Yet there you are implying a depiction of a black person needs to be "darker black" to be credible and not racist.
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Ridiculous game press accusations
- Thread starter dragonzdogma
- Start date
Yet there you are implying a depiction of a black person needs to be "darker black" to be credible and not racist.
i don't have a problem with light-skinned black characters, i have a problem with capcom making the savage mindless african enemies darker skinned while the lone sophisticated and more "western" black person is lighter skinned
it's not a real life case of a lighter woman being in the right, they chose to make the bad guys darker than the good guys
they also obviously tried to make her sexy and it's pretty clear that they thought a darker black women wouldn't be attractive to the audience
SomedayTheFire
Member
Where did I say that? Please point that out to me.
If you don't understand it after having explained to you multiple times you never will. The context you so desperately are clinging onto is sketchy as fuck and pretty damn racist.
Are those African tribes also mindlessly aggressive parasite zombies?
The tribal enemies are all covered in war paint and their skin is grossly discolored and rotting, so there is no light/dark argument to be made there.
Is that somehow racist in itself?
If you can't decipher it from your own thoughts then I don't see how I'm going to help.
None of these explanations are terribly well thought out. Between "it's racist because she's lighter skinned black" or "it's racist because infected tribe" there's little to the racism argument in the game. The whole thing is inspired heavily by Black Hawk Down, including the setting and the people. Is that movie racist when it shows a horde of angry black people beating a white man to death?
Pretty much every single piece of journalism surrounding this game is laughable and embarrassing, almost as much as the actual game.
The tribal people are actually more ash skinned than dark black.
partyphone
Banned
seven years on and people are still defending this specific aspect of RE5. it's gone from funny to sad.
sheva is not a real fucking person being criticized here. i agree that shitting on people for their actual skin color is bad no matter what.
i am calling capcom's deliberate design decisions racist because they made a choice to portray the black protagonist as lighter than the bad guys, both to drive home that she's good and also to make her more attractive.
akidnamededdy
Banned
Well to be fair if you remember at the time that WAS the argument after the initial reveal trailer.
I'm going off Senoculum's post, where he says that the parasite removes higher reasoning. Does the in-game explanation not say that? If so, it comes across like a "reason defeats superstition" narrative, like the myth of Christopher Columbus proving the Earth was round - something Europeans had figured out long before Columbus' time - which was invented to give Americans a national hero.
I think it's worthwhile splitting things up into the initial reaction and the reaction on seeing the full game. It's entirely possible that one is the result of oversensitivity and the other is well-founded.
Which is generally the thinking of mass media in general.
Robert Ashley
Member
Yeah, let's find some stuff to get mad at the gaming press about! Who do they think they are? Elitist pricks! #makevideogamesgreatagain
Pretty much every single piece of journalism surrounding this game is laughable and embarrassing, almost as much as the actual game.
Oh god. Totally forgot about DMC!
Eh, there is a well known issue of associating lighter black people as "better" than darker black people. It's not a good look to throw a very light skinned black protagonist in a situation where she is killing savage dark skin black people, zombies or not. There's simply a lot of connotation that goes with that whether it is intentional or not.
partyphone
Banned
Pretty much every single piece of journalism surrounding this game is laughable and embarrassing, almost as much as the actual game.
what's the specific accusation that's ridiculous here? DmC was garbage but the fanboy reaction to it was vitriolic. yeah it's a bad video game but it's just a video game.
The one that I still find to be the most heinous to this day is: Max Temkin raped a girl in college. Maybe. And even if he didn't, a thing no one had any evidence of, he should still come forward so we can have a meaningful conversation about the man's role in female assault.
Mindblowing that this ever got printed. The subsequent fodder after it was just as shit, basically claiming that because he's a man and decided to not present his accusation to the world at every public event after his public denouncement of the claim, purporting himself to be a maybe-rapist, he was a bad person that deserved to be bankrupt.
Terrible journalism all around. The claim was found to be false months later.
Eh, DmC wasn't that bad. There's a lot of stuff that's far more silly in the Devil May Cry universe than the stuff that happens in DmC.
You're forgetting Josh Stone, another major supporting character in Resident Evil 5.
Sheva's not the one lone good black person in RE5's Africa, and your enemies in RE5 aren't all "blacker" black people.
There's also Doug, the best character in the game.
She's modeled after her actress.
wiki sez:
and even then she doesn't really look like either of them facially. she's a hand-made design that was specifically chosen by capcom.
God Dayumm
Banned
Excellent example, it is embarrassing every time a journalist tries to turn it on the fans
Yeesh...sensitive much?
Much of what the gaming press does is criticism but criticize them and you get this kind of reaction...
What. The. Fuck. Never heard of this before. Kotaku.... of course...
partyphone
Banned
there hasn't been any good criticism of the gaming press in this thread.
SomedayTheFire
Member
Hoo boy. Right the woman in this picture is Michelle Van Der Water. Who was ONLY who Sheva's face was modeled on. The actual actress behind Sheva's mocap and voice was Karen DyerShe's modeled after her actress.
So they took a darker skinned black actress to act out and voice Sheva, then replaced her face and skin tone with a lighter black woman.
There was a bunch of dummies trying to make it look as if all the complaints about the game were solely about the lack of white hair (not just the press, though). Not to mention a couple of embarrassing HOW DARE YOU VOTE WITH YOUR WALLETS articles.
Robert Ashley
Member
It's not just video games. Our entire culture is turning into a Trump rally. Who's telling us what to think today?!! Let's get the tar and feathers!!!
You're right, but it adds nothing to your argument. She's based on two real individuals. Moreso Karen, her voice/motion actress. Speaking of her...
Many of the characters are based on real people and their faces are modified from there. Doesn't suddenly invalidate the actor's involvement.
You don't think the absurd downplaying of the PS4's spec advantage over the Xbox One by the gaming press wasn't awful? How about the writer who tried to twist a scene in Lords of Shadow 2 into rape imagery so they could complain about it?
Both of these examples have been brought up in this thread.
SolidSnakex
Member
Why would anyone do that? Kamitani described why the characters look the way they do and it has nothing to do with story or anything like that. Each character is just based off standard fantasy "classes" like knights, fighters, amazons etc. That was the basic template for each character. It follows that design to the point that the characters don't even have actual names, they're just called Amazon, Elf, Fighter etc. But he didn't just want to copy them and be done with it because there are so many examples of characters like that and the end result is that the characters wouldn't be memorable because they'd be relatively generic. So he decided that what he could do is greatly exaggerate many of their proportions that the classes were known for. So you have the fighter becoming very top heavy in terms of muscle mass, the amazon became very muscular overall, and the sorceress became very busty. The only really "normal" looking characters, if you want to call it that, are the elf and the wizard because there really isn't anything notable about them that you could exaggerate.
And I think he achieved his goal in the end as DC has some of the most memorable character designs of the last generation even though they're all based off very standard fantasy ideas.
It's almost as if America's historical relationship between Spaniards and several nations of Africa is significantly different or something.
ShinMaruku
Member
They didn't replace anything, Karen was only her voice and motion. It's not uncommon to have two actors for different aspects.
Take away the Black Hawk Down filter and Sheva's skin tone is closer to Dyer.
Pretty much every single piece of journalism surrounding this game is laughable and embarrassing, almost as much as the actual game.
Yeah, how a few notable sites handled DmC was straight up embarassing
The reaction from Tameem at Ninja Theory wasn't exactly much better.
The "Bros Before Hos" controversy from Adam Sessler about God of War: Ascension was incredibly overblown. I'd agree that the name of the trophy is crass, but it absolutely was not about what he claimed it was about. He claimed the trophy was given for brutally murdering a beast-woman. That woman did not die, you "murdered" an illusion. And the trophy was given because an important male character chooses to side with Kratos instead of a woman that he might have reason to side with. Hence "Bros before Hos". It's just a story trophy. I do think them changing it to "Bros before Foes" was a better trophy name anyways.
Plus, Adam Sessler along with many others complained about the Trials of Archimedes and it got significantly toned down in difficulty. I thought that was dumb too. It was hard, but I was able to do it on the Hard difficulty after a while. I felt like it challenged my understanding of the combat very well.
Plus, Adam Sessler along with many others complained about the Trials of Archimedes and it got significantly toned down in difficulty. I thought that was dumb too. It was hard, but I was able to do it on the Hard difficulty after a while. I felt like it challenged my understanding of the combat very well.
High Fry Frow
Member
Polygon's bullshit article about Witcher 3 having a race problem...as there are no people of color in a game set in 12th century Eastern Europe...
lmao, yeah. This is one I can get on board with. That was dumb as hell.
SomedayTheFire
Member
They didn't replace anything, Karen was only her voice and motion. It's not uncommon to have two actors for different aspects, usually because Karen was already an accomplished motion capture actress.
Take away the Black Hawk Down filter and Sheva's skin tone is closer to Dyer.
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iz.podpolja
Neo Member
And you know this how?
The Witcher series is very much an expression of the world seen through Polish cultural optics and PoCs rarely happen to be its focus (across all political & social spectra: from far-right to far-left), as there's never been a substantial minority of this kind in the area. Meanwhile most of xenophobic & racist behavior is directed towards people who would classify as Caucasians (ie Jews, Belarusian & Ukrainian minorities and as of late Syrian immigrants - described in right-wing media as simply "Muslims").
BTW Sapkowski's description of non-humans is often understood as an allegory of Jews (with numerous hints in the author's vocabulary, such as use of the word "pogrom", which in Polish is used exclusively in relation to Jews).
It doesn't mean that classically understood racism is not present here, furthermore I'd bet, were the demographical situation any different, it would be a far greater issue, especially judging by the bigotry directed towards people of similar physiognomy, but as it is now, it's a relatively marginal problem, and as such - again - is rarely reflected in Polish cultural output.
I hope I shed some light on the issue that's sparked many plainly ignorant comments (from both sides of the argument - though it's difficult to unsee some of the aggressive "defence" out there).
SolidSnakex
Member
Pretty much every single piece of journalism surrounding this game is laughable and embarrassing, almost as much as the actual game.
This is my favorite on the subject of that game
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/capcom-almost-halves-dmc-sales-expectations/0110372
at least they kept it historically accurate with interdimensional elven specters
What a riveting argument.
SomedayTheFire
Member
As opposed to if you remove things deliberately added to the game from the game it's better!!
Your arguments have been SUPER sketch either way to the point where I don't feel like I should waste my time. Game is racist as FUCK.
Man, 12th century Eastern Europe had a crazy monster problem.