A Flying Nun
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2016
I don't even get why it's that hard to understand.Alright fine, I'll chime in more about muh blacks.
I think the issue here isn't the blacks themselves, but how many of the game's NPCs are ghetto trash and hoodrats despite the main characters not being black. With San Andreas, the theme/setting with a predominantly black cast worked because it was specifically set in a black neighborhood around the time of the L.A. riots, and the overall theme was meant to mimic early 90's gangsta rap culture aesthetic (e.g. NWA, Boyz in the da Hood). That made sense considering that was the theme they were specifically going for for. Just like with vice City being a mashup of Miami Vice and Scarface, hence it had a lot of Latino characters and involved themes of organized crime amidst the neon colors and synth pop.
With the GTA 6, it feels like they just took a generic modern crime plot, set it in Florida, and flooded the cast of NPCs with a bunch of grotesque twerking sheboons. Again, it's not the blacks, it's how it's presented and shoehorned. Also because it's not a specific time period, the aesthetic doesn't work. VC and SA had a unique feel since they were set in prior decades and were deliberately meant to mimic a certain relevant culture from their respective time periods (especially with the music). Hell, watch the fucking commercial for SA: yeah, it's a bunch of ghetto black thugs with guns shooting each other...but with the theme music being "Welcome to the Jungle" and the intended aesthetic and geographic setting it's trying to convey, it absolutely hits hard.
TL;DR - GTA: SA worked with a black cast because the overall style and theme was about inner city gang warfare in a specific time period and specific location, so I understand it. This time it just feels like shoehorned diversity in the worst way. I loved VC and SA, but this just looks lame.
There is nothing inherently wrong with black characters and a black cast. Of course there isn't. You won't find people refusing to watch the Green Mile or refusing to play GTAV because a main character is black.
However, in recent years there has absolutely been a crowd of media creators who forcefeed woke shit everywhere. They have zero regard for their demographic, care more about political grandstanding than telling a story, and unfortunately they hold minority groups in such high regard that they seem to think assigning any minority group character a character flaw is tantamount to claiming every single member of that minority group behaves that way, which leads to a bunch of boring, Mary Sue characters.
There's this hilarious irony where the exact crowd trying to forcefeed minority groups to people is inadvertently training people to recoil from media that has an overabundance of minority groups, precisely because when they're afraid to give them any flaws, it just makes for really boring writing. Ironically, the exact groups they love showcasing as flawed (white men) end up being the most fascinating characters precisely because they gave them actual depth. People aren't recoiling from this trailer just "because racist" or anything simplistic like that, they're doing so because we may be getting another dumbass story where the woman girlbosses her way through the game and shoots rainbows from her vagina before ascending to the heavens as the second coming, with zero stakes, zero conflict and zero depth.
Nobody freaked out about Franklin in GTAV because that game released before this cultural phenomenon developed. We had no reason to expect anything bad; Franklin was just black and that's that, not to mention fairly normal for the franchise. Same exact thing goes for any of the earlier GTA titles.
But this...?
This doesn't look like a predominantly black neighborhood or anything like that, this just looks like they made it a point to make the majority of the population black. Black women in particular seem more common than any other demographic in the trailer, and there's an absolute minority of white people. (or at least appearing so. Lots of tan people that's hard to tell if they're supposed to just be that tan or hispanic)
For me, the red flag is three factors in combination with each other:
1) Black people everywhere. This is an absolutely absurd percent of black people when compared to US demographics. If we're being loyal to US demographics, then either we're in a specific neighborhood or area where they make up 90% of the population, or every 10th person is black at it's most frequent. This is neither.
2) Female protagonist that, thusfar, seems very generic and boring. We don't really see much personality from her at all, which is often what this exact clique of garbage woke writers result in: either Mary Sues without flaws, or dull cardboard cutout characters that barely showcase any personality whatsoever.
3) The "Tiktok" feel. They leaned hard into social media for this trailer, which is yet another indicator for "bad writers desperately trying to stay relevant." The game is primarily about criminal life and dynamics within the USA, yet the only hints of this at all involve two of the scenes with the female lead. If the game is nothing but a constant barrage of moments that go "hey, remember that viral social media thing that happened?! WE DO TOO! LOOK! WE'RE REFERENCING THE THING! WE'RE COOL TOO!" then yes the game will be garbage.
Those three in combination are a massive red flag screaming that the woke writing crowd might've taken over the studio. They're still just red flags, so anyone freaking out saying "it's too early to judge," fine that's fair, but I also fully understand why people are incredibly skeptical.