If you're confused by tweets about Goblinization, it's an event in the lore of Shadowrun, a long-running sci-fi fantasy TRPG, in which 10% of the world's population spontaneously mutates into orks or trolls on April 30, 2021.

Here's why I, as a POC, am not jumping to celebrate:

Shadowrun's world is a cyberpunk future Earth in which magic returns in an apocalyptic event and technology accelerates. By the time the game starts, a handful of megacorporations control global trade, military ops, and governments. This was novel when the game came out in 1989.

In Shadowrun's 2010, a horrifying virus called VITAS breaks out in India and kills 450 million people. By the end of 2012, ~2 billion people globally die to the virus (BUT mostly concentrated in sub-Saharan and West Africa). That's about 25% of the world's population.

In 2011, in the midst of the global viral outbreak, babies are born with an Unexplained Genetic Expression (UGE) - the first elves and dwarves, as magic "Reawakens" on Earth. These metahumans quickly become second-class citizens; the Pope denounces them as "abominations."

In 2021, "Goblinization" causes 10% of the world's population to instantly mutate into either orks (big, muscular, fangs, short lifespans of 35-40 years) or trolls (bigger, tusks and horns, dermal armor, lifespans of 40-50 years). Global response is unsurprisingly worse than UGE.

To recap - elves and dwarves were BORN to human parents. Orks and trolls were MADE in an extremely grotesque and traumatic event. While elves and dwarves had a rough welcome, the response to Goblinization is universally met with fear and physical violence in the game's lore.

So just how bad was the response to Goblinization? Within 2 years of their appearance, a fascist hate group called the Humanis Policlub is formed in response to the US Supreme Court finally granting all metahumans equal rights. They have thousands of members and megacorp backing.

In the years following Goblinization, metahuman hate crimes spike. In one of many clumsy attempts at allegory, Shadowrun's writers decide that Los Angeles has another series of race riots, mirroring the reaction to the 1992 acquittal of 4 LAPD officers who assaulted Rodney King.

The POC comparisons don't stop there: Johns Hopkins is revealed to perform experiments on metahumans (i.e. the Tuskegee Project); the Swiss quarantine all goblinized citizens; the Germans and Seattle put goblinized civilians in internment camps; the Japanese deport metahumans.

Anti-meta hate culminates in February 2039, 18 years after Goblinization. The Night of Rage is a GLOBAL chain of hate crimes in which metas are rounded up, driven from their homes, and/or killed. Most police departments don't intervene. Terror attacks continue for days afterward.

In the present day of Shadowrun, racism has changed so that skin color matters less than your metatype. Elves and dwarves are largely accepted, while orks and trolls (referred to as "trogs") remain marginalized. They are heavily coded as POC, far more than elves or dwarves are.

Orks, for example, create their own subculture and language (Or'zet). When ork musicians start to use it in their songs, it sparks a wave of "Orxploitation": orks/trolls are cast in films, "trog rock" is huge, and "ork posers" (humans with ork body mods) emerge. Sound familiar?

How do "goblins" fit into Goblinization? Well, orks and trolls are often called goblins in universe (ew). Actual goblins don't exist except as mutants - Human Metahuman Vampiric Virus (HMHVV), which turns humans into vampires, turns dwarves into flesh-eating mindless "goblins."

"Why does any of this matter? It's just fiction!" Yes, fiction that people take seriously, that attempts to be an allegory for the real struggles of marginalized people. It's fun to joke about Goblinization but it's just a repetition of existing racist history and current events.

You're allowed to have your fun today. But I already wake up every day knowing people want me to die because I was born with a different skin color. I don't need to think about the possibility of mutating into a more monstrous person and becoming even more hated in my fantasies.

Anyway, if you think the way Shadowrun codes orks and trolls as Black and brown folx is bad, it doesn't stop there. From stereotypical portrayals of First Nations to 80s-era Orientalism (i.e. Nuyen as global currency), Shadowrun has a racism problem worth examining deeply.