Why is it not ok to use allegory and draw from real life slavery/civil rights movements for stories, as long as you're doing it in a respectful way and not as a means to dismiss it/make fun of it? Why does the game need to explain in detail the reasons behind using such things as a framing device? I mean the entire point is that the androids are oppressed and treated as slaves, it makes logical sense then that there would be parallels between the real world civil rights movement, just like there were parallels between the Women's Rights movement and African Americans civil rights movement.
Did people get up in arms over I, Robot, Blade Runner, The Matrix, etc for doing those things also?
Having androids becoming sentient and then coming to terms with that isn't some new thing, it's been in numerous other sci-fi works, from books, movies, games, etc. Sure it was heavy handed in Detroit and not subtle, but it didn't come off like he was making fun of it or anything in the least.
Watch the video to see an explanation for why it's not done in a respectful way. Nobody's saying that allegory and such cannot be used, but when you use them you must take great, great care to pay respect to them (respect here not meaning "they don't actively dismiss it") as by using them you automatically say something about them. The video explains what messages Detroit is telling when it uses its imagery. Doing direct allegory correctly is a
very hard thing to pull off effectively, especially when it comes to serious dramas like Detroit (it's why, for example, the fascism overtones in Star Wars aren't criticised that heavily) and especially when the medium you decide to tell your story in requires the player to 'win' in order to feel satisfied.
And no, people didn't get up in arms over those other pieces of media because they don't use the imagery Detroit uses. Blade Runner, for example, adeptly removes much of the direct slavery overtones Detroit has by making the story about empathy, memory and identity instead; it's about androids rising up from slavery, yes, but it's not
about androids rising up from slavery. What you're getting wrong here is that nobody's saying that looking at the moral quandaries of Androids is a bad thing to do, they're saying that doing so whilst directly referencing real-life civil rights atrocities is insensitive and tone deaf.
So all the other androids that weren't black are not allegorical? Are you not understanding what I'm saying here? On one hand you're saying the whole thing is allegorical but then you single out a black man in particular to demonstrate it's allegorical. You saw the android as black, I saw the android as an android.
Different elements of a story can be allegorical to different elements of real life, you don't suddenly stop the allegories when you've decided to use one. In context, just because other androids aren't black does not erase the fact that the biggest example of direct racial profiling (as in, being profiled as a criminal despite being completely innocent) is in Markus' story.
