Re: Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
Feb. 20th, 2021 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingOkay, so this is awkward to talk about, but…
There is one Black character in Ni No Kuni, and his thing is that he beats his wife. Like, right in front of you. His back is turned to the camera when he does it, but what’s happening is obvious. This is the only real instance of a negative emotion stronger than mild anger or gentle sadness in the game, and it’s… I mean, this is a poor word choice, but it’s striking.
As indicated by the game’s title, it takes place in two closely connected worlds, and the ten-year-old Oliver travels between a suburb of 1950s Detroit to a magical fantasy world with the intent of finding a way to save his dead mother. The idea is that his mother’s “soulmate” in the fantasy world has gone missing; and, if he can find and rescue her, then this might have an effect on his mother in his world.
One of Oliver’s traveling companions in the fantasy world is a girl from a vaguely Orientalist desert city modeled on Silk Road culture. Her counterpart in Oliver’s world is his best friend’s neighbor. Oliver has seen this girl looking out of her window, but he’s never spoken to her because she’s ostensibly too sick to leave the house.
It turns out that the neighbor girl was sick but has gotten better, and that she doesn’t leave her room because she’s scared of her father. Her father, a car mechanic, has had to work overtime to pay for her hospital bills, and he’s been taking his frustration out on his wife, which terrifies his daughter. Now that Oliver is a wizard, he can use magic to heal the dad’s heart, help the neighbor girl overcome her anxiety, and thus fill her counterpart in the fantasy world with the courage she needs to go on her own journey.
This is very much a ten-year-old’s wish-fulfillment fantasy, and it makes sense in its own way, but…
Both the neighbor girl and the fantasy girl have straight blond hair, bright blue eyes, and peach-tinted pale skin. It’s weird to call anyone speaking Japanese “white,” but almost everyone in the game is a generic light-skinned anime person. This means that the abusive husband’s Blackness really stands out.
And, you know, he gets better. After his heart is healed, he apologizes to his wife and hugs his daughter, and everything is okay. He helps you out with a sidequest later on in the game in a way that demonstrates his high competence as a mechanic. But still, for the one Black character in the game to be violent like that… And for there to be only one Black person in Detroit… And for there to be only one person of African descent in the Silk Road fantasy city of Al Mamoon, for that matter… And for both his wife and daughter to be coded as white… I just feel like there’s a lot of racial history at play here that isn’t given sufficient depth for its inclusion in the game to be worthwhile.
Much later in the game, it turns out that there’s a boy with slightly darker skin living next door to the neighbor girl, and Oliver has to heal his heart as well. This boy’s problem is that, although he loves sports, and especially track and field, he is constantly passed over for varsity teams despite the fact that he’s extremely talented, hard-working, and emotionally invested. To me, coming from my own experiences with the United States and its bullshit, the only way to interpret this situation is that this kid is being discriminated against because he’s mixed-race. So when Oliver uses magic to heal his heart and tells him that he just needs to believe in himself and not get discouraged, I was like, “Yeah, I don’t think ‘believing in yourself’ is the most useful way to address systemic racism in Jim Crow America at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.”
I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s more to American culture than hot dogs and hamburgers and saying hello to your neighbors from across their white-picket fences as you stroll down Main Street.
And you could counter this with, “But Ni No Kuni is a game for children that flattens and parodies all of the people and cultures it incorporates into its fantasy world,” and that’s fair. At the same time, I’m happy that Japanese game developers have since figured out that it’s okay to have more than one Black or dark-skinned person in any given game, and that it won’t break anyone’s sense of immersion to have NPCs walking around with a variety of skintones.
There is one Black character in Ni No Kuni, and his thing is that he beats his wife. Like, right in front of you. His back is turned to the camera when he does it, but what’s happening is obvious. This is the only real instance of a negative emotion stronger than mild anger or gentle sadness in the game, and it’s… I mean, this is a poor word choice, but it’s striking.
As indicated by the game’s title, it takes place in two closely connected worlds, and the ten-year-old Oliver travels between a suburb of 1950s Detroit to a magical fantasy world with the intent of finding a way to save his dead mother. The idea is that his mother’s “soulmate” in the fantasy world has gone missing; and, if he can find and rescue her, then this might have an effect on his mother in his world.
One of Oliver’s traveling companions in the fantasy world is a girl from a vaguely Orientalist desert city modeled on Silk Road culture. Her counterpart in Oliver’s world is his best friend’s neighbor. Oliver has seen this girl looking out of her window, but he’s never spoken to her because she’s ostensibly too sick to leave the house.
It turns out that the neighbor girl was sick but has gotten better, and that she doesn’t leave her room because she’s scared of her father. Her father, a car mechanic, has had to work overtime to pay for her hospital bills, and he’s been taking his frustration out on his wife, which terrifies his daughter. Now that Oliver is a wizard, he can use magic to heal the dad’s heart, help the neighbor girl overcome her anxiety, and thus fill her counterpart in the fantasy world with the courage she needs to go on her own journey.
This is very much a ten-year-old’s wish-fulfillment fantasy, and it makes sense in its own way, but…
Both the neighbor girl and the fantasy girl have straight blond hair, bright blue eyes, and peach-tinted pale skin. It’s weird to call anyone speaking Japanese “white,” but almost everyone in the game is a generic light-skinned anime person. This means that the abusive husband’s Blackness really stands out.
And, you know, he gets better. After his heart is healed, he apologizes to his wife and hugs his daughter, and everything is okay. He helps you out with a sidequest later on in the game in a way that demonstrates his high competence as a mechanic. But still, for the one Black character in the game to be violent like that… And for there to be only one Black person in Detroit… And for there to be only one person of African descent in the Silk Road fantasy city of Al Mamoon, for that matter… And for both his wife and daughter to be coded as white… I just feel like there’s a lot of racial history at play here that isn’t given sufficient depth for its inclusion in the game to be worthwhile.
Much later in the game, it turns out that there’s a boy with slightly darker skin living next door to the neighbor girl, and Oliver has to heal his heart as well. This boy’s problem is that, although he loves sports, and especially track and field, he is constantly passed over for varsity teams despite the fact that he’s extremely talented, hard-working, and emotionally invested. To me, coming from my own experiences with the United States and its bullshit, the only way to interpret this situation is that this kid is being discriminated against because he’s mixed-race. So when Oliver uses magic to heal his heart and tells him that he just needs to believe in himself and not get discouraged, I was like, “Yeah, I don’t think ‘believing in yourself’ is the most useful way to address systemic racism in Jim Crow America at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.”
I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s more to American culture than hot dogs and hamburgers and saying hello to your neighbors from across their white-picket fences as you stroll down Main Street.
And you could counter this with, “But Ni No Kuni is a game for children that flattens and parodies all of the people and cultures it incorporates into its fantasy world,” and that’s fair. At the same time, I’m happy that Japanese game developers have since figured out that it’s okay to have more than one Black or dark-skinned person in any given game, and that it won’t break anyone’s sense of immersion to have NPCs walking around with a variety of skintones.
