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nightcoremoon · 4 years

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science fiction needs to step up

so like if we're going by mainstream modern popular stuff, mainly star wars, star trek, mass effect, firefly, starcraft, alien/predator, planet of the apes, halo, half life, bethesda fallout, etc, lots of problems with modern society are just directly copy and pasted into the sci fi series.

now obviously there's people like mary shelley, frank herbert, douglas adams, and hg wells who don't fall into these trappings, and there's a difference between hard sci-fi and a space western (of which the entirety of the previous passage fall under), but space westerns tend to be what most modern popular sci-fi series tend to fall under because of a predominant majority of first-world media consumers tendency to gravitate more towards westerns considering this group of people is mostly The West, and also the tendency for those people to ignore actual science. space westerns is the topic.

they're all built pretty closely off of european colonial imperialism and the specific corruption associated with religion and capitalism. in star wars, the empire is nazis. the borg are commies and the klingons are *tugs collar* you know. in mass effect the spectres are the government's shadow ops who operate above the law which means that the government can do whatever they damn well please, laws be damned, just like am*rica does. the terran dominion and weyland-yutani and the apes and the covenant and the combine and the enclave are all just direct reskins of actual systems that exist in today's world, and countless other pieces of plot in those stories can be found to have roots in racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, and various imperialist cultures such as roman catholicism, the inquisition, ottoman islam, the hunnu, the conquistadors, etc.

now there's nothing wrong with using the empire and darth sidious and stormtroopers as a space version of nazis, hitler, and the storm troopers. there's nothing wrong with having space orcs enslave space goats to appease their magic space demon overlords as a direct euphemism for the complexities of slavery but in space [thats legit the plot of warcraft I'm not even kidding]. there's nothing WRONG per se with a corporation trying to use killer aliens as a war profiteering gig or for scientific research in a work of fiction. countless societies have tried to commit genocide, enslavement, and greedy gains at the cost of innocent lives. the issue is the prevalence of these specific issues being the ONLY PROBLEMS anyone ever encounters in space sci-fi.

I mean there is the overwhelming trope of, eh... "space jews" which, translating from tropes, is when certain alien races are obsessed with obtaining money and typically have large noses or horns or other antisemitic caricatures and stereotypes.

AHEM. FOR EXAMPLE.

this is of course bad and lazy writing and character design. but weirdly enough Star Wars & Harry Potter are nearly the highest grossing film series in history. BIG FUCKIN OOF, GUYS.

and that's the problem! they can get away with this bad and lazy writing and still make money!

even series I like such as futurama do this. dr zoidberg is a fountain of jewish stereotypes. the volus as well, especially compared to the turians. and yeah I do like star wars but you literally can't name one alien race from SW that isn't directly lifted from a real world culture and then bastardized. granted I really can't name any races besides dathomirians because star wars worldbuilding is trash.

but I'm really sick and tired of seeing things in media and just sighing and saying "yeah that's just X but in space". it's really depressing that the visions for the future and fiction that are successful are all built on things that sure might not seem bad on the surface if it's just one of them but it just keeps happening over and over and over again.

and hey maybe watto, griphook, the volus, and the warcraft goblins ARENT all stereotypes of jewish people... but uh... it's not really probable

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