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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.
This is just another instance of reputation laundering of black people by hollywood, although remarkably incompetently executed in this case. Having Yasuke be a secret Assassin mission giver/NPC makes way more sense than having him be an actual stealth assassin type. Only way that would work is if they made him the ninja and let his black skin work with the noh stagehand outfit for perfect night stealth, but that is too daring for even Ubisofts modern retardation. Having a fucking samurai in full yoroi somehow be an assassin, and leaving yasuke unmasked to emphasize his blackness has to be deliberate incompetence at this point.
In the end, hollywood and its adjacents keep making the same mistake: inserting black people into cool shit doesnt make black people cool, it makes that cool shit just shit. They fucked up with Cleopatra, they fucked up with Lord Of The Rings, and they'll fuck it up with Yasuke.
Christ, they can't even commit to doing something when a black man doing cool shit really happened. What the fuck happened to adaptations of Alexandre Dumas dad, or the awesome life of Haile Selassi. The list is not exhaustive or long but surely it is better than enshittifying established cultural properties just to please some click-starved journalist doomscrolling twitter.
As I recall, the Jamaican Maroons were badass and used the "all look the same" trope to pull some ninja crap in their rebellions. FFS, wouldn't Black Flag have gotten into that general time and region?
Black Panther illustrates that there is/was demand for black people being awesome in their own right, not as a participation trophy in other people's stories. You'd think someone would have picked up on that and done something based on historical black badasses. Instead, they tried making a movie about a notoriously atrocious slavemongery kingdom as though they were the exact opposite, and when that failed, shrugged and went back to the cultural colonialism treatment.
They did. They couldn't help but screw it up because too much of the truth was inconvenient.
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