this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Why is "it's realistic" the line your drawing on a space colonization movie?
Your entire premise of "the natives are out gunned" is dripping with white colonization. Why are they always out gunned? Why not show them capable and holding their own and are helped out by "insiders".
Its a fantasy story, and there's tons of ways to do it without relying on the racist "natives are primitives" narrative.
There have to be some kind of rules or else there's no tension. It must be realistic within the rules of the story.
Logically, any colonizer will only proceed if they out gun the natives. Otherwise it's not colonization, but war. And even then in war, the attacker usually figures they have a significant advantage, or else they wouldn't attack.
As if colonisers are in possession of perfect knowledge and logic.
Plenty of stories of wannabe colonisers eating shit because they underestimated natives, if the " historical realism" for some reason is important in a story about blue space aliens, draw inspiration from that why don't you
Isn't that pretty much how all fiction stories of these type actually play out? Much more than in reality, sadly.
Its fantasy, what does logic have to do anything with it?
Like it really comes across as "we can suspend reality, but so long as it's still racist like us"
Well sure. But even fantasy needs to have internal logic to some degree of it gets stupid. If some colonizer attempt came and attacked, and the natives just wiped them out with superior tech, not only would it be unbelievable, but it would be a boring story. We can have the natives eventually victorious and avoid the 'white guy saviour' trope which certainly sucks. But for a good storey, they have to be the underdogs.
If you can't tell a story without basing it off of racist stereotypes, maybe it's a story that doesn't need to be told....
Does it have to be racist? Societies progress in different directions, and when they collide it magnifies this. In the trope where white guys come is with bigger fire power, usually the natives win in the end based on spiritual superiority. Not a bad message really. And in fantasy, the 'races' are arbitrary. In avatar, if the corporation was all black people and the aliens looked very white, would it change the story?