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I am having a hard time finding RP boards that are up to my standards, and not because I am such a fantastic writer that threading with my inferiors feels too much like slumming. I am having a hard time with a lot of the bigotry and bullshit in people's settings and character assortments. It feels weird, too, because I sort of feel like as a nice white (mostly-straight cis)lady it's not really... for me to complain about, I guess? But... uh... what in the fuck. Someone's got to complain about it, and the more someones who are commenting on it, the better. I guess.
It still feels weird. I'm not sure that it should be a great contribution to a conversation to just regurgitate what I've heard and read and learned from LGBT people and POC, but at the same time I suppose more privileged people should be getting up in arms about this shit, so even if it feels weird, I am probably doing a good thing. I hope.
This started as a post in a thread about bigotry in online RP and I thought I would reproduce it here just so that I could complain to more people. A lot of the things I am complaining about don't even directly deal with demographics I'm a part of, which should tell you how bad they can get. For the most part none of these are issues I deal with personally except that living in a world where they are commonplace sort of sucks for everyone. I can't even imagine what it'd be like to be, say, an LGBT woman of color trying to find a place to roleplay online that wasn't full of bullshit. So I am griping about it.
Congrats. You get my complaining. Aren't you so grateful. I will cut this in case you don't want to read it, because there is a lot of it.
The Obvious Ones
I once almost affiliated with an X-Men site run by a Jehovah's Witness who didn't allow homosexuality or swearing or "spiritism" on her board. Even characters who were canonically gay or had magic powers or whatever had to be cleaned up according to her standards. It was screwy and I basically told her that I wasn't going to recommend to my LGBT and non-Christian members that they touch her board with a ten foot pole, and since an affiliation is a recommendation, that wasn't going to be happening. That was the only really overt example.
White People as "Default" People
A lot of the discrimination that happens is the kind of passive stuff that happens because of ignorance. I've joined boards that like to think that their characters are indie, "alternative," or otherwise non-mainstream, and all I see is a parade of near-identical skinny androgynous white models in five hundred dollar carefully-ripped t-shirts and thousand dollar jackets.
I mean, just the idea that white people are the people and Europe in particular is the setting is actually a symptom of a lot of people's passive unexamined white supremacist conditioning. Before someone freaks out on me, let me give some examples.
Think about how many fantasy settings take place in some pseudo-feudal European whitelandia. Think about Tolkien who, despite the fact that he himself was fairly racially-conscious for his time, still wrote a book in which it was a major plot point that a bunch of violent savages were literally riding in on oliphaunts to loot The White City. I mean, come on. Seriously. Also, elves? Basically just white people who are even more magically white than other white people.
Think about steampunk, and how often it's a lot of white adventurist fantasy hearkening back to the days when it was considered totally acceptable for white Europeans to just go tramping into "less civilized" countries. Steampunk doesn't have to be this, as evidenced by sites like Beyond Victoriana, but it frequently is to a degree that I find really obnoxious.
I get that pseudo-feudal European whitelandia is a common setting trope and is frequently considered the "default" fantasy setting, but there is no reason for it to be except that learning about areas of the world that weren't populated by white people is hard and it's much easier to build an "original" setting that's just a mishmash of all the other pseudo-feudal European whitelandia fantasy settings.
Exotic Sexy Asians! So Sexy! So Exotic!
I would also like to cosign the points a couple other posters made about how Asians are played online. Like I said in another thread, to a lot of people Asians have that "omg Asians are so exotic and sexy" appeal to them. Yeah, a lot of non-white ethnicities get exoticized like that but I feel like Asian people get it to a particular degree.
It's highly problematic and I'm occasionally torn as to whether it's better to to just never portray them and have the setting be all white people or to include Asians just to eroticize them as the magical sex fairies of the East (which if I am to believe the portrayals of online RP forums is entirely populated by ninja and stammering blushing bishounen uke).
And before someone says that writing Asian people and gay people this way is some kind of noble service to humanity and act of gracious tolerance, being turned on by someone and respecting them are not necessarily connected. One only has to look at pornography featuring transgendered performers ("chicks with dicks!" "hot trannies!") or interracial porn (which reads so much like descriptions of bestiality when it talks about people of color that I don't even want to describe it here) to see that.
Awful Female Characters
And speaking of being turned on by people without respecting them, female characters? Huge blind spot for a lot of writers. If someone in an RP community cannot think of anything to do with a female character except rape her, I'm going to sit them down. Rape is a serious thing and while addressing it is excellent (no seriously this needs to be addressed more often), most such players are really just using it for shock value or because they don't know how else to develop a woman character. I mean, that's what women do, right? We get raped. If a woman is independent and doesn't take crap? Obviously somebody raped her. If a woman is shy around whatever gender she's attracted to? Someone probably raped her. If a woman is not straight? Oh, she definitely got raped because that's where lesbians come from, right?
It. really. bothers me.
I am Now a Picky Jerk
So yeah. I have a lot of opinions about privilege and prejudice on RP boards. It's become a dealbreaker for me, because I am joining an RP board to have fun, not to give its members a crash course in not being callous ignorant jerks. If it is obvious that if I join I will be playing the only person of color? Bye bye. If female characters exist to sprawl around in their underwear in their sigs and get raped in threads, toodles. If LGBT people are obviously just masturbation fodder for a bunch of straight writers, they can do that without me.
I want boards with realistic non-busted treatments of LGBT people, women, and people of color, and that means those boards have to have people who care about whether what they are writing bears any resemblance to what those people are really like. This narrows my options a lot more than people probably think, but I am gradually finding communities built by people who understand the real world well enough to actually write a decent setting, and it is helping a great deal with my growing disappointment and frustration.
For those of you who don't participate in online forum-based roleplaying, the fact that I am upset by this stuff should tell you how bad it can get. When, for example, a white person is sick and tired of the sight of white people, you know we have gone seriously off the rails into Whitelandia.
It still feels weird. I'm not sure that it should be a great contribution to a conversation to just regurgitate what I've heard and read and learned from LGBT people and POC, but at the same time I suppose more privileged people should be getting up in arms about this shit, so even if it feels weird, I am probably doing a good thing. I hope.
This started as a post in a thread about bigotry in online RP and I thought I would reproduce it here just so that I could complain to more people. A lot of the things I am complaining about don't even directly deal with demographics I'm a part of, which should tell you how bad they can get. For the most part none of these are issues I deal with personally except that living in a world where they are commonplace sort of sucks for everyone. I can't even imagine what it'd be like to be, say, an LGBT woman of color trying to find a place to roleplay online that wasn't full of bullshit. So I am griping about it.
Congrats. You get my complaining. Aren't you so grateful. I will cut this in case you don't want to read it, because there is a lot of it.
The Obvious Ones
I once almost affiliated with an X-Men site run by a Jehovah's Witness who didn't allow homosexuality or swearing or "spiritism" on her board. Even characters who were canonically gay or had magic powers or whatever had to be cleaned up according to her standards. It was screwy and I basically told her that I wasn't going to recommend to my LGBT and non-Christian members that they touch her board with a ten foot pole, and since an affiliation is a recommendation, that wasn't going to be happening. That was the only really overt example.
White People as "Default" People
A lot of the discrimination that happens is the kind of passive stuff that happens because of ignorance. I've joined boards that like to think that their characters are indie, "alternative," or otherwise non-mainstream, and all I see is a parade of near-identical skinny androgynous white models in five hundred dollar carefully-ripped t-shirts and thousand dollar jackets.
I mean, just the idea that white people are the people and Europe in particular is the setting is actually a symptom of a lot of people's passive unexamined white supremacist conditioning. Before someone freaks out on me, let me give some examples.
Think about how many fantasy settings take place in some pseudo-feudal European whitelandia. Think about Tolkien who, despite the fact that he himself was fairly racially-conscious for his time, still wrote a book in which it was a major plot point that a bunch of violent savages were literally riding in on oliphaunts to loot The White City. I mean, come on. Seriously. Also, elves? Basically just white people who are even more magically white than other white people.
Think about steampunk, and how often it's a lot of white adventurist fantasy hearkening back to the days when it was considered totally acceptable for white Europeans to just go tramping into "less civilized" countries. Steampunk doesn't have to be this, as evidenced by sites like Beyond Victoriana, but it frequently is to a degree that I find really obnoxious.
I get that pseudo-feudal European whitelandia is a common setting trope and is frequently considered the "default" fantasy setting, but there is no reason for it to be except that learning about areas of the world that weren't populated by white people is hard and it's much easier to build an "original" setting that's just a mishmash of all the other pseudo-feudal European whitelandia fantasy settings.
Exotic Sexy Asians! So Sexy! So Exotic!
I would also like to cosign the points a couple other posters made about how Asians are played online. Like I said in another thread, to a lot of people Asians have that "omg Asians are so exotic and sexy" appeal to them. Yeah, a lot of non-white ethnicities get exoticized like that but I feel like Asian people get it to a particular degree.
It's highly problematic and I'm occasionally torn as to whether it's better to to just never portray them and have the setting be all white people or to include Asians just to eroticize them as the magical sex fairies of the East (which if I am to believe the portrayals of online RP forums is entirely populated by ninja and stammering blushing bishounen uke).
And before someone says that writing Asian people and gay people this way is some kind of noble service to humanity and act of gracious tolerance, being turned on by someone and respecting them are not necessarily connected. One only has to look at pornography featuring transgendered performers ("chicks with dicks!" "hot trannies!") or interracial porn (which reads so much like descriptions of bestiality when it talks about people of color that I don't even want to describe it here) to see that.
Awful Female Characters
And speaking of being turned on by people without respecting them, female characters? Huge blind spot for a lot of writers. If someone in an RP community cannot think of anything to do with a female character except rape her, I'm going to sit them down. Rape is a serious thing and while addressing it is excellent (no seriously this needs to be addressed more often), most such players are really just using it for shock value or because they don't know how else to develop a woman character. I mean, that's what women do, right? We get raped. If a woman is independent and doesn't take crap? Obviously somebody raped her. If a woman is shy around whatever gender she's attracted to? Someone probably raped her. If a woman is not straight? Oh, she definitely got raped because that's where lesbians come from, right?
It. really. bothers me.
I am Now a Picky Jerk
So yeah. I have a lot of opinions about privilege and prejudice on RP boards. It's become a dealbreaker for me, because I am joining an RP board to have fun, not to give its members a crash course in not being callous ignorant jerks. If it is obvious that if I join I will be playing the only person of color? Bye bye. If female characters exist to sprawl around in their underwear in their sigs and get raped in threads, toodles. If LGBT people are obviously just masturbation fodder for a bunch of straight writers, they can do that without me.
I want boards with realistic non-busted treatments of LGBT people, women, and people of color, and that means those boards have to have people who care about whether what they are writing bears any resemblance to what those people are really like. This narrows my options a lot more than people probably think, but I am gradually finding communities built by people who understand the real world well enough to actually write a decent setting, and it is helping a great deal with my growing disappointment and frustration.
For those of you who don't participate in online forum-based roleplaying, the fact that I am upset by this stuff should tell you how bad it can get. When, for example, a white person is sick and tired of the sight of white people, you know we have gone seriously off the rails into Whitelandia.
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no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 07:27 am (UTC)From:So I'd say that being picky about it because you don't have the energy or the will to give yet another 101 lesson to a bunch of chowderheads is perfectly okay, and that your race or orientation has nothing to do with it.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 05:08 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 05:22 am (UTC)From:Yeah, the setting has the potential for some fantastic stories, and I feel like I got to tell a couple. I don't think it's built for it, though, and it seemed like the setting fought me every step of the way. I've read a lot of the EU, and it's not really much better about minority voices than the movies were.
Eventually it got through my head that people who were attracted to the fandom because they liked the stories it was already telling were not going to be interested in what I wanted to do, because they came for the black and white morality and the sex slave rape princesses and aliens who have a right to be sad but not to be too angry (hi Diversity Alliance) and where there are occasional LGBT people but they're hidden away in NPCs (poor Goren and Medrit).
Sometimes I think watching people on my LJ friends list who are involved in the James Cameron's Avatar fandom that they're in the same position. The movie was pretty plainly about mighty whitey coming in and being a better indigenous person than the indigenous people and using his magical Mary Sue powers to absolve himself of his white guilt, and while the setting has more potential than that... a lot of people are drawn to it because they like the white guilt fantasy complete with noble savages and the whole Dances with Wolves bit.
I'm thinking at this point that there will always be more people involved in any given fandom because they like the stories already in it than there are people like me who on some level really don't like those stories and want to do better.
So I decided that rather than go and get in thread battles for control of the tone of the setting, I would go and find settings that were specifically designed to tell the kind of stories I can enjoy and stop trying to warp the others into something that they're not and that their members don't really want them to be.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 04:04 pm (UTC)From:I definitely agree with your premises here - honestly, I think fandom has a huge component of "naive wish-fulfillment fantasy" baked in, and most of the people involved are cis white people. This kind of especially bugs me about slash - it strikes me as extremely problematic for primarily heterosexual people to be fetishizing gay sexuality in that manner, especially given the overwhelming prominence of rape.
One thing struck me as a little weird:
I think this is because fandom is not criticism, and is kind of directly opposed to critical impulses. People generally involve themselves in fandoms because they're attracted to the source material positively; kind of the point of fandom is that you're a fan. I mean, obviously the "I have a problem with this so I RP/fanfic it" phenomenon exists - but I don't think it ever really can exist in large enough proportion to support reasonably-sized communities.
the arkh project
Date: 2012-01-10 02:27 pm (UTC)From:As for non-computer roleplaying, if you lived nearby I'd love to have you for a game of non-stereotypical D&D, wherein I jettison a good 90% of the trite crap (read: medieval-ish Hetwhitemanlandia) and integrate (ha) things that are pretty awesome from sources OTHER than Tolkien and his derivatives. I've been dying to do an action-packed, character-driven game set in the world of Inuyasha for some time.
Re: the arkh project
Date: 2012-01-11 07:35 am (UTC)From:I was invited to a chat RP whose premise was some kind of post-apoc thing where humans were traveling out to areas which were simultaneously entirely uninhabited but also inhabited by goblinoids who have "no culture" and with whom the humans have tried to make peace but goshdarnit ya just can't reason with them because they'll always stab ya in the back because they're savages. So the protagonists are spreading civilization.
I told the guy running it that I can tell that story, but the humans who are riding out to impose their ways on the inherently-evil cultureless savages will not be the good guys.
I guess he didn't like being told that I could totally play his game about exploring the uncivilized savage-ridden reaches of the continent, but that the most reasonable protagonist for his white adventurism fantasy was a slave-trader.
That was my last straw, I think. Someone who knows me recommended this guy's game to me because he thought I would play in a game created by a white guy who gets all his fantasy from settings created by other white guys in which civilized people leave their cities to explore "unpopulated" lands that are actually full of people that we won't count because they're savages who can't be negotiated with because, to a white person, this is a heroic thing to do.
*headdesk forever*
I have found a couple of good online games, and I've found a good dozen or so people on RPG-D who seem to know wtf I am bitching about, so I think I am just going to make note of their names and go to places they are running so that I can have a better chance of not exploding.
Re: the arkh project
Date: 2012-01-11 04:56 pm (UTC)From:Yeah, that's been my problem with Tolkein's orcs: they're not only uncivilized, they're inherently evil in some undefined essentialist way, and can never be anything but evil servants of the/a Dark Lord, therefore you can't even capture them as POWs, and they're not even as useful as supplies or livestock captured from the enemy; therefore you can't ever do anything with them but kill them (or let them run away to curl up and die in convenient out-of-the way places). It's a classic example of dehumanizing "the enemy" so being good is less complicated. Oh, and the men of Harad? Arab boogeymen left over from the Crusades, dastardly curvy swords and all. Does the story even mention them after the Ring is destroyed?
One of the reasons LotR was such a huge success was that Tolkein only used characters, stereotypes and stories that had already been proven in centuries of myth, legend and folklore, and were firmly rooted in the consciousness of his white readers; which is why the whole thing is so new-looking and retrograde at the same time.
Oh, and what you said on the Avatar storyline. Awesome CGI, sappy characters, totally crappy socio-political scenario. ("Unobtainium?" Really? Don't get me started on the technical/economic flaws...) Although I was kinda impressed that they managed to have the Na'vi looking and acting like EVERY "noble savage" the white folks have ever seen/imagined at once (Celts (covered on woad no less), Native Americans, Africans, Australians, Pacific Islanders, Siberian shamans...did they miss anyone?), while at the same time plausibly pretending to be none of them. I really liked "Avatar," but I'm glad "The Hurt Locker" won the award that year.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-11 02:37 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-01-11 07:38 am (UTC)From:I think it's going to go a lot better. It is already yielding better results.