'God Of War' Director David Jaffe Doubles Down On Calling 'Crimson Desert's' Goblins Anti-Semitic
God of War director David Jaffe doubled on his accusation of antisemitism against Crimson Desert and specifically its depiction of goblins.
Jaffe originally made the accusation in a post to X. He wrote, “Loving Crimson Desert. But...come on, Crimson Desert …this is some anti-Semitic [expletive] or at least it sure feels as such. Which hey, that’s your right. I support your right but I don’t gotta like it.”
“The nose, the job, the mission name, and Goldleaf may as well be Goldberg,” he added.
In a subsequent post, he wrote, “I understand twitter is the new 4chan, so I don’t really know what I expected when so often any comment beyond ‘THIS ROCKS!’ or ‘THIS SUCKS! is like discussing algebra with a Sea Monkey.”
“I also understand I didn’t say they should CANCEL Crimson Desert. I said I am LOVING it. And I am. It’s wonderful,” he continued. “But I also think their portrayal of the Goldleaf folks plays hard into antisemetic tropes. Agree, don’t agree. But it’s my take. And I don’t imagine it is intentional. But maybe it is. Who knows. Not me.”
“But even if it is intentional, that’s their right. I don’t agree with it and I don’t like it, intentional or not. But I support their right to express their views in their art. And that’s all I will say about it,” he concluded.
Alongside this, he shared Jon Stewart’s attack on Harry Potter and the depiction of goblins in the book.
Stewart infamously said back in 2021, “Here’s how you know Jews are still where they are. Talking to people, here’s what I say: Have you ever seen a Harry Potter movie? Have you ever seen the scenes in Gringotts Bank? Do you know what those folks who run the bank are? Jews! And they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s from Harry Potter.’ And you’re like, ‘No, that’s a caricature of a Jew from an anti-Semitic, piece of literature.’ J.K. Rowling was like, ‘Can we get these guys to run our bank?’ It’s a wizarding world… We can ride dragons, you can have a pet owl, but who should run the bank? Jews. Yeah, they look like Jews, but what if the teeth were sharper?”
He later added, “It was one of those things where I saw [the goblins] on the screen and I was expecting the crowd to be like, ‘holy shit, she did not in a wizarding world just throw Jews in there to run the [expletive] underground bank.’ And everybody was just like, ‘Wizards.’ It was so weird. Even Dobby was like, ‘That’s [expletive] up. Those are Jews.”
In a YouTube livestream he doubled down saying, “I’m just point out that, to me, that this kind of checks a lot of the boxes of [antisemitism].”
“And people, which I thought was so interesting, because this is kind of the narrative that you know when somebody has watched a streamer like an Asmongold or maybe even a JTSmash guy or whatever that has a decent enough following,” he continued. “You know that they’ve watched them because you get into these situations where they’re just parroting back the same thing. And what these guys are parroting back to me ad nauseum is that, ‘You’re the anti-Semitic, guy, because you see [a goblin as a Jew]. ‘I don’t see a Jew there. I just see a goblin. The fact that you would see that in a goblin is ridiculous. That means you are anti-Semitic.’”
“And so to that, I will say this: Certainly, to a guy who was raised Jewish and had a bar mitzvah, I’m not Jewish. I haven’t been Jewish since I was 7. But I was raised in a Jewish household. A lot of people will tell you that I am culturally Jewish, which is fine. My Dad was Jewish. My Mom was Baptist. She converted,” he went on. “But regardless, though, I can tell you that I’m not ignorant to the ways of anti-Semitism and certainly not where we are at in the culture right now.”
After going on a tangent about the state of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, he said, “The fact that some of these guys are like, 'Dude, it's a [expletive] goblin,' I'm sorry, you're just not smart enough to have a conversation with me. And I don't mean to be condescending about it.”
”Yes, I know it's a goblin. I understand it's a goblin,” he said. “And I also understand that there's a very high chance that people in Korea have just simply -. This has been inundated and this has been sort of concretized into our culture and they don't even know what the anti-Semitic tropes are about the goblin character.”
He later added, “Do I think they need to change this? No. But do I think this is a reflection of those antisemitic stereotypes? Yea, I do. So what? I don't like it. The more you know better, you do better. So maybe don't do it again if you have a problem with it. But people have to make something out of everything."
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