Jake

Idle Thumbs 185: Beppo's Hole

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I'm aware of Duck Dynasty only because of the issues surrounding it of redneck-sneering television and the choices of the network after the family patriarch turned out to be racist;

Duck Dynasty had a game that was quietly released a month or two ago for $60. I hope it appears on the cast!

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I don't watch the CMAs or listen to country radio, but the image I have of Faith Hill is largely identical to what I would have had of Taylor when she was 14 and in a more "pure" country stage of her career, which is largely identical to what I think about Carrie Underwood.

My cousin dated Carrie Underwood in high school, either that or he just has his yearbook signed by her. I don't remember what he was bragging about. My mother's half of my extended family has been in Checotah for a century or two, with a great grandpa being some kind of entrepreneur in the area in the early 90s. Carrie Underwood is hilariously the biggest thing that town has ever encountered. It is otherwise a sad and backwards place to live which is why I don't really talk to that side and my mom moved to Houston when she hit her late teens to start shedding the racist and religious indoctrination living in such places brings.

 

Anyway none of this matters, I just didn't want to talk about Taylor Swift or the music industry anymore.

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Oh god, and there it is.

 

So I was somehow managing to do okayish in TWOM. I had a couple of beds made so people could rotate sleeping properly, found some books, had a rain water collector. I even had a workshop made so I could make lockpicks and knives. The one thing we were lacking was food. I had found some to last a few days but the place I was going to for supplies didn't have anymore, so I had to go elsewhere. The supermarket should have some. Pavle, you're up.

 

He goes to the store, and at the entrance he looks through to see a soldier who found a woman scavenger. He offered to get her food in exchange for a not so subtle favor request. She declined and he got rough with her. I told Pavle to go beat the soldier's ass. He got a good surprise hit in, but then the soldier deflected every attempt after that, and now my guy is dead.

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Jennegatron nailed much of what I wanted to add! Good stuff. Additionally, I wonder how much of it is a personal decision to "not sell sexy" or really a necessity of the Nashville model. Remember that Swift is literally the only act in the world that is actually selling a lot of records. It's November and she is the first person to go platinum in 2014. I don't mean that conspiratorially so much as "this is how we do it."

 

(all hands are in the air) 

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It's always hard to separate a young pop artist's choices from those of his or her handlers, but I think it is worth noting that both Miley Cyrus (a Disney child star with strong ties to Nashville) and Katy Perry (who started her career as a gospel artist in Nashville) both embraced the sex symbol pop star archetype (which for shitty reasons catches a lot more criticism than a male pop star like Justin Timberlake or Usher doing the same).

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As always, there is a great discussion here, but I really wonder why so many people who listen to Idle Thumbs were unaware of who Taylor Swift was. I think that, even if you don't like her music (and I'm actually way, way into 1989), it's good to just know who she is, consider her importance in the current cultural landscape. Some amount of cultural literacy is completely fine, everyone. I have zero interest in watching a TV show like Duck Dynasty, but the way it pervades the culture has made me learn a little about it so that I can understand it's impact. (Gah, I wish that I could write this with the genial tone with which it was meant)

 

There's a sociological concept of "social capital" theory which basically describes this. Basically, by having an awareness of popular culture, you are acquiring social capital that you can then "spend" on others to strengthen social bonds (and establish your position within the social order). It's a high-falutin' way of saying that it's good to know about things because you can talk about them at the water cooler. This is partially why I watch football (also, it makes me feel like a real 'murican)

 

So, I do a little bit of a sociopath / alien thing with some pop culture; if Taylor Swift is popular, I should experience it to try to better understand my own society. It can also provide a handy cover for guilty pleasures if you happen to have shame about that kind of thing. (In the case of Taylot Swift specifically, I find her fascinating as a nexus for society's views on female sexuality - as discussed in this thread - and constructed media narratives - Shake it Off is very much a response to her media image and critics).

 

Of course, it depends on how you define your social circle. Here on this forum, having knowledge of Pokemon and the Indie Games scene can arguably be worth more than knowledge of Duck Dynasty and Miley Cyrus. It gets more complicated with sub-cultures because then there's also a huge element of signaling that you belong. (Not having knowledge of Taylor Swift can be signaling mechanism of its own, for instance, fir the above mentioned people with peer groups that specifically avoided pop music.)

 

When I think about it too hard, I always end up being suspicious of myself, because who's to say that I like what I actually like or if it's all just social signaling. And then what am I saying about myself to you by communicating this post? It gets very ouroborus-y very quickly.

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Pretty much my only familiarity with the Montage Parody scene is this Farming Simulator video:

 

 

As far as I'm concerned, that's all I will ever need.

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This episode, Beppo's Hole, quickly launched itself into the stratosphere. Within the first ten minutes, we had a GDC dream by Nick Breckon, Italian food and cinema subscription hell and devious schemes concerning lifetime airline passes.

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"Italian food"

 

I'd never even heard of Beppo's before this cast, but this is the greatest use of quotation marks I've seen in a long time. Beautiful communication of exactly the "cuisine" served there.

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Relistening to the podcast, I am feeling I misunderstood the direction of Sean's comment that I questioned earlier in the thread. I had thought his comment was directed towards the race of Pagan Min, but it sounds like it was because he was a fictional character that we shouldn't care. Sincere apologies! I hope it didn't come across as an accusation, as it was never meant that way.

 

 

With that said, I still don't get the allusion. In movies, for example, those characters are still fictional. They aren't real, but we are implicitly asked to make the effort to take them seriously if that's how they should be taken. I'm not sure how that's different from a video game character except that sometimes Nicholas Cage is the wacky flamboyant bad guy, so we're judging if he's playing with or against "type".

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My take on that comment was that on first glance (and second and third) that FC4 art looks like a white guy sitting on a desecrated holy artifact with an asian man kneeling in front of him staring worshipfully at a live hand grenade. As it turns out, it's not a white guy (which makes it only approximately 80% as awful) -- but it's a completely invented asian guy who totally looks like a white guy. It's not an actual person whose idiosyncrasies and appearance just happen to have lined up in an unfortunate way: It's a constructed character, and the way he was constructed, particularly in the context of that initial image, is pretty gross.

 

Or maybe Sean was talking about something else. Dunno!

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Relistening to the podcast, I am feeling I misunderstood the direction of Sean's comment that I questioned earlier in the thread. I had thought his comment was directed towards the race of Pagan Min, but it sounds like it was because he was a fictional character that we shouldn't care. Sincere apologies! I hope it didn't come across as an accusation, as it was never meant that way.

 

 

With that said, I still don't get the allusion. In movies, for example, those characters are still fictional. They aren't real, but we are implicitly asked to make the effort to take them seriously if that's how they should be taken. I'm not sure how that's different from a video game character except that sometimes Nicholas Cage is the wacky flamboyant bad guy, so we're judging if he's playing with or against "type".

I definitely didn't understand Sean's point at all either. Nothing about Pagan Min being a video game character or an invented character or whatever seems relevant to whether he's Asian or not. Remo points out that he's Himalayan, even though he has the "frosty tips," and Danielle talks about how she accidentally put him on a list of white bros in games, and someone corrected her, saying "actually, he's from the region," and Nick responds "but he's not real." But what the fuck does that mean? If I say "we need more LGBT characters in video games" and someone says "Gone Home is a good example!" and I say "but she's not real" I take it their response would be "uh... right... so?" 

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The point of "not real" was that you could declare any fictional character to be anything and it wouldn't necessarily actually be substantiated in any way beyond that declaration. Maybe in Far Cry 4 the fact that he's an Asian guy with uncommonly white features really is a thoughtful and significant dichotomy but on the ad for the game it isn't really.

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I definitely didn't understand Sean's point at all either. Nothing about Pagan Min being a video game character or an invented character or whatever seems relevant to whether he's Asian or not. Remo points out that he's Himalayan, even though he has the "frosty tips," and Danielle talks about how she accidentally put him on a list of white bros in games, and someone corrected her, saying "actually, he's from the region," and Nick responds "but he's not real." But what the fuck does that mean? If I say "we need more LGBT characters in video games" and someone says "Gone Home is a good example!" and I say "but she's not real" I take it their response would be "uh... right... so?" 

 

I consider the "but he's not real" comment about Pagan Min's Asianness to apply equally to, say, Dumbledore's homosexuality. Both are random characteristics, however topical, applied to a character without any actual attempt to integrate them into said character, so it becomes this particularly unreal thing that exists to be brought up outside the context of the fictional work, when Danielle complains about the continuing proliferation of white dudes in video games or when someone accuses the Harry Potter series of extremely traditional social values. Gone Home doesn't get that criticism because the LGBT aspect of the characters is essential to their portrayal (which ironically means it's brought up by other kinds of people as a reason why the game's bad).

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I guess I just don't know enough about how people from the Himalayas look vs. how white people look to be able to make the judgment that Pagan Min is way more white than he ought to be. I have a sort of mild face-blindness (I've introduced myself to people I've known for months because I didn't recognize them) so I tend to be pretty awful at judging ethnicity beyond simple things like "are you obviously black," plus I don't think I know a lot of people from the Himalayas, so I was just assuming that Pagan wasn't just, like, an obviously white guy who is ostensibly actually Asian. I suppose I'll take everyone's word that this guy is obviously white enough that it's an issue.

 

(I'm also not sure Dumbledore is a very good example of this - I think it's perfectly fine to have a gay person whose sexuality doesn't come up in the story. I wouldn't call it a good example of including LGBT characters, because that doesn't really count if nobody even knew, but I wouldn't say that creators only have two options: straight white men, or LGBT minorities who make a big deal about how they aren't straight white men. A better example would maybe be something like how The Hunger Games has a diverse cast of people but somehow racism is gone, so inexplicably nobody ever faces any prejudice or whatever for the color of their skin.)

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A big part of Dumbledore's backstory involved him being good friends with a wizard who turned out to be a bad dude and making some questionable decisions because of it, so I don't know that it's entirely extraneous to the character. Then again, it could have been a witch just as easily, or she could have never said anything and let people believe that they were just good friends.

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Pagan Min pretty much immediately struck me as the typical super-flamboyant Asian gangster type with the crazy colorful suits and whatnot. I don't know, maybe I'm just more familiar with the trope? It... seemed like a fairly common thing to me, but going to look for examples I'm having trouble finding any, so now I don't know how I got the idea it in the first place.

 

I unironically think Pagan Min looks awesome and it's a shame he's a bad guy. We need more Rad Suits out there that aren't a shell for some psycho with an inferiority complex.

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A big part of Dumbledore's backstory involved him being good friends with a wizard who turned out to be a bad dude and making some questionable decisions because of it, so I don't know that it's entirely extraneous to the character. Then again, it could have been a witch just as easily, or she could have never said anything and let people believe that they were just good friends.

 

Considering that the sexuality didn't come up in the novel, I consider it more part of the author's head canon, like you say in a way, than something that's particularly essential to the character. For Pagan Min, tons of people went, "Oh wow, a blonde guy in a Western suit is sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest, that's really problematic imagery," and the rejoinder was, "Don't worry, he's Asian," as if the character was the one who made the decision to have that picture be what it was and not some white dudes in Montreal. That's what I got out of him not being "real."

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Considering that the sexuality didn't come up in the novel, I consider it more part of the author's head canon, like you say in a way, than something that's particularly essential to the character. For Pagan Min, tons of people went, "Oh wow, a blonde guy in a Western suit is sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest, that's really problematic imagery," and the rejoinder was, "Don't worry, he's Asian," as if the character was the one who made the decision to have that picture be what it was and not some white dudes in Montreal. That's what I got out of him not being "real."

But, like, I thought that was a good reply. I was one of those people saying "that's really problematic" (you can go check the Far Cry 4 thread!) and I pretty much shut up when I learned he was Asian. Why is "he's not ACTUALLY Asian, it's a bunch of white dudes in Montreal who made him that!" a good reply, but "she's not ACTUALLY lesbian, it's a bunch of straight people in Portland who made her that" not a good reply?

 

edit: just went back and checked, I actually complained on ANOTHER forum. Sorry.

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But, like, I thought that was a good reply. I was one of those people saying "that's really problematic" (you can go check the Far Cry 4 thread!) and I pretty much shut up when I learned he was Asian. Why is "he's not ACTUALLY Asian, it's a bunch of white dudes in Montreal who made him that!" a good reply, but "she's not ACTUALLY lesbian, it's a bunch of straight people in Portland who made her that" not a good reply?

 

edit: just went back and checked, I actually complained on ANOTHER forum. Sorry.

 

Because Sam and Lonnie aren't shown doing a bunch of crazy problematic shit that gets handwaved away because the makers of the game tell us they're gay.

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But, like, I thought that was a good reply. I was one of those people saying "that's really problematic" (you can go check the Far Cry 4 thread!) and I pretty much shut up when I learned he was Asian. Why is "he's not ACTUALLY Asian, it's a bunch of white dudes in Montreal who made him that!" a good reply, but "she's not ACTUALLY lesbian, it's a bunch of straight people in Portland who made her that" not a good reply?

 

edit: just went back and checked, I actually complained on ANOTHER forum. Sorry.

I guess it depends on how the character was created. If they made a flamboyant white character dominating all the local populace, then realized it might cause PR problems and decided to change up some art and make him Asian so it's OK, that's definitely suspect. If they came up with the character holistically (which it seems like they did,) always intended him to be Asian, and integrated his homeland into the story, then it's just unfortunate advertising.

Same thing with Dumbledore really. What made the whole thing feel disingenuous was not that he is a gay character, but more like he was a straight character through most of the books then the author suddenly tacked on "he's gay" to try to appeal to a certain group of fans.

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Basically, making him asian is an equivalent tactic to GamerGate creating #NotYourShield.

You invoke an unprivileged minority in order to claim that your problematic portrayal is ok because it's not being enacted by white privileged males.

BUT

1) The actual message is being constructed by privileged people.

2) Just because a minority does something problematic does not absolve the action.

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I guess I AM the only person in the world who's seen Asian gangster types dress like that before.

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