A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like

[Arkandel]

@Paris said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

After I left my SO (and that game), they, their friends, and this person especially, tracked my IP and kept a list of known sightings and updated IPs, and either got me banned, or hunted my PCs with their alts while using their staffbits to track me while I was unfindable-- even if we'd never interacted before. They were allowed to do this until I took a long break, and then on my return changed my writing style and the type of character I played. I was able to avoid them for years after that, but about ten years later, my ex found out who I was, and started right back up.

Wtf do you find these people? Between that and the person who reported you to staff for the plot (she?) repeatedly asked you to run... damn. That's some big bucket of badshit crazy right there.

@HelloProject said in [A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like](/topic/1618/a-constructive-thread-about-

So, if nothing else, I do understand the fear, even if I've only experienced a few race things in MUing.

The only weird thing about race I've encountered that stands out is how few non-white PBs are used overall. It doesn't seem to just be that we 'play what we know' because lots of people play the opposite gender, or green-skinned aliens or robots or whatever. It always seemed strange though.

[Tinuviel]

@Arkandel
I can only speak to my own experiences regarding playing races, but these are my thoughts on the subject.

It's easy to play a Klingon, for example. Or a Cylon, or a Na'vi, or whatever. They're fictional, and you can spend an hour on Wikipedia looking up the broad strokes of how to portray them properly. But most importantly, nobody is going to be offended by your portrayal of a Klingon. You're not going to be racist by playing your Klingon in a stereotypical way, because they're fictional.

Playing a human being with hundreds or thousands of years of cultural separation from what you know can be daunting, and would require a great deal of work to do so accurately, or at least accurately enough to avoid offending people or being accused of racism. Playing an Aboriginal Australian, for instance, would be hard for me not because I don't know the intricacies of their various cultures. I don't know, necessarily, what someone with their belief system would do in X situation.

But the main reason I don't play people of colour in my RP is because I don't know a damned thing, compared to what I know about my own cultural heritage, and anything I do know would probably be seen as offensive at worst or a gross overgeneralisation at best.

[Arkandel]

@Tinuviel I would buy that more if I wasn't on St. Petersburg to see all those Russian stereotypes ("everyone drinks vodka ALL the time... comrade!").

I see where you're coming from though.

[Tinuviel]

@Arkandel White people offending white people is different to white people offending not-white people.

Besides, that's not a stereotype, that's just a fact.

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

Wtf do you find these people? Between that and the person who reported you to staff for the plot (she?) repeatedly asked you to run... damn. That's some big bucket of badshit crazy right there.

This was back when Start Your Engines was a thing. Back when Dark Metal was a thing. Tartarus. Man, that's a long time ago, and people were really fucking unbalanced then, relative to now. I may not particularly like @Kanye-Qwest, for example, but she's not half as bad as the people I used to know from that era of games. @HelloRaptor has more and better war stories than I.

Constructively, I'm opposed to the idea of a database or cataloguing. On a forum, you can debate allegations. With a database, I fear people will fall into the trap of accepting lore as data. On a forum, you can ask about a particular player and determine whether the allegations are true or not. With a database, there is a sense of "authority" with what's recorded, even if what is recorded isn't entirely accurate or may even be doctored.

[SparklesTheClown]

I will say that it's a valid concern to not know if you can play a POC properly. There's the equally valid concern that people will accuse you of playing one improperly for the most minor of reasons (this is why these days I make a point of stating that I am, indeed, a black person, so that people will stfu and not say I'm playing my race "wrong").

On the one hand, I would rather someone just straight up not play one if they're just gonna pile on a bunch of stereotypes and play a gross caricature. I've seen this shit in Shang's square, back when I used to play Shang. You'd see a black dude walk in and then start dropping all sorts of N words and basically straight up doing some crazy ass text blackface. I didn't even know it was possible to do text blackface, but goddamn that player sure as hell did it.

I do know plenty of white people who play black characters and are respectful and even acknowledge the culture, because they take time to understand it and such. I don't think it's necessarily difficult. Hell, binge watch The Get Down, Luke Cage, and if you really wanna go for extra credit, every season of A Different World starting at season 2 (Entirely ignore season 1 and Bill Cosby's bullshit).

Things to stay away from: Tyler Perry movies, most things by the Wayans Brothers made after like 1995, The Cosby Show (This is not a 100% bad show re: black culture, but it has a tendency to uh, well it's a complicated topic but basically it's not a good reference for authenticity), pro wrestling (it's better now, but let's just play it safe).

Things you may have seen that are a good reference of depth: Fresh Prince, Family Matters, Attack the Block (it's a movie, go watch it, it's important, it has aliens), Living Single, Blackish, Doctor Who (Doctor Who is fantastic with their black characters), Creed (that Rocky movie).

But overall, the reason I suggested The Get Down and Luke Cage is because these shows combined kind of illustrate the overall heart and soul of black culture, in my opinion. They both illustrate positives, problems faced, and negatives in the culture in a way that isn't hamfisted, because there's still a very interesting narrative beyond these things. And also because they're both on Netflix.

Not every black person is going to agree on what is "proper" black culture, because lots of black people come from different backgrounds, but I do believe that there is an essence of the culture that the majority of people would agree is the culture. You don't have to grow up in a neighborhood like Luke Cage's to understand that it's places like this where the essence of the culture comes from (Though I certainly grew up in multiple places like Luke Cage's setting, which is why it hit me as authentic).

Doctor Who, particularly the Martha Jones seasons, are a great example of the fact that you can still pretty authentically write a black person even if you aren't necessarily touching on their culture. While the current season is doing a good job of touching on culture (even if it's British culture), but not making the character secondary to her culture (IE: They treat her like a person rather than just a bag of cultural traits).

The ultimate thing to remember is that every character is, at their core, a person, and we all generally like and do a lot of the same shit. Culture is more something like seasoning that paints our unique experience and perspective. A white woman might cite Sex in the City as her super feminist adult awakening show, a black woman might cite Living Single or Girlfriends. (I've never watched Sex in the City but people always say these are basically the same shows but culture/race swapped)

One last note is, like, while I don't police people's language, because I am very much an advocate of freedom of speech, I do get uncomfortable when people use the N word in RP, regardless of the context. I don't even use the N word irl. But, that's just my two-cents on that.

Have fun! I hope everyone learned something! I hope this was more helpful than the average Cirno post about race.

[Ganymede]

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

Have fun! I hope everyone learned something! I hope this was more helpful than the average Cirno post about race.

It was. It also illustrates how far Asian-Americans like me still have to go to enjoy portrayals of our own culture. Fresh Off The Boat was good, but it is such a small, over-wrought sliver of Chinese Immigrant culture.

[Arkandel]

@Ganymede I wouldn't trust a catalog to be worth a damn. There'd be fake entries, people plugging in alternate facts for themselves or their favored ones/mortal enemies, and of course there's always self-serving bias in these things. I've seen some people disrespected way more once they were done staffing for popular games than they ever were when it was desirably by others to make sure they were on their good side.

For better or for worse an organic reputation and asking friends about specific folks is probably the most reliable option we will have.

... But I'm still impressed by @Paris' misadventures. Damn, son.

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I wouldn't trust a catalog to be worth a damn. There'd be fake entries, people plugging in alternate facts for themselves or their favored ones/mortal enemies, and of course there's always self-serving bias in these things. I've seen some people disrespected way more once they were done staffing for popular games than they ever were when it was desirably by others to make sure they were on their good side.

Then the catalogue would be pointless. Its purpose was to be authoritative.

[SparklesTheClown]

@Ganymede Oh yeah, no doubt about that. I once wrote a long ass article on this topic because people kept being just absolute fucking garbage to my Asian-American friends about their opinions re: Ghost in the Shell and Iron Fist. But I removed it because it was just kind of a really mean-spirited tone and I didn't think it would be educational (though people who agreed with it, liked it).

As a part of research for doing the article, I found that there have only been 27 shows in American history with Asian leads, and I'm willing to guess that not all of them were something we should be proud of as a country >_>.

[Arkandel]

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

Have fun! I hope everyone learned something! I hope this was more helpful than the average Cirno post about race.

One could conceivably hurl a hastily chewed Taco Bell lunch down a toilet and it'd be more helpful than the average Cirno post about race. But yours was quite insightful, yes.

[Kanye Qwest]

@Ganymede did you seriously just @tag me so I'd get a notification you don't like me? lol go fuck yourself.

[Derp]

One thing that is always going to be particularly troublesome, at least in my opinion, is the fact that you're not really looking to accurately portray culture, in many of these settings. You're collecting a series of tropes in order to tell a story. And tropes by their very nature are stereotypical. It's hard to the point of being insanely difficult to learn enough about a culture to accurately portray them, so many people are going to go with the shortcut version. And in the current age, it's so easy to offend people of those cultures by playing into tropes that it's basically a tinderbox.

But the thing is, it doesn't just apply to POC. Tropes apply to -everyone-. Everything from your sleazy italian mafioso to your Basic White Girl guzzling pumpkin spice starbucks in Ugg boots. Nobody plays MU's for realism, they play it for stories, and those stories require a certain amount of bending of the rules. Homelessness, mental illness, etc, are all common trope fodder, and can be easily offensive too, and yet we have entire game systems that treat these things as a collection of shorthand tropes.

So where do we take a step back and say 'there is a line we have to draw between authentic portrayal for the sake of not offending anyone and realizing that it's just a story'?

[Ganymede]

@Kanye-Qwest said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

@Ganymede did you seriously just @tag me so I'd get a notification you don't like me? lol go fuck yourself.

No, you were tagged because I mentioned that I don't particularly like you -- see above -- but that your observed level of wackiness doesn't rise to half of the shit that I've seen in the past.

We've had a public spat. We're still having one, apparently.

But if you want to rise the echelons that others still occupy, you've got a long way to go, kid.

[Arkandel]

@Derp Being european at heart it's a bit more puzzling to me to associate race with culture - although I'm not saying racism doesn't exist over there, mind you, since that would be absurdly ridiculous to even suggest! There's just no plausible correlation, no specific words or even music... nothing that connects skin color to behaviors.

I guess if anything over there we're more about national stereotypes; the French are lovers, Italians are eaters, Germans are methodical robots, and yes Russians are drinkers.

[SparklesTheClown]

@Derp Oh no I certainly agree with you about tropes. But I think there's a difference between tropes and stereotypes, much like there's a difference between tropes and cliches.

No fictional character is necessarily a 100% 1:1 copy of a real human being, but much like playing an FC, having the overall essence is important. And even then, it's like, just because you're playing a black person or any other race, doesn't mean you have to be like "Alright I'm going to do this grand philosophical expression of culture".

Samuel L. Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction, or his portrayal of Nick Fury, mostly by virtue of Samuel L. Jackson's personality, are essentially tropes that wouldn't come off the same if he wasn't black. Basically tough black badass action dude. It's fun and you don't really think about it, and while some could possibly argue that these are stereotypes, I think the overall positive intent is where the line is drawn.

It's much like a joke. The difference between a joke about race and a racist joke, something that people really bad at understanding comedy don't know the difference between.

A joke about race is when you make a joke on the topic of race, which may just have the punchline of being a funny anecdote about your culture or something, or maybe the punchline is about something racist but the thing you're laughing at is how stupid the racism is, or the person doing it, or just the overall wrongness of the situation. The point of the joke overall doesn't have negative intent, you're laughing -with- the race rather than necessarily at it.

A racist joke is where the punchline has negative intent, and yes the line can be thin, because shockingly comedy is goddamned hard. But like, let's take an Adam Sandler movie for example. There's one movie, I forget which, where Adam Sandler is just walking through a building. There's a Mexican guy sleeping, and like, the entire scene and how it's setup is that the entire punchline of the joke is that this character is a lazy Mexican. I don't think there's any dialogue or anything, you're just supposed to think this lazy Mexican is hilarious, because that's how it's set up.

If your racial tropes have positive intent, I think that more often than not you'll be on the right track. Most tropes that are just obviously offensive would be known enough to avoid anyway. And one thing to remember is that there is literally nothing you can do that won't offend someone. I'm sure my Fear and Loathing character somehow would offend someone. You can't make everyone 100% happy, but you can certainly make most reasonable people happy. I can probably look at every black character in fiction and find a way to deconstruct some sort of problem with them.

The reason for that is because there's a certain point where you forget that not every single person is going to be the same, not everyone is going to be a perfect representation of your race, even other people in your race, because a "perfect" representation of your race is extremely subjective. A lot of modern internet discourse seems to hinge on the belief that there is a perfect way to be black, or a perfect way to be a woman, or a perfect way to be this or that. But that's simply not the case. There's no perfect way to be anything, which is why there are a wide variety of ways to portray someone.

But when it comes to portraying someone in another culture, ultimately what you want isn't perfection, what you want is respect. If you respect what you're portraying, I think you'll avoid 99% of issues. Tarantino isn't perfect and sometimes he can be a hilariously uncomfortable man when it comes to race, but he's respectful and respects what he's trying to portray, and that goes a veeeery long way.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Arkandel said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

("everyone drinks vodka ALL the time... comrade!").

From my own experience with Russians (limited to professors and international students) that is not all that unbelievable.
One of the high points of my college career was having the Russian professor take the whole class (upper level history class of about 16 people) out for shots after the final, then semi-drunkenly rant about how non-Russian made vodka shouldn't be allowed to call themselves vodka.

[Tinuviel]

@Arkandel National stereotypes are the most overt displays of 'racism' in Europe, at least that I've ever seen. One is far more likely to be harassed for being Polish than for being black.

[SparklesTheClown]

I've heard interesting stories of African-Americans going to foreign countries and suddenly experiencing being seen as an American before being seen as a black person. It sounds like an absolutely fucking mindblowing experience, which is a part of why I want to travel soon.

[Cupcake]

Apparently this is how Russians REALLY roll.