Far Cry 3's Citra Is Straight From the Freakshow

[rbstewart7263]

How could would a better use of these tropes look like?...I don't see any way you can tell a story that involves a native population without stepping in anyone of the dozens trope-traps.

My god, there is no satisfying political correctness obsessives like you... You may as well link to TV Tropes and list the hundreds of ways you will never, ever be satisfied.

I described a case wherein I liked the depiction of natives. Check the first comment on the thread. Basically, you can offset negative stereotypes by showing a greater range of native characters over-all. Have other Rakyat characters offering contrasting perspectives - ones that show Rakyat as being something other than blood thirsty savages who like to ritually screw foreigners for their magic babies.

Except that they werent all really like that at all. your blowing it out of proportion. About 20 percent of the population were crazy and the rest were kind of just living there lives and not wanting to get shot....and wanting jason to kill there daughters boyfriends and stuff. But still the natives were cool.

 

[jmarquiso]

You seem to have missed the part where this isn't about overt racism at all, but institutional. These stereotypes - based on complete fabrication - wove their way into the narrative of a game attempting to subvert different racist stereotypes. It's an interesting tidbit of information behind the surface of the game.

You probably don't know that the word "Hot Dog" has a racist origin? It does. Does it take away enjoyment of Hot Dogs? No.

It doesn't mean that anymore.

But it's interesting to know where it comes from if you take a closer look.

Right, I agree with you. But the tone of the article seems more accusatory than interested to me. I got the idea the writers of Far Cry 3 were being critisised for not knowing about this and taking it into account, rather than giving a cultural and historical perspective. There is no racism intended and no racism propagated by this game, is my point. If there are obscure racist undertones that are only relevant if you know about 19th century tattooed men in freakshows, that is too obscure to make valid critisism out of.

I think part of the problem is this -

As an educated Pacific Islander, I'm well aware of these issues. Actually before I was college aged, I was aware that such stereotypes exist. You could find the grass skirt virgin sacrificing savage as recent as in a Saturday morning cartoon (where my people specifically were portrayed as savages with spears). The issue as that many don't know about it, and don't see it, since they aren't the ones being passively pointed at.

And most of the time, not only is it unintentional, it's completely innocent. Example - here in Germany they call Chicken Fingers Obama Fingers. They have no idea about the cultural racism and stereotypes around African Americans and chicken, and don't know that it would be offensive. Why is it called Obama Fingers then? He's President of the United States, and Chicken Fingers are an American dish. If McCain won it'd be McCain fingers - that's what they tell me. Completely innocent. But because that stereotype exists, people may be accidentally regurgitating and continuing damaging stereotypes without realizing it.

So since I've been taught - since I was young - that I'm the dog eating savage with a grass skirt and a spear - and I grew up as an American in California - I could have internalized that a bit too much and not understood my own culture. There's a reason that stereotype exists - but separate the stereotype from the authentic, and you got a whole lot more interesting stuff underneath it all. This article attempted to teach a piece of that.

It sounds accusatory - possibly (I'm assuming, feel free to correct me) - because it's attatched to a piece of media you like or enjoy, and you can't separate problematic implications from your enjoyment of that.

I'll answer that simply -

I still love eating Hot Dogs.

Even though I know that it's a term that had put my people down and justified its colonization.

Hot Dogs taste good.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

Wait, THAT'S what that stupid fucking ending was supposed to be about?

Yohalem actually said that shit?!?!

Mother. Fucker.

Some arrogant asshole writer wants to "subvert stereotype", so I get a shitty, unsatisfying ending ON TOP OF THE FACT THAT APPARENTLY HE COMPLETELY FAILED.

I mean come the fuck on. Citra was NEVER a fucking damsel. You're not subverting shit, Yohalem.

AND REALLY? The guy who, not 1 hour prior, killed an entire building full of armed mercs, while wielding nothing but a knife and hullucinations doesn't have the reflexes to stop or dodge one ***** with a machete whispering OBVIOUS fucking death threats in your ear?

Fuck you Yohalem. Never write for the rest of your life.

.........

(Can you tell I finished the game about 5 minutes ago?)

Noooo she was NOT a damsel. THAT was the point. read again.

No, I know. That's what I'm saying. Yohalem says Jason (and by extension, the player) was supposed to think she WAS until the end. However, NOTHING in the game suggested that at all. She NEVER appeared to need saving, so there was no illusion to be broken by the terrible final scene.

 

[Treblaine]

I'm not even half way through the game and I'm reminded of a quote from a Fifty Cent song;

"You should love it way more than you hate it"

Well I don't, as much as there is to like about it, I hate it way more.

It's so annoying because it seems to be such a step in the right direction but it gets so many of the basics wrong it's almost as if they didn't know why they were doing what they were doing... they just knew if they didn't want to be aother COD-clone they had to do this.

And sorry Ubisoft/French-people but this is very much the French style of storytelling. Overall it might be better than the typical safe American/English style of storywriting but you're more likely to end up with Bullshit like this. But I couldn't care anyway.

It's so... empty. The game is just not engaging - not as engaging as it should be - and I simply do not care about the characters or what happens. The most enjoyment I've had in the game is messing around like the 3 Stooges island vacation... only forever alone. It's fun to pretend the bad guys all dressed in Red Shirts are either hapless Enterprise security crew, or an army of Duke Nukems. And the funny mistakes in the game are my favourite, like how the rebels all seem to be identical twins, triplets and hexuplets, etc because they were too lazy to make different character models.

Citra doing something like that, eughhh, I've been putting off meeting her because I knew it would just be a "freaky for the sake of freaky" encounter and have another writer mistake "shocking" for "compelling".

 

[Saxnot]

I think part of the problem is this -

As an educated Pacific Islander, I'm well aware of these issues. Actually before I was college aged, I was aware that such stereotypes exist. You could find the grass skirt virgin sacrificing savage as recent as in a Saturday morning cartoon (where my people specifically were portrayed as savages with spears). The issue as that many don't know about it, and don't see it, since they aren't the ones being passively pointed at.

And most of the time, not only is it unintentional, it's completely innocent. Example - here in Germany they call Chicken Fingers Obama Fingers. They have no idea about the cultural racism and stereotypes around African Americans and chicken, and don't know that it would be offensive. Why is it called Obama Fingers then? He's President of the United States, and Chicken Fingers are an American dish. If McCain won it'd be McCain fingers - that's what they tell me. Completely innocent. But because that stereotype exists, people may be accidentally regurgitating and continuing damaging stereotypes without realizing it.

So since I've been taught - since I was young - that I'm the dog eating savage with a grass skirt and a spear - and I grew up as an American in California - I could have internalized that a bit too much and not understood my own culture. There's a reason that stereotype exists - but separate the stereotype from the authentic, and you got a whole lot more interesting stuff underneath it all. This article attempted to teach a piece of that.

It sounds accusatory - possibly (I'm assuming, feel free to correct me) - because it's attatched to a piece of media you like or enjoy, and you can't separate problematic implications from your enjoyment of that.

I'll answer that simply -

I still love eating Hot Dogs.

Even though I know that it's a term that had put my people down and justified its colonization.

Hot Dogs taste good.

I understand how somone who grew up knowing these depictions of your people and the racism behind them would be more sensitive to them. But context is important in these cases. I'm Dutch myself, and most depictions of Dutch people fall either into the sex/drug addict, or wooden clogs and windmills stereotypes. while that's certainly not as bad a treatment as polynesians get, there is a similarity here.

All peoples get some stereotypes attached to them. the question is whether the intent of use of a stereotype is racist or insulting. I think that very few people who go to the netherlands actually expect everyone to either be wearing wooden clogs, or spend all day blowing and having sex. It's a stereotype, sure, but it's mostly a humorous one, that very few people actually take seriously.
Likewise, i don't think anyone these days still takes seriously the depiction of polynesians (or any 'savage' people) as cannibal monsters. While it was certainly true in the 19th century, times have changed, and that idea doesn't have the same creditability or value anymore, to my mind.

If there is no racist or hurtful intent, i feel you should give a work or depiction of your people some leeway.

As for the accusatory tone: I wasn't a huge fan of the game, but what specifically gave me the impression that the tone was accusatory was this line:

'Though he uses racist narratives in the plot of Far Cry 3, I believe that he was either unaware of their history, or that in using them he hoped the to critique the culture of excess and stereotyping prevalent in many videogames. If it's the former, he should've done his research, if the latter, his reach exceeded his grasp.'

to accuse the writer of laziness or incompetence based on his lack of knowledge of 19th - century freakshow narratives just seems an absurd suggestion, as well as a bad precedent, because it decreases the impact of the word racism (i.e: if this can be called racism, isn't making fun of germans for their obsession with grundlichkeit racism as well?).

 

[Samuel Newkirk]

No, I know. That's what I'm saying. Yohalem says Jason (and by extension, the player) was supposed to think she WAS until the end. However, NOTHING in the game suggested that at all. She NEVER appeared to need saving, so there was no illusion to be broken by the terrible final scene.

I'm pretty sure that she says you will be the "savior of our people" or something like that (full disclosure: I've only watched my friend play the game, so please correct me if that's not in there.)

Also, just an aside @Therumancer: I would love to see where you are getting this "colonialism was helping, we were wrong to leave" concept from. I think all of the wars for independence that African, Asian, and American nations fought against their colonial rulers show that idea false on its face.

 

[Treblaine]

You probably don't know that the word "Hot Dog" has a racist origin? It does. Does it take away enjoyment of Hot Dogs? No.

I can't find a source on that anywhere. The closest thing indicating a racial slur is used by white canadians agaisnt white americans as "Hot Dog" eater

http://www.rsdb.org/race/americans

It's a wikipedia article I know, but the compendium of sources are quite comprehensive on the origins of "Hot Dog":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog#Etymology

I think this is a bit like the myth that "Picnic" used to be a term for racist lynchings when that was in fact 100% made up, Picnic doesn't have a single violent or racial connotation to it:

http://www.snopes.com/language/offense/picnic.asp

To spite sites like cracked writing a story (without sources) that it is actually racist, some people tell stories that are just not true.

SO yeah, it was never racist. And I don't think it was ever even co-opted as a racist term.

And we can't treat all racism different. Brits often make jokes about how their royal family is German, but while technically racist, that's not in the same league as what gives racism it's worst reputation of using race as a basis for extreme exploitation like chattal slavery and extreme scapegoating violence like "ethnic cleansing".

The reason the racism in this story is bad was these myths where what that lead to policies that denigrated these cultures, with pretext to use armed force to move them off land and force religious conversion and exclusion from positions of power and so on.

So let's keep this all in perspective.

 

[Treblaine]

Also, just an aside @Therumancer: I would love to see where you are getting this "colonialism was helping, we were wrong to leave" concept from. I think all of the wars for independence that African, Asian, and American nations fought against their colonial rulers show that idea false on its face.

Technically correct, but that's not an argument to invade countries and practice colonialism (I don't know what he actually said, jsut homing in on the "helping" part).

Colonialism was "helping" only after it had already torn everything else down, there was nothing left of any kind of infrastructure or the economy or even the ecology. Simple things like the colonial powers coming in and banning one form of currency (shells, beads) and replacing them with fiat currency.

They had NOTHING. Because we took it. Or superseded it.

Realise part of the reason all the colonial powers left was because they couldn't afford them any more. They certainly were no financial benefit, they were a burden. You don't need to manage an entire country to get a single mineral mine. This isn't the white man's burden myth, they were doing just FINE, it's not that "we have to invade to save them from themselves" but that it was our burden because it was OUR MESS!

Difference with American War of independence was "Americans" made up the establishment. In British African countries, it was quite clear that white Brits were still running things in whole or significant part. People who complain about bureaucracy haven't truly experienced the levels of corruption and waste from a country where all the bureaucrats suddenly left. You get a positive feedback of without good bureaucracy the population don't get well educated, then you have a smaller a pool to draw from for a larger bureaucratic infrastructure.

But we (western powers) had to leave. Look at the countries who refused to leave, particularly France who got embroiled in several awful conflicts to try to hold onto power, particularly in Algiers and Vietnam. Some small states did remain part of the commonwealth, but one reason Britain kept them was because they were small.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

No, I know. That's what I'm saying. Yohalem says Jason (and by extension, the player) was supposed to think she WAS until the end. However, NOTHING in the game suggested that at all. She NEVER appeared to need saving, so there was no illusion to be broken by the terrible final scene.

I'm pretty sure that she says you will be the "savior of our people" or something like that (full disclosure: I've only watched my friend play the game, so please correct me if that's not in there.)

You may be right.

Even so, I see that as the idea that Jason is simply helping to rid them of Vaas and Hoyt because they don't know him, not that anyone is really helpless.

 

[strumbore]

The game was about a milquetoast's transformation
into a bloodthirsty baddass, not about the lifestyles
of indigenous islanders. I played the game and was
bored to death with any character who didn't swing his
arms in the air and talk like he just snorted a barrel of coke.

You idiots bring your magnifying glasses and your color wheels
to every game evaluation. By doing so, YOU MISS THE THEME
completely, and make false accusations. The majority of the
islanders of the game lived in TOWNS. They ran shops, drank in
taverns, congregated in the square, and did normal activities
like anyone else. The wore t-shirts. If anything, Citra was an
outcast-psychopath with only a handful of followers. She held no
influence anywhere else on the island.

Just face it. You couldn't see the forest for the trees, and now you
want to burn it down. You wrote a ridiculous screed on the designer's
insidious subconscious attempt to patronize and vilify minorities,
when publicly, in reality, the only theme he intended to explore was
the duality of human nature.

 

[strumbore]

[...] As someone who actually spent a considerable chunk of his life in the South Pacific and has befriended and spoken with quite a few Polynesians from quite a few cultures (in other words, someone who actually knows what he's talking about) [...]

One of the problems with Polynesian stereotypes is that the world at large knows so little about the South Pacific and its cultures that people don't even know the stereotypes when they see them. To claim that Polynesians sacrifice virgins to volcanoes, dress in grass skirts and coconut bikinis while living in grass huts and forcibly tattooing white men is about as ignorant and racist as claiming that black people are related to chimpanzees, are all drug dealers and love to rape white women, but because most people have probably never even met or spoken with a Polynesian they don't know how problematic these stereotypes are.

That's because those stereotypes DON'T EXIST ANYMORE.
I know you want to get on your white horse and save
the poor brown people, but it's 2013. Society has
moved on, even if you wish you lived in the past.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Just face it. You couldn't see the forest for the trees, and now you
want to burn it down. You wrote a ridiculous screed on the designer's
insidious subconscious attempt to patronize and vilify minorities,
when publicly, in reality, the only theme he intended to explore was
the duality of human nature.

I'm gonna have to agree with this.

There's an awful lot of lambasting unleashed on Far Cry 3 recently by people who are staring themselves blind on tiny little issues. This article, the whole "Rape of Jason Brody" thread... It's getting a bit ridiculous.

 

[maninahat]

How could would a better use of these tropes look like?...I don't see any way you can tell a story that involves a native population without stepping in anyone of the dozens trope-traps.

My god, there is no satisfying political correctness obsessives like you... You may as well link to TV Tropes and list the hundreds of ways you will never, ever be satisfied.

I described a case wherein I liked the depiction of natives. Check the first comment on the thread. Basically, you can offset negative stereotypes by showing a greater range of native characters over-all. Have other Rakyat characters offering contrasting perspectives - ones that show Rakyat as being something other than blood thirsty savages who like to ritually screw foreigners for their magic babies.

Ok, lets reverse that and see what comes of it.

A male Rakyat who is well educated/cultured/civilized who does not screw foreigners and does not believe in magic or magic babies. This person can replace Citra in FC3.

So... yea. Good luck marketing that. Is the story more interesting as a result? + or - I get the feeling that would be a lopsided poll.

...That's not what I was saying. If you applied my logic to FC3, you could still keep Citra, ludicrous cultural stereotypes and all, and all you would have to change is protagonist. You wouldn't even have to change the characteristics of the protagonist - he could still be an ignorant, wealthy, young tourist out with his friends - all that's changed is him being a Rakyat ex-islander.

Though the change is only minor, it has a huge influence on the implications of the story. Instead of it being "white guy goes to an island and finds the natives to be jabbering savage lunatics", it turns into "Rakyat returns to his homeland, finds his people have converted to some weird savage religion." Just by having a reasonable, relatable, contemporary Rakyat as the protagonist, the game is making it clear that not all the Rakyat are lunatic primitives; that this isn't normal behaviour for people of this ethnicity, and that these people have a range of attitudes and practises. Basically, it is safe for a story to depict people behaving in a negatively stereotypical fashion, as long it shows there is more to these people than the stereotype, or that the stereotype doesn't apply to all of them.

It also provides its own interesting themes on cultural heritage vs modernisation - we have Citra, who embodies ancestral cultural practises, Vaas, who has embraced a materialistic, modern perspective, and the protagonist, who is riding the line in between. Instead of it being "mightey whitey and the white man's burden", its "prodigal son returns to save his people".

 

[maninahat]

Just face it. You couldn't see the forest for the trees, and now you
want to burn it down. You wrote a ridiculous screed on the designer's
insidious subconscious attempt to patronize and vilify minorities,
when publicly, in reality, the only theme he intended to explore was
the duality of human nature.

I'm gonna have to agree with this.

There's an awful lot of lambasting unleashed on Far Cry 3 recently by people who are staring themselves blind on tiny little issues. This article, the whole "Rape of Jason Brody" thread... It's getting a bit ridiculous.

There is nothing subconscious about any of it. The writer specifically came out and claimed to have wrote in ugly, racist cultural stereotypes, though he reasoned that this was for the purpose of satire. This was after half-wits outright denying there was any racism at all, and scoffed at the likes of me for "looking for things to be offended by".

The writer dropped the ball on the satire, and that is why he is getting criticised; because the story he wrote (which again, he purposely wrote to be full of offensive ethnic stereotypes) accidentally gives off the wrong message, contrary to the one he was trying to impart.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

Which difficulty setting would I have to play the game on for Jason's baby batter to be considered 'innately superior' to all the non-player characters he meets and then brutally murders along the way?

 

[Casual Shinji]

Just face it. You couldn't see the forest for the trees, and now you
want to burn it down. You wrote a ridiculous screed on the designer's
insidious subconscious attempt to patronize and vilify minorities,
when publicly, in reality, the only theme he intended to explore was
the duality of human nature.

I'm gonna have to agree with this.

There's an awful lot of lambasting unleashed on Far Cry 3 recently by people who are staring themselves blind on tiny little issues. This article, the whole "Rape of Jason Brody" thread... It's getting a bit ridiculous.

There is nothing subconscious about any of it. The writer specifically came out and claimed to have wrote in ugly, racist cultural stereotypes, though he reasoned that this was for the purpose of satire. This was after half-wits outright denying there was any racism at all, and scoffed at the likes of me for "looking for things to be offended by".

The writer dropped the ball on the satire, and that is why he is getting criticised; because the story he wrote (which again, he purposely wrote to be full of offensive ethnic stereotypes) accidentally gives off the wrong message, contrary to the one he was trying to impart.

Well first of all, I never listen to a thing writers have to say about their own work; I'll make up my own mind about what I'm seeing/reading. And secondly, is there honestly any way of displaying a savage, tribal culture without people claiming 'racism'?

To me, Far Cry 3 was simply Locked Up Abroad meets Rambo mixed with a slight bit of Heart of Darkness. And the only sense of satire I got from it was maybe Jason's older brother, painted as the typical cool-as-a-cucumber hero, getting killed right out of the gate.

Maybe this just reveals my ignorant mindset, but I seriously never got hung up on the racial stereotypes in this game. I viewed it as a fabricated setting with some real world grit to give it that extra bit of punch.

 

[SadisticFire]

I can't say that I felt the game being racist for simply one fact, my mind wrote it off as "fiction" and held no weight to it. I never even thought about thinking the island being a place associated with somewhere in the real world, I thought it was generic island, with kinda tribal, but not really, people. It was more about how some one turned into a killer, not really the people. But that's my experience, and I'm sure others share it, but not everyone.

 

[strumbore]

I played the whole game and didn't see a single stereotype.
Vaas was a psychopath.
All the islanders were "normal" (see below).
There was no island hocus-pocus anywhere
except with a secluded island-cult leader
with psychotic-fantasies, in this case,
infatuation with powerful men.
Stop over-thinking this. It's patronizing
and presumptuous to assume there's any
crime against culture here. (see last comment)
Nobody thinks polynesians are dancing around
cauldrons or raping the sailors (lol). To
claim such a thing shows your willful ignorance
of the times we live in.

If you really do want to get your panties in a
twist over a stereotype, most "First World" people
assume island peoples live in extreme poverty because all
they hear about them on tv is liberals whining about
how ratty their lifestyles are, and how westerners
need to send intellectuals over to save their societies.
_________________________________________

You bring your magnifying glasses and your color wheels
to every game evaluation. By doing so, YOU MISS THE THEME
completely, and make false accusations. The majority of the
islanders of the game lived in TOWNS. They ran shops, drank in
taverns, congregated in the square, and did normal activities
like anyone else. They wore t-shirts. If anything, Citra was an
outcast-psychopath with only a handful of followers. She held no
influence anywhere else on the island.

[...] To claim that Polynesians sacrifice virgins to volcanoes, dress in grass skirts and coconut bikinis while living in grass huts and forcibly tattooing white men is about as ignorant and racist as claiming that black people are related to chimpanzees, are all drug dealers and love to rape white women, but because most people have probably never even met or spoken with a Polynesian they don't know how problematic these stereotypes are.

That's because those stereotypes DON'T EXIST ANYMORE.
I know you want to get on your white horse and save
the poor brown people, but it's 2013. Society has
moved on, even if you wish you lived in the past.

 

[NearLifeExperience]

Anyone else getting tired of this whole 'boohoo, FC3 is racist' whinging? Just drop it already, everyone's had their chance to flame it for it's racial stereotypes, showing the world what wonderful openminded beings they are towards other races, now let's just move on.

Some of the comments above are breathtakingly stupid, but thanks at least for helping me shade the "typical liberal BS!" "it's satire!" "it's just a game!" and "stop overanalyzing everything!" squares in my Dumbass Internet Comment bingo today.

I think someone is confusing a different point of view with a difference in intelligence.