erin

It does sound more racist, because it is. Why not Yasuke? Just because he's black? Why any of the other AC protagonists? Why choose a Spartan, a highly unethical culture filled with slavery and abuse? Why choose a Welsh pirate instead of a Caribbean native? These are all pointless questions, because the answer is all the same. That's the story they wanted to tell. Maybe they wanted to highlight the historical outlier at an important time in history. We could speculate on any number of different reasons, but "DEI" doesn't make any damn sense, considering they knew how gamers would react beforehand and even went out of their way to make a statement about it.

They wanted to tell this story. If you want a different one, play a different game. There is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing Yasuke as a protagonist. The series has consistently demonstrated that they don't really mind telling the stories of historical outliers, repeatedly. They shouldn't have to specifically avoid (because that is what your argument has shifted to) Yasuke for fears of "DEI." The "anti-woke" are ridiculous.

Eivor was a foreigner (and an invader) for everything outside the beginning of the game, so was Kassandra/Alexios (also invaders), they just had the same skin tone as the place they're foreign in. There's a big difference between "native characters with understated culture" and just "not foreign." Those are totally different arguments, and it seems like you're trying to make both. Again, why not have an interesting character from history be explored like this. Acting as if past characters are these nebulous "local" individuals when they're often the direct children or relatives of prominent, real, historical figures, if fictional ones, seems silly. This is totally in line with past stories they've told. I really don't see a valid reason a non-local character is "problematic" in an AC game. We've done it a bunch of times. We've played a Welsh guy in the Caribbean, a Viking in Britain, and a Spartan in Greece, just to name a few. I'm sure I'm forgetting other valid examples.

The "women are always screaming" stereotype is sexist. It's a direct extension of the pseudoscientific hysteria diagnosis that used to be commonly accepted. "A women," as you put it, might scream, and you might find that annoying. Women as a category have higher pitched voices on average, and the line between "reasonable yelling" and "hysterical screaming" is often just one of pitch, even when the cause for alarm or injury is the same.

Additionally, neither I nor any of the women in my life "scream" in response to injury. We yell in pain just like someone with a masculine voice, if a bit higher pitched. Some may, but it's not common and is usually reserved for situations of extreme alarm or fear, or occasionally excitement. Any time a woman does scream on video, you always see someone in the comments complaining about how annoying women screaming is. The same is never said about men screaming, unless they scream "like a girl."

9/10 times. How out of touch are you?

Perhaps that might be true of authoritarianism, but that doesn't necessarily hold true for leftism in general. Democracy is not an antithesis of leftism, it's the opposite, and there are many leftist principles in government in Europe. I wouldn't go as far as to label any of them a true socialist state, but leftist policies have shown remarkable success.

This complaint feels manufactured. No one complained about the romance-able historical figures in previous Japanese games, and a quick look at social media and Japanese news shows no outrage. Also, every other game features historically unknown natives? What? We have multiple characters that are children of royalty, at least two that are military warlords, and a Viking raider for fuck's sake. The only game I can think of that has a native of the region not connected to the powers that be is 3, where you play a Native American. You're often just playing essentially a secret police for the state of the country you're in. Why not have a black samurai, a notable historical figure, be the main character. That's super interesting. It's not like Japanese culture is being erased. Your outrage feels misplaced and racially motivated, and I doubt we'd be seeing so much manufactured discontent if it was a white samurai (and there were several).

How does this relate to the article, or the situation with the streamer? Sure, dunk on Ubisoft, but maybe not about a black historical figure being black.

Half of Europe would be considered "far left" from a US perspective. Affordable housing? Universal healthcare? Parental leave for long durations? Walkable cities and public transit? Try getting any of those to fly with the US neoliberals.

If true, this would in fact be a huge step toward quantum computing at scale, which would revolutionize computing. However, they've claimed this before, and have offered no evidence yet of their supposed discovery.

Both parties can be immoral, except in this particular case it's very clear that western backed fascist regime is the only immoral party.

Right this conversation isn't worth having lol

I'm not trying to argue that it's okay. I'm not a military expert or analyst. However, people that are those things don't make this argument and so I'm not willing to unless I'm provided evidence of a viable alternative. A better example might be the Ba'athist defense of Iraq during the unjustified 2003 invasion (not that the Ba'athist regime wasn't a nightmare for the Iraqi people, it just wasn't the US's place to involve themselves on false pretenses). Iraqi cities are being invaded, they simply don't have the military infrastructure to have their forces entirely separate from civilian targets, and so civilians end up getting hurt by airstrikes and artillery because of their proximity to military targets. Of course, party extremists also used extreme violence to prevent civilian retreat, but I've seen no evidence of this in Ukraine. Convention is all well and good until said conventions would require surrendering territory to avoid conflict in civilian areas. Governments will take any action they deem necessary to survive a conflict. Both parties in a conflict can be immoral.

The human shield argument has never really passed the smell test for me, especially when used as condemnation against Palestinians. It's very difficult to defend against the invasion of a civilian area without occupying said civilian area. Existing military infrastructure typically doesn't exist at the scale a frontline needs in invaded territory. Strikes targeted specifically against civilians are obviously unacceptable and immoral regardless of perpetrator.

Regardless of the truth of that statement, do you contradict the many, many Russian drone and missile attacks against Ukrainian civilian targets? I'm curious if the condemnation for violence against non-combatants goes both ways.