So anyway, what I'm getting at when people go around complaining that our sci-fi punk-ass bounty hunter anti-heroine from the distant, space-faring future is not frilly and feminine enough to be a Donald Trump voter's waifu is that it makes me wonder like "What if simply she were male? Would this controversy even exist?". If she were male, would anyone still care if she were "ugly" and "unlikable" instead of a TikTok tradwife? (Which incidentally I don't think she is, but maybe it takes the lens of a lesbian to see the appeal. 
) Of course not. No one would even notice because that's how men are very often portrayed in this medium, but it's apparently a form of sexist bigotry to cop an attitude when a woman does it. Views like that feel like a judgment of more than just a game. They feel like judgments of people.
Another critique I've seen objects to the color of our theoretical protagonist's skin on the grounds that it is racist of her not to be white. To put matters in perspective thereon, I'd invite you to try and recall the last commercially successful AAA video game you've ever heard of before that centered specifically on the role of a woman of color. Personally, Tomb Raider games remain the only clear-cut examples of that I can name for you after some 37 years of gaming. That is the depth of the dearth here. And yes, I feel there is in fact merit to telling the stories of more than just one sort of person.
I liked the trailer a lot. Some have compared its aesthetic choices to those of Cyberpunk 2077. I disagree. I was never interested in Cyberpunk 2077. The writing quality here is in an entirely different league and convinces me that this will be a game not beholden to genre cliches. What we could use more of in the future, obviously, is more actual game play footage, but it was just an announcement trailer. Knowing Naughty Dog like we've come to, we should also fully expect some misdirection in some of their trailers and the possibility of there actually being more than one playable character.
I don't believe that holding these opinions makes me "woke". I believe that seriously championing ideas like the defunding or abolition of police departments and the legalization of all drugs and border crossings on racial justice grounds, opposing economic growth as a concept on environmental grounds, those are woke attitudes. If you're an affluent Westerner and your instinctive response to last year's October 7th terrorist attacks on Israel was to decide "Osama Bin Laden was right", that tends to reflect a woke on life. I use the term "woke", in short, to characterize and insult the excesses of left-wing politics as juvenile in nature because it's a juvenile-sounding term that proponents thereof used to embrace. I believe those specifically are the sorts of opinions that were most often being championed by those who used to use phrases like "stay woke". It was something primarily associated with the racial justice movement here in the United States and rooted in the theory of the case that slavery and genocide are the foundations and main legacy of the nation. Critical race theory, colonial theory, this type of thinking.
Valuing and promoting diversity, in other words, isn't the same thing as wokeness in my mind. Active concern for the interests and representation of hitherto or presently marginalized people is simply a liberal idea embraced to one degree or another by essentially the entire political left regardless of faction. I agree with Sundin's sentiments on that: Art is about empathy, and to which end a wide range of different perspectives and backgrounds and stories being told (including some you may not fully agree with) only serves to advance art. Now whether the specific "DEI" formulation and rubric for achieving that is the best one available or not is a fair subject for debate, IMO, but I'm all in favor of broad demographic representation in media, including video games (not least because I deserve to feel seen and respected just as much as you do), and I definitely don't think being a butch woman of color is a form of prejudice and hate.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 15 December 2024
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