Um. And, also y'know. Redguards are all dark-skinned humans (and Hammerfell is around the same size as Skyrim). You've clearly never played or heard of the earlier TES games. Arena had all of the provinces, including Hammerfell. Daggerfall was set in High Rock and Hammerfell. Redguard had a Redguard main character and took place in Hammerfell. If you've only played Oblivion and Skyrim, sure, you mostly see Imperials and Nords respectively, because of where they're set. Just like you don't see many Bretons in Redguard or Bosmer in Morrowind.
The main race divide in TES is men/elves/beastfolk. Though it's more pronounced in Morrowind than anywhere else, even if there is that bit where Khajiit aren't technically allowed inside Skyrim's cities (and Nazi Altmer, but I digress). Nobody really cares that Redguards have dark skin, since they, Imperials, Nords and Bretons are all dudes, even if Redguards originally come from a different continent entirely.
In Morrowind the racial divide between native Dunmer and various kinds of outlander is mentioned, and so race is actually a considerable factor (if ultimately without any implications for the MC, since they can just do whatever). So as far as I know Morrowind still has the closest thing to a proper addressing of racial issues that TES currently has, even if you could just as well conflate that with nationalism (which is probably closer to what it is, since Vvardenfell Dunmer don't like outlander Dunmer just as much, if not more so, than they don't like outlanders in general). Truthfully, the statement was entirely facetious (since Dunmer are literally black people), but there's still a grain of truth behind it.
The Redguards are there, and yes, I know that Daggerfall, Arena and Redguard all feature Hammerfell with at least as good a representation of Redguards as Morrowind's 50-50 Dunmer-everyone else ratio. It's just that this doesn't seem to serve as much of a counterpoint since there's no racial issue to be made of it, since nobody cares that Redguards are dark-skinned.
Yeah, I wasn't arguing on the side of "y dere no real-world racism in TES", I was just pointing out that even if you were going to try to apply real-world racial divisions to TES the claim that there aren't black people is sort of absurd. Complaining about the majority of characters in Skyrim being white humans is like complaining about the majority of people in Vatican City being Catholics. I'm honestly sort of befuddled by the notion that fantasy racism isn't "real" racism because it doesn't perfectly mirror real-world racism.
Like. The Dunmer in Skyrim? They're being discriminated against. There are racist Nords. Just because the former are elves and the latter are fantasy-vikings doesn't mean it's not "real" racism, nor does it mean that it's somehow dodging the issue of racism. Know what'd be fucking stupid? If racism in fantasy worlds was perfectly identical to real-world racism, right down to the specific divisions and directions of it. That'd be shitty worldbuilding.
Its not about realism. I never mentioned the word realism, and, if you re-read my post, I never actually said I wanted real life racism in TES. Saying that fantasy racism is a bad plotline does not necessarily mean that real racism should go in its place.
What I'm saying is, if you're going to put plotlines about race in, you need to
actually have humans of different races in significant numbers. Else you get to have your cake (not having to put minorities in your game) and eat it too (still discuss racial issues).
Alright, I'm going to do the stupid "what if women ruled the world" thing because that's apparently the level of conversation we're at. What if, there were three different kinds of black people (or any other race, but in this example they're all THE SAME RACE), and one type of white person. And we go to Skyrim, and every single person there is a viking-a-like but they aren't human, they're polar bear people. Its an entire realm of polar bear people. Then the next two places we go are deserts, where 95% of the human characters are black. There's a subplots about viking-a-likes and indian-a-likes and roman-a-likes all coming to visit your Africa-a-like. But they're all polar bear people and bird people and elephant people. The vast majority of humans are all variants of African, and there is ONE other human race that isn't that common in the games that isn't African.
That would be weird right?
You know what, let's go a step further and say that race isn't white, they're Japanese. If you're a white TES player in this stupid rhetorical device of an alternate universe, you can't play anyone who looks like you. Just like real life asians!
Cause white romans totally had katanas right? It would be unrealistic for the samurai expies to not be white guys. That would be like a Vatican City full of Buddhists am I right?
And before some smartass says "that would be awesome", the example STILL doesn't completely work because of the context. Imagine in this universe, in your country, white people are the historically oppressed minority and ALL the media is about black people. Because this is the level I need to sink to apparently to make my point.
Furthermore, I'm not PARTICULARLY hating on TES here. There are a million fantasy universes guilty of this, pretty much anything inspired by Tolkien at this point. TES is the one I'm talking about because its what Neonovik brought up as an example of progressiveness in games.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 13170891 times)