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] @[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."

Thanasis Kinias

@aud
Sorry for resurrecting a dead thread, but your comment about using “Norse/Greek names” is interesting to me because of the way that white supremacists historically appropriated ancient Greek stuff as part of their white heritage (now usually called ‘Western’ but functionally the same thing) while denying the whiteness of modern Greeks.
@datarama @xgranade

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] jesus! I had no idea about that, either... but I'm not surprised, either.

I have a prominent Medusa tattoo and after I got it, I started really thinking more about how we view the appropriation of Greek and Norse culture vs. that of others; that is, even though I have no Greek ancestry (as far as I'm aware; I definitely have no cultural ties) nothing seemed problematic to me about using Medusa as a tattoo subject. Yet, was that okay? How would Greek people feel about it? Even as a kid in Utah, I was taught about Greek myths as a kid (in school, even), which meant I didn't think twice about it until much later as it just seemed part of... culture itself*.

But really... it's not. It's specifically part of ancient Greek culture. Which, of course, I know Romans famously appropriated (I think appropriation would be the right term here). I do love my Medusa tattoo (she has red pupils and black sclera) but I wonder if I couldn't have done better and whether it was really okay... or whether anyone even cares or if it matters. I don't know.

* certainly, as we're all the same species, we truly do have 'one culture' in a sense, but given how much violence has been inflicted in erasing and appropriating culture I think saying or arguing "it's all human culture!" is just potentially further enacting harm on communities that have suffered from white supremacy. So.

datarama

@aud @xgranade @tkinias I can't speak for any Greeks, and only for precisely one Scandinavian, but I don't care about people getting Norse imagery or symbolism on tattoos, clothing or whatnot.

Though I *will* judge you if you put horned helmets on vikings or blond hair on Thor.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] what about a horned helmet on medusa

Thanasis Kinias

@aud
I think that today, very few Greeks view this kind of thing in terms of cultural appropriation, because the idea that classical Greece is the foundation for all of Western civilization—and therefore part of the shared cultural heritage of humanity—is quite flattering to Greek nationalists. But this is also connected to Greeks’ ‘promotion’ to (conditional) whiteness in the contemporary world—and Greece’s tourist economy, which benefits from Westerners’ pilgrimages.
@datarama @xgranade

Thanasis Kinias

@aud
That is, ‘appropriation’ looks different in this context than in some others, because Greeks—as fairly prosperous Europeans—are in a different position in global hierarchies of power than, say, Indigenous folks in South Dakota or Western Australia, or any number of poor nonwestern societies.
@datarama @xgranade