Slop.

It's the typical chud thing of looking at hollow and disingenuous liberal messaging and concluding that the problem is that it's attempting to be better and not that there's a rancid core of implicit racism underneath it.

Like the liberal view on race and racism is still fundamentally white supremacist and orientalist, and their concept of anti-racism is like this patronizing thing where the point is demonstrating their own goodness and collecting sufficiently conformist minorities like pokemon out of perceived self-benefit, and not an actual principled opposition to bigotry, cruelty, and the violent consequences of an order built on them. So their messaging is inherently confused and contains this sort of "well yeah the monstrous other is inscrutable and alien, but perhaps a few of them may rise to the status of honorary humans" core to it.

This is why any sort of fantasy race thing beyond simple aesthetics has to fundamentally make all the sapient species people with competing material interests and inherited privilege, making for a commentary on class or imperial/colonial relations rather than an allegory for race and culture.

Yeah this post was "Had me in the first half" -worthy. There's a serious problem in media representing racism with superpowers or different species. Especially if it's just white people with superpowers being discriminated against, because IRL they wouldn't be persecuted. They would use their powers to do crakkker shit the same way they use military tech.

I think it depends. There are really 2 types of "racism".

There are racialised class systems created by nation states and imperialist powers to supress wages and fuel industries. This type of racism has literally nothing to do with physical characteristics, and fantasy races poison the well in this case.

But it is also the type of racism that fantasy mostly ignores. Most media focuses on the liberal theory of racism, in which races with differing characteristics cannot reconcile their differences due to a lack of mutual understanding. In this case, making the different races really be different is not necessarily a bad allegory. It is just an exaggerated presentation of what writers perceive the racial conflict to be.

Given the quality of the writing, they're missing literacy on a much more fundamental level.

This is what the elves in the mine look like because they are discriminated against by the vicious class system that prefers drawfs for mine work.

as long as you pick up the fuckin' nitra i marked god damn it you got a beard in my book

sadly they've been around for like 10 years at this point, the takes have always been shit though

I was actually trying to look this up yesterday, does anyone know what people believed before the Out of Africa theory? Did they actually believed human “races” constituted different species or was there some concept that all of humanity came from the same source even if they didn’t know it was in Africa?

the mutants having massively destructive individual powers does somewhat undermine the coherence of whatever allegory you want to use them for. You could make all the mutations benign but then you probably stop being a superhero comic.

Well kinda yeah, any real functional society would and probably should take pretty serious measures to limit living super-weapons.

They're not 'different' in the way that different humans are different, they're potentially an existential threat to society.

In actuality, mapping space aliens to bigotry (racism, speciesm) is not really far fetched

Humans already have big physical differences with differing needs. Example - cis female body type vs rest (one needs sanitary pads the others don't), or adult vs child (different heights, weights, food requirements), or elderly vs young, able bodied vs handicapped. The differences between generic humans and space aliens is only a more exaggerated, in some sense. Even fantasy races and space aliens are often based on human characteristics. A cis human man is physically closer to a generic cis male fantasy elf than a cis woman.

Furthermore, even if xenomorphs are completely different to us, it doesn't mean that we should discriminate against them, or hate them or go to war with them.

On a narrative level, fantasy or sci fi often exaggerates existing aspects of human society. Magic doesn't exist in reality, but differences in magical talent can be used as allegories about ableism, competition and meritocracy. Planet destroying super weapons don't exist, but can be allegories for nuclear weapons. So exaggerating differences between species/races to make allegories for bigotry has its basis in the very structure of the types of narratives.

Yes, that is a valid critique minus the whole "genetically evil" bit and other nonsense. See https://hexbear.net/comment/6591888 and its parent comment