Quote from: Spinachcat on April 06, 2021, 06:21:47 AM
RPGPundit, how would you classify Rifts China and Rifts Japan? And where do you draw the line between "racialist propaganda" and "fanboy authors"? AKA, in games like Legends of the Five Rings or Bushido or those Rifts books, the authors are clearly enamored with the subject matter and back when those books were written, we just called their exuberance awesomesauce, but how would they be seen if published today?

Maybe a closer comparison would be Rifts Spirit West. For all his faults, racism isn't one of Siembieda's. He loves cultural stereotypes, but they're never done in a mean spirited way.  Or ideologically driven. Race doesn't drive his decisions to make person X the good guy or the bad guy, and most societies in Rifts have their good points and bad points. Even some of the Vampire Kingdoms are shown to be relatively benign to it's slave caste of humans.

Notably, the thing I dislike about these alternate history settings like Coyote and Crow, is the idea that whitey was the cause of all the world's problems, and if they'd just dissappear, everyone else would flourish and invent non-polluting rocket belts to fly around in their near-utopia with.

Quote from: RPGPundit on April 05, 2021, 06:37:45 PM

Quote from: ScytheSong on April 05, 2021, 12:24:56 PM
While we're on the topic of why the European conquest of the Americas was so successful, I have a theory that the Reconquista was much more important than what was taught me in school. Granada falls in August, and Columbus sails in October of 1492. If there weren't a bunch of out-of-work soldiers who were prone to see any conflict as an us-or-them for their very souls, I think there would have been a very different result in the New World. If anyone has done any actual scholarship on the topic, I'd be interested to know about it..

It is absolutely and totally linked. There was an enormous incentive for the Spanish Crown to mobilize people and especially soldiers to the Americas because soldiers left with nothing else to fight tend to be a destabilizing influence. It was also seen as an ongoing part of Spanish Catholic Fervor.
The biggest historical error we see pushed in modern history talks about the initial Spanish conquests of the America is to suggest that somehow the religious component was just pure lip-service. It absolutely was not. The religious fervor of the Spaniards was one hundred percent real, born out of centuries of a people struggling to hold on to their religion under the threat of "heathen" Moorish invaders, and then fighting to reclaim all of Spain for Christ. They saw the Americas, and the mandate to convert the people of "the Indias" to the true religion as a sacred and holy mandate. Of course there was also enormous profiteering and personal agendas, but pretending the religious element was just 'all an act' rather than the FIRST reason to be there ends up causing an enormous error of understanding of the motivations for the expansion to the Americas.

Especially after discovering the Aztecs.  I mean, consider how the Aztecs would have looked to devout Catholic spaniards: an empire based on the ritual sacrifice of thousands of people a year to demonic-looking gods. It was literally biblical, it was like they were seeing the cult of Moloch or Baal in real life once more. For them, to crusade to put an end to that which was clearly in their eyes an unquestionable evil of the highest nature would have been self-evidently doing the work of God.

To extend that:

Finding the unemployed soldiers something to do is huge.  Roughly equally important is that now that Granada has fallen, the crown isn't having to scrape up every spare coin to pay for the Reconquista.  Before that happens, expeditions aren't an option.  Then the expeditions are viewed as a way to do an end-run around the Portuguese routes to India around Africa.  And when that doesn't pan out, exploiting the new world takes over.  What usually happens when people that have been scraping by have dangled in front of them a chance for immense wealth?  Arrogant nobles aren't immune to the psychological effects of such a reversal.  With a chance for more power involved, if anything the effect is enhanced. 

Basically, the powers that be in Spain had a lot of short-term reasons to push for the expeditions that created a perfect storm.   Long-term, it was a more mixed bag, but it still made Spain the world power for over a century.

Quote from: jhkim on April 05, 2021, 09:03:18 PM
There is a huge difference between:

1) A game with no fictional premise other than lack of European conquest, which claims that it is a realistic projection that Native America civilizations would develop advanced technology in 700 years.

2) A game where there are superhuman psychic powers, billed as "science fantasy", that has Native America civilizations developing advanced technology in 700 years.

In #1, the game is making a false claim about where Native American civilizations would go. In #2, though, it's just a "what if". I could imagine a series of "what if" games which each had what if there was a fictional source of advancement for different civilizations. i.e. What if India got superhuman powers and technology? What if Australia gained superhuman powers and technology? What if Europe got superhuman powers and technology? These aren't racist, because they aren't saying that the *cause* of the advancement is racial superiority.

I have no real dog in this fight, but this is clearly a bitter race-fueled power fantasy and not a 'what if' scenario. I outlined that the difference is execution and the result.

'What if WWI Germany became a utopia and conquered everybody' as a purely what-if scenario with the only difference is the absence of jews is this sort of questionable scenario.

Quote from: S'mon on April 06, 2021, 02:27:04 AM
Have to agree with JH on this - probably best to keep 'racist' to a much narrower definition if it's to be a useful concept at all. Eg within the Black Panther film, Killmonger is a Black Supremacist, he talks a lot like Hitler - he's racist. The racism in the film is more around how he's portrayed sympathetically by the director, who seems to think that gripes over 'over policing' south central Los Angeles is an understandable reason for wanting your own Thousand Year Reich. Black Panther's sister is shown as mildly racist, calling the white CIA agent 'Coloniser' seems to be just a racist slur. But the Wakandan society itself isn't racist - if anything it gets criticised for its *lack* of solidarity with the Black Race. As I said, Wakanda isn't a racist concept, "magical supertech country" isn't a racist concept wherever it's set (and Wakanda is hardly a utopia); the film director seems to be somewhat racist.

I can see arguments over how particular characters are portrayed or lines in the movie -- but as you say, Pundit's claim is that just the *concept* of "magical supertech country" is inherently racist - either racist against whites or racist against natives.

Regarding the movie - I thought Killmonger was quite well-portrayed as villainous. He is more evil than in the comics, I note. Also, is there anything other than that one word that made you think Shuri was racist? To my mind, she was remarkably accepting of having a foreign *intelligence agent* in her frickin control room. That was actually a problem of believability for me. I read "colonizer" as mild slur at being an American CIA agent. She didn't seem to have any problem with Bucky later on, or call him names. The local kids called him "White Wolf", but that doesn't seem to be a slur - and it's a reference to a Wakandan in the comics who rose to be head of their secret service, who was a white man adopted after his plane crashed in Wakanda when he was a baby.

Quote from: RPGPundit on April 06, 2021, 05:58:38 AM

Quote from: ScytheSong on April 05, 2021, 09:57:40 PM
I will say that one of the things that's in the (tiny) amount of actual Coyote and Crow game text that I've seen (a blow-up of the jpeg about equipment) is an explicit call out that gunpowder never made it to the Americas. It also says that most of the "warfare" in North America was isolated small units usually working from ambush, and that the weapons of Cahokia reflect that.

Yes. And the text also says that thanks to the Super-meteor the Native tribes just plain SKIPPED mining, industrialization and fossil fuels and went straight to having totally environmentally-friendly green energy and 3-d printers that could make anything.

But this totally isn't Leftist Wish-Fulfillment/Revenge Fantasy

I would agree that it's wish-fulfillment. That's what a ton of fantasy is. Superman is wish fulfillment for what if a corn-fed all-American boy was more powerful than anyone in the world. Spider-Man is wish-fulfillment for nerdy kids who got picked on in school. It's the same with Robin Hood, Merlin, and lots of older character. And yeah, this seems like wish-fulfillment for Native Americans - what if they got magic superpowers instead of being conquered and colonized.

But as "revenge fantasy"? That's claiming "I live out a fulfilling life and never see my attacker" is a personal revenge fantasy.

Quote from: jhkim on April 06, 2021, 12:03:29 PM
But as "revenge fantasy"? That's claiming "I live out a fulfilling life and never see my attacker" is a personal revenge fantasy.

That's what the aphorism says anyway. Clearly that is indeed a personal revenge fantasy.

Quote from: jhkim on April 06, 2021, 12:03:29 PMBut as "revenge fantasy"? That's claiming "I live out a fulfilling life and never see my attacker" is a personal revenge fantasy.

Agreed. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy, not a revenge fantasy.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 06, 2021, 12:57:36 PM

Quote from: jhkim on April 06, 2021, 12:03:29 PMBut as "revenge fantasy"? That's claiming "I live out a fulfilling life and never see my attacker" is a personal revenge fantasy.

Agreed. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy, not a revenge fantasy.

I think we're missing the forests for the trees. I don't think what's significant is that it's wish-fulfillment fantasy instead of revenge fantasy. It looks like it's racist wish-fulfillment fantasy. If someone wrote an alternate setting where a pagan Europe developed super science because Christianity was averted by having the Jews never return from exile and eventually assimilate like so many other exiled communities, there'd be no doubt this person was writing racist wish-fulfillment. While not a revenge fantasy because the super science European pagans didn't act against the Jews, I award no points for being a racist wish-fulfillment fantasy instead. Even if the author claimed his "real" problem is with Christianity, he chose to rationalize his super science setting by eliminating a population that stood in the way in his mind to the wish-fulfillment fantasy he desired.

Coyote and Crow is basically doing the same thing, except it's especially lazy about it. They could have created a science fantasy setting that that centered on Native Americans without essentially stating "and we're not interacting about or with other races at all...because...reasons." Plenty of settings focus on one part of the world or a specific community, but I can't recall seeing the setting deliberately and completely ignoring the wider world. Shadowrun was initially focused on North America, specifically the Pacific Northwest if I recall correctly. Later they expanded to looking at other areas. It would have been weird if Shadowrun deliberately and purposely decided to ignore that there was a wider world outside the Pacific Northwest. Coyote and Crow seems to be doing so in order to have their fantasy of a pan-Native American mono-ethnic society because even thinking about the Other is bad to them.

Hell, it looks like the setting will basically genocide the idea of a Latino/Hispanic race from ever occurring since those don't start to come about until 1493 as part of the Spanish coming to the Americas.

What would be the non-genocidal way to imply the non-existence of a Hispanic population because European colonizers never showed up?

Shadowrun was way cooler...Indians used magic and blew up some mountains, kicked all the white devils off their lands. And not only cooler, more fucking plausible than this tripe. All Native Americans are magically living in harmony? What the hell are these retards smoking?

"Now, 700 years after the world was brought to the brink, a new chapter has begun. Your characters enter a world that is healing but is no less dangerous. The ice sheets are retreating and the seas are calming, but what lay out beyond your borders? The treaties and alliances that made so much sense during the long winters are now eroding and old grudges between nations are not so easily forgotten. New technologies arise almost every day and the rate of change is frightening for some. And then there are the stories. Talk of spirits, monsters, beings of legend. For so many they were just tales to be told around the fire. But now there is talk that these legends may be far more literal than you may have previously believed. Has something awakened them?"

Oh hey internal conflict in the setting nice.

Quote from: jhkim on April 06, 2021, 12:03:29 PM
Superman is wish fulfillment for what if a corn-fed all-American boy was more powerful than anyone in the world.

Except he isn't, because he's Kryptonian. He's not human, and technically is an illegal alien because he was smuggled into America as an infant.

Though that's a whole 'nother discussion, because Superman stories never really reconcile his status an a wholesome American ideal with his fantastic off-world origin. The two aspects exist in parallel, without ever really being integrated.

Quote from: Pat on April 06, 2021, 02:29:13 PM

Quote from: jhkim on April 06, 2021, 12:03:29 PM
Superman is wish fulfillment for what if a corn-fed all-American boy was more powerful than anyone in the world.

Except he isn't, because he's Kryptonian. He's not human, and technically is an illegal alien because he was smuggled into America as an infant.

Though that's a whole 'nother discussion, because Superman stories never really reconcile his status an a wholesome American ideal with his fantastic off-world origin. The two aspects exist in parallel, without ever really being integrated.

I know when I read a Superman comic I think to myself "Boy, I wish I had those powers" and then follow that up with setting-specific pedantry to quell the urge.

Quote from: This Guy on April 06, 2021, 02:19:54 PM
What would be the non-genocidal way to imply the non-existence of a Hispanic population because European colonizers never showed up?

I don't know, but I think it's ironic that the Woke community demands representation no matter the setting or lack of rationale, and here the setting (which is very much backed by the Woke) is telling Latinos "Hell no you won't see yourself in this setting, and that's a feature!" The Latinos' identity is just collateral damage in the creators' desire to ignore all things non-Native American.

Quote from: wmarshal on April 06, 2021, 02:30:44 PM

Quote from: This Guy on April 06, 2021, 02:19:54 PM
What would be the non-genocidal way to imply the non-existence of a Hispanic population because European colonizers never showed up?

I don't know, but I think it's ironic that the Woke community demands representation no matter the setting or lack of rationale, and here the setting (which is very much backed by the Woke) is telling Latinos "Hell no you won't see yourself in this setting, and that's a feature!" The Latinos' identity is just collateral damage in the creators' desire to ignore all things non-Native American.

So like if the designer's implication in the pitch wasn't that this is specifically about Native representation, and if this was presented by some theoretical neutral party as a setting idea they thought of, would the lack of that implication not raise the same flags about the absence of Hispanic characters? They are doomed by authorial intent?

Quote from: Brad on April 06, 2021, 02:25:55 PM
Shadowrun was way cooler...Indians used magic and blew up some mountains, kicked all the white devils off their lands. And not only cooler, more fucking plausible than this tripe. All Native Americans are magically living in harmony? What the hell are these retards smoking?

Yeah. You aren't describing Coyote and Crow. As I said earlier, the text plainly says that combat has been mostly small groups and ambushes, not that they have been living in harmony.