There’s been much ado about Borderlands 2 of late,
specifically about how Tiny Tina, shouldn’t be saying shit like “crunk” and
“badonkadonk.” Tina, ostensibly a sassy
white tween, is appropriating language that one of one of the internet’s many
white knights has deemed African-American slang and culture. This, obviously, constitutes racism as Tina, a
rambling and attention deficit young woman with tan skin is obviously engaged
in…I’m not sure what. The logic of the
twitter based discourse remains largely unclear to me and, presents itself
erratically. It reeks of an attempt to boost
awareness of other projects, and it’s even worse because I think Borderlands 2
is possibly the most progressive mainstream game I’ve ever seen.
Borderlands 2, oddly enough, is situated in a world where
debates of race, sexuality and gender equality are, by and large, settled. Sure, the main villain constantly says incredibly
sexist things, but Handsome Jack isn’t a role model – he’s not even really an
integrated member of any of the societies we’re presented with in Borderlands 2
– and he’s eventually undone. And despite
his overt sexism, there are a number of problematic contemporary social biases
that Jack doesn’t display.
I’m talkin’ about the gays.
Borderlands 2’s world is largely established through the
audio logs scattered throughout its landscape.
You learn the history of the world and the motivations and conflicts plaguing
the denizens of Pandora largely by picking up tiny gray boxes and listening to
people prattle on to audio journals like nobody’s business for between thirty
and one hundred and twenty seconds at a time.
In a handful of these audio logs, you’ll discover that characters, main,
supporting, whatever, are totally “teh homoez.”
Borderlands 2 has a huge number of gay characters in it, ranging prominent
ones you’d never assume to like people with the same genitals unless you asked
them about it to throwaway characters who die in the background of scenes,
calling out for their loved ones.
But it doesn’t just have gay characters in it: plenty of
games do that already, and they usually do it quite poorly. What sets Borderlands 2 aside is that it has
gay characters and nobody cares. Even Handsome Jack, the biggest asshole in
the galaxy who smirkingly jokes about how incapable women are and shows some
pretty serious biases towards anyone who doesn’t inhabit his social ecosystem,
doesn’t care about homosexuality. He’s
not supportive of it or against it, he simply perceives it as a part of
life. When a woman expresses qualms at
experimenting on a man whose husband, because of a life threatening condition, is
not a reliable test subject, Jack cheerfully reminds her that he’ll kill her
wife if she delays his experiments. No
added malice, no bonus points for being gay.
Just standard issue malice. This
nonchalance is everywhere in Borderlands 2.
My personal favorite moment comes from Hammerlock who, for
the most part occupies a space as a mewling British dandy. But when you uncover the layers of his
history as a character, Hammerlock becomes much more complicated, with
ex-boyfriends, hunts gone awry, buggery and dismemberment aplenty in his
past. Nothing is made of Hammerlock’s
homosexuality, and his former boyfriend doesn’t even mention their relationship
except in passing. Homosexuality just
isn’t a big deal for people in Borderlands.
They’re past it.
This comes along with a hyper-aware treatment of Pandoran
gender binaries. Female characters are
resistance leaders, ultimate badasses and rogue AIs. And while damsels certainly occupy game
spaces (most notably Angel, who spends most of the game as a motivating “damsel
in distress”) their treatment is incredibly progressive for a video game. Rather than taking the shape of “rewards,”
and granting heroes their favors (sexy or otherwise) in exchange for their
freedom (a trope hinted at as being an empty, destructive framework for a
relationship as per Mordecai’s furtive marriage to Moxxi) these damsels want to
die. Rather than living as objects of
desire, they act to orchestrate their own destruction. Angel doesn’t even consider the option of
being freed: she simply wants to die so that she can help to stop Jack.
Paired with Lilith’s third act switch from badass chick to
enslaved “object,” it’s a curious dynamic, one that could be perceived as a
continuation of the “damsel in distress” trope all too often seen in video
games if not for the fact that each female character so bound provides you with
most of your motivation and objectives.
You’re never asked to rescue them: you’re asked to kill them, and they
come up with the plan for you to do so.
“Better dead than a damsel,” as once Lilith groans.
That their enslavement as a damsel figure provides women with
additional agency in the game’s framework is fascinating: once characters are
bound by Jack so that they may charge the key, they gain access to a newfound
source of power and a network of systems that allow them to totally fuck with
his plans. Jack seems to have difficulty
curtailing these efforts and, in the end, it is this inversion of the damsel’s
role that allows the Vault Hunters to succeed against Jack.
I don’t have my thoughts sorted out on the topic of
Borderlands 2 and damselhood, obviously.
But the manner in which they treat damsel figures and the manner in
which they’ve created a post-hetero-normative society both represent a
progressive take on social tropes in games in general. Tiny Tina being an olive skinned 13 year old
who spouts internet dialogue that racist white dudes mistake for shit black
people say doesn’t make Borderlands 2 racist.
It does, however, illustrate a fundamental problem with the
white knight power dynamics that much of the dialogue surrounding video games
seems preoccupied with. Predominantly
white game developers and writers are totally comfortable writing about purported
racism and, in the process, illustrate a far more toxic and insidious form of
racial intolerance. There’s a tacit
assumption in Mike Sacco’s statement that Tina’s dialogue is racist which is,
in and of itself, a bit racist: that Tina’s speech represent a language aimed
at representing a Black (uppercase on purpose) culture or language. That’s problematic, but it’s kind of commonplace:
people make associations and generate cultural fictions for groups they don’t
normally relate to, it happens. But
there’s something almost sinister in the manner in which Sacco pointed out that
an element of a game was offensive to him, a white male working in a relatively
white collar position and exercising a certain degree of cultural authority,
because of how it, in his mind, portrayed another ethnic group. I don’t mean to say that we should police
people’s thoughts or ideas, but I do think it’s wise, in general, for people to
avoid speaking on behalf of other groups without solicitation or
prompting. Sacco taking offense on
behalf of Black gamers isn’t illustrating a sensitivity on his part: it’s
demonstrating a belief, one that appears more often than we’d like to think,
that Sacco thinks he’s attuned to or capable of being offended on behalf of a
cultural group he is not a part of.
It’s a complicated matter to really delve in to, but my core
contention is that Mike Sacco, as a white dude, doesn’t get to say what offends
black people, and that the act of doing so is, in and of itself, a form of
cultural subjugation. Sacco has since
lost his job amidst the controversy for some pretty sketchy reasons, and while
I don’t think that’s right I also don’t condone Sacco’s statements or
actions. It’s not that they’re
exceptionally brazen or destructive on their own; this is a conversation about
Borderlands 2 for fuck’s sake. It’s that
they represent a cultural tendency that I encounter quite often, not only on
the internet, but also in academia. A
group of entrenched, all too often white, intellectuals dictate cultural
identity and appropriate behavior for groups who, frankly, don’t need any help
finding things to be offended about.
I’m harping on Sacco here, and I don’t mean to: this point,
I’m sure he regrets his statements. But
I do think that this happened in Borderlands 2, a game so focused on ideas of
cultural fusion and cultural evolution to a state of existence that allows
people to grow beyond biases (hicks who don’t have an inherent fear of
homosexuals is a pretty fucking progressive concept), is unsettling. We’ve got plenty of real examples of
intolerance popping up in video games, but we seem to be willing to put a
tremendous amount of energy into discussing these ridiculous accusations,
considerably more than we’re willing to put into discussing the sexist tropes
we come to accept in games, the heteronormative gaze that preoccupies the
majority of in-game romances (even the ostensibly gay ones) and the relatively
monochromatic pallet used to paint most of the characters we encounter in video
games.
I’ll channel Andrew Ti for a moment. Borderlands 2 be mad progressive yo. It’s not loud about it, and it’s certainly
not wearing it on its sleeve, and I can understand why. Being progressive, in a real sense, is about
not giving a fuck about color, creed, sexual orientation or gender. If you make a big deal out of not caring
about traditionally divisive issues, you can go way too far in the other
direction and, more often than not, end up fetishizing the people that you want
to demonstrate a concern for.
Borderlands 2 doesn’t do that.
The closest it comes to being heavy handed is by presenting you with a
final villain like Handsome Jack: a nerdy, sexist programmer who thinks he’s
the hero of his own adventure and, even when he’s shown how ridiculous his
beliefs are, keeps cleaving to them right up to the last bloody moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment