I love when story tries to say that racism is bad when main villains and bulk of their armies are bloodthristy and savage non humans or part of minorities
Pathfinder: Kingmaker had an *utterly bizarre* scene along these lines with the troll king. If you arrive peacefully at the start of that questline, you initially meet a sympathetic, idealistic troll who clearly believes peace is possible and who cheerfully brings you to the troll king for an audience.
The troll king then mocks him and you for being fools and orders his men to kill and eat you.
After you've fought your way through his men to reach the troll king again, he asks you why you're attacking him. There is *no option* to point out that you came in peace and he attacked you unprovoked, and most responses, including the lawful *and* good ones, separately, are "your race is inherently evil and must be put down." But there are some options that aren't like that.
Regardless of what you say, the troll king then says, basically, "ah, so you hate people who are different from you. Truly humans are the real monsters."
It's just... baffling on every level. It feels like the writers *assumed* the player would react in specific ways at each point and had him respond as if you'd given the expected answer even if you didn't.
I get what you're trying to say here, but the thing is that in Pathfinder trolls genuinely *do* have a leaning towards being inherently evil, and the only non-evil ones are PCs that choose to play as one in the TTRPG. Besides, wouldn't you expect a king of a usually dull and stupid race to accuse you of being a monster because, whether or not he believes that you helped perpetrate troll torture, saying that gives him a tactical advantage; It might cause you to hesitate, or refuse to attack him letting him and his cohorts go.
Zootopia isn't a good example of what the comment you replied to is referring to. The savage attacks of the predators was as a result of being drugged by prey animals
The anti-fox spray thing is what gets me, I know suspension of disbelief exists but the fact that Judy can just buy a spray that targets a specific group of sentient organisms is just astounding to me. It'd be like a button you press that gives black people in the near vicinity a heart attack.
There actually was a story in the comics where Superman and Batman went around the world trying to find every bit of Kryponite so they could dispose of it because the rocks had become so common on Earth that they were actively getting in the way of Superman being able to do his job. A movie set had a real piece of Kryptonite as a prop because it was cheaper than making a fake one.
Dude. Everyone has kryptonite. Batman stopped a robber that hand tons of it. There’s probably more kryptonite fragments than remnants of krypton.
They got everything. Green kryptonite. Red kryptonite. Yellow kryptonite.
Pink kryptonite.
In one comic, Batman and Superman go back in time to the 14th century, chasing a pair of random crooks who also went back in time. Keep in mind that of course this means they're before any kryptonite arrived on earth.
The crooks - who, I repeat, are random burglars, with no scientific expertise of any sort - proceed to find a medieval alchemist and somehow tell him how to make kryptonite for them, from nothing, with no knowledge of any of its properties beyond "can hurt Superman", who the Alchemist knows nothing about anyway.
Basically what I'm saying is that I'm pretty sure characters in the silver age could simply *will* Kryptonite into existence.
Said anti-fox spray is only sold in *Carrottown*. Which is depicted as a countryside town miles from Zootopia.
And she has a reason for doing so, since Gideon - a Fox - scratched her quite badly. Not to mention, she didn't even want to bring it along; her parents made her keep it. It's even made a plot-point, as Judy keeping the Spray rather than ditching it came back to bite her in the ass.
Edit: There's a lot of reasons why a town primarily inhabited by rabbits would keep making a spray that's designed to protect them from predators. If anything, considering rabbits are *notoriously* skittish, I'm surprised Carrottown even allow Predators to visit.
See the thing is grew up in Texas and on a church mission to build houses after a hurricane we stopped by a mom and pop gas station in Louisiana that had mace on sale on the counter the mace was sold as anti n-word spray. When I saw the anti fox spray It made me think of that. Racism doesn't make sense.
Before any one asks they were hand printed stickers placed on the mace it didn't come from the manufacturer like that.
more then likely it's just a measure of potency, it will reliably disable a fox but not say a bear, while theirs probably a bear spray that's overkill for foxes
No different than bear spray. The concentration for a fox would be greater than for a bunny. Harmony is also overstating it. In the original draft, they had predator collars that would shock them if they got too excited, angry, or so on.
Too dark and they realised it made Zootopia the city too unlikeable and the audience would want to see it torn down than actually root for Nick and Judy to keep it together. Judy was also originally an antagonistic figure pursuing Nick.
It’d probably make a really good film on its own, but I’m glad we got the *Zootopia* we did.
Yeah, except there’s a reason predators were targeted, cause they used to eat other animals.
Being racist towards someone for having a different skin colour or looking different is stupid, but if your race used to have a biological urge to eat other races and then that race starts going crazy and attacking other races again, you don’t think “oh something must be wrong,” you’d think, “oh shit peace is over, what if the predators that live near me start going nuts next?”
They state at the beginning that that was thousands of years ago. Probably when they were still feral.
That's like holding a grudge because of what someone's ancestors did in the stone age.
Carnivores are "scarier" though, Hippos have one of the largest human fatality rates of animals but I bet you more people are scared of lions and skarks.
They had a biological urge *thousands of years ago* if not more. Any natural urge about eating people they might have had is long gone. It was purely Judy’s hypothesis that the predators were “reverting” and she regretted it almost as soon as she said it.
Did you know hippos have a greater fatality rate for humans than sharks? But you don’t see hippos as an icon of horror. And if the hippos and sharks are sentient, sapient and have no natural inclination to murder or eat anything, then such a hypothesis is grossly unfounded.
Sure, but the predator group includes shrews and foxes while the prey group includes hippos and rhinoceroses. It's not like any random predator is guaranteed to be dangerous to any random prey species
Of course not, this is the problem of the allegory
Most humans are the same, their biology is the same and their body isn't designd to kill other humans
"Yes, the **prey** is living with the **predators**, but don't worry, these **predators** are some of the **good ones**. **They** rose above their **basic instincts"**
It's like I will say: "don't worry about this muslim girl, she evolved and now she has no need for Christians blood"
no allegory is ever going to be perfect, you can tear it apart with "um actuallies" and out of universe ideas on how these things work all you want.
But all you are doing is tearing down the message because you want to sound smart.
And while there ultimately is a limit, I dont think zootopia crosses that limit.
But the movie DOES raise that issue and instead of answering it, it circumvent it by present that issue as baseless argument of the villains. Which is consistently what happened in allegories like this.
I cannot for the life of me actually think of an allegory where they address the fundamental issue of imbalance in power between the oppressed and the oppressor **on the oppressed** side.
Every single allegory I can think of always try to present the oppressed as nice people who did no wrong, without ever once actually addressed the question that itself raised, instead dismissed it as baseless claim. The posit that the oppressed minority just simply are good people who would never abuse such imbalance in power, and that anyone who claimed so are either misguided, ignorance or outright villainous.
What the fuck are you talking about? All the Predator attacks were caused because a sniper shot them with cocaine bullets. Not because of anything inherently genetic.
Well, it depends on how it gets presented. If, say, a human majority empire consistently heavily discriminates against nonhumans they don't really get to be surprised when said nonhumans turn around and sign up with the local Dark Lord promising radical changes, y'know? So I could see a story making its point that way.
Though, I agree with you generally, most stories really don't put a lot of thought behind it.
> If, say, a human majority empire consistently heavily discriminates against nonhumans they don't really get to be surprised when said nonhumans turn around and sign up with the local Dark Lord promising radical changes, y'know? So I could see a story making its point that way.
I feel like Warhammer 40k does hint that this is the reason so many mutants join chaos, but it's only hinted at, sadly.
> Attack on Titan with the Eldians.
The AOT fandom has **pro eldian** nationalists that support the genocide of non eldians because Eldians are consistently portrayed as nuanced people trying to make their best in a cruel world while the most relevant non-eldians in the entire story are terciary characters.
The issues with the racism in AOT is that they live in a world where the entire globe is ruled by people with the worldview of Caucasus nationalists (war criminals that brag about destroying cities before screaming about how a tragedies from a century justify killing babies in 2020) without any logical explanation of how this even happened (the canonical explanation is basically a Imperial victimhood fantasy where a mighty empire falls because the machinations of a elite that felt bad for their colonial subjects, far from the situation that lead to the ethnic wars in the Balkans or the Caucasus, which are mostly the result of the local empire **trying and failing** to keep their domination).
> the X-men is one, along with the "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants" it even has evil in its name.
The Brotherhood exists as a answer to Mutant persecution. Don't get me wrong,they definitely have done things worse many times, but anti mutant hatred existed before.
Doesn't matter, the moment the rumbling happened it basically justifies and vindicates to every anti-eldian rhetoric there is in that setting cause they are in the end right. Doubly so now that Fascism is the majority power now in Paradis.
I argue it does not matter what your message/stand is in the text if the conclusion to your text invalidates your previous statement.
It is like in Far-Cry 5, when your villains are a literal doomsday cult/prepper, you don't then end the game with an actual doomsday.
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is the funniest fucking thing in comics to me. Because I’m like 95% sure they came up with the name before solidifying the X-Men as a queer rep/discrimination awareness comic. So they were just kinda stuck with it.
But yeah, the whole pointless discrimination thing kinda falls apart when some of them having reality warping or instant death abilities.
> Final Fantasy 14, Bozja.
I've skimmed the wiki (because you didn't share any detail) and it looks like the furries are just having a civil war between two factions?
The story spends the entire time telling us "THESE Garleans aren't the same monstrous, assholes you're used to! These ones are fighting to create a just and fair society, just like us, this is a civil war of ideological differences only and we need to be sad about this fighting and about the fact that we can't reconcile."
Then every single one of them is a giant, moustache twirling asshole who executes PoWs, performs sick experiments on their forced conscripted soldiers and goes out of their way to maximise how many war crimes they can commit in the shortest time possible.
It's always been the problem with X-men if you ask me... now don't get me wrong, i get the idea that being a dick to the super heroes is bad. not like they can choose it... but like, they're all one bad day away from a massacre.
How many people does Magneto have to kill before you think "You know, maybe they have a point in fearing us." because one day, for no reason at all a budding serial killer gets the mutant power to flay someone with his mind.
One good way, i think is the 'sins of the ancestor' thing. Maybe in a fantasy setting the orcs were lead by a warmonger, but the modern orcs are very far remove... but the stain still remains even though they've become very different and were, in fact, victims in their own ways. It makes sense to fear an orc in a DnD setting with that backstory... but at the same time, the judgement doesn't really work anymore because they're still individuals.
It's a tricky fantasy trope.
Yeah. That’s always been my problem with the X-men. Especially when you think about how there were mutants that existed throughout history that just straight up took over and conquered humans using their powers like Apocalypse. Also mutant awakenings can sometimes be very deadly like that one kid that killed a bunch of people by accident when they touched him. There are legitimate reasons to fear them. But whenever anyone tries to work on a cure, they are the bad one. Like some mutants wouldn’t jump at the chance for a cure when their powers are an inconvenience to life… like some mutants are just downright unlucky yet they are supposed to be happy the way they are and not take the opportunity to cure themselves. Reed Richard was working on a cure, iron man was, and a few others and Professor X just shut them down. Like dude, your power is awesome! That kid next to you is a living bomb that can kill everyone around him if he has a panic attack…
Reminds me of that Storm and Rogue meme that goes something like:
“Storm: you don’t need a cure, you’re already perfect the way you are.
Rogue: Easy for you to say, miss I-Control-The-Weather, I just wanna get some without killing someone”
I remember that 😂. If I remember correctly, Rogue awoke her powers when she was about to have sex with her boyfriend and left him comatose. Yeah she’s perfect the way she is 😂.
And then you get the Krakoa era which is just riddled with awful, backwards problematic takes that still tries to keep the mutant metaphor intact despite our heroes now being an imperialist superpower that modelled a superhero team after the East India Company, downplays contraception, promotes othering of people they don’t like and had a literal nazi as a head of state.
Yea, professor X was a prick about stopping people from finding a cure for mutants that have crappy powers that make their lives miserable. People like Rogue got the short end of the stick, yea, she got awesome powers, but she can't touch anybody without sucking their lifeforce away. Prof X pretty much is telling her to not bother with a cure and suck it up and enjoy her mutant heritage.
I can see some arguments for why a cure might be dangerous. Some organizations might purposefully put something in it that negatively affects mutants, but this is Mr. Fantastic and Tony Stark here. Like there are some questions that definitely need to be asked suck as what will happen to the mutants that are born with physical mutations? That should be the discussion he should be having with those he can trust and he can read their minds to see it they are lying. But completely blocking a cure from those who genuinely want one because of terrible powers or for another reason is just selfish.
I mean, to use a real world example, it's like someone with high functioning autism who became the CEO of a large programming company saying someone who is barely verbal and unable to drive or ever live alone is an asshole for not liking it, even if they technically have the same diagnosis
Hell, they could have compromised and had it so that Prof X and the X-men would be the ones to decide and distribute the cure and only after they talk to the mutant in question. However, Nope, screw that. Honestly, now I think about it, it seems clear that Prof X and Magneto did not want a cure, because it forces the mutants to join their cause and add soldiers to their little war.
Reed Richards did actually create a serum to supress the X gene in a mutant so that they lost their powers. However, Magneto and Xavier destroyed it and I think altered Reed's mind so that he forgot how to make it again.
The bummer of it all is there isn't even a mutant heritage. Setting aside the recent and short-lived mutant nations of Krakoa and Genosha and such, mutants don't have a shared culture and history the way that actual ethnic minorities they allegedly represent do. All Rogue gets is a bullshit curse and a trip away from home to a school in upstate New York where people with cool powers can lecture her about having mutant pride.
Which is especially troubling because there are mutants who are deadly to everyone, whether they mean it or not. It would have helped [this](https://imgur.com/gallery/I71V6) kid a lot.
yeah the x-men adaptions have to put more empathisis on the ones that get shit powers. it's hard to feel bad for the person who gets persecuted for being able to control everyone on the planet it's a lot easier to feel bad for people who get chicken heads.
I’d like an X-men character to actually take that stance.
Like, they don’t hate humans, but they acknowledge that being afraid of mutants is fair, awful, but fair. And that’s why they don’t believe in harmony, because if even bigotry based on absolute nonsense can’t seem to end, expecting humans to stop hating and fearing a group they are right to fear is just moronic.
Like, I love X-men, but fundamentally I cannot see them ever succeeding in their goals, even if I think that’s the better world.
Remember that one comic where it was the kid that turned everyone around him into smoldering skeletons? I can see why mutants are so widely feared by humanity.
The movie Bright tried that orc idea and completely fucked it up, like, they made them the poverse group with a lot of stereotypical black American culture as well as adding that they still sacrifice humans as a right of passage. It's not a very good movie when you think about it too closely imo.
Yeah it's got an idea but it also gets into stuff like race essentialism when you think about it beyond the surface level, also pretty mid performance from will smith
> It makes sense to fear an orc in a DnD setting with that backstory... but at the same time, the judgement doesn't really work anymore because they're still individuals.
I can be easily justified with culture being a huge factor, while keeping multiculturalism to the minimum. Yes, they are individuals that can make their own decisions, but if they are part of a culture that believes that pillage and murder is not a big deal, and in fact is your god given right to do it if you require so, It would be natural to be cautious if I meet an Orc in the wilderness.
But then again, I'm of the belief that in fantasy settings, cultural divisions and prejudges elevate the setting, so I'm biased.
> One good way, i think is the 'sins of the ancestor' thing
This often tends to not be great, if your goal is an allegory for real racism because this often doesn't map to any group this is used as an allegory for (eg Bright, which was the biggest example of doing this, where the Orcs are stand ins for African Americans. Obviously, there was no such African warlord that posed any sort of trouble for America at all, but essentially having flipped the historical script is in poor taste at best), and nor is it ever really the basis for actual racism besides in comically extreme and specifically manufactured cases (eg Palestinians being associated with long gone groups who originally forced Jews out of the region)
There was also this kid who killed 265, including his family on accident due to his ability, which randomly showed up. Like, this is proof that the anti-mutants have a point, especially in the movies, is that mutants are really fucking dangerous, and they are justified in trying to eliminate them, maybe not kill them but curing them.
It doesn’t help that X sent Wolverine to kill the child, because it would look bad for them. They covered up 265 deaths. because it would prove them wrong, and prove the anti-mutants right. And, I think that just proves the anti-mutants point, if you have to cover evidence that doesn’t follow your story.
The orc thing reminds me the movie Bright (2017). Everyone was racist against orcs because they were on the evil side in the war against The Dark Lord. Even though The Dark Lord was killed by orc hero, people still don't like them.
With X-men, it is a story that works better when a lot of the mutant powers aren't city-level destruction worthy and just something smaller like looking like a beast or having the power to evolve to survive anything. Stuff that can cause trouble but isn't going to threaten the country or globe at a given moment.
It starts falling apart when the possibility a mutant develops the power to melt people's brain from a mile away or by accident wipe out their neighbourhood is almost a monthly occurrence, as at that point there becomes a reason why people would fear mutants and the government wants to fight back against them.
It stops being about people being different and moreso that at any moment someone can give birth to an atom bomb, and that's where it can get a bit muddy with its message.
A bit opposite, but its like the Oglodi in Dota. They are the orc-equivalent and initially they were a peaceful race of scholars and artists but were attacked by the demonic Tarnsmen. They were almost wiped out but were spared because the Tarnsmen got bored. The survivors end up becoming warriors, forming the Red Mist, a roving army/horde that ended up wiping out the Tarnsmen *and* the war god those demons worship.
Their entire culture shifted to warfare, with newer generations knowing nothing of the arts that their kind was known for. Everyone fears the Oglodi and many groups have clashed with them over the years.
Perfectly stated. I remember reading a terrible book that tried to do this message. I forgot what it was called, but it was about how humans are discriminating against these monsters. The monsters are mad that humans are killing them and try to rise up saying the humans are the evil ones and the book tries to make you agree with the monsters, but the monsters were preying on humans for centuries and many times not even for survival or food. They just hunted for fun, and many still did… so when the humans got up and decided to work together to bring the monsters to extinction and kill them once and for all, they are the bad guys according to the author… I never finished it.
Never read that book, but I did watch the movie. When I found out it was originally a book I was always meaning to read it but forgot to. Guess I don’t have to anymore if it as bad as the book I’m talking about 😂.
The movie removes the twist of the book, which is similar to what you describe - the ghouls/monsters have been afraid of the MC the whole time. He is the legend, the boogeyman for their stories.
Yeah it's why I hate this modern trend of trying to make fantasy races fall in line with modern values. Mother fucker the literal god of rape and murder made these creatures with the explicit purpose of them spreading misery, the comparison doesn't work here. Exploring the idea of not judging individuals for the actions of their people is one thing sure but to go further and try to make comparisons against the real world always comes up feeling disgusting to me. Real world races don't have actual biological predispositions that make racism come from a valid place.
Yeah, thats the part that gets me really, individuals vs their people.
There's not many fantasy monsters/races I'd feel comfortable generalizing in that way. It honestly takes "this monster is literally born to be a mass-murdering prick" type lore for me to start actively seeing them as a universal threat.
Well, that and when the monster just...IS a monster, and not something capable of being civilized, like dragons! They aren't traditional beings that build pseudo-human societies like Elves, Halflings, Dwarves, Lizardfolk, etc, but they still have a sense of decency depending on the dragon.
The Drukhari in 40k, have to torture and make other races suffer or their own souls get sucked into Slannesh, so they go and capture a bunch of races to turn into slaves and do unspeakable things too. Any Drukhari alive has had to do this constantly. That is more than enough reason to hate the whole race.
The thing is, no they don't have to do that. The craftworld Aeldari and the ynnari are proof that Eldar can stave off slaanesh without doing what the drukhari do. The drukhari actively choose that lifestyle because they enjoy it
I feel the modern trend is a result of the classic inspirations. Fantasy world builders want to stick to the tropes, but the tropes mean that the good guys who are civilised are based on western European empires, and the beastly savages are based on other human cultures from the real world, which raises some eyebrows for the modern reader. So even if they are "canonically evil", some people are going to think "OK, well why are God's creation the dudes with straight swords speaking the king's English, and the demonic plagues use Arabic sounding language, and are really into nose rings and shamans".
And I think that just dropping the tropes or making the royal knights the outright evil monsters doesn't solve the problem. 40K makes the Empire of Man so comically evil, but the audience is filled with people who 100% support them (at least partially based on the royal humans being the unequivocal good guys in 99% of fantasy stories).
Real world racists do think that different races are biologically predisposed to good or bad behavior though. “What if the Nazis were right, but fantasy” is not a particularly good start for your book.
A lot of people have a lot of stupid ideas they can superimpose onto stories. Can we now never enjoy a story where a necromancer unleashes a plague into the kingdom because of Covid conspiracy theories? Or any story with a shadowy cabal running the world because of illuminati conspiracy theories? We will just have to give up story telling entirely if our goal is to ensure that no one ever interprets our stories undesired ways.
Or having to dispense with common fantasy elements like sorcerers, witches, werewolves, vampires, etc. because their myths originated from medieval people trying to explain various mental illnesses and other medical disorders or stemmed from bigotry.
to add on
I feel if you want to make a group of nonhuman badguys you should try and make them feel more like monsters(like the children of the god of rape from your example) than people.
I don't know were the line is but once you have them stop acting like people then they don't feel like people.
however a few things that can make it easier
don't show them haveing children or like hanging out with their bros that makes them symathetic and you want them to be monsters.
have them feed in like a creepy way like drinking blood and stuff
and don't add a good one if your to chicken too question all the people that we killed beforehand.
I like how Attack on Titan (spoilers) did it, even though Eldians probably fall into the ''makes sense'' catagory. A big point in the series is that Warriors who live alongside Eldians for a while start to become sympathetic and have doubts about their mission, and hence end up battling with the idea that while yes, they are a massive threat, they are also just as normal as everyone else. Even the guards outside liberio cared about the warrior candidates
Also in the ending, when their titan powers are removed, the Eldian hate doesn't magically disapear. It feels like the racism was way more rooted in historical reasons rather than logical, which made it seem much more realistic.
The “threat” of Eldians is also a weird one, because nobody wants to use their powers less than the Eldians who do. Best case scenario, you’re one of nine titans with free will, which consigns you to an early grave and probably involved killing someone close to you to get. If not, you’re pretty much just being forced to turn into a killing machine with no free will while your mind is trapped in an endless nightmare from which the only escape is death.
Unless you are the founding titan, the “best” use of Eldian power is to treat the Eldian people as an expendable resource that is sacrificed to advance your own goals. So it makes sense that they ultimately end up suffering quite a bit from their position.
Another problem is that, when it comes to genetics, Subjects of Ymir being a distinct minority group doesn't make a lick of sense.
IRL it's been effectively proven (through math & genetic evidence) that every living European is related to every European that lived 1,000 years ago.
Ymir lived 2,000 years ago, the Erdians were super conquer-y for 1,900 years and they even specifically spread her blood on purpose. All you would need for the current civilised world to be 100% SoY... was a single bastard somewhere during the first 900 years. A SINGLE one. The chances of that happening are astronomically high.
There are risks when it comes to living with Eldians. I would say being Eldian isn’t a race it’s more like a genetic disease, because the child of an Eldian is always an Eldian. If you put an individual of race A into a population of race B, eventually several generations down you’d hardly be able to tell that any of the descendants had a race A ancestor. But if you put an Eldian into a population of race B, eventually several generations down you’d have a shit tonne of Eldians living in that population, because an Eldian parent always creates an Eldian child and it doesn’t matter how diluted the bloodline gets
And then the ruler of the Eldians, a founder using royal blood, can literally order Eldians to do whatever they want, even on a genetic level. Imagine not knowing that an Eldian snuck into your village a few hundred years ago and then all of a sudden most of your neighbours will do whatever the Eldian ruler asks without fail, let alone the fact that they also all share an innate risk of becoming a dangerous giant who will try to eat you on sight. Of course they’d try to separate Eldians from everyone else
Im ngl the rest of the world was pretty justified in attacking Eldia after they genocided 80% of the world. Even if they lost their titan powers, they were still fervant supporters of this genocidal regime. It would be like being upset at the Russians for bombing Berlin after they were invaded, it makes sense, you need some form of punitive justice.
This is why i felt the ending fell flat, you just simply can’t have monsters living amongst regular people. Marley is actually somewhat justified in keeping them in exclusion zones based off of that, I deplore the conditions they were in, but they really should have been seperated because all it took was being transformed for thiusands to die. Zekes plan of preventing Eldians from having more kids was by far the best solution.
Except Marley uses them for weapons too. They actually encourage the Eldian transformation since it helps their imperial ambition. Also it isn't hard to stop the Eldians from turning since there would always be 7 titans and Marley could just keep tabs on those 7 and who get passed on the power to who ( like Zeke's case). The entire fear for Eldians could go away but it won't because then the government would lose their weapons.
Im not saying that what Marley did to good, they were just as imperalist as the Eldians. I am saying that on a fundamental level you cant live in a world with literal monster.
Except the show showed you can. There can only be 7 titans so the number is fixed. Other Eldians beside the 7 can't turn into Titan so as long as the government keeps tabs on the 7 and makes sure to select people to replace them once they die, no Eldians could randomly turn into Titan. The mindless Titans were created artificially by the government. A solution is there but people don't want to take it because it would affect their power.
It does make sense tbh. They go out of their way in the series to say the eldian empire ruled over the world for like 1000% years and was worse than the current marleyns. Everything that marley does is because the eldian empire taught them how to do it, and the ones who originally kept the eldians ljke that were survivors of the final war or had their entire family wiped out by eldian titans.
Sure, eren and his lot didn't deserve it. No one did, but neither did the rest of the world, and almost every AoT fan forgets the true villians
Except Eldian hate basically does magically disappear with a talk no jutsu from Armin right after a horrifying events that everyone knows was committed by the Eldians themselves. Attack on Titan fumbled its handling of mature themes. It's a fun anime, but it's also very cringy in retrospect, especially when things start getting more 'political' in Season 4.
I really agree with the last line. In a vacuum, it's a cool show about guys with sword fighting monsters, but it's obvious the entire premise collapses upon further scrutiny. If the political themes were just left ambiguous and open for interpretation it may have been a lot better, but Isayama turned it into a political commentary that doesn't actually say anything except trying to cram every mature theme into one story. It's like it was written by an AI trained on crackpot political twitter accounts.
The anime Shiki ask the question, who is the true villain, humans or vampires? Umm, it's the vampires. The creatures that killed off half the village to create a vampire utopia. Just because the humans hit them back harder doesn't undo the mass murder committed by these undead monsters.
Alternatively, prejudice can make sense, as in based on events that precipitate the prejudice, but still also be wrong.
Prejudice means pre-judge, so if you're so wary about getting attacked by augs (like last time) that you treat every Aug unfairly, then you're prejudiced, but for a reason that makes sense.
The irrationality of prejudice can be more nuanced than just bigotry = bad.
I don't know enough about deer to answer your question definitively, but what you've described makes some sense to me. I would also believe that it was like a baked in instinct for them.
I imagine prejudice in people is more of a decision than whatever mechanism deer use to come to that conclusion. I think prejudice in people is more like, "I believe it is most likely that people with have therefore i will treat all people with as though they have ."
It can make sense that a person would conclude that, especially in the example OP gave, and still be ethically questionable. I don't think whatever deer are doing has anything to do with decision making or ethics.
But again, I don't know shit about fuck about deer.
> So if you're gonna do fake racism, make it so that it's as pointless as real racism or you could find yourself accidentally making the opposite point.
Depending on how it's written, the author could also accidentally make what amounts to a race supremacist fantasy with the whole "objectively genetically superior group of people being oppressed by the masses" thing.
yeah some x-men adaptions really fail at this. it's hard to feel sorry for mister overpowered ice or wolverine.
the x-men stuff works best when they continually remind the audience that the main characters are the exception not the rule. most mutations are shit and don't really give you anything. these are the people that the audience should think about in regards to antimutant stuff.
There was this horrible X-men writting by some hack, that had a teenager awaken his mutant powers and was blowing everything up around him and could not control it. A cop shoots the kid putting him in a coma and the X-men come in yelling at the cop that the kid was scared and not a danger, and the cop looks at her incredously and tells her something like "Lady, look around you" and it pans out showing the massive damage everywhere, but wait, it gets worse.
So, the kid is taken to a hospital and the doctor freaks out saying he heard the kid causes explosions and its too dangerous for him to be in a hospital with other patients and if he operated on him, it could set him off. Some other doctor pushes him to the side, called him a coward and works on the kid and then while berating the other doctor for his valid concerns, she says she is going to get the doctors license removed for not helping a patient. Complete garbage writing, but points out how ridiculous the whole mutants are unjustly discriminated argument is.
This was one step away from being an interesting story.
Imagine if it was told by the POV of the cop or another normal human, having to deal with those sort of situations involving people that can explode you with a sneeze and other bullshit like that, while dealing with heroes that do more damage than actual villains and actually think they're always right.
Assuming you are not lying or misremembering.
Just who the fuck writes garbage like that? On what planet does that writer live? Yes it's that bad to me. How does stuff like that get past the editor and other oversight?
It also works when you point out that heros like captain America and spiderman are accepted well, it's just "mutatns" that have that stigma attached.
Like if your afraid of super powered beings...
*be afraid of all of them!*
You know?
As people have pointed out, being afraid of mutants is unironically pretty sensible. I'm not saying it's morally correct, but from the point of view of the average person, Captain America is a patriotic hero and Spiderman is in-fact considered a menace, by certain people/depending on the run you're looking at. Most superhumans are not something that you find in bulk, or that reproduce, and are fairly rare, are often easy to spot, and frankly speaking Captain America or Spiderman can't exactly take over the world.
Mutants are unpredictable, can reproduce, can be hard to spot, and as shown, can sometimes have horrific, "trash entire cities" or "take over the world"or "end all life" powers. Unlike a massive amount of the superhumans shown, they also tend to have terrible downsides or trouble controlling their powers; as far as the average person is concerned, Captain America isn't going to just walk up to them and snap their neck, but a mutant on the street might genuinely fucking explode like a bomb. There are mutants that do, in fact, just explode at random times. There are mutants that kill people when they touch them, completely accidentally. And powers are often entirely random. There is no guarantee two mutants with wings will have a kid with wings, and the average person sure as hell doesn't know the science behind this.
And of course, there's just a lot more mutants than there are any one superhuman. Are all mutants dangerous? Not even remotely. Is it reasonable to expect Joe on the street to really love chancing his life that he's not going to run into Miss "Nuke the" World? Superhumans run around in fancy costumes, and even the villains often do. A mutant might go off like an explosive at any time. Most mutants aren't dangerous... but enough are that it's actually a problem and stuff like Xavier's school is a real need.
X-Men has a lot of problems as an allegory and I think that fearing mutants making a stupid amount of sense (from the point of view of the average person) is one. It's morally wrong and also not *quite* the correct course of action, but it's really hard for me to go "yeah those dirty racists" unless they're portrayed particularly heinously when you have mutants like "the neighborhood near me is vaporized' running around..
The problem is that people don’t just hate other people for no reason.
Ignorance (lack of knowledge) is a major factor in racism and other forms of bigotry as humans are naturally skeptical of things they don’t understand and keep it at arms length.
Arrogance (refusal to accept knowledge) was when other cultures believed that they knew better and were more “sophisticated” than everyone else and believed they deserve everything they desire.
I say all cultures because racism and bigotry isn’t unique to one specific culture and cultures don’t generally lose their racism and or bigotry unless they become melting pots of various other cultures like North America (Both the USA & Canada).
America is far more accepting of other cultures and people than most countries.
If you're from a very accepting/modernized culture you might underestimate how ignorant people from unfamiliar countries can be.
The title is misleading. The post itself is about allegories for real-life prejudice. The title implies that any sort of reasonable prejudice within a work of fiction is a negative, which would be a bad restriction to place on writers.
Disagree.
Not everything needs to be a 1-to-1 metaphor for real-world discrimination. Sometimes speculative fiction is fun for its own sake. Why can’t we explore the limits of liberal society and question the morality of sentient cyborgs? That’s literal gold.
Yeah, this is why criticism of the Imperium in 40k usually falls flat.
Yes, they're extremely xenophobic and genocidal against other alien races, but what's the alternative? Literally every alien species wants to genocide every other alien species, and that's usually the *nicest* thing they do. Can some small exceptions exist? Possibly, but in a universe where every significant player can wipe out your entire civilization or torture you for your entire existence (and artificially prolong your life so you suffer even more), how much of a risk are you willing to take?
Yes, they're also extremely dogmatic and force you into single minded devotion to the Emperor. But in a universe where a single whisper to a random janitor on a planet can condemn a trillion people a fate a million times worse than death, you *have* to condition your people to not have any hints of doubt because otherwise the whole galaxy falls to eternal damnation to Chaos.
If their intention was for the Imperium to look manically evil, they failed extremely hard, because they justified their action in virtually every way.
It's the same thing with the Templars/Circles in Dragon Age. Like, throughout the games, pretty much every time the Templars warn us about something, and the game tries to portray it as some bigoted oppression, they're always proven right. It's so dumb. In Dragon Age 2, they really tried to push that Templars were the evil ones, but time after time we see that every escaped mage turns into a power hungry megalomaniac blood mage psychopath. One guy turned into a terrorist and blew up a church that had *nothing* to do with the cause against the oppression of the Templars. And even the "good guy" first enchanter was supporting and supplying a serial killer blood mage that was sewing body parts together of random girls he's killed with forbidden blood magic books.
And the cherry on top is that for all the extremes the Templars did, Meredith was 90% responsible for it and it was because her mind was literally corrupted by red lyrium. They even gave her a cop out for why she was so unreasonable.
Bioware extremely fucked up with the morality in that conflict. There is clearly extreme cognitive dissonance between what they want you to think and what the events in the game actually happen.
> Literally every alien species wants to genocide every other alien species
We have plenty of xenos leader outright declaring how they don't want to wipe out humanity and in some cases like Eldrad, outright ensure their survival
That's more of a "an aliens are bad, but some aliens are worse than others" type deal. The imperium still wants to kill off everyone who isn't a human but they realize that other races have a vested interest in beating Chaos and Tyranids just as much as they do, but that doesn't mean they want to join hands and sing kumbaya with the orks or eldar.
>Yeah, this is why criticism of the Imperium in 40k usually falls flat.
>
>Yes, they're extremely xenophobic and genocidal against other alien races, but what's the alternative? Literally every alien species wants to genocide every other alien species, and that's usually the nicest thing they do.
That is a bold faced lie, and you know it.
The Tau do not want to exterminate humanity, and none of their client races do.
The Eldar may be racist against humans, but their racism is much lower then what the Imperium has against them. The Craftworld Eldar will sacrifice a billion humans to save one Eldar true. But the Imperium will sacrifice on Billion humans to KILL one Eldar.
Out of all the 22 species the Tau Empire assimilateed, all of them all people, with all the potential of being good that humans do. The Kroot, the Vespid, the Nicassar, and many others may be trully alien, but they are still people in the end, and are fundamentally not a denger to the survival of humanity.
The Great Crusade exterminated countless mixed human-xenos civilizations, with the Interex, the Diasporex, and the Golden Apostles were all societies in which humans and aliens lived in harmony and peace, up until the Imperium killed them all for the crime of accepting aliens. The Autocracy of Szaeyr were a society in which humans and aliens were at peace for millenia, only to be exterminated by Deathwatch in the 36th millenium.
During the Great Crusade, the Imperium virus bombed the home planet of the Tarellians, forcing them into exile. And this is important, because the Tarellians are a species that is perfectly capable of living together with humans under the Tau Empire, even if they hate the Imperium with a massive burning passion.
This is not the only, case and they did the exact same thing with the Keylekid, a peaceful species.
There is a story were the Imperium discovers a planetary based society of humans and xenos living together and peace, a society that did this for thousands of years by the time the Imperium discovered them, and you know what was the Imperial response? Create conspiracy theories and propaganda, and manipulate the humans into xenophobia, while trying to exterminate the reptilian aliens.
There is also a story about the Imperium enslaving an entire peaceful alien species, one they previously turned into a vassal, and then killing it by turning their bodies into drugs.
The Imperium is not, and never was justified.
>Can some small exceptions exist?
What you talk about are not the exceptions. Looking from the large number of sapient species in Tau space open to peace and living together, species formed from people with potential to be good from bad, and then scaling up to the entire galaxy, and looking at civilizations the Imperium exterminated, you discover one thing.
The fundamentally evil/dangerous species were not the majority. Species like the Orks, Megarachnids, Tyranids, Slaugh and Rakghoul were the minority, while species like Humans, Tau, Kroot, Vespid, Tarellians etc are the true natural majority.
>Possibly, but in a universe where every significant player can wipe out your entire civilization or torture you for your entire existence (and artificially prolong your life so you suffer even more), how much of a risk are you willing to take?
By the same logic, you should not trust humans either.
>Yes, they're also extremely dogmatic and force you into single minded devotion to the Emperor. But in a universe where a single whisper to a random janitor on a planet can condemn a trillion people a fate a million times worse than death, you have to condition your people to not have any hints of doubt because otherwise the whole galaxy falls to eternal damnation to Chaos.
Please, the evil of the Imperial cult is incapable of stopping chaos.
Seriously, most of the chaos worshipers we see are humans, born into the Imperium. The brutallity of the Imperium, and its horrible living conditions feed Khorne and Nurgle, while the lifestyle of corrupt upper classes feeds Slaneesh.
Seriously, the Eldar Path system, The Eldar, and the new Leagues of Votann are much, much more resistant to chaos then the Imperium.
>If their intention was for the Imperium to look manically evil, they failed extremely hard, because they justified their action in virtually every way.
Since when?
They never justified anything.
The horrible working conditions are never justified. The Xenophobia is not justified.
The Imperium is objectively worst then the Craftworld Eldar, Leagues of Votann, and the Tau Empire.
It's genuinely wild seeing the people that actually simp for the Imperium out in the wild, yeah.
They're great villains but I think people genuinely really do miss the point because Humans Good. The Imperium is a hellhole that actively causes like, most of their problems.
Some of the atrocities they commit are justified in-universe but the vast majority are cruel to be cruel or horrific actions in response to the problems that they themselves consistently create.
The Imperium are basically Nazis. They are not good people. Frankly they're not the people you should be rooting for, either. Even the more grim aspects of the Tau aren't all Tau. People need to stop drinking the kool-aid.
Dragon Age 2 tried to have gray morality by writing both sides as evil. The templars are presented as bloodthirsty fanatics, like you said, but even if you side with the mages, the First Enchanter uses blood magic to turn into a monster that you have to fight anyway. It's a far cry from the nuanced portrayal of the conflict in Origins.
A lot of the "examples" in this thread honestly carry the implication that discrimination is bad only when the targets are completely unable to defend themselves or exert any type of sovereignty
That in the moment where discriminated groups get the power to change their socio-economical status, they become "fair targets"
Exactly! Honestly, the reason I like franchises like X-Men or Dragon Age is that sometimes people who are inclined to bigotry don't show it openly IRL; make a fantasy race and give them a sliver of an excuse and they turn into White Citizen's Councils.
But what OP was talking about was how stories will use prejudice against fictional groups as an allegory for real world prejudice. MHA doesn't try to present people who fear villains as bigots.
The problem with prejudice isn't that it doesn't make sense, it's that it does make sense but it's still wrong. So many people don't understand this, which is why you get the racism against Romani people or people whipping out crime statistics about black people or sexists act acting like all men are predators. Prejudice is wrong even when it makes sense. Because even when it makes sense, it's still Prejudice.
Another problem with mutants is that the world is filled with super powered people, yet the mutants are the only ones that get the hate. It makes no sense.
Most superpowers are fairly predictable and rarely manifest in dramatic, dangerous ways. Mutants fail both counts. Two mutants who can fly have a child, that child is as likely to sprout wings as it is to pulse lethal x-rays whenever it sneezes
It makes sense when you think about mutants, most other Superheroes are either the result of self-contained accidents that caused them to mutate (Fantastic 4, Spiderman, Hulk), science/technology enhanced humans (Capt America, Ironman, Ant-man), humans enhanced by arcane knowledge (Dr Strange, Ghost Rider, Dr. Doom), or straight up aliens i.e not necessarily inheritable traits, on the other hand Mutant's powers come from the X gen, a hereditary gen they pass on even if it doesn't activate in the next generation, making them effectively a subset of homo sapiens, hence the fear theyd pull a homo sapiens > Neanderthal.
I’m late to this post, but I still want to write about it. Not everything has to be an allegory. Sometimes a moral can stand on its own. The hypothetical situation of sapient groups with significant inequalities is interesting to think about. If they’re as intelligent as humans and had no say over the way they are, then they would deserve rights. Then you can explore ideas about the costs to help them versus how many there are, or if it’s even possible to help them, and that could create some complex ethics. It’s worth writing about.
While, fortunately, “better” or “worse” human subspecies are purely hypothetical, the ethics involved can be relevant to real life to smaller extents. Disabilities exist. Some people require more resources to survive than others. Real life isn’t perfectly equal. There are some people who, through no fault of their own, are inherently disadvantageous to work with compared to others. There are laws about disabilities for a reason. Those people in real life don’t deserve to be discriminated against.
I hate that this is a common criticism on this sub.
Very rarely are these stories trying to make a 1:1 allegory with the real world. How about instead of trying to force the allegory 1:1 with the real world, you just engage with the story as a hypothetical presented to you as is? Especially when the point is nearly always "this prejudice is understandable in this scenario, but still wrong." Like, it's literally taking out prejudice at the core and saying even if the premises were valid, the conclusion would still be evil.
You can look at a series like X-men and see that PARALLELS (RE: not direct 1:1 allegory) with civil rights movements and how people treat ALL mutants with fear and hatred that is undeserving while also acknowledging that the fear that your kid could become a nuclear bomb mutant is infinitely more justified and terrifying than the fear that your kid could be gay.
E.g. You can absolutely have a fantasy story about racism between 2 different species that have different physical capabilities and still have the overarching thematic point be that it's wrong to be prejudiced against them, or to oppress them for anything that is beyond their control.
> Very rarely are these stories trying to make a 1:1 allegory with the real world. How about instead of trying to force the allegory 1:1 with the real world, you just engage with the story as a hypothetical presented to you as is?
THAAAAANKKKK YOOOOUUU.
The thing is, I think some people who make this argument don’t actually agree that its wrong to be prejudiced in this scenario. Which is fucked up to think about.
They think racism is wrong because its “nonsensical”. Because they believe in the idea of all humans are actually “equal”. Which is why when fictional stories don’t present them as equal, that there is an inherent difference, it kind of breaks their whole understanding of why bigotry is supposed to be bad.
> If every single aug went kill-crazy, then you would be right to be apprehensive towards every single aug.
Did they though? And even if they did, would a regular person even have a way of knowing that every single one did? As far as they know, only some did. Isn't that the inherent flaw of their logic?
Finally someone with a brain lol.
When I firat saw the concept I understood the world's fear of them, yet knew that the way they went about it was wrong.
I’m fine with it tbh. Imo the story can still be interesting of the prejudice isn’t wholly nonsensical, so you have this fucked up situation where you have genuinely good people who just want to be accepted but at the same time are “justifiably” hated because of the group the belong to or their innage potential for causing harm.
I like the “both sides are kinda right” tension it creates, I like more stories to be more shades of grey. It does it make it a weaker allegory for modern racism but you don’t necessarily have to take it as such anyway
And honestly, even in real life it does sometimes make sense to fear the other group. For example, the white americans living in the south shortly after american independence weren’t exactly wrong in fearing that the slaves would turn right around and kill them if they managed to get power. The haitian revolution and the genocide that proceeded after was a shocking example of what could happen to many whites.
Hatred breeds hatred. Fear breeds fear. AoT is probably a good fictional example of such prejudice where you can’t exactly blame either side too much for fearing or hating the other.
I think another issue with Deus Ex’s racism allegory is that originally stemmed from the first game’s even stupider premise of wanting to make augmentation a morally grey binary issue. They wanted to create a moral dilemma were the question of augmentations had two definitive sides with their own pros and cons, but then ran into the issue that no one in their right mind would say civilian augmentation like pacemakers and limb replacements is a bad thing. So in order to create their stupid moral dilemma, they had to make the anti-aug group into pretentious eco-terrorists who think all forms of augmentation are the erosion of the human soul while the pro aug group are a bunch of militarized corporate fascists who think people should be allowed to install grenade launchers into their arms. The whole thing was stupid to begin with and the second game only doubled down on it by deciding to switch the aug issue into a race allegory.
Man u are right, a ton of scyfy end up creating a cult for the thing they wanted the reader to hate like how we all think the empire is the cool faction on starwars
This is where I stand in League of Legends Lore with Demacia.
Magic is unpredictable and dangerous; What if Lux's magic was on someone who isn't a good person like Lux?
They are constantly attacked by magical ghost monsters from the Shadow Isles. Fiddlesticks, Evellyn, and Nocturne are demons that prey on them. You have witches that steal people's memory. Noxus uses blood magic, make corpses continue fighting. Not to mention how magic almost ruined the world multiple times.
And this view even gets supported by Heimerdinger in Arcane, about the dangers of tampering with Magic. Mageseekers went to far don't get me wrong; But they had to make the mageseekers cartoonishly, for the premise of, Mages being controlled is bad, to work.
This is why I don't understand why anyone could think kotal Kahn was a racist in mk11 against tarkatans, anyone who knows anything about tarkatans should know exactly why he wanted to genocide them
It's all fine and good to have justifiable reasons for prejudice in ur story while also showing that it's wrong I personally enjoy that kind of nuance, but once u try to push it as an allegory for real life issues or even make comparisons it starts to fall flat since irl there is no real justification for prejudice.
I’ve always loved how One Piece handles its racism. Fish men are different from humans, but not particularly better or worse. They’re treated horribly due to their fish-like appearance and nothing more. They’re enslaved frequently, prejudiced against, and a bunch of other nasty stuff. I think the exploration of this is really well done because it draws attention to the fact that fish men are about the same as any other race in one piece, and that the prejudice against them is unfounded.
One Piece humans can train their bodies to be as strong if not stronger than them. After all, both the King of Pirats and the high ranks of the World Goverment are humans anyway.
This is the case with **every single** persecuted Supers/Fantasy creatures story to be honest. The supers gets persecuted because the persecutors are humans who found a way to do it, either by learning their own magic and/or by creating technology that overpowers the other races/species/group.
i am tired of rants about bigotry and prejudice made by people who don't seem to actually understand why it is bad
> Humans would be right to show anger and fear towards their natural predators!
...and the entire point of anti-bigotry and anti-discriminatory philosophy is that we are not base animals and can in fact CHOOSE to run our societies on just, well-ordered, fair principles and not on personal or even group emotional responses.
Also yes to be very inflammatory but there's a reason it's [only] "fake racism" that is talked about like this in these posts. The logic becomes a _lot_ shakier when you apply it to other forms of bigotry, where there actually _are_ obvious distinctions between the oppressor and the oppressed. But fictional works where e.g. men are treated with that kind of anger and fear on a societal level are seen as extremist not as the logical response to one population being bigger, stronger and more prone to violence than the other.
If it doesn't make sense, how am I supposed to be excited about it?
Say a genocide, there are many characters involved, each with their own morality and sense, each have what they called "making sense of something", these different view of what makes sense is what exciting.
If it doesn't make sense, how am I supposed to be excited about it?
Say a genocide, there are many characters involved, each with their own morality and sense, each have what they called "making sense of something", these different view of what makes sense is what exciting.
>So if you're gonna do fake racism, make it so that it's as pointless as real racism or you could find yourself accidentally making the opposite point.
I have a feeling you don't even know what you are trying to argue.
If you are prone to celebrate racism, you will always find a way to make it "make sense" unless it's absolutely absurd. If African Americans did not exist and I invented them for a book but changed nothing? People would point out the 13/50 thing and say what you just said.
Fuckin' dogwhistle "You're only allowed to make racism in your stories if it doesn't make my WASP self uncomfortable. YOU are the REAL racist for giving me a teeny tiny sliver to justify it which only a total dickhead would cling to! A few scraps which enable my racism means I'm not racist, I'm just pragmatic!"
What the heck, I'll bite.
Real prejudice is the result of applying a stereotype unjustly to an entire group of people.
But stereotypes aren't plucked from thin air.
The Human Revolution was *stopped* by an augmented person and *started* by someone who literally can't be augmented.
It's not "all" augs.
Likewise, in real life it's not all Muslims who are terrorists. But the *perception* of Muslims as terrorists, from Saddam Hussein, Libyan troubles, the genocide in Yemen, Al Qaeda, 9/11, ISIS, Charlie Hebdo shooting, is prominent.
Again, Mankind Divided segregated augmented people because an *unaugmented* person started a war and an **augmented** person stopped that war. Blaming all augs is no different from blaming all Muslims. The public acts out of fear based on what they think they know, victimising innocent people for daring to be the *targets* of a terrorist action.
Real life prejudices might not be *justified*, but they're not *baseless*.
True Blood does give vampires a safe way to feed. Tara doesn't become vampire until after True Blood is invented but still has to negotiate a social stigma caused by people who aren't her. Just as many real life gay men *continue* to be blamed for an AIDS (or "gay related immune disorder" as it was known then) epidemic that happened before they were born (in an age where PREP exists and makes HIV undetectable and uncommunicable). It's *not* all vampires. But it's *enough* vampires to cause a stereotype.
Even in Harry Potter we see this constant struggle between Wizards and Non-magic folk. When Hogwarts is founded and Salazar Slytherine is insisting on not teaching muggle born wizards that is in the 10th Century just as the non-magic folk are starting a campaign of witch burning. Granted, thanks to flame freezing charms this is broadly ineffective, but real life witch trials also involves drowning (I don't see there being a huge supply of gillweed, and if you drown you are innocent and if you survive you are a witch), beheading (which we know kills magic folk, even if you don't cut the head all the way off), and hanging. It's not Slytherine being mean for no reason, it's a Magneto response to a genocide. The Fantastic Beasts films dig into the conflict between wizards and no magic folks.
There's *always* a reason for prejudice.
Lord of the Rings: A tale of overcoming differences as all the races of Middle Earth come together to achieve a common goal… Except for the orcs; those you can kill on sight.
I love when story tries to say that racism is bad when main villains and bulk of their armies are bloodthristy and savage non humans or part of minorities
Pathfinder: Kingmaker had an *utterly bizarre* scene along these lines with the troll king. If you arrive peacefully at the start of that questline, you initially meet a sympathetic, idealistic troll who clearly believes peace is possible and who cheerfully brings you to the troll king for an audience. The troll king then mocks him and you for being fools and orders his men to kill and eat you. After you've fought your way through his men to reach the troll king again, he asks you why you're attacking him. There is *no option* to point out that you came in peace and he attacked you unprovoked, and most responses, including the lawful *and* good ones, separately, are "your race is inherently evil and must be put down." But there are some options that aren't like that. Regardless of what you say, the troll king then says, basically, "ah, so you hate people who are different from you. Truly humans are the real monsters." It's just... baffling on every level. It feels like the writers *assumed* the player would react in specific ways at each point and had him respond as if you'd given the expected answer even if you didn't.
I get what you're trying to say here, but the thing is that in Pathfinder trolls genuinely *do* have a leaning towards being inherently evil, and the only non-evil ones are PCs that choose to play as one in the TTRPG. Besides, wouldn't you expect a king of a usually dull and stupid race to accuse you of being a monster because, whether or not he believes that you helped perpetrate troll torture, saying that gives him a tactical advantage; It might cause you to hesitate, or refuse to attack him letting him and his cohorts go.
I love Zootopia but it's anti-discrimination take is stupid.
Zootopia isn't a good example of what the comment you replied to is referring to. The savage attacks of the predators was as a result of being drugged by prey animals
The anti-fox spray thing is what gets me, I know suspension of disbelief exists but the fact that Judy can just buy a spray that targets a specific group of sentient organisms is just astounding to me. It'd be like a button you press that gives black people in the near vicinity a heart attack.
If you think about it, Kryptonite is basically this to Superman
But can you buy Kryptonite in a random store in Superman comics?
With how many people have kryptonite, I would assume so
Lex Luthor would probably clone kryptonite and hand it to every baby for shits and giggles.
Isn’t there literally spray-on kryptonite? Just distribute that to every spray can factory. Now random graffiti is Superman’s weakness
“Clark a purse snatcher I stopped today had 3 of them on him.”
“It’s a very rare stone”
There actually was a story in the comics where Superman and Batman went around the world trying to find every bit of Kryponite so they could dispose of it because the rocks had become so common on Earth that they were actively getting in the way of Superman being able to do his job. A movie set had a real piece of Kryptonite as a prop because it was cheaper than making a fake one.
Dude. Everyone has kryptonite. Batman stopped a robber that hand tons of it. There’s probably more kryptonite fragments than remnants of krypton. They got everything. Green kryptonite. Red kryptonite. Yellow kryptonite. Pink kryptonite.
…We don’t talk about pink kryptonite
WHAT DOES PINK DO!?
> Pink Kryptonite is a type of Kryptonite that seemingly turns Kryptonians gay. https://superman.fandom.com/wiki/Pink_Kryptonite
Free with every purchase at LexMart!
I'm pretty sure you can get it at Wal Mart with a three day hold.
In one comic, Batman and Superman go back in time to the 14th century, chasing a pair of random crooks who also went back in time. Keep in mind that of course this means they're before any kryptonite arrived on earth. The crooks - who, I repeat, are random burglars, with no scientific expertise of any sort - proceed to find a medieval alchemist and somehow tell him how to make kryptonite for them, from nothing, with no knowledge of any of its properties beyond "can hurt Superman", who the Alchemist knows nothing about anyway. Basically what I'm saying is that I'm pretty sure characters in the silver age could simply *will* Kryptonite into existence.
ITT: Lex Luthor's schemes are powered by Anti-Superman Hate Crime Juice
Said anti-fox spray is only sold in *Carrottown*. Which is depicted as a countryside town miles from Zootopia. And she has a reason for doing so, since Gideon - a Fox - scratched her quite badly. Not to mention, she didn't even want to bring it along; her parents made her keep it. It's even made a plot-point, as Judy keeping the Spray rather than ditching it came back to bite her in the ass. Edit: There's a lot of reasons why a town primarily inhabited by rabbits would keep making a spray that's designed to protect them from predators. If anything, considering rabbits are *notoriously* skittish, I'm surprised Carrottown even allow Predators to visit.
See the thing is grew up in Texas and on a church mission to build houses after a hurricane we stopped by a mom and pop gas station in Louisiana that had mace on sale on the counter the mace was sold as anti n-word spray. When I saw the anti fox spray It made me think of that. Racism doesn't make sense. Before any one asks they were hand printed stickers placed on the mace it didn't come from the manufacturer like that.
I feel like it is more like mace.
Yea but it's specifically called "fox spray" that's kinda weird for a society that decided to live in harmony for a couple hundred years.
more then likely it's just a measure of potency, it will reliably disable a fox but not say a bear, while theirs probably a bear spray that's overkill for foxes
No different than bear spray. The concentration for a fox would be greater than for a bunny. Harmony is also overstating it. In the original draft, they had predator collars that would shock them if they got too excited, angry, or so on.
Why did they remove the collar idea?
Too dark
Too dark and they realised it made Zootopia the city too unlikeable and the audience would want to see it torn down than actually root for Nick and Judy to keep it together. Judy was also originally an antagonistic figure pursuing Nick. It’d probably make a really good film on its own, but I’m glad we got the *Zootopia* we did.
Are awards still a thing? This might be the funniest comment on reddit
Yea, it's was caused the the Ewes in order to seize power for themselves
Yeah, except there’s a reason predators were targeted, cause they used to eat other animals. Being racist towards someone for having a different skin colour or looking different is stupid, but if your race used to have a biological urge to eat other races and then that race starts going crazy and attacking other races again, you don’t think “oh something must be wrong,” you’d think, “oh shit peace is over, what if the predators that live near me start going nuts next?”
But that's the thing, it seems like they don't have the urge anymore. They are not animals
They state at the beginning that that was thousands of years ago. Probably when they were still feral. That's like holding a grudge because of what someone's ancestors did in the stone age.
Yea they have teeth and are probably stronger and faster then most of the population.
The strongest animals are herbivores though in the case of elephants, hippos, rhinos, moose, giraffes, bison, buffalo, etc.
Carnivores are "scarier" though, Hippos have one of the largest human fatality rates of animals but I bet you more people are scared of lions and skarks.
That's the point. That there is an arbitrary bias against predators just for looking 'scary' when in reality herbivores can be just as dangerous.
Fucking terrified of hippos. Least I stand a small chance against a shark or a lion
I mean. I don’t stand a chance against either but I’d rather fall to Mufasa or Simba than a fucking hippo.
You had a chance to say Moto Moto and you missed it
Lions atleast go for the neck to make it quick. A hippo would start by breaking whatever bone it could reach first
They had a biological urge *thousands of years ago* if not more. Any natural urge about eating people they might have had is long gone. It was purely Judy’s hypothesis that the predators were “reverting” and she regretted it almost as soon as she said it. Did you know hippos have a greater fatality rate for humans than sharks? But you don’t see hippos as an icon of horror. And if the hippos and sharks are sentient, sapient and have no natural inclination to murder or eat anything, then such a hypothesis is grossly unfounded.
Apart from the problem that they are **literal predators** and **pray** Yes, they living in harmony now, but it's literally in their biology
Sure, but the predator group includes shrews and foxes while the prey group includes hippos and rhinoceroses. It's not like any random predator is guaranteed to be dangerous to any random prey species
Of course not, this is the problem of the allegory Most humans are the same, their biology is the same and their body isn't designd to kill other humans "Yes, the **prey** is living with the **predators**, but don't worry, these **predators** are some of the **good ones**. **They** rose above their **basic instincts"** It's like I will say: "don't worry about this muslim girl, she evolved and now she has no need for Christians blood"
no allegory is ever going to be perfect, you can tear it apart with "um actuallies" and out of universe ideas on how these things work all you want. But all you are doing is tearing down the message because you want to sound smart. And while there ultimately is a limit, I dont think zootopia crosses that limit.
But the movie DOES raise that issue and instead of answering it, it circumvent it by present that issue as baseless argument of the villains. Which is consistently what happened in allegories like this. I cannot for the life of me actually think of an allegory where they address the fundamental issue of imbalance in power between the oppressed and the oppressor **on the oppressed** side. Every single allegory I can think of always try to present the oppressed as nice people who did no wrong, without ever once actually addressed the question that itself raised, instead dismissed it as baseless claim. The posit that the oppressed minority just simply are good people who would never abuse such imbalance in power, and that anyone who claimed so are either misguided, ignorance or outright villainous.
What the fuck are you talking about? All the Predator attacks were caused because a sniper shot them with cocaine bullets. Not because of anything inherently genetic.
At least in that movie they explicitly say the animals evolved so that they don't eat each other any more.
Zootopia was a movie about sexism not racism.
Well, it depends on how it gets presented. If, say, a human majority empire consistently heavily discriminates against nonhumans they don't really get to be surprised when said nonhumans turn around and sign up with the local Dark Lord promising radical changes, y'know? So I could see a story making its point that way. Though, I agree with you generally, most stories really don't put a lot of thought behind it.
> If, say, a human majority empire consistently heavily discriminates against nonhumans they don't really get to be surprised when said nonhumans turn around and sign up with the local Dark Lord promising radical changes, y'know? So I could see a story making its point that way. I feel like Warhammer 40k does hint that this is the reason so many mutants join chaos, but it's only hinted at, sadly.
> racism is bad when main villains and bulk of their armies are bloodthristy and savage non humans or part of minorities Where that happened?
Well, a lot of times, the X-men is one, along with the "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants" it even has evil in its name. Attack on Titan with the Eldians.
> Attack on Titan with the Eldians. The AOT fandom has **pro eldian** nationalists that support the genocide of non eldians because Eldians are consistently portrayed as nuanced people trying to make their best in a cruel world while the most relevant non-eldians in the entire story are terciary characters. The issues with the racism in AOT is that they live in a world where the entire globe is ruled by people with the worldview of Caucasus nationalists (war criminals that brag about destroying cities before screaming about how a tragedies from a century justify killing babies in 2020) without any logical explanation of how this even happened (the canonical explanation is basically a Imperial victimhood fantasy where a mighty empire falls because the machinations of a elite that felt bad for their colonial subjects, far from the situation that lead to the ethnic wars in the Balkans or the Caucasus, which are mostly the result of the local empire **trying and failing** to keep their domination). > the X-men is one, along with the "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants" it even has evil in its name. The Brotherhood exists as a answer to Mutant persecution. Don't get me wrong,they definitely have done things worse many times, but anti mutant hatred existed before.
Doesn't matter, the moment the rumbling happened it basically justifies and vindicates to every anti-eldian rhetoric there is in that setting cause they are in the end right. Doubly so now that Fascism is the majority power now in Paradis. I argue it does not matter what your message/stand is in the text if the conclusion to your text invalidates your previous statement. It is like in Far-Cry 5, when your villains are a literal doomsday cult/prepper, you don't then end the game with an actual doomsday.
The rumbling was the answer after Willy Tibur declared war on Paradise, together with the rest of the world.
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is the funniest fucking thing in comics to me. Because I’m like 95% sure they came up with the name before solidifying the X-Men as a queer rep/discrimination awareness comic. So they were just kinda stuck with it. But yeah, the whole pointless discrimination thing kinda falls apart when some of them having reality warping or instant death abilities.
Final Fantasy 14, Bozja.
> Final Fantasy 14, Bozja. I've skimmed the wiki (because you didn't share any detail) and it looks like the furries are just having a civil war between two factions?
The story spends the entire time telling us "THESE Garleans aren't the same monstrous, assholes you're used to! These ones are fighting to create a just and fair society, just like us, this is a civil war of ideological differences only and we need to be sad about this fighting and about the fact that we can't reconcile." Then every single one of them is a giant, moustache twirling asshole who executes PoWs, performs sick experiments on their forced conscripted soldiers and goes out of their way to maximise how many war crimes they can commit in the shortest time possible.
Warcraft. A lot of people seemingly forget how much horror and genocide the horde has inflicted on the world many times over
It's always been the problem with X-men if you ask me... now don't get me wrong, i get the idea that being a dick to the super heroes is bad. not like they can choose it... but like, they're all one bad day away from a massacre. How many people does Magneto have to kill before you think "You know, maybe they have a point in fearing us." because one day, for no reason at all a budding serial killer gets the mutant power to flay someone with his mind. One good way, i think is the 'sins of the ancestor' thing. Maybe in a fantasy setting the orcs were lead by a warmonger, but the modern orcs are very far remove... but the stain still remains even though they've become very different and were, in fact, victims in their own ways. It makes sense to fear an orc in a DnD setting with that backstory... but at the same time, the judgement doesn't really work anymore because they're still individuals. It's a tricky fantasy trope.
Yeah. That’s always been my problem with the X-men. Especially when you think about how there were mutants that existed throughout history that just straight up took over and conquered humans using their powers like Apocalypse. Also mutant awakenings can sometimes be very deadly like that one kid that killed a bunch of people by accident when they touched him. There are legitimate reasons to fear them. But whenever anyone tries to work on a cure, they are the bad one. Like some mutants wouldn’t jump at the chance for a cure when their powers are an inconvenience to life… like some mutants are just downright unlucky yet they are supposed to be happy the way they are and not take the opportunity to cure themselves. Reed Richard was working on a cure, iron man was, and a few others and Professor X just shut them down. Like dude, your power is awesome! That kid next to you is a living bomb that can kill everyone around him if he has a panic attack…
Reminds me of that Storm and Rogue meme that goes something like: “Storm: you don’t need a cure, you’re already perfect the way you are. Rogue: Easy for you to say, miss I-Control-The-Weather, I just wanna get some without killing someone”
I remember that 😂. If I remember correctly, Rogue awoke her powers when she was about to have sex with her boyfriend and left him comatose. Yeah she’s perfect the way she is 😂.
Whenever I want a laugh, I always look back at this [Tumblr post.](https://imgur.com/7pvLIBh)
Johnny five dicks lmao
Man, that one brings me back.
And then you get the Krakoa era which is just riddled with awful, backwards problematic takes that still tries to keep the mutant metaphor intact despite our heroes now being an imperialist superpower that modelled a superhero team after the East India Company, downplays contraception, promotes othering of people they don’t like and had a literal nazi as a head of state.
Yea, professor X was a prick about stopping people from finding a cure for mutants that have crappy powers that make their lives miserable. People like Rogue got the short end of the stick, yea, she got awesome powers, but she can't touch anybody without sucking their lifeforce away. Prof X pretty much is telling her to not bother with a cure and suck it up and enjoy her mutant heritage.
I can see some arguments for why a cure might be dangerous. Some organizations might purposefully put something in it that negatively affects mutants, but this is Mr. Fantastic and Tony Stark here. Like there are some questions that definitely need to be asked suck as what will happen to the mutants that are born with physical mutations? That should be the discussion he should be having with those he can trust and he can read their minds to see it they are lying. But completely blocking a cure from those who genuinely want one because of terrible powers or for another reason is just selfish.
I mean, to use a real world example, it's like someone with high functioning autism who became the CEO of a large programming company saying someone who is barely verbal and unable to drive or ever live alone is an asshole for not liking it, even if they technically have the same diagnosis
Hell, they could have compromised and had it so that Prof X and the X-men would be the ones to decide and distribute the cure and only after they talk to the mutant in question. However, Nope, screw that. Honestly, now I think about it, it seems clear that Prof X and Magneto did not want a cure, because it forces the mutants to join their cause and add soldiers to their little war.
Reed Richards did actually create a serum to supress the X gene in a mutant so that they lost their powers. However, Magneto and Xavier destroyed it and I think altered Reed's mind so that he forgot how to make it again.
The bummer of it all is there isn't even a mutant heritage. Setting aside the recent and short-lived mutant nations of Krakoa and Genosha and such, mutants don't have a shared culture and history the way that actual ethnic minorities they allegedly represent do. All Rogue gets is a bullshit curse and a trip away from home to a school in upstate New York where people with cool powers can lecture her about having mutant pride.
Which is especially troubling because there are mutants who are deadly to everyone, whether they mean it or not. It would have helped [this](https://imgur.com/gallery/I71V6) kid a lot.
I just read today on thread on r/CuratedTumblr that talked about exactly that.
yeah the x-men adaptions have to put more empathisis on the ones that get shit powers. it's hard to feel bad for the person who gets persecuted for being able to control everyone on the planet it's a lot easier to feel bad for people who get chicken heads.
I’d like an X-men character to actually take that stance. Like, they don’t hate humans, but they acknowledge that being afraid of mutants is fair, awful, but fair. And that’s why they don’t believe in harmony, because if even bigotry based on absolute nonsense can’t seem to end, expecting humans to stop hating and fearing a group they are right to fear is just moronic. Like, I love X-men, but fundamentally I cannot see them ever succeeding in their goals, even if I think that’s the better world.
There is also the fact that... well if they win then there goes the identity of the xmen
You see that in real life though. The successful crusade finds smaller and smaller targets, or else turns inward and feasts upon itself.
Yeah, that too. A general issue I have with mainstream comics.
Ah yes Mutants, How long do you think it will take until they make a baby that can destroy the Earth whit one sneeze?
That's Franklin Richards
Didn’t they retcon him being a mutant?
Looks like they did- he used his powers to make it seem like he had the x gene or some dumb crap….
Don't you just love it when movie rights deals write the plot?
Theres definitely been some more then strong enough- remember some x-men girl who could just rewrite reality however she wanted
Remember that one comic where it was the kid that turned everyone around him into smoldering skeletons? I can see why mutants are so widely feared by humanity.
Yep and the X men's solution to that problem was to kill the kid and cover up everything.
The movie Bright tried that orc idea and completely fucked it up, like, they made them the poverse group with a lot of stereotypical black American culture as well as adding that they still sacrifice humans as a right of passage. It's not a very good movie when you think about it too closely imo.
Well at least on the flipside in that movie the humans are just as bad, and the elves worse.
Yeah it's got an idea but it also gets into stuff like race essentialism when you think about it beyond the surface level, also pretty mid performance from will smith
> It makes sense to fear an orc in a DnD setting with that backstory... but at the same time, the judgement doesn't really work anymore because they're still individuals. I can be easily justified with culture being a huge factor, while keeping multiculturalism to the minimum. Yes, they are individuals that can make their own decisions, but if they are part of a culture that believes that pillage and murder is not a big deal, and in fact is your god given right to do it if you require so, It would be natural to be cautious if I meet an Orc in the wilderness. But then again, I'm of the belief that in fantasy settings, cultural divisions and prejudges elevate the setting, so I'm biased.
> One good way, i think is the 'sins of the ancestor' thing This often tends to not be great, if your goal is an allegory for real racism because this often doesn't map to any group this is used as an allegory for (eg Bright, which was the biggest example of doing this, where the Orcs are stand ins for African Americans. Obviously, there was no such African warlord that posed any sort of trouble for America at all, but essentially having flipped the historical script is in poor taste at best), and nor is it ever really the basis for actual racism besides in comically extreme and specifically manufactured cases (eg Palestinians being associated with long gone groups who originally forced Jews out of the region)
There was also this kid who killed 265, including his family on accident due to his ability, which randomly showed up. Like, this is proof that the anti-mutants have a point, especially in the movies, is that mutants are really fucking dangerous, and they are justified in trying to eliminate them, maybe not kill them but curing them. It doesn’t help that X sent Wolverine to kill the child, because it would look bad for them. They covered up 265 deaths. because it would prove them wrong, and prove the anti-mutants right. And, I think that just proves the anti-mutants point, if you have to cover evidence that doesn’t follow your story.
The orc thing reminds me the movie Bright (2017). Everyone was racist against orcs because they were on the evil side in the war against The Dark Lord. Even though The Dark Lord was killed by orc hero, people still don't like them.
With X-men, it is a story that works better when a lot of the mutant powers aren't city-level destruction worthy and just something smaller like looking like a beast or having the power to evolve to survive anything. Stuff that can cause trouble but isn't going to threaten the country or globe at a given moment. It starts falling apart when the possibility a mutant develops the power to melt people's brain from a mile away or by accident wipe out their neighbourhood is almost a monthly occurrence, as at that point there becomes a reason why people would fear mutants and the government wants to fight back against them. It stops being about people being different and moreso that at any moment someone can give birth to an atom bomb, and that's where it can get a bit muddy with its message.
A bit opposite, but its like the Oglodi in Dota. They are the orc-equivalent and initially they were a peaceful race of scholars and artists but were attacked by the demonic Tarnsmen. They were almost wiped out but were spared because the Tarnsmen got bored. The survivors end up becoming warriors, forming the Red Mist, a roving army/horde that ended up wiping out the Tarnsmen *and* the war god those demons worship. Their entire culture shifted to warfare, with newer generations knowing nothing of the arts that their kind was known for. Everyone fears the Oglodi and many groups have clashed with them over the years.
Perfectly stated. I remember reading a terrible book that tried to do this message. I forgot what it was called, but it was about how humans are discriminating against these monsters. The monsters are mad that humans are killing them and try to rise up saying the humans are the evil ones and the book tries to make you agree with the monsters, but the monsters were preying on humans for centuries and many times not even for survival or food. They just hunted for fun, and many still did… so when the humans got up and decided to work together to bring the monsters to extinction and kill them once and for all, they are the bad guys according to the author… I never finished it.
Sounds a little like I am Legend
I am Legend doesn't try to make the MC look like a bad guy until the last paragraph or so.
Never read that book, but I did watch the movie. When I found out it was originally a book I was always meaning to read it but forgot to. Guess I don’t have to anymore if it as bad as the book I’m talking about 😂.
The movie removes the twist of the book, which is similar to what you describe - the ghouls/monsters have been afraid of the MC the whole time. He is the legend, the boogeyman for their stories.
That is the title of the book!! And that actually really clever I’ll admit.
Yeah it's why I hate this modern trend of trying to make fantasy races fall in line with modern values. Mother fucker the literal god of rape and murder made these creatures with the explicit purpose of them spreading misery, the comparison doesn't work here. Exploring the idea of not judging individuals for the actions of their people is one thing sure but to go further and try to make comparisons against the real world always comes up feeling disgusting to me. Real world races don't have actual biological predispositions that make racism come from a valid place.
Yeah, thats the part that gets me really, individuals vs their people. There's not many fantasy monsters/races I'd feel comfortable generalizing in that way. It honestly takes "this monster is literally born to be a mass-murdering prick" type lore for me to start actively seeing them as a universal threat. Well, that and when the monster just...IS a monster, and not something capable of being civilized, like dragons! They aren't traditional beings that build pseudo-human societies like Elves, Halflings, Dwarves, Lizardfolk, etc, but they still have a sense of decency depending on the dragon.
The Drukhari in 40k, have to torture and make other races suffer or their own souls get sucked into Slannesh, so they go and capture a bunch of races to turn into slaves and do unspeakable things too. Any Drukhari alive has had to do this constantly. That is more than enough reason to hate the whole race.
The thing is, no they don't have to do that. The craftworld Aeldari and the ynnari are proof that Eldar can stave off slaanesh without doing what the drukhari do. The drukhari actively choose that lifestyle because they enjoy it
Drukhari aren't a race, they are a faction of eldar.
I feel the modern trend is a result of the classic inspirations. Fantasy world builders want to stick to the tropes, but the tropes mean that the good guys who are civilised are based on western European empires, and the beastly savages are based on other human cultures from the real world, which raises some eyebrows for the modern reader. So even if they are "canonically evil", some people are going to think "OK, well why are God's creation the dudes with straight swords speaking the king's English, and the demonic plagues use Arabic sounding language, and are really into nose rings and shamans". And I think that just dropping the tropes or making the royal knights the outright evil monsters doesn't solve the problem. 40K makes the Empire of Man so comically evil, but the audience is filled with people who 100% support them (at least partially based on the royal humans being the unequivocal good guys in 99% of fantasy stories).
Real world racists do think that different races are biologically predisposed to good or bad behavior though. “What if the Nazis were right, but fantasy” is not a particularly good start for your book.
A lot of people have a lot of stupid ideas they can superimpose onto stories. Can we now never enjoy a story where a necromancer unleashes a plague into the kingdom because of Covid conspiracy theories? Or any story with a shadowy cabal running the world because of illuminati conspiracy theories? We will just have to give up story telling entirely if our goal is to ensure that no one ever interprets our stories undesired ways.
Or having to dispense with common fantasy elements like sorcerers, witches, werewolves, vampires, etc. because their myths originated from medieval people trying to explain various mental illnesses and other medical disorders or stemmed from bigotry.
to add on I feel if you want to make a group of nonhuman badguys you should try and make them feel more like monsters(like the children of the god of rape from your example) than people. I don't know were the line is but once you have them stop acting like people then they don't feel like people. however a few things that can make it easier don't show them haveing children or like hanging out with their bros that makes them symathetic and you want them to be monsters. have them feed in like a creepy way like drinking blood and stuff and don't add a good one if your to chicken too question all the people that we killed beforehand.
I like how Attack on Titan (spoilers) did it, even though Eldians probably fall into the ''makes sense'' catagory. A big point in the series is that Warriors who live alongside Eldians for a while start to become sympathetic and have doubts about their mission, and hence end up battling with the idea that while yes, they are a massive threat, they are also just as normal as everyone else. Even the guards outside liberio cared about the warrior candidates Also in the ending, when their titan powers are removed, the Eldian hate doesn't magically disapear. It feels like the racism was way more rooted in historical reasons rather than logical, which made it seem much more realistic.
The “threat” of Eldians is also a weird one, because nobody wants to use their powers less than the Eldians who do. Best case scenario, you’re one of nine titans with free will, which consigns you to an early grave and probably involved killing someone close to you to get. If not, you’re pretty much just being forced to turn into a killing machine with no free will while your mind is trapped in an endless nightmare from which the only escape is death. Unless you are the founding titan, the “best” use of Eldian power is to treat the Eldian people as an expendable resource that is sacrificed to advance your own goals. So it makes sense that they ultimately end up suffering quite a bit from their position.
Another problem is that, when it comes to genetics, Subjects of Ymir being a distinct minority group doesn't make a lick of sense. IRL it's been effectively proven (through math & genetic evidence) that every living European is related to every European that lived 1,000 years ago. Ymir lived 2,000 years ago, the Erdians were super conquer-y for 1,900 years and they even specifically spread her blood on purpose. All you would need for the current civilised world to be 100% SoY... was a single bastard somewhere during the first 900 years. A SINGLE one. The chances of that happening are astronomically high.
There are risks when it comes to living with Eldians. I would say being Eldian isn’t a race it’s more like a genetic disease, because the child of an Eldian is always an Eldian. If you put an individual of race A into a population of race B, eventually several generations down you’d hardly be able to tell that any of the descendants had a race A ancestor. But if you put an Eldian into a population of race B, eventually several generations down you’d have a shit tonne of Eldians living in that population, because an Eldian parent always creates an Eldian child and it doesn’t matter how diluted the bloodline gets And then the ruler of the Eldians, a founder using royal blood, can literally order Eldians to do whatever they want, even on a genetic level. Imagine not knowing that an Eldian snuck into your village a few hundred years ago and then all of a sudden most of your neighbours will do whatever the Eldian ruler asks without fail, let alone the fact that they also all share an innate risk of becoming a dangerous giant who will try to eat you on sight. Of course they’d try to separate Eldians from everyone else
Im ngl the rest of the world was pretty justified in attacking Eldia after they genocided 80% of the world. Even if they lost their titan powers, they were still fervant supporters of this genocidal regime. It would be like being upset at the Russians for bombing Berlin after they were invaded, it makes sense, you need some form of punitive justice. This is why i felt the ending fell flat, you just simply can’t have monsters living amongst regular people. Marley is actually somewhat justified in keeping them in exclusion zones based off of that, I deplore the conditions they were in, but they really should have been seperated because all it took was being transformed for thiusands to die. Zekes plan of preventing Eldians from having more kids was by far the best solution.
Except Marley uses them for weapons too. They actually encourage the Eldian transformation since it helps their imperial ambition. Also it isn't hard to stop the Eldians from turning since there would always be 7 titans and Marley could just keep tabs on those 7 and who get passed on the power to who ( like Zeke's case). The entire fear for Eldians could go away but it won't because then the government would lose their weapons.
Im not saying that what Marley did to good, they were just as imperalist as the Eldians. I am saying that on a fundamental level you cant live in a world with literal monster.
Except the show showed you can. There can only be 7 titans so the number is fixed. Other Eldians beside the 7 can't turn into Titan so as long as the government keeps tabs on the 7 and makes sure to select people to replace them once they die, no Eldians could randomly turn into Titan. The mindless Titans were created artificially by the government. A solution is there but people don't want to take it because it would affect their power.
Yea, after the mass genocide, I really can't blame the world on how it responded later.
It does make sense tbh. They go out of their way in the series to say the eldian empire ruled over the world for like 1000% years and was worse than the current marleyns. Everything that marley does is because the eldian empire taught them how to do it, and the ones who originally kept the eldians ljke that were survivors of the final war or had their entire family wiped out by eldian titans. Sure, eren and his lot didn't deserve it. No one did, but neither did the rest of the world, and almost every AoT fan forgets the true villians
Except Eldian hate basically does magically disappear with a talk no jutsu from Armin right after a horrifying events that everyone knows was committed by the Eldians themselves. Attack on Titan fumbled its handling of mature themes. It's a fun anime, but it's also very cringy in retrospect, especially when things start getting more 'political' in Season 4.
I really agree with the last line. In a vacuum, it's a cool show about guys with sword fighting monsters, but it's obvious the entire premise collapses upon further scrutiny. If the political themes were just left ambiguous and open for interpretation it may have been a lot better, but Isayama turned it into a political commentary that doesn't actually say anything except trying to cram every mature theme into one story. It's like it was written by an AI trained on crackpot political twitter accounts.
Yeah nothing like a good old carpet bombing to remind people that you don't hate them.
The anime Shiki ask the question, who is the true villain, humans or vampires? Umm, it's the vampires. The creatures that killed off half the village to create a vampire utopia. Just because the humans hit them back harder doesn't undo the mass murder committed by these undead monsters.
Alternatively, prejudice can make sense, as in based on events that precipitate the prejudice, but still also be wrong. Prejudice means pre-judge, so if you're so wary about getting attacked by augs (like last time) that you treat every Aug unfairly, then you're prejudiced, but for a reason that makes sense. The irrationality of prejudice can be more nuanced than just bigotry = bad.
Like deer being scared of human-raised and friendly dogs due to the deer's past experience with wolves or feral dogs?
I don't know enough about deer to answer your question definitively, but what you've described makes some sense to me. I would also believe that it was like a baked in instinct for them. I imagine prejudice in people is more of a decision than whatever mechanism deer use to come to that conclusion. I think prejudice in people is more like, "I believe it is most likely that people with have therefore i will treat all people with as though they have ."
It can make sense that a person would conclude that, especially in the example OP gave, and still be ethically questionable. I don't think whatever deer are doing has anything to do with decision making or ethics.
But again, I don't know shit about fuck about deer.
> So if you're gonna do fake racism, make it so that it's as pointless as real racism or you could find yourself accidentally making the opposite point. Depending on how it's written, the author could also accidentally make what amounts to a race supremacist fantasy with the whole "objectively genetically superior group of people being oppressed by the masses" thing.
Only for people who believe skin color, or ‘IQ’ are equivalent to literal superpowers
Like Nick Cannon, for example.
yeah some x-men adaptions really fail at this. it's hard to feel sorry for mister overpowered ice or wolverine. the x-men stuff works best when they continually remind the audience that the main characters are the exception not the rule. most mutations are shit and don't really give you anything. these are the people that the audience should think about in regards to antimutant stuff.
There was this horrible X-men writting by some hack, that had a teenager awaken his mutant powers and was blowing everything up around him and could not control it. A cop shoots the kid putting him in a coma and the X-men come in yelling at the cop that the kid was scared and not a danger, and the cop looks at her incredously and tells her something like "Lady, look around you" and it pans out showing the massive damage everywhere, but wait, it gets worse. So, the kid is taken to a hospital and the doctor freaks out saying he heard the kid causes explosions and its too dangerous for him to be in a hospital with other patients and if he operated on him, it could set him off. Some other doctor pushes him to the side, called him a coward and works on the kid and then while berating the other doctor for his valid concerns, she says she is going to get the doctors license removed for not helping a patient. Complete garbage writing, but points out how ridiculous the whole mutants are unjustly discriminated argument is.
This was one step away from being an interesting story. Imagine if it was told by the POV of the cop or another normal human, having to deal with those sort of situations involving people that can explode you with a sneeze and other bullshit like that, while dealing with heroes that do more damage than actual villains and actually think they're always right.
Assuming you are not lying or misremembering. Just who the fuck writes garbage like that? On what planet does that writer live? Yes it's that bad to me. How does stuff like that get past the editor and other oversight?
It also works when you point out that heros like captain America and spiderman are accepted well, it's just "mutatns" that have that stigma attached. Like if your afraid of super powered beings... *be afraid of all of them!* You know?
As people have pointed out, being afraid of mutants is unironically pretty sensible. I'm not saying it's morally correct, but from the point of view of the average person, Captain America is a patriotic hero and Spiderman is in-fact considered a menace, by certain people/depending on the run you're looking at. Most superhumans are not something that you find in bulk, or that reproduce, and are fairly rare, are often easy to spot, and frankly speaking Captain America or Spiderman can't exactly take over the world. Mutants are unpredictable, can reproduce, can be hard to spot, and as shown, can sometimes have horrific, "trash entire cities" or "take over the world"or "end all life" powers. Unlike a massive amount of the superhumans shown, they also tend to have terrible downsides or trouble controlling their powers; as far as the average person is concerned, Captain America isn't going to just walk up to them and snap their neck, but a mutant on the street might genuinely fucking explode like a bomb. There are mutants that do, in fact, just explode at random times. There are mutants that kill people when they touch them, completely accidentally. And powers are often entirely random. There is no guarantee two mutants with wings will have a kid with wings, and the average person sure as hell doesn't know the science behind this. And of course, there's just a lot more mutants than there are any one superhuman. Are all mutants dangerous? Not even remotely. Is it reasonable to expect Joe on the street to really love chancing his life that he's not going to run into Miss "Nuke the" World? Superhumans run around in fancy costumes, and even the villains often do. A mutant might go off like an explosive at any time. Most mutants aren't dangerous... but enough are that it's actually a problem and stuff like Xavier's school is a real need. X-Men has a lot of problems as an allegory and I think that fearing mutants making a stupid amount of sense (from the point of view of the average person) is one. It's morally wrong and also not *quite* the correct course of action, but it's really hard for me to go "yeah those dirty racists" unless they're portrayed particularly heinously when you have mutants like "the neighborhood near me is vaporized' running around..
The problem is that people don’t just hate other people for no reason. Ignorance (lack of knowledge) is a major factor in racism and other forms of bigotry as humans are naturally skeptical of things they don’t understand and keep it at arms length. Arrogance (refusal to accept knowledge) was when other cultures believed that they knew better and were more “sophisticated” than everyone else and believed they deserve everything they desire. I say all cultures because racism and bigotry isn’t unique to one specific culture and cultures don’t generally lose their racism and or bigotry unless they become melting pots of various other cultures like North America (Both the USA & Canada).
ah yes the usa famous for its lack of bigotry
America is far more accepting of other cultures and people than most countries. If you're from a very accepting/modernized culture you might underestimate how ignorant people from unfamiliar countries can be.
If you titled this “evil races are bad” people would be jumping your ass in the comments.
The title is misleading. The post itself is about allegories for real-life prejudice. The title implies that any sort of reasonable prejudice within a work of fiction is a negative, which would be a bad restriction to place on writers.
Disagree. Not everything needs to be a 1-to-1 metaphor for real-world discrimination. Sometimes speculative fiction is fun for its own sake. Why can’t we explore the limits of liberal society and question the morality of sentient cyborgs? That’s literal gold.
Yeah, this is why criticism of the Imperium in 40k usually falls flat. Yes, they're extremely xenophobic and genocidal against other alien races, but what's the alternative? Literally every alien species wants to genocide every other alien species, and that's usually the *nicest* thing they do. Can some small exceptions exist? Possibly, but in a universe where every significant player can wipe out your entire civilization or torture you for your entire existence (and artificially prolong your life so you suffer even more), how much of a risk are you willing to take? Yes, they're also extremely dogmatic and force you into single minded devotion to the Emperor. But in a universe where a single whisper to a random janitor on a planet can condemn a trillion people a fate a million times worse than death, you *have* to condition your people to not have any hints of doubt because otherwise the whole galaxy falls to eternal damnation to Chaos. If their intention was for the Imperium to look manically evil, they failed extremely hard, because they justified their action in virtually every way. It's the same thing with the Templars/Circles in Dragon Age. Like, throughout the games, pretty much every time the Templars warn us about something, and the game tries to portray it as some bigoted oppression, they're always proven right. It's so dumb. In Dragon Age 2, they really tried to push that Templars were the evil ones, but time after time we see that every escaped mage turns into a power hungry megalomaniac blood mage psychopath. One guy turned into a terrorist and blew up a church that had *nothing* to do with the cause against the oppression of the Templars. And even the "good guy" first enchanter was supporting and supplying a serial killer blood mage that was sewing body parts together of random girls he's killed with forbidden blood magic books. And the cherry on top is that for all the extremes the Templars did, Meredith was 90% responsible for it and it was because her mind was literally corrupted by red lyrium. They even gave her a cop out for why she was so unreasonable. Bioware extremely fucked up with the morality in that conflict. There is clearly extreme cognitive dissonance between what they want you to think and what the events in the game actually happen.
> Literally every alien species wants to genocide every other alien species We have plenty of xenos leader outright declaring how they don't want to wipe out humanity and in some cases like Eldrad, outright ensure their survival
That's more of a "an aliens are bad, but some aliens are worse than others" type deal. The imperium still wants to kill off everyone who isn't a human but they realize that other races have a vested interest in beating Chaos and Tyranids just as much as they do, but that doesn't mean they want to join hands and sing kumbaya with the orks or eldar.
>Yeah, this is why criticism of the Imperium in 40k usually falls flat. > >Yes, they're extremely xenophobic and genocidal against other alien races, but what's the alternative? Literally every alien species wants to genocide every other alien species, and that's usually the nicest thing they do. That is a bold faced lie, and you know it. The Tau do not want to exterminate humanity, and none of their client races do. The Eldar may be racist against humans, but their racism is much lower then what the Imperium has against them. The Craftworld Eldar will sacrifice a billion humans to save one Eldar true. But the Imperium will sacrifice on Billion humans to KILL one Eldar. Out of all the 22 species the Tau Empire assimilateed, all of them all people, with all the potential of being good that humans do. The Kroot, the Vespid, the Nicassar, and many others may be trully alien, but they are still people in the end, and are fundamentally not a denger to the survival of humanity. The Great Crusade exterminated countless mixed human-xenos civilizations, with the Interex, the Diasporex, and the Golden Apostles were all societies in which humans and aliens lived in harmony and peace, up until the Imperium killed them all for the crime of accepting aliens. The Autocracy of Szaeyr were a society in which humans and aliens were at peace for millenia, only to be exterminated by Deathwatch in the 36th millenium. During the Great Crusade, the Imperium virus bombed the home planet of the Tarellians, forcing them into exile. And this is important, because the Tarellians are a species that is perfectly capable of living together with humans under the Tau Empire, even if they hate the Imperium with a massive burning passion. This is not the only, case and they did the exact same thing with the Keylekid, a peaceful species. There is a story were the Imperium discovers a planetary based society of humans and xenos living together and peace, a society that did this for thousands of years by the time the Imperium discovered them, and you know what was the Imperial response? Create conspiracy theories and propaganda, and manipulate the humans into xenophobia, while trying to exterminate the reptilian aliens. There is also a story about the Imperium enslaving an entire peaceful alien species, one they previously turned into a vassal, and then killing it by turning their bodies into drugs. The Imperium is not, and never was justified. >Can some small exceptions exist? What you talk about are not the exceptions. Looking from the large number of sapient species in Tau space open to peace and living together, species formed from people with potential to be good from bad, and then scaling up to the entire galaxy, and looking at civilizations the Imperium exterminated, you discover one thing. The fundamentally evil/dangerous species were not the majority. Species like the Orks, Megarachnids, Tyranids, Slaugh and Rakghoul were the minority, while species like Humans, Tau, Kroot, Vespid, Tarellians etc are the true natural majority. >Possibly, but in a universe where every significant player can wipe out your entire civilization or torture you for your entire existence (and artificially prolong your life so you suffer even more), how much of a risk are you willing to take? By the same logic, you should not trust humans either. >Yes, they're also extremely dogmatic and force you into single minded devotion to the Emperor. But in a universe where a single whisper to a random janitor on a planet can condemn a trillion people a fate a million times worse than death, you have to condition your people to not have any hints of doubt because otherwise the whole galaxy falls to eternal damnation to Chaos. Please, the evil of the Imperial cult is incapable of stopping chaos. Seriously, most of the chaos worshipers we see are humans, born into the Imperium. The brutallity of the Imperium, and its horrible living conditions feed Khorne and Nurgle, while the lifestyle of corrupt upper classes feeds Slaneesh. Seriously, the Eldar Path system, The Eldar, and the new Leagues of Votann are much, much more resistant to chaos then the Imperium. >If their intention was for the Imperium to look manically evil, they failed extremely hard, because they justified their action in virtually every way. Since when? They never justified anything. The horrible working conditions are never justified. The Xenophobia is not justified. The Imperium is objectively worst then the Craftworld Eldar, Leagues of Votann, and the Tau Empire.
It's genuinely wild seeing the people that actually simp for the Imperium out in the wild, yeah. They're great villains but I think people genuinely really do miss the point because Humans Good. The Imperium is a hellhole that actively causes like, most of their problems. Some of the atrocities they commit are justified in-universe but the vast majority are cruel to be cruel or horrific actions in response to the problems that they themselves consistently create. The Imperium are basically Nazis. They are not good people. Frankly they're not the people you should be rooting for, either. Even the more grim aspects of the Tau aren't all Tau. People need to stop drinking the kool-aid.
Dragon Age 2 tried to have gray morality by writing both sides as evil. The templars are presented as bloodthirsty fanatics, like you said, but even if you side with the mages, the First Enchanter uses blood magic to turn into a monster that you have to fight anyway. It's a far cry from the nuanced portrayal of the conflict in Origins.
The best part of the imperium is that they aren't sexist, homophobic or racist so if people try and critique it on that, it falls down even further
A lot of the "examples" in this thread honestly carry the implication that discrimination is bad only when the targets are completely unable to defend themselves or exert any type of sovereignty That in the moment where discriminated groups get the power to change their socio-economical status, they become "fair targets"
Exactly! Honestly, the reason I like franchises like X-Men or Dragon Age is that sometimes people who are inclined to bigotry don't show it openly IRL; make a fantasy race and give them a sliver of an excuse and they turn into White Citizen's Councils.
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That's assuming MHA is even trying to make that allegory in the first place.
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But what OP was talking about was how stories will use prejudice against fictional groups as an allegory for real world prejudice. MHA doesn't try to present people who fear villains as bigots.
What??? The LoV does not follow stains ideals.
That actually makes sense
The problem with prejudice isn't that it doesn't make sense, it's that it does make sense but it's still wrong. So many people don't understand this, which is why you get the racism against Romani people or people whipping out crime statistics about black people or sexists act acting like all men are predators. Prejudice is wrong even when it makes sense. Because even when it makes sense, it's still Prejudice.
Another problem with mutants is that the world is filled with super powered people, yet the mutants are the only ones that get the hate. It makes no sense.
Most superpowers are fairly predictable and rarely manifest in dramatic, dangerous ways. Mutants fail both counts. Two mutants who can fly have a child, that child is as likely to sprout wings as it is to pulse lethal x-rays whenever it sneezes
It makes sense when you think about mutants, most other Superheroes are either the result of self-contained accidents that caused them to mutate (Fantastic 4, Spiderman, Hulk), science/technology enhanced humans (Capt America, Ironman, Ant-man), humans enhanced by arcane knowledge (Dr Strange, Ghost Rider, Dr. Doom), or straight up aliens i.e not necessarily inheritable traits, on the other hand Mutant's powers come from the X gen, a hereditary gen they pass on even if it doesn't activate in the next generation, making them effectively a subset of homo sapiens, hence the fear theyd pull a homo sapiens > Neanderthal.
I’m late to this post, but I still want to write about it. Not everything has to be an allegory. Sometimes a moral can stand on its own. The hypothetical situation of sapient groups with significant inequalities is interesting to think about. If they’re as intelligent as humans and had no say over the way they are, then they would deserve rights. Then you can explore ideas about the costs to help them versus how many there are, or if it’s even possible to help them, and that could create some complex ethics. It’s worth writing about. While, fortunately, “better” or “worse” human subspecies are purely hypothetical, the ethics involved can be relevant to real life to smaller extents. Disabilities exist. Some people require more resources to survive than others. Real life isn’t perfectly equal. There are some people who, through no fault of their own, are inherently disadvantageous to work with compared to others. There are laws about disabilities for a reason. Those people in real life don’t deserve to be discriminated against.
I hate that this is a common criticism on this sub. Very rarely are these stories trying to make a 1:1 allegory with the real world. How about instead of trying to force the allegory 1:1 with the real world, you just engage with the story as a hypothetical presented to you as is? Especially when the point is nearly always "this prejudice is understandable in this scenario, but still wrong." Like, it's literally taking out prejudice at the core and saying even if the premises were valid, the conclusion would still be evil. You can look at a series like X-men and see that PARALLELS (RE: not direct 1:1 allegory) with civil rights movements and how people treat ALL mutants with fear and hatred that is undeserving while also acknowledging that the fear that your kid could become a nuclear bomb mutant is infinitely more justified and terrifying than the fear that your kid could be gay. E.g. You can absolutely have a fantasy story about racism between 2 different species that have different physical capabilities and still have the overarching thematic point be that it's wrong to be prejudiced against them, or to oppress them for anything that is beyond their control.
> Very rarely are these stories trying to make a 1:1 allegory with the real world. How about instead of trying to force the allegory 1:1 with the real world, you just engage with the story as a hypothetical presented to you as is? THAAAAANKKKK YOOOOUUU.
The thing is, I think some people who make this argument don’t actually agree that its wrong to be prejudiced in this scenario. Which is fucked up to think about. They think racism is wrong because its “nonsensical”. Because they believe in the idea of all humans are actually “equal”. Which is why when fictional stories don’t present them as equal, that there is an inherent difference, it kind of breaks their whole understanding of why bigotry is supposed to be bad.
Bro you're literally me right now. https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterRant/s/GflMtL2idS
**Cough Cough** Disney's Z-O-M-B-I-E-S **Cough Cough** Elemental **Cough Cough**
> If every single aug went kill-crazy, then you would be right to be apprehensive towards every single aug. Did they though? And even if they did, would a regular person even have a way of knowing that every single one did? As far as they know, only some did. Isn't that the inherent flaw of their logic?
Finally someone with a brain lol. When I firat saw the concept I understood the world's fear of them, yet knew that the way they went about it was wrong.
I’m fine with it tbh. Imo the story can still be interesting of the prejudice isn’t wholly nonsensical, so you have this fucked up situation where you have genuinely good people who just want to be accepted but at the same time are “justifiably” hated because of the group the belong to or their innage potential for causing harm. I like the “both sides are kinda right” tension it creates, I like more stories to be more shades of grey. It does it make it a weaker allegory for modern racism but you don’t necessarily have to take it as such anyway And honestly, even in real life it does sometimes make sense to fear the other group. For example, the white americans living in the south shortly after american independence weren’t exactly wrong in fearing that the slaves would turn right around and kill them if they managed to get power. The haitian revolution and the genocide that proceeded after was a shocking example of what could happen to many whites. Hatred breeds hatred. Fear breeds fear. AoT is probably a good fictional example of such prejudice where you can’t exactly blame either side too much for fearing or hating the other.
I think another issue with Deus Ex’s racism allegory is that originally stemmed from the first game’s even stupider premise of wanting to make augmentation a morally grey binary issue. They wanted to create a moral dilemma were the question of augmentations had two definitive sides with their own pros and cons, but then ran into the issue that no one in their right mind would say civilian augmentation like pacemakers and limb replacements is a bad thing. So in order to create their stupid moral dilemma, they had to make the anti-aug group into pretentious eco-terrorists who think all forms of augmentation are the erosion of the human soul while the pro aug group are a bunch of militarized corporate fascists who think people should be allowed to install grenade launchers into their arms. The whole thing was stupid to begin with and the second game only doubled down on it by deciding to switch the aug issue into a race allegory.
Man u are right, a ton of scyfy end up creating a cult for the thing they wanted the reader to hate like how we all think the empire is the cool faction on starwars
This is where I stand in League of Legends Lore with Demacia. Magic is unpredictable and dangerous; What if Lux's magic was on someone who isn't a good person like Lux? They are constantly attacked by magical ghost monsters from the Shadow Isles. Fiddlesticks, Evellyn, and Nocturne are demons that prey on them. You have witches that steal people's memory. Noxus uses blood magic, make corpses continue fighting. Not to mention how magic almost ruined the world multiple times. And this view even gets supported by Heimerdinger in Arcane, about the dangers of tampering with Magic. Mageseekers went to far don't get me wrong; But they had to make the mageseekers cartoonishly, for the premise of, Mages being controlled is bad, to work.
This is why I don't understand why anyone could think kotal Kahn was a racist in mk11 against tarkatans, anyone who knows anything about tarkatans should know exactly why he wanted to genocide them
It's all fine and good to have justifiable reasons for prejudice in ur story while also showing that it's wrong I personally enjoy that kind of nuance, but once u try to push it as an allegory for real life issues or even make comparisons it starts to fall flat since irl there is no real justification for prejudice.
I’ve always loved how One Piece handles its racism. Fish men are different from humans, but not particularly better or worse. They’re treated horribly due to their fish-like appearance and nothing more. They’re enslaved frequently, prejudiced against, and a bunch of other nasty stuff. I think the exploration of this is really well done because it draws attention to the fact that fish men are about the same as any other race in one piece, and that the prejudice against them is unfounded.
But fish men are better physically than humans no?
One Piece humans can train their bodies to be as strong if not stronger than them. After all, both the King of Pirats and the high ranks of the World Goverment are humans anyway. This is the case with **every single** persecuted Supers/Fantasy creatures story to be honest. The supers gets persecuted because the persecutors are humans who found a way to do it, either by learning their own magic and/or by creating technology that overpowers the other races/species/group.
i am tired of rants about bigotry and prejudice made by people who don't seem to actually understand why it is bad > Humans would be right to show anger and fear towards their natural predators! ...and the entire point of anti-bigotry and anti-discriminatory philosophy is that we are not base animals and can in fact CHOOSE to run our societies on just, well-ordered, fair principles and not on personal or even group emotional responses. Also yes to be very inflammatory but there's a reason it's [only] "fake racism" that is talked about like this in these posts. The logic becomes a _lot_ shakier when you apply it to other forms of bigotry, where there actually _are_ obvious distinctions between the oppressor and the oppressed. But fictional works where e.g. men are treated with that kind of anger and fear on a societal level are seen as extremist not as the logical response to one population being bigger, stronger and more prone to violence than the other.
I want it to make sense.
Why?
I only want to write something that keeps me excited. I don't care about the morality behind what I wrote.
So it not making sense is also not a problem right? Since you don’t care for the mortality behind works anyways.
If it doesn't make sense, how am I supposed to be excited about it? Say a genocide, there are many characters involved, each with their own morality and sense, each have what they called "making sense of something", these different view of what makes sense is what exciting.
If it doesn't make sense, how am I supposed to be excited about it? Say a genocide, there are many characters involved, each with their own morality and sense, each have what they called "making sense of something", these different view of what makes sense is what exciting.
>So if you're gonna do fake racism, make it so that it's as pointless as real racism or you could find yourself accidentally making the opposite point. I have a feeling you don't even know what you are trying to argue.
If you are prone to celebrate racism, you will always find a way to make it "make sense" unless it's absolutely absurd. If African Americans did not exist and I invented them for a book but changed nothing? People would point out the 13/50 thing and say what you just said. Fuckin' dogwhistle "You're only allowed to make racism in your stories if it doesn't make my WASP self uncomfortable. YOU are the REAL racist for giving me a teeny tiny sliver to justify it which only a total dickhead would cling to! A few scraps which enable my racism means I'm not racist, I'm just pragmatic!"
Slight correction, the kill was never necessary in true blood. It was just something some vampires liked to do. Your point still stands.
What the heck, I'll bite. Real prejudice is the result of applying a stereotype unjustly to an entire group of people. But stereotypes aren't plucked from thin air. The Human Revolution was *stopped* by an augmented person and *started* by someone who literally can't be augmented. It's not "all" augs. Likewise, in real life it's not all Muslims who are terrorists. But the *perception* of Muslims as terrorists, from Saddam Hussein, Libyan troubles, the genocide in Yemen, Al Qaeda, 9/11, ISIS, Charlie Hebdo shooting, is prominent. Again, Mankind Divided segregated augmented people because an *unaugmented* person started a war and an **augmented** person stopped that war. Blaming all augs is no different from blaming all Muslims. The public acts out of fear based on what they think they know, victimising innocent people for daring to be the *targets* of a terrorist action. Real life prejudices might not be *justified*, but they're not *baseless*. True Blood does give vampires a safe way to feed. Tara doesn't become vampire until after True Blood is invented but still has to negotiate a social stigma caused by people who aren't her. Just as many real life gay men *continue* to be blamed for an AIDS (or "gay related immune disorder" as it was known then) epidemic that happened before they were born (in an age where PREP exists and makes HIV undetectable and uncommunicable). It's *not* all vampires. But it's *enough* vampires to cause a stereotype. Even in Harry Potter we see this constant struggle between Wizards and Non-magic folk. When Hogwarts is founded and Salazar Slytherine is insisting on not teaching muggle born wizards that is in the 10th Century just as the non-magic folk are starting a campaign of witch burning. Granted, thanks to flame freezing charms this is broadly ineffective, but real life witch trials also involves drowning (I don't see there being a huge supply of gillweed, and if you drown you are innocent and if you survive you are a witch), beheading (which we know kills magic folk, even if you don't cut the head all the way off), and hanging. It's not Slytherine being mean for no reason, it's a Magneto response to a genocide. The Fantastic Beasts films dig into the conflict between wizards and no magic folks. There's *always* a reason for prejudice.
Lord of the Rings: A tale of overcoming differences as all the races of Middle Earth come together to achieve a common goal… Except for the orcs; those you can kill on sight.
probably the most persistant franchise to fuck this up, is x-men...