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Chinese entertainment — and to a lesser degree, East Asian entertainment generally — is dominating Western markets. Their products appear to be organically favored by Westerners. The Chinese-made video game Black Myth Wukong was released this week and is now sitting on Steam’s top 10 list for concurrent playercount and user favorability. It sits next to Elden Ring, a Japanese-made video game. The Chinese-designed 2020 Call of Duty Mobile game has made ~4bn lifetime revenue and has 60,000,000 monthly players; a Western-designed Warzone attempted to dethrone it this year and is unanimously considered a failure, losing most of its playerbase in the first month. Genshin Impact and PUBG mobile are other highly popular mobile games led by Chinese studios. Tik Tok is the most used social media company and is a Chinese product. League of Legends (130 million monthly active) is Chinese. Final Fantasy and Lost Ark are the most popular MMORPGs this year, Japanese and Korean respectively. Korean shows are increasingly popular in the West (and have actually slanted Korean tourism in favor of female tourists), and I don’t need to note anime and manga.
What explains this? Wukong in particular appears to be a genuinely loved game, and it makes no overtures to Western culture — it is firmly Chinese in story, music, and art design. IMO there’s likely American propaganda floating around against Chinese entertainment (billions in revenue on the line which compounds), but despite this the products are favored. So I feel safe saying that their products are better. So what has led China, and East Asia generally, to make better entertainment than America and Europe for Western audiences?
I can't speak for any of the games mentioned, but I finished both season of Vinland Saga recently, and a few things stood out to me.
It grappled profoundly with the human condition. It takes place during the viking age of pillage, conquest and slavery. Now if this had been an American or British production, like perhaps The Last Kingdom, they'd be shoving The Narrative in every chance they get. They'd put their thumb on the scale when it comes to depicting Christian versus Pagan beliefs, they'd make random characters gay or black or both. They have wildly anachronistic neo-liberal beliefs expressed by the lead characters. They'd be completely incapable of letting the past be a foreign country like HBO's Rome from 2005, they'd have to start soap boxing.
Instead, Vinland Saga largely deals with the human condition and it's universality. It discusses slavery without making it about race. "Race" is largely irrelevant, and there is no forced diversity. I enjoyed it profoundly in much the same way I enjoyed HBO's Rome, but which I find nearly impossible to enjoy modern works like The Last Kingdom. And I generally enjoyed The Last Kingdom, but it escalated it's current year nonsense to the point where by the last movie what started as some academic theory that a king of England might have been gay because he had no heirs, and was represented in The Saxon Stories I think as rumors other characters hear, turns into the King of England being so crazy for cock that an enemy spy buttfucks him into betraying his most loyal retainers.
The same has largely gone for video game for me lately. I don't play as much as I used to, but the last semi-recent at least middle market game I played to completion was Unicorn Overlord, and I found it delightful in it's distinct lack of The Narrative. I'm not sure how sensitive people are to the psychological damage the constant deluge of demoralization propaganda in western media is causing them. But I think whether they know it or not, they instinctively seek out media that isn't on some subtle level making them feel like shit about themselves.
I need to finish Vinland Saga. I really liked The Norseman in part because I think that film was quite happy to more-or-less inhabit the ideas of the people portrayed in the film, instead of the ideas of modern audiences.
Yeah, I can't exactly claim Vinland Saga is free of historical philosophic anachronism. But in so far as the characters play with ideas that aren't really of their time, its at least from a novel perspective instead of the same tired MESSAGE everything else keeps pushing.
Edit: I've been informed the next story arc for Vinland Saga features a tranny. So... yeah... I can feel the interest fleeing my body.
Huh? Do you mean Hild? I guess she’s kind of butch but I don’t remember anything about her being trans in the manga… Either my memory (and brief skimming of the wiki) is faulty or someone is feeding you misinformation
Apparently Thorkell the Tall has a "daughter" in the next story arc. A giant, muscular, stubbled "daughter" with pig tails. Reading the synopsis of the character is sounds like a case of Transhausen by Proxy, with the mother, Thorkell's wife, raising his son as a daughter so he wouldn't be taken away from her and sent to war. But it also sounds like the story, and the fanbase, don't treat that like the child abuse it actually is. Who knows, maybe I'll be wrong when we get there, but somehow I doubt it.
Oh huh yeah you’re right, I haven’t actually read the post-time skip Vinland arc (the most recent one) where “Cordelia” appears so I can’t comment. The wiki entry doesn’t exactly thrill me however given how, as you mentioned, non-modernbrained the series is up to that point (although I’d still be willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt). When you wrote “next” I assumed you meant the Eastern Expedition arc which is what will be in Season 3 presumably. While it’s entirely possible the series jumps the gun at the end, everything pre-time skip is pretty excellent in the manga so I’d still recommend giving it a fair shot (at least next season which will arguably likely wrap up Thorfinn’s character arc).
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