Anonymous Said: “"There is a vocal, white woman fandom in video games media that will go tooth and nail to see themselves in the medium, but will actively ignore/forget/erase any past present or future WOC because they simply don't care unless it's convenient. See: Assassins Creed Syndicate making Liberation/China nonexistent, the lack of support for Tale of Tale's Sunset, the conversation on Horizon Zero Dawn's whiteness only being brought up by other Black or Brown commentators." Is this a fair statement?”
Not sure where you got the quote from, but yeah, that is the general gist of white gaming feminism.
The situation with Sunset is a product lot of unfortunate elements. Tale of Tales made a gamble to promote their game commercially in a way their PR manager probably assured them would get them noticed, but it didn’t. I only came across the game by accident on YouTube, a lot of gamers across the spectrum didn’t know about the game until Tale of Tales announced that they were leaving the commercial production of video game development altogether. Even then, a lot of gaming websites chose to ignore it or didn’t know anything about it (I’m surprised Gameinformer.com even said anything, let alone reviewed it). The focus wasn’t on promoting their game through word of mouth, but bagging the developers for expressing their frustration with the industry and the gaming public alike which showed little to no support in their opinion. The game had its problems (a lot of it regarding the optimization on the PC), but YMMV on the execution of the narrative and the gameplay used to get Angela Burns’ story across to the player.
In general, Sunset isn’t dissimilar from Fullbright’s Gone Home, but the subject matter deals with the everyday life of a Black Woman, with ties to the Black Panther party, working as a housekeeper for a politically entangled man )whom we never see) in a city ravaged by political and class warfare (from what I remember). Already that’s a strike against the game for white gaming feminists who aren’t concerned with viewpoints outside their comfort zone. Sunset is likely not gonna receive the kind of word-of-mouth support Gone Home got on account of the problems players experienced trying to play the game on the PC, the exit of its developers and the general lack of interest in playing a Black Woman during the 1970s. It’s the opposite of a nostalgic trip 90′s memory lane with a white girl as your protagonist who finds out her sister has run away with her lover, a girl she met in school.
The situation with erasing Aveline and Shao Jun started way before the Syndicate and Dishonored 2 stans decided that the emergence of an adult Emily Kaldwin and Evie Frye at E3 2015 made them the de-facto forerunners of the “Playable Female Assassin Protagonists” in relations to ‘firsts” against Ubisoft. It started way before Bethesda stans figured trotting out non-playable woman characters from other Bethesda titles predating Liberation’s and China’s 2012 and 2015 release was a sure-fire way of winning an argument they figured was only centered on “first female assassin”, much to their ignorance.
White gaming feminists have been repeating erasing the importance of Aveline as Ubisoft’s first playable woman protagonist in their Assassin’s Creed franchise since she was announced before and during E3 2012, funny enough, during when Ubisoft was proclaiming “War is a man’s world”. Aveline was not the “female protagonist” they wanted and they continued ignore and erase her right up until and after her game’s release on the PSVITA in 2012. Shit, Dragon Age fans decided she wasn’t worthy of the name “Aveline” and tried to tell AC fans (like myself), to find another tag because they had a character with the same first name.
They’ve always used the shite argument “Aveline’s a side console character, she doesn’t count as a protagonist because its not the main series” against Aveline because she didn’t get the major (preferred) outing her partner, Connor Kenway did that same year with Assassin’s Creed III. This is not a new thing that just happened and I suspect if the tables were turned, they’d be throwing a fit at the idea of Black and Brown gamers declaring Aveline or Shao Jun were Ubisoft’s first playable female protagonists, because hey, “a white girl did it first, how dare you”. Even with the minimal promotional she got from Ubisoft, fucking Ubisoft did a better job of acknowledging her as the “first playable female protagonist” in their franchise than the whole of AC fandom ever did.
They’ve serially ignored Shao Jun, because at the time, she’d only appeared in Assassin’s Creed: Embers (the animated short about Eizo’s final days) and there was, at the time, little to no hope she’d appear in a game at all. When Ubisoft put their foot in their mouths about the “difficulties of animating co-op women” during their 2014 promotion of Assassin’s Creed: Unity, so-called gamers and feminists went to galactic levels about ignoring Aveline’s status as the developer’s first playable woman character in their franchise no matter many times they got dragged and reminded that she was their first. Even when one of the developers who presumably worked on Liberation mentioned “Aveline’s model used a lot of Connor’s animations” to dispel the idea of animating women in their games was difficult, it fell on deaf ears.
Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation HD had been released across all platforms earlier that same year, but this basically all you saw (and see) in AC tags: “God, Ubisoft sucks. When are they gonna make a female protagonist? That Black girl doesn’t count”.
When Shao Jun’s game, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, was announced that same year, she was ignored. Even amid the understandable complaints about her game being reduced to a Mark of the Ninja styled game, critiques about the inaccuracies about how the character was portrayed by Ubisoft (”Concubine turned Assassin” wearing an outfit that didn’t reflect the time period she lived in), Shao Jun went pretty much ignored by white media and gamers as anyone significant in Ubisoft’s very small list of playable women protagonists.
They were content to dismiss Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China as a nothing game and Shao Jun as a “non-protagonist” like they did with Aveline and I’m not talking about gameplay. They merely chose not to acknowledge the game or her and the lack of promotion the game received more or less helped them do that.
This is a cycle and one that’s not likely going to end, ever because whiteness is their only concern and stepping stones in representation are only ever important when a white girl happens to be at the forefront of the situation. Ubisoft plays a part in this problem, but gaming media and fandom in general compound it because they’re extremely comfortable with speaking over and ignoring Black and Brown gamers who consider these characters important publicly and personally. Even when we get a Black or brown woman protagonist on a primary console, they find a way to either flat-out ignore her or erase her identity to suit whatever whitewashed narrative they got running in their heads.
