California is a state with a rich Asian history (and not just that of the Chinese and Japanese!), and seeing CP77 continue to treat East Asians as some kind of invasive force in its environment and characters is, well, ridiculous, to put it mildly.

It's not just that Asian aesthetics exist in the game, but also how it's framed in such an easily otherising manner: you either speak normally or you speak Asian (or some other racial stereotype). The characters are either normal or they're Asian (or something "else").

Hell, you can design V's face to be robot fucking Fu Manchu, "Asian" in every likeness, but they'll still be treated as white. Because you're white and normal, unlike those Asians roaming Night City.

Blade Runner's inclusion of Asian aesthetics in a setting where all heroic figures and "the common man" are white is done to depict the influence Asian culture as a parasitic, invasive force taking over white America/California; CP77 does it all the same.

As @vexwerewolf puts it, shittiness tends to be connected to other shittiness. CDPR's transphobia and general hate of both game developers and gamers wanting a finished product of course would not be complete without a bit of uncritical racism in the mix. https://twitter.com/vexwerewolf/status/1338535400197984261

As with most of my threads, there's a whole load of other things I could talk about: the paradox of "cheap Asian labour" vs "rich Asians coming to take everything", how this new breed of orientalism now accounts for sinophobia too, and how it's connected to the pandemic...

But I think based on what I've written here I hope my supposed friends and followers of my scifi work can understand don't have warm feelings towards CP, or how I really don't care for them when their cis - and white - selves insist on playing the game with an uncritical eye.

If this is what you call "ruining your fun", wait till you hear what life has been like for the past year or so.

Further reading: @Yinyangfooey wrote for @WIRED about Cyberpunk 2077's orientalism and its place in larger the larger cyberpunk trope.

He's actually, yknow, a writer who knows how to make the words sound good, so give his article a read. https://www.wired.com/story/orientalism-cyberpunk-2077-yellow-peril-science-fiction/?mbid=social_twitter&utm_brand=wired&utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter

Yeah, he knows how to make the words sound gooder than I can.

More addendums:

Racism towards East Asians is a particularly difficult topic because of how different it manifests itself from Black/Native discrimination, but also because white society has done a very good job at obscuring said racism. https://twitter.com/Crazy_Procyon/status/1338560020015804416

The whole fiasco with that school board lumping "Asians" with "whites" and separate from "POC" from a few weeks back sort of says it all, and it's a way to discredit Asian struggles and also divide and conquer POC that works out to be shockingly effective.

It's something of a very insidious but highly useful method of boxing us in: on the white side, we're told we're exceptional and are model ethnic groups, but those standards they hold us to are exceedingly white; stepping out of line results in punishment.

A Black peer of mine once referred to Asian-white dynamics as "an abusive racial relationship", whereby we're held to their standards and expected to fall in line, while also forcing us to allow them to co-opt our culture, racial in-jokes, and mannerisms openly.

Further to that, this buddy-buddy nature is then weaponised to force a sort of "POC wedge" between us and other ethnic groups: you're not like /those/ Black and Native and Latinx people who are super ethnic, you're like /us/, virtuous white people who act in civilised ways.

This wedge means that other POC groups start to distrust East Asians, and vice versa. Asians are stuck between white people who get to puppet our measure of success and still hold power on who gets to be "good Asians", and other POC buy in and view us as effectively white.

Further reading: A previous thread I did regarding Japanese/East Asian cultural appropriation https://twitter.com/Kavaeric/status/1330194962613465089