I haven’t done this in my year in JanitorAI. But I felt I need to address it. Anyway here’s the context: So I encountered the oddest thing. Apparently the name for Revan/Shub-Niggurath trips up the comment moderation. I also see my follower count go down by at least 3 (sad I know) when I posted the bot. But I did some digging and found it extensively discussed in the lovecraft subreddit and a few other places.
There’s generally mixed opinions on this. Here’s my take. Judging from what I see and read, it’s really just an unfortunate name that somehow became similar to a popular slur that came from a Latin name for a color.
At first, it never occurred to me that it was anything bad, nor does it have any negative connotation. I originally associated it with the word “Ziggurat” due to the context of lovecraftian horror. But since I lost some followers over it, it got me thinking… contemplating of just changing the name.
But I can’t and here’s a few reasons. One of the more compelling reasons as stated.
> “Because it shares a few letters with a racial slur? By that logic Nigeria is super racist and should change its name.”
This convinced me NOT to change the name. Furthermore, if we’ll start banning every valid word that is similar to it (example: niggle, trigger, bigger, onigiri, etc.)
As an addendum, as a gay man myself, I am not particularly offended by any word that sounds like gay (example - Gatorade, pronounced as GAY-torade) even when the word gay was frequently used as an insult.
Anyway, back on topic, the name Shub-Niggurath, is referenced a lot in other media without issues. Here’s an extensive list of the use of Shub-Niggurath in popular Media:
https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Shub-Niggurath_in_Popular_Culture
So while it may trip JanitorAI auto-mod, let’s chalk it up to the AI censors being too dumb to recognize the nuance of actual human language. I hope I won’t bleed more followers by this decision. I’m only less than 1k. :(
Here’s the subreddit discussion that I referenced.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comments/6nx3lx/shubniggurath/
And another extensive discussion on whether Shub-Niggurath has intentionally negative connotations
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/is-shub-niggurath-an-intentional...
Is it intentionally racist? I don’t know. I can’t tell if there’s an intent behind it. But it is a legitimate popular culture reference, and I think it is a disservice to censor it, or to avoid using it on the premise that it “sounds like” something else.
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