Change the political alignment of the SRF to not be fascism

[kyres1]

What the title says. Pretty simple reasoning; nobody really wants to bring up fascism in any regard or beat around the bush of it. I especially don't want the particular terminology used because I believe it attracts the completely wrong people who absolutely shouldn't be here. I'm sure some other term works to assign to the evil, dictatorial and authoritarian/xenophobic SRF, or an entirely new word could be invented to assign to the political party overall. It'd help us at least lean away from the topic becoming commonplace seeing as, judging by ongoing arcs, we are probably going to be hearing a lot about the SRF for the coming weeks/months.

For reference the actual mention of it is here,

https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Human_Ideologies_and_Governments

and the SRF entry on the Wildlands itself doesn't actually note these people are definitively fascist.

[limette]

I'm pretty strongly opposed; to call them a different word would just be fascism by another name, which is just itself stupid bush-beating. If it attracts the type of people who would think the SRF to be a good thing, so will the SRF but they adhere to killpeopleism or whatever other word instead. The SRF is pretty definitively The Bad Guys anyway and you aren't even allowed to play a sympathizer. The best way to handle it is by being heavy-handed about those types of people, and continuing the policy of a total ban on SRF-aligned characters. They aren't even close to as harmful as past lore (e.g. ATLAS) because they aren't being glorified or handed to the players, and I've seen no reason to expect that to change; lore has very clearly learned from past mistakes here.

Edited February 5, 2023 by limette

[JeffMomentRed]

I think we should bring up Gadpathur. Commander, Cadres, Military Government, Never fall to Sol again, their society is extremely unwelcoming to outsiders aswell. Fascism under any other name for sure and, perhaps total censorship or retconning of these societies is in order. Dominia, Gadpathur and I'm sure a few more will certainly be wildly different. As someone who has been there(personal experience with a certain political ideology), changing the name of it does not stop people from behaving that way, it will not stop people from playing that way and the "people who should not be here" will eventually read the lore and either choose to break the rule of a total ban on SRF characters or play something much like a Dominian or a Gadpathurian(if they chose to do their reading) OR they will be filtered out by any other means(boredom usually for that "type" of person).

TLDR for ADHD cases like me: No, the people it attracts will show up and play any other authortative government, bump Lorilili, hi Kyres : D

[Fluffy]

While I was not present in the past, so I don't have first hand experience with "past lore", I am also opposed to this suggestions; in an entire galaxy of species and planets, systems and governments, it would be quite unbelievable to not find anything in the huge gray-to-black spectrum of ideologies.

 

The two suggestions posted here seems more from a point of "pink-tinted glasses" lore, but forego the expected huge diversity that we currently have on even one single planet today, and would be unbelievable to not be found across an entire galaxy.

While it makes absolutely sense to cut certain specific things from the IC universe/game (extensive homophobic and transphobic slurs, namely), IC-related ones (xenophobia from one species to the other, military governments, censorships, you name it) makes a perfect sense to exist and to be expected to be found across the galaxy.

Please note that it does not, in any way sense or form, excuse a player to be a dick on an OOC level towards another: if someone plays one such character just to follow you around and insult your xeno character all round long, multiple rounds, and that annoys you, by any means LOOC them and ask them to knock it off, if that fails, ahelp it as it becomes an "OOC being a dick" case, which is not an IC thing anymore and would be handled accordingly; very different thing would be the same player who drops hints to not like xeno characters, the evergreen meowing at tajarans meme and not wanting them on whatever planet/moon/floating city/whatever else they come from, as that is an IC thing that could even result in people talking about things, and is just (at least in my view) one of the many possible role one could roleplay; if you are not interested with said thing, and presuming it is not something done specifically to bother you or maliciously, you are always free to not interact with said characters; others might like the idea to try to talk and discuss the different points of view between the two characters, to have someone to throw into the disposal/hold hostage/make disappear at the next rev/cult round, and all the possible gimmicks/developments/interactions you can get out of said role.

 

.2c

[Caelphon]

This would be better placed in Lore Canonisation / Suggestions. 

[Scheveningen]

My post is gonna get political, but let us be honest, the Aurora lore itself is so intensely recently entrenched (going back to at most 2 years ago) with ideas and concepts that are eternally brainworming our political contemporary that it would be very, very naive or otherwise deceptive to imply that the social spaces between the game and real life are separate and not at all related to each other. Many aspects of contemporary real-world politics - such as in the political systems and rhetoric that currently exist, not the stupid culture wars as to who gets to use a bathroom - are very much integrated into the current state of the lore and the game, and both settings share problems, but the game state aims to be an escalation of many of these problems, most especially that being the settings' hyper-advanced version of libertarian capitalism.

I see no real reason to sanitize the lore of fascism, but it should obviously not get to the point where they are the main antagonist. We should be able to have lore antagonists that are evil not because they pose an existential or paranormal threat, but because their evil is banal and selfishly motivated. I think everyone here can fairly agree that on an OOC level that fascism is an incredibly evil and bad political system unlike any other, and that really stupid shit occurs when you just let it into your society. Not much needs to be explained on that point, but the other lesson that keeps needing to be told is that, as a system of government and a political strategy to achieve power in government, it often employs incredibly effective social manipulation tactics in order to con people into working for fascist ideology. The idea didn't die during [insert time period], it's a stubborn movement built on hatred and resentment, which are intense human emotions that are unlikely to go away anytime soon.

The Solarian Alliance is an example of an entity that failed to meaningfully grow in any capacity for far too long, and this stagnation caused national resentment and restlessness in its populace. Frost and his ATLAS fascists took advantage of this by blaming it on the xenos. Lying is easier than other forms of attempting to gain power, and evidently also seems to be incredibly effective because fact-checkers mean nothing to people who aren't the target audience of fact-checkers (i.e., the current sitting political elite whose power is being threatened by the rise of fascism). A majority of fascist support comes not from ontologically evil and homicidal individuals but from selfish enough people who have been fooled with, and sold, the idea that someone else is the cause of their own explicitly personal problems. 

As for the specter of fascism that very clearly lingers in Sol lore, you can thank two people for putting it in in the first place (neither of which are still around), and you can thank the "no significant retcons" policy as well. The impact Frost, ATLAS, and the SRF have made has been evident in more than several lore articles and arcs that under the current policy, their past/current existence cannot be undone, and the ghost of a purely genocidal death cult is not going away anytime soon from the lore. They are, unfortunately, too integral to the main story. I do hope however that we stop seeing the constant pornography of misery being pushed in prior arcs that achieved little besides pushing the sentiment that the only thing we are going to see is more wars every financial quarter.

There is a pretty big silver lining to all this, though. Anyone who thinks it not an ill-advised idea to play anything along the lines close to an obvious Solarian fascist is absolutely free to be clowned on. It is free to bully evil characters. It is okay.

[Boggle08]

I can't speak for the overall direction of this facet lore development, but curtailing the ideas presented by the SRF seems a little premature, if it's with the intention of dissuading people who have the wrong idea about our server. ATLAS was before my time, but judging by old accounts, They were practically their own meta-clique. We don't have anything like that right now.

[Evandorf]

I feel like we should endeavor to keep evil or unsavory aspects of the lore intact while making it clear that those qualities are not tolerated ICly within the crew or OOCly among the players.

Fascism deserves active ridicule. Using softer language shows an unwillingness to face it.

[EJJ]

I'm not really sure where this thread is coming from. Groups like the SRF are anti-corporate so the SCC, Biesel, NT and everything else opposes them. The wildlands groups pages specifically point out that people who support them cannot be played as outwardly supporting them. And I assume that anyone who's outwardly supporting fascism OOCly is going to be spoken to/banned for breaking some kind of rule. And I assume within the next year or so most of the Wildlands groups will be gone as Sol/Biesel mop them up.

[La Villa Strangiato]

Counterpoint: It immediately marks someone with the scarlet letter if they really want to play an SRF sympathiser, so we should keep it as a sus detector.

[Garnascus]

I think it is ok for our lore to work with themes like this. While i do agree that lore like this DOES tend to attract certain types of unsavory people i do not think the lore of the SRF warrants us pumping the breaks. I trust our lore team to handle the themes responsibly. Our lore has a lot of conflicting factions and ideologies. The Unathi alone have a WEALTH of doctrinal disputes. I completely understand the sentiment of not wanting to mess with the themes of fascism at all and i do think it is something we need to treat VERY CAREFULLY. 

[EJJ]

1 hour ago, Garnascus said:

I trust our lore team to handle the themes responsibly.

Gotta echo Garn on this. You can't play any character that outwardly supports the Solarian Warlord factions, Biesel/SCC/NT and the rest of the SCC are against them, Sol is more or less against them. They're anti-corporate. You can play them as antags and I can get SRF rolling in and saying "kill all xenos" being uncomfortable, but I don't really consider that much different than the occasional assistant that rolls in and says something like "lmao furries on this server?"

And again if someone's agreeing with fascism or whatever OOCly they'll be spoken to and if they're talking about simping for the SRF their character should probably be IR'd and fired.

[Fluffy]

I would also like to point out, as a side note, that the unathi lore not only has a section which basically describes, or at the very least enables, phrenology, but also indicates that "it has been going through a rebirth in popularity",  that "The validity of such a science is discussed, even among strictly professional fields" and that "many individuals and groups have been using this field as a pretext to discriminate against other Sinta".

 

At the worst, it could be weaponized for explicit and blatant racism: "Khaniazwazi takes into account scale coloration, horns, frills, crests and facial structure".

It does not take much effort for a bad faith actor to turn scale into skin, and the second part does not even need to be twisted at all to be weaponized.

 

Point being: I do not believe we have to pink-tint the proverbial lore glasses in the idea that it would curb unwelcome behaviors (also because I find it hard to believe that any shitter would take the time to go dig a justification for said behaviors from the lore in the first place), we should instead aim to correct and curb, and failed so remove those who enact, negative malicious behaviors, as I indicated with more details in my previous post, instead.

[wowzewow]

Echoing Garn's sentiment here.

Also, this should've been a Lore Canonization Application.

Locking and archiving.