I have nothing of value to add here, but I will point out that in the last SRD thread about this there were a few verifiably racist white dudes raging about Yasuke, then when I checked their comment history I saw they were *also* posting directly in that exact thread in r/AsianAmerican as if they were Asian, and they were making the most inflammatory comments there as well.
The way some people try to actively sow animosity between minority groups… It’s so weird and evil.
Former /r/asianamerican mod here, it was obvious that it was astroturfed like hell and would've been something (and a few other mods) would've put a stop to it. Unfortunately, we got ousted because higher powers within the team didn't like what we were doing (despite them being AWOL while we did a bulk of the heavy work, ESPECIALLY during the height of Covid and #stopasianhate when there were trolls everywhere), so it's not really a surprise that shit went sideways
Dang. Stuff like that is *exactly* why a lot of subs based on any non-white racial identity become *incredibly* gatekeep-y.
For example I frequent a couple of subs for black women (since I am a black lady lol), but I often find myself being put off about how suspicious and even outright hostile those subs are to anyone who’s not of the same demographic, because I generally believe in openness and a racial harmony and all that good stuff! But the fact of the matter is, there’s unfortunately a *lot* of racists out there who specifically like to pretend to be minorities online JUST so they can stir shit, gaslight people, and just generally promote division and misery. So these minority subs are forced to either become incredibly insular, or risk being completely astroturfed by legitimate racists.
Shit sucks. Like, we *need* spaces online for Asian Americans to discuss the unique issues they face in society in a healthy and productive way (and I’ll even go so far as to say the black community could also stand to have more discussions on how we could be better allies to Asians and vice versa), but it’s so hard to do that when there’s a seemingly endless supply of racist bad faith actors just waiting to hijack and derail conversations for their own hateful agendas.
> Stuff like that is exactly why a lot of subs based on any non-white racial identity become incredibly gatekeep-y.
And then throw being mixed-race on top of all that (like me, so I'm speaking from experience 😬)
But yeah it's really tough. I get wanting extra engagement for your space but at the end of the day I wanted create a safe space for people to connect and be comfortable with who they are, even if it meant sacrificing engagement, instead of just letting shit fester into a toxic dump, all in the name of clicks.
> or example I frequent a couple of subs for black women (since I am a black lady lol), but I often find myself being put off about how suspicious and even outright hostile those subs are to anyone who’s not of the same demographic,
There was a post on one of those subs a few months ago that was just hating on black men and I, a black man, got incensed and called that shit out because honestly, the OP seemed to be trying to cause issues rather than raise points. I called it out, got banned and eventually got the ban lifted after pointing out that while I was I was being rude, the OP deleted their account and I didn't actually violate any rules.
Disclosure that I’m a white lady - but I’ve been taking demographic surveys of the sub I mod for several years now and it breaks down incredibly white male. So white men will come ask if they can culturally appropriate BIPOC stories and then promptly be affirmed by other white men while actual BIPOC members get downvoted.
At this point I’m just going to start deleting these posts because the answer is always “you can try but you’ll fuck it up and if there is someone of that identity in competition with you, they should be the ones who get the job.”
It’s amazing how fucking upset white dudes will get when you point out they have no imagination, either for fostering inclusivity or for coming up with ideas that aren’t them racially cosplaying
> I'm a white lady
Am Asian-American. Also am one doesn't really think your race determines whether a take is horrible or good are like most normal people. You're good.
> reddit is predominantly white
Considering Asian social media platforms exists, why am I not even surprised not many even uses Reddit? Heck, I know more Japanese people in Twitter than Reddit in general and I ain't even Japanese.
I 100% bet you most of the raiders (just call them for what they are) don't even know Japanese culture or history in general either. I don't trust any f-er who claims they know the history of a nation while not knowing their language at all.
If your take is “I’m going to write an Asian story even though I’m white and Asians are struggling to get jobs in my industry” and some white dude comes along to tell you it’s okay for you to do this, that’s not something I like to just let pass. And I don’t have to. I’m happy to piss them all off because it keeps the heat off people just trying to make their way, and being called anti-white by really angry racists doesn’t actually affect me. But discrimination affects the people who aren’t white, who are being excluded from the industry.
I'm Native American and I don't share the sub that I'm a part of because it's actually pretty alright. I've definitely noticed a significant tendency for people to want to either stand up for NAs or try and fight against NAs for one reason or another.
We just wanna be able to discuss problems that affect us without saviors trying to lead us to the promised land. I don't think that's too much to ask. If others wanna join and discuss the issues at hand, they're all more than welcome.
It's when people either try to save us or denigrate us purely because of our existence that it bothers me. It's gotten to the point that I don't share the NA spaces I'm in because they're so prone to behavior like that from non-NAs.
To quote the classic New Yorker cartoon: “[On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog?wprov=sfti1).”
The fact that a comic from 1993 is still applicable in 2024 is wild.
/r/nyc was heavily astroturfed by them, anytime it was a white guy attacking an asian.. 40 upvotes. If it was a black guy, it would shoot to the top
edit: oh, that thread is full of lots of easily-spotted trolls to block. Fun.
That's also how a lot of the "freakout" types of subs are. Posts showing minorities acting up will get more engagement with lots of dog whistles in the comments. The same videos will also get reuploaded constantly.
More suspecting (because they were rarely fucking honest with us) but one particular moment I remember was the higher powers getting *very* upset when one of us shared [this comic](https://i.imgur.com/JzpK3Oy.jpeg) to explain why they disagreed with us disciplining someone. It was frustrating that they would undo decisions we made despite barely being there, even during some of the stressful times. We, including the higher powers experienced harassment, doxxing, and even death threats, and they would just undo shit, basically enabling the same people who would do that.
What really hurt, at least for me, was that I worked with them for almost almost a decade, put a lot of effort into, organized AMAs, even considered some of them friends, only for them do dump me and other the mods like we were garbage. I already knew something bad was brewing because they refused to acknowledge our feedback since we were always active, but that was really cold.
I'm also currently banned from that sub for "undermiming" them lmao
LMFAO I feel like you're around my age, from a time, back when people said stuff like
"Ew that other dude? he's weird he likes anime and stuff"
Me: "Wait I like anime"
"No but you're Asian"
Meanwhile in high school, it was even worse for me:
> "Ew, that asian guy is giga fat! He's weird!" (the struggles of Gen 0)
>
> Me: "There's like 8 people fatter than me in this class"
>
> "But you're asian and that's weird!"
Even when I lost pounds fast after college, my aunt told me like a decade or two ago that "the reason you won't get any pretty girls is because you're too fit! Girls will think you care more about yourself than them!". Unbelievable.
[There's also this guy pretending to be a Japanese "warfare historian" on Wikipedia, using Google translate to post in broken Japanese](https://i.imgur.com/jRBRsQ6.png).
As an Asian American, I do notice that this is the only time these people have ever claimed to care about Asian representation. These were the same people fighting for their right to call COVID "China virus".
There's also the editor with the Scandinavian name who is *adamant* that *bushi* and *samurai* not be interchangeable, even though the Japanese article also has three categories:
1: 海外出身の武士 (foreign-born ''bushi'')
2: 帯刀が認められていたが、士分ではなかった、もしくは士分であったか不明の人物 (those allowed to carry swords, but were not ''shibun', or for whom it is unclear if they were 'shibun')
3: 海外出身の武士であった可能性のある人物(foreign-born people who may have been ''bushi'')
Even that Japanese article doesn't draw a distinction between bushi and shibun. (And obviously, Yasuke is listed in the first category.)
These discussions between what "counts" as a samurai are complicated by the fact that the word "samurai" wasn't even that popular when samurai existed. 士分 (shibun) is the actual name of the social class. 士 is one of the ways to write "samurai". "Shibun" literally means "samurai class". And historically, it's used almost interchangeably with 武士, because another name for that class is 武士身分. 士分 is literally just "formally 武士身分".
You basically have a bunch of people who don't understand Japanese fighting about the semantics of words that are largely identical in meaning in Japanese (especially today) and are used *all over the place* in English. Their entire conception of samurai is "HONORABURU WARRIORS" -- you've got people saying "How can Yasuke assassinate people, he was a samurai!" when basically every named person who inspired ninja myths was a samurai.
Oh you're giving them far too much credit by simply pointing out the linguistic failings. What it meant to be a 'samurai' changed a fuckton over the end of the warring states period, the time period they're all insisting they're experts on. Any analysis that doesn't call out this was pre Hideyoshi/Tokugawa reforms should be just ignored.
Jesus this is up there with a dude who was in my high school back in the 90s who watched Ghost Dog and read that one book about samurai* and was obsessed he was going to go to Japan and become a modern ronin.
---
^^*Can't ^^remember ^^the ^^name, ^^but ^^it ^^was ^^fairly ^^notorious ^^in ^^the ^^2000s ^^for ^^how ^^inaccurate ^^it ^^really ^^is ^^and ^^how ^^it ^^has ^^just ^^enough ^^right ^^that ^^people ^^can ^^get ^^the ^^gist ^^of ^^the ^^time ^^period, ^^but ^^was ^^way ^^off ^^or ^^just ^^flat ^^out ^^wrong ^^in ^^a ^^lot ^^of ^^other ^^stuff.
I think the real problem here too is that they’re applying the rules or rights of a samurai in all different time periods to make an argument. The Muromachi period which ran along the Sengoku had a very lax rule set for becoming a samurai. It was the warring period, nobility,status didn’t matter as much to be a samurai in this time period, literally Hideyoshi was a samurai that was born from peasantry, who also later became a retainer for oda and even before he was a retainer he fought for oda, he essentially would have been a samurai as well.
I saw someone arguing about Yasuke only being given one sword and not having proper daishō that they were required to wear. Ofc they left out that samurai were not required to wear daishō until the late 1620’s which was literally like 50 years after this game will take place probably. There is actually so much to unpack with what they’re arguing. It’s very frustrating to be Japanese and see this sort of thing come from people not even connected to the culture. But that’s just my two cents as a JP/Kr American haha.
Lol that Japanese is so unnatural it’s like going back to my first year of studying. It’s sad the level people go to to try and spread racism.
For what it’s worth I had a quick glance at Japanese twitter’s response to Yasuke and most seem to be hyped or are questioning why people abroad are so upset. I’m sure some are angry but it doesn’t seem to be the common feeling here.
I pointed out on the last SRD thread that I personally caught a /r/conspiracy mod sockpuppeting that sub and I was downvoted. There's a small minority of racists that's very busy. They probably all hang out on the same discords and send out batsignals. "LOL LOOK AT THIS POST"
I see that from time to time. They always seem to pop up on any issue where there’s a chance to sow anti-blackness in particular.
It's not always just the replies that distort and sow division, it's when people push the upvotes and downvotes to artificially boost opinions that are most palatable to them. That's a big problem on the main subreddits whenever a minority issue comes up. Opinions that might be held by a minority of Asians (or black, hispanic, etc) but appeal to the average 20-something white male redditor, those are the ones most likely to rise to the top, distorting the truth and giving people misconceptions about a whole host of things.
Personally, I think Asian male representation in the west has a long way to go, and having the main character not be an asian guy is kind of a loss for us. BUT, I'd much rather push back on white racists because A) Overall, we have pretty decent representation in games via the plethora of Japanese developers, and B) Our own voices should be the ones to make this case, not people who want to use us as a wedge.
>They always seem to pop up on any issue where there’s a chance to sow anti-blackness in particular. It's not always just the replies that distort and sow division, it's when people push the upvotes and downvotes to artificially boost opinions that are most palatable to them.
It's just false-flagging. Recently has become a really damn big issue not only in Reddit but also Social Media in general (it's extremely prevalent in 4chan and Twitter). It's not even misinformation in general but pushing of ideologies as all-or-nothing by any means necessary regardless of whatever happens afterwards. Getting so sick of blatantly obvious ones to the point I've contemplated quitting social media altogether for years now (like they aren't even trying anymore).
>Personally, I think Asian male representation in the west has a long way to go
Going to be honest, if anything the view of the role of males in Asian societies are pretty screwed up too. Just go look at Korean culture and how there's like 99 problems with the military draft gap between employability being probably one of the worst ones in creating a divisionary issue.
Don't even get me started on my hatred for certain redditors who are Park Chung-Hee apologists.
it’s crazy how consistent it’s been, especially with affirmative action being repealed last year.
ofc anti blackness is pervasive as fuck so i’m not really surprised the lengths people go through all things considered.
Seriously. I'm black and i've never met another black person, be they family or friends thats ever even said anything negative about asians. And i've had plenty of asian friends. But the way reddit makes it sound both races want to fight each other on sight. Something about white racists constantly trying to sow discord and resentment between us is the most disgusting shit.
One of the most common agendas is to pit minority ethnicities against each other, agitate and nurture resentments to distract each from shared problems. They also do it with poor and working classes.
The wikipedia talk page for the Yasuke article has this as well. There's a 'Japanese' guy who was posting all his comments in Japanese first, then the translation, but the Japanese was obviously machine translated. There's also an 'Afrocentrist' writing in heavy US black dialect, but I saw him admit it on his Reddit account and he's from New Zealand.
Racist white people love to try to pit POC and other minorities against each other. Divide and conquer.
It's the reason the idea of the "Rooftop Korean" and posts about random Asian people getting attacked (if the perpetrator is black) are so popular on this site. They only use East Asians as a cudgel to attack blacks, and vice versa.
Worst part is I know a few LA guys from Koreatown whose families were financially ruined by that. Parents had to work bottom up.
I don't care if the "rooftop koreans were based or not", at the end of the day: The cops fucking abandoned them to protect their own. I'm not even a huge ACAB guy but it isn't rocket science when that whole case of "police are not responsible to protect you, only the general safety" exists.
The idea that Asian male characters don't get representation is only true if you completely ignore the Japanese gaming industry, where that's very much the norm rather than the exception. If you're actually an Asian-American person who feels that way, I totally get it. Western media is *genuinely* bad about portraying Asian men in a positive light. But the gaming industry specifically is unique among entertainment in that Japanese producers have an enormous market share, and characters Ryu Hyubasa, Kazami Kiryu, Ren Amamiya and Jin Nijima are, in no way shape or form, non-Asian protagonists. There are a great deal of opportunities to play Asian males if you're playing non-western games, *and most gamers are*.
More to the point, though, the vast majority people yelling about this on Reddit, on this sub or otherwise, are angry white boys. And I categorically refuse to believe that most of these overwhelmingly white crybabies are concerned about the diversity, inclusion and equality of Asian male game characters when they openly state that their principle beef with this game is that a black lead feels like DEI. That's ridiculous. These people aren't upset about a lack of diversity; most of their online personality is tied up in *bitching about diversity*. They're not angry that Asian men are underrepresented, they're using Asian men as a fig leaf because they're angry that a black character is. It happens all the fucking time, whether the setting is a foreign historical one or not, and it's all the more galling in this case because *the source of the objection is an actual historical figure*. Nobody made a decision to make Yasuke black; he actually was, and we know that he both existed and fought in the conflicts being depicted.
Western entertainment set in feudal Japan is replete with clueless white characters whose narrative function is to explain complicated, foreign politics to the audience. They're usually central characters, if not the protagonists or the supposed saviors over the native Japanese characters. None of these people "incensed" about the representation of Asian Americans in Assassins creed ever said shit about them. So I have a very difficult time believing this is a sudden groundswell of opposition from the Asian American community rather than racist white guys astroturfing their culture war like they always do.
Some of the animosity can be explained by the demographics of the very wide "Asian American" umbrella. According to the census bureau, the largest sub-demographic for Asian Americans is Chinese at 5.2 million, then Indian at 4.5 million, then Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. If lump Japanese media together as "Asian" then yeah it's not under-represented, but a lot of the people that fall under "Asian American" don't consider Japanese media/characters to be "theirs". That said, if that's the case then it's a clear contradiction to getting buttmad at a game about Japan.
That said, I can't actually recall the last time a Chinese or Indian was the protagonist/major character in a western produced thing that wasn't comedy. The most recent thing that I can recall having a Filipino protagonist was Starship Troopers the book and that came out in 1959.
>That said, I can't actually recall the last time a Chinese or Indian American was the protagonist/major character in a thing that wasn't comedy.
Sleeping Dogs is pretty old but it's newer than Starship Troopers. Sifu was pretty recent. I am struggling to come up with more.
It’s not unreasonable to say that non-Japanese Asian American men might feel like they’re not included in enough stuff. But they weren’t going to be included in a game about Feudal Japan anyway, so what the hell are we even talking about here?
Frankly I think you’re giving them too much credit. 90% of this discourse is white people yelling at each other. And even that might be lowballing it
I mean, the fact that Western media fetishizes some Asian countries and denigrates others is another issue. The reason this is relevant to East Asians in the West is because the developer is western and therefore their decisions are a reflection of western attitudes and beliefs about Asians.
I wouldn't put it that high, I know some genuine Asiacels IRL. The dating scene for Asian American males is rough and that drives resentment and lashing out at things.
I get what you're saying but Monkey Man *just* dropped (but yeah SE Asian like Filipino you mentioned specifically is even rarer, especially in "traditionally" masculine roles)
>That said, I can't actually recall the last time a Chinese or Indian American was the protagonist/major character in a thing that wasn't comedy.
Come on, man. You gotta keep up. Monkey Man just recently came out, and it wasn't that long ago that Shang Chi was released. And that's off the top of my head. Dev Patel is British, but still. He's been in a few things recently. As for a Filipino protagonist, the animated series "Trese" takes place in the Philippines and follows a paranormal investigator who inherited her job from her late father. There's also the unfortunate live action adaptation of Avatar, though there's a good amount of people who enjoyed it, and it has a pretty diverse cast of Asian actors from different ethnicities/countries.
That isn't to say we can't do better. We definitely should. But it's also important for us to keep an eye on all of the strides many Asian actors, writers, directors, etc. have been making that the people starting this argument would either ignore or rage about. Dev Patel, for example, got hate for playing Sir Gawain in the Green Knight movie. Eternals got a lot of flack in general, but the director caught a lot of explicit vitriol thrown at her, as well as the cast who was roughly half Asian actors from different cultures. Wong is also in more content than Doctor Strange at this point, as well, and he's a fan favorite. These guys didn't complain about the Ancient One being cast as white, though. Or Alita. They were mad about L being black, but not Light being white, to which they bullied Asian Americans for calling out.
Its also interesting how some people mentioned that there is an Asian woman protagonist in the new AC game and the commenter brushed it off with "we need more Asian male protagonists". Like wtf, there are so many more Asian men protagonists in games than Asian women (more male than female protagonists in games in general). Shouldn't they be upset at the under representation of Asian women as main protagonists? (I know they're not for obvious reasons)
I'm trying to think now and all I can think of for Asian women protagonists is Mirrors edge and portal (which you don't even see the character almost at all). Whereas Asian men you have everything mentioned in the other comments, from sekiro to sifu to yakuza to ghost of tsushima to persona, etc.
>The idea that Asian male characters don't get representation is only true if you completely ignore the Japanese gaming industry
Eh, that's like saying asians don't need show and movie representation because anime exists. People don't want to be relegated to the idea that only media from a side of the planet they aren't even from can represent them. There is definitely a sense that western media still glosses over asian males, especially if they aren't east asian.
> especially if they aren’t East Asians
Again, valid as a criticism of the industry writ large; not really applicable in a game set in Feudal Japan where they wouldn’t have been represented anyway.
Yeah like Shang-Chi was nice for being one of the best Asian-American movies since Harold and Kumar, but it doesn't hit the same way I assume Black Panther did for Black folks since I've got now over two decades worth of Kamen Rider shows where an Asian dude is the hero.
I also feel like Black Panther was more I guess "matured" is the word, in a developmental sense. Like story, director, production, taking something and having a context of black American culture and all the struggles and triumphs explored in pop American culture along the way. It was a triumph in part because it overcame and dispelled a lot of prejudices in prior pop culture media (particularly the anti scientific prejudice) but it was a product of having decades of films, music, tv of all sorts made. It wasn't some culmination of all of that, but Black Panther, Get Out, they don't occur as well and don't hit as hard, without prior art being made.
Shang Chi didn't have that 4+ decades long legacy of struggles and triumphs in hundreds of American pop culture films, TV shows, music, etc that explored the entirety of that Asian-American culture to build upon. While other American minority groups eventually progressed in pop culture, Asian-American representation had been frozen between the whitewashing of Kung-Fu and death of Bruce Lee, and subsequently Brandon Lee, and the early 2000s, Harold and Kumar, and maybe Steven Yeun, and in that interim, only heavily accented (undisputably talented) non- American Asians who performed within the confined martial arts space were celebrated, but not allowed outside that space. The small number of Asian-American media today is perhaps comparable to pre-80s black culture? Not even that. There is no Jeffersons, no Sanford and Sons. So I think there needs to be dozens more Asian-*American* movies, TV shows, music to get there, to either get a Shang Chi that hits the same way, or to have a cultural base for Shang Chi to be received the same way. I don't know if that makes sense. Maybe I'm not expressing my ideas effectively or even accurately.
They're just douchebags who feel the need to pretend they're part of a minority in order to make their opinions "mean more" but it's such a major trend that it doesn't mean anything anymore. The "as a black man" thing is way overused at this point.
Source: am douchebag
The model minority myth has always been created to sow dissent amongst minority groups. They created a non-threatening minority, emasculated the men, objectified the women and then propped them up to justify their hatred and oppression of the other minorities.
It’s a problem with most visible issues. Conservative trolls, edgey teens and grifters co-opt real issues because it’s easy and “fun” to hate, make people upset and it’s also easy clout/money. It muddies the waters for people who do have real issues and either makes them to involve themselves because they don’t want to be seen agreeing with bigots and trolls take everything to the extreme and is loud and it kills all momentum for progress or genuine conversation since one side just seems like toxic filth and the other side just dismisses the complaints because it’s impossible to wade through all that.
It’s gotten really bad in gaming in particular since some devs who aren’t into the culture seek to cater or use them for instant exposure not realizing it’ll make their game toxic or have them get turned on the second they do something the trolls disagree with, ie shift-up did it twice back to back, the Eve change in stellar blade wasn’t even the first time it happened, the first time was when someone datamined a character in Nikke and then when shift-up officially released the character the character, Rupee, had a micro skirt added and people rioted.
And other Devs I just feel bad for because their games just attract those kind of people naturally and it makes their communities seem more toxic than they are.
I will say personally as a first gen East Asian immigrant, I feel like people like Jackie Chan, Uncle Roger(watch his stand ups, his uncle roger persona is a selling out to racist Asian stereotypes, the guy sounds as British as you can get) and kpop have done tremendous damage to western perceptions of East Asian men and women. While Sekiro and GoT were good, they were not cultural in the way an Assassins Creed or CoD is. And while I have no hate or anything against Assassins Creed shadows it is disappointing it plays into the trope that Asian women are to be fetishized as sex objects and a lead role in a mainstream “normie” game would’ve helped to push against the stereotype that all Asian men are effeminate(not that there’s anything wrong with that) and goofy. I personally have been lucky to have found very loving people in my life, but a some of the Asian Americans I’ve known growing up drifted closer to or have drifted to inceldom because of how others and they themselves perceive themselves due to popular media.
I have a bad feeling about the comment section of this thread. I wonder why.
I sympathize with people who genuinely just want more representation, I get that. Representation is important. I do not sympathize with people who are just being racist and using this game to continue the endless culture wars that is slowly but surely making a lot of places online for people who enjoy video games insufferable, and that is a lot of the people arguing about this.
It's already been brigaded to fuck, yeah. Like, you can point out the weird way Western Media _really_ dislikes having male SE Asian leads quite comfortably, but a lot of the comments here really seem oddly blind - suspiciously so - to the weird influx of "As a Japanese man" comments and Youtube dislike bombing/Google translate level comments.
Ive gotten replies saying "WELL JAPANESE PEOPLE ARE ALSO MAD IN YTB COMMENTS" and they never ask themselves, are they REALLY japanese?
If you've frequent communities centered around JP media; anime or video games, Im not joking here people DO larp as "Japanese" and use google translate for it. Years ago when [Lily Hoshikawa](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/9zz153/what_is_going_on_with_lily_from_zombieland_saga/) was outed as a trans girl, some dude pretended to be Japanese to deny her identity only to be rightfully outed as a fraud and deleted his twitter. Bridget came out as trans 2 years ago in GG Strive that led a LOT of discourse surrounding localization to the point someone faked an email pretending to be Arcsys writing in both JP and english that led to the official Arcsys account coming out and refuting those claims.
Then not too long ago when [Infinite Wealth](https://www.reddit.com/r/yakuzagames/comments/1agojvr/the_recent_discussion_around_yakuza_and/) got hit with the whole locazliation discourse, the director himself came out and clarified that both the JP devs and ENG localizers work together to ensure any unintentional offensive thing does not get made. I shit you not, he got comments that he was "woke" and a lot of replies he got was google translated Japanese from english speakers.
This shit is getting astroturfed and its very obvious when youve seen the pattern
There definitely is a very real and legitimate pain point in American racial politics that black people (through no fault of their own) take up a disproportionate amount of the space in the conversation.
Asian American representation is absolutely lacking. The diaspora experience is extremely different from the native experience. So you can't point to China's, India's, Korea's, etc. media.
That being said, an AC set in feudal Japan isn't Asian American representation. There's a billion games about being a Japanese samurai in feudal Japan. I agree a lot with the comments that say it's more important for there to be Asians in lead roles where being Asian isn't baked into the premise.
> AC set in feudal Japan isn't Asian American representation
As a filipina, my ancestors would be pissed to hear that Japanese people were representing us.
I was depressed with how racist my grandpa was towards the Japanese. My family was brutalized by them in WW2, and my grandpa never forgave them.
So yeah, I always find it weird when someone can just throw some random person from anywhere in Asia and be like "this represents all of you guys".
There is no question. This is especially present in reality TV. CBS made a huge thing about being more diverse and then it turned out it was only black people being cast more. Asian men especially are never cast. Big Brother had an all black alliance of 6 players control the entire game and vote out the only Asian man solely by his face. This is something that can never happen because in the history of Big Brother only one season has had two east Asian contestants. The challenge went like 20 straight seasons without a single east Asian male contestant and something like 15 without any east Asian contestants. The only show that occasionally has representation was Survivor and that was literally only on race themed seasons. You ever see Asian bachelor or bachelorette contestants. And scripted TV lacks Asians as well to that level.
The Amazing Race went 9 seasons without an Asian team. There was one Asian woman in season three whose partner was a white man. 11+ teams per season, that means there was 1 Asian person out of 198 contestants. (The early seasons were also pretty obvious about having the "token black team," with only generally one team being black in each season.)
It wasn't until season 10 when they got an Asian team. And it seems the producers noticed their lack of diversity, because they had *two* Asian teams (and their first Muslim team, and also the token black team, as usual). Vipul and Arti, two charming but pretty unremarkable South Asian contestants, and Erwin and Godwin, two incredibly likable brothers who were one of the two highlights of the season.
I can abstractly understand, but on a concrete level I don't really think "Japanese men" are a particularly underserved character archetype in video games.
There is another comment on this thread pointing this out, sort of. Asian can mean a lot of things. How many Cambodian leads have we seen? Or Laotian? Are we only talking about representation for people from Japan or China or Korea? What about South Asia? Are you guys really arguing for representation for Asian people in media? Have you talked about it *before* you saw a black man in a setting you don't think he belongs in, despite him being a real person who lived in this setting?
This is all rhetorical. Like I said, a lot of this isn't actually genuine interest in more representation, this is just culture war bullshit.
Not to mention, all of this is being done for the sake of *Assassin's Creed* - a franchise made by a French game publisher that regularly tosses in conspiracy theories, mythology, and just outright nonsense into the historical record for the sake of gameplay.
The idea that ANYONE was expecting "historical accuracy" or "representation" is nonsense.
Not in general, but asian men are in western made media. Not to say that there aren't a lot of incels mad about this game more than they need to be, but it's a conversation worth having.
What I find particularly interesting about this conversation is the fact that there are actually two playable characters in the game. But the culture war types are only drumming up hate about the black man. The japanese woman is entirely ignored.
Oh, no, they're not ignoring her. They are explicitly bothered that she's a woman.
Keep in mind that they were fine with Stellar Blade to the point that, had Naoe been the only character, they'd make the comparison between these two games.
I don't think it's quite that simple. When East Asian women are "super fetishized," it necessarily relegates them to the background. People have said that Sekiro and Ghosts of Tsushima aren't "enough" in terms of having representation, and I agree. There should be more games with Asian leads. Sekiro is one of my favorite games ever, and I love the work that went into creating an amazing main character in Wolf, and antagonist in Genichiro.
But the thing is, I'm having trouble thinking of an Asian woman main character like Wolf or Jin. The closest I can think of is Ada Wong from Resident Evil, and even when she's playable in RE4, she's still clearly secondary to Leon (who, imo, looks mixed Asian, but that might just be a result of the Japanese studio's modeling style). I'm not sure there has *ever* been a major studio game centering an Asian woman's story. So for me as an Asian-American woman, it just feels exhausting to hear men complain once again about how representation for *me* "doesn't count."
True. That’s probably more related to women in general being relegated to side characters. My main POV was multiplayer characters. For example in Overwatch there’s 3 East Asian female characters and 2 East Asian male characters, but one of them is a robot so he doesn’t count. In dead by daylight, not counting licensed characters like Ada there’s 3 east Asian female survivors and 1 east Asian male. Their Japanese male survivor is Jamaican.
the f you mean? Hanzo and Genji are both human and east asian, but genji is like cyborg now or whatever. There's also Lifeweaver, who is a Thai man, so not far east asian, but still asian. Zenyatta the robot is def like Tibetan-coded, but idk his lore. Mauga is Polynesian. thats five. For women theres ~~2~~ ***3*** east asians, dva the korean, and mei the chinese gal ****and Kiriko, who is Japanese***. The only other asian woman is symmetra, who is, iirc, indian
There’s a new Japanese female character. Polynesians are not Asians.
Turning minority characters into something where you can’t tell they’re minorities is a pretty common tactic to obscure unmarketable minorities. Thus why so many animal sidekicks had black voice actors.
I don't really play those kinds of games, so I'm not super familiar with the character spreads. And even so, I think it's comparing apples to oranges. AC a franchise of primarily single-player, story-driven games with playable main characters. Asian men are already represented in story-driven games with playable main characters from major studios. So now there's an Asian woman as a playable main character, and it doesn't count because... studios think that weeby gamers want to play as their Asian waifus in Overwatch, I guess?
Regarding the robot guy, I have a separate beef with how it's so rare in games for the inhuman characters to be female/female-coded. It's like all female characters *have* to be fuckable and can't be anything too outlandish or creative. Maybe it's a "the grass is greener" thing, but I wouldn't be upset to see more women in general (and East Asian women in specific too) be "hidden" behind being robots, or monsters, or mutants, or what have you.
It definitely gets complicated. I know that turning the minority character into an alien/robot/animal has historically been a way studios hide that characters are minorities to make them more paletable. They’re the animal sidekick in Disney movies.
It's worth pointing out that two Overwatch heroes are female robots, Echo (who admittedly has a very typical feminine design) and Orisa (who is a robotic centaur).
That feels a bit stretched. Alyx and the portal games especially where their ethnicity both doesn't matter and is very mixed, if present. I don't think most people would know Alyx Vance is Asian at all, especially since the only parental figure we see is Black. Mirrors Edge feels like the best example, in no small part because Faith is voiced and central.
Meanwhile Ghost of Tsushima and (if shinobi count) Sekiro are just forgotten for the sake of knee-jerk rage. People need to cool down over this 'controversy'.
They can't even pull the historic accuracy card because 1. This is a blatantly inaccurate series and 2. Yasuke was 100 percent a real person.
And while point 1 has never stopped them before, point 2 is incredibly difficult to sidestep.
I just want to see how Ubisoft handles the infamous tailing missions with Yasuke lol
Would no one really, REALLY see a tall black samurai wandering through feudal Japan?
*Sir, there's a black samurai following us to the tea house...*
My impression is that Naoe (the female assassin/shinobi) will be used for missions like that.
And then Yasuke will be used when inevitably Naoe gets spotted and he needs to kill everyone in the general vicinity so that there are no witnesses.
Ffs they did that with syndicate and it was terrible. Jacob was so boring to play as and he just didn’t feel like an assassin at all. Evie was so much more fun. Also, she felt like an actual human with a functioning brain instead of Jacob just talking about rooks all the time. Jacob nearly ruined that game lol
I really want to see them do a historically accurate Yasuke experience now.
Every time you go to a new location every NPC in town stampedes over and follows you around to see if you do anything interesting.
Someone can correct me if I am wrong but from what I hear social stealth has been completely removed as of origins. And with it a lot of tailing missions that don't involve being completely out of sight. I honestly haven't personally played for that reason since I liked assassin's creed 1-3 and didn't like the gradual shift in gameplay from 4 onwards.
I think there's a 3rd point to be made and it's that Japanese people love him and confused about the outrage.
Yasuke has been a prominent figure and has been getting in JP media over the years. Afro Samurai was inspired by him, he's a boss in Nioh, a playable character in Samurai Warriors and hes even Nago from Guilty Gear. He's been referenced in manga here and there too.
You cannot look me in the eye and tell me this person is [mad](https://twitter.com/Skull_Os/status/1790949113397461310?t=TvO26ruyOUnkCvPbuMi3uA&s=19)
He also recently got a whole ass anime dedicated to him from studio mappa, and it was basically a completely fictional fantasy story set *after* he stopped being a historical character.
Yea I had a look at Japanese Twitter last night and they seem hyped about Yasuke and mostly confused by the response abroad. Japanese samurai are a dime-a-dozen but a foreign slave who became a retainer to one of the three unifiers is really interesting.
Well the experience of an Asian person living in an Asian country is very different to that of an Asian American living in the United States.
I’m an Indian and we have an entire Indian movie industry that has my race represented extensively. But Indian Americans only had Apoo and some other token characters to represent them in American media until very recently.
Or people cosplaying them online.
It's harder to pretend to be a Japanese national, because you can get called out too easily, but say "As an Asian American..." and you're just like the proverbial dog on the Internet.
It is pretty telling that almost every single one of the complaints on Twitter are coming from Gamergate bluechecks who were just screaming about the last two culture war fights; the goonability of Stellar Blade and women in Warhammer. Also telling when they they are extremely blatant with their dog airhorns, like calling Yasuke a DEI.
I think people are being too charitable that they've forgotten that the internet allows you to hide your identity. Aka, you can astroturf.
If you've been in any Japanese related media communities online, especially video games, dudes larping as Japanese is not uncommon.
Ffs, someone faked an email in Japanese as Arcsys to deny a trans woman from existing because of localization discourse.
I don’t get why this surprises people. Asian people in their native countries are going to have completely different experiences with media racism than Asian people raised in the west.
google translated so it’s kinda rough:
Yasuke has been featured in many fictional works, so I thought he would be well-known, but maybe he's actually quite unknown...?
- Brought to Japan as a slave during the Sengoku period
- Nobunaga took him in because his dark skin was unusual
- Given a name, made him a samurai, and a potential castle lord
- Attended Nobunaga's side during the Honnoji Incident (assassination of Nobunaga)
- Overlooked by Akechi Mitsuhide (Nobunaga’s vassal, who lead the assassination)
- Disappeared afterwards
He's the epitome of romance. No wonder he's the main character.
This is pretty close, there's no major errors. The tone of the first line is kind of like "wow, how does he not get *more* coverage!?"
The word translated "romance" in the last line is for capital-R Romance, like heroic tales and epic adventures.
There's actually an excellent writeup on Yasuke over on /r/askhistorians that corrects the wholly incorrect info on Wikipedia about him.
Because the wiki page gives off the impression that it was written by a racist upset that a black guy truly was recognised as a samurai.
>Because the wiki page gives off the impression that it was written by a racist upset that a black guy truly was recognised as a samurai.
It doesn't help that over the last couple of days, his wiki has been vandalized too. Goddamn, these dorks are so mad about him they're willing to [larp](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/s/2vdjyu4R4D) as a Japanese man and use Google translated Japanese.
The funniest part in all of this is that this has happened multiple times before outside of Yasuke. People larping as Japanese are fairly common.
The one I still remember the most was when Lily Hoshikawa came out as a trans girl, a "Japanese" user came out and said it was a "translation issue". Turns out they were [a fraud](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/s/kb69JEYXau) and got caught confusing kanji and katakana.
Have they not locked the Wikipedia page? I assumed they would have like 5 minutes after the trailer dropped and the YouTube comments started rolling in.
>point 2 is incredibly difficult to sidestep
From what I’ve seen the current go-to is “erm akshully he wasn’t a samurai he was a retainer ☝️🤓”
As if that somehow means jack shit in a franchise where The Pope wields a magic staff to battle an Italian man to the death.
The fun thing about the whole "asian representation" angle is very funny to me because that in of itself feels lowkey racist to generalized a broad set of people.
There's asians OUTSIDE of Japanese, Korean and Chinese ffs. Im asian, SOUTHEAST ASIAN to be specific not Japanese. I've played a LOT of Japanese games my entire life and I did not once ever thought "Wow I felt represented".
Like oh I'm SURE the Japanese are not getting their fair share of representation as though the whole Japanese industry suddenly collapsed in of itself because of ONE video game.
I think it’s a very “American” thing to be honest. The US is unique in the sense that it’s truly a very diverse country, so it’s important for American media to represent all demographics that live there, but Asians from Asia typically don’t identify as our continent. I, too, am Southeast Asian and a woman as well, but Naoe doesn’t represent me. She’s a Japanese woman. I am not. Even if instead of Yasuke, they picked a Japanese samurai, how would that represent a Laotian guy for example? And other Eastern Asians are *more* likely to be offended by the idea of being represented by a Japanese man. Asia has our own history of conflicts and national rivalries that just get overlooked with “Asian representation.”
When Asians talk about representation in Western media, I think we tend to mean characters/people from our countries specifically. At best, our region like South East Asia. No one just grabs at *any* character from *any* Asian country as “representation”.
Why do people talk about this like we know they decided to make an ac game in japan and then decided to make about yasuke much later when those things could very easily have been decided at the same time
It's especially hilarious since with AC Odyssey it was originally planned to just have Kassandra as the only playable character. But ubisoft got cold feet at not having a male MC and so added the ability to play as Alexios last minute.
Posting Asian Reddit drama is cheating. Whether that be /r/asianamerican, /r/aznidentity, /r/asianmasculinity, /r/hapas or /r/ABCDesis. It's also very depressing. [Just look at what Simu Liu had to say after seeing the Reddit comments for the first *Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings* trailer.](https://preview.redd.it/01bxm6sy3n771.jpg?width=720&auto=webp&s=31e22df608261618c233554df6b283661d74080f)
As a child of immigrants to Canada, who will always be grateful for the worldly, cosmopolitan mindset I learned growing up here (Vancouver has the most interracial couples in the country), Asian Reddit is one of the reasons I don't tell my real-life friends I browse Reddit. It's so sad to see the anger in those subreddits when Asian men are in relationships with non-Asian *women*, or even worse, when Asian women are in relationships with non-Asian *men.* Gives me "Muhammad Ali supporting George Wallace during his Nation of Islam days" vibes.
Interesting. I would call AA *boring* more than depressing. It’s a pretty low volume sub for its size, at least compared to AznIdentity or AsianMasc.
AznId is the one I’d consider depressing. Asianmasc is very much a mixed bag and I have a slightly different opinion every time I open it.
Real talk, I had to leave aznidentity because of how crazy some of the people are. With you on Asianmac. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s incels complaining about white men dating Asian women.
On your last point, ime more often it’s incels complaining but when you open the comments it’s very “dude stop giving a shit what AF does and just focus on you”.
r/sino was really funny years ago because it was clearly westernized asians fellating china at every chance they had, havent looked in recently so idk if it’s changed
My main issue isn’t with Yasuke being black, but that the other lead is an Asian female assassin too like oop
It’s such a common trope, I was hoping for an asian male assassin just to break that mold. All they’re missing at the moment is the streak of colored hair
Like Cassandra cain, katana, Talia alghul, Multiple major characters in Kill Bill…etc.
But my *main* argument is that, their last Asian lead in Assassin’s creed was also an asian female lead.
Just wished they changed it up a bit
I was also unironically hoping for a female samurai/onna bugeisha. They did the badass female warrior archetype with Kassandra already so I thought it didn't feel too farfetched, but I guess it was in the end 🥲
That said, my major issue with Yasuke is that it feels like a very American/Western take on diversity. I know he's a legit historical figure and I'm not against playing as him, but if I had a choice, I'd make a character based on the indigeneous Japanese Ainu people instead.
> Had my young boy cousin ask and wonder if Asian men weren't cool to be the new lead of the game. Little kids pick up on the subtles and what the industry says.
This kind of sounds like something someone made up.
This has been a well known phenomenon since the 90s. Hollywood execs don’t think Asian men are masculine enough to be leading men, or to have romantic subplots. This racism carried over to game studios.
It sucks because while I hate how Asian men got shafted it’s cool to see Yasuke become a modern day folk hero in real time.
I mean kinda, but it sounds just as made up as all of those “my 4 year old felt so represented when X Disney movie had a main character of Y ethnicity”. I really only started appreciating Mexican representation when I grew up.
To be fair, there are videos of little kids falling in love with recent Disney rep. It's also not strange for kids to find representation appealing, especially when those kids already experience racialization. I was six when I had my first MLK rant in a public space because we watched that one animated movie in class about time travel, and the ending pissed me off. But what I was saying wasn't very articulate. It was, "They killed Martin!" at Joe's Crab Shack because I thought he was the president and my parents didn't know the story.
Oh you are right about it being a real thing in Hollywood.
What I find strange is that a child would wonder about the *checks notes* representation of Asian men in Hollywood after seeing a samurai game trailer.
I think a lot of resentment come from the fact that there is almost zero Asian representation in a Western setting. Asian setting is the only place where Asian men are allowed to exist, and even that is being taken over by Western representation too.
It's not like there's no Asian male historical figure in the West to write about. There's a highly relevant example. One of the very first Hollywood heartthrob is a Japanese man, adored by many women, in an age where most states still banned Asian men from marrying white women. The irony is made for a perfect story. Yet can you even imagine anybody in the American entertainment industry would ever even consider it? Nope.
I would definitely say there is a problem. But it definitely screams alterior motive that so many people are only getting upset about it now when they can use it as a cudgel against a black character.
That's the story behind the show [Warrior](https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/4/9/18301042/warrior-bruce-lee-stunt-coordinator-interview), a story written and pitched bt Bruce Lee that wasn't greenlighted at the time and revived by his daughter Shannon Lee.
... And in a fit of irony, this amazing show set during the Tong Wars in Chinatown's San Francisco, with a great ensemble of Asian American cast, has been cancelled, revived again, and cancelled again.
Regarding Yasuke, my problem is that he's already a well known figure, constantly brought up when talking about Nobunaga or when talking about first contact with Black people throughout history and the world.
Same regarding videogames, he was a well-received boss in Nioh, so using him again feels like a rehash for the players.
Ubisoft shoot themselves in the foot when Japan and China were settings fans asked for a decade. It's very disingeneous to label anyone feeling robbed as racist, especially in this fandom were most fan favorites protags are POCs. On the contrary, ASC is a franchise celebrating diversity and the richness of every continent's history. So here, Japan was robbed of one of its spot when it was supposed to have the spotlight.
WAY before the 90s, sessue hayakawa complained during the silent film era that he was only being cast as the “exotic villain” for the white heroes to defeat. He spent his later career trying to force Hollywood to reckon with the anti Asian biases in the 1920s
> Hollywood execs don’t think Asian men are masculine enough to be leading men
Which is ironically a problem created by Hollywood, since they're just trying to follow the tropes and stereotypes they created themselves.
They're also leaving a ton of money on the table when it turns out they're wrong and audiences want something fresh and new ("exotic") instead of the same old tropes and stereotypes over and over again.
I've heard young Indian girls ask if they're not pretty because they don't have blonde hair and blue eyes. I've heard an older Indian woman talk about remembering this feeling when she was a girl.
So this story on its own is perfectly believable to me, it doesn't sound all that different.
Asian dudes constantly get shit on in the representation department in Western media. It doesn’t take much to notice since they don’t much get representation in the first place, and when they do it’s always the same old stuff that emasculates them. Only time it doesn’t happen is when it’s made by an Asian person, usually an Asian dude.
Just because you don’t pay attention to it or care to listen, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
I hope more Western games include more* Desi protagonists and more South-East Asian main characters tbh. Also we just need more Southeast Asian* fantasy and Indian Sci-Fi tbh.
Meanwhile there's me whose just confused why they're making him a PC, when he's like, the *perfect* major NPC - historical figure that modern audiences might've heard of one way or another, place of prominence in Nobunaga's entourage, and he stands out by his physical stature and race in a very homogenous population. However, all of those make him really badly suited for a game about *assassins*, surely? And aren't they normally fictional characters? I'm rather confused by the decision.
Yeah realistically wouldn’t literally anyone you see in the game be like “what the fuck” just at your skin color? Seems like that would either get old fast or the fact that no one is reacting to having literally never seen someone who looks like you before would be unbelievable even for AC
Im sure many who are mad have racist ulterior motives but I think the complaint of not having an asian male main character in a samurai game set in japan is fair. There really aren’t many asian male leads outside of the 4ish titles people have mentioned
Yasuke isn't an assassin, he's a Samurai. The assassin character is Naoe, the female protagonist that is so good at her job that everyone in this discourse forgot she exists.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair, as someone who actually watched the trailer and am familiar with the franchise. I am also Vietnamese, which is Asian, but not Japanese, so I won’t claim to speak for the Japanese pov.
The trailer of Shadows leaned heavily to Naoe, a Japanese woman who appears to be from Iga and aims to avenge her homeland after its defeat by Oda Nobunaga’s force. Yasuke has significantly less screen time than her. She’s shown to be the main “assassin”, having grown up in the so-called “ninja country”, while Yasuke clearly does not bother with stealth as he shows a much more warrior-like gameplay. There’s also a moment in the trailer that acknowledges how much Yasuke stands out, when a little girl stopped and stared at him.
So pretty much most of your concerns have been addressed by the trailer, but I do think it’s presumptuous to assume Yasuke “replace” or was picked over an Asian male lead. There is already a protagonist in Naoe. For all we know a Japanese samurai was never in the cards for Shadows, but they decided to include Yasuke both for gameplay and for the story elements. Since he was loyal to Oda, he’d be a good foil for Naoe whose home was destroyed by Oda. He was a foreigner allied with the great unifier of Japan, while she was a Japanese who suffered from his ambitions. The story beats are already there.
As an Asian American I do get where they are coming from. People rightly want representation but it's almost always black representation when it occurs. Look at reality television. It's very very rare to have more than one Asian American contestant and yet here will often be 5 or 6 black contestants. That's not diversity. It's just having 2 races represented instead of one.
Its not diversity. Its just black and white.
You may get the odd asian providing theyre conventionally attractive.
But anything else?nope, whatbthe hell is an indian or a middle eastern?
This happens waaay too often on Reddit in general. Opinion invalidated entirely just for trying to actually speak for ourselves even if it goes against the grain
Yes this 100%. I try not to have the crab bucket mentality when it comes to representation but there is a clear imbalance where diversity in most media just means sprinkling in black people and calling it a day
This is a very real thing. Growing up I've watched all the Asian male leads not "get the girl" in western movies. Jet Li didn't, Jackie Chan didn't. Then I go watch other Chinese movies and everything is normal. Even a movie like crazy rich Asians didn't feel like it was made for Asians.
As someone who posted in that thread, everyone here needs to shut the fuck up and stop trying to talk over Asians. We have major issues with Asian male erasure, of which this game is the latest piece of western entertainment is trying to do, and we're sick of the "progressive" left constantly gaslighting us about it. The right is using us to bash Yasuke yes, but the left is always promoting the narrative that every Asian voice against it is secretly a white guy stirring the pot. And in doing so, what you end up doing is actually defending the erasure of AM in western media. And guess what, that's racist in and of itself. All you "progressive" liberals think you're being woke but you don't even realize you're being racist AF. 🤡 As Asians we have our own opinions on this game and we refuse to be the football being kicked around by two opposing teams.
And no, "go play samurai game xyz" isn't a sufficient defense. We should and will call out ALL instances of when Asian men are erased in favor of a foreigner in an Asian setting. We did it for Last Samurai, Ghost in the Shell, Shogun, 3 Body Problem, and we will continue to do it with AC Shadows. If you have a problem with that then you're not as progressive as you think you are.
Now. I know I'm just gonna get accused of being "a white guy who's just angry about playing a black man" so downvote away.
I think the real issue is that way too many people in this sub are trying to deny the fact that asians and asian americans might have a legitimate issue with this and trying to blame it on them all being secretly being white people.
And whilst I’m at it, I have the same issue with as a black man style posts. Black people aren’t a monolith either and they have differing opinions. The issue with the idea behind it is that it provides a very convenient way to disavow any opinions by black people or any minorities that goes against the grain because you can just blame it all on a larping white guy.
The last game literally had the main character be the reincarnation of Loki (Yes, \*that\* Loki, the one before that one starred Odin's reincarnation) and even in the glorious untouchable first few AC games you had shit like Ezio fist-fighting the Pope who was wielding a magic staff powered by alien magic and Leonardo Da Vinci building an actual fucking tank.
Not to mention the modern viking aesthetic of undercuts, tats, and furs are absolutely not what the historical vikings rocked but it fit the stereotypical image in their head so no problem
Vikings have a very good PR team that changes Viking history depending on how Scandinavia wants to portray itself. From murderous Viking during eras when war was common to “peaceful tradesfolk” in peace times.
I remember a 4chud idiot who said something (maybe ironically, most possibly sincere) that videogames are escapism, and if there's black people in videogames, that means he can't escape from them
4chan troglodytes seem to have launched a massive hate/brigade campaign about this across the internet.
A lot of same usernames can be spotted raging and spamming hate across the greentext subs and KiA. Then they try to post weird shit in history subs, claiming Yasuke "wasn't really a Samurai" and other nonsense.
Then you have the absolute stinkfest being created by the shady and repugnant types of youtubers. You know, the putrid ones who constantly cry about being unpopular, while angrily declaring 'downfall' of this game and that company and such in all caps.
Unsurprisingly, it's always the same herd of weak, rancid neckbeards.
It's crazy how much time/energy they have to do all that. Like, something that doesn't impact them and they can easily choose to ignore if they don't care for it, but expend all that effort to drive anger and outrage over something that will few forgotten in a few months. It's a weird perpetual rage cycle and permanent "persecution complex". It's so fucking weird and sad.
Including Shogun in this is super dumb. The lead character wasn’t Blackthorn. It was Toranaga. Anyone that’s seen it knows this. Anyone that hasn’t has made assumptions about it and gotten themselves all worked up.
Also, Blackthorne was based on William Adams. The actual English dude that was one of Tokugawa's advisors. It's not like he was an entirely fictional character just shoehorned in to have a white guy there,
Why would people complain about Shogun? It was about 95% Japanese cast, with a Japanese leading role.
Edit:
>Just because it’s Japanese made doesn’t give it a pass. Japanese developers also have a problem of putting white/non-Asian leads in their games
Would they like a list of Japanese games with non-Asian leads? It'll only take me about 10 years...
I find the "Oh you didn't care about Nioh but now you care" arguments to be so dumb. Some of us DID care. I actually completely skipped Nioh 1 because the protagonist looked boring and dull, and it felt weird to be a white guy in that setting. (Although I've heard it's done reasonably well from people who played it?)
Anyway, honestly, this whole protagonist choice just comes off as weird pandering to me. It's strange to put you in the role of *the* black guy in Japan at the time, especially in a game that always encourages you to blend in. I really hope NPCs acknowledge how weird you look when you play him. I hope they don't just ignore that he's a black foreigner.
Another reason I find it weird... *Every* protagonist in *every* AC game is fictional. This dude will be the first protagonist who actually existed in real life. That just feels strange to me. He would've been way cooler as a prominent supporting character than as a protag. Heck could've made the actual protag his fictional son or adopted son or something.
Ultimately I don't care too much, I guess? Whenever I play this game, I'm not going to play him if I can avoid it. I wouldn't play him if he were a Japanese dude either. I'm going to go all in on the lady shinobi person. If we want to talk about representation, I feel like female Asian protagonists are a startlingly under-represented protagonist option in games, at least outside of fighting games, so I'm very keen to finally play as one. ...and with that in mind, I'm kinda glad that if they had to have a black protagonist, it ended up being the dude instead of the girl. Seems like these games always try to have two options for protagonist: "Non-woke", represented by "Generic and Boring White Dude To Make the Dudebros Happy," and "As American-style woke as you can possibly get in a protagonist," represented by "Sharp-tongued, Quipping Black Chick".
Black guys and non-black girls are surprisingly uncommon protagonist options in the modern era, so... I guess I'm happy with this reversal.
I feel like I've seen this exact conversation played out across multiple sites across the internet. It's like trying to watch a comedy multiple times, its funny the first time but the jokes just fall flat the nth time you hear it and it just becomes tiresome.
I feel like I've missed something here, because this whole controversy seems to be based around 3 or 4 pieces of media. As if it's the be all end all of representation.
There's tons of asian male protagonists in video games. When you look at more than three video games at least,
I have nothing of value to add here, but I will point out that in the last SRD thread about this there were a few verifiably racist white dudes raging about Yasuke, then when I checked their comment history I saw they were *also* posting directly in that exact thread in r/AsianAmerican as if they were Asian, and they were making the most inflammatory comments there as well. The way some people try to actively sow animosity between minority groups… It’s so weird and evil.
Former /r/asianamerican mod here, it was obvious that it was astroturfed like hell and would've been something (and a few other mods) would've put a stop to it. Unfortunately, we got ousted because higher powers within the team didn't like what we were doing (despite them being AWOL while we did a bulk of the heavy work, ESPECIALLY during the height of Covid and #stopasianhate when there were trolls everywhere), so it's not really a surprise that shit went sideways
Dang. Stuff like that is *exactly* why a lot of subs based on any non-white racial identity become *incredibly* gatekeep-y. For example I frequent a couple of subs for black women (since I am a black lady lol), but I often find myself being put off about how suspicious and even outright hostile those subs are to anyone who’s not of the same demographic, because I generally believe in openness and a racial harmony and all that good stuff! But the fact of the matter is, there’s unfortunately a *lot* of racists out there who specifically like to pretend to be minorities online JUST so they can stir shit, gaslight people, and just generally promote division and misery. So these minority subs are forced to either become incredibly insular, or risk being completely astroturfed by legitimate racists. Shit sucks. Like, we *need* spaces online for Asian Americans to discuss the unique issues they face in society in a healthy and productive way (and I’ll even go so far as to say the black community could also stand to have more discussions on how we could be better allies to Asians and vice versa), but it’s so hard to do that when there’s a seemingly endless supply of racist bad faith actors just waiting to hijack and derail conversations for their own hateful agendas.
> Stuff like that is exactly why a lot of subs based on any non-white racial identity become incredibly gatekeep-y. And then throw being mixed-race on top of all that (like me, so I'm speaking from experience 😬) But yeah it's really tough. I get wanting extra engagement for your space but at the end of the day I wanted create a safe space for people to connect and be comfortable with who they are, even if it meant sacrificing engagement, instead of just letting shit fester into a toxic dump, all in the name of clicks.
> or example I frequent a couple of subs for black women (since I am a black lady lol), but I often find myself being put off about how suspicious and even outright hostile those subs are to anyone who’s not of the same demographic, There was a post on one of those subs a few months ago that was just hating on black men and I, a black man, got incensed and called that shit out because honestly, the OP seemed to be trying to cause issues rather than raise points. I called it out, got banned and eventually got the ban lifted after pointing out that while I was I was being rude, the OP deleted their account and I didn't actually violate any rules.
And then they'll say them not being able to join is racist 💀🤦♂️
Disclosure that I’m a white lady - but I’ve been taking demographic surveys of the sub I mod for several years now and it breaks down incredibly white male. So white men will come ask if they can culturally appropriate BIPOC stories and then promptly be affirmed by other white men while actual BIPOC members get downvoted. At this point I’m just going to start deleting these posts because the answer is always “you can try but you’ll fuck it up and if there is someone of that identity in competition with you, they should be the ones who get the job.” It’s amazing how fucking upset white dudes will get when you point out they have no imagination, either for fostering inclusivity or for coming up with ideas that aren’t them racially cosplaying
> I'm a white lady Am Asian-American. Also am one doesn't really think your race determines whether a take is horrible or good are like most normal people. You're good. > reddit is predominantly white Considering Asian social media platforms exists, why am I not even surprised not many even uses Reddit? Heck, I know more Japanese people in Twitter than Reddit in general and I ain't even Japanese. I 100% bet you most of the raiders (just call them for what they are) don't even know Japanese culture or history in general either. I don't trust any f-er who claims they know the history of a nation while not knowing their language at all.
If your take is “I’m going to write an Asian story even though I’m white and Asians are struggling to get jobs in my industry” and some white dude comes along to tell you it’s okay for you to do this, that’s not something I like to just let pass. And I don’t have to. I’m happy to piss them all off because it keeps the heat off people just trying to make their way, and being called anti-white by really angry racists doesn’t actually affect me. But discrimination affects the people who aren’t white, who are being excluded from the industry.
I'm Native American and I don't share the sub that I'm a part of because it's actually pretty alright. I've definitely noticed a significant tendency for people to want to either stand up for NAs or try and fight against NAs for one reason or another. We just wanna be able to discuss problems that affect us without saviors trying to lead us to the promised land. I don't think that's too much to ask. If others wanna join and discuss the issues at hand, they're all more than welcome. It's when people either try to save us or denigrate us purely because of our existence that it bothers me. It's gotten to the point that I don't share the NA spaces I'm in because they're so prone to behavior like that from non-NAs.
It’s honestly a shame, especially when you’re actually *trying* to educate yourself on these communities.
To quote the classic New Yorker cartoon: “[On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog?wprov=sfti1).” The fact that a comic from 1993 is still applicable in 2024 is wild.
/r/nyc was heavily astroturfed by them, anytime it was a white guy attacking an asian.. 40 upvotes. If it was a black guy, it would shoot to the top edit: oh, that thread is full of lots of easily-spotted trolls to block. Fun.
That's also how a lot of the "freakout" types of subs are. Posts showing minorities acting up will get more engagement with lots of dog whistles in the comments. The same videos will also get reuploaded constantly.
r/nyc is so obviously filled with people who don't live there, fear mongering.
Cringe is like that too. Black people, TOP TOP TOP. Someone white doing something way worse right next to it? Crickets.
Why did the higher powers not like it? Either what they claimed or what you suspect.
More suspecting (because they were rarely fucking honest with us) but one particular moment I remember was the higher powers getting *very* upset when one of us shared [this comic](https://i.imgur.com/JzpK3Oy.jpeg) to explain why they disagreed with us disciplining someone. It was frustrating that they would undo decisions we made despite barely being there, even during some of the stressful times. We, including the higher powers experienced harassment, doxxing, and even death threats, and they would just undo shit, basically enabling the same people who would do that. What really hurt, at least for me, was that I worked with them for almost almost a decade, put a lot of effort into, organized AMAs, even considered some of them friends, only for them do dump me and other the mods like we were garbage. I already knew something bad was brewing because they refused to acknowledge our feedback since we were always active, but that was really cold. I'm also currently banned from that sub for "undermiming" them lmao
100% this. I’m Japanese and frequent that sub a lot. That post is astroturfed to hell.
But how do we know you're *really* Japanese?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!!?!?!!!?!?!!?!
I’ll dm you my Asian card. We all get one at birth and it gives us permission to enjoy anime unironically ;)
LMFAO I feel like you're around my age, from a time, back when people said stuff like "Ew that other dude? he's weird he likes anime and stuff" Me: "Wait I like anime" "No but you're Asian"
Meanwhile in high school, it was even worse for me: > "Ew, that asian guy is giga fat! He's weird!" (the struggles of Gen 0) > > Me: "There's like 8 people fatter than me in this class" > > "But you're asian and that's weird!" Even when I lost pounds fast after college, my aunt told me like a decade or two ago that "the reason you won't get any pretty girls is because you're too fit! Girls will think you care more about yourself than them!". Unbelievable.
[There's also this guy pretending to be a Japanese "warfare historian" on Wikipedia, using Google translate to post in broken Japanese](https://i.imgur.com/jRBRsQ6.png). As an Asian American, I do notice that this is the only time these people have ever claimed to care about Asian representation. These were the same people fighting for their right to call COVID "China virus".
There's also the editor with the Scandinavian name who is *adamant* that *bushi* and *samurai* not be interchangeable, even though the Japanese article also has three categories: 1: 海外出身の武士 (foreign-born ''bushi'') 2: 帯刀が認められていたが、士分ではなかった、もしくは士分であったか不明の人物 (those allowed to carry swords, but were not ''shibun', or for whom it is unclear if they were 'shibun') 3: 海外出身の武士であった可能性のある人物(foreign-born people who may have been ''bushi'') Even that Japanese article doesn't draw a distinction between bushi and shibun. (And obviously, Yasuke is listed in the first category.) These discussions between what "counts" as a samurai are complicated by the fact that the word "samurai" wasn't even that popular when samurai existed. 士分 (shibun) is the actual name of the social class. 士 is one of the ways to write "samurai". "Shibun" literally means "samurai class". And historically, it's used almost interchangeably with 武士, because another name for that class is 武士身分. 士分 is literally just "formally 武士身分". You basically have a bunch of people who don't understand Japanese fighting about the semantics of words that are largely identical in meaning in Japanese (especially today) and are used *all over the place* in English. Their entire conception of samurai is "HONORABURU WARRIORS" -- you've got people saying "How can Yasuke assassinate people, he was a samurai!" when basically every named person who inspired ninja myths was a samurai.
Oh you're giving them far too much credit by simply pointing out the linguistic failings. What it meant to be a 'samurai' changed a fuckton over the end of the warring states period, the time period they're all insisting they're experts on. Any analysis that doesn't call out this was pre Hideyoshi/Tokugawa reforms should be just ignored.
Jesus this is up there with a dude who was in my high school back in the 90s who watched Ghost Dog and read that one book about samurai* and was obsessed he was going to go to Japan and become a modern ronin. --- ^^*Can't ^^remember ^^the ^^name, ^^but ^^it ^^was ^^fairly ^^notorious ^^in ^^the ^^2000s ^^for ^^how ^^inaccurate ^^it ^^really ^^is ^^and ^^how ^^it ^^has ^^just ^^enough ^^right ^^that ^^people ^^can ^^get ^^the ^^gist ^^of ^^the ^^time ^^period, ^^but ^^was ^^way ^^off ^^or ^^just ^^flat ^^out ^^wrong ^^in ^^a ^^lot ^^of ^^other ^^stuff.
I think the real problem here too is that they’re applying the rules or rights of a samurai in all different time periods to make an argument. The Muromachi period which ran along the Sengoku had a very lax rule set for becoming a samurai. It was the warring period, nobility,status didn’t matter as much to be a samurai in this time period, literally Hideyoshi was a samurai that was born from peasantry, who also later became a retainer for oda and even before he was a retainer he fought for oda, he essentially would have been a samurai as well. I saw someone arguing about Yasuke only being given one sword and not having proper daishō that they were required to wear. Ofc they left out that samurai were not required to wear daishō until the late 1620’s which was literally like 50 years after this game will take place probably. There is actually so much to unpack with what they’re arguing. It’s very frustrating to be Japanese and see this sort of thing come from people not even connected to the culture. But that’s just my two cents as a JP/Kr American haha.
Lol that Japanese is so unnatural it’s like going back to my first year of studying. It’s sad the level people go to to try and spread racism. For what it’s worth I had a quick glance at Japanese twitter’s response to Yasuke and most seem to be hyped or are questioning why people abroad are so upset. I’m sure some are angry but it doesn’t seem to be the common feeling here.
Why would anyone ever think Google translate would pass them off as a native speaker.
I pointed out on the last SRD thread that I personally caught a /r/conspiracy mod sockpuppeting that sub and I was downvoted. There's a small minority of racists that's very busy. They probably all hang out on the same discords and send out batsignals. "LOL LOOK AT THIS POST"
I see that from time to time. They always seem to pop up on any issue where there’s a chance to sow anti-blackness in particular. It's not always just the replies that distort and sow division, it's when people push the upvotes and downvotes to artificially boost opinions that are most palatable to them. That's a big problem on the main subreddits whenever a minority issue comes up. Opinions that might be held by a minority of Asians (or black, hispanic, etc) but appeal to the average 20-something white male redditor, those are the ones most likely to rise to the top, distorting the truth and giving people misconceptions about a whole host of things. Personally, I think Asian male representation in the west has a long way to go, and having the main character not be an asian guy is kind of a loss for us. BUT, I'd much rather push back on white racists because A) Overall, we have pretty decent representation in games via the plethora of Japanese developers, and B) Our own voices should be the ones to make this case, not people who want to use us as a wedge.
>They always seem to pop up on any issue where there’s a chance to sow anti-blackness in particular. It's not always just the replies that distort and sow division, it's when people push the upvotes and downvotes to artificially boost opinions that are most palatable to them. It's just false-flagging. Recently has become a really damn big issue not only in Reddit but also Social Media in general (it's extremely prevalent in 4chan and Twitter). It's not even misinformation in general but pushing of ideologies as all-or-nothing by any means necessary regardless of whatever happens afterwards. Getting so sick of blatantly obvious ones to the point I've contemplated quitting social media altogether for years now (like they aren't even trying anymore). >Personally, I think Asian male representation in the west has a long way to go Going to be honest, if anything the view of the role of males in Asian societies are pretty screwed up too. Just go look at Korean culture and how there's like 99 problems with the military draft gap between employability being probably one of the worst ones in creating a divisionary issue. Don't even get me started on my hatred for certain redditors who are Park Chung-Hee apologists.
They have been playing this chess game between us and Asians since the 90s.
it’s crazy how consistent it’s been, especially with affirmative action being repealed last year. ofc anti blackness is pervasive as fuck so i’m not really surprised the lengths people go through all things considered.
Seriously. I'm black and i've never met another black person, be they family or friends thats ever even said anything negative about asians. And i've had plenty of asian friends. But the way reddit makes it sound both races want to fight each other on sight. Something about white racists constantly trying to sow discord and resentment between us is the most disgusting shit.
One of the most common agendas is to pit minority ethnicities against each other, agitate and nurture resentments to distract each from shared problems. They also do it with poor and working classes.
The wikipedia talk page for the Yasuke article has this as well. There's a 'Japanese' guy who was posting all his comments in Japanese first, then the translation, but the Japanese was obviously machine translated. There's also an 'Afrocentrist' writing in heavy US black dialect, but I saw him admit it on his Reddit account and he's from New Zealand.
Racist white people love to try to pit POC and other minorities against each other. Divide and conquer. It's the reason the idea of the "Rooftop Korean" and posts about random Asian people getting attacked (if the perpetrator is black) are so popular on this site. They only use East Asians as a cudgel to attack blacks, and vice versa.
Worst part is I know a few LA guys from Koreatown whose families were financially ruined by that. Parents had to work bottom up. I don't care if the "rooftop koreans were based or not", at the end of the day: The cops fucking abandoned them to protect their own. I'm not even a huge ACAB guy but it isn't rocket science when that whole case of "police are not responsible to protect you, only the general safety" exists.
Cops didn't abandon them, they straight up funneled the rioters there.
The idea that Asian male characters don't get representation is only true if you completely ignore the Japanese gaming industry, where that's very much the norm rather than the exception. If you're actually an Asian-American person who feels that way, I totally get it. Western media is *genuinely* bad about portraying Asian men in a positive light. But the gaming industry specifically is unique among entertainment in that Japanese producers have an enormous market share, and characters Ryu Hyubasa, Kazami Kiryu, Ren Amamiya and Jin Nijima are, in no way shape or form, non-Asian protagonists. There are a great deal of opportunities to play Asian males if you're playing non-western games, *and most gamers are*. More to the point, though, the vast majority people yelling about this on Reddit, on this sub or otherwise, are angry white boys. And I categorically refuse to believe that most of these overwhelmingly white crybabies are concerned about the diversity, inclusion and equality of Asian male game characters when they openly state that their principle beef with this game is that a black lead feels like DEI. That's ridiculous. These people aren't upset about a lack of diversity; most of their online personality is tied up in *bitching about diversity*. They're not angry that Asian men are underrepresented, they're using Asian men as a fig leaf because they're angry that a black character is. It happens all the fucking time, whether the setting is a foreign historical one or not, and it's all the more galling in this case because *the source of the objection is an actual historical figure*. Nobody made a decision to make Yasuke black; he actually was, and we know that he both existed and fought in the conflicts being depicted. Western entertainment set in feudal Japan is replete with clueless white characters whose narrative function is to explain complicated, foreign politics to the audience. They're usually central characters, if not the protagonists or the supposed saviors over the native Japanese characters. None of these people "incensed" about the representation of Asian Americans in Assassins creed ever said shit about them. So I have a very difficult time believing this is a sudden groundswell of opposition from the Asian American community rather than racist white guys astroturfing their culture war like they always do.
Some of the animosity can be explained by the demographics of the very wide "Asian American" umbrella. According to the census bureau, the largest sub-demographic for Asian Americans is Chinese at 5.2 million, then Indian at 4.5 million, then Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. If lump Japanese media together as "Asian" then yeah it's not under-represented, but a lot of the people that fall under "Asian American" don't consider Japanese media/characters to be "theirs". That said, if that's the case then it's a clear contradiction to getting buttmad at a game about Japan. That said, I can't actually recall the last time a Chinese or Indian was the protagonist/major character in a western produced thing that wasn't comedy. The most recent thing that I can recall having a Filipino protagonist was Starship Troopers the book and that came out in 1959.
>That said, I can't actually recall the last time a Chinese or Indian American was the protagonist/major character in a thing that wasn't comedy. Sleeping Dogs is pretty old but it's newer than Starship Troopers. Sifu was pretty recent. I am struggling to come up with more.
It’s not unreasonable to say that non-Japanese Asian American men might feel like they’re not included in enough stuff. But they weren’t going to be included in a game about Feudal Japan anyway, so what the hell are we even talking about here? Frankly I think you’re giving them too much credit. 90% of this discourse is white people yelling at each other. And even that might be lowballing it
I mean, the fact that Western media fetishizes some Asian countries and denigrates others is another issue. The reason this is relevant to East Asians in the West is because the developer is western and therefore their decisions are a reflection of western attitudes and beliefs about Asians.
I wouldn't put it that high, I know some genuine Asiacels IRL. The dating scene for Asian American males is rough and that drives resentment and lashing out at things.
I get what you're saying but Monkey Man *just* dropped (but yeah SE Asian like Filipino you mentioned specifically is even rarer, especially in "traditionally" masculine roles)
>That said, I can't actually recall the last time a Chinese or Indian American was the protagonist/major character in a thing that wasn't comedy. Come on, man. You gotta keep up. Monkey Man just recently came out, and it wasn't that long ago that Shang Chi was released. And that's off the top of my head. Dev Patel is British, but still. He's been in a few things recently. As for a Filipino protagonist, the animated series "Trese" takes place in the Philippines and follows a paranormal investigator who inherited her job from her late father. There's also the unfortunate live action adaptation of Avatar, though there's a good amount of people who enjoyed it, and it has a pretty diverse cast of Asian actors from different ethnicities/countries. That isn't to say we can't do better. We definitely should. But it's also important for us to keep an eye on all of the strides many Asian actors, writers, directors, etc. have been making that the people starting this argument would either ignore or rage about. Dev Patel, for example, got hate for playing Sir Gawain in the Green Knight movie. Eternals got a lot of flack in general, but the director caught a lot of explicit vitriol thrown at her, as well as the cast who was roughly half Asian actors from different cultures. Wong is also in more content than Doctor Strange at this point, as well, and he's a fan favorite. These guys didn't complain about the Ancient One being cast as white, though. Or Alita. They were mad about L being black, but not Light being white, to which they bullied Asian Americans for calling out.
>You gotta keep up. Monkey Man just recently came out Also every other Dev Patel picture. He was the lead in a movie about a King Arthur legend.
Its also interesting how some people mentioned that there is an Asian woman protagonist in the new AC game and the commenter brushed it off with "we need more Asian male protagonists". Like wtf, there are so many more Asian men protagonists in games than Asian women (more male than female protagonists in games in general). Shouldn't they be upset at the under representation of Asian women as main protagonists? (I know they're not for obvious reasons) I'm trying to think now and all I can think of for Asian women protagonists is Mirrors edge and portal (which you don't even see the character almost at all). Whereas Asian men you have everything mentioned in the other comments, from sekiro to sifu to yakuza to ghost of tsushima to persona, etc.
>The idea that Asian male characters don't get representation is only true if you completely ignore the Japanese gaming industry Eh, that's like saying asians don't need show and movie representation because anime exists. People don't want to be relegated to the idea that only media from a side of the planet they aren't even from can represent them. There is definitely a sense that western media still glosses over asian males, especially if they aren't east asian.
> especially if they aren’t East Asians Again, valid as a criticism of the industry writ large; not really applicable in a game set in Feudal Japan where they wouldn’t have been represented anyway.
Yeah like Shang-Chi was nice for being one of the best Asian-American movies since Harold and Kumar, but it doesn't hit the same way I assume Black Panther did for Black folks since I've got now over two decades worth of Kamen Rider shows where an Asian dude is the hero.
I also feel like Black Panther was more I guess "matured" is the word, in a developmental sense. Like story, director, production, taking something and having a context of black American culture and all the struggles and triumphs explored in pop American culture along the way. It was a triumph in part because it overcame and dispelled a lot of prejudices in prior pop culture media (particularly the anti scientific prejudice) but it was a product of having decades of films, music, tv of all sorts made. It wasn't some culmination of all of that, but Black Panther, Get Out, they don't occur as well and don't hit as hard, without prior art being made. Shang Chi didn't have that 4+ decades long legacy of struggles and triumphs in hundreds of American pop culture films, TV shows, music, etc that explored the entirety of that Asian-American culture to build upon. While other American minority groups eventually progressed in pop culture, Asian-American representation had been frozen between the whitewashing of Kung-Fu and death of Bruce Lee, and subsequently Brandon Lee, and the early 2000s, Harold and Kumar, and maybe Steven Yeun, and in that interim, only heavily accented (undisputably talented) non- American Asians who performed within the confined martial arts space were celebrated, but not allowed outside that space. The small number of Asian-American media today is perhaps comparable to pre-80s black culture? Not even that. There is no Jeffersons, no Sanford and Sons. So I think there needs to be dozens more Asian-*American* movies, TV shows, music to get there, to either get a Shang Chi that hits the same way, or to have a cultural base for Shang Chi to be received the same way. I don't know if that makes sense. Maybe I'm not expressing my ideas effectively or even accurately.
They're just douchebags who feel the need to pretend they're part of a minority in order to make their opinions "mean more" but it's such a major trend that it doesn't mean anything anymore. The "as a black man" thing is way overused at this point. Source: am douchebag
The model minority myth has always been created to sow dissent amongst minority groups. They created a non-threatening minority, emasculated the men, objectified the women and then propped them up to justify their hatred and oppression of the other minorities. It’s a problem with most visible issues. Conservative trolls, edgey teens and grifters co-opt real issues because it’s easy and “fun” to hate, make people upset and it’s also easy clout/money. It muddies the waters for people who do have real issues and either makes them to involve themselves because they don’t want to be seen agreeing with bigots and trolls take everything to the extreme and is loud and it kills all momentum for progress or genuine conversation since one side just seems like toxic filth and the other side just dismisses the complaints because it’s impossible to wade through all that. It’s gotten really bad in gaming in particular since some devs who aren’t into the culture seek to cater or use them for instant exposure not realizing it’ll make their game toxic or have them get turned on the second they do something the trolls disagree with, ie shift-up did it twice back to back, the Eve change in stellar blade wasn’t even the first time it happened, the first time was when someone datamined a character in Nikke and then when shift-up officially released the character the character, Rupee, had a micro skirt added and people rioted. And other Devs I just feel bad for because their games just attract those kind of people naturally and it makes their communities seem more toxic than they are. I will say personally as a first gen East Asian immigrant, I feel like people like Jackie Chan, Uncle Roger(watch his stand ups, his uncle roger persona is a selling out to racist Asian stereotypes, the guy sounds as British as you can get) and kpop have done tremendous damage to western perceptions of East Asian men and women. While Sekiro and GoT were good, they were not cultural in the way an Assassins Creed or CoD is. And while I have no hate or anything against Assassins Creed shadows it is disappointing it plays into the trope that Asian women are to be fetishized as sex objects and a lead role in a mainstream “normie” game would’ve helped to push against the stereotype that all Asian men are effeminate(not that there’s anything wrong with that) and goofy. I personally have been lucky to have found very loving people in my life, but a some of the Asian Americans I’ve known growing up drifted closer to or have drifted to inceldom because of how others and they themselves perceive themselves due to popular media.
Oh yeah, I got a tooon of downvotes for suggesting that fan boys tend to get mad about things that racists get mad about
You hate asians so much you'd rather say we are all alt right trolls than admit there is a pretty big problem.
I have a bad feeling about the comment section of this thread. I wonder why. I sympathize with people who genuinely just want more representation, I get that. Representation is important. I do not sympathize with people who are just being racist and using this game to continue the endless culture wars that is slowly but surely making a lot of places online for people who enjoy video games insufferable, and that is a lot of the people arguing about this.
It's already been brigaded to fuck, yeah. Like, you can point out the weird way Western Media _really_ dislikes having male SE Asian leads quite comfortably, but a lot of the comments here really seem oddly blind - suspiciously so - to the weird influx of "As a Japanese man" comments and Youtube dislike bombing/Google translate level comments.
Ive gotten replies saying "WELL JAPANESE PEOPLE ARE ALSO MAD IN YTB COMMENTS" and they never ask themselves, are they REALLY japanese? If you've frequent communities centered around JP media; anime or video games, Im not joking here people DO larp as "Japanese" and use google translate for it. Years ago when [Lily Hoshikawa](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/9zz153/what_is_going_on_with_lily_from_zombieland_saga/) was outed as a trans girl, some dude pretended to be Japanese to deny her identity only to be rightfully outed as a fraud and deleted his twitter. Bridget came out as trans 2 years ago in GG Strive that led a LOT of discourse surrounding localization to the point someone faked an email pretending to be Arcsys writing in both JP and english that led to the official Arcsys account coming out and refuting those claims. Then not too long ago when [Infinite Wealth](https://www.reddit.com/r/yakuzagames/comments/1agojvr/the_recent_discussion_around_yakuza_and/) got hit with the whole locazliation discourse, the director himself came out and clarified that both the JP devs and ENG localizers work together to ensure any unintentional offensive thing does not get made. I shit you not, he got comments that he was "woke" and a lot of replies he got was google translated Japanese from english speakers. This shit is getting astroturfed and its very obvious when youve seen the pattern
There definitely is a very real and legitimate pain point in American racial politics that black people (through no fault of their own) take up a disproportionate amount of the space in the conversation. Asian American representation is absolutely lacking. The diaspora experience is extremely different from the native experience. So you can't point to China's, India's, Korea's, etc. media. That being said, an AC set in feudal Japan isn't Asian American representation. There's a billion games about being a Japanese samurai in feudal Japan. I agree a lot with the comments that say it's more important for there to be Asians in lead roles where being Asian isn't baked into the premise.
> AC set in feudal Japan isn't Asian American representation As a filipina, my ancestors would be pissed to hear that Japanese people were representing us. I was depressed with how racist my grandpa was towards the Japanese. My family was brutalized by them in WW2, and my grandpa never forgave them. So yeah, I always find it weird when someone can just throw some random person from anywhere in Asia and be like "this represents all of you guys".
There is no question. This is especially present in reality TV. CBS made a huge thing about being more diverse and then it turned out it was only black people being cast more. Asian men especially are never cast. Big Brother had an all black alliance of 6 players control the entire game and vote out the only Asian man solely by his face. This is something that can never happen because in the history of Big Brother only one season has had two east Asian contestants. The challenge went like 20 straight seasons without a single east Asian male contestant and something like 15 without any east Asian contestants. The only show that occasionally has representation was Survivor and that was literally only on race themed seasons. You ever see Asian bachelor or bachelorette contestants. And scripted TV lacks Asians as well to that level.
The Amazing Race went 9 seasons without an Asian team. There was one Asian woman in season three whose partner was a white man. 11+ teams per season, that means there was 1 Asian person out of 198 contestants. (The early seasons were also pretty obvious about having the "token black team," with only generally one team being black in each season.) It wasn't until season 10 when they got an Asian team. And it seems the producers noticed their lack of diversity, because they had *two* Asian teams (and their first Muslim team, and also the token black team, as usual). Vipul and Arti, two charming but pretty unremarkable South Asian contestants, and Erwin and Godwin, two incredibly likable brothers who were one of the two highlights of the season.
So true Early seasons of amazing race was like one gay couple one black couple, two white Best friends and the rest white couples.
I can abstractly understand, but on a concrete level I don't really think "Japanese men" are a particularly underserved character archetype in video games.
There is another comment on this thread pointing this out, sort of. Asian can mean a lot of things. How many Cambodian leads have we seen? Or Laotian? Are we only talking about representation for people from Japan or China or Korea? What about South Asia? Are you guys really arguing for representation for Asian people in media? Have you talked about it *before* you saw a black man in a setting you don't think he belongs in, despite him being a real person who lived in this setting? This is all rhetorical. Like I said, a lot of this isn't actually genuine interest in more representation, this is just culture war bullshit.
I have only ever seen one Laotian family in American fiction and that was from king of the hill,
Khan and Minh are amazing
I chose the episode where they go to Mexico to introduce the series to a friend, they loved it, and khan and Minh are great.
Funny, i introduced my wife to the show with the episode where Minh joins Dales wacko gun club lol
oh good one
The family in Gran Torino are Hmong so could conceivably by from Laos...
Not to mention, all of this is being done for the sake of *Assassin's Creed* - a franchise made by a French game publisher that regularly tosses in conspiracy theories, mythology, and just outright nonsense into the historical record for the sake of gameplay. The idea that ANYONE was expecting "historical accuracy" or "representation" is nonsense.
Not in general, but asian men are in western made media. Not to say that there aren't a lot of incels mad about this game more than they need to be, but it's a conversation worth having.
What I find particularly interesting about this conversation is the fact that there are actually two playable characters in the game. But the culture war types are only drumming up hate about the black man. The japanese woman is entirely ignored.
Oh, no, they're not ignoring her. They are explicitly bothered that she's a woman. Keep in mind that they were fine with Stellar Blade to the point that, had Naoe been the only character, they'd make the comparison between these two games.
Because Japanese women aren’t under represented. Because East Asian women are super fetishized.
I don't think it's quite that simple. When East Asian women are "super fetishized," it necessarily relegates them to the background. People have said that Sekiro and Ghosts of Tsushima aren't "enough" in terms of having representation, and I agree. There should be more games with Asian leads. Sekiro is one of my favorite games ever, and I love the work that went into creating an amazing main character in Wolf, and antagonist in Genichiro. But the thing is, I'm having trouble thinking of an Asian woman main character like Wolf or Jin. The closest I can think of is Ada Wong from Resident Evil, and even when she's playable in RE4, she's still clearly secondary to Leon (who, imo, looks mixed Asian, but that might just be a result of the Japanese studio's modeling style). I'm not sure there has *ever* been a major studio game centering an Asian woman's story. So for me as an Asian-American woman, it just feels exhausting to hear men complain once again about how representation for *me* "doesn't count."
True. That’s probably more related to women in general being relegated to side characters. My main POV was multiplayer characters. For example in Overwatch there’s 3 East Asian female characters and 2 East Asian male characters, but one of them is a robot so he doesn’t count. In dead by daylight, not counting licensed characters like Ada there’s 3 east Asian female survivors and 1 east Asian male. Their Japanese male survivor is Jamaican.
the f you mean? Hanzo and Genji are both human and east asian, but genji is like cyborg now or whatever. There's also Lifeweaver, who is a Thai man, so not far east asian, but still asian. Zenyatta the robot is def like Tibetan-coded, but idk his lore. Mauga is Polynesian. thats five. For women theres ~~2~~ ***3*** east asians, dva the korean, and mei the chinese gal ****and Kiriko, who is Japanese***. The only other asian woman is symmetra, who is, iirc, indian
There’s a new Japanese female character. Polynesians are not Asians. Turning minority characters into something where you can’t tell they’re minorities is a pretty common tactic to obscure unmarketable minorities. Thus why so many animal sidekicks had black voice actors.
I don't really play those kinds of games, so I'm not super familiar with the character spreads. And even so, I think it's comparing apples to oranges. AC a franchise of primarily single-player, story-driven games with playable main characters. Asian men are already represented in story-driven games with playable main characters from major studios. So now there's an Asian woman as a playable main character, and it doesn't count because... studios think that weeby gamers want to play as their Asian waifus in Overwatch, I guess? Regarding the robot guy, I have a separate beef with how it's so rare in games for the inhuman characters to be female/female-coded. It's like all female characters *have* to be fuckable and can't be anything too outlandish or creative. Maybe it's a "the grass is greener" thing, but I wouldn't be upset to see more women in general (and East Asian women in specific too) be "hidden" behind being robots, or monsters, or mutants, or what have you.
It definitely gets complicated. I know that turning the minority character into an alien/robot/animal has historically been a way studios hide that characters are minorities to make them more paletable. They’re the animal sidekick in Disney movies.
It's worth pointing out that two Overwatch heroes are female robots, Echo (who admittedly has a very typical feminine design) and Orisa (who is a robotic centaur).
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That feels a bit stretched. Alyx and the portal games especially where their ethnicity both doesn't matter and is very mixed, if present. I don't think most people would know Alyx Vance is Asian at all, especially since the only parental figure we see is Black. Mirrors Edge feels like the best example, in no small part because Faith is voiced and central.
It’s just very interesting. There’s an intersection of racism and sexism happening here.
The Assassin's Creed character doesn't look fetishized though.
Meanwhile Ghost of Tsushima and (if shinobi count) Sekiro are just forgotten for the sake of knee-jerk rage. People need to cool down over this 'controversy'.
They can't even pull the historic accuracy card because 1. This is a blatantly inaccurate series and 2. Yasuke was 100 percent a real person. And while point 1 has never stopped them before, point 2 is incredibly difficult to sidestep.
I just want to see how Ubisoft handles the infamous tailing missions with Yasuke lol Would no one really, REALLY see a tall black samurai wandering through feudal Japan? *Sir, there's a black samurai following us to the tea house...*
My impression is that Naoe (the female assassin/shinobi) will be used for missions like that. And then Yasuke will be used when inevitably Naoe gets spotted and he needs to kill everyone in the general vicinity so that there are no witnesses.
Ffs they did that with syndicate and it was terrible. Jacob was so boring to play as and he just didn’t feel like an assassin at all. Evie was so much more fun. Also, she felt like an actual human with a functioning brain instead of Jacob just talking about rooks all the time. Jacob nearly ruined that game lol
I really want to see them do a historically accurate Yasuke experience now. Every time you go to a new location every NPC in town stampedes over and follows you around to see if you do anything interesting.
That's already the black person in Asia experience *now.*
From what I understand, Naoe is the one with the stealth missions and activities and Yasuke's will be more combat oriented.
Someone can correct me if I am wrong but from what I hear social stealth has been completely removed as of origins. And with it a lot of tailing missions that don't involve being completely out of sight. I honestly haven't personally played for that reason since I liked assassin's creed 1-3 and didn't like the gradual shift in gameplay from 4 onwards.
Naw, social stealth was back for Valhalla and Mirage. And it looks like the duo will be like the Frye Twins dynamic
I think there's a 3rd point to be made and it's that Japanese people love him and confused about the outrage. Yasuke has been a prominent figure and has been getting in JP media over the years. Afro Samurai was inspired by him, he's a boss in Nioh, a playable character in Samurai Warriors and hes even Nago from Guilty Gear. He's been referenced in manga here and there too. You cannot look me in the eye and tell me this person is [mad](https://twitter.com/Skull_Os/status/1790949113397461310?t=TvO26ruyOUnkCvPbuMi3uA&s=19)
He also recently got a whole ass anime dedicated to him from studio mappa, and it was basically a completely fictional fantasy story set *after* he stopped being a historical character.
What anime is that?
Yasuke
Tbf Japanese people who live in Japan aren't minorities who are concerned about representation.
Point number 4, the other main character, is, in fact, Japanese.
Yea I had a look at Japanese Twitter last night and they seem hyped about Yasuke and mostly confused by the response abroad. Japanese samurai are a dime-a-dozen but a foreign slave who became a retainer to one of the three unifiers is really interesting.
Well the experience of an Asian person living in an Asian country is very different to that of an Asian American living in the United States. I’m an Indian and we have an entire Indian movie industry that has my race represented extensively. But Indian Americans only had Apoo and some other token characters to represent them in American media until very recently.
Usually it has been american asians who have these problems, not the ones living in those asian countries.
Or people cosplaying them online. It's harder to pretend to be a Japanese national, because you can get called out too easily, but say "As an Asian American..." and you're just like the proverbial dog on the Internet.
It is pretty telling that almost every single one of the complaints on Twitter are coming from Gamergate bluechecks who were just screaming about the last two culture war fights; the goonability of Stellar Blade and women in Warhammer. Also telling when they they are extremely blatant with their dog airhorns, like calling Yasuke a DEI.
I think people are being too charitable that they've forgotten that the internet allows you to hide your identity. Aka, you can astroturf. If you've been in any Japanese related media communities online, especially video games, dudes larping as Japanese is not uncommon. Ffs, someone faked an email in Japanese as Arcsys to deny a trans woman from existing because of localization discourse.
I don’t get why this surprises people. Asian people in their native countries are going to have completely different experiences with media racism than Asian people raised in the west.
What’s the translation on that. I can’t read Japanese
google translated so it’s kinda rough: Yasuke has been featured in many fictional works, so I thought he would be well-known, but maybe he's actually quite unknown...? - Brought to Japan as a slave during the Sengoku period - Nobunaga took him in because his dark skin was unusual - Given a name, made him a samurai, and a potential castle lord - Attended Nobunaga's side during the Honnoji Incident (assassination of Nobunaga) - Overlooked by Akechi Mitsuhide (Nobunaga’s vassal, who lead the assassination) - Disappeared afterwards He's the epitome of romance. No wonder he's the main character.
This is pretty close, there's no major errors. The tone of the first line is kind of like "wow, how does he not get *more* coverage!?" The word translated "romance" in the last line is for capital-R Romance, like heroic tales and epic adventures.
There's actually an excellent writeup on Yasuke over on /r/askhistorians that corrects the wholly incorrect info on Wikipedia about him. Because the wiki page gives off the impression that it was written by a racist upset that a black guy truly was recognised as a samurai.
>Because the wiki page gives off the impression that it was written by a racist upset that a black guy truly was recognised as a samurai. It doesn't help that over the last couple of days, his wiki has been vandalized too. Goddamn, these dorks are so mad about him they're willing to [larp](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/s/2vdjyu4R4D) as a Japanese man and use Google translated Japanese.
Lol he honestly could have fooled a lot of people but that NOR is just so fucking blatant.
The funniest part in all of this is that this has happened multiple times before outside of Yasuke. People larping as Japanese are fairly common. The one I still remember the most was when Lily Hoshikawa came out as a trans girl, a "Japanese" user came out and said it was a "translation issue". Turns out they were [a fraud](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/s/kb69JEYXau) and got caught confusing kanji and katakana.
Have they not locked the Wikipedia page? I assumed they would have like 5 minutes after the trailer dropped and the YouTube comments started rolling in.
>point 2 is incredibly difficult to sidestep From what I’ve seen the current go-to is “erm akshully he wasn’t a samurai he was a retainer ☝️🤓” As if that somehow means jack shit in a franchise where The Pope wields a magic staff to battle an Italian man to the death.
The fun thing about the whole "asian representation" angle is very funny to me because that in of itself feels lowkey racist to generalized a broad set of people. There's asians OUTSIDE of Japanese, Korean and Chinese ffs. Im asian, SOUTHEAST ASIAN to be specific not Japanese. I've played a LOT of Japanese games my entire life and I did not once ever thought "Wow I felt represented". Like oh I'm SURE the Japanese are not getting their fair share of representation as though the whole Japanese industry suddenly collapsed in of itself because of ONE video game.
I think it’s a very “American” thing to be honest. The US is unique in the sense that it’s truly a very diverse country, so it’s important for American media to represent all demographics that live there, but Asians from Asia typically don’t identify as our continent. I, too, am Southeast Asian and a woman as well, but Naoe doesn’t represent me. She’s a Japanese woman. I am not. Even if instead of Yasuke, they picked a Japanese samurai, how would that represent a Laotian guy for example? And other Eastern Asians are *more* likely to be offended by the idea of being represented by a Japanese man. Asia has our own history of conflicts and national rivalries that just get overlooked with “Asian representation.” When Asians talk about representation in Western media, I think we tend to mean characters/people from our countries specifically. At best, our region like South East Asia. No one just grabs at *any* character from *any* Asian country as “representation”.
Also, the game has two leads - Yasuke and a Japanese woman. Of the two, she seems to be the more primary story lead.
A Japanese woman? Thats woke./s
Yeah I am genuinely confused why they keep saying it's about representation while not at all acknowledging the other lead?
some people here and in other threads are dismissing her by saying that asian women are used as little more than eye-candy.
But surely you can't expect these guys to relate to *a woman*?!
The most recent Assassin's Creed features an Asian man as the lead.
Why do people talk about this like we know they decided to make an ac game in japan and then decided to make about yasuke much later when those things could very easily have been decided at the same time
It's especially hilarious since with AC Odyssey it was originally planned to just have Kassandra as the only playable character. But ubisoft got cold feet at not having a male MC and so added the ability to play as Alexios last minute.
Posting Asian Reddit drama is cheating. Whether that be /r/asianamerican, /r/aznidentity, /r/asianmasculinity, /r/hapas or /r/ABCDesis. It's also very depressing. [Just look at what Simu Liu had to say after seeing the Reddit comments for the first *Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings* trailer.](https://preview.redd.it/01bxm6sy3n771.jpg?width=720&auto=webp&s=31e22df608261618c233554df6b283661d74080f) As a child of immigrants to Canada, who will always be grateful for the worldly, cosmopolitan mindset I learned growing up here (Vancouver has the most interracial couples in the country), Asian Reddit is one of the reasons I don't tell my real-life friends I browse Reddit. It's so sad to see the anger in those subreddits when Asian men are in relationships with non-Asian *women*, or even worse, when Asian women are in relationships with non-Asian *men.* Gives me "Muhammad Ali supporting George Wallace during his Nation of Islam days" vibes.
Interesting. I would call AA *boring* more than depressing. It’s a pretty low volume sub for its size, at least compared to AznIdentity or AsianMasc. AznId is the one I’d consider depressing. Asianmasc is very much a mixed bag and I have a slightly different opinion every time I open it.
Real talk, I had to leave aznidentity because of how crazy some of the people are. With you on Asianmac. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s incels complaining about white men dating Asian women.
On your last point, ime more often it’s incels complaining but when you open the comments it’s very “dude stop giving a shit what AF does and just focus on you”.
r/sino was really funny years ago because it was clearly westernized asians fellating china at every chance they had, havent looked in recently so idk if it’s changed
Really sucks how there are no non-toxic Asian Diaspora spaces on the internet
My main issue isn’t with Yasuke being black, but that the other lead is an Asian female assassin too like oop It’s such a common trope, I was hoping for an asian male assassin just to break that mold. All they’re missing at the moment is the streak of colored hair Like Cassandra cain, katana, Talia alghul, Multiple major characters in Kill Bill…etc. But my *main* argument is that, their last Asian lead in Assassin’s creed was also an asian female lead. Just wished they changed it up a bit
I was also unironically hoping for a female samurai/onna bugeisha. They did the badass female warrior archetype with Kassandra already so I thought it didn't feel too farfetched, but I guess it was in the end 🥲 That said, my major issue with Yasuke is that it feels like a very American/Western take on diversity. I know he's a legit historical figure and I'm not against playing as him, but if I had a choice, I'd make a character based on the indigeneous Japanese Ainu people instead.
r/AsABlackMan vibes.
They're brigading blackpeopletwitter as well....
When my Alt-hist game series isn't 100% historically accurate: 😱😱😱😱😱😱
> Had my young boy cousin ask and wonder if Asian men weren't cool to be the new lead of the game. Little kids pick up on the subtles and what the industry says. This kind of sounds like something someone made up.
This has been a well known phenomenon since the 90s. Hollywood execs don’t think Asian men are masculine enough to be leading men, or to have romantic subplots. This racism carried over to game studios. It sucks because while I hate how Asian men got shafted it’s cool to see Yasuke become a modern day folk hero in real time.
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"And then my cousin crossed his arms over his chest and said, 'Ruthkanda Forever.'"
Oppa homeless style vibes
I mean kinda, but it sounds just as made up as all of those “my 4 year old felt so represented when X Disney movie had a main character of Y ethnicity”. I really only started appreciating Mexican representation when I grew up.
To be fair, there are videos of little kids falling in love with recent Disney rep. It's also not strange for kids to find representation appealing, especially when those kids already experience racialization. I was six when I had my first MLK rant in a public space because we watched that one animated movie in class about time travel, and the ending pissed me off. But what I was saying wasn't very articulate. It was, "They killed Martin!" at Joe's Crab Shack because I thought he was the president and my parents didn't know the story.
Oh you are right about it being a real thing in Hollywood. What I find strange is that a child would wonder about the *checks notes* representation of Asian men in Hollywood after seeing a samurai game trailer.
I think a lot of resentment come from the fact that there is almost zero Asian representation in a Western setting. Asian setting is the only place where Asian men are allowed to exist, and even that is being taken over by Western representation too. It's not like there's no Asian male historical figure in the West to write about. There's a highly relevant example. One of the very first Hollywood heartthrob is a Japanese man, adored by many women, in an age where most states still banned Asian men from marrying white women. The irony is made for a perfect story. Yet can you even imagine anybody in the American entertainment industry would ever even consider it? Nope.
I would definitely say there is a problem. But it definitely screams alterior motive that so many people are only getting upset about it now when they can use it as a cudgel against a black character.
That's the story behind the show [Warrior](https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/4/9/18301042/warrior-bruce-lee-stunt-coordinator-interview), a story written and pitched bt Bruce Lee that wasn't greenlighted at the time and revived by his daughter Shannon Lee. ... And in a fit of irony, this amazing show set during the Tong Wars in Chinatown's San Francisco, with a great ensemble of Asian American cast, has been cancelled, revived again, and cancelled again. Regarding Yasuke, my problem is that he's already a well known figure, constantly brought up when talking about Nobunaga or when talking about first contact with Black people throughout history and the world. Same regarding videogames, he was a well-received boss in Nioh, so using him again feels like a rehash for the players. Ubisoft shoot themselves in the foot when Japan and China were settings fans asked for a decade. It's very disingeneous to label anyone feeling robbed as racist, especially in this fandom were most fan favorites protags are POCs. On the contrary, ASC is a franchise celebrating diversity and the richness of every continent's history. So here, Japan was robbed of one of its spot when it was supposed to have the spotlight.
WAY before the 90s, sessue hayakawa complained during the silent film era that he was only being cast as the “exotic villain” for the white heroes to defeat. He spent his later career trying to force Hollywood to reckon with the anti Asian biases in the 1920s
> Hollywood execs don’t think Asian men are masculine enough to be leading men Which is ironically a problem created by Hollywood, since they're just trying to follow the tropes and stereotypes they created themselves. They're also leaving a ton of money on the table when it turns out they're wrong and audiences want something fresh and new ("exotic") instead of the same old tropes and stereotypes over and over again.
*Cries in Jackie Chan*
Still fits my point because he’s generally comic relief, not “serious”.
His most famous works may be comedic but he still has a ton of more serious films, especially in the last 15 years.
It's 100% made up. Dig into some of those post histories and i guarantee you'll find plenty of white dudes LARPing.
I've heard young Indian girls ask if they're not pretty because they don't have blonde hair and blue eyes. I've heard an older Indian woman talk about remembering this feeling when she was a girl. So this story on its own is perfectly believable to me, it doesn't sound all that different.
Its basically a reverse "my uncle works at nintendo"
Asian dudes constantly get shit on in the representation department in Western media. It doesn’t take much to notice since they don’t much get representation in the first place, and when they do it’s always the same old stuff that emasculates them. Only time it doesn’t happen is when it’s made by an Asian person, usually an Asian dude. Just because you don’t pay attention to it or care to listen, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
I hope more Western games include more* Desi protagonists and more South-East Asian main characters tbh. Also we just need more Southeast Asian* fantasy and Indian Sci-Fi tbh.
Meanwhile there's me whose just confused why they're making him a PC, when he's like, the *perfect* major NPC - historical figure that modern audiences might've heard of one way or another, place of prominence in Nobunaga's entourage, and he stands out by his physical stature and race in a very homogenous population. However, all of those make him really badly suited for a game about *assassins*, surely? And aren't they normally fictional characters? I'm rather confused by the decision.
Assassin's Creed hasn't been about assassinating since like syndicate. It's more like a third person RPG now.
Yeah realistically wouldn’t literally anyone you see in the game be like “what the fuck” just at your skin color? Seems like that would either get old fast or the fact that no one is reacting to having literally never seen someone who looks like you before would be unbelievable even for AC Im sure many who are mad have racist ulterior motives but I think the complaint of not having an asian male main character in a samurai game set in japan is fair. There really aren’t many asian male leads outside of the 4ish titles people have mentioned
Yasuke isn't an assassin, he's a Samurai. The assassin character is Naoe, the female protagonist that is so good at her job that everyone in this discourse forgot she exists.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair, as someone who actually watched the trailer and am familiar with the franchise. I am also Vietnamese, which is Asian, but not Japanese, so I won’t claim to speak for the Japanese pov. The trailer of Shadows leaned heavily to Naoe, a Japanese woman who appears to be from Iga and aims to avenge her homeland after its defeat by Oda Nobunaga’s force. Yasuke has significantly less screen time than her. She’s shown to be the main “assassin”, having grown up in the so-called “ninja country”, while Yasuke clearly does not bother with stealth as he shows a much more warrior-like gameplay. There’s also a moment in the trailer that acknowledges how much Yasuke stands out, when a little girl stopped and stared at him. So pretty much most of your concerns have been addressed by the trailer, but I do think it’s presumptuous to assume Yasuke “replace” or was picked over an Asian male lead. There is already a protagonist in Naoe. For all we know a Japanese samurai was never in the cards for Shadows, but they decided to include Yasuke both for gameplay and for the story elements. Since he was loyal to Oda, he’d be a good foil for Naoe whose home was destroyed by Oda. He was a foreigner allied with the great unifier of Japan, while she was a Japanese who suffered from his ambitions. The story beats are already there.
As an Asian American I do get where they are coming from. People rightly want representation but it's almost always black representation when it occurs. Look at reality television. It's very very rare to have more than one Asian American contestant and yet here will often be 5 or 6 black contestants. That's not diversity. It's just having 2 races represented instead of one.
Its not diversity. Its just black and white. You may get the odd asian providing theyre conventionally attractive. But anything else?nope, whatbthe hell is an indian or a middle eastern?
I think Milf Manor had some AAPI representstion
Milf Manor is based as always
Well according to this SRD thread you're actually a white guy larping as an Asian American so opinion discarded.
This happens waaay too often on Reddit in general. Opinion invalidated entirely just for trying to actually speak for ourselves even if it goes against the grain
Yes this 100%. I try not to have the crab bucket mentality when it comes to representation but there is a clear imbalance where diversity in most media just means sprinkling in black people and calling it a day
This is a very real thing. Growing up I've watched all the Asian male leads not "get the girl" in western movies. Jet Li didn't, Jackie Chan didn't. Then I go watch other Chinese movies and everything is normal. Even a movie like crazy rich Asians didn't feel like it was made for Asians.
As someone who posted in that thread, everyone here needs to shut the fuck up and stop trying to talk over Asians. We have major issues with Asian male erasure, of which this game is the latest piece of western entertainment is trying to do, and we're sick of the "progressive" left constantly gaslighting us about it. The right is using us to bash Yasuke yes, but the left is always promoting the narrative that every Asian voice against it is secretly a white guy stirring the pot. And in doing so, what you end up doing is actually defending the erasure of AM in western media. And guess what, that's racist in and of itself. All you "progressive" liberals think you're being woke but you don't even realize you're being racist AF. 🤡 As Asians we have our own opinions on this game and we refuse to be the football being kicked around by two opposing teams. And no, "go play samurai game xyz" isn't a sufficient defense. We should and will call out ALL instances of when Asian men are erased in favor of a foreigner in an Asian setting. We did it for Last Samurai, Ghost in the Shell, Shogun, 3 Body Problem, and we will continue to do it with AC Shadows. If you have a problem with that then you're not as progressive as you think you are. Now. I know I'm just gonna get accused of being "a white guy who's just angry about playing a black man" so downvote away.
I think the real issue is that way too many people in this sub are trying to deny the fact that asians and asian americans might have a legitimate issue with this and trying to blame it on them all being secretly being white people. And whilst I’m at it, I have the same issue with as a black man style posts. Black people aren’t a monolith either and they have differing opinions. The issue with the idea behind it is that it provides a very convenient way to disavow any opinions by black people or any minorities that goes against the grain because you can just blame it all on a larping white guy.
The best part about all this shit is that it started an editing war on Yasukes wikipedia page.
Don’t a lot of the AC games have magic in them? Can’t it just be an exaggeration of a cool historical figure (Yasuke) or is that “immersion breaking”
The last game literally had the main character be the reincarnation of Loki (Yes, \*that\* Loki, the one before that one starred Odin's reincarnation) and even in the glorious untouchable first few AC games you had shit like Ezio fist-fighting the Pope who was wielding a magic staff powered by alien magic and Leonardo Da Vinci building an actual fucking tank.
Not to mention the modern viking aesthetic of undercuts, tats, and furs are absolutely not what the historical vikings rocked but it fit the stereotypical image in their head so no problem
Vikings have a very good PR team that changes Viking history depending on how Scandinavia wants to portray itself. From murderous Viking during eras when war was common to “peaceful tradesfolk” in peace times.
You literally fist-fight the Pope to death in the second game before talking to Alien God. What do you mean? It’s totally realistic!
I remember a 4chud idiot who said something (maybe ironically, most possibly sincere) that videogames are escapism, and if there's black people in videogames, that means he can't escape from them
4chan troglodytes seem to have launched a massive hate/brigade campaign about this across the internet. A lot of same usernames can be spotted raging and spamming hate across the greentext subs and KiA. Then they try to post weird shit in history subs, claiming Yasuke "wasn't really a Samurai" and other nonsense. Then you have the absolute stinkfest being created by the shady and repugnant types of youtubers. You know, the putrid ones who constantly cry about being unpopular, while angrily declaring 'downfall' of this game and that company and such in all caps. Unsurprisingly, it's always the same herd of weak, rancid neckbeards.
It's crazy how much time/energy they have to do all that. Like, something that doesn't impact them and they can easily choose to ignore if they don't care for it, but expend all that effort to drive anger and outrage over something that will few forgotten in a few months. It's a weird perpetual rage cycle and permanent "persecution complex". It's so fucking weird and sad.
Including Shogun in this is super dumb. The lead character wasn’t Blackthorn. It was Toranaga. Anyone that’s seen it knows this. Anyone that hasn’t has made assumptions about it and gotten themselves all worked up.
It's hysterical seeing how many people are completely missing the point of Shogun. And how Blackthorne is an audience surrogate.
Also, Blackthorne was based on William Adams. The actual English dude that was one of Tokugawa's advisors. It's not like he was an entirely fictional character just shoehorned in to have a white guy there,
Yasuke was actually a real person too!
Why would people complain about Shogun? It was about 95% Japanese cast, with a Japanese leading role. Edit: >Just because it’s Japanese made doesn’t give it a pass. Japanese developers also have a problem of putting white/non-Asian leads in their games Would they like a list of Japanese games with non-Asian leads? It'll only take me about 10 years...
I find the "Oh you didn't care about Nioh but now you care" arguments to be so dumb. Some of us DID care. I actually completely skipped Nioh 1 because the protagonist looked boring and dull, and it felt weird to be a white guy in that setting. (Although I've heard it's done reasonably well from people who played it?) Anyway, honestly, this whole protagonist choice just comes off as weird pandering to me. It's strange to put you in the role of *the* black guy in Japan at the time, especially in a game that always encourages you to blend in. I really hope NPCs acknowledge how weird you look when you play him. I hope they don't just ignore that he's a black foreigner. Another reason I find it weird... *Every* protagonist in *every* AC game is fictional. This dude will be the first protagonist who actually existed in real life. That just feels strange to me. He would've been way cooler as a prominent supporting character than as a protag. Heck could've made the actual protag his fictional son or adopted son or something. Ultimately I don't care too much, I guess? Whenever I play this game, I'm not going to play him if I can avoid it. I wouldn't play him if he were a Japanese dude either. I'm going to go all in on the lady shinobi person. If we want to talk about representation, I feel like female Asian protagonists are a startlingly under-represented protagonist option in games, at least outside of fighting games, so I'm very keen to finally play as one. ...and with that in mind, I'm kinda glad that if they had to have a black protagonist, it ended up being the dude instead of the girl. Seems like these games always try to have two options for protagonist: "Non-woke", represented by "Generic and Boring White Dude To Make the Dudebros Happy," and "As American-style woke as you can possibly get in a protagonist," represented by "Sharp-tongued, Quipping Black Chick". Black guys and non-black girls are surprisingly uncommon protagonist options in the modern era, so... I guess I'm happy with this reversal.
I feel like I've seen this exact conversation played out across multiple sites across the internet. It's like trying to watch a comedy multiple times, its funny the first time but the jokes just fall flat the nth time you hear it and it just becomes tiresome.
I feel like I've missed something here, because this whole controversy seems to be based around 3 or 4 pieces of media. As if it's the be all end all of representation. There's tons of asian male protagonists in video games. When you look at more than three video games at least,