talker said:
You're ignoring what I said earlier. I think it'd be great if we had more non-white protagonists, but I simply don't think this is the best setting for it. American troops didn't join the war until 1917, and if the protagonist was European the game could be about the entire war, start to finish. The Christmas Truce, Verdun, Jutland, the Somme, these are all important and/or well-known events that we'll miss because the protagonist's an American guy. The fact he'll most likely be black is a footnote to me.
Of course it's not. See above. with an American protagonist we're missing out on the full scope of the war. The skin colour feels like selling out to me.
Why we're angry? Because of the latter bold part, how badly it contradicts with the former bold part and how racist you then come across as.
I can actually get not wanting an
American perspective. That's fair, and because of the reasons you mentioned I'd indeed like to see more perspectives than just a hypothetical Harlem Hellfighters one. Like how the old CoDs showed multiple fronts of WW2. There's indeed about three years of war preceding the US involvement. Not showing any of that would perhaps be wasteful. And luckily that indeed seems to be the case so you can stop worrying about that.
But then you ruin it by claiming that making him
black is selling out. Objecting the nationality, considering the relatively short involvement of the US? Fair enough. Objecting to him being black? Bullshit. Why you're flailing between those two is a mystery to me.
But all of that doesn't change the fact that the Harlem Hellfighters and black US soldiers during WW1 in general is
also a lesser known facet of the war, one of tremendous cultural importance for race relations in the US. And considering the cultural under-representation of minorities in the entire West it becomes an even more valuable story. This is one of the few occasions, probably, that it'll be told in popular culture. The fact that he's black might be a footnote to you, but it's not for actual black people. That simple fact alone
does make this a fantastic opportunity to learn something about African American history.
Black people
deserve to get their stories told. They've been denied that for too long.
And considering what we've heard so far [http://www.gamespot.com/articles/battlefield-1-campaign-details-teased-dev-says-div/1100-6439595/] we won't just see the black bloke tromping around with that trench mace making your objection to a black US soldier being
one of the characters even more void. You act as if he's
the main character. He's not. He's just one of them. To put it in the words of the devs themselves:
As for the character on Battlefield 1's cover, an African-American Harlem Hellfighter, Berlin said putting him on the cover was meant to represent EA's overall goal of spotlighting lesser-known elements of WW1.
"When we set out on this game, we wanted to depict not just the common view of what the war was like," he explained. "We wanted to challenge some preconceptions. We want to delve into some of the unknowns of WW1. Maybe people don't know that this person fought or that person fought, that this army was involved. We're stretching out and bringing all those stories into the game."