Erasmus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 10, 2023 9:30 am
But in my mind, what makes this one worth changing is the parallel to real-life discrimination. If a character gets in trouble for being a mage or heretic, well, those are not so much touching on painful real-life traumas (unless some of you are mages IRL, in which case I have questions). Even the fantasy racism angle is not so painful to play out, because Charali and Hillmen are not real races/cultures.
But many of us are queer, and many of us have felt the pain coming from that in real life.
Having given some more time to bake, I do want to address this and how I feel about it.
No, fantasy racism is incredibly painful to play out. People simply don't play it out to the same degree as some people might remember in TI, and they certainly do not treat characters who take their racism too seriously very well. Characters who showcase cultural intolerance beyond casual "Ah, how Vavardi/Vandagan/etc. of you"isms will often receive severe disdain from their fellows, and for reasons that make plenty of sense. Lithmore is the capital, a melting pot, and where the (metaphorical) magic happens, so ideally most characters who come to Lithmore with more severe opinions about cultural differences have already come to terms with the fact that they are no longer in their own country, and as much as others are foreign to them, they are outsiders. Similarly, Lithmorrans by and large carry their sense of moral superiority close to their chest so long as others generally abide by Lithmorran standards, even if just about everyone will refer to Charali and Hillfolk as savages once or twice if a particularly large specimen isn't standing in the room.
I think people mostly stopped doing it because they thought it sucked. Maybe it's temporary, maybe it's just that the IC culture of PCs isn't really tolerant of racial discord, I don't know, but what is clear is that it is not a significantly-representative part of the roleplay currently except when it is mixed with assumptions of sexual impropriety or one's consumption of coffee or vodka. But these cultures in TI have analogies to real-life cultures, and the racism that people experience in TI can be very indicative and meaningfully representative of the social issues faced IRL by people who belong to minorities.
It's just that no one is branded or burned for drinking vodka or 'being a savage'.
The experience of being an overt racist in TI is the experience of being a nationalist whose country has already been conquered and supplanted, and being surrounded by those more culturally diverse than you. It is an exercise in stewing in your own juices as everyone looks at you like there's something wrong with you - because, well, there is. It's wrong (not evil, but certainly wrong) to judge others based on a stereotype of who you think they might be, or at least to do it to such a level that you exclude who and what they actually are.
That form of racism, taken to its extremes, dehumanizes and degrades everyone you come into contact with, including yourself. It makes them and you into caricatures devoid of individuality. It cuts you away from stories and characters with great and terrible traits, with secrets your character would only use in order to hurt them, and which you are only likely to get out of them through violence, subterfuge, or making them up wholecloth.
It seems like people don't want to roleplay that anymore on the basis of race, perhaps because racial sensitivity has massively increased in the English-speaking world over the past ten years or so, and perhaps because cultural sensitivity in general has expanded. I don't know!
But people are willing to roleplay far more violent hatred and oppression of homosexual characters right now - and I say 'right now' because maybe that wasn't the case three years ago, and now that I think about it, maybe it wasn't the case when I played Percy. The focus seemed to be on magic and heresy and megaviolence rather than on making sure the gays aren't touching weenies. But when I played Percy and he got burned to death for being a filthy thoughtreading mage with dubious connections to dubious places, several people were perfectly willing to hear my story, and the Inquisitors who processed my Review roleplayed with me for about sixteen hours over the course of two days, giving me all the time in the world to say my piece and ensure they knew exactly who Percy thought he was and exactly what he thought he was about.
When I was led to the pyre I was gagged, but that was because rather than surrender himself to the pyre, Percy argued with the Inquisitors and accused them of immorality, blaming Davism for the events that led to his arrest and for the moral degradation of Lithmore. I was offered the chance to resist, however feeble it was, and I paid the price of using it. I went to the pyre smiling, proud of who my character was and what he had done despite spending a little over two OOC months alive, far shorter than I have on Jae currently.
I know that I earned every speck of suspicion I had, despite the fact that at the time, a staff member was actively cheating to act against me by sharing metainfo with his girlfriend and using her as a springboard to hide crossover and attempt to get me killed for having spoken to his girlfriend. I know that the roleplay I received was proportionate to what I had done, and though I was very sad, my captors were exceptionally OOCly polite and exceptionally OOCly courteous to me. I left the character feeling like my scenes in Ahalin were the best scenes I had had on the character, and I am endlessly grateful for the people who helped make that happen. I remember vividly how Percy tried to put forth a last token resistance, raising four of his fingers and thinking something about it, hoping that someone in the crowd would hear it before he eventually succumbed to the smoke and burned to ashes.
This result respected me, and what I'd done, and why. Even if Percy lied about much of it.
I think that's the ideal for every pyring. And having played an Inquisitor after Percy, I know that that can't always happen. I only had one pyring, partially because the one I did was so OOCly exhausting that I did not want to continue playing TI. But despite the fact that the characters in question were completely and unquestionably guilty beyond all shadows of a doubt in my case, my roleplay most thoroughly emphasized sympathy for the plights that led them to do the naughty things they did, a desire to provide the necessary penances for the good of their souls and to go no further than that - and even when one of the players attempted to flash her 100 Charisma to mind-control me into not pyring her, I had enough respect for that person, as OOCly caustic as they would prove to be toward me in the time that followed, to have my character burst into tears at the fact that her life had been so tragic, and that she would finally have the ending that would save her from her fate.
When I witness roleplay based on any form of categorical oppression - be it based on race, sexuality, class, or even upon magic - what I look for in authority figures is the intention to change and be changed by the roleplay of those stories they are ending. When I see that the player is not interested in the deeper meaning behind these parts of the setting, when I see that the roleplay is disrespectful to what and who the other character actually happens to be, and especially if I feel like that's what someone is doing to me, I get really sad.
TI means a lot to me, and I think there's no other incredibly-bleak-grimdark-hellscape setting I'd rather play in.
But the emotional BDSM of totally surrendering the safety of my character to someone else's completely falls apart if I stop having faith that they care about me, and my character, and my time. And the last time that I quit, it was actually because I realized that that was the prevailing vibe, the prevailing opinion held by certain staff members, and that it flowed downward. It was by grace and fortune that my Inquisitors were particularly good and happy and nice roleplayers, and the roleplay could instead have had the effect of emotional abuse. Because the power dynamic is such in TI that the person on the other end of the branding rod has an exceptionally higher amount of power over your story than you do of yours, it is exceptionally important that they give over some of their story to yours, or it just sucks.
I think people feel like treating "sexually improper" characters with little OOC respect is more acceptable than treating characters with little OOC respect because they are Vandagan. To a lesser extent, the same kind of OOC disrespect is given to players playing Hillfolk or Charali.
I think that it is easier for people to do things that hurt the other player in those situations, and that that is the real cause for people feeling icky about gay persecution. It happens far less today in cases of people playing Charali and Hillfolk, and so there is far less of a feeling of OOC injustice in those situations.
But in both cases real, living people are afraid that their characters will be boiled down to stereotypes and treated as more disposable than others by the real, living people on the other side of the keyboard. And people are fine with their characters being treated proportionately to who they are. They simply disagree that it should be so severe, and they feel like something must be done about it, but struggle to put their fingers on it. One side looks to legalizing gay marriage, they think that maybe the reason they're so upset is because IRL is bothering them rn and maybe TI should be gentler, but I don't think that that's really it.
I think it's that if you play a character who's gay, your dignity as a player and the value of your story might be discarded for the sake of ensuring you receive a "themely" amount of persecution. And even in theme, it is abundantly clear that this should be a hotly-debated issue... but without people playing priests, there is no actual moral debate to be had. There is only the question of whether your Inquisitor feels like you deserve their time and respect or not. That is why Ghed's reply is of little comfort for me. People are already free to choose whether they will interpret the IC however they want to. They have, and when they do so I rarely feel like it's anything but an excuse to treat someone like garbage because "they opted into 'theme'".
Roleplay which does not respect the character or the player will always blow. People are just more likely to treat you poorly OOCly if your character is gay. There is an OOC feeling that if your character is gay that you in some way deserve whatever happens to them in the end, that people will giggle and hee and haw about you in private, and that your roleplay will be flanderized and slandered for being a constant cum orgy, and that at the end of it all you'll just be the silly little witch who thought it was a good idea to put your parts in the wrong place or vice versa when you inevitably get whipped, branded, and potentially pyred as a heretic for it.
I don't like feeling that way or seeing people feel that way.