Confusion Around Lifeline’s Accent Shows Gaming Still Falls Short of Meaningful Caribbean Representation
Let's pause on the "Mozambique 'ere" in the meantime, okay?
Since the launch of Respawn’s Apex Legends, many have flocked to engage with the rich lore and background of each of the original eight-plus characters—all of whom exist within the greater Titanfall universe. As one of the few characters with accents representing the Caribbean in gaming, Ajay Che (a.k.a. Lifeline) has drawn a lot of questions about her accent and ethnicity from players who don’t want to feel like they’re being represented by a caricature.
On the Apex Legends subreddit (plus EA and Twitter), there are many threads either inquiring about her accent or calling it out. To the first point, people have speculated that her accent may depict Jamaica, The Bahamas, Trinidad & Tobago, or Haiti. Some West African countries occasionally get brought up, but the main two cited are Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago.
Before diving into this topic, I want to first address those that claim of “Oh, she’s from Psamathe,” so that is a “Psamathe accent.” While Lifeline’s in-game homeworld is Psamathe, the combat medic’s accent is unique to real-life Earth. This attitude is dismissive to the issues of cultural representation in fantasy and the social currency associated with certain accents (like British = intelligent), making it seem like using a real-world accent or language as a fictional one is the same as when creatives in SFF actually build their language system and enunciations (like our boy Tolkien), when it’s really not the same at all.
Apex Legends designed each character with incredible detail while still teasing us for more. However, some basic elements, like what accent is represented, are fundamental, like a name. A few months after Apex Legends‘ release, Black Girls Gaming member Junae Benne wrote about how hard it was to figure out Lifeline’s accent. Despite her being a first-generation Jamaican American and all the sleuthing online, Benne found it difficult to place.
Why this is so common
In his video essay The Bastardization of Jamaicans in Media, Bahamian cultural critique Ransford James (a.k.a. Foreign Men in a Foreign Land) laments the ways American media puts together a mishmash of vaguely Caribbean attributes as a shorthand to differentiate from American Blackness. He argues, “Black people outside of the U.S. are treated as the alternative to the default, which is Black American. This is due to the United States being the cultural zeitgeist of the world.” This particular video discusses Cool Runnings and Netflix’s Luke Cage, but James has discussed cartoons and broader entertainment (including video games) as emblematic of these issues.
In a Black History Month kickback on Feb. 19, he brought this up again, calling the trope a Great Value™ Jamaican character in American media. The difficulty in placing Lifeline’s accent is a constant reminder of this for some players. When I began playing the game about a year ago, I barely heard the difference. However, her accent became too unbearable for my teammates, who had more personal connections to these cultures. We rarely ran her, despite Lifeline’s utility.
One friend has maternal Hispanola heritage, and the other is Canadian but spent a significant part of his life in Trinidad. They assumed it was a badly melded Caribbean accent because that’s par for the course in American media. The former called Lifeline’s accent a “caricature of West Indians.” She (who would often turn down in-game volume to avoid hearing Lifeline speak) continued,
“I’m confident that she’s supposed to be Trini, but it still feels like the sort of mockery you hear when people think of the Caribbean as a whole. Like the dialogue is acceptable to me, the accent just misses the mark.”
The other (Canadian) friend said, “Sounds like a generic ethnic accent. Something easy yet understandable for the players.”
Clues provided by the voice actress
When trying to find out more about Lifeline’s accent, people have turned to voice actress Mela Lee. Before Apex Legends, Lee’s gaming voice work included Jade from Mortal Kombat 11 and several anime characters. After a row on Twitter, in which it is hard to pinpoint exactly what happened (there are seriously 7+ deleted tweets), Lee responded to questions about her own background. She said her background spans the Caribbean (Trinidad and Barbados), Western Africa, Western Europe, and the Pacific Islands. In a May 2019 voice actor video, Lee expressed joy about portraying a character “so representational of my make up. As a person who has a multicultural background, it means a lot.”
In addition to the character’s name being Ajay, a common Indian name, Lee’s comments add some credence to the theories that Lifeline is Trini and could be part Asian. While many pockets in the Caribbean and Latin America you’ll find people with Asian heritage, in Trinidad & Tobago, about a third of the population is ethnically Indo Caribbean (as in India) and a third is ethnically Black Caribbean.
However, while we’re all for voice actors feeling like their multicultural background is represented, this also could’ve been achieved by keeping Lifeline’s voice closer to Lee’s regular speech. Lee and Respawn made a deliberate choice to depict Lifeline’s voice in a certain way, and critiquing this doesn’t mean we want that multicultural representation to be taken away. Going for specificity in that accent is the way to avoid coming off as a caricature.
How should Apex Legends move forward?
Figuring this out shouldn’t even be that much work. Realistically, if Lifeline’s background issues (let alone her kit) are on Respawn’s to-do list, they probably sit at the very bottom. However, we can still ask better of the developers and the company—or, at least, have the conversation so other developers keep it in mind in the future.
As for Respawn, they could start by addressing what Earthen nationality Lifeline’s voice is supposed to represent, so she doesn’t come off as Great Value™ Caribbean video game character. Also, if they are to keep Lee (which, at this point, is likely and I’m not in a place to ask otherwise), her dialogue needs to be reworked with consultants (plural) from that country. In a Twitch interview with RetroSpect, Lee spoke on how the dialect was “dialed back quite a bit” to meet the technical demands of the fast-paced game. With more consultants, maybe even some within gaming, there’s gotta be a way to keep true to wherever her accent is representing instead of watering it down for players.
When Overwatch launched in spring 2016, it set a new standard for games with an abilities/class-type divided roster could look like. However, even with that three-year headstart, Apex Legends routinely blows them out of the park in terms of characters’ socio-economic class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc. But even then, they have room to grow, especially regarding our girl Ajay Che.
(image: Respawn Entertainment)
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