MaDVader lists 6 women and 5 men, and one "Latina". If that's a woman it's 7 women to 5 men.
So slightly unbalanced.
But if you leave out the bonus Trumbull campaign it's equally 4 to 4.
Am I racist or is this game too woke?
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So slightly unbalanced.
But if you leave out the bonus Trumbull campaign it's equally 4 to 4.
Well, yes. Why would you complain about diversity in a videogame unless race bothers you?
But your oversimplification is not really a reflection what you said. You didn't objectively come to a solution by looking at data. You came to a conclusion and then looked at data supporting your conclusion. Don't disguise it as objective research, it isn't.
Allow me to talk about some examples I've recently noticed in TV. There are two big Amazon shows. One coming up, one just released.
Wheel of Time and Lord of the Rings.
Now I've read Wheel of Time extensively. I've read them through and through for years on end because I love the big open world, the characters and detailed storytelling. I've loved the book series so much that I decided not to not watch the TV show when it released. I would wait until the first reviews came in because with Game of Thrones fresh in my mind I didn't want to ruin another good book series. I did watch the show.
The Wheel of Time had forced diversity in its show. The books tell of a backwater village where the main protagonist lives. Thats where the story starts. A backwater village. Through multiple adventures the main ensemble travels through the world, encountering many rich and incredible cultures, all with their own characteristics.
In the TV show that same rural, backwater village had not just 1 culture. But was a melting pot of different cultures. Now that posed some serious questions. Because even though it is a great reflection of our modern day society, it takes away the awe and belief of, later on, discovering those other cultures. After all, if everything is diverse, nothing is. And how big did this backwater village become that it wasn't a village anymore but a town or city where all these travellers came from? The book version of our main protagonist stood out in the book version of the village. He was the only one there who was of a different culture. All through the books villagers responded to his looks and said: You look like a *culture*, are you sure you're not one of them? No, the main protagonist said. I was born in *backwater village*. Big plotpoint, he was of that *culture*. All these little things were taken away by not really adding much. It was shoehorned and created more problems then it solved.
The Lord of the Rings show however has added different elves and dwarves of colour. Which isn't in line with what we've seen in the movies or explicitly been told in the books but also doesn't disrupt the core experience. It has added diversity.
So while forced diversity implements it into a clunky and disruptive way for the sake of having diversity, added diversity neither contributes nor detracts from the core experience.
I get what you are saying about things being woke, I get it. And while I am bothered by the diversity added in the Wheel of Time, I'm not by the diversity added in the Lord of the Rings or many other movies and franchises. Not because Wheel of Time is too diverse but because it's shoehorned in in a nonsensical way that's disruptive to the story.
So representation makes sense if the setting for it makes sense. Any new day movies based in current time should have tons of diversity. Hell, I myself am a minority. I love to see my own represented! But when my minority group plays in on stereotypes, gets shoehorned in or in any other way gets treated or displayed differently then someone of the majority group would, I dislike it. Because good representation is different then any representation. I'd rather be represented in a way that it neither contributes nor detracts from the core experience then that my representation is disruptive and forced.
@MadVader Ask yourself this, is the representation forced and does it take away from the core experience or does the representation neither contributes nor detracts from core experience?
Souds pretty racist to me.I've been playing State of Decay 2 for a few weeks now, and it's surprisingly good after having my expectations set low by player reviews (possibly because of all the DLC content that wasn't there when those reviews were made; also the many small improvements and balance fixes made in patches).
However, one of the first things I noticed and it bothered me, were your characters, the survivors you play. After playing for a few hours, my 5 or so survivors were mostly black, there was a white woman and a Latino man, but there was no single white guy. It was hard not to notice if you played SoD1 where almost everyone was white, just the main character was black, and one NPC was Latino, while women were well represented - this was perfect representation of northern rural America, I thought (although you need more Latinos depending on how south you are).
So, let's look at some hard data by race and gender to see if I'm racist or the game too woke.
There are four predefined couples of characters when starting a new campaign:
- The Surly Siblings: Black Woman, Black Man
- Old Buddies: Asian Man, White Man (<- here he is!)
- Perpetual Breakup: White Woman, White Woman (lesbians for extra wokeness)
- Odd Couple: Latino Man, White Woman
There are two predefined couples when you start the bonus Trumbull campaign:
- The Last Wilkerson: Two Black Women
- Searching for Santos: White (?not sure, maybe black) Man, Latina
Once you start the campaign you get random survivors to join and they can be of any ethnicity or gender, probably random. When I searched the internet to see if anyone else noticed black bias, it turns out they did, but it was, as in my case, a random blip.
My problem is still that it seems minorities are over-represented, making the whole American backwoods experience less authentic. I assume that new characters are generated equally by race/ethnicity (white/black/latino, although Asians are rare) and equally by gender. This is not how it is in the real world where blacks in the rural areas are at around 10%, Latinos depend on latitude, and Asians are pretty non-existent. At least according to my expectations, but let's also look at the hard data.
I don't get to watch many TV shows, but I'm aware that more alt-righty types complain about Netflix blackwashing and general over-representation of minorities, women and non-heteros. So, this is my first real experience with it and it was unpleasant and unexpected, as I'm always on the anti-racist side of internet culture wars.
What do you think?
It's possible that when you look at the racist abyss for too long (I browse meme sites with heavy alt-right presence), the racist abyss makes you more racist or at least sensitive to wokeness.
On a serious note: if you end up in internet debates (the most productive debates, or so have I heard) on the "anti racist" side (whatever that means) and think that ethnicity should be represented realistically and not ideologically then I fear I must inform you that indeed, by postmodern standards, you are racist.
On a positive note if you consume so little media that the current year is the first time you have encountered this ideologically driven nonsense there is a good chance you can continue to ignore western civilizations collaps and keep your sanity.
A friend of mine is married and waits for his child to be born. Bought a house in the country side and lives more or less disconnected from the internet and the rest of the world. I often envy him.
Goyyyio
Sergeant
Im just going to say based and call it a day. Anyone who's truly bothered and cares too much to scream on the internet because black elves has obviously some issues with race, and I agree sometimes diversity makes no sense in some contexts, but definetly LOTR is not the case, same thing in The Witcher series where I didn't even had read the books but really how could having black elves ruin my experience, seeing people angry at it just doesn't makes a lot of sense.
Now in this case in particular, it's just what I call a "bruh moment" because there is a black man and only a white woman as protag in a DLC and therefore it's too woke, it's definetly an exaggeration, and I don't know if Mad is the kind of person that's going to harrass black people - he is worried about coming out as a racist in the end - but it's definitely overthinking, and it's that little incel in every alt right's mind saying "hey you should worry about this little thing and make a value judgement over it". Don't end up like archaic warrior, white people are still the bigger presence in literally everything western media produces, trying to reach more cultures and people isn't something wrong, is just globalization man, we are all human beings living in the same world, you're going to have to face and get used to seeing different looking people than what you're normally used to, believe me, unlike what deranged internet people say, nothing bad is going to happen
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LOTR is specifically inspired by pagan tales like beowulf. Its cultures and languages are based off germanic and celtic culture of the iron age.
Tolkien wanted to continue the pagan european tradition of folktales when he wrote LOTR.
For Witcher the situation is similar albeit not the same. The books take inspiration from slavic mythology and european fairytales. The world that he created is one inspired by medieval europe in which due to technological constraints and cultural reasons multiculturalism as we know it today didn't exist. It also isn't described as such in the books. Hell, the people in that world are xenophobic enough to hate their direct neighbors even though they are of the same ethnicity, culture and language just because they have a different king.
In both cases putting in different ethnicities in a "multicultural" sense doesn't make any sense at all. It doesn't fit to the scenario and it is breaking immersion.
What I ask myself is; why can't they create something unique on their own? They could have complete creative freedom. They could create a fantastical world where they would have the multiculturalism they want to portray so much. They could even have lore to explain it as to create an immersive experience! They can't. I know they can't because what they create is sub-par even when they piggy-back off a popular franchise. The witcher series valued in isolation (ignoring the books) is mediocre. Having read the books I seriously don't know how they could have screwed this up so badly. I have the suspicion the amazon series will be worse. Star Wars they already killed (and racial diversity had none to do with it).
Which brings me to my last point: Why do they do this?
You say they do it to reach a broader audience and make it more inclusive. Fair enough.
But even then. You say that I'm racist for wanting white people in my lord of the rings. Why are black people not racist when they want black people in theirs?
Even worse, they also do it to historical movies or historical fiction. Why would you do that?
Fantasy, fine. Do what you want, at worst the immersion will suffer a bit. But historical movies? Isn't that misrepresenting history?
It is. They are portraying histroy as if multiculturalism always existed. Its ideological propaganda thats what it is. I'm not saying everybody does it with the intend of producing propaganda. At this point its a trend and it has cultural momentum, but there are people who do.
You say it is just part of globalization.
I say damn right its and I don't like any of it.
In the meantime excuse myself I have to do incel things.
Alt right, incel things, even. The horror
buddy. my guy. "the pagan european tradition". c'mon now.
even beyond this you are so wrong it's not even entertaning to correct you. ****ing hell.Tolkien said:
Goyyyio
Sergeant
I won't read your whole post because it's the usual "it's inspired by" bla bla bla "they must be white" discourse. Tolkien said he was inspired by it, not entirely based on those myths, in fact I recall a Tolkien interview saying his inspirations were completely loose and he ended up creating whatever he want upon those stories. Now, it's a TV show wrong for doing the same thing the creator done, 100 years later? You guys get really fed up.
Historical representation? Watch every movie you have seen til today, and tell me they're 100% completely real historical representations. Take every medieval movie with people shooting fire arrows, completely ridiculous. People fighting with swords and no helmets to see the pretty dude riding, super strong plot armours, a gazillion historical inaccuracies, but hey, I draw the line at having a single black dude here man, that is so wrong and the other things aren't... Not because I'm racist, definetly not! Hell dude the LOTR movies were cancelled by Tolkien's descendants because how come Legolas is shooting arrows while sliding in a shield????1? Here's why: it's fun, and because Peter Jackson can do whatever the hell he wants in HIS own adaptation of the book. . Based on your discourse, we should all go cancel Tarzan because he's a white dude lost in the African woods while it was more likely it was a black person, the thing here is, who the f cares, it's a fantasy, you don't like it? Go watch something else. I don't think it's that hard, getting entirely angry on people doing their own thing -because they can - it's dumb, and many "woke" people make the same dumb complaints when a white person plays in an idk, an Asian movie or whatever. Anyone can play anything, I geniunly don't give a crap, the only thing that matters to me is: Is it good?
Historical representation? Watch every movie you have seen til today, and tell me they're 100% completely real historical representations. Take every medieval movie with people shooting fire arrows, completely ridiculous. People fighting with swords and no helmets to see the pretty dude riding, super strong plot armours, a gazillion historical inaccuracies, but hey, I draw the line at having a single black dude here man, that is so wrong and the other things aren't... Not because I'm racist, definetly not! Hell dude the LOTR movies were cancelled by Tolkien's descendants because how come Legolas is shooting arrows while sliding in a shield????1? Here's why: it's fun, and because Peter Jackson can do whatever the hell he wants in HIS own adaptation of the book. . Based on your discourse, we should all go cancel Tarzan because he's a white dude lost in the African woods while it was more likely it was a black person, the thing here is, who the f cares, it's a fantasy, you don't like it? Go watch something else. I don't think it's that hard, getting entirely angry on people doing their own thing -because they can - it's dumb, and many "woke" people make the same dumb complaints when a white person plays in an idk, an Asian movie or whatever. Anyone can play anything, I geniunly don't give a crap, the only thing that matters to me is: Is it good?
Charles Martel was a mistake.
It's a lot more egregious to the average person when a historical figure is race swapt over accurate medieval combat and otherwise minor inaccuracies that only spastic nerds will give a **** about.
Actors are actors, as long as your goal from the very beginning isn't to accurately portray the event, era and its people, but rather have a story vaguely set in the period and place, you can shove Idris Elba in to be sexy on the screen all you want. I won't consider a historical figure really race-swapped until the scene itself acknowledges it, theater plays, and by extension movies, function in a bubble, as long as the world in it acknowledges that this is, indeed, a perfectly fine, medieval European noble or whatever else, I don't see a reason to doubt it.
As for the Witcher, imo it's just a fight-or-flight response triggered after Rotten West came to take and corrupt our stuff after decades of being relegated to Bond villains. Give it some time, Easter Europe just got allowed into cool white kids club a generation ago, we need to speedrun this stuff*. All the pointers and hints are appreciated, though.
* - you would think we'd be smarter about it after being targeted for extermination and slavery as sub-humans. Looks like it's true what they say, that the bullied ones will easily turn into bullies if given a chance.
As for the Witcher, imo it's just a fight-or-flight response triggered after Rotten West came to take and corrupt our stuff after decades of being relegated to Bond villains. Give it some time, Easter Europe just got allowed into cool white kids club a generation ago, we need to speedrun this stuff*. All the pointers and hints are appreciated, though.
* - you would think we'd be smarter about it after being targeted for extermination and slavery as sub-humans. Looks like it's true what they say, that the bullied ones will easily turn into bullies if given a chance.
I never claimed Tolkien was pagan.
"Its not even entertaining to correct you." is also a very interesting way of saying "I don't have any arguments."
Of course Lord of the Rings is "only" inspired by myths. I never claimed it was a retelling of anything. That doesn't mean though that suddenly racially diversity makes sense in that world or was ever part of his vision when he wrote the books.
If you don't mind racial diversity in media where it doesn't fit thats fine by me I am not going to change your mind and I don't want to. Good for you if you are able to enjoy media with forced diversity. And I actually mean that.
However the topic of the thread is not wether we like it or not but wether it is racist to dislike it or not.
I dislike it out of the reasons I mentioned. Do you think i'm racist?
Thats a strawman and you know it. I'm equally bothered by other historical inaccuracies as any other person interested in history. However there are some inaccuracies more problematic than others.
Take Braveheart for exemple:
-The scots wearing kilts even though it is the beginning of the 14th century -> small problem
-William Wallace being presented as if he was a commoner and not a knight -> medium problem
-The film making out a lovestory between him and a french princess which actually was 11 years old at the time -> big problem
-The film claiming William Wallace besieged York even though the scots never came that far south -> major problem
-The film inventing the PRIMA NOCTE myth -> *pull your f*cking hair out* problem
I love the movie, it is enjoyable to watch, but what it is doing is a BIG problem, because people actually believe the bulls*it it portrays. People believing scots wore kilts during the middle ages is the least of that problems though. Them believing such a thing as PRIMA NOCTE even existed is dangerously misinformative though and explaining to them that this is made up is surprisingly difficult as people rather believe some Hollywood movie than some history nerd.
When a historical movie (or other type of media) portrays past cultures as multiethnical or multiracial when in fact they weren't this is not something people just pass aside as something that was done for diversities sake in the movie, they actually believe that was the case historically. Thats a problem. And at that a problem not in the magnitude of a swords scabbard being worn on the back.
Haven't read much of this thread. All I know is, when they made Anne Boleyn black, I checked out. Achilles being black was bad enough...but Anne Boleyn? LOL. Thankfully, all of these wokeish shows are tanking. Maybe they'll finally stop making them. The Comic book industry is on life support because of wokeness killing sales, and thats not even debateable.
Its the main reason Eastern entertainment is off the charts in sales in the West compared to locally produced content. I haven't bought a new console game since that abomination that The Last Of Us 2 was...a pregnant woman running and gunning cuz "muh girl power". And then Abby...nevermind that she killed Joel, the fact that she was more manly than the men is just disgusting. I also timed it, and her POV parts in the game were, not by much, but still slightly longer than Ellie's. And then the fact that Ellie decided to kill EVERYONE except the very person that needed killing which effectively made the entire game's revenge-based plot ultimately meaningless...
Anyways, lefties will "reeeee" but I don't care. They howl about anything anyway. They are a virus and we need a "vaccine" (lol)
Its the main reason Eastern entertainment is off the charts in sales in the West compared to locally produced content. I haven't bought a new console game since that abomination that The Last Of Us 2 was...a pregnant woman running and gunning cuz "muh girl power". And then Abby...nevermind that she killed Joel, the fact that she was more manly than the men is just disgusting. I also timed it, and her POV parts in the game were, not by much, but still slightly longer than Ellie's. And then the fact that Ellie decided to kill EVERYONE except the very person that needed killing which effectively made the entire game's revenge-based plot ultimately meaningless...
Anyways, lefties will "reeeee" but I don't care. They howl about anything anyway. They are a virus and we need a "vaccine" (lol)
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I think there's a difference between objecting to casting choices based om aesthetics, lore and narratives and then being racist.
They don't necessarily go together.
They don't necessarily go together.
Exactly. It is not like people opposing forced diversity in media "don't like them black people" ; the forced part is the issue.
I'd love to see a historical movie set in any other place in the world other than europe and then I would oppose forced diversity hires in that all the same.
Also there are always exceptions to the rule. In theatre this also is less of an issue. Unlike movies people expect inaccuracies especially in the visual department. There a young woman may play the role as an old man. This is also possible because the characters are acted out more and less portrayed through their visuals.
Sometimes an actor may not have the background to back the role up but yet is a very good fit both in terms of looks and acting. Strangely enough when it is the very specific case of a white actor portraying a non white person the opposite side of the political spectrum has a problem and calls it "cultural appropriation".
If leftists didn't have hypocritical standards, then they would have no standards at all. It's only an issue with them when the subject in question is white and therefore "muh racism". Anything and anyone else and it's " muh empowerment". Leftists are a virus without a credible vaccine(lol) to neutralize them.
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If I had the time and inclination one could go look at the demographics of the area. Still, even with that, as long as there are at least 7 black people living there I don't see the game as necessarily unrealistic. Those people do exist even if they are a minority, if the game developers decided to tell the take of that particular person that is their choice, do what you will with it.
To be clear, I am not saying that you should feel bad about previous whitewashing. It's not like you have a personal responsibility. I am just saying that now you can probably relate to how a lot of people have felt for years
I was very happy to play as the black character in SoD1, he was a good main protagonist trying to bring order into chaos and to uphold values in a crumbling civilization. The other survivors you could play as and NPCs were mostly white, as it fits some godforsaken county in the Northwest, there were rednecks, country doctors with cowboy hats, hanging judges, pickup trucks everywhere - this made the game authentic. Now I get forced into a whole set of mostly inauthentic pairs for seemingly no other reason than wokeness.
"If you don't like it, don't play it" simply avoids the problem. I know, because I use it in the internet racism wars as the last resort. Where I am the anti-racism guy attacking (actual) racists.
I can relate to black people and a history of whitewashed entertainment just fine on my own, I don't need enlightment from a game. I dislike being forced into inauthentic diverse choices, just as blacks were rightly frustrated by having to identify with a black sidekick token character or all-white protagonists in entertainment not so long ago. Two wrongs don't make a right. There's no reason at all to over-compensate in the opposite direction for past errors.
I am not saying that overcompensating is good. I am just not sure that I see it in here. If it helps I am more skeptical about the Lord of the Rings casting.
This depends on how it is implement. I do think that the new LOTR series could be forced diversity. Significantly different morphological differences don't coexist alongside each other for long, with one group destroying the other, or both groups hybridizing. I don't know the background of e.g the darker-skinned Elf. If he's from some other distant, unmentioned enclave of elves that developed darker skin for whatever reason, then who cares. But the Western Elves, such as the Sindarin and Noldorian elves, have their descriptions very detailed, and from what I remember of when I read most of Tolkien's works, they were extremely homogenous.
Tolkien created a setting and narrative framework in which the only people and places that were directly described in detail were the Western races of species of Humans, Elves, Dwarves, etc. Having diversity within Middle Earth isn't a problem, they just have to have the "black elf" come from a distant group of previously unmentioned elves who has come west on a quest or whatever. But from the promotional material I've seen (and it looked trash for a few different reasons so after the first wave I kinda stopped paying attention to it), they don't mention any of it. And given the direction of cultural vandalism that has occurred heavily over the past decade, it seems likely they will go with corporate advertising route of "everything fictional always looks like a racial representation of the demographics of London and if you disagree you're a racist yahtzee", which is sad.
Also:
General Hot Take: 'Incels', 'Inceldom' and 'Incel Culture' are a movement of radical equity-driven males who are societal shutouts through no explicit fault of their own, and that by all traditional definitions of the terms "left wing" and "right wing", should be classified as a "far-left wing" movement. The male equivalent of radical feminism. The funniest irony of this being of course that they can't be considered "left-wing" by the new intersectional and neomarxist ideological frameworks since the vast majority of the demographic of Incels are "straight white CISgender males", and the neomarxist dialectic highlights this group as the key oppressor of all the other groups. And so they're arbitrarily lumped in with the other "far-right" groups, all of which I have found out recently, hate Incels as much as everyone else, just for being 'degenerates who put ***** on a pedestal'.
Is there any major ideological group/wing/whatever that doesn't dislike incels? lol
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