muriels traumatic background is handled in the most insensitive way possible
The Arcana is a game that indulges in many fantasies that varies from creative (magicians) and just jumps straight into inappropriate (BDSM, slavery) for a PG13 game.
I’m gonna handle the slavery fantasy because Yes. It’s there. Speaking as a diasporic black person, slavery is an incredible touchy subject for me. While never having gone through it, intergeneration trauma is most definitely a thing and even if it wasn’t – empathy exists.
Muriel is an ex-slave. He used to really resonate within me as a character who suffered trauma and considers himself a loner. He is loved by the fandom because of his outcast demeanor. A lot of players probably suffer from social anxiety and thus see themselves within him. But let me get one thing straight:
the way he acts like this is 100% because of childhood trauma and trauma only exacerbated by the treatment of lucio
And that trauma more explicitly is from being held captive and turned into a slave.
From what we know, Muriel grew up homeless and was tortured/bullied by other school children his age. At such a young age, being without a family, being homeless, and being bullied leaves you vulnerable. It’s a vulnerability that most of us could never even dream of relating to unless you experienced it firsthand yourself. Count Lucio literally took a traumatized child’s vulnerability and abused him until he was at his beck and call.
Something that a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that slavery is one of the most traumatizing thing someone could experience
Slavery Literally Ruins Your Life
Slavery literally runs on vulnerable people’s entire lack of agency and safety. And if someone ever defies their owner in choice of having autonomy – they’re punished with any and all kinds of abuse.
slavery shouldnt be something you take lightly
but thats EXACTLY what nix hydra is doing to this character.
especially in heart hunter:
(cred. anonymous @thearcanasucks)
Muriel was coerced into fight under the guise of “the Scourge”
Lucio basically molded Muriel into a fighting machine persona, just so he could enjoy watching slaves fight and kill each other. He had no concern over Muriel’s physical or emotional health – if Muriel ever died doing what Lucio forced him to do he wouldn’t even care. And muriel was put into a situation where he had to murder if he valued his own life.
And let’s not ignore race – Muriel is a brown man. He’s big too. And he murdered people (who were most likely stuck in the same situation as him). Nix Hydra thought it was acceptable to make a man of color into a violent racist caricature. And this is racist in so many ways – it just matters how you apply it. And nix hydra gives you plently of room thanks to never confirming his race:
native american men face the violent stereotype of being deemed “savage” and being bloodthirsty warmongers. Muriel being a brown man tied up in chains? Living in wilderness? Fighting to the death? Checks all of the anti-native narratives.
Being a man of slavery? Slavery is already hugely racialized. Some of the biggest and longest standing slave trades involved african, arabic, and native american people. And since we don’t. know. his. race. we can just assume that he’s all of the above and fits yet another racist trope :)))
now we know that slavery is Bad and Traumatizing and we ESPECIALLY know that Muriel Is Traumatized. But does the writing know? because no.
back onto the heart hunter topic (because im a bitch who doesnt know how to organize) Heart Hunter is a minigame where youre meant to collect as many hearts as possible to win a photocard and some coins and stuff. every time you collect a heart you’re shown a cute interaction between you and a character – or a character and a character. These interactions are meant to be lighthearted and fun, maybe even romantic. And it worked for a while.
Until the writers at Nix Hydra somehow thought it would be lighthearted, fun, and romantic to write about Muriel’s slavery. Multiple characters bring up Muriels slave persona as if its not a sensitive topic you should only approach with as much care as possible. Slavery is a repulsive practice and it should be treated as such.
And even if you ignore slavery being slavery, Muriel as a character is shown being traumatized by his past. he tries to bury it as much as he can even if that means making people forget about him entirely
Muriel is CLEARLY bothered by his past and wishes no reminder of it – but what do the other characters do? exactly that. They explicitly call him and refer to him as “Scourge” his slave name, even right to his face. So either everyone hates him wants to trigger him or the devs hate us and wants to trigger us.
and this screenshot shows that even years after Muriel becoming a public embarrassment, that he still doesn’t own an ounce of his own privacy. This 2-lined interaction shows us that people are still buying and selling his personal property without his consent. All because they KNOW slaves don’t own their own agency, their own life, their own image. That isn’t okay.
what also isn’t okay is the fact that they brush over it like its some cutesy ‘oh oops!’ moment. Portia shouldn’t be enticed by the fact that her friends underwear is being sold on the black market. She should be horrified. Especially when we see Muriel uncomfortable at the fact and even his reaction isn’t a well written one.
would this your reaction if you found out someone somehow got a hold of your used underwear and sold it to creeps for god knows how much money?
Its obvious that the writers at Nix Hydra also don’t see Muriel as a character with his own agency. They will shove his own trauma in his face, but write him indifferent – because they don’t care that Muriel suffered trauma for nearly his entire life. Nope. Because caring for a trauma-ridden brown man would just be too much work for them.
they’d rather use their time to turn their slave owning, abusive villain into a quirky little power hungry ghost uwu or whatever theyre getting at…
this isnt good. its offensive. and i almost broke out in tears at the way theyre handling this man’s situation. it fucking sucks. stop supporting these racist shit bags please i beg of you
Shit man I haven’t done these routes, I didn’t even know about Muriel’s past (though now that I do know, I hate that creepy lucio guy even more than I already did.) I’ve loved the game so far - I was super excited to get back to it and finish the route I was on now that they’ve fully released it. I’m so fucking disappointed and upset they’d make light of something like that. I hope in the future they rectify that.
As things stand though, now I’ve got a decision to make. I really want to know what happens next, and I mean, I know technically all media has some problematic things with it, and people aren’t inherently bad for enjoying problematic media, but part of enjoying media responsibly is to acknowledge its problems, and in this case, I’ve really got to decide if I want to continue with the story at all, even if I’m not on a route that touches any if this, because in this case it’s a particularly egregious problem.
I’ll have to do some research on this on my own to see what the extent of this crap is before I even think about using the app again.
UPDATE: Some cursory research on google has revealed that this particular issue is only the tip of the yikesberg. Apparently the main writer is a fujoshi, and I’m not talking ‘harmless cringey teenage kid who happens to like gay romance and stumbled into the fujoshi ‘community’ because she doesn’t know any better, and will probably grow out of it once she realizes how toxic it is’ or ‘adult woman who likes gay romance in a non fetishy way and just happens to be clueless enough to have an unfortunate choice in terminology’, I’m talking full on gay-fetishizing yaoi obsession. It’s really clear this lady enjoys in particular media that fetishizes gay men and/or POC, glorifies rape and paints gay men as abusive, and/or contains explicit incest. She also apparently runs an incest fanzine. Like the more I read about her the more it is clear the lady who writes these stories is trash in every way it is possible to be trash. As intrigued as I was by the story from what little I’ve played, The Arcana won’t be getting any more money from me.