Fate's Refusal to Honour (or at least properly research) Depictions of Non-Japanese Figures 2: Electric Bogaloo ft. Wandjina from the Current JP Summer Event

Disclaimer: While I am an Australian, I am NOT of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. Therefore, I am coming at this issue from an outsider's perspective. If there is an Aboriginal person, or more specifically of the Mowanjum people from the Kimberly regions, please PLEASE correct me if I am wrong on any front.

The culprit behind the events of the current Summer story in the JP servers has recently been revealed to be Wandjina, a creator Dreamtime figure from the Mowanjum people's culture.

In any other context, I would be thrilled to have an Australian figure in FGO, but the problem here is the figure they use.

Wandjina are sacred to the Mowanjum people, and therefore one needs to go through Aboriginal Law to obtain the right to use the Wandjina's image.

In Australia, this resulted in an actual conflict between a non-indigenous artist and aboriginals. You can read more here, but one quote to note is from an Aboriginal man of the Darug people, Chris Tobin: "Aboriginal law is very specific on what you can and can't do with wan[d]jinas." Another quote on this topic is made by the owner of an Aboriginal art gallery, Adrian Newstead: "Only a few Aboriginal artists ever win the right to depict wan[d]jina, and only then after years of initiations and ceremonies..."

I am NOT attaching an image of FGO's iteration of Wandjina due to this. Not only is her appearance only Aboriginal on a surface-level with her 'dot art' aesthetic (dot art* is only a recent addition to Aboriginal culture, created back in the 1970s), having no resemblance to an Aboriginal person (note, that while many Aboriginal people are white/pale, FGO continually chooses to depict people of colour as light skinned as possible. And yes, I know she's blue, not white. There is literally no records of her being blue skinned; is this because Wandjina's are associated with rain????) but she is also not very Wandjina looking? These figures do not have mouths, have large eyes meant to resemble the eye of a storm and are typically depicted with elaborate headdresses. That little glowing boomerang on her head is not exactly elaborate. And WHY does she have a boomerang??? Because she's Australian???? By that logic, every Japanese figure needs to have a katana. #GiveMurasakiaKatana2023.

There is also the issue of Cnoc na Riabh. While it is funny to think that she's a foreigner because of an Australian influence, Yaraan-doo is also another Aboriginal figure. And it is slapped onto a white girl for a fan service event. I'd just rather Fate leave Aboriginal culture alone and just do, like, Ned Kelly or something if they're going to continue like this.

More resources and info under the read more!

You'll have noted in the quotes that I've edited an 'n' into wanjinas. This is so I didn't confuse anyone: both can be the correct spelling! I just stuck to what I thought FGO was using for their Wandjina.

Here's an overview of what wandjinas are and their inappropriate use in art: https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/arts/what-are-wandjinas

Here's another page about an inappropriate use of Wandjinas (note: it's only a short synopsis about a documentary that covered the incident, I'm uncertain if you would be able to get access to the documentary outside of Australia): https://www.creativespirits.info/resources/movies/who-paintin-dis-wandjina

It should also be noted that the two websites I've linked above are from the website Creative Spirits. While it is run by a non-Indigenous person, the person behind it is currently transitioning it to be an Aboriginal owned and run resource. You can read more about how this site is run in his About page.

*If you want to know about dot art's origin, here and here are some resources on them. However, this article brings up something interesting that I would like to bring back to FGO Wandjina's dot art aesthetic. It notes that "the term 'dot painting' stems from what the Western eye sees when faced with contemporary Aboriginal acrylic paintings" (emphasis mine). All three articles note that dots were used to obfuscate sacred symbols and artifacts so that those who were not initiated into their cultures could not see what these figures were. In that case, what the hell is the dot art seen on Fate's Wandjina supposed to represent? In this article, it talks about the symbolism in Indigenous art. Fate's Wandjina has none.

Booming Laughter. Like Thunder.

I highly encourage every aventurine fan to step back and criticize the fact that hoyoverse decided to make Romani culture as the basis for his character and took aspects from history like discrimination, slavery, and even the stereotypes as story notes for a fictional planet named after a Romani slur.

This isn't the first time a gacha game let alone hoyo have pulled shit like this. Fgo, genshin, arknights, and probably several more that I've never played. Stay vigilant of this and listen to the people who are most impacted by this.

I am not Romani so I encourage you to check out Florian on youtube, he's talked about aventurine already. Check out the discussion in the comments too

Foreigner class Wandjina for the Wandjina World Tour event in Fate Grand Order.

Illustrator: Keito Koume.

Wanted to practice some transparency effect in watercolor.

BTW for those worried about wandjina just so you guys know she's actually trademarked to protect against unwanted depictions meaning legally you can't depict wandjina without permission so they probably got permission, however if they DIDNT (which lets be real there is a chance of) those affected will be able to pursue legal action if they decide they want to. The best thing to do is probably just raise awareness so if they want to take action they can, but ultimately that's their choice.

Separate from any debate over whether they "should" do so or not, I feel like there's no way fgo retracts a finished playable servant given how skinflinty Lasengle can be.

I think the most they'd do if faced with extreme pressure would be to censor the name like they did in the Chinese server ("Wandjina" to "Foreigner 393"). But I haven't really seen signs of that level of pressure.

[Meteo Hoshizora] is deadass the only writer at TM that cares about the Southern hemisphere @ Nzambi, various Aboriginal Servants, the Vietnamese twins

unfortunately being cared about by a TM writer is not a blessing

— @scarfdyedshadow

I understand the concerns, but gonna wait to see how things play out before forming too much of an opinion on the Wandjina situation. Not really my place to decide how it should be judged, after all.

Day 323:

Kriemhild: First the Grail grows legs and disappears, then it uses them as if it's a rocket, and now it just teleports? My little fool, is this a regular occurrence on these temporary Singularities?!

Master: ... I'll be honest, this is a first for me. At least no one ate anything out of it this time, though!

Kriemhild: *takes a deep breath, then exhales* I know that I'll just get even more angry, but who would be idiotic enough to eat directly from the Holy Grail?

Master: ... Chacha and Musashi.

Kriemhild: Why am I not surprised that the wondering sword-wielder would do that?

The post about 'aboriginal law' is completely wrong. The situation where the law got involved had to do with a white person outright saying they were 'worshipping wrong' and trying to create a museum that proclaimed to teach the 'true religion.' just using the religion in a video game is entirely different. Of course, there's complaints to make about FGO's depiction, but please don't spread misinformation.

Thank you for reaching out to me!

I'm not sure why you're saying the use of the term 'aboriginal law' is incorrect?

Aboriginal law was brought up in the article prior the section that reveals the non-indigenous artist in question accused Aboriginals of worshiping wrong and outlining their attempts to create said museum. It was brought up during the beginning of the article, as I will show below:

As you can see, I've highlighted where Aboriginal law is initially mentioned.

Do you mean that I've misled people to think Aboriginal law is part of Australia's actual legal system? My bad, sorry! And thanks for pointing it out. Aboriginal law refers to Aboriginal cultural law and is not part of Western law. I'll make sure to mention this when I make my follow-up to that post.

But if that's not what you mean, then I'm happy to talk out what you properly mean by me spreading misinformation! Especially if you're Aboriginal; we can work together to iron out the kinks in my initial post.

Wandjina, the culprit behind the 2023 summer event. The first Australian character in FGO (though not the first in the whole franchise; Requiem has the Rainbow Serpent).

To be honest, your discussion of Minase's positive and negative qualities piqued my interest. What do you think are the main recurring fgo writers' strong and weak points? Also where would you rank the lilim harlot event?

For the sake of brevity, I'll stick to one per writer. Picking apart everyone to the extent I did with Minase would take forever and would be better done after their respective Ordeal Calls.

I hesitate to call Higashide's comedy his strong point because his huge hits are about as frequent as his huge misses. I suppose I'll go with clarity for Higashide's main strong point. Even when I think he sucked at delivering his point, I can always tell what he's trying to say, which is not something I can say about Sakurai's most compressed scripts. His weak point is his lack of ambition. It's nice to have at least one person in FGO's team who will never try to escalate things, but I can't see it doesn't make his stories more forgettable in the long run.

Minase was already detailed in his own post.

Meteo’s best quality is a tone setter. Requiem, Salem, and all his events come with an atmosphere that feels very tangibly different from what FGO usually does. Often his events are bad, but never they lack a unique identity. Which segues into his weak point, being that many of his events are comedy events and the man is simply not funny. Bullying Erice is his only consistently good joke, and when he tries other things, the results are more miss than hit. See Las Vegas and Wandjina World Tour for major examples of comedy events that failed hard at the comedy side.

Nasu is a master recycler. I don't know how he does it but the man is constantly reusing the same structures, the same themes, or the same dynamics and somehow it never feels repetitive. There is always something that makes the whole recipe feel fresh and unique despite being so easy to recognize the same usual ingredients there. And what I dislike about Nasu in FGO is how he's still stuck at the concept of selling waifus from the girls with routes days. Everyone has their list of characters who get ship tease with Fujimaru but only in Nasu's case it feels like an overwhelming majority and that some of the choices create too large of a difference between the summoned character and the character in the main story. Was it really necessary to do this with, say, Morgan? Melusine? Tenochtitlan?

And Sakurai I saved for last because one major reason this post took this long is that I was struggling to sort out what is characteristically good and bad about her. Well, even now I don’t have a simple and satisfying answer. Things can’t be simple with Sakurai, unfortunately. One friend of mine described the experience of reading Sakurai scripts as “playing chess against an opponent that doesn’t tell that you are in a game of chess” and that’s honestly a fascinating way to phrase it.

Sakurai is an intriguing combination of inflexibly ambitious and inflexibly professional. She has grand ideas for her characters and she will include them in the script without fail. But she's also strictly adherent to script size limitations. While Nasu is making Camelot and Avalon le Fae with total disregard to every possible limit, Sakurai is cramming so much into Septem's and London's microscopic file space that it becomes utterly incomprehensible. Nasu wrote Last Encore's plot as a whole ass novel and hired Sakurai to convert that into anime scripts because Sakurai is his expert in fitting a lot of stuff into tiny spaces. Tunguska was tossed at Sakurai because probably no one else could fit into its raid event constraints. And because she doesn't compromise on what goes in, her alternative is not revealing the mysteries about her characters but laying out all the hints so the players can figure it out themselves, which is a really fun thing once you're used to it (read: aware that you're playing chess against her).

And the answer to "Where would I rank the Lilim Harlot event" is 1st place.

What's probably going to happen to FGO if there's ever any legal trouble concerning depicting Wandjina is that Aniplex lawyers just have Lasengle change the name slightly and then they say it's no longer depicting any real-life references, but honestly I hope it gets bad enough that they actually need to make a retraction for once. They've been getting away with this for too long

I did not expect Wandjina to escape NPC jail within a month. I assumed she wouldn't show up until the Foreigner Ordeal Call, if ever.

the wandjina problem is definitely agregious and like it just so perfectly encapsulates the majority of my problems with fgo, namely that had it not been a live service model that constantly needs to pull from more and more sources to keep adding to itself then so many of these issues would have been avoidable