Why the whole concept 'Ethical Piracy' in Veilguard is so funny to me
x: My thoughts on veilguard as a whole.
Disclaimer here: piracy isn't just an issue solely in SEA, but for convenience, I will contain the discourse within the confines of my own knowledge.
It occurs to me, through playing veilguard, that the writers simply have no idea how piracy works or what even is a pirate. Piracy, as a concept and in the context of SEA, can be traced to the pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical accounts of colonialists regarding the issue of "native degeneracy" (like amok, latah etc). And that piracy was deemed by the colonialists, to be born out socio-economic degeneration of said native society.
One famous example was the Sarawak King, James fucking Brooke—yes, the third largest island in the world, Borneo once had not just one, but three white kings with the englishiest names to ever englished— who led assaults against the fleet of Raja of Riau under the pretense of suppressing piracy; while the Raja later also used a similar rhetoric that they mistook Brooke's boats as pirates.
See how the term "pirate" was used by both parties to lend justifications and legitimations of their actions, an event that mostly destroyed the Raja's crew and humble fleet compared to barely a scratch of the whole ass vessel of Brooke. But I digress.
The label "pirate" was the license to kill, for the colonial-capitalists. The pirate was the native, and the anti-pirate was the Europeans; piracy was a native defect, and the Europeans were the cure. How? By expansion of the colonial-capitalist enterprise that subsumed the land, the economy, the culture of the natives.
Hence the discourse of piracy is not the discourse about its meaning, but a discourse about power in the context of today. Much like the concepts of terrorism and criminality.
And what does veilguard do with it? Don't get me wrong, I love Isabela and her story arc since DA2. And we can all admit that pirates are cool. However, I do find the Lords of Fortune being 'ethical' with their exploits ludicrous and nonsensical. Like I've mentioned before, the concept of "pirate" is tied to criminality; the very term is invented to undermine native sovereignty on their waters.
In veilguard we have pirates hiring cultural experts (e.g. Shathann) to avoid accidentally undermining the history of different communities (like the Dalish and the qunari.) When I saw and heard those dialogues, I was like "what in white liberal la la land do these writers live in?" Oh, it's Canada, the famously not-white country with its totally non-colonial history.
And you know what, I blame movies like Pirates of the Caribbeans for this. For the appropriation of this historically wrought imagery, for the sanitisation of the discourse surrounding piracy as the ambiguous ground between semantics and politics which was often resolved not by logic, but by canon-balls. When you do what western media has done over this topic, you're left with nothing but a shell of aesthetics. The audience was left with nothing.
