Loosf

Hi hello. Agender faggot.

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Weird furry.
RaccoonRobot
Spicy alt: @LoosfButHornt


youmeyou
@youmeyou

just thinking about how the song of the bats in Elden Ring used to be a track in Ainu, a nearly forgotten language belonging to a small indigenous group from japan. Later replaced in the final release by a song in Latin, another "dead" language. Just this one detail revealing so many threads of colonialism not only within japan but also in the way it's mapped its own heritage to westernized analogues in its cultural exports. And that's not even to speak to the song itself, its lament at having been trod over and neglected by the golden order, an invasive colonizing power!


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in reply to @youmeyou's post:

Saw surprisingly little commentary online about how Pokemon Legends: Arceus is actually historical fiction about the colonization of Hokkaido by the Japanese in the 1800's. The American professor in the game actually parallels how the Japanese had American advisors assist with that process. That makes the game incredibly weird if you keep that in mind. It's...revisionist to be sure, but less sympathetic towards the colonizers than you might think. It feels like they actually had to grapple with cultural guilt a little bit, even though it's mostly whitewashed.

Also a note on the above: the slowly dawning realization of all of that as I played through the first few scenes of the game was an experience. I somehow watched all the trailers without really thinking about it, just thought "oh hey history of Pokemon training, that's cool, invention of the Pokeball, that's sweet..." But upon actually starting the game, I was like...this is based on Japan, why do we have a frontier settling vibe? everybody here in the settlement is really racist... wait a second there was a frontier...oh fuck Sinnoh is based on Hokkaido...oh no

I remember thinking about that when I was playing through it. The Diamond and Pearl clans are explicitly stated to be from elsewhere; all we see of the Celestica are ruins and Volo. We're treated to a fantasized, whitewashed frontier where the Indigenous people are gone, and it's just an untamed wilderness with a few other settlers who've been there a bit longer.

I mean, "a bit longer" could still easily be thousands of years. I hadn't really considered how shitty that was though, leaving ruins from a previous civilization that the clans couldn't possibly live up to all over their homeland (though, arguably, neither could the settlers). Definitely influences how I feel about the clans being more or less okay with the settlers establishing camps all over the place though. Man, what a fucking weird game.