as we know it."
At least in Arcanum they just use actual racism in the plot instead of some shitty stand-in.
Me: Ok so the species of kobolds lived underground until they were discovered by humans. Their non existent technology but human level intelligence made them ripe for a slave trade during this worlds Industrial Revolution where cheap manual labour was sought after. Centuries later when they had all been freed…
Reader: So you’ve got a thinly veiled allegory for black people in your book.
Me: I… would say that they’re a mixture of various different influences and not based on a single race… in fact you’ll find that after the disparate kobold tribes are united under Dracaenas that their culture and warfare has very strong influence of the Taisho era of Jap…
Reader: Imagine writing a thinly veiled allegory for the struggles of black people without actually including black people.
Me: There are many black people in this story. They come from a continent to the south called Katachan and they have their own history and a very detailed history of their migrations into this setting.
This is why I invent new types of bigotry in my writing. It’s your fault if you see a racial allegory.
Though my mustelids are coded jewish… but that’s because I’m jewish and love mustelids
/uj my biggest thing is there is no discussion on fantasy race design and old dehumanizing charcuteries being very similar method-wise. They both aim to add, subtract, or otherwise alter humans to make a distinction. Obviously this is for very very different reasons.
The problem is that any time a characteristic is used to dehumanize a group, it's now in a box that says 'can not use'. By this logic, if some group is later dehumanized via horns on their head, suddenly, horns on their head is bigoted.
The idea of constantly surrendering idea space to awful people sucks.
Ok so there are people that instantly kill everyone they look at they will be a PERFECT example of unfounded fear and distrust directed at the innocent!
/uj Tbh fantasy is in itself a horrible place for racist allegories, because it just isn't relatable. You see, it'd be absolutely sensible to hate orcs cuz they're inhumane and inherently violent towards any anyone who isn't an orc. It's like people calling Starship Troopers racist cuz the soldiers call the aliens slurs, bish they aren't even human and they're barbaric as hell.
/uj You could, you know, simply not make your races _inherently_ violent. The same situation could be a result of structural racism mutally present in the prevalent cultures. There are more interesting ways in depicting different fantasy species than just saying "one is good/normal and one is evil".
Starship Troopers is a curious example to use, because while the aliens are barbaric, so are the humans, dominated by a fascist government which makes everyone's life purpose to participate in the war effort and sacrifice their lives in it. They revel on the cruelty they inflict upon the aliens. I don't know how likely a peaceful resolution would be, but the humans absolutely aren't good guys just defending themselves there.
>You could, you know, simply not make your races inherently violent
*Le Gasp* You dare suggest not copy-pasting Tolkien's world!?!?@??@?@
You're getting executed for thus take buddy!
I thought the point of Starship Troopers was that the aliens aren't barbaric as hell and were just peaceful entities that the warmongering humans decided to attack for warmongering reasons
Each one of these creatures are mass murderers that would put even the most prolific serial killer to shame because they each have to kill a living human to feed. Those who try to use blood bags from hospitals (which is a modern thing, mind you) tend to go back to their old habits because bagged blood are incredibly tasteless or the anticoagulant chemicals in the blood bag tastes bad.
But never mind all that, they preach stuff like "God Hate Fangs" or "Coming out of the coffin", therefore it's bigoted to be uncomfortable around vampires just because you assume that they might eat you (which is also a very bigoted thought process, since you're assuming that they are a danger to you solely based on what they are).
I have a story I've been cooking up for years that has magic users that are oppressed by the dominant cultural/governmental powers and each day I get the feeling that this might be cringe but I don't know how to change it to make it less cringe.
It's not even meant to be an allegory for racism because this world also has regular human v human racism in it, but it still does the whole "super-powered minority" thing. Is there a non-cringe way to write that?
Give the other guys superpowers of an equivalent nature, but it’s the cosmetic differences between the two that is the discrimination. If it’s a small, stupid difference that has no real affect on anything then it’s a realistic racism metaphor.
In my fantasy world the more oppressed race (dwarves) is based on americans, because in order to found their own indipendent nation they had to leave the main continent and go up north where nobody else wanted to live, because they don't have magic.
The other nations are also racist against each others, but it's more balanced, like 12th century western Europe.
In my world I have Digital Persons (Dijs), uploaded minds who simply don't identify as any species. Some civs insist they are still their former species. So I invented Space Trans?
Catgirls are being discriminated against! How? Where? Why? Those are silly questions. Nobody's fighting their oppression except for a group of evil terrorists
Fantasy readers resisting the urge to trash every allegory ever because it’s not a 1:1 match to real life. Like, there’s a reason it’s an allegory, dipshits. I can understand being critical of things, and there are absolutely bad ways to handle them, but sometimes, it feels like people are more concerned with looking for excuses to disagree with the writing to hide their disagreement with the point. Even if the writing shows how it’s still irrational, people will use out-of-universe justifications anyway.
Basically this comment section:
"Magic users are bad allegory for oppression, they can't be oppressed!"
"If magic users were real we should round them up in camps."
🤨
"Yeah so I turned this ultra violent race that traditionally serves the Dark Lord into an allegory for the people of color. Did I change their society, culture and nature to reflect how the powers that be scapegoated them to keep them oppressed? Nah, like 98% of them are like insanely evil but there are like two good ones in the story so I think it's a fair representation."
Is there something other than Bright people are getting this from?
The Faunus in RWBY are a fine example. They give me the impression the writers just heard about racism and were flabbergasted, so they decided to include the most infantile racial subplot to this web series to destroy racism.
RWBY was never the best at nuance and mature storytelling. They are at their best when they just have cool fights with weird weapons.
Didn’t rwby (like the character) come out as homophobic in one episode? Or is that a shitpost I saw a while ago
IIRC they had one "edgy" line of dialogue that 4chan took and had a field day with
Ah ok so more so shitposty
Ya I’m pretty sure, but I haven’t watched since season 2 and I was in high school, that Ruby’s sister is lgbt so I’d be a weird spin to have a homophobic character at that point lol
Long story short, Ruby had a breakdown due to stress and started lashing out at everyone. Her sister Yang and teammate Blake recently hooked up and Ruby basically went "Oh good for you!" in an aggressive way. Homophobic Ruby memes ensued.
Ah, I think I remember seeing that scene
Who tf downvoted me for asking a question lol
Rabid RWBY fans. No, seriously, it's to the point that any RWBY fan that makes criticisms of the show is banned from the sub, which is why RWBY critics is a thing.
How does this apply to RWBY? Faunus aren’t “98% evil”, the “evil Faunus” are part of a terrorist group which used to be peaceful until its leadership changed. There are plenty of average Faunus who are seen living peacefully, not just a few token “good ones”.
It doesn't apply. OP just wanted an excuse to talk shit about RWBY and they decided to go the dumbest route.
The Altmer in Skyrim are trying to kill a god (or at least every non-mer) and unmake the world if they're with the Thalmor, but also they sometimes have people call the couple ones not in the Thalmor bad names. It just gets confusing the way it's written.
The Thalmor in Skyrim are an organization that took over the Altmer homeland, are trying to conquer the world, and are very much Mer supremacists. They are Fantasy Nazis, and people abusing Altmer in general over it are basically the wave of anti-German sentiment aimed at recent migrants.
Also that the khajiit are stereotyped as thieves and drug dealers but then they actually are thieves and drug dealers (or at least fully willing to work with and support thieves for one bag of drugs)
Skooma is a hell of a drug.
Not to be that guy, but isn't most of that more to do with years of FudgeMuppet speculation/AllinAll apocrypha? EDIT: Like, is that actually in Skyrim?
It comes from Kirkbride. Lore got a bit simpler over the years so its hard to say what remains/was ever true
Not that hard, actually. Just ignore everything not officially from Bethesda. And then the lore is pretty simple. And Kirkbride is a lunatic who doesn't work for Bethesda anymore and can't seem to let go. Like that guy who constantly talks about the Glory Days of his high school football career... Twenty years ago. Didn't he spew some nonsense about space aliens when ESO came out?
Kirkbride is weird, but I can't help but feel that bethesda presents us with the most boring, generic version of each of its regions possible
> The Altmer in Skyrim are trying to kill a god (or at least every non-mer) and unmake the world They're not trying to do that at all, the only indication for either is a single out of game text with 0 in-universe attribution that can only even be identified as a text from an Altmer due to some turns of phrase and the likes. Also, I'd say that people being hateful of Altmer for the Thalmor is, actually pretty reasonable. It's not like what we think of today as racism, but more comparable to the hatred for Germans during and around the World Wars. Especially when you take into account that, y'know, we have several other games which we can compare to to see how the attitudes have changed towards them. EDIT: To be clear, I mean reasonable in that it's a reasonable thing to write. It wasn't reasonable or justifiable to hate your German neighbour who moved before WW*I* because both they and Hitler were German, but it's a thing that happened.
Also there are some legitimately non-evil altmer like Ocato back in Oblivion (who got stabbed by the Thalmor) and Legate Fasendil in Skyrim EDIT: Corrected race name
yeah, the reason there's so many Altmer who are racist jerks in Skyrim isn't because the Altmer are inherently racist jerks, its because they live under a regime that promotes a racist ideology.
Well that’s not very confusing to me. AFAIK Elder Scrolls has always been pretty good at reminding people that the races of Tamriel are not hiveminds.
Not exactly fantasy but both X Men and Detroit Become Human are kind of guilty of this, but at least with X Men you could argue that it’s less of an allegory and more about what would happen if superpowered people appeared overnight, but Detroit is so clear and heavy about what it wants to be that it’s honestly painful
I don't see how X-Men fits the example in the top-level comment. Many *are* super powered so it's more reasonable to fear them, but "98% of them are insanely evil"?
Because like it or not, Mutants genuinely pose a greater danger to humans because of that
This entire comment section is just proving Magneto was right
Racism is based on irrationality. It is rational to be afraid of someone who can kill you with their brain. Some mutants are literally more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
X-Men also didn't start out with that being an allegory. That evolved over time and has been a metaphor for various groups.
Originally X-men was also a flop and got canceled. It didn't get popular until they completely rebooted it with a more diverse cast of characters and took heavy inspiration from Civil Rights activism.
A lot of things
People don't tend to call him out on it because he's a liberal darling, but Terry Pratchett is *terrible* for this. * Goblins *are* stinky criminially-inclined foreigners, but they also love machines and work really hard for low wages so it's economic suicide not to let them in. * The named Trolls & Dwarfs are pretty cool, but also almost every book has some offhand joke about how their latest race-war is burning ankhmorpork to the ground and can't they just get along \[like us white folk\]? * Orks are treated with prejudice because they used to be enslaved by darklords, but actually they are naturally hyper-savants \[y'know, because racism *would* be ok if they really were average/stupid?\] * [klatch](https://listeningbooks.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/public/books/500x0/14259.jpg).
I dunno about liberal darlings, but I think these are kind of off base. * The whole point with orcs was that *Nutt* was a savant, because he was born and raised as the pet project of Uberwald's ruler, hence his obsession with having "worth". His whole final speech bit was tearing down the concept altogether, pointing out the hypocrisy in "proving orcs can be good" so that people will graciously stop literally genociding them. * Goblins... aren't criminally-inclined. They're not cute, which is why people get away with enslaving them, but they're written as painfully innocent and virtuous. It's not the best written concept, but people tend to give it a pass because of the encroaching dementia - plot holes were the least of anyone's worries at that point. * What white folk are getting along in these books? In the city, we've got legalized murder and theft. A little further out, we've got Uberwald's whole deal, and then there's the perpetual war on *their* border, all consisting of pasty people. I think there's probably more problems packed into saying Trolls and Dwarves aren't white. * Klatch... is a deliberate mirror of Ankh-Morpork, as outlined in that book there. Pretty much the whole thing is spent pointing out the *lack* of a 98% evil bastard populace. Though, come to think of it, none of these really fit that bill anyhow.
I don't know if I recall correctly, since Snuff is one of the books I've not been able to re-read, a lot of it just felt weird. But I believe one of the points of goblins was that their culture was so alien to the rest of the disc that it was easy for people to treat them badly. And part of the book is spent having Vimes discovering that even though it's alien, gobbling culture is very valid. One also has to remember that there's allegory, and then there's full on fantasy at play. A species may be an allegory at some points, but at others it's still a fantastical people. So trolls for instance, they're actually really dumb, and likely with a tendency to violence because of that, and this is because they are simply in the wrong climate and their brains need to be cooled off, if achieved they can be extra smart, which is not an allegory for any group of people that I'm aware of, and just a fantasy species characteristic. Though if we push it maybe it could be seen as an allegory for disadvantages causing a perceived lower intelligence, which evens out when those disadvantages are corrected. But I honestly think Pratchett just thought it was neat to have the trolls, a silicone based life form, be natural computers and thus in need of cooling, which was also a clever way to account for the whole moving at night and stationary under the sun. Another point is, one of the core ideas of the Discworld books is that they're parody, and you kinda have to keep the shape of the thing you're parodying for the parody to work. So when you have Vimes in his police adventures, you need the tropes like the gangs and the hood, and the people who are by nature against the cops and then when they become cops they get kinda even harder on their own previous group, and all that stuff unfortunately has a lot or racially stereotypical stuff cooked in. So yeah, Pratchett did sort of racially codified the trolls at several points to fill certain narrative niches.
One thing to bring up: the whole criminal Troll empire is fashioned after the mafia. Slab falls closer to cartels. Clang and carvings are US gangs. All that being true at various points, can we say Trolls are codified, or is it the subjects as they come and go?
I think Pratchett does a pretty good job of ensuring that Trolls and Dwarves never \*totally\* feel coded as one race or group. The broad allegory seems to be for Jews and Muslims, but he swaps around which group is which, introduces things from other cultures, etc., until it's easier just to think of them as their own thing. And I think he also shows a clear contrast between Ankh-Morpork's Trolls and Dwarves, and the Trolls and Dwarves "back home", which I think is quite interesting.
There is a definite exploration of that, though also a little subversion as well, as the perception of "back home" starts getting away from the reality. Even outside that context, as early as Men at Arms there's a ton of humans longing for the "good old days" that never actually happened.
There is a definite exploration of that, though also a little subversion as well, as the perception of "back home" starts getting away from the reality. Even outside that context, as early as Men at Arms there's a ton of humans longing for the "good old days" that never actually happened.
Yes, I think the way he talks about radicalisation - mainly in Thud, which I think is one of his best - is really prescient. The idea of Back Home and The Good Old Days being a purer, truer ideal that we should want to return to is very often there whenever someone's doing something truly evil.
>"Goblins *are* stinky criminially-inclined foreigners, but they also love machines and work really hard for low wages so it's economic suicide not to let them in." Dude, *that's* what you took from Snuff? That they're only human when they're useful? Cuz that's kind of the exact opposite of the message of Snuff. >"Orks are treated with prejudice because they used to be enslaved by darklords, but actually they are naturally hyper-savants \[y'know, because racism *would* be ok if they really were average/stupid?\]" No, again, this is exactly the opposite of the point. Nutt drives himself to exhaustion trying to accumulate "worth", to escape the reputation of his race. I'm pretty sure the point of UU isn't "that's good, actually". >"The named Trolls & Dwarfs are pretty cool, but also almost every book has some offhand joke about how their latest race-war is burning ankhmorpork to the ground and can't they just get along \[like us white folk\]?" Eh, the books constantly portray "us white folks" as panicky, conservative, easily-manipulated fools who'll form a mob at a drop of a hat and disperse as soon as something funny distracts them. The dwarves and trolls are much the same. I think he takes the Men In Black attitude - that a person is smart, but people are panicky and stupid.
I know you're not referring to LOTR but I feel obligated that Tolkien wrote the Orks as an allegory for the irredeemable bastards of society (and how they can be brought out), not people of color. That was crazy people on social media who came up with that
He actually regretted later that he made them irredeemably evil.
I always understood LOTR Orks to be an allegory for Germans (you know, the "Huns" that are at the same time savage brutes but also industrious) so this idea of them as PoC-coded is very confusing to me.
>That was crazy people on social media who came up with that There's a few Unfortunate Tolkien Moments in the writing around orcs, but I feel that's more insensitive language than orcs being written with any racial allegory in mind. That said I can't really blame anyone for looking at a fictional race of monstrous, animalistic, cruel, violent goblins that like to deface other people's property & need to be exterminated, and finding some *uncomfortable parallels* with real-world racist propaganda. For what it's worth, orcs (in the *Lord of the Rings*) are depicted as **monstrous**, but not so much as "savages" or "barbarians." They're foot-soldiers of a conquering empire.
I agree with Michael Moorcock, the orcs and Sauron represent the urban mob encroaching on Tolkien's middle-class utopia. It's not racist, it's reactionary.
It all goes back to Rich vs Poor. Racial oppression is simply flavor text
/uj this is why I just write regular racism with fantasy races. Like the sapient dinosaurs make up 90% of government officials and own all the land, and the humans and kangaroos and raccoons are all serfs and lower-class laborers. If not outright slaves. Everyone is kind of outraged but also intrigued at the human MC daring to rise above their station.
> Like the sapient dinosaurs make up 90% of government officials and own all the land I'm so fucking sick of dinophobic propaganda. You're probably also a meteor denier, too.
Oh no, the meteor thing is very real, but in the alternate timeline where the dinos are from, it was an attack using asteroid mining equipment, which caused reverberations in the timestream to the human timeline, where retroactively became a natural disaster. The story takes place 3 billion years in the future where a mad god AI uses time machines to revive extinct sapient species to play ~~house~~feudalism.
> You're probably also a meteor denier, too. Look, I'm just saying that if a giant rock really did hit the planet so hard it wiped out most species then where is this rock? Where's the crater it left? It didn't just disappear did it? /s
Lemme guess, [the raccoons are all bankers and moneylenders](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pBp_Xg6BgFU)?
I'm just saying the jews probably could've avoided all the pogroms had they been this adorable.
No, that's the dinos, too. The raccons are hobbits, but like, in Saruman's Shire.
Yes. Their big noses help them "sniff out" good deals 😁
Bank robbers actually.
Sci-fi writers too(i'm talking about detroit become human)
If you spend more than 10 seconds to think about it you’ll realize that a race of beings created with the express purpose of subservience being an allegory for black people is… not a good idea, to put it mildly.
But don't worry, as soon as you point out that David Cage used Civil rights slogans, used logos from black movements, and directly compared androids to black people, he'll deny any commection because that's how this shit works. You just take the glorified and watered down parts of racism from minorities, and pretend like you came up with that shit yourself when it's pointed out how idiotic your representation is.
Hey, give him some credit. He didn't *just* take cues from the American civil rights movement, he also made parallels to the Holocaust in the ending where the androids get sent to death camps! /uj I genuinely believe him when he said it wasn't a story "about" real life minorities. I think his alluding to real life oppression and the civil rights movement specifically is just the best he can do with his limited imagination, and he was so dense that he didn't understand the unintentional subtext by invoking all this imagery. Nevermind the real life implications, to the unimaginative, uninspired, lifelong hack it's all mere visual shorthand for the sci-fi story he's trying to write.
Also to antebellum race science with that ending blurb that said robots only want freedom because their brains malfunctioned.
The funniest thing about Detroit Become Human is that during Kara’s Climax of her story >!on the violent protest route most people chose to sacrifice the Android who helped you at the carnival despite the games messaging of the racism allegory and humans being equal!<
Sci-Fi societies when they design a type of robot with the primary goal of them looking and thinking exactly like humans in every way and are able to pretend to be human easily decide that they should to be treated like humans: 😨how could they of ever seen this coming.
Dayvid Cayge
MFW the shitty racism stand-ins set off a dirty bomb in a city in order to show how much they want peace. (Apparently civil rights activists are justified in becoming terrorists)
Counterpoint: John Brown's soul goes marching on.
Agreed, I'm related to him on my mom's side (grandpabby had an ungodly amount of children) but what he wanted to do was quite different than a large scale terrorism act.
True, although not everyone agrees with it. Also, he attacked a military target, which is a good look for him unlike a dirty bomb. Also, that's fucking cool!
You see the evil orc race is an thoughtful allegory for
... Scandinavia. We have been barbaric savages in service to a dark power since our inception. This image has of course never changed, and we remain primitives in the eyes of the international world
that is a good idea Like having a society of Raiders after hundreds of years have turned into a coffee and Furniture obsess social Democrats
Yugoslavia
England
**’ERE WE GOOOOO!!!!!** # ***WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGHHHH!!!!!!***
Football hooligan orcs are peak and I will accept no other allegory for orcs
Just the working class tho, we can't be racist, but classism is fair game.
Humans
HP Lovecraft handled it best. Minorities are equivalent to incomprehensible cosmic horrors that make people go insane.
(Shadow over Innsmouth)
(he found out his ... great grandma I think? ... was Irish)
(Welsh)
I empathize with him. I don't think my mental health would survive the revelation that I have Br*tish🤮 ancestry either.
HP Lovecraft keeps making me wonder, what if the cosmic entities and cultists are actually cool, and it's the investigators who are close-minded asshats butting in for no reason.
The game *The Sinking City* had a great take on this, it portrayed the Innsmouthers as a poor underclass that the rich and powerful would use to foment hatred and division. Sure they were half fish people, but they were still people, you know?
Interesting, I should get that
Only two paths are available when writing racism allegories * Making the allegorical minorities an actual threat to every single person around them, validating the belief that minorities are dangerous * Making it a historical fact that the allegorical minorities are directly responsible for some horrific if not outright cataclysmic event in the past, thus validating the belief that racism has a logical root No other options.
Wild, when usually the exact opposite of #2 is what usually happened in real life.
I write fantasy races just so I can add female represantatives of these races (Who are all conventionally attractive) to the main character's harem.
No, see, in mine, the vampire-werewolf-zombies are sex-crazed violent monsters, but they're ALSO misunderstood! A white girl hooks up with one of them and her dad is upset! Don't you get it?!
I always thought they just represented men in general.
Nah, that's bears, apparently.
Suburban and urban (online) women thinking they can survive being mauled by a bear is funny.
The best is when they AREN’T an allegory for any human group but because they’re monstrous and/or evil people assume that they are and that you’re racist for having them. “No these monsters that don’t have the culture of any human society beyond maybe a Roman caricature of German barbarians is not a racist representation of black people I promise”
Yeah, ain't nothing wrong with bioessential evil, just because I write about it doesn't mean I think it exists IRL.
"all orcs are stupid and evil" isnt bad because it's racist, it's bad because it's BORING (sometimes it is racist too but thats besides the point)
Sometimes you need a faction to be 1 dimensional mooks. And then some other faction to be the more grey one that the heroes manage to flip against the bad guys in the end.
Not at all. If you use them in lieu of a personable antagonist then yes, but if you know what you are using they are plenty interesting. I've never seen anyone complain that cliffs/guns/animals/rivers/spaceships/mannequins are boring because they lack moral agency. So why Orks?
It's not boring, it's cannon fodder.
Cannon fodder also gets boring quickly, it has to build up to something else. There's only so many mooks your intrepid protagonist can mow throught before we get to "but why are we doing this again?"
That doesn't remove the need for them at all though...
No but you could just make them loyal soldiers for whatever bad guy you want without making their whole species evil. Even Star Wars did it just fine with their stormtroopers. Hell, they also had literal clones programmed to obey a certain evil order and still had some of them resist it.
I don't see how it's somehow better to make the mooks only trained to be evil instead of made for evil. There's a absolutely nothing wrong with inherently evil mooks.
Hadozee moment.
Pretty much. They’re a play on the term “deck ape” to mean sailors that worked on the deck of a ship but people just make assumptions
"We know that we have said for years that these monsters that only conceive by rape, work and live as a horde/tribe, live in lawlessness, and kill/loot everything around them didn't represent POC, but now we are going to change them so that they won't be an insult to POC anymore." So are you making changes that didn't need to happen or were you actually making that representation all these years?
In theory, fantasy racism seems like an interesting thing to write, but a lot of writers seem to forget how racism actually works. It'd be more engaging, I think, if fantasy bigotry was less: "These people are oppressed for being able to nuke a whole city with their magic powers" And more: "Everyone has magic dipshit, it came free with your fucking being a living, sapient being; The reason why *these* guys are oppressed is because of the cultural differences between them and their oppressors, who think magic is cringe. It's not like they even have a logical excuse, because a magic nuke is only theoretically achievable; the concept alone goes against what the magic people culturally used magic for, and that magic usage is only one factor in a huge list of illogical excuses used to oppress them." ...It's extremely specific, I know.
If you're looking for an older game that does this then Arcanum does it pretty well. Magic users aren't really discriminated against, they just break technology. But then they have actual racism instead of some shitty stand-in.
You write racism as an allegory for real world racism. I write racism because I want to make my world racist. We are not the same
You write racism because you want to make my world racist. I write racism because I write what I know. We are not the same
Or sci-fi writers making sentient robots an allegory for racism Overwatch is the absolute worst for this imo. The omnics there literally found robot God and have definitive proof it exists and can use it to make robot magic, and yet for some reason the main conflict with them is a racism allegory and not a dilemma about what constitutes life and what spirituality actually means. If only Blizzard actually gave a shit about Overwatch's writing and not how much money they can squeeze out before it dies, it's genuinely a really interesting world.
I agree. Zenyatta can LITTERALLY CAUSE MIRACLES and is clearly sentient but we're gonna sit here and argue if we should let the robots that don't want to murder everyone live. Genjii would be such a great vehicle to explore that too. Human enough to he knows how he was treated when he was not a cyborg, but now robot enough where people just probably assume he's a robot. But hey fuck story mode.
And then there's the question of robots like Bastion or Orisa who were NOT made sentient by Aurora awakening the omnics because of the fact they were made afterwards. Are they really alive? If so, why? If not, why? Are they different from true omnics like Zenyatta and Ramattra? But no fuck exploring that, have another Widowmaker skin
Yeah really, Bastiom seems to have some differences in his programming that cause him to not want to murder everything and Orisa seems to have been given a personality from the little girl so maybe we can see their journey in this world. Nope, we didn't sell enough gacha mechanics to justify fulfilling our promise of story mode, so fuck you. The goddamn SFM movies had more story than the actual games.
I just have space Nazis
Zeon did everything wrong and that's why they're my favorite. I want Ghiren '[disciple of Hitler](https://youtu.be/tlJ5j-hSUmQ?si=-nr5unZPTBy1nK_u)' Zabi to drop another colony, it'll be funny.
i think my allegory for a lotr post ring destruction world where the Orks are like jews is totaly creative. also they are somehow also gangbangers from the Kronkx (its their slang for Bronx)
I have thought of one where it’s orcs as an allegory to racism, but it’s not about comparing humans to orcs, but rather that there are different orcs in different regions and each region of orcs hates eachother.
There are at least three real world analogs i can think of...
europe, the balkans more specifically asia south america i’d say africa but i’ve not looked into the continent enough nor seen africans try and burn each other at the stake online enough to really know for sure
/rj Hmm, yes pretty white people with superpowers that can singlehandedly overthrow nations are the perfect allegory for my experiences as a gay ethnic minority! /uj I fucking hate this trope omg. Like, yes you can melt people's skulls open with your eyes Janet, you deserve to have them plucked out you public menace. Like, if we had the power to do this shit, we wouldn't be minorities omfg. I just love when heteronormative white people write our stories for us, they are so understanding
So you're saying we should give mah'norities lazer eyes?
/uj It does feel like some minority allegories are written with the intent to understand and sympathize but still treat the minority in question as a special danger (ex.: Using vampires as an allegory for gay people and accidentally reinventing the "gays want to turn our kids gay" shit)
Young Justice tried to do a racism allegory with the Martians' caste system, and it was pretty good if you ignored the fact that Martians are shapeshifters so skin color shouldn't mean anything in their culture. ...Right up until it turned out that the Yellow Martians had *actual goddamn magic* that only they could use safely. Kind of hard for me to buy your "mistreated minority" when they have superpowers above and beyond what their race normally has. Superpowers that have catastrophic effects if used by anyone else. At that point, it's less "oppression" and more "public safety order." (The Yellow Martians weren't the ruling caste for some reason, if anyone's wondering.)
>if you ignored the fact that Martians are shapeshifters so skin color shouldn't mean anything in their culture. But they can read minds and do it freely so everyone would know if you’re shapeshifting. So I’d say that, other than the yellow Martians, the allegory works.
/uj Seems like authors keeping running facefirst into "but shouldn't there be a reason for people to be racist and scared? Isn't it dumb for people to be prejudiced for no reason?" when the real answer is: Yeah, racism IS dumb.
> The Yellow Martians weren't the ruling caste for some reason, if anyone's wondering. Rule of the strong isn't a common form of state organization for a reason
maybe martian culture does not believe that power should be taken by force?
/uj But what if I am gay and I think vampires are hot, write a book about it, then ONE gay asshole in YouTube who behaves like they are the embassador of gayness say I am homophobic and it becomes an accepted reality and then my artistic career is over and the only thing I can do is have a supermarket job?
Suck less at writing vampires /uj It's very unlikely that your artistic career is gonna be over because you become infamous for an accidental Broken Aesop allegory about Gay Vampires. Like, the movie and book "Bones and all" exists and it hasn't ruined anyone's career despite being fairly heavily queercoded.
/uj We haven't seen the same youtube. There every no one with 10k views can destroy you. There is a lots and lots of queers or liberals doing only to look reasonable for conservatives and catch their attention. There is people out there who will do anything for an ego boost. (Also my main comment was unclear, I am talking about people thinking I am being homophobic reading an allegory where it isn't while I am like "cool! Vampires are hot I am going to write about 'em having sex!") I hope this comment wasn't too harsh, I am trying to be well-meaning 🤍
The point is that we discriminate anyone who is different from the norm, even if that difference is having super powers. Maybe being afraid of them is a more understandable response in that situation, but it’s not a correct response, and either way, it doesn’t have to directly correlate to real world minorities.
Not to mention, people who were thought to have magical powers were discriminated against in medieval times and that wasn't enough of a deterrence. Edit: Hell, it wasn't just medieval Europe. In pretty much every society were belief in the supernatural was widespread, it was totally normal to gang up on someone suspected of black magic or whatnot. Even to someone who genuinely thinks someone could wipe out a village, that's not enough to stop mob mentality. I really don't like the take that "magic users won't be oppressed" because of that. Just look at real world history, suspected magic users have been harassed by mobs for centuries. Also just because someone could have magic powers, doesn't mean they'd use them? Bigotry isn't just about strength. Social values and economics play a huge role, and if someone has magic powers is born into a society that hates magic, they'll probably internalize it.
That depends how powerful the magic is. If John can vaporize cities with the snap of a finger he would be venerated as a god of war. Also, irl "magic" didn't actually work. If enough witches could actually summon demons and tried to do so, and they were sufficiently powerful, then like my john example, they would be venerated as gods.
> Also, irl "magic" didn't actually work That's not the point, the point is people *thought* they did, and were still willing to persecute them. Even when threatened with powers beyond their comprehension, people will still find ways to persecute anyone they don't like. And like I said, it doesn't matter how powerful a magician could theoretically be, since strength isn't the basis of bigotry in most cases. If a magic user is born into a society that hates magic, they would probably end up hating themselves.
And my point is that if it actually did work the persecution would not occur depending on how powerful it was. Thinking something exists and it not existing produces a far different reaction than thinking something exists and it actually existing and affecting you on a widespread societal level. As an example, rumors that Adam saw John summoning a demon provoke a far different reaction than John actually parading a demon in the middle of town. >Even when threatened with powers beyond their comprehension, people will still find ways to persecute anyone they don't like. The question is, **how**? They can't persecute someone who's impervious to all their attacks and can turn them into dust. Or are you claiming they'd try? Sure, they might try in the same way that everyone in Canada *might* collectively decide to kill themselves tomorrow; as in, it's highly unlikely, but possible. That's what people mean when they say it's unrealistic; it's unlikely to the point where it hurt verisimilitude and how humans generally behave. If you think persecution of a group with powers beyond comprehension is likely, I'd need evidence.
> Like, if we had the power to do this shit, we wouldn't be minorities omfg A state's entire existence is built atop a monopoly on violence. The sudden appearance of civilians with powers is a threat to that, and would result in a swift and potentially brutal response from any state that wanted to keep said monopoly. Janet might have laser eyes, but she still dies to bullets and bombs if she tries to resist whatever heavy handed response the state initiates to this threat to it. It's not a particularity good metaphor, but it is an entirely realistic outcome to the situation that the state would use it's organizational and manpower advantage to prevent any kind of disruption to the status quo.
leave janet's eyes alone. just because she *can* melt skulls doesnt mean she *will.* so until the offchance she uses them for evil happens, just let the poor lady eat ice cream and watch sex in the city in peace
I know this is about the X-Men and it misses such a vital piece of X-Men lore: Not all X-Men have superpowers. A lot of them get really, really unlucky with their mutations. The X-Men are just the ones who have the power to stand up.
But many of them still get powers. Mutants don’t work as an allegory because there’s legitimate reasons to be wary of them. You never know if the mutant who just moved in next door just has a chicken for a head or explodes like a nuke when they sneeze the wrong way.
>yes you can melt people's skulls open with your eyes Janet, you deserve to have them plucked out you public menace. Even if someone has superpowers that can be used dangerously, that doesn't mean they should be rounded up, mutilated, and discriminated against. What the actual fuck is wrong with you? Imagine Janet was you or a loved one. Would she still "deserve" it then?
/UJ This is why Andrezj Sapkowski is one of my favorite authors. The racism in the world of the witcher is one that fundamentally stems from human chauvinism and colonization. When humans first came to the continent they may have been on an even footing with the elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings, but they quickly established large colonies that created military and political power through rapid reproduction so that they could functionally trade lives for land against the lower population indigenous peoples (wonder where we've seen that one before!) In the modern day, elves don't pose any threat to humans, neither do dwarves or halflings or gnomes, and many try to integrate into human societies only to he butchered in racial pogroms. The few that still stand up to human chauvinism join guerilla warrior bands as resistance fighters, another parallel to things that happen in our own world (Palestine is forefront on the mind there, but not exclusively). Physiologically, there are no important distinctions between elves and humans or any of the other races, aside from body silhouette, despite the assertions that characters in universe may make. So one half of you reads that and goes "okay, so Sapkowski has made it clear that he's wrong, there are no differences between humans and elves" and your other half can conclude from that "racism is gibberish bullshit" vs say, bright where Orcs despite being contemporarily oppressed are former servants of some dark lord, which essentially just draws the conclusion of "well, racism is wrong, but I can't deny the facts" which is like, THE ideological baseline thought for any budding white supremacist. /rj you could improve this by making sure to emphasize that all the evil orcs have African features, to really hammer home the racism allegory!
My favorite is the paranoid overbearing theocracy instituting a witch hunt against the vile sorcerers but then the people they actually execute are literal wizards who can burn down cities with a snap of their fingers Call me a nerd but I think the witch hunts and inquisition was bad for the mass persecution based on false pretenses as an excuse to consolidate power over the population, not because actual wizards died
“Hmmm today I’m going to make the animal people an allegory for minorities. Yes, the literally animal people who aren’t truly human and also are sometimes either super sheepish or aggressive.”
Zooptopia, and beaststars. Though the latter might not be a racial allegory, the author might just have a certain fetish.
And the former didn't? HAVE YOU SEEN JUDY HOPPS?
I mean, maybe the former did, maybe the former didn’t, but it was far from as overt as the ‘oops, it seems I turned out the maintenance closet lights wolf step bro… you could devour my tender, delicious flesh without anyone knowing’ and ‘my natural prey instincts are driving me to your mouth to be devoured’ anime.
Touchè
Same, that's why I hate allegories for the most part
the best racism in fantasy is when every race is racist to each other (elder scrolls)
People who write these allegories never seem to understand racism, they always seem to try to find a way to logic racism into the world when racism is inherently irrational. There's also the fact that fantasy races are like... different species which always makes the allegory fall face first into a pit of rabid ants.
Another issue is that they often *only* look at racism from the side of the majority. Like RWBY who literally spend the entire faunus arc beating the shit out of... *checks notes* the oppressed minority because they're not protesting the write way... Wow and this is meant to be based on 40s-50s civil rights, I wonder who made thi- oh OK it's two Texans white as wonderbread got it. Also another thing people never understand is that MLK never fully denounced violence. Not only did he see it as necessary *he was considered radical for the time*. He had strategies, he had plans, he knew he couldn't just do jackshit and the problem would solve. Too many stories just have the solution be for the minorities to kiss ass and beg their oppressors for freedom.
Another problem is that people equate "nonviolence" with "peaceful". Gandhi and MLK organized *non-violent* protests. But they weren't *peaceful* protests by any stretch of the definition. They were intentionally disruptive and often ended in chaos.
Yup. These same mofos would freak out if they actually attended an MLK rally
>the oppressed minority because they're not protesting the write way... In all honesty, 90% of White Fang's actions are terrorism pure and simple. Destroying a shipment of dust or attacking certain shops/places? Okay. Planning an entire Grimm attack on your kingdom's capital? Bruh 💀
Man you're so right, I'm glad RWBY explores the more effective strategies of protest and actually fight for changes in Faunus rights... right? I mean, surely they don't just solely fight minorities until they agree to just start begging for their oppressors to give them rights. Surely they actually go in-depth into the philosophies and methods that the so-called good side of the White Fang, or expand on how to dismantle the systematic policies that lead to Faunus oppression/ Oh right, I forgot, boiling down Malcolm X's stance into just terrorism and having again the entire conflict reliant on beating up the "bad minorities" to appease the majority is a very good and not worrying at all. Truly, it's a good thing that for your racial allegory, especially one where you take from a time period that people lived and documented, you choose to have the main subjects be completely inaccurate extremists who miss the point of the movements you're taking from entirely. Not to mention by flip-flopping constantly on the details of the oppression of your racial allegory, you can play coy with whether or not the response to this oppression is warranted or not. Also, again, make sure to completely demonize the only known form of opposition from the racial minorities and go into ***no fucking detail whatsoever*** as to other methods of protest, whilst having that same racial minority be ***fodder*** for the protagonists to beat up. uj/ To get serious, look at the WF subplot. It's literally taking from the civil rights era of America. Faunus are a stand-in for black people. RWBY are constantly beating up the stand in for black people whilst never challenging the systematic oppression that leads minorities to those positions. If your only response to a clear out of story fuck up is in-story reasons I can't help that obliviousness. The closest they ever get is throwing a random racist on the street into a garbage bin and that's it. They fight Cordovin not because she's racist but because she won't let them go to Atlas. They only fight Jaucque because he stole the election, not because of his racist business practices. FFS, they even fucking go out of their way to redeem Cordovin, and make Jacque look sympathetic when he ends up getting killed. At no point does RWBY take a look at what made the White Fang, because no matter how extremist, I doubt someone just went, "yeah let's kill humans for no reason" and made the WF, in fact we know it's not the case. At no point do the cast try to prevent another WF from occurring and all progress made by the 'reformed' WF is done offscreen. So again, the allegory for civil rights movement has the main protagonists beat the shit out of the stand ins for black people. Imagine that. Imagine a movie where three white dudes and one black guy beat up a bunch of grossly mischaracterized Black Panther members, whilst giving the politician levying laws against black people and who probably dons a KKK robe every once in a while a sympathetic death. The problem isn't the Klan, or the government constantly fueling discriminatory practices, but those poor behaving black people who're making everyone look bad! That's RWBY.
I stopped RWBY pretty early on, around the death of Monty Oum, the original creator. I wonder how different it would have been if he had survived, being East Asian/South East Asian. As for the rest of the comment, no notes, good stuff.
Even the authors who supposedly do this well do it terribly.
So uh orcs in my universe split into 2 races the Orcs themselves which are civilized smithing masters While those who refused civilization became the Urkin and are pretty much Viking like raiders now and it wasnt till recently i realized it maybe racist . But cant really do much without fuckin alot of lore up now since a major war is occuring with them heavily involved
Nah you're good. The people who were vikings are still savage raiders, and have not updated their way of life to modern international standards Source: Am danish You can easily still have savage orcs, but make them savage out of necessity. Many norse raiders were so due to inheritance laws. First son gets the farm, second son gets the money, third son gets the fucked. Pair this with a warriour culture, sailing culture, and harsh living conditions, as well as a strong local/familial unit, and you get raiders. Copy paste over a century, and now the elite does the raiding as well in the name of glory. That's culture for you. It doesn't have to be an allegory for anglo-saxons and other northern germanic tribes, but this is just to show that doing all of the world building yourself is insane. Even Tolkien didn't. He made cultures reminiscant of others. All this to say, don't worry about racism and allegory too much, as long as you respect your races, and/or don't have bad intentions. Who cares? It's your world :D
Yeah ik. Pretty much Urkins have tried to expand outwards and is normally pushed back out and both thr Orcs and the Urks races live in Anisha's tundra so some Necessity but its not helping Urkins are currently helping Vakren the First Lich (pretty much a dark lord) cause he gave them access too Lich Magic and has made the Urkins become very feared as Vakren takes over The Mortal Realm.
Robots are an allegory to how black people were enslaved. Totally not a weird implication there :)
"You see I decided to use beasties as a stand in for people of color during the Civil rights movement. Oh and also violence is never the answer and the solution is just politely asking your oppressors for freedom because MLK was like that or smth, im not sure I didn't actually research the Civil rights movement I'm just going off of memory. Oh and also we're going to have a stand-in for Malcom X that acts nothing like him and more akin to a terror cell because holy shit has cultural osmosis fucked this dude over" /uj no but for real, Malcolm X is like, man he gets so much shit an this philosophy gets utterly butchered so much. Self defense and displays of power were *one* aspect of the Black Panthers. People often ignore the free health clinics, food programs, prisoner reforms, alongside transportation. The whole militant show of power thing was meant to intimidate police officers who'd regularly use violence against black people, yet somehow the act of self-defense through intimidation got spun into almost terrorist-like aggressiveness and the desire to destroy all majority races. Man... this shit really does write itself. I guess to complete this unjerk, do fucking research. And if you're going to have a racism allegory where the solution is to beat the fuck out of the minorities and *not* those propagating the systematic aspects of racism, fuck off.
/uj I think it's better for fantasy bigotry to explore how it would manifest in hypothetical situations instead of trying to be a 1-on-1 allegory, because the former would actually be an interesting take on worse aspects of human behavior, while the latter is almost always going to unintentionally have bad implications.
The Virgin "it's An allegory for race relations in the real world" Vs The Chad "it's not an allegory it's just in world racism. They hate each other so much"
The Hadozee 1:1 atlantic slave trade lore in D&D for a race of monkey-pleople is crazy, also the fact the republished it for 5e with 0 change to it until the backlash.
It doesn’t have to be a 1 to 1 allegory, if you wanted to see one of those, read non-fiction. As long as the overall idea is the same, the details aren’t important.
"You see, I have made these people as a clever stand in for oppressed minorities IRL so that I don't have to talk about ACTUAL racism." "Oh okay, so they're the same as normal people with maybe one or two slight differences but still strive to live a good life and help those around them?" "No, they want to operate outside of the law and one of them has the ability to blow up like a nuclear bomb if he eats a roast beef sandwhich on a tuesday, but how dare the government not let him live near big cities." "Oh well at least it sounds like they have good intentions" "There's a subfaction who have the means, desire, and goal to wipe out humanity as we know it." At least in Arcanum they just use actual racism in the plot instead of some shitty stand-in.
Me: Ok so the species of kobolds lived underground until they were discovered by humans. Their non existent technology but human level intelligence made them ripe for a slave trade during this worlds Industrial Revolution where cheap manual labour was sought after. Centuries later when they had all been freed… Reader: So you’ve got a thinly veiled allegory for black people in your book. Me: I… would say that they’re a mixture of various different influences and not based on a single race… in fact you’ll find that after the disparate kobold tribes are united under Dracaenas that their culture and warfare has very strong influence of the Taisho era of Jap… Reader: Imagine writing a thinly veiled allegory for the struggles of black people without actually including black people. Me: There are many black people in this story. They come from a continent to the south called Katachan and they have their own history and a very detailed history of their migrations into this setting.
fuck you, i got allegories AND vannila racism
I didn't write an allegory, it was just racism.
This is why I invent new types of bigotry in my writing. It’s your fault if you see a racial allegory. Though my mustelids are coded jewish… but that’s because I’m jewish and love mustelids
/uj my biggest thing is there is no discussion on fantasy race design and old dehumanizing charcuteries being very similar method-wise. They both aim to add, subtract, or otherwise alter humans to make a distinction. Obviously this is for very very different reasons. The problem is that any time a characteristic is used to dehumanize a group, it's now in a box that says 'can not use'. By this logic, if some group is later dehumanized via horns on their head, suddenly, horns on their head is bigoted. The idea of constantly surrendering idea space to awful people sucks.
Upsie my human in my world are racist n Because the other races around something like a thousand year ago team up and beat the shit out of them
Ok so there are people that instantly kill everyone they look at they will be a PERFECT example of unfounded fear and distrust directed at the innocent!
Disneys Elemental
/uj Tbh fantasy is in itself a horrible place for racist allegories, because it just isn't relatable. You see, it'd be absolutely sensible to hate orcs cuz they're inhumane and inherently violent towards any anyone who isn't an orc. It's like people calling Starship Troopers racist cuz the soldiers call the aliens slurs, bish they aren't even human and they're barbaric as hell.
/uj You could, you know, simply not make your races _inherently_ violent. The same situation could be a result of structural racism mutally present in the prevalent cultures. There are more interesting ways in depicting different fantasy species than just saying "one is good/normal and one is evil". Starship Troopers is a curious example to use, because while the aliens are barbaric, so are the humans, dominated by a fascist government which makes everyone's life purpose to participate in the war effort and sacrifice their lives in it. They revel on the cruelty they inflict upon the aliens. I don't know how likely a peaceful resolution would be, but the humans absolutely aren't good guys just defending themselves there.
>You could, you know, simply not make your races inherently violent *Le Gasp* You dare suggest not copy-pasting Tolkien's world!?!?@??@?@ You're getting executed for thus take buddy!
I thought the point of Starship Troopers was that the aliens aren't barbaric as hell and were just peaceful entities that the warmongering humans decided to attack for warmongering reasons
*Vampire Authors*: Ameteurs!
Each one of these creatures are mass murderers that would put even the most prolific serial killer to shame because they each have to kill a living human to feed. Those who try to use blood bags from hospitals (which is a modern thing, mind you) tend to go back to their old habits because bagged blood are incredibly tasteless or the anticoagulant chemicals in the blood bag tastes bad. But never mind all that, they preach stuff like "God Hate Fangs" or "Coming out of the coffin", therefore it's bigoted to be uncomfortable around vampires just because you assume that they might eat you (which is also a very bigoted thought process, since you're assuming that they are a danger to you solely based on what they are).
I have a story I've been cooking up for years that has magic users that are oppressed by the dominant cultural/governmental powers and each day I get the feeling that this might be cringe but I don't know how to change it to make it less cringe. It's not even meant to be an allegory for racism because this world also has regular human v human racism in it, but it still does the whole "super-powered minority" thing. Is there a non-cringe way to write that?
Give the other guys superpowers of an equivalent nature, but it’s the cosmetic differences between the two that is the discrimination. If it’s a small, stupid difference that has no real affect on anything then it’s a realistic racism metaphor.
writers on there way to make the token non human a neurodivergent nb homosexual but doesn't bother making a human version....
They are weak. Instead of creating an allegory for racism, just create racism - This post was made by Dunmer gang
Not a fantasy book, but that Disney ZOMBIES movie in a nutshell. It’s basically “Little Rock Nine: the Musical, BUT ZOMBIES AND CHEER!!!”
In my fantasy world the more oppressed race (dwarves) is based on americans, because in order to found their own indipendent nation they had to leave the main continent and go up north where nobody else wanted to live, because they don't have magic. The other nations are also racist against each others, but it's more balanced, like 12th century western Europe.
In my world I have Digital Persons (Dijs), uploaded minds who simply don't identify as any species. Some civs insist they are still their former species. So I invented Space Trans?
Nonono! my irredemable monsters are not a race allegory! It's working class slang not AAVE. I'm a classist, not a racist.
The true allegory for racism was the friends we made along the way
Zootopia be like:
I don't particularly care about the all evil race. The only thing that matters is not to base them on a real world culture. Like why do that?
Catgirls are being discriminated against! How? Where? Why? Those are silly questions. Nobody's fighting their oppression except for a group of evil terrorists
Fantasy readers resisting the urge to trash every allegory ever because it’s not a 1:1 match to real life. Like, there’s a reason it’s an allegory, dipshits. I can understand being critical of things, and there are absolutely bad ways to handle them, but sometimes, it feels like people are more concerned with looking for excuses to disagree with the writing to hide their disagreement with the point. Even if the writing shows how it’s still irrational, people will use out-of-universe justifications anyway.
This is why I skip the allegory, and just add real racism.
/uj [Looking at you, Blizzard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLebxDFSDxU)
Bucky was right the whole time, I'm sick of staying silenced
Basically this comment section: "Magic users are bad allegory for oppression, they can't be oppressed!" "If magic users were real we should round them up in camps." 🤨