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The use of fictional creatures and species as metaphor for 'minorities'

Vashon

Active member
Banned
Is really fucking stupid and a cancer in SciFi and Fantasy

This "insane political correctness", in a civilized society, is what is commonly called justice.

If you didn't want to get reported and consequently infracted, you shouldn't have used disgusting, bloodsoaked, and utterly barbaric terms like "lesser races" and "higher species" in the same exact way a British/American racist would justify putting the black/Irish/Japanese/*insert other undesirable nation here* people into ghettoes or concentration camps:
But in this case? They are. They definitively ARE. They aren't humans with mild shading differences, they are different species, all of which actively infiltrate a host society, at least two do so to engage in predation, and the others to engage in parasitism.

They are maneating solo predators in the better cases, and parasitic group hunters in the worst. The best you can do is establish nature reserves. Unless there is a cure. But often times in fiction, there just isn't a cure available.

"But they LOOK human and can talk" That just results in mass executions for the vampires and werewolves in sane, civilized societies that haven't disappeared up their own assholes thanks to their own baggage. And goblins and what not getting treating like vermin. And gassed.

It's a thread about werewolves and vampires.
"But but, we can totally use them as a metaphor for real life issues, even though that gets really dumb and backfirey!" X-Men was a dumb metaphor from the start, and only got dumber as time went on. Tru Blood took its AIDS metaphor to a point that it portrayed vamps as actively seeking to spread the disease and suffering out of spite.

Yes, but:
But nothing. "But it sounds bad" is not an argument.
A thread discussing fictional monsters cohabitating an area with humans starts devolving into infractions & bans because people are being reported for racist dogwhistles, THAT'S why people hate PC culture.
But PC culture is addicted to using these things as metaphors, regardless of how little it makes any fucking sense.


You know what? I'd reckon that the reason so many fantasy verse's, and a few Scfi's, have a strong consistency of there being a hard line of good and evil "species", and there being explicitly zero presence of an "Orcish Rights Advocates" is because most of them take Gary Gygax/1st 4 episodes of Goblin Slayer as the general guideline. Some species are Evil, period, and some people are Evil, period, and while this doesn't mean Good people are perfect, its such a hard and settled thing that everyone who blunders into the woods thinking "If only someone helped these poor creatures, like a white woman in the ghetto in an 80s/90s movie" all died. All of them. The unfortunate ones turned to slaves.

And this just keeps happening until everybody who isn't "turian finger quotes" bigoted "turian finger quotes" is dead and fails to pass on their genes and fails to pass on their ideas to the next generation. And everybody who fails to keep a lid, or allows anybody who wants to allow the use of the Evil races as labor or just let them in, also dies. Because it turns into Haiti, every time. And not just the first genocidal part either, the 2nd part where they enslaved the Dominicans before getting fought off and driven to a side of the island. Every 'missionary' is slaughtered. There is no baptism, there is no subduing them. Its always, permanent war.

Because the Evil species are always Evil, and there is no cohabitation or sing a longs. Its not like human beings of various colors and sizes. And its not like humans and domesticated animals.

"But Half Orcs are good a lot of the time" Yeah, because the awful as shit ones just get abandoned or killed for being fucking animals while young.

Now as far as the X Men stuff goes, its among the best examples of the core premise destroying any comparison with real world minority issues. 1st, the super powers because I don't recall a chromosome getting bent suddenly making me shoot lasers beams directly out of my anus whenever I shit or fart, 2nd, any and every random human mating has a chance to produce a wildly different being compared to its biological parents. So the hate has some invincibly strong foundations on pure logic, and other foundations nearly as strong based on emotion.

Remove the super powers, and then you just have a story about people born with birth defects.

Q99 once posted a thread, which got a lot of fucktards supporting it, about how mutant super powers aren't that big a deal. There was no reasoning in that thread, none. Just a bunch of "hey guys, lets be nice".
 
tbh I'm tired of people taking allegories literal.

"X alien race, Or X special Humans, Or X Machines etc are being used as a metaphor for Minorities/oppresions"

like yeah, you can be all big brained and say "Well technically, they are actually different from humans" And yada yada, but you're literally missing the point of a metaphor. You're just supposed to see and interpret the relation and circumstantial coincidences in their own context.

Like yeah the X men have powers but you aren't supposed to think they're literally 1 to 1 with RL minorities, that's the point of a metaphor, it's supposed to invoke similiar feelings or relations but Contextually it's not the same it's just a form of relating story experiences.
 
Look, I know Vachon's temp banned but that isn't a rule on this site so I'll reply to his points here for the benefit of everyone else.

I was also involved in the initial space battles thread reference first in the "stupid stuff on space battles" thread on this site, that was recently rediscussed in said thread by Vachon before being spun off here.

**

First, from a pedantic level neither vampires nor werewolves are nonhuman races. Due to both being transformed humans. They should thus never have been part of the discussion in the first place.

On a similar pedantic level, vampires are typically depicted as nobles and aristocrats who rule stable domains for long periods of times. And even modern urban fiction has removed the "vampires killing whenever they feed as a metaphor for serial killers", since on purely logistical level this isn't affordable in the modern world. Your interpretation isn't true in Warhammer Fantasy, for clear logistical reasons and writing lessons on villains.

Most writers prefer having count draculas or historical vampires to the modern "serial killer metaphor" version. Vampire counts are more interesting wandering serial killers on the verge of extinction...

**

Now onto the real Meat, always evil races.

The problem here is your arguments are wrong about Gygax, D&D and Tolkien.

Let's start with D&D. You had the Drow using goblins and orcs as slaves successfully and doing fine back in Greyhawk. And the first D&D edition having orcs with the porcelain faces and being primarily lawful and described as not the much worse than humans. And then you had forgotten realms where always evil wasn't applied as a universal rules to the non-eldritch races, including orcs. As well as the Red Wizards of Thay breeding new orc races, as well the Drow once again using Orcs and Goblins as slaves. D&D in far more nuanced and contradictory than you make out.

Then let's rewind to good old tolkien. Where orcs and goblins were better metallurgists than most humans, and their evil intertwined with Sauron's love of technology and order, in the land of mordor. After all industrialisation, agriculture and densely settled cities are an example of the evils of Mordor orcs. Orcs also displayed an anti-cannibalism taboo in the LOTR, had the Hobbit's lighter tone on goblins as part of the cannon with diplomacy in Goblin Town being an option. This is discounting the extra-textual sources by Tolkien where he explicitly deciding against orcs being inherently evil.

Both D&D and Tolkien depicted Orc characters as being akin to evil humans rather than inhuman monsters who engage in constant senseless acts of evil. And both D&D and Tolkien franchises have deliberately chosen to focus on heroism rather than the constant genocidal racial war.

And there a good reasons most smart works don't go to your definition of evil. The moment the author is made to do an actual anthropology entry on say goblins, and answers how many generations they've lived in there home, how they the gather food, what social mechanism are in place to prevent in-group violence, how they make or trade for tools and weapons, and how fusion/fission warfare and reunification happens, ect. ; the monsters suddenly stop being "Evil period" due to realism. The notions of adapting culture to suit a new environment by itself causes massive

A society with human birthrates and child rearing time where everyone is constantly killing everyone else doesn't work. The Mirror Universe of Star Trek has been mocked as unrealistic due to constant assissations crippling it's ability to get anything done. And the more an author compensates you either end up with less evil, or tons of reality warping plot magic, or mental alienness.

**

To tie into politics, the depicts of said species your complaining about aren't psychology inhuman or alien. Instead they look human, can interbreed with humans, can learn human languages, are referred to as races instead of species, are evil in exclusively human ways, and are similar enough to be easily understood by humans, and frequentlyare coded using the same sorts of ideas historical racists projected onto the lesser races. Note how rarely you have actual alienness or xenofiction, instead it's just human behaviour the author doesn't approve that the audience can easily understand.

And the thing is, actual real world racists also treat and use this as metaphors to describe other races. They make satirical jokes about "Orc Lives Matters" and "Goblin Lives Matters" to associate a certain other ethnicity with orcs. And use orc as an insulting term for nonwhite immigrants. And you can imagine why, as your explanation on a constant war against the inferior purely evil race we are infertile with us and who can learn our language and mimic our ways while still being inherently evil and plotting to enslave and exterminate us in secret, is exactly what racists already believe making it a perfect metaphor for them to use to describe their views.

But PC culture is addicted to using these things as metaphors, regardless of how little it makes any fucking sense.
And goblins and what not getting treating like vermin. And gassed.

Oh look, you used a metaphor to.

**

Lastly, even though mutant powers change the stance, X-Men works perfectly as a metaphor on regular humans being bigoted. You know, two parents find out their daughter is a mutant so they organise a mob to try and lynch her, or they disown and kick her out of the house leaving her on the street to starve. And then go to vote for politicians promising to exterminate all mutants, in a country where the law regular ignores anti-mutant violence. X-Men has been used as pro-LGBT+ metaphor because it uses similar scenarios to what LGBT have experience in real life.
 
. You're just supposed to see and interpret the relation and circumstantial coincidences in their own context.
In their own context, teleporters exist, and some of them are not hardcore pacifists like Nightcrawler who need to be victimized with mind control to be aggressive. So uh
Like yeah the X men have powers but you aren't supposed to think they're literally 1 to 1 with RL minorities, that's the point of a metaphor,
Its a shitty metaphor. And metaphors don't work when their central premise is snapped clean in half by the comparison.

"Blacks and Hispanics are being discriminated against FOR NO REASON. WAAAAHHHH"
"They're just people like you and me"

Ok, good starting point, we can at talk about this

"Teleporting, superspeed, invulnerable, mind reading Ubermenschen are being discrim-"
"Yeah NO FUCKING SHIT"
"They're just people, li-"
No they fucking aren't. They are not. Its like saying Elemental Benders of Avatar are just like regular people. They aren't. None of them could be safely or sanely contained in a regular real life human prison. This fact is what made every discussion about the inhumane conditions of of Fire Nation prisons dumb and moot.

Even Cracked, though admittedly before Wong got his way and destroyed the site, made the most excellent point that Senator Kinsey was right. His opening speech can't be argued against. And Marvel couldn't do shit about it. The best the writers could do for the comics was have a fancy shmancy alien organism make a permanent hate plague to explain away everything.

And I think its very on the nose, and extremely conspicuous that the only two view points we get to have are "Extremist to this side and Extremist to that side" and the only characters that get a viewpoint at all are alost always uber powerful and nigh untouchable. You almost never get to see the Push level of street super powers. And they never have petty criminals. Or worse. No, for Xmen, its Xavier and his eternal "bruh, lets just chill and hope that the same government that funded this entire project remains benevolent, despite every evidence to the contrary" and Magneto "The Nazi's and most extremist Jewish sects all had the right idea, just the wrong people".

And thanks to a combination of dumb, shitty writing, and politically driven writing(can't just portray ethnostates as a solution), and money driven permanent conflict, Magneto never looks in the wrong. Ever. Xavier always looks like a fool. Always.

And none of this even touches mutants like Nitro, whose condition is so bad that he is occasionally the subject of "Sometimes, we should let the manical concentration camp prison villains win" because he is frequently portrayed that he can't completely control it and explodes in the kiloton range.

You can't have a "But bigotry is wrong" story when the bigotry is the only survival option. You can't have that story when the sapients in question are that much more powerful, more dangerous, and more capable than mortal humans, and restraining them in a non lethal manner is several orders of magnitudes more difficult, like say, Colossus, or impossible, like Shadowcat or Nightcrawler. Human civilization only works in the manner it does because we are all within arms reach of the same level.

That Will Smith Netflix special can work. And to an extent, it does. Because the elves and orcs are, effectively, just different racial categories of humans. Its just a wider morphological range for humanity. They can still be bound by mortal laws and means, they can be arrested, fined, brought to jury duty, tracked by SSN numbers, etc etc. It isn't the first fictional show or videogame to do that, but its recent.

Zootopia works too, all the animals breathe oxygen, drink water, and exist within 50 degrees farenheit of each other.

Xmen doesn't work. Tru Blood does the opposite of work. Any and every idiot who tries to use Tru Blood as a metaphor for LGBT is saying horrible shit about LGBT.
Look, I know Vachon's temp banned but that isn't a rule on this site so I'll reply to his points here for the benefit of everyone else.

I was also involved in the initial space battles thread reference first in the "stupid stuff on space battles" thread on this site, that was recently rediscussed in said thread by Vachon before being spun off here.
I did not choose my username after a celebrated wrestlerette/protodiva of the 90s that got screwed over in favor of a she hulk and a plastic bimbo.
**

First, from a pedantic level neither vampires nor werewolves are nonhuman races. Due to both being transformed humans.
Read this sentence to yourself out loud
They should thus never have been part of the discussion in the first place.
Meh. It damned sure wasn't part of the discussion in the original op, but its sort of related
On a similar pedantic level, vampires are typically depicted as nobles and aristocrats
That does not help in the depiction of them as Ape Cattle Herders
who rule stable domains for long periods of times.
This is a recent invention. Most of those domains were very small and isolated, and the better to prevent the serfs from escaping confinement.
And even modern urban fiction has removed the "vampires killing whenever they feed as a metaphor for serial killers", since on purely logistical level this isn't affordable in the modern world.
That wasn't the metaphor. The metaphor, in Bram Stoker's novel and the basis for it, was sexual predation, in a more explicit and adult form than Red Riding Hood.

And funnily enough, its the one bit of vampiric mythos that never disappeared. It just got fetishized and lumped into the same category as Rape Fantasies in "Romance" novels. What you are referring to, I think, is the Anne Rice novels. In which young vampires for the first 100 years of their existence, and longer I think, are in fact required to drain an adult human to nearly dry every single night. You can't treat that person like a normal human being for the first 1 or 2 centuries of their undeath. Thats hundreds of thousands of deaths.

"But Cirque du Freak and finger nail poking"
"Demon powered floating motorcycles"

1. Leave that lame crap somewhere else

2. Wasn't that kid like, a runaway? So it still works as a warning tail of weird cults, like carnies, preying on children.


Your interpretation isn't true in Warhammer Fantasy, for clear logistical reasons and writing lessons on villains.
Yes, the Vampires are still predators who keep Ape Cattle and remain interested in the wellbeing of their Cattle, like any good Shepherd and Rancher.
Most writers prefer having count draculas or historical vampires to the modern "serial killer metaphor" version. Vampire counts are more interesting than the wandering serial killers on the verge of extinction...
I did some minor editing for you because the grammar bothered me.

And that doesn't help. They are still obligate carnivores of people whose main philosophical argument of narration boils down to "Free Range or Factory Raised". [/quote]
**

Now onto the real Meat, always evil races.
[/quote] Aren't always Evil. I know
The problem here is your arguments are wrong about Gygax, D&D and Tolkien.
Im not actually going to address the rest properly. Lets go down the list.

Gary "Kill them all, even the Orc babies" Gygax?

"D&D" Do you really want to spend time cherry picking settings and adventures and splatbooks?

And Tolkien? Orcs in that series are explicitly the creations of Fantasy Satan, having captured and warped Fantasy God's creations into his purpose, and Uruk Hai are this and even more so.

This is discounting the extra-textual sources by Tolkien where he explicitly deciding against orcs being inherently evil.
JK Rowling esque in having a shiver through his spine and trying to retcon it.

Orcs in his setting, are literally, and explicitly, the corrupted and demented versions of the righteous, pure and divinely ordained creations.

Also I guess "Meat's back on the menu boys" was a movie only quote
; the monsters suddenly stop being "Evil period" due to realism. The notions of adapting culture to suit a new environment by itself causes massive
Lol
A society with human birthrates and child rearing time where everyone is constantly killing everyone else doesn't work.
"Evil means constant murder"

Slavery, Serfdom, Dhimmis, Caste and Class systems existed and still exists and perpetuate tons of suffering, and used to perpetuate more. Even Sauron's forces kept from fraticide MOST of the time.

Guess what Im not doing? Addressing your philosophical meandering in this post. Its incredibly unfair, but if Im going to address it, it will be another time, minutes or weeks
And the thing is, actual real world racists also treat and use this as metaphors to describe other races. They make satirical jokes about "Orc Lives Matters" and "Goblin Lives Matters" to associate a certain other ethnicity with orcs.
And poorly at that. The rest of this is quibbling about another issue entirely, and is suitable for another post, or thread. I might address it later. Those comparisons breakdown the moment you walk through most ghettoes unharmed, even striking up conversations with people as you wander around or purchase groceries or whatever. You can't do that in a significant number of fantasy settings, and it isn't just Orcs and Goblins. Mindflayers exist as well
Lastly, even though mutant powers change the stance, X-Men works perfectly as a metaphor on regular humans being bigoted. You know, two parents find out their daughter is a mutant so they organise a mob to try and lynch her, or they disown and kick her out of the house leaving her on the street to starve. And then go to vote for politicians promising to exterminate all mutants, in a country where the law regular ignores anti-mutant violence. X-Men has been used as pro-LGBT+ metaphor because it uses similar scenarios to what LGBT have experience in real life.
The difference is is that LGBT are baseline human, and its a quibbling amount where someone puts their pleasure bits and what bits they have and how open and public they can be about that. Its entirely within the realm of possibility that an LGBT person can go unnoticed all there lives, "passing" in the closet with Flower Marriages and Beards and the like. They can also choose relationships that are not, in fact, New Age Degenerate parodies of human sexuality meant for starring in "Oh Joy Sex Toy". Most LGBT do not, in fact, carry around the full smorgasborg of STDs and do everything they can to spread them around with orgies and needle sharing parties. Most LGBT are not, in fact, Nurglesque Slanneeshi Sex Plague Zombies.

You can't smush a random combination of genitals together and suddenly shoot gigawatt laser beams out of them.

While Mutants are in fact, a different issue entirely. Many of them can't go unnoticed, so the issue is closer the racial issues, but even then the comparison breaks down. There are nations that don't trust their civilians with firearms and enact gun control. How would legislate against walking through walls, psychic domination, and teleportation? Its an innate part of these people, its not a piece of clothing they can be stripped of or property that can be seized. And every single one of those powers is more devastating than a simple bang stick.

Its not even a limb that can be amputated. It requires extremely advanced, comic book bullshit "science", to disable or turn off.

And half the time it isn't even a beneficial power, like Rogue, whose mutation was the equivalent of a severe congenital disorder with the bonus of being lethally dangerous.

Yeah its hatred and bigotry. But the problem is, when you start saying that Marvel humans should tone it down, even though they should at least a bit, there is zero good reason for it to all go away. And thats the issue. That fear, of mutants reaching a critical mass of numbers and powers and then by default becoming the ruling class, thats a legitimate fear. And so what if this generation's Xavier didn't have an inclination towards domination.

If the next one does, and has a similar globe spanning device? GG.

If the next Nitro is born with his powers activated at birth?

LGBT can't do the same and neither can racial groups, they'd have to fight for influence that old fashioned way, through economics, politics or warfare.


PS:Can we agree to leave out Blade/Daybreaker type Vampires? Because they really don't belong in this thread.
 
** Werewolves and Vampires as not being distinct races **

Vampires and Werewolves are not races due to being mystical templates that are applied to mortals. There are many variants of Werewolves, but even the hereditary ones typically grow up and live in human societies, have their first change in adolescence or adulthood, and are not otherwise genetically or culturally different from their neighbours besides their condition. A supernatural curse that effects a persons life once a month does not make someone part of a new race.

And as for vampires, they're usually an undead template. They're not a race for the same reason Cyborgs and Liches aren't races Converting adult humans into your kind, is comparable too many things like for example religion, but race really doesn't work this way very well.

In both cases when an individual was born into an ethnic group, raised by it, and spends their entire social life immersed in it until late adolescence or adulthood, and are identical to that group and can pass for said group effortless upon leaving it ; race doesn't really work as a metaphor.

** Vampires **

On a pedantic level, carnivore-ism and parasitism are not the same thing. Ants farming Aphids is not carnivorism.

This is a recent invention. Most of those domains were very small and isolated, and the better to prevent the serfs from escaping confinement.

It's about as recent as Count Dracula, which makes it quite old for vampire folklore. Vampires being immortal preceded their status as members of nobility in fiction. And once victorian vampire fiction made vampires immortal nobles, while still trying to take place in the real world, vampires not being that different from other rulers publicly became the norm. And since americans loved european aristocrats with an ancient bond of "their ancestral land they ruled for centuries", and fused it vampirism being immortal. So they were not "Ape Cattle herders".

And discount this, immortal rulers who want subjects to tax kind of lead to stability. And since traditional vampirism had a single feeding only make the subject temporally weakened before making a full recover so as long as they were not feed on in the future future, not killing your subjects really isn't that hard. At which point there really isn't much difference between them and historical nobles, as both classes view their subjects as commodities to extra profit from with any kindness being born from pragmatic self interest.

That wasn't the metaphor. The metaphor, in Bram Stoker's novel and the basis for it, was sexual predation, in a more explicit and adult form than Red Riding Hood.
What you are referring to, I think, is the Anne Rice novels. In which young vampires for the first 100 years of their existence, and longer I think, are in fact required to drain an adult human to nearly dry every single night

You answer your own objection here. Modern fiction frequently decided the reason vampires consistently killed their victims, to explain why their any living victims to expose their existence to the world, as well as to make the vampires even more evil. See Buffy the Vampire slayer and Blade, among many others. As an aside the above isn't strictly nesserary in Anne Rice, due to the first book interview with the vampire's plot, but it is frequently used

The problem with this, is when vampires are constantly killing their victims in a process that takes less than a minute, the metaphor quickly shifts towards serial killers and away from sexual predation. When the danger of vampires shifts to instant death, and vampires are convergently adapting the same strategies as serial killers to target victims who won't be missed, while the police attributes their actions to a serial killers who they are searching for in order to stop. The metaphor for vampires thus changes from sexual predation to serial killers, since death has replace sex.

** Orcs and inherently evil races **

Gary "Kill them all, even the Orc babies" Gygax?

"D&D" Do you really want to spend time cherry picking settings and adventures and splatbooks?

Your discounting the Forgotten Realms, the primary D&D setting. Also the first edition monster manual is kind of a big deal, since it's the real japanese orcs are depicted with pig snouts, and was written by Gygax. And considering neither Dragonlance or Eberron work this way, that most of D&D not on your side.


Orcs in his setting, are literally, and explicitly, the corrupted and demented versions of the righteous, pure and divinely ordained creations.

Also I guess "Meat's back on the menu boys" was a movie only quote

The Hobbit is explicitly part of the setting. As is the silmarrilion.

Yes, that is a movie only quote. In the book, the orcs explicitly accused the other tribe of being cannibalism and viewed cannibalism as wrong.

Your also wrong on Uruk-hai, being an orc-human hybrid race engineered by Saruman using science, not Morgoth using magic.

Tolkien also had philosophically consistent definition that made hum revise orcs. Due to evil being the absence of goodness and not having an actual essence of it's own, and that creating new souls is fundamentally impossible without God's direction action. Orcs breeding true, exhibiting linguistic drift


"Evil means constant murder"

Slavery, Serfdom, Dhimmis, Caste and Class systems existed and still exists and perpetuate tons of suffering, and used to perpetuate more. Even Sauron's forces kept from fraticide MOST of the time.

This was your definition of evil, not mine. Followed shortly by you saying;

You can't do that in a significant number of fantasy settings, and it isn't just Orcs and Goblins. Mindflayers exist as well

And a debate about good and evil, society, social organisation, good and evil and there social utility, is kind of going too involve "Philosophical meandering".

I shockingly mostly hold a conservative view, that morality exists not because humans are good, but instead because humans are not and removing morality results in editable mass deaths. I extent this to human moral universals existing for very practical reasons. I do blend in vaguely marxists ideas about stratified societies being based around exploitation and dialectic materialism, but a lot of conservatives have adopted similar views on history and sociology.

And the moment an author given the orc tribes their own dialects and metallurgy, have them repeatedly war against other orcs, then enact enough social change to form a unified horde and fight alongside their tradition enemy orcish clans with an ideology of racial unity against neighbouring humans; the work has thrown several major wrenches into the notion of hereditary evil.

And lastly, if your going to discount racists using fantasy races as metaphors due to lacking perfect equivalence, while criticising anti-racists for attacking said racists doing this, I'm not sure what this thread is supposed be discussing or how it's meant to work. You have a very different view on how metaphors work to other posters, and due to indirect metaphors and coding being a rather major part of both this topic and literary analysis in general, it makes actual discussing this topic seriously very difficult. Because showing up late in at multi-decade conversation in sci-fi/fantasy literature, refusing to do any research on the conversation, and insist that metaphors that are not 100% accurate should not be used and therefor everyone sucks, is not conductive to a proper discussion.

** Aside on Mutants **

Considering your defending Marvel Universe civilians, and ignoring the widespread avaibality of power suppression collars, supertech, and other forms of superpowers, I do believe we are capable of having a productive discussion on this subjects. I will also point out that trying to form a mutant ethno-state lead to the genocide of genosha, that most mutants do look almost entire human for doylist reasons, and only reasons mutants in the marvel universe aren't identical socially to DC metahumans is because of shared human oppression forcing them to build there own society and develop class consciousness.

I'll also repeat myself and remind you the setting of the Marvel universe makes the entire anti-mutant arguments really stupid. With proliferating supertech, multiple demonic and alien invasions, and a superhuman arms race where regular humans constantly get new superpowers, everything else going on the anti-mutant bigotry is dumb and out of place.


** PS **

PS: Can you please stop giving backhanded insults to "ghettos" and LGTQ people, and try some measure of tact and politeness in your posts.
 
** Werewolves and Vampires as not being distinct races **

Vampires and Werewolves are not races due to being mystical templates that are applied to mortals. There are many variants of Werewolves, but even the hereditary ones typically grow up and live in human societies, have their first change in adolescence or adulthood, and are not otherwise genetically or culturally different from their neighbours besides their condition.
Aside from the animalistic compulsion to feed on humans. No wait its worse, because wolves typically avoid humans when they can.
A supernatural curse that effects a persons life once a month does not make someone part of a new race.
I guess this can be true. Lepers then. Only the most sanitized and sexually fetishized of werewolves and vampires are fit for inclusion into human societies. And even then, I'd wager most of it is written a conscious effort to de-monsterfy the monsters.
And as for vampires, they're usually an undead template. They're not a race for the same reason Cyborgs and Liches aren't races Converting adult humans into your kind, is comparable too many things like for example religion, but race really doesn't work this way very well.

In both cases when an individual was born into an ethnic group, raised by it, and spends their entire social life immersed in it until late adolescence or adulthood, and are identical to that group and can pass for said group effortless upon leaving it ; race doesn't really work as a metaphor.
You're getting there.
** Vampires **

On a pedantic level, carnivore-ism and parasitism are not the same thing. Ants farming Aphids is not carnivorism.



It's about as recent as Count Dracula, which makes it quite old for vampire folklore. Vampires being immortal preceded their status as members of nobility in fiction.
Neat, a summary on fiction
And once victorian vampire fiction made vampires immortal nobles, while still trying to take place in the real world, vampires not being that different from other rulers
Minus making the metaphor of Blood Sucking Landlord literal. Minus the semi erotic cannibalism.
publicly became the norm. And since americans loved european aristocrats with an ancient bond of "their ancestral land they ruled for centuries", and fused it vampirism being immortal. So they were not "Ape Cattle herders".
Yes they are Ape Cattle Herders. Your "disagreement" and attempted explanation doesn't clash with what I said at all. Serfs were already bought, sold and traded like human shaped cattle. Vampires take the next step into active consumption for nutrition. Getting labor, wealth and food out fo the same source
And discount this, immortal rulers who want subjects to tax kind of lead to stability. And since traditional vampirism had a single feeding only make the subject temporally weakened before making a full recover so as long as they were not feed on in the future future, not killing your subjects really isn't that hard.
Again, there is not disagreement here. Just you letting predators roam around at the top of the food chain because its convenient
At which point there really isn't much difference between them and historical nobles, as both classes view their subjects as commodities to extra profit from with any kindness being born from pragmatic self interest.
Minus, again, using humans as cattle more literally and explicitly
Getting distracted here. About the only fiction I have ever seen that doesn't have them operate as predators is Perfect Creature, which has them given the protection of the church.

The rest is just discussing vampire fiction.
** Orcs and inherently evil races **



Your discounting the Forgotten Realms, the primary D&D setting. Also the first edition monster manual is kind of a big deal, since it's the real japanese orcs are depicted with pig snouts, and was written by Gygax. And considering neither Dragonlance or Eberron work this way, that most of D&D not on your side.




The Hobbit is explicitly part of the setting. As is the silmarrilion.

Yes, that is a movie only quote. In the book, the orcs explicitly accused the other tribe of being cannibalism and viewed cannibalism as wrong.
K.
Your also wrong on Uruk-hai, being an orc-human hybrid race engineered by Saruman using science, not Morgoth using magic.
Same ends same goal
Tolkien also had philosophically consistent definition that made him revise orcs.
Yeah he revised them. Because of post wwII beatnik era political panic finally hitting him. And thats my point really, he had to revise them and thus, it makes it very, very easy to claim death of the author and go with the original version.

Its similar but more total than how Pratchet revised Discworld and went with multicultural and progressive London combined with Industrial Revolution London.


This was your definition of evil, not mine. Followed shortly by you saying;
And a debate about good and evil, society, social organisation, good and evil and there social utility, is kind of going too involve "Philosophical meandering".
Thats not what this is. This is a debate about the morality and practicality of discriminating, in the form of Segregation or even Apartheid, against different species that show fundamental incompatibility with humans OR human civil society. Usually in the form of obligate carnivores who are driven to attack humans. And also in the form of species that show a extreme rate of purely hostile interactions, well beyond human norms. Or beings of sufficient strength and power to be far too difficult to control and constrain by normal human means.
I shockingly mostly hold a conservative view, that morality exists not because humans are good, but instead because humans are not and removing morality results in editable mass deaths. I extent this to human moral universals existing for very practical reasons. I do blend in vaguely marxists ideas about stratified societies being based around exploitation
I like to beleive that we have gotten past the point of even questioning this. :(
And the moment an author given the orc tribes their own dialects and metallurgy, have them repeatedly war against other orcs, then enact enough social change to form a unified horde and fight alongside their tradition enemy orcish clans with an ideology of racial unity against neighbouring humans;
And as long as that stands, they remain permanently incompatible with human civilization. For obvious fucking reasons
the work has thrown several major wrenches into the notion of hereditary evil.
No, it doesn't. Genghis Khan did all of this. He even famously came within a hairs breadth of slaugthering the Chinese and converting vast swathes of farmland into pasture by slaughtering the peasants. He was restrained from this. And for all the horror they inflicted, the first interactions of the Mongols with the rest of Asia had a peaceful intent, mostly because he wanted to focus on China. Didn't work out. Then he, his sons and grandsons famously kicked the shit out of Asia. PRetty damned hard too. But then they settled into being a ruling warrior elite, genocide and mass murder wasn't their goal, it was their method. It was undertandable human motivations and goals that drove all of that, and the same is what restrained it by the end. They went from dirtpoor to fabulously wealthy within a generation of Genghis taking control.

You could negotiate, trade, and deal with them after the first set of wars. To the point that even though the Mongols destroyed the Kievan Rus, the successor states preferred dealing with the Golden Horde than that Teutonic Order.
** Aside on Mutants **

Considering your defending Marvel Universe civilians, and ignoring the widespread avaibality of power suppression collars, supertech, and other forms of superpowers, I do believe we are capable of having a productive discussion on this subjects. I will also point out that trying to form a mutant ethno-state lead to the genocide of genosha, that most mutants do look almost entire human for doylist reasons, and only reasons mutants in the marvel universe aren't identical socially to DC metahumans is because of shared human oppression forcing them to build there own society and develop class consciousness.
Everything around Mutants in Marvel is ridiculous. The most ridiculous being Marvel including them in the Greater Marvel Universe, because that brings up way, WAY too many fucking questions regarding quite literally everybody else. It takes every anti-bigotry screed the heroes ever starred in and stomps all over it.
I'll also repeat myself and remind you the setting of the Marvel universe makes the entire anti-mutant arguments really stupid. With proliferating supertech, multiple demonic and alien invasions, and a superhuman arms race where regular humans constantly get new superpowers,
Not completely. The subject of human born mutants is still significantly different to all of that, with two of those just being another arms race, and the others being a foreign invasion. The problem of increasing numbers of mutants is that you can't quite march an army against your own future children.
everything else going on the anti-mutant bigotry is dumb and out of place.
Meh.

You can take away supertech, powers given often have the possibility of being taken away, with no particular harm to the person, and foreign invasions can be thrown out by sheer force/deus ex machina.

You can't take the mutation out of the mutant, not without possibily murdering them. Even if the genes are suppressed, it doesn't suppress their gametes, which increases the likelyhood of the issue just getting kicked down the road. And yes I know part of the twist in "Logan".

PS:There are no backhanded insults toward LGBT, just a crass summation of the "difference" and how little it really is, in comparison to fantastical fictional entities. LGBT can still be constrained by mortal means.
 
and use this as metaphors to describe other races. They make satirical jokes about "Orc Lives Matters" and "Goblin Lives Matters" to associate a certain other ethnicity with orcs. And use orc as an insulting term for nonwhite immigrants
Citation? I would like a reference for that one. Most likely true but still ridiculous enough to be checked out.
 
Citation? I would like a reference for that one. Most likely true but still ridiculous enough to be checked out.

Reffering probably to filth like the imperial Herald fucktards that try to hijack 40k like the racist fucks they are. Tiny subset of "fans" used to paint a huge fandom with a wide brush.

Nearly ate an beefy infraction for posting some of their early stuff before I realized what the fuck they were all about.

 
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Reffering probably to filth like the imperial Herald fucktards that try to hijack 40k like the racist fucks they are. Tiny subset of "fans" used to paint a huge fandom with a wide brush.

Nearly ate an beefy infraction for posting some of their early stuff before I realized what the fuck they were all about.

At first I'm like all good. Then I read more.
I need a Doom Guy screaming video.
 
Citation? I would like a reference for that one. Most likely true but still ridiculous enough to be checked out.

A combination of random commentators on poorly moderated media sites, but more officially the Anglo Saxon Foundation for the professional serious political variant. And a quick google image search for "Orc Lives" showed several memes even without using the word "matters".

I was unaware of the Imperial Herald, as I referred to Orcs with a C, but thank your for the information Eliar.
 
SB trying to make the krogan into some oppressed mibority

ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
 
SB trying to make the krogan into some oppressed mibority

ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

Hmm alien race uplifted to fight a war for others and after winning said war nearly genocided and kept under control with hyenous bioweapons?

Yea I know they turned on their former allies/masters and dared seek their place as a Big Power in the galaxy. Would have been much cleaner to confine them back in Tuchanka or perhaps a few more worlds and forbid them from going to space again but nooo they just HAD to genophage them/

Or you mean they try to match them to some real world minority?
 
ehhhhhhhh

Why is this such a controversial thing or even new thing? People have been using their writings as metaphors for what they consider good causes for all of human history. Dickens loved metaphors criticising all the issues in Victorian era society and I'm sure some of the conservatives at the time hated that.

Politics is such an unalienable part of a lot of peoples identity that to NOT expect it to have a least some measure of influence on their writings is folly.

Right wing writers do it plenty of a time with the "America Fuck Yeh" type of movies you get out there and I don't see much complaining among liberals or leftists about it. As long as people have opinions their opinions will come out in writing, there are bigger fish to fry instead of stuff that's always going to be the case and is overall a very small thing,
 
ehhhhhhhh

Why is this such a controversial thing or even new thing? People have been using their writings as metaphors for what they consider good causes for all of human history. Dickens loved metaphors criticising all the issues in Victorian era society and I'm sure some of the conservatives at the time hated that.

Politics is such an unalienable part of a lot of peoples identity that to NOT expect it to have a least some measure of influence on their writings is folly.

Right wing writers do it plenty of a time with the "America Fuck Yeh" type of movies you get out there and I don't see much complaining among liberals or leftists about it. As long as people have opinions their opinions will come out in writing, there are bigger fish to fry instead of stuff that's always going to be the case and is overall a very small thing,
But is it always a metaphor?

If I write a story of people exploring a space hulk of monsters, are the monsters a metaphor for natives, the hulk as land, and the people exploring as white men from the British empire?
 
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