#racism in gaming

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

Hello!

I hope I'm not being invasive by posting this ask.

My names is Zade and I run a blog dedicated to Baldur's Gate 3.

Both the game and its fandom have a huge racism issue.

About the game: There is only one black core companion in the game, Wyll, whose story ties directly to the events of the game. He is a textbook prince charming. He also is the companion with the least amount of content and a lot of it is bugged. The writers even publicly mock him and dismiss the issues he faces in-game (he is subdued by a devil that is white-coded). Fans have been sending reports to the developpers for months and are consistently ignored in favour of fans of the more popular (white) companions/NPCs.

A new patch was released a few days ago where Wyll was once again sidelined. This led to a lot of outrage and some responses to that outrage tap directly into the fandom's antiblackness.

About the fandom: Since the game was released, gamers have repeatedly dismissed Wyll as being boring and go to great lenght to justify why they don't interact with him. They purposefully ignore the fact that the character was rewritten late in production in-part because people who played the beta version of the game couldn't handle him having flaws and depth. As of today, he is the least represented in fanarts and posts concerning him will generally receive less engagement than those featuring his white counterparts.

It's no mystery that a lot of Wyll's fans are POC. Those same fans are consistently called aggressive and hostile by the white fandom when they demand that all main companions are treated with the same amount of care. They refuse to see the racism the only black companion faces both inside and outside the game. Our reactions and demands are described as disproportionate and entitled.

I thought this ongoing issue could be of interest to you.

Bonus: A petition is going around to tackle his lack of content and care by the developpers here.

hey thanks for messaging us!!! this ask is not a bother at all :D this is what we're here for. Sadly I know more about bg3 because of the fandom antiblackness against Wyll than anything positive at this point. (I found this article which was similar to an ask one of our blogs got I'm so sorry I can't seem to find it https://www.themarysue.com/baldurs-gate-3-is-the-latest-target-of-racist-dog-whistle-mods/)

Thanks for this summary, blog promotion, and fandom racism breakdown I looked through the first page and it looks great so far!!!

Followers please go give Zade a follow on the blog @absansombre and check out the petition!

mod ali

[waylaidbyenemies]

“Though, I may have a word with the chief…”

How did the player base not fall in love with Wyll when they first heard the iconic line?

[lilithfairen]

Nothing says "this game we stan and its fanboys are totes not racist!" like dogpiling and harassing PoC who are critical of how in-universe minorities are treated in the story, up to trying to claim said PoC themselves are the ones who are racist, right?

If a story wants you to take as companions and fellow adventurers people who immediately greet your character with racist abuse, wants you to interact with them even as they continue to spout racist language, and continues to have characters and entire groups spout racist abuse at in-universe minorities while treating those characters and groups as the "good" side...it's because the story doesn't want you to think being a racist piece of shit is that bad a thing. For some reason.

(Really, just ask yourself how many gamers would reject or even kill at the earliest opportunity any companion in an RPG who expressed disdain towards white men upon meeting them.)

[rjalker]

will watch later

[vavuska]

[commentgoblin]

Genshin add more diverse skin tones challege:

Level: Very possible, literally so easy. The bare minimum, even, since you have a country based on India and the Middle East.

(they probably still won’t do it.)

[omnigeekempire]

The Hate Forspoken Received For Its "Cringey" Dialogue Was Racially & Gender Motivated! Atomic Hearts Makes It Even More Obvious Of That Bias

I hate to be that guy, but I’m going to be that guy: I believe that the hate that Forspoken got for its “cringy and bad” was racial and gender-motivated. The reason I make that claim is that Atomic Hearts also has pretty bad voice dialogues, yet the outcry pales in comparison to what Frospoken had to deal with. (more…) “”

[bubblebuttgames]

Poked my head in on twitter for a few minutes to see game stuff (specifically DA4) and most of it is mostly happy people with some that didn't like the trailer that much but still excited and of course spotted bigots with the stupidest takes 🤪

[prokopetz]

I'm all on board with queer liberation as a core theme in tabletop RPGs, but I've gotta ask: did you think this shit through at all? Yes, you've name-checked the X Card in your preamble and reminded players to choose their pronouns during character creation, and you've got a big stack of testimonials proclaiming that the mechanics of play are "genderpunk" – whatever that means! – but, like, your implicit setting still includes an out-group whose boundaries are delineated within the idiom of race science whom the text insists are ontologically okay to kill. Sure, they've got fash aesthetic, but I don't think making "cop" a biological category is doing the heavy lifting you think it is.

[pro-anomalocaris]

"Every Assassin's Creed game it's always been a guy from the same race and culture" BULLSHIT the THIRD game had a Native American, Mohawk tribe protagonist named Ratonhnhaké:ton AND a mixed race black assassin, Aveline de Grandpré

Tell me you're fake Assassin's Creed fan without telling me you're a fake fan.

This game came out 14 years ago BTW. Non-white people have been leading this franchise from day one. Or have we forgotten the VERY FIRST CHARACTER IN THE SERIES was an Arab Muslim man?!

Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad is NOT a white man's name.

Attention Fake Fans: This has never been your safe space where everyone is a white bro you can crack open a beer with on your back porch and vent to about those darned womens and POCs ruining mah vidya games!

A black male samurai AND a Japanese woman ninja as a protag? gamers are gonna be so racist and sexist this round but this might be the first AC game i play

[spitedemon]

i really don’t think it’s “typical dragon age fandom nonsense” for people to be genuinely upset about the world state choices. combat, level design, art direction, gameplay gimmicks, those have all varied across each dragon age game. the one thing that’s remained constant are nods to our previous choices.

i wasn’t expecting my HoF to come riding in on a griffon, but i can’t find a monument dedicated to warden tabris somewhere around the anderfels? lucanis couldn’t have some lines about the time that one arainai boy was stirring up trouble in antiva city? you’re gonna tell me that making a mage the new divine wouldn’t have some impact on nevarra and antiva? on the anderfels, the supposed most devout militant andrastian nation in thedas? you’re saying nobody in the north is paying attention to who rules orlais or ferelden? come on.

[butchvamp]

veilguard is maddeningly racist and we have got to have this conversation outside of "fantasy racism" terms. we are not talking about fantasy elves. it is anti-indigenous racism, the elves are intentionally indigenous coded as previously stated by Gaider (and it honestly doesn't matter if it's been "confirmed," it is obviously true, no matter what Weekes tries to argue now) and insinuating that your indigenous coded characters 1. are deserving of their oppression, 2. are in any way responsible for it, 3. should feel guilty about it, 4. are foolish and dangerous for wanting to reconnect with and preserve their history, and 5. are "stuck in the past" and "too traditional," (why don't they just assimilate already?) are all insidious, racist ideas that this game perpetuates. and there is very little pushback from the narrative that the player can engage in, which is what a lot of the criticism is discussing. we're not talking about "fantasy racism" or fantasy slurs, we are talking about the real world racism this game is perpetuating.

[priceofreedom]

this makes me so sad and angry

John is easily one of the best voice actors in the game, but because Barret doesn't get enough appreciation, he doesn't either. i'm so tired of the Barret erasure man, and so is he, understandably. Barret is one of the MAIN!!! characters and he gets nothing every fucking time. WHEN will this change.

[bubblingsteam]

[probablybadrpgideas]

Ok, just thinking out loud, but maybe we should let the Great Old Ones out.

I'm just saying. Lovecraft wasn't exactly an unbiased source. Maybe they're perfectly nice. Maybe they just want to stop people saying slurs. Maybe they're just Welsh.

I'm not saying I want the world to end, but I think that it would be a decent compromise to maybe unseal one or two of the smaller ones, just to see what happens. I bet we could put them back if there's a problem. And maybe they'll give us candy!

If it's just one of them, and maybe just for the weekend, it'll be fine. Come on, guys. What's life without a little risk?

Ritual! Ritual! Ritual!