reading reviews for Assassin's Creed: Mirage, which has apparently been billed as a "return to roots" sorta thing and people are like "boring and repetitive" and I'm like my dude, you clearly did not play the original Assassin's Creed sounds about ac...

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] (also! Thank you for chiming in and sharing! This is exactly the kind of insight I wanted!)

datarama

@aud @xgranade It seems to me that what the popular imagination holds Vikings must have looked like is whatever is associated with "badass" at the particular time. Dreadlocks (and perhaps shaven sides) and facial tattoos! Bodybuilder physiques! Lots of coarse black leather clothes!

When I was a kid, this was what the most popular rendition of Thor looked like (from the comic series "Valhalla"). A bit more like a gruff sailor than like a metalhead, wouldn't you say?

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] I am gay and trans, and that connects me to a much larger culture of found family, and I'm stupidly grateful for it; I think without some thread of commonality I'd feel lost. The thread of commonality that was "given" to me as a child is inherently racist, and I've done my best to reject it (well, I've tried, anyway; it's a process).

So, I have a community, and I have "roots" with people who have faced the same challenges and struggles (and have faced, and will face, worse), so I try to honor those. The shared humanity that's there. But... well, would I have been exposed to that if I wasn't gay? I don't really have an answer to that.

cthos 🐱

@datarama @aud @xgranade they appropriated a lot of runes and symbols and it’s very very frustrating.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] ah! Yeah, I feel like you're correct. Like, I feel the decision to give Vikings "dreadlocks" wasn't necessarily directly due to racist views held by developers of the game, but probably some marketing people who said "this is what people seem to think Vikings look like now and we want to sell VIKING".

cthos 🐱

@datarama @aud @xgranade for example, seeing a hammer necklace or tattoo. Is that a neo nazi or an Asatruar? (Not that those are necessarily mutually exclusive)

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] It's definitely another example of why it's necessary to reject their framing and claims. They're all lies, for sure, but if you even unknowingly give them an inch they'll piss on it so badly no one can take it back.

Maybe that's another reason why the "dreadlocked Viking" thing grates. It acts as a sort of validation to their theft.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Well, that, and the Assassin's Creed series has sometimes talked a big talk about how their games stick close to history. Obviously that's not the case and I'm certainly not going to suggest they be held to that (and it's all fiction so obviously a lot of leeway is allowed), but to give in to something that seems not only to directly contradict what is known AND is in line with racists... mmmmph.

datarama

@aud @xgranade Footnote: Nobody actually knows if Northmen in that time had tattoos. It's not preposterous; we know that even earlier people here practiced tattooing (there are a few Bronze Age bog bodies with tattoos). But prominent tattoos aren't mentioned by anyone who wrote about meeting them, and I kinda think the modern "badass viking facial tattoo" would have warranted at least a note along with all the stuff about their hair and personal hygiene.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] I think, in a larger context, maybe that's one reason why conservative groups tend to hate LGBTQ+ people: we can, and do, pop up in every human group and whether each person likes it or not, that connects us. So you have groups that people are very explicitly trying to separate and have one viewed as "lesser", and that shared element of sexuality or gender threaten that separation. It can humanize people in either group.

I wonder, then, if that isn't what a cultural heritage or set of traditions doesn't do in the first place: helps to humanize other people?

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] I have a slowly increasing number of tattoos across various parts of my body, and given the wide range of potential pain they can cause + uhhh, how shall we say, older sanitary standards? Good bet on few people willing to jam a needle in their face in the old days.

EDIT: you know, I should be careful to contextualize this. Given the risk involved with a facial tattoo in terms of pain and disfigurement it seems like the kind of thing you'd probably need to have a rich tradition of rather than just deciding to go all in on it is really what I'm getting at here, and little else.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] (not that I'm saying it wouldn't have been done! Except that since there's not really evidence the English were doing it either and it would feel like something you'd need a lot of cultural knowledge and history to do properly... I feel the same way is what I'm saying. Like. Probably... probably no.)

datarama

@cthos @aud @xgranade At least in Denmark, Thor's hammer specifically is actually common enough that little baubles with it are usually just considered innocent fashion objects.

cthos 🐱

@datarama @aud @xgranade I think it’s wildly variant depending on what part of the country you’re in over here but it’s rare enough that it’s questionable.

datarama

@aud @xgranade I once made an ill-fated MUD engine that I named "bifrost"! If I ever manage to pull myself together and make the fantasy console I want to make, I'll either recycle that name or take something else from Norse mythology.

(There was *a lot* of reawakened popular interest in Norse mythology here in the 1980s, largely because the cartoon adaptation of the comics I just showed a picture from became an absolutely wild runaway hit with both children and adults.)

datarama

@cthos @aud @xgranade That makes sense! Here, it plays a different role. Various little bits and pieces of more famous Norse symbolism have had cyclic waves of popularity in fashion, company logos and the like.

But there are some things (eg. the runic S) that, even here, are inextricably associated with Nazism.

datarama

@aud @xgranade I think it is very, very unlikely - if nothing else, because nobody who met them ever mentioned it in writing. Can you imagine some Arab scholars meeting a bunch of people with facial tats and choosing to neglect that little detail and instead describe their hairstyles? Or an Anglo-Saxon cleric lamenting how the fabulous northmen were seducing the ladies with their combed hair and clean clothes and *not* mention facefuls of ink?

datarama

@aud @xgranade We know that tattooing was practiced in the region during the Bronze Age, but a) that's 1500+ years before the first longboat set sail for England, and b) those tattoos were small, simple and not on the face.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] I did a little genetic algorithm engine that used a directed acyclic graph to keep track of generations (and their associated state) that I called "Yggdrasil"; the worker/thread classes were called Valkyries (alright, that one was a stretch, but it was because they were tasked with assessing the performance of each generation... but yeah, the metaphor was getting a lil loose there).

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] maybe they just assumed the facial tattoos were artistically smeared dirt

"oh, yeah, look at those fancy northmen! even their dirty face has to be better than ours. this sucks."