"up until a few years ago we were genocidal imperialists, but we're fine now, honest."
That's... not really what I'm saying? Obviously there would have been a gradual transition, especially since even before the Avatar Storm Control was probably shifting people away from racism and the like as soon as it stopped being something that could be justified by mainstream science in the mid-1900s. Like I said, it's not like Control was really at all vested in the racism thing.
I don't particularly rate revised in all honesty. It killed most of the more interesting things about mage.
In particularly, I don't like revised because in revised nobody has any concrete objectives at all except to maybe try to save the world or get rich, both of which are extremely tiresome.
I can't speak to the Revised Trad books, I don't have them, but I definitely don't get this impression from the Revised Convention books. Granted, teh core is kind of stupid, but it's kind of dumb to judge the entire line based on its core books
I'm pretty sure you can still be over 100 years old (IE still be an imperialist) without being arete 6. Even if that is the case, this is kind of a huge white wash. It's suggesting that the whole nature of the organization has changed since the avatar storm, which is pretty silly.
The technocracy may not be racist (though honestly I'd bet there's a lot of scientific racism going on there) but it is responsible for a lot of racism. Imperialism was a tragedy, a holocaust, and I think having the bad guys in your setting be in effect, the force of that imperialism who you get to fight is pretty great overall.
First of all, you realize that it's possible to
stop being racist, right? Like, people in real life have repudiated racist views they held earlier in life
You also do remember that, in the Technocracy, those HR sessions where they teach people things like "don't be racist"
actually work, right? Given that they're Mind effects?
When racism was pushed out of mainstream science, it was also pushed out of the Technocracy because anything else doesn't really make sense. To be honest, I'd reject the idea that the Technocracy was
responsible for imperialism in its entirety given that that sort of thing is basically just human nature, but I'll freely admit that it supported and profited upon it in the past. (The idea that the Technocracy is responsible for racism, as opposed to just human beings being shitty, is kind of laughable though. The Technocracy certainly was
affected by racism, but responsible for it? Really?) I will also, however, admit that many of the Traditions did the same thing, because historically speaking that would also have happened. I will also say that, in the modern day, the Technocracy has repudiated imperialism (at least on a shallow level) and is to some extent trying to right the wrongs it caused in the past in the same sense that the modern day West tries to provide things like foreign aid.
See, this is where your problem comes in. I'm trying to craft a world where all sides have realistic motivations and reflect real-life history and ideological trends--and in real life there aren't really clear-cut good guys and bad guys. I think the idea of having any straight villain in oMage (other than arguably the Nephandi) is kind of absurd given that post-modernism was the
whole point of the game.
There's still be racism because like, there's still all the racial shit around science from our society. And indeed, sexual shit.
Shit which tends to be condemned by academia, and which generally shows up in much more subtle, institutional ways in most of Western society. Which is, you know, the Technocracy.