The only people I've ever seen talking about the continuing over-reliance on minstrel show archetypes in media are black people themselves, who still tend to be on the margins of pop culture discourse. Where are you getting it from?
I'm getting it from black people themselves, who by your own logic should STFU and be happy they're getting any representation at all, apparently.
The bots totally real people posting manufacturered PR lines on TwiX about how Marvel's Warvengers XXIII: The Last Force Awakendgame gave them "all the feels" with a one second background shot of dudes making eye contact don't give a shit about mammies or representation of black people because they either don't exist, are paid shills or extremely stupid. They're easily ignored.
At least, until one of these pop culture media outlets link and publish the tweets, with headlines like "real fans push back against bigoted trolls attacking tentpole media franchise!". While simultaneously posting tweets that rightfully ought to be just as easily ignored, from the minority of
actual bigots whilst claiming they're representative of
all forthcoming criticism. Then, it's pretty fuckin' hard to ignore.
Especially when real criticism of these works gets conveniently marginalized.
Like, it's kind of convenient timing that James Somerton...
lmao, I'ma stop you right there. We "anti-woke" folks have been telling you for literal years Somerton was completely full of shit, especially since the grooming allegations came out. Hell, here's a thread on this very forum in which I said as much,
Looks like they're both open again, but I can't help but notice that both his professional and non-professional accounts are pretty much talking politics which is kind of interesting. Like. Why bother having two then. I can understand wanting to talk about politics and making a space for...
forums.escapistmagazine.com
Me! said:
The phenomenon isn't exclusive to white guys. It's just that it takes a certain kind of personality to be a YT outrage peddler/crowdfunding grifter, and you're more aware of the personality tics indicative of this sort with white guys, particularly those of...let's just say, certain political dispositions.
I mean, Destiny, Vaush, and Hbomberguy pull this exact same shtick right down to the letter, but it's interesting you mentioned those you did but not any of those three. Why might that be?
Now you should ask yourself who around here has been
defending him and his ilk for years, up to and including claims of grooming or sexual predation are prototypical right-wing smears.
Funny how we have an established track record of being right more often than not, but we're apparently the ones lacking credibility.
Queer people can't afford to live in this world you seem to live in where media is either completely above criticism or completely unacceptable.
The irony is
someone does that, but it ain't us. What happens nowadays if you admit to liking Harry Potter nowadays, or patronize Harry Potter content?
You can like something or recognize its importance and still politically critique it, especially if the alternative is living in a world with basically no media.
"It's okay to like problematic things!"
You know, so long as you don't speak about it. And if and only if that "problematic" content is by authors not yet unpersoned. Or, if that work sufficiently meets predetermined and ever-shifting nebulous qualitative standards that its "problematic" elements can be overlooked.
That sounds like a recipe for living your life in perpetual misery and disappointment.
Nah, just follow your own advice and stop patronizing shit.
It's a flower-cross, representing the flower from which Bliss is made. It's actually a pretty cool little bit of visual design.
See also, the Manson family and their use of psychedelic drugs to recruit and indoctrinate. You know, because Faith is an expy of Charles Manson, taking us right back to the whole "cult supergroup" thing.
Some people appear to have suggested that its a visual reference to the iron cross, which is a German military symbol sometimes adopted by white supremacists (although it's also still used by the German military today).
"Sometimes" in about the same way the US "sometimes" liberates oil-rich countries.
Frankly, it looks way more similar to a cross moline, which is a common heraldic cross design, although I also don't think that's remotely intentional.
You know damn well the iron cross derives from the heraldic cross being it was the symbol of the Teutonic Order, which is precisely why the Nazi party and contemporary white supremacists continue to use the symbol to this day. That reason being, it's evocative of the Crusades.
At this point you're trying to Chewbacca defense, hoping I don't actually know what I'm talking about.
It also, as you say, looks a lot like the scientology cross.
Yes as a matter of fact it does, which is noteworthy given Scientology's distinct trend for white supremacism.
They apparently consulted "cult experts" for this game so there is some effort to be authentic. My problem is that I'm not sure those connections ever go beyond the purely aesthetic.
We'll get there shortly.
Showing in this case would be characterizing your "white supremacist" characters by having them act in ways that exhibit their beliefs and attitudes, not giving them the aesthetics and refusing to elaborate further.
You mean like for example, kidnapping and indoctrinating people, killing dissidents, stealing and taking land by force, planning large-scale terrorist attacks up to and including the use of stolen nuclear weapons (i.e. the plot of Turner Diaries)?
You know, all those things about which you said,
What is Far Cry 5 actually saying about extreme right wing beliefs beyond "gee, it sure does suck when cults murder people?" That's not a clever or interesting point, it's not worthy of the seriousness of the topics the game makes an occasional effort to aesthetically reference. If the choice is between preaching and saying nothing, then I'll still take preachy any day.
Odd position to say, "they only do bad things without context", but when that context is explained to you, now it's "where's the bad things they do?".
I did my undergraduate degree in religious studies in the mid-2000s. I wrote a thesis on new religious movements at a time when much of the writing and theory on NRMs was from the 90s and heavily rooted in the moral panic around "cults" that evolved out of events like the Waco siege. I have friends today who are still in that field and still writing about the role of fringe religious movements in the modern far-right.
Well if we're comparing dick sizes now, my degree
s (note the plural) are in history and political science, and my minor was in religious studies. Approximately 40% of the credit-hours towards my political science major were spent in a series of 500/600-level interdisciplinary courses which I took for 400-level credit on the media and propaganda, the history of terror in the modern era, the methodology and strategic logic of terrorism, and right-wing extremism in the United States in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. I'm acknowledged as a contributor in three (last I checked) published scholarly articles by friends and colleagues and two more by my professors on the topic, and that doesn't include the two master's theses and one doctoral dissertation in which I'm also acknowledged as a contributor.
I say this because I feel forced to point out that a lot of the conclusions that came out of that era were just bad. They were, in many cases, highly influenced and driven by right-wing evangelical counter-cult movements, who were able to set themselves up as authorities and whom a lot of credulous people believed for some reason.
"Counter-cult" my ass. Don't mince words, and speak the truth of the matter: those
are cults. They just happen to be cults with vastly bigger budgets and readier media access than whackadoodles living in great plains states, who (correctly) perceived the events of the early '90s as symbolic of a federal crackdown on cults, and made the strategic decision to seize control of the anti-cult narrative.
"Cults" were never really the problem.
Only if you're looking exclusively at religious cults, and not political, irreligious doomsday, or personality cults. That's the rub; those other forms all exist, and in the '90s were all interconnected to varying degrees.
The people supporting and propping up the far right were and are not the Branch Davidians or the WBC...
The Branch Davidians didn't have to support right-wing extremists directly. Right-wing extremists saw what happened to the Branch-Davidians, and with Ruby Ridge as a preceding incident, realized they were likely to be next. And, to be frank, they were right.
...they're the same fundamentalist evangelicals who set themselves up as "cult experts" or "deprogrammers" and who everyone inexplicably believed because cults were scary and of course noone within an established religious institution would ever do anything wrong!
And again, you're discounting that evangelical Christianity is, itself, a disparate collection of (doomsday and political) cults. That Christianity shows up as a running theme in so many of them should be a
bit of a giveaway.
But you are misrepresenting the criticism it got as people not understanding the references. Everyone got the references, it's just that references are a really cheap way to pretend to say something while actually saying very little.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying people misunderstood the references; I'm saying they're so ignorant of the source material, they failed to recognize there were references at all. Because they're people who have absolutely no idea what they were talking about, wouldn't have understood there were references unless Peggies were walking around with tiki torches or some shit, and just wanted "orange man bad" repeated back to them to confirm biases.
We're talking about people so fundamentally unaware of what right-wing extremism actually is and looks like, they were too busy internet slap-fighting and clout-whoring over the main antagonists being black, to notice the entire mission series where you literally burn crosses.