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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31475 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Have you seen Muana? The producers went to great lengths to involve the relevant ethnicity in the production. But the story is about a young woman who feels compelled to shirk her duties to her tribe, then questions authority, and goes on a mostly solo adventure to save the environment. The main character is basically Greta Thunberg.

To the extent that these different people actually have a different worldview, this must seem really subversive. Imagine a high-budget movie full of American celebrity actors, shot in America, with pitch-perfect cultural references, about how fulfilling it was to serve the state, written by the Chinese government.

Imagine a high-budget movie full of American celebrity actors, shot in America, with pitch-perfect cultural references, about how fulfilling it was to serve the state, written by the Chinese government.

So this but played dead straight? I'd kinda love it.

Have you seen Muana? The producers went to great lengths to involve the relevant ethnicity in the production. But the story is about a young woman who feels compelled to shirk her duties to her tribe, then questions authority, and goes on a mostly solo adventure to save the environment. The main character is basically Greta Thunberg.

Are you referencing the Disney movie Moana? There's a much more conservative interpretation of that. It could be seen that recent generations ignored their traditions of seafaring and exploration in favor of living in a closed and confined space on their island. By restarting sea exploration, Moana is honoring her ancestors and continuing their culture over her parents.

Yes, I meant Disney's Moana, thanks for the correction. Good point about the "the radicals are the real traditionalists" interpretation. The movie could certainly have been more unambiguously pro-modernity, i.e. if Moana had taught the tribe to accept electrification or homosexuality.

I guess I'd still say that the important thing is that outsiders are writing a story in which the current way of life of the tribe is presented as wrong and in need of change (even if it's back to the past). However, maybe Polynesians tell similar stories about the dangers of stagnation and giving up seafaring. So, you made me realize that the story could plausibly not be very subversive, depending on the details of Polynesian's self-conception, which I know nothing about. But it just seems to hit the favorite beats of Western progressivism in such a cliched and recognizable way that I doubt that that's the case.

Have you seen Muana?

That's actually the EXACT example I was thinking of when I wrote this. That and Coco.

Samoan/Polynesian culture proudly featured on screen... except, you know, no mention of the constant warfare and the patriarchal social structure this necessitates.

You get the Rock as a big and brash and ultimately nonthreatening cultural ambassador, and if you want to get the facial tattoos, that's just fine.

But don't ask what those giant studded clubs were for, nosiree.

I think Vikings are a bit of a counter-example to your thesis. It's well-known how destructive they were (in some time periods). Maybe it's because they're white, so no one feels the need to sanitize their history. And, the Icelandic sagas also let them speak in their own words, to some extent. Those stories are pretty much all about blood feuds and legal drama.

Maybe it's because they're white, so no one feels the need to sanitize their history.

But they do, at least in media where the Vikings are put front and center. Here's a discussion of how Assassins Creed: Valhalla does exactly this:

My more substantive issues go to the overall tone of the narrative and the society that is described here. And I think the problem can be neatly summed up in just one thing about the game: the game will ‘desyncronize’ you (meaning produce a game over) if your [viking] character kills civilians, including if, while raiding a monastery, you kill the monks. You are a viking (one thing they do right: viking is a job description, meaning ‘raider,’ not an ethnic identity) who does not kill non-combatants. This is akin to the famous joke about the pirates who don’t steal anything.

We should be clear about what is happening in England in c. 875 when the game takes place...they were slave raids...

The England of the game is suspiciously both resource rich and surprisingly empty. The player’s clan settles, with a minimum of fuss, in unoccupied (save for ‘bandits’) high value land directly on a river – prime real estate that one supposes the English just forgot about...your raiding doesn’t so much as inconvenience the civilian population.

Norse and Danish rituals are shown to be positively effective: berserker brews work, potions to induce hallucinations produce true prophecies and visions which provide tangible benefits, and Odin straight up talks to you. The narrative repeatedly presents Norse religious responses as correct, right and effective (but, you know, leaves out a lot of the slavery and ritual murder from them). On the other hand, the environmental experience of Christian sites, beyond the looting, was one ruined church in which a woman in religious garb told me that God had commanded her to knife a bunch of people, including me, which then turned into a combat encounter.

Now look, I get it, Christianity in 9th century England was an intolerant, hegemonic religion. But you are a foreign colonizing invader rolling in wrecking their holy sites, (not) killing their religious practitioners and toppling their governments: you are intolerant and hegemonic too!

Unlike in the actual historical event, there is no sign that your warriors are rapidly becoming Christianity-curious (the actual Great Heathen Army was converting en masse within a generation; arriving in 865, Guthram converts to Christianity in 878, a little over a decade later. You are arriving in England around 874, just four years from this event – there should already be a fair number of Christian Danes).

https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-assassins-creed-valhalla/comment-page-1/

I don't think that example shows what it's being made out to show here.

I haven't played Valhalla, but the characters in the Assassin's Creed games are Assassins, a group engaged in a 2000 year old struggle with the Templars to decide the destiny of humanity, and whose creed involves the tenet "Stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent".

The goal isn't to accurately represent Vikings, it's to tell the story of Assassin's Creed, and one Viking protagonist not killing civilians (though in my Assassin's Creed runs plenty of innocent guardsmen get killed too) is just the history bending required to make the story fit.

The author addresses that criticism here: https://acoup.blog/2020/11/27/fireside-friday-november-27-2020/

The tl;dr; is that the majority of players only discover the historical fiction, and never meet the scifi aliens/templars/etc part of the game.

But from how he describes AC: Valhalla, it doesn't sound like it's just the protagonist who doesn't kill innocents. It's all the vikings. They come, build infrastructure, overthrow corrupt Saxons, and teach the locals how stupid Christianity is. (In real history the Vikings all learned how awesome Jesus is.)

Moreover, the complete whitewashing of historical scenarios is not something the Assassin's Creed franchise does in other circumstances. Black Flag (pirates!) does not gloss over the fact that most of the Carribean economy was based on slavery and the expansion pack has a former slave as the main playable character.

Here's an article about how much work Ubisoft put into correctly portraying the Mohawk and colonialism in AC3: https://techland.time.com/2012/09/05/assassins-creed-iiis-connor-how-ubisoft-avoided-stereotypes-and-made-a-real-character/

I haven't played AC3 either, but I'm willing to gamble that attempts by the colonialists to forcefully convert the Mohawk from their own religion to Christianity are not portrayed favorably (if portrayed at all).

Perhaps that and the present-day descendants of said vikings, including their historical nations, are pretty well suborned to the successor ideology, not a huge amount of risk that they'll start forging an identity centered around their Viking heritage.

I don't think the Disney EPCOT version of Norway features much pillaging, though.

Also look at what Disney has done to Thor.

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