My honest thoughts are there's some areas humanity in general are still really "stupid" about, two huge areas are disability and disfiguration. Not only is it very telling that these two things are often interchangeable and used in conjuncture with one another when they most often have no correlation with one another (as one is physical, one is psychological), but how normalized the tropes these things play into so often are that no one bats an eyelid at them. I am telling you, there's ways these things are treated today that is like the equivalent of treating Native Americans as "primitive tribal" or how commonly accepted "black face" was a century ago. I know of course neither having a disability or a disfiguration is a race, but it is a characteristic often used to group together people by a certain visible different (either physically or in behavoir) trait.
The portrayal of people with disabilities or disfigurations in popular media stemmed from the fucking circus treating them like literal "freaks", which then became normalized as media played onto this with propagating three very unhealthy views. The first and most common is the "bad guy", I cannot even begin to tell you how many works of media portray those with disfigurations especially, but also disabilities, as being villainous, IE they don't look like the rest of us or have something really weird in how they act, so they become villain fodder over and over again. The other two equally harmful viewpoints is the "magical" person with disfiguration or disabilities, which is still normally accepted but is basically the same as the "magical black person" trope from the same vein. Likewise there's also often the "one disabled/disfigured friend" trope, which again parallels and unhealthy trope that also is suited for black people.
When you actually start digging in how many parallels you can make between racist stereotypes and people with disabilities/disfigurations, you might begin to realize how toxic this all actually is, and how unpleasant it is for everyone how these things are propagated.
And it absolutely does have a real world affect outside of media. Look up the suicide rates for those with disabilities or disfigurations. One percentage I know is related to autism. Did you know between categorized "normal" people and people on the spectrum of autism, they are 5x more likely to have a suicide attempt by the age of 17? That 22%, or about 1/5, by the age of 17 will have thought or talked about suicide with someone. That around 50% of people with autism won't live past 60, with 60-70% of the reason being because of suicide? It's not that people with autism naturally are more suicidal, it's how fucking society treat these people continually punching down on them. And it's not just autism, the way how most of society lacks knowledge, real support, understanding, empathy, and often how they choose to represent these groups, have a whole lot to do with it.
It's honestly sickening some of the post in this thread talking about a broader range here. RAGE 2 is not the first to do something like this, and it's definitely not even close to the most offensive. Hell, if a few things were changed around it could even be okay, like for example the Resident Evil series uses mutation in an interesting way I don't think is offensive to those with disfigurments or disfiguration (but it does have a few trope-esque things which could be seen as problematic, such as to date the only RE character in a wheelchair has been a villain) but how they handle B.O.W.s is absolutely fine I feel). But it's telling how normalized this sorta' thing is because this is something people are so used to, and there's so little empathy for the struggles of those who have to live life in a way outside of the norm, and just be used in most media as a trope often to fill some villainous or "magical" character use that either uses the disfigurement or disability as a basis of why they're evil or magical, or a visual character design queue that they are.
There's so much to unpack here I couldn't possibly do it in this post, it gets a lot more complicated because there's so many differences between different disabilities and disfigurations. For example, a disfiguration can be from birth, it can be from an accident, it can be from a development defect, etc. But what I can say for certain to condense a lot is that how it's currently treated and normalized is not okay, and is very evidently not okay if you actually spend some time to both see how these groups are often perpetuated in media and how they're treated in society.
