Cuphead: The Fake Outrage (excellent analysis of the engineered "controversy" around this game)

[spiritman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-P9_oUV9Gw

[tintilicmaliq]

Glad to have someone saz it as it is. Only people who benefited by this crap are the devs, and gamers once again proved how limited and gullible they are.

[spiritman]

Originally posted by tintilicmaliq:

Glad to have someone saz it as it is. Only people who benefited by this crap are the devs, and gamers once again proved how limited and gullible they are.

+1

[Rotwang]

Great video, thanks

[Dravvad]

This is a long video so I haven't watched everything, nor am I making a global statement on it.

Only for the Fleischer article, which the video says didn't call the game racist: https://unwinnable.com/2017/11/10/cuphead-and-the-racist-spectre-of-fleischer-animation/

Clearly the guy who made the video didn't actually read it. People are just defending it by saying that the phrase "Cuphead is racist" doesn't appear, even though it complains that the game is "whitewashing" history and ignoring important pieces of it. There's many quotes to be made from this article where it essentially says that many movies and video games are really bad in this sense.

It's not directly saying "racism," but it is doing so indirectly, by arguing that the game is trying to favor the history of white people and act like racism didn't exist or shouldn't be associated with that art style or time period anymore. It's a weird argument for the article if you actually go and read the whole thing.

Originally posted by Article:

By sanitizing its source material and presenting only the ostensibly inoffensive bits, Studio MDHR ignores the context and history of the aesthetic it so faithfully replicates. Playing as a black person, ever aware of the way we have historically been, and continue to be, depicted in all kinds of media, I don’t quite have that luxury. Instead, I see a game that’s haunted by ghosts; not those confined to its macabre boss fights, but the specter of black culture, appropriated first by the minstrel set then by the Fleischers, Disney and others - twisted into the caricatures that have helped define American cartoons for the better part of a century.

Originally posted by Article:

That Cuphead follows the path of the Fleischers and hides what could have been [Calloway's] likeness behind an anthropomorphic talking dice is historically in line with black representation in animation. Once it became faux-pas to depict black characters as minstrels and racist caricatures, then the solution appears to be not depicting them at all.

This is essentially whitewashing: erasing the embarrassing parts of our past so that we can enjoy the good – the drums; the horns; the tap dancing; the big bands and their recognizable performers, along with the broad creative freedom of this style of animation – without having to ever think about the culture that generated this music in the first place; that was never allowed to own its own image.

The answer isn’t to flatten and purify the past, whose lessons many clearly still need. Instead of stripping the burnt black cork from the minstrel and presenting a clean white face, while still singing like Calloway or Armstrong or Waller, modern media that seeks to borrow from America’s conflicted past should do so in a way that reckons with what that past tells us about ourselves.

Originally posted by Article:

Studio MDHR, in interviews, is quick to point out that they avoided stereotypes in Cuphead; that they focused on “the technical, artistic merit, while leaving all the garbage behind.” The truth may be dirty, and often uncomfortable. But it’s preferable to offering up a bleached white past, while pretending nothing was lost in the process.

[there is no band]

Excellent video, thanks for sharing. Honestly, devs themselves came off looking bad after all this.

[Pay Child Suport]

>dean takahashi played the game
>sucks as F
>uploads video
>youtubers ranted on the silliness of the uploader
>plays the game themselves
>sell in millions in just 2 weeks

more like people just took the bait. and they took it hook, line and sinker. though I doubt the devs deliberately told dean to play the game in such an awful way.

[Moe Magi Maxima]

Originally posted by Tentacle Grape:

>dean takahashi played the game
>sucks as F
>uploads video
>youtubers ranted on the silliness of the uploader
>plays the game themselves
>sell in millions in just 2 weeks

more like people just took the bait. and they took it hook, line and sinker. though I doubt the devs deliberately told dean to play the game in such an awful way.

Alternatively, it was a case similar to gen 4 MLP where certain "news" sites did such a godawful job of tackling the product that people either figured they'd be better off checking it out themselves instead of relying on the reports, or that they'd get an entertaining trainwreck out of it and ended up unironically enjoying it enough that they spread knowledge of it like wildfire.

Incidentally, I only use that example because of the similarities and the fact that that's the only example that comes to mind at the moment.

[skyglerb]

I'm pis*** off that this is even an argument, it's. just. a. f******. game.
Why does the internet ruin everything...

[76561198191253173]

Great vid. Sad that devs failed to distance themselves from GGers who used their game in witch hunt against game journalists.

[Moe Magi Maxima]

Originally posted by qzma:

Great vid. >Sad that devs failed to distance themselves from GGers who used their game in witch hunt against game journalists<.

Because not taking a side is clearly the same as taking the side of the people you don't like these days.