(Shadowrun 3e) Shadows of Asia

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Abuse of Children

Waahh! Why do I keep running into situations where I'm expected to have an intelligent opinion about orientalism? One day, someone's going to say to me, "Hey, aren't you just a white guy who's taken it upon himself to say when things are and are not racist?" And I'm going to have nothing. Best I'm going to be able to do is mumble, "Yeah, but I'd just read Shadows of Asia."

Is it really as bad as all that? I don't know. Probably not. But it does have the line, "Manchuria: the most inscrutable of lands among the inscrutable Chinese." And you can't just say that. Plus, the title of the whole chapter is "Chinese Puzzle," so I guess we're talking about orientalism now.

"As a European Orientalist once surmised, Hinduism as 'what Hindus do'. . ." Oh, sorry, that's another quote, from the part of the book where it explains India's caste system. But it's as good a jumping off point as any to get to the thesis of this post - this book has a particular point of view, and that point of view is "The first book in this series was Shadows of North America, because Shadowrun originates in North America, the second book in this series was Shadows of Europe, because Shadowrun has a large European player base, and the third book is going to be Shadows of Asia, because Shadowrun is cyberpunk, and cyberpunk as a genre has a huge amount of unexamined orientalist baggage."

And in true cyberpunk fashion, that baggage remains thoroughly unexamined. Like, the book makes a point of saying that the center of the tourism-for-purposes-of-child-sex-trafficking industry has moved from Bangkok to Rangoon (Yangon). And why would it do that?

No, seriously, why?

Shadows of Asia has a copyright date of 2005-2006. And I think, if you're trying to write about sci-fi Thailand in 2005, maybe the first step is to see what's going on in current Thailand and extrapolate. The headlines back then probably talked quite a bit about the country's growing problem with child sex trafficking and the government's attempts at cracking down on it and maybe the people writing this book thought they'd get it done by 2064. But where are all those sex tourists going to go now? Could be anywhere in the world. Why not nearby Myanmar?

I think that mostly demonstrates a failure of imagination. They're putting Southeast Asia in their roleplaying game and the one thing people know about SE Asia is that it's where perverts from around the world go to pay money to rape children. So, if you don't put something like that somewhere in your chapter about SE Asia, people are going to notice and probably complain. Except, I don't think even that much thought was put into it. I think, what's really going on is that child-raping-sex-tourists are so fundamentally baked into their idea of what Southeast Asia is like that if they didn't mention them, they wouldn't feel like they were authentically talking about the region. No malice. No premeditation. Just sitting down in front of the computer and putting One Night in Bangkok on repeat while you write.

It's like the association between Islam and violent fundamentalism. They're self-aware enough about this to say "Not All Muslims" in the form of two rival factions - the Islamic Unity Movement, which you know, is entirely and uncomplicatedly the Fox News version of Islam and the modern, tolerant Islamic Renaissance Movement. But I think the thing that annoys me about this is that it leads to things like the introduction to Indonesia saying, "Compared to Middle Eastern Islam, Indonesian Islam is moderate, accommodating, and the least Arabic . . . this form of Islam is more tolerant and has been referred to as 'Islam with a smiling face.'"

First of all, no shit it's the least Arabic. I'm assuming you've seen a map before. Arabia is here and Indonesia is waay over heere. We can break out the calipers and count the distance with the legend key, if you like.

But the second, more pertinent thing is what the fuck are you even talking about? If anyone ever referred to my belief system as "_____ with a smiling face" I would punch them in the fucking junk. I may have my issues with the New Atheists, but I don't believe I've ever given someone permission to tell me "you're so reasonable compared to them." (I know, I know, at this moment you're probably thinking "don't worry, no one's in danger of doing that," but I do sometimes actually try to be reasonable).

What's happened here is that they've spent some considerable time characterizing "fundamentalist" Islam as being anti-metahuman and anti-magic (you know, opposed to some of the most popular character types in the game). Then they have characters express surprise when they learn about Muslims who are not like that, without ever acknowledging that this specific form of fantastic bigotry is something they invented for their game of make-believe.

Would an Ayatollah hate an elf? I don't know, maybe, but it hardly seems inevitable.

It's like that thing with Southeast Asia. There are certain ideas that are tangled together in your brain, like Islam and sectarian violence, and you don't make much of an effort to question the connection. Islam being dangerous and unreasonable and opposed to fun is what makes it recognizably Islam and maybe over time you branch out from that simplistic depiction, but what, in other contexts, would be nuance and conflict are instead called out as deviations from expectations.

I'm no expert on orientalism, but I am an optimist re: a human being's capacity for reflection and growth. You can do better. You can learn more about what Muslims actually believe.

But like I said. I don't think it's malice. And I don't even think it's laziness, not really. I think it's in large part due to the fact that this is a game that has been around since 1989 and some part of it is always going to be frozen in the perspectives of the time of its birth. More than Islam staying recognizably Islam or SE Asia staying recognizably SE Asia, it's about Shadowrun staying recognizably Shadowrun. My evidence: "The general theme of Russia is a power play. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the mid 1980s, between Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev." Most everything that's wrong with this book is some variant of that.

There's more I could be saying. For all my complaints, the book does have some delightful fantasy/sci-fi, like mountain-sized fire elementals or high-tech robot governesses. And there are things that are a little weird without rising to the level of offensive. Like the fact that Malaysian communism "threatens the capitalist paradise that urban Malaysia has become" which is maybe a sly bit of irony in the OOC rules section, or maybe just an example of the author not really understanding cyberpunk as a genre ("it's about how neoliberal cyborgs will raise the global standard of living, right?").

Eh, one more grrr before I check out - orks are unusually common in Mongolia and trolls are common among the Maori. And, it's like, Shadowrun orks and trolls aren't exactly fantasy orcs and trolls, so . . . maybe it's not . . . wrong? But my eye is definitely twitching at the thought of untangling the subtext.

Overall, I don't know how I feel about Shadows of Asia. I guess because it covers all of Asia (even Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and the Uighur-inhabited Chinese province of Xinjiang, which have all merged into the nation of Turkestan, presumably for purposes of map legibility) and my knowledge of 30% of the Earth's land area, containing 60% of its total population is cursory enough that I needed the book to be a guide to both the real places and the near-future post-Awakening versions of those places. And I don't feel confident that it was up to the task.

And yeah, that's massively unfair on my part. It's too much to put on a 231-page rpg supplement. Maybe there's a bunch of great stuff in here that would resonate deeply with me if I were less ignorant. Maybe someone's casually flipping through the pages and they stop with reverent awe because they absolutely nailed cyberpunk/fantasy Macao. And maybe that's a pretty far-fetched scenario, but it is entirely probable that there are large parts of the book that are good at a level above my ability to appreciate.

On the other hand, scroll back up and take a look at all the stuff I was complaining about. That's how the book looked at exactly the level of my ability to appreciate. 

Ukss Contribution: I'm going to sit this one out. I'd say that only about 15% of it is actually bad, but that 15% contained things that made me deeply uncomfortable.