Comment on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 hits 1m sales in just one day
rtxn@lemmy.world 4 days agoIt’s a reference to a line in a Stargate episode, uttered by a historian in reference to outdated medieval practices (specifically trepanning). My point is that historical fiction about a specific time and culture should reflect the values and prejudices of the people and not be condemned for it.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Except that isn’t what happens with stuff like this. It isn’t reflecting “the values and prejudices of the people” at the time. It is reflecting them in the modern day.
The problem with KCD1 wasn’t that it depicted low tech people (which it didn’t. It very much went the route of “alchemy is science”) or even the very questionable views on women (that is a very complex topic). It was the insistence that medieval Czech was a land of white people (and a specific phenotype at that…) and blah blah blah. When the vast majority of historical evidence is that medieval Europe was a mixing pot (there is a reason that terms like “moor” existed and plenty of people brought servants, slaves, and even wives back from the various Crusades).
Which gets back to “the dark ages” being about a lack of records more than anything else. But people interpret “Well. there is no record of an arab being in this entire country for 300 years!” as “The white men kept the brown folk out” rather than “Well… there also aren’t a lot of records period. But if you look a few miles to the east you DO see records acknowledging this as though it weren’t a big deal”
Which also lines up with the lead dev being a piece of shit chud who was a loud voice during gamergate.
And it also left a REALLY bad taste in the mouth of people (who give a shit) who read any of the discussion on this and saw WAY too many people talk about how it is important to have a game about Czech that remembers the glory days back when everyone was white and strong and blah blah blah.
And, as a quick aside: KCD1 is still the most bog standard power fantasy fantasy there can be. The combat is more or less “What if you took two HEMA seminars?” and is still star wars kid slicing through plate mail. And it is especially funny because the “historians” that were consulted? No, they weren’t medieval history specialists or even HEMA specialists. If memory serves, it was a guy who specialized in WW1 tanks. And, while people can obviously have multiple passions, it really showed. Also, you are the son of a blacksmith (?) who bangs his way around Bohemia to become bestest friends with the king and blah blah blah.
Which brings us to Ghost of Tsushima. I genuinely love this game even if there is zero chance I ever finish it (I can’t stand ubi open world games and it is more ubi than ubi has been in years). Yes, it is 500% written by a white guy who studied the blade. But it is well acted and well “directed” and really feels like I am playing a Kurosawa film. That said, it definitely depicts the Mongols as violent barbarians who outright use civilians as target practice and do nothing but <REDACTED> and pillage because violence is fine but the other thing triggers ratings issues.
And in the sense of needing a villain that justifies Jin giving up the pretense that samurai were anything other than violent warlords in armor? It works. But if you actually look at politics and cultural shifts in Japan over the past few decades, you’ll see why it was very well received that All Mongols are Barbarian Monsters and so forth. It is the same problem as depicting “generic brown people” in “generic Middle East” as more or less slobbering zombies to be mowed down.
Which gets back to the key point. Pretty much all of these “We are just depicting the <blank> period as it was” isn’t doing that. It is portraying things through the lens of the modern day which is something that is accepted amongst historic fiction writers (more on that shortly). So if they crank up the whiteness? There is a reason.
Now, I said I was going to talk about historic fiction writers. If you ARE interested in “what things were like”, I STRONGLY recommend authors like Miles Cameron (I think that is his pen name for SFF, but they redirect to the same site). Historic fiction can be awesome and the best stories are the ones that need to have a footnote or appendix of “Yo, this ACTUALLY happened.” because of how wild it is. And you’ll find that the writers who actually put the effort in to cite things tend to have much more nuanced depictions of both sides (because it is incredibly rare to have a genuinely evil empire) and are a lot less focused on racial purity because… that shit wasn’t a thing once we got past “The people on that side of the river all have red hair and are evil. I hear their wives and daughters are hot though…”