Makes me little sad when I remember b.orderlands is hella bigoted sometimes because I genuinely love so many of the characters they botched/forgot about due to bias….. Kat Jr, Yvette, Fiona, Sasha, Aurelia, Mordecai to some extent, Nisha, Helena Pierce, Captain Scarlett, The Calypsos, and you know what, Leda too. So much lost potential because they want to prioritize all the wrong things and analyze None of them. Like sometimes I get mad Kat got like 30 minutes of screentime and question why they wouldn’t utilize him more, but then I remember this is the same team that made big game hunt (antiblack and antinative) and the enemies in pirates booty (orientalist) and I go Ohhhhh yeah these people like are white and stupid I forgot….
And like, obviously this is all bad, even Pandora as a concept feels kind of orientalist in its foundation just from how loosely people are willing to throw around the world “savage” in this game when referring to desperate people in a desertic planet, but I don’t know. There’s so much to like. I just often get upset over how much of it is hidden underneath layers and layers of unchecked biases against minorities the (mostly western, mostly white, mostly male) writers clearly were not thinking about while making this game and this world. I’m always going to be invested in it and I will always like it, but I feel it’s important for me to remember that these were choices made consciously by living breathing people who knew what they were doing and should be held accountable for them.
Also because I don’t wanna have any of the racist stuff, you know ? I don’t want to leave it in as I’m taking apart and expanding this world, or at least not leave it unchecked. I think the game would be way better if it took a very specifically anti-racist stanced and invited the player to think “Hey, isn’t it kind of fucked up you’re mowing down several people in the name of profit and material gain ? Or that you’re technically always siding with corporations even when they’re supposedly opposing you ?” Because I think these are genuinely interesting questions. But so long as the priority in the game is “Fun looty shooty game where you kill people indiscriminately don’t ask questions about it PLEEEEASE”, I don’t think it’ll ever progress past it.
Anyway maybe this game would be better storywise if the writers read Orientalism first. And The Capital by Karl Marx at the very least. You wanna be anticapitalist ? Then act like it you fuckass videogame that costs money !!!!