This is why we can't have nice things.
Well, damn it.I have this bad habit of watching a game trailer until I decide sexy/not sexy. If it's sexy, I don't want to see any more because I don't want any spoilers.
For the trailer of Little Devil Inside I decided "sexy" and stopped watching, and because of that, I missed this:
Damn it. Damn it to hell.
It would be difficult to create a more stereotypical, racist depiction than that image. A half-naked savage with a mask and a blowgun. Big lips for extra points!
That is aggressively terrible.
Now, incredibly, there were people whose first reaction was "But that's just history."
An interesting point, until you consider who wrote the history.
Everything written about Africa for centuries was written by people from colonial cultures. The only aim of these texts was to justify colonialism. So the entirety of African culture was reduced to three tropes: savage, dissolute, or simpleton.
In all three cases, it clearly established that "these people" were clearly unable to govern themselves. A thinly-disguised justification for coming in and stealing everything that wasn't nailed down.
Let's reverse that. What if we turned this kind of gaze on Edwardian England?
Men and women dress in elaborate costumes, including a strange focus on enormous hats as a status symbol. They drink intoxicants in these fine costumes until they are rendered unconscious, or engage in savage brawls that often end in serious injury or death.
See how easy it is to do that?
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