I debated reviewing this article, but it was so outlandish and nonsensical I couldn't pass it up. If you saw anything about E3, you know about Cuphead, a game made by Studio MDHR in the style of the old 30's style cartoons. The art style is the real selling point, with many older people mentioning that they often longed to have a video game that actually resembled a cartoon.
Well, it wasn't long before someone was offended by the game, for some reason. To be fair most of this article is the author's own reactions to the game's trailer, which is perfectly fine. The problem is a lack of explanation about certain things.
So let's look into it: Blackmon opens her article:
One of the things that did get a lot of positive attention was the indie game Cuphead from Studio MDHR. MDHR describes Cuphead as a run and gun game in the style of 1930s cartoons, with handpainted backgrounds and original jazz scores. That all sounds awesome until you consider the nature of many of the (highly politicized) cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s.
She's not wrong about the old cartoons. They really do have a racist and politically charged history. But what does that have to do with Cuphead? I mean... Cuphead only looks like those cartoons as an art-style choice. It hardly means it's anything like those cartoons in terms of insensitive content. But let's look further.
seeing the trailer for the game this week elicited a visceral reaction in me. It made me feel physically ill. I got queasy and my head swam a bit.
What? What does this have to do with the game, again? This sounds like a "you" problem.
I kept waiting for the next boss to be a thick-lipped, black-faced, spittle-dripping caricature of an African American man (probably holding aloft a terrified, screaming, blonde, Caucasian woman just to show what a threat he actually was).
Once again, the author's own racial fantasies are not indicative of the game itself. Just because a person uses an art style that as popular in the 30's when people were more racially insensitive and flat-out racists, doesn't mean that the art style is somehow tainted by it. It's up to the author to prove that it's tainted, but instead she tells her own issues with it without explaining what any of it has to do with the game.
This seems to line up well with all of the temptations that Cuphead and Mugman find themselves faced with gambling, speakeasies, liquor, and sirens, all things reminiscent of African American culture and the Harlem Renaissance.
Just because gambling, liquor, and sirens all happened in Harlem doesn't mean a thing; those elements in the game were common in the United States as a whole during that time period. Pretending this is somehow racially insensitive is dishonest at best, malicious at worst. Let's mop this up with the last part:
My life, my experiences, and the body that I live in makes Cuphead and its artistic style problematic to me because of all that it has come to mean in the last 85 years or so and that’s something that I just can’t let go of. Does this mean that anything that is problematic should never be used in games or other entertainment media? We’ve heard that question in other contexts before. Should rape ever be used as a plot device? Abuse of any kind? And the answer remains the same. If it is done well and with proper attention being paid to the narrative. And Cuphead just isn’t the place for it in my mind. The game threatens to draw upon racist caricatures to inform the narrative and give players a series of racism infused bosses and obstructions to justice to properly hate. Perpetuating the stereotype and, in some cases, feeding the racism that is foundational to the art style itself. As for me, I’m going to skip Cuphead (as innovative as everyone claims) because it just hits too damned close to home.
And there you have it. Ultimately she's saying she thinks Cuphead is bad because that art style reminds her of racist cartoons from the 30's. That's fine. I'm not going to knock her for writing her reaction to a game's trailer, but what I am going to knock is her insinuation that the creators are using a racism that is, as she said, "foundational to the art style itself". Nowhere in her article does she explain this, nowhere does she specify how the art style is inherently racist, instead opting for personal tales of her horror at the trailer itself.
A personal account of her beliefs about an art style are fine, but to decry a game for that art style, you need to give a reason for the problems you suggest about the game. Basic questions like, "why is the art style racist?" or "why are you equating a cartoon art style with rape?"
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