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Recently I got turned on to a game called Wild West Exodus. I can't stop thinking about wanting to play this game. The rules seem cool, I like the sales model, and the theme is right up my alley. However, I'm turned off by the fluff. Here's what I'm talking about : Sitting Bull is a werewolf  Ulysses S Grant is Doctor Doom  Gustav Eiffel is a villain  In addition, the Confederacy is painted as sympathetic (they adopted emancipation and are trying to stop the power-hungry Union forces who are obsessed with manifest destiny). I'm torn on this. I am considering just getting some of the basic Lawmen and Outlaws factions, which are much more silver screen heroes and villains, but would I be indirectly (or directly) supporting racism? When is it the right move not to play a game with fun rules and great models taken out of context? I mean these aren't super misogynistic like Kingdom Death, nor are they just straight up gross, but because the fluff exists I'm still on the fence. I'm used to seeing just outright disgustingly wrong minis, but I'm not sure how to go with something that is wrong because of the ideas they represent. They don't have slave models, but the game's fluff sweeps the racism of the confederacy under the rug, and most of the criticism I read about the handling of Native Americans in this game is less about treating them as dumb savages and more about insensitivity to the importance of differences between tribes.
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Mar 7, 2015 16:11
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 01:49 |
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Don't play games that do confederate apologies.
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Mar 7, 2015 16:26
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Night10194 posted:Don't play games that do confederate apologies.
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Mar 7, 2015 17:08
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I'm not going to say you can never do an alternate history where America split in two but the southern half was the more progressive one. But if you do, maybe you shouldn't associate them with the historical Union and Confederacy.
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Mar 7, 2015 17:43
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Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna be buying any of it, thinking more about it. Such a shame they ruin a good game with really stupid story and stereotypes.
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Mar 7, 2015 20:49
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signalnoise posted:In addition, the Confederacy is painted as sympathetic (they adopted emancipation and are trying to stop the power-hungry Union forces who are obsessed with manifest destiny). Ah so it's a historically accurate game? Good to see games take on the War of Northern Aggression truthfully.
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Mar 7, 2015 21:40
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Malifaux has the same kind of problem. It is set in an alternate western setting as well, and they have Asian railway workers. Though it is based in history, and nowhere near displayed as racist. I'm not familiar with the fluff behind the Indians for WW Exodus, but aren't they the "mystic spiritual" type of Indian? Plus it looks like they have a Spanish / Mexican faction where the troops are dirt farmers in huge sombreros? Ehh.
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Mar 7, 2015 22:13
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Night10194 posted:Don't play games that do confederate apologies.
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Mar 7, 2015 23:48
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LordAba posted:I'm not familiar with the fluff behind the Indians for WW Exodus, but aren't they the "mystic spiritual" type of Indian? Plus it looks like they have a Spanish / Mexican faction where the troops are dirt farmers in huge sombreros? Ehh. Yeah, they've definitely got some kind of spirit animal magic going on. I don't really get what the conquistadors are even doing in that time period, either other than supposedly looking for the fountain of youth, but I think Ponce de Leon had been dead for like 200 years at the time of the civil war.
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Mar 7, 2015 23:58
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Isn't WWX also heavily affiliated with Romeo Filip, dramatastic owner of Battlefoam?
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Mar 8, 2015 00:06
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I for one look forward to playing their World War 2 occult horror game and saving the world from the insidious legions of black-clad, gold-stealing wizened gnomes.
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Mar 9, 2015 15:16
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I wouldn't play this game because I'm not big into the steampunk aesthetic, I find it very played out and tired. I prefer sci fi or fantasy touches to historical eras to be more subtle and light handed. I am confused as to why its not okay to play sympathetic, good guy Confederates (no argument here) but its cool to do Bolshevik themed paint jobs. Edit: also forgot to mention if this is something that interest you go ahead and play it and if you run into any opponents that have creepy views avoid them in the future FastestGunAlive fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Mar 9, 2015 |
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Mar 9, 2015 15:58
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Night10194 posted:Don't play games that do confederate apologies.
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Mar 9, 2015 17:40
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I feel your pain on this subject: I love the idea of alternate histories with weird technology and maybe even magic, and I like those models as well, but I could not in good conscience support financially people that paint in a positive light a slave-holding nation.
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Mar 9, 2015 18:32
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The thing that gets me is that it's a complete 180 from what the Confederacy was actually predicated on. I mean, you look at the personal and public writings of high-ranking Confederates, the establishing documents of the Confederacy, and the revisions that states made to their constitutions when they joined the Confederacy, and it's bluntly obvious that the Confederacy was established in great part due to being butthurt over not being able to utilize slaves in their rear end-backwards economic system. Then in WWX, you got them going "oh, totally our bad dudes, now we're all about free men and being plucky rebels against the authoritarian Union!" At best, it's a bad attempt to make a faction more palatable to the average game, at worst it's apologism and/or whitewashing.
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Mar 9, 2015 18:40
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Pyrolocutus posted:The thing that gets me is that it's a complete 180 from what the Confederacy was actually predicated on. I mean, you look at the personal and public writings of high-ranking Confederates, the establishing documents of the Confederacy, and the revisions that states made to their constitutions when they joined the Confederacy, and it's bluntly obvious that the Confederacy was established in great part due to being butthurt over not being able to utilize slaves in their rear end-backwards economic system. Then in WWX, you got them going "oh, totally our bad dudes, now we're all about free men and being plucky rebels against the authoritarian Union!" At best, it's a bad attempt to make a faction more palatable to the average game, at worst it's apologism and/or whitewashing. "It's not about slavery, it's about ethics in government!"
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Mar 9, 2015 19:43
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Pyrolocutus posted:The thing that gets me is that it's a complete 180 from what the Confederacy was actually predicated on. I mean, you look at the personal and public writings of high-ranking Confederates, the establishing documents of the Confederacy, and the revisions that states made to their constitutions when they joined the Confederacy, and it's bluntly obvious that the Confederacy was established in great part due to being butthurt over not being able to utilize slaves in their rear end-backwards economic system. Then in WWX, you got them going "oh, totally our bad dudes, now we're all about free men and being plucky rebels against the authoritarian Union!" At best, it's a bad attempt to make a faction more palatable to the average game, at worst it's apologism and/or whitewashing. It's a weird kind of revisionism that's prominent across the whole spectrum of film and television, and it's an attempt to obliterate the economic dimension of the Civil War. Even relatively "progressive" films frequently eschew showing or commenting on the labour relation between a master and a slave in favor of cartoonishly villainous plantation owners who apparently kept slaves around so they could be mean to them. Adolph Reed, Jr. has a nice article regarding this.
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Mar 9, 2015 20:11
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A lot of stuff he said I agree with, but it felt like he was masturbating the entire time. I couldn't make it through his writing; the guy is kind of insufferable.
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Mar 9, 2015 20:55
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FastestGunAlive posted:I am confused as to why its not okay to play sympathetic, good guy Confederates (no argument here) but its cool to do Bolshevik themed paint jobs. Probably because the Bolsheviks didn't go to war for their right to own other human beings?
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Mar 9, 2015 21:18
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FastestGunAlive posted:I am confused as to why its not okay to play sympathetic, good guy Confederates (no argument here) but its cool to do Bolshevik themed paint jobs. I mean serious resurgent Stalinists are kinda less common than Confederate apologists or neo-Nazis. Like in person I guess they'd be very rude to rich people instead of fantasizing about shooting their black neighbors? Plus it's probably ironic in a way that the Wehrmacht/Confederacy fanboys tend not to be. Bendigeidfran fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Mar 9, 2015 |
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Mar 9, 2015 21:48
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Bendigeidfran posted:I mean serious resurgent Stalinists are kinda less common than Confederate apologists or neo-Nazis. Like in person I guess they'd be very rude to rich people instead of fantasizing about shooting their black neighbors? Basically yea, when someone makes Stalin's Winter Guard or whatever 9 out of 10 times it's a joke and the only real thought behind it is 'ha ha for Mother Russia right' but when someone makes Hitler's SS But With Robots there's probably not a joke there. At best it's just dumb shock 'ha bet you're offended by these swastika banners huuuuuh' (nope, just assume you're a dumb racist) or at worst it's because they do actually have some Opinions About Inferior Races to share.
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Mar 9, 2015 22:31
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Stalinists don't seem interested in collecting Soviet miniature armies, the aesthetic arguably isn't as appealing as the Nazi aesthetic (the latter of which has appeared everywhere from here to Star Wars), and we haven't spent decades subtly glorifying the Red Army like we have the Wehrmacht. Stalinism is an intellectually-bankrupt hipster political stance on the Internet, not so much a fashion choice.
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Mar 9, 2015 22:37
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Hugo boss didn't design stalin's poo poo. Those nazis looked really sharp.
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Mar 10, 2015 00:08
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Also, stalinism appeals more to the eat-the-rich crowd, who tend not to play expensive tradgame hobbies.
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Mar 10, 2015 02:00
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The term you guys are looking for is Lost Cause Revisionism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy It's one of the many ways the South has been forced to deal with the Civil War, because in many ways in the South the Civil War was a war where extremely rich and wealthy people sent hundreds of thousands of poor, uneducated yokels who had never owned a slave in their life to die so that they could stay wealthy. The issue is now they have to reconcile how to handle their ancestors being nominally good and moral people (although let's be real, they were also probably huge racists because come on) who fought to prop up one of the worst institutions our government has ever been a part of. And so they become the historical equivalent of those Episode I fans who ignore Jar Jar and the two hours of trade politics because pod racing and that lightsaber fight were hecka rad bro.
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Mar 10, 2015 02:05
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El Estrago Bonito posted:The term you guys are looking for is Lost Cause Revisionism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy This is the most amazing post
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Mar 10, 2015 02:29
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drat that's some deep poo poo
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Mar 10, 2015 03:01
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It was 20 minutes of trade politics at most and the podracing and lightsaber fights kicked rear end.
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Mar 10, 2015 05:31
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If we're talking about fluff embarrassments involving real-world history, Scion has to get a mention, if only for the bit where Hernan "The Killer" Cortes is established to be a Scion of Quetzalcoatl who was deliberately intended to destroy the corrupt Aztec civilization. Stay classy, White Wolf!
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Mar 10, 2015 06:48
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Antivehicular posted:If we're talking about fluff embarrassments involving real-world history, Scion has to get a mention, if only for the bit where Hernan "The Killer" Cortes is established to be a Scion of Quetzalcoatl who was deliberately intended to destroy the corrupt Aztec civilization. Stay classy, White Wolf! Everything about Scion was a mistake, from rules to fluff. It was the kind of product that you could give WW a pass for if it was made in the early 90's days of Vampire, but... it came out in 2007. It was like "C'mon, White Wolf, what were you thinking?" Of course, it won an ENnie. I guess the WW execs had pictures of the judges blowing a donkey at GenCon.
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Mar 10, 2015 09:18
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I think my favourite is where Monte Cook decided it was a good idea to nickname the citizens a Numera town called Beanstalk "beaners".
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Mar 10, 2015 09:38
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Firefly is the supreme example of the Lost Cause in sci-fi.
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Mar 10, 2015 09:43
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:Firefly is the supreme example of the Lost Cause in sci-fi. I've always found it amusing how many nerds love the Browncoats, nerds who would otherwise be very against everything they stand for.
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Mar 10, 2015 09:46
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Nah, the Civil War analogy in Firefly was that the confederacy won, which is why there were still slaves and that planet with duelist pseudo-aristocrats.
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Mar 10, 2015 10:59
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If that was the intention they hosed it up by making the browncoats the rebels, evoking 'lost cause' sentiment and directly creating analogies to the Civil War. If they had wanted to subvert the theme, they should have really made the Browncoats an established government that lost against a largely reactionary uprising (I think the FTL videogame has you as a Federation member facing against a stronger rebel force). Firefly, on the other hand, feeds directly into Lost Cause revisionism because not only it portrays the rebels as the good guys, but paints the opposition to them as utterly evil/expansionist, which in the end was the entire point of Lost Cause propaganda.
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Mar 10, 2015 11:29
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Firefly's browncoats as good guys/union also fails on another historical parallel. The core planets were the industrial and population base, the browncoats were depicted as agriculturalists. Also, the South was at least as manifest destiny loving as the Union. One of the gripes that caused them to secede in the first place was the fear they wouldn't be able to spread slavery westward. As much as I like Eberron, I always thought the depiction of Zilargo was just a little too close to some vicious Jewish stereotypes for comfort. Edit: Goddamn spelling. wallawallawingwang fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 21:46
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Secede
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Mar 10, 2015 22:01
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wallawallawingwang posted:Firefly's browncoats as good guys/union also fails on another historical parallel. The core planets were the industrial and population base, the browncoats were depicted as agriculturalists. Also, the South was at least as manifest destiny loving as the Union. One of the gripes that caused them to succeed in the first place was the fear they wouldn't be able to spread slavery westward. My exposure to Eberron is mostly that they're just secretive spy-gnomes and their House operates a messaging service. Other than the usual "dwarves/gnomes = jews" stereotypes in fantasy I'm not sure what's supposed to be overly Jewish about them. Considering that Zilargo geographically is a silo-ed off part of Breland, I'm almost convinced that Keith Baker's own Eberron homebrew doesn't even include gnomes at all. On the other hand, secretive wealthy conspiracy The Aurum, who have their base in the Mror Holds, the dwarven homeland, are made up of mostly dwarves and humans, and try to control the world through money...
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Mar 10, 2015 23:29
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bewilderment posted:My exposure to Eberron is mostly that they're just secretive spy-gnomes and their House operates a messaging service. Other than the usual "dwarves/gnomes = jews" stereotypes in fantasy I'm not sure what's supposed to be overly Jewish about them. Considering that Zilargo geographically is a silo-ed off part of Breland, I'm almost convinced that Keith Baker's own Eberron homebrew doesn't even include gnomes at all. Well like you said, gnomes already have that uncomfortable association so combine it with some of the other features of the nation and it sticks out more. Like House Kundarak, the dwarven bankers, were established as a house only with help from Zilargo and House Sivis. So its even worse than them being bankers, they are the hidden power behind the bankers. The gnomes controlling communication and book publishing doesn't help either. I'm a little rust on my Eberron lore, but don't they control the gem trade too? It's going to be an imperfect thing no matter what, just because I'd like to think no one is going to be terrible enough to have gnomes or dwarfs have fantasy blood libel, which you'd need for the horrible to really stick.
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Mar 11, 2015 00:55
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It should be noted that the reason Gnomes are the communications people in Ebberon is literally due to the old joke about tiny people living inside your TV set. I'm not actually joking, the dude who wrote the setting has confirmed this in an interview. One of the initial brainstorming sessions for the setting was literally them sitting around figuring out how you would mimic modern day technology using high fantasy D&D tropes, which lead to "there would be a gnome in a box talking to you!" kind of poo poo.
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Mar 11, 2015 02:48
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