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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23863 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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On some more-progressive corners of the internet (I saw kerfuffles in threads on RPG.net and SomethingAwful) this made (a minority of) people upset for being a racist idea. Racist against what group, exactly? Well, it wasn't that: it was just that the idea of irreconcilable differences existing between groups that could (apparently) communicate with each other was too dangerous to be entertained at all.

I'm reminded of the thread spawned by this Tumblr post, which begins:

Fantasy races are an uncomfortable concept, because they present a world that literally works the way racists think that it works. The attempts to mitigate this problem often fail to address the core concern, merely making the idea more palatable.

It also addresses sci-fi — specifically Mass Effect — as also problematic for having different alien races be, well, different:

This is something that puts me on edge in Mass Effect, otherwise one of my favorite games. True, the game ultimately lands on condemning the genophage, and it’s not subtle about that. I mean just look at the name… But it’s still considered debatable, morally grey, and Mordin Solus remains one of the most charming and enduring heroes of the series. The setting has bent over backwards to make every racist stereotype and talking point as legitimate as possible. In this setting, it is objectively true, scientifically proven that it is in the DNA of Krogans to naturally be violent, warmongering killing machines whose explosively rapid breeding poses an existential threat to the galaxy. That in turn is meant to make us think that maybe forced sterilization is something worth considering. It’s hard to ignore the parallels to real life racist propaganda. I don’t think it’s malicious, just ungrounded and thoughtless; the result of creators to whom these ideals are abstract thought experiments, rather than reflections of real history.

In short, treating differences between thinking beings as anything other than purely cultural is Problematic.

I don’t know how else you’d handle magic creatures or aliens. They’re not the same species. Orcs are specifically not humans, and neither are elves. Klingons aren’t humans. And as such saying that an Orc or a Klingon doesn’t act like a Southern California PMC half wit isn’t quite the same as being a racist.

The things that make me uncomfortable in those settings is less that Orcs act differently than humans, it’s that all orcs have the exact same culture and belief system and nobody rejects it or questions it. Humans are certainly one species, but we are different and have different opinions and cultures and religions. Or maybe I just wonder what a hippy orc would be like.

Per your second paragraph, on the sci-fi end, this is why I think DS9 was one of the best Star Trek series — the stationary setting, longer story arcs, and (particularly in later seasons) less reliance on Negative Space Wedgie or Strange New Life of the Week stories (though there's still quite a bit) allowed it to get further away from the "planet of hats." We get Bajoran political and religious disputes, Ferengi feminists, Cardassian dissidents of various stripes, and even a Klingon restauranteur who played a concertina-like instrument as he serenaded his customers. And as for D&D specifically, this isn't nearly the issue that some critics make it out to be, as Samueldays touches on in his reply to that Tumblr post.

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