Saulkar said:
People have disagreed with me and I respect that, but I have received shit comments that make it hard to tell the difference between a good one and a bad one. The problem is that too many personalities are replying at once. I now understand that this is an intellectual deathtrap. The more you reply, the more your credibility dgoes down the toilet. I feel the need to end this topic now. Too many people gave good comments in opposition and I disagreed with them because I was simply too mentally strained from answering so many questions and comments I did not anticipate. So I apologise.
I thought I could get a conversation going with fellow Canadians and Americans on the current state of how Canadian videogame developers disregard their own nation. I understand that you need a character for a specific situation be it an American or Russian but Canada is getting no love from its own developers. The problem is this went off topic too many times, too much anger, some of which I started. And faarrrrrrrrrrrrr to many instances of people picking out irreverent flaws in my argument and hounding it like wolves using it as a stepping stone to point out my intellectual flaws to get the upper hand, bravo I am real impressed, NOT!
Thanks to those who supported my argument and above all those who argueded against it and FUCK YOU to those who focused on points in my argument that were not relevent to the general idea. Overall, what was this all for, what was it all about.
1. I wanted show that taking a storyline seriously is juvinille but it can still hurt alot given the right context and people need to respect this!
2. Canada does not represent itself in videogames, I do not want Canada to be the main focus, just show your nation some love.
3. Cultures Bleeing into other ones is good, keeps it fresh, it becomes bad when a foriegn culture tries to dominate and dispose of the local.
4. Persistent belittleing of a culture or nation breaks down its skin making it more vulnerable to critism.
5. Culture is good.
6. Finally and above all, I just wanted to say I was not feeling very good about Mass Effect after reading that bit of ingame info, I feel better now but not by much.
Everything else in this forum was unnessesary and I did not want to talk about it. Once again sorry to those who gave valid points but I could not recognise it because of my state of mind, thankyou.
I am done here.
Hmmm, not sure if I responded to the original thread or not, but I found this while cleaning my favorites and oddly I apparently marked it to respond to later.
Before it gets too old I will simply say that I think the basic arguement is a foolish one to be honest. The way the arguement sounds to me is that your saying that Canadian game developers should be extremely nationalistic even if it makes them seem buffoonish by doing so.
Overall I'm one of those "world unity" sorts as I've gone off on in a lot of messages and see individual cultures as being something to be melted into one world unity. Something that I believe happened more or less in universes like "Mass Effect". There is no real reason for me to go into a massive rant on the subject though as I've done so in the past, and made where I think the world should be heading abundantly clear on a few occasions (which is kind of off topic).
The bottom line is that Canada is a minor nation overall, and while the world power structure might change, when dealing with things as they are now, or based on later occurances coming from the world as it is now, it's unlikely that Canada would be a major player. No need to go off on how big an economy Canada represents and so on, the bottom line is that compared to the US, China, USSR, and other major world powers and super powers it's just not a decisive factor.
The thing is that when you start getting into national pride for the sake of national pride you run into situations like the one with Japan and *some* of it's pop culture. To put things bluntly, the cultural and national power fantasies that are at the root of some Japanese anime and other pop culture exports are something it succeeds in spite of, and generally tends to cause it to be laughed at by a lot of people... and yeah, that includes Canadians.
Over the years when talking to people about anime (especially when I was more heavily into it) the issue of some of the Japanese attitudes has come up, especially as they fit into concepts like say "Gasaraki", "Super Atragon", or even "Ghost In The Shell". On a lot of levels is actually detracts from the work, and it says a lot about their science fiction and fantasy that a lot of these works can be appreciated as well as they are by a substantial global audience. For a lot of non-Weeaboo anime fans, it's pretty typical to hear "It's a great series, if you can get past the detached Japanese power fantasies".
At least with Japan, they were a major military world power, and the absolute terror of their area of the world for a long time. To some extent you can understand some of what they do as trying to recapture past glories and the like, even if those "glories" are kind of frightning in theor xenophobia.
Canada in comparison has been involved in a lot of things, but has never been a major military or global force the way the USA, USSR, Japan, Germany, or British Empire were. That could change, but right now nobody is ever going to talk about a "Canadian Empire". What a nation achieves actually does have an influance on how fiction about it's possible future influance (or influance based on that culture in general) is going to be received.
If someone was to release some heavily jingoistic pro-Canadian fiction in any format, I don't think many people, including Canadians, would wind up taking it all that seriously. It would probably get more of a "lul, what?!?!?" response than even some of the Japanese stuff does because at least Japan has been a global power.
Even in terms of science fiction like say David Weber's "Honor Harrington" books, which are based heavily on the traditions of the British Navy (and involve science fiction concepts that allow something vaguely similar to ancient naval tactics to apply to space combat, including sails, and combat being resolved largely with broadside mounted weapons), it works because The British Navy *was* a dominant world power, and while Canada's armed forces come from the British ones according to many things I've read, there has never really been much in the way of a global naval dominance by Canada, and as such there really isn't any kind of global class "order of battle" to build from. If they say based those books on Canada instead of very loosely on Britan I doubt it would have either worked or caught on.
Yes, I know this can be argued, all I'm doing is stating an opinion. If I had to guess, you don't see Canadian producers blowing Canada's horn quite the way that some other nations do it, because they don't want to seem like some of those other nations do. I mean you can't laugh at some of the stuff Japan has done (for example) in it's fiction, if your worse, now can you?
Apologies to those that this might offend, it's just my opinion and guesswork. When it comes to my comments on Japanese fiction and the like, that's based on experience from fan communities I've been in over the years, and is by no means a universal attitude.
P.S. I know you'd like to kill the thread soon, I'm just interested in the issue in particular because (as I said before) I am Canadian, and now that most of the flamers have stopped trying to eat you for breakfast, the thread feels peaceful and respectful. To be honest I'm having a bit of fun here 
