highimpactsex

blogger and game dev

no more social media. i make text games that are poorly rated in game jams and talk about cool niche stuff.


dog
@dog

I love the merlion statues. They’re really cool landmarks.


highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

the history of the merlion is fascinating to me because it is a giant marketing campaign by the singapore state.

i studied in local schools there and thought it was a real mythological beast indigenous people believed in until i learned it was made by some white dude for the singapore tourism board.

both lion and fish do have actual corollaries to real malay myths. singapura is after all the “lion city” and it is a port city in southeast asia. but the specific suturing of lion and fish is really a grand marketing scheme to advertise singapore’s brand.

much has been written about how singapore markets itself. for example, this book review of Brand Singapore brings up how singapore is constantly branding itself as receptive to foreign investment. it cares so much about the branding (the merlion, the Formula One racing, singapore airlines) that it forgets to bring the local cultures to the forefront. and they know this. it’s kinda why the country is ambivalent about the hollywood adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians where they realize it is unironically The Depiction of singapore it’s trying to portray. they want to move away from that, from being a tourist city for rich millionaires to an actual city with well-known local cultures like new york city. but they suck so hard at it lol.

for example, they still can’t figure out how to market their good food overseas. singapore fried noodles is not from singapore, but foods like laksa and hainanese chicken rice have some connections to the hawker/street food cultures there.

they certainly don’t encourage enough local entertainment, let alone export it. it’s only recently that i learned about Ghostlore, a diablo-styled action rpg that uses southeast asian mythology. the state is also very unsure how to promote the arts because what if the good art exposes their hypocrisy? when sonny liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye won multiple eisner awards, people brought up how the grant given to liew was cancelled because the comic is in actuality a critique of how the ruling party fucked singapore up. look at the original cover: the bottom right is a villainous portrait of Lee Kuan Yew, the eugenics-loving founding member of the ruling party. there are awkward photo ops of the prime minister then who was related to LKY. even a singapore airlines magazine article i read lamented how self-censorship in singapore was so hard it made people unsure how to write their own works.

(as an aside, this is also how i feel about writing Hanna, We’re Going to School because i absorbed so much of singapore’s moralistic censorship culture that i found myself veering away from political issues. and i’ve already had people saying they were incensed by what they’ve seen in the game!)

so yeah, i think the merlion is a really good symbol on how well singapore can market its nation brand at the expense of downplaying local cultures. here is a symbol made by some white guy that appropriates actual mythologies for singapore to be recognizable in international communities, but it otherwise has no basis on local and community realities. no one outside hardcore film circles know there’s an interesting dramatic movie about someone who becomes an apprentice for someone hanging people in singapore. it’s only recently that singapore revised their constitution to unban sodomy. no one wants to bring up how rampant transphobia is there. the merlion paves over these wrinkles; it is the ultimate marketing success par excellence, with all its capitalistic downsides.

every time i see the merlion, i legit just think how effective it is in cleaning up singapore’s image. no one thinks about how strange it is. this is just Singapore to people outside and inside singapore. it’s utterly wild.

p.s. if you are interested in learning more about this kind of marketing but with more Theory, i recommend Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism. it talks about how “patriotism” and even just the acceptance that flags are everywhere in some post office are really playing into the national myths concocted by the political elites.


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in reply to @highimpactsex's post:

I happen to read this from a hotel room on the last day of my 2nd trip to Singapore. All these criticisms are certainly true, and my experience as a tourist has been mostly within the bounds of the curated brand of Singapore you mention.

But having grown up as an American in a school system that focused entirely on the merits of freedom at all costs (lionizing the ACLU in assisting Nazis to march in Skokie, say), seeing the Michael Fay case, Singapore was always portrayed as a backwards nanny state bordering on authoritarian. Visiting during the Trump administration forced me to put a lot of those beliefs into context. In the US the media kept "both sides" of a culture war in public view where saying Happy Holidays was a War on Christmas-- in Singapore, non-Hindu people were wishing me, an Indian-American, a Happy Diwali. Freedom of speech lines being drawn where they were in the US meant that Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson went on air every day espousing conspiracy theories and advocating for white supremacy. As you mention, there are massive class disparities in Singapore, but seeing things like multiculturalism, and integrated public housing was a big shift away from the state of affairs I was used to. On some level, it's definitely trading one set of problems for another, but I was forced to question a lot of my assumptions.

I knew it started out as a tourism board thing but I didn't know it was invented by a white guy. It's definitely a weird symbol for that reason, esp. as a culturally-adopted one. The game I was posting the screenshot is by a Singaporean team, definitely part of that culture of seeing it as a local icon.

It's funny, talking about games - I know a few other Singaporean indie games, but it doesn't seem like there's a "scene" or some kind of "Singaporean games" promotion I can see from over here.