Ff7 Racism & Ethnicity: if the effects of unintentional racial nuances or diversity appreciation offends you, dont read this

AllGoodInMyHood

Pro Adventurer
AKA
TomTom
It's a triple entendre. There's a chocobo race depicted there, and the colors of the chocobos were also significant for FFVII players, both inside (i.e. Teioh) and outside (e.g. green for mountain chocobos) the races.

So now, any game that has let's say... a dog/cat of a certain race as a main/secondary hero/npc is fueling the racial conflict? Even as a joke this is pretty "strange" to put it lightly :P
 

Cat on Mars

Actually not a cat
way to kill off your only gay character, jo
very progressive of you, jo

Okay then:
1. We need more women, LGBT characters and more diversity in general in fantasy stories.
2. But at the same time, nothing bad can happen to them...
3. ...rendering them useless for exploring conflict and what makes a story interesting.
4. I guess they could be NPCs only, but then people would ask why they aren't main characters.

Go back to point 1.

There just isn't a good answer to this, is there?
 
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ForceStealer

Double Growth
Okay then:
1. We need more women, LGBT characters and more diversity in general in fantasy stories.
2. But at the same time, nothing bad can happen to them...
3. ...rendering them useless for exploringg conflict and what makes a story interesting.
4. I guess they could be NPCs only, but then people would ask why they aren't main characters.

Go back to point 1.

There just isn't a good answer to this, is there?

This argument is definitely true,I've seen it rendered that your story:
1) Have a diverse set of cast members
2) Be a dangerous, unpredictable world, where anyone could die at any moment
3) No characters from minority classes can be "fridged"

Pick two.

However, I don't think that was the point of hito's joke. Remember when the biggest problem was her retroactively assigning orientations to characters? :lol:
 

Cat on Mars

Actually not a cat
She fridged two, then. Voldemort killed Grindelwald. :wacky:
I never got why JKR had to retcon anything the way she did, she is a fucking idiot. Either put that stuff plainly in your story for everybody to see or shut the fuck up.
 

Strangelove

AI Researcher
AKA
hitoshura
i am mostly being facetious (i read one hp novel as a child, saw two of the films on tv i think and part of the last one at an ex boyfriend's house, but i know the basic outline of the story i think but it definitely wasn't a part of my childhood the way it was for others)

although the problem isn't having bad things happen to a gay character (or """""gay""""" character) at all, but that killing off the few gay characters in a story is a recycled and tired trope and if you're gay in the woods and no one is around to hear it, are you really gay. similar to having villainous characters being gay or coded gay, it's not that it's bad as an isolated incident but as part of a long history where that would be the only way any non-hetero characters would be seen.

having more than just the token minority character and portraying them in a variety of diverse ways would help. i'm sure you could still find someone who would complain but this is the internet, you'll find anything if you look hard enough.

anyway i wasn't trying to be serious i just wanted to shitpost

did jk really once say on twitter that kids in hogwarts would experiment sexually and circle jerks were common, honestly at this point have the whole 'wizards used to shit on the floor then magic away the shit they just did on the floor until they started using toilets' thing i don't know what to believe
 

Cat on Mars

Actually not a cat
@Strangelove My bad, your joke went over my head. A happy brain is a derpy brain, in my case.

having more than just the token minority character and portraying them in a variety of diverse ways would help. i'm sure you could still find someone who would complain but this is the internet, you'll find anything if you look hard enough.

Truer words were never spoken, my good sir.

FFVIIR Cloud bar 01.jpg
 

Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
I dunno why people are so determined to disbelieve JKR on this. She answered a direct question, it's not like the Russo Bros. highlighting the same sex relationship of random NPC 42 as so daringly progressive. Authors get invited to these events to answer questions, they don't have to answer, but it's not wrong when they do.

Fandom just likes to make sexy things more important than everything else, to the point that Dumbledore's Erised vision is now Grindelwald and not Ariana. Cause that guy he knew when he was 16 is now more important to him than his dead sister.
 

Kratos

Pro Adventurer
I don't particularly care for Jo's aggressively mediocre (at best) expansions of HP mythology and lore, but Dumbledore's sexuality was definitely not framed as some big reveal; it was a simple response to a simple question.

There are so many reasons to take her to task, but this was never one of them.
 

Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
I know I overreacted a bit here, I'm just so tired of meme based criticism. Most of this stuff makes for fun memes...unless you make any effort at all (I'm talking less than five minutes) to find out the context. But it's more fun to pass on the meme than to check if it's true or not, even if the meme involves throwing personal abuse at people.

This latest one seems more serious, but the fandom has a history of stupidly overreacting to stuff.
 
Just saw a post on tumblr on how Aerith is 'coded Jewish'.
I knew it wouldn't be long.
This is my favourite bit:
Do I think Square intended every single bit of Judeochristian lore in VII to mean something? No, in the same way I don’t think the Christian imagery in Neon Genesis Evangelion actually means anything beyond the fact that it looked cool, and any analysis anyone gets out of it beyond surface level symbolism is probably overthinking it. But there’s also way too much here for it to be accidental, and to that end I think a lot of this stuff, at the very least on Aeris’s end, was deliberate.
i.e." "Do I think all this coding and symbolism means something? No. But do I think it means something? Yes."
 

Obsidian Fire

Ahk Morn!
AKA
The Engineer
The Jewish stuff I something I could actually see people getting tripped up with. Since if you do a search of what "sephirot" is, you do find out it's a thing in Jewish mysticism. And not like... stuff that doesn't make thematic sense in FFVII either. It's stuff that is thematically consistent with Sephiroth's goals. In fact, it doesn't take much digging to see how the dev team could have been inspired by the actual sephirot (at the very least a broad strokes version of it) when coming up with Sephiroth's goals.

Just take a look at these posts by X-SOLDIER which goes into what the actual "sephirot" is and how the Remake could be building off of it in various ways: https://thelifestream.net/forums/th...pilation-thematic-analysis.22464/#post-852064
https://thelifestream.net/forums/th...on-thematic-analysis.22464/page-2#post-866477
https://thelifestream.net/forums/th...on-thematic-analysis.22464/page-2#post-867279

So like... to dismiss the connection and say it's just a coincidence seems... wrong. It's Sephiroth's name after all and they had to get that from somewhere. To say it is that connection is what it is in the "real world" culture is probably not right.
 
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