When Resident Evil 5 came out, I remember there was much outcry about it being racist, because you play as a white guy and you shoot a bunch of Black people. What could be wrong with that? This came about because I was listening to a video game podcast (The Besties) ranking the best Resident Evil games and RE5 didn’t make it past the first round. Mostly because it failed to fix the mistakes of RE4 and didn’t add anything new or innovative (except maybe the co-op). So I guess you could call this a “Late to the Game“. I played RE5 way after it came out, but not, like,…
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Are Orcs Racist?
This was a recent hot take on the interwebs, and I love the low-hanging fruit so… I actually have a little expertise in this (as much as one can about a swords & sorcery race that doesn’t exist). I have read the D&D Player’s Guide & Dungeon Master’s Guide cover-to-cover, and written a novella about orcs. So I’ve done my research. I mean, I’m not savvy on the history of orcs in fiction, but I’ve got some stakes as a fiction writer. So the big debate is whether orcs are a stand-in for Black people, either in the tribal African “Shaka Zulu” sense or the “genetic predisposition” sense. There has…
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Analyzing the Disney Villains: Scar (The Lion King)
SCAR Origin: The Lion King (1994) It’s kind of nice to see a real royal struggle in a Disney film, with conspiracies and plotting and such. Scar is the power hungry brother to the king. He’s Claudius. He’s Iago. And he’s not that bad. Doesn’t hurt that his voice actor is Jeremy Irons, a voice that never deviates from snide, snake-like deviousness. It’s ironic this post is after Prince John’s, because they are not dissimilar. Motivation: Well, power is nice. But unlike Prince John, Scar wasn’t snubbed because of heredity or birth order. This takes place in nature, and the strongest rules. I don’t think Scar really wants to be…
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The Cliches of Africa
How to Write About Africa Here’s an excellent satire about writing about Africa. I think its point is more that Africa is always painted with the same brush, whether in fiction, non-fiction, movies, news, or other media, but it also has some good points about writing cliches. While reading this I thought a lot about Romancing the Stone, the Lion King, and even Shaka Zulu. I recently had a conversation with my father-in-law about why all these celebrities are suddenly involved in African charity – Bono, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Madonna, and the associated B- and C-listers like Randy Jackson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Alicia Keys, and on and on. We…
