There was, however, talk about low essence causing social problems and even possibly negative qualities.
I think these are fine elements, and modern SR handled this aspect better than say... Cyberpunk where the stat isn't just some abstract 'soul' thing, but Empathy itself.
In SR, at least in 4e and 5e, aside from social limits, the only downsides are POTENTIAL complications, which put the power to explore those things in the hands of the player rather than making sweeping statements. If you WANT to have a creepy 'ware user, your all good, but the system isn't saying 'every quadriplegic in the setting is now a sociopath.'
Superhuman Psychosis is a great example of an interesting take on 'cyberpsychosis,' focusing instead on how you feel about the results instead of any sort of existentialist reading of the human body, and the implication that you were already a bit of a jerk to begin with. Bonus points in that it was worded in a way that a mage or adept could also take it.
Maybe it's time for the game to ground-up rethink essence entirely. Drop it, think of something else.
I think 6e finally fixed the 'core issue' though without much re-imagining, by simply switching what it represented and said about the person, while keeping every other element (Mainly, health complications leading up to death to prevent you from just shoving a ton of 'ware into your body as fast as you can). A lot of people face a lot of bad faith explorations of the validity of their existence already, and by essence not being the primary 'question' of 'ware, more interesting questions (Like the justice of unequal access to 'ware hurting a meritocracy, or how it may change your socialization) are opened up. 'Does this robot arm make you less human the second you socket it in' is a far less interesting question to ponder about human nature than 'What might it do to someone's outlook on the world to be suddenly elevated to a super genius at the age of 4 and raised taking college level courses because their parents got them cerebral enhancements in pre-school to get them every advantage they could get?' Not every child genius automatically becomes a sociopath after all.
This change is unironically one of the best examples of why edition changes are a good spot to change lore without any justification and why that is a healthy thing to do, rather than making every change justified by an event. Limbs already exist in the real world right now that are augmentative beyond what humans can do (like artifical legs for sprinters) or which are MMIs. It was just time to stop playing wack a mole and address the fact that most of the interesting stuff about 'ware had very little to do with the 'spiritual implications.'
That being said, the reasons for orcs being closely associated with people of color is due to descriptions of such races using key words that white supremacists have used in the past to describe people of color. For a quick introduction, check out this from TolkienGateway.net.
This. Another very good read on this is https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2019/6/30/orcs-britons-and-the-martial-race-myth-part-ii-theyre-not-human
Yes.... goooood.... feed me sources for future academic works.
Orks are stand ins for poor people. They just seem like stand ins for blacks because Shadowrun is written and read by Americans, and deals with an urban context. Consider this list:
- reproduce fast, including a high rate of multiple births
- mature fast, become very large and strong at an unusually young age
- continue to be large and strong into adulthood
- speak an incomprehensible language of their own devising
- are intellectually inferior
- eat strongly spiced food cooked over primitive live fire
- like heavily modded ("yerzed out") cars
- have their own musical subculture that outsiders don't understand
How many of these also fit negative stereotypes about hillbillies and rednecks? I count 4, maybe 5. How many fit the stereotype of the Australian Bogan? Again, I count 4. The British Chav? Also 4.
That list is very general, (I count 7 that could be applied to what one might call a 'redneck if you include stuff like coal rolling) but that is the tricky thing about metaphors: they could apply to a LOT of things. Some things on those list were used are very old indeed, Like how Malthusian economic policies were enacted that argued it was moral and necessary to block food aid to Ireland during the famine because they were rapidly breeding idiots who deserve to die due to their foolish population explosion.
However, the coding used to clue you into what Orks and Trolls actually represent, not just what people might believe about them, is very specific.
Obviously this doesn't hold true in the entire setting (I am not sure exactly what the Black Forest Trolls are meant to represent, if anything! I assume they are just a part of the greater balkanization of the world to help accelerate the reduction of the centralized power of nation states compared to corporations), but especially in the context of the primary setting that most players are going to see. One clever thing SR does is couch who is being vicitimized, but doesn't couch who is the victimizers. MoM could be a stand in for a lot of groups, but what Humanis represents is rather obvious and intentional. Part of the power of SR's messaging is this directness about what evils exist in the real world.