Set your DVRs in China for Assassin’s Creed: The Ripoff Show
China and Japan hate each other. They’ve hated each other for a long time, and they’ll most likely continue to hate each other well into the future, and as mostly outsiders reading this, there’s little we can do to change that.
Japanese media is riddled with Chinese stereotypes, while China outright produces government funded anti-Japanese propaganda. Not many Chinese citizens tune in to watch them, though. If anything has the potential to push the two countries closer to peace, it’s the general sense of revulsion toward these shows. See, they’re not….very….good.
They don’t HAVE to be good, because they’ll get on the air anyway and everyone involved will be paid. So it’s common for Chinese TV producers to just rip off a bunch of stuff, make the villains Japanese and call it a day.
A good example went on the air recently: Hunter’s Blade, a “historical” drama about a militia defending their small village from Japanese invaders. The picture above is a depiction of the Second Sino-Japanese War, a conflict that began in 1937 and eventually melted into the Second World War. The problem is, the costumes are completely inaccurate for the time period, dating a hundred years from what people wore in China during the 1930’s. That’s because they were stolen from Assassin’s Creed games.
Maybe they assumed no one would notice, but the assumption was wrong: social media throughout the country erupted in laughter. “When will Assassin’s Creed come out with anti-Japanese DLC?” asked one Twitterer.
But still, they stole from a game that sells on Japanese consoles and is fashioned to American tastes. This would stick it to the Japanese and the Americans simultaneously, if Assassin’s Creed weren’t the product of a French company.