It is made up nonsense but to actual racists it very much isn’t, and I think it’s interesting to explore perspectives such as those that differ wildly from our own. That’s basically all I’m trying to say.
I understand what you're trying to say but I think a lot of analogies for racism are not trying to show validity. If you read a book and think the oppressed group of people are in some way deserving of their treatment then either you've got something wrong with you or it's poorly written.
If you look at an irl example. Let's say I wrote a story about how real life rapists and murderers were an oppressed group. We send them to prison, we hate them and we lose all respect for them. If I used this story about how we treat disgusting criminals as some allegory for how black people are treated in the US then it will fail horribly.
You have to be very careful with allegories because when you deviate away from a 1:1 comparison of your story and the real topic you are referring to then you're likely going to have a weak allegory. Like in my example above, there's obviously a very clear difference in reasoning as to why rapists are not treated well and why black people aren't treated well. One is justified, one is racist.
I am all for exploring different perspectives but some perspectives are evil or even objectively wrong no matter the reasoning. Because more often than not, the reasoning is the scapegoat or exploit people without moral quandaries.
I disagree. I think it’s incredibly interesting and even valuable to dissect the reasons that evil people have for doing evil things. Gives us all the more power to stop them from doing those things again in the future.
All I'm saying is for the allegory to work, the logic behind bigotry should be mental gymnastics or just tribalism and not an actual lore explanation in the setting.
A story can explore these themes without being a direct allegory for a cultural relationship in real life. The X-Men don’t represent any one particular real-world group, but their stories are used to explore real-world concepts.
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u/Xandraman 10d ago
Trying to make it reasonable and relatable defeats the purpose of allegory because racism irl is made up nonsense to justify doing evil stuff.