Tag: the Acolyte

Is DEI about to DIE?

Is it in its last days? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

With the assassination attempt of Donald Trump, he has passed being in the bullseye, but DEI has not. Suppose you have been living under a rock somewhere. In that case, DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, which means focusing on every single minority group out there to exclude the majority in virtue signaling. It also means ignoring minor details for jobs like, oh, ability, experience, and other little stuff like that. Do you help fulfill the quota for sex, sexual orientation, and race? Welcome aboard!

A lot of it was going on with the Secret Service at the attempt being publicly seen to have huge problems and a lot of it was with what people saw the women doing who were part of the Secret Service. This isn’t just men who have been saying this. Women have been saying it too. One woman couldn’t reholster her pistol and the women were asking what they were doing and where they were going. (See here.)

This is not to say that women can’t do this job. I’m sure some could. There are some women out there who are great shots with guns. However, Donald Trump is a big man and if you are going to shield him, you need to be as big as he is. If you also don’t know what to do in a situation like this, you are more of a liability than you are an asset at that point.

The director of the Secret Service has come under fire for wanting a quota of 30% women by 2030 and for also remarks about the dangers of a sloped roof. We also know the assassin was in sight for thirty minutes before anything happened. Why wasn’t anything done?

It might not be any coincidence that shortly after this, Microsoft decides to axe an entire DEI team. At this, I rejoice. Loyal readers know I am deeply interested in the gaming community and nowadays, many of us are dreading new games coming out. Why? Because of DEI. We’re not getting games. We’re getting a political lecture.

Consider also the case of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. The Assassin’s Creed games have been known for historical accuracy in the past. Some people thought it could be used to rebuild Notre Dame after the fire. Now this new game is the first one set in Japan and who is upset about it the most?

The Japanese.

They even have a petition out demanding Ubisoft desist in making the game immediately. A lot of it centers around the character Yasuke. Now he is a real historical figure, but he is being made out to be much more than he was. He was an attendant to Nobunaga, but he was not officially a samurai.

There were plenty of Japanese figures that could be chosen, but Ubisoft decided to ignore all of those. Why? DEI. Oh. This black man who the Jesuits brought over is also supposed to be capable of being LGBTQ+. Yep. That makes sense.

Besides, in the game, the assassin is supposed to be able to blend into the crowd. Kill the target, then hide immediately before people realize what has happened. How will this go in Japan? “So the guy who stabbed the victim? Anything distinguishing about him that sets him apart from everyone else?”

Japan says this is a misunderstanding of Japanese culture and the role of the samurai. They also say it will lead to Asian racism. Besides, how do you make a whole game out of a character that we only have a  few scant documents about?

Gamers have been so sick of this that now we have a website set up to deal with this. DEIdetected.com. If your game has the influence of companies like Sweet Baby Inc. involved, we don’t want them. More and more gamers are going to retro games because they can play games without being lectured on politics that way.

The LGBTQ movement is also getting tiresome for gamers. There are plenty of LGBTQ people who just want to live their lives in peace. When you start putting it in everything, everyone gets tired of it. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has been a massive failure and yet they are introducing a new character, Victoria Frias. Who is she? Mrs. Freeze and surprise, surprise, she’s a lesbian.

I watch the videos people make complaining about this. I don’t see anything that indicates to me that these are staunch evangelical Christians. They’re just people who want to play games without politics.

It’s not just games that are having this. Movies that go DEI are not being popular. The usual claim is that many men don’t want to see movies with strong women. Sorry, but I think the Alien franchise and Kill Bill and others did just fine. For the gaming world, there was no uproar when it was discovered that Samus Aran in Metroid was a woman. No one complained about Tomb Raider. (If anything, most men loved Lara Croft. I wonder why….)

Also, consider a TV series like The Acolyte. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a viewer score of 15% (As of the time of this writing). People who are fans of the series tell me that it is completely out of sync with what George Lucas started and dumps all over the franchise. It is simply pushing a woke agenda.

Contrast this with a major motion picture success last year, The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I rarely see movies due to low income now, but I made sure to see this one. I saw in it a love letter to the fans of the game that focused on facets of the game even going all the way back. Spike from Wrecking Crew is even a semi-prominent character in parts of the movie. I even made a video responding to Grace Randolph on it. (I also have someone on campus who is going to teach me about YouTube editing and producing videos so Gaming Theologian should be back soon.)

What makes great games and movies and TV shows successful? Simple point. They are fun. We enjoy them. We don’t go to these to get told that we need to celebrate diversity or that white men are the spawn of the devil. We go to them because we want to have fun.

If you do it right, you can still get a message across in a fun story. There are several fandoms of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings today and yet both of these series are teaching a Christian way of the world. However, both writers made sure that they were making good stories. Most Christian media today is “Hi. We have to point out to you that this is a Christian movie explicitly so we have to have one scene with a cross where we spell out the gospel entirely because you might miss it otherwise. Also, every Christian will be a charming and lovely character and every non-Christian is completely evil.” It doesn’t work when the Woke do it either where every LGBTQ or minority character is completely awesome and every cis straight white male is evil. Most people at the beginning of The Acolyte said the villain will be the straight white male.

If you are to have characters that are “diverse” in a game or movie or TV show, it needs to be natural and relevant to the story and not forced or artificial. I think of Barrett from Final Fantasy VII. He was a black man who was certainly very gruff, but he also had a great love for his daughter and would do anything to help her out. Many of us liked the character.

Consider comic book characters as well. There is a push to often take established characters who have had a history of having romances with the opposite sex, and all of a sudden make them same-sex attracted. If you want to have a superhero who is same-sex attracted, knock yourself out, but make your own. Don’t throw out a character’s entire history just because you want to shoehorn an agenda into it.

However, if you want to write that story, what the fans want is not diversity for the sake of diversity. What they want is a good story. Yes. Believe it or not if you aren’t a part of these worlds, people who read comic books and play video games care about good stories. We want narratives that hold together. We want heroes we can love because they’re heroes and villains we can seek to take down because they’re villains. We don’t mind some shades of grey where it’s hard to tell who is a hero and who is a villain and we don’t mind it when we have a hard time deciding what the right moral choice to make is. That makes it more authentic for us in many ways.

What will Microsoft do about DEI in the future? I don’t know, but I have high hopes. I have high hopes the time has come for DEI to D-I-E. It has been a kiss of death to series that it has been in. Get back to making great entertainment again.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

The Acolyte vs. Hogwart’s Legacy

What is the difference between these two? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I’ve never been a Star Wars fan.

I know for some of you, that’s automatically blasphemy, but I was not raised in a household where sci-fi was common. I could say the same about video games, but they were just starting out and I was in an elementary school where people were talking about them and my Dad had a Colecovision that I got started on. Either way, the majority of my knowledge of Star Wars came secondhand. My Dad and I never that I recall watched any of the original trilogy together.

I have seen episodes 4 and 5 and I did go with some friends who wanted to see 1. My ex-wife wanted to see 7 and 8 so I took her to see those. Other than that, I don’t have that much experience with the series.

I say that because passion for the franchise cannot be genuine on my part. I cannot begin to just watch the episodes and think that I am up on all the lore behind it like people who have been following the series for decades can. Thus, I haven’t seen an episode of the Acolyte, but I have been watching the controversy over it.

Fans of the series tell me the problem with the Acolyte is that it is essentially dumping all over the lore. Is the series woke? So I am told. Does it make a big deal about diversity? Apparently. Both of those would be problematic enough, but the main thing I hear from people is that it has no real story. You are not invested in the characters.

What many on the side of the woke forget is that they are putting the message as primary and the story as secondary. Do that, and you lose both. Attempts are made to go after the fans and say it’s their fault. If the material was good, the fans would enjoy it. You know what the fans want the most?

A good story.

“Look at how many non-white people we have in this series.”

Fans don’t care.

“Look at how much different marginalized people groups are represented.”

Fans don’t care.

“Look at the movements we are making for LGBTQ people!”

Fans don’t care.

Now fans might think some of those things could be alright, but they don’t want the story sacrificed for those. That’s not the draw. The draw for them of Star Wars has never been the lightsabers and the usage of the force. Those are cool things, but the main draw is the story that resonates from those.

Lightsabers are the medium. The story is what is communicated through the lights and special effects. Fans would rather have a story that was set in a distant past in the Star Wars universe without lightsabers and the force to show how those things came to be than to have an abundance of those and a terrible story.

So now let’s talk about a series I do know something about.

My sister recently gave me a $100 gift card to the Nintendo Eshop. I bought Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, since I knew there was controversy around it and I wanted to see it firsthand. The big thing was one of the characters was supposed to be transgender. The thing is, that’s only said in one paragraph at one point and you could honestly easily miss it if you were going through it. It plays ZERO relevance to the story.

So I had enough left over and Hogwart’s Legacy was on sale so I picked that up.

Hogwart’s Legacy was all set to be game of the year, but what happened? Well, J.K. Rowling said some statements that were deemed to be “transphobic.” In other words, she supported basic biology we should all know. Because of that, even when game sites were reviewing the game, they always thought they had to bring up what Rowling said. People streaming the game when it was brought out were mobbed en masse by angry leftists complaining about them being “transphobes” and there was even a website set up to list who had “streamed that wizarding game.”

But you know what?

Fans didn’t care.

So I turn on this game and what do I see before too long. Well, I am entering into Gringott’s Bank and then going to Hogwart’s and I have a professor named Weasley. I get to put on the sorting hat. (Ravenclaw for me) I go to Hogsmeade and find a shop set up by Ollivander there who has a new one in addition to Diagon Alley. I see Zonko’s Joke Shop.

In other words, I am walking into an established universe.

When I am in Hogsmeade, I go to the tomes shop and before too long, I realize, “Hey. The guy running this is black.” That wasn’t a problem for me. That’s how diversity should go. When diversity is truly there, you don’t have to point it out. It just naturally blends into the society.

Yes, the game has a main story quest to follow, but I am honestly enjoying more now just exploring the world of the game and going on the side quests first. So many aspects I uncover leave me feeling like I am in the world of Hogwarts. That also is the goal of a good game, a good movie, a good book, and a good TV show. It is to leave the people behind with the proper feeling that they should have. Yes. This is one time where feeling is the proper word.

Good stories are meant to draw you in and in that way, the message still comes through loud and clear. Christians often like Christian movies, but non-Christians don’t. They know that they’re being preached to. They don’t like the way non-Christians are depicted as wicked every time and Christians are perfect saints. They don’t like that the makers think you’re so stupid that they have to explicitly spell out the gospel for you every time.

What do gamers want? A good game. What do moviegoers want? A good movie. What do TV watchers want? A good show. What do book lovers want? A good story. All of us want something we can enjoy and if you are not reaching out and giving your fans something they can enjoy, they will never get your message. The only people who get it are the ones who already believe it.

On our side, that means Christian media doesn’t do much good if we want it to reach non-Christians and yet only Christians watch it. If we think the message is primary and sacrifice the story for that, then the audience we want to reach gets neither. We must make the story primary and smuggle the story in under that to get past the watchful dragons Lewis told us about.

Woke material doesn’t do that either. Not only that, but when people don’t like it, the fans are blasted as being bigots, racists, phobes, etc.

So let me deal with some of that.

I love the Metroid games. It was a major shock for fans of the first game when it was revealed the character you’ve played the whole game is a woman. Did that stop fans from playing the series? No. We love the series still.

I remember going to see Wonder Woman. I thought that was an incredible movie. I left the theater wishing there were more movies that were out like that. Having the main character be a woman didn’t matter to me.

I saw Black Panther. I thought it was an alright film. I wasn’t at all bothered that the main character was black.

I like Final Fantasy VII. I don’t mind that Barrett is black. He’s really an awesome character.

Diversity in and of itself is not a problem for us.

When it is a problem is when it is not organic. Diversity needs to blend into the story and not be the story. When you have to point out diversity, that is a problem.

Hogwart’s Legacy is a great game and will go down in history as a great game. I am drawn into the story and I can spend a lot of time wandering around Hogwart’s Castle just exploring without even engaging in combat because of how much I am drawn into the world. The developers respected the lore and they respected the fans.

I don’t know anyone getting drawn into the Star Wars world because of the Acolyte. The developers I understand have not respected the lore and they have not respected the fans.

It’s not hard to guess which of these two is most popular and which of these sells the most.

I suspect some time in the future, many will look back and wonder what our society was thinking by following this woke ideology. Fortunately, great entertainment will still be there waiting for us by the people who care about the material and care about a good story.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)