Here's another post, tangentially related to my previous one of Doctor Who, but also ties in to all the posts I've made before about how to avoid racist tropes:
If you are writing a metaphor for oppression, especially if you're trying to deliberately craft a fantasy or scifi metaphor for an ongoing, real world genocide, you can write out your first draft, build up the scifi or fantasy aspect of it, yeah.
And then when you go to edit that draft.
You need to make a copy and change your scifi/fantasy names to the Real World Equivalent you're trying to build a metaphor for.
You need to use actual plain language to describe your metaphor and what each Real World Party Equivalent is doing in your story.
Is this a setting where robots are enslaved by humans, and the main enslaved robot character heroically sacrifices themself to save their new human friends who rented them out for some field work, after the protagonist destroyed a bunch of rouge robots from the neighboring base, because they killed their humans which is evil and wrong, no matter what those humans might have done to those robots!
The humans didn't deserve to die, even if they made their robots fight to the death for fun!
And this is heroic and tragic and morally correct choice for our protagonist, you should see every action they take as cool and heroic and perfect, don't look any deeper into the metaphor or else!
Annnd in taking away the scifi aspect to make it plain language....
Well, now this is a setting where Black slaves are kept by white masters, and the main enslaved Black character heroically sacrifices themselves to save their new white masters who rented it out for some field work, after the main enslaved Black character killed a bunch of escaped slaves from the neighboring plantation, because those slaves killed their white masters, which is evil and wrong no matter what those masters might have done to those Black people they kept as slaves!
The white masters didn't deserve to die, even if they made their Black slaves fight to the death for fun!
And this is heroic and tragic and morally correct choice for our protagonist, you should see every action they take as cool and heroic and perfect, and having stripped away the metaphor you see how absolutely horrifying and racist this story idea is!
So, before you go publishing your masterpiece sci-fi/fantasy metaphor for real world oppression, to yourself and your audience a favor, and take the time to break your story down into plain language.
Make sure it is actually telling the story you wanted to tell.
Make sure it is on the side of History you want it to be.
Make sure you're not reinforcing real world racism.
Make sure you're not unironically repeating historical slavery apologism *word for word. *
Make sure you're not demonizing the people you're (apparently) trying to support with your metaphor.
If your story is your attempt to stand against racism, make sure you're not being absolutely horrifyingly disgustingly racist because you haven't actually fucking talked or listened to anybody who is actually lived through it!
