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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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?”
Because social justice women put out.
Social justice is a religion, and followers of competing religions have a mild form of chastity nominally attached to it. Social justice has female empowerment and reclaiming sexuality as available tenets, so men signalling their adherence to the religion have a vector to get pussy. High ordered religious/cultural societies relied on sanction of elders to curate mate suitability, but in social justice men have easy access to female curated spaces by just doing performative self abasement.
You can see social justice being unpopular in societies where elder curation is not a barrier to sexual availability, even for nominally religious societies. Religious southeast asian muslim women are notoriously promiscuous and sinic irreligiosity means there is no need for an alternative religion to attract females.
Social justice in the west is the defiled temple with vestigal nuns told to spread their legs for feminism. It sucks.
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Unlike liberalism (in the Founding Fathers sense), SJ recognizes threats to it. A liberal institution will permit the rise within it of those who are hostile to it, one captured by wokeists will purge anyone not sufficiently loyal to their ideology, even if the neutrals are loyalty to the institution.
SJs pulled up the ladder which they climbed up upon. So in order for an alternative to form, wholly separate institutions need to be created anew.
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I do like that framing.
Seems like it gets towards the issue of Whites being the only racial group that doesn't have a massive ingroup preference on average.
Whatever the reasons for that, the White customers will not abandon a product in droves just because the marketing becomes apathetic to or maybe directly hostile to their identity, so they are simply 'safe' to treat as a pariah.
Personally, I'd ask one more question:
Is social justice is slowly capturing and subverting woke capital to their ends such that these companies will simply follow that ideology by default?
Or is Capital subverting and assimilating the wokies to worship the almighty god of profits and loss, such that they'll push the company line with just as much blind enthusiasm as they do every other cause?
Or are we seeing some unholy combination arise, where large companies continue to operate with impunity but also spend billions of dollars on social justice causes and keep a stable of activists around who help shield and absolve them of sins?
Sometimes it feels like profit-driven companies inevitably roll over when facing down a controversy that might lead to lost sales, and thus official policy is to keep moving left when pushed.
But then I remember that most companies don't celebrate pride month at their branches in Middle Eastern countries.
So there is some somewhat more complex calculus occurring under the hood, even if we are correct on their intrinsic motivations.
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