Racism in Valkyria Chronicles

I happened to start Valkyria Chronicles at about the same time the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd began, which tinged my playthrough to the point that I had to break my discussion of how the game handles racism into its post.

While I enjoyed the game, this was the one aspect of worldbuilding that I had the most difficulty with. The game doesn't map the Darcsen ethnic group directly to being Jewish (in fact they're portrayed as the Europan continent's indigenous people), but the comparison is hard to avoid given that we're in a WW2-inspired setting and the Darcsen of captured territories have been funneled into concentration camps as forced labor.

However, the Darcsen aren't discriminated against for religious differences, so much as they supposedly incited a calamity in ancient history, causing many people to die, and as a result they lost their nation and have become a people without a homeland. Nobody really knows exactly what went down back then (being close to two thousand years ago), but in the present day the Darcsens are a persecuted minority in all the places they live and the legend serves as a means to justify it.

The problem is that the game is not terribly good about showing racism and characters overcoming racism aside from broad strokes. Part of this is because we play as Welkin, who is not Darcsen and he's such a nice guy that of course he sticks up for his adopted Darcsen sister Isara, and forces the rest of his squad to work with her and like it. The other part is that I don't think the writers really understood how racism works, resulting in an inconsistent application throughout the story.

We see that Largo and especially Rosie initially aren't too keen on working with a Darcsen squadmate, but Rosie's racism is a bit hit or miss. She's just short of openly hostile at the start of Chapter 3 and still pretty cranky towards Isara at the start of Chapter 8. But at the end of 8 she's oddly considerate and goes to downright pleasant (for being Rosie) during the optional beach chapter that chronologically takes place between 9 and 10. Then she goes back to being hostile in Chapter 10.

This makes it hard to buy into her change at the end of Chapter 10 when she discovers that enemy forces have herded Darcsen prisoners (including children) into a warehouse and then set fire to it. The way she reacts with anger and horror makes it seem as though she'd never seen a Darcsen child before (which I find unbelievable), and this event is the trigger to get her to be less racist as she joins in helping the laborers look for survivors.

Valkyria Chronicles goes out of its way to include racism against Darcsen. It's even present as a character trait in recruitable squad members. So having a prominent character in the squad serve as a racist mouthpiece is necessary for what the game wants to accomplish. That said, I can see why the writing would want to eventually rehabilitate Rosie so we're not left with a major character being a racist the entire game through. This probably would have been okay, except that the game isn't really good about showing racism anywhere outside of Rosie's transformation.

Largo's only skeptical about Isara for about a chapter before he treats her like anyone else. Alicia seemed to be confused at first whether Isara was Darcsen at all and didn't change her treatment of her once she knew better (or offer backhanded compliments like "You're much nicer than I expected a Darcsen would be"). And the other engineers in the R&D workshop who aren't part of the squad treat Isara as just another person.

The game only brings up Isara's race (or the race of other Darcsens) when it wants to make it a point, and then forgets when it wants to focus on something else. For instance, Darcsen characters all have black hair, and so does Welkin's superior, Captain Eleanor Varrot. From the slander "dark-hair" we can infer that only Darcsen have dark hair, so is Varrot Darcsen? It turns out she's not, because Darcsen do not have family names, but the player can only learn this by reading supplemental codexes. However, Varrot is never accidentally discriminated against or slandered in a case of mistaken ethnicity, when there is no way to visually tell her apart from a Darcsen character.

And it is easily confirmed that aside from their dark hair, it's impossible to tell a Darcsen from the rest of the Caucasian appearing population. We know this because Princess Cordelia is secretly Darcsen and no one can tell because of the headdress that hides her hair. Both the majority population and the Darcsen one possess the same range of skin tones.

Isara is also clearly allowed to wander where she wants without being worried about her personal safety and she gets to go to all the squad events. Imagine if she couldn't go to the R&R on the beach because she was Darcsen and it would "look bad" to have her on royal property. I get the game probably wouldn't want Welkin constantly sticking up for her and making a substantial portion of the speaking cast racist, but the result is that the racism really feels like it comes from one character on our side and of course the really mean people on the other.

This is likely because the game is the result of Japanese developers who live in a highly homogeneous country where racism isn't something a significant portion of the population will ever experience. And considering that, it's surprising they made the attempt to the extent that it's codified in the game mechanics where some characters literally don't work as well because they're racist against the Darcsens in their squad. It's not game breaking bad due to how character traits don't always flair up, but I still left all the racists cooling their heels back at headquarters.

Probably one of the worst things in how the game handles racism is how Isara dies. As a writer I like the complete suddenness with which it happens. This is a game set during a war with firearms, so my gut reaction to Isara getting sniped by an enemy soldier when the squad thought they were safe was great. It would be realistic for the squad to have a casualty among the main characters, and in broad strokes I don't mind that it was Isara in particular who was killed.

However, what I do mind is how they handled the impact of her death and how it serves as a vehicle for Rosie's redemption. Despite being the team's token racist, I actually like Rosie, because she's complicated and she's also an unapologetically tough woman who we don't see a lot of in JRPGs. Both she and Isara deserve better than what they got.

After Chapter 10, Rosie begins to soften a bit towards Isara, but has trouble showing it because she's stubborn and not good at apologizing. So initially she refuses Isara's gift of a good luck charm and brushes it off as something she doesn't need from a "dark-hair." Meanwhile Isara works really hard on a plan to protect the squad on their next mission so it doesn't turn into a suicide run, and succeeds. After the mission, Rosie thanks Isara and reveals that she actually kept the good luck charm.

The two agree to become friends and when Rosie asks Isara what gift she would like in return, Isara wants to hear Rosie sing. So of course that's when the bullet catches Isara. When Rosie finally does sing for her, it's at Isara's grave.

Presumably because they had a chance to reconcile that means that Rosie's racism is gone, because Rosie now has a precious Darcsen friend who died and she needs to carry on for. But that reduces Isara to being the magical minority friend who makes a white person better for dying. And the thing is Rosie should still be a bit racist. Learning to be better, sure, but if it's really ingrained she should still slip up without meaning too, and in more ways than just dropping a slur.

The fact Rosie is suddenly not racist is really hammered home when her optional chapter is unlocked and she pushes for the squad to go out and stop imperials from rounding up Darcsens for slave labor. Not only does it suddenly boil her blood, but she's very kind to the Darcsen kid she meets up later and explains that she started hating Darcsens because of an attack on her village when she was a kid during the last war, and she blamed the presence of the local Darcsens for the attack happening in the first place. This pins the source of Rosie's racism to a particular event rather than a systemic societal problem and makes it easier for her to realize she was wrong.

After this point, Rosie's racism or former racism is never brought up again. And it's not for lack of other Darcsen characters for her to interact with. Zaka's part of the squad from Chapter 11 onward, but she has no conversations between him about growing or wanting to do more, even though meeting him and his fellow prisoners in the concentration camp was the start of her awakening.

And heck, just before the penultimate battle Princess Cordelia appears publicly in front of Welkin's squad as a Darcsen for the very first time and nobody says a thing about her dark hair. I realize they have other things to worry about at the moment (like an enemy tank the size of an aircraft carrier), but the fact that the head of state is secretly part of a persecuted minority surprisingly goes unacknowledged by everyone who wasn't present at the moment she revealed it.

At points I wondered if the half-baked Darcsen racism could actually be lifted from the game entirely without hurting it (rendering its inclusion pointless), and I can think of one reason not to. According to generally accepted history, the Valkyrur came from the north and fought with the native Darcsen population. Supposedly the Valkyrur stopped the Darcsen menace and eventually disappeared, perhaps by interbreeding with the local population to such a degree that they could no longer be distinguished as a separate group.

However, over the course of the game, we learn that the Valkyrur were not actually benevolent and pretty much beat the snot out of the Darcsens to get a hold of their geographical resources. Being the winning side, they got to rewrite history and blamed all the atrocities they committed on the Darcsens.

That the legendary Valkyrur were actually a race of conquerors was a nice twist and dovetails with the fact that the first Valkyria revealed in the game is a powerful general on the other side.

While the game could have written the Valkyrur to be remembered as conquerors, I did enjoy the added complexity to the worldbuilding. I just wish that if the game writing was going to include racism that the writers had done a better job of it so it actually meant something.