If Bethesda released Skyrim today, they would have made it woke
If Bethesda released Skyrim today, they would have made it woke
118 comments
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Specifying a 'racist conservative' is redundant.
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We just got the Canadian Future Party, and even though I'm pretty left leaning (both financially and socially), it gives me some faith for conservatives here.
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Ubisoft has proven otherwise
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Woke basically applies to the bigots just realizing and getting worked up by things that had existed for decades. Either they've been dozing off for decades or have been "woken" up to it by propaganda with political undertones, and neither speaks highly of their mental faculties.
Although the thing about The Elder Scrolls in general is that it doesn't hand hold you, so you are free to be a racist bigot and not realize it. They don't force realization onto the player, you can happily adopt and become a tool of the point they are trying to criticize, you can willfully remain as ignorant as you would be in real life. In contrast to Starfield, where all companions are like the borg, of one mind telling you or nudging you into what you should have actually done.
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Unfortunately what I really think is happening/happened with "woke hate" is manipulation for political gain as you mentioned with propaganda.
These people couldn't care less before, other than the religious zealots that would crusade against anything "gay." The political right (I really believe this started in earnest in the US) found a pressure point to use that puts them in direct opposition to what their political adversary aims to achieve (acceptance of all people for who they are). As it stands in the US the right operates almost entirely based off of "whatever the left aims for, make it appear evil. Always oppose all that they do." as opposed to having specific goals of their own other than "shower the wealthy with benefits, remove all barriers to retaining the entirety of profits."
Steve Bannon recently aimed their manipulation at what he described as "rootless white men" through the lense of gaming and societys affect on games/movies. Ever since that started there's been an "explosion" of "this game woke?" discussions in Steam discussion fourms and in regard to movies. Before this manipulation these people just wouldn't care and if anything you'd just see the odd person here or there complain about 2 guys kissing in a specific scene or something. They are made to be even more angry now because they're made to believe it's an affront to them and an attempt to manipulate them and society... Which is "funny" because they are being manipulated, just not by gaming/movie media.
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Yeah the real reason they're doing this cultural stuff is that they need a distraction from the fact that their material/economic platform is becoming more and more unpopular every year. So the anti woke/anti immigration frenzy must continue
Dem politicians should point this out more, but their economic program isn't very popular either. I miss Bernie :(
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I think what the image is trying to say is no one gives a shit that plays elder scrolls about this sorta thing because it's a Fantasy game. No one needs to boot up a video game to be reminded how unfair and shitty our world is. We go to the game and escape that ( hopefully).
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It's not like fiction (including Fantasy) is often used as a means to do social commentary. ^^`
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No, you go to the game to play a power fantasy regardless of how unfair and shitty that fantasy world clearly is because of how your status or your skills help you surpass it. The Elder Scrolls goes that extra step to give you the choice to contribute or fight that unfair and shitty to such an extent that people mod it in when the choice is not given, and the player does not even have to be aware of it.
People play videogames for the control, replayability, and often the narrative (which honestly was never The Elder Scroll's strength), not necessarily to escape the world's problems, problems which some games embrace. At a more basic level, games just need to provide gameplay and a player just needs to explore it.
There's no shortage of games where you play as a jackass in a shitty unfair world. GTA comes to mind.
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whoosh
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Small correction but pelinal was a time traveling cyborg, but being gay is close
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According to MK, he was written to be gay, but higher-ups had him make his relationship with Huna ambiguous.
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I'd buy that
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But how many times and on how many platforms?
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All of them
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Todd Howard wants to know your location
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What about a politician who sexually harasses an employee and making that employee read their erotic interspecies fan fiction.
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Hey, don't talk shit about The Lusty Argonian Maid, it's a classic!
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"Hey kid, ya wanna be Hortator?" - Harvey Weinstein voice
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Aye, I could do that.
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Isn't all Daedric Prince genderless? They just assume the form they like, some are just a pile of tentacle.
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In a literal sense, yes. But they present themselves as male or female usually. So it's still appropriate to refer to Boethia as "genderfluid" because they send to switch it up.
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Somebody has been hitting the moon sugar a little too hard.
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I have stock if you have coin...
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Morrowind is a basically the thesis of Things Fall Apart in video game form, with a good deal of Dune. It’s an examination of colonialism. Every detail of that game is dripping with politics. The Dunmer are racist and engage in horrific chattel slavery - but does that mean it is right for the Empire to colonize them and take their resources? There’s substantial evidence that your character is a spook sent to “fulfill” an indigenous prophecy to tighten the Empire’s control - is that morally right?
There’s also a hermaphrodite male presenting god who has had hundreds of children with something quite close to the Devil.
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This is literally the first time I have seen Things Fall Apart mentioned since high school, 20yrs ago.
Good book, kinda got ruined by the typical over analysation of a HS English class though.
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Good, now make it gayer!
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Bro, same for Star Trek
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Let's hear it for badly written caricatures of racists that are so over-the-top that they allow real racists to say to themselves "I'm not actually a racist, because I'm not extreme as this flimsy caricature of a racist, which is what racists are really like."
I hate the idea that we have to write more well-developed racists just to get racists to recognize that they're, you know, fucking racist, but god damn it, it needs to happen. Skryim is just one of many offenders, video games alone are just one of many offenders as well. Really its the whole US media landscape that has nothing but flimsy, weak caricatures of racists. I personally think these weak caricatures are part and parcel to why it's hard to get racists to have self-reflection because we're not actually doing the hard work of writing realistic racist characters who don't start so extreme. Becoming a virulently violent racist takes time and doesn't happen overnight, and those events that lead to it fall under the umbrella of what's often called "character development."
/end unrelated rant
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Worth noting that whenever the subject comes up, people will defend the Stormcloaks, praising Ulfric's fight for the province's right to self-govern and-
Wait.
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Write a well rounded racist character and you get racists rooting for that character. Racists will never self reflect when they see a well written racist character. It’s like how there are men who don’t see that the characters in Fight Club and Joker are bad people, and rather see themselves in them.
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like the cops who identify with punisher, they're literally not getting it.
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Rooting for bad people in fiction is a fine way to process that part of your own self with no actual risks or consequences. If doing that turns people bad, then playing role-playing games turns people into satan worshippers.
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In short, exactly how it was and how it should be.
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🎶 🎵 How it is, and of course how it could be. 🎵 🎶
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I miss the time when people realized that fiction, even if possibly metaphoric, is ultimately not real.
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Dagoth Ur is woke as fuck and he will awaken all you sleepers.
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In RL Vivek is the racist one.
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They all racist AF, except for Bosmer. They think everyone is equally tasty.
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I miss TrueSTL
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We can do better. TrueSTL had a lot of "joking" real racism IMO.
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I remember there being jokes that seemed like they were drawing parallels between TES racism and IRL racism (like how the Dunmer like calling non-dunmer "N'wah", which sounds suspiciously like "n-word" if you slur the words as you say them) or making fun of racism in the series. I don't remember TrueSTL using jokes to actually make fun of IRL minorities though.
I could be wrong, it's been a while, but I don't remember seeing anything that came off as being intentionally malicious. I will also concede, however, that there were definitely things that might come off that way to a passerby with no TES lore knowledge.
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Is the crusader gay?
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Yes. Also a cyborg.
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The Legend. The Elf Slayer. Pelinal Whitestrake
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Even worse, imagine how woke the books of Karl May (not to be confused with Karl Marx) the most successful German author of all time that were originally published in book form in the 1890s [sic] would be if they came out today:
The foreword to the main trilogy would be so spicy that no modern English translation would include it. Like: He would call out the genocide of the native Americans as such and explicitly assign the full guilt for the decline of their cultures to the whites.
He would have the author-self-insert heroes telling people that use the N-word that “Once they scrape you into the ground, your white-skinned body will become straight and exactly as much a stinking carcass as a negro corpse. You will admit that, and now have the goodness to list your other merits!”
He would have trans coded characters being presented in an unambigously positive light.
And so many more incredibly woke things, like trash talking Christians that don’t respect all other humans and do evil shit…
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By all modern shithead alt-righters, Skyrim is "ultra woke": It promotes ultimate equality and the ability to be anything you want to be, and freely become someone else later.
Or maaaaaybe people who use "woke" unironically just lack the brain capacity to comprehend even a game like Skyrim. 🤷
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So like, are you saying the fascists aren't bad guys?
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No they didn't?
If I'm not getting whooshed from you playing the act:
The joke is that everything in the meme is already in the established TES canon. But capital G Gamers™ (which I hate that those assholes made that word negative), being media illiterate and being "anti woke", often don't see what their loved games contain, even if they complain about those things.
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Whoops I got wooooshed
I've never played Skyrim lol
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I wish all representation was done as well as when it was done out of creative choice rather than trying to win progressiveness points
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I'm still taking that over no representation at all 🤷♀️
Seriously though, representation as a background noise is - imho - one of the most potent tools for normalisation.
And the persons who did good representation haven't disappeared. They're still doing the lord's work.
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Background noise isn't an issue for me, if there isn't an unnatural amount of attention being drawn and the pace of the story isn't interrupted that's just adding interest
The problem lies for me when said character isn't fleshed out in other ways and their only defining trait is that they're x, or that they don't give them any character flaws because they're too afraid to offend that group. Results in a character that doesn't feel natural to the story
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It's kinda weird to try to include representation without it feeling shoe horned. The world of TES (of any fictional world) is entirely hand-created. There are no accidents, all of it is intentional.
This means that, no matter how it's done, any character deviating from the "norm" was consciously chosen to be so. These things that need representation (disabilities, gender identity, sexuality, race, etc) are all things people don't get to choose, so there's an inherent disconnect between the hand crafted world choosing to include diversity, and the real world necessarily having diversity because of chaos.
Following this thread, there's never been a case of inclusivity, or exclusivity, that isn't shoehorned in. It's always been entirely the will of the author to include or exclude these representations. With that in mind, I think it's only a good thing to see more diverse authors bringing more diverse worlds and characters into existence.
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It only feels shoe horned when they don't write the character well.
There are a lot of cases where the person isn't allowed to have any flaws or character development because they're too scared to make them look bad in any way, which also means none of their achievements feel earned. Ohers where they just don't care enough to waste screen time on things that aren't highlighting whatever group they're a part of
Have been a fair few shows I've seen where they've done it right, recently Kaos had a trans character who actually felt like a human being instead of a token "hey look we have a trans person"
The recent doctor who special is one of the bad examples, most of the time the woman in a wheelchair is onscreen it's because they're drawing attention to the wheelchair (oh no, a ladder, oh no a set of stairs etc etc) and not to develop her character in any way besides that
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That's kind of a weird argument. I always took "shoe-horned" to imply that it is pressed into something by force where it doesn't quite fit. So, in my mind just because something is intentional doesn't mean it is shoe-horned.
Creative works always come from the authors lived experiences. The reason why we often find representation of minorities missing in media, is because these minorities don't get to work on them. If there would be more diverse teams working on something we would naturally see more of their diverse experiences represented.
However, for this to be the case a lot would have to change in our society. It is way easier to just keep things more or less as they were and let people without minority experiences write and add minority characters. These, in turn, feel off, feel shoe-horned in, because they aren't based off of lived experiences. They are just there to check a box.
Conversely, the reason why it feels like we used to have better (though less) diverse representations in media is because these actually came from people who had these experiences.
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