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Sakurai's recent Pic of the Day for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has anti-Black implications relating to use of water cannons on civil rights activists.
- Thread starter Chief Malik
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The implications of the imagery are clear and "the lore though" doesn't matter.
Yep. Like as someone who isn't that familiar with SF, I feel like I remember the character having a more agile/acrobatic fighting style so I think they were probably trying to reference that, but there were almost certainly better options with other characters that could've conveyed the same idea without the racist imagery that would still convey their idea just as well
No one on this forum is sentencing him to life in prison, or harassing him and his team. If anyone thinks this was intentional, or are writing off Sakurai/Smash entirely for whatever reason, they're within their right to do that. Bringing up intent and saying people are reacting too harshly, all you're doing is policing other forum-goers posts. Which I guess you can do if you want.
If you want, you can always excuse any racist actions/behaviour (which can have harmful effect regardless of intent) by looking at it in a vacuum and assuming "mere" ignorance, even if there's history like there is with Ultimate, so it's pointless to do.
I mean yeah but it's still fucked up because of the racist comparisons. It's still going "who's the most fitting to represent Mr. Sandman in a fight? A big ape, of course!"
Please explain to me how this spirit battle being racist has been "debunked." I'll wait.
I didn't even know about the one on the first page, nevermind this one.
This deserves a real call to attention and should be changed and apologised for immediately. Why have I never heard of this?
I think a lot of Japanese people have been exposed to certain racist imagery without a lot of the societal context. Like a lot of old cartoon shit like the black face with big red lips was consumed via imported American media without a real understanding of the race situation in America. And this really hasn't happened that much, a few spirits (most/all of which were probably chosen for other reasons ala DK/Sandman) which Sakurai may not have seen personally since I doubt he was very hands on with assigning the hundreds of spirits. Besides this image, how many examples do we have that can be linked to Sakurai? Like I agree representation is an issue in Smash, but there's a difference between apathy and malice and while both are bad they need to be addressed differently
Smash not having black characters is one thing. But posts like this is arguably the most frustrating part. It is half gaslighting and half "deal with it". Why should Nintendo do better when folks doing all this work for free to rationalizing why they don't have to?
I mean, unless a statement has been released on the number of racist things in Smash, I'm not sure why people are so keen on defending the man. He hasn't shown that he cares, whether unintentionally racist or not. If you hurt someone, "intent" doesn't matter, the action is what causes harm and you apologize if you actually care.
Honestly, you shouldn't have even bothered. I agree with you, but Era is an echo chamber, so people will just keep up with their same old tired arguments.
Considering the whole point of Spirits is for "the lore" I would say it matters at lot in how characters are decided, though. For Mr. Sandman, the reference wouldn't work without it being DK.
It's why the Deejay Spirit battle sticks out so much because there were way better options to choose from.
(Perhaps it would've been better if Mr. Sandman wasn't included as a Spirit at all?)
Because they might not have the same associations in Japan? Like I feel like I've seen tons of anime use Gorilla as slang for a super muscly character regardless of race, connotations aren't constant under all cultures. I'm not arguing that it isn't bad, it is and should be removed, but saying they should know better isn't necessarily true
1. DK and Sandman are in the same game.
2. Sandman has never been a final boss. He's the final fight in the first mode of Punch-Out Wii, but the final boss of the game is DK.
3. They fight nothing alike.
Ganondorf and Captain Falcon are both closer in fighting style and stature to Sandman than DK is. Ganondorf's fair is literally just Mr. Sandman's primary punch.
I mean if they wanted to represent the DK battle in Punch-Out they could have just had Punch-Out DK as his own Spirit like they did for Kaptain K.Rool.
Mr. Sandman's a boxer, to represent him as a spirit you'd just have to take any big dude in the cast whose gameplay revolves around punching real hard.
I don't think this is only about Sakurai anymore in that instance anyway.
This is a Nintendo game and anyone at NoA should have immediately said something about the implicit racist caricatures these battles potray.
Not to dismiss the rest of your post, but he was the final boss of the original arcade game.
He's also more or less the final boss of the Wii game; Donkey Kong's essentially treated as a secret opponent.
Do you actually know whether Japan is this collectively naïve?
Can't even count the number of times I've seen this "they can't possibly know better/recognise what's wrong" excuse be rolled out for all kinds of out-of-pocket behaviour.
Lore is not sufficient to excuse a blatantly racist portrayal. They hung themselves by not having many black characters and excluding the few they do have from being playable🤷🏻♂️
Are you seriously trying to suggest Japan doesn't know about racist imagery of black people as monkeys when Smash Ultimate released?
I think my issue is that assigning blame when a person might've reasonably ignorant actually hurts progress, because when people get blamed they start to feel attacked and when that happens they tend to double down. I think we should try to communicate these issues to Nintendo, because they're real and they need to improve, but I think communications shouldn't start as being accusatory or you just cause them to stop listening. I get that this is frustrating and it really fucking sucks that people work this way, but I think when you're communicating problems to the ignorant you kind of have to be polite and understanding for a while or you'll never get anywhere. This doesn't mean being polite will always work, but I think if it improves odds even a little there is value. This is especially true if the other party wasn't acting with malice. Like I think there has to be a way to be firm with your criticisms while being understanding that the other party may have been ignorant which caused this issue
Ok, I don't know enough about Smash to know whether or not that was put there deliberately or it can just be a random screenshot from the game.
If it's the latter, I am willing to just give him the benefit of the doubt because in all honesty, I am European and I had no idea what this Birmingham Campaign was until I read this thread.
Not everyone can know every last atrocity of human history, there have just been too many to teach them in a school curriculum, so unless you dedicate yourself to history in your freetime or make a career out of it...
I could probably hold a 1 hour presentation on the Holocaust with no prior preparation needed because it was drilled into us for YEARS during history classes (understandably so, since I am German). However, learning other aspects of history greatly suffered from that hyper focus on making sure we don't repeat these mistakes. People from other countries learn other things and probably couldn't tell you half as much about the Holocaust if they tried.
It's a fact of life that whenever you encounter something like this and it's not an issue concerning the country the poster is from, it's more likely that they are ignorant than actually knowingly racist.
Anyways, you educated me, so that's good. You learn something new every day.
If it's the latter, I am willing to just give him the benefit of the doubt because in all honesty, I am European and I had no idea what this Birmingham Campaign was until I read this thread.
Not everyone can know every last atrocity of human history, there have just been too many to teach them in a school curriculum, so unless you dedicate yourself to history in your freetime or make a career out of it...
I could probably hold a 1 hour presentation on the Holocaust with no prior preparation needed because it was drilled into us for YEARS during history classes (understandably so, since I am German). However, learning other aspects of history greatly suffered from that hyper focus on making sure we don't repeat these mistakes. People from other countries learn other things and probably couldn't tell you half as much about the Holocaust if they tried.
It's a fact of life that whenever you encounter something like this and it's not an issue concerning the country the poster is from, it's more likely that they are ignorant than actually knowingly racist.
Anyways, you educated me, so that's good. You learn something new every day.
...That's literally DK lol.
I mean, I guess K. Rool could also work (I actually don't know if he was used for another Punch-Out! Spirit battle though), but one of DK's most iconic moves is his neutral-B, the Giant Punch.
Sure not disagreeing with that but i don't know what a character added 20 years ago has to with this
I mean from the article people posted on Black Lives Matter in Japan to try and refute me
That's not to say there is no malicious hate or racism or xenophobia in Japan that's born of more than just ignorance, because their absolutely is. But Japan is a very insular and homogenous country which means even people without malice tend to have a lot of blind spots on these issues
Not aware of civil rights focal points is one thing but racial connotations with monkey/gorilla is another. And there are Japanese people who are aware that shit is wrong so, no.
Mr. Sandman actually has one of the highest profiles of any fighter in Punch-Out in terms of how often he's appeared and how often he's been a boss or a final boss. I feel like he's probably the highest profile Black character that Nintendo has in terms of prominence within their own series, as well as presumably being fairly easily to implement in that he could probably be a variation of Little Mac.
This is an aside, but a big part of why I'd like to see Next Level Games do a new Punch-Out is that I think they tried to make a point to emphasize the most ethnically diverse stable of characters Nintendo has by getting native speakers for all of them, and I feel like a new game would be a great opportunity to make a lot of them playable somehow. There's basically no other way we'll ever get a South Asian playable in a Nintendo game, for example.
DK's a literal gorilla, dude. The point is the longstanding racist comparisons between black people and apes and monkeys.
I know it was chosen because "well DK has a big punch and Mr. Sandman has a big punch", I'm saying somewhere along the line in the last three whole years someone should have looked at that and said "hey we gotta remove this, there's existing racist imagery on this exact comparison here."
Like you could actually use K.Rool because K.Rool has a boxing glove for his FSmash because he was a boxer in the final boss of DK64!
Obviously not all of them are ignorant, but I think the people who are aware tend to be the exceptions. I also think there are cases where the connotations exist but because they've never heard people talk about them they don't actually realize why it's a problem, they legitimately think it's not a big deal, the same way people brushed off racist jokes as just a joke because they'd never received that kind of persistent behavior or talked to someone who had so they legitimately didn't realize how damaging this could be to people
I don't think there's anything defending this. Is it still common or something in Japan to do this type of association while not having any malicious intent? I'm from the Philippines and I know some people who still casually do this without thinking about it (I mean, the anime Slam Dunk is ultra popular there and Akagi still gets casually referred to as "Gori")Please explain to me how this spirit battle being racist has been "debunked." I'll wait.
For the example in the OP, that is most certainly the case. Nevermind the fact that he doesn't know about it, it's only a Twitter post with no one other than himself watching over it.
With the racist potrayal in these spirit battles it's completely different. Not only is the stereotype globally more known, but the game went through hundreds of people not only in Japan, but also America and Europe. So yeah, there is no real excuse for it being in the game at all - and even worse still not removed.
Japan tends to use gorilla a lot as a slang term for buff muscular dudes. Like I've seen it refer to tons of characters in anime, and they're pretty much always using it to refer to a character's physique or how powerful they are, and it's pretty much never directed at someone for their race (especially since Black characters rarely appear in anime and the characters it's used for are pretty much never black)
Nintendo is a multibillion dollar corp with offices with damn near every country in the world, a literal army of lawyers, and marketing department envyed by even bigger companies. They can find every script kitty hosting a rom of Sonic Blast Man, but don't know about the conversation of diversity and representation in modern media in one of the biggest markets in the world?
Jigga please.
I certainly could but I don't. The moment I see any kind of racism and not only that which affects me I point it out. But as I don't even see any racist action here there is nothing for me to excuse.
I mostly wanted to point out that it's ridiculous for people to assume that everyone knows about these issues. And that it's a failing on his part to not be educated enough to know about it. That was my main gripe while reading this thread.
People get that routinely trotting out that excuse is a problem though, right? Defaulting to making excuses and downplaying absolutely everything only ensures the problem stays. Like, even if all of this is an accident, it does nothing to address the problem.
Scrutinising the response of people affected by this in lieu of (or even in addition to) criticising the people responsible is messed up.
I mean Nintendo as a company does, but to convince a company you need to speak to their bottom line and this gets further complicated because of the game of telephone from NoA to NCL that would need to happen for this discussion (and of course it also depends on how much NCL listens to feedback from it's international branches in general). Like I doubt Nintendo actively hates black people given Reggie was president at NoA for so long. I also think as I said before that Japan tends to have a problem where they're generally resistant to changing business practices so I think the best we can hope for is gradual change over time.
Yeah. Even if they didn't know when making it they sure do now, they must. Game & Watch's sprite referencing Fire was altered to remove the feather headdress in the NA version, for example, but these two Spirits are still there even though at worst all they'd have to do is swap those two pngs and then add those Spirits in as different fighters who aren't Diddy and DK.
Well to be fair, most Smash cooperations are with Japanese developers and I can't think of many Black characters from Japanese games.q At least not many that are well known.... Barret? That's literally all I can think off of the top of my head. Since Smash is Nintendo's IP it should be easy to add Twintelle I guess, even though Arms is not really that big of a franchise.
So the core issue is Japanese gaming not having many black characters of big significance to their games. It's getting better recently, but if we are talking legacy characters...
You know you just used "THEY HAD A BLACK FRIEND", as an excuse. C'mon son
I literally have no idea if the controversies ever reached them. I barely saw western media talk about them and I really doubt Sakurai is reading western media in his free time. I think if we wanted it addressed we'd need to find a journalist in one of the bigger publications with enough clout to ask Sakurai in an interview, but I get the feeling their bosses wouldn't let them because they don't want to risk losing access
Yeah that's fair, I'm not trying to excuse Nintendo of their behavior. But I think my main thing is I think we should be directing pressure at Nintendo itself, not individual devs within. I think it's fair to criticise Nintendo for letting this stuff fall through the cracks and also for not responding when it was brought up. Part of my thing here is I frankly just don't have faith in Nintendo to do the right things for the right reasons same as literally any other corporation. They won't risk rocking the boat unless they're convinced it's profitable
I made the connection immediately. I didn't remember the specific name of Birmingham but the imagery is unfortunately iconic.
My thing is, you're willing to give Sakurai the benefit of the doubt, maybe even the side eye but how many times do you have to do that before you think "ok maybe there's a problem" cause it is not the first time Smash has been racially insensitive by "coincidence." It's hard for me to look at this in a vacuum like it's an isolated thing.
Personally, I'm more annoyed by people's (especially Nintendo fans) eagerness to shut down and dismiss the idea that something could possibly be racially insensitive. People never want to listen to what black people are saying; happens on this site a lot when this sort of thing occurs - actually it happens literally every time. That's not even getting to the point that even if all these instances are accidents, they still should be fixed but black people are told to just deal with it for the most part. To stop complaining cause it's a video game they enjoy and don't want to have to think about uncomfortable things. It's about a lot more than just this one tweet to me.
They don't. Just an easy way to put it out of their mind. People don't like to confront the uncomfortable nature of racism, especially if it doesn't regularly effect them.
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