because Character Day events are used by Netease as a popularity contest to gauge reception for their characters, this is the only real opportunity to give anything resembling “feedback” in the form of simply logging into the game and interacting with the event. For this reason i have already been boycotting Identity V on August 7th, the day Netease decided to celebrate the real-life serial killer who brutalized 5 real women.
This year, they’ve decided to bring in another “character”, Edmund Reid, who was one of the real-life police officials responsible for permanently destroying the memory of those women by falsely branding them as “prostitutes” due to his own personal bias and refusing to examine the case from any other angle, ultimately allowing the murderer to escape from justice. He, and the other police officials this “character” represents, is/are the reason so many people to this day believe the entirely untrue narrative that the caricature “Jack the Ripper” murdered sex workers and managed to evade the police. Were it not for the police’s bigotry, the case may have properly been investigated, the serial killer caught and punished, and the women’s families received some closure.
Netease decides to glorify and even sexualize the caricature of the serial killer, further degrade the victims by putting cartoony versions of their real life autopsy photos in the game as an easter egg, and now additionally glorify the cop(s) responsible for making a farce of the case and denying the women justice out of bigotry. Because the devs don’t receive feedback from the fanbase, all i can do is contribute to the one thing they do care about: social media engagement. Hence this post.
For anyone else sharing my feelings on the matter, i strongly recommend the book “The Five” by Hallie Rubenhold, a thoroughly well-researched factual account of the women and how extensively manufactured the accounts of their deaths were. They were real human beings, and deserve better than to be remembered as nothing more than the mutilated corpses of “prostitutes” while the scum who murdered them and the cops who further defiled them are celebrated.
