I hope you appreciate that it is very funny that you used “Exploders” as your example when Infected in Arknights do, in fact, explode. Some more big things that I think help Arknights pull off the Fantasy Oppression Metaphor where very few people do:
1. As you said, oripathy isn’t the only angle of oppression in this setting. That lets them write about a lot of different social issues without watering the metaphor down into uselessness and explore the intersectionality between them. Besides racism against the Sarkaz and its intersection with oripathy, we’ve seen other forms of ethnic prejudice of varying levels of severity, from a Victorian noble congratulating himself on having the magnanimity to hire Zalak gardeners and Ch'en calling Kaschey a racial slur, through a Feline Shieldguard talking about how miserable Ursus’s military entrance exams are to pass if you’re not of the Ursus race, to the Iberian Inquisition treating all Aegir as Cthulhu cultists by default. That ethnic prejudice can also be purely cultural rather than associated with any difference in visible racial traits, as seen with the Tarans and the Winterwisps. Classism is everywhere, and we frequently see the aftermath of colonialism and occupation. SilverAsh says in his first Operator Record that out of all the starry-eyed idealists he’s met, he never encountered anyone until Rhodes whose pet issue was the rights of the Infected- it simply isn’t on most people’s mind as the defining injustice of the world the way it’s presented to the player.
2. While it’s technically possible to develop incredible superpowers from being Infected (e.g. Frostnova, Mephisto, or Angelina), it’s far more likely that you’ll just… get sick. That’s the failure state you see a lot in, say, X-Men: being a mutant is just plain cooler than not being a mutant, which is fine as a fun fantasy story but can muddy up a Serious Metaphor™ pretty badly. On Terra, as you said, plenty of people can just do that: Saria, Gnosis, and Carnelian, for instance, are all 6*s with incredibly powerful Arts who aren’t Infected, they’re just that good. Even among playable Operators, oripathy is often a direct hindrance to their lives and combat ability- Specter, for example, has the self-stun on Bone Fracture because her infection has destroyed her physical stamina, and Eyjafjalla is hard of hearing and has eyesight so bad that she walks into walls. The progression of Lava’s infection has her walking with a cane as Purgatory. And even for those who do get cool superpowers, it’s frequently as much of a curse as a blessing: Frostnova can’t touch anyone without giving them frostbite, Phantom has to wear a special device not to melt people’s brains with his voice, and Lappland’s unilateral obsession with Texas is because of the rocks in her brain. They don’t shy away from presenting oripathy as an illness and a disability that people need treatment and accommodations for, not An Thing To Make You A Cool Badass. And, accordingly, we pretty much never see “they could develop superpowers and kill us all” used as a justification for mistreating the Infected: they’re seen as weaker and less capable, which brings us to…
3. While oripathy can make you dangerous to normies, the oppression inflicted against the Infected is not even slightly a meaningful response to those dangers. That’s the Normies and Exploders scenario- they undermine the metaphor by making fear, prejudice, and/or oppression a logical reaction. According to Blaze, the science says that there’s basically zero risk of person-to-person transmission of oripathy, but a little thing like that makes no difference to how many governments have a policy of shipping anyone who’s believed to be Infected to a segregated quarantine zone on pain of death. (Fun fact, this is a bit like leprosy in the real world: it has a very low transmission rate and can stay dormant for decades with no symptoms, so no one even knew it was infectious until 1873… which did nothing to prevent literal millennia of discrimination before that point, but sure did make it even worse afterward!) The primary danger is from Infected people dying, because of the originium dust bloom… and they’re a lot more likely to die and there’s a lot less likely to be someone there to take the appropriate safety measures around their corpse if they’re living in poverty with no access to medical treatment. The oppression does not solve any of the problems it claims make it justified, and is just an excuse to hurt and exploit people who society already doesn’t like.
4. The fact that the entire setting wears its real-world allegories on its sleeve at all times. Another common downfall of Fantasy Oppression stories is that making the story fantastical divorces it from the inspiration; the whole audience may agree that being racist against elves is bad, and then walk away and completely fail to apply that to anyone who is not an elf. But while Arknights is a story about a mercenary wizard doctor commune led by the teenage bunnygirl King of Hell and her immortal dragon warlock catgirl stepmom on their quest to cure Magic Rock Leprosy, Ursus is Russia and Yan is China and Leithania is Germany, and that’s just the price of admission. When Columbia is known for baseball, rock-and-roll, and a government that won’t shut up about how concerned it is with freedom and equality despite any evidence to the contrary, and then Mansfield Break happens, there’s not a lot of room to argue that the corporatocracy, for-profit prisons, and coercion through lack of health care access aren’t just as much about the US of A as the fact that they were a Victorian territory that declared independence from the Empire while it was busy fighting Gaul. When Tara is named Tara, I know what it means for a poet to be lobbying to try to keep their dying language alive. When Leithania is still haunted by the memory of the tyrannical Witch-King who was overthrown and replaced by two rulers who never agree on anything, I have some real fucking specific suspicions about what the previous regime was like.
good lord this is over a thousand words long now but anyway yeah I think that’s why they managed to use a poem about Stalin’s Great Purge as the lyrics of the character theme for a magical bunnygirl without it being the tackiest thing in the universe.
