Now that I do not feel like death from work and therapy, I can finally sit down and thank you for the work you put into making 1.5 content playable, for me. I haven't touched it, only briefly to test someone else's mod, and I hated it. Like, absolutely despised it. Specifically because of Leo's "barbaric" speech dialogue. I love the idea of incorporating language barriers in games but NOT when it depicts the non-English speaker as uncultured or unintelligent. Even worse, it was very clear that this island was inhabited at some point but, it's like no one cares, just get rich off the island. I think it would've made for a more compelling story if there was a choice for the farmer to turn this into a money-making getaway/tourist trap for Pelican Town, pushed by Lewis, Robin, and Pierre or work with Gunther and Marlon to preserve the island and discover it's past. You could find that it is still inhabited and can either work with (Gunther route) or against (Lewis route) these people to figure out what can be done with their land. Maybe a path where the natives decide they would like to establish a trade/touring spot but with their own ideas and practises. Maybe have a few new NPCs to befriend from the island that also offer a split choice, to make the people less one-dimensional.
You know. Literally anything that doesn't make me, the player, feel like a coloniser. I'm fine with being a capitalist, pretending I'm for the community by working against Joja, but a coloniser?? No thank you.
This makes mod make me more comfortable venturing out to the Island. You're awesome for this!
Hi friends! I made an unofficial update for this mod for 1.6 compatibility. I also made it so you can toggle the alternate portraits and sprites on/off with the generic mod config menu. Please let me know if you run into any issues!
Doesn't this mod make us the colonizers effectively, instead of removing colonial themes?
-Ginger Island is basically uninhabited with no indigenous humans -We help the lost kid on the island re-integrate into a community, so that he may grow up not isolated from other people -We help an old woman get closure related to the passing of her pirate husband -We turn the uninhabited island into a small farm we maintain and a small little beach for the people who live close geographically
your mod: -We barge into an island with residents of different culture than us-We set up a farm on their cultural homeland, with one of them still living in plain view of our antics -We do a "let's bring the tribal kid to our civilized world to show them the merits of our culture" when in reality we show off the funny black kid to the whole town. This is effectively what the English did with Pocahontas during their colonization of North America. -You, the mod maker, ignored cultural origins of the dialog of one NPC and made and remove the idiosyncrasies from his original dialog, erasing the identity he had to replace it with effectively "black but bland" -You made the NPCs hostile toward us for being outsiders, but we force our way into them accepting us anyway through constantly being a nuisance (the nicest way people were colonized) -Furthermore, as someone pointed out to me, you pulled a Disney and turned all the white NPCs on GINGER Island into black people.
obligatory "im white" so take what i say with a grain of salt, but i think this just shows that the original game content is indeed pretty racist, to the degree that we can't really fix it with a mod this simple. like, i like this mod personally (vanilla professor snail in particular i find pretty unbearable), but it being an imperfect solution doesn't make it more racist than the original game. The "uninhabited island paradise rich with resources" is obviously a racist trope, and it's hard to mod around it when the goal of stardew valley, mechanically, is to extract as much wealth from your surroundings as possible. considering stardew valley has exactly 2 nonwhite characters, i dont think it's a stretch to say the game could have some (however unintentional) racism built in. also not sure what you mean by the last bullet point, because its "ginger" the vegetable, not ginger the hair colour (and there are ginger Black people?). I'm not trying to be aggressive or anything, and this mod hasnt been updated in three years so regardless its probably moot, but i wanted to give another perspective.
The last bullet point was a joke, mocking the mostly false claim that Hollywood is replacing redhead characters with black/brown versions and just making a stupid jab my girlfriend suggested.
In regards to the island and the implication that there is racist tropes in an uninhabited island rich with resources, these sorts of islands do exist, and depending on the part of the world, were quite numerous until they were settled. For example, many of the islands of Hawaii weren't settled by any natives, nor were many of the other Pacific islands. I think that by changing the residents of the island from castaways/paleontologists/hermits/pirates to natives, it enforces and creates colonial themes rather than remove them.
I don't plan on using the mod since I like keeping characters mostly the same appearance-wise and not being personally uncomfortable with the base game but I gotta say the comment of making Gourmand/Onca speak 'normally' and 'hating the way he spoke' sorta irked me. To me Gourmand's way of speaking reminds me somewhat of Jamaican patois (not exact but reminiscent) and your altered version felt like it completely scrapped the nature of it resembling a cultural way of speaking making it sound way more like something I'd hear from a white person instead. I feel having them speak in a way similar to patois could've been a great addition.
That's my thoughts as someone who is mixed (Jamaican on my father's side English on my mother's) I think the mod comes from a great place and it seems to have a lot of research put into it even if it's not my sort of thing, just wanted to point out something.
Hey! I had the same problem at first, it was because I had Seasonal Cute Characters. Make sure there are no mods in your folder that change portraits! Even after editing the JSON for SCC though, Birdie's sprite never changed...not sure! But worth having a look through your folder for potential conflicts.
96 comments
You know. Literally anything that doesn't make me, the player, feel like a coloniser. I'm fine with being a capitalist, pretending I'm for the community by working against Joja, but a coloniser?? No thank you.
This makes mod make me more comfortable venturing out to the Island. You're awesome for this!
http://forums.stardewvalley.net/threads/unofficial-mod-updates.2096/post-126468
-Ginger Island is basically uninhabited with no indigenous humans
-We help the lost kid on the island re-integrate into a community, so that he may grow up not isolated from other people
-We help an old woman get closure related to the passing of her pirate husband
-We turn the uninhabited island into a small farm we maintain and a small little beach for the people who live close geographically
your mod:
-We barge into an island with residents of different culture than us-We set up a farm on their cultural homeland, with one of them still living in plain view of our antics
-We do a "let's bring the tribal kid to our civilized world to show them the merits of our culture" when in reality we show off the funny black kid to the whole town. This is effectively what the English did with Pocahontas during their colonization of North America.
-You, the mod maker, ignored cultural origins of the dialog of one NPC and made and remove the idiosyncrasies from his original dialog, erasing the identity he had to replace it with effectively "black but bland"
-You made the NPCs hostile toward us for being outsiders, but we force our way into them accepting us anyway through constantly being a nuisance (the nicest way people were colonized)
-Furthermore, as someone pointed out to me, you pulled a Disney and turned all the white NPCs on GINGER Island into black people.
In regards to the island and the implication that there is racist tropes in an uninhabited island rich with resources, these sorts of islands do exist, and depending on the part of the world, were quite numerous until they were settled. For example, many of the islands of Hawaii weren't settled by any natives, nor were many of the other Pacific islands. I think that by changing the residents of the island from castaways/paleontologists/hermits/pirates to natives, it enforces and creates colonial themes rather than remove them.
That's my thoughts as someone who is mixed (Jamaican on my father's side English on my mother's) I think the mod comes from a great place and it seems to have a lot of research put into it even if it's not my sort of thing, just wanted to point out something.
https://forums.stardewvalley.net/threads/unofficial-mod-updates.2096/page-196