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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Chinese entertainment — and to a lesser degree, East Asian entertainment generally — is dominating Western markets. Their products appear to be organically favored by Westerners. The Chinese-made video game Black Myth Wukong was released this week and is now sitting on Steam’s top 10 list for concurrent playercount and user favorability. It sits next to Elden Ring, a Japanese-made video game. The Chinese-designed 2020 Call of Duty Mobile game has made ~4bn lifetime revenue and has 60,000,000 monthly players; a Western-designed Warzone attempted to dethrone it this year and is unanimously considered a failure, losing most of its playerbase in the first month. Genshin Impact and PUBG mobile are other highly popular mobile games led by Chinese studios. Tik Tok is the most used social media company and is a Chinese product. League of Legends (130 million monthly active) is Chinese. Final Fantasy and Lost Ark are the most popular MMORPGs this year, Japanese and Korean respectively. Korean shows are increasingly popular in the West (and have actually slanted Korean tourism in favor of female tourists), and I don’t need to note anime and manga.

What explains this? Wukong in particular appears to be a genuinely loved game, and it makes no overtures to Western culture — it is firmly Chinese in story, music, and art design. IMO there’s likely American propaganda floating around against Chinese entertainment (billions in revenue on the line which compounds), but despite this the products are favored. So I feel safe saying that their products are better. So what has led China, and East Asia generally, to make better entertainment than America and Europe for Western audiences?

Kinda late to this thread but I have watched and played some of Wukong last week so I will note down my own thoughts about the game itself, isolated from broader cultural context. (I actually managed to completely miss the DEI kerfuffle it reportedly had, gonna look that up)

The good: The presentation is, as the young'uns say, absolute cinema - easily on par with Western hits like God of War (in fact I think it's fair to call Wukong "God of War but Chinese", the parallels broadly hold in most aspects) and imho exceeding them at some points. Major fights in Wukong are exactly what an unsophisticated rube like me pictures in his head when he imagines xianxia - the prologue scene/fight solidly establishes that the sheer spectacle is the main draw of the game, and so far it does not disappoint while still having the difficulty to match, fuck White-clad Noble you are forced to git gud as soon as chapter 1. The game is gorgeous, the monster designs are consistently great, and I physically feel the cultural gap. After so many Western games that SUBVERT LE EXPECTATIONS, seeing a mythical power fantasy played entirely, shamelessly straight feels very refreshing.

The great: Special mention to the animated ending scenes for each chapter, with every one having a completely different art style, and an interactive in-game "tapestry" afterwards that serve as loosely-related loredumps to put things into context. Those are universally amazing, with incredible effort put into throwaway 5-minute segments that aren't even strictly speaking related to the game itself - I checked the credits out of curiosity and every cutscene has a separate fucking animation studio responsible for it! That is an insane level of dedication to your storytelling - foreign as the subject matter is to my uncultured ass, the sheer passion to share your culture and get your point across is still unmistakable. This right here should be the bar for every Chinese cultural export going forward.

The mid: I'm conflicted about combat. On one hand it feels a little floaty to my taste, especially the bread and butter light combos, and you do not get the stone form spell (the parry button of the game) until quite a bit into chapter 2 so the only reliable defensive option you have is dodge roll spamming. On the other heavy attacks are very satisfying to charge and land, and the frequent boss fights are almost universally great and engaging, with very diverse movesets for every one. There don't seem to be any bullshit boss immunities either, the Immobilize spell (which completely stops an enemy for a few seconds) works on pretty much every enemy and boss I've seen so far. Hitboxes and especially delayed enemy attacks can be frustrating at times though.

The bad: The exploration is worse than even Souls games; no map, sparse bonfires and very few notable landmarks scattered over the huge levels are not a recipe for convenient navigation. Maybe it's a skill issue on my part but it's been VERY easy to lose track of where you are (and especially where you were) and miss side content - of which there is a lot, adding to the frustration. To be fair, this is also why Souls games aren't my usual cup of tea.

Overall I think it is a very solid game, especially for the first game of the company, and I think that all the hand-wringing about Chinese bots or whatever is misplaced. It's not a masterpiece - it's just a good, solid game, and "organic" breakout hits of this scale are not unheard of, we had one just earlier this year.

I have long though of making effortpost - how Unreal Engine 3 and X-box 360 killed the game industry. But if you are looking for western game decline - it started around this time. It almost felt crazy when people praised total gameplay blandness like Gears of War, Mass Effect, Assassin's creed as masterpieces. I don't know what happened in 2006-7, but from then big budget games have been more miss than hit gameplay-wise.

However your effortpost turns out, perhaps you should open it with "Call of Duty 4 and its consequences have been a disaster for the Gamer race."

Seriously, that game's progression system for multiplayer practically changed how games are built and designed, not to mention how many people wanted the COD crowd in its wake (which coined the Seven Words of Death for many a game: "we want the Call of Duty audience").

I don't know what happened in 2006-7, but from then big budget games have been more miss than hit gameplay-wise.

Mass adoption. If the gameplay wasn't bland, it couldn't appeal to a mass market as more sophisticated mechanics would effectively gatekeep vast swathes of the population. The other side of the trick was to make people feel like they're accomplishing something, even though what they're doing is incredibly easy. Todd Howard had a whole spiel about it.

I have not played Black Myth Wukong, but from where I stand, most of the innovation in video games comes out of the Western world. Portal, FTL, Terraria (?), Stardew Valley (?), Slay the Spire, all of whom created (or refined, in case of (?)) a genre, are all Western.

Granted, there is Nintendo and Japanese games in general, which I don't have a lot of exposure to because I play on PCs only and don't like super-hard games.

My exposure to games from mainland China has been rather more limited. I played My Time at Portia, and found it mostly forgettable. Not something worse than a Western studio might produce, but conceptionally derivative. "Let us remake Stardew Valley in 3d, and get rid of the politically precarious 'megacorp comes to small town' storyline".

This could be sampling bias, but it is equally possible that mainland China is not good at fostering small indie game devs from whom most of the innovation comes.

With regards to DEI, my feeling from story-heavy games such as Bioware is that gay dating, like straight dating, is mostly opt-in. If the MC has dialog options to flirt with half of the party members who share their sex, I will not be terribly offended by that, I will just not click on that (depending on the gender of my character, perhaps). Most of the core of wokeness, like the concept of white cis-male privilege is not something a game dev would touch with a ten foot pole. Much safer to translate this to fantasy races such as orcs or elves.

With regards to DEI, my feeling from story-heavy games such as Bioware is that gay dating, like straight dating, is mostly opt-in.

It's only opt-in in the same way the game itself is; you can always turn a game off and stop playing, but to get access to large portions of what you paid for you have to directly engage with the wokeness (in this case, gay dating).

In BG3 most of the good character moments are locked behind romance. You will not learn nearly so much about your companions or their backstories, have the same influence over them, or in the end get the same encounters and questlines, if you don't explicitly choose to seduce them. There is no friendship option, you can't become good enough friends with someone that they trust you with their life; apparently the only possible strong relationship two people can have is sexual.

IIRC this is also the case with Hades and virtually every other similar game. "Opt-in" is not really an accurate way to describe a core gameplay mechanic gatekeeping large storylines.

IIRC this is also the case with Hades and virtually every other similar game.

I don't think so. With hades you have 3 romances (and you can max them at the same time).

Now the friendship there was also bribing every character with ambrosia, but nothing was gatekept. It was - I have ambrosia, friendship +1

To elaborate, once you max out the relationship gauge there's an explicit choice to fuck or not to fuck.

I have yet to play BG3, so I did not know this.

Typically, in earlier Bioware games, romance was mostly an additional, optional branch near the end of the character arks, so you did not have to replay the games five times because one party member was only into male non-evil dwarven clerics or whatever.

As the parallel post already pointed out, Stardew Valley is just a straight remake of the Japanese-made Harvest Moon - if it were made in China, it would no doubt be subjected to the same nonstop stream of "Chinese can only copy" slander that Genshin Impact suffered for its heavily-inspired-by-Zelda release region (which still was much less similar to the open world Zeldas than Stardew Valley is to Harvest Moon). Slay the Spire, which I was unfamiliar with, appears to be a deck-builder game, which Wikipedia tells me were also invented in Japan (and certainly most of the most prominent franchises are from there). I'll grant Portal and Terraria, though they both failed to create what I would call a genre since neither spawned any game that I would consider like the original and not inferior to it.

Granted, there is Nintendo and Japanese games in general, which I don't have a lot of exposure to because I play on PCs only and don't like super-hard games.

Right, these two restrictions together seem like they are designed to reach the conclusion that you want. A Chinese or SEA player (mobile-only) or Japanese (console) player willing to treat PC games as non-existent might come to the conclusion that the collective West has been a footnote in gaming (what did they make? Coin Master? Donkey Kong (a Mario ripoff with prerendered graphics)? Secret of Evermore (basically a reskin of Secret of Mana)?), and a Japanese PC player uninterested in casual difficulty would easily conclude that all Western games of note are late copycats of Japanese formulae. It's all too often forgotten that the narrative-driven 3D adventure shooter genre, which is basically the default for Western AAA games nowadays, is itself originally Japanese (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid...).

I'll grant Portal and Terraria, though they both failed to create what I would call a genre since neither spawned any game that I would consider like the original and not inferior to it.

I'll grant you Terraria, but Portal has spawned Talos Principle.

Honestly, there's lots of games that feel Portal-inspired, even if they aren't particularly Portal-like in raw gameplay terms. It wasn't just a well-made 3D puzzler with a good story, it was practically the Myst of the 2000's.

Slay the Spire, which I was unfamiliar with, appears to be a deck-builder game, which Wikipedia tells me were also invented in Japan (and certainly most of the most prominent franchises are from there).

CCGs and deckbuilders are different genres. In CCGs building your deck is something that happens outside the game and everybody brings the one they want to the starting line. In a deckbuilder, everybody starts with the same or very similar decks, and changing the cards in it is a game action.

Even considering the digital CCG campaign mode you can see in the old Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon TCG console games - the kind which was which was pioneered by Microprose's Magic the Gathering - the meta-game (in which "an individual game of Magic" functions like the battle system in Final Fantasy or something) typically has acquiring new cards as a game action that takes in-game currency, but lets you shuffle around which cards you own in or out of your deck for free.

I can't get a good sense of how the Dragon Ball game stated on that wikipedia page to be an "early precursor of the DCCG" actually plays, but from what I can see from a fraction of a longplay and a wiki description it sounds like the cards are closer in nature to playing cards (basically just a number and a suit) than CCG cards.

Slay the Spire, which I was unfamiliar with, appears to be a deck-builder game, which Wikipedia tells me were also invented in Japan (and certainly most of the most prominent franchises are from there)

This is incorrect on a few levels. Firstly, Slay the Spire is not a collectible card game - it really is the first in its genre of roguelite deckbuilders: games with largely independent short runs where players customize an initially simple deck of cards to defeat a series of enemies.

Even digital collectible card games' lineage is pretty independent of Japan. Magic: the Gathering is the proper progenitor of the customizable card game, and its digital versions are also the first of the type. The Japanese games mentioned at the top of the Wikipedia article's History section really only have the similarly of being digital games with collectible cards - not the actual gripping force of customizing decks and evolving card pools and mechanics.

I really enjoyed Stardew Valley, but I'm not really sure what refinements it provided that you couldn't find in the Japanese-made Story of Seasons (formerly known as Harvest Moon due to complicated copyright/trademark reasons) and Rune Factory games.

As a few others have mentioned, the success of Black Myth Wukong is something of a mirage: like 90% of its playerbase are just native Chinese players. I think this fact actually speaks to the wider problem Chinese media faces. TV, movies, books, music: putting aside the obvious issues of CCP interference, Chinese creators still have a big problem with overwhelmingly focusing on the domestic Chinese market.

If you look at the Japanese game examples, Elden Ring and Final Fantasy, these are very much products made with international markets in mind. From Software's Armoured Core series or Dragon Quest of Square Enix are both moderate hits, much more tailored to the local market, and those aren't even close to the weirdest titles that come out of Japan. Stuff that only appeals to the weebiest of weebs and otherwise is entirely limited to Japan.

The problem with Chinese media is that they are still stuck making that latter type of media. My wife watches a lot of Chinese TV - every series is Ming-era drama, Ming-era xianxia, WW2 dramas, with the occasional modern series. The most recent Chinese films I watched were a 3D animated story about Tang-era poets for a family audience and a comedy drama about the pressures of primary school acceptance for Chinese children. The former was probably the best possible family film about Tang-era poetry you could possibly make, but it was still a film about Tang-era poetry.

MiHoYo's popular titles - Genshin, Honkai Star Rail, Zenless Zero - caught on in many ways because they just aped Japanese anime styling to the extent that initial players would have no idea they are Chinese made. I played a lot of Chinese gacha and other phone games in the past, and they were nowhere near as accessible as those titles.

When you can have a hit on the scale of Wukong without doing anything to appeal to international audiences, why would you even bother? Perhaps the future is that China has a breakout film like Parasite or Shoplifting, or a game series like Yakuza or Persona, which are still heavily Chinese but can cross borders, and that kickstarts wider interest.

MiHoYo's popular titles - Genshin, Honkai Star Rail, Zenless Zero - caught on in many ways because they just aped Japanese anime styling to the extent that initial players would have no idea they are Chinese made. I played a lot of Chinese gacha and other phone games in the past, and they were nowhere near as accessible as those titles.

Did those other titles include games like Girls' Frontline or Arknights? Those games also lean heavily on the anime style (even to the point of relying on Japanese VA), and also deemphasize Chinese-ness considerably.

Nah this was years ago, since then several developers have become more international friendly without necessarily having a breakout hit like MiHoYo. But there was a lengthy period in the mid10s where there were dozens of huge F2P Chinese titles that could never have a hope of crossing over to other markets

GFL's origin is that a small Chinese doujin circle consisted of people who really liked Kantai Collection but 1) were more interested in guns than warships and 2) were having trouble with Kancolle's zealous attempts to IP ban every single player who was not physically in Japan. The game caught on largely because it turned out there was a decent amount of people in China/Korea/the west for whom those same two conditions applied.

I honestly thought a big chunk of the popularity was because it did the gun girl thing like the anime Upotte!, but also paired it with an interesting sci-fi story. Like, Arknights was made by some of the same devs, and that also caught on real good even though it mostly lacked gun girls. Interesting.

every series is Ming-era drama, Ming-era xianxia, WW2 dramas, with the occasional modern series. The most recent Chinese films I watched were a 3D animated story about Tang-era poets for a family audience

This is greater praise of China than DeepSeek. May we regain our own high culture.

Perhaps https://youtube.com/watch?v=ecDlMymLt6E is the cartoon in question. It's great. I'll start cramming Mandarin vocabulary immediately. Thankfully I already have Pollard's book.

That is indeed the film I saw. Honestly no idea why it is called Chang'an since the city has little to do with the plot

Gamers are tired of fake androginous blob looking cutesy nonsense.

Black Myth Wukong looks like an earnest attempt at a soulslike with chinese myth back story, doesn't have DEI nonsense in it and indeed got a huge publicity push from the backfired attempted extortion by the media-dei complex.

I'm actually glad for the language/culture gap between the west and Asia. For now they continue to be impervious to the brainworms infecting western game dev. Sony Entertainment/PlayStation was turned to SHIT when the headquarters moved to San Francisco

I don't think there's anything to explain. Having some apps and games in the top 10 isn't dominating, it's just being a player. Dominating would be owning most of the top 10. And they're an advanced nation with a billion people and a solid average IQ, so you'd expect that.

It's more so East Asia than China. Japan through behemoths like Nintendo & Sony have dominated gaming since day 1. Korea has always had a strong E-sports and Mmorpg offering as far back as the mid-2000s.

For its size, China hasn't produced any recent creative works of note. 3 body problem is the only one I can think of. That's 1 international & critical success in my lifetime. Chinese manhua sucks. Their music sucks. Their games are serviceable at best. They haven't produced novels and art of note. And their movies, most of all, suck major balls. Freemium games, gambling simulators and perfect recreations of Mozart don't count. We all know the Chinese can copy better than any known people on earth.

Clearly it isn't a racial problem, because HongKong has shown itself to be capable of amazing art, especially movies. Chinese-Americans also seem to be doing decently in the contemporary art scene. But mainland china is a creative desert. I won't bury the lede, Communism kills creativity. USSR faced the same issue, which led to the surprising popularity of Bollywood in nations that were behind the iron curtain.

That beings us to Wukong, the one exception. It's right there in the name. Sun Wukong draws entirely from 'Journey to the West', a Buddhist epic. It is book with religious significance. It almost feels on the nose, but Wukong is one of India's only enduring cultural influences on China, and it shows.

So what has led China, and East Asia generally, to make better entertainment than America and Europe for Western audiences?

Part of me is offended by this question. America makes amazing entertainment, year over year. They are in a little slump with gaming, but that's about it. What you're noticing, is a slow return to a balance. Not everything is American anymore. America shares the top with England, Korea, India & Japan for top tier entertainment. East Asia is 1.5 billion people. Many of whom are in 1st world nations that are past the lowest tier of Maslow's pyramid. They have rich original cultures and aren't derivative of western myth or philosophy. Why won't they produce great art with global reach ? Ofc they do. China's historic underperformance here is the more confusing statistic. The rest of East Asia doing well is honestly, pretty expected.

Clearly it isn't a racial problem, because HongKong has shown itself to be capable of amazing art, especially movies. Chinese-Americans also seem to be doing decently in the contemporary art scene. But mainland china is a creative desert. I won't bury the lede, Communism kills creativity.

For Hong Kong, I'd go out of my way to point out that it went beyond mere capability for amazing art. For two decades or so (pre and shortly after the handover), it hit far above its weight, arguably being the most culturally productive place in the world per capita, in film. Not just wuxia and martial arts: In the Mood for Love is a movie that is both genuinely loved and widely acclaimed in the global film community as one of the greatest movies of all time.

I'm not sure it's communism per se that did it. Mainland China was starting to produce some films of note (cf Zhang Yimou's oeuvre), but the industry was stillborn. I think it's more about living in liminal zones, in space and time. Conflicts arise, and the future can play out in multiple different ways. Choice and agency matter. Genuine art can exist only in those zones. Otherwise, it's just remixes of what has been that serve to reinforce existing structures and patterns.

Fully agreed on Hongkong.

In the Mood for Love

Ayy, we've all seen the every frame a painting video. I joke, but I want to sit down to appreciate Wong Kar-wai's greatest hits.

wuxia

It's odd. The best wuxia novels come from South Korea but use Chinese myths. I recently rea 'Peerless Dad' and it is legitimately good. But, all Korean. Same for Chinese history. The Qin unification story has been told a million time, but Kingdom (Japanese Manga) has somehow turned out to be the most effective.

I think it's more about living in liminal zones

That's a cool take. By definition, what makes them interesting (the thick atmosphere, the lack of belonging, the feeling of transition) is what makes them unstable and temporary.

You have produced a roughly even mixture of true statements, statements of personal taste (and/or the taste of people with taste similar to yours, cf. "critical success"), falsehoods and blind dismissals ("Freemium games, gambling simulators" seems to simply rule out what is the best monetization model for their market, "perfect recreations of Mozart" is a quip that is utterly divorced from the reality of Chinese music).

USSR faced the same issue

Huh? Most people who lived there believe USSR literature was great (just consider the scifi output), and the movie industry did about as well as you could expect in a place where US-style movie making capital can not be raised. If anything, Russia turned into a creative desert after the fall of communism.

That beings us to Wukong, the one exception. It's right there in the name. Sun Wukong draws entirely from 'Journey to the West', a Buddhist epic. It is book with religious significance. It almost feels on the nose, but Wukong is one of India's only enduring cultural influences on China, and it shows.

...written in China, by Chinese, and presumably utterly foreign to any putative Indian readers. This is as fair as if you said that Star Wars (the highest-grossing Western live action media franchise) is to be credited to Japan and China, because the Jedi are a pastiche of East Asian warrior-monk orders.

Part of me is offended by this question. America makes amazing entertainment, year over year.

...and yet the only American entertainment that I have consumed for the past few years is the culture war. Admittedly, that particular alternate reality game does continue being the unchallenged greatest show on earth. I've tried watching American movies, playing American games and listening to American music, and stopped because they were simply inferior to the better works of entertainment that I can get from East Asia for free (financed by freemium models and gambling elements that extract money from people with more loose cash and lower executive function).

I have made a genuine attempt to love Chinese creative works. For one, they have outdone themselves on cuisine. Traditional, fusion and contemporary Chinese cuisine are all outstanding. 3 of my roommates are Chinese from the mainland (I'm not racist, I have a black friend), and my favorite recent individual (like many rationalists) is an ethnic Chinese man. (Lee Kuan Yew). Yes, I am Indian, but I don't really care about China-India tensions as much as your typical Indian on twitter.

I have tried. But, I've struggled to find much depth to contemporary Chinese music, Chinese movies, Chinese comics or Chinese computer games.

...written in China, by Chinese, and presumably utterly foreign to any putative Indian readers

Fair. I stretched my point there. It is still derivative of their own history, but Wukong is their big win, and deserves to be acknowledged as such.

...and yet the only American entertainment that I have consumed for the past few years is the culture war.

This has to do with a mix of wokeism, covid, the writer's strike and netflix-isms. Matt Damon talks about the death of original mid-budget films. It is more so economics than the death of art.

Now, the best stuff has moved to streaming platforms, getting broken into mini-series with low budgets, that make moderate profits instead of becoming block busters. No wonder horror and intimate character studies are flourishing. Midnight Mass, Pig, Marriage story, etc. are all innovative, gripping masterpieces of the last 4 years. Some of my favorite albums (mainstream and indie) have been produced over these years (Tesseract, Silk Sonic, Black Crown Initiate, Kendrick). Western games are admittedly in a slump but the early 2010s set the bar too damn high (Dota2, CSGO, Skyrim, GPT5,.....) and the studios are still at the tail end of the 'milking it' phrase. Hell, I dislike the wokes as much as anyone on TheMotte, but that guy ' Ta Nehisi Coates' writes a damn good book. I disagreed with everything in it, and I still couldn't put it down.

Yes, the big mainstream of American Media is in the middle of a self-fellating death spiral, but 2024 seems to be a year of 'coming back to senses'. American Entertainment is so incredibly productive, that even when popular media is failing, the lower tiers are still producing hits after hits. You need to look under the covers.

America makes amazing entertainment, year over year. They are in a little slump with gaming,

That sounds like the complete opposite of what's happening. America hasn't created anything amazing in about a decade, they've been churning out sequels, prequels, remakes, and adaptations of foreign material in a scramble to have any content at all, and gaming is probably an exception - mostly due to indies.

America makes amazing entertainment, year over year

Tell me you haven't been paying attention without telling me you haven't been paying attention. Just look at the slop Disney is putting out time after time and the absolute abysmal mindrot offerings in gaming.

90% of everything is shit, that doesn't mean nothing good is produced.

To add to that, we see everything that is vomited onto our market, but we don't see the Chinese market (or other East Asian markets). There's a big cultural and linguistic gap, the only things from over there that make it over here despite that are almost by definition the good things. We're not showered with crappy Chinese phone games or CCP propaganda or what have you. We do get showered with our own crap.

Japan through behemoths like Nintendo & Sony have dominated gaming since day 1

Well, not day one. The first big hit was Pong, from Atari, which despite its name was an American company.

Atari

Huh, I never knew. Always thought it was Japanese.

While as others have pointed out, China still punches well below its weight as far as modern cultural exports go due to government restrictions, I don't think it should be surprising that a region containing 20% of the world's population (and a much higher percentage of its industrialized population) would become a major player in the media and entertainment spheres. It's also not as though a Western obsession with East Asian culture is anything new.

China cultural exports is also a weird one since there's such an international sinosphere that there's plenty of stuff that has been adapted from regional Chinese markets (Cantopop, Hokkien Dramas from Taiwan etc) for broader adaption across the Chinese sphere without really making a blip on anglos.

I've got a Malaysian-Chinese partner and thus probably consume more Sino content than most people. I've enjoyed some of the modern output (Yolo was actually really fun as a boxing movie but also riddled with a bunch of weird diversions from the standard Western tropes that I found fascinating as a culture study).

I think most of the commentary on Chinese culture is unironically racist in the old-fashioned sense of prejudice and ignorance.

China is a very populous country, fairly well developed and with high IQs. There is plenty of talent and wealth there. Of course they will produce compelling cultural products. Genshin Impact, Three Body Problem, Wukong, more obscure stuff like Dyson Sphere Program and Reverend Insanity. Plenty of good stuff has already been made.

Do they censor? They sure do. RIP Reverend Insanity, unfinished. Are they behind the curve? Probably. A lot of slop is being produced because China is only recently developed. Japan became well-developed in the 1970s and 1980s but it takes time for one's cultural output to become globally attractive. If we were back in the 1980s we'd be saying 'oh Japan's cultural output is limited, there are just a few gems here and there, they're fundamentally unable to create'. What was there, LOGH and Astro Boy? Evangelion, Dragonball Super, HxH, Naruto, SAO, One Piece and so on hadn't yet emerged. People didn't think anime was cool, it was just weird Jap cartoons. It only became really popular in the 2010s due to time-lag and possibly Western decline. Now Demon Slayer can go toe to toe with the entire US comics industry.

China is the same. We're looking at the beginning of the growth curve. It takes time for the wealth and talent to circulate appropriately such that they can do great things, develop mature taste and so on. Most people in the West don't know where to look for Chinese cultural output, most of it's still untranslated in Chinese. That's slowly changing and AI should accelerate it.

I disagree. Japan was already exporting a lot of cultural influence in the 80s, arguably more than it is now. Every kid in America was obsessing over Ninja, Karate, ans samurai. Nintendo was an absolute craze. Nerds were trading unlicensed untranslated anime on vhs tapes, trying to figure out wtf it meant. Businessmen were showing off their money be eating at fancy sushi restaurants or benihana steakhouses, then getting drunk off sake and singing karaoke. There was even a hit song "im turning japanese."

On the more highbrow side, there were a lot of Japanese artists winning prestigious awards. yukio mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, kazuo ishiguro, andmany other less famous ones wrote great literature. Haruki murakami got a smash hit with Norwegian Wood. Film buffs loved Akira Kurasawa, whose samurai duels were a major influence on the light saber fights in star wars. Japanese jazz and classical musicians were also popular in their respective scenes.

If anything, that stuff should have been bigger. There just wasnt any real marketing in the US for anything foreign at that time. Even british stuff could be hard to find. There was no choice except American Hollywood movies and TV, for a regular person.

But now? Its easy to get international stuff from all over the world. People love it. But what does China have? A shitty, exploitive gambling app (Genshin impact)? One sci fi novel that i have no ideahow it became popular (three body problem)? Some incredibly jangoistic movies about killing americans (wolf warrior, The Battle at Lake Changjin) which went nowhere outside China? Some hacky web novels about "cultivation" and getting kidnapped by a billionaire?

The sad thing is that they used to do better. In the past, Chinese martial arts movies, food, buddhism, taoism, and sun tsu books were all popular. But almost all that stuff came out of Hong Kong. With the CCP takeover, and general crackdown on non-Beijing culture, their cultural output seems to have really stagnated. I think, if anything, people are hungry to see a Chinese pop culture product, but there's just nothing there.

One sci fi novel that i have no ideahow it became popular

To give the devil it's due, this is a phrase that could apply to western media, as well.

I picked up the Expanse well before it became popular, and it came across as a bland paint-by-numbers sci-fi series. And now... makes vague gestures toward the media landscape.

At the risk of seeming uncultured, I've only heard of Mishima and Kurasawa. And even they are pretty obscure. The average man on the street hasn't heard of Kurasawa.

Compare to Pokemon. Everyone has heard of that. It only got going in the late 1990s. Playstation? 1990s. Sonic the Hedgehog? 1990s. Resident Evil? 1990s. Legend of Zelda? Late 1980s. All of these things started back then and have only gotten more popular.

Let's put to one side whether something is shitty or hacky and look at raw popularity. I could just as well say all those prestigious awards just go to pretentious gibberish, it's a fruitless line of argument. I can't just arbitrarily say that SK has had no cultural output because I look down on kpop soyboys and manhwa. Genshin is popular. The Three Body Problem series is popular and has had a distinct impact on our conception of alien life. Why else would Netflix grab it and pretend all the characters are black or women? Chinese food, Buddhism and Taoism haven't exactly been discarded. Chinese web novels are getting more popular, even non-Chinese people are writing on webnovel rather than royalroad because that's where the readers are. Wukong is popular.

Chinese cultural influence is increasing despite considerable political headwinds.

If you go back to the 1980s, we didn't have the modern Internet, and that's drastically going to affect how popular culture gets spread around the world. Japanese culture in the 1980s had spread as much as could be reasonably expected in a pre-Internet world.

Now that we do have the Internet, spreading culture is much easier. If Chinese culture has spread only as much with the Internet as Japanese culture spread without the Internet, Chinese culture is really doing badly.

I mean... tbh if you've never heard of Kazuo Ishiguro or Haruki murakami then yeah... I'll call you uncultured, at least as far as 20th century novels go. They're not exactly obscure writers, they both sold millions of books besides winning multiple literary awards (whereas 3 body problem only won the Hugo award, which I agree is meaningless now). But OK, they're a bit too "modern," how about Natsume Sōseki who wrote "I am a cat" in 1905, or Jun'ichirō Tanizaki who was shortlisted for the Nobel literature prize in 1964, or Kenzaburo Ōe who wrote famous works in the 60s and finally won the Nobel prize in 1994. Or many, many others, who are admittedly not well-known to the common man in the west, but anyone who's a professional artist in their area knows about them. Like, oh, Osama Tezuka for one, "the father of manga."

And uh even in video games... there's Donkey Kong (nintendo arcade game) in 1981. Or their game and watch system in 1980, Oo the light gun they made for the Magnevox Oddessy (the first home video game console) in 1971, or their love tester in 1969, or their disney-licensed playing cards before that.

And that's just gaming systems from one company. What about all the other stuff I mentioned? Sushi, Karate, ninjas, karaoke, sumo, geisha, pachinko, yakuza, haiku, onsen, kimono, manga... jira? All Japanese cultural exports. Even some of the stuff that should have been Chinese, like Chinese character calligraphy or Journey to the West or Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Go, were still mostly told to us via Japan.

In terms of raw money, it seems like you're mostly just looking at three things, right? Genshin is an anime-styled gambling app, it has no cultural significance whatsover. 3-body problem is a bog-standard sci-fi novel that only got popular because "it's an inroad to the Chinese market" and Netflix will greenlight anything, except they massively changed it to have black and female characters. Wukong, I don't know, I haven't played it, but it's brand new. For the most part, none of those have any cultural signifigance though. When I was a kid, watching "Ninja Turtles" and "Power Rangers" really made me interested in Japanese culture and I wanted to visit there. I can't imagine how playing Genshin impact or watching the 3 body problem makes anyone think "yeah I really want to go to China!!!" If anything, Dragonball or Ranma 1/2 show a better view of China.

edit: to be more clear, I claim that Japan had an amazing literary and artistic tradition long before they became a rich first-world country. China used to, back in the 19th century, but it all got destroyed by WW2 and the cultural revolution. They've since become a top-tier economy, rivaling the US, but they're still a long way behind in cultural output, way behind even much smaller countries. This is admittedly hard to measure, and shouldn't be measured by money, but I still think it's obviously true. I'd go so far as to say that mainland China today is still behind Taiwan or old Hong Kong in cultural exports.

Kazuo Ishiguro or Haruki murakami then yeah... I'll call you uncultured, at least as far as 20th century novels go

I'm sorry, who has heard of these people? Or authors shortlisted for the Nobel Literature prize, not even getting a Nobel?

Japan has... two Nobels for literature. China has... two Nobels for literature. Maybe you just haven't heard of them because you're not cultured enough? I'm certainly not, I don't know about Chinese Nobel winning authors because I'm not interested in that stuff. That's my point. Few people know what's going on in China because of the language barrier, they don't even know what there is to be interested in and enjoy.

The three Body Problem series is exciting and interesting, it actually dares to have different themes and theses to the 'environmentalism good, lets all cooperate and get along with aliens' that everyone else seems to be stuck with. It has genuinely alien aliens with totally different ethics and worldview, not Star Trek's humans with fancy make-up and tropey exaggerations of aspects of Earth culture. It looks at trends like 'men are becoming softer and less manly' and dares to say that isn't such a good thing. There's a distinct enthusiasm about science and technology.

Genshin is significant in that lots of people care about it, they draw a lot of art about it, they bitch on twitter that the characters aren't brown enough... There are 300,000 people in the Genshin memes subreddit. People even make beautifully animated songs complaining about the gacha element: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M5Hfd4wX2GE

Well, you started off with a really strong claim that "most of the commentary on Chinese culture is unironically racist in the old-fashioned sense of prejudice and ignorance." Now it seems like you're backing off of that and just saying it's the language barrier? Seems like a flimsy excuse, when we have millions of Chinese language speakers in the west, and live in an age where both professional translators and auto-translation are in abundance. I really think that if there was a lot of great art coming out of China these days, we'd hear about it.

If your main example is Genshin impact... I dunno man. Sure, there's a lot of kids these days addicted to it. But if you tell a regular person that you love Chinese culture because you're addicted to spending money on pictures of sexy anime girls in Genshin, they're going to look down on you. I realize culture is subjective, so I can't prove that it's bad but.. cmon. you know it's bad. We can do better.

I reiterate that we are literally ignorant of what's going on in China. I am ignorant. You are ignorant. This is the kind of comment I was reacting to.

Chinese manhua sucks. Their music sucks. Their games are serviceable at best.

it is obviously impossible that China could have developed Call of Duty, or League of Legends, or Final Fantasy, or any other modern video game touchstone

How does anyone know that Chinese manhua sucks? Have they actually read it? Listened to 'Chinese music' such that they can characterize it? Have they played many Chinese games? How can it be obviously impossible for China to do such things if Wukong is at 96% positive on Steam with 300,000 reviews and FF VII Remake Intergrade is at 89% positive and 24,000 reviews? Don't the stats show that Wukong is as good as Final Fantasy? FF XIV is in that same territory, 87% positive.

Wouldn't I be an outlandish clown if I said that American music sucks? WTF is American music? Rap? Country? Taylor Swift? A philharmonic orchestra somewhere? Metal? Rock? I bet most people haven't heard more than a few Chinese songs. I haven't.

However, I have played some Chinese games. Some are good, some are bad, some are excellent. Dyson Sphere Program is at least as good as Factorio. And the Steam reviews back me up, 97% to 96% in DSP's favour. Gunfire Reborn is also a pretty good game but nobody's ever heard of it. Most Chinese games aren't even on Steam, I don't even know where you'd look to find them. Some Chinese website presumably.

I've read some Chinese novels. It's the same wide range of quality you find in the rest of the world. Some are really good! Most people just haven't read them because they're on weird Chinese websites and have to be translated into English. Plus they have different values and worldview to Western fiction.

People seem to have got it into their heads that China can only copy, or the CCP crushed Chinese culture into paste. It's just not true. They are perfectly capable of producing good entertainment products. People are literally prejudiced in that they have already worked out their opinion and will look for evidence to back it up. They'll say, with no evidence, that China is using bots to prop up the review score of a AAA game. And at the same time, they'll point out that China's been suppressing the video game industry anyway because it's decadent and a distraction for the youth... Come on, the simplest answer is that it's a good game and people are enjoying it.

Which Chinese novels did you like? Were they "real" novels, written by a professional author to be sold in bookstores, or just amateur webfiction? Because all I've ever seen coming out of mainland China is the latter. And I'm not a total snob, I do sometimes enjoy webfiction, but the all the Chinese stuff I've seen has just been garbage. Endless leveling up "cultivation" fantasies for boys, or "romance" about being raped by a billionaire for girls. I judge it as "it sucks" because I read it and that's my opinion, and I'm assuming that's what the other person also did. Perhaps there's some hidden gem that simply never caught fire or got translated or anything. But perhaps not. There's no "conservation of culture" law that guarantees that a large country must be able to produce great culture in proportion to its economy or whatever. If anything it seems to work the opposite, where the best art comes from the descendants of families that were once rich but lost everything in great tragedies.

I really think that part of the reason "3 body problem" went viral was that people were hungry to see something out of China, and this was the first time we'd ever seen a real fiction book from them. But it was... very mediocre, in my opinion, and it wasn't followed by anything else.

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(whereas 3 body problem only won the Hugo award, which I agree is meaningless now)

If it hadn't been for "puppy" votes brought in by Vox Day as part of an attempt to gank the Hugos, Three Body Problem would have lost to Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor. So it wasn't just a meaningless award, it was a meaningless award with an asterisk

No way. 3BP's dominance of sci fi was total. It would have taken the prize against almost anything.

The greater sinosphere does have a lot of internal crossover between Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia-Chinese, the mainland and other elements which have their own unique voices. Which I think changes the dynamic somewhat versus Japan where their original market was more solid.

A country notorious for faking its math test scores, macroeconomic indicators, astroturfed ‘5c army’ political engagement, and COVID case numbers, is having unexpectedly great entertainment metrics?

I don’t think we need to do any sort of self-reflective cultural soul-searching here. The reflexive 4chan screech of “BOTS” is both sufficient and necessary in this case.

astroturfed ‘5c army’ political engagement,

50c Party, not 5c army. Comes from CPC propagandists formerly being paid half a yuan per post.

The concurrent player record could be inflated. It's a new IP by a foreign studio and while covered by culture war circles before its release, it was only after release and the record-breaking numbers that I saw it brought up among normies. A good comparison is Cyberpunk 2077, its peak was 250K just over 1 million, from a somewhat-established IP, the at-the-time preeminent studio, Keanu Reeves, and years of hype.

That said, if it were bad, Steam would show it, and the negative reviews I see are mostly "Game too hard", with a complement of "My computer can't run this." Some have better criticisms, "Invisible walls everywhere," "Buggy AI", "Repetitive", "Poor world design" and "Not enough variety in attacks." So probably a mix: something was done to inflate the numbers, but for a very good though not paradigm-defining game.

How do you fake Steam numbers? You have to pay Valve a cut for every copy sold and they control who can buy, download and play it. This game is mostly popular in China which had already seen massive Steam numbers for games like PUBG. The Chinese friend I made on PUBG is playing this game right now and it's playing numbers crater when China goes to sleep and skyrocket when they wake up, though it's still quite popular in the West and big name streamers are playing it.

The numbers aren't inflated, it's just that the Chinese are hyped for a good Chinese game.

Low regional pricing (currency, Steam regional prices are set by currency,) discounts/e-rebates for store credit, free keys. Valve isn't freewheeling in China, Steam China operates through Perfect World.

But I just saw I was wrong about Cyberpunk's peak, SteamDB has it at 1.05 million. The difference isn't so stark now, and like I said above, the game is clearly very good, and I'm sure I'll play it eventually.

It can also be true that something other than the even very high quality of the game as responsible for its popularity. 2 million concurrent is incredible but I want to know is this a single player experience truly worthy of those numbers, or is it something else. I think we'd be seeing those numbers soaring among western gamers if it were paradigm-defining. It might be, in a month we might see over 3 million, with a million playing in the west. Maybe not, but even if it just playing to market, that's absolutely valid. MiHoYo of Genshin Impact, Honkai, Zenless Zone Zero, play to the western market in having attractive women and no hamfisted politics in their games. China could do nothing but publish AAA knockoffs with fanservice and no politics and devour the market, and they'd be valid to do it, but that wouldn't make the games amazing themselves, and that's what I'm interested in.

I see two ways to do this. One would be to abuse the refund feature and the other would be some combination of aggressive regional pricing and/or handing out coupons for the game in a region you wouldn't make much money in anyway, in order to gain exposure in regions you care about making real sales in.

Now, I don't believe this is what's happening but it's absolutely possible to do. Much more likely is that the game just is very popular in china.

https://scholars-stage.org/why-chinese-culture-has-not-conquered-us-all/

You are absolutely wrong here. China has hit it big with Wukong, and also saw success with Genshin Impact. But there are fundamental reasons why these successes are isolated in the big picture. All of these other games you mentioned are designed are Western or Japanese developers.

The first issue here is a lack of cultural exchange, or a lack of equivalent cultural exchange. China writes the code for the newest Call of Duty, but it is obviously impossible that China could have developed Call of Duty, or League of Legends, or Final Fantasy, or any other modern video game touchstone. For that matter, it's totally implausible that they could write a Harry Potter, film an Alien, or produce The Sopranos. This is because the CCP explicitly seeks to reduce foreign cultural influence. But China cannot just adapt JttW and RotTK forever. If they want to make cultural exports, that has to be based on a broader and deeper cultural dialogue than is currently allowed. Final Fantasy could not have existed without Dungeons and Dragons. Anime could not have existed without Disney. K pop could not have existed without Michael Jackson.

On to the second issue - the CCP and their economic management of China. After all, k pop and Nintendo were originally developed for a domestic audience. Why can't China build up a robust video game industry behind the Great Wall and then seek to export? Well, the CCP doesn't really want to. It doesn't want young Chinese men to get soft and fat playing video games. It wants them to look like this, and who can blame them?

https://images.app.goo.gl/iT46jnqmyMuf64TY9

In some ways, this is a mess of contradictions. China wants us to consume and influence its cultural products, but not to consume ours. Its not even sure if it wants to consume its own cultural products, insofar as it interferes with its other goals. If a Chinese product was ever too successful domestically, it's easy to imagine the CCP swooping down on it, just as it has done before. This to say nothing of the way that China regulates its own culture with an increasingly heavy hand.

This is also why Japan and Korea are different. They have robust domestic consumption and cultural exchange with the rest of the west.

None of the content on TikTok is Chinese, so it seems a bit inaccurate to describe it as Chinese entertainment. I've always thought China punched way below its weight culturally. I can't think of any TV shows or movies to come out of that country. I can think of very few books. There are almost no Chinese intellectuals who are commonly read in the West. Compare that to India, which has Bollywood and much else, despite having the same population and far less wealth.

You've listed two successful video games (League of Legends is not Chinese, I don't think), which doesn't seem like much. Maybe they're starting to get good at writing software.

Japan and Korea do seem have an outsized influence given their size. I don't know the reason. China can't compare to them yet.

League is majority owned by Tencent, a Chinese company, but is still thoroughly American in culture and it's developers are in California. It's really an example of the opposite phenomenon, an American game that's extremely popular in China and Korea, even more so than it's popular in the West.

Compare that to India, which has Bollywood and much else, despite having the same population and far less wealth.

Er… what else, exactly? I can’t think of any Indian stage plays, video games, or even music (aside from Bollywood soundtracks) that are remotely well-known in the West. As for books, there are a couple of authors that come to mind (more if you count the diaspora, but then to be fair we’d have to add Amy Tan, Ted Chiang, etc. to the China tally).

It seems hard to make the case that China is so far behind India in terms of Western penetration of cultural output, aside from Bollywood.

It seems like India had a lot more cultural cache in the past, when lots of people were going there to learn about budhism, meditation, yoga and all sorts of new-age stuff. Like, it was a huge deal when the Beatles went there in the late 60s, lots of people copied them! But now we can just get that stuff from California, no need to go to India for it.

I don't disagree with your wider point, but there are some good Chinese novels out there if you dig. I particularly enjoyed Waiting by Ha Jin, The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei, and Ingratitude by Ying Chen.

This conclusion seems very excessive. China has a couple hits but the west has a large stable of bangers and continues to release. If we're going to say that the East is punching above it's weight class the example would be nintendo and it's a little late to be worried about that. The last mega hit was Balder's gate, a western studio making a game using a californian IP. The East is big in gacha games but that's partially because those aren't as popular in the west. You mentioned PUBG but you know who ate their lunch? Fortnite, western.

It doesn't really seem like the East is eclipsing a west that can no longer make games so much as china is actually for the first time making serious contributions. many of which are using western IPs like many of your examples.

Balder's gate, a western studio making a game using a californian IP

Baldur's gate was made by bioware in Edmonton, DnD was created by gygax in Wisconsin and the forgotten realms was created by Ed greenwood in Toronto?

And currently, the IP seems to be owned by Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, neither of which are based in California.

My bad, for some reason I had thought the eponymous coast in wotc was Californian.

It sits next to Elden Ring, a Japanese-made video game.

Elden Ring is basically a video game adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen, a German opera that takes 3 days to conduct and is centered around Norse mythology. Its primary themes are largely centered around European medieval alchemical concepts, it's fantasy aesthetic is western-style dragons, and its dominant architecture and clothing styles are so European that just about the only asian-aesthetic character in the setting is an obviously evil and subversive outsider.

It's like the least-Weeaboo game to point at as an example of Asian cultural dominance. Miyazaki is a Europhile if anything.

Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game developer known for Dark Souls / Blood Borne / Elden Ring, not Hayao Miyazaki, the movie director of Studio Ghibli fame.

Elden Ring was literally written by G.R.R Martin. The Souls Games (which Elden Ring is the spiritual conclusion to) clearly take inspiration from Berserk, which itself is heavily inspired by western works.

It is the least Japanese game there is.

The only thing George wrote for Elden Ring is his name on the cover and incest in the dlc.

Kidding, not Kidding. From Software doesn't do plot, or narrative. The one game where they tried to consciously write was Sekiro and it can clearly be seen that they can't really pull it off. (I will await for inevitable arrival of people that will claim that I'm wrong and Miyadzaki is a genius). Currently playing through Wukong slowly and what I've seen from first 3 chapters is miles above what From Software released in last 10 years, combined.

George wrote the back story for the world, and there's clearly a lot of consistent world building. It's not a very detailed plot, but there are lots of fun small details about stuff like Rot and Madness that make the world feel real.

That makes their dominance more impressive, if they can create an entertainment product that beats the West at its own culture (if we consider the Middle Ages to still be our culture).

What dominance? They are producing entertainment products in line with the paradigm of another culture- which is to say, they are emulating others, rather than the other way around. If there's any cultural dominance to be had, it would be of the influence of the customer's culture over their own, rather than the expression of their own.

They receive the money and they control the resources. This gives me a funny image in my head of an Italian Roman claiming the Goths aren’t dominant because they only control Rome with Italian norms… yes, but they are the ones who control it and reap wealth from it. Foreign entertainment is the worst trade in existence: Chinese get to grow economically and employ people and in exchange American young men waste their time on addicting entertainment. They get everything of value, cementing their dominance, and we get ephemeral thrills. That sounds pretty dominant to me.

Now, is a Middle Ages fantasy-scape really “our culture”? I’d say no. Americans aren’t very influenced by the culture of the Middle Ages. And the fantasy scene is really a gloss with nothing underneath. Okay, their fantasy architecture has spires of church, but there’s nothing deeper there. Rather than giving us “culture points” it probably reduces how much we ourselves care about our culture. (Imagine a young kid seeing a beautiful church: wow, this looks like Elden Ring!)

That sounds pretty dominant to me.

Then your concept of dominance is based on a peculiar non-general understanding of dominance, as is your characterization of culture. There's not much else to deal with, any more than anyone else who selectively defines words to make selection-bias arguments.

There are many errors here. (1) Making more money and having more resources is universally considered dominance, and it is a dominance most associated with objective measures of national health, so I don’t actually know why you want to focus on “cultural dominance”. (1a) To make a very mottey example, Jews were dominant in the early years of Hollywood and historians would say as much, yet all of their major products fell in line with plainly goyish and Christian / post-Christian sensibilities… this was still to their benefit, as they made lots of money this way and were able to influence things slightly over time. (2) You haven’t argued why cultural dominance is a fruitful lense to look at entertainment products. (2a) We have many examples in history of clearly dominant groups wholecloth appropriating the aesthetic sensibilities of other nations: the Romans to Greeks, the Muslims to the Byzantines (the star-and-crescent was a Byzantine symbol), Germanics to the Romans. (2b) Entertainment products appropriate the surface-level artifacts of culture but not necessarily anything deeper, with Disney the best example: it appropriates Western art, but that’s it, and visual culture is often appropriated from a different group. (3) Appropriating the aesthetic sense of a different culture does not change the substantive kernel of culture, things like an individual’s relationship to work, family, community, values. A deeper analysis of these games would show a thoroughly Asian obsession with skill mastery, objective grading and peer competition and meritocracy, values which are actually absent the European Middle Ages whose focus was emotional [piety, love]. (4) If Western culture were dominant, we should see it in its fruits: its ability to make compelling leisure experiences. Why didn’t a Western company make Wukong or the other products? The power which enables one group to make more money than another group is indeed a cultural power in its rawest sense, especially when that money is made meritocratically, eg a video game that people buy after looking at gameplay. (5) What does the modern West have to do with the Catholic Middle Ages? Even Catholics are very far away from that culture.

The fact that Japanese devs are able to create a Western culture inspired game more successfully than Western devs themselves seems to support the original comment's point. I suppose there's Skyrim and other games with similar inspirations made by Western devs, but there's plenty of examples of Japanese devs outdoing Western devs with Western culture inspired games. Obvious examples that come to mind include From Soft's Dark Souls games & Bloodborne, Capcom's Dragon's Dogma and even Devil May Cry games, and Square Enix with Final Fantasy games (notably, when they took a modern Western storytelling approach with a Western-culture inspired fantasy game in Forspoken, in bombed both in the West and East).

I seem to think about souls games as a mish-mash of stuff that looks cool. Giant castles with one super lift(with chasm below) that goes on forever is a choice the devs decided on. Kingdom Come Deliverance is western culture and souls games are not.

KCD is European culture, not a Western one.

It's an interesting take but I think it's a combination of a particular Japanese insistence on quality, and also doing a novel take on something familiar - for all that Castlevania is obviously derivative of western tropes, it's really very different in practice to any existing version of the Dracula story.

There could be something to that. I recall being told by some Bloodborne lore hound that the blood communion religion of Yharnam in that game had all the imagery of Christianity, but the structure of the religion was based on Shintoism or some other East Asian religion, which is an extra twist on the "what if it turned out that the church was evil?" cliche.

I actually don't know the Castlevania game stories well, but that's certainly another Western-culture inspired game made by East Asians which has seemed to capture Western audiences. I did watch the Netflix cartoon, which was made by a Western studio, but in a style meant to emulate anime (itself a style meant to emulate Disney), adapting an Eastern dev-made video game that itself was an adaptation of a Western-made story. Which could have turned out interesting, for seeing all the twists and turns such layers of adaptation and copying styles introduced, but it ended up turning everything into slop designed for Modern Audiences, which is why I stopped watching it.

If you argue a Culture X game's success is proves the superiority of Culture Y because someone from Culture Y made it in clear interest of Culture X, I'm not sure we have enough of an agreement on what culture is to have an interesting discussion. Are we talking cultural ideas, motifs, and themes, the sort of things that fiction invokes to convey common understandings and shared sets of expectations that is what culture even is, or are we deferring to ownership structure as our shortcut to what culture a game is?

If it's the later, I'm not convinced, any more than I am by many of your examples. Bloodborne is a gothic horror and cosmic horror game that is quintessentially European in cultural influence. Devil May Cry is so American-culturally influenced that it's unapologetically cringe about it, ranging from the gun culture flourishing to the main character archetype to the Christian normalism.

These Japanese companies aren't unable to do Asian-culture focus games if they want to, and when they do it's very, very obvious. When Fromsoft wants to do a Soulsborne-style Asian game, they make Sekiro. The Yakuza series is a thing. The entire Dynasty Warriors franchise and umpteen spinoff varients are distinct.

Nor is there a lack of successful culturally western games. Just last year Helldivers took the gaming world by storm, and it was a reboot of a European game parody of Iraq-War Americana. Red Dead Redemption is the same era as Dragon's Dogma, and it was (and still is) a classic American cowboy story. One of the top-selling strategy games of all time, XCOM, is basically American sci-fi with NATO-militaristic liberalism. Baldur's Gate 3, the Witcher, God of War reboot.

Appealing to Western-style games as proof of the superiority of non-western-culture is less proving the point and more like fish not having the word for water.

I don't have any opinions on cultural superiority, and as best as I can tell, the original comment didn't express any, either. Just that Eastern devs seem to be appealing to Western audiences better than Western devs. Again, I believe examples of Eastern devs using Western culture in their games even better than Western devs do only supports this notion more strongly, similarly to how an away team defeating the home team in a sport that has home field advantage is a stronger signal that the away team is better than if played on a neutral field.

Now, as you point out, there are plenty of Western made games that do Western culture well. I just think it's correct that Eastern devs have done it better, especially when considering within-genre - there's no Western-made game similar to Elden Ring or Devil May Cry that come anywhere close to those games in quality or stature.

I don't have any opinions on cultural superiority, and as best as I can tell, the original comment didn't express any, either. Just that Eastern devs seem to be appealing to Western audiences better than Western devs. Again, I believe examples of Eastern devs using Western culture in their games even better than Western devs do only supports this notion more strongly, similarly to how an away team defeating the home team in a sport that has home field advantage is a stronger signal that the away team is better than if played on a neutral field.

And if the foreign team defeats the home team by adopting home team signature tactics, strategies, compositions, and paradigms, that indicates that the foreign team may be doing home-team tactics better, but it does not indicate that away-team tactics are a disproof of home-team tactics or premise, or that their approach is fundamentally different. The Japanese baseball team may out-play the American team, but the sheer fact that the teams are playing baseball and not shogi is indicting whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself.

This is especially ironic in the context of east-asian countries like Japan or Korea, in which Westernization was a deliberate national policy for generations and distancing themselves from their own cultural tethers to embrace western cultural aspects was a deliberate process, even as the comparison culture (the US in particular) is commonly understood melting pot assimilation of different cultural inputs. China has solidly established culture of mimicricy of outside forms as well. These are not divergent cultures, but in many real respects cultures that consciously try to get closer.

Now, as you point out, there are plenty of Western made games that do Western culture well. I just think it's correct that Eastern devs have done it better, especially when considering within-genre - there's no Western-made game similar to Elden Ring or Devil May Cry that come anywhere close to those games in quality or stature.

Sure there are. What constitutes quality is subjective (most players don't, in fact, enjoy fromsoft difficulty curves), but stature is not, and there are plenty of series that absolutely crush the likes of Elden Ring, let alone DMC. There's a reason that the Elden Ring peak concurrent steam players was a bit over 950,000, and Minecraft was over ten times that- the qualities may not be what you value, but stature doesn't care about what you value, it cares about what other people care about.

And this is just peak players- in terms of players over time for the last year, Elden Ring for most of the year before the DLC was around 50-60k. PUBG was often at or above 500k. Devil May Cry 5 was closer to 5k. That puts it on the same level as Warhammer 40K: Darktide. Change the metric, and we can probably find comparisons. Metacritic scores? Profitability? Impact / appearances in other cultural products?

This is the issue with semantic gerrymandering. 'Soulsborne' isn't a genre, it's a subgenre specifically defined around a single company. There's no shortage of successful fantasy, or dark fantasy, or adventure. Winnowing the basis of comparison to exclude all others isn't making a point about a much wider category (Eastern-devs), it's just structural cherry picking, just as selecting the highest-performing eastern success rather than the slop is selection bias in action.

And if the foreign team defeats the home team by adopting home team signature tactics, strategies, compositions, and paradigms, that indicates that the foreign team may be doing home-team tactics better, but it does not indicate that away-team tactics are a disproof of home-team tactics or premise, or that their approach is fundamentally different. The Japanese baseball team may out-play the American team, but the sheer fact that the teams are playing baseball and not shogi is indicting whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself.

Sure, but we're not talking about whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself. We're talking about which baseball team is better.

Sure there are. What constitutes quality is subjective (most players don't, in fact, enjoy fromsoft difficulty curves), but stature is not, and there are plenty of series that absolutely crush the likes of Elden Ring, let alone DMC. There's a reason that the Elden Ring peak concurrent steam players was a bit over 950,000, and Minecraft was over ten times that- the qualities may not be what you value, but stature doesn't care about what you value, it cares about what other people care about.

Sure stature is subjective. Popularity isn't, but stature isn't just popularity, it's reputation. In any case, the games you're talking about aren't the same genre, and one doesn't need to gerrymander a soulslike genre to do so. I was actually thinking of 3rd person action open world RPG for Elden Ring, and 3rd person crazy stylish action game for DMC. Again, for either, I can't think of any Western made games of the same genre that come even close.

Sure, but we're not talking about whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself. We're talking about which baseball team is better.

No, the OP is talking about which cultural paradigm is better. Hence why it is Eastern vs Western media while trying to characterize the products as culturally eastern even when only their production or publishing is, and not Eastern-made Western media versus Western-made Western media.

Sure stature is subjective. Popularity isn't, but stature isn't just popularity, it's reputation. In any case, the games you're talking about aren't the same genre, and one doesn't need to gerrymander a soulslike genre to do so. I was actually thinking of 3rd person action open world RPG for Elden Ring, and 3rd person crazy stylish action game for DMC. Again, for either, I can't think of any Western made games of the same genre that come even close.

Without knowing what sort of metrics you're using to make the claim of stature or genre, and with you dismissing popularity, I can't think of any way to disprove the position at all, or to prove it in the first place.

DMC is high-stature based on... what? Helping establish a niche sub-genre that most players don't care about? Elden Ring's stature water point, at least, was based on its immediate release popularity- but a non-trivial part of that just-release hype was popularity benefiting from the advertising emphasizing Game of Thrones as a bridge for the non-Soulsborne, and the player base dropped precipitously when most of those non-Soulsbourne dropped. Is Stature supposed to piggy back on the initial popularity, but not enduring popularity?

What does this category 'Stature' mean beyond 'I respect it, and I think a lot of other people do too' versus 'I don't respect it, and so it doesn't matter how many others do'?

Or, to put it another way- why, besides snobery, should I be more impressed by the DMC franchise (30 million sales worldwide) than the Civilization (40 million worldwide franchise sales) or Call of Duty (425 million copies, 100 million active monthly players in 2023)?

It's not like there's lack of established western franchises that meet your broad categories. Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Red Dead, and Grand Theft Auto are all open world action games of note, some with far more RPG credentials that Elden Ring which is JRPG in the mechanical build sense rather than story-changes-according-to-actions RPG. Depending on what you mean by 'stylish' action games, Helldivers, God of War, Fortnight, Gears of War, or even Doom. Call of Duty has been a spectacle shooter for over a decade at this point- is that not stylish because it relies on gunplay and grenades and setpieces rather than melee combos and stylized cutscenes?

Well, no. This is where we go back to rhetorical gerrymandering, and using winnowing language to remove comparisons. Elden Ring and SWTOR are both open world RPGs, but one is action with 'press X to act' parkour gameplay and a non-linear narrative delivery structure, and one is MMO with 'press hotkey to act' non-parkour to activate with at least 9 novel-scale storylines, ranging from hero's journey to revenge journey to a spy thriller. Both are open-world RPGs with considerable quality, but only one is dismissed by adding yet another qualifier.

And that's when the qualifier is clear. Helldivers and DMC are not the same sort of stylish action games, but they are both action games with an emphasis on style. However, the lack of a western equivalent to DMC specifically is evidence of failure, while the eastern equivalent to Helldivers 2's brand of dystopian-parody sci-fi team-killing we're-the-baddies co-op chaos is...?

If the argument just wants to be that certain sub-genres are dominated by non-western countries, sure. That's banaly true, and can even be narrowed down to 'certain sub-genres are dominated by specific non-western companies.' No one of note outside of Koei is making Dynasty Warrior successes. But it's equally true that there are sub-genres dominated by western companies, and arguing over the stature just turns into a 'my luxury playtime toy is higher class than your crass and low-class luxury playtime toy.'

No, the OP is talking about which cultural paradigm is better. Hence why it is Eastern vs Western media while trying to characterize the products as culturally eastern even when only their production or publishing is, and not Eastern-made Western media versus Western-made Western media

I don't think your interpretation is correct. The fact that the OP also responded to your comment with essentially the exact same point I made, that the fact that Elden Ring is Western through and through despite the Japanese developers only reinforces his point, indicates that his point indeed was one of the devs, not about cultural paradigms.

What does this category 'Stature' mean beyond 'I respect it, and I think a lot of other people do too' versus 'I don't respect it, and so it doesn't matter how many others do'?

Yes, obviously any talk about influence of fictional media is subjective. It's not infinitely subjective, but there's no avoiding subjectivity, and certainly objective numbers can't override it, though it can contribute to it.

It's not like there's lack of established western franchises that meet your broad categories. Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Red Dead, and Grand Theft Auto are all open world action games of note, some with far more RPG credentials that Elden Ring which is JRPG in the mechanical build sense rather than story-changes-according-to-actions RPG. Depending on what you mean by 'stylish' action games, Helldivers, God of War, Fortnight, Gears of War, or even Doom. Call of Duty has been a spectacle shooter for over a decade at this point- is that not stylish because it relies on gunplay and grenades and setpieces rather than melee combos and stylized cutscenes?

I find this paragraph pretty ridiculous. That these games aren't in the same genre as Elden Ring or DMC isn't some result of gerrymandering, it's the result of people categorizing these games based on how gamers perceive them based on their interests and styles and such. Assassin's Creed and GTA could be said to fit into the same genre as Elden Ring, but the former has been shit on for over a decade already for being formulaic, while the latter's core combat and movement based around guns and cars places it ina different category. This isn't gerrymandered, this is the consequence of people noticing that these games differ in critical, important ways that directly affect the structure of the game and the way the players interact with them. Same goes for first person versus third person, which is a pretty major and meaningful differentiator, which is why DMC and Doom don't fit in the same genre (though I'd argue that Doom brought a lot of the feel of DMC from the third person format to third person), even before getting into the difference between shooter and melee combat.

I do think that the default presumption should be that any observation of differences here between East and West is an artifact of different countries being better at different genres. However, the fact that so many of the Eastern successes rely so heavily on Western culture - even the anime-style Genshin Impact is heavily influenced by Western medieval fantasy - only strengthens the point that the original comment was making.

Elden Ring is basically a video game adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen

I've actually never heard this interpretation of the plot of Elden Ring. Can you please elaborate on this?

Adaptation should be understood to be very loose and oversimplified rather than direct, and mixing in some of those other influences, but sure.

The story is the struggle of gods, heroes, and several mythical creatures over the eponymous magic ring that was made from stolen gold, that grants domination over the entire world. The drama and intrigue continue through three generations of narrative protagonists, until the final cataclysm of the twilight of the gods, which ends with the death of all the gods but also the birth of a new world without them and free of their influence.

The majority of the narrative- but not the final act in which reflects generational change- is a result of the actions of the head of the pantheon of the doomed gods in three main parts. In the first part, the head of the pantheon steals the golden ring by force, and with it is able to establish a mighty fortress, but with the seeds of future ruin hinted at from the start. In the second phase, the pantheon head has spawned a dynasty of godlings, and is known as a manipulator of them and is involved in the death of the golden child, who both does and does not die, even as they set forth a plan for a maiden daughter that will have world-ending ramifications for the era of the gods.

In the third phase, the head of the pantheon has gone from an active figure driving the plot to a manipulator from behind the scenes while the rest of the cast fights and kills eachother over the ring. By the end of their plot, the pantheon head goes from fearing the end of the gods to willing it to be so, advancing the destruction of what they have built, utilizing a plot set in motion an age before. The home of the gods and the world tree surrounding will be burned in the fires of death at the direction of the pantheon-head's maiden daughter, who willingly dies in the same flames, which are themselves of the domain/act of a fire god bound to the head-god's will long ago.

The head of the pantheon in both cases is based on Odin, head of a dynastic pantheon of doomed gods, and who is a shapeshifting trickster god with a penchant for cross dreassing and yet also a war-god who was obsessed with death and the future. Odin sacrificed an eye and was speared to the world tree in a sort of ritualistic suicide in pursuit of the knowledge of runes, in an effort to influence the future. Odin's god-magic allowed them to cure the sick, calm storms, turn weapons against the attackers, make women fall in love, and render dangerous troll women harmless. It even allowed them to take the form of another person, which is just a wee-bit important to the plot of Elden Ring.

Re-emphasizing that this is a very loose reusage of tropes and themes, including adapting Odin beyond the play's presentation of Wotan, Elden Ring borrows from Der Ring Des Nibelungen in terms of-

-The titular magical gold ring, which has world-dominating powers

-The role of the magical gold ring, which is for everyone to fight over

-The nature of the Wotan's taking of the ring by force as a sort of 'original sin'

-The role of Wotan as a dynasty-founding manipulator

-The death of the golden-child of Wotan dynasty, who both does and does not die

-The role of Wotan's children in leading the next world

-The transition of Wotan from advancing the world order to working against it

-The role of Wotan in helping sett claimants against each other even after stepping out of the direct story

-The role of Wotan's daughter in invoking the god-killing/world-tree burning flames of a bound fire-god

-The role of Wotan's daughter in choosing to die through this act

Marika, the god-queen of elden ring, is in turn a derivative of Odin in terms of being-

-A ambitious war god who established a dynasty dominant in their realm by right of conquest, rather than as a creator-god

-A trickster god with transformation powers (the item to transform into other things, Mimic Veil, is also known in-setting as Marika's mischief)

-A manipulator god known to lie / deceive / sacrifice others for their own interest, including their own family

-Magical power sets, including identity projection, gender shenanigans, and the ability to make women fall in love (Marika's rival-queen-turned-wife-by-cross-gender-proxy)

-An obsession with death and the future (Marika's actions to seal away destined death to create an artificial immortality, but also preparing the mechanisms to destroy said system via the fire giant plot)

-An interest in learning more on runes as a means to other things (Odin's goal in sacrificing the eye; Marika's only late-reign motivations is to plumb the depths of the golden order, and the metaphysical research of the late golden-order scholars into the metaphysics which run on runes)

-The imagery and execution of an elaborate ritual suicide scheme that involves losing an eye and being pierced in the side with a spear while being pinned to the world-tree (Marika's end-position in the end-game, which is a result of her scheming and duality-nature not only between herself and Radagon, but themselves and the Elden Ring)

-The role of the suicide-ritual as a means to an end of larger ambitions (Odin's sacrifice was to gain the power of runes and knowledge of other worlds; Marika's purpose is part of an extensive scheme to wound and kill the Elden Beast, which is the Elden Ring, which is also her/Radagon (the alchemic theming playing heavier here), and which ends with Marika functionally replacing the Elden Beast on the deific hierarchy in 'her' endings)

-Said larger ambitions being an effort to defy fate / overcome the inevitable end of the world (Odin fails / arguably only succeeds via progeny who survive ragnerok; Marika's plan in 'her' endings involves her functionally displacing the Elden Beast in the divine hierarchy, by becoming synonymous with the elden ring as the mending rune is applied to her and remaining part of the new world even after her dynasty passes)

Are there differences to this? Sure. It's not a direct adaptation, and not trying to be, and oversimplification and all that.

But compared to the fandom's propensity before the recent DLC to try and shove Elden Ring into a pseudo-christian mythos (because clearly the only parallel to an organized religious institition is the Catholic Church), Elden Ring is positively dripping with north germanic vibes and tropes both in and out of the Ring Cycle.

which ends with the death of all the gods but also the birth of a new world without them and free of their influence.

The majority of the narrative- but not the final act in which reflects generational change

Isn't that what Ranni's ending is? Someone has to pick up the ring so she does, free from the elder will and takes the power away from the world, to the stars, so that it can no longer influence the world and it can be free.

Kinda / no / not really what I was alluding to.

All of the endings reflect the generational change, death of the gods influence, and the birth of the new world without the old gods influence, but one shaped by the influence of the free hero who serves as the transition. In Gotterdammerung, it's the power of Siegfried and Brunnhilde's redemptive love that breaks the curse and gives the new world a redemptive motif to end the play, but in Elden Ring the nature of the next world is left to the various ending themes / focuses, none of which are love.

As for the characterization of Ranni, disagreement on multiple fronts. Ranni is not a freedom-and-rebellion protagonist.

-Fundamentally, Elden Ring's player-experienced plot is a mystery plot (what happened / why did Marika break the ring), not a rebellion plot. The belief that Marika / Ranni are in some form of rebellion and trying to free the world from the greater will is broader fan theory deriving from failing to recognize the mystery plot, which deliberately structures the internal acts of the games (guided primarily by the accessible lore in difficulty eras) to encourage a belief that Marika (and Ranni's) motivations are in opposition to the Outer Gods, which are introduced as mid-game concepts as part of the forces tearing apart the world. They aren't- Marika's intent to destroy the Elden Ring is later revealed to have been long-premeditated even before her conquests were complete (the exiling of the Tarnished, the fire giant plot to destroy the tree), while Ranni never actually acknowledges any outer god or the Greater Will (who is never categorized as an elder god either, but which players tried to impose due to thinking the 'outer' meant 'from outer space').

-The reason the plot is not a rebellion plot against the Greater Will is that there's fundamentally nothing to rebel against- the Greater Will has no presence or political role / influence, and there is no enforcement scheme on how the Elden Ring is used. The fan theory that Marika and Ranni were in rebellion against it was a fan/cultural dynamic of trying to fill the mystery of the mystery plot, by projecting a western-expectation of a rebellion-against-god plot when there's no indications in game the rebels and god ever interacted or even coexisted.

The Greater Will being an absent god, and having not been present for longer than any of the even deific character cast have been alive, is part of the plot twists to the early game's narrative encouraging the players to doubt the Two Fingers, who claim to be prophets of the Greater Will, and encouraging a conflict-driven understanding of the various gods of the setting. The early game narration/guiding characters implies/claims that the Greater Will wants things to be a certain way, and presents the Two Fingers as beings of influence and insight, but this is a lie. Not only does critical-path lore reveal the Fingers are not and have not been in contact with the Greater Will for who knows how long, to the degree that they attribute multiple actions of Marika to the Greater Will, but the plot twist at the end of Farum Azula is that not only was Marika not the first 'god' of the Ring, but that there is no set order from the ring- Marika meddled with the composition from the start, but the nature of the Ring and Order has evolved considerably from the era of Dragons of pre-history. There is no 'Greater Will approved' order, or pressure to comply with a specific form of the Elden Ring, there is simply a metaphysical order responding to those who press their will.

(In the non-critical path, further lore reveals the Two Fingers weren't even that important. Rather than being important and influential figures in Marika's Religion, with Marika being some intermediary-pope subservient to the Greater Will, it's discoverable that the Two Finger lore is literal heresy, that Marika came to power by beating up their previously recognized Empyrean the Gloam-Eyed Queen (which is to say she was not appointed, she seized by conquest against their previous interests), and that the Greater Will's last action in the setting was in the pre-history. While the early-game Two Fingers try to present Marika as an errant intermediary, Marika's Golden Order was a god-queen cult which treated her as the only relevant god, not a subordinate. The fan theory that the Golden Order made Marika do things she didn't want at the behest of the Greater Will was always a fan theory- she was a genocidal warlord whose character trait was ambition.)

-Ranni is also not in a rebellion quest or reluctantly picking up the ring because she is purposefully advancing her predestined potential as an Empyrean in what amounts to a greek irony of running into the prophesy she seeks to avoid. Ranni's claimed rebellion is both a case of the irony of exact words- her Two Fingers said she was an Empyrean who could succeed Marika, not that she would (just as there were two other candidates of the same generation who could)- but also a dramatic irony that most of the player base missed despite the majority of Ranni's plotline being the unblocking and fulfillment of her fated destiny.

Ranni is initially presented as a youth-novel protagonist fighting for her free will, but her entire supporting cast are subversions of belief in free will. Her mage advisor wants to turn her into a literal puppet, and is part of a court/class conspiracy to seize power from the royal family via mind-control magic. The royal family in question- her mother Rennala- not only came to power via implicit use of mind-control magic, but may have been under the effects herself at Ranni's conception, as Rannala goes from meeting a cosmic entity to a meteoric rise to scholar-queen, to warrior-queen, to suddenly and madly (but explainable via the same sort of betwitching and enchanting effects associated with her rise to power) falling in love with the masculine-form of the god of the Golden Order for a marriage union that produces a prophesy child (Ranni) and other children who play key roles in subverting the golden order. Well before then, though, Ranni's childhood caretaker is a conspiracy theorist who wears the equivalent of tin foil to prevent the absent-god from reading his thoughts while advancing a multi-generational moleman conspiracy initiated by a dead civilization to put Ranni in place for her destiny to usurp the Elden Ring. Ranni's foster-brother/champion, a being of unbreakable loyalty, is falsely accused of being a mind-controlled tool/assassin despite untold thousands of years of Ranni being in a murder-feud with the alleged controller), and is put down in the midst of him stopping an assassination attempt on Ranni's life. Ranni herself is a literal prophesy child of a star-prophesy civilization who advances at the indirect aid of the ambiguous-god-thing of the Moons, which in Elden Ring are actual entities who manipulate fates and who actually intervene in mortal affairs.

Ranni is the culmination of a underground celestial-worshipping dead civilization's plot to seize control of the Elden Ring... a plot she is an active (if maybe not aware) participant of, from her murder of her half-brother and helping instigate the civil war to her character plot's requirement to re-start her destiny by freeing the stars that were unable to advance her destiny.

Ranni isn't a parody or a deconstruction of free will, but she certainly isn't an agent of it either.

-Ranni's era doesn't remove the influence or the problems of the elden ring, she masks it's still-present effect.

Ranni's order is still a metaphysical order of the elden ring, complete with elden lord consort to the ring-vessel-god, and even in it's setup it is explicitly a transitionary (thousand-year) experience, as fitting the elden mythic cycle of gods. While Ranni presents it as preferable- that it would be better if people couldn't see / feel / touch / believe in the order- that's just a different narrative justification to Miquella's pitch for an era of compassion, and it doesn't change that the order is still there. Ranni's order isn't distant as in proximally far away from other people, it's distant in the sense that it's out of touch, invisible and out of reach, until one day it will be again (the 'return' of the voyage, the inevitable metaphysical turning of the eras that is Miyazaki-worldbuilding and Elden Ring backstory). While this is a great thematic parallel to the Greater Will- another absent entity, and a fulfillment of the Elden Ring/golden order's metaphysical mechanics of regression and causality as Ranni aligns / retunrs closer to the state of the Greater Will (regression)- it's just the turning of the cycle.

Ranni's absence also doesn't 'free' the Lands Between either, since the controlling (and malevolent) factors burdening the Lands Between aren't the applied influence of the Ring, but the actors that exist regardless. This is the explicitly controlling entities now elevated by Ranni (the fate-controlling stars and moons), but also the outer gods like the Scarlett Rot and Formless Mother, and also the ambitious sorts of genocidal warlords and would-be tyrants who would try to conquer and dominate and enforce their will. There is no reformation of the human condition by hiding the Elden Ring, because the Elden Ring was not the cause of the human condition. It is still a cycle where a murderous woman claims the power of god and does what she wants, never really indicating an awareness or interest in resolving problems.

Unsurprisingly, the authors of Game of Thrones and Dark Souls did not write a young adult novel protagonist whose love-interest plot would save the setting.

This is all amazing, shame that the game for me was a murderhobo simulator and nothing else. In a way I can see myself and a few friends getting a few beers and discuss after a playthrough (entirely like I did when the Game of Thrones tv show was coming out), but the game seems to not care about delivering it's themes, so I ended up not bothering at all.

You can see it if you sort of squint at it, since the loss of the titular ring and the fall of the gods of Valhalla have loose parallels in the Shattering and the subsequent destructive wars waged by Marika's children against each other. But that's stretching things. It is true, though, that Elden Ring has hardly any Japanese or Asian influences in it and is in its core sensibilities a thoroughly Western game. This is not really anything new since FromSoft has done this before and to even greater extents; they also did Bloodborne, which as a Gothic Victorian game with a Lovecraftian story could not be less Asian if they'd tried.

It is true, though, that Elden Ring has hardly any Japanese or Asian influences in it and is in its core sensibilities a thoroughly Western game.

This sentiment I'm seeing is such a weird one. What even is "Asian" or "Japanese" here? The way people are speaking it's as if it has geisha women walking in woden sandals and gongs then it's "Japanesey" and if not then it's Western. Culture and the world did not end in 1800. This entire sentiment belies a denial and ignorance of the much more interconnected nature of modernity. People in Japan take influence from things outside of Japan now. What else can they, or anyone else, do but grow in such a way or choose to be an ossified cultural taliban? They were blue jeans. They eat hamburgers, and listen to rock music. And it's all 100% Japanese. Japan makes "western" fantasy and has done so for generations since the early days of D&D being translated over and the game Wizardry getting popular (in Japan).

I'm reminded of when I read a short story by Haruki Murakami about a couple robbing a McDonald's. And the author made an amusing account of the cashier being so shocked and confused by being held up at gunpoint in Tokyo at 1 am under charge to give up dozens of burgers that she didn't know whether to keep "that McDonald's smile." Which doesn't exist in, say, America. It hit me that here is this very American seeming thing but it's very much by and for the Japanese here, and of course McDonald's is just a much a fixture of modern Japanese life as the subway is. The same as childhood karate might be for an American. That's modernity for you.

Also what's a asian vs western game here for that matter? Japan in particular has been a mover and shaker of video games since pretty much the beginning. Arguably Japan more or less made the console a thing. Video games and computers are, again, one of those things made after 1800s. There's cross pollination here. If video games made in Japan by Japanese people are not asian game then what is? Touhou coded exclusively in Ruby?

Arguably Japan more or less made the console a thing.

I'd quibble and say that us Americans made the console (Atari and Fairchild), the Japanese just figured out how to make them a sustainable business by learning from our mistakes.

Thank you. I was circling the comments in this conversation preparing to write something similar.

League is Chinese? They might be owned by tencent, but is any of riot's dev work done in China?

Interestingly Final Fantasy 14 went fairly woke this expansion and it is now the lowest rated expansion they have put out. Though to be fair it's also just some of their worst story telling and quest design and they brought in a new writer.

League's core game was pretty much entirely copied from Dota, which had been around for few years at that point. The core development team for Riot Games was 100% western too.

There is nothing Chinese about League.

Eh... writing-wise, it's really hard to beat Stormblood for jank or ARR for bloat. Dawntrail's got some of the notes pretty dumb, but I think more of the problem's that its trying to put too many plates in the air, more than gone woke -- even Wuk Lamat's weird story arc is just LyseV2 more than Trans Superstar, and the 'we defeat our enemies when we make them our friends' line with the Turiyolal is a continuation of Minfilla's story with the Beast Tribes.

And both Endwalker and Shadowbringer were also just really outstanding for MMO writing, in ways that would be difficult to repeat. Alexandria couldn't and shouldn't have been Ancients v2 Electric Boogaloo.

((Though them no longer being Beast Tribes is as much woke as it is the paradox of non-Beastman 'Beast' Tribes.))

Out of morbid curiosity, I've been playing FFXIV for years, but have only been making my way through Dawntrail slowly - its setting and story thus far haven't been bad, but I'd say they've been aggressively mid, in a way that makes me feel more bored than anything else.

I've generally avoided any fandom discussion of it. Dare I ask what the perceived issues are?

If you're still playing through, I'll be somewhat vague to avoid spoilers.

The stakes are low, and the time pressure lower. Most expansions have started with some rising threat well before the expansion dropped -- Heavensward most famously with the WoL being chased to Ishgard after being framed as a regicidal maniac while Ascians were behind the Ishgardian popehat, Stormblood with the giant Shinryu hamster ball and (for better or worse) Zenos, Shadowbringers everybody being kidnapped to the First and a threat of a whole Umbral Calamity, and Endwalker the Garlean Empire getting desperate enough to start summoning weird primals and throwing out those towers. Here, there's only really the Turiyolal succession, its worst-case scenario is a Bad Brother Winning mumble mumble, until nearly level 95.

Said brother's motivations aren't that interesting or deep. That's not new: one of the big fandom critiques of Zenos was the extent he seemed just bounce around being evil at his uncle's behest and out of Shonen Anime Antagonist-dom, and while there were character notes under that, they only really started to flower with more time post-suicide. In Dawntrail, Zoraal Ja's claimed motivations sound like a less charismatic and coherent version of the Senator Armstrong speech with a sprinkling of For Peace thrown in, and all we get from other characters about him is a talk about Ambition and loneliness. I don't think every villain needs to be or should be a misunderstood woobie, but he comes across as just jumbled. There's a way to read him that's coherent and I think it's the intended read, but a lot of people don't get that from the writing, and even with that read he feels more rabid dog than dire threat. ((We do get an idea for the actual final boss, and it's more interesting, but it comes really late.))

Wuk Lamat feels a bit much like Lyse v2, where she's the main character for this story and we're here to escort and/or cheerlead her. There's always a bit of this going on, since the WoL's almost-mute nature means you need a couple characters for the story cutscenes to work at all, but where previous expansions have had your retinue helping you, or at worst the Scions operating as a group with you as a vital part. Here,

The emotional notes aren't that strong. There's some really high bars to pass, here, by video game standards: .

The Role and new Job quests are also fairly uninspiring. The role quests are often funny, if sometimes in dark ways, but just don't really have the emotional weight for what they're going for. The role quests are more serious, but they're seldom that memorable. Nothing's so bad as the 3.x PLD quest line, but it's never really going above average. There's not even much in the way of good lore about the world; you mostly learn about This One Weird Artifact per. ((I'd actually say that the crafter role quests do a better job, writing-wise: while they're just text they feel more about doing the actual role in the actual place with the actual people, where especially the Sharlayan ones were more having random chores attached to a disconnected story. Uh, excepting FSH 7.0, which goes BLU.))

I don't agree with all the critiques -- in particular, I think the lower stakes is a good thing even if the pacing problems aren't -- but I can understand the complaints.

Much of that tracks with how I feel so far. I don't mind it being a lower-stakes expansion, and indeed I think that's a good thing. For comparison, the last few Elder Scrolls Online expansion stories - Blackwood, High Isle, Necrom - went from a demon lord seeking to destroy the world to a fun vacation and peace conference on a resort island to a demon lord who might accidentally destroy the world, and the most fun expansion was the low-stakes one at the resort. FFXIV in particular seems badly in need of lowering the stakes somewhat and just exploring an interesting corner of Hydaelyn.

My negative feeling on Dawntrail at the moment is mainly just that it's, well, boring. Tural and Tuliyollal are noticeably bland and uninspiring places compared to the last places we've been, the villains are tight-lipped and boring, and the heroic characters we meet are likewise very paint-by-numbers. I don't hate Wuk Lamat, but I'd tend to agree that she is badly over-exposed, particularly because there's just not a lot there, in terms of personality? She'd be fine as a supporting character, I think, but she's being asked to hold up the entire plot, and that's too much for her.

Part of me wonders if it's just that I've played too much FFXIV and I'm tired of it. After all, Norvrandt was also pretty uninspiring for most of the setting (Eulmore excepted; it was delightfully macabre). We're coming off several expansions with Zenos playing a major role, and Zenos was awful. However, I can't help but think that something is wrong, because I am really struggling to find the motivation to play Dawntrail. I just don't care about this place or about any of these people. Where I cared about Ishgard's fate, or about Ala Mhigo's struggle for freedom, here I just do not care who becomes Dawnservant.

Anyway, I asked because I wondered if there was a 'culture war' angle? If Dawntrail is just a mediocre and boring expansion, then that's fine - I've played a lot of MMORPGs and they all spin their wheels sometimes. But is there anything else inflaming fan feeling? You mention a 'Trans Superstar' perception, for instance. I vaguely heard something negative about Wuk Lamat's voice actor, but I can't immediately find any evidence of anything controversial connected to Sena Bryer (edit, googled, apparently Bryer is trans, but... meh, you can't tell that from anything in-game), and the acting itself, in-game, is... fine? Not amazing, but fine. (Plus, well, remember ARR? FFXIV has had some very bad voice acting in the past, and Wuk Lamat's nowhere near ARR-Minfilia.) I also ran into criticisms of Dawntrail's story for being a very generic "yay for multiculturalism!" story, but then, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker all had major subplots or even central story arcs about uniting disparate communities or convincing old enemies to understand each other and make peace or some variant on it, so again I feel like the issue there isn't the premise, but rather the execution. It's not that understanding and seeking harmony between diverse local factions is bad, because we've been doing that in-game for a decade - it seems, at least to me, just that Tural is boring.

I admit I find the culture war angle with FFXIV a bit odd, because otherwise I would have thought that FFXIV is the most, for lack of a better term, 'conservative' of the major MMOs currently on the market.

I just do not care who becomes Dawnservant.

Yeah. And the weird bit is that I don't think we're supposed to: Galool Ja Ja takes you aside around level 83 to specifically say that it doesn't matter who wins the whole keystone deal; regardless of the contest, he'll never approve a claimant that would be a clearly bad Dawnservant, specifically drawing out the two Mamook as failing to grow. The second half of the story kinda recovers by making a more interesting matter show up, but it does so by making clear that a lot of the threats in the first half never could have worked, even if Galool Ja Ja had made a bad mistake.

It's not awful -- when you're done, there's a pretty decent read of everything as a kind of slow-moving tragedy -- but it doesn't have that sorta drive To Find Out that the Dragonsong War, The First, or Elpis had, until nearly level 97.

Anyway, I asked because I wondered if there was a 'culture war' angle?

I've seen a theoretical anti-woke force opposed to Bryer proposed as the cause behind some of the recent DDoS, given the lack of anyone claiming responsibility, but I'm pretty skeptical; both at the sense of such a group existing and caring enough, and in a right-leaning group like that being able to shut up about it.

There's some story motions that could be read about more generic culture war stuff, especially since everything north of the Bridge from Yok Tural is very specifically Fantasy North America, and there's ways you could kinda draw the whole thing as a 'Best and Worst of America', given how closely the spoiler faction looks like a dark mirror to the Turali. There's been some attempts to draw the spoiler faction as a metaphor for AI, or a parable about American Imperialism, or Capitalism, though these are... either strained or generic. The Whalaqee have been fantasy!NativeAmericans being chased by a combination of accidental disease transmission and overt manifest destiny for fantasy!oil since BLU was first added, and while they're backgrounded, the fantasy!oil pumps are not. Maybe the Shalooni msq bit as anti-police corruption in a modern sense? I think you have to read pretty aggressively into it for everything but the Whalaqee.

I think the steelman would be more about the negative space. It is relevant that the Turali are explicitly Central American, and that there's not really much critique of their society. There's a different portrayal of the same story where Galool Ja Ja is a reasonable but less perfect ruler that would still have worked and hit the same story notes -- he has his vices, like his capriciousness and taste for combat, they just are never flaws -- or where Tural is a seen as a hegemonizing force rather than Sharlayan via Koana, or where conflicts between various Turali factions were a lot less reasonable.

But that's still extremely limited compared to Western game politics.

The impression I have is that Tural is meant to be something like Eorzea, only a generation or two onwards. It's pretty clear there are deep tensions and divisions under the surface, and Tural is not as harmonious as it presents itself as. It's only tenuously unified out of a combination of love for and fear of Gulool Ja Ja, who is the Warrior of Light of his society. Much like Eorzea, it seems like Tural was a group of quarrelling tribes and city-states, and it was brought together out of crisis by a superlatively-capable warrior-adventurer. That sounds like, well, what you the player character did for Eorzea. But now it's fifty years later, Gulool isn't going to last forever, and what he accomplished may well fall apart.

Possibly I'll be disappointed later on, but right now I don't get the feeling that Tural is necessarily all that utopian. Before this FFXIV has generally been good at finding the balance with societies, I think. Even the sympathetic city-states (all six Eorzean states, Doma, Hingashi, Bozja, etc.) have skeletons in their closet and some unsympathetic traits, and likewise even the villainous nations (mostly Garlemald) have been shown to possess virtues, and be home to many likeable characters. I think the closest we get to purely utopian/dystopian societies is in Shadowbringers, with the Crystarium and Eulmore, and even then Eulmore's corruption is mostly due to Vauthry, and once he's removed you can appeal to the people and they start to make rapid improvements. That mostly leaves the Crystarium as the most one-note society in the game, and I'd happily say that the Crystarium is the blandest, least interesting civilisation in the game. I suppose there's the Ancients as well, but I think the Ancient society is pretty clearly depicted as horribly, dangerously flawed, and even perhaps dystopian in its own way, simultaneously naive and immensely, recklessly powerful. (I have run into people reading the world of the Ancients as uncomplicatedly utopian and good, but I question those people's reading comprehension.)

This is actually one of the reasons why I think FFXIV's overall portrayal of the world is pretty conservative-friendly, or even surprisingly anti-progressive - there are no utopias, and social improvement is only possible through slow, incremental work, which seems to always require renouncing simple binaries of good and bad, or oppressor and oppressed. This often requires tools that would be unsatisfying to a progressive mindset - I remember enjoying the way that both Ala Mhigan/Ul'dahn and Garlean/Thavnairian relations, for repairing those states, explicitly had to be built on capitalism and mutual advantage. Watching Nanamo gradually figure out how to make the Syndicate work for the common good, to wield the power of coin, of market and profit, for the good was very satisfying. Plus I think it's relevant that multiple sympathetic states (Gridania, Ishgard, Hingashi) are relatively anti-immigrant and isolationist, and this is not presented as something we need to change or fix. Gridania has every right to limit its borders to what it believes that its natives and the forest can support. The Hingans have a perfect right to not allow foreigners deeper into their country. This isn't a blandly progressive worldview.

If nothing else, the Ancients' major sin is hubris - they act like gods, fail to reckon with their own moral flaws or capacity for evil, and assume that they have an unlimited right to remake the world to suit their needs. The one good Ancient, Venat, is also the one who's a monotheist - the one who, in her key character moment, confesses to you that she perceives the presence of some kind of divinity beyond her. That seems a lot like a Judeo-Christian Fall narrative, up to the point where the Ancients' Babel collapses, and many nations - or parallel worlds - are spread out from the ruins. Venat's appearance as a kind of guardian angel with a flaming sword, guarding the way back to the Tree of Life, only fits that further. And it seems relevant that Endwalker's finale, the conclusion to the grand story they'd been building for years, echoes the conclusion to 1.0, in that the universe is saved by the power of prayer.

Certainly there are lots of fan readings out there that disagree with me, but I think there's a lot of room for reading FFXIV's story, at least from ARR through to Endwalker, as being quite conservative.

Yeah, that seems correct. I don't think you'll be disappointed with the rest of how Tural goes. There's definitely still warts-and-all for every one of the cultures you encounter; the Pelupelu, Moblins, and X'braal, just come across as a little minimized compared to others.

((And given how much Gridania's warts get minimized, even including the WHM class quests, that's saying something.))

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hmm for me the woke was mostly in how fake the world felt. A land that's full of diverse peoples that have been at war until just recently but they're all holding hands and singing kumbaya and if there happens to be a disagreement here or there it's fixed in an instant by something like tasty food, or resources. They've all had their cultures diminished to nothingness in just a few years of Galool ja ja's rule or something. Usually it's interesting to see how Japanese interpret foreign cultures via anime and other media since they are so insular they don't seem to bothered when the opinions are incorrect or offend. This felt like they were working with outside consulting groups until they got the usual soulless western media style fictional cultures that have all their rough edges sanded off.

Eh... there's still a lot of weird cultures going on. The entire point of the Lay of Repast joke is specifically about how two Mamool Ja are willing to overlook the Mamook side of that tradition. The Lay of Gold is the only one that doesn't rely on historical stuff, instead the modern (Dawnservant-inspired) Pelu focus on trade. It's less obvious in Tural the city, and the big focus on Big Fat Tacos kinda does do the cultures-as-foods-and-funny-hats bit, but if you look around there's still different parts of the city more focused on Mamook, X'braal, Pelu, and Hhetsarro architectures.

Even where the monoculture answer 'works', like Koana's solution to the Lay of Reeds, it's noteworthy that it doesn't work better: it heals fewer plots of reeds than the ritual magic, and likely has little beneficial effect on the wildlife. In Shaaloani zone, the monoculture sheriff is reasonable but completely fleeced; the local Old Ways of dueling saves the day. And groups like the Yok Huy are both fractured in tolerating Turalyi dominance at all, and even those that 'tolerate' it barely interact with others.

There's definitely a problem, but the game struggling with treating each zone as real cultures and simultaneously bottle episodes that can be solved in at most a dungeon or trial has been a thing since ARR -- the only people you can't persuade that way are literally brainwashed by primals, beast tribe or Ishgardian alike -- and lampshaded as early as Stormblood. The cultures here are a little less interestingly weird than those of the Au Ra tribes, but the Au Ra were far outliers: contrast the Doma, Ishgard, Bozja, so on.

The harder part is that it's openly judgemental about traditions: both the 'sacred brothers' tradition and Koana's abandonment are explicitly written as bad, in contrast to Yok Huy remembrances or the Hhetsarro tribe's interactions with their beasts of burden. That's not completely unprecedented (ie, Ala Mhigan militarism and kings, Limosan piracy).

But I don't know that they're woke in that sense. The sacred brothers deal in particular is not especially woke-flavored ('interracial marriages are bad for the kids?')

Yea I could see it just being bad writing did mention that in my original post that this is probably the worst story we've gotten since ARR. Spending so little time on each culture would also force them to appear shallow rather than it being woke consulting.

It was weird that they seemed to feel so rushed to tour all the local cultures and not leave them open to exploration later considering this is supposed to be the 1st book in their new arc. ARR introduced a bunch of different people that we had smaller interactions with or whose story didn't really come to the forefront until later. You interact with Ishgard early on, but don't go there and really get a deeper understanding until Heavensward. A lot of the Thanallan / ala mhigo and lala plots don't get wrapped up til Stormblood even. This gave the player some mystery or stuff to think about and look forward to in later patches. For w/e reason we didn't get that with Tural. Every culture needs to be tied up with a neat bow by the time we leave.

With the lay of reeds quest this still felt woke to me. It wasn't written like, "tradition works," the point of it was that our lib arts degree majors know better than unfeeling STEM. Wuk isn't a traditionalist, bizarrely she seems to know nothing about her home country despite having lived there her whole life, she is more a "listen to people's lived experiences" type.

For me it was hard not to pattern match it to woke though with the shallow feel good cultures, girl boss mc, beloved characters being sidelined for the sake of propping up new mc etc. Even had a disney esque themesong. There has been a lot more western pressure on Japanese brands and the ff14 community is probably one of the more degenerate and weird ones out of all the mmo's. They've pressured yoshi p to make perv changes like allowing female gear on male chars and stuff.

As a self admitted enjoyer of east Asian cultural products I agree that they're doing well and are even ascendant but the Chinese don't really factor into this.

LoL is an American game, made by an American studio in America, that was acquired by a Chinese company well after it was released and got popular.

China is lagging in all areas of culture production, games, movies, TV and books. There are a few standout hits like wukong or the three body problem but in general the output is trash, unbelievably so. Have you tried playing the chinese mobile Skinner box games? Watch Chinese hit tv shows? Movies? They're almost universally god-awful. They have the technical and financial capacity to create good things but overwhelmingly aren't, even compared to woke America, which really says something.

Chinese pop culture is crippled by government diktats. There was a brief flourishing in late 2010s to early 2020s of Chinese xianxia martial arts stuff that started getting lots of traction, like Word Of Honor and The Untamed, which was initially pleasing to the Chinese authorities for their popular reception in other Asian countries and increased traction in the west.

Turns out, they were popular because they were adaptations of webnovels written by bored ladies chapter by chapter on long commutes. And these bored Chinese women, like bored western women, write thinly veiled smut.

So you have these xianxia novels with impeccably beautiful men having intense physical and emotional fights with each other as they struggle with their roiling emotions, while a virtuous woman laments at their conflict and tries to use her womanly charm to get them to stop their conflict and kiss and make up And continue kissing, and do more.

These adaptations, greenlit by producers desperate for content and 'blind' to the subtext, go balls out in following the vision of the author, complete with creative reinterpretations that somehow enhance the original vision, and when queried by censors the producers just shrug and say 'its the source material, and people like it'. It doesn't actually have gay kissing on screen, just two beautiful men staring intensely at each other in shiny flowing silk robes as a camera spins around them while dramatic music plays and they verbalize their emotional torments. Totally not gay sex. Oh and the 'disciple' of one of the men is the source of what is effectively a custody battle as both men try to be good role models for the 'disciple' and in the end the men make up and have their own academy with the boy as their head disciple and its totally straight and not a gay romance ending and wait wasn't there a female MC at one point?

Women went fucking feral for this shit, and Chinese cultural products started getting consumed voraciously. Then the CCP figured women were having unrealistic standards for men and mandated no prettyboys in TV, and uptake has slowed accordingly.

The Koreans dramas have a much higher international reception even in English media because the Koreans stay shamelessly pretty, and have the extensive plastic surgery to keep it up. I hate kdramas for their tropiness and generally poor acting, but the koreans have leaned in to their strengths and keep their output at max shamelessness. I don't like Jdramas because their dudes all have some weird fucking hairstyle that makes them look like unkempt hairballs and I watch too much JAV to take japanese live action women seriously.

Then the CCP figured women were having unrealistic standards for men and mandated no prettyboys in TV, and uptake has slowed accordingly.

Was this one of the measures introduced by Wang Huning?

Chinese actors are still universally very pretty, only with slightly different beauty norms than in Korea. If anything, the dominating beauty norms in china are still more boyish than Korea or even Japan.

The reason Korean dramas are more popular in the west than the Japanese or Chinese equivalents isn't because their actors are better looking, they're not (than the Chinese anyway), it's because they're much better written, acted, formatted and directed. Are they formulaic? Absolutely, but not more so than their Japanese or Chinese counterparts. I do agree that the Japanese sometimes act better though.

I absolutely agree with you that the CCP is a (probably the) major drag on things. Have you noticed the jingle/music they play when the propaganda segments start? I'm of two minds, either this is too is mandated by the party or they're winking towards the audience.

True that the Chinese acting talent pool just seems to terrible. I would personally attribute that to traditional sinic objections to economically precarious professions, with Chinese talent development basically being 30 years behind the evolution of Japanese and Korean talent scouting and development model, compared with the Hong Kong and Taiwanese producer driven model. Given the constraints put on directors and the frankly terrible salaries writers and producers and staff get compared to celebrities, it also explains the formulaic plots and recycled sets. My own limited dealing with Chinese creatives is that they usually leave China, or go into the relatively unmoderated video game scene, which is where you get the Chinese video game trope of 'cute girls with PTSD' being the dominant narrative medium.

As for the CCP tentacles being winked at, I did not notice it. I stopped watching K/C/HK/Tdramas when my wife got bored of them and got hooked on shopping livestreams instead, freeing me from the torment of pretending to care about formulaic love triangles.

There may be great acting talents in these shows, but being shoved into formulaic tropefests for lowest effort highest reward limits opportunities to showcase auteur talents. The Japanese do seem to like their weird shit which lets actors like Hiroyuki Sanada and Ken Watanabe flex their chops, and the Koreans do good KATUSA work with Steven Yuen, and I really like Lee Jung Jae in Acolyte, where he did fantastic work objectively and his performance along with Manny Jacinto elevated an otherwise messy show. For a dude with no native english and just constant micro expressions he did really well, and if Acolyte had focused on him and Dafne Keen instead of the black girl it would have been way better received.

We have not seen opportunities for Chinese auteurs to flex, beyond the stuff from Hong Kong and that is largely the remnants of the 90s-2000s Hong Kong greats like Tony Leung, Andy Lauand Jackie Chan (he was really good in Steelhead). It will be awhile before any modern Chinese actors like Yang Yang will go beyond domestic attention.

That's funny because all of the xianxia stuff I've read has been pure male story-telling. Intricate power systems, plot focused, progression fantasy, lots of fighting and tactics, struggle for power and status, accumulation of beautiful girls, open sexism and homophobia.

I guess it's the fanfiction.org vs AO3 divide all over again: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context

Intricate power systems, struggle for power and status

Dudes being dudes in on eachother is like bait for women, they love that stuff.

Men care about this kind of thing platonically, in the 'who would win' sense where it's pure love of the game... Women just like how it looks and what it signals. Idk, maybe it's how women put all this effort and brainpower into looking good, they know all these sewing techniques, foundation and makeup:

According to a survey, if you know that a bandeau is a strapless tube top, you're most likely to be a woman.

And if you know that a howitzer is a large gun, you might be male.

According to a survey, if you know that a bandeau is a strapless tube top, you're most likely to be a woman.

Or married. I have a wife who explained that to me. Several times, since of course I forgot such useless information to make room for more gun stuff each time.

Fictional but likely realizable conversation between me and my friends:

Me: can Harry with the Elder Wand take on Mangekyo Sharingan Sasuke.

Guys: autistically calculate power levels and how to resolve conflicting magic systems and Prep Time

Girls: Sasuke takes Harry because he is more Seme than Harry unless Harry is an Alpha and Natuto made Sasuke his omega

Sasuke stomps. Harry doesn't actually have many good combat feats throughout the series; he mostly dodges behind objects and throws out weaksauce spells like Expelliarmus. He wins the final battle of each book due to a dues ex machina power or artifact or a powerful ally (power of love, sword of Gryffindor + Fawkes, Time-Turner, Prior Incantato, Dumbledore, Elder Wand + wand loyalty). The Elder Wand changes little; in canon, it's just a more powerful wand than normal, not some kind of superweapon. Harry's most powerful offensive spell is Sectumsempra, which he wouldn't use unless bloodlusted (the only time he cast it he did not know what it did, and immediately regretted it), and that's basically just a long-ranged sword. His most powerful defensive spell is Protego (not counting the Patronus charm, which is useless against humans). Harry doesn't have the speed or reflexes to use these effectively against Sasuke.

Now, if it was Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres versus Sasuke, that would be more interesting. HJPEV can't lose as long as he is fighting with the Elder Wand, and that gives him a ton of options, even without prep time. Most obvious is to use his Time-Turner to go back in time and plant high explosives where Sasuke is going to be, but Sasuke has survived an attack like that before. HJPEV's best bet might be to talk to Sasuke to find out his motivations and then tell him that in the glorious transhumanist future he can make reconstructive uploads of his clan if he agrees to surrender.

(Actually, it's kind of weird that nobody in Naruto realizes that Impure World Reincarnation + White Zetsu Clones = Free Immortality For Everyone. I guess that's muggle plots for you).

My girl friends must be much more autistic than normal, while not all of them would be interested in 1, I can't imagine them discussing 2 seriously.

To be fair I've only seen this discussion ONCE in real life. Most of my uncovering of the inner goblins of my college educated lit-minded peers was in one-on-one settings where I express surprise at something like 'I didn't understand the first scene of Sherlock season 2 where they made Sherlock and Moriarty kiss' or 'God Sakura is so annoying the series would be much cooler if they got another girl in the team' and seeing the goblin glint in the girls eye. It only happens with girls who both trust you AND have zero intention of fucking you, which is a sadly rare combination in the current day and age.

The Koreans dramas have a much higher international reception even in English media because the Koreans stay shamelessly pretty, and have the extensive plastic surgery to keep it up.

I distinctly remember an ad for some K-Drama streaming service that had "The prettiest people crying" as an explicit selling point.

I just have to know what you think about Hong Kong cultural output in the latter half of the 20th century.

Mid. So much of the HK dramas dubbed into mandarin for local chinese audiences here in southeast asia are basically the same few stories with different skins. The underlying skeleton of family dramas are the same across all cultures, so whether it is Billions or Succession or Dynasty the centrality of sibling and patriarch dynamics will always be present. I do blame the honkies for shitloads of weird complexes about younger-brother-and-elder-brothers-wife, and the Japs for son-and-stepmother complexes based on certain Noticing of their dramatic outputs. I heard that Indian dramas especially focus on mother-vs-daughter-in-law conflicts but my tolerance for bad filming cannot handle Indian or Latin American editing.

I think the reason for HKdrama exploding outwards and receiving a virtuous cycle of profits and reinvestment was the Chinese diaspora being starving for recognizable content, and the Hongkies were the first to produce media at scale, since the Taiwanese were struggling with their language issues over Hokkien vs Mandarin and the Hongkies went went full Cantonese. The Honkies were happy to license their stuff cheaply to Southeast Asian broadcasters and have their shit dubbed, leading to the first mover advantage of Honkie stuff. Inevitably local productions would spring up, creating inferior copies of legacy HK media and highlighting the appeal of just licensing their stuff and etc etc etc.

The plots and writing for HK shows have been really mid, and it was the brutal competition of talent that let certain auteurs like Wong Kar Wai and John Woo exploit available talent like Chow Yun Fatt and Jackie Chan but only after a long time. Advances in filming and special effect techniques allowed Wuxia and martial arts to ascend, and those filled a niche otherwise missing in most television productions. Maybe China would have had the opportunity to develop their film industry as well for local tastes, but they were too busy making Romance Of The Three Kingdoms or Journey To The West for the 2000th time. Never Water Margin though.

This was hilarious, in part because I recognize parts of it and partly remember that Chinese clampdown, but also because didn't you once go a great effort post on K-Drama culture? I remember my brief exposure to K-Dramas, and some of the, ahem, interesting male-on-male focus while female protagonist orbited in the plot background.

I don't think it was an effortpost as much as it was a snide/snarky observation on the tropiness of Kdramas and their specific deleterious effect on Asian women regarding expectation management. I do think it is VERY funny to see the specific tropes crop up over and over again and the common trends. one reason my wife got sick of watching these shows is that I ruined everything for her witb my meta commentary. This dude will die and have a secret twin brother! This secretary actually is the half sister! This car is just product placement and it will be that car that will crash!

For my own edification I did follow your stated path of Noticing the intense man on man melodrama and the diminishing centrality of the female MC.

It should be explicated that the main consumers of dramas are women, and that is true across all cultures all over the world. The difference I think is that the Asian women writers and producers lean in to the degenerate goblin woman energy fermenting in their writers room, leading to women following through in putting pen to paper their boiling emotions after seeing two hot men yell at each other. @FistfullOfCrows mentions that this shit is bait for women, and I think I can reliably tell when there is a goblin woman cackling in the writers room depending on how many opportunities for personal conflict are painfully forced into the character interactions. Men write action scenes with autistic attention to power levels and how smartly the characters will use the environment and the situation to their physical or social advantage, women will force these two guys to grab the retard ball together and smoulder/yell at each other as much as humanly possible.

China is probably still the weakest in pop culture influnce compared to South Korea and Japan, especially when you account for their much larger size, but they are having more sucess on certain niches.

On mobile gaming, they pretty much took the anime aesthetic niche from Japan, the most anticipated gacha games are all chinese, and they dominate the current revenue, especially Mihoyo's big three games (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero), which have a surprisingly large production value, backed by the tens of millions each game gets per month. And they are also pretty big in the web novel genre, though more due to their larger size and still not having expanded much outside of the mainland+Taiwan.

Lets head this off at the pass: is wokeness ruining western games, while chad east asians just remain shameless? My own answer is: Wokeness seems to magnify the problems in bad engagement loops, making the poor underpinnings of the material especially evident and creates a failure cascade.

I don't think we need to delve into what media passes the smell test for Wokeness. saltierthancrait and other refugees from normie fandoms all complain that they actually do like 'Diverse Media' like Andor, Arcane, Balduts Gate 3, but thats missing the point.

The point is that Diverse Media typically has poor core engagement loops, leaving its flaws especially glaring to see. Rings Of Power was a terrible concept to begin with and it failed to hook with girlboss galadriel, making the decent performance of beardless dwarf lady inconsequential within that sea of garbage. Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League is speedrunning fan disappointment with terrible skins and character expansions on top of a mediocre gameplay loop hanging on the scaffolding of a bad narrative thesis. The greatest contrast can probably be seen in the difference between Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda. There are criticisms about Peebee being shrekified and amazon lesbian reverse colonizer Karen, but those are secondary to a mediocre core gameplay loop on a once again thin narrative skeleton. Mass Effect 3 was already wearing out its welcome and had too many additional gay romances, but it at least limped Commander Shepards ending across the finish line. Andromeda shit itself right out the gate and just wheezed out in the open for all to see, forgotten and decaying.

So why are Asian games/media 'successful'? For one there is a shitload of it, since Asia is gigantic and the northeast trifecta churns out tonnes of garbage that does not meet the escape velocity to catch western attention. Secondly, they mechanize skinner box loops in a predatory manner that makes Blizzard blush. The dopamine optimization mechanics Asian game gacha unboxing are reinforcing rewards for the core gameplay loops of explore to kill enemy by test of will or see number go up by minmaxing your gacha rolls.

For skill based games, Asia hardly has a monopoly on it, but I do agree that the sauce has been diluted in the west. Doom is probably the only AAA kinetic skillfest that hits the same dopamine hit of Elden Ring or Stellar Blade or BM Wukong (though the bitching I've seen on weibo sees some players blame optimization failures on difficulty spikes). I don't think the open world action RPG Assassins Creed clones have the sauce anymore, with even good games like God Of War getting a bit bloated with sequelitis trash.

So where does wokeness fit into this? Fundamentally, if a game looks like it doesn't have the sauce, wokeness is the fastest exploitable gap to get more eyeballs to dissect the game and expose all its flaws Dragon Age Veilguard put the blandest most soyface qunari as its trailer thumbnail, on top of it actually being a bad trailer full of Quirky Character Introductions, so much so that Bioware scrambled to release a gameplay preview to shore up the damage... and that gets picked apart by butthurt fans looking for flaws. Without the wokeness, the gameplay trailer would not have attracted so much scrutiny. If anything, attacking Noticers of wokeness in media seems to be the indicative failure signal for public consumption: it means there is nothing redeeming to otherwise direct attention to.

Finally I will say that wokeness is all negative feedback loops, no upside. Girlfriend Reviews got fucking terrorized for daring to cover Harry Potter on her channel, Lindsay Ellis got hounded off the internet for an inoffensive video on Raya The Last Dragon, etc. Solid work can weather some crazies, like how Hbomberguy and Sarah Z have no issues with the Sherlock Fandom, and my queen Jenny Nicholson has torn down woke and unwoke media alike to great delight, but that skill ceiling is hard to achieve. By contrast, shamelessness is an easy path to attention in this starving market, and Stellar Blade, Nikke or other shameless games witb decent gameplay loops saw a bump when they catch the fleeting attention of shameless streamers.

Asians don't actually have the Sauce for excellent media (Korean grindfests and Japanese cash shop meta breakers are still notoriously bad tropes), but the lack of political presshre to force enshittification elements means smaller mistakes can escape notice.

It's a matter of cultural differences. In Japan, I assume you're considered a wokescold if you say that the emperor gave permission for the attack on Pearl Harbor or that the imperial dynasty has Korean roots in part or that the imperial armed forces forced Korean women to be their barrack whores or that the Korean minority is discriminated against in Japan etc. These arguments may be hugely controversial there, but are of little consequence to a Westerner, so if an exported Japanese cultural product of any sort includes them, Western consumers will not identify any of this as woke.

It never really comes up, though. At least as far as I've seen (I don't have a huge social circle) there's no Japanese equivalent to the wokescold who takes smug pleasure or moral gratification in bringing up controversial topics. If something is controversial people just don't talk about it.

In Japanese media, the closest to that you'll likely get is Japanese right-wing themed focus on re-militarization.

If you want a hilarious example of this, check out Deep Blue Fleet. Basic premise is that when Yamamoto was assassinated in WW2, instead of dying he got isekai'd into... his younger self in 1905 with all of the knowledge of what would happen. He rapidly modernizes the Japanese fleet (including creating a bunch of submarine aircraft carriers, which is where the title of the anime comes from) and Japan basically dominates the world.

Absolutely hilarious revanchist slop, but a fun insight into the mindset of revanchist Japanese anime nerds.

Oh, sure, but AFAIK it’s not being done to troll the pacifists, it’s because nationalistic military nerds like it when their country conquers the world.

Look the woke-scolds have their problems, but just being woke doesn't disqualify you from creating great art. If anything, great artists are notorious for associating themselves with questionable movements through the ages.

Take some of the best western games of the last decade - Borderlands 2 or the God of War reboots. They were written by a famously woke cuck. The games were still great. Larian studios of divinity original sin and Baldurs Gate 3 fame allow characters in their games to date and fuck any gender, race, creature you like.

The things that makes woke-scolds bad at games is the 'scolds' part. HR ladies of any kind, make horrible games. Just being woke......well, it's a mental affliction. But, mental afflictions tend to be positively associated with good art.

negative feedback loops

Pet peeve, but you mean vicious circles, a negative feedback loop is when a system has a tendency to reduce its own fluctuations. Like a thermostat.

“Positive feedback loops” could also be apropos, if the claim is that the system amplifies its disturbances.

I believe the Steam numbers include Steam in China; it's dominating Chinese markets.

I wonder if there is a way to determine region-specific use. I know that the major video game “content creators” are obsessing over the game at the moment. Right now at 252k viewers on Twitch, with Fortnite at 80k, GTA at 174k (but that’s not for the game per se but roleplaying).

Take a look at the top grossing mobile games on Google right now. You see Roblox, plus mostly an assortment of addictive shallow games with bright colors. These games are the actual games dominating the mobile market. The market of AAA high production value, high revenue games is a niche that the Asians have taken. But it doesn't beat pumping out dopamine hitting cash grabs to print money.

On the PC side we have the familiar classics of Dota, Apex, CS, Fortnite - all made by western companies. Even LoL is created by an American team, the company was just acquired by China.

It remains to be seen if the monkey game will stick, but as a linear story based action RPG with no replayability value, the players will probably fall off a cliff once the launch hype ends.

Not sure if that list is accurate. It says online that Monopoly Go has 3bn revenue, but PUBG Mobile is 11bn (half not in China), CODM passed 3.5bn last year, etc. Tencent acquired League when it had ~6% of peak player base.

Any list of top grossing Google Play games is going to be a poor record of overall popularity as Google Play is not available in China, and it excludes all of the iPhone market

Monopoly go is only 1 year old. It's current revenue is probably #1 compared to the old guard of games.

I can't speak for any of the games mentioned, but I finished both season of Vinland Saga recently, and a few things stood out to me.

It grappled profoundly with the human condition. It takes place during the viking age of pillage, conquest and slavery. Now if this had been an American or British production, like perhaps The Last Kingdom, they'd be shoving The Narrative in every chance they get. They'd put their thumb on the scale when it comes to depicting Christian versus Pagan beliefs, they'd make random characters gay or black or both. They have wildly anachronistic neo-liberal beliefs expressed by the lead characters. They'd be completely incapable of letting the past be a foreign country like HBO's Rome from 2005, they'd have to start soap boxing.

Instead, Vinland Saga largely deals with the human condition and it's universality. It discusses slavery without making it about race. "Race" is largely irrelevant, and there is no forced diversity. I enjoyed it profoundly in much the same way I enjoyed HBO's Rome, but which I find nearly impossible to enjoy modern works like The Last Kingdom. And I generally enjoyed The Last Kingdom, but it escalated it's current year nonsense to the point where by the last movie what started as some academic theory that a king of England might have been gay because he had no heirs, and was represented in The Saxon Stories I think as rumors other characters hear, turns into the King of England being so crazy for cock that an enemy spy buttfucks him into betraying his most loyal retainers.

The same has largely gone for video game for me lately. I don't play as much as I used to, but the last semi-recent at least middle market game I played to completion was Unicorn Overlord, and I found it delightful in it's distinct lack of The Narrative. I'm not sure how sensitive people are to the psychological damage the constant deluge of demoralization propaganda in western media is causing them. But I think whether they know it or not, they instinctively seek out media that isn't on some subtle level making them feel like shit about themselves.

The past as another country or even a fantasy world as another country is something that IMO Asians do better than westerners. The western world has little experience of true culture shock simply because we’ve been dominating the culture wars for so long that by the time a westerner can easily get to a place, most of the big cities have become westernized with mostly western attitudes towards life and business. You can find western culture everywhere so it becomes harder to imagine a universe in which people don’t aspire to modern western neo-liberal ideals. Asians have the opposite experience—. They inhabit a world that doesn’t adapt itself to their own culture, their folkways, their tastes. So I think that makes them a bit more able to imagine worlds that aren’t like ours or theirs.

I found this most jarring with medieval stuff. I like to read about that world and the history of that world, and they are not like us at all. They were not secular in the least, they believed in God and Fate and Devine Rights. They didn’t worry much about anyone who wasn’t upper class except in the sense that they wanted productive lands and didn’t want revolts. Their lives were dominated by personal politics and looking to get more power for themselves. Even our most power hungry politicians are weaklings compared to what the actual medieval rulers were like.

I think it hurts us culturally because it means we have a hard time understanding people who aren’t culturally WEIRD. The aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were made much worse by the cultural ignorance of American elites who just assumed that traditional Muslims would immediately become Enlightenment minded Jeffersonian Republicans as soon as Saddam or the Taliban were gone. We expected Russia to think like us about Eastern Europe after the Cold War and to value the Western ideal of popular sovereignty over what they wanted which is a secure border between themselves and NATO. It hurts our ability to figure out Israel Palestine because we’re a fairly secular democracy and both Israel and Palestine are religious countries for whom control of The Land is not just about territory but about religion.

There’s a big failure of imagination when the producers of culture have no understanding or close contact with people who don’t think like they do. Producers in America have only themselves and other Narrative-loving liberals to references.

I need to finish Vinland Saga. I really liked The Norseman in part because I think that film was quite happy to more-or-less inhabit the ideas of the people portrayed in the film, instead of the ideas of modern audiences.

Yeah, I can't exactly claim Vinland Saga is free of historical philosophic anachronism. But in so far as the characters play with ideas that aren't really of their time, its at least from a novel perspective instead of the same tired MESSAGE everything else keeps pushing.

Edit: I've been informed the next story arc for Vinland Saga features a tranny. So... yeah... I can feel the interest fleeing my body.

Huh? Do you mean Hild? I guess she’s kind of butch but I don’t remember anything about her being trans in the manga… Either my memory (and brief skimming of the wiki) is faulty or someone is feeding you misinformation

Apparently Thorkell the Tall has a "daughter" in the next story arc. A giant, muscular, stubbled "daughter" with pig tails. Reading the synopsis of the character is sounds like a case of Transhausen by Proxy, with the mother, Thorkell's wife, raising his son as a daughter so he wouldn't be taken away from her and sent to war. But it also sounds like the story, and the fanbase, don't treat that like the child abuse it actually is. Who knows, maybe I'll be wrong when we get there, but somehow I doubt it.

Oh huh yeah you’re right, I haven’t actually read the post-time skip Vinland arc (the most recent one) where “Cordelia” appears so I can’t comment. The wiki entry doesn’t exactly thrill me however given how, as you mentioned, non-modernbrained the series is up to that point (although I’d still be willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt). When you wrote “next” I assumed you meant the Eastern Expedition arc which is what will be in Season 3 presumably. While it’s entirely possible the series jumps the gun at the end, everything pre-time skip is pretty excellent in the manga so I’d still recommend giving it a fair shot (at least next season which will arguably likely wrap up Thorfinn’s character arc).

Chinese entertainment — and to a lesser degree, East Asian entertainment generally — is dominating Western markets.

I'd actually characterize this as the other way around. I'd say that Chinese entertainment has noticeably lagged, between the death grip of anime and K-pop. China has some breakout hits like Black Myth Wukong or Three Body Problem, but in part due to interference from the CCP, most modern Chinese media has trouble breaking through to a wider Western audience.

Edit: To address the actual substance of the post, one thing that I think western entertainment has forgotten how to do is showing, not telling. Instead of presenting us with a dilemma and showing the consequences of the decisions the characters make (think Star Trek), we're now simply told what the correct decision is. Now this isn't a problem in and of itself, but all western entertainment is now like this. And what's even worse, the "correct" answers run completely contrary to the beliefs of a large portion of the audience. At that point, the piece of media is no longer entertainment, but a prolonged lecture. Much of Eastern media has not yet fallen into this. One notable exception I would note is actually China. The CCP is notorious for meddling in all of the cultural products that are produced. The Chinese entertainment that become truly popular outside of China are the ones that are free from obvious CCP meddling.

One quote that I believes fits the situation was said about a Korean player about The Last of Us 2. "It's a story about right or wrong written by people who believe they're always right."

On a separate note, when I understand that when something gets made, there's a limited amount of resources, both physical and mental, that goes into the making. I also understand that all of the decisions they make are deliberate, so that when I see that a character is changed from being White in the source material to Black in the adaptation, this is a deliberate choice made by the production company. It then stands to reason that every time a "woke" choice gets made in a piece of entertainment, some amount of resources went into making that happen. These are resources that could have been used to improve that piece of entertainment in other, tangible ways. Therefore, when I see a lot of these "woke" decisions being made, I have to conclude that more resources went into making the show "woke" than making the show good. So outside of general annoyance with the piece of media itself being "woke," I am even more annoyed in that they cared more about being woke than about actually making a good piece of media.

when I see that a character is changed from being White in the source material to Black in the adaptation, this is a deliberate choice made by the production company

I can imagine a world where this is not always the case. If skin color is not relevant to the story, and the change does not stand out as extremely unlikely (for instance, black characters in historical fiction happening in medieval europe), a production company could have a casting call that's open to multiple/all races.

But in the current cultural climate, I would have a hard time believing that's how any instance of "race-swapping" happened.

We can't race swap anymore without the metanarrative causing irritating discussions. It really doesn't help that Shonda Rhimes ruined 'put black people in fancy clothing' by inserting racism analogues, instead of just ignoring race and letting black actors dress and talk posh.

If the performance is strong enough the race or even gender swaps become secondary, like Idris Elba as Heimdall or Steve whatever as Corlys Velaruon or whoever played Jet Black in live-action cowboy bebop. There are a few gender swaps too, like Katee Sackoff as Starbuck, but I can't think of many.

Anyways, after initial kvetching, the blackness of the portrayal became secondary to the other criticisms of the media in question, because the flipping was relatively unproblematic.

Contra anything made currently where race and gender are front and center: maximal irritation without a good enough product to overwhelm criticism means everyone just shits on it and defenders are few. Dustborn and Valid@te are clowned on for being the woke shitpiles that they are, but BG3 literally has race swapping into an ANIMAL which is bestiality, not just furry, and it turned into a selling point of the game.

Also note that deliberate race-swapping can still make good art. Both Spike Lee & Mel Brooks made "Where did we go right?" movies where the premise is that terrible stereotypes actually sell great. (Bamboozled & The Producers)

"X But it's a $Demographic Movie" doesn't have to suck. It's still all in the execution.

Mel Brooks and spike Lee, notably, do not have products which mostly meet current year standards of political correctness(even as they are by no means conservatives).

One thing I’ve always appreciated about Asian dramas in general is that they aren’t afraid to be themselves and tell a story without feeling the need to insert ironic humor or social or political fashions. It’s a story, and the needs of the story rule everything else going on. Thus the heroes can be really heroic, the love interests can be love interests, and so on. Western media has a harder time doing this because they have to insert corny ironic humor in the movie so it doesn’t seem super serious. They have to make sure the women in the show are badasses, feminist and not too feminine. Men cannot be too masculine, too competent, or if they happen to start that way, they must “learn their lesson” by the start of the third act.

Add in the insular world of movies and TV in which everyone has the same background, the same training, and are expected to follow “Save The Cat” to the letter, and I think it’s just a mess. Nobody can create an honest account of redneck masculinity because nobody in Hollywood comes from that background. If you’re going to film school and have the funds in hand to be effectively unemployed for 3-5 years, you’re not from anything like a working class background and more than likely have never had a ten minute conversation with someone from a working class background. It’s PMC class second sons all around and all they can do is ape media portrayals of things they’re generations away from first hand knowledge of. Here Be There Dragons.

without feeling the need to insert ironic humor

I frequently see this blamed on Joss Whedon, but I think I've come to the conclusion that it's actually cargo-cult writers trying to capture the "quippy" vibe that his productions are famous for. But kind of like Michael Bay, the imitators fall well short of the greatness of the original. Not to say that Bay is the best filmmaker, but attempts to mimic his style (briefly: "make every single shot as awesome as possible") often don't really manage to make awesome shots, especially consistently.

Having re-watched some of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly recently, the quips are there, but they're not usually shallow "lol, so random" jokes: they tend to be deeper cross-references to scenes from far earlier in threads that span an episode or more. Imitations of this tend to just drop jokes randomly and assume they'll land, but, done properly, there's an established setup and payoff. I would cite specific examples, but I doubt any of them are well-enough known to make sense out-of-context.

That’s definitely a part of it, but it was also rare at the time. Like any other trope, you can only put it out there so many times before it becomes tiresome. I’m finding myself so bored with the trope that it no longer lands at all. Even the “save the world” trope of action movies seems a bit played out because it’s all that’s out there and eventually you no longer care about the world.

Even the “save the world” trope of action movies seems a bit played out because it’s all that’s out there and eventually you no longer care about the world.

Hasn't that been a trope-complaint for, well, decades at this point?

Seems practically cyclic to me. New franchises come, and are often at their most intense / highest fan momentum when the stakes are relatively small. To go back just a few decades- Pokemon when Ash was a rookie trainer trying to advance to the first championship, Bleach's Soul Society arc when it was just rescuing a friend from an unjust execution, Naruto when it was orphan wants to be ninja president and has a team rival, My Hero Academia when super-power-less kid gets into super-school and has to keep up, etc.

A lot of series crest around the time that the stakes start to raise the stakes so high that it's narratively impossible for them to lose.

I would cite specific examples, but I doubt any of them are well-enough known to make sense out-of-context.

It makes sense that people might have to binge-watch all of Firefly before they'd be able to understand your analysis, but I'm confused ... you seem to consider this a bad thing?

I don't consider it a bad thing, but the examples that come to mind would probably not be easy to explain if the reader hadn't seen the episodes in question. Something like the recurring use of "special" in the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds" as part of an ongoing dialog between Book and Mal about morality, at least once in the presence of other characters unaware of the context.

EDIT: The famous "I'm always angry" line from The Avengers is probably also an example. As a line, it's cute and quippy, but it lands as the payoff for having spent a decent chunk of the movie trying to keep The Hulk under control: it's a cathartic release in that the anger is well-placed and actually helpful, and also shows that Banner has grown into at least some control of the transition. But in subsequent movies it's basically played for laughs that the two characters in the same body have come to peace -- without the setup, it feels much cheaper to me.

The Avengers and the resulting effects on the tone of the MCU have ruined an entire generation of writers. It worked too well and not enough people noticed that that was mostly because it was within the context of a comic book movie with an ensemble cast. Which is seemingly the only thing Whedon can write: genre fiction with ensemble casts.

Ironically it even managed to ruin gravitas by proxy in making the DC films, Snyder and all that copy him double down on seriousness to insane degrees.

I've often wondered if the entire media landscape might be unrecognizably different if Whedon doesn't get that particular writing gig.

Ironically it even managed to ruin gravitas by proxy in making the DC films, Snyder and all that copy him double down on seriousness to insane degrees.

Nothing about Snyder's work before DCEU implies that he had to take a turn to go where he did. I think that's just who he is. I sometimes even appreciate his clear disdain for certain allegedly immovable parts of DC canon

And who he is is someone who should never have been given control of an entire cinematic universe. Zach Snyder being allowed to act as some sort of auteur or writer-director when his best works like 300 were mainly strong on visuals and he needs at least two tries to make a decent superhero movie is one of the more amazing coups in Hollywood

He really must just be a great guy to be around.

His visual flair and dubious auteur credentials aside, do you not think that the grimdark tone was reactionary? Watchmen, Sucker Punch or even his recent Rebel Moon antics, while still retaining his style were nowhere near as pompous as a Batman v Superman or even a Man of Steel.

He does have an unearned tendency to take himself way too seriously, especially now that he's selling director cuts, but I am utterly convinced that some producer shenanigans were involved to get to "do you bleed" levels.

He said this before getting Man of Steel:

Everyone says that about [Christopher Nolan’s] Batman Begins. ”Batman’s dark.” I’m like, okay, ”No, Batman’s cool.” He gets to go to a Tibetan monastery and be trained by ninjas. Okay? I want to do that. But he doesn’t, like, get raped in prison. That could happen in my movie. If you want to talk about dark, that’s how that would go.

So did the producers push him in that direction or did they find the man for the job?

My intuition was that Batman vs Superman was a studio mandate to rush the shared universe, Snyder tried to do some comic grimdark/Frank Miller inspired stuff and couldn't pull it off.

Just as, iirc, a lot of Watchmen fans argue he didn't get Watchmen either. There were a lot of complaints about Snyder insisting on the violence and gore itself being cool for their own sake so this isn't even new. But obviously far more people feel invested in Batman and Superman than Watchmen so they didn't make as much of an impact.

Snyder was still more respectful of Watchmen in his movie adaptation than whoever is responsible for the hbo series, showing just how low fidelity has fallen.

The HBO series was fucking weird and the female lead was a good actress, but that world was just so tortured in its framing that nothing about it made sense. Vigilante police, reparations, the Klan, nightmare squid storms... its just such a baffling show so far up its own ass that there it took until the penultimate episode to figure out what the central conflict of the show was.

Everyone despises JJ Abrams Mystery Box attitude to storytelling now, but the overly convoluted framing also is Damon Lindlehofs doing. His grubby fingers are good for kneading slow burning plots like The Leftovers, but most of the time he works just collapse in the bake.

There’s frequent motte discussion of terrible performance of western entertainment due to poor decision making on the part of production companies. Orientals keeping their mojo is very plausible and could explain much of this, it seems.

I saw on /r/games that 90% of Wukong players are Chinese, so I don’t think this says much other than that Chinese netizens are hardcore patriots, which I don’t think surprises anyone.

This is an underappreciated point, which is that the more people are connected to The Internet, the more The Internet will organically tilt Chinese (and Asian more generally). This is true of other markets, too; we're able to see the impact of Chinese preferences on Hollywood, for instance.

By that token we should be flooded with Indian gamers too, which we don't have. Even at its peak Mobile Legends shitheels were populated by salty filipinos and vietnamese and indonesians, with nary an indian rearing their head in the race wars. I have no idea where all the Indian gamers are. Surely on commutes people want to do SOMETHING to expend brain cells before the madness overcomes oneself.

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