I realized something the other day that made me basically have to sit down because it recontextualized my entire experience of playing as Nevivi in both RP and content.
So, I have always, literally since A Realm Reborn was still current and Heavensward was not yet a thing, had people being fucking goddamn weird to me if I'm playing her. Not taking her seriously as a character, treating her like scenery, shit-talking lalafells directly in front of her and talking in creepily graphic detail about murdering and cannibalizing her, sending bizarre lewd tells...I get almost no commendations on her despite having mained healer competently for years, and on multiple characters even! Other characters I've played never had this problem with comms so it's not a skill issue. I've even healed in EX and savage content and did fine! I'd be ignored constantly in RP. People would make IRL excuses to leave if they got assigned to her as an icebreaker kind of thing but then promptly go talk to someone else in my line of sight. I got into ERP events a bit several years ago (note that she's in her mid-40s and IC she does look her age. She's never been a young character, just a short character) and instead she was wildly super popular, which was I guess better but very overwhelming. Instant sex icon, through not much effort on my part, it just kinda happened. The sex pedestal wasn't much better in hindsight. It at least felt like acceptance but it made me neurotic as hell and acceptance that hinges on sexual availability is not acceptance.
But if I complained about how utterly bizarre she was treated to other lalafell players I knew, they were like, 'Damn, that never happens to me. This must be something you're doing to cause it. Are you perhaps being a little bit too sensitive? It's not real racism because these are fantasy races and that downplays actual racism so never call it that.' Especially that last bit, which really stuck in my head so I haven't called it that, even though sometimes it was eerily similar.
And then it hit me between the eyes like a brick a few weeks ago out of nowhere. Of course people treated my character weirdly and badly. It didn't have shit to do with her height in the end. It was, in fact, real racism the entire goddamn time, because she looks Black.
I'm not gonna go as far as to say she is Black, because I'm not Black, and the concept of Blackness is not something I know how to write into her character. It doesn't exist as such in the setting lore and I'm not qualified to try to add it in any nuanced way, so I don't. She does however get perceived as Black and I am assumed to be Black by people who don't know me, because 'why would you be interested in a Black character if you aren't Black' is a real (and racist) assumption. Thus, 'looks Black' is how I'll call it.
And guess what skin color all the lalafell players who have insinuated that I did this to myself through some flaw of character play as? Yup, white as hell. They would literally not have been affected by the things happening to me on Nevivi.
Like...shit, I would say I can't believe it took this long to realize, except I can, because I'm not Black IRL so I'm not intimately aware of what racism looks like on the receiving end. I'm not gonna pick up on that pattern. I just chalked it up to people hating lalafells, and let's be real, they very much do. But I didn't stop to imagine that I was getting the wombo combo of shitty but distinctly different fantasy racism and actual racism. Like, the tiniest little sliver of a corner of a fragment of it compared to what anybody who actually is Black will have to endure, but still, people see a character darker than a snowball and lose their entire goddamn mind. If you're actually Black you don't even get to look like yourself in a fun little game without catching the exact same shit that you already have to live with! I can turn it off which is an absolutely absurd level of privilege that I fully acknowledge.
Uuuggghhh, though, this explains damn near everything and I hate it. Do better, FFXIV players, fucking hell.
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