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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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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.

I wake up...

Most complaints and expletives I instantly thought of were already voiced by others, but with how gratuitous and senseless the marketing-by-controversy is - this has to be reverse-psyop-able in some way, right? I'm only loosely following the gamer culture war but I haven't seen a finer target in years, judging by Youtube comments even the most updated NPCs seem to instinctively sense there's something off here. I can only hope KiA or someplace is still capable of coordinated trolling since from a cursory glance /v/ is totally mindbroken, although I can't really blame them, the psyop seems to be near tailor-made to target them specifically. (On a side note, is the tweet in the op here actually real?)

Any other problematic hooks to be derived from this? The immediately obvious race war angle was already mentioned below, they're not the first to think of some kind of black Japanese warrior either, but there has to be something more visceral here to really get under people's skin. Several NTR jokes are at the tip of my tongue but I can't even articulate them in a subtle way because the setting is literally too perfect.

Um actually black samurai were totally a thing historically. But even if they weren't, why does it matter and why are you so bothered about an ahistoric depiction of a black man pairing up with a young Japanese woman to kill a bunch of Japanese men? It's only a video game.

its_all_so_tiresome.jpg

On the bright side, this should be a boom for jokes and memes beyond the obligatory "dass rite, we wuz samuraiz n shieett."

For example, the top appearing comment on the YouTube trailer says "The most heroic thing about this trailer is that they left the comments open." Another commenter remarks, "I cannot wait for Ubisoft to make an assassin's creed game set in Africa and make the main character a Chinese man." Assassin's Creed: Empire of Dust does indeed have some gravitas as a title. There are a bunch of Japanese comments and I'd like to imagine they're chudding out hardcore, but haven't plugged them into a translator lest my illusions get shattered.

Looking at Wikipedia, apparently there are something like 25 Assassin's Creed titles between the main and spinoff series? I would have guessed there were like five.

Um actually black samurai were totally a thing historically. But even if they weren't, why does it matter and why are you so bothered about an ahistoric depiction of a black man pairing up with a young Japanese woman to kill a bunch of Japanese men? It's only a video game.

We need a general name for this two-step strategy of a claim + poisoning the well: P, and if you argue against P, then you are ungoodthinker.

Seems like a variant on merited impossibility. Perhaps merited possibility.

"It isn't happening and if it is, it's a good thing"

"It did happen, and if it didn't, why do you care?"

Empire of Dust

If anyone ever wants to understand Chinese racism, watch the documentary of the same name. Chinese are racist, yes, but the animating force is disgust at perceived incompetence. To have squandered the legacy of colonial infrastructure for no discernible private benefit and not even a permanent elevation of ones tribal standing strikes Chinese as a supreme and unnecessary waste.

As of right now, the official trailer has 266k upvotes and 597k downvotes. It seems quite a few people are pissed, to put it mildly. Keep in mind there's an extra barrier to downvoting these days in the form of a necessary extension so the actual numbers are certainly much worse than what we can see here.

Overall, I can't see this as anything other than a colossal misstep by Ubisoft. "No such thing as negative advertisement" doesn't apply in this case because Ghost of Tsushima launched for PC at almost the exact time the Shadows trailer released and everywhere I look, I see comments along the lines of "play this for the actual Japanese samurai experience".

Imagine how easy it would have been for them to make Yasuke a kind, intelligent side-character and contrast him with an evil, stupid, warmongering Oda Nobunaga. They would have gotten tons of DEI points and almost nobody would have said anything negative. Instead, they catapulted a direct competitor to success and alienated a huge chunk of what could have been their core audience.

Okay, but Yasuke kicks ass. He’s a semi-mythical figure from one of Japan’s most famous historical periods. As a result, I’ve seen callouts to him in some weird places.

  • -13

Even if true, which I doubt, it’s by the standard of the day erasure. The first Japanese centered AC storyline doesn’t feature a Japanese lead. Imagine the uproar if the first AC set in Africa didn’t feature a black African man as the lead. And really I don’t see Yasuke as that famous. He wasn’t featured in any media or historical documentaries or video games or anything else prior to 2020. This despite Anime and Japanese gaming being huge and samurai being second only to ninjas in the part of Japanese mythology exported globally. I find this impossible to take seriously. If he were that famous in Japan, surely he’d have shown up before the current mania for making visible minorities star in every piece of media made. I suspect that what really happened is that the production team went to Japan and went through the archives looking for a Black Man who they could make the star of their game and then polite Japanese archivists agreed that of course the Black Samurai was super famous and of course was a bad ass until the white people left and they laughed behind their back.

He wasn’t featured in any media or historical documentaries or video games or anything else prior to 2020.

Yasuke appears in Nioh, a 2017 game developed in Japan, as a boss. But the context to this is...

I find this impossible to take seriously. If he were that famous in Japan, surely he’d have shown up before the current mania for making visible minorities star in every piece of media made.

Yasuke is a factoid about the Sengoku period. Nioh's plot is framed around a long string of factoids about the Sengoku period. Quite similar to how Assassins Creed plots work, except with Youkai instead of Assassins and Templars. You even play as William Adams, who is another Sengoku factoid. Koei Tecmo practically specializes in games about random Sengoku factoids in general, so even having relatively obscure ones show up is not particularly notable.

Unfortunately, the scarce historical record that is available about him suggests that he was simply a Jesuit novice from Abyssinia. Not exactly kickass category, I'd say.

Okay, but Yasuke kicks ass.

Less than any of the associates of his owner for one year, but they weren't Africans so they all meld together in the minds of non-Japanese due to outgroup homogeneity bias. The Japanese have a slight reason to care about the Black guy in question, since they already know most of the more important people of that time and place. American obsession with Yosuke is elevating bar quiz trivia to the level of actual history.

Well, yeah. Isn’t that what asscreed is all about?

  • -11

I don't think so?

I'm as much to slag on Odyssey as anyone for basically ignoring fem!MC's gender when it should have mattered in a notoriously sexist society, but AC has consistently to this point picked representatives from the culture of the setting as the primary MCs, and to varying degrees used their identity as part of the culture as a significant part of the storytelling. The Italian Renaissance wouldn't have worked as well without an Italian straight out of a noble revenge story, American Revolution utilized it's half-native-american quite deliberately to illustrate that the revolutionaries were the heroes of not necessarily everyone's story, gangster London is a class struggle of the undercrust. Odyssey is blatantly a Greek heroic epic by and of a greek, right down to the notorious fighting of family.

None of these would have worked nearly as well were the character a cultural outsider, as the protagonists aren't simply protagonists of their game, but of the culture rising above the socio-political moment the stories take place in. The Italian Assassin subverting the Church in the Renaissance is also the Italian culture taking that step towards subverting its dogmatic influence through reason and, well, the enlightenment. It's an Italian cultural victory, through an Italian cultural representative, in an Italian manner.

Yasuke the black samurai/ninja isn't going to be the most Japanese protagonist of one of the most culturally salient periods of Japanese identity, particularly when the reason for choosing him derives from American, not Japanese, identity politics.

At least Ubisoft managed to divert the attention away from the fact that they charge $40 for letting you play the game a few days early. /trueleft

The last few AC games have been consistently bad with their historicity. Origins was rather fine actually, but Odyssey first told you how sexist the Olympics were and then let you participate in them as a woman anyway, Valhalla was bad enough that it was criticized by the Acoup guy.

Origins had this old chestnut on its "historical accuracy": https://i.redd.it/jdqdusj2cdh01.jpg

edit: And they made Cleopatra black if I remember right.

but Odyssey first told you how sexist the Olympics were and then let you participate in them as a woman anyway

LMAO. Funnily enough there were Ancient Greek Panhellenic games where women could compete in their own events: the Pythian games held at Delphi two years after the Olympic games allowed women to compete in athletic (and artistic) events.

Regardless even ignoring the Pythian games and restricting to just Olympia there were the Heraean Games held every four years where women ran the footrace against each other.

A company that prided itself on historical accuracy really should have known better, espeically when historically accurate alternatives existed.

Ubisoft doesn't pride itself on diddly squat. A heartless automaton husk free of imagination or spirit is the perfect description of ubisoft.

first told you how sexist the Olympics were and then let you participate in them as a woman anyway,

I assume because it's 2024 that this competition wasn't in the traditional Olympic athlete (lack of) attire?

Your assumption is absolutely correct.

I am by no means an expert on medieval Japan, but I wonder how a samurai would make a good playable character in an AC game. Climbing along some facade to kill an enemy leader (which is a good part of what tends to fill AC games) does not sound very samurai-like. In fact, it sounds positively ninja-like.

Have you not played Ghost of Tsushima?

I haven’t played it since it first came out, but I thought it was a major plot point that the main character had to let go of some samurai ideals and practices and get in the mud a bit in order to effectively challenge the invaders. Is that not how it went down?

Yeah…it’s pretty bad, feels like a Ubisoft game!

What is the dog that didn’t bark here?

They inserted a black character into a Japanese story why? Could they not find a black story tell and have the setting in black civilization.

A fun game would be to get the woke upset that Ubisoft thinks so little of black civilization that they insert black characters into other civs instead of doing a game based on black history.

The anti woke shouldn’t be attacking the cultural appropriation of Japanese culture by inserting Hollywood’s preferred racial balance they should be autistically demanding a black story and accusing Ubisoft of racism for refusing to do that.

I genuinely want more content in an Ethiopian setting. They had a really interesting civilization, with good aesthetics, that's underrepresented in media. On the other hand, I don't play this kind of game, so my opinion doesn't matter much.

A fun game would be to get the woke upset that Ubisoft thinks so little of black civilization that they insert black characters into other civs instead of doing a game based on black history.

The slightly humorous explanation for that is it would entail a black character running around incessantly killing other exclusively black characters.

Maybe they could get away with setting it during the "Scramble for Africa" colonialism period. But they'd have to pull some explanation out of their butt for why Africa was so fundamentally undeveloped BEFORE the Europeans arrived, i.e. why did the magical illuminati people ignore it until then?

Imagine if they added in some reverse diversity and allowed you to play as a white dude running around killing exclusively black people. The volume of seethe generated would probably be considered by engineers as a novel energy source for electricity production.

Especially if he were aided by a slim black female love interest with a pretty face and long, straight hair. The collective seethe might just blast a hole through the fabric of the universe.

I'll grant you it's been a while, but this game does exist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/19900/Far_Cry_2/

Resident Evil 5, too. That one got criticized even at the time, but these were before Obama's second term when things really escalated.

The slightly humorous explanation for that is it would entail a black character running around incessantly killing other exclusively black characters.

You could have the protagonist kill Dahomeys and their trade partners from France, England and the Netherlands. Except this would entail a black character running around incessantly killing strong black women.

Unironically, it seems to me that Mansa Musa would fit well with the other "power and political intrigue" settings in the AC series, although I've only played a couple of the early titles.

Not terribly relevant, but Mansa Musa has some of the most interesting game mechanics in Civ 6. Come to think of it Civ 6 does racially diverse leaders in a fun way that I don't remember anyone really bitching about.

People do occasionally bitch about the leader selection, but I don't think there's ever been a point where a given leader was race or gender-swapped. Easy to avoid critiques from either side about 'inclusion' when the whole point is to represent the entire gamut of global civilizations and to faithfully represent each one as its own unique racial, social, and technological mix of traits.

Leaving aside the running gag about Ghandi being a nuclear-armed terror.

Some complaints about picking lesser-known leaders from a given nation's history in order to prevent a complete sausage-fest.

Hell, STALIN was a playable leader back in Civ 4 (also my favorite to play as incidentally), I dunno if they'd be able to get away with that today, even though he is probably the one leader most Americans could name from Russian history (okay, they COULD name Putin but lol that's not getting included) Note they also completely removed reference to "slavery" as a mechanic post Civ 4.

Probably also a reason that South Africa has never and will never be implemented in the base game.

I don't think there's ever been a point where a given leader was race or gender-swapped

A half-example: the female Zulu leader in Civ 2 was a gender-swapped Shaka.

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Zulu_(Civ2)

INTERESTING.

Never played the first two games, and I pretty much started with IV.

Civ 1 is very primitive and silly, but I really like the balance of simplicity and immersion in Civ 2. For me, it was the best balance of those two in the series (and in strategy games in general) though I never had time to properly learn Civ III onwards, because by that time I was a postgraduate student and I had very little time to learn new games that I might not enjoy.

The Zulu were a faction in 3.

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.

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.

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.

There was no conceivable act of individual heroism that could have shattered the power of the Catholic church at the height of the Inquisition

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.

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.

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.

Hunting heretics/Muslims/Jews gets conflated with hunting witches.

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.

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.

We see people who also dissuade actions under much different arguments. You would have noticed people who argue that this isn't a big deal. It can't be the case where on such issues there are enough people who argue inaction because they see it as uncool, or unnecessary, that what is happening isn't a big deal, but also inaction is the best because it is hopeless.

You use the terms waging the culture war which are highly negatively charged here and associated with censorship, insults, bans etc. It could be said that is carries connotations of unfairness and impropriety, at minimum. So you are being somewhat contradictory with your language. You are saying it is hopeless but also your language is carrying some connotation that it is bad independently of that. That it is ethically superior to not take part. Which would have you share ground with those who favor no opposition because they don't think it should be opposed. Which is still taking part because demoralization preached at one side goes further than even an attitude of general disengagement.

I don't think inaction is chosen as the best, because it is the only choice available, but because it is the preference of those promoting it. The woke have been winning because they have been willing to more aggressively push their agenda through. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy if one's reaction is that there is nothing to be done, while in other issues this fatalism is absent. There is in fact plenty of energy of those who could act and don't. Just like the more extreme progressives started influencing a society that was more hostile to their ideology, it is possible to win over and change the minds of others. Discouragement and demoralization of those who could have opposed it and still can be an opposition is a key aspect to the changes in the progressive intersectionality direction and its victories.

Communism and Catholicism didn't dominate in the way they could have, because there was opposition. And it isn't the Stalin situation yet. It isn't as if you supporting here regulations against the woke would get your life ruined. Of course it is completely impossible to take a genuine stand against woke/progressive intersectionalists and not be hated and vilified by their broader political faction. Or to be disliked by those who sympathize with them and oppose the opposition. There is pressure related to being seen by some as cringe to take stronger positions. But this is a different issue than having no choice. There are also those willing to like and support such opposition.

There are dynamics involved that relate to this idea of the holy left and how it is cringe and symbolically bad and symbolically far right to have a strong position against its excess. These dynamics of underestimating the dangers of far left extremism or the dangers of aligning with it, are part of the reasons that it grew in influence. So I would paint the situation as different than people being afraid of dying as in the case of the Soviet Union. Afraid of being labeled negatively and other things of that nature? Maybe. Some level of sympathy and wrong attitude to have? That too.

History isn't fixed but changes, and moreover it also is the case that even if not all can be won, some of it can be won. So my general point is that demoralized attitude is a self fulfilling prophecy. Just like communists who had remarkable successes found obstacles that stopped their continued victory, the same can apply here. And in the communists, some of their fellow travelers and even some non communists also promoted the idea of the inevitability of their complete victory. The meme of inevitability and hopeless of opposition isn't new but is probably over a century old at this point. If people had this demoralized attitude, the communists would have totally succeeded and those suffering under their boot would be living in dread until that inevitable day. Hope and courage are virtues necessary for positively changing things but are necessary also to give greater meaning with how one engages with such problems in the present.

I will say that even with people who are very busy as is very understandable with other things and don't prioritize this, they still have a choice to have more or less decisive positions on the issue, when they do engage with it. I actually am not some kind of activist, so I certainly could be doing quite more. I am against the nirvana fallacy. I just want to argue that an attitude of superiority of disengagement is the wrong attitude to have and not the morally superior attitude. It is only the perspective that helps the more aggressive party that is successfully changing things to continue escalating.

What's even the point of this? It's all so tired. Ubisoft games are practically a parody of themselves at this point, and have been for years. They are the defining example of monogame slop. Soulless open world games with the same generic tedious grab bag of decade old game mechanics, with a sprawling cluttered minimap full of OCD bait. This one has a giant red flag that a DEI consultancy group ratcheted up the The Narrative a few notches? So what? The games before this weren't worth playing, the games after this won't be worth playing. It's just the same battle lines between people who are tired of demoralization propaganda, regardless of it's plausible alternate explanations, and people who are 100% aboard with current year NPC updates. No one will ever give an inch of ground.

If they’d released AC2 in current year, the same people would be complaining that beating up the Pope was an attack on Western civilization.

I agree that they should just play better games, though.

  • -11

You know, this does hit on a curious experience I had.

I was going through my big stack of George Carlin DVDs, and I got to one which opened on about 10 minutes of unadulterated white bashing. Now I recall, way back in the day, when I first watched this special, that never bothered me. But that was also performed in an era before State and Federal governments were nakedly discriminating against me. Or the schools I would send my children to began gutting the curriculum to cater to lower black achievement levels. Or preposterous notions of "restorative justice" allowed feral blacks to terrorize schools with impunity. Or before decent, productive, law abiding people were punished to the maximum extent of the law for refusing to allow themselves to be victimized by habitual criminals with a politically relevant melanin content.

It reminds me how I laughed at similar bits by Louis CK about how whites have had it so good, we've gonna get fucked so hard when the tables turn. It was funnier as a hypothetical, in the context of lots of other challenging and awful bits. Now it just makes me angry beyond reason to watch it happening in earnest.

Did I care about AC2's pope shiving when it came out? Nope. But it also came out in a very different cultural climate. Things that were hypothetical back then are actually happening now. I also never cared when the pilot episode of The Lone Gunman involved an airplane crashing into the twin towers, and it was all framed as marginally goofy hijinks. But things happened between now and then which significantly changed the cultural context in which an episode like that, made today, would be received. This is not hypocrisy or evidence of any sort of inconsistency.

Edit: I want to note, I know "feral blacks" might be an inflammatory phrase, but I am honestly at a loss as to what else to use. There is a massive cohort of aggressively and confidently antisocial and violent blacks in our schools, enabled by feckless "restorative justice" policies. They are a force of destruction, disruption and violence, unaccountable to all, and utterly untamable, as though a pack of feral animals had been loosed in schools. Some protected species nobody was allowed to do anything about.

If they’d released AC2 in current year, the same people would be complaining that beating up the Pope was an attack on Western civilization.

The same people who are complaining about woke stories today, were alive and active on Internet forums back then, and did not, in fact, complain.

Anyway, can't wait for the new Black Panther game to come out.

My point exactly.

Despite any pope-knifing, AC2 was more controversial for its DRM than for its politics. This was objectively more reasonable than today’s squabbles.

How am I supposed to even begin to argue the opposite position? I don't suppose that the fact that AC2 exists today, and the people you're criticizing are still alive, but they're not complaining about AC2 despite having ample opportunity to do so, changes your mind in any way?

Is your position at all falsifiable?

That said, I agree people should have realized mainstream games, and media of all sorts, are a lost cause, and moved on a long time ago.

On that note, if you've ever owned The Crew, check out the Stop Killing Games campaign! Ubisoft may try to twist the past, but you can change the future!

The initial religions were people worshiping local natural phenomena, such as a pile of rocks. As city states arose, we got local pantheon gods who sit in the local palace/temple and exert power over the local community. As Rome became an empire, it became too hard to have gods that were too Roman to be gods for the known world. Therefore, Catholicism arose as a more universal religion. The same thing happened in the Middle East with Islam. Islam allows for a billion people to follow it, previous religions couldn't.

As the church lost its power, we started to get more localized forms of religion in Protestantism where the power was shipped to the bourgeoisie, who could now read the bible in a way that fit them. The power structure became north-western European merchants.

After WWII the US became a global empire and needed a global religion. Evangelicalism is too particular to WASPs for an empire that covers most of the globe. They needed a far more universalist ideology. Human rights which morphed into wokeness is the perfect imperialist american ideology. It is extremely generic, easy to follow and preaches that we are just random individuals who happened to be born a certain way. We can be whatever gender we want and there are no groups. We are all just consumers in a world which we are allowed to consume whatever product or identity we want. The US military exists to ensure we can all be liberated from any cultural context or organic social structures.

Black people in Japan are a part of this. There is no Japanese culture, history or people. Japanese people are not a collective. They are just a bunch of players who happened to be spawned in that corner of the empire and can easily more around and be exchanged for another group. Ubisoft's ideology reflects the imperial ideology. As for profitability, they are far more profitable than building giant mosques and cathedrals was.

One angle I'm somewhat surprised hasn't been brought up much is that this set-up will almost certainly lead to the "problematic" optics of a non-Japanese person running around slaughtering a bunch of Japanese people. Video games are largely a power fantasy so the player character is going to be generally depicted as by far the strongest being. In the best case scenario, the Japanese will be depicted as weak and passive, needing a "foreign savior". I can imagine the outcry on the left would be swift if this were a game starring, say, a European warrior in 15th century Africa.

Even as someone who feels like "problematic" gets overused, I'd say those optics are more than sub-optimal. I remember having a conversation with someone about a similar potential issue arising with the God of War series, which sees former Greek solider Kratos slaughtering a series of mythical gods (first the Greek pantheon, then the Norse). We were discussing whether it would be difficult to continue the series beyond European pantheons while keeping Kratos as the main character because it just seems like the optics of a white guy traveling to Japan, India, and Mexico and killing a bunch of their local gods would be harshly criticized as a narrative faux pas in this day and age.

I'd be curious to know how positions on the two series correlate. If people were largely basing their opinion on "principle" I'd expect the largest groups to be:

1.) "It's a video game. I don't care if it's about an African guy killing a bunch of Japanese people, or a Greek guy killing a bunch of Japanese gods."

2.) "Optics are bad. I'd prefer a story set in Japan to star a Japanese samurai and I'd prefer a story set in mythical Japan to star a Japanese character."

Does anyone here fall outside of these two and if so why?

One angle I'm somewhat surprised hasn't been brought up much is that this set-up will almost certainly lead to the "problematic" optics of a non-Japanese person running around slaughtering a bunch of Japanese people.

It won't matter in any appreciable way. Some leftists might not like it, but the people who really drive the energies of the progressive movement will, in any conflict between protected groups, come down 100% on the side higher in the progressive stack. This was clear to see during the affirmative action debate, where suddenly children of Asian immigrants were white-adjacent/part of the privileged class.

I have the following well-worn preference cascade hierarchy

  1. My rules. In this case, race blindness.

  2. Your rules, enforced fairly. In this case, all races are treated as protected classes.

  3. Your rules, enforced unfairly. In this case, white people are uniquely disrespected. Black people, uniquely sanctified. <--- we are here

I prefer 1, then 2, then 3.

I don't think that's a preference cascade.

Today I learned. Thanks. Edited my comment.

"problematic" optics of a non-Japanese person running around slaughtering a bunch of Japanese people

For sure the battle lines would be completely inverted if he were white.

There was a bit of this with the first Nioh game, though I don’t think it had the popularity of the AC series and it was made by Japanese developers. It got introduced to me as a “white savior” game.

At least William Adams has a decent amount of actual historical documents about him (and written by him!). Yasuke has about 6 lines total, that say he was gifted by the Portuguese to Oda Nobunaga, and then returned to them after Oda Nobunaga's assassination.

Assassin’s Creed is more in the ‘Bridgerton’ school of historical fiction than the more realistic style. I don’t think the demographics of Bridgerton are propaganda to trick people into thinking the British aristocracy in 1820 or whatever was half black because so many other aspects of the show, from the music to the hair to the gender relations and sex are completely anachronistic. The casting is because it’s a show created by a black woman legendarily famous for self-insert characters. It’s “historical fiction” in the way that Disney’s Cinderella is.

In any case, the rage well has surely been mined with Assassin’s Creed to the point of utter depletion. A woman in 1868 London facing no instances of sexism was standard for the series back in 2015, so I find it hard to work up any performative outrage about a black samurai in 2024.

I don’t think the demographics of Bridgerton are propaganda to trick people into thinking the British aristocracy in 1820

Perhaps not, but if a person thinks African Aristocrats were common in 1820 due to watching the show, its authors would find excuses why the decieved are actually closer to the truth than those who object to seeing any African in an English manor on historical grounds. Or do you disagree that when questioned, the authors probably memorised a name of an African Englishman who rose to a high station, as to deflect criticism of cultural approriation?

Right NOW there are endless attempts by academics and other leftists to prove that Europe was always filled by blacks and muslims in order to stymie opposition to mass migration. The ridiculous muslim viking for one, and all the kvetching about multicultural britain being deliberately excluded from history. The objective is to twist history to a postulation rather than a record, to serve a Current Thing. We already see the next evolution whereby Joan of Arc is trans. Don't be surprised if we discover Charlemange was actually a woman or that the Reconquista is just islamophobia.

I don't buy games with black people in it anymore. Historical exemptions from a previous era, like Barret, get a pass, but if I see a black person (especially that one black bald woman, you know who) on the cover then it a 'never buy, sports-game-tier slop' category.

And I'm not even white.

Don't buy things from people who hate you.

This is pretty much my stance too, now. I saw the Vampyr (which was a solid 7/10 vampire RPG) devs released a new game, then noticed all the marketing was about their cringe interracial coupling. No thanks. And allegedly there's a romance between the (black) male protagonist and the (Japanese) female protagonist in the new AC: I'm sure that'll play well in Japan.

For me, it's just a strong signal that the developers do not care about making a good game on its own merits, and are (in the best case!) cynically playing to the woke gaming press. (If they're true believers, that's even worse.) White leftists writing fiction about black people is basically never going to turn out good, because white leftists worship blacks, and that worship is going to get in the way of any interesting story. In the case of the new AC game, it's even worse -- do you think a white leftist is going to competently write about anti-black Sengoku-era Japanese racism? Or even deal with the subject at all? (Actually, they might -- I think there's an argument to be made that the only people white leftists hate almost as much as other whites, are the Japanese.)

I would have much less of an issue with it all, if any substantial percent of the dev team were actually black, or blacks made up a substantial percentage of their target demographic -- but they aren't, and don't! It's retarded signalling all the way down.

White leftists writing fiction about black people is basically never going to turn out good, because white leftists worship blacks

They don't worship blacks, they worship the idea of an underdog achieving victory, and the eternal failure that is blacks in america (and frankly most blacks save for certain hyperperforming subgroups like tswana igbo or maybe tutsi) is moral cocaine for leftists. Ask a leftist what blacks cultural values are and you'd get at BEST some southern baptist flavors on a bog standard secular humanist post-race fairytale. That blacks themselves either just want to be left alone like white normies or are violent assholes is never considered; blacks can shout from the rooftops that yakub is evil and leftists will plug their ears to advance a black narrative that no black ever actually elides. Fuck, even bell hooks doesn't spout the weird shit leftists say about blacks, and she's pretty much the sole 'sane' black leftist intellectual.

I think you're onto something with underdog victory being a guiding principle among progressives. It's why they can't accept any framing that they are actually in power. I think shooting this particular victim complex is also one of the genuinely new things about the Trump right as well, it's a very useful combination of memes to have for motivating a group.

The coopting of leftist language by trump and his toadies is frankly the best part of his presidency. nothing gets me giggling like police going 'did you presume his gender?' when some dangerhair screams defund the police crap at a police officer.

Man, the Assassin's Creed series. My take can be succinctly summarized. Disclaimer, I haven't played any in the series since Black Flag, which to my mind is as damn near perfect as a game can get.

  1. The series has prided itself on broad historical accuracy. The events it depicts as historical actually happened, the historical figures actually existed and are mostly true to their recorded personas.

  2. Even so, the whole premise is that a secret order of Illuminati-like villains has been both guiding history AND rewriting the historical record as part of a propaganda war.

  3. Even even so, the magical technology that enables the plot to happen is 'genetic memory' or whatever, which holds that the historical periods being experienced by the players actually happened and thus are telling a 'true story.'

  4. So they can just say that Yasuke's history was rewritten by the Villains to downplay his role, and the story in the game is the accurate retelling in the game universe even if 'real world' events are different.

  5. YET, this starts to undermine the general premise that you're a stealthy assassin who kills, then blends in with the crowd. The ONE black dude in Japan is not going to be able to just break line of sight and evade detection by pulling on a mask and sitting on a bench.

  6. But who cares, the gameplay is optimized for fun, not realism.

  7. But but... one point someone made is that the playable protagonist of EVERY game before this has been a fictional character made up specifically for the series, with no historical parallel, which is perhaps in order to give the player the 'blank slate' avatar and avoid any major historical inaccuracies by having some well-known historical figure being an extremely dangerous assassin in their spare time.

So, to the extent Ubisoft has broken a longstanding convention in the series in order to create a playable black character in Japan of all places it bodes ill because it is clear evidence of a point I've made before: If they are specifically advertising their game on grounds of how diverse it is, and they're taking pains to enforce that diversity, it betrays that their priority is not on quality of writing or game design, they're counting on something else to sell the product or, at least, to mask criticism.

But then again, Ubi's whole model is to spit out iterations of a specific formula with small innovations on a regular schedule. Hence there's a new Ghost Recon game, Far Cry, or AC game on the schedule for release just about every year. And while admittedly the AC games tend to be a cut above in terms of average quality, one can understand that Ubisoft isn't in it for the art, it is just another franchise they can milk indefinitely, as long as they don't alienate the fanbase too much with any one entry.

I'd argue Yasuke is very close to being a fictional character that whoever's writing whatever media can project their own 'ooh there's a black guy in Japan' views upon. His historical context is like 2 lines of 'woah there's a black guy in Japan'.

But but... one point someone made is that the playable protagonist of EVERY game before this has been a fictional character made up specifically for the series, with no historical parallel, which is perhaps in order to give the player the 'blank slate' avatar and avoid any major historical inaccuracies by having some well-known historical figure being an extremely dangerous assassin in their spare time.

I think you're right that they obviously want to make this all about Yasuke, and that wouldn't work unless he's the main character because you could always just ignore him otherwise. I also think part of it why previous historical figures weren't playable characters is that it's often more inspiring to imagine hanging out with and earning the respect of your heroes rather than literally being them. Taking the example of AC2, it was quite cool for a lot of people to have their character become friends with Leonardo Da Vinci, but I don't think a game where you play as Da Vinci would have generated quite as much excitement.

I don't think a game where you play as Da Vinci would have generated quite as much excitement.

I mean, a game where you play as mad scientist Leonardo would, in fact, be pretty awesome.

There's zero evidence that Yasuke was either a samurai or an assassin.

I view the Japanese as treating Yasuke as a joke, like a court jester. See here this trinket, dancing for our amusement! That he may have accorded himself decently in battle is no big feat, especially since the samurai were absolute gun nuts in contrast to popular portrayal and should things ever get close in hand a big dude naturally has advantage over smaller dudes: weebs jerk off to the katana when the yuni and yari were the main weapons of choice (or the nagitana but I can't remember the specifics of whether that was the female weapon)

yuni

Do you mean yumi (bow)?

And presumably naginata, which was, yes, used by women, presumably because of its reach which would cancel out size issues.

Right on both counts. No misspelled sea urchin weapon fighting style unfortunately

...assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple.

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.

I’m sure there’s a name for this style of counter argument. I remember something similar when fans of Game of Thrones remarked that they thought it was odd how John Bradley’s character lost no weight despite being forcibly enlisted in the setting’s version of the French Foreign Legion. To which he gave the predictable response of “weLL the sEtTiNg aLsO hAs dRaGoNs wHiCh is uNrEaLiStiC.”

As for Ubisoft, I continue to find it amusing that a company that normally loves to market safe, bland video games accidentally invented the most based video game soundtrack of all time.

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.

Plenty of gamers loved playing CJ, an African-American character, in his GTA San Andreas adventures, fighting for his street gang and taking part in various criminal activities per the GTA formula. It's a great game because it mixes good gameplay (guns, cars, open-world which was somewhat new then), and an interesting story with characters that are both colorful, memorable, and also somewhat realistic, with the usual humorous exaggeration of the series.

The player, who is most likely not a would-be criminal from an impoverished inner-city black neighborhood, gets to experience a fascinating (exaggerated, fictionalized) facet of contemporary American life, with hundreds of references to TV shows and movies, music, sports, etc.

And of course, plenty of opportunities to drop the gamer-word while playing.

In this case, what does a black samurai bring to the experience of the game? Do we get some special scenes of the main character experiencing racial discrimination and having to take revenge? Does not sound like a lot of fun to me.

In the best case scenario, they'd bring some flashbacks of the main character's past life in Africa, with some neat well-researched African culture on display. Somehow I'm skeptical, unless they can somehow place the character in a part of Africa that wasn't having a ton of enslaving, public executions and human sacrifices going on all the time.

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.

aside from some with exotic racial preferences, people usually want to see people that look like them in the media they consoom.

This isn't actually true. White people used to care about seeing people of their own race in their media, but during the Civil Rights era have pretty much stopped doing that. Black people, on the other hand, really want to see themselves, and haven't stopped. (source: Lenk, Hartmann & Sattler; "White Americans’ preference for Black people in advertising has increased in the past 66 years: A meta-analysis" PNAS, Vol. 121, No. 9)

Well, I was referring to all people in general. Even for white Westerners, I wager that the effect you describe is driven by a significantly different demographic than the average gamer. I'd be surprised if this was not also a factor in the rising popularity of Japanese/Korean animated media over Hollywood's muddied productions.

That's the 'women are wonderful' effect. Everybody loves women. Everybody of any race has some women they care about.

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.

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.

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.

it'd be considered immoral to send women into combat if it wasn't laughable as a concept

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

Women being fighters is to enjoy visceral revenge fantasies in a kinetic manner often unavailable to them

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.

strongly suspect that hollywood/journalist/academic weaklings also fail to understand how much physical difference there is between men and women,

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.

maybe using speed

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.

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.

I think there's a significant possibility of disagreement on that point. Wasn't Athena the goddess of war?

I'm sure there are many other examples, from the common witch to the royalty/divinity, where female characters gained the might to defeat men through supernatural means.

Another aspect of it is that having out-of-context female characters opens up different modes of storytelling such as romance, motherhood, which randomly making one of the character browner does not really do.

I think there's a significant possibility of disagreement on that point. Wasn't Athena the goddess of war?

Athena was the goddess of war and wisdom, i.e. strategy. While she was portrayed with a helmet and a spear, she- and her following cities like Athens- weren't really known for mobilizing the women into formations. She is much more of an advisor / general archetype than a warrior.

Yeah, if you want a god to help you with actual fighting, you want Ares. Athena, as you said, was more about behind-the-lines strategy.

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".

Especially when it would be approximately as valid to have some random European dude instead, if they were merely looking to inject diversity into a Japanese setting. (They'll probably still have this guy in there as a side character or something, they love doing that).

And this coming up with a background of an extremely well-received show, Shogun, which tries its damndest to keep things realistic as to the demographics of the time and not shy away from the brutality of Japanese culture during the era.

There's clear demand for a straightforward historically accurate dramatization of feudal Japan, the extra step of adding the culture war issues of today into it is just hilariously tone deaf.

I'd argue that the hands of the producers of our current iteration of Shogun are not clean in this regard--in other words that they also have, possibly unavoidably, made narrative adjustments to suit their idea of the modern progressive ethos. But I am still imagining how to effort post that particular topic.

Mostly, inserting an anti-colonial spin which is anachronistic. The mutation of the traditional Japanese beauty into the feminist heroine role, which is annoying but must be accepted in everything remotely mainstream nowadays.

I think what bothers me is it feels like more and more companies are using inject racial poltiics into otherwise crappily designed media in order to blunt all legitimate criticism because then all criticism can be tarred as racists.

I'm less cynical; I think it's likelier that the people who came up with the story are true believers in the progressive cause. Insofar as it's about optics I would imagine it's more about looking good to the professional media class than it is about pre-emptively shielding themselves from public criticism. I don't know how effective it would be against criticism anyway, mechanically it'll probably be fine, and things like micro-transactions are hated by the left as well so accusations of racism won't do much to defend them in their eyes.

Ironically I feel like we are already past the peak of that particular tactic (I could be wrong). I think that time period where we got a Watchmen sequel series with a Black Dr. Manhattan, and a Lovecraft series specifically about his racism, and Amazon's Rings of Power LOTR adaptation adding in Black elves, dwarves, and Hobbits would be hard to surpass, without straight up becoming comedies.

There's also some funny irony in how Disney's Marvel fumbled (nearly) every move made post-Endgame, such as trying to replace Captain America with a black dude (no hate at Anthony Mackie, mind), to introduce a black supervillain to supplant Thanos as the big bad (maybe a little hate towards Jonathan Majors), and of course their attempt to get audiences engaged with three female heroes almost nobody cares about which was not Black Girl Magic at the box office. I can't even muster up enough interest in that to even attempt to hate it.

It is not working. Maybe they got the message after shareholders attempted a coup.

I would vaguely expect to see a bit less of this particular brand of culture warring in a period where interests rates are higher and thus projects actually have to justify their existence on the basis of short-term profitability.

On the other hand, pretty much every commercial or ad these days still does the Interracial couple thing, almost always black male, white female.

So not sure if I'm looking at the wrong bellwether.

On the other hand, pretty much every commercial or ad these days still does the Interracial couple thing, almost always black male, white female.

The study you linked quite specifically said that considerably more of the interracial couples in the ads they surveyed were a white male with a nonwhite female than the other way around.

The second research question asked about gender differences among interracial couples with a white partner in relation to their actual population. Approximately 59% of the interracial couples portrayed in the television commercials consisted of a white male and a Nonwhite female (WM+NWF). A chi-square goodness of fit test identified that this was not a significant difference from the 55% proportional representation of WM+NWF couples in the US population of interracial couples, according to the Pew Research Center (Livingston & Brown, 2017) (χ² = 2.92, df = 1, N = 99, p = .09). Approximately 30% of the interracial couples portrayed in the television commercials consisted of a Nonwhite male and a White female (NWM+WF). A chisquare goodness of fit test identified that this was a significant underrepresentation from the 37% proportional representation of NWM+WF interracial couples in the US population, according to the Pew Research Center (Livingston & Brown, 2017) (χ² = 15.36, df = 1, N = 99, p < .01). To answer RQ2, there were differences in representation, as the combination of a Nonwhite male and a White female were underrepresented, whereas a White male and Nonwhite female were not.

At this point, it's impossible to deny it's ideological. And to whatever degree the CEOs of these companies "learn their lesson", the lesson won't be "Maybe it's wrong to be racist towards white people". It will be "What is the most anti-white racism we can get away with?"

Being faiiiirrrr the entire job of CEO is to try to optimize for exactly how much you can get away with in the name of maximizing profits before people will balk. Forced diversity is not the only way that media products are getting worse.

I find myself waffling between the position of "CEOs are usually coldly logical sociopaths who are pushing the woke ideology because it appears to be profitable and will change up if it ceases to be so" and

"CEOs are just as brainwormed as other lefties and are genuinely trying to push the message where-ever they think they can get away with it."

In full reality, could be a little from column A and a little from Column B, plus unnoticed variables C, D, and E, too.

My explanation for puzzling CEO behavior.

CEO's don't care about corporate profits or woke politics. What they do care about is status signalling within their elite group. They get more plaudits for woke initiatives than they do for meeting quarterly earnings targets. Therefore, they will purse woke nonsense at the expense of earnings, up to the point where they lose their jobs.

Corporate boards, also caring mostly about intra-elite status games, will give woke-presenting CEOs a long leash before they pull the plug.

However, there is a limiting principle. CEO's with extremely poor performance will lose their job. Being fired is low status so it keeps things from getting too ridiculous.

Yes, lack of accountability does end up gelling with my other theory on institutional failure

As I hinted at above, I would hope that the end of an era of low interest rates enabling all kinds of corporate shenanigans would meant that financial performance again becomes the dominant metric by which decisions to fire are made.

The question is why does it seem ubiquitous. And maybe it is because leftist culture is the culture of PMC.

My working theory which I don't (yet) endorse is that MBA grads and SJWs actually have a lot of aligned incentives.

MBAs come into a company and try to figure out how to broaden their target market beyond whatever core demographic they have established. Regardless of what your company sells, the MBA wants to find a way to sell it to EVERYBODY.

SJWs also have a 'product' they want to sell to 'everybody.' That is, their ideology.

And SJWs can claim to be the ones who can tell the MBAs how to sell beyond their core demo. "If your product isn't selling well to women, it is probably too sexist. If your product isn't selling well to minorities, its probably too racist. If you can't get LGBT folks to buy, your product is too heteronormative. If you denounce the patriarchy and white supremacy and become known as a queer ally, you can reach out to those otherwise unattainable groups who will then buy your product."

An MBA presumably doesn't bother to comprehend the ideology or its goals, but thinks "Ah, we hire extra women, we run some ads that uplift black people, and we start openly celebrating pride and that will kick open new, untapped markets. Lets do it!"

And because SJWs have indeed done the groundwork in prepping the larger society to accept more diversity, this strategy might even pay off in the short term.

In this sense, MBAs and SJWs form a symbiotic team, with both having the similar end goal of achieving 100% market saturation for their product even if it means 'sacrificing' those things that made the product successful to begin with.

Too general.

Communists also have a ‘product’ they want to sell to ‘everybody.’ After decades with half the planet locked behind their ideology, has this co-opted MBAs into a fifth column? No, because there is a competing ideology, and it has a much more credible route to MBA-approved outcomes, like actually having markets or not getting purged.

I actually agree that social justice gains in corporations involve the motives you describe. They’re viewed as money on the sidewalk, better image with little to no downside. I argued such when the Bud Light business demonstrated the downside and when people were reading Super Bowl ads like tea leaves.

The interesting question isn’t “why do MBAs adopt social justice?” It’s “why doesn’t social justice have a credible competitor?”

More comments

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.

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 answer is always, always, always the same. And it's not even just minorities. It's why there's a girlboss in your old thing.

It's expensive to do something novel, and most people don't care about African history. A studio is likely not taking a $100 million gamble just to find out how much they don't. They want to pander but not that much.

However, this other thing has a built-in audience already. They tend to just buy shit (nerds being such reliable consoomer has its downsides) and they've already accepted some female/race-swaps (e.g. growing up BSG was already doing it) with minimal or ultimately meaningless grumbling. Why not more?

(I think the writing is worse now and everything is far more offputtingly oppositional but that's me)

Is there a reliable base of consooming nerds? Star Wars toy sales are the metric I use, and star wars nerds and normies aren't buying sequel trilogy shit. Its all clone wars cartoon era stuff and original trilogy. BSG starbuck sex swapping is a really popular example, but to my mind it is a bad one. The overlap of BSG2 vs original BSG fans is pretty slim, most BSG2 fans are sci fi starved nerds who wanted anything after babylon 5 and star trek went off the air. Space 1999 and Andromeda unfortunately did not catch on, and the race/gender 'swaps' of BSG2 were ultimately incidental.

Star Wars toy sales are the metric I use, and star wars nerds and normies aren't buying sequel trilogy shit.

Fair enough. Let's say they perceived nerds as reliable consoomers.

As for the rest: BSG didn't just change Starbuck and introduce Laura Roslin (so two female regulars), most of the prominent humanform Cylons were female. That's a big change.

It was noticeable. And was noticed. It was just that the writing was "woke" but not yet in the particularly oppositional sense that seems to characterize modern gender swaps where they a) cannot seem to have a counter-balance where male virtues were respected (BSG being a milscifi show helped here) and b) seem to actively want to insult the legacy audience. RDM was more likely to lecture you on imperialism and genocide than mediocre white men.

RDM was relatively deft in how he navigated things, both on and off-screen. The actors had the same initial reaction as modern stars to the backlash but the less connected internet (Katee Sackhoff talks about having to go to an internet cafe to pay to read the hate, which is funny) and the fact that studios didn't see attacking racist fans as part of the promotional strategy all helped.

most BSG2 fans are sci fi starved nerds who wanted anything after babylon 5 and star trek went off the air.

Another way to read BSG2's success is that it kept or neutralized the oBSG fans (sometimes literally buying them off like Richard Hatch) and brought in new fans who were driven either by wanting to see any scifi on screen or the contrast with existing works (I was a Stargate kid and BSG was...very different. Having both was great). In the end, it was likely a net gain (especially since BSG, with all due respect, was not really like SW at that point)

This is what studios are trying to do. Keep legacy fans that love SW/whatever and are starved for it, while bringing in new "diverse" fans - basically they just want to grow the pie, even if that means losing some more legacy fans . They fail at it, constantly, not because the idea is bad (a ton of people showed up for the Force Awakens, that was also its high point in "undecided" markets like China) but because the culture has polarized so much as to make the execution almost inevitably awful.

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.

You'd think someone would have picked up on that and done something based on historical black badasses.

They did. They couldn't help but screw it up because too much of the truth was inconvenient.

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