Gamergaters Please attempt to claim this isn't objectification

[Stubby]

Just now, DunderMifflin said:

I thought it was someone who already doesn't like me using and oppurtunity to throw a jab. 

And that opinion aligns with me more than it does you. Ive said for over a day you shouldn't bother with anymore with the anime discussion that can't be proven. Seems the user that rhymes with Speedo Follofian shares that opinion.

Yeah you keep saying "can't be proven". I don't think you know what that term means. You really should be saying that your opinion can't be proven.  Because the case against you was proven within minutes - which was the whole point of my first post in this thread.

BTW - Speedo does not rhyme with Theda. 

[Theda Baratheon]

4 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

Well there go my hopes and dreams of sailing the high seas on the back of my future wife. Thanks, Theda  

Women can still engage in heavily armored combat though, right?

gosh i've always wanted to take a thoughtful look at tanks, and the men who date them! i mean it DOES hit a little too close to home though...uhh...my dad does have hundreds of hours on world of tanks... 

9 minutes ago, Stubby said:

I thought it was a reader expressing an opinion on the discussion.

you didn't know that opinions aren't allowed on this forum??? apparently this is some kind of tyrannic forum and if you express an opinion the furies break from the earth and impale you with a gleaming spear 

[KiDisaster]

2 minutes ago, Theda Baratheon said:

gosh i've always wanted to take a thoughtful look at tanks, and the men who date them! i mean it DOES hit a little too close to home though...uhh...my dad does have hundreds of hours on world of tanks... 

Don't be too hard on him, not many men can resist the siren song of a Scimitar II. 

Seriously though, how on earth do games like this keep getting made? 

[DunderMifflin]

32 minutes ago, Stubby said:

Yeah you keep saying "can't be proven". I don't think you know what that term means. You really should be saying that your opinion can't be proven.  Because the case against you was proven within minutes - which was the whole point of my first post in this thread.

 

Yeh but it wasn't proven, so you are wrong. Strong evidence against my claim was brought up I admit but nothing was proven.

Because as I've said for the seemingly the billionth time there's no way to prove it either way.

Quote

BTW - Speedo does not rhyme with Theda. 

I dont care

Also it's my word i made up. I can decide how it's pronounced.
The spelling that happens to be the same as a company that makes swimming gear is purely coincidental.

And honestly I don't even know how Theda is pronounced I'm just guessing. I've never seen that name b4 I came to this forum

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

Would my battleship wife come with a dowery and maybe a beneficial political alliance with her family?

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

7 hours ago, DunderMifflin said:

Obviously holocaust deniers and flat earthers.

still not buying the default human claim though because it's not just white people who think anime characters look white.

You're acting like that article validates you when:

Quote

A Trope Codifier for this was Sailor Moon, the cast of which grows quite large over the course of the series. Despite a majority of the characters being 100% Japanese, they have every hair and eye color possible - and even some that aren't. A point of contention is that the main character has yellow hair and blue eyes making her look 'white.' Taking into account that her mother has blue hair and her daughter has pink hair it's clear the color isn't meant to indicate any race. In the live action adaptation, the wild colors were part of the main cast's transformations, but in their civilian personas they had black or brown hair. SM's influence on Japanese pop culture helped to spread the look and it now pervades all mediums (anime, manga, advertising, video games etc).

 

[DunderMifflin]

27 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

You're acting like that article validates you when:

 

No I'm acting like that article doesn't prove anything. Nice cherry picking of the article though.

The only thing I acted like it validated was that it's not a ridiculous claim. From reading the entire article it should be obvious that people can easily mistake anime characters as being white even if they are wrong. It validates that it's not akin to saying the earth is flat or that the holocaust never happened.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

1 hour ago, Theda Baratheon said:

this strikes me as the kind of thread that is actually counterproductive and makes anti-gamer gate people look like the hysterical, easily offended harpies that they portray us to be lmao no offence scot but there we go 

I want to reiterate that I don't think there's any correlation between being a Gamergater and being into stuff like battleship-girls or tank-girls or Fire Emblem Heroes, or anything else where you treat object like women. btw, I can't believe nobody's posted that clip yet.

Ok, I do think there's a correlation between being a gamergater (or alt-right cretin) and being really into Anime and JRPGs and the like. But within that community, there's no correlation between being a gamergater and liking that particular subgenre.

 

 

 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

9 hours ago, DunderMifflin said:

Why is a random video game sprite that looks white automatically white but a random anime character that looks white automatically Japanese? Unless you are agreeing with me that anime characters are made to look European.

As for the Simon Belmont example, that dude would be Romanian if anything. I don't think it's any sort of white privilege to play a game about some Romanians. I don't automatically identity with some Romanians just because they share similar skin tone as me. They are just as foreign to me as they are to any other American of any skin color.

 

1

I think the issue is primarily about looks, not about historic background. As an 8-year old studying the art of Castlevania II at my local rental store, Simon Belmont (even shared my first name) was who I could become. Blond haired, blue eyed, the proto-nordic warrior I had seen my entire life in fiction. Here he was, now, to play as well. This was not a moment of inclusion for me, but only a further instance in a long line of my class/race/gender having preferential treatment in so many areas: including representation. We don't have to align with every single element of these characters, we only have to see bits and pieces.

The issue of Gamergate is more than how we look, I think, because it is a resistance to female protagonists and females developers in gaming. FF13's Lightning was a great character I thought, but the game was panned for a number of reasons. We can extrapolate how Square and the devs working on 15, forever, might have internalized this as a backlash against the female lead, I think. FF15 features an all-male cast, which seems particularly odd in this time of gaming, and particularly for this series as an all male cast hasn't been done since, what, FF2?

Women are represented poorly in games. When games come out to huge disappointment--like Mass Effect Andromeda--the women on staff are blamed. I mean I hate that game, but I would never harass a person who made it.

Either way, I think feminism is often misunderstood in gaming, and how it's approached is problematic due to knee-jerk moralizing from both sides. When male gamers resist change, they are called gamergate--which is unfair because Gamergate refers to specific instances of harassment and hatred where women have been scared/hurt/forced out of work. When male gamers resist change, I'd  argue this is the time to engage in discussion not preaching moralizing--and I think this is where Anita S. and others go wrong. They assume all resistance is fueled by malicious intent, not ignorance, so they fight back with malicious fervor.  

[Centrist Simon Steele]

8 hours ago, Channel4s-JonSnow said:

Apparently there is a term for this:

Mukokuseki

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mukokuseki

 

 

 

So, if I understand, Anime is meant to represent a neutrality? I think I can believe that, as I have often thought characters fit in neither world. But older Japanese work in games did not fit this mold.

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

It would be interesting if people pulled out actual examples of characters they believed to be 'white' in anime and see who agrees. 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

5 hours ago, mormont said:

Um, that is not how this works.

Geralt is indeed a white male. Does he also possess characteristics that place him into a very specific minority category? Yes. Does that make him not a white male? Obviously not. That would be silly. Is there a sense in which being a 'white male' doesn't count, doesn't confer relative privilege, if you happen to belong to another minority? Ask any disabled or LGBTQ+ white male. They'll tell you it's possible to have both white privilege, male privilege and, for example, LGBTQ+ lack of privilege at the same time.

More specifically, Geralt is a classic example of the white male geek avatar. He's different. He's different but he's also special. Just like us in high school! Nobody understood how special we were! They all thought we were freaks! Well, people think Geralt's a freak too, but he's badass!

Traditionally video games, fantasy novels, and sci-fi shows have been riddled with such characters. To be fair, there are now a growing number of those who are non-straight, female, or non-white. Nothing wrong with it, as a fantasy. But to suggest that such a character in some sense isn't a white male character or isn't designed to appeal to that particular demographic is just not, as I said, how this works at all.

 

Yes, this is what I couldn't find the words for last night. Geralt fits that type extraordinarily well--though the books and games do a great job of making his character different, his stories tackle interesting issues, he still fills that archetype. And in Witcher 3, as he searches for his daughter, feels at odds with his world, a man without a country, I think a lot of middle-aged white gamers are feeling that now as evidenced by this thread. What has become of their games? They just don't understand it anymore. The parallels are interesting--I bet a lot exists there for us to pull apart, if I had the energy.  

[Centrist Simon Steele]

4 hours ago, Jo498 said:

Have you read any of the Witcher books? White male privilege does not make a lot of sense in that world. "Human" vs. "non-Human privilege" might and there the mutant Geralt falls closer into the non-human "minority" side (he is not thought of as a freak, he literally is a mutant badass freak, unlike most gamer nerds). It makes not much sense in the Witcher world to compare him to a gay or disabled white male in our world (because his role is very different). This might be moot for the way the people designing games think when trying to appeal to their demographic but it is certainly worth pointing out if one cares about the background world of the Witcher.

(But we had similar things alread with Frodo as straight? white middle class male in the Tolkien thread and this is getting too silly quickly (although here this was hardly possible starting with anthropomorphous female warships), so I am out of here as I have nothing else to contribute because I don't know any of the games in question. I wish everyone good luck with the bowdlerization and purification of the "Gaming scene"...)

 

I think you missed the point. It's not about that  world, it's about this world.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

3 hours ago, DunderMifflin said:

Any random character in a video game that appears to be white actually is white. Including those made by Japanese. Therefore you can wallow I'm white privilege while playin the game.

Any random anime character that looks white actually is not white but Japanese unless specifically srated otherwise. 

Got it. Whatever you say.

What else do you want? Do you just want me to let you have the last word and not respond at all? Is that what you want? Just to let you say something about me and not respond to it? Is that what you want?

 

 

But again, let me ask you, why are you resistant to the concept of white privilege? What do the implications of those words mean to you? I am only curious because often, I find, if we can step around our notions about that term and look at what is truly meant by it, we find it not so dangerous of a term.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

12 minutes ago, Channel4s-JonSnow said:

It would be interesting if people pulled out actual examples of characters they believed to be 'white' in anime and see who agrees. 

Probably my first exposure to anything anime was Starblazers. Captain Avatar was pretty clearly anglo, methinks...

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/starblazers/images/b/be/753055-captain_avatar_large.gif/revision/latest?cb=20110626205135

 

/That said, the vast majority of human characters in the show are of a more classic anime style, which I typically accept as being Japanese.

[TrueMetis]

15 minutes ago, Channel4s-JonSnow said:

It would be interesting if people pulled out actual examples of characters they believed to be 'white' in anime and see who agrees. 

Alright I'll throw out a few.

Usagi Tsukino: Sailor Moon - Japanese

Edward Elric: Full Metal Alchemist -White

Yachiru: Bleach - Japanese

Natsu: Fairy Tail - Not a fucking clue, name suggests Asian.

Goku: Dragon Ball Z - Also not a fucking glue, given the series inspiration probably Asian.

18 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

FF15 features an all-male cast, which seems particularly odd in this time of gaming, and particularly for this series as an all male cast hasn't been done since, what, FF2?

Maria from FF2 was female, and FF1 they were so generic any of them could have been. In the official novel the White Mage was female. So really FF has never had an all male cast.

[DunderMifflin]

13 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

I think the issue is primarily about looks, not about historic background. As an 8-year old studying the art of Castlevania II at my local rental store, Simon Belmont (even shared my first name) was who I could become. Blond haired, blue eyed, the proto-nordic warrior I had seen my entire life in fiction. Here he was, now, to play as well. This was not a moment of inclusion for me, but only a further instance in a long line of my class/race/gender having preferential treatment in so many areas: including representation. We don't have to align with every single element of these characters, we only have to see bits and pieces.

That's just not something I can relate to or understand at all.

one one of the first games I remember loving was Jordan vs Bird, and I wanted to be Michael Jordan and I didn't give a fuck that his skin was a bit different than mine. I didn't want to be Larry Bird who is a lot closer to my skin. And I played basketball religiously for the next 15 years.

To this day I'm still playing basketball video games and I always make my character black because much like in real basketball you are more likely to get picked up for online games with a black guy avatar than a white guy one. Playing as a black guy doesn't bother me one bit. I completely fine with the ridiculously fantasy that I'm good enough to be an NBA player so I'm certainly fine with the fantasy that my skin is a different.

As far as Simon Belmont his whiteness does nothing to connect me to him. He just reminds me of some douche who gets a lot of pretty girls and bullies me.
And still I thought castlevania had awesome games. The black lead character in GTA is a FAR more personally  identifiable character to me than a whole lot of white characters like Geralt or Simon. Their simple whiteness does nothing to connect me to them

13 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

The issue of Gamergate is more than how we look, I think, because it is a resistance to female protagonists and females developers in gaming. FF13's Lightning was a great character I thought, but the game was panned for a number of reasons. We can extrapolate how Square and the devs working on 15, forever, might have internalized this as a backlash against the female lead, I think. FF15 features an all-male cast, which seems particularly odd in this time of gaming, and particularly for this series as an all male cast hasn't been done since, what, FF2?

Women are represented poorly in games. When games come out to huge disappointment--like Mass Effect Andromeda--the women on staff are blamed. I mean I hate that game, but I would never harass a person who made it.

Either way, I think feminism is often misunderstood in gaming, and how it's approached is problematic due to knee-jerk moralizing from both sides. When male gamers resist change, they are called gamergate--which is unfair because Gamergate refers to specific instances of harassment and hatred where women have been scared/hurt/forced out of work. When male gamers resist change, I'd  argue this is the time to engage in discussion not preaching moralizing--and I think this is where Anita S. and others go wrong. They assume all resistance is fueled by malicious intent, not ignorance, so they fight back with malicious fervor.  

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

..and then the poster whose name rhymes with VlueGreyJaygeese answered an questioned asked by the poster whose name rhymes with BarnyardBloor'sBrawnBlow and the also a question by the poster whose name rhymes with Crime and Peel.

Erstwhile, the poster whose name rhymes with JamCreoleMunichSpain answered the same aforementioned question by the poster whose name rhymes with CrennelGoresGoneDough.

Barry the Gimp, through the grimy meatgrinder!

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

JamCreoleMunichSpain is the name of my next Salsa/Zydeco/Rammstein cover band. 

[Fez]

*Mildly disappointed no one batted an eyebrow at the alpaca or the pigeon thing*