Not if that's true for all races in the game, I'd say. And it is. Except of course it isn't, because none of the races is really a full-on cliché of a real culture. It just takes certain elements from them.
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'Zelda,' 'Overwatch' and a failure to represent ME and South Asian identity in games
- Thread starter Poetic.Injustice
- Start date
TheRedSnifit
Member
The stereotypical hyper-feminist middle easterners.
Funnily enough, there are plenty of deserts and camels outside of both the ME and the US. The various countries of North Africa, for a start.
Because skin color is a thing?
Poor GRIMES
Banned
Being generic, or, stereotypical, is the entire reason I'm fully behind what the writer is saying in his piece.
Europe has more power over Middle Eastern and South Asian countries in terms of cultural soft power. The purpose is not to critique just Zelda, which is why a lot of users are quoting me with "gotchas!" it's to critique the lame, basic representations of Brown cultures in gaming as a whole.
What are you implying here? Brown people can only live in the deserts of Agrabah while eating locusts?
That's true for all the cultures in Zelda. It's not only the "Brown" ones.
Hell it's true of pretty much the whole fantasy genre. How often do we get anything else than cool looking imagery and stereotypes instead of an accurate representation?
Gerudo eat locusts? Where did you get that?
Charles Brandon
Member
I've always understood ancient to refer to the pre-medieval period i.e. before 500AD or thereabouts.
Well maybe choose examples that actually fit the critique, then? Because I don't think it applies to Zelda, actually.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Dragon Age seems to have gotten it right.
Poor GRIMES
Banned
All of you are missing the point I've been trying to make. It's not just Zelda. It's not the responisibility of Nintendo to solve all of this by making Zelda an alll-encompassing game. That's not the point. The point is that Brown representation in gaming is basic, stereotypical, and appropriated. Zelda is just another game that can be used as an example of exotization and bastarding Brown cultures in its game. There aren't many games that don't do this. It's just strikingly perplexing to me how almost every time a Brown person or culture is shown in a game they gotta immediately be from the magical desert.
Majukun
Member
when creatives will be allowed to be creative again?
nowadays seems like any kind of author has to create with a checklist by his/her side, otherwise someone will not feel "included"
and let's make any kind of fantasy ethnicity, human group or single character completely featureless...this way they will not refere to stereotypes and this somehow will solve racism
who cares if they already have established identitites from previous chapter of an established universe.
nowadays seems like any kind of author has to create with a checklist by his/her side, otherwise someone will not feel "included"
and let's make any kind of fantasy ethnicity, human group or single character completely featureless...this way they will not refere to stereotypes and this somehow will solve racism
who cares if they already have established identitites from previous chapter of an established universe.
Care to elaborate? I only played Inquisition. I saw a lot of white people and some black characters and thats about it. I guess the fact they all wore European style clothing is what is 'right'?
BocoDragon
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
The Gerudo do trade on a fetishized fantasy of the Middle East. I'm not sure if it's really a social evil that needs to be corrected, though. The game is fantasy and as long as it's not perpetuating harm, I don't consider it bad. Will we discriminate against middle eastern people because of Zelda? I'd think "not in a million years".
Is there a word for fetishization of Dark Ages Christendom? Because it seems to me that most western fantasy trades on it. Zelda (like LotR, Game of Thrones, etc) is fetishization of medieval Europe: knights, decaying temples, magick, priests, etc. That comes from a specific milieu, and it's clearly a post-Rome, pre-reformation Europe.
I know it's quite different when western people romanticize their own cultural past, but let's remember that all fantasy trades on the echoes of someone's culture. And also... Zelda is Japanese! But of course no one would fault them for characaturizing Europeans since they have the seat of power in the world.
Is there a word for fetishization of Dark Ages Christendom? Because it seems to me that most western fantasy trades on it. Zelda (like LotR, Game of Thrones, etc) is fetishization of medieval Europe: knights, decaying temples, magick, priests, etc. That comes from a specific milieu, and it's clearly a post-Rome, pre-reformation Europe.
I know it's quite different when western people romanticize their own cultural past, but let's remember that all fantasy trades on the echoes of someone's culture. And also... Zelda is Japanese! But of course no one would fault them for characaturizing Europeans since they have the seat of power in the world.
Tizoc
Member
I knew that when making the post, but thought I'd posted the entry I found on a website
I suggest checking out Indivisible. It's a action RPG with Metroidvania platforming heavily inspired by Indian culture.
Majukun
Member
dragon age just copycatted talkien,
you had the mining dwarves
the agile archer elves
the qnari that are more or less orcs,big warrior like non humanoid creatures that are regarded to like war.
and so on.
lvl99 Pixel
Member
The skin pigment used are appropriate for people who live in the desert areas of their respective worlds, like in our world, over a million years ago. Theres nothing magical about that. Which "brown cultures" were specifically bastardized here?
The voice actor choices are really odd...
Torbjörn's voice actor isn't even Swedish!
Is Reinhardt's voice actor German? I don't hear him speak German at all in the game!
So odd.
This thread is funny.
"Well the Sheikah are based on Jomon, Edo, and Meiji Japan!"
"There are lots of things about the Gerudo that aren't Middle Eastern!"
The fact that you can point to specific Japanese cultural touchstones in the Sheikah while the Gerudo are just vaguely garbed in a Disney-esque Middle East aesthetic is pretty much the issue at hand...
"Well the Sheikah are based on Jomon, Edo, and Meiji Japan!"
"There are lots of things about the Gerudo that aren't Middle Eastern!"
The fact that you can point to specific Japanese cultural touchstones in the Sheikah while the Gerudo are just vaguely garbed in a Disney-esque Middle East aesthetic is pretty much the issue at hand...
That would change the game play and ruin one of the best parts of the game.+
Many if not all fantasies and scifi take inspiration from real culture. It's a given. When people have issue with it then they issue with not only current but media spanning generations.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
You would have a point if there wasn't creatives out there who have no problem including marginalized people into their work. Especially fantasy writers. The genre is getting very inclusive over the years.
This is of course not acceptable, but I do necessarily feel that it applies to Zelda. You are obviously not going to have an exact representation of a certain culture in a Zelda game, by virtue of its fantasy setting.
Nintendo basically othered the Japanese by having a samurai (Kakariko) vs ninja (Iga) dynamic as the only form of representation of Japanese culture. And all the other characters live in European style villages. BOTW is not a particularly strong showcase for this argument.
There is something to be said about the gender politics of the Gerudo, but I don't feel that a game like BOTW should commit to a certain culture. Once you get inside the walled city, it turns out that the Gerudo are normal people who want the same things as the people from other cities. I actually appreciated this as a sort of subversion where you expect them to be a completely different culture, but they're actually just people.
Finaika
Member
Why does Xiaoyu speaks Japanese?
If you think of this from the perspective of a Japanese game dev working at nintendo they might say: Lets make three races based off real world communities of people who have distinct swords for the players to use.(well 4 if you count the one polynesian village in the south)
1) one based off a culture we're familiar with, our own
2) one based off western society encompassing
3) one based off middle eastern society encompassing
So even though western society has more in the way of fiction based on specific countries in europe(like don quixote for example) and middle eastern society lacks works of fiction based on its specific subcultures to this dev they have done both sides equal justice.
What's more important is the message of this article: when are we going to start getting games that really show off the ME properly and not how it's rooted in zelda. TBH nintendo is so far removed from this debate that this cant even be relevant to them, at least not right now
1) one based off a culture we're familiar with, our own
2) one based off western society encompassing
3) one based off middle eastern society encompassing
So even though western society has more in the way of fiction based on specific countries in europe(like don quixote for example) and middle eastern society lacks works of fiction based on its specific subcultures to this dev they have done both sides equal justice.
What's more important is the message of this article: when are we going to start getting games that really show off the ME properly and not how it's rooted in zelda. TBH nintendo is so far removed from this debate that this cant even be relevant to them, at least not right now
Poor GRIMES
Banned
People can make anything they damn well please. Artists have been criticized, critiqued, berated, harassed, etc. almost every single time they release something new. This isn't an entirwly new phenomenon.
Minorities giving examples of shoddy diversity is not an attack on your game. It's them wanting more out of something that they like. I play Overwatch almost every single day and, oddly enough, I'm a Symmetra main! That doesn't mean I can't want a little bit more! I'm a big fan of Zelda as well and I'm looking forward to playing through BoTW myself after seeing my friends play it!
Representation is important in art, and wanting more from your art gives the player a better sense of place in gaming as a whole.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
She was raised in Japan. Law is Chinese but speaks english cuz he was raised in America.
Isn't Orlais a total stereotype of the french?
I know anecdotes are silly and I don't speak for everyone of my cultures BUT
I'm a mixed race person with Middle Eastern, North African, Caribbean, West African, and European descent (yes, it's a lot lol), and I was really happy with how different races - particularly the Gerudo - were handled.
It was super refreshing to see the inspirations from different real cultures fused together seamlessly to create a cohesive fictional culture. If you look on a surface level the Gerudo seem very "Middle-Eastern" inspired, but there's also a lot of Spanish, North African, Mediterranean, Native American, Latin American, and even a touch of sub-Saharan African mixed in. It's normal that the culture seems "exotic" and the concept doesn't really bother me, but I feel like they were treated with respect and serve as a good model on how to create fictional cultures.
It's really reductionist to see it as a "bastardization" of Middle Eastern culture because there's a lot that is definitely NOT from Middle Eastern culture, and I wouldn't want a fictional brown desert culture to be too white-washed/Europeanized anyway.
I'm a mixed race person with Middle Eastern, North African, Caribbean, West African, and European descent (yes, it's a lot lol), and I was really happy with how different races - particularly the Gerudo - were handled.
It was super refreshing to see the inspirations from different real cultures fused together seamlessly to create a cohesive fictional culture. If you look on a surface level the Gerudo seem very "Middle-Eastern" inspired, but there's also a lot of Spanish, North African, Mediterranean, Native American, Latin American, and even a touch of sub-Saharan African mixed in. It's normal that the culture seems "exotic" and the concept doesn't really bother me, but I feel like they were treated with respect and serve as a good model on how to create fictional cultures.
It's really reductionist to see it as a "bastardization" of Middle Eastern culture because there's a lot that is definitely NOT from Middle Eastern culture, and I wouldn't want a fictional brown desert culture to be too white-washed/Europeanized anyway.
Charles Brandon
Member
What I'm struggling with is how it should have been done differently. If you wanted a race of brown people in the game, how should they be represented? Should they accurately represent a 21st century culture in all it's glory, even though that would obviously be deeply incongruous? Perhaps the answer is that any identifying imagery should be expunged. No scimitars, no veils, no Arabian Nights style costumes. Seems a shame to me but it's not my culture.
Except the Gerudo are lumped in with the "non-human" races, rather than with the Hylians and Sheikah.
While I agree with the writer's points on COD, and I agree that Arab culture's are not often portrayed in a manner that doesn't rely on cliches and tropes. I don't agree with the idea that using cliches or tropes is inherently negative thing when creating a fantasy version of a culture.
Majukun
Member
but when it becomes soemthing you have to do instead of want you want to do,then it becomes a problem.
let creatives be creatives without pulling the reins because they have to fit certain parameters,otherwise is just another form of censorship.
AC plays in ancient Egypt (that's still ME right?) and comes out this fall.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Idk. I don't see too much blowback for how the game's depict it's cultures.
Wait, what? How?
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
Zelda is not failing to represent real people, it does not even try. It represents the fictional people Gerudo, as well as the fictional people Goron and Zora. Or Hylian by the way. None of those are the same as any actual group of people, so why would accuracy when compared to a real group of people be of any importance?
I think Nintendo did a great job in how they represented the Gerudo in BOTW. They are far more complex than they were in OoT, and while they are still rooted in the same broad "desert people" stereotype, they are also far more diverse and complex. There's a gaf thread showing the skin color diversity and body diversity of the Gerudo along with other great details.
Probably because people are used to fantasy settings adapting various stuff from real cultures.
I don't see much blowback over Zelda either aside from one article
Necro900
Member
I think you're deliberately avoiding their point.
Also, you'll find out that 99% of entertainment features stereotypes, they're hugely helpful for building narrative and characters without destroying the pacing of said entertainment product.
The issue is not stereotypes per se. The really fundamental thing is those stereotypes shouldn't be offensive or degrading for those involved. And I honestly can't see anything offensive here, especially since the Gerudo is the most interesting tribe in BOTW as far as characters/diversity/quests/setting goes.
Honestly, I think it's well written, but to each his own I guess.
Source? Are people here making up stuff now?
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Creatives aren't being censored. Creatives can create whatever they want. It's just that in this era of social media criticisms of their work can spread fast now more than ever. It's ok for a creative to admit every once in awhile that maybe they fucked up.
Dark Ninja
Member
No they are part of the Human races along with Hylians and regular round ear humans.
Um really? they reproduce with hylians or the one man born to their race every hundred years
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Or Dragon Age has writing chops to back it up.