Gun Culture in the East (Arknights, Girl’s Frontline, and Sword Art Online)
On YouTube, an old Extra Credits episode about First Person Shooters (FPS games) explored the cultural reasons why that style of game originated in the West, why it remains more popular in the West than the East, and the How and Why behind the differences in Eastern-made FPS games.
But I can also point to a recent, non-FPS game that illustrates the difference.
Arknights is a Chinese-made mobile game, and like all Chinese media, it needed to pass the approval of the Chinese government or die. So in the world of Terra, no one discovered gunpowder.
Please remember that China invented gunpowder. Why would they want to ignore that accomplishment?
In place of gunpowder, Terra has a magical crystal called Originium which is highly volatile and also gives you an incurable form of cancer (Oripathy) that painfully turns you to into more Originium of an even-more infectious variety. The plot of the game largely revolves around how the ruling elites of the nations force the weak, marginalized, poor, and Infected to mine and refine Originium, which leads to further infections and accelerates the death of those already infected. Of course, the Infected are also treated like social pariahs.
A group of the Infected formed a terrorist army called Reunion, hellbent on seeking revenge and taking over the world. I have heard sentiments on Reddit from those claiming to be Chinese citizens, who draw direct and unwarranted parallels between Reunion and the Hong Kong protesters. Thankfully, you would need to squint really hard to get that impression from the game itself.
But I can point to a telling similarity between Reunion and the Hong Kong protesters: Neither have any guns at all, while those who fight and kill them in droves do have guns. Though even most of the “Sniper” class Operators you can employ can only use crossbows, or actual bows.
See, it’s not enough that Originium-based firearms ammunition is highly volatile and potentially carcinogenic. Terra is also a techno-fantasy setting with catgirls and magic, and few people have magical aptitude even after they get infected with Oripathy.
I don’t know why guns on Terra have hammers and triggers at all, because you cannot safely ignite the ammunition without literally casting a spell. If you cast the spell wrong, the gun will explode in your hands. Even when you cast it right, the gun needs careful maintenance to avoid exploding in the future. Even if you can cast the spell correctly, the firepower will be inferior if you cannot cast it masterfully while in live combat.
It is an oppressive elite’s ideal form of gun: All of the deadly power of gunpowder and modern firearms technology, in a form that only their hand-picked, specially-trained, ultimately-expendable attack dogs can use. Even if rebels kill the soldiers and take the guns from their hands, the peasants won’t be able to use the guns, and if they do they risk either contracting cancer or hastening their deaths from it.
The powers of the day in pre-democratic Europe treated crossbows similarly to how China now treats guns, with the kings and popes trying to deny them to the common people. Because any weapon you can just hand to a peasant to turn them into a threat to a knight or his men-at-arms threatened the feudal, hierarchical powers that relied on the monopoly of force they enjoyed through the professional warrior-caste.
Speaking of which, some of you may know about Girl’s Frontline, another Chinese-made mobile game which once employed a number of personnel who developed Arknights, where every playable character ("T-Doll”, or Tactical Doll) not only uses a gun, but anthropomorphically represents the specific gun they use. But what you need to remember or realize is that each of these characters is also a dictator’s ideal: Robot soldiers built by the nation’s military-industrial complex, expressly designed and programmed to fight with guns. Far more capable of fighting with guns than any untrained protesters, probably equipped with kill-switches in case they decide to rebel themselves, and in any case dependent on the state’s industrial resources to provide their daily welfare. An enslaved warrior-caste.
The West eventually went through the enlightenment and formed republics and generally began valuing the common citizen as a full human being, to whom governments needed to answer rather than the other way around. This has had a transformative impact on military doctrine as well, as America is the only country in the world where a private on the ground can call in an artillery barrage, naval bombardment, or airstrike and have the entire military immediately mobilize and risk multi-billion dollars’ worth of equipment to hit a target before it moves (both videos are time-stamped to the relevant points, but the first is short and both are worth watching).
But China has remained an essentially feudal empire for its entire history, and it wasn’t long ago in living memory that Japan was the same.
In Sword Art Online, Asada Shino became a pariah in her community when, as a little girl, she saved her mother from a drugged-up, violent mugger by wrestling his gun from his hands and killing him with an accidental shot. Her neighbors viewed her as more horrifying than the man. Why?
The author doesn't explain it this way, but consider that Shino proved the equalizing power of the gun. It was explicitly a cheap, weak, badly-made handgun, but it was enough to let an untrained little girl kill a full-grown man in one blind shot. In a culture where only policemen and soldiers are allowed to possess guns, in a culture with a long history of martial arts where only those who know martial arts have the power to succeed in battle.
People could accept an untrained civilian with a gun being a threat to untrained civilians without guns, because in that situation the gun is the un-equalizing factor (together with the drugs lending him a madman’s strength).
But for a little girl to defeat such an adult man, by accident? That's an imbalance that the gun equalized. That contradicts their cultural assumptions about guns and who is allowed to have the power of physical violence.
But these assumptions are not universal, either. Did you know there's a thriving Gun Tourism industry where Japanese citizens travel to America to have fun shooting guns on a firing range?
Obviously, Chinese citizens are not allowed to enjoy that same freedom. It might give them ideas.
