![]() If the point of the story is to show the evils of racism, this trope can lead to a Broken Aesop if there are in fact good in-universe reasons to discriminate against a certain type of creature (say, because they need to eat other sapient beings in order to survive, or they genuinely are Always Chaotic Evil apart from the odd angsty heroic one, or they're just potentially-dangerous enough that one doesn't strictly have to be an absolute incorrigible raving xenophobic lunatic to consider making certain. Or don't, if you think that everybody needs to grow a spine, but don't say you weren't warned. note Just watch out for the Unfortunate Implications inherent in depicting a discriminated-against group as "morally inferior". The undesired minorities may be rounded up inside a Fantastic Ghetto, and may also be the targets of Superhuman Trafficking.įuturistic science fiction examples of human-on-alien Fantastic Racism will often make the human racist a member of a group historically discriminated against on Earth (such as a black character in an American-created work) both to emphasize that human-on-human racism is a thing of the past, and for the sake of irony from the viewers' perspective. Real Life weaselly lines like Some of My Best Friends Are X may feature. Fantastic Slurs are often involved, as are Monster Rights Movements. Also related to Have You Tried Not Being a Monster?, where said monsters are usually used as a metaphor for other types of discrimination, oftentimes dicrimination based on characteristics perceived by the bigot to be alterable, "curable", such as an alternative sexual identity, a disability, or a different religion/religious differences (the two tropes can often overlap in the case of religion), rather than race or ethnicity. Not to be confused with Space Jews, in which an imaginary species or culture has disturbing similarities to a real-world racist stereotype. Instead of having The Hero encounter racism between, say, white and black people in the American Deep South, or between ethnic Czech and Roma in the Czech Republic, or between Ainu and Japanese, or any other sets of real-world groups, they encounter "racism" between two-headed aliens and three-headed aliens, or between people with earth-themed elemental powers and people with water-themed elemental powers, or between shapeshifting squid-people and shapeshifting octopus-people. Now that we got that out of the way, Fantastic Racism is a subset of the old trick of dealing with thorny issues through metaphor. "Fantastic" as in " fantasy" or fictional, not as in "awesome", obviously.
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