LET'S (NOT) RESPECT EACH OTHER?S TASTES (OR: "THIS GAME ISN'T FOR YOU, AND THAT'S (NOT) OKAY")

[McElroy]

No, I have a problem with them looking like they?re 13, which is what I was calling out in this game. I don?t like girls. I like women.

Then you're raising a different issue, the other guy was saying he thought they looked adult and was dismayed the artbook says some are 15-17 and that they looked as thought they could be all college students.

Hence, there's no objective standard here, and both of you that agree overall do also disagree about what age the chars seem to be.

I say we just not worry about something that's this degree of subjective with a game this decidedly silly and fun.

That?s not quite what the poster I replied to was talking about. Though I will admit I am ruddy exhausted with Japan?s struggle to make someone who is sexy and also able to legally drink. Something?s wrong when Fire Emblem Three Houses, of all things, shakes things up so much.

Also, looking fifteen is definitely getting into icky territory. If they?re too young to give consent in Alabama, they?re way too young.

"Euphoria Guns" don't cause liver damage.

You do take the extra step to add real world sensibilities to stylized fantasy characters. What I'm saying is that I wouldn't scorn somebody any less for fantasizing about anime girls whether their supposed ages are 18 or 15. I find it a bit silly, and I think about it like, would my dream girl be a 16-year-old? No way in hell! But I can fantasize about getting all the girls I had a crush on when I was a ninth-grader in school.

 

[Erttheking]

No, I have a problem with them looking like they?re 13, which is what I was calling out in this game. I don?t like girls. I like women.

Then you're raising a different issue, the other guy was saying he thought they looked adult and was dismayed the artbook says some are 15-17 and that they looked as thought they could be all college students.

Hence, there's no objective standard here, and both of you that agree overall do also disagree about what age the chars seem to be.

I say we just not worry about something that's this degree of subjective with a game this decidedly silly and fun.

That?s not quite what the poster I replied to was talking about. Though I will admit I am ruddy exhausted with Japan?s struggle to make someone who is sexy and also able to legally drink. Something?s wrong when Fire Emblem Three Houses, of all things, shakes things up so much.

Also, looking fifteen is definitely getting into icky territory. If they?re too young to give consent in Alabama, they?re way too young.

"Euphoria Guns" don't cause liver damage.

You do take the extra step to add real world sensibilities to stylized fantasy characters. What I'm saying is that I wouldn't scorn somebody any less for fantasizing about anime girls whether their supposed ages are 18 or 15. I find it a bit silly, and I think about it like, would my dream girl be a 16-year-old? No way in hell! But I can fantasize about getting all the girls I had a crush on when I was a ninth-grader in school.

Do you see me scorning anyone? I'm scorning the game. We do that all the time on this website. And I'll happily scorn a game that shows me a fifteen year old and expects me to find it titillating.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Oh lord forbid that some of us prefer being sexually attracted to women that we could bone IRL and not get asked pointed questions by the police. I looked at the linked articles and my brain promptly screamed: "pink-haired girl looks like she's 13 years old tops, ABORT, ABORT, ABORT!" I'm so sorry that that's a very niche kink that the majority of us on this website do not share.

The anime police are all 17-year-olds too.

I mean, do you honestly make a difference between ecchi (or I dunno... hentai) in which the characters are 18 vs the one in which they are 16? They all look the same; it's all pedo bait anyways. To me it seems to take a lot of mental gymnastics to defend an almost indefensible habit with "at least they could consent" as if 2D cartoons had lives of their own.

No, I have a problem with them looking like they?re 13, which is what I was calling out in this game. I don?t like girls. I like women.

Then you're raising a different issue, the other guy was saying he thought they looked adult and was dismayed the artbook says some are 15-17 and that they looked as thought they could be all college students.

Hence, there's no objective standard here, and both of you that agree overall do also disagree about what age the chars seem to be.

I say we just not worry about something that's this degree of subjective with a game this decidedly silly and fun.

That?s not quite what the poster I replied to was talking about. Though I will admit I am ruddy exhausted with Japan?s struggle to make someone who is sexy and also able to legally drink. Something?s wrong when Fire Emblem Three Houses, of all things, shakes things up so much.

Also, looking fifteen is definitely getting into icky territory. If they?re too young to give consent in Alabama, they?re way too young.

I'm referring to altname's earlier posts in this conversation and how even you two differ on your perception of the girls as being old enough to drink or not from an appearance standpoint.

And hey, drinking age in Japan is 20 whereas where I grew up there's no drinking age and if you're a kid you just have to be with your parents to get some wine or what have you, so that's also kinda utterly arbitrary. In our culture, half a glass of wine with a meal is said to help with digestion.

 

[gyrobot_v1legacy]

No, I have a problem with them looking like they?re 13, which is what I was calling out in this game. I don?t like girls. I like women.

Then you're raising a different issue, the other guy was saying he thought they looked adult and was dismayed the artbook says some are 15-17 and that they looked as thought they could be all college students.

Hence, there's no objective standard here, and both of you that agree overall do also disagree about what age the chars seem to be.

I say we just not worry about something that's this degree of subjective with a game this decidedly silly and fun.

That?s not quite what the poster I replied to was talking about. Though I will admit I am ruddy exhausted with Japan?s struggle to make someone who is sexy and also able to legally drink. Something?s wrong when Fire Emblem Three Houses, of all things, shakes things up so much.

Also, looking fifteen is definitely getting into icky territory. If they?re too young to give consent in Alabama, they?re way too young.

"Euphoria Guns" don't cause liver damage.

You do take the extra step to add real world sensibilities to stylized fantasy characters. What I'm saying is that I wouldn't scorn somebody any less for fantasizing about anime girls whether their supposed ages are 18 or 15. I find it a bit silly, and I think about it like, would my dream girl be a 16-year-old? No way in hell! But I can fantasize about getting all the girls I had a crush on when I was a ninth-grader in school.

Do you see me scorning anyone? I'm scorning the game. We do that all the time on this website. And I'll happily scorn a game that shows me a fifteen year old and expects me to find it titillating.

I just plain scorn the game for what it represents. Aka enabling sites like Moegamer and how the owner desperates seeks approval for his genre of games and acting passive aggressive about it.

 

[CaitSeith]

No, I have a problem with them looking like they?re 13, which is what I was calling out in this game. I don?t like girls. I like women.

Then you're raising a different issue, the other guy was saying he thought they looked adult and was dismayed the artbook says some are 15-17 and that they looked as thought they could be all college students.

Hence, there's no objective standard here, and both of you that agree overall do also disagree about what age the chars seem to be.

I say we just not worry about something that's this degree of subjective with a game this decidedly silly and fun.

That?s not quite what the poster I replied to was talking about. Though I will admit I am ruddy exhausted with Japan?s struggle to make someone who is sexy and also able to legally drink. Something?s wrong when Fire Emblem Three Houses, of all things, shakes things up so much.

Also, looking fifteen is definitely getting into icky territory. If they?re too young to give consent in Alabama, they?re way too young.

"Euphoria Guns" don't cause liver damage.

You do take the extra step to add real world sensibilities to stylized fantasy characters. What I'm saying is that I wouldn't scorn somebody any less for fantasizing about anime girls whether their supposed ages are 18 or 15. I find it a bit silly, and I think about it like, would my dream girl be a 16-year-old? No way in hell! But I can fantasize about getting all the girls I had a crush on when I was a ninth-grader in school.

Do you see me scorning anyone? I'm scorning the game. We do that all the time on this website. And I'll happily scorn a game that shows me a fifteen year old and expects me to find it titillating.

I just plain scorn the game for what it represents. Aka enabling sites like Moegamer and how the owner desperates seeks approval for his genre of games and acting passive aggressive about it.

Don't blame the game for the the vocal minority attitude. There is nothing in the game itself telling to the audience to feel defensive of liking it more than any other genre has.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

I'm referring to altname's earlier posts in this conversation and how even you two differ on your perception of the girls as being old enough to drink or not from an appearance standpoint.

Nobody can, not really. That's why company policy is to card anybody who looks younger than 40. I, personally, have a real hard time with anybody younger than 25, and that's before the anime style takes effect. That's *why* I pay attention to stuff like art books. I bought this game because I had it on good authority it was about adults. That was a selling point. An almost UNIQUE selling point in a genre fill with 15-17 year olds. It isn't a game about adults, I'm salty about it. Given how horny the people I hang out with on social media (multiple Patreon and crowdfunded games/comics horny) these companies are leaving money on the table by insisting on kids.
This isn't an attack on anything but the game. A game which, otherwise, might be alright. Hell, I might even still end up liking it. Endorphins are awesome, I love giving those out. But it ain't starting out on a good footing. It's a tired trope.

Do you see me scorning anyone? I'm scorning the game. We do that all the time on this website. And I'll happily scorn a game that shows me a fifteen year old and expects me to find it titillating.

It's real weird how this apparently arbitrary decision as far as how old characters are almost invariably arbitrarily sets a character's age at high-schooler or lower, you know?

You'd think random, arbitrary chance would have come up with more games with older characters by now, by accident if nothing else. (That said, the art book says they went with a 15 year old because they wanted a gal that still wore middle school clothes and they ditched a second legal adult because they would've had too many mature people. Disappointed, not surprised)
The creator of Senran Kagura *left* Marvelous because...Sony had a problem with tits out high school kids and he didn't want to set the next game in Ninja Secondary School. That's...that's a lot. Like, you can almost go full nips out in a Sony game if your character is an adult.

Quite clearly, the arbitrary age that shouldn't matter actually matters quite a bit.

Going back on topic: me saying all this is just criticism of a video game I was interested in based on my point of view. Whether or not this game is *for* me is largely irrelevant. It's okay to have an opinion on something even if you don't like it. Or if you like it, but have criticisms about specific issues. Or if you think it's terrible but enjoy it anyway. Bad movie nights are a thing.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I'm referring to altname's earlier posts in this conversation and how even you two differ on your perception of the girls as being old enough to drink or not from an appearance standpoint.

Nobody can, not really. That's why company policy is to card anybody who looks younger than 40. I, personally, have a real hard time with anybody younger than 25, and that's before the anime style takes effect. That's *why* I pay attention to stuff like art books. I bought this game because I had it on good authority it was about adults. That was a selling point. An almost UNIQUE selling point in a genre fill with 15-17 year olds. It isn't a game about adults, I'm salty about it. Given how horny the people I hang out with on social media (multiple Patreon and crowdfunded games/comics horny) these companies are leaving money on the table by insisting on kids.
This isn't an attack on anything but the game. A game which, otherwise, might be alright. Hell, I might even still end up liking it. Endorphins are awesome, I love giving those out. But it ain't starting out on a good footing. It's a tired trope.

Do you see me scorning anyone? I'm scorning the game. We do that all the time on this website. And I'll happily scorn a game that shows me a fifteen year old and expects me to find it titillating.

It's real weird how this apparently arbitrary decision as far as how old characters are almost invariably arbitrarily sets a character's age at high-schooler or lower, you know?

You'd think random, arbitrary chance would have come up with more games with older characters by now, by accident if nothing else. (That said, the art book says they went with a 15 year old because they wanted a gal that still wore middle school clothes and they ditched a second legal adult because they would've had too many mature people. Disappointed, not surprised)
The creator of Senran Kagura *left* Marvelous because...Sony had a problem with tits out high school kids and he didn't want to set the next game in Ninja Secondary School. That's...that's a lot. Like, you can almost go full nips out in a Sony game if your character is an adult.

Quite clearly, the arbitrary age that shouldn't matter actually matters quite a bit.

Going back on topic: me saying all this is just criticism of a video game I was interested in based on my point of view. Whether or not this game is *for* me is largely irrelevant. It's okay to have an opinion on something even if you don't like it. Or if you like it, but have criticisms about specific issues. Or if you think it's terrible but enjoy it anyway. Bad movie nights are a thing.

That's a silly line of criticism though. I'm sure they're also leaving a lot of furry money on the table by not making the characters furries, a lot of, what was that term someone mentioned in a different topic, "vindictive cucking" I believe it was, NTR lets call it, a lot of those people are also not being targeted.

Thing is, if you target the furries and the NTR folk (whatever surname they go by), you are also gonna be alienating some other group who isn't into this thing but who liked your game up to that point.


It's not as though there's a pile of money sitting there and they just don't jump to take it. They deem that by trying to take it, they will be jeopardizing the one they already have. This is the literal argument against mass-appeal in games and how it's better for a game to carve out an identity for itself than to just try to appeal to everyone because that ends up appealing to nobody.




And finally, you may be confusing the term "arbitrary" to mean "random". Arbitrary means "it doesn't really matter so might as well make it into the ideal". The age is arbitrary in the context of the appearance of anime characters, cause they can draw a 140cm short matchstick girl with no chest or hips and call her 18 and...she's gonna be 18 (that's actually Taiga from Toradora btw) and they can draw Yoko from Gurren Lagann with more curves than a frizzy afro and say she's 14 and...she will actually be 14, you could easily swap the two char's ages based on looks alone, so the looks and the age both are arbitrary.

It's why almost no anime characters are outright unattractive, even those who believe themselves to be so are still pretty attractive and all they need to do to turn into a 10 is take off their glasses or let their hair down, someone has to have some story-based reason to actually be ugly, kinda like that curvy girl in GGP who thinks she's fat when she's really really not.

So yeah, what you have with this and the SK director and so on is an ideal of beauty that is very prevalent in Japan, as the schoolgirl thing is a literal national sex symbol there. If you don't jive with that, you just gotta chalk that up to cultural differences.


Oh and this is a personal thing but I never got the point of bad movie nights. It's too cynical for me. Do you not have something you could earnestly enjoy and need to watch something to make fun of? What's the beauty in that? When I see something like Dragonball Evolution, I don't have fun at laughing at it, I am saddened by the amount of wrong that went on in it and can't help but think of the potential that could have been realized but was squandered. Not exactly a fun night activity lol.

 

[Erttheking]

I'm referring to altname's earlier posts in this conversation and how even you two differ on your perception of the girls as being old enough to drink or not from an appearance standpoint.

And hey, drinking age in Japan is 20 whereas where I grew up there's no drinking age and if you're a kid you just have to be with your parents to get some wine or what have you, so that's also kinda utterly arbitrary. In our culture, half a glass of wine with a meal is said to help with digestion.

Ok, when I was talking about drinking age I wasn't literally basing my enjoyment on a person's ability to drink, it was a coy way of me referring to the age of 21. You took that comment a little too literally.

That's a silly line of criticism though. I'm sure they're also leaving a lot of furry money on the table by not making the characters furries, a lot of, what was that term someone mentioned in a different topic, "vindictive cucking" I believe it was, NTR lets call it, a lot of those people are also not being targeted.

I think both groups of people wouldn't care for being compared to Ephebophiles.

And finally, you may be confusing the term "arbitrary" to mean "random". Arbitrary means "it doesn't really matter so might as well make it into the ideal". The age is arbitrary in the context of the appearance of anime characters, cause they can draw a 140cm short matchstick girl with no chest or hips and call her 18 and...she's gonna be 18 (that's actually Taiga from Toradora btw) and they can draw Yoko from Gurren Lagann with more curves than a frizzy afro and say she's 14 and...she will actually be 14, you could easily swap the two char's ages based on looks alone, so the looks and the age both are arbitrary.

They've backtracked on the Yoko thing, she's 18 now. And you can talk about how it's arbitrary as much as you want, there's a not insignificant part of the audience who is going to see someone who is sexalized with a number that low over their head and the question they're going to ask is "...why? Why?" Because that takes them out of the experience and rips the fun out of the media for them. I know I had a harder time enjoying Yoko when she was 14, a problem that merrily when her age was clarified to be 18.

Oh and this is a personal thing but I never got the point of bad movie nights. It's too cynical for me. Do you not have something you could earnestly enjoy and need to watch something to make fun of? What's the beauty in that? When I see something like Dragonball Evolution, I don't have fun at laughing at it, I am saddened by the amount of wrong that went on in it and can't help but think of the potential that could have been realized but was squandered. Not exactly a fun night activity lol.

Oh we can. It's just that taking the piss out of things with your friends is a knee slapping good time. Particularly when you play off each other. It helps if there's a so bad its good movie.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0840359/

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

It's not as though there's a pile of money sitting there and they just don't jump to take it. They deem that by trying to take it, they will be jeopardizing the one they already have. This is the literal argument against mass-appeal in games and how it's better for a game to carve out an identity for itself than to just try to appeal to everyone because that ends up appealing to nobody.

Okay, but: if making a character be 19 instead of the average 17 loses sales...you know how that looks, right? It's just an arbitrary number, not something to jettison your job over. It's not like any supposed character writing would be hugely impacted. Like, if you, for some reason, still need an academic environment where people who don't particularly like each other still need to hang out day in and day out, secondary education exists.

So yeah, what you have with this and the SK director and so on is an ideal of beauty that is very prevalent in Japan, as the schoolgirl thing is a literal national sex symbol there. If you don't jive with that, you just gotta chalk that up to cultural differences.

High school cheerleaders are a sex symbol in the States too. Like Japanese schoolgirls, it's not a sex symbol with positive connotations when the target audience is grown ass men. Of course, Much like cheerleader uniforms as they exist in reality vs as they exist in porn, your average Japanese high school uniform doesn't include a mini skirt. So if you're only goal is "uniform as sex symbol", and you're already modifying the heck out of it for lewdness sake, why does the gal wearing it have to actually be in high school?

Oh and this is a personal thing but I never got the point of bad movie nights. It's too cynical for me. Do you not have something you could earnestly enjoy and need to watch something to make fun of? What's the beauty in that? When I see something like Dragonball Evolution, I don't have fun at laughing at it, I am saddened by the amount of wrong that went on in it and can't help but think of the potential that could have been realized but was squandered. Not exactly a fun night activity lol.

No, see: you earnestly enjoy the bad movie. You then also make fun of it's terribleness.
I recommend checking out MST3K on YouTube or Netflix to get an idea of what it's like. A couple of my favorites are Catalina Caper or Moon Zero Two

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

It's not as though there's a pile of money sitting there and they just don't jump to take it. They deem that by trying to take it, they will be jeopardizing the one they already have. This is the literal argument against mass-appeal in games and how it's better for a game to carve out an identity for itself than to just try to appeal to everyone because that ends up appealing to nobody.

Okay, but: if making a character be 19 instead of the average 17 loses sales...you know how that looks, right? It's just an arbitrary number, not something to jettison your job over. It's not like any supposed character writing would be hugely impacted. Like, if you, for some reason, still need an academic environment where people who don't particularly like each other still need to hang out day in and day out, secondary education exists.

So yeah, what you have with this and the SK director and so on is an ideal of beauty that is very prevalent in Japan, as the schoolgirl thing is a literal national sex symbol there. If you don't jive with that, you just gotta chalk that up to cultural differences.

High school cheerleaders are a sex symbol in the States too. Like Japanese schoolgirls, it's not a sex symbol with positive connotations when the target audience is grown ass men. Of course, Much like cheerleader uniforms as they exist in reality vs as they exist in porn, your average Japanese high school uniform doesn't include a mini skirt. So if you're only goal is "uniform as sex symbol", and you're already modifying the heck out of it for lewdness sake, why does the gal wearing it have to actually be in high school?

Oh and this is a personal thing but I never got the point of bad movie nights. It's too cynical for me. Do you not have something you could earnestly enjoy and need to watch something to make fun of? What's the beauty in that? When I see something like Dragonball Evolution, I don't have fun at laughing at it, I am saddened by the amount of wrong that went on in it and can't help but think of the potential that could have been realized but was squandered. Not exactly a fun night activity lol.

No, see: you earnestly enjoy the bad movie. You then also make fun of it's terribleness.
I recommend checking out MST3K on YouTube or Netflix to get an idea of what it's like. A couple of my favorites are Catalina Caper or Moon Zero Two

So, this is pretty high level kink stuff, but in short and simple terms, there's a difference between cosplaying as a thing (schoolgirl, cheerleader, etc.) and actually being that. The dynamic is just entirely different. To imply that it's just about the outfit or even the length of the skirts or how conventionally sexy they are is just completely missing the point here when the topic is more particularly fetishy stuff. In fact you can actually have a type with a conservative appearance fit someone's bill more so than a skimpier one. Think of the class president types with skirts over their knees, glasses, dark pantyhose, that sort of thing.

Due to various reasons, there's a demand for the latter that is both different in nature and unable to be fulfilled by the former. To pretend that just having someone cosplay as a highschool student will fulfill the same job is just flatly incorrect. In japan they go as far as have cafes where you go and chat with actual schoolgirls even, and let me tell you, there's plenty of prostitutes willing to cosplay for you there too, yet, there still is a demand for the platonic chat cafe too.


So when we enter the realm of fantasy where various moral and legal issues are not relevant any more, and when you have something arbitrary, and when you have this demand that can spawn offline cafes where you go and talk about your day with schoolgirls, it's easy to see why one would go on to have the arbitrary ages be this particular ideal.

 

[Erttheking]

So, this is pretty high level kink stuff, but in short and simple terms, there's a difference between cosplaying as a thing (schoolgirl, cheerleader, etc.) and actually being that. The dynamic is just entirely different. To imply that it's just about the outfit or even the length of the skirts or how conventionally sexy they are is just completely missing the point here when the topic is more particularly fetishy stuff. In fact you can actually have a type with a conservative appearance fit someone's bill more so than a skimpier one. Think of the class president types with skirts over their knees, glasses, dark pantyhose, that sort of thing.

Ok stop. Stop there, stop RIGHT the hell there. High level kink stuff? HIGH LEVEL KINK STUFF!? That's entry level kink stuff tops! Come back to me when you have a latex suit and a St Andrews Cross, THEN we'll start using the words "high level." And since we're venturing into the realm of kink, yes it is about more than just wearing the outfits, but in kink it's usually also about a level of trust and power exchange that you don't really ever see in these games, they just go straight to "look at character, she hot.". It isn't an apt comparison. Look at Ladykiller in a Bind if you want to actually see a game talk about power dynamics in kink. With people who are legally adults.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

So, this is pretty high level kink stuff, but in short and simple terms, there's a difference between cosplaying as a thing (schoolgirl, cheerleader, etc.) and actually being that. The dynamic is just entirely different.

Yes Dreiko, the dynamic between a 19 year old pretending and a 17 or 15 year old *is* very different, hence why I'm perfectly fine with a weird lewd game about shooting 19 year olds with endorphins until they need a bath but disappointed when most of the cast turns out to be 17 or 15 because of inaccurate reporting. That's...that's what I've been arguing this whole time.

To imply that it's just about the outfit or even the length of the skirts or how conventionally sexy they are is just completely missing the point here when the topic is more particularly fetishy stuff. In fact you can actually have a type with a conservative appearance fit someone's bill more so than a skimpier one. Think of the class president types with skirts over their knees, glasses, dark pantyhose, that sort of thing.

Due to various reasons, there's a demand for the latter that is both different in nature and unable to be fulfilled by the former. To pretend that just having someone cosplay as a highschool student will fulfill the same job is just flatly incorrect. In japan they go as far as have cafes where you go and chat with actual schoolgirls even, and let me tell you, there's plenty of prostitutes willing to cosplay for you there too, yet, there still is a demand for the platonic chat cafe too.

So when we enter the realm of fantasy where various moral and legal issues are not relevant any more, and when you have something arbitrary, and when you have this demand that can spawn offline cafes where you go and talk about your day with schoolgirls, it's easy to see why one would go on to have the arbitrary ages be this particular ideal.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/06/national/crime-legal/tokyos-new-jk-ordinance-takes-aim-schoolgirl-exploitation/#.XbSFkC9MGf0

 

[Silvanus]

Right so, whether it befits such themes to take center stage will ultimately depend on the type of game you have and the sort of story. In persona 2 innocent sin you have a gay party member that's pretty clearly into the protagonist, and it fits just fine. In FFXIII you have Fang and Vanille and Fang was initially made to be a dude but they ended up making them both girls and absolutely nobody complained about them being as close as they were (Fang in fact is my fav char in the whole game).

Vanille and Fang? Who're never confirmed to be gay or in a relationship? Yeah, great example of representation there. Your other example is a 20-year-old game, in a series which has since depicted gay NPCs as perverts and nothing else.

Actually, both of these are good examples of one thing, though: deniability. People tend to be a lot happier with characters that might possibly be gay, but never talk about relationships or attraction or anything gay-- the occasional ambiguous glance is alright, at most.

Straight characters, of course, can have wives and girlfriends, or talk about crushes and relationships etc. Gay characters gotta keep that stuff quiet as hell if they want to avoid the ire.

But when you have certain themes and terminology that really doesn't belong in the world narrative just appear it feels trite and artificial. Ultimately it's about not being lazy and trying to go for easy virtue points.

The "why make them gay" thing is idiotic btw, it's the same answer that you get to "why make this magician a 12 year old girl", you do that cause the artist wanted to. I never supported that. You're free to think a choice is bad but you don't get to question it, if you don't like it make your own game.

It's lazy? How come this complaint doesn't crop up for the millionth "family heirloom" quest, or the ten-thousandth "woman kidnapped" quest? Those will be all but guaranteed to pop up in almost every fantasy RPG-- themes about LGBT stuff are bloody rare by comparison, but they're "lazy"?

Ok so I need to clarify, this isn't any old basic sidequest in an rpg. This is a special set of important sidequests that act as the supporting cast's main story in a sense, how you resolve them has huge impact, may cause you to enter romance with the party member or become enemies and have them leave the party or have them gain new jobs. There's this one dude who you choose between letting all his old comrades die and tie him back to his homeland's religious war or not for example. They're the most important sort of sidequest in the game basically. They are cut from a different cloth than the typical "go kill 10 wolves and bring me their pelts" sort.

And the reason gay conversion therapy is trite is that it doesn't actually fit in the world. The DA world is pretty open and accepting to gay people. The idea that you'd even try to magically un-gay someone through a ritual makes absolutely no sense in the world either. This was all conjured up to give the people in the real world something to feel virtuous about playing. This isn't the same as you being able to kill the KKK in red dead 2, the KKK being in that game actually fits and makes sense and Arthur would take them out indeed.

This just sounds like you believe you have a more solid understanding of the world than the actual writers and devs do.

 

[CaitSeith]

snip

Can you reword your arguments without using the term "virtue signaling"? I can't follow what you are trying to say.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

So, this is pretty high level kink stuff, but in short and simple terms, there's a difference between cosplaying as a thing (schoolgirl, cheerleader, etc.) and actually being that. The dynamic is just entirely different.

Yes Dreiko, the dynamic between a 19 year old pretending and a 17 or 15 year old *is* very different, hence why I'm perfectly fine with a weird lewd game about shooting 19 year olds with endorphins until they need a bath but disappointed when most of the cast turns out to be 17 or 15 because of inaccurate reporting. That's...that's what I've been arguing this whole time.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/06/national/crime-legal/tokyos-new-jk-ordinance-takes-aim-schoolgirl-exploitation/#.XbSFkC9MGf0

You know what else is pretty shady in the real world Japan? Idols. Tons of horror stories stemming from ties to yakuza and so on. Hence why I don't care at all about real world idols and just play games with them. If it's a game it's ok basically wraps this up.

Right so, whether it befits such themes to take center stage will ultimately depend on the type of game you have and the sort of story. In persona 2 innocent sin you have a gay party member that's pretty clearly into the protagonist, and it fits just fine. In FFXIII you have Fang and Vanille and Fang was initially made to be a dude but they ended up making them both girls and absolutely nobody complained about them being as close as they were (Fang in fact is my fav char in the whole game).

Vanille and Fang? Who're never confirmed to be gay or in a relationship? Yeah, great example of representation there. Your other example is a 20-year-old game, in a series which has since depicted gay NPCs as perverts and nothing else.

Actually, both of these are good examples of one thing, though: deniability. People tend to be a lot happier with characters that might possibly be gay, but never talk about relationships or attraction or anything gay-- the occasional ambiguous glance is alright, at most.

Straight characters, of course, can have wives and girlfriends, or talk about crushes and relationships etc. Gay characters gotta keep that stuff quiet as hell if they want to avoid the ire.

Vanille and Fang's relationship is not treated any different than Lightning and Hope's actually. There's various stages in a relationship that a couple can be in. There's the Serah and Snow who are already a couple, there's Sazh who already has a kid, there's the couple who has been friends and has a spark of chemistry but hasn't taken the next step (but read the fabulla nova crystallis novels cause those do take some steps alright lol) and there's the early stage attraction with Hope who is also kind of a kid which ends up complicating things some.

It's lazy? How come this complaint doesn't crop up for the millionth "family heirloom" quest, or the ten-thousandth "woman kidnapped" quest? Those will be all but guaranteed to pop up in almost every fantasy RPG-- themes about LGBT stuff are bloody rare by comparison, but they're "lazy"?



This just sounds like you believe you have a more solid understanding of the world than the actual writers and devs do.

You do raise a reasonable point about abducted wives and heirlooms and so on. I'll tell you why that's different. Those stories are not created to (at the very least seemingly) promote heterosexuality. They do not feel like cis propaganda trying to turn the world straight. They feel like just normal events and normal drama. The issue with the magical gay conversion therapy is that it distinctly feels contrived in order to have something gay in a game and not something that organically fits. The laziness comes from inserting a real world thing as-is into the game and not from trying to make it somehow make sense in the world.


It would be me believing that I understand the world better if I were to imply that the writers did this out of error. I did not say that. I said that they did that to virtue signal, which is the issue. They're basically willingly worsening and jeopardizing their game to score social points and seem progressive out of a calculation that whatever damage they do to their reputation by squandering the potential of one of the better characters in the game is gonna be compensated for (and then some) through the good will they garner for themselves, which is my complaint, as such an act is actively bad for games.


Notice, this is an issue raised out of actively liking the gay dude in this game and wanting him to be more interesting. Not out of hating him.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

So, this is pretty high level kink stuff, but in short and simple terms, there's a difference between cosplaying as a thing (schoolgirl, cheerleader, etc.) and actually being that. The dynamic is just entirely different.

Yes Dreiko, the dynamic between a 19 year old pretending and a 17 or 15 year old *is* very different, hence why I'm perfectly fine with a weird lewd game about shooting 19 year olds with endorphins until they need a bath but disappointed when most of the cast turns out to be 17 or 15 because of inaccurate reporting. That's...that's what I've been arguing this whole time.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/06/national/crime-legal/tokyos-new-jk-ordinance-takes-aim-schoolgirl-exploitation/#.XbSFkC9MGf0

You know what else is pretty shady in the real world Japan? Idols. Tons of horror stories stemming from ties to yakuza and so on. Hence why I don't care at all about real world idols and just play games with them. If it's a game it's ok basically wraps this up.

Man, you can't say that making these gals 19 and 21 instead of 15 and 17 would *matter* and is *important* to the folks that want them to be younger for the implications and then hand wave the literal opposite of the coin away as irrelevant.

You can't bring up "but Japan has X" and then just ignore the heinous shit that happens because of it because it's inconvenient to your argument.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

So, this is pretty high level kink stuff, but in short and simple terms, there's a difference between cosplaying as a thing (schoolgirl, cheerleader, etc.) and actually being that. The dynamic is just entirely different.

Yes Dreiko, the dynamic between a 19 year old pretending and a 17 or 15 year old *is* very different, hence why I'm perfectly fine with a weird lewd game about shooting 19 year olds with endorphins until they need a bath but disappointed when most of the cast turns out to be 17 or 15 because of inaccurate reporting. That's...that's what I've been arguing this whole time.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/06/national/crime-legal/tokyos-new-jk-ordinance-takes-aim-schoolgirl-exploitation/#.XbSFkC9MGf0

You know what else is pretty shady in the real world Japan? Idols. Tons of horror stories stemming from ties to yakuza and so on. Hence why I don't care at all about real world idols and just play games with them. If it's a game it's ok basically wraps this up.

Man, you can't say that making these gals 19 and 21 instead of 15 and 17 would *matter* and is *important* to the folks that want them to be younger for the implications and then hand wave the literal opposite of the coin away as irrelevant.

You can't bring up "but Japan has X" and then just ignore the heinous shit that happens because of it because it's inconvenient to your argument.

I don't see how all that real world stuff is relevant in the world of fiction. If anything, more people playing games with these elements would serve to reduce the amount of real world problems. Japan already is one of the biggest if not the biggest consumer of games and other such media in the world and they have some of the lowest rates of those types of crimes despite still having some such crimes so you definitely can't say that games are promoting them. What they're doing is channeling a demand in a harmless direction.

Oh and the actually important thing for me here is freedom of expression. Like one Ken Akamitsu of Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima fame said during some hearings back like a decade ago; you can't pick and choose and say this one thing is dirty and cut it out. Everything has to be allowed in fiction or eventually nothing will be.


The truly important thing for me isn't whether the chars really are 15-17 since they all look however they look, some will look 25 and some will look 12 and their personalities can follow in that pattern too. No, the important thing is if some artist decides that the char is 17 we treat that as equivalently worthy of respect as any other age, as either age would equally be the artist's expression were they to pick it. Like I explained with the term arbitrary, when you have such ages and appearances not really matter, what you get is indeed the clearest expression of the artist that you can get.

 

[Erttheking]

So, this is pretty high level kink stuff, but in short and simple terms, there's a difference between cosplaying as a thing (schoolgirl, cheerleader, etc.) and actually being that. The dynamic is just entirely different.

Yes Dreiko, the dynamic between a 19 year old pretending and a 17 or 15 year old *is* very different, hence why I'm perfectly fine with a weird lewd game about shooting 19 year olds with endorphins until they need a bath but disappointed when most of the cast turns out to be 17 or 15 because of inaccurate reporting. That's...that's what I've been arguing this whole time.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/06/national/crime-legal/tokyos-new-jk-ordinance-takes-aim-schoolgirl-exploitation/#.XbSFkC9MGf0

You know what else is pretty shady in the real world Japan? Idols. Tons of horror stories stemming from ties to yakuza and so on. Hence why I don't care at all about real world idols and just play games with them. If it's a game it's ok basically wraps this up.

Man, you can't say that making these gals 19 and 21 instead of 15 and 17 would *matter* and is *important* to the folks that want them to be younger for the implications and then hand wave the literal opposite of the coin away as irrelevant.

You can't bring up "but Japan has X" and then just ignore the heinous shit that happens because of it because it's inconvenient to your argument.

I don't see how all that real world stuff is relevant in the world of fiction. If anything, more people playing games with these elements would serve to reduce the amount of real world problems. Japan already is one of the biggest if not the biggest consumer of games and other such media in the world and they have some of the lowest rates of those types of crimes despite still having some such crimes so you definitely can't say that games are promoting them. What they're doing is channeling a demand in a harmless direction.

Oh and the actually important thing for me here is freedom of expression. Like one Ken Akamitsu of Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima fame said during some hearings back like a decade ago; you can't pick and choose and say this one thing is dirty and cut it out. Everything has to be allowed in fiction or eventually nothing will be.


The truly important thing for me isn't whether the chars really are 15-17 since they all look however they look, some will look 25 and some will look 12 and their personalities can follow in that pattern too. No, the important thing is if some artist decides that the char is 17 we treat that as equivalently worthy of respect as any other age, as either age would equally be the artist's expression were they to pick it. Like I explained with the term arbitrary, when you have such ages and appearances not really matter, what you get is indeed the clearest expression of the artist that you can get.

Gonna have to stop you there. Japan has low murder rates, yes. Japan also has a massive sexual harassment problem. Hence the creation of female only train cars. Let?s not white wash. And no one is saying this should be banned, and freedom of expression extends to talking about how things suck too, you can?t have it both ways.

 

[Silvanus]

Vanille and Fang's relationship is not treated any different than Lightning and Hope's actually. There's various stages in a relationship that a couple can be in. There's the Serah and Snow who are already a couple, there's Sazh who already has a kid, there's the couple who has been friends and has a spark of chemistry but hasn't taken the next step (but read the fabulla nova crystallis novels cause those do take some steps alright lol) and there's the early stage attraction with Hope who is also kind of a kid which ends up complicating things some.

Lightning and Hope who... aren't in a relationship in FFXIII. That's my point.

And if you're stretching it to include the whole series, then I'd say Lightning and Hope getting into a confirmed relationship and Vanille & Fang not doing that at any point is quite a substantial difference in treatment.

You do raise a reasonable point about abducted wives and heirlooms and so on. I'll tell you why that's different. Those stories are not created to (at the very least seemingly) promote heterosexuality. They do not feel like cis propaganda trying to turn the world straight. They feel like just normal events and normal drama. The issue with the magical gay conversion therapy is that it distinctly feels contrived in order to have something gay in a game and not something that organically fits. The laziness comes from inserting a real world thing as-is into the game and not from trying to make it somehow make sense in the world.

I'm going to be generous and assume the line about "promoting heterosexuality" is not pushing the despicable idea that portrayal of gay people & themes is "promoting homosexuality", because that idea has already got a history of leading to persecution and censorship in my country.

It would be me believing that I understand the world better if I were to imply that the writers did this out of error. I did not say that. I said that they did that to virtue signal, which is the issue. They're basically willingly worsening and jeopardizing their game to score social points and seem progressive out of a calculation that whatever damage they do to their reputation by squandering the potential of one of the better characters in the game is gonna be compensated for (and then some) through the good will they garner for themselves, which is my complaint, as such an act is actively bad for games.


Notice, this is an issue raised out of actively liking the gay dude in this game and wanting him to be more interesting. Not out of hating him.

Lord, if the presence of a gay-centric storyline "squanders the potential" of a character for you, then I would be inclined to think you're quite actively hostile to those themes.

Real world stuff is put in fantasy settings. Fantasy settings are almost all deeply rooted in real world political & historic context, and Dragon Age is no different. This is not about organic presentation, because it sounds to me like your idea of organic presentation would just involve the gay characters never talking about anything to do with romance or difficulties (you know, the stuff gay people can actually relate to).

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

So, this is pretty high level kink stuff, but in short and simple terms, there's a difference between cosplaying as a thing (schoolgirl, cheerleader, etc.) and actually being that. The dynamic is just entirely different.

Yes Dreiko, the dynamic between a 19 year old pretending and a 17 or 15 year old *is* very different, hence why I'm perfectly fine with a weird lewd game about shooting 19 year olds with endorphins until they need a bath but disappointed when most of the cast turns out to be 17 or 15 because of inaccurate reporting. That's...that's what I've been arguing this whole time.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/06/national/crime-legal/tokyos-new-jk-ordinance-takes-aim-schoolgirl-exploitation/#.XbSFkC9MGf0

You know what else is pretty shady in the real world Japan? Idols. Tons of horror stories stemming from ties to yakuza and so on. Hence why I don't care at all about real world idols and just play games with them. If it's a game it's ok basically wraps this up.

Man, you can't say that making these gals 19 and 21 instead of 15 and 17 would *matter* and is *important* to the folks that want them to be younger for the implications and then hand wave the literal opposite of the coin away as irrelevant.

You can't bring up "but Japan has X" and then just ignore the heinous shit that happens because of it because it's inconvenient to your argument.

I don't see how all that real world stuff is relevant in the world of fiction. If anything, more people playing games with these elements would serve to reduce the amount of real world problems. Japan already is one of the biggest if not the biggest consumer of games and other such media in the world and they have some of the lowest rates of those types of crimes despite still having some such crimes so you definitely can't say that games are promoting them. What they're doing is channeling a demand in a harmless direction.

Oh and the actually important thing for me here is freedom of expression. Like one Ken Akamitsu of Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima fame said during some hearings back like a decade ago; you can't pick and choose and say this one thing is dirty and cut it out. Everything has to be allowed in fiction or eventually nothing will be.


The truly important thing for me isn't whether the chars really are 15-17 since they all look however they look, some will look 25 and some will look 12 and their personalities can follow in that pattern too. No, the important thing is if some artist decides that the char is 17 we treat that as equivalently worthy of respect as any other age, as either age would equally be the artist's expression were they to pick it. Like I explained with the term arbitrary, when you have such ages and appearances not really matter, what you get is indeed the clearest expression of the artist that you can get.

Gonna have to stop you there. Japan has low murder rates, yes. Japan also has a massive sexual harassment problem. Hence the creation of female only train cars. Let?s not white wash. And no one is saying this should be banned, and freedom of expression extends to talking about how things suck too, you can?t have it both ways.

That actually is an issue primarily stemming from how packed trains can be. They literally have people packed like sardines in those trains and have to sometimes push them in to get the doors to close during rush hour. If you're this tightly packed you can't help but have your body brush up all over the people around you and some people take advantage.

It's more of a crime of opportunity than anything where you have people go into those trains and claim their groping was accidental. Most of those same people would not go on to sexually assault someone in a less ambiguous situation. They even have a term for this specific type of person called "chikan". Though that is a distinctly different sort of criminal from someone who'd actually commit any sort of statutory rape or prostitution with a minor, which was what I was specifically responding about in the post you're quoting.

Vanille and Fang's relationship is not treated any different than Lightning and Hope's actually. There's various stages in a relationship that a couple can be in. There's the Serah and Snow who are already a couple, there's Sazh who already has a kid, there's the couple who has been friends and has a spark of chemistry but hasn't taken the next step (but read the fabulla nova crystallis novels cause those do take some steps alright lol) and there's the early stage attraction with Hope who is also kind of a kid which ends up complicating things some.

Lightning and Hope who... aren't in a relationship in FFXIII. That's my point.

And if you're stretching it to include the whole series, then I'd say Lightning and Hope getting into a confirmed relationship and Vanille & Fang not doing that at any point is quite a substantial difference in treatment.

You do raise a reasonable point about abducted wives and heirlooms and so on. I'll tell you why that's different. Those stories are not created to (at the very least seemingly) promote heterosexuality. They do not feel like cis propaganda trying to turn the world straight. They feel like just normal events and normal drama. The issue with the magical gay conversion therapy is that it distinctly feels contrived in order to have something gay in a game and not something that organically fits. The laziness comes from inserting a real world thing as-is into the game and not from trying to make it somehow make sense in the world.

I'm going to be generous and assume the line about "promoting heterosexuality" is not pushing the despicable idea that portrayal of gay people & themes is "promoting homosexuality", because that idea has already got a history of leading to persecution and censorship in my country.

It would be me believing that I understand the world better if I were to imply that the writers did this out of error. I did not say that. I said that they did that to virtue signal, which is the issue. They're basically willingly worsening and jeopardizing their game to score social points and seem progressive out of a calculation that whatever damage they do to their reputation by squandering the potential of one of the better characters in the game is gonna be compensated for (and then some) through the good will they garner for themselves, which is my complaint, as such an act is actively bad for games.


Notice, this is an issue raised out of actively liking the gay dude in this game and wanting him to be more interesting. Not out of hating him.

Lord, if the presence of a gay-centric storyline "squanders the potential" of a character for you, then I would be inclined to think you're quite actively hostile to those themes.

Real world stuff is put in fantasy settings. Fantasy settings are almost all deeply rooted in real world political & historic context, and Dragon Age is no different. This is not about organic presentation, because it sounds to me like your idea of organic presentation would just involve the gay characters never talking about anything to do with romance or difficulties (you know, the stuff gay people can actually relate to).

You don't have to actively be in a relationship for there to be signs of chemistry in the story that make it clear someone's into people of the same gender as they are. I don't understand why there has to be this limitation where if you're not obvious about it you're trying to hide or deny something when these sorts of games especially tend to be ambiguous about most such situations anyways. The reason why in a lot of anime and jrpgs you have people shipping various couples in their heads is show of this exact ambiguity but you can still see a current going through despite it.


When there's portals of hell opening all around you and the one gay character's biggest hurdle is his evil mage, slave-owning, human-sacrifice-performing dad not liking that he's gay, while the world is ending, then yeah, that's just a whole lot of potential this char had that's been squandered lol.

I think you're being reductive in defining this as dislike for gay centric storyline in a vacuum when the actual context is a world where a hell of a lot of cool and dire stuff is happening all over the place. When in that context, all this mundane stuff is at best a parenthesis. You can have it flavor a character's past, like how the Qunari's religious code is used to give them interesting backstory, but then they have to move past that and go into something actually interesting.

Oh and this reminds me, I think the qun is supposed to be a standin for islam (or at the very least heavily influenced by it) but because they don't actually just put literal islam in dragon age and have to come up with things and stuff that's actually interesting to make it somewhat distinct, you end up with something not at all mundane but which hits the same notes of philosophy and religion that islam also does. Now, see, this is actually the right way to go about this. An artful metaphor works at broaching these same ideas but is also interesting and fun and enriches the world. The only thing it doesn't do is give you virtue points for having a game with Islam in it.