Some clarification regarding Hispania

[Petitioner]

In vanilla, the Outcasts were generic unspecified Hispanics (this includes Spain as well as Latin American countries besides Brazil). The Corsairs, as can be seen by their base names, were originally intended to be Greek, but Digital Anvil was too lazy/didn't have time to add in a whole new NPC name pool for them, so they use the same one as the Outcasts (hence the occasional Outcasts - Jesus DeJesus vs Corsairs - Jesus Dejesus fights).

When @Irwin and @Reid and I made the Contari Lance OC player faction years and years ago, we decided to make the Contari family Italians from a very tiny Italian minority on Malta which we made up out of whole cloth. This was for the sole purpose of being really snobby and racist to all the other, "uncultured, dirty", Hispanic Maltese. For some reason, everyone else thought Italian Outcasts were really cool and started doing it too.

Back in 4.85, a guy named Sina and some folks made a Corsair group called the [A]narchists with a distinctly Arabic aesthetic. Since then, people have occasionally been a little more daring with pushing the boundaries of what ethnicities the Corsairs might include, but generally have kept to pretty shallow Mexican stereotypes.

Also note that the original Coalition saboteurs are supposed to have stowed away aboard the Hispania, and are the reason that the sleeper ship's engines were originally crippled in the first place. While logically there couldn't be that many people of obviously very non-Hispanic/-Mediterranean ethnicity on the sleeper ship maintaining cover, the Coalition is generally roleplayed as having a myriad of ethnicities within it, especially Russian, Chinese, and anything from within the former Soviet Union -- I myself have a Chinese gunboat captain with an Armenian radar technician within the crew. Theoretically, the Corsairs could thus have any of these ethnicities within them as well, since the SCRA's own lore states that the descendants of the original Coalitioneers lived with the Corsairs for quite awhile, if I'm not mistaken.

My personal take on it is that the Outcasts are north and western Mediterranean, primarily Spanish, Italian, and maybe possibly even Croatian, and the Corsairs are primarily Latin American, Greek, and Arab. However, there's a lot of room to just be creative here, and if you feel like picking an underrepresented culture for an Outcast or Corsair character to be affiliated with makes them a better character, no matter what you do, it's pretty much justifiable. And, of course, sticking with vanilla lore and just being nonspecific Hispanic is pretty solid, too. In general, Freelancer lore isn't realistic in terms of the sort of ethnocultural diversity that one would expect given the background lore, and I'm glad this thread was made for people to discuss the issue more.

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