@Groth The Mulan live action movie, unless it's being given a major revision, doesn't really offer a perspective on Japanese imperialism or this period of time, no.
There are quite a few Chinese language movies set in this era that do touch on it directly as well, though granted they're not from like...the state run media or anything.
@Groth said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
... I have no idea what either of you are even trying to say anymore.
that's been apparent from the very start
I think that this conversation has spun out to the point of absurdity, but I'll say that the comparison to "Schindler's List" is absurd. Nobody walks away from Schindler's List thinking "Man, Oskar Schindler really loved Hitler."
We have taken issue with this character because they are a staunch monarchist who loves Hirohito and will ardently argue against democratic and communist ideologies. They are not an "Oskar Schindler" character.
@juneko said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
I think that this conversation has spun out to the point of absurdity, but I'll say that the comparison to "Schindler's List" is absurd. Nobody walks away from Schindler's List thinking "Man, Oskar Schindler really loved Hitler."
We have taken issue with this character because they are a staunch monarchist who loves Hirohito and will ardently argue against democratic and communist ideologies. They are not an "Oskar Schindler" character.
I thought we already established that you have no issue with the character because they're not actually a member of the IJA and this thread is now about WW2 movies.
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
As a reminder, this thread is not in the Hog Pit, and while argument (and strong argument) is fine, please refrain from personal attacks.
I don't play on Savage Skies and I am pretty unlikely to play on Savage Skies in the near term simply because I am absolutely terrible at playing multiple characters at the same time.
However as an outside observer whos only familiarity with the game is the wiki. I really get the distinct feeling that neither @marsmrsmars nor @juneko are coming at this issue from a genuine concern of playing this game.
The premise of Savage Skies is that a group of ex-military people and civilians join the Sky Guard to fight fascists together. It should go without saying that members of an anti-fascist militia are not going to be fascists. The game also clarifies that you're not allowed to play ex-nazis and in light of this debate they added the additional clarification that all characters from authoritarian states need to be explicitly opposed to excesses, war crimes and atrocities.
As such I think it's very clear that the way this game is intended to be played is that no member of the Sky Guard is meant to be assumed to be associated with any kind of war time atrocity regardless if whatever military branch they are associated with performed those atrocities in the actual WW2. Not only are those atrocities by and large scrubbed out of this timeline but you should assume those Sky Guard characters are opposed to them happening and would presumably have found some way to avoid participating.
While it's fine to raise questions regarding how Hirohito should appropriately be handled, the game appears to be clearly set in the European theater and anything happening in Asia is only background. A background where even though the game is started in 1938, the 1937 invasion of China isn't on the timeline yet so assuming that a fellow member of the Sky Guard participated in the Nanjin Massacre comes across as somewhat ludicrous as you have no reason to think that event has even happened.
If your interpretation of someone having an RP hook about being a monarchist or communist is that they're a fascist complicit in war crimes, I don't think this kind of game is suitable for you. I honestly don't think there's anything the game staff can do that will make you happy because the game relies upon you taking the point of view that everyone in the Sky Guard are on the same side and you are actively looking for reasons to think they're not.
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
@Groth You completely miss the point yet again by saying "worshipping Hirohito is okay because we don't even know if the Rape of Nanking happened yet!"
Would it be okay if someone played someone who really loves Hitler because the lore dictates that Hitler never rose to power and never initiated the holocaust?
No.
No it wouldn't.
This isn't a matter of in-character involvement in warcrimes or in-character thoughts on that, it's a matter of OOC perspective with the knowledge we as human beings hold today.
I already said that I thought that the admins were doing a pretty good job. You are simply a contrarian and have been contrarian the entire time, trying to play devil's advocate for characters worshipping what is basically the parallel of Adolf Hitler in Asia. Me disagreeing with your inane arguments and pedantic nitpicks is not me arguing against the staff. It's me arguing against you.
I'm going to put my hand up and say I don't know much of anything about Hirohito, nor the IJA. I feel very embarrassed reading this thread because it's obviously something that had serious consequences on human history and that I should have been educated about it in school, though I wasn't. I instead learned more about lines of Royal Birtish succession than just about any other historical topic, which I must say was a profound waste of my time. It's evident to me that Eurocentric bias has serious impacts on our education system and cataclysmically, our ability to empathise with and connect with other human beings who have a family history tied to the era.
I know that as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, I feel upset when I encounter people who don't know the facts about it, most especially if they actively dismiss, minimise or deny it. And I feel sympathy for the people on this thread who feel gaslighted by the treatment of a similar atrocity against their own people.
I'm going to make it a point to go and educate myself about this and then, hopefully, pass it on. I was vaguely aware of a history of fascism in Japan, but not the details of what occurred. I don't know if @marsmrsmars and @juneko play this game, and can't fault them if this has left a bad taste in their mouths, but if you do, I play this guy and would be interested in learning more about this through your characters' perspectives.
@Kestrel said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
I know that as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, I feel upset when I encounter people who don't know the facts about it, most especially if they actively dismiss, minimise or deny it. And I feel sympathy for the people on this thread who feel gaslighted by the treatment of a similar atrocity against their own people.
I'll just echo this and add that I sincerely hope my attempt to explain American cultural bias is not taken as an attempt to gaslight or to justify said bias. What happened in Asia during WWII was abominable. (specifically directed to @marsmrsmars and @juneko)
I do think we have to be careful about demonizing with too broad a brush though, because that's a slippery slope to racism. And certainly no side has its hands entirely clean (firebombing Dresden and dropping the a-bomb on civilian cities was pretty abominable too).
The leader-admiring thing? That's a subtlety and I can see both sides. Personally I would not be bothered by a character who had been convinced by propaganda that their country's leader was a good guy, even if that leader were Stalin or Hirohito. Especially if it were coming from a place of wanting to explore that character learning the truth and coming to grips with the reality that their beloved leader was partaking in war crimes. Admittedly, though, that might be too subtle for most MU stories and I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to nope out of it on principle.
All things considered, I think the game has good policies in place.
@faraday said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
The leader-admiring thing? That's a subtlety and I can see both sides. Personally I would not be bothered by a character who had been convinced by propaganda that their country's leader was a good guy, even if that leader were Stalin or Hirohito. Especially if it were coming from a place of wanting to explore that character learning the truth and coming to grips with the reality that their beloved leader was partaking in war crimes. Admittedly, though, that might be too subtle for most MU stories and I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to nope out of it on principle.
I'm not sure it's too subtle for most MU stories; I do think it's too personal for most discussions about broad themes on a MU, though, in the sense that most people even on the game are probably never going to perceive any nuanced or slow character shift, if Kazuko decides to play it that way, simply because she probably won't interact with 50% of the game's entire player base over the course of its existence, especially not to that intimate a level.
A lot of very deep and meaningful and character-driven stories are told on MUs and most of us just don't see them, and that's fine, it just also makes it difficult to use that as a column for discussion on threads such as this one.
@faraday said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
The leader-admiring thing? That's a subtlety and I can see both sides. Personally I would not be bothered by a character who had been convinced by propaganda that their country's leader was a good guy, even if that leader were Stalin or Hirohito. Especially if it were coming from a place of wanting to explore that character learning the truth and coming to grips with the reality that their beloved leader was partaking in war crimes. Admittedly, though, that might be too subtle for most MU stories and I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to nope out of it on principle.
I would personally feel immensely disgusted interacting with any character who tried saying Hitler wasn't so bad, even if they didn't know the facts, even though the Holocaust hadn't properly started in the alternate timeline. (Per official dates; though a sense of fear/unease should have certainly started setting in.)
Like, upfront, just gonna say, I don't want to do it and will probably leave a scene if that happens. That kind of thing happens today and is used to justify modern antisemitism. Even an imagined world with an alternate timeline can't alter the real world context it's being played in.
As a note, I may feel differently about this if the Savage Skies hadn't been intentionally revised to put everyone on the side of relative good. I maintain there could be value in stories that feature even PC-controlled fascists, but these would have to be played in such a way that I understand the player's intentions are specifically to ridicule and criticise, not exonerate fascism. The Savage Skies doesn't allow for such ambiguity, so I'd prefer to see only characters that are unambiguously sympathetic — and I have no interest in reading any attempts to cast any Hitler fanboys as such.
@Kestrel said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
Like, upfront, just gonna say, I don't want to do it and will probably leave a scene if that happens.
I probably would too, but my point was that there's a difference between saying "I don't personally want to interact with this concept" and "Nobody should be allowed to play that concept". Both approaches are completely understandable, but ultimately the latter is a call only the game admin can make.
The difference to me between Communism, State Shinto and Nazism in terms of how it connects characters to atrocities is that while large scale atrocities were performed in the name of all three, it's only Nazism where atrocities are part of the actual ideology. The Japanese are even to this day known for their rampant xenophobia but that xenophobia isn't something that's packaged into a coherent ideology, it's the result of centuries of insular culture and extremely limited immigration, only something like 1.5% of the population are not native Japanese.
During WW2 and under the direction of Hirohito, the Japanese military (both the IJA and the IJN) took a pretty clear stance that the ends justifies the means and the lives of non-Japanese don't matter. They were not concerned about taking prisoners, civilian casualties, forcing women into sex slavery or the rampant use of torture. What makes it particularly awkward even today is that Japan never truly addressed any of this and the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge that many of these events ever happened.
That said I disagree with the notion this means that you shouldn't be allowed to play former members of the IJN or IJA because they're too closely linked with fascism or that supporting the cultural idea of the Japanese emperor should be viewed as supporting fascism.
@Kestrel said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
I'm going to put my hand up and say I don't know much of anything about Hirohito, nor the IJA. I feel very embarrassed reading this thread because it's obviously something that had serious consequences on human history and that I should have been educated about it in school, though I wasn't. ... It's evident to me that Eurocentric bias has serious impacts on our education system and cataclysmically, our ability to empathise with and connect with other human beings who have a family history tied to the era.
I have to second this - my education was lacking generally because Steiner (whose own behaviour was very questionable when it came to race, gender and being in touch with any form of reality) education didn't seem to cover much history. But particularly outside of the Eurocentric view, there was nothing.
As an aside, when we moved to Australia and I went to the museum there on the history of the country, I came out entirely horrified and ashamed to be British.
@JinShei said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
@Kestrel said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
I'm going to put my hand up and say I don't know much of anything about Hirohito, nor the IJA. I feel very embarrassed reading this thread because it's obviously something that had serious consequences on human history and that I should have been educated about it in school, though I wasn't. ... It's evident to me that Eurocentric bias has serious impacts on our education system and cataclysmically, our ability to empathise with and connect with other human beings who have a family history tied to the era.
I have to second this - my education was lacking generally because Steiner (whose own behaviour was very questionable when it came to race, gender and being in touch with any form of reality) education didn't seem to cover much history. But particularly outside of the Eurocentric view, there was nothing.
As an aside, when we moved to Australia and I went to the museum there on the history of the country, I came out entirely horrified and ashamed to be British.
I have the minor benefit of having grown up between two countries, one of which used to be a British colonial territory but is also somewhere up there in the top 5 most hated countries at the moment, at least in Britain. I'm totally used to answering for each of my countries' crimes whenever I'm in the other one. 
@JinShei said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
I came out entirely horrified and ashamed to be British.
Almost every people has done horrid things to others. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be horrified of, and honest about, our past but let it not colour your own self-opinion. Don't find fault where there is none.
He/Him
I am on the fence about that. I think one can really examine the ways one has benefited and tacitly even participated and taken advantage of egregious things done in the name of one's culture or religion and it isn't bad to experience that pain and shame. It is important to not necessarily wallow in it which is where some people get stuck.
@Tinuviel I think the new information about something that is part of my identity should change how I view it. Rather like being part of a political party, I feel I should acknowledge when things weren't right, and when actions harmed others. I should feel strong emotions when justice is not done.
Doing so doesn't harm my self-esteem. Almost the opposite.
@JinShei said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
I think the new information about something that is part of my identity should change how I view it.
Of course. I simply meant that constantly feeling ashamed for things done by other people in the past - even the recent past - isn't helpful. One shouldn't be overwhelmed with the shame of being something because someone else that was that thing did horrid things.
I would never advocate that anyone personally beat themselves up for the actions of their ancestors, but what I inferred from @JinShei is a sense of shame as the result of a loss of national pride. I imagine it's a lot like finding out your childhood hero isn't as great as you thought they were.
And I think, personally, it's good for people to let go of national pride, at least in the sense where it becomes tribal and creates a feeling of righteousness in viewing their nation against the world, or sees their history and culture as superior to others. When school systems don't teach the honest truth about their country's history — and every country has done bad things — this becomes easy to believe because we want to believe good, pure, moral things about ourselves and our surrounding foundation. And that can easily plant the seeds for enabling imperialism, or even internally, the existing systems of class conflict that you haven't been taught to recognise.
@Groth The Mulan live action movie, unless it's being given a major revision, doesn't really offer a perspective on Japanese imperialism or this period of time, no.
There are quite a few Chinese language movies set in this era that do touch on it directly as well, though granted they're not from like...the state run media or anything.
