SV does not have an odd problem with bigotry

Since the thread talks about nerds/geeks the Ideal community when it comes to diversity is the fgc.

No offense but this really sounds like the perspective of someone looking through a blurry window with binoculars and deciding they personally know everyone they see inside.
Thats fine, dont know all the issues. But it is good in raising awareness, back then serial killers can go wild at sex workers and marginalized groups. Now we have less and less because those minorities are becoming more accepted.
 
Bigotry seems to remove itself with tech advancements, HIV isnt that big of a deal w current medications. More groups are meeting and connecting with access to each other.
It might become a bigger deal again. Trump's nominee for head of the CDC has in the past said that HIV/AIDS is god punishing sinners, that we should not teach people to use condoms to prevent its spread, that anyone with it should be kept quarentined and interrogated about past partners who should also be quarentined, is a proponent of abstinence only sex education, and has pushed AIDS treatment drugs that he knew didn't work, in particular on the military.
 
Back to the original, we seem relatively able to talk about bigotry without things blowing up... provided someone doesn't derail it into something else.

I'm not sure* I agree with you. The fact that threads on the subject invariably get derailed and require multiple rounds of the modhammer to get back on track suggests otherwise.
It also acts a symptom of the problems the threads are raised to discuss.

* I need to clarify that when I say "I'm not sure" I genuinely mean that I'm not sure. The stretches of these threads that don't devolve into a dumpster fire can be productive and have helped me broaden my horizons, which supports your position. Its just that the return of the dumpster fire seems almost inevitable, which weakens it.
 
It might become a bigger deal again. Trump's nominee for head of the CDC has in the past said that HIV/AIDS is god punishing sinners, that we should not teach people to use condoms to prevent its spread, that anyone with it should be kept quarentined and interrogated about past partners who should also be quarentined, is a proponent of abstinence only sex education, and has pushed AIDS treatment drugs that he knew didn't work, in particular on the military.
Didnt anyone tell them that Handmaid's Tale is not an instruction manual
 
Since the thread talks about nerds/geeks the Ideal community when it comes to diversity is the fgc.


Thats fine, dont know all the issues. But it is good in raising awareness, back then serial killers can go wild at sex workers and marginalized groups. Now we have less and less because those minorities are becoming more accepted.

Dude America literally just passed laws that make it more dangerous for sex workers to keep working without being exploited and a couple months back the Toronto PD caught a serial killer who spent years murdering LGBT people because the cops didn't give a shit (and then turned around and blamed "the community" for not cooperating with the investigation when they finally did their fucking job and caught the guy).
 
I'm not sure* I agree with you. The fact that threads on the subject invariably get derailed and require multiple rounds of the modhammer to get back on track suggests otherwise.
It also acts a symptom of the problems the threads are raised to discuss.

* I need to clarify that when I say "I'm not sure" I genuinely mean that I'm not sure. The stretches of these threads that don't devolve into a dumpster fire can be productive and have helped me broaden my horizons, which supports your position. Its just that the return of the dumpster fire seems almost inevitable, which weakens it.

A fair point, but it doesn't *always* get derailed and sometimes it goes awhile without being derailed, sometimes it gets back on track, sometimes it stays on topic the whole way.

That it gets derailed a notable amount suggests some level of problem, but it's not to the point where one can't discuss it.
 
This seems like a odd problem common to social justice aligned spaces. Someone goes "ugh (group)" and then someone else busts in and says "hey I'm (group) this offends me".
 
No offense but this really sounds like the perspective of someone looking through a blurry window with binoculars and deciding they personally know everyone they see inside.

"Just wait" is a poison pill solution that only causes complacency and backslides. It's the empty promise of the white moderate to MLK, that things will just naturally get better on their own with time and patience—a promise that has never borne out. Things don't just automatically slide towards justice, in fact the opposite is true. Tons of people thought Obama was the bookmark for a new era of social enlightenment in America and now we have Nazis marching down the street with the silent blessing of the White House.

Complacency is surrender.

It should be noted that there were two main schools of thoughts among black people for civil rights. The 'just keep your head down and provide a good example without rocking the boat and it'll come,' and the 'stand up and fight for it,' school.

The latter school was huge in the 60s. The former school was predominant in the preceding decades when little got done.

Gay rights? Stand up and made it happen, getting in people's faces with pride parades made it work.

Undocumented immigrants have traditionally been in the 'keep your head down' group for clear reasons, but recently they've been more looking at the successes of the 'stand up and get things done' crowd.
 
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Don't be gay. Don't be black. Don't be a nerd. Don't be a woman. Don't be a christian.

Be a goddamn human being.


Going back to this earlier comment, a response has been floating around in my mind-

Someone in a persecuted minority doesn't really have the option of 'just be a non-descriptor human being,' and shouldn't have to hide whatever to be treated normally.

"Oh, yea, I'm a human being who just happens to be (X)," is a position that isn't always an option. "I'm a human being who just happens to like nerd stuff," is, well, a completely easy-to-make statement in the wide majority of locations and social circles. It may or may not be interesting to people in those social circles, they could even think it sucks, but it's pretty darn rare that the consequences will be anything significant. "I'm a human being who just happens to be born in another country and brought over when I was a little kid," will sometimes be met with "Go back to (country)!". "I'm a human being who happens to be gay," is, depending where you are, "Ok, cool," to "That's so great! I've always wanted to have a gay friend/it's so nice you can finally get married to who you want/other try too hard but well meaning answer," to "I know a course that can help you pray that away," and so on.

'Just be a human,' sentiment comes from a positive place, but it doesn't help address problems much of the time and is only an option in some circumstances. If you're around accepting people, they'll already treat you as human even if you identify as whatever. Unaccepting ones, they often won't even if you don't openly advertise identifying that way.
 
By letting those titles define you, you oft become a walking stereotype. And worse? You often become the very type of person you hate.

I'm...somewhat tentatively going to give you the benefit of the doubt and gonna dive into this under the assumption that you're well intentioned but don't really have a lot of understanding. And you don't y'know? Just going off of your post you don't...

Really understand at all tbh.

Like ever seen that South Park episode where Randy drops the n-word on Wheel of Fortune? And the b-plot has Stan trying to convince Token that he understands what's happened and is more tolerant and not racist and all that jazz, with Token getting increasingly frustrated? I can take or leave a lot of South Park but that episode is one of the good ones, for a lot of reasons (the "if even a sliver of what happens to black people happened to a middle class white dude the whole world would explode" is pretty great) but especially for the resolution. Where Stan finally admits that he's white, he doesn't get what it's like to be black. And that can be generalized to a lot of the minority/oppressed experience tbh. And that's fine y'know? If you're straight you don't have to insist that you understand what it's like to be queer, you can just go "I don't really know".

Like, I'm a dude who's into dudes, and I don't exactly like talking loads about it but it's not just a label man, not a tag you choose to put on and can take off, and in no way equivalent to shit like what your favorite hobbies are. It's a whole collection of associated experiences and filters and relationships that inform how you feel about the world and how the world feels about you. Like, yo, well within living memory the US government let AIDS rip through the LGBT+ community because we were fucking undesirables who had it coming. Yo, in a bunch of states you can be fired or evicted just for your sexuality. Yo, society fucks with you because your peers groups unconsciously and very consciously treat who you like as abnormal and weird and something to be ashamed of and it's really hard not to internalize that. Yo, gay dudes in the media are often either sexless, effeminate, foppish punchlines or straight up sexual predators and there are so few exceptions to that fucking rule.

Like, privilege is a loaded word but you want to know what it really means? This. Exactly what you said and the fact that you can believe it, that's privilege. That you can hold up individual examples of success and go "that's all you need really". That you can look at minority spaces and not only feel entitled to be there but unironically say that your exclusion is no different what's been done to them. That you can talk about being "black" or "queer" or a "woman" like it's something that can be torn away, should be torn away, in favor of a kind of fucked up equality where everyone gets to be the Same.

That is to say the Same As You. A white straight guy. And that's what I mean, you don't seem to understand how much society caters to the baseline of White Straight Men, to the point where deviation away from that feels abnormal and uncomfortable to you. Which....well.

Tough tbh. The world's more than white straight guys, you're gonna have to learn to live with us. :V
 
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Thread on a lack of representation for people who aren't white or Japanese Asian in stories.
people who train themselves to see the world in this way are themselves racist (or at least have something very wrong with them if you want to quibble about the specific term)

when most of the stories are fanfics of either worm or anime you're going to get white people and japanese people who for some reason appear to be white. it's just the nature of the fanfic. it'd be weird as hell to randomly shoving "brown" ocs in just to pad out the cast
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anime is mostly written by japanese people and for some reason they love how white people look (if I had to guess i'd say it's the variety of hair and eyecolors that draws their attention. that and the cartoonishly overexpressive eyes;)) /shrug
edit- huh, can't find the article i was thinking of. have a random google result
 
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when most of the stories are fanfics of either worm or anime you're going to get white people

Lol wtf.

I mean, it's not like one of the most popular characters in the fandom is a black girl or anything and the only reason why she gets so little play in actual fanfic is because the Worm fanfic community is an endless Mobius strip of bullshit with only tangential connections to the original story.
 
Lol wtf.

I mean, it's not like one of the most popular characters in the fandom is a black girl or anything and the only reason why she gets so little play in actual fanfic is because the Worm fanfic community is an endless Mobius strip of bullshit with only tangential connections to the original story.
(granted the wormfics are shit, but that isnt' the point)
well that and she is literally invisible 90% of the time and only showed up halfway through the story. imp gets used in plenty of fics, probably the 2nd most out of all the undersiders. grue on the other hand is typically seen as a boring blank sheet of a character and left out of any fic that isn't undersiders centric.
but skitter is always the main character of course. aside from imp and excluding insignificant background characters at endbringer fights there are what...4 nonwhite non asians in the entire setting? (not that that's what I would bring up as a racial issue for wormfics. if anything the problem is how consistently the fics whitewash the asian slaver who made the neonazis look reasonable into an "honorablu warrior" figure, for some reason ripping off hookwolf's interlude rather than try to figure how to portray lung)

mostly though I just listed worm individually as a joke because of how it ate everything.
and it still stands that if japanese anime includes a black guy it's usually a racist-looking caricature like popo. japan doesn't draw anybody who isn't white, especially the asian characters, and all characters are japanese by default. you even see it in shows where being able to distinguish between the two races should be a plotpoint and an inability to do so can be detrimental to following the plot like code geass. the 11s look more european than the brittianians and the royal heir is probably the only character in the show who could pass for japanese. that isn't sv's doing, they're just using the setting as they found it. authors would have to have a significant amount of unacknowledged racism to "fix" that by going on about hinta's(a naruto character who's defining trait is her giant round inhumanly pale eyes) squinty eyes :rolleyes: may as well complain about the "new" default-yellow emoji being racist (although it's slightly better than turning skitter black as a token representation(and proceeding to vent the social-justice-conscious writer's internalized racism as the setting is "black-ified" to justify the change;)) such things are always a trainwreck)
 
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well that and she is literally invisible 90% of the time and only showed up halfway through the story.

For one thing, no, she has plenty of presence in the actual story despite her power. Second she come's in one third into the story and is critical to several events from then on.

Then you have Amy, who is there for a few incidents through the first part of the story until the halfway mark, then promptly buggers off until the very end. And she's one of the most worn out and used characters in the fandom.

grue on the other hand is just a boring character.

Not really. The only problem with him is that you have to put effort and thought into his character and the implications surrounding him. 'Effort' and 'thought' being scarce in fanfic.
 
when most of the stories are fanfics of either worm or anime you're going to get white people and japanese people who for some reason appear to be white. it's just the nature of the fanfic. it'd be weird as hell to randomly shoving "brown" ocs in just to pad out the cast

Like this may be a shock to you, but there are like, black people in Japan. There are lots of non-white, non-asian people in the actual IRL times and places in which lots of anime (or for that matter, holywood movies) are set.

There's no actual *reason* to for not having people of color in these stories other than an author not wanting to include them.

It's not "because of their culture" There have been black people in Japan and Japanese cultural awareness for centuries.
 
And she's one of the most worn out and used characters in the fandom.
shitty anime steriotypes and "dawww" lesbian shipping are responsible for that bullshit, not racism. (if anything the fixation on turning characters gay for no reason would count as 'the opposite' to the tolerance obsessed right?)
there are like, black people in Japan.
and not in japanese cartoons. so what?
There's no actual *reason* to for not having people of color in these stories other than an author not wanting to include them.
there is even less reason for just randomly shoehorning them in, and that'd have to occur to somebody to do.
you'd be better off writing your own setting (and original fiction is a desert here). so what this really boils down to is more an argument about not liking the things sv likes, race never enters into it unless dragged in.
 
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shitty anime steriotypes and "dawww" lesbian shipping are responsible for that bullshit, not racism. (if anything the fixation on turning characters gay for no reason would count as 'the opposite' to the tolerance obsessed right?)
No. We just had a big thread about that, about how lesbians are fetishized (as you say, "d'awww lesbians" and all that), while people escape in a panic when a story so much as contains a male gay character.

Also lol, "tolerance obsessed".
 
That's what we call structural/institutional racism, dude. Try to remember what the topic is.
no, it really isn't. all you're doing is cheapening the concept

edit- and even if it were, that still has nothing whatsoever to do with sv
No. We just had a big thread about that, about how lesbians are fetishized (as you say, "d'awww lesbians" and all that), while people escape in a panic when a story so much as contains a male gay character.
that bit was intended as sarcasm :p ugg the one damn time i don't use a winky face to avoid breaking the parenthesis
 
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it's like arguing with people on imgur who stole a stray dog and come seeking internet points* with this wild tale of assumed abuse. why did i come here, this is pointless


*dogs deteriorate in appearance really fast living on their own, dogs get lost, 9 times out of 10 the time the idiots never even checked the lost dog posters. a good number even have edits and retractions along the lines of "dog was microchipped, a small child was crying" lol
 
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it's like arguing with people on imgur who stole a stray dog and come seeking internet points with this wild tale of assumed abuse. why did i come here

Because you care more about scoring internet points by barging into random threads to bitch about how we shouldn't be talking about the subject the entire thread is centered around than actually coming to understand people's viewpoints.
 
Violation of Rule 2 - Calling all religious people delusional is not cool. So don't. Have some internet points.
lol if I wanted internet points I'd copy/paste from the ones with internet points and watch them mindlessly roll in. of course I don't want internet points.
because people decide what the story is going to be before they try to talk and nothing can budge their favored delusion. it's like talking to religious people
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how then would you fix it?
(some) facts of the matter are: 1 sv's creativewriting section is by and large a fanfic site. 2 the particular sources that have been popular here generally include only white or whitelooking characters(which is not a statement on "the site's" racial preferences so much as just the stylistic conventions of their favored entertainment niche). 3 furthermore only a handful of settings ever get any traction because of how things snowball and take over so good luck writing anything else. 4 and most importantly nobody likes ocs.
so how is failing to stuff a fic with ocs for diversity's sake like a 90s cartoon racist? (especially as it's something that would only occur to you to do if you already had race on the brain for.... i donno, some reason. there must be something that makes sense right? i mean besides an si, inserts don't count)

"stop liking what i don't like(you weeb)" is not a social justice-based argument, and nothing short of that would be meaningful. throwing out buzzwords about the japanese media as a generic faceless monolith is irrelevant, so what else is there?


so what even are we arguing here? is it nothing, just another pointless internet debate? or only wanting to be 'seen' to argue it?

edit- at least I assume they're on about the crw section and not "nonscifi debate" which doesn't have any room for representation of any kind aside from the participants' avatars?
 
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when most of the stories are fanfics of either worm or anime you're going to get white people and japanese people who for some reason appear to be white. it's just the nature of the fanfic.
it'd be weird as hell to randomly shoving "brown" ocs in just to pad out the cast
Huh.

I haven't actually read Worm, because it's long as fuck, but all this time I thought Brockton Bay was a fictional version of Boston, given the map and the fact that it's named after Brockton, part of the bay area.

That's diverse as fuck, IRL. Brockton is a whole 42% white.
 
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