| NintendoCM said: The issue I find with most arguments as to why they would change it, is why does it negative effect you? Saying "why not just leave the character as white", is virtually the same as "what's the harm in making her a person of color". I see this day after day and it can make the video game community really toxic. I think the biggest factor is white people are represented 10 to 1 in cinema and television and studies show other demographics can gain more confidence, security, happiness when someone that represents them is in a film or television project. I'm not saying that it can't get out of hand, in the case of when it has no logical place. But it seems to me like people are making a mountain out of a moll hill. |
Yet rather than create a new, original character that represents black or asian people in any way, they just throw black or asian skin on a Scandinavian character. White people are so represented in film because Hollywood is the dominant film industry and it developed in a majority white (for now) nation. I don't like toxicity in the gaming community any more than the next guy, and I'm sure a lot of the backlash will be based in white identity politics or outright white supremacism rather than a backlash against identity politics in general. But this is a character based in Scandinavian culture and history, and it is no more okay to erase that than to erase a minority character. Not to mention, minority is only respective of US demographics. Imagine if Bollywood adapted Guacamelee into a film and made Juan the luchador played by an Indian? Would that not be just bullshit? Or would you say "what's the harm? How does it negatively affect you?" They would just be making one minority character into another, from the US perspective, so should we care? Of course we should! A luchador is Mexican, and the game is based in a fantasy world where everything is Mexico, called the Mexiverse (seriously, that's what the developer calls it)! It would be ridiculous for the entire cast not to be Mexican! Similarly, a game based in a fantasy world where everything is medieval Europe should have white people, with maybe a few minority characters here or there, but the Scandinavian woman should definitely not be that minority character. It is not racist or toxic to suggest that. If there were a black wizard or something, that could happen, but they'd be their own character with their own identity, not a coat of paint over a Scandinavian woman. That's not even all that far from black face, really. I guess that's what we have the term tokenism for. And we should take it seriously. What they're doing here doesn't advance black or asian people, it just takes a beloved character and changes the character from what people who actually care about that character remember.
