It is and it’s honestly sickening that the same smug legal quips these apparatchiks regularly throw around is now being extended for use to downplay and excuse an outright genocide. They now realize that they can get away with saying and doing virtually anything nowadays so long as they act for the sake of the West’s geopolitical interests, including a modern day Holocaust in Palestine, and it’s disgusting to see them become increasingly comfortable with it.
Agreed. They’re principally asking for letters & books and that would be the best way to express solidarity IMO, though Calla left a link to their commissary on the twitter post so I don’t want to editorialize on their behalf.
Team Melusine for sure. I wanted to buy some Melusine plush and there are LITERALLY NONE ON ETSY WTFFF. Common capitalism L.
There’s a lot of moments where Hoyoverse’s writing for its female cast could have been just as obnoxiously gendered as many anime are but it doesn’t. I’m talking about tha whole “I’m a fighter/strong/performing a traditionally masculine-delineated role and this has erased my femininity! Woe is me, who never experienced being a ‘woman!’” garbo genre. There used to be a manga called “A Story About Treating a Female Knight, Who Has Never Been Treated as a Woman, as a Woman” and it had hundreds of chapters and would get posted on the r/manga subr*ddit every week. I would smash the downvote button everytime I saw that long-winded gasbag title show up on the feed.
It is absolutely a shame that Hoyoverse is unable to resist whitewashing characters from non-white inspired cultural backgrounds because it does a lot of the other things right. Hoyo gets the game dev’s dream of building up a truly international playerbase and they can’t even give them representation in the game. Ironically, speaking now as a leftist, Genshin is probably the biggest modern soft power cultural export from China and Hoyo instead built up a global audience only to use that platform to tell everyone how obscenely colorist the company is. Also, now there’s a reverse racism problem where global players are using Genshin to scapegoat the entirety of the Chinese population as racist just because of Hoyo’s colorist design team leads.
Ugh. I stopped following the company after Natlan when it seemed like all three of their games were just spamming streetwear character designs. Obviously playing it safe with modern motorcycles for Natlan is better than racist tribal loincloths that some people were worried about but it would have been even better to see Aztec/Incan character designs, with the skin tone to match.
Also, Melusines are objectively the perfect potential communards and it’s a travesty that there’s somehow 200K Genshin fanfics on AO3 and not a single one is about a Melusine-led Fontaine Commune.
That’s from a different section. The exact same wording is still there as of the current version:
So pending clarification, it seems to say that all insults targeting groups of “protected charactistic(s)” including those about “mental illness” are prohibited - well, except for those against LGBT, 'cause politics and religion. The clause directly above this one goes to rule that you can’t call Zuckerberg a coward - that counts as “hateful conduct” - but LGBT peoples can be implied to be “mentally ill” or “abnormal.” That’s open season. We’re just conversational props for “political and religious discourse” and, according to Advocate’s interpretation of the changes, can now also be literally compared to an inanimate object.