@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@silverfox It's not simply about being our escapism. It's about being our place to do our thing, within the confines of whatever setting we're in.
If I choose not to deal with a certain kind of story, so long as it's reasonable within the confines of the overall game story, then I have the expectation to have that choice simply accepted and everyone move on. The same goes for those that want to explore the intricacies of race, or culture, or whatever else.
I really hope that I'm not coming across as bigoted or bullying here, as that's not my intent. Gaming is an excellent tool to explore all kinds of things, I just don't care to be told that I must think about X, Y, or Z all of the time always or else I'm a bad person.
Ah, my sleepless babbling might've come across less clearly than I might've hoped, then. I think we're less in disagreement than it might seem.
You're saying it could be valuable, but you don't want to be forced to do it; that's certainly reasonable.
I'm saying, I think there's value in doing it, but I've noticed sometimes there's a sort of subtle cultural pressure to "stick to what you know" in making characters, or sometimes an unspoken implication that making a character who differs from you can only be because of ulterior motives, be it fetishism or 'forced social justice' or whatever else. I think that pressure not to step outside your own iRL/offline viewpoint for "fear of getting it wrong" is counterproductive, both narratively (because more diverse elements in well-rounded characters leads to a richer world and a better story) and in terms of trying to break us out of ingrained unconscious biases.
Aside from it discouraging players trying to widen the viewpoints they're willing to examine the world from—be that world fictional or otherwise—I feel like that "don't try to step outside of what you know, and if you do, you probably have ulterior motives" mindset also reinforces barriers between groups (by ethnicity, culture they were raised in, sexuality, whatever) that contibute to many systemic 'isms' and 'phobias' of various forms—racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. After all, if it's not worth trying to see a fictional story from that viewpoint because you might get it wrong, there's that unconscious association that it's not worth trying to see real world new stories (or anything else outside of fictional worlds) from that viewpoint because you might get it wrong.
So when I say that's something we as a community could work on, I mean we could work on doing away with that sort of pressure you sometimes bump into that "if you are going to make a character who isn't white, you must have an ulterior motive" or that it's somehow wrong/weird/bad to do so. Granted, that pressure is more common in anything set in the modern-day world, as opposed to fantasy worlds, but I'd argue that the modern-day world is where being willing to expand your viewpoint is actually potentially important to things outside of pretendy fun-times internet story games. Since we aren't experiencing widespread and systemic real-world racial oppression of elves, or werewolves, or Togruta, or anything else mythical or purely fictional.
(At least not last I checked; I grant I have run out of spoons and have not read the news in a day or so.)
