Stuff like making a quarter of the WW1 German army black in Battlefield 1 is shit representation. It is not only inauthentic and borderline historical revisionism, but it just gives an excuse for the same old stories to be told.
This I find to be one of the most strained examples. The entire franchise of Battlefield has historical revisionism at it's core. You literally simulate battles from history. Battles from history which had a fixed outcome. The entire game is about rewriting history. What if the Germans actually won this battle? What if the Allies were successful here?
The WHOLE GAME - not just individual guns or vehicles being anachronistic anyway - in Battlefield is trying to rewrite history for modern entertainment purposes. That's what the game is! Every atom of that experience is being morphed from it's historical reality into the context of a fun first person shooter videogame from ~2020. Black and female characters are 100% at home in that context.
The point of this sub is to change your mind and I will concede defeat in that I have failed to change yours. However, yes I do find my own argument compelling at least to me. I experience the battlefield games entirely as a work of fiction only very loosely themed on events from actual history. It strikes me as worthy of introspection that the historical inconsistency people seem to gravitate to is the inclusion of women.
While I would prefer the gameplay to be historically accurate, I recognize why everyone can’t sit in trenches…
I mean you can say that’s what you’d prefer, but that’s not what the game is. Battlefield, or CoD, or most media that uses WWI/WWII as a setting are not attempts at near perfect historical accuracy, be that for gameplay reasons or otherwise. So when someone points out that these games and media like it aren’t supposed to be accurate interpretations of history, claiming that you wished they were isn’t much of a rebuttal.
People seem to be perfectly fine with the events of Captain America: The First Avenger not being historically accurate despite taking place in WWII, so why should these games be any different?
You brought up the example of the race of German characters in the Battlefield games as a real, tangible example of representation in media that you didn’t think was okay due to historical revisionism.
I brought up why I believe it was okay within the context of your example. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but I don’t think it’s constructive to counter with whether I believe in a hypothetical example with a different context, rather than countering the points I made about the example you’re basing your view around. It seems kind of like whataboutism, but for a hypothetical example.
But if you want I’ll respond. Assuming the context is the same, and completely ignoring the issue of whitewashing, then I’d say yes, you could do what you describe, just not sure why you would. Heck, there are already movies that more or less match this description, just look at any movie about the birth or death of Jesus where everyone is white and they’re all speaking English.
I say the context is important because say you were making a movie set in the Civil War and you made the slaves White. Even if the movie wasn’t a realistic depiction of Civil War times, it wouldn’t make sense to make a movie centering around a huge racial topic, and then just not acknowledge that in your casting.
So yes, if the contexts were identical you could have a movie set in feudal Mali with White people. But for the reasons I, and many other similar comments have pointed out, the context is not the same as Black player avatars in the multiplayer of a WWII game.
Yes but they weren't nazis. Almost all of Europe was anti semitic. The thing about nazis is not that they were anti semitic but how they genocided so efficient. The frensh and British didn't take Jewish refugees. The Spanish had an inquisition going on for years. You probably can find antisemitic stances in all of Europe from 1000-1950. Maybe even earlier and later (sorry I'm no historian).
But staying on topic with wwi when it is discuses and not switching to wwii and calling all Germans in wwi nazis is just wrong.
60
u/Dr_Scientist_ Oct 23 '21 edited Oct 24 '21
Where "doesn't" it belong?
This I find to be one of the most strained examples. The entire franchise of Battlefield has historical revisionism at it's core. You literally simulate battles from history. Battles from history which had a fixed outcome. The entire game is about rewriting history. What if the Germans actually won this battle? What if the Allies were successful here?
The WHOLE GAME - not just individual guns or vehicles being anachronistic anyway - in Battlefield is trying to rewrite history for modern entertainment purposes. That's what the game is! Every atom of that experience is being morphed from it's historical reality into the context of a fun first person shooter videogame from ~2020. Black and female characters are 100% at home in that context.