According to “Xiaoting Xulu,” Emperor Qianlong of the Qing dynasty ordered Zhang Wenmin to produce a performance, “The Peaceful Raft of Ascension,” depicting the Journey to the West. The script, written by Zhang, was crafted to uphold the idea of “domestic peace,” using the play to reinforce the Qing dynasty’s rule. After Wukong’s defeat by Buddha, the creators added a celebratory scene titled “Taming the Greedy Tiger and Bringing Peace to Heaven.” Wukong, referred to as “the Greedy Tiger,” was portrayed as the disruptive force and enemy of the Qing’s order. The theme of “suppressing the rebellious” ran throughout.
Sounds familiar to Western media tropes regarding revolutionary villains.
So if I understand this correctly, they did a “Killmonger strangling an old lady” to Wukong? I haven’t played the game and I’m not familiar with the story
The story is basically:
spoiler
It’s sort of unsatisfying and open ended. It doesn’t have anything political to say. With that said I also think that if it did have much political to say it probably wouldn’t be made though. I personally think the chinese games industry is overly restrictive for fear of art being produced that might harm the state and it has a detrimental effect on the art produced overall. This dev wouldn’t have produced anything particularly great or earth shattering in terms of art if they were unrestricted though.
Also how political is anyone going to be when adapting Journey to the West? Like you can do vague theming about empires, but it is such a beloved and well known story, and one fundamentally about spirituality, not political intrigue
apocryphally, jttw itself was a satirization of ming bureaucracy through its depiction of the conflict between tang era buddhist and taoist factions of divinity
a lot of issues were overcome on the journey are the result of some god’s pettiness/fuckup
theres a fan theory out there that the game is a plot by wukong and erlang shen to overthrow heaven
spoiler
main point is that there is mutual knowledge between the two that wukong can’t die if he doesn’t want to (since he’s like six or seven different kinds of immortal), so the first scene where wukong ‘dies’ is just creating plausible deniability for part one of their plan to get rid of the jingu curse
as for why erlang shen needs wukong to overthrow heaven when he can probably do it by himself… idk, unresolved mommy issues probably
So does this mean we won’t get an FPS out of China where we play as Korean soldiers killing off American invaders?
😩
Sincerely doubt it. I have a feeling it would be considered to “dishonor the country” to make a videogame because they’d see it as trivialising the death of its soldiers. I don’t think that would ever be tested though, I don’t think a developer would even risk spending the money to make it to find out that it doesn’t get through the regulator for that reason.
I think more that they focused more on a rather nihilistic apolitical story
Even pop nihilism has a political message: “nothing can change for the better, do nothing, lol.”
Right? How can anything truly be “apolitical”? Apolitical to me means that it’s not ruffling any feathers politically, which would mean it has the politics of hegemony.
Also an apolitical game from a studio who sent out memos to influencers to not talk about “feminist propaganda”? Idek what’s going on there exactly, but it sure is political in some way