Yeah, it’s fairly situational.
Interjection:
I am, yet I don’t advertise it but I do see the point of showing you’re a tolerant sort in your profile so that others, who would otherwise not know have a layer of ambient anxiety peeled off our social interactions.
I mean, if it’s at that point where your everyday bullcrap is creeping into the game you play to relax and have fun, it’s straight up utilitarian to know that whoever you’re talking to won’t be smearing certain biases into their stories too.
The gist of what i’m taking away from this thread re. racism in roleplay is people are missing the “skin-based” tag in the title.
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People who do “brown people bad” racism in WoW are smelly.
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Why is it that it’s always ‘don’t shove your sexuality down my throat’ when it relates to only the barest hint of non-straight orientations? Being open about yourself and celebrating that fact is perfectly normal, reasonable, and justifiable behaviour.
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what do you mean, i’ve responded to ur discord messages though??? >:(
Yeah u responded “No” when I politely asked u for a foot pic which wasn’t the response I wanted at all =/
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Perceived widening of norms is threatening to those accustomed to one thing but not another. It’s inherently reactionary and resists any reflection on what makes it so. It’s only ever “forced” by the Outsider and never a natural outgrowth of tolerance.
The rhetoric used also makes it a violation and perversion of the true order of things; something to evoke disgust and aggression against this threat to what is right, its destruction being a righteous fight against oppression by the false and twisted.
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It’s not okay for the character to lash out at others due to their experiences however it is something that commonly happens in real life. We say we’re only human and I suppose the characters in Azeroth would say something like being only mortal - thus bound to be biased and tempted into sin.
I do not want to single out anyone’s lived experiences in this thread (from what has been posted) because it would not be fair to them to be dragged out as an example so I’ll use mine.
Due to many years spent in unfortunate circumstances and now being left with permanent injuries, both mental and physical, I initially developed an extreme prejudice against men. I would not only actively avoid them but would always make the most vile assumptions about every single one. Even the most benign thing they did would immediately be met with suspicious and hostility from my end. That is misandry and it is just as bad as racism or homophobia.
Was there an explanation for my behaviour? Yes. Was it understandable? Sure. Did it justify what I was doing? No. Absolutely not.
I have been working on it and have become much better at putting my personal experiences and feelings aside but that poisoned perception is still there and I have to keep that in mind when interacting with others so I don’t fall back into old patterns. It was not acceptable to view an entire sex as nothing but slavering beasts even if my personal experiences have almost exclusively been with men like that up until my escape.
This is why I told Obahar that he needs to take a step back because even though I completely understand becoming upset when a topic sensitive to you is touched upon, if we are unable to looks at things from a perspective different than ours then we will not able to discuss them either.
Someone could write a character within this game’s context that is misogynistic (within the limits of the known lore) and actively goes out of their way to humiliate and degrade women due to previous trauma they suffered at the hands of women or because of growing up in environment where that hatred was instilled in them from a young age.
I would prefer not to interact with the character personally since I know I wouldn’t be able to separate IC and OOC entirely when it comes to the subject but I wouldn’t want to ban the concept from being explored as it can be legitimately intriguing.
However, there are only a few players who could do it justice and make that character more than just a caricature, more than just evil incarnate. I have seen the concept being done and it was either an insult to the seriousness of the matter or was written well enough but rejected by the community at large due to OOC feelings and sensibilities.
It was unfortunately a lot more common that those characters were two dimensional and used as a throw-away Saturday night villain or even a cheap attempt at “spicing up” an event by employing them as a shock jock.
This goes for all controversial issues, unfortunately.
One could write an elven noble who, though finding no fault with same sex love or women becoming fighters rather than homemakers, feels bound by duty to the prevent the further decline of its race and attempts to use their political influence in a desperate and misguided bid to enforce the bearing and rearing of more children.
One could write a tauren brave, orphaned as a calf during a Grimtotem attack, struggling to accept the presence of its “good” Grimtotem brethren in Thunder Bluff and growing mistrustful of the elders to the point that they end up going rogue then hunting and brutally killing Jevan’s tribe of Horde aligned Grimtotem to make the other tauren see the “error of their ways” while becoming blind to the irony of the situation because they can no longer see further than the injustice that was done to them.
One could write a lot of interesting characters with prejudices and sins that are at best disdainful and at worst horrifying by our real life human standards but they are rarely written in a balanced way and even when they are, they end up being rejected due OOC discomfort of the players. It is a shame but, well, the denizens of Azeroth are only mortal and we, the players, are only human.
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Are you suggesting that (And I might be misunderstanding) that rejecting someone because you are not attracted to them… is homophobic / a bias? If so, that’s beyond absurd to a level of tumblr posting.
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Yes, you are misunderstanding.
I suggested that people can and do grow bias over the most pettiest of things, such as being rejected by someone. It only takes a little push.
No, he’s suggesting that being rejected by a person because they’re not attracted to your character’s gender can be a valid excuse for the character being homophobic.
Menza wrote a longer and more elaborate post on what Atahalni meant, though I would still say that if one writes
it’s still very iffy, because what you’re writing is still coming from you. It’s not necessarily a separation of IC and OOC, because what you write still has to abide by the terms of service.
Those can be valid cases for y’know, mistrust and wariness. It’s not a valid case for going out of your way to oppress the select minority, and writing a backstory where a minority group does a great injustice against your character can also smell slightly racist/homophobic/sexist/etc as well (looks at JKR).
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Thats not the only Problem Die Aldors has
Gamers rise up to free the german realm of:
- wanna-be GoT roleplay
- “low fantasy” appeal
- weird headcanons
Isn’t it irony that it has the article “die” in it, which of course means in german “the” but in english you know well what it means?
The realm was cursed from the start to die.
If someone tells me that their character only hates mine (and my character’s denomination) because they once got rejected by someone who belonged to the same group, I’m not going to think “oh what an interesting detail to characterise their roleplay”, I’m going to think “well that’s a weird thing to bring into the game”.
But I guess even Azeroth must have its incels? Who knows.
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i’m suddenly aggressively reminded of a guy back on Guild Wars 2 who spend hours a day complaining in map chat that all female RP characters were gay (not actually incorrect at the time) and his RP was just all day trying to hit on every female character and complaining about lesbians lots.
i guess you could technically argue that that falls within the parameters of human prejudice but like, wow, y’know?
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i mean…
looks at some of the posters 
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IDK, most of the people who give those vibes to me are usually slamdunked into my ignore list so I can’t really look at them
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I really don’t care much if a character is gay or straight because I don’t tend to RP characters who would engage with relationship RP.
Whatever makes folks happy is fine.
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Yeah, agreed – I honestly couldn’t care less what sexuality a character is. What I care about is when people either a) actively shame people for having a non-straight orientation or b) say they don’t care, but then prove that they absolutely do care by making it clear they don’t want to see or hear about gay characters.