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Junglenorn Face Rework Concept Art Jabber | 7/3/2020 | 5 | Have you ever noticed that the Junglenorns look kinda... you know?
This is a simple mockup of Junglenorns with a more typical Norn muzzle, as well as other minor facial edits, using the Junglenorn family promo image as a base with the smile from the female Aquanorn promo. Inspired by an exchange in CAOS Coding Caves. |
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I think these actually look cuter than the originals. I guess it's the smaller mouth and less visible teeth.
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Thanks for bringing this up, and for your thoughtful answer, Jabber.
Doringo: This is nowhere near "cancel culture". That thing is a whole different discussion and there's a lot more to it than the stupid mess twitter mobs have turned it into (which has very little to do with social justice and activism), but rest assured, that is not what is happening here.
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Now that you mention it, yeah, their noses aren't as doglike as regular C3/DS style Norns' are. It's the orange spots on the adult's face that make it look like it has flared nostrils (compare to the baby), but the CC mascot up there definitely has a "dog" nose compared to the Junglenorn's vaguely humanoid lump. There really were just a lot of little unfortunate decisions with their design.
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Nice, they actually look better overall. I didn't know they were marsupilami inspired! maybe a dog nose like them, instead of a humanoid nose would also help.
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Your post is too difficult to understand to start with. Are you saying I'm accusing everyone of being racist, or are you accusing everyone of being racist? I have no comment for the rest of that paragraph as it isn't really very relevant to what I have written myself.
The second paragraph is also irrelevant to what I have been saying. The third is where it starts to actually become a response to what I have written. Yes I do prefer to avoid the "nightmare circus" stuff, but that doesn't mean I should just keep ignoring it when I see it making its way into the community more and more each passing year. How is it a "Creatures Problem" and not a cancellation take if you use death of the author to say something reminds you of offensive thing, therefore it is offensive thing? The formula is too exploitable, you could easily abuse it on all kinds of things. This is manufactured drama.
You say that Tomtschek and Alien are not being attacked, but you conclude your post with saying they "made a mistake" because you think the jungle norns remind you of a racial stereotype? The sermon on prejudice remains irrelevant to what I have written.
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You're making a lot of accusations here, so I'm going to go through them one at a time conceptually.
1. Everyone is racist. Every group of people and every specific person. But prejudice is ultimately the intersection of generalization and preference for familiarity, tools used by the brain to deal with a world that is infinitely more complicated than it can process in full detail, and just because you have that kind of hardware limitation doesn't mean you're doomed with some kind of original sin because you also have agency. You're conscious, independent, self-aware, and empathetic, and you have the ability to recognize when something hurts other people (or to anticipate that it would) and change your behavior based on that. It's just a matter of learning. The idea that only some groups of people can be racially prejudiced, or that some are more so than others, is an illusion that comes from the addition of very real cultural power dynamics into the equation. For example, there is no word a black person can call a white person that is equivalent in weight and severity to a white person calling a black person the N-word, and this isn't just a linguistic quirk, it's representative of the historical relationship between black and white people. Through no fault of their own and with no individual control over cultural inertia, people are born into an environment where it is much easier for a white person to hurt a black person than the other way around, and that's just something we have to be aware of as we interact with the world.
2. Black people are not political. It is not obsessive to talk about race and racism as it affects black people, who are largely treated like their very existence is political and for whom everything they say and do is viewed through the lens of their race, and the suggestion that it is, especially when directed at black people talking about their own lives and experiences, is gaslighting. Denying that people experience these problems and stigmatizing discussion of them makes it impossible for things to change. If you're uncomfortable with this topic, you don't have to engage with it. That's a choice you are able to make as a non-black person and it's not necessarily morally wrong. But to implicate that no-one should engage with it is wrong.
3. If you calm down and re-read the posts here, you'll notice that no-one is "canceling" anyone or anything. There are no attacks on Tomtschek or Alien. I was actually very careful not to use the word "racist", specifically to keep my tone from coming off as accusatory to people who are uncomfortable with what I'm talking about. I even still like the Junglenorns! I use them! This was a civil, level-headed, constructive discussion about a problem that I'm not the first to notice exactly until your post. The fact that you saw this and interpreted it as aggressive, unnecessary, manufactured drama poisoning your apolitical video game community only really says anything about you. Like I said, if you don't want to participate with this kind of stuff, you can just not. If Creatures is where you come to get away from the nightmare circus bullshit that happens on a daily basis all over the world, then, honestly, you made a good choice. Trace levels of politics are everywhere, but there really isn't much to say about Creatures, politically, and there's so few active members that you're unlikely to even run into something incidentally because people could go almost anywhere else for a more robust discussion. But this is a Creatures problem being talked about in a Creatures place. It's on-topic, it's warranted, and it will continue.
Acknowledgement of a problem is not the problem. The Junglenorns themselves aren't even really the problem; saying that would imply that racism happens on an individual basis, like if we just got rid of the right people then racism would be solved forever. Additionally, no-one is saying that Tomtschek and Alien intentionally set out to make blackface jungle bunny Norns; we're acknowledging that that's what they ended up doing, without realizing it. They aren't bad people, they just made a mistake. The lack of mindfulness non-black people have about the way these things affect black people is institutional, and exists even in nooks and crannies as obscure as this one. Prejudice, in the general case, is an inescapable problem with the human brain, and everything people can do about it amounts to damage control. But it's still important to try, and to always be trying, because the result is a better, kinder, more understanding world.
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Has this community really degraded into the paranoid practice of cancelling old breeds for sketchy reasons? Arnout is right about the Marsupilami influence, it comes from the Norngarden website itself. However, they were also based off of furbies, which is a primary part of their facial design. You should be able to see the resemblance immediately:
They are basically a fusion between Marsupilami, a Furby and a Banana Norn.
As for the question of "How are they Jungle?" their genome is disease-resistant and designed to allow them to survive in the Grendel Jungle. It is as simple as that.
In conclusion, instead of falsely accusing Tomtschek & Alien of being racially insensitive because you think they're of race X which is somehow inherently racist towards race Y because you believe everyone who isn't race Y is racist towards it (which would be a pretty racist view of things if anyone here actually believes that) you should all realize that, especially in the 2000s web communities, not everyone was obsessed with race and inventing reasons to call others racist? It would help prevent troubling and needless discussions of this sort in the future, as well as preventing many false accusations against innocent users who aren't even around to defend themselves anymore.
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Yeah it's something that bugged me before too. This edit seems to be an improvement in that manner.
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I have to say I don't see the resemblance, the profile is completely different, Marsupilami has a long tail and more doglike in expression. with a large black nose. It doesn't have the strange black-face-y lips, nor the stereotypical red nose.
Unfortunately, intent doesn't mean they can't be racist. The CC is not the most diverse community, and things like this can often be over looked. While the Jungle Norns aren't the only racist breed, they are the most (unintentionally) overt.
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Marsupilami rings a bell for me, too. It's a pretty Norn-y character design, although I gotta say its influence on the Junglenorns is not particularly visible. Maybe making them look more like Marsupilami would be a good way to go.
Re: never coming to mind, I think that's the problem. The Creatures community is overwhelmingly white, or at least not black, and non-black people can be not-conscious of the problems black people face in a way that black people cannot. It's not hard to see how two (presumably) non-black people, Tomtschek and Alien, could have failed to see the racially-charged alternate interpretation of what they made, or for others to feel that their lack of intent is enough to dismiss that.
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