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] (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

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] right, this is an excellent point; the power dynamics (and absence or presence of a history of violence) are totally different here so it's naturally going to be a different 'type' of appropriation. Hmmmmm.

George Snorewell

@tkinias @aud @datarama @xgranade
Well-stated.

Further, It's difficult to make a case for "appropriation" of ancient Greek culture on historical grounds, e.g., places as far flung as Marseille, France and Alexandria, Egypt were Greek colonies...

And, the "Romanization" of Greek culture was anything but appropriation, despite popular imagination: "Zeus pater" (father Zeus) and "Jupiter" are cognates -- i.e. not a linguistic borrowing, ergo not a cultural one either, as just one example.

George Snorewell

@tkinias
Your comment on denying the "Whiteness" of modern Greeks is well-received, and that *is* a post-hoc colonialist interpretation that assigns all supremacy to Rome, which then ties such "Whiteness" to the eventual supremacy of the church in Christendom...

Ignoring the fact that, had the Battle of Actium simply gone the other way, Rome would have become vassal to the Macedonian Kingdom of Egypt, through Alexander the Great's descendant, Cleopatra.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] (I know this comment isn't strictly relevant but I'm delighted that my little original post making fun of Assassin's Creed has spawned such an informative and educational discussion).