I mean it may not be the biggest deal, but yes. People take most of their ideas about history from popular media, most of which is fiction. If you'll read what I wrote I never said it does the individuals that were involved a disservice, that just depends on how important you think history is and isn't really a discussion I'd like to get into. Instead I said it does a disservice to their historical representation the effect of which again depends on what you think about history.
Either way I feel like you're being fairly hostile here, and that really isn't doing much for anyone.
We seem to be at an impasse here, because we have fundamentally different ideas about what it means to portray history, which already has a very complicated relationship with the fictional, fictionally.
Maybe it's just the way you worded it, but you're making it seem like you think it's a bad idea to give everyone equal rights and representation in a game about killing werewolves because... more people have wrote about werewolves and steampunk, meaning it makes more sense for the developers to think those are more traditionally Victorian England than minorities who already lived in England at the time? Are you assuming that it's more "accurate" in popular culture to feature electrical weaponry and fabled beast-men than it is to include an occasional character of color, the latter of which
were historically present at the time?
Regarding the bolded: I'm going to make this very, very clear. This is not the type of debate that hinges on pure, distilled subjectivity. There is no way to realistically play the "it's your fault for not caring about this enough" card. This is not a conversation about dishonoring history.
History tells us that people of color had a relatively substantial community in the era, with positions in a variety of trades. Now, it's true that the white upper class were dominant at the time, but the key issue here is assuming that all people of color in Europe at the time were emaciated doormats in the first place. Some served royalty; some were brilliant composers. It's not a hard leap to make, by proxy, that one could possibly find their way into the ranks of an organization like The Order, whose drive to eliminate beasts would far surpass the drive to institutionally suppress those of their own kind. More numbers, more experiences, more great minds could naturally be subsumed.
As an aside, I would also like to establish that the
"quit dwelling in the past" defense is highly frowned upon even within the black community. I'll digress, it's natural that people of color have a sense of heritage and history, and want to celebrate elements of positivity from their diverse pasts. Tracing their lineages back to their original homes in Africa, honoring civil rights leaders, respecting those who managed to claw out of the muck of systemic racism and found lucrative positions in life in harshly xenophobic times. That being said, you have no reason to assume black people
want works of ficfion to recreate their plight to a T.
You are not going to offend a people by welcoming them. If it were a historically accurate game about Victorian London priding itself on detail that tried to tiptoe around the issues of the classism brought about through racist origins, that would definitely raise some eyebrows. But this is
a work of fiction. Nowhere on the game's box is it going to say "most accurate representation of Victorian London to date." It's taken great strides to establish artistic liberties. There is not a sane victim of prejudice on earth that would wish to perpetuate the notions of fear and hate in a fictional environment.
He's being hostile because you're unironically suggesting something outright paradoxical. Let's play your game and take these things at a perceived "accurate" valuation. If werewolves were real, it shakes up substantial notions established by both fact and physics, including evolution, conservation of energy, parasitic commensalism, metabolism, properties of particular compounds such as silver and their newfound ties to the arcane, lunar cycles, and potentially opens the door to magic's inclusion in the real world, if we attempt to analyze the origin of werewolves. That serves to breed a world so imperceptibly alien to our own that its outcome is outright esoteric. Now, let's see what happens if everyone's given equal rights in Victorian London: a single powerful city's sociopolitics are shaken up to a degree and a white-dominant patriarchy dissolves. Not a state's, not a federation's, not a country's, not a world's. A
single city happens to have made some strides of activism. The world, as a collective whole, continues business as normal while London enjoys a post-racial environment. If you were to make the argument that these revelations were made in Victorian London and then explored in a modern era, sure, the world may have some different views on culture and it wouldn't be completely "faithful" to our world. But this is still a chronistically self-contained hypothetical about Victorian London, which is already comparing mountains to molehills in terms of variations.
That's why he's getting upset.
I've already said all I need to say, but to conclude, there are some strong insecurities at play for you to realistically suggest a localized establishment of equality would somehow jeopardize or even offend a people. There is no disservice in representation. There is no subjugation in inclusion. There is no faithlessness in fiction.