this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads "Preserve the media you can before it's gone forever." The Wikipedia article reads, "No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were transferred to film for editing before transmission and exist in their broadcast form. [88] Some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of other countries that bought prints for broadcast or by private individuals who acquired them by various means. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved, as well as excerpts filmed from the television screen onto 8 mm cine film and clips that were shown on other programmes. Audio versions of all lost episodes exist from home viewers who made tape recordings of the show. Short clips from every story with the exception of Marco Polo (1964), "Mission to the Unknown" (1965) and The Massacre (1966) also exist."

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I agree that preserving the bigotries of the past to show people what they were like critically is important. Although I don't think Cyberpunk counts in this instance. Yes, the artist who originally drew that poster had the intention of satirising the way capitalist companies use trans bodies to sell anything. The problem is, then CD Projekt Red, the capitalist company, used the poster to sell their game. They did the exact thing they were trying to satirise. At one point they held a cosplay contest, and the winner was a cis woman who stuck a glowing dildo up her pants to cosplay as the woman in that poster. And CDPR put images of her cosplay all over their twitter. A cis woman dressed up as a satire of the commodification of trans bodies to win a contest, and a company used her image to sell a video game. You can't have effective satire while doing the very thing you "satirised". I believe the original artist intended to satirise, but the company that owns the rights to the image just played it straight and did the horrible thing in sincerity.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's a great point about the poster and the contest, I'd never made that connection before. I mostly remembered the backlash targeted against the original artist of the poster and the bitter irony of the company using the poster to do the exact thing it was created to criticize. I remember the cosplay contest and thinking that that was a gross costume, but didn't think any further about their use of the photos of a cis woman cosplaying as an over-sexualized trans woman to sell the game or anything. Just goes to show that even as a member of the targeted community, you can miss these kinds of things.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

It's great that you're so open minded to seeing things from another perspective.

I don't blame the artist who originally drew that poster, but I do think she could have played it smarter than to give a AAA gaming company the rights to a controversial and nuanced satire of transphobia. The result of that is kind of inevitable when you consider the capitalist context of big companies like CDPR. I totally want to see political media exploring these issues in indie games, but trusting big corporations to have a nuanced discussion of the most delicate trans issues is a bad idea. A cis woman with a glowing dildo up her pants on CDPR's Twitter was kind of inevitable