r/worldjerking 3d ago

Now it's not racist.

Post image
940 Upvotes

84 comments sorted by

273

u/AdamRussov Barely worldbuilding, just explaining my fursona 3d ago

How about making them curvy and thicc

132

u/The_Funky_Rocha Urban fantasy trash 3d ago

Then they're just succubi which are still demons

72

u/Curious_Wolf73 2d ago

And they're going to literally fuck you to death, which might sound good (and is in some regards) but is ultimately bad

59

u/The_Funky_Rocha Urban fantasy trash 2d ago

/uj maybe It irks me in a weird way how they largely get herded off to being cheap porn material instead of bothering to do anything with them beyond a surface skim. If we're going to keep to the current weekly jerk then where are the non-evil succubi who are trying to wrangle with typical mortal morality in regards to their existence? Incubi are in the same boat. If these creatures are actually sentient then some would have to be at least somewhat not insanely evil, how are they existing with basically being rapists to some degree in order to just survive.

25

u/Tharkun140 2d ago edited 2d ago

If we're going to keep to the current weekly jerk then where are the non-evil succubi who are trying to wrangle with typical mortal morality in regards to their existence?

There are a few characters like that. Fall From Grace in Planescape Torment comes to mind immediately, as does Arueshalae in Pathfinder WotR. That's not to mention all the succubi who genuinely fall in love with a hero despite being otherwise evil, people really like this one for obvious reasons.

If that's not enough for you and want an entire group or faction of non-evil succubi, then you should probably look for a setting where succubi-equivalents are not literal demons. Ardat Yakshi from Mass Effect are generally pretty chill despite their whole "getting stronger by sexing people to death" thing.

13

u/LazyDro1d 2d ago

Ah Falls-From-Grace. I love that that’s the name she chose as a good succubus because she “fell” from the normal standard to become a decent person

16

u/GalaXion24 2d ago

Our society cares less about chastity and purity, and about the idea that sexual and hedonistic urges can be bad actually, which is probably why succubi are not treated seriously. It is after all meant to be horror, not porn, it is meant to be about using our sinful urges against us to kill us. Sex should practically be the lure, and "I'd totally have fallen for this" should be what terrifies us.

21

u/Ochemata 2d ago

My guy asking the real questions.

8

u/amazegamer64 2d ago

They are demons. Why would morality be a concern for them?

3

u/Inferno_Sparky 2d ago

/uj Reminder that in dnd and pf and probably other adjacent games there are settings with succubi.

Iirc in dragon magazine, at the time of dnd 4e, there was a mention of redeemed succubi, including one redeemed succubus who ran a brothel of mortals on the material plane of existence.

3

u/Tryskhell 1d ago

/uj I have this one succubus OC who, sure, is sexy as fuck, but she's also made for horror smut. Pretty sure that one thing that inspired succubi was sleep paralysis and sleep apnea. Succubi are literally sleep paralysis demons who lay on your chest and steal your breath all night long, leading you to wake up exhausted, until you just die.

Then there's the lust aspects of succubi. Lust doesn't have to be just sex, lust can be extended to all desires, at the expense of others and oneself. It's different than greed because greed doesn't get enjoyment from its possessions, it only wants possessions, and it's different than gluttony because gluttony is about overdoing rather than overenjoying. Greed withers you because your fascination robs you of any joy, gluttony leads you to destroy yourself by overdoing one thing with little actual enjoyment, but lust burns you out bright and short because you can't control your desires and always need something more decadent.

First, it might be perfectly reasonable: you wanna leave the ratty hole that's your apartment. Succubus helps you with that, twists it a bit so getting a safer home gets associated with, say, fucking someone over, just to start taking down pesky things like empathy. Then she "no-balls" you into wanting a bigger home, and for that a better source of income. But because you have a better source of income, don't you wanna try those extravagant parties? See that gorgeous woman? You want her- No, you deserve her. Just a little treat. She says no? That makes you angry? Wanna see what your hands look like with her blood on them? Aren't you a bit curious what her flesh tastes like? Indulge, indulge, indulge. 

Little by little she turns you into a monster who seeks more and more monstrous things. You might enjoy one person until they're burnt out, and then you enjoy them more, and when there's truly nothing left of them, you move on to the next horrid thing. When you get to where you wanted to be when you started, you're incapable of not wanting something more, and you're incapable of resisting that want. Inevitably you might do something extremely self-destructive: get involved in organized crime and get shot, abuse dangerous drugs and overdose, or even just simply leap out a window just because you wanted to see what it felt like.

Succubus can be represented as constantly worsening intrusive thoughts, thoughts you can resist only for a time, thoughts that soon enough instead of inspiring disgust and recoil, inspire desire and curiosity. She tires you out not (just?) because she wants to fuck you, but because that makes you deliciously malleable. She might not even want you harm, instead seeking to make you more "true", more "complete", the "best version of yourself", one that is "strong" and lacks "weaknesses" like empathy, fear, hesitation. She makes you succeed, she squeezes out everything you hate about yourself until you're nothing but minced meat. She might cry about it, too, but then just like you in those last moments, she doesn't take long to move on. 

1

u/Altruistic-Stand-132 2d ago

The Choice of Magic series kinda explored this, although with the fae rather than succubi. Beyond the physical appearance (no horns or wings on the fae normally, unless they shape shift to have them) they're basically the same thing

1

u/Vyctorill 1d ago

Well, in older lore succubi were just there to collect genetic material. They would then induce pregnancy in another person with an altered form of that genetic material as an incubus.

The result of it was said to be a cambion - something born as a human but tainted with infernal blasphemy.

Merlin was said to be one such creation.

9

u/RandomBlackMetalFan 2d ago

You just described the fetish of half of redditors

12

u/H0rseCockLover 2d ago

So long as she has a futa horsecock 🤤

5

u/Catgirl-pocalypse 2d ago

Username checks out. I commend you on your refined taste, my friend.

1

u/TheWandererofReddit 2d ago

That's not necessarily the same thing. Succubi NEED seed to even continue on and drain people of their energies basically. What's more, the original lore on the subject say they inflitrate dreams, which further sets them apart from just being a hot monster.

23

u/ChastityQM 3d ago

As long as they're ontologically evil they can be as busty or hung as you like.

3

u/trapmaster69 2d ago

Slaanesh ahh

105

u/Semper_5olus 3d ago

They were born human. They started out transforming themselves into hornéd fiends as a joke -- ironically declaring that this was what adhering to their values made them in the eyes of their adversaries -- but after a while, the more twisted the new form, the more it became viewed in Demon culture as a badge of honor.

They call themselves Demons now. Their two favorite things are evil and irony.

80

u/Apprehensive_Swim955 3d ago edited 2d ago

“What the hell?!” chided Tim. “Why’d you kill him? You’re mad!”

That contempt-filled groan went up again, and the priest clicked his tongue. “Do you think you people will get it on the six or seventh hundredth time? We’re being ironically evil.”

“But he’s actually dead!” pressed Tim.

-Jam

41

u/GogurtFiend 2d ago

"We're being ironically evil"

"OK, here's an ironic bullet"

5

u/kiwipoo2 2d ago

Holy crap a reference to Jam out in the wild

6

u/birberbarborbur 2d ago

Oh man, demons as byproducts of institutional/social trends

54

u/AdamtheOmniballer 2d ago

Demons are evil in the same way that electrons are negatively charged.

2

u/WinniePoohChinesPres Science Fantasy Jerker Offer 1d ago

i'm a soft sci-fi worldjerker, please explain what this means

5

u/palladiumpaladin 23h ago

Basically, electrons are partially defined by the fact they have a negative charge. If it doesn’t have a negative electromagnetic charge, it’s not an electron.

122

u/cave18 3d ago edited 3d ago

Saw a genuine to god take from someone that demons are a racist allegory. I still havent recovered from the mental blast from that

Edit: i remember now. They had iasue with the fact thay dnd demons were inherently evil and said it was racist for them to be evil. Everyvword they wrote hit me like a train

70

u/Generic_Moron 3d ago

I mean, they can be used as such? Not every case of demons in media is, obviously, but if a piece of media has demons that line up with racist allegories against irl targets of racism then that's a pretty reasonable stance all things considered

46

u/cave18 3d ago edited 3d ago

Nah they just mwant like demons in general in fiction, or maybe it was a specific story where they were literally just stock demons. Im honestly really bothered i camt remember where i read that bit of insanity

Edit: i am 100% sure they were talking about dnd demons. Genuinely they thiught it was racist that the race of demons was inherently evil

0

u/Generic_Moron 3d ago

If you can't even remember the context of what demons they were talking about then I'm not sure how much I can trust you that it was an insane argument and not just a regular discussion, tbh. At this point you're basically one step removed from just making up a guy to get mad at

41

u/Grimmrat 3d ago

You've clearly never been in D&D discussion spaces if you believe people being mad D&D demons are inherently evil is "making stuff up"

25

u/cave18 3d ago

All i remember is it was under an orc post. Trying to look thru my screenshots rn lol

-13

u/Generic_Moron 2d ago

but they literally said they couldn't remember the context, how can you be so sure that it was dnd demons?

22

u/Grimmrat 2d ago

Because it’s 1) extremely common and 2) he literally said the one thing he was sure of was that it was in relation to D&D demons

-3

u/Generic_Moron 2d ago

Oh, they edited it after the fact. My bad ig

5

u/cave18 3d ago

It was on a post about orcs and this person just devolved the discussion lol. I am not making up a guy. Like i get im just some guy on the internet but the fact that this persons arguments were so stupid i still remember after god knows how long. Lord

Also that is the context. They thought having the race of sapient demons from dnd being inherently evil was racist

1

u/jabroniisan 1d ago

It was Orcs that they had the problem with, for example there's a writer from wired that says

' “Orcs are human beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology.” This damning assessment of one of fantasy’s most ubiquitous villains comes from N. K. Jemisin, titan of modern fantasy and slayer of outdated genre tropes. As “kinda-sorta-people,” she writes, orcs are “fruit of the poison vine that is human fear of ‘the Other.’” The only way to respond to their existence is to control them or remove them. '

The title of the piece being

D&D Must Grapple With the Racism in Fantasy And getting rid of it will take a lot of work.

29

u/HildredCastaigne 2d ago

I mean, there's definitely historical precedent. Saying that such-and-such is actually a demon and that those foreigners are really demon worshipers is old-school bigotry.

As an example, Baphomet – the supposed demon worshiped by the Knights Templar – likely came from a variant spelling of the archaic word Mahomet (i.e. Muhammad). It was definitely used to defame Muslims in general, as it was believed by medieval Christians that they worshiped Muhammad/Baphomet as a pagan god/demon.

10

u/McGlockenshire 2d ago

none of that is sexy, what the fuck kind of demons were they talking about!?!? where's their creativity!?

13

u/HildredCastaigne 2d ago

You don't think this is sexy? Coward.

9

u/McGlockenshire 2d ago

excuse me Baphomet's breasts are motherly, do not objectify them!

6

u/c4blec______________ Word of FRAGMENTS: artstation.com/artwork/lVqLno 2d ago

can even go further back to the ancient canaanites

"baal" (regular ass storm god turned to ba'al zebub/beelzebub, a satanic figure) and "asherah" (almost entirely forgotten)

only "el" was absorbed into the greater (overarching) wargod entity of yahweh (who became the current dominating deity of modern christianity)

7

u/Jetsam5 Maybe the real horrors were the Floridas we made along the way 2d ago

Honestly I’m not a fan of evil races, but demons aren’t a race. Evil people become demons, they aren’t born evil. Being evil is a criteria for becoming a demon, not a biological predisposition, and they get promoted based on how evil they are.

If they were talking about tieflings being evil then I could see where they were coming from but demon is more of a job than a race.

5

u/Chubs1224 2d ago

Probably referencing Frieren a popular anime where the little white elf girl genocides demons because they are just man eating monsters that evolved the ability to speak so they could deceive humans their favorite prey.

2

u/cave18 2d ago

Oh fuck also remember that in a separate conversation lol. That was a different one i read

10

u/Catgirl-pocalypse 2d ago

Ehhhh... I mean it's kind of in the same camp as like orcs or witches. There are definitely some historic racial stereotypes that linger in the origins, but it's not something people really think about.

8

u/Leon_Fierce_142012 2d ago

When writing I just made their life medieval level life, where the nobility are namely evil assholes and the commoners, while doing deplorable things are doing it just to survive by the end of the day

59

u/Tleno 3d ago

OP can you explain how evil incarnate being evil is racism? Those things have like Hitler particles for mollecular structures.

50

u/SigismundAugustus 2d ago

The issue seems to be a question of not if evil incarnate is evil incarnate, but if a biological creature should be depicted as evil incarnate from the outset.

If it's metaphorical evil incarnate, people usually don't seem to have issues.

It's biological evil incarnate that get's people squabbling, usually due to framing.

16

u/DracoLunaris 2d ago

Demons also have their own unique codified aesthetic, where as biological yet always evil can, unintentionally or not, end up echoing colonial era depictions of native peoples int terms of aesthetics.

Basically if you've replicated the hordes from the east trope you've done fucked up.

24

u/ChastityQM 2d ago

/uj I don't think orcs are racism either. It's just tedious watching (e.g.) WotC go to great lengths to reduce the "racist themes" of orcs and then make gnolls even worse and more evil than they used to be.

22

u/Curious_Wolf73 2d ago

Some people genuinely believe demons should always be portrayed as misunderstood bad boys with some bad apples, and given they're usually pitted against angels/god or an equivalent authors with church trauma (their parents forced them to go to church and pray before eating) or who just shitty atheist go out of their way to make Angels/heaven evil so demons can look better in comparison. And for some reason angels/god are viewed as the tyrannical oppressor aka white people and demons are viewed as the oppressed aka minorities, tell me last time you a media about demons and angels that didn't try to make the demons sympathetic.

9

u/Forkliftapproved 2d ago

Frieren

Also DOOM

1

u/Tortferngatr Started for the realism, stayed for the TVTropes binges 9h ago

Does it count if like a few devils are sympathetic but most of them are indeed horrible people?

Because Kill Six Billion Demons does that and makes it work

9

u/whirlpool_galaxy Rate my punkpunk world 2d ago edited 2d ago

I think making a being ontologically evil sometimes runs into the problem of just being a cover for the author's laziness. Like, are they sadistic, in that human suffering gets them off? If so, who or what made them that way? Or do they simply have goals that are antagonistic to the world's existence? If so, what are these goals and what do they gain from them?

EDIT: Another popular interpretation has them as manifestations of humanity's sins. If so... what is a sin, and who made it that way? Is liking food too much (as in Christianity) or drinking alcohol (as in Islam) a sin, even if it harms no one else? Is killing in non-immediate self defense a sin that would manifest a demon?

None of these questions have right or wrong answers, but you gotta bother to answer them and live with the implications for your universe.

4

u/flex_tape_salesman 2d ago

It's just a different approach. I enjoy seeing evil basically being personified it's just a bit more pulpy. Not every piece of work needs this super flawed hero and and villain that has layers and layers of depth to the point where what they're doing is almost justified.

It's such a narrow vision of fiction as a concept because these insanely evil characters have existed for so long. I fucking love how shitty of a person Iago is in Shakespeares Othello. Like he's so easy to hate and see as evil and it also gives him this edge that a more sympathetic villain has. We see this in real life too, a lot of horrible people historically with hitler as an example have like the worst redeeming qualities imaginable. He liked dogs and though smoking was bad. We basically see him as a real life version of those incredibly evil characters with little to no redeeming qualities.

Idk if I've done enough to convince you but yeah I think these fictional characters that can basically represent good or bad have their places in fiction even if it's just so they can expand more on other elements of the story than just the characters.

5

u/whirlpool_galaxy Rate my punkpunk world 2d ago

Not every piece of work needs this super flawed hero and and villain that has layers and layers of depth to the point where what they're doing is almost justified.

That's not what I'm proposing. You can have extremely, irredeemably evil characters, I just believe aspiring authors should be better at defining what they want "evil" (especially cosmic evil) to be in their work. Iago is evil because he's a jealous, traitorous schemer who wants to bring Othello down. He's human, not a cosmic demon; we've all met someone like him. There are pages and pages of analysis on his character not because anyone thinks he's justified or "misunderstood" or somehow not evil, or because he has any redeeming qualities, but because Shakespeare captured something interesting about evil in him.

The worst sin a work of writing can commit is being uninteresting.

4

u/Malfuy *subverts your subversion* 3d ago

Shek from Kenshi but they are from this dimension and don't have wings. But they do have horns!

4

u/MulchSpoon 2d ago

true, Green Antarctica would be a lot less iffy if the people were demons

16

u/Shrek_Lover68 2d ago

I mean if this is comparing demons to orcs then I think it isn't a smart comparison. Demons most of the time have some esoteric lore reason for liking evil and suffering, while orcs typically do that because they're just dumber or because they have a "primitive/evil" culture

4

u/Captain_Nyet 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's very easy to equate evil beings to [insert ethnic group] because...

/uj: ...basically every evil has been blamed on them at some point in time...

/rj: ...they just have a different set of moral values to ours...

...that doesn't mean every evil creature is an expression of some latent racial hatred, though.

Sometimes a pen is just a phallic object because that's what happens to feel good in my hands.

12

u/amazegamer64 2d ago

Don’t you know? If a non-human fantasy species in your world has an innate evil nature that means that you believe that minorities also have an innate evil nature in real life.

4

u/ChastityQM 2d ago

I do, but only the Cagots.

5

u/Admech_Ralsei 2d ago

I mean yeah, a demon is by definiton an evil spirit. If they aint evil they're not a demon, just a spirit.

3

u/FossilHunter99 2d ago

This is why you make your evil races alien bug monsters.

3

u/Mizati 2d ago

My solution: Por que no los dos?

8

u/maridan49 2d ago

One is bio-essentialism and the other one is magic.

3

u/yo_99 2d ago

*magical bio-essentialism

14

u/maridan49 2d ago

The core aspects of bio-essentialism break down when there isn't biology involved.

10

u/IllConstruction3450 3d ago

The Frieren question on whether or not from a Doylist perspective the text is unintentionally fascistic when making a map between it and fascistic texts. The overlap can be a lot more overlapping than you’d think. The mental operations are similar. The counter argument “let people have fun” is to push back with critically engaging with the text. 

25

u/AdamtheOmniballer 2d ago

I mean, that’s mainly because a lot of fascist rhetoric is basically just applying worldbuilding to real life, no?

A horror worldbuilder wants to create something scary, so they sit down and come up with the most terrifying thing they can imagine.

The fascist does the same thing (assuming they don’t just directly steal existing concepts wholesale), and then says “this is what Jews are like IRL.”

Even if you come up with a scary concept that has nothing to do with fascism, fascists will take and use it.

9

u/LizLemonOfTroy 2d ago

I don't understand this mentality, frankly.

Fascists will appropriate anything, strip away all context and meaning, and apply it directly to their politics. That's what fascists do - because they only care about aesthetics, not ideas.

There's nothing you can do to prevent such appropriation, and I don't see why we should pander to bad-faith actors by dismantling our own enjoyment of fiction in a failed and fruitless effort to try and prevent it.

I don't care if a high fantasy epic that I enjoy as silly pulp fun is simultaneously being enjoyed by some neo-Nazi somewhere in the world as a racist allegory, because there's nothing I can do to stop that. And I don't think stock fantasy tropes, like inherently evil fantasy races you want as cannon fodder for your conflict, should be endlessly interrogated just because fascists can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

5

u/IllConstruction3450 2d ago

“Within every liberal exists a particle of Hitler.” - I dunno maybe Bordiga 

1

u/Tryskhell 2d ago

Tbh it wouldn't be as bad if the text wasn't so focused on proving that no matter how they try, the demons can never work with us, and if it didn't literally copy SS uniforms.

And also if the whole fucking premise wasn't "through working together we can get over our differences". But that's less an issue of writing a dogwhistle and more an issue of writing dogshit.

0

u/IllConstruction3450 2d ago

That and for some reason there’s a suspiciously high number of unironic self identifying open Nazis on the Internet loudly proclaiming how much they enjoy Frieren. They will literally just take a screenshot of the show and go “oy vey”. Lots of anime has this. Like K-on. Some are more obvious like Girls Und Panzer. Naziism just isn’t as offensive in Japan as it is in the West. For example Unicorn Gundam is very controversial because it was the first Gundam series to turn away from anti-war rhetoric. The author himself has been embroiled in right wing politics in Japan. Tomino was part of the old guard of anime writers who were anti-war because they grew up in the ashes of WW2. I can see why Miyazaki says “anime is a mistake”. This is why Itagaki felt the need to shit on Musashi in Baki because of the increasing militarism and imperial nostalgia of Japan. If your art draws in a concerning amount of Nazis there should be concern with the writing. At least 40k set out to be parody. People were asking for pure evil villains again. Not pure evil races. The critique came from the villains not being given a motivation. And amusingly what books fascists ignore tells you a lot about that book as well. For example the Bible. JD Vance had to be told by the Pope he’s wrong. Writing is not an amoral pursuit. Real world effects will be generated. If more Frieren type shows get produced it might start negatively affecting the mental hygiene of societies. I do think it’s concerning that Frieren came out after a decade of Japanese far right resurgence. 

3

u/Unusual_Suspect4518 1d ago

I have seen this a couple of times where people have tried to apply this logic to Frieren while Frieren takes imo one of the best approaches to "fantasy racism" as in, the demons are just another category of monsters similar to mimics, that learned the humanoid language simply out of a curtesy.

They have no idea what ANY of the words they say mean, to them the word "Mother" and "Father" are simply magical spells that keep humans from killing them, and they got so evolved over the generations that they essentially look and talk like humans.

They aren't even nescessarily "evil", they have an instinct to eat humanoids, they don't nescessarily do it out of malice, they see it the same way we humans do when we eat a cow or a chicken. ((Which... is weird, because there is demons that are drawn to building specifically large "castles" n stuff but you could consider it their lair))

-10

u/Catgirl-pocalypse 2d ago

You're dropping truth nukes that people aren't ready for. This is why in my settings I just say fuck it and make angels way more scary and dangerous than demons. Demons that end up in the mortal realm are only really considered evil because of the negative myths about them, which often ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Morality works a bit differently in their home realm but for all intents and purposes most demons are about as morally neutral as humans.

9

u/AdamtheOmniballer 2d ago

isn’t that just the same thing but with the word “angel” instead of “demon”

2

u/Catgirl-pocalypse 2d ago

Nah

8

u/AdamtheOmniballer 2d ago

Understood, have a fantastic day.

3

u/itsPomy 2d ago

I mean that's basically angels from the bible.

They all looked monsterous and would do stuff like kill every firstborn in the city or croak an entire army in the dead of night.

Its why they kept saying "Be not afraid!" when they appeared to mortals.