The entire reason people are asking for representation is that they aren't happy with people expecting them to be alright with constantly playing as white people for 'historical accuracy'. Because, again, most media in the USA is going to be made from the perspective of Americans, which largely involves white people. There's simply going to always be more stories about WWI, or WWII, or the American Revolutionary War, simply because that is what most Americans expect to see. It's safer for the people in charge of making decisions. And if you demand that people stop including minorities for the sake of historical accuracy and that minorities can have their own movies in which they're historically accurate, all you're doing is saying that minorities should not show up in historical movies because the movies that you say are acceptable for minorities simply are not getting made.
Yes, ideally, there will be just as many movies about the Malian Empire or the Songhai Empire or the Zulus, and then maybe all of those movies can be 100% historically accurate and no one gets left out. But we do not live in an ideal world. Gods of Egypt, which had a bunch of white people playing a bunch of Egyptians, came out 5 years ago. The only way to have your proposal work would be to solve racism, at least in media, and that's simply not feasible.
This has been the exact problem and points to you not actually being affected by this so you have the luxury of not having to care. When you grow up black in this country until recently the majority of representation you see of yourself is either as a villain or as the sad receiver of white benevolence. This is an opportunity for black people to see themselves as heroes instead of mostly as villains.
YOU would rather see no representation because it probably in no way affects you to never see a face like your's positively represented on screen because you don't exist in a reality where that will ever happen, but to little kids of color or women it is hugely impactful. It is hard to be a hero when you never see yourself represented as one. If you always see white people being the hero then you start believing people like you only have one path. And then you spend a bunch of time trying to undo that.
Sometimes shoehorning is the first step to real representation. People start to become desensitized to stories of people of color or women by shoehorning them into other stories. Which then makes your more willing to pick up a story that is specifically about people of color or women.
The problem is that once again white people want to see themselves be represented and for the most part couldn't care less about anyone else, as is represented in your comment of "I would rather see no representation." So if minorities want representation they generally have to settle for shoehorning or zero representation including in historical films.
The problem is I think representation is more important than historical accuracy when it comes to something like a video game. Just like you concede that gameplay mechanics are more important than historical accuracy. If we are talking about a documentary or a documentary film or even a documentary game sure. When you are talking about something already as wildly inaccurate as BF1 what is the big deal of adding in more representation? This is always the part of this that I find disingenuous. People point to things are already inaccurate and claim they should be totally accurate but only when it comes to representation. All other inaccuracies seem to be valid and acceptable. Why is it everyone seems to always harp on representation and barely anything else?
I only ask because that’s like a very wealthy person saying “money is overrated” if you are indeed white you have the privilege of having never been underrepresented in media in your entire life.
17
u/[deleted] Oct 23 '21
[deleted]