Posts made by SparklesTheClown

Definitely 100% I think it's good not to assume what people are. I guess I just felt like "well of course this person is (x) if they're playing like this". But I guess I just never really challenged that assumption with any alternatives.

For virtually my entire internet existence, if I don't say anything to the contrary, people will 100% assume and I and everyone else on the internet is white. It's a part of what explicitly keeps me from trying to explore certain things as a black character that ironically white people might find problematic if they don't contextually understand what I'm trying to do.

Something like this might be like the movie Attack the Block, where John Boyega and his friends are delinquents from the projects starting trouble and such. But the point of the movie is to subvert that they're ultimately kids who are the product of their environment, and when presented with the opportunity to do good and be more than that, they will.

Obviously it might be a simplistic interpretation on my part, but I think a narrative like that is hard to do in a MUSH in the sense that it requires you to dive somewhat into problematic trope in order to build to the positive aspect, and OOCly it just feels like there's always that hump of, like, this is a white environment where I have to be very careful about going too deep lore black or they'll think I'm being problematic, am secretly a white person, or any other number of things that keep me from fully expressing myself.

Of course it could all be all in my head, but people definitely 100% assume that everyone else is white usually. So these just feel like things I have to take into consideration. And I can't always depend on the idea that people will understand or even believe my intent, which I think is something that every MUSHer has experience with.

I do think that beyond "let's burn this all down", there's at least some discussion to be had on the topic in general. Hell I never would have even questioned my basic assumption up there if we weren't talking about this. I think things like this need to be discussed, and discussion isn't necessarily the same as a witch hunt.

In Discord we were discussing "problematic" representation by a person in the minority doing the representing. Like, how with trans stuff for example, there's kind of this policing of how other trans people can write about themselves in fiction and such. I personally think that you should be able to write about your own understanding of your experience however you want, but I think that there are enough bad actors as far as just dudes who are doing fetishy lesbian stuff that there are people who will side-eye if they don't know you.

Like, I think that's just a natural reaction. If I see someone playing an over the top black thug character, tossing around the N word and binging buckets of KFC and being the biggest caricature, I'm gonna very deeply question if this is even remotely an actual black person, and I think there are people who will be uncomfortable with it.

So yeah, it's a fine and complex line. What if this person is an actual black person, what then?

I don't have a clear cut answer for you (beyond not throwing around the N word, which I said pages ago), but I believe that it's important to realize that these discussions are nuanced and it's important to accept and embrace the concept of nuance. Some discussions are just that, a discussion. They don't always have an easy solution or answer, and discussing them is how you get a better understanding of how to navigate these difficult situations.

I certainly know men who can play lesbians well, but if I play Devil's Advocate against my own argument for a moment.

I would say that if anything it probably is an ironically poor assumption on my part to say that a woman can't just be bad at RPing in general and thus come off like a guy playing a horny Shang lesbian.

So I do apologize, since gendered assumptions even in a "I'm assuming women can't fuck up in this way" way are still gendered assumptions one way or the other.

I know plenty of actual lesbians in MUSHes who play lesbian characters, and people who are men playing lesbian characters.

Like, the difference is kind of staggeringly obvious.

For one, usually dudes playing lesbians can barely play women to begin with, let alone lesbian women.

Plenty of lesbians I know play sexy characters who are seductive and all of that. It's 100% different than when men are doing this, as men tend to universally play the same lesbian personality and character, while women play their characters as actual people with a personality.

@Pandora said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Exactly this. I'm not going to lie, the idea of a bunch of white people sitting around chatting for 20+ pages about how to artificially inflate the diversity in games makes me nervous for what that artificial diversity will look like, and the continuing chatter about how the community is too insular to invite in minorities so it's better to pretend to be them instead is tragic as fuck.

Fix the culture if you want diversity, and if you can't be bothered, leave us out.

I do think that there are a surprising amount of minorities in this hobby, but I think they tend to congregate around certain places, or stay under the radar. Like, Mega Man MUSH and String Theory (even though ST is invite only now) both have more minorities than the average MUSH. The concentration of trans people on Mega Man MUSH is higher than I've seen anywhere else, which is a part of the reason I've been trying to talk non-MUSHer trans friends into giving it a try.

I think this thread definitely has value, as I'm a strong advocate in I'd rather white people or straight people or whatever have some kind of place where they can ask sincere questions and sincerely educate themselves on things. I think it's more helpful than not.

I've been planning my own MUSH for quite a while (taking my time this time, which is why I haven't mentioned it), which I hope will be a fresh experience that makes POCs and LGBTQ people feel welcome and such, and obviously everyone else. There's certain MUSHing cultures, by no real fault of their own, where a minority would just not necessarily feel like they belong to that OOC culture. It's not anything malicious, and I'm not gonna start dropping game names, but some MUSHing cultures are just culturally not somewhere a minority would feel all that comfortable on an OOC level, just on the sheer fact that they can't relate to the OOC culture. Which for me is more of a neutral statement than "this is good" or "this is bad", just that I want to try to encourage a larger variety of OOC MUSHing cultures. They definitely exist, Mega Man MUSH's very leftist minority friendly culture, String Theory's very family oriented culture where literally the whole MUSH is friends, they're very different from each other, and are also very different from other games.

I've talked a lot in the past, even in my batshit insane WORA days, about how you can build and run a game to encourage a particular kind of culture. And I think that beyond honestly simple to avoid things like toxicity and such, it's definitely possible to build a game that feels welcoming to minorities on an OOC level. But what I failed to understand in the past is that it helps to bring people along who will actually help encourage your game to be a certain way, which is why one man shows aren't great. That's why I'm bringing so many friends along when I make my MUSH, to help me turn it into what I want it to be.

I don't think creating a particular OOC culture is a simple feat without starting out the gate with that plan in your mind. Like, those games I mentioned, they're at a point where their culture likely isn't going to change very much. Arx's culture is unlikely to change, any MUSH that's established itself at this point is not likely to change. Ultimately, if you want big cultural changes on an OOC level, you've gotta make a new environment for it.

That said, encouraging minority options in a roster game and making the characters feel more diverse, both in culture and as individuals to be honest, is one thing that can help an already existing game with this. And yeah, I do think that actually playing said characters helps, but again don't force yourself just because of that.

I've legit seen people outright not bother joining a game because it was like "ugghhh another New England/Maine game where everyone has a mansion and is a white CW character". And I've personally played countless games that take place in an urban environment but it's obvious that the people who made the game have never lived in said environment or even seemingly watched media that took place in said environment, so the characters live in this bizarrely uncanny way because there's no one to creatively drive the game to actually feel like what it's supposed to be.

And by bizarrely uncanny way, I mostly mean everyone is rich, which is so tired and overdone in modern settings. "I live in Hell's Kitchen please come hang out at my 100,000 square foot apartment with my baby, it's so rough here". Honestly, nearly every character not being rich would go such a long way in making settings feel more relatable and down to Earth, and not like a soccer mom power fantasy.

In Arx it makes sense that people are rich, since it's a game mostly focused on nobles. So I just wanted to point out that this complaint excludes Arx, as everyone being rich is narratively appropriate and serves a purpose (plus people choose to be things other than rich).

I think @Pandora brings up something that this thread is definitely capable of discussing.

The fact that the vast majority of lesbian characters in MUSHes are literally the same ultra horny sexpest character. Not that I have room to talk about sexpests, but I feel like I so rarely see lesbian characters who aren't obviously a dude RPing a fetish. If this was black characters they'd all be sitting around eating watermelon and nailing all the white women (I know it seems like I'm throwing stones from a glass house, but I definitely do things in MUSHes other than nail all the white women on most days).

I mean people on the internet say a lot of shit, and they also have a lot of different opinions. Obviously there are always going to be weird unclear waters, but expecting everything to have a neat and tidy explanation that no one has disagreements over is unrealistic.

And just for my two cents, I never thought Gal Godot was white, I just had no idea what the fuck she was. She's in that Morena Baccarin space in my head.

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

A POC (person of color) is any non-white person.

That's not as helpful as it may seem, honestly. Since 'whiteness' isn't solely the providence of those with white skin. Italians, Greeks, Spaniards... not white, but White.

Anyone who wouldn't get racially profiled in the U.S or just entirely banned from the country by conservatives is white by the general American definition of POC. I hope that helps.

@Goblin said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

My character is not black, but a PoC anyway (also I do feel a bit unsure about terminology, I am not American and I don't mean any offense if I chose the wrong words, feel free to educate me if I'm being dumb.)

A POC (person of color) is any non-white person. It's generally best to use it when referring to the overall concept of POCs, or something that involves people of multiple non-white races (I.E: A Topic that affects Asians, black people, Native Americans, etc). When referring to a single race it's generally best to just straight up refer to that race rather than say POC.

Obviously on Arx that's complicated due to them being from fantasy ethnic backgrounds inspired by real ones, so in this case, in my specific opinion at least, I think POC is good for fantasy Arx races based on real backgrounds. Though if anyone disagrees feel free to explain why, which isn't me being defensive or anything, I just genuinely want to know if someone thinks there's a good alternative in this Arx situation.

This probably counts as a minor peeve, but it's somewhat on topic.

Searching for black and other non-white races of PBs is a pain in the ass.

Like, for example, you can search "man with sword" or any other "man with" things, or search "man wearing suit", and like 99% of the results are white dudes.

Now, yes, I understand that I can type black man or chinese man or whatever else, but that is why this is a racial peeve rather than something where I'm like "I want this fixed right now!". But like, I guess my point is, searching for PBs and such with all these extra racial caveats and sometimes having to very precisely figure out how to get non-white dudes to pop up (sometimes there's a bizarre complication), is annoying, and is a reminder that there's literally a default race irl lmao.

I'm like, damn, I want to experience typing "man in boxers" and it's like a variety of sweaty men instead of 99% white sweaty men.

It's not like I sit there losing sleep over this or just being like "FUCK THE MACHINE" every time I do a PB search, but it's a little thing that pings in my brain and makes me go "there's literally thousands of photos of every race of man and woman in each of these categories, why do I always have to see one very specific race without making a bunch of caveats". And it legitimately does complicate my searches in a way where I just get kind of annoyed that I even have to do this extra step that is sometimes not as simple as typing "black swordsman", which I'm sure people can see would get complicated right away.

Could type African swordsman, but then I start getting very specific African cultural stuff that has nothing to do with what I'm looking for.

And "African-American" as a search term to narrow down searches is functionally useless.

This is just an example, but this happens a LOT. Having to figure out how to search for a specific race in a specific category since the default results are always white dudes is just a pain in the ass. We have the technology to make this significantly easier, algorithms can be trained to make this easier, and hell, algorithms can be trained so that the default result isn't just a wall of white dudes, but that's just not the internet we're on right now.

I'm sure there's plenty of people who will find this post rather silly, but honestly, I've been a black dude for 32 years and after a while these minor peeves and annoyances tend to pile up and just become these little annoying pin pricks.

And I guess the broader point beyond this very specific thing is that sometimes I'm just doing something and then it hits me "yeah this is definitely going to be harder because you're trying to do something normal but the black version of it, lmao eat shit I guess".

And, back to the PBs in general, it stood out to me more because early in my MUing I used to play exclusively white characters (I think I mentioned this before), because as a teenager, due to where I grew up, I thought people would hate me or think I was dumb for being black (and not just dumb because I do dumb things). So when I started playing POCs, particularly black characters, I realized just how much fucking harder it was to find PBs I wanted to use for specific things. And even beyond the search results nonsense, it's not like there's a million shows and movies out there with black people doing wizard shit or swinging swords around, even though that stuff definitely does exist, and there's enough of it for there to be adequate search results in my opinion.

Even if you ignore the dreadlocks aspect, I've seen people go far beyond that and claim all kinds of very obviously African hairstyles and be like "no actually the vikings...".

Like, I find it weird that somehow the vikings invented literally every single African hairstyle in existence, even the ones that make literally no sense for a white person to even have, since most of these styles exist in the very specific way that they do to protect whatever type of African hair is most common in the region where that style is from.

Why in the world would medieval vikings invent insanely time consuming and impractical protective hairstyles (that do more damage to their hair than anything else) for their allegedly long flowing straight hair that takes extra effort to even make this kind of hairstyle stay in place for them???

And given just how many hairstyles I've seen claimed under the banner of "vikings", it's super wild that somehow the vikings invented a whole lot of very specific shit apparently in parallel with every African nation and tribe under the sun, except one has incredibly well-documented and researched explanations for every single individual hairstyle existing, and the other has airbrushed art on the side of a dude's van to document that the vikings did indeed do all of this.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

As a Dane, I'm not going to even pretend to deny that I don't fall on my ass laughing helplessly when I see Americans talk about their viking heritage.

Some of them do know what they're talking about. Most of them think they're descended from Vikings the show.

I mostly think it's hilarious when people wear an obviously African hairstyle 'cause "viking heritage" lmao.

@surreality said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@HelloProject This is a good example re: the furor over clothing. Even the article is full of contradictory opinions, but the attacks if you look at the original link are probably not something most people of any description are likely to want to deal with, ever, to put it mildly.

(FWIW, that's almost identical to a dress I bought in Hong Kong, mine just doesn't have the band of black trim; it's why this sticks out in memory.)

As a fashion and costume and fashion history geek, every single thing about this depresses me. I don't expect you to explain or anything, it's 'if you hadn't seen this, this is an example of what I meant'.

Stuff like this is usually pretty easy to explain, since I see it all the time and have had this discussion a lot. To put it simply, Asian-Americans and people who live in Asian countries are living extremely different experiences. You can't expect someone who grew up in China who has only lived in China to have the same experience and opinion as a Chinese-American. Considering that in China you grow up literally in the dominant ethnic group, why would the concept of cultural appropriation or anything like that even be something that you think about?

"Americans got mad, but people in China didn't" is just not a good argument and displays an overwhelming amount of ignorance on the part of journalists. Like, I don't see American journalists looking to see what the opinions of people who live in Lagos are about African-American issues. It just makes literally zero sense to me and has always been my least favorite line of thinking.

Also I didn't actually read the clothing/costume posts 'cause I was still responding to other stuff, but now that I have, like, fashion stuff is extremely contextual. I know 100% for sure that Japanese people in Japan encourage people to learn about Japanese culture and wear/learn about kimonos and stuff. And I know that there's Japanese-Americans who have had their culture disrespected enough times that there's sensitivity and wariness on the topic, because they have very different lived experiences than someone who exclusively grew up in Japan has had.

At the end of the day, all you can do is either 1. decide you don't wanna deal with that and just kind of yeet out of it, or 2. avoid the actual mechanics of what appropriation is and hope for the best.

At the end of the day, on kimonos specifically, the way that people in Japan encourage people to engage with stuff like that would very much entirely avoid the concept of appropriation. Like, if you're literally learning about the culture, doing things in the appropriate way, and respecting what these things mean, it literally doesn't fit the definition of what appropriation is. Appropriation is like, a white person getting a fashionable mini-skirt made out of a kimono and doing a whole "Asian-themed" thing with no regard for anything to do with that culture beyond its iconography and aesthetic.

The kimono debate specifically is one I've seen a lot, as I'm in a lot of Japanese culture things where I hear people discuss this topic quite a bit. It's an extremely thin line with lots of grey areas, opinions, and experiences, and it's one of those things you're not gonna get 100% of people to agree due to the fact that it isn't a strictly black and white issue.

Do I believe that appropriation has a pretty specific definition and set of terms? Yes. However, there is a grey area of, like, people who have seen their culture get appropriated so many times that they aren't quick to trust that someone isn't doing that, and some who believe that they can't trust someone not to be engaging in appropriation at all. To me it's an understandable feeling to have, and I don't judge people for having that feeling. But it's not really a homogeneous feeling or opinion, it's one of those things where it comes down to your own judgement after you've weighed everything that people say and feel and such. You're gonna find people who are all perfectly intelligent and "woke" and everything else whose opinions greatly differ on this.

But if I were to give my personal opinion, I personally follow the terms of avoiding what cultural appropriation generally is. So far I haven't really run into any problems from doing this. At the end of the day, basic respect for what you're engaging with is often all people want, so I go out of my way to show that.

Also that nurse outfit thing is wild, I never thought of that before. I can definitely see why a "sexy nurse" outfit is offensive and belittling from the perspective of a nurse. It really does seem like one of those things that grinds at a culture's perspective. Like my friend was saying on Discord about the way that the Simpsons have painted people's perspective on nuclear power.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@HelloProject
It was this A+ winner of a post.

https://musoapbox.net/topic/3249/diversity-representation-in-mu-ing/242?_=1591921257071

Which I umm am not basing any of my life decisions on.

Edited why are things hard to link It's at the bottom of the page.

As it didn't lead me to a specific post, I'll address two posts I see in that link.

This is the dumbest thread I've seen in a while. Let me state a couple relevant points.

You can play whatever ethnicity or gender you desire. There is zero pushback against this. No game currently open today (bar a few old MUDs and MOOs) still have racism and bigotry baked in to any real degree. And the people who are openly racist/bigots actually get tossed out. Unlike real life.

Playing a PoC to learn empathy? Bitch please. The shit that folks who aren't white have to deal with on a daily basis -don't exist on a MU*-! Period. It is a sanitized experience. It's downright offensive to consider playing a PoC as 'walking in their shoes' or 'learning empathy'.

I don't disagree with this at all. Like, yeah I believe that playing a POC with a certain intent, if it's gonna force you to research and educate yourself about certain things, can give you a better perspective, I really don't think that playing a POC in of itself will magically teach you what it's like to be a POC. And I think that's the point of this post. They're not saying playing a POC is bad, just that it isn't an equivalent experience to being a POC.

@Ominous said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@egg said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Play a POC, it wouldn't kill you.

Yeaaaaaaaah, no.

It feels a bit too much like this:

While it might not kill me, it might offend a person of color, so I'm going to politely say no. I don't judge people who do it at all, but I personally do not trust myself to do the character appropriate justice.

As far as this post, this person literally said they aren't a POC and quite honestly equating playing a POC to blackface is like, what??? Unless you're planning to do some horrific accent and use it as an excuse to drop the N word everywhere, or any number of super obvious things that anyone with common sense wouldn't do, then I don't see the issue. I have literally never met a single other black RPer who has said something like this. And I play in at least two MUSHes currently with multiple black players from a variety of backgrounds, and white people who are playing POCs.

Like, I can't take responsibility for a white person being way off base. I understand the sentiment but this is just straight up not a thing that should be taken seriously.

I mean, I'm just throwing it out there, and this applies to quite a few things so I'm not tagging anyone specifically, but a POC is capable of saying something objectively wrong. Like, this happens damned near literally half the time anyone mentions cultural appropriation on the internet, because so many people, POC or otherwise, never bother to actually learn what appropriation even is and conflate it with "I don't like this". When you compile POC being wrong about something and white people having no concept of what the thing is, you mostly just get a bunch of confusion that mostly serves to hurt more than help.

My point is, I can imagine all sorts of people doing something rather ignorant, it happens every day, but not doing something because someone on the internet can be both wrong and angry at the same time isn't really a reason not to. I'm, again, not advocating that anyone do anything outside of their comfort zone, but if anyone in this thread said that a white person playing a black person or whatever is basically blackface, someone please present me with that so I can see the argument. So far I've mostly seen people annoyed at grossly bad portrayals that I feel are more common sense things than anything.

But yeah, just, like, there's really only two possible explanations for situations like these.

1. The person playing the character is doing so on a degree so bad that it's obviously bothering people (I have seen this happen before and on some occasions I have seen it be so extremely bad that I was like "How is it possible that they have no idea how bad this is?")

2. The person accusing the player of not doing something correctly is obviously wrong in some way and has a misunderstanding of what they're even talking about in such a way that it would be obvious to most people observing.

In my personal experience, #1 has frequently been the case on any game I've seen this happen on, and it's usually when people have reached the point of "wow I wish this person would go the fuck away". #2 I've seen happen but to a significantly lesser degree. Though that story I read on the last page with the Maori bow or whatever is pretty wtf, seems like something a white person being very bizarrely cautious would say without thinking. Like, why would a person on modern day Earth somehow be barred from learning a skill due to their racial requirements???

Either way, a lot of the stories I've read here seem like they're severely lacking in context, as I can think of all kinds of reasons that a lot of this shit would happen. But I legitimately don't think that obvious bad faith or misinformed arguments should be allowed to control things or people, and if I saw someone saying some obviously misinformed shit in a MU I would address it. I just plain don't want white people knowingly following a bad faith or misinformed argument just because they're afraid of being disrespectful. I get that it's a tough goddamned rock and a hard place to be in, but to me it does you and also myself a disservice when I then have to turn around and be like "oh yeah that person was obviously full of shit".

I'm not gonna lie, I'd be (and have been) annoyed as shit if a white person tried to "no actually" me about race stuff, but there's polite ways to bring stuff up. Like, "Hey, what you're saying isn't the same as what I read at <source>, can you look at this and tell me if it's accurate or not?". There's just little things like that, if you're really worried about being polite. You just can't let obvious dumb shit influence and hold a MU hostage. And if someone is gonna have a tantrum, fine. I've seen Cirno try to hold people emotionally hostage with race shit before, and all it does is hurt me and any other POC or marginalized person. It just can't be tolerated.

But, on the flip side, every criticism of what someone does isn't a take-down or assassination attempt. Sometimes you did do something wrong, sometimes you did fuck up playing that character, and sometimes you just need to take the L when it gets explained to you and not develop some weird years long bizarre trauma because someone said you're bad at black characters.

@TheBigD said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@egg said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Play a POC, it wouldn't kill you.

Yeah, no. This is a situation where no one wins. There are folks who will find this idea to be as insulting as wearing blackface. And others who would call it cultural appropriation.

Me, as a white guy? I'm choosing the safer option every time.

I've gotta say, this is not even on the same planet as cultural appropriation. Like, cultural appropriation is a pretty specific concept, namely the concept of taking an aspect of another culture without any real credit or respect for it, possibly also while in the process renaming it and being like "I literally invented this out of no where and never saw anyone else do it before".

I like to use the Macklemore vs. Eminem example. (Warning: Opinions)

Macklemore is cultural appropriation because he legit built his whole ass career on black culture and art and got accolades while pretty much giving nothing back and being completely unable to show any respect or acknowledgement without making it about himself.

Eminem, at least from my extremely subjective perspective, isn't cultural appropriation, because he's spent years respecting and giving back to the culture and art that he built his career on, he had to work very hard for it and pay all the normal dues for it than any black person would, and didn't take any shortcuts to get there. Now, I could criticize his rapping for a variety of reasons, but that's a whole other topic not really related to race relations.

Either way, anyone saying that playing a POC in an RP is cultural appropriation is completely objectively wrong. Though as the example above proved, someone can be a whole ass and it can definitely turn into something racist lol. To me this is just common sense though. That "everything is offensive and understanding how not to be insulting is hard" stuff people always say is nonsense. I know far more white people who understand basic respect and not being a whole ass than ones who don't, so I really don't think it's that complicated.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying play a POC if you aren't comfortable with it, but not doing it because you think people will find it inherently insulting and offensive and all this other stuff is really only a valid reason if you literally have no idea how not to insult another human being. If the reason is "I don't feel comfortable because I'm concerned about being disrespectful", that's one thing, but the way you worded it has a very inflammatory "the SJWs will absolutely fucking destroy me" vibe. I can't imagine someone complaining to you that "RPing as a black person is basically blackface" outside of like a random 13 year old on Twitter whose entire understanding of social issues is memes.

@Coin said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

This all reminds me of a relatively recent thing where someone playing a PoC character, on more than one occasion, metaposed that their character's way of talking was hard to understand and/or "arguably English" (when it very clearly was neither of those things, especially since any of the non-strictly prescriptive grammar used in dialogue was pretty close to AAVE). Like, yikes, ya know?

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Honestly, I think we should all refrain from using slurs - even those that our minority group has reclaimed, or are otherwise acceptable for us to use. Since there's no way of proving we're entitled to use them, it's easier to just not.

@Coin said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I mean, I agree in theory, and pretty much universally RP in that fashion. But I'm not going to tell someone they can't use a slur that their group has reclaimed, either, not my place.

Even if I did use slurs in general irl, I still wouldn't in an RP. There's a pretty simple reason for that, namely: Not everyone in every demographic 100% agrees on 1. what words are "reclaimed", 2. the concept of reclaiming a word in general. It's one thing in your own personal work of fiction, but in an RP, in my opinion, it doesn't really matter what race you are.

There's a level of respect that we have to show for each other as a community, as unlike irl, we have to make this environment as comfortable for each other as possible, due to this being all of our collective hobby that we really have rather limited spaces to be in to begin with. So, speaking as a black person at least, I think that the most fair thing to do is definitely to avoid slurs altogether. I'm not looking to make another black person uncomfortable just because, say, I was fine with the N word, and they aren't. It's a pretty visceral word, I know black people who can't stand hearing it from anyone, it can be kind of like hearing a nuke randomly drop out of no where.

Like, I personally am all for the reclaiming or devaluing of slurs, even if I don't personally do it, mostly just due to my discomfort with using the word, even if I don't mind that other people do. But I don't think it's unfair or imposing yourself if a MU was like "we want to make this environment as comfortable for everyone as possible, so we prefer to avoid slurs of any kind". Obviously fictional fantasy slurs are one thing, but still, I really don't think it's controversial for a MU to say they want to avoid them to make sure that everyone is comfortable. It's a lesser evil, to me at least, to make sure that all POCs are comfortable rather than bring up the often rather controversial topic of slur reclamation.

Now of course this can get muddy, like on the topic of LGBTQ people. As there are people who identify as "queer", and there are people who see it as permanently a slur and do not want to hear people use it in that way. However, I believe that this is kind of an exception to the rule. You can't really tell someone "you can't identify as that", as that's kind of lowkey fucked up. But there's no black people out here identifying as the N word, I don't believe it's oppressing someone's identify to say that we avoid those slurs so that we can have a safe environment. Contextually, "queer" and the N word are quite different things, even if they can both be controversial.

In the end, I guess the difference is, does this controversial word involve someone's overall expression of identity and thus their comfort and sense of self as a human being or not. I don't believe that this is the case of the N word, or other racial slurs, as they aren't really a crux of our existence, they're more an aspect of some of our cultural interaction and how we might express ourselves with other people. And I don't think I've met a black person who would be like "oh no fuck you" if someone said we avoid slurs to make sure we have a safe environment. At least no one I'd meet in a MU.

@Roz said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Have you submitted requests about these? Because staff definitely doesn't go through and look at every character page in search of it. Sometimes you gotta point their attention to an issue. There's too many PCs for them to proactively enforce by checking all the pages every day.

I can tell you that there explicitly have been issues when they've enforced it, but they had to be made aware.

Nah you have a good point, I just kind of assumed that since it was happening then it was allowed, so I didn't bother. I'll keep it in mind for the future.

I definitely think staff need to enforce their own theme and rules. Hell I wish all the time that Arx would enforce their PB rules that are written in the very rule files, about not obviously race changing a character away from their desc.

As far as what other people are saying, I agree in general a little bit with everyone.

1. I definitely think a short few pages is most of what's needed to get the gist across about something. Hell you don't even have to go more than one page, I've literally had to do this.

2. I also think that a nice long optional deep dive can't hurt either, to elaborate on the points in the shorter section. I usually will reference such a section or gradually absorb it over time as I play a character. I think it's unrealistic to expect someone to read and remember a whole book's worth of information about a single character type.

3. I agree that there's a lot of people who don't read or who ignore theme, and while I get that staff not reinforcing what they've written can be an issue, I don't think it should be an excuse to not care about theme. I don't expect a reward for playing my character well or trying to work together with other players who are trying to also hold together a cohesive theme and have distinct cultures that aren't just a generic blob.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

uh i have no idea what mechanic this is but it SOUNDS racist af, just from those terms. Never thought I'd be an elf apologist but EVERYONE SUCKS BUT HUMANS is yikes.

Lmao this was my reaction, though I at least get the sentiment of making races noticeably different.

Ironically much of the tabletop industry I've been involved with lately is trying to fix all the weirdly unfortunate racial implications from older books (or just outright racist things, which I'll discuss more when one of the books is out and I'm allowed to talk about it).

@insomniac7809 said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Not gonna lie, if I need to read an ethnography to roll up a PC I probably won't.

I don't know what's different between a few pages explaining a culture and literally an entire WoD book that does the same thing, except it's a whole ass book.