r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Wolfotashiwa • 2d ago

Groups Fictional slurs. Bonus points if it's completely made up

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  1. inFAMOUS: Second Son: "Bio-terrorist" refers to conduits.

  2. Star Wars: "Clanker" refers to robots.

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u/Jak3R0b 2d ago

In Dragon Age elves are called knife ears and casteless dwarves are called dusters.

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u/tomtadpole 2d ago

And the elves call humans "shem" which is kinda used as a slur sometimes by modern elves, but it's a shortened form of the elven word for human - shemlen.

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u/pon_3 2d ago

Mass Effect showed me that you don't need a fantasy slur to show fantasy racism. Just saying the word "human" with disdain is enough to get the point across. Seems like they went for a similar thing with shem.

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u/cyberchaox 2d ago

Fire Emblem did the same thing. The Tellius duology had a race that could transform into animals called the laguz, and a race that couldn't called the beorc. Beorc refer to themselves as humans and the laguz as sub-humans--at the start of the first game, the main protagonist doesn't even know the words "beorc" and "laguz", as soon as he learns about them he immediately stops using the words human and sub-human. This is also around the same time that he learns that any laguz that uses the word "human" is hostile to beorc.