#ooc issues

Troll hemoism’s closest allegory is classism, and literally stands as a foundation for all what trolls do and base their life around in canon. Being lazy and calling it troll racism, or making direct, centric allegories for race, is bad. Not that (good) allegories are bad in general, but consider that racism has came from the psuedo belief that people of color perform and behave different in ways that hinder or threaten others. Trolls, meanwhile actually do have biological differences that make them behave or perform a certain way. Comparing a society that literally has biological differences to a discriminaton based off of stereotypes of biological difference is bad.

Please watch these two videos if you want a little more insight on why handling and labeling your forms of fictional oppression is important. : X X

Outside of one bit that wasn’t even race related, the hemoism discourse last night was handled pretty well imo. Context wise. We still need to work on tagging stuff for those who wish to block even one sentence commentary, and if anything the communication was slightly better than normal.

So it’s a shame that when I don’t see the bad racism allegories from the past pop up into this, that I still see people being accussed of writing thinly veiled racism from writing hemoism period, simply because being about oppression and mentioning umbrella words is the key link from white muns that looked at the one sentence definition of racism on wikipedia, no other indepth looks at other discrimnated groups, and called it a day.

More words though I’m sure some people didn’t read past the readmore.

-Words like oppression and liberal were used but is a common word belonging to degraded groups. It is not a race centric buzzword and it’s general enough to not be a shock term. It’s not out of character to be used either because troll culture uses political terminology that can be used for most discriminated groups, for the blood discriminated group. See: Lowblooded Alleys from Friendsim.

-I brought up reverse hemoism first and instead of reading into the actual way it was defined, someone saw “reverse” and instantly assumed it was directly parallel reverse racism’s defintion without reading anything. Homestuck is also no stranger to familiar words that have different defintion. See: Cis6l99d.

- I’ve seen way way worse examples of hemoism in the past. This was fine since it was classism based, and paying reference that may corelate to a certain, less related oppression can work well if it hits the beats of their venn diagram comparisons, unintentional or not. I’ve for example made reference to Signless reminding me of MLK and Summoner as Malcolm X. Not that it was intentional, but even if it was it stands by itself as something that is distant enough and doesn’t relate to the biological race comparision; to just give an idea as to how a Troll rights movement and riot could’ve been played out that still works in their universe, without glaring callbacks.

- Oppression isnt a racial buzzword; when you say that it is a racial buzzword and that it makes you uncomfortable from the use alone while ignoring other marginalized groups who share it, you are basically calling an apple an orange just because they’re both fruit.

What else?

Tldr; Hemoism is classism. It’s called low, mid, and highbloods for a reason. Using reference other “isms” are fine so as long as you know what youre talking about, and it isn’t glaringly standing out as something detached from the fictional alien world we’ve set up.

While people need to play it correctly and avoid writing sloppy reference to specific points in history (especially if they aren’t apart of the group that relates to it), other people need to not cry out racism from the word hemoism alone.

If you see something that vaguely reminds you of racism and that’s the issue, versus whether it’s actually racism or not, and you want to snuff it out because it reminds you of what other people are dealing with, remaining ignorant while polishing your claim as thinking for the comfort of poc people, of which little to none speak up about any issues at all, that’s the white guilt talking, my dude.