Steven Universe has convinced me that new, marginalized creators are the only way we’ll ever change depictions. Persona 6 isn’t going to suddenly get woke, for example, if P5 couldn’t learn from criticism of P4. Existing creators aren’t going to change how they work. It’ll be new voices who grew up with a love of the medium and different perspectives. Steven Universe has stories and character types that I’ve never seen before, because cartoon creators before then lacked the interest/imagination.
Here’s hoping we get the “Steven Universe” of JRPG’s (and other games!) soon.
Yep, it will require new teams for existing series to change their handling of these things, with marginalized voiced being raised up instead of being put to “grunt” work.
(While imo SU lost a lot of its mystery and whimsy as the series went on (dropping me off in the process) but I always appreciated the series’s care on subjects of queerness, identity, mental health, family, and so forth.)
Just goes to show how the creative leads really set the tone and expectation, trickle down empathy if you will.
Not to forget valuable contributors like consultants.
But let me ask you this: what they should’ve done? Ignore the game completely? I’m all for that, but I don’t see that ever happening. Focusing only on bad stuff? Maybe, but, again, not really realistic.
And I’m honestly asking, because, speaking of white knighting (I’m white dude), I often don’t sure what to do in situations like that. There are couple of recent action movies with female leads that were doing all the usual sins, but women were like “fuck off, we like it”. Or how Spawn on Me podcast was mocking John Walker for his review of “Mafia III” in a “welcome to my life, white boy” kinda way. And I agree. There is stuff that is not for me. Not for me to watch/play/listen to, and/or not for me to criticize.
That’s why it is a good idea to hire diverse group of people to cover games. But, surprise, all people are people, and they would still like things with problematic content in them.
It’s really case by case but the main thing I try not to do is not talk over people who are more directly effected by something when they are present and try to think about rather my saying something is going to drive away those same people. Something I would keep in mind though is that communities tend to be self selecting, meaning that people who post on a gaming forum are more likely to tolerate the way in which games are sexist and racist and so on and so forth. This does not invalidate the opinions of women who do not mind say Nier (which in terms of sexist outfit issues is low on the list though still very much on it) but to keep in mind all the people that did care 20 years ago and left because they didn’t want to deal with all this crap anymore or even in the first place
And also it’s one thing to like something in spite of it’s problematic content. Frankly on an individual level I don’t really think voting with your dollar means anything most of these things work on a scale too large for it to matter but I think we really need to start asking ourselves if we need to be running glorified free ad campaigns for them. I really like Horizon Zero Dawn. The native appropriation stuff in and around that game fucking sucks and I don’t really talk about it much as that game don’t need me telling people all the ways in which I Think it’s great so they run out and buy it. There’s plenty of other stuff to praise I don’t need to go out of my way to try and canonize it as Saint Zero Dawn, Saint Of Extremely Ill Considered Use Of Racist Terminology And Also Great Combat. It’s okay to like something and not share that with the internet especially in our social media age, it’s okay to find value in something flawed even extremely so (though I believe there have to be limits on just how far you take that for it to still matter) but we need to think about what being vocal about that love means in an age where it can be removed from it’s context with the push of a button and the only thing you have is Zero Dawn Saint Of Great Combat with all the qualifications removed
The only productive thing I can suggest is to write to Austin. I yelled at him about, let’s just say, similar-ish flaw in their coverage and he fixed it. So, it is possible that they would change something, and it is a reason (well, one of them) why I still believe in Waypoint the hedgehog.
You mention the swing might have come in the past couple years, but now I’m wondering whether even egregious characters like, say, Nowi from FE: A were ever critiqued on more than a joking level?
Yes, this is exactly what I mean when I talk about infantilization as the elephant in the room. There have been dozens of thinkpieces about Bayonetta, who is, regardless of your stance on her, at the very least an adult character. I have never seen anyone write a thinkpiece about Nowi, a little kid who wears lingerie. And she was in an extremely popular game!
The most charitable explanation I can think of is, maybe some content goes so far over the line that confronting it is more consequential than some commentators want to grapple with?
It’s easy to say “this game depicts women poorly, but I still love everything else about it it.” I think it’s a lot harder to say “this game features a lingerie kid, but I still love everything else about it”. There’s just no non-terrible-sounding way to say that. Once you’ve acknowledged that a game contains that kind of thing, letting it slide is really tough to do, so maybe it just becomes easier not to mention it at all.
Just on Neir, I found a lotta people happy about Yoko being honest about why their character designs were sexualized.
I kinda hope though this doesn’t become a defense though. It was nice for once to not have a incredibly dumb cover up reason but I worry a lot of folks are now gonna give these really bad designs and gaze stuff a pass simply cause the devs said they were just horny.
Just on Neir, I found a lotta people happy about Yoko being honest about why their character designs were sexualized.
I think this reaction is very directly linked to the negative response to Kojima back when MGS5 came out. Everyone smelled bullshit when Kojima pulled the “ashamed of your words and deeds” line, and it was generally agreed that it would have been better if Kojima just admitted he wanted to have a sexy girl in the game. And in that moment, I think the bar got (unintentionally) lowered. Yoko Taro comes along with NieR:A, and look, he’s not lying like Kojima was, so let’s pop the champagne.
It’s treated as a goofus-and-gallant thing, when maybe it’s possible that both are still just different degrees of goofus.
It’s a relieve to see other people speaking out about how poor the critique of objectification of women still is. After the Xenoblades stream I wasn’t feeling comfortable at all with voicing my concerns in this community.
Not with all that ‘ironic horniness’ in chat. (Like, seriously bad look when talking about a design that looks like it’s fetishizing a minor)
I’m sorry for not adding much else to this conversation. I just wanted to give my deepest thanks to everybody who spoke up about all this.
I have been thinking a fair bit about Xenoblade these past 24 hours. I am playing it, I am enjoying it, I am pretty uncomfortable about the imagery. I am wondering if I have a moral responsibility to put the game down and walk away? To clarify, my main thought revolves around my son. He is way too young to understand anything much right now, but if this was a few years forward and he saw me playing this game, I would hope he would question me as to why I find it acceptable to play a game that has the character images it has. And I don’t know how I would justify it to him, or myself. I am a bit confused really. Having a kid has made me take things way more seriously than I used to, in terms of the example I am setting.
Places like the chat will have people be really silly but it is important that we bring it up so that it wont be normalized as it can led to some serious issues that can harm both audience and creators. @HermanBloom
It ok to play it but if at any point you feel the game isn’t giving you space either by it gameplay of it visuals than walk away from it. It not like it forcing you to play it. As for your son best not to play it around him and in a few years, when he starts to question subjects in games, sit down with him on those subjects. It important to talk about it.
What’s important is shifting the overall tone so that this kind of stuff doesn’t become more normalized than it already is. It shouldn’t be normal that even a minor jab at the character design on Twitter causes a horde of angry fuckin’ goons to come raining down chanting about how people are too easily offended.
Sometimes that’s just a matter of phrasing and how you’re choosing to allocate digital ink and podcast time to these games. In the case of this Waypoint episode, Austin spent a disproportionate about of time talking about how Xenoblade 2 checks his boxes for campy shonen anime games, while devoting about 8-9 seconds to paying lip service toward the game’s terrible representations of women.
I listen to Waypoint Radio to hear more critical and in-depth conversations about the sociopolitical landscape of gaming that’s so often overlooked or outright frowned upon as a subject by most prominent games communities. In that respect, it’s why I was really disappointed with how quickly Austin glossed over the topic here.
I think you hit the nail on the head here, and why I was disappointed with this podcast. I think discourse especially seems to jump very quick to the “horny is cool” line when it’s anime-related. If Xenoblade 2, Fire Emblem, or NieR were not all totally anime, would they be getting as much of a pass?
This sort of thing is a big reason why I’m so apprehensive dive into Nier: Automata. Everywhere I look I see glowing praise for all of the insightful things that game has to say about human nature and consciousness and all that good stuff, but only a passing mention at how there’s a trophy for looking up the protagonist’s skirt and how there’s literally some ridiculous shit where you can have all of her clothing get blown off but “there’s cool philosophy stuff in there I swear!”
The ability of writers and fans to constantly dismiss this type of stuff as some “wacky anime nonsense” is super disconcerting and while I still appreciate that Yoko Taro was honest about his decisions he probably just emboldened other devs to shamelessly do it. People’s apathy towards this gross shit is never ending, and if it’s gotten to a point where even infantilization isn’t enough for major outlets to reconsider how much exposure and coverage and praise they want to devote to something then idk what the fuck is.
I haven’t played or seen anything of Xenoblade, but I’m just gonna chime in: Wait, there’s a trophy for looking up 2B’s skirt? Also there’s a part where she’s not wearing any clothing? I put like 40 hours into the game and never saw or heard of this. (Frankly, I would like to un-know this, please.)
I mean, I would expect games journalists to be more aware in general, I guess, but I would wager that a sizable portion of the game’s audience doesn’t know this, because a sizable portion of the game’s audience doesn’t actually try to look up the protagonist’s skirt.
You must not have followed the discourse very hard as it was discussed a fair bit right when it came out before it was just endless praise. Or maybe you just ran in different circles
