(08-02-2015, 01:30 PM)Flickering Ember Wrote: It's just...for me personally...the game lore does a pretty poor job of giving good reasons to be a IC racist. (See my previous post in this thread for a fantasy world that does quite well in excelling at this--Warcraft)
Part of the problem is that, outside of Gridania's well-known dislike for keepers (poachers) and duskwights (knaves and thieves), and Ishgard's well-known nationalism that tends to appear as racist, we don't see a whole lot in the city-states. That's because, I speculate, the city-states are the cosmopolitan melting pots, given all the adventurers that live and work there. Fernehalwes's already noted that adventurers are a more open-minded, educated lot as a whole, and RL history will tell you that people tend to eventually habituate to "others" when they live in the same place long enough. The most accepting places around are likely those adventurer towns, Revenant's Toll (home the adventurers' guild) and Idyllshire.
Personally, I view the city-states as a lot like, say, Gangs of New York in feel. There's some awful bigotry and a fair amount of prejudice (duskwights are thieves, seekers are whores, lalafell are rich bastards, roegadyn are dumb cutthroats, etc.), but you don't usually have blood in the streets.
Usually.
The further away you get from the city-states, the less you have sneering pronouncements and the more you have outright, explicit, sometimes violent racism. Eorzea's a pretty dangerous place, though, so sometimes you have to band together with those you hate so that the big morbol doesn't eat you all. That probably makes exile the more likely consequence for getting on the ugly side of racism (as we see in the WP HM unlock quest line).
So what does this mean for a character? If you're an adventurer, I'd argue you have a lot of reasons to not be particularly racist. You're exposed to lots of different people and cultures, which tends to blunt prejudices. You also have lots of reasons you might be, including family history, hundreds if not thousands of years of culture, dislike of refugees trying to Take Your Jobs, or simply thinking those short, round ears are just plain gross. If you're not an adventurer, you're probably more likely to be racist, but who knows? Maybe you think other races are cute. Maybe a duskwight adventurer saved your life.
The long and short of it, IMO, is that the setting is open enough for people to put as much or as little prejudice in their characters as they like.
The Freelance Wizard
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Quality RP at low, low prices!
((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
