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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.
Tags:
- culture,
- homophobia,
- internet,
- lgbt,
- misogyny,
- race,
- racism,
- rape,
- roleplaying
