- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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That comic also represents 100% of all survival crafting games, plus Factorio
It’s true, but when I play games like Terraria, I try to preserve beautiful features of the map and even incorporate them into my builds. Like those surface cave things where it’s basically floating dirt/rock with grass and trees growing on them. I often make those into the entrances of underground homes. Same with the deserts. When you get the actuators, you can make sand entrances. I also enjoy making houses in the leaves of the living trees.
Avatar is just recycled CGI Fern Gully anyway
It’s a motif as old as time. Foreign invader getting Stockholm Syndrome with the natives. Another famous example is Dances With Wolves. That film called The Great Wall as well. Some versions of Robin Hood has it. Anthropologists call it Going Native, which is what Carlos Castañeda did.
But they’re not all about economic expansionism
Avatr is about capitalism
That wasn’t glaringly obvious to everyone?
Well it’s literally Pocahontas in space so more obvious comparison is to the colonialism. They could grow gardens and farms while destroying the natives, the movie would have been the same.
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Colonialism was driven by capitalism
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They weren’t settling land - they were setting up a mining operation.
It was just one line of dialog, but the sequel did mention that the company is expanding from just resource extraction to selling settlements to the wealthiest who are fleeing a dying earth
the sequel
So not the original then. The one being discussed.
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Like, to absolutely everyone? This ranks up there with “breathing is good.”
Well acschually oxygen is a corrosive chemical and probably damages your lungs (since that’s the tissue that comes in most contact with it). And also the Great Oxydation Event is probably one of the greatest - if not the greatest - mass extinction of all times, so …
Yeah man, we all understood that the first time around when it was called Fern Gully.
Like Avatar if you want but like… it is not a deep piece of media with hard-to-discern messaging. Shit is pretty clear.
One time I unmatched someone from a dating app because the second avatar movie was coming out and they said that it was weird of me to say that the alien people were supposed to represent Native Americans because “they’re just blue aliens why would you compare them to real life?”
Apparently media literacy makes you a weirdo?
Yes it definitely makes you weird. Turn the brain off and consume the media like a good little sheep (/s if it wasn’t obvious)
Fucking Tarzan was fighting evil white exploiters of pristine Africa in books back in the early 1900s.
A good white saviour from the evil white people, because the indigenous can’t do it for themselves. Just like in Ferngully and Avatar.
Are there even any indigenous people in Tarzan? I haven’t read the book, but from the movie I only remember his gorilla buddy and the little elephant. I think Tarzan is more about rebelling against civilization in general, instead of colonization in specific (which James Cameron’s Avatar is). It’s very post-industrialization in that sense.
Edit: Whoops, just read the synopsis on Wikipedia. I don’t think Tarzan is the white saviour you’re looking for…
Which Tarzan book did you read the synopsis for? Burroughs wrote 24 of them.
Sorry, it wasn’t as much a synopsis as it was the criticism section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan#Themes_of_gender_and_race
Looking at it now, I see citations for the essays, but not for the factual claims made by those essays, so I hope the editor who wrote it didn’t take their word for it.
That was not a subtle theme…
I saw the film in a theater with someone who wanted to impress upon me that someone pointed out to her how alike it was to what happened to indigenous peoples in the Americas (someone else had pointed that out to her, so she assumed I wouldn’t get it on my own). I was like, if you think that’s a novel observation, you really need to be hit in the face with concepts to understand things. It couldn’t have been more obvious.
But maybe that highlights how much some people just aren’t observant or introspective or whatever else. It would explain a lot.
It is also about settler colonialism. There are natural gas fields off the coast of Gaza.
There’s a lovely coast and trillions to be made.
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.
Satisfactory music starts playing
Paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
Explore, exploit, exterminate.
Holy shit! Avatar is about capitalism? How did I miss that?! I better rewatch it and see if it’s a recurring theme.
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.
- Jack Handey
I’m torn, because there’s an idea that industrial capital only knows how to consume and destroy what it touches. And there’s ample evidence to that effect.
But there’s this other more naive notion that life never changes, species don’t compete for habitat, and doing anything to alter the local ecology is this unforgivable sin. This, despite the fact that everything in the area is itself a product of eons of speciation and evolution and carnivorization.
The impulse to preserve has to be balanced with the expectation for change. The goal should be symbiosis, not stasis.
The idea that nature is precious and must be preserved is human-centric.
Trees caused an extinction event when they appeared by absorbing all the carbon dioxyde and radically changing the atmosphere. But we feel bad when we’re the ones doing it
Satisfactory
Factorio.
The factory must grow.
I like to describe the aliens that attack you in factorio as environmentalists.
Pollution actually makes the bugs stronger. Maybe they like pollution and want to go eat it all up.
They get stronger because they mutate to fight back
I never meant evolution, or to spark a debate about it. They fucking get stronger the more poison there is, maybe something whacky happens to them
That’s not how evolution works. A species evolves to get stronger in battle if the weak ones die in battle. A species evolves stronger lungs if the weak ones die of lung cancer. Dying of lung cancer doesn’t make a species better fighters.
Pollution makes their species stronger; this doesn’t imply an individual preference.
Idiots walking off cliffs doesn’t make the survivors like cliffs; it teaches them to avoid them.
That said, evolution can be a real crap shoot, and you never know what sort of perverse effects you’ll get: like us loving sugar so much we eat ourselves into diabetes.
Drag is correct, but it’s fantasy evolution we’re talking about
I feel so bad cutting trees and draining lakes 😔
But your corporate overlords demand it, sadness isn’t efficient, get back to work!
But really they did a great job with commentary. People still say “why can’t we get green energy in the game?”. Because that’s not the point. This is raw capitalism. You’re dropped on a pristine planet, destroy the environment, clear it of all natural resources. It’s &meant_ to make you feel guilty. Maybe look around outside
Thing is that renewables are efficient actually.
What do you mean? Communists didn’t mine minerals and didn’t exploit indigenous people? Lol…
That’s right. For example, Australian communists lived in balance with nature for 60,000 years. Then capitalists came and started breaking stuff.
Aboriginal Elders have told us we are a reflection of the Country: if the land is sick, so are we. If the land is healthy (or punyu), so are we. Wik First Nations scholar Tyson Yunkaporta says our collective wellbeing can only be sustained through a life of communication with a sentient landscape and all things on it.
You wanna go tell Tyson he’s being racist against his own people?
Are you Tyson?
The totem system from the Countries I am from allows for the person to be the knowledge holder of the animal or plant they are given or born into. Within your family group (also known as mob) you are the person that is responsible for its survival and use. For example, if you are given the Kangaroo, people in your mob or Country would come to you to gain permission to hunt the Kangaroo for food or clothing. If you had observed the Kangaroo having high population numbers you could allow them to be hunted to feed families, and on the flip side if population numbers were low, you would not allow this. This totem system was vital to survival of Indigenous people, but also ensured that biodiversity was sustained. It is considered the social responsibility of the community to preserve the environment. By having this relationship and responsibility with a totem creates lifelong physical, spiritual, and emotional connections to the environment. With my personal totem being a Koala, I have dedicated my research interests to understanding more about this animal and advocating for its conservation and preservation. I have focused my early career research on understanding the Koalas diet selection and its relationship to habitat selection.
https://oxsci.org/conservation-through-the-eyes-of-indigenous-australian-culture/
Go tell Teresa that her tribe’s environmental management strategies are fake and racist because they make aboriginals look too smart
Are you Teresa?
Are you? You’re the one claiming racism because drag listens to Aboriginal elders. Drag’s got sources for what drag says, and it seems like you don’t. So you’re just making stuff up.
Besides, the noble savage trope is about thinking indigenous societies were pure an untainted by evil. Aboriginal Australians knew what evil was. They had policies in place within their governments to prevent ecological devastation. That’s not innocence, it’s technology. Aboriginals aren’t savages and drag didn’t say they are. You’re the one denying their advanced environmental policies. Sounds like you’re the one calling them savages.
I guess those megafauna who vanished about 59,500 years ago were really messing with the balance.
Regardless of megafaunata, just by being in Australia, humans became an invasive species and did all sorts of damage that invasive species do.
Worse, indigenous Australians brought the dingo with them. Two very intelligent predators where two didn’t exist before did a lot of damage. Colonizing Europeans also did a lot of damage and nothing that the indigenous people in Australia did justifies what Europeans (basically just the British, let’s be fair) did, but pretending that indigenous humans aren’t as flawed as all other humans does them a disservice. It does not help indigenous people to put them up on pedestals and treat them as noble savages.
https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2020/may/mysteries-of-megafauna-extinction-unlocked
the team found that extreme environmental change was the most likely cause of extinction, not humans.
I dont get it either. This is not about capitalism, this is about human nature of mindless expansion and exploitation…
The word you’re looking for is imperialism, and that’s definitely not unavoidable human nature
“It’s human nature,” okay bud and what about all the groups in history that prove otherwise? You’re just washing history with capitalist mindsets.
