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State of 6e today

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penllawen

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« Reply #210 on: <07-01-20/0859:39> »
Great article, penllawen!
It's absolutely outstanding and I link to it every single chance I get. It wasn't comfortable reading, but it sure explained to me clearly some stuff I half-knew but couldn't have explained, and then went on to teach me a load stuff I had no idea about.

Sir Knollte

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« Reply #211 on: <07-01-20/1138:18> »
Funny how different you can read the whole cyberware essence topic, I always took it more like a life force thing than the soul itself.

To me having cyberware be something forbidden and impure even made it more interesting story wise in the same way sex, drugs and evil music (rock and roll or whatever) is an important element of counter culture, having it dangerous made the decision to implant it more meaningful, but it never lessened the humanity of the character in my mind, the same way I would not call  some one with lessened live force due to drug addiction or terminal illness, less human, soul less or feeling less emotions (Iīd say Fast Eddie might be one of the most human characters from the novels).

In game it really only would get important for those that take the decision to take it to the extreme and go to fringe between live and death (the 0.1 guys) living live on a razors edge probably being more alive than those that never take a risk and only eat food without salt and never drinking alcohol.

On top there is always the theme of hard shell for especially vulnerable persons, like the leather jackets with spikes and sunglasses taken to the extreme with cyberware that actually almost leaves you invulnerable, that is inherently to punk.

I agree that this changed with the later edition though with 5e straight up adding essence to social limit which was not how it worked earlier.
« Last Edit: <07-01-20/1759:06> by Sir Knollte »

Michael Chandra

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« Reply #212 on: <07-01-20/1359:06> »
There was, however, talk about low essence causing social problems and even possibly negative qualities.
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Ghost Rigger

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« Reply #213 on: <07-01-20/1459:33> »
Fantasy races having built in differences is a thing unique to SR, and while it really isn't good even in a pure fantasy setting (Again, people were noting Tolkien's works were kinda sorta really racist in the freaking 60's before the freaking Civil Rights act was signed, and D&D has overtly admitted it was never a good idea), it is especially not good when the metatypes are coded for real world races (You know, the orks orks with their grilled tusks and orksploitated musical genres being coopted by humans and elves and their yertzed out cars with the spinny rims who can't get good education, are attacked by men with pointy white hoods and robes and who are routinely harassed by the police) it is... borderline unconscionable. Like... sorry... no Adlzing, we should never go back to lowering mental maxes on what are, when we say the quiet part out loud, stand ins for black people, lets not. Lets hardcore not.
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.
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dezmont

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« Reply #214 on: <07-01-20/1828:00> »
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.
« Last Edit: <07-01-20/1917:27> by dezmont »

Finstersang

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« Reply #215 on: <07-01-20/1946:18> »
One thing that seems rather obivous, but is rarely mentioned when this discussion pops up:

There are still black people in the 6th world. 

And that adds a lot more depth to that matter - and some pitfalls. I have the feeling that the relationships and crossings (or dare I say - Intersections?) between the pre-Awakening human "races" and the human Meta-races are pretty underexposed right now, at least in the American SR publications I know. And truth be told, I suspect a kind of cowardice at work here: If people get that riled up about the writing of Orks and Trolls who are just "coded as" African-Americans, better not go too much into detail about the situation of the actual black people in Shadowrun or the ways these two systems of "racial identity" can interact! 

Hereīs a freaky thought: Maybe, among some uninspired writing decisions and the general US-centered view, itīs this underexposure that makes Trogs seem like a shallow proxy for the struggles of black people and nothing more.? So maybe, instead of avoiding these pitfalls, you should take the dive and further explore that?

Just ask yourself:
  • Are there black People in the Humanis Policlub?
  • Are there Orks, Trogs and other Metas in white Supremacist movements?

For further reference, hereīs an old reddit post of mine toying with the same questions, although more focused on the perpatrators of racial hatred.
« Last Edit: <07-01-20/1951:47> by Finstersang »

dezmont

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« Reply #216 on: <07-01-20/2119:58> »
One thing that seems rather obivous, but is rarely mentioned when this discussion pops up:

There are still black people in the 6th world. 

And that adds a lot more depth to that matter - and some pitfalls. I have the feeling that the relationships and crossings (or dare I say - Intersections?) between the pre-Awakening human "races" and the human Meta-races are pretty underexposed right now, at least in the American SR publications I know. And truth be told, I suspect a kind of cowardice at work here: If people get that riled up about the writing of Orks and Trolls who are just "coded as" African-Americans, better not go too much into detail about the situation of the actual black people in Shadowrun or the ways these two systems of "racial identity" can interact! 

Hereīs a freaky thought: Maybe, among some uninspired writing decisions and the general US-centered view, itīs this underexposure that makes Trogs seem like a shallow proxy for the struggles of black people and nothing more.? So maybe, instead of avoiding these pitfalls, you should take the dive and further explore that?

Just ask yourself:
  • Are there black People in the Humanis Policlub?
  • Are there Orks, Trogs and other Metas in white Supremacist movements?

For further reference, hereīs an old reddit post of mine toying with the same questions, although more focused on the perpatrators of racial hatred.

Well that is really common in any scifi or fantasy story where you are using fictional concepts allegorically. Star Trek, for example, replaced the real world Russians with The Klingons in TOS, but had a Russian crew member, because The Federation was intended to be a 'solved' society but they still wanted to depict a cold war with a hostile foreign belligerent power that was relevant to the people of the 60s.

The power of an alegorical fictional element is that it allows you to make more pointed commentary than you might otherwise make, for example it might be really really rough to write a fictional element where a real world civil rights organization had a member assassinated. A huge point of fiction is that it is a safer space than real life to explore complicated topics, and alegory is a further 'cushon' as well as helping us explore issues in a new light (For example, SR using orks as an inarguably oppressed minority was a great way to comment on how, at the time, D&D was replicating colonialist narratives about noble and good civilization vs a barbaric and always evil and hateful tribal system).

SR does do some stuff with cultural/ethnic background to varying degrees of success (For example, Japan and Aztland are used to represent highly repressive cultures that DO emulate 'old world' feelings on race, gender, and sexuality) but goes out of its way to mention that traditional American concepts of race, gender, and sexuality aren't 'a big deal' anymore. For example, if I recall correctly there was a fiction bit where Haze blackmailed a "family values" CAS senator not for sleeping with a man, but cheating on his wife, because that was the actual controversial thing in setting.

Mixing an allegory with real world issues can be a bit problematic, because it heavily muddies what you are trying to say and can be confusing or even make you seem like your saying the opposite of what you intend. It is, for example, fairly likely Humanis recruits from all ethnicities of humans in the UCAS but say... drawing a black man in what is essentially an KKK outfit and bringing explicit attention to it raises the question of what you are TRYING to say, because that could be read a lot into.

So I wouldn't necessarily say its 'cowardace' that they aren't exploring real world race (That much), so much as it... sorta doesn't make sense with what they are trying to do (which is using fictionalized metatypes to talk about the issues of race from a unique perspective that sheds some light on how Americans relate to their own history and ongoing reality of race). By amping up problems you can use the natural capability of metaphors and allegory to encourage empathetic thinking, because the fundemental purpose of a metaphor is to convey concepts that are extremely difficult to relay in literal terms in a manner that makes it easier to understand.

For example, it is hard to express in literal terms some of the discrimination black Americans face in the education system in a way that makes it easy to understand or accept how stacked the system is, and it requires explaining a lot of systems that don't sound related like housing loans due to the link between home values and education both in terms of education being funded by property tax and in the sense that its much easier to send a child to college on a middle class income if you own a home and can mortgage your house. But using Orks, who age fundementally differently in setting and so the rules of how education links to age being humanocentric is a very overt and obvious way that the system biases against them and ENSURES they can't succeed without hercurlian effort and absurd sacrifices because they won't even finish high school before their parents are too old to really work anymore and they had to be supporting themselves the entire time with a full time job and no degree. Its a sort of injustice that is obviously deliberate and cruel, which encourages every player to heavily empathize with orks on the issue of education and relate to their point of view, because the metaphor makes this injustice more clear.
« Last Edit: <07-01-20/2121:41> by dezmont »

Shinobi Killfist

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« Reply #217 on: <07-01-20/2138:54> »
Fantasy races having built in differences is a thing unique to SR, and while it really isn't good even in a pure fantasy setting (Again, people were noting Tolkien's works were kinda sorta really racist in the freaking 60's before the freaking Civil Rights act was signed, and D&D has overtly admitted it was never a good idea), it is especially not good when the metatypes are coded for real world races (You know, the orks orks with their grilled tusks and orksploitated musical genres being coopted by humans and elves and their yertzed out cars with the spinny rims who can't get good education, are attacked by men with pointy white hoods and robes and who are routinely harassed by the police) it is... borderline unconscionable. Like... sorry... no Adlzing, we should never go back to lowering mental maxes on what are, when we say the quiet part out loud, stand ins for black people, lets not. Lets hardcore not.
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.

Yeah, I had assumed they were overall thinking poor and downtrodden with imagery focused around redneck since the authors were from America.  They listen to a type of metal, drive fast cars, and eat BBQ. They were coded for good ole boys more than anything imo.

penllawen

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« Reply #218 on: <07-02-20/0456:44> »
There are still black people in the 6th world. 
...
Hereīs a freaky thought: Maybe, among some uninspired writing decisions and the general US-centered view, itīs this underexposure that makes Trogs seem like a shallow proxy for the struggles of black people and nothing more.? So maybe, instead of avoiding these pitfalls, you should take the dive and further explore that?
There's a line I recall from early SR, probably 2e. I can't find it now - it's not in And So It Came To Pass..., and I don't have time to comb the books. It goes something like "Old racial tensions faded out. Why be concerned about that guy over there who has a different skin colour, when that troll over there has hands bigger than your head?"

Even reading that in my callow youth, it seemed obvious to me that the thought process was: "We want to incorporate racial tensions, but we want to keep it at arm's length from real world racism. So we do a switcheroo, quietly drop axes on which real-world racism functions, and substitute metahumans instead." That still seems obvious to me today, honestly. I am surprised this is a controversial point.

Yeah, I had assumed they were overall thinking poor and downtrodden with imagery focused around redneck since the authors were from America.  They listen to a type of metal, drive fast cars, and eat BBQ. They were coded for good ole boys more than anything imo.
Throughout SR's history, the touchstone for anti-metahuman racism is a group of people who wear robes and tall white pointy hoods. I wonder what that could tell us about who the metahumans are stand-ins for.

dezmont

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« Reply #219 on: <07-02-20/0724:50> »
There's a line I recall from early SR, probably 2e. I can't find it now - it's not in And So It Came To Pass..., and I don't have time to comb the books. It goes something like "Old racial tensions faded out. Why be concerned about that guy over there who has a different skin colour, when that troll over there has hands bigger than your head?"

Even reading that in my callow youth, it seemed obvious to me that the thought process was: "We want to incorporate racial tensions, but we want to keep it at arm's length from real world racism. So we do a switcheroo, quietly drop axes on which real-world racism functions, and substitute metahumans instead." That still seems obvious to me today, honestly. I am surprised this is a controversial point.

It honestly isn't. Shadowrun is sorta famous for its racial commentary and being WAY ahead of the curve of the RPG industry in noticing the problem of how fantasy RPGs interact with race. Every single core book has outright stated racial prejudice of the real world mostly gave way to the prejudice against metahumans (Which is not accidently called racism. SR deliberately avoids calling metatypes races, but uses the word racism and race riots and the like in reference to them for a reason).

Throughout SR's history, the touchstone for anti-metahuman racism is a group of people who wear robes and tall white pointy hoods. I wonder what that could tell us about who the metahumans are stand-ins for.

There is also the Alamos 20,000, a literal Neo-Nazi group made up of lower class reactionaries falling into a death cult that targets metahumans for extermination or enslavement. Doesn't get much less subtle than that. And Humanis doesn't just ape the bedsheets, it apes the flaming crosses too. (I am not sure this is official art, but I know that official art uses this exact imagery, obvious trigger warning for uhh... imagery of an out and out hate group).

Trying to look at Orks and Trolls as a generic poor underclass really doesn't... work. So many concepts and ideas do not work through that lens (Humanis and Alamos 20,000, EVO, MoM, Their relationship to the Police, The Night of Rage, the fact the game constantly says racism when talking about prejudice against metahumans despite not using the term 'race' for metahumans, ect).

Threats is such a good insight into how overt SR wanted this to be: Brackhaven is overtly called a 'reactionary race baiter,' Alamos 20,000 are called 'equal opportunity nazis.' Its weird reading a SR book with swastikas in them. There are literal pictures of a metahuman lynching complete with burning crosses in the Humanis section of Threats, its... pretty brutal stuff.

As a side note, If anyone has any more high quality materials on this subject I would be extremely grateful to have them! This stuff is important to the history of our hobby and SR's place in that history is... frankly one of breaking ground and actively being a leader not just in the RPG industry but in fiction in general, and not a lot of media historians focus on RPGs right now! Also I am famously verbose about topics relating to SR to the point I regularly break the reddit character count 3 times over, so it should be a low stress topic for an assignment some time in the future.
« Last Edit: <07-02-20/0758:23> by dezmont »

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« Reply #220 on: <07-02-20/0810:31> »
This is exactly why I don't have a problem with "racism " in SR. They don't ignore or pretend that it's something else, the purposely shift the focus to "imaginary" targets while still focusing on the dark negative aspects as a political commentary without actually using any real world specifics. While there are many obvious correlations (KKK vs Humanis for example) between real world and SR world, there are still quite a few different ways to interpret the same correlation.
They also don't glorify, but instead choose to use it as an example of the effects of racism on society. The hate groups are some of the most obvious bad guys in the game!
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dezmont

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« Reply #221 on: <07-02-20/0843:13> »
This is exactly why I don't have a problem with "racism " in SR. They don't ignore or pretend that it's something else, the purposely shift the focus to "imaginary" targets while still focusing on the dark negative aspects as a political commentary without actually using any real world specifics. While there are many obvious correlations (KKK vs Humanis for example) between real world and SR world, there are still quite a few different ways to interpret the same correlation.
They also don't glorify, but instead choose to use it as an example of the effects of racism on society. The hate groups are some of the most obvious bad guys in the game!

This is a good observation, I literally didn't feel comfortable typing 'KKK' but was down to talk about Humanis, for example. I imagine it helps the writers out a lot too: Depicting a group like the NAACP being exposed to violence or talking about them casually hiring violent mercenaries who may not give a crap about metahuman rights (Though, to be fair, SR does such a good job drawing the moral lines I have never seen A PC prejudiced against anything but elves or not super gung-ho to ruin a racist's day, which just does a good job of showing how tight the writing can be when its deliberate and thought out, and I think a lot of tables would actively mistrust a player eager to take prejudiced: Orks for similar reasons) probably is a lot less comfortable for players, GMs, readers, and writers than having MoM.

Couching in metaphor the metaphor lets you go to more extreme places, a sort of 'fictional rhetorical hyperbole.' By portraying something to a more extreme degree you can play up the reality of the emotions living through something would cause.

A good personal example is the reason why I like 5e shifters so much (to the point I once famously started a stupid internet fight about them, sorry again!) compared to 4e and earlier ones. They are much more vulnerable and pseudo-human, but with instincts and desires and needs that alienate themselves and permanently mark them as different, down to many having the urge to totally repress them! They are more focused on identity, belonging, and the dangers of being yourself in a society that not only doesn't accept you, but violently rejects you and doesn't even want to pretend to treat you with dignity, as opposed to a more abstract spiritual dualism that older shifters represented.  One deciding to 'come out of the closet' to even super close friends probably would be absolutely terrifying because the cost was so high if you misjudged the situation and said 'friends.' While my coming out was a mixed bag, it never got to a level resembling 'If you do it wrong your going to literally be shot in the face right then and there or sold to a black lab.' But it felt like that, both before, during, and the aftermath, which is why the metaphor really worked. Being in the closet feels a lot like worrying about if your friend would shoot you in the face and turn you in for a bounty because they think you are some subhuman animal. Is this intended? I think a little bit, the writeup for 5e's run faster was powerful and hit some pretty specific notes (And Run Faster actually had a LOT of very insightful writing in that chapter), but I also think the metaphor was in some ways intended to be more general and more about any group that deeply needs to hide for fear of violence. Either way, the fact that the violence they could face was super hyperbolic made their plight way more 'real' in a way that depicting it with real LGBTQ+ people would be crass, and the fact its more couched made the people I played with buy in more, rather than less, to the point it became sorta understood that now Shifter Rights were important to that community I played in, because they saw that vulnerability through that metaphor.

Metaphors are also a great way to convey complex information that is hard to convey literally, condensing complex and ephemeral topics into little snippets of relatable things to empathize with. You can't literally describe what anxiety is, but saying its 'like an annoying fly buzzing in your brain combined with you half remembering you needed to do something' really conveys a lot of the experience because everyone knows what it feels like to be trapped near a buzzing pest and how unsettling it can feel to remember you need to remember something.

Metaphors, in addition to triggering empathy through the ability to intensify plights to highlight them better, also force empathetic thinking in ways literal writing doesn't, because you actually need to examine them and imagine what the author means in the context of their time and the work. The number one reason fiction authors tend to use metaphors is to force you to stop and think about stuff. To digest with the work and imagine it through different lenses and on different levels. Coming out and just SAYING STUFF rarely is as effective.
« Last Edit: <07-02-20/0848:47> by dezmont »

Ghost Rigger

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« Reply #222 on: <07-02-20/1432:39> »
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.

Throughout SR's history, the touchstone for anti-metahuman racism is a group of people who wear robes and tall white pointy hoods. I wonder what that could tell us about who the metahumans are stand-ins for.
And yet there still exists specific coding for white and other PoC groups, as well, and some African-American coding is absent. "Spicy food" can point to Mexicans, Cajuns, East Indians or any variety of Asians, and there's no stereotypes about orks having a preference for fried chicken and watermelons. On top of that, there's just no way orks can be African-Americans and African Americans alone, because they aren't exclusively American. In fact, even within America they can't be exclusively African-Americans because of all the rural, traditionally white places they can be found. They have to be poor people universally and specific groups specifically, otherwise it just doesn't make sense.

Remember, the rich use racism as a tool to divide the lower classes and keep them from uniting to overthrow their masters. American slave owners didn't just use racism to justify owning black slaves, but also to discourage their white indentured servants from teaming up with those black slaves. If urban American orks are African-American but an ork from, say, Florida is named Cletus, has 14 kids with his cousin and hunts alligators for a living, then that enhances and broadens the metaphor, suggesting that these various groups are not quite as different they seem on the surface.
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dezmont

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« Reply #223 on: <07-02-20/1652:06> »
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.

Throughout SR's history, the touchstone for anti-metahuman racism is a group of people who wear robes and tall white pointy hoods. I wonder what that could tell us about who the metahumans are stand-ins for.
And yet there still exists specific coding for white and other PoC groups, as well, and some African-American coding is absent. "Spicy food" can point to Mexicans, Cajuns, East Indians or any variety of Asians, and there's no stereotypes about orks having a preference for fried chicken and watermelons. On top of that, there's just no way orks can be African-Americans and African Americans alone, because they aren't exclusively American. In fact, even within America they can't be exclusively African-Americans because of all the rural, traditionally white places they can be found. They have to be poor people universally and specific groups specifically, otherwise it just doesn't make sense.

Remember, the rich use racism as a tool to divide the lower classes and keep them from uniting to overthrow their masters. American slave owners didn't just use racism to justify owning black slaves, but also to discourage their white indentured servants from teaming up with those black slaves. If urban American orks are African-American but an ork from, say, Florida is named Cletus, has 14 kids with his cousin and hunts alligators for a living, then that enhances and broadens the metaphor, suggesting that these various groups are not quite as different they seem on the surface.

Let me be explicit. Are you continuing to try to tell me that Orks and Trolls are not intended to represent specifically ethnic minorities despite official SR art going out of its way to depict a lynching, and are continuing to insist that orks are just a 'generic poor' and are not intended to specifically be a commentary on race despite the books literally saying that they are a stand in for racial prejudice and referring to discrimination against them AS Racism, specifically because you believe that the writers wouldn't intend this specific interpretation on the fact they didn't write in that Orks like watermellon and chicken regardless of all the other context to orks?

« Last Edit: <07-02-20/1654:59> by dezmont »

Ghost Rigger

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« Reply #224 on: <07-02-20/1716:56> »
It's not an either/or thing. Orks can still be poor people in the general while urban American orks are African-Americans in the specific. If you never left Seattle, you might never notice the difference. However, if ork culture in Hong Kong or London is the exact same as ork culture in Seattle, then that's just bad worldbuilding brought on by Americentricism. Orks are universal across countries and the rural/urban divide, so they have to represent something universal.
After all you don't send an electrician to fix your leaking toilet.

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