Quote:Firstly, it's odd no one seemed to notice this in RE4.

Quote:. Secondly, I'm not sure how much of a problem racism is in Japan, at least compared to xenophobia.

Quote:Of course, there are things like that despicable NY Post cartoon today that try to prove that wrong

Great Rumbler Wrote:lol

Quote:What you just described is exactly the problem. That people *want* it to be racist, so they view it as such. It's fear, it's ignorance. I cant stand it.

Quote:There's also the spectre of the old racism debate, hovering the background. That debate is only going to get louder and more urgent once the game is released, and is being covered beyond the cosy world of the specialist gaming press, since there's imagery in here that goes beyond the general air of foreign menace that caused a ruckus in the first trailers.

One of the first things you see in the game, seconds after taking control of Chris Redfield, is a gang of African men brutally beating something in a sack. Animal or human, it's never revealed, but these are not infected Majini. There are no red bloodshot eyes. These are ordinary Africans, who stop and stare at you menacingly as you approach. Since the Majini are not undead corpses, and are capable of driving vehicles, handling weapons and even using guns, it makes the line between the infected monsters and African civilians uncomfortably vague. Where Africans are concerned, the game seems to be suggesting, bloodthirsty savagery just comes with the territory.

Later on, there's a cut-scene of a white blonde woman being dragged off, screaming, by black men. When you attempt to rescue her, she's been turned and must be killed. If this has any relevance to the story it's not apparent in the first three chapters, and it plays so blatantly into the old clichés of the dangerous "dark continent" and the primitive lust of its inhabitants that you'd swear the game was written in the 1920s. That Sheva neatly fits the approved Hollywood model of the light-skinned black heroine, and talks more like Lara Croft than her thickly-accented foes, merely compounds the problem rather than easing it. There are even more outrageous and outdated images to be found later in the game, stuff that I was honestly surprised to see in 2009, but Capcom has specifically asked that details of these scenes remain under wraps for now, whether for these reasons we don't know.

There will be plenty of people who refuse to see anything untoward in this material. "It wasn't racist when the enemies were Spanish in Resident Evil 4," goes the argument, but then the Spanish don't have the baggage of being stereotyped as subhuman animals for the past two hundred years. It's perfectly possible to use Africa as the setting for a powerful and troubling horror story, but when you're applying the concept of people being turned into savage monsters onto an actual ethnic group that has long been misrepresented as savage monsters, it's hard to see how elements of race weren't going to be a factor.

All it will take is for one mainstream media outlet to show the heroic Chris Redfield stamping on the face of a black woman, splattering her skull, and the controversy over Manhunt 2 will seem quaint by comparison. If we're going to accept this sort of imagery in games then questions are going be asked, these questions will have merit, and we're going to need a more convincing answer than "lol it's just a game."

Quote:It's interesting that the biggotry everywhere else is not real but when it hits close to home, suddenly it's the biggest discrimination in the world today.

Quote:Again, this isn't an issue as to the motives of the character. Within the confines of RE4, the character Chris is an upstanding guy who's killing them only because they are zombies, and he hasn't got any racist motivations for that. It's an issue of interpretation. You might see that as something worthy of condemning people at large, all I'm saying is that it's there. It might not even be an issue if there wasn't that history to deal with. Imagine if you will a zombie movie set in a fat camp where a skinny guy was shooting up all the zombified fatties, and you get close to the thing.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:Do you consider the Boomers in Left 4 Dead to be just another symptom of fat aggression, or do you interpret it the same way you interpret RE4?

Quote:Imagine if you will a zombie movie set in a fat camp where a skinny guy was shooting up all the zombified fatties, and you get close to the thing.

Quote:I've never read anything by Lovecraft to justify the notion that he was ironically poking fun at racism in his books, and to read them it seems more than apparent that he's genuinely racist when he talks about a "repulsively large negroid" in Herbert West, Reanimator. He was no Mark Twain. Other letters seem to justify it, and it was also well known he would make casual remarks against jewish people while walking with his wife, who herself was jewish and she would point that out to him.

Sometimes "reading deeper" is code for "reinterpret it until it fits with what you want to think".

A Black Falcon Wrote:That is precisely what I was thinking after reading that post of his... the idea that somehow racism against black people isn't real but discrimination against fat people is is just stupid. Racism against black people is unquestionably worse and goes back far longer... all kinds of discrimination are real, not just the kind that personally affects someone.

Of course there is persecution of fat people, more so against people who are very overweight (given that a third of the American population is overweight and another third obese...), but comparing it to anti-black racism... absolutely not.



Without the history it definitely wouldn't be the same, but that history matters greatly... you can't look at it without that in mind. The same would apply to anti-semitism, sexism, etc. The historical context is extremely important, as that defines how people will see the imagery.

Quote: I can't see a game like that being developed, much less released, in the US.

Quote:I don't know, has anyone gone through that game looking to see if the imagery and way it is presented are racist? I haven't played it or seen much of any footage of it, so I couldn't say...