• they/them

bad at video games / pun enthusiast / filthy cripple

📍 occupied penobscot land


pleasantlytwstd
@pleasantlytwstd

I knew from the minute that a Black genderqueer person reported in December 2021 that Forspoken had zero Black writers and zero Black consultants it was going to be a mess

But to see the conflicting views on length of game, followed by the absurd PC requirements, discovering that Square Enix fudged their review trailer to sound better than what reviews were making of it, and then to actually hear the dialogue they made this woman read is a lot

like 'chatty bling' will be burned into my head for eternity, and I'm sorry but it's worth talking about because the writers they had on deck were sheer powerhouses---

that should've absolutely read the idea/script and went 'oh the lead, antagonist, and most important people are Black? this isn't for me, let me get the right people on the horn'

anyway hire Black people so you're not this level of embarrassing
it is absolutely WILD that in 2023 this still has to be said especially when you consider we just had not one but TWO banger AAA games that did Black representation extremely fucking well

sorry pals, there's just no fucking excuse at this point
even white creators and YT reviewers are advising to not buy it, and that is especially egregious like that's not me being a meanie for serious what was the play here

like
I'm still a Black queer person when you done talking about it so, uh
you gotta miss me on this one, this is pretty bad


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in reply to @pleasantlytwstd's post:

As someone who can't speak on black issues or the black experience, but CAN speak from knowing plenty of white would be creatives who bill themselves as inclusive and end up Accidentally Doing a Racism...

I was cringing at first because Forspoken looks at itself and instead of granting its narrative the proper gravitas for a player to take seriously, it shrugs, winks, and says "Can you believe this shit?"

Then I thought for a moment.

"Oh. The white people wrote the black protagonist like this because they imagine black people as too 'sassy' to be anything but quippy about fantasy."

It's very prototypical "I am a white guy trying to write a protagonist black people will love", from the perspective of a white guy who had to deal with other white guys doing that kind of pandering to get good boy points and failing horribly while I was trying to be "A creative" .

When I got caught up on this I felt like I wad going to sublimate on the spot and just cease to fucking exist because what in the flip flying fuck is happening.

-2023-. And we're still like this. Even if you look past the fact that it's fucking morally correct to do this shit right, it's fucking beneficial for these companies to pull their heads out of their asses and hire the people they're trying to portray! What even! Like, I would buy the fuck out of pretty much any game that did trans or disabled people right. I would do the same of any marginalized group and so would A VERY LARGE NUMBER OF US.

I get that they're worried about alienating their bigoted ass audience because they (game studios as a whole) can clearly make money by shitting out the same game every so often (thinking about Call of Duty...) but FUCK.