the heavy-handed political message of Detroit: Become Human is disgusting in addition to being an utterly wasted opportunity ...
the heavy-handed political message of Detroit: Become Human is disgusting in addition to being an utterly wasted opportunity
the message isn’t just “racism is bad”
it’s “this racism, which we made to be not tempting at all and only be held by repulsive people, is bad, because you already believe it is”
It’s a fucking Daily Show episode. It’s an ideological handjob: The things you already believe make you a perfect, wise, moral person, you never need to think about anything. You don’t need to think about the all-consuming nature of prejudice and how it pops up unhindered in people who swear to be free of it. You don’t need to think about how little about your life would have to change to make you think racism was the obviously correct viewpoint with exactly as much smugness. You don’t need to think about who you are prejudiced against. You just need to bask in the smug self-satisfaction that you know Racism Is Bad, and people who disagree with you about anything are stupid and repulsive. Like these guys who spend thousands of dollars on consumer electronics in the form of androids, and are then are so overwhelmed by the need to be stupid and repulsive they have to savagely beat their own expensive androids. Not like you! You’re smart, not like the stupid and repulsive people who disagree with you. *handjob noises*
The deck is so stacked in favor of the androids it kills the message. The androids don’t “become human”, they already are. Kara and Markus behave identically to humans the moment they need to.
Hey, wouldn’t it make sense if the androids were weird, and weird to be around? Like they didn’t have the program to navigate the situations they found themselves in, and they had to cobble one together from what data they have? What if Kara literally had no way to talk to anyone other than “like a housekeeper or nanny”, no matter how inappropriate this was or how much it freaked people out to hear her cobble together sentences out of phrases that were not meant to be used that way? What if she was on the run with Alice and in a constant state of terror that she’s going to encounter a situation she just Cannot Deal With that a human wouldn’t even notice?
What if deviant androids weren’t “runaway slaves”, who everyone agrees were human and should have been treated nicer, they were the mentally ill, who almost every person crusading against racism is gleefully prejudiced against? What if instead of jerking the audience off about how not prejudiced they were, you instead showed them how prejudiced they were, by presenting characters who are like people they actually hate, instead of like people they gain status for pitying?
I was nodding along from the first line thinking “how could you write a better racism analogy” and your last paragraph took me completely by surprise, that would have been such a better way to do it.