Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27745396-20170905185708/@comment-33052016-20170908020444

While I agree with the comment above, the OP wasn't asking which of them would be worse, but which term should be used.

We don’t know much about a Faunus from a biological standpoint besides that each of them has a random animalistic trait, that many are known for having night vision for whatever unexplained reason, and that crossing with humans will result in Faunus kids. Apparently they also share some behaviours with the animals from which their Faunus traits are, such as Blake’s liking of tuna or her hate of dogs, but I’m pretty sure these are just excuses to make easy cat jokes. The Faunus don’t make any sense at all from a realistic point of view, specially considering they are EXACTLY like humans in every way except one, but let’s pretend they do and try to answer the original question.

Now, I’m an art student and science’s never been my forte, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. This said, I’ve been researching about what makes a “species” different from a “race” and I’ve found that, while many people agree on certain definitions, there are always cases that defy them and make it harder to actually come to a conclusion. For example, I’ve read multiple times that a two different species can’t breed offspring or, if they can, it will turn out to be infertil (which is the horse and donkey’s case). The wolf-dog hybrid has been proved to be fertile, but even though dogs and wolves were depicted as different species, now the dog is considered a sub-species of the wolf, changing its name from “canis familiaris” to “canis lupus familiaris”. However, there’s the wolf-coyote hybrid case, aka coywolf, which is fertile and well-adapted although wolves and coyotes are different species. Another example is the arctic fox and the red fox, capable of interbreed, despite them being different species as well (vulpes lagopus and vulpes vulpes respectively, both sharing the vulpes genus).

I also found this in a wolf/coyote discussion which I think is something to consider while thinking about this issue.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the entire concept of "species" is a human construct we use to help us classify living things.

There's no intrinsic scientific reason why organisms need to divide themselves up into discrete groups that humans can easily distinguish.

In cases like wolf/dog/coyote complex where it becomes difficult to decide where one species ends and another begins the difficulty has more to do with the failings of our model rather than the actual situation in the real world.

Where I’m trying to go with this? The difference between species and races is really ambiguous. I haven’t been able to find a definition and differentiation between the both that everyone agrees with. So I don’t think we would be able to tell if Faunus and humans are different species or races of the same one just by what we’ve been told in the show. Again, I hardly know basic biology stuff and I could be totally wrong so feel free to correct me, but I think to determine the relationship between humans and Faunus we would need to know how they are actually related. As in, genes, evolution and such.

That said, Qrow did tell us the Two Brothers created humanity right off the bat, so since all of the process it took from apes to get to humans has been erased, apparently evolution isn’t a thing in Remnant. It hasn’t been explicitly said but has been hinted that Faunus didn’t evolve from humans either: in the WoR about them, Qrow mentions Faunus have been around the same time as humans, if not longer. Since that episode I’ve been craving a story that explains how Faunus came to be. The Two Brothers didn’t create them, so where did this guys come from? If it was another god(s) or something of the sort, then humans and Faunus wouldn’t be related at ALL. The most... logical, let’s say (for a lack of a better term) thing I can come up with is that X deity took some humans, put some animal traits on them so they’d look cool and left them to roam around the world. In that case Faunus would be a sub-species of the homo sapiens, so the relationship they’d have with us would be similar to that of dogs and wolves.

All being said, I think if people referred to Faunus’ discrimination as “specism”, some Faunus (and “human allies” too, if such thing exists in Remnant) would consider the term derogatory since they would feel it lowers the Faunus to the level of animals instead of people, specially if it hadn’t been proved or even studied if the Faunus are a different species. That actually would make for an interesting fictional conflict to have in the story, but I don’t believe the writers have even considered that.