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Why So Serious?
Battlefield 1, the big WWI game that launches this October, features this Harlem Hellfighter in all its marketing and has an expansion pack devoted to the famed unit. But do any of them identify as transgendered or intersex?
Throughout my life, I have been extraordinarily traditional while most of my friends have been remarkably progressive. Perhaps it’s the curse of an orthodox artist. Perhaps God thinks it’s funny. In any case, experience has taught me to be diplomatic and to choose my battles with care. But while my hippie friends and I have generally gotten along because we share an interest in life’s frivolities (even though we differ on nearly all serious matters), I find it’s increasingly difficult to maintain such friendships. With each passing year, philosophical differences intrude further and further into our casual pastimes.
These days, every other film, novel, or game is linked to some public controversy. Does the story lack gay characters? Unacceptable! Does it involve hunting? Outrageous! Why can’t player-characters in the game be cross-dressers? How can the book be respectful of the nefarious oil industry? How racist of them to choose a white man as the hero! How irresponsible to show a character smoking! Why doesn’t this sport have more diversity? You know what I mean. Even Superman, who used to explicitly fight for “the American way,” is now a globalist, an environmentalist, and probably a secret bisexual like all superheroes must be.
Electronic Arts advertised a black man and an Arab woman as two protagonists in its upcoming WWI game, Battlefield 1, but even that hasn’t stopped many gamers from complaining that they can’t play as female soldiers in the history-based shooter’s multiplayer mode (history must be racist and sexist). The hero on the cover is at least rooted in reality.
The Passion of the Christ was accused of anti-Semitism for daring to dramatize millenia-old scenes straight from the book of this country’s most popular religion.
And today I find myself having to defend the proposal of whaling as an acceptable feature in a light-hearted pirate adventure game called Sea of Thieves. Never mind that every player in the cartoonish game is cast as a thief and a cutthroat (that is, a pirate) or that we’re talking about a game with krakens and mermaids.
When did progressives abandon the liberty to have fun?
Published in Entertainment
Well, if there are serious offers being made…
That’s interesting. You’d think that the remedy for having a paucity of female characters is for aspiring female writers to create them. Same for any other minority; if you want a minority representative, let a minority author create one. But as you pointed out, JK Rowling made her main character a boy. White guy is the default.
I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that until the last few generations, in western culture, the vast majority of historical or widely-known events were driven by white guys. Leaders of countries, generals and soldiers in battle, etc., were almost all white guys.
As women start to occupy leadership roles, maybe that will change. Not right away, of course, but in a few generations. It makes you pause to realize that women leaders (think Margaret Thatcher rather than Queen Elizabeth) have only really been around for a short while.
If our military leadership continues to be feminized and “generals and soldiers in battle” include many more women, we won’t be around “in a few generations,” at least not recognizably.
This.
But until the recent Industrial Revolution the object of the game was to get your family’s property into the next generation reasonably intact. Princess R. O. was fine if she happened to be your cousin (or in James de Rothschild’s case well into the Revolution, your niece) or offered an attractive family alliance. As a peasant fantasy of breaking into the big time wealth- and power-wise, the R.O. theory works. As a matter of any kind of practical biology I gots my doubts.
Weirdly, this is a phenomenon that replicates itself across cultures. Not just white guys—there’s a reason (I think, anyway) that Anansi the Spider is a boy… Deeper than sexism, deeper than generals and soldiers, deeper perhaps than humanity itself—if a Neanderthal was to tell a story, would the main character be male by default?
You can riff on an underlying basic premise, right? So if the basic story is “boy kills dragon gets girl,” a halfway decent human storyteller can add twists and turns; “oh, and the boy is a poor-but-decent commoner and the girl is a princess” or “oh, and the dragon is actually the evil brother of the noble King” or “oh, and maybe the boy is actually a Sponge, or a Smurf, or a stuffed bear, and the princess never actually shows up, but we know that once the character proves himself a man by defeating his own fears, everything’s going to be hunky-dory…”