(Version española)

I have always found interesting how selective Social justice warriors are when they speak about racism and stereotypes. They seems to have a particular selection of races that are “protected” and so everything that happens to them is “racism”, while other races are completely ignored under the same circumstances. This of course applies to white americans over everything else; we all know by now that, by SJW standars, white americans have no culture, can’t receive racism, and are never stereotyped. But it also happens to other countries, and one example of it is Spain.

The best example of this is probably the Resident evil saga. SJWs usually complain that Resident evil 5 is “racist” because you have to kill black people (in a game set in Africa…), yet i have never seen one complain that in Resident evil 4 everything you kill are spaniards, since the game is set in Spain. And a very stereotyped Spain i must say. In fact is so stereotyped that it’s not Spain. It’s mexico. Even the accent of the characters is mexican. Spanish characters in games have a long tradicion of being stereotyped like hell. There are only a few spaniards i can think of in games that are not, like, Mila in Dead or Alive or Zatto in Guilty gear. Yet i have never seen anyone inside this culture of outrage complain about how stereotyped we are and how it should be changed. And i think i know why.

I think they don’t do it because, well, probably the main reason is that they really know shit about any culture outside their “protected” groups, but another big reason is probably that they can’t get the support of spaniards for it. Because we just don’t care. People complaining about stereotypes are usually white middle class millenials who try to feel outraged in stead of someone else, but even so there are a number of black people in their ranks that help support them in their idea that their “protected” races need their help to become something in life (a very racist sentiment, i must say). In the case of spaniards, they would probably have a hard time finding many of us who seriously complain about how we are portrayed in games, and supporting them in their madness. I don’t think i have ever seen a spaniard complain about it. Oh, sure, we bring it up sometimes, but we do it in a humorous way, to laught at how ridiculous characters like Vega are; there are no one complaining about how Vega is offensive and should be changed. In fact Vega is a very popular character in Spain.

I still remember the first time i saw Miguel Caballero Rojo in Tekken (The name’s a joke referencing Michael Knight btw, you’re welcome). As he appeared in the screen, dressed in some kind of “traditional” clothes more akin to a mexican noble house than to a spaniard, in an scenary set in a meadow full of sheeps, me and my friends began to laught so hard we had to pause the game because our stomach hurt. Yet, i’ve never seen anyone offended by the character. We simply laught at this stuff. We consider it normal for a far away country like United states or Japan to not know shit about a small, close to bankrupcy due to government corruption, country that time ago ruled half the planet but now can only presume of it’s soccer team and having invented the lollipops (yes, we created the lollipops, you are welcome as well). We do exactly the same about other countries, we know shit about half the countries in the world and we represent them through stereotypes. And that includes white americans, who are represented in almost every fictional work made outside the United states as blonde, blue eyes, and with an specific facial structure.

Oh, and i have something to say about stereotypes itself too. I’ll tell you something as an artist: stereotypes in fiction are not bad. Stereotypes are a way to quickly convey information to the reader, precisely because, being stereotypes, everyone think about a set of information about a character when they believe it belongs to that stereotype. This is something we artists use when we have to give the reader (or spectator) a lot of info in a small ammount of time, which usually happens in movies, short comics, animations or even videogames that don’t spend much time on story. This is easily exemplified with anime. They have some stereotypes for personalities, like “yandere”, “tsundere”, etc, that they can use in the first chapter of a show to quickly explain the spectator that a character is more or less “X” way, and latter in the show they can explain more about the character. This can be applied to race. If i, as a comic artist, have to do a 3 panel strip about a spaniard, one of my best options to show everything i want to say in so short space, is to make the character a walking stereotype, so i would make a Matador or a Flamenco dancer. And i doubt many people here would be offended by it.

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