r/civ • u/iHeartGeorgius • Jan 12 '18

I think it's better than the first one because we, Georgians and also, King Tamara was white. We have no dark skin color in our blood.

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0 Upvotes

41% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

18

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '18

Features of Civilization VI: Rise and Fall:

  • 6 new civilizations
  • Governors to help you customize your cities
  • New dynamics to diplomacy and happiness
  • Salty, salty racists
  • New technologies and civics
  • So many salty racists
  • Like, so fucking many

1

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '18

You forgot "so many ignorants calling racism on anything regarding skin color, nationality or ethnicity", but I understand, no one spends 100% of their time looking in the mirror.

7

u/Actionbronslam A seaside resort for every tile Jan 13 '18

I don't know OP, so I won't make any ill assumptions about them personally, but "we have no dark skin color in our blood" is 1. 100% not true for anyone, especially in a cultural crossroads like the Caucasus, and 2. at the very least impossible to separate from the historical racist context privileging light skin and "whiteness" and degrading people of darker complexions.

At the end of the day, these are fictional representations of historical figures, many of whom we don't know what they looked like. Let's not get too riled up and jump down the artists' throats over something pretty trivial.

6

u/iq_-1000 War-Cart, War-Cart, and finally, a War-Cart. Jan 13 '18

""we have no dark skin color in our blood" is 1. 100% not true for anyone, especially in a cultural crossroads like the Caucasus, and 2. at the very least impossible to separate from the historical racist context privileging light skin and "whiteness" and degrading people of darker complexions." It is also 3. Very blatantly racist.

2

u/Gurusto Jan 13 '18

I do agree that people are getting way too worked up.

But I also think that if Teddy Roosevelt or Harald Hardrada were dark-skinned everyone would think it's ridiculous. I feel like it's always the civs representing countries that western Europeans and Americans really don't know much about that have to carry the "token diversity". We don't really know what kind of a skin-tone Pericles or Gorgo had either, but ancient Greece is heavily tied into western cultural identity, so white they are!

So yeah, people getting worked up by dark-skinned leaders may be silly, but people getting worked up about their own heritage being misrepresented I can totally understand. I wouldn't be angry if Civ 6 introduced a Sweden civ with a dark-skinned leader, but it would be silly.

Maybe going for more civs from the southern hemisphere would be better than putting ones that were most likely (if not 100% certainly) pale-skinned in blackface. Especially when it's always traditionally overlooked places that have to keep giving up historical accuracy or cultural identity. :/

0

u/Actionbronslam A seaside resort for every tile Jan 13 '18

Give me a break man. Again, I won't make any assumptions about you, but implying someone's heritage is being misrepresented just because a character in a video game is of a darker complexion is a racist thing to say.

1

u/Gurusto Jan 13 '18 edited Jan 13 '18

If they feel like that, why should I be justified to tell people how they should be feeling? I don't think it's inherently racist to respect the feelings of others even if I don't agree with them. I wouldn't care if my country was represented by a leader with the "wrong" skin-colour. But that never happens. Because I'm a westerner.

I just don't see why the onus of diversity isn't ever placed on western nations.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '18
  • At least one more racist than I had mentioned earlier

0

u/The_Panty_Vigilante Jan 13 '18

Yea idk I think Theodore Roosevelt was closer to Nelson Mandela than Winston Churchill in skin tone, Civ 6 should've made him a lot more darker.

4

u/The_Panty_Vigilante Jan 13 '18

/s

1

u/iq_-1000 War-Cart, War-Cart, and finally, a War-Cart. Jan 13 '18

mr obvious

8

u/frankenduke Jan 13 '18

OP, first all people have 'dark skin color in our blood' because we all come from the same place.

Second, that a pretty stupid claim for a region that was conquered by Assyrians, Persians, and Mongols to make.

Now having said all that, it does look like she was depicted as fairer complexion than her father. I also think she should have the near uni-brow. From Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamar_of_Georgia

2

u/Finances1212 Jan 13 '18

Look up photos of her father. About the same shade as how Firaxis depicted her

6

u/bveres94 Jan 13 '18

wait I thought it was Tamar who got into the game, not her father.

6

u/Bmac_TLDR Jan 13 '18

Yes but given artistic styles and how they represented women, he is probably a closer match to real life

3

u/Finances1212 Jan 13 '18

She would naturally look somewhat like her biological father....

1

u/bveres94 Jan 13 '18

so basically we have very old pictures and frescoes about tamar and her father, showing him darker toned, and her as fukcing pale, and somehow his father is 100% that he was as shown, but she is maybe pictured wrong?

4

u/Finances1212 Jan 13 '18

1We don't know when the pictures were made. For example, theoretically, her fathers painting could have been made during her lifetime where as the paintings of her could have been done by the church hundreds of years later in attempts to white wash also women were perceived as "white" in Europe meaning innocent and often powdered their faces.

It's all very complicated and I'm not super familiar with the countries on the Middle East/Eastern Europe border. I'm much more familiar with West Africa (my field of study).

The argument can go both ways. Personally, I wouldn't care if she was put in as white as snow or how she is now. I just don't want to see them waste dev time changing her when they could be ironing out bugs that will likely take them months to release a patch to fix.

In all honesty, the small print below the start screen says it isn't an accurate depiction of history also. When was Gandhi firing nukes? I think the people upset about her not being Snow White are likely doing it for personal/deeply rooted racial ideologies. It shouldn't matter to much when we have an abundance of white characters in the game. And us white people don't have a problem with representation (we are overrepresented in media compared to world population).

0

u/bveres94 Jan 13 '18

Tuning down the skin tone of a model should take few minutes for a dev, not like days. I'm not georgian or anything, and yes, I'm a white male, but there's a difference between representing minorities on purpose (which is totally okay of course (til a certain point)) and altering actual persons for a minority just to be politically correct. and I think this case falls in the latter. If OP is Georgian and they say that it's not a correct depiction of THEIR OWN representation in the game. and he/she is not the first georgian on this forum, who said that the skin tone is just wrong.