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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.
Ah, yes, the old pretending to be retarded style of counterargument. I notice this often enough that I started bookmarking examples that I meant to get around to writing up, but it still surprises me when I bump into examples of people that appear to just obviously putting on a show of acting like they're confused about something that's simple and obvious to anyone involved. No one is objecting to Assassin's Creed being fantastical and taking a bunch of poetic license with the source material and content from history. I've played exactly one Assassin's Creed game and included the cinematically awesome leap of faith mechanic - your character, dressed in aesthetic white robes, can climb to incredibly high perches above cities and dive off, covering tons of terrain in a majestic swan-dive before plopping safely into a stack of hay. Helpfully, some physics students ran some quick math on this and concluded that diving a couple hundred feet into a shallow bed of straw will probably kill you.
Of course, this didn't really bother anyone even though there probably weren't very many Arab assassins diving off of mosques into shallow beds of straw. Why not? Because it's awesome. It looks cool, it's a fun mechanic, and it's memorable. People weren't bothered by Ben Franklin having a magical golden apple because it just sounds incredibly fun in the context of America's founding. You know what else is fun and awesome? Samurai and ninja assassins in medieval Japan. Super awesome and super cool, something that much pretty much every male grows up thinking is super awesome and super cool. So, naturally, fans of the game are excited to play out one of the classic settings for awesome sword-play.
You know what's not awesome? Injecting your stupid racial politics into 16th century Japan and then hiding behind "actually, there was a black samurai, and you weren't even upset about a golden apple, so I've gotcha you racist". Furthermore, when someone does that, you can probably rest assured that they're not all that invested in making the game awesome, so it raises your hackles in expectation that you're dealing with people that are more interested in pissing off putative racists than actually making a game cool. Maybe the game will be good and maybe it won't, but pretending to be retarded when having the argument isn't likely to convince anyone.
From the point of view of an average progressive normie playing as a black samurai is awesome and fun, and you're the one who is injecting politics.
Compare to, for example, feminism in Western media.
Yasuke was probably not a samurai, that's a historical question. Many times the women described in these stories - where they function like men in the plot and mechanics - are anatomically impossible.
Yet, almost every single bit of Western media I watch allows this fantasy. I watch something about war or violence and ScarJo or whoever is doing acrobat-jiu-jitsu and throwing around 200lb men. I play a game and the female characters play just like the men even in places where it just doesn't make sense. I watch The Rookie and the 5'4 Latina captain and the 6'0 Nathan Fillion have the same record in fights.
I could complain about this being inaccurate , but I'd be the one swimming against the tide. And looking a bit weird the more insistent I got about it. Even other woke-critical people would be unsympathetic or walk away.
That's the 'women are wonderful' effect. Everybody loves women. Everybody of any race has some women they care about.
On the other hand, aside from some with exotic racial preferences, people usually want to see people that look like them in the media they consoom. Moreover, adding characters that look blatantly out of place from a historical, common sense point-of-view, takes away from the immersion.
For a lot of (male) gamers, adding attractive women in skimpy clothing is just a bonus. It does take away from the realism, still. The problem these days is that Western content creators have a tendency to pair a 'realistic, gritty' aesthetic with feminist fantasies. So the male fantasy of a scantily-clad (it's magic armor ok) Amazonian goddess turns into a rough-looking, middle-aged, square-shouldered she-man.
I highly doubt that this particular trope would play as well in traditionalists societies. I don't think you can pin this on the WAW phenomenon because it manifests in the exact opposite way in certain cultures: it'd be considered immoral to send women into combat if it wasn't laughable as a concept.
Seems to me that it's just a very Western trope. Cultures have their fictions, this is the West's. As it is with the race swap stuff, so it is with the gender stuff.
Well, yes. They listened to the people who (rightly) said that those characters were meant to titillate men. I don't even think it was a confluence of two factors, it was straight up hostility to "objectification".
I guess nobody bothered to argue that attracting men in media men were likely to pay for was hardly a great sin, cause here we are.
Its immoral to send them into combat, but awesome to see them beat up meanies. Women being fighters is to enjoy visceral revenge fantasies in a kinetic manner often unavailable to them. I strongly suspect that hollywood/journalist/academic weaklings also fail to understand how much physical difference there is between men and women, hence the claims that transwomen are actually only as strong as baseline women who work out a bit. If your reference point is a commie poet who thinks the gym is a haven for reactionary chuds you have literally no idea how much of a difference there is between men and women
True. But, as someone said above, it's interesting that a lot of this stuff is aimed at men (or in male genres). I may not have been the target audience for Atomic Blonde but it was me and people like me in the theater.
I think that bit would vary by culture.
Oh, 100%.
The funny thing is, people think they've corrected against the pervasive social messaging. Except that same messaging - and their bubble - has ensured that they underestimate the gap. I hear a lot of caveated statements about "well, a really well-trained woman" or "maybe using speed". Um...this isn't a video game. There's no balancing...
That'd be my practical argument against this particular myth: apparently we can't just do kayfabe and leave it at that. But that doesn't mean it's more plausible than other, more recent "woke" myths.
Fucking idiots think womens small frame is -1 STR -1 CON +2 DEX. Speed and nimbleness is not natural to humans and women dont get some balance to the physical meta. Except for making more humans, but thats a 14 year process before they're useful.
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