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In a more formulaic and low stakes corner of the culture War Ubisoft has announced "assassin's creed Shadow". The series is known for offering open world exploration set in various historical locations and times from the Nordic to ancient Egypt. This installment is appearantly a popular fan request in being set in fuedal Japan.
The culture War angle is that the game has two main characters, a female assassin and a disputed historical black warrior named yasuke. Now I haven't played one of these games in over a decade and am not particularly invested in this title but the response has been a fairly clean case study in marketing by controversy and I think it might be worth dissecting.
In my corner of the web I first learned of the game's existence from the preemptive "man, racists right wingers are going to hate this" posts. And indeed if one looked it was not hard to soon after find right winger racists filling their niche in this tired dance. One can always find bad takes that isn't what is interesting about how this kind of thing develops.
A trap seemed to be set, I don't know which end first broached the topic of "historical accuracy" but because it took the form of what legitimate criticism might look like the culture War quickly fell into a groove of progressives defending the historical existence of yasuke being a real samurai and pointing to other popular media depictions of him as well as pointing out that the assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple. The anti-progressive backlash is in a hard place because I think there is something legitimate there but the shape of the discussion is not condusive to making the argument.
I think most of the anti-progressive front probably doesn't have an issue with a black sumurai in a game made by people they trust to have making awesome games as their first master. There's something itching in the back of the head of the backlash crowd that the reason we have yasuke isn't because a black guy in Japan makes for interesting segments of blending into crowds but because the people making the game have an anti-majoritarian view. The same thing that gave us yasuke is what motivates someone to put on a "fuck white people" shirt.
This is a feature of the culture War I'm seeing more and more. Proxy battles that few people care deeply about but have features that make them better or worse to do battle on. This game seems like favorable terrain from the woke angle and it's tempting to just give them it but I understand the impulse to fight on the terrain anyways.
Not engaging and being critical is a default victory for the minoritarian/woke supporters. Does this means you are obligated to take part in the culture wars? Well, kind of. Like it or not, those who show up are those who win. Disengagement is not a neutral position but helps the aggressive side making moves that doesn't want criticism. It is of course very understandable for someone not to want to debate such issues, but I wouldn't praise disengagement as a good attitude.
In general, a good society only exists and works when people comprising it are sharing good moral values as priors and work together based on that shared ground. And even then, even if the majority has good moral principles organized minorities who have captured sufficient power can infringe on the values of the majority. Maybe part of sufficiently good morals includes controlling such issues without going off the rails.
I am increasingly of the view that we need antiwoke industry regulations to stop such things and force on institutions, including private corporations to have to show some level of sensitivity that goes against the progressive stack. Or making quotas in favor of progressive stack groups downright illegal and if not large fines, perhaps even harsher criminal penalties. Including rnforcing laws in the book that already would stop this agenda. Of course the end point wouldn't be no black guys or women ever, or zero cultural appropriation ever, sorry anyone wishing this, but there should be penalties for excessive cultural appropriation, or trying to stack the deck with progressive stack diversity.
Nor can say Japanese be expected to not have mainly Japanese characters. I would say that it is understandable for nations to promote more of their own culture, but not understandable to have to shoe horn an excess of progressive associated demographics, or protagonists where they shouldn't be under such goals. I don't know exactly where the lines should be put, but I am firmly confident that it would be better if there were such lines against the woke/intersectionalists, provided an attempt of being reasonable about it is made.
On the tally we can add:
Loss of freedom of those who want to push the woke agenda. A sacrifice I am very willing to make.
More freedom for those working in companies, journalism, etc, who want to dissent from this but can't.
Fairer arrangement for actors, including voice actors.
Greater historical accuracy and even respect of mythos that are related to specific people. For example Japanese semi mythological settings, or Lord of the Rings which are related to particular peoples.
Greater quality as checkbox diversity isn't prioritized.
Better options for the people don't like woke content who outnumber those who do.
Enforcing a good general principle and eroding an ideology that is not isolated in media but from double standards there and elsewhere can and will lead to greater discrimination and further slippery slope dangers.
Depends on what you mean by "show up", and what you're expecting to get out of it.
There was no conceivable act of individual heroism that could have shattered the power of the Catholic church at the height of the Inquisition, or hastened the fall of Soviet communism during the reign of Stalin. There was no "war", just those with power enforcing their will on their powerless, with very few meaningful avenues for rebuttal. Only through the accumulated weathering of decades (or centuries) did a change of conditions eventually become possible.
I certainly think it's virtuous to not be afraid of the censors. Do what you want to do, and don't let them stop you. But don't have delusions of grandeur either. If the only reason you're waging the culture "war" is because you think you can change the course of world history, then you should consider if there are better ways you could be spending your time.
Bad history. The Inquisition was set up precisely to stop idiot rubes out in the sticks from freaking out about nonsense like "witches making the cows' milk dry up" and burning people. The Spanish crown then won a political struggle with the Papacy, asserted control over the office in the area under its secular jurisdiction, then started using it as a secret police against perceived fifth columnists and as a revenue source.
Unexpectedly.
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If the Inquisition was started to prevent witch hunts, then why is it that we now conflate Inquisitors with witch-hunters and torturers?
Because the actual history is messy and embarrassing to every-one.
The early medieval church was clear enough that belief in witch-craft-as-real-magic was superstition left over from the bad old days (think 800 AD). Witch-craft-as-baseless-superstition was heresy and subject to punishment, but you could get in trouble both ways. You committed heresy if you put yourself forward as a witch who could really do the magic. You committed heresy if you tried to protect society against some-one who you asserted was a threat because they could really do the magic.
Then, starting around 1400 AD (but slowly at first) mankind regressed, becoming afraid of witchcraft-as-real-magic.
This is obviously embarrassing to the Catholic Church, who knew the truth and lost it. But it is embarrassing to Enlightenment thinkers too. First, the deterioration happens late; the early stirrings of modernity are making people less rational. Second, the Enlightenment could have taken witch burning as showing the fragility of human knowledge and a case study in losing truths once known. But instead it just ignored the real and troubling story in favour of bashing the Church as always in error.
Recall the story that Columbus met opposition to sailing West to China from people who believed that the Earth was flat. It originated in a "biography" that changed the story to make it more dramatic. Then anti-Catholics took it up, because the flat earth myth was a convenient stick to beat the Catholics. There is a problem with anti-religious campaigners just making stuff up.
I find this disillusioning. As a young man I believed that the 18th Century Enlightenment guys were the good guys who were opposing the Catholic Church (who were the bad guys because they just made stuff up). Now I find that every-one is just making stuff up. And twisting the witch craft story to bash Catholics isn't the only example, so I cannot excuse it as "just once".
I'll caveat that this is a little more complicated than the quick summary -- you can find some Catholics being very skeptical and treating the accusers as heretics into the height of the early modern witch trials, and there's a controversial claim of an English witch-execution as early as the 900s. It's not clear how much the earlier Church was free of witch-hunting among the laity because they didn't believe in it (or were told to not believe in it), and how much because the records weren't made to start with.
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Hunting heretics/Muslims/Jews gets conflated with hunting witches.
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Because the sales pitch of the inquisition wasn't "we will stop witch hunts", it was "we will do witch hunts the proper way". Granted though, this did reduce insane witchery nonsense substantially, and it probably was the most pragmatic way of doing so.
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Voltaire and anti-Catholic propaganda pervasive from the French Enlightenment through the Spanish Civil War, mostly.
I would have thought that Britain and the Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda, considerably preceeding the French Enlightenment, would have played an even larger part.
Oh sure. I'm just less familiar with that than with the French stuff.
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