#its kinda fucking racist without ever exactly getting better in that regard and had a likewise problematic history wi

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shoutouts to tumblr being kinda normal about homestuck for a while until that poll thing happened

[rosekin]

FIRE EMBLEM REVIEWS

Fire Emblem 1, or “The Marth Game”: My advice to everyone everywhere is to never play an RPG thats released on the NES. 0/10

FE2, Gaiden: I really wish this one wasn’t an NES RPG because it’s honestly really promising. Here’s hoping it gets a remake one day haha 2/10

FE3, Mystery of the Emblem, or “Marth 2″: NES RPG 0/10

FE4, Genealogy of the Holy War: Ah, a SNES RPG! Those are often good. Too bad this one has atrocious map design, boring characters, poorly balanced gameplay, inherent genetic superiority built into its royal units, and incest. c’est la vie, 0/10

FE5, Thracia 776: It’s not a BAD game exactly, but it is a game that was designed with the kind of “difficulty” that exists purely to sell strategy guides. 3/10

FE6, Binding Blade: Entering into the GBA Era, we have a game that is incredibly dull and has a lot of poor design decisions reminiscent of FE4. It gets points for including Roy from Super Smash Bros Melee, however. Bold choice, Intelligent Systems. 2/10

FE7, Blazing Blade: The prequel to Binding Blade, Blazing Blade is better than Binding Blade in every regard except instead of Roy, Binding Blade has 3 main protagonists and the only good one is the one with the least screentime. Lyn is a cool and interesting character, but Eliwood is too milquetoast and Hector is a dick. 6/10

FE8, Sacred Stones: It has good maps, good characters, an actual postgame, and introduces a feature that makes it far more replayable than previous games, Class Trees. No longer does every Mage become a Sage, for they could also become a Mage Knight. For certain base classes, this opens up a range of up to 4 possible options for their final class! Some people might complain that Sacred Stones is too easy, but I’ll take a game easy enough that I can use whatever party I want over something like Genealogy where units who aren’t mounted are absolutely worthless any day. No, the only complaint I have about Sacred Stones is the unfortunate misogyny in the writing surrounding Eirika. I highly recommend that if you play the game, you use the Restoration Queen fan hack(it also adds gay marriage which is cool.) 9/10, 10/10 with Restoration Queen

FE9, Path of Radiance: Ike game, baby. This is the Fire Emblem I’d recommend the most for sure. The first game in the series that’s not largely from the perspective of nobility who are in charge of armies, The central players to this plot is a small mercenary company. It’s a very refreshing change of pace. The only problem I have with it is in regards to the Fantasy Racism aspect. I’m the kind of person who would rather have, like, Racism With Furries in a game like this than Actual Racism being portrayed, and PoR honestly handles it rather well, but it always grinds my gears when they’re like “oh yeah mixed people are the most oppressed because the humans and the furries both shun them” like god thats not how it works. Aside from that, wonderful game. 9.5/10

FE10, Radiant Dawn: Ike 2, this time with co-protagonist Micaiah, the first female lord to not be a naive, softhearted damsel, who hails from the “evil” country from the last game. It’s hard to talk about without spoilers, but Radiant Dawn is very pro-proletariat. Also the “Ike gay” subtext becomes closer to being just regular text, and new character Heather is definitively a lesbian. This is, very unfortunately, the best Fire Emblem will ever do for gay rights. 10/10

FE11, Shadow Dragon: A remake of FE1 that doesn’t manage to throw off its shackles of being based off of an NES RPG, which limits its gameplay and story. 3/10

FE12, New Mystery of the Emblem: A remake of FE3 that is arguably worse than its original in some ways, and started the trend of having player avatar characters that ruin the plot by being overly significant. 0/10

FE13, Awakening: Very boring. Makes a lot of gameplay changes that absolutely trivialize the gameplay aspect, as if the bland map design didn’t do that enough already. Had to introduce difficulty modes that made all of the enemies insanely strong with busted skills because that’s the only way this game could be remotely challenging. The characters are bland, the plot is borderline nonsensical, and Robin ruins it all as well.This game also introduces new series mainstays such as homophobia, pedophilia, and rampant oversexualization of women. 0/10

FE14, Fates(Birthright, Conquest, and Revelations): A game so nice you buy it thrice! Fates manages to take a lot of things from Awakenings gameplay and improve them enough that they’d be worth maybe a 3.5/10, if it wasn’t for the fact that Fates continues, and actually increases, the homophobia, pedophilia, and rampant oversexualization of women, as well as adding our fourth horseman of the anime apocalypse, our long lost friend Incest who hasn’t been seen since Genealogy. It’s okay, though, because you just grew up thinking you were siblings, you’re not actually related(except for Azura, who is your actual cousin so that excuse wouldn’t even work). On the bright side, Corrin is actually the avatar character who fits reasonably in the plot so far, if only because the plot of Fates is so laughably bad even compared to Awakening. I could rant about so many things about this terrible terrible game, but it’s already taking up too much of my review post as it is. 0/10.

FE15, Shadows of Valentia: Finally, a remake of FE2, I can’t wait to see what they’ve done with it. It’s got really cool kinda choppy animation in the CGI cutscenes I like that. Wow, they managed to capture the innovative gameplay of the original while updating it to be far less frustrating... And they managed to update the already surprisingly interesting plot by... adding unnecessary characters and making it way more classist and sexist. Great. 3.5/10

FE16, Three Houses: The gameplay, quite honestly? Worse than Fates. The story... I like the characters, and it’s not really as problematic as Fates(hardly any incest to speak of, the sexualization of women isn’t quite as bad, the homophobia is less “depicting gay people in gross ways” and more “the only options for dudes are a base gametwink, a free DLC twink, and a paid DLC twink”). Really the biggest stumbling block is they took the pitfall of doing Actual Racism instead of Fantasy Racism, and then they really fucked up by portraying it far worse than Path of Radiance did Furry Racism. In Path of Radiance, the racist people who join you consist of Soren, who has a Distrusting Furries pass on account of being mixed(I already complained about this) and Jill, who is from Daein(the Bad People country) and has had her brain poisoned by propaganda. Ike doesn’t coddle her on this, however, and tells her to shape up or get the boot. In Three Houses, characters are allowed to be racist with no repercussions. Pretty much any and all character growth connected to Stopping Being Racist is carried out through completely optional support conversations. This? Sucks! It sucks! uhhh 3.5/10 as well

[tumblunni]

Today’s weirdass yokai watch fact I have learned: Agent X is Injun Joe. He’s just.. Injun Joe. His japanese name is goddamn Injun Joe.

“Hey what’s an american thing? Men In Black and uhhhh RACISM”

His entire design is just fuckin Injun Joe, the version from a very particular tv show in japan, just fuckin recoloured purple. I never would have even known!!

So uhh yeah, good on you dub team for removing all that loaded roulette of a thing, holy fuckin shit...

I feel kinda bad for the japanese developers though because there’s no indication they really uhh.. KNEW anything about the whole native american situation at all. Apparantly the tales of tom sawyer was one of a few classic american books that got a kids show in japan, so the thought process behind this was probably just “this was my first childhood impression of what america is like, i should give it an affectionate reference”.

Which is uh.. its the same reason we have Jynx. Seriously! “Little Black Sambo” was another “classic western franchise” that japanese kids read in the 50s and 60s. Taking it completely out of context like that, the racist stereotype design of the earliest illustrations became seen as an iconic cartoon character and the japanese audience had no idea of its origins in anything negative.

This is why i really hate that whole “its a classic, so you’re not allowed to complain about the racism”. like there’s a big ol fat difference between simply understanding that the racism is a product of its time, vs YOURE NOT ALLOWED TO BE SAD ABOUT IT. Teaching friggin “classics” in this atmosphere of out of context dancing-around-the-elephant-in-the-room is how we get situations like this where people who don’t already know the context can just pick up the racism accidentally. Also seriously if we even had the slightest fuckin warning or even ACTUALLY TAUGHT KIDS that the racism is bad and its only here because this is an old book, then maybe itd be less goddamn traumatizing for the actual non white kids in the damn class...

I can still remember how my high school did this with of Mice Of Men, regarding ableism. Like it was friggin HIGH SCHOOL, there’s less of an excuse of ‘oh we cant explain, its too complicated for kids’! (Which is dumb anyway cos kids not already knowing about racism is like THE BIGGEST REASON you should tell them the thing is wrong/take the thing out when you talk about the book, otherwise it just goes into their brain unquestioned) Anyway, if you didnt already know, Of Mice And Men is a story all about a Scary Developmentally Disabled Man who is Just Like A Big Adult Child and is Big Scary Murderer and Too Dangerous To Live and The Only Way For Him To Be Happy Is To Die and Everyone He Ever Loved Is Finally Free Of The Burden of Him And He Would Be Happy That They Can Finally Be Happy. Yeah. Its fucked up and I hate it and I hate that it was just taught unchallenged and unquestioned. I didnt know I was autistic until i was an adult and this sort of message was the only perspective i was ever being given on what mental disabilities were, which probably contributed a whole lot to why i never got diagnosed and why i was goddamn terrified when i did finally find out. I’m so fuckin glad that being autistic is just.. like.. exactly the same as how I fuckin think, instead of this ridiculous gross fatalistic stereotype. And I hate looking back on how i blindly believed it and how i was rude to other autistic kids cos i fuckin DIDNT KNOW I WAS ONE OF THEM and thought it was a goddamn death sentence i had to avoid by being Aggressively Neurotypical At All Times.

But yeah this was indeed a book made in an older time where autism hadnt even been properly investigated by medical science and didnt even have a name. And by the standards of the time it’s comparatively progressive, because the story does indeed say this mentally ill man isnt actually evil, he’s just ACCIDENTALLY dangerous, and you’re supposed to feel sad that he has to die. But that doesn’t mean its goddamn true, it doesnt mean it should be taught as true, and it doesnt mean its not harmful to real people with real disabilities who are very likely sitting right there in this classroom listening to this tripe. I’m not saying don’t read any “classics” in class, just itd be nice if the teacher remotely aknowledged the problematic shit instead of reading it out as-is and not discussing a single thing. Like seriously it could flesh out the curriculum quite a bit if you added some essays like “explain why this thing is bigoted and the cultural context as to why it happened”. Or even just a goddamn warning at the beginning of the lesson that this chapter is gonna contain emotionally harrowing stuff! And its not even like its JUST “classics” that do this, the book directly after this in that same year of highschool was a modern thing about “oooh the scary inner mind of an autistic”, full of loads of stereotypes and weirdass child abuse apologism cos ~oh the kid was such a burden~ :/

So yeah. That stuff. Its bad.

It can lead to super outdated horrible stereotypes getting reintroduced into the brains of kids who dont know any better, or in this case foreign audiences who arent familiar with the cultural context. So that’s why I don’t blame nintendo for making a random villain named after the really insensitive name of an old not-exactly-well-portrayed villain from a “classic”. Instead I blame the people in the west who act so flippant about racism/other bigotries as long as its “classic”, its our fault that we’re sending this impression out to other countries.

Also its super depressing imagining this dude is meant to be the ghost of a guy with the same backstory as that dude from tom sawyer, aka a half native american mixed race man who only turned evil because he was treated like shit by racist bastards. Seriously it sucks how unsympathetically and scarily ‘ol IJ is portrayed in tom sawyer, but i guess again its a ‘for its time it was ahead of the curve’ sort of thing. Still not good though. The only thing more not gooder than that is if after he died with no sympathy from anyone forever he also came back as a weird purple slime ghost and continued suffering for more centuries :(

:(

:(

Man i usually love learning development trivia about games but this was really one of those facts thats more of a cursed thing :(

Aaaand ending with a random piece of trivia his japanese name is Injaneno which is a goddamn pun on That Damned Name mixed with a stereotypical italian mafia speak version of “dontcha know”. Or, well, the japanese stereotype of what italian mafia speak sounds like in japanese. Apparantly hokkaido accent is their equivelant of the ‘this character is foreign’ accent! Like how texas accents are for america and literally-everywhere-except-england accents are for britain. Its such a dumb trope, isnt it? “How do we know this character isn’t from this country? Cos they speak a very specific local accent of this country.” Its just the dumb stereotype of certain accents being uncultured or stupid or whatever so its a shorthand for ‘not fluent in the language’ even though being not fluent in the language sounds entirely fuckin different.

So yeh. Facts. Some of them kinda cursed. Also even more reasons to cry for goddamn MIB slime man...

oh and also his slime form in japanese is just “Demon Injaneno” instead of “The Executor”. which is an added layer of pun thats just like ‘dontcha know’ with an even more heavy accent. So i’m glad they kept the idea of scary alien blobman doom agent having goofy cute puns, and the whole X obsession is a nice way of punning without all them layers of weirdness.