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POC are not interchangeable nor do you get to decide our affiliations for us
"This App is good. However, you're apping for a pakistani character and using an obviously middle-area located asian model for your character pic. Please remedy this or your app will be void."
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bad_rpers_suck post. The OP goes on to complain how this is excessively anal hence their posting but actually this kind of action by mods is a good thing.
Initially reading the sentence I wondered if there might be some leeway in playing a Pakistani character with Indian blood in their background* because that would explain why a Pakistani character might look somewhat like they were from Madhya Pradesh, and then it hit me that they were using Asian in the sense of the continent instead of the region which only covers Bangladesh, India and Pakistan as it occurs in the UK.
Actually, this is a long-standing rant I have when it comes to people overseas i.e. in America who don’t seem to understand that while they might use Asian to stand for anyone from the whole continent in other places this isn’t necessarily the case. That they want to use the term like that is all well and good but my grief tends to come in the form of their attempting to ram it down my throat where their telling me that I’m Asian to my ears smacks of telling me that I’m not Burmese, not Oriental because I don’t conform to whatever it is that they’ve decided that an Oriental person should be. And this always comes from people who in the UK would be classified as Oriental so it looks, every single fucking time, like they’re telling me to GTFO of the group because I don’t meet their criteria, and then they wonder why I get so furious that I end up almost physically sick as a result.
Of course the argument that I’m just wrong because tends to get followed up with the one that regional differences in language don’t matter and that I don’t know what anybody in Europe or the motherland thinks because if they’ve never left America and live in their own insular little communities there’s no way that I could possibly have contacts across the world or have travelled at all. Shit, there’s no way I could even ever have relatives back home who I’ve talked to, I couldn’t have anything like knowledge of the Burmese community in the fucking country I live in, I couldn’t possibly know the greatness that is the Word handed down by American Asians from one motherfucking country. And it is always American Asians of that one origin to the point where I wonder if it’s some kind of asshole disease that’s localised to their gene pool because even the Burmese-[that specific community] lot in the US seem to show touches of it half the time.
Which seems to diverge from my point but funnily enough doesn’t quite as far as all that. Applying the US usage of the word Asian to the sentence up there suddenly the leap from the possibility of a Pakistani character with Indian heritage becomes the fact that somebody has most likely used an Arab PB for a Pakistani character. Google is source enough to show the difference, and that there are some incredibly good looking Pakistani actresses out there. I had even wondered if the character being applied for in this instance was one where the issue of her face would never really arise but a quick Google tells me that it wouldn’t be the same character since said character is from Afghanistan. Regardless, what this PB issue seems to come down to isn’t a lack of resources on Google, there are Lollywood sites enough with images of distinctly conventionally attractive actors and actresses so more likely the case is that the player cannot tell the difference.
I’ve talked about how regional distinctions tend to be missed by those who aren’t from those regions before and how amongst POC we tend to look at each other curiously and then make a polite enquiry because it’s not about othering but rather looking to include someone in our group. Amongst POC it’s a way of finding someone who shares similar traits, a similar history, an understanding and especially out in the West it’s a pleasant sort of grouping against the storm. There are things I don’t have to explain to fellow Burmese, things that other Orientals just get, that Asians get too because we’ve got more in common when it comes to background so sometimes issues are just instinctive. And if we’re not from the same point of origin you end up having conversations where you find yourself saying things like “we have that too”. It’s not at all like external othering where a white person decides your delineation based on what they’ve decided that you ought to be like and then gets offended when you don’t conform to their outsider stereotypes.
So this PB issue of using an Arab face for an Asian character starts to sound like somebody has decided what a Pakistani should look like because either they have no idea what actual Pakistanis look like or because they just don’t care to check the difference. It may just be in an RP but it’s pretty much advertising that POC are interchangeable as far as white folks are concerned and when the OP argues as much inbad_rpers_suck then it just reinforces that notion. It’s putting people into boxes decided upon by outsiders and it’s the sort of completely racist bullshit that gets carried over from real life.
I had a discussion not so long ago about the term ‘safe space’ and it was interesting to note that for minority groups a safe space is somewhere where we can be safe from harm where as for that white privileged majority it generally means a space where they’re free to be assholes. And RP certainly seems to be the new asshole space where they can app their racist fetish characters that reinforce all the negative stereotypes that while folks love to ascribe to POC: it’s an area in which a PB issue is really very, very tiny in comparison to the utter fuckjaws who force POC out of games due to their racism. Though maybe that’s the point, they don’t want us there anyway because that would, you know, mean that in one tiny area they’d have to actually view us as equal.
* Granted, when I was thinking about Pakistani/Indian intermarriages there I was considering it from the POV of their being a limited gene pool due to migration somewhere else which might facilitate such an alliance since while neither party might fit entirely traditional criteria they would be at least less misaligned than someone else. For example, back in the day it would have been completely unheard of for an Anglo-Burmese Catholic to be involved with a Burmese-Chinese Buddhist romantically but with time and distance that stops being an unacceptable match at all. The difference in cultures would have been so vast as to be unbridgeable both parties being at least bilingual, boarding school educated individuals of a specific class being a minor similarity since the fact of one party being very specifically foreign would have taken precedence over that, especially since Anglo-Burmese is a cultural affiliation that probably has some European ancestry dating back to the time when Portuguese traders arrived in the country but certainly doesn’t use the word ‘Anglo’ correctly at all.
From this
bad_rpers_suck post. The OP goes on to complain how this is excessively anal hence their posting but actually this kind of action by mods is a good thing.Initially reading the sentence I wondered if there might be some leeway in playing a Pakistani character with Indian blood in their background* because that would explain why a Pakistani character might look somewhat like they were from Madhya Pradesh, and then it hit me that they were using Asian in the sense of the continent instead of the region which only covers Bangladesh, India and Pakistan as it occurs in the UK.
Actually, this is a long-standing rant I have when it comes to people overseas i.e. in America who don’t seem to understand that while they might use Asian to stand for anyone from the whole continent in other places this isn’t necessarily the case. That they want to use the term like that is all well and good but my grief tends to come in the form of their attempting to ram it down my throat where their telling me that I’m Asian to my ears smacks of telling me that I’m not Burmese, not Oriental because I don’t conform to whatever it is that they’ve decided that an Oriental person should be. And this always comes from people who in the UK would be classified as Oriental so it looks, every single fucking time, like they’re telling me to GTFO of the group because I don’t meet their criteria, and then they wonder why I get so furious that I end up almost physically sick as a result.
Of course the argument that I’m just wrong because tends to get followed up with the one that regional differences in language don’t matter and that I don’t know what anybody in Europe or the motherland thinks because if they’ve never left America and live in their own insular little communities there’s no way that I could possibly have contacts across the world or have travelled at all. Shit, there’s no way I could even ever have relatives back home who I’ve talked to, I couldn’t have anything like knowledge of the Burmese community in the fucking country I live in, I couldn’t possibly know the greatness that is the Word handed down by American Asians from one motherfucking country. And it is always American Asians of that one origin to the point where I wonder if it’s some kind of asshole disease that’s localised to their gene pool because even the Burmese-[that specific community] lot in the US seem to show touches of it half the time.
Which seems to diverge from my point but funnily enough doesn’t quite as far as all that. Applying the US usage of the word Asian to the sentence up there suddenly the leap from the possibility of a Pakistani character with Indian heritage becomes the fact that somebody has most likely used an Arab PB for a Pakistani character. Google is source enough to show the difference, and that there are some incredibly good looking Pakistani actresses out there. I had even wondered if the character being applied for in this instance was one where the issue of her face would never really arise but a quick Google tells me that it wouldn’t be the same character since said character is from Afghanistan. Regardless, what this PB issue seems to come down to isn’t a lack of resources on Google, there are Lollywood sites enough with images of distinctly conventionally attractive actors and actresses so more likely the case is that the player cannot tell the difference.
I’ve talked about how regional distinctions tend to be missed by those who aren’t from those regions before and how amongst POC we tend to look at each other curiously and then make a polite enquiry because it’s not about othering but rather looking to include someone in our group. Amongst POC it’s a way of finding someone who shares similar traits, a similar history, an understanding and especially out in the West it’s a pleasant sort of grouping against the storm. There are things I don’t have to explain to fellow Burmese, things that other Orientals just get, that Asians get too because we’ve got more in common when it comes to background so sometimes issues are just instinctive. And if we’re not from the same point of origin you end up having conversations where you find yourself saying things like “we have that too”. It’s not at all like external othering where a white person decides your delineation based on what they’ve decided that you ought to be like and then gets offended when you don’t conform to their outsider stereotypes.
So this PB issue of using an Arab face for an Asian character starts to sound like somebody has decided what a Pakistani should look like because either they have no idea what actual Pakistanis look like or because they just don’t care to check the difference. It may just be in an RP but it’s pretty much advertising that POC are interchangeable as far as white folks are concerned and when the OP argues as much in
bad_rpers_suck then it just reinforces that notion. It’s putting people into boxes decided upon by outsiders and it’s the sort of completely racist bullshit that gets carried over from real life.I had a discussion not so long ago about the term ‘safe space’ and it was interesting to note that for minority groups a safe space is somewhere where we can be safe from harm where as for that white privileged majority it generally means a space where they’re free to be assholes. And RP certainly seems to be the new asshole space where they can app their racist fetish characters that reinforce all the negative stereotypes that while folks love to ascribe to POC: it’s an area in which a PB issue is really very, very tiny in comparison to the utter fuckjaws who force POC out of games due to their racism. Though maybe that’s the point, they don’t want us there anyway because that would, you know, mean that in one tiny area they’d have to actually view us as equal.
* Granted, when I was thinking about Pakistani/Indian intermarriages there I was considering it from the POV of their being a limited gene pool due to migration somewhere else which might facilitate such an alliance since while neither party might fit entirely traditional criteria they would be at least less misaligned than someone else. For example, back in the day it would have been completely unheard of for an Anglo-Burmese Catholic to be involved with a Burmese-Chinese Buddhist romantically but with time and distance that stops being an unacceptable match at all. The difference in cultures would have been so vast as to be unbridgeable both parties being at least bilingual, boarding school educated individuals of a specific class being a minor similarity since the fact of one party being very specifically foreign would have taken precedence over that, especially since Anglo-Burmese is a cultural affiliation that probably has some European ancestry dating back to the time when Portuguese traders arrived in the country but certainly doesn’t use the word ‘Anglo’ correctly at all.