The specific example that made me start thinking about this was how AC Odyssey has a sidequest where a slave doesn’t want to be freed because he thinks being a slave is cool, actually, which is both absurd apologetics but also misses that in Greek and Roman systems manumission was a form of social control that both rewarded and indebted slavers’ most loyal collaborators. That turned into thinking about how just absolutely absurdly shitty classic Greek society was in general, and how AC Odyssey made it this weird wholesome egalitarian slaver dictatorship where everything’s cool and good except for the bad mean guys who are indistinguishable in methods or goals from anyone else.
That’s also one of the things that pisses me off about Starfield so much, how the “good guys” are a pair of far right colonial empires: one is literally just the fascists from Starship Troopers, and the other are a bunch of feudal ancap dictatorships. Even the villains are just saturday morning cartoon villains who are bad and mean but don’t really ever do anything distinct from the “good” factions except be ontologically opposed to you, the main character.
Someone else pointed out recently how HOI4 ends up effectively doing Nazi apologetics the same way, where in trying to avoid giving their worst fans a holocaust button they just outright remove all the actual horror and material actions the Nazis did altogether.
And I don’t think I even need to get into how rampant this problem is in liberal fantasy settings, which are always full of apologetics for monarchism, because that’s well tread ground for criticism. It’s enough to make something like how the original Mount and Blade handled the in-universe nobles as being inherently sexist and classist pieces of shit who were obstacles for a female and/or commoner PC to fight against and overcome almost refreshing, instead of it just being like “yeah these awful pieces of shit who are all definitely mass murderers and worse are actually cool and nice to you and not really all that bad really” like so much feudal apologia media does.
And yeah, there’s a point to be made about not wanting to grapple with problematic themes and all, but where there’s the line where that just turns into apologetics for the very problematic thing you’re trying to avoid dealing with at all?
Final Fantasy XIV tried to make Limsa Lominsa morally gray by making them a settler state that displaced the Kobold and Sahagin tribes, and it still makes you help the settler state against the tribes for plot reasons. Just allow me to help those that deserve it for once
RPG’s let me play as the nonhumans for literally once challenge (any%)
why do JRPGs always have cooler monster designs than character designs
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that is probably the coolest way to run a traditional fantasy game but like 1/2 or more of traditional fantasy humanoids are just ‘humans with pointy ears’ or ‘green humans that work out’ or ‘short humans with hairy feet’ or ‘short humans with colorful hair’ or ‘different color of human with pointy ears’, dragonborn don’t even have tails in dnd 5e. goblins and maybe cat people are as close to human as i want in a setting lol, when the ‘races’ are too close to human it makes me feel weird about fantasy and the use of heroic thinking and fantasy logic in fascist propaganda/media. make it utterly alien to that, don’t do a shadowrun or x-men and backhandedly justify racial segregation by making the minority a genuine threat or actually significantly different enough to justify prejudice. even with inhuman humanoids i feel like its hard not to fall into problematic tropes by instinctually comparing it to reality and racial issues - we generally want our media to say something about reality after all. idk its an issue i struggle with when it comes to fantasy or sci fi worldbuilding. i like the variety in visual character design allowed by nonhuman humanoid characters but idk how to write that kind of world without creating a justified ethnic conflict, like if the aliens are just smarter than us then maybe they SHOULD rule us for our own good. if elves are so much wiser and in tune with nature then maybe humans SHOULD be eradicated to prevent their rampant growth and deforestation. if the orcs… you get what i mean. when they all look like different colored human types its especially aesthetically reminiscent of reactionary ideology to me.
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I did that for a time: the fallen ancient empire and the vanished frightening and malevolent people that left their marks across the land and left behind a lot of monsters and evil magic were… the humans.
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Sounds a bit like a tabletop version of Animorphs. Neat!
The moon cat race (can’t remember what they’re actually called) are also a race of religious pariahs in the woodsy place (fuck I can’t remember what anything is called) because the theocracy that runs the place views unsanctioned hunting as blasphemous and they’re a people who are traditionally hunters.
You do a ton of quests for the theocracy, especially if you’re a Conjurer/White Mage.
Later in the story, once the Garleans are driven from Ala Mhigo, there’s this horrid moment where the ruling class of Ul’Dah decree that the treasures that Theodoric looted from his own people should not be returned to the people and instead invested in a new business. With Ul’Dah’s ruling class running it, of course.
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It pisses me off that Lolorito sort of floats around, profiting from basically everything, making you financially dependent on him and his enterprises, and nothing ever comes of that except knowing he’s still doing that at the end of Endwalker.