which, to me, sounds like you're making the statement that Barret's characterization (which would not just be the linguistic accuracy of his slang, but we'll get unto that later) is not something an "actual black" person would write.
Which would be wrong. Which you would know, had you asked. The reason I even mentioned characterisation at all in the first post is because I'm unsure whether or not Square is planning to tweak his personality in the remake (say, his anger and explosive behaviour being portrayed as darker and being received seriously instead of frequently played for laughs). It's a qualification. What Square plans to do in that regard doesn't matter one way or another to me, but what I was doing was acknowledging that, judging by the tone and artistic decisions (i.e. the edgelord sunglasses) of the trailer, there may be nuances in his characterisation that are subject to change.
hian said:
My response about Barret's popularity among many black gamers is a response that is pertinent to that, because if a lot of black people identify with Barret as he is written, which goes to show that the way he was written is not necessarily at all incongruent with how an "actual black" person would have written him.
It's not pertinent. His reception amongst other black gamers has nothing to do with how I receive him. And whilst I don't think Barret is written poorly, there are a variety of factors that affect how black people interact with media representations--both in general and specific to individuals. You can’t deign to infer the fullness of how a person consumes a media depiction from a clip, or even the fact that their opinion is overall favourable. Nor is a favourable reception “proof” that the depiction in question is unimpeachable or even “good.” One doesn't necessarily follow the other.
E.g., as someone who is also African and was an avid comic fan at one point, I find the concepts of “Wakanda,” “Oya,” (a Yoruba alias for an apparently Igbo character with some corny “burn the witch” background), and most of the African characters to be mildly annoying and poorly-researched in the best of times, and downright terrible, orientalist, and unfortunate at worst. Are Ororo and T’Challa and Vixen still some of my favourite characters in fiction, though? Yeah. Will I write long-ass papers about all the things wrong with them? Probably not because I’m #exhausted and I don’t give that much of a shit, but I could.
And yet none of this matters. Pursuing this question is pointless, as never did I comment on Barret’s actual character.
hian said:
Also, if you consider any of the posts before this reply of yours essays, then I'm not sure how to break this to you, but :
You're on a forum - a fan forum for a 20 year old video-game no less - and you expect what? Twitter comment length posts?
That was an obviously light-hearted post, but if you want an answer to this needless rhetorical question, then what I didn't expect is for a one line (and mostly joke-y) post to be extrapolated into a nonsensical argument against a position I never even took. I don't think this was expecting too much.
hian said:
Whether you're black or not has no bearing on that whatsoever, as you so neatly point out later - since some black like and relate to Barret, others don't. My point was simply that as long as the former is true, statements implying "actual black folk" wouldn't write him that way is BS regardless of whether or not the latter is true.
It has bearing. I don’t need to be preached to about the fact that black people have differing opinions. I’m well aware of this. Nor do I especially want to hear about what hypothetical situation would qualify as anti-blackness. I can decide that for myself.
hian said:
Except that nobody was trying to lecture you. I was making an observation about a trend I don't like, which, as I've just outline, I felt your post tied neatly into.
Which it didn't. Move on. Any thesis about what would constitute "real racism" or "white-washing" is not only unwelcome, but irrelevant.
hian said:
And people can be critical of that criticism, if they think it's wrong.
You can think it’s wrong as the day is long and argue all you want on objective nuances of narrative, but if a black person were to say they’re suffering from racial fatigue and hate a character because they find him to be grating and stereotypical, not only do you have zero authority to tell them that they’re wrong, it’s not your place to try to convince them otherwise or cite differing black opinions as “proof” that theirs is a “misinterpretation.” It’s really not your business, and whatever you have to say is not meaningful in that context. At all.
But again. Completely off-subject. I never made any judgements about how Barret is portrayed.
hian said:
Also, you have no way of knowing whether these people are critical of that thing or not.
And neither do you. Ergo, bringing them up was completely pointless and serves only to substantiate…whatever you’re arguing. I never said I did. The only one bringing up phantom black people here is you.
hian said:
I happen to know many who aren't, so the point is still moot.
Good for you. And? I could say, “And I know many who are,” but again, and? Black people and their opinions are not a rhetorical tool or a cudgel to be used in debate, and just like I don’t give a shit about your black acquaintances, I don’t expect you to give a shit about mine. I understand their positions, but they have no bearing on my own. We’re not the borg. Nor are we opposing forces. We don’t cancel each other out.
hian said:
Also, minus 1 for vacuous Sarkeesian paraphrasing.
I know you think you delivered a sickass read and ripped out my edges or whatever, but I've never even seen a Sarkeesian video, so as clever as I guess this dismissive quip is, I don't know what you're talking about. Regardless, it’s some common-ass sense. What’s a breaking point for some people is a minor (or non-issue) for others. It’s not news.
hian said:
Except that nobody did that. Stop strawmanning people. I made an example, to demonstrate one existing position - not to make a statement about the average position of every black person on the planet.
No. You assumed you know their position (and any intricacies therein) from video clips. You could be wrong about that interpretation, you could be right. It really doesn’t matter. But if you want to argue, argue on your own merits rather than use strangers or anecdotes as pieces of “evidence”…as if “evidence”-based arguments have any bearing on how people feel about media representation.
…Or anybody was even talking about the quality of Barret's characterisation.
hian said:
I could be extremely sarcastic here, but I’m not gonna.
hian said:
Which is of no relevance to the point in any way what so ever.
No, it’s not. It’s not relevant to my original point at all, but if you’re really trying to tell me that constant negative depictions of black people don’t affect how black people consume, relate to, and critique entertainment, then I don’t know what to tell you except that you are wrong as hell. Really.
The point is that portrayal of black people in Western media is overwhelmingly negative, or shallow, or both, or they get killed off (or all three). Being as such, some black people have a low tolerance for this and have an adverse reaction to characters they feel fit these categories…hence why some black people who dislike Barret, dislike Barret.
hian said:
One thing no writer ever should have to consider when telling a story, is how often somebody else did it before them.
Writers (and other creators) do not produce their works or release them in a vacuum. Nor is media fangless. Whatever you create is released into the real world, with real effects. You are responsible for these effects. You can continue on mindlessly regardless, without any kind of conscientiousness, but there is no hiding from criticism behind some smokescreen of “artistic vision.”
hian said:
Can the argument be made that it's unfortunate that people (a lot of black content creators as well - just look to the hip hop industry)
What does hip-hop have to do with this, please.
hian said:
However, because like with all stereotypes, some people actually fit the bill, it can never be said that "character X" isn't genuine enough just because it's stereotypical to one degree or another.
...No one ever said this, so I don’t know where you’re getting this.
And speaking generally, the problem isn’t that characters are “stereotypical” or have “stereotypical” traits. The problem is that, not only is it the same archetype ad nauseam, the characters are by and large underdeveloped, are relegated to support roles, and are extremely depthless…to the point of caricature. Understandably, black people popping up every once and again to do nothing but scream an exaggerated “AW HEEEELLL NAH” or “THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT” or any other Stock Black Person Line™, can be tremendously aggravating.
You ever hear it contextualised as “the danger of a single-story” (the framework posited by Adichie)? That’s the point of contention.
…But again. None of this is what I was talking about.
hian said:
Simply put, context matters, and in the context of FFVII, all of the cast are violent to one degree or another, can be cast as criminals, have bouts of anger, make stupid decisions, and several of them have comic relief moments. Barret's dispositions are completely in-tune and in line with the rest of the cast in that regards.
FFVII exists in the context of the wider world. I know you don’t expect everybody to contract amnesia every time they consume a new piece of media. You can argue if you want about how appropriate Barret’s disposition fits with the narrative, but the fact remains that it won’t stop anyone from parsing his character as another in a long line of violent, angry, rash, criminal black men and being tired of it. And they’re entitled to be tired of it.
hian said:
it rings completely hollow to me.
It really doesn’t matter what it rings to you. Not even being dismissive. You really can’t run around telling black people that they have no right to dislike a portrayal of a black man in the media. Your perception of blackness and what black people act like, and your opinion on how black people should engage with black characters written by non-black people don’t have any merit in that arena.
hian said:
Some people just liked Barret because he was "hood". Half of the local teen-aged drug-dealers and thugs in my circle at the time played this game for Barret alone. They didn't touch gaming in general. They made an exception for FFVII, because, and I'm paraphrasing "Cloud's a thug with big-ass sword and Barret's a gangta with a gat for an arm".
It’s almost like…there are and were few black people in video games…and people liked him…because they identified with the fact he was black.
Still really don’t care about your anecdotes or the preferences of ya “thugs” tho, so I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.
hian said:
This tells me all I need to know about your knowledge about linguistics.
Let’s not.
hian said:
Simply put though - this entire paragraph is word-salad except for the last sentence
The police not gonna arrest you if you ask for clarification.
hian said:
- which unfortunately is a moot point, because A.) Barret's slang is apparently good enough for a lot of people who use that slang in their every day speech
Source?
But on an actually serious note: Again. What does that have to do with me?
hian said:
B.) because it's a game with an age rating and target audience that demands certain concessions.
I don’t know what this means. Explain, if it pleases you. If you mean swearing, it’s not salient because speaking AAVE doesn’t necessitate swearing.
hian said:
I'm impressed that you could capture the "cadence" of Barret's writing, and how it "sounds completely unnatural" when it was all delivered in text.
And I’m pretty sure you can tell who is non-fluent or otherwise unfamiliar with English just by their diction and syntactical choices online. Let’s not.
hian said:
But I think we've established how much you know about linguistics by now.
Tell me something. Ignoring the obvious intentional provocation here, do you honestly think that a person needs to be degreed in order to recognise the speech idiosyncrasies of the communities that they belong to? Genuinely asking. Would you feel comfortable telling a Darija speaker that they don’t know what they’re talking about if they said the script for so-and-so Moroccan character sounds stiff and odd? Would you correct an Igbo person if they claimed a character who is supposedly from Anambra is speaking as if she just stepped out of Owerri?
hian said:
I'll grant the point on writing though, because everyone in the game says silly shit. That's called bad writing, and worse localization.
It’s almost like…that’s what I’ve been saying…this entire time….so odd…and Strange….
hian said:
At least Barret's writing was good enough to capture an audience of people who generally don't feel represented in media.
And then Square freed the slaves and passed the Voting Rights Act of ‘65. And unto them Square sayeth, “All ye, children of Ham, shalt receive
a fifth of Henny 40 ounces and a mule.” And lo, it was Good.
Seriously. Not to be funny, but it’s hard to take this sentence seriously when me…I am
Mariah that audience™. Like...sis...the #deezcourse. I’m not even sure what this is meant to communicate. “I haven’t heard this criticism before, therefore you must be wrong”? “I think it’s good enough, therefore it’s above criticism”?
I hope you realise that this entire exercise has been in essence:
Me: Barret’s AAVE sounds stiff and a bit weird
You: How can that be true when I know a black person that likes Barret?
I mean, I hope you can recognise how patently ridiculous this entire thing is.
hian said:
Firstly, Barret's speech isn't a dialect - it's a sociolect.
AAVE (like MLE) is both. It’s spoken by African Americans and is indigenous to the United States. Globally, other black people have pidgins, patwa, creoles, and/or other variants of English or whatever imperial language was “imported” to them by invasion. Moreover, AAVE exists on a continuum and speciates with travel. For example, in addition to their own creole, the way Gullahs speak AAVE is heavily and directly influenced by their Krio and Mende ancestry, and is markedly different from how the average black New Yorker speaks. A New Yorker in turn is different from a Louisianan Creole, and there are even accents and vocabulary unique to major cities (e.g. New Orleans versus Baltimore versus Philly).
It still doesn’t matter, because I’m not interested in semantic arguments. It’s not relevant.
hian said:
Secondly and actually, there very often are discrete differences between those and actual languages.
No. There’s a reason that people are forever running around spouting that Weinreich quote. “Language” and “dialect” are largely political distinctions, hence why Swedish and Norwegian are considered separate languages, and Dutch and Afrikaans…but Mandarin and Cantonese are discussed as “dialects” of Chinese, and Idemili can be indecipherable to eastern speakers and has a million orthographic oddities, but is considered mere “regional flavour” of a single tongue. This paradigm is not some oddity. It’s quite common, especially amongst languages with massive amounts of speakers, or speakers separated by considerable geographic difference. Bet money that if you touch down in the Ninth Mile countryside or somewhere in the Caribbean, you won’t understand a word of what anyone is saying. But will they be speaking English? Yes.
Is there sometimes a distinction between a language and a dialect drawn for convenience sake? Yeah. Are there any hard and fast rules? No. And regardless, this is another pointless belabouring of semantics.
hian said:
Several in fact - Starting with the rather obvious one of them being informal subsets of an overarching and formally structuralized language, which often have no written language to accompany them
I don’t get what you’re saying. There are loads of “formal, structured” languages that have no writing system to accompany them, either because that system was destroyed or mostly destroyed by colonisation (e.g. Nsibiri), or the language is/was based entirely in verbal communication and just never had one. I’m not sure when a writing system became necessary to qualify as a language. In any case, AAVE—like onwu, or pidgins, or any other English variants—is written with the Latin alphabet.
hian said:
- and even when they do, the written expression of the dialect being informal and unstructured as well.
I hope you’re not saying that AAVE and other dialects are “unstructured,” because if you are, you are wrong as hell. Full stop. They have systems of grammar, and if you violate those systems, it’s immediately obvious to native speakers. I don’t feel like writing some treatise on grammar rules, but case in point and the most popular example: the habitual be…an extremely simple and intuitive tense/conjugation with implicit meaning that non-speakers stay fucking up when trying to sound funny.
hian said:
all incorrect when used in writing that is not supposed to directly quoted speech.
Personally, I tend towards the school of sociolinguistic thought that says distinctions of “correct” and “incorrect” are meaningless when speaking about communication, and when applied across dialects. AAVE is not “incorrect English,” and speaking English incorrectly is not AAVE. You can speak AAVE incorrectly (because, again, it has grammar and context-based vocabulary) and still not be speaking Standard English. Nor is AAVE simply a type of pronunciation. As I said, it’s not just chopping the G’s off gerunds, and reducing it to that (written or otherwise) doesn’t even follow logically. I meant it when I said doing such is silly (and frankly lazy) and can be considered a form of linguistic othering. Speakers of Standard English only have their own speech eccentricities (say, flapping like hell), and yet you would never see some shit like, "I was wedding the budder knife cuz I needed to warsh it afder spilling musderd onnit fifdeen times,” for a speaker of General American.
hian said:
They're all wrong linguistically speaking, and they're all right in terms of story-telling effect insofar they manage to convey the type of voice they're supposed to convey.
hian said:
and so to express that in writing is done to keep the flavor of that difference which otherwise would be complete lost in what would then be assumed to be just "standardized speech".
No. If you can actually speak AAVE, I guarantee you that you can communicate that a character is a black AAVE speaker without describing their race, skin colour, or denoting it orthographically at all. I honestly don’t give much of a shit whether it’s indicated punctuationally or isn’t, but the latter is very much is possible to accomplish.
If I introduce a character by making them say something like: “Nah, he stay tight as hell, but I told him he could catch the hands real quick and all of a sudden he out here acting like he don’t what it is,”
I’m pretty sure you know that character is black.
hian said:
So why can't Barret's slang just be another way of being black then?
If Barret is a character that was intentionally to sound hokey because he’s a non-AAVE speaker who speaks like he does to sound tough, then that would be fine. But I think you and I both know that’s not the case. The question comes down to whether we acknowledge that AAVE is not just pronunciation (or some weird approximation used to represent pronunciation), is not just Standard English spoken “incorrectly,” does have a set of grammatical regulations, and can, in fact, be spoken incorrectly. I mean, if you don’t recognise all that, and you really think it’s just some random bullshit language mangling, then oh well. We have nothing to talk about.
If you do, then I don’t know what exactly the point of any of this was.
Like, let me ask you a very fair question. What exactly are you even arguing and why? Do you know?
hian said:
I'd have asked what you meant if I felt confused about what you said. I didn't however, because it looked pretty clear from your specific choice of words.
And again. You were wrong. Your misinterpretation is your own fault, not mine.
hian said:
Maybe, if you feel misunderstood despite this that you should refrain from posting shit without a care in the world for the meaning of the words you choice while topping it off with silly gifs.
Feel free to ignore my posts, because ain’t nobody was talking to you to begin with.
Anyway, buy
Pep Rally on
iTunes.
EDIT:
I'm still miffed that they gave him sunglasses, though.
I'm gonna die (of laughter) if they turn Barret into BERETTA, LORD OF THE SUPREME EDGE, because that would be mad funny.
about ethnolinguistic "authenticity" and presenting an argument from authority on strength of the apparent reception from other blacks™. 
